by Alex Scarrow
‘I see.’
He wanted desperately to look around, behind himself, to check and see if Mr Jones had brought with him some hired knuckle-heads. But he knew he needed to remain calm, remain in control, remain businesslike.
‘If you were to show this particular piece of jewellery to me, Mr Tolly, I might actually believe you.’
This is it, Bill, mate . . . this is where you go very careful.
‘See, I’d be a right fuckin’ fool if I brought it along ’ere tonight, dontcha think, Mr Jones? A right fool.’ He glanced around now. ‘I’d say you mighta brought a chiv man or two along tonight.’
The gentleman stared at him silently. In the failing twilight, the faint dark patches that hinted at eyes, nose and mouth had merged into one shape now beneath the brim of his hat. ‘You are playing an exceedingly dangerous game, Mr Tolly. I would strongly advise against that.’
‘I ain’t playing a game. This is a business deal, Mr Jones. I’m a business man.’
The gentleman wheezed a soft, sputtering laugh. ‘No, you are not. You’re a common crook who believes he’s stumbled across something of value.’
‘But, see, I have, ain’t I?’
‘You have a trinket that might – at worst – cause embarrassment to an associate of mine. That is all. You go and fetch it, bring it back here and, if you are quick about it, I shall be prepared to give you another hundred pounds for the errand and not a penny more.’
Bill shook his head. ‘Nah, that’s all right. It’s safe with me bizness partner. Think it can stay where it is for now.’
‘Partner?’ The word filled the space between them. ‘Now, you assured me you work alone, Tolly.’
Bill realised the mention of someone else involved in this deal was deeply unsettling for Mr Jones. Just as unsettling, in fact, as hearing Mr Jones refer to ‘we’.
‘So? I ’ad a little ’elp to do the job. A coupla ’elpers to be sure.’
‘And they . . .’ A long pause. A very long pause. ‘And they know about this trinket?’
‘Oh, yes they do, Mr Jones. But don’t worry, they won’t flap their mouths. Not when there’s some decent money to be ’ad out of you.’
Bill realised he was trembling; not out of fear, but sheer damned excitement. He could hear an unsteady warble in this gentleman’s voice and knew this was going perfectly. Far better than he could ever have imagined.
He’s fucking scared shitless.
‘Please understand, Mr Tolly, that we . . . uh . . . we could find you very easily. And if we decided to do that, you and your colleagues would end up in a very unfortunate way.’ The gentleman took a step closer, but Bill stood his ground.
Brass it out, Bill. Show ’im who’s boss here.
If Mr Jones had brought along with him a pair of knuckle-heads, then now would be the time he’d beckon them forward, he figured.
‘Mr Jones, you ain’t gonna find this nice little piece and the picture in it, not if you do anything to me. It’s safe with a friend of mine. Anythin’ funny ’appens to me and it’ll get took to one of ’em penny papers.’
Mr Jones stopped where he was. ‘It would be desirable to have this item back without any more blood being shed.’ He waved a hand. ‘The money is inconsequential. But discretion, you understand; discretion – that’s something we value far more.’
‘I can un’erstan’ that, Mr Jones. Summin’ like this in the paper would be very embarrassin’.’
‘Hmmm,’ replied the gentleman. He turned to watch the last of the crimson stain disappear from the twilight sky. Silent consideration of the way ahead that lasted long enough for Bill to prompt him.
‘So . . . Mr Jones?’
‘So, it seems, then, our little matter is not going to be concluded tonight. You and I will require a second meeting. I don’t have that sum of money on me right now.’
Bill shrugged. ‘Of course not. Didn’t expect yer to. But I’ll ’ave me hundred pounds now, Mr Jones, if that’s all the same to yer. And the rest when yer got it.’
‘I shall need to make some . . . uh . . . arrangements first.’
‘Do what you ’ave to, but you don’t want to keep me waitin’ too long, Mr Jones. I tend to get impatient.’
CHAPTER 9
21st September 1888, Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, London
‘Is he awake yet this morning?’
The ward matron turned at the sound of her soft voice. ‘Ahh, here she is again! Good morning, Mary,’ she said with a polite nod. ‘Yes, he’s up and about. Had a cup of tea and making quite a nuisance of himself so far this morning.’
‘Oh, good,’ Mary replied cheerfully, striding along the polished floor of the hallway towards the nurses’ station, a bunch of fresh daffodils under one arm and a basket of fruit from the market in the other.
‘Good lord! Are those grapes! Goodness, lucky Mr Argyll!’
Mary smiled as she passed by. ‘Yes, I heard tell they were good for a weak constitution,’ she replied, self-conscious that she was over-egging her ‘h’s.
Over the last week, she’d been working so hard on that, and other things. Listening closely to the way more refined ladies than her spoke to each other. This morning, stopping at Covent Garden on the way in to Saint Bart’s, she’d discreetly followed two well-to-do young ladies all the way around the market, listening to the sounds of the words coming out of their mouths and the sorts of things they talked about. Mary had all new clothes now. Nice clothes, better than she’d ever worn before. And walking around the market, if she kept her mouth shut and just practised the measured little steps of a properly finished lady, if she didn’t swing her arms like she was used to doing but kept them occupied holding a small purse, she could almost pass as one of them.
Almost?
No, not almost – she did. Men – the nice gentlemen – tipped their hats, offered polite smiles and stepped aside for her. And the tradesmen and stall owners! Good lord, there were even faces amongst them she recognised, men who would have crudely wolf-whistled at her only a few days ago, or slapped her behind playfully or even grabbed at her cleavage. Now they doffed their caps politely and with exaggerated and misplaced ‘h’s enquired hhhhall hhhabout ’er ’ealth.
Mary bustled into the ward and instantly spotted John Argyll sitting in striped hospital issue pyjamas, a dressing gown and slippers on his bed, frowning at the morning paper. The dressing on his head had been replaced a couple of times, on each occasion with somewhat less wadding, so that it looked not quite so comical now.
‘Good morning, John!’
Argyll looked up at her, his tanned face splitting instantly into a broad smile. ‘Am I happy to see you. This damnable word right here is driving me crazy. What is it?’ he said, pointing to the column of text for an article about domestic sanitation. She leant over his shoulder and narrowed her eyes at the word his finger was hovering over.
‘Basin.’
He squinted and leant closer. ‘Good grief, I think you’re right!’ He shook his head, confounded and annoyed with himself. ‘I kept looking at it, spelling all the letters out correctly, and yet just couldn’t make sense of the damned thing!’
‘You shouldn’t fret about it, John. You know what Doctor Hart said: that there might be things that don’t make sense to you at first. But they’ll come back to you.’
He nodded. ‘I know, I know, but it’s the fact I can read all the other words. It’s just so damned irritating. Doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Your damaged mind will get better.’ She squeezed his shoulder affectionately. ‘It will, love.’
But, please, not too quick.
She sat down in the visitor’s chair by his side. ‘You’re remembering things better now, aren’t you? What about the things we talked about yesterday evening? Can you remember?’
They’d been playing cards – cribbage – and speaking in hushed tones so as not to disturb the others in the ward. Argyll had been asking about them, what they had meant to each other bef
ore the incident, how they met, where they lived, what he did for work. A million and one questions that Mary had managed to answer cautiously. The surgeon, Dr Hart, had suggested it best that, at first, she should not tell him the answers to too many things; that she should let him ask the questions, then try and reach for the answers himself. It might be better for his healing brain to be worked rather than spoon-fed. And at the very least, if he started to learn things about himself that he hadn’t been told, then it would be a sign that some degree of his amnesia was clearing up.
He nodded proudly. ‘I remember everything from yesterday.’ He laughed. ‘I remember you cheated at crib.’
Her jaw dropped in mock horror. ‘John! How could you say such an awful bad thing? Me? A cheat!’ Her horror dissolved into a polite giggle as she squeezed his hand.
‘I remember how little I know about us,’ he said after a while. Sadly. ‘I wish I could remember how we first met, how we felt . . .’ He shook his head.
‘The doctor said I have to let you see if you can find those things yourself. I’m sorry.’
He stroked his chin, thick with bristles, much in need of a wet shave. ‘But you, Mary, you have it all in your memory. You remember us.’ He looked at her. ‘And . . . and did you . . . ?’
Her cheeks flushed slightly. ‘Did I love you?’
He looked desperately hopeful. Puppy-dog pitiful in his pyjamas.
‘Yes . . . yes, I do, John.’
Relief spilled across him. An odd expression on such a mature face. Mary supposed the man must be in his mid- to late-thirties; crow’s feet arcing down across sun-browned skin that she imagined had seen a lifetime of wonderful and exciting things in America. And yet there was the smile of an innocent child on his craggy cheeks.
‘I’d be so lost without you.’ He looked around at some of the other men, old and young, in the row of beds opposite. Some of them had yet to receive a single visitor, as if they were entirely alone in this world. Unmissed. Unnoticed. But he was lucky. He had this wonderful young lady. A breath of fresh air, a spoon of sugar in a bowl of oats. Her chirruping voice lightened the oppressive gloom of the ward, which was otherwise a sea of sighing breaths, moans and sleep-talking threats and curses.
‘Doctor Hart said I may not need to remain in the hospital much longer. A few more days at most to make sure the swelling has gone down and to remove the stitches in my side.’
‘That’s . . .’ Mary smiled. ‘That’s wonderful news.’ Her stomach flipped. So distracted with her daily visits here, dodging the other girls in her lodging house and their inevitable probing questions as to what the devil she’s been up to these last few days, and pretending to be someone she wasn’t, she’d given little thought as to what happened next. She wasn’t even sure why she’d been coming to visit John this last week. Surely the prudent thing to do would be to run. Get out of London now, before this sham fell apart. But she found herself coming here, dutifully, every morning. What was that? Guilt? Concern for this lost soul? Something else?
‘I can’t wait to come home,’ he said quietly. He tossed a conspiratorial nod at the old man in the next bed. ‘The chap over there keeps breaking wind during the night.’ His face wrinkled. ‘Most awful bloody smell.’
Mary smiled. But her mind was racing. Home. The moment he checked out of the hospital and they asked for a contact address, this little sham was all going to be over.
John squeezed her hand. ‘Can’t wait to come home.’
‘Yes.’ She leant close to him, kissed him tenderly on the cheek. ‘I’m going to take good care of you, my love.’
CHAPTER 10
22nd September 1888, Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, London
‘Provided there are no problems, no complications, I would say he could be discharged by the end of this week. But you must understand: Mr Argyll suffered a severe blow to his head. Beneath the skull, a degree of haemorrhaging occurred which—’
‘Hemmer . . . ?’
‘Internal bleeding, Miss Kelly. The blood wasn’t able to find a way out and was thus causing a build up of pressure inside his cranium . . . his skull. It’s this pressure that I believe has caused significant damage to his brain.’
Dr Hart could see the poor young woman was hoping to hear a more positive prognosis than he was giving; an assurance that the man’s memories would all come flooding back fully-formed in one moment of blinding epiphany. But the truth was there were absolutely no assurances he could make. He’d seen enough cracked and caved in skulls to know that the damaged brain behaved in no predictable way. A man might receive a tap on the head and be reduced to a vegetative state for the rest of his life; another might be bludgeoned until his head looked like a misshapen potato and yet still walk away proudly sporting stitches that would one day make a scar worth boasting about.
‘I’m sorry, my dear, there really is no knowing for sure how much of a recovery he will make. Or how soon. If, indeed, ever.’
‘But will he be able to walk properly again?’
John could manage a stilted shuffle. His right leg seemed to operate perfectly normally, but his left appeared to exhibit signs of partial paralysis.
Dr Hart pressed his lips together. ‘My hope is that it will get better as his mind knits the damage that has been done. From my experience, the harder he works to recover, the better the chances are for him that he will make a full recovery, in time.’
She sucked in a breath. ‘Then I’ll have to be a hard taskmaster,’ she said with a firm nod.
Dr Hart smiled encouragement. ‘That’s the idea.’
He looked out of the window of his consultation room at the ward across the passageway. He could see Mr Argyll playing chess with another patient. ‘So he’s an American? Is that right? Is he visiting London? A business trip perhaps?’ The exotic twang of the former colonies was certainly somewhere there in the calm, deep drawl of his voice.
‘Uh . . . yes, that’s right. Yes, he is American.’
‘How did you both meet?’
Mary Kelly’s cheeks prickled with crimson. She looked flustered. ‘I . . . well . . . it’s . . .’
Dr Hart waved his hand. ‘I’m sorry. Very nosy of me.’
‘No, honestly, that’s all right. We met in . . . Covent Garden.’
He smiled. ‘I see.’
He suspected Matron was right about one thing: Kelly was a working girl. No doubt about it. It was in her diction. So careful and deliberate in the way she talked. But every now and then she let slip and missed a consonant, or dropped an ‘h’. A girl quite obviously working very hard to disguise it.
Matron’s instinct at the beginning of the week was to suspect this girl was on the make somehow. Some scoundrel looking to hoodwink the unfortunate chap. She’d told him about a story she’d once read in one of the penny papers about a scurrilous housemaid who’d hoodwinked her way into the will of a senile old millionaire, convinced him he had no living relations or heirs, that he was entirely alone. With a cautionary cocking of an eyebrow, she’d alluded that perhaps ‘that girl who keeps visiting our Mr Argyll’ might be up to similar tricks. But then there was no one quite so cold-hearted and cynical as Matron. And even she was now prepared to admit that perhaps she’d probably misjudged the poor girl.
Dr Hart liked to think he had a fairly good measure of people; after all, he met and fixed up all manner of people here who drifted into St Bartholomew’s at every hour of night and day. And Mary Kelly, to his eye, looked very much like a young woman hopelessly in love.
And why not? It irked him so that his parents’ stuffy generation still invested so much stock in a person’s class. That a person should be condemned to never better their station because of an accident of birth, an accident of accent and diction. What with Mr Argyll being an American, he was certain something as old-fashioned and uniquely English as class meant absolutely nothing to the man. Dr Hart sometimes rather fancied he’d be more at home in a country like America, where a person was a measure of what they a
ctually achieved rather than merely being the sum of their manners and bearing.
An American gentleman and a working-class English girl in love? Good grief, the world was full of far more unlikely things.
‘I suspect you will make a first-rate nurse for our patient when you get him home, Miss Kelly. First-rate.’
‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘I’ll have him back to his old self, so I will.’
‘I’m certain you will. He seems a very resilient gentleman, does Mr Argyll. And, I suspect he’s a jolly lucky man to have someone like you to care for him.’
Mary sipped tea from the cup. Fine china and a slender handle that allowed only a couple of fingers through its eye. She spread her little finger out, like the other ladies in the tea shop were doing.
What now?
Dr Hart thought John was almost ready to be discharged from the ward. He’d even asked her if Mr Argyll’s home had suitable access for a wheelchair, as initially he would need one.
She’d nodded, but in actual fact her mind had been racing. The lodging house? Her room? No. She couldn’t take John back to that squalor. Even his befuddled mind would instantly work out that they couldn’t possibly have been living together there.
A hotel? She had the money.
No, that wouldn’t do. She’d let slip to John they had a home together. A foolish bloody slip. But there it was; she’d said ‘home’. She had only two or three days left now and then they were going to discover there was no home, that she was an imposter, a charlatan.
I should run. Right now.
She toyed with that idea as she carefully forked at the cake on the plate before her. She could take that money of John’s and disappear. It was back home, under her bed. She could go back, grab it and run away. Another city, another country, another life. But she dismissed the notion without even being sure why.
Yes . . . why?
She fished for an answer to that question. And the answer came back surprisingly easily.
‘He needs me,’ she uttered softly, then immediately scoffed at her own fuzzy-headed sentimentality.