The Trouble With Tortoises

by Evelyn James

  “Funeral will be on Friday,” she told Robin. “Vicar said it’s best not to hang around. It will be simple, but Ethel shall not find her way into a pauper’s grave. I have always sworn that my children shall be buried proper, not that I wished any to die before me.”

  “Might I offer a token towards the funeral?” Clara said. “On the behalf of the Malorys, who must surely owe Ethel a little in wages.”

  Clara opened her purse and produced some coins which she placed on the mantelpiece. Mrs Dickinson’s eyes narrowed, but you did not spit at money when you had a funeral to pay for and winter upon you.

  “Having buried both my parents, I am well aware that funerals can soon become expensive,” Clara added.

  Mrs Dickinson mellowed, her eyes straying to the coins.

  “You try to make the best of it, remind yourself that though it is one income gone, it is also one less mouth to feed, but that don’t make the pain any easier,” she sniffed.

  “No, nothing can, except time,” Clara replied.

  Mrs Dickinson turned to her fire and stared at the dull flames that barely burned above the coals.

  “The Malorys weren’t so bad, I suppose,” she mumbled to herself. “They took on my Ethel even though Mrs Malory knew of my lads’ reputation. She said she judged a person by herself and not by her relatives. That was a generosity you don’t often see. And she helped Abbey get a place at that hotel in town. I don’t hold them a grudge, not really, just came as a shock, you being on the doorstep.”

  “I can fully understand that,” Clara said. “I am sure that all the events of the last day or so have been a shock. No one expects a healthy young woman to suddenly pass from this life.”

  “No, that is it,” Mrs Dickinson watched the flames with a suddenly morbid fixation. “Do you believe we pay for our sins in this life as well as the next?”

  Clara frowned.

  “I haven’t really considered it.”

  “My old man, he broke the trust of good men and he died in prison. I always said it was like he was punished for his actions, for betraying people who had looked out for him.”

  “I am not certain that is how things work,” Clara said. “I mean, he was already being punished anyway, wasn’t he?”

  “By our means of justice, but I am talking about something beyond the laws of man. I don’t know. Seems to me that sometimes our own actions can bring us strange consequences.”

  Clara was not enjoying this train of thought. She was not religious, though Tommy was. She doubted the God he believed in would take someone’s life for the stealing of a pig. Especially as the man had been caught and sent to prison and was thus facing earthly consequences for his actions.

  Clara glanced at Robin, but he seemed absorbed by Mrs Dickinson’s talk, as if they had discussed this before and he agreed with her.

  “There are consequences to actions and sometimes those consequences are different to what we expect,” Mrs Dickinson continued. “My Ethel’s sudden passing I feel was a reflection, a judgement on her actions.”

  “You have me at a loss,” Clara said. She assumed Mrs Dickinson was not referring to her daughter’s inadequate housekeeping skills. “What had Ethel done that could have been so bad as to forfeit her life to some universal justice?”

  “It is not the physical crime that is the worst of it, you know. Bad as that can be. It is the moral crime. Betraying friendship, scorning trust and kindness. We break another’s heart that way and that does not heal easily, not even if we pay for our crimes in the usual sense,” Mrs Dickinson persisted. “I have heard the vicar’s sermons on the like, how a lie is as much a mortal sin as murder in the eyes of God. When we steal or cheat another person, we are corrupting our own soul, and we forever leave a mark on those we commit our crime against. They never really recover, you see.”

  Clara was growing uncomfortable. She didn’t like such dark talk that seemed to take the world out of her control. To imagine there was some force, some order of balance working around them to even out the rights and wrongs of this life, might be comforting for some, but not when it meant people like Mrs Dickinson were attributing the deaths of loved ones to their own misdeeds.

  “I am not sure I believe that at all,” Clara said. “There are plenty of foul criminals out there who are very alive and certainly not being ‘brought to justice’ by a mysterious force working to balance out the good and bad of the universe.”

  “Maybe it only works on those who should know better, who have had the chance to be good,” Mrs Dickinson continued. “In any case, I can’t help thinking it was my Ethel’s actions the day before yesterday that brought her death. She betrayed herself, and the Malorys, and she paid for it.”

  Robin was nodding along. Clara felt as if she had stumbled into a madhouse. She wanted to get out as soon as she could.

  “What did Ethel do that was so heinous?” Clara asked, wanting to get away from moralising.

  “When she came home, the last day she was well, she brought something with her. It was in an old biscuit tin and she would not let me see inside, but I guessed she had taken it from the Malory house. No other place she had been,” Mrs Dickinson continued. “That evening she said she was going out. I asked where and she would not say to me, just said she would not be long. She had that box with her. When she came back, she didn’t have it anymore.”

  Mrs Dickinson looked coldly into the flames.

  “She was drenched too. Bad night to be out. She started a fever a little while later, by morning she was too sick to leave her bed and I sent a message to the Malorys. By early evening, she was gone.”

  Mrs Dickinson closed her eyes and dropped her head. Clara felt a shiver work up her spine, a chill brought about by the woman’s belief that committing a single, foolish misdeed could result in sudden death. It was a terrible thing to think, as if there was no redemption, no second chances in this life.

  “You don’t know for sure that Ethel had stolen anything,” Clara said, suddenly wanting to disprove the woman’s theory.

  “Sin corrupts and kills us,” Robin mumbled.

  Clara would have liked to kick him. Mrs Dickinson raised her head.

  “This morning, while I was sorting through Ethel’s things to pick an outfit for her funeral, I found in her coat pocket a ticket for a pawn shop and some money,” Mrs Dickinson picked up a ceramic spill pot from the mantel and fumbled inside it, producing a piece of paper, though not the coins that had gone with it. “This man is disreputable. My lads have gone to him in the past when needing to move something they stole. I thought Emily knew better than that, had a better set of morals, but I was wrong.”

  She gave the pawn ticket to Clara.

  “Maybe the tortoise is there,” she said.

  Clara held the ticket a moment, then put it in her handbag.

  “Mrs Dickinson, if it is any consolation, I do not believe our actions are so swiftly judged and punished,” she said. “I think there is always hope for us.”

  “You can believe that, because you aren’t a criminal,” Mrs Dickinson said with such intensity it was frightening. “I believe we pay for our actions. Just as my Ethel did.”

  Chapter Eight

  Talk of divine retribution had unsettled Clara. She had not considered herself so sensitive to such talk, but suddenly her mind kept fixating on Mrs Dickinson’s strange rantings and her conviction that her daughter had died because she had committed a crime against the Malorys. That seemed a very unfair way of things to Clara, after all, wasn’t God keen on redemption? Saul becoming Paul and all that.

  The worst of it was that Clara could not fathom why the matter was affecting her so. She had not given God much time since the war and all the horrible things done under his banner. During the war it had been hammered into the population that God was firmly on the side of the British, French and Belgians, all well and good, except that the Prussians and Austrians were also having this preached to them, they even wore the slogan Gott Mit Uns on their he
lmets – God With Us.

  Both sides of the conflict were claiming God was on their side, and that was simply not possible. Surely God must pick a side? If you were a British bishop you held persistently to the view He picked the side of the British, but if you were a German bishop, then you argued He was on the German side.

  Altogether theologically complicated, but what really had turned the tables for Clara, who had to admit she had been a casual believer to start with, was seeing the world turned to chaos. Innocent young men on both sides being massacred, while others were forced to kill one another. For four and a bit years Christian concepts such as mercy and forgiveness were lost, and it was far easier to see the world as Godless, than to understand how a loving and omnipotent being could allow such horrors to happen.

  Clara had been happy to renege her religion, though she was not able to go so far as to call herself an atheist. She was certainly satisfied to live in the everyday secular world and to leave questions about deities and their powers to others.

  It must be four or five years since she placed God firmly away in a cupboard, along with the old family Bible and a silver cross her mother had been given by a distant aunt. So why was He suddenly creeping back in?

  Why was she asking herself if it was His hand behind the fateful shooting of Jao Leong? What if He had taken action? Punished a wicked woman as Mrs Dickinson would have it?

  Clara shook the troubling thoughts from herself. What rot! If God was taking an active hand in punishing the likes of Ethel Dickinson and Jao Leong, why had he not struck down the Kaiser in 1914 and saved the world from a lot of trouble? No, those sorts of theories did not hold up to close examination. People tried to see patterns in random events, to find meaning in misfortune when life was just what it was – a miscellaneous assortment of births, deaths and all the bits in between. Luck was relative, and there was no rhyme or reason to it all.

  Having given herself a stern talking to, Clara felt a good deal better and walked home with determination.

  She could hear voices from the parlour when she arrived and hung up her coat and hat. She stepped through the doorway and found Tommy with another young man of about the same age.

  “And here is my sister, Clara,” Tommy announced as Clara stepped into the room. “Clara, this is Captain Harold Laker, Royal Artillery.”

  Harold Laker was a short, sturdy fellow, the sort one could not imagine being blown down in a strong wind easily. He seemed to firmly take hold of any piece of ground he stepped onto and become as immoveable as an oak tree. Four years of peace had seen Laker lose his military physique and grow comfortably stout, only adding to his appearance of reliable solidity. He seemed altogether more real than most people and seemed to take possession of the very space he was currently reposing in with an alarming assurance. He had certainly become the centrepiece of the parlour, as if everything suddenly focused upon him, and yet, he also managed to appear utterly unassuming.

  When he rose to greet Clara, it was still with the rigid formality the army had drilled into him and he insisted on giving her a salute rather than shake hands. His hair was only a little longer than army regulation and his moustache was the sort a British military officer would be proud of. He had a jovial smile on his face.

  “Miss Fitzgerald.”

  “Clara, please.”

  “Your brother has spoken of you and quite spun my head with tales of your impressive achievements. I am absolutely delighted to meet you at last.”

  Clara was duly charmed, and a pleased smile crept onto her lips. She scolded herself for being so easily flattered.

  “Have you just arrived, Captain Laker?”

  “Harold,” Harold corrected her. “I much prefer Harold. Captain Laker was a man at the Front, I am a civilian now.”

  “Harold arrived not long after you departed,” Tommy interjected. “I have mentioned the spare room to him, but he is being rather too polite to accept it.”

  “I don’t want to impose upon you,” Harold said graciously.

  Knowing how this game went, and the peculiarly English formalities of getting someone to accept an invitation freely given, Clara jumped in.

  “Well I quite insist you stay here with us. You are here to help us, and we can’t possibly expect you to sleep at an impersonal hotel. It would be bad manners to invite you down and then have you paying to sleep somewhere.”

  “If you are quite sure?” Harold said.

  “I am positive,” Clara reassured him. “You are our guest and that is that.”

  Harold was beaming with delight. The preliminaries safely negotiated, Harold returned to his seat and Clara took a place on the somewhat lumpy sofa. She made a mental note to see about a new one in the near future.

  Outside a squally shower blew dead leaves at the window and the fire sparked and crackled, reminding them all of how relieved they were to be indoors. Clara felt a pang of guilt she was not chasing down Jeremiah the tortoise, considering the weather outside, but then again, if he had been pawned by Ethel (a remarkable turn of events) then he would surely be safely in the warm, waiting to be claimed or sold on.

  “I have outlined the situation to Harold,” Tommy said. “Explaining the nature of the help we hope he can offer.”

  “It is certainly an unusual request,” Harold remarked. “At least for me. I am sure there are clever fellows working for the authorities who do such things all the time.”

  “Sadly, not in Brighton,” Clara said lightly. “And not on cases that the Chief Constable considers low priority.”

  “Oh,” Harold looked uncertain what to say for a moment. “Well, I shall do what I can. I used to live, eat and sleep shell trajectories. I can still remember the coordinates from some of our attacks, they seem imprinted on my brain. I have half a mind to write them down and have them put on my gravestone when I die, to baffle future generations.”

  “It must have been quite a task, range-finding,” Clara said.

  “You had to have the right mind for it,” Harold nodded. “First you needed a solid understanding of numbers and mathematics, but it was more than that. You needed to be able to judge distances accurately and to be able to listen to a shell land and decide if it had hit something or not. Can’t quite explain the last bit, but you developed a sixth sense for when a strike was true. In fact, there were times I could tell you a shell was going to hit the right target before it even landed, like I was somehow riding it and could see where it was going.

  “You had to have nerves of steel too, because while we were shelling the Hun, they were doing all in their power to shell us. You would go for their big guns, aim to destroy them or at least keep them out of action long enough to give the regulars a chance to move forward. Each shell that missed, you knew was giving away your position and increased your own odds of a Hun shell landing on top of you. It was a game of who got their aim right first. Terrifying in many regards, but you had to keep your mind focused, even when the guns next to you had been blown to smithereens.”

  Clara tried to comprehend such an experience; the adrenaline, the terror, the need to drive it all away and concentrate on the task at hand, but she knew no stretch of her imagination could truly ever conjure up what Harold had gone through. He seemed unharmed by the experience, talking about it calmly as if he was just referring to the art of winning a football match or aligning a telescope on Mars.

  “I can’t really imagine how it was,” Clara confessed. “I try, but without having been there I can only create a poor copy of what it must have been like in my head.”

  “That is not such a bad thing,” Harold smiled. “Sometimes, I would gladly give up these memories for something blander, the sort of recounting you might find in a boy’s adventure novel, not the gritty, bloody reality I have stashed up here.”

  He tapped the side of his head.

  “However, as grim and awful as that time was, it appears it can have a benefit in a post-war world. After all, if I had not been required to figure out shell tra
jectories, I would not be able to help you now,” Harold had not lost his happy tone throughout the conversation.

  Clara wondered how much of his good cheer and light-heartedness was a necessary shield he put up to protect himself from deeper probing. Was he really so content and carefree? She would never know for sure, and perhaps that was the point.

  “I suppose tracking the movement of a bullet must be slightly different to that of a shell?” Clara asked.

  “Yes and no,” Harold replied. “With a shell, the goal is to send it up high and then have it arc down onto the target. Its trajectory is going to look like a huge curve, and the angle of the gun muzzle will determine how sharp or shallow that curve is. With a gun, you aim directly at a target and intend to fire in a straight line. The explosives used to force the bullet out of the muzzle thrust it along that imaginary line.

  “But there are things in common. If a bullet was to fly far enough or was not powered by a sufficient force it would arc and dip down, thus it would potentially hit its target lower than intended. Ignoring things like the type of damage a bullet does compared to a shell – for what you hope to achieve by shooting someone is very different to what you want to achieve with a shell – you do have to take into account wind speed and force for both. Angles play a part and so do distance.

  “I have no doubt, therefore, that I can help you. I just may need a little more time than if I was trying to tell you where someone shot a shell from.”

  Harold sat back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap, he seemed to be already enjoying the prospect of this challenge.

  “I would imagine that whether a gun is being fire upwards, or straight ahead, would make a difference to where the bullet went too?” Clara asked.

  “Naturally,” Harold agreed. “When you shoot anything upwards, gravity comes into play. As our old friend Newton demonstrated, gravity is an implacable force that is constantly pulling everything downwards. Now, take our shells, if we wanted them to go a short distance, we raised up the gun muzzle, so they were shooting up high into the sky and the pull of gravity would impede their forward progress and cause them to fly in a tight arc.