by Jean Stubbs
‘Poor little lass,’ said Lintott to himself. ‘I could never see the sense of a child dying. Never.’
A story, written and illustrated by Carradine for his sister. Sewn together to form a book of five pages.
Once upon a time there was an enchanted princess called Odette. She did not know she was a princess. She thought she was someone else...
‘That’s him all over!’ Lintott snorted. ‘She’d have to be something different, now wouldn’t she?’
A fair likeness of the child had been used for the cover. The Inspector surveyed it, head on one side, critically.
‘Very good!’ he commented, and put it aside and pulled out a bundle of letters. ‘I suppose these are from Mr Walter Carradine when they were courting.’
But they were not. Written in French, signed Papa or Maman. Daily news, political news, remembrances of the last holiday, hopes for the next holiday, were imprisoned in a language unknown to him. But he formed an impression by their bulk.
‘They didn’t half stick together. Not a sheet, not a line, from her husband? Did she throw them away, then? Probably. This here divine marriage seems a bit one-sided to me.’
Gabrielle’s housekeeping books, immaculately and minutely kept. Paid bills which made Lintott’s eyebrows climb. And then six locked volumes and one unlocked, bound in soft blue leather. None of the keys was small enough. Dexterously, Lintott picked all the locks with a hairpin lying in the dust and opened the top volume. All he could make out were the dates. He applied himself to the others and guessed them to be the diaries kept from Gabrielle’s marriage to the death of the child in 1882. The last entry was made in June of that year, the rest of the book was blank.
Confounded, he stared at the elegant foreign hand. It was like watching a criminal escape down a street while you stood at a high window. He collected them together and placed them with the letters. After further thought he added the account books, though he had not much hope of them. Still, you never knew.
‘I shall need help with these,’ he said, puzzled. ‘I can’t hardly ask him to come back home, and yet I’m foxed. It’ll have to be somebody as I trust, too.’
He straightened up slowly. You couldn’t call it rheumatism, but his joints were stiff and reluctant to perform. He looked round at the luxurious disarray and went to find the housekeeper: helpless and guilty. Under his arm, wrapped in newspaper, was tucked possible evidence.
Lintott finished his stew with considerable relish and drew a slice of bread round his plate to sop up the last of the gravy.
‘Is that good enough for you then, John?’ Bessie enquired with a hint of sarcasm. ‘After all the foreign cooking!’
He shook his head slowly from side to side, grinning at her tone, and watched her move from oven to table and back. Currant pudding and custard.
‘That was capital, my lass. Capital. Bessie, do you recollect our Lizzie learning French?’
‘Oh, she’s not worriting with that nonsense now.’
‘An enquiring mind,’ said Lintott pensively. For the girl had tried to teach herself, and he had found tuppence for a second-hand primer.
‘She’s best off with a family of her own and well she knows it. I never saw the sense of learning for learning’s sake.’
An old problem, sorely felt and insoluble. He would have been glad to shelve it.
‘You don’t suppose, Bessie, as she might still know enough to help me out with these French diaries, do you?’
‘I can slip round after supper and ask her, if you like.’
‘No, no. Sit yourself down. I’ll take a turn in the air myself, I think. I haven’t seen her in a week or two.’ Communing with his pipe, knowing he could have done no more for the girl than he had done, knowing it was not enough.
Bessie, divining his trouble, said, ‘Water under the bridge, John. That’s what you always say. She couldn’t have a better husband than Eddie. I dare say he’ll set with the children while she comes here.’
So Lizzie washed her hands and sat at the parlour table, a little flustered with importance and pleasure, while her father untied the parcel of diaries. A battered French dictionary stood by to refresh her memory.
‘Now then,’ Lintott began awkwardly, ‘if you can’t help me, my dear, I’ll have to fetch Mr Carradine from Paris, and I’d rather not do that. I needn’t say,’ he added, becoming a policeman, ‘as this is all confidential?’
Lizzie shook her head, picked up the first volume, ran her fingers lightly over the embossed blue leather and sniffed the pages.
‘You’re a regular detective yourself, my dear!’ he said, admiring.
‘I always do that, father. I like the feel and smell of a book.’
There was no reproach, but he sat humbly beside her. Hands knotted between his knees, as she scanned the pages.
‘Can you make it out, my love? It don’t matter if you’re on the rusty side.’
‘Oh, I’m not rusty,’ said Lizzie. ‘I’ve kept it up, father, along of teaching the children as they get older.’
‘Waste of time!’ Bessie pronounced, slightly jealous of their proximity, though she loved them both.
Lintott recognised himself in his daughter as she raised a strong, plain face.
‘We’ll never agree on that, mother, so let it be.’
Bessie sniffed and opened her mending basket ostentatiously. Lintott and Lizzie exchanged a smile.
‘Shall you write it out, father, while I read it? I shall be slow enough.’
He nodded and reached for pen and paper. Became a policeman once more.
‘You’re not to repeat a word of this, mind, either of you!’ he warned his womenfolk. ‘Now, Lizzie, I’m not interested in chit-chat about society and the weather. So read it out until I stop you, then go slow. We might have to put a night or two in on this lot, if Eddie don’t mind, but we’ll see. Start away, my love!’
Then he settled down to frequent dips in the inkwell, while Lizzie brought Gabrielle Carradine to life.
The socks had long since been darned and folded by the time Lintott leaned back and stretched, and ordered a pot of tea for all. As Lizzie had translated he had edited ruthlessly, making notes and comments. Now he lit his pipe and watched the two women pondering on a world unknown to them.
‘And I pulled him up about talking wild,’ he remarked into the silence.
Gabrielle’s thrice-yearly flights from respectability and a dull devoted husband. Meetings with D. chaperoned by Berthe. Unchaperoned meetings with D. in a rendezvous previously arranged. Sauntering in the Tuileries, parasol raised against a glittering sun. Conversations whispered on spindly iron chairs as Paris took the spring air. The city, cold with snow, warm with promise. The long lazings in bed, while the first fire of autumn soared in the grate and cast shadows on a high ceiling. Happiness, until he stole the child.
‘Where’s that list of passengers?’ Lintott asked himself and ferreted it out while his tea cooled. ‘No go. The only D. in the lot is a Miss Damien (60). He must have got away! But he took the little girl on that train. I swear it!’
‘I wonder if her poor husband ever read those diaries, after she passed over?’ said Bessie, nursing her cup.
‘Well, if he did he never said anything,’ Lintott replied drily. ‘He was like those three monkeys, meaning no disrespect to the gentleman. Neither heard, saw nor spoke evil.’
‘He couldn’t afford to face the truth,’ said Lizzie unexpectedly. ‘She was an angel to his mind. You don’t question angels, in case they turn out to be something worse. I’ll bet he just had everything locked up and put away, without looking.’
‘She was a proper bad lot!’ Bessie pronounced judgement.
‘Was she beautiful, father?’ Lizzie asked wistfully.
‘A regular bobby-dazzler. Not my style, of course,’ he added hastily.
‘She seemed to be other men’s style, from all accounts!’ Bessie sniffed.
But the revelation had been richer, more titillating th
an a novelette. She would have liked to read it by herself, all over again, in delicious secrecy and condemn every word. Lizzie was quiet, knowing that passion belonged to favoured women, and always would.
‘I still don’t see why she took against Bertha,’ Lintott mused. ‘She gives no details of this here — kidnapping. Just says D. has her.’
‘If he got her away from the nurse, on a pretext of some sort, wouldn’t Mrs Carradine blame her, Father?’
‘The nurse might’ve been in the plot,’ said Bessie, well-versed in paper romance. ‘He might’ve bribed her to let the child go, and Mrs Carradine found out.’
‘Mother! Don’t talk so soft! That nurse had been with Mrs Carradine all those years. She wouldn’t do a thing like that.’
‘She’s a foreigner, isn’t she?’ cried Bessie indignantly. ‘We don’t know how they might behave!’
‘Now, now, now!’ Lintott ordered. ‘Stop your clatter! No, Bessie, I can’t go along with that ingenious notion of yours, my dear. I’ve got a fair idea of old Bertha, and bribes don’t come into it. I dare say Lizzie’s nearer the mark. Mrs Carradine thought the world of that little girl. I can see her flying up and striking out, right and left — and Bertha was the nearest to hand, and probably guilty of neglect. Let the child go off for a walk with Mr D., or something of that sort. She’d known him after all for — when does that first entry come in? — five years.’
‘Disgusting!’ said Bessie. ‘She must’ve gone straight off as soon as the baby was born.’
‘Mon beau printemps,’ said Lizzie quietly, without condemnation. ‘He must have thought the world of her, Father. He didn’t mean the little girl any harm. He was only using her to fetch Mrs Carradine after him.’
Lintott removed his pipe from his mouth, astonished. ‘Only?’ he cried. ‘What’s come over you, Lizzie? You don’t kidnap a six-year-old girl, get her killed on a train and spoil folk’s lives, and somebody says only.’
‘I don’t know what you were thinking about, love,’ said Bessie, frowning and shushing.
‘Anyhow,’ said Lintott, mollified, ‘that’s beside the point. When I tell Mr Carradine this little batch of news he’ll have me haring after that Bertha. And there wasn’t a mention of where she lived, or a letter from her to the lady, in those papers.’
‘There wouldn’t be,’ said Lizzie, silenced on one opinion but offering another. ‘She was a peasant, Father. She couldn’t read nor write, I expect.’
‘Oh,’ said Lintott.
Skirmishes between Bessie and Lizzie, with the Inspector acting as a peaceable referee, had been frequent. Skirmishes between Lintott and Lizzie were to be avoided.
‘Have you been through Mr Carradine’s papers, John?’ Bessie asked quickly.
‘Not yet.’ He recollected his double position, as head of the family and confidential detective. ‘I’ll fetch your mantle, Lizzie. Time you went home.’ Escorting her through the quiet of a Richmond midnight he said shyly, ‘I’m much obliged to you, my love.’
‘I enjoyed it, Father. It makes a change.’
Her intelligence had always been a block over which the family stumbled: unable to comprehend the use of it, financially helpless to encourage it.
‘You should have been a man,’ said Lintott uneasily. ‘A woman with a brain is like a racehorse in a farmyard, neither use nor ornament.’
‘You know my views on that, Father. We’d best not argue.’
‘Just don’t get mixed up with this Suffragette business, my girl. You know what the old Queen thought of it, God rest her.’
‘If a woman is fit to rule a country why isn’t she fit to vote?’
‘Well, well, well. If women are to do men’s work what are the men to do? We can’t all be earning a living. That’s common-sense, that is, Lizzie.’
She was silent, needing his affection more than his approbation. He patted her shoulder, inadequate for once.
‘Nothing’s wasted,’ he comforted her. ‘Look how your French turned out tonight. I’d have been lost without you. Think of that, my love.’
She kissed his left muttonchop-whisker and opened her garden gate.
‘A woman’s place is in the home,’ said Lintott stoutly. ‘Always has been, always will be. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, my love. You’ve more influence over us, and a better influence, that way.’
Her nod was mere good manners.
‘How should we manage without you looking out for us?’ he cried, after the faded violet mantle.
‘You needn’t fret, Father,’ said Lizzie, trapped by love and circumstance. ‘We need looking after, just as much.’
‘That’s all right, then. God bless you, my love, and goodnight.’
But he shook his head now and again, on the way home.
‘That’s one case as I’ve never got to the bottom of!’ he said to himself. ‘I can’t always understand a woman when she’s being a woman. When she’s trying to be a man I’m floored!’
Lintott sat at Walter Carradine’s mahogany roll-top desk and marvelled at love’s patience and blindness. The diary entries were tender, brief, stating fact and commenting on it with affection. Gabrielle’s letters, tied with a ribbon, were her only concession to romance.
‘I hope he got more out of them than I have,’ Lintott commented. ‘They seem pretty cold stuff to me. If he’d stopped to think — well, he didn’t want to think, did he? — he’d have seen she was being coerced by both sides. I dare say he put it down to maidenly modesty. After the marriage she could have told him night was day, and he’d have reckoned she was right!’
The recorder that was his mind set Gabrielle’s diary against Walter’s and found deception.
My dear wife telegraphed me today, advising me to postpone my visit for the coming weekend. Odette is staying with a friend of the family, and Gabrielle wishes me to avoid the disappointment of her absence. She thinks for us all.
Gabrielle wrote: D. has her. I have questioned Berthe continually, but she had no cause to distrust. Today I telegraphed Walter. How should I explain her absence? I cannot endure his patience and his questions. It is difficult enough to explain to my parents. Such threadbare reasons, and yet they accept them, and Berthe, of course, supports me in everything.
‘There you are, you see,’ said Lintott, puzzled. ‘Still the confidential maid! No sign of a rift, there.’
Walter: I received the terrible, the incredible news, that Odette has been killed in a train accident. Gabrielle is prostrate with grief. I am waiting for a cab to take me to Victoria.
Gabrielle: Gone, both gone. I am dismissing Berthe. I cannot bear even to see her. Maman arranges everything. But, gone, gone, gone. All gone.
Then blank entries in her diary until June, 1882. And two lines.
This must be the new life? What emptiness!
The child died as I live, by fire.
But Walter had recorded with loving care and kindness the weeks between.
We returned last night. Gabrielle has sent Berthe back to her village. She says she can bear no one near her who reminds her of Odette. I spoke with the poor creature before she left and assured her she should not want. I wished to remonstrate, in the kindliest fashion, with Gabrielle, but she was too unwell.
Gabrielle seemed a little better today, and came downstairs for dinner, though she ate nothing.
Gabrielle rose at noon today, but retired early with a headache.
Gabrielle and I sat together this evening, and once or twice she spoke to me with quite a composed aspect. I believe she is recovering a little.
Nick comes home tomorrow. I have great hopes for his visit, since Gabrielle was always fond of him. Perhaps he can help her as I evidently cannot.
And then, in January 1884, the simple words She died today. 2.35 p.m.
Afterwards, comments on Nicholas Carradine’s progress at school, his hopes for the boy’s career in the family business. Only two references to his loss. He had written to inform Berthe, and he had asked
Gerard Lasserre to allow him to be buried in Paris when his own time came.
Lintott was not a fanciful person, but the thought of a good Englishman lying in foreign soil beside an unfaithful wife, disturbed his notion of propriety. He turned to Walter’s account books and traced a payment, equivalent to £200, care of M. le Curd, Paimpol, Brittany, for Berthe Lecoq.
‘Mrs Tilling,’ as the housekeeper appeared with a laden teatray, ‘how old would Bertha be now, at a guess? Oh, I do enjoy a hot muffin!’
‘I can only reckon by guessing, sir, and that’s the truth. She never mentioned her age. She’d be around forty when Madame first engaged me, and that was — bless me! — twenty-eight years ago. Close on seventy, sir.’
‘A strong woman, Mrs Tilling? Hardy constitution?’
‘Oh yes, sir. She had the constitution of an ox — if you’ll excuse the expression.’
‘Then she could still be alive. Mrs Tilling, I have to ask you this though I don’t like! Could anyone have bribed Bertha, in any way, to betray either her mistress or Miss Odette?’
‘Oh no, sir! She’d have laid down her life for Madame or the child. I’ll say that for Berthe. She might have been difficult, but she was loyal!’
‘Mrs Carradine sent her back to her village, you know,’ Lintott continued, conversationally. ‘Just like that! Said she couldn’t bear anyone round her who reminded her of the child. How does it strike you, knowing them both?’
The housekeeper’s face was a struggle between curiosity and respect.
