Kept

by D. J. Taylor

  It was thought that given the urgency with which he had returned to England, Mr. Farrier might remain some time in his native land, but the wanderlust to which he is peculiarly susceptible was soon upon him once more and within three months he was gone. There is a poste restante address in Paris for those who wish to communicate with him, and Mr. Devereux may be contacted on any legal matter.

  In due course there was a parliamentary by-election in the borough of Southwark, and Mr. John Carstairs did indeed come forward as the Conservative candidate. He fought a vigorous campaign and in losing by a scant fifty votes was thought to have acquitted himself admirably. It was believed, however, that the expenses were very high, so high in fact as to preclude any subsequent reattempt, and that additionally Miss du Buong, Mr. Carstairs’s fiancée—she is of the brewing family in Aldershot—advised him to have no more to do with those dreadful political persons.

  Mrs. Carstairs declares herself very satisfied by her son’s present mode of life and always defers to him in any family matter.

  The Dean of Ely, Mr. Marjoribanks, fetches his own slippers now, pours his own tea and is very morose of an evening when there are none of his fellow clergymen come to call.

  Of Esther I know nothing at all. How should I? She comes from a place of which the fashionable world knows little and cares less, and has doubtless returned there. Certainly, the villa at Shepherd’s Bush has had an agent’s board at its window these three months past, and as is generally the custom the neighbours know nothing about it. If, as certain newspapers averred, Captain McTurk had her placed on an emigrant boat to Van Diemen’s Land in the wake of her departed consort, then he has said nothing about it. I myself believe that she is now fortunate enough to occupy a most suitable situation in life, agreeable to herself and those around her.

  Rumours of Mr. Pardew could be heard in every part of the globe to which miscreant Englishmen abscond. He had been seen at Pau and glimpsed walking the promenade at Boulogne. A gentleman passing through Leghorn swore that he had set up as an attorney in the town, dined with the mayor and could be viewed proceeding by carriage to the Roman Catholic church each Sunday forenoon. So persistent were the stories of his presence in Ottawa that Captain McTurk absolutely sent Mr. Masterson across the Atlantic to investigate. He found a person of that name, certainly, but one barely thirty years old, with a thriving law practice, six red-haired children and a pronounced North American accent. After this fiasco, and the routing out of sundry other false Pardews in those continental spas and watering holes where English people congregate, Captain McTurk’s eye turned nearer to home. A search was made of the premises at Carter Lane, which yielded up the most interesting documents—nothing, perhaps, that incriminated anyone other than Mr. Pardew but sufficient in themselves to submit half a dozen persons prominent in public life to agonies of embarrassment. Such was the stir caused by these revelations that a Duke’s lady, told by her husband that he had some grave matter to discuss with her, was thought to have remarked that “she supposed it was another of Pardew’s bills.”

  All this was highly amusing, no doubt, but it did not bring the investigating authorities any closer to Mr. Pardew’s whereabouts or indeed to the man himself. A short while after his disappearance a lady living at a house in Kensington, very shocked by the public accounts of her husband’s wrongdoing, came forward—or was perhaps induced—to declare that she was Mrs. Pardew, whereupon the general sensibility was acutely inflamed. Let the woman be most severely questioned, the cry rose up, let her be charged as an accessory to her husband’s crimes and forced to make reparations, and then justice would be seen to be done! And yet Captain McTurk was compelled presently to concede that Mrs. Pardew, a comfortable middle-aged woman whose marriage lines showed her to have been married to Mr. Pardew for ten years, knew almost as little of her liege lord as the police officer himself. Indeed her ignorance of her husband’s career, acquaintance and habits—let alone his criminal propensities—was invincible. She was also very nearly penniless. Whereupon, as so often happens in these clement times, the general sensibility reversed its previous view and declared that she was a wronged woman. A newspaper got up a subscription for her maintenance, the Queen herself was known to be interested in her fate, and Captain McTurk, not without all private misgivings, gave up on her as a bad job.

  It is impossible, though, in the modern age—the age of railways and the penny post—for a man to be altogether mysterious, and gradually, over the period of a twelvemonth, there came forward one or two persons able to furnish certain details of Mr. Pardew’s former life. These were not very remarkable. It was subsequently proved beyond doubt that he was the son of a Manchester manufacturer who had lost his money, that he had spent much of his early life abroad—might even be supposed to have been educated there—and later been engaged on certain projects in the engineering line, blameless in themselves but no doubt furnishing the expertise wherewith to commit grand larceny. The trail in this regard having led, as it was bound to do, to the door of Mr. File, that gentleman was able to demonstrate to his complete satisfaction, if not to that of the magistrate who sentenced him to two years’ imprisonment, that he and Mr. Pardew had never met. An account was subsequently found in Mr. Pardew’s name at a joint-stock bank in Threadneedle Street, devoid of all but a few shillings. And at about this time there arrived at Captain McTurk’s office in Northumberland Street a small package, addressed personally to him and postmarked with a Nottingham frank, which, when opened, was found to contain a pair of keys. At which point Captain McTurk remarked to Mr. Masterson that Mr. Pardew was a cool one and no mistake. There are, perhaps, worse epitaphs.

  MR. RICHARD FARRIER TO MR. JOHN CARSTAIRS

  I could not of course have gone away from here without satisfying my curiosity with regard to her—over and above, that is, the dreadful day on which we took her from the house—and this I determined to do. The place is about twenty miles out of London and very discreet; indeed, as Devereux remarked, were it not for the palings and the person who sits at the little lodge gate until such time as the door is closed for the night, one would think it a very pleasant spot for a gentleman’s residence. Devereux, who knows all about it, says that in point of diet, medical care, &c., it could not be bettered, and indeed I could find no fault in anything that I saw either inside or out. But I tell you, Carstairs, it does no good to a man to visit such places for they speak of a providence that is neither beneficent nor wise, that can tap you on the head with his hammer and leave you speechless on a whim. Boys robbing birds’ nests and trampling the squabs for their sport are not more cruel…

  I had been told that I might find her in the garden, and so it proved, sitting in a little chair that someone had put out for her in the shade of a laurel hedge, very neatly designed, I should say, with a spigot for her drinking cup and a bell to ring should she need attention, and the bell always answered, which is not universally the case, I believe. I came upon her, I must own, in silence, wanting to gain some idea of her before I spoke. Indeed to see her thus sent an absolute pang through me, so unchanged did she seem from those days of which you have heard me speak, when we were, as I suppose, children together and yet conscious of a time when we should be children no more…. She had some object before her on her lap with which she played that I thought for all the world a mouse, until I saw that it was but a toy moved hither and thither by the motion of her hands, innocent enough, you may say, but somehow made horrible by the restless play of her fingers, her habit of clutching the thing to her cheek, &c.

  Seeing me walk towards her over the grass—the day was very bright and the sun high over the hedge—she looked up and smiled, and again it was as if time had stopped since the occasion of our last meeting, but for a slight hollowness, perhaps, about her face, a certain brightness about her eyes that spoke more of artifice than nature, and I knew that she recognised me. “You are very comfortable, I see,” I said, having been instructed to confine myself to remarks of easy familiarity.
“Oh, yes,” she replied—and I could see that there was some struggle proceeding in her mind—“very comfortable indeed. But I shall take no more medicine, however much entreated.” “I have none,” I told her—there was a sheet of foolscap, I now saw, on the tray before her, black with scrawl—“so you may rest easy.”

  There was a silence which I must confess embarrassed me, for having come with my head full of harmonious sentences, I could now think of nothing to say. “Is there any way in which I may serve you?” I asked finally, hearing the noise that her hands made as they pushed the mouse across her lap and down among the folds of her skirt. “I think not,” she said. “And yet you may send Esther to me.” At first the name meant nothing to me, and I shook my head. “It is a long time since she went away, and I would have her back.” Intrigued, in spite of myself, I looked down at the sheet of foolscap, but a child learning its letters would have been more intelligible. “You must not think,” she went on, gathering the toy in her hands as if it were something infinitely precious to her, “that I am afraid of a mouse. Indeed, I killed one once with a poker, as I shall do this if I have a mind.” And then she laughed, quite girlishly, with not the least suggestion that she sat in a garden where there is a porter at the gate and an iron railing six feet high for a fence.

  “Isabel…,” I began once more, but it was as if a door had been locked and bolted between us that no key could open, and so we stared again at each other—she with her hands turning in her lap, I with my gaze fixed upon a pair of eyes that seemed to conceal awful, trackless depths behind them—until something—the sun perhaps, glinting off the roof of the distant house, a bird alighting on the hedge top, the neat step of the servant girl moving across the bright grass—drew her glance and she turned aside.

  “Well,” said the superintendent, Mr. Mortimer, breakfasting with his wife and daughters one Sabbath morning, “the attachment between our Mrs. Ireland and the woman who attends her is a very singular one.”

  “I had not remarked it,” observed Mrs. Mortimer, continuing to butter an egg. “Grizelda, you may ring for John footman and tell him we shall not be needing the fly from the stables for church.”

  (The superintendent of the Ware asylum resides in the neatest little villa imaginable, and Mrs. Superintendent is naturally its most delightful ornament.)

  “Nevertheless, it is so,” Mr. Mortimer went on, not quite liking the instructions about the fly but fearing to countermand them. “One might almost call it a sisterly affection.”

  “There was some scandal, was there not?” enquired the eldest Miss Mortimer, who could not be kept from reading newspapers and was thought to take an excessive interest in the doings of her father’s patients.

  “It is all very shocking,” countered her mama. “And if my opinion had been asked—which it was not—I should have said that the arrangement originally proposed for the young woman would have been much better allowed to persist.”

  “There was a gentleman, was there not?” continued the eldest Miss Mortimer, who was quite incorrigible.

  “That will do, miss. It is a wonder to me that your father allows such talk.”

  But Mr. Mortimer was not listening. He was still thinking of the cancelled fly and the play of Mrs. Ireland’s hands as they moved restlessly in her lap.

  “Neverthless, I think it very creditable to the girl that she minds her duty. You will oblige me, Maria”—and it was a measure of Mr. Mortimer’s exaltation of spirit that he said “Maria” rather than “my dear”—“by seeing if there is not some small thing, some dress or bonnet of the girls, that might be looked out and given to her.”

  “I should hardly have thought it worthwhile, Augustus”—it was a measure of Mrs. Mortimer’s temper that she said “Augustus”—“but if you insist.”

  “I do. And now, if you will excuse me, I have business to attend to.”

  (“It is all the fault of that Mr. Farrier coming yesterday and being so solicitous of Papa’s opinion,” Mrs. Mortimer told her daughters. “You know what he is like with such gentlemen.”)

  But Mr. Mortimer, walking alone to church through splashes of summer rain, knew that he had done the right thing.

  “Take it away, Esther! You know I cannot abide such stuff.”

  “Certainly not, miss, for without it you will be ill again, and it’s I that shall have the nursing of you.”

  The draught, newly mixed by Mr. Mortimer’s apothecary and fetched by that gentleman beneath a folded napkin, lay on the deal table between them.

  “I shall not drink it. Indeed, I shall fling it out of the window and startle the birds.”

  “In that case, miss, you will try my patience, which you know you would rather not.”

  Mistress and servant regarded each other anxiously. Then, in the manner of one who submits to an inexorable fate, Mrs. Ireland picked up the glass and began to sip at it. Evidently, what it contained was not wholly inimical to her, for she drank off perhaps half the contents before seating herself on one of the leather-backed chairs at the further side of the table. Moving forward once or twice as if there were something she urgently wished to say, she yawned hugely, shook her head with a bewildered air, as if the yawning were a procedure wholly beyond her comprehension, and then fell into a light sleep. After studying her intently for a moment or so, Esther took the half-full glass from where it lay in her hand and bore it away to the kitchen. Here, having ascertained that no other domestic duty had escaped her, she remained, half her attention alert to any sound that might come from the adjoining room, the remainder bent inwardly upon her own concerns.

  Three months had elapsed since the trial: Esther supposed that the time had not gone unhappily with her. Of William, Sarah—that whole life that had occupied her from the moment she left Easton Hall—she had not ceased to think, and yet there was a vagueness about it, a diffusion of sentiment and memory, that calmed her apprehensions. Here and there about her person she carried mementoes of those days—a little twist of sprigged muslin bought at the Earlham Street market, an ornamented card with William’s great scrawled signature on the reverse. Sometimes of an evening, when her mistress lay asleep or sat comfortably installed in her chair at the window, whose peculiarities of scene never ceased to amuse her, she would take out and examine these items and ponder the events that they reawakened in her mind. But though the remembrance of them lingered, she found—and she believed that the finding was agreeable to her—that the circumstances of her new life did not encourage a propensity to brood. There was Mr. Spence, the apothecary, at the door, or a walk around the grounds to negotiate, or an illustrated magazine sent with Mr. Mortimer’s compliments for them to examine. Such occurrences were not an antidote to her loss, but they were a drag upon it and thus she welcomed them with perhaps a greater eagerness than they deserved. Certainly there cannot be many persons who would regard a half hour with the Illustrated London News as balm for a bruised spirit.

  As to the patterns of this new life, Esther did not cease to wonder at them. The cottage that they inhabited she had adopted as if it were her mistress’s own, and Mr. Mortimer only some friendly visitor, and she polished its surfaces and tended its linen as if her wages depended on it. Mr. Mortimer noted this application and commended it. “Why, Esther,” he said, “forgive me if I say that you are doing work that is not yours to do.” And Esther bridled, as at the wildest compliment. In this way they grew very confidential, and Esther was encouraged to impart certain details of her mistress’s condition, born of long observation, which it is to be hoped that Mr. Mortimer appreciated.

  “Do you think she knows herself?” he asked once.

  Esther considered the question. “It is hard to say, sir. She knows me. And there is that which she says which has a point, only you would not notice it to begin, if you take my meaning. And then she is so forgetful.”

  “You must help her to remember.”

  But Esther thought privately there was much her mistress wished only to forget.


  Once, at one of these times, moving nervously at the window—for she liked to see the birds, or if not the birds then the play of the wind in the trees—she had enquired, “Esther. Where is William?”

  “He has gone away, miss.”

  “Gone away? What, to Lynn with the master? I did not hear the dogcart in the drive.”

  “No, miss. He has gone away forever.”

  “Forever? I—that is—you must forgive me, Esther.”

  And Esther forgave her, treasuring the remark, as we value some shiny pebble found amongst a heap of broken stones on the beach.

  Looking now at the kitchen clock, Esther saw that the supper hour was approaching. “You must try and get her to eat,” Mr. Mortimer had frequently enjoined. “It would be a great thing if she could be got to eat—eh?” And Esther, agreeing with him, had promised. Moving beyond the kitchen door, she saw that Mrs. Ireland had woken up and was surveying the room in which she sat with a kind of startled benignity, as if its dimensions, while not displeasing, were the source of some bewilderment to her.

  “Gracious, Esther! I have had such a dream. That the Queen herself stood by my bed and enquired of a receipt for damson preserves. Very civil, indeed, she was, but most dreadfully superior.”

  The rain beat suddenly on the window, and mistress and servant laughed and were very comfortable together. And Esther, presiding over the teapot, in the stuff gown that Mr. Mortimer’s daughter had presented to her, thought of the orchard at Easton Hall, and the carter’s van receding across the blue horizon, and Mrs. Finnie’s jet-black hair, and Mr. Randall’s psalms, and William helping his master down from the carriage door, and the blue cockade in his hat, and the time when he had first come to love her.