by D. J. Taylor
As it happened, Mr. Crabbe was away, attending upon some grand nobleman at his estate, but an obliging young clerk, himself not a little awed by the lustre attaching to the name and reputation of Mr. Masterson, looked into the matter and reported that the money had apparently (although it seemed that there was some faint mystery about this) been received from a firm of engineers in the north of England in settlement of a debt owed to one of Crabbe & Enderby’s clients. And here Mr. Masterson did prick up his ears, for he knew that the debts of engineering firms in the north of England are generally paid in coin or notes of the realm. However, he did not remark this fact, but, having obtained from Mr. Crabbe’s clerk the name of his client, he hurried back to Northumberland Avenue.
“The firm whose debt the money was intended to settle is called Pardew & Co.,” he explained to Captain McTurk, as they sat in the gloomy office looking out over the stableyard. “A bill discounter, I believe, somewhere in the City.”
Although the name of Pardew was familiar to Captain McTurk, he did not immediately choose to advertise this fact. Instead he contented himself with enquiring, “What was the name of the debtor?”
“A firm of engineers at Sheffield, I believe. Messrs. Antrobus & Co.”
“Hm. Just oblige me, Masterson, would you, by stepping down to the reading room and bringing a commercial directory? Of the northern counties, if there is one.”
Mr. Masterson did as he was bidden. The commercial directory was a large and compendious volume, but, as both men had suspected, it contained no mention of Messrs. Antrobus & Co. Whereupon Captain McTurk became intrigued, slapped his hand upon his thigh, shut his door, placed his feet upon the table and cast his mind back to a case that had occupied him at an earlier stage of his tenure in Northumberland Avenue and which interested him very much.
“Well, I have heard from Farrier,” Mr. Devereux remarked to John Carstairs at about this time.
“Have you indeed? It must be a great trouble to him to answer his letters.”
“It was more a case of the letter finding him. He has had the most tremendous adventures, I believe. Lost in a blizzard with his ankle broke, a wolf on his tail and the sled with his friends on plunged into the frozen river and all of them drowned.”
“You don’t say?”
“He was found half-frozen in the snow and sent back east to recover himself—see here! I believe he writes from Montreal—and the letter reached him there. But the upshot is that he declares himself most interested to read it and, having settled one or two matters to his satisfaction, intends to return home within the month.”
Mr. Devereux and John Carstairs sat in the former’s shabby chamber in Cursitor Street. Some little time had elapsed since John Carstairs had visited the premises, and the room seemed to him yet more sunk into decay. The bust of Lord Eldon boasted a layer of dust so thick that some enterprising person could, had he wished, have reached out and written his name on that jurist’s august forehead, while the floor, quite half of which was carpeted with old legal reviews and law books, seemed to make a positive virtue of its untidiness. Mr. Devereux, on the other hand, was more cheerful than ever and poked up his fire and arranged his papers on his desk as if half a dozen clerks laboured in the broom cupboard and a ducal chariot lay drawn up at the kerb outside.
“Well,” said John Carstairs, taking a look in quick succession at Lord Eldon, Mr. Devereux’s variegated carpet and the somewhat cheerless prospect of Cursitor Street, “that settles it, I suppose.”
“Settles it? I would hardly go so far as to say that. What exactly does it settle?”
It may as well be admitted that the resources of John Carstairs’s mind were not concentrated on Mr. Devereux with the attention that was perhaps the lawyer’s due. Only the previous afternoon John Carstairs had spent half an hour closeted with Mr. Dennison, while the Honourable Mr. Cadnam had kicked his heels in the newspaper reading room, and while that guardian of Southwark Conservatism had not exactly told his client that the nomination for the Borough was his for the taking, yet he had contrived to leave him with the impression that all was not lost. In this way John Carstairs had been persuaded to bestow on Mr. Dennison a cheque for fifty pounds to defray certain additional expenses which that gentleman had accrued in pursuit of his candidature. And then that very morning had come news—well, not news, but a rumour brought by a gentleman who had got it from another gentleman at his club—that Mr. Bounderby was…to be promoted? Transferred to another position? Proceeding to dignified retirement at Richmond? At any rate, to disappear from the Board of Trade in the very near future. All this had caused John Carstairs’s mind to deviate wildly from the line on which it had been set following receipt of Mr. Devereux’s summons two days before.
“What exactly does it settle?” demanded Mr. Devereux again, who perhaps had some inkling of this agitation.
“Eh? You must excuse me, Devereux. The fact is that there are certain things…” Intimate as he had become with the lawyer, John Carstairs did not quite wish to unburden himself to Mr. Devereux on the subject of the Southwark nomination. “What I mean to say is that if Farrier is returning to England, then something surely can be done.”
“But what precisely? No doubt he may call upon Mr. Crabbe and take his opinion. No doubt he can write to Mr. Dixey if he has a mind to. But that will not get him any closer to Mrs. Ireland. Let a respectable medical man say that the patient is not to be seen, shock to her delicate sensibilities and so forth, and take it from me, seen she will not be.”
Perhaps a quarter part of John Carstairs’s mind still dwelt upon Mr. Dennison, the crack of that gentleman’s knuckles, which seemed to him more obnoxious than ever, and Mr. Bounderby’s supposed departure, but it was an influential quarter.
“Then I don’t see what we are to do.”
“Well…look here.” Mr. Devereux gave the fire a tremendous poke and kicked over a couple of volumes of Lorrequer’s Commercial Law in his eagerness to draw his chair closer to that of his guest. “There are one or two things that I have picked up in the course of my own business. In my line of work one hears a lot about the stamped paper that is going around the City. Well, let me tell you that a great deal of it is Dixey’s.”
“You don’t say?” John Carstairs wondered again.
“I have seen no paper myself, you understand. But from what I hear he is properly in queer street. Trying to renew but at longer intervals, and then bringing in fresh bills to anyone that will accept them, which is not many in these circumstances. But that’s not all.”
“No?”
“No. I chanced to be in Oxford the other day. A particular affair called me there, and I’m an Oxford man myself, you know, whatever my present occupation may suggest to the contrary”—and here Mr. Devereux laughed with what appeared to be genuine amusement. “Well, I was walking past St. John’s College, and something prompted me to step inside and call upon the cousin of Henry Ireland’s that inherited the Suffolk property. Mr. Caraway he is called, and you never saw such a man: I should think that to step outside his lecture room would be a great adventure for him and that a brisk walk would confine him to bed for a week. Anyway, he was pleased to send word that he would see me—I believe he thought I had come to trouble him about the property, and was relieved to discover that I had not. I was pretty frank with him—I always find that it pays in such matters—and he seemed quite agreeable to talk about Henry Ireland’s will and its provisions.”
John Carstairs was now all ears, and Mr. Dennison a mere speck in his mental cosmos. “Did he indeed?”
“Well…yes. It appears there were two sums of money. I suppose the greater part of it must have come from old Mr. Brotherton, for Henry Ireland was sadly embarrassed when he died. A certain sum to be laid out on Mrs. Ireland’s care and treatment, to be administered by her trustees, and a second sum—Caraway would not say how much, but substantial—set aside for her private use.”
“And so Isabel—Mrs. Ireland—is an heiress? At any r
ate the money is her own?”
“It is her own if the doctors say she is fit to use it.”
“And now she lives in the house of one of her trustees, while her estate is administered by the other?”
“I suppose that is about the strength of it.”
“And not in sound mind?”
“That is what we have all been led to believe, at any rate.”
“It sounds d——d suspicious to me.”
“And to me. When we have Farrier here, he may think there is a case to answer. Indeed I am certain of it.” Mr. Devereux stood up from his chair and extended his arms in a gesture that, such were the dimensions of his chamber, nearly knocked Lord Eldon from the mantelpiece. “By the by,” he remarked, “I hear you are coming out for Southwark.”
“I…Let us say that it is not quite settled.”
“I should say that it was,” observed Mr. Devereux, who appeared to know everything. “Why, that Honeyman the brewer has given up politics, they say, to marry an earl’s daughter. And as for Sir Charles Devonish, from what I hear the amount of his paper in circulation is well-nigh as great as your Mr. Dixey’s.”
XXVII
FLIES AND SPIDERS
Is that you, Emma?”
“Yes, Mrs. Latch.”
“I am still abed, I’m afraid. You had better bring me a cup of tea, if you would.”
“Certainly, ma’am.”
Esther lay in the big brass bedstead listening to the sound of the servant’s footsteps descending the rackety stair. The fire, lighted three hours previously, had begun to go out, and she could feel the cold creeping back into the room. She remembered William standing with his back to it as he had bade her good-bye. Turning towards the bedside clock, Esther found that it was nine o’clock. She lay motionless for a moment or two longer, her gaze fixed on a jacket that for some reason William had left draped over a chair back, and then, rising out of the bed with an effort, got up and began to put on her clothes.
As she dressed she peered curiously out of the window. Six months in the metropolis had not dimmed Esther’s interest in the complex organism of which she was a part. Even now, embarking on some solitary journey by train or omnibus, or out with William at some place of entertainment, she found herself mesmerised by the volume of people, the noise that they made and the costumes that they wore. “How many people live in London?” she had asked, a fortnight into her stay at Shooter’s Buildings, and William had told her a million or maybe two, but what did it matter, eh? Curiously, his matter-of-factness reassured her, gave her confidence in his ability to forge out patterns in the city’s immensity. For her own part, she remained awed, impressionable, and in the matter of windowpanes and the views from railway carriages ever inquisitive. Now, however, there was only fog pressing against the glass and a handful of plane trees all but lost in vapour, and she turned regretfully back, curiosity quenched by a memory forming in her mind.
William had said something to her before he went out. What had he said? That he would be back late? That there was a message for Mr. Grace that should be given to him if he called? She could not remember. Sitting on the bed once more to button her boots, she tried to imagine William’s face as he had spoken the words, thinking that this would help her to recall them, but her head was still fuddled with sleep and she gave up the attempt, threw a last glance around the high, angular room and the window of fog and then went out onto the landing and carefully down the staircase.
A noise of fire irons being clashed together told her that Emma, the maid-of-all-work, had transferred her operations to the drawing room. The promised tea lay sending up steam from the kitchen table, and she drank it gratefully, the warm cup cradled in her hands, looking round the kitchen for signs of Emma’s industry (experience had made her an exigent mistress, not a tolerant one) and finding them in the row of burnished saucepans and the tray of vegetables brought that morning from Shepherd’s Bush market. Emma’s wages were twelve pounds a year, and this both alarmed and comforted her, for she knew that six months before she had been earning the same sum herself, casting the same covetous eye over the remains of a joint that Emma cast as she carried it back from the dining-room table.
The noise of clashing fire irons had now given way to a dull thudding sound suggestive of a mat being belaboured with a stick. A double rap at the door announced the arrival of the postman, but Esther, going to investigate, found only a single letter marked Urgent: Mr. Wm. Latch. In any case, as she reminded herself, no one ever wrote to her, for with the exception of her mother no one knew where she was. Returning to the kitchen, she poured a second cup of tea from the pot which Emma had left stewing, examined the bowl of lump sugar to assure herself that it had not been pilfered from and took the cup and saucer into the parlour, where she sat down immediately in a chair and began to brood.
She became aware, without consciously registering the fact, that she was thinking of William. This did not surprise her, for she knew that this was, had been for as long as she could remember, the single topic on which her thoughts ran. In the half year since she had left Easton Hall, she had come to acknowledge that William, if not the paragon of her imaginings, was a reasonably fair-minded and unexceptionable specimen of male humankind. This realisation, which had come gradually upon her, did not distress her, for she knew—years of observation had taught her—that there were worse than William, who did not at any rate mistreat her, take conspicuously more than was good for him to drink or swear more than ordinarily. Evidence of his regard, moreover, lay everywhere around her—in the house in which they lived, the third of a row of dwelling houses known as Cambridge Villas, in the person of Emma, whose deference Esther still found highly agreeable, and in the half-dozen dresses and other items of clothing, newly bought, that now constituted her wardrobe. In all, Esther declared herself more than satisfied with William. To be sure, the “Mrs. Latch” with which Emma daily saluted her was a fiction—and she believed that Emma knew it to be a fiction—but, again, this did not distress her for she knew it to be a consequence of the step she had taken and the world in which she now moved and had her being.
And yet there were mysteries pertaining to her new life that she could not fathom, no matter how hard she tried. The first, and the most pressing to her mind, was the nature of William’s business, how he came by his money, everything in fact that occupied him in the many hours that he spent beyond the walls of Cambridge Villas. Undoubtedly, he worked for Mr. Pardew—he was “Mr. Pardew’s man,” he told her proudly—and Mr. Pardew, she understood, was a bill discounter. Esther knew about bills—they had not been altogether absent from previous establishments in which she had worked—but what William had to do with their negotiation and collection she could not determine. Mr. Pardew she had met but once, at a house to which William had escorted her in Kensington—a civil old gentleman, she had decided, with a jutting jaw, who had let fall the single remark that it was a fine day. Others of Mr. Pardew’s satellites—Dewar of the melancholy visage and a sharp-faced man named Pearce—she encountered but rarely. It was Grace that she saw most often and with whom, indeed, William seemed to spend the larger amount of his time. To meet with Grace, to talk with Grace, to plot with other persons in Grace’s company: these, so far as she could establish, were the principal occupations of his day. To this end, he went (she had picked this up from stray scraps of his conversation) on boat trips to Greenwich, to an office in the City—quite where in the City Esther knew not—and half a dozen other places. Yet the nature of the business on which he was detained she could not begin to elaborate.
“William,” she had asked at the end of the first month of their association, having already meditated on the subject for some time, “what is it that you do all day with Mr. Grace?”
“What do we do?” William did not seem displeased by this enquiry, nor indeed by anything, that she asked him. “Why, we are Mr. Pardew’s men, you know, and we do his business.”
“Does that mean that you collect
his bills? Or do you sit in his office? It is only interest that makes me ask.”
“Well, now…not exactly. Today he and I were in Southwark, where we had an affair to settle, and then we had Mr. Pardew’s instructions to see a party at the Green Man.”
“And all this is to do with money?”
“Well, yes. That is…not exactly.”
More than this William would not say. Esther, seeing that some mystery hung over his silence, forbore to ask. And yet her curiosity was roused, still more at the time three months ago when they had exchanged the modest eyrie in Shooter’s Buildings for the comparative splendour of Cambridge Villas. Of the financing and maintenance of Cambridge Villas—it was rented at forty pounds the half year, for Esther had seen the receipt—William said not a word. He merely informed Esther of the change of lodgement, engaged a wagon for the transfer of their possessions and the deed was done. There were other changes that Esther noted at this time, quite apart from their removal to Shepherd’s Bush. One was William’s habit of darting up from his chair if a knock came at the door. Another was the look of vexation that passed across his face if he judged that a stranger was staring at him in the street.
“You won’t guess who I saw today, Esther,” William exclaimed one evening at about this time, standing in the parlour with the dust from the street clinging to his clothes.