I held my breath; held my breath and waited. But she said no more. Isabella Anne Gordon.
‘Are you sure that you didn’t read the letter?’ I put a world of appeal into my voice, nothing that could be interpreted as censorious in any way. Just a young man appealing to an older woman for help. ‘Just to make sure that it was suitable for a young girl to read? Do tell me that you read it, dear Mrs Peters!’
She smiled a little at that, but shook her head. ‘No, I didn’t; though I can’t say but that I would have liked to know. But, there you are, I didn’t,’ she admitted. I thought that there was a note of disappointment in her voice, of regret that she could not tell me what I wanted to hear and waited patiently for an opportunity to question her further. ‘You see, Mr Collins,’ she explained, ‘I was just handing over these articles. None of my business, really. The girl was over twenty-one. I could tell that by looking at her and I could tell it from the evidence of the register in front of me. She had a right to the two little items that her mother had left to identify her and she had a right to this letter that had come for her, although, as I said, it had been put there in error and should have been sent straight back to the sender.’ She stared across at me and there was, I thought, an alert aspect of her features, almost as though she thought that I might come up with something else. I mused for a moment, my mind producing all of her words, one by one, across the memory sheet within my brain.
‘Pauline steamed off stamps.’ I said the words, half to myself, and half to her.
Mrs Peters beamed upon me fondly.
‘That’s right. Very neat, she was. Yes, she would get the kettle, hold it just at the right distance. Would know how long to give it, I suppose experience would tell her, but it seemed to me as though she would always know the exact moment when the glue had melted. And it would do your heart good, Mr Collins, to see how neatly she peeled the stamp off and left never a trace on the envelope.’
And then Mrs Peters sat back in her chair and popped another chocolate drop into her mouth. I stared across at her, moving the facts around in my mind.
‘As easy, or even easier to steam open the adhesive gum from an envelope than to steam off a stamp,’ I said eventually.
Mrs Peters looked gratified at my little show of intelligence. I felt almost as though I were in the nursery playing a game of hunt the thimble under the fond gaze of my nursery governess.
‘Indeed,’ I said cautiously, ‘it must have been very tantalizing for someone, once they had peeled off a foreign stamp, not to want to know what the letter was about. And very tempting, I’m sure, just to have a quick look to see what it said. After all, it must have been highly unusual, almost unknown, for an orphan in Greenwich Workhouse to receive a letter that was posted from foreign parts. A clerk handling these letters, especially one who had an interest in foreign stamps, would have been bound to have felt somewhat curious.’
Mrs Peters’ bright eyes signalled to me to go on.
‘It couldn’t have been done, officially,’ I said slowly. ‘In fact, as you’ve told me, Mrs Peters, officially, since the child was no longer resident, had, in fact, run away; well, officially, the letter should have been returned to the sender, even if he or she were in foreign parts.’
I left a silence. We were both, I knew, thinking hard. I had realized in a flash what she was implying, but knew that I would have to be careful.
‘It occurs to me …’ And now I did not look at her, just spoke looking across the room at the row of books on the shelf in the alcove. I left a little pause and then resumed, speaking slowly and as though to myself. ‘Yes, I suppose someone who was well practised in steaming off stamps would be equally skilled in steaming open a letter.’
‘Very poor glue in some of those ready-made envelopes. Not like the ones when I was a girl when you painted on your own glue.’ Mrs Peters also looked across at her collection of books by Mrs Gaskell and did not meet my eye when I turned towards her.
‘And, of course, it would be intriguing, a letter coming from foreign parts, addressed to a child.’ I allowed the comment to hang in the air. Where did we go from here, I wondered.
‘You’re a nice-looking young man,’ said Mrs Peters, unexpectedly. ‘A bit too young, of course,’ she continued, running an eye over me, ‘but never mind about that. I’m sure that the river air has given you an appetite. It’s just about lunchtime for Pauline. Now why don’t you go down and take her out to lunch. I can recommend the Trafalgar Inn. You will get a very good lunch there, Mr Collins.’
‘What a very excellent idea,’ I said, rising to my feet. ‘I suppose I can’t tempt you to join us, Mrs Peters, can I?’
I could see that she was tempted. There was a sudden glint in her eye. She would enjoy, not just the food and the company, but the unravelling of a mystery. But then she shook her head sadly.
‘No, Mr Collins, you’ll do better on your own, without me, or without your friend, Mr Dickens. You’re a man that a woman would find it easy to talk to. Pauline was, is, a nervous girl and deep down, under all that talking, Pauline is a worrier. You, if I may say it, have a nice reassuring manner. You go now and enjoy your lunch. Don’t say anything about me. Pauline would be upset if she thought that I knew.’
‘Mr Collins!’ Pauline was excited at my arrival and then disappointed when she looked past me and saw that I was not accompanied by my friend Dickens. Luckily her name was engraved on a neatly embossed and framed card that stood upon the desk as I was on the point of calling her by her first name and I swallowed it hastily.
‘I’ve been sent by my friend, Mr Dickens, to ask you if you would trust me to take your books to him, Miss Harper. He will sign them and I will return them to you. What do you say? He would come himself, but he is so terribly busy at the moment. I will take the greatest possible care of them if you will entrust them to me. And I know that Mr Dickens will write a little message for you also.’ Dickens would not fancy coming to Greenwich this afternoon, but I knew him too well to fear that he would refuse to sign the books, though. His fans, though there were thousands of them, were very precious to him and he had a driving desire to unravel this matter of the death of poor Isabella Gordon.
‘Oh, Mr Collins!’ Pauline was in ecstasy at the thought. ‘I’ll fetch every single one of them during my lunch hour,’ she said earnestly. She looked at the clock behind her. Ten minutes to one. The chances were strong that her lunch hour began at one o’clock. In any case, she had given me the opening that I wanted.
‘I’m just off to have a spot of lunch, myself,’ I said carelessly. ‘Someone recommended the Trafalgar Inn to me. What do you think?’
‘Oh, it has lovely food,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘Or so they say,’ she added hastily. ‘I’ve never been inside the place myself, you understand.’
Lived alone, I cast a quick look at her left hand, no ring; unmarried. I smiled at her. Too young for me, Mrs Peters had remarked in her sardonic fashion, but a youthful appearance would make me seem innocuous. I decided to proceed cautiously.
‘Perhaps if you are leaving shortly, you could point me in the right direction,’ I suggested. She followed my eyes to the clock. At that very moment, the long hand jumped forward a little and touched the figure of eleven. Pauline made up her mind instantly. She went to the door at the back of the office, opened it and called out: ‘Mary Ann, I’m off to lunch now.’
‘I’ll wait outside,’ I said hastily and was gone before the obliging Mary Ann appeared on the scene.
Pauline took very little persuading. Once she had accompanied me to the Trafalgar Inn and had inhaled the delicious aroma of steak and kidney pie, which eddied through its door, her protestations dwindled rapidly and she came eagerly into the coffee room with me.
Luckily most of the inhabitants of Greenwich and those who had stopped off to see the Royal Observatory were crowded into the tap room and the public room, so we had the coffee room to ourselves. I ordered recklessly: soup, steak and kidney pie and some por
t.
‘Well, I never,’ said Pauline. ‘Goodness, gracious, Mr Collins! Port in the middle of the day! I never did hear of such of thing. The idea of me sitting here in an inn and drinking port at an hour like this!’
‘Nice, isn’t it?’ I took a gulp to encourage her, and I must say that she downed a considerable amount from her mug, though doing so in a very ladylike fashion with one little finger lifted aloft as though to disassociate itself from the action. ‘Now, Mr Collins, don’t ask me to eat that amount of steak and kidney, just don’t ask me!’
‘Well, I won’t ask you, then,’ I said, heaping her plate and then tasting some for myself.
Judging by the way that Pauline was tucking into it, I decided that it would be no good to interrogate her about the letter until it was finished. I chatted about my good friend, Mr Dickens, told her little secrets about the next instalment of Bleak House and then surreptitiously studied the puddings’ menu chalked on a board by the door. That would be the moment, I decided. That would be the time when Pauline, relaxed by the port, filled with good food, would be in a suitable state to open her heart to me and to spill out any information within that mysterious letter. Bread and butter pudding? No, a bit too ordinary, something that a single lady might make to use up the stale bread in her basket. Blancmange? No, too messy, too difficult to talk while coping with the wobbles beneath the spoon. Gypsy tart – that would be the one. Superlatively sweet, crisp and delicious. I ordered it instantly with an eye on my companion, who threw up her hands and shook her head at me, but had a broad smile on her plump face.
‘Lovely place here. Greenwich! Great spot to live in,’ I said enthusiastically. ‘I’d love to have a house here and look at the ships. I’d love to travel, go to foreign parts, wouldn’t you?’
She almost choked on her gypsy tart in her eagerness to agree with me. ‘I’m just the same, Mr Collins. I’d love to see all those countries …’ She paused for a moment, and then she said, rather shyly, ‘I collect stamps, Mr Collins. And sometimes, of an evening, I get my album out and I turn the pages and think about the countries where each stamp comes from. It’s a lovely way to pass an evening.’
I stared at her in admiration. ‘How wonderful. I started to collect stamps when I was a boy. We went to Italy for a few years and I had a big collection of Italian stamps, and then when we came home I got a bit discouraged because it seemed to be nothing but English stamps and the occasional French one. But then when I left school,’ I said, leaning across the table and speaking to her in a confidential manner, ‘well, my father forced me into a job with a tea importing firm, Antrobus & Company on the Strand. Didn’t like it much, but I did get lots of stamps, from India, mainly, India and Ceylon. Lots of Ceylon stamps.’
‘Ceylon,’ she said eagerly. ‘I have one stamp from Ceylon. Just the one. I love the sound of the name of that place. Sounds like music, doesn’t it?’
‘How did you manage to get it?’ I made my voice sound like an eager collector of stamps. Ceylon, I thought and my mind went to the opium-drugged figure that I had escorted home last night. Could Jeremiah Doyle have anything to do with our quest?
She looked slightly embarrassed; said nothing for a few seconds, and then said dismissively, ‘I got it from a sailor.’ She had a slightly shamefaced look when she said the words. Perhaps because she thought it was unbecoming to associate with sailors.
Or perhaps because it was a lie. I took a bite into the gypsy tart from my spoon and revolved its sweetness within my mouth. Enough to put anyone in a good mood, I thought.
‘Of course, you, a stamp collector, would be lucky, wouldn’t you, working here. Letters must have come from all over the world, from people enquiring after children that they had left behind.’
‘Not much of that,’ she said. ‘Poor things. Once they were left, they were left. Were apprenticed out as soon as they could be. Didn’t get much schooling, just get them out to work as fast as possible.’
‘But that letter that came for Isabella Gordon,’ I said casually. ‘Where did that come from?’
She gave a guilty start. Eyed me carefully. I took off my glasses and polished them with my silk handkerchief. ‘The river spray has got on to them,’ I said in explanation and waited for her to swallow her mouthful.
‘Isabella Gordon,’ she repeated, almost mechanically. There was a wary look in her eye.
‘Was that the Ceylon stamp?’ I asked.
‘No that one was from a sailor.’ The answer came quickly and she sounded very definite, almost defiant about it so I allowed it to pass. There was definitely something slightly defensive about her now and I thought it might be wiser to wait, before any further questioning, until I collected the books. After all, the door had been opened now to allow a request to see the stamp album to seem quite natural.
‘What about a cup of tea, Miss Harper?’ I enquired and hoped for the answer which I received.
‘I’ll make you a good cup of tea, Mr Collins, when you come to collect the books. No point in adding to that enormous bill that you have run up here,’ she said, sounding her former jolly and cheerful self.
‘Do you know, I enjoyed that meal immensely,’ I confided. ‘As for that gypsy tart, well, I’ll remember that!’
She giggled a little at that and I thought, not for the first time, how very good-natured, and happy fat people were. And so we got up to go and I bestowed a large tip on the surprised waiter. I had had my money’s worth, I thought and the slow, intermittent service had made our conversation easier.
‘Sun! In November! You don’t know how lucky you are to be out of London,’ I said, once I had paid the bill and we had emerged from the inn. We walked away together and I noticed that Pauline was now relaxed and happy. I resolved to be tactful and careful in my questioning. She, I felt sure now, might well hold the key to the murderer of Isabella Gordon.
Pauline’s house was perched on top of the hill; belonged to her late father and mother, she told me as we struggled up the steep path. Her father had been a retired sailor and he kept a telescope, always, on his bedroom windowsill so that he could keep an eye on the ships as they went up and down the river.
‘That was probably what made you take an interest in collecting stamps,’ I said and she agreed so happily that I felt safe in adding, ‘I do hope that you’ll show your album to me, when we are having that cup of tea. You know you have made me feel quite nostalgic for the old hobby. I have no idea what happened to my stamp album; my mother probably threw it out on one of our moves – always moving house, my mother and my father.’
The stamp album was produced as soon as I was ensconced in an easy chair with a fine view over the river in front of me. It held an impressive collection, stretching over about twenty years, mainly English stamps, but there were also some German, French and Danish stamps, obtained by her sailor father from ships that came in and out of Greenwich, I guessed. A few Indian stamps, one from Ceylon, three from India; these ships would dock higher up in the river, nearer to London, but sailors would meet sailors so her father would have been the source for these perhaps. One American stamp and one Australian stamp. Dickens had told me about his American trip and how he and his wife had to take a train to Liverpool to reach their ship, so not many American stamps would come her way. As for Australia, well I had a strong impression that one had to go to Southampton for a ship to that faraway continent.
‘Did your father ever sail to America?’ I asked idly and she shook her head. She appeared nervous and uncertain. The flow of conversation had dried up. I felt ashamed to be playing guessing games with such a nice woman. I reached across and took her hand.
‘Pauline,’ I said earnestly, ‘please tell me about that letter that came for Isabella Gordon.’ I hesitated for a moment and then decided to be honest. ‘I can’t get the picture of her out of my head,’ I said, blurting out the words and feeling relieved that I could be sincere and honest. ‘That man strangled her, beat her, her legs were broken, she was covered in brui
ses. I don’t know how anyone could do such a thing to a young girl.’
Soft-hearted Pauline had tears starting from her eyes. She hesitated for a moment, looking an appeal at me and I answered the unspoken question.
‘No one at your workplace will ever know,’ I said. ‘I just want a clue. She had dangerous information about someone, was blackmailing them, something about a brother. Does that make sense? Was there something in that letter that came for her … the letter that Mrs Peters gave to her … where did it come from, Pauline?’
‘America,’ she said after a long pause. She looked behind her as she spoke, her voice not much more than a whisper, almost as though she expected to find someone listening in to her confession. There was enough of a hesitation in her voice to make me uncertain of whether she was telling the truth.
‘And was it about her brother?’ My voice, too, was almost a whisper. I was on the verge of finding out something vital. I trembled with excitement.
She shook her head. ‘Isabella didn’t have a brother.’
‘Didn’t have a brother.’ I repeated the words. I still held her hand and I felt how hot it was, almost fevered.
‘The letter was from a lawyer, an attorney, in America,’ she whispered.
‘America,’ I repeated. It was an effort to let go the idea of Yorkshire, but the word wasn’t a surprise. I had been expecting something like this ever since I heard of the stamp being removed. What use to a stamp collector was one of those red penny stamps featuring the severe profile of Queen Victoria? But a ten-cent stamp of George Washington’s intellectual face, now that would have been a prize.
‘That’s right, Mr Collins.’ She squeezed my hand. She seemed to have recovered from her anxiety and embarrassment. ‘It was ever so exciting, you’ll never believe it, but it was about a will and it was about her father’s will.’
Season of Darkness Page 21