Part 2

Chapter 24,296 wordsPublic domain

Three days after this Mr. John Gilsey, who is a detective, and, I have heard since, a very famous gentleman, was engaged by Lord Castlecourt to “work upon the case.” Mr. Gilsey was very soft-spoken and pleasant. He did not muddle you, as Mr. Brison did, and it was very easy to tell him all you knew or could remember, which he always seemed anxious to hear. He had me up in the sitting-room twice, once alone and once with Mr. Brison, and they asked me a host of questions about Sara Dwight. I told them all I could think of; and when I came to her hands, and how they were white and fine, like a lady’s, I saw Mr. Brison look at Mr. Gilsey and raise his eyebrows.

“Does it seem to you,” he says, scribbling words in his note-book, “that this sounds like Laura the Lady?”

And Mr. Gilsey answered:

“The manner of operating sounds like her, I must admit.”

“She was in Chicago when last heard of,” says Mr. Brison, stopping in his scribbling, “but we’ve information within the last week that she’s left there.”

“Laura the Lady is in London,” Mr. Gilsey remarked, looking at his finger nails. “I saw her three weeks ago at Earlscourt.”

Mr. Brison got red in the face and puffed out his lips, as if he was going to say something, but decided not to. He scribbled some more, and then, looking at what he had written as if he was reading it over, says:

“If that’s the case, there’s very little doubt as to who planned and executed this robbery.”

“That’s a very comfortable state of affairs to arrive at,” says Mr. Gilsey, “and I hope it’s the correct one.” And that was all he said that time about what he thought.

After this we stayed on at Burridge’s for the rest of the season, but it was not half as cheerful or gay as it had been before. My lord was often moody and cross, for he felt the loss of the diamonds bitterly; and my lady was out of spirits and moped, for she was very fond of him, and to have him take it this way seemed to upset her. Mr. Brison or Mr. Gilsey were constantly popping in and murmuring in the sitting-room, but they got no further on--at least, there was no talk of finding the diamonds, which was all that counted.

This is all I know of the theft of the necklace. What happened at that time, and what Mr. Gilsey calls “the surrounding circumstances of the case,” I have tried to put down as clearly and as simply as possible. I have gone over them so often, and been forced to be so careful, that I think they will be found to be quite correct in every particular.

Statement of Lilly Bingham, known in England as Laura Brice, in the United States as Frances Latimer, to the police of both countries as Laura the Lady, besides having recently figured as a housemaid at Burridge’s Hotel, London, under the alias of Sara Dwight.

I never was so glad of anything in my life as to get out of that beastly hole, Chicago. I’ll certainly never go back there unless there is an inducement big enough to compensate for the elevated railroad, the lake, the noise, the winds, the restaurants, the climate, and the people. Ugh, what a nightmare!

England’s the country for me, and London is the focus of it. You can live like a Christian here, and enjoy all the refinements and decencies of life for a reasonable consideration. How my heart leaped when I saw the old, gray, sooty walls looming up through the river haze--I thought it best to sneak by the back way, because if I go up the front stairs and ring the bell there may be loiterers round who had seen Laura the Lady before, and might become impertinently curious about her future movements. And then when I saw Tom waiting for me--my own Tom, that I lawfully married, in a burst of affection, three years ago, at Leamington--I shouted out greetings, and danced on the deck, and waved my handkerchief. It was worth while having lived in Chicago for a year to come back to London and Tom and a little furnished flat in Knightsbridge.

We were very respectable and quiet for a month--just a few callers climbing up the front stairs, and demure female tea-parties at intervals. I bought plants to put in the windows, and did knitting in a conspicuous solitude which the neighbors could overlook. When I saw the maiden lady opposite scrutinizing me through an opera-glass I felt like sending her my marriage certificate to run her eye over and return. We even hired a maid of all work from an agency as a touch of local color on this worthy domestic picture. But when the Castlecourt diamond scheme began to ripen I nagged at her till she was impudent and bundled her off. Maud Durlan came in then, put on a cap and apron, and played her part a good deal better than she used to when she acted soubrettes in the vaudeville.

We were two weeks lying low, maturing our plans, tho when I left Chicago I knew what I was coming back for. Outwardly all was the same as usual--the decent callers still climbed the front stairs, and elderly ladies who, without any stretch of imagination, might have been my mother and aunts, dropped in for tea. I used to wonder how the people on the floor below--they were the family of a man who made rubber tires for bicycles--would have felt if they could have seen Maud, our neat and respectable slavy, sitting with the French heels of her slippers caught on the third shelf of the bookcase, dropping cigarette ashes into the waste-paper basket.

When all was ready, Tom and I left for a “business” trip on the Continent. We went away in a four-wheeler, driven by Handsome Harry, the top piled with luggage, my face at the window smiling a last, cautioning good-by at Maud. Five days later, under the name of Sara Dwight, I was installed as housemaid on the third floor of Burridge’s Hotel.

I had done work of that kind before--once in New York, and at another time in Paris; having been born and spent my childhood in that cheerful city, my French is irreproachable. The famous robbery of the Comtesse de Chateaugay’s rubies was my work--but I mustn’t brag about past exploits. I had never been engaged in a hotel theft of the importance of the Castlecourt one. The necklace was valued at between eight thousand and nine thousand pounds. The stones were not so remarkable for size as for quality. They were of an unusually even excellence and pure water.

After I had been in the hotel for a few days and watched the Castlecourt party, all apprehension left me, and I felt confident and cool. They were an extremely simple layout. Lady Castlecourt was a beauty--a seductive, smiling, white and gold person, without any sense at all. Her husband adored her. Being a man of some brains, that was what might have been expected. What might not have been expected was that she appeared to reciprocate his affection. Having made a careful study of the manners and customs of the upper classes, I was not prepared for this. I note it as one of those exceptions to rule which occur now and then in the animal kingdom.

Besides the marquis and his lady, there were a maid and a valet to be considered. The former was a dense, honest woman named Sophy Jeffers, close on to forty, and of the unredeemed ugliness of the normal lady’s maid. Such being the case, it was but natural to find that she was in love with Chawlmers, the valet, who was twenty-seven and good-looking. Jeffers was too truthful to tamper with her own age, but she did not feel it necessary to keep up the same rigid standard when it came to Chawlmers. It was less of a lie to make him ten years older than herself ten years younger. From these facts I drew my deductions as to the sort of adversary Jeffers might be, and I found that, by a modest avoidance of Chawlmers’ society, I could make her my lifelong friend.

The evening of the Duke of Duxbury’s dinner was the time I decided upon as the most convenient for taking the stones. I had heard from Jeffers that the marquis and marchioness were going. When her ladyship left her rooms that afternoon I heard her tell Jeffers that she would not be back till after six, and to have everything ready at that hour. Off and on for the next two hours I was doing work about the corridor with a duster. It was near six when I heard the two servants talking in the sitting-room. A bird’s-eye view through the keyhole showed me where they were, and that they were engaged in searching for something in the desk. It was my chance. With my housemaid’s pass-key I opened the door a crack, and peeped in. The leather case of the diamonds stood on the dressing-table not twenty feet from the door. It did not take five minutes to enter, open the case, take the necklace, and leave. Jeffers heard me. She was in the room almost as I closed the door. Before she could have got into the hall I was in the broom-closet hunting for a dust-pan. But she evidently suspected nothing, for the door did not open and there was no indication of disturbance.

Two days later Tom and I returned from our “business trip” to the Continent. I quite prided myself on the way our luggage was labeled. It had just the right knock-about, piebald look. We drove up in a four-wheeler, Handsome Harry on the box, and Maud opened the door for us. For the next few days we were quiet and kept indoors. We spent the time peacefully in the kitchen, breaking the settings of the diamonds and reading about the robbery in the papers. As soon as things simmered down, Tom was to take the stones across to Holland, where they would be distributed. We threw away the settings, and put the diamonds in a small box of chamois-skin that I pinned to my corset with a safety-pin.

That was the way things were--untroubled as a summer sea--till ten days after our return, when I began to get restive. I had had what they call in America “a strenuous time” at Burridge’s, working like a slave all day, with not a soul to speak to but a parcel of ignorant servant women, and I wanted livening up. I longed for the light and noise of Piccadilly, the crowd and the restaurants; but what I wanted particularly was to go to the theater and see a play called “The Forgiven Prodigal.”

Maud and Tom raised a clamor of disapproval: What was the use of running risks? did I think, because I’d been in Chicago for nearly a year, that I was forgotten? did I think the men in Scotland Yard who knew me were all dead? did I think the excitement of the Castlecourt robbery was over and done? I yawned at them, and then told them, with a gentle smile, that they were a “pusillanimous pair.” There might be many men in Scotland Yard who knew me, and that, as they say in Chicago, “is all the good it would do them.” They couldn’t arrest me for sitting peacefully at a theater looking at a play. As for connecting me with Sara Dwight, I would give any one a hundred pounds who, when I was dressed and had my war-paint on, would find in me a single suggestion of the late housemaid at Burridge’s. So I talked them down; and if I didn’t convince them of the reasonableness of my arguments, I at least managed to soothe their fears.

I dressed myself with especial care, and when the last rite of my toilet was accomplished looked critically in the glass to see if anything of Sara Dwight remained. The survey contented me. Sara’s mother, if there be such a person, would have denied me. I was all in black, a sweeping, spangly dress I had bought in New York, cut low, and my neck is not my weak point, especially when _crême des violettes_ has been rubbed over it. My hair was waved (Maud does it very well, much better than she cooks, I regret to say), and dressed high, with a small red wreath of geraniums round it. Nose powdered to a probable, ladylike whiteness, a touch of rouge, a tiny _mouche_ near the corner of one eye, and long, black gloves--and, presto change! I wore no jewels--their owners might recognize them. One could hardly say I “wore” the Castlecourt diamonds, which were fastened to my corset with a safety-pin. They were rather uncomfortable, but they were the only thing about me that were.

As I stood in front of the glass putting on finishing touches, Maud left the room, and went to the drawing-room to watch for Handsome Harry, who was to drive our hansom. I did not like taking a hired driver, and, thank goodness, I didn’t! I was putting a last _soupçon_ of scarlet on my lips, when she came back, stepping softly, and with her eyes round and uneasy looking.

“I don’t know whether I’m nervous,” she says, “but there’s a man just gone by in a hansom, and he leaned out and looked hard at our windows.”

“I hope it amused him,” I said, looking critically at my lips, to see if they were not a little too incredibly ruddy. “It’s a harmless and innocent way of passing the time, so we mustn’t be hard on him if it doesn’t happen to be very intellectual. Come, help me on with my cloak, and don’t stand there like Patience on a monument staring at thieves.”

I was irritated with Maud, trying to upset my peace of mind that way. She’d had any amount of good times while I’d been at Burridge’s with my nose to the grindstone. And here she was, the first time I’d got a chance to have a spree, looking like a depressed owl and talking like the warning voice of Conscience! As she silently held up my cloak and I thrust my hand in the sleeve, I said, over my shoulder:

“And you needn’t go upsetting Tom by telling him about strange men in hansoms who stare up at our front windows. I want to have a good time this evening, not feel that I’m sitting by a guilty being who jumps every time he’s spoken to as if the curse of Cain was on him.”

Maud said nothing, and I shook myself into my cloak and swept out to the hall, where Tom was waiting.

There had been a slight fog all afternoon, and now it was thick; not a “pea-soup” one, but a good, damp, obscuring fog--a regular “burglar’s delight.” As we came down the steps we saw the two hansom lamps making blurs, like lights behind white cotton screens. Tom was grumbling about it and about going out generally as he helped me in. And just at that minute, still and quick, like a picture going across a magic-lantern slide, I saw a man on the other side of the street step out of the shadow of a porch, and glide swiftly and softly past the light of the lamp and up the street, to where the form of a waiting hansom loomed. It was all very simple and natural, but his walk was odd--so noiseless and stealthy.

I got in, and Tom followed me. He hadn’t seen anything. For the moment I didn’t speak of it, because I wasn’t sure. But I’ve got to admit that my heart beat against the Castlecourt diamonds harder than was comfortable. We started, and I listened, and faintly, some way behind us, I heard the _ker-lump!--ker-lump!--ker-lump!_ of another horse’s hoofs on the asphalt. I leaned forward over the door, and tried to look back. Through the mist I saw the two yellow eyes of the hansom behind us. Tom asked me what was the matter, and I told him. He whistled--a long, single note--then leaned back very steady and still. We didn’t say anything for a bit, but just sat tight and listened.

It kept behind us that way for about ten minutes. Then I pushed up the trap, and said to Harry:

“What’s this hansom behind us up to, Harry?”

“That’s what I want to know,” he says, quiet and low.

“Lose it, if you can, without being too much of a Jehu,” I answered, and shut the trap.

He tried to lose it, and we began a chase, slow at first, and then faster and faster, down one street and up the other. The fog by this time was as thick and white as wool, and we seemed to break through it like a ship, as if we were going through something dense and hard to penetrate. It seemed to me, too, a maddeningly quiet night. There was no traffic, no noise of wheels to get mixed with ours. The _ker-lump!--ker-lump!_ of our horse’s hoofs came back as clear as sounds in a calm at sea from the long lines of house fronts. And that devilish hansom never lost us. It kept just the same distance behind us. We could hear its horse’s hoofs, like an echo of our own, beating through the fog. It got no nearer; it went no faster. It did not seem in a hurry, it never deviated from our track. There was something hideously unagitated and cool about it--a sort of deadly, sinister persistence. I saw it in imagination, like a live monster with bulging yellow eyes, staring with gloating greediness at us as we ran feebly along before it.

Tom didn’t say much. He doesn’t in moments like this. He’s got the nerve all right, but not the brain. There’s no inventive ability in Tom, he’s not built for crises. Handsome Harry now and then dropped some remark through the trap, which was like a trickle of icy water down one’s spine. I began to realize that my lips were dry, and that the insides of my gloves were damp. I knew that whatever was to be done had to come from me. I’d got them into this, and, as they say in Chicago, “it was up to me” to get them out.

I leaned over the doors, and looked at the street we were going through. I know that part of London like a book--the insides of some of the houses as well as the outsides; it’s a part of our business in which I’m supposed to be quite an expert. The street was a small one near Walworth Crescent, the houses not the smartest in the locality, but good, solid, reliable buildings inhabited by good, solid, reliable people. The lower floors were all alight. It was the heart of the season, and in many of them there were dinners afoot. I thought, with a flash of longing--such as a drowning man might feel if he thought of suddenly finding himself on terra firma--of serene, smiling people sitting down to soup. I’d have given the Castlecourt diamonds at that moment to have been sitting down with them to cold soup, sour soup, greasy soup, any kind of soup--only to be sitting down to soup!

We turned a corner sharp, going now at a tearing pace, and I saw before us a length of street wrapped in fog, and blurred at regular intervals by the lights of lamps. It looked ghostlike--so white, so noiseless, lined on either side by dim house fronts blotted with an indistinct sputter of lights. There was not a sound but our own horse’s hoof-beats, and far off, like a noise muffled by cotton wool, the echo of our pursuer’s. Through the opaque, motionless atmosphere I saw that the vista into which I stared was deserted. There was not a human figure or a vehicle in sight. It was a lull, a brief respite, a moment of incalculable value to us!

My mind was as clear as crystal, and I felt a sense of cool, high exhilaration. I have only felt this way in desperate moments, and this was a truly desperate moment--a pursuer on our heels and the diamonds in my possession!

I leaned over the doors, and looked up the line of houses. It was Farley Street. Who lived in Farley Street? Suddenly I remembered that I knew all about the people who lived in No. 15. They were Americans named Kennedy--a man, his wife, and a little girl. He was manager of the London branch of a Chicago concern called the “Colonial Box, Tub, and Cordage Company,” that I had often heard of in America. We had marked the house, and made extensive investigations before I left, intending to add it to our list, as Mrs. Kennedy had some handsome jewelry and silver. Since my return I had seen her name in the papers at various entertainments, and Maud had told me a lot about her social successes. She was pretty, and people were taking her up. All this--that it takes me some minutes to tell--flashed through my mind in a revolution of the wheels.

I could see now that the windows of No. 15 were lit up. The Kennedys were evidently at home, perhaps had a dinner on. They, along with the rest of the world, would in a minute be sitting down to soup. They might be sitting down now; it was close on to half-past eight. Why could not we sit down with them?

I lifted the top, and said to Harry:

“Is the hansom round the corner yet?”

“No,” he answered, “it’s our only chance. They’re still a bit behind us. I can tell by the sound.”

“Drive to No. 15, second from the corner,” I said, “and go as if the devil was after you.”

I dropped the trap, and as we tore down to No. 15 I spoke in a series of broken sentences to Tom.

“We’re going in here to dinner. You must look as if it was all right. If we carry it off well, they won’t dare to question. We’re Major and Mrs. Thatcher, of the Lancers, that arrived Saturday from India. They’re Americans, and won’t know anything, so you can say about what you like. Give them India hot from the pan. I’ve been living in London while you’ve been away. That’s how I come to know them and you don’t. My Christian name’s Ethel. Do the dull, heavy, haw-haw style. Americans expect it.”

We brought up at the curb with a jerk, threw back the doors, and dashed up the steps. I caught a vanishing glimpse of Handsome Harry leaning far forward to lash the horse as the hansom went bounding off into the fog. As we stood pressed against the door, Tom whispered:

“What the devil is their name?”

“Kennedy,” I hissed at him--“Cassius P. Kennedy. Came originally from Necropolis City, Ohio; lived in Chicago as a clerk in the Colonial Box, Tub, and Cordage Company, and then was made manager of the London branch. Their weak point is society. If any people are there, keep your mouth shut. Be dense and unresponsive.”

We heard the rattle of the pursuing hansom at the end of the street, then through the ground glass of the door saw a man servant’s approaching figure.

“Only stay a few minutes over the coffee. We’re going on to the opera,” I whispered, as the door opened.

I swept in, Tom on my heels. We came as fast as we could without actually falling in and dashing the servant aside, for the noise of our pursuer was loud in our ears, and we knew we were lost if we were seen entering. As Tom somewhat hastily shut the door, I was conscious of the expression of surprise on the face of the solemn butler. He did not say anything, but looked it. I slid out of my cloak, and handed it, languidly, to him.

“No, I won’t go up-stairs,” I said, in answer to his glare of growing amaze.

Then I turned to the glass in the hat-rack, and began to arrange my hair. I could see, reflected in it, a pair of portières, half open, and affording a glimpse of a room beyond, bathed in the subdued rosy light of lamps. I was conscious of movement there behind the portières--a stir of skirts, a sort of hush of curiosity.

There had been the sound of voices when we came in. Now I noticed the stealthy, occasional sibilant of a whisper. There was no dinner-party. We were going to dine _en famille_. So much the better. My hair neat, I turned to the butler, and, touching the jet of my corsage with an arranging hand, murmured:

“Major and Mrs. Thatcher.”

The man drew back the curtain, and, with our name going before us in loud announcement, I rustled into the room, Tom behind me.