Charles Palliser (148 page)

The Wrong Hands

How much pleasure it gives me to imagine the discomfiture of Old Corruption! Here are Lady Mompesson and Sir David hastening in their night-attire to the Great Parlour with their servants running around them calling out and bumping into each other. As they enter, the footman, Joseph, is lighting the gas, and then he and the other lower servants are shooed from the room by their employers with orders to run for a surgeon and the watch. At the opposite end of the chamber Mr Thackaberry is bent over something lying on the ground. In the dim light of the single mantle it can be seen that the beautiful Turkey-carpet is being disfigured by a dark, spreading stain.

“See if anything has been taken,” Lady Mompesson says.

Sir David steps over the object on the ground and searches the hiding-place. Then he hurries back to his mother and whispers: “It’s not there!” He adds in horror: “Nothing else seems to be missing!”

“What is not there?” she demands, but reading the dismay on his countenance she looks down at the body. “Search him!” she commands imperiously.

He kneels beside Mr Thackaberry who is pulling open the injured man’s coat and who says: “Oh, leave him to me, sir. Don’t dirty your good linen. The wretched betrayer! First the Hougham rents and now this! He isn’t worth your concern.”

“Get out of my light, you old fool!” Sir David exclaims.

With as much dignity as he can muster in his night-shirt and night-cap, the butler stands up and moves away as his employer goes through the pockets of the injured man.

“It must be here,” he cries after a moment, and starts to search them over again. Again, he finds nothing. Then he leans over the face and says: “What have you done with it?”

Mr Thackaberry looks down at him and then glances at Lady Mompesson: “I beg pardon, your ladyship, sir, but I believe Mr Assinder is … ”

“It must be here!” Sir David cries. “He was shot as soon as he opened the hiding-place!”

“Then he must have had an accomplice,” his mother says.

681

682 THE

MALIPHANTS

Sir David stands up and says to the butler: “Assemble all the servants immediately.

They must all be searched. Their persons and their boxes.”

“Very good, sir. But if there’s something been taken, I fear it’s too late now. Some of them have left the house to go for assistance.”

“Nevertheless, do as I say. A valuable paper has been removed.”

When the old servant has hurried out, Lady Mompesson says: “Remember, we dare not reveal the nature of the document for no-one must know that it even existed!”

“If it fell into the wrong hands …” her son begins and breaks off with a shudder.

“It won’t. It must have been taken by mistake by one of the servants working in colleague with Assinder. I suspect Vamplew for I have seen them whispering together.

When he finds what it is he will destroy it. How should he know its significance?”

“But, Mamma, it appears that that is all that was taken! As if they were looking for it!”

“That is an alarming possibility,” Lady Mompesson concedes. “And it suggests that I was right to suspect Assinder of being in the employ of our opponents. If only the Huffam boy were still alive! For as soon as he is declared to be dead, Silas Clothier inherits.”

“He is old. What will happen if he dies before that happens?”

“Unless we can find the will, then the Maliphant heir will inherit under the codicil.”

A few minutes later the servants are all mustered and not one of them is found to be missing (for no-one recalls the knife-boy). Mr Vamplew is roused indignantly from his bed and subjected to the indignity of being made to assemble with the servants. Then they and their possessions are thoroughly searched by Mr Thackaberry and the watch.

(One of the footmen — Edward, I believe — is very drunk and angrily refuses to be searched until the watch restrain him by force.) Although, to the embarrassment of many, numerous small articles — bottles of wine, items of table-silver, clothes — are discovered on the servants and in their boxes, no document is found.

It is long after dawn when one of the scullery-maids suddenly asks where the knife-boy, Dick, is.

While I made my way out of the silent mews I was thinking of nothing but the danger of being pursued. As I went a little further I found that everything was enveloped in the darkly yellow gauze of the freezing fog. I had no idea of the time since the sun was not visible but only present as a faint lightening of the fog whose cold hands seemed to reach under my thin clothes and run clammy fingers down my body. Once clear of the neighbourhood I found myself heading eastwards without reflecting. Then a sudden upsurge of exultation seized me and I rejoiced to think that I had escaped and triumphed. But as soon as I had leisure to consider my situation I realized how disadvantageous it was. Although I at last had the will — and I pressed the package to my side reassuringly, longing to open and read it but not daring to — my possession of it now put me in considerable

THE WRONG HANDS

683

danger from both the Mompessons and, above all, from Silas Clothier. The latter would do anything to destroy it — and myself along with it.

The obvious course, which was to go to the Digweeds, was barred to me by Joey’s warning that Barney might have someone posted to watch the house. If only I had had time for Joey to do what I had instructed, I could have gone straight to my new lodgings and been assured of my safety. As it was I was literally homeless and penniless. There must be still some hours to go before dawn and in my thin clothes and without a great-coat I was feeling the cold severely.

I had been walking briskly to try to keep warm and by now I had reached Regent-street. There was little traffic at this early hour and not many foot-passengers. I walked down to the Quadrant where there was a baked-potato-seller’s stand on the corner, and I loitered within a few yards of it, deriving some feeble heat from its glowing brazier.

There were two women in bedraggled finery standing near it. One of them shivered and the other laughed mechanically and said:

“I amn’t cold, Sal. My vartue keeps me warm.”

Desperate for the warmth, I hovered nearby as close as I dared. The number of waggons and market-carts trundling towards Covent-garden increased, and herds of sheep and cattle came past on their way to Smithfield. After a time I saw one of the horse-patroles returning from duty in the suburbs around the metropolis. Some working people were passing now, though it was still too early for the clerks walking into the City, as I knew from my memories of my street-trading career.

Only by laying the will before the Court of Chancery could I gain any security, for then there would be less point and more risk in killing me. For at present, unknown, and even believed to be dead, I was very vulnerable. Yet, given my present appearance, I had no chance, as Miss Lydia had pointed out, of getting past the door-keepers of Chancery and I was determined not to give up the document except into the hands of a high official and before witnesses, for I remembered Miss Lydia’s warning that the Mompessons had an agent in the Chancery-office.

However, there was Henry Bellringer, Stephen Maliphant’s half-brother. I had seen him in the Court and I knew he had some kind of connexion with Chancery. He had been kind to me — as kind as his circumstances permitted — and was the friend I had mentioned to Miss Lydia, and so I resolved to go to him.

It was still some hours too early to think of that and so I walked about to keep warm, stepping carefully for the paving-stones were slippery with frozen dew, and watching the metropolis struggling into wakefulness on a raw, foggy winter’s dawn.

Shop-boys awoke from their frozen slumbers beneath the counters and lit the gas-lights which struggled feebly against the growing fog. Then they began to take down the shutters, blowing on their freezing hands which must have been painful against the wood and iron. Now the lamp-lighters set about extinguishing the lamps which were casting tiny amounts of light in the thick fog. People were hurrying to their place of work not from enthusiasm but to keep warm and get in out of the cold. Around Leicester-square I encountered groups of finely-dressed young gentlemen roistering their way home.

684 THE

MALIPHANTS

I reached Barnards-inn and, wiser now than on my previous visit, I did not declare myself to the porter but waited until his attention was distracted by a gentleman who was giving him some instructions, and then hurried past.

I made my way through the two courtyards and up the stairs to the garret where, finding that the outer door stood open, I knocked on the inner one. After a moment Henry opened it and gazed at me in surprise. He looked exactly as before except that he was wearing a flowered chintz dressing-gown, a velvet night-cap with a gold tassel, and Turkish slippers.

“Do you remember me?” I asked, recalling that it was about two years since he had seen me.

To my relief he looked at me with delight and exclaimed: “Indeed I do, John! You brought me the news of poor Stephen! My dear fellow, I’m very pleased to see you again.”

He ushered me in and closed the door. The room was much more cheerful, for there was a new sopha and a second table, and a bright Turkey-carpet and some pictures. I had interrupted him in the preparation of his breakfast for a frying-pan stood on the hob containing three rashers of bacon and a couple of kidneys. At the sight and — more particularly — the smell of this food, a sharp pain seemed to attack me in the stomach.

Henry must have seen this for he insisted that I sit at the little table from which he cleared a jumble of books, papers, pens, pen-holders and other paraphernalia, and, despite my protests, he served me with his own breakfast.

For some minutes I ate in a greedy, unashamed silence while Henry watched me with a quizzical expression.

“Upon my soul,” he said, “you look as if you haven’t eaten for a week.”

Seeing the ill-concealed expression of regret with which I finished the last of my food, he cut two slices of bread and toasted and buttered them for me, and then made coffee for both of us.

“Am I keeping you from your business?” I asked as I embarked upon them. “It is still early, isn’t it?”

“It wants five and twenty minutes of eight,” he said, taking from his pocket a rather handsome silver watch.

“I thought it was earlier. I was afraid of waking you if I came too soon.”

“Too soon! By Jove, have you been up all night?”

I nodded, still intent on chewing.

“Indeed? Then I hope I am to learn the reason.”

“I will tell you,” I answered.

Seeing that I had consumed all of his breakfast and was still unsatisfied, he gave me a large piece of pound-cake to eat with my coffee.

“Did you recognise me that time?” I asked. “When I saw you in the Court of Chancery at Westminster?”

“When was that?”

“It was two years ago. Shortly after I last came here, in fact.”

“And what were you doing there?”

“Well that’s a long story. But I want to tell it to you. I need to be able to trust someone.”

THE WRONG HANDS

685

“You know you can trust me, old fellow. For poor Stephen’s sake. I only hope I can do more to help you than I could last time. I have often remembered how I let you go off like that without doing anything for you, but I was deuced short of the ready then.”

“I believe you may be able to help me. Do you know anything about Chancery?”

“Indeed I do. I’m articled there.”

This was better than I’d hoped!

“I’m a Sixty-clerk. That means,” he went on, “that I work to one of the Six-clerks. (Of course there ain’t six and sixty.) One day I shall become one, I hope. I don’t suppose any of that means much to you. But look here, what the devil is all this about, old chap?

You’re being confoundedly mysterious.”

“I need to sleep,” I said.

I was exhausted and yet my mind felt strangely sharp and almost painfully clear.

“Then by all means sleep first and then tell me your story.”

“No, I must tell you first.”

And so during the rest of that morning I told him enough of my story to let him know that I was the Huffam heir and that I had in my possession a long-lost will that would resolve the issue. He professed himself amazed to learn this and revealed that he knew quite a lot about the suit since it was, he explained, absolutely the most infamous. When I described how I had obtained the will he applauded my actions as bold and high-spirited. finally, I impressed upon him the grave danger I was now in.

“And so,” I concluded, “I need help in laying it before the Court. I can pay you, for the old lady I spoke of gave me some money which some friends of mine are keeping for me.”

“The money be hanged,” he exclaimed. “I would be honoured to act for you without a fee. Though that shows you how bad a lawyer I must be! But am I to understand that you have the document with you at this very minute?”

I opened the lappels of my coat and showed him the package that was hanging round my neck.

“And so you have not looked at it yet! Then the first thing is to read it.”

While he cleared a space on the table I removed the document and unfolded it.

Seating himself beside me he looked through it rapidly and then exclaimed :

“By heavens, this is the real thing all right. My word, this brings to an end one of the longest suits in the long cobwebby, spidery history of Chancery. Won’t the lawyers just stare when this comes before the Master!”

He laughed and, because I was unfamiliar with the Chancery engrossing hand in which it was written, he read aloud the part that concerned the entail: the estate was settled upon “the infant, John Huffam, and upon the heirs male and female of his body”.

He scanned it and said : “And it’s witnessed in proper form.”

He lowered the document and said gravely: “Well, that’s simple enough. Even muddle-headed old Chancery can’t do much to obfuscate and complicate this, old fellow.”