by D. J. Taylor
It was by this time perhaps three in the afternoon, the light beginning to fade, and I would gladly have taken my leave, thinking that I could do no good, that the place was altogether shut up and deserted, when a face appeared at the window—a queer pale face rising out of nowhere and, I will confess, giving me such a start as I never before felt in life—and a man, whom I recognised as Randall the butler, came stepping across the grass. Having had much courtesy from him in the past, I prepared to greet him civilly, only to detect a look of great anger in his face. I had no business here, he told me before I could speak a word; Mr. Dixey would not see me, would not see anyone, and I should do no good. I replied, as coolly as I could in the circumstances, that I regarded Mr. Dixey as my friend, that my duty as a Christian and as a minister of God brought me here, on behalf of not only Mr. Dixey but another person that I knew rested beneath his roof. At this Randall seemed transformed by an emotion that might either have been fear or solicitude. Mr. Dixey would not see me, he repeated. I should go at once, or he could not be held responsible for what might happen. At this, I confess, I began almost to laugh, and yet there was something in the man’s expression that stifled the laugh in my throat. The great gloomy house, Randall’s pale face regarding me in the half-light, the thought of Dixey roaming the empty corridors—for I believe that no servant other than Randall remained—the woman confined in some remote chamber: all this worked on me to such an effect that, to my shame, I stole away through the kitchen garden and on into the woods with the howls of Dixey’s dogs in their kennels ringing in my ears, regained the road with my heart pounding and a dreadful sense of there being someone or something almost at my heels. And yet there was nothing, only the mist and the movement of the trees in the wind, and so I made my way home very troubled by what I had seen and the thought of what it might portend.
24 November 1866
So I am to be Vicar of Holkham! A letter from Cousin Richard setting out the terms of my incumbency realising in me the greatest exultation. There is a fine rectory, apparently, and eight hundred pounds a year besides.
27 November 1866
To Ely.
In the study, his hand supported by the ferrule of the square desk, the stuffed bear stiff and cumbersome a yard from his elbow, Mr. Dixey watches at the high window. The gravel drive that lies beneath it, its inflexions curving away around the rank lawn and the fountain with its dripping caryatid, is quite empty. It is a week now since anyone came along it, and that was only the postman—Sam Postman, Mr. Dixey thinks he is called—who rapped at the door for two minutes without an answer and then reluctantly departed, leaving the letter propped up against the door. It is a wonder, Mr. Dixey thinks, that the servants did not collect it. Then he remembers that the servants are gone, away to Watton, Lynn and Norwich, and that he watched them go. There is a suspicion—a footfall in the distance, a door seeming to close far away—that Randall may still be in the house, but Mr. Dixey cannot be sure.
In the end he retrieved the letter himself. It lies now on the desk beside him, flanked by the display cabinets, the specimen cases and the bead-eyed bear. In the grate a coal or two still flickers red-white, and there are other letters stacked on a chair to the right of the hearth, for Mr. Dixey has been burning his correspondence. Great dockets and folds of foolscap, many of them crossed over and sealed and recalling the days before envelopes, all gone crackling into the flames. Looking at the piles of ash banked up on either side of the winking coals, Mr. Dixey wonders from where in the human heart rises the urge to reconstitute that which has been obliterated. The only trace of a dodo that endures, apart from a half-dozen pages of contradictory drawings, is the half of a leathery hide kept preserved in the Oxford museum. All that is left of the moa are a few bones found in the dirt of a New Zealand cave. Perhaps, Mr. Dixey thinks, at some future point an anatomist will attempt to reconstruct his life rather as the naturalists attempt to reimagine Didus ineptus from the accounts of the Dutch travellers to Mauritius two centuries before. The thought is curiously consoling, but the vision it conjures up of persons unknown to him busily at work here at the centre of his private world is more than he can bear.
Guided by some prompting he cannot quite explain, he slides open the lid of the nearest display case, brings out the two marsh harrier eggs that lie within and balances them on his palm. They weigh nothing, so light, he thinks, that they might float. Regretfull, y he crushes the eggs beneath his fingers, breathing in the faint odour compounded of earth, albumen and decay. There are other things than letters to destroy, he thinks.
The letter, Mr. Dixey divines, this sentence or so sent from a desk in Carter Lane, has destroyed his hopes. Now there are connections to be made. People will no longer see him as himself but as part of a complex chain of incident, collusion and desire. That is the way of things. His hand is on another display case now: an eagle’s egg taken from the loch at Strathspey. Again he crunches it between his fingers. Once, as a young man, he shot at a golden eagle high on a hilltop in Sutherland, but at the moment he raised his gun to his shoulder the bird tracked away, lifted by a spiral of wind he could not see, and the bullet went wide. He would have fired again, had not the sun suddenly risen from behind a cloud to blind him.
A movement beyond the window catches his eye, and he stares once more into the pale December light. There is a carriage approaching down the gravel drive. Mr. Dixey can see the coachman’s grey head bobbing up and down as the transom shifts beneath him. As he looks on, the carriage makes a half turn into the wide space before the front of the house and stops. Watching the people who emerge from it—a sharp-featured middle-aged man commands them, whom Mr. Dixey has never seen—he thinks that if he wished he could throw open the window and fling more of the eggs down upon their heads. He has a sudden vision of the shells, white and papery, slowly descending like snowflakes through the chilly air.
He takes a last look through the window. Curiously, the men—there are four of them—seem in no hurry. Conferring, heads angled together above the gravel, they have the air of pleasure seekers, anxious to inspect their guidebooks before setting forth on their tour of the grand house. Mr. Dixey moves rapidly down the great staircase into the hall and thence into the servants’ quarters. The kitchen cat, cleaning her paws on the big oak table, watches him as he goes. The kitchen door is half-open, has been so for some time apparently, for there is a little whirl of old leaves, dirt and grass-ends upon the threshold, and Mr. Dixey passes through it. In the distance he can hear the dogs howling. He cannot remember when they were last fed, but it is not less than three days since.
The first belt of trees is within reach now, and he plunges into it, stands breathing heavily with his gaze fixed upon the house. He wonders how long it will be safe to stay here, concealed in this thicket, and whether there may be other men approaching silently through the grounds to cut off his retreat. As if to confirm this suspicion, something stirs in the dense bank of foliage to his left. Instantly, he hastens away down the woodland path. It seems to him as he moves that the place is unnaturally still, that there should be birds calling, but that they are gone—the dogs have stopped howling, he registers—and that his breath sounds unusually loud in his ears.
There is another stirring—so faint as to be hardly perceptible but a stirring nonetheless—in the trees, and he turns round, more in curiosity than alarm, to inspect what it is that haunts his steps, here in a Norfolk wood on a winter’s afternoon in the thirtieth year of the reign of little Victoria of Saxe-Coburg, the niece of the sailor king, whom once he saw on a hot afternoon in Windsor with the brass bands playing and the rooks cawing frenziedly above the distant elms.
The rest you know.
“Nothing to be discarded, mind,” Captain McTurk instructed as they came into the house. “Everything to be kept.”
The lower parts of the house were empty and undisturbed. In the servants’ quarters a silence. In the pantry a rat sitting on its hindquarters eating at a rancid ham. In the drawi
ng room a half inch of dust upon the lacquer table and the old Dixeys in their frames.
In Mr. Dixey’s study a great chaos: the windows raised and the curtains billowing in the wind; Bruin cast lengthways upon his paws and a great lump torn out of his ursine head; a litter of broken shells and scattered books; a microscope thrown upon the carpet with its lens smashed in two.
“He has destroyed…everything,” said Captain McTurk.
“Not quite everything, I think,” remarked Mr. Masterson. “See here.”
On the great table, under a dome of glass, a circular plate, spread with moss, on which sat a pair of perfect ruddy-brown eggs and an inscription, printed in elegant italic script on a slip of paper. Captain McTurk bent to examine it.
“Pandion haliaetus. What is that?”
But Mr. Masterson had read his Latin at Charterhouse School.
“Osprey eggs,” he explained. “A great rarity, I believe.”
All this time, needless to relate, Captain McTurk and his men had been ceaselessly at work on the public’s behalf. It is remarkable, is it not, the volume of evidence that will suddenly spring to hand when the perpetrator of a crime has finally been unmasked. Let a man stand charged with stealing a sheep, and immediately a parcel of corroborating detail will be found torn open and spilling its contents at his feet. Witness A will allege that he enquired of him the best way of cooking mutton, witness B confirm that he attempted to borrow from him a carving knife and fork, witness C relate that he was seen gathering the materials for a mint sauce, and out of all this testimony and supposition is instantly constructed a vast edifice of guilt. So it was with Captain McTurk’s investigation. He had fished sedulously in the turbid lake concealing the affairs of Mr. Pardew, Mr. Dixey and sundry other persons connected to them, and all kinds of curious things had come up struggling on his hook. He had been to Easton Hall and examined its contents most thoroughly. He had made a visit to Jemima at her villa in St. John’s Wood, consulted Mr. Caraway of St. John’s College and called upon Mr. Dunbar in Watling Street but found the latter gone into the country. The landlord of the Black Dog had wilted beneath his gaze, Mrs. Farthing had curtseyed in his presence and it was rumoured that His Grace the Duke of——had been absolutely compelled to forsake his ducal mansion and spend an exceedingly comfortless hour in the little room behind the stable yard in Northumberland Street.
In this way all manner of confidential remarks had been made into Captain McTurk’s ear and all manner of confidential documents reluctantly entrusted to his care. Half a dozen counterfeit cheques drawn on provincial banks by persons unknown; private communications sent by Mr. Dixey to his lawyer; a little scrap of paper—heaven knows where it came from—in which a gentleman signing himself “R.P.” (Mr. Pardew’s initials, certainly, but no doubt shared by many other persons) conveyed certain immensely suggestive instructions: all these had somehow found their way into Captain McTurk’s grasp, and those who monitor the achievements of our public servants felt that the captain had excelled himself.
And yet, flattered as he was by these encomia, Captain McTurk was uneasy. It is one thing to have amassed a quantity of evidence, forensic and circumstantial, which may be of use to a prosecuting counsel. It is quite another to secure a conviction. Captain McTurk had not the slightest doubt that certain crimes, and certain of them very heinous crimes, had been committed. A quantity of fraudulent cheques had been passed through the banking system. An audacious robbery had taken place on the Dover mail train. A gentleman had apparently been bludgeoned to death in Suffolk. That gentleman’s wife had been held, apparently against her will, by another gentleman who proposed to marry her and thereby secure the inheritance with which her late husband had entrusted him. That each of these misdeeds was, to a certain degree, connected with the others Captain McTurk was sure. And yet, given that two of the persons he desired most urgently to interview were dead, the second in a manner so dreadful that Captain McTurk shuddered to remember it, and the third unaccountably vanished from sight, the proof might be difficult to obtain. And so, as he sat in his office above the stable yard, with Mr. Masterson returning almost daily with the results of some freshly executed commission, Captain McTurk searched for some key that would unlock these mysteries.
For a while he thought he had found it in Mr. Crabbe, and yet Mr. Crabbe, it soon became clear, was quite equal to his stratagems. What was it, the old lawyer enquired, that he had done wrong? Certainly, he had presided over the establishment of a trust for the benefit of Mrs. Isabel Ireland, but if there was a flaw in its conception or its administration he would be glad to hear of it. As to the medical basis on which the conditions of that trust had been enforced, he had taken his advice from that very eminent medical man Dr. Conolly, now deceased, whom all the world knew. In fact Mr. Crabbe practically defied Captain McTurk to arraign him, an action that Captain McTurk, who had examined certain medical records which application to Dr. Conolly’s executors had produced for him, feared to take.
All this, however, would scarcely do for the public and those guardians of the public conscience that take an interest in such matters. The public desired a trial—two trials—any amount of trials, so long as justice could be seen to be done and transgression properly rebuked. And so, after great deliberation, and nearly four months after these affairs had first come to the public’s attention, it was declared that the Crown intended to prosecute Robert Grace, William Latch and Joseph Pearce for their part in the theft of bullion from the Dover mail train, and to arraign Augustus Crabbe, Esq., on a charge of conspiring to defraud Mrs. Henry Ireland of money and property that was rightfully hers. Naturally, each of these proceedings caused a great sensation. The circumstances of the robbery were once more described in every newspaper in the land. Mr. Crabbe’s illustrious career and his yet more illustrious connections were similarly made much of. And yet it was generally felt that the trials were rather a frost. Messrs. Grace, Latch and Pearce were swiftly examined, found guilty, rebuked, imprisoned, sentenced to transportation and so forth, all the condign punishments that the law allows—an old lady, supposed to be Mrs. Grace, fell into a fit in the courtroom at this juncture and was taken away—but it was clear that nobody cared in the least about these satellites of the vanished Mr. Pardew, and that the public was exercised only by the fate of their commanding spirit.
On the morning before Mr. Crabbe’s appearance in court, Captain McTurk had a conversation with Mr. Hammerdown, the prosecuting counsel, in which certain of his anxieties were made plain.
“It is an uncommonly difficult case,” he explained. “Indeed, I scarcely know where one part of it ceases and another begins. There is Mr. Dixey dead, having tried, as one supposes, to marry his ward for her money. Mrs. Ireland, of course, can say nothing about it. There is this Mr. Pardew vanished with two hundredweight of bullion off the Dover train having, so far as we may deduce, had the husband of Dixey’s ward murdered for him. Dixey, one gathers, owed Pardew ever so many hundreds of pounds. Mr. Crabbe is Dixey’s lawyer and Mrs. Ireland’s trustee. Pardew passed his fraudulent cheques through Crabbe’s office. You would think, would you not, that they were all confederate together, and yet, do you know, I doubt it.”
“Indeed, you know,” observed Mr. Hammerdown, who despite his terrible reputation was a mild-mannered man very much bullied by Mrs. Hammerdown, “I don’t think old Crabbe, whom I have known these thirty years, ever meant to murder anyone nor rob a train of its bullion.”
“I rather agree. It is a tremendous intrigue, but my belief is that Pardew is at the bottom of it. There is some hold that he had, you mark my words, some pit that he had dug for him that he could not climb out of. You had better see what you can get Crabbe to say about it in the box.”
Mr. Hammerdown said he would see what he could do. Sadly, all this delicate scheming came to nothing, for on the morning of the old lawyer’s first day on the stand it was declared that he had suffered a seizure in the night, was being attended upon by Sir Clarence Coucher
of Harley Street and could take no further part in the trial.
Mr. Crabbe survived his attack, but he retired altogether from legal practice. The chambers at Lincoln’s Inn have been taken over by a brace of rising barristers and the old clerk finally evicted from his kitchen in the basement. The West End hostesses on whom Mr. Crabbe used so sedulously to call no longer see him now, for he sits in his Belgravia mansion, meekly attended by his daughters, and thinks who knows what thoughts of his former life.
Mr. Guyle continues about his business as before.
Mrs. Ireland did not appear at the trial. Her absence was regretted by both the public and the legal profession. “Only put her on the stand,” Mr. Hammerdown was thought to have pronounced, “and we shall carry all before us.” However, polite enquiry revealed that Mrs. Ireland could not be put on the stand, could take no part in anything, that her health, in fact, was in an altogether precarious state, and that it would be better for her to remain in the establishment to which she had been conveyed after her rescue. Of these lodgings I know very little, other than that they are very genteel, well conducted and altogether discreet, and that Mr. Farrier, visiting her there, emerged looking very grave and would say nothing of what took place.