Charles Palliser (108 page)

“Going entirely to pieces! Damned Jews!”

“Nobody will take your father’s acceptances,” Lady Mompesson translates; “for our credit is destroyed now that the codicil has been laid before the court and we are threatened with the loss of the estate.”

“Damnable bad news from Assinder, too.”

“Ah, Assinder,” David begins and his mother glances warningly at him.

But it is too late.

“I won’t hear any more of that!” the elderly baronet cries. “He’s the nevy of a man who served me and my father for forty years! And he’s done damn’ well by me, too!”

“He has succeeded admirably in bringing down the poor-rates,” his wife says conciliatingly ; “for he has largely excluded the settled poor. And the enclosure of the common land has been successful.”

“That may be so, Father, but Barbellion …”

“I know what Barbellion thinks,” Sir Perceval shouts. “And your mother.” He glares at her. “But it’s nonsense. I’d trust him with my life.”

He pauses and regains his breath.

497

498 THE

PALPHRAMONDS

After a moment, Lady Mompesson says equably: “Leaving that question aside, the fact is that he has estranged the chief tenants and in many cases their rents are gravely in arrears.” Before her husband can protest, she turns to her son and goes on: “That is why your father’s affairs are in so sad a state.”

“And you’re making ’em worse!” the baronet cries. “Spending your time and my money in the lowest gambling-hells. (Like that one that was robbed the other day. And serve its patrons right! Damn’ fool pastime.) Hate to think how much you’ve squandered there. Now, tell me frankly, how much are your debts?”

Mr Mompesson looks at his mother and she purses her lips.

“A little over two thousand pounds,” he answers.

The baronet looks somewhat mollified on hearing this figure: “Well, that’s bad but it ain’t impossible. There is only one thing for it: you must marry.”

“The very course I have been thinking of myself, sir.”

“Very well. But you know whom I am referring to.”

“But Father, as I said the last time we spoke of it: I need a bride with ready cash. And I believe I have found one.”

“I have told you before, the first priority must be to retain the estate.”

“But not if we can’t afford to keep it, Father. What would it matter if we lost the land as the price of remaining afloat?”

“Dammit, sir!” the baronet cries. “Have you no pride of family? Mompessons have owned land down there for hundreds of years.”

“Oh come, Father. You speak of pride, but you know the truth. We acquired the estate by very dubious means. Your grandfather got that miserable creature, James Huffam, into his power and helped him to cheat his own son of his inheritance.”

The baronet turns purple with rage and while his wife angrily signals to her son to leave the room, this is perhaps a good moment for us, too, to withdraw from this domestic scene.

Through the long hours of darkness that followed I watched the wretched creature across the cell from me as I tried to make sense of what was happening. So this was the Refuge mentioned in my mother’s narrative!

I thought of the procession of years — more than my lifetime — that he had passed here. It was a long time before it occurred to me that I was locked up with the murderer of my grandfather — since any hope I had nurtured that he might be innocent had been dispelled by the sight of that wild countenance — for this creature, now whimpering and huddling itself against the opposite wall, appeared to present no danger to anyone except perhaps itself.

For the first hour or so my cell-mate shook his chains as if trying to escape, but he was so firmly secured that he could hardly move. Then he set to moaning and rubbing his head against his upper arms which was all he could reach, constrained as he was by the links, and after some time the terrible idea came to me that he was weeping. It occurred to me to attempt to speak to him, but here a difficulty arose: I did not know how to address him.

Eventually I said simply: “Do you understand me?”

At my words he pressed himself back against the wall, staring at me in THE BEST OF INTENTIONS

499

terror and trying to shield his face. And it was long before he was quiet again.

The long night dragged by. There were noises from elsewhere in the house for I heard a thin wailing sound that was so unrelenting that it might have been the wind — except that I believed it was a calm night.

So little light reached the cell that it was difficult to know when the dawn had arrived, but at what I took to be an early hour, Dr Alabaster came to the grille accompanied by the turn-key who had brought me there the night before.

My poor fellow-inmate cowered back at the sound of the mad-doctor’s voice : “Good morning, Master Clothier.”

I crossed to the grille and peered through it at the sallow features of Dr Alabaster.

“Don’t call me that!”

“I trust you passed a pleasant night,” he went on; “reunited, after so long a separation, with your esteemed parent.” He held a lanthorn up to the grille so that it illuminated my face: “But I see that you appear tired. My fear is that he may have kept you awake with his eloquence. You must have had a great deal to talk over together. Has he told you of your distinguished grandfather — who I believe died before you could have the pleasure of making his acquaintance — and of his own affection for the gentleman and of its practical expression?”

He motioned to the turn-key to unlock the door and as it swung open he made a mock rush towards the chained creature who started back in terror. Without thinking I hurled myself at our tormentor, butting with my head since my arms were secured. The other man, however, pulled me away and hit me in the face so that I fell stunned onto the stone-flagged floor whose thin covering of straw gave little protection.

“Be careful not to mark the body, Rookyard!” exclaimed the doctor, brushing down his coat with a glance of deep resentment towards me. “I was warned that he was violent.

We may have to use the Tranquillizer or the crib.”

Rookyard smiled reflectively.

“Put him in one of the low grates,” said Dr Alabaster. Then he said to me with a thin smile: “Now take leave of your father properly, as a dutiful and affectionate son.”

When I did not move Rookyard propelled me violently forward so that the poor wretched creature cowered back against the wall.

“What an affecting scene,” said Dr Alabaster.

He began to walk away up the passage but then turned and said: “Show yourself to be your father’s son, Master Clothier, and don’t disappoint your family’s hopes in you.”

There was a coarse guffaw of laughter from Rookyard and from the tall man, whom I now saw to be waiting in the passage. Then they pushed me before them in the other direction.

At the end of the passage we ascended some stone stairs — the turn-keys kicking and tripping me as I climbed — and then passed along another passage, then down some more steps into what seemed to be the cellar level of the building. Here we stopped and when the giant had unlocked another iron-grilled door, Rookyard pushed me through it so hard that I fell sprawling on the ground. As I picked myself up I found I was in a cell that seemed to me to be identical to the first, except that it was uninhabited: there was straw on the floor and a tiny barred window high up. There were no articles of furniture 500 THE

PALPHRAMONDS

or, indeed, any contents except a narrow palliasse of straw, a jug and a wooden platter containing some cold porage.

Rookyard released me from the strait-waistcoat and then the door clanged shut behind me. Looking at the food and the water in the jug, it came to me that they were poisoned and so, despite my hunger and thirst, I determined neither to eat nor to drink, let the consequences be what they would.

My only hope lay in escaping, and with this in mind I examined my cell. The window was not only too high up to reach but also, with its iron bars, impossible to squeeze through. From the feeble quality of the light that came through it, I seemed to be below ground level and on a quiet side of the building. Peering through the small grille that surmounted the iron-bound door, I could see a little way along the passage in either direction by the faint lume of a distant gas-mantle. Holding the bars of the grille, I pulled myself up the door until I was just able to peer out of the bottom of the window on the opposite wall. I could make out a patch of waste ground with a scrubby grass-plat beyond it on which a broken wheel-barrow was lying on its side, and further off some untended shrubs and a large pond surrounded by a muddy swamp. There was no prospect of escaping that I could imagine.

The long hours dragged by and the cell was as cold as the other had been, and I was still in only my night-shirt. (I discovered that at least I still had the sovereign that I had hidden in its hem.) I was so hungry and thirsty that, towards noon, I nearly succumbed very suddenly to the temptation offered by the bason of congealed porage and the jug of cloudy water. But this would be to abandon the quest both to bring the Clothiers to justice for what they had done to me and my family, and to unravel the mysteries that surrounded me.

I was dozing on the palliasse when I suddenly heard something and looked up just in time to see an object being pushed through the grille and falling onto the straw on the floor. I rushed to the door but because of my limited angle of view was only in time to glimpse a figure passing swiftly and almost noiselessly along the passage away from me.

I picked up the object and found that it was half of a loaf of bread wrapped in a piece of muslin cloth that I found to be soaking wet. Here were the food and drink that I desperately needed! Then a suspicion came to me. This might be a ruse to lure me into consuming poisoned food when I would not eat what had been given to me. But then I wondered what I had to lose by taking this risk since otherwise I would die anyway?

So I made a lingering feast of the soggy bread and then tilted my head and wrung out the cloth into my mouth. No drink before or since ever tasted as sweet as that water, savouring though it did of the grubby cloth.

This must have been the early afternoon for it was only an hour or two later that it began to grow dark, or, rather, even darker, and so I found a dry corner of the cell and settled down to try to sleep.

Dozing restlessly, I fancied I was dreaming that someone was calling me. But since I did not recognise the voice and since it was calling “John Clothier, John Clothier!” and I did not want to acknowledge that this name was mine,

THE BEST OF INTENTIONS

501

I refused to answer the summons. Yet it came again and again and more and more insistently so that at last I woke up and lay with beating heart in the near-darkness and the bitter cold, having no recollection of where I was. Then I realized that someone was in reality calling to me by this hated name for I heard a loud insistent whisper repeating the syllables, and at that instant the memory of my situation came flooding back.

The unknown being who was addressing me was at the door of the cell. I rose and, advancing cautiously towards it, saw the outline of a face through the grille against the faint light that came from the passage. This individual was holding something through the bars and when I took it I found that it was another piece of bread wrapped as before.

“You are John Clothier, are you not?” said a gentle voice.

For a moment I was too stunned to answer and my visiter, who sounded like an elderly gentleman, asked again: “You are the son of Peter Clothier?”

“I am John Clothier,” I answered hesitantly and reluctantly. “But who are you?”

“My name will mean nothing to you. I am Francis Nolloth.”

He stepped back into the passage so that the little light there was from the gas-mantle some yards away fell on him. I saw that he was a small man of upwards of sixty with a mild, Quakerish face and a bald head, that he was looking at me with a kindly expression, and that he was the pitying figure I had seen in the night-ward — the owner of the single countenance on which I had so far seen signs of intelligence and compassion in that place.

“Thank you,” I said as I began to devour the bread.

He stepped forward again to whisper through the grille: “They mean to poison you.

Take nothing from them.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I am a wardsman here and trusted by them.” I must have revealed my dismay, for he went on: “Yes, I am an inmate of this place. But I am as sane as you.”

“Don’t say that,” I protested. “I believe I am going mad.”

“That’s what they want,” he said. “I know, for they don’t notice me and so I hear many things, for my duties take me everywhere in the house and at all hours.”

“Can you not escape?”

“Escape? To what? I have nothing in the world outside. I would be forced to beg my living on the streets.”

“How can that be? Have you been here so long?”

“Longer than anyone. Longer even than Dr Alabaster himself, for he inherited me from his predecessor.” Almost proudly he said: “I have been here more than five-and-twenty years.”

“How is such a thing possible?”

“Oh it is a common enough story. I have not time to tell it now though we are safe for a little while because the night-porter is still in the kitchen. We will hear him when he comes this way and then I will go. As for how I came here, suffice it to say that I was so unfortunate as to be heir-at-law to a large estate.”

“Can that be a misfortune?”

“Aye, for my brother and sister stood to inherit in default of myself and they had the means and the lack of scruple to have me put away. And so a medical gentleman was bribed to perjure himself. So you see, my case is similar to yours 502 THE

PALPHRAMONDS

and your father’s and to many others. But our time is too short to waste. Listen to me carefully. As I have said, I have overheard them talking about you and I know that you are in danger of your life. For as long as I may, I will pass food to you. But we must try to get you free of this place.”