Once we had gained the shield of the wall he tilted his head to peek round the corner. ‘That was a narrow squeak,’ he said, brushing himself down. We crept on, close to the wall, until we reached a door at the far end of the yard. To my surprise, though evidently not to his, it was unlocked, and we passed through. Duckenfield halted here, and removed something from his pocket. It was a silk tie, which he told me to put on.
‘If anybody asks, we are visitors here.’ I did up the tie, and on seeing my handiwork he gave a long-suffering sigh. He fiddled around with the knot for a moment, then squinted at me, unimpressed. ‘Not quite the picture of respectability I was aiming for . . .’
Just then a voice hailed us from down the corridor. ‘Are you the entertainers? It’s Friday today, isn’t it?’ An old lady approached, her eyes darting inquisitively between the pair of us. She was wearing a plain brown smock, with a little lace cap on her head.
‘It is Friday, madam,’ replied Duckenfield gaily.
‘We always used to have an entertainment on a Friday – but not so much of late,’ she explained. She was slightly stooped, and wheezing, though her voice carried confidently.
‘Indeed? Well, my young friend and I,’ he said with a glance at me, ‘would be honoured to oblige you. Perhaps you could direct us to –?’
She blinked at him appraisingly, then seemed to come to a decision. Who else in here would be sporting a top hat, brocade waistcoat and tie but an ‘entertainer’? ‘The hall is this way,’ she said, and beckoned us with a waggle of her hand. As we followed, she told us her name was Miss Finch, and that she was one of the house trustees. Duckenfield leaned to my ear and whispered, ‘I hope you have a party piece at the ready.’
I signalled to him frantically that I had no such thing, and he laughed behind his sleeve. The hall was a more convivial place than its counterpart across the yard, either because authority here was almost unnoticed or because the women had a keener instinct for communal living. Perhaps fifty inmates – all wearing the institutional brown – sat about talking, or else wandered in a daze. Our guide clapped her hands together and asked for quiet. We waited on the threshold whilst she explained that ‘two gentlemen from the local theatre’ (when had she conceived this idea?) had arrived and would be pleased to entertain them. Duckenfield’s face as he listened was a picture of mischievous glee.
‘What are we to do?’ I asked him in a panicked whisper.
‘Why, we must entertain them.’ He left a pause, then added winningly, ‘Or at least I must. You should try to find the lady.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, more relieved than I could admit. Just then Miss Finch put her head round the door and asked us if we were ready. With a wink, Duckenfield drew himself up and sauntered into the room. I watched through the half-open door as he bowed before his audience, thanked Miss Finch for her introduction and explained that his associate was temporarily indisposed – ‘a ticklish cough’ – but that he himself was perfectly able to perform solo. A hush had fallen on the room, and I held my breath. The silence lengthened as he stood there, and I wondered what on earth he intended to do, with so many eyes upon him.
Then, without further preamble, he began.
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain . . .
His voice, beautifully supple, seemed to dance with the verse, nonchalant yet commanding, with a lilt so natural one might have thought the words had just sprung, fully formed, from his own teeming brain rather than Keats’s. It was the sound of a man in his element, and when he reached the end of the sonnet there was a stunned pause before the audience broke into applause.
Miss Finch, deeming herself superfluous, had edged into the wings next to me. In response I pulled a wondering face, as though to say, We are in the presence of a master. Duckenfield had already launched himself into some Tennyson when I leaned in and asked, in a whisper, if she knew of a lady named Edith, or rather Mrs Arkell, in residence.
She shook her head slowly. ‘It is a large house, as you see. There are a great many here I could not name.’ She saw my disappointment, and added, ‘Perhaps you might try the sewing room.’ She evidently assumed I knew the layout of the house, and without disabusing her I sloped off down the corridor. Whenever I encountered a trustee, distinguished by their white caps, I asked the same question, but no, they’d never heard of Edith. What struck me was the social promiscuity of the inmates, here a hollow-cheeked waif, and there a jabbering imbecile; here a genteel-looking lady trying to read a book, there a loud-mouthed dolly-mop holding court nearby. Many were close in years to Miss Finch, possibly older, yet round the next turn I saw a young girl nursing a baby. No attempt had been made to discriminate, no concessions made to class or to age. It was not cruelty that predominated here, but indifference.
Eventually I found another hall, where several old ladies sat with heads bowed, unspeaking. At first I thought it might be a prayer meeting, so intense was their concentration, but then I realised that they were each absorbed in needlework. To interrupt the genteel mood seemed discourteous, and I was about to withdraw when one of the ladies glanced up, and, catching my eye, offered a shy smile. It was a face that had known hardship, but had not forgotten what it was to be gracious. Touched, I sidled over to her table, and saw that she was making a sampler, with a border of foxgloves and forget-me-nots. Her needle had just completed a word, all delicate loops and curlicues. It read EDITH. I stared for a moment at her.
‘Edith,’ I said in wonder. She raised her head again. I knew the answer before I had even asked her. ‘Is your name – Edith Arkell?’
She frowned uncertainly. ‘Yes . . . is there something –?’
‘I have news for you.’ I took off my coat, turned it inside out and began to tear at the lining. ‘You don’t know this, but you are the owner of a row of houses not far from here.’
Her smile had faded now, replaced by alarm. ‘I think there is some mistake. I don’t own – any house. I never have.’
I had opened up the lining along the coat’s hem, and removed from it the folded page I had taken from the ledger at St Pancras Records Office all those months ago. Smoothing it out on the table in front of her, I explained that her name had been used under false pretences and that, by default, she was now leaseholder of five separate properties. She still looked doubtful. Who could blame her?
‘Mrs Arkell, please – hear me out. My name is David Wildeblood. I have come here only because I want to help you. I met you once before. You lived at Goldington Street in Somers Town. You left there and came to the workhouse, because your health had failed. I am here to assure you that this does not have to be your home. You can live in a house of your own. Is that something you would like?’
She hesitated, bewildered, but now with a faint inkling that I was not, after all, a madman. ‘Well, I don’t know – I’m rather old, you see, and I’ve no children. Who would look after me?’
‘Whoever you wish – you can afford it. All you have to do is come with me. Would you do that?’
By now our conversation had drawn curious looks from other seamstresses. Mrs Arkell looked about her, as though they might know the answer. Her gaze returned to me once more, and perhaps she discerned some grain of possibility in my pleading look. She smiled again, and held out a bony, almost weightless hand for me to help her to her feet. Now I knew how Stanley felt when he found Dr Livingstone.
I walked her out of there, stepping back up the corridor and onwards to the main hall. The door stood open. More inmates had since crowded into the room, drawn by the siren call of Duckenfield’s mellifluous voice. It took me a few moments to identify the piece he was then declaiming: ‘. . . a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an an
gel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals – and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – no, nor woman neither –’
And on that line he paused, having spotted me, with an old lady leaning on my arm. He gave a wry little laugh of understanding, and said, in his own voice, ‘Though I am always prepared to make an exception.’
The newspapers had a field day. I was pleased to see that the Chronicle led the charge, though Paget and I, a brief exchange of letters aside, avoided one another. Once the existence of the ‘phantom’ leaseholder was brought to light the whole house of cards came down. Moyles and several other St Pancras vestrymen were arraigned for conspiracy to defraud. They had been caught once, in April, for neglecting the repair of insanitary and dangerous tenements in Somers Town. Instead of carrying out those repairs they had attempted to conceal their ownership of the leases, first behind the shield of a puppet company, and then under a series of borrowed names. It had enabled them to charge exorbitant rents without being answerable to the protest from their tenants. This last subterfuge might have gone undetected, the reports noted, but for the accidental discovery that one of the listed owners, Thomas Bowland-Darke, was two months dead when he ‘bought’ the lease on houses in Johnson Street. Another leaseholder was revealed to be a seventy-eight-year-old widow, Edith Arkell, resident in St Pancras Workhouse and quite unaware of her accession to the property-owning classes.
The exposure of the fraud reverberated through Parliament, where a lobby led by the Liberal MP Augustus Abernathy had been calling for the ‘unregenerate slum classes’ of Somers Town to be resettled at Bindon Fields, Bedfordshire. The lobby had been organised by a charity, the Social Protection League, several of whose members were, unbeknownst to the public, the very slumlords responsible for the shocking condition of that neighbourhood’s housing. Legal action would be taken against them. The plans for any enforced relocation, let alone the pilot scheme of a so-called ‘labour camp’, were thrown out. The Home Secretary announced that there would be an investigation into how the St Pancras Vestry – supposed ‘guardians of the poor’ – had been allowed to run the parish as their personal fiefdom. What I hadn’t known was that the cleared land in Somers Town had been sold to an association of property speculators. One of them was a company named Condor Holdings, which, on investigation, was found to have been recently dissolved.
A few days after the storm had broken I received a letter written on House of Commons paper. It was from Paget’s friend, Robert Tallis, and included this afterthought:
Whilst it will be a source of satisfaction to know that Mrs Arkell has been restored to a private residence and her former respectability, one pities the fate of those others amongst the ‘deserving poor’ left homeless by the clearances at Somers Town. I fear it very likely that some who profited from the illegal sale of the land will escape without consequences.
The morning after I had taken Mrs Arkell out of St Pancras Workhouse I returned to stand watch at its gate, in time for the emergence of the men. He looked only mildly surprised to see me, as though he were out on a stroll and had spotted an agreeable acquaintance whose name he couldn’t quite recall.
‘Mr Duckenfield!’ I called in greeting. The other casuals, dazed by the prospect of another day’s tramping, were dispersing in his wake.
‘Ah, Daniel the judge,’ he said with a tip of his hat, and I wondered then if he really had forgotten my name, or was quoting again. ‘All well with the old dear?’
I assured him it was, having installed her at my lodgings for the time being. (Mrs Home, doubtful when I introduced Mrs Arkell as my ‘aunt’, came round to the idea once she sniffed the extra rent money.)
‘I have something of yours,’ he said, holding up a forefinger. He dipped into his voluminous coat, like a stage magician, and drew out my knife – if I could call it mine. It would always be a thing I was looking after for Jo. I thanked him and pocketed it.
‘There is something I have for you,’ I said, taking out a cloth-bound volume, blunted at the edges and somewhat knocked about since my schooldays. ‘Now that I know how much you like to read . . .’
He took it, with a bemused smile, and opened it at the title page. ‘“The Diary of an Aurelian”,’ he read, ‘“by . . . Thomas Wildeblood”. I’ve heard of that name.’
‘My father. His first book – he wrote it when I was a boy.’
‘But this must be a treasured – look, an inscription, “to my dear son David”. This is really too much!’ His pleased expression was touched with doubt.
‘I would like you to have it. A token. Had it not been for you, I’d never have been able to find her. And your impromptu recital was, well – it won’t be forgotten, by me or the distressed ladies of St Pancras.’
He waved a hand in dismissal of his good deeds.
‘And you made sure that nobody stole my boots,’ I added.
He smiled then. ‘Well, for that I will take some small credit. I would not have you go bootless.’ He returned his scrutiny to the book. ‘And for this, I thank you. By the next time we meet I shall be an authority on butterflies of the world!’
I wondered about that – not his expertise in butterflies, but about the likelihood of our meeting again. It was too sad to think of him out here day and night, ‘carrying the banner’, in his own phrase. I would miss his company, but I didn’t know why, or how to tell him. ‘It’s an odd thing,’ I began, ‘after such a brief acquaintance – I have a feeling that once we part we may never . . . set eyes on each other again.’
He shrugged, smiling. ‘Who is to say that we won’t? In this city you would be surprised at how often the same faces rise to meet you.’
‘But the streets – they’re dangerous . . .’
Duckenfield shook his head. ‘Pray, don’t alarm yourself. I know what’s o’clock. I have walked the streets too long not to be leary.’
A leary man, I thought, in echo. Yes, that was what he was. ‘Where will you go?’
He tipped his head to one side, and pouted his lower lip. ‘The winter’s coming in. I dare say I’ll find a suitable hole to hibernate – somewhere I can read in peace.’ He held up my father’s book in illustration.
We stood facing one another for a few moments, before he said, ‘One more thing. Your money – hidden in the wall over there.’
‘Please,’ I replied, shaking my head. It would have mortified me to take it. ‘Buy yourself a decent dinner. Or – I don’t know – a new pair of boots.’
He looked down at his present battered pair, as though he had never really noticed them before. ‘Hmm. Perhaps I will,’ he said thoughtfully. I had a sudden inexplicable urge to keep him talking there a while longer, but he had already thrust out a hand. ‘Goodbye, then. I’ll see you on the road.’ It sounded like a valediction he had uttered often, amongst his own.
I returned his goodbye, and felt a numbness rise into my throat. I started south. Before I got to the turn in the avenue I paused, thinking I would take a last look at him tramping in the distance, a wisp of smoke rising from the pipe in his mouth. But then I couldn’t bear to see whether he would stop to retrieve the money or not, and I walked on.
18
Reckoning
NOVEMBER HAD SWAMPED the city in choking brown fogs and rainstorms, basting the streets until every building was blurred and the gutters rose like rivers in flood. Carters with lanterns on their horses ghosted out of the dark, and the air would ring with sharp cries and a screeching of wheels as some poor fool tried to cross the road. Gas lamps looked on blearily, their orange eyes blindfolded by the murk. Returning home at night, I would sometimes pass a little huddle of vagrants and hear them coughing like hags.
Arrangements at Hanover Street had reverted to normality after I had found lodgings for Mrs Arkell and a lady companion in Marylebone. I had visited her there once, and been graciously received. Otherwise, my society had dwindled almost to nothing. I no longer saw Paget, an
d the few colleagues from my time with Marchmont had fallen away. The Evening News had kept me on as a copy editor, and I settled into the dreary diurnal round of office life. As for Roma, after what happened at Jo’s funeral I considered myself an outcast, and had not ventured into Somers Town since. Of course my banishment did not prevent me from thinking about her, and whenever my steps led me towards Camden or along the Euston Road I half hoped, and half dreaded, running into her. I imagined the various things I might say, if ever we did meet, but the memory of her implacable dark eyes burning through me eventually put a stop to that. She was gone, and there was an end of it.
I had not been entirely forsaken, though. On my chimney piece stood an invitation card whose severe gilt edges looked askance at the dusty night lamp and the slouching row of books. On first reading the words Sir Martin Elder requests I was convinced it was a wedding invitation, but it turned out to be a party at the Elder mansion to celebrate Kitty’s coming of age. That I had been invited at all surprised me, for we had not seen one another since the day of that carriage ride in September when she had told me of her engagement. I suspected that something in my response at the time had disappointed or displeased her, though I couldn’t fathom what it might be – I had congratulated her, and meant it. A note, written in brown ink, had been included with the card.
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