I speculated on the likely effect on her of discovering that I was still alive. Was it only because she believed I was dead that she had consented to this marriage? Presumably Bellringer had put it to her that marriage to him was the only alternative to marriage to Tom. And he might have deceived her into believing that he admired her for her own sake, for she obviously had no conception that he had the will. My letter explained all of this and when she had read it, Joey would lead her from the house and I would be waiting with the chaise to drive her to safety.
The wind had dropped slightly but the dark clouds were lowering threateningly when, at about noon, we reached the village of Hougham. A few minutes later we reached Mompesson-park and, having passed through the high gates where I had first met Henrietta, drove round to the front and halted at the foot of the pincer-like flight of steps up to the portico.
I waited out of sight inside the vehicle while Joey ran up and hammered at the door.
I heard it opened and then Joey said:
“I must see Miss Henrietta right away. I’ve rode express from Town with a urgent message from Lady Mumpsey.”
“Why, don’t you know no better than to come to the front door, old feller?” the footman (whom I recognised as Dan) answered. “Anyways, she ain’t here. The fambly’s all up in Town, as you oughter know.”
The voice of a woman whom I took to be the housekeeper down here said: “Is there anything amiss, Robert?”
I descended from the carriage and mounted the steps, saying as commandingly as I could: “Come, I know that Miss Palphramond is here.”
Both servants stared at me in surprise. Did Dan recognise me?
“I am privy to the secret,” I said to the housekeeper. “I am charged by Lady Mompesson with a letter for Miss Palphramond which I am to put into no other hands than her own.”
She stared at me as if I had taken leave of my senses: “I have not the slightest conception of your meaning, young gentleman.”
Her demeanour was so convincing that I was at a non-plus.
“Then we have over-ridden them on the road and they have not yet arrived,” I said. I turned to Joey: “We will retrace our steps and meet them on the way.” Then I said to the housekeeper: “But if they arrive without having met us, be sure to tell Miss Palphramond that Mr John Umphraville has business with her and that she must do nothing before seeing him.”
I had hit upon that name as a way of conveying to Henrietta the gravity of my message — and perhaps even my identity, though (as far as I knew) she believed me dead — without being understood by her companions. The housekeeper consented to deliver this communication and while I returned to the post-chaise and ordered the driver to halt just out of sight of the house, Joey went round to the stables.
He rejoined me a few minutes later: “The groom’s-boy said there ain’t been no carriage come and I believe he’s telling the truth. There ain’t no cattle in the byres nor no ruts in the mud.”
“Can we have over-ridden them?”
His face indicated how unlikely he thought this and I agreed.
“Then,” I said in despair, “Bellringer must have changed their destination from Hougham.”
“But you told me as how Sir David said the old coachee had his orders from Lady Mumpsey! And I larned from the stable-men as how the orders was for Hougham.”
“That’s so! Then they must have come here. But perhaps they have gone straight to the church!” I stared at him in horror: “But to which one? Melthorpe or Thorpe Woolston?”
“We must try ’em both. Which is nearer?”
“Thorpe Woolston.”
“Then I’ll run there and you take the chaise to Melthorpe.” He looked at me anxiously: “Are you well enough?”
“You don’t know the way!” I objected.
“Set me on the road and I’ll enquire it out.”
Joey’s suggestion was a good one, so we took the chaise back to the lodge-gates and then parted: he set off in the direction I showed him while I told the driver the way to Melthorpe along the turnpike.
It was already dusk when we drove up the High-street where nothing appeared to have changed. Yet how different were my circumstances from when I had last seen these familiar sights! When we reached the church I could see no lights inside. I got down, crossed the road and hammered at Mr Advowson’s door.
After what seemed a long wait he opened it a few inches and peered out.
“Do you know anything of a wedding here?” I cried.
“A wedding, sir?” he answered, clearly not recognising me. “There’s no wedding due, for there’s no banns been called.”
“This is by special licence.”
He shook his head: “Even so, sir, I’ve heard of nothing of that nature.”
Then unless Joey had more success, I had lost all chance of thwarting the marriage!
I was about to turn away when the old parish-clerk said: “Ain’t it Master Mellamphy? ‘Mr’, I suppose I should say,”
I nodded.
“Why, I’m very glad to see you, sir. Will you have the goodness to step across to the vestry with me, for there’s something I wish to show you?”
In some surprise, I agreed for there was no reason for haste now. He fetched and lighted a lanthorn, and then we crossed the road and went up the path between the graves. All the while he maintained an unbroken flow of gossip about the changes that had been taking place in the village, but my attention was elsewhere. He unlocked the great door and ushered me through the dark and empty church into the vestry.
And now he explained: “About three or four years ago — not long after you were last here yourself, Mr Mellamphy — a stranger came to my house and asked to see the baptism-books for the last twenty years. Well, it appeared that he needed to copy a number of entries, so I left him alone here for an hour or so. He thanked me and departed, but as I was putting the books away I recalled that business about the record of your baptism and noticed that the last of the registers he had been looking at was the very one that it was in. Well, something made me look at it again.” He turned to me and said impressively: “Why, it had been torn clean out.”
So that was what Lady Mompesson had meant when she said that even my existence had not been proven! She and her advisers must have learned that someone had removed this record — for it was in their interest that my claim should be upheld. It must have been the Clothiers who had done it when they laid the codicil before the court. I hoped that the copy Mr Advowson had made that time I had passed through the village on my way from Quigg’s farm was still safely concealed in Sukey’s thatch.
Now Mr Advowson was groping in the darkness amongst a pile of huge old registers.
“But here’s the strangest thing,” he went on, panting as he lifted one of them onto the table. “The stranger who must have done it, I knew him. I didn’t recollect then, but it came to me afterwards. I could not be mistaken, for he was the tallest man I have ever seen.” A cold chill ran down my back as he turned to me and said: “That man that came all those years ago with the young lady, sir.”
“Hinxman,” I muttered. The man who had helped Emma when she had tried to abduct me! Alabaster’s agent! It made sense, for I was sure he had been employed by Silas Clothier to destroy the evidence on which my claim to be the Huffam heir rested in order that the provisions of the codicil could be put into effect. And then I remembered that I had overheard him saying to another of the turn-keys that he was going to the North while I was a prisoner of Alabaster’s at exactly that time.
“Is this the register?” I asked, looking at the book he had retrieved.
“This? Oh no, sir. This is something quite unconnected with that, though I believe it has a connexion with yourself. I hope you won’t think it impertinent of me, but after you had gone that last time, I fell to thinking about how Mr Barbellion had examined the marriage-records going back fifty years but had not found what he sought. And then I remembered how you had asked me about the Huffam family as
if you had an interest in them. And then I recalled the quatre-foil that Pimlott noticed on one of the chests. (I sent him about his business after what you said, sir, by the way.) Do you recall, Mr Mellamphy, he said he had seen the same figure on one of your mother’s possessions? Well, I put all this together afterwards and looked through the chest. And I found this.” He indicated the mouldering volume. “It’s from the time when the chapel in the Old Hall was used by the family for christenings and suchlike. (According to what they say round these parts it was de-consecrated after a murder there, but that’s an old wives’ tale.) So I wondered if it was what Mr Barbellion was looking for.”
“Of course it was!” I cried, remembering Miss Lydia’s story of the elopement of my great-grandparents and the wedding at the chapel.
I leafed through it and found the right date, 1769. And there at last was the piece of evidence that had been sought by so many for so many years: the record of the marriage of James Huffam and Eliza Umphraville. Miss Lydia was indeed recorded as a witness just below the signature of John Umphraville.
Mr Advowson confirmed that the entry was formally correct and duly witnessed. Thanking him for his efforts, I begged him to keep the book safely and then left him and climbed back into the chaise.
“Where to, sir?” asked the postilion.
“Back to Hougham,” I said. Then a thought came to me: “No, go down the High-street and bear sharp right at the Green.”
Remembering the copy of my baptism-record that I had left with my old nurse-maid and reflecting that it was now crucial, I had decided to call on Sukey. The postilion was disgusted when he saw Silver-street for after the thaw and several days of rain, it was like the bed of a muddy stream.
To my astonishment, however, there were no cottages here and no sign among the flourishing grass that there had ever been any. My first thought was that the copy had been destroyed and my claim to the property therefore fell. Then it occurred to me to wonder where my old friend and her family might have removed to. I ordered the postilion to circle the Green and then return to the High-street in the hope of finding informants. Nobody was abroad in the heavy rain so at last I stopped and knocked at a cottage door. I was directed by an old woman there to another part of the village and hastened thither.
By the time I reached the cottage to which I had been referred it was the middle of the afternoon. At the place I had been directed to I found a sad little group of wattle-and-daub cottages scattered higgledy-piggledy on a bare patch of waste land, as randomly as if they had fallen off a waggon.
I chose one of them at hazard and, since there was no door to hammer on but only a leathery curtain to keep the rain out, I called into its dark interior: “Hello there! Sukey?”
Immediately Sukey — older, more careworn, thinner — came forth blinking in the weak light. She took a moment to recognise me but then with an exclamation moved forward and flung her arms around me.
Then she drew back red-faced: “I didn’t ought to have took the liberty. You’re a growed man now a’most, Master Johnnie, and quite the genel’man agin.”
For answer I seized her and hugged her.
“Dear, good Sukey!” I cried.
“Why, this has been a day for seeing old faces,” she said, standing back to survey me. “But yours is the fust that I cared to set eye upon.” Before I could ask her what she meant, she cried: “What’s wrong with your head?”
“A slight accident,” I said. “It’s of no importance.”
She looked at me disbelievingly. Then, noticing the chaise a few yards away, she exclaimed: “You’ve come into your inheritance!”
I shook my head: “I fear I’m no richer now than when I last saw you.”
“But the grand carriage and sarvint?”
“Hired with the last of my money.” Then I blushed and said: “Sukey, I never sent you the money I borrowed the last time I was here.”
She nodded gravely and I wished that I had done so with Miss Lydia’s money as soon as I had escaped from old Clothier and moved into lodgings with Mrs Quaintance.
“So much has happened,” I went on. Falteringly I began: “My mother …”
“Come in and seat yourself,” she said. “You look pale.”
I followed her and found myself inside a small windowless hovel with a low roof of furze branches and a floor of bare mud. There was no fire and it was illuminateci only by a tallow rush. There were two battered chairs and I sat on one of them.
In a few words I told her of my mother’s death, by which she was deeply moved, and a little of what had happened to me since I had last seen her. But I quickly turned the conversation:
“Why have you moved house?” I asked.
“Why, they’ve destroyed them cotts in Silver-street and elsewhere. It was done to bring down the poor-rates, for this is outside the paritch now, and so we get nothing from the Guardians.”
“That’s terrible,” I said, my indignation against the Mompessons rising.
“Oh, there’s many and many in the same case now. Like poor old Mr Pimlott. That puts me in mind of something, Master Johnnie. That time that man broke into your mam’s house, ’twas Mr Pimlott as helped him.”
“So I believe, but how can you be so sure?”
“He died a few months back. While he was on his deathbed my aunt tended him. (Bless her soul, for she passed on herself not a week arterwards.) He told her there was something he wanted to say to me a-fore he died. I went to him and he told me he was sorry that what he had done that time had injured me and Job. He on’y done it to wound your mam on account of she was gentry, for he was dreadful bitter agin ’em. See, he had worked for the Mumpseys all his life, but then he got to be bad with the rheumatiz from labouring in the wet fields, and so the steward — not the old steward who was a decent man, but his nevy — turned him off. And he ’victed him and his good-wife from their cottage on the estate, and all they could find was that damp little cott nigh to your mam’s house. He reckoned the old woman died on account of it being so cold and wet.”
“Well, but his part in the burglary?” I prompted.
“That day when the tramping man was turned away from your garden-gate, Mr Pimlott seen it and called out to him and offered him meat and a night’s shelter. Then they got to talking and the long and the short of it was they planned it together and Mr Pimlott helped him to carry it out. He told me how arterwards he seen some drawing or something on a letter-case that the man took and he knowed as how that meant that your mam was connected with the Mumpseys, so he reckoned he’d had his revenge. But when he seen you agin that time you come here from up north it begun to prey on his mind for you looked so ill and miserable, he said. And when Mr Advowson suddenly told him the next day that he hadn’t no more work for him, he believed it was a judgement upon him for what he done to you and your mam. And then his own cott was pulled down not long arterwards, like I was saying, and he tried to make himself one like this that Harry built for us, but it blowed down in a high wind and he fell ill and lay for days with no shelter over his head, a’most, and all the time it was gnawing upon his mind what he’d done.”
I was silent for some time thinking back over the past and how things had turned out.
Then I asked: “How is Harry? And the other children?”
She looked down: “It would be better if they didn’t see you.”
Mention of Harry reminded me of the agreement he had extorted from me in connexion with the copy of my baptismal entry.
“Sukey,” I asked, “have you still got that piece of parchment?” Before she could answer, however, I remembered something she had just said and a sudden and terrifying thought occurred to me: Mr Advowson had said that it was Hinxman who had removed the entry from the vestry and I tried now to recall if Sukey had seen him on that distant day when he and Emma tried to abduct me. Could it be that he had somehow followed me and was here now?
Hastily I demanded: “Sukey, what did you mean by saying I wasn’t the first face fro
m the past that you had seen today?”
“Why, I was walking back from Nether-Leigh when I noticed lights in amongst the trees. You mind as how the wall along the park is broke down there? Well, I went a little way up the old carriage-drive and seen as how the lights was in the Old Hall. So I went closer and who do you think … ?”
“Lights in the Old Hall!” I exclaimed. “But it’s a ruin. It’s deserted.”
Suddenly I thought of the old chapel there in which James and Eliza’s marriage had taken place. Surely any building that had been once consecrated could be the venue for a marriage by special licence!
I jumped up: “I must go there!” I cried.
“Where?”
“To the Old Hall.”
“Not in this clashy weather,” she cried for the wind was now roaring above us; “and you looking so wan!”
She made a feeble effort to seize me, but I dodged her exactly as I had when I was a mischievous child trying to postpone my bed-time, and ran out and boarded the chaise, shouting to the driver: “Back the way we came. And then turn off where I tell you.”
As the chaise set off Sukey ran alongside for a few yards in the pouring rain shouting something I couldn’t hear above the clattering hooves and driving wind, but we soon left her behind.
CHAPTER 120
The postilion urged the horses into a fast trot, and as I retraced in the swaying chaise the course of walks I had so often made as a child, the long-threatened storm broke. As we breasted Gallow-tree-hill, it grew quite dark and rain came slashing against the windows with impassioned vindictiveness. Then I remembered: there was something I had wanted Sukey to tell me! Of course! The record of my baptism! What had become of it? I cursed my forgetfulness in neglecting to ask her.