The Solitary House (44 page)

Charles looks away, sick at heart. “And Miss Adams?”

“I am making arrangements for her to be placed in Lady Cremorne’s care, with the strong recommendation that she remove with her to her own family’s seat in Derbyshire. The girl went to live at Curzon Street for a time, they tell me, after her parents died. She had hitherto been a mild and peaceable child but grew capricious and unsettled almost at once. Suffered badly with her nerves and became altogether
ungovernable. It was about this same time that Lady Cremorne suffered her unfortunate accident. And as you may remember from your time in the Detective, I am no great believer in coincidences.”

“You mean, his wife
knew
?”

“Did the fall not take place in the middle of the night? When the rest of the household were a-sleeping? And was it not impossible to account afterwards for what she was doing there? My guess, my lad, is that she discovered the two of ’em together—her husband and his niece. Discovered it and either ran away in terror, or took issue with the man and paid the price. But I would lay a hundred pounds that she will never tell. It seems that all this time she has believed Clara had been placed in a distant asylum, far from London and beyond her husband’s reach. Though it appears she has been making efforts to find the child of late. But why now, after such a stretch of years—”

“The letters,” says Charles. “The anonymous letters.
She
must have known what they referred to all along, even if she didn’t know who was sending them.”

Bucket nods; even he has not made this last connexion. “That would explain it, I grant you. And it would likewise explain why Lady Cremorne has been writing so many letters herself in recent weeks—enquiring discreetly of all her acquaintance about establishments where the girl might be found.”

“But how could she have agreed to have a mere child committed to a lunatic asylum in the first place—even if it was meant to protect her?”

Bucket is silent a long time, twisting the great mourning ring on his little finger, but finally he turns to Charles. “Not all Jarvis’s patients were put there by Edward Tulkinghorn. Some were entrusted to him by their own families—well-meaning people, most of ’em. The young lad Cawston, for instance, was the apple of his family’s eye. A fine young fellow he was once, and full of promise, but he became so fixed in his habits, and so prey to monomania, they could no longer manage him. The grandmother who brought him up sincerely believed she was doing the right thing—that Jarvis would effect
a cure. In my experience, people are more often committed to such places out of love, than wickedness. Love and ignorance. The mind is a singular thing, Charles, a singular thing, and it has depths that even your finest science has not yet fathomed. I have known women”—and his face is drawn now with the memory of an old and unhealed pain—“who have so longed for a child that they can think of little else, and sink into such a pit of melancholy that there is no recovering them. And what can even the most loving of husbands do at such a pass but follow the advice the doctors give? There is no solving such cases, no knowledge of the heart that can bring back a mind so clouded and astray.”

Charles thinks of his own mother, driven from her reason by the loss of a child, and of the sister he knows he will never find, and it is a long, long moment before he remembers that the present Mrs Bucket was not the first. And that even now, Bucket has no children of his own.

They sit in silence again, and it is Bucket, in the end, who breaks that silence first.

“I must be away soon, to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and to the funeral, but before I do I should tell you what I found there this morning. It’s why I suggested we take a stroll down here. Open air, my lad, is best for evil deeds.”

He turns his eyes again to the river. “There were secrets in Tulkinghorn’s private museum, my friend, that even you did not discover. Like a wall hung with priceless pictures that turned out to be no more than a wooden partition. Like a little brass clasp that unlocked that partition, and allowed it to swing open. Like another set of pictures, hung inside, of an obscenity such as I have never seen in all my years in the Detective. Images of children, mostly, as would wring your heart and incite you to a blistering vengeance had you laid your eyes upon them. And were that not enough, there was a little parlour hidden behind, in the heart of the spider’s web, where I found the
last and worst of all Tulkinghorn’s secrets. There was a box of papers there that chilled the very blood in my veins. Seems that this young Hester was
his
daughter. Secreted away, all these years, where no-one would think to look. Seems he styled himself her ‘Guardian’, and never revealed, even to Jarvis, that he was the father. Not even when he got her with child—that same child that even now lies mouldering away in the foul earth of Tom-All-Alone’s. Seems Hester’s mother was his own niece, whom he ruined when she was still little more than a girl herself, and then traced to the workhouse when she was turned out of doors, for bringing such disgrace on the family credit.”

Charles turns to him, his face aghast. “What was the girl’s name? The mother?”

Bucket eyes him a moment, then nods. “So you understand, now, do you? I wondered how long it would take for you to marry it all together. You see, now, why I am in hopes that this bruised and wounded girl may yet find love in the bosom of her own proper family. For your guess is right, my lad, and your case is solved against all expectation. The name of Hester’s mother was Honoria. Honoria Chadwick.”

Half an hour later Charles is walking the short step back to Buckingham Street. The thin sun is warming his back and despite all he has witnessed, and all he has undergone, for the first time in weeks his mind is at rest. He parted with Bucket at the top of the steps, where the Inspector turned to him and took him by the hand. “If you ever see your way to returning to the Detective, then you have only—”

Charles smiled but shook his head. “It is a kind offer, but I think not. And now I must get back to the house. My uncle will be missing me.”

“Give him my compliments, my lad. And my best respects. And Charles—” he said, as he made to go, “a piece of advice. Given in a
spirit of kindliness. You may take it, or not, as you think fit. But if I were in your place, I would make peace with my father. And once that is done, go with him to see your mother. I know what you are a-feared of, but not all asylums are as wretched as Jarvis’s. You may take my word on that.”

Charles studied him, then nodded, and started to turn away, before recollecting something and turning back. “And the trooper? You don’t still believe—”

“Ah,” said Bucket with a smile, his fat forefinger again in evidence. “He’s all right. Before this day is done, he’ll be discharged with no stain on his character. You may take my word for that. I can tell you now that I no more believed it was George as done the deed, as I believed you capable of it, but there was evidence against him, as there was against you, and that being the case I had no choice but to take him in under guard, while I concluded my investigation. But as things stand now I know the truth of it, and I will soon have all the proof I need for an arrest.”

And with that Mr Bucket buttoned himself up and went quietly on his way towards the Strand, looking steadily before him as if he already had the face of his culprit before his eye.

The house is hushed and still when Charles opens the door and pauses for a moment in the empty hall. The danger that darkened this place has lifted, and all is at peace. It’s so quiet he can hear the faint ticking of his uncle’s clock, and the sound of sheets cracking and whipping like sails in the yard at the back. Laundry, he thinks, abstractedly. Molly must have done the laundry. There is a visiting card on the hall-stand which he picks up without really looking at it, before climbing the stairs slowly, aware, for the first time, how much his body aches and how much he wants a hot bath. But first he must look in on his uncle, and tell him what has passed.

The drawing-room curtains are still half-closed, and Charles waits as his eyes adjust to the dim light, breathing in the scent of a wood
fire burning low in the grate and the faint aroma of port from the glass at his uncle’s side. Maddox’s eyes are closed and his mouth slightly open, and his sombre and motionless face gives no hint of the dreams within. He must have fallen asleep in his chair, for his pillow has been carefully tucked behind his head, and a blanket drawn up over his lap. A lap where, as Charles now sees, the black cat is curled and sleeping, his ears twitching every now and then at the tiny crackles from the subsiding fire. Thunder has never sat with Maddox before, and Charles is smiling as he tiptoes over to the chair and bends to give the cat a quick caress before reaching to his uncle’s hand. But while the cat has warmed in the fire’s glow, the old man’s fingers are chill; and though Thunder stirs now and stretches at his master’s touch, Maddox lies rigid still, and does not wake.

And as he sees this—and as his heart lurches to what it means—there’s a sudden catch in Charles’s throat that has him kneeling quickly by Maddox’s side and pushing the hair gently from his uncle’s brow—an echo—all unconscious—of what the old man used to do when he was a boy—little enough in itself, but a gauge of deep affection in an age uncomfortable with intimacy, and a family chary of love.

“The doctor came but he says there’s little we can do but keep him warm, and trust to hope. And there is hope, Mr Charles, there is hope.”

Stornaway is standing in the doorway, and although his words are brave there is a break in his voice. And as Charles reaches again for his uncle’s wrinkled hand there is a new and different catch in his throat, and he can scarcely see for tears. Everything he’d wanted to say—everything he so wants to share—Maddox will not hear it now. May never hear it. Charles told himself it could wait till tomorrow, but tomorrow is here, and it is too late.

Stornaway comes slowly forward. “It came on so sudden—I thought at first it were just another of his turns. He’d been fretting about you, and I was trying to turn his mind to other things. I told him he had no cause to worry on your account—that you’d become a
fine detective in your own right, and even the highest in the land were now knocking on your door—”

“I’m sorry Abel, I don’t understand—”

Stornaway looks at him. “That card in the hall, Mr Charles, did you not see whose it was?” Charles wipes his hand across his eyes and puts his hand into his pocket. The card itself is over-embellished and a little pretentious, but otherwise hardly very remarkable, but the name—the name!

It’s scarcely conceivable that two short words can conjure such a fever of contradictory ideas, but even in his first confusion Charles knows that this man must be—can only be—a son who bears his father’s name, for the man now venerated by some almost to idolatry died an outcast and a pariah almost thirty years before, his heart cut out, and his body burned on an Italian shore.

Charles turns to Stornaway. “You showed my uncle this?”

Abel nods. “I wish to God I hae never done it, but how could I hae known he would take on so? All on a sudden he was shouting wildly about things long ago and then he gripped me by the arm and said a name I have nae heard from his lips for half a lifetime or more, and the next thing I knew he had fallen back in his chair with no stir of life about him, just as you see him now.”

“He said a name? What name?”

Stornaway sighs and shakes his head. “He loved once, Mr Charles. Loved and lost. He never spoke of it, after they parted—not to me, and not to Fraser. But we knew, all the same. They met when we were in Northamptonshire working a case, but in the end she upped and married another. I never knew what became o’ her after that, or if he ever saw her again. But it was her name, Mr Charles—the last word he spoke to me was her name. It must hae been her—with the life he’s lived I know of nae other.”

Charles looks at Stornaway, and then at the card in his hand, and wonders suddenly if he has another answer to that question, however extraordinary and unlikely it may seem. For he knows—as Stornaway
may not—that the woman whose son has left this card was once as infamous as the man she married, the brilliant daughter of brilliant parents—an old woman now, if yet she lives, but celebrated once for her beauty, and her cloud of red-gold hair.

“Mary,” he says softly, half to himself, but as he glances up at Abel’s face he sees the old man’s eyes widen in sudden amazement, and realises with an absolute clarity that whatever this card means—whatever demands are made of him, or questions asked—there is an unguessed secret that lies unseen, in the darkness and vacancy of his uncle’s cold repose.

FINIS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

These acknowledgments include details of the novel’s plot, so readers may want to wait to read them until the end
.

As any Dickens devotee will know,
The Solitary House
is one of the titles he originally considered giving to
Bleak House
. I’ve always considered that to be without question Dickens’s masterpiece, and it is the first and most important of the three great mid-Victorian texts that inform my own novel.