Kept

by D. J. Taylor

  At twenty-two he grew meekly reflective over the errors of his early life. The public office and Mr. Barrister’s chamber had been a torture to him, he declared, had stifled him into a misery from which he had pined to be released, but there was much that he might do—would do—to inspire some pride in the hearts of those who took an interest in him. For myself, I think he was sincere in this. Within a year, at any rate, he was gone from London, the rooms in Clarges Street were let out to the Honourable Mr. Popjoy, Lord Clantantrum’s son, who furnished them with gauzy prints and portraits of Taglioni in the appropriate Parisian manner, and the blear-eyed waiter at the Megatherium, shuffling into the card room at dawn to take orders for breakfast, saw him no more. Nobody quite knew where he went for—and this was a peculiarity in him—he had no intimate friends. There are some gentlemen whose progress around the world is as well known to the public as the holders of government offices—one week they are at Paris, the next they have moved on to Munich preparatory to an excursion down the Rhine—but Mr. Farrier was not among them. His doings were his own, and his tracks were not of the kind determined by Mr. Cook.

  All this was enough to make Mr. Richard Farrier a figure of consuming interest to those concerned with the fate of Mrs. Ireland. A gentleman who was her second cousin and in addition had been in love with her ten years! (The fact of Mrs. Ireland’s marriage was conveniently forgotten.) There was a general feeling—no one quite knew where it had arisen, but it waxed powerfully nonetheless—that Mr. Farrier should be sent for, even unto the ends of the earth, and what he had to say be respectfully listened to. Sadly, this proposal, to which half a dozen genteel drawing rooms keenly assented, fell at the hurdle of Mr. Farrier’s exact whereabouts. A man may be both everywhere and nowhere in particular, and so it was with him. The goldfields of the Cape; California; Moscow; Samarkand—all these were confidently proposed as places where he might be found, and to none of them, ultimately, could his scent be traced. The old gentleman in Devizes, to whom application was made, knew nothing about it. An old woman who kept rooms in Sackville Street which he used as a poste restante could offer only an accommodation address in Paris. It seemed that Mr. Farrier had vanished entirely, wandered to the very precipice of civilisation and then stepped off, only that he had a lawyer, a Mr. Devereux, with offices in Cursitor Street, to whom some account of these wanderings was presumably communicated.

  On this Mr. Devereux, several pairs of eyes were instantly turned. “You should step along and see him, John, indeed you should,” Mrs. Carstairs had remarked to her son. “Really, Mother,” John Carstairs had replied, “I don’t suppose it will amount to anything in the least.” Nevertheless, John Carstairs was still nursing the wounds of that dreadful afternoon at the Board of Trade, and step along he did.

  Mr. Devereux, it appeared, was a lawyer in a very humble way—at least he had no clerk, was seen to open his office door himself and at one point was absolutely compelled to go down on his knees and attend to a fire that was in danger of extinction. However, what he had to say proved to be of considerable interest to John Carstairs.

  “Well, yes,” he observed to that gentleman, “I don’t doubt that it’s a most interesting affair. None of Mrs. Ireland’s friends able to communicate with her. Supposed to have lost her reason into the bargain. Yet I don’t for the life of me see what it has to do with my client.”

  “A man may want to see a woman to whom he is related.”

  “Certainly he may. And there may be perfectly proper legal instruments that prevent him from so doing.”

  “He might apply to the lady’s lawyer.”

  “Indeed he might. And yet you had no very great luck there yourself, I believe?”

  “Well…no. Perhaps not.”

  Seated on the further side of Mr. Devereux’s tiny hearth, his head practically pressed against a mantelpiece whose only adornment was a bust of the late Lord Eldon, John Carstairs was not cast down by this exchange. If he was to be compelled to spend his afternoons in lawyers’ chambers, he much preferred that his host should be Mr. Devereux rather than Mr. Crabbe. Mr. Devereux was a youngish man, within a year or two of his own age. More than this, something in Mr. Devereux’s manner—he was a dark-haired man with brisk movements and a pair of very knowing grey eyes—suggested that he would not be averse to the betrayal of…not secrets, but at any rate information that Mr. Crabbe would not have yielded up about his client in a hundred years. Consequently, John Carstairs determined not only to win his way into Mr. Devereux’s confidence but to satisfy his curiosity in certain areas of the case that had always interested him.

  “It’s all true, I take it, about their former association?”

  “If you mean by that: did he propose to her when they were both eighteen, then the answer is yes. But I don’t suppose very many tears were shed on either side.”

  “No doubt it’s as you say. And what about the story of the child he had from that other woman?”

  “What about it indeed? I don’t doubt that five miles from here there is an eight-year-old boy with exactly the same colouring to his hair as Richard Farrier and with Richard Farrier’s exact habit of casting his eyes into the sky as he talks to you. But young men will be young men, I take it.”

  And Mr. Carstairs, who had been, and indeed still was, a young man and additionally recalled a similar accident from his own younger manhood, nodded his head very vigorously.

  “But the thing is, Carstairs”—it will be seen how very intimate Mr. Devereux and John Carstairs had grown in the half hour of their acquaintance—“this is all very fascinating and so forth, quite a magazine serial in its way, but what is one supposed to do about it, eh? I can’t write a letter on my client’s behalf for I have no instructions. I can’t write a letter on my account for where the deuce is my right to go interfering in things that don’t concern me?”

  “Even so,” John Carstairs interjected.

  “Even so. As for obtaining any instructions, I might as well ask you for your opinion as to where I might direct the letter for all the good it might do.”

  “Surely you, of all people, ought to have some notion of Mr. Farrier’s whereabouts?” observed John Carstairs, who had not quite appreciated the very caustic ironies in which Mr. Devereux habitually dealt.

  “But I do! He is in Canada. When last heard of, he was at Montreal with an earnest predisposition to travel to Vancouver. That is three thousand miles distant if you don’t happen to have an atlas before you. Other than that, it is impossible to say.”

  “But there is an address?”

  “There is an address.”

  In the end, after certain other items had been divulged, it was agreed between them that Mr. Devereux should write a letter to his client in Canada outlining such facts of Mrs. Ireland’s history as might seem pertinent to him and that John Carstairs, much to Mr. Devereux’s satisfaction, would undertake to pay him for his trouble and for all the expenses incurred. “For as you can see,” he explained, with an engaging candour, “there are no legal Dives quartered here. In fact business is deuced hard to come by.”

  “In what branch of the law do you specialise?” John Carstairs wondered.

  “Oh, testamentary dispositions, tenancy disputes—the full range of domestic and commercial practice. But to be perfectly frank, I spend most of my time in pursuit of defaulting bill signatories, which is not exactly work for a gentleman, don’t you know?”

  John Carstairs signified with a nod of his head that he did know and made his way out onto the pavement, where so much mist had descended in his absence that the corner on which Cursitor Street meets Chancery Lane had all but vanished into the gloom. There were pale lights beginning to shine in the windows of the law stationers and the copying shops, a young woman’s startled face appeared suddenly behind a curtain ten feet above his head and drew it shut, a great clatter of milk churns being rattled downstairs rose from a dairy hard by, and John Carstairs wrapped his muffler about his face, secured the fastenings
of his great coat and set off in the direction of Whitehall and the society of the Honourable Mr. Cadnam. He was thinking about a young woman to whom he had once behaved very much in the way that Mr. Farrier had done to the mother of his natural child, and the thoughts, though they at first awakened in him an agreeable nostalgia, were not in the end pleasant to him. In Cursitor Street, meanwhile, the afternoon wore on without further interruption in Mr. Devereux’s chambers, and their tenant, having spent half an hour recruiting himself over a copy of Punch, went out searching for tapers, there being nothing with which to light the candle and no clerk to send out in his stead.

  XVIII

  SUB ROSA

  There is much that I would remember that I have forgotten. And there is much I remember that I would forget.

  Last evening I had a curious presentiment that my guardian would come to my room & indeed it was so. He came bearing an ulster thrown over one arm & said if I wished it he would take me into the grounds & show me his dogs. Tho’ I have no great liking for dogs—certainly not of the kind my guardian breeds—& no great liking for my guardian’s company, I said I wished it very much. This seemed to please him, for he remarked that they were unusual dogs & I should not regret my choice.

  “But you must be very quiet,” he instructed. “Indeed we must be altogether silent while we are in the house.”

  I said that I would be very quiet.

  Such a queer excursion! First we stole down the back staircase, where the moon shone through a great window & enveloped us in white, ghastly light. Passing through the servants’ hall, we came upon a room behind whose door a lamp still burned. “That is old Randall’s pantry. He has fallen asleep in his chair, I’ll be bound,” my guardian explained. Making not the least sound, he drew open the pantry door—I could see the old man fast asleep with his head on the table—& returned with a key that would admit us to the gardens.

  I confess that I am of a singularly nervous disposition—altogether frail & fearful, Papa used to say—& that had I not had my guardian beside me & his arm to lean on, I should have been very much afraid. Viz., the trees rattling above us in the wind, a dark, cloud-strewn sky & not a spark of light to be seen. As to where the dogs might be kept, I had no need to enquire, for we could hear them howling from afar. They are housed in a great barn, a full half mile from the house. This we approached—my guardian taking up a lantern which lay in one of the anterooms—whereupon the barking & snarling rose in a crescendo, & I wondered that the people in the house did not think there were burglars on the property.

  For myself, I did not care for the dogs, which seemed to me great wolfish beasts, of a kind I never saw unless they are some breed of mastiff. My guardian, however, exulted in their company, reaching his hand through the bars of their kennels—they are all chained up against the hours of darkness—flinging them biscuits, &c., which he had brought in his trowser pocket.

  I enquired—for it seemed to me that such animals must take a deal of labour—did Mr. Randall or any of the servants engage in their care?

  My guardian said no, that he would not have the servants interfering—that was his word—in such business.

  Seeing that I shivered at the cold, he immediately became solicitous. Would I take his coat to add to my own? Would I return to the house? Hearing that I should, he locked the door of the kennel room behind him, extinguished the lamp—the dogs seemed subdued & silent at his going—& set off across the darkling lawn. Next to the barn, I noticed, a high thorn hedge grew up in a square, with a wooden gate set into it, curious to see, yet even in daylight, I should guess, impenetrable to the eye.

  “What is that?” I asked, as we passed there.

  “It is nothing,” he said. “A part of the wood that I keep shut up.”

  And yet it seemed to me that others of my guardian’s hounds must be kept there, for I am certain I heard a noise of movement & a snuffling that did not come from the barn.

  And so we returned to the house, taking ourselves once more to my guardian’s study, where a fire still burned (for which I confess I was very grateful) & I was bidden to recruit myself with a glass of wine. It was by now very late—half past midnight—yet my guardian seemed disposed to talk, showed me a pair of avocets under glass. They are curious birds with turned-up bills, which he said had been taken at the Breydon Water and set up for him by Mr. Lowne, the Yarmouth taxidermist.

  I thought the avocets pretty birds but did not see why they should not remain at liberty on the Breydon Water. However, I said nothing of this.

  Neither—though it was on the edge of my tongue—did I speak to him of the rose.

  Sir Charles came out of his hole in the wainscot & ran silently about the floor, coming rather close to my skirts, which I did not like.

  My guardian continues to observe me in the most marked manner. Looking once more at his display cases, at his insistence, I caught for a moment in the reflection of the glass his face regarding me. The look Papa’s face had when he drew his portraits, only, it seemed to me, less agreeable.

  “Sir,” I said, when half an hour had passed, “I wish very much to write the letter of which I spoke.”

  “Which letter was that?” he enquired, affecting forgetfulness.

  “The letter to my husband’s lawyer,” I replied.

  “Why do you wish to write to him?” he asked, by no means unkindly.

  “There is much that I wish to ask him,” I faltered.

  “You may ask me.”

  “I would ask him.”

  “Then you may do so.”

  Nothing more was said. Presently he escorted me back to my chamber, pausing only to bow as he quitted me at the door.

  It occurs to me that I am another of his avocets, set up by Mr. Lowne, for him to inspect at his leisure.

  And then this morning another flower. The same white rose on the same silver salver. With no hint as to how it came here.

  Yet I am not without resource in these matters.

  Thus, when Esther arrives with the lunch tray, having first secured the rose in my desk, I enquire, “Were any flowers brought to the house yesterday, Esther?”

  “Indeed, ma’am, the master brought some from Lynn.”

  “And what kind were they?”

  Esther looks up from setting down the tray. “Why, roses, ma’am. & grown under glass, too, for there be none outside in this weather.”

  I see. Or rather, I do not see.

  Esther & I are very confidential. Indeed we talk for as much as ten minutes whenever she fetches my tray or retrieves it: I sitting in my chair; she performing certain little duties around the room for which I am exceedingly grateful. Thus I believe I can state with confidence of Esther that:

  She is twenty-one years old.

  She earns twelve pounds a year.

  She has never left the county of Norfolk.

  She has a mother & four brothers & sisters living in Fakenham.

  She has read the Bible, & Foxe’s Book of Martyrs & Maria Monk, but little else.

  To be sure, her manner of speaking often bewilders me. She says “mawther” when she means “girl” & “du” when she means “do” & “dicker” when she means “donkey.”

  But I must not mock her, for she is very kind to me, sympathises with my wants & wishes to ameliorate them.

  The footman, who is her admirer, has gone away to London. Where, she says, he will write one day & “send for her.”

  What should she do, I asked, when this summons came?

  “Why,” she said, “go and do as he bade me.”

  “What?” I said. “And give up your situation here?”

  This, however, she would not answer. Feeling, perhaps, that I am confederate with Mr. Randall.

  Once I asked her, “What should you do, Esther, if you could leave here & do exactly as you chose?”

  “Why, ma’am,” she said, “I should take a husband, & have six children, & live in a cottage, & be happy I hope. Only I should take care that I wasn’t poor.
”

  And where should I go if I left here & could do as I chose?

  I have not the least idea in the world.

  I am lying in bed in the old house at Kensington, though it is not yet dark.

  It seems to me that I have lain there for hours, waiting for the light to fade & the noises around me to cease.

  Then I see that, though I have not been aware of her coming, Mama is standing at the door watching me. Mama, in a brown dress with her red-gold hair standing out from her face, & something in her hand which the light catches & plays with. How long she stands there I do not know, until Papa, coming briskly into the doorway, catches her in his arms & whatever she has in her hand tumbles down to the floor.

  And Papa smiles at me.

  I set this down exactly as it came into my head this morning, at about half past ten, as I sat at my desk with bright sunshine—for the spring is come—pouring in through the window.

  Esther is my spy.

  No, that is not quite true. Rather, there is much that Esther tells me, all incautious, that I would not otherwise know. It is like Papa, who would come back from the meetings of the committee at his club (which proceedings were of course secret) & talk endlessly of them from sheer amusement.

  Of the other servants. Of the house. Of my guardian & his habits.

  Thus I learn—something I might have guessed—that Mr. Randall, the butler, is a religious man, constant at his meeting, &c., pressing tracts both on those who would have them & those who would not.

  That Mrs. Wates, the cook, was found dead drunk in her room last Sunday; a great scandal that was somehow kept from the master, despite there being no dinner that night.

  That Mrs. Finnie, the housekeeper, “gives herself airs,” is very hard upon the maids & in consequence much disliked.