Authors: Evelyn Hervey
‘He’s been. I’ll tell you.’
‘Go up to your room, girls, and take off your hats and cloaks,’ Miss Unwin said.
‘Can’t we take them off here and Mary go up with them?’ said Louisa. ‘It’s a fag going all the way up and then having to come all the way down again.’
‘And it’s a task which teaches you that everything in this world is not easy. Off you go.’
Louisa went, with Maria obediently behind her.
‘Yes?’ said Miss Unwin, almost before the two of them were out of hearing.
‘Well, it ain’t so good.’
Miss Unwin felt a dart of rage. She had, somehow, counted on Vilkins getting exactly what they needed to know out of the rabbit-skin man and she had been let down.
‘What do you mean it’s not so good?’
‘’E don’t know.’
‘But you said he would.’
‘Only thought ‘e would, didn’t I? Thought a chatterbox like ‘im would be bound to ‘ave learnt where she come from, or if she ‘ad relations anywhere about, something like that.’
‘And he knew nothing?’
‘Didn’t know much, that’s for sure.’
‘But he knew something. What was it? What was it?’
‘Well, all he really said was the old witch told ‘im once what she wanted to do when she’d finished ‘ere.’
‘And what was that? Does it help? Oh, Vilkins, tell me.’
‘Don’t see as ‘ow it does ‘elp, not a bit.’
‘But what, Vilkins, what?’
‘Wanted to set up in a public ‘ouse. Never hadn’t had no liquor most of ‘er life, wanted to ‘ave a pub of her own. An’ drink all the cellar, I dare say.’
‘And did she tell the man where she intended to set up in this public house?’
‘No. Never said nothing about that. He said as ‘ow she told ‘im once she didn’t think the old feller was a-going to die for many a long day, an’ as ‘ow she’d ‘ave to wait an’ wait till ‘e did afore she got what he’d left ‘er in ‘is Will an’ she could put it with ‘er bit o’ savings.’
‘Vilkins,’ said Miss Unwin, with dawning delight. ‘You see what this means?’
‘Can’t say as I do, no. Not really.’
‘It means she wanted him to die. It means that, though she was loyal to him, nevertheless she wanted him to die before her. She wanted him to die so that she could set up her public house somewhere and have time to enjoy it.’
‘Well, if she did she’s got it now. But we ain’t got no idea where she ‘as got it. Nor any ‘ope of finding out, if you ask me.’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m afraid you’re right.’
Miss Unwin felt her brief flame of excitement die away.
‘She could be anywhere in the whole country,’ she said. ‘One wretched public house. How are we to find it?’
‘Dunno,’ said Vilkins.
It took Miss Unwin till late that night, very late, to hit on the answer.
She had settled herself again to a study of the weighty
Potherton on Poisons
. Hour upon hour she had read, turning from one arsenic reference to another. She learnt of the powder’s uses in industry and commerce, of its supposed properties in heightening the female complexion, of its medical uses, of mispickel, realgar and orpiment, of Fowler’s Solution and the Durkheim springs.
And suddenly while she was in the middle of an abstruse passage on severe gastro-enteritis, in which she recognised more or less the symptoms she had seen in Mr Partington, the answer to her other problem arrived in her mind.
Simple. If Mrs Meggs had bought a public house she
would have had to get hold of a going business or to have obtained equipment for a new one. And, again, she would have had to become a new customer at a brewery. One of these activities could, surely, be traced through a commercial agency. It might take time. It would certainly take money. But it could be done. If it was going to save Richard, it must be done.
In the event it proved startlingly easy. Next day had perforce to be another dull morning for Louisa and Maria. She set them pages of the copy book to write out. Then, once again she took a cab, but this time to the City. There, without much inquiry, she located a firm of agents who, with never a question asked but with several sovereigns from her rapidly diminishing savings passed over, undertook to make the necessary inquiries.
She felt as if she was living a fairy story when the very next morning there was a letter addressed to her and in it she read, in a clerk’s regular copperplate hand, that a Mrs Susan Meggs had started a business as a public house at 14 Nile Street, London E.
Nile Street
, the helpful firm added,
is to be found off the Ratcliff Highway
.
The Ratcliff ’ighway,’ Vilkins said, when she told her the good news. ‘That’s bad.’
Miss Unwin realised as soon as Vilkins had made her downright comment that the fact that Mrs Meggs’s new public house was situated off the Ratcliff Highway was indeed not good news. The Ratcliff Highway was notorious. Running beside the ever-busy Docks, seamen of every nationality and race thronged it with, if all that she had heard was true, the women who catered for men paid off after long voyages ready and willing for a spree. Robbery was a daily, or rather nightly, occurrence. Fights were frequent and bloody. And, above all, no female who was not of the lowest sort was considered to be safe there.
But Mrs Meggs must be seen, Ratcliff Highway or no Ratcliff Highway.
There was another, different difficulty, too, about herself and Vilkins setting out for this dangerous locality. Richard Partington’s daughters were, after all, now her responsibility. She should not leave them in the house for any considerable period with only the newly arrived cook, Mrs Miller, to look after them. Louisa certainly could almost be counted on to take advantage of such a situation to launch out on some escapade or other. It was in her nature. And her twin, though less of a madcap, would always follow. Their discovery of their grandfather’s gold was proof enough of that.
So the only course open to her was to venture down the Ratcliff Highway after dark, when the girls were safely asleep. But this would mean that she and Vilkins would arrive at the Docks at the worst time possible. By day
most of the area’s inhabitants would be busily at work. At night they would be on the loose, prowling like tigers.
Yet there seemed no other possible course. If some evidence was to be found to show that Richard Partington was not the only person who was likely to have murdered his father, then to Dockland by night they must go.
Some precautions, however, Miss Unwin was able to take. She asked Vilkins if she might borrow from her some garments that did not proclaim her at once a lady.
In course you shall ‘ave what you want,’ Vilkins declared. ‘’Cept my bonnet. I must keep that for meself, it’s so fine.’
Miss Unwin remembered Vilkins’ bonnet then. It was ‘fine’, a big straw which even without the wide red ribbon sewn round it was famously conspicuous.
‘Oh, Vilkins dear,’ she said, ‘do you think you ought to wear a bonnet like that in a place like the Ratcliff Highway?’
‘An’ why not, I should like to know.’
‘Well, my dear, I hardly like to say this. It is a fine bonnet, I know, and you looked well in it in Bayswater on your evenings out, as I recall. But … But in another part of the city, a part where … Well, where there are girls who …’
‘’Ere, I know what you’re a-trying to say. That I’d look like a dollymop. That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘Well, dear, it is a bonnet that people will look at.’
‘An’ so it should be. If you’re a-going down Ratcliff Tghway, Unwin, it’d be as well you too looked like most o’ the girls we’ll see. An’ don’t you be thinking nothing else.’
Miss Unwin paused and reflected.
‘Yes, Vilkins dear, you are perfectly right. I do not know that nowadays I could carry myself that way with any assurance. I have learnt so long to be respectable. But if you feel that you can do it, then perhaps it would after
all give us a measure of protection. Only …’
‘Only you don’t want me to go and pick up trade, eh? Don’t you worry. I knows ‘ow to scare ‘em off, just as well as I knows ‘ow to make ‘em look.’
‘Then so be it, my dear.’
‘’Ere, but there’s something else we ought to take.’
‘Yes? What’s that? I rely on you, dear. You have had experience of that world, the world beneath as I call it, more recently than I.’
‘So I ’ave. An’ lucky for you it is.’
‘Then what else do you recommend we take?’
‘Knives,’ said Vilkins. ‘A pair o knives from out o’ the kitchen drawer.’
So it was with a knife each hidden in their pockets that Miss Unwin and Vilkins approached the Ratcliff Highway that evening. Vilkins, Miss Unwin had to concede, looked in her garish bonnet every inch a street-walker, but one well capable of looking after herself. In Vilkins’ second skirt herself, and with an old mantle of her own scissor-shorn of its decoration, she hoped she made a reasonable companion to her friend, somewhat more respectable but by no means looking the lady.
The scene in front of them as they entered the wide road certainly made their precautions seem necessary. It was as lively as any daytime street further west in the primmer parts of the great metropolis. Men of every colour and creed in the wide world, it seemed, strolled and rollicked along both pavements and roadway. There were Chinese and Negroes, lithe brown-skinned Malays, whiteturbanned lascars, great hulking fair-haired Swedes and Norwegians, bold red-shirted Americans, their twanging speech loudly out-topping all the noise around them.
For a moment the governess in Miss Unwin came to the surface. What a lesson in geography lay before her. How strikingly could she demonstrate to her pupils the variety of humankind from the throng that sauntered and eddied by. But no such lesson could ever be. Because, besides the
seamen from so many lands and the lightermen and ballast-heavers and coal-heavers from the area itself, there were the women of the Highway.
They put Vilkins and her gaudy bonnet to shame. Few of them, indeed, wore anything on their heads at all. Instead long greasy locks tossed in the light of the lamps and the harsh glare coming from the raw gas-jets outside the many shops vying still for business. Bright shawls, brilliant red, vivid green, blatant blue, dazzled the eye over blouses often torn or mud-streaked and always so low-cut as to be open invitations. Brass heels on red shoes trod through the black and greasy puddles of the roadway or clattered on its dark cobbles.
‘Vilkins,’ Miss Unwin said, ‘who are we to ask where Nile Street is to be found? We cannot approach creatures like those.’
‘We could. If we ‘ad to. You can talk to anyone an’ ‘ope they’ll listen. But we can do better nor that.’
And Vilkins, whose eyes had been darting hither and thither over the noisy scene, suddenly moved forward and pounced.
Her quarry was a hot-eel boy, a dirty ragged creature of nine or ten with a broken-wheeled cart on which rested his brazier and the slices of eel he was frying.
‘Eels, all ‘ot, eels all ‘ot. Ha’penny a piece. Come an’ get ‘em. Come an’ get ‘em.’
‘We’ll ’ave a couple o’ them,’ Vilkins said, taking a penny from her purse careful not to show its contents too broadly, small though they were.
The boy handed them each a piece of white-fleshed, strong-smelling eel, smoking slightly, on a pair of scratched and battered tin plates.
‘’Ere, this is good,’ Vilkins said, sinking her teeth in.
Miss Unwin followed her example, telling herself firmly that in her youngest days she would have been overjoyed to get anything as tasty and solid to eat. But she found those days were far away, and eel as badly cooked as it had
been by the ragged urchin in front of them not at all to her taste.
Yet she made herself eat and smile. She knew what Vilkins had come to the boy for.
At last Vilkins handed back her little platter with only the centre bone of her piece of eel left on it.
‘Can you tell me where Nile Street is?’ she said.
The boy looked at her in astonishment.
‘What,’ he said, his voice loud even among all the surrounding noise, ‘yer don’t know Nile Street? Where you come from then?’
Would he expose them as a pair of intruders? Would he draw the attention of anyone looking for prey?
Miss Unwin cast a nervous glance round.
‘Yeh,’ Vilkins answered the boy, her voice even louder. ‘We been away, see. Guests of ‘Er Majesty. Long-stay guests, too, weren’t we, dear?’
Miss Unwin nearly missed her cue. But from somewhere in her long ago past she brought up the answer, and in her voice of old.
‘Too bloody long,’ she said. ‘Too bloody long by far.’
‘What you get sent down for then?’ the urchin asked. ‘You two in a bawdy-house, was yer?’
‘You mind your business, ‘less you want a clip round the ear. An’ where is Nile Street, if you’re so clever?’
‘All right, all right. Up on the right. Past Paddy’s Goose.’
Vilkins linked her arm through Miss Unwin’s and moved off.
‘Paddy’s Goose,’ she said, ‘know what that is? I’ve ‘eard talk about it.’
‘No. No, I’ve no idea what it is. What is it?’
‘It’s a public house. Not the one we’re looking for, in course. It’s a big, big place. Does a roaring trade if what I heard’s true. Got the name they call it by from the sign. It’s the White Swan truly.’
‘Well, I wish we were past it and in Nile Street.’
Certainly Miss Unwin had cause to wish the expedition at least half-way over. The crowds were getting rowdier by the minute. Groups were standing in three parts drunken circles singing.
‘Oh, Mexico was covered in snow, the grub was bad and the pay was low,’ was the one set of words she was at all able to make out.
Other groups were gyrating in clod-hopping dances. There was one thumping and stamping to the screeching music of a blind fiddler, who because of his handicap coupled with a viciously malicious expression seemed somehow to Miss Unwin a worse embodiment of evil than even the roaring drunk sailors and their women forming his audience.
On they went, hardly steadily since from time to time they were forced to a complete halt when some dancing circle lurched across their path.
A trio of seamen bore down on them with frightening directness, already beginning from a distance of ten yards or more to yell crude invitations. But by dint of swerving into the roadway they avoided the encounter.