by D. J. Taylor
“No. Who?”
“Sarah! I was stepping out of the Green Man with Mr. Grace, and there she was, walking up Wellington Street towards me. It gave me quite a turn, I can tell you.”
“What is she doing in London?” Esther wondered.
“Ladies’ companion. Upper servant. That kind of thing, she said. I took her address, so you must go and see her, Esther.”
“I should like to,” Esther said truthfully.
In the event, the piece of paper with Sarah’s address turned out to have vanished from William’s pocket—it was quite mysterious, William declared, how it should have disappeared—and this desirable scheme had perforce to be abandoned.
Grace was frequently seen at Cambridge Villas. He had a habit of arriving in the early evening for supper, sleeping the night in the back bedroom and being found in the kitchen cooking himself an early breakfast in a frying pan.
It was with Grace, and at Cambridge Villas, that William had commenced on the most curious undertaking of all. Coming back to the house one afternoon after an excursion to Shepherd’s Bush market, she had found a quantity of dark, rectangular bricks piled up on the kitchen table, together with a large pair of bellows. As she examined them, William came in from the parlour.
“Why, William, what are these?”
“These? Why, they are firebricks. And that is a pair of bellows unless I am much mistaken.”
“Firebricks?”
“Well…yes. The thing is that Grace and I have decided to go in for the business of making leather aprons.”
“Leather aprons?”
“I declare you sound like a parrot, Esther. Yes, leather aprons. The fact is that we have some capital secured between us, and this seemed the best way of laying it out. Grace knows all about it.”
William explained that they intended to carry out the work in the back bedroom. As this involved the generation of a great deal of heat, it would be necessary to remove the stones from the hearth and replace them with firebricks. He added that leather aprons were valuable items and much sought after, and that they fully intended to make their fortune. And yet Esther could not help noticing that the project was remarkably short-lived. A week, perhaps, was spent in this endeavour, during which the house grew so hot that Esther frequently retired into the kitchen. Afterwards nothing more was said of it, and the back bedroom once more became Grace’s occasional sleeping place and a store for the few things they had brought with them from Shooter’s Buildings. Going in there on some errand in the days after the work had ceased, Esther found that the floorboards next to the hearth had been scorched quite black.
The tea had gone cold in her hand. Starting up in her chair, Esther became aware that the morning was now well advanced. Beyond the window the fog had risen, to be replaced by a weak and watery sun. The thoughts of William, Sarah, Bob Grace and the charred boards in the back bedroom still turning in her head, Esther went upstairs to her room and sat once more upon the bed. Driven by an instinct she did not quite comprehend, she got up and moved to the wardrobe where William kept his suits of clothes and plunged her hand into the pocket of the nearest. There was nothing in it, however, save a solitary guinea piece, which, having inspected it for a moment or two, she somewhat guiltily replaced. The instinct continued to oppress her, and presently she went over to a trunk that lay in the corner of the room and returned with a small packet of papers. Among these was the letter that Mrs. Ireland had entrusted to her on the day before she had left Easton Hall, and she examined it carefully, allowing her mind to wander over the scenes it conjured up. Again, somewhat guiltily, she replaced the packet in her trunk, having first concealed the letter among several larger items, and retraced her steps to the vestibule. Here she selected an umbrella from the basket that contained William’s walking sticks and went in search of Emma, now at work in the kitchen.
“Emma! I am going out for an hour or two.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“If Mr. Latch returns, you had better say that I shall be back in the afternoon.”
“I can do that, ma’am.”
This instruction was superfluous. William, once he had quit the house after the breakfast hour, was never known to return to it before the evening. Leaving Cambridge Villas, the umbrella swinging restlessly in her gloved hand, Esther wandered at first in the direction of Shepherd’s Bush, where there were certain shops she might examine and certain necessary purchases she might make. The weather was less forbidding now, and she walked more rapidly, with a sharp eye for her surroundings and the people she passed, yet she knew that her journey had no obvious motive. Gradually, Shepherd’s Bush market having no charms for her, she found herself moving eastward.
Eventually, she stepped onto an omnibus which took her to the Charing Cross Road, and having alighted halfway along this thoroughfare—dense now with the noise of wagons and carriage horses stamping their feet as they waited at the crossings—continued into a vicinity that was familiar to her from her days in Shooter’s Buildings. It occurred to her that such wanderings might bring her to William, much of whose business was still conducted in this former territory, but she forbore to approach the entrance to Wellington Street or put her head in at the door of the Green Man and instead walked along the Strand in the direction of Fleet Street. The memory of having come this way six months before now assailed her, and she bit meditatively on her lip. The tap of her expensively shod boots on the pavement reminded her of the shabby footwear she had worn that day, and she marvelled at the transformation that had come upon her. There was a flight of steps to her left leading down into a little shabby courtyard, and here a young woman of about her own age, rising to the topmost step, stopped and regarded her keenly.
“Esther! Is that really you?”
For a moment Esther could only stare at the girl’s smiling face.
“Sarah! What a pleasure it is to see you.”
Sarah continued to examine her wonderingly. “Isn’t this a splendid piece of good fortune? But what brings you this way?”
Esther outlined, without any great conviction of motive, her journey from Shepherd’s Bush. Sarah grasped her elbow.
“But I would scarcely have recognised you in your finery. You are looking very well, Esther.”
“Nor I you.”
Esther looked closely at her friend as she said this. In her six months in the metropolis she had acquired sufficient sophistication to comprehend that whereas she, Esther, was dressed expensively and respectably, Sarah’s attire was perhaps a trifle too overstated for the season and the time of day.
“But come, dear, we must sit and talk now we have stumbled upon each other. You are in no hurry?”
“Not at all. I—”
Betraying by the manner of her walk her familiarity with the street and its environs—a glance into a shop window here, a dart across the pavement there—Sarah led them to a decent-looking restaurant bar adjacent to St. Bride’s Church.
“The clergyman will want to come out and chase us away, I shouldn’t wonder,” Sarah remarked mysteriously. “Are you still a religious girl, Esther?”
“I suppose not,” Esther replied, acknowledging that she had not ventured into a church since her arrival in London.
“They are such flats, to be sure, those parsons.”
“What is a flat?” Esther wondered.
“Why, a gaby, a young innocent. Like Margaret Lane, to whom Raikes said that he had shot the seraph and she believed him.”
All traces of Sarah’s previous melancholy had vanished, Esther noticed. Sitting in the window of the restaurant bar, with one dainty boot escaping from the folds of her skirts, she seemed in the highest of spirits.
“No,” she explained, in answer to Esther’s question, “I had a bad time of it when I first came here. Indeed I stayed once in a boardinghouse in the Borough, where I scrubbed the stairs for my keep. But now I am with Mrs. Rice, and all is well with me.”
“Who is Mrs. Rice?”
“She
is a widowed lady who lives in Kennington, and was married once to a sea captain, and I am her companion, you know, and have all the ordering of the meals and the carriage to take us driving, and it is all very pleasant. But Esther, what is all this about William?”
Dazed by the rapid flow of information that had been conveyed to her, Esther could only repeat mechanically, “What is all what about William?”
“You knew that he had seen me? Indeed, I have seen him several times for I am often come this way on business.”
“On business for Mrs. Rice?”
“Well, yes—that is, in a manner of speaking. But is it true what they are saying?” She drew her head closer to Esther’s. “You mustn’t mind telling me, dear, for I know when a secret is to be kept.”
“Is what true?” Esther said blankly. “What secret is to be kept?”
“Oh, I did not mean to upset you. Truly I did not. Only you know that William is often seen about with that Mr. Grace?”
“Mr. Grace? Yes, I know of him.”
“I never could abide that Grace. Well, they are saying…”
“Who is they?” Esther wondered in bewilderment.
“Why, Mr. Farrow that keeps the Green Man for one. Dear me, I hardly like to tell you if you really do not know, but—you have heard talk of the bullion robbery in the summer? Everybody has been speaking of it.”
“The mail train going down to Folkestone? Yes, I have heard of it.”
“Dear me, it cannot be that you do not know—but they are saying that Grace—I cannot speak for William, of course—was in some way concerned.”
“You are saying this to hoax me, Sarah—you are indeed.”
“Certainly I am not. Why, let me tell you what I myself have seen. I was at the Green Man a fortnight ago—I have—business—that occasionally takes me there—when I saw Grace pass a French coin, one of those big Napoleons, to Mr. Farrow, and heard Mr. Farrow say that he would need to mend his bellows to deal with such an item.”
Esther became aware that her hands were gripping the tabletop before her so tightly that it seemed almost that the wood must break apart in her hands. She said, shortly, for it was the only thing she could think of saying, “I am sure William has nothing to do with this.”
“Very likely not. It is that Grace, I am sure.”
“He is Mr. Pardew’s man, in any case. The bill broker that has an office in Carter Lane.”
“And Grace is Mr. Pardew’s man too, dear. Why, I declare that they are like perfect brothers together. But come, let us talk of something else. Indeed, that man over there has been staring at us these five minutes past. How vulgar people are!”
They talked idly for a moment or two more, but Esther had not the heart for conversation. Beneath her meek exterior she was consumed with nervous anxiety. That William, her William, should be spoken of in connection with this great crime seemed to her a terrible thing. The most terrible and unjust thing she had ever known. And yet as Sarah continued to put questions to her, to which she replied only in listless monosyllables, she was forced to consider certain incidents to which she had been party, certain fragments of talk passing between William and Grace that had come her way. All this frightened her further, and yet she was forced to acknowledge that the alarm was not disagreeable to her, that it gave a piquancy to the situation in which she found herself.
As her mind worked in this way, her interest in what Sarah was saying altogether lapsed, so that the other remarked, “You are out of sorts I daresay, dear, and would sooner be alone. But now we have found each other, we must not give each other up again.”
“What is your address?” Esther asked dully.
“Mrs. Rice says she is tired of the house and means to sell it. You had better ask for me at the Green Man. That is the best way, I think.”
Standing on the corner, the bells of St. Bride’s Church as they struck the hour quite obscuring their farewells, Esther watched her friend depart along Fleet Street, hobbling slightly with the odd irregularity of her gait. Thirty yards along the pavement a fat man with a red face and a waxed moustache stood staring into the window of a gentlemen’s outfitter, and Sarah stopped to speak to him. Something in her gestures now conveyed to Esther what trade it was that brought her to the region of Fleet Street in her best clothes on an afternoon in November. Not wishing to see the result of this chance encounter, she turned on her heel and moved disconsolately away.
Returning to the house in Shepherd’s Bush an hour later, she discovered that William had sent word to say that he should not be back until morning. It was by now nearly four o’clock, and the vestiges of daylight had already begun to recede. Beyond the kitchen window dirty yellow fog was beginning to creep back into the dreary garden, and she sat in a chair and watched it, thinking all the while of William, Sarah and the events of the morning. A thought struck her, and she moved silently up the staircase to the landing, here proceeding past her own room and into the back bedroom, not inhabited since Mr. Grace had last slept in it a fortnight ago. Here the atmosphere was cold and damp. A jug of stale water stood on the dressing table, and she trailed her fingers in it for a moment, brooding over the task that she had set herself. Then she bent down and, resting one hand on the iron fender, stooped to examine the hearth. This, it occurred to her, was unlike any other hearth she had ever seen. The firebricks lay piled up around its interior where formerly the ordinary hearthstones had been. Beneath them a steel plate of some kind had been fixed to the floor. It was not, however, either of these novelties that drew her attention, but the boards on either side of the hearth. These were scorched almost black with heat, indeed at some points altogether burned up, the wood itself turned into a dark mass like charcoal. Squatting now on her haunches, she ran her hand curiously over the boards. They were not, as she had first assumed, quite uniform in their appearance for stuck in the surface here and there were several fragments of some yellowy substance. After a moment more, Esther ran her finger over the wood and gently prised one of the fragments away with her thumbnail, placed it carefully on her palm—it was perhaps the size of the head of a pin—and inspected it closely. Whatever the metal was, it seemed clear to her that it had at any rate undergone some melting process in the hearth.
She squatted there for a long time with the yellow fragment in her hand. There was a brooch on the bosom of her dress that William had bought her a month since, and she wondered if the money that had purchased it had been stolen. This thought gradually worked upon her to such an extent that she unpinned the brooch and placed it on the charred board before her. In this way, another long period of time passed. She was woken from her brooding by the sound of the church clock striking five and a realisation that the pain in her legs was becoming unendurable. The room was now quite dark, she saw, and the landing beyond wreathed in shadow. It occurred to her that she could not stay here forever, that she should find some occupation by which she could pass the next few hours. A part of her wished that William was in the room with her, and another part—perhaps the larger part—was grateful for his absence.
After a few more moments of reflection she got up and, walking carefully down the dark staircase, went into the kitchen and lit a lamp. Then, with the lamp in her hand, she climbed the stairs once more and turned into her own room. Here, again, she delved into the trunk containing her papers and emerged with Mrs. Ireland’s letter. The two things that preyed upon her mind were, she now acknowledged, connected. The connection, she once more acknowledged, was William. Again she wished that William were in the room next to her, and yet she shrank from the questions that she knew she would wish to ask him. The room, the bed on which she sat, the mirror by the wall in which she glimpsed her reflection—all these things were suddenly distasteful to her, and, pressing the letter into the pocket of her dress, she carried the lamp hastily downstairs. Still for a moment she stood uncertainly in the hallway. A sound came to her ears, and she realised that it was a footstep beyond the door. A sudden apprehension overtook her,
and she shrank back into the corner of the vestibule, her face averted from the turning handle, and it was thus that William found her as he stepped hastily into the house, his silk hat pushed back from his forehead and a little cloud of condensation hanging about his features.
“Good gracious, Esther! You seem quite taken aback to see me. Whatever is the matter?”
“I did not think—Emma said—that you would be back until the morning.”
“A man may change his mind, you know,” William said easily. “The fact is that there is something of mine that I cannot do without, and I have to fetch it. There, will that satisfy you?”
He was an astute man in his way, and he knew, as he said this, that his return was not the cause of Esther’s alarm, that there was something that agitated her beyond his unlooked-for knock at the door.
“Whatever is the matter?” he said again, pressing his hand against her arm. “Why, you are trembling like a leaf.”
She felt the pressure of his hand without seeing it. Her eyes were searching his face, which seemed to be unnaturally pale in the half-light of the hall.
“I have seen Sarah,” she said.
“Sarah? Sarah Parker? What did she have to say?” Esther watched him as he said this, and it seemed to her that his face was paler still.
“She said”—Esther halted, for the words would not properly form in her mouth—“she said that you and Mr. Grace had stolen a great sum of money.”
“Did she?” William laughed. “Then she is a greater fool than I took her for, and when I next see her she shall be told so.”
He made to move past her into the body of the house, but she clung onto his arm and restrained him.
“Oh, William! I have been up to the back bedroom—where you and Grace were at work—where the hearth is all scorched—and there are pieces of gold on the boards.”
“It’s a lie! Sarah has been filling your head with nonsense, and you are fool enough to believe her.”