“There certainly was such a ring,” I said. “A mourning ring commemorating a lady named Amelia Parker, the grandmother of Henry Frant. Together with Mr Noak’s clerk, I was instrumental in finding it on the day before I left. The circumstances of its discovery were –”
“How it was found is beside the point,” Dansey cut in. “We are concerned with how it was subsequently lost. When did you last see it?”
“On the evening of the same day. In the small sitting room at Monkshill.”
“Mr Carswall alleges that while he and the others were at dinner, you slipped into the room where the ring was and stole it.” He paused and licked his lips. “It was a room you had no right to be in, either, he said, but you were seen coming out of it by one of the servants, and no one saw the ring after that.”
I shook my head. “The groom who brought you the letter drove me into Gloucester: in other words, Mr Carswall cannot have discovered the ring’s loss after my departure. If his tale is true the theft must have come to light beforehand. And if we admit that circumstance, the whole tale becomes suspect.”
Something like hope leapt and died in Dansey’s face. “You are assuming it is the same groom. But even if it were the same man, there are obvious reasons why Mr Carswall did not charge you at once with the crime. Is it not probable that he would wish to spare the ladies from scandal? And there was Mr Bransby to think of, not to mention the boys and Mr and Mrs Allan. No, the more I think of it, the more his conduct shows a very proper delicacy.”
“Then it is evident that you do not know Mr Carswall.”
“That is unnecessary, Tom. And unkind.”
“But it is true.”
Dansey’s lips tightened. His face wore the expression it had when he was about to beat a boy. He said quietly, “There is one further particular. According to the letter, when he discovered the loss, Mr Carswall immediately made inquiries; and a footman said he had come across you mending your coat, your topcoat, with a needle and thread during the evening, a circumstance which struck him as unusual: in the ordinary course of things, he thought, a man in your position would have asked one of the maids. Moreover, the servant claimed, you appeared embarrassed to be caught with the needle in your hand and thrust the mending away from you.”
I smacked the palm of my hand against the surface of the table. “It is a fabrication concocted by that villain Carswall with the aid of an equally villainous footman. I wondered at the time at the servants’ kindness to me on my last evening.”
“The coat, Tom,” Dansey said quietly.
“What of it? It is hanging over there.”
“Bring it here.”
I stared at him in silence, while thoughts rushed in an angry torrent through my mind. After a moment, I fetched the coat from its hook and, still without a word, laid it on the table between us. Dansey explored the pockets, and methodically felt the lining. His fingers paused when he reached a place at the bottom of the coat, close to a spot where a seam ran down from the waist to the hem. Slowly he raised his head and looked at me.
“There is something here.”
“That may be so. But that is not to say I put it there.” They were the wrong words: they made me sound defensive, like a rogue squirming in the dock. I went on quickly, “Here – take my penknife, see what it is.”
Dansey opened the knife and sliced through the stitches of the seam with the tip of the blade. The thread was black but some of the stitches were darker, as if recently renewed. He worked his fingers into the gap and folded back the lining.
“It is tucked into the hem itself, I fancy,” he said. “A few of the stitches are cut so it forms a little pocket.”
He drew out a paper that had been folded into a compact square. He laid this on the table and opened it. I saw a scrap of writing on the paper, my own writing, and there at last was the ring in all its glory. I pushed my hand across the table and picked it up. Dansey made no move to prevent me. My head was swimming.
“Yes, Ned: it is the very ring that Mr Carswall describes. Underneath the stone is a scrap of Mrs Parker’s hair. You see?” I dropped it on the table.
He let it lie. “It is your handwriting on the paper, is it not?”
“Indeed it is.” I took up the paper and examined it under the lamp. Caesar commanded the legions to march to their winter quarters. “Yes, it is part of a translation I set Charlie and Edgar, one of the last tasks I gave them. Look – the paper is crumpled. When they finished they must have thrown it away.”
“You suggest that someone found it and used it to wrap the ring, knowing that it would implicate you further?”
“I cannot think of any other explanation.”
The waiter was approaching. Dansey dropped his glove on top of the ring. Neither of us spoke again until the dishes had been laid on the table, and the man was gone.
“Mr Carswall begged Mr Bransby to examine your coat when you arrived back at the school,” Dansey said. “If the ring were found, he wrote, he regretted that he might be obliged to press charges. He added something to the effect that he would see that neither Mr Bransby nor the school should suffer.”
The food grew cold on our plates. Around us the noise rose and fell like waves breaking on a beach. Carswall had manufactured a neat little plot. Involving Mr Bransby as his agent was particularly astute. Who would doubt the word of a clergyman, and one who had so benevolently offered me a position as a favour to an old servant, my aunt? And if public scandal resulted, it would do so from Stoke Newington, not Monkshill-park.
“Carswall is a tyrant and a lecher in his own house,” I said. “Particularly when drunk. The other evening, I restrained him from paying unwanted attentions to Mrs Frant.”
Dansey cut into his meat. “Were there witnesses?”
“None that I know of, apart from Mrs Frant. It is possible that Miss Carswall and some of the servants heard our altercation, but that would not answer.”
“Would Mrs Frant testify to that effect?”
“I would not ask her to do so. I could not ask it of her, Ned, you must see that. Besides, she and Charlie are dependent on Carswall for the clothes on their backs and the roof over their heads.”
“I see.”
I picked up my knife. For a few minutes we ate in silence. If the case came to court, and if it went badly for me, I might find myself facing transportation, or even the gallows. My fate hinged on Edward Dansey.
“What do you intend to do?” I asked.
He continued chewing, slowly, very deliberately. He was a fastidious fellow, Dansey. I could not hurry him and I could not persuade him. There, on the other side of the table, sat my judge and jury: and all I could do was wait to hear the verdict and the sentence.
“I tell you fairly, Tom, it looks black.”
“I am not a thief.”
The Janus face saw both ways. “Mr Carswall is a respectable citizen, a man with a considerable position in the world,” Dansey said. “And Mr Bransby is both a man of the cloth and our employer.”
“Mr Bransby is anxious to oblige Mr Carswall.”
Dansey did not reply. All of a sudden, I knew I might have added And you in turn are anxious to oblige Mr Bransby. There at last was the nub of the matter: Dansey did not want to imperil his position; on the other hand, his conscience was a tender organ and, despite the ring now lying under his glove, he could not be sure that I was not speaking the truth. Indeed, I think he wanted to believe me.
“Mr Bransby does not know you are here?”
He gave a little shake of the head.
“If Mr Carswall were to lay charges against me, everything would depend on the ring,” I said. “Without the ring, there would be no case to answer.”
“Very probably.” Dansey pushed aside his plate. “Believe me, Tom, I do not know what to think.”
“You mean whom to believe.”
He darted an imploring glance at me. “If I did, it would be so much easier.”
“Then you must do as you thi
nk right.”
He took out his purse and laid a few coins on the table. He picked up his gloves and slid along the bench and out of the booth. He did not once look at me, but I watched him. He put on his coat and hat and wound his muffler round his neck. At last he pulled on his gloves, nodded to the waiter and left.
My eyes were hot, and I could have wept for the injustice of it all. Instead, I cupped my hand over the ring and drew it towards me.
66
I slept – or rather lay – that night in a lodging house in an alley off Fetter-lane. It was a daedal maze of chambers like evil-smelling cupboards; but I paid to have a room to myself and wedged the palliasse against the door. The only intruders were rats and insects, though the house around me was never still, never quiet.
My mind was equally restless. Even if I disposed of the ring, I did not think it would be wise for me to return to Stoke Newington. Mr Bransby was not a corrupt man but he was zealous in attending to the wishes of wealthy parents and guardians. I had little doubt he would dismiss me from his employment; leaving aside the accusation of theft, either of the other accusations was sufficiently grave to justify him in dispensing with my services.
Dansey’s conduct saddened me, though by warning me of what was afoot, he had saved me from almost certain arrest. I was grateful for his kindness, but I own that his unwillingness to trust me rankled. I had not expected that of him. For all his kindness, there seemed something mean-spirited about his behaviour.
Now, as perhaps never before, I needed the advice of a disinterested friend. As the night wore on, the conviction grew that my best course was to find Mr Rowsell as soon as possible and lay the whole matter before him – or almost the whole, for I did not wish to elaborate on what had passed between Sophie and myself, or even between myself and Miss Carswall. As a lawyer, he would be well placed to advise me, and as a friend he had always treated me with kindness.
On Friday morning, therefore, I washed as well as I could and put on fresh linen. I left the lodging house, breakfasted at a stall and went to a barber’s to be shaved. Fed and respectable, I made my way to Lincoln’s Inn. Atkins, Mr Rowsell’s clerk, was copying a document in the outer room. He greeted me coldly – Atkins never cared for me; I believe he was jealous of my place in his master’s affections. I begged the favour of a few words with Mr Rowsell.
“I am afraid he is not here today, sir.”
“He has been called away on business?”
“He has been unwell: there was palpitation of the heart yesterday, and Mrs Rowsell kept him at home to be bled. I believe he is quite recovered but he sent word this morning that he would stay away until Monday.”
“Would he object if I waited upon him at home?”
Atkins’s mouth puckered in the pale circle of his face. “Mr Rowsell is a gentleman who enjoys company, sir.”
I thanked him and walked up to Northington-street. When I rang the bell, the door was opened by a servant but Mrs Rowsell was coming down the stairs, with a gaggle of children behind her. I scarcely had time to open my mouth when she pushed aside the maid and confronted me on the doorstep. I swept off my hat and made my bow.
“Mr Shield,” she said, her face reddening. “You are not welcome in this house.”
In the chilly silence, the children stared up at me. The maid peeped over her mistress’s shoulder. Bransby knew of my connection with Mr Rowsell but I had not anticipated that he would move against me with such rapidity: he must have written yesterday, as soon as he had had the letter from Carswall. Nor had I expected Carswall’s malignity to pursue me so far, or so quickly, or my friends to be so little proof against its power.
“Madam,” I began, “I hope I have done nothing to offend –”
“Go,” she commanded and flung out her right arm as though to sweep me from the doorstep. “Mr Rowsell will not see you again, either here or at Lincoln’s Inn. Nor shall I. Go, Mr Shield, and never return.”
I bowed, replaced my hat and walked away. The door slammed. I drifted, allowing my legs to carry me according to their whim through streets filled with slush and mud and restless crowds. I had lost my position, my good name and even my friends. I had lost Sophie – indeed, had she ever been mine? In the middle of the throng I was as solitary as if I had been a castaway on a desert island.
The currents of the city flung me hither and thither, and at last washed me up among the coaches and wagons in the yard of the Bull and Mouth in St Martins-le-Grand. I hesitated at the open door of the coffee house, the rich smells reminding my stomach that I was hungry. But now I was friendless, I knew I must conserve my meagre stock of money; and I owed it to both my aunt and myself to preserve intact my little nest-egg in the Funds for as long I could.
A plump man was standing in the doorway, haranguing an unseen audience within. He was thinking about money, too. “Six shillings a day! Have you ever heard the like? God damn it, do they think I’m Croesus? Six shillings a day!”
At the same moment, a lady leaned over one of the balconies that ran round the yard and communicated with the rooms beyond. She called down to her maid, who was taking a parcel to the Cirencester coach. “Why didn’t you pack the pearls?” she cried. “You silly, silly girl! You know I always take my pearls.”
Six shillings. Pearls.
The words flew together and jogged my memory. A foolish schoolboy pun fell out. Mrs Jem, I had said on the day that Mr Rowsell had informed me of my aunt Reynolds’s legacy to me, Mrs Jem, you are indeed a pearl of great price. Mrs Jem lived at 3 Gaunt-court, and she still owed me six shillings from the sale of my aunt’s belongings.
67
A week later, on the 29th of January 1820, the old king died: poor mad George III at last made way for his plump and profligate son: and the world shrugged its shoulders and moved on. By that time, I was already beginning to slip into another mode of life – by good fortune, rather than by intention. When one is entirely adrift, it is sometimes wiser not to splash and shout but to lie still and trust to the benevolence of the currents.
In their own way, the Jems were indeed benevolence incarnate. They lived in a tall, narrow building hard by the Strand. Three Gaunt-court was one of a group of dilapidated houses huddling around a dingy court like elderly ladies reduced in income, retired from the world and finding safety and recreation in the company of their kind. When I came to call for my six shillings, I saw a card in the window announcing a room to let. The steps up to the front door had been recently swept, and someone had tried to clean the knocker, though without notable success.
Mrs Jem remembered me. Without my prompting, she unlocked a drawer of the kitchen dresser and brought out a paper containing six shillings. I inquired about the room: she puffed up the stairs and showed me a back garret with a narrow bed. I was tolerably certain that Mrs Jem would not allow anyone to pilfer my belongings. Within a few minutes, we had come to an arrangement which depended on my paying my rent a week in advance, meals and laundry extra.
It was necessary for the agreement to be ratified by Mr Jem, an enormously fat man who spent most of his days in bed, but this was a formality, like Parliament sending up a bill to the monarch for the Royal Assent. Mr Jem had once been a carpenter with men working under him but a mishap with a saw had cost him his right hand.
“A schoolmaster?” he wheezed. “I have a letter to write. I’d be most obliged if you would assist me, most obliged.” He waved his hook at me. “I cannot write neatly, sir, not now, not as neatly as I would wish.”
I doubt he could ever write much more than his name. The letter was a petition to a man he had once worked for. The following evening I tried without marked success to show Mrs Jem how to reckon up accounts on paper as well as in her head. Within a few days, and quite without conscious volition, I had become part of a minuscule community composed of the Jems and their lodgers. We were held together by our poverty, and by our need for one another’s services.
Jem and Mrs Jem and all the little Jems held sway in the bas
ement and on the ground floor apart from the front parlour, which was rented out to a man who constructed fake Neapolitan mandolins and filled the house with the scent of wood shavings and varnish. In the rooms above nested the other tenants, not higgledy-piggledy, as in the Rookeries of St Giles, but with decent intervals between them. I remember a widow who washed clothes and a man who had a coffee stall in Fleet-street; a one-legged sailor who acted as a gentle and infinitely resourceful nursemaid to the smaller Jems; a Russian couple who spoke only a few words of English, who went in fear of the police, and who were always willing to offer you a dish of tea; and a broken-down clerk who had worked in the City before his health gave way. As for myself, I helped reckon up who owed what to whom, tried to teach the younger Jems their alphabet, and wrote letters for anyone who would pay for them.
No, Gaunt-court was not St Giles: there is more than one way of being poor. Mrs Jem was fiercely determined that her house should be respectable. On Sunday, she took the little Jems to chapel twice a day, and Mr Jem too, if she could contrive it. She ruled her kingdom with Amazonian severity. When she saw the seamstress from the second-floor front parading in her finery up and down the Haymarket one Friday evening, she threw the poor woman and her belongings on to the street. To be both poor and respectable, you must also be ruthless.
Mrs Jem and I got on well enough. She took me on trust: all she knew of was that my aunt had been a decent woman and that I was a college man replete with book learning. I told her I was newly returned to London, having lost my position through no fault of my own. I did not enter into particulars, and there was no need so long as my conduct continued satisfactory.
As time passed, Mrs Jem, whose invisible web of influence spread far beyond the confines of Gaunt-court, found me scraps of tutoring here and letter-writing there among her friends and acquaintances. Like old David Poe, I became a screever, a humble scribe of other people’s communications.
The American Boy Page 35
