Nettleblack, page 50
A. D. And where did you pluck that theory from, Cassie?
C. B. From – from – I – when I –
E. M. Danadlenddu, you’ve broken her.
A. D. It sounds to me like you’ve been reading too many novels. Or should I make that writing them? Which reminds me, Mrs. Ballestas – have you had a proper leaf through your daughter’s papers recently? You’ve made your feelings about – what did you call it? – that frivolous brain-rot of a popular fiction so very –
C. B. You’re not slipping off the subject this time! I know you’re moving the head – because I saw you take it from the morgue that first night it went missing! And if it sounds mad enough to be a novel, then that’s you borrowing from me, and not the other way around!
E. M. Danadlenddu – you were seen?
C. B. She was seen. I saw her. And she knows it’s true.
E. M. Wretched girl, I told you to be careful!
A. D. You didn’t see anything, Cassie. I know you would make up any lie just to impress your mother, but this one is simply embarrassing. Don’t you think?
C. B. I know what I saw.
A. D. I don’t think you do.
C. B. I’m not listening to you this time –
A. D. Cassie, unless you wish things to become very unpleasant, very quickly, I would apologise to everyone here and sit back down with your fictions.
C. B. No! Not again! You stole the head, and I watched you do it!
A. D. Very well. Don’t you mean that you let me do it?
E. M. Did she really!
C. B. I –
A. D. Don’t you mean that we stood in that pitiful excuse for a morgue and had a full conversation about letting me do it?
K. B. Cassandra –
C. B. Mother, don’t listen to her –
A. D. I was to sneak out with the head, and you were to heroically rediscover it the following day, after – what do you call her? Javert? – had been suitably shamed for her guarding negligence. Only, you see, I didn’t want to play along. If someone – and yes, Cassie, I mean you – is so thoroughly pathetic that they have to stage their own triumphs just to look good, they’re hardly someone to respect as an ally and friend, are they?
E. M. Oh, better and better! Danadlenddu, you little fool, you never told me they were this useless!
C. B. It – that wasn’t what I – you suggested it –
A. D. And you ate it up, every last bite of it. You were perfectly willing to let me carry a poor man’s mortal remains all around the town for you, so that you might knock your colleague off her shaky pedestal. I ask you, Mrs. Ballestas – with a daughter like that, who I’m sure you feel in some way morally bound to protect, how are any of us in Dallyangle supposed to trust you to keep us safe?
C. B. It – it wasn’t – I didn’t – that’s not what I –
K. B. Cassandra, is this true?
E. M. Now we’ll have some sport!
K. B. You didn’t just witness – you were actively conspiring –
C. B. I never meant for it to happen like this! I mean – alright, yes, it was a mistake – but I wasn’t just out to scupper Septimus, I swear!
A. D. Really? Then do explain why you failed to inform your colleagues that you knew exactly who had taken the head –
C. B. Because I wouldn’t get believed! Not without more proof! Which I was trying to get! Otherwise it was just my word against the white girl –
A. D. Oh, please. You were covering your mistake.
C. B. I was fixing it!
K. B. Cassandra! Did you truly imagine no one would listen to you? That I wouldn’t listen to you?
C. B. I – I couldn’t –
K. B. You put everything at risk. Everything. And for what? I never lost faith in you – I would have believed you – I always –
C. B. ‘I never lost faith in you’? You’d look me in the eye and claim that was even slightly true.
K. B. It –
C. B. I proofread your Record! I know exactly what you write about me, when you get into your analytical stride, and forget I’m the one who’s going to see it! Or do you not forget? Do you scrawl out those dissertations on my lackadaisical carelessness and paltry efforts and keep your fingers crossed that they might shock Cassandra into some kind of productive work-ethic?
K. B. I –
C. B. Your words! My words spoil your sensibilities, well – this is what your words do to me. And every time you look at me it’s obvious you’re still thinking them. Every time you call me Cassandra, and set everyone else to believing they should do it too – not Division Sergeant, like Javert gets to be, like I ought to be – everything in the way you treat me twists it in. I don’t get the surname. I’m not good enough. I can’t do it on my own. Well – here we are! Here’s where that’s led us!
[Silence.]
E. M. You must tell me, Danadlenddu, why you ever made me believe I needed to bother with angry letters and hidden heads. Perhaps this is what we ought to do with the Nettleblacks next – just leave the wretches to themselves, and watch them bait each other bloody!
K. B. I – this – this does not distract from – from what you have done –
A. D. It’s your word against ours, Mrs. Ballestas. A disgraced official with a disastrous recent record, trying to cover up her daughter’s mismanagement, against the landlord’s niece and a lady’s maid of spotless character.
E. M. You will never find that head – not as long as we have any say in it! –
A. D. And given that any accusation you make relies on Cassie’s little misdemeanour to back it up –
E. M. Just end it while you still can!
A. D. As Cassie knows all too well, Mrs. Ballestas, I can keep a secret. If you announce your resignation tomorrow, no one ever need know any of this. You can use whatever excuses you deem most appropriate. Perhaps you’ve decided to divert your energies into supporting the New Police?
E. M. This contrary town has dodged a proper police force for far too long. There’ll be a real constabulary here before the year is out, you mark my words – and they won’t sit back and let the criminals run wild.
A. D. You used to work on a police periodical, I believe, Mrs. Ballestas?
K. B. That was a mistake.
A. D. Another mistake! Like mother, like daughter, eh, Cassie?
E. M. And there’s no point trying to send her back there. I know the Constabulary Bulletin ladies – good girls, very good girls, even if they did choose Bedford College – and they don’t want anything more to do with her. Quite right too, I say! If, just to render her unfortunate position more distasteful still, she despises women to the extent that she’d force them to usurp the police and abjure their very womanhood, it’s only fitting that true ladies ought to despise her in return! Why is it that you scorn your own sex so much, girl? Is it your innate capacity for malice? Is it your willingness to consort with poisonous deviants? Why is it – do tell! – that you seem so hell-bent on upending the natural order of things?
K. B. I – I –
E. M. You, you?
K. B. I think that – considering – for all I know – you decapitated a man, embalmed his head, and staged an elaborate charade with his remains for weeks – when it comes to upending any ‘natural’ order –
E. M. You hear this! Do you! Accusing me of murder!
K. B. If it wasn’t murder, where did you obtain the head?
A. D. I think that’s enough for one evening –
E. M. If a stupid little under-gardener will go about his work at the wrong time, in the wrong place, in the midst of my uncle’s pheasant-shoot –
K. B. You shot him?
E. M. Murder, again! Owing to Danadlenddu’s idiotic relation and her propensity for disappearing-acts, I wasn’t even there when the shot was fired!
K. B. Then – what? You paid off your family’s mortician?
C. B. Probably sent Adelaide to rob his grave.
E. M. She is lurid, this child! The man was practically a pauper before we raised him up. His body hadn’t even been claimed – if I hadn’t put him to use, he would have gone straight to the dissection-table –
A. D. There’s something to appeal to you, Cassie.
E. M. So you see – I didn’t shoot him! You have nothing!
A. D. And I rather think – with all due respect, Milady – that we have nothing more to say. Though I’m sure Cassie and her mother have an awful lot to talk about.
E. M. Much as I would love to stay and watch you dance, I think my intrepid little maid has hit it spot-on. Resign tomorrow, girl, and spare yourself the humiliation as best you can. Otherwise – and I give you fair warning, though you do not even slightly deserve it – by the time I am finished with you, there will not be a scrap of Dallyanglian air left for you to breathe, nor a single house that will open its doors to you. There is an order to this good English town – to England itself – and it does not set persons like yourself on a par with women like me. I would be disgracing the very concept to let you reduce me thus. So you will banish your vile brood from Dallyangle, or I will do it for you. Let us see if you have been sufficiently civilized to make at least one worthy choice.
Transcribed by Henry Nettleblack, 9.45ish – 10pm
28.
OF EXPLANATIONS,
BOTH DENIED
AND PROVIDED
Septimus once more
The grass crashes into my palms, seeps up through my fingers. More force behind it than grass ought to have. It’s heavy with damp, every blade a little cord round my knuckles. Not just my hands – I’m crumpled on all fours, and my knees’re drenched.
Wait. How’d I end up on the floor?
The building. Climbing down. I jumped. Thought my legs’d catch me a right side better than they seem to’ve done.
My breaths are more like gasps – too much like. Cold air pours over my lips. Just one more gasp, and my limbs’ll stop shaking enough to let me stand. Maybe two more. Fine – three – if I grab for something to help me up. The garden’s a bricked-in square. There’s got to be a wall in arm’s reach.
Moss smudges off the scratch of the bricks on my skin, and I’m up – almost – there. It’s the back wall, steadying me to elbow-height. Beyond it, there’s the blanket dark of the fields, a shuddering slosh sounding out the river as it champs at the towpath. We’re right at the top of the town, backing onto the Angle and beyond. And if Property’s had to keep a flat here – well, that works. The Sweetings can hide out deeper in the countryside, cross the river at the nearest bridge, climb this wall and sneak into town via the garden gate.
Could, I should say. Whatever the old arrangement was, it’s over now. The Sweetings can’t keep forcing Property to make life easier for ’em. That’s assuming the two’ve even a mind to let Property survive the night.
Right. Well. No time for slumping, not with lives still to save.
And here come my charges. Rosamond Nettleblack, damn her, lands neat on her toes like an acrobat, greatcoat whirling behind her as she jumps from the crook where the garden wall meets the ground floor. Her grin’s brittle, but there’s smug excitement in it even so. “How’s that for the Pobbles cliffs?”
I grit my teeth. It’s that or groan, or retch. She’s still watching me, waiting for applause she ain’t going to get, pursing her lips in mock-pity for my staggering state. Well, let her think me as limp as she likes. She ain’t had to climb this house upwards, or climb it more than once, or climb it with half her face splintering off. And this ain’t a competition. I’ve just got to get ’em both out.
A wet crash brings Property down after her. No perfect landing this time. They’re slumped in the grass like a swatted cranefly, limbs everywhere, the tails of their evening dress flailed into twists. They’re spluttering something, too breathless to give the words much shape. “The ferret – maledizione – the ferret will have to save himself – ”
I ought to help ’em up – they did it for me – but I – well. I don’t think I can let go of this wall yet. Just a second longer, just ’til my legs stop shaking, then I’ll be all the help they need.
Nettleblack’s distracted, skidding about to peer back up the building. I drag my eyes after hers, blink hard to get the focus –
Oh.
It’s the lights. One by one, there’s yellow splotches warming up the curtains, every window from attic to ground. The sputtery strike of an extra candle, or a gaslit haze turning brighter and brighter. Spots of light spilling down into the garden, burnishing my bloodied hands where they grip the wall. If you were out in the fields, or jostling with the coppices, you’d see these windows for miles. Is that how the Sweetings’ve always seen this place, sat under some hedge-cracking tree by the farms – the same view I used to have? All the countryside a swathe of black, and Dallyangle a perfect sitting duck, a neat heap of town speckled with lanterns?
I snarl as I watch the lamps strike up, though I can’t say I’d not expected it. Can’t keep climbing over someone’s lodgings without ’em noticing sooner or later. And I weren’t as sleek about it on the way back down. It was – effort, more than I thought it’d be. Too much to leave me room to think about being stealthy.
Never mind that now. Deal with this. If the Sweetings get through the door, and they think to check the skylight, here’s our escape-route lit up for the chase.
I dig my heel in the grass, push myself forward a step – another – ’til I ain’t got the wall to hold me up anymore. My stomach clenches, squashes the words out on a painful hiss – “We have to go.”
Property struggles to their knees, a fistful of grass in each hand. There’ll be no saving that shirt. Their eyes widen when they find me, hollowed to skull-sockets from the window-lights, the streak of new-cut scar on their cheek damp with blood and grass-blades. “Septimus, are you – ?”
“I’m fine,” I snap. “Out the front. Follow me.”
I don’t dare throw ’em both over that back wall. Not when the towpath’s got no lights – not with the river so close. And what would I do with ’em in the pitch-black fields – how will that make us safer, when the Sweetings’ll be headed out that way themselves soon enough? No. We need streets. People. Lanterns. Everything you can stare out for miles – a sitting duck, maybe, but safe enough if you can crawl right inside it. So I set our pace, teeth clenched against the throbbing in my muscles, stagger us through the narrow brick path that cuts between the houses. It ain’t open to the sky – just cut through the edge of two terraces. There’s a flimsy wooden gate in the middle of the passageway, half-open, slipped free of its latch.
Henry’s been here. She’s left it ajar.
And – I spot it across the street, dragging myself out of the passage both-handed, palms too numb and scraped to feel any more scraping from the bricks – her bicycle’s gone too. She made it out.
She made it out.
Relief wrings straight through me. It’s double-edged: I’m glad of it, and I’d never have it any other way – but it acts on my traitorous body like a warm bath, slackening every sinew I’ve been trying to keep taut. Which – later, perhaps, would be fine – but not yet! I ain’t in a bath, ain’t even half-safe. I’ve still got these two idiots to sort out. I can’t relax.
Even so – there’s no yelling that at my weak-kneed gratitude. One moment I’m stumbling forward across the street, then –
“Septimus!”
Cobblestones. Too close. I must be back on hands and knees.
I peer through gushes of hair, seeping out from where I pinioned it under my jacket. There’s tiny specks of plant pushing up around the cobbles, and a sharp-cornered shadow cutting across ’em, blocking the glare from the street-lantern. It’s Property’s carriage, tugged to a weird diagonal in front of the tenement, the horse untended and stamping. Lucky for ’em it didn’t just walk off with their getaway. Nettleblack’s inside the carriage already, leant out through the open window like a lady in a sedan-chair, her elbow crooked and pale on the black paint. Property had hold of the reins – but they’re dropping ’em now, shaky footsteps stabbing closer to my hands. I squeeze a cobblestone for each palm, spit heavy breaths through my teeth. One stone’s heavier than the other. Or is that me, my veering balance, toppling over sideways?
“Narcissus, we can’t leave her like this.”
Property’s voice is trembling, their mud-crusted hands tugging at my shoulders. Heaving me back to my feet. Again. “I don’t mean to offend your stoical sensibilities, sweet Septimus, but you truly are keeling over. And – believe me, I am the last individual to suggest venturing back into the jaws of the Sweetings, but my money – ”
Nettleblack drums her fingers on the carriage window. Hoisted up, leant on Property’s sharp shoulder, I can see her better, though she’s all sliced up in strands of my hair. That clambering excitement’s drained out – her wide green eyes are bright with fear. “I think it’s rather your money or your life at this stage, cariad. What do you want – to take her with us?”
No.
“I said I’m fine,” I growl, shoving away from Property’s grip. My cycle’s just across the street, propped against the opposite housefront. Damn this slumping relief. I can still make it. “You go – I need to be somewhere else – got a cycle – ”
“Wait!” Property cries. I ignore ’em, fling out step after step. My cycle tips forward to meet me, pressing under my palms to keep me steady. “You’re exhausted! Please – this is insanity – where do you need to be? I can drive you – ”
Then we hear it. Even I can hear it. The crash of footsteps, echoes rattling down from every housefront. Sprinting. Too quick. We’ve no time to hide.
All I can do’s stand still. Frozen where I am, my hands scalding-knuckled round my cycle’s handlebars. Nettleblack’s tucked up in that carriage, and Property’s right by the horse. There’s a street’s-width between me and those two – I can’t help ’em this time. I can only wrench my head round, spit out hair, watch in a daze as Property ducks behind the bulk of the carriage.
