Highgate Rise

by Anne Perry

  “So yer want a room?” he said mildly. “I daresay as I can find yer one. Mebbe if yer can pay fer it, one all ter yerselves, like. Ow abaht five shillin’s a week?”

  Jack’s lip curled with distaste and he reached out and put his hand on Emily’s arm. “Actually you mistake our purpose,” he said very frankly, looking at Thickett with hard eyes. “I represent Smurfitt, Taylor and Mordue, Solicitors. My name is John Consterdine.” He saw Thickett’s face tighten in a mixture of anger and caution. “There is a suit due to be heard regarding property upon which there have been acts of negligence which bear responsibility for considerable loss. Since you collect the rents for this property, we assume you own it, and therefore are liable—”

  “No I don’t!” Thickett’s eyes narrowed and he tightened his body defensively. “I collect rents, that’s all. Just collect. That’s an honest job and yer got no business wi’ me. I can’t ’elpyer.”

  “I am not in need of help, Mr. Thickett,” Jack said with considerable aplomb. “It is you, if you own the property, who will shortly be in prison for undischarged debt—”

  “Oh no I won’t. I don’t own nuffin but this ’ouse, which in’t ’ad nuffin wrong wif it fer years. Anyway”—he screwed up his face in new appraisal, his native common sense returning, now the first alarm had worn off—“if yer a lawyer, ’oo are they? Lawyers’ clerks, eh?” He jabbed a powerful finger towards Emily, Charlotte and Gracie.

  Jack answered with transparent honesty.

  “This is my wife, this is my sister-in-law, and this is her maid. I brought them because I knew you would be little likely to see me alone, having a good idea who I was and why I came. And circumstances proved me right. You took us for a family on hard fortune and needing to rent your rooms. The law requires that I serve papers on you—” He made as if to reach into his inside pocket.

  “No it don’t,” Thickett said rapidly. “I don’t own no buildings; like I said, I just collect the rents—”

  “And put them in your pocket,” Jack finished for him. “Good. You’ll likely have a nice fund somewhere to pay the costs—”

  “All I ’ave is me wage wot I’m paid for it. I give all the rest, ceptin’ my bit, over.”

  “Oh yes?” Jack’s eyebrows went up disbelievingly. “To whom?”

  “Ter ve manager, o’ course. Ter ’im wot manages the business fer ’o’ever owns all them buildings along Lisbon Street.”

  “Indeed? And who is he?” The disbelief was still there.

  “I dunno. W’ere the ’ell are you from? D’yer think people ’oo ’as places like vat puts their names on the door? Yer daft, or suffink?”

  “The manager,” Jack backtracked adeptly. “Of course the owner wouldn’t tell the likes of you, if you don’t report to him—who is the manager?’ I’m going to serve these papers on someone.”

  “Mr. Buffery, Fred Buffery. Yer’ll find ’im at Nicholas Street, overbe’ind the brewery, vat’s w’ere ’e does business. Yer go an’ serve yer papers on ’im. It in’t nuffink ter do wi’ me. I just take the rents. It’s a job—like yours.”

  Jack did not bother to dispute it with him. They had what they wanted and he had no desire to remain. Without expressing any civilities he opened the door and they all left, finding the carriage a few houses away, and proceeding to the next address.

  Here they were informed that Mr. Buffery was taking luncheon at the neighboring public house, the Goat and Compasses, and they decided it would be an excellent time to do the same. Emily particularly was fascinated. She had never been inside such an establishment before, and Charlotte had only in more salubrious neighborhoods, and that on infrequent occasions.

  Inside was noisy with laughter, voices in excited and often bawdy conversation, and the clink of glasses and crockery. It smelled of ale, sweat, sawdust, vinegar and boiled vegetables.

  Jack hesitated. This was not a suitable place for ladies, the thought was as plain on his face as if he had spoken it.

  “Nonsense,” Emily said fiercely just behind him. “We are all extremely hungry. Are you going to refuse to get us luncheon?”

  “Yes I am—in this place,” he said firmly. “We’ll find something better, even if it’s a pie stall. We can get Mr. Buffery when he returns to his office.”

  “I’m staying here,” Emily retorted. “I want to see—it’s all part of what we are doing.”

  “No it isn’t.” He took her arm. “We need Buffery to tell us who he manages the building for; we don’t need this place. I’m not going to argue about it, Emily. You are coming out.”

  “But Jack—”

  Before the altercation could proceed any further Gracie slid forward and grasped the bartender waiting on the next table, pulling his sleeve till he turned to see what was upsetting his balance.

  “Please mister,” she appealed to him with wide eyes. “Is Mr. Buffery in ’ere? I can’t ’ear ’is voice, an’ I don’t see too well. E’s me uncle an’ I got a message fer ’im.”

  “Give it ter me, girl, an’ I’ll give it ’im,” the bartender said not unkindly.

  “Oh I carsn’t do that, mister, it’d be more ’n me life’s worf. Me pa’d tan me summink wicked.”

  “ ’Ere, I’ll take yer. E’s over ’ere in the corner. Don’t you bovver ’im now, mind. I’ll not ’ave me customers bowered. You give yer message, then scarper, right?”

  “Yes mister. Thank yer, mister.” And she allowed him to lead her over to the far corner, where a man with a red face and golden red hair was seated behind a small table and a plate generously spread with succulent pie and crisp pickles and a large slice of ripe cheese. Two tankards of ale stood a hand’s reach away.

  “Uncle Fred?” she began, for the bartender’s benefit, hoping fervently at least Charlotte, if not all of them, were immediately behind her.

  Buffery looked at her with irritation.

  “I in’t yer uncle. Go and bother someone else. I in’t interested in your sort. If I want a woman I’ll find me own, a lot sassier than you—and I don’t give ter beggars.”

  “ ’Ere!” the bartender said angrily. “You said as ’e were yer uncle.”

  “So ’e is,” Gracie said desperately. “Me pa said as ter tell ’im me gramma’s took bad, an’ we need money fer ’elp for ’er. She’s that cold.”

  “That right?” the bartender demanded, turning to Buffery. “You runnin’ out on yer own ma?”

  By this time Charlotte, Emily and Jack were all behind Gracie. She felt the warmth of relief flood through her. She sniffed fiercely, half afraid, half determined to play this for all it was worth.

  “Yer got all them ’ouses, Uncle Fred, all Lisbon Street mostly. You can find Gramma a nice place w’ere she can be warm. She’s real bad. Ma’ll look after ’er, if’n yer just find a better place. We got water on all the walls an’ it’s cold summink awful.”

  “I in’t yer Uncle Fred,” Buffery said furiously. “I in’t never seen yer before. Git out of ’ere. ’Ere—take this!” He thrust a sixpence at her. “Now get out of ’ere.”

  Gracie ignored the sixpence, with difficulty, and burst into tears—with ease.

  “That won’t buy more’n one night. Then wot’ll we do? Yer got all the ’ouses on Lisbon Street. Why can’t yer get Ma and Pa a room in one of ’em, so we can keep dry? I’ll work, honest I will. We’ll pay yer.”

  “They in’t my ’ouses, yer little fool!” Buffery was embarrassed now as other diners turned to look at the spectacle. “D’yer think I’d be ’ere eatin’ cold pie and drinkin’ ale if I got the rents fer that lot? I jus’ manages the bus’ness of ’em. Now get aht an’ leave me alone, yer little bleeder. I in’t never seen yer an’ I got no ma wot’s sick.”

  Gracie was saved further dramatic effort by Jack stepping forward and pretending to be a lawyer’s clerk again, entirely unconnected with Gracie, and offering his services to dispatch her on her way. Buffery accepted eagerly, very aware now of his associates and neighbors staring at him. His dis
comfort offered a better sideshow than many of the running patterers who sang ballads of the latest news or scandal. This was immediate and the afflicted one was known to them.

  When Buffery had identified himself, Jack told Gracie to leave, which she did rapidly and with deep gratitude, after picking up the sixpence. Jack then proceeded to threaten him with lawsuits as accessory to fraud, and Buffery was ready to swear blind that he did not own the buildings in Lisbon Street, and prove it if necessary before the lawyer who took the rent money from him every month, less his own miserable pittance for the service he performed.

  After a brief luncheon, early afternoon found them in the offices on Bethnal Green Road of Fulsom and Son, Penrose and Fulsom, a small room up narrow stairs where Jack insisted on going alone. He returned after a chilly half hour. Emily and Charlotte and Gracie were wrapped in carriage rugs, Gracie still glowing from her triumph in the public house, and the subsequent praise she had received.

  They spent until dark trying to track down the property management company whose name Jack had elicited, by a mixture of lies and trickery from the seedy little Mr. Penrose, but eventually were obliged to return home unsuccessful.

  Charlotte intended to recount the day’s events to Pitt, but when he arrived home late, lines of weariness deep in his face, and in his eyes a mixture of eagerness and total bafflement, she set aside her own news and asked after his.

  He sat down at the kitchen table and picked up the mug of tea she had automatically put before him, but instead of drinking it he simply warmed his hands holding it, and began to talk.

  “We went to Shaw’s solicitors today and read Clemency’s will. The estate was left to Shaw, as we had been told, all except a few personal items to friends. The most remarkable was her Bible, which she left to Matthew Oliphant, the curate.”

  Charlotte could see nothing very odd in this. One might well leave a Bible to one’s minister, especially if he were as sincere and thoughtful as Oliphant. She could almost certainly have had no idea of his feelings for her; they had been so desperately private. She recalled his bony, vulnerable face as clearly as if she had seen it a few moments ago.

  Why was Pitt so concerned? It seemed ordinary enough. She looked at him, waiting.

  “Of course the Bible was destroyed in the fire.” He leaned forward a little, elbows on the table, his face puckered in concentration. “But the solicitor had seen it—it was an extraordinary thing, leather bound, tooled in gold and with a hasp and lock on it which he thought must be brass, but he wasn’t sure.” His eyes were bright with the recollection. “And inside every initial letter of a chapter was illuminated in color and gold leaf with the most exquisite tiny paintings.” He smiled slowly. “As if one glimpsed a vision of heaven or hell through lighted keyholes. She showed it to him just once, so he would know what item he was dealing with and there could be no mistake. It had been her grandfather’s.” His face shadowed for a moment with distaste. “Not Worlingham, on the other side.” Then the awareness of the present returned and with it the waste and the destruction. His face was suddenly blank and the light died out of it. “It must have been marvelous, and worth a great deal. But of course it’s gone with everything else.”

  He looked at her, puzzled and anxious. “But why on earth should she leave it to Oliphant? He’s not even the vicar, he’s only a curate. He almost certainly won’t stay there in Highgate. If he gets a living it will be elsewhere—possibly even in a different county.”

  Charlotte knew the answer immediately and without any effort of reasoning. It was as obvious to her as to any woman who had loved and not dared to show it, as she had once, ages ago, before Pitt. She had been infatuated with Dominic Corde, her eldest sister’s husband, when Sarah was alive and they all lived in Cater Street. Of course that had died as delusion became reality and impossible, agonizing love resolved into a fairly simple friendship. But she thought that for Clemency Shaw it had remained achingly real. Matthew Oliphant’s character was not a sham she had painted on by dream, as Charlotte had with Dominic. He was not handsome, dashing, there at every turn in her life; he was at least fifteen years her junior, a struggling curate with barely the means of subsistence, and to the kindest eye he was a little plain and far from graceful.

  And yet a spirit burned inside him. In the face of other people’s agony Clitheridge was totally inadequate, graceless, inarticulate and left on the outside untouched. Oliphant’s compassion robbed him of awkwardness because he felt the pain as if it were his own and pity taught his tongue.

  The answer was clear. Clemency had loved him just as much as he had loved her, and been equally unable to show it even in the slightest way, except when she was dead to leave him something of infinite value to her, and yet which would not seem so very remarkable that it would hurt his reputation. A Bible, not a painting or an ornament or some other article which would betray an unseemly emotion, just a Bible—to the curate. Only those who had seen it would know—and perhaps that would be the solicitor—and Stephen Shaw.

  Pitt was staring at her across the table.

  “Charlotte?”

  She looked up at him, smiling a very little, suddenly a tightness in her throat.

  “He loved her too, you know,” she said, swallowing hard. “I realized that when he was helping me to follow Bessie Jones and those awful houses. He knew the way she went.”

  Pitt put the cup down and reached to take her hands, gently, holding them and touching her fingers one by one. There was no need to say anything else, and he did hot wish to.

  In fact it was the following morning, just before he left, that he told her the other thing that had so troubled him. He was tying up his boots at the front door and she was holding his coat.

  “The lawyers have sorted the estate already. It’s quite simple. There is no money—only a couple of hundred pounds left.”

  “What?” She felt she must have misunderstood him.

  He straightened up and she helped him on with the coat.

  “There is no money left,” he repeated. “All the Worlingham money she inherited is gone, except about two hundred and fourteen pounds and fifteen shillings.”

  “But I thought there was a lot—I mean, wasn’t Theophilus rich?”

  “Extremely. And all of it went to his two daughters, Prudence Hatch and Clemency Shaw. But Clemency has none left.”

  There was one ugly thought which she had to speak because it would haunt her mind anyway. “Did Shaw spend it?”

  “No—the solicitor says definitely not. Clemency herself paid huge drafts to all kinds of people—individuals and societies.”

  “Whatever for?” said Charlotte, although the beginning of an idea was plain in her mind, as she could see that it was in his also. “Housing reform?”

  “Yes—most of it that the solicitor knew about, but there is a great deal he cannot trace—to individuals he has never heard of.”

  “Are you going to find them?”

  “Of course. Although I don’t think it has anything to do with the fire. I still believe that was intended for Shaw, although I haven’t even the beginning of proof as to why.”

  “And Amos Lindsay?”

  He shrugged. “Because he knew, or guessed, who was responsible; perhaps from something Shaw said, without realizing its significance himself. Or even uglier and perhaps more likely, whoever it is is still after Shaw, and that fire was a failed attempt to kill him also.” He pulled his muffler off the hook and put it around his neck, the ends hanging loosely. “And of course it is still not impossible Shaw set them himself: the first to kill Clemency, the second to kill Lindsay because in some way he had betrayed himself to him—or feared he had.”

  “That’s vile!” she said fiercely. “After Lindsay had been his closest friend. And why? Why should Shaw murder Clemency? You just said there was no money to inherit.”

  He hated saying it, and the revulsion showed in his face as he formed the words. “Precisely because there is no money. If it was all gone,
and he needed more, then Flora Lutterworth was young, very pretty and the sole heiress to the biggest fortune in Highgate. And she is certainly very fond of him—to the point where it is the cause of local gossip.”

  “Oh,” she said very quietly, unable to find anything to refute what he said, although she refused to believe it unless there was inescapable proof.

  He kissed her very gently, and she knew he understood what she felt, and shared it. Then he left, and she turned immediately and went upstairs to dress for the day’s journey with Emily, Jack and Gracie.

  It took all morning to trace the management company, and a mixture of evasions and trickery to elicit from them the name of the solicitors, this time a highly reputable firm in the City which took care of the affairs of the company which actually owned the properties in Lisbon Street, and also several others.

  At two o’clock they were all seated in the warm and extremely comfortable offices of Messrs Warburg, Warburg, Boddy and Boddy, awaiting Mr. Boddy Senior’s return from an extended luncheon with a client. Grave young clerks perched on stools writing in perfect copperplate script on documents of vellum, which had scarlet seals dangling from them. Errand boys scurried on silent feet, discreet and obedient, and a wrinkled man in a stiff, winged collar kept a careful eye on them, never moving from his wooden chair behind the desk. Gracie, who had never been in an office of any sort before, was fascinated and her eyes followed every movement.

  Eventually Mr. Boddy returned, he was silver-haired, smooth-faced, impeccably bland in voice and manner. He disregarded the women and addressed himself solely to Jack. It seemed he had not moved with the times and recognized that women now had a legal entity. To him they were still appendages to a man’s property: his pleasure possibly, his responsibility certainly, but not to be informed or consulted.

  Charlotte bristied and Emily took a step forward, but Jack’s hand stayed her and as a matter of tactics she obeyed. In the last two days she had learned a quite new respect for his ability to read character and to obtain information.