by Caro Peacock
‘He can come to me,’ I said. ‘Mrs Martley can help nurse him.’
‘.. . and you have access to a competent physician .. .’
‘I’ll see to that,’ said Kennedy.
‘… then it might be the best course. I’ll go and write a note to your doctor and Brown here will see about transport.’
There was no question of jolting Daniel home in a cab. The clerk offered to summon a two-horse ambulance for us, but we’d have to pay for it ourselves. Kennedy and I had six shillings between us, which the clerk thought would be enough. We waited half an hour while the clock ticked and the clerk’s pen scratched. Eventually an orderly put his head round the door and said the ambulance was outside and they were just carrying the gentleman into it.
There was room for the two of us to ride inside, on pull-down seats. As he helped me in, Kennedy warned me not to be shocked by Daniel’s appearance. It was late afternoon by then with the light going and the inside of the ambulance was dim. The first thing I could make out was a blanket-wrapped bundle on a broad shelf, a white bandage, and then Daniel’s face under it, almost as white, eyes closed.
Kennedy took the seat next to me and the driver closed the door and got up on the box. The ambulance cart was so well sprung that it was more like being in a boat than a vehicle, and its windows were small and high up, so we couldn’t see out. This added to the unreality of our journey back across London. For most of the time, Daniel didn’t move or open his eyes. Only, when I thought we must be somewhere near home, I looked up and saw him staring at me.
‘Liberty?’
His voice sounded surprisingly normal.
‘Yes.’
‘There’s something I’m trying to remember. It’s important.’
‘Don’t worry. Don’t think about it now. We’re taking you to my house.’
‘Phillips. Take me to Phillips.’
‘My dear fellow, don’t worry about that now,’ Kennedy said. ‘We’ll do whatever’s necessary.’
Daniel looked at us, eyes feverishly bright in the dimness, then gave a sigh and closed them.
*
He was still unconscious when we reached home and Kennedy and the ambulance driver carried him upstairs. I ran ahead to warn Mrs Martley. As soon as he was laid down on the couch in our parlour and the ambulance man had gone, she took charge. While she made him comfortable, I was set to work making up the fire, putting the kettle on to boil, fetching pillows from our beds. Once he was settled, Kennedy looked at his watch and said he must go to his orchestra.
‘I’ll look in on my doctor friend on the way and send him round. Then I’ll be back as soon as the performance is over to see how he’s doing.’
The doctor came an hour later and confirmed what his colleague in St Bart’s had said: concussion, rest, calm. He was worried that Daniel might be feverish and recommended sponging his face below the bandage with cold water, persuading him to take some gruel or well-diluted beef tea when he woke. I sponged his face while Mrs Martley made gruel, working by firelight in case lamplight disturbed him.
At some point between the doctor’s visit and Kennedy’s return he woke up enough to be propped on pillows and swallow some spoonfuls of gruel. He looked puzzled, as if he didn’t know where he was or who we were. Afterwards, he went to sleep again. Mrs Martley asked me in a whisper what had happened.
‘I wish I knew.’
When Kennedy came back he insisted on sleeping in an armchair beside Daniel for the night and sent Mrs Martley and me upstairs for some rest.
The next two days were a blur. With the curtains drawn, we were hardly conscious of light or dark. I saw daylight – mostly damp and raining – when Mrs Martley sent me on errands: to the butchers for steak to make beef tea, to the grocers for barley water, to the chemist for valerian root and melissa that she brewed into soothing teas for Daniel. It was a relief in its way to be given orders. Kennedy came and went several times a day. The doctor visited three times, took Daniel’s pulse, looked into his eyes and continued to warn about fever. He never asked for a fee, either then or later, so either he was doing it from friendship or Kennedy was paying him.
Sometimes, unpredictably, Daniel would call out my name, whether I was sitting by him or in the bedroom upstairs. It was always the same thing. He was trying to remember something. I must go to Phillips and tell him. But when I asked gently what Phillips must be told, he couldn’t remember.
Around daylight on what must have been Thursday morning, the bellows boy came running upstairs from the courtyard to say there was a man with two horses waiting for me. Until then, I’d forgotten all about Amos. I ran downstairs to where he was waiting on the chestnut hunter, holding Rancie by the reins, and explained what had happened. He was full of concern and muttered about what he’d like to do to the robbers if he got hold of them.
‘If I can help, you send for me, promise me that.’
I promised and allowed myself just one long stroke down Rancie’s sleek neck before they went away. Back upstairs, Mrs Martley shouted to me to wait outside the door while she finished seeing to Mr Suter. She did everything for Daniel, sponging his body with warm water, bringing him bedpans. I offered to help, but she said that wouldn’t be right for an unmarried woman. My share of the task was to carry the bedpans downstairs and empty them.
‘And you’d better be getting the stains out of his good shirt,’ she said, on one of my reappearances upstairs. ‘If it goes to the laundrywoman like that, she’ll be charging us extra.’
In between the nursing, she’d taken it upon herself to sort out Daniel’s clothes, brushing and hanging up the jacket and sponging the waistcoat. It was her flag of hope: Daniel would be up and about one day, needing them again. I wished I could be as hopeful. The shirt she bundled into my arms was a good linen one, stained all down the front and round the cuffs with his blood. She couldn’t have known how terribly it brought back the time less than a year ago when I’d stood by my father’s body and held his shirt, similarly stained.
I filled a bowl with cold water, following her instructions to soak the stains then dab them with oil of eucalyptus. It made them paler but didn’t obliterate them altogether. Only one long smear on the cuff and right sleeve reacted differently. It was much the same rusty brown colour, but cold water and eucalyptus oil made no difference to it. On the other hand, it turned paler when I rubbed it with a soapy rag, which had made no difference to the blood stains. I puzzled about it in the idle way you think about things that don’t matter as a relief from things that do.
Sometime on Thursday evening, when the light was going, Daniel called to me again.
‘Liberty?’
I was sitting on the rug beside the fire, rolling up strips of sheet for bandages.
‘I’m here.’
His eyes focused on me. They were different, not puzzled any more. He started speaking, quickly but coherently.
‘I’ve remembered. You must tell Phillips at once. I’ve remembered what happened.’
I went over and kneeled down by the couch.
‘I had a message about Rainer,’ he said.
‘Rainer? But –’
I thought he was rambling, back to his old obsession. He went on, speaking urgently.
‘The message had been delivered to my lodgings. Somebody sent it on to me at Kennedy’s place. It said if I waited outside St Sepulchre’s after midnight, a man with some information about Rainer would meet me.’
‘Was it signed?’
‘No. There was no name or address.’
‘Why didn’t you tell Kennedy?’
‘The note said I wasn’t to tell anybody or bring anybody with me.’
‘So you went. That was begging to be attacked.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I waited there, quite a long time after midnight. Then, when there was nobody else about, a man came walking down the street towards me. He was walking like a military man, upright and confident, nothing like the porters or vagrants you get around Smithfield at night. Whe
n he came into the lamplight, I saw his face. It was brown and creased, as if he’d spent a long time in the sun, with a moustache like the cavalry men wear. I knew then. I might have said to him, “You’re Rainer,” or perhaps he said he was, but I’m not sure of that.’
‘Then he hit you?’ I said.
‘No, while I was looking at him, somebody must have come up from behind. I fell against Rainer. I think he must have held me up while the other man hit me again. The next thing I knew, I was falling and there was shouting and feet running. That’s all. I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in a hospital bed and nobody would listen to me. What day is this?’
‘Thursday.’
He looked scared, as if he couldn’t trust time any more, tried to get up and fell back on the couch, eyes closed. Mrs Martley came in, angry with me.
‘What have you been doing? Didn’t I tell you not to let him get excited?’
He was hardly conscious by then. She put an arm round his shoulders and made him sip one of her brews. When Kennedy arrived, much later, he was asleep again. I took Kennedy to a corner of the room and explained in a low voice what had happened.
‘I thought even Daniel had stopped believing in Rainer. Why did he suddenly spring to life again?’
I’d been doing a lot of hard thinking while I waited for Kennedy.
‘Whoever sent that note must have known he’d been looking for Rainer,’ I said.
‘You believe there really was a note?’
‘Yes.’
‘Half London must have known he was looking for the man,’ Kennedy said.
‘Yes. It would have been the easiest way of decoying him anywhere.’
‘But why? He’d already had his pockets picked several times over. Even the underworld must have known he’d nothing left worth taking.’
‘There’s something else,’ I said.
I walked softly across the room so as not to disturb Daniel and picked out his shirt from the basket waiting to go to the laundrywoman. The blood stains were much paler after my work with the oil of eucalyptus, but the brown smear on the sleeve and cuff showed clearly.
‘He says he fell against the man,’ I said. ‘He probably put his arm up. This is theatrical make-up.’
‘Ye gods. You’re sure?’
‘I saw the girls using something very like it at the Augustus.’
‘But why in the world would anybody pretend to be a figment of Daniel’s imagination?’
‘To make him stand still long enough for somebody to come up behind and cosh him.’
‘But why? If this was a sham Rainer …’
‘It was.’
‘Then Daniel couldn’t possibly be a threat to a convict who’s breaking rocks on the other side of the world.’
‘No. I think he’s a threat to somebody because he’s looking for Marie. Rainer was simply the bait to catch him.’
Kennedy put his hands to his forehead.
‘So what do we do?’
‘What we’ve been trying to do since the trial. Find Marie.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Next morning I went out before sunrise, leaving Daniel sleeping and Mrs Martley watching over him. Kennedy hadn’t wanted me to go alone, but there was a rehearsal he couldn’t afford to miss. He’d asked me to wait, but I’d refused. For one thing, I didn’t want to lose any more time. For another, my plan seemed so unlikely to succeed that I didn’t want anybody to witness its collapse. By the time I crossed London Bridge it was a bright but cold day, with the sun glinting on the river, sailing barges coming up on the rising tide and steam paddle boats threshing their way against it out to sea. On the south side, I went along the Borough towards St Thomas’s Hospital. The directions from the baker in Soho hadn’t been precise, so I had to walk along the High Street on one side of the hospital, Joiner Street on the other and all the small streets in between looking for the shop. The first baker I found reacted as if I’d accused him of high treason.
‘The frog place is the other side, further down.’
I found it, not far from the place where I’d started my unsuccessful search for Marie, a thin slice of shop squeezed between a greengrocer’s, with nothing in the window except cabbages and a few dried-out oranges and an ironmonger’s. Its window was mostly filled with pound loaves and meat pies, apart from a defiant corner where a glazed apple flan and some tartlets clustered round a small French flag. The man behind the counter was elderly and had a defeated look, but his eyes lit up when I spoke to him in French. Where had I learned it? he wanted to know. Ah yes, the good nuns. He’d even heard of the convent school in Normandy where my father had left me for a year when I was eleven and too young to join him on his travels. The baker came from Caen himself, but his sister-in-law had a cousin who’d been a nun there. Had I known her? Well, a pity, but it was a good place, good to talk about it.
I asked the baker if he had many French customers.
‘Quite a few, yes. Especially on Sunday mornings.’
‘Why Sunday mornings?’
‘On Sunday mornings, I bake brioche. I should like to do it every day of the week, but there’s so much work to it and good butter is so expensive, it wouldn’t pay. Believe me, mademoiselle, I have a queue of people outside. I have to take on an extra boy for Sunday mornings only. We can’t take them out of the oven fast enough. People come from as far away as Bermondsey.’
‘You recognise all your customers?’
‘Of course.’
‘And you notice when there are new ones?’
‘Yes, there isn’t much time to talk, but I like to ask them where they come from in France.’
‘There’s a woman I’m trying to find. She’d have moved here quite recently. Her name is Marie Duval.’
I described her as well as I could. Before I finished he was smiling.
‘You mean my little Mademoiselle Triste?’
‘Sad? Why?’
‘That’s what I called her. Sunday before last, she arrived too late, came running up after we’d finished baking. Nearly crying, she was. So I promised her, if she came the next Sunday, I’d keep some aside for her.’
‘Did she come?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘So that’s two Sundays you’ve seen her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know where she lives?’
‘No, but it can’t be far from here. That first Sunday it was a cold morning, and she came running up without a cloak or overcoat, only her indoor clothes and her bonnet. She said she’d smelled the brioche.’
So Marie was within sniffing-distance of where we were standing. How far would that brioche smell travel, on a cold Sunday morning? Probably a long way to a French exile. It was helpful, but not helpful enough.
‘Do you know anything else about her?’ I said.
‘Only that she trims bonnets for a living. Last Sunday, she dropped her change. She said her fingers were sore from all the bonnets.’
I thanked him, saying truthfully that one Sunday I hoped to return and taste his brioche. So as not to waste his time, I bought some almond biscuits and stood eating one, looking round. It didn’t seem like an area for milliners. On an impulse, before my luck could go cold, I walked up to a young woman who looked more brightly dressed than most of the people of the Borough, in a bonnet trimmed with unseasonable roses.
‘Do you know anywhere near here that trims bonnets?’
She took it as a compliment to her taste.
‘Sweat shop just over there in Back Pig Yard. They ain’t no good, though. I can tell you where to get one like mine, if you want.’
I let her tell me and thanked her. She’d pointed to a narrow opening between two buildings across the street.
I walked down it, squeezing between piles of rubbish. It opened on to a mean courtyard surrounded by buildings of soot-darkened brick in various states of disrepair. A reef of broken tiles took up one side of the yard, under bare and sagging roof timbers. The building opposite seemed in be
tter repair than the rest, though the windows were cracked and the paintwork faded. Several new packing cases stood outside it. The gleaming yellow straw around them was the brightest thing in the yard.
I went through a narrow doorway and up a wooden staircase. Women’s voices sounded from a half-open door on the first landing. I knocked. There was no answer and the conversation inside went on, uninterrupted. I pushed the door and walked in.
At first I thought there was sunshine coming into the room, it seemed so bright. The brightness came not from sunlight but dozens and dozens of summer bonnets, the cheap ones in varnished yellow straw that looked like unhealthy confectionary. They were piled on trestle tables, stacked against the walls, lined up on the windowsill. Three large rolls of ribbon – red, yellow and blue – hung from a stand by the window. A glue pot stood on a trestle over a spirit lamp in the corner, filling the room with the smell of rancid meat. Two women were working at the tables; a third was standing at the roll of yellow ribbon, cutting off a length, measuring it with her arm from fingertip to elbow. The two at the table stared at me. I’d never seen them before. The third had her back to me.
‘Marie?’ I said.
She turned, the ribbon looped between finger and thumb. Her mouth fell open. She’d recognised me.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’d just like to talk to you, please.’
She glanced towards the door. I think it was in her mind to run.
‘Marie, don’t try to get away. I’ve found you this time and I’d find you again if necessary. We’ve been looking for you so long, and you can help us.’
I might be speaking to a murderer, or a murderer’s accomplice, but nothing was to be gained by outright accusation at this stage. Besides, the poverty of Marie’s surroundings suggested she hadn’t received a fee for services rendered, either from Lady Silverdale or anybody else.
The other two women were looking at us curiously, without pausing in their work, their fingers folding red and blue ribbon into rosettes. Marie glanced towards them and back at me.
‘Can we go somewhere to talk?’ I said.
‘I have no time to talk.’