The Tiger in the Well, Page 25

  "Habeas corpus?"

  "It's a writ requiring the gaoler to produce the prisoner in person and state the reasons for holding him. If the court decides the reasons aren't good enough, he goes free. What it'll do in this case is to delay the whole process and give us time to establish a political motive."

  He got to his feet and solemnly shook Harriet's hand.

  "And as I said a few minutes ago," he said, "there's an uncommon number of policemen about this morning. That's all."

  He shook Sally's hand, nodded to them both, and limped out as briskly as he'd come in. She realized with surprise that he hadn't once said how difficult it would be, how awkward it was to take on a case like this, what a problem she was causing him. Anyone less like the helpless Mr Adcock was hard to imagine.

  Mindful of his warning, she slipped out of the church by a side entrance and looked both ways before turning left into Lime Street and setting off back to Spitalfields.

  At the Mission, there was work to be done. Someone had brought a vast pile of old clothes in, and Angela Turner wanted someone to go through them and sort out the wearable from the worthless. Sally spent the morning doing that, with Harriet playing busily near by, and wondered all the time about Mr Wentworth and extradition and habeas corpus; but even more about something else.

  After their lunch of bread and cheese, and after washing the dishes for the three or four women and children who were there with them, Sally took Harriet upstairs for her nap. When the child was in bed, Sally sat down beside her and stroked her head.

  "Hattie?"

  "Mmm."

  "You're being a good girl. Can you be a brave girl too?"

  Harriet lay looking up at her, right thumb in mouth, left hand tugging gently at her right ear: her sleepy posture. Sally knelt down and laid her own head beside her on the pillow. She whispered:

  "When Mama was a little girl like Harriet, her papa would take her into the forest or up in the mountains, and we'd live in a little tent, and we'd cook our food over a campfire and drink water out of the river. And we both had to be very brave because of the tigers and the snakes and the wild monkeys. But even when Mama couldn't see her papa, she knew he was there close by, and she wasn't afraid. Now, Hattie, my sweet, you're going to be brave too, aren't you? Because Mama is going to go somewhere else for a while. But we'll take you to a friend who'll look after you. And you won't see Mama, but she'll be there close by. And soon afterwards we'll go home. . ."

  Harriet was asleep. Sally's voice faltered. Very gently she stroked the hair off Harriet's face, and looked at the child for a minute or so, marvelling at that intense firmness, even in sleep, the concentration, the Harrietness. She would have liked to see something of that loved Papa in her child, passed on through her, but there was none; for he hadn't been Sally's father at all, though she didn't know that till after his death. All Harriet would have of him would be Sally's memories. And the firm, one day, which Sally had founded with the money he'd left her.

  One day. . . When? Soon, perhaps.

  Sally got up quietly, wrote a note to Angela Turner and another to Miss Robbins, and set off for the bathroom.

  "But Sally - what have you done? Your hair - dein schones Haar. . ."

  "I want to change my appearance. But cutting it short isn't enough - I want to change the colour too. I wondered if you could help me?"

  Rebecca turned to Mrs Katz and her daughter Leah, who was holding Harriet, and they spoke rapidly. Sally heard the words mit Henna farben, and Mrs Katz nodded and went out.

  "With . . . henna? I don't know the word. It will make it red, maybe. Browny-red. Yes, we can do it. But why, Sally? What are you going to do?"

  Seeing that Harriet was occupied with a little wooden dog, Sally spoke quietly.

  "It's what you told us yesterday. I had an idea after I left, but I'll need to disguise myself. And I'll need somewhere safe for Harriet to stay. I can't leave her in the Mission - they're too busy, there isn't anyone who can look after her. But I thought perhaps you might be able to. . . And Mrs Katz and Leah are so kind . . . I don't like to ask. But I can't think of anything else."

  It was the first time in her life she had asked for something without being able to pay for it. She felt quite naked, and not only because of her newly cropped head. Rebecca looked at Leah, and the other girl, small and birdlike and lively, nodded at once.

  "Of course," Leah said. "Of course we can. But what are you going to do?"

  Sally felt sick. Each time she thought about it, it felt worse; but she was set on course now, and she wouldn't turn back.

  "I'm going to get into his house. I want to see him for myself. If I can do something to stop him, then I will. But I need to look different. He knows what I look like - or Parrish does - and they won't be expecting someone dark-haired. They won't be expecting anyone at all. So. . .Well, that's what I'm going to do."

  They looked at her without speaking. She thought for a moment that they hadn't understood, but Leah's English was good, and Sally had tried to translate as she went along anyway. No, they understood all right.

  "But how?" said Leah.

  "I don't know yet. I'll find a way. But it might take me some time, and that's why. . ."

  She looked at Harriet, who was oblivious to everything except the little wooden dog. Rebecca stooped and picked her up, taking Harriet on her lap.

  "She'll be safe," she said. "We'll take care of her. But have you really made your mind up?"

  They were understanding each other more easily now - half in German, half in English. Sally nodded.

  "Absolutely. I must. Not only for Harriet and me but for Mr Goldberg. I've thought it through. Why should they suddenly want to arrest him now? He hasn't been in hiding; he's a journalist, he's well known. It's only now he's started investigating the Tzaddik that the police come after him. No, Rebecca, I've got to do this. But I need you to tell me everything you can remember - every detail - about him, his servants, his habits . . . everything."

  Mrs Katz came into the room with a bowl of hot water, a towel and various things in a brown paper bag. She said something to Leah, who translated:

  "It will take two hours. You have to put up with hot water, says Mama. And your hair is so blonde that it might not go very dark. But we'll make it as dark as we can. You'll need to loosen your dress - put this towel around your neck so it doesn't stain. . ."

  As Harriet watched, curious, Sally bent forward over the bowl and Mrs Katz began to work.

  And Rebecca told her everything she remembered. The maid she had known was a Russian girl, and she had been on the permanent staff of the house, not the Tzaddik's personal staff. Like a monarch, he travelled with a court. There was his secretary, a German called Winterhalter; his cook, a Frenchman whose name Rebecca didn't know; his personal physician, also a German, Dr Strauss; his coachman and the servants who dealt with the business of moving him about; and, most important of all, his valet, Michelet.

  It was Michelet's job to see to dressing and washing the Tzaddik and to all his other personal needs. He was the most powerful person in the household apart from the Tzaddik himself. He was a vain man, Rebecca thought, trying to remember what she'd heard; capricious and plump and greedy for chocolates and little sweetmeats and scented cigarettes. He was the only person in the household who could manage the monkey, which bit anyone it wanted to without punishment. It had fastened its teeth into Michelet's hand once, and instead of trying to shake it loose or prise its jaws open, he had calmly puffed at his cigarette to make the end glow and then stubbed it out on the monkey's head. The monkey had screamed and fled, and had been terrified of him ever since.

  And as for the monkey itself. . .

  "It's evil," said Rebecca, as she rubbed something pungent into Sally's hair. "I don't care what they say about animals being innocent, not knowing good or evil, Adam and Eve, the Tree of Knowledge, blah blah - that monkey is not innocent. It knows evil, and it does evil. If I believed in all that folklore stuff about
dybbuks and golems and so on, I'd think it was an evil spirit, not an animal of flesh and blood. When he wants to punish a servant he sometimes tells the monkey to attack them, and it does. They daren't defend themselves - except Michelet that one time. And one other thing she told me, the maid Olga: she said the monkey is getting old. The Tzaddik has tried to replace it by training younger ones, but they won't take to it. One day soon it will be too old to do anything, and then it'll die, and what he'll do then, God knows. . . There. Now we rinse again. Put your head over the bowl. . ."

  Sally absorbed it all, letting Mrs Katz and Rebecca rub and rinse and dab the paste on and swathe her in towels and rinse again. Mr Katz came in halfway through, and threw up his hands and went out again, but came back to play with Harriet.

  Time went past, and they had some supper of beetroot soup and pickles and black bread, and then Sally (with her head still turbanned) took Harriet up to bed in the cot they'd made up in Rebecca's room. Mr Katz had often sheltered refugees before; his business was prospering, and there was always room in the house for anyone in need of help. Besides, he liked children.

  They left Sally alone to say goodbye to Harriet. The child was sleepy, and no longer curious about the towels that swathed her mother's head.

  "Goodnight, my little sweet one," Sally whispered. "Remember what Mama said about being brave?"

  "Tigers," said Harriet.

  "That's right. Even if you can't see Mama, she won't be far away. Now close your eyes, my baby. Be a good girl and a brave girl. . ."

  She kissed her forehead, and then her cheeks, and then hugged her close. As she laid her down, tears fell on the pillow beside her; but Harriet didn't notice.

  And then downstairs again, and the towels came off, and there was her hair, dark red, cropped. She didn't recognize herself in the little looking-glass Mrs Katz held up for her.

  "Thank you," she said. "That's. . . Well, it's just what I wanted."

  "Die Augenbrauen!" said Rebecca. "The eyebrows - they should be darker. Your eyes are dark already - that's strange, isn't it? Eyes so dark with hair so fair. But the eyebrows ought to match."

  Leah found a pencil, and Sally licked it and darkened her eyebrows. Now she was completely someone else. She realized she needed another name.

  "Louisa Kemp," she said. "That's what I'll call myself. I'm . . . a maid of all work. Or something. Thank you all for what you're doing."

  "Sally, you mustn't forget, he's dangerous. He kills people," said Rebecca.

  "How long shall we leave it before coming in to get you?" said Leah.

  "I'll get a message to you somehow. If I don't. . ."

  "And what about Mr Goldberg?"

  Sally hesitated, and then shrugged. "If he turns up . . . I don't know. Tell him I've seen a lawyer. . . Look after Harriet."

  "She'll be safe," whispered Rebecca.

  They kissed. Sally wrapped her cloak around her, put on her bonnet, and left.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  THE VALET

  It had begun to rain.

  It came down steadily and heavily. There was a depression over the whole of southern England; clouds hung low over London, their heavy bellies turning into mist where they touched the high points of Crouch Hill, Streatham Hill, Hampstead and Highgate, and discharging themselves copiously and endlessly into the drains, the gutters, the soil.

  The new sewers under London had been designed to cope with exceptional rainfall. When there was too much water for the main interceptory sewers, it flowed over weirs into storm-relief sewers and thence into the Thames. These weirs were on the courses of the old rivers that laced subterraneously through London: the Fleet, Stamford Brook, the Walbrook, the Tyburn and so on. Most of these rivers were known and mapped and accounted for, though few of the pedestrians and drivers and passengers who moved about above them had any idea they were there.

  But in the older parts of the city there were dozens of springs and streams that had been completely forgotten. Not more than trickles, for the most part, but some of them carried substantial volumes of water - much more after a rainfall, when the water had had time to soak into the soil. And along with the springs and rivers, there were hundreds - maybe thousands - of ancient sewers, some blocked and crumbling, others still just flowing, but all of them crusted with filth and slime and alive with frogs and rats and eels.

  One of these lost rivers had been called the Blackbourne. It rose deep in the ground under a spot in Hackney where there had once been a monastery, but which by Sally's time was occupied by a pickle factory. It flowed meanderingly south and eventually slouched into the Thames somewhere near the Tower of London. By the thirteenth century it was already an open sewer, flowing not only with household wastes, dead dogs, and so on, but also with the by-products of paper-mills, tanneries and soap-boilers along the banks, so that Blackbourne water became a synonym for unspeakable filthiness. By the seventeenth century it had been built over and lost, but it still flowed on, and in 1646 a heavy rainfall caused three houses to collapse into it. Fifteen people were drowned, and three more never found at all in the putrid swamp. Soon after that it was built over again, and forgotten.

  But it still ran. The forgotten sewers still emptied their filth into it; and the various abominations that had trickled into it since then had made it no sweeter. All kinds of things contributed. A leaking drain under a slaughterhouse in Stepney allowed vast quantities of blood to seep into an ancient culvert running below it, and thence into the Blackbourne. A dye-works in Shoreditch discharged all its waste chemicals into a convenient pit in the yard behind, which absorbed them gratefully and conveyed them through various channels into the river. The brick wall built roughly in 1665 to shore up the side of a plague pit had begun to crumble, and the Blackbourne was leaching out the essences of several dozen long-dead plague victims to add to the mixture. All in all, it was a powerful brew, and when it moved sluggishly in dry weather, it released gouts of nauseating stink through crumbling bricks and loose flagstones into a hundred cellars; and little by little, it scoured away ancient mortar and lime and cement when it was swollen after a storm.

  And if you were below ground, you could hear it.

  "What's that noise, Charlie?" said a painter and decorator to his mate as they cleared up after a job.

  Charlie listened.

  "Sort o' rumbling," he said. "It's them hydraulics." He jerked his thumb at the new pipework bearing high-pressure water from the London Hydraulic Company to power the lift in the corner of the basement they were working in. "I don't trust 'em."

  "No it ain't," said the first man. "It's coming from down under the floor. Listen. . ."

  He knelt laboriously and applied his ear to the parquet flooring.

  There was a clatter as the iron cage of the lift rattled open, and Herr Winterhalter, the Tzaddik's secretary, got out. He looked at the kneeling workman.

  "Have you finished?" he said stiffly.

  "Oh yeah - sorry, guv. Thought I heard a noise."

  The workman got to his feet as the newcomer handed them both some coins.

  "That, I believe, is the sum we agreed," he said. "You seem to have completed the work satisfactorily. When will the paint be dry?"

  "Best give it thirty-six hours," said Charlie. "Not much ventilation down here. All them doors want keeping open."

  They gathered their tools and went up by the narrow staircase, the lift evidently being out of bounds to tradesmen. So was the front door, so they left by the area steps.

  Sally watched them from the shelter of a cab-rank across the square. The house was full of activity; every window was lit, with servants passing to and fro, carrying things or adjusting curtains. Soon she would have to make a move.

  Clutching her basket, she gathered the cloak about her and ran through the teeming rain to the area steps. Was her story ready? Then down.

  The kitchen window lit up the little sunken area, but it was streaming with moisture both inside and out, and no one looked through as
she knocked at the door.

  Before anyone could stop her, she opened it and stepped inside, and stood blinking the rain out of her eyes.

  "Here -"

  A portly woman was looking up from the saucepan she was holding over the range. A maidservant stopped in mid-stride, holding a tray of dirty plates, and a footman stared from the door, where he was about to take out a large covered silver dish.

  "Remuez! Remuez!" came in a sharp voice from the fourth person, a dark-featured man in a cook's white hat. He was cracking eggs into a bowl and watching the stout woman's saucepan. She looked at him blankly. "Stir it! Stir it!"

  She turned back, but it was too late; the sauce boiled over and hissed on the range, and the smell of burning came to Sally's nostrils.

  The French cook released a volley of curses, but he couldn't move for the eggs in both hands. It was Sally's chance. She saw a dishcloth near by and darted forward to mop up the mess, letting the stout woman turn and shout back at the Frenchman.

  The maid carried her dishes through to the scullery, the footman went out, and the moment passed. The stout woman took the saucepan back from Sally and said, "Ta, love. I'll see to it. Blooming fancy rubbish - I can't understand what he's on about. You the girl from the agency?"

  Sally had a second to think in. "Yes," she said.

  "Put your basket down there for now, then. We'll get your uniform sorted out later. See if you can give Monsewer a hand - I don't know what he wants."

  "If you please, ma'am, I speak a little French - there was a French cook at my last situation -"

  For some reason, her voice came out slightly Yorkshire. She let it, happy to go with the flow of events while they were favourable.

  "Thank Gawd for that. I can't understand him . . . stupid man."

  Throwing off her cloak and bonnet, Sally hastened to speak to the cook. Within five minutes she had become indispensable, relaying brisk orders to the stout woman (who, she learned, was the cook-housekeeper Mrs Wilson) and the kitchenmaid. It was the busiest time of the evening: apparently there were some important guests in, and dinner was in progress upstairs. The cook M. Ponsot fussed over sauces and pastries in a lordly, arrogant way that made Mrs Wilson fume with irritation, and Sally exchanged little sympathetic glances with her. What a piece of extraordinary luck, to come in just now: could she use it? And what was this agency?