The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  It was very soon clear to me that they were both of them head over heels in love. Not that I could say anything, of course, or even divulge that I knew what was happening. But I was always ready to divert Miss Darby and allow them a few moments of private conversation, so that sometimes I wondered whether I was not becoming quite devious. Needless to say, I would never have done so had I not believed that Rick was as noble and praiseworthy a creature as there possibly could be, despite a certain restlessness that occasionally caused me a little unease. The tenderness and patience he showed to the importunate Amy was touching to observe, and in Clara’s presence he became the most attentive of young men. As for Clara, I had never seen her look so beautiful. She blossomed before my very eyes, and took on new womanly ways, and little innocent feminine wiles that must have been utterly enthralling to her charmed admirer. Rick loved her dearly, and I do not think she loved him any the less.

  I scrupled to tell Clara that I had discovered her secret—indeed, it was so obvious to me, that I could scarce see how either of them could hope to hide it. And one morning before breakfast, when I had finished helping Caroline with her dressing, I found Clara waiting impatiently for me in my room.

  “Hester, Hester!” she cried, closing the door behind me and standing with her back pressed against it. “I thought you would never return!”

  “What is it, my pet?” I asked, going to her. “Have you been unwell again?” For indeed, her eyes were unnaturally bright, and the hair on her forehead damp against her skin.

  “Oh Hester! I have a secret to tell you! I have been wanting to tell it for so long—so very long! Please forgive me!”

  And what secret might that be, my beautiful darling girl?

  “What is it, Clara? Shall I try to guess?”

  “Oh you could never guess! How could you guess such a thing?”

  She stopped and looked at me, and had I not known better I might have thought she was afraid. I put my arms about her, and she buried her head against my breast.

  “It’s about—” she began in a whisper. “It’s about—”

  It was so touching to have her clinging to me in that way, hiding her face, and to know that her tears were the tears of joyful love, that I was not above teasing her a little—a very little.

  “Let me guess, my own pretty one,” I said soothingly. “Could it, perhaps, be about a certain gentleman?”

  I heard her give a little gasp.

  “Now, I wonder who it can be?” said I gaily, pretending to consider.

  I felt her stiffen in my arms, and burst into sobs. “Oh Hester, he says—he says he loves me dearly. That no-one will ever treasure me as he does, or love me more.”

  “And did you think you could conceal such a thing from your own Hester?” said I with a smile. “Why, I have known all about it for many weeks now!”

  Clara held up her flushed face, the tears still staining her cheeks. “And yet you never said anything,” she said wonderingly.

  “It was your secret, my pet,” said I. “And I knew you would tell me in your own good time.”

  “But now I have—you don’t think it wrong of me, do you?”

  How could I have said so, looking at her lovely anxious face? I shook my head. “Of course not,” I replied encouragingly. “How could he not love an angel as beautiful as you, and being an angel how could you not return that love?”

  “But that’s not quite the worst of it!” cried Clara, holding me even tighter and hiding her face once more upon my breast.

  “Why, you never mean to say that you—” I began with a smile.

  “Yes, yes!” she sobbed. “Even that—even that! And now you know it all. You know everything!”

  I told her, laughing, and to her utter consternation, that I had known that, too! And then we sat together for a while over the dying fire, and after a little while Clara was quiet, and soon it was as if nothing at all had ever happened.

  EIGHT

  A Morning Adventure

  THE ACCURACY IS EXCEPTIONAL. The fragility of the shimmering stained-glass wings, the sharp serrations on the articulated legs, and the density of the improbably long and heavy body. In reality, this creature is barely an inch long, but at this magnification there’s something faintly horrifying about the size of those eyes, and the monstrous efficiency of that hooked proboscis. And if you’re wondering where we are, this is the third room of the Northern Zoological Gallery of the British Museum; we are by the table marked Hymenoptera, and we—like Charles—are looking at a display devoted to bees. It’s only one of eight similar cases in this overcrowded room—in fact, there’s barely an inch of floor or wall space in either direction that doesn’t have its neatly arranged array of eggs, shells, and mounted insects, or its furred or feathered exhibit staring beadily down from a glass case. The sheer variety of death on display here is rather overwhelming—even a little sickening—but as this room confines itself only to the banal and British, it lacks the glamour of the more exotic Mammalia room with its lions, tigers, and bears, or the child-catching appeal of the stuffed giraffes in the Central Saloon. Combine that with the wintriness of the weather, and you’ll understand why there are only half a dozen other people here. One of them is a stocky man with a balding head and thick grizzled eyebrows who’s making detailed notes in a black pocket-book on the subject—it would appear—of honeycombs, though the cells in his drawing look rather more circular than hexagonal, so it seems he is not a very accurate draughtsman. Far less so, certainly, than the man who produced the drawing Charles is still admiring. Charles has never had the patience to produce work as detailed as this, but he can recognise a proper scientific precision when he sees it.

  “Apiology interests you? Or are you, perhaps, an apiculturist?”

  The voice behind him is a soft Lowland Scottish, the man’s pale face stippled with sandy freckles.

  Charles turns to him and smiles. “I doubt you could produce any honey worth the eating within five miles of here. But the study of insects in general, yes, that does interest me. And these illustrations are particularly fine.”

  The man’s flush of pleasure betrays him.

  “They’re your own?”

  He bows, and extends his hand. “James Duncan, at your service.”

  Charles frowns. “James Duncan? Not the James Duncan of The Naturalist’s Library, surely?”

  “The same. I am gratified to find that you know it.”

  “I am a great admirer of the series,” answers Charles, shaking his hand. “And the entomological volumes, in particular, are excellent of their type. I was especially interested in your description of the formation of swarms—one can only have the highest respect for such a prolonged and painstaking effort of observation.”

  Duncan bows. “I drew heavily—as you no doubt know—on the work of Monsieur Huber—”

  “Of course—”

  “—but all the same, I do not think I am being unduly immodest if I say I was able to add a number of useful deductions of my own. Indeed, since that volume was published, I have pursued my study of bees rather further, and am considering a new work on the same fascinating subject.”

  They have started to walk back down the gallery, and as they pass the man with the pocket-book, Charles notices that he is eyeing the two of them with distinct interest.

  “You may remember,” continues Duncan as they walk, “that I asserted that a honey bee can fly up to two miles in quest of food. Indeed, there have been well-authenticated instances in which they have been known to have covered double that distance, but these are relatively rare. The subject of my more recent interest, however, is the fact that they often appear to make the deliberate decision not to forage in the area immediately surrounding the hive, despite the fact that the source of provender therein may be plentiful, and the effort required to harvest it proportionately less.”

  Charles looks across at him. “That is curious. How do you explain it?”

  “I suppose one must conclude that i
t is an act of self-defence. That they are attempting—in a purely instinctive manner, of course—to prevent predators or parasites locating their nest. Interesting, is it not?”

  It’s not merely interesting, thinks Charles, his hand going automatically to the folded envelopes in his coat pocket; it might very well be the breakthrough he’s been looking for.

  He’s tempted to accept Duncan’s offer of a glass of beer and more debate about bees—under normal circumstances there’s very little else he’d rather do—but he has an idea in his head now, and he needs to find somewhere quiet to test it out. He gives Duncan his card and the two of them part on the most affable terms on the museum steps. When he gets back to Buckingham Street most of the windows are already dark, though there are sounds from the kitchen that show Molly still has tasks to do before she sleeps. He stops for a moment outside his great-uncle’s room and is relieved to hear him sleeping soundly—if rather noisily. The old man has been troubled by bad dreams, and on more than one occasion since Charles moved in the whole house has been roused by shouting in the early hours. Charles does not care about being woken up—he has a talent for sleeping that rivals his cat’s—but his uncle has already suffered one fall which Charles knows he should have prevented, and for that reason if none other, Billy now has a truckle-bed in the drawing-room every night.

  Once up in the attic Charles lights the lamp, and drags his copy of Cruchley’s New Plan of London onto the makeshift table. He gets the envelopes out of his pocket, and starts to mark the locations of the receiving-houses on the map in red ink. The last one done, he steps back and contemplates his handiwork. The crosses form a perfect arc around the northern rim of the East Westminster postal district. Had he not met Duncan, he might never have thought of it—or seen it as merely an arbitrary and meaningless scatter. But not now. Now he has a new way to interpret what he sees; now he can find a pattern in this baffling randomness. The man he’s seeking may well be no more conscious of what he’s doing than the bees Duncan is studying, but Charles is prepared to bet his motive is exactly the same. Like them, his first priority is self-protection; like them, he’s prepared to travel much farther than he needs, to conceal his quarters from anyone who might want to track him down. Charles leans forward again, and looks more closely at the details of the streets. Armed with his new insight, the answer seems obvious. The heart of the arc marked on the map is no more than a mile from this very room. One of the most infamous intricate illicit districts in this dirty dangerous town. That maze of streets, courts, lanes, and narrow alleys, already immortalised—if that’s the word—in Dickens’s Sketches by Boz. A place teeming with people, and thick with crime, and Charles’s destination as soon as it gets light.

  Seven Dials.

  And as we wait for the slow dark hours to pass, we might do no worse than stand, as Dickens himself once stood, in the irregular square at the crossing point of the seven narrow passages that give this singular place its name. Dickens talked of arriving ‘Belzoni-like, at the entrance’, and if you’re thinking that you’ve heard that name before and recently, then you’re right. It was this same Giovanni Belzoni who brought back the sarcophagus that holds pride of place in Mr Tulkinghorn’s labyrinthine collection. It was this same Belzoni, moreover, who was the first to find the entrance to the inner chamber of the second pyramid of Giza, and the first to penetrate inside. Hence, I suppose, Dickens’s choice of analogy. It is certainly true that Egypt can hold no darker ways, no more obscure secrets, and no more deadly claustrophobic tunnels than those that confront us here. In the brightest daylight it’s hard to see far, the air is so dense with grit and coal smoke, and even a ‘regular Londoner’ would hesitate to come here by night, as we have. So let us explore a little, while we wait for Charles.

  We could do with him now, though—if only for his near-perfect sense of direction. It’s doubtful any cartographer has ever ventured anywhere near these tight and interlocking streets. The traveller who trusts to John Rocque’s serene and civilised version of the city—some hundred years older than the map on Charles’s desk—will come in full expectation of a symmetry of orderly boulevards in a seven-pointed star, as formal and considered as a London Versailles. What he will find instead is squalid and rat-infested passage-ways that open suddenly and erratically into uneven rutted courts, where barefoot children wallow with the dogs and play at tip-cat and battledore among the rags and paper gathering in drifts on the pavement. In these shops third-hand counts as spanking new and most of the articles are so made-do and mended that it’s hard to make out what they might once have been. The public-houses and gin-shops are only now, well past midnight, closing their doors and evicting their staggering and roaring clientele into the cold, where their shabby womenfolk are sitting on the steps, their shoulders slumped, waiting—as they have these four hours—for their men to emerge.

  Some of these tall high-ceilinged houses still cling to a fast-crumbling memory of grandeur, but if their dimensions impress, their interiors will dismay: This district is populated not by the house, but by the room—even by the closet. Whole families inhabit six feet square—one in the front shop, one in the back kitchen; two sharing three rooms upstairs. Most of the men are labourers, most of the women prostitutes, even, it is whispered, that so-called lady trying to keep up a genteel appearance in the attic storey. Cages are stacked in every alley awaiting the morning trade, for—unlikely as it sounds—half the bird-fanciers and animal-dealers in London have made this quarter home. There are huddles of bony fearful rabbits, and birds of every conceivable kind—fowls, doves, fancy pigeons, owls, hawks, parrots, love-birds. An irony that last, if rather an obvious one, since there is little love lost among all these people cramped in so little space. Even at this hour brutal quarrels are breaking out between those above and those below, and the sound of stamping on paper-thin floors is contending with the drunken bawling of the Irishman two doors down, who beats carpets by day and keeps his hand in by night on his wife and children.

  As dawn approaches the darkness finally starts to thin, and all of a sudden the light seems to gather and surge. The sky is grey now, not black, and there are the first signs of life that isn’t four-legged or verminous. Coster-mongers and street-sellers are some of the first, but it is not too long before the dilapidated shops begin to open their shutters, and scrawny children appear on the doorsteps, chewing husks of stale bread.

  By the time Charles arrives, close on nine, the matrons of the manor are in full voice, and as full dress as their wardrobes allow, or their profession expects. A little local difficulty has been simmering nicely for a good quarter of an hour and, fuelled now by gin, is about to take a turn for the physical. The urchin children are gradually abandoning their shuttlecocks, and settling down for far finer entertainment—and free, too.

  “Go on, Kat!” hollers one of the women standing by. “Don’t take no nonsense from such as ’er—the dirty tramp! Tear ’er eyes out!”

  “You’re a one to talk,” cries another. “I know where you was last night—question is, does yer ’usband?”

  “Does he even care, more like!” shouts a third from the safety of a doorway and for a moment or two there’s the risk of a sideshow skirmish to the main event. Kat, however, is not to be distracted; she has a score to settle.

  “Come on then—out with it!” she hisses. “You was up to it again wiv my Johnny last night, weren’t yer? Don’t you start lying to me neither, ’cause I can sniff out when ye’re lying soon as look at yer!”

  “Go to it, Kat,” yells one of the lads from the door of the gin-shop. “She ain’t even ’alf your size—no contest!”

  The other woman is now looking rather flushed about the face. “Bah,” she spits, “who’d a blamed him if he was—I mean, who’d look twice at you, you stinking alley cat! Yer name suits yer and no mistake!”

  “Who are you calling an alley cat,” screeches the other, rushing at her rival, and seizing her by her thin dress. “You—you hussy!”


  The two fall finally to blows to the whistles and cheers of the crowd, and the barking of a number of lean and hungry dogs, who set to in a gutter brawl of their own.

  Charles has been standing watching all this time, hoping he won’t have to intervene, but old habits die hard, and even though he no longer has the hat, stock, and belt, he still has the mind of a policeman. Though as he’s about to find out, that can be a troublesome quality without a uniform to back it up.

  “Come on, girls,” he shouts, darting between them and endeavouring to push them apart. “That’s enough of that.”

  It’s too much to hope that someone else might weigh in and help him—they’re enjoying it far too much—and in the next minute or two he gets as many kicks and scratches as either of the women. But he finally manages to get the sturdy Kat off-balance and push her firmly against the nearest wall. It’s only when he hears the whoops and cat-calls that he realises he has each hand on an extremely large and half-uncovered breast. He steps back at once, pulling away as fast as a scald, feeling the hot blood flood all over his face. Worse still, Kat is not at all offended, indeed seems to have taken quite a shine to him, and is now leaning against his chest and leering in his face in a lop-sided half-slurred way.

  “Get home with you, and sober up,” he says curtly. “And think yourself lucky I didn’t call the constable.”

  There’s a sting under his eye that argues for a deeper cut than the ones on his hands, but there’s not much he can do about that at the moment: He has no intention of going anywhere near the water in the drinking fountains here. The crowd is starting to disperse, now the show is over, and a few moments later a shuttlecock shoots so close by his face that he feels it skim his cheek. He wheels round but the children are too quick for him and all he sees are dirty heels disappearing down a side street. He’s starting to feel irrationally thwarted; this is not how this morning was supposed to be going. He had a clear logical plan, and now everything’s muddled and confused. He stands for a moment contemplating the seven public-houses that ring this square. Two of the hard-faced women in the crowd are about to disappear into the Clock House, and he hesitates a moment before following them in.