by Granger, Ann
She was obliged to give way, but not without marking her displeasure.
‘Very well, Inspector Ross, if you insist. However, if you have reason to call again in the absence of the master, I would be grateful if you apply to the back door of the house.’
She turned on her heel and marched away; and I heard her instructing Purvis to go up to the nursery and fetch down Ellen, complete with outdoor clothing.
In due course Ellen appeared from the direction of the back stairs, wearing a grey cloak and a minute bonnet perched on the front of her hair, secured with a large pearl-headed pin and tied with ribbons under her chin.
‘Yes, sir?’ she asked apprehensively, eyeing me as if I’d come to accuse her of some crime and haul her away in handcuffs.
‘Don’t worry, Miss Brady,’ I told her. A faint rustle at the rear of the hall told me that either Mrs Bell or Purvis lurked there, listening. ‘On the day she went missing, Mrs Canning took Miss Charlotte out for a walk. Now then, I think it likely that she followed the route she normally took on these occasions. You usually accompanied her, did you not?’ Ellen nodded. ‘So you can show me exactly the way.’
We left the house and Ellen indicated we should go to the right. We set off sedately. When we were out of sight of the house, I said, ‘Don’t be alarmed, Ellen, but I am anxious to talk to you without anyone else eavesdropping.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Ellen, still apprehensive. ‘I thought as that was your idea. Are we still to walk the way Mrs Canning normally wanted to go?’
‘Yes, if you would.’
‘Well, then,’ said Ellen, ‘we’d walk to Regent’s Park. Miss Charlotte liked to visit the boating lake. Not that we ever went on it, of course. We’d walk right round it. That was in good weather. In bad weather, we’d cut the walk short, but we always went out, unless it was fairly pouring it down.’
‘It was good weather the day they left the house and disappeared?’
‘Yes, sir, it was a very fine day. I wasn’t surprised Mrs Canning wanted to walk out with the child. Only surprised she didn’t want me with her.’
So, I thought, that was a change to the normal routine. Something had happened to bring that about.
Aloud, I said, ‘Then let us go to the boating lake. Now, Ellen, you must believe that anything you tell me I will use only as necessary for finding Mrs Canning. I will not report to Mr Canning, or Mrs Bell, or anyone else other than another police officer, what you tell me. You can speak absolutely freely.’
She didn’t answer, so I added, ‘It won’t cost you your place!’
At that Ellen burst out, ‘I won’t have a place if Mrs Canning and Charlotte don’t come back, will I? I dare say that I won’t have a place in that house any more, even if – when they do. Mrs Bell is so angry with me – and the master – that for two pins they’d turn me away today, so they would! It is only because they want to keep an eye on me that they keep me in the house at all.’
‘Oh, why so?’
‘So that they know what I do and whom I speak to, such as to you, now, today.’
‘Ellen,’ I said gently, ‘what is it they are afraid you will tell me?’
I received no answer to this for some minutes. Then Ellen said stonily, ‘I’m sure I don’t know, sir.’
‘I’m sure – or reasonably so – that you do know, or can hazard a guess,’ I said.
‘I don’t gossip, sir.’
It was time to be as obdurate as she was being. ‘See here,’ I said to her, ‘Mrs Canning may be, almost certainly is, in danger, to say nothing of even greater danger to the little girl. Don’t you want them to be found and brought back home safely?’
‘Yes,’ said Ellen simply. After a moment she added, ‘I’ve scarcely slept a wink for thinking of them and worrying, and that’s the truth.’
We walked on in silence until we reached the park. Another short walk inside the park itself brought us to the boating lake, where I indicated a wooden seat. Ellen sat down and I beside her.
‘We should have brought some bread for the ducks,’ I said.
‘We used to do that,’ said Ellen. ‘Miss Charlotte liked . . .’ She fell silent and I waited patiently. I sensed she had decided to tell me something but was not sure how to begin. A nursemaid pushing a baby carriage walked past us. A small boy carrying a hoop trotted alongside her.
‘Mr Canning is a strange sort of feller, so he is,’ said Ellen suddenly, her Irish brogue more pronounced. ‘He won’t let anyone into the house, you know. There’s never a visitor. They never go out together except to church of a Sunday morning. Then it’s straight there and home again. No family comes. I don’t know that Mr Canning has any. I know that Mrs Canning has an elderly relative, an old auntie, down in Southampton. She lived there with her before she was married. She told me so. She told me, she missed the sight of the sea and the air being different in a big city. She would like to take Miss Charlotte to the seaside somewhere, for a little holiday. But Mr Canning always said he couldn’t leave his business. Sometimes Mrs Canning said she felt she couldn’t breathe at all, here in London. I understood what she meant for I feel the same way myself. I grew up in the countryside.’
‘When I was a boy back in my home in Derbyshire,’ I told her, ‘I was sent down the pit to work at ten years old. There was precious little fresh air there.’
‘In the dark?’ asked Ellen, looking anxiously at me.
‘Very dark.’
‘Were there rats, sir?’
‘Big as a small dog.’
‘Weren’t you scared?’
‘Terrified. It made no difference, I had to go down. There were younger boys than me down there.’
‘You won’t mind being in the city, then,’ said Ellen, ‘for all the smoke and the stink of it. It must be better than being buried down there with the coal.’ She folded her hands in her lap. ‘Mrs Canning was a very unhappy person, sir. Mr Canning – I’m not saying he’s the only man in the world to be like it – but everything must be done how he wants it. Mrs Bell runs the household, down to the smallest detail, without any consultation with Mrs Canning, because he will have it so. Mr Canning goes to his business selling the wine to the gentry. Poor Mrs Canning has no say in anything and is allowed to go nowhere, not to meet with other married ladies or anything like that, no tea parties or charity circles, such as a lot of ladies give their time to. That’s why she and I and little Miss Charlotte walked out every day.’
‘Yet it was Mrs Canning who chose you to be the nursemaid, I believe.’
‘So she did, sir. Mrs Bell hires and dismisses the maids – and they do come and go at a fair old clip, you can believe me. They don’t like working there. Purvis doesn’t mind so much. She’s a walking streak of misery like old Mother Bell herself. Only Mrs Bell was never a mother and when it came to engaging a nursemaid, Mrs Canning – for the only time ever, I do believe – put her foot down and said she must choose whom it would be. The agency sent several girls and she chose me. Mrs Bell didn’t like it. She doesn’t like me. But, perhaps because Mr Canning was proud to be a new father and all, he let Mrs Canning have her way in that. Mrs Canning and I always got on famously.’
‘So what do you think caused Mrs Canning to take the child and run away?’
I wondered whether Ellen would deny that was the case. Instead, said, ‘The master and mistress had a terrible argument, sir.’
‘When was this?’
‘Well, they’d had a few of them this last month or two. But this particular one was the evening before – before Mrs Canning left. She told him how unhappy she was, and lonely, and wanted it all to change, to be allowed to make friends. There were ladies at the church who had called and left cards. But she was not allowed to call and leave cards back. She wanted to do that. Mr Canning would have it was all nonsense and he wouldn’t have her “running about the town” in his absence. He said all manner of things, besides, unkind things. Mrs Canning was in tears and he only shouted at her.’
‘How did you come to hear all this, Ellen?’
‘Miss Charlotte had been restless. She woke often at night and called out. I think she was aware her mama was unhappy and that made her unhappy and frightened, too, not understanding it, you see. So I would get up to go to Miss Charlotte and I could hear, the house being so quiet at night, how Mr and Mrs Canning argued. I sleep in the nursery, sir, and it’s on the same floor as Mr and Mrs Canning’s room. Mrs Bell and the maids are on the floor above and probably don’t hear. That night, my, oh my, they made so much racket perhaps the staff sleeping above did hear. But you won’t get any of them to admit that to you, sir.’
‘So, this has been going on for a few months?’
‘Yes, sir. It began, I do believe, after Mrs Canning had the misfortune to lose the baby.’
‘What baby is this? I asked, startled.
‘She was expecting another child, sir. But with three or four months she miscarried and was quite ill for some weeks. This happened last year, towards Christmas.’
‘So Mrs Canning had been down in spirits for almost a year, since losing the baby,’ I mused.
‘Yes, sir. Women do get that way after a healthy birth, even. Any midwife will tell you so. With losing a child, well, what would you expect? But Mr Canning couldn’t see it. He just lost his temper and shouted at her, as usual. Then she’d be sobbing and he’d storm out. I’d go in and try and comfort her. That fool of a doctor he called to examine her made it worse. He told Mr Canning that Mrs Canning was suffering from hysteria. He said it was a sickness of the womb, and very common among women. Mr Canning told her she must “pull herself together” – that’s his phrase. If she didn’t, he said, he would send her to a clinic recommended by that doctor, and they would treat her there.’
‘What sort of clinic?’ I exclaimed.
‘The master and the doctor both called it “a special place for treatment of female hysteria”. I’ve heard of such places, sir. They do all manner of indecent things to women there; and take such liberties . . . It’s what no kind, gentle lady like Mrs Canning should have to put up with. Don’t ask me to speak more of that, sir, because I won’t. It’s not fitting. I’m a respectable girl, and the dirty words won’t leave my lips. But the poor lady isn’t ill, sir! She’s only unhappy.’
So, having driven the poor woman into a nervous decline, he intended to send her off to be locked up in what amounted to a private asylum, though it might call itself a ‘spa’ in the fashionable Continental way. There she would be subjected to goodness knows what by way of treatment. Jane had panicked and fled, taking the child. Canning knew the reason for it. He’d never admit it. Her actions probably, in his view, confirmed the doctor’s diagnosis of hysteria. Well, I am not a doctor, but if a man acts more like a gaoler than a husband, he ought not to expect his wife to like it. Canning was a bully, and that was the only word for it.
‘We should go back now, sir,’ said Ellen firmly, getting to her feet. ‘It will be bad enough as it is, when I go back, for they – Mrs Bell first and Mr Canning when he gets home – will want to know every mortal word we exchanged. But you needn’t worry, sir, that I will tell them what I told you. I am not afraid of them. They can send me away; but they can’t do it with a bad reference because of what I might go telling people.’ Ellen cast me quite a mischievous look. ‘I do believe, sir, that Mr Canning is a bit frightened of me!’
No, I needn’t worry about Ellen. She was more than able to look after herself.
When I arrived home that evening, I found Lizzie ready to tell me what had happened at Somerset House and her hope that the porter might have information for her on the morrow.
‘Well, there is no harm in going back there and finding out if his wife has any memories of her time in Putney of help in this case,’ I said cautiously, ‘but do please be very careful, Lizzie. Asking questions can be a dangerous business.’
Chapter Six
Elizabeth Martin Ross
‘THAT ANIMAL,’ declared Wally Slater, the cabman, with pride, ‘that is your genuine hackney vanner. That animal is bred for the purpose and is, as working horses go, a regular diamond. He’ll keep going all day without going lame or starting to wheeze or otherwise breaking down. He’s a young horse, too, you know, only a six year old. I had to pay handsome for him,’ added Wally confidentially, ‘but he’ll repay me with years of hard work, reliable as Big Ben is at telling the time.’
A smile of pride creased his battered ex-prizefighter’s features and rendered them, if possible, even more alarming.
The three of us, Wally, Bessie and myself, gazed at Victor as he waited, one hind hoof tipped, in the shafts of the four-wheeled growler, just outside our modest house. Victor in turn rolled a large brown eye at us, as if assessing what Bessie and I might weigh, without baggage. What he saw must have reassured him, for he sighed and settled down as if to doze off.
‘He looks quiet enough,’ observed Bessie. ‘He’s half asleep.’
‘He’s an excellent temperament. You’ve got to have a cab horse with a good temperament. There are those cabmen,’ continued Wally, ‘who look to buy a horse cheap. You know, some old carriage horse no longer fit to be part of a smart gent’s carriage pair. An animal like that might be more showy, but it’s not used to the work, can be difficult to handle, takes a chill easy, and don’t last more than a couple of years. I’ve seen horses like that drop dead in the shafts. No, Victor and me, God willing, will be together as long as old Nelson and me were.’
‘Speaking of youngsters, Mr Slater,’ I said. ‘Is young Joey still in your employ?’
‘That street urchin you foisted on me?’ Wally chuckled. ‘He’s come along very well. Of course, we had a few problems. F’instance, my wife won’t stand for bad language, as no more she should. So I had to tell him a few times to mind his. Trouble was explaining to him what was bad language, as he seemed to think all language was fit for anyone’s ears, females included. But we got that straight. He took to my old horse, Nelson, straight away and Nelson took to him. Why, when Nelson’s time was finally up, and he had to go to the knacker’s, young Joey was in tears, as was my wife. I had a tear in my eye, for that matter,’ added Wally. ‘Of course, you’d hardly recognise the lad if you saw him now. My wife has been feeding him up and he’s grown and filled out, though he’ll never make a prizefighter.’
Wally became business-like. ‘You want to go to Somerset House first and then out to Putney. We’d better get started.’
Victor recognised from the tone of his owner that we would shortly be off. He threw up his head and looked alert. Bessie picked up the small basket containing apples to sustain us, and we climbed into the growler.
I had been worried that the friendly porter might not be on duty. But there he was at his station and greeted me like an old acquaintance.
‘Pleased to see you again, ma’am. I knew you’d be back and I haven’t let you down! I told my wife all about it last night. She was very happy during her time in service in Putney when she was a young girl, and it got her reminiscing right off. I told her about the house with the weathervane as you described it, a running fox.’
‘And she knew the house?’ I asked eagerly.
‘Well, she remembers a house with a weathervane like that,’ the porter replied cautiously. ‘Not to say it’s the same one, of course! But it was near the Portsmouth road, as you said. It belonged to a gentleman name of Spelton or Shelton, she cannot be sure which, and she knows no more about it than that. It was not a household that was on friendly terms with the people my wife worked for. By that I mean they didn’t go visiting back and forth, so she never saw any of the people who lived there. The only thing she has in her mind is that Mr Spelton (or Shelton) was an elderly gent and something of an invalid. The reason she knows that is because the doctor used to call regular on a member of the family in her house. Quite often when he arrived he would say, as he was taking off his hat and coat, that he was coming from Mr Spelton (or Shelton). Or, when he was l
eaving, he would say, “I must be off to see Mr Spelton,” (or Shelton).’
‘I am extremely obliged to you, Mr – I am afraid I don’t know your name,’ I told him.
‘Hogget, madam.’
‘Then I am very obliged both to you and to Mrs Hogget. I wonder if I might trouble you to ask her one more thing. Can she remember the name of the doctor?’
‘I’ll ask her,’ he promised. ‘Let me know how you get on.’
I returned and conveyed what I’d learned to Bessie, who became thoughtful. ‘You know what, missis, you may have started a hare, that’s what. Hogget will go home and tell his wife that you’re really interested and now you want the name of the doctor! If Mrs Hogget is still friendly with anyone from her days in service out at Putney, she’ll be sure to mention it. You’ve set a rumour going, that’s what.’
Mindful that this was exactly what Ben had feared, I said firmly, ‘I am only making a general inquiry.’
‘People going to all the trouble you’re going to,’ retorted Bessie, ‘aren’t making general inquiries. They’ve got a very particular interest, that’s what. Begging your pardon for speaking out, missis,’ she added belatedly.
Well, she was probably right but what was done was done. I settled back and let Victor take us all to Putney.
I need have had no fears about locating St Mary’s church for it was just across Putney Bridge, standing by the river, and we saw its ancient square tower from the far side. We clattered over the wooden bridge, which echoed hollowly beneath us, and found ourselves in the High Street. Bessie and I descended from the growler and Wally clambered down from his perch.
‘Seeing as,’ Wally pointed up at the clock on the solid stone tower, ‘it is past twelve, Victor will be wanting his oats, to stay nothing of a rest. I suggest to you, Mrs Ross, that I take Victor somewhere suitable, that has a stable yard with a water trough, and I can see to him and to myself there.’