Season of Darkness

by Cora Harrison

  There was a keen wind blowing down the alleyway and I propped Doyle against a wall, still keeping my arm below his armpit and my other hand flat against the breast of his starched shirt front. Oddly, he seemed aware of the cane and now held it firmly in one hand.

  ‘All right, sir?’ A policeman came down from Fleet Street, attracted by the two figures. He touched his hat, perhaps in recognition of a mistake.

  ‘Thank you, Officer. My friend has had too much opium, I think.’

  The policeman surveyed him with a knowledgeable eye. ‘Takes them that way, best to get him some air. Walk him down to the river, sir. Fog’s lifted at last. Lovely moon. Bright as day. Yes, take him down there. He’ll be right as a trivet as soon as he gets the breeze in his face.’

  I had planned on getting the man in a cab, but I thought it polite to murmur an acquiescence.

  ‘It’s Mr Collins, isn’t it?’ went on my new friend chattily.

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ I felt a slight thrill at being recognized here on the midnight streets of London. Perhaps the policeman had read Basil.

  ‘Seen you around with Mr Dickens,’ continued my new friend. ‘Now you keep your hand on the gentleman’s right arm and I’ll take the other arm and we’ll get him down to the river with no trouble. There’s a bench down there, beside the Whitefriars Stairs, sir.’

  ‘Collins, Collins,’ muttered Mr Doyle. His voice was that of a drunk man, but his eyes as they turned towards me, seemed, beneath the gas lamp, to be regaining some sense. ‘That girl, Collins’ girl.’

  ‘That’s right sir, one foot in front of the other, that’s the way.’ The policeman, perhaps out of a feeling of tact, continued to make loud encouraging sounds, but beneath them, Doyle was still muttering to himself, repeating over and over again the two words: ‘that girl’. He was walking more strongly, though, and I stopped when the Whitefriars Steps were in sight.

  ‘Thank you, Officer, I think that we’ll do very well now.’ I gave him a coin and was glad to see the back of him. There was a bench there for waiting passengers and I thought that Doyle would come to his senses, sitting there in the cold damp air.

  He was quite amenable, almost like a limp rag doll. I guided him over, pushed him gently, a hand on each shoulder, and he collapsed on to the bench. I sat beside him and looked across the river at the boats. A police launch passed, going at high speed down river, going towards Wapping. My eyes followed it. A horrible place, Wapping, a place where pirates and smugglers were executed, their bodies left in iron cages until a high tide put an end to their lives. I tried to distract my mind by scanning the river and then, with relief, noting that the ferry was pulling out from Blackfriars. It was just at that moment I felt a prod on my arm.

  ‘Look at this, Collins.’ The man had come to his senses. His eyes were still vague and cloudy, his words slurred, but he sat up straight and he had his cane in his hand.

  ‘Yes.’ I turned my attention on him.

  ‘Wanna show … something.’

  And then, to my horror, he slid open a centre portion of the cane that he carried, took from his pocket a cartridge and inserted it into the space. The cane was a disguised gun.

  ‘Give me that!’ To my alarm, my voice rose to a shriek. The man looked at me with his blurred eyes, looked startled. I tried to control my voice, to sound authoritative.

  ‘Good man. Just you give that to me.’

  ‘It shoots …’ His voice trailed away.

  ‘So it does,’ I said, trying to make my voice sound unconcerned. ‘But, I think that you’ve put the cartridge in upside down. Let me fix it for you.’

  After a moment, I had shaken the cartridge loose and with a shaking hand, I pushed it deep down into my trouser pocket. Let him think that he lost it. He was on his feet now, aiming the cane at me and I had no intention of letting him have the cartridge back. He staggered and I held his upper arm firmly. A cloud came across the moon, but there was still light enough to see that a boat was coming towards the stairs and I hailed it with my umbrella while still supporting the drugged man with one arm.

  ‘York Stairs,’ I said as soon as we were seated. I had needed some assistance to get the man on board. The boatman had held the boat steady against the steps while his assistant hauled Doyle by one arm and I pushed. Soon we had him seated under the lantern in the prow of the boat. Both men recognized him and neither was surprised by his condition.

  ‘The air will do him good, sir.’ The boatman echoed the policeman’s words. By the light of the lantern there I could see that Mr Doyle’s face was beginning to look a little healthier. His eyes, though, were still vague and unfocused. A stream of words came from him, random and meaningless and then, quite suddenly, my name once again.

  ‘Collins. The girl,’ he said. ‘The girl.’

  ‘What did the girl say?’ I asked the question in his ear, so quietly that the boatmen, who were singing softly together, had no chance of overhearing.

  Doyle turned his face towards me. He seemed, at first, to be puzzled by my question, but then, quite unexpectedly, he gave me an answer.

  ‘She wanted my opinion on her father’s will.’ The words were crisply spoken and quite unlike the meandering vague utterances so far. I drew in a breath.

  ‘Her father’s will,’ I repeated. Was the man wandering, thinking perhaps of some case that he had worked on, something that he had studied. Or did his words concern Isabella?

  He said no more for a moment, just sat and listened to the plash of the oars against the water and the soft song of the boatmen.

  ‘Isabella,’ I said, trying to jog his memory, but it was no good. He had lapsed into an opium dream, muttering to himself.

  ‘Nearly there, now, sir,’ called the boatman and his assistant took the grappling hook and a noose of rope from beneath the front seats. The freshening wind blew some of the ragged clouds away from the face of the moon and the sudden light seemed to startle my companion. He sat up very straight, looked all around him and then spoke in clear, precise tones, as though making a submission at the bar.

  ‘Isabella Anne Gordon, daughter of Andrew and Anne Gordon.’

  And then he began to groan a little and to shake. By the time that the boat was moored beside York Stairs, he had lapsed into a state of tremors and total misery, weeping softly as I and the boatman dragged him out while the other man held the boat as steady as he could.

  ‘Will you be all right, sir?’ The boatman eyed the size of the tip that I had given and decided to be generous. ‘Here, Jem, you help the gentleman get him up to the top of the steps.’

  I got rid of Jem at the corner of Buckingham Street. I was bursting with excitement and impatience. Isabella Anne Gordon, daughter of Andrew and Anne Gordon. How on earth could the lawyer have known these details if Isabella had not told him?

  Mr Doyle, however, said no more as I steered his footsteps towards Adelphi Terrace. When we reached Robert Street, though, he dismissed me with the haughtiness of a lord, thanked me for the pleasure of my company, but he would trouble me no more. I watched him go with regret. He was quite steady on his feet now and strode along with his head slightly tilted, nose in the air and one hand swinging the cane gun. I fingered the cartridge in my pocket and waited as he mounted the steps to number five. He found his key with ease, inserted it into the door and vanished within. How had he managed to sober up so quickly? Dickens, I thought ruefully, might have been more forceful with the man, would probably have insisted on his explaining how he knew these details about the murdered girl, but I couldn’t quite see how I could do any more at this late hour of the night. My mind went to that other night, the time when I had spotted the watch and someone had taken a shot at me, had scared me off, and perhaps, coolly retrieved his watch.

  But who had been that person?

  It only now occurred to me to wonder why my unseen watcher carried a gun. Not a usual thing for a gentleman to do on the streets of London. A pistol, perhaps, but not a gun. My mind went through the other in
habitants of number five Adelphi Terrace. The schoolmaster, a brute of a man, educated, but from a low-class background, I would have guessed. Would a man like that even have learned how to shoot? And then there were the two young journalists. A gun was an expensive purchase. One of them had talked about a shooting gallery. But the guns in a shooting gallery were hired for the occasion.

  But what about a man who had a gun slotted into his cane, always with him, always ready for use.

  I shrugged my shoulders and walked back towards the Temple Inns at a smart pace. My mind had been made up. I would go back to my rooms, banish all thoughts, all wonderings from my mind, go to sleep and in the morning, I would get up with the lark and I would go back to Greenwich again. I would take the nine o’clock steamer, I decided. An unbelievably early hour for me, though I shamefacedly thought of how my industrious friend Dickens would already be at his desk, sharpening his quill pens at that hour. ‘Can’t bear those new-fangled steel pens, Wilkie,’ he used to say to me. ‘A pen has to be moulded to my design before it can record my thoughts. There is something so unyielding, so alien about a steel pen.’

  So, while Dickens’ newly-made pen, dipping in and out of a pot of blue ink, was filling a long page with the words from his brain, I would be on my way down to Greenwich to find out some more details about Isabella Anne Gordon from Mrs Peters. I felt more capable of dealing with her than I did with cross-examining the lawyer, a man probably twice my age. Women, though, were different. I always got on well with women, liked them and enjoyed their company. I would bring Mrs Peters a gift of some chocolate drops, I thought sleepily.

  EIGHTEEN

  Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone:

  My aunt’s room was in front. The miniature of my late dear uncle, Sir John, hung on the wall opposite the bed. It seemed to smile at me; it seemed to say, “Drusilla! deposit a book.” There were tables on either side of my aunt’s bed. She was a bad sleeper, and wanted, or thought she wanted, many things at night. I put a book near the matches on one side, and a book under the box of chocolate drops on the other. Whether she wanted a light, or whether she wanted a drop, there was a precious publication to meet her eye, or to meet her hand, and to say with silent eloquence, in either case, “Come, try me! try me!”

  Yes, a large box of chocolate drops, layer after layer of them. That had been a good gift. I had always a theory that a gift should be something that both could enjoy and Mrs Peters and I sat cosily by the fire and tempted each other and told each other how beneficial they were for the health.

  ‘My friend is brooding on producing an intelligent woman clerk for you, Mrs Peters,’ I said jokingly. ‘I left him hard at work. You were a bit unfair to him, you know. What about Sally Brass in the The Old Curiosity Shop? She was sharp as a needle, twice as sharp as her brother Sampson. And she never did housework, either, now did she?’

  She laughed a little at that. ‘I must say that I rather liked Sally Brass. I had forgotten about her. Still, no one could call her a heroine, could they, Mr Collins? And so I think we score evens.’

  ‘Shake hands on it and do have another drop of your excellent sherry with your chocolate drop, Mrs Peters,’ I said, filling both glasses to a generous measure, while she selected a sweetmeat and then pushed the box across to me. And then when she had relaxed over the soothing combination, I said tentatively, ‘And now, Mrs Peters, are you going to tell me what you were going to say the other day? There was something, wasn’t there?’

  She didn’t look surprised, just took another sip of her sherry while I bit into a chocolate drop.

  ‘You see, I wouldn’t want to get anyone into trouble, Mr Collins,’ she said after a moment. ‘That Mr Dickens, you’ll excuse me for saying this, but I think he might be a bit of a stickler for rules and regulations, and after all, it was a very long time ago.’

  ‘I’m sure that he wouldn’t see it that way, Mrs Peters,’ I said earnestly. ‘You can rely on me to persuade him. I do give you my word that no one will get into trouble.’ I wondered what was coming, but felt sure enough of Dickens to be able to make the promise.

  ‘It was Pauline, you see,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘She was only a youngster at the time. A bit giddy, you know. But under me, my responsibility and so I wouldn’t like her to be reprimanded for something that she did when I was supervising her.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ I said, wondering what was coming.

  ‘Well, it was about eight or nine years after that girl Isabella had been left by her mother. She wasn’t with us anymore. She had come back from the baby farm when she was seven and she would have been working with the other girls, picking oakum, would have been about nine years old, I’d say, and she just upped and went. Lots of them did, and still do, Mr Collins, and I have to say that not much effort is taken to try to trace them. Save the parish money, is the feeling, you know.’

  ‘Did her mother came back for her?’ I asked.

  She sighed at my stupidity and ignorance, but then helped herself to another chocolate drop. ‘No, Mr Collins, this is not a fairy tale, not one of your friend, Mr Dickens’ novels. No, her mother did not come back for her, but there was a letter, addressed to her. Now, if young Pauline had done her job properly, seeing as the girl was no longer a resident of the workhouse, then the letter should have been sent back to sender.’

  ‘But there was no name on the envelope, no return address,’ I put forward the surmise instantly, hoping that she would be impressed by my quick wits.

  ‘Wrong,’ she said triumphantly. ‘But I see that I’ll have to tell you something about Pauline as a young girl. She used to collect stamps.’

  I swallowed some more sherry in order to assist me in thought and it did not fail me. ‘It was a letter from overseas,’ I guessed. Suddenly everything was beginning to make sense.

  She smiled with pleasure. ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘Well, a stamp from anywhere in England wouldn’t be too valuable, but from overseas, well that would be exciting for a girl who collected stamps. She removed the stamp and then put the envelope with the other objects in Isabella’s folder.’ I took another chocolate drop and beamed at her. She lifted her sherry glass in tribute to my quickness and I thought, once again, how women were so much easier to deal with than men. I exerted my mind to win more approbation, as though she were my nursery governess, teaching me my letters.

  ‘And then there is Greenwich,’ I said with a wave towards the window. It was decorously clothed with a net curtain, but that was not enough to hide the stately ships, sailing ships, steamers, dredgers, pilot boats, and police boats that bobbed on the river outside. ‘We were thinking, myself and Mr Dickens, about Anne Gordon and her husband going up to Yorkshire, perhaps to collect a boy from a previous marriage of hers, but, of course, now it makes sense to me. They were off to make their fortune. They put the baby in the workhouse, put her there because it would be no place for her until they had made their way, until they had a place to live and land to give them money for food and clothes. It’s obvious, now. They were on their way to Australia.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I was thinking,’ she said with an air of great satisfaction as she tucked into my box of chocolate drops.

  ‘And did you question Pauline?’ I asked.

  ‘She denied taking the stamp, of course, that would be Pauline. A great talker, but more lies than truth, normally.’

  ‘Did it have a postmark on it? Even if the stamp was removed, there would still be part of the postmark, wouldn’t there?’

  The elderly lady beamed at me like a proud mother. ‘What a clever young man, you are. Well, there was a postmark, I saw it when I handed it over, but you know, Mr Collins, that letter had been lying in a damp drawer for about ten or fifteen years. And Pauline would have steamed off the stamp. She was very neat and careful about things like that. Her stamp album was a thing of beauty. Ever so proud of it, she was. Nevertheless, steam will affect an envelope whatever the reason. I know that it was very hard to read it, but
I seemed to make out the word, ‘Oxford’ or something very like it. I only saw it for a moment, of course, just as I handed it over to her.’

  ‘Oxford,’ I said, feeling suddenly disappointed.

  ‘That’s what I thought that I saw, but I may have been wrong. Poor light, old age, any of these things could have led to making a mistake.’ Mrs Peters had an annoyed look on her face, annoyed with herself, not with me. I guessed that she was not used to making mistakes.

  ‘And you are sure that Pauline wouldn’t have bothered steaming off an English stamp.’

  Mrs Peters shook her head decisively. ‘No, she wouldn’t, letters coming every day, the wastepaper basket full of them. Why should she bother? No, if she did something like that, something that would have caused her dismissal, I’d say that it was because it was an unusual stamp, one that she didn’t have in her collection.’

  ‘Australia, perhaps? New Zealand, America, Canada, India, Tasmania, Singapore.’ I thought of all the places that English people went to and then a sudden idea came to me, as I remembered the man last night. ‘Or America, Georgetown, America,’ I said slowly. That had been the place where Mr Doyle’s rent had been paid from, according to his landlord. And, then more with hope than expectancy, I asked, ‘What did the letter say?’

  ‘I haven’t the least idea,’ she said composedly. ‘I gave Isabella Gordon the letter, her letter. It was missing its stamp and most of its postmark, but it had been noted on the log by Pauline.’ She paused and looked across at me.

  ‘Anything else?’ Now I was completely puzzled.

  ‘Just that it was addressed to Miss Isabella Anne Gordon, daughter of Andrew Gordon and Anne Gordon; the ink was faded, Mr Collins, but I could read that very distinctly. Official looking, I thought it was. Professional looking. That’s what I thought.’