The Mystery of the Cupboard (12 page)

“Arh. A big 'un.”

“How big?”

“Big enough to hold what it had to,” he said shortly.

“So you know what was in the parcel you posted!” said Patrick.

“Well, I would do, wouldn't I,” he said. “Seein' I packed it.”

“Please — what was in it?”

“And who did you post it to?” said Patrick.

“That'd be tellin',” said Tom.

“Yes,” said Omri.

The old man leant forward on the table until his face, which hadn't been shaved lately, was only a foot from Omri's. He seemed to be trying to peer into Omri's mind through his eyes. Omri could smell his tobacco-y breath.

Tom Towsler leant back and said, “I don't mind telling you. Not 'im.” He jerked his thumb at Patrick. “She'd-a wanted you to know, you bein' family.”

Patrick stood up at once. “It's okay,” he said. “I'll go back to the pub and wait for you.”

“Don't tell the others where—”

“Course not,” said Patrick. He turned and walked around the side of the house.

Omri looked back at the old man, who seemed to relax.

“It ent for strangers, this story.”

“Please go on, Mr Towsler.”

He lit another cigarette. “It were like this, see. She made a bit of a friend o' me, early on like, when she could still get about a bit. Before she took to her bed. She set about pickin' one of us she thought she could trust.”

“Why did she pick you?”

“It were strange like. She asked who'd like his fortune told. Well, we all did, 'cept one who was 'Oly Roman and said it was blasphemous.” He pronounced it “blas-fee-mus”. “And it were, in a way! She knew more'n she should've for a Christian, if you take my meanin'. She did some hocus-pocus with boilin' up bits o' lead and makin' queer shapes of 'em in a basin o' water. Well, we had to help her. She couldn't hardly lift much by then. And she telled us some things about our lives, and she were so right, it scared us stiff if I'm honest. To me she said, ‘You'll live your life alone, yet not alone.' Well! I were well and truly married, had a new daughter, I thought, ‘We got a right one here!' But then she looked at me out of them sad, ill eyes and said, ‘You will do.' My mates on the team all laughed and said she'd get me runnin' errands for her to the devil.”

“What did she mean, ‘You will do'?”

“She wouldn't say, not then. But after the others had gone out of the kitchen where we was doin' the hocus-pocus, she kept me back. Boiled up the lead one more time, and made me steady her hand while she poured it for herself. When I touched her hand like—”

He stopped and looked away.

“Yes?” prompted Omri eagerly.

“I can't rightly describe it. A tinglin'… I nearly let go, only I thought, she'll drop the saucepan and the hot lead'll go all over. But holding her hand while she poured, well, I wouldn't do that again for a mint o' money, I can tell you. Not to mention what happened after.”

“What?”

“She took one peep into the water and in a second she'd covered up her eyes… Took a terrible turn, she did. I never saw if she took the piece o' lead out and looked at it proper, like she done with ours, 'cause she just pointed with one hand, all trembling, to the door and ordered me to leave her to herself. But later we heard her cryin' somethin' awful.”

“And afterwards? I mean, the parcel…”

“I'm comin' to that. After a couple o' weeks of stripping, we started on the thatchin', see, and she was gettin' worse, with the doctor comin' and goin'. Till near the last she'd be about, and gettin' us our tea, and givin' us money for cider or beer. And times we'd do her bits o'shoppin' for her, till the gentleman come. Then he took over.”

“The gentleman? You mean, her son?”

“Arh… There was no more tea nor nothing else, after he come, not on the job anyhow. He just told us to get on with it and to keep our voices down. And she never come downstairs no more after that.”

“And did he stay with her till she died?”

“Oh, he were with her at the end, but for the last week he kind of come'd and go'd. He weren't there all the time. That's when she called me to come to her.”

“Called you?”

“Her bed were near the window and we had the ladders up and we'd look in on her, when he weren't about, to see she was all right like, and when it was me going past her window with a load of thatch, she might beckon, weakly, like this” — Tom crooked his finger — “and when I could, I'd go to her room and she'd give me instructions.”

“About the packages.”

“Arh, them.”

“Tell me about - the other one.”

“I wasn't to send it till after she'd gone. ‘Wait, Tom,' she whispered. ‘Wait till I'm dead. Safe and sound — under the ground' — and she give a little wheezy cough and tried to smile. Then she told me where the gentleman had put it away, hidden like. I was that afeared that he'd catch me takin' it and think I was stealin', but I had to do it - maybe it
was
the devil's errand, like the lads said, 'cause I couldn't resist her when she gave an order. Strange sort of a thing to be posting. A metal cupboard. And the key to it.” He paused. “And a letter.”

“A letter!”

“She told me what to put in it. I were never much on writin', but I done my best.”

“Who was it to?” asked Omri, though he knew.

“A lady. My memory's goin'. Whole gaps. Just goin'.”

“Maria? Was it Maria Darren?”

Tom's face cleared. “Arh! That's it!”

“What was in the letter - do you remember?”

“It were short enough… Let me see… Something about a mystery — arh, that's it, the key to the mystery. I remember that because she took the key off of her neck when she said it, so I knew it were a real key she meant. She made me write something more about the key, about how it opened many locks — something like that. Then she told me to write three words. ‘They're three hard words, Tom,' she said, ‘so get them right.
I took them.'
I wrote that down and then I couldn't help it, I asked her what she'd took, and she give a look that shut me up. Then she said she didn't ask forgiveness because she knew there couldn't be none, and at the end, that sad part. ‘Is it any comfort to you to know, my life too was ruined?' I remember that word for word, it gave me heartache, the way she said that, so sorry-like, and bitter at the same time. Then she was quiet for a while and I thought she'd dropped off, but she suddenly said, ‘Put “love”.'”

“Then what happened?” asked Omri almost in a whisper.

“Then I held the pen in her hand and she signed it with just her initials. She told me to put the key with the letter in the envelope, put that in the cupboard, pack it
up careful, and after her funeral to send it to an address she gave me. A lawyer. She said he'd know where to send it on.”

“And was that all?” Omri asked after a moment. “That's the whole story?”

The old man passed his hand over his bald head and looked down at the table. After a while, he said, “That's all as I can tell without you thinkin' what they all think.”

“What?”

“That I'm funny in the 'ead.”

“I won't think that,” said Omri.

“Well, then. The last time ever I saw Missus Driscoll — who wasn't a missus, but a miss, so they said, but that's nought to do with me - she give me a trifle for doin' her errand, and she give me somethin' else as well. She give me a present as no man ever had a better, except I had to keep it secret all these years, but for sure that's why I never, ever forgot that lady, and says a prayer for her of a Sunday to this day.”

Omri found his mouth had gone dry. “What — what was it? What did she give you?”

The old man looked at him for a long time. His eyes had lost their piercing, steady look and become dreamy and unfocused. When he spoke again it was in a singsong voice as if Omri wasn't there.

“She gave me her confidence. She told me about
them,
and said they'd all gone safely back,” he said. “All but one, and she wouldn't go, because she said her life
wasn't worth living where she come from, she wanted to stop here, with Missus Driscoll. But she couldn't keep her, like, bein' not long for this world. So she give her to me - she give her into my hand, into my keepin'. And I kept her. I kept her safe, and she was the best friend, the sweetest companion any man could have.”

“Can - can I see her?” whispered Omri.

Tom's eyes focused on him again.

“I don't know how or why, but you're the first as I could've shown her to,” he said. “But I can't because… because I ent got her no more. She lived with me in secret for thirty year, and then one day two months ago she—”

He stopped. Omri saw he had stopped because he was going to cry. Omri wanted to turn his eyes away but he couldn't.

“She was a little person, wasn't she?” he asked in a whisper. “A tiny person as big as your finger.”

“Arh,” Tom Towsler said hoarsely, wiping his eyes. “My Jenny.”

O
nce started, the old man couldn't stop. It poured out, and Omri sat there in the garden and listened.

Jenny had been a maid in a large Victorian household sometime in the 1870s. (“Around when Boone was a boy,” Omri thought. It was hard to compare them, their lives had been so different.)

She'd been put into service when she was only twelve and had been a servant for eight years with an awful snobbish family in Dorchester with lots of children and a houseful of servants. They made her sleep in a tiny attic without any heating, gave her half a day off a month,
allowed her no ‘followers' (boyfriends, Tom explained), and worked her like a slave from morning till night, doing the hardest, lowest household chores for practically no money.

Her own large family lived in poverty in the country — quite near where they were now, as it happened — so there was no way they could help her. In fact, most of the little she earned went straight to them. She couldn't save anything. There was no escape — this was to be her whole life.

And then one night when she was asleep, curled up against the bitter cold in her little room under the roof, she was transported into a different world — a different time. She found herself in a country farmhouse much like the one she'd been born in, only that it wasn't so poor. And she was tiny, or, as she thought, everything around her was huge.

Terrified at first, she soon found that this was not, as she'd thought, a nightmare. On the contrary, she seemed to be living a dream of happiness in the home of this giantess, whom she learnt to call Miss Jessie, and who, instead of expecting Jenny to work for her, did everything in her power to please her and make her happy.

She gave her delicious things to eat, as much as she wanted (the first time in her life she had had enough), and spoilt and cossetted her. She even taught her to read, using tiny cutout pages printed clearly in big, brown-ink
letters. But the best thing she did was to talk to her and treat her as an equal, as a person with rights and dignity. As a friend.

In the beginning, Jenny was shuttled between her two worlds, and it was like shuttling between hell and heaven. But hell by day wasn't so bad when you knew that heaven was waiting. She began to spirit away things that she needed in that heavenly other place — such as sewing things so that she could make her own clothes, not out of coarse cloth but from the silks and muslins Miss Jessie supplied.

She brought her own little eating utensils, hidden in her pockets, and then she grew bolder. With her pitiful wages she bought some cookpots, shoes, books, and other carriables.

At night she would bundle these necessaries up in a pillow slip and cuddle it to her in bed, so that when Miss Jessie ‘summoned' her (as she called it, as when her hated real-life mistress pealed one of the household bells), the things she needed would go with her.

In the Dorchester household they began to complain about her. She was constantly tired. There were times when she couldn't be wakened. A doctor was called but could find nothing wrong with her.

Eventually, after a prolonged visit that, at her beseeching, lasted several blissful days, she had awakened in the poor ward at a big hospital. The nurses were bewildered. As she lay there apparently unconscious,
eating nothing, hardly breathing,
she had put on weight,
and when she awoke she was in better health than when she had ‘fallen ill'.

They sent her home to the family she worked for, but they were growing tired of her ‘turns'. The mistress of the house summoned her for the last time.

“You'll have to go,” she said carelessly. “You're not earning your keep. I'll give you your wages to the end of this week. But you can't expect a character after the trouble you've caused.”