The Dark Clue (9 page)

Yours truly,

George Jones

X

Memorandum of a letter from Walter Hartright to
J. Ruskin, Esq., 14th August, 185-

1. Thank you for seeing me – very helpful.

2. Have written to Lord Egremont and Mr. Fawkes.

3. This afternoon will go to Covent Garden as you suggested (if the rain eases!)

4. If – as I feel sure it will – it would be helpful to talk further at a later date, may I accept kind offer to see me again?

XI

Letter from Walter Hartright to Laura Hartright,
15th August, 185-

Brompton Grove,
Tuesday

My dearest love,

Lord! The rain today! – it continued without let, from dawn until the middle of the afternoon. And not just a downpour, but a biblical deluge, so that you might suppose God had tired of the filth and squalor to which we have reduced His world, and sent a second Flood to wash it away. Indeed, the spectacle filled me, for an instant, with a superstitious awe; for the violence of the weather seemed of a piece with my discouraging letter from Jones (which, though it had been provoked by Thornbury, yet I could not help taking as a personal rebuff) and my pained recollections of the day before – and it was easy enough to imagine that all three had been ordained by some great force with the express purpose of thwarting me!

I soon put such unworthy thoughts behind me, however (and it was not just the fear of Marian's mockery that made me do so!), and resolved that, rather than seeing these set-backs as a deterrent, I would take them as a spur to further action. I therefore busied myself with reading and correspondence until, a little after four o'clock, the rain relented sufficiently for me to venture out of doors without being immediately soaked to the skin.

Perhaps, as it turned out, it would have been better if I had been more credulous, and stayed at home all day after all.

Maiden Lane is a narrow little street lying between Covent Garden and the Strand. I must have passed it a hundred times, on my way to and from the theatre; yet I am ashamed to own that, before today, I scarcely knew of its existence. It is, in truth, a mean, poor, dingy kind of a place – yet not entirely abject, for two or three of the houses still have vestiges of respectability, which cling to them like the shreds of some finery passed on by one of their richer neighbours in Buckingham Street or Villiers Street. This afternoon, however, it looked desolate enough: for the rain seemed to have swept down all the detritus from
Covent Garden market, and knots of children squatted in the gutters, patiently making little mountains of mud and old cabbage leaves and broken fruit. They turned and looked at me as I approached; and then, as I passed, returned without a word to their game.

Turner's father, I knew, had kept a barber's shop on the corner of Hand Court; but whether Hand Court still existed, and, if so, which of the half-dozen or so gloomy little entrances (crammed here and there between the houses at odd angles, as if a giant dentist had prised the bricks apart to accommodate them) might lead to it, I had no idea. As I looked about for someone to ask, my eye fell on a girl of twelve or thirteen, standing a little apart from the rest.

‘Good afternoon,' I said.

She stared at me, but said nothing. Her large eyes, I noticed, were brown, and flecked with amber. Her dark hair was matted, and there was a grey smudge on one cheek; but had you washed her, and dressed her in new clothes, and placed her in any drawing room in Harley Street or Berkeley Square, she would have been counted very striking, and made much of by the ladies.

‘Can you tell me', I said, ‘which is Hand Court?'

Again, she did not speak; but continued to stare, as if trying to find some meaning in my face that she had not heard in my words. At length she wiped her hand on her grubby pinafore, and jerked her cracked thumb towards a gloomy passage on the other side of the street. It was barred by an iron gate, beyond which nothing was visible save a line of discoloured wooden slats that seemed to dissolve, after a few yards, into pitch-blackness.

‘Is that a barber's shop?' I asked, pointing at the corner building.

She hesitated a moment, then at last broke her silence. ‘No, sir,' she said, in a flat, weary voice. ‘It belongs to Parkin.'

‘Parkin?'

‘The grocer, sir. ‘E keeps it for a warehouse.'

I walked to the window, wiped a film of soot from one of the little panes, and peered in. All I could see to start with was a heavy metal grille, but as my eyes adjusted to the meagre grey
light I at length made out a row of shadowy tea chests stacked against the far wall. So much for my hope of finding the shop unchanged, and perhaps even occupied by a member of the same family.

‘Does anyone live in the court?' I said, turning back to the girl.

She looked at me as if I had asked her whether the sun was warm, or water wet. ‘Why, yes, sir.' She started to laugh. “Unnerds of ‘em!'

For the life of me I could not imagine where hundreds of people would fit, unless the court were a mile long; but I contented myself with asking:

‘Anyone called Turner?'

‘Turner? No, sir, not as I knows.'

‘Any old people, who might remember how it was years ago?'

‘Well, sir …' She frowned, and her gaze flickered towards the gate. ‘There's old Jenny Watts, as I've ‘eard tell is ninety …'

There was a sudden eagerness in her tone; and I could not help noticing that her eyes followed my hand as it reached into my pocket and drew out a shilling.

‘Will you take me to her?' I said.

For answer, she glanced at the pawnbroker's across the street, then trotted to her charges playing in the gutter, and said something to the eldest girl. Then she ran back and took the money, before looking round furtively again, and muttering:

‘Only I mustn't be long.'

She opened the gate easily enough, but as we passed through, a boy of perhaps fifteen suddenly emerged from the shadows and blocked our way. Without taking his eyes from us he half-turned his head and shouted a word – I could not make it out, but it sounded like ‘khulim' – into the court behind him. All at once, in the darkness beyond, I saw figures hurrying about, and there was a frantic chink and scraping of metal, which led me to suppose that they had been gambling, and were gathering up the evidence.

‘All's well,' said the girl. “E's not' – and again I could not discern the word, but it might have been ‘esclop', or possibly “Islop'. The boy seemed no more inclined to let us pass; for he spread his feet, and folded his arms, and started, slowly and insolently, to whistle.

‘Come on, Sam,' said the girl. ‘We're just going to Jenny Watts'.'

The boy widened his eyes and grinned; and then, glancing behind him again, to see that his companions had finished their business, lazily stepped aside.

Perhaps it was their slang which put the idea in my head (for there seemed a distinctly Arabic ring to it), but my first thought as we entered the court was that I had been transported to some city of the East. The buildings, four or five storeys high, faced each other across a space so narrow that – as, supposedly, in Damascus or Baghdad – a woman on the top floor could shake hands with her neighbour opposite without fear of mishap. The eight or nine boys who stood about, watching me silently, only added to the impression; for, if there was nothing exotic about their clothes or their complexions, yet their blank sullen faces made it all too easy to imagine that they belonged to a different race entirely. Only when you looked up, and saw a strip of foul grey tinged with brown – made fouler and browner every second by smoke from the fires of those who could afford them – did you realize that this was not a cool refuge from the Mediterranean sun, but a part of our own city, which we have condemned to perpetual twilight.

‘In ‘ere, sir,' said the girl, stopping by a green door that had wrenched its hinge from the frame. She pushed it open with her shoulder, and led me into a kind of lobby which gave access to a scuffed and dirty wooden staircase. The air was cool but close, and so foetid that I had to press my handkerchief to my nose.

‘Are you not well, sir?' said the girl, clearly unaccustomed to such faint-heartedness. ‘It's a bit of a way; and ‘ard if you ain't got your wind.'

The cause of her concern was soon apparent. Treading gingerly (for the steps were bowed and shiny with use, and I feared my boots might go through them altogether), I followed her up three flights of stairs to the top of the building, where she succumbed to a terrible fit of coughing so violent that I found myself looking for blood on the hand she held to her mouth.

It was almost a minute before she had recovered enough to knock on the door. A frail voice answered (though too faintly for
me to understand what it said), and the girl pushed her face to the wood and wheezed:

‘Sarah Bateman. With a gentleman to see you.'

And this time I heard, distinctly enough:

‘Oh! Come in!'

The girl opened the door, and – how to describe what met my eyes? First, the light: a pearly grey haze, diffused through a grimy skylight, which almost dazzled me for a moment, after the gloom of the lower storeys; then an impression of space, which I soon saw came not from the great size of the room, but from its bareness. The floor was uncovered, and there was nothing on the walls, save – on the chimney – piece – an engraving of a sportsman and his dog. A single iron cooking pot, its bottom smeared with ash, hung above the lifeless fire. A small table, a crate which had been pressed into service as a dresser, and a crude bed in an alcove completed the domestic arrangements.

But what struck me most was the figure sitting in the small attic window. She was probably, in truth, little bigger than the girl; but her upright bearing, and her old-fashioned sea-green silk dress, gave her a kind of stateliness that made her appear too large for the Lilliput in which she found herself. Heaps of clothes were piled against the wall behind her; and she held before her a pair of black breeches, which she seemed to have just finished mending. Her face was the colour of cork, and wrinkled like a monkey's; and, as we entered, she turned and looked at me with light, curious eyes and an ingratiating smile.

I expected the girl to say something more, by way of introduction, but she merely stood aside; and, after a few seconds, I realized I must speak for myself.

‘Mrs. Watts?' I began.

The woman made no response, and I wondered whether she might be deaf; but the girl said:

‘Go on, she can ‘ear well enough.'

‘I believe', I said, ‘that you remember this place as it was, many years ago?'

Again she said nothing; but cocked her head, and shifted in her chair – like Florrie preparing to hear her favourite story.

‘I am interested in a family called Turner,' I continued.

She frowned; and then, after a few seconds, said: ‘Toorner?'
Her voice was strong and clear; but having no teeth, she seemed to hold the word in her lips, almost squeezing the life out of it.

‘They kept a barber's shop,' I said. ‘On the corner of the court.'

‘Oh, the
barber's
.' She nodded. ‘Yes. Where Captain Wyatt went.'

‘Captain Wyatt?' I asked.

‘To ‘ave ‘is ‘air dressed, o' course!' she said, as if I must as well know who Captain Wyatt was as why he would go to a barber.

‘Did you know them?' I said. ‘William Turner? And Mary? And their son?'

She nodded again. And then, to my surprise, she winked at me, as if she knew something remarkable about them, and was acknowledging my shrewdness in guessing it.

Even though I knew it to be foolish, the thought that I might be the first person to discover some secret about Turner's childhood (for I could not imagine Thornbury coming here, and I fancied that she would have been less conspiratorial with me if he had) set my heart beating faster.

‘Can you tell me something of them?' I said.

The woman reached down beside her chair, and brought out a little stool, which she gave to me. I sat down, and – since she said nothing more – coaxed her by going on:

‘I should especially like to hear about the boy.'

‘Ah!' She grimaced knowingly. “E was a slippy one.'

‘Slippy?'

‘Up and down, sir. In and out.'

‘Up and down the court, you mean?'

She nodded. ‘Reg'lar little fish.'

The girl giggled; and, after eyeing her uncertainly for a moment, Mrs. Watts joined in – as though she thought she had made a joke, but needed confirmation to be sure.

‘And what about the Strand?' I asked. ‘Did he go there much, to see the river?'

‘Oh, yes, sir.'

‘That's well enough, for a fish,' said the girl; and they both laughed again.

I pressed ahead doggedly, anxious lest the whole interview dissolve in merriment:

‘What, he liked the ships, did he?'

‘Ah, yes,' said Mrs. Watts. ‘The ships. They was much thicker then, before they built the new docks.'

‘And did he paint them at all, or draw them, that you remember?'

‘Ay, sir,' she said; yet I doubted that she did, for her tone was quite mechanical, and she immediately went on:

‘My father was a purlman, and plied all the vessels ‘ere-abouts; but them docks pretty much ruined him, for after they was made ‘e couldn't get near the boats, and when a seaman's ashore ‘e don't want purl, do ‘e, sir?'

‘No -' I began; but before I could say more she continued:

‘For nothing'll please ‘im but to sit in a tavern, with ‘is mates, and them women.' She laughed, and looked past me, towards the girl. ‘In't Jenny right, pet?'

‘Do you recall anything of the mother?' I said, hoping that a different approach might nudge her back to the subject.

‘Why, yes, sir,' she said, with sudden animation, ‘that I do.' She shook her head. ‘She, sir – oh, my, she was a very gale –'