‘From Yorkshire,’ he murmured in a perplexed fashion. ‘Well, you may be right, gentlemen, but I had not heard that.’
‘He had been previously in another London school, then, perhaps,’ I hinted. Surely the man would have had to give references. You needed references for every job of work in the country. My mother always complained of being pestered for references for former scullery maids when she hadn’t the slightest recollection of their names. ‘You would have had a reference with him, wouldn’t you, sir?’
I hoped that he would not be offended, but, on the contrary, his face cleared. ‘You’re right, Mr Collins, yes, of course, I had a reference for him.’ He compressed his lips together and behind his gold-rimmed spectacles his eyes grew large with the effort to remember.
‘I know,’ he said triumphantly. ‘I just couldn’t think for the moment. When you get to my age, gentlemen, the memory begins to fade. Words come to the tip of the tongue and then they vanish into the thin air. I knew it was by the river. Greenwich,’ he said triumphantly, ‘that’s where it was, Greenwich. He taught at the Royal Navy College in Greenwich previously. And that accounts for it, I suppose.’ He said the last words more to himself than to us, muttering them in an undertone, his fingers fidgeting with his ring, his eyes bent upon the ancient cobbled path at our feet.
‘Strict disciplinarian, isn’t he,’ said Dickens quickly. ‘I got a flavour of it when he was talking about boys when we were drinking our port. Yes, a very strict disciplinarian!’ I could see that the old canon lifted his head very quickly, focusing on Dickens who was not looking at him, but at a Norman buttress. ‘I remember my old schoolmaster,’ went on Dickens cheerfully, ‘would flog you as soon as look at you. Well, they say that boys are all the better for it, don’t they?’
‘No, no, you’re quite wrong there, Mr Dickens. I don’t think that it does any good. Just fills the boys with resentment. We should lead by example or else we raise young savages.’ The elderly clergyman looked the famous author in the face and spoke to him as sternly as any schoolmaster.
‘I’m so very glad to hear you say these words,’ said Dickens earnestly. He paused for a moment and then said, ‘But surely Mr Cartwright didn’t come straight here from Greenwich, did he? I understood that he had been up in the north of England for some time. Isn’t that right, Collins?’
‘That’s right,’ I confirmed without a blush. ‘I, like you, had Yorkshire in mind.’
‘It may be, it may be.’ The canon was lapsing back into the vagueness of old age. ‘I seem to remember him telling me that he had not taught for some time. Some illness, no doubt. And, they do say that the air in Yorkshire is very bracing. I knew a bishop who would swear by sea-bathing in Scarborough. Wouldn’t care for it myself, but there is no accounting for tastes. Now, myself, I don’t like Norman architecture,’ he confided with the air of one confessing to a grave sin, ‘but there you are, the world is full of clever people who come here to look at the Norman section of our ancient church. We can’t all think the same way, can we, Mr Dickens?’
‘Except in the treatment of children,’ said Dickens gently and the old man’s face brightened.
‘God bless you,’ he said. ‘God bless you for what you said there. I heard you speak at the dinner for Great Ormond Street and I’ll never forget the little story you told about the sick poor child lying in an old egg box.’ The kind old man wiped his eyes. ‘God bless you for the way you open men’s hearts,’ he said as he turned away.
‘I usually aim to open their purses,’ said Dickens in my ear on our way to the gate, but I was not fooled by the cynical words. We had both been touched by the canon of St Bartholomew. ‘Not a man to like brutality,’ he said after a minute, watching the disappearance of the kindly old man. ‘I think that if my little friend Isabella had threatened to tell the holy man, the canon of St Bartholomew’s, about the past history of Frederick Cartwright, she would have put herself in considerable danger from that amiable school teacher.’
‘Interesting that he, that Cartwright, I mean, came from Greenwich, isn’t it? I wonder how Isabella found that out.’
‘From one of those young chaps in the top storey of the house. I’d be willing to lay a small bet on that. Journalists pick up odd facts about people. The pair of them seemed to have been very friendly with the two girls. It always happens. These young fellows always flirt with the housemaids. And, of course, Cartwright would have no reason to keep Greenwich a secret. He was probably a good enough teacher for the Royal Navy School. They expect brutality there. But he might have gone a step too far in Yorkshire, though. D’you know, Wilkie, I’d give a lot to find out what the truth is about this story of a brother.’
‘Well, even if Cartwright had nothing to do with Isabella’s mother that does not mean that she did not have a son. Annie Brown might have been a married name. She could have been a young widow with a son who was old enough to be of use to them if they went off to a new life. That would fit in with this plan of coming back for the baby when she was a bit older.’
‘That story about an illness, that was to cover up the man’s time in Yorkshire. If he beat a boy to death while he was up there, they may not have been willing to have given him a reference. So our friend Cartwright has erased that from his professional life.’ Dickens gave a short laugh. The Yorkshire thing interested him.
‘Don’t you think that we should make a thorough search of that room, of Isabella’s room, in Adelphi Terrace, Dick? You’re friendly with the landlord. Can’t you get him interested? Ask his permission. We can’t keep relying on Sesina. She has her own work to do. I wouldn’t like to get her into trouble either, poor little thing.’
‘Don’t you worry about Sesina, Wilkie,’ said Dickens as we paused outside my lodgings at the Temple Inn. ‘She’s smart enough to run rings around Mrs Dawson, you know. She’ll come up with an explanation for anything that she’s doing. “Just thought I’d give the place a clean out. Heard mice in there, missus.” He mimicked Sesina’s high-pitched voice with great accuracy. ‘You know, Wilkie,’ he said, ‘I’ve had a few sessions with our friend Sesina in the past. She tried to run rings around me on one occasion, persuading me to restore marks that she had lost by a fit of temper: “Can’t do my work agreeable to myself, Mr Dickens, without having my marks put back into my book.” Quite a girl, our little Sesina.’ Dickens laughed heartily and I said no more, but my anxiety about the girl wasn’t so much the fear of a scolding from Mrs Dawson, but that she might be putting herself into grave danger from a murderer who might be lurking in that house.
And what about Mrs Dawson, I thought, as I made my way up to my rooms. We had not really discussed this matter; by now, Dickens had probably brushed the matter aside as a coincidence of name, but what if Mrs Dawson had been the woman who had the baby farm, like the woman in Dickens’ book, Oliver Twist? What if Mrs Dawson was the woman who had raised Isabella? I imagined from all that I heard from Dickens that Isabella had been a smart, intelligent girl – the handwriting on those cards was fluent and well-educated. What if she had a childhood memory of some scandal, some piece of brutality; a memory that had suddenly come to the fore when Mrs Dawson had said or done something? That could happen with childhood memories; my mother was a great believer in things like that.
And now that little housemaid, Sesina, if she went on prowling for clues, might well be in danger of the same fate as her friend. I felt worried about her. Wondered whether I could get her to confide in me.
SIXTEEN
Sesina was exhausted when the door knocker sounded in the mid-afternoon.
Today was washing day and on washing day mornings, she and Isabella had always got up at five o’clock in the morning. The fire in the washhouse in the lower basement had to be lit to heat up the water to boiling point. Later it would help to dry the clothes so that they could be ironed. There was no place at Adelphi Terrace to dry clothes out-of-doors, like the garden they had at Urania Cottage where the girls had all learned how to w
ash clothes, how to take out stains, and which materials could be boiled and which had to be carefully washed by hand. All about starches, too and how to iron the clothes, how to make sure that the flatirons’ temperature was right for the cloth. She remembered windy days when white petticoats blew like sails from the washing lines and those competitions they had, watching balls of spit bubbling on the hot surface of the irons and betting whose spit would last the longest. Washday had sometimes been fun in Urania Cottage. She had to admit that. And the girls all had a little rest in the afternoon after washday and something special for supper.
Not here, though. Too much work for two people, well, one and a half, really. Sesina looked across at the young girl that Mrs Dawson had imported to help her. Crying, poor little thing. Her hands were a mess. Big chilblains swelling out making her fingers look like sausages. One of them bleeding too. That mixture of lye and ashes was bad for the hands, cracked the skin something terrible. She felt a bit ashamed that she had forgotten to tell her to put goose grease on before she started to scrub. Now she decided to ignore the knocker for a moment while she took the bowl from the netted safe in the pantry.
‘Here, rub some of that on your hands. Makes them feel ever so soft. You’ll be a lady in five minutes.’ That got a smile from her. Thirteen years old. Still growing by the look of her. Sesina ignored the knocker once more and fetched a slice of bread from the bin and slapped some of the grease on with an old broken knife.
‘You eat that up, get it inside you. Inside and out, that’s the trick with goose grease.’ She gave the girl a wink and began to climb the two flights of stairs up from the kitchen.
‘So there you are; I thought that I was going to have to answer that door myself.’ Mrs Dawson had a head outside her parlour when Sesina opened the door to the back stairs.
That would be terrible, missus, wouldn’t it? After all, I’ve only spent the last eight hours on my feet, scrubbing, banging, lugging pots of boiling water, busting my guts with that mangle, taking the skin off my hands with that lye soap and my legs on fire with bending over that tub. It would be a dreadful thing if you had to cross the hall to open the front door. Sesina bit her lips to keep back the words. After all, except for Mondays, the work was easy here. The kitchen was warm and the food was plentiful. Wait until I make my fortune and then I’ll tell you what I think of you. That was what Isabella used to say.
And, surprise, it was him again. But not just him and his friend. This time there were three of them. Sesina had seen Mr Dickens’ head first, his friend at his shoulder, but one more behind them. Big, heavy man. Bringing all his friends along to see the place where the murdered girl used to live. Making a show of them. Soon they’d be like Aspley’s on the Strand where they showed the wild beasts to people who had the money to pay for the sight.
‘Ah, Sesina.’ Mr Dickens on the look-out as usual, with one of his quick looks around the hall as if he was doing a spot check to see if there was a speck of dust anywhere to be seen; the girls of Urania Cottage used to giggle behind his back when they saw him doing this and Sesina had to tighten her lips to keep a smirk back. That nice Mr Collins gave her one of his little smiles. The hall had passed muster. Mr Dickens’ head bobbed a quick nod and then turned to one of the other men.
‘This girl was a friend of the dead girl, Inspector Field. Her name is Sesina. A clever girl. I’m sure she will be a great help to you, Inspector.’
Inspector – from a prison? Inspecting what? Who was he? Wearing a top hat and a black coat. Fat. Huge stomach. Not interested in her. Sesina took Mr Collins’ hat before she took his. She’d give that hat a brush before she handed it back to him. Inspector Field’s hat was better brushed, but the leather lining was slimy with sweat.
‘Inspector Field is the policeman in charge of poor Isabella’s murder, Sesina.’ Mr Collins gave her a nice smile as though he could read her good intentions towards his hat.
‘Would you like to see Mrs Dawson, sir?’ Sesina did her best to make her voice sound polite and helpful. The missus wouldn’t like the police wandering around the place. Goodness knows what they’d find. Though a policeman is only a man when all is said and done. There was a girl in Urania Cottage who had started to go out with a policeman. Kept it a secret for ever so long. Even Mrs Morson thought nothing of a policeman walking past every day and never wondered why Hannah was spending such a time in the garden, not until the night when poor old Hannah became stone drunk from the bottle of whisky that she and the policeman had been drinking in the garden shed. Great fuss about that, of course. Mrs Morson sent a note by a fly across London for Mr Dickens to come and deal with Hannah. But before he could arrive, Hannah just crashed out of the place, breaking down the fence as she did so. Couldn’t leave by the gate, like any normal human being, had to make a theatre out of the whole business. That was Mr Big-Headed Dickens! Always going to the theatre himself. Or going off to France when he felt bored and stale. Sesina had heard him telling Mrs Morson how he really needed a break. What did he think that his girls, as he called them, would do when they felt bored and stale and really needed a break? She and Isabella had a good laugh over that. ‘Hannah just needed a break,’ whispered Isabella, while they were eating their dinner, listening to a carpenter mending the broken fence. Mrs Morson, at the head of the table, had looked puzzled when all the girls choked over their soup; they were laughing so much at the notion of Hannah and her idea of ‘a break’.
Ah, well!
‘In here, sir,’ she said demurely, addressing her words to Inspector Field and tapping politely on the door of Mrs Dawson’s sitting room. She dropped one of her curtsies and left them to it.
They took quite a while before they came down to the kitchen. She had time to ease the ache in her calves by putting her feet on the stove and, feeling a bit sorry for the poor little thing, she told Becky to do the same.
‘Keep on rubbing that stuff into your hands, though,’ she advised. ‘I’ll give you a bit to take home with you in a jar. Washday comes around quicker than you think. Those little hands of yours will split and crack tonight if you don’t keep them blisters well greased.’
Sesina was almost half asleep before she heard the creak of the backstairs door. In a flash she was out of her seat and in the washhouse, testing the iron by spitting on it. The sheets, dangling down from the clothes horse, were still too wet for ironing, even though they had put them through the mangle twice and had stoked up the fire as high as possible. The window to the yard was open, too, but there was a heavy fog outside so the steam had nowhere to go. She let the men stand around there for a couple of minutes, though, as she busily raked the embers and turned up the damper a bit more. Do them good to breathe in a bit of the atmosphere. Not a nice smell, that lye. If I ever get my money, I’ll send all of my washing out; sheets, everything, she decided keeping her back turned on them and noisily riddling the embers. When she turned around eventually, Mr Dickens wasn’t looking at her, but was absent-mindedly turning the handle of the mangle.
‘Someone should invent a machine to do all this washing, shouldn’t they, Wilkie. Bless my soul, we have trains tearing through the length and breadth of the country, their wheels turned by steam. Why doesn’t someone invent a steam-powered washing machine, Sesina?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Sesina. She did, though. Why bother when you can get girls to do it for ten pounds a year? And scrub floors, dust walls and ceilings, haul carpets down stairs, wash dishes, carry slop pails, clean fireplaces, rake out the coal, open doors to visitors and answer their stupid questions. She put back the iron on top of the stove in a businesslike way and moved towards the door.
‘It’s not so steamy in the kitchen, sir.’ She held the door open for them.
He gave her a stern glance that seemed to mean: I’ll decide for myself, young woman, but when they came in to the warm kitchen, he stopped at the sight of poor little Becky holding out her sore and bleeding hands in the air. When she stood up, he went over and silently t
ucked a coin that looked like half a crown into the poor little thing’s apron. Not bad at times, Mr Dickens. Bark worse than his bite, she thought.
But then he turned back to Sesina. He had a determined look on his face, she thought.
‘This business of Isabella has to be sorted out, Sesina. You do see that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do, sir.’ She thought that the words sounded a strong note and goodness knows she hoped that it was a true note. Why should Isabella die like an unwanted dog with a cruel master? Why should any man do that to her? Beat her, strangle her and throw her in the river? Men like that, she thought viciously, should be hanged.
‘I want the man who was responsible for killing Isabella to be caught, sir,’ she said to him and she heard a note of sincerity in her voice. He heard it also and she saw him nod his head. He lowered his voice so that he just spoke to her.
‘We want to have a good search of that room next to the kitchen, Sesina. That’s the first thing to do, don’t you think? We’ll see if Isabella has left us any more clues; that’s what I’m hoping for.’
‘We know that you had a good look, Sesina, but you don’t have much time, do you? You’ve got too much to do and not much help to do it.’ Mr Collins, too, cast a pitying look at poor Becky and her poor hands and then patted Sesina on the shoulder as he whispered the words in her ear.
‘I’m sure that you are right, Mr Dickens.’ Sesina hoped that her voice sounded humble. Always liked to be right, did Mr Dickens. Nice as pie once you told him that he was right. ‘I don’t get the time for anything but work.’ That was true, anyway. What with doing Isabella’s work as well as her own, there was not much time left in the day.
He gave her a nod and walked out after the other two. She could hear them moving around, shifting the bed, taking all the drawers out of the chest, and then the creaking of a chair, probably holding up the weight of that police inspector as he climbed on it to see the top of the press. And then the chair was moved and there was more creaking. She would have liked to have a look, to see if they discovered any new hiding places, but she stayed where she was. Might as well rest her legs. And rest her tongue. All this ‘yes, sir; no sir’ business was tiring. Just as if she wasn’t as good as any of them. A couple of years ago she would have said it out loud. That’s what had made her leave Urania Cottage. She couldn’t keep her temper. And the more marks she lost, the more her feelings boiled over. Couldn’t stand the sight of that silly book. She might be different now, she thought. She was older and a bit more sensible. But there was never any use in looking back. Best to concentrate on getting her money out of that man. Safely, she reminded herself. And then clearing out of Adelphi Terrace.
Season of Darkness Page 17