Beautiful Lies (26 page)

‘Webster’s father was a minister,’ Maribel said, remembering Charlotte.

‘I should have known it. The man is a bigot and a damned hypocrite, Bunyan on the library shelves and dirty pictures under the bed. The disgust he parades is nothing but blind terror at the voracity of his own appetites. Don’t be deceived by the reverential references to the invalid wife. There is no man in the world more infatuated with sex than Alfred Webster.’

Maribel squirmed.

‘That is just what Charlotte said.’

‘I won’t ask how she knows.’

At Cadogan Square Edward paid the cab and helped Maribel out. They were in the hallway when he began to laugh. Maribel put a hand over his mouth.

‘Quiet,’ she hissed. ‘You’ll wake Her Ladyship.’

Edward kissed her fingertips as together they tiptoed up the stairs. He was laughing again by the time they let themselves into their flat.

‘What?’ asked Maribel. It had been days since she had seen him laugh. ‘What is it?’

‘I just remembered,’ he said. ‘Lady Worsley told me the most marvellous story about Webster. After all that Sink of Iniquity business, Worsley went to visit Webster in Holloway gaol. He had thought to cheer his spirits, but when he was shown to Webster’s cell, he found the man positively elated. When Worsley rather nervously enquired what it was that had made him so cheerful, Webster told him that, while exercising in the prison yard that morning, it had occurred to him that if anyone at that moment had asked who was the most important man alive, the answer would have to be – Webster himself.
The prisoner in this cell
, I believe, were his exact words.’

‘No. Really?’

‘Apparently. Isn’t it wonderful? She also told me that every year, on the anniversary of his imprisonment, Webster insists upon parading about London in his prisoner’s uniform for the entire day, cap and all. An act of remembrance, apparently. The irony is that, as a first-class misdemeanant, after the first day he wore his own suit of clothes.’

Maribel thought of Webster’s clenched fists, the hatred in his milky eyes.

‘I think perhaps he is quite mad,’ she said slowly.

‘Of course he is. Only the insane believe themselves always to be right.’

Much later, she rose and went into the drawing room. It was cold. She shivered, huddling into her nightgown as she unlocked the drawer at the back of her desk and drew out the photograph of Charlotte. The edges of the photograph curled a little. They had grown velvety with handling. She should mount it, she thought, but she knew that she would not. She ran her thumb very gently over the blur that smeared Charlotte’s skirts, touching the place where an overheated imagination might see a face. It was possible to see anything, she thought, if one wanted to enough. For a moment she pressed the photograph against her chest with the flats of her hands. Then, impatiently, she pushed the picture back into the drawer and, locking it, went back to bed.

H
ER EQUIPMENT WAS HEAVY
and she travelled to the Wild West by hansom, her boxes tucked around her feet. Raw gusts of wind rattled the windows and tugged at the hats of pedestrians as they hustled, heads bent, along the busy pavements. Maribel pulled her cloak more tightly about her, glad of the fox-fur tippet around her neck. She rested the side of her face against it, rubbing her cheek against the shivery softness of its underbelly, and hoped it was not going to rain. She had almost not come. At breakfast she had told Edward she was not feeling well and thought it might be prudent to cancel the Wild West and spend the day in bed. He had considered her over the top of his spectacles. Then he had lowered the newspaper.

‘My father once told me that one only regrets the things one does not do,’ he said. ‘Aside from the inescapable fact that it would have behoved my father to regret a good deal more of the things he did do, it is one of the few wise things he ever said.’

‘I don’t mean not to go. Just not today. If I am coming down with something –’

‘Why are you so nervous?’

‘I’m not nervous.’

‘Good. Because you have no need to be. You will be wonderful. And you will go if I have to drag you there myself.’

If the Speaker of the Commons had hoped that the mortification of exile would put an end to the excesses of the Member for Argyllshire he was to be considerably disappointed. In the days after the Worsleys’ dinner Edward returned to Parliament with a new and bitter determination, his old irony ground by the seven-day absence into something sharper and more vicious. When he left Cadogan Mansions in the mornings he slammed the front door. Maribel had taken to holding her breath as she tiptoed across the hall. She had no desire to face the wrath of Lady Wingate.

At Drayton Gardens an overturned dray blocked the road. Maribel stared out of the window at the scrofulous bark of the plane trees that lined the pavement. When Edward had asked if she meant to write a plan for her day at the Wild West she had been emphatic. A plan constrained possibility, she said, and precluded the taking of risk. The preconceived shape of it limited what the eye could see, the heart feel. It was only in those spaces in oneself that opened when one was afraid that inspiration could truly take hold.

She had been right, she thought as the cab driver touched his whip to the horse’s rump and the hansom began very slowly to edge forward. All the same she wished she had a plan. She had told too many people about her expedition to return with nothing. She thought again of the coquettish way in which she had suggested to Mr Webster that he might want to publish the photographs in his newspaper. Though almost a week had passed she still felt a sour squirm of nausea whenever she thought back to that night. She had not made a fool of herself, not quite, but she had come very close. When she had turned away from Webster to talk to Sir John he had made a sideways remark about political passions running high and the lady on his other side had pressed her buttonhole mouth tight shut and blinked her eyes in a way that had made Maribel want to pour soup over her head. Again and again she reassured herself that she had not really thought Mr Webster so very interesting, that, until he had revealed himself to be a madman, he had given a reasonably effective impression of an intelligent and entertaining companion whom any woman might have found congenial. Then she thought of the jolt in her stomach, the heat that had suffused her when he looked at her, and she was flooded yet again with shame at her foolishness and her mendacity.

Major Burke met Maribel at the small side gate to the Wild West through which he had once smuggled the Princess of Wales. When the cab pulled up, he stepped forward to open the door for her. He wore his usual wideawake hat and, beneath his coat, a waistcoat of scarlet silk decorated in appliqué with a lurid pattern of orange and purple. Maribel gazed at it in astonishment. A hat could not help being wideawake in the company of a waistcoat like that.

‘I am delighted to see you, ma’am,’ Burke said, lifting his hat. ‘We feared that perhaps you had forgotten us.’

‘Of course not. Thank you for accommodating me.’

‘Please, it is our privilege to have you here.’ He bowed. ‘It is not every day we play host to glamorous lady photographers.’

Maribel smiled. His courtesies were almost as shameless as his waistcoats.

‘Then let us both make of the most of it,’ she said.

‘Amen to that. Now where do you wish to start?’

The translator’s name was Molloy, an American originally of Irish extraction who, according to Burke, spoke more than ten different Indian dialects. Molloy was a lean, sharp-faced man with a gold watch chain and a derby hat. His eyes were set slightly too close together. When Burke introduced him to Maribel he bowed, doffing his hat, and kissed her hand. The wet press of his lips put Maribel in mind of egg white, which in turn made her think of Mr Webster. The association did not favour Mr Molloy.

Molloy, Burke and Maribel walked together slowly around the Indian camp. The wind had dropped and a thin sunlight strained through a muslin of cloud. From behind the rock-strewn embankments came the submerged rattle and whistle of trains entering the Earls Court cutting. The camp was much smaller than Maribel remembered, no more than fifteen tepees for the approximately one hundred Indian performers and their handful of children. Only those squaws with a role in the show had been permitted to travel with the company.

The Indians were drawn from a number of tribes, not only Sioux but Cheyenne, Pawnee, Kiowa and Arapaho. In the past these tribes had sustained their own enmities. Now they squatted together outside their tepees or sprawled on benches hewn from split trees. The men’s black hair fell in hanks over their shoulders and their naturally harsh features were further brutalised by slashes of vivid paint in every shade and hue. One face was bright yellow, the eyes outlined in blue and the nose adorned with a brilliant red streak. Another was blue, yet another green with yellow stripes across the cheeks. Beside the men, two tangle-haired infants scratched in the dust with a stick. A few of the women sewed, garments of fabric or leather piled in their laps, their beads bright drops of colour in the flat white light. The rest stared ahead of them or down at the ground, their hands slack between their knees.

‘They are grown rather accustomed to visitors,’ said Burke.

The tepees were arranged in a circle, their sides elaborately decorated with patterns and pictures of buffalo and birds. The ground about them was hard and dusty, the grass worn away, and the canvas was stained with soot. And yet there was none of the usual detritus of camp life that she had seen with Edward in Mexico, no smoke-blackened pots and pans, no stone circles or raked-over fires.

‘They eat in the dining tent,’ Burke explained. ‘We get through six hundred pounds of fresh meat a day.’

‘It is as though they are waiting for a train that will never run,’ Maribel said.

‘That is the life of the travelling show,’ he agreed cheerfully.

‘What exactly is it you are looking for?’ Molloy asked her. It was the first time he had spoken. His voice was high-pitched, slightly nasal, and he drew out his words like elastic, stretching the vowels and pressing down into the inflections. Like a whining child, thought Maribel, or a woman wheedling a favour.

‘For what’s there,’ she answered.

The men took her to the stables, where several Indians and many more white-skinned men busied themselves with horses, and to the blacksmith’s forge. The blacksmith too was a white man, his eyes blue in his dirty face, but several Indians squatted there, watching him as he went about his work. Another held the head of a wild-eyed bay, murmuring something unintelligible under his breath as the blacksmith nailed a new shoe to the horse’s nearside back hoof. Behind the forge men unloaded wagons full of straw and animal feed. Not one of them was a redskin.

‘The Indians do not do work of this sort?’ Maribel asked Burke.

‘Our Indians are performers, not labourers. We hire navvies for the heavy work.’

They circled the warehouses, following the path to the Medicine Tent, a kind of sweat house filled with steam made by pouring water over heated stones. When she asked if she might go inside, Burke shook his head. The Medicine Tent, he said, was for the use of men only.

‘In the old days the Indians would take a sweat as a ritual purification before battle,’ Molloy explained. ‘Here it is a place for them to relax and unwind. The Sioux call it
inikagapi
.’

They walked around the dining hall. The sides of the hall were rolled up. On the beaten earth floor battered trestle tables were set out in rows, like a school.

‘The tent behind the mess tent there is the sanatorium,’ Burke said. ‘Mercifully we have had little cause to use it.’

Maribel looked at the tent. She could feel her pulse in the roots of her teeth.

‘Your doctors,’ she said. ‘They work there?’

Burke raised an eyebrow.

‘That is the idea.’

She hesitated.

‘If I wished, needed – for my work – to meet your doctors, might that be arranged?’

‘You’ll be disappointed, I’m afraid. We feared a red-skinned medicine man might cause more trouble than he cured so we hired them here. Both our men are English.’

‘You can say that again,’ Molloy said.

Burke grinned.

‘Nothing wrong with pride in your homeland,’ he said. ‘If it weren’t for that we’d not have made a dime.’

A little later Burke excused himself. It was Molloy, the translator, who remained with Maribel as she set up her equipment in the corner of a small tent provided for her use. He leaned against the table and watched her as she worked, his arms crossed over his chest, his foot swinging backwards and forwards.

‘Do the children go to school?’ she asked him as she polished the plate cover.

Molloy shrugged.

‘The kids are in the show, them that are old enough. It don’t leave much time for schooling.’

‘And how old is old enough?’

‘The youngest’d be Master Bennie, I guess. He’s coming up five and plenty grave enough for adulthood. It’s one of them peculiar things with Indians. Born ancient, the lot of ’em, yet even the wizened-up ones stay kids their whole lives.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Damned if I know,’ Molloy said.

Maribel looked up, startled by the coarseness of his language. He saw her looking but he did not apologise. He hummed under his breath and his leg swung like a pendulum. Maribel busied herself with her plates, stacking them in their cases in her battered satchel.

‘You ready?’ he asked her.

‘Not quite.’

Molloy drummed his fingers on the table.

‘Major Burke tells me you speak a dozen Indian languages,’ Maribel said to distract him.

‘Something like that, I guess.’

‘Where did you learn so many?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘The best ones always are.’

Molloy fished his watch from his pocket, studied it, shook it. He held it to his ear and, frowning, wound it, rubbing its face on his waistcoat before setting it back in his pocket again.

‘I ran away from home,’ he said at last. ‘When I was a kid. A Lakota chieftain accepted me into his tribe.’