Derby Day Page 14

  X

  Shepherd’s Inn and elsewhere

  Bred up, like a bailiff or a shabby attorney, about the purlieus of the Inns of Court, Shepherd’s Inn is always to be found in the close neighbourhood of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the Temple. Somewhere among the black gables and smutty chimney-stacks of Wych Street, Holywell Street, Chancery Lane, the quadrangle lies, hidden from the outer world …

  W. M. Thackeray, The History of Pendennis (1850)

  SHEPHERD’S INN IS generally owned to be rather an obscure locality. Chancery Lane is only two minutes distant, and the shops and the taverns of Oldcastle Street hard by, but somehow the Inn has detached itself from the bustle of their traffic and the old porter who sits in a chair before the lodge gate can sleep for hours at a time without anyone disturbing him. Fifty years ago the Inn was full of Chancery lawyers and black-coated attorneys’ clerks, but the lawyers have all gone now and the place is given over to black-lead companies and commission agents and persons so enigmatic as not to advertise their existence, and the brass plates on the doors change hands at three-month intervals. Mr Crutwell, the celebrated divorce lawyer, has chambers here, only he never visits, and Mr Abrahams, who lends money to the nobility and whose wife has a ‘drawing room’ in Portland Street, keeps an office somewhere nearby. But the private residents are all rather retiring: middle-aged gentlemen in threadbare coats who stalk in and out of the arch as if they really had somewhere to go; young men in shirtsleeves who never seem to have any work but are always about the place smoking cigars and chaffing the porter. Very occasionally a carriage or a gig stops at the gate and a visitor walks over the gravel paths, past the statue of the shepherd’s boy behind its iron palings, to search for someone who will most likely have moved out six months before, but this is still a great event in the life of the Inn, where the pattern of the days is altogether less conspicuous.

  It was here in Shepherd’s Inn, on the top floor of a house set at right angle to the lodge gate, that Mr Pardew and the lady who called herself his wife had come to rest. The inhabitants of these dwelling places do not generally take much notice of each other, but anyone who took an interest in Number 3 would have seen that its latest set of tenants seldom left their chamber, that the gentleman, in particular, only came out very late at night or very early in the morning, that the blinds in the windows were usually pulled down, and that scarcely anybody, least of all the postman, came to call. For his own part, Mr Pardew thought that he had a very comfortable lodging, where nobody cared who he was or what he was about and where he could probably have set up as a resurrection man, robbing corpses out of the graveyard at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, without anyone taking the slightest notice.

  It was about three o’clock on a spring afternoon – a raw afternoon with rain desultorily falling – and Mr Pardew, with a mackintosh drawn up to his chin and a scarf wound very tightly around the lower part of his face – was coming back through the archway. In one hand he held his stick, and in the other a provisions basket, and the porter who sat, not in his chair, but behind the smeary glass of the lodge-gate window, noticed that as he reached the arch he turned very deliberately on his heel and looked back the way he had come. A fat woman dressed in black with a put-upon expression on her face came waddling towards him over the stone flags and he stood aside to let her pass by before making his way to the open door of Number 3 and proceeding stealthily up to the third floor. There was a faint smell of meat roasting and a woman’s voice softly singing, and Mr Pardew stood on the mat for a moment considering them before producing a latchkey, twisting it in the lock and stepping inside. Here the suspicion that had occurred to him during the walk from the lodge was confirmed by the sight of a tray containing a teapot, a milkjug and a second, incriminating cup.

  ‘Why have you had that person here?’ he demanded, very sharply, as Jemima came into the room to greet him.

  ‘It is only my sister, Richard. I don’t suppose you would wish me to turn her away.’

  ‘I should have turned her away, and all the rest of that d——d family of hers, too.’ Mr Pardew’s expression as he said this was very striking. ‘What does she want?’

  ‘It is a pity a woman can’t see her own flesh and blood after two years away from them.’

  ‘A pity! It is a pity you ever wrote to her at all. I shan’t have her here. She will –’ Mr Pardew very nearly said ‘betray us all’ but stopped himself. In fact the possibility of someone betraying him was not one he thought at all likely. He had been here a fortnight now, living very inconspicuously, revisiting none of his old haunts, and he fancied that he was no danger. To be sure, there had been an occasional fright. He had been smoking a cigar once in a shilling divan when a man had addressed him by name, but he had kept his head, produced a card that said his name was Abernethy, received an apology and gone on with his cigar. Another time a policeman had looked very hard at him as he walked down Cursitor Street, but Mr Pardew had assured himself that policemen sometimes do look very hard at the most innocent passers-by and continued on his way. Apart from this, in his wanderings around London, he had gone unmolested.

  ‘I shan’t ask her again, if you wish it,’ Jemima said, very meekly, and Mr Pardew looked at her fresh complexion and the neat little apron she had round her waist and was mollified. A top-floor set in Shepherd’s Inn is not perhaps the easiest lodging to render cheerful, but somehow Jemima had made it so. There was a bright little screen in the far corner and a picture or two fixed to the walls along with the smell of the roasting meat.

  ‘You will never guess,’ he said, pulling off his gloves and talking in a more companionable manner, ‘who I saw today?’

  ‘Who was it?’ Jemima wondered, half in and half out of the kitchen.

  ‘Well – in point of fact I walked round to see Lord Fairhurst at his club.’ In fact, Mr Pardew had gone nowhere near Lord Fairhurst or his club, but he was determined to make up for his bad temper.

  ‘Gracious,’ said Jemima, who, as Mr Pardew knew, loved talk of this kind. ‘How was his lordship?’

  ‘Well – I have seen him better. A touch of the gout, I should say.’ No one who saw Mr Pardew’s face could have doubted that he had sat in Lord Fairhurst’s club and taken tea with him. ‘They say that his uncle, who owns half of Hampshire, made him his heir on condition he gave up drinking port. But all that was a long time ago.’

  ‘There was a gentleman called while you were out,’ Jemima now said.

  ‘What sort of a gentleman?’

  ‘Well – he said that you would know him, and why he called.’

  Mr Pardew set down the cup of tea that had just been brought to him – very fragrant tea it was, in the most delicate little cup – and walked over to the window, whose blind for once was raised. Down below in the courtyard a man in a shabby coat with his hands plunged deep into his pocket was walking nervously back and forth, casting sharp, uneasy glances at the archway and the porter’s lodge.

  ‘Is that the man?’

  ‘Yes – that is him.’

  Mr Pardew continued to stare for a moment or so, drank some more of his tea – it seemed less fragrant to him now – and then went yet more stealthily back down the staircase. Captain Raff met him just beyond the outer door.

  ‘Why, Pardew, there you are. How I missed you coming back to your rooms I can’t imagine.’

  ‘And yet somehow you did,’ Mr Pardew said. ‘Here, you’d better come upstairs.’

  The sitting room was empty on their arrival, a fact that Captain Raff seemed greatly to regret. Plucked from the courtyard, and safe behind a locked door, he seemed less ill at ease.

  ‘Ain’t your wife going to join us, Pardew? Deuced pretty woman, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  Mr Pardew looked as if would have liked to kick Captain Raff back down the stairs whence he had come. Instead he picked up the stick, which he had put down when first returning, and weighed it in his hand.

  ‘Perhaps I do mind your saying so.’ Mr Pardew
thoroughly despised Captain Raff. ‘But never mind. I take it you’ve brought the twenty pounds.’

  ‘Twenty! You’ve had fifty already.’

  ‘Fifty. Seventy. A hundred. These things don’t come cheap, Raff, as well you know.’

  ‘I daresay they don’t,’ Captain Raff conceded. He had seen the stick now – it was an inch thick, at least, around the middle – and was becoming uneasy again. ‘But, well – twenty pounds, you know.’

  ‘You’ll make fifty times that if it all comes off.’

  ‘Ah, but that’s the question, ain’t it?’ said Captain Raff, who seemed delightfully unaware of how much Mr Pardew disliked him. ‘When will it come off, eh?’

  ‘When will it come off? I’ll put an advertisement in the Gazette if you like. Should that suit?’

  ‘I never knew a fellow for flying off the handle so much,’ said Captain Raff, almost piteously. Evidently he had come to Shepherd’s Inn prepared to meet Mr Pardew’s demands, for he took a notecase from his pocket, and with a kind of sigh, as if he could not hold himself responsible for any circumstances that might arise, began to count out four five-pound notes onto the table before him.

  ‘I shall need assistance, you know,’ Mr Pardew said as he gathered up the notes with what, Captain Raff could not help noticing, was a kind of disdain. ‘Should you like to come with me?’

  ‘Come with you!’ Captain Raff gave a look of stark horror. ‘No, I should not. That sort of thing ain’t in my line at all, you know. Lythgoe will do it, I dare say.’

  ‘Lythgoe?’

  ‘The little chap as we sent to Boulogne in search of you. Mr – that is, we have his paper, you know.’

  ‘Do you indeed?’ Mr Pardew gave him a look that made Captain Raff glance at the door and measure his distance to it. ‘Well, you had better let Lythgoe know that he’s needed. But there is one thing you can tell me, Raff. Who’s your principal, eh?’

  Captain Raff looked yet more stricken. There was a wild look in his eye. ‘You shall have your money,’ he said. ‘A promise is a promise, you know.’

  ‘I don’t doubt I shall have my money. But I want to know who’s giving it to me. It ain’t you, is it?’

  ‘No, it isn’t me,’ Captain Raff said, very humbly, all the while measuring the distance to the door.

  ‘Well then, who is it? To whom do I apply if, well, let us say, if things ain’t to my liking? Why – let us be straight about this – should I have to deal with you, eh?’

  ‘As to that,’ said Captain Raff, recovering something of his dignity, ‘I suppose I can carry a message as well as the next man?’

  ‘I don’t doubt you can, but what if the message ain’t to my liking? Why, I might have to shoot the messenger, if you take my meaning.’ But all this was lost on Captain Raff, who looked more terrified than ever. Mr Pardew grinned. ‘No, don’t alarm yourself, Raff. I’m not going to shoot you. Nor yet anyone else, I hope. You had better go back to your Mr ——, give him my compliments, and tell him the thing will come off. But there’s to be no splitting, mind.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Captain Raff said, so relieved that the interview was over that he walked down the stairs quite proudly with his head in the air, telling himself that he had brought the business off with a flourish, and that Mr Happerton would be pleased. ‘No splitting eh?’ he said to himself as he passed through the gate and went out into Oldcastle Street. ‘Well, we shall see about that.’

  Once Captain Raff had gone, Mr Pardew made as if to fling himself into a chair and resume his cup of tea. Then, setting down the tea cup, he went and stood by the window, where Captain Raff’s receding figure could be seen approaching the lodge. Picking up his stick, and regretting the smell of roasting meat which continued to pervade the room from beyond the kitchen door, Mr Pardew walked down the staircase and by moving very rapidly across the courtyard contrived to emerge into Oldcastle Street just as Captain Raff could be seen turning into a side alley thirty yards away. Fortunately Oldcastle Street and its surrounding thoroughfares were full of people, and by keeping himself to a safe distance and trusting to the Captain’s lack of observational powers Mr Pardew had no difficulty in holding him within his sights without himself being seen.

  In this way, face well down under his coat collar, and with sundry excitable flourishes of his stick, he followed Captain Raff along the southern edge of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, watched him saunter negligently across Chancery Lane, where he was abused by a crossing-sweeper and nearly knocked down by a hay-cart, and then shadowed him eastward along Cursitor Street and into Plough Place. Just as Mr Pardew was beginning to think that the game was not worth the candle and that Captain Raff might walk all the way to Whitechapel without stopping, his quarry paused, stood uncertainly on a street corner and darted into a building whose doorway was ornamented with a brass plate that read BLUE RIBAND CLUB. Mr Pardew retired to the other side of the street to a print-seller’s displaying views of Old London, and amused himself by examining the passers-by while keeping an eye on the club’s doorway.

  Perhaps a quarter of an hour went by in this way when Captain Raff appeared in the doorway with a tall, stoutish man arrayed in a pair of top-boots who looked about for a cab, and then had himself and Captain Raff carried away in the direction of Fleet Street. For a moment Mr Pardew wondered about summoning a second cab – there was one moving up towards him from St Andrew Street – and renewing his pursuit, but then it occurred to him that the information he sought might be more readily to hand. Accordingly, tucking his stick up under his arm, he marched off across the road, stalked into the doorway of the Blue Riband Club and buttonholed the servant who kept guard over the vestibule.

  ‘Dear me,’ said Mr Pardew very mildly. ‘Was that my friend Captain Raff just stepping out of the club? I fear I must have missed him.’

  ‘Yes, sir. The capting’s gone this instant. Him and Mr Happerton both together.’

  ‘Ah, with Mr Happerton is it?’ said Mr Pardew, almost to himself, and walked back into the street.

  Mr Pardew was a resourceful and sometimes a studious man, and in the course of the next week he marshalled his resources and made a study of Mr Happerton. He enquired of the Blue Riband and found that it was a club for sporting men; he consulted an ostler or two, and turned up a saddler’s shop which Mr Happerton was thought to patronise; he spent at least one morning in a library examining back-numbers of The Times newspaper; and before long he had assembled a little dossier about Mr Happerton that would have done credit to a police detective. He knew how Mr Happerton had made his money. He knew about his marriage and his trip to Rome. He knew a great deal about Tiberius. All this information Mr Pardew stowed away, not having any immediate use for it, but thinking that it might very well prove to his advantage in future days, when certain other schemes had come to fruition.

  It might have been said of Mr Pardew in these days by anyone who knew him – and there was only Jemima to notice where he went and how he occupied himself – that he was very restless. When he sat in the room at Shepherd’s Inn he was always writing little notes to himself, considering them as he ate or drank or tapped his stick, and then tearing them asunder and casting them away. He took great long walks – north, south and west of the city, to Hampstead, St John’s Wood and Kilburn – which never seemed to tire him or bring him ease. There was a particular street in St John’s Wood, very quiet and secluded, with the houses all huddled up behind laburnum hedges, which he walked down several times with a very longing look. He walked down St James’s Street looking in at the windows of the gentlemen’s clubs there and gnawing at the end of his stick, and along Piccadilly glaring at the shopfronts like a Scots divine who thinks the whole of the West End frivolous and can’t for the life of him see why it is permitted.

  Once, about this time, as they were sitting together in the room at Shepherd’s Inn, looking out at the statue of the shepherd boy behind his iron fence, Mr Pardew said, in such a soft voice that he might have been speaking to himself: �
��I was done a bad turn, but it will all come out right again, you shall see.’

  And Jemima, not quite understanding the words, and not having heard him talk in this way before, wondered at them, and smoothed her hands very demurely down the folds of her dress, and went away to infuse the tea.

  ‘By the by,’ Mr Pardew said, when she returned, ‘how should you like to go to Richmond one day?’

  And so they went to Richmond, on an April day that was not quite spring and not quite summer, and walked by the river, until it became too cold for comfort, and ate whitebait at the Ship, and looked at the people, and perhaps in the end enjoyed themselves. There was a fog starting up over Richmond Hill as they came back, with the gas lights winking through it and a dull grey twilight descending, and Mr Pardew thought it was like the fog that covered his own affairs and resolved that the bold stroke he was now meditating should blow it away.

  Captain Raff called again, and they had a very intimate conversation, at the close of which Mr Pardew sent the Captain away down the staircase with perhaps the haughtiest look he had ever minted. The scheme on which he was now embarked promised a great deal – if it succeeded. But if it were to fail Mr Pardew knew that even little dinners at Richmond, out of season, with the wet grass fouling his boots, would be beyond him. And so life went on quietly at Shepherd’s Inn and Mr Pardew continued to meditate on the bold stroke that would blow the fog away.

  One Saturday morning towards the middle of April, when there was a faint suspicion of gillyflowers in the Shepherd’s Inn window boxes, Mr Pardew dressed himself with more than usual care in a suit of black-cloth taken from the trunk he had brought with him from Boulogne and, with Jemima (who assumed from his appearance that he was going off to dine with a duchess) bidding him farewell, walked off under the arch and into Oldcastle Street looking like an old black rook. The sun had been out and the crowds flocked over the pavement, and it may be that Mr Pardew was troubled by the conspicuousness of his suit – which close inspection revealed to be not of black-cloth but of Oxford mixture – and the silk hat he had on his head, for he seemed to step in and out of doorways and into those places where the crowd pressed thickest. He headed, not north towards Hampstead and St John’s Wood and the usual course of his wanderings, but eastwards towards the City, walked down Newgate Street and Cheapside and came presently to Cornhill.