The Street Philosopher

by Matthew Plampin

  Such upright decency, Boyce thought, from a paid assassin. ‘There was no arrangement. Remember that. We were merely acquaintances.’

  The slightest of smiles returned to Twelves’ unsavoury features. ‘Very well.’

  Boyce replaced the unlit cigar in his coatee and brushed the cuff covering his wooden hand. ‘I will leave your imbursement here at the Albion, with notice that it is for a local apothecary. It will be a generous sum for the work. Should you be caught, I will of course deny all knowledge and leave you to your fate.’ He turned his head a fraction, meeting the hired man’s eye. ‘Be sure that you tell them at whose behest it is done. And make Cracknell suffer. I wish him to suffer.’

  ‘He will, sir, never fear. They both will.’ There was now a note of something very like admiration in Twelves’ voice. ‘May I say, Brigadier, that it is always a pleasure to serve a gent who knows ’is mind. I can truly respect that. No qualms. One thing ye encounter a fair amount in this trade, sir, is qualms. Norton had ’em in spades. Cause no end of bother.’

  Boyce frowned, his tolerance for this meeting at an end. ‘I do not ask for your damned respect,’ he snapped. ‘Just do as I order.’

  He swivelled on his heel and walked back towards the hotel.

  Cregg reached into his pocket for the bottle. It was crudely cast from brown glass and had no label. He could not remember purchasing it, or what it contained. There were only a couple of swallows left, at any rate–reckoning that he’d need the steel, he popped the cork and drained it in one. The liquid caused an involuntary twitch, and then a deep shiver. He smacked his lips together, flipping the empty bottle around so that he held the neck, and then brought it round abruptly against the wall beside him.

  With reverential care, Cregg lifted up the broken end. The jagged edges glittered in the gaslight that seeped into the alley from the square beyond. You can keep your rifles and your bayonets, he thought–give me a good sharp bit of glass any day of the bleedin’ week. He stole to the alley’s mouth, and took a careful look at the open ground beyond.

  Piccadilly was heaving with crowds. Teams of labourers and carpenters were busy preparing the decorations to mark the Queen’s procession through the city the following day. Multi-coloured poles were being erected along the length of the main promenades, and capacious wooden balconies were going up in front of almost every building. Beneath the flat orange light of the gas lamps, wagons loaded with flags and banners were being emptied, their contents hung everywhere that could possibly accommodate them. Around this industry, large numbers had gathered simply to watch and chatter. Many of these spectators had umbrellas under their arms and glanced up frequently at the sky, which had grown increasingly stormy as the afternoon’s light faded.

  All of this stood in his favour, Cregg decided. The combination of crowds, colourful banners and rainy gloom meant that he’d be able to get across the square without drawing any undue attention to himself. Then he could get his satisfaction, and melt away like the darkness at dawn. He had a notion that whilst the crushers were busy mopping up at the hotel, he could do a spot of robbing on the London Road or thereabouts with a good chance of success, drumming up some ready funds to get him on the next train back to the Metropolis, and away from this arse-hole of a city for good. The plan seemed so simple, so damn sound, that he cursed himself for not settling on it sooner.

  He studied the entrance to the Albion Hotel. It was lit up brightly against the evening. He’d have to keep a close lookout, and pick his moment carefully.

  Leaning down to check the makeshift sackcloth dressings he’d applied to his leg, Cregg felt suddenly unsteady, his head light. He wondered how many days it had been since he’d eaten anything. His eyes seemed to be losing their focus. He blinked, and the orbs of gaslight that lined the promenade each produced a twin, a perfect double that slowly drifted back over until the two images aligned and became one once more. He knocked the back of his skull against the bricks behind him three times, took a few deep breaths and then peered out at Piccadilly again.

  The Royal Infirmary stood opposite the alley, rising up imposingly in the centre of the square. Cregg’s dizzy stare roamed from the columns of the portico, up to the dome and then settled on the main body of the building beneath. A lamp had just been placed in a window on the first floor. Beside it, a nurse was leaning down to help a man with a heavily bandaged head to sit up in his bed, so that he could see something of the preparations underway outside. The nurse was solicitous and gentle, even taking hold of the man’s arm to help him to the sill. Cregg wiped his watering eyes and gulped, unwanted remembrance of his own time in hospital coming to him with ugly clarity.

  After falling before the Redan, Cregg had been out for the best part of four days. He had awoken from this black slumber to find himself bound and bleeding in the hospital at Scutari. His bed was in the cellars, away from all daylight, where the low stone arches echoed dully with screams and whimpers, and the ragged sound of weak men vomiting. The nurses were but distant, pale figures, drifting like phantoms through the corridors.

  Confined to this grim dungeon, Cregg grew confused. The agony from his wounds was constant, gnawing, utterly unbearable. The face, at first, was particularly bad. He was beset day and night by fat Turkish flies, which tried to crawl in amongst the bandages and lay their eggs in his tattered cheek. He could not sleep, and in the tomb-like darkness a voice in his head started to mutter nasty things. It reminded him repeatedly who was to blame for his ordeal–who had mashed him up, killed his pals, and deserved to bleedin’ well die himself. And it did not stop once he was back in old England either; only liquor, he soon learned, an earnest devotion to hard liquor, could quiet its jabbering.

  Some whistles from across the square pulled him back to the present. A small crowd had gathered around the entrance to the Albion. The porters were attempting to keep them back as a fancy carriage was waved up to the door. Inside the hotel, he saw the briefest flash of a red sleeve. It was time for him to act.

  Cregg started out across Piccadilly, the bottle sliding a little in his clammy palm. He stepped over a pile of pale flower garlands, which were about to be strung up between the gaily-coloured poles. The first drops of rain fell upon his ruined features as he hurried on.

  He passed by the glossy horses, all champing at their bits, and the coachman, who was pulling up his collar against the breaking storm. He’d go for the neck. There’d be no quarter for the bastard then–he’d be certain to breathe his last on the cobbles of Manchester. And what a well deserved end it would be.

  There he was, stepping out of the hotel: Colonel Boyce. Now trussed up as a general or some such, but still the same old bleedin’ Boyce, pretty much unchanged in Cregg’s eyes. See how he steps towards his carriage, the crippled veteran fumed, so full of his own worth, and his power over the rest of us! And those moustaches, those bleedin’ moustaches, so sharp and huge! Boyce had presided as Cregg had dangled half-naked and bloody from a cartwheel, his head lolling, weathering the lash; Boyce had cowered beneath those rocks at Inkerman, whilst Major Maynard was lost to the Russian guns; Boyce had jutted into view at a dozen skirmishes afterwards, directing decent men to their doom whilst staying safely in the rear. And Cregg was willing to bet the shirt off his back that it was Boyce who had ordered him to the Forlorn Hope for the first assault on the Great Redan.

  For a long second, Cregg was so overwhelmed by the sight of his intended victim that he stood transfixed, almost fearful, like a rabbit before a stoat; then his hatred, his resolution flowed back into him. He shoved aside the handful of people who stood between them, the broken bottle ready in his hand.

  ‘It might–could—’ Nunn began. He stopped, shaking his head in frustration. Boyce paused just before the door, regarding him with some impatience. ‘It seems to, to—’

  ‘Come on, Mr Nunn,’ said the Brigadier-General. ‘Out with it, man.’

  ‘R-rain, Briga-Brigadier,’ Nunn mumbled. ‘It seems to be about to… about to�
��’ He stopped, wiping away the excess of spittle that had gathered around his lips with a handkerchief kept in the sleeve of his dress-coat expressly for this purpose.

  ‘Rain?’ Boyce looked out of the nearest window, over the heads of the crowd. ‘So it has arrived at last. Honestly, this wretched city. Tell the porters to bring an umbrella, would you?’ Nunn started to amble uncertainly across the lobby. ‘Actually, Mr Nunn, stay where you are. I’ll see to it.’

  They called him an idiot, but this was not true.

  For a long time after his return from the war–a year, they told him–Nunn had not been able to remember anything. His parents, his sisters, his oldest friends, all had come before him, and had managed to elicit no response whatsoever. Francis Nunn, First Lieutenant of the Paulton Rangers, seemed to have lost his mind to a piece of Russian shrapnel.

  Then, quite unexpectedly, his father received a letter from none other than his former commander; and within a week, Brigadier-General Boyce had arrived at the Bath sanatorium in which Nunn had been sequestered. The effect of this distinguished visitor’s presence upon him was pronounced and immediate. He had struggled to stand the moment Boyce first entered the room, and soon began to speak, to answer simple questions–far more than he had done since his return from the war. The Brigadier-General had stayed for several days, spending long hours alone with him, discussing their time in the Crimea together. These conversations had proved a stern mental test for the depleted young officer. Boyce had been keen indeed to learn what he could or could not recall.

  A few months afterwards, Nunn had received the appointment. He found himself dressed up in a uniform once again, and dispatched to the Brigadier-General’s headquarters. He was, he slowly came to understand, an aide-de-camp, and a captain. His duties seemed to consist of little more than following Boyce around, opening doors for him, standing behind his chair, and sitting in his carriage. Nunn experienced some unease at this strange new life, but was unable to identify its cause. He felt as if his brain was wrapped up in stifling gauze, as if every word he tried to utter was a fiendish puzzle he simply could not solve; as if even the very simplest of actions was a double-time march up a steep hill with a full field pack strapped to his back.

  The Brigadier-General returned with an umbrella. ‘I do hope this latest downpour won’t delay us any further,’ he said briskly, handing the leathery contraption to Nunn. ‘Colonel Bennett told me that poor Wray is usually asleep by seven. I wouldn’t want to have to make the journey out to Bennett’s place again on another occasion.’ The Brigadier-General looked at his aide-de-camp. ‘You remember Wray, Mr Nunn, don’t you? You have spoken of him before.’

  Nunn blinked, trying his hardest to think. Nothing came to him.

  The Brigadier-General sighed. ‘No matter, Mr Nunn. Do not trouble yourself.’ He gestured towards the carriage outside.

  Summoning all his powers of concentration, Nunn opened up the umbrella, stepping through the Albion’s double doors as he did so. There was only a narrow stretch of open ground between the doors and the carriage. The wide umbrella almost covered it completely. He held it up in the air with a reasonable approximation of smartness, and Brigadier-General Boyce emerged into the wet Manchester evening.

  Nunn’s reactions were not what they once had been–far from it. But he noticed the man in the torn coat moving quickly around the carriage’s rear wheels, and he saw the lights of the Albion glint upon something sharp in his hand. Instinctively, he swept the umbrella from over the Brigadier-General’s head and pushed it hard into this man’s path. The attacker tried to keep coming, snarling loudly, going for Boyce now like a mad mastiff. A broken bottle speared through the fabric of the umbrella as its metal spokes bent and collapsed. Nunn felt the glass cut into his upper arm. Still pushing with the umbrella, he proceeded to beat the man down with his other hand, balled into a hard fist.

  Nunn’s long convalescence had not diminished his physical strength, and soon the attacker was lying defeated in the gutter. Nunn then forced the hand holding the bottle to the ground, treading on it firmly, shattering the weapon. The attacker cried out as the fresh shards were pressed into his palm, and reached around with his other hand to claw at Nunn’s boot. With a start, Nunn saw that it lacked a number of fingers. He leant down and peeled back the remains of the umbrella.

  Up until then, everything had happened too rapidly for the crowd to follow, but as the torn flaps revealed a hideously disfigured face, contorted with crazed energy, they recoiled with a gasp. Nunn found that there was something extremely familiar about this face. He stood very still, studying it carefully, spectral recollections drifting slowly over him.

  ‘’Allo, Lef’tenant Nunn!’ said the attacker boisterously, in an East London accent. His defiant grin exposed further the extent of his mutilation. ‘Cat got your tongue,’ as it, cock? What you doin’ still trailin’ around be’ind that cunt in there? Eh?’

  Nunn turned. The Brigadier-General was seated in his carriage, not even bothering to look out of the window to discover what was transpiring in the street behind him.

  ‘I’ll get you yet, Boyce!’ bellowed the attacker, suddenly furious. ‘I’ll get you! You bastard!’

  Two constables arrived at a run, one urging Nunn to step back whilst the other struck his stick against the attacker’s jaw, and then across his shoulders.

  ‘Shut your noise, ye hear?’ said the policeman harshly to the disfigured man sprawled at his feet. ‘Or d’ye want more?’

  The man spat out a bloody tooth with a sneer. ‘You ain’t got nothing that I ain’t tasted before, Peeler.’

  The stick rose and fell. More policemen arrived, and made their own enthusiastic contributions to the felon’s subjugation. The constable at Nunn’s side apologised to him for the inconvenience. He nodded absently, and climbed into the carriage.

  The vehicle’s springs creaked under Nunn’s weight. He sat down opposite Boyce, lost in perplexity. His commander was busy attending to his moustache with his remaining hand, the left, helped by the small grooming kit that was kept on board the coach at all times for this purpose.

  ‘Who was that ruffian, then?’ inquired Boyce incuriously. ‘Some drunkard, I suppose?’

  Nunn stared out at the dome of the Infirmary, which wore a gleaming patina of rainwater, and the drenched labourers in the square below, toiling on despite the deluge. ‘C-Cregg. I think. A private …’

  Boyce looked up keenly, closing the mirror. ‘Yes, I remember the name. It cannot have been him, though. He was killed before the Redan on the same day that you and I received our injuries.’

  Nunn put a hand to his brow. His head was throbbing. ‘There’s something else, Brigadier. Something about dr-drawings.’ He sighed in exasperation, and felt hot tears welling in his eyes. ‘Wicked drawings. And there’s more besides, b-but I can’t recall what it–what I …’

  Boyce paused, as if considering this, and then shook his head with grave certainty. ‘No, Mr Nunn, my apologies, but I can recall nothing about any drawings, wicked or otherwise. That is but a product of your beleaguered mind, I fear, as is your encounter with this long-dead infantryman. I would advise you to let such treacherous thoughts go, so that they can trouble you no longer.’ He studied Nunn’s arm, as if noticing the cuts on it for the first time. ‘Some of those are rather deep. Come, we must go back inside and have them properly dressed.’

  3

  As one who watches Manchester with a dedicated eye, your humble correspondent cannot help but observe that much is currently being said around the provinces of our busy city on the subject of disgrace. Gossip of an exceptionally scurrilous sort is shuttling back and forth across every shop counter on Deansgate; it is drifting in whispers around the august warehouse-palaces of Portland Street and the reading rooms of the Athenaeum; it is being shouted lustily over the playing fields of Peel Park. Every word of it, needless to say, concerns a pair of young gentlemen from two of our foremost families. It is being reported with ludicrous c
onfidence that these men are holed up in the cellars of one of their fathers’ premises, a corrupted cabal at their disposal, laughing at us all; and elsewhere others swear that they have been seen climbing together on to a train at Bank Top, loudly proclaiming their intention to escape to the Far East, where they will be able to indulge their aberrant appetites in absolute freedom. The term ‘disgrace’, of course, is frequently and vehemently applied.

  We do not seek to comment on the gentlemen’s alleged crimes, or to speculate as to their whereabouts. We do, however, find ourselves thinking that this term, with all it implies, is lamentably excessive. Should it not rightly be reserved for those who have committed acts of grievous harm–for those who have wronged their fellow man, or betrayed a sacred trust? These two souls have injured nothing but our sense of propriety, a fluid notion indeed in a city such as ours. All we ask for is some consideration of the complexities involved in this sad matter. Language, when so misused, when so hysterically twisted, stands in danger of losing its meaning completely.

  Kitson reread this, his final paragraphs of street philosophy, and folded up the piece of paper on which it had been written. He knew full well that Thorne would not print the piece. The Star’s role was to fan the flames of scandal, not to attempt to dampen them. But he bound the report up anyway, along with his letter of explanation, and pushed both under the door of the magazine’s office. A gust of wind ran up the straight back of Corporation Street, carrying a cold spattering of rain. Kitson started back down towards the traffic of the warehouse district, heading for his attic, his mind taken up entirely with what he was about to do.

  As he reached King Street, he was pulled from his thoughts by a sudden commotion a short distance up the pavement. A team of constables, about eight strong, had emerged from an alleyway, carrying a writhing man between them. They were heading for the classicised bulk of the new Town Hall–built, like so many of Manchester’s more recent public buildings, on the Athenian model–which also housed the ‘A’ division of the city police in its basement. This was most probably an uncooperative felon being taken down to the cells. Their captive could be heard cursing with all his might, demonstrating an insane passion which, along with his ragged, grimy clothes, indicated that his was a life of drunken vagrancy. He was not a Manchester man; there was a cockney twang to his obscenities. Kitson watched this fractious party with mild interest. Then the vagrant started to shout about the Crimea.