Death at Dawn
Page 11
I hired a loitering boy to carry the bag and arrived in plenty of time to take up the seat I’d reserved on the Windsor coach, only to find the vehicle surrounded by a crowd of people pushing, trampling on each other’s toes, waving pieces of paper.
‘… sent my man to reserve seats three days ago …’
‘Quite imperative that I arrive in Windsor by three o’clock or …’
‘… travel outside if need be, but I must get to Windsor …’
A couple of harassed ostlers were trying to hold them back, while the coach guard slowly spelled out names on a list. For some reason, half London seemed possessed of a desire to travel the twenty miles or so to Windsor. It was only when I’d claimed my place, after some unladylike elbowing and shoving, and we were going past Hyde Park Corner that I recalled the reason for this migration of people. They all hoped for a chance to see the new queen. As far as anybody knew, she was still in London, but was expected any day to travel to her castle at Windsor. I was wedged in between a lawyer-like man with an umbrella and an Italian confectioner with – of all things – a large cake on his lap. In spite of the crush, with two extra passengers crammed inside the coach, he couldn’t resist unwrapping it to show us all. It was marzipan-striped in red, white and blue, with gilt anchors, bells, and a tiny sugar replica of Westminster Abbey.
‘For Her Majesty.’
‘Has Her Majesty asked for it?’ the lawyer-like man said.
‘Poor little Vicky,’ said a man in the corner, who seemed at least three parts drunk. ‘Such a weight on such young shoulders.’
From the murmur of approval round the carriage, he did not mean the cake. Their voices mingled like pigeons in a loyal cooing: so young, so beautiful, so alone, so dignified. All the men in the coach were wearing black cloth bands on their sleeves in mourning for the king and the lawyer had a black streamer round his hat, but grief for William seemed lost in excitement over little Vicky. I said nothing. Even if my own world had not fallen apart, I could have raised no great enthusiasm about a grand-daughter of mad King George succeeding to a thoroughly discredited crown. Of course, that was the kind of thing said by my father’s friends, but even to hint at it in this patriotic coachload would bring down on my head accusations of republicanism, atheism, treason and revolution. ‘Well, that explains the six dozen of champagne, at any rate,’ I thought. Lady Mandeville’s haste and anxiety, the disruption of her household, were no more than symptoms of royalty fever. Any person of consequence living within an easy drive of Windsor Castle would be expected to entertain housefuls of guests drawn by the mere chance of seeing Her Majesty riding in Windsor Great Park. The advantage was that, in the middle of such a stir, nobody was likely to pay attention to a new governess. The disadvantage, from a spy’s point of view, was that one of the puzzles had such a simple explanation.
We reached Windsor half an hour late because of the amount of traffic on the outskirts and unpacked ourselves from the carriage. The confectioner strode away through the crowds carrying his preposterous cake like the Holy Grail. I hoped the flunkey who received it would treat him politely at least.
There is no getting away from the castle at Windsor. Its old grey walls tower above the little town like the slopes of the Alps. The narrow streets were crowded with people in their best clothes, most of the respectable sort looking hot and uncomfortable in black, but with a carnival sprinkling of parasols and brightly coloured frocks. I stood outside the inn where the coach had put us down, wondering how I was to recognise the vehicle from Mandeville Hall in the confusion of broughams, barouches, fourgons, calèches, landaus and every other type of conveyance that clogged the centre of town.
‘You Miss Lock, the governess?’
A phaeton drew up beside me, drawn by a bay cob with a grey-haired coachman in the driving seat. It was crowded with packages and parcels, a large fish kettle, crates of bottles.
‘Where you got to?’ the driver grumbled. ‘I been looking for you an hour or more. Now we’ll be back late and they’ll say it’s my fault as usual.’
It was no use pointing out that it wasn’t my fault either. I managed, without his help, to find a gap for myself and my bag between a box of wax candles and a large ham, and settled back for a ride through the Berkshire countryside. For much of the journey we went through Windsor Great Park, with cattle grazing under oak trees old and gnarled enough to have seen Queen Elizabeth out hunting. Every time I looked back, there was the castle, silver in the sun, dwindling gradually into a child’s toy castle as we trotted in a cloud of our own white dust between hedges twined with honeysuckle and banks of frothy white cow parsley, though in that royal county it probably goes by its country name of Queen Anne’s lace. The smell of strong tobacco from the driver’s clay pipe mingled with the chalky dust, flowers and ham. I’d thought that once we got clear of the town he might turn and speak to me and I could ask him about the family, but he never once looked back.
We came out of the parkland alongside an area of common land that I guessed must be Ascot Heath. The horse races had been run earlier in the month, while the old king was still alive, but a string was at exercise in the distance, stretching out at an easy canter. I thought of Esperance and longed to see her. The racing, and the nearness of Windsor, had clearly attracted the gentry, because there were some grand houses close to the heath. I thought any of them might be Mandeville Hall, but we trotted on past various walls and gatehouses until we came alongside a park railing. The uprights of it flickered into a blur in the sunshine and it was a while before my eyes cleared. They focused first on the railings themselves, newly painted, topped with gilt spearheads. Three men were at work with pots and brushes, re-gilding the spearheads. As we went past, one of them shouted at the driver and looked angry, probably because our dust was spoiling their work. He took no notice. Behind the railing an expanse of parkland sloped upwards, with oaks like Windsor Castle’s but much younger. At the top of the slope was …
‘Good heavens, another castle.’
I said it aloud, to the ham and the fish kettle. At second glance it wasn’t quite a castle, only a very grand notion of an Englishman’s country house. It had enough towers and turrets for a whole chorus of fairy-tale princesses and was bristling with battlements and perforated with arrowslits as if ready to take on an army. In reality, an army of boys armed with catapults could have done it mortal damage because the front was more glass than stone. Three storeys of windows dazzled in the sun, most unmedieval. The whole thing was a perfection of the modern Gothic style, as much antiquity as an ingenious architect could pile on without sacrificing the comfort of the family who were paying his fee. We slowed to a walk, approaching two open gates. They were wrought iron, twenty feet high, freshly painted and gilded like the railings. Cast-iron shields, as tall as a man, with the device of three perched birds were attached to each gate. A small lodge stood beside the right-hand gate, built like a miniature Gothic chapel to match the house.
‘Is this Mandeville Hall?’ I asked the driver, appalled at this magnificence. He nodded, without turning round.
‘Built on slavery,’ I whispered to the ham, desperately trying to keep up my spirits. I knew the Mandevilles lived in some style, but had expected nothing as bad as this. The memory of my father’s body in the morgue came into my mind and I felt a black depression. I was wasting my time. How could his life or death be connected with all this pomp?
A man in a brown coat and leggings came out of the lodge, through an arched gateway between two haughty stone saints. He glanced at me, simply registering my presence, and then away. The driver leaned down from his seat and gave him something in a twist of paper, probably a roll of tobacco. They seemed like old friends as they filled their pipes and started muttering together. I caught the words ‘new governess’ and a moan about the traffic in Windsor. The driver jerked his head towards the house and asked, ‘They back, then?’
‘She is. He isn’t.’
‘When’s he expected?’
The driver nodded and tapped out his pipe on his seat.
‘Seeing as they’re open, might as well go up the straight way.’
‘Better not. What if her ladyship sees you?’
‘See two of me, if she does.’
The driver made a tilting motion with his elbow and they both laughed. He jerked the reins and the cob, tiring now, went trotting slowly up the steep drive towards the castle. We hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards when a shout came from the gate lodge behind us. I turned round and there was the gatekeeper, waving his arms and pointing back the way we’d come. The driver turned too and his face went slack.
‘That’s done it.’
A great cloud of white dust was coming along the road from Windsor, a much larger one than we’d made. At the centre of it was a travelling carriage drawn by four horses, coming at a fast canter. At that point they must have been a half mile away, but we could already hear the harness jingling, the thudding of their hooves and a whip cracking. My driver seemed frozen, irresolute. Then he swore and jerked at the cob’s head, as if intending to go back down to the gate lodge. But it was too late. The carriage was thundering between the gates, at a trot now but still fast. The gatekeeper had to jump aside. There were two men on the box, one in a plain caped coat, the other in a burgundy-coloured jacket, with whip and reins in hand. My driver tried to pull our phaeton off the drive and on to the grass. The wheel must have stuck in a rut because it lurched and wouldn’t go. He struck at the cob with his whip, swearing. By now the carriage was so close the air was full of the sweat of the four labouring horses. The face of the man driving it was red and sweating, his black eyebrows set in a bar.
‘Oh God.’
It was the gentleman who’d disputed his bill in the hotel at Calais. He must have seen that the phaeton was stuck in his path, but he was still whipping up the horses. I don’t know why I didn’t jump out. Perhaps I believed that the driver of the carriage must swerve at the last minute. But he didn’t. The phaeton lurched and juddered as the cob, writhing under the driver’s lash, tried to drag us clear. Then the world came apart in a confusion of whinnying, swearing and splintering wood, and I was in the air with a great downpour of wax candles falling alongside, making splintering sounds round me as I landed with my face on the gravel of the drive and my knee on the fish kettle.
When I managed to get to my feet I found that the cob had saved us at the last second by managing to drag the phaeton out of its rut and far enough on to the grass for the carriage to give us no more than a glancing blow. But the blow had been enough to tear the nearside wheel from its axle and throw the phaeton sideways. The cob, trapped in the shafts, had gone with it and was threshing on his side. The driver was slashing at the harness with a knife, trying to release him, letting out a torrent of obscenities. I limped over to them.
‘Sit on his head, for gawd’s sake,’ he yelled at me.
As instructed, I sat on the cob’s head. That kept him still enough for the driver to release him. When he told me I could get up, the cob scrambled to his feet. His face and neck were grazed, his eyes terrified.
‘He’ll live,’ said the driver, after running his hands down his legs.
‘He could have killed him. He could have killed all of us.’
I was boiling with the anger that follows terror. The driver felt in his pocket for his pipe, found it broken, threw it down on the grass.
‘Shouldn’t have been coming up that way, should we. Only it’s another mile round by the back way.’
At least our danger had made him more conversational, though depressed.
‘But he must have seen us,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, he saw us all right.’
‘Is he a guest here? Surely Sir Herbert will be angry that …’
He was staring at me as if I’d said something stupid.
‘What are you talking about, girl? That was Sir Herbert.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My hot anger turned to something colder and harder. Until then, I’d had misgivings about entering any man’s house as a spy. Now I knew that if there was any way I could find to repay Sir Herbert for treating my life (and the horse’s and coachman’s lives) so lightly, I would find it. I looked for my bag and found it in the wreckage.
‘Where are you going, then?’ the driver said.
‘To the house. I’m allowed to walk on their sacred drive, I suppose.’
‘In that case, you can go through to the stableyard and tell them to send a man down.’
The bag was heavy and my knee hurt, though I hoped it was nothing worse than bruising. I walked slowly up the drive, my eyes taking in the place like any sight-seer while my mind was otherwise occupied. A broad terrace stretched from the row of windows on the ground floor dotted with marble statues – Apollo, Aphrodite, Hercules, Minerva – looking out at the grazing cattle in the park. Gleaming white steps ran down from it to a formal garden with yew bushes clipped into pyramids and box hedges in geometric shapes. It did not match the Gothic architecture of the house, but it must have cost a lot of money, so perhaps that was the point. A ha-ha divided the formal garden from the pasture, and a bridge large enough to span a good-sized river carried the drive across it, decorated with more marble mythology: Leda and her swan at one end, Europa and the bull at the other.
I felt very conspicuous, as if the hundreds of window panes were eyes watching me. ‘They’re not the spies though,’ I said to myself. ‘I am.’ I gloried in the word now because I thought that I’d found my enemy at the very start. A man who could deliberately run down his own groom driving one of his own vehicles was surely capable of anything, murder included. Blackstone had only told me part of the truth when he said the Mandeville household had something to do with my father’s death. He surely meant Sir Herbert himself. I’d seen for myself that he’d been in Calais three days after my father died and might well have been there for some time. What my father had done to earn the hatred of this money-swollen bully I didn’t know, but I’d find it out and tell the world. He could do what he liked to me after that, I didn’t greatly care.
*
On the far side of the bridge the drive divided itself into two unequal parts. The broader, left-hand one passed through a triumphal stone arch to the inner courtyard of the house. I glanced inside and there was the carriage Sir Herbert had driven. Evidently this was the entrance for the Mandevilles and guests, not limping governesses. I stopped at the point where the drive divided and put my bag down to change arms. Before I could pick it up again, the carriage wheeled round and came towards me, this time at a slow walk, with only the coachman on the box. When I moved out of the way to let it pass, he didn’t even glance down at me, but the footman standing at the back of it gave me a look. The poor man was so plastered with dust from the road that he could have taken his place among the statues on the terrace without attracting notice, apart from a few glimpses of his gold-and-black livery jacket. His wig must have come off somewhere on the journey because he was clutching it in his hand and his muscular stockinged calves were trembling.
I let them go past, then picked up my bag and followed. The side of the house was on my left, with fewer and smaller windows than the front. To the right, a high brick wall probably enclosed the vegetable garden. There was a brick wall on the other side as well and a warm smell of baking bread. We had come out of grandeur, into the domestic regions. I followed as the carriage turned left and left again, through a high brick archway with a clock over the top of it, into the stableyard. A dozen or so horses looked out over loosebox doors as their tired colleagues were unharnessed from the carriage, flanks and necks gleaming wet as herrings with sweat. A team of boys with mops and buckets had already started cleaning the carriage. The footman was walking stiffly away through an inner arch and the coachman was having a dejected convers
ation with a sharp-faced man in gaiters, black jacket and high-crowned hat who looked like the head stableman. I put my bag down by the mounting block, picked my way towards them over the slippery cobbles and waited for a chance to speak to the man in gaiters.
‘The driver of the phaeton asks will somebody please come down and help him.’
‘And who may you be?’
‘I’m the new governess, but that doesn’t matter. The phaeton is quite smashed and the cob …’
He clicked his fingers. Two grooms immediately appeared beside him.
‘Bring in the cob and phaeton,’ he told them. Then, to me: ‘Beggs – can he walk?’
I was pleased by this evidence of humanity.
‘The driver? Yes, he’s not badly hurt, he –’
Cutting me short, he turned back to the men.
‘So you needn’t waste time bringing Beggs back. Tell him from me he’s dismissed and to take himself off. If there’s any wages owing, they’ll go towards repairing the phaeton.’
‘But it wasn’t his fault,’ I said. ‘Sir Herbert …’
He walked away. I went and sat on the mounting block with my bag at my feet. After a while an older groom with a kindly face came over to me.
‘Anything wrong, miss?’
‘I’m … I’m the new governess and I don’t know where to go.’
He pointed to the archway where the footman had gone.
‘Through there, miss, and get somebody to take you to Mrs Quivering.’
He even carried my bag as far as the archway, though he didn’t set foot into the inner courtyard on the far side of it.
‘The driver,’ I said, ‘it isn’t at all just …’
‘There’s a lot that’s not just, miss.’
The courtyard I walked into was sandwiched between the stableyard and the back of the house. A low building on the left was the dairy. Through a half-open door I could see a woman shaping pats of butter on a marble slab. The smell of bread was coming from a matching building on the right, its chimney sending up a long column of sweet-smelling woodsmoke. The back of the house itself towered over it all, with a line of doors opening on to the courtyard, one with baskets of fruit and vegetables stacked outside. The dust-covered footman was standing by another door, talking to a woman in a blue dress and white mob-cap. When he went inside, I followed him into a high dark corridor.