Half the World in Winter

by Maggie Joel

  ‘On the other hand it might have set the entire building alight and killed sundry innocent persons.’

  ‘It was a child’s firework, no more. Hardly the Gunpowder Plot. And no point playing “what if ” either. Your cab might have overturned just now and killed you outright. But it didn’t.’ Kemp regarded him over his cigar. ‘Sure you won’t have one of these?’

  Lucas turned away from Kemp and stood by the window. The hansom, which might have overturned killing him outright, had long gone, and another passenger was no doubt already seated inside it thinking about his life. The girl who had run out in front of the horse was also, one imagined, long gone and he had not so much as caught a glimpse of her. It was as though she did not quite exist. And yet she might have caused his death.

  He turned to face Kemp.

  ‘Is Sinclair shaken by it?’

  ‘Not a bit of it. Annoyed mostly. Told this inspector fellow they should think no more about it. He’s a good man, Sinclair, nothing shakes him. And he bears no ill feeling towards this undoubted lunatic. He’s an example to us all, Jarmyn.’

  ‘The lunatic?’

  ‘No. Sinclair.’

  ‘No doubt he is. And his motives are in no way driven by his desire to protect the company,’ observed Lucas. ‘To avoid any more bad publicity in The Times.’

  Kemp frowned and crushed the stub of his cigar on the ashtray. ‘Damn it, it is your company, Jarmyn. Your father created it. Do you absolve yourself from all responsibility for its future?’

  ‘On the contrary, I think I am the only one of us who does feel responsible.’

  About one thing, at least, Mr Jarmyn was quite mistaken. The girl who had run out into the street in front of the oncoming cab was not long gone. And contrary to Mr Kemp’s assertion, she was not indestructible. Far from it. It was Annie who had once worked in Mr Jarmyn’s household until a terrible accident and its aftermath had driven her, only a few short weeks ago, to flee.

  On leaving his household Annie had made for Bethnal Green in the east to find Agnes. But Agnes had left no forwarding address and Annie, wandering the unfamiliar and frightening streets alone, had not reckoned on so many endless, identical broken-down houses or so many unfriendly, desperate faces. She had fled once more, this time back into the City, and had slept a night in a doorway and another beneath a railway viaduct where a man had tried to force himself on her and a woman, to whom she had turned for help, had taken her belongings and tried to cut her face. She had panicked, then. No job and no place to stay and no one to help her. When she had seen her old mistress outside a shop in Bond Street it had seemed a miracle, like God Himself was telling her to go back and, in her desperation and despite the ghost, she had asked for her job back. The interview had not gone well. Annie had an idea she had mentioned the ghost. She had not been given her job back.

  She had become weak with hunger and thirst and despair and out of her despair had come here, to Half Mitre Street. The master worked here. He was no longer her master but he was a kind man; Annie knew this instinctively when every other instinct had let her down.

  Annie had crouched, waiting, with no real thought for what she might do next, when a black cab had swung around the corner and in the window of the cab was Mr Jarmyn. Afterwards she wondered if the ghost had made her do it. Something, at any rate, had made her career into the street and into the path of the oncoming cab. She didn’t know much but what she did know was that, no matter what happened next, the cab would stop and if she was badly hurt they would help her and in all likelihood and out of pity, if nothing else, give her back her old job.

  She had screamed, ducked and thrown up her hands too late to avoid the flying hooves, which had caught her a glancing blow to the head. Stars had exploded before her eyes and she had stumbled away, arms shielding her head, staggering and blundering into a wall where she had slid to the ground and sat clutching her head, from which a trickle of blood seeped. She had rocked back and forth. She had felt sick.

  She had remained in this position as Mr Jarmyn and Mr Kemp discussed the deranged man and debated the significance of the event. Now she cried a little. After a long while she looked up, blinking as a black fog swam before her eyes, pressing her hand tighter to her temple, which only caused the wound to bleed more copiously. The cab had stopped but no one had come to her help.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE OFFICES OF THE NORTH West Midlands Railway Company had been firebombed and now, only three days later, there had been another train accident. The Times, having missed the first incident, had not been reticent to record the second:

  The express train is reported to have gone into the rear of a stationary goods train at a place called Prior’s Marsh Junction some five miles southeast of Wolverhampton. The driver of the passenger train, seeing the danger early, had applied his brakes so that the express only clipped the last car of the goods train and the resulting casualties were limited to a few bruises, sprains and minor lacerations. The cause of the accident is yet to be determined but will, no doubt, form the subject of an inquiry.

  On Thursday morning—and for the second time that week—a meeting of the board of directors had been hastily convened.

  ‘As usual, an incident occurs and we—not to mention the public, the shareholders, the newspapers—fly into a panic!’ said Kemp, standing up and walking around the large oval table that dominated the board room, his hands behind his back in a way that reminded Lucas of one of his old Latin masters at Harrow.

  ‘I don’t see anyone panicking, Kemp,’ Sinclair replied mildly, lighting a cigar, and for a man who had recently survived a firebomb he did indeed appear remarkably calm.

  ‘Would you prefer not to have been told about the madman at Jarmyn’s house? And have you already wiped from your mind the firebombing of our own office, Kemp? Or is your concern for your family’s safety as cursory as your concern for that of our passengers’?’ snapped Hart.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ exploded Kemp, coming back to the table, thumping his hands down on its surface and leaning over it at Hart.

  ‘Gentlemen! This is unhelpful,’ interrupted Sinclair. ‘We are all cognisant of the distressing events that occurred at Jarmyn’s house and we have discussed already the outrage here on Saturday evening. Let us say no more about that—the matter is now in the hands of the police. Our immediate concern must be the incident that occurred this morning on our own railway line and we are here to decide what action, if any, is required of us.’ He paused to allow his words time to sink in. ‘We are all acquainted with the facts as they currently stand. It would appear there is little room for doubt that frozen signals were again to blame—’

  ‘That is supposition,’ countered Kemp at once.

  ‘Be that as it may—’

  ‘No. Not “be that as it may”. There is a procedure: an inquest, a public inquiry, a report.’

  ‘Not an inquest,’ Hart pointed out. ‘No one died.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. That is so, I had quite forgotten,’ Kemp conceded. ‘Nevertheless, there is little to be gained by preempting the report.’

  ‘I believe, and the minutes will bear me out, we will find that you stated the exact same thing at the meeting following the Lea’s Crossing accident in December, Kemp,’ observed Freebody.

  ‘Yes, and I stand by it.’

  ‘And in the meantime, another accident with the exact same cause has happened!’ Hart retorted, pushing his chair back in disgust.

  ‘How do we know it is the exact same cause?’ Kemp replied, speaking slowly and patiently as though to an imbecile. ‘And, as you have just pointed out, there were no fatalities. I think, therefore, that my policy of no action has been fully and finally borne out.’

  ‘Preposterous!’ declared Hart, leaning back in his chair and looking to his fellow directors for their opinions.

  ‘The report of the Board of Trade’s inquiry into the Lea’s Crossing accident is scheduled for release on the 1st of March,’ said Sinclair. �
�It would be imprudent of us to act prior to that time.’

  ‘I would prefer that we had acted in December,’ said Lucas, stirring uneasily in his chair. ‘It is surely only due to good fortune that we have suffered no further fatalities since that time. However, as we have made it this far, perhaps Sinclair is right, perhaps it is prudent to await the report’s findings before acting.’

  He was aware he had contradicted himself but his mind was so foggy he could do nothing about it.

  ‘I disagree,’ said Hart instantly. ‘We already have a proposal on the table for measures that will radically improve safety for both employees and passengers and we know the costs involved. Indeed, we have had such a proposal for some months though we have, thus far, entirely failed to act on it. The technology exists, other lines have used it, the work can begin at once. It is merely a question of approving these measures, is it not?’

  ‘Well said, Hart,’ nodded Freebody.

  ‘We know the costs and that is the issue,’ replied Kemp, lifting up the proposal that lay before them then letting it drop disdainfully back onto the table. ‘The cost of changing every single signal is prohibitive. We will find ourselves having to lay off employees and cut services in order to fund it. And it will take months, even if we commence straight away. We know the impact this will have on the shareholders. The result could be …’ he paused, looking for the right word, ‘catastrophic.’

  The other directors said nothing and Kemp went on.

  ‘It is almost February. The winter is drawing to an end. How many more frosts will there be before the spring? I say let us wait till next winter before rushing into these costly and potentially calamitous improvements.’

  ‘What you are proposing is nothing short of manslaughter, Kemp.’

  ‘And what you are proposing will bring this railway down!’

  ‘Gentlemen, let us put the proposed measures to a formal vote,’ said Sinclair. ‘I believe we are all familiar with the suggestions that have been made and the projected costs involved? Good. Freebody and Hart, I take it you are both in favour?’ Both men nodded. ‘Kemp, you, I understand, are against it?’ Kemp gave a sharp single nod. ‘And I am inclined to vote against it myself, at least at the present time. Jarmyn, it would appear that you have the deciding vote.’

  ‘Mrs Logan, is Mr Jarmyn home yet?’

  ‘Not yet, Mrs Jarmyn.’

  Aurora stood at the window in the drawing room and regarded the street below. She had been watching for his return for some time, uncertain if he had somehow slipped in without her knowledge. Mrs Logan knew, of course. It irritated her that Mrs Logan would know if her husband had returned and she would not.

  ‘Will that be all, Mrs Jarmyn?’

  ‘Yes, that is all.’

  She did not turn around as the housekeeper withdrew. It was only once she heard Mrs Logan make her way down the hallway that she moved. She glanced at the door to see if it was shut then went silently to the cabinet on the far side of the drawing room that housed the decanted liquors.

  It was locked. This surprised her. In the first years of their marriage they had dismissed a housemaid for secretly helping herself to the sherry, and for a time after that the cabinet had been kept locked. But not for many years. Aurora pulled on the handle a second time to make sure it was not merely stuck. It was certainly locked. Well, then someone had erred. She could not think who: Mrs Logan held the keys to all the cabinets and cupboards in the family rooms but she felt certain Mrs Logan would not take it upon herself to suddenly, after three years, start locking this particular cabinet. A mistake then. Or she had been instructed to do so.

  And if she had been instructed, who had done the instructing and who was being locked out?

  She stood in the middle of the room, staring straight ahead, unseeing. She was no longer in the drawing room at Cadogan Mews: she was at her mother’s house in Cheyne Walk. Poor Mama—wife of the late and once Hon. Griffin Randle, MP—had been a drunk. A discreet drunk, it was true, but a drunk nonetheless. Not even the servants had known it. Indeed her own daughter had never had so much as an inkling until she had begun that unenviable task of going through her mother’s belongings in the months following her death. And there they were: Andalusian sherries and vintage Iberian ports, Armagnacs, Calvados, and Tyrolean schnapps—indeed every variety of strong liquor one could conceive—hidden in drawers and on the tops of cupboards and at the backs of wardrobes for all the world like a sort of morbid distillery treasure hunt. It had been an appalling discovery.

  And she had made the mistake of telling Lucas.

  It had not seemed like a mistake at first—he was her husband, wasn’t he?—and he had been very tactful about it but as the years had passed she had come to realise that he watched her each and every time she drank. It was so subtle she had convinced herself, at first, that she imagined it. Yet the realisation would not go away. Lucas had enthusiastically read Mr Darwin’s Origin of Species early on in their marriage—indeed it had been published the year they had met—and though she had not read the book herself she felt certain Mr Darwin did not assert that should the parent of the species be a drunk, then it followed that the offspring would be too. This, however, was what Lucas appeared to believe. In the months following Sofia’s death his eyes had never left hers whenever she poured a glass of wine or accepted a sherry after dinner. She no longer thought she was imagining it. And now the liquor cabinet was locked against her.

  She paused, listening again for Mrs Logan’s footfall on the carpet but hearing nothing.

  The efficient, the estimable, the loyal Mrs Logan. Could she … was it possible she was a confederate in this scheme against her?

  She moved back to her place by the window. Outside, a police constable was strolling past the house on the opposite side of the mews, whistling and twirling his truncheon. He glanced up, almost as though he was aware she was watching him, and tipped the end of his truncheon to his helmet in a salute. Aurora stepped back from the window and let the curtain fall back into place.

  She shivered, pulling her shawl closer about her shoulders.

  At the sound of hooves on the road below, she pulled the curtain aside again. A cab had turned into the mews from Cadogan Square and she watched its progress as it approached the house. As it passed him the police constable stopped to nod his head at the occupant of the cab. A moment later the cab pulled up outside the house and Lucas got out, though all she could see of him was the top of his hat, the tips of his shoes and the black cape thrown over his shoulders. It could have been any gentleman alighting from any cab in London yet the manner in which he flung open the door of the cab and stepped down, rummaging in his coat pocket for coins, flicking the cape aside then turning towards the house and hurrying, his shoulders hunched against the cold air, up the front steps—it was all him. One could not be married to a man for twenty years and not know every part of him and he, you.

  He had not dined at home for the last four evenings, ever since, in fact, the Sunday morning visit from the police inspector. But he was home now though he would not come up to see her, of that she was certain. So be it. She would see him later, if he stayed for dinner.

  She dressed carefully for dinner, choosing a gown of the best shot silk in the richest purple and the lowest neckline. She wore her pearls though it would be just the family dining, and she pulled on a pair of slender dove-grey silk gloves that came up beyond her elbow and so covered the vivid white scar on her arm. Tonight she did not look at the scar. She regarded herself unflinchingly in the mirror: no one had ever said Aurora Jarmyn was once considered a great beauty because one only said such things about a woman whose beauty had faded.

  She waited patiently at her dressing table thinking about her mother, who had been so strong in the weeks and months following the Hon. Griffin’s spectacular political downfall and his physical demise not long after. She had rebuffed the most brutal social slights, forestalling, with sheer force of will, the catastrophic social plummet t
hat seemed—so suddenly—to be their fate. Indeed she had held onto the house and their social position with a tenacity that had seemed nothing short of heroic so that, there they were, mother and daughter, less than nine years later, playing host to ministers and industrialists and foreign dignitaries and their wives in the very room where the Hon. Griffin had collapsed and died of apoplexy. The very room, it had later transpired, where two bottles of Colombard Armagnac were hidden in the piano stool.

  Oh Mama, sighed Aurora. She had appeared strong yet she had not been strong. Do I appear strong? she wondered now, studying her reflection. But there was the dinner gong and she rose and descended to the dining room.

  Lucas was there, already seated, and he looked up upon her arrival.

  ‘Aurora,’ he said, getting up and moving to pull out her chair, all without once looking at her, without seeing the gown or the pearls or the dove-grey gloves, or the face that had once been painted by Royal Academy artist E. G. Hunt. Her beauty irritated him, she felt. More, it made him furious. She seated herself and allowed him to move her chair under the table. He thundered back to his own end of the table and angrily shook out a napkin. A place was set for Dinah but so far she had failed to appear and Bill had returned to Oxford on Sunday.

  ‘We are dining alone tonight,’ she observed.

  ‘It would appear so.’

  She nodded. Well, so be it. If they were to have this little interlude together, just the two of them, she would not waste her time. ‘Lucas. Have you given any further thought to the situation regarding my uncle? It is not my own safety I am concerned with,’ she went on before he could answer, ‘it is the children. It is the servants. It is the people visiting our home. I am afraid he has become a risk. A liability. I realise that you made this point when we were first married and I argued strongly in his favour. I believe now that I was wrong. Or rather, that things have now reached a point where we can no longer manage him.’