The Man of Gold (22 page)

But more. There was Vilkins still to think of. How wonderful that all those fears of the night had been banished. What trouble Vilkins had got into and got out of she had still to learn. But it was a trouble that, it was plain, had been got out of without anything impossible to contemplate having happened. Vilkins’ cheerful, and not very respectful, answers to her master over leaving the breakfast half-laid showed that.

And had Vilkins learnt something about Miss Fulcher that would lift the cloud hanging over this house for ever? It would be very much like Vilkins not to have arranged her thoughts enough to have put that vital piece of business to the forefront. So it might yet be there to be told. Good news.

There came a knock, or rather thump, at the door.

‘Come in,’ Miss Unwin called.

Vilkins reappeared with her tray.

‘Can I get on with it now?’

‘Yes. Yes, Mary, of course.’

How exasperating to have Vilkins there before her eyes and, with Richard present, not to be able to ask her a single question. But it would not be long till breakfast was over and there could be contrived an opportunity for a few minutes’ private talk with her old friend.

Miss Unwin decided that it would be sufficient punishment for the twins to let them stay in their separate rooms until breakfast was over. One meal of bread and water, not so different from the breakfasts they had had up to the time their grandfather had been poisoned, would be a reminder to them of what they now had and stood to lose.

So, even before contriving her talk in private with Vilkins, she went up to the girls’ bedroom, took Maria with her to the schoolroom and there confronted them both with what she had guessed.

‘You wanted to put mustard into the sugar-plums I took away from you, didn’t you?’

She let her gaze, severe as she could make it, rest equally on both culprits.

Maria broke first. She gave her sister only the most fleeting of glances by way of obtaining permission to break a sworn compact. Then, with evident relief, she spoke.

‘Yes, Miss. Yes. Was it very bad of us?’

‘Well, it was not the sort of behaviour I should have expected. Was it, Louisa?’

‘No, Miss. But I don’t think we’d have put very much in the plums.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. And let me hear, too, that you will, neither of you, contemplate doing such a thing again.’

‘Oh, no, Miss Unwin, we never will.’

‘Louisa?’

‘No, we won’t. We won’t contemplate filling sugarplums with mustard ever, ever again.’

‘Very well. Then we will begin lessons in half an hour.’

‘Miss Unwin?’

‘Yes, Louisa?’

‘Can we have our proper breakfast now?’

‘No, Louisa, you most certainly cannot.’

So Miss Unwin went in search of Vilkins and her account of what she had done and what she had found out in St Giles’ Rookery. Yet, even as she went, a faint tingling of doubt manifested itself in her mind. Had the girls been a little too quick to confess to their misdemeanour? Had she herself made a mistake in, with the welling-up of happiness she felt, telling them what she believed they had done instead of getting them to tell her first?

She shook her head.

This was not a day for doubts. This was, was to be, a day of unimaginable happiness when towards its close down at Greenwich a certain question was to be asked, a question which she knew her answer to. And, more immediately, Vilkins might really have, somewhere in the cheerful muddle of her mind, the answer to the mystery that still hung over them all.

If before the day was done the cloud of suspicion had been finally and irrevocably lifted from Richard, and if Richard had asked her – had asked her a certain question, then what a day of rejoicing it would prove to have been.

‘Vilkins.’

Vilkins was down on her hands and knees, her rump in the air, brushing at the carpet newly laid outside the dining room. Miss Unwin opened the door behind her. The dining room was empty, Richard having drunk his last cup of tea, eaten his last muffin.

‘Come in here quickly, my dear, and tell me all about everything.’

‘Unwin, I can’t. I’m all behind with me work.’

Miss Unwin had not used a single oath since the day she had been released from the workhouse to go as a
kitchen-maid, the start of her path upwards in the world. But at this moment she nearly said ‘Damn your work.’

Instead she bent down, seized poor Vilkins by the arm and unceremoniously dragged her into the temporary privacy of the dining room.

‘Now, just what happened at St Giles?’

‘I was chased.’

‘Chased? Who by?’

‘Great ‘ulking mulatto. Took a fancy to me in the Grapes, ‘e did. Lickin’ ‘is lips from right acrost the room.’

‘And you had to leave to get rid of him?’

Miss Unwin would by far have preferred to be hearing whether Vilkins had found Mr Bessom and whether that weak-willed lodgings owner knew why Miss Cornelia Fulcher visited the chemist’s shop and what was in the well-wrapped bottles she brought back. But she felt she owed it to Vilkins, who had so willingly risked so much out of mere friendship, to hear her adventures as she wanted to tell them.

‘Yeh,’ Vilkins answered, cheerfully enough. ‘’Ad to lead ‘im a merry dance, I did. An’ nearly got caught more times than I likes to remember. Nip along an alley I would, thinking I’d thrown ‘im off once an’ for all, an’ what should I see at the far end? The man hisself. Could ‘e run. Must be the fastest man in England, if ‘e was only a Englishman.’

‘But he never did catch you?’

‘Oh, yes, ’e did.’

‘Oh, Vilkins. But what – What happened?’

‘Took a liberty, ‘e did. There was I up against a wall, an’ ‘im with ‘is great black arms either side o’ me. Then ‘e took a liberty.’

Miss Unwin looked at her friend.

‘What liberty?’ she asked.

‘He kissed me. Kissed me right on the end o’ me nose.’ Miss Unwin suppressed a laugh. This was a day for happiness.

‘But, Vilkins, that wasn’t too bad,’ she said.

A grin spread itself round Vilkins’ face.

‘Wasn’t too bad, considerin’ what I did to ‘im arter,’ she said.

‘Oh, Vilkins, what?’

‘Bit ‘is bleedin’ nose back I did. ‘E was so surprised ‘e clapped ‘is great big ‘ands to it, an’ I got clean away. Only I was lost then, an’ couldn’t find me way out till I got a bit o’ daylight.’

‘And then you found an omnibus and came home, safe all but for a scraped shin getting down, wasn’t it? But, Vilkins, why didn’t you take a cab home? You had enough money, hadn’t you?

‘Well, I ought to ‘ave ‘ad. But I didn’t take account of Mr Bessom an’ the way ‘e can sink the gin.’

‘Oh, Vilkins, you had to stand him so much liquor that you spent all that money?’

‘That’s right. But it was worth it.’

‘Worth it? What did you find out from him then? What? What?’

‘Monkshood,’ said Vilkins. ‘That’s what I found out. Monkshood.’

‘Monkshood? What’s that, my dear?’

‘Poison,’ said Vilkins in fittingly sepulchral tones.

‘What? You mean that Miss Fulcher was buying monkshood and that that is some sort of poison?’

Miss Unwin went rapidly over in her mind what she had read in
Potherton on Poisons
. But she could not recall any reference to monkshood. Had Vilkins got it wrong? It was, alas, all too possible.

‘What exactly did Mr Bessom tell you about this monkshood that Miss Fulcher is said to have bought?’

‘Ain’t no “said to” about it. Bought it she did, by the bottle. An’ poison it is. Everyone knows that.’

Miss Unwin noted that, for once, her friend apparently knew more than she did. And she was inclined to believe her. If Vilkins said everyone knew something, there could
be little doubt that a good number of people did know. In which case monkshood – that was presumably the popular name – was something fatal to anyone who had it administered to them.

‘Did Mr Bessom see what Miss Fulcher did with the monkshood?’ she asked.

‘No. Couldn’t find out nothing. An’, don’t you see, that makes it all the more likely she was a-giving it to the poor old gentleman? If she was so secret, stands to reason it was something wicked, don’t it?’

Miss Unwin found herself inclined to think her friend’s reasoning might be sound.

She made up her mind in a moment. She would set the twins a task which she could sit and watch them at, and then she would take
Potherton on Poisons
once more and comb through it till she found a reference to monkshood. If it was only a country name, it was understandable that she did not recall it. Professor Potherton was not a man to make use of popular names. The Latin language was his preferred territory.

‘Well, I’ll leave you to get on with your work, dear,’ she said to Vilkins. ‘And I had better return to mine.’

‘If you can call looking arter a pair o’ kiddies work,’ said Vilkins, dropping to her knees on the carpet once more.

Well, Miss Unwin thought, as with the two girls confronting Butter’s
Spelling
she settled down to Professor Potherton, I certainly do call this work. And it is work which I devoutly hope will bring great gains.

To Richard. To Richard.

And within a quarter of an hour gain her reading had brought.

Monkshood, Professor Potherton deigned to mention, was the popular name for acontine, known also as wolfsbane ‘and to the Ancient Greeks by the nomenclature Stepmother’s Poison.’

For a moment Miss Unwin’s heart raced with excitement. Had she at last found out how old Mr
Partington had perished: Had she found his murderess? Acontine, she read, was a poison that it was not possible to detect except by a judicious tasting of extract from the tissues most immediately affected, ‘a proceeding of extreme hazardousness’. So no wonder the professor’s findings were so delayed.

Eagerly she read on.

And almost at once encountered defeat. ‘Aconitia,’ Professor Potherton wrote, ‘though of some medical use as a liniment for the relief of rheumatism and neuralgia, is particularly to be noted for the speed and violence of its onset if imbibed. Few survive more than a few minutes.’

But Mr Partington had survived many hours. He had, indeed, it seemed most likely, survived more than one dose.

So whatever had poisoned him, it was not after all monkshood. And Cousin Cornelia was not the murderess, merely most probably a sufferer from neuralgia.

It was all to be looked at again. Her heart sank.

She gave a great sigh and slammed
Potherton on Poisons
shut.

‘Now, girls,’ she said, ‘let us see if you can spell every word in your lists without error.’

So the day that was to be the great day of happiness wore on, with one blight cast on its perfection. Miss Unwin tried not to think about that. But she could not prevent herself being conscious that the day was not what she had once thought it was to be.

In the late afternoon she found herself setting out for the Greenwich steamer with Richard. The hours since she had tested the twins’ spelling – only Louisa got one of Butter’s list wrong, and Miss Unwin contrived not to hear her error – had gone by in busy affairs of one sort or another. She had not had time to begin to think again who could have murdered old Mr Partington if Miss Fulcher had not. Was it after all her brother, hoping to hide some misappropriation of hidden sovereigns? Or was it Mrs
Meggs, wanting what she had been told she was to get in the Will? Or was it some other unthinkable alternative?

Neither had she time to consider the final object of the expedition to Greenwich, to wonder at what precise moment Richard planned to ask the all important question. She had not even had time to think about how she would give her answer.

In the cab on the way to the pier at London Bridge Richard was jolly and jocose. Plainly this was not the hour he had chosen. So she succumbed to his mood. What she had to consider if she let her mind dwell on serious matters was so difficult, so forbidding, that she snatched at the opportunity to postpone hard thought.

As they boarded the steamer Richard’s high spirits became yet more ebullient. Everything he saw seemed to provide subject for a joke or a fantastic story. A police cutter rowed by at speed, its oarsmen flashing their blades to a steady rhythm.

‘You know why that’s called a cutter?’

‘Because it cuts through the water at such a pace, surely.’

‘Quite wrong. It’s because that sort of boat was invented at Calcutta in India, and the word has become somewhat corrupted.’

‘Oh, Richard. Such tarradiddles. What an example to the girls.’

‘But the girls are not here to be set an example.’

For a moment then Miss Unwin thought that it had entered Richard’s mind to say what had to be said without the presence of the twins. But the moment passed.

And she was glad. Because in those two seconds in which the question might have been broached the thought had come to her that while there loomed over Richard the faintest shadow of Inspector Redderman’s suspicions she would not be able to answer with the fervant ‘Yes’ which her whole being seemed to be on the point of crying out.

But that was a matter of a few moments only. For all the
rest of their voyage down the river light-heartedness reigned. In her mind as plainly as it did in Richard’s.

With steadily churning paddle-wheels they chuffed their way between the tall warehouses on either bank. They passed the grim old bastion of the Tower. They watched the anchored shipping slip by. They speculated on what business was taking lone rowers in little wherries hither and thither. They wondered what tales a tall Indiaman, its masts silhouetted against the evening sky, might tell.

Time slipped by.

And then they had arrived, and Richard had swept her into the private room he had telegraphed for at the Trafalgar, a room with a balcony overlooking the swirling river.

And she had protested.

‘Richard, a private room. It must cost so much. And to have telegraphed to order it. You – You must not –’

Then she checked herself. Not over what Richard must or must not do, but over what she must not do. She must not anticipate a wifely right to forbid or advise against a husband’s actions.