by Caro Peacock
I thought about it all through a cold and rainy Sunday. The temptation was to rush to Daniel and Kennedy with what I’d found, but it would be no kindness to raise hopes only to shatter them. Also, I was still a long way from finding Marie. South of the river’s another world. To anybody who’s not a Londoner, that probably makes no sense at all. I could probably walk there in an hour – into the City, across London Bridge and I’d be there. The problem was that I had none of the mental hooks that fix you to a place. I’d spent a fair part of my life in London, but although we’d moved around a lot it had always been north of the Thames. Even notorious areas like St Giles were familiar to me. I knew, as a cat knows her territory, which streets were safe to walk down and which weren’t, and which direction to run in if threatened. Given the number of my father’s friends and acquaintances, wherever I went in the whole stretch of London between Hyde Park and St Paul’s, I was likely to meet somebody I knew. South of the river, I knew nobody.
That evening Mrs Martley and I sat at the kitchen table sharing the light of one lamp, she pasting more regal snippets into her scrapbook, me making a poor job of repairing the hem of my brown corduroy dress.
It was my oldest and least liked, but, with luck, might make me inconspicuous south of the river.
I crossed our wide and new London Bridge in thick mist on Monday morning, with steam tugs whistling to each other on the Thames and a smell of sewage hanging in the air. The slums on the far side weren’t so very much worse than those of St Giles, just a bit older and even more crowded. There seemed no plan or logic to the area. Streets came to dead ends or ran into narrow passageways half-choked with rubbish and leading to courtyards of crumbling houses, broken windows covered with boards or stuffed with bundles of rags. Children were everywhere, splashing barefoot in the gutters, ferreting among piles of muck and rubbish with naked backsides showing through the splits in their trousers. I saw one boy who couldn’t have been much older than five chasing a smaller girl, a live rat dangling by its tail from his outstretched arm. At least nobody took much notice of me, apart from a bungled attempt to pick my pocket by a man so drunk he must have been doing it from force of habit rather than with serious hope of success. A woman alone might attract stares in Pall Mall, but here most women were on their own, carrying baskets of damp washing, bringing foul-smelling buckets out from basements, or trying to interest customers in trays of dingy-looking pies while batting thieving boys away like clouds of summer mosquitoes.
I found my way without too much trouble to Black’s pawn shop. Behind the counter, a fat man wearing an old overcoat without a shirt or any other linen underneath it and smelling of stale beer, was no help.
‘Excuse me, I think a woman may have come in recently to dispose of a diamond earring,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, that will be the Empress of Russia. We get her in here all the time.’
‘This woman was French, name of Marie Duval, dark-haired and around thirty.’
‘You trying to put something on me?’
‘No, I’m just trying to find the woman. Can you remember anybody of that description?’
‘No.’
‘Or this earring?’
I gave him the sketch. He crumpled it and threw it down on the counter.
‘Does it look like I deal in diamonds? Why’re you asking me all this? A Peeler in girls’ clothes, are you?’
‘Of course not, I’m just trying …’
‘Bert.’
He said it loudly. A large bald man lumbered from the room at the back, like a bear from its den.
‘We’ve got a lady ’ere asking questions about diamonds,’ the fat man said. ‘We don’t want to disappoint her, do we? ’Ow about you show her your dog instead …’
A snarl came from behind the bald man’s legs. I looked down and saw a black mastiff with pig-like eyes and more teeth than I’d ever observed in a dog’s mouth before. I said I was sorry for troubling them and left hastily, just remembering to retrieve the sketch.
After wasting some time walking round the streets near the pawn shop, I decided that I was on the wrong track. I was sure Marie had used the pawn shop, in spite of the fat man’s hostility, but that didn’t mean she lived in the immediate area. She’d been a respectable woman, after all, and there was no reason to think she’d sunk so rapidly to the level of the slums. I walked at random, southwards and then east, looking for signs of what passed for respectability in the Borough. Some comparatively new rows of terraced brick houses looked more hopeful, though the streets in between were as muddy as the builders carts had left them, not much better than farm tracks. When I met people picking their way through the mud I wished them good morning and asked if they knew of any French women living nearby. Most were polite, some off-hand or pretending deafness, but either way the result was the same.
At length I came to a row of small shops, a baker, a cobbler, and ironmonger. My spirits rose for a moment when the ironmonger peered out from between shining columns of kettles, pans and pails dangling on strings from the ceiling and said yes, there was a Frenchwoman living at the end of the street, but on further questioning she proved to be seventy or more and had lived there for as long as he could remember.
Some time after that, throat dry and shoes clotted with mud, I put my usual question to a woman who gave the usual negative reply, but kindly and in a southern Irish accent. In what seemed like a moment of inspiration, I asked directions to the nearest Roman Catholic church. The old priest there was deaf and short-sighted but did his best to be helpful. Yes, there were some French women in his congregation, mostly from Brittany, he believed. He didn’t know the names of all of them, but could not recall a Marie Duval or any dark-haired woman in her thirties who had arrived in the area in the past few weeks. I was sure from her accent that Marie was not a Breton, so my inspiration had led me down another false trail.
The mist didn’t clear properly all day, blurring outlines of buildings and making pavements slippery. I crossed back over London Bridge in the last of the light, meeting the rag pickers and the collectors of horse dung for the market gardens and dog dung for the tanneries, trundling their carts back southwards with the spoils of the day. I’d gained less than they had. My day had been totally wasted and now there were only six days to go before Jenny would stand trial.
On Tuesday morning I wrote a note to Kennedy, saying I’d call at his lodgings in the afternoon. When I got there, Kennedy looked tired and, for once, as old as his years. That was a shock in a man usually as buoyant as a seagull on a wave.
‘We’re still a world short of anything that would convince a jury, aren’t we?’ he said when he’d heard me out. ‘We don’t even know the earrings were Columbine’s.’
‘I think I can find that out,’ I said. ‘It’s just a case of –’
‘And even if we can prove they belonged to Columbine, we can’t prove that Hardcastle stole them. She might have given them to him as a gift.’
‘Why would she do that?’
‘Don’t think I’m attacking your theory for the sake of it. You may even be right. But it’s proof we need, and we’ve so little time left.’
‘Shall you tell Daniel?’
‘I can’t see any harm in telling him. He’ll have more chance of finding Marie than finding Rainer, I suppose. At least she’s not on the other side of the world.’
‘No, but she might be on the other side of the Channel.’
I felt disappointed and cast-down, although I knew in my heart that he was right. I asked how Daniel was, and he looked sorrowful.
‘Doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep. Got punched on the jaw by a man in St Giles who stole his money and he didn’t even notice the bruises.’
‘When shall you see him?’
‘This evening at Drury Lane, I hope. They’re performing The Mountain Sylph. I don’t suppose he’ll stay to hear it, but he knows he’ll find me there.’
It was an opera by a friend of theirs. Daniel would normally have been th
ere, leading the orchestra. If he wouldn’t even stay to hear it, things were very bad indeed.
I walked straight from Kennedy’s lodgings to the Augustus, thinking there was one question I could settle at least. As I’d hoped, Bel was early; I found her with one of the other girls in the dressing room, and Pauline hadn’t arrived. Bel greeted me like an old friend and wanted to know why I hadn’t brought my guitar. I took her into a corner near a gas-light and showed her the sketch of the earring. She was doubtful.
‘I don’t think I saw her wearing anything like that. It was usually emerald or sapphire studs, to match her costumes.’
‘Still, she’d have lots, wouldn’t she?’ the other girl said, coming over to look.
I turned the conversation to Pauline. She was apparently being as disagreeable as ever and had tried to trip Bel up during her solo.
‘Only I stamped on her foot, so she won’t try that one again in a hurry. That’s the good thing about Spanish – you can stamp.’
‘Have you ever seen her with a quite tall gentleman with bad breath?’ I said.
‘Not that I remember. But if he’s been with her, bad breath won’t be the only thing he’s got.’
‘Do men leave messages for her at the theatre?’
She smiled at her reflection in the mirror.
‘Wouldn’t be much use if they did. She couldn’t read them.’
‘Why not?’
‘’Cos the stupid cow can’t read.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘Course I’m sure. She even has to get us to read out the playbills to her, ask anyone.’
On the walk home, I ran through this new chain of events in my head. A mysterious man had come inquiring at the theatre two days after Columbine’s death. Five days later the man with bad breath had met Pauline in the Rotunda, obviously by appointment, and tried to strangle her. The newspaper on the floor tied it to Columbine’s murder. Until then, I hadn’t known which of them had brought the paper, but since Pauline couldn’t read, it was almost certainly the man. Was there something in the report and his investigations at the theatre that made him think Pauline was guilty? If so, why had he decided to be Columbine’s avenger? Was he an old lover, a long-lost relation? We needed to find him but, without knowing his name, where he came from or even having a reliable description of him, it was even more hopeless than finding Marie. I’d loved London and its crowds all my life, but that evening I felt like howling with rage at the sheer size and complexity of it.
Then it struck me that howling was no use. I did, after all, know one thing about the man with bad breath. I knew the newspaper he read. I turned back towards the offices of the Morning Chronicle. The presses were thundering and the bored young clerk at the counter told me there was just time to insert an advertisement in their columns for the next day if I hurried up about it. I borrowed his pen and inkstand and wrote.
If the gentleman whose business was interrupted in the Rotunda on Monday last would communicate with Mr Lane at Abel Yard, off Adams Mews, Mayfair, he might learn something to his advantage.
I paid the fee and walked out quickly, in case caution might make me twitch it out of the clerk’s hand.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When I rode out with Amos next morning a sharp wind from the east made our horses fidgety but the sky was clear and he had news for me. He’d discovered what public house Hardcastle’s former groom favoured and was in high hopes of meeting him that evening. We were back at Abel Yard and Amos had just slid off his cob to help me dismount when I saw a familiar figure approaching. He was on foot this time, soberly dressed in a black overcoat and top hat, face pinched from the cold wind. I stayed in the saddle, taking an unfair advantage I supposed.
‘Good morning, Mr Disraeli. I hope your mare’s not lame.’
‘She’s cast a shoe.’
He seemed ill at ease in such unfashionable surroundings. The coach repairer’s terrier sniffed at his polished boots and Mr Colley chose that moment to come past with one of his cows – Marigold, I think – forcing us all to move aside.
‘Miss Lane, there’s a good friend of mine who would like to meet you. My friend believes your advice might be helpful.’
‘Is it anything to do with Columbine?’
For a man so ready with words, he took his time about answering. The ‘yes’ when it came was reluctant.
‘Who is she?’
‘She? I didn’t say so.’
‘No, but you went out of your way not to.’
‘She, then. At present, I can’t say.’
‘So she wants my help and I’m not even to know her name?’
‘My commission was to see if you’d agree to meet her. Will you?’
‘You’re puzzling me, Mr Disraeli. You know my interest in all this, but I’m not entirely sure about yours. You seem to take your friends’ concerns very much to heart.’
‘Favours to friends are a useful currency, don’t you find?’
He smiled when he said it, but it wasn’t a kind smile. Was he reminding me of a favour from him to me?
‘Very well, I’ll see your friend, but only on condition that it won’t damage the interests of Jenny Jarvis. When and where?’
‘I’ll leave her to communicate with you directly. I take it letters will find you at this address?’
I could see his nostrils twitching at the smell of the cess pit. Our landlord was in a constant state of warfare with other house owners about whose turn it was to pay to have it emptied.
‘Letters find me, yes.’
He raised his hat a few inches and turned away. Amos waited until he’d gone a few steps before shouting after him.
‘Mr Disraeli.’
He spun round, unused to being addressed in Amos’s robust Herefordshire accent.
‘What?’
‘That mar’’s a bit on the lungeous side when they’re shoeing her. If I was you, I’d get in there sharpish and knock ‘em down twenty guineas.’
Disraeli looked astonished, but had the grace to smile.
‘Thank you. I’ll think about that.’
He walked away. Amos helped me dismount.
‘You’ve just saved him twenty guineas, ’ I said.
‘Favours to friends are a useful currency, don’t you find?’ He said it in a fair imitation of Disraeli, then added in his own voice, ‘But he’s not a bad sort of a chap, take him all round.’
That certificate of character, more than anything else, made me decide to go on trusting Disraeli – for a while at least.
‘Who’s this lady You’re seeing?’ Amos said.
He never pretended not to have overheard. It saved a lot of time in explanations.
‘I don’t know, but I might have a guess.’
‘What?’
‘Maybe it’s the same lady you’ll be asking the groom about tonight.’
‘The one Hardcastle’s going to marry?’
‘it’s possible, isn’t it? Maybe she’s heard things about him she doesn’t like and wants to know more.’
He whistled.
‘If it’s that, you tell her to wait for a better horse at the next market. See you Friday morning, then.’
That afternoon, two painters arrived with a hand cart, slopping blobs of whitewash on the cobbles. It turned out that they’d been sent by our landlord to paint the rooms that had been Old Slippers’, ready for the gentleman tenant he hoped to find for all our rooms together. Mrs Martley had been entrusted with the key and brought it down to the yard for them. As the men sorted out brushes and old sheets, she looked wistfully up the staircase to the empty rooms.
‘Shall we?’
I nodded and followed her up two flights of bare wooden stairs. At the top of the stairs a cobweb-filmed skylight filtered the dusk of the March afternoon. On our left an open door showed a small room with an empty tea chest, a fireplace just wide enough for one shovelful of coal and a window overlooking the courtyard. I pushed open the door on the right and we stepped i
nto a totally bare room.
‘Oh, it’s beautiful,’ I said, caught by surprise.
Mrs Martley gave me an odd look because in any normal sense, it wasn’t. The white paint on the walls had flaked off, making a scurf-like margin round the floor. The ceiling was bulging down in one corner and the place already smelled of damp and mice, as if it had been uninhabited for weeks rather than just a few days. But all that was nothing compared to the good-sized window looking out over a line of rooftops, steep and uneven as an Alpine mountain range, and a glimpse of treetops in the park with rooks circling. Far away to the west a gold bar of sunset edged the grey clouds.
‘I could live here,’ I thought. ‘I’d have my clothes trunk in the corner where the ceiling’s bulging, a table beside the window with my books and writing things and a white and blue china bowl full of apples for Rancie.’
I’d buy the glass mermaid from the pawn shop and hang her in the window, where she’d catch the sun and scatter rainbows over the white walls. On summer mornings, I’d get up and put on my riding clothes, without worrying whether I was disturbing Mrs Martley, pick up an apple from the bowl and run down my own staircase to meet Amos Legge.
‘it’s a pity,’ Mrs Martley said, and heaved a sigh that seemed to come up from her shoe soles. I guessed she had her own dreams, as unlikely as mine. The five shillings extra a week just might be managed if I worked hard and found more Vickylings to teach, and even the fifty pound deposit would be possible once I’d sold Rancie. But with Rancie gone, there’d be no more morning rides with Amos Legge and the sight of the treetops in the park would be a torment rather than a pleasure.
‘We were nicely settled here,’ Mrs Martley sighed.
In a few weeks Jenny might be dead and Daniel driven half mad by it. I couldn’t expect to lean on him any more. The bright bar of sunset had disappeared already and the rooks had gone. I turned away from the window.