Читать книгу 3-Book Victorian Crime Collection: Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour - Caro Peacock, Caro Peacock - Страница 15

CHAPTER SIX

We’d slowed down for some reason towards the end of the journey, so the packet didn’t tie up at Dover until the dark hours of the morning. Tired passengers filed down the gangplank into a circle of light cast by oil lamps round the landing stage. A two-horse carriage was waiting for Celia and her family. It whirled away as soon as they were inside, so they must have left servants to bring on the luggage.

With no reason to hurry, I disembarked with the last group of passengers, ordinary people with no carriages to meet them. Beyond the circle of light was a shadowed area of piled-up packing cases and huge casks. I felt as wary as a cat in a strange yard, half expecting Trumper or the fat man to step out and accost me, not quite believing I’d managed to leave them on the far side of the Channel. I walked along the dark seafront, listening for footsteps behind me but hearing nothing. There were very few people about, even the taverns were closed. When I turned into a side street, a few sailors were lying senseless on the doorsteps and my shoe soles slipped in the pools of last night’s indulgence. An old woman, so bent that her chin almost touched the pavement, scavenged for rags in the gutter, disturbing a great rat that ran across the pavement in front of me into a patch of lamplight from a window. It was holding a piece of black crepe in its teeth. The old woman made a grab for it but missed and the rat darted on, trailing its prize, a mourning band from a hat or sleeve. The lamplight fell on the arm of one of the horizontal sailors, and I saw that he too was wearing a mourning band.

‘Has somebody died?’ I asked the rag woman.

I had to stoop down to hear her reply, from toothless gums, ‘The king.’

She was adding something else, hard to make out. Itty icky? I made sense of it at the third try.

‘Oh yes, so it’s Little Vicky.’

William’s niece, Victoria Alexandrina, a round-faced girl of eighteen, now Queen of Great Britain, Ireland and a large part of the globe besides. So a reign had ended and another begun while I’d been in Calais. It seemed less important than the coldness of my toes through the stocking holes.

I walked, sat on the sea wall then walked again, until it was around six in the morning and I could show myself at the Heart of Oak. It had a new black bow on the door knocker.

‘You again,’ the landlord said, bleary eyed.

I collected my bag that I’d left in his keeping, secured my cheap side room again and requested a pot of tea, carried up by the same maid who’d brought me water to wash my hair on that Sunday morning, when I’d been so pleased with myself, not quite three days ago, but another lifetime. I slept for a couple of hours then put my head out of the room as another maid was hurrying past and asked for more tea, also writing materials. The pen she brought me was the same crossed nibbed one with its ink-stained holder that I’d used to write that foolish, light-hearted note to my father. It now served to write a very different letter to my brother Tom. I wrote on the top of the wash-stand, with my travelling mantle wrapped round me for a dressing gown.

Dear Tom,

I am sorrier than anything in the world to be sending such grief to you. I have to tell you that our beloved father is no more. He was killed in an accident in Calais, on his way home from escorting his charges on their Grand Tour of Europe. I was present at his burial. I know that when you read this, the first impulse of your kind heart will be to come home to me, whatever the cost to your career. I am certain that I speak with the authority of our father in saying that you must do no such thing. I am as well as may be expected in the face of such news, and as you know we have relatives who – while they may not be over-brimming with the milk of human kindness towards our father’s children – are much aware of the demands of Family Duty.

May God bless you, my dear, dear brother and help you to bear your grief. I am at present at Dover, and shall write again as soon as I am more settled, with an address.

Your loving sister

Libby

Are you blaming me? If so, read it again and admit that there is not one lie in it. Accident? Well, murder is an accident to the victim, is it not? And suppose I had written Dear Tom, Our father has been murdered … would he have waited tamely in Bombay? No, he would have been home on the next ship and all our sacrifice in parting with him for the sake of his future would have been wasted. Surely there had been enough waste already. And the relatives? That was no lie either. Three or four aunts would have indeed taken me in from cold Duty. I was not bound to write in my letter what I felt – that I should sooner put on pink tights and dance in the opera or ride horses bareback in a circus than accept the wintery charity of any of them. I should have had to pay dearly for it in endless days of criticism of my father. They’d be all too eager to believe the lie that he had been killed in a duel, hugging it to their hearts under their yellowed flannel chemises. Over the years, I’d dwindle to the grey and dusty poor relative in the corner of the room furthest from the fire, doling out physic in careful teaspoons, combing fleas from the lapdog. Besides, if I went to any of the aunts I’d have no freedom, hardly allowed to walk in the garden without asking permission. They would certainly not permit me to do the only thing in my life that made sense – discover who killed my father and why.

I addressed my letter by his full name, Thomas Fraternity Lane, care of the Company’s offices in London. They should send it on by the first available boat, but it would still be weeks or months before it came into Tom’s hands. I drew the curtains across the window and started to dress myself to take it to the post. The stockings I’d walked in were beyond mending and had to be thrown away. This reminded me that most of my clothes and possessions were in a trunk at Chalke Bissett. When I left them there I had assumed it would be only a matter of days before we’d be sending for it from our new lodgings in London. I unpacked my bag, picked up the pen again and made a list:

1 merino travelling mantle with wide sleeves

1 straw bonnet with lavender ribbon

1 pair of brown leather shoes for day (scuffed and soles worn thin)

1 day dress (lavender cotton)

1 day dress (blue-and-white cotton print)

1 white muslin tucker embroidered with lilies of the valley

1 silk fichu pelerine trimmed with Valencienne lace

1 cotton petticoat

1 pair stays, blue satin covered

1 pair garters

1 pair white silk stockings

1 pair blue worsted stockings

1 pair white cotton gloves (soiled with smuts from the steam packet)

2 ribbons (blue, white)

At that point, the maid came in for the tray. She looked so tired and was so shy that I couldn’t refrain from tipping her sixpence, which reminded me of the thinness of my purse. I shook the coins out on the bed and counted those too:

1 sovereign

7 shillings

3 pennies

2 halfpennies

Total: £1 7s 4d.

This was not inspiriting. I’d have to make my rounds of the jewellers again, this time selling the last thing I had, a gold-mounted cameo ring my father had bought for me at Naples. I put on the lavender dress, packed the rest of the clothes into my bag and went out to take my letter to the post. The streets were crowded, full of carts and carriages coming and going from the harbour, an Italian playing a barrel organ with a monkey collecting coins in its hat. The tunes were jaunty, but the monkey had a black bow round its neck in concession to our supposed national grief. I kept glancing round, wary of anybody who seemed interested in me.

It was worse when I reached the office and had to stand in a queue behind several others. The fat man’s agent had come looking for me in this place. The only way he could have known to deliver the note to the Heart of Oak was by intercepting the letter to my father I’d left there. I looked at the old clerk, sitting on his high stool with his pen behind his ear and ledger open on the counter in front of him, wondering, ‘Are you in their pay?’ When it came to my turn he blinked at me short-sightedly through his glasses, with no sign of recognition, and accepted my letter.

‘Is there anything poste restante for Mr Thomas Jacques Lane?’ I said, trying to make my voice sound casual. There had been three letters when I first inquired. The clerk blinked again and went over to a bank of pigeonholes. My heart thumped when he took out just one sheet of folded paper. Who’d taken the others?

‘You have his authority to collect this?’

‘Yes. I am his daughter.’

He gave me a doubtful look, asked me to sign the ledger, then handed it over. I hurried out with my prize, looking for a quiet place to read, already puzzled by the feel of it in my hand. It was thick, coarse paper with a smell about it, oddly familiar and comforting. I touched a gloved fingertip to my nose. Hoof oil, memories of stables and warm, well-tended horses. I took refuge in the doorway of a pawnbroker’s shop with boarded-up windows and unfolded it.

With Ruspect Sir, We be here safly awayting yr convenunce if you will kindly let know where you be staying.

This in big, disorderly writing and a signature like duck tracks in mud: Amos Legge. I couldn’t help laughing because it was so far from what I’d been expecting. Certainly not from one of my father’s friends, yet hardly from an enemy either. Neither the man in black nor the one who called himself Trumper would write like that. I went back to the office, paid tuppence for the use of inkwell, pen and paper, and left a note for Mr Amos Legge, saying that I was Mr Lane’s daughter and I’d be grateful if he would call on me at the Heart of Oak. I strolled back to the inn taking a round-about route by way of the seafront. As I passed a baker’s shop, the smell of fresh bread reminded me that I was hungry and had eaten nothing since the tartine on the other side of the Channel. I stood in the queue behind a line of messenger boys and kitchen maids and paid a penny for a small white loaf, then, with a sudden craving for sweet things, four pence more for two almond tartlets topped with crisp brown sugar. I carried them back to the Heart of Oak, intending to picnic on them in my room and spare the expense of having a meal sent up.

As bad luck would have it, the landlord was in the hall. His little eyes went straight to my paper parcel, calculating profit lost.

‘How long are you planning to stay here – madam?’

The moment’s pause before ‘madam’ just stopped short of being insulting.

‘Tonight at least, possibly longer.’

‘We like payment on account from ladies and gentlemen without proper luggage.’

In other words, I was not respectable and he expected me to bilk him. Biting back my anger, telling myself that I couldn’t afford to make more enemies, I parted with a sovereign, salving my pride by demanding a receipt. As he went away, grumbling, to write it, the door from the street opened.

‘’Scuse me for troubling you, ma’am, but be there a Miss Lane staying ’ere?’

I stared. The door-frame of the Heart of Oak was high and wide, but he filled it, six and a half feet tall at least with shoulders in proportion. His hair was the shiny light-brown colour of good hay, topped with a felt hat which looked as if it might have doubled as a polisher, his eyes blue as speedwells. The clean tarry smell of hoof oil wafted off him.

‘You must be Amos Legge,’ I said, marvelling. Then, ‘I am Mr Lane’s daughter.’

He grinned, good white teeth against the brown of his face.

‘I thought you was when I see’d you back there, only I didn’t like to make myself familiar, look. You do resemble ’im. ’E be here then?’

For an instant, seeing and feeling the cheerfulness of him, I was back in a safer world and I think I smiled back at him. Then it hit me that the world had changed and he didn’t know it.

‘I think we had better go in here,’ I said, indicating the snug.

His grin faded but he followed me, stuffing the felt hat into his pocket, dipping his head to get through the lower doorway of the snug. I left the door open to the hall, otherwise the landlord would have put the worst interpretation on it.

‘Had you known my father long?’ I asked him.

His speech might be slow but his mind wasn’t. He’d already caught a whiff of something wrong.

‘Nobbut ten days or so, miss, when he helped me out of a bit of a ruckus in Paris. We was to go on to Dover and wait for ’im ’ere. Yesterday morning we got in.’

‘We?’

I’d put my parcel of bread and cakes down on the table and the wrapping had fallen open. Unconsciously, his big brown hands went to the loaf and tore it in half. It would have been unforgivably impolite, except he did it naturally as a bird eats seed. He chewed, swallowed.

‘Rancie and me.’

‘Rancie?’

‘That’s right. Is ’e not here yet, then?’

He ate another piece of loaf.

‘He’s dead,’ I said.

His eyes went blank with shock, as if somebody had hit him. He shook his head from side to side, like an ox troubled by flies.

‘When ’e said goodbye to me and Rancie, he was as healthy as any man you’d ever see. Was it the fever, miss?’

‘He was shot,’ I said.

He blinked. Amazingly, his blue eyes were awash with tears.

‘Oh, the poor gentleman. Those damned thieving frogs … Excuse me, ma’am, but you can’t trust them, whatever they say. He should’ve come back with Rancie and me. I’d ’ave seen ’im safe.’

‘I don’t know that he was shot by a Frenchman.’ I’d decided to trust him. I had to trust somebody, and he was as unlike Trumper or the man in black as any person could be. ‘The fact is, there’s some mystery about it, and I need to find out everything I can about what happened to my father over the past week or ten days.’

I told him about the black lie and what had happened in Calais. As he listened, he engulfed first one then the other of the almond tarts, not taking his eyes from my face.

‘How did you and my father meet?’ I said. ‘You mentioned something about a … a ruckus.’

He wiped crumbs from his mouth with his sleeve.

‘I got in a bit of disaccord with a frog on account ’e was driving a horse that was as lame as a three-legged dog, only ’e didn’t speak English and so there was no reasoning with ’im, look. So the frog took a polt at me, only I fetched ’im one first, and ’arder. No great mishtiff done to ’im, but ’is friends were creating about it and I reckon they’d’ve ’ad me in prison except Mr Lane saw what ’appened and made them see sense.’

Of course my father would side with the defender of a lame horse. I imagined that he must have slipped some money to the Frenchman to save Amos Legge from having to explain himself to a Parisian judge.

‘So you see, when Mr Lane mentioned ’e was puzzled ’ow to get Rancie back to England, I was glad to be of use.’

‘So you brought her back for him?’ I said.

It amazed me that while the fat man and his agents were scouring Paris and Calais for this mysterious and fatal woman, this well-meaning giant should have escorted her across the Channel, apparently without fuss. But my heart was heavy and resentful because she – whoever she was – had survived and my father had not.

‘Is she here in Dover?’

He nodded. ‘I’ve got ’er here safe, yes.’

‘Then I suppose I’d better come and see her.’

‘Just what I was going to suggest myself, miss.’

The landlord was lurking in the hall, probably listening.

‘Your receipt – madam.’

I tore it out of his hand. He looked up at Amos Legge then down at me with a greasy gleam in his eyes that made me want to kick him. I wanted to kick the entire world. I stalked out of the door, Legge behind me. I more than half resented him for bringing this female and when he came up alongside me, walking respectfully on the outside of the pavement, I kept as much space between us as I could. He must have sensed my mood because he uttered no more than ‘Left, miss,’ or ‘Across ’ere, miss,’ taking us towards the landward side of the town, away from the crowded streets.

Who was this Rancie person? Badly treated servant girl? Wronged wife? Betrayed sweetheart? Any of those could have appealed to my father’s chivalrous and romantic instincts. He’d eloped with my mother and they lived ten years blissfully together until fever took her. He grieved all his life, but there is no denying that his nature inclined to women. He loved their company, their beauty, their wit. In our wandering life together there’d been Susannas, Rosinas, Conchitas, Helenas … I do not mean that my father was a Don Juan, a ruthless seducer. If anything, quite the reverse. Far from being ruthless, he’d do almost anything to help a woman in distress. His purse, his house, his heart would be open to her, sometimes for months at a time. Undeniable, too, that some of the Susannas, Conchitas and Rosinas took advantage of his chivalrous nature.

‘There’s no great ’urry, miss. She won’t run away,’ Amos Legge protested.

I suppose I was walking fast. We were clear of the town now, only a farm and barns on one side of the road, a broken-down livery stable on the other.

Well, if it had happened like that, it wouldn’t have been the first time. But it had been the last. Violent husband or bullying father had resented it, caught up with him. For the first time, my unbelief in the black lie wavered. Suppose, against his will, that he had been forced into a duel after all.

‘Nearly there, miss,’ Amos Legge said.

We were level with the farm. I expected him to turn in at the gateway. Perhaps my father had instructed him to lodge this Rancie hussy out of town, for her protection. But we walked past the farm gateway and turned in under the archway of the livery stable with its faded signboard, Hunters and Hacks for Hire. There was a groom sweeping the yard. Amos Legge nodded at him and took my arm to keep me from treading in a trail of horse droppings. I drew the arm away. Seeming unoffended, he walked over to a loose-box in the corner, letting out a piercing whistle. A horse’s head came over the door, nostrils flared in curiosity, eyes bold and questioning.

‘What …?’

I was caught off balance, assuming that our journey was not yet over and we would have to ride. Amos Legge stroked the horse’s nose, whispered something then turned to me, the grin back on his face.

‘Well, miss, ’ere’s Rancie for you.’ Then to me, alarmed, ‘My poor little maid, what be you crying for?’