I paid her a visit.
Geraldine’s eyes were bandaged but, more surprisingly, so was her left arm and both wrists were tied to the sides of the bedframe. She had slashed herself with a broken glass, the matron – a tall woman with a severe face but a kindly manner – had explained.
Geraldine jumped when I approached.
‘It is me, March.’ I sat beside her.
‘Oh, March. I had a dreadful visitor today, an Inspector Quigley.’
‘He is a horrible man,’ I agreed. ‘But what did he want?’
Geraldine twisted her head in a sweeping circle.
‘Would you like some more medicine?’ the matron asked, but I do not know if her patient even heard her.
‘He told me that attempted suicide was a criminal offence punishable by prison and that I should not survive long in there.’
‘I am sure any judge, when he knows what you have been through, would not want to punish you any further.’
Something metallic clattered to the floor and she let out a cry.
‘But he said it would be different if I cooperated and told him the name of Peter’s customers.’ She threw her head back so hard I thought she would rick her neck. ‘I told and told and told him that Peter was not like that, but he would not believe me. And then he said not to worry about prison because he had got two doctors to certify that I was insane, and that I should be put in a madhouse and kept in a straitjacket for the rest of my life.’
‘He does have a certificate,’ Matron confirmed quietly, ‘and they are coming back this afternoon.’
She went to settle a girl who was weeping noisily.
‘I shall see what we can do to fight it,’ I promised, but without much hope, for even Sidney Grice with all his ingenuity and powerful contacts had not been able to keep me out of an asylum.
‘I should have cut deeper,’ she whispered.
‘Do you think Peter would want that?’
‘He is the only person who will be pleased to see me.’
‘He wanted you to live again,’ I argued.
‘For what?’
‘I have a friend who was a beautiful child,’ I said, ‘but her parents were killed and she was badly disfigured in a fire.’
‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’
I remembered her fears just in time to stop myself touching her hand. ‘For many years she thought she had nothing to live for and kept the means to kill herself.’
‘Was she violated?’ Geraldine squirmed.
‘No, but she was forced to witness her friend being attacked and she is in constant pain.’
‘Is this one of these stories children are told about other people being worse off?’ She squirmed. ‘Oh hell, March, I cannot even cry.’
I forgot Geraldine’s fear and took her hand, and she must have forgotten too for she curled her tiny fingers around mine.
‘How did your friend plan to do it?’
‘She carried an amulet filled with cyanide,’ I replied.
‘Oh.’ Geraldine made a sour face. ‘That is a horrible way to die. I read about it in your story.’
‘She gave it to me to get rid of,’ I told her. ‘Because she realized that she wanted to live.’
Geraldine writhed and arched and let out a sob. ‘It comes in stabs,’ she cried and banged her head up and down on the pillow. ‘Oh, Daddy, it hurts so much.’
A nurse hurried over and gave her an injection and, almost immediately, Geraldine settled down.
‘When I was a child and my daddy loved me – no, do not tell me that he still does – he used to tell me stories every night. “The Firefly” was my favourite.’
‘I do not know that one,’ I said, but she was already asleep.
*
‘We cannot keep her like this forever,’ the matron confided. ‘The effects of the opium are wearing off quicker and she needs bigger doses – too big. Much more will kill her.’
‘Would that be such a bad thing?’
The matron crossed her arms tightly. ‘I entered this profession to save lives, not to take them.’
‘I am sorry.’
She relaxed her arms. ‘The Lord will take her when he is ready.’
‘I hope he does not wait too long then,’ I said, and I do not think she had it in her heart to disagree.
*
For perhaps half an hour Geraldine slept peacefully, but all too soon she awoke with a jolt, already whimpering in pain. Matron was attending to a young woman who was vomiting blood across the aisle.
‘You remember what you told me about your friend with her amulet and how it brought her good luck?’ Geraldine asked. ‘Do you still have it?’
‘Yes,’ I answered warily.
‘I could do with some luck,’ she said blandly.
‘Are you sure?’
‘It is my only hope.’ She put her free hand on top of mine. ‘Don’t let them do it to me, March.’
‘We can fight it,’ I tried again.
‘And if we fail?’ Geraldine asked simply. ‘And, even if we win, what is there for me now?’
I reached into my bag. ‘There is a screw cap on top.’ I put it into her upturned palm.
‘Like a watch crown? I feel it.’
‘Geraldine . . .’ I tried one last time, but I was too tired.
‘God bless you, March,’ she said. ‘You can leave me now.’
I kissed her goodbye, and knew God would not bless me for that day’s work. I doubted that he would ever bless me again.
80
The Head of the Hound
THERE WAS A flat parcel at the bottom of the pile and Mr G opened it first, cutting the string with his cord-knife, carved from the femur of Marchioness Froughsborough, recovered from the gibbet by one of her acolytes. He peeled back the thick brown paper and lifted out a white letter bearing a gold and red crest of a shield topped by the head of a greyhound and subtitled with a blue scroll bearing the words DEO DANTE DEDI.
‘Charterhouse School,’ he informed me, letting the letter skim through the air to alight face-up on the green leather seat of his swivel chair.
There was a second parcel inside the main one and my godfather unwrapped it, smoothing the creases from each of the five layers of paper as he went along, eventually uncovering a photograph in a frame. ‘They cannot think I would want to hang it on my wall,’ he grumbled, lifting it out and laying it under his desk lamp.
I peered over. It was the image of a youth in a dark blazer and light, baggy trousers and a white shirt, the collar so wide that it overlapped his lapels. A peaked cap cast a flimsy veil of shadow over his eyes.
‘Eric C. Bocking,’ I read from the tiny brass plaque on the mahogany frame. ‘Charterhouse School Middleweight Boxing Champion 1876.’ Eric had his chin up and was holding a trophy, about the size of a silver eggcup, in both hands at chest level. ‘Oh,’ I said.
‘There is more eloquence in that syllable than in half an hour of your usual babble,’ my guardian told me. ‘For once I would like your silly female opinion.’
‘I am only sorry that I do not have one with which to oblige you,’ I sniped. ‘But, if you would like a reasoned feminine judgement, he is not at all what I expected. Lucy said he was beautiful. It may be a bad photograph and I do not like to be unkind, but this boy is distinctly ugly.’
I picked up his second favourite magnifying glass and took a longer look, but could find no reason to revise my opinion. Though he was sturdily built, Eric Bocking’s face was not attractive. His nose, arising from between small round eyes, curved sigmoidally towards a snubbed tip with upturned nostrils over thin lips, parted in an arrogant smirk to reveal two upper central incisors severely splayed and twisted.
‘Not plain then?’ my godfather checked.
‘Not even in a bad light,’ I said guiltily, for I had endured enough barbs about my own looks not to wish to insult another’s. ‘No wonder Freddy did not encourage him.’
‘Age him,’ Sidney Grice suggested,
taking the glass off me and substituting his third choice. ‘Give him a hard life and a poor diet. Take off his cap and dress him in shabby clothes.’
I screwed up my eyes and tried to imagine a greying of the pallid complexion, a drooping of the mouth, some bagging below those haughty piglet eyes.
‘Who have you now?’ Mr G urged.
‘It cannot be.’ I lowered the lens and the image jumped out at me, leering horribly from under that cap. ‘Johnny “the Walrus”Wallace.’
‘Indeed.’ And Sidney Grice prised the handle of his magnifying glass from my fingers as if I were a corpse. His fingers, I noticed, were as cold as if he were one himself.
81
The Death of Captain Bligh
I WAS RUNNING short of cigarettes and W. Twiggs, the tobacconist’s shop, was having a half-day, so I rushed up Gower Street and just managed to catch Mr T before he turned the Open sign round in the front window.
Sidney Grice was coming down the stairs as I unclipped my cloak and hung it up.
‘You have been running.’ He aimed an accusatory finger. It did not take a detective to observe that I was still out of breath. ‘Ladies never run.’
‘Not even if they are being chased?’ I unpinned my bonnet.
‘Ladies are never chased.’
‘Perhaps you should tell the gentlemen that,’ I suggested.
Molly came, dragging a bucket and smearing the floor with a string mop. ‘Oh, miss.’ She slopped dirty water over my boots. ‘I could have helped you with that.’
Molly grasped my hat with soapsuddy hands, crushing the silk marigolds on the side, and rammed it back on my head.
‘No,’ I started to explain, but Molly was saying, ‘There you are, sir.’ And she handed her employer a stick. ‘Is that the one that turns into a stepping ladderer?’
‘Leave my things alone.’ Mr G snatched it from her.
‘What, all your things, sir?’ Molly grinned dreamily. ‘What, not touch your cups and sorcerers, your food plates, your dusty furniture and screwned-up newspapers? Oh . . .’ She clasped her hands ecstatically. ‘What a life of bridled pleasure I shall have.’ Her face fell. ‘Only I dontn’t not much like pleasure . . . much.’
‘I do not think you will be overburdened with it in the near future,’ I forecast, as Sidney Grice’s expression changed from grumpy to very grumpy.
I gave up trying to uncrease the orange petals.
‘Oh.’ Molly flung my cloak into my arms. ‘I dontn’t not know if you rememberer, miss.’ She selected another walking stick but her employer whipped it away. ‘’Cause your remembory aintn’t not much good,’ Molly went on. ‘But when I said I’d had swallowed a live mouse . . .’ She slapped her bosom so hard that I winced. ‘I couldntn’t not have, could I?’ She cackled, grabbing Mr G’s hat off the stand so violently that she dented the crown. ‘Silly me.’
‘Well, it is not very likely.’ I checked my hair in the mirror and decided it did not look too bad by my standards today. I had pinned it up a bit higher and thought it suited me.
‘No,’ she cackled. ‘’Cause Cook explainered it. A mouse is much too small to swallow. It must have been a rat.’
‘At last, a brain inside you.’ Sidney Grice inspected his cane suspiciously.
‘What brain, sir?’ Molly put a hand up to try to hide the damage.
He sighed. ‘The rat.’
‘Oh no, sir,’ Molly explained patiently. ‘It was me who swallowed it, not Miss Middleton.’
She made a grab for another stick and he slapped her hand away.
‘Tea, please, Molly,’ I said, before it occurred to her to slap him back. Molly scowled because she had been enjoying the game and my guardian scowled because I had said please.
‘Somebody has been polishing my canes,’ he announced icily.
‘That was Miss Middleton, sir,’ Molly put in quickly. ‘I tried to stopper her. I begged on blended knees.’
‘Humph.’ Mr G grumbled. And I took the blame because she would have been in much bigger trouble than I, though I could not help but conjecture that Molly had not just swallowed a rat, she had become one.
*
I had my first cup of tea wordlessly, while Sidney Grice made some urgent notes at his desk then sorted through the rest of his mail, ripping and screwing up and hurling almost all of it away until, with a loud rhyrrhh, he threw himself into his chair.
I poured his drink and topped up mine. ‘I was just thinking.’
‘Nobody just thinks.’ He stirred his tea vigorously. ‘They do at least forty-three other significant things simultaneously. Shall I enumerate?’
‘No.’ I tickled Spirit’s ear as she promenaded past me. ‘I was thinking how fortunate it is – and I am not sure that it can just be good luck – that none of the women who were violated is with child.’
Mr G stopped stirring. ‘Not one,’ he agreed carefully.
‘I would not have thought he would be considerate enough to use French—’
‘Indeed,’ my guardian interrupted, still capable of being shocked at the things I knew. He leaned back, untouched tea swirling around the handle of his spoon, while he braced himself for what he was about to articulate. ‘Come now, March,’ he chivvied. ‘Finish your sentence. You cannot afford to be priggish in cases like these.’
‘Letters,’ I said, and he hurrumphed.
‘Quite so.’
And I had a strange feeling that in one field at least I might be less squeamish than he.
‘Expound twelve major causes of women not conceiving during congress.’ He took an avid interest in his watch.
‘The woman may be too young or too old,’ I began. ‘She may be infertile. It is believed that women are more fecund at certain times of the month.’
My guardian looked as if the milk he never consumed were sour, but I continued. ‘She may already be with child or only just have had one. She may be congenitally barren or have had an infection.’
‘We do not need to dwell on the nature of that,’ he assured me hastily.
‘How many is that?’ I asked.
‘Eight.’
‘Is that all?’ I racked my brains and remembered that, despite what men like to believe, it was not always the woman’s fault. ‘The man may have had an infection such as mumps or be congenitally barren. He may be incapable of,’ I struggled to find the right words, ‘spilling his seed.’
‘One more.’ Sidney Grice looked distinctly green.
‘He may have no seed to spill,’ I ended, to his undisguised relief.
‘Let us consider that last proposal first.’ He stretched forward to paddle his tea again – six times in each direction. ‘Since you are invariably slow to say something relevant. Why would a man have no seed?’
‘He could be a eunuch in a harem,’ I suggested weakly, ‘or a castrato in the Sistine Chapel, or have had an accident. Or sometimes men are castrated for medical reasons.’
Sidney Grice rose like a man in a dream and sleepwalked round his desk to his cabinets. He pulled open a top drawer and plunged his hand in, apparently randomly like a child at a lucky dip, but withdrawing the file he sought in his first attempt.
‘We simply must,’ he declared, raising the brown envelope high above his head, ‘and we must do it now.’ He waved the envelope triumphantly. ‘Pay a visit to Captain Bligh.’
‘I have some bad news for you.’ I put down my cup. ‘Captain Bligh is dead.’
‘What?’ Sidney Grice slapped the file down on to his desk. ‘Dead? Do not tell me he is dead – although you have already done so. Dead when, where and how and why, and why was I not informed?’
‘I think about seventy years ago,’ I hazarded. ‘I do not know what he died of, but I thought everybody knew.’
Sidney Grice clapped a hand to his head. ‘You must have been mixing with Molly too long to have become so obtuse,’ he said kindly, ‘to imagine, even for one dull-witted moment that I was referring to Captain, later Vice Admiral of the Blue, William B
ligh FRS RN, who died, incidentally, on Sunday 7 December 1817, sorely missed – though not, I suspect, by the naughty crew members of His Majesty’s armed vessel Bounty.’ He threw himself back in his chair. ‘I am of course – and you will feel almost as stupid as you are when I rectify your misunderstanding – referring to Mr Captain Bligh, the retired General Surgeon of Great Russell Street.’
‘Why was he called that?’
‘It is his patronym.’
‘You know full well what I mean.’
‘His father was Mr Bligh and a great admirer of his namesake.’
‘I see.’ I got up, hoping that George would not want to call our firstborn Ounces, though I could just about live with Sterling.
Sidney Grice clinked his cup with the spoon as if about to make a speech. ‘I cannot possibly drink that now,’ he complained. ‘It is grossly over-stirred.’
And, while he rang three times for his flask, I got up and glanced at his urgent notes. He had sketched a pole with alternating bars hingeing out of the sides. The Grice Ladder Cane was printed underneath.
82
The Mystery of the Missing Bells
THE BRITISH MUSEUM has been described as the biggest building site in Europe and they had only finished its new White Wing a year or so ago, but even then, I had read, it struggled to house the vast quantities of antiquities flooding in from every corner of the empire. I am ashamed to say that I had never troubled to visit it and we had only a glimpse of the roof today, for Mr Captain Bligh lived in a neat terraced house at the Bloomsbury Street end of Great Russell Street, furthest away from Tottenham Court Road.
‘I shall answer it,’ we heard being called, and the householder himself responded to my knocks.
Despite being, as my guardian had informed me on the way, nearly eighty years old, Mr B seemed in robust health, straight-spined and solidly built, with a florid complexion and a handshake too strong for my, until recently, pain-free fingers. ‘You will take tea?’ he offered after the introductions.
Dark Dawn Over Steep House Page 32
