‘What the devil was it doing in your hand in the first place?’ Adam asked.
‘’Ad it in this pocket, first off,’ the manservant said, hauling at the cloth of his jacket to show where he meant. ‘I was shifting it to the other ’un but the bugger’s got a life of its own. Always ’andy to ’ave, mind. Never know when you might need to wallop summ’un.’
Hetty, who had been eyeing Quint with poorly concealed distaste, began to back into the corner of her room. ‘No need for any wallopin’ ’ere. You’d best know I can scream like a bloody cockatoo, if I want to. And there’s always a copper standing near the railway arches.’
‘There will be no walloping of any kind, Miss Gallant.’ Adam raised his hands soothingly for the second time in ten minutes. ‘For God’s sake, Quint, put that wretched thing away. Have you no idea how to behave in the home of a young lady?’
Grumbling to himself, the manservant thrust the iron bar back into the depths of his jacket.
‘These daguerreotypes of Dolly as nature intended,’ Adam said, trying to return the conversation to its earlier subject.
‘What of ’em?’ Hetty, still staring suspiciously at Quint, was on her guard.
‘Dolly must have been very much in need of money to agree to pose for them.’
The young woman nodded. ‘She wanted ready gilt so’s she could leave town. Desp’rate, that’s what she was. Desp’rate to get away.’
‘To get away where?’
The young woman shrugged. ‘Anywheres,’ she said. ‘As long as it was out of London. She got the coins for dropping her petticoats, but those went. Don’t ask me ’ow. In the end, she even spoke to that interfering old cow what pesters all the girls.’
‘And who might she be?’
‘Bascombe, her name is. She runs some charity. I’ve got a card for it somewhere. She give all the girls one.’ Hetty pulled open the drawer of a battered bureau, rummaging around in it for a few seconds before pulling out a small square of card. She handed the card to Adam, who held it up to the light from the basement window. ‘The National Society for Returning Young Women to their Friends in the Country’, the lettering on it read, followed by an address in the city.
‘She wants to get us girls out of the theatres and into the country,’ Hetty said. ‘Christ alone knows what we’d all do in the country. Stop our sinning, Bascombe says. Start our starving is what I says.’
‘But Dolly spoke to Mrs Bascombe?’
‘Miss Bascombe.’ Hetty corrected him. ‘She said to me she was going to see her.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Laughed in her face.’ The young woman looked a little embarrassed. ‘I didn’t think she was serious. I thought she was ’aving me on.’
‘You have little time for Miss Bascombe and her ideas, I see.’
‘She’s a fool,’ Hetty said vehemently. ‘There’s worse ways to earn your money than dancing on the stage. Much worse ways. Look at my Aunt Loo. She died of the matches.’
‘Of the matches?’
‘The phossy got into her bones. I wasn’t going to have that happen to me.’
Adam was still looking puzzled. Quint stepped in to explain. ‘Woman must have worked at one of the match factories down Bow way. The fumes from the matches get to ’em. Gets to the bones in the jaw.’ He gestured towards his own jaw. ‘Rots ’em away.’
The young dancer was nodding in energetic agreement as Quint spoke. ‘Right old sight she was at the end. Couldn’t bear to look at ’er. So I’m not going to have some ’oity-toity old prune telling me I’m ’eading for the fires of ’ell if I do a few jigs on stage.’ Hetty stared belligerently at Adam and Quint as if they were about to second Miss Bascombe’s notions of female propriety. ‘I’m not going to listen to some old trout as always dresses like she’s off to see a body planted in the churchyard, am I?’
‘I don’t suppose you are, Miss Gallant.’
Hetty’s anger with Miss Bascombe seemed to have spent itself. She laughed. ‘She’s a sight, that one. As ugly as bull-beef. And you wouldn’t believe what she ’as on ’er head.’ The girl laughed again. ‘I wouldn’t wear a hat like ’ers if it was given away free with a pound of tea.’
Entertained as Adam was by Hetty’s energetic contempt for Miss Bascombe’s dress sense, he was eager to return to the subject of the girl for whom he was searching. ‘Your friend Dolly,’ he said. ‘Her fee for her modelling had gone, you say. Would she have had any other money?’
Hetty shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not. She had a necklace or two. And rings. One of ’em that twerp Wyndham give her. Nice, that was. She could have took ’em to the swinging dumplings.’
Adam leaned towards his servant.
‘Down the pawn shop,’ Quint muttered in his ear.
‘I don’t see as how she could have done that, mind,’ Hetty continued. ‘If her pockets was jingling, she wouldn’t have gone to see Bascombe.’
Although she was still keeping her distance from Quint, the young woman had clearly lost any fear of her visitors she might have once had; she had moved back to her battered piano and was tapping out a simple melody on its keys. ‘Be lovely to have some real gilt,’ she said longingly. ‘Some that was your own, and no fancy man could kiss or kick it out of you.’
‘Perhaps some day you will, Miss Gallant,’ Adam said.
Hetty continued to move her fingers across the keyboard and looked coquettishly at him. ‘Maybe I will at that, Mr Carver, or whatever yer name is,’ she said. ‘As for the rest of it, if you want to find Dolly, you’d best go and see that old cow Bascombe.’
‘I think I shall, Miss Gallant,’ Adam said, raising his hat and turning to leave. ‘Come, Quint, we shall leave the young lady to her music.’
The two men were halfway up the short flight of stone steps that led up to the street when Hetty, deserting the piano, appeared at her door. ‘’Ere, ’andsome,’ she called. ‘I got something else you might want to ’ear about.’
Adam looked down at her shapely figure silhouetted against the light. ‘Go ahead, Quint,’ he said. ‘I shall catch you up in but a moment.’ He returned to the small basement area.
Hetty moved very close to him and rested her hand on his arm. ‘Tonight ain’t a good night for me to be entertaining you,’ she said. ‘I’ve got what you might call other commitments.’
‘You have been very helpful, Miss Gallant.’
‘Hetty,’ the girl said, stroking her fingers across the young man’s forearm.
‘You have been very helpful, Hetty.’
‘Another night, when I ain’t got these other commitments,’ she went on, ‘I could be even more ’elpful. If you was to be passing by, say the night after tomorrow, I could be very ’elpful indeed.’ She leaned in to him and kissed him on the mouth. He responded and their tongues briefly touched before she pulled away. ‘Night after tomorrow,’ she said, and moved back into her room.
* * * * *
‘Which way to the King’s Cross station, Quint?’ Adam asked as he strode up to join his manservant, who was loitering on the street corner a hundred yards from Hetty’s flat.
Quint pointed to the right and they began to retrace their steps through the grey streets behind the Pentonville Road. Neither of them spoke.
Adam, the taste of Hetty Gallant’s mouth and lips still on his, forced his thoughts to Dolly Delaney. There were so many questions about her disappearance that needed answering. Why was the girl so eager to leave town? And what had happened to the money she had earned from her modelling? Pennethorne had said that she had posed naked on several occasions. Surely this must have earned her more than a few pennies? How had she spent it so quickly that she was obliged to think of taking charity? And what of the Bascombe woman? Had Dolly been to visit her? He took out the card and l
ooked again at the address. There was no help for it. He would have to visit the National Society for Returning Young Women to their Friends in the Country.
While Adam had been asking himself these questions, his servant had been leading the way like a military scout pushing forward into enemy territory. As they turned into the Pentonville Road, Quint began to whistle. He whistled as if he was well aware that he was producing no tune but was confident that, if he just kept whistling, he would eventually hit upon one by chance.
‘What the deuce was all that business with the iron bar?’ Adam asked, as they approached the Great Northern Railway’s London station.
‘Like I said, guv. A cosh is always ’andy to ’ave.’
‘In one of the dens of iniquity you frequent, possibly it is. It was scarcely likely to be needed in the living room of a young danseuse.’
The older man made no reply but continued to whistle. Even amidst the noise of the traffic that now swirled about them, the sound was exceptionally piercing.
‘And I wish you would refrain from that, as well, Quint.’
‘What?’ the servant asked in an aggrieved voice.
‘Whistling like some damned butcher’s boy.’
‘Ain’t my fault if I’ve got a taste for music. That ’Etty bint banging on her piano has set me off.’
‘Well, do stop it. It’s jangling my nerves. And I’m hungry. Let us find something to eat.’
Quint pointed to where a hot-potato stall stood on the other side of the street. Dodging a cab which came thundering past, its driver flicking his whip at his horse, they crossed the street.
‘Warm your ’ands and fill your belly,’ the owner of the stall said, as they approached. ‘And all for only ’arf a penny.’
To both of them he dispensed a large potato, glistening with salt.
‘I suppose this spot of yellow grease is butter, is it?’ Adam said, prodding doubtfully at what he had been given. Quint, who was already attacking his potato like a wolf tearing at a lamb, made no reply. Tentatively the young man bit into his own food. He took one mouthful and then another. ‘This is rather good,’ he said, after several more mouthfuls. ‘I am surprised I have never dined al fresco here before. I must recommend it to Cosmo.’
There was silence as the two men finished their potatoes.
‘I do declare I am still hungry,’ Adam said. ‘Could you force yourself to eat another, Quint?’
His servant indicated that he undoubtedly could.
‘We’ll have another of those apiece, my good man.’
The potato man stared at Adam, clearly unused to the idea of a gentleman wanting to sample his wares. Then he took two more potatoes from the brightly polished can in which he kept them and handed them over. Adam and Quint began to eat again.
‘Why would Dolly be earning all this money and yet never have any?’ Adam asked after a few moments had passed. Quint, his mouth full of potato, made a series of inarticulate noises. ‘Where is she spending it?’ Adam was addressing his questions as much to himself as to his servant.
Quint swallowed what he had been chewing and blew noisily on the potato in his hand to cool it. ‘Maybe she ain’t been spending it,’ he said.
His master looked enquiringly at him.
‘Maybe she’s bin giving it to somebody else.’
Adam thought for a moment. ‘You are still of the opinion that the girl is being blackmailed? That she is handing her earnings over to an extortioner?’
Quint shrugged. ‘Could be,’ he said.
‘But it need not be so.’ Adam was glimpsing other possibilities. ‘She might be supporting a relative who has fallen on hard times.’
‘Her dear old ma,’ Quint suggested, blowing once again on his potato.
‘Or a father. A brother.’
‘A beau what’s in danger of ending in the workhouse.’
‘You are showing an unexpectedly romantic side to your imagination, Quint. But you are right. There could be another lover whom Dolly is supporting.’ Adam thought for a moment or two. ‘And yet, if that is the case, why is she so eager to leave London?’
Quint, who had just taken another huge bite from his hot potato and thereby rendered himself speechless once more, shook his head to indicate that he had no answer to the question.
‘Hetty said her friend wanted to shake the dust of the city from her feet,’ Adam continued. ‘“Desperate” was the word she used. Why would she be so desperate?’
CHAPTER EIGHT
The National Society for Returning Young Women to their Friends in the Country had its headquarters in one of the narrow streets adjacent to St Paul’s. As Adam approached the building – a tumbledown relic of the previous century that seemed an unlikely home for any organization calling itself a ‘national society’ – he was aware of the great dome looming over him and over the rest of the people hurrying and scurrying through the streets. A brass plaque advertised the Society’s presence, and Adam lifted a lion’s head knocker and let it rap twice on the shabbily painted door. Shuffling footsteps could be heard behind the door, and it creaked open. The bald head of an elderly man gradually emerged, like a slow-motion jack-in-the box.
‘If you’re delivering the coal,’ the old man said, ‘you need to go round the back.’
‘I have no coal, sir,’ Adam said. ‘I am looking for Miss Bascombe.’
The bald head withdrew behind the door. Adam waited some moments and was about to try the knocker once more when the head reappeared. The old man had found a pair of armless glasses, which he had propped on the bridge of his nose.
‘You don’t look much like the coalman,’ he admitted. ‘Miss Bascombe, you say?’
‘If she is here. I understand this is the office of her Society.’
‘Oh, she’s here, all right,’ the old man said, sounding as if he rather wished she wasn’t. ‘You’d best come in.’ He opened the door wider, and Adam was able to walk into a cold and dark vestibule. The decrepit doorman, his frame bent almost double at the waist, peered up at the visitor. ‘She’s up there,’ he said, jerking his thumb towards the ceiling. ‘You’ll make your own way.’
This was clearly a statement rather than a question and Adam, nodding briefly, looked towards the crooked wooden staircase at the end of the hallway.
The elderly concierge shambled into what was either a small room or a large cupboard to the left. He settled himself with difficulty on a high stool, and appeared to go to sleep.
Adam began to climb the stairs. As he did so, he caught the briefest glimpse of rooftops and St Paul’s dome through the filthy glass of a tiny window that provided what little light there was. At the top of the staircase there was a landing, with two doors opening off it. One was ajar, and Adam could just see in the room the shapes of chairs and a table, all covered with sheets. He tapped on the other door. In the quiet of the building it sounded, he thought, like the knocking that rouses the porter in Macbeth.
It proved as nothing compared with the thunderous bellow that came from inside the room. ‘Enter!’
Adam could scarcely believe that the voice belonged to anything human, let alone female. It seemed to rattle the door frame and agitate the dust in the air. He hastened to follow its instruction.
Miss Bascombe was sitting behind a large desk, silhouetted against the light from a bay window. The only other objects in the room were two chairs and a vast cabinet of Gothic design, which looked more like a scale model of a cathedral in northern France than a piece of furniture. A portrait of a mournful-looking man with a long beard hung on one wall.
‘My late and very much lamented father, the Reverend Septimus Bascombe,’ Miss Bascombe bellowed, noting Adam’s eyes straying in the direction of the picture.
‘A fine-looking man indeed,’ the young man
said weakly, feeling some comment, however banal, was required.
Miss Bascombe made a noise that could have been either an indication of assent or a snort of contempt and waved him towards one of the chairs.
She was a woman of enormous presence and imposing bust, reminding Adam very much of Mrs Gaffery, his landlady in Doughty Street. The founder and life president of the National Society for Returning Young Women to their Friends in the Country was evidently one of those formidable spinster ladies from the upper-middle classes who had decided to devote their energies to the improvement of those less fortunate than themselves, uncaring of whether or not the less fortunate wished to be improved. She gave the immediate impression that most members of the human race were profound disappointments to her. None the less, she was prepared to continue her generous, if possibly unavailing, efforts to better them.
As he explained the reason for his visit, Adam was conscious that she was examining him, rather like an entomologist peering down a microscope at a particularly unprepossessing species of beetle. He tried to retain his self-confidence, but he felt himself wilting under her pitiless gaze. When he came to an end, there was an ominous silence.
‘Young man, I am unconvinced that it would be to the Society’s benefit to tell you what I know of Miss Delaney.’ Miss Bascombe continued to roar as if she was addressing a large congregation in the nearby cathedral. ‘Or, indeed, to the benefit of the foolish girl herself.’
‘I wish simply to speak with Miss Delaney. Her friends are anxious to know that she is well.’ Adam spread his hands and smiled what he hoped was his most engaging smile. ‘I can assure you that I am entirely respectable and so, too, are my motives in making my request of you.’
‘You may well be as respectable as the Bank of England, Mr Carver,’ Miss Bascombe boomed, looking as if she believed the exact opposite, ‘but I am none the less disinclined to give you the information you want. The Society can only thrive and flourish and continue its valuable work if I, and others engaged in that work, behave with the utmost discretion. The poor, misguided young women who come to us must be able to trust us implicitly.’
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