Ann Granger (6 page)

He raised his bushy eyebrows. ‘Do you count yourself among the lucky or the unlucky?’

‘I enjoyed considerable freedom! But that was because I was motherless, my father was a busy man, and there was no one to worry what I did.’

‘Then you were unlucky,’ he observed.

I contradicted him vigorously. ‘By no means! The children I’d count unlucky are those who must work for their livings from a tender age, even in the coalmines around my home town.’

‘The poor live by harsh rules, it’s true,’ returned Lefebre calmly, ‘but to have money brings its own constraints.’

‘One can’t expect to be given everything and nothing be required in return.’ I didn’t really know what he was talking about and it seemed a totally unsuitable conversation to be conducting as we were shaken about in that jolting trap.

My tone must have told him I disliked the exchange so he said no more on the subject, but gave me a thoughtful look.

Perhaps he thinks me strange? I thought. Well, if so, it can’t be helped. ‘I speak as I find!’ people used to say in my home town. Mind you, it was generally said by those who knew they’d just ‘put their foot in it’, to borrow another expression. But the thought niggled at my mind that perhaps he’d been trying to tell me something.

After that we carried on for a little way in silence. Eventually we saw two figures ahead of us on the road walking in single file. A woman plodded behind a man who strode out jauntily with his hands in his pockets and his hat at a rakish angle. It had started out as a top hat, but one side had been punched in deliberately so that instead of standing up straight, it bent to one side. I’d seen this fashion on louts in the London streets.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Greenaway, slowing the trap and pulling up as we reached the two. I saw then they were accompanied by a pair of small terrier dogs, which scampered from the heather where they had been foraging and watched us with bright, malicious eyes.

Greenaway leaned from his perch and hailed the man.

‘Well, then, Jed Brennan, you’re back in these parts! I was remarking only the other day it was about time we saw you again.’

The man approached the trap and the woman fell back and stood waiting, head bowed. She was a poor drab creature indeed. Although the weather was so warm she wore a plaid shawl crossed over her chest and fastened at the small of her back. Dank greasy locks of hair drooped from beneath a wide-brimmed felt hat. She had secured the hat as Dr Lefebre had done his on the ferry, by tying a scarf over it and knotting it under her chin, so that the sides of the brim were flattened against her ears. Her skirt had been turned up some inches at the hem and pinned there in an attempt to protect it from the dust and mud of the road. It allowed me to see she wore a man’s boots, which hadn’t been so protected and were caked in dried mud. It was she who carried the couple’s possessions in a large and heavy-looking wicker basket strapped to her back. She may or may not have been aware of my scrutiny. She kept her face down. This made me the more curious and suspicious so that I attempted to get a better look. I fancied I saw some bruising but could not be sure. What did strike me was the weariness in her whole demeanour. It was that kind of exhaustion that leaves the sufferer afraid to sit down, for fear it will be impossible to drag himself to his feet again.

The terriers came a little too close to our pony and barked. The pony snorted and threw up its head. Our trap rocked.

The man called roughly to the dogs and they fell back. It drew my attention to him.

He was a bold-looking fellow about forty years of age with a skin burnished by sun and wind and abundant black curls. He wore a workman’s strong boots but was otherwise much better dressed than his poor wife, something of a ‘masher’ in a suit of brown corduroy with a waistcoat of moleskin. Unfortunately the result of this attire was to make him resemble some kind of large, upright, short-furred animal. A bright scarlet handkerchief was knotted at his throat. He was handsome in a coarse way. The woman, if ever she had any looks, had lost them.

Brennan turned to the doctor and myself and raised his crooked hat with a flourish. ‘Good day to you, gentlefolk!’

I was getting a little annoyed at being taken for gentry, which I am not, being a respectable doctor’s daughter and no more; but I disliked even more being greeted by Brennan, whose manner verged on the insolent. His bright dark eyes mocked us and when they rested on me seemed to gleam with unwished-for appreciation.

Both Lefebre and I nodded silently in acknowledgement of his greeting. He replaced his hat and turned his attention to Greenaway again.

‘I’ll be calling on your ladies to see if they have any need of me,’ he said.

‘I’ll tell ’em,’ replied Greenaway curtly. Perhaps he too had noticed the mockery in Brennan’s gaze. He shook the reins and we moved off, leaving Brennan and his wife behind us.

‘Who on earth was that fellow?’ called Dr Lefebre.

Greenaway twisted on his perch. ‘Jed Brennan, sir, a travelling rat-catcher by way of trade. He makes a circuit as regular as a judge and appears always at about the same time, though I do believe he’s from London by way of permanent dwelling. I fancy he is of tinker descent and likes it better on the road than in the city.’

‘Is he honest?’

‘Why, yes, sir, if you mean, does he pilfer? No, or he’s never been known to. He’s well paid for his work. There are always rats and a rat-catcher never goes short of business.’

I had a question of my own. ‘Does that poor woman always travel with him?’

‘Yes, miss. She always comes along, even when she’s carrying. The pair of them strikes a little camp wherever they stop for the night, put up a rough sort of tent. They cause no trouble as I’ve heard.’

I said no more but pressed my lips together angrily. I realised that when Greenaway spoke of the woman ‘carrying’ he meant not the wicker basket on her back but any child she might have in her womb. I wondered who cared for the couple’s children while they tramped the countryside.

I thought of Brennan’s sharp shiny dark eyes, so like those of the vermin that gave him his living, and shivered.

We continued, passing through isolated clumps of trees and across more heath until unexpectedly our dirt track joined a better one. I could smell the salt tang of the sea again. I thought of the yellowed atlas I’d discovered in Josiah Parry’s library and calculated we had cut diagonally across the heath and now reached the shoreline again, not on the inlet but ‘around the corner’. We were at some point where the sea formed that channel of water between the mainland and the Isle of Wight that is called the Solent. The land hereabouts was farmed. We again passed through hedged fields.

Greenaway raised his whip and pointed. ‘Shore House,’ he said.

Chapter Five

Elizabeth Martin

I WAS surprised to hear Greenaway tell us we’d arrived because we hadn’t yet reached any village or even a cluster of dwellings. In fact, owing to Greenaway’s ‘cutting across’, we’d seen little sign of any habitation at all.

Shore House stood in apparent isolation, although a bend in the road ahead might conceal more buildings. A tall hedge of glossy-leaved laurel surrounded it but once we had trotted through the open gates we saw a pleasant garden, the lawns broken by islands of rhododendrons and trees clipped into ornate topiary shapes. The house looming up before us was built of unpleasing yellow brick and didn’t appear particularly old, possibly no more than fifty years or so. It must have been built when fashion was turning to the Gothic rather than the Palladian style. All the windows had pointed arches above, like church windows, and there were incongruous turrets stuck at the roof corners. In a further flight of architectural fancy a band of red and black brick ran all round it at first-floor level. It was an ugly house, but somehow confident in its ugliness. It seemed an odd retreat for a pair of maiden ladies. Weren’t they lonely here?

Nevertheless, I rather liked Shore House’s eccentric appearance, but Dr Lefebre didn’t.

‘What a monstrosity!’ he murmured more to himself than to me.

Greenaway drew up before a large solid square porch jutting from the façade where we were decanted, together with our baggage, and abandoned. The trap was driven off at once, presumably in the direction of the stables. The pony, sensing its stall and a feed ahead of it, broke into a canter and Greenaway, with the human equivalent no doubt awaiting him, did not slow it.

‘Dear me,’ murmured the doctor, again to himself.

But our arrival had been heard or seen within. A severe, capable-looking woman in black bombazine with a fob watch pinned to her bosom opened the door. She could only be a housekeeper.

‘Welcome, Doctor,’ she said stiffly, ‘the ladies are waiting for you.’ She glanced at me and added, ‘And for Miss Martin.’

She was already slotting me neatly into the order of things within the household she ran – and letting me know it. Dr Lefebre was a guest. I was there by way of employment, although living as one of the family. The staff would be suspicious that I might ‘give myself airs’. This dragon was already drawing an invisible line over which I might not step. Someone more easily wounded than myself might have been overawed. I’m of tougher material.

‘Yes!’ I agreed cheerfully. ‘I’m to be companion to Mrs Craven.’

‘Indeed, miss’ replied the housekeeper dourly. She stood aside to allow us to enter. ‘Your hat and cane, sir?’

The doctor meekly handed over both articles. They were placed on a large well-polished hall table already covered with objects including a box for outgoing letters, a silver letter tray and an ornate oriental letter knife with a curious wavy-edged blade.

‘If you would be pleased to follow me, I’ll conduct you to the ladies.’ The housekeeper was not permitting us to linger.

There was only the faintest emphasis on the last word. I was not a ‘lady’ and should remember it. On the way there we had twice been taken for travelling gentlefolk, and I found the sudden fall in my status amusing. Glancing at Dr Lefebre I saw a faint smile on his face and I guessed he’d noticed it, too. Nothing, it seemed, got by the doctor without his taking note of it.

A strange man, I thought; what, I wonder, is he really doing here?

We followed the housekeeper, leaving our bags on the doorstep.

She showed us into a spacious drawing room. The furniture was of first quality but mostly half a century or more old. It showed the elegant lines and fine workmanship of the beginning of the century when old King George was still alive and talking to the trees in Windsor Great Park, while his plump son waited impatiently to succeed him. Everything had that mellow patina of pieces lovingly cared for, and all harmonised, as if the items had been bought together and always stood in the same rooms, grouped together like old friends. From this I deduced it was inherited furniture. The Roche ladies had no reason for or interest in buying newly fashionable. Their parents had done so more than half a century before and the ladies preserved the choice of their forebears in pious memory, or possibly simply through thrift.

The Gothic windows looked out on to a smooth lawn, dotted with more topiary work and bordered by shiny bright green leaves of laurel hedges. The far ones had been trimmed low enough to allow a glimpse of shingle beach. Beyond that – and I couldn’t repress a gasp of delight – was the sea, sparkling like tinsel in the sunlight. Now I understood the choice of this lonely place to build a country retreat. What a view! I had to tear my gaze away from it to concentrate on meeting the residents of the house.

You can imagine how curious I was for my first sight of Mrs Craven, but she wasn’t in the room. Present were a pair of ladies who could only have been sisters. Like the furniture, they belonged, and had always been, together. Though they had adopted the modern fashion for the crinoline, they were, like the furniture, somehow of another period.

I thought them both younger than their brother, Mr Roche, but not unlike him in build, having large-boned but spare figures. At first glance they might even have passed for twins, as they wore gowns of identical material, a tartan pattern in muted browns and greens. Both wore their greying hair parted centrally and crowned by confections of ribbons and lace pretending to be caps. But one woman appeared a year or two older than the other and on second look I noted a definite difference in their features.

The elder lady had rounded cheeks, a receding chin and straight jutting nose that somehow contrived to give her the look of a ship’s figurehead. As the billows part before the ship’s wooden prow, so one instinctively felt all opposition would step aside before the will of this middle-aged woman. She sat perfectly still with her hands resting in her lap. Her gaze watched us and assessed us, but not a muscle of her face moved. Yet despite the controlled composure of her manner, a gleam entered her eyes when they rested on me as if she were already anticipating that we’d clash.

The younger-looking one possessed a larger squarer jaw and sported a couple of false ringlets over each ear, perhaps to soften or draw attention away from this unfeminine feature. She also wore a cameo brooch at her throat whereas her sister had a ruffle of lace at the neck of her gown. The younger woman’s expression was gentle and even timid in comparison with the very direct, assertive look of her sibling.

They had surely spent their entire lives together. There had been such a pair of sisters in my hometown, grown into each other’s ways so completely that it was hard to imagine one without the other. As for the identical material of their gowns, perhaps their brother had sent them a bolt of cloth from his warehouse? At any rate, it clearly didn’t seem strange to them to dress alike. It might have heightened their feeling of togetherness. But it wouldn’t do for me to be turned out in exactly the same way as another lady in the same room.

They had been playing chess immediately prior to our appearance. A little table with a marquetry chessboard inlaid in the surface still stood between them. Now the formidable housekeeper came forward unbidden, lifted table and chess pieces together and set them to one side against a wall in a smooth movement. Not a single piece slid out of its station.