The Governess (22 page)

‘So,’ the Sergeant said, dipping a look quickly back over his shoulder to make sure his every word was being closely followed. ‘So, miss, you don’t attempt to deny that this particular handkerchief is your particular property?’

‘I do not, Sergeant. Why should –’

‘Then, miss, do you deny what this handkerchief is stained with?’

With a flick of the wrist that would have done credit to a professional conjuror Sergeant Drewd turned the fragment of cambric so that the larger part of it, until now hidden inside his fist, was visible.

On it Miss Unwin saw a dark brownish stain which she knew at once was blood.

There appeared, too, to be some little glinting specks of black adhering to the brown-red stain, but she took no immediate notice of them. Blood on my handkerchief, she thought instead. Blood on a handkerchief that I have been made to admit is mine. Whose blood can it possibly be? Surely not Simmons’s? Yet for the Sergeant to be flourishing it in the way he is can mean only that, yes, he is claiming that it is Simmons’s blood.

Did I have it with me when I found her body, she asked herself then distractedly? At once she knew that she had not. The cambric gift was not something to be tucked into her sleeve on any day of the week. Indeed, there had never been a single occasion while she had been at Northumberland Gardens that she had chosen to wear it.

No, beyond doubt it ought to be in the top drawer of her chest in her bedroom. Yet here it was in Sergeant Drewd’s hand.

He was playing the Dirtyguts trick on her. He must be.

‘Sergeant Drewd,’ she said, making her voice as coldly cutting
as she could manage, ‘from where was it that you took that handkerchief, which I acknowledge to be mine?’

‘I take it?’ the Sergeant answered, with a look of slyly concealed triumph on his face. ‘I assure you, miss, I did not take this handkerchief, which you have admitted before witnesses to be yours, from anywhere at all. It was brought to me, this object was. Brought to me by a reliable and public-spirited person, who will if necessary aver to the fact in court.’

Miss Unwin felt yet more confused.

‘What do you mean by “brought to you”?’ she said.

It was all she could rise to in answer.

‘Sergeant Drewd is a man who’s apt to mean what he says, miss. As perhaps you’ll come to know.’

‘I dare say, Sergeant. But I ask you once again. Where did you get this handkerchief which ought to be in a drawer in my room? Who was this person who brought it to you? And – and what is that stain on it?’

‘Well, now, miss, what would you say the stain is? Allow me to show it to you more clearly. Allow me.’

And the Sergeant thrust the little piece of cambric as close to Miss Unwin’s face as he could without actually touching it.

‘Take it away,’ she burst out in fury. ‘Take it away.’

At once she regretted her anger, because the Sergeant had immediately turned round to Mr and Mrs Arthur with a look on his face as much as to say
See the guilty thing start back from the evidence of her crime
.

‘Well, miss, what do you now say that this handkerchief is stained with?’

‘I would say,’ Miss Unwin answered, remotely as she could, ‘that it seems to be stained with blood, though whose blood that might be I cannot say. Did one of the servants cut herself? Did she snatch up the handkerchief when she happened to be in my room for some reason? Is that it?’

‘Won’t do, miss, won’t do at all,’ the Sergeant said. ‘Supposing I was to tell you where this handkerchief was found. Do you think you might sing to a different tune then?’

‘I have no idea where the handkerchief could have been found.
As I told you, it ought to have been found, if it was found at all, in a drawer in the chest in my bedroom.’

‘Well, it was not, miss. I can assure you of that. It was found, I’m very much inclined to believe, exactly where it was hidden.’

‘Hidden? Hidden by whom, Sergeant?’ Miss Unwin countered.

The Sergeant lifted the waxed ends of his moustaches with a sharp smirk.

‘By whom, miss? By whom? That’s as may appear in due course. That’s as it may appear to a Judge and jury in due course.’

‘What do you mean by that, Sergeant?’

Miss Unwin felt herself uttering the challenge as if she was watching herself from a far height, a figure dressed in her grey stuff half-mourning frock and quiet grey mantle, still clutching her prayer-book in her gloved hand. A figure striving to contest every point being made against her. Because she knew very well what the Sergeant had meant. He meant that he now felt he had enough evidence to arrest her on a charge of murdering Simmons and very probably on one of murdering Mr Thackerton too.

No sooner had she admitted this fully to herself than the Sergeant spoke the words.

‘Harriet Unwin, I arrest you on a charge of murdering one Martha Simmons on or about the fourth of the present month, and I caution you that whatever you say will be taken down and may be used against you.’

From the pocket of his violently checked brown suit he produced his fat notebook.

Miss Unwin said nothing.

Despite her dismal predicament, Miss Unwin found in herself a sharp quirk of amusement at the way, no sooner had the words J
arrest you
been spoken, than Mr and Mrs Arthur, as one, turned on their heels and presented their backs to her. It was as if, she thought with a lively bitterness she had hardly known she possessed, they were a long-matched, loving couple sharing at once their every idea.

For a moment she contemplated calling out to their swiftly retreating figures
Miss Rhoda Bond of Maida Vale
.

But this was no time for petty revenges. Her own troubles had crowded in fast upon her.

Henry, by the front door, was almost as quick as his Master and Mistress to act on Sergeant Drewd’s words.

‘Will you be wanting a cab then, Sergeant?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Cab to the door, quick as you like,’ the Sergeant answered.

There followed some long silent minutes while Miss Unwin and Sergeant Drewd waited together in the empty, marble-floored hall with only the echoing tock-tock-tock of its tall clock to be heard.

Miss Unwin once or twice was on the point of speaking. She wanted chiefly to ask who the ‘reliable and public-spirited’ person had been who, the Sergeant had said, had brought him her precious cambric handkerchief stained with blood. She wanted, too, to know where it had been found. The Sergeant had said to her –she heard again the very tone of his brisk words – that she would sing to a different tune when she learnt where that was. But he had not told her. Evidently he had felt he had learnt enough now to make his arrest without noting her demeanour when he produced that revelation.

But each time she brought herself to the pitch of demanding answers to the questions a wave of discouragement washed over her. She had been arrested. The words that she had striven so
hard to avoid having said to her had been spoken. It was done. Nothing that she could say now could make them be withdrawn. Whatever she told the Sergeant now he was not going to answer with a merry laugh and say it had all been the merest mistake.

She was altogether in doubt, too, about what would happen to her next. She was going to be taken away. But would she be hurried off to Great Scotland Yard or to the nearby police station? And when she got to whichever of the two it was to be, what would happen then? Presumably she would be questioned. But would this be by Sergeant Drewd once more, or would some superior officer now take a hand?

Whichever it is, she reflected amid the blank confusion this unknown future presented to her, the time to put up her defence would be at that interrogation. If she could find a defence to put up. But it would be then that she must convince the authorities that she was the victim of a terrible error.

If that was possible. If the magistrates’ court first and the Judge and jury at the Old Bailey afterwards did not inexorably await her.

At last Henry arrived with the cab, a four-wheeler, and Sergeant Drewd led her out to it. She cast one glance backwards as she was hustled along the path to the gate.

How much she was leaving behind in this house she had lived in for not much more than three short months. Little Pelham first of all. They had got on well together. She had pledged herself to his future, and he had gobbled up everything she had given him to learn as if they had been so many creams and custards. Then there was Vilkins. Vilkins, who, when she had first encountered her here, she had for a moment wanted to disown as part of a past to be blotted out for ever, but who from the start of the ridiculous business of the missing sugar-mice had been a staunch and welcome ally in an unfriendly world. There was her work, too. In teaching Pelham she had been acquiring knowledge fast herself, learning how to teach, how to encourage, how at times to reprimand. Besides that, there had been what she had taught herself in the quiet evenings in the schoolroom, her steadily advancing grasp of French grammar and vocabulary, the volumes of history she
had devoured, and Lyell’s
Geology
and those two books of Mr Darwin’s.

She had even developed some affection for the house itself, new and ostentatious though it was. But its broad stucco front with its tall windows glinting and gleaming from their regular cleaning, the solid front door with the daily whitened front steps leading up to it and the two well-polished brass bells beside it, all these had come to mean something to her. They had given her a sense of solidity, a feeling of security. Even the two clusters of spotted-leaved laurels on either side of the path leading to the steps, dust-covered in summer through they were, grime-smeared after winter, had contributed their share to that feeling by their very sombreness, by their stubbornly continuing existence in soot-permeated London.

Would she ever see the house again? It was horribly unlikely. Even if, when she was questioned, she managed to find such convincing answers to everything that she was allowed in the end to emerge a free woman, it was extremely doubtful that Mr Arthur would consent to have her on the premises again. The best she might hope for was that he would agree to provide her with a letter she could show to any future employer.

Sergeant Drewd reached past her and opened the cab door.

‘Get in, miss,’ he said.

Miss Unwin dipped her head and climbed into the interior of the vehicle. It smelt of straw that had been wetted a hundred times and now had dried to powderiness. The Sergeant climbed in behind her after giving the driver a muttered instruction she had been unable to hear. With a groan the cab jerked into motion.

It was the local police station that proved to be their destination. Sergeant Drewd hurried her in and past a long counter presided over by a uniformed sergeant and heavy with great black-bound registers of various sorts. Behind this there was a broad corridor down which the Sergeant led her, his boots clunking loudly on its bare greyish floorboards.

At the far end they came to a small lobby with two ranks of barred cells leading off it. The sight of the bars, thick and close-set, sent an actual shudder of suddenly realised loss of hope through Miss Unwin’s frame.

To be put behind bars: it had been the threat that had hung obscurely over all her childhood. Obscure but real. How many of the children she and Vilkins had grown up with had ended behind bars, she asked herself? She could not know, but felt safe in guessing that it might be as many as half of their playmates – in what little play they had had.

A constable was sitting at a bare wooden table in the middle of the lobby with yet another black-bound register open in front of him. He was scratching laboriously with a squeaky quill as he made a new entry.

‘Brought you a female on a charge of murder,’ Sergeant Drewd said to him.

He looked up. A drop of thick black ink fell from the end of his pen and made a large blot on the open page below.

‘I don’t see how I can ‘commodate her,’ he said. ‘I don’t see it at all.’

‘Then you’ll have to stir yourself and make shift,’ the Sergeant answered. ‘She’s to be kept here till Mr Superintendent Heavitree comes over from Great Scotland Yard. Them’s orders.’

‘But I’m full right up,’ said the constable. ‘You know how they come pouring in on a Saturday night, Sergeant. Drunk and disorderlies by the dozen. No, by the score. I’m full right up, I tell you.’

‘But not so full as you can’t take one female, up on a charge of murder,’ Sergeant Drewd stated.

The constable, who had begun trying to scoop up the blot on his register with the ball of a fat finger, gave a huge, puffy sigh.

‘I’ll have to put her in the solitary with Old Fits then, that’s all,’ he said.

‘You do that then, Constable. You do whatever you have to, but just have her ready and waiting for Mr Heavitree.’

The constable got ponderously to his feet and led the way all along one of the ranks of cells to the far end. There was a pervasive odour of carbolic overlaid in whiffs with the sharp tang of vomit. Miss Unwin tried not to look through the bars of the cells against which her skirt was brushing. But she could not altogether avoid getting an occasional glimpse of the cells’ occupants, and what she saw did nothing to raise her spirits. There were women lying on the floors, apparently still dead drunk after the excesses of the
night before. There were others, standing close to the bars, whose profession was startlingly clear from bright broken feathers adorning battered hats or from brass-heeled shoes boldly flaunted, let alone the occasional shouted coarse endearments with which they greeted the constable.

At the end of the row a small cell faced up the rank. The constable took a heavy key from the bunch at his belt and unlocked its door. Only when Miss Unwin was urged inside did she get a good sight in the gloom of the single person occupying the confined space, so far back was she sitting and so black were her clothes.

She was a woman of perhaps sixty with a long, pale face, wearing a black bombazine dress from which odd pieces of material sharply jutted. Her black straw bonnet, too, had more of its straws projecting, it seemed, than lying in place. Across her bony shoulders was a black feather boa, or at least the remains of one, with scanty feathers spiking out at all angles. Altogether she looked like nothing so much, Miss Unwin thought, as a bedraggled, wind-blown rook.