The Children of Silence (8 page)

‘Mr Fullwood, this is Miss Doughty who wishes to speak to Mr Dromgoole,’ advised Magrath.

‘Miss Doughty is very welcome to do so,’ replied Fullwood, with a polite nod in her direction. ‘I think new visitors do him good.’ He drew up a chair for Frances beside Dromgoole, and she was seated. The doctor and attendant both remained standing, observing the patient closely.

‘Mr Dromgoole?’ asked Frances, but there was no reaction. Recalling that he had had pretensions as a Doctor of Medicine, she went on, ‘or should I call you Dr Dromgoole?’

After a moment or two he turned his head towards her and slowly a smile spread across his features, a look of joy and hope. ‘Adeline?’ he said, ‘is that you, Adeline?’

Frances was about to explain that she was not Adeline, but then thought she might do better if she pretended she was. ‘Yes, I have come to see you.’

‘Oh!’ he exclaimed, and an expression of great joy lit up his face. He reached out and took one of her hands in both of his.

‘Do you remember Mr Antrobus?’ asked Frances.

‘Oh, Adeline, my Adeline!’ he sighed.

‘It is a pleasure to see you again,’ said Frances wishing she knew who Adeline was. She glanced up at the two men, but they both shook their heads. ‘I was hoping you could tell me about Mr Antrobus.’

Dromgoole said nothing but as he smiled, tears welled up in his eyes.

‘I think you had a quarrel with Mr Antrobus,’ Frances persisted, hoping that repetition of the name might produce some memory. ‘Do you recall that?’

The patient began to weep noisily and tried to pull her hand to his lips, but Fullwood came forward and gently disengaged the grasp. ‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured, ‘but I really think you will learn nothing.’

Frances could only agree. Even if Dromgoole could reveal some information she could not vouch for its reliability. ‘If he does say anything about Mr Antrobus, I would be grateful if you would write to me and let me know,’ she said to Dr Magrath as they returned indoors. ‘Who is Adeline?’

‘I’m afraid we don’t know,’ shrugged Magrath. ‘Mr Dromgoole was not married and we know of no relative of that name. A childhood sweetheart perhaps or a lady to whose hand he aspired.’

Adeline was not a common name, and Frances thought that if she could find the lady she might learn what concerned Mr Dromgoole.

Frances returned home to find a letter from Dr Goodwin consenting to an appointment the next morning. Sarah had good news: she had located Mrs Dean, the cook who had worked at the Antrobus house at the time of Edwin Antrobus’ disappearance, at which time they had employed her for some five years. A cook, especially a good one, was a person of value, and she had not been difficult to find. Ladies often exchanged confidences about their cooks, boasted of good ones or complained about the ones they had just dismissed. Any lady who prided herself on being something in Bayswater society knew where to find the best cook, even if it meant raiding the kitchen of a great friend, and agencies liked to know where they were and whether they were content.

As Frances had anticipated, Sarah reported that Mrs Dean’s duties had meant that she had seen little of her master and almost nothing of his wife and therefore had no information to divulge about Mr Antrobus’ disposition or state of health. She knew that her mistress had a strange affliction that meant that she kept to herself most of the time and had noticed that Mrs Antrobus liked to play the piano – ‘not proper music at all but bits of tunes that repeated over and over again’. They didn’t often have visitors to dine – there was Mr Antrobus’ business partner, Mr Luckhurst, and his brother, Mr Lionel, and his wife and son, and his mother-in-law, Mrs Pearce, though not so much in the last few years as she had been very unwell. His sister-in-law Miss Pearce called often, though never at the same time as Mr Lionel. The parlourmaid had told her that Mr Lionel and Miss Pearce didn’t ‘get along’ and it was thought better not to have them visit at the same time or there would be what Mr Antrobus called ‘an atmosphere’, something he wanted to avoid. Mr and Mrs Antrobus had not dined together for some little while. Mrs Antrobus usually took her meals in her parlour, and often Miss Pearce would join her there. Then when they had dined, Mrs Antrobus would play the piano and Miss Pearce sang or hummed songs in a strange deep sort of voice.

The cook was aware that medical men called, but she never saw them and they didn’t stay to dine. If Mr Antrobus had quarrelled with anyone she knew nothing about it. She could provide no information that would help locate the present whereabouts of the parlourmaid and the charwoman.

Sarah was not disheartened by this very modest success and felt confident that she would find the other two servants in time. Frances felt similarly confident. When, a year and a half previously, Sarah had asked to be an apprentice to Frances in her new business, the request had come not from a burning desire to be a detective but because she wished to remain loyally at Frances’ side. Since then she had not only proved to be a valuable assistant and an indispensable protector of her employer’s safety, but she was taking on cases of her own, ones appropriate to her very special talents. She had earned a formidable reputation in Bayswater for meting out justice in a robust manner.

Sarah had recently become the champion of a poor washerwoman who lived separately from her husband and supported four small children. Believing that the earnings of his wife were his own property to enjoy as he pleased, he had a habit of descending upon her when short of beer money, terrorising his family and taking away whatever he could find.

A neighbour of the unfortunate woman, hearing of her plight, suggested she employ Sarah’s services. The unhappy washerwoman had pleaded that she had barely enough to feed her children, but the neighbour had gone to Sarah and appealed to her good nature and general distrust of men. Sarah, whose relish at dealing with such a case was payment enough, realised that simply taking the husband to a private location and explaining to him the error of his ways, pleasurable as such a task would be, might not be sufficient. The fact that since 1870 married women had been entitled by law to keep their own earnings was something that had been lost on too many men, who had chosen to ignore the wishes of parliament and continued to cow their wives into submitting to their demands. Sarah decided to engage the services of Tom Smith, a young relative of hers and a junior businessman of extraordinary energy who was running a team of messenger boys he referred to as his ‘men’. Tom had the washerwoman’s husband followed and as a result, when he was about to raid his wife’s home once more, the police were summoned in time to witness the crime and arrest him.

Sarah’s only regret was that any respite for the wife would be temporary, and she was considering what to do about this when, to her relief, the husband suffered an attack of
delirium tremens
and was removed from the police cells to the public asylum.

Unusually for Frances, that evening was to be given over entirely to the pursuit of pleasure. She allowed herself not to feel guilty at such an indulgence since it was a special occasion marking the recent return to London of Frances’ near neighbour and friend Cedric Garton. Cedric was a dedicated man about town, suave and elegant in his clothing, amusing in his conversation and a great lover of all things artistic. He lived in a beautifully decorated apartment with his devoted manservant Joseph and, though widely considered to be both handsome and eligible, had never shown any inclination to marry.

He had spent the last few months travelling about the Home Counties – he refused to go north of Hertfordshire because of the climate – to give lectures on Classical Art to enthralled audiences of mature ladies and aesthetically minded young men, and he was currently delivering the same delightful treat in London, where he had become all the rage of a set of Chelsea poets.

Cedric had already attended several performances of Messrs Gilbert and Sullivan’s acclaimed
Patience
at the Opéra Comique. Having enthused about the delicious greenery-yallery of the decor, Mr George Grossmith’s velvet knee-britches and Japanese attitudes and the resplendent uniforms of the Dragoon Guards, he insisted on providing tickets for Frances, Sarah and Professor Pounder for what he promised was the gayest night to be had in London.

Frances was particularly interested since there had been several letters to
The
Times
and the
Chronicle
from the minor and uncelebrated Bayswater poet Augustus Mellifloe, insisting that the character of Reginald Bunthorne was modelled upon himself; the fact that the piece was intended to be a satire having entirely escaped him.

‘I shall never write poetry,’ said Cedric, ‘it is far too exhausting. And Mr Mellifloe will never write poetry either, because he cannot.’

Cedric, for all his protestations of idleness and habitually languid manner, was actually a devotee of the manly art of pugilism as taught by Professor Pounder’s sporting academy, an exercise to which he brought both energy and finesse. When urgent action was required, he was as vigorous and active as any man in London.

It was a joyous evening, despite the hot and heavy atmosphere produced by the crowded theatre and the gas lamps. To Frances’ amusement one of the songs immortalised the skills of a private detective, Ignatius ‘Paddington’ Pollaky, and Cedric said he hoped that one day she too would be celebrated in song.

Sarah’s comment was that she could not see why the twenty lovesick maidens so doted on the namby-pamby poets when they might better have admired the muscular Dragoon Guards, and Cedric could only agree. Professor Pounder said nothing, but then he was a man of few words.

Frances was not very familiar with the world of the theatre but reflected that it was in some ways a miniature of life. Everyone on the stage was an actor pretending to be what he or she was not, and did not everyone do that all the time, including even herself? She tried her best to be honest but it was not always possible. She still awoke, perspiring, from those horrid nightmares, yet outwardly pretended that the brutal attack which she had only survived unscathed due to the intervention of Sarah’s firm fists, but which she seemed doomed to relive again and again, had not shaken her. She professed no more than curiosity about her absent mother, yet it was a constant and consuming mystery.

Frances also observed that the musical piece, though light, included double deceptions: not only was the actor Mr Rutland Barrington pretending to be idyllic poet Archibald Grosvenor but Grosvenor himself, at a moment’s notice, threw off what proved to be a pretence of which he had wearied and became what he wanted to be, a ‘commonplace young man’. In one very amusing scene the Dragoons donned aesthetic garments in an attempt to win the ladies but thankfully soon reverted to their uniforms. How much might be achieved with costume, Frances thought. How easy it was to put off one set of apparel and don another, and be seen differently by the world, which only took notice of exterior show.

F
rances’ appointment with Dr Goodwin was at ten o’clock the next morning and this gave her the opportunity of rising early to visit the offices of the
Bayswater Chronicle
, which, apart from a tendency to sensationalise the commonplace and wallow in the sensational, was one of the more accurate periodicals. The detailed accounts of the arguments that so frequently broke out at meetings of the Paddington Vestry was one of the best guides to matters of public concern, as well as being very amusing. She was often assisted in her endeavours by the paper’s most active reporter, Mr Max Gillan, who understood the value of information as an item of commerce and appreciated that it passed in two directions.

On this occasion, Frances was not looking for anything in particular but simply wanted to examine all the newspapers for the few months before and after the disappearance of Mr Edwin Antrobus for any clues that might throw some light on the event. Since the finding of the remains in the canal the entire focus of the investigation had moved from Bristol to Bayswater, and who could tell what gem might be lying in plain sight, unclaimed because no one had looked for it?