3-Book Victorian Crime Collection: Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour. Caro Peacock
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it first thing tomorrow.’
She opened a drawer in the table with her left hand and threw me a stubby piece of sealing wax, her right hand still writing. It was all brutally clear. My poor father was judged to be an impulsive blunderer so his daughter was to be used but not trusted. The address was St James’s Square, so presumably Lady Mandeville was at her town house. I lodged the application on the mantelpiece and, with nothing else to do, sat and watched Miss Bodenham copying. She was amazingly sure and quick, like a weaver at his loom. I noticed the pages she was copying from were a horrid mess of scratching out and over-writing, some lines travelling at right angles down the margins, others diagonally into corners. When, around midnight, she paused to mix some more ink, I risked a question.
‘Is it a novel?’
‘Not this time. Political economy. After a while it doesn’t matter much whether it’s one or t’other. Words, words, words.’
For the first time she risked a smile, a little roguish twist to her lips that made her look younger and friendlier.
‘You are copying it for a friend?’
‘I am copying it for money. Printers are very clever on the whole at deciphering an author’s intentions, but there are some writers whose hands are so vile the printers won’t take them. The publishers send them to me to make sense of them.’
The fingers of her right hand seemed permanently bent, as if fixed for ever in the act of holding a pen. Once she’d mixed the ink she yawned and said the rest would wait for tomorrow after all. Nearly unconscious with tiredness by now, I expected to be shown into a bedroom, but she bent down and pulled out from under the table two straw-stuffed pallets with rough ticking covers and a bundle of thin blankets.
‘You can put yours by the fireplace. I’ll go nearer the door because I’ll be up earlier in the morning.’
Quite true. Around four o’clock in the morning, just as light was coming in through the thin curtains, she was up and out, taking with her my letter from the mantelpiece and the cold teapot from the grate. I rose soon afterwards, tidied our pallets and blankets back under the table, and found a kind of cubbyhole on the first landing with a privy, a jug of water for washing and a piece of cracked mirror. With nothing else to do, I looked round her room trying to find some clue to her connection with the man in black, but it was as barren in that respect as the stones she used for paperweights. Her bookshelves were interesting though, old and well-used books, mostly from reformers and radicals of previous generations: Tom Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, even Rousseau himself in the original French. If they were her choice, then Miss Bodenham and I had views in common. It might even account for her caution, since reforming views were no more popular at present than when Tom Paine was threatened with hanging as a traitor.
Before six o’clock she was back with the teapot, a small loaf and a slice of ham.
‘Your books …’ I said.
‘Are my own business.’
She pushed papers aside and we had our breakfast at the table: fresh white bread, half the ham each and cups of blessedly hot tea. She ate delicately in small bites, relishing every mouthful, so perhaps my arrival had brought a little luxury for her. But as soon as we’d finished, that was an end of softness.
‘I’ve delivered your application. She will probably want to see you tomorrow, Wednesday. We have a lot of work to do.’
All that long summer day, with the scent of lime trees and coos of courting pigeons drifting in through the window, Miss Bodenham coached me in my part.
‘The family lived in Geneva, down by the lake. You know Geneva?’
‘Yes. We stopped a week there on our way back from the Alps.’
‘Keep to yes and no whenever possible. She will not be interested in you and the Alps. Your charges were two girls and a boy: Sylvia who is now twelve, Fitzgeorge, nine and Margaret, five. Repeat.’
‘Sylvia, twelve, Fitzgeorge, nine, Margaret, five. Was I fond of them?’
‘It is unwise for a governess to express fondness. The mother may be jealous. You found them charming and well-behaved.’
‘Were you ever a governess?’
‘Yes. But you must cure yourself of asking questions. Governesses don’t, except in the schoolroom.’
‘Is it very miserable?’
‘How old is Fitzgeorge?’
She seemed pleased, in her gruff way, with my speed in getting this fictional family into my head. Less pleased, though, when it came to my accomplishments.
‘She will probably ask you to show her a sample of your needlework.’
‘I don’t possess one.’
‘Not even a handkerchief?’
I eventually found in my reticule a ten-year-old handkerchief which the nuns had made me hem. She looked at it critically.
‘The stitches are too large.’
‘That’s what Sister Immaculata said. She made me unpick it nine times.’
‘It will have to do, but you must wash and iron it.’
She issued me with a wafer of hard yellow soap. I washed the handkerchief in the basin on the landing, hung it from the window sill to dry, went downstairs to beg the loan of a flat iron from the frizzy-haired maid and the favour of heating it on the kitchen range. I was ironing it in the scullery when somebody knocked at the door. The maid had gone upstairs, so I went to answer it and found a footman outside in black-and-gold livery, powdered wig and hurt pride from having to stand on a doorstep in Store Street.
‘I have a letter for a Miss Lock.’
Scented paper, address written in violet ink, seal a coat of arms with three perched birds. Inside, a short note hoping that Miss Lock would find it convenient to call at eleven o’clock on Wednesday, the following day, signed Lucasta Mandeville. I told the footman that Miss Lock would keep the appointment, then fled to the scullery from which a smell of burned linen was rising. Handkerchief totally ruined with a flat-iron shaped hole in the middle. Miss Bodenham sighed as if she hadn’t expected anything better and found me one of her own. It was more neatly stitched, but I had to go through the whole laundering and ironing process again.
In the evening, Miss Bodenham put on her bonnet, bundled together a great sheaf of papers, and said she must go and deliver it to the printers in Clerkenwell.
‘I’ll come with you.’
My head felt muzzy from a long day of study.
‘No, you stay here. I’ll bring back something for a supper.’
I watched from the window as her straw bonnet with its surprisingly frivolous green ribbon turned the corner, then caught up my own bonnet and hurried down the stairs. I was tired of being obedient. Blackstone and Miss Bodenham might think they’d taken control of my life, but I had my own trail to follow. It took me southwards down Tottenham Court Road towards St Giles. It was the busiest time of the evening with the streets full of traffic; at the point where Tottenham Court Road met Oxford Street there was such a jam of carriages that I could hardly find a way through. Wheels were grinding against wheels, drivers swearing, gentry leaning out of carriage windows wanting to know what was going on, horses whinnying. It seemed worse than the usual evening crush so I asked a crossing sweeper who was leaning on his broom, watching, the cause of the commotion. He spat into the gutter.
‘Layabouts from the country making trouble as usual.’
From further along Oxford Street, above the grinding wheels and the swearing, came the funereal beat of a drum and voices chanting, ‘Bread. Give us bread. Bread. Give us bread.’
I went towards the sound and saw a procession of working men in brown and black jackets and caps, mufflers round their necks in spite of the warmth of the day. They were walking