The Trespass: A Novel by Barbara Ewing

Author:Barbara Ewing [Ewing, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

In London the consternation was much, much worse than Harriet had anticipated. She had thought of herself and her disappearance as the object of the consternation: for everyone else the object of consternation was her father.

When she had not come back to the carriage outside St Paul’s Church; when first Lucy and at last the head footman had gone into the church, found the vicar and ascertained that Harriet had not spoken to him, the immediate assumption was that she had been kidnapped in Covent Garden, the daughter of a Member of Parliament, perhaps held to ransom. The servants were terrified for their very lives. Messages were sent to the brothers, Richard and Walter, who in turn sent a messenger to Sir Charles in Norwich: not only the police but the Prime Minister had soon been alerted; over and over Lucy wept that she would be dismissed.

Sir Charles (disdaining the London and North Eastern Railway even though he was a shareholder) arrived, incandescent with rage and fear, on horseback. He had ridden, whipping his horses to the point of collapse, leaving even Peters, who was usually a galloping match for his master, struggling to catch him. Sir Charles marched into his house, striking the footman who opened the door across the face; the servants were assembled and the police inspector was waiting. Each servant went over the events, Sir Charles shouted, the police took notes (Peters smugly thought to himself that this would never have happened if he had stayed in London). The cook and one of the butlers confirmed that a hansom cab driver, the same one who had taken the furniture away in a cart, had come to the door in the mews, anxious to volunteer that he’d taken the young lady to Fenchurch Street Station, but could say nothing about her further whereabouts; he had come, he said, because he felt uneasy about dropping off a young lady at a railway station on her own: when the police tried to find this cabman to ascertain whence he had collected her, he was nowhere to be found. Lucy was instantly dismissed, Sir Charles unmoved by her weeping: she was the personal maid, she should have known where Harriet was at all times.

Mary’s stripped room was observed in incomprehension; Harriet’s own room was studied, but not by Lucy, who would have recognised that Mary’s gowns and hats swelled Harriet’s wardrobe: Lucy was now trudging to Spitalfields. Sir Charles and Richard and Walter and the police saw Harriet’s clothes untouched, it seemed: how could they have been expected to know that it was Mary’s linen that lay on the lemon-scented shelves?

A heavy police-presence was seen in Covent Garden and at Fenchurch Street Station: if anyone had seen Harriet quickly making her way through the cabbages and the chickens in one, or the new railway trains in the other, or the rats in both – would they tell the bobbies and get into trouble themselves? In Covent Garden the pale girl with the baby and the violets remembered Harriet: nobody asked her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.