3-Book Victorian Crime Collection: Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour

I was twenty-one and six months at the time.

‘So I have six months to find a husband?’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Hardly that. In fact, I am proposing that we should leave the whole question on the shelf …’

‘And me on the shelf too?’

‘Exactly that, until I return next summer and we can set about the business in a sensible fashion.’

He must have seen the hurt in my face.

‘Libby, I’m not talking about the marriage market. I’m not proposing you trade your youth and beauty for some fat heir to a discredited peerage.’

‘I don’t think they’d rate higher than the second son of a baronet,’ I said, still defensive.

He came and took my hand.

‘You know me better than that. I’m not a young man any more.’ (He was forty-six years old.) ‘I must think of providing for you in the future. I shan’t die a rich man and Tom has his own way to make.’

‘I’d never be a burden on Tom, you know that.’

‘I’ve not been as much of a father to you as I should. But I have tried to give you the important things in life. Your education has been better than most young women’s. You speak French and German adequately and your musical taste is excellent.’

‘That reminds me, I’ve broken another guitar string.’ I was uneasy at hearing myself praised.

‘And we’ve travelled together. You’ve seen the glaciers of Mont Blanc at sunrise and the Roman Forum by moonlight.’

I was wonderfully fortunate, I knew that. When I was back with my father it was easy to forget the other times, lonely and homesick in a cold French convent, or boarded out with a series of more or less resentful aunts or cousins. It was almost possible, though nowhere near as easy, to forget the glint of my brother’s handkerchief waving from the rail of the ship as it left Gravesend to carry him away to India, and the widening gap of dark water.

‘Couldn’t we just go on as we are?’ I asked. ‘Tom will come back one day and I can keep house for him and you. Do I really need a husband?’

He became serious again. ‘The wish of my heart is to see you married to a man you can love and respect who values and cares for you.’

I watched the steam packet go out again, arching sparks from its funnel and trailing a smell of coal dust. In three hours or so it would be in Calais, then perhaps bringing my father back with it. Around noon I felt weary from my early start and went back to my room. I took off my dress and shoes, loosened my stays and laid down on the bed. I must have dozed because I woke with a start, hearing the landlord’s voice at the bottom of the stairs, saying my name.

‘Miss Liberty Lane? Don’t know about the Liberty, but she called herself Miss Lane, at any rate. Give it me and I’ll take it in to her.’

As his heavy footsteps came upstairs I pulled my dress on and did up some essential buttons, heart thumping because either this was a message from my father or my aunt had tracked me after all. But as soon as the landlord handed me the note – adding his own greasy thumb-print – I knew it had nothing to do with Chalke Bissett. The handwriting was strong and sprawling, a man’s hand. The folded paper was sealed with a plain blob of red wax, and a wedge-shaped impression that might have been made with the end of a penknife, entirely anonymous. I broke the seal and read: … take the liberty of addressing you with distressing …

‘Bad news, miss?’

The landlord was still in the room, his eyes hot and greedy. I gripped the edge of the wash-stand, shaking my head. I think I was acting on instinct only, the way a hurt deer runs.

‘I must go to Calais. When’s the next boat?’

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_adfb1ffe-e464-5ffd-9c76-426e033c97d2)

‘Was your father a confirmed and communicant member of the Church of England?’

The clergyman was plump and faded, wisps of feathery brown-grey hair trailing from a bald pate, deep creases of skin round his forehead and jaw giving him a weary look. I’d traced the address on the card I’d been given at the morgue to a terraced house in a side street, with a tarnished brass plate by the door: Rev. Adolphus Bateman, MA (Oxon). This representative of the Anglican Church in the port of Calais was at least living in Christian poverty, if not charity. His skin creases had drawn into a scowl when I’d stood on his doorstep and explained my need. The scowl was still there as we talked in his uncomfortable parlour under framed engravings of Christ Church College and Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery. He smelled of wet woollen clothes and old mouse droppings, familiar to me from enforced evensongs in country churches with various aunts. It was a late autumn English smell and quite how he’d contrived to keep it with him on a fine June morning in Calais was a mystery.

‘Yes, he was.’

I supposed that, back in his schooldays, my father would have gone through the usual rituals. There was no need to tell this clergyman about his frequently expressed view that the poets talked more sense about heaven and hell than the preachers ever did.

‘Half past three,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I shall arrange the interment for half past three. The Protestant chapel is at the far side of the burial ground. The total cost will be five pounds, sixteen shillings and four pence.’ Apparently mistaking my expression, he added impatiently, ‘That is the standard charge. There are the bearers and the gravediggers to be paid, as well as my own small emolument. I assume you would wish me to make all the arrangements?’

‘Yes, please.’

I took my purse out of my reticule and counted the money on to the faded crochet mat in the middle of the table: five bright sovereigns, sixteen shillings, four penny pieces. It left the little purse as floppy as the udder of a newly milked goat. I’d had to sell a gold locket belonging to my mother and my grandmother’s silver watch to pay for my journey. It had been a nightmare within a nightmare, going round the streets of Dover trying to find a jeweller to give anything like a fair price for them, with the steam packet whistling from the harbour for last passengers. In normal times I’d have cried bitterly at parting with them but, turned hard by grief and need, I’d bargained like an old dame at market. As I stowed the purse away the clergyman asked, with just a touch of sympathy in his voice, ‘Have you no male relatives?’

‘A younger brother. He is in Bombay with the East India Company.’

I had a suspicion he intended to pray over me, so moved hastily on to the other thing I needed.

‘You must know the English community in Calais well.’ (He did not look as if he knew anything well, but a little flattery never hurts.) ‘Can you tell me if there are any particular places where they gather.’

‘The better sort come to the Protestant Church on Sunday mornings. For the ladies, the Misses Besswell run a charity knitting circle on Wednesday afternoons and there are also a series of evening subscription concerts organised by …’

I let him run on. I could not imagine my father or his friends at any event known to the Reverend Bateman.

I left the house, filling my lungs with the better smells outside – seaweed and fish, fresh baked bread and coffee. This reminded me that I had eaten and drunk nothing since the message had arrived, back in Dover. I was almost scared of doing either. That message had divided my life into before and after, like a guillotine blade coming down. Everything I did now – eating, drinking, sleeping – was taking me further away from the time when my father had been living. I still couldn’t think of eating, not even a crumb, but the smell of coffee was seductive. I followed it round the corner and on to a small quay. It wasn’t part of the larger harbour where the channel packet came and went, more of a local affair for the fishermen. There were nets spread out on the pebbles, an old man sitting on a boulder and mending one of them, his bent bare toes twined in the net to keep it stretched, needle flashing through the meshes like a tiny agile fish. The coffee shop was no more than a booth with a counter made of driftwood planks, a stove behind it and a small skinny woman with a coffee pot. She poured, watched me drink, poured again, making no attempt to hide her curiosity.

‘Madame is thirsty?’

Very thirsty, I told her. It was a pleasure to be speaking French again.

‘Madame has arrived from England?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘A pleasant crossing?’

‘Not so bad, thank you.’

The sea had been calm at least. I’d stood at the rail all the way, willing the packet faster towards Calais but dreading to arrive.

‘Is madame staying in Calais for long?’

‘Not long, I think. But my plans are uncertain. Tell me, where do the English mostly stay these days?’

She named a few hotels: Quillac’s, Dessin’s, the Lion d’Argent, the London. I thanked her and walked around the town for a while, trying to get my courage up, past the open-fronted shops with their gleaming piles of mackerel, sole, whiting, white and orange scallops arranged in fans, stalls piled high with plump white asparagus from the inland farms, bunches of bright red radishes. At last I adjusted my bonnet using a dark window pane as my mirror, took a deep breath and tried the first hotel.

‘Excuse me for troubling you, monsieur, but I am looking for my father. He may have arrived in Calais some time ago, but I am not sure where he intended to stay.’