by Anne Perry
There was still a small hall in the road, and according to the board outside it was open to hire by the public. He noted the name and address of the caretaker, and within another ten minutes he was sitting in a small cold front parlor opposite a stocky, elderly man with pince-nez on his nose and a large pocket handkerchief in his hand against the sneezing which frequently overtook him.
“How can I help you, Mr. Pitt?” he said, and sneezed hard.
“Were you caretaker of the Bethlehem Road Hall seventeen years ago, Mr. Plunkett?”
“I was, sir, I was. Is there some trouble about it?”
“None that I know of. Did you lease the hall to a religious organization on a regular basis?”
“I did, sir; most assuredly. Eccentric people. Very strange beliefs, they had. Didn’t baptize children, because they said children came into the world pure from God, and weren’t capable of sin until they were eight years old. Can’t agree with that, certainly I can’t. Man is born in sin. Had my own children baptized when they were two months old, like a Christian should. But they were always civil and sober people, modestly dressed, and worked hard and helped each other.”
“Are they still meeting here?”
“Oh no sir. Don’t know where they all went to, I’m sure I don’t. They got less and less, about five years ago, then the last of ’em disappeared.”
“Do you remember a Mrs. Royce, some seventeen years ago?”
“Mrs. Royce? No sir, no I don’t. There were a few young ladies. Handsome and nicely mannered they were, but they’ve all gone now. I don’t know where, I’m sure. Maybe got married and settled down to a decent life—forgot all that nonsense.”
Pitt could not give up now.
“Do you remember anyone at all from seventeen years ago? It is important, Mr. Plunkett.”
“Bless you, sir. If I can recall anything you are more than welcome to it. What was this Lady Royce like?”
“I am afraid I don’t know. She died about that time, of scarlet fever, I think.”
“Oh—oh my goodness! I wonder if that was the friend of Miss Forrester? Lizzie Forrester. Her friend died, poor soul.”
Pitt kept the excitement out of his voice. It was only a thread, perhaps nothing—it might break in his hands.
“Where can I find Lizzie Forrester?”
“Bless you, I don’t know, sir. But I think her parents still live on Tower Street. Number twenty-three, as I recall. But someone’d tell you, if you were to go there and ask.”
“Thank you! Thank you, Mr. Plunkett!” Pitt rose, shook the man’s hand, and took his leave.
He did not even think of eating. He passed a public house, and the smell of fresh-baked pies did not even tempt him, so eager was he to find Lizzie Forrester and learn another side of the truth, something of the past of Elsie Draper which had sewn in her mind the seeds of such madness.
Tower Street was not hard to find: a couple questions of passersby and he was on the doorstep of number 23. It was a neat tradesman’s-class front door, with a brass knocker in the shape of a horse’s head. Pitt lifted it and let it fall. He stepped back and waited several minutes before a clean and dowdy maid answered it, not unlike the woman who did the heavy work in his own home.
“Yes sir?” she said in surprise.
“Good afternoon. Is this the home of Mr. or Mrs. Forrester?”
“Yes sir, it is.”
“I am Inspector Pitt, from the Bow Street Police Station.” He saw her face blanch and was instantly sorry for his clumsiness. “There’s been no accident, ma’am, and no crime that concerns this household. It is just that someone here may once have been acquainted with a lady we would like to know more about—in order to understand events that have no connection with this family.”
She was still highly dubious. Respectable people did not have the police in their houses—for any reason.
He tried again. “She was a very distinguished lady, the lady we wish to learn more about, but she died many years ago; therefore we cannot ask her.”
“Well—well you’d better come in, an’ I’ll ask. You stay there!” She pointed to a spot on the hall floor on the worn red Turkey carpet next to the stand for sticks and umbrellas and the potted aspidistra. Pitt obeyed dutifully, waiting while she whisked away along the linoleum corridor past the stairs and the polished banisters, the samplers which read THE EYE OF GOD IS UPON YOU and THERE’s NO PLACE LIKE HOME, and a picture of Queen Victoria. He heard the servant rap on a door, then the latch open and close. Somewhere in the back parlor his person and his errand were being described.
It was fully five minutes before a middle-aged couple appeared, dressed in neat and well-worn clothes, he with a watch chain across his middle and she with a lace fichu at her neck pinned with a nice piece of Whitby jet.
“Mr. Forrester, sir?” Pitt inquired politely.
“Indeed. Jonas Forrester, at your service. This is Mrs. Forrester. What may we do for you? Martha says you are inquiring about a lady who died some time ago.”
“I believe she was a friend of your daughter Elizabeth.”
Forrester’s face tightened, some of the fresh-scrubbed pinkness fading from it; his wife’s hand gripped his arm.
“We have no daughter Elizabeth,” he said levelly. “Catherine, Margaret, and Anabelle. I’m sorry; we cannot be of assistance.”
Pitt looked at the very ordinary couple standing side by side in their hallway, faces set, hands clean, hair neat, the precise and God-fearing samplers on the wall, and wondered why on earth they should lie to him. What had Lizzie Forrester done that they should say she did not exist? Were they protecting her or disowning her?
He took a gamble. “The records say that you had a daughter Elizabeth born to you.”
The color flooded back into Forrester’s face, and his wife’s hand flew from his arm to cover her mouth and suppress a gasp.
“It would be less painful for you to tell me the truth,” Pitt said quietly. “Far better than my having to go and ask questions of other people until I uncover it for myself. Don’t you agree?”
Forrester looked at him with intense dislike. “Very well—if you insist. Although we’ve done nothing to deserve this, nothing at all! Mary, my dear, there is no need for you to endure this. Wait for me in the back parlor. I shall return when it is done.”
“But I think—” she began, taking a step forward.
“I have spoken, my dear,” he said levelly, but there was insistence under his genteel tone. He did not intend to be argued with.
“But really, I think I should—”
“I don’t care to repeat myself, my dear.”
“Very well, if you say so.” And obediently she withdrew, nodding miserably at Pitt in a sort of half recognition of his presence. She retreated back the way she had come, and again they heard the door latch open and close.
“No need for her to suffer,” Mr. Forrester said tartly, his eyes on Pitt’s face, hard and critical. “Poor woman has endured enough already. What is it you want to know? We have not seen Elizabeth in seventeen years, nor are we likely to ever again. She ceased to be our daughter then, and whatever the law says, she is none of ours. Although what concern it is of yours I fail to see!” He opened the front parlor door, twisting the handle hard, and showed Pitt into a cold room with too much furniture, all spotlessly clean. The tables were crammed with photographs, china figures, Japanese lacquer boxes, two stuffed birds and a stuffed and mounted weasel under glass, and numerous potted plants. He neither sat down himself nor offered Pitt a seat, although there were three perfectly good chairs, all with embroidered antimacassars on their backs. “I completely fail to see!” he repeated accusingly.
“Perhaps I could speak to Elizabeth myself?” Pitt asked.
“You cannot! Elizabeth went to America seventeen years ago. Best place for her. We don’t know what happened to her there or where she is. In fact, she could be dead for all we know!” He said it with his chin high and his eyes bright, but Pitt
caught a quaver in his voice, the first sign that there was pain as well as anger in him.
“I believe she belonged for a while to an unusual religious organization,” Pitt began tentatively.
The pain vanished from Forrester’s face, and only rage and bewilderment remained.
“Evildoers!” he said harshly. “Blasphemers, the lot of them.” He shook with the depth of his outrage. “I don’t know why they let them come into a God-fearing country and permit their wickedness to innocent people! That’s what you should be doing—stopping wickedness like that! What’s the use of your coming here seventeen years afterwards, I’d like to know? What good is that now, to us or to our Lizzie? Gone to join wicked men, she has, and never a word of her since. Mind, we’re Christian people; we told her she’d be none of ours until she forsook her ways and came back to good Christian religion.”
It was nothing to do with the case, but Pitt asked in spite of himself. “What was her religion, Mr. Forrester?”
“Blasphemy is what it was,” he replied hotly. “Downright blasphemy against God, and all Christian people. Some charlatan who said he saw God, if you please! Said he saw God! And Jesus Christ! Separately! We believe in one God in this house, like all other decent people, and nobody is telling me some ignorant man with talk of magic and working miracles is going to have any part of me or mine. We told Elizabeth, forbade her to go to their meetings. We warned her of what would happen! Goodness knows how many hours her mother spent talking to her. But would she listen? No she wouldn’t! Well in the end she went off to some place in America with the tricksters and wasters and fools who were taken in as she was, or saw a way to make a profit out of gullible women. You do everything you think is right, all you can do to keep your family God-fearing and Christian, and then they serve you like this! Well, Mrs. Forrester and I say we have no daughter Elizabeth, and that’s how it is.”
Pitt could see the man’s grief, and his anger: he felt betrayed by his daughter and by circumstances, and it confused him, and the wound, for all his protestations, was not healed.
But Pitt had to pursue his own questioning.
“Was your daughter acquainted with a Mrs. Royce before she left England, Mr. Forrester?”
“Possibly. Yes, possibly she was. Another deluded young woman who would not take the counsel of her betters. But she died of typhoid or diphtheria as I recall.”
“Scarlet fever, seventeen years ago.”
“Was it! Poor soul. Dead without the time to repent, I daresay. What a tragedy. Still, the main damnation will be upon the heads of those who beguiled her away into idolatry and blasphemy against God.”
“Did you know anything of Mrs. Royce, sir?”
“No. Never saw her. Wouldn’t permit any of those people through my door. I lost one daughter, that’s more than enough. But I heard Elizabeth speak of her often, as if she were quality.” He sighed. “But I suppose being of gentle birth is no help to a woman, if she has a delicate constitution and a weak will. Women need looking after, sir, guarding from charlatans like that—that blasphemer!”
Pitt could not bear to give up. “Is there anyone who can tell me about Mrs. Royce? Did she ever write to your daughter? Would they have had mutual friends, anyone who still keeps that particular faith around here?”
“If there is, I don’t know of them, sir, nor do I want to! Emissaries of the devil, performing his works!”
“It is important, Mr. Forrester.” Was that the truth? To whom did it matter, after all these years? Pitt, because he wanted to know why Elsie Draper’s sick mind had clung so passionately all the long years in Bedlam to her hatred for Garnet Royce? But what difference did it make now?
Forrester was looking uncomfortable, his eyes not quite steady on Pitt’s face, his color mottled.
“Well, sir ...”
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Royce did write some letters to Lizzie, after Lizzie’d gone. We didn’t send them on. Didn’t know where to send them, and we’d sworn we’d never speak of Lizzie again, like as though she were dead, which she was to us, but then since they weren’t ours, we couldn’t rightly destroy them either. We’ve still got them somewhere, up in the box room.”
“May I?” Suddenly Pitt was shaking with excitement, a wild hope beating upwards like a bird inside him. “May I see them?”
“If you wish to. But I’ll thank you not to mention it to my wife. You’ll read them in the box room, sir, and that’s my condition.” He looked uncertain as to whether he might impose any condition upon the police, but his resolution to try was strong, his pale eyes defiant.
“Of course,” Pitt conceded. He had no wish to cause distress. “Please show me the way.”
Fifteen minutes later Pitt was crouched under the beams of the roof in a small, stuffy, ice cold box room where three large trunks lay open, a variety of cases for hats and mantles were piled high, and in front of him at last were the six precious letters addressed to Miss Lizzie Forrester and postmarked from April 28 to June 2, 1871. They were all sealed, exactly as they had arrived.
Carefully he slipped the edge of his penknife under the flap of the first envelope. The letter was in a young, feminine hand and seemed to have been written in some haste, as if interruption were feared.
19 Bethlehem Road
28th April 1871
My dearest Lizzie,
I have tried every art or plea I know, but it is no use, Garnet is adamant. He will not even listen to me. Every time I mention the Church he forbids me to speak. Three times in the last two days he has sent me to my room until I should come to my senses and leave the subject alone, forget it forever.
But how can I? I know no other such sweetness or truth on the face of the world! I have gone over everything I have heard the Brethren say, over and over it in my mind, and I find no fault in it. Surely some of it seemed strange at first, and far from what I had been raised to believe, but when I consider it in light of what my heart tells me, it all seems so very right and just.
I hope I may prevail upon him; he is a good and just man, and only desires what is right for me. I know from all my past both as his betrothed and as his wife that he desires to protect and care for me and guard me from all ill.
Pray for me, Lizzie, that I shall find the words to soften his heart so he will permit me to come again to the Church and share the sweet companionship of my Sisters and receive some instruction in the true teachings of the Saviour of All Mankind,
Your dearest friend,
Naomi Royce
The next letter was dated a week later.
Dearest Lizzie,
I hardly know how to begin! My husband and I have had the most dreadful disagreement. He has forbidden me ever to go to Church again, nor even to speak of the Gospel in the house. I must not mention the teachings or anything to do with the Brethren to him, nor try to explain to him why I know the Church is true, nor what makes me feel so.
I know it is hard for him! I do know it, believe me. I also was raised in the orthodox faith and believed it until I was eighteen years of age, when I began to find some of its doctrines did not answer the questions that cried out in my heart.
If God is such a holy and marvelous being as we are told—and I believe He is—and if He is our Father, as we are all taught, then how is it that we are such flawed creatures with no hope of growth, mere spiritual children, pygmies of such deformity of soul? I cannot believe it! I do not! There is endless hope for us, if only we will strive harder, learn who we are and stand upright, learn every good thing, seek after knowledge and wisdom, with the humility to let ourselves be taught. Then by the grace of Our Lord we shall become, in time, worthy to be called His children.
Garnet says I blaspheme, and he has ordered me to repent of it, and accompany him to a “proper” church every Sunday, as is my duty to God, to society, and to him.
I cannot! Lizzie, how can I deny the truth I know? Yet he will not listen to me. Pray for me that I may have courage, Lizzie!
/>
May the Lord bless you and keep you,
Your dear friend,
Naomi Royce
The third letter had been written only three days after the second.
Dearest Lizzie,
It is Sunday, and Garnet has gone to his church. I am sitting in my room and the door is locked—from the outside. He has said that if I will not go to his “proper” church, as a Christian woman should, then I shall go nowhere else.
I must be content with that. If I cannot have my freedom to choose where and how I shall worship God, as we believe all human creatures should, then I shall remain here. I am resolved. I shall not go to his church, nor forswear my own conscience.
Elsie, my maid, is very good to me and brings my meals to my room. I don’t know what I should do without her—she came with me when I was married, and seems to have no fear of Garnet. I know she will post this letter. I will have but three postage stamps left after I send this; after that Elsie has sworn she will evade the butler’s eyes and deliver personally such letters as I write to you.
I hope next time I write I shall have better news.
In the meanwhile, keep your heart high and trust in God—no one ever trusted in Him in vain. He watches over all of us and will give us nothing more than we can bear.
Your devoted friend,
Naomi
The next letter bore no date, and the handwriting was more sprawling and unsteady.
Dearest Lizzie,
It seems I have come to the greatest decision of my life. Yesterday I prayed all day to question myself as rigorously in every particular as I might, examining my beliefs in the light of all that Garnet has said about our Faith being blasphemy, unnatural, and based upon the maunderings of a charlatan. He says that the Bible is sufficient for all the Christian world, and whoever adds to it in any way is wicked or deluded and should be denounced as such, that there is no further revelation, nor ever will be.
