When the Devil Drives (3 page)

‘I'm not allowed in here, am I?'

‘It's all right. Mrs Martley won't be back from Bloomsbury for another hour.'

Mrs Martley wouldn't tolerate Tabby in the house. Since I paid the rent, I could have insisted, but compromised for the sake of domestic peace. I told Tabby to lay two places at the table, carried a saucepan of Mrs Martley's good mutton broth to the fire and roused the sullen and cindery coals. Tabby sat and watched while I knelt on the hearthrug and stirred the broth. It should have been the other way round, but she was about as easy to domesticate as a March hare and it was less trouble to do it myself.

‘Well, what did you make of Mr James?' I said, carrying the saucepan to the table. I thought she might have been impressed by his sad story and his callow good looks. She made a face.

‘Thinks the sun revolves round him, don't he?'

‘Ah, so that struck you as well. Why?'

She chewed a nugget of mutton and thought about it. ‘I reckon it was him talking to her all the time, not noticing what she said. You picked him up on that, not seeing or hearing her.'

More to the point, Tabby had picked up my picking him up.

‘He says he loves her.'

‘Oh, that.' She tore off a hunk of the loaf.

‘Tabby, please use the bread knife. You don't think he means it?'

She shrugged, as if to say that was nothing to the point.

‘I think he means it,' I said. ‘I daresay he goes for long gloomy walks and writes bad poetry to her.'

‘What's poetry?'

I stared at her. She wasn't joking. ‘It's words going together and rhyming,' I said. ‘Like “Where Alph, the sacred river ran Through caverns measureless to man”.'

‘Oh, you mean what people sing when they're drunk. Kitty's titties and things like that.'

‘Well . . . but coming back to our client, how do you suggest we set about looking for Miss Dora Tilbury?'

As far as the case offered any profit at all, it would make a prentice piece for educating Tabby in our business. Tracing missing persons is nine-tenths tedium, asking the same question time after time without result.

‘She must have gone somewhere after she got off the coach,' Tabby said.

‘Exactly. We start from the last thing we know about her. She gets off the coach at the Three Nuns in Aldersgate. Either she gets straight onto another coach, in which case the driver or the clerk who books the places will have noticed, or she walks out of the yard.'

I thought of a wise saying of my friend Amos Legge, the most fashionable groom in Hyde Park: Anyone who goes anywhere has to do it on two feet or four. When it came to inquiries in the world that went on four feet I could call on his help if necessary.

‘If she walked out of the yard,' I went on, ‘she has two choices. She turns left or she turns right. Young women travelling on their own aren't so very common. If we ask questions at and around the Three Nuns, we might find somebody who saw which way she went.'

This was where my new apprentice might prove her worth. Ragged boys who loitered for a chance to earn pennies holding horses or carrying bags might talk more easily to somebody who'd grown up like them, on the streets.

‘She didn't know London,' I said. ‘She'd have hesitated, wondering what to do and where to go.'

And yet I couldn't picture it. Something was wrong.

‘Unless there was somebody meeting her,' Tabby said.

‘According to Mr James, she didn't know a soul in London.'

‘So he said.'

‘You're suggesting there was somebody and he didn't know about it?'

She shrugged.

I looked at her, thinking that this made sense. Up to then, I couldn't understand how any creature who lived and breathed could have been as dull as he made Dora Tilbury out to be. By his account, this girl had lived nineteen years without acquiring friends, interests, dreams or any more experience of the world around her than a reasonably enterprising rabbit. It didn't match the young woman who'd got up on a dark autumn morning, walked on her own to the local inn and taken herself off to a city where she knew nobody.

‘He said that in their hearts they were engaged,' I said. ‘I wonder if he might be wrong about her heart.'

‘You mean she liked somebody else better and he didn't know it?'

‘It's possible, isn't it? If he thought he loved a girl, it might not even occur to him that she didn't return the sentiment.'

Looked at that way, Miss Tilbury's blankness became comprehensible. He knew nothing about her hopes or dreams because she hadn't chosen to confide in him.

I stood up and carried our empty bowls to the sink. ‘Let's stay with the hypothesis that there's another man,' I said.

‘Hypo . . .?'

‘Let's assume for the moment it's true. It must be somebody her guardian didn't approve of, or she wouldn't have needed to run away.'

I wished I'd thought to ask if Miss Tilbury wrote or received many letters. There might have been some man she'd met only fleetingly and had fallen in love with by correspondence. I imagined her poring over a final decisive letter:
Come to me, my darling. I'll be there to meet you off the coach and whisk you away and marry you.
Had the fawn gone by arrangement to meet her own particular prowling lion?

‘We'll be at the Three Nuns tomorrow to meet the coach,' I said. ‘If we're there at the time she arrived, a week later, it might help to jog people's memories.'

‘If it's another man, he might have wanted to get his hands on her money, then kill her,' Tabby said cheerfully.

I was about to ask what she was talking about, until I remembered that Miss Tilbury's two hundred a year would seem like a fortune to Tabby.

‘I think a murderous fortune-hunter would expect more than two hundred,' I said.

I'd slipped Mr James' two sovereigns and two shillings into my pocket. I took out the shillings and gave them to her. ‘Your wages.'

She looked at me doubtfully. ‘I haven't done nothing yet.'

‘You will. I'll meet you at the bottom of the stairs at nine o'clock tomorrow morning.'

Timekeeping was no problem with her. She could count up to twelve by the chimes of the workhouse clock on the other side of the churchyard. I watched from the window as she walked across the yard to the wooden cabin that was the nearest thing she'd ever had to a home. Tabby was fifteen years old, she thought. She could hardly remember a mother and she'd never met her father. I'd gathered from a few things she'd said that her mother's acquaintance with him had been fleeting and probably commercial. Until a few months ago, she'd survived on the streets of London, begging or running errands, flapping away pigeons to harvest crusts of bread from gutters, sleeping in doorways. Hopes of better pickings on the streets of Mayfair had brought her to Abel Yard, where she'd slept on old sacks in a lean-to next to milkman Colley's cowshed. Then she'd saved my life. She'd demanded nothing in return and if I'd offered nothing would simply have shrugged and turned back to the streets. I'd decided to try to help her by gradual stages. Mr Colley had a son-in-law who pretended to be a carpenter. Since the man was as idle as an aristocrat, his carpenter's shed was rarely used. Ten shillings from me persuaded him to partition it and make half into a space not unlike a ship's cabin, where a small person might sleep. Another ten shillings eventually produced a bed platform, three pegs on the wall and a small chest made from old planks for Tabby's few possessions. Bedding, blankets and a rag rug for the floor came from our living quarters, so cost me only an argument with Mrs Martley and remarks from her about taking riff-raff out of the gutter. When I'd first showed the cabin to Tabby she'd looked at me as if I'd offered her Blenheim Palace but she wasn't sure she liked the architecture.

‘Do I have to stay here all the time?'

‘Only when you want to. It's not a prison.'

For three days after that, we didn't see hide or hair of her. On the fourth night she slept in the cabin. Now that the evenings were growing colder and darker, I'd glance out to the yard most nights and see the glimmer of her candle through cracks in the wall.

I decided that I'd better clear away the evidence of our meal before Mrs Martley came back. The water bucket was empty, so I carried it down to the dark cubbyhole under the stairs that housed our pump and the drain for slop water. The pump valve needed replacing and every pull on the handle made a noise like a donkey braying. It took me a while to realize that somebody was shouting my name from the yard.

‘Excuse me, where can I find Liberty Lane?'

I turned. The man standing there looked as if he hadn't rested or eaten for days. He was hatless, his dark jacket buttoned up to the chin, brown hair disordered, eyes feverishly bright. His voice and the whole of his long body were vibrating with urgency.

‘Tom Huckerby,' I said. ‘What's wrong?'

No mistering or missing with us. That had always been his way, from years back when I'd met him as one of my father's friends. I'd seen him twice since my return to London, once addressing a crowd at Hyde Park Corner on the evils of the new poor laws, once leading a march on Parliament. He was political to his fingertips, with a passion for justice and a contempt for possessions so total that if he ever happened to come by money or good clothes they instantly spun away from him like things in a cyclone. He'd twice served prison sentences for organizing demonstrations against the government.

‘We need a hiding place.'

My heart sank. Politically, I was on his side but my way of life was precarious enough without having to harbour wanted men. Still, my father's daughter couldn't turn him away.

‘How many of you are there?' I said.

‘Not us. Not this time at any rate. It's our printing press. The devils sent the bailiffs in at first light this morning but we managed to get it away from them. We've been looking all day for somewhere to keep it where they won't find it.'

The authorities had several ways of dealing with protesters, apart from prison sentences. Heavy fines and legal costs meant that possession orders were constantly hanging over Tom Huckerby and people of his kind. Confiscating the presses that produced radical broadsheets or short-lived newspapers critical of the authorities was a tidy way of suppressing them.

‘Where is it?' I said.

He led the way through the gateway into Adam's Mews. A flat cart was standing there, with a small and weary-looking pony in the shafts. A plump young man standing beside the pony gave me a smile that was surprisingly cheerful in the circumstances.

‘That's it.' Tom Huckerby pointed at an assembly of shapes covered in old sacks on the cart.

‘Weighs a ton, it does,' said the young man in a strong Welsh accent. ‘You should have seen us getting it over the wall.'

‘We might just get it in behind the pump,' I said. ‘Bring the cart up as close as you can.'

The young man led the pony and cart through the gateway. I cleared some old cans and buckets away from the cubbyhole, revealing a space behind the pump. Their muscles cracking from the strain, the two men slid the largest of the components to the edge of the cart and staggered with it over the cobbles. I tugged at a canvas sack, intending to follow, but could hardly move it.

‘That's the type,' said the young man, coming back, his face shining with sweat. ‘Solid lead it is.'

The two of them hauled it off the cart and I helped drag it behind the pump. The rest of the parts were lighter and we managed to get all of them wedged in and covered with sacks.

‘We'll send for it when we can,' Tom Huckerby said.

I took one of the sovereigns out of my pocket. ‘This won't go far, but it might save you sleeping in the park.'

Tom Huckerby received it without embarrassment and the young man thanked me. I watched them go, torn between shame that I hadn't given him both the sovereigns and regret that my small profit was melting away so quickly. Professionally speaking, I could not class it as one of my more successful days.

TWO

N
ext day Tabby and I took the omnibus from Piccadilly to the City and were at the Three Nuns well before the coach from Braintree arrived. Tabby stayed in the yard, striking up conversations with stable lads and loitering boys. I talked to the publican and established that nobody of Miss Tilbury's description had been seen inside his inn on the previous Thursday or at any other time. The booking clerk, in his booth at the end of the stable block, was sure that no such woman had taken a seat in any outward-bound coach that day. A crossing sweeper in the street outside thought he might have seen a young lady in a blue cloak, but it became clear that he'd happily claim sight of a waltzing rhinoceros if he thought there might be pennies in it.