A RAP ON MY DOOR SUMMONED ME BEFORE DAWN. A MIST HAD come down in the night, filling the streets with a dank, sour-smelling fog; it wrapped us so tight we could imagine we were the only ones abroad at that hour. Occasionally we heard shouts, or the rumbling of some distant cart, but otherwise we proceeded through the fog alone: Lyell a dark, mountainous blur before me; his daughter and I behind; and a negro servant wheeling our luggage in a squeaking barrow at the rear. I still had Lyell’s pistol in my pocket and I kept a tight grip on it, though the fog had probably damped the priming. If a Spanish assassin came upon us here he would have little difficulty disposing of us unseen.
I had thought we would make for Fraunces’ Tavern, but instead Lyell led us directly to the western waterfront, and after brief negotiation engaged a wherry to take us across the river. The city receded into the mist almost as soon as we had pushed off, and we were alone on the water. Miss Lyell, seated on the bench beside me, clutched my arm and huddled close.
I did not wish to impress Lyell with my ignorance, but nor could I enjoy any comfort if I did not know his intentions.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘The coach leaves from the corner of Broad Street.’
‘Which they will almost certainly be watching. We will join it at Paulus Hook, on the New Jersey shore, and pray we have eluded them.’
I did not ask who they might be. After that, the only sound was the splash of the oars in the glassy water.
On the far bank of the Hudson, at a mean little town called Paulus Hook, we found an inn where we could breakfast. The hot food warmed my spirits, and the fog began to lift. At last the Industry stage rattled into the yard, and soon we were snug in her cabin. Lyell dozed in his corner while Miss Lyell sat opposite me under a morass of shawls and blankets, her head peeking from a vast fur capelet. She affected to read a novel, though she cannot have been very comfortable in it for every five minutes she seemed to be rearranging her posture, which occasioned much brushing together of our legs. Sometimes I would catch her eyes peeking over the cover of her book, and she would hold my gaze with delicious amusement before returning to her reading. For the rest of the time, I stared out of the window, counting the carts we passed and examining the new country.
It was a strange land, neither so pleasantly civilized as England nor so savage as I had expected of this untamed continent. We were never isolated – you could always see the next farm or inn or church spire – but the settlements did not seem deeply rooted in their environs. Beyond the farmlands which had been cleared around each house, thickly grown pine forests swallowed up the landscape, so that the settlements seemed perpetually besieged by nature.
Nor had they achieved much with the establishment of roads. A dreary ceiling of cloud had descended, and the showers which whipped over us every quarter of an hour turned the track to mud. High, unbridged rivers frequently broke our progress, and we would have to huddle in a rotting skiff while the coach was poled across on a scow. The rain seeped into my shirt and down the back of my neck, while black scum from the seats smeared itself over my breeches. It was no small mercy when we pulled into the town of New Brunswick for lunch, though even that relief was tempered by the discovery that our carriage would go no further. Instead, we were transferred into a cart little more than a hay-wagon, its only condescension to our comfort a flat roof on wooden pillars, and leather curtains which could be rolled down the unboarded sides. We soon discovered that they could not be left up, on account of the prodigious quantity of mud which was admitted, but once they were down we were left to endure almost complete darkness.
Other passengers joined us at New Brunswick: a pair of young men making for their college; a minister returning to his parish; a Philadelphia merchant and a colleague from Connecticut; and a well-dressed, dark-skinned gentleman who said nothing, but kept his own counsel on the end of the bench. I could see little of him save his eyes, which gleamed even in the gloom, but as the miles shook and rattled under our wheels I became convinced he was watching me. I put my hand to my pocket, reassuring myself that the package and the pistol were still safe, and when I risked a sideways glance at him again his gaze had moved on.
It was late afternoon, our last stage of the day, when he sought my conversation. I was staring into space, drained by the exertions of fighting the bucking coach and hungry from the early hour at which the Americans dined, when I saw him gazing at me, clearly expecting an answer to a question I had not heard.
‘I beg your pardon. My thoughts were elsewhere.’
‘I have asked: are you an Englishman?’
‘Yes.’ I spoke guardedly, for there was an accent to him which was neither English nor American, but seemed to hail from the Continent.
‘Then we are at war.’ He smiled as he said it, baring a row of white teeth in the darkness. It was not what I anticipated, nor what I wished to hear from my travelling companions. It must have shown in my face, for he laughed softly. ‘I am from Spain. José Vidal, at your service.’
I did not give him my own name; he did not seem to need it. But we had been overheard. One of the students sitting beside us, a broad-shouldered fellow with a cocksure bearing far in advance of his years, took it upon himself to intervene.
‘I overheard your remarks just now, and I’ll warn you straight: we don’t hold with all your old world quarrelling over here. Amity to all and entangling alliances with no-one, that’s our way. You could learn from us.’
I was tempted to cuff the boy for his earnest priggery – without England’s might protecting their precious trade, the Americans would have found it a deal more trouble building their self-righteous paradise of wealth and liberty. But the silver-tongued Mr Vidal was all mollification.
‘We can learn much. Here in America, English and Spanish are peaceful together, yes, Mr Jerrold?’
‘Say, that’s more like it,’ beamed the American. ‘Why don’t you shake hands on it?’
Mr Vidal’s hand was already hovering in the gulf between us. With the utmost reluctance, I reached across and met it. I barely intended to touch, but he gripped me like a vice, far harder than was courteous, and did not release me for some moments. As he did, his nails scraped across my wrist like claws.
For all that, I had a greater concern. ‘How did you know my name? Are we already acquainted?’
‘Perhaps. I have spent some time in London recently. But I think not.’ Again that smile. ‘I heard your wife call it to you.’
Miss Lyell, seated beside me, burst into laughter. ‘You see how attentive you have been to me, Mr Jerrold? You have quite convinced this poor little Spanish gentleman that we are married. Is that not charming?’ She pinched my arm. ‘You must be more measured in your affections, or we will scandalize our companions.’
‘We are merely travelling together,’ I explained.
‘Though we really might as well be married. Travelling in these extremities must be a far greater intimacy than marriage, I always think.’ Miss Lyell’s leg squeezed against my own.
Vidal raised a pencil-thin eyebrow. ‘You travel alone together. Is that permitted in England?’ He was suddenly leaning forward, staring at Miss Lyell with such candid appetite that it seemed his eyes alone might unlace her stays. She wriggled a little in her seat, and though she affected to speak lightly I could sense Vidal had agitated her.
‘There is no impropriety. My father is with us.’ She indicated him, sitting stony-faced at the end of the coach. ‘He will see that I am not seduced by foreign desperadoes on our travels.’
‘And where do you travel?’
‘Philadelphia,’ I said quickly. I knew nothing about this Mr Vidal, but he inspired deep anxiety, and it seemed prudent to hide our ultimate destination from him.
‘Do you have business there?’
‘Our business is our own.’
I had spoken so brusquely that I half expected the fraternally minded American to protest. But before he could rebuke me, our conversation broke off as my side of the cart bounced into the air. I was flung from my seat and found myself lying on the mud-streaked floorboards, with the ground rushing past between the cracks below and an overbearing weight pressing on my back. The driver naturally saw nothing of this and did not flag his jolting pace one whit, so it was some time before we had extricated ourselves from our tangle. As I regained the bench, I patted my pocket to ensure that the package was safe.
The pocket was empty.
I fell back to the floor, scrabbling about in the darkness amid the mud and the boots. There were murmurs of astonishment above my head, and several hands reached in to haul me back, perhaps thinking I had again been pitched off my seat. I shrugged them away. There was no thought to my actions, no reason – only a desperate compulsion to find what had been lost. Once, in battle, I had seen a sailor’s arm carried clean away by a cannonball, and watched in horror as he ploughed through the carnage on deck seeking the missing limb. In my frenzy to find the package I was hardly more moderate. And the consequences if it were gone would be almost as ruinous. Could it have fallen through the cracks in the floor and even now lie disintegrating in some muddy puddle a quarter of a mile back?
As my eyes began to master the darkness I became aware of a pair of gleaming riding boots before my face. I looked up, beyond the crimson velvet breeches and coat, and saw Vidal’s moustachioed face peering down on me like a master at a disorderly hound. About him, the other passengers looked curiously at my antics.
‘There was a package in my pocket. It must have fallen out when we hit that rut. Has anybody seen it?’
Half a dozen heads shook helplessly in the gloom. At the far end, where Lyell sat, I heard a hiss of breath. I did not dare turn to meet his anger. Vidal’s face lowered over me in triumph.
‘But this is absurd,’ said Miss Lyell. ‘Mr Vidal picked up your package – I saw him myself.’
I got to my feet and sat down on the bench, leaning forward to look Vidal close in the eye. ‘Is that true, Mr Vidal?’
For a moment we were locked in silent contest. The fingers of his right hand twitched towards his belt, where something bulged from his hip, while his eyes darted left and right. I could almost see his mind calculating the odds; had he been nearer the rear of the cart, I think he would have leaped down and run. As it was, hemmed in by the other passengers, he could not move, while I kept my own hand thrust prominently inside my coat pocket.
‘I pick it up to keep safe. You take.’
He reached inside his coat. My hand twitched and he shot me a disdainful look, then pulled out the familiar package. The seals were unbroken and the cords still tied. The relief flooding through me was so great that I almost dropped it as I took it.
With the little charade past, the other passengers turned back to their own affairs. Vidal, though, still leaned across the cart, staring at me.
‘I hope you will deliver it safe to M’Culloch’s inn at Pittsburgh,’ he said softly. ‘There are many dangers on the way. Anything can happen.’
*
We halted for the night at Princeton, a mean little town chiefly noted for having hosted a battle during the war of the rebellion. It possessed little more than an inn and a seminary, though that at least was an improvement on its namesake in Devon, which possessed only an inn and a prison. Fortunately the staging-house was more comfortable than I had expected, and I was able to procure myself a private room with a proper bed and sheets. The thought of sharing quarters with Vidal, or, almost worse, having to bundle in a communal bed with Lyell, was too terrible for my battered constitution.
Exhausted from the ceaseless travelling, I fell into bed early. But by some perversity of my nature, or perhaps the frailty of my nerves, I could not sleep. I lay there for what seemed hours, rolling over in my bed, pulling on extra blankets and discarding them, trying to conjure innocent, soporific thoughts when my mind insisted on ceaseless activity. Lyell and Vidal, Nevell and his damned secrets, the Spanish broadside opening up on us, and a New York graveyard in the dead of night combined with the endless miles of rutted turnpike and weatherboard houses. Above all there was the package preying on my cares: unknowable, yet all-consuming.
Eventually, I must have fallen into a half sleep. Unreined, my thoughts took on new and improbable life: I found myself running down a muddy track pursuing Miss Lyell as she waved the package in the air, taunting me with it. Her dress billowed behind her, always just beyond my reach.
The road turned into a corridor, and Miss Lyell slowed. She had come up against a door in the far end, and was frantically trying to open it. I could hear the clatter as she fought with the latch, and the rasp as it lifted.
I sat up in bed. The rasping was not confined to my dream – it was sounding from the bedroom door. In the moonlight which streamed through the gauze curtains I could see the latch come free and the door edge ajar. An orange arc of candlelight opened into the room – a crack at first, then ever wider. I reached down to the floor beside my bed and grabbed the Manton pistol, training it on the door with trembling hands.
‘Mr Jerrold?’
Miss Lyell’s voice was urgent, yet such was my confusion that I did not answer immediately. Still uncertain that it was not part of my dream, I laid aside the pistol, and as she stepped through the door I crossed to meet her. Almost before she could put down the candle I had pulled her close to me; I forced her mouth open with my own, thrilling at her moan of pleasure, while my fingers dug into the soft flesh of her breasts. Spinning her round, I guided her back towards the bed, and as I did so our lips pulled apart.
‘Martin,’ she hissed, and I was so surprised by the use of my Christian name that my hands dropped away. ‘You are mistaken.’
A crushing wave of mortification broke over me, chased quickly back by angry disappointment. Though now that I looked at her closely, I could see that she had not dressed for seduction: instead of a chemise or petticoat she wore a dark riding dress with a fur-trimmed cloak over her shoulders. Standing there in my nightshirt, my intentions all too evident, I felt not a little ridiculous.
I heard an unmistakable heavy tread in the corridor and flopped onto the bed. Lyell’s silhouette filled the door like some spectre of the Apocalypse.
‘Catherine has roused you, has she? Then dress yourself and join us in the stable yard. Leave your chest – I have arranged for a wagon to bring it to Pittsburgh – and take only what you may fit in a saddlebag. And your package, of course. You have that gun I gave you?’
I nodded dumbly. Miss Lyell followed her father downstairs and I pulled on my clothes as fast as I could. As to what was happening, I did not even attempt to comprehend it. I felt as though I were standing on a ship in a storm, with all the cannon cut loose and careering about the deck; simply to avoid mortal harm sufficed me for the moment.
The Lyells were waiting in the stable yard with one of the ostlers. He looked as befuddled as I did, but had managed to saddle a trio of horses and lead them into the yard. There was a black gelding for me, a mare for Miss Lyell, and an enormous carthorse for Lyell. He took even longer than I to mount, kicking at the stirrups and almost strangling the poor beast with the reins. His daughter was more accomplished: she slipped onto her mare with practised ease and was immediately stroking its mane and whispering in its ear. I was startled to see that she did not ride side-saddle, but swung her legs astride the horse like a man. Her skirts rode up, exposing slim, silken calves very white against the mare’s dark flanks.
I had little time to admire them. Lyell threw the ostler a coin, growling at him that he should forget all he had seen, and then we were trotting out of the yard and away from the inn. On the outskirts of the town we met a drunken pair of students from the college, singing lewdly as they staggered out of a ditch, but after that we were alone. Even without the encumbrance of Lyell’s weight we could not have travelled quickly. Although the rain had stopped, ragged scraps of cloud still blew across the sky tearing rents in the moonlight. Sometimes they hid it altogether, and then we would have to rein in our horses and wait, for we were so far from civilization that the darkness was complete.
‘Where are we heading?’ I asked Lyell during one of these interludes. We were still on the turnpike, though its autumnal condition left it too treacherous to attempt blind.
‘A village called Attleborough.’ Lyell had craned his head to look back, though I cannot imagine what he expected to see in the darkness.
‘Where is that?’
‘Off the main road, which is all that matters. When Mr Vidal finds we are gone in the morning, he will not think to seek us there. I wager he’ll make all speed to Philadelphia, which will only waste more of his time.’
I had thought that Philadelphia was our destination, a staging post to Pittsburgh, but clearly Lyell had decided otherwise.
‘You fear Mr Vidal so much?’
‘He is an agent of Spain – he as near as told it to our faces. I need not remind you what we must fear of the Dons.’
In fact he could not remind me, for I had never known it. Again, my perilous ignorance began to panic me, and I must have conveyed it to my horse for he began to huff and twitch under me.
‘You have already allowed him within a hair’s breadth of stealing your package,’ Lyell continued, ‘and he knows we are travelling together. If we tolerate his presence on our journey, he will surely strike again at a time when there are no witnesses in crowded carriages to see him.’
I would rather have trusted my luck to the carriage and the company of our fellow passengers: gallivanting off alone in the dark seemed a sure way to invite disaster, whether at Vidal’s hands or from the cutthroats who surely frequented the roads. Besides, Vidal had seen the address on my package. He knew our destination, and could follow us there at speed. But Lyell was not a man to be contradicted, certainly not on a moonless road in the dead of nowhere.
‘We could denounce Vidal to the American authorities,’ I suggested. ‘They would doubtless be sensitive to a Spanish agent in their midst.’
Fortunately, the night kept me from observing Lyell’s reaction. The scorn in his voice was sharp enough. ‘That is a poor jest indeed, Lieutenant. Denounce Vidal to the Americans? He would denounce us in turn, and we would be ruined. Hah!’
This last interjection was not directed to me, but to his mount, whom he seemed to imagine as some fleet champion rather than a lumbering shire horse. The moon had reappeared, and we were able to continue our journey between the sleeping towns and fields. Perhaps a poet could have hymned their serene beauty, but to me they seemed menacing, a besieging wild where Spanish spies, American bandits, savage Indians, bears, wolves and panthers might lurk in malevolent concert. I hunched low on my horse, gripping the reins as though they suspended me from a precipice, and succumbed to a fog of despair.
Miss Lyell, by contrast, appeared to be in her element. Her golden hair was tied back with a scarf, blowing behind her, but otherwise she wore no cap or bonnet. She sat straight-backed in the saddle, rising and sinking with the rhythms of her mount in a way that was sensuous to behold. With Lyell sitting squat on his plodding beast, we must have made a strange sight to any farmer looking out of his window that night.
After some hours’ riding, we crossed a river and passed out of New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Immediately, my spirits lifted. My knowledge of the American geography was meagre at best, an almost completely blank chart, but I knew the name of Pennsylvania. How could I forget it, when it was inscribed like some archaic rune on my package. In Pennsylvania, I would find Pittsburgh; at Pittsburgh, M’Culloch’s Inn and its enigmatic occupant, Mr Tyler.
In my former dejection, I had allowed myself to lag behind the others. Now I kicked after them. ‘How far to Pittsburgh?’ I called to Lyell.
‘Three hundred miles.’
We could make that in a week – less, if the roads improved. I trotted up beside Miss Lyell and for the last few miles we amused ourselves staging mock races with each other.
Just before sunrise, we left the southerly road and turned west. The sky was lightening behind us, and the clouds which had obscured our progress in the night now became a canvas on which the sun’s pink and orange hues could shine. Before us, though, the land stayed wrapped in darkness as we rode ever deeper into the continent.