Charles Palliser (30 page)

Mr Barbellion flinches: “I am afraid my agent lost her, Lady Mompesson.”

“He should not have done. He was being well paid for his pains.”

“Lady Mompesson is doubtless correct,” Mr Barbellion replies with a slight bow.

“How came he to be so remiss?”

“In the very early hours of this morning he was roused at the Rose and Crab inn by a message from his informant to the effect that Mrs Mellamphy had just left for London.

He naturally set off in pursuit of the night-coach, but when he overtook it he found that she and her son were not on it. So, assuming that they had travelled post, he himself proceeded to Town, making enquiries at each of the inns that post along that road. He found no trace of them.”

“I see,” Lady Mompesson says, and drums with her fingers on her fan. “Then why do you say she has come here?”

“She confided as much to my informant.”

“Has it not occurred to you that she might have been lying? I take her for a cunning dissembler.”

“I think that unlikely, Lady Mompesson. It is more probable that because my agent was apprised of her departure so soon, he somehow overtook his quarry on the road.”

“Overtook her! How extraordinary. But if she is here, she must be found. As long as she has that codicil …” She breaks off and Mr Barbellion nods. “You did right to report this to me, Mr Barbellion. Sir Perceval has not my appreciation of the delicacy of the affair.”

“Sir Perceval’s directness,” says Mr Barbellion, “is in the fine old tradition of the English gentleman, but in this case something more circumspect is called for.”

“Precisely my view. Tell me, why do you think she decided to flee, Mr Barbellion?

Did she
realize
that your agent was observing her, for he seems to have made a bad business of it.”

“I believe she fled on account of the attempt to abduct the boy that took place on the very day that I visited her. She actually accused me of responsibility for that. How absurd! As if I would ever involve myself in anything that exposed me so dangerously.”

“I believe I can account for her fear of yourself, Mr Barbellion. From something she said when she came to Mompesson-park two months ago, she is under the misapprehension that you are acting for the other party.”

“I see!” Mr Barbellion exclaims. “Then that explains much.”

“However, I am very alarmed to hear that the other party found out her whereabouts and attempted to seize the child.”

“Indeed. In fact, I believe that it was through her own attorney that our opposite discovered where she was hiding.”

“Yet you assured Sir Perceval and myself that that man — (What is his name, Sumptious?”

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“Sancious,” Mr Barbellion murmurs.

“Quite so.) — That that man could be, if not precisely trusted, then at least relied upon.”

Mr Barbellion flushes. Surely he must have felt … But no, let us speculate no further.

He murmurs: “I fear I was mistaken, Lady Mompesson. He had the audacity by some means to discover Mrs Mellamphy’s hiding-place and, doubtless realizing the value of this intelligence, to sell it to the adverse party.”

At that moment the baronet, who is reclining upon a sopha near the door into the next room, catches sight of his solicitor and beckons to him.

“I am alarmed to learn it,” Lady Mompesson says. “But I see Sir Perceval has noticed you. Just before you go to him, I want to say something. We seem to be singularly unlucky in tutors and governesses.”

“So I have heard from Assinder. Mr David Mompesson is recovered, I trust?”

Lady Mompesson draws her lips together: “Indeed, but I was not referring to that regrettable incident. My allusion was to Tom’s governor who has also left, though under much less reprehensible circumstances. There was some unpleasantness over what Sir Perceval sees as a boyish prank. Be that as it may, we are in need of another governor.

Will you look out for one — and this time find a young man with a somewhat robuster disposition?”

“I shall take charge of that, Lady Mompesson. And before I go, I have some grave news from Hougham. Now that the autumn rents are in, Assinder informs me that the rent-roll is down again and I fear the figure is alarmingly low. Much of this is due to the old difficulty: tenants cannot be found who are willing to take on a farm whose poor-rate is at least equal to the rent.”

“I thought Mr Assinder was dealing with the problem of the settled poor?”

“He informs me that he is proceeding as fast as is practicable, Lady Mompesson. But at the same time, I must caution you again that …”

He breaks off and looks at her speculatively.

“I am prepared to acknowledge that you are correct about Mr Assinder,” she says.

“But I warn you, Sir Perceval still refuses to hear a word against him.”

Sir Perceval beckons again, this time with an impatient shake of his head, and receiving a cold smile of dismissal, the solicitor leaves Lady Mompesson with a bow and crosses to the baronet.

We changed horses twice during the night, though I have only a very confused memory of being carried half-awake from the darkness of the carriage into the bright lights of the coffee-room. When I awoke I found myself leaning against the shoulder of my mother who was still slumbering. On my other side was an elderly gentleman, also fast asleep, at whose slowly opening and shutting mouth I gazed in fascination. It was a dark and gloomy morning for the good weather of yesterday had departed — or perhaps had stayed behind as we journeyed South. The sky was low and grey and a drizzling rain fell at intervals, so that we seemed to have passed suddenly from the golden end of summer to the grey beginning of autumn. We travelled on all through that long day and the next night, and although it had all seemed so

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exciting at first, my spirits quickly sank with the boredom and confinement of the swaying carriage.

In the early dawn the coach rumbled beneath the arch of an inn-yard. My mother half woke up, looked out of window and sleepily asked: “What is this town?”

“Hertford,” the elderly gentleman answered, waking with a snort. “The Blue Dragon.”

My mother started and came suddenly awake.

At that moment the guard bellowed at us that we had five minutes, and in great haste we left the coach and hurried to the travellers’-room. (Here, to my amazement, there was a gentleman being shaved in a corner of the room as we ate.)

“We are nearly arrived,” my mother said as we drank our coffee.

“Mamma, whom do you know in London?” I asked.

“I know no-one except Mr Sancious. I will go to him as soon as possible in order to ask his advice about how we can manage with so little money.”

Now I broached a subject I had for some time brooded over in secrecy: “Mamma,” I began, “has it ever struck you that Mr Sancious may not have behaved well by us?”

She admitted that this had occurred to her and now that the question was before us, we frankly discussed whether it was in good faith that he had given us such disastrous advice. When my mother made much of the fact that he could have no motive for having deceived us, I told her that Mrs Digweed’s story about how her husband had lost money in a building speculation suggested that the scheme we had been encouraged to put money into might have been a fraud from the very beginning. And then I pointed out how suspicious was Mr Sancious’ interest in whether we had anything to sell, and asked her if she thought he might have had any way of knowing that we had the codicil and that it was valuable to other people.

At this she fell silent for a long time and then said: “Yes you may be right. Perhaps it was he who betrayed us to our enemy, although I don’t understand how he could have found the way to him. But it’s true that he has always known my real name and that might have aided him.”

Despite my attempts, I could not persuade her to tell me what she called “our real name”, though I guessed it was the one beginning with “C” that I had seen all those years ago before I could properly read.

finally I asked: “Mamma, what name shall we go under now?”

She looked at me in surprise: “What do you mean?”

“I think we should use another in case anyone is searching for us.”

“Another name! How strange that it should be here …” she began softly and then broke off.

She would not tell me what she meant (and it was long before I found out), but she agreed that we should choose a new name. We thought of the little hamlet near Melthorpe called Off land to which we had often walked, and settled on that. How strange names are, I reflected, repeating to myself “John Offland”.

“So now we have no-one to go to,” I said. “Except for Uncle Martin’s widow?”

“Oh, Johnnie, we can’t do that. I hardly knew her. She was a young woman when I was only a little girl.”

“But wasn’t she your cousin?”

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“I suppose so. Our families were connected in some way, but not very closely for my father did not know hers. And about the time she married Uncle Martin my father and he quarrelled and I had very little to do with her afterwards.”

“What was the quarrel about?”

“Oh never mind now. It’s a very long story. You’ll know all about it one day.”

I was about to ask what she meant by these hints that she had dropped before, but at this moment the guard interrupted us with a warning that the coach was about to go forward. The gentleman who had been seated opposite us did not get back in but two new passengers — a genteely-dressed lady with a youth a few years older than I —

boarded the coach and we set off again.

The lady — who introduced herself as Mrs Popplestone (travelling with her son, David) and to whom my mother, rather shame-facedly, returned that we were Mrs and Master Offland — struck up a conversation with my mother and they were soon fast friends.

Long before I saw London I smelt it in the bitter smoke of sea-coal that began to prickle my nostrils and the back of my throat, and then I saw the dark cloud on the horizon that grew and grew and that was made up of the smoke of hundreds of thousands of chimneys. After some miles the villages became more frequent, straggling along the road as if reluctant to leave its protection, and the gaps between them grew shorter. At last they came to be so many and the gaps so few that I exclaimed, “Surely this is London!” But my mother and the nice lady and her son laughed and assured me that we still had some way to go. I went through this exchange several times more, for I could not believe that the streets of shops and fine houses which were now almost continuous were only overgrown villages lying outside the capital.

I could see that my mother was almost as excited as I was. “It seems bigger than ever,”

she said softly, her eyes glittering.

At last, however, we passed through the turnpike that was at that date on the New Road, and my fellow travellers admitted that indeed we were in London. And now I was amazed that we travelled on and on through street after street without coming out at the other side of the town. Moreover, I had never seen or imagined streets like them: I was overwhelmed by their width, by the height of the buildings, the volume and the variousness of the traffic — magnificent private carriages that swept past us with a disdainful flourish of their horses’ tails, shabby hackney-coaches, black coal-waggons, huge lumbering drays — and the press of foot-passengers along the pavements like two vast crowds hurrying in opposite directions.

After nearly an hour we entered a particularly wide street which Mrs Popplestone informed me was Regent-street but which I did not recall from my beloved map — and, indeed, it had been constructed since that was printed. Now the coach slowed almost to walking pace for here the carriageway and pavements ran together in one dangerous crowd of men and youths and horses and carriages like a wild, moving market-place.

There were sallow-skinned boys in black coats with flat round hats and with ringlets hanging down on their cheeks — “Jews”, my mother whispered — who were running in amongst the carriages offering articles for sale at the windows: oranges, gingerbread, nuts, pen-knives, pocket-books, and pencil-cases. And other men and boys were thrusting papers through the windows of carriages, and when one hurtled through ours I picked it up and saw that it was a play-bill. (At last I would go to a real theatre!) And there were yet others running into the middle of the streets at peril of their lives 140 THE

MOMPESSONS

with shovels and buckets. It was like a waking dream: the noise of the vehicles rumbling and clattering over the paved streets, the cries of street-vendors, and the ringing of the newspaper-sellers’ bells. All of this filled me with a mixture of excitement and fear.

Now we encountered a lock of carriages and came to a halt, surrounded by handsome vehicles of a number and variety I had never dreamed of. On our right was a fine landau painted scarlet and beautifully varnished, with a coat-of-arms emblazoned on the side-pannel which was repeated on hanging folds of the gold-fringed hammer-cloth on which the coachman and the whip sat. There were two footmen standing abreast up behind wearing tri-corns and coats with huge gold shoulder-knots, each carrying a gold-headed cane sloped across the roof, and both of them were staring as if sightlessly ahead. There was an even more elegant equipage on the other side, for in addition to the two footmen it had a boy in a striped waistcoat and small wig who stood on the platform and who caught my eye and smiled in a manner that made him my mortal enemy.

Above all I was astonished by the flaring gas-jets lighting the streets and shop-windows, for they had been lit quite early on that dark and rainy September day. I had never heard of such a thing, for gas lighting had not at that date reached our village. I looked at my mother and saw that her cheeks were flushed as if the same emotions had taken hold of her.

“So many gas-lamps!” she exclaimed. “And only look at the plate-glass and the gas in the shops. When I was last here only three or four streets in St. James had gas lighting and few of the shops had such windows.”