Highgate Rise

by Anne Perry

  “What may I do for you, Mrs. Pitt?” Shaw asked, frowning at her in grave concern. “I hope you are as well as you seem? And your maid?”

  “We are very well, thank you. Our visit has nothing to do with your profession, Dr. Shaw.” There was now no purpose whatsoever in continuing with the tale of Gracie’s uncle. He would see through it and despise them both, not only for the lie, but for the inadequacy of it. “I did not come about myself.” She faced him boldly, meeting his eyes and being considerably disconcerted by the acute intelligence in them, and the directness of his gaze back at her. She took a deep breath and plunged on. “I have determined to pursue the work that your late wife was involved in regarding the housing of the poor, and their conditions. I would like to learn where she began, so I may begin in the same place.”

  There was a full minute’s total silence. Matthew Oliphant stood by the fire with the Bible in his hand, his knuckles white where he grasped it, his face pale, then flushed. Gracie was rooted to the spot. Shaw’s expression flashed from amazement to disbelief, and then suspicion.

  “Why?” he said guardedly. “If you have some passion to work with the poor or the dispossessed what is wrong with those in your own neighborhood?” His voice hovered on the edge of sarcasm. “Surely there are some? London is teeming with poor. Do you live in some area so select you have to come to Highgate to find anyone in need?”

  Charlotte could think of no answer. “You are being unnecessarily rude, Dr. Shaw.” She heard herself mimicking Aunt Vespasia’s tone, and thought for an awful moment that she sounded ridiculous. Then she saw Shaw’s face and the sudden color of shame in his cheeks.

  “I apologize, Mrs. Pitt. Of course I am.” He was contrite. “Please forgive me.” He did not mention either his bereavement or the loss of his friend; as an excuse it would have been cheap and beneath him.

  She smiled at him with all the warmth and deep empathy that she felt for him, and the very considerable liking. “The matter is forgotten.” She dismissed it charmingly. “Can you help me? I should be so obliged. Her crusade is one in which I should like to become involved myself, and draw others. It would be foolish not to profit from what she has already done. She has earned much admiration.”

  Very slowly, wordlessly, Matthew Oliphant sat down again and opened his Bible, upside down.

  “Do you?” Shaw frowned in some inner concentration. “I cannot see that it will be much advantage to you. She worked alone, so far as I know. She certainly did not work with the parish ladies, or the vicar.” He sighed. “Not that poor old Clitheridge could fight his way out of a wet paper bag!” He looked at her gravely, a kind of laughing admiration in his eyes she found a trifle discomfitting. One or two rather absurd thoughts flashed through her mind, and she dismissed them hastily, a flush in her cheeks.

  “Nevertheless I should like to try,” she insisted.

  “Mrs. Pitt,” he said gently. “I can tell you almost nothing, only that Clemency cared very much about reforming the laws. In fact I think she cared more about them than almost anything else.” His face pinched a little. “But if, as I suspect, what you are really seeking is to discover who set fire to my house, you will not accomplish it this way. It is I who was meant to die in that fire, as it was when poor Amos died.”

  She was at once fiercely sorry for him and extraordinarily angry.

  “Indeed?” Her eyebrows shot up. “How arrogant of you! Do you assume that no one else could possibly be important enough in the scheme of things, and only you arouse enough passion or fear to be murdered?”

  It was one sting too much. His temper exploded.

  “Clemency was one of the finest women alive. If you had known her, instead of arriving the moment she was dead, you wouldn’t have to be told.” He was leaning forward a little, his shoulders tight and hunched. “She did nothing to incur the kind of insane hatred that burns down houses and risks the lives of everyone in them. For heaven’s sake if you must meddle—at least do it efficiently!”

  “I am trying to!” she shouted back. “But you are determined to obstruct me. One would almost think you did not want it solved.” She pointed at him sharply. “You won’t help. You won’t tell the police anything. You stick to your wretched confidences as if they were secrets of state. What do you imagine that we are going to do with them, except catch a murderer?”

  He jerked very upright, back straight. “I don’t know any secrets that will catch anyone but a few unfortunate devils who would rather keep their diseases private than have them spread ’round the neighborhood for every able and nosy busybody to turn over and speculate on,” he shouted back. “Dear God—don’t you think I want him caught—whoever he is? He murdered my wife and my best friend—and I may be next.”

  “Don’t give yourself airs,” she said coldly, because suddenly her anger had evaporated and she was feeling guilty for being so ruthless, but she did not know how to get out of the situation she had created. “Unless you know who it is, as it appears poor Mr. Lindsay did, you are probably not in danger at all.”

  He threw an ashtray into the corner of the room, where it splintered and lay in pieces, then he walked out, slamming the door.

  Gracie was still standing on the spot, her eyes like saucers.

  Oliphant looked up from his Bible and at last realized it was upside down. He closed it quickly and stood up.

  “Mrs. Pitt,” he said very softly. “I know where Mrs. Shaw began, and some of where it led her. If you wish, I will take you.”

  Charlotte looked at his bony, agreeable face, and the quiet pain in it, and felt ashamed of her outburst for its noise and self-indulgence.

  “Thank you, Mr. Oliphant, I should be very grateful.”

  Percival drove them; it was well beyond the area of Highgate and into Upper Holloway. They stopped at a narrow street and alighted from the carriage, once again leaving it to wait. Charlotte looked around. The houses were cheek by jowl, one room upstairs and one down, to judge by the width, but there may have been more at the back beyond view. The doors were all closed and the steps scrubbed and white-stoned. It was not appreciably poorer than the street on which she and Pitt had lived when they were first married.

  “Come.” Oliphant set out along the pavement and almost immediately turned in along an alley that Charlotte had not observed before. Here it was dank and a chill draft blew on their faces, carrying the smell of raw sewage and drains.

  Charlotte coughed and reached for her handkerchief—even Gracie put her hand up to her face—but they hurried after him till he emerged in a small, dim courtyard and crossed it, warning them to step over the open gutters. At the far side he knocked on a paint-peeled door and waited.

  After several minutes it was opened by a girl of fourteen or fifteen with a gray-white face and fair hair greasy with dirt. Her eyes were pink-rimmed and there was a flicker of fear in the defiance with which she spoke.

  “Yeah? ’Oo are yer?”

  “Is Mrs. Bradley at home?” he asked quietly, opening his coat a fraction to show his clerical collar.

  Her face softened in relief. “Yeah, Ma’s in bed. She took poorly again. The doc were ’ere yest’dy an’ ’e give ’er some med’cine, but it don’t do no good.”

  “May I come in and see her?” Oliphant requested.

  “Yeah, I s’pose. But don’ wake ’er if she’s sleepin’.”

  “I won’t,” he promised, and held the door wide for Charlotte and Gracie to enter.

  Inside the narrow room was cold. Damp seeped through wallpaper, staining it with mold, and the air had an odor that was sour and clung in the back of the throat. There was no tap or standpipe, and a bucket in the corner covered with a makeshift lid served the purposes of nature. Rickety stairs led upwards through a gap in the ceiling and Oliphant went up first, cautioning Charlotte and Gracie to wait their turn in case the weight of more than one person should collapse them.

  Charlotte emerged into a bedroom with two wooden cots, both heaped with blankets. In on
e lay a woman who at a glance might have been Charlotte’s mother’s age. Her face was gaunt, her skin withered and papery, and her eyes so hollow the bones of her brow seemed almost skull-like.

  Then as Charlotte moved closer she saw the fair hair and the skin of her neck above the patched nightshirt, and realized she was probably no more than thirty. There was a handkerchief with blood on it grasped loosely in the thin hand.

  The three of them stood in silence for several minutes, staring at the sleeping woman, each racked with silent, impotent pity.

  Downstairs again, Charlotte turned to Oliphant and the girl.

  “We must do something! Who owns this—this heap of timber? It’s not fit for horses, let alone women to live in. He should be prosecuted. We will begin straightaway. Who collects the rent?”

  The girl was as white as flour; her whole body shook.

  “Don’t do that, please miss! I beg yer, don’t turn us aht. Me ma’ll die if yer put ’er in the street—and me an’ Alice and Becky’ll ’ave ter go inter the poor ’ouse. Please don’t. We aven’t done mithin’ wrong, honest we ’aven’t. We paid the rent—I swear.”

  “I don’t want to put you out.” Charlotte was aghast. “I want to force whoever owns this place to make it fit to live in.”

  The girl looked at her with disbelief.

  “Wotcher mean? If we makes a fuss ’e’ll ’ave us aht. There’s plenty more as’d be glad ter ’ave it—an’ we’ll ’ave ter go souf into—w’ere it’ll be worse. Please miss, don’t do it!”

  “Worse?” Charlotte said slowly. “But he should make this—this fit to live in. You should have water at least, and drainage. No wonder your mother is ill—”

  “She’ll get better—jus’ let ’er sleep a bit. We’re all right, miss. Just leave us be.”

  “But if—”

  “That’s wot ’appened ter Bessie Jones. She complained, an’ now she’s gorn ter live in St. Giles, an’ she ain’t got no more’n a corner o’ the room to ’erself. You let be—please miss.”

  Her fear was so palpable that Charlotte could do no more than promise to say nothing, to swear it in front of Matthew Oliphant, and leave shivering and by now aware of a rising nausea in her stomach, and an anger so tight it made all the muscles in her body ache.

  “Tomorrow I’ll take you to St. Giles,” Oliphant said quietly when they were out in the main street again. “If you want to go.”

  “I want to go.” Charlotte said the words without hesitation—if she had thought for even a moment she might have lost her resolve.

  “Did you go there with Clemency also?” she asked more gently, trying to imagine the journey she was copying, thinking of Clemency’s distress as she must have seen sights just like these. “I expect she was very moved?”

  He turned to her. His face was curiously luminous with memory that for all its bleakness held some beauty for him that still shone in his mind and warmed him till he was temporarily oblivious of the street or the cold.

  “Yes—we came here,” he answered with sweetness in his voice. “And then to St. Giles, and from there eastwards into Mile End and Whitechapel—” He might have been speaking of the pillared ruins of Isfahan, or the Golden Road to Samarkand, so did his tongue caress the words.

  Charlotte hesitated only a moment before plunging on, ignoring what was suddenly so obvious to her.

  “Then could you tell me where she went last?”

  “If I could, Mrs. Pitt, I would have offered,” he said gravely, his cheeks pink. “I only knew the general direction, because I was not with her when she found Bessie Jones. I only know that she did, because she told me afterwards. Would to God I had been.” He strove to master his anguish, and almost succeeded. “Maybe I could have saved her.” His voice cracked and finished husky and almost inaudible.

  Charlotte could not argue, although perhaps by then Clemency had already frightened those landlords and owners whose greed had eaten into them until they had destroyed her.

  Oliphant turned away, struggling for control. “But if you wish to go there, I shall try to take you—as long as you understand the risk. If we find the same place, then—” He stopped; the conclusion was not needed.

  “You are not afraid?” she asked, not as a challenge but because she was certain that he was not. He was harrowed by feelings, almost laid naked by them, and yet fear was not among them—anger, pity, indignation, loss, but not fear.

  He turned back to her, his face for a moment almost beautiful with the power of his caring.

  “You wish to continue Clemency’s work, Mrs. Pitt—and I think perhaps even more than that, you wish to learn who killed her, and expose them. So do I.”

  She did not answer; it was hardly necessary. She caught a sudden glimpse of how much he had cared for Clemency. He would never have spoken; she was a married woman, older than he and of higher social station. Anything more than friendship was impossible. But that had not altered his feeling, nor taken anything from his loss.

  She smiled at him, politely, as if she had seen no more than anyone else, and thanked him for his help. She and Gracie would be most obliged.

  Naturally she explained to Pitt what she was doing, and to what end. She might have evaded it had not Vespasia taken the children to Caroline, but their absence had to be explained and she was in no mood to equivocate.

  She did not tell him what manner of place she would be going to because nothing in her experience could have foreseen where the following two days would take her. She, Oliphant and Gracie were driven by Percival from street to street, forever narrower, darker and more foul, following the decline of the unfortunate Bessie Jones. Gracie was of inestimable help because she had seen such places before and she understood the desperation that makes men and women accept such treatment rather than lose their frail hold on space and shelter, however poor, and be driven out into the streets to be huddled in doorways shuddering with cold, exposed to the rain and casual violence.

  Finally in the later afternoon of the third day they found Bessie Jones, as Clemency Shaw had done before them. It was in the heart of Mile End, off the Whitechapel Road. There seemed to be an unusual number of police around.

  Bessie was crouching in the corner of a room no more than twelve feet by sixteen, and occupied by three families, one in each corner. There were about sixteen people in all, including two babies in arms, which cried constantly. There was a blackened potbellied stove against one wall, but it was barely alight. There were buckets for the necessities of nature, but no drain to empty either that or any other waste, except the one in the courtyard, which overflowed and the stench filled the air, catching in the throat, soiling the clothes, the hair and the skin. There was no running water. For washing, cooking, drinking, it all had to be fetched in a pail from a standpipe three hundred yards away along the street.

  There was no furniture except one broken wooden chair. People slept in what scraps of rag and blanket they could gather together for warmth; men, women and children, with nothing between them and the boards of the floor but more rags and loose ends of oakum, and the dross of the cloth industry too wretched even to remake into drab for the workhouse.

  Above the crying of children, the snoring of an old man asleep under the broken window, boarded with a loose piece of linoleum, was the constant squeaking and scuttling of rats. On the floor below were the raucous sounds of a gin mill and the shouts of drunkards as they fought, swore and sang snatches of bawdy songs. Two women lay senseless in the gutter and a sailor relieved himself against the wall.

  Below street level, in ill-lit cellars, ninety-eight women and girls sat shoulder to shoulder in a sweatshop stitching shirts for a few pence a day. It was better than the match factory with its phosphorous poisoning.

  Upstairs a brothel prepared for the evening trade. Twenty yards away rows of men lay in bunks, their bodies rotting, their minds adrift in the sweet dreams of opium.

  Bessie Jones was worn out, exhausted by the fruitless fight, and glad now at le
ast to be under shelter from the rain and to have a stove to creep close to in the night, and two slices of bread to eat.

  Charlotte emptied her purse and felt it a gross and futile thing to have done, but the money burned her hand.

  In all of it she had followed the path that Clemency Shaw had taken, and she had felt as she must have felt, but she had learned nothing as to who might have killed her, although why was only too apparent. If the ownership of such places was accredited publicly there would be some who would not care, they had no reputation or status to lose. But there were surely those who drew their money from such abysmal suffering, and who would pay dearly to keep it secret, and call it by some other name. To say one owned property implied estates somewhere in the shires; farmlands might be envisioned, rich earth yielding food, cattle, timber—not the misery, crime and disease Charlotte and Gracie had seen these few days.

  When she reached home she stripped off all her clothes, even her shift and pantaloons, and put them all in the wash, and told Gracie to do the same. She could not imagine any soap that would cleanse them of the odor of filth—her imagination would always furnish it as long as the memory lasted—but the sheer act of boiling and scrubbing would help.

  “What are you going ter do, ma’am?” Gracie asked, wide-eyed and husky. Even she had never seen such wretchedness.

  “We are going to discover who owns these abominable places,” Charlotte replied grimly.

  “An’ one of ’em murdered Miss Clemency,” Gracie added, passing over her clothes and wrapping herself in Charlotte’s old gown. The waist of it was around her hips and the skirt trailed on the floor. She looked such a child Charlotte had a moment of guilt for involving her in this fearful pursuit.

  “I believe so. Are you afraid?”

  “Yes ma’am.” Gracie’s thin little face hardened. “But I in’t stoppin’ ’ere. I’m going’ ter ’elp yer, never doubt that, an’ nob’dy in’t going’ ter stop me. Nor I in’t going’ ter let yer go there on yer own, neither.”

  Charlotte gave her a great hug, taking her utterly by surprise so she blushed fiercely with pleasure.