The Man of Gold (8 page)

Miss Unwin turned from her task and looked up at Richard.

She saw a spasm of determination come over his face, transforming momentarily its pleasant roundness into something more active.

‘No,’ he said quietly to her, with the evident intention of not letting his father hear. ‘No, this time I will do what I know I ought. I will go round myself at once to Doctor Sumsion.’

‘Yes,’ Miss Unwin answered. ‘You are right. I am certain of it.’

She looked down at the old man. But his eyes were closed and it seemed he had not heard the words that might have sent him into a paroxysm of rage, perhaps fatally.

From behind her as she knelt she heard Richard’s voice, with a note of plaintiveness in it. ‘There is one thing …’

‘Yes?’

‘Miss Unwin, Harriet, you must know, you must have seen or guessed by now: my father never lets me have money. Not so much as a single penny. I –1 can’t pay the doctor his fee.’

Miss Unwin looked up at him over her shoulder. His face was simply woebegone.

‘I am sure the doctor will not ask for money before he has examined your father,’ she said.

‘Oh, he may, he may. A year ago when the children had the measles my father refused him half of his seven shillings and sixpence, and he declared then that he would not attend anyone in this house unless he were paid beforehand.’

‘Oh, very well,’ Miss Unwin said, unable to keep a trace of impatience out of her voice. ‘I have some small savings. I will produce what is necessary.’

‘Oh, thank you, thank you. You have no idea –’

‘You had better go at once,’ Miss Unwin broke in. ‘The least delay may mean you are too late.’

‘Yes, Yes, you are right.’

Richard turned and she heard him running along the passage and tumbling almost down the stairs.

He proved not to be too late in fetching the doctor, and nor were his fears about the man’s possible intransigence over his fee justified. Doctor Sumsion, for all his considerable age and rotundity of figure, did not hesitate for a moment when he saw old Mr Partington still lying on the floor where Miss Unwin had found him.

‘Good gracious me,’ he said. ‘The poor fellow is
in extremis
. No doubt about that. No doubt at all.’

He took his stethoscope from out of the tall silk hat he held, knelt with a little grunt beside Miss Unwin and began his examination.

‘Can we lift him on to his bed now, Doctor?’ Miss Unwin asked when he had eventually finished.

‘No. No, I think not.’

The doctor got laboriously to his feet and turned to address Richard.

‘Mr Partington,’ he said, ‘unless I am very much mistaken your father will not rest on that bed again. I have to tell you that he has only minutes to live.’

‘My gold.’

From the floor behind them the two words issued from
the lips of the dying miser. In a few moments they were repeated. ‘My gold.’

Miss Unwin could not help feeling that they were words spoken from beyond the grave.

And they were the very last that the old man uttered. As the three of them stood helplessly looking down at him he gave one final short groan. The doctor dropped to his knees again beside him and applied his stethoscope.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. He has gone. Poor fellow, may the Lord have mercy upon his soul.’

Richard stepped forward to help him to his feet.

He stood for a long moment looking Richard full in the face.

Miss Unwin thought that he must simply be recovering his breath after the exertion and perhaps the inevitable shock, even for a medical man, of witnessing the moment of death. But she was soon disillusioned. The doctor had been in deep and perplexed thought. And at last he spoke.

‘Mr Partington,’ he said, ‘I have to tell you that I am by no means happy over your father’s demise. I have seen many men and women go to the great Beyond, and I know the symptoms of most illnesses as well as any man, though I say it.’

He fell silent, still looking Richard straight in the eye.

‘Yes, sir,’ he continued, ‘I know what death from disease should look like. And those signs were not there with your father. But other signs there were. Unmistakable signs. Mr Partington, I believe your father died by poison. I cannot sign a death certificate. There will have to be a post-mortem examination.’

No sooner had puffing old Doctor Sumsion spoken the word ‘poison’ than into Miss Unwin’s mind there came, vivid as a painting, a picture of the scene during the first parsimonious meal she had eaten in this chill house. She saw again the seven of them at the dining table, old Mr Partington at its head, Cousin Cornelia, honoured guest and though she herself had not known it at the time destined bride for Richard Partington, her brother Jack on old Mr Partington’s other side, lounging in his chair and looking decidedly ill-tempered at the shortage of wine, the twins sitting opposite each other, shabby and subdued in their ill-washed frocks. Then herself, a wary and perplexed newcomer, and Richard Partington at the far end from his father, giving her from time to time rueful, awkward smiles, very conscious of the deficiencies of the household. And, just as they had finished eating the small helpings of meat and the wretched boiled potatoes that had accompanied them, old Mr Partington had had his second attack of griping internal pain that evening and in refusing medical attention had blurted out his accusation of poisoning.

Not once in the weeks she had been in the neglected, shabby house, as the weather had gradually warmed into spring and as old Mr Partington’s attacks had continued at intervals, had she heard him make the accusation again. If she ever thought of it in those cold, cramped days, it had been to dismiss the words as the expression of a momentary malignant fury.

But now, with Doctor Sumsion’s considered judgment
still ringing in her ears, she realised that, far from being some exasperated exaggeration, the accusation must have been true.

Mr Partington’s attacks of violent pain had not been the symptoms of an illness he was suffering from. They had been signs that someone had been slowly and with evil intent trying to end his life.

Yet Miss Unwin could hardly credit it.

Why should anyone behave in a manner so fiendishly cruel? And, worse, could that person be, as would seem most likely, someone inside the house or a frequent visitor to it?

She decided there and then that she would pursue such thoughts no further. If Doctor Sumsion was correct in his diagnosis and this terrible thing had indeed taken place, it was at least no immediate concern of hers. She herself had been an ignorant witness of events in the house. None of them had meant anything to her. If the doctor’s accusation, for that undoubtedly was what it was, was to be pursued it was a task for the proper authorities. No doubt Richard Partington would call them in, or the doctor would do so himself.

No doubt, too, in the coming days there would be a great deal of unpleasantness while the investigations were carried out, and she herself would come in for some share of it. But the investigations and anything they might bring to light were truly no real concern of hers.

What was her concern was the two children who had at this moment been deprived of their grandfather. There was no use in pretending that they had loved the old man. He was not lovable. But he was part of their lives and the suddenness of his death would come as a shock. For that she must prepare them, and in the coming weeks she must do all she could to help them over its effects and to protect them from those inquiries that were bound to be made.

That and no more.

But Miss Unwin was to find almost at once that her role
in the house could not be confined simply to looking after the two little girls who were her responsibility.

As she left the room where old Mr Partington lay dead and went to find Louisa and Maria to break the sad news to them, both Richard Partington and Doctor Sumsion came downstairs. So she was in the bare hall when the doctor, with a little ‘Hem’ of embarrassment, put a request to the new master of the establishment.

‘There is one small matter, my dear sir. I hesitate to mention it at such a time, but the affairs of this world must proceed.’

Richard blinked at him, absolutely without understanding.

But Miss Unwin had grasped the meaning of the doctor’s roundabout words at once. He wanted to make sure of his fee.

First she remembered her hasty promise that from her small savings she would find, if necessary, the seven shillings and sixpence which a doctor would require sooner or later as the case might be. She could run up to her room at this moment, take the coins from the box in which she kept her savings and – And then what? It would greatly embarrass Richard if she were to give him the sum in front of the doctor, thus betraying the fact that his father had kept him deprived of even the smallest coin.

But with that reflection came, pouring in, another. Richard’s father was no longer holding the purse strings. Richard himself was now the heir to all the old man’s wealth.

Then yet another thought crowded in. All the old miser’s wealth was in the form of gold, of gold concealed here and there in this very house. And of that Richard, she was almost certain, knew nothing.

But this was no moment to ponder the implications of all the secret knowledge she herself had. There was an immediate dilemma facing the new master of the house.

And she saw at once how she could help him.

‘I think, sir,’ she said, going over to him, ‘that Doctor Sumsion would like to receive his fee. May I go and fetch the necessary sum for you? I know where you keep money for immediate use.’

It took Richard, visibly, some moments to understand what she had said. But at last he answered.

‘Why, yes. Yes. Yes, Miss Unwin, that would be very kind. I –1 am afraid I am somewhat discomposed. Thank you. Thank you.’

It was a look of real gratitude that he gave her as she turned to go.

Yet it was as nothing compared to the flood of realisation which spread over his open round face some half an hour later when, with the difficult business of telling Louisa and Maria of their loss and indeed making them appreciate that it was a loss completed, she informed him of the great wealth that lay literally under his feet.

‘Miss Unwin, Harriet, how – how can I thank you? To know so much, to have found it out. To have kept the secret, to tell it to me now, now that it can mean so much to me. I do not know how to thank you enough. Yes. Yes, by Jove, I do. Ask me for something, Miss Unwin, Harriet. Ask. Please ask. Ask for anything. Help me to show how grateful I am, shall always be. Yes, ask. Ask. Please ask.’

The wild tumbling of words might have made Miss Unwin laugh aloud had the circumstances been otherwise. But she thought of the old man lying dead in the room above them. She thought how only an hour or so before he had been alive, though ill indeed. And she thought, too, that Richard Partington had been calling her Harriet. This was something he ought not to have done. She must be, she could never be otherwise to him than, plain Miss Unwin, governess.

Whatever, in the clash of wild emotions that were meeting in him at this moment, he might imagine.

‘Mr Partington,’ she said with haste, ‘I do not ask you to believe me about what I have told you. It is in truth almost unbelievable. But come with me now and I will show you where I saw that hidden store of gold, where Louisa and Maria led me to it. Your father has been in no condition to remove it since the time he learnt from me that his secret was known.’

‘Yes. Yes. Show me. Please. But – but of course I believe you. You are a person I should never disbelieve.’

‘Come with me, Mr Partington,’ Miss Unwin replied, forcing herself to be stern almost as a gaoler.

She led Richard Partington at once and hastily down to the basement and, recognising instantly the thin flagstone which she had watched her two charges replace in the late hours of the night only a week earlier, she knelt to raise it up.

But hardly had she done so when a voice came harshly cackling out from behind her.

‘Thief. Thief. Stop that. Stop. Taking a sick man’s gold. Stop it, you thieves.’

It was Mrs Meggs.

She stood there in the doorway from the kitchen a more than ever malevolent figure, the eyes in her dark brown face glittering with fury, the sole bristly white hair jutting from her chin seemingly more prominent than ever.

Miss Unwin realised then that in all the turmoil of old Mr Partington’s death, in her trouble over telling the two girls, in the complications of explaining what had happened to Captain Fulcher and his sister, in seeing them leave, dinnerless, neither she nor Richard had thought to tell Mrs Meggs in the kitchen, busy over the last preparations for their scanty meal, what had happened.

‘Mrs Meggs,’ Richard said now, ‘I must tell you that your Master is no longer alive. He died, quite suddenly, an hour since.’

‘You lie, you lie!’ the old woman screamed out. ‘You
think you can rob him and pretend to me he is no more.’

‘Mrs Meggs,’ Richard said, ‘I assure you I am speaking the simple truth. My father is dead. Doctor Sumsion was here and witnessed his end.’

‘Yet you come to rob him before his breath is cool,’ the old woman shouted back. ‘I called you thief, and thief you are. You and that precious hussy of yours.’

Miss Unwin had not realised until this moment that the bad-tempered and mean-minded old housekeeper was quite as devoted to her employer, despite the way she had made sure he ate meat when all the rest of the household had vegetables only, despite the extra large cup she always gave him when it was time for tea. But now she saw the full extent of the link between the two aged and miserly people. And she saw something else, too. Mrs Meggs had got it into her head that Richard Partington took a special interest in herself.

Perhaps, she thought, it is true. He does in moments of stress call me Harriet. He did once at a hard time for himself ask me for advice about calling a doctor against his father’s wishes. Yet … Yet surely he cannot truly feel for me anything that could cause a bad-tempered old crone like Mrs Meggs to think of me as his ‘hussy’.