Kept (18 page)

“I am glad to see you, Esther. Will you sit down?”

Esther did as she was bidden, wondering what Mr. Randall wished to say. He had a doubtful look on his face—very creased, it seemed, from his half slumber—and his fingers turned over an iron key that he held in the palm of his hand.

“Now, Esther,” he said, moving the key between his fingers so that, try as she might, Esther could not but look at it. “Here is a question for you. How many people reside in this house?”

“There are six. Now that William has gone.”

“There are seven,” Mr. Randall corrected her. “How are there seven? I shall tell you, Esther. You shall not think you have been deceived, I hope, for there has been no deception. You know the west wing of the house?”

“I have never been there.”

“No. The rooms are empty and shut up. They have not been used since before I came here, and that is many years ago. But see, one of them is not empty and not shut up. Or rather…” The key was very ancient and antique, Esther saw, with a large, much-ornamented hinge. “There is a lady lives there. Mr. Dixey’s ward. An invalid.”

Feeling that something was expected of her, Esther said, “What is the matter with her?”

“What is the matter with her? It is hard to say. The master has had doctors to see her. Their opinion is that her mind is troubled, that
she does not know herself. That is why she lives as she does. Do you understand me, Esther?”

Esther nodded.

“Naturally, it is Mrs. Finnie that looks after her. Who attends to her wants. But we are shorthanded, Esther, and there is need for another…. I wish you only to take up Mrs. Ireland’s meals and attend on her. Just as if she were a guest in the house.”

“Her name is Mrs. Ireland?”

“Did I not say so before? Yes, that is her name.”

As Esther listened, Mr. Randall explained the nature of her duties. These were that:

Thrice a day, at eight, one and seven, she should take a covered tray supplied by Mrs. Wates to Mrs. Ireland’s chamber.

On reaching the chamber, she was to knock at the door. If Mrs. Ireland did not answer, she should wait a short time and then unlock the door.

Once inside the room, she should lock the door behind her.

The key should at all times be left in her pocket and returned to Mr. Randall when not in use.

If, at any time, Mrs. Ireland seemed disturbed, alarmed or in any other way altered from her usual manner, she should leave the room immediately, locking the door behind her, and inform Mr. Randall.

Any questions put to her by Mrs. Ireland that were not immediately answerable should be referred to Mr. Randall.

The door should be locked at all times.

Any suggestion by Mrs. Ireland as to leaving the chamber should be referred to Mr. Randall.

Twice a day, at two and eight, she should return to the chamber and collect the tray. Again, she should knock at the door. If Mrs. Ireland did not answer, she should wait a short time and then unlock the door.

The key should be kept in her pocket.

The door should be locked at all times.

(
XIV
)

O
ne spring morning, when the wind blew crazily against the upper storeys of the house, Esther went into Sarah’s room and found her gone. For a moment, standing in the doorway with her hands plunged into the pocket of her sacking apron and the light spilling over her face, she saw nothing strange in the vacant bed, the half-open skylight window and the patch of angry blue sky beyond, supposing that Sarah had already gone downstairs to light the fire or, as was sometimes her habit, risen early to perform some mysterious errand of her own. And yet there was something about the room that seemed to her odd, beyond the roar of the wind and the neatly drawn coverlet. Not altogether knowing why she did it, Esther tugged open the topmost drawer of the chest in which Sarah kept her clothes. It was quite empty. So, she discovered, was the drawer beneath it. Instantly, half a dozen other tiny vanishments and discrepancies became apparent to her—the square of mirror that had hung on the wall, the portrait of the Crystal Palace Exhibition cut out of an illustrated paper, Sarah’s pattens gone from beneath the bed—and the room’s secret declared itself. Carefully shutting the drawers of the chest and hauling the skylight window to, Esther considered the implications of this discovery. It occurred to her that Sarah might still be in the house—it was, she calculated, barely half past six—and with this expectation growing in her mind, she rushed downstairs into the hall, practically colliding with Mr. Randall, who, very white and shabby at this early hour, was winding up the grandfather clock with his butterfly key.

“Why, Esther! Whatever is the matter?”

“It is Sarah, Mr. Randall. It’s my belief that she’s gone.”

Together they moved around the ground floor of the house opening doors and throwing open closets, but there was no sign of anything save the kitchen cat, who looked up resentfully from its slumber on the parlour sofa as if to say that it very much deplored the intrusion. Then Mr. Randall discovered that the bolts of the kitchen door had been drawn and that the door itself lay half-open on its hinge.

There was no doubt about it, Mr. Randall said, standing uncertainly
in his shirtsleeves, with the wind rushing into the kitchen through the open door, but that Sarah had gone.

Subsequently, Mrs. Wates bustled downstairs with her hair done up in curlpapers, conducted a rapid inventory of the kitchen and confirmed that a two-guinea piece left in a box by the outer door and intended for payment of the butcher’s bill had also vanished in the course of the night.

The master had best be told, Mrs. Wates suggested.

At lunchtime the remaining servants sat in conclave over the absentee.

Mrs. Wates deposed that Sarah was a bad girl, who in the manner of bad girls would undoubtedly come to a bad end. It was not for her to judge, for judgement lay in the hands of the Lord, but a girl of that sort, who crept out of the house in the middle of the night without a word to anyone, would certainly have a baby, and the baby would die, or be taken from her, and this was on balance a good thing.

Mrs. Finnie said that she was a sly one and no mistake, that she had had a look on her face this past week that was a sure clue to her intentions to anyone experienced in these matters, that it was a wonder, what with people sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night and opening doors, that they had not all been murdered in their beds, and that Mr. Randall ought to unlock his strongbox and ensure that the plate had not been stolen.

Margaret Lane said that she did not wish to speak ill of anyone, least of all those that were not there to defend themselves, but she had always thought the way that Sarah had made eyes at William downright shameful.

Mr. Randall said that it was all a great pity, and that he hoped Sarah would be happy.

Esther said nothing.

That afternoon Mr. Randall went into Watton to make enquiries, asked at the railway station, put his head into the bar of the Bull and returned empty-handed. It was not, he explained to the audience of the servants’ hall, and notwithstanding the missing two-guinea piece, as if Sarah had committed a criminal act. She had merely quitted her
situation, albeit in mysterious circumstances, and there was nothing that could be done.

“Oh Lord,” Mr. Randall prayed aloud that evening as they sat before the fire, “we commend to thy care thy servant Sarah, and we hope that we may remember her as we should and have no cause to repent of the treatment we allowed her, and that no harm shall come to her on the path she treads. Amen.”

And that was all that was said of Sarah, the parlourmaid at Easton Hall, who could not read and whose brother had died in China.

I
t will perhaps be allowed by those who have gone into the matter that in late years our idea of London has altered somewhat, and that a metropolis previously known for its stink and its monotony has blossomed forth in all kinds of unexpected colours. In short, the place has been taken up and turned romantic. Somers Town, as sketched by Mr. Dickens, stands revealed as the most charming of localities; Islington is a sooty paradise; even Limehouse Hole has declared itself full of the most interesting byways and peculiarities that polite society had formerly not imagined to exist. A penny gaff, beneath the gaze of these new explorers, is the most delightful refuge for the curious seeker after pleasure, and a threepenny theatre with a conjuror and a line of young ladies in Turkish trousers practically the acme of popular entertainment. Neither must it be supposed that this transmogrifying hand, once directed at a Clerkenwell, a Whitechapel or the vicinity of the Borough, can be stayed from touching the inhabitants of these respectable purlieus. The very beggars and the street acrobats have grown suddenly picturesque and behave as if they wished to appear in those representations of “London Characters” that decorate the print sellers’ windows, and the coster-women have the vanity of artists’ models. For myself, I altogether abhor and repudiate this false alchemy, whereby base metal, wrested out of the foulest pits and mines, is brought forth as human gold. Limehouse Hole, where Rogue Riderhood dwelt deep and dark, is no doubt a fascinating and fashionable place, but I for one would not go there, and one were as likely to meet a footpad in High Holborn as a soft-voiced old apple-woman with a sentimental eye. Dirt is dirt and squalor is squalor, that was what I was taught, and a waistcoat held together by one precarious button less efficacious than that secured by three. The number of persons rendered more humorous and idiosyncratic by their privations is a dismally small fraction of gross humanity.

Certainly, the eye that lingers in St. John’s Square, Clerkenwell, on a fierce morning—fierce, that is, in point of view of rain, fog and other elements—in early February will be hard put to distinguish any redeeming features. For a start, there is the general aspect of the place: a great ragged confluence of shabby thoroughfares quite cut in half by the Clerkenwell Road, the whole bleakly laid out and disposed beneath a flint-coloured sky suggestive of impending cloudburst, such light as there is dissolving into misty radiance. Then there is the teeming throng of people: each omnibus that clatters by is laden with passengers; tarpaulins gleam over the knees of those who sit outside. Labouring men in mufflers and shabby jackets, with billycock hats pulled low over their brows, go shambling past to their places of work hard by in Goswell Road or Aldgate; small boys with pieces of wet sacking drawn over their already wet shoulders slip past bent on God knows what errands, darting out of the little shops and places of manufacture. The commercial genius of Clerkenwell, it may be said, does not hanker after the grand scale. Warehouses, factories and the like are there none. Rather, each dwelling house and shop is divided into a myriad of individual concerns, three or four at a time. The house that stands yonder, within a yard or two of the public wheel track, squeezed in between a corn chandler’s and an ironmonger’s and looking like a very small man quite domineered over by two burly companions, a house that in Kensington might harbour a family of five plus a cook and a maid of all work, contains, in Clerkenwell, beginning at its uppermost storey, a dye-stamping business, a sign painter’s, a glass and enamelling establishment, a mysterious enterprise engaged in the distillation of black lead and, in its basement, a room in which six children are employed twelve hours a day manufacturing colour-paper fans at three-halfpence the dozen. Thirty-seven persons pass in and out of these premises on a given day (there is an old woman, dying of the dropsy, locked up in a gaunt back bedroom who goes nowhere at all), all of them liable to tumble head over heels amongst the corn chandler’s stock or scarify themselves upon those of the ironmonger’s wares proudly displayed on the narrow pavement. There is no space, you see, in Clerkenwell, and a shop is not a shop until half its contents are on view beyond the doorway, and a house not a house until two
dozen people are crammed into its five rooms. No space, only dirt and decay, and ash-ridden streets, and a blackness of night which no lamp can penetrate, and nocturnal policemen going two by two, and poverty and pestilence taking turns as to which shall more advantageously dispose itself.

Loitering keenly along the corner of the square, a dilapidated umbrella allowing a miniature cataract to descend on his uncovered head, Mr. Grace, Mr. Pardew’s confidential clerk, was in no way discountenanced by what he saw. He had been dealing with Clerkenwell and its regions for the greater part of his professional life. Clerkenwell, it might be said, was in his blood. Set down in it, he knew exactly where he was bound, what he might find there and what in strict monetary terms might be the issue. In this spirit, forgetting the particular errand that brought him here, he browsed impressionably for a moment on the crowded pavement, put his head in at a pastrycook’s and reluctantly withdrew it, stood for a while before a down-at-heel stationer’s displaying copies of the
Raff ’s Journal
, the
Larky Swell
and other publications, and took a determined interest in the back part of a sofa, from which the horsehair had begun to sprout in little melancholic tufts and follicles, that some enterprising dealer in furniture had crammed into his window. The sound of a bell, clanging from the tower of St. James’s Church, cut short this reverie, and negotiating his way past the lower outcrops of a kind of Parnassus of willow-pattern crockery, over which the rain dripped and tumbled, he passed around the western edge of the square into a street of tall, nondescript houses dignified by the name Clerkenwell Court. A casual observer who monitored his progress might have remarked that he examined not the house numbers but the brass plates set at head height next to their doors. An apothecary’s, a day school and a dealer in hides and tallows—from whose frontage came a reek that made even Mr. Grace, Clerkenwellian that he was, shy his head—were rejected, until finally he stopped before a plate whose inscription read
J. Snowden, Dial Painter
. Having ascertained that this was the place he sought—for he was a nearsighted man—he rolled up the tattered umbrella, gave a couple of smart raps on the dusty front door with the ferrule and stood back from the step the better to appraise whoever might appear
upon it. The door having been opened by a young woman in a shawl carrying a baby on her hip, Mr. Grace bared his teeth and enquired, “Name of Dewar?”

“Second floor back.”

Experienced enough in these visitations to know that the woman’s sullen tone denoted not impertinence but the dignity of proprietorship, Mr. Grace raised his umbrella by way of a salute and proceeded across a negligently swept hallway to the staircase. He was a calculating man—long years in the service of Mr. Pardew had taught him the value of calculation—and as he ascended he looked diligently about him and calculated both the degree of the squalor that he saw and the likelihood of his errand’s proving successful. That there was a connection between the two, Mr. Grace well knew. “No stair carpet anyhow,” he said to himself as he gained the first landing. “Not that one expected it anyway. But holes in the timber big enough to put your foot into, and not even the sight of a coal scuttle”—this observation was provoked by a heap of coal piled up on a sheet of newspaper—“dear me, that’s bad.” Proceeding up the second flight, he grew suddenly conscious of the noise his boots made on the bare slats and wondered proudly at the effect such irruptions might have on the equanimity of persons inhabiting second-floor back bedrooms in Clerkenwell Court. Standing finally on the second landing, he beat a miniature tattoo on the door, which caused it to rattle dangerously in its frame, and then, barely pausing for the weak cry of acknowledgement that came from within, pushed his way inside.

He stepped into a room that was not disorderly or unclean but presented merely the chill discomfort of poverty. The bare boards of the floor space were decently swept. Upon them could be found a high brass bedstead of the old-fashioned type pushed back almost to the window, a wash-hand stand, a couple of cane-backed chairs and a small occasional table. A tiny fire burned in the grate, composed of three glowing coals and so insubstantial that the air by the door where Mr. Grace now lingered seemed quite unwarmed. On a shelf affixed to the nearside wall sat a beer jug, a white china cat from whose mouth issued a spray of coloured paper, and a copy of
All the Year Round
, so dusty and timeworn that it seemed that, in deference to its title, it
had always lain there from January through December. A few miscellaneous items—a plate, the half of a quartern loaf and a teapot—lying in the grate completed the picture. All this, Mr. Grace’s beady eye took in as he stood in the doorway. So fascinated was he by the meagre inventory that it was a moment before he could begin to appraise the room’s human populace. This consisted of a thin, pale-complexioned woman who, although dressed, lay on the bedstead in an attitude of extreme fatigue, and a pasty-faced, unhealthy-looking man wearing a dressing gown over his frayed shirt who sat awkwardly on one of the cane-backed chairs. Seeing from their faces, in which curiosity combined with great alarm, that he was master of the situation and that no voice would be raised against him, Mr. Grace brought his hands smartly together and made a little bow.

“Name of Grace. That put you in the way of Lewis Dunbar. Recollect me?”

Receiving no answer, other than a vacant nod of the head from the man, he delved into the inner pocket of his coat and brought out a wad of grimy paper, much folded and secured with a piece of ribbon.

“See this? Bill for thirty pounds in favour of Hodge, dry-goods merchant, Pentonville. Know anything about it?”

Dewar turned a doleful pair of eyes towards him. “On my honour, sir, the money was paid.”

“Very likely! Very likely indeed, with me standing here a-holding of it in my hand. Did I say thirty pounds? More likely thirty-five, what with the interest owing. More like thirty-seven pound ten shillings, I shouldn’t wonder. Question is, Mr. Dewar, what do you mean to do about it?” He stopped for a moment, his attention fixed on some incongruity in the room, in the set of Dewar’s face even, that he could not quite fathom. “Great heavens, man! What have you done to your hair?”

“He’s dyed it.” The woman spoke for the first time, indistinctly, with her hand drawn up to her breast.

“Dyed it, has he?” Grace rocked back on his heels, as if this were the most singular thing he had ever heard. “Now why should he want to do that?”

The woman coughed, in a way that brought a crimson flush to her
otherwise pallid cheeks. “He thought one of the reasons he couldn’t get work was his looking so old.”

“And so it was!” Dewar interjected. “Once your hair’s turned, there’s no chance for you. The governors don’t want old men, or them that they think is old. I was working in a chophouse in Hanover Street, first job I’d had in a month. Come the second day I saw the man who owned it talking to the head waiter. ‘We don’t want no old men,’ he says. ‘Better turn him off.’ So they turned me off, and I went away and had my hair dyed, though precious little good it’s done me.” The woman began to cough again, and he broke off and regarded her helplessly.

“Had to dye your hair?” Grace wondered. “Dear me, that’s bad. That’s bad indeed.” Although he continued to stare around the room with benign amusement, as if the sight were a kind of tableau expressly designed for his entertainment, he had already begun to recalculate his strategy. His original scheme had been to browbeat Dewar, threaten him even, and thus to secure some small portion of the debt contracted to Mr. Hodge of Pentonville some eighteen months before and now transferred to his own master. Experience told him, however, that such a game was not worth the candle. Accordingly, he began upon a second scheme, which Mr. Pardew had suggested to him earlier that morning in Carter Lane.

“Now see here, Mr. Dewar. I don’t doubt there’s paper of yours all over the City. There may be a dozen Mr. Pardews after you. I don’t know. P’raps there’s more. However many there are, it’s no good to me. Still, there’s a way we might help one another, indeed there is. If the lady don’t mind, perhaps you could come along of me to somewhere we could talk more private-like?”

Dewar looked at him curiously for a moment, but in the end assented, muttered something in an undertone to his wife, drew off the tattered dressing gown and replaced it with an equally threadbare topcoat, which he took from a pile of clothing heaped at the end of the bedstead. Thus arrayed, he stood uncertainly in the doorway for a moment while Grace, tipping his finger to his forehead in salute to the occupant of the bed, led him out onto the landing.

“Your wife’s bad, ain’t she?” he remarked conversationally as they descended to the level of the street.

“Don’t take no nourishment from her food,” Dewar gloomily assented. “Thin as thin.”

“Consumption, I should say. I seen that kind of cough before. When the spots come to their cheeks. She’ll die on you, I shouldn’t wonder. I means no harm,” he admonished, catching the look in his companion’s eye. “Neither does Mr. Pardew, for all he’s a hard man. But there’s truth and there’s lies, you know. Now, from the look of you I should say that you could do with something ‘ot. Am I right?”

Dewar nodded his head. Glancing sideways at him as they passed through the door of the house into Clerkenwell Court, Grace satisfied himself that he seemed to shuffle rather than walk.

“Here,” he said. “How long since you had a square meal? Come on, you can tell me, you know.”

“Yesterday. That is, the day before.”

“And that bread and tea, I shouldn’t wonder. Never mind. Just step along this way.”