The Mortality of Queens

19 - Dearbhla's Scream

Larkenfen

The creatures' leader lifts a barbaric club... His compatriots inch closer; their injuries, ailments and stink fill his senses. Arthur's mind quails before the impact yet his head lifts against all fear, to stare defiance into the leader's dull lifeless eyes. They remind him of the eyes of the huge shark that fishermen caught in the Thames and put on display five years before. The assailant is about to lash down... then grunts to stare at where an arrow tip has sprouted rudely from its chest. Apart from juddering forward a little at the impact, the monster seems unaffected at being pierced by the arrow but turns around, curious to see from where it came. Arthur sees the answer as it does; between its legs he spies a distant figure racing toward them, flying boots raising puffs of sand.

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Arthur came roughly awake with a grunt. The coach wheel had stumbled into a rut. Fellow passengers on the coach had been similarly discomfited and one stared across at Arthur and Amorrie, who slept still on his shoulder grumbling softly into his neck. Arthur wondered if his dream had caused him to mutter too. He wiped his chin, suspicious that drool had escaped the corner of his mouth.

'I hardly see you all day and when you arrive, straight-ways you fall asleep,' Arthur said when Amorrie came awake later.

'Tis this blasted 'traption,' she responded, 'it rocks and creaks and afore I know it...'

'I think you attend me just for respite.'

'There is such hullabaloo in my world, I get no rest there.'

After Hurting had left his studio, Arthur had packed and made enquiries before booking himself onto the next morning's coach on the Cambridge Road. He had not intended to take up the Countess's commission so quickly. It was testimony to the anxiety induced in him by Hurting's visit that he now felt himself safer close to the borders of pestilence than in Smoothfield.

Nouhou must have endured similar terrors for Arthur found the small child waiting on his doorstep on the morrow, with a woeful collection of belongings and a pleading look that Arthur could not ignore. He allowed the child to travel with them, paying threepence for a place up top of the coach.

There was no Royal Mail coach to be had and Cambridge was a day and a half's journey from London. They ambled along the Great North Road to the coaching township of Puckeridge, in which Arthur spent the night at an inn. Nouhou bedded in the stable; Arthur's willingness to share his bed, being prohibited when the landlord saw the state and origins of the child.

The following day the coach reached Cambridge in the afternoon, from where Arthur's enquiries led him to a cart and driver who had brought fish and eels into Cambridge from the fens that morning. He was returning and agreed – readily at the sight of Arthur's sixpence – to take them to Larkenfen. The man was a caustic fellow, who smelt as stale and pungent as his cart, but offered his opinions readily. He was by turns jovial and sinister and Arthur felt cowed by his accent. The man kept sneaking glances at Nouhou, who mainly slept in the back of the cart.

'S'over eight miles Cambridge to Reedston, master. We's deep in Fenland, with the causeway rare passable at this time of year. S'lucky, weather's unus'al fair. We be s'picious folk, but hardy n' abidin'. When rains come the causeway is lost to we. In drought, we be for'ver on our guard 'gainst the Greynhym's forays. If 'n marshes dries up or streams stop their runnin', the plague is 'pon folk, quicker'n a heron'd gulp down a frog.

'That's Fenland for 'e; everythin' ends in witchery 'n eels.'

Occasional unearthly cries, which the Carter blamed upon 'perfidious waterfowl that'd ruin the fisherfolk's livin', rose up from the marsh upon either side.