Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman

by Tessa Arlen

  “Well of course, Jackson, I am surprised we didn’t think of this before. Of course you must go. We’d better get Simpson to drive you to the station if you want to catch the next one up to town. Take all the time you need,” Lady Montfort replied as she rang for the chauffeur.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Sitting alone in her second-class compartment, Mrs. Jackson looked out of the window as the train, sending out a plume of thick, oily black smoke and cinders into the pure air, trundled heavily through a shallow valley of fields and copses.

  Over the hill to the north lay Haversham Hall and Iyntwood, and to the south, over the brow of another hill, lay Cryer’s Breech. Market Wingley was already several miles distant and she had been on the train only five minutes. It had taken just five minutes to cross the only world she had known for nearly twenty years. It had been nearly two years since Mrs. Jackson had traveled alone by train up to London, so her sense of adventure was almost overpowering. The train rocked in a comfortable rhythm as it picked up speed and Mrs. Jackson gazed unseeing out of the windows. In her mind she saw Haversham village: the church on the edge of the green; village women as they gathered at the pump; the men grouped at the forge as Bernard Oldshaw shod the great, round feet of shire horses while the plowman leaned against the door of the Goat and Fiddle with half a tankard of cider, enjoying a moment of respite from his labors. It was an idyllic image and Mrs. Jackson knew it was one much prized in the hearts of the English, especially when they were abroad. She was also aware, however, that behind it lay narrowness and an insularity that prevented any comprehension of life in a wider world.

  Her thoughts of the village led her back to Violet. Since her conversation with Stafford, she reflected that she was perhaps rather intransigent when it came to stepping outside her own experience and what she considered the proper way of doing things. She had acquired status in the house of an important family by often having to squash down her personal needs and sensitivities, to accomplish her lofty status. She had perhaps sacrificed almost too much to attain her position, and now she found it hard to step away from the rigid conventions she clung to and find compassion for the likes of Violet. She had forgotten how hard it was to fit in to a strange new culture with its own language and government.

  She had initially believed that Violet had chosen to run off, but around the edges of this belief now crept the beginning of doubt. Wouldn’t it be too daunting for a village girl to leave this known rural backwater and venture out with no idea of what was waiting for her in the great wide world? What if Violet had been forced to run away by something she had witnessed on the night of the ball, perhaps the murder of Teddy Mallory? Mrs. Jackson was a practical woman. She was on the whole well meaning and kind, but she was not blessed with a rich imagination. She left all that sort of stuff to Lady Montfort.

  Her train pulled into Marylebone station on time at seven minutes past one. As she got down onto the platform it took her a moment to adjust to the noise and throng of passengers alighting from the train. It was hard to get her bearings with carriage doors slamming like volleys of gunfire. The harsh hiss and clash of steam engines pulling out from other platforms was disorienting. She startled at the train conductor’s shrill whistle and the whir of a flock of pigeons as they flew up to roost in the vaulted glass roof. She joined the orderly crowd walking toward the ticket collector and stopped to look for the Bakerloo Underground sign, causing people to step around her. Her tuppenny tube ticket was tucked into the inside of her glove so that she didn’t drop it as she clutched the handrail of the escalator, steeply descending deep into the underworld.

  She hadn’t ridden on an underground train in well over five years. The Bakerloo line was new, she now remembered. At the bottom of the escalator she turned left and walked along the brightly lit, white-tiled tunnel to the station. On the platform, she had to hold on to her hat as a gust of warm, stale air preceded the hum of the train in the tunnel before it clattered into the station, shining with lights, glossy painted maroon coachwork, and gleaming glass. Twenty minutes later she rose to the street and a mass of traffic. The noise was deafening: horse-drawn cabs, motorcars and omnibuses, errand boys on bicycles, and pedestrians—all competed for right-of-way as they swept past her, dexterously weaving in and out among one another, and another horde of the same spun by in the opposite direction. A tall police constable blew his whistle and threw up his right arm to stop traffic, and she joined a group of people crossing to the other side of the street, where she asked directions to Clevellan Square.

  When at last she arrived at the house and walked down the area steps below street level to the servants’ entrance, she felt she had come a thousand miles from another country and had made every step of the way as a pioneer in some foreign land.

  It was a scullery maid who answered the door and indicated with a wrinkled, soap-stained hand that Mrs. Jackson should walk through into the butler’s pantry. Mr. Evesham greeted her with great civility, unusual in butlers to domestic staff from other houses; Lady Montfort must have called ahead. She followed the butler down the dimly lit central corridor to the far side of the house. He opened the garden door and out she went and up steps to arrive at last in the house’s large walled garden, which took up the entire center of the square. There among the trees, sitting in a lawn chair, as pretty as a watercolor and as if Holloway Prison existed only on the front page of The Times, sat Lucinda Lambert-Lambert.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Jackson,” she said politely, sitting up a little straighter and indicating a chair next to her. “I hope you had a pleasant journey.” She sounded like a little girl playing at tea parties; her words came out self-consciously, almost haltingly, as if Lucinda was listening to them carefully and checking herself for adult inflection and manner.

  Mrs. Jackson sat down but did not presume on the invitation; she sat on the very edge of the chair, her hands in her lap. She returned Lucinda’s greeting just as carefully.

  “I am very relieved to see you looking well, Miss Lucinda, after that awful experience. It must have been quite dreadful in…” Mrs. Jackson was careful to keep any judgment about Lucinda’s recent doings out of her expression and voice.

  “… Prison,” Lucinda firmly finished for her. “Actually, that was the point of it all, to go to prison. Yes, it was an awful experience. I believe it is supposed to be.” This condescending statement was in such contrast to Lucinda’s pretty-picture-book appearance that Mrs. Jackson was jolted out of her tactful consideration toward the girl. Goodness me, she thought, what a self-righteous little prig.

  She remembered the Lambert-Lamberts patiently standing in the hall at Iyntwood, waiting for the telephone to ring. Feelings of annoyance and impatience began to gather and then evaporated when she noticed that Lucinda looked very pale, and there were dark smudges under her eyes and her lips were dry and cracked. Lucinda must have felt her sympathy rather than her irritation, as she continued with little less bravado.

  “The whole thing was frightful, but I had to do it, had to do my bit,” the girl muttered and folded her thumbs into her fists. Mrs. Jackson had already noticed how bitten-down the nails were. She understood that Lucinda had naïvely taken on what she believed to be a just and deserving cause out of a passionate need to be useful. The poor girl was probably under the impression that she had joined a noble crusade and that right would prevail over might. Mrs. Jackson’s understanding of the political machinations of their modern world was limited, but she understood human nature. She knew enough to recognize the pitfalls of the hidden ambitions involved where the suffragette cause was concerned—the Pankhurst women on one side and the home secretary, Mr. McKenna, and the government on the other. Nothing was as it seemed; there were always hidden agendas.

  “Holloway was hellish, but they’d told me it would be,” Lucinda went on. “The noise was the worst because you can’t see what’s going on. They keep WSPU prisoners in the horridest part of the building, poor, brave things. Most of them were
striking.”

  No doubt she was referring to the hunger strikes, thought Mrs. Jackson. Accounts of them in the newspapers had been hair-raising. Now there was this Cat and Mouse Act, which meant that they released starving women from prison before they died, to allow them to recover, and then put them back in prison. It was a form of suicide or murder in itself, depending on how one looked at it. It got the government off the hook if their prison inmates starved themselves to the point of death in prison but died conveniently at home.

  She listened as Lucinda spoke of her forty-nine hours in Holloway. Female wardens built like men, who smelled of sweat and greasy unwashed hair, and their refusal to let her be with other political prisoners; the oppressive silence that fell between the sound of heavy footsteps on hard stone and the ceaseless slamming and locking of heavy doors; and, worst of all, the voices of women calling out in entreaty, pain, or outrage. It would have been an appalling experience for gently reared Lucinda, Mrs. Jackson thought, alone in her cell, left to imagine the worst … The girl was evidently still suffering the effects of her ordeal.

  Mrs. Jackson was not unsympathetic but she was in London for another reason, and it was one that mattered far more than the self-induced fears of an indulged girl who had spent a couple of nights in prison before her father rescued her. She leaned forward with her eyebrows raised in polite inquiry; it was an expression that worked well on housemaids, and she found it had its effect on Lucinda.

  “You didn’t come to hear about all of that, Mrs. Jackson.” She watched Lucinda push back a long lock of hair that had fallen out from under her hat. It refused to stay put and slid down again, and she spun the end of it around her forefinger.

  “I am very sorry for everything that happened to you, Miss Lucinda, but I am sure you have heard what happened at Iyntwood.” She sat in her chair, back straight, signaling that she had heard enough about Holloway.

  “Yes, I have, Mrs. Jackson. Terrible news about Teddy, I had no idea. Mother says there was a gang of people who had followed him down from London. It was an awful, terrible thing to have happened.” Lucinda’s voice was flat and expressionless.

  “Yes, quite dreadful.” Mrs. Jackson kept her voice neutral, as if she were talking about missing a bus, or dropping sixpence down the drain. It sounded too dismissive, so she added truthfully at the last moment, “Poor young man, he certainly didn’t deserve that end.”

  “Poor young man my foot! He was a thug and a dreadful bully. Do you know what he did to Violet?”

  Mrs. Jackson did not know, but in the last few hours she had groped toward the possibility of what might have happened to Violet, and then shied away from the thought. But this was why she was here, to find out, so she nodded, encouraging Lucinda to continue.

  “If you knew, why didn’t you stop it?” Mistaking Mrs. Jackson’s nod of encouragement as one of knowledge, Lucinda’s tired, blank face became animated and more hair slid down from under her hat.

  In a reasonable and quiet tone Mrs. Jackson assured her that no one had had an inkling of what had happened to Violet, not even now.

  “I can’t imagine how they didn’t— When I saw her on the night of the ball, she was terrified, incapable of speech. How could you have not known? It was a continual thing, you know … his … his, well … what he did to her. She was desperate, with no one to go to in that blasted house.”

  Mrs. Jackson tried to slow things down. She said quietly, “Of course something would have been done to protect Violet, had we known. But she…”

  “Somehow,” Lucinda shot her a reproachful look, “the poor girl had got it into her head that Teddy’s wicked treatment of her was her fault, that she had behaved improperly.” Lucinda’s voice was low and she almost spat the words. There were two bright spots of pink on her cheeks and, to Mrs. Jackson’s wary eye, something almost deranged in her fervent expression.

  “He was at it almost as soon as Violet started work at the house.” If she had wanted to see Mrs. Jackson flinch, she was rewarded. “You had no idea, did you?” Mrs. Jackson shook her head. “Apparently you told her not to catch anyone’s eye when she was working upstairs, and to avoid conversation altogether with the family. She hoped that if she steered clear of Teddy, he would leave her alone. But of course he didn’t. He stalked her through the house in the early morning when she was working, when she was cleaning the fireplaces, when he was sure she was alone, the little weasel. He always waited for her in the dark. It makes me ill to think of the terror she endured and the pain she suffered. She told no one at all. She was ashamed, you see, petrified every time she heard that Teddy was coming down to Iyntwood. Can you imagine living like that? I can’t.” Lucinda was completely out of breath. She licked her dry lips and frowned off into the shrubbery.

  It dawned on Mrs. Jackson that having just spent a couple of the most frightening days of her young life, Lucinda had given herself Violet as a cause to strive for and perhaps as a justification for the crushing embarrassment she had caused her kindly and well-meaning parents. Evidently Lucinda was not done.

  “There are so many of them: young girls, working long hours in factories, sweatshops, on farms, and in houses; alone, afraid, and abused by little scugs like Teddy.” Lucinda’s voice sounded too shrill, her sharp face looked angular and mean, her eyebrows were down, and she glared at Mrs. Jackson from under them.

  Lucinda’s escalating wrath caused Mrs. Jackson to become very still. Her heart beat at an alarming rate and her blouse collar cut into her neck. Oh dear God, she thought, here it is. Now she’s going to tell me. She fought down a rush of panic. How stupidly I have blundered in here. She’s going to tell me how she manhandled Mr. Mallory’s tied and gagged body up onto that dray and hid it in the storage box. She’s tall enough, she’s strong enough, and she’s angry enough. She could have done it given the time, and Mr. Mallory was such a slightly built young man. She walked over to the stable block to meet him, knocked him on the head, and then tied him up. Then she drove the dray up to Crow Wood, and hanged him from the gibbet. All she had to do was drive forward. She jumped as Lucinda laughed.

  “If you could just see the expression on your face, Mrs. Jackson, it’s almost laughable. What do you think I did?”

  “I can’t imagine, Miss Lucinda.” She heard the whisper of her voice and tried to pull herself together. She squared her shoulders and waited.

  “Oh yes you can imagine, Mrs. Jackson. You can imagine very well what I did, and that is why you are here, isn’t it?” Lucinda had regained some control of herself. Her face was still white but her eyes were not as fierce as they had been. She was fully in control now.

  “You don’t want to say?” She laughed cheerily, just like she had when she was a naughty little girl. “All right then, I’ll be a good sport and tell you what happened.

  “As long as Violet worked in the house, Teddy would hurt her and bully her, until he got bored and moved on to some other poor girl. No one could stop him but me.”

  Mrs. Jackson exhaled slowly, a long, shaky breath.

  Lucinda laughed. “Oh no, Mrs. Jackson, you are quite wrong. I didn’t need to kill Teddy. There were plenty of other people who wanted to do that. They were practically lining up.”

  “Well, I didn’t think you had…” She was gratified to hear that her voice was as smooth as glass, despite the pounding in her ears of her fast-beating heart.

  “Oh yes you did!” Lucinda laughed again. “On the night of the ball I was outside alone at the front of the house wondering when I could decently leave, and Violet came running along in the dark. Teddy had got his hands on her again, and all she could think of was getting as far away from the house as she could. Luckily I was there to stop her. I knew she hadn’t a hope of finding a decent place to go to, that she would be in as much danger out there as she was in the house. But I knew I could help her. I told her I’d take care of her. I told her to go and change out of her uniform and then I took her up to my room and we waited there for the ball to be ov
er and when it was quiet and the storm was over, I took her with me up to London.”

  Mrs. Jackson felt relief wash through her like a drink of cold water, and she heard herself ask, with understandable trepidation, where Violet was now. She imagined Violet chained to railings outside the Houses of Parliament or filling bottles with petrol in the basement of some suffragette stronghold; even worse, languishing in Holloway with other women encouraging her to go on a hunger strike.

  “She’s quite safe, you know, she’s with friends of mine.”

  Here was Lucinda’s triumphant moment, and privately Mrs. Jackson would have liked to give her a good slap. Neither did Lucinda’s news reassure her. Which friends? she thought. Where? She swallowed and tried to keep her voice even.

  “I hope you’ll trust me with Violet’s address. I’ll understand if she doesn’t want to come back to Iyntwood, but I would like to talk to her and tell her how sorry I am we let her down. All of us.”

  “Yes,” said Lucinda, “all of you—all of us in fact. All women, all let down. Women like you, Mrs. Jackson, and young women like me.” Mrs. Jackson could tell that Lucinda was about to embark on the suffragette cause and the plight of the working-class woman again. She didn’t think she could bear another political harangue. If Lucinda wanted to spend her life fighting for women’s suffrage and the rights of the working poor, that was her choice to make. All Mrs. Jackson wanted to know now was where Violet was. She said quickly before Lucinda could get going, “Her father is desperately worried too…”

  “No, he’s not, Mrs. Jackson. Jim Simkins knows exactly where Violet is. You didn’t really expect me to spirit her away and leave her father to wonder for the rest of his life where she could be?”

  Lucinda was quite calm now; no doubt she saw her motives as beyond reproach, thought Mrs. Jackson. Rescuing Violet was Lucinda’s redemption for her outrageous behavior and in her mind she had done a very good job of it.