by Carol Hedges
He thrusts the envelope into Hawksley’s hand and melts back into the shadows of the night.
For several minutes after the encounter, Hawksley does not move. He stares into the middle distance, stunned by what has just happened. Then he seems to reach a decision. Stuffing the letter into the pocket of his coat, he sets off purposefully towards the bright lights of the Strand.
***
Sunrise comes slowly, imperceptibly, like the ticking of a clock face, the fog lifting to meet it. Marianne Corvid feels her eyes and ears working in the pale dawn before she is even thinking properly.
Her heart beats the blood awake. She throws back the coverings and stands in her night-gown in the freezing cold room, pushing back her hair, kneading the ache out of her shoulders before lighting the gas-lamp, which hisses and murmurs like human voices.
Marianne opens the lid of the clothes chest. Inside is a mirror. She stares down at her reflection. Her eyes are like a reducing chamber. If she looks into them long enough, she will become as small as her own reflection. She will diminish to a point and vanish.
She notices the hollow in her throat under which a necklace should hang. It has been a long time since she wore jewels for pleasure. She doesn’t have any jewellery now. It is all gone, all sold.
Somewhere in the white distance, church bells chime. She dresses, packs her bag with what she needs for the day ahead, then leaves the empty house. She is not looking for a way to escape the past. The past is in everything she does, that obsession to love and be loved, which is now merely a reservoir of love gone sour.
The streets are crowded with people coming into the city to work, but she finds that if she looks at them in a certain way, they shift around her. It feels almost physical, in the way that memories can seem physical. Even the quality of light seems to change.
She walks on. The present becomes occluded. She is two people, separated by the years. One of them is lost. The other is what she has become, what she is now. She blinks, and the two coalesce and suddenly she finds herself here, where she knew she would inevitably end up, under the plane trees with the ebonised dust blowing in the air. Waiting for the future to arrive.
***
Frederick Undercroft’s bedroom door has been shut for the past week. But today the master of the house finally emerges, weak and pale but dressed in his business suit. He descends the stairs, slowly, holding tight to the banister rail, and makes an unexpected entrance in the dining-room, where Georgiana is just finishing her breakfast.
She glances up, her eyes widening.
“Good morning, Frederick. Should you be up and dressed?”
He slides into a chair, indicates to the maid to pour him a cup of coffee.
“I can hardly go into work in my nightshirt.”
“Is that where you are intending to go? You do not seem in quite a fit state.”
“My state, fit or unfit, is no concern of yours,” he snaps, gulping down the bitter black brew. “There is work to be done, clients to see. And letters to write. Important letters.”
There is an expectant pause. He stares at her meaningfully.
“What letters?”
“It is my intention to write to the detective police. I want the case reopened. Lying up there has given me ample time to think it over, and I believe I have new evidence that I wish to lay before the detective inspector.”
“What is this evidence?”
He looks across the table at her, his face stony, his eyes settling on her. His lips and cheeks are as pale and precise as waxwork.
“I am not going to tell you. Suffice to say that I now believe that more than one individual was involved. I know who they are and I will give the names of these individuals to the authorities.”
“What names?”
He does not answer.
She looks away.
“They will not believe a word you say. You are clearly mad.”
His smile is vulpine.
“Ah, you’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? But you are wrong. I have never been saner in my life. By the end of the day, the matter will be back in the police’s hands. And there is nothing that anybody, especially you, can do to stop me.”
He staggers to his feet, and lurches unsteadily to the door, calling loudly for his overcoat and top hat.
She sits immobile until she hears the front door closing. Then she, too, rises and makes her way to her room. She sits at her dressing table, trying to work out what to do.
I do not claim to be a good person, she thinks, but I do not deserve this.
She dresses herself quickly and without the aid of the maid. Then she slips out of the house and strides determinedly up Haverstock Hill. Reaching the chemist’s shop, she pushes open the door, the tinkling bell bringing the young assistant from the back where he has been grinding powders to make pills.
She states her request in a low voice, touching her forehead with a gloved hand, as if in pain. He nods understandingly and hands her a small bottle of ruby liquid. She fumbles in her bag, produces the payment, and goes.
Georgiana walks up to the horse pond at the top of the hill, where she picks up a cab, ordering the driver to take her into the West End. All the way there, she sits stony-faced, staring straight ahead, her mind lost with childhood memories.
She sees her young self, happy, loved and secure. Dreaming her girlish dreams in her little white bedroom, about the wonderful man who will one day arrive to sweep her off her feet. How naïve and innocent she was back then. How sad and disillusioned she is now.
She gets the cab driver to drop her at the top of Oxford Street. There are many pharmacies and chemists in the area. None of them know her, or will remember her, a pale, unenticing woman complaining of a headache.
By mid-afternoon, she has amassed a bagful of small bottles of ruby liquid. She takes a cab back to the house in Downshire Hill, tells the servants she doesn’t want any supper, is going straight to bed and is not to be disturbed.
Georgiana climbs the stairs to her bedroom and bolts the door, placing a chair under the handle. Then she sits down on the bed. Her hands are trembling. Her breathing is fast and ragged. She sets the bottles out on the nightstand and begins to uncork them. The pungent smell of cinnamon fills the air.
Georgiana Undercroft reaches for the first little bottle, closes her eyes and downs the contents in one quick swallow.
***
In the late afternoon, Frederick Undercroft sits at his desk. He has no recollection of how he has spent the day. There were documents to sign, there were clients to advise. He supposes he performed the appropriate actions in both cases.
At some points, his lawyer’s clerk entered, placed cups of coffee on the desk, and re-entered to remove them later. All this must have happened, but it is as if he has been an onlooker to events. Now, with the pale afternoon sunshine waning and the light in his room becoming too dim to read clearly, he decides to call it a day.
He puts on his overcoat. In one of the pockets he finds a letter addressed in his handwriting to a Detective Inspector Stride at Scotland Yard. He is tempted to open it to see what he wrote. He does not recall composing it, nor can he work out why he should want to write to this man.
Undercroft leaves his office, the letter in his hand. It is his intention to post it but he cannot now recall where the nearest post box is located. He sets out to find it. On his way, he finds himself cutting through a courtyard in which a marionette show is coming to an end.
The audience is hooting with laughter. To Undercroft it appears that the puppets are being made to fornicate. When he looks more closely, he sees that they are. Bemused, he walks on.
The city closes in around him. He begins to lose all sense of where he is, what he is. His thoughts stammer in his head. All the hours and minutes and days of his life are colliding. Time is suspended. He could be anywhere, or nowhere at all.
***
Frederick Undercroft is not the only one experiencing a baffling sense of loss.
Belinda Kite lies awake in Hawksley’s bed, unable to sleep. Something is very wrong. She’d arrived at his hotel a few hours earlier to find no tempting little supper laid out by the fire, and a host who seemed dull and preoccupied, strangely indifferent to her chatter.
Usually, Hawksley couldn’t wait to hear her talk about her day, what she’d seen, or eaten. Her tart comments on the women she encountered in the street never failed to provoke a wry smile and some compliment on her beauty, wit and intelligence, and how much he loved her for them.
Tonight, however, Hawksley has barely spoken to her, seemed uninterested in her excited description of her new dress, and has not reiterated his promise to take her out to the finest restaurant in town.
When he led her to his bedroom, he removed her clothes detachedly, as if she was just some woman he’d picked up for the night. Worse, for the first time since she went to bed with him, he did not wait patiently for her to climax first, taking his time to arouse her with his kisses and caresses.
Instead, after a few perfunctory strokes of her breasts, he rolled her onto her back and mounted her, spending himself inside her with a groan, then sliding off her without a word.
Now he sleeps, one heavy arm thrown carelessly across her naked body.
Belinda eases out from under his arm and gets out of bed. Tiptoeing over to the chair where he has flung his clothes, she starts to go through his pockets.
She does not know what she is looking for, but she does know that she is looking for something that might give her a clue as to his behaviour. She wonders whether she has been replaced in his affections by another woman. It seems the only logical explanation.
There is nothing incriminatory in his trouser pockets, nor in his waistcoat pockets. Belinda moves on to his jacket. In an inner pocket, she finds a railway ticket to Liverpool. It is dated for tomorrow morning, first thing.
Further exploration elicits a message from the Electric Telegraph Office, 448 Strand. Dated late last night, it states that a single berth in a first-class cabin has been reserved on the SS Great Eastern, leaving Liverpool for New York in two days’ time.
She checks ticket and message carefully, just in case she has misunderstood what she has discovered. She has not. Both are reservations for one person only. Mark Hawksley is leaving London for New York, and he is leaving on his own. He has not told her, nor clearly has he made any plans to take her with him.
For a moment, the perfidy of her lover stuns her. She actually takes a step back, as if he has struck her a blow. Given all that she thought she meant to him, and he to her, such a betrayal shocks her to her core. It is even worse than discovering that he has another woman.
She returns to the bed and stares at Hawksley’s sleeping form. He does not move. Once again, the old despair of being abandoned by those she trusted and loved begins to rise up inside her, but she pushes it down. Now is not the time for such thoughts, she tells herself. She needs to think clearly and act quickly.
Belinda crouches down and feels under the bed until her hands close on the cash box. Gently, she eases it out and with catlike tread carries it into the other room, setting it down by the door.
She puts on her clothes. She does not look round. Part of her wants to, but she doesn’t let it. Instead she tucks the cash box under one arm and walks out of the room, out of the hotel, and out of Mark Hawksley’s life forever.
Some time later Belinda Kite steps down from a cab. Giving the driver instructions to wait, she lets herself into Number 11, Cartwright Gardens. At this hour, the place is in darkness; the servants are all either out or in their own rooms. Even so, she knows she must move fast. She has not got much time.
But before she prepares to gather together her few belongings, there is one last important thing to be done. Belinda makes her way to the basement kitchen and helps herself to something from a kitchen drawer.
She goes up to her bedroom. Hanging from her wardrobe is the new dress. It is perfect, the stuff of dreams. Her dreams.
All her life Belinda Kite has dreamed of owning a dress like this. In the darkness of the boarding school dormitory, in the loneliness of her abandoned childhood, always standing in the shadows, she had watched other girls, far less pretty, less accomplished, waltz in and out of her life in their beautiful dresses.
She feasts her eyes upon the cream puffings, the bronze velveteen flounces and the delicate lace embroidery of the dress that was bought and paid for by her false seducer. Just as she has been bought and paid for, and now discarded, her heart ripped in two.
Then Belinda lifts the beautiful dress from the hanger, rolls it up and stuffs it into the grate. Striking a match, she drops it onto the material and watches as the dress is consumed by fire until there is nothing left but blackened ash.
***
Darkness falls. A solitary man walks towards the lights and bustle of King’s Cross Station. Look more closely. Do you recognise him? He passes through the sooty brick archway, his shoulders rounded, his unbrushed top hat pulled down low. This much you see. What you cannot see is the darkness that fills his head like cold ink, the tendrils of it dragging at his mind.
Like a moth drawn to a flame, Frederick Undercroft heads towards the warmth and lights of the concourse. He has a sudden urge to be amongst strangers going about their everyday business. People who do not know him, who do not wish him harm.
It is 6.20 pm and the station is unexpectedly busy. There is a palpable air of excitement mixed with expectation. Everyone seems to be heading towards the same destination. A leaf caught in an updraft, Undercroft follows them.
He arrives at a certain platform, finds himself borne along in the middle of a crowd of men and women. Many of the men carry cameras. They hurry down the side of the platform until they are close to the end, where they start setting up their equipment.
“What is going on?” he asks.
“The Flying Scot is coming in,” he is told. “Ten hours from Edinburgh Waverley, and she’s due in a couple of minutes. Never late.”
He stands at the edge of the platform staring up the line. He sees two yellow lights glowing like vengeful eyes, far away still but coming closer, closer. He hears steel upon steel, the thrumming of rails, the rhythmic churning of the engine.
Then the gigantic green behemoth is in sight, smoke billowing from its chimney, steam hissing from its sleek sides as the driver applies the brakes.
Undercroft takes a step forward. He smells acrid smoke, feels the power of massive pistons moving remorselessly up and down. The great heart of the train is beating, beating. He takes another step.
A sudden cry. A screech of brakes. A shout from the crowd. But the mighty machine moves on until it comes to rest at the wooden buffers. Too late. The crowd surges forward. Too late. The fireman jumps down, slips between the footplate and the rails. Too late. Far too late.
As the crowd surges forward, and the porters and guards rush to the platform to stop anybody alighting from the train, a black-clothed and heavily-veiled woman separates herself from the excitable throng and walks calmly back down the platform towards the now unmanned barrier. She makes her way out of the station and goes to find a cab.
***
Detective Inspector Stride sits at his desk and surveys the pile of paperwork. Despite his new file-it-on-the-floor-and-forget-it system, the pile seems to have grown again. He picks up the top item – a letter addressed to him personally – heaves a sigh, and opens it. As he reads the contents, the frown between his eyebrows gets deeper. When he has finished reading, he goes to the door and calls for Cully.
“Am I going mad, Jack?” Stride asks, handing him the letter.
Jack Cully scans the contents.
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’m reassured. I thought it was me.”
“It’s just a string of meaningless gibberish – though it appears to be signed by Mr Frederick Undercroft and is written on his official legal note paper. Some sort of hoax?”
Stride
shrugs.
“Who knows? Get someone to take it round to his office and see what he has to say about it, will you?”
There is a pause. Stride looks up.
“Is there a problem?”
“Mr Undercroft won’t be in his office today.”
“I see. So where will he be?”
“In the police morgue. Apparently, he fell under a train at King’s Cross station last night.”
***
At the coroner’s inquest on the body of Frederick Undercroft, evidence will be presented as to the extremely agitated state of mind of the deceased in the days leading up to his death. A report from his clerk and a garbled letter addressed to Detective Inspector Stride of Scotland Yard will be produced to corroborate this.
The presence of small, but not insignificant amounts of arsenic in his body will be attributed to the chemical being used in the manufacture of the vibrant Arsenical Green dye used to colour the green wallpaper in his bedroom. (New research, recently published in scientific journals, has thrown unexpected light upon the malign effects of inhaling and ingesting even slight residues of the chemical over a long period of time via this unfortunate choice of decorative material.)
The final report on the death of Frederick Undercroft, lawyer, will state that he was apparently the victim of a tragic accident, though given the mitigating circumstances, an open verdict will be declared.
The role of the unknown black-clad woman who had followed him from his office to the station, and of the unknown black-gloved hand that pushed him into the path of the oncoming train, will not be considered as a major contributory factor.