Death of a Dancer

by Caro Peacock

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Toby Kennedy called for me in a cab. Since we were visiting a barrister, I wore my best blue merino dress with darker blue bonnet and cape. On the way I told him about the man in the Rotunda. To spare my own blushes, I left out the detail of being mistaken for one of Pauline’s sisterhood.

  ‘It may have nothing to do with Columbine,’ he said. ‘Women like that always run the risk of somebody trying to strangle them.’

  ‘Then what was the newspaper doing there? And who was she meeting in St Paul’s Church the Saturday before Columbine was murdered?’

  ‘How do you propose to find out?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m quite sure Pauline won’t tell me.’

  ‘Whatever you do, talk to me first. Don’t take any more risks on your own.’

  I didn’t promise.

  ‘So, do we tell Daniel?’

  He thought about it, then shook his head.

  ‘Not yet.’

  He laughed when I told him about the repossession of Hardcastle’s phaeton.

  ‘His creditors must be at the end of their patience. After a public humiliation like yesterday, they’ll all be pouncing.’

  I’d been thinking about debts after the discussion with Disraeli.

  ‘Isn’t it odd, though, that they’re choosing to do it now?’ I said. ‘It’s usually the other way about. If a man’s keeping a woman and the man dies suddenly, then her credit vanishes overnight. They swoop in and take her jewels, clothes, everything.’

  You couldn’t be in London long without hearing of cases like that: women who’d been driven to the opera in their own carriages one season cadging gins in public houses the next.

  ‘I wonder why Hardcastle was so insistent that he expected to come into money soon,’ Kennedy said. ‘Perhaps he thinks Columbine’s left him something.’

  ‘Ye gods, do you suppose that’s possible?’

  ‘Wills are public documents. I’ll see if I can find out.’

  The cab lurched and jangled along the Strand and Fleet Street. As we came within sight of the Old Bailey and the prison of Newgate next door to it, my spirits sank at the solidity of the walls holding Jenny and the flimsiness of hope. Daniel was waiting for us outside the Old Bailey, with a man whom Kennedy introduced to me as his friend James Harmer, a solicitor. Harmer told us that the barrister, Mr Phillips, was appearing for the defence in three cases that day, but had been persuaded to put half an hour aside for us. We followed him through the doorway and up a staircase. It was the first time I’d been inside the Old Bailey. It wasn’t a particularly old building – the court house had been rebuilt in my grandfather’s time – but it felt as bleak as if centuries of misery were climbing out of the ground and up its walls, like damp stains.

  ‘Charles Phillips is far and away the best barrister at the Old Bailey,’ Kennedy whispered to me. ‘He’ll get her off, if anybody can.’

  I was only partly reassured. As a group, the Old Bailey barristers had a poor reputation and were looked down on by the rest of the legal profession. Charles Phillips came as a pleasant surprise. When we were shown into a little room that was not much more than a cubbyhole, he got up from the table where he was sitting and greeted Kennedy like an old friend. The top of his head was bald, fringed with dark curly hair and sideburns above a high white stock. His eyes were large, his voice pleasant and calming, with a strong southern Irish accent. Once the introductions had been performed, Harmer left us to go to another meeting. There were only two chairs for visitors, so Kennedy pushed some bundles of briefs aside and perched on the edge of the desk.

  ‘Kennedy’s been telling me something about it,’ Phillips said. ‘We’ll do what we can, but to be frank with you, it’s not the easiest of cases.’

  ‘She’s innocent,’ Daniel said. ‘Shouldn’t that make it easier?’

  Kennedy gave him a warning glance. Phillips nodded, unoffended.

  ‘An innocent country girl, alone and friendless in London. We’ll emphasise that, of course. A fragile butterfly trapped between the grinding millstones of the law. We’ll have the jury in tears, if there’s a heart amongst the lot of them.’

  He sounded as if he meant it.

  ‘Suppose we were able to prove that somebody else committed the murder?’ Daniel said.

  He managed to sound quite cool and businesslike. The barrister’s forehead creased.

  ‘Can you prove it?’

  ‘I strongly suspect that a certain person had a hand in it.’

  ‘Are you thinking of the maid?’ Phillips said.

  Daniel shook his head.

  ‘Can you prove it, or give reasonable cause for suspecting somebody else?’

  Daniel didn’t answer. He must have realised how unconvincing his suspicions would sound. Phillips sighed.

  ‘There was enmity between Columbine and Miss Jarvis. There’s no point in denying what the whole town knows.’

  ‘The enmity was entirely on Columbine’s side,’ Daniel said. ‘Jenny had no motive to kill her.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that somebody else did have a motive?’

  ‘Yes, I am. We can’t prove it at present, but I believe we can show that somebody else had a substantial motive.’

  Phillips sighed again, more heavily.

  ‘Mr Suter, proving that somebody else is guilty is a fine and complete defence, if you can do it. Producing strong arguments that somebody else might have done it may influence a jury favourably, if you’re persuasive and fortunate. But it’s a risky course. If your proof isn’t strong enough and you can’t convince them, then the jury will hold it against you and decide, if that’s the best you can do, then the accused must be guilty as charged.’

  Silence, apart from feet echoing on a staircase outside.

  ‘Yes, I see,’ Daniel said.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve distressed you by putting it so plainly. If you can bring me proof, I’ll use it most gladly. If not, we must do the best with what we have. Could we find somebody who would give a character witness for Miss Jarvis?’

  He and Daniel discussed that for a while. I could see that Phillips was surprised that Daniel knew so little about her background. Eventually they agreed that Daniel would approach Blake, who might at least say that Jenny was honest and hard working.

  There was a knock at the door and Harmer put his head round.

  ‘Wanted in Court Two, Mr Phillips.’

  With a brief apology, Phillips hitched up his robe, put on his wig, and went. As Harmer showed us out, Daniel asked what the fee would be and Harmer said three guineas. It sounded quite moderate and I think Daniel would have been comforted if it had been higher.

  Daniel, Kennedy and I lingered on the pavement outside the Old Bailey. Daniel’s eyes were on the prison next door.

  ‘Do you want to try to see her?’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘As we’re here in any case. If you two don’t mind waiting, that is.’

  The sight of his bowed shoulders as he went away tore at my heart.

  ‘Coffee,’ Kennedy said.

  He took my arm and guided me across the road into a side street. Halfway down it was a coffee house, with curved railings round the basement and narrow leaded windows that looked as if they hadn’t changed in two hundred years. The atmosphere inside was fuggy and so charged with the smell of coffee that just to stand there was like drinking it. The clientele all looked like lawyers or lawyers’ clerks, and a row of wigs in colours ranging from pure white to dirty straw hung from pegs along the wall. Some of the customers looked up when we came in and seemed annoyed to see a woman. Kennedy guided me to a table in a dark corner and called for coffee. A waiter in a long white apron brought it promptly. I sipped and found it was the best I’d ever tasted.

  ‘Drink it up,’ Kennedy said. ‘You look worn out.’

  He wouldn’t let me discuss the case at all until we’d emptied our cups and he’d ordered two more.

  ‘Mr Phillips isn’t very hopeful, is he?’ I said.
r />   ‘Between the two of us, Liberty, I doubt if he has any hope at all. Harmer and I were talking about it earlier. Phillips will do his eloquent best, of course – and that’s pretty considerable – but it’s useless against the facts.’

  ‘There really aren’t too many facts, though, are there?’

  ‘A fight on stage, a poisoning a few days later, a suspect in possession of a poisonous substance, who runs away and hides. What more will a jury want? And another thing …’

  He looked at me and hesitated.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Men and poisoning. Rightly or wrongly, they see it as a woman’s crime. Your good solid juror will look at her in the dock and he won’t be seeing a poor scared girl or a crushed butterfly – he’ll be thinking of all the women he’s ever been close to, and shivering inside.’

  ‘So any chance she has depends on proving that somebody else did it?’

  ‘You heard what Phillips said about that.’

  ‘He doesn’t believe she’s innocent, does he?’

  ‘Barristers don’t let themselves think like that.’

  ‘She is, though; I’m sure of it.’

  He looked at me, his eyes sad.

  ‘My dear, loyalty to Daniel is all very well, but are you sure that all this is helping him?’

  I stared at him, puzzled.

  ‘But saving Jenny’s all that matters to him.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the point I’m trying to make. Daniel’s obsessed. You’ll forgive me for speaking behind his back, but he’s one of my best friends, and your father and I were friends for twenty years or more. I hope that gives me a right to be concerned for both of you.’

  I nodded, scared of what was coming. A flock of legal clerks had burst in, arguing in loud voices as if the whole world wanted to hear them, ranging around for a table, setting cups rattling. Kennedy had to wait until they settled.

  ‘If she’s hanged, it will almost destroy him,’ he said quietly. ‘If you’ll forgive me saying so, the best thing you can do is be there to pick up the pieces at the end of it.’

  I felt myself getting hot and angry, but the concern in his face and voice made me hold my temper.

  ‘You seem very sure that it will end badly.’

  ‘I can see this is the hardest thing in the world for you. It’s been clear to all his friends, ever since you came back to London, that you and Daniel would marry. You’re as well suited as any pair can be, and if it hadn’t been for this miserable business …’

  He trailed off. I must have let anger show on my face after all.

  ‘You’d got us tidily married off already, had you?’ I said.

  ‘Please, Liberty, don’t be offended. I don’t want to be saying this, but somebody has to. It’s what your father would say if he were here.’

  He’d picked the only weapon that would check me, and he must have known it. I turned my head away so that he shouldn’t see my tears, but it was no use.

  ‘Oh, my poor girl. I’m desperately sorry.’

  A clean handkerchief, his, found its way into my hand under the table. If any of the other customers were watching, they probably thought he was another legal man consoling a client.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You were talking about picking up the pieces.’

  ‘When this is over, Daniel is going to be in a bad state. He’ll come to his senses in time and see it for the madness it was, and he’ll thank his stars if you’re still there waiting for him. But until that happens, it will be difficult for you. You might want to consider moving away for a while. I know somebody in Ireland who’d be only too glad of a companion like you for a month or two.’

  ‘You mean until Jenny’s safely hanged,’ I said.

  He met my eyes.

  ‘Yes, if I’m honest, that is what I mean. I wish, for Daniel’s sake, and the girl’s too, that there was any chance of it going the other way, but nobody thinks it will. Another thing – since I’ve trespassed so far already –’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Just supposing Phillips performs a miracle and she gets off – what happens then?’

  ‘Then Daniel will look after her – marry her, probably.’

  Up to then, I hadn’t thought so far ahead, but my answer came without hesitation. Kennedy looked surprised.

  ‘And you accept that?’

  ‘Of course I do. Daniel’s my best friend in the world and I owe him almost everything. What he wants, I want. Besides, we’d never so much as discussed marrying.’

  ‘I hope he knows how lucky he is in you,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘It’s mostly the other way about. Besides, you’re forgetting one thing in all this. I meant it when I said I’m sure Jenny’s innocent. I wasn’t at first, but I am after what’s happened.’

  A great sigh from Kennedy. This wasn’t the way the conversation was supposed to end. He’d never know that, for a few heartbeats, the idea of running away to Ireland had seemed like a window opening, until a tenderness came over me for my life in Abel Yard, Amos and Rancie, even Mrs Martley.

  ‘It’s a matter of being practical,’ I told him, although I was really telling myself. ‘If we can’t prove that somebody else killed Columbine, we might at least show there are other suspects. Remember, Mr Phillips said a jury could be influenced by strong arguments that somebody else might have done it.’

  ‘I’m glad Daniel didn’t start talking about Rainer, at any rate,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, and it’s as well I haven’t told Daniel about Pauline, or that filthy bet of Hardcastle’s. I don’t like to think what he’ll do if he finds out about that.’

  ‘Yes, that’s our biggest worry at present, isn’t it – Daniel doing something desperate.’

  The seriousness in Kennedy’s face and voice scared me.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Daniel said something odd to me that night Jenny was arrested, after he’d walked you home. He said, “Do you know, I think Liberty half suspects I killed the woman myself.”’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You don’t sound as surprised as I’d expected.’

  ‘I can see why he thought it. He was outside the door of the theatre the night she was poisoned. I asked him if he’d gone in. He hadn’t.’

  ‘He said to me, “Of course, I told her I hadn’t gone inside.”’

  ‘Well, that’s the same thing, isn’t it?’

  Kennedy looked hard at me.

  ‘You know very well it’s not.’

  I stared down at the rings of coffee stains on the table.

  ‘Are you saying that Daniel admitted he’d gone inside?’

  ‘No, he didn’t do that. What I’m saying is that he might have been preparing the way for saying it later, if necessary.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I’m afraid he’d do anything rather than see Jenny hanged. Anything – you understand?’

  ‘You mean he’d confess to the murder?’

  I looked up in time to catch Kennedy’s nod, so slight it was hardly a movement at all. His eyes were pleading with me not to ask the next question.

  ‘We must go,’ I said.

  Daniel was waiting by the thick iron-plated doors of the prison, staring at the ground, oblivious of the crowds going past. He didn’t see us until Kennedy put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Have you been here long?’ Kennedy asked.

  Daniel shook his head, but it was more of a dazed gesture than an answer.

  ‘Did they let you see her?’

  ‘For a while, yes, in a room with other prisoners. She’s just been told: her case comes up a week on Monday. Twelve days, that’s all we have. Twelve days.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  We started walking, one on each side of Daniel, otherwise I think he’d have stayed rooted outside Newgate. He didn’t speak until we were halfway along Fleet Street.

  ‘I wonder why he asked about Marie.’

  ‘Hardly surprising,’ Kennedy said. ‘She made the syllabub. She was with Columb
ine every minute that the woman wasn’t on stage. It’s been in my mind that the magistrates might have let her go too easily.’

  ‘But she was devoted to Columbine,’ I said. ‘That’s one thing everybody agrees on.’

  And yet, even as I said it, I thought that a lot of things everybody agreed on turned out to be wrong. I asked Daniel and Kennedy if they knew where Columbine had lived. Kennedy remembered from having it pointed out to him as he was driving past one day, a villa opposite the barracks on the south side of Kensington Gardens, not far from some nursery gardens.

  I parted from them at Chancery Lane, where Kennedy had another lawyer friend who could tell them how to find out if Columbine had left a will, and walked on alone in the thin March sunshine, past our fine new national gallery and the empty space in front of it that had been dignified with the name of Trafalgar Square, back towards Piccadilly and Hyde Park.

  Instead of turning up Park Lane for home, I went round the end of the Serpentine Water then westwards along Rotten Row, the road old King George had made from Westminster to his palace in Kensington, with its elegant double row of lamp standards and good surface for galloping messengers. It was mid-afternoon by then, so the fashionable were out in force, on horseback and in carriages. It was not a good place to travel on foot and I had to dodge and weave to save myself from being bowled over by racing phaetons or by landaus driving two abreast while the ladies in them chatted as if they were on their drawing-room sofas.

  Near the palace, I crossed Kensington Road and found a sign pointing to Malcolm’s nursery gardens. The road it indicated was a broad and muddy track between plantations of young trees, still bare as mop handles but full of singing blackbirds. Less than half a mile away from Kensington Palace, it might as well have been in the country. Several villas with plenty of space between them were set back from the road in the middle of the nursery fields. They were small but well kept, with carriage houses to the side. It struck me as one of those parts of town where rich men stored their mistresses, convenient for visits, with not too many nosey neighbours.

  A man was raking the gravel on one of the drives. I asked him if he knew where Columbine had lived and he pointed with his rake at the next villa down. It was built in the picturesque style with a steeply pitched slate roof, arched windows, and twisted tree trunks supporting a balcony that ran all along the front, twined with bare wisteria shoots. The front door was shut, but the door to the carriage house was open, revealing emptiness inside. There were no blinds or curtains at the windows. I walked up to the front door, my feet crunching on gravel, and knocked.