Kept (9 page)

“Gracious, Sarah, what is the matter? Ain’t you well?”

“Oh, it is nothing. Indeed it is very nice here, and I am glad to have you with me.” She dabbed at her eyes once or twice with the sleeve of her dress. “If Joseph were here, he would tell me not to take on, I know he would.”

“Who is Joseph?”

“He is my brother. But he is in China with the army, and I have not seen him these two years.”

“And have you no other family?”

“None to speak of. But he writes to me, and that is something. Look, there is that gaby Margaret Lane. Mrs. Finnie must have grown tired of sorting the linen and sent her out to find us. Hollo, Margaret! You would never guess what has happened to us since we sat here.”

Margaret’s face stared anxiously at them from the path. “What has happened?”

“Why a great swarm of bees from Farmer Mangold’s hive across
the field fell upon us. Indeed I think they would have stung us to death had not Esther here yelled at them and driven them away.”

Seeing the girl’s open mouth, Esther could not resist a smile.

Margaret frowned. “It is very bad of you to hoax me in that way. Mrs. Finnie says you are both to come instantly to the house.”

“Cheek of Mrs. Finnie to send you her orders,” Sarah muttered under her breath, “when everyone knows that the kitchenmaid answers to the cook. You should say you will wait to hear from Mrs. Wates.”

Nevertheless, she made no move to prevent Esther from accompanying her back along the path. As they came through the kitchen garden, a slither of displaced gravel and the noise of hoofs announced the return of the gig. A moment later William’s tall figure, his arms laden with parcels, could be seen in the kitchen doorway.

“Let us not go into the kitchen,” announced Sarah, who had stopped to adjust the pinafore of her dress. “Look, there are the shutters of the dairy half-open. Ten to one the cat has got in. Will you come with me, Esther?”

Wondering, Esther followed her. There was no sign of the cat.

That evening after supper Mr. Randall read from the Psalmist:

Behold, he travaileth with iniquity,

And hath conceived mischief, and brought forth falsehood.

He made a pit and digged it,

And is fallen into the pit which he made.

His mischief shall return upon his own head,

And his violent dealings shall come down upon his own pate.

 

T
here are some men whose lives are altogether mysterious. How do they come by their daily bread? No one knows, and yet they are always respectably dressed, seen stepping briskly out of hansoms or into their box at Astley’s. Their very wives, perhaps, are ignorant of the paths they tread in the course of a morning’s business, the company they keep and the hour at which they are likely to return to their familial hearth. They are glimpsed at the opera, at race courses, at boxing matches, at all the genteel diversions that England affords its citizenry, and yet the friends gathered round them are as mysterious as they. Their absence—should they cease to appear in these public amphitheatres—is seldom remarked, for there is no one sufficiently near to them to remark it. They bring legal suits, occasionally, and win them, they sit in Parliament or are active at the patent office, without one iota of this mystery ever separating itself from their elusive forms, and their fellow citizens can spend twenty years in their occasional company without ever forming a clear idea of their character, opinions and temperament.

Such a one was Mr. Pardew. At the time of which I write he was a man of perhaps fifty years of age—but there had been no one with him at a school or a college or a regimental mess to confirm this speculation—tall, long-jawed, his hair still jet-blacked and with a hard grey eye that suggested its owner would brook no interference in any scheme on which he was legitimately engaged. As his voice assumed at moments of emphasis a somewhat curious intonation, it was thought that he had spent some time on the Continent, and might even have been born there, but this, as in the matter of his age, was the merest conjecture. As for the other appurtenances by which a man’s stature is generally judged, scarcely anything could be said. He had a house in Kensington, but it was not thought that he was often at home there, and when he entertained his friends it was at a public room or at a the
atre. There was a Mrs. Pardew—at least he spoke of such a lady—but no one had ever seen her. Of his antecedents, his business and the nature of the ravens that fed him, all was as dark as pitch. And yet it was said at clubs, and in drawing rooms, by those who if they did not know him well at least knew of him, that Mr. Pardew was a warm man and that he knew what he was about.

At the same time, a man cannot spend half his adult life on the margin of polite society without one or two incontrovertible facts arising from his dealings, and so it was with Mr. Pardew. The sum of what was known about him may have been unconscionably small, but there was at least
something
, and what there was encouraged Mr. Pardew’s fellow men to regard him with a certain circumspection. Ten years ago he had featured in the commercial directories as a stockbroker with an office in Pump Court EC and a certain Mr. Fardel as his associate. Of this Mr. Fardel even less was known than his partner, and yet his notoriety was, for a brief moment, altogether remarkable. In short, Mr. Fardel was found one morning lying dead in an obscure alleyway not far from Pump Court with the back of his head stove in by some blunt instrument—a life preserver or bludgeon, it was suggested by Captain McTurk of the City Police Force, who attended this melancholy scene. It was first presumed that Mr. Fardel had been robbed, until a search of his person disclosed that neither his notecase, nor his diamond tiepin nor his gold watch-seals—not even the silver-knobbed cane that lay by his side—had been disturbed.

Some enemy, then, who had waylaid him in this dark corner at dead of night—the hour of Mr. Fardel’s demise was put at between one and two in the morning—to prosecute a personal vendetta? And yet Mr. Fardel’s existence, diligently investigated by Captain McTurk and his men, proved to be the most blameless that ever a man had lived. A bishop, as the inspector observed, would have been flattered by the encomia pronounced over his catafalque. And here the matter would have rested, had it not been for a statement offered to the police some months later by a gentleman who had been abroad and only lately returned to hear news of the murder.

This person alleged that, walking in the vicinity of Pump Court on the night of the murder—very late it was, he believed—and passing the
office of Pardew & Fardel, he heard loud voices coming from within. It was then suggested by persons who had had professional dealings with Pardew & Fardel that the two principals had for some little time been in dispute about certain matters relating to the firm’s business. A clerk summoned to give evidence to Captain McTurk deposed that on the day preceding Mr. Fardel’s murder, during the course of an argument in the doorway of the office, he had seen Mr. Pardew raise his fist and shake it at his partner’s retiring back. All this was very bad, but it was not perhaps conclusive.

Mr. Pardew, in the course of his several questionings, replied in his blandest manner. Certainly he and his late partner, the absence of whose capital he very much regretted, had had their differences. Certainly they had quarrelled that day in the office. Certainly they had remained there until a late hour on the evening that Mr. Fardel had met his end. Equally certain, however, was that between one and two in the morning, and indeed for two hours before that, he had been playing cards at his very respectable club on Hay Hill in the company of half a dozen very respectable gentlemen, all of whom were ready to swear to his never having left the room.

And there, inevitably, the matter had to rest. Captain McTurk declared himself satisfied—more or less—of Mr. Pardew’s innocence. The office in Pump Court continued to trade for some months and then shut its doors, and no more was heard of Mr. Pardew for the next half-dozen years. It was thought that he had engaged himself in commercial speculations on the Continent—some said at Leipzig, others at Prague—but whatever commercial speculations they were no hint of their nature was ever breathed in London. There were one or two people—possibly the gentlemen with whom Mr. Pardew had been playing whist on the night of his partner’s misfortune—who said that he had been harshly done by, and that base calumny and foul slander had conspired against his reputation, but these defenders were not notably numerous. When Mr. Pardew returned into the public gaze, whether from Vienna, Prague or some other foreign capital, it was as the proprietor of a manufacturing process which, various quidnuncs had asserted, might altogether revolutionise certain aspects of commercial engineering. No one quite knew how Mr. Pardew had come
by his expertise, or his capital, but for a short time at any rate his stock was in the ascendant. And then there came another gentleman, a professional engineer, which Mr. Pardew was not, who alleged that in the course of their association, at some manufacturing works in the north of England, Mr. Pardew had…defrauded him of a patent? Appropriated some idea to which he was not entitled? The legal point was obscure, but it was generally held by those who knew about such things that Mr. Pardew had behaved badly. A Chancery suit was brought at great expense, whose result was not quite satisfactory, either to Mr. Pardew or to his former associate, and the manufacturing process altogether lapsed. All that had taken place four years ago, after which no more had been known of Mr. Pardew’s whereabouts, or his undertakings, than Captain Franklin’s.

On this particular morning—it was a raw, brisk morning in the early part of the year—this Mr. Pardew could be found seated in an office in the modest thoroughfare of Carter Lane, London, EC. It was a somewhat humble premises—no more than a single room with a couple of tables crammed together and a fat, shabby clerk grooming his nails with a paper knife in the corner—but Mr. Pardew’s demeanour suggested that it was his to order and command. Beyond the window, which looked out onto the lane itself, the great dome of St. Paul’s spread across the skyline, and Mr. Pardew, lounging on his tilted chair at such an angle that it seemed he must topple over and go sprawling in the dust, regarded it sardonically, as if he altogether saw through it and declined to be hoodwinked by its bulk and solemnity. The clerk, whose attitude to Mr. Pardew suggested a familiarity not often found in City functionaries, completed the paring of his nails and flung the knife down onto his desk, where it rattled ominously and lay quivering for a full half minute.

“Are you a-going out this morning then?”

Mr. Pardew continued to stare sardonically at the cathedral dome. “I may very well do so. What is it to you?”

“Nothink. Nothink at all. I mind my business like anyone else. But what am I to say if Donaldson comes?”

“You may give him a civil answer, show him the paper and remind him that it’s due three weeks hence.”

“Shall I now?” exclaimed the clerk with a horrible, bogus enthusiasm. “And I don’t doubt he’ll pay us the fifty sovs on the instant. Cash down, I shouldn’t wonder. Oh yes indeed.”

From which conversation it may be gathered that whatever business Mr. Pardew had previously undertaken he now dealt in discounted bills—the discounted bills, moreover, of people who were very anxious that they should not be redeemed. The look which Mr. Pardew gave his clerk at the conclusion of this exchange was a curious one, for it spoke, on the one hand, of a very definite obligation to him which Mr. Pardew could not ignore, and, on the other, of an absolute determination to have done with this indebtedness, and it was perhaps as well that the clerk did not see it.

It was now about midday, the time when men of business, if they are to perform any useful activity, are generally about it, but still Mr. Pardew sat, swaggering, it might be thought a little uneasily, on his chair. Once or twice he took a letter from his waistcoat pocket and read its contents through very thoroughly, made various abstruse calculations on a second piece of foolscap and then pushed the first document into the pocket of his coat. Once, again, he picked up a walking stick that lay against the table, weighed it in his hand like a man who tests a weapon and then replaced it.

The clerk, meanwhile, ate his luncheon out of a paper bag while regarding his master with a vigilant eye. Finally, in a movement that for all its purpose seemed to suggest some inner uncertainty, Mr. Pardew rose to his feet, jammed his hat on his head and thrust the stick under his arm.

“I’ll not be back. If Carey calls, you had better have a message sent to me at the club.”

The clerk having signified that he would do this, Mr. Pardew opened the office door and stepped out into the street. Very spruce he looked in his grey morning coat and tall hat, with the cane wedged under his shoulder like a swagger stick, and several passersby remarked him as they went along Carter Lane in the direction of the City. Had any one of them continued to stare, they would have observed him walk in a leisurely fashion along the lane and its adjacent thoroughfares until he came to New Bridge Street. Here, in
sight of Ludgate Circus, he boarded an omnibus, tendered his twopence to the conductor and was conveyed along High Holborn to the vicinity of Lincoln’s Inn. A further walk of two minutes brought him to the chambers of Mr. Crabbe, where he sent up his card via the clerk and asked if he might have the pleasure of speaking to that gentleman. Had there been a third person present in Mr. Crabbe’s sombre vestibule, that person might have deduced from their familiarity that Mr. Pardew had had previous dealings with the clerk, and that they were sufficient to admit the transfer of two sovereigns wrapped in a twist of paper.

Mr. Crabbe, sitting in his room, with its fine view out over the gardens—very frosty now, with the trees altogether black and leafless—and the wall of books surrounding him on three sides, knew all the little there was to know about his visitor, did not like it at all and had half a mind to send back the card with a short answer. By chance, however, a great nobleman who had intended to spend that morning at Lincoln’s Inn had found himself unexpectedly detained at the House, and Mr. Crabbe, tired of poking his fire and bullying his clerk, was eager for diversion. Accordingly, he sent down word that he would be happy to see Mr. Pardew, and, having done so, placed himself before his bow window, the better to receive his visitor.

If Mr. Crabbe had expected that Mr. Pardew would be awed or made otherwise respectful by this piece of condescension, he was mistaken, for Mr. Pardew stalked into the room as if Mr. Crabbe’s deigning to see him was a simple acknowledgement of his genius. Upon my word, Mr. Crabbe thought to himself, he is going to hit me with that stick! However, having exuberantly flourished his cane practically under the old lawyer’s nose, Mr. Pardew secured it beneath his arm and bobbed his head.

“It is very good of you to see me, Mr. Crabbe. Truly I am obliged.”

Mr. Crabbe, bobbing his own head, and silently acknowledging that it was good of him and that Mr. Pardew in considering himself obliged spoke only the truth, looked carefully in front of him. He noticed the shine of Mr. Pardew’s hat and coat, the jut of his jaw and the grip of his fingers on the walking stick, but he did not as yet form
any judgement save to wonder idly what possible errand, or request, or supplication could have brought Mr. Pardew to see him.

“I believe, Mr. Crabbe, that we have a mutual friend. His Grace the Duke of——has mentioned your name to me.”

At this, Mr. Crabbe pricked up his ears. He was indeed a friend of the Duke of——, knew every secret of the great man’s that there was to be known, had presided, in fact, over the ducal family’s affairs for thirty years. In addition he was jealous of his friendship, and it irked him that such a man as Mr. Pardew (a man who, as he reflected, was supposed to have murdered his own partner!) should presume to allude to it. At the same time, such was the discretion with which Mr. Crabbe conducted his affairs that he had an idea that the only way in which Mr. Pardew could have come by this information was if he had been told it by the Duke himself. Consequently, he did not bristle in anger but contented himself with smiling rather stiffly.

“His Grace is very kind.”

“His Grace,” said Mr. Pardew, “is a d——d old fool. He has a great heap of money which he will not invest, an estate which is falling around his ears and some highly expensive habits which he will not curb. But doubtless you know him better than I.”