Ann Granger (9 page)

He paused only briefly to mark my discomfiture and then, dropping his bantering tone, leaned forward and added seriously, ‘If I achieve nothing else on this earth, I hope I shall advance the day when people will cast off the superstitious attitude towards illness of the mind which clings so obstinately even among the educated. That, and the ridiculous notion that such an illness is somehow not respectable. People still hide their mentally afflicted or simply refuse to believe there is anything wrong. I’ve been brought so many patients far too late for anything to be done, yet I might have helped those same sufferers if only I’d been called on in time.’

I was struck by the sincerity with which he spoke and which glowed in his eyes. Yet his words prompted me to say, ‘Mrs Craven believes you’ve come to judge
her
state of mind. Is that true? You told me yesterday you hadn’t come to treat her.’

He frowned and drummed his fingers on the cloth before replying. ‘Nor have I. I’m here only to assess the general situation. Charles Roche is very worried about his niece. He’s head of the family and responsible for her while her husband’s away. For his sisters, too.’

‘She’s very young,’ I said, ‘so much younger than her uncle and aunts. Do you know anything of her parents?’

‘I know only that her father was a younger brother to the Roche ladies and Charles; I fancy his name was Stephen. Lucy was his only child. Both Stephen and his wife died when Lucy was an infant; I don’t know in what circumstances.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Well, I’ve come here to be companion to Lucy and not to be your spy, Dr Lefebre, nor that of Charles Roche. I wish to make that clear.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of asking you to spy on my behalf,’ he returned calmly. ‘That would be unpardonable behaviour on my part. Nor, in order to form an opinion, would I seek the help of someone so recently arrived on the scene.’

So that was me, put in my place.

I set down my cup. ‘You’re very direct,’ I said. ‘But I’m glad the matter is clear.’

He smiled. ‘So are you very direct, Miss Martin. But I’m glad of it, truly. The people with whom I so often have to deal tend to prevaricate. I appreciate your plain speaking. Nor did I wish to suggest I thought your opinions of no value. I would always take anything you said very seriously, believe me. But in medical matters I have to make my own decisions and before I can do that, I have to dig out the details of the business in my own way.’ He leaned forward. ‘I am a teaser out of secrets, Miss Martin!’

With that, he pushed back his chair, bowed to me and walked out.

He had not been gone five minutes when the door opened a crack. I looked up and saw Lucy peeping into the room.

‘He’s gone!’ I called.

The door opened more widely and she came in. ‘I didn’t want to meet him,’ Lucy said truculently, staring at me as if I would reprove her for her lateness.

‘I think he knows that,’ I said.

Lucy shrugged and went to the sideboard to help herself to a single slice of cold beef. She put her plate on the table opposite to where I sat and took a chair. She was wearing a blue gown today. I’d decided to dress soberly in brown. I was, after all, the companion and Miss Roche would be watching details like dress with an eagle eye. I didn’t intend to give her any occasion to criticise me. But I had added crocheted collar and cuffs.

‘I heard you talking with him,’ Lucy told me. ‘I was in the small parlour next door.’

‘Did you hear what we said?’

She shook her head. ‘No, though I tried and I’m usually good at catching what people are saying. Your voices were too low. But I suppose you talked about me. In this house people do discuss me when I’m not there. Even when I am there they talk about me sometimes as if I weren’t. You saw that yourself yesterday after dinner.’

‘I told Lefebre I wouldn’t be his spy,’ I said.

Lucy, cutting into her beef, looked up at me and for the first time smiled. The change in her was remarkable. She was so pretty and had seen such tragedy already at so young an age. If nothing else, before I left here, I’d like to see that smile often dimpling her cheeks. But I mustn’t hide things from her or she’d never trust me.

‘I did ask him if he knew anything of your parents and he told me you’re an orphan,’ I confessed.

I was sorry immediately I’d said it because the smile faded from her face and eyes. The sullen look returned.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘They drowned.’

‘But what a terrible thing!’ I exclaimed. ‘A tragedy!’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve no memory of them. They were returning from the East. My father had gone out there to set up the office to deal in tea. Until then, the family were all of them in the silk trade and had been since the first Roche arrived in London and set up his shop in Spitalfields. Naughty old John Roche that Aunt Christina was telling you about yesterday. They made the cloth themselves then, or rather the weavers did. The weavers worked in the attics of the merchants’ houses in those days using handlooms, whole families of them, even their children as soon as they were big enough.

‘But the firm of Roche has always moved with the times. As soon as the new factories opened in the north of England, where silk thread’s woven into cloth using the power looms, Uncle Charles bought shares in factories in Macclesfield and Derby. The London looms were closed. Of course, that put the home weavers out of work. Many found themselves in the workhouse because of it and there they were put to such rough tasks that their hands were ruined for handling silk forever. But, as every Roche is taught, there is no place for sentimentality in business … and precious little room for it anywhere else!’

Lucy paused to sip her tea.

‘When I was only twelve Uncle Charles took me north with him to visit one of the factories, because he believed I should see the progress of our modern age. It was quite terrifying, Lizzie. You should have seen the great waterwheels turning with such a roar and splashing. We were led into a huge shed full of machinery making an even more deafening noise. The heat was such I thought I’d faint. And, do you know? Some of the workers were children, just like me then. Some were younger than me, some my own age, a few a little older. I was very distressed and asked my uncle why they weren’t in school. He told me they must work because their parents were poor, and they were fortunate to have such an employer offering many jobs. He said the very small ones were only supposed to work six and a half hours a day, and that too was “progress”. Before the government brought in some new laws, they could work much longer. Now older children and women work only ten and a half hours a day. That still sounded a great deal to
me
, although Uncle Charles said it was a great improvement and “a sign of the enlightenment of our times”. I still thought it very sad, the children looked so pale and ill. While I was there I saw one little boy fall asleep where he stood at the loom. He would have been caught in the machinery but Uncle Charles ran forward and pulled him clear. Then the foreman came, a great bully of a man, and beat the poor little boy for falling asleep. After that Uncle Charles hurried me outside. He said I’d seen enough. I think he’d seen rather more than he wanted to.’

‘What led him to add the import of tea to his interests?’ I remarked, curious.

She hunched her shoulders. ‘Uncle Charles believes in diversifying.’ Suddenly she adopted a deep sonorous voice in imitation of her uncle. ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket in business!’

I thought wryly that my late godfather had been of similar mind when he diversified his business interests out of cloth and became such a notable slum landlord. I wondered what other pies Charles Roche had his thumb in? Lucy had a kind heart and was sorry for the young workers toiling among the noise, heat and dust of the factories to produce luxury cloth for wealthy women to wear; and the impression I’d received of Charles Roche was of a kindly man. I believed his genuine concern for his niece’s welfare. But no doubt in business he saw only profit and loss instead of human beings. It reminded me of the people who stoked up their fires to a cheerful blaze with coal produced in such dangerous conditions underground, so often at the cost of lives.

‘You know a great deal about your family’s business interests, Lucy,’ I remarked.

As had happened on the evening before, her childish features suddenly took on such a look of cynical resignation that I was again shocked. It seemed so out of place. Then it faded and was replaced with an almost equally abhorrent levity.

‘I was born a Roche. Business, business, the talk is of nothing else in my Uncle Charles’s house,’ she said carelessly. ‘It would have been the same in my father’s had he lived. Perhaps it was to escape the talk and my aunts’ company my mother accompanied my father on his journey to China. It must have seemed a great adventure and I don’t blame her. They left me with servants and in the guardianship of Uncle Charles. The ship sank in a typhoon, as I told you. As soon as I was old enough, Uncle Charles sent me away to school.’

She swallowed another mouthful of beef before adding with that same unreal and misplaced cheerfulness, ‘So, you see, I have always been an inconvenience to everyone.’

‘I’m sure that’s not how they see you!’ I protested.

She shook her head and leaned across the table in a dramatic manner. ‘Oh, but you don’t know them yet. The Roche family is most respectable, Lizzie, as my Aunt Christina was at great pains to tell you last night. Even though we know from John Roche’s diaries what a rascal our ancestor was. I found the diaries when I was twelve, hidden away in a drawer in Uncle Charles’s house. Nobody knows I’ve seen them, only you. Seventeen illegitimate children, only fancy! In the end, even the other Huguenots would have nothing to do with him. Except in business, of course: they put their scruples aside for that.

‘Aunt Christina, naturally, has chosen to “forget” all that old scandal. If she knew the diaries existed and Uncle Charles has them, I’m sure she’d seek them out to burn them. But Uncle Charles has quite a collection of books nobody knows about but me. He keeps them all in that desk.’

Her eyes met mine. There was a challenging gleam in them. She wanted to see if I was shocked and waited in anticipation for my protest.

She looked disappointed when I received her confession calmly. But I could well remember hiding myself away with my father’s anatomy textbooks and poring over the curious illustrations. I, too, must have been about twelve years old at the time. But my early study of the human body appeared innocent compared with whatever Lucy had found in Charles Roche’s secret cache of what he probably called ‘erotica’ and, where I came from, they called ‘dirty books’.

‘I’m surprised your Uncle Charles doesn’t keep his collection locked away, not just lying there where a child could find them.’

‘Oh, he does,’ Lucy assured me. ‘I saw him hiding the key. He put it in a blue and white vase on the mantelshelf in his study. So I waited until he was out and got it down and opened the drawer.’

I couldn’t help but laugh although for a twelve-year-old to have found her uncle’s collection was hardly desirable. ‘And did you read the other books too, Lucy? Not only the diaries?’

‘Yes, of course I did. Or looked at the pictures mostly. Some of the books were in French. But the sort of French they taught us at school didn’t have the right words in it.’

The image of prosperous, respectable Charles Roche floated before my inner vision. He probably locked his study door before he took his private reading from its drawer, to avoid being caught by a servant, or, indeed, his niece wandering in. ‘It’s a – a sort of hobby some gentlemen have,’ I said. ‘He would be embarrassed to know you’d seen them.’

‘He shouldn’t have locked the drawer,’ retorted Lucy with simple logic. ‘If he hadn’t locked the drawer, I wouldn’t have bothered to open it. Anyway, Aunt Christina will remind you again and again of the high standards of behaviour expected from all the family members and anyone associated with us. Respectability means no awkward loose ends. “A place for everything and everything in its place.” That’s Aunt Christina’s favourite motto. My sin, Lizzie, is that there is not – nor has there ever been – any place for me. I litter the place like an unfinished piece of embroidery left on a chair. I should be tidied away. That’s what your Dr Lefebre is here to do, tidy me away into the expensive private asylum he runs. I’m to be locked up where no one can see me, like John Roche’s diaries.’

‘He’s not my Dr Lefebre!’ I said sharply.

Lucy’s response was to look mulish in a way already familiar. My one-time governess, Madame Leblanc, would have said firmly that pulling such a face was not
comme il faut.
What a strange little thing Lucy was, a doll in appearance, but on closer acquaintance a damaged doll.

I couldn’t say I liked the idea that Lefebre, besides being a specialist in his field, also ran his own asylum. It did lend colour to Lucy’s misgivings where he was concerned. But there again, as the doctor had pointed out, I knew nothing about the situation. If Lucy were deluded enough to believe her baby was not dead, she could also easily fancy Dr Lefebre had come to take her away with him to his private madhouse. I knew young people could cling to an idea against all argument. Lucy, having once seized on the notion, wouldn’t easily relinquish it. It struck me that in all her chatter she had made no mention of her husband – and none of her child. The last, given her reported delusion, was odd.

This wasn’t the moment to talk of them. In any case, the housekeeper, Mrs Williams, interrupted us.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs Craven – and Miss Martin, too – but Brennan is anxious to begin. He’s waiting in the kitchen with one of his dogs and wants to let the animal loose here to see if it can sniff out the rat Miss Roche saw.’

Lucy shivered and pushed away her plate unfinished.

‘You won’t want to be here, ladies, so I suggest you go out for a walk,’ went on Mrs Williams briskly.

I leaned across the table to Lucy who sat with downcast eyes and reminded her that she had promised to show me some of the countryside.