The Governess (11 page)

Then there would come the departure of the coffin, black and massive round its inner case, studded with shining rows of japanned brass nails. That would be a hard moment for a small boy, knowing that under all the show there would be lying the body of his grandfather so lately alive and barking out each evening his approving grunt of a laugh when a sugar-mouse’s head was snapped off.

No, only when at the end of this day Pelham was safely asleep could she attend to her own troubles. Perhaps that would be time enough.

She found Pelham excited rather than distressed, at least outwardly.

‘Miss Unwin, Miss Unwin, the funeral carriage has arrived. Hannah and I peeped through the blind and saw it. And can I creep down when Grandpapa goes and watch through the banisters?’

‘Certainly not. And, Hannah, you can go back to your work
now. No, Pelham, your mother and your grandmother will be staying in their rooms, as is proper, and you must stay up here.’

‘But, miss, must I?’

‘Yes, you must. No two ways about it.’

‘Well, but … But couldn’t we peek round the blinds again? The horses have all got tall black feathers on their heads.’

Miss Unwin thought for a moment. Perhaps, after all, it would be better for the boy if he did see the coffin leave. At least it would prevent him harbouring in his head unpleasantly fantastic thoughts.

‘All right. You may do that. But you mustn’t lift the blind more than an inch or two, mind.’

‘No, Miss Unwin. I won’t. Really I won’t. Thank you, Miss Unwin.’

So when the procession was due to leave they each went to a window and peered downwards at the enormous hearse, its black relieved only by gold-painted skulls at each corner and gold-painted cherubs along its sides, at the four black horses in its traces nodding and tossing the ostrich plumes on their heads, at the coachman, massive in his all-black coat and hat.

‘Oh, look, Miss Unwin, one of the horses is –’

‘Sssh, Pelham. I can see that quite well, but a little gentleman does not mention such things.’

‘No, Miss Unwin.’

Then along the path to the gate between the heavy clumps of laurel there came the big, black elm-wood coffin, carried on the shoulders of half a dozen black-clad mutes.

Miss Unwin thought she recognised them from a funeral she had encountered nearby one day when she was taking Pelham for his walk. The two of them had stood respectfully to the side then as that other coffin had been carried to the hearse and Miss Unwin had been assailed as the mutes had passed with such a reek of gin that for an instant she had been transported back to her earliest, most terrible days and the full-bellied parish beadle who on his visits to the workhouse had always exuded such an odour of juniper.

No doubt, she thought, a similar waft of sweetness is eddying along the path down there now.

But a lady, however newly arrived at that state, does not mention such things. Even to herself.

The new Mr Thackerton emerged a moment later and went down the path in the wake of the coffin and climbed stiffly into the family carriage drawn up behind the hearse. He was followed by the other mourners who had come to the house. There were not, Miss Unwin noted, all that many of them although they included a number of under-managers from the office with among them the dark, dour figure of Ephraim Brattle.

Eventually the cortège moved off in the direction of the notably respectable Kensal Green burial ground, the lumbering hearse, the mourning carriages and finally the carriages of neighbours sent empty to follow the procession as a mark of respect.

Then, just as the last carriage turned the far corner at its slow walking-pace, a four-wheeler cab came up from the other direction and tagged itself on to the end of the line. Through its window, which was opened to its fullest on this day of inappropriate sultriness, Miss Unwin caught a distorted glimpse of a vivid brown suit.

She shuddered at the sight. In a swift spasm of true fear.

But this was no time for considering her own future. Pelham had to be kept fully occupied until his head lay on his pillow in sleep. There had been certain small signs, a quick frown, a withdrawn look momentarily about the eyes, that had told her that for all his merry talk of black-plumed horses’ disrespectful behaviour some decidedly unmerry thoughts had come into his head.

So in a twinkling it was out with Miss Richmal Magnall’s
Questions
and learning by rote their answers. What is the largest desert in the world? The Sahara. Which is the greatest ocean in the world? The Pacific.

At last however the supper hour arrived – no visit to the drawing-room on this sad day and no reward of a sparkling sugar-mouse – and then it was bath-time and finally it was time for prayers, for a story read till sleep had almost closed the eyes of the listener. And then finally Pelham’s long day was over.

Miss Unwin lit his nightlight and then went to the schoolroom and rang its bell for Vilkins.

As soon as Vilkins had come in and shut the door safely behind her Miss Unwin put her first question.

‘This ought to have been your half-day off, shouldn’t it?’

‘Well, yes, in a manner o’ speaking. Only Cook said as I’d better stay in on account o’ the funeral an’ everything.’

‘Yes. But there’s nothing to prevent you going out this evening if you want to?’

‘No. She said that’d be all right. An’ I might take a bit of an airing.’

‘Could you do something for me instead? Though now it comes to it, I hardly like to ask you.’

‘Well, if you don’t ask I can hardly say as I will, can I? An’ you can take it from me, whatever you does ask I’ll do it. I ain’t been friends with you since before almost I could talk for nothing.’

‘No. No, I suppose you haven’t. And, believe me, whatever has happened to me since we were little girls together, I am your friend still. Unless I felt I was, I would not dare ask what I am going to.’

‘Ask away then. Ask away.’

So Miss Unwin told her friend of old about the extraordinary speech Mrs Arthur had burst out with the evening before and the inference she herself had drawn from it. Then she went on to say why she felt it was now doubly urgent for her to find proof of some sort of the supposition she had arrived at and how she thought that Vilkins could help her to that.

‘Follow ‘im in a hansom,’ Vilkins said at the end of it all. ‘Why, I’ll do that an’ make a pleasure of it. I ain’t never rode in no hansom afore. I won’t half make that cabbie go, I can tell you.’

‘But, Vilkins dear, you must be careful. What if it turns out that I am quite wrong about Mr Arthur and he finds you spying on him wherever it is that he goes to? You could be dismissed.’

‘Yes, an’ pigs could fly. I won’t let ‘im see hair nor hide o’ me. Don’t you worry. I’ll just go an’ get me glad rags on, an’ then I’ll be off. A hansom cab, an’ me in it. Oh, lawks.’

Vilkins was as good as her word, even attempting to leave the schoolroom before Miss Unwin could give her money for the expedition. In less than ten minutes her figure could be seen
clattering up the steps from the front area, banging out of the gate and marching off in the direction of the nearest cab rank.

Would she succeed in following Mr Arthur when he came out, Miss Unwin asked herself. Would he even go out this evening?

The second of her questions was answered some twenty minutes later when Henry left the house and went off in the same direction as Vilkins had taken. Five minutes later he returned in the hansom he had been sent to fetch and Miss Unwin heard him through the open schoolroom window, which now that the funeral was over no longer had to be obscured with a blind, telling the driver that his master would be out directly.

Then, while the cab stood below in the dusty, left-over heat of the hot day, its ribby horse occasionally shaking its head against the flies and making its harness faintly jingle, at the far end of the street another hansom appeared. As soon as it had rounded the corner it came to a sudden rocking halt.

Miss Unwin, leaning out of the window as far as she dared without attracting attention, felt she could almost see Vilkins, in her big garishly flower-bedecked straw bonnet, thrusting her cheerful round face up to the little opening in the cab’s roof to bawl out instructions to the driver on his perch above and behind her.

Then Mr Arthur came out, his silk hat freshly gleaming from the attentions of Henry’s brush, a cigar between his lips. A whiff of its rich, piquant scent came all the way up to Miss Unwin as his cab clattered away down the street.

The second hansom at the far corner jolted into sudden life. Miss Unwin watched it until it disappeared at the other end of the road. Then she put Pelham’s discarded Snakes and Ladders board back into the cupboard and settled down to a long wait.

But well after St Stephen’s Church clock had struck ten – all the maidservants were strictly bound to be back indoors after a half-day by ten-thirty – there was still no sign of Vilkins returning.

Abruptly Miss Unwin left the schoolroom, went into her bedroom, lit her candle and by its gradually increasing light looked at the battered alarm-clock on the chest of drawers. Twenty-four minutes past ten.

She blew out the candle, turned and hurried out of the room and down the stairs. Bonnetless, she unfastened the lock on the wide front door, slipped it open a few inches and stepped out into the warm night. She went along the path to the gate and peered up and down the road.

Nothing.

Silence. The undisturbed quiet of a respectable district of London at a late hour of the night. The laurel bushes in the garden behind her were not stirred by so much as a puff of air. No dog, far or near, so much as barking. Not even the rattle of the hansom taking home some late-returning reveller in a distant street.

How long had it been, she asked herself, since she had looked at her clock. Two minutes? Probably not more. And the clock was right. She made sure of that herself when she wound it. It needed putting forward only by one minute each night, old though it was.

What should she do about Vilkins? Should she go back indoors, ask one of the men servants, any one of them but Joseph, to go to the police station and report that a girl was missing? Surely it was ridiculously early for such a dramatic measure. But then if Mr Arthur had – appalling to think of it – somehow realised that Vilkins had been following him, and if he was truly his father’s murderer, would he have hesitated to …?

She could not make up her mind to carry forward the thought.

Then, almost unbelievably, in the hushed silence of the heavy night she thought she caught the sound of a tiny tick-tocking, rapid and regular.

Footsteps. It must be footsteps beating out on the pavement as someone hurried along. Would it be Vilkins? Surely it must be.

Was the sound getting nearer?

She listened, straining.

Yes. Yes, it was. And the rapidity of the steps meant surely that they belonged to someone who was running.

But they were still a good way off, and it could not be long now – hardly two minutes, if that – before the church clock would strike the half hour and Vilkins, if this was Vilkins, would be late, would have to produce explanations, might give away their whole plan in her flustered state.

Certainly she would have no time to stand outside and tell of any news she had. If she failed to ring at the servants’ bell before half past she would be in trouble.

Miss Unwin went back into the garden and pushed her way into the massed laurels beside the path until she was sure she was well out of sight.

The footsteps were loud now in the darkness, and surely they must be Vilkins’s. There was a hearty clumsiness about them that, even at a distance, was somehow unmistakable.

But would she be in time?

Then at last Vilkins came into sight, running up to the gate, pushing it open and leaning on it panting loudly as a dog. Then with lurching, exhausted strides she made her way along the path, up the front steps and leant a finger on the bell beneath the visitors’ one.

In time. The church clock was silent still.

Down in the area below, as Vilkins stumbled to the steps leading to it, Miss Unwin heard the heavy bolt on the basement door being drawn back.

‘What time of night is this, my girl?’

The cook, for all her plump and comfortable aspect, plainly had a sharp side to her tongue on an occasion like this.

‘It’s not half past, Mrs Breakspear. Really it ain’t.’

‘And lucky for you it isn’t, my girl. Otherwise you’d be in hot water good and proper.’

‘Yes, Mrs Breakspear. Sorry, Mrs Breakspear.’

‘Well, get along to bed with you. Straight away, mind. A fine time of night for a girl like you to be out. Off to bed. Straight away.’

Miss Unwin breathed a sigh of relief on Vilkins’s behalf. She waited among the blotchy, dust-laden leaves of the laurels until she heard Mrs Breakspear bolt the basement door again and then she slipped back inside again herself, locked the front door and made her way calmly up the stairs, the lowly governess going quietly about some business of her own.

But how was she to learn now what Vilkins had found out? If Vilkins had found out anything. Had she perhaps done no more than wait hour after hour outside Mr Arthur’s club somewhere in the West End while inside he … He did whatever it was that gentlemen did in gentlemen’s clubs, dined, talked, played cards, played billiards. Had Vilkins’s expedition come so near to disaster for her to no purpose?

Miss Unwin longed to know. But she saw no way that she could find out.

Vilkins had been ordered up to bed straight away, and she would not dare disobey. Doubtless Mrs Breakspear would not be above going to see that her order had been carried out. Nor could there be any question of creeping up the servants’ stairs to go to Vilkins when all was quiet. For one thing that part of the house was somewhere she had never penetrated to, which it would have been wrong for her to be seen in. For another, second housemaid and scullery maid shared the same small room, Vilkins had told her once, and Nancy would be in bed there already.