The Grenadillo Box: A Novel (24 page)

I lifted my pen and brushed the end of my nose with its downy tip. There were other questions I would have asked, more information I could have given her, but these matters were better left until I had ascertained I’d be able to contact her, and that she’d be willing to respond. I folded the page, took a wafer of wax, melted it on the candle, and watched the red liquid ooze like unctuous blood across the fold. I blew to harden it, then pressed it with my ring. On the front of my letter I wrote “Miss Dorothy Chippendale” in large, clear letters. Then, placing the letter in my pocket, I went in search of Molly Bullock.

She was squatting among the bales of hemp and cotton, nibbling a mince pie and warming her bottom against the stove. Quiet as a snake I stole up behind her, and with a swift gesture stooped and squeezed the succulent buttock beneath her petticoat. She squealed and spun round, chuckling with delight when she saw it was I.

“Nathaniel Hopson—you’re a stranger. Come here this instant,” she cried.

“I’ve a favor to beg of you first.”

“As usual.” She dropped her eyes and began to toy with the ribbons of her bodice.

My cheeks flamed. “Not that,” I said, “something more pressing.”

She pouted coquettishly and swiveled away. “Someone else, is there? A new attachment?”

“No, Molly. How could you think that? It’s the whereabouts of Dorothy Chippendale I’m after.”

“How should I know where she went?”

“An acquaintance of yours, the scullery maid Ellen Robson, knows it—I’m convinced of it.”

At this Molly looked up. A great gash of a grin was stretched across her face. “That dung heap’s no friend of mine. Why don’t you ask her? She’d be enough to scare the wits out of you.”

“I tried, Molly,” I said, pushing her fingers away from my buttons.

“Why should she tell me?”

Molly continued to press herself on me, and I found myself growing hot with awkwardness on account of it. My hair stuck damply to my forehead, my spine prickled with sweat, and to my chagrin I felt my lust begin to stir. I backed away in an effort to restrain myself. “I hazard from the little I know of the female sex that if you offered her some morsel of tittle-tattle, she might…share her knowledge about Miss Chippendale.”

Oblivious to my plea and reticence, Molly advanced towards me again. “I see your scar’s healed well,” she said, licking my temple indecorously. “Give her some intelligence on the subject of you. Is that what you mean?”

The discussion was becoming more awkward and intimate than I had intended. But I didn’t want to vex Molly.

“I might have more intelligence to offer her if you would just refresh my memory…” She thrust herself against my leg.

“Not now, Molly, I have other matters to consider.”

I stepped neatly back towards the door, opened it, and reversed, straight into a figure poised upon the threshold. I spun round to see who it was. A lady stood there, her hand frozen in midair as if she’d been about to knock.

It was Alice Goodchild.

I bowed to her, spreading my arms gallantly to hide the disheveled Molly from her view. Her arrival threw me into even greater confusion. I felt my face crimson and prayed she hadn’t noticed Molly. “Miss Goodchild! This is an unexpected visit.”

Evidently she was as surprised as I, for she too flushed scarlet. “Indeed, Mr. Hopson, I trust it is not inconvenient. But I have come to inform you of a new discovery. A matter concerning your friend.”

Molly had by now stepped up behind me. I could feel her suspicions branding the back of my neck. Before she could interpose I turned back to her. “Miss Bullock, I think my instructions are clear enough. I’d be grateful if you’d attend to them at once.” With that, I pressed my letter into Molly’s hand.

As the coolness of my tone registered, Molly’s mouth opened and shut like that of a pike gasping its last. Any moment now she’d recover her senses, yell at me for my lofty airs, and Alice would comprehend we were intimate with each other. But if I moved speedily I might avoid it.

Turning my back on Molly, I held a protective arm behind Alice and shepherded her briskly towards the showroom, away from the upholstery shop. I glanced at her as we walked. She was as alluring as ever, in a dark blue velvet hat and fur-trimmed cloak. Perhaps it was the cold that made her eyes gleam like rare jewels in her face. Pleasure, warming as a draft of brandy, rushed through my veins. I dared to glance back over my shoulder. Molly was still standing thunderstruck by the door, her face a picture of unadulterated fury.

“It is a pleasure to see you, Alice. I’m due to leave for Cambridge in the morning and intended calling upon you later this afternoon. I’ve a favor to ask of you.”

She seemed scarcely to hear me, for her mind was all on the scene she had just witnessed. “Who
was
that person?” she demanded in a low voice.

“An upholsteress by the name of Molly Bullock, whom I’ve asked to help me find out the whereabouts of Dorothy Chippendale,” I said truthfully.

“Dorothy Chippendale?”

“Dorothy is Chippendale’s youngest sister, whom Partridge hoped to marry.”

“Has she too gone missing?”

“She disappeared at the same time as Partridge. You’ll recall he mentioned her in the letter to me that Foley found. I thought it my duty to inform her of Partridge’s death.”

“That was indeed most kind of you.”

“She was all but engaged to him, and in truth I wrote in the hope she may know something that can assist in unraveling the reason for his murder.”

“And what does Molly Bullock know of Dorothy?”

“Nothing, but she has the means to find out. She’s acquainted with the scullery maid in Chippendale’s house, who could discover Dorothy’s whereabouts if she’d a mind to.” I paused. “Below-stairs gossip being what it is, someone in the household must have heard something of her sudden departure.”

“She seemed very startled by your request.”

“D’you think so? I didn’t remark it. More likely it was your arrival that flummoxed her.”

Before she could further interrogate me on the subject, I continued, “But enough of Molly and Dorothy. Tell me about yourself. What brings you here?”

“I have something to tell you that concerns the tool chest.”

“Then let us go somewhere away from here so you can tell me properly.”

She agreed to grant me the rest of the afternoon, and since the weather was pleasantly fine, we decided upon a promenade. In St. Martin’s Lane I hailed a hackney carriage and directed the driver to take us to St. James’s Park.

“Now tell me,” she said gaily after I’d told her how I’d opened the box, “what’s this favor you require of me?”

“The warden on duty the night the hospital opened was a man by the name of James Barrow. According to the intelligence I unearthed at the hospital, he lives in Hatton Garden. I would ask you to go and seek him out, find out what you can from him of that time, the first night the hospital opened. I would go myself but there is no time before I must leave.”

“What should I say to him?”

“Ask him why, of all the children listed that first night, only one was entered without an age.”

“It may have been a simple oversight.”

“It may have been a deliberate omission. You see, if Partridge was accepted that night, he would have been aged four or five years. No longer an infant; no longer eligible by rights to be cared for at the hospital.”

“You suspect this entry might be his?”

“Perhaps.”

By the time we arrived at the park, the sun was sinking below the treetops, casting long black shadows interspersed with streaks of brilliant light. The skaters on Rosamond’s Pond glided prettily by while we walked slowly, admiring the clusters of fallow deer gathering in the copses for the night. Alice took my arm, and I pressed my elbow into my side to draw her closer. To have her thus dispatched the downcast feelings and fears that had earlier troubled me and made me feel more content and hopeful than I had for some time. I led her to the far end of the park, where we found the cows just in for milking at their stalls. We joined the line, and I paid a penny for a cup of warm milk drawn fresh from the beasts’ udders for her.

“And now,” I said as she sipped it, “you must tell me your news, for I’ve told you all I am able and can bear the suspense no longer.”

There was a small rim of cream on her upper lip, which she licked delicately away. “What I have to tell you concerns the picture we found on the lid of Partridge’s tool chest. I don’t quite understand the significance of it, but I think you should know.”

“Go on.”

She smiled gravely but wouldn’t be rushed. “You already know a part of it, for you told me yourself you found the picture in Partridge’s notebook, with a title.”

“
Daedalus and Talos,
as I recall it. But it meant nothing to me.”

“Indeed. As soon as I saw it I thought the image a striking one. You remember there were two figures, one standing, one lying prostrate on the ground before a temple. And a bird flying off in the distance. I am quite familiar with ancient legends, they have always enthralled me, but this was unusual and I couldn’t identify it. So the next evening I searched my brother’s schoolbooks.”

“And what did you find?”

“The story that the picture illustrates is, as you discovered, Daedalus and Talos. I believe the scene Partridge has drawn is taken from the legend told in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses.
What will interest you, I think, are the details of the story, for they seem to me extraordinarily apt in view of Partridge’s own tragic tale.”

She halted and seemed to search my face, though I knew not what for. “Go on,” I said.

“Daedalus was a legendary inventor and craftsman in Athens. He had a talented apprentice by the name of Talos. By the age of twelve the apprentice surpassed his master—the legend says he picked up a fish bone and made a saw, that he invented the potter’s wheel and a compass for marking circles…”

“And what became of him?”

“In time Daedalus grew unbearably jealous of the talented Talos. So much so that one day he led Talos to the roof of Athena’s temple on the Acropolis and pushed him over the edge to his death. Afterwards, to avoid detection, he descended to the place where Talos’s body lay and put it in a bag, intending to bury it. But the peculiar relevance of the subject is this. The soul of Talos the talented apprentice was said to have flown off from his body in the form of a partridge.”

“What?”
I was, I confess, incredulous.

“Yes,” she reiterated. “There are various versions of the legend, but according to Ovid the soul of Talos was transformed into a partridge.”

I was silent as the significance of her words registered. “It cannot, surely, be a coincidence? The sudden appearance of this picture in the tool chest. The sudden dismissal from the workshop. Above all the
name.
”

“That’s what struck me so forcefully.”

“Then you believe he chose the subject of his picture specifically for that reason?”

“Perhaps,” she said thoughtfully. “Though I would caution against reading too much into it.”

But my mind was racing. I’d scarcely heard her. “Perhaps he intended it as a message? A way of communicating what was happening, when he was unable to contact anyone.”

“I believe that’s too fanciful,” said Alice. “After all, he wrote you a letter, did he not, and told you plainly what had happened? More likely he saw in the legend some strange echo of his own condition, and he found it consoling. I mean the name, and the story of the jealous master and the talented apprentice. That doesn’t mean he saw the legend as a presage of what was about to happen to him.”

“But the parallel is so clear,” I protested.

She shrugged her shoulders and looked at me, holding out her half-full mug of milk for me to finish. I was encouraged by the gesture, interpreting it as a signal of the growing easiness between us. I took the mug from her, listening while she reasoned with me.

“Think more carefully about it, Nathaniel, and you’ll see the notion is plainly ludicrous. Partridge was killed in Cambridge, a day’s journey from London, where Chippendale was. Partridge’s death is bound up with Montfort’s, which has nothing to do with this picture. Furthermore, if Partridge believed himself to be in jeopardy from Chippendale, why was there no mention of it in his letter?”

I refused to be discouraged. “I don’t know. Perhaps because there was no time to write more?”

She shook her head vehemently. “Unlikely, I think.”

“But then, as we’ve seen, unlikely events do sometimes occur.”

I raised the mug to my lips and drained it in a single gulp. I thought back to my earlier altercation with my master. I remembered the cruel manner in which he’d treated Partridge, his jealousies, and the way he’d come between Partridge and Dorothy. I was heartily ashamed then that I’d failed to muster courage enough to confront him, and could excuse myself only on the grounds it was expedient to keep silent for the time being. I remembered the coldness in his eyes; the sudden change in his appearance and demeanor; his irrational outburst at my absence when but hours earlier he’d seemed content enough to let me pursue my quest; the menace in his whispered ultimatum to me. There was no doubt he was unpredictable and inconstant in his loyalties, no doubt he was capable of acting callously; but it was another thing to murder someone. And even if I could believe Chippendale
had
killed Partridge, there was Lord Montfort’s death to consider. I could think of no good reason why Chippendale might assassinate such a prominent patron unless it was to recover his precious drawings, in which case they would not have been left scattered about the floor. Yet still I kept returning to the picture.