CARO PEACOCK

Death at Dawn

To Caroline Compton

Contents

Title Page Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Copyright About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

‘Would you be kind enough to tell me where they keep people’s bodies,’ I said.

The porter blinked. The edges of his eyelids were pink in a brown face, lashes sparse and painful-looking like the bristles on a gooseberry. Odd the things you notice when your mind’s trying to shy away from a large thing. When he saw me coming towards him over the cobbles among the crowds leaving the evening steam packet, he must have expected another kind of question altogether. Something along the lines of ‘How much do you charge to bring a trunk up from the hold?’ or ‘Where can I find a clean, respectable hotel?’ Those kinds of questions were filling the air all round us, mostly in the loud but uneasy tones of the English newly landed at Calais. I’d asked in French, but he obviously thought he’d misheard.

‘You mean where people stay, at the hotels?’

‘Not hotels, no. People who’ve been killed. A gentleman who was killed on Saturday.’

Another blink and a frown. He looked over my shoulder at his colleagues carrying bags and boxes down the gangplank, regretting his own bad luck in encountering me.

‘Would he not be in his own house, mademoiselle?’

‘He has no house here.’

Nor anywhere else, come to that. He would have had one soon, the tall thin house he was going to rent for us, near the unfashionable end of Oxford Street when we … Don’t think about that.

‘In church then, perhaps.’

I thought, but didn’t say, that he was never a great frequenter of churches.

‘If an English gentleman were killed in … in an accident and had no family here, where might he be taken?’

The porter’s face went hard. He’d noticed my hesitation.

‘The morgue is over there, mam’selle.’

He nodded towards a group of buildings a little back from the seafront then turned, with obvious relief, to a plump man who was pulling at his sleeve and burbling about cases of books.

I walked in the direction he’d pointed out but had to ask again before I found my way to a low building, built of bricks covered over with black tarry paint. A man who looked as thin and faded as driftwood was sitting on a chair at the door, smoking a clay pipe. The smell of his tobacco couldn’t quite mask another smell coming from inside the building. When he heard me approaching he turned his head without shifting the rest of his body, like a clockwork automaton, and gave me a considering look.

‘It’s possible that you have my father here,’ I said.

He took a long draw on his pipe and spoke with it still in his mouth.

‘Would he be the gentleman who got shot?’

‘Possibly, yes.’

‘English?’

‘Yes.’

‘She said his clothes had an English cut.’

‘Who said?’

Without answering, he got up and walked over to a narrow house with a front door opening on to the cobbles only a few steps away from the morgue. He thumped on the door a couple of times and a fat woman came out in a black dress and off-white apron, straggly grey hair hanging down under her cap. They whispered, heads together, then he gave her a nudge towards me.

‘Your father, oh, you poor little thing. Poor little thing.’

Her deep voice was a grieving purr in my ear, her hand moist and warm on my shoulder. Her breath smelled of brandy.

‘May I see him, please?’

She led the way inside, still purring ‘Pauvre petite, oh pauvre petite.’ Her husband in his cloud of pipe smoke fell in behind us. There were flies buzzing around the low ceiling and a smell of vinegar. The evening sun came in through the slats of the shutters, making bars of red on the whitewashed wall. Three rough pinewood tables took up most of the space in the room but only one of them was occupied by a shape covered in a yellowish sheet. The woman put her arm round me and signed to the man to pull the sheet back. I knew almost before I saw his face. I suppose I made some noise or movement because the man started pulling the sheet back over again. I signed to him to leave it where it was.

‘Your father?’

‘Yes. Please …’

He hesitated, then, when I nodded, reluctantly pulled the sheet further down. They’d put my father in a white cotton shroud with his hands crossed on his chest. I took a step forward and untied the strings at the neck of the shroud. The woman pulled at my arm and tried to stop me. Trust your own eyes and ears, he’d said. Never let anybody persuade you against them. He’d been talking at the time about the question dividing some of his naturalist friends as to whether squirrels were completely hibernatory, standing in some beechwoods with Tom and me on a bright January day. I tried to keep the sound of his voice in my head as I lifted up his right hand, cold and heavy in mine. I pulled the shroud aside with my other hand and looked at the round hole the pistol ball had made in his chest, right over the heart, and the livid scorch-marks on his skin surrounding it. No blood. They’d have sponged his body before they put it in the shroud. That probably accounted for the vinegar smell. It would have been done by the same plump, liver-spotted hand that was now pulling at my arm, trying to make me come away. The thought of that hand moving over him made me feel sick. I pulled the shroud up, crossed his right hand back over his left and watched while they covered him up again.

‘His clothes?’ I asked.

She looked annoyed and left us, wooden clogs clacking over the cobbles. The flies buzzed and circled. After a minute or two she was back with an armful of white linen, streaked with rusty stains. Breeches, stockings, a shirt. On the left breast of the shirt was a small round hole. I bent over it and smelled, through the iron tang of blood, a whiff of scorched linen and black powder. I think the woman imagined I was kissing it, holding it so close, because her arm came round me, sympathetic again. The man was repeating some question insistently.

‘You will need an English priest?’

‘I don’t think … Oh, I see. For the burial. Yes.’

He produced a dog-eared calling card from his pocket. I heaped the linen back into the woman’s arms and took the card. She’d tried to be kind to me so as I left I slid some coins from my bag into the pocket of her apron. It struck me as I walked away that they were English coins and of no use to her, but then in Calais she could find somebody to change them. It came to me too that she hadn’t shown me his outer clothes, shoes, hat or jacket. One of the perquisites of her job, probably. Some lumpish son or cousin of hers might be wearing them even now. There should have been rings as well. I made myself picture the crossed hands against the shroud. They’d let him keep the narrow silver ring on his left hand that he wore in memory of my mother. He usually wore a gold one with a curious design on his right, but I was certain that the hand I’d held had been bare. The thought of somebody else wearing his ring made me so angry that I almost turned back. But that was not sensible, and I must at all costs be sensible. I walked by the sea for a long time, watching the sun go down. Then I found a pile of fishing nets heaped in a shed, curled myself up in them and alternately slept and shivered through the few hours of a June night. In the shivering intervals, every word of the note that had jolted my world out of its orbit came back to me.

Miss Lane,

You do not know me, but I take the liberty of addressing you with distressing news. Your father, Thomas Jacques Lane, was killed this Saturday, seventeenth June, in a duel at Calais …

CHAPTER TWO

Everybody knows the place in Calais where gentlemen go to fight duels, the long stretch of beach with the sand-hills behind. People point it out to each other from the deck of the steam packet. By the time the first grey light came in through the doorway of the fisherman’s hut I knew that the one thing I wanted to do was follow the route my father would have taken three days before, at much this time of the morning. I unwrapped myself from the nets, brushed dry fish scales from my dress and walked along the harbour front, past shuttered houses and rows of tied-up fishing boats. Eventually the cobbled road runs out in a litter of nets and crab pots, just above the fringe of bladder wrack and driftwood that marks high tide line. They would have left their carriage there.

No carriage this morning, nothing but a fisherman’s cart made of old planks, bleached silver by the wind and sea, with shafts just wide enough for a donkey. No pony, even the most ill-used one, could be so thin. The owner of the cart probably lived in one of the little row of hovels built of rocks and ships’ timbers, so tilted and ramshackle they looked as if some especially high tide had dropped them. The windows were closed with warped wooden shutters. There was nobody looking out of them so early in the morning, not even a fisherman’s wife watching for her husband. In any case, a fisherman’s wife would know there was no use looking out for boats with the tide so very low, almost at its lowest, the silver strip of sea hardly visible across the wide sands. Would it have been so low at first light three days ago? I thought I must buy or borrow an almanack when I go back into the town. It might be of some importance to know. Anything might be of some importance, it was simply a matter of knowing what.

Later, I’d come back and try to talk to the fishermen’s wives. It’s easier, usually, to talk to women than to men.

‘I am sorry for disturbing you, madame, but can you recall a carriage drawing up there where the road runs out, three mornings ago? Just as it was getting light, it would have been, or even while it was still dark.’

They might quite easily have arrived in the dark, perhaps waited in the carriage until that first strange, flat light that comes before sunrise, when they could see to walk along the beach. I’m sure if he had met a fisherman’s wife that morning, he’d have raised his hat and wished her good day. But almost certainly he did not meet her, the morning being so early. And even if she had met him or seen the carriage standing there, I don’t suppose for one moment she’d tell me. The men and women who live in that ruckle of cottages must be used to seeing carriages drive up in the early morning, dark silhouettes of gentlemen against the pale dawn sky walking across the sands, but I’m sure they don’t talk about them to strangers. These gentlemen and their purposes have nothing to do with the fishermen’s world, any more than if they’d come down from the moon, and the fishermen will know there is no good in what’s happening, nothing but harm and blame. So I should ask, but nobody would tell me. It was simply one of those things which must be done.

Now that I considered, there should have been two carriages, not one. But then, he might not have come by carriage. It was only a short walk out here from the town and he was never one for taking a carriage when he could go on foot. He might have slipped out of the side door of an inn while it was still dark, the horses asleep in their stalls, only the dull glow of a fire through the kitchen window, where some poor skivvy was starting to poke up the fire for coffee. I dare say he’d have liked a cup of coffee, only he couldn’t wait. So he might have walked here and seen the other carriage drawn up already and gone on without pausing over the sand.

Alone? He shouldn’t have been alone. There should have been a friend with him – or at least somebody he called a friend. In that case, they would have stayed the night together in an inn. If I asked around the town somebody surely would have seen the two of them together and be able to describe the other man. I’d do that later, when I come back from my walk.

The sand was firm underfoot, only I wished I’d brought stouter footwear. But then my escape from Chalke Bissett had been so hurried I’d had no time to go to the bootroom and find the pair I keep for country walking. Besides, when I escaped I had no notion in my head of walking over French beaches. A day or two on English pavements was the very worst I’d thought to expect. Still, the shoes were carrying me well enough. The ramshackle cottages were already a mile behind me, the sand dunes and the point at the far end of the beach in sight. Nearer the tideline, there was a gloss of salt water over the sand. My foot pressed down, making a margin of lighter sand, then the footprint filled up with dark water behind me. Salt water and sand were splashing up to the hem of my skirts, making them drag damply round my ankles. From here, if there were figures on the point you’d be sure to see them. He would have seen them – three of them – with the sun rising behind them. They would have to pay attention to that sun, be quite sure it didn’t get in their eyes. The figures would be waiting there, just where the gull has landed, and my father and the man he called his friend would have walked over to them, not slowly but not too fast either, like rational people who have business together. They’d have shaken hands when they met, I know that, and serious words would be spoken, a question put, heads shaken.

‘Since your principal refuses to offer an apology, then things must proceed to their conclusion. Would you care to choose, sir?’

And the black, velvet-lined case would be snapped open. As the man challenged, my father would have first choice. So he’d take a pistol, weigh it in his hand and nod, and the other man would take the other. How do I know? The way that anybody who reads novels knows. I confess with shame that ten years or so ago, around the age of twelve when much silliness is imagined, the etiquette of the duel had a morbid fascination for me. I revelled in wronged, dark-haired heroes, their fine features admitting not the faintest trace of anxiety as they removed their jackets to expose faultless white linen shirt-fronts over their noble and so vulnerable breasts, shook hands with their seconds (who – not being heroes – were permitted a slight tremor of the fingers) then strode unconcernedly to the fatal line, as if … Oh, and any other nonsense you care to add. Write it for yourselves and thank the gods that no girl stays a twelve-year-old for ever. But that’s why I knew enough to imagine how it would have happened three days before, at very much this time in the morning. The two pistol shots, almost simultaneous. Then the frightened seabirds wheeling and crying – unless the seagulls on the Calais sands are so blasé by now that they are not in the least alarmed by duellists’ shots. A figure flat on the sand, the two seconds bending over him, the doctor opening his bag. A little further off, the survivor with his left arm over his eyes to shield out the dreadful sight, pistol pointed to the sand, anger drained out of him; ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’

‘It really is the most appalling nonsense,’ my father said. ‘I wish you would not read these things.’

Back to being twelve, and my father – who was so rarely angry with anything or anybody – much annoyed with me. I had just twirled into the room in my new satin shoes and a fantasy of being a princess carelessly mislaid at birth – trilling that I hoped one day men might fight a duel for love of me. He’d caught me in mid-twirl, plumped me down in a chair and talked to me seriously.

‘Some day another man besides myself and your brother will love you. But hear this, daughter, if he proves to be the kind of fool who thinks he can demonstrate that love by violently stealing the life of another human being, then he’s not the man for my Liberty.’

‘But if he were defending my honour, Papa …’

‘Honour’s important, yes. But there’s wise honour and foolish honour. I wish to say something serious to you now, and I know if your mother were alive she’d be in utter agreement with me. Are you listening?’

I nodded, looking down through gathering tears at my new satin shoes and knowing the gloss had gone from them forever. He seldom mentioned our mother, who’d died when I was six years old and Tom four, but when he did, it was always in connection with something that mattered very much.

‘If you ever – may the gods forbid – get yourself into the kind of scrape where your honour can be defended only by a man being killed for you, then you must live without honour. Do you understand?’

I said ‘yes’, as firmly as I could, hoping the tears would not fall. He crouched beside the chair and put two fingers under my chin, raising it so that my eyes were on a level with his.

‘Don’t cry, my darling. Only, duelling is wasteful, irrational nonsense and I’m sure when you think more deeply about it, you will be of the same opinion. Lecture over. Now, shall we go out and feed the goldfish in the fountain?’

So that’s how I knew, you see – knew for sure that I’d been told a black lie. It was there in my mind as I looked down at his body, although it didn’t take clear shape until I walked across the beach. The duel never happened. My father was dead, that was true enough, even though not a fibre of my mind or body believed it yet. But it was impossible that he died that way, no matter what the note said or what the couple at the morgue believed. I was as sure of that as the sun rising behind the point, turning the rim of sea to bright copper. That rim was closer now and the tide seemed to be on its way in. I followed my own footsteps back over the sand, making a slow curve to the line of fishermen’s cottages. It looked as if the people in them must have started their day’s work, because there was a figure in front of the cottages looking out to sea. It would be a fine day for him, I thought. The sky was clear blue, with only a little breeze ruffling my bonnet ribbons. When I got to the town I’d drink some coffee and plan what questions to ask and where to ask them. Who saw him? Who were his friends in Calais? Who brought his body to the morgue? Above all, who wrote that lying and anonymous note to me at Dover? Insolent as well as lying, because the unknown writer had added a command:

Remain where you are for the present and talk about it to nobody. People who are concerned on your behalf will come to you within two or three days.

As if I could read that and wait tamely like a dog told to stay.

The man I’d noticed was still standing by the cottages. Closer to, he didn’t look like a fisherman. His clothes were black, like a lawyer’s or doctor’s, and he was wearing a high-crowned hat. He was thin and standing very upright, not looking out to sea now but back along the sands towards the point. Almost, you might think, looking at me. But of course he had no reason to look at me. He was simply a gentleman admiring the sunrise. Something about the stiff way he was standing made me think he might be an invalid who slept badly and walked in the sea air for the sake of his health. Perhaps he came there every morning, in which case he might have been standing just there three days ago, watching whatever happened or did not happen. I raised my hand to him. Of course, that was over-familiar behaviour to a man I’d never met, but the rules of normal life didn’t apply any more. Either he didn’t see my gesture, or he did and was shocked by it, because he turned and walked away in the direction of the town, quite quickly for a supposed invalid. Strange that he should be in such a hurry after standing there so long, but then everything was strange now.

CHAPTER THREE

Two mornings before I’d woken up on a fine Sunday in the inn at Dover, with nothing in the world to cause me a moment’s anxiety. Nothing, that is, beyond whether my aunt might have sent one of her servants or even a tame curate to recapture me. It was a small side room, the cheapest they had, looking out over the stableyard of the larger hotel next door. I remember standing barefoot at the window with my woollen mantle round my shoulders, looking down at the sunlit yard and the grooms harnessing two glossy bays to a phaeton, feeling well satisfied with myself and the world in general. My escape from the dim, sour-faced house at Chalke Bissett had gone entirely to plan. Even before the servants were up I was on my way across the field footpath to the village, knowing the area well enough by then to guess that there’d be a farm cart taking fruit and vegetables into Salisbury. The driver said he’d take me there for a kiss, but I bargained him down to one shilling and insisted on sitting in the back, along with withy baskets full of strawberries and bunches of watercress.

From Salisbury, I took a succession of stage and mail coaches, much as I’d planned from the road book giving coach routes and times in my aunt’s small library. Her road book was out of date, like everything else in the house, so some of the times were wrong and I had to wait for hours in the street outside various inns, trying hard to be inconspicuous in my mantle that was too heavy for a warm June day and the battered leather travelling bag that I would not allow anybody else to carry because I was unsure how much to tip. Salisbury to Winchester took four hours and two changes of horses. At Winchester I managed to secure the last outside place in another coach that took me all the way across Hampshire.

It was a glorious evening, flying along on the top of the coach behind four fast horses with the scent of hay and honeysuckle in the air, haymakers out late with their scythes and rakes and the sun sinking in the west behind us, throwing their long shadows out over the shorn fields. I felt like singing, only it would have drawn the attention of the other outside passengers, a clerical-looking man with a cough and a farmer and his wife, loaded with packages that included a live duck in a basket with its head sticking out complacently, as if it too were enjoying the sweet air. We arrived at the changing point of Hartfordbridge in the early hours of the morning, when it was already getting light, so that spared me the worry and expense of a room in the inn. I simply sat on the edge of a horse trough, wrapped my mantle round me and ate the last slice of bread and butter I’d taken from my aunt’s kitchen.

From Hartfordbridge it was a long and expensive day’s journey into Kent and Tunbridge Wells. In this fashionable place, spending the night on the edge of a horse trough was out of the question, but luckily I’d made friends with a lady on the journey, travelling to meet her husband from a boat at Chatham. We shared a room and a large but lumpy double bed at a modest inn. Over a supper of cold beef pie and two pots of tea – we were thirsty because the roads were dusty from the dry weather – she glowed with happiness at the idea of seeing her husband again.

‘And I’ll soon be seeing my father,’ I said.

Now I’d put two good days’ travelling between myself and my aunt, it seemed safe to talk about myself.

‘Has he been away long?’

‘Only since September.’

It seemed longer. I remember that my companion asked the waiter if he had any news of the king. He shook his head gravely, implying that it was not good. King William was elderly and ill, probably dying, but that was not causing any great outbreak of grief among his subjects. I thought he was probably one of the dullest men ever to sit on the throne of England and in any case our family’s sympathies were far from royalist. But I said nothing for fear of offending my companion, who was a kind woman.

Next morning we breakfasted together on good bread and bad coffee, then she took the coach for Chatham while I passed some time looking round the town, admiring the fashions and waiting for the coach that would take me on the last stage of my journey to Dover.

I reached the port in the evening. I knew it quite well, from the occasions when I’d crossed to the Continent with my father and Tom, but I’d never been there on my own before. I stood at the inn where the coach had put me down feeling for the first time scared at what I’d done. Then, determined that my father should not come back to find a feeble young woman, I adjusted my bonnet, slung my mantle over my arm and picked up my bag. I was wearing my second-best dress in plain lavender colour, with tight-fitting sleeves and a little lace at the neck. My bonnet had suffered from travelling outside and my hair felt plastered with dust, but I hoped I looked respectable, though travel-worn. The inns and hotels along the seafront and near the harbour were too expensive and conspicuous. If my aunt sent somebody after me, those were the first places he’d try. I walked along a dimly remembered side street, at right angles to the sea, and hit on an old inn called the Heart of Oak that looked as if it catered for the better class of trades-person rather than the gentry. The dark panelled hall smelled of beer and saddle leather. A brass bell stood on a counter. I rang and after some time a plump bald-headed man arrived, wearing a brown apron stained with metal polish.

‘I should like to engage a room,’ I told him, as confidently as I could. ‘Not one of your most expensive ones.’

‘Just for yourself, ma’am?’

His voice was polite enough, but his boot-button eyes were weighing me up.

‘Just for myself.’ Then, losing my nerve a little, I added, ‘I’m here to meet my father. He’s coming across from Calais.’

Which was the perfect truth, even though the look in those eyes made it feel like a lie.

‘How many nights, ma’am?’

‘He may be arriving as early as tomorrow …’

‘Tomorrow’s Sunday.’

‘… or I might have to wait a day or two. I am not entirely sure of his plans.’

That was true as well, although one thing I was entirely sure of was that my father’s plans did not include having his daughter there to meet him at Dover. His latest letter – in my bag and marking my place in the volume of Shelley, which was the only book I’d brought with me – made it quite clear that I was to wait at Chalke Bissett until called for. The innkeeper grudgingly admitted there was a room on the second floor he could let me have.

‘I’ll take supper in my room,’ I told him. ‘Mutton chop, some bread and cheese, and a jug of barley water.’

He nodded gloomily and called the bootboy to carry my bag upstairs to a small but reasonably clean room, furnished with bed, chair and wash-stand. I tipped the boy sixpence and, as the door closed behind him, spread out my arms and opened my mouth in a silent but most unladylike yell of triumph. When supper arrived I ate it to the last crumb then slept in the deep featherbed as comfortably as any dormouse.

I idled Sunday away pleasurably enough, tipping the little maid a shilling to bring cans of warm water upstairs so that I could wash my hair. When it was dry I strolled along the front in the sunshine, watching families driving in their carriages or walking back from church, and sailors arm in arm with women friends, bonnet and bodice ribbons fluttering in the breeze from the sea. The white cliffs gleamed and the old grey castle on top of them seemed from a distance to have broken out in patches of pink-, green-and lilac-coloured mushrooms, from the parasols of the ladies sight-seeing. In such a busy place, nobody was in the least disturbed by a young woman walking unescorted. I revelled in being alone and the mistress of my own time for once.

But on Monday morning I woke at first light with a little demon of anxiety in my mind. Now that I might be meeting my father within hours, it occurred to me that he would perhaps be annoyed because I had disobeyed instructions. I took his letter out of my bag and read it by the window as the horses stamped and the ostlers swore down in the yard. It had been written from a hotel in Paris, posted express, and arrived at Chalke Bissett just the evening before I left, too late to change my plan of escape.

My dearest Daughter,

I am glad to report that I have said farewell to my two noble but tedious charges and am now at my liberty and soon to be on the way home to my Liberty. I have faithfully conducted His Lordship and cousin around Paris, Bordeaux, Madrid, Venice, Rome, Naples. All wasted, of course, like feeding peaches to donkeys. They pined for their playing fields, their hunters, their rowing boats at home. The stones Virgil and Cicero trod were no more than ill-kept pavement in their eyes, the music of Vivaldi in his own city inferior to a bawled catch in a London tavern.

But enough. I have justly earned my fee and we may now set about spending it as we planned. If I had travelled home with my charges I should have rescued you from Aunt Basilisk sooner, but I’m afraid my princess must fret in her Wiltshire captivity a week longer. I had business here in Paris, also friends to meet. To be candid, I valued the chance of some intelligent conversation with like-minded fellows after these months of asses braying. Already I have heard one most capital story which I promise will set you roaring with laughter and even perhaps a little indignation. You know ‘the dregs of their dull race …’ But more of that when we meet. Also, I have just met an unfortunate woman who may need our help and charity when we return to London. I know I may depend on your kind heart.

I plan to be at Chalke Bissett about a week from now. Since even five minutes of my company is precisely three hundred seconds too many for dear Beatrice/Basilisk I’m sure she will not detain us. So have your bags packed and we shall whisk away. Until then, believe me your loving father.

Then, after his signature, a scrawled postscript.

If you’d care to write to me before then, address your letter to poste restante at Dover. I shall infallibly check there on my arrival, in the hope of finding pleasant reading for the last stage of my journey.

As I re-read it, I was seized with a panic that he might at that very moment be stepping off a boat and posting to Chalke Bissett, not knowing I was waiting for him less than a mile away. I ran downstairs, secured paper, pen and ink from the landlord and – lacking a writing desk – stood at the cracked marble wash-stand in my room to scrawl a hasty note.

Dearest Father,

I am here in Dover at an inn called the Heart of Oak. Anybody will direct you to it. I could not tolerate the company of La Basilisk one hour longer. So you need not brave her petrifying eye and we may travel straight to London. Please forgive your disobedient but loving daughter.

I didn’t tell him in the note, and never intended to tell him, that the real reason I’d fled the house of my mother’s elder sister was that I couldn’t tolerate her criticisms of him. She’d never forgiven his elopement with my mother and used every opportunity to spray poisonous slime, like a camel spitting.

‘Your father the fortune hunter …’

‘He is not. He had not a penny from my mother.’

‘Your father the Republican …’

‘He’s always said it was wrong to cut off the head of Marie Antoinette.’

‘Your father the gambler …’

‘Do not all gentlemen play games of hazard occasionally?’

She called me argumentative and said I should never get a husband with my sharp tongue.

*

I sealed my scrawled note and was waiting on the steps of the poste restante office as it opened. When I handed it over the counter I asked if there were any more letters waiting for Mr Thomas Lane. Three, the clerk told me, so I knew I hadn’t missed him. I strolled by the harbour for a while, watching the steam packet coming in and passengers disembarking. The novelty of my escape was wearing off now and I was beginning to feel a little lonely. But that was no great matter because soon my father would be with me and a whole new part of my life would be starting. My father had talked about it back in September, nine months before, as he was packing.

‘I’m quite resolved that if I have to leave you again it will be in the care of a husband.’

I was folding his shirts at the time.

‘Indeed. And have you any one in mind?’

‘As yet, no. Have you, Libby?’

‘Indeed I have not.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘Then we can look at the question like two rational beings. You agree it is time you were married?’

‘So people tell me.’

‘You mean the match-making matrons? Don’t pay any heed to them, Libby. They’d have any poor girl married by the time she’s off toddlers’ leading strings. People should be old enough to know their own minds before they marry. Thirty for a man, say, and around twenty-two for a woman.’

I was twenty-one and six months at the time.

‘So I have six months to find a husband?’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Hardly that. In fact, I am proposing that we should leave the whole question on the shelf …’

‘And me on the shelf too?’

‘Exactly that, until I return next summer and we can set about the business in a sensible fashion.’

He must have seen the hurt in my face.

‘Libby, I’m not talking about the marriage market. I’m not proposing you trade your youth and beauty for some fat heir to a discredited peerage.’

‘I don’t think they’d rate higher than the second son of a baronet,’ I said, still defensive.

He came and took my hand.

‘You know me better than that. I’m not a young man any more.’ (He was forty-six years old.) ‘I must think of providing for you in the future. I shan’t die a rich man and Tom has his own way to make.’

‘I’d never be a burden on Tom, you know that.’

‘I’ve not been as much of a father to you as I should. But I have tried to give you the important things in life. Your education has been better than most young women’s. You speak French and German adequately and your musical taste is excellent.’

‘That reminds me, I’ve broken another guitar string.’ I was uneasy at hearing myself praised.

‘And we’ve travelled together. You’ve seen the glaciers of Mont Blanc at sunrise and the Roman Forum by moonlight.’

I was wonderfully fortunate, I knew that. When I was back with my father it was easy to forget the other times, lonely and homesick in a cold French convent, or boarded out with a series of more or less resentful aunts or cousins. It was almost possible, though nowhere near as easy, to forget the glint of my brother’s handkerchief waving from the rail of the ship as it left Gravesend to carry him away to India, and the widening gap of dark water.

‘Couldn’t we just go on as we are?’ I asked. ‘Tom will come back one day and I can keep house for him and you. Do I really need a husband?’

He became serious again. ‘The wish of my heart is to see you married to a man you can love and respect who values and cares for you.’

I watched the steam packet go out again, arching sparks from its funnel and trailing a smell of coal dust. In three hours or so it would be in Calais, then perhaps bringing my father back with it. Around noon I felt weary from my early start and went back to my room. I took off my dress and shoes, loosened my stays and laid down on the bed. I must have dozed because I woke with a start, hearing the landlord’s voice at the bottom of the stairs, saying my name.

‘Miss Liberty Lane? Don’t know about the Liberty, but she called herself Miss Lane, at any rate. Give it me and I’ll take it in to her.’

As his heavy footsteps came upstairs I pulled my dress on and did up some essential buttons, heart thumping because either this was a message from my father or my aunt had tracked me after all. But as soon as the landlord handed me the note – adding his own greasy thumb-print – I knew it had nothing to do with Chalke Bissett. The handwriting was strong and sprawling, a man’s hand. The folded paper was sealed with a plain blob of red wax, and a wedge-shaped impression that might have been made with the end of a penknife, entirely anonymous. I broke the seal and read: … take the liberty of addressing you with distressing …

‘Bad news, miss?’

The landlord was still in the room, his eyes hot and greedy. I gripped the edge of the wash-stand, shaking my head. I think I was acting on instinct only, the way a hurt deer runs.

‘I must go to Calais. When’s the next boat?’

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