“You stay calm and quiet, and they’ll find you alive in the morning,” Sumner says. “If you fret or struggle, it may not end so well.”
There are three horses in the stable—two are black, young and lively-looking, and the other is an older gray. He takes the gray out from its stall and saddles it. When it snorts and shuffles about, he rubs its neck and hums a tune until it quiets enough to take the bit. He turns down the oil lamp, then opens the main doors and waits a minute, listening and watching carefully. He hears the whine and burble of wind in the trees, the hissing of a cat, but nothing worse. The mews is empty: light seeps upwards from the sentried gas lamps into an umbrous sky. He swings the satchel onto the horse’s withers and pushes his boot into the stirrup iron.
*
Dawn finds him twenty miles to the north. He passes through Driffield without pausing. At Gorton, he stops to let the horse drink from the mere, then continues in the semidarkness northwest through the beech and sycamore woods and along the dry valley floors. As the sky lightens, plowed fields appear stretched out on either side, their deep furrows specked with brighter lumps of chalk. The hedgerows are tangled and crosshatched with dead nettle, knapweed, and bramble. Close to noon he reaches the brow of the Wolds’ northern scarp and descends to the patchwork plain below. When he enters the town of Pickering it is night again, the blue-black sky is dense with stars, and he is dazed and queasy from hunger and lack of sleep. He finds a livery stable for the horse and takes a room at the inn beside it. When they ask, he tells them his name is Peter Batchelor and he is on his way from York to Whitby to see his uncle, who has taken ill and may be dying.
He sleeps that night with Drax’s gun gripped tight in his right hand and the leather satchel shoved beneath the iron bedstead. In the early morning, he eats porridge and kidneys for breakfast and takes a heel of bread with dripping wrapped in butcher’s paper for his tea. After six or seven miles, the road north begins to rise steadily past stands of pine and roughened sheep fields. Hedgerows stutter, then disappear, grass gives way to gorse and bracken; the landscape hardens and reduces. Soon he is up on the moor. All around him, continents of dark-edged clouds dangle above a treeless unbalance of purple, brown, and green. He feels a sharp new chill in the heightened air. If Baxter sends men to look for him, he is almost sure they will not look for him here, not immediately at least—to the west perhaps or to the south in Lincolnshire but not here, not yet. He has another day or so, he expects, before the reports from Hull reach Pickering, enough time for him to arrive at the coast and find a ship that will carry him east to Holland or Germany. When he gets to Europe, he will use Baxter’s money to disappear, become someone else. He will take a new name and find a new profession. Everything erstwhile will be forgotten, he tells himself; everything that has lingered on will be wiped clean.
The clouds close together and darken; a steady rain begins to fall. He meets a carter traveling south with ewes for market and they stop to talk. Sumner asks him how far to Whitby, and the carter scratches his grizzled chin and frowns as if the question is a puzzling one, then tells him he will be lucky to get there afore dark. A few miles farther on, Sumner turns off the Whitby road and cuts northwest towards Goathland and Beck Hole. The rain ceases and the sky turns a pale, summery blue. The purple heather is patchy and burned over on the slopes near the road, and farther off there are clumps of trees and bushes gathered in the wet hollows. Sumner eats his bread and beef dripping, and scoops brown, peatish water from a stream. He passes through Goathland and moves on towards Glaisdale. The moor turns briefly back to grassland edged with bracken, stitchwort, and low elder, then rises again and reverts to its tight-shorn barrenness. That night, Sumner sleeps, shivering, in a half-collapsed barn, and in the morning he remounts and continues northward.
When he gets to the edge of Guisborough, he stops at a stable, sells the horse and saddle for half their value, then picks up his bag and walks on into the town. At a newsdealer near the railway station, he buys a copy of the Newcastle Courant and reads it on the platform. The report of the murder and robbery in Hull occupies a half column on the second page. Patrick Sumner, an Irishman and former soldier, is named as the culprit, and there is a description of the stolen horse and mention of a large reward offered by Baxter for anyone who comes forward with useful information. He leaves the newspaper folded on the bench and boards the next train to Middlesbrough. The compartment smells of soot and hair oil; there are two women talking together and a man asleep in the far corner. He tips his hat at the women and smiles but doesn’t offer to speak. He lifts the leather satchel onto his knees and feels its reassuring pressure.
That night he seeks out foreign voices. He goes along the dockside from one tavern to the next listening for them: Russian, German, Danish, Portuguese. He needs someone who is clever, he thinks, but not too clever; greedy, but not too greedy. In the Baltic Tavern on Commercial Street he finds a Swede, a captain whose brig is leaving for Hamburg in the morning with a cargo of coal and iron. He has a broad face and red eyes and hair so blond it is almost white. When Sumner tells him he needs a berth and will pay whatever is required for the privilege, the Swede looks him over skeptically, smiles, and asks how many men he has murdered.
“Only the one,” Sumner says.
“Just one? And did he deserve it?”
“I’d say he deserved it sure enough.”
The Swede laughs, then shakes his head.
“Mine is a merchant ship. I’m sorry. We have no space for passengers.”
“Then set me to work. I can pull a rope if need be.”
He shakes his head again and takes a sip of his whiskey.
“Not possible,” he says.
Sumner lights his pipe and smiles. He assumes this firmness is just a show, a way of driving up the price of his passage. He wonders for a moment if the Swede might read the Newcastle Courant but decides that’s hardly likely.
“Who are you anyway?” the Swede asks him. “Where do you come from?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“You have a passport though, papers? They’ll ask for them in Hamburg.”
Sumner takes a single sovereign from his pocket and pushes it across the tabletop.
“That’s what I have,” he says.
The Swede raises his pale eyebrows and nods. The roar of drunken voices swells around them, then deflates. A door swings open, and the smoke-filled air shudders above their heads.
“So the man you killed was rich?”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Sumner says. “I was only making a joke.”
The Swede looks down at the gold coin but doesn’t reach for it. Sumner leans back in his chair and waits. He knows the future is close by: he can feel its tug and sprawl, its shimmering blankness. He is standing on the very lip, poised and ready to step off.
“I think you will find someone to take you,” the Swede says eventually. “If you pay them well enough.”
Sumner takes another sovereign from his pocket and places it down next to the first. The twin coins wink yellow in the flickering gaslight; on the wet, black tabletop, they shine like eyes. He looks back at the Swede and smiles.
“I do believe I found him,” he says.