‘For him that is joined to the living there is hope; for a living dog is better than a dead lion.’
To Cadbury this seemed like a threat, the more threatening because delivered even more flatly than usual.
Was her sister the dead lion? Was he the living dog?
‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘some new clothes will cheer you up.’
She smiled, a rare event.
‘There’s nothing new under the sun.’
Twenty minutes later the bumpkin returned with the dressmaker, weighed down with holdalls. Cadbury had explained that he wanted Deidre to put on a dress and a wig – her hair was cut almost to the skull – and go to look for the Two Trevors. He couldn’t imagine they would recognize her; once the dressmaker was finished, neither did Cadbury. The dress and the false hair did not transform her into a beauty. If anything she looked even stranger than before – like a doll, an automaton that he’d seen demonstrated at Old King Cole’s Palace in Boston. Once the powder and lip rouge had been painted on, Deidre looked very strange indeed, as if someone had described a woman to a sculptor blind from birth, who’d then had a stab at making one that had turned out impressive in its way, given his limitations, but still not entirely convincing. Still, it would certainly do the trick. No one was going to recognize her.
By now it was dark. He paid off the dressmaker and the bumpkin, gestured Deidre over to the largest window and raised up the lantern so she could see herself reflected in the glass. He thought her expression softened for a moment as she swayed back and forth and then he saw an expression of pure delight.
‘Who is this?’ she said. ‘Who comes out of the desert like a pillar of smoke scented with myrrh and frankincense?’ And then she laughed.
‘I’ve never heard you laugh before,’ said Cadbury, mystified.
‘There is a time to laugh,’ said Deidre, as she swayed back and forth admiring herself in the window, ‘and a time to weep.’
Having taken Cadbury’s instructions as to what she should and should not do (‘Don’t be seen by the Two Trevors and don’t kill anyone’), she was gone for nearly two hours, during which Cadbury had plenty of time to consider what his grandmother had meant when she repeatedly told him that worrying is the Devil’s favourite pastime.
If he’d known the truth about Deidre he would have been less worried for his own sake but even more concerned for the successful accomplishment of their business. Deidre Plunkett, if not an imbecile, was certainly at the high end of simple-minded. Her mother, a devout member of the Plain People, who feared her daughter’s oddness more than her lack of understanding, read out loud to Deidre daily from the Holy Book in the hope that its wisdom would drive away her strangeness. In this she failed, not least because of the influence of her equally odd but much more quick-witted sister, the late Jennifer. Devoted to Deidre, Jennifer showed her greater powers of intellect by devising games for her sister, the least appalling of which involved torturing small animals to obtain a confession, putting them on trial on trumped up charges and then inventing hideously complicated executions. Though Deidre’s powers of understanding were weak she was naturally cunning when it came to killing in the way a wolf is cunning. No wolf can speak or count but a mathematician who speaks a dozen languages would be unlikely to last an hour with a single wolf in a dark wood on a cold mountain. And she was not so simple that, by keeping her mouth shut and adopting the enigmatic nearly-smile her sister had taught her, she hadn’t gained a reputation for shrewdness and acumen, one which seemed ably supported by her talent for murder.
Anyone who tried to strike up a conversation with Deidre soon felt awkward under an empty gaze that, paradoxically, seemed to suggest profound and dismissive guile. Her terse replies, terse because she rarely understood what was being said to her, seemed to imply she regarded anyone speaking to her as a wordy fool. The enigmatic, often vaguely menacing, quotations from the bible of the Plain People were triggered by the words of whoever was talking to her. In this way her replies always seemed relevant if mockingly at odds. In other circumstances a savvy operator like Daniel Cadbury would have seen through her, but fear (not guilt, mind, because Jennifer had tried to murder him first and had unquestionably got what was coming to her) and worry that she knew everything and was biding her time blinded him to the truth, one of these truths being that Deidre had taken a liking to him. The fact that she fancied him was what made her, in fact, more talkative than usual – the only way she had of flirting with him was by waiting until a word triggered off something she recognized from the Holy Book. Unfortunately much of the Holy Book consisted of rather brilliant threats of one kind or another against unbelievers, hence Cadbury’s feeling that there was something menacing about her way of talking to him.
Deidre had been gone nearly an hour and a half when he could endure no more. He decided to risk the clear chance of walking into the Trevors and find out what was going on.
She may have been disguised but she was easy to spot, so odd was her appearance and manner. It was just as well Cadbury found her when he did because she’d come to the attention of a trio of what passed for dandies in that part of the world: top hats, red braces and pointed slippers. The four of them, Deidre with her blonde wig, mad eyes and painted cheeks, looked like the bad dream of an unhappy child.
‘Any more like you at home, gorgeous?’ mocked the gurrier, who clearly regarded himself as the Mr Big. Deidre stared at him then let out a kind of strangulated whine, her best attempt at playing the reluctant coquette.
‘How about a blow dry in the entry?’ said one of the others. Deidre did not know what either a blow dry or an entry was but she knew violence when she heard it. The third top-hatted gurrier grabbed her by the arm. ‘Kissy-kissy!’ he said, laughing.
Cadbury was about to step in when a man in his fifties called out nervously to the gurriers, ‘Leave her alone.’ All three turned to Deidre’s saviour.
‘Why don’t you come and make us, fatso?’
Already pale, the man turned paler and didn’t move. Cadbury decided to pretend to be a relieved lover finding his lost sweetheart (‘There you are, my dear. I’ve been looking for you for half an hour!’). But he was too late. The gurrier’s grip on Deidre’s arm tightened as he turned away from her. Her left hand was already in her pocket and pulling out a short knife with a wide blade. With all her skinny strength she punched it into his back between the sixth and seventh ribs, tearing her right arm free as he fell, crying out. The leader jerked away and turned so that the blow aimed at his back struck him in the stomach, followed by a strike to the heart. The third gurrier tried to speak, holding his hands out to protect his chest and stomach. ‘I …’ But he never finished what he had to say. Deidre’s knife took him through the eye. She looked around the crowd to check if anyone else was coming for her. But the crowd was still and soundless, unable to make sense of the painted doll of a woman, the savage emptiness of her eyes and the blood on the ground.
Cadbury walked towards her in the silence, broken as he approached her by the eyeless third man calling for his mum. ‘My dear,’ said Cadbury, ‘my dear,’ careful to bring her back from whatever ecstasy had taken hold of her. She blinked, recognizing him. Slowly he placed his open palm on her hand, careful not to hold or grip as he urged her away.
Unsurprisingly no one followed, and turning and twisting in the pretty but narrow streets they were secure enough for the moment, the peaceful town’s watchmen not being used to more than an occasional late night drunken fight. The result of everything turning to vinegar in such a fashion was at least clarity: get out, keep going. But waiting in Spanish Leeds for Cadbury was an expectant Kitty the Hare, and explaining to him how this fiasco had taken place along with the probability of Cale being lost to the Two Trevors didn’t bear much thinking about. Cadbury needed to show that he’d made a serious attempt to do something to recover the situation. There could be no greater contrast than between Bosco and Kitty the Hare, except that they both thought that Thomas Cale was a talisman for the future. (‘The spirit of the age, my dear Cadbury, possesses some people and the thing to do when you find one is to ride on their tails until they burn themselves out.’)