Half the World in Winter

by Maggie Joel

  She met his gaze and saw his brow crease.

  ‘You are still set on removing him to an asylum?’

  ‘I believe it would be best. And I understand that such places are quite different now than they were when I initially looked into this option. Twenty years have passed. I believe the more exclusive, private places are considered to be not dissimilar to the resorts one visits for a health cure in Switzerland.’

  ‘To be paid for by the railway company profits?’

  For the first time she felt her mask crack but she kept her voice steady: ‘I brought my own money into this marriage, or had you forgotten?’

  The maid came in at this point, carrying the soup tureen. She paused, appearing perplexed by Dinah’s absence from the table.

  ‘Hermione, do you know if Miss Jarmyn will be joining us for dinner?’ inquired Lucas.

  ‘I couldn’t really say, sir,’ was the reply.

  ‘Then I propose you serve the soup and we shall await developments.’

  They both fell silent as the girl ladled a clear soup into their bowls and withdrew.

  Lucas had not given her an answer regarding her uncle’s future. The question lay unresolved—one of many such questions—and it threatened to get lost in the crowded space between them.

  Aurora tried once more to cross that space. ‘And what news of this second railway accident?’ she inquired. It was, perhaps, an unfortunate choice of topic.

  ‘That is hardly dinner conversation, I would have thought,’ he replied, not looking up.

  ‘Indeed? And when do you propose we discuss it? Are we to be the victims of further reprisals, do you think? Or do you consider your family’s safety not worth discussing with your wife?’

  ‘Enough!’

  He stood up and the door opened and Dinah hurried in, two spots of colour on her cheeks.

  ‘So sorry,’ she said, glancing at both her parents, then dipping her head and taking her seat. Lucas sat down again and picked up his soup spoon, but a vein stood out in his neck. Dinah gave no explanation for her tardiness and for a time did not lift her gaze from her lap. When she did, her eyes were a little reddened and Aurora thought, But she has been crying! The realisation astonished her and she almost exclaimed out loud, but the maid had come in to remove the soup bowls so she said nothing. When she did manage to catch her daughter’s eye, Dinah returned her gaze with a face that was composed and expressionless so that she wondered if she had imagined it.

  ‘Hermione,’ (Aurora had learnt the girl’s name), ‘why do we have no wine with our dinner? Please fetch a bottle of the ’71 claret from the cellar. Mrs Logan will show you where it is.’

  ‘Very go—’

  ‘No.’

  Hermione jumped, a look of terror on her face. No one moved so that for a moment they were a frozen tableau.

  ‘There will be no wine with dinner. Hermione, you may leave us now.’

  Hermione left but in the shadow of the doorway stood Mrs Logan and Aurora saw her, silent and triumphant, as though she had somehow planned the whole scene.

  As the Jarmyns shared an uncomfortable meal in Bloomsbury, just a mile or so to the north beneath the great domed entrance of Euston Station Thomas Brinklow stood in the frozen night air, his collar turned up and his hands deep in his pockets.

  Everything had turned out badly. The madness that had taken over him the first morning he had gone to Half Mitre Street and had eventually carried him back to the very same place five nights ago so that he had found himself firebombing an office, which had almost burnt down a building and nearly killed two people, had deserted him, leaving him sick and empty yet filled with a loathing that turned his stomach.

  He had been too afraid to return to his lodgings and for five days and nights he had walked the streets, sleeping rough in corners and in doorways, certain that if he attempted to leave the city there would be constables stationed at all the main railway termini, that his likeness would have been distributed as far and wide as Whitechapel and Kensington, though he had only the vaguest notion where either of these places were. After five days he was wretched beyond anything he could imagine and, in his delirium, a cell in a police station no longer seemed the worst option. But no constable had stopped him and no mention of the bombing had been made in any newspaper that he could see and he had marvelled that here was a city where a man might firebomb an office and it not warrant a mention in the paper. There was a war going on, he saw, in some foreign place, and that took up a great many columns in some newspapers and a great many illustrations in others.

  He had escaped but he had brought the loathing and sickness with him.

  Drunks and beggars crowded the station entrance and there was nothing now to distinguish him from them. The street girls who plied their trade for a few pennies in the dark places that surrounded the station avoided him. He had fallen lower, even, than they and as he watched the trains come in from the North and depart for there again an hour or so later, he despaired of ever seeing his home again.

  The girl at the public house had taken his money. She had rifled through his pockets and taken everything and in his drunken and confused state he had let her. The memory of it sickened him. His attempt to destroy the railway company office later that night had been nothing but an attempt to destroy the fact of his encounter with the girl in the dingy passage behind the public bar. He had not destroyed the office and he had not destroyed the memory of that encounter. Each step he took caused him to slip further into this pit and at each slip his soul became blacker. The thought of his wife was as painful to him now as the thought of his dead little girl. He could not return home and the fact he had no money was not the reason.

  From this place, very far away at the bottom of a deep, dark pit, it had been a day or more before Thomas had become aware of some change around him—indeed it was impossible to miss for everyone at the station was agog with the news: there had been another train accident. An express train had gone into the rear of a stationary goods train at a place called Prior’s Marsh Junction. The train was a North West Midlands line train.

  Another accident? Thomas reeled. It was murder and no one did a thing to stop it.

  ‘That police constable has walked past the house six times in the last hour,’ observed Dinah, who was standing by the window in the drawing room, where they had retired after dinner.

  ‘Six?’ said her father. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I have counted.’

  It was clear to Aurora—though apparently not so to Dinah—that Lucas had no wish to discuss the police constable. His angry outburst at dinner hung over them, creating a sort of fog that it was difficult to see through. Her own anger and the humiliation she felt at being spoken to in such a way before the servants, before her own daughter, seemed a lesser thing. She had said nothing since they had retired to the drawing room but she spoke now: ‘Perhaps he believes there is to be a robbery,’ she suggested, not lifting her head from her embroidery.

  ‘Then he must believe it is to happen here,’ replied Dinah, ‘because it is at our house that he keeps looking.’

  The maid came in with the tray of coffee and Lucas looked up from his newspaper.

  ‘Ah, Hermione. There is to be a robbery. Can you confirm that the plate is securely locked up?’ The girl, unskilled at recognising mockery, looked up and opened her mouth to speak but Lucas held up a hand, forestalling her. ‘That’s fine. You couldn’t really say—is that right?’

  ‘I was going to say, sir, that yes it is. Mrs Logan checks it personally herself every night, last thing.’

  ‘Oh. Well, very good,’ said Lucas, and he returned to his paper.

  ‘If you please, sir, when is the robbery to ’appen?’

  ‘Mr Jarmyn was making a joke, Hermione. There is to be no robbery.’

  ‘Very good, madam.’ The girl turned to go.

  ‘And, Hermione, would you advise Mrs Logan I wish to conduct an inventory of the cellar tomorrow morning. First thing. Directly a
fter breakfast.’

  ‘Yes, madam,’ and the girl left. Aurora returned to her sewing, aware that Lucas had looked up, but what could he say; the household was still her domain, was it not? She knew he would say nothing.

  ‘Do you remember that housemaid, Lucas,’ she said, addressing him as though he had not rebuked her in front of them all at dinner, ‘when we were first married—Clarice? Clara? She was dismissed when we found her syphoning the sherry. We had to put a lock on the liquor cabinet. I wonder what became of her?’

  ‘I cannot possibly imagine,’ he replied and she saw the consternation in his face.

  ‘I wonder if we should not have called the police instead of simply letting her go. One cannot imagine any good coming of someone like that. It is such a relief to have servants one can trust.’

  Aurora found her fingers were numb with the cold and, as she thought this, her needle slipped and the point went straight into her thumb, piercing the skin. A bright red bead of blood immediately welled up and she stared at it, feeling nothing. When would the house be warm again? When would she be warm again?

  ‘Here he is again,’ said Dinah, from the window. ‘That makes seven.’ She moved away from the window but instead of taking a seat, stood restlessly for a moment. ‘Mama, I think I shall retire to my room,’ she said, and having made this decision she kissed them both and left the room abruptly as though to remove herself before the constable could return for an eighth time.

  Had Dinah been crying earlier? There was nothing now in her countenance to suggest it. She had mentioned an intention of going to her committee in the morning—though she had, surely, resigned, from this very committee only a few weeks earlier, it occurred now to Aurora. Dinah had mentioned her intention after dinner but before Lucas had come into the room and this, too, now appeared significant, though why it should appear so Aurora could not say.

  She looked down at her lap. The pin-prick on her thumb would not stop bleeding. She reached inside her sewing bag for a handkerchief, wrapped it around her thumb and held it tightly.

  ‘An inventory of the cellar?’

  She did not look up at her husband’s words. There was an iciness to his tone that had not thawed one iota since dinner. She had thought he would say nothing.

  ‘Certainly. Do you not approve?’ she asked lightly, determined not to be unsettled.

  ‘Approve? It is no concern of mine what you undertake in the way of household duties. I am merely curious to know what it is you hope to achieve by it.’

  ‘I would have thought that to be obvious. As with any inventory, it is to provide a detailed record of our stock. And if we find we are deficient then we shall be in a position to rectify the situation. Do you not undertake such inventory of the rolling stock on your railway?’

  ‘It is hardly necessary. Our rolling stock does not require replacing quite as readily as our cellar does, it would appear.’

  Lucas stood up, brushing from his lap the newspaper he had been reading so that it fell to the floor. He took two steps then paused, standing in the centre of the room, his fists clenched by his sides.

  ‘Perhaps it is easier to steal a bottle of sherry than a train,’ Aurora observed and saw at once she had made a mistake.

  ‘Do you think I am not aware?’ Lucas demanded, rounding on her. ‘Do you really believe a husband does not know when his wife is a drunk?’

  Aurora continued with her embroidery and with her thumb immobilised it was no easy task to push the needle through the thick material; indeed the part she now worked on was particularly stubborn and the needle would not—it simply would not!—be pushed through the hole she had identified for it.

  Do you really believe a husband does not know when his wife is a drunk?

  There! The tip of the needle was through and now she was able to pull the gold thread through after it. Her task completed, she looked up at him.

  ‘What a ridiculous thing to say!’ she replied with a laugh. ‘How can you say such a thing!’

  But her reply seemed only to inflame him more.

  ‘Your denial offends me. You offend me. The very sight of you offends me,’ and making a disgusted noise he turned on his heels and left the room.

  She remained quite still on the sofa and listened to these words and it was as though they had been spoken by someone very far away, in a distant room. She had made a mistake mentioning the maid, the locked cabinet. He had somehow decided this was proof she was a drunk.

  She continued to sit quite still. No expression crossed her face. His words washed over her. They did not touch her. The end of her thumb was white and still she felt nothing. A tiny patch of blood appeared through the handkerchief and began to grow. How could it bleed so, from such a tiny scratch?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ON FRIDAY MORNING A LETTER arrived from Roger Brightside three weeks after the report of his death. It came with the first post and was all but lost amidst the letters of business, the tradesmen’s accounts and the requests for charitable donations that were piled high on the silver letter tray that Mrs Logan handed to Mr Jarmyn at breakfast. When he thumbed through the pile he paused at the letter, not because it was clearly of a personal nature nor because it had colourful foreign stamps nor yet because the handwriting was unfamiliar to him. He paused because it was addressed to Dinah.

  ‘Dinah, this one is for you,’ he said, handing it over without thinking. Then he watched as his daughter took the letter and turned a deathly pale and withdrew from the room and he realised the letter had been postmarked Madeira on the eighteenth December and had been sent by her cousin a fortnight before his death.

  THE REPORT OF THE COURT OF INQUIRY

  HELD IN PURSUANCE OF AN ORDER

  OF THE BOARD OF TRADE ,

  DATED THE 29TH DECEMBER 1877,

  I NTO THE CIRCUMSTANCES ATTENDING THE

  ACCIDENT ON THE NORTH WEST MIDLANDS

  RAILWAY WHICH OCCURRED NEAR

  WOMBOURNE ON THE 27TH DECEMBER 1877.

  PRESENTED TO BOTH HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT

  BY COMMAND OF HER MAJESTY

  APRIL 1878

  In his study an hour later Lucas laid the three-year-old report on his desk and rubbed his temples. It would be another four weeks at least until the report from the Lea’s Crossing accident was published. It hardly seemed to matter now, in light of yesterday’s vote.

  Yesterday’s vote hardly seemed to matter now in light of last night’s scene with his wife.

  He stood up, walked two paces and returned to his desk and sat down. He would think about the report, the vote. These things were important. They required his immediate attention.

  Had the board made the correct decision? Had he made the correct decision? How had it come down to his vote? Yet it had, and he had the whole weight of it on his shoulders. On his head. Well, the decision had been made. He hoped, he prayed, that it was the right one.

  He picked up the Wombourne report once more. It was the worst accident in the company’s history: the local branch line train travelling between Wolverhampton and Stourbridge had been delayed leaving Wolverhampton and had attempted to make up time as it entered the stretch of line a mile north of Wombourne. It had been travelling at top speed when it had ploughed straight into a track-maintenance gang who were replacing sleepers on the same stretch of line. The resulting accident had caused thirty-one fatalities and a hundred and twenty-one injuries. How the track-maintenance gang had come to be working on that stretch of line at that time and how the railway had failed to notify the driver of their presence was the main focus of the report.

  He had attended the scene and the subsequent inquiry himself, had travelled up on the afternoon of the accident, hiring a man with a trap at Wolverhampton and arriving in time to see the chaos and the destruction that a train travelling at top speed could wreak on a gang of workers and eight carriages of passengers. He remembered stepping down from the trap in a daze, scrambling down the embankment, slipping but hardly noticing, righting
himself and wandering the length of the train, taking in the twisted carriages, the people scurrying about, hearing the cries, the screams for help though the accident was already four or five hours old by then. The reek of burnt metal and smoke had filled the air. A pall of smoke hung over the front carriages so that the people from a nearby village who had come to help moved about like ghosts, appearing then disappearing.

  Out of the smoke a figure had appeared, a woman in a full skirt, a shawl pulled tightly around her shoulders, a bonnet on her head but no reticule, no umbrella, no parasol. Nothing, in fact, in her hands at all. She had simply walked out of the smoke devoid of personal belongings like a soul arriving at the gates of Heaven.

  He had assumed she had survived the accident. She had stopped when she saw him standing there watching her, and something had made him want to go to her, to rush over to her and—and—what? He had been confused, ashamed of his inability to assist her, a survivor of his railway, of the carnage that he was responsible for. In the end a man, a local from the village, had gone to her and led her away. Gone.

  But he had not forgotten her.

  The same woman had attended the inquest at Birmingham Assizes three days later and he had found out she was not a survivor at all. She had gone to the accident site, as he had, though she had gone to locate her husband. Her husband, it now came out, was not a survivor either. He had been in the front carriage of the train. His remains were in the mortuary at Wolverhampton.

  So he had killed the woman’s husband: Paul Logan, a wine merchant, employed by a large Birmingham-based wine wholesaler, a man who had set off from his lodgings in Wolverhampton one December morning to meet a customer in Stourbridge and another in Birmingham; a trip lasting two days, no more, in these days of fast, efficient rail travel. (Why did he remember these details? They formed no part of the Board’s report and if Mrs Logan had told him she had certainly not referred to it since.) Paul Logan had set off one morning and he had never returned. He had left a widow. There were no children—he had pondered that at the time: three years of marriage but no child. Was that a Godsend or an even greater tragedy?