Laetitia Rodd and the Case of the Wandering Scholar Read online

  LAETITIA RODD

  AND THE CASE

  OF THE WANDERING

  SCHOLAR

  To the memory of my dear friend, Nick Henderson

  ALSO BY KATE SAUNDERS

  The Secrets of Wishtide

  Contents

  Also by Kate Saunders

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Afterword

  Note on the Author

  Also available by Kate Saunders

  Come, let me read the oft-read tale again!

  The story of the Oxford scholar poor,

  Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,

  Who, tired of knocking at preferment’s door,

  One summer morn forsook

  His friends, and went to learn the gipsy-lore,

  And roam’d the world with that wild brotherhood.

  Matthew Arnold, ‘The Scholar Gipsy’

  Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys.

  Alfred Tennyson, ‘Locksley Hall’

  He told how murderers walk the earth

  Beneath the curse of Cain –

  With crimson clouds before their eyes,

  And flames about their brain;

  For blood has left upon their souls

  Its everlasting stain!

  Thomas Hood, ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’

  One

  The morning air was warm and tender, filled with the scents of May: the wild grasses and flowers on Hampstead Heath, and the ripening hayfields beyond. Mrs Bentley and I had taken our work out into the back garden, to bask in the sun like a pair of lizards; she was shelling peas, I was darning a stocking. It was one of those golden days when the heart simply rises up and even the greatest sorrows fall away.

  I was rather proud of that little garden, though it was nothing more than a tiny strip of grass bounded by sooty brick walls. When I moved into Mrs Bentley’s house in Well Walk, two or three years before the time of which I am writing, there had been no garden at all; merely a dank yard behind the wash house. Once upon a time, as wife of an archdeacon presiding over a comfortable establishment in Bloomsbury, I had employed a gardener. As an impoverished widow, I was now forced to do the work myself – but I am country-born, and knew well how to make things grow. My dear mother gave us each a patch of garden to tend; my brother’s quickly turned into a blasted heath, but I loved grubbing about with my trowel – I will never forget how proud I was when Papa praised my first lettuce.

  I took a cutting from the climbing rose in my brother’s large garden in Highgate, and managed to persuade it to creep up our sunniest wall. I paid the youngest of Mrs B’s five sons to nail up a wooden trellis, and planted a honeysuckle – a triumphant honeysuckle, now full of bees and spilling extravagantly over the wall into the garden of the retired sea captain next door.

  Memory becomes more vivid with age; I was three years past my half-century, but the scent took me straight back to the summer twilight in the garden at home, when I was a romantic girl and my dearest Matt was a handsome young curate, and he asked me to marry him beside a great fountain of honeysuckle. Dear me, how happy we were – and how certain we would be happy for ever!

  There is a good reason why Providence does not allow us to look into the future. I did not expect our romance to end as it did, with poor Matt’s sudden death. He was a vigorous man of one-and-fifty, who had known scarcely a day’s illness in his life – which explains why he never got round to making provision for his widow. It would have grieved him very much to see me in my reduced circumstances; this was what gave me the courage to make a new life from the ashes of the old one. The Lord ‘tempers the wind to the shorn lamb’; though I felt utterly abandoned, I know now that my every step was guided.

  For surely it was more than mere coincidence that brought me here, and matched me with Mary Bentley – my landlady and supposedly my servant, who instead became one of my dearest friends. She was small and bent and wrinkled, with faded blue eyes and sparse white hair, and when I first came to inspect the house, I took her to be in her dotage. She was younger than she appeared, however, and (apart from her rheumatism) perfectly energetic and capable. Her white hair had once been flaming red; I could see the colour for myself in the russet heads of all her five sons and their legions of children.

  The late Mr Bentley had been the Hampstead postman. To make ends meet, Mrs B took in lodgers, and I was delighted to discover that she had once, more than thirty years ago, let rooms to the poet John Keats and his two brothers.

  ‘Very nice-mannered boys, they were,’ she would say sadly. ‘And they died too young; my heart just about broke for them.’

  Matt would have teased me, and called me ‘sentimental’, but I took the Keats connection as a hopeful omen for my new life in Hampstead. Certain people (my brother’s wife) did not believe the house in Well Walk was sufficiently genteel for the widow of an archdeacon, and predicted that I would give up the ‘experiment’ after a few weeks. Certain people (see above) thought it quite outrageous of me to assert my independence, when they had been counting on me to stay in the bosom of the family as an unpaid governess – the common fate of the poor female relation, if she’s not careful.

  There was a brisk knocking at the kitchen door. I put my darning aside and went to answer it. I liked to spare Mrs B when I could – and I was lying in wait for the butcher’s boy, to make a serious complaint about the last order of mutton (fatty and hung too long).

  To my surprise it was my brother, grinning all over his face and smoking one of his horrid little black cigars.

  ‘Fred! What are you doing here?’

  ‘It’s such a glorious morning, I couldn’t resist taking a stroll across the Heath, and I knew you’d be overjoyed to see me.’

  ‘Hmm, I suppose you can come in – but not the cigar.’

  ‘Now, Letty, don’t be a spoilsport.’ He blew a smoke-ring. ‘My house is filled with nurses and babies, and my chambers are enormously dull at this time of year. You’re my only refuge from sober duty.’

  ‘Thank you for that doubtful compliment. I assume everything is all right at home, or you wouldn’t look so pleased with yourself.’

  ‘Yes, of course it’s all right. Everyone at home is horribly healthy.’ Fred gave me one of his wicked smiles, just as he used to when he was eight years old, and trying to drag me into one of his illicit schemes; I’m afraid he usually succeeded, though I was supposed to be the ‘sensible’ one. ‘Your latest niece is eating and screaming round the clock, and Fanny’s starting to complain again – always a good sign.�
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  My brother, Frederick Tyson, was one of the most celebrated criminal barristers in London. The goriest murders were his delight, and the popular press loved him for the extravagance of his performances in court; the stationers’ windows in the streets around the Old Bailey were crammed with cartoons of his portly and flamboyant figure, always brandishing a large white silk handkerchief (I considered the handkerchief rather vulgar, and out of keeping with the solemnity of the occasion, but when did he ever listen to me?).

  As a little boy, Fred was plump, with dimples and curls; at the age of fifty, he looked like a disreputable cherub. His wife had lately been confined with their eleventh child; his children were all healthy and bonny, and had brought immeasurable joy into my childless existence – but I could not help observing that Fanny was at her most agreeable when expecting, and often wondered if my brother kept her in that condition on purpose.

  ‘And besides,’ added Fred, ‘this isn’t a social call.’

  ‘You have some business for me?’ This sharpened me up at once; I had a small reputation as a private investigator, and relied upon my brother to find me suitable employment. ‘I do hope it’s something substantial this time.’

  My last paid assignment had been a handful of guineas for escorting the daughters of a Portuguese grandee around the Great Exhibition, which had just opened and was all the rage (it was a long time before I could admit how tedious I found the whole experience – hours in an oversized hothouse looking at machines, while my feet ached like fury).

  ‘More than decent,’ said Fred. ‘I don’t know the particulars, but the client is as rich as Croesus – and very willing to pay through the nose for your services.’

  We set forth half an hour later, after I had changed my ‘everyday’ gown of washed-out grey cotton for my good black silk and black silk bonnet. My clients, as I knew from experience, needed to be assured of my perfect respectability – and what could be more respectable than a clerical widow in black silk? They liked me to look a little dowdy and unremarkable, but without any worrying signs of shabbiness.

  ‘You couldn’t be more proper,’ Fred said, giving my silk skirt an impertinent tug. ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury himself would look shifty beside you.’

  ‘Stop it!’ I snatched my skirt away from him. ‘Make yourself useful and tell me about the case. You said we could walk to the house; where is it?’

  ‘Near Preacher’s Hill, and the old Spa gardens. The house belongs to a Dr Chauncey; our man lives there as a private patient.’ Without any change in his genial manner, my brother was suddenly businesslike. ‘His name is Jacob Welland; he made his fortune with what’s politely known as “guano”, and impolitely as “bird-droppings”. The enquiry was delivered to my chambers yesterday afternoon, by a dashing young footman who looked like a brigand in a light opera – olive skin and black eyes; a Spaniard or Italian. He caused absolute havoc in the office. All the younger clerks were taking turns to snuffle at the keyhole trying to get a peep at him – Beamish had to drive them away with a ruler.’

  ‘And what is the assignment?’

  ‘That I don’t know; the letter only mentioned a “family matter”.’

  ‘I daresay he wants to inspect me first.’

  ‘Well, it’s bound to be a scandal of some sort; that’s what “family matter” generally means.’ He blew another smoke-ring. ‘Five bob says it’s adultery.’

  ‘Fred!’ I knew he was teasing and I should not rise to it – but I could not allow him to speak lightly of such a serious matter.

  ‘Oh, keep your hair on. And please don’t tell me what Papa would say.’

  ‘You shouldn’t make jokes about the Commandments.’ (Precisely what Papa would say; poor man, he never could overcome his innocent amazement that his son refused to follow him into the Church.)

  ‘I have the highest respect for the Commandments; Number Six keeps me in continual employment.’

  The morning was so fine, and the prospect of a new case so interesting, I decided to ignore him – and I had to pay attention to where I was walking. New buildings were biting at the edges of Hampstead Heath, including the splendid new church that was taking shape at the top of Christchurch Hill. The sunny air rang with shouts and hammerings; every pavement seemed to be blocked by planks, wheelbarrows and perilous heaps of bricks.

  Rosemount, the house of Dr Chauncey, had been built in the previous century, when Hampstead enjoyed a few unlikely years as a fashionable spa. It was a long, low red-brick, surrounded by generous gardens and screened from the road by a row of elms.

  The door was opened by a young maid in a fresh ‘morning’ gown of figured blue cotton, a great deal better than the old gown I had just taken off, which Mrs B was threatening to cut up into dusters.

  We were shown into a drawing room, handsomely appointed and furnished. There were no signs of illness here; it was a hospital with only one patient. Before I had time to make my usual lightning assessment of the surroundings, a footman entered.

  ‘Mrs Rodd, Mr Tyson.’

  Fred grinned at me and mouthed the word ‘brigand’. So this was the footman who had caused such a sensation amongst the clerks at his chambers. He was very young, a stripling barely emerged from boyhood; tall and slender of build, and as handsome as a god, with the sort of dark eyes that romantic lady novelists like to describe as ‘flashing’. Despite his stagey looks, however, he wore a livery-jacket of sober grey, and his manner was quiet and respectful.

  ‘My master expects you. Please to follow.’ He spoke with a heavy accent that I could not place.

  The young man led us through the dustless hush of the house, and into the sudden fug of a large conservatory with a glass roof; if not for a door open to the terrace, the thick, damp heat would have been uncomfortable. There were tall stands of potted ferns (very fashionable, though I had always considered them rather ugly plants); I first saw Mr Welland through a screen of long, crinkled, curling, dirty-green fronds.

  ‘I cannot get up, please forgive me. Thank you for coming quickly; time is one thing I cannot buy.’

  He did not need to explain why he was in a hurry. The signs were only too plain, and only too well known to me – the breathless, whispery voice, the hot, bright eyes and nervous, strumming, skeletal fingers. Jacob Welland was dying of consumption, the same pitiless disease that killed poor John Keats; ‘where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’.

  (My dearest Matt once told me, after burying a young girl we had both known from infancy, that seeing such suffering made him angry with the Almighty; he could never help weeping at the funerals of children he had christened, and consumption took so many; whole families sometimes.)

  My brother made the formal introductions. We sat down in two basket chairs, next to the invalid’s couch and close to the open door. Looking behind the signs of his illness, I judged Mr Welland to be about forty years old. He had the sandy remnants of fair hair, and eyes of burning, fevered blue. Despite the heat, he was swaddled in a sumptuous dressing gown of quilted blue satin.

  ‘You do not need to convince me of your discretion, Mrs Rodd,’ Mr Welland said. ‘You have been recommended by someone I trust to the utmost; let us save time by getting straight down to business.’ He said something in a language I recognized as Spanish; the young footman bowed and backed away through the trailing fronds. ‘I need you to find someone, but nobody must know that you are searching, least of all your quarry. If he thinks you’re after him, he’ll run for cover like a hare.’

  ‘I can do all sorts of things without anybody knowing,’ I said. ‘But I don’t understand; is this man a runaway, or a criminal?’

  ‘He’s my brother,’ he whispered. ‘Joshua Welland. My only living relative.’

  ‘And you’re leaving him everything, I suppose,’ said Fred. ‘Pardon my cynicism, but people who are about to inherit fortunes are usually only too easy to find. Have you tried putting a notice in The Times?’

  ‘I want to see him before I
die,’ Mr Welland replied, faint and calm, as if addressing us through a sheet of glass. ‘Chauncey can’t keep me alive beyond a few more months.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’ I asked.

  ‘Ten years ago,’ said Mr Welland. ‘Just before I sailed for South America. To my everlasting sorrow, we parted in anger. There are amends to be made – for our mother’s sake.’

  ‘Yes, I understand.’ (I wanted very much to know the reason for the quarrel, but Mr Welland was pitifully short of breath, and there were facts I needed first.) ‘Can you describe him? How old is he?’

  ‘He’ll be thirty now. Young enough for a man to start again.’

  ‘Is he tall or short? What colour is his hair?’

  ‘Golden, our mother used to call it.’ His voice was feeble, yet his blue eyes burned with purpose; I understood that the determination to find his brother was keeping him alive. ‘Money is no object to me. My lawyer, Mr Harold Mitchell in Barnard’s Inn, will provide anything you need. The money that I have left with him includes your fee, Mrs Rodd.’

  The sum he mentioned, so off-handedly, was enormous; it was all I could do to keep my composure (I’d been hoping the fee would run to a new ‘everyday’ gown, but this would buy me silk).

  Fred pursed his lips, and would have whistled if he hadn’t caught my eye in time. ‘I know Mitchell. It’s a good firm.’

  ‘Mrs Rodd, will you take this case?’

  ‘Most happily, Mr Welland.’ I banished the money to the back of my mind to concentrate upon the poor invalid. ‘While this is not my usual line of work, I have had some experience of finding people who have gone missing.’ (Most notably in the Heaton business, my first successful inquiry, when I found the supposedly deceased spinster aunt living in cheerful disgrace with a half-pay captain.) ‘Do you know for sure that your brother is still alive?’

  ‘Oh yes, there have been several sightings recently.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Joshua is something of a white stag,’ Mr Welland said. ‘He lives like a wild creature, in hedges and ditches. The country people know him and protect him.’