Through all this I am standing half in, half out the coach. I want to ask Price why he stopped, and who’s attacking us; whether he has a second gun on him; what sort of trick it is he thinks he is playing. I am so filled with questions at that moment, all of them there, present to me all at once, that my head feels light with them, as though thoughts are air, no, lighter than air, are buoyed by the magic of balloon gas, and all the same I cannot get my legs to move, am frozen, rooted, grown into the doorway of the coach at foot and hand.

Then Price is hit. The swing of a bat, an axe, a sledgehammer: invisible, trailing a bang like an afterthought. What sort of gun is this that slams a man into the side of a coach and leaves his chest a hole open for perusal?

Then it’s my turn. I feel a punch, then heat, a branding iron plunged into my temple. My last thought is another question of sorts, mute wonder at the fact that neither Price nor I found time to shroud our fall in Smoke.

Then hard hands grab me from behind.

As metaphors of death go, this is one I can believe.

PART THREE COMMONERS

PART THREE COMMONERS

When one remembers under what conditions the working-people live, when one thinks how crowded their dwellings are, how every nook and corner swarms with human beings, how sick and well sleep in the same room, in the same bed, the only wonder is that a contagious disease like this fever does not spread yet farther.

FRIEDRICH ENGELS, THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND (1845)

IN THE WOODS

IN THE WOODS

Thomas goes down hard. It’s Charlie who is pulling him. The force of it surprises Livia: he grabs him at throat and shoulder, kicks his feet out from under him. Anything to get Thomas away from the door. Out of the line of fire. On the way down, Thomas’s shoulder collides with the edge of the seat. It twists the body and makes him land facedown, his arms trapped beneath him at odd angles. He may well have broken bones. Then again, what does it matter? He is already dead. Livia saw him being hit. Something dislodged itself, some clump of him, of his face, his head. It flew through the air. She will see it to her dying day. Livia’s face is speckled with his blood.