He listened as she told him of Sophie’s newest piece of news and then nodded seriously.
‘I’m not at all surprised,’ he said simply and returned to his fabric which was not settling itself entirely to his satisfaction. ‘She was always a little madam, wasn’t she? Showing herself off and expecting people to admire her. It makes sense she’d be on the stage. And I wondered where she had her money from. Unless her mother had died and left her a legacy, I couldn’t see it.’
‘She hasn’t said her mother has died,’ Tilly said doubtfully. ‘She never speaks of her and somehow I have never brought myself to ask her.’
‘Perhaps you should,’ Jem said reasonably and stepped back to admire the thick green silk that now hung in perfect swathes from the bar above the counter. ‘There, if that don’t sell out inside the week, then I know nothin’ about this business or the taste of my customers – isn’t it a fine piece of stuff?’
‘Indeed it is,’ Tilly said and then laughed. ‘In fact, you may let me have a length.’
‘I’ve already cut it for you,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like it and it’ll suit you fine. As to Miss Sophie – she has her own reasons for telling you now and not sooner. I’d not cater to her taste for attention by letting her see you’re all that concerned, if I were you.’
Which, she decided, was wise advice and went home comforted, to concentrate instead on the matter of Polly and her father; and sought out Silas and told him frankly she would, after all, welcome his company on the visit to Clerkenwell.
‘I beg your pardon?’ He looked blank for a moment, dragging his attention from the street which he had been staring into from the drawing-room windows. ‘To Clerkenwell? Oh, the court – of course, glad to be of service, Tilly. Very glad.’ And he had smiled at her a little vaguely. ‘Er – the young ones off to Leicestershire then?’
‘Next week,’ Tilly said and looked at him sideways. ‘Does that perturb you?’
‘Oh, not in the least!’ he said, a little too quickly. ‘Ah – tell me, were you – I mean – were you surprised – oh – that is to say –’ He stopped awkwardly.
‘Surprised that Duff should be invited to return to Leicestershire?’ Tilly said a little wickedly. ‘Oh, not in the least. I suspected that he would return – he enjoyed the shooting so much that it is natural he should now consider hunting, I suppose. And I am no longer at all perturbed by his friendship with Patrick Paton. I was an unduly anxious mother to be concerned in the first place. Now I have seen how attached he is to Sophie, how can I deny my own foolishness?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am sure you are right.’ And lapsed into silence to remain so, apart from necessary comments regarding their travel, until they had almost reached the courts.
‘I am sorry if I am boring you,’ Tilly said a touch sharply just as they entered the City of London and the horse drawing their cab was whipped up to turn northwards for Clerkenwell. ‘I would not have asked you to accompany me if you had not offered, you know, and although I said I was perfectly able to make this journey on my own I have to admit I quaked a little at the prospect. But now I see I should have suffered the quakes and left you in peace.’
‘Oh, no!’ he protested and roused himself. ‘I do beg your pardon, Tilly. It’s just that –’ He shook his head. ‘I feel such a fool, you know. I had convinced myself over the years that I was an excellent judge of character. I prided myself on it. And I had Miss Oliver down as a person of independent means who because of her sprightly nature and high intelligence found it possible to live her life independent of any maternal care or support. To discover how wrong I was – I have to confess to being quite put down in my own estimation.’
‘That must be painful,’ Tilly said and leaned back in the corner of the cab so that her face fell into the shadows and she could study him without close observation on his part. ‘Your feelings are engaged with Miss Oliver, I believe?’
He turned his head and peered at her. ‘Engaged? Decidedly not!’ he said vigorously. ‘Or not in any – in any loverlike sense! She is a child and I enjoy her company, for she makes me laugh with her prattling, just as children do. And she is so very pretty that she is a pleasure to the eyes. But my feelings are not engaged further than that. I am a man, Tilly, not a boy like Duff. You may ask him if his feelings are engaged – and I strongly suspect that they are – but for my part – no.’ He smiled then a little crookedly. ‘If I seem put out by young Miss Oliver, believe me that it is the wound to my amour propre and my intellect that causes suffering, not to my heart.’
Does the gentleman protest too much? Tilly wondered, still in the shadows, and then as her spirits quite unaccountably lifted, wanted to laugh. It didn’t really matter, did it? He didn’t care for Sophie and she had been feeling those stabs of unbecoming jealousy for no reason. How cheering that was! It even helped her pretend she was not concerned about the other comment he had made, regarding Duff and his feelings. She’d think about that some other time.
The courts, when they reached them, were alive with human activity, and Tilly felt greatly comforted to have Silas’s large protective shape beside her. The entrance hallway, which was surging with people of all sorts, lawyers as well as clients – many of the latter looking decidedly the worse for wear, even at this hour of the morning – smelled foully of dirt and bodies and tobacco smoke and the alcohol which had had its damaging effects on the people she saw around her, and she lifted her handkerchief to her nose as unobtrusively as she could as Silas led the way in to stand beside her, looking about.
‘I think I must seek out the clerk of the court,’ he said in her ear. ‘I shall go and make enquiries and return to you swiftly. You be so good as to wait here while I check where he is to be found – I think that will be best, so please don’t stir from this spot.’ And before she could object he was gone, pushing his way through the crowd, leaving her feeling very isolated and conspicuous, for she was much better dressed than most of the other women in the big vestibule.
There was a uniformed man at the door, and she caught his eye, and he came across to her, his brass buttons winking in the thin sunshine that came in through the high windows.
‘Can I be of ‘elp, Madam?’ he asked heavily, looking at her in an avuncular manner.
She caught her breath and said gratefully, ‘Indeed, I am seeking information about a man who was – he was before the court here a year ago and was found guilty. I employ his daughter in my household and seek to gain information about his welfare for her peace of mind.’
‘O’ course, Madam,’ he said as though it was the most commonplace request in the world, and one he regularly heard each day. ‘This way.’
‘Oh! There is a gentleman with me,’ she said. ‘He has gone to seek where we should be and –’
‘I’ll find him and send him to you, Madam,’ the man said heavily. ‘It ain’t suitable for a lady like you to be standin’ here in the middle of all this.’ And she shrank back as a man a little more drunken than the rest came reeling across the hallway and nearly bumped into her, only being held back by the buttoned one’s hefty arm.
She didn’t argue after that, and gladly followed the buttons in the opposite direction to the one in which Silas had gone, and let him deliver her to a small room at the back of the building.
‘There,’ the man said. ‘Here’s the register of all the people what’s been in and out of ‘ere this past year. When did this case come up?’
‘It was just over a year ago,’ Tilly said and the man nodded.
‘In that case, you look in this ledger ‘ere. Start from the back, see? It’ll be quicker than going through for the whole year. You know his name?’
‘George Robert Mitcham,’ Tilly said. ‘So his daughter told me. Of Postern Court, High Holborn.’
‘Then you should find him easy enough. Now, the name of the gentleman what’s with you? I’ll go seek him for you,’ the buttoned giant said and she smiled up at him gratefully.
‘Mr Si
las Geddes,’ she said. ‘And thank you for rescuing me so kindly.’
‘It’s no more’n my place, Madam,’ he said with an air of vast superiority and turned and went, leaving her with the big leather-bound ledgers. Some of them were set on a sloping desk in the middle of the small dirty room, and the rest were on the shelves which lined the walls in serried rows of well-tooled leather, a series of accounts of felons and thieves of all sorts, going back to the end of the last century, according to the dates carefully engraved at the foot of each ledger’s spine. She shivered at the thought of the years of wickedness contained therein, and with a strong effort of will, opened the pages of the ledger the man in buttons had indicated.
It was heavy and the pages smelled of damp and ink and newly released dust, but she riffled them through her gloved fingers, not quite sure why, but needing to become accustomed to the sight of the pages, all of them covered with names and addresses written in perfect copperplate, though in rather cramped lines. After each name was a laconic account of an offence, such as ‘pickpocket’ or ‘horse thief’ or, in some cases, ‘murderer and batterer’. She saw the words ‘hanged at Newgate’ appear several times in a final column and shuddered and hurried on, riffling harder and faster.
And then she caught her breath, staring down at the name that leapt off the page at her, almost as though it had shouted to attract her attention.
It was not Polly’s father’s fate she had found. It was Sophie’s mother’s. Dorcas Oliver, she read. And slammed the book shut.
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘I DOUBT IT will come as so much of a shock to her,’ Silas ventured after they had travelled halfway back to Brompton again, and she roused herself from her reverie and looked at him.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Polly,’ Silas said. ‘I have no doubt she has guessed that his fate was as we found. She said as much to you, you told me. That he was an ailing man.’
‘Oh, Polly,’ Tilly said. ‘Yes, I dare say.’
‘So you need not be so sad for her,’ Silas went on, watching her as closely as he could in the dark interior of the rocking cab as the driver whipped up his tired horse to send it careering along the Strand on its way westwards, ‘need you? It does your tender heart credit, of course, but you should not be so very distressed.’
She bent her head to look down at her gloved hands on her lap. She had not given more than the most perfunctory thought to the way Polly might react to the news that her father had died within six months of his imprisonment, as had been recorded in the ledger; it had been her own feelings about finding Dorcas Oliver’s name that preoccupied her, and it was shameful to have Silas thinking so well of her concern for Polly when she was, in truth, being thoroughly wicked, wondering how it would be possible to handle this piece of news about Dorcas in a way that would benefit her, Tilly, and more importantly, Duff.
Ever since she had allowed Sophie to move into Quentin’s and had watched her conquer Duff’s heart, her feelings had been mixed. On the one hand she was deeply grateful to discover that her fears regarding the nature of Duff’s attachment to his friend Patrick Paton had been unfounded. Clearly, she had decided, watching her son positively mooning over Sophie, he was every inch a woman’s man. Whatever adolescent feelings had been involved when he was at school, now he was out in the world all that had been forgotten. She had not even been particularly anxious when Duff had made it clear he had every intention of accepting Paton’s latest invitation; she had actually permitted herself to think such a connection could do her boy nothing but good, in a world where the quality of one’s friends was of such importance.
On the other hand, her feelings about Sophie were sometimes less than kind. She seemed to Tilly to be altogether too charming to be trusted. Every one of the guests in the house adored her. Even the usually acerbic Miss Fleetwood had come under her spell; and more significantly so had the servants. In Tilly’s now wide experience they were a class of people who were very good indeed at seeing through pretension and deceit. There had been previous guests who had seemed charming and likeable to their fellows, and to Tilly herself, but who had been loathed and despised by Eliza and all her staff, and Tilly had learned to see their reaction as a very accurate measure of people’s true character. There was Mr Greenwall who had decamped one night by the window of his room, bag and baggage, leaving three months’ bills unpaid, and Miss Carter, who had been discovered to be the root cause of the disappearance of several pieces of other guests’ property. The servants had not been taken in by those two at all, when those above stairs had been quite hoodwinked.
Yet now, here was a guest she distrusted, yet they did not. Could she be behaving in a most unfair way, tarring Sophie with the brush not only of Tilly’s own memories of her mother, but of her grandmother? Tilly had hated and feared Mrs Leander, Sophie’s grandmother, who had been her father’s mistress all those years ago, a jumped-up housekeeper who had abused her position in the house to – well, Tilly would not think about that again. Think instead of Dorcas, who was still very much to be thought about, going by that entry in the ledger at Clerkenwell Magistrate’s Court. Imprisoned for two years for the separate crimes of common prostitution and obtaining money by trickery, she would soon be released. The dates on the ledger had made Tilly shiver with anxiety. Another month, that was all, and Dorcas would be free.
And what had Sophie been using for money in the meantime? She had been but a child of sixteen when her mother was imprisoned. Had she really left her mother’s care because she chose to, which was the impression she had given Tilly? Hardly, not at that age. Her mother must have left her to survive as best she could, and find money where she could. Yes, she had worked as a dancer, but why had she only now admitted this fact? Why had she not told Tilly sooner? The questions came thick and fast, and the hardest for Tilly to consider was, had Sophie been living on ill-gotten funds?
At that thought Tilly had felt herself go white. Had she herself been taking, as rent, money Dorcas had filched in some unspeakable manner? It was all too confusing and painful and it was small wonder that now she sat in the cab with Silas’s anxious eyes on her, thinking her upset about Polly. She would have to make herself a better dissembler, she thought with some panic, and managed to smile at Silas.
‘I am sorry to be so distrait,’ she said. ‘It is all so – that place was a great deal more unpleasant than I had expected. And the news of George Mitcham’s death and all – well, forgive me.’
‘There is nothing to forgive,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t wish to see you anxious unnecessarily. I do agree with you. It was quite dreadful to see so many unhappy people, most of whom I am certain are in the difficulties they find themselves because of poverty rather than because of any inherent wickedness.’ He brooded for a while. ‘I took as many notes as was possible before that officious creature turned us out –’ He almost snorted at the way the lordly being in buttons had shepherded them out of the building. ‘And I hope it will be enough to convince my Society that action must be taken for these poor wretches.’ He threw himself back against the leather padding of the cab and glowered. ‘It is a little short of disgusting that some of our fellow creatures should have to suffer so much when out here –’ and he gestured out of the window at the handsome new stucco-fronted houses which had been built along the road that led to Brompton ‘– out here is comfort and decency and every incentive to live a virtuous life. I am fast reaching the conclusion that virtue is entirely to be bought. It is certainly hard to come by for those who lack enough to feed and clothe themselves.’
‘Yes,’ Tilly said and leaned across and touched his hand. ‘You are a good man, Silas, and I must thank you warmly for your help this afternoon. I have been less than gracious in being so preoccupied with my own concern. It is good of you to spend so much time on my behalf and on that of the poor people for whom you show so much compassion.’
‘Oh, it is no effort at all,’ he said and smiled at her. ‘Caring for you,
that is. To take care of and to help you, Tilly, is a privilege. It is one I hope to enjoy for as long as you will permit me. For always, if you will consider it.’
She drew back. ‘Really, you must not –’ She stopped. ‘I mean, I was complimenting you on your work for the poor through your Society as much as – well, I am sure they appreciate you.’
‘I don’t do the work for appreciation,’ he said and drew back into his corner. ‘But because it needs to be done. Ah, here we are. Another few yards and you may rest a little before you talk to Polly.’
The moment had passed and she wasn’t at all sure how she felt about that. Had be been about to declare himself, to make a proposal? It had seemed so, and she was startled at how fluttery such a thought made her. Did she want him to do so? If so, why had she choked him off so quickly? She was a little old at thirty-five to behave like a foolish girl; a widow such as herself should surely be a little more worldly-wise. And one who had twice been widowed – well, it did not suit her at all to behave in so missish a fashion. She was quite ashamed of herself.
He handed her out of the cab with his usual punctiliousness, and she smiled at him tentatively. ‘I cannot thank you too much,’ she said. ‘You have been –’
‘Please take it as read,’ he said a touch brusquely. ‘There need be no more mention of it. Will you speak to Polly at once? Or accept my advice and rest in your room for a while first? It may be an emotional experience for her and therefore wearying for you.’
‘Of course I shall accept your advice,’ she said, feeling it was the least she could do and in truth glad of an excuse to escape to be on her own for a little while. It would soon be time to busy herself about the normal work of the late afternoon, supervising the preparation of dinner and the arrangement of the dining room, and after that there would be no time to do anything until she fell into bed at night, once the last guest had sought his or her room. No time for anything – not even thinking about Sophie. Or Silas.
Paying Guests Page 22
