by Y. S. Lee
Angelica knew the way to Great Russell Street, a detail that Mary found noteworthy. The museum had recently been rebuilt at enormous expense, and the two women were silent as they entered the courtyard and contemplated its elegant façade. On holidays, the building swarmed with bodies: courting sweethearts, scowling pedants, packs of mewling children. Today, however, it was relatively quiet – which is to say only half full – and they made their way into the imposing entrance hall without difficulty.
“I didn’t know you were fond of museums,” said Mary.
“Oh, it’s the only part of my character that’s not hopelessly superficial,” replied Angelica. “My father used to take me, as a child. I was absolutely fascinated by the natural specimens. I once frightened him terribly by disappearing. After a frantic search, he and some museum employees found me beneath a hippopotamus, contemplating its, er, underbelly.”
The cloakroom attendant who took their umbrellas gave them a disapproving look, which made them both smile. “The natural history exhibits are closed today, due to illness,” he said.
“The exhibits are ill?” asked Mary, with mock innocence.
Angelica couldn’t quite stifle a giggle.
“Illness on the part of the museum staff,” snapped the cloakroom attendant.
“Did you tell your mother about the hippo incident?” asked Mary, after they’d moved away. It was slightly awkward, but the most natural way of introducing the subject of Mrs Thorold.
“Not at the time,” said Angelica. “But of course, it was too good a story to be kept for ever, so my father told it once I passed the age for wandering off. I’m afraid I don’t remember the event myself; only his fondness for the tale.” Her eyes glinted with moisture as she uttered this last sentence, and she dabbed them fiercely with a handkerchief. “Perhaps it’s just as well we can’t pay homage to the hippopotami; I couldn’t bear the disappointment if it turned out they weren’t twelve feet tall.”
This was the tone of their visit: light-hearted yet nostalgic, sentimental but disciplined. They wandered the vast halls in companionable silence. Angelica volunteered an occasional remark, but she remained, for the most part, in a contemplative mood.
Mary counselled herself to patience. While it was impossibly tempting to question Angelica on the subject of her mother, that was the fastest route to mistrustful silence. It was enough that Mary was conveniently idle and available just at the time Angelica most wanted companionship. The rest would come. She believed that. But still, the question buzzed about her mind, taunting, distracting: would it come in time?
It might not have come at all except that they wandered, perhaps by chance, into a room crammed with artefacts from the East. There were curved swords and thick, round shields; sculpted breastplates and silver-tipped helmets; sheet-gold drinking-cups and fanciful talismans. And in a glass-topped case at the centre of the room lay an extraordinary amulet: a polished circle featuring the shape of a bird in flight, worked in gold and rubies and emeralds. It gleamed in the prosaic London daylight like an ember amidst ashes.
Both Mary and Angelica fell silent at the sight of it. They drifted closer to the jewelled disc, gazes fixed and unblinking, until the frames of their crinolines brushed the base of the wooden case. It was a heart-stopping piece, a physical token of arrogance, power and unimaginable wealth.
Mary swallowed hard and glanced at Angelica, whose face was creased with something that looked very much like pain. Mary’s instant thought was of Mr Thorold, imprisoned for smuggling these sorts of treasures. She bit her lip and remained silent, staring at the piece, scanning their surroundings. This was the critical moment and they were alone in this narrow chamber.
One room over, a group of museum-goers was being condescended to by a man in a rusty-black frock-coat. There was a young couple paying more attention to each other than to the exhibits. A shabby clerk with an untrimmed beard. A middle-aged bluestocking with pince-nez. But near them, nobody. She needed to exercise patience. Keep silent. Pray that they weren’t interrupted.
After a long minute Angelica spoke, her voice scratchy and waterlogged. “Mary … do you think he did it?”
Too many thoughts clamoured for voice. Yes, of course. Who else? Do you know something that Scotland Yard doesn’t? Eventually, Mary said very quietly, “I don’t know. I suppose I assumed the police had the right man.” What about the right woman? What else was there to know about Angelica’s mother?
Angelica nodded. “Everybody does.” She glanced swiftly, accusingly, at Mary. “Including my mother, for why else would she live in isolation in rural France? She was born in Chelsea. She’s a Londoner, through and through. She would never leave this place, even if her own life was at risk. Do you remember how she flatly refused to leave town during the Great Stink? You must remember; you were there. My father was beside himself with anxiety; he had already let a house in Kent, or wherever it was, and my mother wouldn’t hear of leaving! And that was it: my father knew she couldn’t be budged.
“But the day after my father’s arrest, she vanished. I came back to the house – the house in Cheyne Walk, I mean – before leaving for Germany. She had disowned me – again, you were there – but I thought she had spoken in anger. I thought perhaps we could be reconciled before I left the country. But she was … gone. Servants dismissed. Everything abandoned. I couldn’t even get in to retrieve my things.
“I thought about breaking a window. After all, it was my house. But there was a constable on the corner watching me – I suppose my behaviour did look suspicious – and I didn’t want to explain anything… Anyway. It’s all in the past. But all this to say, even my mother must believe in his guilt. If she thought him innocent, she would stay here and damn the social consequences.”
Mary nodded. This was the most obvious interpretation if one knew nothing about Mrs Thorold’s piracy. Yet it seemed incredible that Angelica should be ignorant of the fact that there was an arrest warrant out for her mother. “Did she … did Scotland Yard never contact you?”
Angelica shrugged. “They interviewed me before I went to Germany. But how I could have known the first thing about my father’s business? The firm was Thorold and Son, not Thorold and Daughter. I was too busy being polished and finished and finding a suitable husband.” There was no mistaking the bitterness in her tone. Yet…
“What about your mother? Did the police mention that she might be involved?”
Angelica snorted. “I told them what I thought of that asinine theory. My mother was far too fragile, not to mention too self-absorbed, to assist my father in his business. And why would she work against him? She had a comfortable life, a large house and nothing to do each day except ride out in the carriage and consult her physicians. Undermining the company would have destroyed her own comfort and security. Only a fool would consider it.”
A fool or an embittered, hate-warped criminal, thought Mary. “And they believed you?”
“They had to. I was the person best placed to know, and by then, Mamma had already vanished.”
“Some would call that suspicious behaviour on her part. Why not stay and prove one’s innocence?”
“Questions like that are why you’ll never truly be a lady,” muttered Angelica, although she didn’t seem to intend it as an insult. “My mother was far too well-bred to submit to questions from the police.” She uttered the word “police” in much the same tone she might have used for “vermin”.
“But leaving the country so precipitately … doesn’t that look like an admission of guilt?” persisted Mary.
Angelica flushed and paused. “It would be, if she were accused of anything that was actually within her powers. But the charges against her are so outrageous, so absolutely, utterly fantastic, that I can scarcely believe they’ve been made. They seem more like a monster of my imagination than anything in real life.”
Mary was quiet. Denial was endlessly powerful, and there was no point in antagonizing Angelica further. After a minute, she as
ked, “Do you think she might come back once the scandal is forgotten and the charges dropped? It’s been more than two years…”
Angelica sighed. “She might. Truly, I had hoped she might come back before Papa died. You know, to see him one last time. Impossible, of course.”
Mary watched her face for a moment before asking, “Do you want to see her?”
A fast-moving cloud of misery scudded across Angelica’s expression. “Yes and no.” She paused and traced a pattern in the dust of the glass jewel-case. “I still have nightmares about the last time I saw her, you know. The shouting, the recriminations, that vicious look in her eyes…” After a few moments, she sighed and said, “Nevertheless, something changes when one is nearly alone in the world. With my father gone, I’ve begun to long for my mother in a way I never did when they were both alive. There’s something about her being my last remaining relation… I don’t know if you’ll understand the feeling, being an orphan.”
Mary’s mouth was dry but she managed to whisper, “I can imagine.”
Angelica glanced at her sceptically. “Can you, indeed? I won’t say it’s worse than being an orphan, but at the moment, she’s more of a phantom than a relation.”
Mary drew a deep breath. “I don’t suppose you’re in contact with her at all?”
Angelica made an equivocal gesture. “Occasionally, I write to her at a poste restante address in rural France. It’s very unreliable, the foreign post, and unbelievably sluggish. But we have managed to exchange letters, now and again.”
The tingling sensation in Mary’s body was almost unbearable. A link! An undeniable, traceable connection between mother and daughter! She managed to say, in a tolerably normal voice, “Did she know you were coming to London? Because of your father’s illness?”
Angelica shook her head. “I wrote to her, of course, to let her know, but I didn’t stay to receive a reply.” She sighed. “That’s the most frustrating part: she hadn’t any close friends or family, and all the others must be as dead to her as my so-called friends are to me now. Even if she were actually here now, in town, we’d never find each other unless we actually ran into one another in the street.”
Mary thought about that. There was no reason for Angelica to tell her all this. If she were secretly in cahoots with her mother’s criminal activities, it would be much simpler and safer for her to deny everything: no contact, whatsoever, since that fateful spring of 1858. “What about an advertisement in the newspaper? Didn’t she read the Times? You can get that abroad…”
“What a memory you have, Mary Quinn. She did.” Angelica straightened, as though braced by the idea of action. “I suppose if I advertised and received an immediate reply, I could delay my departure by a day or two. Or if she’s still in France, I could detour to see her on my journey back to Vienna. Yes. It’s only a very remote chance, but I shall place an advertisement in tomorrow’s paper. I dare say your excellent Miss Treleaven would give me permission to use the Academy’s address.”
Mary controlled the dangerous impulse to smile. The image of Mrs Thorold walking boldly into the lion’s den was tempting, indeed. “I dare say.”
Angelica drooped suddenly, remembering. “Is it worthwhile, do you think? It’s more of a fool’s errand than anything else.”
“I suppose it depends. Might it help soothe this yearning to see her? To know that you’ve done everything possible to contact her?”
Angelica rubbed her temples. “If nothing else, it might allow me to sleep. I can’t take many more of these broken nights.” The two women turned away from the jewellery display and began to retrace their steps through the museum, past the pompous guide, who was just leading his group towards the amulet.
“Three more days in town,” mused Angelica. “I suppose a great deal could happen in the next three days.”
To Mary’s ears, her words sounded like nothing less than a prophecy.
Eleven
As they emerged from the museum, Angelica declared her intention of returning to the Academy for a nap; she had scarcely slept for over a fortnight. She insisted that she would go alone and asked Mary, instead of accompanying her, to deliver the text of her advertisement to the offices of the Times. Mary hesitated. She had a strong sense of being manipulated. Was this simply part of a larger plan for Angelica and her mother to meet up privately? Yet Angelica was insistent; good manners and the need for discretion meant that Mary could only agree. She consoled herself with the knowledge that Angelica was still being shadowed by another member of the Agency, and left her on the front steps of the museum without a backward glance.
The Times office was located in Blackfriars, not the sort of area that Angelica would have been brought up to know, but familiar enough to Mary. She chose to walk. It was a distance of only about two miles, and the afternoon promised to be relatively dry.
Printing House Yard was unsigned, and Mary found it only by threading her way in and out of each narrow street and unpromising alley in the area. She had expected to navigate by the roar and rattle of a printing press, the dashing of reporters and errand boys and a steady stream of insiders feeding precious information to the paper’s editors. Instead, she eventually stumbled into a sleepy-looking courtyard with a couple of scruffy, ailing trees behind a high iron fence and a sign that read, simply, the times.
Once inside, she understood the reason for the quiet: this was the lull in the news cycle, the one period during which the building was permitted to drowse. In a few hours, the Yard would teem with journalists, editors would arrive to bring shape and order to information and the small, ink-stained boys known as printer’s devils would gamble their lungs and their fingers to ensure that the printing presses kept turning. The roar of the presses would rattle the gates until four or five in the morning.
Now, however, she edged past a shrivelled-looking man peeling an equally shrivelled orange, who directed her towards the Advertisements Office with a lackadaisical tilt of the head. This office stood separate from the main building. Even before Mary opened the door, she heard the hum and clatter of activity within.
The room was populated by men for whom tidiness, let alone fashion, had never been a concern: faded, ill-fitting frock coats, torn and ink-stained shirt-sleeves and squashed, greasy hats were the order of the day here. They hunched over desks, clustered around tables, lounged dangerously in open windows. The room was lit with a bizarre combination of candles, gaslight and oil lamps, each light source adding its own characteristic odour to the overwhelming smell of stale sweat, old cooking, anxiety and, curiously, wet dog, that filled the room with a near-visible fug.
Mary entered, presented herself at the desk nearest the door and coughed discreetly. The desk’s occupant, a freckle-faced young man with extremely grubby shirt cuffs, blinked up at her, blushed and leapt up, promptly knocking over his chair. “Beg your pardon, miss,” he said, scrabbling to right the furniture. “Er, are you here to see somebody?”
“The person in charge of personal advertisements, if you please.”
“Right you are. You want Jimmy Hobbs, I reckon. Just a moment, miss.” He turned his head thirty degrees and bellowed in a honking sort of tenor, “Hobbs!” When no answer came, he tried again. “Hobbs, I say!”
“What?” came the eventual, surly reply.
“Customer!”
At length, Jimmy Hobbs deigned to appear, scowling at Mary through a pair of spectacles cloudy with fingerprints. “What’s your business, miss?”
Mary unfolded Angelica’s carefully worded note. “I’d like to place this advertisement in tomorrow’s paper, if you please.”
Jimmy Hobbs squinted at the copperplate script, pretending that it was difficult to decipher. “To Mrs H. M. T., late of Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, now resident in France. A member of your family dearly wishes to see you and requests your confidential reply to Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls, Acacia Road, St John’s Wood, London.” His gaze flicked up to Mary. “Just one day? Chances of her seeing it are
slim to none, miss.”
“The next three days, then.”
He remained dissatisfied. “An ad like that, you ought to run it for a week, at least. Supposing she’s poorly for a few days and doesn’t get the paper for a spell? Wasted money, that. And there’s a saving of ten per cent if it runs over a week.”
“Three days, please,” repeated Mary.
Jimmy Hobbs sighed at the stupidity of the world and said, “Right. That’s thirty-five words at ha’penny a word, for three days, makes four shillings, fourpence ha’penny, if you please. Cash only.”
A few moments later, Mary was out of the door with a lighter purse and a head full of unanswered questions. Ought she to have continued to advertise on Angelica’s behalf? Any contact from Mrs Thorold might be useful, even if Angelica was safely back in Vienna by the time she replied. Or was this a fool’s errand, with Mrs Thorold either unreachable in rural France or too clever to respond to such a transparent ruse? The geographic scope of this assignment was quite new to Mary, and she wondered if she would have cause to travel abroad as part of her search. And if requested to do so by the Agency, how might she respond?
Her thoughts reverted immediately to James. This was the fifth day of their self-imposed separation; the first time since their engagement and the founding of Quinn and Easton that they had been out of contact for more than a day or so. Despite her hectic days and sound-asleep nights, James’s absence was more profound than even she had anticipated. She was continually addressing mental remarks to him, inventing sly quips for his pleasure, and eagerly consulting his opinion – only to remember that not only was he absent, he would continue to be for some time. Life without James was flatter, duller, oddly hollow. It was a realization that alarmed her: how had she grown so dependent upon a single person? Her only consolation was that she, with all her flaws, seemed equally necessary to his happiness. So this was modern love. Or another of its iterations, at least.
She awoke from her reverie to find herself striding southwards down the Commercial Road. Thoughts of Mrs Thorold must have directed her, in an unconscious way, towards the river. Thanks to the wintry chill, she couldn’t smell it from here. She could, however, hear its constant life: the horns and bells of ships and barges, the clamour of voices calling orders, immediately augmented by others protesting, countermanding and grumbling about the same. Instead of going directly down to the docks, however, Mary turned her steps towards one of the small side streets off Butcher Row. Lang had given her his address and now that she was relatively near, she could not deny herself the satisfaction of passing by his lodgings. She had no expectation that he would be at home. She merely wanted a little more detail with which to furnish her mental image of her cousin.
