Kept

by D. J. Taylor

  Looking from Grace to the figure of the old lady going intently about her chores and back to the blackbird, who had flown back to the window ledge and perched there in a state of apparent dejection, Dewar felt that he might faint with fear.

  “How…how will this help me repay my debt to Mr. Pardew?”

  “That’s for Mr. Pardew to say. But you working for the South-Eastern Railway Company is a start, indeed it is. But not a word about the Duke, mind. Mr. Pardew don’t like his friends’ names being bandied about, and that’s a fact.”

  Half a dozen questions sprang unbidden to Dewar’s lips, but Grace brushed them aside. He could say nothing more, for it was Mr. Pardew’s doing and he knew nothing of it. Dewar had better take the letter, for there was further company expected and this was not a thing to leave lying around, indeed not. There was gin or whisky. Which would he take? His mother should bring a jug of hot water, that she should. The bird hobbled and fretted at his hand.

  A dozen hours later Dewar awoke upon a mattress in a bare-boarded upstairs chamber which he could not remember having entered the previous night. He was fully clothed, save for his jacket, which lay atop the rough assortment of bedding piled around him. The room was empty except for a three-legged chair on which rested a water jug, an empty glass and a spent candle. He was not in such a condition that he could recall precisely what had happened to him in the later stages of the evening, but his first thought was for the letter, which he searched anxiously in the pocket of his coat to retrieve. There it was, still in its envelope, and he took it out and examined it once more, marvelling a little at the sonority of the words and his own name lodged inexplicably within them. There was a dryness in his throat, and he drank off a glass of water from the jug—very musty and stale it was—with trembling hands. Certain other remembrances of the previous night now crowded in on his mind with such speed that he could scarcely separate one from the other: of two very tall and silent gentlemen named Pearce and Latch arriving at the house very much muffled up in coats and scarves; and of his being introduced to them by Grace; and of one of them—he could not remember which—laughing and saying that he would “do”; of a great deal of talk he could barely fathom about Mr. Pardew’s affairs and schemes; of a solemn handshaking intended to seal some compact of which Dewar had only the faintest comprehension before the gentlemen took their leave; of Grace leading him up the back staircase and grinning at him beneath the light of the candle; of the footsteps and whisperings that seemed to resound through the house after he had pressed his head against his makeshift pillow.

  There was weak sunshine, he saw, falling into the room through a skylight above his head. Seizing his coat and stowing the letter back into one of his pockets, he made his way onto the landing, looked to right and left but found only closed doors, and so made his way down the creaking stairs. There was a little closet at their foot, and there he made water, washed his face, combed his hair and repaired the damage to his costume consequent upon a night spent in his clothes. The house seemed to him extraordinarily quiet. There was no sound that he could determine, save for a wheel turning in the street outside. A clock fixed to the wall beyond the closet door told him that it wanted a few minutes until the hour of nine. Grasping the lapels of his coat in his hands, so nervous now that his legs shook beneath him, he turned into the hallway, put his nose into the parlour and the drawing room and, finding no one there, took it out again. A giant ulster, which he supposed to be Grace’s, hung on a peg by the door, but of Grace’s hat, which he remembered seeing placed there the previous night by its owner, there was no sign.

  Supposing that he would find the household at breakfast, he descended the second flight of stairs to the kitchen, making a purposeful noise with his boots as he did so in order to announce his coming, but here, too, all was silent and empty. Beyond the gloomy window a wind had got up and was blowing the bushes back against each other and causing one of the stunted trees to bend at a very uncomfortable angle, and he became aware—how he had not noticed it when he first came into the room he could not tell—of a furious scratching somewhat above the level of his head made by the blackbird, the length of chain taut against its neck, dashing itself against the pane.

  Something stirred within him, and he reached out and seized the chain in his hands, gave it a twist and broke it—it was flimsily made and came apart in his fingers—then released the catch and pulled the upper frame halfway down. He had an idea of removing the chain from the bird’s neck, but before he could move closer, in a great rush of feathers and beating wings the creature was aloft, chain and all, into the rush of air. He saw it in flight for a moment, high above the chimney stacks and the distant gables, and then it was gone. It seemed to him that he had done something very foolish and which he would regret, but he was conscious, too, that he was glad to have done it. A few moments later he let himself out of the house and began the search for an omnibus that would take him to London Bridge.

  XVI

  “THE BLACK DOG KNOWS MY NAME”

  In the corner of the paddock, from behind the oak rail, Mr. Dixey watches the wolf. The oak rail is five feet high, above a fence of corrugated metal, though once already the wolf has jumped the fence and been found wandering in the wood. How it made its way through the thorn hedge, which is impenetrable to man, and the locked gate, Mr. Dixey does not know, but he has resolved to be vigilant. He can leave nothing to chance. Wolves—this he knows from experience and study—are resourceful creatures.

  From above his head, tumbling crazily out of the pale sky, a crow descends onto the grass and turns a beady eye over its surroundings. There are always carrion here. The trees are black with rooks. Jackdaws nest in the eaves above the dairy. The wolf, Mr. Dixey believes, leaning now on the rail—he is a tall man and can do this without discomfort—is no longer nervous of him. Or rather he has ceased to notice him. Mr. Dixey thinks that the wolf imagines him to be part of the landscape, a kind of moving tree that marches alongside the rail, the corrugated metal fence and the thorn hedge. Do animals have a sixth sense? Mr. Dixey thinks not, and yet even when he moves towards the rail in silence, stealing up to some vantage point from which he knows the beast cannot see him, the wolf is always anxiously regarding the space in which his head appears. It is uncanny, Mr. Dixey thinks.

  Just now the wolf is huddled down in the shadow of the paddock’s further end, tail curled over its forepaws, looking for all the world like a very large dog, sniffing at a strip of rabbit hide. It is extraordinary what it eats. Rabbits. Hares. Chickens from the farm. It is indiscriminate in its tastes but not, Mr. Dixey thinks, greedy. Food thrown into the paddock when it has eaten its fill will, like as not, be left for the crows. Mr. Dixey is impressed by this prudence. It confirms certain of his deductions about natural law while denying others. This interests him.

  Silently, one hand shielding the other as it rests on the rail, Mr. Dixey sketches the wolf. He reproduces the high arch of the spine, the curve of the muzzle, but the set of the head—the grin when it raises itself up—eludes him. Mr. Dixey believes—long years of studying animals have told him this—that we see in nature what we wish to see. Nonetheless, the wolf ’s grin intrigues him. It speaks of fairytale children run to ground in dark forests, ransacked graves, rawhead and bloody bones. The Scots of Sutherland used to bury their dead in island cemeteries a mile from the shore, so persistent were the attentions of the grey gentlemen. Mr. Dixey wonders if his own wolf, now hunkered even further down in the shadow of the fence, is becoming faintly domesticated. It is a timber wolf from Norway, brought across the North Sea in a fishing boat three months since and landed on the quay at Lynn in a crate, snarling with such venom that at first the porters Mr. Dixey had engaged to carry it to his wagonette refused to go near. Though quiet, for the most part, it was not a docile beast. A fortnight after its arrival, thinking that he might see some sport, Mr. Dixey introduced a bull mastiff into the paddock. It is not an experiment he intends to repeat.

  In
some parts of Britain it is still considered unlucky to call a wolf a wolf. The Scots, in particular, have a horror of this. But then it is not much more than a century since the last in Scotland perished, wrestled and stabbed to death by the great Highland hunter MacQueen of Poll a’chrocain in the glens of the Monadhliath. A large black wolf which the previous day had killed two children crossing the hills with their mother. The timber wolf, Mr. Dixey thinks, is similarly coloured—grey as it wanders into the pale sunlight but with a darker tint showing through. His dogs loathe it, are reduced to paroxysms of unease even from the further side of the thorn hedge.

  There is a squire in the West Country—Mr. Dixey has corresponded with him—who has a scheme to run wolves at stags on the downs or to make them quarry for his own hounds. Privately Mr. Dixey thinks this madness, but he is content to lend his ear. The timber wolf has risen to its feet now, stands staring at him incuriously before turning to examine the long curl of its tail. Mr. Dixey stares back. The crow, which has been quietly searching through the long grass, reemerges with something red and glistening held in its beak. Reluctantly, Mr. Dixey folds up the scrap of paper that is his sketch, sees that the paddock gate is securely fastened, passes through the low door in the thorn hedge and locks it behind him. There are other things that demand his attention: lawyers’ letters, estate business and the stables’ disintegrating brickwork. He has his own grey gentlemen, he thinks, gnawing at his vitals.

  Mr. Dixey sits in his study. In the half-light—for the shutter is still pulled across one of the windows—the room seems ghostly: the display cabinets and the bookcases gathered up in shadow, the stuffed bear somehow insubstantial, like an oversized children’s toy that might skip suddenly away to the chimes of a musical box. A mouse runs up over the pile of legal papers and bundles of foolscap, a bold, confident mouse that sits washing its whiskers in the shade of the inkwell and wringing its paws like some supplicant come to beg a favour, and Mr. Dixey puts down his pen and regards it, makes soft, encouraging noises with his tongue against his teeth, finds the fragment of a biscuit in his trouser pocket and crumbles it up.

  There are black dogs everywhere in Norfolk, Mr. Dixey knows. When scudding storms hide the moon on a winter’s night, then Odin, mounted on his eight-legged horse Sleipnir, leads the Wild Hunt across the sky with a pack of yammering hounds at his heels. In the time of Henry I, when an abbot that the monks of Peterborough did not desire was foisted on them, black huntsmen on black horses were seen, followed by hounds as black as jet with huge staring eyes. To meet Black Shuck and to stare at his solitary, blazing orb is to meet a portent of your own death. One summer Sunday morning in the time of Queen Bess, did not ominous storm clouds loom over the town of Bungay, whereupon there rose up a great tempest of violent raine, lightning and thunder, the like whereof hath been seldom seine. With the appeerance of an horrible shaped thing, sensibly perceived of the people then and there assembled. Already that morning a fiery demon had laid waste the church of Blythburgh, leaving two men stark dead. Here the demon took the shape of a black dog with eyes of fire, killing and burning every person in its path. Passing between two men, it wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant cleane backward, insomuch that even at a moment where they kneeled they strangely dyed, seizing a third in such a gripe on the back, that therewithal he was presently drawen together and shrunk up, as it were a peece of lether scorched in a hot fire.

  In Mr. Dixey’s study:

  a tray of legal papers, over which Mr. Dixey looks and ponders and broods

  a mouse washing its whiskers and drinking milk from a saucer

  a morsel of paper, very much scratched and half obliterated, on which he, or someone, has written: the black dog knows my name.

  XVII

  MR. RICHARD FARRIER

  It was at about this time that the name Mr. Richard Farrier began to be spoken of by those persons with an interest in the Ireland case. Quite how this came about was a mystery and yet, it seems to me, a mystery of a very common sort. Such is the strength of the public thirst for information, that a gentleman who at the beginning of the week lives a life of blameless anonymity can often discover by its end that half the world seems to be intimately acquainted with his affairs and likes nothing better than to discuss them with the other half. So it was with Mr. Farrier, of whom, a month or so before, nothing had been known, and who now, a month or so later, was spoken of in the most confidential terms by men and women who would not have recognised him had he arrived in their drawing rooms bearing the tea things before him on a tray.

  At the time when people began to talk of him, he was in his twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth year, of a good family supposed to come originally from the West Country. He was, additionally, a cousin of Mrs. Ireland’s, and by no means so remote a one as John Carstairs, being in fact the son of the great-niece of the former Miss Brotherton’s great-grandmother. And here the most delicious scent of romance could be found wafting across the pathways of Mr. Farrier’s early life, for it was said—no, it was known—that with regard to Miss Brotherton he had wished to be something more than a cousin, and that to this end he had proposed marriage to his relative when he was no more than eighteen years old. As to what had occurred between them, given that no one else had been present in old Mr. Brotherton’s rose garden on the afternoon when Mr. Farrier pressed his suit, nothing very profitable could be said. Within a year, in any case, Miss Brotherton had absented herself upon the Continent with her papa, and her suitor went off to console himself in whatever manner young gentlemen of eighteen with broken hearts may hope to be consoled.

  It is commonly supposed that if a man’s romantic aspirations are known he cannot be altogether mysterious, and yet over Mr. Farrier’s career, ambitions and even his whereabouts mystery continued to hang in an impenetrable cloud. His parents had died young. In their absence he had been brought up by an old clergyman in Devizes and then, at seventeen, prepared for admission to Oriel College, Oxford. Of Mr. Farrier’s undergraduate doings, a certain amount was known, but not all of it was creditable. In particular he was thought to have got in with a set of sporting young gentlemen, spent astonishing sums on top boots, bridles, saddles, tailcoats and other equine appurtenances, altogether neglected his books and been compelled to quit university life before the completion of his second year.

  As for Mr. Farrier’s subsequent progress through the world, gentlemanly, upstanding and courteous though he doubtless was, I fear that the Dean of Oriel, who had ultimately pressed for his superannuation, must be granted a certain amount of prescience. At twenty he had been put into a public office, and for six months it seemed as if a great career awaited him there. And then people began to say that there was a certain want of…application in his dealings with the great men who administered the office and that a certain noble lord on whom he had been bidden to attend, while acknowledging his gentlemanliness, courtesy, &c., had complained bitterly of his neglect. It was said also that he owed money, and to the kind of person to whom money should not be owed, and was more often to be found at a prizefight than attending divine service. The result was that he was removed from the public office, his debts were paid for him, a young woman who proposed that he was the father of her child was somehow placated and he was sent to read with a very respectable barrister in Thavies Inn with a view to entering at the bar. Here, once more, at the commencement of his studies he won golden opinions, was smiled upon by Mrs. Barrister and her daughters (the story of the young woman had not perhaps drifted as far as Thavies Inn) while even Mr. Barrister, to whom all young men were anathema, was supposed to have nodded his head and said that he would do. And then one morning as this Telemachus sat in his chamber with a copy of Coke open on his desk before him impatiently awaiting his pupil, he received instead a visitation from a knowing old gentleman with only one eye, in a shabby greatcoat, who produced from his satchel an equally shabby pocketbook from which he extracted a bill for fifty pounds with Mr. Farrier’s signature—a fine, upstandi
ng, gentlemanly signature it was, with all manner of flourishes and underlinings—appended to the stamp. “This is no business of mine,” Mr. Barrister observed, having dangled the piece of paper between his fingers for as long as was consistent with civility. “I daresay not, sir,” the old gentleman said, grinning, “but it’s a thing as we always try with young gentlemen that reads in barristers’ chambers, you know.” And after that it was all up with Thavies Inn, Mr. Barrister, Mrs. Barrister and the latter’s highly eligible daughters.

  Still, though, all was not over with our young Apollo. It was at about this time, having achieved his majority, that he came into a certain sum of money left to him by his father. This being a circumstance that infallibly encourages an independent-minded and free-spirited attitude, he took rooms in Clarges Street, engaged the services of a valet and an old woman to do his laundry, displayed a row of stiff-backed invitation cards on his mantelpiece and was inducted into a gentlemen’s club named the Megatherium, where it was his delight to remain until four o’clock in the morning on at least three days in the week playing whist. There were those who maintained, at this juncture in his life, that Richard Farrier was going to the dogs, that respectable mammas should not deign to have him in their drawing rooms and that the old gentleman in Devizes was greatly to be pitied. Still, I think, and the world tended to think also, that all was not lost with him. He was very civil in his manner, very courteous in his address and very prompt in the payment of his club subscription.