Death of a Radical (24 page)

“Was it his chest? Did he suffer an attack?”

“You knew of his condition?”

“We traveled up north together on the Leeds flyer. He had an attack in the coach.”

“You became acquainted at the coaching inn?” She shook her head vigorously.

“Oh no! I was in Miss Price's care—my old governess. She was on her way to take up a very good place outside Wakefield. She hired us a private parlor,” she explained. “I saw Mr. Adley sitting in a bay window down below.” Fond reminiscence flushed her face and her pupils widened. “He pretended to be busy, taking out a bit of paper and his pencil—all so that I should not think he had noticed me watching.” Her voice caught and she stopped.

“I saw you on his arm at the fair.” She nodded politely, her lips compressed. “You went into the yard of the Queen's Head.” That must have been around the time the note found its way into the colonel's carriage. He thought of the lads playing their game with the hat in the marketplace. “Did you see anyone else in the yard?” His tone succeeded in distracting her. She gave him a sharp look. She considered the matter.

“There were ostlers and serving men gathered under the arch watching the disturbance. Mr. Adley said we should go into Mrs. Bedlington's parlor until the soldiers made order. I did see my uncle's coachman by the stables …” She checked herself as if the recollection embarrassed her.

“He'd been drinking,” he supplied sympathetically, thinking her an innocent. Lally looked at him, surprised.

“Had he?”

“The man was arrested blind drunk minutes later.” She drew her brows together and wrinkled her neat nose.

“I did not particularly look at him. I did not wish him to see me.” She blushed again. Her skin was a barometer of her emotions.

“While you were with him, did Mr. Adley speak to any other friends?”

She pursed up her lips. “Friends?” she queried doubtfully. “There were some young men—weavers. Not my uncle's men. Independents, I think.”

“Can you describe them?”

“There were four or five maybe.”

“And Mr. Adley spoke to them?”

“To the great tall one—he stood head and shoulders above the rest.”

“Fairish hair and a red complexion?” Miss Bedford nodded. “And what did they speak of?”

“I didn't hear. Well, not really.” Either Miss Bedford had not been interested—which, to Jarrett, seemed unlikely—or her efforts at eavesdropping had been frustrated. “I thought there was someone they were looking for—Lem or some such name.” Her eyes were fixed on her fingers twisting the handkerchief in her lap.

“This Lem, do you think he was a friend?”

“If so they weren't very happy with him. The big one said, ‘Just wait till I get my hands on him,' or something like that,” she tailed off. “But perhaps they were just funning.”

“So Mr. Adley took you into the Queen's Head …”

“We had tea in Mrs. Bedlington's parlor.”

“How long were you there?”

“I do not recall,” she replied evasively. “An hour perhaps.”

“And Mr. Adley never left you all that time?”

“We left the door open and Mrs. Bedlington came in and out. It was quite proper!”

“I am sure it was,” he responded mechanically. “Then Mr. Adley escorted you home.”

“Yes.”

“And you saw him next …”

“At my aunt's.” Her eyes grew misty. “He was early.”

“And at the play I saw you in the box at the end across the way,” he said in a cheerful tone, hoping to move her past a fresh wave of emotion. He had to know the sequence of events that led Grub to ride up the fell that night. “Mr. Adley was standing at the back, behind you. Did you observe him leave?” Miss Bedford's color ebbed then returned a hot pink. “Perhaps you left the theater together?”

“I did not!” she protested. She turned in her seat to address him directly, her manner half guilty, half defiant. “I was feeling faint. I just went into the yard to breathe some air. My aunt was enjoying the opera; besides she was sitting
seats
away. I couldn't catch her eye and,” she ended lamely, “I did not wish to disturb her.”

“Mr. Adley followed you out?”

“He was concerned about me,” she insisted with a touch of pride.

It seemed there had been romance in the air that night. Gradually he coaxed an account of the scene from her. It was a little blurred in parts—a rosy tale of two young people enjoying each other's company away from the eyes of the world.

“So you left the theater toward the end of the first act. Mr. Adley joined you there and you took a turn about the yard together. You remember nothing else? Mr. Adley mentioned he was going somewhere after the play, perhaps?” Miss Bedford shook her head. They each stared out at their portion of the frosty landscape in silence. She hugged her cloak closely about herself. It was cold. He should offer
her shelter, but that might be considered improper. He was on the verge of proposing that he should call a groom to drive her back into town.

“There was the man in the marketplace,” she said suddenly.

“What man?”

“There were two of them, I suppose, if you think about it,” she went on, debating with herself. “One after the other, but it was the
other
one.” Jarrett reined back the blasphemy that strained to break from his mouth. She was distressed and young and her species were not known for their reasoning.

“I am afraid I don't follow you,” he said mildly.

“We were standing under the arch that leads to the marketplace.” She hesitated. “Talking. And Mr. Adley saw someone, out by that round stone building.”

“The tollbooth? Who?”

“I don't know. I saw nothing clearly. But Mr. Adley knew him, I think.”

“Why?”

Miss Bedford stared at him, startled by his passionate tone. “Why do you think he recognized someone?” he elaborated impatiently. Her expression changed to one of sympathy beyond her years.

“He made an exclamation,” she said patiently. She's humoring me, he thought fleetingly. “You know—the kind that one makes when one is surprised to see someone; but my uncle called me.” Miss Bedford looked over toward the gate as if she half expected her relative
to appear again. “I had to go. Uncle John would have been very cross had he seen us together.” Her face fell suddenly. “That is the last time I saw Mr. Adley.” A tear ran down her cheek.

“And you saw nothing else?” he pressed. She looked at him piteously through watery eyes. “The man by the tollbooth,” he insisted. She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief.

“Just an outline—he stood in shadow. It was just a man, that's all!”

“Was he wearing a hat?”

“Of course he was!” Miss Bedford responded acerbically.

“What kind?”

“It was just a hat; that's all.”

“And there was nothing else you remember about him? What was he doing?”

“Pulling on his gloves,” she replied and burst into noisy tears. He leaned back against the bench. It was at moments like these a man could do with a wife. After a moment she blew her nose. He risked a side glance. She was sitting very straight. She had a neat way of disposing her limbs. She reminded him of a little brindle cat. The impression was reinforced when she turned her head and gazed at him steadily with her dark golden eyes.

“You said there were two men—one after the other. Who was the other man, Miss Bedford? Did you know
him
?”

Lally was thinking of the moment Favian had held her,
heart to heart in the darkness. She would, she told herself fervently, cherish the memory for the rest of her life. Mr. Jarrett was waiting for her answer. She nodded.

“Lieutenant Roberts,” she said.

His left hand lay flat against the grain of the oak panel; his right hand encompassed the smooth, cool brass. This was foolishness. He turned the door knob. Cheerful sky-blue curtains were pulled back around the four-poster bed. The slippers embroidered by his mother's hand were set neatly on the rug beside it. A table had been placed in the light of the tall, narrow-paned windows. It was disordered, as if the untidy scholar had just stepped away a moment. Scraps of notes were pinned into the soft plaster of the wall above it. The little vandal! No thought to housekeeping. That would have to be replastered.

There was a black leather-bound book a hand's span high lying on the desk. He frowned. What was Grub doing with
his
notebook? He would never have thought the boy a thief. As he picked it up, he realized it was not his after all—there were gold initials tooled into the leather: F V A. It was the twin of the notebooks he himself had carried for years. A paper label stuck into the inside cover declared it supplied by the very stationer he patronized in Paternoster Row. Odd to think Grub had been carrying about the same notebook as he. He flicked through it. A third of the pages were covered in Grub's thin, erratic hand. It was not a journal but a scattering of notes—thoughts, ideas, tumbled down one after the other. The
passages in ink were blotted and smudged where Grub's fingers lagged behind his thoughts. The pattern was strangely familiar. His own notebooks were punctuated with sketches. Grub's were peppered with snatches of poetry—quotations that pleased him and other lines of his own. Grub was not a particularly good poet. He inclined toward the kind of contrived, overblown sentiment Jarrett found tiresome. Perhaps he might have improved had he lived.

The boy's prose was more lively. Jarrett came upon an entry marked with the date of Favian's journey up north. It seemed he had taken against a fellow passenger—a woman whom he depicted as a troll of loathsome habits. A piece of paper slid out. It was a receipt from the Royal Hotel, Leeds, for a pint of porter and a dish of broiled pigeon. There was a raised mark on the surface that caused him to turn it over. Grub had penciled two words heavily underscored on the back:
yellow gloves.
What was it Miss Bedford had said?
He pretended to be busy, taking out a bit of paper and his pencil—all so that I should not think he had noticed me watching …
But why yellow gloves? He slid the bill back into place and turned the page. A quartered sheet dropped to the floor. He picked it up. It was a cheaply printed ballad, “The Weaver's Lament.” “
Your mouth is shut and you cannot unlock it,”
he read. “
The masters they carry the key in their pockets.”
He heard an echo of Grub's eager voice in the painting room:
My desire is to write real songs—songs to rouse everyman's heart. A ballad, you see. I am working on a ballad …

Grub's verse changed. There were a few fragments in the old style—a half-formed sonnet, “The Snare,” about a scarlet handkerchief belonging to a lady with tresses of night and eyes that pierced the soul. He smiled, thinking of young Miss Bedford. There were word combinations, some impatiently scored through, others circled, and verses of another kind, verses with more life to them: the beginnings of a fresh composition, “The Hand in the Glove.”

There's not a mechanic throughout the whole land
But what more or less feels the weight of his hand.
That creature of tyranny, baseness and pride
Mangles men crying Progress! And other such lies.

If Watson and his friends were in truth the colonel's radicals, Grub would have been no threat to them. He would have offered his whole-hearted support.

As he laid the notebook aside, his eye was caught by a single sheet of paper. He picked it up.

My dear Sticks—

A chance encounter with your brother in Leeds the other day put me in mind of the letter I owe you …

He had never finished it. Grub must have begun the letter soon after his arrival. The first paragraph mentioned “cousin Raif” three times. The boy had been so very young. He thought of how Grub had cut him in the
theater the previous night and a lump rose in his throat.

The boy had told him of this encounter in the painting room.
Mr. Strickland's compliments …
Francis Strickland. That Grub should have run into
him.
Then again, the region was unsettled. He thought of the colonel's informant. It came to him in a flash of memory: standing in the yard when Mrs. Bedford had issued invitations to her deathly “entertainment.” There had been another Woolbridge connection in Leeds with Grub that day. He would have come to the Royal Hotel to collect his niece. Jarrett dropped the letter back on the desk and left the room.

Half an hour later Matt the footman answered the bell ringing in the morning room. Mr. Jarrett handed him a letter.

“Get this to the post as quick as you can.” He put his hand in his coat and drew out a shilling. “Go now,” he urged. “There's another for you if you catch the down stage.”

He rode up Quarry Fell with the button Grub gave him wrapped in a clean handkerchief in his breast pocket. He fancied he could feel it over his heart. A pure world of virgin snow spread out left and right highlighted by delicate strokes of copper where dried grasses broke the surface. If he stood again where they had found the boy perhaps, in the daylight, he could discern something more of what had happened there. They made good time. Despite being dragged out of his warm stall with the taste of barely digested feed in his mouth, Walcheren was on his best behavior. They jumped down a bank into the cross lane to Pennygill. The thorn tree was up ahead. The pristine snow was soiled. Miss Lonsdale's words in the courtyard, the night before, came to mind:
Once it falls to earth it is only a matter of time before people trample it and everyone is complaining of the mud …

The man Duffin saw on the pack-horse trail: where had he come from? He stood up in his stirrups examining the lie of the land. Knot Hill was to his right. The pack-horse
trail crossed the lane behind him, running on around the foot of the hill toward Grateley Manor. Thanks to the shadows thrown by the lantern the man carried, Duffin's impression had been restricted to clothes and build. A gentleman's clothes and hat; the poacher had been adamant about that. Not many with clothes like that came up here—though a man might borrow or steal, of course. He looked north, tracing in his mind's eye the line of the pack-horse trail curving down to join the Carlisle road. In this isolated neighborhood a man on foot would have most likely come from Dewsnap's farm, or the Anderses' place or perhaps High Top. He thought of Mr. Hilton and his strapping sons. Their bulk ruled them out. Duffin had described a slimmish man of average height. He heard voices and the rumble of cart wheels. Over the branches of the thorn tree a familiar head was bumping up the lane toward him.