Voice of the Fire Alan Moore (mystery books to read TXT) 📖

mother in the room we have together for the night, and now I can’t find which it was. It’s dark soon, and she’ll think me lost if I’m not back.’

Although the child was reassured to find someone who might assist her in her plight, she was not yet so reassured as I, to learn that she had mortal voice, and kin, and flesh and blood. In my relief, I promised I would help her find her mother’s room, at which she beamed and took my dry, age-spotted hand into the warm pink shell-curl of her own, then led me up the narrow stairs.

It soon became apparent that the child, returning from her play, had looked upon the first floor for the room she and her mother shared, when all the while their billet lay just one floor higher, leading from the coach-inn’s topmost landing. Tapping hesitantly on the door, I was soon answered by a quite bewitching jade-eyed woman of perhaps some five and twenty years, her great relief at having found her child soon giving way to an effusive gratitude bestowed upon myself, her benefactor. Though I’d spent but moments with the girl and done no more than walk upstairs with her it was, to hear her mother talk, as if I’d single-handed snatched the infant from the slobbering jaws of wolves.

‘Oh, Sir, you’ve brought her back. I looked from out my window and the sky had come so dark. I had no notion where she’d gone and was that worried I was at me wit’s end. Nelly, now, you thank the gentleman for all he’s done.’

Her daughter here performed a brief, embarrassed curtsy, mumbling her thanks, gazing the while towards the warped boards of what little floor their narrow room possessed. I saw she had her mother’s ocean eyes; the same fine-bladed cheeks with their impressive line calling to mind the urgent frailty of Italic script. Two years at most would make a splendid bed-full of her.

While I smiled down at her child with what she no doubt took to be paternal fondness, Nelly’s mother did not cease professing her indebtedness and admiration, head tipped back, lifting her lashes like the lids of jewel chests deep with emeralds to gaze up at me.

‘To think a gentleman as grand as you would stoop to help the likes of me and Eleanor, why, Sir, it fairly takes the breath from out of me. Look at the handsome clothes you’ve got upon you! You must be a great physician, else a lord to dress so gay.’

I told her, in a modest and good-humoured way that should not seem too vain, that I was neither of these things, being instead a judge. I will confess the taking of a certain pleasure from her indrawn breath and widened eyes, having upon occasions in the past had cause to note that women will become enthusiastic, even wanton, in the presence of authority such as my station lends me. With one hand raised to her breast as if physically to suppress its palpitations, she now took a small step back from me, perhaps to reappraise my scale as one might do with mountains or some other scenic feature. Where she’d thought me small and near to hand she found me massive and remote. I saw myself reflected as a god in twin green mirrors and at her excitement was myself aroused in some small measure.

‘Oh, what must you think of us, turned out so poorly? Never seen a judge, nor thought I should, and here I am with one that close as I could reach and touch him. You’ll have come here on important business, I’ll be bound.’

I told her that I had a case to try in Kendal, whereupon her ardour doubled.

‘Kendal! Why, that’s no more than the place where little Eleanor and I are headed with the morning’s coach. Nell? Do you hear? We are to ride to Kendal with a judge.’

Though she could have but little comprehension of my office or that power it represented, Eleanor now looked at me for all the world as if she had been promised she’d be carried to her destination on the shoulders of Saint Christopher himself. She took her mother’s hand, seeming afraid lest one of them might suddenly ascend to Heaven from the sheer occasion of it all. The Widow Deene, as she would shortly introduce herself, was meanwhile fired by morbid speculation with regard to the impending trial at which I should preside. Although throughout her tone was one of fascinated horror, I have more than once observed that in the fairer sex preoccupations with the charnel often mask an equal inclination to the carnal side of life’s affairs. Whenever some rough sort is made to swing, one measures in the filthy-fingered gropings of the crowd the lewd abandon that this glimpse of their mortality awakes in them. The women, later, will perform an imitation of the hanged man’s final dance, writhing beneath their husbands’ lunging weight, so that I wonder if we were not most of us conceived to an accompaniment of creaking ropes and flailing, blackened tongues? Such a conception surely might account for our obsession, later on in life, with all the sudden, hurtful ways there are to leave it, such as Nelly’s mother now evinced.

‘It is a murder, Sir, you are to try? Please God that there are not such things in Kendal, not if me and Nelly are to make our living there.’

I reassured her that the fellow up before me was no cut-throat, but instead a sheep-thief of no great account, although this did not much relieve her curiosity.

‘And shall he hang, Sir? What a thing it must be, saying if men are to live or die.’ A colour had arisen in her cheek, so that I smiled a little, knowing her to be already taken by the glamour of my robe and gavel.

In response I held her eye and spoke in tones of great severity. ‘If