Frankenstein's Legions (12 page)

Theirs had been a brave try, founded on strictly rational thought. Mere assassination of the Arch-Traitor by wayside ambush or sniper’s shot, would not have sufficed. Outright attack in force passed the clearest message to all traitors in Reaction’s employ—or it might have had it succeeded.

There is no safety from the Republic’s displeasure, it would have demonstrated, no appeal against History’s condemnation!  No distance, no guards, no snuggling deep into a tyrant’s bosom was protection enough. The Republic struck when and where and how it wanted, and not via some  furtive assassin’s blow but with style!  Massed infantry attack deep in the black heart of the enemy!  Loseley was to have burned and Talleyrand with it.

But it and he hadn’t. So that was that. No good crying over spilt milk or unspilt blood. Prisoner-to-be still had one more duty to fulfil.

He had faith, of the strictly secular kind. He knew he would make it home, somehow. He would report to the Republic. He would demand his due punishment for failure.

*  *  *

If a wounded French agent could extricate himself from England the same should have been child’s play for Julius and Ada, who had their health (if not life, in one case), plus funds, plus every right to be in the country.

Not so. At the exact moment said Frenchman was murdering Melchizedek the shepherd’s family on the Downs above them, down in Lewes town beside the River Ouse the couple were being rudely rebuffed.

‘N-K-D,’ said the quaymaster, and made to turn away. Julius’ hand on his shoulder restrained him—and earned a black look.

‘Explain yourself, sir!’ Julius cried. ‘I demand a degree of courtesy!’

The quaymaster reached up and politely but firmly disengaged the delaying hand. There were scowling dockhands and mariners around who looked willing to give him support.

‘I’ll explain, but I’ll not alter, mister furriner—and I’ll thank you to keep your paws to yourself. N-K-D I said and say again: ‘tis local dialect for ‘no-can-do’: our little rustic joke, only it ain’t no joke. No one here will take you, not for love nor money.’

‘But why not, man?’ said Frankenstein. ‘We can afford to be lavish, nor shall we haggle.’

Quaymaster’s expression indicated he never doubted it.

‘Nor shall I, mister. Neither shall I be druv—as we say here in Sussex’

Julius looked to Ada for interpretation. She supplied, purse lipped.

‘The motto of the county, mein herr.’  She adopted a  rustic accent: ‘‘We wunt be druv.’  In plain English, they sometimes oblige but cannot be forced.’

‘Just so, ladyship,’ confirmed Quaymaster. ‘And there’s an end to it.’

‘But in the name of God why not?’ cried Frankenstein, throwing up his arms. ‘You have craft galore: why cannot we be conveyed to the coast?’

Quaymaster was amused. Lady Lovelace sniffed, even though she now had no need for breath. The man knew.

‘But it don’t stop there, does it, mister?’ he said. ‘I misdoubt your path ends at Newhaven and England’s shore…’

He had them there, though naturally Julius couldn’t admit it. Quaymaster pressed his advantage in the intervening silence.

‘I dare say you might get one of the gentlemen to take you…’

‘He means smugglers,’ interjected Ada helpfully.

‘…but we’re law-abiders here. And besides, Lewes is a pious Protestant place. I don’t speak for all, but many don’t hold with all this … reviving business.’

He looked at Lady Lovelace with frank distaste. Foxglove bristled.

‘We load occasional Lazaran regiments for the war,’ said the master of this little world, ‘out of duty and love of country. But shipping deaders abroad without a licence?  Oh no, matey, that’s a hanging offence!’

*  *  *

It was the same story in Rye when they got there, via many tedious short journeys and changes of train. At the Mermaid Inn, whilst Ada waited in the rain outside, Julius enquired after local vessels plying for hire. Subtle questions (or so he deluded himself) ascertained which of their masters were the liveliest lads.

Passing by the port’s gallows en route to the harbour should have prepared them for disappointment. There, strung up and rotting, were all those free traders who’d run foul of the coastal blockade squadron. Their former colleagues passed by them twice a day—a salutary lesson.

Rye mariners weren’t so restrained as those of Lewes. After their first ‘no’ to Frankenstein wasn’t heeded, they threw fishheads.

Lady Lovelace had to bear-hug Julius in an icy embrace to keep his pistol in his pocket.

*  *  *

They struck lucky on their way back along the coast. Though first impressions suggested quite the contrary. Life served them up a lemon, only for it to spontaneously turn into lemonade.

A militia-constable boarded the train at Cooden Beach and started checking tickets, so they were obliged to disembark at the next stop, far earlier than intended. However, that ‘choice’ of station might have been their downfall just as effectively as surrendering themselves. ‘Norman’s Bay Halt’ was the epitome of insignificance set in a sea of desolation. Anyone alighting there merited a curious glance.

Julius and Ada got them aplenty but, as luck would have it, not from the constable. An incautious flash of ankle meant he was all agog at a jaunty young lady passenger at the time. Then the loco chugged away and he never knew about the certain promotion just missed.

Which meant he retired, decades later, still a constable, rather than the Inspector that might have been. Taking the long view from then, he would have said the glimpse of stocking was good, as far as it went (½ inch up the calve), but all in all wasn’t fair exchange. But he didn’t know and so didn’t say so, and remained content as he was. Thus things worked out well for everyone.

Back at Norman’s Bay, the pancake flat Pevensey Levels spread from the distant Downs right to the pebbly beach, and the wind swept over all. It spoke of rain soon. Only a few cottages, doubtless the abode of sluice-keepers and the like, relieved the uniformly grey scene.

‘Please tell me,’ said Ada, ‘I beseech you, that this is the low point in our adventure...’

Frankenstein looked all around again, as if he couldn’t trust first impressions. Finding nothing for his comfort, he tried to light a cheroot but the lucifer wouldn’t flare. He flung both away, losing both smoke and dignity.

‘I can only observe,’ he said, ‘that here is indeed low, madam. In fact, positively sea-level. Therefore, it is difficult to conceive of deeper depths, but one cannot rule it out. As I found out in the Heathrow Hecatomb, Fate sometimes drives our fortunes positively subterranean...’

Lady Lovelace slumped down onto the suitcase Foxglove carried for her.

‘In which case,’ she sighed, ‘I propose to throw myself under the next train to arrive.’

Foxglove prematurely stepped between Ada and the platform’s edge, although the track was visibly empty for miles either way.

Her proposal would do the trick. If anything, Lazarans were even more delicate than living humans, and disturbance of the serum sustaining their frames invariably did for them. The mangling attentions of a train’s iron wheels would certainly put Lady Lovelace beyond reviving as an entity, leaving just loose limbs fit only for spare parts. A dreadful waste of Frankenstein’s hard work...

He decided to risk a second cheroot and this one took.

‘Even if sincere,’ he commented, puffing away, ‘your proposal may be long delayed, madam. This hardly seems the busiest of lines: your despair must stew awhile...’

Inadvertent mention of food reminded them they were hungry. Simultaneously, the rain arrived.

‘Perhaps,’ said Foxglove, keen to get his mistress away from the rails, ‘we should seek shelter nearby. And eat something. And then think about things.’

‘‘Things’?’ said Lady Lovelace bitterly. ‘Don’t talk to me about things!’

But she arose and went with them into the days to come.

*  *  *

To their pleasant surprise, two of the low cottages transpired to be joined-into-one—and an inn besides!  ‘The Star of Bethlehem,’ no less. Though a mystery how it found custom out here in the back of beyond, the gift-horse’s mouth was not inspected. It meant there was no need to share a fisher-family’s limited hospitality.

Even so, there might still have been problems. Regardless of former status, Lazarans were—at best—only tolerated in public houses, and then only in the public bar, or that portion of it designated for day-labourers, gypsies and sundry hoi polloi. There the undead formed a reassuring bottom-of-Life’s-barrel for even them to feel superior to. Ada and Foxglove wouldn’t have enjoyed that.

Fortunately, the Star was so far flung it only had the one bar—a sort of rough Sussex equality. There they found funny looks galore but also, compared to the cold and rain outside, a welcome, and warmth, and food for sale. And, as it turned out, not only food.

Whilst the landlord went off to assemble their ‘luncheon’ (which got laughs), one of his customers peeled away from the bar huddle and came over, drink in hand. He looked capable of anything: a gnarled tree-trunk of a mariner with wind-reddened face and wind-slitted eyes. Yet they probably appeared as exotic to him as he to them.

‘Come for the whale, ave ye?’ he asked, without preamble. The lower classes were meant to preface unsolicited conversation with ‘excuse me saying’s and ‘might I make so bold’s...

‘No. We’ve ordered lamb cutlets,’ replied Foxglove, who was prickly on points of etiquette.

The mariner smiled but remained. Frankenstein’s curiosity got the better of him.

‘What whale?’

‘Only you’ve missed he,’ the mariner went on. ‘The big ole stranded whale what trippers came to see, that the Railway company put the halt in for, he clean rotted away two year back. And good riddance: all pong and no eating.’

‘Don’t you have a go at old whaley!’ said the landlord, returning with a tray of brandies. ‘He were good business while he lasted. And put us on the map too, with a new name.’

‘The Railway company didn’t much fancy ‘Pevensey Sluice,’’ the mariner explained. ‘Normans Bay sounded much sweeter to they...’

‘Really?’ Frankenstein delivered the variant of that wonderfully multi-purpose English word which implied he didn’t give a damn. ‘No, not here for the whale,’ he then confirmed, and left it at that.

The visitors downed their drinks and when the spirits reached their spirits they felt revived enough to converse—amongst themselves.

‘Are you still here?’ Foxglove asked the mariner. Somehow, by tone alone, it was conveyed he’d happily make it otherwise.

The mariner ignored words and intonation alike. He focused on the gentry.

‘So,’ he said, softly, ‘if ain’t the whale of blessed memory, then you must be for France...’

That got their attention.

‘What on earth do you mean?’ asked Ada, taking command in full aristo mode.

The mariner cut her dead, or as good as. His gaze remained on Julius.

‘Not ‘earth’: I’m talking sea. Earth’s where this here deader belongs. Sea is how you’s trying to escape: is why you’s here in Normans Bay. Now Mr Whale’s gone there ain’t no other reason.’

Frankenstein installed a finger erect before Lady Lovelace’s opening jaw. Slowly she closed it again, in order to bite her tongue.

Julius spoke quietly, though he now suspected it little mattered in this place. The mystery of the Star’s location was solved: it lived and thrived on illicit trade, born of being in prime position for it.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is loose talk. Your country is at war with France: all contacts with it are capital crimes...’

The mariner smiled. The exercise screwed his eyes up still more till they were mere beads of light.

‘If we weren’t in mixed company,’ he answered, ‘I’d have this shirt off and show you my back. Red and ridged as bacon!  Twelve years in his Majesty’s navy flogged all the patriotism out of I!  Now are you France bound or not?  Are we in business?’

They were. They certainly were.

*  *  *

Since it was cold and dull upon the beach at midnight, they made conversation. It is unlikely Lady Lovelace would have exerted herself otherwise.

The only alternative sound around, save the sea, was moaning from Lazaran gangs working sluice gates out on the Levels. Not that cold, wet and dark signified anything to them: it was merely their response to being ripped from eternal rest. Owners had to accept that perpetual lamentation was a feature of the low-grade Lazaran. Even muzzles and beatings only reduced it to a hum.

Accordingly, almost anything was an improvement on that distant but depressing dirge.

‘Have you ever played rounders, mein herr?’

She persisted in calling him that, for reasons all her own. Julius speculated that she wished to emphasise his foreignness, the better to stress her own belonging here. Nationality might be all Lady Ada Lovelace (deceased) had left. In the modern world to be born (or even re-born) English was to have done well in the lottery of life.

Frankenstein skimmed a flat pebble at the waves. It sank like... a stone.

‘Rounders?’ he said. ‘It is a card game, no?’

‘No,’ Ada replied. ‘It involves a bat and ball and running between four stations. One played it as a girl, but that is not material. One only mentions it because the sport employs an apposite phrase: ‘Three strikes and you’re out.’  I strongly believe that applies to us.’

Frankenstein yawned. It was a bore to feign interest but their rendezvous was late.

‘How so?’

‘In that by time of our third request for conveyance, first Lewes then Rye, the news will have spread to every fisherman’s ‘spit n’ lean’ hut and foreshore in the south—for theirs is an incestuous world, bound into brotherhood by adversity and risk. Our concerns would be the subject of promiscuous discussion and, soon after, public knowledge.’

‘Really?’  That word again, this time expressing surprise.

Lady Lovelace nodded.

‘Really. As I say, on the third occasion of asking is my calculation,’ she confirmed.