Gaslight

by William Drummond

  Manningham tapped off his ash. “Very ingenious,” he said. “So I am ‘the villain’?”

  “Not the villain. Just careless. I wouldn’t dare suggest more.”

  He rose. “Thanks to your compendious accounts, it’s very easy to check,” he said. “We know exactly how many bottles are in the cellar.”

  None were missing.

  But ten minutes later, when Jack Manningham drew out his watch and swore gently that even if he found a cab he would be late for his appointment, his chamois leather gloves were not to be found in the drawer of the hallstand. “My God! This is intolerable,” he said. “Bella, this is not an occasion for practical joking. Would you be kind enough to give me my gloves immediately?”

  Bella appeared obviously distressed. “I’m afraid that I haven’t the slightest idea where you have put your gloves.”

  “They are always in the drawer. As you know very well, I put them there immediately when I come in.”

  “Why should I move them?” Bella asked.

  As they argued, Mr. Manningham towering higher in righteous rage, and Bella coming the closer to tears, Elizabeth searched desperately for the gloves, hoping that their discovery would lay this storm in a tea cup.

  “Here they are, sir!” she said, producing them from the depths of Mrs. Manningham’s shopping basket.

  Mr. Manningham took the gloves and looked from the basket to his wife. He said nothing. His pursed lips were eloquent enough.

  “I can’t imagine,” Bella murmured. “Perhaps they fell—”

  “Or leapt!” her husband suggested, smacking the gloves viciously against the palm of his left hand. Then he jammed his top hat jauntily on the side of his head, seized his silver-topped cane from the umbrella stand and sallied incredulously forth.

  It was not long after, that Nancy returned down the area steps. As she opened the kitchen door, the bell pealed from the drawing room. “It’s ’er,” Elizabeth said. “Better take the puppy up immediate, Nance.”

  Nancy placed the hamper on the kitchen table. “What’ll us do, Liz?” she asked. “I seen ’im at the corner, and ’e says, not to let ’er alone with it, not on any account.”

  “Oh, ’e never!” Elizabeth said. “It’s past believing. Says ’e’s frightened of ’er going out of ’er wits; an’ the way ’e carries on . . . it’s enough to drive anybody crazy, it really is.”

  The bell pealed again.

  “We got to let ’er see the puppy,” Nancy said. “ ’E didn’t say not to do that.”

  “I’ll come with you, Nance,” Elizabeth said. “Two’s better than one in a fix.”

  Bella was standing at the head of the stairs outside the drawing room, nervously wringing her hands. “How is he?” she asked. “How’s my little darling?” She did not wait for an answer but took the hamper from Nancy and bore it into the drawing room. She put it on the rug before the hearth and pulled out the stick. Cerberus was already yelping with delight. “Yes,” she said, “you know it’s Mummy don’t you, darling?”

  Nancy winked at Elizabeth, seeing this display of mother love as ludicrous, if not disgusting, in a grown woman. But Elizabeth frowned her back to gravity.

  As Bella lifted the puppy out, the two maids crowded forward. The lacerated paw was now hidden in a splint and a gauze bandage. The puppy put his front paws on his mistress’ bended knee and licked her face. His muzzle seemed moister now.

  “What did the vet say, Nancy? Was the bone broken?”

  “He said it was lucky Cerberus was so young, mum, because it was mostly carti-something . . .”

  “Cartilage?”

  “That’s it. Nothing’s broke that he can feel, but he’s put the splints on to keep ’is leg straight. But to bring ’im back to surgery tomorrow because it might go septic, and he’ll change the dressing.”

  She caught hold of Cerberus by his long floppy ears. “Isn’t that wonderful, boy?” she said. “You’re going to get quite better.” She kissed him. Then she turned to the maids. “Well, I won’t keep you. You must be far behind already.”

  This was the awkward moment. When Nancy explained about meeting Mr. Manningham and what he said, Bella did not take it in. She flushed as if someone had struck her across the face; and as if she could not believe it, she said, “Will you repeat that?”

  “The words was, madam,” Nancy said, “ ‘Not to leave the puppy alone with Mrs. Manningham, not on no account.’ That’s what Mr. Manningham said.”

  The only sign that Bella gave of having heard was to bite her lip hard while continuing to run her hands over the puppy’s head and back.

  Then she stood up. “Elizabeth!” she said. “Perhaps Nancy told you last night that I promised to give her a lesson in dressmaking.”

  Elizabeth nodded.

  “Under the circumstances,” Bella said, “would you object—I know it’s hard and I won’t press it—if I gave Nancy her dressmaking lesson this morning.”

  It was hard, since it was also Nancy’s half-day off that afternoon. But Elizabeth, accustomed for years to be given orders, was so touched to be asked by a mistress to do a favor and so aware of the importance of that favor, that she nodded her head in brimming agreement; and then she ran from the room, reaching the landing before she burst into tears.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Mr. Albert Booker looked at his reflection in the plate glass window of Whiteley’s window, adjusting his brown bowler hat to an appropriately rakish angle, the mean between the raffish and the decorous. He wore a folded cream silk handkerchief projecting from the breast pocket of his brown worsted jacket and a new pair of white spats over his shining brown shoes. He had never looked so smart, nor been so prosperous in the course of his twenty years on earth.

  Two years before, he had gone to work for Mr. Rough, a retired gentleman living in Ossington Street, in the capacity of manservant, or so he thought. He soon found, however, that Mr. Rough had only semi-retired. Having served his time as a police detective, ex-Sergeant Rough resented the idea of being, as he said, “put out to grass.” He “liked to keep his hand in.” So while not conducting anything so grandiose as a Detective Agency, plain Mr. Rough did a number of little investigations, sometimes for his old colleagues in the force (he referred to Sir George Raglan, Chief Commissioner, as “my old friend, Sir George.”) and sometimes for such public-spirited bodies as insurance companies, who never pay out their shareholders’ money for a claim if it is possible to recover stolen property or prove conspiracy, complicity, malfeasance and the like.

  Albert Booker soon found himself called upon to perform duties quite other than those of a manservant, duties for which he was compensated on a scale altogether more remunerative. It was, Mr. Rough said, “of the essence” that Albert should appear to the outside world as the manservant of a retired gentleman, though he was at liberty to consider himself as the assistant (very private) of a private detective.

  It was a deprivation for Albert not to be able to boast to the world of the past achievements of his employer, but it was a compensation to be working with the great man.

  In most cases Mr. Rough elucidated the purpose of the investigation in sufficient detail for Albert Booker to know precisely what he had to discover, but in what Albert regarded as “The Number Thirteen Angel Street Case” his brief was terse and all-inclusive. “I want to know what’s going on there,” Mr. Rough said. “Everything.”

  Being a young man more than averagely attractive and attracted to the opposite sex, Albert Booker favored the sapping technique. “If you want to effect an entry,” he proclaimed, as if this were a discovery which had not been made with the first domestic servant, “the easiest way in is through the basement.” To be paid for conducting flirtations with pretty maids was one of the pleasurable aspects of his duties. Nancy was a funny girl, a mixture of innocence and guile, of blatant vulgarity and naive good taste, of sensuality and shrewdness. He did not feel guilty of deceiving her because he knew that she would deceive him, given the
opportunity. And incidentally, Mr. Rough appreciated that to keep Nancy interested, it was necessary to spend more than was usual for most girls of her station—excursions to the fireworks at the Crystal Palace, the waxworks at Madame Tussaud’s, to Hampton Court, Maskelyne and Cooke at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly and the Moore and Burgess Negro minstrels at St. James’s Hall, to say nothing of such music halls as the Metropolitan in Edgware Road.

  Nancy enjoyed herself in almost any surroundings labeled as a Pleasure Resort. She liked an arm ’round her waist, a hand upon her breast, embraces more intimate up to, but excluding, the ultimate. She was terrified of the possibility of having a baby, and in order to distract Bert Booker from the achievement of what she thought was his final aim, she would talk interminably about the goings on of Mr. Manningham and his wife, the details of which Albert Booker related later to the satisfaction, and mounting excitement, of his employer.

  Working though he was in the dark, Albert himself, became more and more interested in this case. He even envisaged the possibility of prolonging the investigation of Nancy on his own behalf after the conclusions of the investigation on Mr. Rough’s; and at his own expense!

  So, waiting outside Whiteley’s this sunny afternoon, which he had promised Nancy would, if the afternoon was fine, be an excursion by the steamboat from Chelsea Pier up the river to the Botanical and Pleasure gardens of Kew, he was looking forward to a lively combination of business and sport. But then he saw approaching down Angel Street a lovely who drove all thoughts of Nancy away. She was wearing a gray silk dress, with matching mantle, a saucy bonnet of Brussels lace, topped with artificial roses and tied with ribbons beneath the chin, and she sported a lace-and-silk parasol. The dress was so catching a thing that men turned to watch her in the street. The cut was demure, but the breasts so to speak struggled against the bondage of the bodice. The bustle, which might have sat sedately upon another, was signaling like semaphore. Detecting an invitation in the lovely’s approach, Bert Booker cast duty aside and advanced, raising his bowler, and bowed. The lovely in her turn bowed.

  “Excuse me, Miss,” Bert said. “I know that we have met, but where?”

  The lovely looked up, fluttering her eyelids. “I am not sure that I ’ave the honor of the acquaintance.” It was Nancy! She burst into a laugh. “You are a scream, Bert! But didn’t I take you in Bert, just for a moment?”

  “You did, Nance, you did!” Bert Booker said. “You know what I thought, Nance?”

  “No, Bert?”

  Bert thought rapidly. “I thought,” he said, “I thought, that’s the way Nance ought to be dressed all the time.”

  “You didn’t,” Nancy said. “I bet you thought, ‘That’s not my Nance. It’s another girl.’ Didn’t you?”

  “And you are!” Bert said. “You’re my other girl. And we’ll take the omnibus to Chelsea Pier and then we’ll go to the Botanical Gardens and I’ll show you to all the orchids in the tropical house and I’ll say ‘Beat that, if you can! Nance’s more beautiful than you all!’ And you know what they’ll say?”

  “No Bert! What’ll they say?”

  “They won’t say nothing,” Bert said. “Orchids can’t talk.”

  The lovely in the gray dress and lace bonnet launched with her elbow a sharp jab between his ribs.

  It really was a lovely day. On the river steamer, Bert blew half a crown on a bottle of champagne and they sat on the deck drinking it, watching Putney, Hammersmith, Barnes, Mortlake and Chiswick glide by, splendid in the sunshine, while Nancy told the story of the dress and how sweet Mrs. Manningham was, even though she was going dotty and thought she heard noises upstairs, which was perhaps the only reason in the first place why she gave Nancy the dress.

  Nancy in her cast-off finery was so proud and really pretty that Bert did not have to remember when to lay his hand on her hand or on the side of her chair. “But the whole rig-out?” he asked. “She really must be fond of you to give you this cape thing and the bonnet and the parasol.”

  And then there came tumbling out the story of the puppy caught in the trap, and the way Mr. Manningham had forbidden her to leave the puppy alone with her mistress, and that’s why they had spent the whole morning together making over the dress and Mrs. Manningham had said, “You’ll look a fright if you go out with that black straw of yours. You must have the whole outfit.” And she gave her bonnet, mantle and parasol. “I really am sorry for her, losing her wits, the way she is. I really am,” she said.

  They wandered through Kew Gardens, but did not stay long in the plant house. “I don’t like to think of them being shut up in these glass houses,” she said. “They can’t be ’appy.”

  “But they would die if they was outside,” Bert said.

  “They make me sweat anyway,” Nancy answered, “I mean, purr-spire.”

  They had tea in the Pleasure Grounds and then as the sun began to slant, they walked to the District Line Station. “What do you make of ’im?” Bert asked, trying to slip his arm round Nancy’s waist.

  “ ’Im?” Nancy disentangled herself. “Yer know what, Bert?”

  Bert took her hand and shrugged his shoulders to show that he was not really interested in Mr. Manningham. “You know, Nance, you’re one of Nature’s Ladies.”

  “What?” The pretty, complex, sensuous, romantic, vulgar, ambitious girl cried out from the shelter of Bella’s outfit. “What you mean?”

  Bert didn’t precisely know. “You know, Nance,” he said.

  Nancy took his arm and walked with him towards Kew Gardens Station, her hip pressed so close to his that with her waggle it was a recurrent nudge. “You know what, Bert?” she said. “If ’e was free of ’er . . .” Bert Booker said nothing. “She’s too nice, Mrs. Manningham is.”

  They went back to Charing Cross and had dinner at Gatti’s in the Strand. In the course of the dinner, Nancy first became amorous, then hiccupy and finally aggressive. “Don’t think I’ll invite you to dinner when I become the second Mrs. M.,” she said, “because I won’t, Bert. I’m gonna give you the boot; an’ I’m gonna give Liz the boot. And we won’t live in that ’ouse either. A nice little place in Pimlico on the borders of Belgravia! That’s us.”

  Bert was rather tipsy too. He had drunk the major part of both bottles of wine. “I don’t believe a word of it, Nance,” he said. “But you’re beautiful in that dress.” He leered across the table at her. “You’d be prettier out of it.”

  Nancy pouted. “You’re being naughty, Bert!”

  “I mean it, Nance. But why should Mr. Manningham with all his money—?”

  “Has he got all that money?” Nancy asked. “It’s ’er money. But if she was put away, I’d be Mrs. Manningham in common law.”

  “But why should he have you?”

  “ ’E’s made for me,” she boasted.

  Bert Booker took her back to Angel Street in a hansom cab. He made love to her but he restrained his passion. “I don’t believe it what you say about Mr. Manningham,” he taunted. “I think you’ve made it up just to make me jealous.”

  It was then that Nancy told him about the clutch of hands over the rat trap, beneath the stairs.

  The smugness of her recital made Bert angry. “Supposin’ he wants you to help him get his wife put away, of course he might give your hand a squeeze. But all this talk about ‘wife in common law,’ you’re crazy, Nancy.”

  But Nancy was not to be cheated of her dream. “You’re just plain jealous, Bert Booker,” she said.

  She crouched back in her side of the hansom until they reached Number Thirteen Angel Street. Bert Booker told the cab driver to wait. He was afraid that Nancy might trip going down in the semidarkness of the area steps. But into the penumbra of the gaslight appeared a figure which proved to be Mr. Manningham. He was in high fettle. “Ah!” he cried, “who is this gorgeous creature? And what a magnificent outfit! I seem to have seen the gown somewhere.” He glanced down at the bosom. “But never so elegantly worn. Well, I declare it’s Lady Nancy
with the saucy nose.” He put his arm on her shoulder and turned to Bert. “Is she not the prettiest girl in Bayswater?” Bert Booker clenched his fists. If Mr. Manningham had been a stranger, he could have dealt with the situation, but he was Nancy’s master.

  Nancy just giggled. “It’s all right Bert. Don’t worry, love!” She blew him a kiss.

  When Mr. Manningham escorted her up the front stairs elaborately taking her arm as if she were the lady of the house, instead of leaving her to enter by the area steps, she laughed joining in the joke.

  The last that Albert Booker saw as the hansom drove him off was Mr. Manningham with his arm ’round Nancy’s waist, bending down to whisper something to her and Nancy looking up into his bearded face.

  Three quarters of an hour later Albert Booker had finished his verbal report and three fingers of Mr. Rough’s whisky in seltzer water. His employer had heard him mostly in silence, though when Booker mentioned Mrs. Manningham’s fears about noises which she imagined coming from the upper floor, he drew his breath. “Ah, that’s very interesting. Very interesting, indeed.”

  When he had finished, Albert ventured to suggest that his investigation might be more fruitful if he knew what he was supposed to be looking for. Mr. Rough replenished his own glass generously and his assistant’s with moderation. “You hold your liquor well, my boy, but remember the morning after.” Then he filled his curved briar with his nighttime blend. He was a connoisseur who did not smoke just tobacco, but had different mixtures, smoked in different pipes, each of which he declared had properties as distinct as the blends of whisky. He drew on the pipe until the tobacco was burning well and then he said, “You’ve done well, as it is, my boy. I’ve kept you in the dark, deliberately. For a number of reasons. For one, before you were born, but not perhaps before you were thought of, Number Thirteen Angel Street was the scene of a peculiarly horrible crime. What that crime was I do not propose to tell you, nor do I want you going down to Printing House Square to search through the files of The Times. Enough to say that the criminal was never found, that a large sum of money was paid out by an insurance company, and that the police finally abandoned the case. I had my own theories at the time, but I was still a junior. I was given no opportunity for pursuing them.