Death at Dawn (8 page)

‘A turncoat, then.’

‘Certainly a man of hasty and arrogant temperament.’

‘Since he’s rich, couldn’t he simply buy himself another constituency?’

‘For the present he prefers sulking in his tent, so to speak. Sir Herbert has become something of a focus for other men who think the country is going to the dogs.’

‘But what does that have to do with how my father died? This baronet can hardly go round shooting everybody who favoured the Reform Bill. Even old King William had to support it in the end. Besides, how did they know each other? My father did not cultivate the friendship of rich Tories.’

‘I doubt if your father and Sir Herbert Mandeville ever met. There is no reason to think so.’

‘I repeat the question: what does he have to do with how my father died?’

‘Quite probably nothing personally. Your father, unfortunately, blundered into something mortally serious that touches many people.’

‘You keep criticising him and not telling me why.’

He said nothing. I could feel him willing me into doing what he wanted and tried to play for time.

‘They are very rich, then, these Mandevilles?’

‘They own substantial estates in the West Indies. The seventh baronet had profitable dealings in slaves.’

‘I shall hate them.’

‘Governesses can’t afford hate.’

‘Nor spies?’

‘No.’

‘Do they live in London?’

‘They have a house there, but their main estate is at Ascot in Berkshire, not far from Windsor. If successful in your application, you would probably spend most of your time there.’

Ascot. A picture came to my mind of heathland, horses galloping across it. An idea began to form.

‘I may not be successful. If they are opponents, you can hardly recommend me.’

‘That will be attended to. They are advertising for a governess, so an application would not be unexpected.’

The sun was down, the room almost dark. I stood up to light the candle on the wash-stand. My legs had stopped trembling and the idea was growing.

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I shall apply for the post …’

‘I am glad of that, Miss Lane.’

‘But on two conditions. One, you must tell me what I am looking for. I can’t be expected to guess. Is it this woman again?’

‘No. Put the woman out of your mind. The main thing required of you will be to communicate to me news of any guests or new arrivals at Mandeville Hall. In particular, I have reason to believe that they will be holding a reception or ball in the next few weeks, and it would be very useful to us to know the guest list in advance. You will also inform me of the comings and goings of Sir Herbert himself and his family.’

‘How am I to inform you?’

‘Wait here for two days. Either I shall come and see you again, or instructions will be sent to you.’

As the candle flame steadied, I saw satisfaction on his face – and was pleased to be able to erase it instantly.

‘I said there were two conditions.’

‘What else?’

‘I have inherited a mare from my father. If you can arrange and pay for her stabling at some place convenient to Ascot, I shall do as you suggest. If not, then I refuse your proposition.’

‘A governess with a horse?’

He almost lost his self-possession. You could see him grabbing at the tail of it like some small animal bolting, and wrestling it back under his black jacket.

‘A
spy
with a horse,’ I said. ‘That’s different.’

He thought about it for half a minute or so.

‘Very well, I accept your condition. If you will let me know where the mare is, I shall arrange …’

‘No. Find a stables and I’ll make the arrangements.’

We glared at each other. Then he said, ‘Three days, in that case. Do not move from here. For necessary expenses…’

He picked up his hat from the wash-stand, clinked something down in its place, and went. As the door closed behind him I saw a handful of coins glinting in the candlelight. Ten sovereigns. I sorely needed them, but it was some time before I could bring myself to pick them up.

*

Three days passed. When he’d ordered me not to move, I don’t know whether he meant the town of Dover or my room at the inn. It didn’t matter in any case, since I had no intention of staying imprisoned. I slept, ate, walked by the sea, slept and ate again. The landlord had become polite now that I’d paid my reckoning to date and let him see the flash of sovereigns in my purse. Chops and cutlets, eggs, ham and claret were all at my disposal, so I made the best of them. I was like somebody cast up on a sandbank, with stormy seas in front and behind; it may have been only a short and precarious rest, but it was precious for all that. In my wandering round the town I kept an eye open for Trumper but saw no sign of him and hoped he was still on the far side of the Channel. Several times I was tempted to take the road out of town and visit Esperance and Amos Legge, but made myself defer that pleasure until I had news for them. It came on Saturday evening. A knock at my door and the landlord’s voice.

‘Letter for you, miss, just come.’

I opened the door only wide enough to receive it and took it over to the window. The paper and the writing were stiff and formal, like the man who’d sent it, the message very much to the point.

Early on Sunday morning I walked to the stables in sweet air between hay fields, with choirs of skylarks carolling overhead. Amos Legge was looking in at Esperance, leaning over the half door. He turned when he heard my step and gave a great open smile that did my heart good because it was so different from the man in black.

‘Just given Rancie her breakfast, I have.’

She was munching from a bucket of oats and soaked bran, the black cat looking down at her from the hay manger.

‘I’ve found a place for her,’ I said.

I’d expected him to be pleased, but his face fell.

‘Where’s that then, miss?’

‘The Silver Horseshoe, on the west side of Ascot Heath. You can take her there in the bull’s cart, then you’re on the right side of London for getting home to Herefordshire.’

He still looked unhappy, and I supposed he was calculating how little profit his long journey would have brought him.

‘You won’t go home quite empty-handed,’ I said. ‘This
is for the expenses of the journey, and what’s left over you are to keep for yourself.’

I put five sovereigns into his hand. He deserved them, and being reckless with Blackstone’s money was some consolation for having to take it. He looked down at the coins and up at me.

‘I’m sorry it isn’t more,’ I said. ‘I am very grateful to you and hope I may see you again some day.’

The sovereigns went slowly into his pocket, but his hand came out holding something else.

‘My cameo ring? But you were to sell it.’

‘We managed after all, miss. She do resemble you somehow, the lady on it.’

Tears came to my eyes. That was what my father had said when he bought it for me. I drew out the ribbon I wore round my neck with my father’s ring that the black one had so reluctantly given me and knotted the cameo beside it. I thought my good giant might have gone hungry. His cheeks looked hollow.

‘Thank you, Mr Legge. That was a great kindness.’

He murmured something, then ducked into the box to pick up the empty feed bucket and went away across the yard. I spent some time with Esperance, stroking her soft muzzle, watching the way her lower lip drooped and twitched, sure sign of contentment in a horse.

‘I shall come and see you at Ascot when I can,’ I told her.

It occurred to me that, by sending her ahead, I’d committed myself to winning the governess post. Until
then, I’d been priding myself on my cleverness, but now I was beginning to see how thoroughly I’d got myself enmeshed.

‘And I suppose you’d better go too,’ I said to the cat Lucy.

She gave a little mipping sound in answer and jumped lightly down to her place on the mare’s back. I left them there. In the yard, Amos was filling buckets at the pump. I held out my hand and wished him goodbye, but again he insisted on escorting me back to town. We didn’t speak much on the way and he seemed cast down, but perhaps that just reflected my own sadness at having to part from him.

The London Flyer drew out on Monday, prompt to the minute. I’d arrived early and secured a seat by the window and when I looked out there was Amos Legge, taller by a head and a faded felt hat than the crowd of grooms, ostlers, boys and travellers’ relatives come to see our departure. I waved to him as we clattered away, but if he waved back I didn’t see it for the cloud of dust we were raising.

Store Street is not in a fashionable part of London. It lies, as Blackstone had said, near the British Museum, off the east side of Tottenham Court Road. They’d been building the new museum for almost my entire life and were still nowhere near to finishing it, so the streets around it were dusty in summer and muddy in winter from the coming and going of builders’ wagons. It was an area I knew quite well because, being cheap, it provided rooms for exactly the kind of musicians, writers, actors and wandering scholars who tended to be my father’s friends. So when I got down from the Flyer on Monday afternoon, I had no need to ask directions.

In other circumstances it would have delighted me to be back among the London crowds, on this sunny day with the season at its height, the barouches whirling their bright cargoes of ladies to afternoon appointments,
the shouts of the hawkers and snatches of songs from ballad sellers, the smell compounded of soot and hothouse bouquets, whiffs of sewage from the river and crushed grass from the parks, baked potatoes and horse dung, that would tell you what city of the world you’d arrived in if some genie dropped you down blindfold. Even now, my heart kept giving little flutters of delight, like a caged bird that wanted to be let out, only the bars of the cage were the memory that this was not how I was meant to come back to London. I should have been walking at my father’s side, laughing and talking about the people we’d soon be meeting again, the operas and new plays we were planning to see. Another reason for sadness was that there seemed to be more beggars in London than when I was last there: not just the usual drunkards or boys holding out hands for halfpennies, but men who looked as if they might have been respectable once, in workmen’s clothes with hungry faces.

My progress was slow because of the heavy bag and I had to keep stopping to change arms. I suppose I should have paid a boy a shilling to carry it – certainly there were enough of them around – but the slowness suited me. It was evening by the time I got to Store Street. Many different families or solitary individuals found living space in the terraces of houses, like sand martins nesting in a river bank. The sound of a guitar and a man singing in a good tenor voice drifted from an open window. From another window on a first floor, a woman’s laughter rang out over a green-painted balcony with pots of geraniums and a parrot in a
cage. I couldn’t help smiling to myself. According to one of my aunts, the combination of green balcony, geraniums and parrot were unmistakeable signs of what she called a ‘fie-fie’ – a fallen woman. Well, that woman sounded happy enough and even her parrot looked more cheerful than my aunt’s. Number 16 was blank and drab by comparison. I knocked and the door was opened by a thin, frizzy-haired maid, chewing on her interrupted supper. I gave her my name and said Miss Bodenham was expecting me.

‘Second floor left.’

The bag and I had to bump and stumble up the two flights, so it was hardly surprising that Miss Bodenham heard us coming.

‘Miss Lane? Come in.’

An educated voice, but weary and rasping, as if her throat were sore. She held the door open for me. It was hard to tell her age. No more than thirty-five or so, I’d have guessed from her face and the way she moved, but her dark hair already had wide streaks of grey, and her complexion was yellowish, her forehead creased. She was thin and dressed entirely in grey: dark grey dress with a kind of cotton tunic over it in a lighter grey, much ink-stained, and grey list slippers sticking out under her skirt. The room was almost as colourless, dominated by a large wooden table piled with sheets of paper covered in small, regular script, with stones for paperweights. A small, cold fire grate overflowed with more paper, screwed up into balls. Apart from that, the furniture consisted of two upright chairs without cushions and a shelf of well-used
books. The floor was of bare boards and even the rag rug, which is usually the excuse for a little outbreak of colour in even the dreariest homes, was in shades of brown and grey. The place smelled of ink and cheap pie.

‘Please sit down, Miss Lane. Have you eaten?’

I hadn’t. The smell came from half a mutton pie, wrapped in yet another sheet of paper and left down by the grate, as if she hoped that even its fireless state could give a memory of warmth. If so, the hope failed. The pie was as cold as poverty and mostly gristle.

‘There is tea, if you like.’

The tea suited the rest of the room, being cold and grey.

‘I have your letter of application,’ she said. ‘You will need to copy it out in your own hand.’

She went to her bookcase, moved some volumes aside and brought out more written sheets of paper. By then I was so tired from the long day that I could have put my head down on the table and slept, but tea and pie seemed to be Miss Bodenham’s only concession to human weakness. She cleared a space for me among the papers, put written sheets, blank sheets, a pen and an inkwell down in front of me. I looked at the letter I was to copy and recognised the severe and upright hand from the note he’d sent me.

‘Is this by Mr Blackstone?’ I said.

She had already sat down on the other side of the table and started writing something herself. She looked up, annoyed.

‘Who?’

‘The gentleman who sent me to you.’

‘It is not necessary for you to know that.’

‘Why not? Do you know?’

She bent back to her writing. She was copying some thing too, although the hand was different.

‘Is Mr Blackstone his real name?’

Only the scratching of her pen for an answer.

‘What did he tell you about me?’ I said.

‘That I was to lodge you, assist you in applying for this post, and instruct you in your duties.’

‘As a governess?’

I meant ‘… or spy?’, wondering how much she knew. The expression of mild irritation didn’t change.

‘As a governess, what else? I understand you have no experience of the work.’

‘No.’

‘Then we should not waste time. Copy it carefully, in your best hand.’

The address was given as 16 Store Street, the date the present: 26th June.

‘Should I mention that I could also teach them guitar and flute?’ I said.

She didn’t look up from her writing.

‘The flute is not considered a ladylike instrument. Keep strictly to what is written there.’

‘Must I use a false name?’ I said.

‘Apparently.’

So even my poor father’s name was denied to me. With so much else gone, I should have liked to keep one scrap of identity.

‘Could I not still be Liberty at least?’

‘Who in the world would employ a governess named Liberty?’

Miss Bodenham stood up, flexing her fingers, and lit candles on the table and mantelpiece. Outside a summer dusk had settled on Store Street. ‘Have you finished? Put it in the envelope with the character reference. You’ll find the address on the back of the letter.’

I thought it was as well to read the reference before I sealed it. It seemed that I had given perfect satisfaction to my previous employer for three years, that my manners were ladylike and my three young charges had become perfect paragons under my instruction. They had parted from me with great regret and could most warmly recommend me to any gentleman’s household. The phrasing had all Blackstone’s stiffness, but it was copied in a flowing and feminine hand. The thoroughness of his preparations scared me and I tried one last attempt.

‘Does Mr Blackstone often perform this kind of service?’

‘Please don’t plague me with questions. I’ve neither the knowledge nor the time to answer them. Seal it up and I’ll deliver it first thing tomorrow.’

She opened a drawer in the table with her left hand and threw me a stubby piece of sealing wax, her right
hand still writing. It was all brutally clear. My poor father was judged to be an impulsive blunderer so his daughter was to be used but not trusted. The address was St James’s Square, so presumably Lady Mandeville was at her town house. I lodged the application on the mantelpiece and, with nothing else to do, sat and watched Miss Bodenham copying. She was amazingly sure and quick, like a weaver at his loom. I noticed the pages she was copying from were a horrid mess of scratching out and over-writing, some lines travelling at right angles down the margins, others diagonally into corners. When, around midnight, she paused to mix some more ink, I risked a question.

‘Is it a novel?’

‘Not this time. Political economy. After a while it doesn’t matter much whether it’s one or t’other. Words, words, words.’

For the first time she risked a smile, a little roguish twist to her lips that made her look younger and friendlier.

‘You are copying it for a friend?’

‘I am copying it for money. Printers are very clever on the whole at deciphering an author’s intentions, but there are some writers whose hands are so vile the printers won’t take them. The publishers send them to me to make sense of them.’

The fingers of her right hand seemed permanently bent, as if fixed for ever in the act of holding a pen. Once she’d mixed the ink she yawned and said the rest
would wait for tomorrow after all. Nearly unconscious with tiredness by now, I expected to be shown into a bedroom, but she bent down and pulled out from under the table two straw-stuffed pallets with rough ticking covers and a bundle of thin blankets.

‘You can put yours by the fireplace. I’ll go nearer the door because I’ll be up earlier in the morning.’

Quite true. Around four o’clock in the morning, just as light was coming in through the thin curtains, she was up and out, taking with her my letter from the mantelpiece and the cold teapot from the grate. I rose soon afterwards, tidied our pallets and blankets back under the table, and found a kind of cubbyhole on the first landing with a privy, a jug of water for washing and a piece of cracked mirror. With nothing else to do, I looked round her room trying to find some clue to her connection with the man in black, but it was as barren in that respect as the stones she used for paperweights. Her bookshelves were interesting though, old and well-used books, mostly from reformers and radicals of previous generations: Tom Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, even Rousseau himself in the original French. If they were her choice, then Miss Bodenham and I had views in common. It might even account for her caution, since reforming views were no more popular at present than when Tom Paine was threatened with hanging as a traitor.

Before six o’clock she was back with the teapot, a small loaf and a slice of ham.

‘Your books …’ I said.

‘Are my own business.’

She pushed papers aside and we had our breakfast at the table: fresh white bread, half the ham each and cups of blessedly hot tea. She ate delicately in small bites, relishing every mouthful, so perhaps my arrival had brought a little luxury for her. But as soon as we’d finished, that was an end of softness.

‘I’ve delivered your application. She will probably want to see you tomorrow, Wednesday. We have a lot of work to do.’

All that long summer day, with the scent of lime trees and coos of courting pigeons drifting in through the window, Miss Bodenham coached me in my part.

‘The family lived in Geneva, down by the lake. You know Geneva?’

‘Yes. We stopped a week there on our way back from the Alps.’

‘Keep to yes and no whenever possible. She will not be interested in you and the Alps. Your charges were two girls and a boy: Sylvia who is now twelve, Fitzgeorge, nine and Margaret, five. Repeat.’

‘Sylvia, twelve, Fitzgeorge, nine, Margaret, five. Was I fond of them?’

‘It is unwise for a governess to express fondness. The mother may be jealous. You found them charming and well-behaved.’

‘Were you ever a governess?’

‘Yes. But you must cure yourself of asking questions. Governesses don’t, except in the schoolroom.’

‘Is it very miserable?’

‘How old is Fitzgeorge?’

She seemed pleased, in her gruff way, with my speed in getting this fictional family into my head. Less pleased, though, when it came to my accomplishments.

‘She will probably ask you to show her a sample of your needlework.’

‘I don’t possess one.’

‘Not even a handkerchief?’

I eventually found in my reticule a ten-year-old handkerchief which the nuns had made me hem. She looked at it critically.

‘The stitches are too large.’

‘That’s what Sister Immaculata said. She made me unpick it nine times.’

‘It will have to do, but you must wash and iron it.’

She issued me with a wafer of hard yellow soap. I washed the handkerchief in the basin on the landing, hung it from the window sill to dry, went downstairs to beg the loan of a flat iron from the frizzy-haired maid and the favour of heating it on the kitchen range. I was ironing it in the scullery when somebody knocked at the door. The maid had gone upstairs, so I went to answer it and found a footman outside in black-and-gold livery, powdered wig and hurt pride from having to stand on a doorstep in Store Street.