Half the World in Winter

by Maggie Joel

  ‘There will have been another accident,’ remarked Jack, and Aurora, standing outside the boys’ room, paused to listen. She pictured her youngest son with his hands in his pockets imitating the way Bill stood, the voluminous Boys’ Compendium of the English Soldier: His Uniform and Weaponry as Used in the Greatest English Battles, whose heroic and blood-curdling pages had consumed him for the past fortnight, open on the bed beside him. ‘There’ll be an article in The Times for certain,’ Jack added, because this was not their first railway accident and they knew how things would be.

  ‘Telegrams do not always mean there has been a railway accident,’ Gus corrected, the meticulous one, the contrary one. ‘In actual fact,’ Gus continued, ‘in most households the arrival of a telegram would not signify a railway accident at all. It would, more likely, announce a wedding or someone’s arrival somewhere or, on occasion, the death of a distant relative.’

  ‘But here it usually means a railway accident,’ Jack observed.

  They fell silent but Aurora hesitated outside their door. She did not venture up to the children’s rooms in the attic often, and the room directly next door to the boys’ room she had not set foot in for many months. She had been absent, she realised, and perhaps her children had needed her. But six months had passed and things would be different from now on. She would go into the boys’ room to say goodnight to them. She would write to Bill before she retired for the night, and tomorrow she would take Dinah to her dressmaker and together they would pay some calls. She had wanted them all to go away together, to Italy perhaps with the Brightsides, it had seemed like such a practical idea, but Lucas had forbidden it. But he would come around. In the meantime she would say goodnight to her children.

  There had been a railway accident.

  Mrs Logan had known it as soon as the boy had delivered the telegram in the middle of dinner.

  ‘Got three more of these to deliver before I get off,’ the boy had announced importantly, pausing on the back step to adjust his chinstrap and await a coin. ‘Next one’s over Hampstead way. Take me best part of an hour to get there in this weather, I s’pect.’

  ‘To what address?’

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Can’t say, can I?’

  A second coin was passed to him, which he slipped into his tunic pocket. ‘Coburg Square. Give you the name, if you like?’

  But Mrs Logan did not need the name. She already knew it: Mr Porter Sinclair, a director, like Mr Jarmyn, of the North West Midlands Railway. The other two telegrams would be going to Mr Hart of Aldgate and Mr Freebody of Mayfair.

  When a second telegram had arrived at the house an hour later and Mr Jarmyn had retired to his study, her suspicions appeared to have been confirmed.

  The port decanter in his study had been almost empty. Annie ought to have noted this and informed her at once, but Anne had quit and the decanter had gone unfilled. So Mrs Logan had made her way down to the cellar and dug out the correct bottle, but before she had had time to decant it Mr Jarmyn had rung for it.

  The study was on the first floor in a small room at the rear of the house and, in answer to Mr Jarmyn’s summons, Mrs Logan had knocked briefly at the door before going in. The room was lit by a single lamp attached to the wall and bookshelves lined all four walls, reaching to ceiling height. Aside from the two jardinières overflowing with ferns, the chiffonier by the window, an occasional table near the fireplace and the work table in the centre of the room, the only furniture were the two Louis XIV chairs, in one of which Mr Jarmyn had been seated.

  The telegrams had lain opened and unfolded, on the worktable on which the crystal decanter and his empty glass stood, almost as though Mr Jarmyn had placed them there for her to read.

  But why would he do such a thing? His business was of no concern to her.

  She had opened the new bottle and stepped back at once. She disliked the smell of port. The deceased Mr Logan had developed a taste for it early on in their short marriage and, with him being in the wine trade, no doubt this was a useful taste for him to acquire but, three years after his death, the richly sweet odour and the glistening crimson hue of the stuff—so like freshly spilt blood—had, as she decanted it, induced an image of her dead husband that was so vivid and so unexpected she had had to stifle a gasp: Paul Logan standing frozen, now and forever, beside the shuttered window in their two-room tenement, holding aloft a tiny tumbler. It was night-time, of course—wasn’t it always night-time in that place?—the room in shadows, lit only by a guttering candle, the meagre light catching the dark liquid in his tumbler and creating a myriad of crimson, flickering points. That was his final night on Earth. The following morning he had left and was killed. They had been married less than three years.

  She blinked, shutting out the past.

  The two telegrams delivered earlier in the evening had lain open on the table, confirming that there had been an accident and that three people were dead.

  So be it. They would all know about it soon enough. It would be in the newspapers tomorrow for certain. It was carelessness then that had caused Mr Jarmyn to leave the telegrams lying open like that where anyone might see them.

  ‘Are you running my entire establishment single-handedly, Mrs Logan?’ he had asked, not raising his head to look at her face.

  ‘It would appear so, Mr Jarmyn.’

  And he had nodded as though this was only to be expected.

  CHAPTER THREE

  May 1880

  THE HOUSE HAD NOT ALWAYS been so cold. It was not so very long ago that fires had been lit in the grates.

  Sofia Jarmyn, a bright child of nine years of age, had once played in this house. A child at once unremarkable and precocious: adorable and irksome in equal quantities; eager to turn her hand to whatever games her brothers suggested and irritated by her role as forever the youngest in a large household; striving to mimic her elder sister and impatient to be her own person. She attended dance class, she practised her scales, and on warm summer afternoons she painted watercolours in Regent’s Park and watched, fascinated, as the raindrops transformed her carefully constructed creations into abstracts. At night she turned the pages of picture books filled with malevolent fairies and naughty children whose transgressions never went unpunished and, like her sister and her brothers before her, she dismissed such nonsense and decided it need not apply to her. She was, in short, a little girl.

  On an afternoon in the final week of May the last crocuses and daffodils had fallen away and the delphiniums and hydrangeas were beginning to take their place in the boxes that lined the windows of Cadogan Mews. The sun had risen early if sluggishly and had endured throughout the day, though veiled by a sickly yellowish cloud of London smoke. It was a day for running very fast down a steep grassy bank, for hitching up dresses and paddling barefoot in shallow streams as tiny transparent newts swam in circles at your toes. It was a day for climbing trees and hiding when your name was called.

  ‘Stand still, Sofia, please!’ said Mrs Logan crossly.

  ‘Will I be allowed to stroke the horse’s nose?’ said Sofia, trying for all she was worth not to wriggle. For today she was to ride in a hansom cab with her mother and, whilst it was quite exciting to ride occasionally in an omnibus with Dinah, to ride with her mother in a hansom cab with a horse, that was beyond anything!

  ‘If you do not let me tie you hair properly you won’t be going anywhere.’

  But Sofia ignored this because her mother had promised, which was worth more than any threat from Mrs Logan. Besides which, the promise had been made at Easter and Sofia had waited weeks—weeks!—for this day. She was not about to have it taken from her.

  ‘Dinah!’ she called, seeing her elder sister go past her door, and Dinah put her head in and smiled.

  ‘Is it today you are to go with Mama?’ she said.

  ‘Yes! And we are to ride in a hansom. I expect I shall be allowed to stroke the horse’s nose.’

  ‘They do bite, you know,’ Dinah observed, but with a smil
e to take the sting out of her words.

  ‘Not if you do it right,’ said Sofia as though she were an expert on such matters. Then she sighed. ‘I wish you were coming with us.’

  ‘But I can’t—I have a caller coming. Besides, it is your outing, not mine. You should enjoy all Mama’s attention for once without me getting in the way.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true,’ agreed Sofia thoughtfully. She would like to have all Mama’s attention. That seemed incredible, unprecedented. She felt a little giddy and sick at the enormity of it. And, as if her imagination had conjured her up, her mother appeared now in the doorway and Sofia turned crimson with delight for now the outing would begin. And not only that, but her mother had dressed in Sofia’s favourite blue taffeta gown that shone with different hues of turquoise and emerald like a peacock’s tail when it was caught in sunlight. She wore her pearls, just a single string as it was daytime, and her third-best kid gloves, which were midnight-blue to complement the gown. She looked, to Sofia’s eyes, like a figure from a fairytale who danced at midnight at a ball in a magical palace and quite probably wore glass slippers. Her mother did not, of course, wear glass slippers, but that was the impression she gave.

  ‘Are you ready, darling?’ said Mrs Jarmyn from the doorway, and when she said this she smiled as though she was looking forward to their outing every bit as much as her daughter was.

  Yes, Sofia was ready! She had been ready for hours! And she wanted to shout out, Let us go! Let us hurry! But something in her mother’s poise and bearing as she led the way downstairs forestalled her and instead she followed in dignified silence, her chin held high. For today they were not visiting the monkeys at the zoological gardens or the ducks in the park or choosing toys from the toy shop, they were visiting Mama’s dressmaker. Sofia was to have her own dress made for her by Mama’s dressmaker in Bond Street. She was to be allowed to choose the fabric and the style herself, so long as it was appropriate, and in a week there was to be a party at which she would be allowed to wear the new dress.

  ‘Have you thought about what type of dress you are going to choose?’ her mother said as they paused in the hallway to put on hats and gloves.

  Sofia had thought! Indeed she had thought about little else: ‘A princess line with a cuirasse bodice in sapphire or perhaps crimson silk, but certainly not in green and not in taffeta though I do like taffeta but I think it will be a little stiff and bothersome to wear.’

  Her mother tried very hard not to laugh, instead raising both eyebrows. ‘I am not sure that sounds entirely suitable for a little girl,’ she observed.

  ‘But I wish to look as beautiful as you, Mama,’ Sofia replied artlessly.

  Mrs Logan had gone outside to whistle for a cab and, as one drew up, Sofia found she no longer wished to stroke the horse’s nose because she had outgrown such things. It was, then, a day for riding in hansom cabs, for marvelling at the carriages and omnibuses in Regent Street, for viewing the fine ladies in Bond Street in their elegant gowns and their brightly coloured parasols and the ostrich feathers in their hats. It was a day to have your first dress made for you.

  Instead, it was a day when none of these things happened.

  Instead, an hour or two later nine-year-old Sofia ran indoors from the garden blindly, furiously, her face hot with unshed tears, ran upstairs and pushed open the first door she came to. She came to the drawing room, where a fire was burning.

  At 19 Cadogan Mews, as at each of the grand merchants’ houses in Bloomsbury, fires were lit by the maid—in this case, Annie—in the kitchen, the morning room and the bedrooms early each morning before the family awoke. The dining room and drawing rooms fires were lit only in the late afternoon as the curtains were drawn and the lamps turned on. The grates had to be swept and the fenders and the fire-irons cleaned daily throughout the cold months when the fireplaces were in use. At the end of May, as she swept and polished and cleaned and blacked, as she manhandled the coal up from the scullery in a large metal bucket then struggled to ignite the fire, Annie may have been counting the days till the official start of summer. Or she may have been more concerned with keeping her hair and her skirts away from the fire, for many a poor girl had been horribly burnt by a stray ember catching her skirts alight, though in truth it was more likely to be the young ladies in their gowns of silk and satin and their increasingly lengthy frills of gauze and tulle who were at risk rather than the maid in her brown Holland dress. But still, Annie took no chances.

  The fire was lit.

  At a little after five o’clock, Mr Jarmyn arrived home from his office in the City. The overzealous eighteenth-century tambour clock in the drawing room chimed the quarter hour as he came up the front steps and let himself in, and the other clocks throughout the house would follow two minutes later. But in those two minutes the world turned upside down.

  A scream was heard, a scream so terrifying and dreadful it pierced the heart and chilled the soul. Mr Jarmyn, still in his hat and coat and gloves, charged at once into the drawing room. The boys—Gus and Jack—arrived in a tumble at the top of the stairs and their father, seeing them, called out, ‘Stay out, go back upstairs!’ and the boys had turned, their faces ashen, half at his words, half at the smell of burning. Mrs Logan arrived next, coming down the stairs, her face stricken, in time to see the maid, Annie, running from the room, screaming, her hands over her face, and almost knocking over Cook—puffing and panting, her face scarlet—who had just ascended from below stairs. Dinah too, coming in from the garden, her face a little flushed, saw the maid run from the room and instinctively her hands flew up to cover her own face, mirroring Annie though she had not seen what the girl had seen. Someone in the drawing room had slammed the door shut so Dinah could not identify who was in the room and who was not, but beyond the door she could make out voices and a dreadful screaming that would not cease and now shouts, a thump and someone crying out.

  The door opened and Mrs Logan came out, seemingly quite calm though her eyes were terrible and her face was utterly drained of colour. She put a hand on the doorframe to steady herself, not speaking at first.

  Their cousin Roger Brightside was there, Meredith and Travers’ boy, and when Mrs Logan said in a slow, steady voice, ‘Someone must get Dr Frobisher,’ he said at once, ‘Let me go!’ and plunged down the stairs, glad it seemed to have something to do. The front door opened and slammed shut and footsteps clattered down the front steps and away.

  Dinah could not move, her fear rendering her motionless.

  ‘Go upstairs,’ Mrs Logan ordered, pushing Dinah back, but not before Dinah had seen the door to the drawing room open and her father stagger out, a bundle wrapped up tightly in what appeared to be the drawing room hearthrug held in his arms. It was a heavy, awkward bundle and he carried it with shaking arms and so very carefully up the stairs towards the bedrooms, Mrs Logan hurrying after him.

  Despite Mrs Logan’s insistence she go upstairs, Dinah found herself in the drawing room doorway where she stopped, unable to set foot within. Grey and steaming coals lay in the hearth, and an overturned plant pot and splashes on the walls and mantel suggested someone had tossed water on the grate to put a fire out. Uncle Austin—when had he got here?—was crouched in the corner of the room, rocking silently back and forth. And her mother too was there, standing in the centre of the room, making no sound, her face frozen, her clothing burnt and black on one arm. The smell was everywhere, of burning. Burning clothing, burning rug, burning hair, burning flesh. The room was filled with smoke and Dinah ran to the window and fought with it then flung it open. She thrust her head out and gulped down the London air that they usually tried so hard to avoid. The sudden draught of cold air sucked much of the smoke out of the room but not the smell. The hearthrug had gone and the carpet was a different shade where the rug usually covered it. The carpet closest to the grate was blackened and singed. Nothing else in the room was burnt—except for Mrs Jarmyn, whose arm was seared red and already blistering.

  ‘Who?’ s
aid Dinah. Her mouth was dry and no further words seemed to want to come.

  No one answered her and her mother fainted.

  At length Roger returned with Dr Frobisher, who ran immediately up the stairs and went into one of the bedrooms, pushing Mr Jarmyn and Mrs Logan out and closing the door so that Mr Jarmyn paced the corridor. Mrs Logan poured him a whisky and Dinah took some herself though she detested it and could hardly hold the shaking glass to her lips. No one spoke. It was as though they had all lost the power of speech.

  A commotion erupted downstairs as the other maid, Agnes, returned from her day off and was met by the by-now-hysterical Annie. Mrs Logan had to run downstairs to hush them, only to find that Cook had administered her own hysteria-cure already and the girl was sitting on the floor rubbing the side of her face, the newly returned Agnes staring at her, pale and frightened.

  When Dr Frobisher emerged his face too was pale and he took Mr Jarmyn into his study. Then he went to Mrs Jarmyn who had been carried up to her room, and administered a draught and left a balm for her burn.

  No one mentioned a name. No one said, It is Sofia. No one dared to ask, How is she? Will she be all right?

  Outside darkness had fallen and, as he finally took his leave, the doctor shook his head, saying: ‘She will not last the night,’ and the look he gave said: And that is for the best.

  But she did last the night. And there followed a terrible time with the child alive, though barely; unable to speak, to eat, to drink even; in such silent and terrible pain it was more than anyone could bear. Mr Jarmyn remained constantly at her bedside, leaving her room only to pace and tear at his hair in the hallway. Mrs Logan, pale but calm, ministered to her night and day. The boys were kept away and crept about the house like beaten dogs. In another room, Mrs Jarmyn, her arm bandaged, and heavily sedated on the draughts Dr Frobisher had left for her, lay in her bed, unable to speak.