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Authors: Marjorie Eccles

Tags: #Mystery, #Historical

Shadows & Lies (31 page)

BOOK: Shadows & Lies
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To be fair, Harry was not alone in his condemnation of the policy, even among the war correspondents. A good deal of moral pressure was building up to augment their rations. The mistake, Harry thought, had been to believe that this could ever have been simply a white man's war, which need not involve the native population. They had been expected at the onset of real trouble to decamp and leave the white man to it but they did – or could – not. They had been drawn in, willy-nilly, excluded from their traditional way of life, prevented from escaping the beleaguered town by the surrounding Boers, unable to graze their cattle, or having to watch them picked off or stolen by enemy raiders. They had no previously hoarded stores, as we
had, and no other means of obtaining food was available to them.
“Well, it looks as though B-P will soon be relieved of part of the problem, if he has his way. His latest policy is to ‘encourage' some of the blacks – several hundred women and children, I believe – to leave and find what food they can in the north.”
“Yes, I've heard. With an offer of food for their journey — nine slaughtered horses.”
“What a prospect,” said Harry in his sardonic way. “Either be shot by the Boers when you try to leave, or stay here and die of starvation.”
To give him his due, B-P believed the Boers would play the game and not shoot women and children. But the Boers were not British and had never heard of playing the game. The great exodus was driven back and the women shot if they did not obey.
“Ah well,
nil desperandum,”
Harry said. This time we didn't laugh. By now, we could read each other's thoughts.
He had never again approached any moment of intimacy, after that tender gesture when he had pushed back my hair. But when our hands accidentally touched, or our eyes met, I thought of things that were not good for me to think.
 
What more is there to say?
Except that, just before the siege ended after seven long months, Harry Chetwynd and I inevitably became lovers. That Hugh came home unexpectedly one day and found us together. That he went out without a word and the next day, leading his men in a daring – and some said reckless – sortie against the Boer positions, was shot and killed, earning himself the Victoria Cross for his valour.
I never believed that I would write these words, but I must. I could never rid myself of the feeling that Dr Harvill was using me as an experiment, but now I have to say that I shall remain forever in his debt. The cloud under which I have lived for over a year has at last lifted.
Rosa watches me like a hawk. She tells me to be calm, and has brought me a tisane, which she swears will soothe my nerves, but my fingers can hardly hold the pen steady enough to write. When I came to that part of this re-creation of my past, that point where Hugh was killed, and I faced what I had done – caused a true, honest and brave man to lose his life because of my faithlessness – that was when I knew I had come to the end of my journey of self-discovery, for that is what it has been. Memory did not come suddenly, with
a
blinding rush. First I would recall one thing, then another. Scenes, events and memories of people I had known piled themselves on top of one another in no sort of sequence. Only gradually did they begin to form some of order in my mind, until I no longer had to question each recollection. I had regained that basic human right – the right to a past.
And the best – and the worst – of it was that it brought Ludovic back. Ludo.
 
While we in Mafeking waited for supply trains to bring us food, mourned our dead and wondered what the last seven months had accomplished in bringing the war to an end, England apparently went wild with people pouring into city centre streets to celebrate Mafeking's relief and honour the hero of the hour
—
Colonel Baden-Powell. Especially was this so in London – and of course, Yorkshire – where church bells rang and mill buzzers hooted not only in Dewsbury and Bridge End, but in Bradford and all over the West Riding in honour of their own heroes who had been caught up in the siege – and no doubt the townspeople crowded into the streets and the marketplaces there, too, to celebrate. Never mind that the war was still going on, Britain was in the grip of jingoism. Young men were still being urged to volunteer; to go out in the name of Queen and country, to be slaughtered or to die of fearful wounds, dysentery, enteric fever and gangrene.
I wished for nothing more, now, than to shake the dust of Africa from my feet. What I did not want to do was to go back to Bridge End, Willie Dyson and, above all, the Crowthers. How could I return without Lyddie? How could I return to them at all – those dear people who valued integrity above all else – as a grieving young widow, knowing how I had betrayed my marriage vows, and where it had led? But I had nowhere else to go.
Until I remembered the letters we had received from Rouncey before the siege, saying that she had returned to England from America and was now teaching young women students at the Royal Holloway College, at Egham Hill in Surrey. I wrote to her to ask if she had any suggestions as to how I might live, and she offered me a home.
On Hugh's death, I had been left with a considerable amount of money at my disposal, leaving me in no doubt that I need never be in want again for the rest of my life, but the thought of keeping that money filled me with so much revulsion and shame, I would not accept it. His family, who did not, of course, know the full story of his death, and my part in it, thought I was deranged when I agreed to take only what was necessary for my journey home. Maybe Rouncey would really be as glad to have me live with her as she said, and I felt that if I could act as her housekeeper (her own housekeeping skills being nil) my presence there need not be a burden.
“I didn't ask you to live with me to be my servant, Hannah, but as a companion. But if you feel you must do something to earn your keep, you may help me with the book I'm writing. It hasn't yet progressed very far beyond a huge accumulation of research documents, and they badly need sorting and classifying. What do you say to that?”
I wasn't sure whether I was qualified to do what she was asking, but I didn't dare to say so; nothing, in Rouncey's view, was ever beyond your grasp if you put your mind to it. Should I demur, I'd be faced with a brisk injunction to get my head down and buckle to, as I bad so often been told to in the schoolroom. I smiled at the thought. Her energy and determination were already passing them-sleves on to me and I began to feel that the prospect ahead might have something more to offer than a mere solution to the difficult situation in which I presently found myself. I discovered that her
writing was concerned mostly with the rights of women; apart from gathering material for her book on the subject, she wrote leaflets for the Women's Social and Political Union, supporting their constant pressure to be given the vote. We lived together in her little house near the college for nearly three years, and I learned Mr Pitman's shorthand and how to work a typewriter to help with her voluminous correspondence.
“There's to be a WSPU meeting in Grosvenor Square next week. Shall we go, Hannah?” she asked one bitter, early December day. I looked at her doubtfully. She hadn't been well lately and still had a
hacking cough; the weather was appalling. Snow had drifted in the lanes round the cottage, telegraph wires had come down, the post couldn't get through, but she would go. We had a slow, cold journey to London only to find the meeting cancelled. We stayed overnight with friends of hers, who were as worried as I was by her cough. The next day, by the time we had trudged the three miles from the station through a blizzard back to the cottage, it was evident she was very ill indeed; with pneumonia, as it turned out. When she died, three days later, I was bereft.
I had to leave the cottage because the owners wanted it for their son, who was getting married. Rouncey had left money to the WSPU and the rest, which amounted to nearly a hundred pounds, to me. It was enough to enable me to furnish a room I had found, and to provide me with a little cushion in case of need. With my typewriting skills I soon found a job in a firm which imported fans and Imari porcelain and lacquered goods from Japan. Twenty of us women sat in rows clattering away at our heavy, noisy machines all day long. It was hard, concentrated and extremely dull, repetitive work for which I was paid very little – and the noise, after the peacefulness of the cottage, was deafening. But I had my independence.
Three months later, on a lovely spring day, when I was standing in front of a flower seller, heart-stopped by a heavenly scented mimosa, which we had called acacia in Mafeking, and wondering whether I could afford to buy a bunch, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Harry Chetwynd.
I may be condemned as self-seeking by agreeing to live as his mistress in this pretty house he bought for me in St John's Wood, being grateful for whatever time he could spare to come to me. True, it was
a far cry from the shabby little room I rented, from the hard, ill-paid work at the office and the everlasting din of all those heavy machines – but I would not have done it had not my heart leaped at the sight and touch of him as I looked again into those laughing eyes.
The attraction between us was very different from the sort of love which had existed between Hugh and myself
—
a love which, had I not been so foolish and wrong-headed as to fail to recognise it, would have outlasted life itself. I accepted from the start that Harry could not marry me. He was perfectly honest with me, but promised that even in the event of a convenient marriage being forced on him, it would make no difference to us. We existed for nothing but ourselves; it was only when Ludo was about to be born that the fly appeared in the ointment. By now, I had ceased to believe that I could ever bear a child, and when I found I was expecting one, my attitude changed. I did not want him or her to be born out of wedlock. I wanted Harry to be proud of us and for his family to meet and acknowledge us. Demanding this, I saw a side to Harry I did not like.
After Ludo was born, however, the three of us existed in a trinity of love – except that I could not get it out of my mind that Harry had a duty to tell his father, and his mother, that he had a son.
I sometimes think that there is something dark in me which presages death to all those I love – my parents; Lyddie; Hugh; Rouncey. My child. It was as the result of a quarrel over his refusal to do as I wished (though later lovingly made up), that Harry agreed to go on an outing ‘to clear the air' as he put it. We would sit on the top of an omnibus and view London in the beautiful autumn weather, he said, and let the wind blow away all the dissensions that had been between us.
The last words I heard before I lost consciousness amid all the hideous confusion of the accident, as my hands were reaching out to find Ludo, were: “He's a goner.”
All that Louisa Fox had told Crockett that night at Scotland Yard – about being in Mafeking at the time of the now famous siege; of having met both Hannah Osborne and Harry Chetwynd there; about having recently discovered that Harry had had a mistress and a child – all this had so far supported Crockett's own theories. Theories were one thing, however. Proof was another. And what he'd been told had given him no further pointers as to how he might find Mrs Osborne, who he was convinced would lead him to Rosa Tartaryan's murderer. And this was, after all, his paramount task, as he had been reminded by the Saroyans. The brothers were increasingly angry at the failure to discover her murderer. “I'm sorry, I know it's difficult for you, but we're doing all we can. For the moment, let's go over once more anything you can tell me about the time she was employed by Mrs Smith.”
While they hadn't exactly approved of Rosa working as a servant to raise money for their funds, they hadn't quite disapproved. “She knew what she was doing, she was clever, my Rosa, very clever. Had she not been a woman, she would undoubtedly have been our leader,” said Gevorg, without irony. But they still could recall nothing more of Mrs Smith than her name. They didn't even know how Rosa had come to hear of the vacant position.
Crockett had asked Louisa if she thought there had been an affair going on between Hannah Osborne and Harry Chetwynd in Mafeking.
“Nothing that I was aware of,” she'd answered doubtfully, “I was barely fourteen after all, though one is always looking out for romance at that age, and Harry was very good-looking … but Mrs Osborne – well she was young, too, but she was a married woman. No, I'm sure there wasn't anything of that sort.” Besides, she'd added after a moment or two, Mrs Osborne had been distraught when her husband had been killed in an engagement just before the end of the siege, for which he'd had received the highest decoration in the land, for bravery in the face of the
enemy. He had been such a nice man, so kind and polite. No, they hadn't had any children
But she added after a moment, looking very thoughtful, that perhaps Crockett should know that Sylvia Eustace-Bragge, Harry's twin sister, had known that after his return to England Harry had taken a mistress and had an illegitimate – and what was worse, retarded, child. Sylvia, however, did not know who this mistress was or where she lived. Crockett blew out his lips, disbelieving. Even Constable Grayson had known that the foster mother of the little boy on the ‘bus was receiving money from the Chetwynds, and must have put two and two together. Farming out a bastard child was not an unusual happening, whatever circles you happened to move in.
Crockett thought he would somehow have to find the time to go and see Mrs Jenkins, the foster mother. Any opportunity to learn something wasn't to be missed. Unfortunately, however absorbing the Chetwynd affair might be to him, there were other pressing matters he had been obliged to deal with; even now, he couldn't put forward any justification for proposing he should put in further work on it, so any investigation had to be confined to odd times he was able to snatch. He had no desire to have his knuckles rapped for wasting constabulary time, but he thought he might fit in an hour that afternoon.
 
Sarah Jenkins lived in a neat little house on a decent street and was evidently in comfortable circumstances. There was snow in the air as Crockett knocked on her door, but the tidy living room into which she welcomed him was warm and snug, with a bright fire burning in a polished grate, and pervaded by a good, wholesome smell of baking. She was surprised but pleased to see him. “Nice to see you again, Mr Crockett, sit you down,” she said, shooing off a marmalade cat curled on a cushion, brushing off stray cat hairs. The armchair certainly needed a cushion; it was horsehair, severe and upright, designed for a bigger man than Crockett, such as Jack Jenkins had been.
When Sarah had opened the door to his knock, a little, dark-haired boy of about three or four had been by her side, clutching her skirts as if afraid she would go away. Now he sat on the rag rug in front of the fire, playing with a pile of wooden bricks,
taking not the slightest notice of anyone. “You'll have some tea?” asked Sarah.
“I wouldn't say no, Mrs Jenkins.”
She went into the adjoining kitchen and the boy went with her. She came back with a tray spread with an embroidered cloth, on which were china tea things and an uncut cake, and he followed close on her heels. “Just made,” she said, placing the tray on the tapestry cloth which covered the centre table. “Seed cake. It's not everybody likes it.”
“Thank you, I'm very partial to the taste of caraway.”
She cut him a generous slice, then seated herself in a plush-covered rocking chair on the opposite side of the hearth. Crockett, who wasn't used to children, placed a hand on the boy's shoulder, but quickly took it away when he felt him stiffen. “What's the lad's name, then?”
“I've named him Jack, after my husband – but he shakes his head and gets angry when I call him that, so it's usually chicken, or something. Isn't it, love?” She leaned forward and stroked the boy's dark hair. He was sitting on the floor again, absorbed in sharing his slice of cake with the cat, and made no response.
“Is it all right to talk?” Crockett asked.
“I reckon he hears and understands everything, when he wants to, which isn't always, so it might do some good in the end, who knows? Something he hears might some day make him want to talk.” She was a simple woman, not particularly well educated, but she had a robust common sense and a kind and loving heart. He thought Agnes would have liked and approved of her.
“I'm sorry. I was under the impression there were difficulties with his – intelligence.”
“Pardon me, Mr Crockett,” she answered stiffly. “Pardon me, but whoever told you that is lying. The child's no idiot. He can read already, and make his letters. He can make pictures, too.” She went to a drawer in the sideboard and fetched one of the lurid images the boy had made with his paint box. Thick slashes of red and black, a small dot in the centre, surrounded by what looked like thunderclouds. “Frightening, somehow.” It was true he had never spoken, she said, but lately he had begun to utter a few, mostly unintelligible, words. Now and again she had
surprised brief glimpses of a mischievous, boyish gleam in those dark brown eyes. Once or twice, he had even slipped a trusting little hand into hers – almost instantly withdrawn – but she believed he was ‘coming round', as she put it.
“There's nothing wrong with him but that he's still missing his mother, poor lamb. Maybe he'll get over it in time, but he hasn't yet.” She looked at Crockett with a sudden intake of breath. “Have you …you haven't found her?” He sensed in her a battle between hope and fear; between a desire for the child to be united with his real mother and the knowledge of the loss it would mean to her. Her love for the child won. “That would be a wonderful thing,” she said generously, but couldn't prevent herself from adding, “Whoever she is, how could she not have claimed him by now?”
“I think she must believe him dead.” Despite Harvill's assurances that Hannah's refusal to acknowledge the boy was due to a suppressed, unbearable memory, that was a conclusion Crockett himself thought more believable. He felt bound to add honestly, while knowing he was dealing Sarah a blow, “But I have hopes that may be remedied, before long.”
She turned her head away for a moment so that he could not see her face. “Silly of me. I always knew it might happen, one day.”
Crockett awkwardly patted her hand and wondered if she might take offence if he approached the subject of the allowance paid to her for looking after the child. She was the sort of woman who valued her independence, her ability to keep her head above water, despite not having a husband to provide for her. The room was comfortable, neat and clean as a new pin. Probably containing nothing that every other house in the street wouldn't possess, except perhaps the heavy mahogany sideboard that was of excellent quality, polished within an inch of its life, as was the small grandfather clock, and the harmonium in the corner. But she lived comfortably, without an occupation that would provide money for her and the boy.
The subject came up quite naturally, after she'd poured him another cup of tea, and served another slice of seed cake. “I was in service, used to be a nursemaid, before I married Jack, and I'm
fond of children. I'd just lost my own baby and after Jack died, I was thinking of getting another position.” A shadow of pain crossed her face, a double grief remembered and learned to live with. “Then I was asked to take in the little one here. Much as I wanted to, I'll admit I hesitated. I couldn't see how I could make ends meet, you see, but then, Lord bless us, if the lady didn't come and offer to help.”
“Which lady was this?” He thought immediately of Lady Chetwynd, or even the grandmother, Lady Emily, but Sarah surprised him.
“Why, the sister of the young man who was killed, Mrs Eustace-Bragge. She said she was sorry for the child and offered to help from the goodness of her heart.”
“Did she, by jingo? Was that the only reason, do you think?”
She looked at him directly. “Well, I have wondered. She didn't strike me as that sort – and I've known many an arrangement like this, when I was a nursemaid.”
“I wonder why she, out of all the family, was chosen to sort out the business?”
“I doubt if anyone else at all knew about it, never mind the family. She talked a lot of high-flown rubbish about good works being of no value if everybody knew what you were doing – and by the amount she offered to pay me, I took it that meant I was to keep my mouth shut, if you see what I mean, Mr Crockett. I accepted the money, but I haven't spent it all. There's a tidy sum put by for the boy, when he needs it.”
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