The Jekyll Legacy Read online

  The Jekyll Legacy

  For

  Ingrid with gratitude and admiration

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 1

  Hester shifted one of the grayish net curtains that veiled the single window of the room and which, from the start of its service, had been so relentlessly starched that its edge might slash an unwary finger. There was the smell of boiling cabbage in the air, battling the choking fog outside. She pulled her shawl closer about her shoulders. There was certainly no chance of lighting a fire in that cramped iron basket. Beyond the window the yellowish billows closed in more closely, rising to blot out the street and the resolutely respectable, if narrow, houses on either side.

  She bit her lower lip as she let the lace weapon of the curtain clank back into place and turned a little to survey this prison for "respectable" females, which Mrs. Carruthers kept mercilessly so that it might in turn keep her—at least in toast and kippers—two new scents having now been added to the general collection controlled by the damp-exuding walls.

  Skirting two unsteady chairs and a small bow-legged table, pulling her skirts as tightly against her as she could lest one of the skimpy ruffles upset all the furnishing just as a domino might bring down a whole line of its fellows, Hester seated herself upon the board-hard bed and took up her lap writing desk. Bringing out that book she had bought so hopefully two months ago, she now ruffled through its pages. Her head was turned once more to the curtained window, but what she saw in imagination were the gallant flames of maples against the less flamboyant oaks. September in Canada was a riot of color. Here in London it was the dregs of a not-too-well-washed pot.

  She settled the desk carefully lest the small ink bottle drip its contents on the coverlet of the bed. Hester began to write, slowly at first, with rolling loops and the flourish of a document meant for official eyes. Then, as her fingers grew less stiff from the chill, she covered pages with greater speed. The scratch of her pen now did not produce fine penmanship but rather was ridden by the desire to keep some record of her own recent actions, reactions, hopes, and more common fear.

  "Thus I left Eakand Abbey yesterday." Her pen sputtered. She needed a new one, but even so small an expense must be carefully considered now. "Her Ladyship was pleased ..." Hester's lips tightened into a thin line and the wrinkle between her straight brows deepened—it was fast becoming a permanent feature there. She blotted one of the splatters of ink and continued. ". . . to offer me a recommendation.

  "When I declined, I was treated to a major outburst of that pettish anger that Lady Ames uses to control her house and family. I no longer wondered why Major Ames had entrusted me with the care of his daughter's overseas traveling. Now I am sorry to have to leave Hazel with such a guardian. If there was only some way I could see her in better hands— but I am powerless. So I came away just before dusk with skimped pay for two months of work and an exceedingly scanty wardrobe. Thus I am to meet a London that is far different from that I have built for myself in dreams."

  Unconsciously she was listening to her father's querulous voice to snap her into life, ready to take dictation.

  Hester gave a slight shake of shoulder and straightened. She would never hear that voice again. This was London, not a thousand miles away and months in the past. Her hand smoothed the already too-well-worn black skirt considered suitable for a governess in mourning. Though the purchase of that, and two other very modest and most simply fitted dresses, had made a hole in her funds.

  "Does my present situation really please you, Father?" Even in her own ears her voice sounded harsh and rasping. She was—was beginning to sound like him. Hester brushed her hand across her lips and refused to be silenced.

  "You so often commented that I was practically useless to you—it would seem that opinion of me is nearly universal now."

  Hester dropped the pen into its groove on her desk and began leafing back through the ledger. An envelope insecurely kept there fluttered to the bed. She ran her finger along its open edge to pull out its contents though she already knew them well. One was certainly her first step toward her own freedom. She had heard and wondered at the sums of money paid by the New York Ledger and its like— and that women writers did more than a little of that earning. She herself ventured once to send them a much copied and toiled over manuscript—though it had not sold. But she had sold elsewhere—to The British Lady, which was housed right here in this fog-ridden city. This note was from one of the editors approving two short articles she had dared to send. Though, of course, she did not use her own name—no lady would.

  Here she was addressed as Dorothea Meadows. However, the words beneath that somewhat stiff beginning brought her warmth even in this cold room. ". . . like your article on the wonders of the Great Falls and your descriptions of the primeval forests of our sister country overseas. If you should come to London, I would like to meet with you and discuss some matters that might be to our mutual advantage."

  She folded the much-creased letter briskly— that must be acted upon—and put it back in the envelope. But the other scrap that had fallen free was different; she really did not know why she had kept it all these months.

  Father had managed to turn all funds toward his own comfort, buying an annuity that made no provision for her. But he had been unable to part with the only things he had ever enjoyed—his books. Those she had taken a kind of savage delight in selling, doubtless for much less than they were worth but enough then to give her a tiny refuge against becoming an utterly penniless woman. What she held now in her hand had fallen from one of the leather-bound volumes of poetry printed in its native Greek. It was for that reason a good hiding place, because Hester did not know the language; she had been battered through Latin in order to better serve her father's work, but she had not been pushed to learn Greek. The book had remained on his bedside table during those hours he had lain like one already dead. It had not been added to those tied up in unwieldy bundles waiting for the bookseller to clear them away. She had even brought it with her—why she did not know—one of the few things to remind her of that other narrow house and the musty-smelling rooms where fresh air never entered.

  The book had borne, under its cover, a shield bearing the arms of what she now knew was an Oxford college, hinting at one of those parts of her father's past that he never discussed. Below the shield, in a flourish of lines and loops, a name was penned, the ink so faded now that it had near disappeared forever.

  "L. Jekyll," a name she had never heard her father refer to.

  The clipping was not a part of the past. Just a newspaper notice she was sure her father had cut out, so meticulous was the edging.

  Wanted —

  Information leading to the discovery of one Leonard Jekyll, Esquire, who left England in the year 1863. If he or his descendants (if any exist) wish to hear something greatly to their advantage, let such write to Robert Guest, care of Turk's Court, The Temple, London.

  "Jekyll." She spoke the name aloud now. It was a strange one and for some reason she took a dislike to the sound of it. Now she laid the clipping aside and drew from the bottom of her traveling desk, turning out paper and envel
opes to secure it, the very book that had given it shelter in the past. The binding was of maroon leather, quite unlike any she had seen before. She wondered if her father or one of his acquaintances of the far past had not abstracted it willfully from its native shelf. Page by page she examined it. There were a few comments on some of the margins written in a spider-foot lettering, which she recognized as her father's before the bouts of crippling rheumatism had crooked his fingers so he was unable to write at all.

  On impulse she took up the scrap of paper, smoothed it out as well as she could and laid it over the Oxford seal, closing the cover firmly. She very much doubted that the earnestly seeking Mr. Guest would consider this the sort of evidence that would be worth her paying out the price of a cab on such a day to take it to Turk's Court.

  The fog seemed to have crept into the very room, gathering in the corners to build up behind the chairs and under the table and bed. She had thought that some of the rooms at Walford Castle would be good places to conceal a ghost, but this shabby, long-used chamber, in spite of its breath of too-old cabbage and kippers, might readily summon the unknown. Nonsense! She was an intelligent woman, she had run a house since she was twelve, at the death of her last downtrodden governess. Ghosts existed only on paper, and here—in this shabby room—none worthy of frightening anyone could possibly appear.

  Hester turned her head to study her reflection in the dull and wavery surface of the small mirror. Her skin was olive, to be sure, but it was clear and when she was troubled or angry had a faint glow about the cheekbones. There had been rumors raised in the Sisters' School, during the two terms she had attended, that she had Indian blood. But the rumors had died when the very correct manners her father had drilled into her (and railed at Poor Mouse Fremont to do the same) met each and every covert taunt or snicker or suggestion with aloof dignity.

  Her hair was not black but a dark brown, very thick and long, which sometimes in the full sunlight showed a reddish tinge. For the rest she was in want. She had a nose, neither aristocratically bold nor turned up or down—just a nose. Even all the rest was undistinguished—her mouth was over-wide, with faint lines about it that appeared to be permanently set by now. Her broad forehead was revealed to its greatest extent by braiding her hair and pinning the braids as close to the skull as firmly as she could for her governess role. There were no stylish fringes or loose locks flying. Her dark eyes, of course, did not possess any mysterious depths.

  Hester chuckled, recalling the various eloquent descriptions of heroines in the books of fiction she had read during stolen moments. Fluff and trifling those novels were, but they had the art of transporting their readers into a kind of dazed shadow-life. And she did not doubt that their writers got better returns for their pains of procreation than she had been paid for the sale of travel articles that had won her grudging awards in the past. No, if one was to live by one's pen, one had to be a Mrs. Southworth and possess a powerful imagination.

  She did not need to look into her purse to count her riches—it was so flat that one worn sealskin side rubbed the other in a most familiar fashion and had done so for a long time. Hester had been trained solely to be a handmaiden to one man's selfishness and now, at twenty-three, she needed work and had no suitable skills to offer. She had not been judged a proper governess, and she had no introductions to take her past the outer door of any girls' school. Could she be a servant? She feared not. Kitty's tales of life downstairs were most discouraging, and besides, she had no written references to back her.

  She began to write on a sheet of foolscap, using her best choice of word and phrase to compose a letter to the editor of The British Lady. When she had finished she put it aside for a second and later reading.

  She tapped her penholder against her teeth and again reread the news clipping. She had never heard what had brought her father from England to the northern province of the west. All the days she had known him he had never referred to his past. Why, she had never even known his age! His narrow face, its graying skin so seldom touched by sunlight, had not seemed to add a single year as time passed.

  Once more she turned to the front of her ledger and read: "Father is silent always concerning the past. He never consorts with anyone directly from England. When the new vicar came to call last year he was so chill and distant of manner that the poor man must have been speedily frozen. We have never had even a tea party."

  She sniffed and hunted hurriedly for a handkerchief. Surely she was not going to have a cold now! That would give Mrs. Carruthers further chance to set her out on the street—or would it?

  Hester, her head tilted a little to one side in thought, considered the advantages of taking to her bed and demanding comfort and nursing. Someone small and appealing—such as Hazel would probably be in another five years or so—could carry that off readily, but a big gawk of a woman such as herself—no.

  Instead she gave a last sniff and returned to her reading. Even the one small essay into the wide world of these past two months had impressed deeply upon her the singularity of her own house—one could not really, she decided bleakly, have called it a home.

  Of her mother she had the vaguest of memories—there had been a quick-moving lady with a wide spill of curls that persisted in seeking freedom from a net to fall to her shoulders or dangle about her cheeks. Then that presence had vanished without explanation from her narrow circle of life and all she could remember. Shades had been pulled down to turn rooms into dull and frightening caves; her father wore a dark band on his coat sleeve for a season. It was then they had moved out of Montreal to a small town near the American border. The servants she had always known left, and the wrinkled-faced woman who had been hired as a governess stayed on as housekeeper. But this arrangement had not worked and Hester, in her early teens, had taken charge of the household.

  During those years she and her father had been almost totally isolated from others of their own kind. A day pupil at the Sisters' for a time, she had been strictly forbidden to take part in any unnecessary activity. Nor did she have any friends. She had turned early to her books and her own scribbling for relaxation from her father's lessons, which were hard and sharp, meant to make of her a reliable aide for his own labors. Occasionally letters arrived that she was forbidden to open, and these were subsequently burned, still unopened, in the fireplace.

  Now the memory of those unread screeds somehow became joined in her mind with the cutting from the Montreal paper. The mystery surrounding that clipping was in truth her only legacy from her father. Though they had subsisted comfortably while he lived, his death meant utter poverty for his daughter.

  She still thought that she had been very lucky to be introduced to Major Ames when her plight was fully realized. To escort Hazel Ames overseas, and there act as her governess for at least six months, seemed the perfect answer to her problems. For, with that natural resilience common to youth, she was sure that something fitting her talents would turn up in the future. The most common answer was, of course, marriage.

  Hester frowned in a way that erased any small claim to attractiveness she might possess. The few men she had met under her father's roof had all been elderly and solemn, most of them ignoring her as if she were the statue of Truth that adorned the end of the stair rail. In addition, her father's constant disregard for any thought or desire of her own, his demand for her constant attention, had made her strongly disinclined to meet others. To allow some man complete dominance over her again was what she shrank from the most.

  She reached again for the ledger and flipped over page after page, realizing that this last thought bore the ring of truth—she had looked upon her father's death as a release from a burden that was fast becoming intolerable. Hardhearted, unnatural daughter? She had in truth played a role, without realizing it, ever since she had gone through the house marking down the lists to be handed to the auctioneer. She had busied herself finding positions for the two elderly maids upon whose shoulders most of the keeping of the house had de
pended. It was Hester who had been left with no future but what she could carve out for herself.

  She smoothed out the letter she had written earlier because she knew now she dared not overlook the slightest aid to a fruitful future. She read word by word—in the most restrained and formal way. Surely she could concoct a suitable letter for Mr. Guest.

  Having taken the measure of Mrs. Carruthers, Hester had no desire to leave her two missives to await a tardy visit to the pillar-box on the part of the pinched-face maid. Fog or no fog, she could at least mail her own letters. Once more she leafed through the book—such a dull account and so drearily presented!

  It was the latter pages that held her now. Though she had known very little about the care of children when she met Hazel, she had been struck by the child's shyness and began to wonder if they had not a bond in their dislike for people and situations that made them feel unhappy and miserable. Her own answer—books—came immediately to mind and she put firmly into the bottom of Hazel's "on-board" satchel some others beside the school texts. She produced the few that she had kept because, first her mother's name was within, and, secondly, she had come to feast herself upon their livelier prose years ago. Hester made Hazel aware of the works of Miss Austen and Jane Eyre, though she was certain that Lady Ames would not have found the misfortunes of poor Jane, the governess, suitable for Hazel's reading at all.

  Her eyes found another entry in her record. "Hazel has asked me a question concerning the 'horrid' mysteries as mentioned in Northanger Abbey. I have never read one (what would Father have done with Mrs. Radcliffe's volumes— thrown them straightaway into the fire?), but I told Hazel that they were a kind of ghost story intended to set shivering the adult reader who professed that only in their extreme youth long ago had they known such childish tastes. I think she believed me.

  "Still, it struck me odd that our entrance into this country was not unlike the general atmosphere of the 'horrids.' We came ashore on a damp, dark day of which there are so many here. A hard-faced woman clad in creased black, with a footman, met us. Hazel took one look at the woman and, straightaway, her manners became once again those of the timid and fearful child. I could not guess then to what extent this woman's influence reached. She had a voice as harsh as her face as she introduced herself as Mrs. Riggs, Lady Ames's personal maid.