The Durham Deception (9 page)

They were going to stay at Miss Howlett's house for a few days. Helen had written asking whether they might visit. It had been many years since she'd seen her aunt and, besides, she wanted to show off her new husband. She said nothing about the main reason for her trip. Meanwhile Tom arranged through Scott, Lye & Mackenzie for a meeting with Major Marmont, who happened to be performing in Durham for a week.

So, why had Helen's aunt gone to Durham when the rest of the family lived in the south?

‘It's rather a sad story as I understand it from the hints my mother has given,' she said. ‘Many years ago Aunt Julia moved to Durham in pursuit of a man. She was engaged to be married to a curate but something went wrong. He was working in a parish somewhere in the city. I do not know whether things went wrong before or after she visited him but anyway the engagement was broken off and then the curate was moved to a different parish. Aunt Julia was reluctant to come back empty-handed, so to speak, and decided to prolong her stay in Durham. She must have fallen for the place because a few weeks turned into months and then became a year or two. At some point she acquired a fine house in the old part of the city on the bailey, where she has been living, a prosperous and respected spinster, these many years. I don't suppose she'll ever return to the south now.'

‘She must have an independent streak,' said Tom.

‘Mother says I take after her but I am not certain whether it is altogether a compliment. It's only recently that Aunt Julia and she have started corresponding again.'

‘I had the feeling that your mother was not so concerned about your aunt but more about – I don't know – about family honour, the memory of her father.'

‘It is this business of the medium using grandfather Howlett to get what he wants from Julia that is so distasteful. I agree with mother there. But, Tom, I am not looking forward to this one bit.'

‘After the trouble in Tullis Street?'

‘It does not give me much of an appetite for confronting mediums.'

Neither Tom nor Helen had talked a great deal about the apparent suicide of Ernest Smight. When they did discuss it, they tried to persuade themselves they had no share in the man's death, that it was a result of his despair at the police action and imminent prosecution. But even so they felt twinges of guilt. They had been present at the séance; they were witnesses. Like the authorities, they too regarded Smight as a trickster who deserved exposure, for Helen had by now begun to revert to her old suspicion of mediums and Tom had almost forgotten the encounter with his father.

‘Never mind,' said Tom. ‘You will not have to confront this Flask fellow by yourself, if it comes to that. I'll be there. And maybe you will be able to convince your aunt without any confrontation, maybe she'll have had a change of heart by the time we arrive and be all for leaving her money to a local orphanage.'

‘I hope so,' said Helen. She gave up any pretence of reading her book and gazed out of the window at the countryside rolling by. They had stopped at several great manufacturing conurbations, each announced by a pall of smoke not merely overhanging but spreading out into the surrounding countryside. In between the towns the landscape was largely low and level, stretching away in the summer's afternoon.

‘I feel life must be more serious up here,' said Helen after a time. ‘More earnest.'

‘Is that because the Brontë sisters and Mrs Gaskell tell you so?'

‘Why, Tom, I did not know that you read female authors.'

‘I may have glanced at them from time to time.'

Tom had taken an interest in female authors ever since he had met Helen and she revealed to him her ambition to write a novel. He had even read a few of their books to get a sense of the competition. But he did not have much to say about his experience of women authors, except that there seemed to be an awful lot of them. This would not have been a tactful remark to make to Helen under any circumstances. He went back to reading the Cornhill Magazine and Helen returned to her book.

They were joined by a tall, well-dressed gentleman who got on at York. After putting a small valise in the rack, he settled himself in the opposite corner of the compartment. He stretched out his legs in front of him and flexed his gloved fingers. His glance flicked from Tom to Helen and back again.

‘Newly weds?' he said.

Helen looked up, a very slight blush on her cheeks. Tom was about to tell the man to mind his own business but his wife said, ‘Not
that
new. But how do you know? Is it so obvious?'

‘When I was putting my bag up there I noticed that the initial, the last initial, on your case had recently been painted over and a different one substituted. You started out as an S but now you are transformed to an A.'

The man addressed Helen. The familiarity in his words might have been offensive in someone else but he had a curiously insinuating manner of speaking. His voice was warm and low.

‘Very observant of you,' said Tom.

‘It is not only a question of letters and paint and luggage. Do not take what I say amiss but there is a kind of bloom on the both of you,' the man persisted. ‘The bloom of the freshly married when the voyage of life lies all before you.'

‘Yes, we have lately cast off into the sea of marital life,' said Helen, ‘marital life with its many shoals and shallows, its storms and its sunny days.'

‘My dear lady,' said the man, his voice taking on a quality that was positively flowing and syrupy. ‘My dear
young
lady, you can certainly take a metaphor and stretch it. But to move from metaphor to actuality, are you travelling far today?'

‘To Durham,' said Helen.

‘What about you?' cut in Tom. ‘You cannot be going any distance since you're travelling light.'

‘Durham is also my destination. A city on a hill.'

‘Going there on business?' said Tom, giving the stranger a taste of his own inquisitiveness.

‘I reside there for the moment,' said the man. ‘But I am always about my business. It never ceases.'

By now they were approaching the outskirts of the city. The green of the countryside was blotched with heaps of slag and skeletal pitheads and pinched lines of housing. Even the sheep in the fields seemed to have been dipped in a sooty dye. Helen looked as eagerly out of the window as she would have at an attractive prospect. Then the train ran across a gently curving viaduct and they had their first sight of the castle and the cathedral. The afternoon sun gave the stone a warm glow but the buildings were still massive and imposing.

‘Here we are!' said the man, waving his hand as if he'd conjured up the scene himself. ‘The city on a hill.'

The train had scarcely begun to draw up alongside the platform when the tall gentleman leaped from his seat and took his valise from the rack in a single movement. He had the door unfastened before the train was fully stopped. He paused for an instant and made a kind of mock-bow towards Tom and Helen.

‘
Au revoir
, Mr and Mrs A.'

And with that he stepped out on to the platform. By the time Helen and Tom had gathered their own luggage and got down, there was no sign of him. A few other people got off the train at the station, which was so new that the stonework had only just started to take on a darker, grimy colour. Among the alighting passengers was a tall, shabbily dressed man who stared at the retreating backs of Tom and Helen.

The Ansells took a battered old hansom from the railway station. Helen gave the driver an address in the old part of town called the South Bailey. As they were being driven downhill past terraces of new housing, Helen said, ‘I wonder if the man on the train is typical of the inhabitants of the city? I thought it would be full of miners.'

They drove across a bridge that straddled a river so dark in patches that it might have been running with liquid coal. Tom thought it was the River Wear. He had studied a town map before leaving London and recalled how the river looped round and back on itself so that the older part of Durham was isolated like a peninsula. Some loungers in artisan clothes turned from gazing into the black waters to look at the cab go by. To the right, high up on the bluff overlooking the river, were the castle remains and the twin towers at the western end of the cathedral. The carriage ascended slowly into this fortress-like area by a roundabout route, passing through a wide marketplace and then up cobbled streets that were lined with tearooms and confectioners and dress shops.

The road began to level out and they passed beneath the cathedral on its eastern side. Helen had never seen her aunt's house before and had only the name to go by: Colt House, named for the mine-owner who had once lived there. Tom stuck his head through the trapdoor in the hansom roof and repeated the name to the driver who shook his head. Tom added that it was the residence of Miss Julia Howlett. The driver's seamed face registered some kind of recognition at the name. Within a few moments they had drawn up before a broad-fronted house with a handsome pillared portico.

The Ansells got down. The driver produced their cases. Before Tom had finished paying him and while Helen was still studying the facade of Colt House, the front door flew open. A small woman came out at a run and nearly collided with Helen.

‘Helen, is it really you?'

She held Helen by the elbows and looked up at her face. She was tiny, bird-like.

‘Aunt Julia!' said Helen. ‘You have not changed.'

‘But you have, my dear. Last time I saw you, you were so high – or so low, I should say. And this must be your husband Thomas.'

Tom shook hands with Miss Howlett. She had a darting eye, and he felt assessed within seconds. He wondered whether Helen felt the same twinge of discomfort. They weren't exactly innocent visitors. They had come to persuade this woman to do what she probably had no wish to do.

Colt House

As they were talking in the hall, a stout and quite elderly man entered. He was carrying a bundle of papers under his right arm. White hair straggled from beneath his hat. He looked at Tom and Helen with curiosity.

‘Septimus!' cried Aunt Julia. ‘You must meet my niece and her husband.'

The gentleman came forward. He awkwardly shifted the papers to his other arm and shook hands with the Ansells.

‘I have heard a deal about you,' he said. ‘Miss Howlett has been greatly looking forward to your visit.'

‘Mr Sheridan – Septimus – is a lodger in Colt House,' said Julia. ‘He has been here for so long that I may say he is almost part of the furniture!'

Far from being insulted, Septimus Sheridan smiled gently and bowed his head. He said to Helen, ‘You aunt is very good to me, Mrs Ansell.'

‘Now then, you two must be tired after your long journey. You will need to wash and change before dinner. We will be dining early because I have invited a few friends and neighbours for this evening.'

‘Not on our account, I hope,' said Helen.

‘My dear, do not be so modest. But no, I had arranged this, ah, event before I knew you were coming. Even so your arrival is very timely. You see, I have asked a good friend of mine to provide us with a manifestation tonight.'

‘A manifestation, Miss Howlett?' said Tom. He had an uneasy feeling he knew what was coming.

‘Oh do not call me Miss Howlett, Tom. If I am an aunt to Helen, I shall be one to you also. But, yes, we are having a
manifestation
. A gentleman by the name of Eustace Flask is to show us his powers. He will communicate with the other side, he will bring us messages from beyond the grave. I am sure your mother has mentioned Mr Flask, Helen? I have been filling my letters with him. He is a remarkable individual.'

‘She did mention someone of that name,' said Helen, glancing at Tom. Her look gave nothing away. Well, thought Tom, this has come sooner than expected. But it was good to have an early opportunity to get the measure of their opponent.

Aunt Julia talked with enthusiasm on the subject of spiritualism while they ate their early dinner. But her enthusiasm was oddly impersonal. She wasn't attempting to make contact with the ‘other side' for herself or to soothe some recent grief. Rather, she was genuinely eager to further the work of those ‘brave and pioneering' individuals who, in the face of misunderstanding and even persecution, were attempting to ‘pierce the veil between the mortal and the eternal.'

Tom caught Helen's eye while she was coming out with all this. Yes, their task was going to be a difficult one. It did not seem to him, either, that Aunt Julia was physically weak or mentally failing and about to give away her worldly wealth, as Helen's mother had implied. Perhaps that had just been Mrs Scott's way of getting them to go on their mission to Durham.

It was difficult to work out Septimus Sheridan's exact position in the household. From some comments he let slip during the meal, Tom understood that he spent most of his time in the cathedral library engaged on some scholarly work or other, which explained the bundle of papers he brought to the house. Certainly, he had the dry and dusty look of one who most enjoys old libraries. Even his hair was the whitish-yellow tint of old parchment. But every so often he'd glance at Julia Howlett in a way that was half admiring, half timorous. Whenever she was speaking he listened with particular attention and he was quick to agree with her, whatever the subject. She, for her part, treated Septimus with a weary familiarity. He called her ‘Miss Howlett' while she called him by his first name.

He'd been introduced as a lodger. A lodger! It was just the kind of description which might have provoked a bit of scandalized gossip, a situation where a single man, however old, was living in the house of a spinster lady, however ancient. If so, Aunt Julia didn't seem to care. In the brief time since they'd been introduced, Tom had realized that here was a woman who went her own way – something which would make Helen's task even harder.