Chapter Two
Elizabeth Martin Ross
BEN’S FIRST question, when he realised the identity of his catch in the fog, was to demand what on earth I was doing out and about.
I told him I was looking for Bessie.
‘What’s Bessie doing out in this murk?’ he demanded.
‘I’ll explain later,’ I told him, ‘it has to do with apples.’
I heard Ben give a gusty sigh which turned into a cough as fog seeped into his throat.
‘Let’s go home,’ he said. ‘You won’t find her in these conditions and she may have made her own way home by now.’
I wasn’t sorry at the prospect, so home we stumbled, holding on to one another like a pair of blind people.
When we married we invested what money we had in our little red-brick terrace house not far from Waterloo Station. We were able to do this because the previous owner was my former employer, my godfather’s widow, ‘Aunt’ Parry. It had been among the many properties she owned and one of the best of them, built only twenty years before. (Other buildings she owned were frankly slums and no one would choose to live in them, but the rents kept Aunt Parry in comfort!) However, she generously allowed us to purchase our new home at a very good price.
Having laid out our capital for the house, however, there was no question of us being able to furnish it down to the last saucepan and also pay servants of the better sort. (Although Ben is in receipt of a very respectable salary with prospects of it being increased.) Anyway, the house wasn’t large enough to warrant ‘staff’. But if I were to be spared the rough work, I would need help. In Dorset Square, where I had been living with Aunt Parry, Bessie had been the lowliest staff member, the kitchen maid. She was more than willing to escape the eagle eye of the Parry cook, Mrs Simms, and come to be our maid of all work. So we moved into the house, all three together.
I had always thought, when I was at Dorset Square, that Mrs Simms was unduly strict with Bessie. But then, I had never had charge of a fifteen-year-old girl; and after a very short time I began to have some sympathy with Mrs Simms.
Bessie was hardworking and loyal and I knew her to be intelligent and quick-witted. But she also possessed an independent mind and was certainly not shy of giving her opinion. In addition she proved unexpectedly artful. The problem had been exacerbated, not long after we set up house, by Bessie discovering temperance.
My first knowledge of this came when Bessie, after we had been only a month in the house, meekly asked if she might have permission to go to a regular prayer meeting at five p.m. on a Sunday.
I hadn’t expected Bessie to develop an enthusiasm for religion but it seemed a reasonable request, even laudable. Nevertheless, I asked one or two questions. One of Mrs Simms’s recommendations, when she handed Bessie over to my charge, was a darkly whispered, ‘You want to watch out for followers, Mrs Ross!’
I must admit Bessie isn’t the prettiest girl. She has a scrawny but wiry frame and, given that the poor child has been employed to scour pots and scrub floors since the age of twelve, her hands are roughened and red enough to belong to a forty-year-old. Add in frizzy mouse-coloured hair and crooked teeth, and ‘followers’ wasn’t the word that first sprang to my mind when she begged her permission. But I did ask what kind of prayer meeting it was, where it was held and who conducted it.
I learned it was run by a Reverend Mr Fawcett in a nearby hall and was an offshoot of the temperance movement. I consulted Ben.
‘I’ve seen enough violence and crime originating in drunkenness,’ said Ben, ‘if Bessie wants to “sign the pledge” it’s fine with me.’
It would have been acceptable to me, too, but Bessie’s new-found interest extended to a desire to ‘spread the word’. In a nutshell, Ben and I were expected to shun the Demon Drink, too. It wasn’t that we did drink very much. Ben had an occasional glass of porter with his supper. During his time in London he had come to like this strong dark ale, very popular with the porters at London’s meat and fish markets. A bottle of porter on the table is unsightly, so on the rare occasions we had guests I removed the porter and substituted a bottle of inexpensive hock.You can see, we hardly kept a cellar! Porter or hock, it had to be drunk with Bessie looming in the background like a Greek chorus. She didn’t wring her hands, but she had mastered the sorrowful shake of the head and the reproachful look.
‘Ignore her,’ said Ben, who was amused by the pantomime, ‘she’ll soon get tired of it.’
So Bessie got away with that and moved on to a more openly expressed criticism.
I found her in the kitchen, standing over the washing-up, gazing at a pair of wine glasses, and shaking her head dolefully.
‘I can’t do it, missus,’ she said as soon as I approached. I did wish she wouldn’t call me ‘missus’ and had suggested various alternatives, but Bessie had decided in her own mind what my title should be. Ben was always referred to as ‘the inspector’ and addressed as such.
‘You can’t wash up, Bessie, why not?’ I asked.
‘I can wash the pots and dishes,’ said Bessie, ‘but not them glasses as have had strong drink in them. If I do, I’m encouraging you and the inspector in what I know is wrong.’
My instinct was to shout, ‘Rubbish! Get on with the dishes!’ But for once I managed not to say the first thing to come into my head. I had a better idea how to deal with this.
‘Oh, I see, Bessie. Well, yes, I have been thinking it might be better if you left the glassware to one side and I’ll wash that. The glasses were a wedding present from my Aunt Parry and I shouldn’t like them broken.’
Bessie turned to me, her face a picture. She opened her mouth but, for once, no retort came out. I picked up the offending glasses and put them to one side. Bessie washed up the dishes with much clattering and clanging of the pots but otherwise in a mutinous silence. For some time after that I was repeatedly asked, ‘Are you sure you want me to wash this plate, missus? I might break it.’
She would gaze at me innocently when she put the question, but I had won that round and she knew it.
On that day, the day of the fog, we were to have pork chops for supper and I discovered, when I went into the kitchen to prepare the meal, that we had no apples for the accompanying sauce.
‘There were two apples in the bowl, Bessie. What happened to them?’
‘The inspector put them in his pocket, missus, when he went off this morning.’
‘But they were cooking apples, sour.’
‘I did tell him,’ was the serene reply. ‘But he took ’em just the same. He’ll have a horrible ache in the guts. Do you want me to run to the greengrocer and get some more?’
‘Stomach, Bessie, not “guts”,’ I corrected automatically and hesitated. The fog, gathering fast all afternoon, was now a real pea-souper.
‘It ain’t far,’ said Bessie. ‘I know the way. I’ll keep close to the wall.’
Against my better judgement, I agreed. In normal weather it would have taken her fifteen minutes at the most. The shop was only just round the corner. Even adding on time for the fog, she should have been back easily in half an hour. But when there was still no sign of her three-quarters of an hour later, I threw a shawl round my shoulders and went out to look for her. Instead I’d found Ben.
We hurried back to the house as fast as we could. As soon as we were through the front door I was listening for Bessie, in the kitchen, but there was no sound. I made sure the kitchen was empty and came back to Ben.
‘No luck?’ he asked, ‘I’ll go and look for her.’
As he turned back to the door I detained him.
‘There’s no chance of finding her in this, Ben.You’ve only just arrived home. Sit down and warm yourself by the fire and if she’s not back in another twenty minutes, perhaps, well, I don’t know what we can do.’
Ben looked unhappy. ‘She would choose tonight of all nights!’
‘Why? What’s so special about tonight?’
Ben hesitated but eventually told me about his encounter with the girl on the bridge. ‘It doesn’t mean any harm has come to Bessie, but I don’t like her being out so long.’
‘That sounds terrifying,’ I said, worried. ‘But is it true? Do you believe the girl? About the shrouded figure, I mean?’
Ben hesitated before answering. ‘I know it sounds fanciful, but she swears the other girls working in the area know about him and one of them, she says, actually saw his face.’ He gave a hiss of frustration. ‘I wish I could find that girl and get a description,
any
detail would help. First, though, I have to find Daisy Smith,
if
that’s her real name, and ask her the name of the girl who got a glimpse of the Wraith’s face. But I know nothing about Daisy, other than she’s a street-walker and wears a hat with feathers on the top of it.’
The gaslight gleamed on something stuck to the lapel of Ben’s overcoat. I stretched out my hand and gently detached it, holding it up. It quivered in the draught, a single thread of a colour almost scarlet in its intensity.
‘We know one thing,’ I said. ‘She has bright red hair.’
Ben uttered an exclamation and took the hair. He hurried into the parlour to the desk where we kept writing materials and, taking a fresh sheet of clean letter paper, carefully folded the hair inside it in a little packet. On this he wrote, ‘Daisy Smith’ and the date.
‘Preserving the evidence, Inspector Ross?’ I asked with a smile.
‘As yet we have no crime,’ he replied. ‘But we may well end up with one.’
At that moment, a faint click from the ground floor rear told us someone had just closed the back door very gently indeed.
We both dashed into the kitchen to find Bessie, still in bonnet and shawl, gripping a basket with apples in it.
Together we demanded to know where she’d been for so long.
‘It’s the fog, missus,’ said Bessie defensively. ‘It took me longer than I thought it would.’
‘It’s taken you an hour, Bessie!’ I reached out to take the basket from her. She was unwilling to relinquish it and I saw why. ‘What are these?’
From underneath the apples I retrieved a stack of cheaply printed leaflets. ‘“Beware the danger of strong drink!”’ I read aloud. ‘What on earth is this, Bessie? Where did you get them?’
Bessie looked miserable. But she was a truthful girl. ‘I got to the greengrocer’s shop real quick, and I thought I had time to go on just a little bit further and collect them pamphlets from the hall. Mr Fawcett asked us last week to give out the pamphlets, when they came from the printer’s. There’s a meeting at the hall tonight, so instead of waiting till tomorrow, I thought I’d collect them now, and give some of ’em out before I went to the meeting tomorrow, Sunday.’
‘Give them out!’ I cried. ‘Does Mr Fawcett expect you to stand about on street corners handing out these things?’ I shook the stack of paper sheets at her.
‘Oh, no,’ said Bessie earnestly. ‘Just give ’em to people we know, to tell ’em about temperance.’
‘I don’t know about temperance,’ said Ben, ‘but if there should be a bottle of porter in the larder, I’ll have it with my supper.’
‘Oh, good heavens, supper! Bessie!’ I ordered, ‘we must get on with that now. There’s no time to discuss this. But we’ll talk later.’
‘Yes, missus,’ said Bessie unhappily.
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Ben later, over the pork chops.
The fire burned cheerily in the grate and glinted on the brass fire-irons and fender. It was a sight to make anyone feel more relaxed.
‘It’s partly my fault,’ I said, ‘I should have found out more about these meetings before now. I thought they just sang hymns and listened to this fellow Fawcett preach about temperance. I think, I think that tomorrow I’ll go with Bessie, meet this preacher for myself and tell him that distributing leaflets is completely out of the question as far as Bessie is concerned.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Ben, pouring out the last of his bottle of porter.
‘Ben,’ I asked, ‘do you really eat sour cooking apples?’
‘Certainly,’ said my husband, ‘I’ve always liked them since I was a child.’
Ben was snoozing in front of the fire when Bessie and I left the house late the following afternoon. There was no sign of the previous day’s fog, though every chimney belched out grey clouds to hang above the streets. These were emptier than on a weekday and in a Sunday silence. Those few people to be seen were dressed in their best, although as always, there was a scattering of street urchins in rags. They ran alongside the Sunday strollers asking for pence, trusting that it being church day, Christian charity would make the target feel obliged to part with some small coins.
The hall where the meeting was to be held was wedged between two taller buildings and looked as if it might have begun its existence as a storehouse of some kind. Its brickwork was coated with the normal layer of soot but its tall narrow windows had been cleaned and a noticeboard outside had a paper sheet pinned to it, advertising that evening’s meeting ‘with an address by Reverend Joshua Fawcett. Tea and biscuits to follow’.
