The Governess (21 page)

They were going to be in good time for the service despite having to go on foot, however, and as they neared the church Miss Unwin noticed that there was quite a crowd gathered on the pavement outside. She put this down at first to the fine weather. It was in fact so hot that they had been constrained to cross the road earlier to keep in the shade.

Now, opposite the elaborate ironwork gates of the narrow churchyard, they began to cross back again. But, before they had reached the far pavement with Mrs Arthur walking a little ahead and for once holding Pelham’s hand, a sudden loud voice bawled out from the knots of idlers on either side of the gateway.

‘That’s the one. That’s the governess.’

Although she had clearly made out the words, Miss Unwin could not believe that she had heard what she had.
That’s the governess
. The shout could only refer to herself. And now that she looked at the crowd more sharply she saw that they were hardly the regular churchgoers at respectable St Stephen’s, not even the servants from other houses in the district who usually occupied its back pews. They were nothing less than a collection of roughs. But why should one of them have called out that she was there, that the governess had come?

She learnt why at once.

‘Murderess!’ shouted another voice, loudly and terribly clearly.

Miss Unwin saw Pelham dart a look back towards her, a look that showed more of fright than understanding. Nor did it seem that his mother had gathered what was happening any more than he had. She was walking sedately forward towards the far pavement and the church gates, head tilted high, seemingly oblivious of the vulgar mob.

Miss Unwin wondered for a moment whether she should hurry forward and take Pelham’s other hand to reassure him. But at once she knew she must do nothing to associate him with herself, especially as in the wake of that first ‘Murderess!’ almost everyone in the two knots of people on either side of the gateway was now shouting.

Luckily the very volume of the noise was obscuring what was being yelled for the most part. Once or twice, as she walked
slowly forward some two yards behind Mrs Arthur, she caught some particularly clear shout.

‘Let ’im seduce yer, did yer? Dirty cow.’

‘Not fit ter look arter anyone, never mind a child.’

For an instant she longed to clutch her skirts and dash full pelt up the path and into the sanctuary of the cool interior of the church. But at once she despised herself for the thought.

No, she was innocent. If the ignorant shouted and catcalled, let them. Only the truth could hurt.

By the time they had gone through the gateway the noise had penetrated even the ladylike aura which Mrs Arthur surrounded herself with. Miss Unwin saw her suddenly look back at the jeerers on the pavement and it was evident that now at last she had understood what they were calling out.

‘Come, Pelham, come.’

Her voice was high-pitched and not far from sudden hysteria.

At something like a run she hurried into the church. Her disappearance brought a renewed burst of noise from the crowd, a sort of ironical cheer. A voice called ‘You should have sacked the filthy creature long ago.’

Miss Unwin, her face set, walked the last few yards up to the church porch at the same pace that she had walked the rest of the way. But she more than half-expected to feel a stone come flying through the air and strike her on the back.

Inside the church she made no attempt to go up the aisle to the Thackerton pew near the front, but sank on to her knees on a hassock in the first vacant place she saw.

But even then she was aware that at once the person sitting on the bench next to her had moved sharply away.

Miss Unwin paid little heed to the service that Sunday morning. The thought of the shouts and jeers of the crowd outside made her shudder each time they entered her mind. There must be gossip all round the district, for miles around, to attract such roughs to the church just to see herself. In the public houses where the men servants of the area went to drink her name must have been bandied about. The vilest things must have been said about her. The scandal hinted at by Hopkinson of the
Mercury
, on the basis of that quarter-minute and by Mr Commonsense of
The Times
, read by dozens of butlers as they ironed its inky sheets, must have been discussed, embroidered on, laughed over in the coarsest way.

And tomorrow, when there were newspapers published again, Horatio Hopkinson would tell the world at length about the murder of poor Simmons, would speculate afresh over its implications. Then things would go from bad to worse.

Once she could have borne it all, however filthy the rumours. Long ago such tittle-tattling, however much neighbourhood tongues wagged, would not have touched her. In those days she had been low and there was nothing that could have sunk her lower. But now, now she had climbed up to the slippery perch she rested on, each word she imagined being said of her was like a slap in the face.

At last the congregation embarked on the final hymn. With a twist of irony that she was able to recognise through all her misery, it proved to be that favourite of the children’s hymnodist, Mrs Alexander, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ with its unbending description of the social order, ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, and ordered their estate.’

In her distress Miss Unwin found it hard to say to herself, as in better times she had, that this was only the opinion of one woman
versifier. Instead she found herself questioning whether by moving from the low estate into which she had been born she had indeed sinned against an immutable law. Were those jeers and catcalls her punishment? Was there to be yet worse to come?

Angrily she shook off the thought. No, she had risen in the world by her own good efforts, aided by kindness that she had had no right to expect. But those efforts had been hard indeed to make. She had toiled, she knew, far more than she would ever have had to have done had she been content to remain the maidservant she had become, like Vilkins, when they had both left the parish workhouse together. She deserved to be at the height, such as it was, that she had risen to. She did deserve it, and if she was to be cast down from it now it would be an injustice that cried out for remedy.

But would Mrs Arthur Thackerton see any injustice there? It was scarcely likely.

She could imagine that as soon as they had returned from church Mrs Arthur would tell her husband about ‘the disgraceful scene’ outside the gates, even if it was not repeated when, in a few minutes’ time, they had to leave. Then there would come the unyielding words of dismissal, and this time no threat of taking legal action would save her. Mr Arthur would know very well that such expense was beyond her purse. He would act ruthlessly and he would act quickly.

She might well sleep in a different bed this very night. At the Governess’s Benevolent Institution, if she was lucky. At somewhere yet more bleak if they denied her the right there to call herself a governess any longer.

‘All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.’

The final repeated chorus of the hymn came to its triumphant conclusion. A few last organ notes reverberated in the high roof of the church. The Rector and the choir filed out. In the nave the worshippers in the back pews waited respectfully for those in the front ones to leave.

Miss Unwin saw Mrs Arthur coming towards her down the aisle with Pelham’s small hand clutched in hers so tightly that the tips of his fingers were a pulsating red.

She stepped out from her place to join them.

‘Stay where you are,’ Mrs Arthur hissed like a snake about to strike. ‘Stay where you are, and do not try to come to the house till I have taken Pelham back.’

Miss Unwin flinched and moved into her pew again. The words were no more than she had expected. But they had hurt.

She wondered with an inner sinking whether the crowd that had assembled for the pleasure of abusing her had dispersed.

The last reverberations of the organ had died away. She listened intently. A few of the congregation as they neared the doors had begun speaking to each other in voices discreetly low. But it was not difficult to hear sounds from outside.

There seemed to be no shouting. Only there came to Miss Unwin’s ears the raised voices of neighbours greeting each other.

She stepped aside to allow the other people in her pew to leave. The women among them, without exception, clutched their skirts tightly around themselves so that there was no possibility of them even touching her. But this no longer upset her. She had been scorned enough already.

Besides, when she got to No 3 Northumberland Gardens, she knew for certain now something worse than scorn awaited her.

At last she thought that Mrs Arthur and Pelham would have got sufficiently far ahead for her to be able to venture out without causing Mrs Arthur the terrible shame of being seen with her. She hurried past the few remaining members of the congregation who were standing talking in the sunshine – were they discussing the dreadful Thackerton governess? What if they were? – and made her way back towards Northumberland Gardens, deliberately choosing to walk in the full glare of the sun by way of accepting some punishment somehow to mitigate the wrath that awaited her when the door of No 3 opened to her ring on the bell.

Should she even ring at the servants’ bell as a sign of humility? No. No. No. She would not. She had earned the right to use the visitors’ bell and she would exercise it.

The door opened almost as soon as her gloved finger had touched the bell-push.

Henry was there in the full glory of his livery, wig on head powdered to a fine whiteness, green plush braided coat well-fitting across wide shoulders, white breeches snowy as his wig, stockings taut across the well-shaped thighs that had as much as anything secured him his post. Then, peering further into the hall, which was deep in shadow after the glare of the sun outside, Miss Unwin saw, drawn up for the sole purpose of confronting her, a grim party of three.

In the middle stood Mr Arthur, tall, flushed of face between his well-brushed Piccadilly Weeper whiskers, mouth set in a fierce line under his moustache. To his left stood Mrs Arthur, in her go-to-church finery, and still with the furious expression that had been on her face when she had hissed her warning to follow only at a great distance. And, unexpected but no surprise, on Mr Arthur’s right there was Sergeant Drewd.

As she took a pace into the hall past the impassive Henry, the Sergeant stepped forward in his turn.

‘Miss Harriet Unwin,’ he said, rolling the syllables on his tongue.

Miss Unwin drew back her shoulders and advanced to meet whatever fate awaited her.

‘Yes, Sergeant. You were waiting to see me?’

‘Waiting, yes. To see you, yes. To have a word with you, yes indeed.’

‘Then perhaps we should step into the dining-room,’ Miss Unwin said. ‘I do not think the servants will have begun to lay the table for luncheon yet.’

‘Ah, no, miss,’ Sergeant Drewd retorted. ‘I don’t see this as what you might call a dining-room matter. What I have to say can be said where we are. Just exactly where we are.’

He gave a glance to each side and shot another in the direction of Henry standing, tall and impassive in his green livery, beside the door he had just closed.

Yes, thought Miss Unwin, you want your audience.

She felt a sudden inner sinking. Was what the Sergeant wanted an audience for to be the arrest in the case of the murder of
William Thackerton and the subsequent murder of Simmons? It looked very much as if it was.

Had he then contrived now to find something he saw as being good evidence against her? But what was there to find? Had he, perhaps, though, while she and Mrs Arthur had been out at church, succeeded in making his way to Mrs Thackerton in her bedroom and there persuading her into retracting the claim that had seemed to prove her own innocence of the murder of Simmons?

Or, worse, had he now manufactured some ‘Dirtyguts’ trick or other, and was he about to spring that trap?

‘I have just one question to ask you, miss,’ the Sergeant went on, secure of his spectators. ‘Just one question and that is all.’

‘Very well, Sergeant. I shall do my best to answer.’

But what question would it be? Would she have a good answer to it? Almost certainly not, if the Sergeant was so sure of himself in putting it to her. But, even if she did, would that of itself be enough to lift suspicion from her shoulders once again?

Sergeant Drewd came stepping forward towards her, and, as he reached her, whipped round his right hand, which he had been holding stiffly behind his back, and thrust it almost into her face.

She looked down. He seemed to be holding, bunched in his fist, a small piece of white cloth, a corner of it drooping down in front.

‘Now, miss. What I have to ask is this, this and this only. Do you recognise the handkerchief I am holding in front of you?’

Still somewhat dazzled from the effect of the strong sunlight outside, Miss Unwin had not realised that what the Sergeant had been holding out to her was a handkerchief. She blinked now and peered at it more closely.

She saw on the corner that hung down from the Sergeant’s fist two initials worked delicately into the fine fabric. The letters H and U. Her own initials.

‘Yes,’ she said, puzzlement seeping into her brain like an on-coming mist. ‘Yes, I do recognise it. It is one of my own handkerchiefs, a very precious one I was given by –’

She hesitated for a moment.

‘A precious handkerchief I was given by a former pupil.’

It had been the gift, in fact, of the young lady whose leaving
home to be married had been the cause of her own elevation in the world from lady’s-maid into lady. The embroidery had been done, in greatest secrecy, by her young mistress on a particularly fine piece of cambric.

The only handkerchief of such material that she possessed, she never used it but kept it carefully in the top drawer of the chest in her bedroom. What was it doing here now, in the Sergeant’s hand?