Quincunx

  When they came in they froze in surprise at the sight of the strange lady. The four members of the family stared at each other for several moments.

  Then Mr Digweed stepped forward, lifting his hand to his forehead: “Why, miss, we didn’t …”

  “Dad, it’s me, Sally.”

  Mr Digweed stopped in amazement. Then he seemed about to move forward.

  “George!” his wife cried, and he halted.

  The parents looked at each other for a few moments, and then Mrs Digweed said eagerly: “Have you gave it up?” Then she stepped back: “But I only need to look at you. And to smell you. Faugh! You stink like an alley-cat.”

  “How can I give it up?” Sally broke in impatiently. “What could I do?”

  “I could find you work, decent honourable work.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Why, as a laundress, working with me.”

  Sally grimaced in distaste. “What, up before dawn, working all the hours of daylight, ruining my hands, and working alongside servant-girls and dolly-mops. Ketch me at that!”

  “Then go now, Sally,” her mother said. “And don’t come here again. Not nivver.”

  “Why are you like this, mam? Why can’t you forgive me?”

  “Forgive!” she exclaimed. Then she said more calmly: “And that’s twice you got Joey mixed up in all that.”

  “What else could I do?” Sally cried. “You was starving and you wouldn’t take money from me. Would you rather he’d died?”

  “No, in course not!” Mrs Digweed said with a troubled expression. “Oh Sally, I don’t understand it. I only know that what you’re doing is wrong and shameful.” Her voice broke as she went on: “Why have you come? And how did you find us?”

  Joey said: “I brung her. We’ve been meeting now and agin.”

  Mrs Digweed looked at him reproachfully: “That was wrong of you.” Then a new thought struck her and she cried: “So Barney knows where we are!”

  So I was right! She knew all about Barney! Surely my suspicions of her were justified!

  “Steady on, old gal,” her husband murmured with a glance at me.

  But his wife turned to me and said: “No, it’s time we should tell you everything, Master Johnnie. Most likely it was wrong of us not to say it a-fore, on’y we thought it was for the best. You see, Barney is George’s brother.”

  “He is, I’m mightily sorry to say,” said Mr Digweed. “He is a regular right-down bad ’un and allus was from a boy.”

  “But there’s more than that,” Mrs Digweed went on. “It was him what broke into your mam’s house.”

  At last she had told me! And she and her husband seemed so ashamed and guilty that I didn’t know what to think now. Had I been mistaken in my suspicions of them?

  “There ain’t no danger of Barney finding us,” Joey said. “Whenever I met Sal I was allus very careful not to let nobody dodge me back here.”

  “Well,” said his mother, “but this time you’ve brung her.”

  “I won’t tell him,” Sally said.

  “But he might have follered you here.”

  “Why should he do that?” Sally asked with a smile.

  Involuntarily Mrs Digweed glanced towards me.

  “Oh,” Sally said, “I know Barney wants to find Master Johnnie. And I know why, too.”

  The rest of us looked at each other at a nonplus.

  “That reminds me what I come for,” Sally went on. “I’ve brung something for him. Look what I’ve risked for your sake, mam, because I knowed you’d want him to have these back.”

  She reached into her handsome reticule and then, to my delight, held up my mother’s pocket-book. I almost snatched it from her and tore it open. To my relief, it was intact and I found the copy of the codicil I had made and the letter — or whatever it was — written by my grandfather which I had been about to read just before Barney had stolen it. Even the pages of the map which I had long ago given to my mother were still there. The letter, I reflected, would be a great deal more significant to me now after what I had heard from Mr Nolloth.

  “Barney gived them to me to read for him,” she explained to me, “that night when he took them of you. But I didn’t want to give ’em back, so I told him I’d had ’em prigged. He hit me for it.” She laughed and looked at her mother: “He wanted me to read ’em so that he could know how much to ask for ’em when he come to sell ’em. And I know who he meant to sell ’em to. It’s that split-cause, that lawyer, what he got onto years back when I read him that fust letter what he’d stole. I brung these to show you I don’t go along with everything Barney tells me to do. I want to make peace with you. I’ve left Barney.”

  So I had been right! It was Sancious who was the link between the Digweeds, on the one hand, and my mother and myself, on the other. And the link with Sancious was through Barney.

  “You could have brung them papers back two years ago,” her mother said; “and saved Master Johnnie a mort o’ grief.” Then she scrutinised her daughter’s face: “What’s really happened? What are you keeping from us?”

  “Nothing! I’ve told you the truth.”

  “You’ve fell out with your fancy-man, haven’t you?”

  Sally flushed.

  “I want to come back,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “Why?”

  She glanced at Joey and me. “I’m ill,” she said very softly.

  Her mother stared at her. “No I won’t help you, Sally,” she said sadly. “Not if you won’t promise never to go back to Barney but to work honest.”

  “Don’t arst it, mam,” Sally said. “I won’t.”

  “What will become of you? You know what happens to gals like you when they gets too old.”

  “Oh that’s a long way off. Time to think of that when it happens — if I live that long. Until then I’ve got plenty of tin.”

  She removed a purse from her reticule and showed that it was full of gold.

  “And I can be useful, too, and warn you what Barney’s got it in mind to do about Master Johnnie.” She held the purse towards her parents: “Here, take some.”

  Before I could ask her what she meant in reference to myself, Mrs Digweed said angrily: “How dare you! Git out of this house a-fore your dad throws you out.”

  Mr Digweed muttered something that might or might not have been confirmation of his wife’s threat, but at this outburst Sally herself turned red, rose and stamped her foot.

  “Very well, I’ll go. And maybe I won’t nivver see any on you agin. And you’ll be sorry if Barney has his way with your precious Master Johnnie. Why, Barney was right about you. You really are a pair o’ gudgeons! No wonder he took you in over that building spec!”

  “What do you mean?” her mother asked.

  She laughed: “That split-cause arst him to find flatts.”

  “You mean Barney knowed from the start that it was a take-in?” Mr Digweed asked.

  “In course,” she jeered. “You see, that big builder was in it with the split-cause and the coves what owned the land, and they only put up a few carcases as call-birds to draw flatts like you into doing the work on the rest. It was planned from the start that they would screw you all up to selling out for far below the value of the work what you’d put in. And, like I say, that lawyer is up to other things. I was going to tell you but I shan’t now.”

  She flounced out banging the door behind her.

  There was a silence. Mr Digweed shook his head and said: “My own brother. I can’t hardly credit it.”

  So much was becoming plain to me. The Digweeds had been victims of the same fraud that my mother had been ruined by. And the common factor was again Sancious and behind him, I suspected, Silas Clothier. More and more — and especially now that Mr and Mrs Digweed had been so frank with me — I was wondering if I had been correct in assuming that they were being paid by an agent of the Mompessons.

  Mrs Digweed said: “You didn’t ought to have met her, Joey.”

  “She’
s my sister, ain’t she? Why are you down on her so hard? Dad, you’d let her come and see us now and then, wouldn’t you?”

  Mr Digweed looked extremely discomfited at this.

  “Well,” he said at last, “if it’s ‘no’ what your mam says, then I reckon she’s right.”

  “You don’t really think that,” Joey cried. “Why can’t you forgive her?”

  “Forgive her!” his mother exclaimed. “Have you forgotten what she done? How she left Polly and the little boy in Cox’s-square when they had the fever, and went to Barney and … ?”

  Near to tears she broke off. Sally had left her brother and sister that time when the rest of the family were up North! Left them, in the event, to die! So that was the explanation of the family’s reticence about that period. I blushed with shame at the memory of the motives I had attributed to them. Now that I saw them unguardedly in conflict with one another, I realized that I had grievously misjudged them.

  “Another thing,” said Mrs Digweed. “Master Johnnie ain’t safe here from Barney no more now. Even if nobody didn’t foller Sally here, I don’t trust her not to tell him where we are jist out of spite.”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” said Joey.

  “Oh no?” Mrs Digweed said darkly. “I think I know my gal better than you do, young man. So it’s right away from here we’ll have to go. And that means I’ll have to build up a new connexion in the launderin’ line and your dad will have to give over the S’iety. You see what you’ve cost us, Joey?”

  “It’s your fault, not mine,” he cried. “You should make up with her.”

  He made towards the door.

  “Where are you goin’?” cried his mother. “You’re nivver goin’ arter her, are you? You ain’t going back to Barney?”

  But Joey ran out without answering.

  As I watched and listened, I was thinking how wrong I had been in my suspicions of these good people. And when I remembered how, thinking they were profiting from me, I had bargained so hard for the largest share of the toshers’ spoils I could win, I burned with shame. And now it seemed to me that I was the cause of the trouble that had come upon this family.

  “You mustn’t move simply on my account,” I said. “You stay here and I’ll go away.”

  “No,” Mrs Digweed said. “It ain’t entirely on your account, Master John. I don’t want Joey meeting her and mebbe Barney again. So it’ll have to be another part of Town altogether.”

  “From what Sally has just said, I begin to understand more of the connexions between us,” I began. “But I still don’t really understand why you went to such lengths to rescue me?”

  “Well,” said Mrs Digweed glancing nervously, as it seemed to me, towards her husband, “for one thing, it was shame at what Barney had done to you and your mam.”

  “You mean that time he burgled our house?”

  She nodded and said: “And more than that. And we was grateful for how your mam sarved us that time she give me and Joey our coach-fare back to Town.”

  How wrong I had been about them! Far from their being rewarded for guarding me, I had been costing them all that money — for medicine, for my food, for my clothes, and for lost working-time! Well, they had certainly paid back my mother’s kindness in full and with interest. And yet I still didn’t understand how it was that first Barney and then Mrs Digweed had come to our house in Melthorpe.

  “Please tell me about that time Barney burgled us,” I asked. “I know he had to leave Town just then, but why did he go to that particular village?”

  “Well,” said Mr Digweed, “it’s like this. Our dad — that’s his and mine — come from your part of the country. You might have noticed as I don’t speak quite like a Lunnon man. He come up to Town from a village not far from Melthorpe when he was a boy.”

  “I see. And you have connexions still down there?”

  “Aye, a few, but they’re mainly cousings as I don’t know no more. Now my dad’s heart was allus set from a tiny boy on being a j’iner and comin’ up here. His old feller was a day-labourer so it wasn’t easy, but his uncle Feverfew was a stone-mason — and a mighty ’cute ’un — and respected by the fambly he was in sarvice with at the big house nearby. So he got my dad a place there, and fust he worked for the estate carpenter and he was so keen and willing that he got gave inside work — cabinet-making and that — for the fambly. They had a land-agent that took notice of what a steady worker he was and give him the chance to better hisself. So at last he come to Town one year when the whole household come up for the Season — for they only lived down in the country for part o’ the year. Well, arter a few years he left the sarvice of the fambly and with the help of the genel’man what I mentioned, he got hisself ’prenticed and when his time was sarved he set up in trade for hisself. And at fust he done well for the agent give him work at the fambly’s house in Mayfair and that give him his West-end connexion. But then the drink became too much for my old feller for he had always liked his glass. And by the time me and Barney had sarved our time, he didn’t have much of his connexion left, though we still done a little work for that fambly ourselves now and again. But we had to fall back on jobbing work and Barney quickly tired of that. The hours was too long and the money too short.”

  “And then he took to breaking into houses?” I prompted.

  “Aye, he did, I fear. That and many other things. But it was a long time a-fore I guessed it.”

  “So he had relatives in Melthorpe he could visit?” I asked.

  “He was up there doing some work for the fambly what my dad fust worked for.”

  “And it was while he was coming back from there on his way to Lunnon,” Mrs Digweed went on, “when he broke into your mam’s house. It was jist chance that he chose that one, as he told Joey, for he was angry because he had been turned away with ill words when he asked for money.”

  “That was my nurse’s doing,” I said. “And mine, too, as I remember.”

  “Well, all he stole was a silver letter-case,” Mrs Digweed said. “There was a letter inside it and he thought it might do him some good. But not being able to read hisself and not trusting nobody that wasn’t fambly (not to say that he trusts us, neither) he had to wait to get it read and that wasn’t until Sal j’ined him quite a long time later. Something she read there led him to a lawyer called Mr Sancious who, it seemed from the letter, was desperated to larn where your mam was living.”

  “I see!” I cried. “That is how he discovered our whereabouts. I had never understood that!”

  So another piece of the pattern fell into place.

  “And that led to all the harm that befell you, didn’t it?” Mrs Digweed asked, fixing her troubled gaze upon me.

  “I fear that it did,” I replied. “For Mr Sancious found his way by that means to our enemies and it was at their prompting that he cheated my mother of her little fortune.”

  I was beginning to understand at last. But there was much that was still puzzling. “Then if Barney came to my mother’s house by chance, surely you and Joey did not come by coincidence all that time later?” I said to Mrs Digweed.

  “I told you when George fust brung you to this house,” she said, meeting my gaze without flinching; “that it was not by design that I come to you and your mam that time, and that’s the solemn truth. But Joey must tell you about that.”

  I blushed at the implied reproach. I could not doubt her, though I was very puzzled as to how such an apparent coincidence could not have been premeditated. Then something else became clear and I cried: “And it wasn’t simply because of old Sam’el making a mistake that I was directed to Barney!”

  “No, you arst about a Digweed and he sent you to one,” Mrs Digweed admitted. “But we weren’t lying when we told you that, for it was true that we knowed Isbister. What we didn’t tell you was that we knowed him on account of how Barney worked mates with him and Pulvertaft. That was when he got Joey mixed up in their lay.”

  She shuddered.

  So that wa
s why he was so knowledgeable about burial-grounds that time we had argued in Melthorpe!

  “We was very green, Master Johnnie,” Mr Digweed said. “We thought they were running an ornery carrier’s consarn. It was a long time a-fore we larned what they was up to.”

  Though I now believed that Mr and Mrs Digweed had done me nothing but good, I was still puzzled by the fact that she and Joey had come to my mother’s house. And, moreover, how was it that Joey had led me to the house of Daniel Porteous? And what of my suspicion that Barney had been involved in the murder of my grandfather?

  Seeing that Mr and Mrs Digweed were preoccupied in discussing their children, I took a candle upstairs and, making myself comfortable on my straw bed in the corner, examined the letter. The design of the quatre-foil rose on the seal was very familiar to me, and I knew now what the dark stains were. But this time I saw ambiguities in the superscription that I had not perceived before: “My beloved son — and my heir: John Huffam”. Not merely could it be addressed to Peter Clothier as my grandfather’s son-in-law and heir, or to my mother as his heir-at-law, but also to anyone who became his heir-at-law as I myself now was. Feeling that it was therefore in a sense addressed to myself, I unfolded the sheet and began for the second time to read my grandfather’s words:

  “Charing-cross,

  “The 5th. of May, 1811.

  “Claim to Title of Hougham Estate:

  “Title in fee absolute held by Jeoffrey Huffam. Allegedly conveyed by James and possession now Sir P. Mompesson. Subject of suit in Chancery.

  “Codicil to Jeoffrey’s will of ’68 criminally removed by unknown party after his death. Recently restored through honesty and perseverance of Mr Jeo. Escreet. Creates entail vested in my father and heirs male and female. Legality of sale of H. estate? P. M. not dispossessed but now only dependant right of base fee, while fee absolute to self and heirs?”

  This was the point at which I had stopped reading on the earlier occasion. Now I read on:

  “Very recently informed by unimpeachable informant: Jeoffrey H. made second hitherto unknown will also criminally suppressed after death. Disinherited James in favour of self. So sale invalid, no title to convey. Assuming will regained and rights restored, self and heirs owner of fee simple. Informant avers: will concealed for thirty years by Sir A., now by Sir P. Promises to obtain.