The Tiger in the Well (26 page)

OF THE BLESSED AND HOLY SANCTISSIMA SOPHIA

The house was well looked after, and the garden was tidy, if rather austere. She rang the doorbell, and after a minute the door was opened by a thin man dressed as a Catholic priest.

"Good aftemoon," she said. "I've come to see Mr. Beech."

He looked a little pained.

"Mr. Beech is . . . well, he is in the house. ... Is he expecting you.^*"

"No, but he'll know who I am when he sees me," she said. "My name is Lockhart."

She spoke as pleasantly as she could. There was something narrow and fastidious about this man, with his slightly preposterous gold medallion on its chain around his neck, and his amethyst ring. She didn't want to have the door shut in her face. He made up his mind and stepped aside.

"Well, you'd better wait in the hall," he said.

Dark, oppressive furniture, meticulously cleaned and polished; a scent of incense in the air; a feeling of impersonality. The priest awkwardly gestured to a chair for her and vanished up the stairs. She sat and waited. Apart from the incense and the oddly institutional feeling, there was nothing to mark this house as being the headquarters of the Order of the Most Holy Sophia's Emanation, whatever that was.

Five minutes went past, and then she heard someone coming downstairs. He reached the bottom and turned: a thin, sallow, elderly-looking man, dressed like the one who'd let her in, and with the same golden device on a chain around his neck.

"Mr. Beech?" she said.

**I am," he repHed. "I am afraid I don't know who you are. Miss Lockhart. I am not sure how I can help you."

"Were you once the rector of St. Thomas's in Portsmouth.'*"

"I was, but for some time now I have ..."

His voice sagged. She looked at him in alarm, for he looked as if he was going to faint. He'd suddenly realized who she was.

She wasn't going to help him. She watched as he struggled to a chair. He looked as though he wanted to sink onto it, but he held the back and stayed upright.

"You had better come into the library," he said in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper.

He opened the door for her. The library was not much of one; a few shelves of books, a table, some chairs, and over the mantelpiece a painting in the symbolist manner, full of people with halos, and golden rays, and ecstatic expressions.

She sat down, and he shut the door.

"You know why I've come," she said.

"Yes."

"You falsified a marriage register to make it look as if I'd married a Mr. Parrish."

"I . . . yes."

He was standing brokenly by the table, twisting the golden medallion between his fingers. In the clearer light of the H-brary Sally could see that it wasn't gold at all, but brass. It consisted of a vaguely female shape surrounded by rays, as if she were giving off light.

"What is that.'*" she said, after a few moments' silence.

"The symbol of Sanctissima Sophia, the Most Holy Wisdom."

"And what is this . . . order of yours.?"

"A group, a band of . . .of initiates devoted to the understanding, the propagation, so to speak, of the Holy Wisdom."

"The Holy Wisdom.? Is that different from the everyday kind.?"

"It. . . naturally, there is an esoteric aspect which I cannot . . . degrees of initiation . . . It is a complex system, based ultimately on the idea of salvation through, through, through knowledge. ... A very ancient doctrine . . . Gnostic ..."

"So if you know the right things, you go to heaven. Yes, well, I can understand that. The opposite is not knowing J things, and that's pretty hellish, Mr. Beech. I didn't know for three years that I was married to Mr. Parrish, for instance. Is that an example of the secret knowledge you're so devoted to.'*"

"Miss Lockhart, I beg you to allow me to explain. ..."

"That's exactly what I've come for."

He pulled out a chair and sat down across the table. His skin was loose, papery, and yellow; he looked as if he'd been profoundly ill. Nicholas's Crockford's Clerical Direaory had revealed that he was in his early fifties, but he looked eighty. His eyes were watery and bloodshot. She had never seen such guilt, such weakness, such misery, such—^what.^* There was a cunning stubbornness in his face, too, which she did not like.

"Well.?" she said.

"It was something which occurred when I was not altogether in my full health," he said. His eyes would look at her a moment, and then flick away again. "Since I was a young man, as a missionary in the tropics, I have been subject to a ... a ... an affliction which renders me, from time to time, perhaps . . . ah . . . less sure in my judgment than I should be. This incident ... to my intense regret, my profound embarrassment ... it fell in one of those periods."

"Why did you do it.?"

"I have explained. I cannot be sure of my actions at such times. It was a deplorable lapse, truly deplorable. I admit it freely."

"I asked why. Why did you do it.? Did he make you.?"

"He.?"

"Parrish, of course."

"It is hard to be sure, at this distance. . . . Please believe me, I was not acting from malice; I had no idea that there was really anyone of your name. It was of the nature of a jest, a sportive essay in . . ."

"Oh, stop lying, Mr. Beech. Have you any notion of what this has led to.'"'

"Please, Miss—er—Lockhart, please keep your voice a little lower, I beg you—"

"I have a daughter. Yes, an illegitimate daughter, but mine, and I love her. Her father is dead. I have never met Mr. Parrish in my life. Suddenly I was served with papers saying that he was suing me for divorce and custody of my child. He was able to tell this—this fantastic lie because of what you did three years ago when you entered a false record in the marriage register. I've been trying to find you ever since I saw it there, and now I've finally tracked you down, you're going to have to testify in court that you made that false entry. You're the only person who can say with absolute certainty that Parrish did not marry me that January. If you . . ."

She stopped, aware that he was shaking his head. She stared. He looked down.

"You're going to have to," she said again.

"No. I cannot."

"W^}'.^Why are you doing this to me? My daughter —you'll let a complete stranger take her away from me.^ Whyf

He swallowed several times, tried to speak, made as if to get up. She reached across the table and seized his papery wrist, aware of the urgent strength in her fingers and quite willing to snap those frail bones if that would have helped.

"Please—you're hurting me—"

"Why did you do it.^" What hold has he got over you, for God's sake.? Why won't you admit it's not true.'*"

"I cannot—I cannot be spoken to like this—"

The door opened. Mr. Beech looked around like a guilty schoolboy.

"May I ask what is the occasion for this extraordinary display?" said the priest who'd shown Sally in.

She let go of Mr. Beech's wrist, and he sank backward, sniveling, his lower lip quivering, tears in his eyes.

"I am trying to persuade Mr. Beech to do what he knows is right. He has grievously harmed me and endangered my child, and only he can make things right. Mr. Beech, I ask you again: Will you testify in court that you made a false entry in that marriage register.^"

"I cannot be compelled. ... It would be quite incompatible with my, my, my work for the Order of Sanctissima Sophia for me to be submitted to the cross-examination of a—"

"Very well. Will you sign an affidavit saying it?"

"I cannot do that. It would be improper for a man of, of the cloth to commit himself to, to an oath of any kind."

"Mr. Beech has made his position clear, it seems to me," said the other man. "I think you will not gain anything by adopting a threatening manner. I must ask you to leave."

He moved toward her, and desperately she said, "Very well, I shan't threaten Mr. Beech with anything. I'll even withdraw my request for his help in court. He can stay here undisturbed. But you must see that I need to know why! Why did you do it? Was it Parrish who made you, or someone else? What did they do to make you sign that register.?"

"No, it was not! I don't know anyone called Parrish!"

"You wrote a letter to a clergyman in Clapham recommending Mr. Parrish. You must have known him."

"I was ill!"

"Who was it, three years ago? Who came to you and got you to sign the register?"

They were all three standing, and none of them moved for some moments. Finally Mr. Beech made a convulsive little shudder and began to cry. His shoulders heaved, the tears ran thickly down his cheeks, his hands mopped helplessly at his nose and his eyes. The other man turned and

let him out the door; Sally heard his frail footsteps mount the stairs.

The priest shut the door again.

'i do not know what is best in this case," he said heavily. "Mr. Beech is of course subject to the disciplines of this order, which he joined recently, but they do not include the power to force brothers to reveal anything they wish to keep private. . . . But there is another involved, namely yourself, and if I understand you correctly there is a child in danger. This is very difficult."

He looked at the tawdry picture over the mantelpiece as if for inspiration.

"What I can do is this. It did not come to me in the confessional, and I don't consider it especially secret; the housekeeper knows, and the gardener's boy knows, and better you should hear it from me than from someone of that sort. Mr. Beech has been suffering for years from a condition which he contracted as a young man. He told me when he first joined this order that he had recovered from it, but to my sorrow I discovered that that was not true. He was receiving packages brought to him and left in the care of the housekeeper, as I say, or the gardener's boy. So I can make a guess that the sender of those packages was the same person who made him do whatever it is that has hurt you—the same person who is still in control of him."

"Still.?"

"Oh, yes. Mr. Beech is unhappily still a victim; I fear that at his age ..."

"But what is this illness of his.? And why should it give anyone else a hold over him.?"

"Oh, I beg your pardon; I should have made it clearer. Mr. Beech is a victim of morphine. He is addicted to the consumption of opium."

Opium . . .

Sally had shivered when she heard that. She'd had expe-

rience of what opium could do, and now she understood Nicholas Bedwell's curious reference in the letter: because his twin brother had been trapped, as Mr. Beech was, into helpless dependence on the drug.

So it was blackmail: sign that register, or we'll expose you. His will weakened by years of addiction, he'd signed. All that Sanctissima Sophia nonsense was an attempt to forget, to cover up, to distract his guilt by flinging mysticism in its face. How many other weak little crimes had he committed.'* How many other lies had he told.'*

But they were still supplying him with the drug. That was interesting. It was why he didn't want to say any more, of course; they might cut off the supply. There was something in this opium connection that made an alarm bell jangle somewhere in Sally's mind. The hair on her neck was bristling, and she didn't know why.

She spent the early part of the evening playing with Harriet and cutting bread for the supper which they all shared. Harriet was definitely not well. She had a slight fever, and she couldn't concentrate on any game for long without becoming cross and tearful, and Sally was torn between her desire to fuss over Harriet and her awareness of the much worse sufferings of some of the other children.

When she had a spare moment, she went to the dispensary to see if Dr. Turner could reassure her about the fever; and to her surprise she found the doctor alone and in tears.

"Oh—silly—can't help it, damn it. But it always takes me like this—oh, when will we be able to change things.'*"

Sally put her arms around her and let her sob. It seemed that a woman with tuberculosis had come to the mission ear-Her, and Dr. Turner had had to send her away. She should have gone to the London Hospital in the Whitechapel Road, not far away, but she'd refused.

"They know it's a sentence of death—they only go there to die, they all say that, and they won't go in. She begged me to let her in here, but, oh, I can't let disease in—I just

daren't Any infecrion will spread and spread. She's just going to sleep in the street, I know it—"

Sally let her cry; she was so strong, so honest in her tears, that Sally had to cry too, for Dr. Turner, for the little boy Johnny, for the woman with consumption, for all those poor stunted lives. And all her own fears and problems seemed not separate for once but part of them, part of this great ocean of unhappiness that was lapping at the door of the mission.

''I'm no use to you," Sally said.

They looked at each other, each tear-stained and red-eyed. Dr. Turner shook her head. Then she stood back and blew her nose and sighed.

"Come and listen to Jack Burton tonight," she said. "He'll cheer both of us up."

"Who's he.?"

"A docker. He's trying to get all the dockworkers behind the union, so the union can help all the workers. Unless they're united, you see, they can be exploited so easily. Jack Burton's so cheerful, such a powerful speaker, he lifts my heart, makes me think it's all possible. Do come, Sally! May I call you Sally.? I'm Angela."

"I'd like to. I'd love to. This is a new world to me; I'd never dreamed of things like this, troubles like this—those matchbox makers I saw this morning. But . . .I'm worried about Harriet. She's got a slight fever, and I don't think I ought to go out. Anyway, there's someone coming to see me. About the business involving Harriet, you remember. I'll tell you more about it soon; I found out something today. I think I'm on the track."

"You'll come another time.? Sally, I can't tell you how much strength there is, how much wasted talent and imagination and all those qualities like intelligence and courage and leadership and vision. They're all there, in working men and women. They don't need middle-class do-gooders like me! All they need is the chance. ..."