The Man of Gold (18 page)

‘Surely, sir,’ Miss Unwin said, ‘it is a distance that can easily be walked? Or do you feel truly ill?’

She looked at him with quick anxiety. But there was no sign on his face that he was more than merely tired, and indeed already he had regained much of his colour.

‘Ah, but no, my dear,’ he said in answer. ‘We are not going tamely back to the house. Far from it. This is no moment for quiet regularity. Can you guess where I intend to take you?’

Miss Unwin could not. No idea came into her head of where Richard, so soon after his release from that long series of questionings, could possibly want to go. Once, yes, before his father’s death when the house had been so cold and uncomfortable, he might have wanted to visit a Turkish bath. But now there was no reason why he should not bath to his heart’s content in water as hot as he liked in his own home, and drink tea there and eat a good breakfast beside a fire if he wanted one.

‘You cannot guess?’ Richard asked with a smile.

‘No, sir, not possibly.’

‘Not after what Inspector Redderman has just told me about you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Why, you goose, I am going to take you to buy you a present. The best there is to be had. We’ll go to Asprey’s.’

‘To Asprey’s, the jeweller’s?’

Miss Unwin felt altogether dazed by this impetuosity. She hardly knew what to think. That Richard should be so eager to show his regard for her – no, she corrected herself, surely his love for her – made her glow and glow with pleasure. But, without at first quite knowing why, she did not altogether like the manner in which he was proposing to show this gratitude, this love.

Words alone, she thought, as gradually she came to terms with the whirling feelings inside her, words of thanks alone would have been enough. More than enough. To hear Richard voice his thanks for what little she had done for him with all the warmth she recognised that he was showing in this other madder enterprise: that would have satisfied her every dream. But to hear him proposing to spend some large sum on a piece of jewellery from the shop which she understood to be the best and most expensive in all London: it was something she could not find wholly pleasing.

But the hansom had come to a halt beside them in the roadway. Richard had opened its doors. He put out his arm to hand her up the iron step. How could she disappoint him?

Meekly she allowed herself to be installed in the fly-away vehicle. A moment later Richard was there beside her. A moment more and he was tapping on the roof above them in signal to the cabbie behind to start. And then they were bowling along with all the exhilaration that a ride in a hansom can possess when there is little traffic to impede its way.

Then they were in Bond Street and the vehicle had halted outside the tall impressive building that housed the jewellers, and its wide plate-glass windows with their discreet displays of fabulous gems were glittering in the May sunshine before her.

‘Rich – Mr Partington,’ she managed to say before she had stepped down from the lightly swaying cab. ‘Mr Partington, please do not think I am not grateful for the offer you are making me. But – But, truly, I do not want anything. I do not feel it is right that you should give me anything.’

Except, except, she added secretly to herself, except your love.

‘Nonsense, nonsense,’ Richard answered.

And he held out his hand with such firm gaiety that she could not do other than put hers into it and allow him to help her down on to the pavement.

‘Please, sir,’ she said, ‘it is not nonsense. Very well, if you will, I acknowledge that I may have done something to secure your release from Inspector Redderman’s interrogation. But whatever I have done, I have done willingly and would do again without a second thought.’

‘But you have done for me what no one else would do. You have done what no one else could have done, I am certain. And I will reward you. Indeed, whatever bauble I find for you here will not be half enough to show my – my feelings.’

It was these last two words that were Miss Unwin’s undoing. That Richard should wish to show her not simply gratitude, but feelings. She felt no longer able to resist anything. For what else could he have meant by the word than feelings of love?

Before she knew it she was in the shop, and before they had been inside its doors five minutes the top of the glass showcase in front of her was strewn with a profusion of jewelled objects glinting richly against a thrown-down velvet cloth.

‘Now, choose,’ Richard said. ‘And do not hesitate. Whatever catches your fancy you shall have. Take two, if you want. Do take any two that you cannot choose between.’

‘But, Mr Partington-’

‘No. No buts. Or only: But I would like three. That is the furthest I am prepared to allow you.’

Miss Unwin desperately wanted to say that if she were being given a true choice, then she wanted nothing. But the shopman was standing there, leaning a little forward with obsequious interest, and she felt she could not engage in a battle of contradiction.

She looked down again at the glittering display. Was there something, one thing, that seemed less costly than the others? Was there not something that looked decently modest?

Her eye fell on a little heart-shaped olivine brooch surrounded by a tiny border of pearls. It was very pretty. If she had been a rich woman she could have seen herself wanting such an object. And besides it was heart-shaped. And it really seemed to be the least valuable object in front of her.

She wished violently that the shopman had murmured prices as one by one at Richard’s instigation he had brought out the wealth the place possessed. But he had been discretion itself.

‘Now, choose. One, two or three. Choose.’

‘Well, if you insist. Then – Then this.’

She picked up the brooch. It really was delightfully pretty.

‘But you have chosen the very smallest item,’ Richard said. ‘Add something else to it. This necklace, now would not that suit you admirably?’

‘No, sir, it would not.’

‘Not? But why ever do you say so? It seems to me that it would set off your features to a nicety.’

‘As to that, sir, I cannot be the judge. But it would not suit me because it is a necklace of diamonds.’

‘And they would gain lustre from your wearing them.’

Richard’s eyes shone in his round, snub-nosed face, and Miss Unwin felt for him at that moment such a gush of love that tears came.

But she was not going to yield.

‘No, Mr Partington,’ she said. ‘Because you have made such a point of it I will accept this brooch. But nothing more. Nothing. Do not press me, or I shall refuse even this charming thing.’

‘Very well, you obdurate person,’ Richard said.

He turned to the shopman, pulling out his newly acquired chequebook with a flourish.

‘How much do I owe you?’ he asked.

‘Just fifty guineas, sir.’

‘Fifty-’

Miss Unwin had to rein herself sharply back. But she longed to heap reproaches on the giver of the gift. Fifty guineas. It was a sum out of all proportion to anything she had done to earn it.

But Richard, without a qualm, was writing out the cheque.

Miss Unwin sat in silence in the hansom that whisked them back to the Harrow Road. She hoped that Richard, who had been so absurdly, so ridiculously, generous was taking her silence for a gratitude that had deprived her of words. But the truth was that speech had been taken from her by the turmoil of mixed feelings she was experiencing.

At the house Richard asked her to stay with him while he ate a late breakfast. But Miss Unwin was adamant.

‘I am here as governess to your daughters, Mr Partington,’ she said. ‘And I am afraid that of late I have been scandalously neglectful of my duty towards them.’

So she spent the rest of the day no longer as an investigator of crime but as a simple governess. And very glad she was to be able to do that. For one thing she found the many hours that Louisa and Maria had been made to sit alone studying the tasks she had given them had had as bad an effect as she had feared. In the months she had been in the house she had, she prided herself, gradually brought them both from a state of semi-savagery to taking a real interest in what she had to teach. But it had been
hard work, and their attention to their lessons had always been precarious. Now they had lapsed.

Miss Unwin had been aware of their falling into bad ways even before she had been temporarily not a governess but an investigator. There had been signs of a slackness she deplored, but she had put it out of her mind when Richard himself was in jeopardy. There had been worse signs, too, of a new greediness despite the gifts their father had showered them with before his incarceration. The more they had received the more Louisa at least had seemed to want. But, again, Miss Unwin had shut her eyes.

‘Louisa, pay attention,’ she said now, for the fifth or sixth time that morning. ‘If you will not listen, you cannot learn.’

‘But, Miss Unwin, Papa is back today. We really ought to have a holiday.’

‘What nonsense. Just because your father has been away on business and has now returned there is no need for you to break off the course of your studies.’

‘But it has been broken off, Miss Unwin,’ Maria pointed out more quietly. ‘You have scarcely been with us to give us any lessons for a week.’

‘Well, no, Maria, it has not been as long as that. But I agree I have been absent more than I would have liked. However, it was necessary and there it is.’

Then she saw Louisa give her twin a glance which clearly boded some naughtiness.

‘Now, Louisa.
La plume de ma tante est sur la table
. Translate, please.’

‘But, Miss Unwin,
le père de nous est-or
rather he has been –
dans prison.’

‘You were not meant to know that,’ Miss Unwin burst out before she could stop herself. ‘How did you know it? And, besides, it isn’t true.’

‘Oh, Miss Unwin, we never thought you would tell a fib,’ Louisa said with great cheerfulness.

‘I am not – No, dear, what I have said is nothing but the plain truth. Your father has not been in prison. True, he has been kept at the police office. Your grandfather died in a mysterious manner, and of course the police have to inquire into it all. But it has been no more than that.’

‘But he was locked up,’ Maria observed.

‘Well, yes, I suppose that he was prevented from returning home. But that was all a dreadful mistake. The Inspector, Inspector Redderman, has now come clearly to the conclusion that, of course, your father could have had nothing to do with the dreadful thing that has happened.’

Miss Unwin, even as she spoke, knew that what she was saying was not the exact truth. Inspector Redderman had made a point of indicating that he still considered it possible that Richard had been responsible for the crime. But that was simply not the case. It could not be true. So there was no harm, surely, in softening a little the Inspector’s warning.

‘Well, in any case,’ Louisa said, ‘if Papa was locked up and has now been let out we ought to have a holiday.’

‘But you will not. You have already missed too many lessons, and we are going to make up for lost time as hard as we can.’

‘Well, you may be going to as hard as you can, Miss,’ the irrepressible Louisa said. ‘But as for us, well, we’ll just have to wait and see.’

But at least she bent her head over her French book once again.

So the rest of the day passed quietly enough. They all dined together, and Richard cut such prodigious slices of mutton that Miss Unwin wondered whether her plate would hold them all. And afterwards she made an excuse of lessons to prepare for the next day and retreated to her room. There, with wonderful relief, she set aside
Potherton on Poisons
and took up instead her French grammar. She was not so far ahead of her pupils in knowledge of that language that she
could afford to forget her own studies.

The next day seemed to pass as easily and well as the day before it. Life was back to its ordinary way, Miss Unwin felt. True, old Mr Partington’s death was as much of a mystery as ever. But she presumed Inspector Redderman was making inquiries in Nile Street. Perhaps he had already arrested Mrs Meggs and they would only be told of it when it pleased him to do so. Certainly the day before, as she had learnt from Vilkins, he had paid a prompt visit to the kitchen quarters and had carried out a long examination of Mrs Meggs’s old room before sealing it under lock and key.

So perhaps it was all over.

Then quite late in the afternoon, after she had brought the girls back from their walk and was reading to them, Vilkins knocked at the door.

‘Yes, Mary, what is it?’

‘Please, Miss,’ Vilkins said in her best parlour-maid manner, which was not very much of a parlour-maid manner but sufficed. ‘Please, Miss, you’re wanted by the Master. Down in the drawing room – and he’s in a taking about something.’

‘That will do, Mary.’

But by delivering this mild rebuke Miss Unwin failed to learn that Richard was not alone in the drawing room. She entered only slightly puzzled as to what he could urgently want at an hour when he knew the girls’ lessons were not quite over. And there standing gravely by the fireplace was Inspector Redderman with beside him, more grave and much more rotund, Doctor Sumsion.

‘Miss Unwin,’ Inspector Redderman said without preliminary, ‘Mr Partington thinks that you should be present to hear certain matters which have come to light.’

‘Yes, Inspector?’

‘Perhaps you would be as well to be seated.’

‘Very well, if what you have to say will take some time.’

Miss Unwin chose the first chair to hand and sat.

‘Doctor,’ the Inspector went on, having seemed to take charge, ‘you had better say what has to be said.’

‘If you wish it.’

Doctor Sumsion gave a little cough.

‘I understand, Miss Unwin,’ he began, ‘that it was you who pointed out to the Inspector here the presence in this house of a considerable number of empty bottles that had once contained Fowler’s Solution.’

‘I did, sir.’

‘Yes, well, I am sure it was most perspicacious of you.’