The Governess (17 page)

‘Don’t know, Sergeant.’

‘Then I’ll tell you. The moral of that is that no one crosses Sergeant Drewd and goes away scot-free. No one. Never.’

There was a long, long silence in the hall.

Then John spoke again. Miss Unwin even thought she heard him swallow before he did so.

‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘I heard the Master cough. Honest and honest, I did.’

Well, it seemed she need not have feared John would succumb to bullying. He appeared to have acquired a lot more courage than he had had on the night of the murder.

But the case against Ephraim Brattle seemed now, beyond
doubt, in ruins. So the Sergeant’s mind would be busy, surely, in mustering up again the case against Harriet Unwin. To be all the more strongly believed in for the upset his newest theory had received.

She bit her lip.

It would not be so easy now, not by a long chalk, to cajole the Sergeant into taking account of what she had found out about Mr Arthur. But if Ephraim Brattle could not possibly be the murderer of William Thackerton then it looked as if her own suspicions had been right all along. Mr Arthur had desperately needed money and his father’s life stood between him and his acquiring it. Between him and the continued willingness, too, of the tiny womanly siren who had enslaved him.

She remembered abruptly the words Mrs Arthur had spoken at the breakfast table just a few hours ago. Those unusually sharp and bitter words.
Surely it is a tragedy when your own father is foully murdered under his own roof
Yes, it had been a just rebuke. Mr Arthur had given little sign ever that he felt his father’s death as a tragedy.

‘Very well then, damn you, have your cough then. I’ll look elsewhere. See if I don’t.’

Sergeant Drewd’s words, sharp as the crackle of musketry, interrupted her train of thought, and a moment later she saw from her high viewpoint his head with its heavily macassar-oiled hair crossing swiftly to the bell-pull to summon one of the footmen to let him out.

Barely had he rung when Joseph appeared, handed him that brown bowler hat from the hall-stand and unlocked the door for him.

He was gone ‘to look elsewhere’. And where would that be? Down in the country where her own secret lay, easy for the finding? She very much feared that it would be.

But she did her best to shake the care off. There was nothing she could do to put matters right at the present moment. As soon as the Sergeant came back she would have to see him, if she possibly could, and begin to plant in his mind her own suspicions, her own certainties almost, about who had been responsible for the death of William Thackerton. But even if she had got hold of
the Sergeant at this moment he would be in no mood to listen to anything she had to say. So back to her duties.

‘Come, Pelham, or we shan’t get as far as the Round Pond.’

‘Oh, yes, Miss Unwin.’

Up Pelham jumped.

But in the hall, just as she was on the point of calling Joseph back to let them out, she checked herself. She had imagined that when Sergeant Drewd had delivered his
Damn you, have your cough then
to John the boy would have quickly retreated back to whatever work he was supposed to be doing. But he had not. Instead he was standing at the back of the hall, big hands stuck in his pockets, almost hidden beside the tall, ticking clock just where Hopkinson of the
Mercury
had tucked himself away before she had encountered him with such awkward results.

She turned and walked sharply back to where John was lounging, an expression on his face that looked like nothing so much as triumph, as if he had just emerged from a scuffle with a boy bigger than himself, a winner despite his inner doubts.

As she got close up to him – he had managed by the time she reached him to make his face blank, even a bit hangdog – she became conscious, too, of something else. Something so out of place that it took her two or three seconds to realise what it was, even to realise with which of her five senses she should recognise it.

The boy smelt of aniseed.

That was it. There was emanating from his mouth a strong odour of aniseed, so strong indeed that Sergeant Drewd too must have been very much aware of it. Then she saw what the source of the smell must be. John’s left cheek was bulging. He had in his mouth, had had there during the whole course of his interview with the Sergeant, what had been known to her in her earliest days by the vulgar term of’a gob-stopper’, a large sugar ball, flavoured with aniseed, layered with different colours which while it was sucked revealed themselves one by one. During the whole of her desperate childhood she had experienced such a delight only on one solitary occasion when from a passing carriage a little rich boy had spat one out and she had swooped on it like a plunging carrion crow and tucked it straight into her own mouth.

Her first thought, when she realised what John had been doing during all the Sergeant’s questioning, was to wonder again at the courage the boy had developed since his outburst of sobbing in the dining-room under the Sergeant’s threats. But her second thought was quite different.

‘John,’ she said without any preliminary, ‘where did you get that sweet you’re sucking?’

With an audible click John pushed the aniseedy ball further back into his mouth.

‘What sweet, miss?’ he said.

‘Now, John, it’s no use pretending with me. You’ve got what’s called a gob-stopper in your mouth, and I mean to know how you came to get it.’

For an instant plainly John contemplated not replying. His face flushed darkly and a mutinous look gathered in his eyes. But he was facing someone who had no doubts she would get her answer.

‘Bought it, miss.’

‘Oh, yes? And where did you get money enough to go buying yourself sweets?’

Again a moment of mutiny. Again only half carried out.

‘I get me wages, don’t I, miss?’

‘Yes, you do, John. And I happen to know that your last month’s wages very nearly all went on a new pair of white gloves which you had to buy in place of the ones you lost. Now, give me the truth. Someone put into your pocket the wherewithal to buy that sweet and a good many more, too, did they not?’

‘No, miss. No.’

But the denials were hectic. Very different indeed, Miss Unwin thought, from the bravado with which he had told his lie to Sergeant Drewd. Because she had no doubt now that the boy had been lying through thick and thin in his interview with the Sergeant not many minutes earlier.

She turned to little Pelham waiting patiently by the front door to set off on his walk.

‘Pelham,’ she called, ‘I think perhaps we can forget a little about being in mourning now. Would you like to take your hoop with you on our walk?’

‘Oh yes, please, Miss Unwin.’

‘Then go upstairs and fetch it from the toy cupboard like a good boy. I have got to go and see to something with John. I shan’t be very long.’

She hardly waited to watch Pelham setting off for his hoop as fast as his chubby little legs would take him before she briskly ordered John to go ahead of her down the stairs to the kitchen area.

He made no attempt any longer to defy her. His face had lost much of its colour and his big lubberly hands hung despondently at his sides.

She ushered him smartly past the scullery where Nancy was busy at the sink peeling a large pile of carrots and went on to the nook between the servants’ hall and the door to the area where there stood the truckle bed on which the boy spent his nights. Beside it was his box.

Miss Unwin did not stop to ask permission but knelt swiftly, grasped the box’s lid and opened it wide. There on the top was the remains of a bag of gob-stoppers, some ten out of a dozen. She put them down on the floor beside her. Next came a few items of clothing, not very well folded. Miss Unwin plunged her hand straight beneath them and came up with a handkerchief tied at all four corners. It clinked a little as she lifted it.

She pulled apart the knot and poured the coins the handkerchief had held in a pile beside the bag of gob-stoppers. The sum amounted to twenty shillings and eight pence.

‘So he gave you a guinea,’ Miss Unwin said.

‘No. Nobody ever –’

‘Now, don’t lie to me. I want to hear from your own lips who gave you so much money. Just that.’

A long, stuffy silence in the narrow nook of a sleeping place. John was staring at his ill-gotten wealth, spread in a shining pile of silver and copper on the bare grey-brown boards of the floor.

‘It was Mr Brattle,’ he whispered at last.

Miss Unwin had expected to hear nothing else. But her heart leapt up for an instant at the words.

‘It was to get you to tell that story about hearing the Master cough and to stick to it through thick and thin, wasn’t it?’ she said.

Tears were rolling blotchily down the boy’s face now. He sniffed hard.

‘Yes,’ he muttered. ‘I – I –’

‘Very well,’ Miss Unwin said. ‘You need not tell me any more now. But understand this, John, you will have to repeat it all to Sergeant Drewd at the very earliest opportunity.’

‘Yes, miss. Yes. But will he – but what’ll he do to me?’

‘Well, you would deserve it if you were severely punished,’ Miss Unwin answered. ‘But I dare say the Sergeant will be so pleased to hear what you tell him that you’ll escape lightly enough.’

With that she hurried up to the hall again. Pelham and his hoop awaited.

So, while Pelham bowled the hoop cheerfully along the wide pavements leading to Kensington Gardens, Miss Unwin gave herself over to thinking how she now stood. All seemed to be once again as fair as it had been when she had first heard that Ephraim Brattle might be the murderer in their midst. The position was, if anything, better, she reflected. The confidential clerk had now been exposed trying to provide himself with a false alibi for the time of the murder. Surely, only a murderer would need to do that.

For a moment she wished she had been able to deal with John while the Sergeant had still been in the house. He might already have left London to make inquiries about herself in the country, and to have her secret known, even when there was no question of her being seen any longer as a murderess, was something she would rather have avoided.

But in the meantime there was little Pelham. He was further away from her on the broad pavement than she could have wished, his hoop bouncing and singing in front of him. She picked up her skirt and ran.

Back from their walk Pelham’s needs kept her steadily busy. His hands had to be washed after coming into contact with the hoop that had picked up the dust of the pavements. During luncheon he had to be watched with more than usual closeness. A second spilling accident was not to be thought of. After the meal he had to be settled down for his nap.

But as she attended to all these tasks Miss Unwin felt an inner sense of comfort. These were the things that ought to occupy her. No more cudgelling her brains over the mystery that had seemed to pervade the house like a miasma. No more journeying across London to confront ladies of doubtful virtue. No further need to enlist the aid of Vilkins in anything other than the everyday, ordinary tasks of filling Pelham’s bath and bringing up her own simple supper each night.

So she was little prepared when, with Pelham happily asleep for his nap, she went to carry out her next duty, reading to Mrs Thackerton, to find that once again she was treading on the edge of a precipice.

Miss Unwin even felt a sense of deep pleasure in the fact that she was going to read to Mrs Thackerton once again. Of course her sitting-room would be unpleasantly stuffy, even though its hardly ever extinguished fire had been allowed to go out on this especially sultry day. Of course the ammonia odour of hartshorn would be hard to bear. Of course the dimness behind the half-drawn blinds would make it as difficult as ever to decipher the words on the pages of the book she would be given, and that book would be ploddingly dull, whichever it was. But reading to Mrs Thackerton was part of the everyday course of events in the house. It was part of the way things had gone from her very first days here. It had nothing whatsoever to do with murder, with sudden suspicions, with fluttering-winged striving to escape.

It was to be one of the days, she discovered as soon as she entered the room, when there was not to be conversation. After Mrs Thackerton’s attack of the morning when the doctor had had to be fetched it was a wonder that she was not in her bed.

So, all there was was a thin hand extended in the direction of the book on the little side-table beside the brass-decorated coal scuttle. The volume proved to be a novel,
A Point of Honour
by Mrs Edwardes. It did not promise much.

But at least it is not
The Christian Year
, Miss Unwin thought. It was well enough to be pious but to read aloud for a whole hour those grey and plodding verses had been a strain on her patience. Yet had that volume been Mrs Thackerton’s choice today she would not have grudged it. Its mild and unexceptionable sentiments would have been better far than extracts from whatever was now being said about the Northumberland Gardens Tragedy in
The Times
or the
Mercury
.

She embarked on her reading almost with eagerness. But hardly had she begun when Mrs Thackerton’s weary hand was raised.

‘Yes? Am I speaking too loudly? Does it pain you?’

‘No, my dear, no,’ came the invalid’s feeble voice. ‘I have got the headache it is true. But then I am seldom without that. No, I like to hear you read so. I like your vigour. Your youth.’

Silence fell then in the fuggy room. Miss Unwin wondered whether to ask again why her reading had been stopped. But eventually she got her explanation.

‘It is my Godfrey’s Cordial. I feel I should take a spoonful.’

‘Yes, of course. Let me give it to you. Where is it?’

Miss Unwin peered round in the gloom.

‘No, my dear. Beside my bed. Next door.’

‘Ah, yes. Then I shan’t be a moment.’

She got up from the low buttoned chair where she was accustomed to sit when she was reading and went to go to Mrs Thackerton’s bedroom.