The Dark Clue (19 page)

‘How do you do, Mr. Jenkinson?' She was young – only fifteen or sixteen – with a strong, fine-featured face and an almost gypsy-brown complexion; and there was a kind of modest attentiveness in the way she took my hand that made me think she was anxious to win my good opinion, perhaps as a suitable wife for my supposed cousin.

‘Let's see it, then,' said Whitaker.

Nancy crouched down, slipped an old oilskin pouch from behind her apron and laid it in the pool of lamplight on the floor. ‘He gave this to my ma,' she said, drawing out a flat package covered in tissue-paper, and starting to unwrap it.

‘Turner?' I said.

I don't know whether she replied or not, for at that moment I saw, beneath her fingers, the first patch of that familiar burning orange-red, and then a dark strip of foreground, and then a brilliant button of sun, furious as a raw wound, leaking its radiance into a sky ribbed with cloud.

‘Here,' she said.

It was, I saw, as I took it, a little watercolour of the park, which might perhaps have served as a sketch for a larger oil. The brushwork was so rough and indistinct – sometimes an object would be suggested by no more than a line, or a single speck of paint – that it was difficult to make out anything clearly, but I was able to identify the Grecian temple; and a herd of deer (no more than a cluster of dots, really) roaming across
the hillside; and something that looked like an empty chair in the bottom left-hand corner, on what must be the terrace in front of the house.

‘Did your mother know him well?' I said.

‘She saw him often enough, I believe,' said Nancy. ‘She was a housemaid here, like me.'

‘And why'd he give it to her?' I said, with a leer that made me cringe inwardly.

‘I don't know, Mr. Jenkinson,' she said. ‘She never said. Why do you suppose?' She looked me straight in the eye, and gave a little smile, but I noticed she was blushing.

I felt I could not ask more without seeming to act out of character; so I chuckled, and gave her the picture back, and said – with the air of a man whose limited curiosity has been satisfied – ‘That's very interesting, gel. Thank you.'

This encounter, you may think, afforded me little enough; and yet it gave my visit to Petworth some point and purpose, which it would have otherwise lacked, and left me feeling – whether rightly or wrongly, I still cannot tell – that I had learnt something of value about Turner, and gained an insight into his character.

I should, indeed, have come away quite satisfied, had it not been for an incident on the way back, when – just as we had emerged once more from the tunnel into the service wing, and I was starting to breathe more easily – I saw, coming towards me, with a tray laden with glasses and a decanter for the house, the man in all the world I most, at that moment, dreaded meeting: the footman who had taken me to Colonel Wyndham that morning. There was no point in turning around, or pulling up my collar to hide my face, for he was already watching me, with a little frown of puzzlement, and would have undoubtedly seen any hesitation or evasion on my part as a confirmation of guilt. My only hope, I realized, was to make him doubt the evidence of his own eyes; and when he slowed his pace, therefore, and made to waylay us, I stopped, and gave him a frank smile, and said:

‘Who's this, Paul?'

‘Mr. Bond,' said Whitaker. ‘Mr. Bond, Mr. Jenkinson. My cousin from London.'

‘It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Bond,' I said. I did not offer my hand, for he could not take it; but bobbed my head respectfully.
‘Paul's a good boy, and writes often, and never fails to say what a help you are to him, in learning his duties.'

Bond made no response, save to look deep into my eyes, and then at Whitaker, and then back again. At length he said:

‘And where do you put up, Mr. Jenkinson?'

Before I could reply, Whitaker – anxious, no doubt, to show that he had not flouted the rules by inviting me to stay at the house – said:

‘At the Angel, Mr. Bond.'

Bond said nothing more, and, after a moment, nodded and moved on. As he turned into the tunnel, however, he looked back at me with a cool gaze that plainly said he was not convinced; and I knew that he might tell the housekeeper what he had seen; and that she might tell Colonel Wyndham; and that the colonel might send to the Angel to make enquiries after me. I resolved, therefore, that to avoid the risk of embarrassment for my kind hosts, and of disgrace – or perhaps even dismissal – for their nephew, I must quit Petworth within the hour.

And so it was that I thanked Paul Whitaker at the cowyard gate, and gave him a sovereign for his pains, and five shillings for Nancy, and made my way back to the hotel, and ordered a fly to drive me to Horsham, where I supposed (correctly, as it turned out) that I should be able to take an early train to London. Mr. and Mrs. Whitaker implored me to stay, saying they were sure no harm would come to them or to Paul; but I would not be swayed. Then they refused payment for my room, since I should not have slept in it; but I insisted, and at length they relented, and we parted with many professions of thanks and good will on both sides.

I was so exhausted that even the cold air could not keep me fully awake on that journey through the night, and I slipped between sleep and consciousness, and half-dreamed that I was fleeing some dark confinement with Turner, who chuckled gleefully at our escape – or, rather, that I
was
Turner, and the chuckle was mine.

But now – you will be relieved to hear! – I am fully restored to myself.

Your loving husband

Walter

XIX

From the diary of Marian Halcombe,
29th September, 185–

I have been on my knees, giving thanks. I shall, I know, meet grief and pain and weariness of heart again, as surely as I have met them before; but today – let me joyfully acknowledge it – I have been truly happy.
Thank you, Lord.

The morning, it must be said, gave little enough hint of what was to come; for I had slept poorly, and gave myself a momentary fright when I peered into the glass and saw there, instead of the lively, cheerful face I had expected, a haggard, half-familiar woman in middle life, with dark rings beneath her eyes and the first silver threads in her tangled black hair. By energetically plying the hair-brush, and smiling brightly (as you do on being introduced to a stranger), and murmuring silly little phrases of encouragement – ‘You'll do very well, Marian, indeed you will' – I soon banished her; but the baleful image lingered in my memory, like an awful vision of the future.

Matters were not greatly improved when, leaving the house a little later, we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a dense fog, as still and chilly as the tomb, which stung our eyes, and clogged our mouths and noses, and speckled our hands and faces with sharp little crystals of soot. I had – I now realized – been looking forward to our boating expedition with unreasonable, childish pleasure, and the certainty that I should be deprived of it cast me down as palpably as a physical burden, bowing my shoulders and slowing my step. I tried, however, to conceal my disappointment; and, taking Walter's arm, laughed, and said with as much bravado as I could muster:

‘We shall be fortunate to find the river at this rate, let alone see anything from it.'

The journey to Brentford seemed endless, for the cabman – unable to see further than his horse's ears, and fearful, presumably, of colliding with another vehicle, or running down a child – crawled along at a snail's pace (and a cautious snail at that); and when we looked out of the window we could make out nothing to tell us where we were, or how far we had come – so that, for all we knew, we might have been travelling very slowly in a circle,
and still only a hundred yards from our own front door. But then, all of a sudden, the fog thinned to reveal a line of black battlements (belonging, alas, not to the romantic old castle I at first imagined, but to a row of hideous brick villas, which seemed to think they might disguise their newness with a show of trumped-up antiquity); and then it had dwindled to a few wisps of mist; and by the time we neared Brentford, ten minutes later, you could see, through a dazzling chalky gauze, the unmistakable brilliance of a cloudless sky.

We turned into a broad, tree-lined road, and pulled up, about halfway along, in front of a modest gate crammed between a coach-house and a tall boundary wall. The house itself – which stood back a little way, behind a worn carriage sweep mottled with weeds – seemed, from the street, entirely characterless: neither large nor small, neither old nor new; quite indescribable, in fact, save as a catalogue of angles and dimensions. As soon as you walked through the door, however, you found yourself in a charming, well-proportioned hall, hung with delicately drawn portrait sketches, and freshly painted in pale, old-fashioned colours that accentuated the impression of light and space.

A stocky manservant of about thirty, with a florid complexion and a sweet smile (that peculiarity alone, surely, must make the household remarkable, for how many footmen are encouraged to
smile
at visitors?), led us to a large parlour at the rear of the building. For an instant, I had the illusion that I was entering Elizabeth Eastlake's boudoir; for this room occupied the corresponding corner of the house, and exerted, as it were, the same architectural force: you felt the shadowy bulk of hall and staircase bearing down on you, pressing you forward as insistently as a hand on the neck, and the big french window drawing you towards it, with its promise of freedom and fresh air. It took but a moment, however, to see that the presiding spirits of the two places were entirely different; for where Fitzroy Square is all oak and varnish and titanic chaos, this was brightness and elegance and classical order. The books were ranged with military discipline along their shelves, without a single mutineer on chair or table; there were no curiosities to be seen (unless you count a pair of graceful porcelain figures on the chimney-piece); and in place of the bulging bureau was a little writing desk, with fluted Grecian legs,
and a drawer barely deep enough to accommodate a small family of envelopes, that looked as if it might have been used by the Empress Josephine to compose billets-doux to her husband.

A slender woman of perhaps sixty-five – who contrived, somehow, to appear fashionable in a straight powder-blue dress that would have been considered
démodé
twenty years ago – rose from a scrolled chaise longue to greet us.

‘Miss Halcombe! Mr. Hartright!' she said, advancing towards us with arms outstretched. ‘You've brought the sun!' Her voice was soft and melodic, with none of the roughness of age – so that if you had heard it without seeing her, you would have imagined that it belonged to a woman thirty years younger. She glanced at the window, flung up her hands in a kind of priestly invocation, and then – in a single sweeping movement, as gracious as a dancer's – extended them towards us, taking Walter's hand in one and mine in the other, so that we stood like a chain of children preparing to play ring-a-ring-o'-roses.

‘If we stop to be polite,' she said, ‘the day will be gone. So shall we agree, this very minute, we'll take our chances, and venture out, now?'

‘Yes,' said Walter and I together, without a moment's hesitation.

She coloured and nodded with evident pleasure. ‘I confess I didn't entirely despair when I saw the fog,' she said, moving towards the door, ‘but my poor husband was quite determined we were doomed. He'll be more than glad to hear that matters have mended.' She paused, and added, as if as an afterthought: ‘You will not, I hope, object to taking the oars, Mr. Hartright? There will not be room for our man as well.'

‘No, not at all.'

‘Good.' She hunched her shoulders and rubbed her hands with excitement; and then – with a little ‘Oh!' that was as much a cry of joy as a word – disappeared into the hall.

Sometimes, when their little one has done something especially charming, you may see parents give each other a conspiratorial smile compounded of fondness and indulgence and shared delight; and it was just such a smile that Walter and I exchanged now. Then, without a word (for why speak, when your meaning has already been so perfectly conveyed?), we gravitated to the
window, and gazed out on an artful confection of paths and lawns and rose-bushes – still dotted here and there with flowers, and with the last vapours of mist clinging to them like fleece snagged on a bramble – surrounded by formal little hedges. We had been standing there, in companionable silence, for a minute or more, when Walter suddenly startled me by saying:

‘He must be blind.'

‘What!'

‘Her husband. Look.' He gestured towards the french window; and then, realizing he might make his point more strongly, opened it. ‘No. Smell.'

I did so. The air was hard and cold, and thick with the smoky residue of fog; but mingled with it, like the last echoes of a forgotten world, were the pungency of thyme, the narcotic sweetness of rosemary, and the dying breath of the roses.

‘The garden is planted for scent, not sight.'

‘That's a small enough foundation for a great edifice,' I said. ‘Perhaps they both just prefer sweet smells to brilliant spectacle.'

Walter shook his head. ‘If he could see, he would have known without being told.'

‘Known what?' I said, half-laughing (and, it must be said, entirely lost).

He raised his face to the clearing sky. ‘That the weather was better.'

‘How do you know he didn't?'

‘Because she said: “He'll be delighted to
hear
that matters have mended.”'

I considered a moment. He was right, of course: Mrs. Bennett
had
said that, and it did seem curious, now I came to reflect on it, though I had paid no attention to it at the time.

‘Very good,' I said. ‘We shall lose you to the detective police.'