Michael Cox (42 page)

III
A Conversation in King’s Bench Walk

IT WAS BUT a short journey to Mr Wraxall’s chambers.
Having tendered my grateful good-byes to Mr Pilgrim, I was soon sitting with Mr Wraxall in his comfortable, fire-lit study, recounting my recent adventure, although I said nothing of why I had left Grosvenor Square alone without first informing Sergeant Swann. Neither did I mention that I would do so again if circumstances required.
‘You’ll forgive me, I hope, my dear,’ said Mr Wraxall, when I had finished, ‘if I presume to say that I’m a little disappointed that you put yourself in the way of danger once again; but there, the thing is done, and thank God you are now safe.’
His manner was conciliatory; but his disapproval was evident.
‘Of course I cannot – and will not – insist that you warn Sergeant Swann in advance of any future expeditions. I only entreat you – for my own peace of mind, if not your own – to consider that it might be prudent to do so. So now, let us put this little unpleasantness aside and get down to business. I take it that there
is
business to discuss?’
Relieved to come at last to my purpose, I told him that I was curious to know whether anything more had been discovered from Conrad Kraus; but before Mr Wraxall could reply, there was a knock at the door, and in walked Inspector Gully.
‘Well, here’s the very person who can tell us,’ said the barrister, getting up to greet his visitor.
‘Miss Gorst,’ said Mr Wraxall to the inspector, ‘has had a little escapade, haven’t you, Miss Gorst?’
This, of course, obliged me to tell Mr Gully how I had been followed by Mr Vyse’s man.
‘Arthur Digges?’ enquired the inspector.
Mr Wraxall wondered whether he was known to the Detective Department.
‘Slightly,’ replied the inspector. ‘A former tar. Been with Vyse for the past three years. Nothing more.’
‘But why was he following me?’ I asked.
‘Futile to speculate,’ said Mr Wraxall, ‘so let us not do so, although my guess is that, like sending Yapp to Evenwood, it was intended to bring home to you that Mr Vyse has his eye closely fixed on you.’
The conversation then returned to Conrad Kraus.
‘I believe I’ve got a bit more purchase on certain matters connected with Lady Tansor’s former dealings with Mrs Kraus,’ said Mr Gully. ‘Perhaps it would interest you to hear where I think we now stand? Very well then, here it is, as tight as I can manage it.’
He took out his note-book, opened it, and cleared his throat.
‘
Item
. Miss Emily Carteret leaves for the Continent – date of departure: on or about 19th January 1855 – full approval of noble cousin – acquaintance of noble cousin recommends German-speaking maid and general attendant, recently widowed – name of German-speaking party: Mrs Barbarina Kraus – accompanied on trip by Mrs K’s son, Conrad, nineteen years, strapping lad, but somewhat deficient in mental powers.
‘
Item
. Miss EC’s destination: Carlsbad, where pa-in-law of Mrs K resides – date of arrival: early February 1855 – reason put out for going: to take the waters – true reason for going: to find a husband – suitable party speedily discovered in the shape of Colonel Tadeusz Zaluski, indigent former Polish army officer.
‘
Item
. Miss EC and Colonel Z marry – date of marriage: 23rd March 1855, according to information received from local enquiries – union soon blessed with happiest of tidings (facetious query: effect of Bohemian waters?) – son born in town of Ossegg – date of birth: Christmas Day, 1855 – son christened Perseus.
‘
Item
. The family Zaluski returns to England with three-month heir – received by gratified noble cousin at Evenwood on 7th April 1856 – Mrs Z basks in noble cousin’s golden beams – second son, Randolph, born November of that year – Mrs Z’s triumph complete – Duport succession secure at last.
‘
Item
. Miss EC, having become Mrs Z, now becomes Mrs Z-D (Zaluski-Duport) by Royal Licence – legally instituted as noble cousin’s successor – on death of noble cousin (November 1863), husband’s name shed – former Miss EC now Emily Grace Duport, 26th Baroness Tansor, mistress of Evenwood.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Mr Wraxall.
‘Spot of bother, in the town of Franzenbad,’ replied the inspector, ‘involving Conrad and – excuse me, Miss Gorst – a girl from the locality. Crisis precipitated. Police called. Flight of Mrs K and offspring. Mrs Z left maidless. That’s the long and the short of it, for Conrad can’t, or won’t, give us any more.’
‘And the paper – Conrad’s precious paper, which smelled of violets?’ I asked. ‘Do we know any more of that?’
Having licked his thumb and forefinger, Inspector Gully turned over the pages of his note-book once more.
‘A letter, I think we may safely assume. Contents unknown. Recipient? Also unknown, but we might further assume the noble cousin, Lord Tansor – Conrad, of course, could not read the direction.’
Piecing together what he had managed to get out of Conrad, the inspector gave us the following tentative account of how he had acquired the letter.
Conrad, it seems, is waiting to take a letter to the post office; but, just as Mrs Zaluski is sealing it, she knocks a bottle of perfume over the envelope, and Conrad has to wait for it to dry.
Off he trips to the post office at last; but the letter is never sent, for by now he has become infatuated with the beauteous and unattainable Mrs Zaluski and, in his simple devotion, he keeps the perfumed letter. He is unable to read it; but it is hers, and it has her scent upon it, and that is all he cares about.
Mrs Kraus and her son – abandoned, it seems, by their mistress as a result of the unpleasant incident in Franzenbad – at last, and after many hardships, arrive back in England. Conrad conceals the letter in his room, but takes it out every day, for its lingering scent of violets always reminds him of his faery queen.
So things might have gone on, no doubt, if his mother had not discovered his treasured paper.
‘Whatever was in that letter,’ said Mr Wraxall, ‘other than the faded scent of violets, must have offered Mrs Kraus a powerful weapon to use against her former employer, for whom she clearly harboured considerable animosity. It is, without question, the key to the whole business. It unlocks everything. But it was also Mrs Kraus’s death-warrant. Bad as she may have been, she did not deserve her fate. Like the death of Paul Carteret, this was a wicked thing that was done to her, my friends, a wicked thing.’
He shook his head.
‘What kind of person was Mrs Kraus?’ I asked, remembering the unpleasant old woman in the Duport Arms.
‘According to what the inspector here tells me,’ replied Mr Wraxall, ‘she was ambitious to improve herself, by whatever means she could. Her father, I think you said, Gully, was a German immigrant, a watch-maker by trade. She’d received a little schooling, gaining thereby some superficial accomplishments, and married Manfred Kraus, her father’s apprentice; but after he died, she took up with a certain Lemuel Burlap, a petty rogue and sharp, long known to the police.
‘She then obtained a position in the household of the Duke of Eastcastle, on the strength of which she was recommended by Lord Tansor to accompany Miss Carteret to the Continent.
‘On her eventual return to England, after the Franzenbad incident, Mrs K and her son lodged for a time with Burlap; but after he was transported – what year was that, Gully?’
‘In ’67,’ replied the Inspector, without a thought.
‘Ah, yes, ’67, to be sure. After Burlap had been taken off, Mrs K was thrown back on her own, none-too-scrupulous resources. Time passes, and life gets ever harder; but then she finds the letter.’
‘Ah, the letter,’ repeated the inspector. ‘Back yet again, Mr W, to the letter.’
‘Yes, indeed, Gully,’ said the barrister. ‘Unfortunately, we must presume that it has now gone for ever. Yet although the words on the paper may be lost to us, I believe that some invisible residue of the truth remains, which we can still strive to infer, or guess at, or deduce. Yes, it is my experience that something always remains – like the faintly lingering perfume that entranced Conrad for so many years. It’s for us to sniff it out, and put a name to it. And we shall, we shall. It’s all a question of time.’
The two men had fallen silent; but I sensed an unspoken intimation of some mutual, although as yet incompletely formed, apprehension.
‘Time,’ said Mr Wraxall, after a period of significant silence.
He tented his fingers over his mouth and closed his eyes, as if the better to contemplate the implications of the word.
‘Of the essence, Mr W?’ suggested the inspector.
Mr Wraxall did not answer, but continued to sit, eyes closed, tapping the tips of his fingers together.
‘Penny for them, Mr W?’
The barrister opens his eyes, and looks benignly at the inspector.
‘I was merely wondering why Miss Emily Carteret was intent on finding a husband so soon after the death of her beloved fiancé. Curious, don’t you think?’

IV
An Unwelcome Prospect

UNTIL THE FINAL day, the rest of our time in London proved largely uneventful. Emily, still confined to the house on the doctor’s orders, insisted on my keeping her company; and so, to my frustration, I was obliged to remain in Grosvenor Square, passing the long hours reading to her, or conversing on books or public affairs, or the tedious doings of Lady or Miss So and So.
Sometimes, however, a mood of melancholy and listlessness would overcome her, and then she simply wished me to sit by her, with my still unfinished work, as she lay on the sofa under her rugs, silently looking out of the window at the dreary metropolitan sky.
After luncheon, she would usually drift off to sleep for an hour or so, and I would put down my work to study her face in repose. It sometimes seemed as if death had taken her, so still, pale, and lifeless did she seem. Once, I even took up a hand-mirror and stood over her, to assure myself, by seeing her breath mist over the glass, that she still lived.
Despite the signs of encroaching age, which she concealed so skillfully, and of which few but myself were ever aware, the striking beauty of her features – her full sculptured lips, the long slender nose, finely arched eye-brows and delicately mounded cheeks, all framed by her still-lustrous black hair – exerted a continual fascination for me, as I now knew that they had done for my father, whose love for her had proved his undoing.
One afternoon, having always been considered by Madame and Mr Thornhaugh as possessing a talent for drawing, a gift, it seems, that I had inherited from my mother, I took out my note-book in an attempt to make a likeness of her as she slept; but it did so little justice to the original that I ripped out the page and threw it on the fire.
It was impossible not to wonder what dreams came to her behind those closed, long-lashed eye-lids. Her afternoon slumbers seemed tranquil, untroubled by the terrors that came to her by night. Perhaps she saw again the sunlit days – before the world was darkened by her iniquities; before she implicated herself in betrayal and murder – when she was simply Miss Emily Carteret, the universally admired daughter of Mr Paul Carteret, of the Dower House, Evenwood, untouched then by the torments of guilty memory, or the deadly darts of foreboding.
As I now read over the foregoing, and what I have written elsewhere in these pages, I am struck once more by the capricious and inconsistent nature of my feelings for Lady Tansor. I knew now that she had been a calamity in my father’s life, and I had been instructed to hate her for it by Madame, my adored guardian angel. Of course I wanted her brought to account and punished for what she had done. I would sit, watching her sleep, knowing that her treachery had driven my father to commit murder, depriving me, too, of the life that I had been born to lead, and then my resolve would revive and harden; but when she woke, giving me a drowsy smile as she stirred lazily beneath her mound of rugs, in a moment all my righteous anger would dissolve quite away.
It sometimes happened – as on this afternoon – that I even began to question once more my fitness for the Great Task. I was so young, so inexperienced, so untested in the dangerous commission that I had been sent to Evenwood to discharge. I felt sick with consternation at what still lay ahead, and by the weight of responsibility that I had been required to bear by Madame and my dead father.
Such discomposing thoughts were running through my head on our last day in Grosvenor Square. I had been sitting, an unopened book on my lap, as Emily slept, reflecting on recent events. Engrossed as I was with my own thoughts, I did not notice that she had awoken.
‘Alice, dear,’ she said, sleepily, giving me a languid smile, ‘there you are, as always when I wake. Like Patience on a monument. Such a good girl – such a good friend.’
More compliments followed, fondly and – apparently – sincerely expressed. Once again, although I tried to resist it, her sorcerous charm began to work on my resolve. Could she really be guilty of the crimes that both Madame and Mr Wraxall had accused her of? Might she not have been compelled, against both will and conscience, to commit them, first by her unquestioning love for Phoebus Daunt, then later by her desperation to keep them from discovery?
She still possessed a troublesome conscience – that was only too apparent from the constant assault on peaceful sleep by her night-terrors; and this might, perhaps, argue for a more lenient view of her character. So, under her drowsily mesmeric gaze, I reasoned; but then, in an instant, the spell was broken.
‘Oh, by the way,’ she suddenly said, in the most casually peremptory tone. ‘Dr Manley has recommended that I should leave England for the remainder of the winter. He believes a change of climate is essential. I shall make the arrangements as soon as we return to Evenwood. Could you please ring for tea? I have a rather dry throat.’
At which, without another word, she took up her magazine, opened it, and began to read.
I was dumbstruck.
‘Leave England? For how long?’
She looked up, and removed her spectacles.
‘That, I think, is for me to decide.’
‘Do you tell me this as your friend, or as your paid companion?’ I asked, as calmly as I could. The question produced an immediate riposte.
‘Your forget yourself, Alice,’ she snapped, her expression tightening. ‘This has nothing to do with our friendship. I intend to take Dr Manley’s advice, and there’s an end to it.’
I saw that further remonstrance on my part would be useless. She had given no thought to consulting me, but had taken her decision only in accordance with her own wishes – as my mistress once again, not as the true friend she purported to be. This, then, was what the equality of friendship meant to her.
Lord, I had been a gullible fool! Madame had warned me that I could not depend on a continuity of favour from Lady Tansor, even when intimacy between us had been established; for her friendship would always be infected by pride and self-interest, and by the constant desire to retain the superiority of her condition.
‘You speak as if you don’t wish to accompany me,’ she said, fixing me with one of her cold stares. ‘Is that how it is?’
‘Not at all,’ I replied, forcing myself to smile in an earnest and propitiatory manner, and reaching forward to take her hand. ‘Nothing would be more agreeable to me; and if it is for the benefit of your health, then of course it’s what I would wish above anything in the world.’
Although she said nothing, I saw that she had been a little mollified by my acquiescent words; and so I asked her, now mustering up a show of false eagerness, where we were to go.
‘I have not quite decided,’ she said, ‘but Dr Manley has recommended Madeira.’