The Path of the Wicked Page 9

  In the morning we went to town and Mr Godwit made a great production of seeing me comfortably settled at the Queen’s. We drank coffee together; then he went off to do various errands, promising to come and collect me around noon the next day. I unpacked my travelling bag in my room and then strolled out to take a measure of the town. Like spas everywhere, it moved to the quiet rhythms of people not quite ill but not exactly well. A stream of elderly people in bath chairs pushed by maids or valets rolled along the wide Promenade. The people in the chairs were swathed in rugs, although the day was hot enough for ladies to need sunshades. Among pedestrians, white-haired men with a military look still managed something like a marching step by precise placing of their walking canes. Many of them had sunburned faces that suggested long service in the Indian army, or yellowish complexions from troubled livers. Somebody told me later that people from the Indian service liked Cheltenham for retirement because it reminded them of their summer hill stations in the Himalayan foothills. The public buildings were grand and mostly quite new, designed for people with cultivated tastes and time on their hands. There were the assembly rooms, a Literary and Philosophical Institution, a bandstand for concerts. One great advantage of the place was the large number of women out walking on their own or in pairs. Most of them were middle-aged and I assumed that they were invalids there to take the waters or comfortably-off widows living in the terraces and hotels. Their presence meant I wasn’t conspicuous on my own.

  At this time of day at least, it wasn’t a town for young men. I saw nobody resembling the gentlemen jockeys I’d seen up on Cleeve Hill, or anybody at all who looked like a racing man. In one way this was a relief, because I was in no hurry to encounter Henry Littlecombe. In other ways, it was disappointing because I was hoping to pick up some gossip about the missing Peter Paley. That was one of my reasons for coming to town; the other a need to find somebody who knew about Jack Picton’s radical and probably revolutionary activities. I hadn’t been specific about either of them to Mr Godwit, because I knew he’d disapprove of both. After a while I went back to the hotel, ate a good lunch at a table of my own in the dining room, and asked a rather surprised porter for directions to the Mechanics’ Institute. In Albion Street, he said, not far from the hotel. I walked there in the afternoon sunshine and found the doors closed, hardly surprising because the mechanics of the town were likely to be at work. A noticeboard beside the doors gave an idea of the serious-mindedness and politics of the place: a lecture by a Chartist who’d been in prison for his views, an appeal for everybody to sign the petition demanding reprieves for the Newport rioters and, more surprisingly, a meeting of the women’s branch of the local working men’s association. I pushed one of the doors and it opened. A woman was sweeping the hall floor inside. I apologized for troubling her and said I was hoping to find Mr Barty Jones. She looked me in the eye, sizing me up.

  ‘Who wants him?’

  ‘My name is Liberty Lane, but that won’t mean anything to him. I’m a friend of a man he knows in London, a printer named Tom Huckerby.’

  It was hard to tell from her expression if the name meant anything to her. Tom had friends and allies in most parts of the country.

  ‘Mr Jones isn’t here.’

  ‘Do you know when he might be? I could call back later.’

  ‘You could try this evening, if you like. There’s a meeting on at seven.’

  I thanked her and walked back to the Promenade, wondering how best to burrow into local gossip. It would probably come my way naturally if I stayed in town a week, but I couldn’t wait that long. Still wondering, I came back to the Literary and Philosophical Institution. Quite a different atmosphere here from the Mechanics’ Institute, more leisurely and less political. The notices outside advertised concerts and lectures, including one happening this afternoon on the habits and habitats of British butterflies. Ladies and gentlemen strolled in and out. I went inside and found the reading room. Elderly men were taking an after-lunch doze in leather armchairs; a clergyman and a grey-haired woman sitting side by side at a table were reading newspapers. With nothing much in mind, I settled myself at a small table with a pile of local newspapers. For a small town, Cheltenham seemed to generate quite a few. At the top of the pile were copies of the Cheltenham Looker-On. It turned out to be a cheerful and gossipy publication, mostly chronicling recent arrivals in the town. A name in an edition of a few weeks ago caught my eye: Mr D’Israeli, the veteran author of Curiosities of Literature and other well-known works, is at present sojourning amongst us. My laugh woke up one of the sleepers and brought a look of reproach. This veteran author was the father of my now ex-friend, Benjamin Disraeli MP. It seemed I couldn’t get away from the family. I read through the next edition, wondering whether the senior Mr D’Israeli was still in town. Then, quite unexpectedly, I came across another name I knew. The paragraph was curt and not at all sociable.

  Mr Colum Paley wishes it to be known by all concerned that from the present date onward he will not be responsible for any debts or obligations incurred by his son, Peter Paley, however and whenever they were entered into.

  Somebody had taken the trouble to circle the paragraph in thick black pencil. I checked the date. It was the week before Mary Marsh was killed and Peter Paley had disappeared. Mr Godwit had mentioned that Paley senior had grown impatient with his son’s debts, and here was the proof of it.

  Wondering who might have been interested enough to circle the announcement, I looked up and found the clergyman had stopped reading his paper and was looking at me. He was holding a pencil. It looked very much like the sort of pencil that would make thick black marks. I met his eye and gave a questioning look towards my paper. Sure enough, it brought him over to stand beside me.

  ‘Allow me to introduce myself. Reverend Francis Close, vicar of this parish. Do I take it that you’re a visitor here?’

  His voice was low but sonorous, as if he created the acoustics of the pulpit round himself wherever he went. He was a good-looking man and, I guessed, conscious of it. The woman he’d been sitting beside was watching him with devotion. I gave him my name and admitted to being a visitor.

  ‘I see you’re observing our depravities,’ he said, nodding towards the paper. ‘I’m afraid we have many of them.’

  ‘More than other places?’

  He frowned, aware I wasn’t taking him quite seriously. ‘I believe so. Card playing, dancing, racing and gambling among the wealthy and idle; ingratitude, Chartism and socialism among the working men. Now we are being told we must submit to the arrival and departure of railway trains on the Lord’s Day. We shan’t allow it.’

  ‘Cheltenham didn’t strike me as particularly sinful,’ I said.

  ‘That’s because you don’t know it yet.’

  ‘Did you know this young man in the paper?’

  ‘Only by reputation, as a typical young gambler, wasting his substance and his life.’

  ‘That seems to be his father’s opinion, certainly.’

  He frowned. ‘Like father, like son. I wouldn’t want you to take away the impression that because Colum Paley is at last acknowledging his son’s sins – for the preservation of his own purse – he has none of his own. If anything, the father is worse than the son.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘In ways that I shall not even sully your ears by mentioning. I refer to his reputation only because some misguided people in our community have chosen to treat him as an honourable man. I should not wish an innocent visitor to fall into that error.’

  Judging from his expression, he was only just giving me the benefit of the doubt on the question of innocence. I thanked him for his concern, disappointed at not getting more specific information, and walked out of the reading room.

  The butterfly talk had just finished. Some of the audience were coming out of the lecture room, others lingering inside to look at collections of butterflies and pictures of them on the walls. I went in, trying to weigh up who would be most likely to joi
n a stranger like me in a cup of tea and a gossip. Most were women, with a few gentlemen. I’ve no taste for looking at dead butterflies under glass, so I pretended to concentrate on the pictures. It was a temporary exhibition, mounted on cards rather than framed, mostly amateur and of varying quality. The colour more than anything else drew my attention to a small painting of the common blue butterfly. It was carefully done in watercolour from three different aspects: on a birdsfoot-trefoil flower with wings folded to show the underside, wings spread and then in flight. The artist had worked with precision, showing every vein in the wings. Equally carefully, he or she had added the date bottom left: April 1840. The signature was on the right-hand side. I glanced at it from idle curiosity and then must have made some sound or movement because people were staring at me. The artist’s name was Mary Marsh. A tall woman with curly grey hair was standing next to me. She smiled.

  ‘Yes, it’s very well done, isn’t it?’

  ‘The artist . . .’ I said.

  ‘She’s dead now, poor girl. We had a series of classes on painting butterflies earlier this year. She brought her pupil to them, but the girl wasn’t very interested. Mary had much more talent.’

  ‘Barbara Kemble,’ I said. ‘Mary Marsh was her governess.’

  I was trying to catch up, staggered at coming close to Mary Marsh so unexpectedly.

  ‘You knew Mary?’ said the woman. She was kind, taking my surprise for distress.

  ‘No, not really. That’s to say . . .’

  A male arm in a black sleeve reached out between the woman and me. While I’d been looking at the picture, I’d been aware of steps coming up behind me and somebody standing there, but I had been too absorbed to take much notice. I half turned, surprised at the rudeness. A hand came past my cheek, scrabbled at the edge of the picture and, before the woman or I could do anything, tore it off the wall and let it drop to the floor. Reverend Close stood there with the self-satisfied look of an Old Testament prophet watching a sinful town destroyed.

  ‘It should not be there,’ he said, in a voice that carried all around the room.

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  He spoke to the room, not to me. ‘To the pure, all things are pure. From the impure, everything is impure.’

  ‘Only half of that is in the Bible,’ said the woman beside me, with some spirit.

  He disregarded her, turned on his heel and walked out, leaving first a silence, then a surge of the over-bright conversation that comes from general unease. Although some of the people had put on church-going expressions that suggested they agreed with the vicar, I sensed that others were embarrassed by him. I bent down and picked up the picture. The butterfly with wings spread was torn right across.

  ‘I’m so very sorry,’ the kind woman said. ‘It can be mended, I think.’

  ‘But why did he do it?’

  ‘Because he’s exactly the kind of man who would cast the first stone. He thinks he has a monopoly on the scriptures, but there are other people who can read the Bible as well.’

  She was indignant, cheeks flushed. ‘I’m so sorry this should have happened to you.’

  I accepted her suggestion that we should go for a tea and we went to the refreshment room next door. Her name was Felicity Dell, a doctor’s widow. I told her that I was staying with Mr Godwit, without introducing the distant relation fiction. She’d met him several times and liked him. When tea had been brought, I turned the conversation back to Mary Marsh.

  ‘Why is Reverend Close so insulting about her?’

  ‘Because he listens to rumours.’

  ‘What rumours?’

  ‘I feel as if I’m being disloyal to the poor girl’s memory, even passing them on. People are so ready to believe the worst.’

  ‘Believe me, Mrs Dell, I’ve no interest at all in harming her reputation. But I have reasons for wanting to know why she was killed. I’m afraid I can’t tell you what the reasons are, but if the rumours had anything to do with her death, I’d like to know about them.’

  ‘They have, yes. Some people say she was . . . let’s say, she was too friendly with the man who’s accused of killing her – with Picton.’

  ‘Did those rumours start before or after she was murdered?’

  She looked around, making sure nobody was listening. ‘Most of them afterwards, but . . . I haven’t told anybody else this, because I didn’t want to blacken her reputation any further. But the fact is, I did see her and the Picton man together.’

  ‘Recently?’

  ‘No, in early May, at the time of the butterfly classes. It was a series of five, over five weeks. We worked in pairs, two to a specimen case, and as it happened she and I were usually together. Her pupil, Barbara, was put with one of the other girls. I liked Miss Marsh. She seemed very quiet in her manner at first, but when you got to know her, she had some incisive opinions and a sense of humour. She seemed to enjoy the classes, so I was surprised when she didn’t attend the last one. Barbara wasn’t there either, so I assumed the girl was ill and Mary had had to stay with her. When the class was over, I went to see a friend of mine in St James Square. The parish workhouse is just behind the square. I know it well because my husband used to be a visiting doctor there. I walked past the workhouse and there was Mary, talking to a man just outside it. I’m sure that man was Picton.’

  ‘You’d have recognized him?’

  ‘Oh yes. Jack Picton is pretty well known in town – the demon king as far as some people are concerned.’

  ‘You were surprised to see them together?’

  ‘Yes. I couldn’t think how they’d have met.’

  ‘Did you say anything?’

  ‘No. I was on the other side of the road. They were deep in conversation. I’m sure she didn’t see me. To be honest, I didn’t think of it again until those rumours started.’ She stared at the tablecloth and then added, quite fiercely: ‘Some people, they assume that if a woman gets murdered she must somehow have brought it on herself. I hate that.’

  There was nothing else she could tell me. We exchanged cards and she invited me to call next time I was in town. Before we parted, she offered to take the blue butterfly painting and have it mended for me, but I decided to keep it for the time being. It was the closest I’d come yet to Mary Marsh.

  EIGHT

  At half past six I was back at the Mechanics’ Institute inquiring for Mr Barty Jones. A young man with a fierce scar on his face that looked as if it had been made by hot metal told me his meeting had already started, so I was too late. He had no notion when it might finish. His manner wasn’t especially obstructive, but not welcoming either. I strolled around in the warm evening. Most of the invalids had gone back to their hotels for early dinners and the sociable part of the evening hadn’t properly begun. The assembly rooms and the Literary and Philosophical Institution were closed. The main signs of life were a phaeton clopping along the Promenade, taking a party for an airing, and voices from the open doorway of a public house. A small breeze from the west stirred the dust. I wondered what kind of welcome Amos had found when he came home to his people and whether he’d sold the nervous charger. I missed him. All the time my mind was running on what Mrs Dell had said. Because of that, I followed her route to St James Square, looking for the workhouse.

  Even though I expected it, the place still came as a shock. After the elegant buildings of the rest of the town, it looked like some grim factory. The central building was a hexagonal three-storey block of red brick, with two lower wings radiating out from it at angles. One of them was longer than the other, with an iron cross at the apex of its roof. I guessed that one wing was for men and the other for women, the normal system, with a chapel where, for an hour or so every week, a man and wife kept in the separate wings might have sight of each other. I walked round it. At the back, great wooden gates, ten feet high, were firmly barred. Round the side, a smaller entrance with one word – Workhouse – carved in the stone lintel. The board of guardians who ran the establishment might have sa
ved the money they’d paid to have it chiselled. The place couldn’t be anything other than a workhouse, except perhaps a prison. It really wasn’t very different, except the men and women inside were guilty of poverty and homelessness, not wrongdoing. If Jack Picton and Mary Marsh really were meeting secretly, why should they have chosen this ill-omened spot of all the places in town and country? Wondering that, I hadn’t noticed somebody walking up behind me until he spoke.

  ‘So, you’re admiring our Bastille.’

  For the second time that day, I was being addressed in a voice used to making itself heard in public. But this was different from the self-satisfied tones of Reverend Close. This was a working man, speaking with the local accent. I turned and saw a man of perhaps forty-five or fifty. He was medium height or less and looked as tough as a brick, rectangular in build with broad shoulders, jaw and forehead, his body braced on rather bandy legs. His dark hair was short, flecked with grey.

  ‘Bastille?’

  ‘A hell on earth.’

  ‘The Bastille fell.’

  ‘So will this, one day. Not soon enough, though.’ He gave me a long look, as if waiting for disagreement, and then added: ‘You were looking for me?’

  ‘You’re Mr Barty Jones?’

  A nod. ‘They said a young lady was looking for me.’

  The slight emphasis on ‘lady’ didn’t sound like a compliment. I gave him my name and asked how he knew where to find me.

  ‘I know a lot of things.’

  It sounded like a warning. He could have known where to find me only if somebody at the Mechanics’ Institute had pointed me out as soon as I’d left the building and he’d followed me. That might mean that he’d heard about my earlier visit and had been waiting when I came back, not in a meeting at all.