The Bohemian Girl

‘good’ pieces of the entire house, the rest left for the tenants. A chesterfield sofa was assumed to double as a bed. The walls were covered with paintings, cows much in evidence, the frames jammed against each other. On the shore of this sea of clutter, a vast woman sat where she could get the light from a window. Her black dress and cap aimed for austerity; her huge excess of flesh argued indulgence. ‘I am Mrs Durnquess,’ she said. ‘I don’t get up.’

‘Not at all.’ Janet Striker walked into the room as if she owned it and presented a card. ‘I am Mrs Striker of the Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women. This is one of our patrons, the well-known man of letters, Mr Denton. Our business is beneficent, Mrs Durnquess: we seek the whereabouts of one of your tenants.’

‘My tenants’ whereabouts are here, or they aren’t my tenants. I am ever so particular.’ Her accent suggested to Denton a forced gentility, but he was poor on the English of the English; anything with a dropped H was to him ‘Cockney’, most else ‘genteel’.

‘We hoped you could help us.’

‘I’d be ever so happy to help you, Mrs — mmm — Strickers — I don’t have my right glasses on — and at once when I am apprised who the person might be.’

‘A young woman named Mary Thomason.’

The fat face pouted. Some delicacy had been denied it. ‘Gone,’ she said.

‘Ah.’ Janet sounded to Denton as forced as the landlady; he’d never heard her put on the full gloss of the middle class before. ‘As we feared. Gone from our ranks, too — oh, not as one of our clients, not one of the women. Rather, a volunteer. A helper.’

‘Gone.’ Mrs Durnquess sighed. ‘Not like some, not folded up her tents like the Arabs in the middle of the night and as quietly stole away down Fitzroy Street. No, she was a good and honest girl; she paid her rent and a week ahead, but she has gone.’

‘May I ask when? We have missed her since August.’

‘It was August. Won’t you sit down, Mrs mmm, and you, sir. I stand so little any more, but I know it is fatiguing. The Queen Anne side chair is quite comfortable, or the Recamier. Yes, it was August. She left me a note and a shilling, and she disappeared.’

‘Do you know why?’

The head, topped with grey sausage curls that might not have been entirely real, bobbed up and down. ‘Her father. An accident at the works. I have only the haziest idea of what a works may be, and it suggests a level of society not of the best, but she was a good, sweet girl with manners well above that station.’

‘She told you in the note that her father had had an accident? And so she was going home to be with him? And where was home?’

Mrs Durnquess waved an arm from which flaccid muscle hung like dough. ‘The west.’

‘Cornwall? Devon? Wales?’

‘Mary was an artist and suffered the artist’s flaw of inspecificity, though it is inspecificity that makes them artists. Many of my tenants are artists, or artists in embryo. When the late Mr Durnquess passed away — also an artist, twice accepted annually at Burlington House but not, alas, an RA — I was left with only this house and his paintings.’ A fat little hand waved at the walls. ‘I survive by renting rooms that were formerly my domestic haven to students in that great cause — Art.’

‘Ah.’ Janet glanced at Denton. ‘Mr Denton has spoken with her employer.’

‘The man Geddys? Hmm-hmm. I never approve of older men and younger women. Not to suggest that there was anything. I disapprove of speculation, especially on that score. But-’ She raised her tiny, blackened eyebrows. ‘He saw her home from work more often than perhaps a gentleman ought to have done.’

‘Could she have run off with him?’

‘Oh!’ It was a breathy little yelp. The thought of running off had a very strong effect. ‘To Gretna Green? I hardly think. I had required to speak with him in January and reminded him that we must appear to be upright and to be upright. People, I said, must not be given cause for scandal. I required to know what his seeing her home meant.’ She pulled herself up a little, sniffed. ‘He was — is — a very smooth man, if made somewhat unattractive by a physical affliction. I told him I was not subject to flattery or sham. He took my meaning and said quite forthrightly that he saw Mary home because she was in his employ and she was a naive, sweet creature in a city full of risks. I gave him what I refer to as the benefit of the doubt. It is true, after all, that a child like Mary was vulnerable, to put a point on it.’

‘And that was the end of it? A note and a shilling?’

‘Why, no, there was her brother. Next, I mean. In her note, she said that her brother would come for her things, and the brother would bring another note from her as his bona fides. And so he did.’

‘And what sort of man was he?’

‘Why, somewhat like Mary. One could see the family resemblance. Bigger, to be sure, manly, rather poorly spoken, I fear — taking after the father, I suppose. Mary spoke like a gentlewoman. But he had the aforementioned note, and he gathered up her things, and that was the end of it.’

Denton leaned forward. He was sitting on a chair with a horse-hair seat, very high in the middle, and he risked sliding off if he didn’t keep his balance. ‘And her things?’

‘She wasn’t wealthy in the things of this world. He brought a little trunk and a man to carry it, and he put her things in it and away they went.’ She waved the other arm towards Euston.

Denton asked more questions about the brother, but she had told them what she knew. As for the man who carried the trunk, she said, ‘My maid, Hannah, dealt with him.’

Mrs Durnquess said she was fatigued then and would she excuse them, and she pulled on a tasselled cord that hung from a cast-iron arm up near the moulding. Janet Striker tried one or two more questions, but they’d got what there was to get; half a minute later, they were out in the corridor. Slow, thumping footsteps announced the Irish maid, who appeared in a narrow doorway, sleeves pushed up again, face red. ‘Going, are you,’ she said.

Denton gave her a shilling. ‘We’re looking for Mary Thomason.’

‘Who’s that, then? Oh, the little thing that was up in Seven. She’s been gone for ages.’

‘Going on three months, I think,’ Janet Striker said.

‘And me the only servant in the place, it seems like years.’

Denton gave Janet a look that meant that he wanted to do this one himself, and turning back to the maid he said, ‘Your name is Hannah.’

‘And what if it is?’

‘Hannah, Mrs Durnquess says you dealt with Mary Thomason’s brother.’

‘Sure, there was no “dealing with” him. He come, he got what he wanted, he left.’

‘What did he take?’

‘And how would I know? He brought a box with him; I suppose it was heavier when he left than when he walked in. He didn’t fill it with nothing of ours, you may be sure.’

‘Did you stay with him while he got the things?’

‘Not me. Haven’t I got plenty else to do than watch somebody fill a box? He emptied the room of her stuff, that’s all I know. Little enough she had, poor thing. A lot of art stuff. When the brother was gone, it was gone. I got the work of cleaning the room, of course, but she’d left it pretty good.’

‘Did she have friends in the house?’

‘If she did, I never saw them. Madam don’t like visitors, and she don’t like to-ing and fro-ing between the rooms. She hears the footsteps over her head, she raises the roof. Of course, I’m the one’s supposed to set it right.’

‘Did you ever have to set Mary Thomason right?’

‘Her? No, she wasn’t the sort. Quiet.’

‘And the brother? Did he ever visit her?’

‘Never saw him before. Little cock o’ the walk, if you take my meaning. Fancied himself, I thought — couldn’t be bothered to carry the box, but brought a man to do it.’

‘And where did they go?’

‘You think I have the time to watch folk off the premises? They went, that’s all, and good riddance. He give me tuppence. A great gentleman, I don’t think.’

‘And the man? Did he help the brother pack up her things?’