by Joan Aiken
He handed Val a card and then, blushing pink all over his ingenuous face, made his escape back to the club.
Val, rather amused, glanced at the card. Lord Orville, it said, and gave the club address and a house in Somerset. Tucking it into her muff, Val was reminded for the first time of her fellow passenger on the ship; his card was in there too and she had never looked at it. She drew it out and read:
SIR MARCUS CUSACK Editor: Selkirk’s Magazine Appin Court Cockburn Street,Edinburgh
Chapter 4
When, at a late lunch next day, Val asked her table waiter at the Jersey about the Elephant and Castle Theatre, he primmed up his lips and said it was not one of the better houses.
“South o’ the river, it is, miss; not a nice neighbourhood for a young lady to visit.”
“What’s the matter with it?” asked Val drily, reflecting that if, in her researches, she confined herself to the regions thought suitable for young ladies to visit, she was not likely to get very far.
“Well, the theatre itself ain’t so bad; music-hall at the moment, miss, but not too low class—not that I’ve been to it meself; but the district ain’t far from Bermondsey, and that’s a part no young lady oughta go near.”
“What happens in Bermondsey?”
“Why, ain’t you heard o’ the Bermondsey Beast, miss?”
“Oh yes—vaguely—”
But the old waiter insisted on telling her all over again, with gloomy relish, how during the past year a series of horrific murders had been committed, almost all in the Bermondsey area, all, apparently, by the same hand; neither the Bermondsey constabulary nor the metropolitan police had been able to catch the killer.
“Yes, there were reports about it in the American papers,” Val said, hoping to stem the flood.
“Reports? There’s been broadsheets, pamphlets, all sorts o’ stuff published. All women of a bad sort, they are, what gets killed, miss; and they’re done in in an ‘orrible way, stabbed and then bits of ‘em cut off.”
“Well I won’t go to Bermondsey,” Val promised. “But I do want to get to the Elephant and Castle Theatre; there’s somebody acting there who knows my brother, and I don’t know how else to get in touch with her.”
“Well, it ain’t so far as the crow flies, miss, jest across Blackfriars Bridge; my advice to you is to get a respectable keb driver to take you there and ask him to wait for you till you’ve finished your business.”
Well tipped, the old waiter promised to procure a cab driver of sufficient respectability and departed on this errand.
Val reflected that she would soon be short of money. The income her father had left her permitted her to live in moderate comfort in New York, where her accommodation was rent free and her funds were augmented by earnings from the Inquirer. But the fare to England had made a large hole in her savings, and unfortunately Ted Towers had not been very forthcoming with promises to pay for travel articles or more information about British social structure.
“You’ve done all that before,” he pointed out. “Readers want something new. And James O’Brien is in London already, writing the same kind of thing. If you could go to France, now, or Scotland. Well, send me some pieces if you want to, and I’ll see if I can use ‘em. And, I tell you what: I’ll give you a few addresses of editors you can call on in London; maybe you can pay your way by doing stuff for them: Impressions of an Americaine in Mayfair.”
“I should think that’s been done to death too,” said Val, discouraged. However she had the addresses and had spent the latter part of yesterday afternoon and some of this morning going to see editors, with not very encouraging results. But her principal task, she still felt, must be to find Nils and Kirstie. The longer it took to locate them, the more deeply concerned she became; under all her actions and her impressions of London lay a pricking anxiety and a sense of urgency. For, surely, if all had been well with the pair, they could have found some means of getting in touch with her by now? Nils might have remembered the hotel, where Val had stayed before with her father. Or he might have arranged for a message to meet the ship when it docked?
And since he had not done that—arrived at this point, Val was suddenly overtaken by an alarming thought: suppose Nils had never returned to London? Then Kirstie and the children were on their own, perhaps completely without resources? No wonder they had been obliged to leave their house. From the various remarks about Kirstie that Nils had let fall—scrappy and incomplete though these were—Val had gathered an impression of a small, frail, timid creature, rather solitary, friendless, far from adequate to cope with such a situation.
And of course, if Nils were not back, Kirstie might very likely not know where to start looking for Val. Might not even have received her cable?
She pulled out Kirstie’s little note and read it again. “I know I can trust you . . . Be good to them—I know you will. Your loving sister.”
Now it seemed a cry for help—a cry of despair.
But was Kirstie so completely friendless and solitary? She had some family still—her parents were dead, Nils had said, but there were—were there not?—two eccentric old aunts. Of course! And that was the source of the teasing memory that had assailed her in the house agents’ office—“and when they’re in town,” Nils had said, “they’ve got this great mouldy house in Grosvenor Square.”
Grosvenor Square—no distance away. The only difficulty was that Val did not remember ever having heard Kirstie’s name before marriage. Nor had she any idea whether the aunts bore the same name. It would hardly be possible to call at every house in Grosvenor Square asking if two elderly Scottish ladies resided there whose niece, in opposition to their wishes, had married a man called Hansen?
At this moment Val’s waiter reappeared, with the intelligence that a cab was waiting to take her to the Elephant and Castle Theatre. As she followed him to the lobby she asked him, “Is there any kind of directory of London that gives the names of the people who live in each house, by streets?”
“Yes, there is, miss,” he surprised her by answering. “Kelly’s Directory will tell you. O’ course it doesn’t list the poorer parts, like Spitalfields and Whitechapel, where folk lives twenty and thirty to a house, an’ sleeps in shifts.”
“Do they really?” asked Val, appalled.
“Lor’ bless you, yes, miss. An’ there’s sailors and foreigners an’ all sorts coming and going there. But up the West End, where the nobs live, that’s all listed.”
Val resolved to consult Kelly’s Directory as soon as she returned. Indeed she would have sought out a copy straightaway if the cab had not been waiting.
The morning’s fine promise had been belied as the day declined toward dusk. A thick, blanketing, icy fog had settled over the town. Cries of street vendors and newspaper boys wailed eerily through the gloom. Nothing of the river could be seen as they crossed Blackfriars Bridge; the cab seemed suspended in a strange grey-brown cloud, palely illuminated by gas lamps on either side, with the occasional splash of oars and mournful hoots from barges down below.
Val shivered. It was not difficult to believe the most horrific tales of the Bermondsey Beast in weather like this.
“Wait here, please,” she said to the driver when they reached the Elephant and Castle Theatre. “I shan’t be any longer than I can help.”
Since she had not paid him, she felt fairly certain that he would wait, though he grumbled that it was a most awkward location; five or six roads met together here, and there was a constant jostle of vehicles, mostly market wagons. The theatre was not open for business yet, for it was still early in the evening, but Val found a side entrance and made her way determinedly down a narrow, precipitous flight of stairs. At the bottom her way was barred by an old charwoman with a bucket and broom and a severe cold.
“Nobody ain’t allowed in ‘ere,” she snuffled. “ ‘Cept on business.”
“Well
I am on business,” said Val. “And I want to see Miss Letty Pettigrew.”
She had some visiting cards printed with her name and that of the New York Inquirer; she had had the forethought to provide herself with one of these, and she passed it over.
“Ho,” said the charwoman, after she had read the card with mumbling slowness, shaping her lips silently over each syllable. “Well, you’re lucky; Miss Pettigrew ain’t hoften ‘ere this early, but she ‘appens to be re’earsing up on stage; re’earsing hof ‘er new number she is, hat presink, so I dessay you can go hup.” She gestured toward another flight of stairs which, Val found, led to the balcony. A piano was being thumped in the auditorium and on the bare dusty stage a buxom, untidy flaxen-headed girl was singing a song about how the boy she loved was up in the gallery, at the top of a pair of powerful but not very musical lungs.
“Not bad, darling,” said the pianist, after five or six verses. “Soften it up a bit on verse five, can’t you—just to show that you know the difference between piano and fortissimo, eh? Now I must be off—the landlord of the Royal Oak will murder me if I’m not there by seven.”
“Miss Pettigrew, there’s a newspaper lady ‘ere wants to speak to you,” said the charwoman appearing on stage with her mop. “She’s up there in the circle.”
“Well, tell her to come down to my dressing room,” said Miss Pettigrew impatiently and disappeared into the wings.
Val made her way downstairs again, located a door on which “Pettigrew” was scribbled in chalk, and knocked. “Come in!” sang out the same powerful voice, and she walked into a room about eight feet by six, with one gaslight, a small coal fire, a shelf, a broken-backed chair, a powerful scent of violet powder, and a cracked mirror. A heap of soiled clothes lay in the corner, more clothes hung on hooks, and the shelf was covered in stumps of wig paste.
Miss Pettigrew was briskly hooking herself into a tarlatan ballet skirt which had seen better days.
“Give us a hand to do this up at the back, dear,” she said, “I want to see if it still fits.”
“It’s a bit torn at the waist,” Val said.
“Well, it’ll have to do; can’t expect new on the Elephant’s screw.”
Seen at close quarters Miss Pettigrew’s air of a plump, good-natured, round-faced eighteen-year-old was replaced by a different impression; she looked older and harder, the lines round her eyes and at the corners of her mouth suggested that she was nearing her thirties, and a quarter inch of black was visible at the roots of the flaxen mop. A pair of shrewd eyes regarded Val.
“Well, what is it, dear? Are you really from the New York Inquirer?”
“Yes I am, but that’s not what I’m here about,” said Val frankly. “I’ve just come over from New York, I’m the sister of Nils Hansen, and I want to ask you if you know where he is?”
Letty Pettigrew had been leaning back negligently, resting her shoulder against the make-up shelf and balancing the broken chair on one of its legs; now she brought it down to earth with a crash.
“You’re Neal’s sister? Fancy that! I never knew he had any family—he always told me he was a poor lonesome orphan.”
“I’m his half-sister; I live in New York.”
“Well, well! Wonders will never cease! Now I come to think of it, you do have a look of Neal,” said Miss Pettigrew. Her manner was not unfriendly, but there was something dry about her, as if she had long since discovered that a natural good humour was more than she could afford among the sharp practices of her world.
“Have you any idea where I can find Nils?” Deciding that complete candour was the best policy here, Val added, “He invited me to come over to London and stay in his house while he and his wife went on a cruise; but now I’ve arrived I find they’ve left their house and I haven’t any new address for them.”
As the words left her mouth she suddenly remembered that Miss Pettigrew was originally to have been a member of the cruise party; perhaps it was not the most tactful thing to have said.
Miss Pettigrew took it calmly enough, however.
“Oh, the Dragonfly cruise, yes; Nuggie Reydon’s yacht.”
“I suppose they haven’t gone off on it already?” it suddenly occurred to Val to ask.
“No, last I heard the Dragonfly was at Tilbury fitting up; anyway my cousin saw Nuggie Reydon only last night, at Mere-weather’s in the Strand, with a party of swells.”
“Is that Lord Clanreydon—the owner of the yacht?” Val asked, remembering some of the things Nils had said about his well-known friend. “What does he look like? Is he a thin, pale man with very odd eyes?”
“That’s the one, dear,” Miss Pettigrew nodded. “Odd eyes is right: looks as if his Ma had been friends with a goat. Oops! Pardon me.”
“It must be the same man—I met him yesterday. But how peculiar,” Val pondered. “He heard me say I was Nils’ sister—he’s a friend of Nils’—and yet he said nothing, when he knew I was looking for him.”
But was it so peculiar? she wondered. Given the instant antipathy that had sprung up between her and the pale-faced man, why should he want to help her?
“He is a very queer cove, that Nuggie—a nasty one to cross, too. Clever—oh yes, I grant you that,” said Miss Pettigrew. “He’s a real dab at politics and speechmaking, Neal says; means to step into the G.O.M.’s shoes one o’ these days; but just the same I’d never have close dealings with him if I could help it. I was just as glad not to go on his yacht, if the truth be told. But as to where Neal is—no, dear, I’m sorry; there I can’t help you. Cross my heart, cut my throat, I’d tell you if I could. I reckon old Neal must have run into a spot of trouble, an’ he’s gone to ground till it blows over.”
“Debt, you mean?”
“Maybe. Or maybe he cut a bit too near the bone with one o’ those bits he writes for the papers. There’s been newspaper writers got a taste o’ the horsewhip, before now, when they wrote what someone didn’t care for. Maybe there’s some cove with his dander up, hunting round to give Neal a belting, an’ he thinks it best to lie low for the time.”
Val, too, had been reflecting along these lines. It did seem possible that his gossip-mongering in print had landed Nils in trouble. But—even so—wouldn’t he have found some means of getting in touch with his sister?
Perhaps not. Perhaps he would be more likely to contact Miss Pettigrew.
“If you do hear anything from him, I’d be extremely grateful if you’d let me know,” she said. “Or tell him I’m looking for him.”
“All right, dear! You’re not the only one as would like to know where Neal’s got to, I can tell you that,” Letty divulged. “There’s my auntie Liza a-looking after those two brats of his; fit to be tied, she is, acos it was to be just two or three days, cash in advance, an’ now nigh on a month has gone by, an’ no more dibs, no word, and the kids is still there.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you know that, even?” Letty had been rather absentmindedly painting her face; now she screwed her neck round and stared at Val, hare’s-foot in hand. “Neal’s kids—little Pieter and what’shername. They’re at my auntie Liza’s.”
“But why?—Where is your aunt?” Val almost stammered in her astonishment.
“Islington.”
“I don’t understand!” said Val. “I thought Kirstie—my brother’s wife—would never leave those children!”
The more she thought about this revelation, the more extraordinary it appeared to her.
“How did it happen?”
“Well,” said Letty, “I daresay you didn’t know my young cousin Mercy was housemaid at your brother’s?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I mentioned her to Neal a couple months ago an’ they took her on,” explained Letty. “Mercy wanted to go on the stage like me, but she got took bad with the smallpox, so she had to go into service instead; no stage m
anager ‘ud look at her, her face is all pocked. So she’s been obliging in Welbeck Street. Well, when Neal got back from America—this is what Mercy says, I was in a pier show at the time, Southend, cockles and mussels and mud—his wife had been poorly, an’ had to go to the country for a rest. She’d bin worried with duns, too; Mercy said none o’ the tradesmen’s bills had been paid for ever so long, and Mercy only got her wages because she was my cousin an’ I told Neal to see she did. So Neal says to Mercy, ‘We’re a-going to close the house up, do you know a decent woman as can look after the kids for a few days?’ an’ Mercy said her ma would oblige.”
“Yes, I see,” said Val, unravelling this slowly. “So Nils did come back from New York. And they left the children with your aunt and went off—when was this?”
“When I was in Southend. Three weeks ago—maybe more.”
Immediately on Nils’ return, then, Val deduced.
“And the children have been there ever since? And your aunt doesn’t know where Nils and his wife went?”
“That’s about it,” said Letty, nodding, and then carefully holding her head still as she supplied herself with a pair of very improbable black eyebrows.
“Well then—good God—something, some accident must have happened to them!” Val was more and more dismayed. “From all he told me about her, I’m sure Kirstie would never leave her children so long with a stranger.”
“There’s naught amiss with my auntie Liza.” Letty was rather affronted. “She’s brought up five children and buried seven; she’s a decent sort o’ woman—runs a respectable clean lodging house in Islington.”
“Of course,” said Val hastily. “I’m sure she does—all I meant was—here, give me her address. I’m their aunt, after all; at least I can pay her what’s owing.”
And see that the children are being properly looked after, she mentally added.