The Last Crossing (2 page)

Beneath my feet, the deck of the
Pasha
lurched, grew more and more tipsy with every minute that passed. Yet that unsteadiness was nothing to how unbalanced I feel now, staring down into Grosvenor Square, wondering what has prompted Custis Straw’s blunt and peremptory summons, what it means.

O
ut of the black inkwell of the night sky, incongruously, a white flood poured. Fat flakes of lazy snow eddying, sticking like wet feathers to whatever they touched. Simon Gaunt, waking with a start, discovered himself seated on an inert horse, becalmed in a storm. For the briefest of moments, mind a blur of white, he searched for a name. Seized it. “Reverend Witherspoon!” he shouted. “Reverend!”

Nothing answered, nothing moved except for the palsied snow.

Since dawn, Witherspoon had been driving them to the brink of collapse. In London, Simon Gaunt had not recognized the danger of that side of Witherspoon, the reliance on iron rules. Cited like Holy Scripture.
When journeying one must never halt until wood and shelter are obtained
.

But here, on a barren tabletop plain, wood and shelter were a figment of the imagination.

Press on, my boy
.

As the October dusk drew down, Simon had argued desperately for making camp. But Witherspoon would not hear of it; the imposing face that ecstatic love could render soft as soap in London was now cast as hard as an Old Testament prophet’s certainty.
We shall not yield to adversity
.

So on they went, deeper and deeper into bewildering nightfall, Witherspoon flogging his mare until he opened a safe ten yards, a cordon sanitaire between himself and the weak-kneed naysayer. Ten
yards to symbolize the moral gulf separating master and disciple.

The last thing Simon could remember before falling asleep was the Reverend’s broad shoulders rocking side to side like a wagging forefinger, reproving his feebleness, admonishing his sloth.

How long had he slept?

“Reverend Witherspoon! Reverend Witherspoon!” The snow drowned his cry. Knowingly or unknowingly, Witherspoon had ridden on and Simon was alone. A cold clinker of fear settled in the grate of his belly. Lost. He lashed his horse into a trot; the gelding submitted for a hundred reluctant yards, then faltered, came to a complete standstill.

How dreadfully cold it was. A breeze sprang to sudden life and his cheeks, wet with melting snow, stiffened at the icy touch. The wind panted, flakes swirled, thickened. Twisting in his saddle, Simon strained for a glimpse of Witherspoon hastening to gather the lost lamb, some darker blot in the darkness of night. The blizzard was strengthening, slapping at horse and rider; he could feel the gelding’s mane fluttering against his hands clamped to the reins.

Bouncing his heels on the gelding’s ribs, he urged it to resume an unwilling shamble. The gusts were growing fiercer, snow was biting at his face like flying sand. He ducked his head and watched the drifts unroll beneath him, a white scroll of vellum, luminous in the dim light.

The scroll stopped. His hat sailed off. Dismounting, Simon rifled the saddlebag, found his old Oxford scarf, bandaged his burning ears with it, knotted it under his chin. Wind keened through the weave of the wool. Never had he known such cold; it drew heat out of the body like a leech draws blood. Forehead, eyes, cheeks ached from the frigid, sucking mouth.

Weariness overwhelmed him, dropped his forehead heavily against the horse’s flank. He let it rest there. Just a minute. Only a minute. Then he would move. Go on. The gelding’s rump was crusted with ice and snow, so was Simon’s beard. Raking his fingers through it, he plucked away clots of ice, trying to pray. “Lord God of Hosts,” he began, but his thoughts were lost in the roar of the storm, brain nothing but a puddle of numb slush. Falling back on memory, he
recited from the Book of Common Prayer. “ ‘O most glorious and gracious Lord God, who dwellest in heaven, but beholdest all things below,’ ” he mumbled. “ ‘Look down, we beseech thee, and hear us, calling out of the depth of misery, and out of the jaws of this death, which is now ready to swallow us up: Save, Lord, or else we perish. The living, the living shall praise thee. O send thy word of command to rebuke the raging winds and the roaring …’ ” His voice ebbed away.

It was no good. He dove back into the saddlebag, fingers turned to pincers by the cold, and grappled a tin, pried away the top. The wind caught the lid, tore it from his hand, kited it off into the howling night. He patted, crooned and clucked, feeding the exhausted horse his shortbread, trying to kindle in it a little strength to continue on.

The gelding shied when he tried to remount. Somehow Simon snagged the stirrup with his boot and clambered aboard, weeping when the horse once more stubbornly stalled, beating its neck with a fist. But then it swung its head, put the wind to their backs, moved off hesitantly. With the blizzard whipping its hindquarters, the gelding broke into a lope, then a wild staggering gallop, heaving like a storm-driven ship. Simon tasted long white streaks of snow, smears on the chalkboard of night, as his brain jerked from spot to spot on his body, probing. Face dead, a slab of wood. Fingers dead. Twigs.

Latimer, bound to the stake, had said to the chained and sobbing Nicholas Ridley beside him, “Play the man, master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”

He would have welcomed to burn like Latimer now.

The horse gave a grunt, stumbled, fell in slow, dreamy increments. Simon became a boy again. His father had bought him a ticket at the London zoo for a ride on the camel. The dromedary was lowering itself to earth, in stages, a complicated, groaning piece of machinery, settling to its knees, sinking.

Pitched headlong, Simon lay in a pillow of snow, listening to Ridley screaming in the flames.

No, not Ridley screaming, the horse. He staggered to the fallen gelding. It was trying to rise on three legs, the fourth was horribly
broken. Lurching up and falling back, lurching up and falling back. Simon caught the head stall, pulled the beast down and squatted on its neck, bringing to an end the terrible struggle. The horse stared up at him. Its eye a coal-yoked egg.

He placed his hand over the eye. His brother Addington had smashed a lot of hunters’ legs. Addington, merciless rider. Long ago, a boy of ten, he’d seen one of the victims of Addington’s recklessness destroyed. The gamekeeper delivered the coup de grâce while Addington and his fox-hunting friends drank whisky in the house. The callous cruelty of it had made him sob miserably, displeasing his father. “Buck up,” Father had commanded him.

Left hand blinkering the eye of the horse, Simon reached for the knife sheathed on his belt. Less a knife than a small, bone-handled sword bought in Fort Benton, a bowie knife the Americans called it.

He told himself, “The Holy Ghost reads hearts.”

When he sliced the throat, a tremor ran down the horse’s neck, hot blood scalded his hand. The weary horse did not take long to die.

Whimpering, Simon huddled against its belly, cringing from the wind. His hands were alive with needles of agony; when he slipped them down the front of his pants to warm them, he felt the gluey blood on his privates.

There was a hymn – it skipped about his brain before he heard himself singing. “ ‘How mighty is the Blood that ran for sinful nature’s needs! It broke the ban, it rescued man; it lives, and speaks, and pleads!’ ” Blood running for sinful nature’s needs. Living, speaking, pleading. To rescue man.

Simon scrambled to his knees, knife upraised. Drove the sixteen-inch blade into the horse’s chest, sawed the belly down to the legs. Guts spilling, a thin steam sifting out of the lips of the incision. Plunged his hands into the mess of entrails. Tore away, scooping offal behind him, hacking with the knife at whatever resisted, whatever clung. Moaning, hunching his shoulders, drawing his knees up to his chest, wriggling away at the mouth of the wound, he burrowed into the balmy pocket.

Safe in the slick, rich animal heat, out of the cruel wind. Not all of him, but enough. An embryo, curled in the belly of the dead horse.

The little bells sewn to the hem of Talks Different’s caped buffalo robe jingled crisply as she strode along, towing an old buffalo bull hide piled with sticks rooted out of a coulee bottom. The sharp cold that had greeted her at dawn was lifting; Sun was climbing higher and higher, softening the snow, making it stick to the parfleche soles of her moccasins.

The passing of last night’s blizzard had left the air perfectly still. Talks Different sweated in her robe, eyes squinted against Sun’s dazzling dance on the white plain. All at once, she stopped and stared. Off in the distance, something was moving, most likely a prairie wolf gorging on a kill. She gave a tug to the hide-tail, briskly covered another hundred yards, but still could not give a name to what it was she saw. Something crouched above a carcass, something forbidding and black. The bells of her robe pealed a thin warning, but the creature did not run from the ringing like a coyote or wolf would. And it was too small to be a grizzly.

The glaring light stabbed thorns in her eyes; they streamed with tears. What she was straining to see could not be a vision, visions were given freely to her. This seemed to be a thing of the earth, but very strange. She hurried on.

Now she could recognize the body of a horse, one hoofed leg jutting up. But the black thing that had moved before now stayed absolutely still, wrapped up in a ball. She called out to it, identifying
herself as a holy being, asking it if it were a holy being too. At the sound of her voice, it stirred, twitched.

Talks Different was not afraid to meet anything strange because she had been made an unusual being herself, a
bote
granted the blessing of Two Spirit. Confident in her sacred power she came forward, ready to face whatever waited there.

Slowly, unsteadily, it rose up on its hind legs and became a Hairy Face dressed in black pants and black coat. He said nothing. His clothes, his hands, the hair of his head, even his beard, downy as a fledgling duck, were smeared with dried blood.

Now he worked his lips, trying to make words, but nothing came from his mouth except the sounds of a baby wanting to nurse. He took a step and his legs gave way, dropping him on his bottom like a toddler. And like such a child, he stretched out his arms to Talks Different, begging to be picked up, carried and comforted.

I
n the spring of 1871, Henry Gaunt stood at a window looking down on the splendid grounds of his country estate, Sythe Grange. Earlier that morning, his son Addington had conducted preparations for the day with his customary military exactitude. Now they had the gift of a lovely afternoon, a few mares’ tails whisking a soft-blue sky, bright-green turf spread like billiard-table cloth. Red-and-white-striped marquees were wrinkling in a gentle breeze while, in the tidal shade cast by the flopping canvas, reefs of children clamoured for ginger beer and lemonade as their elders sampled claret cup and champagne.

More guests were streaming in, the gravel of the long, sweeping drive crunching under the wheels of a procession of traps, dogcarts, and carriages conveying his neighbours to the Annual Meeting of the Society of Toxophilites. Their host knew he ought to go down, ought to greet them, but found he couldn’t bring himself to.

Was he losing his grip? Grip was what had always distinguished him from other men of business. Unscrupulous was what they had called him – those crabbed, anxious, whining clerks; the idle rich and their pettifogging lawyers.

No one had ever given him a hand over the stile, he had clambered over himself. No advantages. His father nothing more than a middling builder of gimcrack little houses and stucco villas. But after Father had gone to his reward, Henry Gaunt seized his chance, knew what would be the going thing. Railways. Contracting work at first.
Using profits from contracting to build and operate his own railways. Short lines at the start, but ones that paid handsomely. Nothing grandiose like the Enfield and Edmonton Railway, three miles of track and at the end of it a station house like a maharaja’s palace, pounds poured into the restoration of a Stuart house by fools. A dream of grandeur resulting in bankruptcy.