The Solitary House (20 page)

The man glares at him for a moment, then nods. There’s a tiny spasm under his left eye that wasn’t there before.

He keeps Charles waiting, for all that. Half an hour later he’s on the point of going back inside and hauling Jacky out in front of the lot of them when the kitchen door opens and the man sidles out, looking more edgy than ever. He stops in the doorway and takes a small screw of paper from his jacket, then stuffs a penn’orth of tobacco into his cheek and starts to chew.

“They don’t let us have pipes in there. Not while we’re working. And I can’t stay long. They’ll have my arse if I’m not back in five minutes.”

“Let’s get it over with then.”

Charles gets out a folded piece of newsprint and pushes it under the man’s nose. It’s a page from the
Illustrated London News
, and it took him most of the afternoon to find it. The quality of the illustration is not as good as he’d hoped, but it’s a likeness nonetheless. A likeness of Sir Julius Cremorne.

“Recognise him?”

Jacky shifts his tobacco to the other cheek and carries on chewing. “If that’s who I think it is, he’s a regular. Twice—sometimes three
times a week. Drinks a lot of brandy, gambles a lot of money. Ideal client for a place like this.”

“Who does he come with?”

“Couple of other stuffed shirts. Same crowd mostly. Sometimes there’s a stiff old fellow with grey hair, but usually it’s another younger cove with a nasty mark on the back of his hand. Looked to me like a knife done it—he usually keeps his gloves on, but I saw it once when I was on privy duty.”

You and I have seen this man before, but Charles, of course, did not, which means he cannot possibly realise the significance of this otherwise trivial observation.

“What about the girls?”

The man looks at him but says nothing.

“Don’t be coy with me, Jacky. I know as well as you do why men like him come to a
place like this
.”

Jacky’s shaking his head. “Yeah, he likes the tarts. Has his own type, like most of ’em. Blonde’s his favourite, but most of all he likes variety, him and the other one both. And they like to
share
, know what I mean?”

“Anything else?” Charles’s face is grim.

Jacky eyes him narrowly. “There was another cove he came with once—now, he’s a different kettle of fish altogether. I seen him before. He don’t come for the girls, that one, he comes for the
boys
. Guardsmen if he can get them, specially the young ones, but he ain’t that fussy. I should know.”

He moves closer, all his previous jumpiness gone. “You know too, don’t you? I mean, you might look all innocent and like butter wouldn’t melt,” he whispers, “but you and I know better.
Don’t we?
”

And then the kitchen door opens, and there’s the sound of an angry voice calling his name, and Jacky is gone.

Back out on Haymarket, the lights are even brighter, the music even louder, and the crowds even thicker. Charles has just stepped aside to
allow a blue silk train the space to pass when he feels a small cold hand slide into his, and another close tightly around his balls. “Fancy a frig, mister?”

He knows the voice; has known it, in fact, these five years and more. The girl standing behind him is tiny and her impish features heavily made-up, but there’s life and real affection in the bright green eyes. She’s arrayed in an expensive and extremely fashionable combination of ruby satin and white lace that clashes jauntily with her anything-but-expensive accent. Though as Charles well knows, she can mimic the gentry to perfection when it suits her—in fact this talent of hers has been more than a little useful to him in the past. He may have met her first in the exercise of her profession, but she’s been invaluable to him since in the pursuance of his own, both official and unofficial. Informer, undercover agent, decoy, spy: Lizzie has been all of this to him, and more. As well as a true and unfailing friend. But there is one more fact about Lizzie Miller that you need to know, and will not discover from anything these two are about to say: She is the same age, almost to the day, as the sister he has lost. That other Elizabeth who had the same golden hair, and the same bright green eyes; that other Elizabeth he has never, in all this time, ceased to search for.

“I got your message,” the girl says now with a smile, before looking up in his face and sensing his unease. “Somefing up, Charlie?”

“It’s cold out here, Lizzie, do you want a drink?”

She shakes her head. “The old hag is watching us—see? Over there, pretendin’ to look in the shop winda?”

The woman’s probably no more than fifty but looks and dresses like an old crone. As drab as Lizzie is gay, with strands of dry grey hair escaping from an old straw bonnet and dirty marks on her patched cotton dress.

“She’s checkin’ up on me—makin’ sure I don’t ’ook it in the bloody frock she spent so much money on. She won’t be too fond of you neither so you’d better be quick, whatever it is.”

The girl moves away from the glare of the lamp, and Charles follows her into the comparative shadow of a closed doorway. There he fishes inside his coat and pulls out his sheet of newsprint.

“Have you ever seen this man?”

Lizzie squints at the page. Those green eyes of hers are not just very pretty, but very long-sighted, and the smudgy images all look alike to her. “Bloody ’ell, Charlie, that could be anyone! Dark coat and a beard—is that the best you can do? Half the blokes in London look like that, and most of them are down ’ere at least once a week. I must a shagged a dozen like that in the last two nights alone.”

“He’s a banker. Sir Julius Cremorne. You must have heard of him.”

Lizzie snorts. “If I ’ad a shillin’ for everyone as ’as told me they was a lord or a sir or a bloody judge, I wouldn’t ’ave to drop me knickers to buy me bread. You’ll ’ave to do better than that.”

“He stammers,” says Charles suddenly, the words out before he’s even had the conscious thought.

“What’s that?” says Lizzie, her voice dropping.

“I think—I’m not sure—but I think there’s a good chance he might have a stammer. Why—does it remind you of someone?”

The girl puts out a hand and leans heavily against the wall.

“What is it, Lizzie?” says Charles, grabbing her by the shoulder. “You know him, don’t you?”

She turns and spits into the street, which tells him far more than anything she’s yet said: She’s hardened to her life, tough as it is, not usually so easily rattled. “Oh yeah,” she says bitterly, “I’ve seen him.”

She looks up and past Charles’s shoulder. The older woman is moving through the milling crowds in their direction. She’s surprisingly agile for such a stout matron, and she does not look pleased.

“Look,” says Lizzie in a quick whisper, “come and see me Monday—I’m off to Brighton for the weekend first fing wiv one a me reg’lars—Bert ’itchins—remember ’im?—but I’ll be back Monday. Come and see me in the afternoon. But meanwhile—”

She’s about to say something more but the old woman is already upon them. “Are you buying, sir?” she says tartly, breathing gin fumes
in his face. “Because if not, Lizzie has work to do, and I’d thank you not to occupy her.”

Charles and Lizzie exchange a glance. She looks—to his eyes—pale and stricken under the paint, but he’ll get no more from her with her iron-eyed minder in tow.

Monday seems a very long way away, but it doesn’t look like he has much choice. He’s going to have to wait.

TWELVE

The Letter and the Answer

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
brings a reply from Eleanor Jellicoe, and an invitation to call on her that afternoon at her house in Brixton. It’s a grey drear day of low cloud and fine almost imperceptible rain. Not a morning that tempts you outside; indeed, the sort of morning that seems made for domestic preoccupations, especially those you’ve been finding excuses to avoid for weeks. Like unpacking. Though to be fair to Charles, he has made a certain amount of progress since we last took a look round his attic refuge. There are now four shelves of books, more or less neatly arranged, but the rest of his precious collection is still bedded in sawdust in three large crates. He leaves the warm bedclothes to Thunder the cat, who bunches them up into a curled nest, and calls to Billy for his breakfast to be brought up on a tray. And then he gets to work. With so much more space at his disposal than in Percy Street, he can have the luxury of a rather more scientific organisational principle, and he spends a happy half hour deciding which system to employ to group his objects. And so it is that he does not hear the door open—does not hear the girl’s feet, bare as ever, whatever the temperature, approach across the wooden
boards. Hears nothing, in fact, until the plate and tin mug clatter to the floor and he turns to see her face.

He has never seen a look of such abject terror before; never, indeed, seen the phrase
horror-struck
as anything other than a ludicrous hyperbole fit only for one of Mrs Stacey’s Gothic novels. But there are no other words. Her eyes are dilated black with fear and her mouth distorted like a cry of pain. He starts towards her, out of pure instinct, but she staggers back from him, her lips moving soundlessly. And now he knows—the
what
anyway, if not the
why
. He is holding the menace in his own hands. One of the centrepieces of his collection, acquired—at a price—from an explorer recently returned from the left bank of the Niger, and about to occupy pride of place under
Ethnographical
between the shrunken South American head and a Chinese
urh heen
fiddle (which is a rather finer example, in fact, than the one on display at that very moment on the upper floor of the British Museum).

The bearded mask.

He stands there, looking down at the thing lying there in his hands, and realises with a jolt that this is surely the point. To him it’s just a ‘thing’—a treasured thing, a beautiful thing, but a thing all the same—a mere artefact, collected for its craftsmanship and prized primarily as an intriguing if uncivilised curiosity. Words like
demon
and
magic
and
soul-eating
may be nothing but quaint pagan concepts for him, but he has only to look at the girl to know that it is not so for her. What little he understands of the purpose and use of such masks comes straight (or crookedly) from the mouths of European missionaries, but even such partial and ill-informed accounts are enough for him to know that she might now believe herself cursed—as
a woman and an uninitiate—merely for laying eyes on it, just as surely as he profanes it with the touch of his sacrilegious hands. Charles is the one who feels accursed now—cursed by carelessness—and he plunges the mask back in the sawdust with a hot flush of shame before turning back to the girl.

“It’s gone. I’m sorry—I had no idea.”

Molly is still standing on the same spot. The only difference now is that there are huge tears coursing silently down her cheeks; tears she makes no effort to wipe away. Charles is seized with an immense, irrational desire to touch those tears—to put his fingers gently against that face. But he does nothing. Embarrassment? Fear of rejection? Mere clumsiness? Some or all of the above, no doubt. And perhaps—more to his credit—a sudden realisation that this girl, too, must have been considered, at least by some, as little more than an intriguing if uncivilised curiosity. Which is enough, all things considered, to stop him doing anything other than stand there, unmoving, until he hears the sound of Billy coming up the stairs. He seizes the excuse to move swiftly to the door and close it behind him, leaving Molly standing exactly where she was, surrounded by the ruins of his uneaten breakfast. As he clatters down the stairs Charles tells himself he’s doing it for her sake—protecting her from Billy’s all-too-perceptive eyes—but I suspect that this time he’s being disingenuous, and I’m reminded of the old truism that it’s the lies you tell yourself that are the worst lies of all. Something Maddox tried to tell him only a few days ago, though without very much success.

Half an hour later Charles is on a large red omnibus lumbering slowly over Westminster Bridge. The traffic heading into town on the opposite side of the road is almost at a standstill—a line of carriages, carts, wagons, and hackney-coaches stretches back to the far end of the bridge and beyond, the carters cracking their whips and swearing. Crowds of clerks and office workers are making their equally hindered way on foot. Dark grey figures on a pale grey day; a palette
of neutral tones. As soon as the ’bus turns down the Brixton Road Charles realises with a start that it must be two years or more since he came this way. He can still remember fields backing onto the rather elegant houses that line this street—marshy scrubby tracts of unloved land, in the main, but green all the same. Now the seep of the suburbs is absorbing these last remnants of countryside, and what once were villages are gluing irrevocably together in lacklustre London leakage. Meadow after meadow pass them by, sliced now into residential building plots. Here and there the outline of a street has been cut, and two or three show-homes stand on the corner sites. They look sharp enough, these little model houses, their paintwork unpeeled and their small squares of rudimentary garden marked out with posts and string, but those who buy them may find the workmanship belies the sprightly exterior. Corners are cut here, as well as built on. Farther down the road the ’bus rumbles past other sites which have clearly not attracted such an encouraging level of interest; here the ground is merely squared into foundations, with large confident notice-boards posted along the fence proclaiming
This Ground to Be Let
. Farther still, and we’re into dirty shanty settlements, where the dogs fight, the weeds grow rank, and rubbish is dumped daily by contractors unconstrained by such nice concepts as ‘Health’ and ‘Safety’.