Painting The Darkness (31 page)

‘Your Imperial Majesty. This, I confess, I had not expected.’ She was older, of course, gaunter, more severe. Her coolness had turned to something bitter, her aloofness to a tried and tested strength. But her eyes? They were the same. They would, he knew, always be the same. In them, for him, there would always be discernible an unanswerable accusation.

‘Mademoiselle Strang,’ he said at last. ‘You … you are nursing here?’

‘Yes. What of you, Your Imperial Majesty?’ Plon-Plon could hear the journalists muttering curiously behind him. ‘Are you here, perhaps, to ease your conscience?’

The aide-de-camp stepped forward, but Plon-Plon held him back. ‘
Un moment
. Mademoiselle, you have nothing to reproach me for, I think.’

‘Ask the mothers of the sons who are dying here.’

He had no answer for her. What he did say he instantly regretted. ‘Soldiers have their duty to perform. Sadly, death is often a part of that duty. Mothers may find it hard to understand, but—’

‘I speak as a mother!’ She stared at him with an intensity from which, had he been alone, he would have turned and fled. ‘You should know I speak as a mother. You should know, above all people.’

There was nothing else to do but feign ignorance. ‘Mademoiselle, I do not know what you are talking about. If you will excuse me—’

The bloody water hit his face before he saw her raise the basin. Its warmth changed to a creeping chill as it flooded down his face and soaked into his general’s sash and epaulettes. When he opened his eyes, she had gone. The discarded basin was rattling to rest on the floor. The journalists were laughing. The aide-de-camp was mopping his tunic with a cloth. But Vivien Strang had gone.

Plon-Plon left the newspaper on the bench and headed eastwards, shuffling gloomily through the leaves on the Quai de Montebello. He had never seen her, from that day to this. He had not so much as heard her name mentioned between his discussion with James Davenall in July 1867 and his encounter with James Norton fifteen years later. He had thought she had done her worst, that day in Scutari. But now, if Norton was the man he feared he was, he knew she had not.

VIII

I had been vaguely aware for some days that Hillier wanted to talk to me. For fear that she would ask when Constance would be returning, I had done my best to avoid her. That Sunday afternoon, however, as I was heading out, she intercepted me in the hallway, with such a determined expression on her face that I knew it could no longer be deferred
.

‘
I must speak to you, sir,’ she said emphatically
.

‘
I’m really in rather a hurry
.’

‘
It can’t wait
.’

‘
Very well.’ We stepped into the drawing-room, and she closed the door. ‘What is it?
’

‘
I’m givin’ you notice, sir
.’

‘
Notice?
’

‘
I … have found another position
.’

‘
May I ask where?
’

‘
Mortlake, sir. A very nice ’ouse’old. I think it will suit me … very nicely
.’

‘
I don’t remember you asking for a reference
.’

She blushed. ‘I didn’t like to bother you, sir, so … I asked your mother, bein’ as I was with ’er in Blackheath longer ’n I’ve been ’ere with you
.’

It was a minor enough issue, God knows, but somehow, after all the weeks of Constance’s absence, this, on top of Ernest closing the doors of Trenchard
&
Leavis to me, seemed one abandonment too many. ‘When do you want to leave?’ I said through clenched teeth
.

‘
As soon as … it’s convenien
’.’

‘
Convenient? Well, Hillier, I think tomorrow will be convenient
.’

‘
Oh! I didn’ mean so—
’

‘
Or today, if you prefer.’ Her crushed look did not touch me. ‘Go whenever you damn well please
.’

She burst into a flood of tears, but I did not pause to heal the petty wound I had inflicted. I slammed out of the house, cursing under my breath all the greater and lesser parties to the
conspiracy
James Norton and the world in general had hatched against me
.

I had not realized how thick the fog had become. Its chill, white, swirling presence rose to meet me as I turned into Avenue Road. It was not yet mid-afternoon, but the fog had imposed a night of its own, in which all sounds were muffled, all vision blurred. I blundered down the streets, glad of the moist and cloaking obscurity, happy to be one anonymous figure passing, camouflaged, through a gagged and blinded world
.

I had conceived a mad notion to seek out Norton at his hotel, to settle for once and all my contest with him before the courts could make it inviolably public. The fog, I think, gave my fevered plans some eerie form of safe passage to reality. Though it grew thicker as I neared Regent’s Park, my steps quickened. I noticed, all at once, that I was panting with the exertion of the pace I had set. My heart was pounding, my lungs were straining. When I put my hand to my brow, it came back damp with sweat. I plunged on through the yellowing, moving curtain of the fog, damning all my lost opportunities to have closed before now with the man who had forced me to see that one of us must be victor and one vanquished
.

‘
Penny for the guy, mister?
’

1 heard him before I saw him, at the corner of the street: a muffled, under-nourished, saucer-eyed youth holding a tobacco-tin with, propped against the wall beside him, a guy larger than himself, straw protruding from a sack-covered head on which two buttons and a bootlace made a pair of staring eyes and a madly fixed grin
.

‘
Penny for the guy, mister?
’

He made to rattle the tin, but no noise came. It was empty. I took half a crown from my pocket and tossed it in. His eyes grew larger still, and his mouth dropped open in a silent gasp. Then I crossed the road and we parted, he, his straw-souled friend and I
.

I turned towards the steps that ran down to the Regent’s Canal, judging that the towpath would lead me to Paddington more reliably than a maze of fog-choked streets. What made me stop and look back I cannot say, but, when I did, the rimy
veil
lifted for an instant to show me the boy I had just left on the opposite corner. His trade was looking up. A man and a woman were standing by him. The woman stooped and dropped a coin into the boy’s tin. Perhaps she asked him for directions. At all events, as I watched, he turned and pointed straight at me. Then, just as the woman began to turn her head in my direction, the fog reasserted its mastery, closing off the scene with a blank impenetrable wall of white
.

Dismissing the stray snatched vision from my mind, I plunged down the steps and started along the path. I must have gone twenty yards before I realized that I had set off in the wrong direction. Muttering an oath at the absurdity of my error, I turned and began to retrace my steps
.

The fog was at its thickest here. Its murkiest residue had drained into the cutting of the canal and made of it a phantom world of cotton-wool sound and unseen, barely rippling waters. A dark shape looming ahead of me represented the arch of the bridge from which I had just descended. Reassured of my bearings, I pressed on
.

Then, once more, the fog lifted. I looked up at the parapet of the bridge, suddenly disclosed by the fickle plumes of vapour, and saw there a man and a woman, looking down at me
.

Her dress was of inky black velvet, ruffled at the collar with white lace. On her breast, as a corsage, she wore a single blood-red rose. She was bare-headed, and her hair, scarcely less black than her dress, fell in thick unbraided tresses to her shoulders. In the set of her jaw, the intensity of her dark eyes, the flicker of an expression about her lips, the way in which she simply stood and gazed down at me in unashamed scrutiny, there was combined the disdain of an empress and the provocation of a whore
.

When my eyes shifted to the man beside her, doubt ended and fear began. I knew at once who he was by the flinty grain of his eyes, the lean and grizzled cunning of his face, the square and muscular set of his shoulders. I did not need the photograph to tell me who he was, yet, in that moment, I craved the certainty it seemed to confer, longed for the proof it represented. I drew it from my pocket, glanced down at his captive image and knew
there
was no room for error. I had found him – or had been found
.

I had not taken my eyes from them for more than an instant. Yet, when I looked back, they had vanished. The fog had reclaimed its gift
.

I heard my footfalls echo in the brickwork of the arch as I raced beneath it and flung myself up the worn steps three at a time. There seemed so many more than when I had descended. Yet speed made no difference. When I emerged on to the bridge and gaped about me, there was no sound save my own panting breaths, no movement save the wilful ice-cold eddies of the fog. They had gone. And all I could do was shout the name of my quarry at the opaque deriding air
.

I walked into the park and cast about hopelessly for a sign of them. There was none. I followed some of the paths I knew, became, for all my familiarity with them hopelessly lost, at length found myself by the boating lake, and eventually traced a route out by Hanover Gate. I was tired now, and the chill of the fog, as dusk approached, had crept into my bones. I turned for home, refuting in my mind all the reasons why I might simply have imagined what I had seen. Self-doubt, a lack of trust in my own senses and instincts, was gnawing at my confidence
.

Then I remembered that they had spoken to the boy begging pennies for his guy. I walked back to where he had been, judging him worthy of another half-crown if he could put my mind at rest
.

But he was not there. He, too, had vanished, leaving only his guy to greet me, lolling crookedly at the foot of the wall, straw bristling from his lumpen torso, button eyes still staring, bootlace mouth grinning. I heard a firework begin its invisible flight somewhere above Primrose Hill and remembered that it was Bonfire Night. The straw-stuffed guy had been abandoned. And so had I
.

IX

Duty had impelled Richard Davenall to call at The Limes that afternoon. Worried by reports from Roffey that Trenchard had been pursuing an independent search for Quinn, he had telephoned the Orchard Street shop on Saturday, only to be informed that ‘Mr William has taken indefinite leave’. The news had left him sorely worried as to the young man’s state of mind.

But his journey to St John’s Wood had been a fool’s errand. The maid, flustered and tearful beyond detailed questioning, had told him only that her master had gone out, destination unknown. The prevailing fog, wispily insignificant in Highgate but blindingly dense hereabouts, rendered further enquiries hopeless. He ordered the cabby to take him home.

When he at last disembarked in North Road, chilled and exasperated by the slowness of the journey, he was aware only of a marked desire for whisky and a warm fire. Yet, as he let himself into the house and felt its familiar reproachful greeting close around him, another sensation, quite unlike those reminders of physical frailty, gripped him and sent a shiver down his spine.

He stood still for a moment, transfixed, whilst the door swung to behind him. It was Braddock’s afternoon off, so the upper reaches of the house were deserted. Yet that alone could not explain the atmosphere he detected. In the chilly silence there was something alert, something attentive to his presence, something, as it were, awaiting him.

He made his way towards the study. The tall ceilings and narrow passages of his father’s house enclosed and encircled him. He walked straight ahead, needing no light to guide him. At the end of the corridor the study door stood open. He could see it outlined against the faltering glow of the ebbing fire. Then he knew.

It had been an evening such as this, fog-wrapped and deathly cold, in the late autumn of 1859. He had returned
from
Holborn in bitter mood, wincing at the memory of a series of petty indignities inflicted on him by Gregory Chubb. He had resolved to lodge a complaint with his father, useless though he had known it would be. He had marched boldly in the direction of the old man’s study. Then, as now, the door had been half-open, firelight glowing within. Then, as now, in his imagination, an animated conversation had been in progress in the room. It was Gervase, with his father. Realizing that they did not know he was there, he had stopped and listened, as now he stopped and remembered.

‘Ten thousand pounds?’ Wolseley said disbelievingly. ‘If this is a joke, young man, it’s in very poor—’

‘It’s no joke!’ Rage was boiling beneath the surface of Gervase’s voice. ‘I require you to arrange it.’

‘As your father’s executor, I must—’

‘As
my
solicitor, you must do as I say – or I’ll find another who will.’

‘You have no right to talk to me in those terms.’

‘Have I the right to dispose of this money? That’s all that matters to me.’

Wolseley’s reply came as if through clenched teeth. ‘In strict law, it lies within your gift.’

‘Then, pay it and have done.’

‘I cannot do that. What has he done to earn such a sum? His salary would not amount to this in twenty years.’

‘I require no homilies. You have my instructions. There’s my signature to them. I want the money paid immediately – and then I want it forgotten. Is that clear?’

‘I warned your father that you would squander your inheritance. If he were alive today—’

There was a loud crash, as of Gervase thumping the desk. ‘Is it clear, damn you?’

There was an interval, then Wolseley replied in an icy monosyllable. ‘Yes.’

‘Good. I want him on his way at once. Can I leave you to arrange it?’

‘You can.’

‘No delays, mind.’

‘There will be no … delays. Lennox will have his money.’