Keeping Bad Company

by Caro Peacock

  I was beyond being tactful.

  ‘Plotting?’ She made another appeal to Mr Patwardhan. ‘Was I plotting?’

  She was playing with me. I was furious.

  ‘All I’m asking you for is a name. Or even a guess at where those jewels might be now. Anything. I’ve got until midday tomorrow to tell them something.’

  ‘I wish I could help you.’

  The way she said it was like a door closing. I tried everything I could think of in the way of appeals, persuasion, but it was like hammering my fists against teak.

  ‘I hope one day you know what it’s like when you love somebody and he’s in danger,’ I said.

  But it was an admission of my defeat. Anil showed me out. At the door he said, under his breath, ‘I hope you find your brother.’

  I paused on the step, hoping even at that point that he might have something to tell me, but he only bowed and closed the door.

  The ride back to London seemed endless. The horses were tired and the quiet ticking of Tom’s watch against my hip seemed to vibrate through my body. Amos didn’t have much to say after I reported my failure to him. As we came near the park in the dusk, he asked me what we were going to do next. I tried to drag my mind back from panic.

  ‘When you’ve taken the horses back, would you mind going to Robinson’s print shop near Ludgate Hill and bringing back Tabby.’

  It was twenty past seven by then, with no more comings or goings to be expected at the print shop. There was just the faintest chance that she might have seen something useful. Amos expected to take me back to Abel Yard, but I went with him to the livery stables. It was a short step from there to Kensington. For once, I didn’t even stay to see Rancie untacked and fed. I told Amos I’d see him later and went to pay another call on the lady who had been Mrs Eckington-Smith. She was on the point of taking her little girl upstairs to bed and looked alarmed when she saw me at this unconventional hour for callers. No point in burdening her with the worry for Tom. I simply asked her my questions there in the hall, with the child in her nightdress sitting on the stairs.

  ‘You told me you were going back to your maiden name but Mrs Glass called you Mrs Eckington. Was that a mistake?’

  ‘No. Eckington is my maiden name. My husband simply added his own name to mine when we were married. They were such snobs, his family, they hated being just Smith.’

  ‘So your husband’s name was Smith?’

  ‘Yes, does it matter? Has he done something worse?’

  ‘Does he have a brother?’

  She was looking alarmed at my urgency. Even the child sensed it and was chewing her fingernails.

  ‘Yes, an elder brother.’

  ‘A soldier?’

  ‘A long time ago. Long before I knew him.’

  ‘In India?’

  ‘I think so. Soldiers go everywhere, don’t they? I was never very interested in him.’

  ‘Where does the brother live?’

  ‘He has a house somewhere in Buckinghamshire, out in the Chilterns. I only visited once, a horrible gloomy place. I remember that he and my husband talked the whole visit about money. They’re obsessed with it.’

  ‘You don’t remember where exactly?’

  ‘No. It was a long time ago.’

  She’d have remembered if she could. She wanted to help me but was scared and bewildered. I apologized for intruding and left. It was dark by the time I came out, but I walked straight home across the park, not caring. Four captains on the list, one named Smith. For what it was worth, I now knew the identity of The Soldier. Captain Smith. Brother to Eckington-Smith. Holder of more than ten thousand pounds worth of shares in the East India Company, using his brother as nominee. A covetous, secretive man who knew about the jewels. If I found him, I might find Tom, but had no idea where to look. Locating a man named Smith somewhere in the Chilterns would take days, and we had sixteen hours left.

  At nine o’clock, Amos came back to Abel Yard, bringing Tabby with him.

  She ate, drank and, from her remarkable memory, ran through everybody who’d visited Robinson’s print shop that day, but no description matched anybody in the case. Besides, it had moved on now.

  ‘Eckington-Smith has a brother,’ I said. ‘I don’t know where he is, but he’s got Tom.’

  ‘That house,’ Tabby said, munching bread.

  ‘Would they keep him there? If Eckington-Smith recognized us, he’ll know it’s not safe.’

  But it was a big if. It had been dark in the yard. He might have supposed it was no more than a simple attempt at robbery. Our talk became a council of war, with Mrs Martley observing. It was a measure of her partiality for Tom, and her anxiety about him, that she tolerated without complaint the unwashed presence of Tabby in the parlour. Tabby insisted that her place was back there in her woodshed den behind Eckington-Smith’s house, watching. It was hard to deny, although she looked beyond tiredness, her face white and pinched.

  ‘I’ll take her,’ Amos volunteered. ‘Then come back here and decide what to do next.’

  He’d brought a cob with him, tied up below in Mr Grindley’s carriage workshop with a pile of hay borrowed from the cows at the end of the yard.

  ‘No knife,’ I said to Tabby. ‘And don’t go inside that house whatever happens. We’ll come for you first thing in the morning.’

  I went down to see them off, Tabby riding pillion. Upstairs, Mrs Martley had fallen asleep in her chair. I persuaded her to go up to bed, made up the fire and sat with my heart beating in rhythm with the ticking watch that was still in my pocket. If there was even the faintest chance that Tom was being kept prisoner in Eckington-Smith’s house, we’d force our way in early, before people were awake. It was possible. Amos could always whistle up half a dozen strong-armed grooms. Two things worried me. The first was that if Tom were inside the house, the first reaction of his captors might be to kill him to stop him giving evidence against them. The second, less logical but stronger, was my belief that Tom wasn’t there. I’d missed something. I still couldn’t see what it was, but if I could only think of it, he might be safe. I was no nearer it when Amos came back, just before midnight. I’d left the door unlatched for him.

  ‘She’s there watching,’ he said. ‘Not a light on in the place. You’d say it was empty.’

  ‘I’m afraid it might be,’ I said.

  I brewed tea. We discussed what we should do. Amos was all for a raid on the house at first light. No need for anybody else, he said. Just say the word and he’d be through the door like a badger through a hedge. With no other plan, I had to agree. At about two in the morning, Amos went down to see the cob was all right and smoke a pipe in the yard.

  I must have been dozing in the chair, because I woke with a start to hear his voice on the staircase. He wasn’t alone. He was gently encouraging somebody up the stairs, the way he might have spoken to a weary horse. I jumped up and opened the door, thinking the miracle had happened and Tom was back. As they came in, Amos was practically carrying the person with him. Swathes of dark silk trailed round his corduroy shoulder. Two dark eyes stared into mine.

  ‘Chandrika!’ I said, disappointment and amazement hitting me together. The gold embroidered hem of her sari was torn, her feet bare and bleeding.

  ‘Tom,’ she said, looking at me as if the one word explained everything. For a while, it seemed to be all she could say. I fetched a glass of water and knelt down at her feet, waiting.

  ‘My mother. I’m so sorry. I wanted to say then, when you were there, but I knew how angry she’d be.’

  Her eyes were on me, as if I should understand without being told.

  ‘To say what?’ I said.

  ‘She has the jewels. I know where they are. We can take them, then they’ll let Tom go.’

  ‘Your mother’s had the jewels all along?’

  ‘Not all along, no. Only for a little while. Mr Griffiths made Mr McPherson steal them back for her.’

  ‘Steal from where?’

  ‘East I
ndia House. The man you call The Soldier was keeping them in the vaults there. But that doesn’t matter. I can take you to where they are now and you can take them to the men who have Tom.’

  ‘So where are they?’ I said, still not quite believing.

  ‘We have a boat on the river. There’s a big wooden chest in it.’

  ‘The boat with the sea horse?’ I said. She nodded. ‘But there’s only one chest there and it’s full of opium balls.’

  ‘The jewels are there.’

  Amos was standing beside her chair. He caught my eye.

  ‘Back to the boat, then?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll go down and see to something. Give me half an hour or so.’

  While he was away, I persuaded Chandrika to drink some tea, well sugared, and got from her the story of how she’d managed to get the eight miles from Richmond to Mayfair alone and in the dark. She told it simply and without dramatics, though the risks she’d taken astounded me. Soon after Amos and I had left, she’d walked out of the back door of the cottage while her mother and Mr Patwardhan were in conference and asked the first person she met the way to London. After the first mile or two, her sandal strap had broken and she’d gone barefoot. By good luck, she came to some inn along the way just as a London coach was about to leave and persuaded the coachman to let her ride on the outside.

  ‘I had no money, so I gave him a bracelet,’ she said.

  Judging by the ornate silver bangles on her arms, he’d been well paid. In her light sari, Chandrika must have been cold and shivering when she got down in Piccadilly, but had enough presence of mind to ask the coachman to call her a cab. Another bracelet had gone for the fare. I supposed it was a tribute to the comparative honesty of the coach driver and cabbie that she had any left.

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’ I said.

  ‘Tom told me.’

  It sounded as if she’d hung on every word he said.

  ‘Won’t your mother be angry when she finds out?’

  ‘I shan’t be able to go back to her, ever.’

  Again, no drama in her voice, but complete certainty. I felt pity at the way she’d burned her bridges, but was anxious to know if she were telling the truth. It was a relief when Amos called up to us from the yard. He’d borrowed a fine Stanhope gig that had come into Mr Grindley’s workshop for repairs and harnessed the cob to it. It was a crush for the three of us, Amos driving in the middle, with myself and Chandrika on either side. I’d found a good thick cloak for her and a pair of slippers for her narrow feet. We’d have looked a strange trio, if there’d been anybody alert enough to notice us on the London streets at three o’clock in the morning.

  By half past four, we were rowing out again to the Calypso. After searching along the wharfs, Amos had borrowed a rowing boat in the same cavalier way that he’d borrowed the gig. Luckily, the rope ladder was down, as we’d left it. It looked as if nobody had been to the boat since our visit. I went up first, fearing for Chandrika in slippers and sari, but she left the slippers in the boat, hitched up her sari and climbed like a cat. Amos followed with the lamp and we went down into the hold. The opium chest was still there. Amos opened the lid and I showed Chandrika the neat rows of petal-wrapped opium balls in their separate compartments. She picked up one of the balls and rapped it sharply against the planks, the noise echoing round the empty hold. The opium ball cracked open like an egg, showing a dark core inside, a wooden sphere about the size of an apricot. When Chandrika took the sphere into her hands and twisted, it came into two halves. She held one of them closer to the lamplight so that we could see. Nestled in raw cotton, a great ruby flashed fire like the heart of a volcano. She went on, until the planks where she was kneeling were scattered with fragments of opium crust and wooden hemispheres, with more rubies, diamonds and an amazing emerald shining out. Then she looked up into our wondering faces.

  ‘Enough for Tom?’

  Right up to then, I’d been half alert for a trap, but the simplicity of her expression and the tone of her voice convinced me. It was a ransom for a prince and to her my brother was worth it.

  ‘Enough,’ I said.

  ‘Then let’s take them to whoever wants them so much,’ she said.

  Gently I picked up the great square-cut emerald. As it moved out and in of the lamplight it transformed itself from the dull glow of a green bottle to the blaze of beech trees in midsummer sunlight. And yet it was the bottle, not the emerald, that came into my mind. A dull green bottle, so as not to show any change in appearance from the arsenic. An elderly woman who almost fainted when a man she had not seen for some time walked into a drawing room. I might have made some sound, because both Chandrika and Amos were staring at me.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Amos said.

  ‘Nothing wrong, except that I’m a fool. Come on, let’s go and get Tom.’

  Chandrika started knotting the jewels into a fold of her sari as if they were of no more account than pebbles.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Put them back in the chest, for the while at least. We may need them, but I don’t think so. Your mother might keep them, Chandrika.’

  She’d been prepared to sacrifice everything for my brother. If it turned out to be necessary, I’d still accept the sacrifice as freely as it was offered. But there was another way, less brutal to her, and I knew Tom would have wanted me to try it.

  ‘So where are we going?’ Amos said.

  ‘To Tom’s lodgings.’

  He stared at me.

  ‘So you think he’s come back?’

  ‘I think he never went away. Come on.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Grey daylight was just beginning to show the outlines of banks and merchants’ offices as we drove up from the river to the heart of the City. We were the only vehicle on the roads, with the cob’s hooves echoing along chasms of buildings. We stopped by the alley at the back of Eckington-Smith’s house. I got down, walked along the alley and called softly to Tabby. She was with me as soon as I’d spoken.

  ‘He’s not there. Nobody’s in there.’

  ‘No. Something else to do.’

  I told her as we walked back to the gig. There was no room for her inside so she hung on to the back as we went along Cheapside, past Newgate and into Holborn.

  ‘Quieter for all of us to walk from here,’ Amos said.

  ‘Quiet’s not what we want,’ I said. ‘Right up to the door, close as we can get.’

  The front of the house was dark and blank like all the others in the street. Amos handed the reins to Chandrika. She looked from him to me, puzzled.

  ‘Just keep hold of them like that. He won’t go anywhere,’ Amos assured her.

  It was his way of making sure she stayed in the gig, away from trouble. He’d guessed that was what I wanted. He stationed himself on the pavement, by the cob’s head. To anybody looking out of the house, he’d look like any ordinary groom. I whispered to Tabby to keep out of sight on the far side of the horse and not move till Amos did. On the first floor of the house, a spark flared, then candlelight. A curtain shifted and dropped back. I went up the step, hammered on the door knocker and shouted up to the window with the candle.

  ‘It’s me. Tom’s sister.’

  The window sash lifted. A face in a nightcap looked out, confused and blinking.

  I called up: ‘Is he back? Have you heard from him?’

  Mr Tillington shook his head and replied in a quavering voice, ‘You haven’t found him, then? My poor girl. Wait, I’ll come down.’

  We waited. I glanced across at Amos. To look at him, you’d have said he was relaxed to the point of being half asleep.

  The door opened. I stumbled against it, trying to look as if I were fainting, but in reality to make sure it didn’t close.

  ‘My poor—’

  I suppose he was going to call me poor girl again, in that weak quavering voice, but he never got that far because Amos hurtled like a comet across the pavement, up the step and crashed with a
ll his considerable force into my brother’s kind, sick friend, Mr Tillington. Alias Captain Smith. Alias The Soldier.

  Mr Tillington went down like a sack. Tabby, who’d been close behind Amos, trod on him as she followed me upstairs. I called Tom’s name as I went. The house sounded echoing and empty, the stairs dark. The first door I opened from the landing let us into what was evidently Tillington’s room, window up, bed disordered.

  ‘Found him?’

  Amos’s voice, then his heavy footsteps upstairs. He came into the room with us.

  ‘What about him?’ I said, nodding downstairs to where Tillington had been felled.

  ‘He won’t be troubling us.’

  ‘Dead?’

  My heart lurched.

  ‘No, but good as for a while. You two stay here while I make sure there’s nobody next floor up.’

  His footsteps went on up. I pulled back the curtains, found a lamp on the bedside table and lit it. The room looked and smelled like any sickroom, a smell of camphor and beef tea, a row of medicine bottles on the mantelpiece. He’d acted his role of invalid very thoroughly. I remembered Mrs Glass’s voice: Amateur dramatics can be very dangerous to the feelings in sultry climates. His acting skills must have swept her off her feet many years before, since she’d been so badly affected when she caught sight of him at the dinner party. If he and Tom hadn’t happened to walk in at the same time as McPherson, I’d have tumbled to it sooner. The former Captain Smith had kept up his acting skills well enough to deceive Tom completely. It must have been a bad moment for both him and McPherson when they’d met at the Talbots’ dinner party. McPherson could have destroyed ‘Tillington’ in a moment. But then, McPherson was a man with several things to hide and could only guess what game his old associate was playing. In both cases, they’d followed their devious instincts and played bluff and counter-bluff.

  I opened the door on the other side of the landing. Another bedroom, window well-curtained. The smell was strange, sickly. A figure wrapped in a blanket lay unmoving on the bed. Light from the lamp in my hand lurched from the bed across the walls and back, as if the room had turned into a ship’s cabin in a gale.