When the devil drives, p.14
When the Devil Drives, page 14
‘For my sins,’ he said. ‘That’s the excuse for my atrocious unpunctuality. They kept their poor galley slaves working so late, I scarcely had time to go home and change.’
From his manner, I guessed he was by no means a galley slave but a young diplomat learning his trade before being sent to some foreign embassy. A man appeared in front of the curtains to explain that Mr Collins would be singing, bravely, in spite of a bad cold. It was a pleasant enough piece, but not first rate, with a rather depressed chorus of fairies who sounded as if they too were suffering from Mr Collins’ cold.
At the interval, the Talbots had arranged for supper to be served to us in our box. From the way Beattie glanced at Mr Calloway and me as we were forking up our chicken in aspic, I suspected her of matchmaking. With the instant understanding of two people who like each other on sight, but without romantic complications, Mr Calloway and I exchanged our own looks, which said we were not playing that game. Once that was decided, I was free to enjoy his gossip about life at the Foreign Office.
‘There we all were, a nice quiet Saturday morning with only a few messages coming in from the cipher clerks, feet up on our desks, looking forward to being out of harness by lunchtime. Then, a hawk in the dovecote. A panting messenger arrives with the news that our esteemed chief, whom we’d all assumed to be safely occupied at Windsor being bored to distraction by the happy couple, has been sighted in Whitehall. Feet off desks, novels into filing cabinets, immediate Pam alert.’
He mimed wide-eyed civil servants, straightening collars and smoothing hair. Pam was the irreverent name for our formidable Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston. Even heads of state would not lightly annoy him, let alone young civil servants.
‘So we all sit there, shining with alertness, waiting for Pam to burst in and tell us what international crisis has brought him rushing back from Windsor to London on a weekend. Is there another revolution in Paris? Have the Ottomans insulted us? Where should we send the gunboat? So we sit and we shine and we wait and at the end of it – nothing happens.’
‘So the crisis must have gone away of its own accord,’ Beattie suggested.
‘If so, it managed it without the help of the Foreign Office. At half past five word gets round that Pam has gone straight back to Windsor without even setting foot in the building.’
I hoped I didn’t look guilty. Were the contessa and I responsible for the strange behaviour of our most senior statesmen? The letter I’d delivered to His Highness might have made the Foreign Office uneasy about a threat to the dignity of their royal visitor. George Talbot said there must surely be some reason for the Foreign Secretary’s return to the capital. Calloway shrugged.
‘Who knows. Perhaps he’d forgotten his dress studs. Perhaps he was attempting to escape from the Windsor treadmill and our sovereign lady had him rounded up and brought back.’
Over the dessert of raspberry ices, Beattie asked Calloway if court life at Windsor were really so boring. He admitted that he had no direct experience of it, but the head of his department had to make frequent trips to Windsor Castle when Pam was in attendance there.
‘From what he says, it’s the combination of Love’s Young Dream and all that formality which makes it such a burden for everybody else. Can you imagine, the pair of them riding together in Windsor Great Park and about thirty assorted courtiers and statesmen of various nationalities riding at a respectful distance behind them, pretending not to be there?’
It was clear that the engagement of Victoria and Albert, although still not officially announced, was already a fact of life in Whitehall.
‘They really love each other then?’ Beattie said.
‘Evidently. At least it’s not one of those diplomatic marriages where the two parties can hardly bear to be in the same room. I’m told she looks at him as if the sun rises in his eyes.’
‘What about him?’ I said.
‘Almost equally devoted, it’s said. Though he’s a young man of such impeccable breeding and virtue, it’s hard to tell what he really thinks.’
‘Is any man’s virtue impeccable?’ I asked, teasing him.
‘Albert’s is, I’m sure. He’s unbelievably serious minded. A friend of mine met him, and within two minutes Albert was quizzing him about workers’ housing in Birmingham. His Highness had more facts and figures at his fingertips than an entire committee.’
‘It’s no bad thing for a young man to be serious, with such burdens ahead of him,’ George Talbot said.
Calloway arranged his features into diplomatic agreement. ‘And perhaps we should all give thanks to Cupid that it was young Albert who won her affections and not his elder brother.’
‘Is Prince Ernest not so virtuous then?’ I asked.
‘Not quite,’ Calloway said.
He and George exchanged a look that said some things were not to be discussed in front of ladies, which annoyed me. George turned the conversation to diplomacy. ‘I suppose there are some countries which won’t be entirely pleased with the arrangement.’
‘Quite true,’ Calloway said. ‘I know the prime minister had reservations on that score. The Coburgs aren’t popular abroad and the Russians hate them. Some people think Albert’s Uncle Leopold won’t rest until there’s a Saxe Coburg on every throne in Europe.’
‘I thought she was going to marry the Czar’s son,’ Beattie said.
‘That was a distinct possibility back in the spring. I’m sure there’ll be some disappointment in St Petersburg. I dare say Austria will have reservations too, which is amusing since Kolowrath is actually a guest at Windsor at present.’
‘Kolowrath?’ I asked.
I suspected that the Talbots didn’t recognize the name either but didn’t want to show their ignorance by asking. I had no shame on that score.
‘Count Anton Graf von Kolowrath, the Austrian minister of the interior and Prince Metternich’s right-hand man, though he’d probably be quite happy to see Metternich go under the wheels of a coach.’
‘Like quite a lot of other people,’ Talbot commented.
In European politics, Metternich was generally regarded as the prince of darkness, capable of any kind of diplomatic double dealing.
‘Yes,’ Calloway said. ‘I’d give quite a few guineas to be there when Count Kolowrath has to give formal congratulations to the happy couple.’
I felt sorry for little Vicky. She was only twenty years old after all, and the whole world was taking an interest in what should be the private matter of choosing a husband. If I became annoyed sometimes at my friends’ matchmaking attempts, how much worse it must have been for her.
We finished our raspberry ices as the orchestra began to file back into the pit and settled to more fairies and a ballet about Mars and Venus that had probably been grafted in from some other opera. In the foyer after the performance, Mr Calloway helped me deftly into my cloak. We were halfway to the door when George Talbot spotted a friend of his who was a member of parliament with a particular interest in foreign affairs. One of the many amiable things about George was that he never missed an opportunity to advance a protégé’s career, so Calloway and I had to be introduced to the MP and serious chat followed, with the crowd surging round us like the outgoing tide round a rock. I was only half listening to exchanges about some trade agreement when something in the sea of people caught my eye. It was the briefest of looks, a dark head of hair and a light-footed way of walking even in a crowd. Oddly, I had the impression that, at the moment I’d glimpsed him, he’d only just started walking and until then had been standing still, as we were. A person may stop walking for many reasons and London is full of dark-haired men, but I was immediately sure that he was the man I knew as Mr Clyde and he’d been staring at me. He went on, out of the door. You can’t go running after men in public places. Then, as usually happens, I was not so sure after all. If it had been Mr Clyde, might he have paused, hoping to speak to me, then decided against it? By the time my party had got outside, there was no sign of him or anybody like him on the pavement.
We all went together to find the Talbots’ carriage. Calloway handed me in, hoped we’d meet again then wished us goodnight, because his rooms weren’t far away.
‘Did you like him?’ Beattie asked, as soon as our wheels were rolling.
‘Yes. He’s very entertaining.’
Beattie looked at me, trying to make out my expression from the headlamps of an oncoming carriage.
‘No more than entertaining?’
‘Heaven knows, that’s rare enough.’
Until that possible sighting of Mr Clyde reminded me of business, I’d enjoyed the few hours’ respite and friendship and was grateful. I craved warmth and kindness, like a cat hungry for cream.
‘Is there somebody else?’ Beattie said.
‘I think so, yes. But he’s away in Ireland.’
‘Only think so?’
George told her to stop plaguing the poor girl with questions and turned the conversation to what I thought of the evening’s performance. They dropped me off at the gateway to Abel Yard, promising that we’d meet again soon for a musical evening at their home.
The first thing I looked for was a glimmer of a candle from Tabby’s cabin, but there was nothing but darkness in that direction. When I did pick up a faint light it came not from the cabin but between the closed doors of the carriage repairer’s store shed by the gates. There shouldn’t have been a light in there. It was after eleven o’clock and Mr Grindley never worked so late. I listened and heard low voices inside. One of them was male, the other Tabby’s. I prised open the door and walked in to find a man holding a mallet. His shadow wavered over the wall in the candlelight. Tabby was bending over a bench, an odd white hat on her head that I’d never seen her wearing before. My heart turned several cartwheels before I recognized the man with the mallet.
‘Tom Huckerby, what in the world are you doing now?’
He looked a little shamefaced. The mallet was the kind printers use to pack type into its frame, Tabby’s strange hat a paper one that printers make fresh for themselves every day to keep ink out of their hair. Another man I’d never seen before was crouching close to a second candle sorting through type.
‘Seemed a pity to have the press here and not bring out a new edition of The Unbound Briton,’ Tom said. ‘We didn’t think you’d mind.’
They’d dragged the press out of its hiding place and reassembled it in an empty space between parts of carriages.
‘It’s not a question of whether I mind,’ I said. ‘It’s not my storeroom.’
‘I know, but Boadicea here says the man never works Saturday afternoons and Sundays and in any case he’s out visiting his sister.’
I looked reproachfully at Tabby. She grinned back. It seemed to me ironic that a girl who scorned reading and writing could so easily be seduced by the glamour of the press.
‘What are you printing?’ I asked Tom.
‘Latest edition of The Unbound Briton. Don’t worry, we’ll have every drop of ink scrubbed away and the press back under the stairs by daylight.’
I tucked away my good white evening gloves and picked up a proof page. Surrounded by columns of type was a picture of a gentleman’s dress chariot. It was done from a rough woodcut, over-inked and gleaming black. On the back, where footmen should have been, two creatures reared up with horned heads and animal bodies.
‘Not you as well, Tom,’ I said.
He was political to the bone and would not usually waste paper and ink on horror stories to scare housemaids.
‘Not really our style, I know but we had a page to fill,’ he said. ‘A fellow I know runs another paper, more of a penny-dreadful than ours, but we help each other out when we’re short of copy. He takes some of our politics and I take some of his shockers.’
‘More appearances of the devil’s chariot, then?’
‘All over the place, and half a dozen girls supposed to have disappeared. You know how these stories grow legs.’
He sounded as sceptical as I was.
‘The man you know who wrote this story, has he actually talked to anybody who’s seen it or is it all second hand?’
Tom had to think about it. ‘As far as I remember, he claims he spoke to a girl in Holborn who reckons she was dragged into the chariot by two men with bulls’ heads, only she struggled and got away.’
Tabby gave me a ‘told you so’ look.
‘When was this supposed to have happened?’ I said.
‘Last week.’
‘He only claims to have spoken to the girl?’
‘Codling’s not exactly the most reliable man in journalism.’
I tried to return Tabby’s look, but she was too entranced with Tom setting up a line of type to notice.
I was about to go to bed and leave them to it, when Tom remembered something. ‘I saw your friend Jimmy Cuffs. He gave me a note for you.’ He pulled it out of his pocket and handed it over, ink-smeared. It was addressed to me in Jimmy’s meticulous writing:
Miss Lane,
Re your inquiry about a certain ring. My informant tells me it was the head of a bull on a man’s body, finely modelled. The Minotaur?
Candlelight wavered over the note as I read. But the candle flame was burning steadily. The wavering was from my hands shaking.
‘Tom?’
He looked up. ‘Bad news?’
‘That friend of yours, Codling, do you think he could get the woman to speak to me? The one who says she was nearly dragged off in the chariot.’
He was puzzled, both at the request and the urgency I couldn’t keep from my voice.
‘I could try.’
‘As soon as possible.’
He hesitated, torn between curiosity and the demands of his printing, then nodded. I got his permission to take the proof page upstairs with me, took off my fine clothes and read the story by the lamplight. The black chariot worked itself into my dreams. I woke shivering from a dream of it rumbling along behind me as I ran away down an endless street of blank houses. I was not much better than all those nervous housemaids now. I was starting to believe in it.
TWELVE
Tom Huckerby was at my door around noon next morning, weary and hollow-eyed.
‘The woman’s name is Blade. Codling thinks he might be able to get her to talk this afternoon.’
‘Where?’
‘You know the Flora Tea Gardens, near the Swan Inn on the Bayswater Road? He said he’d try and get her there about three.’
I said I’d be there. He hesitated, looking worried. ‘He says she’s accustomed to . . . to being paid for her time. That’s why she was out on the street so late on her own.’
‘How much does she want?’
‘Codling thought she might talk to us for five guineas.’
‘Five guineas!’
I didn’t know the rates for the midnight sparrows, but that seemed excessive.
‘That’s what he says.’
In the few hours available, the only way I could put my hand on that sort of money was by raiding the store of guineas Mr Clyde had left for me in the desk at Grosvenor Street. Normally that would have troubled my conscience but I was past that by now.
Suzette opened the door less promptly than usual, looking sulky and not pleased to see me. I took five sovereigns out of the bag in the writing desk, knowing that I could make up the extra five shillings from my own resources. On the way downstairs, I asked Suzette if she’d seen Mr Clyde that day.
‘No, ma’am.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘Can’t rightly remember, ma’am.’
I might as well have spoken to the banisters.
At two o’clock, Tabby and I were walking across the park towards the Bayswater Road. I hadn’t wanted to take her, but it turned out that she’d been eavesdropping from under the stairs when Tom Huckerby was talking to me. I’d given in, on the condition that she kept her distance when I was talking to our witness.
‘If she sees a whole group of us, she might turn and run,’ I said.
‘Not with a chance of getting her hand on five guineas.’
It struck me that my apprentice might know more than I did about the tariff for Miss Blade’s kind. The Flora Tea Gardens were not far from the livery stables where Amos worked. They’d been fashionable once, but on an afternoon in late October there was a sad and faded air about them. Rosemary bushes in the sparse borders still showed a defiant blue flower or two, but geraniums hunched as if waiting for the first frost. Tom Huckerby was already there sitting at a table, the only person in the gardens. I joined him and sent Tabby into the neighbouring Swan Inn, just in case the tea gardens still ran to providing tea. Tom was ill at ease.
‘I don’t know if they’ll come. This Codling, I shouldn’t want you to think he’s a particular friend of mine.’
A sulky girl came out with a tray, followed by Tabby. The teacups were chipped and the milk so sour that, when I poured, white globules floated on brown sludge. A long time after three o’clock, two more people came into the garden. One was a man in a low crowned hat and a black overcoat. Blue smoke and the smell of a cheap cigar came ahead of him. He was small, in his late twenties, with sparse fair hair, pale eyes with near-white lashes and a protruding lower lip like a carp. A woman followed, shoulders hunched, an Indian shawl over her head. I glanced at Tabby and she withdrew to a seat a couple of tables away.
Tom introduced Mr Codling to me. The woman was slumped on a chair, with just a glance up at me from under the shawl.
‘Miss Blade,’ Codling said.
Hers was a strong face, or should have been, with high cheekbones and a good chin, arched eyebrows, dark hair waving over a white forehead. But her eyes were as dull as bottle stoppers, her cheeks too bright with rouge. She wore a brown wool skirt and a dark blue jacket. The brown bodice under the jacket was fastened unevenly with buttons in the wrong holes, glimpses of red chemise showing through. Codling sat down and looked a question at Tom. I’d given Tom the five guineas. He handed it over and it disappeared into Codling’s pocket like a fly down the carp’s gullet. I asked the woman if she’d care for a cup of tea.
