The Governess (14 page)

Before long she even began to want to turn and walk back along the path to the gate, to close it irrevocably behind her and to hurry, hurry, hurry away till she found a street where there were clopping horse-buses plying – perhaps carrying enamelled advertisements for Thackerton’s Hats – and she could get herself back home.

To No 3 Northumberland Gardens.

No, she was not going to draw back. What awaited her there was something she had to fight to free herself from, to fight however besmirched the battlefield.

Then at last, just before she was going to concede at least a second pull at the brightly polished bell, the door was opened. A pretty little maidservant stood there, a girl scarcely out of her teens dressed in a pink print frock that made even the dresses of the
maids at Northumberland Gardens before they had been put into half-mourning look drab as sackcloth, with an apron that though it was not lace was as deeply frilled as if it had been.

‘Yes?’ the girl said. ‘Madam?’ she added.

‘I wish to see Miss Bond.’

‘Miss Bond’s resting. She’s been out driving and she always rests then till dinner time.’

‘Very well. But will you please nevertheless go to her and say that a lady has called on urgent business concerning –’

Miss Unwin drew in a quick breath.

‘On urgent business concerning Mr Arthur Thackerton.’

At the mention of the name, to Miss Unwin’s considerable relief, a fleeting look appeared on the apple-rosy cheeks of the pretty, and pert, girl blocking her entrance to the house. It was only the briefest of passing expressions. But Miss Unwin had learnt by sharp necessity to read everything in people’s faces long before she had learnt the pleasure of reading print.

Mr Arthur Thackerton was certainly known in this pretty little house. That she had learnt for certain now. He was known here in a special way, an intimate way, even a disgraceful way. The flick of extra pertness on that pert and pretty face had told Miss Unwin that.

‘I’ll see,’ said the girl.

She stood back from the door.

Miss Unwin stepped quickly forward, without any lack of dignity but with determination.

Inside, she found a charming, small hallway, papered with other roses, pink ones. There was, too, the neatest of hall-stands with a mirror in a gracefully carved frame and with, each hanging on its own hook, brushes with delicate china backs painted in a pattern of forget-me-nots, a hat brush, a clothes brush, a mud brush.

The little maid went trippingly up the stairs. Miss Unwin set herself to wait again, grateful now for the coolness inside the house.

She waited for nearly ten minutes.

Once she looked longingly at the closed front door. But she had not overcome the obstacles she had surmounted to lose heart now,
even though what lay immediately ahead was almost certain to be a task more formidable than anything she had encountered yet.

Then at last the little maid came mincing down the stairs again.

‘You’re to wait in the drawing-room. This way.’

A door was opened for her, a door decorated with china finger-plates and doorknob, here with roses and forget-me-nots intertwined.

The drawing-room of the little house was by no means as imposing as that at No 3 Northumberland Gardens, and it was by no means as pleasant as the drawing-room at the house in the country, the first such Miss Unwin had ever seen, a room she had learned to love and regard as the centre of her world. But it was a pretty room, an elegant room. Its walls were lined with padded satin in a soft pink. The curtains, looped deeply over the two tall windows, were of a paler satin and the lace behind them was of the richest workmanship, reducing the sunshine outside to a cool opalescence. All the chairs and the single little sofa were covered in heavily embroidered material and the side furniture was of ebony, intricately patterned with brass. There were pictures close-packed on every wall, paintings of elegant ladies on swings, in boats, with little dogs.

A room that has cost someone a great deal of money, Miss Unwin said to herself.

Then the door behind her opened and the person who had caused all that money to be spent stood before her as she wheeled round.

She was tiny. Her lack of height struck Miss Unwin with almost as much surprise as if the newcomer had been blown into the room in an explosion of conjuror’s smoke. But in the next instant she saw something else about Rhoda Bond. Tiny she might be, but she was every quarter-inch a woman. Her figure was, despite the smallness of her body, if anything too full, too womanly. She was dressed, too, in a manner that did everything that could be done with tight-laced stays, artful pleats and stiffening at the hips to emphasise and present that full womanly figure.

She would be a difficult person indeed to deal with. Her very
assurance of dress, her very lack of any self-consciousness about the smallness of her stature, told Miss Unwin that at once.

‘My maid says you come from Mr Arthur Thackerton.’

The voice was not unladylike. But it was as contrived, Miss Unwin thought, as her figure. This gave her a small burst of hope. If contrivance was there it could be broken. However iron-reinforced underneath, that which had been manufactured could, given enough will, be broken.

As within the next few minutes it might well have to be.

‘Then I am afraid that your maid misunderstood me,’ Miss Unwin answered her. ‘I did not say that I came from Mr Thackerton. I said that I came on business concerning him.’

The soft womanliness of the face atop that tiny, full, womanly body hardened for an instant into a smile. It was a smile that in part acknowledged that in response to an invitation to tell a half-truth a truth had been told, and it was in part a smile that flung down a challenge.

‘I believe,’ said Rhoda Bond, ‘that you told the girl your business was urgent.’

‘Yes. Yes, I said that. My business is urgent. It is perhaps even a matter of life and death.’

Again Rhoda Bond’s soft, round face in its frame of dark curls smiled a swift, hard smile.

‘Not a matter of life and death for me, I trust.’

‘No. For myself.’

‘Then I hope you’ll not find yourself disappointed.’

Miss Unwin allowed her gaze to drop for a moment to the pretty round rug at her feet. Then she lifted it once more to face her opponent.

For she had no doubt now, if ever she had had any doubts, that it was by an opponent that she was confronted.

‘I have omitted to tell you my name,’ she said. ‘It is Unwin, Miss Harriet Unwin, and I am –’

‘The governess,’ Rhoda Bond broke in. ‘I thought as much. The governess there’s been all the talk about in the
Mercury.’

‘Yes. There has been talk, as you call it. There, and elsewhere. It is because of that talk, because it is nothing less than the most atrocious falsehoods, that I have dared to come and call on you.’

‘You have dared?’ Rhoda Bond sounded thoughtful. ‘Yes, I was beginning to wonder about that. Calling here’s a daring enough thing to have done. A very daring thing for a governess, a governess in the employ of Mr Arthur Thackerton.’

‘For Mr Thackerton’s employee to call on …’

Miss Unwin let the end of her retort hang in the air. But if she had hoped that she had said enough to Mr Arthur Thackerton’s mistress she was to be disappointed.

Rhoda Bond simply let the sentence hang.

At last Miss Unwin was constrained to admit defeat and finish it.

‘Yes, daring enough to call on another woman who depends for her daily existence on Mr Thackerton.’

‘Oh, don’t think I deny what I am,’ Rhoda Bond answered. ‘But, you know, there’s a difference between the two of us. Quite a difference. Mr Thackerton would dismiss you at a moment’s notice if he found any cause to do so. But I don’t think he’s any intention of dismissing me.’

‘No? Perhaps you have had recent reason for believing that?’

‘I –’

Rhoda Bond, a tiny extra flush of colour on her softly rounded cheeks, had plainly been on the point of claiming that she did have a recent reason for believing Arthur Thackerton’s interest in her had not waned. Of that Miss Unwin was as certain as she was that four fours made sixteen.

But she knew, too, that Rhoda Bond had stopped herself making the admission, and that, once seen as a danger, such an avowal would be doubly and trebly hard to wring out of her.

Indeed, she was standing there now quite silent and waiting. If the negotiations were to be kept open then the next move would not come from her.

If ‘negotiations’ was at all the word for one whose position was so altogether weak.

Miss Unwin took a breath.

‘Miss Bond, you know what is being said about me, that I was the person who gave the alarm over Mr William Thackerton’s death and that this means that, in a closed household, I am the most likely person to have struck the fatal blow? That and worse.
It is not true. None of it is true. But what is true is that someone, some person within those four walls, did strike that blow. I know that. None better. I was the one responsible in the first place for making it plain that the house is as impregnable to any burglar or even to an unannounced visitor as it is possible to be.’

‘Miss Governess, if I wanted to hear any of that I could read it in the paper.’

‘And it seems that you have done so,’ Miss Unwin retorted. ‘But you have read to poor purpose. Will you let me tell you what are the consequences of what I have just explained? The consequences for you?’

Rhoda Bond did not reply. Yet her silence now was an open admission that she did indeed want to know what the consequences were. For her.

Again Miss Unwin gathered her resources.

‘Admit for one moment that that which I have sworn to you is the simple truth,’ she said. ‘That I was not the person who committed that act. What follows? That it was some other person in the household. And now consider it all, quite coolly and disinterestedly, as if’ – she could not stop the tiniest bitter trace of a laugh colouring her voice – ‘as if you were a newspaper reader who knew nothing of the people concerned, or someone who had written a letter to the editor and believed he had as much right as anybody to speculate on the matter.’

‘Come on, you said there’d be consequences for me. I don’t see them so far. None at all.’

‘Not even that the most likely individual within that house to have needed to commit the crime would be Mr Arthur Thackerton?’

Rhoda Bond stepped back half a pace. The high colour which had stayed on her full rounded cheeks left them as abruptly as if her very heart had ceased for a moment to beat.

‘What – what do you mean?’ she said at last.

‘My meaning is quite clear,’ Miss Unwin replied. ‘I do not propose to discuss with you every person under the roof at Northumberland Gardens, but it must be plain with only the very least thought that the one who stood to gain most from old Mr
Thackerton’s death is his son and heir. He needed money. He needed it badly, did he not?’

‘Yes. No. No. Why should he need money? What do you mean?’

Miss Unwin had kept hold of her umbrella when she had been shown into the room and now she lifted its point a little from the floor and swept it round in a gentle arc.

‘This is what I mean, Miss Bond. That here is a room that must have cost a very great deal to furnish so prettily, and it is in a house that must cost more than a little each month in rent. Where does the money come from?’

‘Where it comes from is no concern of yours.’

‘I wish it were not. Believe me. I do not like having to come here and say the things I have to you. But I have been accused in so many words of killing Mr William Thackerton. Knowing that someone else had very much better reasons for doing that than 1 ever could have makes what I asked altogether my concern.’

‘Well, that’s as may be.’ Rhoda Bond stamped her expensively shod little foot. ‘That’s as may be, but it’s certainly no concern of mine.’

‘No? Let me speak quite plainly. To have a murderer as your lover, to have it come out in court one day that he murdered his own father so as to pay your bills. I think that should very much concern you, Miss Bond.’

‘But – but he isn’t. He didn’t. My God, what am I to do?’

‘You are to tell me the whole truth. At least then you will know where you stand and can do something to make matters as easy as possible for yourself.’

‘You think so? But surely –’

‘Come, if that is what did happen, and there is a good deal to say that it was, then you will get nowhere by pretending that everything in the world is made of roses.’

‘But I didn’t want him to –’

Rhoda Bond stopped herself. She stood looking then at Miss Unwin under lowered brows, her mind plainly calculating and calculating.

It seemed a long time to Miss Unwin before she spoke again. But when she did so it was with a toss of her elegant head.

‘Oh, no, miss. You don’t catch me that way. You and your “if this happened” and your “admit for a moment”. Well, I don’t admit, not for one moment. It was you, you the governess, who was first to see that body. If you’re to be believed. More like it was you that saw the body dead minutes and minutes before you set up a cry of murder. Oh, I know the likes of you, and don’t you think I’m to be caught in any of your little traps, my miss.’

‘I am setting no trap,’ Miss Unwin answered.

But within she was wishing with desperation that Rhoda Bond had tumbled out the facts she needed to hear while she had still been so thoroughly frightened. Now, it was clear, any fright she had been feeling had passed away. It was going to be yet more difficult to get out of her anything at all concerning Arthur Thackerton.

‘Well,’ Rhoda Bond went on, ‘what you done smelt devilish like a trap to me. But I won’t be took. So you’d better be on your way, before I gets angry.’

‘I have told you. Everything I’ve said has been for your good, as well as for mine. I wish to clear my name. And as for you, I suggest that if Mr Thackerton did indeed kill his father you –’

‘Ah, but there you’re wrong, my fine miss. Arthur Thackerton didn’t never kill his father. You was the one what done that, and don’t think I don’t know it.’