In Pale Battalions - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  ‘This man Mompesson?’

  ‘No. Another man. A friend from the Army.’ There was a gold pocket watch acting as paperweight for some letters in the bureau. I followed its coiled chain with my eye, snaking round the edge of the blotter … to a photograph, a sepia miniature in a silver, oval frame. ‘He lived at Meongate, you see. His name was …’ The photograph was of a lady, dark-haired, in a high-necked lace blouse, whose face I’d seen before, in Lord Powerstock’s own study, in a portrait of his own wedding. I lifted the picture from its place and stared at it in disbelief.

  I hadn’t heard Fletcher move, but, suddenly he was beside me, snatching the picture from my hand. He stood awkwardly, putting most of his weight on a stick, but on his level stare there was no hint of weakness.

  ‘His name was Hallows.’

  ‘That photograph … is of his mother.’

  ‘It may be.’

  ‘It is. She worked in this area before her death. She even wrote about this pub. The police broke up a meeting here twelve years ago. And you keep her picture in your bureau.’

  ‘You know a great deal, Mr Franklin.’

  He was wrong. I still didn’t know enough. ‘You knew Lady Powerstock, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ He replaced her picture in the bureau and reached past me to raise the lid. ‘What of it?’

  ‘And Mompesson?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him. I was acquainted with Lady Powerstock. She was a fine woman. But she’s been dead for eleven years. I have no connection with her family.’

  ‘Did you know the late Captain Hallows – her son?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or his wife – Leonora?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Now missing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She left Meongate early yesterday morning and has not been seen since. She’s been somewhat distressed since the murder – and the subsequent suicide. I’m worried about her.’

  He turned and limped back towards his chair. ‘I told you, Mr Franklin. I can’t help you.’

  I followed him. ‘Have you seen her? Has she been here?’

  I couldn’t decipher the expression on his face as he looked at me. ‘What business would she have with me? There’s no reason for her to have been here.’

  ‘I think there is. I think the reason is connected with the photograph of Lady Powerstock you keep by you. The sort of photograph that might be kept by … an admirer, let’s say.’

  He turned then to confront me. I could tell by his simmering look and tensed muscles that he was angry, but still composed. ‘Tread carefully, young man. Since you claim to be looking for a lady who’s missing, I’ll attribute your insolence to concern on her behalf. But I shan’t have Miriam Powerstock spoken of disrespectfully. By Heaven I shan’t.’ I could see that I’d hit the mark. ‘Don’t let this limp fool you. I started work on ships when I was fourteen. It makes a man strong – strong enough to break your arm if I want to.’ He reached out and seized my left forearm with crushing force. I winced. ‘See what I mean?’ Then he released me.

  ‘I’ve no wish to speak of anyone disrespectfully,’ I said after a moment. ‘Mrs Hallows is missing from home. I’m bound to do all I can to find her.’

  ‘Suppose she had been here. Suppose I could tell you she was well. Would that satisfy you?’

  ‘If you know where she is …’

  ‘Exactly. It wouldn’t satisfy you, would it?’ He moved back towards the bureau. ‘There’d never be an end of questions. About me, about Miriam, about all the things people like you just can’t leave alone.’ He turned the key in the bureau lock. ‘So the answer to your question is no. I don’t know Mrs Hallows. I’ve never seen her.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can believe you, Mr Fletcher.’

  He looked out into the narrow yard beyond his window. ‘Well, that’s your problem, isn’t it?’

  ‘If you know anything, it’s your duty to tell me.’

  He turned to face me. ‘Don’t talk to me about duty. You’re too young and I’m too old. I know my duty – and it isn’t to help you.’ He paused. ‘You carry your shoulder stiffly. Is that a war wound?’

  ‘As it happens, yes.’

  ‘Then you should know better than to lecture me about duty. Doesn’t what’s happening in France sicken you?’

  ‘How would you know what’s happening in France?’

  ‘I read the newspapers. But, unlike most people, I read between the lines. If you’re involved in this war, you have my pity – but not my respect.’

  ‘You’re a hard man, Mr Fletcher.’

  ‘Life’s made me like that. I thought once I could help others, that together we could win a better life, some of the privileges people like you enjoy. But that was before this.’ He slapped his stiff right leg.

  ‘And before Miriam Powerstock died?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  ‘Whatever you think of me, you must understand that I’m only trying to help Mrs Hallows. It’s vital that I find her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You may as well know. She’s expecting a child. With her husband dead, I’m not sure she’s responsible for her own actions.’ It wasn’t true. I may have doubted Leonora’s word, but never her level-headedness. If Fletcher had met her, he would know that.

  He was clever enough not to challenge the point. He nodded slowly, as if absorbing the implications of what I’d said. ‘That certainly explains your concern, Mr Franklin. The family doubts paternity, I suppose.’ Then he seemed to think again. ‘Unless …’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘Captain Hallows has been dead longer than his wife’s been pregnant. Is that it?’

  ‘Now it’s my turn to say that’s none of your business.’

  He limped back towards me, musing as he did so. ‘Your tone confirms it.’

  ‘Perhaps you can at least understand now why I must find her, before she does anything … irresponsible. She shouldn’t be left to wander … in an area like this.’

  ‘This area is my home, Mr Franklin. Be careful how you speak of it.’

  ‘Surely you can see …’

  ‘What I can see is a pampered young man meddling in things he doesn’t understand. Unlike Lord Powerstock, I’m not a man of property: I live under my sister’s roof, on sufferance. But my past is one possession I don’t intend to give up, certainly not at your say-so. I know nothing of your friends. I want to know nothing of them. I met the first Lady Powerstock when she worked in this area – a long time ago. But that’s all.’

  ‘That’s not good enough.’

  ‘It’s all you’re getting. And now I think it’s time you left.’

  I could see further argument was useless. Fletcher looked then as I always now think of him: bleak and unshakeable, like some outcrop of rock on a windswept moor. Despite my concern for Leonora, I felt his secret drawing me past his implacable hostility. A resentful old dockyardman with mind and body twisted by an unfortunate past? Even then, I could see there was more to him than that. He was too subtle, too lucidly intelligent, for the image to fit. There was something else, something more in his proudly set face, his books and his bureau, his one, treasured picture of Hallows’ mother, that told me I’d found, in him, the missing link between what I knew and what I sensed in the Powerstock household. Yet still he was right. Still I did not understand.

  I left the Mermaid in a rage. I had no way of forcing Fletcher to tell me anything, but I knew – or sensed – that he could tell me everything I needed to know if only I could find some way past his well-prepared defences. I went to the nearest pub, a tiny alehouse in the shadow of the Dockyard wall, crowded with workmen, and drank quietly in a corner, trying to reason out what, so far, seemed inexplicable.

  Later – none the wiser – I retraced my steps to the town station and telephoned Meongate. It was Fergus who answered and confirmed there was still no news of Leonora. I warned him that my own return might now be delayed. I had no intentio
n of leaving Portsmouth until I’d gleaned more than Fletcher hoped I would.

  It was mid-afternoon and quieter on the streets. I made my way to the Guildhall in gathering drizzle and found, at its rear, the public library. There, in a drab chamber where old men in frayed coats stood at boards reading newspaper accounts of the latest triumphs, an attendant brought me back copies of the local evening paper for November 1904.

  I skimmed through the bound and crinkled pages to the date I wanted: Monday, 28th November. There was no missing the headlines above a right-hand column: DISTURBANCE AT PORTSEA TAVERN – POLICE BREAK UP SEDITIOUS MEETING – 8 ARRESTS, ONE CONSTABLE INJURED. I scanned the report.

  ‘Prompt police action brought to an abrupt close on Saturday night a riotous gathering at the Mermaid Inn, Nile Street, Portsea, and, with it, the disruptive movement amongst HM Dockyard personnel of which this so-called public meeting was the culmination.

  ‘Recent months have seen a number of groups spring up in the locality allegedly seeking to improve living conditions in Portsea, groups which, it now transpires, have also been motivated by revolutionary political objectives. Disaffected members of the Dockyard labour force and others of the unemployed have succeeded in recruiting support from well-intentioned and well-connected philanthropic circles for a sustained campaign for better living and working conditions in the area. That this seemingly laudable endeavour concealed more sinister political aims was never more evident than in the groups’ contacts with Royal Naval personnel, some of whom were present at Saturday’s meeting – and others before it – where some of the more inflammatory speeches could only be interpreted as an incitement to mutiny.

  ‘This last factor alone obliged the police to take action, which they did in exemplary fashion. The meeting was broken up with the minimum of damage and injury, although one constable was cut about the face with a knife and is now recovering in hospital. The ringleaders were all arrested, amongst them Donald Machim, notorious for his violent role in the engineers’ strike of 1897–98, and Daniel Fletcher, for long a thorn in the flesh of the Dockyard management as a fomenter of unrest. Machim, Fletcher and three others were brought before the magistrates this morning on charges of conspiracy, sedition and incitement to riot. They were remanded in custody until 5th December.’

  So there it was. Miriam Powerstock had written of the disrupted meeting in tones which left no doubt of where her sympathies lay. And Daniel Fletcher, who kept her photograph by his side eleven years after her death, had been arrested that day. I asked for the following months’ copies and went through them until I found the trial report. On 23rd February 1905 the five defendants had all been found guilty as charged and sentenced to various terms: five years for Machim, two for Fletcher, eighteen months for the others. And the judge had spared a coruscating word for the conspirators’ philanthropic supporters.

  ‘It has been profoundly depressing to hear that several members of the cloth and of the aristocracy at one time placed their faith in the likes of these wretches to improve society when, in fact, their true and abiding intention was to undermine it in every way that they could.’

  So much for that. Even as the judge recorded his words for unyielding posterity, Miriam Powerstock had been carrying the virus that later killed her. Now I could begin to understand what Fletcher meant, what made him as bitter as he was: her death at Meongate, a sacrifice – as he might see it – for his bankrupt ideals, while he sat in a prison cell, or still sat – with the memory of what it meant – in a pub back-room in Portsea.

  * * *

  I left the library and wandered out into the grey, un-caring light of late afternoon. The street past the Guildhall was busy with homeward-bound traffic, the pavement thick with raincoated figures, who knew little of the war I’d returned from and even less of a twelve-year-old drama still fresh in my mind.

  I followed a tunnel beneath the railway embankment that led to a park where unexpected quiet reigned, where drizzle blurred the edges of my indecision. I sat on a bench and watched dusk gather about the war-geared city, cranes still working and a hooter blaring in the distant dockyard. The silence around me was sufficient to admit the smeared patter of the rain, the moist stillness to absorb the lone, passing figures. There I waited for darkness to fall.

  Night came: inky black in the park, the city’s lights shrouded against air raids. I made my way back towards the railway station and called in at a nearby picture house to watch a jerky newsreel from the Somme. Strident music and bombastic commentary couldn’t hide, from me at least, the truth behind its choreographed mockery: forced smiles from the tired faces of men who would never come home.

  By the time I left, it was late enough for my purpose. I followed the same route as before to Charlotte Street, where now the pubs were full and noisy, the naphtha touches above the eel and pie stalls lighting the faces of drunken men and shabby women, a barrel organ cranking somewhere its mechanical overture to the night’s excess.

  I cut down the alley that I knew led to Copenhagen Yard. The noise of the street faded behind me till only the odd shriek and smash of glass caught up with my footsteps. The day’s rain smeared the cobbled margins of the alley, where a cat hissed and retreated through the sundered boarding of a narrow door. This was the place I had been before, but changed by night, its squalor rendered sinister by the cloak of darkness; changed, perhaps, as much by my reasons for being there as by its own, shifting, deep-shadowed nature.

  I turned into the yard. This time, no staring youth was there to meet me, only the blank, rain-dewed tenement walls and black, socketed windows. Water dripped irregularly from a sagging gutter on to the dully echoing lean-to roof. Nothing stirred.

  I crossed to the wooden stairs and paused. Still there was nothing. It seemed safe enough to climb them. From the narrow, railed platform at their top, I scanned the yard beneath me: it was deserted.

  I had brought a stone with me from the park. Now I lifted it from my pocket in a gloved hand and brought it down against one of the panes of the kitchen window. A sharp crack of glass split the silence. But there was no reaction: such a noise, I judged, was not unusual. I tapped out the loose shards of the pane with the stone, then reached in and pushed back the latch. I prised up the sash till the window was half-open, then climbed on to the railings and eased myself across on to the sill. A scramble and I was through, dropping down on to bare boards where broken glass crunched beneath my feet.

  I lit a match. The flare of light showed a mean, stripped kitchen, bare but for a stove and sink in one corner and a table in another, lath and plaster walls behind sagging paper. But I was in luck: on the table was a butt of candle in an enamel saucer. I put the match to its dwindled wick. By its wavering light, all I could see was what I might have expected to see: a drab, deserted garret. Nothing more.

  I went out into the passage. There a strip of linoleum covered the boards. To my right, two more doorways opened on to empty rooms. To my left, the passage ran to the entrance door. And there the flickering light showed a pale shape on the floor: a letter. I stooped and picked it up: a thick vellum envelope incongruously lodged amidst the dust and scattered plaster. I held it up to read the name: J. Willis, Esq.

  That was all. But not all. I knew the precise, elegant hand. The writing was Leonora’s. I hurried back to the kitchen and replaced the candle on the table, then tore the letter open. Inside was a single, folded sheet. I held it in the pool of faltering light and began to read. It opened abruptly, without address or salutation.

  ‘I must speak to you. It is more important than I can say that I should do so. If you receive this letter, I beg you to make contact. I have seen Mr Fletcher and he will know where I can be found. Leonora. September 25th.’

  I stared at the brief, charged message. The date was the day before: the day of Leonora’s disappearance. Now I knew for certain that she too had followed the trail which led to Fletcher and an empty garret in Portsea, a trail whose end she knew but I still did not.

&
nbsp; Metal chinked against metal, somewhere close by. I jerked upright and strained my senses for some sign of what it might mean. Sure enough, there it was again. Somebody had released the padlock on the front door and slipped the hasp, somebody who must know, by the candle I had lit, that I was there. I snuffed out the flame and thrust the letter into my pocket. At once, though too late, the glimmer of an electric torch reached me from the stairway beyond the window. I was discovered.

  There was no time to hide or flee. I made for the passage, hoping, I think, that there was a bolt on the door I could slide across to deny access. But it was a vain hope. As I swung into the passage, I heard a key turn in the lock. An instant later, the door burst open and a dazzling torchbeam met my panicky advance.

  ‘Stop where you are!’ The voice was abrupt and authoritative. Instinctively, I obeyed.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Surely you know me.’

  ‘Fletcher?’

  The torch snapped off. Now I knew by his outline in the less intense darkness of the doorway that it was indeed Fletcher; I could see the drop of his right shoulder where he leant on his stick. ‘What are you doing here, Mr Franklin?’

  I tried to talk away my sense of guilt. ‘I might ask you the same question.’

  ‘Hardly. I rent these rooms from the owner of the woodyard. So I have every right to be here.’

  ‘Earlier, you denied any connection with this address.’

  ‘But you didn’t believe me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then who else did you expect to meet here?’

  ‘Maybe the real tenant. Maybe Mr Willis.’

  ‘I see. You know about Mr Willis, do you?’

  ‘I know of his existence. And that Mrs Hallows was trying to contact him – at this address.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Now you’re the one asking questions. Why should I be any readier to answer them than you were mine?’