Untitled (9 page)

   "Yes, sir."

   He perches on the edge of the armchair and holds his hands out to the fire. "I hear you were the one to open the door. He must have been an audacious fellow to have presented himself as me."

   "Yes, sir."

   He looks at her. "I know the police officers spoke to you, asked you questions, that sort of thing. But let me put this question to you again: What did the man look like?"

   "Oh, sir." She sucks at her lip as she looks towards the wall, bringing into her mind's eye the man she saw so briefly. "He had a beard, a brown beard going grey."

   "So do half the older men in London."

   "Sir?"

   But he waves at her to continue.

   "He was older than you, sir, by quite a way."

   He nods. "So, he was nothing like me at all, by all accounts. This is really quite remarkable."

   Jane looks down at the carpet and the pattern of roses woven into it. It is not her fault, she tells herself. How could she have known that he was not only an impostor, but a bad impostor at that?

   Without looking up she senses him stepping this way and that, no doubt exasperated. "Well," he says at last, "anything else you noticed?"

   "No, sir. There was nothing much to notice. He was dressed like a gentleman."

   "L
ike
a gentleman? Do you mean he wasn't a gentleman but still you let him into the house?"

   Her breath catches in her throat. "No," she says, "that's not what I meant." For what else can she say? Yet there was something not quite like a gentleman about him, though she cannot decide what it was.

   Mr. Robert is watching her. "Well? What is it you
did
notice?"

   "He was in a black coat, a hat, and a white shirt, like a gentleman." She thinks, thinks. "His eyebrows were thick. His lips were full. He was a little stout, so that his waistcoat gaped." She is pleased with herself for all of this. Yet evidently Mr. Robert is not.

   "Yes, yes," he says. "But is there anything to distinguish him? Any mark that would set him apart from the many gentlemen in this city—other than the fact that he patently is no gentleman?" He sighs. "His voice? His accent?"

   She presses her arms against her sides to keep herself calm. "I don't know, sir—maybe his voice was a little rough."

   "Rough? How so? Uneducated?"

   "I don't know, sir, really I don't. He just didn't talk exactly like you."

   Letting his head fall forward into his hands, he sighs. "Try to think clearly. Close your eyes. Picture him to yourself. Let yourself hear him speak."

   So she closes her eyes, but that doesn't help. She sees the same man standing there, his thick beard, brown eyes beneath a black hat. An umbrella held uneasily in one hand. The stretch of his waistcoat over his belly—his coat not buttoned. A gentleman's clothes, but not quite clean and tidy enough for a gentleman: a dark smudge on the edge of his collar, his collar badly pressed. His beard unkempt. His voice when he said,
There will be repercussions, mark my words.
The sounds strangely flat, not round the way Mr. Robert talks. The way he took off down the hallway in long strides as though he was used to walking great distances—and his boots. The heels worn down on the outside because he walked a little bowlegged. But how to explain all of that without Mr. Robert suspecting she's to blame for letting in a man so obviously not a gentleman?

   She's so tired that she can't concentrate. Her head is spinning and she has to open her eyes.

   "Nothing?" he says in a tired voice.

   "Sir, when he walked—"

   "Did he limp?"

   "No, sir."

   He lets out a sigh and flicks his hand through the air. Enough. As though she couldn't have noticed anything useful, as though he should have known. "It can't be helped. I don't suppose the majority of us have a distinguishing feature that the common populace would notice." He reaches for a sheet of paper by his feet and glances at it. "Most likely we will never catch him. But he learnt his lesson, didn't he? It wasn't worth his while to risk so much only to find all these papers."

   There are papers close to her feet, and small cards. She bends down and gathers the cards together. Columns of numbers in a tight hand. Numbers upon numbers. She comes close. "Here you are, sir."

   "Thank you, Jane."

   He lets his eyes run over them, then stares back into the fire. "Not an auspicious start to your career here. For that I'm sorry. The police officers are—the police officers have seen too many cases where servants have deceived their employers. Their view is jaded."

   "Yes, sir."

   "Thank you, Jane."

   But she doesn't leave. Instead she says, "Sir, he knew the house."

   "He knew the house? What do you mean?"

   "He walked straight through to your study. As though he knew the way. And"—here her heart presses harder because something else has just struck her—"he didn't go into any of the other rooms. Did he, sir? But he was here for close to half an hour. Wouldn't a burglar want to take jewelry? There's none of that in a study. Maybe there was something in here he particularly wanted."

   He stands, his hands flying up to his head, fingers combing through his hair. "By Jove, you're right. You're exactly right."

   He looks around him as though seeing the disordered room all over again. "This sheds a new light on the matter." He takes her hand and shakes it. "You're a good girl. We'll see through to the truth of this business, yes we will."

   "Sir?" she says again.

   He looks up at her, impatiently this time.

   "He must have known, mustn't he? That it was me who was going to answer the door."

   "I suppose he would."

   "So how would he know?" She bunches up her apron between her fingers because his eyes are on hers.

   "Ah," he says at last. "Ah, I see." He smoothes his moustache and looks away. "There could be a number of explanations—but tell me, do you suspect any—any wrongdoing? From inside the house, I mean?"

   "Oh no, sir," she tells him fast. "That's not what I meant." A lie, of

course, but to hear the suspicion coming from his mouth scares her, for it gives it a life of its own.

   He raises his eyebrows. "Well, I suppose there are all sorts of ways information can be obtained. Tradesmen come to the door, delivery boys—without even thinking, it could have slipped out and been passed on."

   She watches as he moves around the room picking up papers and cards that have fallen on books, on the desk, on the carpet, even a couple in the coal scuttle. She wonders if she should help, but he seems intent on something.

   Then he pauses and looks back at her, as though he has just remembered that she is still there. "I'm sure you're eager to get back to your work. It has been a long day."

   He has already turned his attention to his papers when she closes the door. The hallway echoes under her boots, then she takes the dim stairwell down to the kitchen. It has, she thinks, been a very long day.

        
T
hrough dinner that night Robert Bentley often catches his wife's eye but says little. He asks how his mother is—"Much the same." He asks if she has read the letters to the editor in
The Times
today—she has not. He grunts and bends his head over his beef consommé. Mrs. Johnson's best, despite the interruptions and distractions of the day, but neither he nor Mina says as much. Indeed, they barely say another word, despite Cartwright and Sarah standing at attention by the sideboard, listening to their silence. The quiet magnifies Cartwright's quiet tread, Sarah's sniffs and sighs, the delicate tap of serving spoons against serving dishes, Sarah's whisper to Cartwright—"Should I fetch the roast?" When a piece of coal suddenly spits, they all jump.

   In the wake of the burglar's intrusion, silence hangs like cobwebs. What is it waiting to catch? The small buzzings of suspicion? Inklings about who and what and why that might flit through the air? But Mr. and Mrs. Robert are too cautious to talk in front of their servants, and as for their butler and their maid—they have to stand quietly until dinner is finally over, a dinner endured from soup to nuts so that, to all appearances, nothing has been upset by the events of the day.

   Then, with a glance to Cartwright, Mrs. Robert orders tea in the drawing room, and they are gone. Napkins left beside plates, chairs pushed out from the table. Sarah bursts out with, "Bloomin' heck, Mr. Cartwright, they didn't say a word about it, not a single word," and is reprimanded, for Cartwright's own nerves are becoming unstrung.

   It takes a while for the tea to come—no water had been set to boil downstairs. While Mina Bentley settles herself in front of the fire and her husband stretches his feet towards the fender and opens the newspaper, Mrs. Johnson is snapping at Elsie to fill the kettle. Robert Bentley reads out a letter to the editor, a letter about the pressing need for an efficient system of identifying recidivists. His wife says, "Oh really?" and, "How interesting," though it is clear that her interest is somewhere else entirely.

   But then, as she knows full well, so is his.

   Twenty minutes later there is all the bustle of the tea being brought in. Sarah putting down the tray, straightening one of the cups and saying, "What a day it has been, ma'am." All she gets for her trouble is Mrs. Robert glancing up at her with, "Yes, Sarah, what a day. Thank you." And that
Thank you
is enough to make her bite her teeth together and close the door just a little too hard on her way out of the room.

   They listen to Sarah's footsteps fading along the hallway, and the squeak of the door down to the kitchen. Only last week Robert remarked that they should have it oiled, but Mina shook her head— squeaking hinges, she said, have their uses. Now she sighs, reaches for the milk and pours a little into the cups. "She is growing unbearable."

   The tea gurgles into the cups, leaving a tail of steam rising through the air. He lets the newspaper drop onto his knees. "Mother likes the girl."

   "I'm sure your mother wouldn't put up with impertinence." She spoons sugar into the cups and holds one out to him.

"The servants are curious. How could they not be?"

   "Yes." She lifts a cup off its saucer and holds it between her hands. "How could they not be?"

   Later, she is sure, Sarah will be rough unfastening her dress. She is easily made resentful—for being told not to leave the house without permission, for not learning anything about the burglary this evening. But she's also not the sort to give up. Perhaps while she's folding the dress she'll offer up a little of what's being said below stairs in the hope of learning something new. There's that about Sarah—not cleverness, but tenacity and a certain lack of scruple.

   The cup is deliciously hot against Mina's palms. In the fireplace, flames are swaying through the coals, but inside the layers of her dress and petticoats, she is still cold. She lifts one foot high enough for the warm air to flood in around her ankles.

   "English houses are an abomination," she says. "You get burned on one side, and freeze on the other. Look at that." She nods at the fire. "All that heat going straight up the chimney." She glances at Robert, but he's paying no attention. His cup is forgotten on the arm of the chair. He's bent forward, eyes closed, squeezing the skin between them. This is how he will look as an old man, she thinks. His nose thinner, his shoulders bowed. She imagines herself beside him, a little stout perhaps, and her hair bright with grey. For a few moments she lets herself believe that this can happen. A quiet life together. A dull life—how wonderful! Then the weight of all that's balanced against it presses back down.

   The heat wraps itself around her. The fire splutters and spits. She draws back her feet. "What do you make of our intruder now?" she says. "I know you have a theory—I can see it on your face."

   "Oh." He gives a slight smile. "That new housemaid pointed out something interesting. The police might have noticed if they hadn't been so intent on suspecting her."

   She nods. "The poor struggling police. They never get it, do they? And then people have to call in the likes of Mr. Holmes."

   He sucks noisily at his tea. "Where else do you think Doyle gets his ideas? The police see nine cases of domestic burglary in which servants have robbed their employers. They are called in on the tenth case, and they assume it's the servants again, but instead it's something quite different."

   "Such as?"

   "Our man was a burglar."

   "Darling, only a couple of hours ago you announced that he wasn't. He didn't take a thing."

   "That was before I talked to the new housemaid." He takes another sip of his tea and scowls. "My love, you are a clever woman who has chosen a clever maid."

   "You see?" she says. "There is more to domestic management than meets the eye."

   "And more to this burglary than met my eye. The maid noticed something peculiar. Not only did our burglar go straight to the study as though he knew his way there—"

   "Whoever told him all the other servants were out could have told him that, too."

   "Yes, yes. But what is more interesting is that he was here for half an hour and didn't venture into any of the other rooms. How long could it have taken him to prise open the desk? How long to realize that the room was full of papers and more papers, and nothing of any other sort of value?"

   "Oh." She settles her cup in its saucer and grips both tightly. Her hands feel flighty.

   He doesn't notice. "That's right," he says. "I've been thinking— what could he have been after?" He nods to himself. "Well," he says, and lifts his eyes to hers, "it only just occurred to me—the work of the Troup Committee is not secret, and neither is the fact that while I am in London I shall testify before them."