Death of a Dancer

by Caro Peacock

  ‘We could advertise in the papers for Marie and offer a reward,’ Daniel suggested. ‘And I might ask Barnaby Blake if he has any ideas. He knows his way around.’

  These didn’t seem particularly promising lines of inquiry, given that Marie was apparently reluctant to be found, but Kennedy and I were so relieved he was suggesting something with no risk to himself for once that we encouraged him.

  When we drew up at Kennedy’s lodgings, the Irishman looked at me, concerned.

  ‘You’re sure you Don’t mind taking the gig on yourself?’ he said, putting some money for the fare into my hand.

  I shook my head. I understood all too well why he could not escort me to my door. He didn’t dare let Daniel out of his sight.

  Mrs Martley was sitting at the table, pasting up her scrapbook by lamplight. A lamb hot-pot was warming by the fire, filling the room with the smell of gravy and onions. She took one look at my face and asked what was wrong now. I told her some of it as she fussed around, stoking up the fire, sitting over me while I ate as if I were an invalid. Now and again she sighed, ‘That poor Mr Suter.’ But mercifully she didn’t put into words what was obviously in her mind: that if I’d married Daniel months ago and taken care of him like a sensible woman instead of going gallivanting around, none of this would have happened.

  I scribbled a note for Amos saying that I wouldn’t ride for the next two mornings, fixed it to the door downstairs and lay awake most of the night, hearing the workhouse clock striking the hours from across the graveyard.

  Tuesday turned out to be one of those days that never bothered to get properly light, the sky low and drizzling, people shuffling along in waterproofs or driving in closed carriages with drivers hunched on the boxes under their capes. As I walked past Lady Silverdale’s house on my way to give a lesson, I was greatly tempted to ring the bell. I could picture those clear eyes on me as I asked: Did you know your son had married Columbine, Lady Silverdale? Did you decide to do something about it? She wouldn’t have been able to predict that. Or would she? Her powerful, unconventional mind might be capable of anything.

  What if She’d found out about the secret marriage? Not an impossible supposition, given her son’s lack of discretion. Lady Silverdale seemed the type to take immediate and decisive action. Having the marriage annulled was one option, but it would have made the family a laughing stock, which was exactly what she wanted to avoid. Disposing of Columbine would have been much more effective. But how would she go about it? This wasn’t Renaissance Italy, where aristocrats had trained poisoners on their staff for emergencies. She’d have had to find somebody to do the deed for her. Except, wouldn’t it be simpler and safer to do it herself? Her nocturnal way of life and her husband’s absence in the country would make it easier for her to come and go unobserved than most ladies of her class. The obedient daughter would probably not even look up from her notes if Mother chose to absent herself for an hour. It need take no more than that. I imagined her tripping downstairs, wrapped in a cloak with a hood over her cropped head, signalling a cab. For greater safety, she might even decide to walk. At the theatre, she could slip in unnoticed at the stage door and …

  And there it collapsed. She couldn’t rely on trotting in with a pocketful of thornapple seeds and just happening to find Columbine’s syllabub bowl standing ready. Somebody inside the theatre would need to have helped her. Perhaps She’d had somebody spying for her at the Augustus; it might have struck her as a sensible way of keeping check on her son’s activities. If so, did her spy carry out the poisoning on her orders, or simply give her the information she needed?

  The questions went round and round in my head the entire time I was teaching, and I’m afraid my pupil – quite a promising harpsichord player – for once did not receive the attention she deserved.

  As soon as the lesson was over I walked to the Augustus, hoping to put some flesh on my skeleton of a theory. I’d been going about things the wrong way, considering everyone at the theatre as either a possible killer or a witness. That approach had got nowhere because none of them seemed to have a reason for killing her. They might not have liked her, but as their leading attraction she brought in the audiences that paid their wages. And so far, all my inquiries had failed to produce a single witness. So I’d start again. Who amongst the artistes or backstage staff might have been a spy for Lady Silverdale? Somebody who needed money, probably; poorly paid and with an irregular income. Unfortunately, that covered just about everybody at the Augustus.

  I arrived to find Billy in his room just inside the door, re-arranging brooms and buckets and trying to look busy. He gave me a nod, visibly trying to remember my name and failing. I asked him if he’d seen Mr Hardcastle recently.

  ‘No, not since …’

  ‘Since the evening Columbine was murdered?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did you ever see his mother in the theatre?’

  ‘His mother?’

  ‘Lady Silverdale.’

  No guilty start; he wasn’t even interested. I’d no great hopes of Billy because he seemed too stupid to be anybody’s spy, but I hoped to find more success along the corridor, in the dancers’ room. Bel was there with two other girls. There was no sign of Pauline or Jane Wood.

  The girls seemed subdued. I asked them if they knew why Jane Wood had decided at the last minute to give evidence.

  ‘We didn’t know she was going to,’ Bel said.

  ‘Did she show up for the performance as usual last night?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bel said. ‘We wouldn’t speak to her.’

  ‘I suppose she didn’t have no choice,’ one of the other girls muttered.

  ‘Do you know how the police found out about her seeing Jenny in the dressing room?’

  All three of them shook their heads.

  ‘Had she said anything to you about it?’

  More headshakes.

  ‘When are they going to hang Jenny?’ Bel said, not looking at me.

  ‘In two weeks, perhaps.’

  ‘it’s wrong, making them wait like this!’ Bel practically shouted it. ‘If the judge says people are guilty, they should take them straight out and hang them, not make them wait. Can you imagine, waking up every morning and thinking …?’

  Tears flooded her eyes. One of the other girls ran over and put an arm round her.

  ‘She liked Jenny,’ the girl explained.

  I looked around for something to dry Bel’s tears and spotted what looked like a piece of clean sheet on a chair. But when I picked it up there were brown smears down the middle if it.

  ‘That Don’t matter,’ one of the girls said. ‘it’s only the brown stuff we put on our faces to look Spanish.’

  I passed the cloth to Bel and she dabbed her eyes.

  ‘Bel – all of you – if you can think of the slightest thing that would help Jenny, please tell me.’

  But Bel just went on sobbing while the girl rocked her in her arms.

  My next stop was the Surrey family’s dressing room. Mrs Surrey was sitting in her petticoats at the table, adding up columns of figures. I guessed she was doing the family accounts and, from her frown, they were proving problematic. The girl, Susanna, dressed in doublet, hose and a hooded cape, had arranged herself picturesquely on a pile of moth-eaten cushions, fair hair flopping over the volume of Shakespeare she was studying. Her brother David was trying to get the caretaker’s cat to take an interest in a woollen bobble on a string, while their father carried out repairs to the strapping for Richard’s hump with needle and cotton, deft as a sailor stitching a sail.

  I asked Mr and Mrs Surrey if they knew why Jane Wood had decided to give evidence against Jenny.

  ‘we’ve been wondering about that ourselves,’ Honoria Surrey said. ‘Perhaps her conscience was troubling her.’

  She spoke softly and I guessed that they were reluctant to discuss the matter in front of the children, though from Susanna’s expression she wasn’t missing a word.

  ‘D
id you ever notice anybody in the cast or backstage taking a particular interest in Columbine?’ I asked them.

  ‘Everybody, I suppose,’ Surrey said. ‘Theatre people love to gossip, and she was rather a phenomenon in her way.’

  ‘Putting it bluntly, can you think of anybody who might have been taking money to spy on her?’

  They looked at each other and shook their heads.

  ‘it’s not impossible,’ Surrey said. ‘But we’ve not noticed anything, and we spend more time here than most.’

  The cat, refusing to take an interest in the woollen bobble, was pawing at one of the tapes trailing from Richard’s hump. Robert Surrey twitched it away from him.

  ‘David, will you please take that cat back to Billy. I Don’t want it undoing all my work.’

  With the rueful expression of a boy who is always in the wrong, David scooped up the cat. It settled purring in his arms and I opened the door for them.

  ‘What’s all this about Columbine again?’ he muttered to me as they went out.

  I shut the door and followed them into the corridor, remembering how I’d seen him sobbing on the night of Columbine’s death. In the unaccountable way of boys, he must have taken a liking to Columbine and might still be grieving. I was sorry for him and thought he should be allowed to talk about her if he wanted. He took a few steps along the corridor and spoke over his shoulder.

  ‘Why are they all making so much fuss about her? She was a horrible woman. I’m glad Jenny killed her.’

  ‘What? I thought you liked her.’

  I was so surprised, I let the remark about Jenny pass. He spun round, a scowl on his face like his father’s when about to strangle his mother on stage.

  ‘Like her? Like her? I detested her.’

  No muttering this time. He meant it.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She called my mother a nobody, just because mother wouldn’t stand aside for her in the corridor. Actors are more important than dancers, everybody knows that.

  My mother had a right to go first.’ A dowager duchess arguing the order of precedence at a state banquet couldn’t have been more vehement. ‘She was a she-wolf, a bottled spider.’

  He might not become the great Shakespearean actor of his generation, but his work had given him a good line in invective. I responded in kind.

  ‘The tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal.’

  ‘Eh?’

  He obviously hadn’t encountered Twelfth Night yet.

  ‘I mean, you’ve changed your mind. You were very upset on the night she died.’

  I thought of him standing there with the cat clutched to his chest for comfort, much as now.

  ‘It wasn’t her I was upset about. It was Geoffrey.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The cat. I thought he was going to die too.’

  His voice had dropped back to a normal boyish mutter. I looked down at the cat. It stared complacently back at me.

  ‘But there was nothing wrong with the cat, was there?’

  ‘I thought he’d be poisoned too, because he’d eaten her syllabub.’

  ‘I think We’d better go back to the start on this,’ I said.

  I put my arm round his shoulder and the three of us went along the corridor to the caretaker’s room. Luckily, there was no sign of Billy. David put the cat gently on the floor and it buried its face in the feed bowl. I sat on Billy’s stool.

  ‘I’m not going to get into trouble, am I?’ David said.

  ‘No, but this might matter very much. Did you see the cat eating from the bowl in Columbine’s dressing room the night she died?’

  ‘Not from the bowl, no. From the saucer, like he usually did.’

  ‘Usually. You mean he did it more than once?’

  ‘Yes. Billy knew about it too. It was a joke between us, you see. But it was my idea, not Billy’s.’

  He told the story coherently, once he got started. After the perceived insult to his to his mother, he’d watched Columbine closely at rehearsal and been amused by all the ceremony around her, particularly the ritual of the syllabub. He and Billy took to referring to Columbine as the cat that got the cream. Then David decided that Geoffrey should have his share of the cream as well.

  ‘It started because Susanna dared me to go in Columbine’s room.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘we’re always giving each other dares, my sister and me. It was easy. I knew when Columbine went on stage, and Marie would be waiting in the wings with a shawl to put round her when she came off, so the dressing room was empty.’

  ‘Was this the night she died?’

  ‘Not the first time, no. The first time was when we were rehearsing. I thought while I was in there I’d get some of the syllabub, for Geoffrey. So I went in with a saucer and a spoon, got some of the syllabub – but not enough so that they’d notice – and gave it to Geoffrey. He liked it.’

  ‘I’m sure he did. How many times did you do that?’

  ‘Twice when she was rehearsing, then the last night.’

  ‘Did anybody but you and Billy know about it?’

  ‘Susanna knew.’

  ‘Nobody apart from that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And on the night Columbine died?’

  ‘Just the same. I went in and got some of the syllabub while the first ballet was on.’

  ‘Did anybody see you?’

  ‘No. I nearly got caught, though.’

  ‘Nearly?’

  ‘When I was in there, I could hear the audience clapping and cheering at the end of the ballet, so I knew Columbine and the maid would be back in any moment.’

  ‘Did you notice anything different about the syllabub, like black flecks in it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the cat ate it as usual?’

  ‘Straight down.’

  Geoffrey looked up from the feed bowl, licking his lips.

  ‘Was he sick at all?’

  ‘No. I kept him with me all the time. I was so afraid he’d die any minute. Only, he didn’t.’

  ‘When you went into Columbine’s dressing room, was anybody else there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see anybody hanging around outside in the corridor?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘David, where are you?’

  His father’s voice from their dressing room.

  ‘I must go,’ David said.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Before we left, he bent to stroke the cat. I’d seldom seem a healthier feline specimen.

  ‘Are you going to tell my father and mother about this?’ he asked as we went along the corridor.

  ‘I won’t, but I think you should. You didn’t do anything very wrong, after all, and this may be important.’

  ‘For Jenny Jarvis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I Don’t know yet.’

  I wasn’t keeping anything from him. What he’d told me had turned the whole case so completely upside down that I might as well have been standing on my head, like one of the boy acrobats.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A dead rat and a live cat. When the police fed a sample of syllabub to a rat, it died. The cat had feasted on a saucerful of it and flourished. The only explanation was that poison had been put into the syllabub after the boy David stole some. But he’d left the dressing room just as Columbine was on her way back to it, and from then to her death she and Marie had been alone there all the time. So only Marie would have been able to put poison in the syllabub, unless somebody had added it in the confusion after Columbine’s death – but what would be the point of that? The conclusion must be that Marie was guilty, or Columbine had been poisoned by something else. But Marie insisted that she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything else all evening.

  It all hinged on Marie and she could be in France by now. Or dead. As I walked home, going over and over what I’d learned, it came to me that, if somebody else had paid
her to poison Columbine, he or she might have made sure of her silence by having her killed too. And yet she’d lived long enough to walk into a pawn shop with the incriminating earring. Why should Hardcastle or anybody else pay her off if he’d intended to kill her?

  That night I slept restlessly, plagued by dreams of searching for Marie in unlikely places, wading up to my waist in the sea or in a wood, dragged back by clinging brambles. I had to give a lesson on Wednesday morning, and on arriving home I found a note in Amos Legge’s splayed handwriting: Old Morris reckons our man is trying to steal back the Stanhope that was took off him. My head was aching enough without another puzzle. The sun had come out, so for the sake of exercise and fresh air I decided to walk across the park to the livery stables and find out directly what he was talking about. When I suggested to Mrs Martley that she might come with me, she jumped at the chance. The decorators were still at work in Old Slippers’ rooms and the racket they made – along with reminder that we’d soon be homeless – was having a depressing effect. Her spirits rose as we crossed the road and went through Grosvenor Gate into the park. She looked around like a woman fresh up from the country at the lambs skipping and bleating, the gentlemen on horseback, the ladies in their carriages going out on afternoon calls.

  ‘Just look at that bonnet, and she’s older than I am. No woman over sixteen should wear yellow.’

  I supposed she’d got that from one of the ladies‘ magazines that were passed on to her. As we walked, she talked happily about the Queen’s coronation, due in three months’ time. Though more than a year had passed since Victoria Alexandrina had succeeded to the throne, Mrs Martley’s enthusiasm had shown no sign of waning.

  ‘I should love to see her in her coronation dress, shouldn’t you? Maybe if we got up very early and stood outside the Abbey, or perhaps Buckingham Palace would be better.’

  ‘Buckingham Palace, I think.’

  I said it at random, not caring. I thought there’d be some sad changes for us long before the crown was placed on little Vicky’s sleek brown head and where to stand for the coronation was the least of our worries.