The Man of Gold (15 page)

A few yards further on, however, Miss Unwin had to drag Vilkins quickly into the mouth of a side street. A great lumbering drunk, a coal-whipper to judge by the glinting black dust clinging to his jacket and begrimed face and bare brawny forearms, was bearing down on them looking as if he was never going to take no for an answer. But the almost solid darkness of the lane, with its tottering buildings all but leaning into each other, seemed a worse danger. She came to a halt where some feeble light from the Highway still penetrated. The coal-whipper entered after them. Miss Unwin’s fingertips sought the wooden handle of the kitchen-knife in her pocket.

But Vilkins just looked the huge fellow up and down.

‘It’s half a sov’ to you, me lad,’ she said. ‘Not a penny less.’

‘Half a sov’. For the likes o’ you. Get out of it.’

The hulking coal-whipper turned and lurched away, guffawing like a maniac.

‘I’ll give ‘im the likes o’you,’ Vilkins exploded.

‘No, come along. Come along. We’re here for a purpose, don’t forget.’

‘Well, s’pose you’re right. But I don’t like being bested by a feller like that, I tell you.’

On they went.

Then a fight between two women blocked their path altogether with the happy, jeering crowd it had rapidly produced. ‘Get yer nails in, Doll.’ ‘Kick ‘er, Meg.’ ‘Give ‘er a good ‘un.’ The set-to was drawing more onlookers by the minute, men, other women, children, laughing and shrieking.

‘We’ll ‘ave to wait an’ watch,’ Vilkins whispered in her usual shower of spit. ‘’Less we do we’ll attrac’ attention.’

Miss Unwin realised that, once again, her companion and mentor in this underworld was right. She gritted her teeth and pretended to turn her full attention to the fighting women in the centre of the rough circle the onlookers had formed.

‘What’s it all about then?’ Vilkins cheerfully demanded of a little wizened man in a sealskin cap standing beside her.

‘Oh, they’re always at it, them two,’ he said. ‘They both belongs to a sailor gone to Java for the spices. Leaves ‘em ‘ere, he does, both in the same bit of a house. But Meg, she don’t want to spend what he leaves ‘em with, an’ Doll, she always starts to go through it like it was water. So the ship ain’t ‘ardly past Gravesend afore the two of ‘em’s at it tooth an’ nail.’

‘Which of ‘em gets the best of it then?’ Vilkins asked happily. ‘Spend or save?’

The little man in the sealskin cap laughed.

‘Sometimes one, sometimes the other,’ he said. ‘That’s
what makes it so good. They’re an even match. It’s sometimes the one the peelers take in, when they comes at last, an’ – Hey, look out.’

He had turned and was looking back up the road. Miss Unwin followed the direction of his gaze. Three policemen, bunched together for safety’s sake, yet tall and looming in their black oilskin capes and tall hats, were slowly approaching. Round her, suddenly, she felt rather than saw the whole tight-knit crowd melt away. Meg – or was it Doll? – gave her opponent a last jabbing punch that laid her low and took to her heels with half a dozen raucously yelling urchins behind her.

‘Come on,’ said Vilkins.

Miss Unwin turned and they started off at a run. But in a moment better thoughts intervened and Miss Unwin took hold of Vilkins’ arm and made her slow to a walk.

‘I’d have more than a little explaining to do if we were taken up by the police here,’ she said.

‘Yer, you’re right. Couple o’ respectable girls we are, or nearly so, just going about our business.’

They went on at a more sedate pace, and almost at once caught sight of the hanging sign of the White Swan illuminated by a flaring gas-jet just beneath it. From the tall, board-fronted building the sound of singing and the music of a band could be heard.

‘It shouldn’t be far now,’ Miss Unwin said, ‘though I don’t suppose we’ll find a street sign.’

But in that she was unduly pessimistic. On an ancient piece of board at the second corner after they had passed the noise-rocked, brightly-lit Paddy’s Goose there had been painted in crude letters, dripping from the brush, not ‘Nile Street’ but just the single word ‘Nile’.

It was enough, however. They were within reach of their goal.

The little lane was as unlit as the turning had been where they had had their encounter with the coal-whipper.
But this was a path Miss Unwin had got to take.

Far down it, Miss Unwin thought she detected a glimmer of light, perhaps from a feeble lantern.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘There must be a house down there where someone’s at home. Let’s pray it’s Mrs Meggs.’

‘Well, if she’s the skinflint you said she was,’ Vilkins answered, ‘I don’t suppose she’ll ‘ave put light to so much as a candle.’

Miss Unwin refused to let herself be dismayed by this piece of lugubriousness.

‘We shall see,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

They plunged into the black darkness of the lane. Beneath her feet Miss Unwin could feel the mud gripping and sucking. The smell was noisome, blotting out completely the tarry odours from the nearby shipping that had accompanied them up till now.

But, bit by bit as they felt their way along, the darkness yielded. Looking up, Miss Unwin could make out the dome of the sky above through the gap between the ramshackle buildings to either side, though this was hardly two yards wide. More than one pair of houses, indeed, was kept apart by beams of wood jammed across the lane.

A cat suddenly ran squawking from under their feet.

‘Out arter rats, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Vilkins remarked cheerfully.

Miss Unwin felt less cheerful. But the tiny glimmer of light she had first seen was growing larger with each step they took. Now she could make out, peering ahead, that it came from a window down at ground level. It was so feeble, however, that she guessed it must come from a single tallow candle.

There were no other lights in the whole lane and Miss Unwin surmised that the people who lived in the hovels to either side found so little comfort indoors that they preferred to stay out as long as they could. No doubt many
of them had been in that circle of jeering faces surrounding the two fighting women, the saver and the spender.

‘Yes,’ Vilkins said suddenly, ‘looks as though it might be an ale house or something o’ the sort.’

The light from the single window, though not much more than a yellowy glow, was, now that they were yet nearer, showing up something of the outside of the building. Miss Unwin, after a slithering pace or two more, was able to make out a board proclaiming ‘Ales and Stout’.

Mrs Meggs’s new home. The public house, such as it was, which it had been her ambition over the years to own. The house for which she had needed the small sum she had been left in old Mr Partington’s Will. The house for which, perhaps, she had poisoned the old miser.

And now they were outside it.

There was a door of boards roughly knocked together, showing glints of light from the candle inside.

‘Well, knock or something,’ Vilkins said.

Miss Unwin had one secret question she intended to ask old Mr Partington’s former housekeeper. She had worked it out from her reading of
Potherton on Poisons
. What had led her to it was asking herself how someone like Mrs Meggs could have obtained enough arsenic to kill the old miser. Going through the various sources of the poison which Professor Potherton had listed, she had been particularly struck by one. The professor, indeed, had drawn special attention to it as being the source most easily accessible ‘to the generality’.

So easy was it to acquire, the professor had written, that he felt himself constrained to refer to it ‘in the relative obscurity of Latin’.
Pedicae muscarum
was, he said, the nearest he could manage to describe it in the dead language.

And there he had ceased.

Miss Unwin had not yet in the course of self-education come to the gentlemen’s preserve of Latin. Only the occasional phrase in general use was she conversant with. But she knew how to use a dictionary.

Five minutes’ work gave her the answer.
Pedicae muscarum
or snares of flies. Otherwise, she realised, fly papers. By boiling a single
pedica muscarum
, Professor Potherton had written, a quantity of arsenic sufficient to effect death could be obtained.

So Miss Unwin came to the conclusion that if Mrs Meggs had indeed hastened the death of her employer in order to obtain the sum she needed to set her up in her long cherished public house, then by boiling fly papers she
had most likely done it. Miss Unwin viewed Professor Potherton’s careful use of the obscurity of the Latin language as so much shutting the stable door when horses galore had been stolen. She did not, of course, believe that Mrs Meggs, who could hardly read, had gone on the same hunt through the dictionary as herself. But she knew from her early days in the world down below how much knowledge exists there, more by far than is ever suspected by those sailing in the world above who believe nothing is known until it is in the pages of a book.

No, Mrs Meggs was perfectly likely to know that fly papers were a handy source of poison. And fly papers were easily to be bought. Fly-paper men, often with the sticky strips of glue-daubed paper wound round an old tall hat by way of advertising their wares, were a common sight.

So Miss Unwin saw the task that awaited her when she at last would find herself facing the cantankerous old crone who had ruled the kitchen of the Harrow Road house as being simple enough. She must insert into the conversation at some chosen moment a sharp question about fly papers. And then she must watch the old woman’s face as intently as ever she watched the faces of her pupils to see whether they were comprehending what she was telling them. Armed then, perhaps, with the knowledge that the old woman was indeed guilty she could attack her as hard as she might.

Vilkins had asked her why she had not knocked at Mrs Meggs’s door.

‘No,’ she replied, ending her time of doubt, ‘I shall not knock. I shall go straight in.’

She put her hand to the rough boards in front of her and gave a sharp push.

The door yielded at once and they found themselves in the room that was soon to be the bar of Mrs Meggs’s ale house. A trestle with planks of unplaned wood on it had been put up across one end and on that there burnt
the single candle which had led them to the house. By its light old Mrs Meggs was peering ill-temperedly at a sheet of paper, apparently trying to make out what was written on it.

She looked up at the noise of their entrance. The candlelight caught the single white bristle of hair still protruding from her chin.

‘Not open till –’ she began.

Then, realising who her visitor was, she came to a dead halt.

‘Good evening, Mrs Meggs,’ Miss Unwin said. ‘I hope I have not disturbed you. I have come to see that all is well with you. I am afraid you left Mr Partington’s house in more of a hurry than he would have wished.’

The old woman glared at her.

‘You’re not wanted,’ she said. ‘Hussy. You poked your little nose in everywhere there. Don’t come poking it in here.’

‘But, Mrs Meggs, I hope I never interfered with your housekeeping at Harrow Road, and I have no intention of interfering here. I came only to see if you needed any help.’

‘Then you can go back to where you came from. To his bed, I dare say. To his bed.’

Miss Unwin felt her anger rising. But she was determined not to be forced into a situation where she could not put her question about fly papers in a manner that would take the old housekeeper most by surprise.

She thought she saw a way towards her end.

‘No,’ she repeated, ‘I came only to see if I could help. There is that paper there by the candle. Can I read it for you?’

‘I can read what’s to be read for myself.’ The old woman gave her a look of such malevolence that she almost quailed.

Out of the blue Vilkins came to her aid.

‘Ain’t no shame in not being able to make out other
people’s letters,’ she said, loudly and cheerfully. ‘I can’t hardly make out any meself, an’ I’m ‘appy as I am.’

‘And who are you, barging in on an old woman?’ Mrs Meggs retorted.

‘This is Mary Vilkins,’ Miss Unwin hastily explained. ‘She has come to the house in your place.’

She was conscious that this was a departure from the truth. But to tell Mrs Meggs that the house she had ruled with such grim parsimony for so many years now boasted two servants might well rouse in her such a coil of malicious envy that any chance of putting the question about fly papers to good effect would be gone.

But Mrs Meggs was not to be so easily placated.

She gave the gaudily bonneted Vilkins a glare of anger.

‘Then she ought to be back in her kitchen,’ she said. ‘’Stead o’ poking into my affairs. There’s work enough to be done there, I can tell you.’

Was this another chance, Miss Unwin wondered.

‘Why, yes,’ she said. ‘I always thought that you had more than enough to occupy you, what with waiting at table and cooking and cleaning all that big house.’

‘And a sight more when you came,’ the old woman snarled.

‘I hope I did not make too much extra for you to do.’

‘You did, didn’t you? Wanting the parlour to give your lessons in and I don’t know what else. Why those little brats had to be taught all the nonsense you put into their heads I don’t know.’

‘Well,’ Miss Unwin answered, ‘they are after all, you know, Mrs Meggs, the daughters of a gentleman. They must learn what it is proper for a lady to know.’

‘Be wanting them to have a pianner next,’ the old woman spat.

Miss Unwin had thought how in fact Richard Partington had already ordered a piano, and one of the finest and prettiest too. But, again, this was something best not told to the former housekeeper.

‘Well,’ she said, hoping to ease the talk into the direction she wanted, ‘at least the girls no longer make work for you. I’m afraid they were dreadfully untidy.’

‘Tidy, tidy. That’s all you can think of. No harm in a bit of mess. Not when there’s nothing but work and expense to clear it away.’

‘Yes, but mess often leads to disease, you know. Dirt attracts flies, and –’