The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

He knows the voice; has known it, in fact, these five years and more. The girl standing behind him is tiny and her impish features heavily made-up, but there’s life and real affection in the bright green eyes. She’s arrayed in an expensive and extremely fashionable combination of ruby satin and white lace that clashes jauntily with her anything-but-expensive accent. Though as Charles well knows, she can mimic the gentry to perfection when it suits her—in fact this talent of hers has been more than a little useful to him in the past. He may have met her first in the exercise of her profession, but she’s been invaluable to him since in the pursuance of his own, both official and unofficial. Informer, undercover agent, decoy, spy: Lizzie has been all of this to him, and more. As well as a true and unfailing friend. But there is one more fact about Lizzie Miller that you need to know, and will not discover from anything these two are about to say: She is the same age, almost to the day, as the sister he has lost. That other Elizabeth who had the same golden hair, and the same bright green eyes; that other Elizabeth he has never, in all this time, ceased to search for.

  “I got your message,” the girl says now with a smile, before looking up in his face and sensing his unease. “Somefing up, Charlie?”

  “It’s cold out here, Lizzie, do you want a drink?”

  She shakes her head. “The old hag is watching us—see? Over there, pretendin’ to look in the shop winda?”

  The woman’s probably no more than fifty but looks and dresses like an old crone. As drab as Lizzie is gay, with strands of dry grey hair escaping from an old straw bonnet and dirty marks on her patched cotton dress.

  “She’s checkin’ up on me—makin’ sure I don’t ’ook it in the bloody frock she spent so much money on. She won’t be too fond of you neither so you’d better be quick, whatever it is.”

  The girl moves away from the glare of the lamp, and Charles follows her into the comparative shadow of a closed doorway. There he fishes inside his coat and pulls out his sheet of newsprint.

  “Have you ever seen this man?”

  Lizzie squints at the page. Those green eyes of hers are not just very pretty, but very long-sighted, and the smudgy images all look alike to her. “Bloody ’ell, Charlie, that could be anyone! Dark coat and a beard—is that the best you can do? Half the blokes in London look like that, and most of them are down ’ere at least once a week. I must a shagged a dozen like that in the last two nights alone.”

  “He’s a banker. Sir Julius Cremorne. You must have heard of him.”

  Lizzie snorts. “If I ’ad a shillin’ for everyone as ’as told me they was a lord or a sir or a bloody judge, I wouldn’t ’ave to drop me knickers to buy me bread. You’ll ’ave to do better than that.”

  “He stammers,” says Charles suddenly, the words out before he’s even had the conscious thought.

  “What’s that?” says Lizzie, her voice dropping.

  “I think—I’m not sure—but I think there’s a good chance he might have a stammer. Why—does it remind you of someone?”

  The girl puts out a hand and leans heavily against the wall.

  “What is it, Lizzie?” says Charles, grabbing her by the shoulder. “You know him, don’t you?”

  She turns and spits into the street, which tells him far more than anything she’s yet said: She’s hardened to her life, tough as it is, not usually so easily rattled. “Oh yeah,” she says bitterly, “I’ve seen him.”

  She looks up and past Charles’s shoulder. The older woman is moving through the milling crowds in their direction. She’s surprisingly agile for such a stout matron, and she does not look pleased.

  “Look,” says Lizzie in a quick whisper, “come and see me Monday—I’m off to Brighton for the weekend first fing wiv one a me reg’lars—Bert ’itchins—remember ’im?—but I’ll be back Monday. Come and see me in the afternoon. But meanwhile—”

  She’s about to say something more but the old woman is already upon them. “Are you buying, sir?” she says tartly, breathing gin fumes in his face. “Because if not, Lizzie has work to do, and I’d thank you not to occupy her.”

  Charles and Lizzie exchange a glance. She looks—to his eyes—pale and stricken under the paint, but he’ll get no more from her with her iron-eyed minder in tow.

  Monday seems a very long way away, but it doesn’t look like he has much choice. He’s going to have to wait.

  TWELVE

  The Letter and the Answer

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING brings a reply from Eleanor Jellicoe, and an invitation to call on her that afternoon at her house in Brixton. It’s a grey drear day of low cloud and fine almost imperceptible rain. Not a morning that tempts you outside; indeed, the sort of morning that seems made for domestic preoccupations, especially those you’ve been finding excuses to avoid for weeks. Like unpacking. Though to be fair to Charles, he has made a certain amount of progress since we last took a look round his attic refuge. There are now four shelves of books, more or less neatly arranged, but the rest of his precious collection is still bedded in sawdust in three large crates. He leaves the warm bedclothes to Thunder the cat, who bunches them up into a curled nest, and calls to Billy for his breakfast to be brought up on a tray. And then he gets to work. With so much more space at his disposal than in Percy Street, he can have the luxury of a rather more scientific organisational principle, and he spends a happy half hour deciding which system to employ to group his objects. And so it is that he does not hear the door open—does not hear the girl’s feet, bare as ever, whatever the temperature, approach across the wooden boards. Hears nothing, in fact, until the plate and tin mug clatter to the floor and he turns to see her face.

  He has never seen a look of such abject terror before; never, indeed, seen the phrase horror-struck as anything other than a ludicrous hyperbole fit only for one of Mrs Stacey’s Gothic novels. But there are no other words. Her eyes are dilated black with fear and her mouth distorted like a cry of pain. He starts towards her, out of pure instinct, but she staggers back from him, her lips moving soundlessly. And now he knows—the what anyway, if not the why. He is holding the menace in his own hands. One of the centrepieces of his collection, acquired—at a price—from an explorer recently returned from the left bank of the Niger, and about to occupy pride of place under Ethnographical between the shrunken South American head and a Chinese urh heen fiddle (which is a rather finer example, in fact, than the one on display at that very moment on the upper floor of the British Museum).

  The bearded mask.

  He stands there, looking down at the thing lying there in his hands, and realises with a jolt that this is surely the point. To him it’s just a ‘thing’—a treasured thing, a beautiful thing, but a thing all the same—a mere artefact, collected for its craftsmanship and prized primarily as an intriguing if uncivilised curiosity. Words like demon and magic and soul-eating may be nothing but quaint pagan concepts for him, but he has only to look at the girl to know that it is not so for her. What little he understands of the purpose and use of such masks comes straight (or crookedly) from the mouths of European missionaries, but even such partial and ill-informed accounts are enough for him to know that she might now believe herself cursed—as a woman and an uninitiate—merely for laying eyes on it, just as surely as he profanes it with the touch of his sacrilegious hands. Charles is the one who feels accursed now—cursed by carelessness—and he plunges the mask back in the sawdust with a hot flush of shame before turning back to the girl.

  “It’s gone. I’m sorry—I had no idea.”

  Molly is still standing on the same spot. The only difference now is that there are huge tears coursing silently down her cheeks; tears she makes no effort to wipe away. Charles is seized with an immense, irrational desire to touch those tears—to put his fingers gently against that face. But he does nothing. Embarrassment? Fear of rejection? Mere clumsiness? Some or all of the above, no doubt. And perhaps—more to his credit—a sudden realisation that this girl, too, must have been considered, at least by some, as little mo
re than an intriguing if uncivilised curiosity. Which is enough, all things considered, to stop him doing anything other than stand there, unmoving, until he hears the sound of Billy coming up the stairs. He seizes the excuse to move swiftly to the door and close it behind him, leaving Molly standing exactly where she was, surrounded by the ruins of his uneaten breakfast. As he clatters down the stairs Charles tells himself he’s doing it for her sake—protecting her from Billy’s all-too-perceptive eyes—but I suspect that this time he’s being disingenuous, and I’m reminded of the old truism that it’s the lies you tell yourself that are the worst lies of all. Something Maddox tried to tell him only a few days ago, though without very much success.

  Half an hour later Charles is on a large red omnibus lumbering slowly over Westminster Bridge. The traffic heading into town on the opposite side of the road is almost at a standstill—a line of carriages, carts, wagons, and hackney-coaches stretches back to the far end of the bridge and beyond, the carters cracking their whips and swearing. Crowds of clerks and office workers are making their equally hindered way on foot. Dark grey figures on a pale grey day; a palette of neutral tones. As soon as the ’bus turns down the Brixton Road Charles realises with a start that it must be two years or more since he came this way. He can still remember fields backing onto the rather elegant houses that line this street—marshy scrubby tracts of unloved land, in the main, but green all the same. Now the seep of the suburbs is absorbing these last remnants of countryside, and what once were villages are gluing irrevocably together in lacklustre London leakage. Meadow after meadow pass them by, sliced now into residential building plots. Here and there the outline of a street has been cut, and two or three show-homes stand on the corner sites. They look sharp enough, these little model houses, their paintwork unpeeled and their small squares of rudimentary garden marked out with posts and string, but those who buy them may find the workmanship belies the sprightly exterior. Corners are cut here, as well as built on. Farther down the road the ’bus rumbles past other sites which have clearly not attracted such an encouraging level of interest; here the ground is merely squared into foundations, with large confident notice-boards posted along the fence proclaiming This Ground to Be Let. Farther still, and we’re into dirty shanty settlements, where the dogs fight, the weeds grow rank, and rubbish is dumped daily by contractors unconstrained by such nice concepts as ‘Health’ and ‘Safety’.

  Eleanor Jellicoe’s house proves to be one of a low unfinished row that peters quickly into a quagmire of red clay and gravelly rubble. The few feet of trench outside her gate suggest that digging did at least start on the drains, but from the smell and the slowly caving walls it appears work has stalled. And yet the thin, elderly lady who opens the door to Charles seems remarkably unconcerned by the makeshift state of everything about her. There’s a plant in a pot on her windowsill, and her little cottage is as neat as she is; it occurs to him as he looks around him that she must spend her whole life cleaning.

  “Mr Maddox?” she says. “You are prompt, I’ll say that for you. After a lifetime of working to a strictly regulated timetable, my hours are now my own, but I still appreciate those who respect the punctuality of their appointments. Will you come in? I have made tea.”

  The tray of miniature blue-and-white cups and saucers is set in a sitting-room barely large enough to hold them both. Everything seems to be constructed slightly less than life-sized: Charles finds himself stooping like Gulliver. He looks about for a chair sturdy enough to hold him, but there is only one other. He perches awkwardly, worried it may not hold his weight.

  Miss Jellicoe pours, presents, and takes charge. “Now. Your letter indicated that you had received my address from Mr Henderson. I gather, therefore, that what you have to ask me concerns my time at the Camberwell workhouse?”

  Charles gets out his notebook, hearing the little chair creak alarmingly.

  “Though I am not sure whether I will be of any use to you, I’m afraid. My memory is not what it was.”

  Charles doesn’t believe a word of it; he’s prepared to bet the mind behind those enquiring eyes is as sharp as it ever was. He thinks, with a pang, of his great-uncle, not realising that she has seen the look of sorrow cross his face.

  “It is a difficult case, the one you are working on?”

  He hesitates, momentarily wrong-footed. “No—not especially—that is, yes, of course, for those directly concerned. But I am hoping to be able to offer my client some sort of conclusion—an answer to his questions, at least.”

  Miss Jellicoe folds her hands in her lap, and sits back in her chair, clearly waiting for Charles to begin.

  “The incident in question took place some sixteen years ago—”

  “In 1834.”

  “In 1834, exactly. A young woman was admitted to the workhouse that May in circumstances—well, shall we say, in—”

  Miss Jellicoe nods. “She was with child? I thought as much. I’m afraid that was—and is—an all-too-frequent occurrence. We must have had scores of pregnant girls come through our doors in the course of a year.”

  The numbers, if nothing else, are not encouraging, but Charles makes an effort to seize back the initiative. “This young woman was very young indeed. Not much more than seventeen. Pale hair, very slender. Does that remind you of anyone?”

  Miss Jellicoe takes a deep breath. “I can recall at least a dozen girls that might fit such a description, Mr Maddox. There were, as I said, all too many of them, and a sad proportion were quite as young as that, if not younger.”

  “This girl’s name was Chadwick. Her father came looking for her some months later, but by then both mother and child were long gone.”

  “Oh dear,” says Miss Jellicoe with a sigh. “Your client wasn’t the first father to repent a rash condemnation made in haste, and he won’t be the last, I dare say.”

  “He was told his daughter had died in child-birth, and the baby removed to an orphanage.”

  Miss Jellicoe gets up from her chair. She goes to the window, looking out over the half-desolate landscape. There’s a group of labourers working at a distance; the noise of their digging is just audible in the misty air. A moment later she looks back to Charles, her face troubled.

  “There was one young woman—but she did not call herself Chadwick—I’m quite sure of that—”

  “She may have gone under another name. I’m sure that’s quite possible.”

  She returns to her chair and adjusts her shawl. The house is, indeed, extremely cold, and Charles notices for the first time that the room may be clean, but their two chairs and the low table are the only furniture, and there are neither coals nor ashes in the grate. No fire has been lit here for days. He wonders suddenly, looking again at her gaunt face, if he is idly consuming a whole day’s ration of provisions. “This girl,” she continues, softly, “if it was indeed her, stayed only a few weeks with us. She was very poorly both before and after the child was born, and we did not think she would survive. The child was removed as a precaution. A sad case, a very sad case.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t think I take your meaning.”

  “It was badly deformed. The child, that is. The spine was twisted, and the face strangely drawn on one side. It gave quite a disquieting appearance. I am afraid to say I have rarely seen such a face outside a circus. Or one of those deplorable travelling freak shows.”

  She shakes her head, disapproving, and Charles remembers, with a quick rush of self-disgust, his own boyish delight at being taken to one such in St Giles. Even at that age he was, to be fair, far more interested in the wax models and mechanical contraptions, and what he now knows were—at best—pseudo-scientific displays of bottled foetuses and two-headed calves, but he still remembers the wretched look on the face of the trapped and tamed giant in the room at the back—Before Your Very Eyes, Ladies and Gentlemen—From the Snows of the Himalaya to the Streets of London—Chico, the Tallest Human in the Known World!

  “None of us thought the poor mit
e would survive,” continues Miss Jellicoe, recalling him to the present. “And of course there were those who said it was God’s will. The outward manifestation of sin and depravity.” She shakes her head.

  “What happened to the young woman?”

  “She was taken away.”

  She sees his face and quickly raises her hand. “No, no—not in that way. A gentleman came and took her with him. Said he was a relation of hers. As far as I remember the young woman was barely well enough to walk, but he insisted. But did you not say that your client’s daughter had died?”

  “That’s what he was told, but there are no records. No proof.”

  Miss Jellicoe looks at her hands in her lap. “I was rather unwell myself soon after the young woman left. I cannot answer for what records were kept—or not kept.”

  “Do you know what happened to the child?”

  She shakes her head. “As I think you know, there was an outbreak of smallpox around that time. So many children died. I fear such a weak and undersized baby would have been only too susceptible to that terrible disease. God forgive me, but in such cases death itself is often far preferable to the probability of an even more dreadful disfigurement. Nonetheless, I am sure it would have received only the best of care in Peckham.”

  Charles frowns, and flicks quickly back through his pages of notes.

  “I have here that the Convent of the Faithful Virgin Orphanage is in Norwood?”

  Miss Jellicoe nods. “Indeed it is—I know it well, and it is an admirable institution. But the child was not sent there.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure. The baby was sent to Mrs Nicholls. In Peckham.”

  “And she was—?”

  “A dedicated and Christian woman, with the welfare of the babes in her charge always at heart.”

  Her cheeks are now rather pink, and she looks away.

  “They put the child in a baby farm,” says Charles softly.