A Christmas Hope Page 5

  She was disappointed, unreasonably so, and she was also humiliated. She had come in here and interrupted the scruffiest and most disreputable man she knew, a man who had not long ago run a brothel for a living. She had asked for his help, and he had refused her. Worse than that, she could see that his refusal was perfectly reasonable.

  She turned and walked away before he could look up again and make some further remark or—worse—see that she was hurt.

  Christmas was approaching rapidly. There were now parties, theater performances, opera, and ballet for those who either had such tastes or found these events were appropriate places at which to be seen. Claudine was of the former opinion, Wallace the latter, although he did like certain orchestral concerts, particularly oratorio—the only one she did not care for.

  A couple of days after Claudine’s conversation with Squeaky, she and Wallace dressed to join some friends at the theater for a gala occasion. Claudine did not have a new gown yet, so she chose an older one. It had been considerably adapted, almost recut, and she felt it was particularly flattering. She had always been tall, and since working at the clinic she had had less time to eat. Actually, if she were honest with herself, she had less time in which to be bored, and consequently eat cake and pastries. As a result, she was considerably slimmer than she had been a short while ago, and it became her.

  Wallace looked at her without interest as she came down the stairs to where he was waiting. Then he noticed the peacock-shaded silk over the darker blue underskirt, and his eyes widened. He drew in breath to say something then changed his mind.

  “We’d better hurry,” he told her instead. “We don’t want to be late.”

  The theater was already crowded when they arrived, with people greeting friends. The sound of laughter, the swirl of bright gowns, and the glittering of lights gave a sense of festivity, as much so as wreaths of holly, the sound of church bells, and the songs of carolers. It still looked like there would be no snow. How perverse of her to be sorry for that! Claudine did not like the cold and was always afraid of slipping on the ice, but the snow was like a soft mantle, hiding the ugliness of so much, allowing one to be willfully blind to it for a season. For a little while the world could be as one wished it to be, reality painted over.

  They were inside the crowded foyer, trying not to be jostled. She stayed close to Wallace. She would be most embarrassed to lose him, since he had the tickets. After a moment or two, in desperation, she took his arm.

  She passed people she knew, at least by sight. She smiled at them and inclined her head. They smiled back. Wallace bowed. Once or twice they made polite conversation regarding the weather or some uncontroversial subject everyone could express opinions about without fear of contradiction. It seemed unwittingly meaningless, and yet it had some social value.

  They took their seats, which were in one of the better boxes, and Claudine thanked Wallace for his generosity.

  The lights dimmed, and the buzz of conversation ceased. The curtains were drawn open to gasps of pleasure as the scenery was revealed, and the drama began immediately.

  Claudine found her interest in the romance fading after only a few minutes. It seemed clear from the casting exactly who was going to fall in love with whom. And since the Christmas season was traditionally one of happy endings, the result also was predictable.

  Instead she looked across at the people in the boxes opposite and, as discreetly as possible, began to watch them. She held her enameled opera glasses to her eyes, as if studying the stage, but actually looked to the side.

  The first people she recognized were Martin and Eppy Crostwick. At this distance, Eppy looked as delicate as a bone-china figurine, with her flawless complexion and dainty features. Her pale yellow hair was piled up precariously. Claudine noticed a few other opera glasses trained in her direction, which would no doubt please her. Eppy loved to cut a dash, and her ambition knew no bounds.

  Martin was sitting next to her proprietorially, looking self-satisfied and nodding his head now and then.

  A little farther along, at the same level, were Lambert and Verena Foxley. They were speaking to each other and not even affecting to look at the stage.

  Claudine was irritated with them for their ill manners. Then, aware of her own hypocrisy, she turned to watch the performance.

  Half an hour later, when the plot was proceeding exactly as she had foreseen, she looked along the boxes again. This time she saw something she had not expected: Alphonsine Gifford was staring at the stage as if captivated by the actors. Her face was less beautiful than that of her stepmother, but there was a warmth and a charm in it that was easily as attractive. Her hair had a touch of auburn, which some people might not have cared for but which Claudine thought was particularly pleasing. Alphonsine had dressed in soft colors, which made her vitality even more apparent.

  Next to her was Ernest Halversgate. He was a total contrast to her. There was nothing unpredictable in him. Some might have considered him good-looking, but Claudine found him insipid. Watching him now as he stared not at the stage but at Alphonsine, it was difficult to re-create in her mind the horrified expression that had been on his face as he stood on the terrace near Winnie’s unconscious body. There seemed to be a faint smugness in him now. Could he possibly have dismissed it from his mind so soon?

  Or was Claudine being totally unfair, judging him for what was nothing more than a masterful effort to behave with consideration toward the young woman he was accompanying now? From everything Claudine knew, it would be an eminently suitable match. Both sets of parents would approve it. For the Halversgates, it would be something of a catch. Alphonsine was an heiress of substance. For the Giffords, well, Ernest had a reputation for diligence and sobriety. He might bore Alphonsine to death, but he would never break the rules, either morally or socially, and he would invest her money profitably. He neither gambled nor drank.

  Claudine pulled herself up sharply. She was being horribly unfair, and unkind. She did not know Ernest Halversgate. Plenty of people who were interesting and witty were also cruel, and what good was all the entertainment in the world without kindness? She should stop making assumptions about his personality. Dutifully she looked back at the stage until the intermission.

  She had not wished to meet the Foxleys and the Crostwicks, but Wallace did, so it was unavoidable. She should have expected it. It was very possibly why they were here in the first place. The romantic comedy was hardly to Wallace’s taste, and she knew of no reason why he would imagine it was hers.

  Close up, Eppy looked even more striking. Claudine was pleased she had worn something so unusual herself. Her height made her additionally noticeable, and in a manner quite uncharacteristic for her, she enjoyed being noticed.

  “How extremely well you look.” Eppy said it in a tone of voice that was hardly complimentary, as if Claudine had been fading away the last time they had met.

  “How generous of you,” Claudine murmured, meaning anything one cared to attribute to it.

  Verena Foxley smiled as if nothing ever troubled her. She was rather like a swan gliding above the water, Claudine thought. Such elegant and regal birds, but heaven only knew what their feet were doing beneath the surface.

  “What a delightful occasion,” Claudine went on. It was only fair to Wallace that at least she try. “It quite puts me in the mood for Christmas.”

  “I was already in the mood for Christmas,” Eppy said, with her eyebrows arched in surprise.

  “So I observe,” Verena murmured, glancing at Eppy’s hair.

  Claudine had a ridiculous image of the whole coiffure decked with tinsel and candles, and the desire to laugh was so overwhelming she snatched a handkerchief from her reticule and buried her face in it as if she had a fit of uncontrollable sneezing. She dared not look at Verena.

  “I’ve heard no news of that wretched man Tregarron, have you, Burroughs?” Martin Crostwick said with a gesture of distaste. “I don’t know why the devil the police can’t catch him.
It would seem simple enough. Dammit, even if he wasn’t dangerous, the man’s a bad influence on others. I can’t understand it, but young men are apparently fools enough to admire his … I don’t know what! Disregard for anything to do with decency.”

  “Don’t worry,” Eppy comforted him. “Their attention has been well and truly curtailed, and it was slight enough anyway. Tregarron’s a fugitive now, and no one will give him food or shelter, let alone friendship. I think the whole miserable disaster happened at a very fortunate time. Decent young men will have had a sharp lesson against keeping bad company.” She looked pointedly at Claudine.

  Claudine wanted to come up with some scathing reply about fair trial and assumption of innocence, but no coherent words came to her quickly enough.

  “I daresay, he’ll leave the country,” Wallace put in, perhaps afraid that Claudine was going to speak. He avoided looking at her. “After this, there’s really nothing left for him in England. All he has is his reputation, and that’s gone, as it deserves to be. A lot of it was built on hot air anyway.”

  This time Claudine did not stop to think.

  “It’s built on a large body of poetry,” she said fiercely, “that is all rooted in the valleys of Wales, the hills and the coastline, the history. Even those with no Welsh ancestry at all find a familiarity in it. He’d die away from his own places. Where on earth could he go? He’d be a stranger always.”

  “Then he should have lived a decent life, instead of drinking himself half senseless and going from woman to woman,” Wallace said extremely sharply. It was intended to silence her, and she knew it.

  “Going from woman to woman may be immoral, but as long as the women concerned are willing, it’s not a crime,” she retorted. “And drinking too much is a vice practiced by half the men in London, at one time or another in their lives. I daresay, it is the same in Paris or Rome or anywhere else.”

  “Why on earth are you defending him?” Verena said in surprise. “You saw what he did to that poor young woman. She might be of … no virtue … but she didn’t deserve that. I thought your charity work was precisely concerned with protecting women of her sort, at least from disease and attack.”

  “It is.” Claudine felt the heat burn in her face. “And I’m not defending him. If he did that to her, intentionally, then he deserves to be put in prison. But we—”

  Wallace lost his temper. He turned toward her with his eyes blazing. “There are no ’buts,’ Claudine,” he said between clenched jaws. “These highly respectable young men, known to all of us here for years, saw him do it and tried their best to prevent him. What happened is not open to question.”

  “Three of them?” she responded recklessly, knowing she would pay for it later. “All younger than Mr. Tregarron, and sober, and they couldn’t stop him? He must have superhuman strength. I hope if they find him they get at least six policemen to capture him. Otherwise one of them may end up dead, too, like poor Winnie Briggs.”

  “Who is Winnie Briggs?” Martin Crostwick asked with a blank look on his face.

  “The girl Tregarron murdered!” Eppy snapped at him.

  “The girl Tregarron attacked in a drunken rage,” Lambert Foxley corrected her. He shot an irritated glance at Claudine. “Perhaps we should not preempt a jury by leaping to conclusions. Although I don’t see an alternative one, myself,” he added. “The sooner the issue is decided, the better it will be for all of us. If I have a word with the appropriate authorities, perhaps we can avoid the necessity of having to appear in court ourselves. A sworn testimony should be sufficient, if it is clear enough that we all agree as to the facts.”

  “An excellent solution,” Martin Crostwick agreed. “Get the matter over with.”

  The bell rang to warn that the intermission was nearly over, and without further comment—apart from general observations as to how pleasant it was to have met—they returned to their boxes.

  The rest of the evening passed by Claudine. Her mind raced, searching desperately for a way to stop Lambert Foxley from essentially ending the pursuit of truth before it even began, which is what would happen if he “had a word” with the authorities. Squeaky Robinson had refused to help. What could she do alone? She certainly could not find Dai Tregarron and warn him. She could not even look in the places Squeaky could have, or ask the people he knew. But she could ask the women who came and went at the clinic if they knew anything of Cecil Crostwick or Creighton Foxley. And Ernest Halversgate, she supposed, though he seemed more a spectator than a participant in the seamier sides of life. She would hate doing it. It was an unfair pressure to question the injured who came for help, but it was the last option she had left.

  And she might learn something of Winnie Briggs that could prove useful, even if it were no more than the name of a prior acquaintance. Anything that kept open the questions surrounding her death would be worth it.

  Blast Squeaky Robinson for his stubbornness!

  Maybe she could give it one more try? If she went to see him with specific ideas, that might persuade him!

  “No,” Squeaky said even before she had finished speaking. He looked down at his ledgers, which were spread out on the desk in front of him. “We could use more money for supplies—medical supplies,” he emphasized.

  “We have plenty,” she replied. “At least until mid-January.”

  “Not if we get a lot of patients in, and people have overspent themselves for Christmas,” he said doggedly. “Then what’ll you do, eh?”

  “Go out and find some money, of course,” she told him tartly. “As I always do.”

  “Very right an’ proper,” he nodded. “So go do it.”

  “By then Dai Tregarron could be in jail waiting to be hanged!”

  Always literal when he wanted to be, Squeaky gave her a long, cold stare, and spoke very clearly. “It is December; Christmas is in less than a fortnight. They haven’t even caught him yet. They’ve got to try him and give him three weeks’ grace before they hang him. You’re good at sums—that’s more than a month, at the very least. He has time. We don’t. We need more money.”

  “No we don’t!”

  “Everybody needs more money,” he said reasonably.

  “You really won’t help me?” She felt despair well up like a dark cloud filling the sky. She had tried to do something like this once before, and Squeaky had had to rescue her. The memory was so humiliating she refused to let it enter her mind.

  “No, I won’t,” he said flatly.

  She felt ridiculously as if she were going to weep. She swallowed hard, a loneliness crowding in on her from every side: in society, at home, now even here. It had been absurd, even pathetic, that a woman of her age and station should find her only real friendship in a clinic for women off the street! And now even at the clinic she was alone.

  “Then I shall have to do it by myself,” she said with as much dignity as she could manage. She turned and walked out of the office, leaving him sitting at the desk, a pen in his hand and a look of baffled frustration on his face.

  Claudine walked the length of Portpool Lane and turned onto Leather Lane, moving south briskly but without purpose. She was angry. She was afraid of doing this alone. Mostly she was afraid of failing.

  She realized how perverse she was being. She knew almost nothing about Dai Tregarron, except that he had a poet’s vision and the music of words in his brain. He might very well be guilty of having beaten Winnie Briggs and given her the blow that had been the immediate cause of her death, at least in law. He might not have meant to kill her, but it was a foreseeable result—and a wrong and brutal thing to do. Yet he hadn’t seemed like a man who would do such a thing. How could one person hold such violent and terrible contradictions within their nature?

  Why was she wasting her time at all? And it was a waste. Squeaky was only speaking the truth when he told her she would be far better employed raising money for the clinic. He had not observed that she was on this mission largely to defy Wallace and all the people she k
new who were like him. Did she even know why? Yes, she did. Dai Tregarron had called her Olwen, had spoken to her as if she were a creature capable of escape from the commonplace, not the pedestrian, middle-aged woman everyone else saw, incapable of imagination, even less of passion. He had seen who she wanted to be and given the dream a moment’s life.

  Someone dug hard fingers into her arm. She gave a cry of fear because the grip was strong enough to pull her to a halt. She struggled, looking around the gray street for anyone who would help her, but she saw only vehicles passing by, people hurrying, collars turned up. She swiveled around to lash out with her free hand as hard as she could.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Squeaky demanded shrilly. He had to let go of her and step back smartly as she swung her arm, stumbling forward with the impetus when there was nothing close enough to strike. “Who the hell did you think I was?”

  She was furious, and horribly embarrassed. A man in a morning coat and top hat was staring at them as he approached. He moved aside quickly, as if she might attack him, too.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” she shouted at Squeaky.

  “I did!” he shouted back. “I called your name. You’re so busy in your daydreams you didn’t hear me. And you’re walking like you’re going to break into a run any minute. I ain’t chasing you all the way along the street!”

  “Keep your voice down!” she growled at him. “You’re making a spectacle of us.”

  “I am?” he said incredulously. “I just touched you! You’re the one galloping down the pavement like the devil’s after you, then attacking me and screaming like a—”

  “You were after me,” she pointed out. “Well, what do you want? I presume you have something better to do than just scaring me half to death?”

  “If me speaking to you in the street, in broad daylight, scares you half to death, how on earth are you going to detect where to find Tregarron and why he wasn’t to blame for that poor girl dying?” he demanded. “You’ll meet a lot worse than me in the first public house you go into.”