‘What did he tell you?’
Mr Moorhouse shuffled forwards in his chair. He looked to the left and to the right like a man preparing to cross a busy road and then leaned towards Adam.
‘She’s an actress.’ He spoke as if this were the most surprising of all professions that Garland’s lady friend might pursue. Adam, who had already heard of Garland’s amatory arrangements from Jinkinson, was not surprised.
‘Not just any actress,’ Mr Moorhouse went on. ‘Lottie Lawrence.’
Adam had heard the name. Had she not been one of the actresses in Fechter’s company when he had charge at the Lyceum a few years earlier? Mr Moorhouse, who seemed by this point breathless with excitement at the thought of Garland’s love life, immediately confirmed his memory.
‘Beautiful woman. Saw her myself at the Lyceum. In The Lady of Lyons.’ There was a pause as Mr Moorhouse drew energetically on his cigar. ‘She played the Lady,’ he added.
Adam took out his cigarette case, extracted a cigarette and lit it. He was half intrigued and half disappointed by his elderly friend’s revelations about the identity of Garland’s lover. It was interesting to learn that she was well known in her own right. Perhaps her fame as an actress granted first Creech and then Jinkinson an extra advantage in their financial negotiations with Garland. Perhaps, he thought suddenly, one or both of them had approached Lottie Lawrence herself in an effort to extort additional money from her. And yet he had discovered little more than he already knew about the amorous MP. He had learned a name. That was all.
‘Is there anything more to tell, Mr Moorhouse?’
The old man appeared to have entered a pleasant reverie in which, perhaps, the images of the actresses he had seen on stage in a lifetime of theatre-going were drifting through his mind. He started when Adam spoke.
‘What was that, old chap?’
‘Did your friend Beattie let slip any further revelations about Garland?’
‘None that I can recall.’ Mr Moorhouse had decided that he had smoked his cigar to its end and was looking around for the ashtray in which to deposit the butt. Adam passed him the brass one from the small table by his side.
‘But you said “women”,’ he remarked. ‘You said that the gossip surrounding Garland concerned “women”. In the plural rather than the singular.’
‘Did I, old chap? Just my way of putting it, I suppose.’ Mr Moor-house was having difficulty dousing his smouldering cigar in the ashtray and his attention was concentrated on performing this task. ‘Although, now I come to think of it, Beattie did say that Garland was a devil with his maidservants as well.’
The old clubman had finally succeeded in extinguishing the cigar and he turned to Adam with a look of triumph on his face and ash on his fingertips.
‘A devil?’
‘Always after them. Forcing his attentions on them.’ Mr Moor-house’s delight in his victory over the cigar stub disappeared and he shook his head sadly. ‘I do think behaviour of that kind is exceedingly caddish. Poor girls! They’re not in a position to refuse his advances, are they? And the consequences can be so cruel. One fall from virtue and a woman’s reputation is gone for ever.’
Mr Moorhouse had thoroughly depressed himself with thoughts of the moral dangers that threatened female servants. He sighed, as if at the wickedness of the world, and began to search his pockets for another cigar.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Le dimanche anglais, eh, Quint! A phenomenon to make the heart sink and the soul quiver. What do you say to a Sunday excursion?’
Quint poured his breakfast tea into his saucer and raised it to his lips. He sucked in the liquid with a noisy slurp. His expression suggested that anything he might say to a Sunday excursion would be short and unprintable. The two men were sitting in the kitchen at Doughty Street. Adam had broken his own fast and was now watching Quint eat and drink. Undeterred by his manservant’s lack of enthusiasm, he continued to speak.
‘We know that our missing dandy has gone to ground somewhere. We know that part of an item abstracted from Bellamy’s Lodging House, Golden Lane was in said dandy’s office. Ergo, we reasoned, Mr Jinkinson had been in Bellamy’s Lodging House in the past. The boy Simpkins confirmed our reasoning. So now the time has come to see if he has visited there again. The hour has arrived for us to travel to Golden Lane.’
‘I ain’t doing anything on a Sunday,’ said Quint flatly. ‘Sunday’s a day for loafing and liquoring, not gallivanting around Golden Lane after some dozy old josser who’s prob’ly fluttering after some judy in the streets.’
‘Oh, Quint, Quint. You disappoint me. Have you lost the spirit of adventure which carried us both through the mountains of Mace-don? What has become of all the daredevilry you showed in the land of Alexander and Aristotle?’
‘I ain’t lost a thing.’
‘I think perhaps you have been corrupted by comfort, Quint. Two years in Mrs Gaffery’s luxurious lodgings, and you have become a positive sybarite. The stout-hearted hero of yesteryear has departed for ever.’
‘Ain’t nothing departed, I tells you.’
‘To Golden Lane, then.’
‘Hold hard.’ Quint’s resolve to stay in Doughty Street was crumbling but he still had reservations. ‘Ten minutes around Golden Lane looking like that and you’d not have the shirt left on your back.’
Adam glanced down at the immaculately tailored suit he was wearing. ‘Ah, I need to be dressed in something more discreet?’
‘You need to be dressed in something that don’t scream, “I’m a swell. Come and wallop me.” ’
‘Golden Lane is dangerous territory, then?’
‘A sight more dangerous than the arse-end of Greece.’
‘There were brigands in those hills we travelled, though.’
‘Maybe. But you can whistle up worse brigands round Golden Lane any time you like. Wear those flash togs and you won’t even need to whistle.’
‘I yield to your greater knowledge of these matters, Quint. What do you suggest?’
‘I got me some old fustian. Jacket and trousers. Had ’em for years. Thought they was about ready for Rag Fair but maybe they got one last wear in ’em here.’
Quint departed for his room and returned holding what looked more like a pair of dead animals than a suit of clothing. Very reluctantly, Adam took them and retired to change. When he entered the sitting room once more, he was wearing both the suit and a look of profound distaste.
‘This is revolting, Quint. Little wonder that you were about to dispose of it.’ He shook his shoulders in an attempt to settle the jacket more comfortably on them. Adam’s manservant was several inches shorter than his master and there was little chance that any suit he had once owned would prove a perfect fit. ‘It feels as if it contains a small menagerie of things that once crept and crawled on the face of the earth. And now they are creeping and crawling through the folds of the jacket.’
‘It may not be what the quality wears,’ said Quint, sarcastically, ‘but it’s the kind of thing the nobs round Golden Lane do. So, if you wants to look like you belong there, you’d better keep it on.’
Quint now made a great show of consulting the watch in his weskit pocket. He was mightily proud of this fob watch which, in one of his more expansively autobiographical moments, he had told Adam was a family heirloom inherited from his grandfather. In fact, he had chanced upon it many years earlier, stripping it from a corpse he had found washed up from the river at Rotherhithe.