Kept (11 page)

“Cold, you say?” Mr. Guyle’s breath as he said this rose in a little cloud above his head. “I suppose you’ve a fire in your chambers, eh? And a young man to bring in the coal?”

Mr. Crabbe acknowledged meekly that he did.

“I never saw the need of such things myself. Never indeed. A lot of d——d nonsense. Well then, Crabbe” (it was alleged by certain young barristers that in a moment of conviviality Mr. Guyle had once addressed his friend as “Adolphus”), “what is it that I can do for you?”

And here Mr. Crabbe hesitated. He had come to Mr. Guyle not for a legal opinion but for advice—information even. And yet he knew from long experience that even should Mr. Guyle possess this information, and even should he care to divulge it, such intelligence would not be given up without a struggle, in which the yielding up would become a kind of triumph on Mr. Guyle’s part. Accordingly, he decided to advance by stealth.

“I hear,” he said, “that Lord——was most heartily obliged by your opinion of the Darrowby affair. Indeed, I have heard it said that the case could not have been prosecuted without your aid.”

As Lord——was the gentleman who currently sat upon the woolsack, and whom Mr. Crabbe and Mr. Guyle each regarded as the leading luminary of their profession, this might have been taken for the prettiest of compliments. Mr. Guyle, however, was not to be won over by compliments.

“Hm…well! Darrowby was a fool to think that he could bring the affair off uncontested. And Lord——was a fool to think the business could be concluded in a lower court. But come, Crabbe, you are not here to talk pleasantries, I’ll be bound.”

Mr. Crabbe, looking at his fingers as they lay in the lap of his black lawyer’s suit, thought that they were nearly blue with cold, and that even minor humiliation at Mr. Guyle’s hands was perhaps preferable to the discomfort of sitting in his room even a few moments longer.

“Very well. I merely wish to put a question to you. Have you ever heard of a man named Pardew?”

Mr. Guyle examined the quill pen he held in his right hand with apparent incredulity, as if he had never seen such an implement in his life before and rather doubted its function. “There was a judge of that name on the northern circuit in, when would it have been? Thirty years since, I don’t doubt.”

Mr. Crabbe sighed gently. Mr. Guyle was in one of his captious moods. “Your memory, Guyle, is really remarkable. No, I have just had this gentleman at my chambers. A bill discounter, stockbroker, that kind of thing.”

Mr. Guyle placed the quill pen wonderingly down on the foolscap page beneath him and bent his hands over it as if he intended to worship it as a fetish.

“The man who murdered his partner? Farrell? Fardolf? McTurk came within an inch of taking him. He told me so himself.”

“Nothing was ever proved.”

“And nobody ever saw the poor wretch who shot at Her Majesty in the park, but when found he had a pistol in his shirt and a spent cartridge at his feet. Well, what did the man want?”

Again Mr. Crabbe hesitated. He was aware that he was not quite getting the better of this exchange, not quite indeed being treated with the respect that the Mr. Crabbes of this world demand from their Mr. Guyles. A part of him, consequently, did not altogether wish to reveal to Mr. Guyle why it was that Mr. Pardew had come to him. Accordingly, he once more moved the equipage of his conversation onto a subsidiary track.

“Well then, let us say that Pardew did murder his partner, although nothing was ever proved. Presumably, that would not debar him from taking legal advice?”

“The man who is due to be hanged tomorrow morning is not debarred from taking legal advice, as you well know.”

“At any rate, he seems thoroughly respectable,” Mr. Crabbe went on, thinking as he did so that he knew Mr. Pardew to be thoroughly unrespectable. “I believe him to be a friend of His Grace the Duke of——.”

“You may take it from me that His Grace keeps some pretty queer company.”

All this, Mr. Crabbe acknowledged to himself, was hard. He had never boasted of his dealings with the Duke of——to Mr. Guyle. Nevertheless, Mr. Guyle was as familiar with them as he was with the names of Mr. Crabbe’s wife and daughters. He was aware, too, that in mentioning that nobleman, in advancing his name as the touchstone of Mr. Pardew’s respectability, he had betrayed himself. The realisation made him bitter, more bitter than he perhaps cared to admit, and he shifted his neat little lawyer’s boots uncomfortably on Mr. Guyle’s dusty floor and resolved that at any rate he would stay no longer in this icehouse. Something of this resolve communicated itself to Mr. Guyle, for he shuffled the papers that lay before him, exhaled another mighty spout of condensed air and stared levelly at his friend.

“Now see here, Crabbe. I don’t know what this man may have told you. He may very well not have murdered his partner. He may be head nursemaid to Lord John’s grandchildren for all I know, though I must say I doubt it. All I can say is that a lawyer has a duty to be…circumspect. As for Pardew, I believe I heard that he had been at Prague or Vienna, though what he did there who knows? From what I hear of him, he would not be the kind of person to tell you. And now perhaps you’ll excuse me as I have a deal of work in front of me. You had better give my regards to Mrs. Crabbe and the girls.”

Mr. Crabbe, thinking that he had got off rather lightly in this exchange, nodded his head and made his way down Mr. Guyle’s Arctic staircase and across the frozen garden to his own chambers, where he immediately ordered his clerk to stoke the fire to its fullest extent and instructed that a glass of brandy should be fetched from the public house beyond the Inn’s gate, so great was the extremity of cold into which he had been plunged. And Mr. Crabbe, as he drank the brandy and sat with his feet practically in the flames, such was the chill that he had brought back with him from Mr. Guyle, and thought of Mr. Pardew, who had been at Prague or Vienna, but about whom nothing was known, was struck by a feeling of disquiet that he could not quite fathom, the thought that he had plucked from its shelf some container that had better stayed unopened.

Presently he fell asleep over the fire—the old clerk, stealing into his room, watched him for a moment and then crept silently away—but the dreams he dreamed were not pleasant ones. A cat that in fine weather sunned itself on the steps came loitering through the half-open door to curl up next his feet; a cracked old gentleman with a suppositious interest in a Chancery case who had been bringing Mr. Crabbe his petitions these twenty years or more got a quarter way up the staircase before being smartly repulsed by the old clerk, but Mr. Crabbe heard neither of them. When he awoke it was gone four o’clock, the fire had burned down, the cat was investigating the crevices of the wainscoting and there was snow falling beyond the window onto the dark trees. And Mr. Crabbe watched it in silent wonder, as he and Mr. Guyle had watched it fall on the turrets and pinnacles of old Windsor in the days of King George III.

Mr. Pardew, when he emerged beyond the high stone gate of Lincoln’s Inn, did not, as he had suggested to his clerk, make his way to his club. Instead he boarded a second omnibus at the corner where Chancery Lane meets High Holborn and had himself conveyed along the Marylebone Road and then northwards in the direction of St. John’s Wood. Once arrived at this desirable locality, and having brushed from his boots several pieces of straw that he had brought with him from the omnibus, he set off in a purposeful manner along two or three side streets until he reached an avenue of secluded villas, each set back from the road and established behind hedges of laurel and cedar. It was growing steadily colder, and Mr. Pardew as he walked pulled the collar of his coat up to his chin. An onlooker who had studied his passing, here on this grey January afternoon beneath a darkling sky, would perhaps have noted that he appeared to be in a remarkably good humour, smiling to himself and on one occasion, such was his apparent delight, stopping at the pavement’s edge to laugh out loud. Turning in at the gate of one of the laurel-shrouded villas, and having been admitted by a servant girl in a white cap and a pinafore, he made his way into a drawing room, very daintily furnished, with pink and white paper
on the walls and copies of pictures by Frith and Etty hanging in gilt frames, where sat a woman of perhaps twenty-nine or thirty years with a complexion as pink and white as the paper, reading, or perhaps only affecting to read, the
Pall Mall Gazette
.

“Why, Richard,” this person remarked when she saw him—her friendly tone perhaps masking a faint anxiety—“you are quite a stranger here.”

“I don’t believe that I am quite…that,” replied Mr. Pardew, standing on the hearthrug and jingling his money in his pocket. “It is but a week, surely?”

“Nine days. Ten days. But I declare, had you come only a little later you would have found me out.”

“Indeed? And where would you have gone?”

“I had thought of going to see the people in Islington.”

“Had you now?” Mr. Pardew’s face as he said this was set in the same cast as when he had discussed the little matter of Donaldson’s bill with his clerk. “You know I don’t care for you paying such calls.”

“It is only my sister, Richard. And besides, what else is there for me to do? I declare, since I last saw you I have left the house only once, and that was to visit the milliner in Marylebone High Street.”

By way of an answer Mr. Pardew looked down his nose, took off his coat and scarf, both of which he placed on the sofa, and seated himself in an armchair. An onlooker who observed this scene—one of the cupids, perhaps, gazing down from the frame of Mr. Etty’s picture of the Crystal Palace Exhibition—would possibly have drawn two conclusions from it: first, that the young woman with the pink and white complexion, though dressed in accordance with the latest dictates of fashion, was not what is generally known as a lady; second, that though his relation to her might not be outwardly clear, Mr. Pardew brought to his surroundings the same proprietorial air that had been in evidence at his office.

“But let us not say another word about that, Richard,” continued the young woman, whose name was Jemima, “for I am very glad to see you.”

Mr. Pardew did not reply, but the look on his face seemed to suggest that he, too, was glad. Jemima hastened to press home her advantage.

“You will take tea?”

“Tea? Certainly I will. Let the girl bring it in. Upon my word, Jemima, you’re looking uncommon handsome.”

Jemima laughed, but there was something in the laugh that suggested she did not find Mr. Pardew’s compliment wholly to her liking. The tea having been brought by the very respectable maid, she busied herself with its infusion, rattling the tongs against the sugar basin and standing meekly at Mr. Pardew’s side as he accepted his cup.

Drinking a certain portion of his tea off at a gulp, Mr. Pardew looked at her sardonically. “Upon my word! Anyone would think that you had been a parlourmaid once. There’s a way they deal out the sugar, I have remarked it.”

“That is very ill-natured of you, Richard. A girl can’t help where she comes from.”

“I don’t suppose she can. I meant nothing by it, so don’t take on. Shall I tell you what I have been about?”

“If you will.” She hovered attentively by his side, not knowing whether he desired her to remain or to return to her seat.

“Well, today I hoodwinked an old lawyer. Well—not hoodwinked him. Played upon his vanity rather.”

“Gracious, Richard! Do you mean you took his money?”

“Nothing so grievous. Let us say that I placed him in a position where he may be able to do a service for me.”

“What kind of a gentleman was he?”

“Don’t be a goose! The most respectable old lawyer in Lincoln’s Inn. Lives in a big house at Belgravia and dines with half the Cabinet, I shouldn’t wonder. Should you like to see him? Why, we could call upon him if you like.”

“No indeed! I should like nothing less.”

But there was a colour in Jemima’s cheeks as she said this, over and above the pinkness of her complexion, that suggested she liked to hear such stories, and that Mr. Pardew’s tales of the world he inhabited were among her greatest solaces. “But, Richard, how can he be of service to you if you have…hoodwinked him, as you say?”

“Why, he has a name, you see. That’s the beauty of dealing with men who have names. Have a Treasury lord vouch for you and you’ve
twice the credit you began with. It’s a trick I wish I’d learned long before.”

“But why is it that you need…credit, as you say?”

“Well…” Mr. Pardew was always circumspect in his dealings with the persons around him, but Jemima’s pink and white complexion was so agreeable to him that he was perhaps less cautious than he should have been. “Let us say that I have a little scheme in mind, with which this gentleman may be able to assist me.”

All this conversation was very pleasant to Jemima, and she hung upon it, wishing in fact that it could be indefinitely sustained. In truth she knew very little of Mr. Pardew’s affairs—he was perhaps careful that she did not—but what she did interested her beyond measure, interested her, it might be said, rather more than did Mr. Pardew himself. But it could not, of its nature, be indefinitely prolonged, or perhaps it was merely that on this particular afternoon Mr. Pardew did not wish to prolong it. At any rate, when the servant girl had returned to the drawing room to clear away the tea things, he ceased to talk affably of his affairs and stood by the window looking out into the gathering darkness.

“I declare it is starting to snow. You had better tell the girl to go.”

Jemima did as she was bidden. Soon there came the sound of a door closing and footsteps receding into the distance. Returning to the drawing room, Jemima placed herself in its very centre, in the manner of one who awaits some signal. Finding that Mr. Pardew continued to stand by the window, she angled her head in a gesture that he appeared to understand as he twitched two or three fingers of his left hand and she retired once more. Presently her movements could be heard in the room above.

Mr. Pardew continued to watch the snow keenly: soft, regular flakes of snow, beneath which the summit of the laurel hedge had already begun to disappear. In his mind he could see it falling elsewhere: down the river at Greenwich, up on the heath a mile or so distant from where he now stood, upon the strawberry fields at Hammersmith, piling up in drifts upon the islands of the Thames at Twickenham and Teddington. It reminded him of certain other snowfalls he had witnessed, several thousands of miles distant, and of times when fate had
not smiled on him in the way it seemed now to be smiling and there were no grand schemes in his head on which to brood.