No Life for a Lady, page 5
It had not always been this way. For the first couple of years after my mother vanished, I had tried to keep house beautifully. But there was something so wearying about it, so all-encompassing; the relentless return of dirt and chaos, and I could never match up to the effortless way my mother had managed the servants. I was the interloper, the poor relation in housekeeping terms; I took over the running of the house before I had built up any authority with those who served us, and my father never quite trusted me to have made a proper transition from dependent daughter to lady of the house. Besides, once I realised that he did not really notice the difference between spotless and spit and polish, I decided the latter would do.
Edith, weary Millie and I gathered in the parlour, and set a plan of action.
‘It would be easier,’ Edith said, ‘if we had more help and then we could do it as we went along, rather than all last minute and topsy-turvy like this.’ She despised me, most of the time, but I couldn’t blame her, because I couldn’t pay her that well and her job was not at all joyful or rewarding. She was often scrambling to keep up with all that needed to be done. My mother had somehow inspired the same devotion in our servants as she had in everyone else and they had forever been doing more than they needed to, purely to please her. I was not my mother.
‘I can’t afford to hire anyone else, Edith,’ I said. ‘Right, so shall we divide it by floor? I can do the bedrooms. Edith, can you do this floor, and perhaps Millie, as it is your domain anyway, the kitchens and suchlike? And then we can meet back here at midday and see how far we have got.’ It was not their ideal solution, I could see, but I had to look as if I was at least nominally in charge.
We went at it. The key, for me at least, was to actually behave like a banshee. My father had left for work, so I tore into his room and ripped the sheets and blankets off his bed as if fighting a death battle with a ghost. Then I ran into my bedroom and did the same there. I picked up all the bedlinen and shot downstairs as fast as I could run and put them in the laundry basket. After that I ran back up, remade everything with clean sheets and blankets, and wiped all the surfaces, then brushed the floors as if they were a fire I had to douse.
It was past time, I realised, to change the tattered newspapers that had lined our chests of drawers and trunks for the past five years or so. I debated for a while using that day’s newspaper before my father had read it but relented. I found older papers, and a new folding technique I called Bundle and Squash helped me put the clothes back in the drawers at record speed.
By lunchtime, I was puggled. If I could have wailed like a banshee, I would have. By the end of the day, I was exhausted. The three of us sat at the kitchen table, sweat and dust in every pore, and agreed to never again let it get so bad. It was the same discussion we had roughly every two months.
‘Violet,’ my father said later that day, ‘all my shirts are crumpled up in my drawers like birds’ nests. Can you sort it out, please? I can’t have creased shirts.’
He seemed grumpy again, and I welcomed back his old self. But by the time I had ironed a shirt for him for the following day, I was ready for bed. By the grand hour of eight and thirty, I was tucked up, ready for sleep.
I couldn’t, of course. I dozed and dreamt of hag-like witches, claiming to be my mother, and oily detectives, their hands outstretched, luring me to a lurid doom. But in between I lay awake and stared at the ceiling, wondering how I could stop Mr Knight from bringing my family into disrepute.
At midnight I gave up on sleep and lit my oil lamp. I had stupidly taken all the books in my bedroom back downstairs so instead I read the pages from the Hastings Observer of five years before. The old news was not interesting, the typeset fading, and it was not long before I found my eyelids drooping.
Seconds before I threw them aside, I spotted another advertisement. It was very small, uncoloured, with no illustrations, no great boasts, barely even twenty words long.
It was for another detective.
Chapter Eight
I had to go. I had to go and find this Mr Blackthorn, Mr Bernard Blackthorn, and see what he was like. If he was like Mr Knight, erring on unpleasant, then I would know that all detectives were like that, and I would put up with it. But what if there were other detectives, who were more as I had imagined them to be? The detectives I had read about, who were principled, upstanding, understanding, heroic. A little like a knight, stuffed full of chivalry and a desire to ride to the rescue of forlorn spinsters.
The thoughts raced around my head all night until eventually I dropped off into the sleep of a mummified person around five in the morning, to be woken two hours later by a seagull cawing outside.
Mr Blackthorn’s office was in Hastings, on the edge of the old town. I would lose my way in the maze of streets uphill, so I walked down to the seafront and then along the flat, wide promenade. There was a sharp wind coming off the sea and my skirts whipped around my ankles, but I put my head down and continued, fighting to remain respectable and not be blown out to sea. This was a more familiar battle to me than the much-heralded 1066 event, which had been fought a good seven miles away at a place appropriately called Battle.
Just before the black fishing huts, I turned left up a narrow, cobbled street lined on either side with rows of small houses. In this area the rooftops were all odd heights, walls and windows bulging, later additions jutting out; they were homes built and adapted for living in, across centuries. Many sat on a high pavement that ran above street level, hiding deep cellars and connecting tunnels built for smugglers of years past. The old town was where the real people lived and traded: the fishermen, shopkeepers, seamstresses, publicans; those who did not have the luxury of choosing the town for its fresh air.
It was also rougher here, and I was glad I never adopted the latest fashions. Giant leg o’mutton sleeves or hats adorned with flamingo feathers would only serve to advertise me as prime fodder for pickpockets in this part of town.
Mr Blackthorn’s premises were up a side street that led into a small square, surrounded by high walls on three sides. The door might once have been bright red but was weathered to a dull, peeling brown. There was no sign, no gold lettering, only a rusty number three, which had lost a screw and hung upside down. I pulled the bell, and it clanged deep within.
There was no answer. I turned the handle and pushed the door and it opened, sagging inwards, so I clambered over the step and went in.
It was a junk shop. There was furniture everywhere, wardrobes, chests of drawers, bookcases, ornaments piled high enough to cover all but the tops of the windows, so light squeezed in only reluctantly. There was no obvious pathway through it all, and if I headed in any particular direction, I might embrace a roll of carpet.
‘Hello,’ I cried, and from the depths of the maze I heard footsteps. Or not quite footsteps, but a dragging sound and a thud. I conjured up Quasimodo, Frankenstein’s monster and Cyclops, before a man appeared through the gloom.
He had a long beard and he was very tall. He looked at me, making a sound halfway between a harrumph and a cough.
‘You want a chair?’ he asked. I could not see one that was not covered in piles of books and papers. ‘Or a wardrobe?’ He ran his hand over his face. ‘A bookcase?’
‘No, I want a detective,’ I said. ‘Mr Bernard Blackthorn.’
‘Ah… ah.’ He stood awkwardly. ‘That was my father. He died around a year ago. I am Benjamin, Benjamin Blackthorn. I sell furniture now,’ he said. ‘I did carry it on for a bit, but then… this.’ He gestured at his left leg, which was sandwiched between two wooden splints. ‘I’m tall… men like to try. I’m not much of a fighter. My father was shorter. It was better for the business.’
We stood and looked at each other silently for a second. Although he was so injured and unkempt, I did not get the sense from him that I wanted to flee and never look back. The relief outweighed my disappointment that he was no longer a detective.
‘I am Violet Hamilton. I am here about my mother. She was very beautiful,’ I said. It was always best to get that out at the beginning. ‘She disappeared about ten years ago, from Hastings. You might have read about it. The police didn’t search for very long.’
‘I only moved here in the last year or so,’ he said. ‘Here, have yourself a seat.’ He cleared away the rubbish from the armchair one-armed, dumping it on top of a cabinet and then propping himself against a sideboard.
‘Missing persons can be fiendishly difficult to solve,’ he said. ‘People disappear for all kinds of reasons, and it is harder than you think to find them. There are cities you can disappear in, make a new identity, and no one will question it. It might take a lot of time and a lot of money. And how much are you prepared for the other option?’
‘The other option?’
‘That she isn’t alive any more,’ he said. ‘Are you willing to face that? Face whatever might have happened to her to prevent her coming home, however horrible that might be? Or perhaps that if she was found alive, she might not be the person you remember? Life is not always kind.’
My eyes were getting used to the gloom, and I could see he looked tired, as if life had not been kind to him either.
‘I have already employed the other detective, the one by the seaside, Mr Frank Knight,’ I said. ‘But I think – he is not – I think I may have made a mistake. Do you take on occasional cases?’
He sighed and ran his hand along the wood of the sideboard, reflectively. It was a strong hand, used to doing practical things.
‘I’ve come across him. He’s only been in town a few weeks. He seems a straightforward chap. What’s your difficulty with him?’
Mr Blackthorn was the one who was straightforward. He was so different from Mr Knight, so solidly reassuring, without any of the hubris.
There was a strange squawking from a wardrobe, as if a bird was being strangled.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Mr Blackthorn said, and he opened the door of the wardrobe and took out an angry seagull from the hat shelf. It was furious and tried to peck him. He restrained it easily, holding its wings to its body under his arm and its neck with his other hand. He limped to the door and placed it on a stone mounting block outside. I was sure it cursed at him in seagull language before it flew away.
‘It met my window and knocked itself out,’ he said. ‘I found it unconscious outside the shop this morning. I thought it only needed a bit of a rest in the dark and some water, and look, it’s fine now.’
I had risen from my chair but now I sat down again, heavily. This. This was what a detective should be like. The relief of it, that such a detective existed, that kindness existed, was immense. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of pestilent seagulls on the seafront, and he had chosen to rescue one of them. Mr Knight might have killed it and dressed it for dinner.
If I had been a weaker woman, I might have swooned.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ Mr Blackthorn said.
‘Won’t you… won’t you take on my case?’ I said.
‘I’m not one to get in the way of another man’s business,’ he said. ‘What’s your reason for disliking Knight?’
I sighed inwardly, and then took a picture, a clothed picture, of course, of my mother from my reticule and showed it to him. I did not want to let go of it, so we had a brief, awkward tussle and then I realised that he could not easily bend down to look at it more closely and I released it. He raised his eyebrows at me and then examined it.
‘A beauty, then, your mother,’ he said, and handed it back to me. ‘That doesn’t answer my question.’
‘He seems very quick to judge her,’ I said. ‘He has uncovered some things about her and he is not treating them impartially, factually, as a good detective should.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘I would prefer not to discuss them, until you agree to take on my case. They are private.’ I knew I sounded like a prim great-aunt, but I was not ready to trust him fully, even though his demeanour, his consideration for birds, his straightforwardness and perhaps even his beard were very reassuring.
‘What about your family, your husband, your father? Can they not help?’
‘I am a spinster. My father is infirm,’ I said. ‘Nearly blind and possessed of an uneven temperament. I cannot trouble him with this. I had hoped to reunite my mother and father in marital bliss before he dies, but for his sake I need to put an end to this fiendishness.’
I had gone overblown. Although I could barely see his face under the weight of all that hair and bushy eyebrows, I felt he was suppressing a laugh. He frowned abruptly and ran his hand through the curls on his head.
‘If you’re paying him, he should work to the brief you give him,’ he said. ‘Judgement doesn’t come into it. Just tell him how you want it done, be firm. Sometimes ladies can be too polite.’
‘If I can get my money back from him, I can pay you,’ I said. ‘It’s not much, but I’ll pay you whatever I have. I don’t trust him, because… because…’ Why didn’t I trust him? Instincts and feelings would not convince a man.
‘Because?’
‘He wears a holiday blazer and his teeth are too small,’ I said. It sounded pathetic and slightly unhinged.
‘Miss Hamilton, I can’t help you,’ he said. ‘I’ve given it up. Detective work is mostly a filthy business, and I want no part of it. My leg is taking a while to heal and I prefer my limbs intact. My father was the best one. I’m sorry he’s not here.’
‘Won’t you consider it? It seems as if you have some experience in… handling difficulties.’
He shook his head. ‘If you have furniture you want to sell, I can buy it off you. But taking business off other detectives on a whim is not something I do.’
I tried to argue but he clumped his way to the door, opened it awkwardly, and then stood upright like a soldier, waiting for me to leave.
‘What is that?’ I said, on my way out. I was clutching at reasons to stay, I knew. There was a machine on top of a cabinet that looked very pleasing to the eye, black and modern, with fancy curled lettering on it.
‘It’s a typewriter,’ he said. ‘They are the modern way, apparently.’
I was about to ask more but he raised his eyebrows at me, patiently.
‘Very well, I am going,’ I said. ‘I just… I really thought you might help.’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and barely waited for my skirt to clear the step before he closed the door. I stood and blinked my eyes at the glare from the pavement and the sky. The sun had come out, the seagulls were wheeling and shrieking and in the distance was the blue, blue sea. It was hard to hold onto how you really felt when the weather decided to be cheerful. I wanted the rain back to match my mood.
I cried a little in bed that night. My future felt very bleak. I had not minded spinsterhood so much when I had had a mission. But now it was a mission that was likely to end in despair and ruination. At the very best I faced a life of paternal hatred, public shame, dwindling income and knitting bonnets for other women’s babies. And the hairy giant that was Mr Blackthorn had chosen to rescue a seagull over me.
Chapter Nine
Lying was utterly wicked, of course, but sometimes being a female required it.
I called on Mr Knight the very next day and told him another detective was taking over my case.
I had tried to write a letter, because I really did not want to see Mr Knight again, but it did not have the firmness, the decisive, final quality I needed. I realised I had to go and see him, even though all of me quailed at the thought.
He was not expecting me, and when I went into his office he had his feet up on the desk, and he was looking at the pictures of my mother again. At least I thought he was, but when I came in, he threw whatever he was perusing in his desk drawer and slammed it shut, swinging his feet to the floor.
‘Miss Hamilton,’ he said. ‘An unexpected surprise. Take a seat, take a seat. You have come to tell me about your mother. Wait, let me get my pen and ink.’ He bent down and started rooting around in a lower drawer.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, there is no need.’ My voice was a little raspy, so I cleared my throat.
He sat up clutching the pen and the inkstand, placing them on his desk, and then dived back down and brought out some sheets of paper.
‘No,’ I said again. ‘I have decided I am going to hire another detective.’
He stopped dipping his pen in his ink and stared at me. ‘Two detectives?’
‘No, I am going to dispense with you. I mean, your services. I am cancelling your services.’ Why was I so weak, so woolly?
He gave a short laugh and threw down his pen.
‘Miss Hamilton, you cannot do that. You cannot hire a detective, and then fire him.’
‘I can,’ I said, but I could hear the uncertainty in my voice, the lamentable similarity to a mouse squeaking.
‘No, you can’t. I have already invested hours in setting up this investigation for you. It is not done.’
‘I am doing it,’ I said. ‘I should like my money back. I am happy for you to keep whatever you have spent on… outgoings, but I should like the rest back.’
His nostrils flared, and even his moustache looked as if it was perking up and getting angry. He took a deep breath.
‘I don’t think you understand,’ he said. ‘You cannot cancel an investigation on a whim. This is not a tea party. I have put considerable effort and money into this case already. I have uncovered significant leads. This may severely hamper finding out what happened to your mother. I do not think you are being rational.’
‘I feel very rational,’ I said. ‘I have found a better detective.’ Oh God, why had I said that? He half rose from his desk, and then he crossed his arms and sat back down again, breathing through his nose.
