The Bohemian Girl

The Bohemian Girl - Kenneth Cameron



Acknowledgements
I am indebted to my editor, Bill Massey, for both his expertise and his having put up with me in the first place. As well, this book and several others owe much to Tim Waller, whose linguistic knowledge and sense of period slang seem boundless, not to mention his ability to move back and forth with ease between British and American styles while I am floundering in the middle.
Several works were also useful to me: the Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody and Robert Machrae’s The Night Side of London for details of the period; Michael Holroyd’s biography of Augustus John and Alison Thomas’s Gwen John and Her Forgotten Contemporaries for details of artistic life, and, less so, Virginia Nicolson’s Among the Bohemians; Yesterday’s Shopping: The Army and Navy Stores Catalogue, 1907; Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves and My Reminiscences as a Cowboy; and, as always, Baedeker’s London and Its Environs (in this case, the 1902 edition) for details of the city, including such trivia as the address of Kettner’s restaurant in that day and ‘Old St Alban’s Church’ for what is now called St Alban’s Old Church. Finally, two websites: The Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health, at www.mum.org; and the Metropolitan Police, at www.met.police.uk.



CHAPTER ONE
The room in sunlight was not half bad, everything too heavy, of course, but so was every other middle-class room in London. Denton’s chair was too heavy; the curtains were too heavy; the air felt heavy, but the sun that poured in was bright and cheerful and lightened everything. And, after six months away, two of them in a Central European prison, his own house would have looked wonderful in pouring rain.
‘Well,’ Denton said, luxuriating in his own chair at last, ‘we did it!’ He was more than six feet tall, lean, fiftyish, with an enormous Mr Punch nose and an unwaxed moustache that hung down over the ends of his mouth. Even in a Jaeger robe and pyjamas, he carried an air of the American West.
Atkins made a face. ‘Yes, though I’m not at all sure what we done, except go on a fool’s errand and come out with nothing we took in but our skins.’ He eyed a very large dog whose forward end resembled a bull terrier’s. ‘Rupert’ll never be the same.’
‘Thank God.’ Rupert had lost thirty pounds during the imprisonment, thanks to a diet of cabbage and potatoes, and little enough of those. They had all lost weight, but Denton still thought the trip had been a triumph. After a month in Paris learning how to take a motor car apart and put it back together, they had driven a Daimler 8 across France, Germany and Austria-Hungary and into the Carpathian Alps; then, after several adventures (including thirty-one tyre repairs, a tow over a mountain pass from eight draught horses, and a wait of three weeks for petrol), they had gone into Transylvania, where they had been arrested as spies. The motor car and Denton’s guns and a mostly finished novel were still there, seized as ‘military contraband’. But it made a great story, and it had made a great series of articles in England, America, France and Germany, and it would make (as it was supposed to, for that was the object) a popular book: Motors and Monsters: From Paris to the Land of Dracula by Automobile. Denton banged his hands on the arms of his chair and shouted, ‘By God, we did it!’
‘I never want to see a cabbage again.’
‘On the other hand, look at the taste you’ve developed for bread made out of sawdust.’
‘Rupert’s skin and bones.’
Denton stuck out a hand, and Rupert licked the open palm from fingertips to wrist. ‘I wish he hadn’t bitten that customs officer.’
‘Fool threatened us; what’d you expect? Bloody tyrants, them Central Europeans.’
‘You shouldn’t have said “get him”.’
‘Who was to know Rupert was trained to attack?’
They were both drinking coffee, Atkins standing from some ingrained sense of protocol, although he was wearing a seedy velvet robe, napless in many places - he was a small man, and the original owner had been large - and munching a piece of Denton’s toast. Denton poured himself more coffee and, looking up at Atkins with a smile that didn’t quite hide his sincerity, said, ‘I’d never have made it without you.’
‘Likewise, I’m sure, General, except that of course I’d never have made it without you because I’d never have been daft enough to undertake such a jaunt in the first place.’ Atkins shrugged himself upwards into the robe as a means of avoiding more thanks and said, ‘We’re in the morning paper. Noted Novelist Returns. I’m included as “faithful soldier-servant Harold Atkins”. Faithful, my hat. You done with me?’
Denton was starting to rip envelopes open, the accumulated mail of six months, throwing crumpled paper towards the fireplace and missing. He was hoping to find a letter from a certain woman but failing. ‘Hold on.’ He tore the end off an envelope of a particularly heavy paper, noted that it was addressed from ‘Albany’, the once-fashionable ‘single gentlemen’s flats’ (correctly ‘Albany’, no ‘the’, although most people said the Albany, as had Oscar Wilde), found inside a note on the same heavy paper with some sort of embossed thing and a smaller, lighter, plainer envelope. He read the few words on the heavy paper and then looked at both sides of the smaller envelope but didn’t tear it open.
‘Got steam downstairs?’
‘Nothing that’d run a ship, if that’s what you’re after. Goose the kettle, if that’ll do.’
Denton handed over the small envelope and muttered that he didn’t want the envelope damaged, to which Atkins answered that of course he was in the habit of damaging everything that came into his hands, and he vanished back into the darker end of the long room and clumped downstairs, Rupert in tow. Denton dealt with the rest of his mail by glancing at it and throwing it away - invitations that he threw towards the fire unopened, both because he didn’t go anywhere and because they were months out of date; the usual letters from people adoring his books and wanting something, often to sell a ‘sure-fire idea for a best-selling book’ of their life stories, sometimes to borrow money. The only new thing among this lot were four - no, six; there were two more at the bottom of the pile - from somebody named Albert Cosgrove, proclaiming boundless enthusiasm for his books and profound awe at his genius. The first, sent a month before, was a request for a signed copy of one, ‘please to inscribe To Albert Cosgrove’, no offer to pay for the book, of course. The others were hymns of praise, one beginning ‘Dear master’, another ‘Cher ma?tre’. Two had been written on the same day, only three days ago, one saying ‘I long for your arrival that will return the English language’s greatest literary artist to our land’ and asking for signed copies of all of Denton’s books.
Albert Cosgrove went into the fire, too.
Denton was American. He wrote grittily realistic novels about American sod-busters and the demons that tormented them, and he didn’t think of himself as a literary artist. He preferred to live in London, and he preferred living well to living like his characters. For that reason, his only regret about the Transylvanian trip was that most of the new novel - already paid for by his publisher and expected soon, as the editor’s letter showed - had been taken away when they were arrested and not returned when they escaped. Or were allowed to escape, as he believed had been the case.
By the time he had disposed of the mail, Atkins was back beside him with the steamed-open envelope on a salver.
‘The silver thing’s a nice touch,’ Denton said.
‘It’s called a salver. In the best houses.’
‘This isn’t one of the best houses.’
‘Mmm.’
Denton extracted the folded paper that was inside, teasing it out with the end of the letter-opener, and let it fall to his lap, where he prised the folds apart with the same tool and held it down so he could read it. When he was done, he said, ‘Read it?’
‘I didn’t presume.’
‘That’ll be the day.’ Denton turned the paper over and searched the other side and only then picked it up with his fingers and handed it over. ‘See what you think.’
Atkins read it. ‘Woman.’
‘Good. Most Marys are women.’
‘Fears bodily harm.’
‘So she says.’
‘You know what she’s doing, don’t you, Colonel? It’s the same old song and dance - somebody sees spooks or hears burglars under the bed, what does she do? Write a letter to the sheriff!’
‘I wasn’t a sheriff; I was a town marshal.’
‘And then they expect you to come riding on your faithful horse Fido with six-guns blazing! That’s what she’s on about. Another hysterical female, wants a bit of the thrilling.’
‘You should be writing novels, not me.’
‘Well, what you going to do?’
‘Nothing.’ Denton turned to look at the servant. ‘Look at the date.’
Atkins studied the paper, suddenly saw the light. ‘Oh, my heart, it’s two months old.’
‘Two and a bit.’ He picked up the heavy notepaper that had enclosed the small envelope. ‘“Dear Mr Denton, I found this missive behind a recently purchased little Wesselons. As it is addressed to you, I send it on like a good postman. Yours most sincerely, Aubrey Heseltine.”’ He handed the note to Atkins. ‘Pretentious - “little Wesselons”! Some Albany idiot who wants everybody in London to know he bought a painting.’
‘A Wesselons is a painting?’
‘Don’t play the dunce, Atkins! What’s got into you?’
‘My mind’s on higher things.’
Denton sighed. Atkins had had some sort of religious experience in prison, the source of a new dourness. ‘Does piety have to be humourless?’ he said.
‘I don’t think humour comes into it.’
‘Surely there are jokes in the Bible.’
‘I certainly hope not!’
‘God ought to be allowed to laugh, surely. Jesus laughs somewhere, doesn’t he?’ Denton thought of telling Atkins an American joke - a rabbi and a priest are almost run down by a carriage, and so on - but he wasn’t sure it was relevant. ‘Is this about a woman?’
‘Now you’re offending me.’
‘It’s like you to have been led into the tent by a female. Was it Katya?’ Katya had been some sort of hanger-on at the prison (actually, Denton thought, Colonel Cieljescu’s - the commandant’s - mistress), but Atkins had been much taken with her.
‘I’ll give notice if you keep this up.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with hearing a call to God just because the voice is a woman’s. Read Adam Bede.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘That’s the title. Upright man who falls in love with a lady preacher. Not your usual, however.’ Atkins was a great reader of Charles Lever. ‘George Eliot.’
‘I thought it was Adam Breed.’
‘The author.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘It’s a her. England’s greatest novelist.’
‘I haven’t had your advantages.’
‘You’ve had exactly my advantages; you just made different use of them.’ This was only roughly true: both men had been in the army, both had been poor, but one was English and one American, and one was a servant and one was a figure of some notoriety, even fame. Denton indicated the notepaper. ‘Wha’dyou think?’
‘I think he’s a gent who’s coming it a little high, as you say, but I don’t see nothing suspicious. He buys a painting, finds an envelope, sends it to the person it’s intended for. Trail’s cold after so long; female has either had harm done to her or not by now.’
Denton read the woman’s letter aloud. ‘“Dear Mr Denton, I should like to come by one evening to seek your advice. I believe that someone threatens harm to me and I do not know quite what to do. If I may, I will call and if you are not in I will return. Mary Thomason.”’ Atkins had been pouring coffee and now put it down next to him. Denton said, ‘No salutation - simply “Mary Thomason”. Suggestive. Have some more coffee yourself.’
‘Don’t mind if I do. Suggestive of what?’
Denton shrugged. ‘Unconventionality?’
‘Ignorance, more likely.’
‘No, it’s a good hand, trained, and she says “I should like”. Mmmnmh. Maybe in a hurry or maybe wanting to seem businesslike, but maybe unconventional.’
‘You’re off on a hare because the thing was found behind a painting - arty stuff. You think, “Art, Bohemians, unconventionality, that’s for me!” Rushing your fences, Colonel.’
‘And how do you find something “behind a painting”?’ Denton sipped his coffee. By now, Atkins was sitting in the other armchair. ‘He can’t mean on the wall behind a painting, because he says he bought it, and I can’t believe he bought the wall, too. What he probably means is “in the back of a painting”.’
‘Not my line of work.’
‘Nor mine, but we’ve both turned paintings over.’ There were four or five on the walls, two more in the downstairs hall, both stinkers he’d bought because they were big and he was trying to fill a lot of space. ‘I suppose Aubrey Heseltine could tell us.’
‘You’re intrigued.’
‘I am. I’m guilty, or bothered, or something. A woman thinks she’s appealed to me for help, and I don’t hear her cry until too late.’
‘Hardly your fault, is it? She never sent the letter, did she? There wasn’t no stamp on it, was there? The back of a painting isn’t exactly the Royal Mail, is it? No on all counts. She thought better of it; you’re free and clear.’
‘Why did she put the letter in the back of a painting?’
‘Did she? You got no evidence.’
‘Well - you have me there. But the letter didn’t put itself in the back of a painting. Hardly “thinking better of it” to put it there, was it? The trash would be the likelier place.’
‘But you don’t know she did it. It’s moot.’
Denton studied him, or seemed to; he was really thinking of the woman and the somebody who might have wanted to harm her. ‘I think I’d like to know where Mr Heseltine bought the painting.’
Atkins put his eyebrows up and rose, gathering the cups and putting them with the ruin of Denton’s breakfast. ‘I’m off, then,’ he said.
‘What are you off to do?’
‘Stack this lot for Mrs Char and then read my Bible. Going to look for jokes. You’ve got me thinking.’
‘Good.’
Atkins got to the end of the room and put the tray into the dumb waiter and then said from the gloom, ‘Mind, I’m not to be got at with secular reasoning. I’m a saint by revelation.’
‘Nice, having a saint for a servant.’
He went on down the stairs, the door banging behind him. Denton didn’t want to rob the man of his religion if it was a genuine comfort to him, but he liked Atkins better when he was doing what amounted to a music-hall turn as a comic servant. After thirty-one years in the British army, Atkins was an accomplished batman, liar, thief and entertainer; he could cook, press, argue with creditors, give points on etiquette and do imitations of every officer he’d ever served. Denton was sure he did imitations of Denton, too, or at least had until Calvinist humourlessness had revealed itself to him. Atkins needed to be shaken out of his dumps, Denton thought; he needed to be seized by a new interest.
Well, maybe the outdated letter from Mary Thomason would fill the bill.
He went upstairs to the room that served him as both bedroom and office, littered now with the relics of life after the prison. He kicked aside the worn boots in which he’d walked out of Transylvania, the straw suitcase that had been all he could afford in Cluj, the canvas jacket he’d worn as a deckhand on a Danube steamer, and sat at the dusty desk.
It hurt him that there had been no letter from her. Maybe she didn’t know he’d got out. Maybe she thought he was dead; she lived in a world of prostitutes and want, read few newspapers, knew nobody. He sighed. They had corresponded throughout the trip; even in prison he had written to her, for the last weeks almost every day. Letters from her had reached him until he’d been arrested; then he had got nothing from her, hadn’t expected to, but he’d sent her a cable as they had come through Paris on their way back and had thought - hoped - he’d find a note asking him to come to see her. Maybe the cable hadn’t reached her. Maybe—
He tried now to write her a note to tell her he was alive, that he was in London, hesitating at once over ‘My dearest Janet’, settling for ‘My dear Mrs Striker’, then ‘Dear Mrs Striker’, then writing a page about not receiving letters from her at the prison and then being on the run, about missing mail, all of that, then pitching it out and writing simply, ‘I’d like to see you. May I visit?’ He sent an unhappy Atkins out to find a Commissionaire in Russell Square to carry it to the telegraph office, reply prepaid.
He sat on, head on one hand, elbow on desk, staring out of the unclean window at the back of another house forty yards away. He sighed again. The happiness of the early morning couldn’t last; left behind were Janet Striker’s silence, the mystery of the woman who had left the note in the painting, the irritating knut at the Albany who had found it.
He decided to write to him: ‘I must thank you for forwarding to me the envelope you say you found behind a Wesselons. May I call on you to discuss this matter briefly?’ Mr Heseltine, he thought, would say yes, because he suspected that Mr Heseltine was the sort of pretentious ass who would have pitched the envelope into the coals if he hadn’t recognized that it was addressed to a well-known author.
The question was, why did Denton want to discuss the matter with him at all? As so often, his own motives seemed rooted in a guilt about something he hadn’t done. His gloom deepened. The only antidote he knew was work. He would go to work; he would try to recover the novel that he couldn’t bring out of Central Europe. He had written an outline of it before he had left London six months before. It was in a drawer in the desk.
He pulled the drawer open. It was empty. He was going to shout for Atkins when he found that Atkins was standing at his door. Denton said, ‘Have you been cleaning up my desk?’
‘Not likely. You know somebody wears a black bowler and has a red moustache?’
‘Did you find a Commissionaire?’
‘’Course I did.’
‘I’m missing something from my desk.’
‘I haven’t been home long enough to pinch it. You know a bowler and a red moustache or don’t you?’
Denton was going through the other drawers. ‘I hope not. Why?’
‘Looking at us from the window of the house behind.’
‘Lives there, I suppose.’
‘Housemaid two doors up says the house is empty and to let. Then, coming back from finding the Commissionaire, I see him skulking across the way. Have yourself a look.’
They both went along the corridor to the front of the house, on this floor a small bedroom he never used. Side by side, they looked down into the street. ‘Gone,’ Atkins said. ‘I knew it.’ He sniffed. ‘Suspicious.’
‘What’s suspicious about it?’
‘He had a rum look.’
‘Probably what he’d say about you.’ Denton went back to his desk.
Atkins followed. ‘As long as I’ve come this far, I might as well get your clothes.’ Denton’s blank look made him add, ‘Air them out. Six months in the clothes press. Eh?’
‘Well, hurry up, I’m working.’ He began again to search the drawers he’d already looked through.
‘Could have fooled me.’ Atkins loaded his arms with wool suits. Going out, he said, ‘That fellow was a bad actor, I’m telling you. They know you’re back, Colonel.’
‘Who?’
‘Your enemies.’
Denton put on an old shirt and hugely baggy corduroy trousers, stuffed his feet into leather slippers and went up another flight to the attic. Could he have left the outline up there? The unfinished wood smelled the same as it had six months before - dusty, dry, resinous - and his exercise contraption seemed the same, his dumb-bells, his Flobert parlour pistols, locked in their case and hidden under his massive rowing machine. The old Navy Colt that had been with him since the American Civil War, however, wasn’t there; like his novel and his Remington derringer, it hadn’t made it back from Transylvania. The outline wasn’t to be found, either. Denton hoisted a hundred-pound dumb-bell, thought he’d lost strength in the prison. He sat in the rowing machine, looked up at the skylight to make sure that nobody had tried to break in, went back downstairs. Checking his domain, like a dog pissing at corners.
Then he sat again, trying to find if he could recall, word by word, the novel that the Romanians had thought too dangerous to return.