The Man of Gold (9 page)

But Richard Partington evidently felt the jibe as going too near home.

‘Mrs Meggs,’ he said, ‘you will apologise instantly to this lady. I know that the news you have just heard must have distressed you. I know that you have served my father for many, many years. But what you have said is unforgiveable. Apologise for it this instant.’

‘Thief I have called you, and thief I have called her,’ the old woman answered. ‘And thieves you are, the pair of you. Stealing what the Master saved and scrimped for over the years, stealing it within an hour of his dying. You, Miss, are a thief, a thief and this man’s whore.’

Richard Partington’s simple round face went turkey-cock red.

‘Go!’ he thundered. ‘Go. Leave this house, leave at once. I – I will give you what wages you are owed. But leave my house now you shall.’

‘Wages!’ the old woman screamed back at him. ‘I am owed more than wages. I am owed under the Will. Dare you say different?’

‘Very well then. I will pay you from this gold a sum that should satisfy you. But I will not tolerate your presence here one moment longer. Get out. Get out. Send for your possessions when you will, but be out of this house tonight.’

Miss Unwin, standing there confused and hurt by the violence of this sudden scene, wondered whether the vicious yet deprived old woman would obey. Would her hatred, her loss, be too strong?

But, somewhat to her surprise, the unexpected anger Richard Partington had shown had its effect. Mrs Meggs stepped back towards the kitchen.

‘Yes, I’ll go,’ she said in an evil mutter. ‘I’ll shake the dust of this accursed house from me. But you will suffer, killer of your own father. You will suffer, don’t fear for that.’

She turned then and scuttled away.

And barely half an hour later Miss Unwin saw her by the light of the nearest street lamp go stumping out of the house, a wicker basket seemingly all she cared to take with her.

But during the time between the ancient housekeeper uttering that final malediction and her departure Miss Unwin had had much to think about. The words the old woman had uttered had sent a dart of fear into her.
Killer of your own father
. And that very evening Doctor Sumsion had solemnly declared that in his considered opinion old Mr Partington had been killed, had been poisoned.

Could Mrs Meggs have suspected something of this? Certainly she had been present serving the meal on that
first night she herself had spent in the house when Mr Partington had uttered his claim that he was being poisoned. And who was it that Mrs Meggs had accused? None other than the one person who had befriended her here, apart from her two charges. She had accused Richard Partington of killing his own father, and it was just possibly true that he had reason to kill a father who had treated him worse than the lowest servant. If ever there was reason for a son to murder a father, then perhaps Richard Partington did have such a reason.

She felt a chill of premonition rise up in her.

But it was dispelled at that instant. Richard, too, had been watching his father’s old housekeeper and single servant stump away into the darkness.

‘Well,’ he said, coming up to stand at the uncurtained window beside Miss Unwin, ‘to tell the truth I had long wished to see her go, though knowing how she cared for my father I would not have had her leave in this way and on this day.’

‘No,’ Miss Unwin answered. ‘I, too, feel sorry for her, though she did nothing to make my life easy here.’ Richard gave a little laugh.

‘At least,’ he said, ‘we shall no longer have to endure those fearful meals, though what we shall eat tonight I cannot imagine. And the girls certainly ought to have something.’

‘As for tonight,’ Miss Unwin replied, ‘no doubt Mrs Meggs has left in the oven what we were intended to have for dinner, and, since it was meant for three more than will eat it, there will perhaps be enough. I can easily bring it to the table myself.’

‘You are very good,’ Richard answered. ‘Indeed, so good that I –’

Miss Unwin thought it was time to interrupt. And an idea had occurred to her opportunely to put forward. ‘Mr Partington,’ she broke in, ‘Mr Partington, since we
shall be without any servant now, may I make a suggestion?’

‘Of course. I am sure any suggestion you may have will be more than sensible.’

‘It is simply this then,’ Miss Unwin hurried on. ‘At my last place of employment there was a housemaid whose work was particularly good. I know she no longer wants to stay on in her present situation, so may I ask her if she would care to come here? Her name is Vilkins., Mary Vilkins. I have known her a long time.’

Indeed, she thought privately, I have known poor Vilkins as long as it is possible for any two people to have known each other. Were we not brought to the parish workhouse one after the other as foundlings, I to be named Unwin and she following me to receive the name which that ignorant beadle believed was spelt with the next letter in the alphabet?

She thought then how in the new awkward circumstances that she foresaw facing her it would be a comfort to have dear Vilkins with her. To have well-meaning, clumsy Vilkins, her broad face with its ever-red dab of a nose well to the fore, beside her.

‘Why, of course,’ said Richard Partington. ‘Perhaps tomorrow as early as may be you could go back to Bayswater and ask her if she is willing to take a post with us. And – And tell her the wages she will receive will be handsome, more than handsome. I have the means now, and I will use them to the full.’

Miss Unwin hardly took in Richard Partington’s words as he told her that she could bring to the house Vilkins, her old friend if social inferior now. Mostly she was simply pleased at the prospect. She greatly feared difficult times lay ahead. There was to be the post-mortem examination of old Mr Partington’s body, and if that revealed, as Doctor Sumsion had seemed sure that it would, that the old miser had indeed died by poison then there would be a police inquiry.

It would be an inquiry that would, at the very best, be acutely distressing. But, if those wild words which Mrs Meggs had uttered before she left the house had meant anything, an investigation could be far worse than distressing. It would mean that Richard Partington would fall under suspicion, and in the weeks in which she had been governess to his children Miss Unwin had conceived a very great liking for Richard. He had borne up well, she believed, under appalling circumstances. Persecuted by his excessively mean father, he had smiled and not lost his temper and had tried and tried to make the best of things.

What other man, she had asked herself often, would endure those empty pockets? And this was the person who might well be accused by wagging tongues, if by no others, of the terrible crime of patricide.

So Richard Partington’s offer of more than handsome wages for Vilkins, contrasting sharply as it did with his father’s insistence not so many weeks before that she herself should accept a salary which many a servant would have refused with disdain, passed by her entirely.

Even the realisation of just how wealthy her employer now was had scarcely impinged on her. During the evening they had together searched the old dingy house for Mr Partington’s other hiding-places. There had been no fewer than five of them. Two more under flagstones in the basement – Miss Unwin by carefully pacing to and fro had been able to detect where a stone slightly wobbled – two behind loose pieces of wainscot in the dining room and in the little parlour, and a last one, the only one not full-packed with softly gleaming sovereigns, in the old man’s bedroom under a floorboard on which the greasy marks of his scrabbling fingers could still be made out.

There had not been enough time even to count every coin that night. But between them they had roughly calculated that Richard Partington was now possessed of a fortune more than double that which his rich Cousin Cornelia had inherited. He was, indeed, suddenly a man of gold, little though she properly had taken it in.

So when Miss Unwin went early next day as Richard had suggested and put his offer of employment to Vilkins she did vaguely recall that something had been mentioned about wages and thought herself empowered to say to Vilkins that she would be paid not less than she was receiving in Bayswater. But in any case Vilkins had been so joyful at the prospect of the two of them being under the same roof again that she had brushed aside all question of money.

‘Oh, Unwin, we’ll have such larks. Such larks we’ll have when their backs is turned an’ we can remember what we was in the old days.’

‘The bad old days, Vilkins, my dear. Remember that.’

‘Oh, lawks, yes, bad they was. Hungry we was and cold like what we never ain’t been since.’

‘As to that, I’m not so sure,’ Miss Unwin replied with a smile. ‘I tell you I have been cold enough since I left here, and hungry too.’

‘What, ain’t I a-going to get me dinners in the place where you are?’

Miss Unwin smiled again.

‘I think I can promise you you’ll get as good a dinner now as in any servants’ hall anywhere,’ she said. ‘But while the old gentleman who was head of the house was alive we had short commons enough, all of us, in the dining room as well as in the kitchen.’

But the dinners Vilkins got proved, in fact, to be a good deal better than in most servants’ halls. And the meals, prepared by a new cook, that she brought up to the dining room were nothing other than luxurious. Richard Partington was spending the gold he had taken from its hiding-place by the basement door and in the other places in the house as if each sovereign were no more than a penny.

He bought himself new clothes. Miss Unwin was quite ready to acknowledge that the old blue coat and the old green trousers in which she had first seen him, and in which she had seen him every day that she had been in the house, deserved to be discarded. They had been turned by a tailor long ago, she had soon spotted, and their former insides had become as lacking in nap as, no doubt, their old outsides had once been. But the number of new coats and the pairs and pairs of trousers that he had made for himself astonished her.

Yet he did not buy for himself only. Maria and Louisa, for so long dressed in the cheapest of calico frocks, were given new ones by the dozen, and in silk. Nor were clothes all that was lavished on them. The painters were ordered in to make their joint bedroom, once drab almost as a prison cell, into as pretty a chamber as could be imagined. Two little white beds were bought from the upholsterer’s, their white curtains looped back with knots of pink ribbon. Two pretty white toilet tables were installed, each with its cargo of trinkets, little mother-of-pearl-backed looking-glasses, vases for flowers, and a tiny bell
of silver each with which to summon poor Vilkins who, to tell true, made clumsy work of acting the ladies’ maid.

But that service, in any case, was something which Miss Unwin discouraged. The girls had made their own toilets until this time, and there was no reason, she felt, why they should not go on doing so for the most part, even though the clothes they had were finer and the brushes with which they brushed their hair had silver backs in place of the single wooden-backed one they had had to share in the days when they had lived, unjustly, like paupers.

Nor was Miss Unwin herself forgotten in the golden shower. Indeed, before long she felt bound to protest in strong terms as with each succeeding evening Richard Partington came back with some new gift, a bracelet in coral, a silver-gilt pencil-case, or simply a cake from the pastrycook’s whirled round with pink cream.

‘No, sir,’ she said, when Richard attempted to fasten the little pencil-case by its chain round her wrist. ‘No employer should give anyone in his employ such things as this.’

‘But it gives me pleasure to do so.’

‘Yes, sir, I can see that it does that, and I can understand it. After so many years of deprivation it is little wonder that you should enjoy the fruits of wealth and enjoy bestowing them on others.’

‘Then let me bestow this pencil-case – it is but a trifle – on you, Harriet.’

‘No, sir. Well, if you must I will accept it as a last gift. But on one condition.’

‘And what is that, you iron maiden?’

‘Sir, I do not wish to have to say this. But I must. You force me to. Sir, it is not proper that you should call me other than Miss Unwin, and I beg you not to do otherwise in the future.’

‘But–But–’

The expression of perplexity on his cheerful, snub-nosed
face was comical to see. Miss Unwin well knew from it what was passing through his mind. One half of him, she did not doubt, was wanting to insist on calling her by the forbidden forename. The other half was Willing to please her by doing as she had asked. And she thought, that second half knew, too, that what she had said was right. He ought not to be taking such a liberty with her. Not unless he meant more by it than in his position he should.

‘Come, Mr Partington,’ she said. ‘Please me in this, as much as you pleased me by your gift. Promise me that for the whole time I am in this house, however long or short it may be, you will address me as you ought to address your children’s governess.’

Richard hesitated.

He looked down at the carpet at his feet. It was new, had been installed only two days before, a luxurious Turkey with a pattern of roses. Miss Unwin was aware suddenly of the particular smell of a new carpet in her nostrils, like fresh straw.

‘Oh, very well, if you really do insist,’ Richard said at last. ‘But, all the same, tell me, please, why you speak of your stay here as being possibly short. You do not mean to leave me? To leave us, I should say.’

‘No, sir, I have no intention of leaving while I can help Maria and Louisa in any way.’

‘Then why this talk of a short stay? I mean, you – Well, never mind what I mean for the present. Why a short stay, Miss Unwin?’

Now it was Miss Unwin’s turn to hesitate in answering. But it was not her nature to fudge an issue.

‘Sir, it is because you yourself may not stay in this house for very long.’

‘You think I may buy something else? I have thought of it, but I am not sure, now that I come to it, that I want to live anywhere other than in the house where I was born.’