Imogen Robertson - Instruments of Darkness

“Mr. Molloy! Explain yourself.”

“Just a bit of business, Miss Chase.” Molloy ran the tip of his tongue over his thin lips. “No need to concern yourself.”

Susan’s heart began to thump heavily in her chest. “Please, Miss Chase! If I just let him have the ring then he won’t take Mr. Graves to prison. Please let me. I do not want Mr. Graves to go away.”

The last words came almost as a wail. Susan felt Miss Chase’s grip on her shoulder tighten. She looked at Molloy.

“Terrify a child two days after she saw her father killed, would you? How dare you call yourself a man?”

Molloy straightened, though he still struggled to look Miss Chase in the eye.

“All very sad, I’m sure, miss. But business is business. You can give me the ring, sunbeam. Miss Chase has nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, is that so?” Miss Chase was quite flushed. Susan put her hands on the clasp again.

“You must let me. Please.”

Miss Chase pulled a little purse from her waistband. “What is the debt, Molloy? I shall pay it before I let you rob this child.”

He muttered something under his breath Susan was sure she should not hear.

“Twenty shillings. And there is no robbery about it, Miss Chase. You have no right to say so.”

“I wonder what people would say if they heard this story, Molloy.” Miss Chase’s eyebrows drew together threateningly.

“You must not pay it!” Susan stamped her foot. “He wouldn’t like it! You know he wouldn’t. He’d be ashamed and not come near us. It must be me who pays. He looks after me! We owe him and you do not!”

Miss Chase looked confused. Susan stared up at her with desperate seriousness. Molloy gave a thin smile.

“No matter to me who pays, but I have other business to attend to, so if you don’t mind hurrying along, ladies …”

Miss Chase glanced up at him with a sneer. “Oh be quiet, Molloy. You’ve been hanging round here for days, and I am thinking.”

Molloy dropped his chin. Miss Chase wet her lips.

“Very well, Susan. I shall lend you the twenty shillings-” and as the girl began to protest-“ and I shall take the ring from you as surety. That way, you know the money is yours to spend as you like.”

Molloy did not look up, just traced a half-moon in the dust before him with his boot.

“Looks like you are getting into my business, Miss Chase.”

She looked at him with disgust but did not reply. Susan’s heart leaped up happily.

“Yes, please. That would be right. And when I am a lady I can pay you back.” Susan paused. “And buy you a carriage, if you would like one.”

“Thank you, Susan. But my father has a carriage, and I am happy to share his.” Susan accepted this with a nod.

The business was transacted. Susan took the money from Miss Chase and dropped her ring into the young woman’s hand. The latter took it reluctantly, but urged by the determination in Susan’s eyes, put it safely away in her purse. Susan then placed the sum owed into Molloy’s hand with the bright smile of a girl buying sugar sweets. She turned away again, but Miss Chase kept her hand on her shoulder.

“The note, Molloy.”

He grinned a little ruefully and took a thick wallet from his coat. It bristled with dirty papers; some had crumpled, and he had tried to smooth them.

“You’d be a caution in business, Miss Chase. Shame you have to stay at home and paint screens all day.”

Again, she said nothing, but watched him steadily as he rifled through his papers, withdrawing one from the center of the greasy clump with a scowl. He put it into Susan’s hand. Miss Chase still watched him.

“And is it noted that the interest has been paid?”

Susan looked blankly at the figures a moment, then turning the page over, said, “Yes, here it is, Miss Chase.”

“Very well.”

Molloy fitted the money into his wallet and put it back into his coat, tapping it gently where it sat over his heart.

“Joy to do business with you, ladies. Young Graves is a lucky man to have such friends.” Susan looked at him with her head on one side.

“And now you have your friends, too.” He smiled at her curiously. “The shillings. You said they were your friends.” He gave a sharp bark of laughter.

“ ’Deed I did, sunbeam, ’deed I did!”

He tipped his greasy hat and turned to walk up the street, whistling as he went.

Miss Chase knelt down till she and Susan were looking at each other eye to eye.

“Tell me, sweet, while we are alone. Have you had a moment to say anything to Jonathan?”

Susan’s feelings of independence, of power seemed to flood away from her. She looked at Miss Chase very sadly.

“Yes, and he said I would have to learn French!”

Miss Chase laughed, throaty and musical, then standing and hugging the little girl briefly to her side, she led her back into the house.

Crowther stirred and groaned. The knocking at the front door had been enough to wake him, and now there were voices. He half-listened as he swung from his bed and began to dress, letting the shreds of his too-brief rest scatter about the floorboards of his room. He paused. He could swear he heard a dog yelping. He shook his head and reached for his shirt. The vigil had tired him. His bones felt old.

“Of course he’s asleep, girl! He was at Cartwright’s bed till after dawn. But I must see him, and you must wake him.”

It was Michaels’s voice. Then that yelping again. There was definitely a dog with him. He heard his maid protest once more, though the words were indistinct.

“Oh, just go and get him, for the love of God, Betsy. Or I’ll cut off your father’s credit at the Bear and tell him why, you see if I don’t!”

Another, higher-pitched mumble.

“No, I don’t want to be shown into the library, thank you! Who do you think I am? I’ll wait in the hall. Now go and wake him before I lose my patience.”

Crowther opened his bedroom door and looked down into the hallway.

“No need, Michaels-you have done the job yourself.” He spoke with a smile in his voice, but catching the other man’s eye looking up from the shadowed flags below him, his face became all seriousness. “What has happened?” He started down the stairs. “Coffee, please, Betsy. In the study.”

Michaels looked uncomfortably down at the dog by his side, held close on a leather leash. A black whippet bitch, a little gray around the muzzle.

“The dog, though, Mr. Crowther.”

“It is no matter.”

Crowther pushed open a door on the left of the hall and let Michaels step in front of him. Then he crossed to the shutters and let the summer light in. He turned back. Both Michaels and, it seemed, the dog, were lost in open-mouthed contemplation of the room.

It was a pleasant, generous space, paneled in painted wood.

The previous occupants had used it for a dining room, but Crowther did not entertain, and needed the space for his work. He had had shelves built all along the back wall which housed the volumes and preparations he most valued. In the center of the space was a long, roughly made table, rubbed smooth with much scrubbing, such as one normally finds in the kitchens of better houses. His instruments were laid out upon it. At the far end, under a pair of brass candlesticks sat his writing desk, his neglected notebooks open on top. It was the preparations that held Michaels’s eye. They were the products of almost a decade’s study and careful collection. Crowther had haunted the auction rooms of London and Europe like other men with money and leisure, but he did not buy Italianate art, or marble fragments of the ancients; he bought body parts, each injected with colored resins to show the different vessels and forms we carry, floating in sealed heavy jars of alcohol, or those strange freaks of development, opened up like so many strange texts to be absorbed, learned from. Michaels’s eyes tracked along the shelves.