The Man of Gold (2 page)

As the cab bowled along towards Bayswater she could not help thinking, too, with wonder and dismay about Richard Partington and the total lack of money in his pockets. Such a state was unheard of for any gentleman. Was he beyond the ordinary absent-minded? Certainly he was a little strange in his manner. There was that sudden overflowing of excitement, that odd abruptness. But that was, after all, no more than an acceptable departure from the strict conventions. So how did it come about that he was so utterly penniless?

She puzzled over it and puzzled over it, but came to no conclusion.

Of course, it was clear that old Mr Partington was the one who held the purse-strings. But he could not surely have left a grown son – Richard Partington must be thirty years of age – with his pockets bare as if he was a little boy too young even for pocket-money. Surely he could not.

Yet what other explanation was there?

Well, next week, when she would meet Richard Partington’s father, might provide the answer. And it was curious, too, that she had not met old Mr Partington already. If it was he who was to pay her salary, her mean and disgraceful salary, ought he not at least to have been present at the interview she had just attended? Perhaps he had duties at his works, but could he not have stepped across to the house for ten minutes only? It seemed odd. It was odd.

But no doubt time would answer the enigma. If she took the offered post.

And, despite every reason not to, that she would do.

Miss Unwin met the holder of the purse-strings at her new place of employment just one week after her disconcerting interview there. As she had known she would do, she had written accepting the post at the exact ending of the twenty-four-hour period in which to make up her mind that she had insisted on. She took up her duties at the beginning of the next week, and at dinner that evening she met old Mr Partington.

Quite what she had expected she was unable, after encountering the reality, precisely to remember. Certainly she had been prepared for some oddity. The man who could, it seemed, allow his thirty-year-old son to have not a penny in his pockets, the man who had offered so uncompromisingly a salary which many a cook would have scorned as wages, must be unusual. But the reality so far exceeded what she had contrived to imagine that the earlier picture was driven entirely from her mind.

She had come down from the room she had been given at the top of the house, a cheerless and unheated chamber, to the dining room which Richard Partington had already pointed out to her.

The moment that, a little cautiously, she opened the tall unpolished, dust-grimed door she saw the owner of the house standing in front of a once-magnificent marble fireplace, in which a tiny fire smoked and sulked, in all his strikingness of appearance.

He was very small, almost it seemed to her at that moment of shock a dwarf, though later she realised he was in fact no freak but simply as short as a man could be. In
view of Richard Partington’s own small stature she might have expected his father to be not much above five feet in height. But somehow, perhaps because his frame was not only short but slight as well, old Mr Partington looked very much smaller than his son.

If that had been all that was out of the ordinary in his appearance, she might have quickly got used to it. Yet she did not. In all the time she knew him – it was not very long – she never failed to feel an inner uncomfortableness on each occasion she was in the same room with him.

It was, she came to believe, because of the nature of his face, or rather of his whole head. Perched above that small, shrunken body, on which a suit of rusty black hung in lugubrious, time-polished folds, his head, which was almost entirely bald, seemed unnaturally large. Its size was emphasised by the thinness of the few hairs stretching across it and the pallid flesh seemed drawn tight as could be over skull, cheekbones and jaw. But nor was this all. From the enormous head there projected ears that were yet more out of proportion, pink-tinged flaps extended wide to catch the least sound, to examine it, to see what use could be made of it, to store it away.

‘Father,’ said Richard Partington as Miss Unwin, not without an inner stiffening of resolution, stepped into the room, ‘this is our new governess, Miss Harriet Unwin. I – I have the greatest faith in her abilities.’

The little old man kept his eyes fastened on Miss Unwin. And she, with a strong effort of will, kept her gaze from dropping to the floor at her feet.

‘Hm,’ the old man said at last. ‘I hardly see how she has had opportunity as yet to display any abilities – unless it is an ability to seize on the remuneration she has been offered.’

For a moment Miss Unwin, holding her eyes steadily on the small figure in front of the marble mantelpiece and its grudging fire, was tempted to reply that she had not so far
seized on a single farthing of the little she was to receive. But she held herself in check.

‘Good evening, sir,’ she said instead. ‘May I say how pleased I am to be under your roof, and to have charge of two girls as promising as your granddaughters.’

She contrived then to send out a quick look to Louisa and Maria, standing mutely in a far corner of the room.

‘Promising? Promising?’ their grandfather barked out. ‘What do they promise but expense and yet more expense?’

There was no reply to be made to that, and Miss Unwin experienced the first of her many pangs of regret at having, so much against her better judgment, cast her lot in this strange place.

Nor was the smile, concealed by a quick turn of the head, which Richard Partington at once darted out to her much in the way of reassurance.

But, mercifully, the need to continue such an unpromising conversation was brought to an end by the sound of voices in the hall outside.

‘Ah,’ said Richard Partington, quickly seizing on the interruption, ‘that will be our guests for the evening.’

‘Yes,’ his father chimed in, in a voice marked by no sign of hospitality, ‘tonight we are entertaining, Miss Unwin. But I beg you to remember we are not people who frequently scatter what little we have under the eyes, and I may say the noses, of others.’

‘Our guests,’ Richard Partington broke in, making Miss Unwin think for a moment of a tired, flogged horse gallantly approaching yet once more a hedge it had found too high to jump before. ‘Our guests are family relations and as such have a particular claim upon us.’

‘Yes, that must be so,’ Miss Unwin agreed, with as much force as she could muster.

But she let herself think, almost with bitterness, of her own foundling’s life in which there could never be family relations to be offered, or not, hospitality.

‘Distant cousins,’ the small figure by the fireplace almost spat out.

‘Yes, my Cousin Cornelia, Miss Cornelia Fulcher, and my Cousin John, her brother, Captain Fulcher, Jack as he likes to be called,’ the gallant horse said. ‘We made their acquaintance only a year or two ago. Cousin Cornelia’s aunt on her father’s side died and I chanced to see the notice in the newspaper and wrote.’

‘Chanced. Chanced. Paid a halfpenny for the privilege of reading in a public ordinary the nonsense the newspapers print to catch their readers.’

‘Less expensive, Father, than buying a newspaper,’ Richard Partington murmured in reply.

Miss Unwin, who in her former place of employment had been accustomed to see as a matter of course two newspapers at the breakfast table every morning, felt a renewed sinking at the parsimony so casually put in front of her. Newspapers she preferred not to see herself if they could be avoided, but it seemed a gentleman’s right to have them in the house. To learn that the father of her charges was reduced to hiring the sheets at a public dining room was yet another sign to her that she had made a bad decision in accepting the challenge of teaching the two stonily silent girls in the corner.

But she had little opportunity to muse. Before Richard Partington opened the tall, dusty mahogany door behind her there was time only for the little old man by the fire to dart out one single comment.

‘Has ten thousand of her own in the Three Per Cents now. From the aunt.’

Then the heiress herself was in the room, her brother a pace behind her.

Miss Unwin’s first thought was decidedly irreverent.
A good thing she has inherited her fortune, without it she would be hard pressed to find a husband
. And her second thought was yet more irreverent.
Even with it she will be pressed hard enough
.

Miss Cornelia Fulcher appeared to be in her late thirties, her very late thirties, and those years had taken their full toll. Both her face and figure were worn. Angularity was their most pronounced characteristic. And her nose, which was thin enough to remind Miss Unwin of a knife, was a raw red.

But thoughts such as those were to be kept to the very back of the mind, hardly to be thought at all. And perhaps Miss Fulcher’s personal appearance would be no indication of her character.

Her brother seemed a good deal more prepossessing. To begin with he was reasonably tall, and after a period with two men of such limited stature as old Mr Partington and his son, if was somehow a relief to be in the same room as a person of normal height.

Yet even as this thought sprang irrepressibly to her mind, Miss Unwin felt a pang of guilt. Richard Partington had from their very first meeting been the soul of kindness. Even to think as slightly badly of him as she had, and for a fault he could not overcome, was a sort of betrayal.

Miss Unwin made up her mind that she would not by way of atonement allow herself at least for the next twenty-four hours one single reflection about how poorly she was being paid.

Besides, Captain Fulcher was not really in any way good looking. His face was too high coloured, a mottled red that spoke of the bottle, and his moustaches were surely too well curled, altogether too much proclaiming the military man.

‘Very good of you, very good of you,’ he said boomingly to old Mr Partington as he went up and offered his hand.

The little old man hesitated noticeably before extending his own hand, emerging like the head of a dried-up tortoise from his rusty black sleeve. But at last he did touch the Captain’s fingers before rapidly withdrawing, as
if anxious not to lose any precious heat from his body. And, in view of the feebleness of the fire in the grate at his back, that was perhaps sensible.

The Captain, however, appeared not to notice the rebuff, though Miss Unwin was certain that a rebuff had been intended.

‘Looking forward to a good dinner,’ he said, his voice echoing round the high-ceilinged, inhospitable room. ‘Had a wretched day. Every nag I put a guinea on came to a full stop in mid-career.’

‘I cannot commiserate with you, sir,’ old Mr Partington answered. ‘A man who will risk his guineas, such guineas as he has, on the turn of speed shown by a horse deserves to lose every coin he possesses.’

Captain Fulcher took the remark as a joke.

‘Gad,’ he said, with a roar of laughter. ‘Lose every coin he possesses. That’s devilish near my position. Devilish near. If it wasn’t for Cornelia … But that’s another matter. ‘Nother matter altogether. Now, sir, I’ve brought you some sherry. Small gift. Know you like it.’

From the pockets of his broadly cut, military-looking coat he produced a pair of bottles of sherry and, without anything in the way of permission, he proceeded to draw their corks with a corkscrew he seemed to know where to find on the sideboard. He then poured glasses for himself, old Mr Partington and, grudgingly a little, for Richard Partington.

Miss Unwin noted his behaviour as yet one more curious circumstance in this house of curious circumstances. But she had no time to think about it. Richard Partington had introduced her to Miss Fulcher.

‘I am glad to hear those two little girls are to have better care,’ she said in a near-whisper. ‘When my brother and I were last here I could not help thinking that they needed more supervision. There was –’

She stopped and gave a great swallow so that the cords of her thin neck heaved.

She leant nearer Miss Unwin.

‘There was dirt,’ she hissed.

‘I understand that until now they have been looked after entirely by Mr Partington’s housekeeper,’ Miss Unwin answered, tactfully as she could. ‘And she must have many other duties.’

She wondered then herself just how many duties the housekeeper, a Mrs Meggs, of whom she had as yet only heard, did have. She suspected they were many indeed. So far she had seen no other servant. The door had been opened to her ring at the bell by Richard Partington himself, who had begun some explanation and had then abandoned it. He had told the cab-man, too, to put down her luggage in the hall, and there, but for a small valise she had herself taken to her room, it had remained. She had seen it as she had come down to dine.

‘Yes, I suppose the good Mrs Meggs does do more than falls to the customary duties of a housekeeper,’ Miss Fulcher said. ‘Or so it seemed to me on our previous visits.’

She drew in a breath in something between a shudder and a sigh.

‘I am a country dweller, Miss Unwin,’ she went on. ‘And, to tell you the truth, I am not surprised that the girls, living in London, should not be as clean as I should like. London is not a place where a lady can live with any true comfort.’

Miss Unwin was rather at a loss for a reply. Many ladies certainly lived in London without any feeling of discomfort, rather the opposite. But this was hardly a rejoinder she could make to her new employer’s guest. She contented herself with a half-smile.

But a half-smile seemed to be all that was required.

Miss Fulcher again advanced her thin red nose till it was almost within an inch of Miss Unwin’s.

‘Flies,’ she whispered. ‘Flies. Horrible.’

Miss Unwin, from her days at a house in the country,
recalled not a few flies. Again a half-smile seemed to be her only recourse.

Luckily, at that moment the dining-room door was thrust open and a large tray, held in a pair of scrawny, almost gypsy-brown hands, appeared. It came to a momentary halt and then advanced once more, pushed forward by an elderly woman, old beyond any guessing of her age. Miss Unwin supposed that this must be Mrs Meggs. She was not an attractive person. Her face was as darkly brown as her hands and from a jutting chin there curled upwards a single bristle-thick white hair. A pair of sharp eyes looked rapidly round the room from beneath eyebrows composed of a tangle of more thick white hairs, and the bent attitude of her whole body only added to an impression of malevolent inquisitiveness.