Shadow of the Serpent im-1

by David Ashton

  The hypocritical, unco guid quality in Mulholland’s tone made McLevy want to spit. Sookin’ up. The constable was sookin’ up to the lieutenant. The bugger was after something. And McLevy knew exactly what it was, the sleekit lang dreep.

  He stood suddenly, moved to the door and turned the handle.

  ‘I’ll go shake Frank Brennan till his teeth rattle, though I doubt we’re wasting our time. Sadie lived hard but she survived. She knew the streets and could look after herself in her chosen profession. The strike was from close by. It would be trade. She wouldnae let rough that near. It would be trade. Respectable. A clean blow.’

  Then he was gone. Roach sighed.

  ‘Why is it Inspector McLevy, given the choice in matters of heinous crime, will always seek out culprits from amongst the respectable classes?’

  Mulholland, to whom this appeal was directed, made the following response.

  ‘I have sometime asked the inspector that, and he has given me always the one word in answer, sir.’

  Roach waited.

  ‘Experience,’ said Mulholland. He nodded politely and followed his inspector out of the door.

  6

  I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man and true.

  I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do.

  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, ‘The Revenge’

  Benjamin Disraeli followed the erect form of Sir Henry Ponsonby, the Queen’s private secretary, down a long corridor of Buckingham Palace towards the Royal reception chamber.

  They walked in silence. Disraeli measured the man’s military back and wondered how many daggers he could safely plunge in. Quite a few. It was a broad back.

  He did not trust Ponsonby. The secretary belonged to the other camp and who knows how many were the keyholes against which he pressed his Liberal ear?

  One of Disraeli’s many talents was insidious character assassination, an invaluable weapon in politics, and he had no scruples about using this talent to poison Victoria’s mind against the man. To a certain extent he had succeeded: Ponsonby’s influence had waned and Disraeli gloried in the fact, but not enough, not enough by a long chalk, the fellow was still too close to the Queen.

  Close enough, for instance, to look over her shoulder and slide the resultant information of her communications with Disraeli towards the enemy.

  Ponsonby stopped at a door and turned.

  ‘Her Majesty is most anxious to see you, prime minister,’ he said in his usual bluff direct fashion, not that it fooled Disraeli. It was an honest open face and therefore all the more to be suspected.

  ‘Dear me. And what has caused this anxiety, I wonder?’ murmured Disraeli, eyes veiled in apparent thought.

  ‘I am sure she will tell you, sir.’

  But then as Ponsonby lifted his hand to knock softly upon the door, Disraeli slid in the knife.

  ‘The election, Sir Henry, how do you think it will result?’

  ‘I am sure I do not know,’ was the careful reply.

  Disraeli laughed suddenly, eyes creased in amusement, charm personified.

  ‘But you are of the Liberal faith, Sir Henry. You must wish William Gladstone to prevail, trample us Tories to the ground like so many snakes!’

  He laughed again. A high-pitched sound, like steel on stone, and his eyelids batted together in a strangely feminine fashion.

  All terribly pleasant. Ponsonby’s back stiffened a notch.

  ‘My politics have never interfered with my function, sir. I merely wish what is best for the country.’

  ‘And your Queen, surely?’ responded the prime minister with devious, toxic humour.

  ‘And my Queen,’ came the stolid reply.

  Sir Henry always seemed to play with a straight bat. That was even less to be trusted.

  ‘Then let us hope,’ said Disraeli with a winning smile, ‘that both are satisfied. Queen and country.’

  For a moment the two looked at each other, then Ponsonby nodded somewhat jerkily, tapped upon the door and opened it slowly.

  ‘The prime minister, Your Majesty,’ he announced.

  Disraeli slid through the aperture and the door closed behind, shutting off Ponsonby, his abhorrent Liberal tendencies and the rest of the known world.

  Now, for as long as this lasted, Disraeli was safe. The door was thick and there was a large key stuck in the lock to this side. No eavesdropping from the enemy.

  In the middle of the room, stood a small, dark-clad figure. His Queen. He resisted the impulse to fall upon his knees, it would be the devil’s own job getting up again.

  She extended her arm. Benjamin Disraeli took the plump little hand in both of his, bowed deep, kissed it and murmured as always, ‘In loving loyalty and faith.’

  He straightened up with some difficulty, and looked into the worried eyes of his Faerie Queen.

  ‘That dreadful man, you will defeat him, Mr Disraeli. Anything less shall not be countenanced.’

  Queen Victoria waved her arms in the air as if pursued by Highland midges and motioned her prime minister towards a chair which she herself had set, precisely in the middle of the reception room.

  Disraeli sat down gratefully although he had, of late, been experiencing some severe pains in the region of his back passage, and the chair, like so much of Buckingham Palace, seemed to have been constructed with the utmost discomfort in mind.

  ‘I shall do my best, Your Majesty,’ he replied a trifle wearily, ‘but I am afraid the final decision will be that of the populace, an unfortunate disadvantage for our small measure of democracy.’

  She adored his sly humour but took a stern part in the dance between them.

  ‘Shame on you, sir, to doubt the people of this country. They have more sense than to vote for someone of such … questionable temperament.’

  ‘Many things about Mr Gladstone are questionable, save the one. He has stamina. Mark you, so does the hybrid mule.’

  Victoria smiled and Disraeli put up a languid hand to touch the one dyed black curl which dangled down the centre of the mighty dome of his forehead. His dry skin and hooded eyes brought to mind the appearance of some exotic reptile.

  In 1874, these six years past, his Conservative party had swept in with a healthy majority over the crumbling Liberal government of William Gladstone. Disraeli himself had been prime minister in 1868, before being leapfrogged by the People’s William, and, having triumphed once more, teetered back towards his Queen like a slightly mildewed second bridegroom.

  From that very moment they were in accord. She had not enjoyed her sojourn with Gladstone who had treated her like a public department. Disraeli treated her like a woman and would defend the empire to the last drop of blood. He had very lofty views.

  Victoria watched him where he sat and nodded silent approval. He was her prime minister and for these six happy years they had mourned together, she for her husband Prince Albert, he for his wife Mary, though Victoria always thought the woman a bit of a flibbertigibbet while pleasant enough.

  Nevertheless, Disraeli, like herself, grieved constantly. The black border round their letters had not diminished in thickness by one iota during all that time.

  And within these black borders, he had courted her assiduously, a delicate chivalrous courtship which, of course, would never speak its name. A conduct most becoming.

  She was Victoria Regina after all, the Empress of India, the imperial bond between them reinforced each year he stayed atop the greasy pole of politics. She felt at home with this strange creature, this Jew who had taken the Church of England as his guide and buckler. But now …?

  The Queen moved away restlessly and Disraeli watched with a certain detached amusement as she glided around the room like an anxious little pigeon looking for berries.

  ‘I received your letter in thanks for the snowdrops, it was most … welcome,’ she said distractedly, fussing with a particularly hideous brocaded cushion which was not worth the fussing over. Indeed, were that all to Othello’s hand in the pl
ay when he sought to smother Desdemona, the poor creature might yet have lived. Even the Moor in the height of his jealous passion would not have deigned to touch such a gruesome object.

  Disraeli roused himself from this meditation.

  ‘As were the flowers themselves, ma’am. Faerie gifts from Queen Titania.’

  ‘From Osborne House to be precise,’ she replied dryly. ‘Primroses will follow.’

  ‘Your Majesty’s sceptre has touched the enchanted isle.’

  He opened his arms in an extravagant gesture as if receiving an onslaught of flowers and her lips twitched in response. He did lay on the flattery with a trowel but she bathed delightedly in the wash of words.

  ‘Indeed the Isle of Wight can be enchanted and so before the rest of the country.’

  ‘In climatic terms, most definitely,’ was his dry response.

  Disraeli had, from time to time, visited her island retreat at Osborne and found little there to occupy him, except the avoidance of seagull droppings.

  She sensed the cynicism and bridled a little.

  ‘I am aware, Mr Disraeli, that you do not hold Nature in great affection.’

  He put his head to one side, like a curious tropical bird.

  ‘Dear madam,’ he murmured, ‘if you but command me, I shall cover myself in woad and spend the rest of my life in woodland contemplation.’

  The image was so ridiculous that she burst out in laughter. He followed suit and, for a moment, the two of them guffawed like a pair of old wives at the market. Then there was silence.

  ‘I am reminded,’ her eyes were glinting in mischief and there was a glimpse of a younger self, ‘for a reason I cannot bring to mind, of the time my dear mother walked out of the dining room holding a fork, which she had mistaken for her fan.’

  She let out another roar of laughter then put a hand up to cover her mouth as if to contain the life force.

  He did the same in perfect mimicry and they looked at each other like two Wise Monkeys.

  When she removed her hand, the face was once more the solemn, heavy visage which the world knew as Victoria Regina.

  She turned away, went swiftly to the window and gazed out into the Mall where her subjects moved and jostled in an incessant stream, the carriages clattering, pedestrians swarming like ants, all going about their business, all with their secret thoughts. All, well at least those who were franchised, soon about to vote.

  Disraeli, meantime, was in a quandary. It was a great honour to be allowed a seated audience, in fact he knew of no other person granted this privilege, and he would take care, as always, to conceal the chair behind a screen before leaving so no one might ever discern the fact. But for now he was rather incarcerated.

  Like Macbeth. Cabined, cribbed, confined … and what was the rest of the quote? … bound in to saucy doubts and fears. Quite so. Quite so.

  He may as well be wedged in a chamber pot. His buttocks were chafing on the stuffing of the chair, which seemed to be composed entirely of granite chips. Yet, he could not rise without Her Majesty’s permission. He was a victim of her uniquely granted privilege and favour.

  The phrase amused him and his long upper lip twitched like a horse’s as he gazed around the room.

  Disraeli disdained Buckingham Palace, so much of the décor seemed like some sort of vulgar wedding cake.

  Above his head, a garish chandelier hung like the sword of Damocles. That phrase did not amuse, so he fixed his eyes upon the broad back of his beloved Faerie Queen.

  She had assumed the throne at the age of eighteen and they thought she would come in like a lamb, but, by God, they quickly changed their tune. Forty-three years on, and she still had the heart of a lion. What nerve. What muscle. What energy. Some Faerie.

  And indeed, he did love her. She was the only person left in the world that he could love. He remembered a moment not long after his wife had died when he to his Queen, quite out of the blue, a surprise even to himself, had said … ‘Every night, when I return home, I find another empty room.’

  Victoria had looked at him with such feeling in her eyes. She understood the emptiness within. It was a moment of rare simplicity. They both treasured such moments.

  ‘Did you know,’ she still gazed out of the window, ‘that when I was very young, they used to pin a sprig of holly to the front of my dress?’

  ‘The Ancient Romans,’ Disraeli shifted uneasily, ‘considered the holly sprig a symbol of health and well-being, Your Majesty, and of course at Christmas time we are festooned from top to bottom with that particular evergreen.’

  ‘It was not for that.’ She turned back from the window. ‘It was to keep my chin up.’

  ‘A somewhat unnecessary precaution, I would have thought.’ He shifted buttocks again. Damn the thing.

  ‘You may stand, Mr Disraeli.’

  He uncoiled from the chair with as much grace as his ageing bones would allow, stuck out his right leg and assumed a posture which suggested that of an actor about to deliver a long speech.

  ‘As Your Majesty commands.’

  Disraeli took out a scented handkerchief and dabbed at his lips, the rings on his fingers glittering as he took care not to stray to where the rouge delicately enhanced the pallor of his cheeks.

  ‘I am told,’ Victoria said abruptly, ‘that your friends call you … Dizzy. Is that so?’

  ‘A derivation more than a description, my dear madam,’ he drawled, the ghost of a smile on his lips.

  There was a churning in the royal stomach. She did not want to lose this man. She had been bereaved of her beloved Albert and it near broke her heart. She was unsure if the same organ could stand the prospect of losing another dear friend. It could not be.

  ‘You must win this election, Dizzy. You must remain my prime minister. I will not have the barbarian at my gate.’

  ‘The portents are promising, Your Majesty.’

  Yet somewhere, despite the recent fervour created through the opening of Parliament by the Queen in her new glass coach, the Royal visage being seen from every angle, despite the recent by-election results, results so favourable they had seduced him into going to the polls in the first place, despite publicly flaying Gladstone’s Liberals as a party of appeasement who would muzzle the British bulldog, despite all this, Disraeli sensed the people might possibly alter course.

  The imperial dream had spawned some puny detractors and then there was the recent fiasco of the Zulu War where the Queen’s great favourite Lord Chelmsford, a vainglorious idiot in command of the British forces, had caused the death of nearly fourteen hundred men at Isandhlwana.

  Disraeli had protected the lying numbskull because Victoria doted upon the fellow, but it had cost the prime minister in public and political opinion.

  It had been a pre-emptive war, an invasion under the guise of freeing the land from a despot, King Cetshwayo. Of course the fellow was a tyrant but he hardly presented a threat to the Western world, which was the other fictional reason for the offensive action. To invade another country at this juncture was not a good idea.

  Not with the Russian bear growling in Afghanistan, which was another pretty kettle of fish. The Forward Policy to defend India’s borders by extending them as far as the Hindu Kush and bring a large part of the country under imperial rule had ended in military victory.

  But defeating the tribesmen did not necessarily mean controlling them, as the First Afghan War had so painfully proved. Now there was a second, and once more the threat of local uprisings against the occupying army which presented an easy target to those who wore no uniform, struck from the shadows and then melted back into a sympathetic populace.

  The cost of the conflict and, from Gladstone’s entrenched moral probity of opinion, the doubtful ethics involved, had unleashed some of the most excoriating oratory from the great Midlothian tree-feller.

  ‘Remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as that of your ow
n!’

  Gladstone had thundered thus in Dalkeith.

  Indeed the man was thundering everywhere like an American stumping orator.

  Also there was the small matter of six bad harvests in a row. Disraeli had not personally arranged the weather but politicians get blamed for everything.

  The Queen did not seem totally convinced by his reading of the oracle, so he tried a recent witticism which had its roots in a dark wish.

  ‘Does Her Majesty know the difference between a misfortune and a calamity?’

  ‘I have had both in my life,’ was the response.

  Oh dear. Not promising, never mind, press on regardless.

  ‘If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity.’

  A small smile. No more than that. Then, for the first time of that meeting, they looked squarely into each other’s eyes. A rare simplicity.

  Victoria drew herself up in queenly stance to match his actor’s pose.

  ‘We must put our trust in God, Mr Disraeli,’ she asserted somewhat throatily. ‘He will command the field.’

  ‘He will indeed, madam.’

  But Disraeli did not say what form this God might take. Or where He might strike. Like a serpent.

  Certain words had been dropped in a certain quarter, as regards the Queen’s deep disquietude. Certain events might have been set in motion and, if need arose and these events assume an ominous turn, what would he know of it all?

  His hands were clean. Especially under the nails.

  7

  I met a lady in the meads

  Full beautiful, a faery’s child

  Her hair was long, her foot was light

  And her eyes were wild.

  JOHN KEATS, ‘La belle dame sans merci’

  McLevy on the saunter, Mulholland loping along at his side like an Irish setter.

  This had once been the inspector’s favourite pursuit, a gentle perambulation through the streets of Leith to observe his charges, most of them doing their level best to avoid his eye.

  The delvers, the nymphs and their pounces, the low and high thieves, the bolters, the pleaders, the sneaks, the climbers, the thimblers, the cardsharps, the young keelies with their shooting jackets, caps and fancy girls, the dollymops, shopgirls and maids who slipped out from their place of work to sell their favours, then last but not least, the lost causes.