Kept (48 page)

Immediately, he fled down the street, not pausing to look behind him, reached the corner—he had by now almost come to the margin of St. Paul’s Churchyard—and stopped to catch his breath. There were two officers following him, he realised, but a good way behind and not moving with great speed. Dodging in and out of the knots of passersby, who regarded him with keen interest, he sped on towards Cannon Street in blind panic, came to a crossing and rushed upon it, heedless of the traffic. Before he could gain the further side, the shaft of a cart struck him on the breast and threw him down. A man helped him to his feet and enquired if he were injured.

“Hurt? No, no, it’s all right.”

To the man’s surprise, and that of other people standing near him, he walked on quickly, hardly feeling any pain. But within a few moments there came a sensation of nausea, an ominous warmth in the back of his throat, and he stopped and vomited up a quantity of blood. Sympathetic passersby were all about him—he could see no sign of his pursuers—but he threw them off, drops of blood spraying onto his jacket cuffs and his shirtfront. As he passed the corner where Cannon Street leads into Watling Street, the memory of an ancient conversation came into his head, of Dunbar standing in the deserted boathouse at the lochside, giving his address and telling him to look him up. What was the number? It was 18. He was sure it was 18. He was conscious now of a pain between his ribs and knew that he was conspicuous to the people through whom he passed. These onlookers shrank from him as he moved desperately along the street. Number 18 was a corn chandler’s, with its goods spilling out onto the pavement, but there were rooms above and he seized upon a boy who was standing in the shop doorway and demanded, “Does Mr. Dunbar live here? I must see him. Mr. Dunbar.”

Seeing his bloodied clothes and the agonised expression on his face, the boy started back in fright. As luck would have it, there was a noise of footsteps on the wooden stair behind him, and Dunbar, a brown-paper package under one arm and a newspaper in his hand,
moved slowly into view. Seeing Dewar, he set down the brown-paper package and looked at him keenly.

“Who’s this? Why it’s Dewar, who wondered why men should collect eggs!” Then his eye fell upon Dewar’s crimson shirtfront. “But heavens, you’re injured, man. What’s the matter with you?”

“It’s nothing—truly.” Dewar’s mouth was full of blood as he spoke. “Only I must come inside. Let me come inside!”

A whistle sounded at the end of Watling Street. To the surprise of Dunbar, whose hand still grasped him by the shoulder, Dewar sank to his knees on the pavement amidst the corn chandler’s spreading paraphernalia. Here the policemen, coming up at a run with their faces very red, found him in a state of insensibility with Dunbar feeling his pulse for signs of life. At first it was proposed that a cab should be fetched, then, when an examination of the prisoner had been conducted, a police doctor and a stretcher. Shortly afterwards, when the crowd of onlookers had dispersed and the police ambulance rolled off through the dust, the corn chandler’s boy emerged from the shop with a bucket of water and began silently to wash the blood from the grey stone step.

FROM THE DIARY OF THE REV. JOSIAH CRAWLEY, CURATE OF EASTON

15 November 1866

Aghast, on returning to these pages, to find three years now gone since first I came here. Three years! And what is there to show? And yet there have been passages in my life when I could account for each passing day, so plenteously filled were they with good work done on the Lord’s good business. Now the memory of the week past is like a blank page in a book from which the words have ebbed away, quite beyond the power of calling back. Thought of unburdening myself to Margesson, but—as ever—shrank from the candid confession of my woes, from which no good ever came. A month now since I last saw Ely.

 

17 November 1866

Winter encroaches on every side. White mist, which in these parts hangs over the fields at dawn, still there at dusk; geese abound on the lakes and meres; haw berries ripe on the hedge. My landlady confined to bed with a bronchial ailment, necessitating on my part the performance of many irksome chores. Mrs. Forester much gratified by my condescension. “There’s many a gentleman wouldn’t stand for such treatment, &c. She is a good woman, and I would perforce do my best by her. A curious letter from Cousin Richard. A living in which he has some faint interest at the coast here to fall free this next quarter day. What would be my opinion? Wrote, as best I could, on my
behalf, sending my tutor’s commendation, the letter Warden Plender addressed to me when I took my fellowship, but I have suffered too much disappointment to set great store by it.

 

20 November 1866

Much troubled by conscience, I determined to make a visit to the Hall, to which every species of rumour continues to adhere. Dixey not seen in the parish for a month, a bailiff absolutely heard enquiring of him in Watton High Street, &c. Rain falling incessantly through my journey gave the estate a yet more melancholy aspect than I remembered: the grass grown up a foot high by the driveway; the windowpanes at the lodge smashed and broken. Approaching the house, in which no sign of life seemed apparent, I found myself visited by the queerest apprehension and misgiving, to the extent that I could scarcely bring myself to belabour the great front door. Receiving no answer to my repeated summonses (which clamour resounded inside the house, I fancied, like the roll of some ghostly drum), I wandered around the side of the house. Here all was fallen into the rankest desuetude: weeds grown up in the kitchen garden; the door of the keeper’s cottage swinging from its hinge and a pig peering out from within.

It was by this time perhaps three in the afternoon, the light beginning to fade, and I would gladly have taken my leave, thinking that I could do no good, that the place was altogether shut up and deserted, when a face appeared at the window—a queer pale face rising out of nowhere and, I will confess, giving me such a start as I never before felt in life—and a man, whom I recognised as Randall the butler, came stepping across the grass. Having had much courtesy from him in the past, I prepared to greet him civilly, only to detect a look of great anger in his face. I had no business here, he told me before I could speak a word; Mr. Dixey would not see me, would not see anyone, and I should do no good. I replied, as coolly as I could in the circumstances, that I regarded Mr. Dixey as my friend, that my duty as a Christian and as a minister of God brought me here, on behalf of not only Mr. Dixey but another person that I knew rested beneath his roof. At this
Randall seemed transformed by an emotion that might either have been fear or solicitude. Mr. Dixey would not see me, he repeated. I should go at once, or he could not be held responsible for what might happen. At this, I confess, I began almost to laugh, and yet there was something in the man’s expression that stifled the laugh in my throat. The great gloomy house, Randall’s pale face regarding me in the half-light, the thought of Dixey roaming the empty corridors—for I believe that no servant other than Randall remained—the woman confined in some remote chamber: all this worked on me to such an effect that, to my shame, I stole away through the kitchen garden and on into the woods with the howls of Dixey’s dogs in their kennels ringing in my ears, regained the road with my heart pounding and a dreadful sense of there being someone or something almost at my heels. And yet there was nothing, only the mist and the movement of the trees in the wind, and so I made my way home very troubled by what I had seen and the thought of what it might portend.

 

24 November 1866

So I am to be Vicar of Holkham! A letter from Cousin Richard setting out the terms of my incumbency realising in me the greatest exultation. There is a fine rectory, apparently, and eight hundred pounds a year besides.

 

27 November 1866

To Ely.

 

In the study, his hand supported by the ferrule of the square desk, the stuffed bear stiff and cumbersome a yard from his elbow, Mr. Dixey watches at the high window. The gravel drive that lies beneath it, its inflexions curving away around the rank lawn and the fountain with its
dripping caryatid, is quite empty. It is a week now since anyone came along it, and that was only the postman—Sam Postman, Mr. Dixey thinks he is called—who rapped at the door for two minutes without an answer and then reluctantly departed, leaving the letter propped up against the door. It is a wonder, Mr. Dixey thinks, that the servants did not collect it. Then he remembers that the servants are gone, away to Watton, Lynn and Norwich, and that he watched them go. There is a suspicion—a footfall in the distance, a door seeming to close far away—that Randall may still be in the house, but Mr. Dixey cannot be sure.

In the end he retrieved the letter himself. It lies now on the desk beside him, flanked by the display cabinets, the specimen cases and the bead-eyed bear. In the grate a coal or two still flickers red-white, and there are other letters stacked on a chair to the right of the hearth, for Mr. Dixey has been burning his correspondence. Great dockets and folds of foolscap, many of them crossed over and sealed and recalling the days before envelopes, all gone crackling into the flames. Looking at the piles of ash banked up on either side of the winking coals, Mr. Dixey wonders from where in the human heart rises the urge to reconstitute that which has been obliterated. The only trace of a dodo that endures, apart from a half-dozen pages of contradictory drawings, is the half of a leathery hide kept preserved in the Oxford museum. All that is left of the moa are a few bones found in the dirt of a New Zealand cave. Perhaps, Mr. Dixey thinks, at some future point an anatomist will attempt to reconstruct his life rather as the naturalists attempt to reimagine
Didus ineptus
from the accounts of the Dutch travellers to Mauritius two centuries before. The thought is curiously consoling, but the vision it conjures up of persons unknown to him busily at work here at the centre of his private world is more than he can bear.

Guided by some prompting he cannot quite explain, he slides open the lid of the nearest display case, brings out the two marsh harrier eggs that lie within and balances them on his palm. They weigh nothing, so light, he thinks, that they might float. Regretfull, y he crushes the eggs beneath his fingers, breathing in the faint odour compounded of earth, albumen and decay. There are other things than letters to destroy, he thinks.

The letter, Mr. Dixey divines, this sentence or so sent from a desk in Carter Lane, has destroyed his hopes. Now there are connections to be made. People will no longer see him as himself but as part of a complex chain of incident, collusion and desire. That is the way of things. His hand is on another display case now: an eagle’s egg taken from the loch at Strathspey. Again he crunches it between his fingers. Once, as a young man, he shot at a golden eagle high on a hilltop in Sutherland, but at the moment he raised his gun to his shoulder the bird tracked away, lifted by a spiral of wind he could not see, and the bullet went wide. He would have fired again, had not the sun suddenly risen from behind a cloud to blind him.

A movement beyond the window catches his eye, and he stares once more into the pale December light. There is a carriage approaching down the gravel drive. Mr. Dixey can see the coachman’s grey head bobbing up and down as the transom shifts beneath him. As he looks on, the carriage makes a half turn into the wide space before the front of the house and stops. Watching the people who emerge from it—a sharp-featured middle-aged man commands them, whom Mr. Dixey has never seen—he thinks that if he wished he could throw open the window and fling more of the eggs down upon their heads. He has a sudden vision of the shells, white and papery, slowly descending like snowflakes through the chilly air.

He takes a last look through the window. Curiously, the men—there are four of them—seem in no hurry. Conferring, heads angled together above the gravel, they have the air of pleasure seekers, anxious to inspect their guidebooks before setting forth on their tour of the grand house. Mr. Dixey moves rapidly down the great staircase into the hall and thence into the servants’ quarters. The kitchen cat, cleaning her paws on the big oak table, watches him as he goes. The kitchen door is half-open, has been so for some time apparently, for there is a little whirl of old leaves, dirt and grass-ends upon the threshold, and Mr. Dixey passes through it. In the distance he can hear the dogs howling. He cannot remember when they were last fed, but it is not less than three days since.

The first belt of trees is within reach now, and he plunges into
it, stands breathing heavily with his gaze fixed upon the house. He wonders how long it will be safe to stay here, concealed in this thicket, and whether there may be other men approaching silently through the grounds to cut off his retreat. As if to confirm this suspicion, something stirs in the dense bank of foliage to his left. Instantly, he hastens away down the woodland path. It seems to him as he moves that the place is unnaturally still, that there should be birds calling, but that they are gone—the dogs have stopped howling, he registers—and that his breath sounds unusually loud in his ears.

There is another stirring—so faint as to be hardly perceptible but a stirring nonetheless—in the trees, and he turns round, more in curiosity than alarm, to inspect what it is that haunts his steps, here in a Norfolk wood on a winter’s afternoon in the thirtieth year of the reign of little Victoria of Saxe-Coburg, the niece of the sailor king, whom once he saw on a hot afternoon in Windsor with the brass bands playing and the rooks cawing frenziedly above the distant elms.

The rest you know.

“Nothing to be discarded, mind,” Captain McTurk instructed as they came into the house. “Everything to be kept.”

The lower parts of the house were empty and undisturbed. In the servants’ quarters a silence. In the pantry a rat sitting on its hindquarters eating at a rancid ham. In the drawing room a half inch of dust upon the lacquer table and the old Dixeys in their frames.

In Mr. Dixey’s study a great chaos: the windows raised and the curtains billowing in the wind; Bruin cast lengthways upon his paws and a great lump torn out of his ursine head; a litter of broken shells and scattered books; a microscope thrown upon the carpet with its lens smashed in two.

“He has destroyed…everything,” said Captain McTurk.

“Not quite everything, I think,” remarked Mr. Masterson. “See here.”

On the great table, under a dome of glass, a circular plate, spread
with moss, on which sat a pair of perfect ruddy-brown eggs and an inscription, printed in elegant italic script on a slip of paper. Captain McTurk bent to examine it.

“
Pandion haliaetus.
What is that?”

But Mr. Masterson had read his Latin at Charterhouse School.

“Osprey eggs,” he explained. “A great rarity, I believe.”

All this time, needless to relate, Captain McTurk and his men had been ceaselessly at work on the public’s behalf. It is remarkable, is it not, the volume of evidence that will suddenly spring to hand when the perpetrator of a crime has finally been unmasked. Let a man stand charged with stealing a sheep, and immediately a parcel of corroborating detail will be found torn open and spilling its contents at his feet. Witness A will allege that he enquired of him the best way of cooking mutton, witness B confirm that he attempted to borrow from him a carving knife and fork, witness C relate that he was seen gathering the materials for a mint sauce, and out of all this testimony and supposition is instantly constructed a vast edifice of guilt. So it was with Captain McTurk’s investigation. He had fished sedulously in the turbid lake concealing the affairs of Mr. Pardew, Mr. Dixey and sundry other persons connected to them, and all kinds of curious things had come up struggling on his hook. He had been to Easton Hall and examined its contents most thoroughly. He had made a visit to Jemima at her villa in St. John’s Wood, consulted Mr. Caraway of St. John’s College and called upon Mr. Dunbar in Watling Street but found the latter gone into the country. The landlord of the Black Dog had wilted beneath his gaze, Mrs. Farthing had curtseyed in his presence and it was rumoured that His Grace the Duke of——had been absolutely compelled to forsake his ducal mansion and spend an exceedingly comfortless hour in the little room behind the stable yard in Northumberland Street.

In this way all manner of confidential remarks had been made into Captain McTurk’s ear and all manner of confidential documents reluctantly entrusted to his care. Half a dozen counterfeit cheques drawn on provincial banks by persons unknown; private communica
tions sent by Mr. Dixey to his lawyer; a little scrap of paper—heaven knows where it came from—in which a gentleman signing himself “R.P.” (Mr. Pardew’s initials, certainly, but no doubt shared by many other persons) conveyed certain immensely suggestive instructions: all these had somehow found their way into Captain McTurk’s grasp, and those who monitor the achievements of our public servants felt that the captain had excelled himself.