Half the World in Winter

by Maggie Joel

  ‘How can you suggest such a thing?’ and he turned and left the room.

  When he had gone, she stood alone in the room for a long time before turning off the gaslight and going upstairs. There was no light from her husband’s room and she went directly to her own room and closed the door.

  Bill had come home and that was a good thing.

  There was no light from her husband’s room because her husband had not lit the lamp. Instead Lucas stood quite still in the middle of the room in darkness.

  The imprint of her fingers on his arm felt like the brand of a hot iron and it was all he could do not to rub at it to relieve the sensation. Why had she come to him like that? What had been her intention? Could she really not sense his disgust, his loathing? He had tried so very hard to hide it but some part of him had thought she must surely sense it—how could she not?

  He had a memory of her in the days following their wedding, laughing and lovely and coquettish, hardly the blushing bride he had somehow expected. They had taken a walk in Hyde Park, she on his arm, and he had seen the gazes of other men on her and he had seen her eyes fixed on him and he had felt like the luckiest man alive. In the years that followed she had turned his household into a home and had given him five splendid children, she had presided over his dinner parties and sat beside him at church. These things alone meant nothing: they were what any wife did. It was the place in his heart that she had inhabited that set her apart.

  Now that place was empty. Desolate. Uninhabited. Now he had to steel himself to sit at the same table as her.

  But he would not let her see it. He was still her husband and he would not say what burnt inside him, even though it cost him everything to say nothing when the words threatened to erupt from him at every moment. He would not say it. He would take it to his grave rather than utter those words: You killed our daughter. It is your fault she is dead.

  CHAPTER NINE

  May–June 1880

  IN THE GREAT CITY OF London time went on as usual: Parliament sat and laws were passed. Business was conducted and a great many people made fortunes and an even greater number went hungry. Lives were started and lives ended—sometimes on the same day and to the same individual. May drifted into June with a promise of summer in the air.

  Inside 19 Cadogan Mews time had ceased. It no longer existed, it had no meaning. A silence had fallen that no one felt willing to break. Footsteps were muffled and commands, if they were uttered at all, were given in muted whispers in the hallways and corridors. Doors were kept closed and before entering hands hesitated on doorknobs and deep breaths were taken. An excuse not to enter at all was often found.

  On the fifth morning after the fire Lucas stood outside the drawing room door at a loss. He had not slept for days. He imagined that no one had. The doctor had returned each morning and had shaken his head a great deal. The boys, Gus and Jack, were to be sent away to stay with their aunt and uncle in Great Portland Street. Mrs Logan was to arrange it. Aurora had emerged from her stupor briefly, but was now sedated again. Lucas had sat with her for a long time when he had no longer been able to sit with Sofia, stroking his wife’s hair and kissing her sleeping eyes because his heart broke each time he thought of her waking and remembering.

  The burn on Aurora’s arm was worse than he had first realised. It would heal but it would scar horribly. He had helped the doctor to change the dressing. There was normal untouched pink flesh around the wound—one could at least see what normal unburnt flesh looked like. He could not help the doctor change his daughter’s dressings. He left the house rather than listen to her screams.

  He had prayed with all his strength but in his heart he had argued, Why should God save my child and yet let so many others perish? The answer was simple: God would not save her.

  He pushed open the drawing room door and surveyed the scene, though it broke his heart afresh to do so. Sticking out from under an armchair was a child’s shoe, an outdoors shoe made of brown suede with a buckle. He picked it up and held the shoe tightly in both hands and poured out his soul in great sobs that, until that moment, he had not been able to release.

  After a time he calmed himself and looked about him. The room was untouched since the afternoon of the fire. The air was still heavy with smoke and other odours that for a moment caused him to put out a hand to the wall to steady himself. The wall was coated with grime from the fire. The carpet was singed but only in a thin oval-shaped ring. In the centre, where the Persian rug had lain, the carpet was untouched. Chairs and tables had been knocked over and Lucas stooped and righted one or two then made himself stop. Amazingly the side table on which a sherry decanter and a glass had been placed lay undisturbed and unspilt. The decanter’s glass stopper was out as if someone had been drinking, or pouring a drink, at the exact moment—

  At the exact moment.

  He picked up the stopper and replaced it slowly into the decanter.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  He wheeled around to see the major standing motionless and silent in the doorway. For a moment both men regarded each other. Slowly, calmly, Lucas returned the decanter to the sideboard. The major responded better to slow, calm movements. And for the last five days he had been in a state of prolonged agitation and distress—so much so that Mrs Logan had begged more pills from Dr Frobisher, and that had seemed to do the trick.

  ‘Come away now, Uncle, this is no place to dwell,’ Lucas said gently, holding out his arm in a way suggestive of their departure from the room.

  But the major made no move to leave. Lucas looked into the old man’s eyes and, for a second, experienced a view of the world deeper, more intricate than he had known existed. A war was raging but it was not simply on a battlefield in the Crimean Peninsula a quarter of a century ago, it was right here and now. He lowered his eyes, deeply troubled.

  ‘She oughtn’t to have been drinking. She got too close to the fire and the pretty little girl tried to save her.’ The major’s voice had a curious youthful quality that was horribly at odds with the broken man who uttered these words.

  ‘What did you say?’

  Lucas advanced on the old man, his heart lurching inside him, but the major pressed the palms of his hands against his temples and began to rock back and forth.

  ‘Uncle, please! What did you just say?’

  ‘She tried to save her but her dress caught alight,’ and the major began to weep, tears streaming down his face, and Lucas gazed at him, appalled.

  ‘My wife? Are you referring to Aurora? Are you saying that she got too close to the fire and Sofia tried to save her? Is that what you are saying? Uncle?’

  But the old man had gone, or the lucid part of him at any rate, and though Lucas shook the old soldier’s shoulder vigorously he knew it was of no use.

  ‘Father. Mama has awoken and is calling for you.’

  Lucas came out of the room, leading the major, closing the door behind him and turning the key in the lock. Dinah was standing in the turn on the staircase waiting for him but his heart had turned as black as charcoal and, rather than go to this wife, he left the house without a word.

  CHAPTER TEN

  London and the North: December 1880

  THE FIRST SNOW FELL THE day before Christmas Eve and London at once became bright and muffled and mysterious where before it had been dark and noisy and all too familiar. Young ladies took carriages along Regent Street and walked arm-in-arm in Hyde Park, hands deep in fur muffs, and those who were old enough to remember it recalled the last time the Thames had frozen over and how they had skated from one bank to the other risking certain death should the ice crack and they fall through to it to the waters below.

  At 19 Cadogan Mews, Cook sealed off the kitchen and prepared her Christmas pudding following an ancient recipe known only to herself. The preparations completed, the doors were thrown open and the family trooped down to each take a turn at stirring the batter. When it was stirred and a lucky silver threepenny dropped in, Cook pressed the batter int
o a mould, tied a cloth around it and boiled it for six hours, then it was hung in the larder to age.

  On Christmas Eve, and in deference to Prince Albert, a tree was brought into the house and decorated. Gus questioned why they were observing a German tradition especially now Prince Albert was dead, and Bill observed that, if enough English people did it, then it became an English tradition, didn’t it? In the evening they sat around the piano and Dinah was persuaded to play so that they could sing carols, though they did not sing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’, which had been Sofia’s favourite.

  On Christmas Day the family went to church and afterwards Mrs Jarmyn and Dinah distributed a basket of food at the infirmary in Bedford Street. For dinner they ate roast goose and applesauce and Jack got the silver threepenny bit which meant that he would marry within the year and Dinah felt a little lost and sad and wondered why she had not found the lucky penny herself.

  On Boxing Day Mrs Logan packed two bags and Mr Jarmyn journeyed north.

  The inquiry into the Lea’s Crossing railway accident was set to commence the following day but the snowfalls of the last few days meant that there were no trains out of Birmingham and he was forced to take a room at the Railway Hotel. A telegram awaiting him there informed him that the Board of Trade officials had been similarly inconvenienced and the inquiry delayed. It was eventually convened, two days late, on the twenty-ninth.

  The mood at Wolverhampton was menacing. The previous day a gentleman identified—wrongly—as an official of the railway company had been set upon and beaten and now lay senseless in the infirmary. Protestors had journeyed up from the capital and from all parts of the Kingdom in time for the hearing and could be seen haranguing from platforms and handing out tracts. The crowds outside the Town Hall had not been dampened by either the inclement weather nor the enforced delay in proceedings and, despite the local constabulary forming a solid ring around the building, Lucas had to run the gauntlet of the mob simply to reach the hall in time for the first session. One of the protestors threw a stone that bounced off his shoulder and another thrust a pamphlet in his face which he made the mistake of reading:

  Staplehurst—Shipton-on-Cherwell—Abbots

  Ripton—Wombourne

  And now Lea’s Crossing!

  88 DEAD! 263 INJURED!

  When will the CARNAGE end?

  Demand action NOW!

  Demand an ACT OF PARLIAMENT to regulate rail safety!

  Staplehurst, Shipton-on-Cherwell, Abbots Ripton and, of course, Wombourne. Four horrific railway accidents forever imprinted in the public’s consciousness; forever identified with malevolent, grasping black-hatted railway owners placing profit above human lives. Lucas screwed up the pamphlet and stuffed it into his pocket.

  ‘Four days it has taken me to get to this wretched place,’ remarked Kemp, who was waiting for him just inside the main entrance. ‘Why do we build our railways in such distant and dismal locations?’

  ‘So that we do not have to travel on them ourselves,’ Lucas replied. He was not pleased that Kemp was here. He would have preferred Freebody or Hart or even Sinclair again, at a pinch. But not Kemp. ‘Do we know who is chairing the inquiry?’

  ‘Llewellyn.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Llewellyn was a retired colonel who had chaired the Wombourne inquiry three years earlier. His report on that occasion had laid the blame for the accident squarely with the railway and his summation of its directors and practices had been scathing and widely reported in the newspapers at the time.

  ‘Well, this inquiry is not going to be quite so cut and dried, I trust,’ said Kemp. ‘Good luck to him trying to prove our signals froze. Even if he does, he can hardly hold the company responsible for a frost, can he?’ he said, echoing the words of Standish, the locomotive superintendent.

  ‘No doubt he can and will,’ Lucas replied, finding Kemp’s bullish manner irritating. ‘Shall we go in?’

  They followed the jostling crowds into the same chamber in which the inquest had been started and soon adjourned some three weeks earlier. They had arrived in good time but the hall was already packed to bursting and most of the public benches had been taken, some with entire families settling down with rugs and pipes and pies and bottles of ginger beer as though to attend some country fair. The air was so charged, the volume of voices and eating and drinking and smoking and spitting so great, that Colonel Llewellyn, on first taking his chair, at once stood up and ordered the marshals to remove all persons who were not sitting in an orderly and silent fashion. This created a stir and a delay that further put back proceedings by some quarter of an hour but did at least result in Lucas and Kemp finding themselves seats in the front row.

  Llewellyn, who had been a substantial man three years earlier at the Wombourne inquiry, was now positively vast and the table at which he placed himself shuddered as he leant his bulk against it, and the scribes and other officials on either side of him were dwarfed like children beside him.

  ‘A man who grows fat on the suffering and destruction of others,’ observed Kemp in a low voice.

  ‘This man does not cause that suffering and destruction, he merely tries to find out the truth behind it to ensure it does not happen again,’ Lucas replied tersely, wishing Kemp were back in London.

  ‘And if it did not happen again, he would be forced to find some other employ, would he not?’

  ‘If there was no investigation then public confidence would not be restored and no one would dare to travel on our railway.’

  ‘Yes they would. People would still need to travel. They would have no choice.’

  ‘Damn you, Kemp! I happen to believe in this process, I am here to work with this inquiry not against it. We have nothing to hide: if we are at fault then let it be known.’

  ‘Laudable words.’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it is high time we got these proceedings under way,’ declared Llewellyn in a booming voice that silenced the chamber.

  Lucas tried to settle himself in his seat as Llewellyn introduced himself and the other officials on the committee and proceeded to outline the scope and nature of the inquiry. He had made the same speech three years earlier at the Wombourne inquiry and Lucas had sat in the front row of that inquiry with Kemp beside him.

  He looked down, wondering if Kemp were thinking the same thing. The horror of that fortnight of testimony from the survivors and the relatives of the dead was still there, three years later. And the company had introduced additional safety measures as a result of the inquiry. Yet here they were, three years later.

  Kemp had smoked a cigar, he remembered, as they had stood outside the inquiry on the first day. No doubt he would do so again today.

  The inquiry into the Lea’s Crossing railway accident was to run for some weeks: there were, after all, upwards of sixty witnesses to examine and sworn depositions to be made. Many of these witnesses waited now in a small, windowless antechamber off the main chamber. Some were employees of the railway company. The guard of the ill-fated train, an ageing man with mutton-chop whiskers and a resigned air, was called to make his statement first, followed by the stationmaster at Dawley Station, a worried-looking individual with round spectacles which he removed half a dozen times and polished with a large red handkerchief. After him came a number of other railway employees: foremen and guards and superintendents. Outside in the corridor a never-ending stream of clerks and officials in tall hats and black coats strode back and forth staggering under the weight of documents and ledgers and talking in low voices. They seemed unaware of the people waiting in the small, windowless antechamber.

  Finally the first of the passengers was called: a farm worker, his hair thinning, his body stiffened by a lifetime of manual labour, a cap twisting between two huge hands, who told the inquiry, in a broken voice, ‘My son’s legs were crushed in’t smash. He were to tek up an apprenticeship as a tanner. It were all arranged. We were travelling together t’Birmingham so he could begin his apprenticeship. Now what is to bec
ome of him? He cannot walk, much less take up his apprenticeship.’

  The man’s words were recorded but no one attempted to answer his question. Next came a pregnant woman, whose husband had been knocked insensible by the crash and who could now no longer speak nor feed himself. She had cried throughout her deposition, dabbing a sodden handkerchief to her eyes. Eventually she had been led, fainting, from the room by an official. Then came the man, Brinklow, whose child had been killed. Whilst what had gone before had unsettled the attendant crowd, the arrival of Brinklow sent a thrill of anticipation through the room.

  Brinklow was tall though slightly built for a foundry worker. He wore a collarless shirt and a jacket and trousers that fit him badly and, like the man whose son’s legs had been crushed, he held his cap tightly in his fists. Only those seated at the clerk’s desks and in the front few rows of the chamber could see his face clearly. What they saw was a thin moustache and badly shaved chin, a flattish nose slightly awry as though once broken, grey expressionless eyes. They saw the lean, hollow look of a man who worked hard and never had quite enough to eat. They saw an unremarkable face where they had expected to see something else.

  ‘Mr Brinklow, please state for the inquiry your name and profession.’

  ‘Thomas Brinklow of Blackstone Cottages, Foundry Lane, Dawley, Shropshire. I am a foundry worker, second class, at Spendlow’s Iron Company, Iron Works and Heating Engineers in Dawley.’

  An unremarkable reply made in an unremarkable voice. Whether this was a God-fearing man or a drunk, or neither, the people listening could not tell.

  ‘Mr Brinklow, you understand that this is not a court of law and that no one today is standing trial? You understand the purpose of this inquiry, that it is to investigate the events surrounding, to ascertain the cause of and, where possible, to make recommendations on, the terrible train crash that took place at Lea’s Crossing on the fifth of this month?’