The Street Philosopher

by Matthew Plampin

  During the first assault on the Redan, his interferences became rather more direct, and have prompted me to write this letter in the hope that it might lead to some form of punitive action being taken against him. I witnessed him running amidst the men of the Light Division at the height of the attack, shouting seditious slogans, undermining the confidence of the soldiers and interrupting their advance. In my opinion as an officer, this absurd behaviour contributed directly to the failure of the assault and the deaths and injuries of a number of soldiers; indeed, my own wound, which has caused me to be sent home, was inflicted as I attempted to correct his disturbances.

  I implore those with direct authority on this person to consider this incident and summon him away from the Crimea as soon as possible; and I entreat the ministers of our government to impose some manner of formal restriction upon civilians who seek to enter a theatre of war, so that the disastrous, inappropriate bravado of the Courier’s man cannot be repeated.

  It was signed A commander of Infantry, July 1855.

  Kitson finished reading it. He made no visible reaction. ‘And this led to your being recalled by O’Farrell?’

  Cracknell nodded. Whilst the trials of ‘Richard Carr’ were loudly detailed all around them–including her less than successful attempts to splice the main-brace, and then sneak to her Billy’s hammock once the moon was high above the waves–the Tomahawk told of his fall. He had actually managed to persevere until the final three-day bombardment of Sebastopol in early September, and the miserable failure of the second British assault on the Great Redan: their final humiliation, in which Sir William Codrington, the Courier’s old pal, had played a prominent, inglorious role. When the Russians had withdrawn from their fortifications the following morning, after the successful French occupation of the Malakhoff Tower, Cracknell had been among the first to venture past the enemy defences and into the burning town. This had brought him no satisfaction or triumph, however. The Redan, that impregnable bastion, had been but a miserable mess of scorched earth, splintered timber, dead Russians and camp litter; and Sebastopol itself a ruin only, knocked to pieces by shot and then set on fire. It had seemed a paltry thing, an empty accomplishment that was neither victory nor defeat, completely unworthy of the many thousands of lives it had cost.

  Furthermore, the publication of Boyce’s letter in the Times had made it almost impossible for him to operate. No soldier or sailor of any rank would tolerate his presence, even for a second. He was cursed and spat at wherever he went. Every one of his friends seemed either to be dead or to have been invalided home. And perhaps most crucially, the Courier’s circulation had begun to drop. Before long, O’Farrell had grown nervous and he was summoned back to England. Not a word of his had appeared in the London Courier since.

  ‘All of which leads me to this place, Thomas, to a grubby tavern in Ancoats, standing before you with my clothes torn and stained and my last few pennies jangling forlornly in my pockets.’ Cracknell felt like laughing aloud at this ludicrous state of affairs, if only to mask the black despair that was gathering inside him. ‘I sell to anyone who will consider me. The Dublin University Magazine ran a piece last winter. But I’m the Tomahawk of the bloody Courier, aren’t I–the disgraced relic of an ignoble war that everyone wants to forget. I am friendless, Kitson, entirely friendless, thanks to Nathaniel bloody Boyce.’

  Cracknell took a deep, soothing drink from the fresh jar of porter that had been set before him. It was good, he told himself, that his blood was up; it would make the attainment of his object that evening all the easier. He could not help but think, however, that their conversation was starting to veer off course. Kitson, bless him, had somehow managed to get the Tomahawk struggling like a kitten in a rain-barrel to justify himself–when he was in fact the wronged party, the innocent victim. He knew that he must change the tide of their discourse, and dislodge this sanctimonious street philosopher from the seat of judgement on which he was becoming so damnably comfortable. It was time, in short, to launch an attack of his own.

  He looked Kitson over. The fellow’s clothes were clean enough and in decent repair, but they looked to be second hand; there was no watch-chain either, and his boots were old. ‘I must say, though, Thomas, that you yourself are hardly the picture of journalistic success. How on earth did you end up here?’

  Kitson realised that he was now leaning against the bar. For the first time in days, his chest had stopped hurting. His cheeks were flaming; no longer did the wet jacket feel so cold against his back. In fact, was it even still wet? He had already been in the tavern longer than he’d intended. Cracknell’s story had held him, if only because of his sheer amazement at the man’s capacity for self-delusion; but he would take his leave soon.

  After draining his beer-jar, Kitson gave a terse account of how he had fled the Crimea the very afternoon of that first attack on the Redan. Totally deaf, half-mad with guilt, and still caked with a thick mixture of blood and dust, he had simply walked aboard the first steamer bound for Constantinople, without sending word to anyone. Back in England, after a period recuperating at a cousin’s house in Highgate, he had tried for a time to find work in the hospitals and infirmaries of London. The sight of death, however, and the feel of warm blood on his hands and clothes, quickly proved to be more than he could bear. Eventually, on the advice of a friend from his days in art correspondence, he had come to Manchester and introduced himself to Edward Thorne of the Manchester Evening Star.

  ‘Street philosophy was the only employment Thorne could offer,’ Kitson explained wearily. ‘This didn’t concern me in the least. I didn’t care what I did. I only wanted to be away from everything, from everyone, thinking that I could repair myself if I was only left alone. I—’ The porter was going to his head. He was talking more than he meant to, saying things certainly not suited to his former senior’s ears.

  Cracknell’s expression was unsympathetic. ‘But then this bloody great art exhibition came along and upset all your plans, eh? Enough to attract old colleagues you probably thought you’d shaken off for good, and old enemies you’d quite forgotten, all brought together in your sooty refuge! Well, my commiserations, Kitson, truly.’

  Another song began, this time a Lancashire clog hornpipe. Some space was cleared, and led by the comic dancer up on the stage, the revellers clomped about in their wooden shoes with whooping enthusiasm. Arms were linked, skirts gathered up, and caps thrown in the air.

  ‘Tell me,’ Cracknell asked loudly as he lit a cigarette, ‘did you consider my plight at all when you fled so promptly from that ruined house? When you abandoned me, Thomas? I was trapped in there for hours, y’know. I had to claw my way out through several tons of masonry, and then creep back to the British line under the cover of darkness–all the while thinking that I was about to get shot in the back by a Ruski sniper.’

  Kitson drank from his second jar. Cracknell was goading him, and he would not rise to it. His only thought back in that collapsed parlour had been to leave, to hide himself away. Before heading for the cemetery, though, he’d noticed that the table the correspondent had been sheltering under was still intact, despite being largely buried under a fall of bricks. He had not gone to help. Cracknell, he’d felt, deserved to be left.

  ‘I knew that you would manage to save yourself somehow.’

  ‘It was your final dereliction of the Courier, I suppose–leaving your erstwhile mentor for dead.’ Cracknell paused thoughtfully, smoke spilling from his lips. ‘Do you know, I often reflected whilst in the Crimea that your desertion was in fact a singular piece of good fortune. It allowed me to find my true level. You did not understand our mission, and you were certainly never committed to it. As soon as things got a little difficult, you simply melted away.’

  Grinding his teeth, Kitson took hold of the iron bar-rail with both hands. He would not relent and give Cracknell what he so plainly wanted.

  ‘You’re more of an observer, Thomas, aren’t you? You will not act to bring about change�
�you will not take a bloody stand. I mean, look at you now. A bloody street philosopher, a purveyor of gossip, of empty-headed prattle! After all I tried to teach you about the duty of the correspondent to truth, to matters of import!’ He stopped to drink, wiping his mouth reproachfully on his sleeve. ‘I admired you, at first. There was wit in your pen, and vigour, and serious intelligence too–but you lacked the strength of will to hold them together. You possessed every gift except the one needful–the pearls without the string.’

  The voluble bombast in Cracknell’s voice was enough to cause something of a disruption. A number of those dancing eyed him with open dislike.

  Kitson hunched his shoulders and lowered his head; it was no use. He could not leave this unanswered. ‘You mean I lacked your capacity for selfish indifference,’ he snapped.

  Cracknell curled his lip. He had won. ‘You are referring to Madeleine Boyce again, I take it.’

  ‘And Robert Styles.’

  Cracknell laughed–he actually laughed at this mention of their illustrator’s name. ‘How could I forget? A fellow with a similar weakness to your own, Thomas, if you don’t mind me saying, but with the very opposite inclination–a mind prone to an excess of brutality and morbidity rather than sentimentality.’

  ‘Sentimentality?’ Kitson turned towards him. ‘I helped many on the docks. In the British Hotel.’

  ‘A drop in the bloody ocean,’ Cracknell replied coldly. ‘A single line of one of my articles did more for the cause of the common soldier than an entire year of mopping up gore for Mother Seacole. But then, how can I expect you to understand this? Both you and Styles were utterly unable to grasp the simple, potent role of the war correspondent.’

  ‘Keep it down, can’t ye?’ growled a voice nearby. Up on the stage, the singer slid neatly from the hornpipe into a comic ballad, greeted with a universal bellow of approval. ‘A friar came to a maid when she went to bed,’ he began, warbling earnestly up at the balcony, ‘Desiring to have her maidenhead …’ The crowd erupted into salacious whistling.

  ‘Like you do, you mean,’ Kitson cried, ‘with your pointless, protracted feuds,’ He snatched the Times clipping from the bar and held it in Cracknell’s face. ‘How, pray, was your crusade against Boyce part of any effort to relay matters of import–to bring about this change you boast of?’

  Cracknell said something about how Boyce, apart from his various terrible crimes, was a symbol of the turpitude of that war; a symbol of both undeserving privilege and callous incompetence.

  Kitson ignored him. ‘For you to talk so freely about the neglect of duty would be amusing in its hypocrisy if the consequences had not been so tragic. You were our senior. Robert Styles was broken by your taunts, by trying to keep pace with you, with what you insisted we all do. I told you he had to be sent home, many times, yet you did not do it. And it cost Styles his life.’

  The song went on behind them, the singer raising his voice in an attempt to drown out the heated disputation at the bar. ‘But she denied his desire, and told him she feared hell fire …’ The audience joined in; more faces turned towards the two newspapermen.

  Cracknell took a sip of beer. ‘You talk, Kitson,’ he said levelly, ‘as if I were the one who shot the boy.’

  This remark, delivered so calmly, robbed Kitson of his breath, winding him as suddenly as if he had been slammed hard against the floor. A momentary vision flashed across his mind: of Styles’ wasted limbs, twitching for the last time on the bloody tiles of the parlour, a fraction of a second before they were buried forever beneath a heavy fall of Russian masonry.

  Kitson faltered, his gaze dipping down. ‘That is something I must live with. I–I cannot forgive myself for my part in his death.’ He looked back at Cracknell. ‘And I cannot forgive you either. We failed him. He was our charge, our comrade, and we failed him appallingly.’

  Cracknell rolled his eyes and finished off his porter. ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, listen to yourself! So damnably sensitive, so full of bloody drama! Drink up, man, before you collapse in a swoon.’ He summoned the barmaid and requested more gin, sliding an extra sixpence in her apron as he did so with an air of lascivious benevolence. ‘The sad truth of it,’ he continued bluntly, ‘is that Robert Styles wished to die. There was nothing either of us could have done to prevent it, short of binding the poor fellow in chains. Don’t you remember all those ghastly drawings of his?’

  Kitson flinched. He had in fact brought a small number of Styles’ works back from the Crimea with him, taking them from the Courier tent on that last afternoon and tucking them inside his filthy jacket. His intention had been to try to honour the illustrator’s dying wish; but, as he had expected, it had been impossible to engage the interest of any respectable publisher. The bundle of gruesome studies had lain untouched at the bottom of a wardrobe in his cousin’s attic for nearly eighteen months.

  ‘Death was his fascination,’ Cracknell pronounced. ‘A lunatic obsession. Styles wanted nothing more than to join the fallen soldiers he studied so assiduously. He wanted to die. If it had not been by your hand, Thomas, it would’ve soon been another’s. Perhaps even his own.’

  ‘Tush, quoth the friar, thou needst not doubt,’ went on the ballad, accompanied by the scraping of the fiddle, ‘If thou wert in hell I could sing thee out!’ The tavern exploded into uproarious mirth.

  ‘You cannot honestly believe that.’

  Cracknell merely raised an eyebrow as he polished off his second measure of gin.

  Kitson glared at him. ‘So you feel nothing–no shame, no remorse, not even the smallest sense of responsibility? Two young people died as a direct result of your neglectful behaviour. The Norton Foundry will surely close, bringing want and worry to its many hundreds of employees. William Norton has been forced to flee the country, and Jemima James has been reduced to almost certain penury. And yet you feel nothing–nothing but your righteous wrath about the evils of Nathaniel Boyce?’

  Cracknell picked up Kitson’s beer-jar and took a long draught; then he set it down, his moustache heavy with foam and his cheeks red as radishes. He paused for a few seconds, as if considering what his former junior had said. Then he grinned. ‘Astute as ever, Thomas!’

  Kitson strode away from the bar with livid energy. He had heard enough. It was time for him to leave.

  ‘Wait, my friend, wait,’ Cracknell begged with a boozy chortle, jogging after him and fastening a hand around his arm. ‘What about Mr Twelves?’

  ‘That is my concern, is it not? If they are even out there.’

  ‘I cannot let you go outside. They will surely murder you.’

  Kitson looked into Cracknell’s rosy face, trying to find an explanation for this concern for his wellbeing, and saw at once that it was somehow part of the scheme–part of the reason he had waylaid Kitson on King Street, brought him to this place, plied him with drink, and tried so hard to provoke an altercation between them. He attempted to free himself, and they began to grapple; a table went over with a crash. People began to shout.

  Men, the landlord’s roughs, were soon prising them apart. Mr Bairstowe himself looked down from the balcony, and asked what the trouble was. He addressed Cracknell by name; they were plainly acquainted. This was the world in which his former colleague had hidden himself so effectively for all these weeks.

  ‘Oh, nothing, Bairstowe old chap,’ Cracknell replied breezily, ‘just a difference of opinion. I will replace any drinks that were lost.’

  Bairstowe snorted. ‘As if ye could. Who’s this with ye?’

  ‘An old friend from my days on the London Courier. He’s at the Evening Star now.’

  Kitson shook off the man who was holding him. ‘I am no friend of his,’ he said fiercely; and then he walked out of the tavern into the rain.

  4

  The musicians started up again, and another song began. Bairstowe walked slowly down the balcony stairs, stopping by the door. Cracknell found himself being escorted over to him. The Trafford’s proprietor crossed his arms.
He had the flattened, broken nose of a retired pugilist, and was regarding the swaying Tomahawk with weary amusement

  ‘Time for ye to leave as well, I think, Mr Cracknell,’ he said. ‘Afore my other customers tear out that bushy beard of yours.’

  Cracknell gave a throaty chuckle. ‘My apologies, Bairstowe. You know how these things can go. What is the hour, if you please?’

  ‘Aff past eight, near enough,’ someone mumbled.

  ‘Heavens, early still.’ He chuckled again, and made a great show of stumbling into the man beside him. ‘Yet I feel already that I should be heading to my bed.’ The barmaid appeared and sullenly returned his cane, which had been left leaning against the bar. He bowed to her in gratitude.

  ‘Aye,’ agreed Bairstowe, nodding at a man to open the door, ‘and not a moment too soon. Good night to thee, Mr Cracknell.’

  Outside, Cracknell looked around for Twelves. There was no one at all in the rainy street. Perhaps Kitson had been right. He straightened his jacket, shrugging off his show of inebriation like a cloak and directing himself not towards London Road and the Model Lodging House, but somewhere else altogether.

  Then he caught sight of them down a side alley, silhouetted against a distant gas-light: four black-suits standing around their victim, who lay coughing at their feet. Immediately, he started back to the Trafford. Reaching the door, he wrenched it open.

  ‘Mr Bairstowe!’ he bellowed. ‘There’s something out here I believe you might be interested in!’

  Kitson landed on his side and curled up on the wet cobblestones. The stick had struck him in the stomach, close enough to his old wound to set off a great sparking bonfire behind his eyes, and lay him out, entirely helpless. He hadn’t seen his assailant; he could tell, though, that more than one man stood around him.

  ‘So this is the end,’ said a nasal, inexpressive voice somewhere above him. It belonged to the man from the Belle Vue–Mr Twelves, the leader of the black-suits. ‘This is it for ye, Mr Kitson, and no mistake. No gang of bugger-boys to rescue ye this time. Brigadier Boyce has ordered you dead.’ He tapped a knotted cudgel against his leg. ‘And it will ’appen.’