By the light of the lamp she was carrying he could see her face tighten with offense at the implied insult, but he turned away and started resolutely back through the rain to where Boyd was screaming in the darkness.
“I’m coming, you great idiot,” he called, trying to influence the night with his confident tone.
He noticed that he was carrying the wedding ring in his hand, holding it as tightly as a sailor undergoing surgery bites a bullet. That wasn’t smart—if he dropped it out here in all this mud it wouldn’t be found for years.
Over the noise of the rain he could hear Boyd roaring.
Crawford’s tight breeches didn’t have any pockets, and he was afraid the undersized ring would fall off his own finger if he wound up having to struggle with Boyd; in desperation he looked around for a narrow upright tree branch or something to hang the ring on, and then he noticed the white statue standing by the back wall of the stable.
It was a life-sized sculpture of a nude woman with the left hand raised in a beckoning gesture, and as Boyd roared again Crawford splashed across the mud to the statue, slipped the ring onto the ring finger of the upraised stone hand, and then ran on to the derelict coaches.
It was easy to see which one the crazed Navy lieutenant was in—the carriage was shaking to pieces as if it had a magically sympathetic twin that was rolling down a mountain ravine somewhere. Hurrying around to the side of it, Crawford managed to get hold of the door handle and wrench the door open.
Two hands shot out of the darkness and grabbed the collar of his shirt, and he yelled in alarm as Boyd pulled him inside; the big man threw him onto one of the mildew-reeking seats and lunged past him toward the doorway, and though a web of rotted upholstery had got tangled around Boyd’s feet and now sent him sprawling, the big man had managed to get at least the top half of his body outside.
For a moment Crawford seemed to hear the distant singing again, and when something brushed gently against his cheek he let out a roar as wild as any of Boyd’s and jackknifed up onto his feet; but before he could vault over the other man, he braced himself against the wall—and then he relaxed a little, for he could feel that all the loose threads of the upholstery were bristlingly erect like the fur on the back of an angry dog, and he realized that the same phenomenon must have been what made the shreds of the seat upholstery stand up and brush his face a moment ago.
Very well, he told himself firmly, I admit it’s strange, but it’s nothing to lose your wits over. Just some electrical effect caused by the storm and the odd physical properties of decaying leather and horsehair. Right now your job is to get poor Boyd back to the inn.
Boyd had by this time freed himself and crawled out onto the puddled pavement, and as Crawford climbed down from the coach he was getting shakily to his feet. He squinted around suspiciously at the trees and the ruined carriages.
Crawford took his arm, but the bigger man shook it off and plodded away through the rain toward the inn.
Crawford caught up with him and then matched his plodding stride. “Big beetles under your shirt, were there?” he asked casually after a few paces. “Would have sworn rats were scrambling up your pant legs? I’ll bet you wet your pants, in fact, though as rain-soaked as you are nobody’ll notice. Delirium tremens, we doctors call this show. It’s how you know when to back off on the drink.”
Ordinarily he wouldn’t have been as blunt as this, even with someone he knew as well as he knew Jack Boyd, but tonight it almost seemed to be the most tactful approach—after all, no one could be blamed for suffering a case of the galloping horrors if the cause was simply a profound excess of alcohol.
Actually he was afraid Boyd had not been quite that drunk.
The party was clearly over. Lucy and Louise were complaining about having to go to bed with wet hair, and Appleton was evasively irritable and, as if to confirm the soured mood, the landlord muttered angrily in his room and caused either his knees or the floorboards to creak threateningly. The women abandoned the lantern and fled to their rooms, and Appleton shook his head disgustedly and stalked upstairs to go to bed himself. Crawford and Boyd appropriated the lantern and tiptoed to the closed door of the taproom and tried the lock.
It wouldn’t yield.
“Probably just as well,” sighed Crawford.
Boyd shook his head heavily, then turned and started toward the stairs; halfway there he paused and without looking back said, “Uh … thanks for getting me … out of that, Mike.”
Crawford waved, and then realized that Boyd couldn’t see the gesture. “No trouble,” he called softly instead. “I’ll probably need something similar myself sooner or later.”
Boyd stumped away, and Crawford heard his ponderous footsteps recede up the stairs and down some hall overhead. Crawford tried the taproom door again, with no more luck than before, briefly considered finding out where the barmaids’ rooms were, and then shrugged, picked up the lamp and went upstairs himself. His room wasn’t large, but the sheets were clean and dry and there were enough blankets on the bed.
As he got undressed, he thought again of the overturned boat and the house across the street from the pub. Twenty years had passed since that rowboat foundered in the Plymouth Sound surf, and the house had burned down nearly six years ago, but it seemed to him that they were still the definition of him, the axioms from which he was derived.
Long ago he had started carrying a flask so that he could banish these memories long enough to get to sleep, and he uncorked it now.
Thunder woke him up hours later, and he lifted his head from the pillow and reflected sleepily on how nice it was to be drunk in bed when the lanes and trees and hills outside were so cold and wet … and then he remembered the wedding ring he had left in the yard.
His belly went cold and he half sat up, but after a moment he relaxed. You can get it in the morning, he told himself—wake up early and retrieve it before anyone else is up and about. And who’s likely to be rooting around out behind the stables, anyway? Sleep’s what you need right now. You’re getting married later today—you’ve got to get your rest.
He lay back down and pulled the blankets up under his chin, but he had no sooner closed his eyes than he thought, stableboys. Stableboys will probably be working out there, and I’ll bet they’re on the job early. But maybe they won’t notice the ring on the statue’s finger … a gold ring, that is, with a good-sized diamond set in it. Very well, then surely they’ll report the find, knowing that they’ll be rewarded … after all, if they tried to sell it they’d get only a fraction of its real value … which was two months’ worth of my income.
Damn it.
Crawford crawled out of bed and found the lamp and his tinder box, and after several minutes of furious striking he managed to get the lamp lit. He looked unhappily at his sodden clothes, still lying in the corner where he’d thrown them several hours ago. Aside from one change of clothes, the only other things he had brought along to wear were the formal green frock coat and embroidered waistcoat and white breeches in which he was to get married.
He pulled the wet shirt and breeches on, cringing and gasping at the cold unwieldiness of them. He decided to forego the shoes, and just tottered barefoot to the door, trying to walk so steadily that his shirt would not touch him any more than it had to.