Charles Palliser (111 page)

He spoke hesitatingly as if unused to speech, but his voice was soft and gentle. I was unable to speak or even to nod my head.

He went on: “But I see that you are Mary’s child. You feature your dear mother’s fa…” His voice broke and he stopped.

“In course the boy’s your son and heir, Peter,” said Hinxman. “Why, it’s plain to see he’s inherited his father’s wits.”

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“For he wouldn’t be a scholard in Dr Alabaster’s ’cademy if that wasn’t so,” added Rookyard.

“Yes. These gentlemen are right. I am mad, you know.” Then he said eagerly: “But tell me, how is your dear mother?”

Unable to speak, I shook my head.

“I broke her heart. Do you know what I did?”

I shook my head to try to stop him.

“I murdered her father,” he said almost in a whisper. “Your grandfather.”

“No, no, that’s not true.”

“Oh but it is. Though I don’t recall how or why but, you see, that’s because of my madness.”

“Why, you took a haxe,” said Hinxman, “and you chopped the old genel’man in three eq’al pieces. And an uncommon scaly way to show respect for your miss’is’ dad it was.

Pertickerly on your wedding-night.”

“Not an axe, Mr Hinxman. It was a sword.”

“Which only makes it worse, Peter,” put in Rookyard, “as you’ll see yourself if you think about it. Or you would do if your wits wasn’t addled.”

“Some things I remember clearly. Others not at all. After your mother and I left the house, I went back secretly. I remember that very well.”

“Yes,” I said. “But it was by arrangement with Mr Escreet.”

He frowned: “No. You’ve been misinformed. Nobody knew. At least, I don’t believe so. I remember passing the door of the dining-room which was open and averting my head so that anyone in there should not see me. So you see, I must have meant to do harm, mustn’t I? I went to the library and there I found Mr Escreet. I remember that very clearly. Then it seems that I attacked him and Mr Huffam. I used a sword. We were in the plate-room. Sometimes I can almost remember doing so, but this part of it seems like a dream. Apparently I stole some money. But I certainly remember that I could not leave the house for the back-door was locked. And I recall cutting my hand as I broke the glass of the vestibule-door. So you see, I must be a murderer. But Mr Escreet survived, thank God.”

My belief in what Mr Nolloth had said dissolved and I believed I was staring into the mild brown eyes of the murderer of my grandfather.

“You feature your grandfather very nearly,” he said. “The same eyes. The very mouth that your sweet mother has. What is your name?”

“John,” I managed to say. Seeing no sign that he recognised the name I added: “John Clothier.”

“I remember that name,” he said with a shudder. “It is mine. Or it was. Once I was proud to bear it. I loved my father, and I admired him as sons do their fathers. Though I saw how unhappy he made my mother — a gentle creature who could do nothing right in his eyes. For long I knew nothing of the business that my father and brother drove, for I was a shy, dreaming schoolboy who wanted nothing more than to be left alone with my books. I wished to become a book-seller. But when the time came for me to leave school, I found that I was expected to enter and to bear my full part in the family’s trade. And now I discovered what it was.” He paused and sighed. “In brief, they had a hand in every low, snivelling trick that is perpetrated in London against the poor or the unworldly or the defenceless: They ran illegal pawn-shops that charged too high a rate of interest and were used as a cover to receive stolen goods. They lent money to young gentlemen with expectations

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and then blackmailed them or their friends for extortionate repayments. And they owned some of the worst properties in the metropolis: the stinking dens of the most poverty-stricken from which they wrung blood-rents, as well as the haunts of every imaginable and unimaginable vice from which they reaped a dividend.”

“Now, now,” said Rookyard. “You mustn’t slander one of the finest old genel’men in London.”

“Imagine what such a discovery meant to me,” he continued, apparently not having heard this remark. “The father and brother whom I so revered, revealed to be no more than crimping cheats and blackmailers! When I refused to have anything to do with all of this they tried every means to make me give way from bribes to threats and eventually to violence. Is it any wonder that I became as I did? After my mother died I had no allies. I believed that everybody was against me, and that all the people in the world were either weak and therefore victims, or strong and so behaved as my father and brother.

Your mother and her father were the first decent people I had ever known. Because I came to love your mother I found the strength to resist.” He broke off and gazed at me as if he had newly awakened from a dream: “That wasn’t what I meant to say. I wanted to ask you how your mother is.” His voice trembled. “I don’t know what to believe. The people here tell me such stories.”

“You’ve been told often and often enough,” said Hinxman. “Turned w— and died mad.”

I looked at the man’s jeering face and could not tell if he had spoken merely at hazard.

“She is alive and well, is she not?”

“Yes,” I stammered. “She is alive and well.”

My voice only trembled slightly but the tears welled from my eyes and ran down my cheeks.

The gentle, melancholy face studied mine: “You are lying to me as they all do. I see that she is dead, isn’t she?”

I could not speak but I nodded.

“I feared it. I only want to know that she did not die in misery and want, as Mr Hinxman and the other gentlemen tell me.”

I tried to finds words to reassure him, but he read my mother’s history in my countenance and covered his face with his hands.

I rose and moved towards him but a heavy hand gripped my shoulder and Hinxman’s voice said coarsely: “I don’t have all day to listen to you two chat about old times, pleasant though it is to hear you.”

As he raised me from the chair and began to push me towards the door I managed to turn and say: “I will talk with you again.”

He gave no sign of having heard me, and in a moment I was out in the passage and Rookyard had swung the door shut behind us.

On the way back along one of the passages Hinxman met a turn-key I had not see before and shouted to him: “Hey, Stillingfleet. Take this young wronghead back to No.

12. I’ve got to get ready for the night-coach to Gainsborough. I’m going north this evening on business for one of the doctor’s customers.”

He thrust me at the other man and went off. Remembering that this was the turn-key whom Mr Nolloth had mentioned as the only one there possessed of any humanity, I said to him: “Mr Stillingfleet, supposing I were to offer you a sovereign to help me get away? Would you do it?”

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“No,” he answered without hesitation; “for that would be bilking my master.”

I had expected a refusal and, strangely, his answer cheered me for it was at least honourable. And, after all, he might have cheated me by taking it and doing nothing. But if I could do nothing for myself, I could at least help another and so, remembering the hideous wound I had seen beneath the stock, I said: “You know Peter Clothier?”

“Aye, poor devil. What of him?”

“If I offered you the money to help him as you can, what would you say?”

“I’d say I wanted to see your blunt fust.”

I decided to trust him and he let me halt while I retrieved the sovereign that Daniel Porteous had given me from its hiding place in the hem of my night-shirt.

As I handed it to him I said: “Try to stop the chain biting into his neck so tightly.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said as he took it.

Once I was alone in my cell again I laid myself down on the straw and wept. In the hours that followed I could not efface the memory of that delicate, suffering face nor disguise from myself that I had been made the unwitting means of inflicting further pain.

Moreover, I now had no reason to doubt that he had indeed committed that terrible crime — not that Mr Nolloth had been lying to me, I assumed, for he had himself been deceived. I believed that at least life had no further horror to threaten me with for my death now seemed inevitable and to be welcomed.

Despite this resolve, as the evening wore on I listened anxiously for the faint sounds from elsewhere in the building to die away in the hope that Mr Nolloth would soon come. If I could not share my fears with a sympathetic hearer I believed I would truly forfeit my sanity. During all the long hours of darkness that dragged by, the only people who passed were the turn-keys whose heavy tread I recognised. But at last, at what must have been after midnight, I heard faint footsteps in the passage and went to the grille where I found Mr Nolloth. He apologised for having failed to come before, and then passed through the bars some more food and drink which, eagerly as I received them, were less valuable than the chance to tell him of my encounter that day and to find my own anxieties shared. First I told him how the interview had ended.

“Do not believe for a moment that I am blaming you,” the old gentleman said kindly when I had finished my account; “but I hardly like to think of the consequences.”

“If only I could have disguised my feelings,” I cried.

“Don’t reproach yourself. You did what was expected of you.”

When I told Mr Nolloth how Peter Clothier had described murdering my grandfather, he sighed: “He believes it now, but I assure you it is not the 514 THE

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truth. It is not even plausible. The account he gave me of that night when he first entered this place is self-evidently the truth.”

I bid him continue with it from the point at which we had been interrupted the other night, and when he did so I forced myself to play devil’s advocate because I wanted to be convinced that the confession I had heard was false.

“As you know from your mother’s account, the charade of the quarrel took place as planned and your parents left the house and went to the coach-office at Snow-hill.

There your father changed his coat to make recognition more unlikely in case he were seen, and he returned to the house.”

“He now denies that this was by prior arrangement.”

“I know,” said Mr Nolloth. “But if the back-door was not left unlocked by Mr Escreet, then how did he get in?”

“He did not explain that,” I happily admitted.

“He went to the library which he found empty. A minute later Mr Escreet entered from the plate-room and told him that your grandfather was engaged with Mr and Mrs Fortisquince, but that he had given him the package which Mr Fortisquince had brought. Your father took it and then made to leave. How does that square with what he told you?”

“He said that he met both my grandfather and Mr Escreet in the plate-room and attacked them and left them for dead.”

“That is impossible. For one, the sword that was used to kill your grandfather hung upon the wall of the passage between the plate-room and the street-door — in other words, on the opposite side of the house. No, the truth is that he simply took the package from Mr Escreet and made for the back-door without even meeting your grandfather.”

“Mr Fortisquince saw him as he passed the dining-room,” I said. “But because he was wearing a different coat he did not recognise him.”

“And that was as well since it meant that he continued to believe in his innocence for longer than he might have done otherwise. But when Peter reached the back-door he found that it was locked and the key gone.”

“That is strange,” I said.

“Very strange. (You see, his original account is much more puzzling and therefore more credible than the simple version he now believes.) He assumed that one of the servants had come upstairs in the interval and, needing to go into the back-yard, had locked the door on entering the house again. Realizing that he would have to leave by the street-door, he went to the front hall.”

“And Mr Fortisquince saw him again as he passed the door and now began to wonder who he was.”

“Indeed? So you see how this version tallies with the evidence given by others! Now here is the strangest part of the story. Your father found that the glazed door between the hall and the vestibule was also locked and the key gone. Now that, he assured me, was quite contrary to the usual custom of the house, for the key remained always in the lock and the door was only secured at night as an additional precaution. He was about to break the panes of the door into the vestibule when he saw through the glass that the key to the street-door itself was similarly missing.”

“How strange!”

“Wait. There is something even odder to come. For he then noticed that the great key of the street-door was lying at his feet by the vestibule-door.”

“That is wonderful indeed! What explanation did he offer for this?”

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“None that satisfied him. But at least he now saw his way out. He broke a pane of glass in the vestibule door as quietly as he could and in doing so cut himself slightly and tore his coat.”

“Thus accounting for the blood on his hand and the tear in his jacket that so alarmed my mother!” I exclaimed in delight.

“Yes, exactly. But your father could not account for the blood inside the package that he found when he and your mother opened it early the next morning at the inn in Hertford. Nor for the fact that the will was not there. That remains a mystery.”

“Yes, my mother described how there was nothing in it except the bank-notes covered in blood, although he apparently expected to find something.” After a silence I went on:

“And what about the question of who did, then, murder my grandfather?”

“Your father and I believed we had resolved that question.”

He paused and I realized that he was listening to some faint and distant noises. We almost dared not breathe until, after a few moments, absolute silence returned.

“There appears to be a disturbance in the house. Perhaps one of the poor wretches has become violent. I must not stay.” Mr Nolloth paused and then said gravely: “As far as the murder of Mr John Huffam is concerned, I fear that your father was, in a sense, responsible.”