Free Kept by D. J. Taylor

phantom crowd huzzaing at the street corner)—when a cab comes briskly into view at that thoroughfare’s nearer end. So muted is its passage through the receding slush—the snow has vanished now, gone to fall on Clerkenwell and Whitechapel and Wapping Old Stairs—that no one in Tite Street hears it except Mrs. Farthing, who, like an old bloodhound taking the scent, sees it from her front door and steps out into the road almost before the vehicle pulls up and an oldish gentleman in a wide hat and an ulster begins to descend laboriously onto the pavement.
    “D——d cold for the time of the year, I should say,” the gentleman remarks, and Mrs. Farthing bridles, as if to say, “This is not language I would use, but the sentiment is, at any rate, sound.” A casual observer, overhearing them, would perhaps deduce that the gentleman and Mrs. Farthing were formerly acquainted. Certainly, Mrs. Farthing gives a little bob, hinting at great things in the curtseying line were further encouragement to be offered, while the gentleman gives her a glance that might be interpreted to mean “I would not dream of being so impolite as to suggest that I never met you before.” This impression is reinforced in Mrs. Farthing’s hallway, an immensely gloomy passage lit by a single lantern. Here the gentleman, having declined Mrs. Farthing’s offer of refreshment, fixes her with a look and presumes that the patient—the young lady—has passed a pretty comfortable day.
    “Pretty comfortable, sir,” Mrs. Farthing assures him. “Leastways, nothing I would complain of.”
    “She has been quiet, has she?” the gentleman continues.
    “Quite quiet, sir. Except that she took on once or twice, sir, which I never could abide, sir, and told her plainly that I would not.”
    “Took on, has she?” The gentleman’s voice is very low now, very low and confidential.
    “Crying, sir! Walking about the room! Not answering when spokento!” Mrs. Farthing particularises these failings as if each of them should be dealt with at Snow Hill by Mr. Ketch in front of a baying crowd.
    “Indeed? Well, I am obliged to you, Mrs….”
    “Farthing, sir,” says Mrs. Farthing eagerly, as if to say that she knows this game exactly. “And now, sir, perhaps you would care to come inside?”
    The gentleman duly comes. The parlour door shuts behind him. Mrs. Farthing lingers hesitantly before it for a moment, like a duenna uncertain what the young people are up to, before stumping off to the kitchen with the thought that it is no business of hers, which indeed it is not. Presently the parlour door creaks open, the gentleman and his companion—her shawl drawn up very tight over her face—are borne away (it is very late now, and the lights in the surrounding houses are all but extinguished) and Mrs. Farthing slips out of our story and back into the cramped and melancholy annals of Tite Street.
     
     
    “You’ll find Mr. Dixey an uncommonly peculiar gentleman,” Dunbar said, drawing the collar of his ulster close against the drizzle.
    “Pecooliar?” Dewar rolled the word around his mouth and made a tentative step on the path before him. “In what way pecooliar?”
    “Well, I don’t exactly know how to put it. Nothing out of the ordinary to look at, perhaps, but uncommon strange all the same.”
    “Ten guineas is ten guineas,” Dewar suggested hopefully. “Pecooliar or not.”
    They were standing on the verge of a small country back road, poorly surfaced, against which wound an ancient brick wall, very worn about its extremities, which rose to a point almost level with their heads. Above them, and to the right, tall trees—firs and spruces—hunched into near-impenetrable thickets, with only a glimpse or two of pathways running on into the wood. To the left the land sloped down through fields and pasture to a low-lying plain, apparently devoid of human habitation, on which the weak late-afternoon sun shone faintly. Save for the drip of rainwater