The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris

by Leon Garfield

  Tap-thump . . . tap-thump . . .

  Nine

  A BOY APPEARED at the corner of the building. A burly boy, though looking quaintly small in a cut-down sea captain’s coat that was still too large. A red-faced boy with fierce little eyes that Mr. Raven recognized as violent and savage.

  Tap-thump . . . tap-thump . . . The boy stiffened and glared at the advancing inquiry agent. Terror, confusion and guilt were written all over him. Mr. Raven smiled; he was used to that. The boy licked his lips, glanced toward the poorhouse and whistled. Almost at once another boy appeared. This newcomer was somewhat stunted and malignant looking. Mr. Raven knew him. He was the son of Dr. Harris.

  “Good evening, my young friend,” said Mr. Raven affably.

  “Meet Bostock!” said Harris rapidly, and gave a little hysterical laugh. “My friend Bostock. Bosty, this is Mister Selwyn Raven what I told you of.” He thrust Bostock between himself and the man with the horrible boot.

  So, thought the inquiry agent with weary contempt, you have been attempting to rob the poorhouse. Perhaps you’ve already done so? But no matter. Boys will be thieves . . . and then they’ll be men and fouler still. But outwardly he maintained his look of affability. He was not a man to waste his time on little crimes. He preferred them to bleat and fatten before he pricked them to let the poison out. Nonetheless, he saw the boys were petrified with fear and guilt and would, most likely, oblige him with their grimy little souls if he kept their secret.

  “Up to mischief?” he chuckled. “Well, well! Boys will be—he—he!—boys! But I’ll not say a word, my young friends! I too was a lad once!” He thumped his boot with his stick. “Weren’t we, eh?”

  “That’s very decent of you, sir,” said Harris, and to Bostock’s undying admiration, gave a careless smile. Bostock knew it was a careless smile because it was quite different from Harris’s ordinary smile. Harris was a real marvel. He, Bostock, was quite dried up with terror, having been warned of the clubfooted devil.

  “Brett,” said Mr. Raven abruptly, after talking idly about this and that, as was his habit, to put the boys at their ease. “Do you know a man called Brett?”

  Harris looked at him in utter astonishment. What on earth was Mr. Brett to do with anything? The inquiry agent, observing this astonishment, which was plainly genuine, felt a sudden pang at his heart. Whatever trifling crime the boy might be carrying on his soul, there was no doubt he was innocent of the terrible darkness that lay beneath the affair of Adelaide Harris. It moved the inquiry agent strangely to have stumbled on this little patch of innocence in the wide, crawling desert of sin.

  “Mister Brett’s a master at our school—Doctor Bunnion’s,” said Harris, and another huge piece of the puzzle fell into place in Mr. Raven’s mind. Another connection. The school. The innocent son of Dr. Harris . . . and Mr. Brett, etcetera, etcetera! Snap, snap, snap went the links of the chain; in his remarkable inner eye the inquiry agent saw all the actors in the drama like spectral dancers weaving across some ominous shoulder of the Downs, fettered to one another by lust, hatred, vengeance and greed, etcetera. But who was it who led the dance and dragged it on to his chosen perdition? Mr. Raven could hardly wait to get back to his room and embark on a larger piece of paper, but there was still more he needed to know. He had to be sure.

  “Tell me about this Mister Brett,” said the inquiry agent gently. “What manner of—er—gentleman is he?”

  At once Bostock and Harris obliged with all they knew and suspected of Mr. Brett. They talked very freely and eagerly, which amused Mr. Raven, as he guessed it was to distract him from their private concerns. Though he was a sinister and even frightening man, he was also a man of humor. It was perhaps this that made him truly terrible. He could laugh with one part of his mind while the other continued to gather all those materials with which he built the vaults of human hell.

  So he smiled and nodded while Bostock and Harris told him of Mr. Brett’s pallors and tremblings at every knock on the door, his fearful looks when asked even about historical murders, his strange reluctance to leave the school for so much as an afternoon, and his most certain guilt of some unspeakable crime, most likely in the north.

  When they were done, Mr. Raven thanked them gravely, flattered them by calling them his assistants, then tapped and thumped his grim way toward that tangled nest of cobbled alleys, called by some The Twittens, and by others The Lanes, where there was a shop that sold paper of the larger size.

  Bostock and Harris, much shaken by the encounter, walked along beside the whispering sea.

  “I think you got the better of him, Harris,” said Bostock shrewdly.

  Harris nodded. “But he’s a clever man, Bosty. Don’t underestimate him. That question about Mister Brett was a real banger.”

  “Why’s that, Harris?”

  “Sparta, Bosty. If he’d got onto that talk of Mister Brett’s about Spartan infants being exposed, he’d have guessed and it would have been all up with us.”

  Bostock halted and whistled at the narrowness of their escape. Harris patted him on the shoulder. “One needs a long spoon to sup with gents like Mister Raven.”

  They walked on again, picking their way around the drying fishing nets above which flies wove glinting puzzles in the stinking air. The failure of their recent attempt to rescue Adelaide from the poorhouse weighed heavily on the friends. They had been so very near to success. Harris had actually got into the room where the foundlings were kept. No one else had been there at that moment. The poorhouse keeper must have gone to the privy or something. It had been a remarkable piece of luck such as happened once in a lifetime. Harris had been laughing at the ease of it all.

  “And there she lay, Bosty. My sister. Right at the end of the row. I think she knew me, Bosty. She gave a sort of smile. Just another minute and I’d have had her. Then you whistled.”

  Bostock scowled, and picking up a stone, hurled it into the sea. “He was coming, Harris. I had to warn you.”

  Harris nodded. The friends halted and gazed mournfully back toward the poorhouse. They dared not return, yet it seemed unbearable not to.

  “There’s only one thing to do,” said Harris at length.

  “Own up?” said Bostock faintly. “Tell the truth?”

  Harris looked at his friend with a universe of pity in his face. Bostock’s simplicity touched him and made him feel curiously protective. He wondered how long Bostock would have survived in this stern world without his Harris.

  “The truth?” he said gently. “What is truth, Bosty? There ain’t no such thing, old friend. There’s no truth in nature, Bosty, and that’s where it counts. Everything has to hide to survive. Truth in the wild means sudden death, and truth at home ain’t much better. And anyway,” he added, “it’s too late to own up now, old friend.”

  “What then, Harris?” whispered Bostock, another bastion of his innocent young soul cracked and tottering from this last intellectual blow of his friend’s.

  “A letter, Bosty. An anonymous letter to my pa. It’s the only way. A letter informing him where Adelaide really is. Then he can go and fetch her and no one will be any the wiser.”

  Bostock sighed. “You’re a genius, Harris.”

  Then the friends shook hands and dispersed to their several homes.

  There was a quiet on the Harris household; there was an aimlessness, also, as if certain invisible threads that had held the family in order and regulation had been severed and so exposed the bleak loneliness of souls. Private chasms of fear had opened in every heart, and grinning calamity squatted in the hearth.

  The Harris sisters were in the kitchen with the servants, picking at a vague dinner of cold mutton and cheese. Dr. Harris was out, and Mrs. Harris, the distraught mother, was crouching in the nursery where the strange baby still lay like a nightmare in Adelaide’s cot.

  Morgan, the nurse, was certain the infant was a changeling, an uncanny creature left by those malignant sprites who were the fallen angels of some ancient faith.
There was no other explanation. She reminded Mrs. Harris that against all advice, Adelaide had been christened in the goblin font of St. Nicholas’s with its ugly pagan carvings grinning in the stone. Angrily Mrs. Harris had told her to hold her tongue, but Morgan, who was Celtic and wise in country ways, could not be silenced. She went on and on until Mrs. Harris had bowed her aching head and allowed Morgan to consult her elder sister, who was even wiser.

  So Morgan had gone off to call on the Hemps where her sister had once been nurse and was now the cook. Both the sisters had come from Aberystwyth as quite young girls in search of fortunes and husbands, but having found neither, had settled in the Hemp and Harris households to which they’d brought a touch of Celtic magic.

  The sisters talked long and hard over a glass of cordial and Morgan then returned, with a parcel of strong herbs, through the devious lanes at about half-past six. For a few uneasy moments she’d fancied she heard the sound of unequal footsteps—a tap-thump . . . tap-thump—as if she was being followed, but soon she outdistanced them and reached the Harris home with her wild garlic, coltsfoot and sheep’s sorrel safely under her arm.

  The changeling was asleep, but its face clearly lacked the smooth innocence of a mortal babe. There were shadows and creases across it that hinted of weird dreams and dark passions abrewing, and its little mouth was shut in a line of cruel pink.

  “I got ’em, ma’am,” breathed Morgan, and Mrs. Harris raised her tear-stained face uncomprehendingly. So Morgan, seeing the poor lady was beyond clear thinking, laid a strong hand on her shoulder and set about making a fragile ring of herbs around the cot. This done, she opened wide the window and bade Mrs. Harris repeat after her the Celtic rune her sister had told her.

  At first, Mrs. Harris, who was a God-fearing woman, was quite repelled and would have nothing to do with it, but at length she was worn down and haltingly pronounced the eerie spell. Though she did not understand it, it was a call into the darkness of the lost faith—a command to the invisible goblins and demons whose ghostly bishops, on midsummer nights, crossed the moonlit lawns of those churches and abbeys that had usurped the ancient shrines. The uncanny words demanded the presence of the bringers of the changeling.

  As they died away, a breeze sprang up and billowed out the curtains. Then the door blew open with a sharp sound. And Harris came in. There was a look of intolerable curiosity on his face.

  “For God’s sake, go away!” cried his unhappy mother. “Haven’t I enough to bear?”

  Harris stared in bewilderment at the circled herbs and silently withdrew.

  “He’s gone and spoiled it, ma’am,” said Morgan bitterly. “Just like all else he sets his hand to.”

  For the remainder of the evening and several times during the night, Harris had a strong smell of herbs in his nostrils and an overwhelming desire to go again into the nursery, but the memory of the bitter words from Morgan and his mother rankled in his heart, and with difficulty, he conquered the impulse. Instead, he lay awake and composed the anonymous letter he had determined to send to his father, the letter that would bring the whole terrific affair to a quiet and sensible conclusion.

  Simple, brief and to the point. Bostock would write it. No one knew Bostock’s writing; indeed, there were very few who knew Bostock could actually write. Bostock would write it during Monday’s school, and it would be delivered on the same day, poked under the door at half-past five. Harris sighed and smiled as he drifted on the tide of sleep. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Tomorrow . . . the poorhouse . . . Adelaide . . . home at last . . .

  Ten

  SORLEY, THE FAT boarder, driven half out of his mind by guilt on account of Mr. Brett following him everywhere, had at last come to terms with his conscience and taken a stolen veal pie out of concealment, scratched “Sorley is sorry, sir” on the crust, and placed it in Mr. Brett’s bedroom. This done, he was able to pass into an untroubled sleep, from which he awoke wretchedly hungry but spiritually refreshed.

  Mr. Brett, on the other hand, awoke with considerable bewilderment and discomfort. He had not expected the pie—which Sorley had laid by the end of his bed—and had trodden in it. Thus all traces of its origin were obliterated and Mr. Brett was left, standing on one foot, much puzzled by the broken mystery.

  At last he decided it must have come from Tizzy’s mother, Mrs. Alexander. There was good reason for his supposing this, as for some time now he had been giving Tizzy lessons in classical history when school was over. Whether his passionate love for Mrs. Alexander’s daughter had begun with the lessons or just before them was no longer possible to say, but there was no doubt the lessons aggravated it. When he sat in the empty classroom, waiting for her gentle knock, his heart thundered so that he almost jumped out of his skin when at last it came.

  It had been Mrs. Alexander herself who had suggested the lessons, her German heart lifting to a scholar, and in return for improving her daughter—as if I could improve her, thought Mr. Brett with a sigh—she mended his linen and had promised to make him a shirt. “For your veddink, Herr Prett,” she’d added with a sentimental smile. “Veneffer it shoot pe.”

  Mrs. Alexander’s English had once been much better, but the longer she lived with her husband, the fiery Major, the farther she retreated into the tongue of her childhood, as if striving to recapture the illusions she’d had when she’d never understood a word the Major said.

  Mr. Brett sat on his bed, wiped his foot and smiled. He liked Mrs. Alexander and would have gone to thank her directly, but the damage done to the pie he thought would make him look awkward and ungrateful, so he waited till breakfast and contented himself with smiling meaningfully at her across the table whenever the occasion offered. At first Mrs. Alexander was frankly puzzled, but then she smiled back as if with a suddenly kindled optimism.

  “You giff Tizzy her lesson today?” she murmured as they left the table. Mr. Brett nodded warmly. “Coot! Better than anythink, it takes her mind off this shtoopid business vit that Relph Bunnion.”

  “Very decent of you to take trouble with my gel,” muttered the Major, brushing between his wife and Mr. Brett. “Improving a gel’s mind is as good as giving her a rich dowry, I always say. Whoever gets her ought to be grateful to you, Brett. Take it as a personal favor. We don’t say much, eh? But friendship between men . . . hoops of steel and all that.”

  The Major hurried away, leaving Mr. Brett to gaze after him with a feeling of hopeless anger. Major Alexander always succeeded in infuriating him into silence. Friendship between men was not something that was uppermost in his thoughts, nor deeper down, neither. He frowned and went toward his classroom.

  Major Alexander did not follow suit. Instead, by devious and almost underground ways, he went to Dr. Bunnion’s study, where he appeared with the somewhat quizzical air of a sapper gauging how much powder would be needed to bring down everything in sight. Dr. Bunnion looked at him uneasily. The Major compressed his lips and closed the door.

  “My dear sir,” he murmured, appearing to examine the walls, “a few minutes of your time is all I ask.”

  Dr. Bunnion nodded helplessly and the Major, having satisfied himself about the walls, fixed his eyes on the headmaster’s desk. “Strictly speaking, sir, it’s my—um—second’s place to be here, but for good reasons—very good reasons, I might say—I’ve come myself. I’m not a bloodthirsty man. Your military men rarely are. It’s your damned civilians who are always so keen on blood. What I want to say, sir, is that this unhappy affair is not of my choosing.”

  “The challenge was yours, Major Alexander,” said Dr. Bunnion bitterly.

  “No choice,” said the Major. “My child’s honor and all that. And a gel’s honor, I need hardly tell you, is a delicate flower. Had to act as a father, you know. But now I’ve come to see you, man to man, to discuss what might be done about avoiding bloodshed. A parley, you might say, sir.”

  He laid his hands on Dr. Bunnion’s desk and leaned forward, staring very confidentially at the headmaster
’s cravat. “To be open and aboveboard, sir, I’m fond of your boy. He’s a fine fellow and I’d have been content to have him as a son-in-law. In a way, you might say that I love the lad as a son—and that’s why I don’t aim to stand in his way.” Here the Major gave a little skip sideways, as if to illustrate his point. “I understand your ambitions for the lad. Good God! What father wouldn’t? But there’s me family’s honor which is, and always will be, dearer to me than blessed life itself.”

  The Major gnawed his lip, and having finished with Dr. Bunnion’s cravat, looked searchingly at his fingers. He leaned forward still further till the headmaster could make out the powder in the Major’s military wig, and also a few cake crumbs. “But there is a compromise, sir,” breathed the Major, and went on to mention that in addition to his daughter, he had a son.

  Dr. Bunnion laid his fingers together and pursed his lips. He knew of the Major’s son, and of the Major’s difficulties in finding a situation for him.

  “I understood he’s in a monastery,” murmured the headmaster cautiously.

  “It didn’t suit,” said the Major. “He—ha-ha—he couldn’t acquire the habit! Truth of the matter is, he wants to teach. I think he’s got a talent for it.”

  “But—” began Dr. Bunnion hopelessly.

  “Brett,” breathed the honorable Major. “No good, you know. Sly. Secretive. I can’t bear underhanded men. If Brett goes, good thing for the school. Then my boy Adam comes. Even better. What d’you say sir?”

  The Major skipped back and stared at the headmaster’s waistcoat as if to divine what was going on within. In addition to being honorable, the Major was a reasonable man. Though he would have preferred to marry off Tizzy to Ralph, he was quite prepared to settle for the chance of planting his son Adam in the Bunnion stronghold and so increase his grip on it. If the headmaster agreed, at one stroke the Major would have avoided the duel, ridded himself of the contemptible Brett, who he always felt looked down on him, and acted in the best interests of his family.