Kept

by D. J. Taylor

  “But, William—oh!”

  She felt rather than saw his hand strike her cheek. The smart of it did not so much hurt her as startle her, and she stood for a moment rubbing her palm against the side of her face, altogether bewildered by the sensations that stirred within her.

  “I should not have done that,” William said with a curious remoteness, as if he were speaking to himself. “But it is hard to bear such things—there!”

  Again she was startled by the violence of his embrace, and she let out a little cry not of fear, exactly, but of some emotion that she could scarcely identify. Just as the thought that her brooch was contraband had failed to shock her, so she submitted—not unwillingly but with a curious feeling of excitement.

  “That’s my good girl,” William said, after a moment had passed. “Now, do you believe what Sarah told you?”

  “I do not know what I should believe.” Her head was still against his shoulder. “But, William, are you in danger?”

  “Nothing to speak of. But, see, I must be gone from here. Only for an hour or so, but there are things I must do.”

  “Oh, William, if you would only stay. Promise me you shall.”

  “I can’t, Esther. A couple of hours. I promise you. Look”—he caressed her with his hand, and she followed the movement of his fingers wonderingly along her dress. “Say you shall be here with supper on the table and a jug of beer on the hearth and I shall tell you everything.”

  “That is an easy thing to promise,” Esther said, her eyes alight.

  “Well…perhaps it is. Wait—”

  Esther stood meekly in the hallway as he strode up to their bedroom. Here the sound of cupboards being opened and shut could be plainly heard. Then he hurried back down the staircase, pausing only to rest his hand upon her hair.

  “I’m sorry that I struck you, Esther.”

  “It is nothing,” she said.

  When he had gone she moved into the parlour and sat by the fire in a reverie. Curiously, the thoughts that rose in her head were not of the previous five minutes but from far back in time. In her imagination she was back at Easton Hall, hanging out linen on the currant bushes before the kitchen garden, with the sun slowly declining over the edge of the wood and the cries of the rooks echoing in her ears. She brooded over this picture for some time, the faces—William, Sarah, Mr. Randall, the master in his black garments—rising and falling before her, until she became aware that an hour had passed, the fire had burned low and that the evening was well advanced. Hastily, she donned her coat and bonnet and, purse in hand, went out in the empty street. A walk of three minutes brought her to a row of shops, where she made various necessary purchases: a particular sweetmeat that she knew William favoured, a particular relish that might garnish his beef. Then, stopping at the public house at the end of the row, whose entrance emitted an enveloping glare of yellow light, for the filling of her jug, she sped away home. The house was dark and the silence within broken only by the tick of the clock. Swiftly, she placed her purchases upon the kitchen table and went to light the lantern in the hall. There was a noise beyond of footsteps approaching the door, and she went eagerly to open it.

  In the region of Newington Butts, hard by the Walworth Road, squeezed in behind a pair of factory chimneys and altogether dwarfed by a gasometer lately installed by an optimistic gas company, lies a row of mean little houses, very tottery and shaky in their appearance—as if they were about to tumble over and might need propping up with some giant crutch—named Bright Terrace. From an upper room in one of these properties, at a window quite half of whose panes had fallen away and been stuffed up with rags and pieces of old brown paper and beneath which the wind passed unhindered, Sarah sat looking out across the dismal street. An hour had passed since she had concluded her transactions in the Strand—it was now about four o’clock in the afternoon—but she had not yet divested herself of the costume in which she had sallied forth that morning or indeed even taken off her bonnet. Instead she crouched almost motionless in an armchair looking first at the street, which was altogether devoid of human life, then at the two white hands that lay in her lap and finally at the mantelpiece a yard or so from her head. There was nothing remarkable about the mantelpiece other than the fact that it supported a tea caddy with the representation of a royal personage on its side, yet an onlooker who sat beside her might have observed that the gloomy street and the pair of pale hands held no joys for her and that it was to this unremarkable object that her gaze returned.

  The room in which she sat was perhaps more commodious than the servants’ quarters at Easton Hall, but not much better furnished. There was a stout iron bedstead jammed up against the wall, a little wardrobe and an occasional table on which reposed a water jug and a basin. A handful of coals—very small coals they were—lay on a sheet of paper in the grate, but the fire had not yet been lit. Upon this somewhat melancholy scene there looked down a couple of prints of gauzy dancers in the correct Parisian manner and a picture of a bowl of peonies bought at the threepenny stationer’s. All this Sarah saw, or rather did not see, for by now her gaze was concentrated almost exclusively upon the tea caddy. Ten minutes or a quarter of an hour went by in this way, until there came a sound—very faint and tremulous at first, then mounting in volume—of footsteps ascending a staircase, a knock at the door and an old woman with a hard eye and the lower part of her face wrapped up in a comforter put her head into the room.

  “Oh, it is you, is it, Mrs. Mayhew?”

  “Your light wasn’t a-shining,” this lady observed. “I was wondering whether you was still hout.”

  “Well, I am not. It is too fatiguing for a girl to be out the entire day.”

  “Hoity toity. When there’s work to be done.”

  “There shall be a half sovereign for you in the morning, indeed there shall be.”

  “Those that wants supper should know where supper comes from,” Mrs. Mayhew remarked, as if pronouncing a general truth which every inhabitant of Bright Terrace would do well to take to heart. And then she went away again in a flurry of crashings and cross little door-rattlings, the wind rose once more through the variegated window and rustled the prints of the French dancers on the wall, children’s voices sounded in the street and then fell away to nothing, and Sarah sat still in the armchair with her white hands folded in her lap and her eye fixed on the tea caddy a yard away from her head. Her lips moved and it may have been that she was talking to herself, but if so, her speech was soundless and did not contend with the noise of the wind. A ginger cat that Mrs. Mayhew sometimes conciliated with scraps of fish came twisting round the door, which had been left an inch or two open, and sat down by the hearth, where it began examining its whiskers and Sarah became dully aware of it. Finding that the spell of her contemplation was broken, she rose from the chair, stretched her arms above her head and let them fall, took a pair of florins from the pocket of her dress and placed them on the mantelpiece and then busied herself with various utensils that lay in a heap by the side of the grate. Still, as she did this, conveying a china plate and a bone-handled knife to the occasional table and then delving into a cupboard for the half of a loaf and a morsel of butter, her mind did not cease to turn on the subject that had occupied her for the past hour.

  The encounter with Esther had discomposed her, not merely because it had recalled to her a life that she had thought past, but because it had awakened in her resentments which she imagined that time had begun to soften but which now seemed to jut out from her imagination quite in the old way. At the same time, the contrast between the life that Esther now led and her own circumstances could not but fail to strike her and distress her. Why should she not be Esther, she wondered, and live in a villa at Shepherd’s Bush and have a servant girl to tyrannise? In this way Sarah waxed very wrathful, assuring herself that she had been ill-used both by providence and those persons about her. And yet, she told herself, she knew things about Esther that Esther herself did not know. She was aware, too, that much
could be made of this knowledge, should she so choose, and the thought of the power thereby conferred on her was very pleasant.

  Brooding continually on these and other matters, one eye still fixed on the tea caddy as she chewed her fragment of bread, she returned to her chair. Certain scenes in her past life, she now realised, were very vivid to her: an afternoon at Easton Hall when she and William had escaped Mrs. Finnie’s vigilant eye and gone wandering by the river and grown very confidential; Esther’s face as she bent over her work; the rooks in the elms. On her forearm there was a red mark extending beyond the muslin cuff to her wrist, and she remembered the day on which it had been placed there and the passions that had caused it. The thoughts were not pleasant to her, and she stood up again with such a start that the ginger cat made off prudently in the direction of the door. It was in her power, she knew, to ameliorate this hurt, to cause pain to others that would be a satisfaction to herself. And yet…

  The tea caddy was now in her hands. She did not know how it had come there. She could not remember picking it up. The face of the royal personage stared up at her. The red-faced gentleman she had met in the Strand had said that he was a military man and had come within a yard of the royal personage at some review, and she had not known whether to believe him. There she was with her hand inside the tea caddy. How had it come there? She had not wished to place it there, surely? And yet she was shaking the contents out onto the surface of the occasional table. There was not a great deal. A silk handkerchief that she had had from her old mistress as a present five years since. A little jet dog with a partridge stuck in his mouth. A string of buttons looped up and tied in bow knots at the end. Each of them reminded her of some passage in her life without in any way calming her or causing her to reflect on what she did. And now there it was, a scrap of paper which she could not read, but which she knew stated an hour at which she should meet the person who had sent it, signed off with a pair of initials in black ink which she could interpret for she had traced them with her fingers a dozen times.

  The paper was a month old, and in ordinary circumstances would have been thrown swiftly away, but for some reason she had kept it and brooded over it in the way that a heathen native broods over his fetish of feathers and straw. A month ago, she recalled, William had given her a five-pound note, but there had been no more largesse from that quarter. The vision of Esther in her villa, with her meek servant, came to her again, and she gave a little stamp with her boot upon the bare floorboard. She knew that if she did what her mind now counselled her to do, she would injure William as much as Esther, and yet the knowledge of it did not dissuade her. And so she meditated on until the room grew dark and voices sounded on the stairs—men and women together—and the house became animated around her. Finally, when the evening had come, with her mind still calculating, yet feeling that she could stay no longer in the confined space, she rose to her feet, clasped a jacket around her meagre shoulders and ventured out into the street.

  It was past six o’clock, and the nocturnal life of Newington Butts was at its early peak. Costers’ barrows were drawn up by the roadside, their arrays of produce lit by flaring gas jets. Dull-eyed men leaned out of public-house doorways to converse with children sent to fetch them home. All this Sarah saw as she walked along, silent and solitary in the great crowd of vagrant humanity. There were a couple of soldiers in red coats—a recruiting sergeant and his mate, she thought—marching in tandem on the far side of the street, and she stood and watched them, thinking—though she knew in her heart that it was the merest fancy—that the younger of them resembled her brother. Queerly, the thought affected her more powerfully than any of her previous reflections, and she quickened her pace and hastened on. The dark alleys and courts ran away from her, and the people seemed to disappear under her gaze. There was a police station on the corner of the Walworth Road, and having stopped for a moment to gather her jacket more tightly around her shoulders, she bowed her head and stepped inside.

  XXVIII

  QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

  QUESTIONING OF ESTHER SPAULDING

  Q: Come now, Miss Spalding, there is nothing to fear if you will tell the truth. Where is William Latch?

  A: I do not know. Indeed I do not.

  Q: What are his habits? Where does he go?

  A: To the Green Man in Wellington Street, I think. And to Mr. Pardew’s in Carter Lane.

  Q: Pardew?

  A: He is Mr. Pardew’s man. That is what he says.

  Q: Where does his money come from? Is he a warm man?

  A: Indeed, sir, he seems to do well by his business, for there is always money about the house.

  Q: More money now than there was formerly?

  A: There has always been money. Perhaps. I do not know (weeps).

  Q: There is no need to agitate yourself, indeed there is not. What work did he say that he was engaged upon?

  A: Only that he was Mr. Pardew’s man. That he collected his bills and went upon his errands.

  Q: And yet he wished to manufacture leather aprons. Had he experience in such a trade?

  A: Not to my knowledge.

  Q: Did leather goods of that kind come into the house?

  A: I think not.

  Q: Were you ever admitted to the room when he and Bob Grace were at work?

  A: Never. I was told that the fire was so hot that it would be a danger to me.

  Q: How long did this process continue?

  A: A week. Ten days. Sometimes the house grew so hot that I went out and walked on the Green or among the market stalls.

  Q: Did you not enquire what he and Grace were about?

  A: I was told that I should mind my business and it was no concern of mine…

  Q: How came you by this letter?

  A: It was given me by Mrs. Ireland.

  Q: Yet it is dated six months since. You made no effort to deliver it?

  A: No.

  Q: Why is that?

  A: I cannot say.

  Q: Did Latch know of the letter?

  A: I cannot say.

  Q: Have you any knowledge of its contents?

  A: (weeps)

  Q: Come, the sergeant shall fetch you water. Have you any knowledge of its contents?

  A: I have read it, yes.

  Q: Was she who wrote it in her right mind, would you say?

  A: I cannot say.

  Q: You cannot say?

  A: No, I cannot (weeps).

  QUESTIONING OF THE MAN PEARCE

  Q: Come now, let us have some account of you.

  A: Account of me! You shall hear nothing from me, unless I’ve a mind. If I was a gentleman, you would not cotch me here and you knows it.

  Q: On your arrest at Epsom you had twenty pounds in your pocket. How did you come by it?

  A: It was honestly earned, that is all I can say.

  Q: Well, let us leave that for a while. What is your connection with the man Pardew?

  A: None. I never met him before this Derby Day.

  Q: A pair of shoes were taken from your lodgings and were found to have fragments of gold embedded in the soles. What do you say to that?

  A: I have no knowledge of it.

  Q: And leather gauntlets, badly scorched, as if held to a flame. Have you any knowledge of that?

  A: The same. Will you keep me here all night?

  Q: If I have a mind, I shall keep you here all week. Who is Bob Grace?

  A: He is a fellow I know.

  Q: What sort of a fellow?

  A: A very nice fellow. But you had better ask him.

  Q: I prefer to ask you. You know that he was employed by Mr. Pardew?

  A: He may have said so. It was nothing to me.

  Q: And yet you were seen in his offices on two occasions by independent witnesses. What have you to say to that?

  A: Nothing.

  Q: Mrs. Sharp, who keeps your lodgings, states that on a day in the summer of this year she came upon forty sovereigns in the cupboard of your room.

 
A: What was kept in my cupboard was no business of hers.

  Q: I must warn you of the peril you are in, indeed I must. Tell us about Pardew.

  A: There is nothing to tell.

  Q: Were you ever in Suffolk?

  A: In my recollection, no.

  Q: And this is not yours?

  A: It is a pretty toy. But no, I never saw it.

  Q: And yet you would know how to use it?

  A: You may think what you will. It is no concern of mine.

  Q: I would have you flogged if it were in my power.

  A: But it is not. I have done nothing. Let me go.

  XXIX

  THE FIRM OF PARDEW & CO. IS WOUND UP

  Mr. Pardew sat in the office at Carter Lane with its bleary window and its view of the dome of St. Paul’s. It was ten o’clock in the morning, an hour at which it might have been supposed that the life of the room would have reached its zenith, that all manner of schemes would be in a state of strenuous advancement. In fact Mr. Pardew was alone and silent. Dressed in his customary sober suit, with his stick laid out on the desk before him and with a newspaper unfurled beneath his gaze, his outward demeanour, as he alternately bent his eyes over the black print and glared up at the bleary window, seemed in no way to differ from that of other mornings. And yet his clerk, had he been in the room, might have noticed that Mr. Pardew’s gaze strayed ever so occasionally to the door and that a sudden noise from the street caused him to jerk up his head with a quite singular expression of interest. He was one of those men who are able to conceal their frets and anxieties, and though all manner of terrors gnawed at his vitals, still he was determined that none but himself should know of their existence.

  An hour had elapsed since Mr. Pardew had arrived at his office, and that had been spent in ceaseless brooding. A further thirty-six had passed since Pearce had fallen into the hands of Captain McTurk. Mr. Pardew did not know the exact circumstances of this falling, but he knew some of them, for he was the kind of man who has confederates even among the ranks of his enemies. Whether Mr. Pardew possessed an ally at the court of Captain McTurk I do not know, but it was a fact that on the evening of Pearce’s arrest a whisper of it had reached his ears. A less coolheaded man than Mr. Pardew would, I think, at this juncture have taken his leave, fled on some boat to the Continent, or to some remote part of the country where he could lie hidden, but Mr. Pardew, having considered the situation in his ruminative way, pondered what Pearce might be induced to tell Captain McTurk and what he might not, had decided that a short period of grace was still allowed him and that there were one or two affairs that it required him to settle before his departure.