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At the time when my story takes place, I had been a widow for two years, my husband, Bentley Drummle, having died after being kicked by one of his hunters (for horses have this advantage over wives: nobody blames them if they kill the man who beats them).
I had gone back to the market-town in Kent where I had lived as a child to visit some property I owned there, and to pay my last respects to its ghosts – for my new tenant intended to build a cement-factory on the land, and I imagined that any self-respecting ghost would quit the place rather than be smothered under a vast flow of cement, and exorcised morning, noon, and night by the factory bell. I had signed the papers with some regret, but more relief. The rent would be sufficient to secure my independence; and I was by then old enough, and experienced enough in the world, to understand the meaning of satis. In any case, I have never been one to place much value on ghosts, especially since I now knew that they were not my ghosts.
Among the ghosts I found one living man, whom I had known since we were children. He was then a blacksmith’s boy, called Pip, who had been sent up from the village as a sort of playmate (it would be more accurate to say plaything) for me. Who he was as a man, and what part he was to play in this story, these pages will show; I did not yet know these things myself, though we sat and talked for some time, until the mists were rising and the moon lit the ruins of Satis House.
* * *
Satis House was a vast, rambling, wreck of a place when I was a child. There was a deserted brewery, and a deserted woman; the place seemed always to have been the same, and I seemed always to have been a part of it. And always, I had vaguely supposed myself to be the daughter of Miss Havisham and her false lover Compeyson – for children, even girl children, are not so innocent in these matters as adults like to imagine, and my mother-by-adoption’s bitterness toward Compeyson was such that I could readily imagine he had ruined her as well as deserted her. Even her insistence that I call her “mother-by-adoption” and nothing else seemed to testify, in its own way, that she was something else indeed; and her relations’ whispered insinuations that I had Bad Blood, and was likely to grow up into they knew not what, seemed to seal the case (although I am sure that they would have whispered much the same things if I had been born a royal princess).
I had heard Miss Havisham’s story from her own lips; no one in that house else ever dared to speak of it directly, not even the poisonous relations. She was a woman who had little to do with time, for time had stopped long ago in Satis House, and had gone on without her. As a consequence, though she had told me in precise detail how her brother and Compeyson had wronged her, she had never troubled to mention when.
Therefore, it was not until just before the time of which I speak that I had any reason to doubt my earliest conjecture about my parentage. As I prepared to relinquish my property to my new tenant, I had occasion to inspect a number of family documents related to its history, from which I learned that the marriage between Miss Havisham and Compeyson was to have taken place in January of 1799. This threw a new light upon the question, for I was, as I believed, about thirty-five years old; I might have been thirty-four, or thirty-six; but at any rate, I was fairly certain that I was not forty-three. And to anyone who knew my mother by adoption, it was wholly impossible to believe that she could have allowed Compeyson back into her life years after he had jilted her.
I thought then of Arthur Havisham, who had died in greatly distressed circumstances when I was, I think, about four years old. Word of his death had reached Satis House, and had plunged the place into deeper gloom than usual, for a few of the servants had been fond of him. I remembered that Miss Havisham had forbidden his name to be spoken, and had dismissed one of the housemaids for weeping. It seemed improbable, though not impossible, that I was his daughter.
I thought, also, of a curious object I had possessed for as long as I could remember. It lay at the bottom of my jewel-box still; Miss Havisham had been used to say that it was my first jewel, and that I would have much finer ones when I grew older – as indeed I had. It was the size of one of the "cartwheel" pennies of George the Third's day, and might well have been a penny once, but it had been worn, or ground, until its surface was perfectly smooth. Some hand had then marked a pattern on it, as if with a thousand pinpricks: a heart on one side, a five-pointed star on the reverse.
So long as I had supposed Miss Havisham to be my natural mother, I had been able to make nothing of this token, save that she must have given it to me to gratify some obscure whim. Now, I wondered whether the object might hold some clue to my parentage.
Therefore I took it with me when I went to see Mr. Jaggers the lawyer. I will not say that I liked Mr. Jaggers – I am not sure that anyone has ever precisely liked Mr. Jaggers – but I trusted him implicitly. He had done much to secure my separation from my husband, and to ensure that I kept at least the bit of land where Satis House had once stood, though by law married women have no property of their own, and virtually everything else had been sold to pay Bentley’s debts. He had, moreover, handled my adopted mother’s affairs since before I was born. And so it was to London, and to Mr. Jaggers, that I brought my questions.
* * *
When I was a girl, London was a half-day’s journey away by coach. It was now faster to travel to Tunbridge, and take the train from there; and I was no longer slowed by Miss Havisham’s insistence that I have a suitable escort, and that I rest a while after my journey. I intended to go to Mr. Jaggers at once, and then to Mrs. Brandley’s house in Richmond, where I had lived for some five or six years after my education had been completed (which is to say, after I had I learned how to talk charmingly, and to dance, and to play the pianoforte tolerably, for there was little enough in this education that was worth the name, save a reasonable command of the French language and a smattering of German and Italian).
I had no sooner alighted from the train at London Bridge Station when I heard a voice calling “Estella!”
I turned. It took me a moment to recognize the man. My cousin, Herbert Pocket (I shall go on calling him my cousin for convenience) had been a pale young gentleman when I saw him last; he was a very brown gentleman now, and somewhat older. Like Pip, he was a partner in Clarriker’s House, and had been in Egypt for the last eleven years when he was not traveling to Turkey or India.
I was surprised to see him in England, although perhaps I should not have been. I had already seen Pip, and I recalled that where Pip went, Herbert generally went also, and vice versa.
Herbert, I should explain, is the eldest son of my adopted mother’s cousin, Matthew Pocket. There were a great many Pocket children, and the entire family was notorious among the rest of the clan for their improvidence and impracticality – which is another way of saying that they refused to recognize Mammon as the only true god, and stubbornly persisted in their idolatry despite their relations’ best efforts to browbeat them into recanting. Matthew, in particular, was remarkable for his probity and lack of self-interest, and received the usual reward of the disinterested man; that is, the privilege of acting as executor for various wills in which he and his children received nothing. (My adopted mother’s will was the sole exception, and even there, I think, he was an afterthought.)
As for Herbert, he was the only man I knew in my youth who was entirely impervious to my charms, which suggests that he, at least, was practical enough to possess a keen sense of self-preservation.
“How are you, Herbert? Have you come home for good?”
He nodded. “I’m to manage the London office. Clarriker’s, you see, sends its junior clerks abroad to weather them; there is nothing like ten or twelve years in the Sahara for making a man able to bear the dryness and dust of the London office. They can’t take on green young men directly; their constitutions can’t stand it. Besides, learning to sit a camel is most excellent practice for the chairs at Clarriker’s.”
Herbert said this with a rather rueful laugh, and I asked him whether he missed Egypt.
“A little. Sometimes. For the most part, I am glad to be back in England. Home and hearth for me. Should you like to spend all of your life abroad?”
“I cannot say. I think I might.”
“You might have better luck with Pip. He means to go back to Egypt, if he can’t persuade Clarriker to open a branch in Australia. He’s always been keen to see Australia.”
For the next few minutes, I was so absorbed in wondering what on earth Pip had to do with Australia, that I forgot to demand of Herbert what he thought I had to do with Pip.
Upon hearing that I did not live in London, but had come because I had business with Mr. Jaggers, Herbert promptly invited me to stay with his family – to which I assented gladly, as I had no real desire to see Mrs. Brandley, and I knew she was no more desirous of seeing me.
* * *
Mr. Jaggers’s premises in Little Britain were surrounded by a great throng of people, all of them waiting to see the great man; but when I had battled my way through this disreputable-looking crowd and made myself known to his clerk, Mr. Wemmick, I was ushered into the Presence at once. The lawyer’s chamber was a gloomy little room, filled with a peculiar collection of objects – a pair of dueling-pistols, and a deck of cards, and several mourning brooches with locks of hair in various colors, and two casts of faces that must surely have belonged to the most hardened criminals in the Empire, and I don’t know what else.
“Ah. Mrs. Drummle. What can I do for you?”
“You can tell me, Mr. Jaggers, whether I am Arthur Havisham’s daughter.”
Mr. Jaggers was so averse to making anything in the nature of an admission that I thought it best to make a direct frontal attack, and take him by surprise. Even so, he did not precisely say whether I was Arthur Havisham’s daughter, but in his expression I read no, or at least a distinct absence of yes.
“Who am I, then?”
“Estella Drummle, unless you have remarried since I saw you last.”
“I mean, who were my mother and father?”
“That,” he said, “can make very little difference now.”
“Then there cannot be any harm in telling me the truth.”
“What is truth?” said Mr. Jaggers, for all the world like jesting Pilate, and like that worthy, he did not stay for an answer. “I can tell you your position in law, which ought to serve. In law, you understand, you are considered to be the daughter of Miss Havisham and no-one else.”
“Many things are considered true in law that may not be true in fact. For example, in law a husband may help himself to his wife’s property without being considered a thief, and to her body without being considered a –”
“Let me put a case to you,” interrupted Mr. Jaggers. He looked positively distressed – insofar as that dark, bushy-browed, sunken-eyed face was capable of distress. He was aware, of course, of everything that had happened in my marriage to Bentley, but he would have preferred that I never spoke of the matter again. “I admit nothing, you understand. Suppose a man, in the course of his work, hears a great many private confidences, some of which concern persons now dead, some of which may – or may not – concern the living. Suppose he has given his word, at various times, to keep these confidences. After how many years, would you say, should that man regard those promises as no longer binding? Thirty? Forty-seven? Twelve? Three?”
“Are we playing parlor games, Mr. Jaggers?”
“Come, you must have some exact number of years in mind, if you are so certain that enough time has passed by now.”
“Let us say any number of years, or none, if the secret was never yours to keep in the first place.”
Mr. Jaggers gave me a reproachful look. “I said nothing of myself, Mrs. Drummle; I only put a case to you. Let me put another question to you: for whose benefit do you seek to learn what you call truth? For your own? What possible difference could it make to your way of life or your future? For your parents’ sake? If they are living – which they may not be – is it not likely enough that the discovery, after so many years, would cause them more pain than pleasure?”
“I think that was four or five questions, not a question. I shall not try to answer them all. I will say only that the truth matters to me, and I give you my word that I will not disclose it to anyone who is likely to suffer pain by it.”
“Let me put another thing to you –”
“I am heartily sick of men putting their things to me without so much as asking my leave. Even the flower girls in Covent Garden generally hear a few pleasantries first.”
Mr. Wemmick stifled a cough that might – if it had not seemed so unlikely – have hidden a little choke of laughter. Mr. Jaggers looked still more distressed. (Widows, unlike young girls, are generally permitted to know about such matters; but on no account are they to jest about them, however bitterly.)
“I fear that I can be of little more assistance to you in this matter, Mrs. Drummle. Mr. Wemmick will show you out, unless you have other business?”
“Just one question,” I said, and produced the token. “Have you ever seen this object before?”
“No.”
“Have you any idea what the signs on it mean?”
“No.”
But I had noticed several tokens very like it among the other strange objects in the room, and I could only conclude that he was lying.
* * *
As Mr. Wemmick showed me to the door (which I was quite capable of finding for myself, having passed through it only half-an-hour before), he said, in a voice too low for Jaggers to overhear, “Mrs. Wemmick and I would be very pleased if you would join us for tea tomorrow. The Castle, at Walworth. You’ll know it when you see it.”
It came to me, as I was thinking over this strange invitation, that I was certainly not capable of finding Walworth by myself. Though I had lived for several years at Richmond, I knew little enough of London, having seen little more of the city than its ballrooms and theatres.
I confessed my ignorance to Herbert that evening, after I had greeted his wife Clara, and admired the children (of which there were some four or five – they did not sit still long enough to be counted).
He frowned slightly. “If Wemmick has invited you to tea at the Castle, depend upon it, he has something particular to say to you that he won’t say in front of Mr. Jaggers. May I ask whether your business in London concerns your late husband?”
“It concerns no one except myself.”
“In other words, I may not ask. Very well.” Herbert spoke cheerfully enough, but I felt immediately that I had been churlish.
“I beg your pardon. It is only that I had rather not speak of it.” I could not then have said precisely why I had rather not; but perhaps, already, I felt some intimation that my errand was likely to meet with dubious success, and if I did discover the truth, it was apt to be a shameful one.
“Well, as to finding your way to Walworth, it’s easy enough,” said Herbert. “I’ll walk there with you tomorrow; we haven’t much to do at the office just now.”
* * *
Mr. Wemmick was right; I would have known the Castle even if Herbert had not pointed it out to me. It was the strangest and most delightful little house I had ever seen, a perfect miniature Gothic castle, down to the banners on the turrets. I was later to learn that it was fully prepared to withstand an invasion of Normans, should any decide to besiege London in these unromantic times: there were kitchen gardens in the courtyard, and chickens and rabbits and even a pig.
The season then being near Christmas, a great quantity of holly and ivy had been cut from the garden, and Mrs. Wemmick, a lady in the most determinedly orange gown I had ever seen, was sitting at a table making garlands. I offered to help her, and we passed the afternoon quite merrily until Mr. Wemmick arrived from the office.
A little servant girl made tea, and Mrs. Wemmick set about making an enormous quantity of toast, but still nobody said anything about why I had been invited.
“Halloa!” exclaimed Mr. Wemmick, glancing out of one of the narrow, arched windows. “Here’s Mr. Justice Darnay, and just in time for tea!”
I had read of Mr. Justice Darnay in the newspapers, but had never met him before. He was a man of about fifty, still handsome, but with a certain general air of disarray about his dress, though I could not identify any particular article that created the impression. Mrs. Wemmick hastened to put out a bottle of sherry; I gathered he was not the sort of man who took tea when anything stronger was available.
The conversation turned to the great actors of the day, and somehow – I don’t know how – it was agreed that all of us, Mr. and Mrs. Wemmick, and Mr. Justice Darnay, and Mr. Jaggers, and I, and Herbert and Clara, should go to the theatre on the following night. Mr. Wemmick seemed so determined to throw me into the company of Mr. Justice Darnay, that I began to wonder whether he was expecting me to make a second marriage with him; but a chance mention of his wife, who was then visiting a married daughter in Gloucestershire, reassured me on this score.
Mr. Justice Darnay helped himself to another piece of toast. “Did you see Miss Tree’s Juliet, Mrs. Drummle? Well, I must call her Mrs. Kean now.”
“No, I have been in London very seldom these past few years. And please, call me Estella.” Feeling suddenly that I was being rather forward, I found myself launching into an explanation that only seemed to make things worse. “Drummle is my late husband’s name, I – I have never felt it to be mine. I was Miss Havisham before I married, but that is not my true name either. I was an adopted child, you see. I do not know who my parents were.”
Mr. Justice Darnay smiled. “We have something in common, then. I have never been certain of my true name either, but it is not Darnay. I was christened Sydney, after a man I never knew, a man who gave his life for my father’s. The story is a strange one, as my mother and my sister told it to me...”
The story of Mr. Justice Darnay’s family was certainly a remarkable one; I believe it might well have served for the plot of a novel. “But surely,” I said when he had finished, “the cases are not the same; you know your true name to be Evrémonde –” I stopped short, realizing that one could, in fact, put a very different construction on the story as Darnay had told it.
“Just so,” said Darnay, responding to the expression on my face rather than anything I had said. “I have never been certain, nor has my sister, who knew the man and loved him as a favorite uncle. Does it matter? I have always striven to make the name of Darnay mean honor and probity, and I am satisfied in my own mind that I know who I am and what my name stands for. I resolved long ago that I would not seek to know more; I could see no good that might come from prying into a secret that was not mine, and was bound to cause my mother and father pain.”
“It is harder for a woman,” I said. “We cannot distinguish ourselves in the law, nor in business; we must, as a rule, accept the names that are put upon us. And I know well enough what name society gives to women like my mother – or even yours, if what you suppose is true.”
“That is one reason why I never asked her. I do know – if what I have sometimes supposed is true – that society is wrong. She could not have done it with any thought of payment or compensation. She did it because she loved them both, and because she never thought to see her husband alive again.”
I said nothing – though I wondered. Men often underestimate how calculating women can be, especially their own mothers, sisters, and daughters. But then, men are calculating too. Herbert’s words came back to me as we sat by the hearth sipping our tea, and I began to suspect that Mr. Wemmick had invited me to his house with the sole object of making me hear Darnay’s tale, and of persuading me that my questions were better left unanswered. Well, I had heard, but I was not yet persuaded.
I had no further opportunity of asking any questions until Mr. Justice Darnay had departed, and Mr. Wemmick offered to see me home.
“Would you say that Mr. Jaggers was an honest man?” I asked him once we were alone.
“I would say,” said Mr. Wemmick, with a general air of unwillingness to commit himself, “that he’s an honest lawyer.”
“He wouldn’t lie, then, to someone who consulted his advice on a matter of importance?”
“Never known him to. Why?”
I produced the token. “He told me yesterday he didn’t know the meaning of this, but I saw several others like it upon his shelves.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Wemmick, “he was truthful enough when he told you he didn’t know what it meant. But if you’d asked him whether he knew what it was, or where it came from, he’d say Yes. That’s what I mean by an honest lawyer. Always put a question at least three different ways when you’re dealing with one.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“To be sure I do. I’ve seen a thousand of them. Considered as portable property, of course, they’re worth nothing. They’re called leaden hearts. Convicts make ‘em – ones facing transportation – and they give them to their sweethearts, or their family, as a sort of keepsake.”
“Do you know what the star on this one means?”
“No. But I can tell you it’s not a professional job – you see how the two halves of the heart don’t quite match? – and the man who made it was most likely illiterate. Most of them have a name and a date, sometimes a message of some sort. It’s easy enough to have one made for you, so I’d venture he was probably destitute as well.”
“I think it was given to me by my parents.”
“That may be so.”
“Do you know anything of them?”
“I might,” said Mr. Wemmick, “but I want you to consider everything our guest said today, and to consider further that you may not like the answers you’re looking for. I’ll give you a hint tomorrow night at the play, if you are still certain you want to know.”
I could get nothing more out of him, and waited with impatience for tomorrow.
* * *
The play was Hamlet. I think it was well acted; I cannot say for certain; my mind was elsewhere. At the interval, Mr. Wemmick and I were briefly left alone in our box.
“Are you enjoying the play?” he asked.
“Very well,” I said, because that is what one says, although I scarcely knew whether I had enjoyed it or not. If he asked me any more questions about the performance, I resolved to answer them all with “massive and concrete,” a phrase which Herbert claimed would serve for any occasion when one was called upon to express an opinion about one of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
“Some might say,” Mr. Wemmick remarked, “that Hamlet is the tragedy of a man who asks too many questions.”
“And some might say that it is a play that shows the truth will out, however deeply a man may seek to bury it,” I replied.
He looked intently at me for a moment, and then said, “Very well. It is likely that Mr. Jaggers will invite you to dinner within a few days, for I’ve given him the impression, without positively saying so, that this evening is Herbert’s treat. When he does, look closely at his housekeeper – if he allows you to see her.”
At this point, the other gentlemen returned with lemonade and ices, so that I had no opportunity to ask him what he meant by this cryptic speech.
* * *
As Mr. Wemmick had foretold, Herbert and Clara and I were invited to dine at Mr. Jaggers’s house a few days later. He lived in Gerrard Street in Soho, a once-respectable neighborhood now much gone to seed. As we drove past music halls and cheap eating-houses, I wondered whether Mr. Jaggers was motivated by a commendable desire to live among the people he represented in court, or whether he wished to make himself visible in the neighborhood as a cheap form of advertisement.
We were served at dinner by a man servant; I saw nothing of the housekeeper, and I was reminded of Mr. Wemmick’s curious hint that I might not be allowed to see her. But when Clara and I left the table, I caught a glimpse of a woman at the far end of a corridor: a woman with a pale face and a quantity of flowing ash-grey hair; a woman who started as if we frightened her, and vanished silently. She struck me as a curious sort of housekeeper; but then nearly everything about Mr. Jaggers’s establishment was curious.
I learned from one of the other servants that she was never called Mrs. Anything, as is the custom with housekeepers, but seemed have no name but Molly; that she had been in Mr. Jaggers’s service for more than thirty years; and that she scarcely ever left the house, save when she went out to buy certain household necessities (which she did at no particular hour, and not every day), and to church with the other servants on Sunday.
Church with the other servants, I thought, would not serve my turn at all; I must speak with her alone. There was nothing for it but to haunt Gerrard Street while Mr. Jaggers was at his office, and hope that the need to buy things for Christmas would draw Molly out of doors sooner rather than later. And so I told Clara on Monday morning that I was going to visit Mrs. Brandley at Richmond, and might not be back for some hours.
* * *
The cabman seemed reluctant to take a solitary lady to Gerrard Street, until I claimed to be the president of a Society for the Relief of Unfortunate Girls, and proceeded to rattle off statistics about the great social evil until my powers of invention gave out. After that he was, I think, so afraid of having to listen to them again that he asked no more questions, and we made excellent time.
I stationed myself across the street from Mr. Jaggers’s house, and waited.
Though I had taken care to dress both respectably and inconspicuously, and though the darkness and fog were on my side, I could not shake off the impression that faces were watching me from behind every window. Once I heard the regular tread of a policeman, and ducked into the nearest alley. I was sure that if he saw me, he would suppose me to be a prostitute, or a lady burglar, or both. Some time later, a group of men stumbled out of one of the public-houses in a state of inebriety, and I hastened to hide myself again. I thought that after all, I would rather have the policeman back again.
I was beginning to think that I had come on a fool’s errand, and to wonder how on earth I would find my way back to Herbert’s house, when at last I saw a woman’s figure emerge from Mr. Jaggers’s house.
I crossed the street. “Molly,” I called softly.
She turned. She looked like a frightened deer in the fog.
“Molly, don’t be alarmed. I must speak with you about a private matter. I was one of Mr. Jaggers’s dinner-guests on Friday; you may have seen me then.”
I was now near enough for us to see one another clearly. Whether she saw in my countenance what I saw in hers, I do not know. I only know that now that I had seen her face to face, I wanted desperately to hear her story.
“Gin,” she said. “I’ll want gin if I’m to answer any questions, and to get out of the damp.”
It was not a London voice. I could not place the accent – it seemed to have traces of more than one region – but it made me think of open country, moorland and mountain and heath.
Molly led me through a maze of streets, which quickly became narrower and fouler-smelling. These streets, I was beginning to suspect, were my birthright, and I tried not to shrink from them. At last we came to a door beneath a sign which read, optimistically, LADY’S SALOON BAR. I doubted that any lady had entered there in twenty years, even in the singular quantity implied by the sign; but after the dingy, shadowy world outside, I was half-dazed by the splendor within. All was gilt-paint and ornament, brass and glass and mirrors doubling or trebling the dazzle of the gas-lights. We were served by a girl in ostrich-feathers and a large paste necklace.
“Gin punch for both of us,” said my companion. “This lady pays.”
I tried to protest that I did not want any gin punch, but it was plain that Molly would take offense if I did not keep pace with her, and I needed to keep her in a good humor. There was a flash of fire in her black eyes that spoke of temper, now that the fear had left them – for seldom have I seen such a quick transformation in any human creature, as I saw in Molly when she perceived herself to have slipped Mr. Jaggers’s bonds. All of the mystery seemed to have gone out of her; she was an ordinary, common woman, with coarser speech and manners than one would have expected of a gentleman’s housekeeper.
My companion took a gulp of her drink and smacked her lips. “Ah, that’s good. Warms a body, it does. It’s been an age since I was in a gin-shop. He don’t allow it, so I’ll thank you to be quiet about this meeting.”
I did not have to ask who he was. “How did you come to be in his service?”
“I owed him my life, didn’t I? He owns my life; it’s mine no more since the day I was tried. But there are days I think I’d as soon have hanged, if I’d known then all that I know now.” Molly finished her gin and signaled to the girl for another; she brought a second glass for me as well, although I had taken only a sip of my first.
“Tried for what crime?”
Molly leaned forward. “Murder,” she said in a hoarse whisper.
I felt a sudden chill, and thought that perhaps I did need more gin, after all.
“I knew I’d hang, if Jaggers wasn’t for me; and half his fee was that I’d go into his service and do whatever he asked of me, for I had but two things to give him, and he took them both. Well, he was a bachelor then, as he is now, and I thought it might be that he wanted someone to warm his bed, though he didn’t look like that sort, and I’d consider my life cheaply bought at that price.”
I tried to conceal a rising feeling of revulsion. Could this be my mother speaking? And then it came to me that I had sold myself to Bentley Drummle for far less, for little more than spite, and I supposed there could be little question that I was her daughter, after all.
Molly noticed nothing of my disgust. She was talking feverishly now, as if she had not been free to talk in years. “But that wasn’t what he asked of me, oh no. ‘Twas my life itself he wanted, not my body.”
“The other thing that he asked of you...” I thought I knew already, but I felt that I must pursue this thread, wherever it led. I found myself reaching for my gin-glass; Dutch courage, didn’t they call it?
“My child,” said Molly. “My little child, as I told Abel I meant to kill.”
The room seemed to rock on its foundations at these last words. I told myself it was only the gin-fumes. “Who is Abel?”
“Abel was my man. I don’t know if he’s dead or living. We was married when I was very young, over the broomstick – and we had some good times together, for all that he turned out worthless in the end. I was a pretty girl in those days, though you might not think it now, and we led the tramping life. Slept in barns, most nights, or out on the heath. Ah, I can see those stars shining still. You don’t see stars like that in London, there’s too many lights and too much smoke.”
“No.” I doubted that you could see the stars over Gerrard Street one night in ten.
“I named my baby after them stars. They were the prettiest things I knew, and they shone on the poor as on the rich. I liked that. Star, she was called, and eyes like stars she had.”
Star? It seemed a queer, heathenish sort of name, although – Why, “Estella” meant the same thing, didn’t it? Suddenly I found my head full of strange notions about fate, and the hopelessness of escaping it.
“So we got on well enough for two years or three, and then it all went wrong. Abel found hisself another woman. I knew he loved that child better than he ever loved me, so I told him I’d kill her and he’d never see her again, for ‘twas the only thing I had that could hurt him as much as he and that d—d minx had hurt me. And he believed me! Went pale as a ghost, he did, though he never said another word to me about her, then nor ever.”
So, I thought, before I ever laid eyes on Miss Havisham, before I knew I was myself, I had been another instrument of vengeance for another woman. Herbert, who liked to sprinkle his conversation with bits of Eastern languages, would have called it kismet. “Don’t you think it was cruel to let him think his daughter was dead?” I ventured.
“No crueler than he’d been to me,” said Molly stubbornly. “And don’t you start asking them questions, questions that lead you round to an answer before you know what’s what. You remind me of him when you do that. ‘Now, Molly,’ he says, ‘you want your little girl to have a better life than you could give her.’ As if he could read my mind, and tell me what I did or didn’t want! ‘She’s gone to a rich lady,’ he says, ‘with no children of her own, who means to care for her as if she were her own little girl, and bring her up to be a lady herself. You’d rather see her dressed in silks and satins than rags, wouldn’t you?’ But I never saw her again at all, not from that day to this.”
I looked up at this last turn of phrase, but Molly’s face was impassive; if she knew me, she gave no sign. She had another grievance, and was now well launched on it. “And he held that time over me ever afterward, he did – always making me show my wrists to gentlemen at his table, as a curiosity, and boasting of them – always making me remember...”
I saw that she had some curious scars on the back of one wrist, but it seemed inconceivable that Mr. Jaggers could have inflicted them, and I could make no other sense of her remark that he had boasted of them. It seemed to me that Molly was on the verge of becoming incoherent – for the girl, you must understand, had been keeping our gin-glasses filled all this while. I thought that I must ask her about the token while she was still capable of giving me a sensible response. Reckless of the consequences of revealing myself, I produced it.
“Do you know this token, Molly?”
“Oh, aye. Abel made it when he was in prison. He was took up for thieving once – a coat to keep us warm and a pair of boots, nothing more! – but they threatened him with transportation, and he made that for the babe to remember him by in case he never saw her again. Well, he wasn’t transported, not that time. I don’t know what became of him – I never saw him after I told him the child was dead. But I sewed it into her clothes before I gave her to Mr. Jaggers. I reckoned it was hers, and I had no right to keep it from her, whatever he done to me.” Molly went silent abruptly; she looked from the coin to me. At last she said, “Well, I reckon Mr. Jaggers didn’t lie. You have had a better life, ha’nt you?”
“I suppose so.” I was certainly grateful not to have been brought up in a gin-shop, or on a heath under the open stars. And yet – Abel, it came to me, had loved me. I could not tell if Molly had; she spoke as if there were little feeling or compassion in her, but I judged thirty years with Mr. Jaggers to be as likely to obliterate these qualities as twenty with Miss Havisham.
“Not so good, then?” asked Molly, with more shrewdness than I would have expected.
I shrugged. “It’s been as good as any other, I suppose.” I was feeling profoundly weary, and had no desire to discuss the subject. The coincidence of my name, and of certain other circumstances, had half-convinced me that some impish fate had marked the course of my life at birth, and it was futile to avoid or change it.
“You’re married? He said you were like to marry well.”
“I was. He’s dead now.”
“Was he good to you?”
“No.”
“I’d thought you might lead a different sort of life, if you was a lady. They always say that gentlemen treat ladies well, whatever they might do to the likes of me.”
“Men are men,” I said. “They’ll treat a lady as badly as any other woman, if they think they can get away with it.” (This was not wholly just to Herbert, or to Pip, or even to Mr. Wemmick; but I was not in the mood to be just.) “The only advantage to being a lady is that sometimes you can make them pay.”
“What was your man’s name?”
“Bentley. Bentley Drummle.”
To my surprise, I saw that the name meant something to Molly. The fear had been almost gone from her face, but it was back now. No, it was not fear but horror. She had become something weird and uncanny – even to my eyes, and I had grown up with so much weirdness and uncanniness that I had become almost inured to it. It flashed upon me, first, that she looked very like Miss Havisham; and then that she was not really like Miss Havisham at all, and that one possible advantage to not being a lady was that one might do almost anything.
She rose, drained her gin-glass, and shook her head when the girl came back to offer her more. By the time I had paid the girl, she was almost at the door. “You’ve given me courage, and I’ve not had that since I was a girl. Farewell. What I do now, I do alone.”
***
Molly disappeared into the fog before she had gone a dozen paces, and I attempted to retrace my steps to the comparative safety of Gerrard Street, but realized almost at once that it was a fool’s errand. The afternoon was already dark as night, and I was lost, and I did not particularly care that I was lost. I realized that I was well and truly drunk for the first time in my life, and I now understood why Bentley had so often felt the need to throw glasses about and smash the crockery when he was in such a state. If I had had anything to smash, I would certainly have done so.
I do not know how long I wandered there. I know that I was beginning to feel the chill, and to notice an incipient headache, and to be a little frightened, so I suppose the effects of the gin were starting to wear off. After some time I stumbled into the halo of a gas-light, and found myself face to face with the last man I would have wished to see in my present state of degradation.
“Estella! What are you doing here?”
Well might he ask; I suspected there were very few reasons why a respectable woman would venture into such a neighborhood. “I suppose you wouldn’t believe me if I said charity work,” I said, I think without slurring any of the words over-much; but then I had to choke back a wild, bitter laugh. “You know too well that I have never been – charitable! You know what I am – but you don’t know who – and it’s too, too funny, but you won’t find it so. And I mocked you for being coarse and common, and a blacksmith’s boy!”
“Don’t speak of it, Estella; it’s all right.” Pip had taken me by the arm, and was steering me toward a cheap-looking tea-shop, where he ordered a pot of strong tea and asked the waiter to show us to a private room. “The lady’s had a shock.”
“I haven’t had a shock,” I said. “Ladies have shocks. I’ve had about a pint of gin punch, which is not the same thing at all.”
If he was disgusted by this, he gave no sign. “Strong tea will help with that, too. Also some of those cakes” (these were garishly frosted, and seemed to be all the shop offered in the way of nourishment). “You may not think you want them, but you do.”
Had I been capable of clear thought, this proof that he was well-experienced in handling drunken people might have alleviated some of my shame; as things were, it only enhanced it.
“You may as well know,” I said, when I had gulped down some of the tea, “that I was a coarse, common girl all along, and you were as far above me in birth as I thought I was above you.”
“It was long ago, Estella, and it makes no matter now.” He hesitated a moment. “I have known who your parents were for some time, and I believe now that I should have told you long ago. Mr. Jaggers persuaded me that revealing the truth would be to no one’s advantage, least of all yours.”
“Oh! Mr. Jaggers persuaded you, did he?”
Pip laughed. “Estella,” he said, “I wouldn’t be Mr. Jaggers just now for twenty thousand pounds.”
I did not laugh. “I wouldn’t either. Will you take me to him?”
“Yes. After you’ve had something to eat. There’s no hurry; we are not five hundred yards from his house now.”
I must, I supposed, have been wandering in circles. “What are you doing here? Herbert said that you meant to stay with your friends in Kent until the new year.”
“I was looking for you,” said Pip simply. “Herbert sent for me.”
I blinked. I was still a little drunk, perhaps, but I could make no sense of the idea that Herbert had sent for Pip to look for me in Soho.
“Clara told him she had overheard you asking Mr. Jaggers’s other servants about Molly, and he guessed that you were searching for information about your parents. So he wrote to me and asked me to come and speak with you, because he thought your father’s story was my story to tell and not his. Herbert, you know, seems such a good-natured, lazy, amiable fellow, but I should advise you never to underestimate his intelligence. When I came, you were nowhere to be found; Clara said that you had gone to Richmond, but Herbert thought you were more likely to be somewhere in the neighborhood of Gerrard Street, and sent me there to look for you.”
“Herbert knows who my parents were?” Here I had been wandering all over London, I thought, when it seemed that there had been no reason to leave my cousin’s house at all. I wondered if everyone knew who my parents were but me.
“He does, but as I said, he felt the secret was not his to tell. I suppose it is mine if it is anyone’s. I knew your father rather well.”
“What was my father? I know he deserted Molly for another woman and he was once arrested for stealing a pair of boots, and that is all.”
“He was a convict,” said Pip, “a transport to New South Wales, who was later condemned to death for returning to England, but died in prison before the sentence could be carried out.”
“Better and better!” I replied. “What next? Have I a forger for an uncle, and an opium-fiend for an aunt, and a den of thieves for cousins?”
“Of your aunts, uncles, and cousins – if you have any – I know no more than you. Of your father, I can say that he became an honest man in Australia, and a sheep-rancher, and very wealthy, and – my benefactor!”
I stared at him. “That,” I said feebly, “is a rather strange coincidence.”
“Perhaps not so strange. I think when he saw me first he thought of you, the child he had lost, and it made him want to do something for me.”
“Molly spoke of him as if he had cared for me.”
“He did. I wish you had known him, Estella. He may have treated Molly badly – I daresay he did – but he was an extraordinary man. He loved you very much.” Pip toyed with his tea spoon, seeming to drift off into a sort of reverie. “The last words I said to him,” he added after a moment, “were of you.”
“Oh?” I asked. “Did you tell him I had been educated to be an instrument of revenge, and that I had grown into a cruel, cold creature who would scarcely have had a word to fling at a convict if she had met him?”
“I told him you lived and found powerful friends, that you had grown into a lady, and that you were very beautiful.”
“Nothing more?”
“Nothing more.”
I finished my tea and cake. I felt – I will not say wholly recovered, but certainly steady enough to know my own mind, and imbued with resolution. “You said you would take me to Mr. Jaggers’s house.”
“And so I will.” Pip signaled to the waiter for the bill. “Estella – I have no doubt that what you intend to say to Mr. Jaggers will be well deserved, and I’ve no intention of dissuading you. But I do believe that when he left you in Miss Havisham’s care, he had no notion what she would become, nor any thought more selfish than saving one child from the misery and despair in which he saw so many live and die.”
“If that is so,” I said, “I had rather hear it from his own lips. Let us go.”
* * *
We were, as Pip had said, no more than a few minutes’ walk from Gerrard Street, and another minute brought us to Mr. Jaggers’ door. I rang the bell.
“Would you like me to go with you?” Pip asked, and I felt the pressure of his hand upon my glove.
“No,” I said – feeling, like Molly, that what I had come to do I had better do alone. “Wait for me.”
As the door swung open, I thought I heard him murmur, “Always.”
I started when I saw that it was Molly who had let me in – though I do not know who else I was expecting. “I’ve come to see Mr. Jaggers, on a matter of business. Is he at home?”
Molly bowed, and turned away. After a moment she returned, and said that he was at home, and would see me. Her face gave no sign that she recognized me, or was surprised to see me; only I thought her a little paler than before. If her blood was still heated by drink, she likewise gave no sign of it.
Mr. Jaggers rose and offered me a chair when I entered his study. “You have come to renew your inquiries, I suppose?”
“I have no need to. Pip has told me all.” I thought it best to shield Molly. “He also told me that you had dissuaded him from telling me the truth years ago.”
“I stand by that decision. There were others besides yourself who might have been hurt by the truth.”
“My mother?” I said. “I hardly think you care whether she is hurt or not. You keep her here as another trophy of one of your famous cases, I suppose. A living one. May I remind you, Mr. Jaggers, that it is no great accomplishment to get a woman acquitted for a murder that was never committed in the first place.”
Almost as these words were spoken, I regretted them, and wondered what had possessed me to speak so vehemently on Molly’s behalf. I hardly knew her, I did not think that I liked her, and I felt as if I had just all but admitted that I had heard her story from her own lips, a fact which I was anxious to conceal. But Mr. Jaggers had something in his nature, I believe, which induced people to make rash admissions in his presence.
Mr. Jaggers tilted his head quizzically, unperturbed. “Are you very certain, Mrs. Drummle, that you know the full story?”
“I have heard enough of it. Why did you not produce the evidence? I mean, produce me.”
“Was it not the case that I had already provided a home for you? A home where you might never know violence, or poverty, or ignorance – where you had every comfort, and the prospect of a good education, and a life free from the misery and neglect into which you were born. Should I have taken you from that home and displayed you before the court? Should I have left your fate up to the indifferent wisdom of the judge – let me see, it would have been old Stephenson at the time, who would have been as like as not to insist that you be given up to your natural mother?”
“Yes,” I said. “You should have done, rather than let a woman you knew to be innocent face the gallows.”
“There was never any question of that, Mrs. Drummle. I think you may not know the full story, after all: I may as well tell you that it was not for your murder that Molly was tried. Your absence acquitted her; your presence would have done her case immeasurable harm, and perhaps she would have ended on the gallows after all.”
“What?” I had not anticipated this, and I sat staring at Mr. Jaggers.
“Molly was tried for the murder of another woman, a woman found dead in a barn, after a violent struggle. A woman who had led a rough, tramping sort of life, as Molly herself had, and who had aroused her jealousy. There were marks upon Molly’s hands, said to be the marks of fingernails; the prosecution would have it that she had destroyed her child, as proof of the violence of her jealousy; yet they were forced to own that she was not being tried for that child’s murder, and if she had killed her own child, they were as likely to be the marks of the child’s nails as the woman’s. You see that the child’s presence would scarcely have helped her case.”
“Was she guilty, Mr. Jaggers?”
“Why, you know that already. Of course she was Not Guilty, else she would hardly be living, and a free woman.”
“You know that is not what I mean.”
But I could get nothing more from Mr. Jaggers; he was not one to make rash admissions, even years after his client had been acquitted. It came to me, however, that Molly was certainly not a free woman, whatever the jury had determined, and that the hold her master had over her seemed a certain proof of her guilt.
Perhaps Mr. Wemmick had been right, after all. The more questions I asked, the less I cared for any of the answers.
“Good night, Mr. Jaggers.”
“Good night, Mrs. Drummle. Molly will show you out. I rather think she will not be far.”
So I surmised that Molly must have been listening at the keyhole; and though she was already halfway down the corridor when Mr. Jaggers opened the door of the study, her guilty start confirmed this.
* * *
I remember almost nothing of how Pip and I returned to Herbert’s house, or of dinner that night, although I suppose we must have had it. I fell into a numb and weary sleep soon afterwards, from which I did not wake until the morning was well advanced.
I expected that Herbert would have already left for Clarriker’s, but to my surprise, he and Pip were still sitting at the breakfast table, deep in consultation over the morning newspapers.
“Poor man!” Clara was saying as I entered the room.
“Who?” I asked, helping myself to coffee and hoping that it would clear some of the fog from my head.
“Mr. Jaggers,” said Herbert. “Estella, something’s happened. He was struck over the head with a blunt object of some sort. He hasn’t regained consciousness. The Times says that it appears to have been a burglary.”
“That is very sad,” I said, without much conviction.
“It’s also very strange,” said Pip. It seemed to me that he was looking unwell, almost feverish. “Mr. Jaggers never locked his doors or windows at night. He was known for it. That’s mentioned in the Times as well.”
“Foolish of him,” I remarked, thinking at the same time that it seemed unlike Mr. Jaggers to be foolish.
“The point is that he knew his house was as safe as a fortress. There wasn’t a burglar in London who would have dared to touch it. It was as much as their lives were worth.”
“Perhaps it was a burglar from out of town,” I said. “One who didn’t know the great Mr. Jaggers lived there.”
“They all know,” said Herbert.
“Every burglar in England?”
“Yes.”
I found this hard to believe, and the burglary still did not strike me as more than a mildly curious coincidence, until Pip added, “It says in the papers that his housekeeper hasn’t been seen since he was found. She’s supposed to have gone out of the house late last night or early this morning, and she hasn’t returned.”
I started. “Do the police suspect her?”
“No, they don’t,” said Herbert. “Not yet. First of all, the doors and windows were unlocked, so the burglar would hardly have needed any help from anyone on the inside. Secondly, nothing was taken but a few articles of plate, and the housekeeper would have known that they were worthless. Britannia metal, all of them. He was too canny to keep silver in the house. Thirdly – as one of the bobbies was so obliging as to mention to the press – it’s not likely that a woman could have struck such a blow, unless she was uncommonly strong in her hands and wrists.”
Something Molly had said the day before came back to me. “Always making me show my wrists to gentlemen at his table, as a curiosity...” I had been able to make nothing of it at the time. “Was Molly uncommonly strong?”
“Yes. And Mr. Jaggers was in the habit of showing off her strength to his guests. And now that it’s in the papers, it’s only a matter of hours before someone will remember.”
“We have to find her first,” said Pip, in a strained voice. “Before they come looking for her.”
* * *
“This way, I think.”
I was far from sure that I knew where Molly had led me; one alley looked very like another, and all of the wretched dwellings the same. But I tried to remember – for there was little doubt in my mind that she knew the district well, and that it was here that she would go to ground.
The inhabitants of these streets looked at us curiously: old Irishwomen with pipes in their mouths; dirty, half-naked children; hulking boys who loitered and grinned. No one seemed to have any particular occupation. Pip attempted to question some of them, but no one would admit to having seen a woman of Molly’s description. It seemed to me highly improbable that anyone here was in the habit of admitting to anything.
“She turned left here, I think. I remember that pawn-shop, or one very like it. No, this can’t be right. It was a wider street than this.”
“Handel, old chap,” said Herbert quietly, “it can’t be very nice for Estella, being dragged through St. Giles like this. Don’t you think we had better take her home, and you and I can come back later –”
“No,” said Pip. “It wouldn’t be very nice for Estella to see her mother hanged or transported, either.”
“It is also not particularly nice for Estella to be talked about in the third person, and not consulted in decisions that concern her.”
Pip and Herbert both looked abashed. “Right,” said Herbert. “What do you say, Estella?”
“I say we keep on.” This was, I must own, more for Pip’s sake than Molly’s. I thought our chances of finding Molly were slim; but I had by now heard a little of my father’s history from Pip and Herbert, in snatches, and I gathered that Pip would never forgive himself if he failed to save yet another of my wayward parents from self-destruction. I hadn’t the heart to tell him that he cared more about my parents than I did.
We had come, by now, to another little pawn-shop almost identical to the first, and another street that led off to the left. I turned, and turned again, and then we were standing before a door that read LADY’S SALOON BAR.
Unlike most of the houses on this street, the gin-shop had glass in the windows instead of paper and rags stuffed in to keep out the cold; and at one of the upstairs windows I saw a flicker of movement, and knew our search was over.
* * *
We had some difficulty persuading the proprietor of the gin-shop to allow us to see his new lodger; at first he denied that there was anyone upstairs, and then declared firmly that she had given orders not to let anyone in. He was not, however, proof against the sum of money that Pip offered him, and at last we were shown upstairs.
Molly was sitting on the edge of the bed, making a motion with her fingers which was like knitting, though she had no needles and no yarn. I feared, for a moment, that she had gone mad; but Pip and Herbert seemed to notice nothing unusual about her demeanor, and I learned later that this movement was a constant habit of hers.
She positively refused to leave her wretched lodgings, even when we had represented her danger to her in the strongest terms that we could. She seemed, indeed, not to care that she might be tried and hanged for Mr. Jaggers’s murder. It was only when she realized that it might not be a case of murder – that the man was still alive, and for all we knew, might already be conscious – that she started and looked up, one hand fluttering about her heart. She shrank away from us, as if she suspected us of being his agents.
Pip, guided by I know not what instinct, sat beside her and laid certain points before her: that the lawyer was no doubt intimately acquainted with these streets, and this house, as he was with all of the seamier parts of London; that she had come here on foot, and come twice in the space of two days, and there might well be witnesses who had noticed her; that the owner of the gin-shop had yielded to our bribery, and would very likely yield again. He introduced all of these ideas with so much gentleness that Molly did not take fright again, but began to look at him with something like trust.
She must, he said at last, be far away before Mr. Jaggers came to his senses, and this time she seemed to understand.
“Far from London,” I added, remembering what she had said about the stars on the heath, “somewhere out in the open country, I think.”
Slowly, Molly rose and reached for her cloak. Herbert had meanwhile gone out to find a hackney-coach; as soon as he returned, we left for Herbert and Clara’s house, which we judged to be a safe enough refuge for the moment. There was no one, save Mr. Jaggers, who could connect Molly with any of us; we were not known in the neighborhood, and if the police managed to trace Molly to the gin-shop, the proprietor could give them nothing more than a general description of our appearance, which might have applied equally well to a thousand people in the city.
I have said little of Clara, thus far; she had struck me as a kind hostess and a thoroughly conventional little woman, chiefly absorbed in her home and children, and consequentially not very interesting. I was rather surprised when she accepted the news that we were going to be hiding a suspected criminal with perfect composure, and welcomed Molly into her house without seeming to notice anything odd about her person or manners. I learned later that this was not the first time she had assisted Herbert in concealing a fugitive from justice, and that she had been brought up in a grim little waterfront district, by a father whose chief occupations were drinking and swearing.
Somehow this upbringing seemed to have made her more of a lady, if one were to judge by her manner to Molly, than mine had, though I had been educated with the sole aim of becoming one. I can find no way to resolve this paradox, save to conclude that the world’s definition of a lady is very far from the true one.
* * *
Herbert offered to buy Molly a ticket on the night train to Bristol, which at that time was about as far away as you could get without changing trains. Molly seemed to approve; she had been there as a young woman, she said, and liked the idea of going back.
Clara had been looking dubious all the while these preparations were being made, and, at Herbert’s urging, she spoke up. Molly had surely never been on a train before; she had not left London in thirty years; the modern world must seem as alien to her as it did to Rip Van Winkle, and her own unfamiliarity with it must be apparent to all who saw her. Besides, she had no friends there, and no means of support. I was inclined to agree with Clara, for nothing I had seen of Molly, so far, convinced me that she had wits or sense enough to make her own way in the world. Pip and Herbert acknowledged the force of these objections; Molly herself did not. To Bristol, she declared, she would go; and even Clara was forced to admit that she had no better ideas.
In the afternoon, I went out to buy a few necessities for her journey, as well as some henna, which had been a favorite preparation of Mrs. Brandley’s. It has the useful property of turning one’s hair a violent and unnatural shade of red, and thereby diverting attention from one’s face.
In the shops people talked of nothing but the attack on Mr. Jaggers. The news I heard was not particularly encouraging, save for the fact that he was alive, so there was as yet no question of murder. Almost every shopkeeper and passer-by seemed to have a theory, and they all seemed to involve the vanishing housekeeper in some way. She had been the confederate of the mysterious burglar and had fled with him. She had been drugged and stolen from the house for some dark and unspeakable purpose. She had been in love with Mr. Jaggers for years, and upon seeing him, as she thought, dead, she had gone quietly out and drowned herself in the Thames. She had been assisting him in some experiment, perhaps involving the recreation of a crime, and had accidentally injured him and fled in a panic, taking a few articles of plate as a blind. At any rate, the police were searching for her, and were certain to find her.
I took some slight comfort in the fact that nobody, as yet, seemed to have hit upon the theory that she had deliberately attacked her employer in revenge. But they did not yet know the motive for revenge that she had, nor had her extraordinary strength become common knowledge. By the time I had finished my shopping, I was inclined to agree with Pip and Herbert that she must leave London at once.
As I stepped into the hall of Herbert’s house with my parcels, I heard a burst of song: “Finches of the grove are we, we sing in perfect harmony ...”
The song broke off as I entered the sitting-room. Herbert was lying on the sofa, giggling feebly; Pip, who seemed to be in slightly better form, was standing by the window with a wine-glass in his hand. Molly was leaning against the far wall, taking her wine from a large tumbler.
“What,” I demanded, “is the meaning of this?”
Pip was still sober enough to look embarrassed. “Well, ah – it was like this. Herbert asked Molly if he could offer her some refreshment, like any good host, and she said she’d take a glass of gin. Well, he hadn’t any gin, as it happens, but there was wine, several bottles of it in fact, so she said she’d take some of that.”
“And when Molly drinks,” Herbert added, “everyone drinks. She made a point of it, and she can be very ... er, persuasive.”
“I’d noticed.”
“Wine?” offered Pip.
“Thank you, I will. Perhaps it will make your behavior somewhat less unfathomable. Have you forgotten that Molly has a train to catch?”
“Not for many hours yet,” said Herbert carelessly, filling my glass.
“Let’s have another song!” cried Molly. “Don’t you know any more?”
“When I went to Lunnon town, sir,” Pip sang experimentally, “too rul loo rul... No, confound it, I know all twenty verses off by heart, but I never heard the tune in my life. Estella! You play the piano, don’t you? How about ‘Old Clem’?”
“You can’t play ‘Old Clem’ on the piano,” I said positively. “It hasn’t got a tune.”
“On the contrary, that is the only kind of song I can play on the piano. I’ll play it, and you help sing.”
“Yes, let’s have ‘Old Clem,’” said Herbert. “I’ve no idea what it is, but it sounds intriguing.”
Pip began to play the piano – which he did by doubling his fists up, and hammering on the loudest keys as if they were an anvil. “Hammer boys round, Old Clem! With a thump and a sound, Old Clem! Beat it out, beat it out, Old Clem! With a clink for the stout, Old Clem!”
I don’t know what had possessed him, or what possessed me to sing along – I only know that I remembered the tune because it had been a favorite of Miss Havisham’s, and that I felt as though we were laying her bitter ghost to rest.
Blow the fire, blow the fire, Old Clem! Roaring dryer, soaring higher, Old Clem!
“Hush!” Clara came into the room. “You’ll wake the baby!”
Pip blushed scarlet. “Sorry, Clara.”
Clara was looking at us as if she thought we had taken leave of our senses; Pip and I looked at each other and burst out laughing, I hardly know why.
* * *
Clara and I then went to work on Molly, staining her streaming hair with henna and rinsing it out. While she sat drying it by the nursery-room fire, she amused the older children with a number of weird tales about her younger days – all about ghosts she had seen while spending the night in a churchyard, and highwaymen, and a murder she claimed to have witnessed. She seemed half a ghost herself, I thought, some wayward visitor from a violent elder world.
But once we had bound her hair into a knot, and used a little rouge to conceal her natural pallor, she was wholly transformed. I dressed her in one of my own gowns, and Clara gave her a pair of gloves long enough to conceal the scars that were her most distinguishing mark. She looked, I thought, like any other semi-respectable lady of indeterminate age; indeed, I would have had a hard time telling the difference between her and Mrs. Brandley. When we led her back into the sitting room, Pip and Herbert positively applauded.
“But where will you go, Molly?” Clara asked. “How do you mean to live?”
“How do all old gypsy women live? Sixpence to tell your fortune?”
Herbert laughed, and offered her sixpence. Pip gave her another, and said, “Estella?” I shook my head, and said that I didn’t think I liked my fortune, and had rather not know any more of it.
Molly took Herbert aside into the hall – and informed him, as he told us when he returned, that he was shortly to become a father again. It seemed that Clara had not told him this yet, but it proved to be quite true; and amid the resulting hubbub, I scarcely noticed when Pip slipped off with Molly. He had a curious half-smile when he returned.
“Well?” I asked. “What’s your fortune?”
“I can’t tell it,” he said, “or it won’t come true.”
“Herbert did.”
“This one is different,” he said. “Besides, you said you didn’t want to know yours.”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
Pip said nothing. He hummed a line or two of “Old Clem.”
“You,” I said, “are infuriating. And I don’t believe she can tell fortunes at all. I don’t believe in people with supernatural powers, and that sort of thing.”
“I don’t, either. But I should say she’s a good observer. And good at telling people what they want to hear. I think she’ll be able to take care of herself in Bristol.”
* * *
We ate a hasty and late meal, consisting of cold roast beef and some rice pudding left over from the children’s supper in the nursery. Molly’s train was to leave from Paddington Station shortly before midnight. Pip and I escorted her there, and did our best to explain the mysteries of tickets and conductors. I am not sure how much of this she took in, but we helped her on board and settled her into a compartment, and as she did not have to change trains, I supposed she was bound to reach her destination.
Afterward, taking a cab back to Herbert’s house, we had a chance to talk over the extraordinary events of the day in private. I had been looking forward to this – for some unaccountable reason – but when the moment came, I found myself almost without words.
“Thank you,” I said. “I am sorry that – I mean, you’ve gone to such trouble to help her, and it’s kept you from your friends, and – and I am in your debt. That’s all.”
“It was no trouble at all. Besides, I liked her. Once you get her away from Jaggers, she’s rather fun. Don’t you think so?”
“No, I don’t,” I said frankly. “Have you forgotten that she’s committed one murder – most likely – and attempted another?”
“With some justification, I would say.”
“I wouldn’t. It was a brutal act, and a stupid one, and I haven’t much patience with people who are stupid and brutal. I have had enough of them for one lifetime.”
“Estella – did you not wonder why her resentment of him should have broken out in violence now, after half a lifetime in his service?”
“No.” It had not occurred to me to wonder why Molly did anything; she had not struck me as altogether sane. “Why? Do you know something?”
“I don’t exactly know, but I have an idea. You said, I think, that she started the first time you mentioned Drummle’s name.”
“Yes. What of it?”
“She was there when Mr. Jaggers spoke of your marriage, I am sure of it. I remember it as if it were yesterday, for it causes me pain yet. He said, as I recall, that – that a fellow like Drummle either beats or cringes, and if he should turn to and beat – well, you – he might possibly get the mastery on his side. He spoke of it as if he were weighing the odds at a horse-race.”
“Very like him. On which side did he place his bet?”
“On yours, I think.”
“Well! He’d have lost his wager, then.”
“I think not,” said Pip quietly.
I drew a slow breath, remembering that Bentley was, after all, dead; and Miss Havisham was dead; and even Mr. Jaggers might well be dying. I was alive, and free, and that was something.
“Anyway,” said Pip, “Molly heard it all, not knowing what she heard; and if she took her revenge on him when she did know, I cannot blame her.”
“I had rather she not do it in my name.”
“We cannot always choose what people will try to do in our names. But I think, if their motives were decent, it is worth considering them with as much charity as possible – I mean charity in the true sense of the word, not in the sense of filling Christmas baskets with a great many things you don’t want.”
“I think you have a greater capacity for charity than I do.”
Pip shook his head. “Hardly. But it can be learned, you know.”
It was by then very late; here and there a light still burned in one of the houses, and a few night-walkers were clustered around the poor warmth of a coffee-stall. A man’s voice, not particularly tuneful, rose in a Christmas carol.
... And to the earth it gave great light, and so it continued both day and night ...
Drunk, I thought, or mad; no one in their right wits would go wassailing at this hour.
* * *
The morning post brought a letter for Pip from his friends in Kent, and the Times for Herbert, who tore it open in search of information about the attack.
“Well!” he announced. “It would appear that Mr. Jaggers is conscious, and expected to make a full recovery. He has described his assailant. It seems that everything we did yesterday was unnecessary.”
“What?” said Pip, setting down his letter.
Herbert put the newspaper down on the table. “Read it for yourselves.” Pip, Clara, and I crowded around.
... Anyone having information about a boy some fifteen or sixteen years years of age, with fair hair and a Cockney accent, seen in or around Gerrard Street on the evening of the 19th inst., should notify the Metropolitan Police ...
“Why,” said Clara, “how extraordinary that she should be innocent after all. I wonder why she fled. Perhaps the sight of him, lying as if he had been murdered, alarmed her so much that she took fright.”
“Perhaps,” said Herbert. “And yet – I wonder.”
Something in Herbert’s voice made Pip and me both look up. It took me a moment to see the point. If Mr. Jaggers had deliberately set out to describe a person exactly the opposite of Molly, he could scarcely have done better. Could it be that the honest lawyer had told a positive falsehood for once in his life?
I began to wonder if I had misjudged him; but remembering the fear in Molly’s eyes when she spoke of him, I was inclined to think that if he had indeed taken it into his head to give my mother her freedom, it came a great many years too late.
“Well, Handel,” said Herbert, rising from the breakfast-table, “I suppose you mean to be off before I come home this evening, so, a merry Christmas to you. You’re to come to us again before you leave for foreign parts, mind.”
“You’re going back to Kent so soon?” I asked, feeling as though I should miss him.
“Yes. I promised the children I’d be with them at Christmas.” Pip hesitated a moment. “That reminds me, I have an invitation to convey to you. Biddy – Mrs. Joe Gargery, that is – wrote to tell me that she and Joe would be very pleased if you’d join us.”
I was rather bemused by this invitation, as I had not the slightest idea who Mr. and Mrs. Joe Gargery were; in all the years that I had known him, Pip had never spoken much of his people. Then I realized that it was, in all probability, my fault that he had never spoken of them to me, and blushed for the girl I had been.
He, I think, came to entirely the wrong conclusion about why I was blushing, and immediately stammered out an apology for his presumption.
“Why,” I asked, my eyes wide, “what presumption can there be in passing along an invitation from a third party? You, I trust, did not ask her to invite me; no blame can be attached to you.”
Pip went very red at this, and I enjoyed his discomfiture very much until I grew bored with tormenting him, at which point there was nothing for it but to accept the invitation. I must confess – if any confession is needed – that I did so without regret.
* * *
It was not the first time I had made the journey into our own country in Pip’s company, but it was the first time in many years. We talked idly of then and now, and of the great changes the railroads had made – of almost anything, except the events of the last few days or our intentions for the future.
The fog had cleared as we left the city, and a thin shaft of December sunshine pierced the window. There were boys dodging along the railway line, risking life and limb as boys will. Children always seem to find it a great game to put a penny along the tracks, and to wait for the train to come along and flatten it. It crossed my mind that I might destroy the leaden heart that way, and be entirely free of the past.
Idly, I took the token from my purse. It occurred to me, for the first time, that Miss Havisham must have named me for the sign upon it; the coincidence which had seemed so uncanny, and so sinister, was in fact no coincidence at all. I thought that I would not destroy it after all, for it was wholly mine, and it had guided me to the truth.
“What is that?” asked Pip. I told him, and he said, “May I see it?”
The tenderness with which he took it into his hand told what I had already suspected: that he honored the memory of the man who had made it, as I who had never known my father could not.
“Keep it,” I said.
He shook his head. “It’s yours.”
“You would value it.”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I do. But I want you to keep it.”
“Very well, then. I will keep it for you.” He tucked it away in his coat-pocket, and, when he thought that I was not observing him, permitted himself to smile.