The Five-Minute Marriage

by Joan Aiken

She added, diffidently,

  “You were right and I was wrong, Cousin Gareth, about taking the poor old man to see my mother! I am sorry for all the distress and awkwardness that it has caused you.”

  “Oh well,” he said tiredly. “Don’t put yourself about As Dr. Bowles told us, it might have happened any time during the last seven years. But it was certainly a piece of good fortune that Bowles was at hand, so no one can think it was anything but the course of nature. At least—I hope not,”

  “And now at least,” said Delphie, “you are rid of one of your most inconvenient problems.”

  “What is that?”

  “Why,” she said, moving softly toward her mother’s room, “as soon as you like—tomorrow morning, if you please!—you can set in hand the arrangements to have your marriage annulled.”

  And, stepping into the darkened room, she softly closed the door behind her.

  She had hardly expected to be able to sleep for hours to come; after dismissing Mrs. Andrews she was still sitting with open eyes, gazing at the window, and had been doing so for about ten minutes, when she became aware of a scratching and tapping outside, and heard whispering voices:

  “Cousin Delphie! Cousin Delphie! Could you please open the door and let us in!”

  After yesternight’s burglar, Delphie had taken the somewhat irrational precaution of carrying her wedding lines around with her in her pocket; her hand found and closed on the paper now. But then she realized that the persons outside were not burglars.

  “Good heavens,” she thought confusedly. “The children!”

  Only now did it occur to her that, throughout all the excitement during the previous hours—the carriage coming and going—the doctor and Fitzjohn arriving and departing—not a sound, not a footstep, not a murmur had been heard from upstairs. Despite the promise the children had given their uncle, this seemed too good to be credible—ominously good; and here, now, was the proof of that.

  They had not been in the house at all!

  No doubt they had been to Astley’s Amphitheatre on their own, thought Delphie tiredly, getting up out of her chair and throwing a shawl over her shoulders. And I cannot say that I blame them—I am sure they do not often have a treat, poor little things; and it is really a fortunate occurrence, for, despite his promise to them, Gareth could hardly take them now, on the day after his uncle’s death.

  She tiptoed swiftly to the glass door leading into the garden, and opened it. To her considerable surprise, there seemed to be several persons more than just the children clustered outside in the dark little paved yard.

  “Heydey, Miss Delphie! Ain’t this a prime caper then!” whispered a cheerful, familiar voice.

  “Good God!” exclaimed Delphie in utter astonishment. “It’s never Jenny Baggott! What in the name of heaven are you doing here at three o’clock in the morning?”

  “Let us in, Miss Delphie, and we’ll give you the whole history!” Jenny whispered. The children were already slipping past, murmuring and giggling amongst themselves—

  “Don’t go into the front room!” said Delphie hastily—not that there was any particular reason why they should take it into their heads to do such a thing. “You’d best—you had better all come into the kitchen and tell me what you have been doing,” she added, with as much severity as she could muster, fastening the glass door behind the last of the shadowy figures. With stifled squeaks and exclamations, and a great deal of chuckling, they obeyed her, perching themselves on chairs and table, and squatting on the floor. Delphie, following, lit a candle and then a lamp, which she set on the dresser.

  Turning from adjusting its wick—

  “Good God!” she gasped. “Mr. Palgrave!”

  For, to her utter consternation, she found the poet in the midst of his children, seated comfortably in Mrs. Andrews’s rocking chair, already looking about him in a vague, absent way, as if searching for a pen, and a bit of paper to write on.

  “Ain’t it a prime lark!” said Jenny again, and the two smaller boys, Lance and Lionel, could no longer restrain their delight, but burst into an exuberant, capering dance, crying out,

  “We rescued Papa! We rescued Papa!” while all the rest of the children broke into excited, self-congratulatory chatter.

  “Don’t you think it was clever of us, Cousin Delphie? We took the donkey for him to ride on—just like Jesus—hold your tongue, Lionel!—in case poor Papa couldn’t walk so far after all those years in prison—and we took our supper and waited out in the park for hours and hours until it was truly dark and late at night so there would be fewer persons about—we had such larks dodging the constables and hiding in bushes—stop being a jaw-me-dead, Percy, let me tell the tale—of course it worked in very well because we knew Cousin Gareth would be pleased to have us out of the way while he gave his party—shut your head, Tristram! Cousin Delphie knows that already—and we left Helen looking after Mama because Helen’s quake-spirited and don’t care for larks above half—and we made ourselves masks out of newspaper and painted black, so that it would seem like a real rumpus—” Indeed, many of them were still wearing black loo-masks, evidently homemade.

  “But—good heavens!—how did you ever succeed in getting your Papa out of the prison?” said Delphie faintly.

  She could not find it in her heart to reproach them—so filled with evident pride and delight as they were, so bursting with pleasure at the success of their expedition—but she did feel that the rescue of Thomas Palgrave was far from being an unmixed blessing, and must certainly be attended by unheard-of complications in the near future.

  Mr. Palgrave himself seemed to be imbued with somewhat similar doubts, for he looked around the crowded kitchen with a touch of irritability, and said in a querulous tone,

  “Not so loud, pray, not so loud! Lower your voices, if you please! You appear to forget that for six years I have been used to a very considerable degree of solitude, and silence, and privacy. This clamor grates on my hearing, I fear—it grates! I have need of a great deal of quiet, I do indeed! Perhaps there might be prepared for me some small, retired chamber—any will do, so it has a couch, a chair, a table, an inkstand—to which I might repair?”

  “Oh, but you must have some supper, Papa!” cried Isa. “May we give him something to eat, Cousin Delphie?”

  “Yes of course you may, my dear,” Delphie replied absently. “Look in the larder—you will find cold duck, cold beef, cold capon, cold goose-and-turkey pie, a piece of cheese, and a few apple tartlets; pray take whatever you fancy.”

  The children needed no further invitation; most of them set off in the direction of the larder immediately.

  “But I still do not understand how you managed to get your Papa out of the prison,” Delphie went on, addressing herself to Arthur, who had remained.

  A deprecating cough behind her in the corner at this point made her turn around.

  “Ahem! I daresay I can explain that point, miss!”

  Very much astonished, Delphie observed a personage whom she had hitherto overlooked among the crowd—the gangling figure of Mr. Sam Swannup, who stood in a corner beside Jenny Baggott, with a look of simple pride on his face.

  “You see, miss, it was all along of your kindness in giving Miss Baggott here the wherewithal to buy me out—and indeed, ma’am, I’m that obliged to you—I’ll be pleased to attend to any locks of yours that should chance to require mending free gratis to the end of my days—Miss Baggott come to me in the prison, all smiles, and, says she, Sam Swannup, you’re a free man, for Miss has give me the dibs, and I’ve paid your blunt! And we can get wed next Thursday fortnit, the minute I’ve my wedding dress made, she says. Oh, my stars! says I. Whatever can we do to repay Miss? And she says,’ Sam, you’re a locksmith, you can unbolt a betty as good as any man in Smithies’ Road, why don’t you let Miss’s friend out of the buckle? Oh, says I, for sure that’s a first-rate notion, and it will be a service to litter-ayture into the bargain; so then, Mr. Bardwell chancing to employ me to dub up
the betty on your downstairs window—”

  “Mind your language, Sam! For shame! I daresay the young lady can’t make head nor tail of what you’re a-telling her!” said Jenny reprovingly.

  “Beg pardon, miss, I’m sure! As I was a-saying, Mr. Bardwell (which is an old chum of mine, and he it was who passed me the word to keep an eye on His Nabs here while in the Bastile)”—here Sam cast a look of great devotion at Mr. Palgrave—“Mr. Bardwell, as I say, employing me to do this little job on the lady’s window—I was able to pass the nod to the young’uns upstairs as how I’d be pleased to help them fetch their Pa out of durance vile.”

  “But how did you manage the escape?”

  “Why,” said Sam, “on account o’ me being a locksmith, miss. Natural, when they gets me to do the job on the gates in the clink, I keeps a bread-cast of the locks as I mends ‘em; I’d be a poor sort o’ betty-faker if I didn’t do that; it’s only common sense to fake a screw of any lock you works over!”

  “So,” said Tristram, unable to keep out of the tale any longer, “all we had to do was wait till the turnkeys were all asleep—for they keep mighty poor watch at the Marshalsea!”

  “And then,” burst in Percy, “Mr. Swannup unbuckled the betty—I mean, picked the lock—and I went in, because I’m smaller than Tris and can go more quietly than Artie—and I sneaked past the charleys—and roused up Papa and told him the coast was clear—”

  “And we fetched him back on the donkey!” chorused the children all together. “Only Isa had to go back for the canary, of course—and then Papa wanted all his books, so that made it take a good deal longer—”

  “And I went along for the lark—we was that tickled to think we could do you a good turn, Miss Delphie,” said Jenny exuberantly, taking a large bite out of a chicken leg which Percy had handed to her.

  “Won’t Mama be pleased! How soon may we tell her?” Lionel was beginning, when a harsh voice from the doorway froze them all where they stood.

  “What is the meaning of this disgraceful pandemonium?”

  Delphie, turning with a wishbone in her hand (which she had absently picked up) met the furious eyes of Gareth, who, standing on the threshold, surveyed the exultant scene before him with an expression of unmixed wrath and disapproval.

  “Uncle Gareth!” Percy said happily. “We have rescued Papa!”

  “So I see! And what, may I inquire, do you propose to do with him now? Is he to be hidden in the cellar? Or transported overseas? You are aware, I suppose, you bacon-brained young numbskulls, that the constables, learning of his escape, will be around here first thing in the morning—that it is an indictable offense to help a prisoner escape from jail—that you will all be liable for sentences—and I shall too, as your guardian—you sap-skulled, totty-headed, bird-witted idiotic little goosecaps!”

  A ring of horrified, open-mouthed faces stared at him. None of the children said a word, until Isa began to cry.

  “Oh, poor Papa!” she sobbed. “But we couldn’t leave him in the poke forever.”

  “I begin to wish you had, however!” said Mr. Palgrave testily. “All this commotion is having the most adverse effect upon my wretched, overstrained nerves. Indeed I think that at any moment I may be subject to a Spasm!”

  “I knew that little sense could be expected from the younger ones,” Gareth went on furiously, ignoring his brother-in-law, “but had you bigger boys not reflected for a moment? Did you not know how I have been working, week in and week out, for years now, to amass a complete list of your father’s debts and liabilities, so that I could come to an agreement with his creditors? That, indeed, I had almost succeeded, and might, in another month or so, have been able to pay off his debts and arrange for his release? And now—now—you have to go and overset all my careful work with your cork-brained heedlessness—God knows what will happen—he will be seized and thrown back into jail—possibly some different jail, as his offense is now of a different order—you wretched, stupid little ninnyhammers!”

  Others besides Isa were now in tears, and Mr. Palgrave himself was beginning to look very lugubrious at the thought of what was in store for him, while Jenny and Mr. Swannup gazed at each other in horror.

  “Lawks-a-mussy!” said Jenny, aghast “If only I’d a thought—but there! I never do, as Sister says: if she’s said it once, she’s said it a hundred times, Jenny, says she, if ever there was a shatter-brain, it’s you, always flying off on some mad freak without giving it any thought—”

  Gareth, taking cognizance of Miss Baggott for the first time, gave her a glance of bleak dislike, coupled with surprise.

  “As for you, ma’am, I do not at all understand how you came to be embroiled in this crackbrained escapade but—remembering your behavior on our previous encounter—I am very ready to believe that you encouraged and abetted these silly children in their folly.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sure!” whimpered Jenny dolefully. Mr. Swannup laid a protective arm around her shoulders, but he, too, was looking wholly subdued and crestfallen.

  “What had we better do, Uncle Gareth?” said Arthur humbly.

  “What must you do? Why, take him back again, to be sure!” said Gareth.

  Delphie, who all this time had remained silent in gathering indignation, could now restrain herself no longer.

  “How can you be so unkind and—and quelling—and unsympathetic, when these poor children thought they had been so clever and useful and done their Papa such a good turn!”

  “It was for Uncle Gareth we did it really,” said Percy, knuckling a tear out of his eye. “We knew he hated having to go every day with Papa’s meals—”

  Delphie’s exclamation, however, had gone unheard by most, for the children, evidently inspired by Gareth’s suggestion, were exclaiming, in chorus,

  “Yes, yes! That is what we will do! That will be an even better lark! Come, Papa—finish your last bite of tart!—Tristram, make haste and get the donkey out of its shed—Percy, do you take the books—Lance and Lionel, you had best stay at home this time, you are too little to walk such a distance twice in a night—Morgan and Melilot too, your legs are not long enough to keep up, for we shall have to go very quickly—it will be light in two hours more—come along Papa—make haste!—and you too, Mr. Swannup—”

  In another moment the kitchen was empty. The larger children had left precipitately, dragging Mr. Palgrave, and accompanied by Jenny and Sam Swannup; while the four smaller ones, evidently anxious to escape from their uncle’s disapprobation, had scurried softly away up the stairs.

  “I suppose I may know whom I have to thank for the inception of this addlepated escapade!” Gareth said bitterly, finding himself left face to face with Delphie, who was beginning in an absent-minded manner to tidy away the plates of cold meat and brush up the pastry crumbs. “For five years I have accompanied the children to and from the jail without any such notion entering their heads. But as soon as you appear on the scene, with your nonsensical romantic notions, every kind of trouble comes upon us!”

  “Who invited me here?” she began indignantly, but, ignoring her, he went on,

  “Aware as I am of your previous association with that outrageously vulgar girl—who, I do not doubt, planned the hoydenish trick by means of which you gained entrance to Chase—”

  “Thank you! Pray say no more!” flashed Delphie. She was trembling with rage. “Your attitude empowers me to tell you that I think Jenny Baggott has more kindness and genuine good feeling in—in her little finger than you have in every inch of your body! I was never so shocked in all my life as when I heard you berating those poor well-meaning children in such a way! How could you? I wonder that even you—hard, cold, and unfeeling as I know you to be—were not ashamed! You are the most odious, callous, insensitive person I have ever had the misfortune to encounter and—I am sorry I ever met you! I most heartily wish that I never had come to Chase!”

  “You cannot wish it more than I, ma’am!” declared Gareth, rather white around the nostr
ils. “You seem to have brought me nothing but misfortune and disaster at every turn. If it had not been for your absurd notion of introducing Uncle Mark to your mother, he might still be alive now—instead of which his death may still be a cause of scandal, gossip, and for aught I know, criminal proceedings! I do not scruple to call you my evil genius!”

  “You have said enough!” said Delphie. With shaking hands, she pulled her wedding lines from her pocket, tore the paper in half, and handed the pieces to Gareth, who received them with a very blank expression. “I am excessively glad that at least now our association may be terminated,” she went on. “I shall make arrangements to return to Greek Street tomorrow!”

  Then she recalled that unfortunately she could not do that, for Jenny had already rented the rooms to a gentleman in the woolen hosiery and hat business. A sharp decline in spirits began to replace her anger.

  Gareth said, “Pray make exactly what arrangements you think best!” and, turning on his heel, left the room. Delphie heard him run up the stairs very fast, and then there came the slam of a door on the upper story.

  Left alone in the untidy kitchen, she sat down, put her elbows on the table, beside the forgotten canary, and burst into a storm of tears.

  13

  It was not to be expected that Delphie could soon compose her spirits enough to sleep. In whichever direction she turned her thoughts, they encountered so many occasions to alarm, distress, or mortify, that her mind seemed to rebound, wretchedly, from one point to another. As soon as she tried to fix on one aspect of her troubles, to arrive at some practical resolution, some different cause for anxiety would intrude itself.

  First, and worst, was her quarrel with Gareth, and her impulsive announcement that she would immediately remove herself and her mother from Curzon Street.

  Certainly it was her most eager wish to do so; she felt she would die if obliged to remain for another twenty-four hours under the same roof with Gareth; yet how could she possibly subject her poor mother, after such an unprecedented series of shocks, to the distress of yet another upheaval? It could not possibly be done within twenty-four hours; Mrs. Carteret’s spirits must be given a few days, at least, in which to settle.