Charles Palliser (166 page)

“Wait!” I said. “I want to ask you something. You told me once you killed a gentleman.”

He looked at me in astonishment.

“I have a good reason for asking. You said it happened not long before I was born.

Tell me the truth now. Where was it?”

He merely smiled as if at a private source of amusement.

I wanted to believe that Mrs Sancious had been telling the truth, but there was also this other possibility.

“Tell me,” I pleaded. “No harm will come of it. Was it in this house?” I gestured with my hand to the dark mass behind us.

With a half-smile that was directed at both of us he slunk away into the darkness.

Mrs Sancious and I began to walk slowly across the empty yard. After a moment I could not prevent myself from beginning: “Your account just now of what you saw the night my grandfather was murdered … ” I paused and went on: “You implied just now that you only said it because you wanted to goad the old man into giving you the will.

What did you mean?”

“What does it matter?” she said dully.

“It matters to me. Did you mean that you invented those things?”

She shrugged her shoulders: “I saw Clothier.”

768 THE

MALIPHANTS

“Then if you saw all that, why didn’t you come forward when he was indicted?”

“You assume too much. And why should I? I hated your mother. She was a spoilt child. She had everything — a loving father, fine dresses, music, so much — when I was poor and despised, though I was cleverer and more beautiful than she. I was happy to see her suffer.”

I shook my head for I wanted to protest that my mother’s life had not been as she imagined.

“I was envious of her then,” she went on. “And later, I was jealous.”

I looked at her sharply: “Did you have any reason?”

Suddenly she stopped and turned to me: “I’ll tell you bluntly, then: I never believed that the murderer was your father. Though of course I have no conclusive evidence of what happened or didn’t happen that night.”

“Tell me what you mean!” I begged, for in the light of things I had been told or had come to suspect, her words were capable of more than one interpretation.

She would say nothing more, however, and we walked on in silence.

Then she said: “I have something that belongs by right to you.”

She reached into her reticule and handed me the package she had taken from the bureau. We had by now reached the corner of Charing-cross and the Strand, and I approached a street-lamp and slid the contents out. I read the opening and recognised it as the purloined will which I had last had, briefly, in my hands some ten months ago.

Now that I was to be let to live it was of no use to her, but her motive for restraining Barney puzzled me.

“I do not understand,” I said. “You have devoted so much to the pursuit of the inheritance.” (I bit back the impulse to say that she had helped to bring about the death of people who stood in the way.) “Why did you throw away your chance just now?”

“There’s been too much death,” she said softly.

“Come,” I said. “We must lay the events of this night before a magistrate’s office.”

She would not move and I saw that she was shivering. I took her arm and so, grotesquely arm in arm with one who had done so much harm to me and those I loved, I slowly walked through the streets as dawn began to paint the eastern sky.

We went to the police-court at Bow-street where I told the authorities what had happened. A constable was sent with the watch to the house and Mr Escreet was taken up and found to be so wandering in his mind that he was confined to a madhouse to await trial.

Before I took leave of Mrs Sancious later that morning, I asked her to explain to me some things that I did not understand. She would say nothing more, however, of what she had or had not witnessed the night my grandfather was murdered. But there was something else I was puzzled by: exactly how she and Henry Bellringer were related. I knew now that she was a descendant of Jeoffrey Huffam’s sister, Lætitia, who had married George Maliphant. What I did not understand was how her nephew Stephen, should come to be the half-brother of the great-grandson of Mr Escreet. She explained that the wife

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of her brother, Timothy, who was called Caroline and was Stephen’s mother, had been married and widowed previously. Her first husband was Michael Bellringer, the father of Henry and grandson of Mr Escreet. (It was not merely coincidental that this connexion should have come about for both the Maliphants and the Bellringers lived in Canterbury where Henry Huffam had once owned property which Paternoster, Michael Bellringer’s great-grandfather, had managed on his behalf.)

I went back to my lodgings and, exhausted as I was and with my bruises aching, looked for a safe place to hide the will. One of the bricks around the hearth-stone was loose so I removed it, folded the document, and replaced the brick on top of it. Then I threw myself on the bed and slept for the rest of that day and all the night.

In the weeks that followed I had no desire to see Henrietta for I was upset and hurt by her behaviour at the Old Hall. I had much to preoccupy me for Mr Barbellion wrote to me repeating the offer of his services which he had made on the last occasion when we met. He told me that if I had succeeded in obtaining the will I should be made aware of the following facts: Sir David Mompesson had been indicted and convicted in his absence for the murder of Bellringer and this meant that as a felon his property would be escheated — that is, pass to the Crown rather than to his heirs. This would happen despite the existence of the codicil, for the Maliphant claimant — now revealed to be Mrs Sancious — had lost her rights under it since I was now known to be alive. He therefore urged that if I had the will I should lay it before the Court and obtain a judgement that the estate had never belonged to Sir Hugo Mompesson in the first place, but to my grandfather. He believed that this would be relatively easy to achieve and that consequently the estate would be mine. If I did not have the will, he went on, I could at least claim the annuity which the Mompessons had for so long refused to pay, and he said that a judgement in my favour to this effect would soon be achieved. I wrote to him and, without revealing whether or not I had the will, told him merely that I had no interest in pursuing my claim either to the annuity or to the estate itself.

Why did I answer in this way? You know that I had come to see what kind of deeds the desire for the estate had led others into. Moreover, I did not want to continue to be a play-thing of Chancery. I wanted to be free to plan my own life. Besides, I knew that the pursuit of a claim to have the annuity restored to me would require a great deal of money. Money was my dominating preoccupation, for a month after the events at Hougham I was three weeks in arrears of rent to Mrs Quaintance and was now penniless. I had seen Joey and his mother a few times and knew that if necessary I could go to them for help, but I shrank from the thought of doing so. I often wondered what had become of Lady Mompesson — or, more precisely, of Henrietta — and walked past the house in Brook-street a number of times. It appeared shut up and empty. I bought a newspaper occasionally and scanned the fashionable columns but saw nothing about either of them.

I might mention here that Escreet died raving in the madhouse a couple of weeks after the death of Sancious, without ever being brought before a grand jury.

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Then one day at about this time, a stranger came to me at my lodgings. He revealed that his name was Mr Ashburner and that he was a money-lender. He told me he had come to make an offer to me: he was prepared to lend me money against my expectations.

When I expressed my surprise that he should know anything of my affairs he pointed out that such intelligence was the basis of his profession, but he would not tell me how he had come by it. I dismissed him as politely as I could (not very politely, I fear!).

This incident made me reflect, for it raised the possibility that it was known that I had the will. It was more probable, however, that it was the annuity that was known about, and in that case the implication was that it was widely believed that I had a good chance of obtaining it — though I assumed that it would not be worth much now. I thought of the good I could do to others if I had even a little money. I could help the boys at Quigg’s, try to free old Mr Nolloth, and look for Mr Pentecost who might still be in the fleet, and perhaps even Mr Silverlight. And to obtain the annuity when my mother had failed would be a kind of justice, I reflected.

So I wrote to Mr Barbellion and, at his invitation, went to see him at his office at No.

35 Cursitor-street. He explained to me that now that the estate was in process of being escheated, its administration was entirely in the hands of a Receiver appointed by Chancery; and he warned me that the mismanagement and corruption this would involve would destroy it within a very few years. He made it clear that he was no longer acting on behalf of the Mompessons, and he even warned me that Lady Mompesson was trying to rescue what she could of the family’s property from the escheatment and that therefore she and I would be on opposite sides if I were to press any kind of claim at all.

I was impressed by his frankness.

He informed me that he was prepared to act on my behalf if I chose to pursue my claim either to the annuity or, if I possessed the will, to the estate itself, and he tried to learn from me whether I had it. Without actually lying, I prevaricated and insisted that I was only interested in the annuity. I reminded him that in his letter to me he had said that he believed this undertaking could be successfully concluded soon, and asked him how long he considered it would take and how much it would cost. He answered that no more than five years should suffice, and I was startled to learn that this could be considered “soon”. I said that I would like to retain him but had no money at all. He said he was delighted to accept my instructions and as for the cost, well, he had one or two ideas about that. Had I considered whether I had a claim upon my grandfather’s estate? It was some time before I understood what he was referring to, and when I did I insisted that I had no interest in that at all. He seemed surprised and said he had some ideas that he would prefer not to disclose at this stage and that, with my permission, he would pursue them but take no action without prior reference to me. To my amazement, he then offered to advance me monies against my expectations, saying that it would give him considerable pleasure to see me come into some of my rights at least.

I was utterly confounded by this. Had I always misjudged him? Was he really a generous man who believed in justice? I stared at him as he smiled at me, and wondered. On the other hand, could it be that he was after a THE KEY

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share of the Hougham wealth for himself and was trying to lure me into his toils?

Obviously guessing something of what was passing in my mind, he explained that he had been associated with the estate for most of his professional life for he had first worked as a very young man for the father of Sir Perceval, Sir Augustus, who had begun a series of improvements to the property that his son had abandoned. Because of this, it grieved him very much to see it fall into decay. He had worked hard for the various improvements he had carried out — many of them, in the twenty years since the death of Sir Augustus, against the wishes of Sir Perceval, who was profoundly traditional and hated change of any kind. His only ally had been Lady Mompesson and she had not always taken the long view, either. What had caused him most pain, however, was his discovery some dozen or more years ago that Assinder had been assiduously embezzling rents and falsifying his accounts. Although he had at length and with difficulty persuaded Lady Mompesson of the truth of this, he could never convince Sir Perceval that the nephew of his faithful old steward could be cheating him; and he had been deeply hurt by this lack of faith in his own judgement.

When I told him of my concern at some aspects of the policy that the proprietors had been following, he said that he owed it to himself to make it clear that it was only Assinder’s greed that meant that the policy of enclosing the common land and closing the villages had borne so heavily upon the poor. He concluded by saying that since the accession of Sir David, who begrudged putting a penny back into the land, he, Barbellion, had made no advance at all with his designs for the improvement of the property; and that he wanted nothing more than to see justice done after all this time and the property restored not merely to its rightful owner, but also to the condition in which it had been at the death of his first employer.

When he had finished I sat silent for some time, and then said that I was deeply affected by his offer but that he must understand that I was interested in the annuity only. I had no desire to claim the estate itself for I had come to believe that great wealth represented a commensurate moral danger to its possessor. Now he looked at me in a rather droll fashion and asked me how much I thought the estate was worth if it were to come on the market at this very moment. I said I had no experience of such matters, but he encouraged me to make a round guess. I chose a large figure of so many tens of thousands of pounds and he laughed drily and said I was quite out. The property was worth precisely nothing. Quite literally, nothing. And even that might be an over-valuation. I asked what the meaning of this riddle was and he explained that the estate was so heavily burdened by a number of charges — post-obituaries and mortgages and annuities, of which mine was only one, though it was the first — that its net worth was either nothing, or even much less than nothing. But now that it was in Chancery and the process of escheatment had been begun, he doubted if it would ever absolve its own debts and be able to be sold. Its fate was to be mismanaged and further run down for decades to come.

This was astonishing news and it set me thinking. I could see that Mr Barbellion expected that this would prompt me into confessing that I had the will, but I adhered to my resolution to say nothing about it. I accepted, however, his offer of a loan of forty pounds per annum at a compounded rate of interest of six per cent and to be repaid out of the annuity. I received my first