Hasty Death

∨ Hasty Death ∧

Three

As to making a companion of a servant or inviting her to the drawing room to have tea with one, as I have heard is sometimes done, such a thing is simply ruinous to the mistress’s authority in her own household and highly derogatory to her personal dignity.

Mrs C.E. Humphry, Etiquette for every day (1902)

Harry waited patiently until Rose reappeared, bathed and dressed. “Thank you for all you have done,” said Rose. “Have the police arrested that dreadful man?”

“I am making arrangements to ship him off to Australia and I have frightened him into silence. Otherwise society would be delighted to hear of your latest escapade.”

“Being kidnapped and tied up can hardly be described as an escapade.”

“Granted. But the daughter of an earl working in an office would most certainly be regarded as an escapade.”

“You are right,” conceded Rose. “But what was the point of bringing us here?”

“You need to present a respectable appearance before you return to that hostel. You will tell Miss Harringey that you were both the victims of a practical joke. I told her I was your brother, therefore it will seem perfectly in order for me to escort you back. Now to the problem of Daisy. I gather from Becket that you do not wish to have anything to do with her.”

Rose raised her eyebrows. “Of course not. How can you even ask such a question? She put my life at risk. I could have choked on that gag.”

“Nonetheless, you might still be choking on that gag if she had not severely burnt her wrists in helping you to escape. Becket has sent for the doctor. You did thank her, I hope?”

“I did not know her wrists were burnt,” said Rose. “I will see that she is amply compensated when my parents return.”

“Money solves everything, heh? And how will you explain the reason why Daisy must be paid?”

“They will be so glad that I am rid of her, they will pay anything.”

“You are at fault, you know.”

“How, sir?”

“You chose to step outside your class and befriend an ex-chorus girl from the East End. It amused you to do so. You educated her and introduced her to a better way of life and now you want to throw her back again like some toy that had failed to work.”

“That is not the way it was. We were friends.”

“A friendship easily broken.”

Rose’s lip trembled. “I have suffered an ordeal, I am abominably hungry, and yet all you can do is rail at me over a servant.”

“Aha! So Daisy is nothing more than a servant. I suggest we have her up here and ask her to explain what drew her back to her old haunts.”

Harry rang the bell. “Becket, fetch Miss Daisy. Is the doctor coming?”

“He will be here shortly.”

A few moments later, Daisy was led into the parlour. “None of us has eaten, Becket,” said Harry. “A late luncheon, I think, after the doctor has left. Pray take a seat, Miss Levine.”

Daisy sat down on the edge of a chair and Rose turned her head away.

“I am interested to know what took you back to your old neighbourhood,” said Harry gently. “First, some brandy for Miss Levine, Becket. She is looking extremely pale.”

He waited until Daisy took several sips of brandy.

“Now,” he prompted her.

Daisy gave a dry sob, like a weary child. Rose turned her head and looked at her, at the white face and the bound wrists.

“My lady and I were working in a room together, sir, typing out stuff from ledgers. We decided they were just making work for us. Then one of the bosses needed a temporary secretary and Ro – I mean my lady, got the job. So I was on me…my…own. Men kept dropping in for a bit, but when they saw it was only me they left.

“I began to feel that Daisy Levine was really nothing. I began to remember the old days in the theatre, where I was considered attractive. I thought I’d just go back to my own kind, as I thought of them. That’s where I met Billy. I’d known him before, and when he asked me up to that flat for a drink, it seemed all right to go.

“Like a fool, I told him the whole story. I was lonely, you see. You can’t break the barriers of class, sir. It’s flying in the face of nature.”

Harry turned to Rose. “You inadvertently broke the barriers of class, Lady Rose. You joined the suffragettes and then abandoned them. You cannot go around changing the rules and expect things to be easy. So do you want to get rid of Miss Levine and return to your comfortable and privileged life?”

Rose thought of her pride in her job and how she had dragged Daisy along with her into this new life. She remembered Daisy’s gallantry, her spirit, and realized for the first time that she would not have been able to go through with the business of getting a job without Daisy.

“I’m sorry, Daisy,” she said. “Thank you for helping me to escape. We will go on as before…as friends.”

“Thank you, my lady.”

“Rose, please.”

“The doctor is here,” said Becket.

“Take him through to the back parlour. When he is finished, we will have lunch.”

“Very good, sir. Miss Levine?”

♦

The doctor declared the burns to be bad but not serious. Daisy’s wrists were once more treated and bandaged. She was made to swallow two aspirin and told to rest.

After the doctor had gone, Becket produced a meal he had ordered from a restaurant in the King’s Road.

During the lunch, Rose suddenly said, “I am glad now we decided to work at the bank. Please apologize to your secretary for trying to take her job away from her.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”

“I had this mad idea that it might be fun to work for you and I went round to offer my services.”

“Miss Jubbles said nothing of this to me,” said Harry. “I wonder why.”

“Well, she wouldn’t, would she?” remarked Daisy. A touch of colour had returned to her cheeks.

“Why not?”

“She doesn’t want to lose her job.”

“Miss Jubbles should have known her job is secure.” Harry’s black eyes studied Rose’s face. “I am interested to know why you wanted to work for me. I was under the impression that you neither liked nor approved of me.”

“Daisy and I were of help to you over that murder at Telby Castle last year. I thought it might be fun to work together again, that is all. Do you have many exciting cases?”

“Not in the slightest. Lost dogs, society scandals that need to be covered up, that sort of thing. But you surely do not intend to work at that bank for very long.”

“Perhaps. But I am doing very well. Now Miss Levine is being wasted there. All she is doing is typing stuff out of ledgers that doesn’t need to be typed. As you were instrumental in getting us the work, I would be grateful if you could perhaps speak to Mr Drevey and point out to him that Miss Levine is not only an expert typist but that she has mastered Pitman shorthand.”

“I will see what I can do.”

♦

After he had escorted Daisy and Rose back to their hostel and impressed on Miss Harringey the respectability of her tenants, Harry decided to go to the office. He found Miss Jubbles hard at work polishing his desk.

“Miss Jubbles! It is Sunday. What on earth are you doing here?”

Miss Jubbles blushed painfully. “I was just passing and I thought I would do a few chores.”

“This will not do. You work too hard. Please go home.”

“I am sorry, Captain.”

She looked so upset that Harry said impulsively, “I have been out on an odd case. Do you remember I told you I was doing some work for the Earl of Hadshire?”

“Yes, but you did not tell me exactly what was involved.”

So Harry told her the whole story. Miss Jubbles smiled, exclaimed, and listened intently while inside her brain a small, jealous Miss Jubbles was raging. That girl again. That wretched beautiful girl!

When he had finished telling her about Rose, Harry smiled and told Miss Jubbles to go home.

He gave her five shillings and told her to take a hack. Mrs Jubbles tore herself away. How sooty and cold and grim London looked! The hackney horse steamed and stamped as she climbed in and gave one last longing look up at the office windows.

The hack eventually dropped her at a thin, narrow brick house in Camden Town. Miss Jubbles lived with her widowed mother. She unlocked the front door and called, “Mother!”

“In the sitting-room, dear,” came a cry from upstairs.

Miss Jubbles mounted the narrow stairs to the first-floor sitting-room. Mrs Jubbles was sitting before a small coal fire which smouldered in the grate. She was a tiny woman dressed entirely in black. Her black lace cap hung over her withered features. Her black gown was trimmed with jet and her black-lace-mittened hands clutched a teacup.

When Miss Jubbles entered, she said in a surprisingly robust voice, “Ring the bell for more tea, Dora.”

Miss Dora Jubbles pressed down the bell-push, and after a few minutes a small maid, breathless and with her cap askew, answered its summons. “More tea, Elsie,” ordered Mrs Jubbles. “And straighten your cap, girl.”

Mother and daughter exchanged sympathetic smiles after the girl had left. “Servants,” sighed Mrs Jubbles as if used to a household of them rather than the overworked Elsie and a cross gin-soaked woman who came in the mornings to do the ‘heavy work’.

“How did it go?” asked Mrs Jubbles eagerly.

Dora took off her coat and unpinned her large felt hat and stripped off her gloves. “Wait until Elsie brings the tea-things. I’ve ever so much to tell you.”

From her daughter’s tales, Mrs Jubbles had gathered that Captain Cathcart, younger son of a baron, who had chosen to sink to trade, was enamoured of her daughter. Both dreamt rosy dreams of being finally ensconced in some country mansion with a whole army of servants at their beck and call.

Elsie panted in with a tray with the tea-things and a plate containing two small Eccles cakes. Mother and daughter lived thriftily. Mrs Jubbles’s husband had owned a butcher’s shop in Camden Town and two houses other than the one the widow now lived in. She had sold all for a comfortable sum, but was keeping aside a substantial amount for her daughter’s wedding. The fact that Dora was now thirty-eight years old had not dimmed her hopes. She saw Dora as elegant and distinguished.

Dora told her mother all about Lady Rose, ending with, “She is very beautiful.”

Mrs Jubbles sniffed. “You should tell the newspapers what this Lady Rose has been up to. They’d pay you and she’d be so socially ruined that he couldn’t possibly want to marry her.”

Dora was shocked. “I would be betraying the captain’s trust. Oh, if you could have seen the way he smiled at me. There is an intimacy there, Mother, a warmth. And to confide in me the way he did? No, he seemed impatient with the adventures of this Lady Rose. He is never impatient with me.”

A little doubt crept into Mrs Jubbles mind. “This Lady Rose is young?”

“Yes, very. Barely twenty, I would say.”

“And the captain is…?”

“Nearly thirty. Yes, he is younger than I am, but I think I am young-looking for my age.”

“Oh, yes, dear. Only the other day, the baker, Mr Jones said, ‘Where is your lovely daughter?’ That’s just what he said. So you do not think it would be a good idea to apprise the newspapers of what this Lady Rose is doing?”

“No, Mother. I would not breathe a word to anyone apart from you. And you must swear you must not tell anyone either.”

“There, there, girl. I swear,” said Mrs Jubbles and crossed her fingers behind her back.

♦

Harry had forgotten to tell Mr Drevey about Daisy’s prowess, the sick secretary had come back, and so Rose and Daisy were once more closeted together, typing out from the entries in the ledgers.

Rose was becoming weary of her new life. All her initial enthusiasm had gone, bit by bit. She longed to have a bed of her own again and decent meals. Her pin-money had gone quickly on items which Daisy had considered frivolous, such as an expensive vase for flowers and even more expensive flowers to put in it. Their wages had melted away on meals at Lyons, cosmetics, perfume that Rose felt she must have and new gloves and various other little luxuries. The winter weather was horrible.

The pin-money she had brought to her new life had run out and their combined wages did not allow them any luxuries. She was tired of cooking cheap meals on the gas ring in their room, tired of saving pennies for the gas meters, weary of the biting cold in this seemingly endless winter. She found that although Daisy did not like to read, she loved being read to, and so that was the way they passed most of their evenings.

Her clothes were beginning to smell of cooking, and regular sponging down with benzene did not seem to help much. Their underclothes had to be washed out in the bathroom and then hung on a rack before the gas fire. The sweat-pads from their blouses and dresses took ages to dry.

One morning Rose discovered a spot on her forehead. She could never remember having any spots on her face before.

She could only admire Daisy’s fortitude. Daisy never complained. Rose did not know that Daisy, after her initial rush of gratitude after their escape, was as miserable as she was.

Daisy was every bit as conscious of the rigid English class distinctions as Rose and was afraid that any complaint from her would be treated as the typical whining of the lower classes.

One morning, as they arrived for work, it began to snow. Small little flakes at first and then great feathery ones already speckled with the dirty soot of London.

By lunchtime, it was a raging blizzard.

“We won’t even be able to get along to Lyons for lunch,” mourned Rose, “and my back hurts with all this useless work.”

“There’s a pie shop round the corner,” said Daisy.

“Oh, would you be a dear and get us something?” said Rose. “I’ll see if there is anywhere here I can make tea. I think there is a kitchen upstairs next to the executive offices. Take my umbrella.”

Daisy struggled out into the whirling snow. She bought two mutton pies and hurried back towards the office. A news-vendor was shouting, “Society murder. Read all about it!”

Daisy bought a paper and breathed a sigh of relief when she entered the bank and shut the door on the white hell outside.

“I’ve got tea,” said Rose when she entered the room. “There was no one upstairs. I’ll wait until they have gone this evening and smuggle the tea things back. Mrs Danby won’t see me. She never even comes near us any more, and Captain Cathcart must have forgotten that we wanted real work.”

“I’ve got the pies. Look at me coat,” said Daisy. “Soaked already. We’ll never get home in this.”

“Home,” echoed Rose bleakly, thinking of that awful room.

“Look, I bought the Daily Mail. There’s something about a society murder. Here’s your pie. You’ll need to eat it out of the newspaper wrapping. No plates.”

Rose took a bite of the pie. “This is really good. We should buy another two to take home.”

“I say!” exclaimed Daisy. “You’ll never believe who’s gone and got himself murdered.”

“Who?”

“That Freddy Pomfret. Remember him? We met him at Telby Castle last year.”

“So we did,” said Rose.

“It says here, ‘Man-about-town, the Honourable Mr Frederick Pomfret, was found shot dead in his town flat in St James.’”

As Daisy read on, Rose furrowed her brow. She remembered Freddy as vacuous and silly with his white face and patent leather hair. Hardly the man to incite anyone to murder him. But there was something else, something about Freddy nagging at the back of her mind.

At the end of the working day, they went out into a white world. London had gone to sleep under a thick blanket of snow.

“Let’s see if the underground is working,” said Daisy. “The Central London Railway goes to Holborn and then we can walk home.”

They stumbled through white drifts to King William Street Station and took the hydraulic lift down to the platforms. Trains consisted of three carriages hauled by electric locomotives. These were powered by the largest power-generating station in the country. The coaches were known as padded cells and they were long and narrow with high-backed cushioned seats and no windows. Gatemen stood on platforms at the end of each carriage to call out the names of the stations.

They paid the two pennies each fare and waited in the crush until they managed to get on ‘the tube’, as it was known.

“We should have travelled like this before,” said Rose. “The omnibus is so slow. Why didn’t we think about it?”

“I did,” said Daisy. “But it frightens me to be so far underground with all them buildings on top of us.”

They got out at Holborn Station. The snow, which had eased a little when they left the office, had returned in all its ferocity. By the time they reached the hostel, they were cold and their clothes were soaked.

Rose searched in her purse. “I have no pennies left. What about you?”

“No, but I’ve found a way to fix it.” Daisy crouched over the meter with an army knife bristling with gadgets and fiddled about with a thin blade until a penny rattled down and then another.

“Oh, Daisy, that’s robbery.”

“That’s warmth,” said Daisy cheerfully, dropping the coins back in, turning the dial and then lighting the small gas fire. They took off their wet clothes. Rose still felt self-conscious at disrobing in front of Daisy, but Daisy had no such qualms. She stripped naked and then wrapped herself in a wool dressing-gown and began to hang her clothes in front of the fire. Rose followed suit.

“Have we anything to eat?” she asked.

“’Fraid not,” said Daisy gloomily.

There was a knock at the door. Rose opened it a crack. Miss Harringey stood there. “A gentleman has called,” she said, her voice heavy with disapproval.

“Did he give a name?”

“A Mr Jarvis.”

“Tell him to wait and I will be down directly.”

Rose scrambled into dry clothes, leaving off the misery of stays, and hurried down the stairs.

Mr Jarvis stood in the hallway carrying a basket. “Mr Jarvis! How on earth did you get here in this dreadful weather?” asked Rose.

“I rode one of the big horses, one of the ones that pull the fourgon. Here are some things for you” – he proffered the basket – “and here is a letter. Please do not say anything. I think the lady of the house is listening. Good evening.”

He opened the street door and mounted the large shire-horse which was tethered outside, by dint of scraping snow off the low wall outside the house and using it as a mounting block.

Rose hurried upstairs. In the room, she opened the letter. It was from her mother, Lady Polly, to say that they had returned from Nice and would Rose please stop all this nonsense and come home.

“What’s in the basket?” asked Daisy.

Rose lifted the cloth cover and gave a delighted cry. “Food! Oh, do look, Daisy. Game pie and wine and biscuits, cake, tea, coffee, and he’s even put in a bottle of milk. And there are other things.”

Daisy laid two plates and two cups on the table along with the cheap knives and forks they had purchased. “We’ll need to drink the wine out of teacups.”

“We haven’t a corkscrew.”

“I have,” said Daisy, producing the knife again and twisting a corkscrew out from among the many implements.

As their clothes steamed and the room warmed up, both began to feel more cheerful. “I know what it was,” said Rose suddenly.

“What?”

“About Freddy Pomfret. When I was working as secretary, one of the clerks came in and said, ‘Mr Pomfret has very generous friends.’ Mr Beveridge asked him what he meant and he said, ‘Three people have paid large deposits into his account so we don’t need to send him any more letters about his overdraft.’”

“Probably his relatives. But why didn’t they pay up before? What you getting at?”

Rose was about to correct Daisy’s grammar and remind her not to be so familiar but in time remembered that they were supposed to be on an equal footing.

“There must be some reason he was murdered. What if he was blackmailing people?”

Daisy looked doubtful. She thought it highly unlikely. The Freddy she remembered was silly but not villainous. Still, if Rose’s detective urges had started up again, perhaps she would get in touch with Captain Cathcart. Daisy had a fondness for the captain’s servant, Becket.

“We could ask Captain Cathcart.”

“Perhaps. I would like to see the books and then perhaps go to Scotland Yard and talk to Superintendent Kerridge.”

Daisy’s face fell. “Could we see the captain first?”

But Rose wanted to show the infuriating Harry that she could be a better detective than he was.

“I’ll see what I can do tomorrow.”

“If we can even get to work,” Daisy pointed out.

♦

The next morning was cold and still but the snow had stopped. As Rose and Daisy slipped and stumbled their way along to the underground station at Holborn, Rose wished she had packed her riding breeches. These long skirts and petticoats were useless attire for getting to work through a snowfall.

The City was quiet, shrouded in a blanket of snow. They had to knock at the bank door to gain admittance. At last one of the clerks opened the door to them.

“Nobody’s turned up except me,” he said. “I keep the door locked because anyone could walk in and rob the bank. Charles, the doorman, hasn’t turned up and he’s really got no excuse. He lives in the City. May I get you ladies anything? Tea?”

“Maybe later,” said Rose. “We’ll let you know. Thank you.”

Once they were in their office, Rose whispered, “This is a perfect opportunity. I’ll go upstairs to the counting-house and start searching.”

“What about the banking hall?”

“The records won’t be there. In any case, everything in the banking hall will be tightly locked.”

Daisy lit the fire and then waited impatiently. Outside, she could hear the scraping of shovels and then the swish of brooms as the street-sweepers got to work. A shaft of sunlight suddenly shone down through the grimy window.

Then there came a banging at the front door. Daisy stayed where she was, nervously chewing at a thumbnail.

She heard the clerk running down the stairs. She stood up and opened the door of her office a crack. She heard the doorman complaining that he had a bad leg and it had taken him ages to struggle through the snow and then a female voice. Mrs Danby. Oh, where was Rose?

An hour passed. Daisy was just about to go out and up the stairs in case Rose was in trouble when the door opened and Rose slipped in.

“Where have you been?” hissed Daisy.

Rose sank down in her chair. “It took me ages. But I’ve got some interesting information. Get on your coat and hat, Daisy. We’re going to Scotland Yard. I telephoned Detective Superintendent Kerridge.”

“But what about old Danby?”

“We’ll just need to risk her not knowing we even turned up for work.” They covered their typewriters and put on their coats, hats and gloves. Opening the door of their office, they crept out. To their relief, they could hear the doorman complaining about his leg to someone in the banking hall off to the left of the main door.

“Quickly,” said Rose.