Dido hesitated. She was approaching now those outlandish ideas of which she had warned her sister. She bit the end of her pen and gazed down into the red cave of hot coals as she wondered how best to express her darkest suspicions; suspicions which were all built out of such very tiny details as seemed of no importance on their own – details which anyone else might have passed over entirely, but which clung to her brain like burrs and briars on a gun-dog’s coat after a day’s rough shooting.
If you have been attending as you should to all my accounts, Eliza, you will by now be aware of some very great problems and discrepancies in the account of Miss Fenn which I have so far pieced together. To borrow a phrase from dear Harriet: it will not do at all. And the most incongruous fact is still the letters in the bible. I have, as yet, said nothing to Anne about them – nor about the true identity of ‘Miss Fenn’; but the time draws near when I must decide what she is to know and not to know – as well as determining how Mr Portinscale is to be persuaded that there was no suicide …
The letters seem to prove that there was a lover: a man who lived close at hand (the evidence for his proximity is, you will recall, the absence of a post office mark on the letter’s cover and Miss Fenn’s reference to seeing him ‘again and again’). But this accords so very ill with the neighbourhood’s opinion of the woman that I find myself going over the words of the letters, in the hope that I might yet discover some other meaning concealed within them.
And then there is that very jarring fact which has preyed upon my mind since my visit to Mrs Nolan: her assertion that she had never seen Miss Elinor Fenn.
This is inexplicable, Eliza. How could it be that Miss Fenn had never called upon her daughter in Bath? When the child was with Mrs Pinker, she had visited her every week without fail, going to the considerable inconvenience of driving herself fourteen miles in a pony carriage in order to do so. This argues a very natural and amiable maternal attachment, does it not? And yet this attachment was done away entirely when Penelope came into Mrs Nolan’s care! Why?
Dido set her pen aside with a restless motion, chafed together her hands, then dropped a coal or two more onto the dying fire. She crept closer to the hearth until her feet were resting upon the fender and her face warm, even though the cold night air continued to chill her back. Her tired eyes watched the coals gently pulsing from black to red and her thoughts were so very strange she could not help but wonder whether she was like dear Mr Cowper when he looked into his fire – ‘myself creating what I saw’. But there was a kind of sense and pattern to her ideas – a way of fitting together all the pieces to make a complete map – even though it was one with a very surprising geography indeed.
She picked up her pen, determined upon writing down her incredible tale, even if, when it was finished, she had not the courage to publish it.
You see, Eliza, when I began to look for the cause of this change, I was reminded of one other very slight discrepancy in the accounts I have heard of Penelope’s going to Mrs Nolan’s school. Lucy told me that Penelope had been in Bath since she was five years old – and Mrs Nolan herself confirmed that account in my first interview with her. But, Mrs Pinker’s maid told me that girls were not sent from the house in Great Farleigh until they were seven.
Is not this rather strange? It alerted me to a possibility which can make comprehensible a great many of the mysteries which surround me. The possibility which has been tormenting me these past two days. Eliza, I do not believe that the child Mrs Pinker cared for was Penelope at all. I believe there was a switch made at the time of the removal to Bath, and, while her own child was hidden somewhere close to Madderstone, Miss Fenn pretended that Penelope was her daughter …
Small flames began to lick at the coals, brightening the room, lighting up the noble black profile of old Mr Kent in his frame, and sending shadows dancing across the ceiling. Out in the foggy night a fox barked sharply. Dido brushed her pen against her lips as she thought. Were her suspicions too fantastic? She had tried to ground each new idea in fact – that was a principle which her brother Edward had taught her. And Edward had once won a medal for debating at Cambridge. But he had never told her what one was to do when facts led to monstrous suspicions against the most innocent-seeming people. The great logicians of the university seemed to be entirely silent upon that point.
She sighed. What else could one do but follow the trail of reason relentlessly to its end?
Of course the next question must be: why was the exchange made? And I think that the reason lies in Miss Fenn’s remarkable determination to keep a particular secret from her husband.
As I told Mr Lomax at Bath, I believe Miss Fenn was an exceptionally clever and resourceful woman. (And I apologise, by the by, for my continued use of that name. I know that I ought to write instead of Lady Congreve, but I have known her too long as Miss Fenn to be comfortable with any other name.) Now, although the abominable laws of our land decree that a woman fleeing her husband’s ill-usage may take nothing with her, I believe that this remarkable lady contrived to steal one thing which he valued very highly indeed – and, having taken it, she was forced to do all that she could to keep it concealed. Even the friends who had helped her knew nothing of it. Because if Lord Congreve had known, he would never have rested until he had got back his property.
You see, Eliza, the key to it all lies in another little detaiclass="underline" a piece of information I got from Mrs Pinker’s maid, but the significance of which I have only just begun to suspect. As I have said, girls did not leave Great Farleigh until they were seven years old. It was boys who left that establishment at five.
Dido bent eagerly over her writing desk, her pen scratching rapidly in the red firelight, her eyes bright, one small foot tapping rapidly upon the brass fender: impatient now to get it all told.
Miss Fenn had contrived, in fact, to steal from Lord Congreve his son: the heir to his title and estates. That is what he had always been uncertain of: the sex of the child she had borne. He feared she had robbed him of the next Lord Congreve and he could not rest until he had discovered the truth. That, you see, is why Captain Laurence began his investigations. But, of course, he found only what Miss Fenn had intended her husband should find if he searched: a daughter. The ‘little miss’ about whom His Lordship cared so little he did not even trouble to protect her from the captain’s own selfish schemes!
Well, I think I begin at last to understand Miss Fenn (and upon further reflection I am quite determined to continue with that name – she deserves to have a title quite different from that of her brutish husband!). She was, in fact, the religious, upright woman that her neighbours believed her to be. And when I next see Mr Lomax I shall be sure to tell him that my ‘great idea’ has been vindicated entirely …
She paused, a smile softening her anxious face; but a moment later she had recollected herself and her pen was driving fast across the page.
The poor woman was quite determined to protect her son from the influence and example of such a vicious father. Titles and fortune were of no importance to her beside virtue and she set about hiding her son so effectively he would be protected even after her death. The web of deceit which she wove cost her her life in the end, Eliza – and I cannot bear to think that she might have died in vain. Lord Congreve shall not find his son if I can prevent it.