Charles Palliser (105 page)

Everything about your motives that puzzled me before is clear to me now.”

She glares at him so remorselessly that at last he has to cast down his eyes. “You should have told me earlier,” he says. “You should have trusted me. Even now, it’s not too late for us to reach a new understanding.”

The young widow stares at him speculatively.

At the usual hour for my supper that evening the door was suddenly unlocked and Emma came in carrying my evening meal. I was surprised by this attention for since I had grown so much stronger, I had usually had my meals brought by Ellen. Emma smiled at me in quite the old way and sat on a chair beside me as I ate the thick mutton broth on a tray set before me.

“John,” she began, “although my father and mother are very hurt, I have persuaded them that you spoke as you did because you have not yet recovered fully.”

She paused but I said nothing.

“And while you were sleeping,” she continued, “Mr Gildersleeve came to tell us that after we had left, the Master made the order assigning custody of you to my father. So you will really be my brother now. Isn’t that wonderful?”

I nodded without looking at her and laid down the spoon, for I had little appetite.

Emma noticed this: “Come,” she said, “do try to eat.”

I shoved the bowl away.

“Why, you’ve left half of it!” She pushed the tray back. “You must eat in order to get well and strong again.”

“I can’t eat any more.”

Emma seated herself on the bed and picked up the bowl and spoon. “Let me feed you as I did when you first came to us. Don’t you recall how helpless you were?”

At this reminder of past kindness 1 felt an impulse of guilt, and as she smilingly held the loaded spoon towards me I forced myself to swallow. But my gorge rose and I shook my head.

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“Very well,” said Emma, standing and picking up the tray. Just for a moment I thought her face looked as it had at that terrible instant in the court-room. Then she smiled and was her old self again: “Let me prepare you a tumbler of camphor-julep to help you sleep.”

“Thank you,” I said. “That would be very kind.”

When she brought it a few minutes later I had to disappoint her once again for I could not manage more than a few sips. However, when I promised to drink it later, she left it by my bed, kissed my forehead very sweetly, blew out the candle, and left the room. To my surprise, I heard her lock it behind her.

Sick at heart as 1 was, the thought of consuming anything revolted me, so when all was quiet I got out of bed with the intention of pouring the drink away, for I did not wish to wound Emma further. The window was locked so I went to a corner of the chamber where no carpet covered the boards, dipped my fingers in the tumbler and began to scatter the drops on the floor. As I did so the strangest thing happened: the liquid seemed to be red and slightly sticky. And yet in the queerest way I knew that it was not blood at all, for it was as if I was both dreaming and still wide awake. Now as I made my way back to the bed I became convinced that the room — though it looked as it had always done — was actually the one in which my mother died. And the bed-covers that I pulled over myself were the bundle of rags under which I had lain during those terrible nights at Mitre-court a few months before.

As I lowered my head and closed my eyes I found myself looking out through a window at a vast dark mass stretching towards the horizon and dotted with tiny yellow points of light. In the foreground the spires of buildings were etched against the pale magenta sky and I realized that I was almost on a level with them, hundreds of feet above the ground. Suddenly, impossibly, a shape appeared at the window and as I felt a swelling sense of terror, slowly defined itself as a pale face — remote, marble-like, watching me with empty, transparent eyes. Just as my terror became too great to bear, the scene changed and I found myself hurried through a series of visions of haunting beauty alternating with scenes of horror, so that I was swept from heights of terror to sweet agonies of reminiscence for something lost that I could not quite recall.

Once I found myself riding in a swaying carriage through the streets of a great city in a fiery dawn with the blazing red disc of the sun glaring above the horizon. When I put my head out of window and looked up, I saw dark billowing clouds blowing in great swirling eddies around the buildings which reared monstrously high beside me so that their tops were lost in the smoke, and I realized that the city was being engulphed in a vast conflagration. Opposite me in the carriage was a female figure who, though her veil was lowered so that her features were obscured, seemed to be strangely familiar. As I stared at her the veil grew darker and darker until her whole head was a black shadow.

But now as the carriage lurched round a corner the sun caught it from a new angle and the outline of a scull began to appear. I did not want to know that face and I screamed and screamed and it seemed to me that I awoke and found myself in the bed-chamber in Mr Porteous’ house, and yet it was not that familiar room for now the walls began to turn on their axes and the fire came leaping out of the grate and I was plunged back into a maelstrom of terrifying visions.

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For how long these phantastic scenes succeeded one another I do not know, but I believe they held possession of me all night. When I awoke the next morning — as exhausted as if I had not slept at all, my mouth dry and my head aching — I lay fearfully wondering if I were losing my mind, and trying to remember if I had ever heard that such dreams were a sign of the onset of madness, though at the same time I was haunted by a kind of nostalgia for some of what I had experienced.

Although it was still very early and the house was not yet stirring, I suddenly-thought I heard a noise outside and without quite knowing why I did it, I half-closed my eyes to feign sleep. The door slowly opened and Emma’s face appeared round it. To my horror, her expression was precisely as it had been at the moment in court yesterday when I had refused to accept her father as my guardian: the features cold and hard and her eyes narrowed. When she had crossed to my bed she picked up the empty tumbler, and in a voice cold enough to match her expression she said: “Are you awake?”

Taken unawares and afraid that she might have glimpsed my eyes between the half-closed lids, I answered: “Yes.”

Was it my imagination, or did she seem to start at my voice?

“How are you?” she said tonelessly.

“Not very well.”

Suddenly she exclaimed: “Well, what do you expect if you will not eat, you stupid little boy.”

In that instant, as I looked at her and heard those words spoken in that tone, something I had long half-known rose to the surface of my mind and coalesced with my dreams of the night before: the young lady in the carriage, the veiled face, the angry words.
It was Emma who had tried to abduct me all those years before!

Now I believed that I understood everything. All that had puzzled me about yesterday’s transaction in court — Mr Barbellion’s words about the “affinity of blood and sentiment” and the Master’s reference to Mr Porteous as my uncle — now fell into place:
Mr and Mrs Porteous were my uncle and aunt! Daniel Clothier and his second wife!

My horror was too profound to be dissimulated and I saw that Emma had perceived that some monstrous revelation had come upon me. For a moment she gazed at me and then she smiled or, rather, tried to for it looked to me to be a sickly imitation: “Have you guessed the real reason why we have been so kind to you, Johnnie?”

I nodded.

“Then say it.”

“Your father is Daniel Clothier, my father’s elder brother.”

“Yes,” she said. “We are your real family. My father took his present wife’s name when he married a second time. So you see, I am something much better than your adopted sister: I am your real cousin!”

While she leant forward and kissed me, my mind was in turmoil. So she was Emma Clothier! That was how Henry Bellringer had been about to address her! (Though I couldn’t imagine why he should know her.)

“You must be wondering why we kept it from you,” she went on. “I will explain everything and then you will understand. But my father and mother FRIEND OF THE POOR

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should be here. I will summon them. How glad they will be to know that we may now tell you the truth.”

Still smiling she went out. It was some time before she entered, with her parents behind her, crying: “Isn’t it clever of Johnnie to have guessed!”

“Well done, old fellow,” said my uncle, striding forward and holding out his big pink hand. I took it, remembering with an inward shudder what my mother had written about him. “You’re a sharp one and no mistake,” he added.

His wife hugged and kissed me and I wondered whether she knew as much as the other two. “Doesn’t he look surprised!” she cried.

“You must be wondering why I changed my name,” my uncle said, looking at Emma.

“It’s because I was so disturbed by my father’s treatment of my brother.”

“You mean my father?” I said.

He glanced at Emma.

“And so you see, Johnnie,” she said, taking the old lady’s arm, “my mamma is not my real mamma but my papa’s second wife.”

Her moving story of a brother who had died was an invention!

“But why did we keep this from you, you must be asking,” my uncle exclaimed.

I nodded.

He turned to Emma again and she said: “We were going to tell you very soon, but we agreed to wait until you were stronger. Perhaps it was wrong of us but we were afraid of the consequences since you were so weak then.”

“You were right, you were right,” I murmured.

“You do understand what we were afraid of, don’t you?” Emma said.

I nodded my head. I only wanted to be left alone to think about all this.

“We guessed that your poor mother had prejudiced you against us,” Emma said.

“And so it proved when you told me all the unkind, misguided things she had written about my dear papa.”

Here was a new aspect of the affair: Emma had sat for hour after hour listening to my story and expressing horror at my relation of the behaviour of her father, and then gone into another room and conveyed the whole of my account to him!

“Your mother was sadly deceived,” my uncle said. “We will explain all of this to you when you are fully recovered.”

“But you must be wondering how it can have come about,” Emma said, “that you have been reunited with us. How was it that of all the houses in London you chose to ask charity of, it should turn out to be your long-lost and unknown uncle’s!”

I shook my head in bewilderment.

“It was Providence,” my aunt cried. “The Lord be praised!”

“Yes, Johnnie,” Emma said. “Extraordinary as it seems, it was mere coincidence that brought you to our door. It’s the sort of thing that you expect to find only in a novel —

and only when you know the author has been too idle to work it out any better.”

Coincidence? No, I could not believe that. If there was an Author arranging my life, I could not think so ill of him.

“I guessed the truth very soon. Do you remember how I trembled when you told me your name was ‘Clothier’?” Emma asked.

I nodded, recalling how I had described it as the name I hated above all others.

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THE CLOTHIERS

“I guessed then who you might be for my father speaks often of his poor brother’s wife and her child. I dared not give voice to my suspicions for I feared the effect of the shock upon you of finding yourself among your ‘enemies’.” I blushed and she went on:

“You had no reason to disbelieve what your mother told you. But we will explain it all to you and then you will understand the truth and no longer be frightened and mistrustful.

Remember, Johnnie, we have all the time in the world.”

“We should leave him now. He is looking tired,” my aunt said.

“Yes, I should like to sleep,” I said.

“Of course,” said Emma. “It’s still very early. In an hour or two I’ll bring you your breakfast.”

They withdrew, locking the door behind them, and left me in an anguish of doubt and fear. Could I believe that they had dissimulated their identity in order to protect me?

Was everything that my mother had written about my uncle mistaken? I had to decide, for if she had been right then I was in grave danger for I assumed that the codicil had been laid before the Court of Chancery, and if it was now in force, then the only bar to the Clothiers’ (or, rather, Porteouses’) inheriting the Hougham estate was the continued existence of the Huffam line. And this, surely, was the explanation for what had happened during my appearance before the court: my mother’s death had been proven in order that my status as the Huffam entailee might be established! And it was to make certain of my identity that it had been mentioned in court that “Peter Clothier”

appeared in the Melthorpe register as my father.

So only my life stood in the way of Silas Clothier’s immediate inheritance of the estate! Moreover, since he had to be alive at my death and must be a very old man by now, then his heirs — my uncle and Emma — must be impatient to see that condition fulfilled. No wonder that Mr Gildersleeve had laid so much emphasis upon my state of health! Nor that Mr Barbellion had raised objections to my uncle’s being made my guardian!

How fortunate it was, I reflected, that my dreams had alerted me. Then suddenly I understood why I had had those visions: something had been put in my food! My heart began to thump as I remembered what Miss Quilliam had once said about laudanum: that in very small quantities it brought profound sleep, but in slightly larger doses it stimulated vivid and extraordinary phantasies, and that in still larger quantities it was a poison that was undetectable. Had Emma hocussed my supper and the sleeping-draught? And I had lived only because I had consumed so little of them? Or was I going mad that I should suspect such a thing?

Just as I reached this juncture, there was a gentle tap upon the door. I heard the lock turn almost noiselessly and Emma entered, smiling with her old composure, and bearing a platter of porage.