by Bob Biderman
‘”Yes, of course. It’s very good, though I might have written it differently.”
‘”Have you read the 5th edition?”
‘”I’m not certain what edition it was that I read”, I admitted.
‘He handed it to me, carefully folded so that I could see the offending passage. I copy it here in full, as much to remind me how fine a line there is between odiousness and honour, as to have a record of betrayal (even one for a cause that is just).
When Mr Hayward left, the editor of this journal was placed in one of those difficult positions in which all the commonplaces of ethics seem to point one way and paramount and imperious duty in another. To save Lipski – to prevent a judicial murder of the most aggravated kind, one way lay open, and only one way. Publish the fact that Mr Justice Stephen is, to say the least, haunted by a terrible doubt as to whether Lipski is not as innocent as the poor woman for whose murder he is to be hanged, and his execution becomes morally impossible.
But then the conversation was private, the interview confidential. We were in precise terms interdicted from using it. If we published it, Mr Justice Stephen might be very angry. Mr Hayward would fall into disgrace and we should have to face the odium of a breach of confidence. ‘You have no right to use a private conversation.’ ‘If you don’t, an innocent man will be hanged.’ ‘But save Mr Hayward’s client.’ ‘And no one will trust you any more.’ ‘Well, when a life is at stake they had better not tell me anything that would save that life and expect me to keep it secret.’
And so, after many arguments pro and con, we decided that our first instinctive conclusion was the true one, and we publish the above statement just as we received it…’
‘I looked up at Myers, who had been following my eyes as I read. He bade me turn the page and continue:’
When going to press a boy brought up a letter from Mr Hayward, couched as follows:
Dear Sir – I do most sincerely trust you will not report my private conversation with the judge; it would ruin my professional standing and, what is more consequence, it would be adverse to the interest of my poor client. – Yours very truly, John Hayward.’
CHAPTER 40
HE MET HER at the coffee stall on Garrick Street just outside Covent Garden. They sat at a rickety table the stall keeper had placed there for the convenience of his customers who shifted as the wayward sun from the earliest costermongers still rubbing their sleepy eyes, to businessmen staving off the boredom of their jobs, to shoppers come to fetch their daily fare, to tired workers wanting liquid vigour, to ladies of the night who might share a penny’s worth of cocoa whilst dreaming of their princes.
‘The judge was furious,’ Maggie said. ‘He wrote his wife to say it was a wicked lie from end to end.’
‘How do you know?’ Z asked.
‘I have my sources which I shall protect better than that awful man who dares call himself a journalist.’
Z looked at her and thought what a remarkable woman she was. It’s not that he hadn’t felt that way before, it was simply as time went by this subliminal realisation had transformed itself into conscious admiration.
Certainly the judge was furious and the consequences were not as Stead had predicted – the people did not rise up demanding action; Justice Stephen simply reverted back to his native intransigence. Yet there was still hope, he thought, if only a glimmer – like the tiny flame that flickers from a dying candle.
And there were things happening that ratcheted up the pressure for Matthews to relent and offer a stay of execution. A petition with over two thousand signatures had been forwarded to the Home Office. And that very day on the floor of the House, a question was to be put to Matthews by Cunningham Graham.
‘What more can be done?’ Maggie asked, as much to the rising moon as to the man who set opposite. ‘It’s so late in the day.’ Then fixing Z once more in her gaze she said, ‘Certainly there must be someone of importance who can intercede…’
What she didn’t say, what she couldn’t say – at least not to him – was that surely there were people, his people, who were powerful enough to come to Lipski’s aid. What about the Rothschilds? Or the Mocattas? They wielded enormous power. Surely people like that could force insignificant creatures like Matthews and Stephen to listen.
But she didn’t say that to him because part of her knew it was wrong. She knew deep down that issues like poverty and injustice had to do with one’s position in the world and those who controlled the wealth of nations owed allegiance to power itself regardless of race or religion.
Another side of her, however, truly thought that Jews tended to be – well, there was no other word for it – conspiratorial. Where this feeling came from she didn’t know nor did she ever try to analyse it. Mostly she was able to quell what she regarded as her baser instincts. But sometimes, like now, they surfaced despite herself.
‘Greenberg has spoken with Baron de Worms,’ Z told her.
‘The MP?” she said.
He nodded. ‘Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade. Baron de Worms, it seems, knows Matthews quite well. Their families were both involved in Ceylon…’
‘Doing what?’
‘Helping set up plantations for the coffee trade – till the blight started killing coffee off. Then they switched over to tea.’
‘Fellow Empire builders,’ she muttered.
‘At least it’s a connection,’ said Z. He didn’t say that Baron de Worms was also a Jew, because he understood what she had left unsaid – she didn’t need to say it aloud for him to comprehend her feelings because he assumed that deep down all Christians felt like that. And he knew that the Baron was as far removed from the penniless Ashkenazi hoards as Maggie was from her own Saxon forebears. ‘Greenberg is trying to convince him to set up a meeting between Hayward and Matthews. Hayward has also written to the Queen. A final plea before the hangman comes.’
Maggie found herself staring into his eyes and thinking they were eyes unlike any she had seen in a man. Gentle and strong: an appealing combination. But there was also vulnerability and something else; not exactly sadness, rather a sense of the French tristesse – a kind of sorrow that comes not so much from the head but from deep inside the heart. A sadness that is, perhaps, ancestral.
Z, on the other hand, was looking past Maggie at the coffee stall itself. Like hundreds of others that had sprung up around the city, it provided a cosy café atmosphere without walls and often without tables and chairs (though sometimes, like here, a rickety one or two). Coffee was brewed in large, five gallon tins set over a charcoal brazier keeping the essence – well mixed with burnt carrot and chicory – piping hot throughout the day and evening. A display shelf held an assortment of cakes and buttered bread. Another held the coffee mugs and saucers.
He had recently done an article on the coffee trade and had found it a fascinating business. So the link that had been forged between Matthews, the Home Secretary, and de Worms, Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, being coffee related set off a chain of strange ideas in his head. Why, for instance, had Lipski’s landlady been out the morning of the murder? To fetch him a fresh pot of coffee, of course. Coffee that he didn’t drink, as the landlady had testified. When she had later felt the pot, it had already cooled. Just as the leads in this convoluted case had grown cold and distant.
But Maggie was thinking how calming it was to be sitting with him there, out in the open, by the wonderful market of Covent Garden that she so loved. At this time of the evening there was still a residual buzz even though the market itself had ceased for the day because, in truth, the market never ended. The finish of one day simply coincided with the beginning of the next in a lovely continuity of movement like stars dancing in the firmament.
And where else could they be sitting if they wanted to drink a cup of coffee as well as talk? The café at the British Museum was her first choice, but
not at this hour. That’s where she’d meet her fellow readers and chat about the ideas of the day with women like Eleanor Marx and that sweet young writer, Amy Levy, another Jew of course, who reminded her slightly of Z, himself.
Then there were the writers’ cafes of Bloomsbury set around the Museum, as if huddled there for safety as well as companionship, and those even more bohemian ones in the muddy streets of Soho. But you could never be alone there; in fact, you’d be almost sure to meet authors touting their latest book, painters back from Paris, Russian Narodniks, travelling acrobats. So a coffee stall by Covent Market wasn’t a bad place to meet if you wanted to be alone, especially if the things you had to say needed to be said in private.
But they weren’t engaged in idle banter. As the evening was swallowed into night, the mood shifted and their tone became more sombre. Death, up till now, had been held at bay by faith and by the ticking of the clock which still had many hours. But now the hours were few and fewer and faith was starting to flounder. For in three short days the young man Lipski would die, strangled at the end of a hangman’s rope. And British Justice, they felt (for different reasons), would possibly die with him.
CHAPTER 41
A WEEK’S REPRIEVE! The papers would have shouted it out except they weren’t printed on Sunday. Z learned about it from Myers who had sent a note by special courier.
‘I wanted you to know, Hayward received a copy of the telegram sent by Matthews to the governor of Newgate – it reads as follows: “In communicating the enclosed Respite to Israel Lipski, be good enough to inform him distinctly that it is granted not from any doubt existing in my mind as to the verdict or sentence, but merely to enable his solicitor to make certain enquiries which he has asked to be allowed to make. The convict must clearly understand that unless these enquiries put a new aspect upon the case the sentence will be carried into effect. I am, Sir, your obedient servant, Henry Matthews.”
The Committee for the Defence of Israel Lipski gathered at Hayward’s office that afternoon to celebrate. Hayward’s wife had baked a beautiful cake to mark the occasion – but nobody could figure out if it was kosher. So it sat forlornly on the conference table looking moist and luscious while everyone there – Hayward, Myers, Greenberg, Krantz, Z and Maggie – gazed at it with eyes burning with lustful hunger.
‘What would be in a lovely cake like that to make it not suitable under Jewish law?’ Maggie whispered to Z.
‘Lard,’ he whispered back. ‘Hayward doesn’t know whether his wife used lard or butter – or both.’
It was Krantz who finally took up the knife and began slicing off pieces and handing them around.
‘God will forgive us,’ he said.
And everyone gratefully accepted their slice, except Greenberg who, patting his ample tummy, said he was restricted by his very severe diet demanded of him by his heartless doctor.
But everyone, including Greenberg, accepted a glass of champagne from a magnum which had mysteriously appeared – though no one claimed to have brought it.
They toasted Lipski with fervent wishes that this short respite might lead to his freedom. They toasted Hayward for his single-minded determination to defend an innocent man regardless of personal cost. And they toasted Myers, who was the anchor that kept the good ship Defender from floating off aimlessly into the endless miasma – though he, himself, pooh-poohed the idea.
It was only then they saw the note which had been affixed to the magnum in such a way as to have been easily mistaken for a label.
Greenberg read it out: ‘From W.T. Stead, Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Three resounding cheers to Mr Hayward and his staff!’
At once the room fell silent. And it remained so until Greenberg raised his glass and offered up another toast:
‘To Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette!’
The room remained embarrassingly quiet.
Then a strange thing happened. Hayward raised his glass: ‘To Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette!’ he said.
And they all drank to Hayward’s toast. All, that is, except Myers.
CHAPTER 42
Z HAD BEEN furiously writing articles for the Jewish press, trying to build the momentum for commutation as well as cast a net into the community that he felt held the key to solving this maddening case, once and for all. For he suspected person or persons unknown had information that could help gain the missing piece still absent from this grotesque jigsaw. And these persons unknown could only be found by trawling the depths of the ghetto – not through the English press but by means of the media which could leap the linguistic divide into that hidden world journals like the Pall Mall Gazette or even the Jewish Chronicle could never penetrate.
Besides, the established Jewish press shied away from publishing anything that seemed to be championing Lipski. Even Mordecai at the Jewish Record told him, ‘This case has gone on far too long,’ as he handed back Z’s proffered article. ‘If one Jew didn’t do it, then it was two. And that would double our trouble, wouldn’t it? Did you read what happened in Kishinev the other day? Another pogrom! You think it can’t happen here? Ask my friend from Prague or my other friend from Vienna!’
The most he could get out of Mordecai was a quiet plea for respite, simply asking for British fair play, if not full-blown justice. To Z it was a cap-in-hand, thank-you-sir, if-you-would-be-so-kind, sort of pleading that he would have nothing to do with.
So it was left to the anarchist Yiddish press printed by ancient machine or copied by hand on single sheets of foolscap and distributed in places like Sonnenschein’s Strudel House or plastered on dirty brick walls throughout the East End.
But who were they, really, this ghostly audience? These were people fighting back starvation and, if lucky enough to work, spending sixteen hours a day cooped up in dark, squalid, sweaty hovels. Lipski was an immigrant Jew and people in the East End of London might sympathise with his plight, but they had seen death in many forms, each one brutal and grotesque. They had seen children malnourished and girls forced into prostitution so their families could have a crust of bread. What was justice to them when the mortuary wagon was just around the bend?
It was Jerome who told him what Z probably knew but couldn’t admit to himself. ‘This Lipski case is a quagmire. Once you step in it’s hard to extricate yourself. But you don’t want to sink so deep that you suffocate alongside him.’
‘It’s gone far beyond the guilt or innocence of a single man,’ Z told him, realising, of course, that Jerome wouldn’t understand.
It was true. Jerome didn’t understand what Z was actually trying to say. But he did understand something else. ‘Have you read that new book by Louis? It’s already sold thousands of copies here. And it’s all the rage in America. It’s called, Strange Case of Dr Something-or-other…’
Z shook his head.
‘I saw Henry the other day – Henry James. He thinks it’s a work of genius. It’s about a man who always treads the straight and narrow, kind and charming – you know the type. But he has a secret desire to explore the moral hinterland. So he invents a potion that releases him from his propriety – except it all goes wrong…’
Of course, Dostoyevsky played around with this idea some years before. Z had read him in French as his work hadn’t been translated into English yet. (And when it was finally translated, it was done by an English schoolmarm who censored the passion and Eastern European angst with a flick of her pen.)
That wasn’t the point, he told Jerome. There are demons in anyone that could emerge under certain circumstances. But sometimes these demons are invented by those in power who find it necessary, for reasons of their own, to burn a few witches.
CHAPTER 43
Z AND MAGGIE are walking together back to the East End from Hayward’s office. Maggie has taken a folded sheet of paper from her bag and hands it to Z as they stroll.
Unfolding the paper
, he sees that it is written in child-like script.
‘It’s a copy of a letter from Judge Stephen to his wife,’ Maggie tells him. ‘I showed it to Myers but I didn’t want to show it to the others.’
Z reads through the text. He is quite adept at reading as he walks. Indeed, he has completed entire books while strolling through Hampstead Gardens. And this is what the copy of the letter said:
‘I have decided to return tomorrow after thinking over and over Lipski’s case. I decided at last, this morning, to telegraph Matthews to respite the man for a week, to satisfy the public and avoid the appearance of haste. I do not doubt the man’s guilt, but I thought the execution was to follow too quickly on the consideration of the case and I felt also that when we held our final conversation on Thursday night, I had been rather tired and hurried, and I wished to make assurance doubly sure. I shall therefore go back to town tomorrow, thoroughly restudy the whole case, from first to last, and probably come back to my first opinion, for I do not see how anything new can come out. I am dreadfully vexed about the whole matter, as you can imagine, and the worst of it is that everyone will say I was bullied into it by that blackguard Stead. In fact his disgusting interferences tempted me violently to hold off from all interference at all, but that would have been a vile motive to act upon. I have tried to do right, but it has been a most trying time, and I shall not forget it for a long time…’
Finished reading, Z re-folds the paper and hands it back to Maggie. ‘How did it come into your possession?’ he asks.
‘I was given it by a friend,’ she says.
‘Your friend needs to practice her penmanship,’ he replies.
She purses her lips. ‘It tells us what we’re up against, doesn’t it?’
‘We were under no illusions,’ he says. But saying that, he realises they probably were. Those who knew Justice Stephen told them he was a stubborn man with fixed ideas. However, some thought he was malleable. His elder brother, Leslie, was a friend of artists and was well known in bohemian circles. Justice Stephen didn’t live in a bubble.
