One of the Family

by Monica Dickens

  ‘You want Mr Whiteley avenged.’

  ‘But not by me. I am not testifying about the notes for revenge. I’m obeying the law.’

  ‘I don’t want to have to hear you do it.’

  ‘And I don’t want to do it. Dearest, if you must be so sentimental, why not be sentimental about me?’

  ‘Oh, I am.’ Gwen dabbed a handkerchief at her eyes and the corners of her mouth. ‘That’s why I don’t want to come to the Old Bailey any more. I’ll be waiting here for you at home, with a good fire, and the tea things, and admire you for your strength, like a knight’s lady when he returns from the jousts.’

  Madge came to the Central Criminal Court, and Austin, joined by Teddie’s barrister husband Ralph on the day it seemed that Leonard would be called to the witness box.

  Mr Henry Curtis Bennett, for the defence, had reminded the jury that it was not his business, or anyone else’s, whether the accused was actually William Whiteley’s son. ‘The point is that, rightly or wrongly, obsessively, he believed that.’

  But the prosecution would not relinquish the question: who was Horace Rayner’s father? The accused had stuck to his story of Mr Whiteley’s long-ago friendship with his mother, Emily Turner, and of how his step-father, George Rayner, had told him, when he had been drinking, who his real father was.

  ‘And then I did remember him visiting us as a child, powerful, domineering, and somehow – in some way connected with us. From that time, it preyed on my mind.’

  The voice of the man in the high dock was not very strong, and his one eye had a way of roving round the courtroom, not staying on the face of Mr Muir, the prosecuting counsel, below him. When it rested for a moment on Leonard, he felt it, uncomfortably, as a plea for help.

  Two men at the poor lodgings to which the accused had been reduced after his wife went back to her family had borne witness that they had heard him boast of a wealthy parent – ‘the richest man in London’. The landlord of a hotel in Red Lion Street described him trying to evade rent on the promise of a thousand pounds expected to arrive from his father.

  ‘Just before my mother died, she said –’ Horace Rayner swallowed painfully, his Adam’s apple darting in and out of his high collar. ‘She told me, “If you ever need a friend, go to William Whiteley and mention my name.”’

  ‘And you did.’ Mr Muir looked at him grimly over half spectacles.

  Rayner then gave his account of the fateful interview in the office. ‘Towards the end, Mr Whiteley said, “I can’t recall the past.” He was very cold. He told me to try the Salvation Army. I asked again, “Do you refuse to help me, with either money or a job?” He said that he did, and I said, “Then I have made up my mind to blow my brains out.” I took out the gun. He said to me, “Don’t talk so silly, put that thing down.” I think I put the gun in my pocket. He started to leave the room. I asked him to come back, but he refused, and said something about a policeman. I don’t remember any more, my lord.’ His eye moved to the judge. ‘I don’t remember the shots.’

  ‘Are you saying you did not fire them?’

  ‘I say, I can’t remember them.’

  Mr Muir then read out the note that had been found in the man’s pocket by police at the hospital: ‘... has brought upon himself and me a double fatality ...’ with its sorrowful ending, ‘R.I.P.’

  ‘You do remember writing that, Mr Rayner?’

  ‘I think so. It must have been – impulsive insanity.’ He quoted his counsel.

  Leonard Morley was called to take the stand. He had watched other witnesses: Whiteley’s staff, Rayner’s landlord, and his aunt Louise Turner, who was awed and hesitant, and ordered to speak up. He determined on dignity. Inwardly he was the boy Leonard being forced to own up to a petty crime at Goring School. Outwardly, he was the dependable henchman and true friend of William Whiteley, head up, voice clear.

  He gave the dates and contents of the five notes from the list the police had transcribed.

  ‘And you kept some of these to yourself, Mr Morley?’

  ‘Three of them. For the reasons I have already explained.’

  ‘Please tell the court.’

  Leonard told the court. ‘Mr Whiteley was an old man, who had suffered greatly in the past from attacks by less successful traders. He was still working hard, and very happily. I did not want to upset him. When I did feel obliged to show him the second letter, he tore it up in a furious rage. It made me feel my first instinct had been right.’

  ‘And what do you think now?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘In view of what has happened,’ Mr Muir had the spectacles off and was using them for emphasis, ‘do you still think you were right to keep the notes to yourself?’

  ‘I couldn’t let them see my doubt, Gwen,’ he told his wife later, ‘I had to say, very firmly, “Yes.”’

  ‘Of course you did, dearest. You had done what you believed was right.’

  Leonard had seen Henry Beale in an extravagant black stock in the courtroom. He had seen young William and Frank Whiteley in their mourning bands. What did the brothers think about him? They had accepted his story, but had they been listening to Henry Beale’s poison, and were they really thinking that he might have been able to save their father?

  Mr Muir sat down with a dissatisfied grunt.

  As at the inquest, Leonard felt as if he were on trial himself. Did all witnesses feel like this? In discussing criminal cases with Arthur French, Leonard had thought being involved would be exciting. Now he hoped that it would never happen to him again.

  Slowly, keeping him awkwardly waiting, Mr Curtis Bennett rose to point out, with an assumed air of bored patience, that the defendant had consistently denied writing the notes and the police had not been able to produce a shred of evidence that he had. ‘They are irrelevant to this trial, m’lud.’

  Defending counsel nodded to Leonard, who stepped down and went back to his seat in what he hoped was a dignified way, his heart pounding as if he had bicycled three times round Hyde Park, trying to keep up with Madge.

  ‘You stood up to it well, Leonard,’ Ralph said afterwards. ‘If I were prosecuting, I would have believed you as a witness.’

  ‘Don’t you believe everyone who swears on the Bible?’

  ‘Only about one in ten.’

  ‘Will they call me again?’ Leonard wanted to go a long way away from London, from England, to an inn by the foothills of a small mountain, where he could watch sunsets with Gwen.

  ‘Muir only called you today as a formality. The notes have nothing to do with the case. The jury has long ago made up their minds.’

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘They probably all shop at Whiteley’s. Now let all of us go to the Waldorf Hotel and drink champagne. Austin? Madge?’

  When Leonard got home, he felt unsuitably frivolous. He left it to Madge to tell her mother about the exemplary performance of the jousting knight.

  Ralph Wynn was right. The next day the jury was only out of the courtroom for ten minutes before returning to deliver their unanimous verdict. Horace George Rayner was found guilty of murder, and sentenced by Lord-Alverstone, the Lord Chief Justice, to death.

  It surprised nobody. The surprise was that although William Whiteley had been an immense and popular figure of commercial legend, when Rayner’s solicitor initiated a petition for a reprieve to the Home Secretary, thousands of people added their names to it. Ordinary citizens, clergymen, borough councillors, M.P.s, titled people – a hundred and eighty thousand letters flooded in within two days. Speeches were made. Sermons were preached. The cry rose again: ‘Nursed back from death to Death!’ An excited female offered herself to Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, as a substitute customer for the hangman’s noose.

  No one at Whiteley’s admitted to signing the petition except Henry Beale, who had the gall to ask Leonard whether he would add his name.

  ‘Don’t insult me, Beale. A life for a life. That’s the least we can do for the Chief.’
<
br />   But Madge had signed, and Bella had copied her. ‘Don’t look so injured, Daddy. It’s not because we forgive Horace Rayner. It’s our protest against the death penalty. Look.’ Madge showed Leonard a copy of the letter they had sent in. ‘A detested relic of a barbarous age.’

  Mrs Roach and Tatiana had signed it, and some of the staff at Ladbroke Lodge. ‘That creeping stain who calls hisself a butler,’ Flora Bolt jeered. ‘Trust him to take the side of a gaolbird.’ She herself would need to think about it. ‘If Bill Bolt had killed me when he come here Christmas Eve, wouldn’t I want him to swing for it?’

  ‘But you would be dead, Flo.’ Dicky’s logic was always good.

  ‘Like poor Mr Whiteley. I’ve got to think about what he would want.’ By the time she had made up her mind, the letter had been posted.

  The outcry for the murderer’s reprieve became an even greater public sensation than the murder or the trial. People were caught up in the drama of it, and swept after the banner of an easy humanitarian cause. On March 30th, Leonard and Gwen went again to the theatre with Vera and Charles Pope, who were great believers in the temporary replacement of real life by unreality.

  None of them would ever forget the evening. Halfway through the second act of What Every Woman Knows, the play was halted. The actors stood in attitudes of suspense. The house manager came on stage to announce that His Majesty King Edward VII had commuted the sentence of Horace Rayner to-penal servitude for life.

  Sensation. Thunderous applause. Unparalleled drama. When the play resumed, to a house still buzzing with talk, it seemed very tame.

  The populace was satisfied. No matter that Arthur Chapple, a lawyer, wrote to The Times denouncing the circus of maudlin hysteria by the irresponsible masses. ‘Not trial by jury, but trial by the mob.’

  Still less matter that Horace George Rayner had made a statement from Pentonville prison that he would rather die by hanging than live the rest of his life behind bars.

  He was reprieved.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Now I’ll never know who wrote those accursed letters,’ Leonard fretted to Gwen.

  ‘What does it matter, Leo? They’re finished, done with. Forget them.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  Two months after his old employer’s death, Leonard’s mourning had reached the stage where sick regret had taken over from crisis, to delay the restoration of happier memories from the past. Whiteley’s was recovering, business was buoyant, but that could not lighten Leonard’s sombre mood. He had lost weight. He thought his sandy hair was thinning. He could not get rid of a chesty cough, which Little Bucky’s mustard plaster did not dislodge. No. 72 was haunted by icy draughts. The high Georgian windows rattled, and you could hear the wind penetrating the gaps. The huge bathroom with the double basins and the eccentric geyser was freezing. The ventilation grilles on the Gents and the upstairs Place had to be stuffed with newspaper. Pipes in the servants’ basement Place congealed. All the inmates of the house had colds or chilblains. Everyone smelled of camphor oil and eucalyptus.

  Whiteley’s was steam-heated. Customers’ furs piled up in the cloakroom. No wonder Leonard could not shake off his cough, scolded Dr Buckmaster. The contrast between indoors and outdoors was too savage. Coughing, muffled in a scarf on perishing mornings, Leonard longed to be comfortably inside the store; but the old Chief’s absence had left such a bitter void that coming to work was nothing like the joy it used to be. Leonard could not forget. Why did everyone else seem to have forgotten so quickly?

  He liked it when a customer, seeing him patrolling the floors with his black silk cravat and wide armband, wanted to talk about William Whiteley, and to cluck about the sadness of it all.

  ‘It must be hard for you, Mr Morley,’ the elder Miss Moffat said perceptively, ‘to see it all going on like this,’ she nodded round the echoing tiled dairy hall, ‘as though nothing had happened.’

  ‘Thank you, madam. But we must remember’ – he had formulated a pompous little public disguise for his gloom –’that continued active trading is our best memorial.’

  ‘It is what he would have wanted.’ But Miss Moffat was not fooled. ‘Oh poor Mr Whiteley. I knew him for more than twenty years.’

  Her eyes were moist. Leonard coughed into a large handkerchief.

  Day to day trade was thriving. The lure of spring round the corner stimulated shoppers to spend money. The fashion showrooms and ready-made departments were crowded with women anxious to cast off sombre winter clothing and try out the new textiles and lusciously named colours. Aertex (’It breathes!’), stockinet, loganberry pink, aubergine. The new ‘health corsets’ were sold out as soon as a fresh order came in. Engineered to thrust the padded bottom out and the broad triangular bosom forward like a fearsome stuffed bird, they were no healthier than last year’s models, and probably even worse for the internal organs. But they were the thing!

  That was important now. The old man’s sons, with all respect, knew that they must look ahead, not back. The slogan of their Whiteley’s advertisements was, ‘Looking forward – it’s The Thing!’

  To which Leonard mentally added a second line of doggerel: ‘The King is dead – long live the King!’

  The new management structure was being developed. William and Frank, who were already on the Board as Directors, would become joint Chairmen in their father’s place, with overall responsibility for the whole business. The General Manager’s heart had kept him away for more than six months. The old Chief, ruthless with bad workers, but loyal to good ones, had kept the position open for him, but the brothers, who owed the man less, were considering an ultimatum. Come back to work, or resign.

  Who would get the top job? Leonard Morley, Assistant Manager, thought, with all modesty, that he should be the man. Henry Beale, with all arrogance, thought that his exalted position as successful Chief Buyer made him ideal. The brothers Whiteley were rumoured to be considering top-flight London retailers to see who they might seduce away to Westbourne Grove. Leonard went soberly on with his work, taking responsibility, paying attention to staff, worrying about details; but he could not look far into the future.

  ‘That bastard should have shot me too, Gwen.’

  Most wives would have cried, ‘Don’t talk like that!’ at the word ‘bastard’, if not at the death-wish. Leonard’s wife, being Gwen, replied with comfortable amusement, ‘Then you could have been buried at the old Chief’s feet, like a crusader’s dog.’

  ‘Oh, you do me good, you really do.’ Leonard hugged her: soft, fragrant, pliant. ‘Because you won’t let me take myself seriously.’

  At the Loudon Street Settlement, the little deformed child Angel, who had hung on to life longer than anyone had expected, seemed at last to have reached the end of her struggle. Her mother had gone off with a spice pedlar and her brothers and sisters were dispersed into sweatshops and street gangs, so she was living at the Settlement all the time now, looked after by the come-and-go residents of the women’s dormitory.

  ‘Last time a doctor paid us a flying visit, he said, “All we can do is help her to die.”’ Madge was desolate. She loved the grimacing, indomitable child who fitted her convulsive limbs into her lap so contentedly, and watched her face for the chance of a joke.

  ‘He should have taken her to the Great Ormond Street Hospital.’ Bella was glad to show Toby Taylor that she knew the right thing to do.

  The three of them were walking home through the bare trees and lifeless grass of Kensington Gardens after a visit to the Natural History Museum.

  ‘He said it wasn’t worth taking up a cot from a child who might be cured.’

  ‘Is he the only doctor?’ Toby asked, walking between the two cousins, tall and very ‘toffee’ in a long grey coat with a wide shawl collar and an insouciant tilt to his curly Homburg.

  ‘It’s hard to get them to come. At the beginning, when Arnold Toynbee made settlements a fashionable novelty, influential people wanted to help. Now that we’re boringly well establishe
d, doctors and politicians don’t bother.’

  ‘I would bother,’ Toby said, ‘for what it’s worth.’

  ‘Would you? Would you really?’ Madge stopped and looked into his face. ‘Would you come and see Angel?’

  ‘Of course. I don’t know if I could help, but if her breathing’s so bad ... we could try thyme and pine oil. Did the doctor give her an inhalation?’

  ‘He didn’t think it was worth it. He looked at some of the new babies, and then he rushed off.’

  ‘It’s always worth it. I’ll be there tomorrow.’

  When Toby was talking, Bella thought, life seemed easier. He swept you along with his confidence.

  ‘I wish I could come,’ she said softly. ‘I am so sorry for that poor little scrap.’ She could feel her arms aching as she thought about holding this child they called Angel. Although she would like to prove to her mother that marriage was not the only worthwhile career for a woman, she sometimes did think about herself in a nursery with a baby, and even pushed a pillow under her loose nightgown to study how she would look, sideways in the mirror.

  ‘Why can’t you come?’ Madge said impatiently, stooping to pick up a child’s ball on the path and throw it back to him, while Bella was still thinking of doing that. ‘I’ve asked you thousands of times.’

  ‘Come with me, Bella.’ When Toby looked down at her with that smile, she was glad she was a short woman. For Madge, the smile was more challenging, face to face. Tilted down towards Bella, it was protective, considerate.

  But Angel looked so dreadful, dribbling and gasping, bundled up in her little wheeled box to protect her jerking limbs and her big unwieldy head, that Bella had no desire to pick her up and hold her.

  Toby and Madge put the box on a table and made a tent over it for herbal steam. Taking the kettle to reboil it in the kitchen, Bella was afraid of the noisy competent women who were making soup in cauldrons and slamming pies in and out of the ovens and cutting long loaves of bread against their chests with knives like swords. She was glad to see Jack Haynes come in with a bucket of coal weighing down each arm. He tipped the coal into the bin and came over with the empty buckets to mouth, ‘Bey-ya,’ as he had learned to do when he was at Chepstow Villas.