Within a fortnight, Miss Violet Owen was engaged to be married to Mr. John Edward Pinkerton.
"All of my good counsel comes down to nothing,” Jenny mourned, as she and Tory stood on the widow’s walk of the cottage in Moonfleet Way. “If the foolish chit will not listen to my advice, one would think at least my experience might have taught her something.:"
"I suppose one could argue she’s marrying for love," Tory suggested, half-heartedly. She leaned on the railing to gaze down into the tangled sprawl of overgrown roses and heather that ran riot in the landlady’s garden, like one of Mr. Ashbrook’s fairy paintings.
"Love will not save her," Jenny sighed. "So long as her groom is a man, she will always be his slave."
Tory was inclined to agree, but she could not say so when she was supposed to be a married woman, herself. She was lucky to have found Jack in a world where there was no threat of marriage to hang like a noose over a woman’s dreams. She looked out over the furze-covered heath, the ragged hills sloping down to the rooftops of the town, past the old stone buildings on the quay to the deep blue bay and the wide sea, beyond. She felt the comforting presence of the sea in this place more than anywhere else they had been since the islands. It was like a spirit, like one of her Mohawk ancestors, urging her to be strong. Reminding her who she was.
"Well, Ned Pinkerton hardly resembles a slavedriver," she spoke up, at last. Violet had bought him round backstage one night to introduce him, an eager, pink-cheeked, fair-haired youth who looked rather like a confection, himself, extremely polite and wholly smitten.
"No," agreed Jenny. "At least he’ll keep her in sweets." She grinned as she turned for the door back into Tory’s room. "Speaking of which, I’ve an engagement out, tonight. It’s time I returned to Dragon’s Rest to make myself ravishing."
Dragon’s Rest was what she called her lodgings with the ferocious widow.
"However do you manage to get out at night, with her on watch?" Tory wondered.
"Oh, she pops off to sleep soon enough. And very loudly. Once the snoring begins, I’ve only to shinny down the back stairs like a little mouse and leave the door unlatched for later."
"But," said Tory, following her inside, "do you think it’s wise to continue? With the status of Mr. Crowder’s case still unknown?"
"I shall live as I please," Jenny retorted, a little too sharply. Then she turned to face Tory, flushed with apology. "I'll not alter my life to suit him," she said, and she turned and bustled down the corridor for the stairs.
Alphonse knew a great deal about being invisible. A Negro child in the sugar islands was the most invisible of God’s creatures, there were so many of them. And as a very small, very black man, he had learned to live in the shadows, watching for his opportunities.
He was watching, now, in the shadows of a cold stone warehouse a block above the quayside. The sun was long down, the stars were out and a chilly fog was curling in from the water. It was only minutes since Mr. Bell and Mrs. Kennett had passed him, on their way to their favorite quayside tavern. And Alphonse stilled his breath as another figure edged past him, close enough to touch, if that had been Alphonse’s object, keeping to the shadows. The silent figure slipped down the road in the same direction Bell and Mrs. Kennett had gone. A moment later, Alphonse followed him.
Alphonse waited at the mouth of a little alleyway that opened onto the quay. At the next corner, the other figure also waited, then approached the lighted window of the Half Seas Over. Not marching up with a buoyant sailor’s step, nor reeling in happy, drunken abandon, his movements were stealthy, furtive. He did not wish to be noticed amid the mariners and revelers and urchins and ladies of the evening roving up and down along the quayside. And Alphonse nodded slowly to himself. Kit had been right to come to him.
"How did Crowder know to find Jenny here after the company disbanded in Charton-on-Crewe?" Kit had reasoned. "Fairweather never brought us here. How does he know that I often escort her out? Why has he not bothered to pursue her himself to this place? He must have a spy in our midst, sending him information."
"We are an acting company," Alphonse had replied, carefully. "Not revolutionaries plotting against the state." A subject he knew a little something about.
"Spies are the backbone of legal cases of all kinds," Kit insisted. "Especially cases of marriage and infidelity, where so much of the evidence is hearsay. They are well paid for their trouble. I imagine a fellow like Crowder could afford to make a very attractive offer."
"And you have a suspect in mind?"
"I can’t say for certain," said Kit. "And I cannot go to Jack until I know; he has enough to worry about."
Alphonse nodded.
"But there is one person I feel might be . . . more susceptible than others to an arrangement of this kind. And I blush to confess to you, Mr. Belair, I have lowered myself to inspecting the post that I collect each morning. Only one person receives unmarked letters stamped in London with any regularity."
What a clever spy Bell himself might have been, Alphonse reflected now. But that, of course, looking the way he did, he could never blend in. Not as Alphonse did, now. By day, on a public street among the English, Alphonse could scarcely go unnoticed, but here he was just another shadow, moving as invisibly as a ghost along the dark street. He paused in the murk of a darkened shop doorway and watched the figure in front of him glide out of a niche between a shop facade and the pub next door to lounge beside the multi-paned window beneath the Half Seas Over sign. When the traffic in the street subsided for a moment, the figure casually peeped in the lighted window. He half-turned upon his shoulder, devouring the scene inside. He didn’t notice the small, square silhouette emerge from the shadows behind him and come abreast of him in the street. When he did finally peel his eyes away from the window and glanced down at the furrowed brown face gazing up at him in the pool of reflected light, his entire body started.
"Belair!"
"Good evening, Mr. Harding."
"I'm very sorry for the way things have turned out." Jack sighed into his laced fingers on the desk before him in his office the next morning. Henry Harding sat rigidly in an armchair across the desk. Jack glanced up sideways at the three red striped wooden juggling pins hung up on the side wall to give him courage. This was the part of this job he would always hate. "But I cannot have our people spying on one another."
"Tell that to Belair," sniffed Harding. "Popping out of the shadows like a hobgoblin. What business was it of his what I was doing out last night?"
"You were following Mr. Bell and Mrs. Kennett. I could not make this accusation without proof."
"Their word is ‘proof,’ of course, and mine means nothing. You don’t know that I wasn’t out on some . . . assignation of my own that you know nothing about."
"Give me the lady’s name," said Jack, opening out his hands on the desk. "Or if that is too indiscreet, I will look at any anonymous note on your behalf. Convince me I am mistaken."
"How can I, when they have already convinced you otherwise?"
"I will listen to anything you have to say."
But Harding said nothing. He lacked the imagination to make up an elaborate lie, could only sit there, fretting over his injured dignity.
"A small company like ours is like a family," Jack began again, quietly. "We must work together if we are to succeed. This sort of thing hurts all of us. We can’t have divisiveness and deceit . . . "
"Oh, of course, you are unblemished on that account," grumbled Harding. "You and your sister. You deceived this company and you were not dismissed for it."
Jack winced inside, but he was actor enough not to let it show. "We never spied on our colleagues for the sake of ruining them," he replied. Gazing at Harding’s guilty scowl, he pressed on. "Why did you do it? How has Mrs. Kennett ever wronged you that you would plot against her in this manner?"
"It was a proposition of business, nothing more," Harding said loftily. "It’s no crime to avail oneself of opportunities."
"Even if it means betraying your friends?"
"Friends!" scoffed Harding. "That Kennett woman is an adulteress, all right, what does it matter who with? We all know what Bell is. And these are the people you defend, Gabriel and Belair and that half-caste wife of yours, while decent fellows like myself are cast into the streets."
Jack swallowed a grim smile. Harding was making this chore much easier.
"I am prepared to schedule a benefit for you for next week, Mr. Harding. That should net you enough for a fresh start somewhere else. Or you can leave right now. The choice is yours."
Harding responded with a sullen nod.
"No one but the principals involved knows anything about this matter and I should like to keep it that way," Jack continued. "No idle rumors will follow you from Heathpoole."
"I should hope not." Harding sat up even straighter, mustered what was left of his tattered dignity about him like a cloak, and twirled up off the chair. "The day may come, Dance, when you shall be sorry you treated me this way."
Top: Poole Quay by contemporary artist Rodney Chapman
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