by Issy Brooke
Sir Henry and Theodore went into the breakfast room together and bit by bit, Sir Henry warmed up and outlined his theories and hopes for the future. Theodore was genuinely enthralled. He even followed Sir Henry out again, once they had dined, still probing him about threshing machines.
Sir Henry stopped awkwardly at the foot of the stairs.
Theodore finally intuited that Sir Henry no longer wished to speak about farming machinery but he wanted to seize the chance now they had established a rapport. He couldn’t wait to tell Adelia how well he had done in making Sir Henry feel at his ease. Now at last he could ask him about his business with Dido. Adelia had told him all about finding him going through their daughter’s writing case, and he meant to get to the bottom of the situation.
“I say, have you spoken to Mondial about all these improvements? He’s very interested in having all the modern conveniences,” Theodore said.
“In passing, yes. He refers me to his estate manager mostly.”
“Ah, he’s not so hands-on as you, then? What about Lady Mondial?”
“What about her? What interest would she have in pumping and drainage, tilling and ploughing?”
“She is my daughter through and through. She is as interested as I am in such things, I am sure.” Perhaps, he thought. It was a small lie. In fact it was his youngest daughter, Edith, who had the most analytical mind he had ever encountered. She could glance at a steam engine, listen to its thumpings, and tell you exactly what was going wrong and how to fix it. “After all, I understand that you and Dido have grown close?”
Sir Henry’s face went blank and rigid. “You understand no such thing, sir.”
“Oh, I am not implying anything. But it is known that you and her...”
“Nothing is known! Good day, sir.”
Theodore watched in amazement as Sir Henry took the stairs two at a time and disappeared around the bend on the landing.
Well, he thought. I suppose that’s a success, of a sort. I have certainly touched a nerve.
But if Sir Henry has touched my daughter – my married daughter, my respectable daughter – I shall take a pistol to him and I shan’t even bother to be masked. Let them hang me for it.
Sixteen
When Adelia climbed into the closed carriage that was awaiting her in the courtyard, she was surprised to find Harriet was already nestled in a plush hooded cloak in a corner. It was too thick for summer but at least would muffle the worst of the bumpy journey. Adelia was wearing a silk and cashmere cape over a respectable tailored jacket and matching skirt. Her puffed sleeves made wearing anything other than a cape very awkward.
“Good morning!” Harriet warbled. “Would you care for a mint?” She pulled out a twist of paper from her deep handbag and wafted the humbugs under Adelia’s nose. “I am a terrible traveller.”
“You are a terrible person and we are hardly travelling far. I am only going into town. It’s barely a few miles and I should walk if it I were allowed.”
The door was closed and she nodded through the window at the coachman who was happy to have a trip away for half a day. They rumbled off. She had to speak up over the noise of the wheels on the gravel and the squeaking of the springs. “Anyway, why are you here?”
“Lord Mondial invited me to stay.”
“No, why are you here in this carriage, you harridan?”
“Oh, I heard in passing that you had asked for a ride into town and I thought you’d enjoy the company.”
“Harriet...”
Harriet leaned forward although she didn’t drop her voice. “I know why you’re going and you’ll need my help. Didn’t you ask for it? I nearly invited Lady Calaway to come with us too.”
“Oh goodness, I adore Grace with every inch of my being but no, I really don’t want her to know about my particular private matter. It’s a family thing. I regret even telling you.”
“You cannot keep anything from me. I promised to help you and I haven’t managed to do so yet. Anyway, you will be safer with me at your side. We shall have to go into all the lowest dives in town.”
“You look positively excited at the prospect.”
“I am a bishop’s wife. I am used to accompanying my husband as he ministers to the very worst and poorest and lowest of London’s streets. I find it invigorating and humbling, all at the same time. You, however, are going to be shocked and troubled.”
“I doubt it. I was not born a lady.”
Harriet looked disdainful. “You were not born poor, and that makes all the difference.”
It was too early in the morning to bicker, even as friends. So Adelia nodded with mild restraint and let Harriet have the victory this time.
Soon they arrived in the town and she gave the coachman a coin or two to spend in the respectable inn where Harriet had first stayed. He took the horse around to the back of the inn and rang the ostler’s bell as he went. Adelia faced Harriet. “Well, then, oh fount of all knowledge both depraved and unseemly, where do we start?”
Harriet looked up and down the busy street, and pointed. “We go that way and start looking down the side alleys.”
They set off, picking their way along the raised pavement. “Why did you choose to go this way?” Adelia asked. “There are no docks in this place, being so far from the sea. I know that shabbier places are near the docks in a city, but not here. We’re going downhill. Is it perhaps to do with the wind? Are we near a tannery? Perhaps there is a clue in the width of the street...”
Harriet laughed. “I didn’t want to walk in the shadows, that was all. This way is as good as that. There was no art to my choice. We will simply start to ask around. I’ll go and talk to that market seller. He will know where the dosshouses are.”
“The one with the pretty hat pins?”
“Oh, I hadn’t noticed what he was selling,” Harriet said with pure innocence in her voice.
Yet she still bought a new hatpin with a green emerald button. It was inevitably going to be made of paste but it looked well enough even in the light of day. And Harriet also got her information. It wasn’t long before Harriet and Adelia had found a strong hint that Alfred Pegsworth – “such a nice gentleman, shame he’s down on his luck” – would be in a public house at the back of a coffee warehouse on the road east out of town, surrounded by looming hills and rocks. They walked with small, careful steps through the muck. There were no pavements here and the road was busy with carts and barrows.
Adelia found that she was feeling a little uncomfortable. She must have walked too close to Harriet because she bumped her friend with her elbow. Harriet laughed and took her arm. “Steady now. Hold your nerve.”
“I am perfectly fine.”
Adelia was grateful that this time, Harriet didn’t argue back. They came up to the rough wooden door of the public house. Adelia nearly missed it, but Harriet spotted the faded sign hanging from a chain and pole above the darkened window. It was impossible to see inside and the door was closed. They were going to have to enter. It didn’t look like any inn that Adelia had ever been in.
“This is not the right thing to do,” Adelia said, pulling her cape around her shoulders even more tightly and wishing she’d opted for a dark rough wool rather than russet-brown cashmere. “My reputation hangs on a thread at all times; you must know that.”
“You are correct. But if anyone sees you here, and they are the sort of people to judge you for being here, then they ought to not be here themselves. You will both be trapped in a case of mutual silence and each will be unable to call the other out. It is an elegant solution to transgression.”
“You speak as if you have had cause to rely upon such a solution before.”
“Oh, these things do not trouble me. Being a clergyman’s wife gives me a free entrance anywhere – visiting a hovel like this merely improves my status. The worse the public house, the greater my holiness, don’t you see?”
“Well, in that case, you may enter first.” Adelia nudged Harriet to the door. Harriet
laughed and pulled it open without hesitation.
Conversation wavered and fell as the two women slipped in. They stepped directly into a low-ceilinged room thick with smoke both from pipes and also from the open fire. It was crowded with men dressed in shades of grey and brown. Through the strange quietness, Adelia thought she heard a baby cry out but she had no idea where it might have been. It might have been in a basket under a table.
There was a portly man in an apron who stood behind a high table at one end of the room, which she assumed served as the bar. He came forward with a look of concern on his face, and confusion as he tried to work out what manner of women they were.
Harriet had obviously encountered such uncertainty before. She said, boldly, “We are respectable women, sir, on a mission. We’re looking for Alfred Pegsworth and if he is here, might we have a private room in which to talk?”
“He’s in the back, but are you sure you want to be here and are you sure that you want to see him?”
He was then assured that they were sure, and that was backed up by a small coin. He took them to a room off to one side, separate from the main room by a thick curtain rather than a door, and asked to wait while Alfred Pegsworth was fetched.
Alfred arrived at the same time as the publican brought a small decanter of his “best” wine and some smeared glasses. He fussed around the table as if his diligence could conjure up doilies and crustless sandwiches, and no one could speak freely until he had gone. Adelia used the few moments to study her brother carefully.
He was forty-one, ten years younger than Adelia, but he looked unkempt and old. He had a beard and moustache which both needed trimming, and his hair was too long, touching his ears and grubby collar. His dark suit matched but it was shiny at the elbows and knees, and his waistcoat was missing a button. They were good quality clothes, made to last, which was one advantage at least. He smelled of carbolic acid. There were worse things to smell of.
Looking at him brought her back some painful memories of their father. And with that memory came blame, blame directed at her even though she had been innocent of any of the troubles that had befallen the family in times past.
Alfred, her brother, had been eleven when she had married Theodore. She was twenty-one then and Theodore was twenty-eight. She had risen from being a mere gallery owner’s daughter to the wife of an Earl, and their father had lavished a huge dowry upon her. His business was doing well and they were a popular and rich family amongst the well-to-do trades of London.
So off she had gone to her new married life, leaving Alfred to learn the ropes at their father’s side, and all should have been well. Yet within a year, their father had seen a few business ventures fail, a gallery expansion eat money and return no profits, a few major sales fall through, and their mother – always sickly and weak – had died in her sleep.
When Alfred had been fifteen, their father had killed himself.
The shame that had attached to the family after that event had been devastating. Even while people assured them of their sympathetic feelings in private, the public gossip was one of studied horror and judgmental sneering. Harriet had stuck to Adelia’s side throughout, ignoring even the worst of the comments that were cast their way. Her father’s action, taken in the very depths of his despair, cast long shadows and most people did not care to ask why this had happened. They were content to gloat in their own apparent “strength”.
While Adelia had had her friend, her husband and her first children to comfort her, plus her title and her status, the fifteen-year-old Alfred had not been so lucky. Now orphaned, he had been apprenticed to his uncle Oliver Pegsworth but he ran a tannery business which was not to Alfred’s liking, even though he had been placed as a clerk in the offices rather than out in the leather workshops. The dreadful smell from the pits permeated everything. The tannery was on the edge of the worst slums of London as no one else would put up with the noxious fumes, and though it was a profitable and essential business, it was a horrible one dealing with animal carcases and the filth that was used in the tanning processes.
At twenty-two Alfred struck out on his own in the world but he found himself adrift, sustained only by a lingering feeling of resentment that he focused on his sister.
If such money had not been wasted on her dowry and wedding, he said, then his father’s business could have weathered its storms. Mother would not have died and father would not have done – he would not have done the thing that he did.
And Alfred would have been Master Pegsworth for a little longer and not ended up merely known as “that Alf who smells of dog’s mess.”
“That Alf” then roamed London getting into jobs and out of them; and finally he got himself into a marriage that, though he was in many ways now out of it, still hauled him back to his responsibilities from time to time.
Such responsibilities as he was talking of now, here in this lowly public house.
He sipped at his wine, taking his time with it, and shot a dark look at Harriet before saying to Adelia, “Does she really need to be here?”
“Yes, she does. She has helped you in the past. Don’t forget the time that she got you that position as a clerk to the bishop.” Which he had left after only three months, she thought but did not say.
He knew what she wasn’t saying. “It wasn’t my thing. Too preachy.”
“What is your thing?”
“It would have been printselling. Gallery owning. That sort of thing. You know, what I was born to.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake.” Adelia closed her eyes and asked for strength. She opened them and spoke as calmly as she could. “So, how is your good wife?”
“Jane is as Jane does.”
It wasn’t much of an answer but in truth, Adelia did not like Jane and she certainly didn’t trust her. She was as much of a chancer as her brother was. She suspected both had lied to the other about their wealth before the wedding. It would have been an uncomfortable wedding night as the truth was revealed. Both had married the other on the promise of great riches: both had lied. It was an inauspicious start to married life and the outcome had been predictable.
“And how is your son, my dear nephew Wilson?” she continued.
“Right, well, you see, it’s about him that I need to speak to you.”
Harriet nudged Adelia as if to say, “You see? I was right.” Adelia nodded and said, “I understand you want him to go to school?”
Alfred shot another filthy look at Harriet. “She’s been spilling my business, hasn’t she? It’s not done, you know, to be gossiped about. I might look like this now, but I was raised to conduct myself with certain standards. I don’t like to be talked about. I still deserve respect, you know.”
“You do. And she didn’t spill your business. I just know that Wilson is thirteen now, so it’s about the time you’d think of his future.”
“Huh. Well. I want to send him to a good school. I want him to have a proper gentleman’s education so that he can take up the lifestyle that ought to have been mine.”
“I see.”
“You can’t argue with that, can you?”
“I cannot,” she agreed. “But first, I’d like to ask you about when you were prowling around the grounds of Mondial Castle the other day.”
“Me? I’ve never been there.”
“Don’t lie to me, Alfred.”
He picked at a cold lump of wax that was welded to the table top. “Well, yes, I did come down to see if you were about but I resent that being called prowling. And I am not stupid. I know you’re going to ask me about that murder that happened there, like I had anything to do with it. That’s not nice, you know. I’m hurt, I am, that you think so low of me.”
She could have slapped the mulish resentment right out of him. She wanted to. But she restrained herself and said, stiffly, “Actually, I only wanted to ask if you had seen anything or anyone acting suspiciously.”
“No. I didn’t see a thing.”
“Are you sure?”
/>
“There you go again, acting like I’m no brighter than a house-brick. Just because I never had the advantages that you have had. Yet instead of feeling charitable towards me, you kick me while I’m down. It’s only on account of my good Christian nature, all forgiving and forgetting, that I even come back to see you like this from time to time.”
Adelia wanted to hit him and laugh at the same time. So, she was supposed to be grateful that he was here? “Well, if anything occurs to you, please send me a note.”
“I could come to see you.”
“At Mondial Castle? I fear it would be impossible at the moment. It is a house in mourning.”
“That’s not what they’re saying around town.”
Harriet leaned forward and poured him a little more wine out of the decanter. Black lumps swished at the bottom. “So, what are they saying around town?”
“That there’s going to be a big party and lots of people are turning up soon.”
“The party was arranged anyway, before it all happened.” Adelia suddenly felt the need to defend Lord Mondial’s decisions. “But Dido has lost a very dear friend. Yet you have not even asked after your own niece’s health.”
His face fell. “As to that, I am sorry,” he said in a lower voice. “I am. And I feel for you all. Death is death, isn’t that right?”
Adelia nodded, accepting his apology because she knew that he meant it. He saw that as a moment of weakness, and struck immediately. “Such tragic events make us treasure our young folk even more closely, isn’t that so? As for my Wilson, he’s such a bright young man. So much potential if only it could be unlocked in the right way. I know you do only want the best for all of your family and we only need a little boost, a little temporary easing of the passage of your nephew into a good school, not Eton, not Westminster, but a good one nevertheless, you know.”
She knew that was why they were there and decided she wanted to get on with it. She pulled her handbag onto her lap and slipped a hand inside. “I am happy to help out with Wilson’s education,” she said. “But this must go towards a school for him, and not get diverted in any other direction.”
