found me scraps of tutoring here and letter-writing there among her friends and acquaintances. Like old David Poe, I became a screever, a humble scribe of other people's communications.
So, by and large, my life was tolerably comfortable. I was poor but not indigent. I had useful occupation but not too much of it. I did not eat fine food but my belly was always full. I had a roof over my head and people who thought in a remote but not unfriendly way that I was one of them. From the window of my room I had, on clear days, a vista of slates and chimneys and pigeons; and at night-time the sky glowed an unhealthy yellow with the flaring lights of the West End.
I run ahead of myself. February moved into March. I felt a certain pride in my survival, for I knew that, even a year ago, even six months, such independence and self-sufficiency would have seemed an impossible dream. I had changed. My mind was whole again.
I could not say the same for my heart. Not a day passed but that I thought of Sophie. The humdrum nature of my existence left me plenty of room for reflection, and for dreams. In memory I relived that afternoon in Gloucester a hundred times, a thousand. I tried to recall every word, every gesture, that had passed between us, from our first meeting outside Mr Bransby's school to that cruel moment on my last evening at Monkshill when Sophie had seen Miss Carswall slipping away from the schoolroom.
On most days I would find occasion to visit a tavern or a coffee house and read one of the papers. In this way, I came across a brief account in the
So there was a life gone, neatly parcelled up and despatched into oblivion. Early in March, after a decent interval, the engagement between Miss Carswall and Sir George Ruispidge was announced in the London papers. A few days later, I saw a notice to the effect that Mr Carswall and his family had come up to town, where they had taken their old house in Margaret-street again.
Had Sophie and Charlie come with them? Was Edgar back with Mr Bransby? The new term at Stoke Newington had begun on the first day of February. I would have liked to know whether Miss Carswall was sanguine about her future happiness. A prig was always a prig, surely, even though he had a baronetcy and a fortune to lay at her feet.
In this period, I communicated only once with my former associates. On the last day of January, I wrote to Edward Dansey, thanking him for his kindness, without specifying its nature, and asking him to have my trunk packed and stored until I was in a position to receive it. I enclosed a little money to defray his expenses. I did not give him my direction, however, though I added that I would do myself the honour of writing to him again when I was more settled. With this letter, I enclosed a note to Mr Bransby, regretting that circumstances compelled me to resign my position with immediate effect and begging him to accept the salary he owed me in lieu of notice.
Of course, I read the public prints for another reason. To my inexpressible relief, there was no mention of a stolen ring, no mention of a search for Thomas Shield. I reasoned myself into a belief – or at least a hope – that, having frightened me off and cost me my livelihood, Stephen Carswall had decided to leave me alone, perhaps because the pleasure of any additional revenge he might wreak on me was not worth the danger of scandal at this delicate point in his daughter's life. He would not want to put at risk the very existence of his grandson, the hypothetical Carswall Ruispidge, and his golden future.
The only item that still tied me to the past was Amelia Parker's mourning ring. I could not bring myself to drop it in the Thames, which would have been far the wisest course of action, for it was my one remaining connection with Sophie Frant. But I would have returned it to its owner, if I had known who its owner was. In the meantime, I hid it in a deep crack in one of the exposed purlins that ran the length of my room. I masked its presence with crumbling plaster rammed deep into the fissure; and in time a spider built its web across the crack, and I went for days without remembering the ring's existence.
I had cut myself adrift from my own life. I was not happy in those days but I thought myself safe.
68
The bubble burst on a Tuesday in April. It was a fine day, almost warm enough for summer, and in the morning I had walked out to the pretty village of Stanmore, where Mrs Jem had a friend who wished to write a long and carefully worded letter of complaint to her father's executor. When I returned to my lodgings late in the afternoon, I found one of the little Jems waiting for me on the stairs.
'Ma wants you,' she announced. 'Mr Shield, am I as pretty as Lizzie? She says I ain't – she's a liar, ain't she?'
'You and your sister are both incomparably beautiful, each in your unique way.'
I gave her a penny and went down to the basement, where Mrs Jem was usually to be found sitting in an elbow chair placed between the range and the window at the front, which commanded a view of the steps up to the front door. Her fine, dark eyes peered out at me from their swaddling folds of fat.
'There was a man come asking after you before dinner,' she said.
'He wanted a letter written?'
'He didn't want nothing. Except to know if you lived here.'
'So you told him I did?'
'The girls told him. They was playing outside on them steps, the little monkeys. Then I came up and sent him about his business.' She studied my face. 'What you been up to?'
'What do you mean, ma'am?'
'Don't try and gammon me. I smoked you a long time ago. A man of your parts must have a reason to want to live in a place like this.'
'Madam, I told you-'
'I know what you told me, and you don't have to tell me again.' She smoothed her apron. 'You'll say it's none of my business, and in the ordinary way of things it ain't, not if there's no trouble. But he wasn't the sort of man I like to have inquiring about my lodgers. Sharp little runt, with a dreadful knowing way about him. He tried to bully me, too.'
I smiled at her. 'I wish I had seen it.'
Mrs Jem did not return the smile. 'Could have been a runner once, maybe, and now works private. The sort of fellow you'd find sniffing round the servants in an action for crim. con.'
'I assure you, ma'am, that is not the case here.' I felt myself grow warm, nevertheless: if Henry Frant were alive, then what had passed between Sophie and me on that afternoon in Gloucester would indeed have amounted to criminal conversation. 'I – I cannot think what he wanted.'
'He wanted you,' Mrs Jem said. 'That's plain enough. I give you fair warning: I don't want to lose you, Mr Shield, you're clean and obliging and you pays your rent. But I won't have unpleasantness in this house. I have to think of my girls.'
I bowed to her.
'Lord, don't waste your fine airs and graces on me. Just make sure that man don't come pestering us again.' She smiled as she spoke, though, and waved me away as she would have dismissed one of her own children.
I went quickly upstairs to my garret. I had little doubt what this visitor meant: Carswall had found out my direction. I cursed my own complacency. I had known from the beginning that he was a man of strong passions, a man capable of enduring hatred. I wished with all my heart that I had not hidden the ring in my room. Was there still time to dispose of it?
There was a loud knocking on the street door below, followed by voices in the hall, and then the patter of small feet running upwards. Lizzie and Lottie burst neck and neck into my room.
'Oh, sir,' Lottie began.
Lizzie pushed her sister against the jamb of the door, temporarily silencing her. 'There's another man for you, sir, not the-'
