Читать книгу Death of a Dancer - Caro Peacock, Caro Peacock - Страница 8

The yellow-haired dancer, Pauline, was at the front of the huddle. She looked more self-possessed than the other girls and had taken time to wrap a shawl round her shoulders. When she turned to look at me there was a glint in her eyes, as if she were enjoying the excitement.

‘She’s been poisoned,’ she said.

‘Who said so?’

‘The doctor’s in there, with the policeman. I heard him asking Mr Blake if anybody knew what she’d been eating and drinking.’

‘That doesn’t mean she was poisoned,’ one of the girls said.

‘She was raving before she died,’ said Pauline, annoyed at being doubted. ‘Going on about bleeding and people not seeing.’

‘How do you know?’ I said.

Silence, then one of the other girls said, maliciously, ‘Pauline was looking in at the door.’

Pauline turned on her.

‘Somebody had to do it, didn’t they? We’d heard she’d been taken ill, so there we all were, wondering whether the ballet was on or off. Of course nobody thinks to tell us anything. So I said I’d go and ask Mr Blake if everybody else was too scared to. But when I got to her room the door was open and Marie was crying and Mr Blake was inside and Mr Surrey with his face all covered in black make-up. Columbine was stretched out on her couch in her under things. Her eyes were black, black as burnt chestnuts, and she was babbling away in this odd voice, but not making any sense.’

‘Did anybody say then that she’d been poisoned?’ I said.

‘No. I thought she’d had a fit. I asked could I do anything and Mr Surrey said to go and get some strong coffee …’

‘Coffee? Why?’

‘I don’t know. Anyway, the nearest coffee stall’s half a mile away, but then the doctor came in anyway so we forgot about the coffee and the doctor said everybody was to go out except her maid. Mr Blake told me to go back to the dressing room and tell the other girls that Madame was very ill and there’d be no ballet. So I did.’

The maid Marie had stopped screaming. In the calm that followed I heard the whisper for the first time, ‘Jenny’. It came from one of the other girls, I didn’t know which, and at the sound the whole group of them went still and quiet.

‘Has Jenny been here tonight?’ I asked.

Only the dark-haired girl spoke.

‘If she has, we didn’t see her.’

I asked the girls to let me through and started to walk along the corridor. Pauline asked where I was going, but I didn’t answer. The door to Columbine’s room opened and the actor who played Othello, Robert Surrey, came out in costume. His face was covered in black cork makeup, with lips showing pinkly through. He had an arm round Marie and she was curled up against him, her face contorted with shock and grief, as if she wanted to burrow into his padded doublet for safety. He led her past me, into another room. Almost at once, Barnaby Blake appeared from the direction of the stage, with Rodney Hardcastle walking behind him. Hardcastle seemed angry and confused.

‘She was all right this afternoon. Are you sure it’s not some kind of game she’s playing with us?’

Blake, grim-faced, simply answered by opening Columbine’s door to let Hardcastle see inside. I took a few steps forward and looked too. Columbine was lying on a couch. Somebody had covered her with a silk shawl, but it wasn’t quite long enough and her feet and ankles in their white silk stockings stuck out. Hardcastle said nothing at first, then he suddenly retched and sprayed a fountain of claret-pink vomit all over the walls and corridor so violently that it spattered my shoes. There was a nervous-looking police officer standing by the couch and a thin, grey-haired man dressed in dark clothes sitting quietly on a chair. The grey-haired man got up when he heard Hardcastle retching and came out, carrying a black bag and closing the door carefully behind him. The doctor, staying piously by the corpse of the patient he’d failed to save. Was it piety, or simply as good a place as any to wait for the arrival of a more senior police officer? He took a disapproving look at Hardcastle, now leaning on his elbow against the wall.

‘Who’s this?’

Blake explained to him in a whisper and the doctor looked even more disapproving.

‘He’d better be taken somewhere quiet.’

Blake seemed ready enough to let the doctor take charge and suggested they should all go into his office. Kennedy had arrived by now, and I could tell from the expression on his face that the news had reached the musicians.

‘I’m going for a look outside,’ he said. ‘Go back and wait for me in the pit.’

I knew he was going to see if Daniel might be waiting there, as he had been earlier in the evening. Instead of heading for the pit, I followed him along the corridor. Billy the doorkeeper came in from the street, followed by two more police officers. They pushed past us and went into Columbine’s room.

Kennedy and I looked up and down the street but there was no sign of Daniel or anybody but a few loiterers, wondering why the police had arrived in a hurry. We’d closed the door and turned back into the corridor when a sob sounded from inside Billy’s shadowy cubicle by the door.

‘Who’s that?’ Kennedy said.

A pale face looked up at us, then a plump boy of about ten years old got up from the floor and came out, cuddling a tabby cat and crying. I recognised the cat as Billy’s but couldn’t place the boy. He was clutching the cat close to his chest for comfort, tears running down on to its fur. I asked him what was the matter.

‘The girls say the poison was in her syllabub,’ he said. ‘Is that true?’

‘Who are you?’

‘David Surrey.’

That placed him: the son of Othello and Desdemona. It was a surprise that he should be grieving so much for Columbine, or perhaps it was simply shock.

‘Is there anybody to look after you?’

‘My mother’s in our dressing room, but…’

I put a hand on his shoulder, and guided him to the door he indicated. It was the room where Robert Surrey had taken the maid Marie. When I knocked and opened the door I had a glimpse of Marie sitting on a chair and a woman in bodice and petticoats kneeling beside her with an arm round her shoulders. I pushed the boy gently into the room, complete with cat, but before I could close the door on him, a police officer came pounding along the corridor and shoved me aside. He went up to Marie, took her wrist and pulled her to her feet. The other woman cried out and Surrey asked what he was doing, but the policeman took no notice. He dragged Marie into the corridor and towards the outside door. Marie was too shocked to cry now, almost past walking. The door to Columbine’s dressing room opened and another policeman came out, carrying a glass bowl with a silver cover. Blake followed, face grim.

‘What’s happening?’ Kennedy asked him.

‘He’s arresting Marie.’

‘Why Marie?’ I said. ‘What’s the proof?’

Blake glanced towards the policeman with the bowl.

‘They think that is.’

‘What is it?’

‘Columbine’s syllabub,’ he said. ‘Marie says it’s the only thing she ate or drank all evening, and then only a spoonful or two.’

‘But why would Marie admit that, if she’d poisoned it?’

By now, Blake was following the police constable and Marie down the corridor. I fell in behind them.

‘Cab,’ the leading policeman said. ‘Somebody call a cab.’

Bow Street police office was so close that they could have walked to it in a few minutes, but the policeman was trying hard to do things properly. He clung to Marie’s wrist as if scared she’d escape although she had no more energy in her than a ragdoll. Billy went to the door and let out a piercing whistle, and almost at once an old cab came rattling down the street. The policeman bundled Marie into it, got in beside her and signalled to the cab driver to close up the apron on them both. At the last minute he remembered the bowl and gestured to his colleague to hand it over.

‘Bow Street,’ said the policeman, clutching the bowl like an invalid with a basin of gruel.

Pauline suddenly appeared beside us, in her outdoor cloak, hair tucked under her feathered bonnet. She stared at the bowl.

‘What’s in it? Is it arsenic?’

There was something brutal about her curiosity. Blake must have felt it too, because he snapped at her to go back inside.

‘Why should you think it was arsenic?’ I said.

Her cold eyes swept over me.

‘Just interested.’

The cab driver swung himself back into the driving seat and they clattered away over the cobbles.

‘I don’t believe Marie did it,’ I said to Blake. ‘Besides, she seemed to like Columbine.’

‘As it happens, I agree with you. Marie was entirely devoted to Columbine.’

‘Then why did you let him arrest her?’ I said.

‘I had no choice in the matter. When a police officer is called to a murder, he can hardly leave without arresting somebody.’

‘Even if it’s the wrong person?’

Blake sighed. He looked tired, as I suppose we all did, and possibly he’d even liked Columbine. He certainly liked the money she’d brought in.

‘I don’t believe Marie will spend long in the cells. The police will have to bring her before a magistrate and he’ll have a higher standard of proof than an inexperienced constable.’

I hoped he was right. He walked rapidly towards the stage, telling the various by-standers who were crowding the end of the corridor to get out of the way. Gradually they dispersed, with the smell of Hardcastle’s vomit still poisoning the air.

The rest of the performance was cancelled. Toby Kennedy insisted on escorting me home, though he’d have a long walk back from Mayfair to his lodgings in Holborn. We left the theatre along with a dazed crowd of artistes, all talking nineteen to the dozen. There wasn’t much grief for Columbine expressed and, now that the first shock had worn off, most of them seemed full of excitement at having first-hand knowledge of an event that would be the talk of the town.

Kennedy didn’t say anything until we were clear of the rest.

‘Do you think it was Suter that the trombone fellow saw earlier?’

‘It might have been,’ I said. ‘Daniel wanted me to ask the women about Jenny. Perhaps he hoped to see some of the dancers on their way in and ask them himself.’

‘If Blake’s right and the magistrates let the maid go, the police will have to ask more questions.’

We walked in silence for a while, thinking about it.

‘What is it about the syllabub?’ I said. ‘Isn’t that a strange thing to have in a dressing room?’

‘Exactly to Columbine’s taste, I should think: whipped cream, sugar and sherry,’ Kennedy said. ‘It was all part of her affectation. She insisted it was the only thing she could eat on rehearsal or performance days. The maid always prepared it at home and brought a big bowl of it in with her.’

‘And everybody at the theatre knew that?’

‘Of course. It was a standing joke.’

Columbine had been altogether a joke, or perhaps something worse than that. But I couldn’t get out of my mind the picture of those silk-stockinged feet sticking out.

‘Do you know anything about her? Was she always like this?’

Kennedy had been part of London’s artistic circles most of his life and had a love of gossip.

‘There’s usually been some scandal circulating round her. I remember when she first appeared on the London scene – must have been twenty years ago. She was about seventeen at the time and bewitchingly pretty.’

‘Where did she come from?’

‘Nobody knew. She simply turned up on an old lord’s arm at the opera one night, dressed in red satin and more diamonds than all the rest of the women put together. He put it about that she was the daughter of an Italian count, but there were rumours that she was a milkmaid from his estates in Dorset.’

‘Did she try to get him to marry her?’

‘He had a wife already, also down in Dorset.’

‘Were he and Columbine together long?’

‘Almost a whole season, until he killed himself.’

‘Killed himself?’

‘Got out of his carriage and jumped off London Bridge one night. She said he was drunk and trying to show her how he used to dive off a bridge at home when he was a boy.’

‘Did people believe her?’

‘There was no proof to the contrary, and he was always eccentric. The town said suicide but the jury brought in death by misadventure.’

‘Do you think she pushed him?’

‘No. She had a lot to lose by his death. While he was alive he could cut down his forests to buy her more diamonds, but the estate was entailed, so once he died it went to his heir.’

‘What happened to her then?’

‘That was when she decided to become a dancer. She was never very good, but people would always pay to look at her because of her beauty and her reputation. And of course various men became her protectors. She always had the best in houses and carriages.’

We crossed Leicester Square, trying to keep clear of the worst of the mud. A chanter was still hawking the Columbine ballad by the light of a guttering tallow candle. In an attic somewhere, a man who’d dreamed in his youth of being a poet was no doubt already working on its sensational sequel.

‘You said people paid to look at Columbine because of her reputation,’ I said. ‘There are plenty of scandalous women. Why was she special?’

Kennedy thought for a while before answering.

‘You know the fascination cliffs or precipices have for some people? All the more if poor fools take to flinging themselves over them. It was like that with Columbine.’

‘The old lord wasn’t the only one, then?’

‘No. There was one scandal not so long ago, about a cavalry officer who turned to forgery on her account.’

‘How long ago?’

‘About five years, I think. It’s a strange thing that, now and again, even women like Columbine can fall for a man’s looks instead of his money. Maybe it’s a kind of a holiday for them, who can tell? Rainer, the name was. Major Charles Rainer of the Household Cavalry. He was a handsome devil, all the swagger in the world, best horseman in London, killed two or three men in duels. All the usual nonsense.’

‘What did he forge?’

‘Bills. You know what a bill is?’

‘A legal promise to pay. They’re what they keep passing around to each other in the City.’

‘Just so. Forging them’s a serious business. In theory, you could still hang for it. This man took to forging them to pay for all the presents he was giving Columbine. At least, that’s what he said in the dock at the Old Bailey. He tried to get the jury’s sympathy, saying he’d been tempted away from his honourable career by a wicked and ungrateful woman. It goes without saying that she’d taken up with another man by then.’

‘And did it get the jury’s sympathy?’

‘Of course not. He was found guilty and sentenced to ten years’ transportation. He yelled out from the dock, cursing her.’

Five years since Rainer was transported, nearly twenty years since the old lord died. It didn’t seem likely that either of those scandals would be of interest to Disraeli and his friends now. We walked in silence along Piccadilly, up Berkeley Street and through Grosvenor Square. Candlelight glowed softly behind the curtains of the great houses. It was quite possible that in one of them Mr Disraeli was sitting with the gentlemen over their port, no more than a few yards away. Well, I had some information for him, and some questions.

When Kennedy and I parted at the foot of my stairs in Abel Yard, he promised to get word to me as soon as he had news. He patted my arm and told me not to worry.

‘And you – are you taking your own advice?’ I said.

He didn’t answer.