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

by Lynn Shepherd

  And now it is morning. The air is still; motes of dust catch in the sun. Thunder is dreaming of rabbits, and his small whimpers and twitches are the only noise in the otherwise silent room. Until a bell rings somewhere downstairs and the girl starts awake, aghast at the light, and what that tells her about the time. There are half a dozen tasks already neglected and she slips quickly and silently from the bed, gathers up her clothes, and leaves without a sound. Charles stirs and turns over, aware, somewhere deep in his sleep, of a shift, and an absence. When the door opens ten minutes later, the breakfast tray is borne by Billy, who puts it down, none too quietly, on one of the packing cases and starts to move about the room, muttering self-righteously about the mess. He picks up the towels and starts to fold them for laundry, but comes to an abrupt halt when he sees the stains. He looks across at Charles, and sees that the hand lying on the pillow is swathed in bandage and the shirt lying half in and half out of the hip-bath is rinsed with red. His eyes widen and he hovers for a moment, before turning and all but running out of the door. By the time Abel Stornaway has scaled the stairs, Charles is sitting up and pouring coffee with his left hand, and spilling at least half of it on the floor as a result.

  “Good heavens, Mr Charles!” wheezes Stornaway, his hand still on the door-handle. “Should I send Billy for the doctor?”

  Charles smiles crookedly. “Another brandy would be more to the purpose, I suspect, Abel. But no—there’s no call to trouble the doctor at present; he would only tell me to do what I’ve already done. Would you please ask Molly”—this with a slight flush—“if she would come up in half an hour and bind the wound again? And in the meantime I will need Billy to help me get dressed.”

  “Ye’re never going out in that state—”

  Charles leans over and lifts his pistol-case from the box where it has been all this time, then looks up at Stornaway.

  “It would appear,” he says drily, “that I’ve been in a far more vulnerable state than this for the best part of a week, had I but known it. But I am ignorant no longer. Tulkinghorn has made a serious mistake in showing his hand so crudely. If I didn’t know Cremorne had something dire to hide before, I do now.”

  He flicks open the case with his left hand and looks at the gun. “Abel, am I right in thinking you know your way round one of these?”

  “Of course, Mr Charles,” says Stornaway, somewhat taken aback, “I had a pair of Nocks me’sen until only a year or so back. And your great-uncle swore by his Manton flintlocks. Finest gun-maker in England, that’s what he allus used to say.”

  “Excellent. This one hasn’t been fired for a while, so I need you to clean it and have it ready for me by the time I’m dressed. I’ve let myself get out of practise—quite possibly dangerously so.”

  Dressing, eating, bandaging, all take far longer than he has patience for, and somewhere in the midst of it all he has a strange flash of almost gratitude towards his attacker that he did nothing worse—nothing that might have condemned him to such maddening slowness forever, and not just for the time it will take this wound to heal. But the feeling is fleeting; he knows this was only ever meant as a warning, and that if he encounters the man again there will be no question, and no vacillation: It will be death, or nothing. By midday he’s finally making his way through the crowded back-streets and alley-ways between the Haymarket and Leicester Square to a long whitewashed passage which leads in turn to a large low brick building with a rather battered sign over the door that says George’s Shooting Gallery, &c.

  Inside he finds half a dozen gentlemen at the targets, each stripped to his shirt, and all being assisted with weapons, powder, shot, and the occasional refreshment by a strange little man with a large head, and a face smeared with gunpowder, dressed in a green-baize apron and cap. He spots Charles straightaway and comes limping towards him—well, not exactly towards him, for he has an odd way of shuffling round the room with one shoulder against the wall and heading off at a tangent to where he really wants to go.

  “Nice to see you, Mr Maddox, sir,” he says. “The guv’nor ain’t here at the moment, but I expect him shortly.”

  “Can I pay for fifty shots?”

  “By all means, Mr Maddox. The stall at the end is free at the present—that’s your preference, as I recall?”

  “It is indeed, Phil, thank you.”

  The little man helps him off with his coat, noticing—but knowing better than to remark—that his client’s right hand is tightly bandaged, but also that someone has so contrived it that it appears he should still be able to hold a gun. And indeed he can, as five minutes’ shooting proves. Firing the pistol is not an issue, though aiming it accurately quickly proves to be. Charles becomes increasingly red-faced and irritable as shot after shot goes wide, and the slick gentlemen in the stands next to his slip him condescending glances. He could out-shoot the lot of them—yesterday. It’s as he feared—he’s resisting admitting it, but the injury is not as insignificant as he insists and his usual sure aim has quite deserted him. Not to mention the fact that he’s still in severe pain and took a shot of brandy to numb it, neither of which is helping matters. Fifteen minutes later he wipes away the sweat beading on his brow and goes over to the rough oblong table near the door, where Phil is now busying himself preparing coffee, no doubt in anticipation of his master’s return. Charles throws himself into a chair and casts the gun onto the table in front of him. Phil says nothing and concentrates instead on boiling the water, and stirring the coffee grounds. The need for conversation is obviated, in any case, by the arrival of the gallery owner, a fine hearty-looking man of fifty or so, with a barrel chest and a slow and deliberate tread. He looks every inch the old soldier, from his weather-beaten face to his upright army bearing, and though he is clean-shaven now (every morning, by Phil), at moments of anxiety or reflection you will see him smooth his upper lip with his hand, as if his military moustaches were still there. He takes a seat beside them, nodding to Charles and making no more remark than his assistant on the bandage—now touched with blood—about his hand. He takes out his pipe and lights it with slow solemnity, then Phil pours coffee for the three of them and his master sits back with his mug and sets his pipe between his teeth. He takes his time, but eventually he leans forward with his elbow on his knee and stretches his neck a little. “How’s the aim?”

  Charles shakes his head. “Hopeless. I didn’t make the mark once.”

  Phil seems to be avoiding his master’s eyes, and the latter fans his cloud of smoke away in order that he may see Charles more clearly. “In my experience,” he says at last, folding his arms upon his chest, “a good aim is a matter of mind, eye, and hand, marching in step, the one with the other. Now, it seems to me, Mr Maddox, sir, that your mind is what it ever was; your eye, the same.”

  “But not my hand,” says Charles grimly, holding it out before him and feeling the change of position in a throb of pain. A thin runnel of red has leached from beneath the bandage and stained his cuff.

  The trooper nods, his face serious. “What accident have you met with, sir? What’s amiss?”

  “I no longer have all five fingers on my right hand. I thought it would make no difference to my grip. But alas, it seems I was mistaken.”

  The trooper nods, then takes his pipe from his lips for a moment and knocks the ashes out against his boot.

  “It’s a question of balance, I should say,” he says finally. “Balance and weight. You have been accustomed to hold the pistol in a certain way. Now you must make an adjustment. A compensation. D’you follow?”

  “I’ve been trying to do so, but my shots still go wide.”

  The trooper swallows the rest of his coffee, then puts his mug down and gets lumberingly to his feet.

  “If we give our full minds to it, sir, we may come upon an answer.”

  The two of them return to Charles’s stand and start again. For a good while they seem to be making very little progress—shots fly as wide as they had before—but then the trooper h
its on the idea of holding the gun with both hands.

  “ ’Tis not how the gentlemen do it, sir,” he says. “But needs must. Needs must.”

  It feels odd at first, and Charles does indeed receive scornful glances from those at the other stands who have not yet abandoned the gallery for luncheon at their club, but there’s no doubt of its efficacy. The second hand gives him precisely the measure of control and counterweight he needs, and he has just made his first mark when the two of them are distracted by footsteps in the passage and a commotion at the door.

  The trooper casts an eye in that direction, evidently concerned, but Phil has forestalled him. Charles cannot see who it is and can only—for a moment at least—register Phil’s low tones, and Phil’s grimy hand on the door. No-one is more surprised than he is when it becomes obvious from the noise that the intruder is a woman. She is young and, to judge by her accent, French.

  “You know who I am,” she says in a shrill and angry voice. “You take my money many times—it is money as good as any man’s—I demand to enter dis place!”

  “I’m sorry, madymosselle, but orders is orders. The commander says I am to refuse you entry. And round ’ere, what the commander says, goes.”

  She has by now so far encroached on Phil that Charles can see her profile against the wall. She is a black-haired woman, with large wary eyes, and a drawn and hungry look, and flesh so thin and taut that the bones of her face seem to press against the skin. It’s clearly not the first time the Frenchwoman has been there—or made trouble when she has; the trooper frowns and folds back his sleeves, then makes his stately measured way to the door.

  “You will not gain entry here, mistress.”

  The woman laughs out loud in an affected manner, and stands her ground.

  “I will not, eh?”

  “No,” he says heavily, “you will not. Even if I have to carry you out. Make no mistake, I don’t want to do it. I would rather treat a lady such as yourself with the respect she is due. But if I must, I will. You may be sure of that.”

  She looks the trooper up and down, knowing that even her ferocious determination is no match for a man of his training.

  “I will not forget zis,” she says scornfully between clenched teeth. “You have not use me well. You have been mean and shabby—as mean and shabby as that miserable lawyer in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. You will be sorry to cross one such as I!”

  And she turns on her heel, and with what she clearly imagines to be an aristocratically contemptuous flick of her cloak, she is gone.

  The trooper shakes his head and returns to Charles.

  “My apologies, Mr Maddox, sir.”

  “It’s no inconvenience to me. But I admit to some surprise at seeing a lady here.”

  “She’s no lady, sir,” says the trooper, “though I might have called her one, out of courtesy. I have all sorts, here. Mostly they come for skill, like you, but some just for idleness. There are even ladies of title and fashion who come here merely to amuse themselves between morning calls and the milliner’s. I keep a case of pocket pistols in the drawer there, expressly for the purpose. But when you own a place such as this, you have to be on your guard. I have a long nose for such as she—those who come with revenge in their hearts and dreams of score-settling and I know not what. She is one of those, sir, if I am not very much mistaken, and a dab she is at hitting the mark. I don’t know much of women, Mr Maddox, but she’s an erratic, that one, that much I do know. I don’t want her on my conscience.”

  This is quite considerably the longest speech Charles has ever had from the trooper’s mouth, and he can see from the creases on the broad brown forehead that the Frenchwoman, whoever she is, has been troubling him for some time.

  “I’m sure she means nothing by it. It’s no doubt just her way—they are an impassioned and capricious race. I don’t think you need worry unduly.”

  It sounds trite, even to his own ears, but it seems to go some way to reassure the trooper. Though, as we shall see, he will be far better advised to take no notice whatsoever of Charles’s advice, and remain fully and vigilantly on his guard.

  When Charles returns to Buckingham Street the house is silent. Billy has been dispatched on afternoon errands and Abel is nowhere about. He hesitates for a moment, wondering what best to do, then goes quietly down the back-stairs towards the kitchen. He hasn’t seen Molly on her own since—since then—and feels he has to cross that line—establish how the two of them are to go on. But when he reaches the half-closed door he’s stopped in his tracks by the most ordinary, and at the same time the most astounding thing in the world. The sound of a girl’s voice. Molly is singing. But there are no words, only a low cadenced humming to a melody unlike any Charles has ever heard before—indeed unlike any conventional European notion of what a ‘melody’ actually is. But whatever it is, the sound seems to reach inside his head and ring to a deeper rhythm than four–four time. He stands listening, wondering if she’s done this before and it’s just that he has never heard her. He knew the girl could not speak and thought—wrongly it seems—that she was incapable of any sound. Something else he has assumed, and must now reassess. But this small check—insignificant as you may think it is—is still enough to make him reconsider; he retreats silently back the way he came.

  Up in his great-uncle’s room he finds both master and attendant sleeping peacefully over the subsiding fire. Charles pokes the smouldering coals and retrieves the newspaper from the floor at Stornaway’s feet. Then he pours himself more brandy-and-water and sits down on the sofa. It’s a long time since he’s sat doing nothing but yesterday is catching up with him. We would call it post-traumatic stress and wonder how he could possibly cope with such a serious injury without analgesics, but all such concepts are equally alien to Charles. He sits back and closes his eyes for a moment, lulled by the alcohol, the warmth, and the soft pattering of the fire. When he opens them again, the room is in darkness.

  “I let you sleep. You looked to be rather in need of it.”

  Charles starts. It takes him a moment to recognise the voice, though he has known it all his life. Stornaway has gone and Maddox is watching him quietly from the other side of the hearth. The long dark shadows cast by the low firelight give his face an austere, almost classical air.

  “Are you intending to tell me what has happened to you, or am I required to guess?”

  Charles struggles to sit up, forgetting—but not for long—that he can’t put any weight on his right hand.

  “I was—waylaid. By Tulkinghorn’s hired henchman.”

  “You are sure of that?”

  “As sure as I can be. He’d been sent to warn me off. He took a little personal memento with him to make sure I took the point.”

  He holds up his hand.

  Maddox raises an eyebrow. “A rather brutal tactic, but without doubt an effective one. There is no infection?”

  Charles shakes his head. “Molly is a very efficient nurse. The wound is clean, and I know what to look for.”

  Maddox nods, reflectively. “I, too, lost many things in the course of my career. My faith in my fellow men, my freedom on occasion—albeit temporarily—and once, and once only, something more important than either of those things. But I never suffered a loss quite so tangible as yours. Your sangfroid, if I may say so, is admirable.” And he is, indeed, looking at Charles with an expression in his eyes his nephew cannot remember seeing before.

  Charles shrugs, though his new-found self-possession is clearly not quite all Maddox believes it to be, for there are hot tears prickling his eyes. He’s spent so much of his life managing for himself and expecting nothing from those around him—so long without a mother, in the coolness cast by a distinguished but distant father—that kindness always comes to him as a shock, and it’s kindness that has undone him now, not pain, however intense, or self-pity, however justified.

  “At least I know now that I’m not wasting my time,” he says eventually, and then explains, as concisely as he c
an, what he discovered at the Graham Arms.

  “But you have no clue as yet as to what this package contained?” says Maddox thoughtfully, when he has finished.

  “No,” says Charles, “but whatever it was, it terrified Cremorne enough to get Tulkinghorn involved—and Boscawen killed. This, my dear uncle, is no ordinary case of petty blackmail. There’s something base and corrupt at the bottom of all this—something Cremorne absolutely cannot afford to have come to light. It’s no coincidence I was attacked as soon as I left the rat-killing. I’ll bet this thug has been following me for days and knew exactly what Milloy was going to tell me.”

  “No doubt.”

  They are silent; the only sound the prim ticking of the ornate French clock on the mantelpiece.