Charles Palliser (125 page)

Joey’s manner was less sullen than I had ever seen. It seemed to me as if he was truly pleased to be able to do something for me and with this reflection, I decided to trust him.

So we left his father, and Joey led me on a headlong chase across the metropolis, weaving our way between the foot-passengers on the crowded pavements, dodging up alley-ways, and diving across busy roads so suddenly that horses reared their heads and drivers shouted and cracked their whips at us. With many digressions and doublings back, we were heading steadily East along the riverside.

We passed the Tower and cut through a district all of whose streets were either cleared away or in process of being demolished. This was St. Katharine’s parish where a medieval college and hospital together with more than a thousand houses were being taken down (and their inhabitants evicted) to make way for the new dock. The rubble and soil extracted from here were being shipped up-river to fill the Grosvenor-bason in Pimlico — an undertaking which I had seen while crossing the Neat-houses in search of Barney.

Beyond that we suddenly entered a district where men with wind-burnt faces in stiff clothes walked the streets, brazen-faced women flaunted their finery, and all about us were ships’-chandlers, biscuit-makers, rope-makers, and, in short, 576 THE

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the manufacturers and suppliers of everything to do with ships. Sea-gulls cried above us and London was suddenly a sea-port.

At last we reached a shabby, run-down district near the river and here, in a dirty, narrow way called Brewhouse-lane, Joey stopped and knocked on a low door set deep in the wall. (We were, in fact, in Wapping and almost beside Execution-dock where pirates and mutineers were formerly executed by the incoming tide.) We were both gasping for breath and I had had neither time nor wind to ask any questions.

Meg’s turned out to be a clean and respectable lodging-house — a most unlikely occurrence in that part of London where the crimping-houses lay in wait to prey upon discharged sailors. Meg herself was a friendly, honest woman of about Mrs Digweed’s age. Although she was an old companion of hers, their friendship was, Joey assured me, quite unknown to his uncle. She showed Joey and me to a small but spotless room, and when she had withdrawn, I expected Joey to say he would leave me and was about to ask him to convey my thanks to his parents, when he made it clear that he wanted to say something. I was impatient for him to go for I had much to think about.

He seemed to be having difficulty in beginning, but at last he blurted out: “It was all down to me. Ma didn’t know nothing about it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Jist a-fore we went down to the North that time, Barney got Sal to bring me to him and he gived me four shillin’ and promised me more if I’d do what he wanted. I was to get inside this crib in Melthorpe, and he told me exackerly where it was and what it looked like. I was proud that he trusted me. And that was why I led Ma back through Melthorpe and straight to you and your mam.”

“I see. And what did he want you to do?”

“I was to prig a door-key if I got the chance. But most of all I was to look out for any screeves — papers — that might be lying around, and to see where anything vallyable might be kept hid.” Then he cried: “But I didn’t do none of them things.”

“Because I caught you!”

“No!” he exclaimed indignantly. “I didn’t want to do nothing arter your mam was so good to us. I reckoned I’d jist take a good look round so I could tell Barney what I seen, but not tell him nothing that’d help him to prig nothing of you.”

Was this the truth at last? Presumably his parents had known this but wanted Joey himself to tell me. And now he had done so at a time when, having rescued me from his uncle, he felt in a morally stronger position. I was almost certain that I now knew the reason for his sullenness towards me : there is nobody we resent as much as someone to whom we feel we have done wrong.

“I believe you,” I assured him.

“That ain’t all,” he said. “That time I dodged you from the carcase, there was more to it. When you found your shake-down at the Common-garding that night, I spoke to the boy what you’d gived a ring to.”

“Luke!” I cried.

“That’s the ticket. I got him to watch you and dodge you if you went anywheres, and then come back and tell me where you were. I gived him my last four-pence and promised him another six-pence. Then I went back to Barney and found they was getting ready to clear out of there. Barney told me he’d got his orders about you from whoever it was that was paying him.”

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“Who was that?”

“I dunno. But he told me how I was to make a pall of you and lead you as if by chance to this crib out towards Islington. He even drawed me a map so as I should find it.

Which as you know I done.”

I said nothing but suddenly he broke out: “Well, I nivver knowed what they meant to do, did I?”

I nodded distractedly. What he had said confirmed my assumption that Sancious was the connexion between Barney and the Clothiers.

“So I left Barney and went back to the Common-garding,” Joey went on; “and Luke took me to your grand-dad’s house.”

Almost everything that had still puzzled me about the role of Mr and Mrs Digweed was now explained and my fears about them were all but laid to rest. And though Joey had done my mother and me wrong, he had been too young to be held responsible and the very fact that he had for so long resented me was proof of how guilty he felt. Even so, I could not be entirely sure that he would not return to his former allegiance to his uncle, and therefore I felt I could not trust him too far.

As Joey was leaving, Meg asked me to come and eat in the kitchen, so it was only after I had returned to my chamber later that evening that I had leisure to reflect on the things Mr Escreet had told me — and told me, as it were, by mistake. His confusion about time and my identity had given me a window straight into the past so that I believed I now possessed knowledge that no-one else alive had apart from us two. I now knew that the purloined will of Jeoffrey Huffam had indeed existed and that it was the attorney Paternoster who had misappropriated it and sold it to the Mompessons. I also knew that instead of destroying it (as Mr Escreet had assumed they would), the Mompessons had kept it, for shortly before my grandfather’s murder he had received that mysterious promise from someone in their household that he would return it to him through the agency of Martin Fortisquince. I was puzzled by why the Mompessons had held onto the will since its effect was to disinherit them. (Presumably it had been by an oversight and surely they must have destroyed it by now?) And I was intrigued by the identity and motives of the person who had undertaken to steal it back from them.

I settled down to try to sleep. In the middle of the night there was a noise at the front of the house and when I looked out of window I saw the three Digweeds standing in the street with all their possessions loaded onto a hand-cart. As I came down, Meg rose and let them in. We went into the kitchen and they explained that they had decided to flee from their house under cover of night and in the utmost secrecy, in case Barney or any of his gang were keeping watch. They intended to find somewhere to live in this part of the metropolis so that I could dwell with them again. I was very surprised by this and it confirmed my assumption about their real motives.

In the morning they succeeded in finding a little cottage nearby in Peartree-alley off Cinnamon-street, and we all moved into it. Having become strangers here, they had no credit at the chandler’s, could score nothing on the slate at the tap, and had no relationship with the pawn-broker. And so, moved by this evidence of their loyalty to myself and feeling guilty for having misjudged them, I decided that I owed it to them to tell them at least a little of my story. Yet since I was still not sure if I could trust their son so far, I resolved to wait until Joey was out of the house.

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It happened that the next time he went out his mother, as if aware that I might not want to speak frankly before him, asked me: “Did your grand-dad tell you anything useful, Master John?”

I started.
My grand-dad?
What did she know? How could she know it? Then I understood how we had misunderstood one another for she had been misled by my reference to my grandfather’s house.

“You mean, Mr Escreet?” I said. “The old gentleman at the house by Charing-cross?”

She nodded and so, fortunately, I had no need to deny that Mr Escreet was my grandfather. It was, after all, my grandfather’s house. I explained that the old gentleman I had visited was the confidential servant of my mother’s father and I began to recount some of what he had told me.

However, as soon as I mentioned the Mompessons Mr Digweed broke in: “The Mumpseys! Why, that’s the fambly what my dad worked for down in the country before he come up to Lunnon. What I told you of a-fore.”

“That’s a strange coincidence,” I said. He looked puzzled. “I mean, the odds are very long against it.”

“Oh I don’t know so much,” he replied. “Arter all, they was the big fambly in them parts, so seeing as how that’s where my old feller come from it ain’t no wonder that he should have gone into sarvice with ’em.”

“Where exactly did he come from?”

“Why, a village called Stoke near ’Ougham, what got took down about fifty year back.

So my dad’s fambly had to leave.”

“I know it. They rebuilt it and called it Stoke Mompesson.”

“Aye, but then ’twas for freeholders on’y so they wouldn’t be a burden on the paritch.”

It was an extraordinary coincidence that there should be this further link between myself and the Digweeds. Had I been premature after all in allowing my suspicions of them to be laid to rest? But if they were concealing something from me, then they would hardly have admitted to this.

Mr Digweed went on: “My fambly — the Digweeds and Feverfews — has been masons and j’iners for the Mumpseys since time out of mind.”

Then a thought occurred to me and, trying to hide a note of suspicion, I asked:

“Then is Barney connected with them?”

“He was for a time but hasn’t been for many a year,” his brother answered, “for he fell out with the steward over payment for some work he done and held a grudge agin ’em ever arter.”

I knew something of Barney’s grudges. Relieved that all was beginning to fall into place, I said:

“I remember you told me that you and Barney went on doing work for the family your father served. So was that why Barney was up there that time he broke into our house?”

“Aye, that’s right,” said Mrs Digweed. “Do you mind as how the Mumpseys opened up their big house in ’Ougham not long arter that? Well, Barney got took on beforehand to help make it ready which is why he was passing through Melthorpe that day.”

So there was no coincidence! Now I saw that I had misread this connexion and got it the wrong way round: it was that original link between the Digweeds and my own district from which all the other apparent coincidences had followed! Then I had been completely wrong to suspect Mr and Mrs Digweed of being A FRIEND ON THE INSIDE

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involved in some vast conspiracy! (Indeed, I remembered now that when Mrs Digweed and Joey had come to us in Melthorpe, she had mentioned her husband’s connexion with Mompesson-park. How strange that I had forgotten that.) I felt now that I trusted them enough to tell them more. So I explained briefly how an ancestor’s last will — together with a codicil attached to an earlier will — had long ago been stolen, and how all the ill suffered by my family followed from that: my grandfather had been murdered, my mother ruined, and I myself persecuted in the way that they knew about. Now that the codicil had been obtained by the Clothiers and laid before Chancery, my life was in grave danger for Silas Clothier would come into the Hougham estate upon my death. What I had learned from Mr Escreet was that the Mompessons had bought the purloined will from its thief, and I guessed that it was in the attempt to regain it from them that my grandfather had been murdered — and in such a way that suspicion had fallen upon his new son-in-law.

They shook their heads at this story, and then Mrs Digweed asked: “Ain’t there no way you could make yourself safe?”

“Only if that purloined will still existed and could be laid before the court, for it would overturn the codicil and there would be no advantage to anyone in my death. But it must have been destroyed long ago.”

“Are you sure?” Mrs Digweed asked. “Don’t you think that if the Mumpseys kept it for forty year, then if they did get it back that time arter the poor genel’man was killed, they’ll still be keeping it?”

“Yes,” I said, my heart racing at this confirmation of my hopes, for I had earlier pushed that very thought from my mind. “But if they did have a reason for keeping it —

which I can’t believe for it does them nothing but harm — then it’s probably in a bank-vault or some other secure hiding-place.”

“Hiding-place!” Mrs Digweed exclaimed and turned to me, her face flushed with excitement: “What year was it that your grand-dad was done to death?”

“Why, it was in May the year before I was born.”

“And you was born about six months a-fore Joey, ain’t that so?” She turned to her husband: “Why, then that was the May of the year of the Great Comet. Do you not rec’lleck it? ’Twas as big as a cheeseplate.” He nodded and she continued: “That was the time I was nussing Polly and it was jist then that you done some work for the Mumpseys!”

Mr Digweed stared blankly at her.

“A cove come from their steward,” she went on, “to say they needed some j’inery work done.”

“Mr Assinder?” I asked.

“No, the one a-fore him,” she said to me, and then turned back to her husband: “And you wondered why they didn’t use one of their reg’lar men, for you’d done no work for

’em for many a year?”

“Aye,” he said. “I recall it now.”

Mrs Digweed cried: “So don’t you see, the job you done was that very time they must have got Master John’s dockyment back!”