The Misbegotten (12 page)

Eventually, Mrs Alleyn turned her unsettling gaze to Richard, and asked after his progress with an introduction she had made. Rachel breathed more easily, and decided not to speak again, however many times Richard turned, and smiled, and urged some comment from her. She held her tongue, and smiled politely, and tried not to notice the way Mrs Alleyn kept glancing at her, almost reluctantly, as if she couldn’t help herself. Rachel saw an inexplicable mixture of calculation and curiosity in her eyes, and it increased the feeling she already had of the house being watchful. She was glad when, after forty minutes or so, Mrs Alleyn dismissed them with exquisite good manners. As they crossed the hallway once again, a flash of movement and colour caught Rachel’s eye. Through a narrow door behind the main staircase, where the back stairs led down to the cellars, a servant was watching them – a red-haired girl with long eyes and a keen expression. With a start, Rachel recognised her as the girl who’d served them, just the once, at their wedding feast. The girl who’d also paused and stared at her peculiarly, just as Mrs Alleyn had.

‘I did advise you not to ask about her son, did I not?’ said Richard, as they walked away down Lansdown Road.

‘No. You did not,’ said Rachel. ‘You said only to mention nothing of the misfortune that befell him with the girl he was engaged to . . . I thought Mrs Alleyn might like to speak of him, since I gathered she has little opportunity to.’

‘The whole subject of her son is one she feels most acutely. Perhaps too acutely to discuss with a new acquaintance.’

‘Well, how could I know if you didn’t warn me?’ said Rachel, rattled. She felt uneasy in a way she couldn’t explain.
The lady thought she knew this face.
Something about that realisation gave her a peculiar, expectant thrill. ‘Mr Weekes – I think I just saw the serving girl from the Moor’s Head, working there as a servant.’

‘Sadie?’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sure not.’

‘No, the other one. The one who served the wine one time, and spilled it on my hand. You must remember – the red-haired girl?’

‘No. There’s only Sadie working there at the inn, and why would she be at the Alleyns’ house on Lansdown Crescent?’

‘I do not say that I saw Sadie, I say that I saw the other girl . . . I’m sure of it,’ Rachel insisted.

‘Well. I’m sure you must be mistaken. I saw nobody. You did well, though, my dear. I’m sure Mrs Alleyn approved of you.’

‘I am not so sure. She watched me most peculiarly, and you must have noticed when you introduced me – how startled she seemed. Do you think she thought she recognised me from somewhere?’

‘How could she recognise you, my dear? I did tell you that she is not always the easiest company. I’m sure she wasn’t watching you with anything other than the curiosity of making a new acquaintance . . .’

‘It startled me to learn that her son was there above us all the time, hidden away.’

‘Yes – forgive me. I thought you’d understood. His infirmity goes beyond a mere darkening of the spirits – he was injured in the war as well. One leg is all but useless, and he suffers terrible headaches, I am told. Pains that last for days, and obliterate all thought.’

‘Poor man,’ Rachel murmured.

‘As I said, I have seen him but once or twice in all the years since his downfall. He is a strange and difficult man, impossible to know.’

‘Such suffering might make any one of us strange or difficult.’

‘You have such a kind heart, my dear,’ Richard said, squeezing her hand where it rested on his arm. He seemed to have relaxed in the short distance that they’d walked from the Alleyns’ house, his nerves dissipating to leave him buoyant, almost jubilant. ‘She is a fine lady, is she not?’ he said, smiling. ‘And beautiful, though none so lovely as you.’

Rachel smiled at the compliment, but she still wondered about Mrs Alleyn’s strange exclamation, and repeated glances; and she wondered about the red-haired serving girl she’d glimpsed at the top of the stairs. And while she could not have said what any of it meant, or if it was significant, it only added to her unusual suspicion that she had been watched, and that much had gone unsaid.

From the hill where Lansdown Crescent sat, aloof, the rest of the city was a tangled mess. As they descended into it there seemed to be less light from the sky, even; the air thickened with the stink of human endeavour. Rachel stepped around piles of horse muck and oily puddles, but could not keep her shoes from getting spattered.
Pattens
, she made the mental note.
I must acquire a pair of pattens.
Richard left her near the abbey, to meet with a man on business, and Rachel walked a convoluted route back towards the house above the shop. She was starting to enjoy the noise and bustle of the narrow cobbled streets, which in places were scarcely wide enough to allow two people to pass without their shoulders bumping. What had once seemed like crowding had come to feel more like community.

Since her retreat from Milsom Street, she had taken to exploring the narrower streets behind and between, where the backs of buildings piled on top of one another as they marched up and down the city’s steep hills. Everywhere were tangled gutters and gables and rough cobble walls; chimney pots like rows of broken teeth, stable doors and sink holes, outdoor stairs and crooked sheds; all making a mockery of the strict and serene façades that faced the front. Here Rachel was not noticed, she was not remarkable. She drifted through the hotchpotch, learning its hidden paths and places; the steep, mossy steps that carved unexpectedly beneath a terrace of houses; the butcher’s shop built into the arches beneath a road, where cooks and housekeepers queued for the best cuts in Bath. Here there were no confectioners selling fudge or candied fruits, no glovers with wares in silk or kid leather. Here there were coopers selling barrels and baskets, and cobblers hammering new soles onto men’s work boots. There were rag shops and haberdashers, and communal bake ovens for those too poor to have their own. Rachel had begun to feel that she knew the city better now than she ever had before.

Buying a paper cone of hot chestnuts from a barrow boy, she checked over her shoulder a couple of times, to be sure Richard was nowhere around, before turning into the street that led to Duncan Weekes’s lodging house. She hadn’t been sure that she would visit him until that exact moment, but curiosity convinced her to. It had been several days since she’d spoken to her father-in-law outside the Moor’s Head, and she now understood that Richard would never consent to her calling on him.
Just as the old man foresaw. He warned me not to ask, but he lied about the bad blood between them, and the cause of it
, she thought, uneasily.
How could he refer to his wife’s death as ‘matters long past’?
Richard had said such damning things about his father that Rachel was having trouble reconciling his portrait with the sad old man she had met, who had praised her kindness and gentility.
Underneath the blame and anger there must be love. Is there not always love between parent and child?
She thought of Mrs Alleyn, whose life had been so blighted by her son’s misadventures and persistent affliction.
But she does not abandon him, and I should not abandon Duncan Weekes so very easily. Not until I have his version of these events.

She had the worrying feeling that she might come to regret her decision, but she needed to know; because if what Richard had told her was true, then perhaps any love between him and his father had indeed died, and the reconciliation Rachel hoped for would be impossible. It was disquieting, that she should feel too nervous of her own husband to ask him what exactly had befallen his mother.
Keep that curiosity secret
, urged the soft voice in her mind. Still, the sadness in Duncan’s eyes fretted at her memory, and he had praised Richard with unmistakable pride.
He loves his son, that much is clear. And he seems to have precious little else left to him.
Duncan Weekes was the only kind of father that remained to her, but as she made her way to him, Rachel prepared herself to sever all connection with him should Richard’s condemnation prove well founded.

The building she came to was tall and narrow, cramped awkwardly between warehouses and workshops in the southwestern reaches of the city, near the riverside with all its mud and stink. The walls were streaked with soot, the windows opaque. Washing lines were strung from the upper storeys, and threadbare clothes hung limp in the still air. On the front steps sat a little girl no more than three years old, dressed in a canvas pinafore and a tattered cap. She gave off a strange, unwholesome smell, like fish and milk. Rachel bent down with a smile.

‘Hello, little one. Do you live here? What’s your name?’ she said. Shining wet trails ran either side of the child’s mouth, from her nose to her chin. She regarded Rachel with steady, wide eyes, and said nothing. Rachel took out her handkerchief and tried to wipe the girl’s face, but she shied away, got up and ran down the steps. Just then the door opened, and a woman with a pinched face came out carrying a basket on her hip. She squinted suspiciously at Rachel as she slipped in through the open door.

Inside it was cold and damp. A gloomy hallway with bare floorboards, where the sounds of footsteps and voices and children crying came creeping through the walls. There was a stink of tallow and ammonia. Duncan Weekes’s lodging was on the lowest floor of the house, so Rachel went to the stairs at the far end of the hallway, and down into stagnant darkness. Small as it was, the basement was divided into two rooms, and Rachel turned to the one on the right, as instructed. Her hand was shaking slightly as she raised it to knock. She thought of the rooms on Abbeygate Street, and how poor she’d thought them at first. Now the place where her father-in-law lived put a knot of shame and disgust in her stomach, and she fought hard to smile as she heard the bolts slide back within. Duncan Weekes looked almost frightened as he peered out, eyes all rheumy and bloodshot. His wig was off, revealing the scanty grey shreds of his own remaining hair, and without it he seemed smaller, denuded. He smiled and gave her a slight bow, and all the while radiated a kind of anxious shame.

‘My dear Mrs Weekes – it is so kind of you to call, so kind . . . I had not thought you would. I fear the condition of my lodgings must disgust you . . .’

‘Nonsense, Mr Weekes,’ Rachel murmured, but could not make herself convincing. She smiled to belie herself, and handed him the cone of chestnuts as she came inside. ‘Here – they’re still warm.’

‘Thank you. Too kind. Come now – come and sit by the fire.’ Duncan Weekes bustled clumsily, clearing a cup and a half-empty bottle of wine from the mantelpiece, and the fallen pages of a newspaper from the single armchair by the hearth. He had but one room, and that was cramped and dark. A narrow bed was against the back wall, with a trunk at its foot; beneath the only window, which was high in the wall and let in little light, stood a plain desk and a bentwood chair, and next to the door was a chest of drawers. The fireplace was mean – just a small grate for coals, a sooty hotplate for a kettle, and nothing more. It cast a meagre circle of light and warmth. Duncan Weekes fetched the bentwood chair and sat down opposite her, awkwardly, with his hands on his knees.

‘And how are you, my dear? How is my son?’ he said keenly. There was wine on his breath, and she saw his glance drift to the bottle he’d removed from the mantel. He snatched his eyes back guiltily, his face wearing a constant apology.
He is ashamed. Of himself, as much as his poverty. And so eager to befriend me.
Rachel felt a renewed resolve – that if she was wrong to disobey her husband, still it had not been wrong to come to these poor lodgings, to take this first step.

‘I am well, as is Richard, thank you, sir. I . . . I did speak to him about you, but . . .’

‘He would not hear it?’ said the old man, sadly.

‘Not yet. His . . . pain over the rift between you is yet strong, and persuasive. Perhaps, with time . . .’

‘A great deal of time has passed already, my dear, and none of it has dulled his anger. He spoke sharply to you, when you mentioned me?’ Duncan Weekes’s watery eyes fixed on her, full of concern.

‘I . . . a . . . a little, yes. I am sure he did not mean . . .’

‘Poor girl. You are too kind and good, to be reprimanded over the likes of me. I am but a ruin of what I once was. ’Tis scant wonder my boy wants nothing to do with me.’

Butterflies took flight in Rachel’s stomach. She swallowed before she spoke again, and found her throat dry.

‘Forgive me, sir, but I must have it from you. My husband . . . my husband told me that you killed his mother. Does he speak the truth?’ Her voice shook audibly; there was a long and deafening silence afterwards. Duncan Weekes stared at her, his eyes gone wide and empty. Rachel suddenly realised that she had no idea how he would react to her terrible question.
Fool! To come here, and be alone with him, and say such a thing!
Rachel started up to her feet and made for the door.

‘Wait! Don’t go yet, I beg you!’ Duncan called after her. Rachel paused, and glanced back. The old man’s eyes were no longer empty, or alarming. His whole body had collapsed in misery, shrinking in on itself as though she’d kicked him. ‘Forgive my silence, only . . . only you did shock me so. It did shock me, to hear you say it,’ he said.

‘Then . . . it is not true?’ Rachel whispered.

‘I . . . I cannot say it is wholly untrue. Alas, I cannot say so.’ He wiped at his eyes with a juddering hand. ‘But you must believe me, please, when I say that I never had any intention of harming my Susanne. I loved her more than any man ever loved a wife, and never laid a finger upon her in anger . . . For all she did upbraid me often, and point up my many failings.’ A fragment of a desolate smile crossed his face. ‘I loved her truly, and meant her no harm.’ Rachel stayed where she was for a moment longer, then took a step back towards the chair. Duncan Weekes’s sorrow was like a physical thing, like something she could touch.

‘Do you . . . do you
swear
this to me, sir?’

‘I swear it upon my very soul, Mrs Weekes.’