Death Rites Read online

  The skinny body of the mute jerked as if it had been kicked by a swayback mule, and Herne waited for it to drop, pushing at it with .the empty pistol. The man stepped back a couple of paces, the eyes blanking out with the beginning of the mystery of dying. The knife was still clutched firmly in his hand.

  The mouth opened and closed a couple of times, but no sound came out. Herne risked a glance past the man to where Becky lay motionless, her hair spread out like a veil, the bonnet caught under her chin. It was too dark for Jed to see clearly, but there was a dark stain or a shadow about her open mouth.

  It might have been a trick of the evening light.

  It might have been blood.

  Despite the severe gut-wound, the third man was coming back, knife ready, the other hand clutching the scorched mark on his coat where black blood was already trickling its way through the layers of winter clothing.

  “Jesus,” said Herne quietly. “I don’t know what your name is, but you surely got a whole lot of nerve.”

  He slipped the warm gun back into the holster, and dropped his hand to pull out the bayonet from inside the right boot.

  It was a long weapon, slender and mean. Herne had carried that knife, or one like it, ever since his time in the War. As a boy of just nineteen he and his old friend Whitey Coburn had ridden with the notorious Quantrill. As part of his unit of Raiders they had been there on that bitter day in 1863 when the town of Lawrence had been burned to the ground and more than fifty men butchered. In that one year alone Quantrill and his men killed over a thousand people.

  Neither Jed nor Whitey ever forgot those days.

  Just as he looked after his guns, so Jedediah Herne never neglected his knife, keeping it honed sharp enough to split a hair.

  A thread of scarlet worming from his open mouth, the mute lurched forwards, trying a clumsy stab at Herne, aiming at the groin. But Jed was faster and better balanced, with a longer knife. And he was without the handicap of a bullet in the stomach draining the life away.

  He cut at the man’s wrist, feeling the edge of his blade grate through flesh and tendon, opening up the fingers as if they’d been burned. His assailant’s own knife slipped to the dock.

  He tried to pick it up.

  There wasn’t any other kind of choice open to him.

  And he didn’t make it by a long way. As he stooped forwards, left hand still gripping the stomach wound, Herne stepped lightly in out of the fog at him, like the avenging angel of death, and cut his throat, the steel slicing a gaping mouth in the side of his neck, the blood from the severed artery under the ear spurting high in the air. Pattering on the damp wood all around them.

  Gargling deep in his chest, the mute slipped to his knees like a penitent at confessional, one hand at his belly, the other touching the fountain of blood from his neck. He brought the dappled fingers to his eyes as if he couldn’t believe what he was feeling.

  Like a swimmer entering deep water, he slid forwards on his face, the blood slowing, dying away to a thin trickle, and finally stopping.

  With the third death, Herne stood still, taking several deep breaths into his chest, relaxing himself after the supreme tension of the life and death struggle. Bending and wiping the bayonet clean on the stained coat of the man with the shattered head, and slipping it back again inside his boot.

  Looking round in case the wharves hid any other rats, flicking out the spent cartridges, and reloading with the speed that came from years of long practice. Listening, senses straining for anything out of the ordinary.

  But there was just the sullen noise of the fog-horns, echoing around the harbor of New York, reverberating about him, until it seemed as if the whole world was filled with wreathing mist and the boom of the ships.

  It was full dark, the light having failed utterly during the brief scuffle. A scuffle that left two men dead on the dock and the third weaving and bobbing gently beneath the water, his hair like fronds of weed about the bloodless face and the staring eyes.

  Only when he was sure that there was no further threat to him did Jed Herne turn to the motionless body of the young girl. She lay a few paces from the splintered edge of the wharf.

  “Becky.”

  He knelt down, feeling the damp through his trousers, lifting her head, and cradling her in his arms.

  “Rebecca. It’s me. It’s Jed.”

  Her head would have flopped back if he hadn’t been holding it, and her eyes were shut. He could feel that she was still breathing, a faint pulse fluttering in her neck confirming that she was alive.

  But there was blood around her nostrils, and trickling from the corner of her mouth. He wiped it away with his fingers, wondering if a stray bullet had hit her, or if one of the thugs had injured her.

  “Becky! Can you hear me? Come on, Becky!” He felt the chill of utter desperation and loneliness, dropping his voice to a whisper. “Becky, my love. Please, Becky. Please, my dear.”

  The eyes fluttered and blinked up at him, barely visible in the gloom, and the corner of the lips curled up in an attempt at a smile.

  “Jed ... I must have ... my chest hurts so and ... and I want... cold ... very cold ...”

  “I’ll carry you. We’ll get a cab and then we’ll soon be good and warm. Come on. Up we go.”

  Again he was shocked at her lightness, more like a child of seven than a grown girl of sixteen. Her head nestled against his shoulder and he stood up, smiling down at her.

  Her eyes were closed again.

  So he walked off the dock, towards the hotel, leaving the deaths behind him and carrying life with him.

  Sweeping across the Hudson from the Jersey shore, came the first flakes of snow.

  Chapter Three

  The Grand Central Hotel was shrouded in snow by the time that Herne had got the semi-conscious girl back there. The cabs were nearly all off the mean streets, and it was a stroke of luck that he saw one wending its way home through the bitter weather. The driver refused to take them, and Jed was forced to draw his Colt to convince the man that it was urgent.

  Their rooms were on the seventh floor of the new hotel, overlooking Broadway, with side views of the junctions of Bleecker and Amity Streets. Jed had booked in there simply because he had heard it was the biggest place in New York. The decorations alone were said to cost better than a half million dollars. A dining-room so vast that six hundred people could sit down and eat in great comfort and luxury.

  Since there was still money left over from the last job he had done there seemed no reason to Jed not to spend it on the best. For Becky.

  There was even a doctor kept on the premises, just for the benefit of the guests. At a price, of course. He was a young man. Very brash, very confident.

  Becky was sleeping when he arrived, brandishing a small black bag, more interested in what Jed’s relationship was to the girl than in what was wrong.

  “I expect it’s just tiredness. Or a touch of trouble with heavy menstruation,” he said.

  “I heard of a lot of things, but never monthly bleedin’ from the mouth,” said Jed, feeling the red anger beginning to rise. Fighting to control himself.

  “From the mouth, you said, Mr. Herne?”

  “Right.”

  “A lot?”

  “Enough.”

  “You do know ... pardon me for asking this, but you do know a little about blood? Only I believe you are a cowhand or something.”

  Herne clasped his fingers tightly together to stop himself busting the young man in the mouth.

  “I seen a lot of dead, and a lot of dyin’. I know about blood.”

  There was such venom in the voice that it finally penetrated the thick skin of the doctor and he took a step backwards as if he had been physically threatened.

  “Now, now, Mr. Herne. You and Miss Herne are ...”

  “Miss Yates! She is my adopted ward.”

  “Please. Keep your voice down. It is better for her to sleep and you call me as soon as she wakes. It is now nearly ten o’clock, bu
t I shall be on call through the night if you require me.”

  After he had gone, Jed walked silently into the girl’s bedroom, looking down at her sleeping face. Seeing how young and vulnerable she was. The skin stretched tight over the cheeks, the eyes closed, though he could see the lids moving as if she was having a bad dream.

  Acting on an impulse that he didn’t even try and think about, Jed bent over the bed and touched his lips to Becky’s face, kissing her as softly as a butterfly alighting on a leaf. She stirred in her sleep and moaned quietly, her fingers moving as if she was trying to touch something that lay just beyond her reach.

  Herne sent down for a bottle of liquor and settled in a deep chair at the side of the room, leaving on the solitary light set in the wall alongside the door. Dozing in the pool of yellow that it cast on the floor, just touching the corner of a framed print of a sailing-ship beating around Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale.

  When she cried out, he woke up immediately, his hand dropping from force of habit to where his gun would have been, if he hadn’t taken it off and left it on the small table by the side of the untouched bed in the other room.

  “Jed. My throat! Oh, Jed … Jed!!”

  The cry became a scream, even before he had powered himself from the chair to stand by the bed. He reached out and turned up the gas-light over the bed, looking down at the frightened face.

  “What is it?” he asked anxiously.

  She struggled to sit up. He reached down to help her, with an arm under the shoulders, bringing her to a more upright position.

  “Drink. I have to ...”

  The suite of rooms had a private bathroom, and it took him only a moment, after shaking his head to clear away the mist of sleep, to reach a glass and fill it with water. Walking quickly back with it, ignoring the drops that he spilled on the carpet.

  For a nightmare moment he thought that Becky was being attacked by an invisible creature. Her hands were at her throat, and she was fighting for breath, her face red with the effort, eyes starting from her head.

  “Jed!” she managed, as he brought the glass to her, then the eyes rolled up in the sockets, and she fell backwards, banging herself on the headboard.

  Herne put down the glass and tried to help her up again, but as he did so a torrent of blood vomited from her open mouth, splattering all over the white sheets and the thick blankets. Pouring out like a river of crimson, soaking through her cambric nightdress, running over her fingers, and dripping to the floor.

  “My God! Becky!”

  For the first time that he could remember, Jed was helpless. If it had been a bullet wound, then he’d have known what to do. Bandage it up. But what could a man do when there was no wound, and the blood came from inside the throat?

  The pendant around her neck swung loose, clotted with gouts of blood.

  It was obviously a question of sitting and holding her, watching her die, or trying to get help.

  The doctor was in the room within eight minutes. Eight of the longest minutes that Jedediah Herne had ever known.

  By the time that he appeared, still rubbing at his eyes, the bleeding had slowed, and Becky was lying more quietly, half-moaning and half-crying. Jed had wiped most of the blood away from her face and mouth, trying to swab it clean with heavy towels from the bathroom, throwing the crimson rags into the bath.

  “It has been what we of the medical profession call a massive hemorrhage from the pulmonary region,” pronounced the young doctor, after he’d examined Becky and given her a potion to help her to sleep.

  “What the Hell do the medical profession intend to do about it?” snarled Herne angrily. “We have to be moving west in a couple of days.”

  The doctor turned to look at him, and there was genuine concern and sadness on his face.

  “I am truly sorry, Mr. Herne. I thought all along that you were aware of what the situation was and that you were keeping it concealed from the girl to save her from unnecessary distress.”

  It was as though a great hand of icy steel had reached out and gripped Jed by the heart.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come. Outside the room in case she can still hear us, Mr. Herne.”

  Gently, the doctor took the older man by the arm and led him from the room that smelled heavy with the sickly odor of spilled blood.

  “Sit down.”

  “I guess that I’d maybe rather stand, if n you don’t mind.”

  The young man nodded. “Very well. I will put it as best I can, Mr. Herne. The girl is suffering, and has been suffering for some years, from a disease of the lungs. A form of wasting illness where the tissue of the body is destroyed. Often wetness and exposure to wind and cold can make this worse.”

  “What? What are you saying?”

  “A great German man of medicine named Robert Koch has very recently discovered a bacillus — that is what causes such an illness — and it is called tuberculosis.”

  “Tuberculosis?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Herne.”

  “Come on, Doc. You’re not goin’ to keep puttin’ it off. I’m her ... her only relative. I have a right to know how long it’ll be before she’s better.”

  The doctor didn’t reply immediately, walking to the window, and pulling back the drapes, looking out over the sleeping, white-shrouded city. Replying without looking at Herne.

  “That is precisely it, in a nutshell, Mr. Herne. Rebecca Yates is not going to get better. The condition is too far advanced.”

  “What are you ...?”

  “Rebecca is going to die.”

  “Die!”

  “Quietly. She will die, in my estimation, within the next twenty-four hours. Another hemorrhage like that last one will undoubtedly kill her, and I believe that it will not be long.”

  Jed Herne took a deep breath, forcing air into his chest until it hurt. Saying nothing.

  “Mr. Herne. I can get you a skilled nurse, or I can stay. It will all be billed to you on ...”

  “Get out of here.”

  “I think that it would be better if I were...”

  “I’m grateful to you, and I believe what you say. So if there’s nothing that can be done, then I’ll stay with her. If I need you, then I’ll call.”

  “Very well.”

  “Doctor?”

  “Yes, Mr. Herne?”

  “She won’t … you know ... won’t suffer when it comes, will she?”

  The young doctor shook his head. “The worst of the pain is already over for her. Rebecca will be very weak when she wakes.” He paused. “If she wakes.” He spoke with an air of finality.

  “And there’s nothing you can do?”

  “I’m truly sorry. There’s not a thing that I or anyone else can do. I’ll be ready if you need me.”

  As he went out Jed said quietly: “She’s very young. Very young.”

  But the doctor didn’t hear, closing the door silently behind him. Leaving Jedediah Herne alone with Rebecca.

  Somehow, cramped in the chair, Jed Herne slept. Fitfully, his rest disturbed by any change in the girl’s breathing, his mind ravaged by dreams of the past.

  A young girl, with Becky’s face, running screaming from the blazing ruins of Lawrence, her back streaming fire like a bridal veil of red and yellow and orange.

  Wandering through a great brothel, with a high vaulted roof, peopled by men and women from his past. All of them dead.

  Just before dawn he woke, but Becky still slept. She was quieter now, her breathing less harsh, though Herne saw the traces of new blood about her lips.

  He drew the drapes again, shutting out the glaring whiteness of the snow over New York. Great flakes still blew lumpily past the windows, torn apart by the rising wind.

  A whiteness that was reflected in the clean sheets that the manager had sent up. Jed had changed the bed himself, rejecting any offer of help, tenderly moving the frail body of the girl.

  A little of the old blood smeared the sheets, mixed with the startling brigh
tness of the fresh blood.

  Images that Herne took with him again as he slipped into a restless sleep, tangling with the memories of the way he had found his wife.

  “Louise.” he said, unaware that his lips had even moved at all.

  In his dream he relived that cold morning near Tucson. It had been bitterly raw, his breath frosting the air as he woke. Snow outside their cabin. Deadly white.

  White sheets cold and empty at his side.

  Like a new land viewed from the highest peak of a range of mountains.

  Unsullied.

  Except for where his wife had lain that lonely night, far on her side of the bed.

  There the white was dappled and clotted with brown.

  Dark brown that was still red in places where the blood hadn’t dried.

  In his dream, just as he had two years back, Jed found himself walking towards the barn, where the door stood open, a light wind tugging at it, making its hinges creak.

  Knowing what he would find inside.

  The green dress.

  The overturned box.

  The ray of pale light gleaming off the golden wedding ring.

  Louise.

  Louise.

  “Louise!”

  “Jed.”

  Half-waking, he staggered to his feet, peering round the room to see who had spoken.

  Becky was watching him.

  “Hello, Jed.”

  “Becky. Did I waken you?”

  “No. I was kind of dozing. I feel awful tired, Jed. I recall a lot of blood.”

  “Surely. Coughin’ like you were doing. It strained something in your throat, the doctor said.”

  “I’ll be all right?”

  “Sure. Right as rain. We’ll be off out of New York in a couple of days. Get you on your feet and smarter’n a lick of paint.”

  But she was asleep again.

  The doctor came up shortly after six, and took her pulse, checking her breathing, and feeling the heat of her brow.

  “How is she?”

  He shook his head. Looking at the girl, making sure that she couldn’t hear.

  “She is sinking, Mr. Herne. All the parts of her body are, as it were, packing up their tents ready to depart.”

  “When?”