Kept (39 page)

“If that be the case, then he is a very hospitable Bluebeard,” Mr. Crawley observed, “for I have dined at his table several times and never thought I might be eaten up with the dessert.”

“No doubt one gentleman is very like another in company. But I am only repeating what Papa has said.”

Mr. Crawley bent down from his chair and gave the coals another little shove with the poker. He had an inkling—and he did not quite know how the inkling had come to him—that he ought to be careful in whatever further remarks he uttered on the subject of Mr. Dixey’s ward. And yet he was aware, merely from the tone of her voice, that this was a topic in which Miss Marjoribanks was as keenly interested as himself. Accordingly, he sat up from his delvings in the fire and remarked in his blandest tone, “She is a Mrs. Ireland, is she not? The daughter of Mr. Brotherton, who I believe was a literary man. But I did not know there to be any scandal.”

“Well…perhaps not.”
Scandal
, too, was not a word that Miss Marjoribanks used lightly. “But Papa says that people have begun to wonder why she is so long shut away, and her family not permitted to see her, and that it is very strange.”

“I have no doubt that everything is in order,” said Mr. Crawley, who did not necessarily believe this. “Mr. Conolly, I believe, that used to direct the asylum at Hanwell, is a very competent man.”

“Papa says he is a charlatan.”

Mr. Crawley had the utmost respect for the Dean of Ely’s opinion on this and any other matter, but he did not feel it necessary to concur.

“However that may be, it seemed to me that Mrs. Ireland scarcely knew herself.”

“She is supposed to be very good-looking, I believe,” Miss Marjoribanks remarked innocently.

“Very probably. I scarcely had time to observe her before she was removed from the room.”

Mr. Crawley was conscious that the conversation was straying into areas where he was altogether reluctant to follow. At the same time, he was aware that should a young lady seated in her father’s drawing room wish to discuss a certain topic, there is very little that can be done to prevent her.

“I am sure I have read a newspaper report that said she was very good-looking,” Miss Marjoribanks continued.

All this was very bad, and not for the first time that afternoon Mr. Crawley wished that he had stayed in Easton and written his sermon. Making a violent effort to change the subject, he enquired, had Miss Marjoribanks been amused by her reading of
Mrs. Caudle
? only for Miss Marjoribanks to remark in return, had not its author famously quarrelled with the late Mr. Brotherton? Even now, at this late stage, Mr. Crawley assured himself that there might still be an opportunity for the saying of some soft word or two. At this very moment, though, there came an irruption at the door, a noise of stoutly shod feet in the hallway, and the arrival of the Deanery parlourmaid to announce, “Ef ’n’ ye please, miss, Mrs. Harrison and the young ladies.”

This, Mr. Crawley thought, he really could not bear. He rose to his feet, glanced extenuatingly at his watch and said his farewells.

“I shall look forward, Miss Marjoribanks, to have the honour of entertaining your father and yourself at Easton before long.”

“As for that,” Miss Marjoribanks replied, beckoning Mrs. Harrison and her three hulking daughters into the room, “Papa is exceedingly busy, what with Mr. Prendergast and the diocesan accounts. But I shall tell him you said so.”

Still Mr. Crawley believed that he might be able to press the fair Amelia’s hand. But Miss Marjoribanks was a Dean’s daughter and allowed no hand pressing. A brisk handshake and Mr. Crawley was outside once more on the gravel beyond the Deanery door, listening to the cabman who had brought Mrs. Harrison and her three daughters in from Trumpington cursing over his twopenny tip. As he walked disconsolately back to the inn where his horse was stabled, he encountered a clerical acquaintance—does one not always meet some acquaintance at these times?—who shook him by the hand and enquired, “So, old fellow, when is it to be?”

“Eh?” said Mr. Crawley sharply. “There is nothing of that kind in prospect as far as I’m aware.”

“Indeed? Then I am very sorry to hear you say so.”

And so Mr. Crawley returned to his inn, his boots leaving faint impressions in the powdery snow, and his mind, for some reason, bent not on Miss Marjoribanks and the splendours of the Deanery drawing room but on Easton Hall and the secrets that were kept within it.

O
f all the artistic gentlemen so regularly held up for the public edification, I will own that the one that I esteem above all is Mr. Frith, RA. How many times, wandering in the corridors of some municipal gallery, halfway down the stairs of some Pall Mall club (with Timmins, my host, a little red-faced and pursy, urging me on to the supper table), have I not stopped to admire, as it might be, a representation of the Derby, or the interior of a railway carriage, or a London street, and found my eyes straying to that discreet and unpopulated corner where lies the familiar signature? To be sure, all human life is gathered here: the upward tilt of the servant girl’s bonnet as she angles towards her sweetheart; the fiery complexion of the tipsy soldier tumbling from the alehouse door; the stout paterfamilias with his brood of children; General Sir Willoughby de Courcey, CB, on his great charger and Sergeant Snooks at the gun carriage—all this Mr. Frith seems to be able to take off as easily as you and I play at spillikins or twit Miss Mary (a demure young lady who scarcely lifts her eyes from the table) that her lover stands waiting in the porch.

And yet Mr. Frith is not, I think, what the world calls a realist. He may paint a crowd, survey a marching army, oversee a swarm of boys as they come clamouring from the schoolyard gate, and yet his art lies in design, in what he sees and what he does not see, in what he hastens to include and what he chooses to omit. It is remarkable, is it not, when confronted by one of Mr. Frith’s teeming panoramas, how often the eye remarks their chains of quiet connection: how the soldier on the white horse has, plainly, a regard for the innkeeper’s daughter who brings him his beer; how the gentleman in the tall hat and the eyeglass is clearly confederate with the black-coated cleric who shuffles behind him? There is no proof of these affiliations—the thing no more coheres than some slice of microscopic life over which the
man of science places his lens—but the effect is so very singular. For myself, I think Mr. Frith the equivalent of a great botanist or a marine biologist, and yet the plants upon which he botanises and the colonies of sea urchins over which he trails his net are humankind.

Let us say, to amuse ourselves, that Mr. Frith has set up his easel on the concourse of London Bridge Station on this quiet summer’s evening, here among the rows of kiosks and the bookstall women selling copies of the
Cornhill
and
Bell’s Life
and ninepenny novels and waxing ever more discontented, it being past eight and the workday crowds mostly departed. What does he see? A couple of small boys, indescribably dirty and depraved, playing at peg top at the summit of a flight of stone steps, several old women bent on mysterious errands at the sausage and pie shops, certain of those vague-looking persons, very dilapidated in the hat and footwear department, who
will
always infiltrate themselves into scenes of this kind. One passingly dramatic event Mr. Frith will have missed, seeing that he has only just begun to set out his materials, is the arrival, hot from the City half an hour since, pulled by a pair of sweating horses, of a covered wagon at whose appearance two railway policemen instantly emerged and began to help its custodians unload a pair of crates into the stationmaster’s office. That gentleman stands at his door now, under the eye of the station clock and a severe-looking lady in a black coat with turban to match, and no doubt Mr. Frith would cast an appreciative glance over the brass buttons of his waistcoat and the jet profusion of his whiskers. Others are there on whom Mr. Frith’s hand would perhaps pause: an old clergyman in gaiters and a suit of black with a copy of
Fraser’s
under his arm looking very studiously at the printed timetable that hangs under glass on the wall beside the stationmaster’s door; three or four young ladies in dove-grey travelling dresses and sober bonnets being whisked out of the waiting room by a hard-faced old woman who could be anything from the headmistress of their school to the embittered old housekeeper of their aunt. A train stands waiting—the Dover train (via Folkestone), the mail train heading down to the steamer packet—at the nearby platform, all wreathed in vapour with its furnace banked up and a couple of workmen busily shovelling coal onto its fuel stack, but the old duenna pays it no heed and whips
her charges away at the point of a little umbrella to a distant bench beyond the reach of engine fumes and artist’s palette alike.

In their wake, though, step a pair of gentlemen with whom Mr. Frith might if he cared do marvels: the one clad in black with curious side-whiskers and a prognathous jaw bearing a stick—fiercely—and a travelling bag in his hand; the other, burly and red-faced, burdened by the weight of a couple more such containers. What is in those bags? Whatever it is, the burly man is uneasy about them, gives them anxious little glances and fiddles nervously with their straps. To be sure, there is something faintly mysterious about these persons. The same cab brought them to the station—can be seen, in fact, on the further side of the concourse rattling off towards the Borough—but it could not be said that either knew or acknowledged the other. Are they here to catch a train? Certainly, he of the side-whiskers and the jutting jaw has gone off to inspect the framed timetable and shake his stick in the direction of the ticket office, but the burly man merely drops his burden at his feet (and no end of a thump can be heard on the stones) and stands guard over it, mopping his brow with a handkerchief and generally looking for all the world as if the bags contained a couple of alligators taken from the reptile house at the zoo.

The hands of the station clock have now moved to within a few moments of half past eight, which is the hour of the Dover train’s departure. A few passengers are already moving briskly along the platform, but there seems some doubt as to whether the brandisher of the stick and the custodian of the travelling bags shall join them. The former is now standing before the station bookstall, poring over that month’s
Cornhill
as if it contained fresh instalments of the Scriptures and a man would jeopardise his soul by not reading them, while the latter looks almost wildly about him, first at the waiting train, then at the station clock, then at the platform edge, but never, it must be noted, at the figure by the bookstall. A guard arrives out of nowhere—a fat, ill-favoured man with the most melancholy face you ever saw—looks around him once or twice and in a curious gesture—curious in that the doing of it seems to perplex him rather—taps the peak of his broad cap a couple of times with his forefinger. By now it is wanting a minute and a half to half past eight.

Galvanised by some mysterious agency, both our gentlemen can be seen hastening to the ticket office. Are those first-class tickets they have bought? Certainly, the burly gentleman goes and arranges himself in a first-class carriage, staring nervously at a porter—a gloomy porter who thinks it surprising that three travelling bags can weigh so much—who carries those items off to the luggage van. But as for the other gentleman, what
can
he be doing? First he strolls along the platform, glancing to right and left as if waiting for someone to join him. Then he doubles back, as if the object of his quest lies behind one of the monstrous pillars supporting the station roof. The sad-eyed guard, by this time, is traversing the platform ringing his bell to signal the train’s departure. A few seconds now until half past eight. The great wheels have begun to grind and a hellish mechanical noise to drive out all human interventions. The guard has clambered up into his compartment that abuts the luggage van, where he stands peering melancholically out into the murk, and still the sharp-jawed man lingers a yard or so away. He will turn back and retreat to his pillar—no, he sees an acquaintance at the platform’s further end and is hailing him through the smoke. But no, there is no one there.

The train has begun to roll slowly yet inexorably forward. The guard, half-hidden in the billowing, ever-ascending vapour, gives another confidential tap on the peaked brim of his cap with the tip of his forefinger, and the sharp-jawed man, belying the impression of age implied by his silvery whiskers, makes a bound and a leap and is swallowed up by the guard’s compartment as it rocks by, so that Mr. Frith, if he sat still at his easel (but that there is no one there and the platform empty), might wonder where he had gone and how a man can vanish into thin air on a railway platform in the middle of the evening of a summer’s day.

STATEMENT BY SAMUEL SPRAGG, RAILWAY POLICEMAN

A message came through to our post from Messrs. Abell in the City about seven that a shipment would be travelling down to Folkestone
on the mail train. This was quite in the usual way of things. Constable Harlow and I attended. Again, this was customary on such occasions. The bullion boxes were taken from the wagon all sealed up in red wax and then taken into the stationmaster’s office, and Mr. Sellings will tell you the same.

 

STATEMENT BY JAMES SELLINGS, STATIONMASTER, LONDON BRIDGE

The first I knew of it was when the van pulled up before my door. That is quite usual. There is never notice given, as Mr. Smiles will tell you. Three chests according to my signed document, the one weighing 98 lb., the other 92
¾
lb., the third the same to within an ounce or so—look, it is written down here. They are bound in iron and take two men to carry them. After weighing, the chests were taken to the luggage van, Sergeant Spragg and Constable Harlow attending, and fastened up by Mr. Dauntsey and myself, using our separate keys, in the third of the three safes. I have done my duty in the matter and can say no more.

 

STATEMENT BY PETER DAUNTSEY, ASSISTANT STATIONMASTER, LONDON BRIDGE

The seals were unbroken, as I remarked, it being a particular duty of mine at this time.

 

Mr. Pardew sat alone in the luggage van, feeling the train roll under him. Behind the half-open door a few feet away to his right he could glimpse chimney tops, slatted roofs, the silvery grey of the river. The sight reassured him, for he knew that they must be travelling across the arches above Tooley Street. Drawing himself up to his feet and resting one hand on the metal stanchion that rose from the floor of the compartment to its ceiling, he began to say something to Dewar,
speaking loudly above the roar of the wheels and ceasing only when he found that the man had gone. Gingerly, for he was conscious that a false move would send him plunging to his death beneath the arches, he reached out and fastened the door. This action both diminished the volume of noise and brought home to him the reality of his position. There was an oil lamp to hand, which Dewar had left, this he secured and lit before looking about him. At the far end of the compartment, a little apart from the handful of cases and travelling portmanteaux, he could see the three squat safes side by side against the wall. There was something about them—some quality in the dull gleam of the metal—that made him wish to reach out and touch them, but something else, too, that stayed his hand. Standing irresolute on the moving boards, he realised that he was struck with terror, and that, curiously, it was a terror of an abstract sort, and that its effect, though it remained with him always, was to displace the chief anxiety that occupied his mind and substitute it with other, lesser horrors that now came crowding in on him.

The first of these, he now acknowledged, was that he found Grace—Grace’s presence, Grace’s familiarities—intolerable. Whatever else might occur as a result of the night’s work, he would have done with Bob Grace, and whether or not there remained an office in Carter Lane, Grace would certainly no longer sit in it with him. The thought cheered him, even though the greater terror still lurked behind it, and he consoled himself with it for a while, reaching as he did so for the travelling bags and, with a good deal of exertion, manoeuvring them to a place on the compartment floor about a yard from the three safes. There should be no more Grace to fret and trouble him—no, he should see to that. And then some queer remembrance, brought into his head perhaps by the glimpse of the rooftops of Tooley Street, stirred in his mind, and he recalled out of some distant corner of his bygone life a schoolyard, with grey stone walls abutting a landscape of low, forlorn hills, and himself in it, and an old gentleman whom Mr. Pardew had not thought of for thirty years saying something to him, and Mr. Pardew shuddered at the recollection, silent for a moment, with his hand over the clasp of the nearest travelling bag, until the sound of footfalls woke him from his reverie.

At the sight of Grace, whose arms and legs seemed not quite sure of themselves in this confined space and whose face appeared to have squeezed itself into all manner of unnatural corrugations, the old gentleman and the schoolyard with its grey stone walls vanished instantly.

“Gracious heavens, man, you are drunk! You were at an alehouse before we came here. Is it not so?”

“Sir, I swear it’s not. I’m as sober as Father Mathew. Indeed I am.”

“I’ll have no blacklegging, do you hear? You knew what this was about when we began it, and you shall stick to me.”

Grace said something in an undertone, doubtless to the effect that there would be no blacklegging and he would stick by him.

“Now then,” Mr. Pardew remarked, more mildly. “We shall get on very well if you do exactly as I say. What is the time?”

“Twenty-five minutes wanting to the hour.”

“And Pearce and Latch?”

“Off in the cab half an hour since.”

“You have seen Dewar?”