My impulse was to ignore his letter altogether, but once rationality regained a hold I knew that a meeting with him was unavoidable. If Moyles and the Social Protection League were to be thwarted it was imperative that I should talk to someone whose influence might count. Our assignation was at a public house in Westminster, where I found myself the next evening, almost wading through the fog-drowned streets. Figures lurched out of the clinging gloom as I passed through a neighbourhood every bit as disreputable-looking as Seven Dials or Drury Lane. The noise of the traffic rose like a distant rumour, then faded. Entering the taproom the noisome odour of damp clothes and rank tobacco almost overpowered me. As I stooged around the mid-evening drinkers I heard my name called, and there was Paget beckoning me to his corner booth.
‘Fine night to come out!’ he said in jovial irony. I met his eye but said nothing. ‘David, this is Robert Tallis.’ He gestured to a dark-browed, clean-shaven man sitting opposite, dressed in a severely tailored suit, with a thick-knotted tie surmounted by a pin. I supposed him to be about thirty. He tipped his head in greeting.
‘Mr Wildeblood. I trust you’re . . . recovered?’
‘Entirely, thank you.’
‘Poor fellow looked half dead when I last –’
‘May we proceed to business,’ I cut in, silencing Paget. Tallis looked quizzical for a moment, then spread his hands as though to say, By all means.
‘I gather from Paget here you have been privy to confidences – I won’t ask from whom – regarding the resettlement scheme at Bindon Fields.’
‘I have. I was told by . . . my informant that the Social Protection League intend to establish it as a labour camp for the so-called “criminal” poor. You know of an MP named Abernathy?’
Tallis nodded.
‘He’s leading the lobby, with the support of a cleric, Father Kay, and a social scientist named Sprule.’
‘I’ve met them. This encampment – is it legal?’
‘They could make it so, if Harcourt can be persuaded that society is under threat of contamination. Their ultimate aim is to stop the degraded poor from breeding. It’s a radical scheme.’
‘Infamous, more like,’ muttered Paget.
‘You’d be surprised how quickly ideas can gain purchase. Today’s “infamous” proposition may be tomorrow’s accepted principle. That is why we cannot afford to stand by.’ He looked at me. ‘If you have information that might compromise the charity’s standing . . .’
‘What if it could be proven that their backers have forced hundreds of people into homelessness through the bogus allocation of leases?’
Tallis raised his eyebrows. ‘Then we would be in a strong position to discredit them and put the lobby to rout. You have evidence?’
‘I have hopes of – securing it. Do you happen to know of a company named Condor Holdings?’
Tallis shook his head. ‘Are they involved?’
‘Up to their necks,’ Paget supplied. ‘But they’re deuced secretive.’
‘Well, if you do unearth something, you should waste no time. Here,’ he said, taking out a card and handing it to me. ‘I’ve written my home address on the reverse. I hardly need tell you to be careful. They plainly have no scruples about dealing with their enemies.’ His look indicated that he had been fully apprised of my recent brush with mortality. ‘And now, gentlemen, with your leave, I must return to my masters at the Home Office . . .’
He rose, clapped on his hat and shook our hands in departing. I was sorry to see him go, for it left me inescapably alone with Paget. A girl had just set down more drinks at the table, giving me no option but to remain.
‘Here’s how!’ said Paget, raising his glass with a wink. ‘Glad that you could meet Tallis. He’s a good man to have batting for us.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Well, he’s helped me before when I was in a pinch. A trustworthy sort.’
I considered this for a moment. ‘Not too many of those about.’
He paused, his glass halfway to his mouth. ‘No. I suppose not.’
‘One can never tell, I think.’
He squinted uncertainly. ‘Tell . . . what, exactly?’
‘The trustworthy sort, as you call them. I mean, you think you know a fellow – work with him, drink with him, believe him a gentleman – and then, without warning, he shows himself to be . . . the most appalling blackguard. A real bad hat.’
Paget was staring at me now, his face clouded with suspicion. ‘I sense something . . . amiss. Are you implying –’
‘What? That I know such lowlife scum?’
There was another pause. ‘I’m not sure I like your tone. If you have something to say to me, then out with it.’
I felt my lip curling as I pondered a reply. ‘Very well. Allow me to tell you a story – a brief one. A fourteen-year-old girl lives in a Somers Town tenement with her widowed mother and young brother. The mother dies, of consumption, leaving her children to survive as best they can. The girl is determined not to have her brother taken into the parish’s care, but the pittance she earns from needlework will not be enough to keep them both. And so she resorts to a line of work that will always pay a young girl, if she’s desperate enough. I’m sure I don’t need to explain, do I?’
Paget’s face had gone pale. His eyes were fixed, unseeing, at a point off to my left. ‘No, you don’t,’ he said, almost under his breath.
‘And may I further suppose you will be familiar with a certain night house off the Haymarket?’
‘Why are you saying this?’ he said, his voice deathly quiet.
‘The woman you saw with me that day in Somers Town. Roma. You thought you’d met her before, but you weren’t sure.’
His eyes lifted to mine, seeming to enquire. ‘Her? But – I don’t know any woman called Roma.’
‘You think she told you her real name? It was her, though. She remembered you, from all those years ago.’
Paget kept staring, as though at some horrific distortion in a looking glass. Then he shook his head, defeated. ‘I didn’t . . . I didn’t know.’
‘What – that she was fourteen?’
He was shaking his head. ‘I didn’t know,’ he repeated. ‘It wasn’t that kind of place. She – the girl – I swear to you I would never have –’
‘Don’t swear anything, not to me. You observed the age of consent. I’m sure that Roma was grateful for your fine moral discrimination.’
He sat there, eyes cast down, and for a long time neither of us said anything. I waited, choked with revulsion, and yet there was melancholy in it, too, for I realised this would be our last time together as friends. I took miserable gulps from my pewter as I waited for him to speak.
‘I know my asking forgiveness is useless, but if I try to explain something – would you listen?’ I glanced at him, and he read my silence as assent. ‘Ten years ago I was a different man. I had been a long time recovering from a personal disaster – someone I had loved. I won’t burden you with the story, but it had nearly killed me. I saw no one, went nowhere, yet I yearned for the touch of . . . Can you understand, David? I had learned to accept the disadvantage of my looks –’ (I felt a dreadful quiver of sympathy then, though I refused to meet his eye) – ‘but I had never thought to endure such soul-crushing loneliness. It became so intolerable that I told myself I would go out into the street and beg the first woman I met to marry me. Utter madness! But that was the pass I had reached.’ He paused, and seemed to shudder at the memory. ‘Of course, I did no such thing. Somehow I dragged myself through the daily round, hardly caring whether I lived or died. Then a friend invited me to dine with him one evening. He perceived my wretchedness almost immediately – I suppose it was obvious to see – and took me off to various dens he knew, hoping to raise my spirits. One of them was . . . well, you know the rest –’
‘How many times did you go there?’
‘My dear fellow –’
‘How many?’
He shrugged hopelessly. ‘I d
on’t know – half a dozen? It was a transaction, nothing more. And she didn’t look fourteen . . . I never thought to meet her again, and I dare say she imagined the same. I’m sorrier than I can say that she was driven to it, and that I . . .’
Whilst he was telling his story, his head had drooped lower, by degrees. Now he looked up again, enquiring.
‘You are –’ he faltered, ‘fond of her, I think?’
‘As though you care,’ I said sullenly, but could no longer rouse myself to anger. All I really felt was pity. Ours was a world of loneliness and struggle and disillusion, and none of us would get out of it alive. I took another deep draught of ale. ‘The friend I carried to the hospital, the one whose blood was on my coat. It was Jo – her brother. I tried to save him, but I couldn’t.’ And she will never forgive me for it.
‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ he said earnestly. ‘Remember poor Kenton. These are violent times we live in.’
It was true, and yet I was still too sick at heart to be consoled. We sat there for some while longer, lost in our own thoughts as other drinkers mumbled around us. Eventually I rose to my feet, and Paget did likewise.
‘David –’
‘I must go,’ I said. A look of despairing appeal was in his eyes.
‘I hope, after all – I hope you will shake my hand?’
He had thrust out his hand, and I hesitated, just for a moment, before I took it. His palm was clammy to the touch. I felt his relief as I did so, but those earlier intimations still fluttered within me, like a wounded bird. Our friendship was gasping out its last. The past had caught us up, and delivered a death blow.
17
On the spike
IT WAS TIME. I no more wished to see the inside of a workhouse than jump off a bridge into the Thames, but this was where the trail had led me, and holding back now would be to squander all those days and weeks of investigative toil. So I climbed back into my old clothes, trying not to think about whose blood stiffened the fabric, like old glue, and hauled on a pair of boots so worn from tramping it would have been an act of mercy to retire them.
I bent to the looking glass, and beheld an image of disrepute that had required no counterfeiting on my part. My face, with its straggly beard and scarred nostril, belonged to one as might steal a purse or start a fight. It seemed the streets had claimed me for their own. I waited for the sound of my landlady leaving the house – I had avoided her sight in recent days lest my dishevelment caused her to take fright – then slipped out into Hanover Street. I walked up to Angel and thence down the hill to St Pancras Workhouse, my brain already aswirl with gloomy presentiments. During my time at the paper I had conversed with several people who had, at one time or another, sought shelter ‘on the spike’, and their accounts of the experience, whilst distinct in the particulars, were unanimous on one point: it was a last resort.
The autumn afternoon was beginning to darken as I approached the building. Men loafed about the entrance, not talking, or even looking at one another. These were ‘casuals’, vagrants who applied for the statutory two-night stay. Some were quite respectable-looking, their affliction not illness but age: they had become too old for any kind of paid labour. Others lay slumped beneath flimsy burlap sacking, either in fuddled stupor or simple exhaustion. The gates would open, I gathered, at six in the evening, but before that you were obliged to queue at an office where they doled out tickets for admission. I adopted the same whipped-cur expression as the rest, careful not to catch anybody’s eye as we shuffled in a line alongside the wall. As it inched forward, I glanced at the bills and notices haphazardly plastered against the brickwork. One announced a reward – twenty pounds – for the safe recovery of a pet pug, its owner serious enough to have had the notice printed up in different fonts. A little further along was another plea, this one for the return of a lost four-year-old boy. A brief description of the child was appended, and beneath it the promised reward – two pounds. I could almost hear Marchmont’s booming, ironic laughter.
The man in front had noticed me reading, perhaps in itself enough to excite attention. He was about forty, bedraggled, unshaven, with prominent yellow incisors that lent his face a ferrety slyness – but the smile was friendly, and his voice, too. ‘Been on the road?’
I nodded.
‘Where’d you come from?’
‘Um . . . Norfolk.’
He looked blank, and I realised then that his question referred to which workhouse I’d come from – he had naturally assumed I was an itinerant like himself.
‘I mean, Islington,’ I corrected myself.
His eyes lit up. ‘Good skilly there.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed, not sure what skilly was. It didn’t matter, because the man was off on a long gabbling monologue about spikes he frequented – Poplar, Mile End, Islington – and the variable quality of their food and ‘kip’. He talked of each workhouse with the intimate knowledge of a connoisseur. When he eventually paused I asked him about his situation; he replied that he had been employed in his earlier years making lucifer matches and white lead, but then his health gave out, he lost the work and had to quit his lodgings. He had been ‘on the doss’ ever since. Just then a couple of his companions arrived, travel-stained like him, and I was forgotten amidst the raucous bonhomie of their reunion.
Having at last secured a ticket, I crossed the road and found a low brick wall on which to lean. The early-evening temperature was brisk but not unpleasant, which perhaps accounted for the small crowd of casuals, about thirty in all. In winter one might see a hundred or more. Loafing there, I kept my head down and was almost entirely ignored. Almost. Someone had noticed me: he was a queer-looking cove, sporting a top hat and leaning on a stick as though he were waiting on a royal summons instead of a workhouse opening for business. I met his eye for only an instant, but it was enough. He sauntered over and, with a rakish little movement, tipped his hat.
‘Mind if I join you?’ he asked, indicating the wall.
From a distance he had looked like some racecourse swell, but up close his dandyish garb indicated its survival from better days. His mauve brocade waistcoat had held up, but the check trews were patched and worn, the boots were scuffed, and the seams of his tailcoat looked precarious. The collar of his shirt was putty-coloured, and his top hat had a dulled sheen, like the coat of a stray dog. None of this, however, seemed to impinge on his magisterial air of self-assurance. Indeed, his amused gleam suggested that he had conducted a thorough scrutiny of my own attire and found it, frankly, not up to snuff.
‘Don’t believe we’ve met,’ he said in a light, well-spoken voice that seemed on the verge of laughter. ‘William Caleb Duckenfield.’
I took his proffered hand and mumbled my name. He squinted at me, hearing something in my accent.
‘Out of – hmm – Norfolk, perhaps?’
‘You can tell?’
‘I have a fine-tuned ear,’ he said with a twinkle. ‘Stopped at Norwich on my travels. Burnham Market, Wells-next-the-Sea, Cromer . . .’
‘I come from Swaffham.’
‘Swaffham! I know Swaffham. No shame in that.’ He took off his hat and scraped long oily strands of grey hair back from his skull. The stubble on his jaw showed flecks of white, and his throat was wattled, yet in spite of these signs of age his gaze was quick and oddly youthful. ‘So – what brings you here? From your dial I’d judge you’re no more than twenty and despite the disrepair yours are not the togs of a travelling gentleman.’ I smiled, disarmed by his perspicacity. He seemed to have looked right through me.
‘Are you such a . . . gentleman yourself?’ I asked, fencing a little. He shot me an arch look that acknowledged my little deflection.
‘I’ve rambled about these isles a fair bit,’ he drawled. ‘My own forebears came from Cheshire – the Duckenfields were a notable family there once – and I came to know the north-west pretty well in my younger years. But fate has blown me hither and thither since. To find myself today at the door of St Pancras Workhouse
, in health but out of pocket, one might say I was on the crest of a slump.’ He brightened at this last phrase, and dipping into his waistcoat pocket produced a short clay pipe. As he stuffed the bowl and lit it, he said, ‘If you’ve baccy, better hide it now, else they’ll take it off you at the gate. Money and matches, too.’
I checked my pocket and found a couple of bob and some pennies – and a sovereign, which Duckenfield saw. ‘A couter! You really haven’t been on the spike before, have you?’ I shook my head and faced his appraising look. ‘Anything else on you? Diamond ring? Deeds to an estate?’
‘Only this,’ I said, and from my pocket I flashed Jo’s knife at him.
At that moment the bell of St Pancras Church rang out – six o’clock – and he sighed, stroking his chin the while. ‘Look sharp,’ he said, indicating that I should follow him. We walked round the back of the wall on which we had been settled. With a surreptitious glance about him he bent down and tugged out a loosened brick. He looked at me, holding out his hand. ‘Empty your pockets,’ he said, and when I hesitated he gave an impatient tsk. ‘There’ll be hell to pay if they find something on you.’ I handed over my coins, but he kept his palm open, ‘The chive?’
‘The money I don’t care about, but I’m not letting this out of my sight.’
He shook his head disbelievingly, then squirrelled the cash away in the wall and replaced the brick as scrupulously as a bank clerk. He stood up, and said, ‘Give it to me. Otherwise you’ll never get past ’em.’ He saw my reluctance. ‘I’m doing you a favour,’ he said. So I handed him the knife, and it vanished somewhere inside his coat.
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