The Crimson Rooms (26 page)

Which made my own pathetic state all the more absurd. There was no question of my confiding in these women. So you’ve fallen in love too, they’d say incredulously. It must be catching all of a sudden. Who is he?

And some of them, on hearing the name Nicholas Thorne, would be even more disbelieving. But he’s already engaged to be married. He’s bound to be a silk one day. What are you thinking of?

In any case, their conversation had moved from the subject of love to the more pressing one of money. Our current rates of pay, those of us who received any fees at all, were untenable. Why should we be paid so much less than our male colleagues for doing the same work, usually in half the time? Maud, the most committed suffragist among us, was so vexed by the question that she had canvassed her MP and brought it up at a political rally. “It’s the only way. We have to make our presence felt with every element in society but especially those in public office. We have to keep challenging the norm or they’ll think they can get away with it. They pay us pin money in the expectation that we’ll be grateful for anything, as indeed I’m afraid we are.”

“There isn’t time to fight battles on too many fronts,” said Carrie. “My own feeling is that we should concentrate on the law. We have to prove ourselves as lawyers and we don’t want our cause to be tainted by association with shrill women who are simply looking for a cause, any cause.”

I was thinking: What if Carrie had reached me that day in Toynbee after the concert and insisted I took tea with her? What if there’d been no rush along the hot pavement, no Thorne carrying my briefcase, no argument in the tea shop? What if I’d not seen him between the day of Leah’s first court appearance, when he touched my arm and gave unwanted advice, and Stephen Wheeler’s bail hearing in Chesham this week? Perhaps his impact would have faded in the intervening days, leaving the faintest scorch mark instead of an indelible scar. As it was, the image of him flared in my mind and every word and glance we’d exchanged made him more ineradicable. It was too late.

Carrie said: “Once we have an expertise in a certain field of the law we are uncrushable, because we are needed. If we’re too generalist, we are dispensable. I said to Ambrose . . .”

Nonsense, I told myself, you’re not in love. How would you know what being in love is? It’s so long since you felt anything for any man that you think the faintest spark of interest, a raising of the pulse, is being in love. You don’t even know Thorne.

So I set the thought of him aside and heard myself talk quite calmly about the Wheeler case (which they’d read of in the newspapers), the fact that we had our own line of inquiry, and that I was to visit Stella’s house on Monday. Then we discussed Leah Marchant’s predicament, and Carrie had much to say concerning the iniquities of a law that would probably ensure that Leah never recovered her children. “You do realize how much money she’ll need before they are released. Each day they’re in the home will cost her more, because in order to get them back she’ll have to recompense the charity for their board and lodging. And then she’ll have to show that she can provide for their moral and financial needs. I mean, the authorities might conclude that the children are indeed better off in an institution, have you thought of that?”

“I’ve never seen Leah Marchant with her children or visited the Good Samaritan’s Home so cannot make a judgment. But given she surrendered them voluntarily in the first place, this all seems very unjust.”

“She will have been told the rules when she placed them in the home but been so desperate to get away that she won’t have listened. How could a woman, forced to surrender her children, think rationally? Did she sign a document? Can she read? But you should visit the home. It’s possible you might be pleasantly surprised. Is it one which sends children to the colonies?”

“What do you mean?”

“One thing you’ll need to check is where the home stands on child migration. I don’t expect you want the children mixed up in that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Surely you know that this country ships masses of children to the colonies every year, particularly Canada and Australia. It’s government policy, has been for years, to support charities in sending unwanted children overseas to underpopulated outposts of the empire. After all, there are hundreds of perfectly good homes for them out there, people crying out to adopt a child.”

Maud said: “For some, that must surely be an excellent solution. I heard of a boy who was given his own land in Canada and is now a prosperous farmer.”

“Yes, but I also know critics of the scheme. Some of the children they send abroad are very young. And I don’t know what checks are made, once they’re out there.”

“But what has this to do with the Marchant children?” I asked. “You are surely talking about a scheme for orphans. The Marchant children have one if not two parents.”

“I’m just warning you to be vigilant. At Toynbee all kinds of things come to light. I’ve dealt with the case of a woman who recently married a good man, prepared to take in the child she’d been forced to give up because it was conceived when she was sixteen and turned out by her family. But when they made inquiries they were told the child had been adopted and was enjoying a comfortable life with a well-to-do family in the West Country. I’ve written numerous letters but the only response from the charity is that they feel it’s important for the child not to be contacted by its natural parents at this late stage. That mother is adamant she never agreed to the child being adopted and the charity is refusing to show me the papers they say she signed. If it’s all aboveboard, why the secrecy, is what I want to know? The only way forward might be to take the home to court, bring it all out in the open, let them prove they went through a due process and that your client’s children are indeed still in this country.”

“Where else could they be?”

“Where indeed? It seems to me that charities are overzealous in having children ‘adopted’ and coy about admitting what form these adoptions take. If these Marchant children are healthy and personable, they would be considered ideal candidates for Canada. It’s such a cheap, neat option.”

Before I left, I arranged to call on Carrie in her offices to look at papers she had collected on the welfare of children taken into care. But I was cursing myself for not consulting her earlier. If only I hadn’t been distracted by Thorne that day at Toynbee I would have acted with greater urgency. Carrie had pulled me so firmly back into line that the turmoil of the morning now seemed an aberration. My vocation was clear: to rescue the Marchant children from the abyss into which they appeared to have fallen.

O
n Monday, I visited Stella Wheeler’s childhood home,
83 Manchester Street, in a grid of mid-Victorian terraces off Horn Lane in Acton. The house was substantial compared to Stella’s and set back a few feet from the street, behind a low front wall shielding a diminutive garden with a rose bush in the center and borders crammed with lobelia.

The front step was swept, the door had recently been washed, and the hall smelled of baking. Mrs. Hobhouse greeted me with the words “I’ve been cooking for the funeral. They say the body will be released early next week. Of course for now I can only do things that will keep. Dundee cake.” She showed me into the front parlor, which was stuffy with underuse and into which had been crammed a collection of oversized furniture presumably passed down from previous generations. Mrs. Hobhouse’s housekeeping, unlike her daughter’s, was decidedly up to scratch. Even the fire irons, I noted, had been dusted, and the antimacassars were newly starched.

“I’ll fetch the tea,” she said. “Will you be all right in here for a moment?”

The parlor spoke volumes for Mrs. Hobhouse’s respect for good-quality old things, coupled with a love of what was new and fashionable. The sideboard, for instance, was Victorian oak, but on it was arranged a modern tea service with a stylishly inconvenient pot—probably a bad pourer—patterned in orange and green. In the middle of the mantel was a black-and-white vase with Egyptian figures and at either end were framed wedding photographs, one for each of the Hobhouse girls.

Julie’s was on the left. Her unfortunate groom, Michael, had an awkward posture, and even in that formal pose his bride, in an ethereal lace frock, looked impatient as she held herself rigid while supporting him on her arm.

In the other, identically framed photograph, I at last met the younger daughter, Stella, as she stood beside her new husband, Stephen Wheeler, in a church doorway. One glance confirmed my belief that the Wheeler marriage had been a mismatch. Stephen’s feet were planted too far apart, his shoulders rounded, teeth showing through his beard, a trilby clutched to his soft belly with one hand, the other on his new wife’s slender hip. She had a girlish form and was evidently well aware of her own beauty; her posture and restrained smile suggested that she was holding herself carefully, as if she were modeling her clothes rather than participating in a wedding. She wore her hair in a dainty bob, and her headdress had two small earpieces with artificial flowers clasping the veil on either side of her forehead. Her face had the regular beauty of a line illustration in a women’s magazine, though her nose was perhaps just a little too broad. Her eyes, like her sister’s, were wide-set, but she had a prettier mouth and was altogether much finer-featured than Julie. Though her frock had a demurely square neckline, there was a heaviness in her eyelids that was somehow affiliated to Wheeler’s hand on her hip, bunching the fabric of her skirt. A little bouquet of lilies was clasped to her breast.

“I can hardly bear to look at that,” said Mrs. Hobhouse, who had brought a tray of tea.

“When was the date of the wedding?”

“April 26. They’d not been wed three weeks when she . . .” Tea was poured and I was provided with napkin, plate, knife, and rock bun, but it was clear, despite this hospitality, that Mrs. Hobhouse was not comfortable with my visit. She treated me with reserve and once or twice gave me a slightly hostile glance. The house, save for the ticking of a clock, was silent and I thought of the hours she must spend alone in it now that her daughters were gone.

“You must be wondering why I’m here, exactly,” I said. “Forgive me if it seems intrusive but I wanted to see Stella’s room, just in case there was anything the police had missed, anything that might give us a clue as to why she died.”

“Do you think I haven’t been through that a thousand times? There’s nothing in her room, I can tell you. I can’t help thinking, Miss Gifford, that it’s
his
things you should be looking at, not hers. He’s the one who did it.”

“I understand how you must be feeling and I’m sorry. I won’t stay, if you’d rather I didn’t. It’s just that the police are so sure of Stephen’s guilt that they are going to set an early trial date. Just supposing Stephen isn’t the right man, supposing it was someone else.”

“But it was his gun.”

“Mrs. Hobhouse, there’s no motive. And it’s just possible someone could have used Stephen’s gun. Anyone could have got into the backyard. The shed wasn’t locked.”

She was momentarily startled by this idea, then slumped back in a gesture of total exhaustion. With her mouth slack and her eyes closed, her face aged twenty years. “I’ve thought this through. In my view there’s no doubt Stephen did it. He wasn’t right in the head, I can see that now, and I reproach myself for not taking more notice before. Our Stell was scared about staying too long when she came here that last time lest she wasn’t home when he got back.”

“What was she afraid of, exactly? Did he lose his temper with her, do you think?”

“She never gave me details. I think he could be unpleasant, you know, go silent. I don’t think he hurt her, if that’s what you’re getting at. But even when they were engaged the fact he kept such a close eye on her caused friction between them. His jealousy would have provoked her into being difficult.”

“Can you explain what you mean by difficult?”

“Sulky. She was always a bit of a sulker. And I expect if he asked her questions she didn’t like, she wouldn’t give him straight answers on principle.”

“But do you think, aside from that, she ever gave him cause to be jealous?”

“You’re talking about the dancing that Julie was going on about. He didn’t really mind that. But you see this terrible thing has happened and what’s on my mind is that Stella may have played up deliberately, not realizing that he was far more dangerous in one of his moods than any of us realized, and what he might do to her in the end.”

She led me upstairs to Stella’s bedroom in the back of the house, overlooking a symmetrical garden with vegetables and berry bushes. The room smelled of clean bed linen and the fruitcake baking below. There was a narrow bed against one wall, a space where a dressing table had once stood—the rug was dented with castor marks and there was a pale oval patch on the wallpaper—a wardrobe and a chest of drawers. The only incongruous item was a dressmaker’s dummy with a half-made black skirt pinned to its waist. The surfaces were painfully bare.