Death at Dawn (10 page)

‘Good heavens, another castle.’

I said it aloud, to the ham and the fish kettle. At second glance it wasn’t quite a castle, only a very grand notion of an Englishman’s country house. It had enough towers and turrets for a whole chorus of fairy-tale
princesses and was bristling with battlements and perforated with arrowslits as if ready to take on an army. In reality, an army of boys armed with catapults could have done it mortal damage because the front was more glass than stone. Three storeys of windows dazzled in the sun, most unmedieval. The whole thing was a perfection of the modern Gothic style, as much antiquity as an ingenious architect could pile on without sacrificing the comfort of the family who were paying his fee. We slowed to a walk, approaching two open gates. They were wrought iron, twenty feet high, freshly painted and gilded like the railings. Cast-iron shields, as tall as a man, with the device of three perched birds were attached to each gate. A small lodge stood beside the right-hand gate, built like a miniature Gothic chapel to match the house.

‘Is this Mandeville Hall?’ I asked the driver, appalled at this magnificence. He nodded, without turning round.

‘Built on slavery,’ I whispered to the ham, desperately trying to keep up my spirits. I knew the Mandevilles lived in some style, but had expected nothing as bad as this. The memory of my father’s body in the morgue came into my mind and I felt a black depression. I was wasting my time. How could his life or death be connected with all this pomp?

A man in a brown coat and leggings came out of the lodge, through an arched gateway between two haughty stone saints. He glanced at me, simply regis
tering my presence, and then away. The driver leaned down from his seat and gave him something in a twist of paper, probably a roll of tobacco. They seemed like old friends as they filled their pipes and started muttering together. I caught the words ‘new governess’ and a moan about the traffic in Windsor. The driver jerked his head towards the house and asked, ‘They back, then?’

‘She is. He isn’t.’

‘When’s he expected?’

‘No telling. I haven’t slept these two nights past, listening for him. You know what he’s like if he has to wait while the gates are opened.’

The driver nodded and tapped out his pipe on his seat.

‘Seeing as they’re open, might as well go up the straight way.’

‘Better not. What if her ladyship sees you?’

‘See two of me, if she does.’

The driver made a tilting motion with his elbow and they both laughed. He jerked the reins and the cob, tiring now, went trotting slowly up the steep drive towards the castle. We hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards when a shout came from the gate lodge behind us. I turned round and there was the gatekeeper, waving his arms and pointing back the way we’d come. The driver turned too and his face went slack.

‘That’s done it.’

A great cloud of white dust was coming along the
road from Windsor, a much larger one than we’d made. At the centre of it was a travelling carriage drawn by four horses, coming at a fast canter. At that point they must have been a half mile away, but we could already hear the harness jingling, the thudding of their hooves and a whip cracking. My driver seemed frozen, irresolute. Then he swore and jerked at the cob’s head, as if intending to go back down to the gate lodge. But it was too late. The carriage was thundering between the gates, at a trot now but still fast. The gatekeeper had to jump aside. There were two men on the box, one in a plain caped coat, the other in a burgundy-coloured jacket, with whip and reins in hand. My driver tried to pull our phaeton off the drive and on to the grass. The wheel must have stuck in a rut because it lurched and wouldn’t go. He struck at the cob with his whip, swearing. By now the carriage was so close the air was full of the sweat of the four labouring horses. The face of the man driving it was red and sweating, his black eyebrows set in a bar.

‘Oh God.’

It was the gentleman who’d disputed his bill in the hotel at Calais. He must have seen that the phaeton was stuck in his path, but he was still whipping up the horses. I don’t know why I didn’t jump out. Perhaps I believed that the driver of the carriage must swerve at the last minute. But he didn’t. The phaeton lurched and juddered as the cob, writhing under the driver’s lash, tried to drag us clear. Then the world came apart
in a confusion of whinnying, swearing and splintering wood, and I was in the air with a great downpour of wax candles falling alongside, making splintering sounds round me as I landed with my face on the gravel of the drive and my knee on the fish kettle.

When I managed to get to my feet I found that the cob had saved us at the last second by managing to drag the phaeton out of its rut and far enough on to the grass for the carriage to give us no more than a glancing blow. But the blow had been enough to tear the nearside wheel from its axle and throw the phaeton sideways. The cob, trapped in the shafts, had gone with it and was threshing on his side. The driver was slashing at the harness with a knife, trying to release him, letting out a torrent of obscenities. I limped over to them.

‘Sit on his head, for gawd’s sake,’ he yelled at me.

As instructed, I sat on the cob’s head. That kept him still enough for the driver to release him. When he told me I could get up, the cob scrambled to his feet. His face and neck were grazed, his eyes terrified.

‘He’ll live,’ said the driver, after running his hands down his legs.

‘He could have killed him. He could have killed all of us.’

I was boiling with the anger that follows terror. The driver felt in his pocket for his pipe, found it broken, threw it down on the grass.

‘Shouldn’t have been coming up that way, should we. Only it’s another mile round by the back way.’

At least our danger had made him more conversational, though depressed.

‘But he must have seen us,’ I said.

‘Oh yes, he saw us all right.’

‘Is he a guest here? Surely Sir Herbert will be angry that …’

He was staring at me as if I’d said something stupid.

‘What are you talking about, girl? That was Sir Herbert.’

My hot anger turned to something colder and harder. Until then, I’d had misgivings about entering any man’s house as a spy. Now I knew that if there was any way I could find to repay Sir Herbert for treating my life (and the horse’s and coachman’s lives) so lightly, I would find it. I looked for my bag and found it in the wreckage.

‘Where are you going, then?’ the driver said.

‘To the house. I’m allowed to walk on their sacred drive, I suppose.’

‘In that case, you can go through to the stableyard and tell them to send a man down.’

The bag was heavy and my knee hurt, though I hoped it was nothing worse than bruising. I walked slowly up the drive, my eyes taking in the place like any sight-seer while my mind was otherwise occupied. A broad terrace stretched from the row of windows on the ground floor
dotted with marble statues – Apollo, Aphrodite, Hercules, Minerva – looking out at the grazing cattle in the park. Gleaming white steps ran down from it to a formal garden with yew bushes clipped into pyramids and box hedges in geometric shapes. It did not match the Gothic architecture of the house, but it must have cost a lot of money, so perhaps that was the point. A ha-ha divided the formal garden from the pasture, and a bridge large enough to span a good-sized river carried the drive across it, decorated with more marble mythology: Leda and her swan at one end, Europa and the bull at the other.

I felt very conspicuous, as if the hundreds of window panes were eyes watching me. ‘They’re not the spies though,’ I said to myself. ‘I am.’ I gloried in the word now because I thought that I’d found my enemy at the very start. A man who could deliberately run down his own groom driving one of his own vehicles was surely capable of anything, murder included. Blackstone had only told me part of the truth when he said the Mandeville household had something to do with my father’s death. He surely meant Sir Herbert himself. I’d seen for myself that he’d been in Calais three days after my father died and might well have been there for some time. What my father had done to earn the hatred of this money-swollen bully I didn’t know, but I’d find it out and tell the world. He could do what he liked to me after that, I didn’t greatly care.

*

On the far side of the bridge the drive divided itself into two unequal parts. The broader, left-hand one passed through a triumphal stone arch to the inner courtyard of the house. I glanced inside and there was the carriage Sir Herbert had driven. Evidently this was the entrance for the Mandevilles and guests, not limping governesses. I stopped at the point where the drive divided and put my bag down to change arms. Before I could pick it up again, the carriage wheeled round and came towards me, this time at a slow walk, with only the coachman on the box. When I moved out of the way to let it pass, he didn’t even glance down at me, but the footman standing at the back of it gave me a look. The poor man was so plastered with dust from the road that he could have taken his place among the statues on the terrace without attracting notice, apart from a few glimpses of his gold-and-black livery jacket. His wig must have come off somewhere on the journey because he was clutching it in his hand and his muscular stockinged calves were trembling.

I let them go past, then picked up my bag and followed. The side of the house was on my left, with fewer and smaller windows than the front. To the right, a high brick wall probably enclosed the vegetable garden. There was a brick wall on the other side as well and a warm smell of baking bread. We had come out of grandeur, into the domestic regions. I followed as the carriage turned left and left again, through a high brick archway with a clock over the top of it,
into the stableyard. A dozen or so horses looked out over loosebox doors as their tired colleagues were unharnessed from the carriage, flanks and necks gleaming wet as herrings with sweat. A team of boys with mops and buckets had already started cleaning the carriage. The footman was walking stiffly away through an inner arch and the coachman was having a dejected conversation with a sharp-faced man in gaiters, black jacket and high-crowned hat who looked like the head stableman. I put my bag down by the mounting block, picked my way towards them over the slippery cobbles and waited for a chance to speak to the man in gaiters.

‘The driver of the phaeton asks will somebody please come down and help him.’

‘And who may you be?’

‘I’m the new governess, but that doesn’t matter. The phaeton is quite smashed and the cob …’

He clicked his fingers. Two grooms immediately appeared beside him.

‘Bring in the cob and phaeton,’ he told them. Then, to me: ‘Beggs – can he walk?’

I was pleased by this evidence of humanity.

‘The driver? Yes, he’s not badly hurt, he –’

Cutting me short, he turned back to the men.

‘So you needn’t waste time bringing Beggs back. Tell him from me he’s dismissed and to take himself off. If there’s any wages owing, they’ll go towards repairing the phaeton.’

‘But it wasn’t his fault,’ I said. ‘Sir Herbert …’

He walked away. I went and sat on the mounting block with my bag at my feet. After a while an older groom with a kindly face came over to me.

‘Anything wrong, miss?’

‘I’m … I’m the new governess and I don’t know where to go.’

He pointed to the archway where the footman had gone.

‘Through there, miss, and get somebody to take you to Mrs Quivering.’

He even carried my bag as far as the archway, though he didn’t set foot into the inner courtyard on the far side of it.

‘The driver,’ I said, ‘it isn’t at all just …’

‘There’s a lot that’s not just, miss.’

The courtyard I walked into was sandwiched between the stableyard and the back of the house. A low building on the left was the dairy. Through a half-open door I could see a woman shaping pats of butter on a marble slab. The smell of bread was coming from a matching building on the right, its chimney sending up a long column of sweet-smelling woodsmoke. The back of the house itself towered over it all, with a line of doors opening on to the courtyard, one with baskets of fruit and vegetables stacked outside. The dust-covered footman was standing by another door, talking to a woman in a blue dress and white mob-cap. When he went inside, I followed him into a high dark corridor.

‘Excuse me,’ I said to his back. ‘Can you please tell me who Mrs Quivering is and where I can find her?’

He turned wearily.

‘Housekeeper. Straight on and last on the left.’

He disappeared through a doorway. The passage was a long one and the door at the far end was green baize, marking the boundary between servants’ quarters and the house proper. At right angles to it, another door marked
Housekeeper
. I knocked, and a voice sounding harassed, but pleasant enough, told me to come in.

Mrs Quivering reminded me of the nuns. She looked to be in her thirties, young for somebody holding such a responsible position, and handsome, in a plain black dress with a bundle of keys at her belt and smooth dark hair tucked under her white linen cap. But her eyes were shrewd, twenty years older than the rest of her. She looked carefully at me as I explained my business.

‘Yes, you are expected, Miss Lock. I understand there was an accident on the drive.’

‘I’d hardly call it an accident. What happened –’

‘You are unhurt?’

‘Yes, but –’

‘I’m sorry that I can’t allocate you the room used by your predecessor. We are expecting a large number of house guests shortly and I am having to set rooms aside for their servants. You might share with Mrs Sims, or there is a small room two floors from the
schoolroom that you might have to yourself.’

I had no notion who Mrs Sims, might be. I said I’d take the small room two floors up, please, and she made a note on a paper on the desk beside her.

‘I’m sure Lady Mandeville will want to talk to you about your duties, but she’s occupied at the moment. I shall let her know you’ve arrived.’

She rang a bell on her desk and a footman appeared, not the one from the carriage. His wig was perfectly in place, the gold braid on his jacket gleaming.

‘Patrick, this is Miss Lock, the children’s new governess. Please show her to the schoolroom.’

He bent silently to pick up my bag. We’d gone no more than halfway along the corridor before he dropped it like a terrier discarding a dead rat and gave a low but carrying whistle. A boy appeared from nowhere. Patrick nudged the bag with his foot and the boy picked it up. It was clearly beneath the dignity of a footman to carry servants’ bags. The boy looked so thin and exhausted that I’d have spared him the burden if I could, but he followed us through a doorway and up two flights of uncarpeted stairs. There was no lighting on the stairs, except for an occasional ray of sunshine through narrow windows on the landings. It reminded me of the times I’d been allowed backstage in theatres when calling on my father’s actor or musician friends. Out front, palaces, moonlit mountains and magic forests; behind the scenes, bare boards, dim light and people scurrying quietly about their business.
I tried to keep note of where we were going, aware that much might depend on knowing my way round this backstage world. On the second landing, a maid with a chamber pot stood aside to let us past.

‘How many servants are there?’ I asked the footman.

‘Fifty-seven.’ He said it over his shoulder, adding, ‘That’s inside, not counting stables or gardens, of course.’

We went from the landing into a carpeted corridor with sunlight at last, streaming through a window at the end. The footman knocked on a door halfway along it.

‘It’s the governess, Mrs Sims.’

The door was opened from the inside, on to one of the most pleasant rooms I’d seen in a long time. It wasn’t as grand as I’d feared, much more on a normal domestic scale. A square of well-worn Persian carpet softened the polished wood floor. The windows were open, letting in the mild air of a late summer afternoon. A doll with a smiling porcelain face lolled on the window-seat, alongside an old telescope. A dappled rocking horse stood on one side of the window and a battered globe on the other, next to a cabinet of birds’ eggs. Three small desks were lined up along the wall, blotters, pens and inkwells all neatly ranged. Three children, two dark-haired boys and a yellow-haired girl, were sitting at a table with bowls of bread and milk in front of them, a vase of marigolds and love-in-a-mist in the middle of the white tablecloth.
Overseeing them was a grey-haired woman in a navy-blue dress and white cap and apron. She turned to me, smiling.

‘You’ll be Miss Lock. I’m right glad to see you. I’m Betty Sims, the children’s nursemaid.’ Her accent was Lancashire, her welcome seemed genuine. ‘And these are Master Charles, Master James and Miss Henrietta. Now, stand up and say good afternoon to Miss Lock.’

The children did as she told them, obediently but with no great enthusiasm. The older boy, Charles, at twelve years old, already had his father’s black bar of eyebrows and something of his arrogant look. His brother James was three or four years younger and more frail, glancing at me sidelong as if weighing me up. The girl, Henrietta, was between them in age, masses of fair ringlets framing a round face with plump babyish cheeks. Betty Sims told them they could sit down again, so they resumed spooning up the soft paps of bread, though not taking their eyes off me.

‘Did anyone offer you a cup of tea?’ Betty asked.

I shook my head. My throat was parched and I was so hungry that I even envied the children their bread and milk. She told me to take the weight off my feet and keep an eye on the children and went out. I sank into a chair by the window, upholstered in worn blue corduroy.

‘That’s my chair,’ Henrietta said. ‘But you can sit in it for now if you want to.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Do you know Latin?’ Charles said.

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t suppose you know as much of it as I do. Do you know about Julius Caesar?’

‘Yes.’

‘He was the greatest general who ever lived, apart from Wellington. Did you ever meet the Duke of Wellington?’

‘No.’

‘Papa met the Duke of Wellington.’

James dropped his spoon with a clatter and wailed, ‘Where’s Betty? I feel sick.’

‘He doesn’t really,’ Henrietta said. ‘He’s a terrible liar. Did you know you’ve got dust all over your shoes? I have fifteen pairs of shoes.’

‘You’re a lucky girl.’

‘A red leather pair, a green leather pair, pink satin with bows, pink satin without bows, white brocade …’

She was still reciting her wardrobe when Betty came back carrying a tray with tea things and half a seed cake.

‘I feel sick,’ James said. ‘I want some cake.’

Unperturbed, Betty cut thick slices for herself and me, thin ones for the children. When they’d finished them, she said they should go to their bedrooms and be quiet. She’d come along in five minutes and help them change.

‘Change for bed?’ I asked her, when they’d filed out of the room. It wasn’t yet six o’clock.

‘No, changed in case their mother and father want them downstairs before dinner. They usually do, but they might not this evening because of Sir Herbert only just getting back.’

‘Getting back from where?’

It felt mean, commencing my career as a spy on a person who’d been kind to me, but I had to begin somewhere.

‘London, I expect. He’s always up and down from London. Sir Herbert’s an important man in the government.’

She said it with simple confidence, but if Blackstone and Miss Bodenham were right, any importance he might have had was in the past.

‘So he has a lot of business to attend to?’ I said, finishing my second cup of tea.

‘Yes.’ But her attention was on something else. She was staring at the draggled and dusty hem of my dress.

‘If the children are sent for, their governess and I usually take them down together – when there is a governess, that is.’

She was hinting gently that I wasn’t fit for company. My heart lurched at the thought that I might soon be standing in the same room as Sir Herbert Mandeville.

‘But you do look tired out, Miss Lock. If you like, I could make your excuses for you …’