The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers Page B

managed to get her pistol reloaded.
    Still peering out the window, Crawford backed across the hardwood floor to the table that had all his clothes on it; he flipped up the ends of the tablecloth and balled them up in his good fist.
    At the end of the pier Keats glanced back and saw Josephine advancing at him; he swung the portmanteau around like a discus thrower and then let it sail off the end of the pier; Crawford's whispered curse coincided with the distant splash.
    "A pound's enough for the goddamn tablecloth, I trust," he said bitterly, thinking of how much he'd paid for the portmanteau.
    "Yes sir," said the barmaid, who edged away from him as he strode across to the street door, swinging his impromptu luggage with a sort of furious nonchalance.
     
    He crossed London Bridge and, after walking east through the Billingsgate fish market, he sauntered as carelessly as he could past the Customs House and the Tower of London, envying the surrounding fish-sellers and housemaids and laborers their indifference to these imposing stone edifices that seemed to personify law and punishment. He kept glancing behind him, but he didn't see any following figure that walked as though it had been wound up with a key.
    He could tell by the shops he passed that he was approaching the docks. All the grocers had posted signs assuring the public that the barrels of beef and pork and biscuit they sold would keep forever in any climate, and every other shop window seemed to be crowded with brass sextants and telescopes and compasses—and the stiff paper compass-cards printed with the crystallized-looking rose indicating the directions. These shook with the rattling passage of every carriage as if fluttering in some otherwise-undetectable magnetic wind.
    His tablecloth bundle was attracting the rude attention of a crowd of street boys, so he stepped into a shop that displayed luggage in the window—but the proprietor, after greeting him civilly enough at first, took a second look at Crawford's face and then asked him how he dared to bring "filthy bones and teeth and marbles" into a store run by a Christian; the man actually drew a pistol from under the counter when Crawford tried to explain that his bundle just contained clothes and that he wanted luggage, so he fled back out to the street and the clamoring children.
    One of the boys ran up behind him with a knife, slashed the bottom of his bundle and then yanked on the bulge of garment exposed; the sleeve of his green velvet jacket wound up hanging out, with a pair of undershorts from his more heavy-set days somehow caught in the lacy cuff.
    Crawford whirled around so fast that the sleeve-and-shorts stood out behind him like a tail, but he wasn't quick enough to see which boy had done it—though he did see the luggage shop proprietor standing in the shop doorway looking after him, and Crawford thought he saw the man make a hand-signal to someone across the street.
    Just what I wanted, Crawford thought hysterically—an inconspicuous exit.
    A pub door banged open farther down the street and two skinny, sick-looking men came hobbling out toward him, each of them waving a bloody handkerchief; they were both jabbering at once, but Crawford caught the word "stone" and another word that seemed to be "neffy-limb."
    He turned around to run back the way he'd come, but he thought he glimpsed stiff limbs swinging in the crowd, and a rigid, expressionless face . . . and so he swung his bundle around in a fast circle, much as Keats had done with his portmanteau, and let go of it. The tablecloth blew open and clothing billowed out in all directions and shoes flew into the crowd, and Crawford ran down an alley.
    Enough people ran squabbling into the street after the explosion of valuable clothing to cause a raging traffic jam, but several members of the crowd came pelting along the alley after Crawford; he rounded a corner into a narrow old brick court and then, before his pursuers could appear behind him,