Ashenden (23 page)

“Stop weeping,” said Mr. Williams the next morning. “Have you packed your box?”

Dulcie nodded. Her eyes were almost swollen shut and her heart was a twisted lump in her chest.

“Where’s your uniform?”

“Upstairs.” The white apron and cap, the cuffs and collar, the black bodice and skirt were lying on her narrow bed like the skin of another life. She twisted her handkerchief in her fingers.

“What on earth were you thinking? The Janus Cup is the most valuable treasure in the entire house. It’s
Roman
.” He seemed to be suggesting that she should have taken something different, something less rare and conspicuous, but that could not be so. “The family have been very shaken by the news, although naturally relieved at the outcome.”

“What did you tell them?” she said in a dull voice. She, unlike Jack, had always liked the family and hated the thought that they would think badly of her.

“I told them I discovered the theft after the waits left last night, which is true. I told them that Pierce had the cup in his possession when he was caught, which is true. What I didn’t tell them was that he had an accomplice.”

Fresh tears fell. “Jack wasn’t my accomplice. He didn’t know I’d stolen it. He said it was wrong. He was going to put it back.”

“Maybe he would have and maybe he wouldn’t.”

“I don’t understand.” Her lips were dry and cracked with salt. “How did you know he’d have it?”

“I didn’t,” said Mr. Williams. “The person I was expecting to catch was you.”

She caught her breath and raised her eyes. “You left the cabinet open. I don’t suppose you told them that.”

“Don’t think about going to them with such a story. Or to the police,” said Mr. Williams. “It won’t make any difference to Pierce. And no good will be served by both of you going to prison. Or the three of you, I should say.”

“What do you mean?”

“You are fortunate that the Hendersons are charitable people. Miss Henderson, Miss Rowena, was particularly concerned to hear about your condition and wishes to help, which is frankly more than you deserve.”

“You are protecting your position,” said Dulcie, as the truth of it dawned on her.

He folded his hands. “You should also know that Pierce has confessed to the crime, which may lighten his sentence.”

*  *  *

Jack Pierce was sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labor and imprisoned in Reading Gaol, where he had been held on remand since he was arrested. Twelve months, or even six, would have been the expected sentence for a first offense where the property had been recovered, particularly when the accused had pleaded guilty, but the judge was of the opinion that the high value and rarity of the cup, together with the high standing of its owners (with whom he had had the pleasure to dine, although he did not mention this in his judgment), amply justified a longer term.

The week before the trial, Dulcie went to see Jack. She had written him many tearstained letters, begging him to take back his confession, and had had no replies. The vicar drove her to the jail in his little trap, but she would have walked the frozen miles had no other form of conveyance been available.

The visiting room was partitioned into three small separate compartments by iron bars. Jack sat on the far side, Dulcie by the door, and in the middle was a jailer to ensure that nothing, other than words, passed between them.

They were allowed twenty minutes. Hard as it was to speak in the presence of the guard, Dulcie said what she had come to say: that Jack should tell the truth, that he should take back his confession, that he should not sacrifice himself for her. If she had imagined or feared that the jailer, overhearing their conversation, would have her arrested and detained in his place, she was mistaken. Instead, the guard, a huge solid man, sat mute and impassive on the prison bench, his fleshy hands hanging down like sides of ham.

Jack was still wearing the clothes in which he had been arrested. He looked gray and beaten, and she was distressed by how much
he already seemed to be part of this awful place, with its thick walls and clanging gates, its heavy, oppressive air and stenches.

He said very little, other than to refuse what she asked. “Have you told anyone what happened?” He glanced at the jailer.

“Just my mother. Williams knows, of course. He worked it out, as I wrote you.”

“Then tell no one else.”

At the end of the twenty minutes, she got up to go, tears welling in her eyes. “I’ll come next week before the trial. The vicar said he would bring me again.”

“Don’t,” said Jack, looking at her directly for the first time. “It makes it harder.”

When she next saw him, he was three months into his sentence. Before a trial you could visit a prisoner every day; after a conviction it was every three months. She was showing now, her skirt belled out in front of her. The change in him, however, was shocking.

Partly it was the rough prison uniform, bright yellow down one side and purple-brown down the other. There was some sort of awful hat, too, which he was allowed to take off in the visiting room, but which had a long flat peak that hung over his face. (The vicar had explained to her that the prisoners were not allowed to communicate with one another and the hats were designed to discourage this.) The worst was his dull, dead eyes, and his fingers, the nails torn and bleeding.

“Oh!” she cried out before she could stop herself. “Whatever have you done to your hands?”

Jack looked at his hands as if they didn’t belong to him. “Picking oakum,” he said.

“What’s oakum?”

He considered the question for a time. “They give us old tarred rope and we’ve to shred it.”

“But that’s harsh,” she said.

Another pause. “Better than stone breaking.”

He asked how she was, and when she told him that she had been getting by on a little sewing work sent down from the Park, that her
mother had been kind, and many in the village, too, and that everyone wished him well (she omitted to say that Billy Wells had asked her to marry him), she could see that his concentration was waning. They fell into a silence.

“Time’s up, C forty-two.” The jailer, a different jailer, pointed at the clock.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said to Dulcie. “My mind wanders these days. I’m not used to speech.”

“It won’t be long,” she said. “It won’t be long until the baby is born. Then I can find proper work, and when you’re released . . .”

He put up a hand to stop her words. Then he smiled. It was a lovely smile, full of the old Jack, and she folded it away in her heart for safekeeping.

The baby was born in early May. For months, she had resented the child growing inside her and heaped on its unborn head all the causes of her misfortune: her stealing the cup, Jack’s arrest and imprisonment, the loss of her position. Yet the instant the child was laid in her arms and began to suckle, she fell in love. She called the boy Peter.

Her confinement meant that she had missed the next occasion on which Jack would have been permitted a visit. She wrote to him and told him that he had a fine son and whispered in the baby’s ear that soon he would meet his father, his brave, stubborn father.

A week before the date of the visit, she was changing the baby’s napkin, marveling at his little fat legs kicking in the air and the wisps of hair that curled on his head, when her mother brought a letter for her.

It was from Jack and it was written in pencil on rough prison paper. It read:

Dear Dulcie

Theyve told me youve asked to visit nxt Weds and Ive said that I wont see you. Its fore the best. Well Im halfway thro my Term and when I come out Ive been thinking to go away and make a start Somplace else. Billy Writ me a letter and the long and short
is he wants to marry you. I shld say its a good Offer and with my blessing take it shld you wish. Youve been true Dulcie none better and you deserve the best.

Yr loving frend Jack Pierce.

She didn’t hear from him or see him again, although she learned from his mother that after his release he sailed for Canada. And, one day, listening to the voices of her children, watching blossom blow down a dirty Reading street in between the tramlines, she did find herself happy again.

E
very farm for miles around now belongs to the estate. Land makes money, as it always does, and the greater the number of acres, the larger the income. New cottages, almshouses, and a pumping station have been paid for out of its earnings. But there are other uses for revenue and that is to fund tastes acquired in more exotic locations, in casinos, for example, and the grand hotels that face the sea on sunny esplanades, or to maintain discreet furnished apartments in the better districts of European capitals.

*  *  *

Jimmy Henderson was so rarely at Ashenden these days that he had forgotten how agreeable it could be, in its own staid and oldfashioned way. He preferred life to be more vivid, on the whole, and since his parents’ deaths he had spent most of his time on the Continent, for Jimmy was of the opinion that there was no need to endure gray skies and rain when sunshine was reliably on offer. Weather, of course, was not the sole attraction of foreign climes. If other temptations—horse racing, cards, certain liaisons and entanglements—had led to his divorce three years ago, he could not say he particularly regretted succumbing to them, merely the money they had cost. Divorce was shockingly expensive.

That day of reckoning, which was continuing to drain his pockets long after the lawyers had finished their business—schooling
for the child, a London town house for his erstwhile wife, Matilda, didn’t come cheap—was the principal reason for his visit to the estate and the weekend party he had assembled here. Jimmy had plans. These centered on one of his guests, Mrs. Carrington, even if she was not as yet fully aware of them. He was conscious of time ticking past; a recent communication from the Banque de Paris had rather focused his mind.

Saturday morning, Jimmy had risen early and was nursing a thick head with the aid of sweet black coffee. It had been a cool, wet summer and he was glad of the fire that was burning in the drawing room, where breakfast was laid out on a sideboard. The previous evening had gone well, he thought. Much laughter, much gaiety around the piano, significant glances by the score, and the warmest good-night kiss at the end of it all. In fact, everything had gone so swimmingly, he had been rather disappointed to hear no patter of feet making their way to his bedroom door in the middle of the night. Still, all boded well for today’s diversion, a little boating trip he had organized. Nothing like a river trip for dalliance: there was a spot he knew, shaded by willows, that would be just the ticket.

Half an hour later, most of his guests had come downstairs and were helping themselves to kedgeree, sausages, eggs, and kippers. They were rather an odd party, he had to admit. To encourage Mrs. Carrington to accept his invitation for the weekend, he had cordially extended it to her own houseguests, Maus and Helga von Stamm, nieces of her late husband, who were spending the summer with her. He had thrown in the lure of Bradshaw, the American essayist and playwright, who was a particular favorite of hers and no rival to him, or any other warm-blooded male. At her suggestion, he had also invited Paul Lyell, her godson, and his Oxford friend, Max Koenig, neither of whom he had met.

The Germans girls, Maus and Helga, had gone to bed early the previous night before he had formed much of an impression of them. In the light of day Helga, with her crown of dun-colored plaits, revealed herself to be a rather stolid fräulein. As for Maus, who gave the impression that she might run up your trouser leg
and nip you, he could well see where the nickname originated. They were apparently over here to perfect their English, although there was nothing wrong with it except that it was too perfect, as the English of foreigners tended to be.

“Good morning,” said Bradshaw, coming into the room impeccably dressed in a blazer and flannels.

Americans, in Jimmy’s experience, failed to understand that what you wore in the country ought to look as if it had been worn in the country on at least one previous occasion. He himself was wearing a favorite old cream linen suit, with frayed cuffs, baggy knees, and strained buttons.

“Sleep well, I trust?” said Jimmy.

“Wonderfully, thank you.”

Bradshaw approached the sideboard, where Paul Lyell was already returning for a second helping. They began to resume a conversation they had been having the previous evening about
Parsifal.

Not a sporting type, Paul Lyell, thought Jimmy, who held sporting types and the schools that produced them in the highest regard. From what he had gathered the previous evening in conversation with Mrs. Carrington, the boy had upset his father, who was a wealthy industrialist, by insisting on a medical career and was now midway through his clinical training at the Radcliffe Infirmary. “I think that is rather noble of him,” Mrs. Carrington had said. “It takes courage to turn your back on what is mapped out for you and make your own way in life.” Paul Lyell didn’t strike Jimmy as courageous. Privately, he could no more imagine the boy in an operating theater than on a battlefield.

The dark horse of the gathering was Max Koenig, a small, neat man in his early twenties, with sharp black eyes, a prominent nose, and a closely trimmed beard. Quite a typical specimen of his race. Koenig described himself as a “mathematician,” which struck Jimmy as neither a profession nor a hobby but rather a boast.

All in all he was relieved when Mrs. Carrington, the last one down, made her eventual appearance. What she was wearing had a jaunty, nautical look, and as she paused a moment in the doorway,
something mocking in her expression acknowledged the theatricality of her choice.

Letitia Carrington had been a great beauty in her day and was still handsome at forty. As Letty Lee, she had been making a name in the halls when Gerald Carrington, an armaments manufacturer many years older than she was, had persuaded her to marry him, having seen her act dozens of times and presenting a bouquet at the stage door on each occasion, some of which were said to have had diamond bracelets and emerald earrings concealed among their foliage and blooms. Gold digging on her part, most people had assumed, but Jimmy, who had seen the couple together at Biarritz on a number of occasions, thought they had seemed genuinely fond of each other. Not a trace of Letty Lee now remained, not in accent, vocabulary, or bearing, and he thought that admirable. She and her husband had had no children and she was now very rich.