Blackstone and the Burning Secret
Sally Spencer
Copyright © Sally Spencer 2005
The right of Sally Spencer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
First published by Severn House Publishers Ltd in 2005.
This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
Extract from Blackstone and the Great Game by Sally Spencer
Prologue
The House of Lords, 17th May 1900
It was a warm spring day. Outside the Palace of Westminster, the general populace strolled by, enjoying the mildness of the air. Inside the Palace—and more specifically, inside the House of Lords—it was an entirely different matter. Here, the air was thick with an oppressive heat which had been generated more by anger and indignation than by the weather.
From his place on the Government benches, Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, watched as Lord Clitheroe, one of the rising stars of the Liberal Party, climbed confidently to his feet from the benches opposite.
‘My Lords, I must once again address the issue of the war in Southern Africa,’ Clitheroe said.
There were cheers from the Liberal benches and theatrical groans from the Conservative seats. Both sides were making a loud enough noise, the Prime Minister thought, but there was no doubt which of the two sounded the more spirited—and it was not his own party.
‘I have said from the very beginning of this conflict that the war against the Boers of Southern Africa is an immoral war,’ Lord Clitheroe continued.
The Boers! Lord Salisbury repeated silently—and with some disgust. Who would ever have thought that a bunch of farmers of Dutch descent could ever have been moulded into such an effective military force?
‘I make no apology for my choice of words,’ Clitheroe thundered. ‘Immoral was what I called it, and immoral is what it is.’
There were roars of agreement from those peers sitting on the red benches behind him, but scarcely a murmur of dissent from the Government benches which he faced.
‘Why are we fighting it? Because the Boers are evil?’
‘No!’ the Liberals cried.
‘No,’ Clitheroe repeated. ‘A thousand times no. They are an honest God-fearing folk, living in states they themselves created—states which only exist because of their efforts. Shall I tell you how this came about?’
‘Yes,’ called the Liberals obediently, though they knew the story as well as Clitheroe did himself.
‘When the Boers decided that they no longer wished to live under British rule, what did they do? Did they attack us, as we are now attacking them? No! Instead—because they are a peaceful people—they withdrew. They trekked into the interior of Africa, where out of virgin territory they single-handedly established the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. And why did they do this? Because they are simple farming folk who wish for no more than to be left alone to grow their crops.’
The Noble Lord had been speaking for nearly two minutes, and had still not mentioned the gold, the Prime Minister noted. He wondered if this were some kind of record.
‘I will tell you why we are fighting—why we are sacrificing British lives and Boer lives,’ Clitheroe continued. ‘It is because gold has been discovered in those peaceful, ordered Boer states. Gold, My Lords. And this Government—this wicked, unprincipled Government—will go to any lengths, and commit any injustice, to get its hands on that precious commodity. But this government’s plan simply hasn’t worked, has it?’
There were more cries of ‘No!’ from the Liberal peers behind him. The Government supporters continued to be mute.
‘It hasn’t worked,’ Clitheroe said passionately, ‘because the Boers are fighting for a just cause, and because they know their cause is just. This small, gallant army of farmers has the mighty British Empire on the run. Mafeking, Ladysmith and Kimberley are all under siege. Under siege!’
‘Shameful!’ cried the men behind him.
‘As early as last December—when the full extent of the disaster began to reveal itself—I called for the Secretary of War to be impeached,’ Clitheroe continued. ‘Yet there he sits even now—cloaked in his mistakes, cloaked in his failures! I call on him, yet again, to resign—to make way for a man who will sue for peace! I call for him to go—and for his rotten Government to go with him.’
The Prime Minister risked a sideways glance at his Secretary of War. Yes, he was indeed still sitting there, though only a few months earlier even Salisbury himself would have put the man’s chances of political survival at virtually zero.
Amid loud cheers from his own side, Clitheroe sat down. The Lord Chancellor, who, from his Woolsack, had a view of both sides of the House, scratched his nose, then said, ‘Lord Lansdowne?’
From the Government benches, Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, 6th Earl of Kerry, Viscount Clanmaurice and—for the moment at least—Secretary of War, rose to his feet.
‘The noble Lord would give away Southern Africa if he could,’ he said contemptuously. ‘And what else would he be prepared to cede? India? Canada? I believe that if his party took power, Her Majesty the Queen would have so little to rule over she could walk round her entire empire in a day!’
There was some laughter from the Government benches, but it seemed merely childish and defiant when compared to the roar of anger which rose from the benches opposite.
‘Would the noble Lord complain so bitterly if we were winning the war?’ Lansdowne asked scathingly. ‘I think not. While having no wish at all to compare him to a rodent, I cannot help but note that it is always the rats which leave the sinking ship first.’
There were cries of ‘Shame!’ and ‘Withdraw!’ from the other side of the House.
‘But, in fact, the ship is far from sinking,’ Lansdowne continued. ‘As the House is well aware, we have already captured Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State.’
‘And what about Mafeking?’ the Opposition jeered. ‘What about Ladysmith and Kimberley?’
The Secretary of War smiled. ‘It is interesting that you should raise that question,’ he said, ‘because I was just about to announce to the House that General Roberts’s forces have relieved Mafeking this very day—and that the relief of Ladysmith and Kimberley are expected to follow very shortly.’
It was as if a huge bucket of cold water had suddenly been thrown over the Opposition, the Prime Minister thought. Now the roars came from the Government side of the House, and it was the Liberals who had fallen unnaturally silent.
‘There will be dancing in the streets when the news is announced,’ Lansdowne said. ‘Dancing in the streets! And what will My Lord Clitheroe do? Will he join in with the celebration, and show h
imself to be a hypocrite? Or will he instead choose to mourn the triumph of Her Majesty’s brave soldiers over our enemies?’
Nicely done, the Prime Minister thought. He had been right to keep Lansdowne on, despite all the calls for him to go. True, he had done it partly for selfish reasons—if Lansdowne had fallen, it was likely that the Government would have fallen, too—but it was gratifying to think that in saving his own administration, he had also saved the hitherto distinguished career of Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice.
1
The police constable whose nightly beat took him along Tooley Street—and down the lanes which ran off it—was called Dobson, but was known to all his colleagues as Dobbin. This nickname was arrived at not so much because it was a variation on his true name—‘Dobbo’ would have been the obvious choice if that had been the case. Rather, it was in recognition of the fact that he was not exactly the brightest button on the tunic—that, like a stolid carthorse, he was reliable but uninspired.
Yet however slow-thinking he was—and even though many other men would undoubtedly have assessed what was going on more rapidly—it was Dobbin Dobson who first came across the fire in the Imperial Tea Company’s warehouse at the far end of Battle Bridge Lane.
It was the flickering glow in the warehouse office that first caught his attention, if not his interest.
He walked on. Some careless clerk had obviously left the gaslight burning when he went home, he thought, and the clerk in question would doubtless be in trouble for it come the morning.
Yet did gaslights burn as brightly—or as irregularly—as the light he’d just observed? he asked himself when he’d taken a few more steps.
He spun round smartly on his heel—as they’d taught him to during his training—walked back to the window, and peered through it.
A large table dominated the centre of the office, and in the middle of that table a small fire was merrily eating its way through a small mountain of stacked documents.
The constable instinctively grabbed the bars on the window and gave them a good hard tug. He was wasting his time. The bars were made of solid steel and were embedded in thick concrete.
‘The door,’ his slow brain told him. ‘Try the bloody door!’ The door was iron, rather than steel, but was just as solid as the window-bars, and was very definitely locked.
Dobson returned to the window. The fire had gained a stronger hold even in the short time he had been away, and at the very moment that this thought crossed his dull mind, the big table collapsed with a crash which rattled the windows.
The constable fumbled in his pocket for his whistle. But what good would that do? His nearest colleague would be streets away, and the Night Patrol Sergeant could be anywhere on the patch. And this wasn’t even a job for the police. What was wanted was the Fire Brigade—and damn quickly!
There was a public phone box on the corner of Tooley Street, Dobson recalled—and though he was even less famed for his athletic ability than he was for his intellect, he reached the box in record time.
*
He was sure there were worse places than Tooley Street that a fire could choose to break out, Leading Fireman Harris thought as he put down the phone and hit the alarm button.
There had to be worse places, he assured himself, as the bell shrieked on every floor—and in every room—of the fire station.
But he couldn’t help wishing that—just at that moment—he could think of even one of them!
Within a second of the alarm going off, every man in the fire station was on the move. In the recreation room, a chess game was abandoned, and billiard cues—already lined up for a shot—clattered on to the table. In the gymnasium, barbells were carefully—but swiftly—placed back on their stands, and a fireman about to leap the vaulting horse pulled himself back at the very last moment.
Down in the stables, a groom touched the spring which released the horses from the cords securing them to their stalls, dropped collars over their heads, and pulled the blankets off their backs.
‘Calm, my beauties,’ he cooed softly. ‘Keep calm.’
Firemen converged on the tackle room, reaching for their helmets, pulling on their boots and tucking their short axes into their belts.
The engineer was already at work in the garage, checking that the fire engine’s boiler was burning strongly enough to generate the pressure necessary to pump water. When the groom arrived with the horses, he stepped aside to allow the other man space to strap the animals between the shafts. By the time the crew arrived, the horses were in place and eager to be going.
The whole operation had been, as it always was, frantic but efficient—pandemonium, certainly, but organised pandemonium.
The garage doors swung open, and the horses pulled the tender out on to the street.
It was a little under three minutes since he’d sounded the alarm, Leading Fireman Harris thought, as he braced himself against the rocking of the tender. That was good by anybody’s standards—but was it good enough?
He was too young—as were the rest of his watch—to remember the Great Tooley Street Fire of 1861 personally, but the details of it were burned into his brain, as they were burned into the brains of all his comrades.
The fire of 1861 had started in Cotton’s Wharf but within minutes had spread to Hay’s Wharf—a full two hundred yards downstream. The problem, as the .fire-fighters had appreciated from the start, was that the warehouses were packed with all kinds of highly, flammable material—cotton, sugar, tallow, rice, spices, jute, hemp, and even saltpetre!
The fire engine in the present crisis dashed up Southwark Bridge Road, and turned on to Union Street, while Harris relived the disaster of the past—a disaster which had occurred before he’d even been born.
They were all old men now—those whom he’d spoken to about it—some of them so old they were hardly able to remember their own names. But when they talked about the blaze, it was as if they’d just come away from it.
The tallow had been the worst, they’d said. It had liquefied with the heat, and then flowed into the river. There’d been so much of it that it had actually set the Thames on fire!
Imagine that—Old Father Thames on fire!
And Harris, whose business it was—and who had seen more fires than he could count—found it almost impossible to conjure anything quite so horrific.
And what about Tooley Street itself? he’d asked these old men.
Strike them dead if they were lying, they’d replied, but Tooley Street had been ankle deep in molten grease and tallow!
The engine turned on to Borough High Street, and now Harris could see the red glow in the night sky over Battle Bridge Lane.
‘Leading Fireman Harris was the man in charge at the big Tooley Street fire of 1900,’ he heard a voice from the future say in his head. ‘And what a right bloody mess he made of it, as well!’
It had taken two whole weeks for the Brigade back in 1861 to completely extinguish the fire, he remembered, and the damage it had wrought had been terrifyingly immense.
Eighteen thousand bales of cotton had been destroyed, five thousand tons of rice had been reduced to ashes. Nobody had blamed the Fire Brigade for that, of course—at least, not openly.
The engine had reached Tooley Street, and the driver’s mate was ringing his bell furiously to alert the crowds of people who had already started to appear on the street.
In 1861, people had hired boats to go out and see the burning river from closer to, Harris thought grimly. They’d taken risks even a fireman wouldn’t have taken, and a fair number of them had lost their lives because of it—more, in fact, than had lost their lives in the Great Fire of London.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen this time—not on his watch.
The tender turned on to Battle Bridge Lane, and the full extent of the task ahead of him was now visible to Harris for the first time.
The fire had completely engulfed the ground floor of the tea warehouse, and had spread to the first floor. Thick smoke bil
lowed from the windows, carrying with it the acrid smell of burning tea.
If it had been the other way round, Harris thought—if the fire had started at the top and then worked its way down—he might have been able to save something. As it was, the best he could hope for was to stop the fire from spreading.
The driver reined in the horses a dozen yards from the building; his mate stopped ringing the bell. It was time, Harris thought, to find out just how good a leading fireman he really was.
‘Masterton! Higgins! Get the hose down to the river!’ he bawled at the top of his voice.
The two firemen obeyed instantly.
‘Woddle! Smith!’ he shouted at two other members of the crew. ‘Do whatever needs to be done to keep the crowd out of the way!’
The fire had almost reached the second floor. It was going to be a real proper bugger to put out.
*
At the end of an hour’s hectic, dangerous work, the fire was under control, and Leading Fireman Harris could relax a little, confident that his name would not, in fact, live on in infamy, but might even merit being mentioned—approvingly, and in passing—to future generations of young, eager, trainee firemen.
He had already decided that the blaze had probably been started deliberately, and shuddered at the thought that—if it was not, in fact, an insurance fiddle—a firebug was perhaps on the loose in London.
What he did not know—could not know—was that the fire formed only a small part of a much more elaborate and carefully formulated plan; that it was the opening shot in—or perhaps an early warning beacon of—a campaign aimed at bringing London, the mightiest city in the modern world, the hub of the greatest empire ever created, to its knees.
2
Leading Fireman Harris stood looking up at the blackened shell of what, until a couple of hours earlier, had been a thriving tea warehouse. The owners wouldn’t be pleased, he thought. Like most people who knew nothing about firefighting, they’d probably complain that the firemen should have got there sooner—that since the blaze had gutted the building, they’d failed to do their job. But how little they knew! The true measure of his team’s success on the job, Harris told himself, was that the fire had not been allowed to spread beyond the warehouse—that there hadn’t been another disaster like the one in 1861.
Blackstone and the Burning Secret (The Blackstone Detective Series Book 4) Page 1