A Merry Widow

Christmas Day came and went, leaving at the back of my mind a strange floating inebriation, which I knew would never pall. I was buoyed up by the certainty that a cloud had now been lifted from Sparkle of Sound. Jasper and his companion were persistent, they were ingenious, but they could not fight a spirit.

On Boxing Day, the first thing I did was to pay my respects at Uncle Arthur’s tomb. There were no flowers about, so I gave him a little kiss by way of thanks and then, as the shop was in easy view from the park, I built a snowman by way of tribute. I’d have liked to have thanked Harry, too, as much of the magic had been due to his eight little hands, but I think that he had already taken my gratitude as read.

My relationship with Mr Whybrow appeared to be forming much as I’d expected it to. Yes, I was still The Shopgirl, but I knew beyond any doubt that while there were things I could never expect to be, I was still special to him in a way that nobody else could be. That was sufficient for us both.

It would have been nice to get on with assembling my airship, but the pavements were too icy to risk dragging the gondola up. It’d probably have to stay in the cellar until the snow melted. Besides, I owed Mr Whybrow some time as shopgirl. The shop, as I’d expected, was freezing. I stoked up the stove to a blazing heat, and left the office door open in the hope that some of the warmth would carry out.

Inspired by my memory of Christmas Day, I took a fancy to some chestnuts and wondered if he’d kept any in the safe. I looked in an old cardboard box at the bottom and found not chestnuts, but a cylinder phonograph and some cylinders. Sarah Bernhardt – Nellie Melba – I was familiar with the names, but naturally had never heard them perform save that one time Sarah Bernhardt had sung at the workhouse, and instilled in me my own short-lived ambition to sing.

I’d never actually used a phonograph before, but I’d seen Mr Whybrow use his only the previous day, and remembered the particular manner in which he’d poked two fingers inside the cylinders when putting them on their mandrel. I cranked up the spring, being careful not to overwind it, and within a minute, that voluptuous voice which had charmed London and Paris was filling the back office. What a wonderful thing the phonograph was! I was elevated, with the famous and talented performing solely for me. It was so tempting to sing along with the recording, but I dared not. My carol-singing outside the town hall had kept the fire brigade busy all Christmas Eve.

I chanced to look out of the window and was alarmed to see a richly-dressed lady coursing across the shop floor like one of those new destroyers with full steam up.

I snatched off the needle, killing the music, and hastened out to greet her, hoping that I wasn’t blushing. But I might as well not have bothered. Fizzing with excitement, she drove a locomotive over my innocent act.

“Why did you stop? That was heavenly!”

“The master forbids music in the shop, Miss. He says it’s a distraction.” I’d missed the delight in her face until that moment. What a fool I’d been, worrying about getting into trouble. She was just a music lover who’d chanced to hear the phonograph as she’d passed by. I noticed that she was glancing about the back office with a quizzical frown.  “Can I help you, Miss?”

“No – I was looking for the accompanist, that’s all. I don’t see anyone else here……..”

“No, Miss, the Master’s in his workshop.”

Light broke across her face. “Ahh, I see. Your master plays the piano?”

“Yes, Miss.”  I began to wonder who she was, and more particularly, where she was leading.

The lady nodded, apparently satisfied. “That’s excellent. Good accompanists are so hard to find. It’s been delightful talking to you, Miss.” She bobbed her head, and by the time I could acknowledge her compliment she was already steaming out of the shop.

A puzzling encounter; we appeared to have been at cross purposes, of which she had been unaware. But then I heard Mr Whybrow’s footfall on the stairs, and knowing how delicate wax cylinders are, I replaced the phonograph in the safe with as much alacrity as I dared.

By the time he arrived, I was standing dutifully behind the counter, needing only a cartoon halo to portray my innocence. I observed that he was carrying a familiar little parcel under his arm.

“Ello ello ello,”  he merrily effused. Yes, that Christmas Day had certainly worked its magic on him!  “Did I hear a customer just now?”

“Just a lady asking directions, sir. Is that - ?”  I nodded to the parcel.

“Yes, Mrs Beauregard’s work. I didn’t want to send the fobwatch down the Lamson. Didn’t take long,” he snorted. “Gave me a chance to use some of those uvarovites I’d been trying to shift. Will you be all right, delivering this?”

Something sharp transfixed my bowels as I saw his concern writ unashamedly across his face. “Yes, sir. I’m used to riding the bike in the cold.”

“Ah – I was thinking more of our recent – “

Putting our new relationship to the test, I risked resting some fingertips on his lapel. “I’ll be quite all right, sir. I’ll check the Dreadnought over and once I’ve set off, there won’t be much they can do.”

He tried to smile back, but his misgivings remained clear to see. He patted my fingertips distractedly. “I’d be happier if that airship of yours was finished. It’d be perfect for deliveries. Once you’re up in the air, you’d be safe from anything. Except maybe an aerial kraken.”

Or another airship. I wouldn’t put anything past those two.  

“I look forward to finishing it, sir. And thank you for making that possible.”

Bashfully, he looked to the ground. “Can’t have you held up by a minor detail like that, can we?”

I laughed back, provoking a smile to twitch on his face. “A minor detail like an engine? Indeed not, sir.”

I was very thorough when I checked over the Dreadnought, but everything was in place, with nothing missing or added. Thus, the only problem remaining was starting the beast in the cold. Oh, and my necessary lack of skirts while riding it through Caledon, but I wouldn’t have got very far with them on.

At least he’d sent me out in plenty of time to catch the daylight. I kept a weather eye out for traps, but Caledon was quiet, a thousand festive dinners still settling. I had to traverse half the community before I found Mrs Beauregard’s house, and when I did, I wondered if I’d come to the right place.  As I shuffled my skirts back on, I took in the clapboard structure – it appeared sound enough, but in desperate need of a lick of paint. Or three. And the garden was a bleak blanket of snow crowned by a single tree that clung defiantly to its sole ambition of giving the place a spot of colour. And boy, did it have its work cut out.

A loud report reached me from behind the house. I recognised it instantly as a shotgun, and heard it so clearly that I could even distinguish it from that sharper bang particular to a rifle. Pressing myself to the wall of the house, I inched around and peered into the back garden.

I need not have worried. There in the middle of a snowy lawn, stood a lady in late middle-age, reloading a shotgun, with a nearby tree as the apparent object of her target practice or whatever. I thought it best to introduce myself before she could raise the muzzles again.

“Mrs Beauregard?”  I called out. “Sparkle of Sound, with your ring and fob watch.”

The lady turned to scrutinise me as though she herself was suspicious of a trap. Then, breaking the barrels, she hefted her shotgun in the crook of her arm and marched over to me. Her face was lined through stress, but I saw in her an inherently jovial lady who had refused to let life trample her down.

“Ah, there you are, my dear. That’s wonderful. Do pardon the artillery, I was just scaring off the birds. Wretched magpie took my ring, you see.”

From what I’d seen, she was wearing her monocle over the wrong eye. The magpies were perfectly safe, which was more than I could say for anybody else within range of that shotgun which stared at the ground like two disconsolate drainpipes. Caledonians never did anything by halves.

“We call him Zeus,” Mrs Beauregard explained. “My late husband kept him handy when he was stationed in the far east, in his younger days. A double eight-bore is a powerful argument when the locals get restless.”

“But surely, Madam, if the magpies took your ring, it’d be in the nest?”

“That had occurred to me,”  said Mrs Beauregard sourly. “But as you can see, I no longer have the advantage of youth, so I’m not in a position to shin up a ladder. Easier to try and shoot the thing down.”

“I am,”  I offered. “If you have one available?”

Her eyes widened with joy. “I say – would you really do that for me? That’s most kind of you. Just wait here a moment.”

She stomped off back to the house and returned minus Zeus, and toting instead a ladder. “It’s my balance, you see. The first thing to go, if you’re not used to ladders.”

Bracing the ladder hard against the tree, I soon clambered up and located the nest. But that’s all that was there. An empty nest. I shook it about, turned it upside down, held it up to the light, but only a couple of beer bottle tops fell out.

I descended, empty-handed.  “I’m sorry, Madam; if a magpie took your ring, then it wasn’t this magpie.”

The news seemed to cut at her, making her bite off a bout of tears. “Blast. I’m sure they must have taken it. There’s no other explanation.”

“I’ve brought a replacement,” I offered, hopefully.

Mrs Beauregard gave a snort, her grief unmissable. “It’s not the same, though. I’d had that ring since we were married.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Madam.”  A sympathetic lump rose in my own throat. “I do have your fobwatch as well.”

“Thank you, my dear. One moment.”  Mrs Beauregard produced a handkerchief from her sleeve, and blew her nose with a trumpeting that carried across the garden. “Would you bring it inside, please?”

Leaving the ladder where it was, I followed her inside to a parlour that was clean, but as dark and otherwise neglected as the exterior. At least it was warm, though. She took my parcel over to the window where she unwrapped it. I was relieved to see happiness break out on her face as she examined the fob watch.

“Oh, yes – he’s even set the right time. Thank you so much, my dear. I do rather depend on this for the time.”

I gave her a nod to reply, Indeed, Madam  but my attention was drawn to a large astronomical clock standing nearby. It appeared amazingly intricate, and I was sure that in a better light, it would be dazzling, although I couldn’t help finding it grotesque; it wasn’t the sort of thing I’d want on a mantelpiece. Marble was for civic buildings and tombstones, not clocks. Besides, it was also quite inert.

“You’ve discovered my secret, then,”  said Mrs Beauregard, sadly as though silently appending, And now you must die.

But I was only more puzzled. “Madam?”  I nudged.

Mrs Beauregard hesitated before crossing the room to a plain sort of framed certificate hanging up hard by the clock. “This,” she stated simply, unsure whether to cry again or to get angry with me.

“I’m sorry, Madam, I thought you meant the clock. I hadn’t noticed this.”

Suspecting that she might be about to divert me from this mystery, I stepped over to take in the certificate. I scanned the plain, official print in a couple of moments.

“DECLARATION OF SHERIFF AND OTHERS. 

“31 Vict. Cap. 24  [whatever that meant]

“We, the undersigned, hereby declare that  Judgment of Death was this day executed on Cuthbert Beauregard in Her Majesty’s Prison of Newgate in our presence. Dated this 1 day of March 1885.”

Underneath were sundry official signatures. Governor, chaplain – anyone who’d have been present at the event.

Mrs Beauregard took down a great double lungful of air and held it for a few moments, to steady herself. “They pinned that to the gate, the day he was taken from me. Now you know why I live so quietly here. I can’t bear to put that away, and it’s why I never let anybody in. I prefer to be alone with my memories.”

I felt as though I was intruding on something private. “I’m terribly sorry, Madam. I was assuming that you’d meant the clock.”

“Oh, that old thing! It hasn’t worked properly in years. I’ve never let it out of the house. Cuthbert loved astronomy; he’d had to learn the motion of the planets as part of his navigation. The Admiralty didn’t want its young officers confusing them with stars, after all. When I last saw him, two days before – the end, he told me that he’d be found innocent when Venus and Mars were in trine. I thought at first that he was being metaphorical – referring to war and love, somehow; I suppose he had to be cryptic with the warders looking on. It was only afterwards that I realised he was being quite literal. I’ve spent years sitting up half the night studying the sky, but on the one occasion the planets fell into that alignment, absolutely nothing happened. It was just another day, like all the rest since he was taken from me. Bleak.”

She was obviously riding a wild horse with her reminiscences, and I had decided it would be best just to let her ramble. But now she was getting upset and it was time to step in with the Londoners’ Panacea.. “Mrs Beauregard, would you like me to put the kettle on for you? It’s bitterly cold outside.”

“Thank you, my dear – that would be most kind. You’ll find the matches by the stove.”

The kitchen was like the rest of the house. Dark, neglected, yet clean. And thanks be to God, she’d had gas laid on. No faffing around trying to get coal to light in that mausoleum. Her gas jets needed cleaning, though. I used two matches before it became clear that I needed to give the gas more time to build up before applying a flame. So, I twiddled the knob, counted to five, struck a match and –

FWOOMF!

A cloud of town gas exploded in my face, making me step back. My heel jammed down hard into the floor, which gave way underfoot. The boards were rotten. I didn’t even have time to yell as I felt myself falling right through. Luckily, the joists were made of sterner stuff although they were as wormy as the floorboards. When I’d recovered sufficient breath to assess my situation, I found that I was jammed into the twelve-inch gap by my bustle.  Nothing was sticking into me, but I was well and truly stuck fast. Rapid cinematographic images flickered through my mind of Mrs Beauregard’s horror when she found I’d destroyed her floor, Mr Whybrow’s wrath at my carelessness (“Surely you’d have had the sense to be careful in a house so delapidated!”)…….

I was wondering how I was going to get out of there when Mrs Beauregard appeared standing over me.

“I’m sorry, Madam, it gave way under me.”

Mrs Beauregard was quite unabashed at the damage I’d caused. “My dear, I’m terribly sorry. This old place does need a lot of work on it, but I’m afraid I don’t even get a pension from the Admiralty, even though he was on active service.  Here, let me give you a hand – oooooops – “

The lady was no longer young, but her weight told in our favour as she pulled me out of the hole I’d created. After dusting myself down and inspecting my bustle for splinters, I looked into the hole. The joists were uninjured, and I wouldn’t have fallen far anyway. The ground was only about three feet below the floor.

“It’s fortunate you don’t have a cellar,”  I remarked.

“I do, but it doesn’t stretch this far back,”  said Mrs Beauregard. “Don’t worry about the floor, I can soon have that put right. I’m more concerned about your dress. Would you be so good as to turn your back to the light?”

“Don’t worry about that, Madam; it was my own fault.”  Nonetheless, I complied. My view of my own bustle was necessarily limited. As I turned, I chanced to look into the chasm. Something tiny glinted from its depths.

“Yee – ha!”

Poor Mrs Beauregard must have thought I’d gone insane as I dropped to lie on my front and felt around in the hole. But she wouldn’t have thought that for very long. I fumbled around with my fingers, and found what I was looking for. Small, shiny, round and with a rough edge. Triumphantly, I pulled out of the hole and held Mrs Beauregard’s ring to the light.

For a moment I thought that she was going to faint. Her face paled, and set like marble. Then her racing mind found its bearings.

“Ohmygod. You’ve found it!” Seizing the ring from me, Mrs Beauregard kissed it fervently, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I never thought I’d see it again – my dear, you can’t imagine how happy you’ve made me!”

It was left to me to help myself up. “Do you by any chance take it off when washing up?”  I asked.

“Well, yes – my fingers are thinner than they used to be, I worry about losing it down the plug hole.”

“Might I suggest that in future Madam puts it in an egg cup when washing up?”

“You can be sure that Madam will!”  Ecstatically, she clutched the ring to her chest. “And it looks like I owe the poor magpies an apology. No more letting off Zeus at them!”

I took the spare ring back with me. Mrs Beauregard had said nothing about payment, and with Mr Whybrow’s earlier advice in mind, I hadn’t mentioned it either. My delight at having found her original ring was only slightly abated by the darkness surrounding her late husband. He must have done something wrong to have attracted the ultimate penalty, yet she was devoted to his memory. Could he have been innocent? Or was she just too besotted to accept anything wrong with him?

I found Mr Whybrow waiting for me in the shop. He was pretending to tidy his office – I say pretending, as that was something he never did, so I could only assume it was a very clumsily-contrived excuse to wait for me and see for himself that I was all right. This, I pretended not to have noticed as I announced that Mrs Beauregard had not needed the spare ring.

“Indeed?” He raised an eyebrow, inviting me to continue.

I explained what she’d been doing when I got there, and why she was doing it. Mr Whybrow gave a mirthful grunt.

“I can see why she didn’t hit anything; she’s blind as a bat. Missed that rip in your skirt.”  He nodded to my rear side.

“Oh……….. I’m sorry, sir; I’ll stitch it up.”

“In your own time, there’s no rush.”  He bit off what he was going to add. Customers won’t be looking at your rear.  Because he’d have then added, Even if I do. And that would have embarrassed us both. I had the perfect means of breaking the awkward silence that followed.

“Sir – did you know that her husband had been executed?”

“She told you that?”

“She kept the official form they pin up on the prison gates when it’s been done. But it was at Newgate, and she said he was in the Navy, on active service. He must have been an officer; she said he had to know all about navigation.”

A gear or two seemed to have jammed in Mr Whybrow’s mind. “Beauregard, Beauregard………….”  I could see the jammed mechanism stumbling over, “Where have I heard that name before?”

Finally the tumblers dropped. “Oh, dear Lord, yes. I remember now. That’s going back before your time; almost before mine! It depends what you mean by ‘active service.’  He was a commander, but the Admiralty cashiered him and threw him to the civil courts when he was arrested for murder; they reckoned he was spying for Germany. There was a hell of a fuss in the papers. Witnesses not turning up, evidence not being produced – the case had more holes than Aunt Fanny’s drawers. The press reckoned the judge had been ordered to send him down by the government.”

Things began to make more sense. “She clearly still loves him, and I got the impression she accepts he was guilty.”

“Love can be the strongest pull of all,”  Mr Whybrow agreed. “It can drive many to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do, or stretch their faculties beyond the human norm.”

I could understand that; I’d seen it in the workhouse. My own father had put me there out of love, after all.

Mr Whybrow seemed to have misinterpreted my faraway look. At any rate, something must have been on his mind for some time.  “Yes, I expect that one day, someone will sweep you off your feet.”

Resolutely, I shook my head. “No, sir. I’m happy here.”

“Don’t underestimate the power of love. I lost a previous shopgirl to what was originally a casual customer. You’re as human as anyone else; one day a man will spirit you away on a cloud of rose petals, and I’ll give you my blessing.”  He turned to leave, darkly adding, “And on that day, the light will go out of this shop.”  He said it mezzo voce, as though not certain that he wanted me to overhear. But hear it I did.

 “Then you’ll have to learn to trust me, won’t you, sir?”

He spun on his heel, glaring back, but I met his countenance firmly. We remained like that for but a moment, but it seemed to last forever.

Finally, he admitted, “Yes. Perhaps we need to learn to trust each other.”

Then he was gone, leaving me with another enigma. What he had just said could be interpreted in many ways! But he was right. What he was trusting me with, was the ability to define the rules and change them at will. Only a man with a great deal of faith would do that. Or a man prepared to risk losing someone for the sake of seeing her happy ………..