Caro Peacock - Death At Dawn

To Caroline Compton

Would you be kind enough to tell me where they keep peoples bodies, I said.

The porter blinked. The edges of his eyelids were pink in a brown face, lashes sparse and painful-looking like the bristles on a gooseberry. Odd the things you notice when your minds trying to shy away from a large thing. When he saw me coming towards him over the cobbles among the crowds leaving the evening steam packet, he must have expected another kind of question altogether. Something along the lines of How much do you charge to bring a trunk up from the hold? or Where can I find a clean, respectable hotel? Those kinds of questions were filling the air all round us, mostly in the loud but uneasy tones of the English newly landed at Calais. Id asked in French, but he obviously thought hed misheard.

You mean where people stay, at the hotels?

Not hotels, no. People whove been killed. A gentleman who was killed on Saturday.

Another blink and a frown. He looked over my shoulder at his colleagues carrying bags and boxes down the gangplank, regretting his own bad luck in encountering me.

Would he not be in his own house, mademoiselle?

He has no house here.

Nor anywhere else, come to that. He would have had one soon, the tall thin house he was going to rent for us, near the unfashionable end of Oxford Street when we Dont think about that.

In church then, perhaps.

I thought, but didnt say, that he was never a great frequenter of churches.

If an English gentleman were killed in in an accident and had no family here, where might he be taken?

The porters face went hard. Hed noticed my hesitation.

The morgue is over there, mamselle.

He nodded towards a group of buildings a little back from the seafront then turned, with obvious relief, to a plump man who was pulling at his sleeve and burbling about cases of books.

I walked in the direction hed pointed out but had to ask again before I found my way to a low building, built of bricks covered over with black tarry paint. A man who looked as thin and faded as driftwood was sitting on a chair at the door, smoking a clay pipe. The smell of his tobacco couldnt quite mask another smell coming from inside the building. When he heard me approaching he turned his head without shifting the rest of his body, like a clockwork automaton, and gave me a considering look.

Its possible that you have my father here, I said.

He took a long draw on his pipe and spoke with it still in his mouth.

Would he be the gentleman who got shot?

Possibly, yes.

English?

Yes.

She said his clothes had an English cut.

Who said?

Without answering, he got up and walked over to a narrow house with a front door opening on to the cobbles only a few steps away from the morgue. He thumped on the door a couple of times and a fat woman came out in a black dress and off-white apron, straggly grey hair hanging down under her cap. They whispered, heads together, then he gave her a nudge towards me.

Your father, oh, you poor little thing. Poor little thing.

Her deep voice was a grieving purr in my ear, her hand moist and warm on my shoulder. Her breath smelled of brandy.

May I see him, please?

She led the way inside, still purring Pauvre petite, ohpauvre petite. Her husband in his cloud of pipe smoke fell in behind us. There were flies buzzing around the low ceiling and a smell of vinegar. The evening sun came in through the slats of the shutters, making bars of red on the whitewashed wall. Three rough pinewood tables took up most of the space in the room but only one of them was occupied by a shape covered in a yellowish sheet. The woman put her arm round me and signed to the man to pull the sheet back. I knew almost before I saw his face. I suppose I made some noise or movement because the man started pulling the sheet back over again. I signed to him to leave it where it was.

Your father?

Yes. Please

He hesitated, then, when I nodded, reluctantly pulled the sheet further down. Theyd put my father in a white cotton shroud with his hands crossed on his chest. I took a step forward and untied the strings at the neck of the shroud. The woman pulled at my arm and tried to stop me. Trust your own eyes and ears, hed said. Never let anybody persuade you against them. Hed been talking at the time about the question dividing some of his naturalist friends as to whether squirrels were completely hibernatory, standing in some beechwoods with Tom and me on a bright January day. I tried to keep the sound of his voice in my head as I lifted up his right hand, cold and heavy in mine. I pulled the shroud aside with my other hand and looked at the round hole the pistol ball had made in his chest, right over the heart, and the livid scorch-marks on his skin surrounding it. No blood. Theyd have sponged his body before they put it in the shroud. That probably accounted for the vinegar smell. It would have been done by the same plump, liver-spotted hand that was now pulling at my arm, trying to make me come away. The thought of that hand moving over him made me feel sick. I pulled the shroud up, crossed his right hand back over his left and watched while they covered him up again.

His clothes? I asked.

She looked annoyed and left us, wooden clogs clacking over the cobbles. The flies buzzed and circled. After a minute or two she was back with an armful of white linen, streaked with rusty stains. Breeches, stockings, a shirt. On the left breast of the shirt was a small round hole. I bent over it and smelled, through the iron tang of blood, a whiff of scorched linen and black powder. I think the woman imagined I was kissing it, holding it so close, because her arm came round me, sympathetic again. The man was repeating some question insistently.

You will need an English priest?

I dont think Oh, I see. For the burial. Yes.

He produced a dog-eared calling card from his pocket. I heaped the linen back into the womans arms and took the card. Shed tried to be kind to me so as I left I slid some coins from my bag into the pocket of her apron. It struck me as I walked away that they were English coins and of no use to her, but then in Calais she could find somebody to change them. It came to me too that she hadnt shown me his outer clothes, shoes, hat or jacket. One of the perquisites of her job, probably. Some lumpish son or cousin of hers might be wearing them even now. There should have been rings as well. I made myself picture the crossed hands against the shroud. Theyd let him keep the narrow silver ring on his left hand that he wore in memory of my mother. He usually wore a gold one with a curious design on his right, but I was certain that the hand Id held had been bare. The thought of somebody else wearing his ring made me so angry that I almost turned back. But that was not sensible, and I must at all costs be sensible. I walked by the sea for a long time, watching the sun go down. Then I found a pile of fishing nets heaped in a shed, curled myself up in them and alternately slept and shivered through the few hours of a June night. In the shivering intervals, every word of the note that had jolted my world out of its orbit came back to me.

Miss Lane,

You do not know me, but I take the liberty ofaddressing you with distressing news. Your father,Thomas Jacques Lane, was killed this Saturday,seventeenth June, in a duel at Calais

Everybody knows the place in Calais where gentlemen go to fight duels, the long stretch of beach with the sand-hills behind. People point it out to each other from the deck of the steam packet. By the time the first grey light came in through the doorway of the fishermans hut I knew that the one thing I wanted to do was follow the route my father would have taken three days before, at much this time of the morning. I unwrapped myself from the nets, brushed dry fish scales from my dress and walked along the harbour front, past shuttered houses and rows of tied-up fishing boats. Eventually the cobbled road runs out in a litter of nets and crab pots, just above the fringe of bladder wrack and driftwood that marks high tide line. They would have left their carriage there.