Michael Cox (40 page)

SERGEANT SWANN CLOSED his note-book for a second time.
‘I think that’s all we can do here,’ he said, standing up and patting down his bowler hat on his head. ‘If you agree, miss, we’ll all get a cab back to Grosvenor Square, and then our friend and I will go on to the Department, for a few private words. I think you said you won’t need me any more today?’
‘That’s correct, sergeant. I shall be attending Lady Tansor for the rest of the day.’
‘Very well, then. Come along now, Conrad. The inspector would like to see you. You remember the inspector, don’t you?’
Conrad nodded.
We left the hotel, and a cab was soon found to take me back to Grosvenor Square.
The door was opened to my knock by Charlie.
‘Good-morning, miss,’ he said, standing to attention, and saluting me.
Then I saw him glance outside, at the faces of Sergeant Whiffen Swann and Conrad Kraus looking out of the cab window.
‘Not a word, Charlie,’ I whispered, as I hurried past him.
‘Not a word, miss,’ he replied, closing the door.

II
The One-Armed Soldier

HALF AN HOUR later, unobserved, I left Grosvenor Square once more, this time to walk to Mrs Ridpath’s house in Devonshire Street.
Of course I should have told the sergeant where I was going; but I had had enough of Sergeant Whiffen Swann for one day, and this was my own private business, which I did not care to have reported back to Inspector Gully, and thence to Mr Wraxall.
On arriving in Devonshire Street, I found that I was fifteen minutes before my time, but, feeling somewhat wearied, I knocked on the black front door all the same.
The maid admitted me, took my coat and umbrella, and conducted me up to the drawing-room.
As she was about to announce my arrival, the girl turned to me.
‘She’s expecting you, miss,’ she whispered, ‘but the gentleman’s still here.’
‘Gentleman?’
‘He wouldn’t give his name, miss.’
So saying, she tapped softly on the door, and we entered.
Her face a sudden picture of confusion, Mrs Ridpath stared across the room at me from a chaise-longue by the fire. Her visitor was sitting with his back towards me.
Tall and broad-backed, with a magnificent head of thick, golden-hued hair that curled around the nape of his muscular neck, he was in the process of raising a glass of cordial to his lips with his left hand. The empty right-hand sleeve of his tweed Norfolk jacket hung over the arm of the chair.
‘Esperanza, my dear!’ exclaimed Mrs Ridpath, clearly still flustered by my arrival. ‘You’re a little early, I think?’
She walked across to kiss me on the cheek and shepherded me over to join her on the chaise-longue. As I sat down, I was able, for the first time, to look her visitor in the face.
And what an impressively handsome face it was, exactly like one’s notion of some great Saxon king, or sea-roving Viking warrior: weathered, clean-shaven, with the striking exception of a magnificent moustache, the ends of which drooped down almost to his chin; and having a pair of the most delicately pale blue eyes I had ever seen.
‘My dear, may I introduce Captain—’
‘Willoughby,’ the gentleman broke in, getting up to shake my hand. ‘John Willoughby.’
There was no doubt now: he had only one arm; and this instantly brought to mind the man I had seen on the bridge over the Evenbrook, on the day my Lady had driven out in the barouche with Mr Armitage Vyse.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Ridpath, appearing strangely disinclined to meet my questioning eye. ‘Captain John Willoughby. And this – John – is Miss Esperanza Gorst, of whom you’ve often heard me speak.’
‘Delighted and honoured to meet you, Miss Gorst,’ said Captain Willoughby, releasing my hand and taking his seat again.
There followed an embarrassing period of shuffling silence, during which Captain Willoughby tapped the fingers of his remaining hand on the arm of the chair, and Mrs Ridpath smiled fixedly in the most abashed and self-conscious manner.
Eventually, a few words were spoken on the subject of the recent snow, and on various other trifling matters. At last I could stand no more.
‘I believe I know you, sir,’ I said, giving Captain Willoughby the boldest look I could.
‘I don’t think that’s possible, my dear,’ Mrs Ridpath began, but she was prevented from saying any more by Captain Willoughby.
‘No, Lizzie,’ he said, ‘Miss Gorst is right. I believe she
does
know me – at least by sight – and so deserves to know a little more about me.’
‘As you wish,’ said Mrs Ridpath, folding her hands in her lap with every appearance of unwilling resignation.
‘That’s the thing, Lizzie. Doesn’t do to deny what can’t be denied, you know. Well, Miss Gorst, you’ve seen, but not met, me before – that’s true; and so I’ll lay it out to you, as plainly as I can, for I’m a plain man, and can’t do it any other way.’
He gave a preliminary cough, crossed his legs, and sat back in his chair.
‘What you must know about me is this. I am – I beg your pardon,
was
– one of your father’s oldest friends. Different in every possible way, of course, him and me – I dare say that no two fellows were ever more so. I was once accounted a pretty good sportsman, and could ride any Leicestershire man ragged, before the Russians blew my arm off; but your esteemed pa could hardly get on a horse without straight away falling off. Still, we were chums from the start, and the best of chums we stayed, even when circumstances kept us apart.’
‘And where did you meet my father, Captain Willoughby?’ I asked.
‘Ah, at school. Eton. He was in College, of course – a King’s Scholar. We Oppidans lodged in houses in the town, but I hit it off with him from the start, and soon he was taking breakfast with me in the house, and keeping some of his things in my room – Long Chamber, where they put the Scholars, being a pretty inhospitable place. I was put somewhat in mind of it at Scutari.
*
‘Well, your pa was as clever as they come – cleverer. Deuced if I know how he kept it all in his head. “The learned boy”, that’s what we all called him when he came to the school. There never was anyone like him – an absolute demon at his lessons. His masters could hardly keep up with him, let alone the rest of us. I was the most confounded dunce – always had been; but that didn’t matter to Glyver.’
‘Glyver? That was the name you knew him by?’
‘At school, yes. Edward Glyver.’
‘Not Glapthorn?’
‘No, not then,’ said Captain Willoughby, after a moment’s consideration. ‘That came later, when he lived here – I mean in London.’
‘You must also have known Phoebus Daunt at school, then?’ I observed.
Captain Willoughby uncrossed his legs, and took out his pipe.
‘Mind if I smoke, Miss Gorst?’ he asked.
‘Not at all.’
Several more moments passed as he reached into his jacket pocket for a pouch of tobacco, dexterously filled his pipe with his remaining hand, and set a match to the bowl. Then he sat back again in his chair, puffing out a blue-grey cloud of sweet-smelling smoke.
‘What were we saying?’ he asked.
‘Phoebus Daunt,’ I replied. ‘I remarked that you must also have known him, at school.’
‘Slightly.’
It was abundantly apparent that the captain had no intention of saying any more on the subject; and so, instead of pressing him further, I put another question to him.
‘Captain Willoughby, are you the friend at Evenwood that Madame de l’Orme told me about?’
To this enquiry he gave an immediate answer.
‘You may consider me so.’
‘The person with whom I should communicate, by placing two lighted candles in my window, should I ever need assistance?’
‘Again, you may consider me to be that person.’
‘And how did this arrangement come about?’
He blew out another plume of smoke.
‘That’s easily told,’ he said, ‘and I’m ready to do so.’
Another long, slow puff.
‘Well then, after you were born, and just before he left Paris to go on his travels in the East – which I believe you now know about – your pa wrote to me. He’d conceived a plan for your future, and asked me to watch over you, should I ever be requested to do so. To this, of course, I instantly agreed.’
‘But then he died,’ I remarked.
‘Indeed,’ said Captain Willoughby, from behind a fog of smoky tendrils.
‘And then?’
‘Madame de l’Orme wrote to me last year, to tell me that the circumstances were now right for your pa’s plan to be put in motion at last. That piece of intelligence, of course, immediately put things on a war footing, and I began to make the necessary arrangements.
‘All went smoothly, and when you arrived at Evenwood, I’d already taken a cottage in the village. You may know it. Curate’s Cottage?’
I knew it – a small, two-storeyed dwelling, not far from the entrance to the church-yard – and now recalled Sukie mentioning that it had a new tenant, a former military gentleman who kept himself very much to himself.
‘Every morning, mid-day, afternoon, and evening since then,’ continued the captain, ‘without fail, come rain or shine, I’ve set off on patrol through the Park, making sure to stop for a moment or two before the West Front, to look up at a certain window. When I’m confident that no candles are burning there, I go on my way rejoicing. You’ve seen me standing there once, I think, one foggy morning?’
‘And once on the bridge,’ I said, ‘as Lady Tansor passed by in her barouche, with a gentleman companion.’
‘Ah,’ said Captain Willoughby. ‘You saw me then, did you?’
‘It was you!’ I cried, having been struck by a sudden realization. ‘You let me out of the Mausoleum!’ Captain Willoughby nodded.
‘Bull’s-eye, my dear. No candles burning, just a soldier’s instinct – and a little luck.’
It appeared that he had chanced to see me setting off to the Mausoleum, and had decided he would take a detour on the way back from his mid-day patrol, to assure himself that all was well with me.
Arriving at the Mausoleum soon after my Lady had departed, and hearing my cries coming from within that dreadful place, he was at first dismayed to know what could be done to release me. Then he remembered hearing his neighbour, the loquacious Mr Thripp, mentioning that a key to the Mausoleum was kept in the Rectory. This, after walking the considerable distance to seek out the Rector, he eventually obtained, on the pretext of wishing to satisfy an architectural interest in the interior of the building.
‘Dashed good luck, of course, that the old boy was at home,’ the captain conceded. ‘But I’d have got you out, one way or the other, never fear, even if it meant bringing up the artillery to blow the doors off.’
Of course I had to kiss him, which I did, to his great confusion.
‘Now, now,’ he said, in a vain attempt at bluster, ‘that’s enough of that. Only doing m’duty, you know.’
I allowed him several more puffs on his pipe, as a reward, before continuing to quiz him.
‘Now Captain Willoughby,’ I said at length. ‘Tell me this. Are you acting strictly under orders?’
‘Orders? What do you mean?’
‘I have so many large and urgent questions to ask, concerning my father’s history, to which I long to have answers. I’ve a strong impression, Captain Willoughby, that you know a very great deal more about him than you’re able to tell me, and that you’d be willing to reveal what you know, were you not constrained in some way. I simply thought that you might be obeying orders, which, of course, a soldier is obliged to do.’
Throughout this exchange with Captain Willoughby, Mrs Ridpath had remained silent, although still visibly discomfited; but now, before Captain Willoughby could speak again, she stood up to ring the bell to summon the maid.
‘How rude you must think me, my dear,’ she said. ‘Here you are, a quarter of an hour in the house, and I’ve offered you no refreshment. You’ll take something, won’t you?’
The girl was soon at the door to receive her orders. After she had gone, Mrs Ridpath sat down again, and gently took my hand.
‘You must know, my dear, that Captain Willoughby and I are not free agents. As you have realized, we can act only according to the instructions we’ve been given by Madame de l’Orme, who is in turn fulfilling her own undertaking to your dear father. You may call these “orders”, if you like; but they are orders that we can neither counter-mand nor ignore. It will not always be so. A day will come…’
‘A day always comes,’ I said, wishing to spare her any more discomfiture, ‘and so I shall not make myself disagreeable any longer, dear Mrs Ridpath, but shall wait patiently for that day of final illumination. But will you please just tell me this: how did you come to play a part in my father’s plan?’
‘That’s a long story, my dear,’ she said, ‘and now is not the time to tell it. But this much, at least, I believe that Madame would not be unwilling for you to know.
‘I was one of your predecessors at Evenwood. My name then was Lizzie Brine.’

LIZZIE BRINE.
‘I had a maid once,’ I remembered Emily telling me, ‘Elizabeth Brine by name, who gave very satisfactory service.’ Mr Pocock had also mentioned her name, and that of her brother, John Brine, who had been Mr Paul Carteret’s man-servant at the Dower House.
Mrs Ridpath saw the flash of remembrance in my expression.
‘You’ve heard of me, I see,’ she said.
‘I have.’
‘I’ve just a little more to say, my dear, and then I think I’ll have said enough, for now.
‘Not so very long after the death of Mr Phoebus Daunt, when it became known that Miss Carteret, as she then was, intended to go travelling on the Continent, I naturally expected that I would accompany her. Instead, I was informed by Miss Carteret that she required someone to attend her who could speak French and German, and that she would therefore be seeking to engage a new maid.
‘So she left Evenwood, and soon afterwards I was dismissed, along with my brother, by the late Lord Tansor. I don’t say we weren’t treated well: we were given excellent references, and sufficient money to allow us to leave England, where we’d no future, and begin new lives in America. John bought some land to farm in Connecticut, and I became housekeeper to Mr Nathan Ridpath, a Boston banker.
‘Well, you may guess a little of the rest. I married Mr Ridpath, and began to improve myself thereby, having always been an eager learner, and greatly fond of the few books I could get – and of course the first thing I did was to learn French and German, not so much to spite my former mistress, although I won’t deny that it gave me some satisfaction to acquire the skills I had been dismissed for lacking, but principally to begin turning myself into something better than an English village girl, for my husband’s sake.
‘But then Mr Ridpath died, only six months after our marriage. He left me very well provided for, and in this comfortable condition I returned to England. This is the house I purchased, and here I’ve been ever since.’
I listened to her with rapt attention, for of course any scrap of information concerning Emily’s past was of the greatest interest to me; and in Lizzie Brine’s story I began to divine dim intimations of some momentous, yet still unformed, truth.
‘But how did you first come to know my father?’ I asked.
‘When I was Miss Carteret’s maid, we – I mean my brother, John, and I – came to an arrangement with your father.’
She paused.
‘An arrangement?’
‘Living in London, your father – Mr Glapthorn, as he was then known to us – required to be kept informed of what passed at Evenwood, particularly concerning Miss Carteret and Mr Phoebus Daunt.’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘But, after you returned from America, how did you find each other again?’
‘I came here in 1857,’ said Mrs Ridpath. ‘When I’d got myself nice and comfortable, I took a trip to Paris – a place I’d always longed to visit, and of course I now had the means and leisure to do so, as well as an ability to speak the language.
‘Quite by chance, I happened one day to see some delightful water-colours for sale in the window of a shop in the Quai de Montebello. There was a man – an Englishman – talking to a lady working in the shop, whom I quickly apprehended must be his wife. Although he was much changed since we’d last seen each other, I recognized him straight away, and he recognized me, although neither of us acknowledged the other.
‘Well, I bought one of the water-colours, and then left the shop; but he soon caught up with me, and so our acquaintance was renewed.
‘After I returned to London, he and his wife – calling themselves Mr and Mrs Edwin Gorst – moved to the Avenue d’Uhrich, at the invitation of Madame de l’Orme. We continued to correspond, and in due course, like Captain Willoughby, I was asked to participate in your father’s great scheme to regain his inheritance through you, his only child. And this I agreed to do, most willingly, to put right the terrible wrong that had been done to him, and to you, by my former mistress.’
Light – more blessed light – was now breaking through the obscuring clouds of ignorance and doubt. I kissed Mrs Ridpath, and thanked her for favouring me with her confidence, limited though it was, as we both knew.
‘So, Miss Gorst,’ said Captain Willoughby, getting up from his chair, and towering over me, ‘you now know a little more than you did when you woke up this morning. We’ve been introduced at last, and I’m heartily glad of it.’
‘As I am, Captain Willoughby,’ I replied. ‘Truly glad.’
‘Of course I’ll be on patrol once more when you return to Evenwood,’ he continued, ‘and I trust that your candles will remain unlit; but London is a different matter. A rather sizeable place, London. Can’t be everywhere, you know; so you must be careful in your daily routine, especially when going out alone. You’re to send word immediately to Lizzie here, if you feel yourself to be in danger from a certain legal gentleman – you know to whom I refer, I’m sure – and she’ll call up the cavalry. You’ll do that, won’t you?’
When Captain Willoughby had gone, Mrs Ridpath gave me a note from Mr Thornhaugh, which had crossed with the report that she had only just forwarded to Madame:
Madame and I are naturally concerned, Little Queen, that what she was bound by duty to tell you about yr father & yrself will have caused you deep distress. So write, as soon as you can, to assure us both that all is well. For the time has now come to put in train the culminating phase of our Great Task. This, Madame knows only too well, will present the most exceptional test of even yr remarkable resourcefulness & strength of mind. I shall write no more at present, except to assure you, once again, that Madame and I continue to have the greatest confidence that your endeavours will meet with complete success, & that what was lost to yr father will be restored to the full – by
you.
Having read Mr Thornhaugh’s note, I drank up my tea, and prepared to leave.
‘Good-bye, dear Esperanza,’ said Mrs Ridpath at the door. ‘I’m glad, and much relieved, that we understand each other a little better. It has been hateful to me, having to keep my true identity from you, although what Madame will have to say to me when I tell her, as I must, I don’t know. But I can see no harm coming from it; and so good-bye again, dear child. Your father would be so very proud of you.’
A cab had been called, and was waiting for me. As it pulled away and set off for Grosvenor Square, I laid back my head and closed my eyes.
A few more small but consequential steps had been taken on the road to the achievement of my great goal, and my father’s final and long-awaited vindication. But what still lay ahead?