The Man of Gold (3 page)

On the extended tray there were seven soup plates and a small tureen.

To table, to table,’ old Mr Partington cackled out as Mrs Meggs banged down a plate at each place. The soup has cost a pretty penny to heat, I’ll be bound, and it will be ill to let it cool.’

Miss Unwin felt a new sense of amazement.

But no sooner had the old man pronounced the extraordinary words than he let out a sharp moan of agony and doubled up, his hands clutching at his stomach.

Richard Partington at once ran towards him.

‘Father,’ he said. ‘Another attack. Are you all right? Water. Can I give you some water?’

Miss Unwin, who had seen that on the dining table there was a carafe of water, went to it and poured some into the first tumbler that came to hand. She hurried along the length of the room and- held the glass ready for Richard Partington to take and let his father, who was slowly straightening from his stomach-cramped position, sip at it.

However, the attack, though fierce, was short lived. The old man very quickly began to recover, and within
two minutes appeared to be as spry as he had been when Miss Unwin had first seen him.

‘What are you all waiting for?’ he said, in a voice that was not far from a snarl. ‘I told you the soup will be spoilt.’

Miss Unwin, who was hungry, noted with dismay how little the old man had helped her to. But it was dismay that lasted only until she tasted the watery liquid.

What it had been made from she could not guess. Certainly water was the chief ingredient, together with some salt and the faintest tinge of meat. The whole tasted so unpleasant she was unable to finish even the little she had been given.

While the soup was before them there was some little stiff conversation between the Partingtons and their guests. Miss Unwin thought it best not to attempt to join in. A governess, although she was considered to be a lady and thus fit to sit at the family table should that be thought convenient, was nonetheless always a dependant. Silence for such a one was golden.

A dish of mutton with some potatoes followed the soup. Again old Mr Partington as he carved put the smallest of helpings on to the plates. So small were they indeed that Captain Fulcher broke out in protest.

‘I say, my dear fellow, give a chap a little more, won’t you? When a chap’s been at the races all day he gets a devilish sharp appetite.’

His host gave him a long look.

‘Meat costs money, my dear sir,’ he replied at last. ‘I tell you, we do not eat as well every day in this house.’

Miss Unwin once more felt a lurch of dismay. She was not eating well now, not at all. Food as poor as this had not been put before her since she had left, many years ago it seemed, the workhouse that had been her earliest home. Was she now going to have to endure years of such austerity? And winters in rooms as cold as her bedroom above?

But the meat was at least rather more easy to eat than
the soup had been to drink, and she devoured her portion and the black-marked potatoes that went with it with something approaching eagerness.

But her hunger was not allayed. Would there be something in the nature of a pudding? Surely with guests at the table there must be.

She was not, however, to learn how far Mr Partington’s unwilling hospitality stretched.

Before the shrunken old man had finished his own mutton – and Miss Unwin had observed that at least he had carved for himself no more than he had been willing to carve for others – his head suddenly jerked forward and struck the surface of the table in front of him, sending his plate with its few remains of hoarded meat skittering to the side.

Once more that moan of pain escaped his lips.

Richard Partington jumped from his chair.

‘Father,’ he said, ‘this cannot go on. You are ill. Seriously ill. You must call the doctor.’

Slowly the old man forced his body into a half-upright position.

‘Ill?’ he ground out. ‘I am not ill and well you know it. I am being poisoned. Poisoned. And no doctor is going to find a medicine that will put an end to that.’

It seemed to Miss Unwin, looking back at the start of her life in the shabby house next to the pin factory, that the first evening she spent there had within it the whole pattern of her existence afterwards. The bone-chilling cold, the grim sparseness of the meals, the embittered meanness of old Mr Partington with the half-hidden sweet apologetic smiles of his son, and, running through it all, the old man’s sharp bouts of painful illness.

Another note that varied as little was his adamant refusal to have the doctor called. True, he did not repeat, at least in Miss Unwin’s hearing, the claim that he was being poisoned, and she came at that period to believe the words he had gasped out at the dinner table on her first evening under his roof were no more than so much unthinking fury, though later she was to recall them vividly enough.

But in the days and weeks that followed that first appalling, unforgettable meal the memory of that particular moment slipped into oblivion. Other meals, even less appetising, even more parsimonious, put that first one into the shade.

On all occasions when there were no visitors, and the Fulchers were the only ones ever to cross the threshold of the cold, uncared for house, only one course was served at dinner. It was almost always the same, largely potatoes, generally some other vegetable – whatever was cheapest in the market, Miss Unwin soon decided – and with those a little meat, which usually Mrs Meggs served to old Mr Partington alone.

This had happened at the second dinner Miss Unwin ate in the house.

Mrs Meggs came into the dining room with her tray on which there were two dishes, one containing a fair quantity of boiled potatoes, though already Miss Unwin could see that they were more black than white, and the other with a lesser quantity of dark coarse cabbage. But in addition there was one plate on which there lay some meat. Miss Unwin, hungry after a small breakfast and as small a lunch, could not refrain from looking with more closeness than was properly polite at what they were to get. She was unable to decide whether the dark and stringy pieces on this solitary plate were mutton or beef. But soon she found the question was not one which would concern her. The plate was put fairly and squarely in front of the master of the house, and before Richard Partington, herself and the two girls, empty plates were banged down by Mrs Meggs, as if challengingly.

It was a challenge which, to Miss Unwin’s considerable embarrassment, Richard Partington at once took up.

‘Mrs Meggs,’ he said, staring hard at a point on the ceiling above him, ‘is there no meat for Miss Unwin?’

‘There’s not,’ Mrs Meggs answered, plonking down the two dishes of vegetables for him to serve himself from.

Richard Partington’s round open face went red with immediate anger.

‘Father,’ he said, looking along the table to the old man, ‘for myself I do not mind, but I feel that it is our duty towards one who has come to live under our roof that we provide her with the common necessities of life.’

‘Common necessities, sir? Potatoes and cabbage are those. She can eat them, or go. I did not want a governess for your children.’

For a long moment Richard Partington held his peace. Miss Unwin, watching him covertly as she kept her eyes down to the empty plate in front of her, realised however that further words were not far from his lips. She wished
passionately that he would keep silent. But she doubted whether he would remain so for long.

Her doubts were soon resolved.

‘Father,’ Richard Partington said, grating the word out, ‘Father, how does it come about then that you have meat in front of you?’

‘That is my business, sir.’

‘No, Father, while a lady brought into this house to care for my daughters is without meat to eat and while you have it, it is my business as much as yours.’

Now it was the turn of the old man to be silent.

Miss Unwin sat still, looking unswervingly at her empty plate. Richard Partington sat glaring at his father, the two dishes of steaming vegetables growing cold in front of him. Louisa and Maria shifted to and fro on their chairs. Miss Unwin guessed that they were as hungry as herself and as eager for the dispute to end so that the food, little appetising as it was, could come to them.

At last the old man at the head of the table made a grudging reply.

‘Mrs Meggs puts meat in front of me, as you well know, sir, because I am not at present in good health. She believes I need the nourishment so that I can work to keep you all in the idleness you prefer. And that is all that is to be said on this subject.’

Miss Unwin wondered whether this was true. Would her knight errant, little though she wished it, spring again to her defence?

But, evidently, the challenge he had issued before had been as far as he felt able to assert himself against the formidable character of his father.

‘I may speak of this again when the time is more appropriate,’ he said.

But he spoke the words so quietly that Miss Unwin had more guessed what they were than heard them, and she doubted whether the old man at the other end of the table, for all the extraordinary size of the two ears that jutted
from his bald white skull, had caught more than a rebellious murmur.

And that he had felt able to ignore.

So in the days that followed it was potatoes and other vegetables that Miss Unwin ate. Only very occasionally at times when Cousin Cornelia and her brother were not visitors did some meat get served, and when it did she half regretted it so nearly tainted did it taste.

One day Richard Partington began an attempt, she realised, to explain matters.

‘I am afraid I do not see as much of my girls as I should like, Miss Unwin.’

‘No, sir. They would benefit from a father’s attention, when they have had no mother to care for them.’

Richard Partington heaved a deep sigh.

‘I wish it could be otherwise. I wish –’

He broke off.

Then there flashed out that rueful, engaging sideways smile.

‘Oh, Miss Unwin, it’s useless to attempt to conceal from you the true state of affairs. You must have seen what my situation is from your very first day in this house.’

‘I do not wish to know more than it is proper for me to know, sir.’

‘Sir? Sir? No, please, Miss Unwin, do not call me by such a title. I need a friend. Sometimes I think I need a friend more than ever man did.’

Miss Unwin felt herself at a loss, and contrived to say nothing in answer.

Certainly in the time she had been in the house she had already come to feel for Richard Partington a great deal of sympathy. He was a pleasant person. She detected in him, of necessity deep buried, the springs of generosity. She would not find it difficult to share friendship with him.

But from the first moment she had contemplated becoming a governess she had known she must hold to one inflexible rule. If ever anywhere she found herself
under the same roof as a gentleman whose affections were not engaged, she would keep herself strictly aloof. From all that she had heard she knew that to do otherwise was to court disaster.

She had heard too much of young governesses seduced by the sons of the houses where they taught. That led easily and swiftly to ruin. It led, she knew, to the streets. Equally she had heard of cases where honourable love had been offered by a susceptible gentleman to a governess with some pretensions to beauty, and of the almost invariable opposition the hint of such a misalliance created in the young man’s family. That opposition could bring ruin almost as final as a life on the streets.

Yet here, in the cold, cold house next to the pin factory, she felt her situation was in some way different.

For one thing she had learnt that the reason Miss Cornelia Fulcher, that hater of the flies and dirt of London, had visited the capital was that a marriage between herself and her cousin was contemplated. So presumably Richard Partington’s affections were already fixed.

His father spoke of the match on occasion in unmistakable terms.

‘Well, Richard,’ Miss Unwin had heard him say, ‘the life of a country gentleman should suit you well. You have a great capacity for ease.’

And Richard Partington had remained silent, seemingly in agreement.

Equally, Miss Fulcher made it plain on her every visit that it was Richard she had come to see.

‘Oh, Cousin Richard, I cannot agree with you more. You put it so well, so well.’

And really, Miss Unwin had thought, Richard Partington had said nothing then that was not a mere ordinary observation.

‘Oh, Richard, I so look forward to the day I need come no more to London. The noise of town, its dirt and
those wretched, wretched flies everywhere.’

‘Come, Cornelia, there are surely no more flies in London than near a farmyard in the country.’

‘That may be so, Richard, my dear, but I assure you there is no farmyard within half a mile of Stavely.’

‘Is there not? I thought when I visited you on the sad occasion of your aunt’s funeral that I observed a farm within a hundred yards of the house gates.’

‘No, that is nothing. One could not call it a farm. There is a man there who keeps a few cows, no more.’

‘And those cows attract not a single fly?’

‘Now, Richard, you tease. You must know in truth that London abounds with the filthy creatures. Why, in Jack’s lodgings I have had to have fly-papers hung in every room. They are an abomination, but what else is to be done?’

Here old Mr Partington had abruptly intervened.

‘Nothing is to be done, madam. Let a few flies have their little day. The fly-paper men are rogues, to the last one of them. I cannot tell you what they attempt to make one pay.’

‘And that, sir,’ Cousin Cornelia replied, with a trilling little laugh, ‘must be because you make no attempt to pay them.’

Old Mr Partington had looked for a moment then as if he would produce a reply that would send this distant cousin scuttling from the house. But he had controlled himself, and Miss Unwin thought she knew why. If his son were to marry the lady with ten thousand in the Three Per Cents of her own, he himself would no longer have to support son, nor son’s daughters, nor the governess they needed.