expressive of unforced merriment and wholly unexpected in that grim setting.
'The cove's too long,' someone said. 'Have to cut off the feet again.'
'No,' said another man. 'Take his boots off- that should do it.'
My boots were roughly removed. I was now lying on my back, with my elbows, the crown of my head and the soles of my stockinged feet touching hard surfaces. A heavy object fell on my leg. I twitched involuntarily. Something else fell beside it and then the third item. I stretched down my bound hands and made out the shape of a boot-heel.
'Hey, lad,' said the voice of the first man. 'There's air holes. You can breathe. Not very big holes, though. If you was stupid enough to make a row, you'd need more air, and you couldn't get it, could you? So keep quiet as a mouse.'
At first I could not understand him, for there was plenty of air, albeit laden with the scents of sawdust and varnish and an underlying tang of horse manure. Then I heard a great clatter a few inches above my head and sensed a sudden enclosing, a diminution of the light. All at once, a terrible racket broke out about me. My ears filled with the sound of hammering, so close that the nails might have been driven into me. There must have been two or three of them wielding hammers, and in that confined space, which acted like a drum, it seemed like a multitude. They were nailing me up in a box no larger than a coffin.
All at once, the terrible truth burst over me. I recalled what I knew of the dimensions of the box, and put them together with the black carriage and the rusty black clothes of the two men. I realised that the box was not like a coffin: it was a coffin.
77
I was to be buried alive. I had no doubt of it whatsoever. I faced the prospect of a lingering and horrible death.
My captors transferred me to another conveyance, probably a closed cart. We drove for what seemed like hours but might have been as many minutes. Time means very little without a way of measuring it.
I tried to struggle – of course I did. Yet the dimensions of the coffin, the presence of my boots and hat with me, the shortage of air, and above all the tightness of my bonds made it almost impossible for me to move at all. All I could manage was the faintest of whimpers from my parched throat and an ineffectual knocking of my elbows against the sides of my prison. I doubt if the sounds I made could have been heard by anyone sitting directly on the other side of the coffin, let alone by those in the street.
My intellectual faculties were equally paralysed. I wish I could say that I faced what lay before me with calmness. In the abstract, it is perfectly true that if you cannot avoid death, you might as well look it in the eye. But the needs of the moment swamped such lofty considerations. To continue to breathe – to continue to live – nothing else mattered.
We came to another halt. I half felt, half heard a great clatter and then a jolt. There was a knocking on the roof of my little prison. Someone laughed, a high sound with an edge of hysteria. The coffin swayed and bumped and banged. It tilted violently to a sharp angle. This, together with a series of irregular thuds, told me that we were mounting a flight of stairs. The coffin levelled out and a few paces later I heard a man's voice, but could not make out the words.
The coffin groaned and screeched: someone was raising the lid. Currents of air flowed around me. The tip of the crowbar came so far inside that it grazed my scalp. I felt a burst of intense happiness.
'Remove the gag,' said a man whose voice was familiar. 'Then the blindfold.'
I retched when they pulled the rag from my parched mouth. I tried and failed to say the word 'water'. A hand gripped my hair and pulled up my head. Fingers tugged at the knot of the blindfold. Light flooded into my eyes, so bright that I moaned with the shock of it. I could see nothing but whiteness. I closed my eyes.
'Give him a drink,' said the voice. 'Then leave us.'
A hand cradled the back of my head. A container made of metal rattled against my teeth. Suddenly there was water everywhere, flooding down my face, finding its way between my cravat and my neck, filling my mouth and trickling down my throat and making me gag. The mug withdrew.
'More,' I croaked. 'More.'
The mug returned. I was so weak that I could not satisfy my thirst.
'Leave us,' the man commanded.
I heard footsteps – two sets, I fancy – on a bare floor and the sound of a door opening and closing. There was water on my lashes, and I did not know whether it came from the metal cup or from my tears. My eyes were still screwed shut against the light. Slowly I opened them. All I could see was a sagging ceiling, fissured with cracks, with the lathes exposed on one side where the plaster had crumbled away.
'Sit up,' said the voice.
I hooked my bound hands round the rim of the coffin and eventually managed to bring myself into a sitting position. The first thing I saw was a great, grey mass of hair below a black velvet skull cap, like a hanging judge's. I lowered my eyes to the face, which was on the level of my own. Recognition flooded into me with a sense of inevitability.
'Mr Iversen,' I said. 'Why have you brought me here?'
'You will be more comfortable in a moment.' He leaned forward in his wheeled chair and studied my face. 'Wriggle your limbs as far as you are able. Now lean back a little, now forward. Does that not feel better? Now, more water?'
I drank greedily this time. Mr Iversen refilled the mug from a jug on the table beside his chair. The cripple was attired as he had been before, in a black, flowing robe embroidered with necromantic symbols in faded yellow thread. His crutches were propped against the bottom of the coffin. On the table was a pocket pistol.
My eyes travelled on, and I discovered we were not alone. Seated by the window with his back to us was another figure in a dusty suit of brown clothes and an old-fashioned three-cornered hat.
'You're a fool,' my host observed in a friendly tone. 'You shouldn't have come back. You should have gone far, far away. Seven Dials is not a safe place for the inquisitive. I tried to give you the hint on your last visit. Still, one cannot expect old heads on young shoulders, I suppose.'
'A hint?' Anger spurted through me. 'You call those bullies of yours a hint? What do you want of me, sir?'
'The truth. Why did you come back here yesterday?'
All my words might win me was a kinder way of dying. I was tired of the lies, so I told him the truth. 'I came back because of that bird of yours.' I saw understanding leap into his eyes. 'The one that says
'That damned fowl.' Iversen's fingertips tapped the butt of the pistol. 'I put up with it for the sake of the customers, but I could stand it no more. I hoped I had seen and heard the last of it.'
'I've drawn up a memorandum,' I said. 'It covers all the circumstances of this business, including my visits to Queen-street, since I first met Mr Henry Frant.'
'Ah yes. And you've had it witnessed by a brace of attorneys and sent a copy to the Lord Chancellor. Come, Mr Shield, don't play the fool. You would have gone to the magistrates long before this if you had intended something like that.'
He was in the right of it. I had indeed begun to write such a memorandum on my last evening at Monkshill- park. But it lay unfinished in my room at Gaunt-court.
'No,' Iversen went on. 'I do not believe it for a moment. Not that it matters. We shall soon have the truth out of you.'
Neither of us spoke for a moment. The room was heavy with a strange, sweet odour. I looked at the two figures before me, Iversen seated beside the coffin, and the old man in an elbow chair by the barred window. I heard as if at a great distance the sound of the world going about its business. There were noises in the house, too, feet on the stairs, a tapping from below and a woman singing a lullaby. There was life around me, and it was full of wonders, a sweet thing that I could not bear to part with.
'Sir,' I said to the man in brown. 'I appeal to you. I beg you, help me.'
The old man did not reply. He gave no sign he had heard me.
