Authors: Evelyn Hervey
Miss Unwin, whose head had sunk to her breast in despair, looked suddenly up.
It was simply what Vilkins had said about her being a lady. It had put her in mind, by an unaccountable leap of thought, of her cell companion of the morning, Mrs Honoria Fitzmaurice, Old
Fits, lady at the bottom of the long slope up which she herself had climbed a little way and had been hurled back down. It had put her in mind of Mrs Fitzmaurice and the trick she had boasted of playing with the aid of her lowest-of-the-low friend, Mrs Childerwick, the laying-out woman.
‘Vilkins,’ she said. ‘Vilkins, you and I are of the same height and the same figure, are we not?’
‘Always was,’ Vilkins answered sturdily. ‘Could always put on one another’s pinafores, such as they was, turn and turn about, couldn’t we?’
‘Yes, yes. We could. And you are wearing that wonderfully big bonnet of yours.’
‘Yeh. I like ‘em big. The others laugh at me about it. But I like it the way it is.’
‘Listen, Vilkins. I want to change clothes with you. I want to change clothes, then call the constable to let you out but go out myself instead. They won’t come to look at you in here till nine o’clock. They told me that. It’s when they give the prisoners bread and cocoa. I want that time – I suppose it’s not much more than an hour and a half – to go back to No 3 and there, if I can, get into Simmons’s room before Joseph does.’
‘But you won’t be able to break in there, Unwin,’ Vilkins said, apparently quite undismayed by the extraordinariness of the plan that had been put to her. ‘You won’t because Joseph couldn’t, an’ he tried hard enough, believe you me.’
‘But I will get in, Vilkins, I will. You see, I have an advantage over Joseph. I have a good memory for what has been said to me.’
‘Well, memory won’t get you past that door. It’s a good ‘un. A real good ‘un.’
‘No. But my memory has told me already that Mrs Thackerton said to me once that she has kept a set of keys to the house even although Mrs Arthur has taken over conduct of the household. I can get the key to Simmons’s room from her set, Vilkins, and then I can get in there and find what Joseph is so sure is to be found and what Sergeant Drewd evidently missed.’
‘Then go on, Unwin. Go on.’
And Vilkins instantly began pulling off her lavender stuff half-mourning dress.
It did not take long for Miss Unwin and Vilkins to exchange dresses and pass over servant’s shawl for governess’s grey mantle. Once the change was completed Miss Unwin hid her head inside Vilkins’s large straw bonnet, took Vilkins’s purse, which she had accepted the loan of after some demur, and with its metal clasp set the bars of the cell ringing.
In the lobby at the far end she was able to see the constable’s shadow move as he heaved himself out of his chair. Then she turned away and pretended to be looking down at the cell’s occupant seated in the gloom on the narrow bench.
Clump, thump, clump. She heard the constable’s steps approach and forced herself not to look round.
‘You’ve been long enough,’ came a grumbling voice at last, accompanied by the heavy jingling of keys.
‘Yes, sir, I’m sorry,’ Miss Unwin said, answering quickly for fear that Vilkins might speak by mistake and keeping her voice to a murmur.
Still with her head turned towards Vilkins, she heard the key squeal once in the lock of the cell door. Only then did she turn, muttering a quick ‘Goodbye then, miss’ for Vilkins’s benefit, and scurry, head still lowered, out into the corridor.
Behind her the cell door swung closed with the same booming clang it had made when she had first been put into the dark confined space alongside Mrs Honoria Fitzmaurice.
‘You’re in a great rush all on a sudden,’ the constable complained. ‘Wait, can’t you?’
Without turning, Miss Unwin flung out an answer, picking up again in her fear the coarse mode of speech of her earliest days, something she thought she had for ever banished.
‘I’m wanted back at me place. They’ll create something terrible if I’m any later.’
‘You’re all the same, you girls,’ the constable replied, immensely
to her relief. ‘Well, you can find your own way out. I’m not going chasing after the likes of you.’
Miss Unwin hurried away, face well concealed inside her large bonnet, slipping like a wraith back along the way she remembered from having been marched in by Sergeant Drewd. In little more than half a minute she found herself standing outside the police station on the wide pavement. A free woman.
Then, to her delight, she saw a hansom come slowly trotting along the street with no passenger inside.
At once she hailed it, thanking Vilkins once again in her mind for providing her purse. Every moment might count if she was to get back to Northumberland Gardens before Joseph attempted to break into his mother’s room once again.
But the trip in the hansom, that wonderfully light vehicle specially designed for rapid movement through city streets, was in the event too quick for her. She had hardly sat in its gently swinging seat for three minutes before the cabbie was drawing up outside No 3 Northumberland Gardens. She had had no time at all to think how she was going to get into the ever-locked house in order to obtain the key to the room in the attics that might mean everything to her future.
Here she was, dressed in Vilkins’s lavender maid’s dress. So how could she ring at the visitor’s bell to have Henry, or worse Joseph, open the door to her? On the other hand, were she to ring at the servants’ bell, she would be let in at the door down in the area by most probably Mrs Breakspear, and the cook would hardly admit Miss Unwin, the governess, by this unaccustomed way without a host of questions.
But time pressed. She passed up to the driver, high-perched behind her, the sixpence of his fare through the little trap in the hansom’s roof, set foot on its iron step and descended to the pavement. And still no answer to her dilemma had come to her.
For a moment she stood looking up at the house, the house that only that morning she had been convinced she would never see again. Tears pricked at her eyes at the thought of how near she was to the secret that lay in Simmons’s room and how far away.
But her dilemma remained.
She went up to the gate, opened it and set off with leaden steps
along the path towards the white-scrubbed steps leading up to the imposing front door and its two either-or bells.
Then, floating up from the area beneath, she smelt a richly mixed aroma. It was the Thackertons’ dinner. The mingling smells of what might be rich turtle soup, well-cooked plaice sweet and fresh, roast mutton too, it seemed, and most probably a fowl and the spiciness of a substantial pudding.
The Thackertons’ dinner. It was being served at that moment. What a mercy, she thought, that Mr Thackerton had always insisted on dinner on Sundays being eaten at the same time as on weekdays and not, as in other households more considerate of servants, in the middle of the day. And serving at the table, however few diners were seated at it, there would be Mellings himself and both Henry and Joseph. So if the visitors’ bell rang at this unusual hour one of the maids would answer, and whichever of them it was would be a much easier figure to confront than the footmen. A sharp word from Miss Unwin and, with a little luck, even Hannah for all her customary unwillingness to take orders from the governess, would retreat and allow her to set foot indoors.
Miss Unwin put a finger on the visitors’ bell and let it peal loud and long.
Then she waited, counting the seconds.
She had reached only ‘twenty-three’ when she heard footsteps on the far side of the door. Would they be Henry’s or Joseph’s after all? No, surely, they sounded too light and too rapid.
Then the door swung open, a little hesitantly. It was Hannah standing holding it.
‘Ah, Hannah. I am happy to tell you that the misunderstanding has been satisfactorily cleared up at the police station. I will go up to my room now, and when Mr Arthur has dined I shall come down and tell him.’
Already she had gained entrance.
‘Oh, yes, miss, yes,’ Hannah said, blinking in surprise. ‘Only the Master ain’t dining at home tonight. But Mrs Arth – but the Mistress is here, of course.’
‘Yes. Good. Then I shall see her.’
Miss Unwin longed to race up the broad stairs in front of her
before Hannah took in the clothes she was wearing. But there was one thing more that she had to find out.
‘And Mrs Thackerton?’ she asked. ‘Is she dining downstairs this evening?’
‘Oh, no, miss. Mrs Thackerton ain’t at all well still. She’s in bed. Fast asleep in her bed, I dare say.’
‘Yes. Of course. Poor Mrs Thackerton.’
Then at last she could make for the stairs, and go up them, if not at a telltale run, at least with reasonable haste.
Once out of Hannah’s sight, in fact, Miss Unwin did take to her heels. She had a tremendous amount to accomplish, and very little time to do it in.
First, without any hesitation, she made her way to Mrs Thackerton’s sitting-room. Outside its door she listened hard for a few seconds. She had to be sure that there was no one there, not Mrs Thackerton up unexpectedly from her bed, not say Nancy, promoted from the scullery to duties upstairs.
All seemed silent. Slowly Miss Unwin opened the door. The room beyond was almost in darkness. The blinds were half-lowered as they almost always were, and the fire had still not been lit. And there was no one there.
Miss Unwin closed the door swiftly behind her and looked all round. Mrs Thackerton, though she had said that she still held the keys of the house, had said nothing about where it was that she kept them. But they were at least much more likely to be somewhere in here than in the bedroom next door.
The invalid sofa. The little piecrust table next to it, with a medicine glass still on it. The mantelpiece, but nothing on its green cloth with the green-and-gold fringe except the clock ticking quietly away under its glass dome and the photographs in their silver frames – Mr Arthur as a boy in frocks, Mr Arthur at Eton, Mr and Mrs Arthur on their wedding day, little Pelham in his mother’s arms, little Pelham naked on a bearskin rug, little Pelham in his first sailor suit.
Then there was the bookcase. But there was nothing behind its glass front besides Mrs Thackerton’s books, the works of piety and the dull, dull novels. In the far corner, a hanging shelf with half a dozen pieces of Meissen ware on it. Just as it had always been.
But next to the fireplace there was the side-table, and it had two narrow drawers under it. Miss Unwin, while she had been reading to Mrs Thackerton or having the undemanding conversations which occasionally had taken the place of reading, had never seen either of these drawers open.
She crossed over to the table and did a most unladylike thing. One after the other she jerked the two private drawers wide.
It was in the second that, together with a pile of lavendercoloured writing paper and a few dried-up pens, she found them. A large assorted clutter of keys on two linked rings.
She picked them up, thrust them into the pocket of Vilkins’s shapeless dress and hurried out. As quickly she mounted the stairs to the schoolroom landing.
There she had intended to go through the baize door leading to the last part of the servants’ stairs, those going up to the attic bedrooms. But on the landing she hesitated. Pelham. How was he? Who had seen him to bed in her absence? Was he happily asleep as he ought to be? Or was he perhaps lying awake still, lonely and worried by the startling change that had occurred in the even tenor of his life?
She crept to his door and eased it open.
In the dim light of the still bright evening outside coming through a gap in the curtains she saw that he was, in fact, asleep. But, stepping nearer, she realised that his face was flushed with heat and, yes, there were surely the smudges on his cheeks of tears that had not long dried. And no one had lit the nightlight. If he were to wake when it had got thoroughly dark he would be yet more distraught.
She turned and went across to the schoolroom where, safely out of reach on the top of the tall toy cupboard, she kept a box of lucifers.
Hardly pausing to discard encumbering bonnet and shawl, she hurried back with the matches into Pelham’s room. There, turning from the bed so as to shield the sudden burst of light and the harsh scrape of the lucifer on its box, she struck the first match that she had been able to take hold of with fumbling fingers. Mercifully it lit at one stroke. She carried the little flame carefully to the
mantelpiece and applied it to the wick of the nightlight. It caught and began to burn steadily.
Thrusting the lucifers into Vilkins’s pocket alongside the two rings of keys, she closed the door carefully and softly behind her and then went to the servants’ staircase and rapidly mounted upwards.
But, up at last where she wanted to be, she realised that, ridiculously, she did not know which room off the narrow corridor there had belonged to Simmons. All she did know of this part of the house, the women servants’ domain, was that one of the rooms was shared by Vilkins and Nancy. Supposing she tried one of the doors and it was that one and Nancy was there. That alone might put an end to her quietly getting into Simmons’s room and giving it the thorough search that was likely to be needed.
Yet there was no time to be wasted. Downstairs dinner might have nearly come to its end and Joseph, free of his duties in the dining-room, might come creeping up here to make a new assault on the locked door.
The locked door. Yes, weren’t there bound to be signs on it of Joseph’s first attempt?
There was little light up under the roof, only what came in through one small window at the end of the narrow corridor. But Miss Unwin went rapidly from door to door, stooping and peering, and hoping. And at the fourth one she looked at she saw, quite clearly, a whole line of scratches along its edge near the lock.
Hastily she pulled out Mrs Thackerton’s two linked key rings. Which key was the one she wanted?
Rejecting the larger ones as obviously having more important uses than to give a servant some privacy, and discarding too some of the smaller ones as belonging almost certainly only to cupboards, she saw with dismay that there were still plenty of possibilities left. Nothing for it but to try them systematically one by one, shifting each rejected key to the far side of her gripping fingers as it failed to do the trick for her.