Charles Palliser (167 page)

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quarterly advance from his managing-clerk that very day, and Mr Barbellion undertook to set my claim in motion.

I am pleased to be able to say that the first thing I did was to send to Mr Advowson the money that I owed Sukey — with an addition to represent notional interest. I also went to see Joey and his mother and insisted — in the teeth of their opposition — on paying them five pounds to make up for all that they had spent on and done for me. It was now that Joey told me that a few days after my last encounter with Barney outside the house at Charing-cross, a body that he suspected was Jack’s was found on some waste-ground near flower-and-Dean-street, the district to which Barney and his company had removed after leaving the Neat-houses. I might mention here that that was the last I ever heard or saw of any of them.

Now I had just enough to pay my rent and keep body and soul together until the next quarter’s remittance. As the weeks passed I spent a great deal of time thinking about what I should do. I would often take the will from its hiding-place and sit by the hour studying it and trying to decide. Mr Barbellion’s revelation about the estate placed my relation to it in a new light, for there was no question now of its being a temptation. No question of my being corrupted by great wealth. On the contrary, its possession would be an onerous and perhaps crippling responsibility. I thought over and over again about what Sukey had told me of the depredations of the Mompessons against the poor. What would happen to them if the estate remained in Chancery? And now it began to seem to me that to reject the estate was to act selfishly and to shirk my responsibilities. Moreover, I had never given up the idea that Justice required that my great-great-grandfather’s will be executed.

Then in early June of the following year, Mr Barbellion wrote asking me to meet him down at Hougham a few days hence, for he said he had much to explain to me that could best be clarified there. He enclosed a bank-note for ten pounds to cover the expenses of the journey. Though I was somewhat puzzled, I welcomed the opportunity to look at the property — not with the clear intention of pursuing my claim but merely in order to assess the difficulties that would lie ahead if I were to come into possession.

Down there I might be able to judge the issues more clearly.

Since I am close to bringing to a conclusion my share in these pages, I will anticipate now events that have taken place in the period since that visit by addressing you directly a second time, my dear friends, in order to tell you of the fate of those of my former companions whom I have been unable to find again. Keeping the promise I had made to myself at the time, I sought to have Mr Nolloth released and Alabaster’s madhouse closed down. I found, however, that the good old man had died less than a year after my escape. The serjeant whom I consulted about bringing a suit against the mad-doctor assured me that it would be almost impossible to prove anything against Dr Alabaster.

The same lawyer dissuaded me from trying to pursue a charge against Mrs Sancious that she had brought about Stephen’s death, and remembering that she had saved me from Barney, I decided not to go ahead. After all, the death of her husband under such circumstances was a kind of punishment.

Since I had not forgotten my undertaking to myself to do what I could for the boys at Quigg’s academy, I wrote to an attorney in the nearest town to that institution to ask him to visit it as my representative on the pretext that I was searching for a school for a nephew of mine. The lawyer reported back that he

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had gone to the farm and found that the Quiggs had given up the scholastic profession and gone back to agriculture. He was emphatic that he had not seen a living boy on the premises.

Since his flight, Sir David has been living in penurious exile in Calais on remittances from his mother who has a small property secured to her independently. She lives in a very diminutive house in Mayfair and some of her income has to go to keeping Tom in the private retreat (not, unfortunately, Dr Alabaster’s!) to which the consequences of his intemperance (of various kinds) have condemned him. Daniel Porteous set up in trade in Lisbon — a place with which his bank had connexions that were close enough to allow him an
entrée
and not so close as to make it necessary for his conduct in England to be bruited abroad. His wife and son went with him, and so did Emma.

As for Henrietta, I must go back to that visit to Hougham in June.

I took the coach to Sutton Valancy as an outside and then with the money I had saved thus, I hired a horse and hacked to Melthorpe — for I had a fancy to see the little place again and the old house where my mother and I had lived.

The village seemed unchanged. The yellow-red brick of its better houses was mellow in the sun of an early summer afternoon, and the trees and grass were still clad in the bright green hues that would fade as the summer advanced. No-one recognised me, though I saw Mr Advowson crossing the High-street from his house to the church, and reflected that he was returning to the vestry after his dinner. Why should he pay any attention to a strange young gentleman riding a horse through the village?

Our old house looked shut up and abandoned and when I asked a passer-by about it I learned that it had stood empty for six or seven years. So far from needing to raise our rent, Mrs Sancious had not bothered to find another tenant! She had seized on the excuse as a cover for her malice. I went up the farm-lane that ran along the side and, lifting the latch of the well-remembered gate, ventured into the garden. It looked very small now, and the smaller for being over-grown to such a degree that it was impossible to see where the grass-plat ended and the Wilderness started.

This was where my story began! Began on that other summer day when Bissett’s cry had summoned me from here to an encounter with a stranger at the gate — that encounter from which so much had followed. How much more I knew and understood now than when I had last looked upon this place before our flight to London! And yet there was still so much that was mysterious. I had been told and had overheard so many stories since then — Mrs Belflower’s, Miss Quilliam’s, my mother’s, Mr Escreet’s, Miss Lydia’s — and had heard so many lies and inconsistencies and distortions and omissions.

I remembered the sculpture that Martin Fortisquince’s mother had brought to this garden from Mompesson-park or, rather, Hougham-park as it should, and might once again, be called. I advanced the length of the grass-plat and pushed through the brambles of the Wilderness until I saw it. Moss had grown again over the inscription and now when I had scraped it all off, I found that although I had been certain of my earlier reading, the words in fact were:

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Et Ego in Arcadia.
An enigmatic phrase. And what was the meaning of that ravaged, time-worn countenance? And of the arms seizing the figure from behind? Whom were these struggling figures intended to represent? Was it the story of a chase — Pan and Syrinx or Tereus and Philomel or Apollo and Daphne — or of an amorous encounter? I could never know. And, anyway, did it matter what the sculptor (the great-uncle, I believed, of a man whose death I had brought about) or his patron (my own great-greatgrandfather) had intended? Looking into the empty eyes I saw that I could read from that palimpsest of a face anything that I chose. As I tried to grasp it, the pattern receded endlessly, like the tiles of the broken floor of the Old Hall.

And then there was the mystery of why the banished wife had brought this sculpture here. Yet I believed I understood that as I thought of the concealed sixth that always breaks the pattern of fives. The disgraced woman had brought the sculpture with her because it had saved the life of her secret lover and, perhaps, father of her child. And perhaps had died of a broken heart because he — and I was sure I knew who he was —

had never visited her. And this brought my thoughts, as so often, to Martin Fortisquince.

So much was still unresolved. He had written in the register of my baptism “godfather and father” and that whole entry and what Mr Advowson had described of its composition could bear a particular explanation.

So many omissions. So much that my mother had kept from me or on which she had been mistaken. (I knew that she had been wrong about Miss Quilliam’s treachery, for example, and about Mr Pentecost.) I thought of the words from her account of her life that had echoed so often in my memory: “I could not bear to think that the father of my child had killed my Papa!” How much she had had to bear. I remembered how while we had sought shelter in the yard of St. Sepulchre after fleeing from Mr Barbellion, she had talked wildly of the “crescent moon” and the curved sword and the blood. And hence, surely, the name she had once chosen: “Halfmoon”. If she could not forget the truth, had she succeeded in making it more bearable? And then what Mrs Sancious had said so recently came into my mind : “I never believed that the murderer was your father.”

What had she intended to convey? What should I believe now?

At last I left the house and rode towards Hougham. As I passed Sukey’s tumbledown cottage I wondered whether to call upon her, but by the time I had decided it might be a friendly thing to do I had gone past it and felt that I could not spare the time to turn back. Afraid of keeping Mr Barbellion waiting, I urged my nag into a canter, although I knew I had more than an hour to get to Hougham. A few minutes later I passed a country-woman who, wearing a scarlet cloak and carrying a basket, was going the same way as myself, and, perhaps because I was thinking of Sukey, I was struck by her resemblance to my old nurse.

A quarter of an hour afterwards I rode up the carriage-drive to the big house and gave my horse to a boy who issued from the stable-block at the sound of my arrival. Mr Barbellion had explained to me that the Chancery Receiver had retained just enough of the servants to maintain the house and that, as an officer of the Court of Chancery himself, he had been able to obtain permission to visit it on this occasion.

I entered the hall and a figure came forward to greet me with a curtsey. To my astonishment it was Mrs Peppercorn :

“How very good it is to see you again, sir,” she said. “I met you hard by here THE KEY

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once many years ago when you were very young. You will have forgotten my existence, I am sure.”

“On the contrary,” I replied. “I recall our last meeting very clearly.”

“You are very kind to say so, Mr Huffam,” she said with a smile. (For I had taken my grandfather’s name in accordance with the wish expressed in the paper written by him on the evening of his death.) “Mr Barbellion is expecting you in the justice-room,” Mrs Peppercorn went on. “I will conduct you there.”

Though I believed I could find the way unassisted — for it was the very chamber in which Sir Perceval and Lady Mompesson had received my mother and myself on my first visit to the house — I allowed her to lead me there. All the while, as we passed through state-rooms whose furniture and pictures were muffled up in great swathes of brown Holland like so many crouched monks, she kept up a stream of talk. She told me of the tragic vicissitudes that had recently overtaken the Mompesson family and explained that as one of their most long-serving and, if she might be permitted, most loyal retainers, she had been allowed by Chancery to end her period of service at the house where she had begun it in the happy days of Sir Augustus. And it was now that I learned most of what I have repeated above of the recent circumstances of the family.

She made no mention, however, of Henrietta.

As I entered the justice-room Mr Barbellion, who was sitting at the far end reading some papers, rose to shake my hand. We exchanged pleasantries and seated ourselves, once Mrs Peppercorn had withdrawn, on one of the sophas (I) and an elbow-chair (he) from which the coverings had been removed.

“I have asked you to meet me here today, Mr Huffam,” he began, “because I wish to put before you in the most vivid terms the certain fate of this great responsibility” (here he waved his hand to take in the house, the park, and the tenanted lands and houses beyond it) “which is now drifting rudderless in the dangerous waters of receivership. I suppose it will eventually be auctioned, but what will be left of it I shudder to imagine. I therefore beg you to tell me whether you have the purloined last testament of Jeoffrey Huffam. If so, the estate may be saved.”

When he ended I hesitated, looking over his shoulder through one of the windows whose curtains had been drawn. I could see the branches of the great elms of the park waving gently in the wind against the pale blue sky and at that moment a great longing welled up in me to feel this place my own.

“I have it,” I said.

A reddish flush appeared in his cheeks and he stood up quickly and took several turns around the room.

Then he said: “Though the estate is encumbered in the ways I have told you, the situation may be very different once the will is accepted — as it surely will be. In that event all charges secured upon it since its inheritance — its improper inheritance — by James Huffam would arguably be invalid.”

I stared at him in amazement.

“I don’t understand,” I protested.

“It’s very simple. Once it has been proved that James had no right to sell it and that therefore the Mompessons never had legal title to it, then none of the obligations that they have entered into are valid.”

“Is that certain?”

“Nothing is certain in Equity, but no-one has a better chance of gaining such an outcome than myself.”

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He had told me at our last interview that the estate was worthless because of all the encumbrances upon it. Now he was saying that the purloined will could be used to repudiate them. But had I the moral right to do so? To render valueless the various mortgages and post obits and other charges that had been imposed upon it? Surely I had, since they had been undertaken by those who had no right to the estate? And, besides, I would be doing so in order to ensure its future well-being and that of its dependants.