Kept (6 page)

“You’ll find Mr. Dixey an uncommonly peculiar gentleman,” Dunbar said, drawing the collar of his ulster close against the drizzle.

“Pecooliar?” Dewar rolled the word around his mouth and made a tentative step on the path before him. “In what way pecooliar?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know how to put it. Nothing out of the ordinary to look at, perhaps, but uncommon strange all the same.”

“Ten guineas is ten guineas,” Dewar suggested hopefully. “Pecooliar or not.”

They were standing on the verge of a small country back road, poorly surfaced, against which wound an ancient brick wall, very worn about its extremities, which rose to a point almost level with their heads. Above them, and to the right, tall trees—firs and spruces—hunched into near-impenetrable thickets, with only a glimpse or two of pathways running on into the wood. To the left the land sloped down through fields and pasture to a low-lying plain, apparently devoid of human habitation, on which the weak late-afternoon sun shone faintly. Save for the drip of rainwater from the trees and the receding jingle
of the cart that had brought them from Watton—now on the point of vanishing beyond the bend in the road—all was silent.

“Will he be expecting us?” Dewar went on. His eyes were red and inflamed from want of sleep. “This Mr. Dixey.”

“There was a wire sent saying the goods shall be delivered,” Dunbar told him. “Just that. Rather neat, don’t you think? But, see, we must be getting on. There is a gate here, to my recollection. And have a care for that d——d casket.”

They passed on along the road under the high trees, to a point where a five-barred gate, secured to its stanchion with a piece of rope, broke the wall’s uneven course. Behind it a track, no more than a few feet wide, led away through the wood. Dewar would have climbed the gate, but Dunbar, gesturing at the burden he held under his arm, jerked at the rope and opened it to let him pass.

“I saw a man drop a sea eagle’s egg,” he explained, “on the doorstep of the clergyman that was booked to buy it.”

“This Mr. Dixey,” Dewar went on, whose curiosity had been pricked. “What does he do?”

“What does he do?” Dunbar stood for a moment with his hand on the topmost bar of the gate while he looped the rope-end around its post. “Why, he is a squire. Owns the land around here. That village where we put up our traps too, I shouldn’t wonder. What does any gentleman do? Why, he has his occupations like any other man. Mr. Dixey here is great in the dog-breeding line. Keeps a whole pack of them chained up in a barn—you shall hear the noise of them presently. Why, when I was here last a great mastiff jumped a four-foot hurdle and made fair to tear out my throat.”

“What did you do?” Dewar wondered nervously.

“Do? Why, I dealt it a blow on the nose that had it howling for a week, I shouldn’t wonder. I never could abide a venturesome dog. But see, we are getting well on into Dixey’s estate.”

Following the cast of his arm, his companion saw that the tall avenue of trees was thinning out into a more random assemblage of grass and outbuildings. In the distance, perhaps a half mile distant, the outlines of a substantial residence could be dimly glimpsed. To Dewar
everything that he saw was possessed of great novelty, and yet he was conscious that there was something lacking in the vista that lay spread out before him. Great piles of green-coated timber lay on either side of the path, looking very much as if they wanted a woodman to come and take them away, and there was rank, knee-high grass in the paddock. Presently they passed a long, low barn, sheltered on three sides by banks of fir trees, from which, as Dunbar had promised, a cacophony of barking ascended to the pale sky.

“Grim kind of a place, ain’t it, though?” Dunbar remarked, as if following his thoughts. “But there is no one lives here, you know. Just a servant or so and a man to open the hedge gates to carriages. Not that there’s many of them. The gardeners have been sent away, I believe, for Dixey don’t care about the height of his grass. As for what he owes in London, why your guess is as good as mine.”

“And yet he’ll pay five guineas for an egg?”

“More than that sometimes. And not just eggs. Why, I brought him a pine marten last year, which I took in a wood in Carmarthenshire, that he paid twenty pounds for. There’s no accounting for the rarey things he delights in.”

“But he don’t keep up his estate, and the gardeners is all gone?” Dewar’s sense of propriety was offended.

“A solitary old gentleman he is. Why”—Dunbar’s eye searched for some point of comparison—“like one of those rooks up there on the fence. You shall see. Here, we are almost in sight. That is the servants’ hall, behind the long window. Dixey’s butler is a decent old fellow, but the housekeeper is a regular tartar, so no chaff, you know.”

They came now to a rectangle of bare, flattened earth, hedged around by currant bushes, that abutted the back parts of the house. Here some faint signs of human activity declared themselves. A man in a shabby suit of green, who might have been a gamekeeper, one foot braced against a tree stump, was sharpening the points of a trap with a little whetstone, while a maid with short yellow hair was taking in washing that had been spread to dry over the bushes. Dewar, staring about him, thought the scene a very dreary one—there were old harnesses piled up by the porch that seemed as if they had been there ever
so many years, and what looked like a fox’s pelt nailed up on the barn door—but he approved of the servant girl, who nodded unblushingly to Dunbar as he went by.

“That’s a nice-looking girl,” Dunbar observed as they passed out of earshot. “And here is old Randall. How are you, Mr. Randall? Tolerably well, I take it?”

Dewar, still registering the first impressions of a dozen other things that he saw, could not separate the butler’s face from his surroundings. A row of pewter pots on the long sideboard behind him; a line of prints on the further wall, over which the soft rays of firelight played, a sheet of newspaper pale in the murk of an armchair—all these seemed to him elements of Mr. Randall’s being and his worn old face. An elderly woman with shiny black hair looked up from a chair by the fire, where she sat stitching a cushion cover, and Dewar, thinking that some gesture was expected from him, touched his hat. The woman turned her head away, whether pleased or offended he could not tell.

“Quite an adventure,” Dunbar was saying to Mr. Randall, as they proceeded into a wide, panelled hallway where portraits hung in dirty gilt frames. “But there is not much sport left in these isles. Why, Mr. Cumming says he thinks of taking his guns to Africa.” A tall footman carrying a tray before him came hurrying down the staircase, bobbed his head to Mr. Randall as he passed and disappeared into the silence they had left behind them, and Dewar thought of the grocer’s shop in Hoxton, with the great blinds drawn low over the window and the drift of white dust upon the lids of the flour barrels, and the two assistants all attentive behind the counter, and the pleasure it had been to command them.

A staircase of twenty-seven steps, a serpentine corridor whose lamps had not been lit, a man’s face, hard and accusing, staring out at him from a picture frame, a closed door from whose lintel soft light gleamed—all this Dewar saw, and did not see, for his mind was lost in the airiest speculations over what lay around him: the footman with his tray, the casket in his hand, the murmur of a voice, whether above or beneath him he could not tell, elsewhere in the house. The door from behind which the soft light glowed having been wrested open
for him by Mr. Randall, he tumbled into the room over a ridge in the carpet, regained his footing, assured himself that the casket was secure in his grasp and then looked around him.

Dunbar, in whom the strangeness of their surroundings produced no obvious disquiet, was already on his way towards the wide desk that lay at an angle to the fireplace. Dewar followed dutifully behind him. In the course of his commercial career he had attended upon many gentlemen in their studies—he had brought in his little bill, defended it, conceded alterations to it and negotiated its settlement—but he was conscious that he had attended upon no such person as Mr. Dixey and in no such surroundings. The gentlemen of Hoxton had sat, for the most part, in small, ill-favoured rooms with cash boxes on their desks, whose windows afforded a view of mean little gardens and stunted trees. Mr. Dixey, alternatively, sat in a great wide room before a high window affording glimpses of a receding gravel drive and an ornamental pool, around which the wind whistled and careened, and on his desk there lay not a cash box but what appeared to be a human skull. He was—and this could be inferred even from his seated position—a tall man, elderly but apparently vigorous, in a suit of black with a white stock tied around his throat and bony hands that, resting curiously on the desk before him, looked as if they might have concerns of their own and be about to go scuttling off across the veneer in defiance of their owner’s wishes. There was a little tuft of grey hair on the point of his chin, which, whether left there by chance or design, enhanced this singularity, and Dewar became instantly fascinated by it, watched it as its owner rose to his feet (he did this cautiously but in a manner that suggested much steadfastness of purpose) and marked it as it moved up and down in response to the opening and closing of his lips.

“You are very punctual, Dunbar,” Mr. Dixey said. “It is not a week since I received your letter.”

“When goods are procurable, why, they should be delivered,” Dunbar remarked. “That is a principle for the retail trade, I take it.”

Pressing closer to the desk, Dewar gazed wonderingly at the paraphernalia that surrounded it. The bear he had anticipated and regarded only cursorily, but the great cabinets—some displaying pieces of stone, others with stuffed birds and animals set up in what seemed to him the
most lifelike attitudes—captured his attention and he began to inspect them out of the corner of his eye. The movement drew Mr. Dixey’s gaze upon him for the first time.

“This gentleman is not your brother, Dunbar? I don’t believe I ever saw him before.”

“No indeed, sir. Why, William is laid up at Twickenham with a hacking cough. This is Mr. Dewar, as came recommended to me by an attorney with whom I have dealings, and has given great satisfaction.”

There was a small grey object on the desk, nestled in the delta formed by a pair of randomly cast books, which, as Dewar watched, came to life and, now revealed as a mouse, ran off towards Mr. Dixey’s bony hand, was scooped up by it and deposited in his pocket. Dewar was conscious that something in the room—he could not tell what—oppressed him, and to counter this feeling, perhaps even to distance himself from the transaction on which they were engaged, he found himself placing the casket squarely down on the lip of the desk. Picking up a pair of spectacles that lay atop a third book and settling them on his nose, Mr. Dixey bent forward to examine it. There was an eagerness about him, Dewar saw, that contrasted very markedly with the diffidence of his greeting.

Rolling the eggs from side to side in their bed of moss, he balanced one finally on the palm of his hand and balanced his forefinger upon it: “There are only two?”

“Two is difficult enough, sir,” Dunbar observed. “It is indeed. Why, there were two fellows, to my knowledge, that spent a week in Easter Ross not long back and came away with nothing. Besides, the folk there have turned cunning. They know the value of the things. The help’s not gratis, if you take my meaning.”

Looking at the old man as he peered over the desk, the spectacles balanced on the bridge of his nose, the egg in his hand, the light in his eyes, Dewar was aware that what oppressed him was Mr. Dixey. He looked out of the window, where a faint greyness had begun to fall over the late-afternoon sky and a wind had got up above the tops of the trees, and then back at the tuft on Mr. Dixey’s chin. There was a pat-pattering of footsteps above them and a noise that might or might not have been laughter.

“These will do very well,” Mr. Dixey said. “I am obliged to you, Dunbar.”

“When goods are delivered, they should be settled for,” Dunbar rejoined, in a tone that suggested there might previously have been some slight oversight in this department.

“And so they shall. See, the note is here in my hand. But there is another commission I should have you execute, if you are agreeable.”

“Oh, I am always agreeable. What is it?”

“Did you ever see a wildcat in these islands?”

“I saw one took in Lincolnshire twenty years ago. A great thing that fell out of a tree and set the keeper’s dog yammering into the bushes. The keeper himself, who was a man six feet tall, said he would not have cared to get in the way of it. And when we laid it out, it measured thirty inches from nose to tail. There are none of your farmyard tabbies that size, I’ll guess. But there are no wildcats left in Lincolnshire, nor anywhere else that I heard of.”

“But they could be looked for? In the Scots forests, say?”

“Oh, they could be looked for. Like the wolves. Looked for and not found. There was a gentleman shot a bustard the other day in Suffolk, and everyone said it was the last to be seen.”

Mr. Dixey nodded. If he was displeased by this impediment, he did not say so, but contented himself with removing his spectacles and polishing their lenses with a handkerchief. The tall footman that Dewar had seen on the stairs came beckoning at the door.

“You must excuse me. There is an urgent matter to which I must attend.”

Dewar found that the feeling of oppression had left him, that he stood not in the premises of some sinister theatrical showman but in a spare, angular chamber tenanted by an old man in black with a grey head who wheezed as he passed on his way to the door. Mr. Dixey and the tall footman disappeared immediately into the upper parts of the house. Dewar had a last glimpse of a pair of oddly truncated legs vanishing into shadow. Dunbar whistled crossly to himself as they negotiated the lower staircase and came again into the great hall.

“He’ll find no great cats in Lincolnshire. Not if he drew every wood from the Wash to the Humber, for they are all gone.” Thinking
that some explanation was required for this access of temperament, he remarked, “A man gets tired of this work. I have been too long about it, I daresay.”