“I in’t yer uncle. Go and bother someone else. I in’t interested in your sort. If I want a woman I’ll find me own, a lot sassier than you-and I don’t give ter beggars.”
“ ’Ere!” the bartender said angrily. “You said as ’e were yer uncle.”
“So ’e is,” Gracie said desperately. “Me pa said as ter tell ’im me gramma’s took bad, an’ we need money fer ’elp for ’er. She’s that cold.”
“That right?” the bartender demanded, turning to Buffery. “You runnin’ out on yer own ma?”
By this time Charlotte, Emily and Jack were all behind Gracie. She felt the warmth of relief flood through her. She sniffed fiercely, half afraid, half determined to play this for all it was worth.
“Yer got all them ’ouses, Uncle Fred, all Lisbon Street mostly. You can find Gramma a nice place w’ere she can be warm. She’s real bad. Ma’ll look after ’er, if’n yer just find a better place. We got water on all the walls an’ it’s cold summink awful.”
“I in’t yer Uncle Fred,” Buffery said furiously. “I in’t never seen yer before. Git out of ’ere. ’Ere-take this!” He thrust a sixpence at her. “Now get out of ’ere.”
Gracie ignored the sixpence, with difficulty, and burst into tears-with ease.
“That won’t buy more’n one night. Then wot’ll we do? Yer got all the ’ouses on Lisbon Street. Why can’t yer get Ma and Pa a room in one of ’em, so we can keep dry? I’ll work, honest I will. We’ll pay yer.”
“They in’t my ’ouses, yer little fool!” Buffery was embarrassed now as other diners turned to look at the spectacle. “D’yer think I’d be ’ere eatin’ cold pie and drinkin’ ale if I got the rents fer that lot? I jus’ manages the bus’ness of ’em. Now get aht an’ leave me alone, yer little bleeder. I in’t never seen yer an’ I got no ma wot’s sick.”
Gracie was saved further dramatic effort by Jack stepping forward and pretending to be a lawyer’s clerk again, entirely unconnected with Gracie, and offering his services to dispatch her on her way. Buffery accepted eagerly, very aware now of his associates and neighbors staring at him. His discomfort offered a better sideshow than many of the running patterers who sang ballads of the latest news or scandal. This was immediate and the afflicted one was known to them.
When Buffery had identified himself, Jack told Gracie to leave, which she did rapidly and with deep gratitude, after picking up the sixpence. Jack then proceeded to threaten him with lawsuits as accessory to fraud, and Buffery was ready to swear blind that he did not own the buildings in Lisbon Street, and prove it if necessary before the lawyer who took the rent money from him every month, less his own miserable pittance for the service he performed.
After a brief luncheon, early afternoon found them in the offices on Bethnal Green Road of Fulsom and Son, Penrose and Fulsom, a small room up narrow stairs where Jack insisted on going alone. He returned after a chilly half hour. Emily and Charlotte and Gracie were wrapped in carriage rugs, Gracie still glowing from her triumph in the public house, and the subsequent praise she had received.
They spent until dark trying to track down the property management company whose name Jack had elicited, by a mixture of lies and trickery from the seedy little Mr. Penrose, but eventually were obliged to return home unsuccessful.
Charlotte intended to recount the day’s events to Pitt, but when he arrived home late, lines of weariness deep in his face, and in his eyes a mixture of eagerness and total bafflement, she set aside her own news and asked after his.
He sat down at the kitchen table and picked up the mug of tea she had automatically put before him, but instead of drinking it he simply warmed his hands holding it, and began to talk.
“We went to Shaw’s solicitors today and read Clemency’s will. The estate was left to Shaw, as we had been told, all except a few personal items to friends. The most remarkable was her Bible, which she left to Matthew Oliphant, the curate.”
Charlotte could see nothing very odd in this. One might well leave a Bible to one’s minister, especially if he were as sincere and thoughtful as Oliphant. She could almost certainly have had no idea of his feelings for her; they had been so desperately private. She recalled his bony, vulnerable face as clearly as if she had seen it a few moments ago.
Why was Pitt so concerned? It seemed ordinary enough. She looked at him, waiting.
“Of course the Bible was destroyed in the fire.” He leaned forward a little, elbows on the table, his face puckered in concentration. “But the solicitor had seen it-it was an extraordinary thing, leather bound, tooled in gold and with a hasp and lock on it which he thought must be brass, but he wasn’t sure.” His eyes were bright with the recollection. “And inside every initial letter of a chapter was illuminated in color and gold leaf with the most exquisite tiny paintings.” He smiled slowly. “As if one glimpsed a vision of heaven or hell through lighted keyholes. She showed it to him just once, so he would know what item he was dealing with and there could be no mistake. It had been her grandfather’s.” His face shadowed for a moment with distaste. “Not Worlingham, on the other side.” Then the awareness of the present returned and with it the waste and the destruction. His face was suddenly blank and the light died out of it. “It must have been marvelous, and worth a great deal. But of course it’s gone with everything else.”
He looked at her, puzzled and anxious. “But why on earth should she leave it to Oliphant? He’s not even the vicar, he’s only a curate. He almost certainly won’t stay there in Highgate. If he gets a living it will be elsewhere- possibly even in a different county.”
Charlotte knew the answer immediately and without any effort of reasoning. It was as obvious to her as to any woman who had loved and not dared to show it, as she had once, ages ago, before Pitt. She had been infatuated with Dominic Corde, her eldest sister’s husband, when Sarah was alive and they all lived in Cater Street. Of course that had died as delusion became reality and impossible, agonizing love resolved into a fairly simple friendship. But she thought that for Clemency Shaw it had remained achingly real. Matthew Oliphant’s character was not a sham she had painted on by dream, as Charlotte had with Dominic. He was not handsome, dashing, there at every turn in her life; he was at least fifteen years her junior, a struggling curate with barely the means of subsistence, and to the kindest eye he was a little plain and far from graceful.
And yet a spirit burned inside him. In the face of other people’s agony Clitheridge was totally inadequate, graceless, inarticulate and left on the outside untouched. Oliphant’s compassion robbed him of awkwardness because he felt the pain as if it were his own and pity taught his tongue.
The answer was clear. Clemency had loved him just as much as he had loved her, and been equally unable to show it even in the slightest way, except when she was dead to leave him something of infinite value to her, and yet which would not seem so very remarkable that it would hurt his reputation. A Bible, not a painting or an ornament or some other article which would betray an unseemly emotion, just a Bible-to the curate. Only those who had seen it would know-and perhaps that would be the solicitor-and Stephen Shaw.
Pitt was staring at her across the table.
“Charlotte?”
She looked up at him, smiling a very little, suddenly a tightness in her throat.
“He loved her too, you know,” she said, swallowing hard. “I realized that when he was helping me to follow Bessie Jones and those awful houses. He knew the way she went.”
Pitt put the cup down and reached to take her hands, gently, holding them and touching her fingers one by one. There was no need to say anything else, and he did hot wish to.
In fact it was the following morning, just before he left, that he told her the other thing that had so troubled him. He was tying up his boots at the front door and she was holding his coat.
“The lawyers have sorted the estate already. It’s quite simple. There is no money-only a couple of hundred pounds left.”
“What?” She felt she must have misunderstood him.
He straightened up and she helped him on with the coat.
“There is no money left,” he repeated. “All the Worlingham money she inherited is gone, except about two hundred and fourteen pounds and fifteen shillings.”
“But I thought there was a lot-I mean, wasn’t Theophilus rich?”
“Extremely. And all of it went to his two daughters, Prudence Hatch and Clemency Shaw. But Clemency has none left.”
There was one ugly thought which she had to speak because it would haunt her mind anyway. “Did Shaw spend it?”
