by Parry, Owen
I was flummoxed.
Perhaps I am a fool in so many ways that they cannot be tallied, but I did not expect Miss Perkins to appear in Glasgow. Yet, up to me she stepped, with a great and grandiose folderol of bodily contortions. Her travelling costume included a rather alarming abundance of feathers, as if she had prepared herself to fly the rest of the way should the train break down. All in handsome green she was, with bits of cream lace planted here and there, and her hat was of a size to inspire awe. Her blond hair was put up, and she wore summer gloves that did not look quite fresh.
I would not tell you that she looked a queen, for she did not. Queens pursued a duller course than Miss Perkins. Nor did she achieve the elegance she wanted, to be plain. Even I could tell that much. Yet, every male head on that platform snapped in her direction, as smartly as if given a command.
Just as Mr. Adams come up beside her, with a look of infernal confusion on his face and the luggage precarious in his struggling arms, Polly gave me a smile as bright as sunrise. Although one of her teeth was just awry, which I had not noted previously. Still, it was not unbecoming, since the teeth looked to be her own, and that is something.
“Well!” she declared—indeed, hers was a tone of declaration— “It’s good to lay eyes on a gentleman again, and one what don’t think it’s ’is right and ’is bleedin’ privilege to take advantage of an innocent lady what finds ’erself cast on ’is mercies upon the railway!” She glanced cooly at Mr. Adams. “A gentleman what is unlike some people of which we ’ave a mutual acquaintance.”
She extended her hand to me. Rather as if she expected me to kiss it. I gave it a friendly shake, instead, and welcomed her to Scotland.
Again, she aimed a haughty look at the luggage-encumbered slave to which Mr. Adams had been reduced.
“’E’s a dirty little cooter,” she told me, “and wants watching every minute, don’t think ’e don’t.” She sniffed. “You wouldn’t think ’e ever met ’imself a proper li-dy.”
And then she excused herself delicately, to answer the strain of her journey with a visit to the lady’s parlor within the station, despite the intelligence I offered of the hotel’s proximity.
As she took herself toward the bustling hall, Miss Perkins managed to seem an entire procession. With men and boys bowing and tipping their hats, and doing most all they could to beg her notice, Henry Adams put down the pile of travelling kit—not without dropping a bag or two about him—and admired his companion’s triumph.
“Isn’t she splendid?” he asked me. “I don’t believe I’ve ever known anyone like her.”
OF COURSE, MY PRIMARY INTEREST was the letters.
“Oh, she has them, all right,” young Mr. Adams assured me. “I’ve seen them.”
“Well, what do they say, man?”
He looked perplexed, as if I should have known everything that had happened since I left London.
“She hasn’t actually let me read them,” he told me. “But she’s shown them to me. Twice. She really is a wicked little teaser-cat, you know. Have you seen the way she dances when she—”
“What is the difficulty, then? Not enough money, is it?”
“Oh, no. Nothing of the sort.” His perplexity multiplied, as if he thought me hopelessly ill-informed. “She hardly seems interested in the money. Although I suspect she’ll take it, in the end. A girl in her position wants funds, of course.”
“What is it, then? Why will she not give you the letters?”
Twas then his bafflement reached its apotheosis.
“She refuses to give them to anyone but you,” he told me. “She says she’s frightfully sorry she took them, and feels she has to make amends to you personally. I say, Jones. I suppose I should be more than a little jealous.” He stepped closer to me, as men do when they intend to embarrass themselves. “But I don’t imagine you’d be the sort to crowd the field on a fellow.”
Just then, a porter come up with a trunk, and I told him we would make for the Hotel Clarence. Since Mr. Adams did not seem forthcoming of purse, I paid the fellow and added a tip. For safety. I did not wish to endanger Miss Perkins’s wardrobe, see. For hard enough it seemed to keep her garments upon her.
As we followed the porter along the pier, through a great contention of ladies who lacked some precious parcel, young Mr. Adams edged close to me again.
“Jones, I find I must ask you something plainly. Man to man.”
When fellows say that, they are up to something nasty.
“Have you . . .” he began, “ . . . did you . . . has Miss Perkins ever . . . has there been any sort of intimacy between the two of you? I don’t ask out of—”
I stopped and gave him a look to freeze the Punjab over in July. “I am a married man, Mr. Adams. And if you have the least regard for Miss Perkins, you will—”
“Terribly sorry,” he said, fair jumping back. “Really. I am sorry. I knew better, of course. It’s only . . . it’s only that I’m afraid I’ve fallen in love, you see.”
And there you have what comes of scheming mischief.
OUR CAB RIDE TO THE HOTEL was uneventful, except for the slap Miss Perkins gave to Henry Adams’s hand when it accidentally strayed toward her skirts.
“Don’t you be nasty,” she told him, and I believe he blushed, although it was hard to see, for the cab was not lit.
The fellow at the desk had doubts about allowing a room to an unmarried lady, who was travelling without the benefit of familial supervision, but I convinced him it was a matter of legation business. He gave me a smirk or two, and he did take an especial interest in Miss Perkins’s prancing about the narrow lobby, but in the end all parties had a room, and the luggage was sent up while Mr. Adams and Miss Perkins inked the registry. Young Mr. Adams received lodgings next to mine, but Miss Perkins was consigned to a separate floor, to suit propriety, with a caution not to come down to the lobby or enter the dining room unescorted. I thought the clerk’s manner needlessly harsh, but the Scots are so wary of sin that they search until they find it.
Out of earshot of the clerk, we agreed to meet in my room in ten minutes. And that Miss Perkins would bring the letters.
“I can’t ’ardly wait,” she told me, with a smile and a blue-eyed wink.
When both of them made to separate from me, I held back Mr. Adams by his sleeve. Discreetly.
“Perhaps,” I whispered, as Miss Perkins’s form diminished up the staircase, “you should come to my room in five minutes. If it does not inconvenience you.”
Mr. Adams agreed with alacrity. I do believe he was as eager to keep me from an intimate encounter with Miss Perkins as I was to avoid one. Twas queer to have the fellow jealous of me. But then Miss Perkins knew how to bait a man, if you will allow me the frankness.
I went to my room and moved the pistol case and the fancy-wrapped shawl to the top of the dresser, listening all the while to a fellow out on the square, who had been seduced by Satan’s elixirs and was bellowing “God Save the Queen” at the top of his lungs. He could not find his pitch, which ever annoys me. I bent to the basin to rinse my face and hardly had time to look after myself before Mr. Adams come knocking on my door.
He did not beat Miss Perkins by a minute. And how she did it so quick I cannot say, unless it is a skill of the stage, but she had managed to exchange her green costume for a gown of sapphire blue. The dressmaker had economized on the amount of fabric devoted to the bodice, and her white shoulders led the eye lower still, to where a fellow’s eye has no business going. She had dropped her hair, too, and might have taken the role of Guinevere upon the stage.
She had the two packets of letters in her hands, still tied with the same ribbons.
Disappointed she seemed that Mr. Adams had anticipated her arrival.
“I don’t think as that one should be allowed to read ’em,” she told me. “As ’e already seems to ’ave plenty of powder in ’is keg. Couldn’t you pack ’im off til we finish our business?”
Mr. Adams’s expression
feared calamity.
“Surely, Miss Perkins,” I said, “you wouldn’t want to compromise your reputation by being alone with a man in his hotel room.”
That pleased her no end. She lifted her nose and turned it to Henry Adams. “Always a gent,” she said, “and considerate of a poor girl’s reputation. Unlike some present company as might be among us.”
“Please,” I said. “The letters.”
“Well, I ain’t sure,” she told me.
I searched for a response, but she continued without my interlocution.
“I don’t know if anybody ought to be reading such dirty business.” She blushed, and I do not believe it reflected the art of the stage. “I never ’eard the likes in my life,” she told me. “Nothing but dirty filth it is, and not fit for the sewers, let alone being set down on paper, bold as brass. It’s the wickedest business what ever I come across.”
“Miss Perkins,” I said, “the contents may have great importance. An importance that is perhaps beyond your—”
“Well, I don’t see ’ow they could matter at all to anyone who ain’t a stinker!” she declared. “Perhaps you ain’t the gentleman I took you for. You all fancy and telling me ’ow I was to pose myself in your room and the like, and ’ere I thought you—”
At the turn in her discourse, I suffered a savage glance from Henry Adams.
“—wasn’t a bit like the rest of them.”
“Please. The letters, Miss Perkins. I assure you my intentions are not lascivious.”
Tentatively, she began to extend them toward me. “I’m ashamed that ever I took them. And twicet ashamed that ever I read them. ’Ad to read them over and over, I did, since I couldn’t believe the ’alf of what they was going on about.” She lowered her eyes. “I didn’t know a woman could do them kinds of things to another woman.”
Henry Adams and I exchanged a glance that suggested we were not the men of the world we fancied ourselves. Out in the square, that drunkard still howled at the Lord to preserve the Queen.
“Oh, I know as there’s bossy women and girls as like things peculiar,” Miss Perkins continued. “But this is just the dirtiest! You’d think she was a man ’erself, the things she talks of doing to ’er sweetie.”
“Miss Perkins . . .” I began, as I sought to force things back into a sensible order, “ . . . you mean that these . . . these . . .” Of a sudden, I hesitated to take the missives from her. “ . . . you mean these are love letters written from one woman to another?”
“And absolutely filthy,” she said. “Nearly burned ’em, I did.”
When I failed to grasp the proferred letters, Miss Perkins took matters in hand. For her temper was up just thinking of the injuries implied to her fair sex. She stepped to the writing table and pulled the first ribbon until the bow dissolved and the letters spread themselves in a fan. Choosing one at random, she unfolded it and spread it out for all of us to see.
When we proved shy of reading the text in her presence—given the immense nature of the perversity involved—she stared at us as if we were bad little boys.
“Well, I thought you wanted to ’ave yourself a look,” she said to me.
“But . . .” I began again, trying to make all the pieces fit—where on earth was the value worth killing for, if the letters were not from a man of position, but from a woman? What woman in England maintained a position of such power and importance that she might be endangered by the existence of—
A wave of horror swept over me. And through me. And all around me.
“ . . . a woman,” I muttered, seeing an august portrait in the air. Could it be . . . was it possible . . .
“Well, if you won’t believe me, ’ave a look for yourself,” she told me. And she picked up the letter and held it up to my face. “See ’ow the bleedin’ cow signs it? Shameless as a slut on the docks, she is. ‘Your Old Pam.’ ”
It is a most peculiar situation to find yourself relieved that the Prime Minister of Great Britain has embarrassed himself by scribbling obscenities.
Henry Adams made a grab for the letters, but Polly was too quick for him. She interposed a volume of skirts and swept up the papers and dumped them into my hands. Not without dropping a few of them onto the floor. Lord Palmerston was a voluminous correspondent.
“There,” she told me. “If that’s the sort of nastiness you prefer to a girl what was all ready to treat you proper, good riddance.”
“Miss Perkins,” I said, “Polly . . . these aren’t . . . the letters are not from a woman. They’re from Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister. His nickname is ‘Old Pam,’ see.”
She made a delighted face. “Coo, ain’t ’e a dirty bird, then? The old bugger.”
“Jones, really,” Mr. Adams interposed, “you needn’t tell her—”
“Polly, you’re a good girl. A very good girl,” I told her. “You’re a very good girl, indeed. I . . . I believe I could kiss you!”
Of course, I did not mean it literally. And I regretted my speech the moment it was uttered. The words just come out, see.
“Well, don’t stop yourself on my account,” she told me, practically offering me one of those milky cheeks. “And to think ’e’s still capable of doing things like that, the old leaker,” she added. For even a penny-gaff songstress has some knowledge of the Prime Minister.
“Jones,” Mr. Adams said, “do you realize . . . that those letters could bring down the government?”
“Or control it,” I said, for I saw farther than he did.
“Coo,” Polly said. “I shouldn’t like to be ’im when ’is wife finds out.”
And the night was still in its infancy.
You might have slapped my face and I would not have felt it. Fair stunned I was. Not only by the magnitude of power those letters offered the possessor, but by my blindness in the face of the obvious. I should have known days before who had written the letters, for the evidence had been hurled in my direction until it lay in piles on every side of me.
The risks that Mr. Disraeli had been willing to run had been too great to be caused by a stack of debts—in England, debts were the very badge of a gentleman. Yet, he had been willing to risk career and reputation—even prison, perhaps. I should have seen it could not be a matter of chasing after a peerage for the rich man who held his paper. And then Lords Russell and Lyons, who were no friends to Mr. Disraeli’s faction, had come to Mr. Adams with their worries, implying that our Minister’s help was to be rewarded, without the least willingness to enter into detail about the help required. There was the Prime Minister’s notorious reputation as a fellow of more enthusiasm than virtue where the ladies were concerned. That boy in the Dutch cap, in Lambeth, who lived next door to the late Betty Green, had spoken of a tottering old man who come visiting. But I had leapt to the conclusion that he spoke of the elder Mr. Pomeroy, despite that gentleman’s obvious robustness. Death had been piled upon death with pestilential abandon. The private indiscretions of some lesser figure could not have been the cause of such a massacre. As for Betty Green—or Sarah Pomeroy—twas obvious why they had made her out not only a Jewess, but a Hungarian one. For a Jewess would create an embarrassment of race, but a Hungarian mistress might be portrayed as the agent of a foreign power. In whose arms the leading man in England had taken his repose.
Those letters had the power and promise to draw the likes of Lieutenant Culpeper into the matter. A pawn-broker’s life, or that of a boy, would be nothing against such stakes. Had Betty Green been wiser, she would have seen that death must be her destiny. For none who knew or suspected the secret, below the level of great social power, would be allowed to survive.
That meant that other deaths were in the offing.
I could have cursed. And I do not curse lightly, and wish not to curse at all. As much as I had deplored Inspector Wilkie’s subservience, and mocked the English as a servile people, the taint was still deep down in my own bones. For I, too, had looked downward instead of up. And if I had cursed, which I did not,
I might have laughed thereafter. For I had been proposed as a clever detective— although I did not make that claim myself—yet I had failed to look through a lamplit window when invited.
But what had Palmerston’s follies to do with ships?
I had no more time to plod to conclusions, for the city’s clocks already had given us midnight, and I was to be at John Knox’s feet by one.
I turned to my companions. Young Mr. Adams had been as shocked as I was by the identity of the author of those epistles—perhaps he was even more shocked—but Miss Perkins expected less of the high and mighty, and she had taken upon herself the unbidden duty of examining the letters a final time, in case we had neglected some intelligence. Giggle and blush she did, and now and again she whispered, “The dirty old bugger . . .”
“Look you,” I said abruptly. As if to wake myself from the thrall of a dream. “We must divide the letters. Mr. Adams, you will take one packet. Miss Perkins, might I ask you to retain the other stack until I return?”
“You’re going out?” Mr. Adams asked me. “At this hour?”
“I have an appointment.”
He gave me a look that I found inappropriate and said, “Why, Jones, you old dog!”
Miss Perkins also scowled her disapproval.
“No, no,” I assured them. “It is a police matter, see. I am to meet a certain Inspector McLeod in the Necropolis, under the Knox statue. We must meet in secret, so that he will not be compromised.”
“That sounds queer,” Henry Adams told me.
“Yes. It does.” I walked over to the dresser, took one of the pistols from the case, and tucked it underneath my frock coat. “And if it is as queer as I suspect it may be, I will be prepared.” I looked at him a touch severely, for the young man wanted gravity. “There is another pistol in the box. And it is loaded. If you find you have a need . . .”
“Really, Jones . . . I know nothing of pistols. I couldn’t possibly, you know.”
“Well, it is in the case. If anyone comes asking for the letters. I suggest you take it with you to your room.” I shifted my attentions to the White Lily of Kent, who now looked more alarmed than disapproving. “Miss Perkins, I recommend you stay here in this room, rather than returning to your own.” When she looked a bit too eager, I added, “Until I come back. Then you may retire to your own chamber.”