by Caro Peacock
Mr McPherson thanks Mr Lane for his communication, but sees no need for a meeting. If Mr Lane wishes to do him a service, it will be by not gossiping about this business and strongly discouraging anyone else from doing so.
‘Curt,’ I said.
‘You can’t blame him. He must be sick of the whole affair.’
‘You’d think he’d be glad to have his name cleared.’
But something was beginning to stir in my mind that I couldn’t understand myself yet, let alone discuss with Tom. I expected him to be anxious to get back to Mr Tillington’s sickbed, and indeed he was on edge, but there was something else on his mind.
‘The parliamentary committee’s almost finished taking evidence.’
‘I suppose it will be months before it produces a report,’ I said.
‘Yes, but according to the men that know, they’ve pretty well reached a decision.’
‘On whether Griffiths had McPherson’s assistant killed? Surely that’s out of the question now. They’d have never made their truce otherwise.’
‘I don’t think they even know about the truce. They’ll let the whole business lie as something on which they can’t reach an agreement. I meant they’ve already decided on what matters most to McPherson and his friends – the compensation.’
‘Are they getting it?’
‘Not until after the war with China, then it will be exacted from Peking as part of the peace settlement.’
So Disraeli had been well informed as usual.
‘I suppose the Calcutta men aren’t pleased about that.’
‘Furious. From their point of view the war is only a means to an end. They want their compensation now. Without it, some of them will be ruined.’
‘McPherson included?’
‘Possibly, but the really worried ones are the smaller men who put more than they could afford into the Eastern trading companies. It looked like easy money, but now the shares are going down and down.’
Tom looked more gloomy about it than you’d expect for somebody with no capital.
‘You realize what that means, Libby?’
‘That our family fortunes are wrecked? Woe and alas.’
‘I mean if the game’s lost, the merchants will be going back to see what they can do in Calcutta and there’s no reason for Company men to stay either. We could all be sailing in two or three weeks.’
It really was woe and alas now. I’d known a parting must come, but had managed to push the thought away as something weeks or even months in the future. I’d hoped to be back on unclouded good terms with Tom before it happened. A smaller sorrow was that, with Tom and the rest of them gone, we might never know the truth about Griffiths’s death.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said, as if guessing my thoughts.
‘Not your fault. Shall you come back tomorrow?’
‘If I can, yes.’
I didn’t go back to the City next day. I’d failed entirely in Tabby’s craft, either in finding her or Eckington-Smith, so had to fall back on my own. I made myself neat for visiting and walked across the park to Kensington.
‘You must come and visit me, any time you like,’ Mrs Eckington-Smith had said to me when I’d finished my work for her.
She didn’t mean it: we’d both known that. It was when she was on the point of moving out of the house she’d lived in with her husband in St John’s Wood. She wanted to leave that and the memory of her marriage to him behind for ever. I was part of that. She was grateful to me for helping to free her, but I’d seen her at the darkest time of her life and she could never look at me without thinking of it. I was aware of that when I stood on the doorstep of her cottage – not far from where Mrs Glass lived – and gave my card to her maid. Still, she came to meet me bravely.
‘Miss Lane, such a pleasure. I’ve been hoping you’d find time to call.’
Her parlour was comfortable but not ostentatious, lilacs in a vase on the table and a child’s wooden horse and cart on the carpet. I think she and her small daughter had been playing with it when I arrived. When our coffee was served, the child and the horse and cart were sent to play with the maid in another room. We sipped our coffee and made conversation – about her son, away at school, the new piano she’d ordered. She was interesting herself in charity work and beginning to make new friends.
‘I’ve introduced myself to them by my maiden name,’ she said. ‘Not that it makes much difference.’
The wounds were raw, but healing. Still, she winced when I mentioned that I’d heard her husband had left the house in St John’s Wood.
‘He had to, I suppose. He has debts.’
‘Do you happen to know where he moved?’
She shook her head.
‘Somewhere cheaper, I suppose. I did hear he’d been travelling round the country a lot. Trying to get fools to lend him money.’
‘Does he have investments in the East India Company?’
‘He certainly did at one time. He was trying to build up enough shares to be a director. He said there were fortunes to be made from India.’
‘But he never went there, did he?’
‘No. He’s scared of any sea voyage longer than to the Isle of Wight.’
She changed the subject, wanting my valuable opinion of whether to plant geraniums or penstemons in her window box. After half an hour I left. She came to the doorstep with me and urged me to call again soon, managing to sound as if she meant it. Since that attempt had failed, I needed some other means of finding Eckington-Smith’s present address. I went home, folded a sheet of paper, wrote on it the address from which I knew he’d moved and marked it ‘Urgent’. Then I put on a plain grey dress and bonnet and walked to Westminster. It took some time to find the entrance used by MPs so I arrived there looking suitably confused, like a timid conscientious servant. I inquired of the official in tailcoat and breeches standing at the door if somebody could kindly give me the address of Mr Eckington-Smith MP.
‘You could leave it here if you want to, missy.’
‘Is he here today, sir?’ I hoped not.
‘No. Haven’t seen him for a while.’
The messengers had prodigious memories for the comings and goings of MPs.
‘It’s urgent.’ I showed him the address. ‘He used to live here, only they say he doesn’t any more. I don’t know what to do, sir.’
He liked being called ‘sir’ and maybe even the timid smile I gave him from under my bonnet rim. Perhaps he was bored, or even kindly by nature. At any rate, he decided to help. He told me to wait, beckoned up a younger messenger and asked him to cut along to the post room and inquire for Mr Eckington-Smith’s present address. I waited. A few members came and went. Luckily Mr Disraeli was not among them. After a quarter of an hour or more, the younger man came back with a slip of paper. My messenger read it out painstakingly.
‘You know where that is, missy?’ Then, mistaking my look of surprise for ignorance. ‘It’s in the City, not far from where the Bank of England is. You can get an omnibus from over there.’
I knew it well. Mr Eckington-Smith’s current address was two streets away from where Mr Griffiths had died. Probably not a coincidence.
I took the omnibus to the Bank and walked along Cornhill and Leadenhall Street, past the offices of the East India Company. A small detour took me to Mr Griffiths’s late lodgings. There was an alleyway beside it and a place at the back where a carriage might have waited. At least the Rani’s story did not fall down on that point. The address given to me was only a few minutes’ walk away. Eckington-Smith lived at number five: a plain terraced house of sooty brick and faded cream paintwork, respectable but not impressive. The basement area was deserted with nothing in it but a water tub and an old broom, no sign of servants. I walked round the corner to the back of the row of houses. A narrow alleyway ran along the row, just wide enough for handcarts delivering goods or clearing cesspits. From the smell, some attention was needed. A wall with a line of narrow wooden gates closed off the backyards of the houses.
I counted along, opened the gate and walked into the backyard of number five.
They’d had a bonfire, fairly recently, but not since the downpour of two days ago. The ashes were heavy and sodden, pieces of unburnt paper glued to the trodden earth. I took off my glove and prised up a couple of them and read . . . profits for the City of London. It has been a process of gree . . . and . . . even the opium-dulled consc . . .
Judging from the ash pile, it had been a large bonfire, but then it would have needed to be to consume a carriage-full of Mr Griffiths’s pamphlets. I checked that nobody was watching me from the back windows and looked round the yard. Nothing much to see except brick walls on either side and a lean-to against the right-hand wall, probably for coals or logs. The door wasn’t locked. I lifted the latch, opened it and knew I was on the trail at last. I was looking at a nest of sacks. It could have been a refuge for almost anything: a large dog or an exceptionally badly housed kitchen maid. I knew, as surely as if she’d engraved her name over it on a brass plate, that the nest was Tabby’s. It was exactly the way she’d made her sleeping place in the shed near the cows in Abel Yard, before I had the cabin built for her. She had a way of rolling two sacks into a bolster. You could even see the imprint of her head in the middle of it. I picked up a long brown hair and flicked a flea off my wrist. Oh Tabby. There was nothing else of hers, but then I didn’t expect anything. She’d returned to her old life, where you kept your possessions on your person.
I went back to Abel Yard, guessing that Tabby wouldn’t be back in her lair till after dark. By eight o’clock I was back in the alley. I went into the yard of number five to make sure she wasn’t back. The shed was unoccupied. Inside the house, a dim light showed from a window on the first floor. I let the latch down softly and took up position in the alley, wrapped in my cloak, leaning against a wall. At this time of night, there was no reason for anybody else to be there, so I had it to myself apart from the occasional scavenging dog or mousing cat. Now and then hoofs and carriage wheels sounded faintly from the street. Darkness came down. A variety of clocks from banks and counting houses doled out nine strokes, then ten. Two fighting dogs rolled across my feet. A few houses down, a knife scraped across several plates then a bin lid clanged. Pig bin, I supposed. I walked up and down the alley several times to keep from getting stiff and cold. Eleven o’clock. Another walk up and down. The faint light was still showing in number five. It must have been near midnight when it happened. A dark figure turned off the street and into the alley. It was moving cautiously, but as if it knew where it was going. I drew back against the wall, not wanting to scare her off before I had a chance to say anything. From where I was standing, I’d be about ten yards away from her when she got to the back gate. The advancing figure was no more than a black shape against the dark. It was at the gate before I realized that it wasn’t Tabby.
Not very tall, but too tall for her. A man, breathing wheezily as if unaccustomed to walking. I could smell the fumes of strong tobacco from his greatcoat and cheap brandy as he fumbled at the latch, cursing under his breath. A rough voice, not Eckington-Smith’s rotund tones. So our man had a visitor who came by the back gate. He managed the latch, pushed the gate open and walked into the yard, leaving it open. He was carrying a bag that looked heavy in his left hand. I moved so that I could see into the yard. He went to the back door, knocked on it with his fist, but not loudly. The light on the first floor waned then the window went dark. Somebody had picked up a candle in its holder and was carrying it down to the door. I was wondering whether to risk moving into the yard to overhear anything that was said when somebody pushed me roughly aside and rushed past. Tabby, running. I don’t think she even knew who I was. I was simply an obstacle. Inside the gate, she hesitated for a moment. The visitor was still at the door. It opened, and there was Eckington-Smith standing inside it in a dark flannel dressing gown, his face with its broad forehead and narrow chin as pale as a peeled pear in the light of the candle he was holding. He started saying something to the man at the door. It sounded like a complaint of some kind but he didn’t finish it because Tabby bounded forward and something flashed in the candlelight.
She pushed the visitor aside, making for Eckington-Smith. The visitor stumbled. His arm swung out with the heavy bag he was carrying. Whether it was intentional or an accident, it hit Tabby, knocking her off balance. It gave me the two seconds I needed to catch up with her. I grabbed her by the shoulder. Cold air hit me as her knife ripped through my cloak. We were stumbling on something. Sovereigns, spilled from the visitor’s bag, hundreds of them glinting in the candlelight. The light was wavering because Eckington-Smith was swinging the candle around, shouting, ‘Police, police.’
‘Come away,’ I said to her. ‘For heaven’s sake, come away.’
It shook her, hearing my voice. Up to that point, she’d been straining away from me, still trying to get to Eckington-Smith. The visitor was on hands and knees, scrabbling sovereigns. Taking advantage of her moment of confusion, I dragged her back towards the gate. Eckington-Smith was still yelling. Distantly, the clack-clack of a police rattle sounded, like a startled pheasant.
‘Run. Just run,’ I said.
Running from the police was a natural instinct for Tabby. We ran back along the alley, in the opposite direction from the way we’d entered. I only hoped it wasn’t a dead end. For a bad moment it looked as if we were making straight for a blank brick wall but an opening to the side gave just enough space to squeeze through. Tabby found it first and turned a pale face to me to make sure I was behind her.
‘Yes, go on.’
We came out to a street, quite a wide one. Police rattles were clacking from two directions now, but still some distance away. Tabby dived up another alleyway. I followed. She knew the territory better than I did. It came out in Leadenhall Street. A few lamps burning outside buildings made it look alarmingly light after the alleyways. We were the only people in it.
‘Walk,’ I said to Tabby, and turned us westwards.
She’d have gone on running but I had a stitch in the side. In any case, respectability was now our best hope. As we walked, I slipped off my mistreated cloak and made Tabby wrap it round herself and put the hood up.
‘Don’t need it,’ she said.
But that wasn’t the point. If the police encountered us now, I’d do my best to pass for a lady out late with her maid. What we were doing on the streets of the City late at night should be no business of the constables. Luckily, we didn’t meet one. At Cornhill a cab came grinding towards us, probably on its way home. Two half-crowns in hand persuaded the driver to change direction and take us as far as Charing Cross. We walked back to Abel Yard from there, without attracting much attention. At Abel Yard I took her upstairs to the parlour, sat her down on a chair (trying hard not to think about fleas) and stirred up the fire to make tea. When I found some bread and cold meat for her she ate wolfishly, her slowly acquired table manners quite gone. I waited, drinking my tea, until she was finished. Then: ‘You’d better explain,’ I said.
TWENTY
‘You should’ve let me kill them.’
‘You’d have hanged.’
‘Wouldn’t matter.’
Tabby hunched in the chair, hair flopping, eyes burning.
‘I thought you were going to get him stopped, that time you found out about him,’ she said. ‘I waited for you to do something, but you didn’t, so it was up to me.’
Her anger against me was so fierce I could feel the heat of it, like standing too close to the fire. No use pretending I didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘I didn’t know you knew, Tabby. I suppose I was trying to protect you. That’s why I took you off following him, as soon as I found out what he was.’
‘You thought you took me off.’
Six words like so many punches. I didn’t know my work. I didn’t know Tabby.
‘So all the time, that house in Clerkenwell . . .?’
‘Yes.’
‘H
e had to close it, you know. I made sure influential people knew about it, so it closed.’
‘And opened again three doors down, a week later.’
She said it like a fact of life, sure as rain falling.
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Lot of things you don’t know.’
No answer to that, so I didn’t try. She sat staring at the fire for a long time before she spoke again.
‘I’d worked it out, how to get both of them. Thursday nights, he always brings the takings round to the back door.’
‘The man with the bag of money?’
A nod.
‘Is he the manager of the house?’
Another nod.
‘You wouldn’t have got away.’
‘Yes I would, if it hadn’t bin for you interfering.’
‘For heaven’s sake, was I supposed to stand there and let you knife them?’
‘Nothing to do with you.’
More silence. She was forcing me back, making me defend myself. I tried to keep my voice level.
‘You think I didn’t do enough,’ I said. ‘You’re right. If that wicked place has opened again, I didn’t do enough. But we did manage to do a lot of harm to him. If he’d managed to trick us into thinking his wife had gone mad and was trying to kill him, he’d have got all her money. Without it, he’s overstretched financially and nearly running out of credit.’
Silence. I might as well have been speaking Greek.
‘And he’d have managed to take her children away from her.’
‘Her children,’ Tabby snapped out. ‘What about the others?’
No use pretending I didn’t understand her. She was right. I’d been too pleased with myself for what I’d managed to do for the man’s unfortunate wife, too ready to believe that the brothel in Clerkenwell had closed for good.
‘How did you know?’ I said.
‘How do you think I knew?’
The eyes fixed on mine weren’t burning any more. They’d gone dull as pebbles.
‘You?’
‘I got away, three years ago it was. There were girls there younger than me, a lot younger.’