Sons of Fortune (33 page)

The news delighted Caspar, though it still fell far short of the sort of curriculum he wanted.

“I wish I were there to see it,” Greaves went on awkwardly. He spoke so softly that it was several moments before Caspar grasped what had been said. “The truth is, my boy—and this is not to become general knowledge before chief has announced it—I have been offered an assistant headship…er…elsewhere.”

“No, you mustn’t, sir,” Caspar pleaded.

“It was the last thing I wanted. But he made me see that our ideas will never prevail if we all stay huddled at the one school. We must ‘go forth and speak unto all nations’—or unto all schools anyway.”

“When?” Caspar asked, on the edge of his seat.

“After Christmas.”

“I’ll have them give in my notice,” Caspar said firmly. “I’ll follow you to the new school, sir. Where is it?”

Greaves laughed, thinking this no more than an excess of zealous politeness.

“I will,” Caspar insisted. “I couldn’t stand Fiennes without you—I mean without maths as you teach it.”

Still Greaves would not be persuaded to take this boyish outburst seriously. There was no time, then, to pursue the discussion for, at that moment, Nora came out onto the terrace. Greaves stood at once. Caspar, following the master’s eyes, saw his mother and stood, too. “Have a good rest, Mama?” he asked.

“Rest!” Nora said, fanning herself. “In this heat! I’ll join you in a lemonade, if I may.”

A footman brought a glass for her and a fresh jug, clinking with ice. They all sat again. Greaves had never seen
iced
drinks before.

“Your son is probably too modest to tell you, Lady Stevenson, but he is into the finals of his age group.”

“Well done!” Nora said. But her tone made it obvious that no other result had been expected.

“I play too hard,” Caspar said.

“In this weather that would be very easy.”

“No, I mean I play only to win.”

Nora looked puzzled from him to Greaves.

Greaves laughed. “He is lampooning me, Lady Stevenson. Socrates says that the spectator at the Olympic Games is superior to the athlete, in that the athlete is an involved partisan but the spectator may cultivate a dispassionate appreciation of what might be termed
pure
athletics. I have tried to tell your son that the athlete, too, can cultivate that same appreciation even in the heat of the game.”

“You hear that, Caspar,” Nora said. “I’m sure it’s true. And what other truths have you arrived at?”

“Your son does not think our modern system for apportioning careers within the family very equitable.”

This indiscretion annoyed Caspar intensely. He could fight his own battles, he thought. Nevertheless, he smiled sheepishly, as they expected him to.

“Yes, young man!” Nora said, glad that Greaves was there. Now Caspar could not wriggle off into noncommittal shrugs and mumblings. “That is something I meant to take up with you—and now is as good a time as any. I thought your answers to Lord Stevenson were even more evasive than usual.”

Caspar sighed.
Very well,
he thought.
Why not? Tell her all.
But he spoke with reluctance, having no way of knowing whether it was a clever or stupid thing to do. “I have no interest in the army,” he said. He waited to see the effect.

His mother raised her eyebrows briefly. “A trifle negative, dear?”

He took a further plunge. “I want to go into business.” He paused. “Commerce.” Again he paused, watching her closely. “Trade!” He made each sound more reprehensible than the last.

Nora’s face was unreadably impassive. “They are not the same, of course. What d’you know of any of them?”

“Enough, Mama, to know they would suit me better than soldiering.”

Greaves, his upper lip resting on the point of a triangle formed by his two index fingers, watched them, his eyes flicking left and right like a tennis spectator’s.

“And what makes you think you would survive? It is not a very considerate world.”

“I think I would.”

“And if you didn’t?”

Caspar drew a deep breath. “At least if I went down, it would be my own fault. No one would order me to take five hundred men with drawn swords to face heavy artillery on three flanks of a valley!”

Greaves drew in a sharp hiss of disapproval. Nora, secretly pleased at Caspar’s answers, dared not show it. She turned to Greaves. “And you, Mr. Greaves,” she said, “have made a conquest of Professor Thomson.”

“I?” Greaves was delighted at this unexpected tribute.

“He told me that we have nothing to fear for the future if our schools have mathematics teachers of your calibre.”

“Yes. Fiennes is very lucky,” Caspar said with an absolutely straight face—much to Greaves’s discomfiture.

The talk then turned to general matters. Ten minutes later, as Nora was on the point of leaving them, a footman came out, somewhat briskly, considering the heat. He waited for Nora to turn to him and then told her that Mrs. Thornton had called in some agitation and would be grateful for an interview.

Hiding her annoyance, Nora left Greaves and Caspar. Arabella had a tendency to be imperious lately. She behaved as if the rescue of tarts and elimination of masculine ardour were the twin hubs of the universe. Whereas, she thought wryly (and to prepare herself not to be too sharp with Arabella), everyone knew the universe had but one hub, and that was here in Hamilton Place.

Their greetings were warmth itself. Arabella was sure she had called on the least convenient day of the whole year. Nora assured her that the musicians were not due for hours and that she had been bored to distraction until the footman brought the joyful news…and so on.

“Well!” Arabella sat shivering with excitement. She was plainly bursting with some news of especial importance to Nora.

“How was Paris?” Nora asked. “It’s a city I never liked.”

“Oh, dreadful, dreadful!” Arabella said, waving a hand as if Paris had been a mere incidental in her travels. “Now listen. I was walking along one of the pavements there. One of the advantages of having
maisons tolérées
,
I have found, is that the
Police des Moeurs
can take you into them. They don’t openly have to pretend to you that such places are not to be found. And the wretched panders who manage the houses have to let you in and answer your questions and show you everything. Well, as I was saying, my dear, one day I was walking along—that is, I had been to see a most singular house in the Cours des Coches, which is distressingly near the English Church and our own embassy. A dreadful house, owned by a Monsieur Calignani, a Frenchman, of course, despite his name.” She paused, not knowing how to continue.

“What was so singular about it?” Nora asked, hoping Arabella would soon get to the point.

“Every woman in that vile place—and some are no more than mere girls—is a…a teratism…a nonesuch…a grotesque.”

“A freak of nature, you mean?” Nora asked.

“Precisely. The extraordinary thing is that this house is not patronized by low and degraded people, as you might think. The policeman who was my guide assured me that only the most refined “gentlemen” of otherwise exquisite tastes are permitted there. And this was borne out by two of the women themselves. Piteous creatures.”

“Really?” Nora said, thinking she would soon have to ask Arabella to come back another day.

“Of course, they dress it up in high-sounding names, with doors to each room labelled Manticora, Wyvern, Dipsas, Hippocerf, Simurgh…and so on. But the names were mere perversity. Perversity upon perversion. For they bore no relation to the wretched ogresses within.”

Nora cleared her throat.

“Yes!” Arabella said. “Come to the point: I was leaving—had left that dreadful house and was walking up the foot pavement to the Rue Malesherbes when I chanced to look over my shoulder. Well, my dear, picture my surprise when I saw a certain Herr Porzelijn—a Dutchman who is well known to us. And a man less aptly…”

“Ignaz Porzelijn?” Nora interrupted. “Surely not.”

“I believe that is…yes…”

“A big man. A very big man. Gross to the point of obesity?”

“It must be the same. But surely you don’t know him?”

“I know
of
him. He appears to be a close friend of a young man who works for me. Bernard Bassett—the young man who manages my London properties. This Ignaz Porzelijn is a dealer in antiques, I’m told.”

“And in flesh!”

“Really?”

“Oh, no doubt of it. He is well known to us. One of his tricks is to lurk in a carriage near our Hornsey Refuge and decoy women on their way there.”

“Tell me more,” Nora said, not knowing when the information might prove useful.

“His main trade is in girls of ten to fourteen, whom he takes to continental houses with forged birth certificates provided by our government.”

Nora looked scandalized.

“Indeed,” Arabella assured her. “in England our birth certificates and death certificates are never brought together. Herr Porzelijn simply asks Somerset House to supply copies of birth certificates for girls now dead but born over twenty-one years ago. We have records where he handed over five ten-year-old English girls to a Paris house, with certificates “proving” them to be over twenty-one—which they have to be in order to work in any of the continental houses.”

Nora shut her eyes in horror at it.

“Oh, and there is worse. Girls of five, torn by monsters—no, I’m sorry. I won’t. I won’t.”

“I had no idea,” Nora said, still shaken. “No idea. I always felt Paris was a vicious, rotting…”

“Paris!” Arabella cried. “I’m talking about London. Here! A mile from this house. Every night. Every night, you’ll find mutilated little creatures flung into Meard Street from a house there. I have seen it. That is no hearsay.”

Nora, who, from her early upbringing in Manchester’s cotton mills, had thought herself tough and hardened, looked at Arabella with new eyes. Arabella had once seemed, indeed had once been, a delicate prude, full of vapours and fancies. Now, match her where you would, she was a woman of formidable stomach and great bravery.

“I’m sorry.” Arabella smiled grimly. “That has nothing to do with why I am here. I was telling you about the Cours des Coches—what an apposite name! And Ignaz Porzelijn. He was just getting out of a carriage. And! On his arm!…Guess! You’ll never guess. Little Mary Coen! She was unmistakable, of course.”

Nora was so surprised she stood up. She sat again, abruptly.

“Mary! You are sure?”

“Of course I’m sure—I have her in the carriage outside. She is recovered now. Naturally he had drugged her—that is quite common. She had no idea who I was, or where she was, or who she was. I’m sure she still doesn’t know what has so nearly befallen her.”

“But how did you get her away from him? He sounds a very dangerous sort of man.”

Arabella made a contrite smile. “I had the police with me, remember. And I told a leetle, leetle lie, I fear. I said the girl enjoyed Lord Stevenson’s protection. That was enough!”

Nora laughed. “That’s no lie, Arabella. He’d do anything for that girl. He saved her life when she was just ten, remember? I don’t suppose you do. When she was burned like that.”

Arabella coughed delicately. “Er…the word ‘protection’ can imply different things in different countries.”

“I see.” Nora looked at Arabella through narrowed eyes. “Or even in different tones of voice or a different tilt to the shoulders? Mmm?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Nora laughed. That was rich! The one thing she was certain of was John’s absolute fidelity to her. “I’m sure his honour will withstand it,” she said, to Arabella’s great relief. “But has Mary told you…I mean, presumably you know how she came to be there?”

Arabella put her head on one side, guardedly. “I know in part. She absolutely refuses to say why she ran away in the first place. Something happened there in Galway, but she won’t say. Not to me. Perhaps she will to you. I’m certain she came to London looking for Lord Stevenson. She was in some trouble and needed him. She denies it, of course.”

“That’s very possible. She worships him. We pay her next to nothing, you know—but she won’t dream of leaving. Well…” She laughed. “Until this.”

“The point is, she
did
see Lord Stevenson, here in London.”

“Oh? But now isn’t that odd he never mentioned it! And he was very upset at her running off like that.”

“But she didn’t speak to him. He didn’t see her. She saw him get into a cab—this was up near your office in Nottingham Place, the only address she knew. She shouted but failed to make herself heard over the traffic. So, having no money left she followed him on foot as best she could. She ran all through the park, she says, so she must have followed him almost all the way here.”

“Here?” Nora said. Her disbelief in the girl’s story was growing strongly. “But John never comes here—only for dinner parties. Otherwise never! He always stays at his club.”

“Well, she said Hamilton Place. She’s quite certain of that. And she told me the name when we were still in Paris. She lost him in the park and she wandered around for hours. And then she saw him again, just as he was leaving this house. Again she was too far away for him to hear her, but she knocked at the door and your housekeeper saw her and spoke to her.”

Nora rang for a footman, who appeared instantly. “Ask Mrs. Jarrett to come here,” she told him.

“And your housekeeper gave her a little money. And advised her to go to the Hornsey Refuge—which was where Porzelijn was lying in lurk.”

Nora was now in something of a dilemma. Arabella had been so kind, in intention and in deed, and was so pleased at the way it had turned out, it would be a poor recompense to demolish the girl’s story on the spot. And Nora was sure the story would be demolished, for John would never set foot here when she was away, and Mrs. Jarrett would never part with a farthing in such circumstances.

Nora had to get Arabella out before Mrs. Jarrett appeared. She stood and said, “I’ll come to the door myself, my dear. You’ve been most kind. And, of course, any expense you have incurred…” and so on all the way to the door. Arabella, at first a little startled, left feeling a glowing sense of having done her duty well and truly. Just before she got into her cab she turned back to Nora. “I still have hopes of finding young Charity in this way, you know. Even after almost five years! I’m positive she didn’t run off to get married. I’m sure she was inveigled off in just this way.” And with a wan little smile she got up into the cab.