A Christmas Hope (7 page)

She had not wished to meet the Foxleys and the Crostwicks, but Wallace did, so it was unavoidable. She should have expected it. It was very possibly why they were here in the first place. The romantic comedy was hardly to Wallace’s taste, and she knew of no reason why he would imagine it was hers.

Close up, Eppy looked even more striking. Claudine was pleased she had worn something so unusual herself. Her height made her additionally noticeable, and in
a manner quite uncharacteristic for her, she enjoyed being noticed.

“How extremely well you look.” Eppy said it in a tone of voice that was hardly complimentary, as if Claudine had been fading away the last time they had met.

“How generous of you,” Claudine murmured, meaning anything one cared to attribute to it.

Verena Foxley smiled as if nothing ever troubled her. She was rather like a swan gliding above the water, Claudine thought. Such elegant and regal birds, but heaven only knew what their feet were doing beneath the surface.

“What a delightful occasion,” Claudine went on. It was only fair to Wallace that at least she try. “It quite puts me in the mood for Christmas.”

“I was already in the mood for Christmas,” Eppy said, with her eyebrows arched in surprise.

“So I observe,” Verena murmured, glancing at Eppy’s hair.

Claudine had a ridiculous image of the whole coiffure decked with tinsel and candles, and the desire to laugh was so overwhelming she snatched a handkerchief from her reticule and buried her face in it as if she had a fit of uncontrollable sneezing. She dared not look at Verena.

“I’ve heard no news of that wretched man Tregarron, have you, Burroughs?” Martin Crostwick said with a gesture of distaste. “I don’t know why the devil the police can’t catch him. It would seem simple enough. Dammit, even if he wasn’t dangerous, the man’s a bad influence on others. I can’t understand it, but young men are apparently fools enough to admire his … I don’t know what! Disregard for anything to do with decency.”

“Don’t worry,” Eppy comforted him. “Their attention has been well and truly curtailed, and it was slight enough anyway. Tregarron’s a fugitive now, and no one will give him food or shelter, let alone friendship. I think the whole miserable disaster happened at a very fortunate time. Decent young men will have had a sharp lesson against keeping bad company.” She looked pointedly at Claudine.

Claudine wanted to come up with some scathing reply about fair trial and assumption of innocence, but no coherent words came to her quickly enough.

“I daresay, he’ll leave the country,” Wallace put in, perhaps afraid that Claudine was going to speak. He avoided looking at her. “After this, there’s really nothing left for him in England. All he has is his reputation,
and that’s gone, as it deserves to be. A lot of it was built on hot air anyway.”

This time Claudine did not stop to think.

“It’s built on a large body of poetry,” she said fiercely, “that is all rooted in the valleys of Wales, the hills and the coastline, the history. Even those with no Welsh ancestry at all find a familiarity in it. He’d die away from his own places. Where on earth could he go? He’d be a stranger always.”

“Then he should have lived a decent life, instead of drinking himself half senseless and going from woman to woman,” Wallace said extremely sharply. It was intended to silence her, and she knew it.

“Going from woman to woman may be immoral, but as long as the women concerned are willing, it’s not a crime,” she retorted. “And drinking too much is a vice practiced by half the men in London, at one time or another in their lives. I daresay, it is the same in Paris or Rome or anywhere else.”

“Why on earth are you defending him?” Verena said in surprise. “You saw what he did to that poor young woman. She might be of … no virtue … but she didn’t deserve that. I thought your charity work was precisely
concerned with protecting women of her sort, at least from disease and attack.”

“It is.” Claudine felt the heat burn in her face. “And I’m not defending him. If he did that to her, intentionally, then he deserves to be put in prison. But we—”

Wallace lost his temper. He turned toward her with his eyes blazing. “There are no ’buts,’ Claudine,” he said between clenched jaws. “These highly respectable young men, known to all of us here for years, saw him do it and tried their best to prevent him. What happened is not open to question.”

“Three of them?” she responded recklessly, knowing she would pay for it later. “All younger than Mr. Tregarron, and sober, and they couldn’t stop him? He must have superhuman strength. I hope if they find him they get at least six policemen to capture him. Otherwise one of them may end up dead, too, like poor Winnie Briggs.”

“Who is Winnie Briggs?” Martin Crostwick asked with a blank look on his face.

“The girl Tregarron murdered!” Eppy snapped at him.

“The girl Tregarron attacked in a drunken rage,” Lambert Foxley corrected her. He shot an irritated glance at Claudine. “Perhaps we should not preempt a
jury by leaping to conclusions. Although I don’t see an alternative one, myself,” he added. “The sooner the issue is decided, the better it will be for all of us. If I have a word with the appropriate authorities, perhaps we can avoid the necessity of having to appear in court ourselves. A sworn testimony should be sufficient, if it is clear enough that we all agree as to the facts.”

“An excellent solution,” Martin Crostwick agreed. “Get the matter over with.”

The bell rang to warn that the intermission was nearly over, and without further comment—apart from general observations as to how pleasant it was to have met—they returned to their boxes.

The rest of the evening passed by Claudine. Her mind raced, searching desperately for a way to stop Lambert Foxley from essentially ending the pursuit of truth before it even began, which is what would happen if he “had a word” with the authorities. Squeaky Robinson had refused to help. What could she do alone? She certainly could not find Dai Tregarron and warn him. She could not even look in the places Squeaky could have, or ask the people he knew. But she could ask the women who came and went at the clinic if they knew anything of Cecil Crostwick or Creighton Foxley. And
Ernest Halversgate, she supposed, though he seemed more a spectator than a participant in the seamier sides of life. She would hate doing it. It was an unfair pressure to question the injured who came for help, but it was the last option she had left.

And she might learn something of Winnie Briggs that could prove useful, even if it were no more than the name of a prior acquaintance. Anything that kept open the questions surrounding her death would be worth it.

Blast Squeaky Robinson for his stubbornness!

Maybe she could give it one more try? If she went to see him with specific ideas, that might persuade him!

“No,” Squeaky said even before she had finished speaking. He looked down at his ledgers, which were spread out on the desk in front of him. “We could use more money for supplies—medical supplies,” he emphasized.

“We have plenty,” she replied. “At least until mid-January.”

“Not if we get a lot of patients in, and people have
overspent themselves for Christmas,” he said doggedly. “Then what’ll you do, eh?”

“Go out and find some money, of course,” she told him tartly. “As I always do.”

“Very right an’ proper,” he nodded. “So go do it.”

“By then Dai Tregarron could be in jail waiting to be hanged!”

Always literal when he wanted to be, Squeaky gave her a long, cold stare, and spoke very clearly. “It is December; Christmas is in less than a fortnight. They haven’t even caught him yet. They’ve got to try him and give him three weeks’ grace before they hang him. You’re good at sums—that’s more than a month, at the very least. He has time. We don’t. We need more money.”

“No we don’t!”

“Everybody needs more money,” he said reasonably.

“You really won’t help me?” She felt despair well up like a dark cloud filling the sky. She had tried to do something like this once before, and Squeaky had had to rescue her. The memory was so humiliating she refused to let it enter her mind.

“No, I won’t,” he said flatly.

She felt ridiculously as if she were going to weep. She
swallowed hard, a loneliness crowding in on her from every side: in society, at home, now even here. It had been absurd, even pathetic, that a woman of her age and station should find her only real friendship in a clinic for women off the street! And now even at the clinic she was alone.

“Then I shall have to do it by myself,” she said with as much dignity as she could manage. She turned and walked out of the office, leaving him sitting at the desk, a pen in his hand and a look of baffled frustration on his face.

Claudine walked the length of Portpool Lane and turned onto Leather Lane, moving south briskly but without purpose. She was angry. She was afraid of doing this alone. Mostly she was afraid of failing.

She realized how perverse she was being. She knew almost nothing about Dai Tregarron, except that he had a poet’s vision and the music of words in his brain. He might very well be guilty of having beaten Winnie Briggs and given her the blow that had been the immediate cause of her death, at least in law. He might not have meant to kill her, but it was a foreseeable result—and a wrong and brutal thing to do. Yet he hadn’t
seemed like a man who would do such a thing. How could one person hold such violent and terrible contradictions within their nature?

Why was she wasting her time at all? And it was a waste. Squeaky was only speaking the truth when he told her she would be far better employed raising money for the clinic. He had not observed that she was on this mission largely to defy Wallace and all the people she knew who were like him. Did she even know why? Yes, she did. Dai Tregarron had called her Olwen, had spoken to her as if she were a creature capable of escape from the commonplace, not the pedestrian, middle-aged woman everyone else saw, incapable of imagination, even less of passion. He had seen who she wanted to be and given the dream a moment’s life.

Someone dug hard fingers into her arm. She gave a cry of fear because the grip was strong enough to pull her to a halt. She struggled, looking around the gray street for anyone who would help her, but she saw only vehicles passing by, people hurrying, collars turned up. She swiveled around to lash out with her free hand as hard as she could.

“What’s the matter with you?” Squeaky demanded shrilly. He had to let go of her and step back smartly as
she swung her arm, stumbling forward with the impetus when there was nothing close enough to strike. “Who the hell did you think I was?”

She was furious, and horribly embarrassed. A man in a morning coat and top hat was staring at them as he approached. He moved aside quickly, as if she might attack him, too.

“Why didn’t you say something?” she shouted at Squeaky.

“I did!” he shouted back. “I called your name. You’re so busy in your daydreams you didn’t hear me. And you’re walking like you’re going to break into a run any minute. I ain’t chasing you all the way along the street!”

“Keep your voice down!” she growled at him. “You’re making a spectacle of us.”

“
I
am?” he said incredulously. “I just touched you! You’re the one galloping down the pavement like the devil’s after you, then attacking me and screaming like a—”

“You were after me,” she pointed out. “Well, what do you want? I presume you have something better to do than just scaring me half to death?”

“If me speaking to you in the street, in broad daylight, scares you half to death, how on earth are you
going to detect where to find Tregarron and why he wasn’t to blame for that poor girl dying?” he demanded. “You’ll meet a lot worse than me in the first public house you go into.”

She looked him up and down, from his cadaverous face and crooked top hat to his skinny legs in striped trousers and resoled boots.

“What do you want, Mr. Robinson?” she said coldly.

“To help you find Tregarron an’ find out who killed that poor girl, you daft piece,” he replied with total disrespect. “You don’t have the first idea as to what you’re doing.”

She stood motionless, staring at him. She wanted to say something to freeze his impertinence, but she was also astounded with gratitude.

“Thank you,” she accepted after a moment. She thought of adding something about his manners but decided against it.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “Not that it’ll make any difference, of course. There ain’t a damn thing we can do.”

“Then why are you here?” she said tartly.

“ ’Cos I remember the last time you set out detecting, an’ how you near got yourself killed that time.”

She did not say anything. There was no reply to make. Instead she asked him what he thought they should do.

“Look for that damn fool Tregarron,” he replied, falling in step beside her. “Find out what he says happened, and then tell him to get out of London. Go hide in Glasgow, or somewhere else they’ll never look for him. See what else I can find out about the girl, what’s ’er name—Winnie Briggs. You should look into the doings of those three young men. And don’t get caught at it, like last time!”