Holmes sighed. ‘You show a remarkable lack of patience, Watson. The plan was thwarted when William Durrington became involved in a trivial altercation with one of the passengers on the Brighton line platform. The argument developed into a fight, and resulted in Durrington being pushed onto the tracks just as a train arrived. He was badly injured and did not survive.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Mrs Chasuble. ‘I had no idea of that, though I am not in the least sorry to hear it. As a man sows, so shall he reap. When I realised that the scheme had gone awry, I supposed that he had merely mistaken the time or the day.’
‘You knew nothing at the time of his failure to collect the child, of course.’
‘Naturally not. I left the station to reacquire the perambulator. My instructions were that I should walk back through Hyde Park, as if returning to the Moncrieffs’ Upper Grosvenor Street home, before ridding myself of the encumbering conveyance in Bayswater. I was then to hide at an agreed address while I awaited my share of the proceeds. With them I intended to start a new life as a governess, with the proceeds of authorship as my nest egg. I fear now, however, that I was sadly deceived in believing that Sergeant Durrington intended to deliver them to me at all.’
‘I see that your understanding of human nature has matured with the years. For the moment, however, I am more interested in the events of that day. As you left the station, you were quite understandably in a state of some distress. As I have said, you are not a monster. You were, I imagine, quite visibly upset. And it was at that point that you met a kind gentleman who gave you his card.’
‘That is correct, although I cannot imagine how you know it. I admit that I was quite overcome by womanly tears, and Mr Thomas Cardew, though a stranger, was good enough to comfort me. As you have said, Frederick, he was the very soul of charity.’ She clutched her husband’s hand tightly.
‘You rid yourself of the perambulator as arranged, and at that point your movements pass beyond my ken. We know that Durrington’s promised money was not forthcoming. I assume you found a new situation, probably under a new name, living, I would imagine, in constant terror of the law. After some time you plucked up the courage to approach Mr Cardew for help, and he was in a position, either then or later, to offer you work as governess to his orphaned granddaughter.’
‘It was some years later,’ Mrs Chasuble agreed. ‘He told me at the time that his daughter was of age and his male ward already had a tutor, but that he would keep me in mind for any future positions that came up. He was as good as his word.’
‘After you came to live here you would have had no reason to guess that Jack Worthing was the baby you had abandoned. His unusual arrival in Mr Cardew’s custody was, I imagine, rarely discussed even among the family, and probably never with the staff. You would have known him only as Mr Cardew’s ward, and after a decade you could hardly have been expected to recognise him.’
‘Indeed, no. Even as an infant, he was unusually lacking in distinguishing features. After Mr Cardew’s death he claimed to have re-established relations with a reprehensible younger brother, which made it all the more unlikely I should guess at his true origins. I remained ignorant of them until the day that Lady Bracknell appeared in the morning-room and recognised me from her sister’s employ.’ Mrs Chasuble shuddered at the recollection. ‘Only when Mr Worthing heard us discussing the particulars of the case did I learn that he had been discovered in a handbag, and consequently realise who he was. Mr Cardew must have found him in the cloakroom shortly after I met him outside the station, although I gave him no clue that would have led him there.’
‘In Lady Bracknell’s presence you would, of course, have felt altogether too intimidated to make a full confession. You saw that the revelation of John Worthing’s true identity would be quite enough to distract from the improbabilities of your story, and you felt that there was nothing to be gained from going into further detail.’
Mrs Chasuble said, ‘It is true, to my great shame. I have always espoused the virtue of honesty, and enjoined it strictly upon my charges, but in the event the temptation to err from the path of absolute veracity was too great for me to resist.’
She began to weep, and her husband embraced her. He said, ‘Come, come, Laetitia, you must not castigate yourself so. I fear that none of us is perfectly honest. I blush to admit that I have myself on occasion exaggerated the calls upon my time, in order to cut short an unexpected visit from a troublesome parishioner.’
Holding his wife close, he looked at us. ‘What is to be done now, Mr Holmes?’
Gently, Holmes said, ‘I cannot see that anything further needs to be done, Dr Chasuble. Your wife’s remorse is obvious. Sergeant Durrington is dead, as are both General and Mrs Moncrieff, so there is no question of her testifying against her accomplice or making reparations to her victims. Indeed, her chief victim has, as you have pointed out, forgiven her. She has not profited from her crime, and no lasting harm has come from it. I cannot see that punishment would do any good in this instance. I only ask that I may rely on you for further information should I need it.’
The elderly couple tried to thank him, but he raised a hand to stop them.
Holmes said, ‘You spoke earlier of the Magdalen, Dr Chasuble. I freely admit that my knowledge of, and for that matter my interest in, holy scripture is profoundly limited, but I do happen to recall how that particular Bible passage ends. My suggestion now, Mrs Chasuble, is that you should go and sin no more.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE PRISM PAPERS
‘But how did you come to know the whole story, Holmes?’ I asked him on the train back to London, after summarising for him all I had learned of the Cardew family’s history. ‘Was it all in the police records, or did some of it come from Langdale Pike?’
‘I pieced it together from documents held by the police,’ Holmes said. ‘As they could have done themselves, had they the wit and determination.’
Outside, the shadows were lengthening as the sun sank slowly to the right of our carriage. The woodland beauty that had pleased me on the journey up to Woolton was becoming sombre and gloomy as we narrowed the distance between ourselves and the capital.
‘After your departure, I headed as arranged for Scotland Yard, where our friend Gregson obtained access for me to the records room. It did not take long to track down, in the files for 1867, the original police reports of the missing baby. That was where I first saw Mrs Chasuble’s maiden name in this connection, the nursemaid Prism being naturally the chief suspect. It was a surname I had encountered only once before, and its also being the name of Cecily’s former governess was too great a correspondence to be ignored.
‘At first I suspected that Prism and Thomas Cardew were in cahoots, and that Cardew had had her procure an infant child for reasons of his own, later rewarding her with the post of governess to his granddaughter. However, a much later and rather apologetic note, added to the Moncrieff file only two years ago, cross-references the case with another file relating to the foundling discovered by Cardew at Victoria Station. It was quite clear from this material that Thomas Cardew had made diligent efforts to trace the parents of the child he found, including communicating with the police, before adopting him as his own.
‘The reason no connection was made between a child going missing and one being discovered on the same day had much to do with the disruption and confusion caused at Victoria Station by the assault upon, and subsequent death of, one Sergeant William Durrington. The police, like everybody else, realised the child’s origins only decades later, when the newspaper reports began to appear proclaiming the rediscovery of the Handbag Heir.
‘There was also a cross-reference to a further file of correspondence from Ernest Worthing in 1895, relating to a lost cigarette case, which appears to have been ignored as the work of a crank, but that did not seem of relevance to our current investigation.
‘Having dismissed the idea that Prism had been working for Thomas Cardew, I returned to the orig
inal file, where I read the police account of the discovery of the perambulator. One fact which was not made public at the time was that the conveyance was not found empty. Inside there were several hundred handwritten pages, which turned out to be the draft manuscript for what would have been a three-volume novel.’
‘How peculiar,’ I observed.
‘I borrowed it with Gregson’s blessing,’ said Holmes, producing a thick wad of papers from an inner pocket. ‘It had been sitting unread in the archives for more than thirty years, so he had little reason to object.’ He passed me the stack of yellowing pages, each of them inscribed in fading ink in a feminine hand.
The title page announced, ‘Beata, Or a Maid’s Tale’. The author’s name was given as ‘Felicia Lens’.
‘A transparent pseudonym,’ I observed.
I turned the page and read:
High, high up, oh! so high aloft in the ancient, craggy, woody, cliffy hills of Umbria, by the purple vineyards and among the balmy olive-groves, stands a romantic hilltop town of alabaster-coloured stucco and ruddily russet terracotta roofs, its ancient stony walls the wise and silent arbiters of many romantic secrets kept by its rustic burghers and patrician noblemen over the long and lingering centuries.
I said, ‘My word, I’m glad I didn’t write this.’
‘You will, Watson, you will,’ said Holmes. ‘That is,’ he added placatorily when he saw my expression, ‘I imagine you will reproduce it, if our current adventure merits inclusion in your memoirs. Your professional opinion is not favourable, then?’
‘Certainly not. It’s absolute drivel.’
Holmes nodded gravely. ‘It seems the police had come to much the same conclusion. The investigating inspector had attempted to delve into the opening pages, but he appended a note to the effect that the prose was turgid, the dialogue stilted and the subject matter nauseatingly sentimental, and moreover that it appeared to have no bearing on the case. It was clear to me that this vital piece of evidence had never been properly read.’
‘I should rather think not,’ I said. ‘Despite its authorship, I cannot see what its bearing upon the case might be. Unless… is it written in some sort of code?’
‘Alas, no,’ said Holmes. ‘It is what it appears to be, a sincere attempt at a literary work by an enthusiastic but naïve hand. However, I could not afford to ignore it, especially since it had lain unexamined since the original abduction case.’
He smiled grimly. ‘I think you know that I am not a man to shirk his duty, Watson, but I quailed. Nevertheless, there are certain techniques that I have mastered for reading at speed when urgency requires it, which allow one to absorb the salient points of a document in the briefest time possible, and this seemed like a sufficient occasion to apply these skills.
‘I skimmed through the novel in about an hour, and by the end of it I had a very good idea of the story. It continues in much the same vein as you have seen for two and a half chapters before announcing the birth of the heroine, a good-hearted peasant girl living at an unspecified time during the Italian Renaissance, and named, as you might expect, Beata. For the majority of the book her experiences are predictable enough – growing up in respectable poverty, caring for her aged relatives, being captured by brigands, falling in love with the young guardsman who rescues her, being informed by his jealous sergeant that he has died in a skirmish, running away to join a circus and the like, before she is appointed, as a vaguely justified reward for her honesty, bravery and good-heartedness, to the duke’s household as nursemaid to his infant grandson Candido.’
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘“Ah,” indeed. The most significant part of the narrative for our purposes arrives when Beata is suborned against her will by that same Sergeant Guglielmo, a plausible yet conniving villain since discharged by the duke for his general perfidy. To placate him, she abstracts the young lordling from his crib and leaves him in a basket at a wagon-station for the scoundrel to find.
‘This development of the plot comes extremely late in the novel, and is written in a much more breathless style, and more hurried handwriting, than the rest of the manuscript. A rushed and highly implausible ending follows, in which the baby is saved, the villains receive their comeuppance, Beata is informed by the duke that her beloved is not dead after all, and she is enabled to live happily ever after.
‘A more tedious confection I have never, I am pleased to say, been called upon to peruse, but you will observe how its terms are suggestive. I am sure that “Felicia Lens” began her story a fair while before she became embroiled in the plot to kidnap Ernest Moncrieff, but she finished it as a hasty confession of what she had been forced to do, together with a wistful expression of her hoped-for outcome.’
‘But nobody realised what she was telling them, because it was so atrociously written.’ I shook my head. ‘I’m sure there’s a lesson there.’
‘I had, as I have said, dismissed the idea that Thomas Cardew had colluded in the kidnap, but from the manuscript it was apparent to me that there had nonetheless been a conspiracy to abduct the Moncrieff child. Clearly, however, something had happened to place the baby in Cardew’s hands, rather than those of Laetitia Prism’s accomplice.
‘From the rank assigned by “Felicia Lens” to the wicked Guglielmo, and the record of Sergeant William Durrington’s accidental death at Victoria that day, it was not difficult to decide what that something had been. I was also able to derive the major points of the reality underlying the fiction – Durrington’s dismissal by Colonel Moncrieff, his plot to gain revenge, his blackmailing of the young Laetitia Prism and her reluctant capitulation.
‘It remained only for me to have a discreet conversation with Merriman about where Cecily’s former governess might be found now,’ said Holmes. ‘He was kind enough to provide me with her new name and address, and so I hurried to Woolton Rectory, rather expecting that I might be following in your footsteps.’
‘Bravo, Holmes,’ I said. ‘If only the police had been so astute.’
He shook his head. ‘To be just, it would have availed them very little. The nursemaid Prism was already their chief suspect in the kidnapping, and she had successfully hidden herself away. Durrington, meanwhile, was dead, and there was nothing then to connect either of them to Cardew, who had ended up with custody of the child.’
‘No, I see. I say, though, how did you find out about Miss Prism meeting Cardew at Victoria that day?’
‘That was rather a toss of the dice, I admit, but it seemed to be the only explanation that would fit the facts. For Miss Prism to end up by happenstance in the employ of the very man she had abandoned as a child would be a coincidence on a scale that beggars belief. Coincidences occur, and it would be an error to rule them out of my considerations altogether, but I always look very carefully indeed at the alternatives.
‘One possibility that occurred to me was that Miss Prism had taken the position as Cecily Cardew’s governess out of concern for Jack Worthing, knowing full well that he was the misplaced Moncrieff infant and wishing to observe for herself that he was living a happy life. This idea I dismissed. To do such a thing she would have to be driven by unassuageable guilt, yet she could have alleviated this by revealing his identity, anonymously if need be, at any time during his childhood rather than waiting twenty-eight years to be confronted by Lady Bracknell.
‘If she was ignorant of Worthing’s origins, then the apparent improbability could only be explained by the one known connection between herself and the Cardew family: that she and Thomas Cardew were at Victoria Station at around the same time on the same day in 1867, respectively abandoning the child and finding him. Given her likely state of mind, and Cardew’s known character, the scene I concocted seemed the most likely.’
‘And Mrs Chasuble confirmed it.’
‘She was remarkably helpful, under the circumstances.’
Had she been, however? I pondered for a while. The train was approaching King’s Cross now, and once again the gloomy tenements
and smokestacks of the capital were springing up around us like weeds. ‘I’m not sure exactly what we’ve learned, though, Holmes. We know what happened to Ernest Moncrieff as a baby, but as you said, there’s not much use we can make of that knowledge now. I really think the information I gathered was more useful. Although Cecily’s parents are believed to be deceased, her mother is of the right age to be Mrs Teville. If the rumours about Mrs Teville’s daughter are in any way accurate, then Cecily might be she.’
‘All data is valuable, Watson, and the more detailed our knowledge of the background to the case, the greater our chances of a full solution. I confess that none of the information we have obtained during our day’s excursion is immediately applicable to the matter Lord Goring called us in to investigate. In that respect, our most useful information still comes from Langdale Pike.’
‘You mean that Illingworth’s a knave,’ I asked, ‘and that Mrs Teville has a secret? That, too, seems rather thin stuff to me, Holmes.’
‘We also know that Bunbury is a fiction, and we may guess that our dead man intended by the name to send some message to the Moncrieffs. That is, if it were his real name it would be a very great coincidence, and I have already given you my view of those. I told Gregson as much when I saw him.’
‘Do you think Bunbury had blackmail in mind?’ I wondered, thinking of the unfortunate young Laetitia Prism. ‘It would be a crude way of signalling that he knew of Algernon’s past and was willing to make it public.’
‘It is a distinct possibility,’ said Holmes, ‘and one which we could do worse than to put before one or other of the brothers.’
‘But all the family have denied knowing the name,’ I pointed out, ‘even Lady Bracknell. What makes you think they will change their tune now?’
‘I am moderately sure that Algernon was on the verge of confiding in us yesterday, before his aunt’s untimely arrival,’ Holmes said. ‘Let us speak to him once again, now that we know the truth.’
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