Dark Dawn Over Steep House

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  ‘As good as my Japanese.’ I replaced the glass, gave him back the button and sat to face him again.

  ‘Tooth translates as zahn and snake as Schlange’ l could not help but notice how he sat more erect when he spoke German.

  ‘Schlangezahn,’ I realized, not very cleverly.

  Sidney Grice yanked on the bell pull again. There was a distant cry and Molly came clattering down the stairs.

  ‘Surely that is proof enough that he attacked Lucy?’

  ‘Is it?’ Mr G inclined his head.

  ‘I suppose somebody else could have worn his waistcoat,’ I conceded, as Molly cantered along the hall.

  ‘That is one of forty possible explanations and only the sixth most likely.’

  Molly burst into the room.

  ‘You are late,’ her employer scolded.

  ‘Better late than later,’ she responded brightly but, seeing that did not go down very well, tried again with, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I was just giving the cat a bath.’ She struggled to straighten her apron but managed to twist it more askew.

  ‘You were doing what?’ I exclaimed in horror. ‘Is she all right? You have not drowned her?’

  I jumped out of my chair but Molly slapped her knees in merriment.

  ‘Bless you, miss, I didntn’t not put no water in. I gave Splirit the bath to play in with Mr Grice’s sock what he don’t not know she chewded up last week.’

  ‘I think he does now,’ I told Molly, and she clamped her hands over her mouth one at a time.

  ‘Oh, miss, you didntn’t not tell him?’

  ‘No, you just did.’ I sat back. ‘And her name is Spirit.’

  Molly’s arms windmilled, nearly catching her employer in the face as he whisked away.

  ‘Oh, bless you, miss, I know that, but she laughs like a spider when I call her that.’

  ‘You took Molly on,’ I reminded my guardian and he rolled his eye.

  ‘So you did, bless you, sir.’ Molly smiled affectionately.

  ‘That is three blessings in two minutes,’ he complained. ‘Any more and I might as well have employed the Pope.’

  ‘I didntn’t not think you cared for Roaming Cathlicks.’ Molly folded her arms with the air of a doorman who had been instructed not to admit me.

  ‘I do not care for anyone,’ he reminded her.

  ‘You liked Mrs Dilligent,’ she reminisced, ‘and the doctor lady.’ Molly rested a hand familiarly on the back of her employer’s chair and he flinched, his mouth working towards an explosion of abuse. ‘And the Gorestring woman what we stayed with.’

  It had been one of the most terrifying nights of my life, but Molly was clasping her cheeks as one might recollect a romantic dinner.

  ‘Tea please, Molly,’ I put in hastily, and she looked at me dolefully.

  ‘Me and Mr Grice was having a good old chinwag,’ she reproached me, catching her employer’s expression as she bent to pick up the tray. ‘Oh, and now look, you’ve gone and upset him and he’s so difficult to upset normanly.’ She stumbled on the hearthrug. ‘Not to worry, sir. We’ll catch up later.’ She began to curtsy, but thought better of it as the tray tipped thirty degrees. ‘Bless him,’ she crooned as she left.

  ‘But we do know that the button belonged to Schlangezahn,’ I recapitulated.

  ‘It certainly resembles a button which Prince Ulrich Albrecht Sigismund Schlangezahn might wear.’ Mr G shook open a folded square of chamois.

  ‘So shall we pay him a visit?’ I suggested.

  ‘Not yet.’ He polished his eye.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There are turnips for dinner.’ Sidney Grice reinserted his eye. It was not, but it looked upside down. ‘And I have yet another telegram to send to that not especially mysterious, though doubtless parasitical solicitor, Mr Silas Spry.’

  He went back to his reading.

  ‘Good heavens,’ he cried. ‘I have yet to reach the thrilling climax of this account but, from Miss Bocking’s testimony of how she invented her safety pencil sharpener, it would appear that the design was indeed stolen.’ He waved the report accusingly. ‘From me.’

  40

  The Ruins of Abbey Road

  WE HAD A good drive, our horse getting into a steady trot and tossing its head joyfully at the unaccustomed exercise along Marylebone Road past the new Madame Tussaud’s with its verdigris dome.

  ‘Perhaps they will put you in their chamber of horrors one day,’ I teased.

  ‘I would be in familiar company.’ Sidney Grice struggled to extract the cork from his flask. ‘Apart from capturing three of the murderers represented therein, I have shaken the hand of both Messrs Caleraft and Marwood, the executioners.’

  It was another hot day and I was glad of my new bonnet but, though I had brought a new parasol to complete my outfit, I dared not open it in the presence of my guardian.

  Families, gaggles of girls and gangs of youths were heading for Regents Park.

  ‘It is salutary to recall that forty skaters drowned in that boating lake when the ice broke eighteen and half years ago,’ my guardian said grimly. ‘Yet another example of the perils of seeking frivolous pleasure.’

  ‘You take pleasure in some things,’ I pointed out.

  ‘None frivolous,’ he parried as we whisked by, the sounds of the city almost too faint to hear. ‘And very little pleasure.’

  London has always been a city of contrasts – poverty cheek by jowl with opulence – but I never ceased to marvel how the urban bustle of Gower Street could give way to near-rural tranquillity still within the borough of Camden. Gower Street ran largely between two rows of terraces, the only vegetation being in the occasional window boxes. Abbey Road boasted imposing villas set back in large plots. The pavements were dotted with plane trees and the gardens profuse with shrubberies and well-clipped lawns.

  Four young men crossed in front of us. They had long and unkempt hair.

  ‘Such poverty even here,’ I sighed. ‘That one has nothing on his feet.’

  My guardian clucked. ‘He can afford to smoke cigarrrrettes, though.’ He rolled the R’s in a distinctly feline purr.

  It was not difficult to spot the site of Steep House. The line of precisely trimmed privet hedges to our right was herniated by unkempt bushes bulging into the pavement and overhung by branches.

  ‘Halt,’ Sidney Grice commanded and the driver hauled on his reins with a gentle, ‘Whoah.’

  The horse slowed reluctantly, snorting and stamping its hooves at having its fun curtailed.

  ‘There, you unattractive fool.’ Mr G stamped both feet at once and we pulled up. ‘Reverse your vehicle immediately.’ The horse edged uneasily backwards until we were alongside the gates of the previous property. ‘Stop-stop-stop.’ My godfather could not have yelled any more urgently if we had been about to reverse over a cliff, and the horse obeyed instantly, slithering slightly on the cobbles.

  The name on the brick pillar gatepost had been freshly repainted.

  ‘Finkin’ of movin’ awt ’ere?’ Our driver lowered his hand for his fare. ‘You won’t find a decent tiger for miles.’

  ‘Is he speaking an obscure Hindoo dialect?’ my guardian pushed open the flap. ‘If so, it is not one that I have studied.’

  ‘It is rhyming slang for pub,’ I interpreted.‘Tiger cub/pub.’

  ‘It is wonderful to know that your time in such establishments has not been entirely fruitless.’

  We clambered out and I just had time to give the horse a raw potato before the sting of the whip on its flanks set it off again, wild-eyed and sweating with exertion.

  ‘Pay attention,’ my guardian snapped as if I had run off to pick wild flowers, and we stood side by side, gazing through the high railings at the childhood home of Lucy Bocking.

  New House stood on a wide raised terrace at the end of a thirty-yard gravelled drive, with a carriage turning circle cut into closely clipped lawns, still lush despite the summer’s drought. The house itself was wide and clean-lined and
stood three storeys, white-painted with a central door and rounded bays at either end. The long windows were divided into small panes. It was an impressive and elegant building, but the crowning glory of New House was a great dome on the flat roof, an upturned cast-iron basket filled with glass glittering in the August sun.

  ‘Very nice,’ I commented.

  ‘It is what it is,’ my guardian told me.

  ‘So is everything.’ I wondered if the fountain in the circle had any fish in it.

  ‘Except art, money, power, chocolate-coated biscuits and people,’ he told me. ‘Come.’

  We made our way back up the road past the privet hedge, rule-straight on one side, unkempt and ragged on the other. The wrought-iron railings flowed on but were eroded in places and brown with rust, and here the spikes were topped by heavy rolls of viciously barbed wire. The gate was chained and secured by a chunky cast-heart padlock.

  Mr G slid the cover up.

  ‘Brass workings,’ he remarked in satisfaction. ‘So they will not have corroded.’

  He set to work with his picks, whistling a short low note over and over again, while I watched a grey squirrel chase itself round the trunk of an elm tree.

  Just as I was battling with an urge to beat him into silence with my parasol Sidney Grice stopped chirping.

  ‘Got it.’

  There was a clunk and he hinged the shackle away to force the gate open with some difficulty, as the hinges had not been so resistant to the elements and fought noisily to resist him.

  The top of Steep House was just visible above a crop of giant cow parsley or Heracleum mantegazzianum, as Sidney Grice classified it. The roof had gone, apart from the back left-hand corner where a gable of charred beams supported a patchy tent of grey tiles.

  The ground had not been tended for years and we slashed our way through the undergrowth with the vigour of two Stanleys hot on the trail of Dr Livingstone. Any thoughts I might have had were interrupted when I became ensnared in a heavy spider’s web. I plucked it off my face, stumbled over a tree root and barked my shin.

  ‘Blimmit,’ I cursed and my guardian paused in concern.

  ‘I cannot help feeling that I failed you.’ He watched me struggle to my feet. ‘By not impressing upon you forcibly enough that profanities are never acceptable from the mouth of a lady in any but three circumstances, none of which are pertinent to your situation.’

  ‘But it does not mean anything,’ I argued.

  ‘The vilest obscenities never do. Duck.’ He let go of a bramble and I moved just in time to save my bonnet from being whipped away.

  I brushed myself down. ‘You have still not explained why we are here.’

  Sidney Grice set off again, hacking his way through a splendid crop of nettles.‘Who owns this territory?’ he challenged.

  ‘Freddy Wilde, of course, and all the people her father borrowed from probably.’ A creeper had managed to wrap itself round my ankle and I ripped it away, shaking the cherries off a no longer ornamental tree like a tempest.

  ‘And whose companion is Miss Wilde?’

  ‘I hope this game will not last very much longer.’ I inspected the blackberries but they were still green and hard. ‘For we both know it is Lucy Bocking.’

  ‘Then I need not enquire if you are aware that Miss Bocking is currently employing our services.’ He paused to scrutinize a leaf as if he had never seen one before.

  ‘Indeed you need not,’ I agreed. ‘But what has this got to do with her case?’

  Mr G mumbled about something-iculae vulgaris and released the leaf. ‘Now you have changed the format of our intercourse from me asking you questions to which we both know the answer, to you asking me questions to which neither of us have a solution.’

  He pulled apart a drape of dead ivy dangling from the branch of an ancient oak and there stood Steep House, a blackened shell of once-red brick, scabbed with patches of what had probably been a cream render. It stood full height at the rear to the right where a bay supported itself, the house having fallen away to leave it stranded as a tower, perforated by oblongs where the windows would have been. The other bays had collapsed outwards, the front left sprawling towards us.

  We stepped up and the ground became firmer. The raised terrace was buried now and the undergrowth too high and dense to enable us to walk round the sides of the house.

  It would have been possible to have seen straight through the ruins were it not for the sycamores and birch trees already established in the interior. Chimney breasts rose only a foot or two above their ground-floor hearths, one near the middle three fireplaces high, and I could not help but note how what must have been the servants’ quarters had by far the smallest grate.

  ‘What do you hope to find?’ I asked.

  ‘The truth.’ Sidney Grice crouched by where the front door had been. ‘There are few things more tragic than a dead house.’

  ‘A dead person,’ I suggested and he sniffed.

  ‘People must expect to die, but to see a building cut down so cruelly in its prime is a calamity on a par with giving the vote to any coarse commoner with ten pounds to his name.’

  Mr G shook his head sadly and, though I could not agree with his priorities, I could not help but share his sadness, not just at the destruction of a beautiful house but more especially since we knew that Freddy Wilde’s family and their servants had been lost there during that terrible Christmas.

  I had read what I could find about the fire in my guardian’s vast repository of newspaper cuttings, but I could not imagine the terror of the occupants that night. Did Mr and Mrs Wilde run through the flames looking for their daughter? Perhaps Lucy’s brother Eric did. Were the maids trapped in their attic rooms, begging for help? How badly was Fairbank, the butler, injured when he carried Freddy out?

  ‘I am always surprised how quickly nature reclaims her own,’ I said, trying to blot out the memory of another fire at the end of an aristocratic dynasty.

  ‘If you had troubled to peruse Hamish Vixen’s Differential Rates of Soil Incremental Deposition and Colonization you would be less astonished and better informed.’ He selected a broken tile out of the dozens strewn there.

  ‘I think I would prefer to be surprised.’

  I paced the frontage of the house as evenly as I could over the rubble and weeds. By my feet was a grating over a light well and behind that the blackened remnants of a window frame, little more than charred marks on the wall. Was this where Lucy’s brother, Eric, had been trapped and died? I resolved to find out. Such a site should not go unnoted.

  From left corner to right, it was a matter of forty-six strides which, at about thirty inches each, made the width of the house some one hundred and fifteen feet and, as far as I could judge, the depth was even greater.

  ‘One hundred and twelve feet,’ my guardian confirmed without looking up. He was rooting through the detritus with the end of his cane.

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘There is no point in having distances if you cannot judge them.’ He sprang up. ‘From Miss Wilde’s scanty description where would you say her bedroom was?’

  ‘Well, nobody sleeps on the ground floor from choice and the top floor would have been the servants’ quarters and the attics,’ I reasoned. ‘And Freddy said she could see Lucy’s house and the driveway from her room. So I would say the first floor of this left-hand bay.’

  ‘So would I.’ He limped towards it. ‘And, conveniently for us, it has collapsed.’

  ‘Why conveniently?’

  He tore a tangle of weeds away. ‘Because we can see the damage to every level without having to ascend an unstable structure.’

  ‘But there is nothing left of the floors,’ I objected and he bfffed.

  ‘There is always something left of everything. It may be a puff of smoke long dispersed into our soiled atmosphere and therefore untraceable, but for as long as this deformed globe hurtles elliptically round the sun it remains.’ He bobbed and scraped the moss from a chunk of br
icks and cement lying flat on the ground. ‘Nonetheless,’ he concluded, some time after I thought he already had.

  ‘So her parents must have slept on the right-hand side,’ I calculated. ‘Freddy said they liked the sunrise and that must be the east.’

  ‘South-east,’ he corrected mildly.

  I walked alongside the bay – its structure increasingly scattered as I approached the apex – and glanced back to see Sidney Grice shuffling on his haunches to the footings of the house where the outer wall rose three or four courses high. ‘Fascinating,’ he cried. ‘See how everything is piled up.’

  ‘Well, it would be,’ I replied automatically, my eye caught by a leg sticking out from under a stone plinth.

  41

  The Bucket, the Bat and the Broken Glass

  SIDNEY GRICE CAME Over.

  ‘What have you found?’

  I kneeled. ‘A doll.’ The plinth had fallen against the edge of a rockery so that it lay tilted about thirty degrees from the ground. I drew back my hand. ‘It must be Freddy’s, the one she talked about.’

  ‘Possibly,’ he conceded. ‘Stand clear.’

  Mr G bent at the knees and, keeping his back straight, ran his fingers under the propped-up end of the stone. The other end was submerged under a heavy net of undergrowth. He braced himself and strained, the wiry roots ripping as he wrenched the plinth, soil scattering, a herbaceous periwinkle torn from the ground with it, violet-blue flowers tumbling away. He was a small man and not sturdily built but he had great strength.

  ‘Can I help?’ I stepped forward.

  ‘You most certainly can.’ My guardian’s face was purple. ‘But you most certainly shall not.’ He heaved with all his might – his neck muscles about to burst his starched collar – and the plinth hinged up, reached the near vertical and, with one final strain, toppled diagonally into the long grass of a shallow depression. Mr G breathed and rotated his shoulders.

  ‘What a world exists beneath our feet.’ He massaged his right upper arm.

  And, craning over him, I glimpsed a myriad of woodlice scurrying for cover, a fat earthworm contracting indignantly, centipedes and millipedes writhing, tiny round white eggs, a spindle-legged spider strutting its suddenly sunlit domain. The doll was uncovered now, fine porcelain lying supine on the soil, her face towards me, politely listening to our conversation. A few shredded strips of dark dress material were draped around her waist and legs. A disgustingly swollen slug slid lazily over her chest. She must have been pretty once. Her left eye was closed but the other still glinted through a layer of dust and long curling lashes. Her cheeks were rosy and her lips deep ruby despite the earwig ambling in the valley between them. And she had thick cascading hair which I had no doubt would be golden if it were washed – one of the reasons I never liked dolls for, not only were they pretty, but they always looked like they knew it. The only damage I could see was a crater in her left temple, big enough to put two or three fingers in and for the large garden snail that had made its home in it.