Quincunx

  So then I begged him to tell me: What was the purpose of it? Why had he not revealed it at the inquest? Then was Peter innocent? He said he would say no more and he told me to tell him whether my child lived. I said I would not unless he answered my questions. Now he grew angry and rose from his chair and came towards me and I was so frightened Johnnie. He is so big and queer-looking. I smelt brandy. He said: What did you really come for? You didn’t think of me for all these years, did you? Now you come here making these accusations. I started out of my chair and made for the door. I told him that I had wished to write to him but Mr Fortisquince prevented me. He said: He poisoned your mind against me. I got out of the room and back into the hall and opened the vestibble-door. He followed me, saying: He thought I cheated your Father. I suppose you believe that, too. But if you think I have money you are wrong. I have nothing. Nothing but this worthless house. I have been unlucky. Damnably unlucky. I got out into the street and away. I don’t know if he truly meant to harm me, but one thing I am sure of: Johnnie, you must never go there. Never! I believe he is dangerous, that his wits have turned after all these years alone in that house. But at least now I know: Peter told me the truth about the quarrel. I don’t know what that means but at least he didn’t lie to me.

  Now I must go back and tell you the rest. After Peter left me that day the long slow afternoon dragged past. I heard the sounds of arrivals and departures going on around me. Doors opened and shut and I heard steps along the passage outside, but nobody stopped at my door. I had no appetite to eat. Late in the evening the chamber-maid knocked to bring candles and a warming-pan, and was surprized to find me alone in the darkness. As you may imagine, I hardly closed my eyes that night. The next day came early for me, dark and overcast. Another weary day passed. I sat at the window watching everything that arrived, and whenever a post-chaise drove under the arch I waited for Peter’s tread, but it never came. Then, just before midnight, as I was about to retire to rest there was a knock at the door and Martin came in. He looked at me for a moment with an expression which I could not read and then he told me what had happened.

  I swooned and Martin summoned the servant who was waiting outside. She put me to bed and a surgeon was brought to prescribe a sleeping-draught. I awoke after a troubled sleep of a few hours and Martin told me the rest. When Peter had returned to the house yesterday, he had been searched and the bank-notes covered in blood had been found in his possesion. It had been confirmed that those very notes had been issued to Papa. Peter had been taken up and charged with the murder. Martin assured me that he was absolutely convinced that a terrible mistake had been made. (Oh Johnnie, what could I say? For I knew that he had gone back to the house and come back with blood on his hands.) When examined, Peter had refused to say anything at first. At last Martin had spoken to him alone and he had told him where I was and asked him to come to me. He had only waited to give evidence at the inquest and had then come straight to me. Now he summarized the evidence. He had advised Peter to say nothing as he was fully entitled to do. The witnesses — himself, his wife, and Mr Escreet had managed to avoid mentioning the quarrel that had driven Peter from the house. Fortunately, the servants, being below stairs all this time, had seen and heard nothing. After Peter and I left the house, Mrs Fortisquince had withdrawn upstairs to make ready the tea-things leaving the three gentlemen in the dining-room. Martin then gave Papa a package he had been entrusted with, and my Father left the room with Mr Escreet in order to place it in a safe place in the plate-room. Martin said: They were only gone for a minute or two and I, having no heart for sitting over my wine alone after the distressing events earlier that evening, was about to join my wife upstairs, when Escreet returned to say that he and your Father would only be a little longer, and that your Father begged me to wait since he wished to discuss the evening’s events in confidance. Escreet happened not to close the door as he went away and just a minute or two later I saw a strange man pass the door coming from the hall. I am certain it was not Peter for although he was about the same build, he was not wearing Peter’s coat but a bright red one. I assumed that it was a man-servant whom I had not been told was in the house. A few moments later the same figure passed the door again. I began to wonder who it was, for it occured to me as strange that I should not know a new servant. And if it were a servant, I wondered why he did not seem to have come from the stairs down to the servants’ quarters. Just a minute or two later I heard cries. I ran to the Library and found it empty. So I went into the plate-room and there I found a terrible sight. Your Father was lieing face downwards. He had been run through with the old sword that hangs on the wall of the back-lobby and which was still in his body. Escreet was lieing beside him and at first I thought he was dead, too, for his head was covered in blood. The strong-box was open and had been rifled. Now this is something I did not tell the inquest: Escreet regained his senses after a few minutes and told me that the person who had done this was Peter. I told him he must be confused because Peter had left the house some time ago, but the old gentleman insisted that he had come back. The servants were by now hysterical with fear that there was a murderer in the house. So I searched it from top to bottom and established that no-one was there. I found that the back-door was locked and that the only copies of the key were in the possesion of the cook and Mr Escreet. I went to the front of the house, where I found that the vestibble-door was broken and the street-door unlocked and open. I believe that the murderer entered the house by the street-door. Somehow he unlocked it and then smashed his way through the glass and wooden frames of the vestibble-door. I assumed that when I had seen him through the door of the dining-room he had been attempting to leave by the back-door but had found it locked and had had to return to the front and leave the way he had come. All this I worked out later. Now I called out to foot-passengers in the street to summon the watch and they arrived within a few minutes. But before they came, I went back to Escreet and told him that I had found nobody in the house and that he must have been confused when he said that he had seen Peter. He accepted this and said that he would not mention this to the authoraties. So when they arrived he told the constable that he had not seen his attacker. However, the servants repeated his words to the constable and so he was examined about them at the inquest. He said that he must have been wandering in his mind when he made this alligation against Peter. He now insisted that he had been struck from behind and therefore had not seen his attacker. But unfortunately, the coroner suggested to the jury that he was lieing in order to avoid incrimmanating Peter. The waiter at the coaching-inn was found and testyfied that he saw you and Peter arrive and book seats for the night-coach. He then showed you to a private room and said he did not see Peter leave the Inn but could not testyfy that he had not done so. The result of the inquest was that, in accordance with the directions of the coroner, the Jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against Peter. He was charged and detained in custardy. He will now be indited before a Grand Jury. If they decide that there is enough evidence to return a True Bill against him he will be sent for trial. One other thing: When he was asked where you were, he refused to say. You may imagine the fears this provoked. But afterwards I saw him for a few minutes and he told me where you were and insisted that you be kept out of London. His great fear was that his Father and Brother would gain power over him again and perhaps thereby be the means of hurting you. Martin kept insisting that it was all a horible mistake and that Peter could not have been guilty. But he didn’t know what I knew. He pointed out that there was no evidence against him except the bank-notes and Papa might well have given them to Peter unbeknownst to Mr Escreet. And there was no evidence of any motive once this alligation of robbery was set aside since the quarrel had not been mentioned. Neither was there any evidence to show that Peter went back to the house. The person Martin had seen was, he was almost sure, not Peter. The only other point against Peter was that the murderer had somehow opened the front-door without forcing it and this impliccated someone
who had the oportunity to take a copy of the key. But this applied to other inhabitants of the house as much as to Peter. Against this, the fact that the murderer had had to break through the vestibble-door in order to get in suggested that it was not Peter for he could have made a copy of that key as well. Instead it suggested that the murderer was someone not connected with the household who had been acting on a sudden oportunity to pick the lock of the door or perhaps had even found it unlocked for some reason. Martin asked me if I could give any testermoney on Peter’s behalf, for example by saying that he had staid with me all the time at the Inn. What could I do? I said nothing and he looked surprized and said that in that case I should stay out of it altogether and remain where I was until he returned to tell me the result of the Grand Jury hearing.

  The time that dragged past, it must have been a week but I can’t bear to recal it. At last Martin returned. He told me that Peter’s Father and Brother had intervened and old Mr Clothier had used his power of attorney as Peter’s committee in lunacy to appoint his attorney, and had appointed none other than Mr Daniel Clothier! This gentleman had instantly forbidden anyone — including Martin — to comunnicate with Peter. Martin said that the evidence to the Grand Jury given by himself and all the other witnesses was exactly as at the inquest, except that under examination by Mr Daniel Clothier, Mr Escreet had been forced into admitting that the reason why Peter and I had left the house was because a violent quarrel had sprung up between him and Papa. Mr Daniel Clothier had ellicited this ostensably because he was trying to use a defence of insanity and wanted to stress how strangely Peter had been behaving that night, but Martin was very angry about this because he said that until the quarrel was revealed, Peter had a reasonable chance. Now everything went against him. The prisoner had, of course, no right to give evidence, but the Judge had asked him some questions. And Peter had kept trying to insist that he did not wish to be represented by his Brother, that his Father had abused his power of attorney by appointing him, and that his Father and Brother wanted to have him hung because he knew things about them that could incrimmanate them. This had made a very unfavourable impression on the Jury. And when the Judge asked him to explain the quarrel he had had with his Father-in-law, Peter had come out with the most extrordinary Story: he said that it had not been a real argument but a kind of charade concocted between them with the collusion of Mr Escreet. He had insisted that far from their having really quarrelled about money, Papa had given him some of the bank-notes that had been found upon him and he had inexplicably found the others covered in blood in his pocket and had returned to London and gone to the house with the intention of finding out what had happened and returning them. Mr Escreet was examined again and testyfied that he knew nothing of the alledged gift of money to Peter, although as my Father’s confidencial Agent he knew of all his financial transactions. As for the Story that the quarrel was a charade concocted beforehand, he only wished that that had been the case. At this juncture Mr Daniel Clothier had deposed that Peter had recently been found insane by a Comision of Lunacy and said that members of the Comision were present to confirm this, and that Mr Silas Clothier and servants from his household were also prepared to give evidence of the prisoner’s insane conduct over the past several months. The Judge had then directed the Jury to find that Peter was unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity, and they had done so. Then the Judge had ordered that he be comited into the care of his Father who undertook to deliver him into the custardy of the keeper of a place called The Refuge. And the Judge had directed (Martin said) that the inditement be not withdrawn but ordered to be kept upon the record. Martin explained that this meant that Peter would remain in the madhouse for the rest of his life. If he ever seemed to have regained his sanity, he would have to stand trial for murder.

  Though I was too distraught to be able to give any thought to my future, Martin insisted that I remain out of London and go into hiding for he feared that old Mr Clothier might try to gain power over me in order to obtain the Codacil. He reminded me that if it could be laid before the Court, then it was in the interests of the Clothiers that I should die, for now I was the sole Huffam heir whose continued existance was keeping old Mr Clothier from inheriting the Estate. He told me that he still owned his Father’s old house in Melthorpe which was unoccupied and he said that I could live there without paying rent. When I suggested that it might be unwise to hide so close to Hougham, he argued that that was why it was so safe: nobody would think of looking for me there. (He said jokingly that to seek safety closest to danger was to live by my Family’s motto.) It seemed so kind that I gratefully accepted and he escorted me there and made me mistress of the house. On the way there, I chose the name of Mrs Mellamphy and we gave out that I had been recently widowed and that Martin was my late husband’s Father. Thank heavens I have already told you about all of this and need not go into it again. Afterwards, he engaged servants for me, Mrs Belflower and Bissett, arranged for the house to be made comfortable, and then returned to London to sort out my affairs. Of course, all of this compromised me and that is why I was treated as I was by the better sort of people in the village. Particularly when a few months later it became clear what my situation was.

  Martin was my Father’s executor — for Papa had neglected to change this after the breach between them. I was his heir, of course, but there was very little to inherit except the Hougham Annuaty — for even the house belonged to Mr Escreet. Martin had to sell the furniture and plate to clear Papa’s debts — the largest of which was the four thousand Pounds owed to old Mr Clothier. (He managed to rescue a little of the plate and china and some books.) Once the Estate was settled, there was no more than a few hundred Pounds and the Annuaty. However, since I was a married woman all my personal Propperty belonged to my husband, and because he had been declared insane his legal personality was now vested in his committee who was, of course, old Mr Clothier. Martin feared that old Mr Clothier would therefore claim that the Annuaty should be paid to him on behalf of his son, and that is exactly what happened. Consequently, the Mompessons refused to pay it to either of us and old Mr Clothier took the issue to Chancery and made it a part of the Suit that he had been conducting for so many years (for Chancery spreads into everything thus when once you are involved in it), and Martin told me he feared that it would take many years to resolve. (Incidentally, he also mentioned that at about this time Mr Daniel Clothier quarrelled publicly with his Father and renounced him, saying that it was because of his shame and indignation over the way his Father had treated Peter. Martin said that he had repudiated his part in the old gentleman’s Busyness, even going so far as adopting the name of his second wife when he remarried at about this time — for he had seen notice of this in the Gazette.)

  For the first few months I lived on the money Peter had given me, with some assistance from Martin. But then I became aware that I was expecting a confinement. It was now that (as I have explained) Martin settled upon me the two thousand Pounds in the Consols that was what we lived on until I was cheated of it. But he insisted that (because of Jemima) this was the end of any assistance he could give me, beyond allowing me to occupy his house rent-free. He also warned me that there was a possibility that old Mr Clothier, in his capacity as the trustee of my husband, could gain custardy of you if he came to know of your existance, for he pointed out that any child of mine born in time would threaten his inheritance of the Hougham Estate. For this reason it was essential that the birth of my child and my whereabouts remain secret. Nobody outside Melthorpe — where I was known simply as Mrs Mellamphy — knew anything of your existance. Of course, Martin attempted to keep it from his wife though as you know, she found this out when he became unable to conduct his Busyness privately. After you were born he stopped visiting me because of her. I never gave up thinking about the mystery of Papa’s murder and at the end of that first year — in the December before you were born — there was a terrible reminder of it when two families in the Ratcliffe-highway were slau
ghtered at night by a man who broke into their houses. I wanted to believe that the person who murdered Papa had not been Peter but someone from outside, and I wondered if it could be the same individual who had carried out those terrible crimes. But the authoraties caught the man they believed responsible and he hanged himself before he came to trial, so I could never find out. As time passed I thought of many things. I suspected everybody, everybody. Peter, Mr Escreet, and even … Oh Johnnie, I could not bear to think that the Father of my child had killed my Papa! I imagined so many things. I even feared that it was I who was responsible — though all unwittingly — for the murder of my Father and the imprisonment of my husband. That it was not his fault for his passion for me had driven him to it.