Half the World in Winter

by Maggie Joel

  ‘Well but surely this is a private family matter, Mrs Logan, is it not? I do not think you need to concern yourself.’

  ‘No, you are wrong, Mrs Jarmyn—’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  For a moment no one spoke. Upstairs, though she was certainly not eavesdropping, Hermione held her breath. She had a dizzying sense of things moving beyond anyone’s control, beyond, at any rate, her own sphere of experience. She gripped the top of the banisters and peered through them.

  ‘I apologise if I appear impertinent, Mrs Jarmyn, but I believe Miss Jarmyn may be in danger—’

  ‘What can you mean?’

  ‘A man came to the house on the night of the dinner party. He was deranged. A madman. He attempted to enter the house by force. We managed to prevent his entry—’

  ‘But this is nonsense! You forget that I was in attendance at the dinner party and I can assure you that this fantastical tale is nothing more than that: fantastical, and I am at a loss to know why you would invent—’

  ‘Mr Jarmyn knows. He was there. The man wished to speak with him.’

  ‘Mrs Logan, do you really think my husband would keep such a thing from me? From his wife?’

  ‘Nevertheless it is true. He wished, for your own peace of mind, to keep it from you. ‘

  ‘And now you suggest my husband colluded with you to lie to me, to lie to the members of his family? You have gone too far, Mrs Logan.’

  No one moved. Mrs Logan’s bonnet hid her face so that, upstairs, peering through the banisters, Hermione could see only that her hands tying up her bonnet had become still. Mrs Jarmyn she could see quite clearly but she had been in service long enough to avert her gaze at once rather than look on her mistress’s face. What could she do? She looked about her for a large, ugly vase that she might drop but there was none and she realised that, even had there been one, she did not have the courage to drop it.

  Mrs Logan’s hands, still holding the ends of her bonnet ribbon, fell to her sides. A second passed, then another before she reached up and took the bonnet off. Beneath, her face was quite pale but composed.

  ‘I am sure that was not my intention, Mrs Jarmyn,’ she said, her voice steady though very quiet and contained as though she were in church. ‘I am merely concerned for the well-being of the family. I realise now that this should be a private conversation between yourself and Mr Jarmyn. If you allow me a few moments to change into suitable clothing I shall be ready to undertake the inventory.’

  Hermione, though not a little astonished at this sudden and total capitulation, breathed a sigh of relief and fanned herself, liberally, with the feather duster. She had only just got over her shock when Mrs Logan herself appeared before her on the first-floor landing, grabbed her firmly by the arm and marched her downstairs to the front door.

  ‘You must go, Hermione,’ she commanded, her face no longer composed, her voice no longer quiet or contained, and though Hermione was only dimly aware of what was being asked of her, she shook her head instinctively.

  ‘No, Mrs Logan—’

  ‘You must take a hansom to Mr Jarmyn’s office in the city and tell him to return home at once.’ And Mrs Logan slapped her own cloak around the girl’s shoulders and her own bonnet on her head, thrust two half-crowns into her hand and pushed her out the door. ‘Go! Hurry!’ she urged as Hermione stood on the doorstep gaping at her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THOMAS BRINKLOW HAD RETURNED TO Cadogan Mews the evening before minus his jacket, and this alone would have been cause for anyone who saw him to stare, for the air had been bitter and many poor souls would perish that night who wore more on their backs than he did. The train accident, he had noted, which had been reported that day and had happened many miles from here, had very little impact on this street. The white-fronted houses had been shuttered and silent. No one had arrived or departed. At Mr Jarmyn’s house lamps had been lit and then extinguished by unseen hands. A solitary caped police constable had appeared as the clocks struck midnight, slapping his hands together and whistling tunelessly, causing Thomas to slip down into the basement area of one of the houses until the man had passed. Otherwise he had been alone all night and into the morning, until it had seemed no one was ever going to leave the house again. And then the door had opened and Thomas had felt a pulse beating in his head.

  It was Jarmyn himself who came out, striding right past him, and not even noticing him. Thomas watched the man whose father had built the railway and he saw a cool contempt for the world in this man’s face, a belief in his own righteousness that was unshakable.

  A stiff breeze had got up but the cold did not touch Thomas, which was as well since he was in his shirtsleeves, having traded his jacket to an old soldier on the Euston Road in exchange for the man’s knife. It was a military knife, scarred and chipped from use but still sharp. It nestled now in Thomas’s arms, wrapped in a piece of oilcloth, and his thumb traced the shape of the handle.

  He made to set off after his quarry but the Jarmyns’ front door opened a second time and this time it was the young lady whose face he had seen in the window one evening a week or more ago. She was clothed in a many-layered emerald-green cloak with a fur-lined hood that all but covered her face and delicate fur-lined boots so intricate and beautiful it broke your heart to see them in the dirt and grime of the street. She carried an embroidered bag fastened with a gold clasp, a bag so tiny it must surely contain nothing more than a single gold sovereign, and she seemed to float along the pavement somehow with a sense of great purpose yet with an effortless glide. He thought how very young she was and yet she held herself like a princess, though he had never in his life seen a princess.

  She was already some distance ahead of him and it seemed that she must glance behind her at any moment and see she was being watched. He looked about but there was no shadow to merge into, no place in which to take refuge. If she chose to look back she would see him. But she did not.

  A cab had entered the square from the north and she hailed it and as she climbed in he saw her face, briefly, in the second that she waited to step inside. It was a perfect, angelic, untainted face. A face that registered no pain or misery and no joy. It was smooth and composed and then it was gone and somehow, in the moment after she turned away, he could no longer remember her features, the detail of them was gone. All he had was a sense of her, vivid but swiftly fading, like a dream in the moment after waking.

  A pressure was rapidly building inside his head and he rubbed his temples to relieve it. His plan had changed in the moment that she had appeared. An eye for an eye. It was simple. So simple that the pressure cleared and was gone. An eye for an eye, a daughter for a daughter. And then they would have to listen, wouldn’t they? The lawmakers and the Board of Trade inspectors and the directors of all the other railways. When they saw what they had caused, they would have to listen. He would make that sacrifice, and so would she.

  He set off quickly on foot heading south after the cab.

  A moment later Constable Matlock emerged from the basement of number 13 Cadogan Mews, where he was on friendly terms with the domestic staff, and, dabbing a handkerchief to his mouth to remove any traces of the muffin he had just consumed, resumed his rounds. He passed numbers 15 and 17 and then number 19, where he thought he could see a maid standing at an upstairs window. Giving the girl an acknowledging salute, he continued on his way.

  Folk were hurt, I could see, and I was very afraid. I found her, my little Alice, lying at some distance from me, and she had been thrown across the carriage and had hit something. I learnt later that a metal rod had pierced her straight through though at first I did not know this. I called her but she did not answer. I went to her and thought at first she must be dead but she was breathing though she stopped soon after and she was dead.

  Lucas put the deposition down on his lap and closed his eyes for a moment. The Metropolitan Railway’s train jolted as it pulled out of Gower Street Station and the pile of statements on hi
s lap almost slid to the floor. He reached out and grabbed them just in time.

  The first-class carriage was crowded, so much so that a number of gentlemen were standing, their tall hats almost brushing the curved ceiling of the carriage. He had been fortunate to get a seat. Usually he enjoyed travelling on the new subterranean railways. It seemed to him that they represented some splendid monument to man’s achievement, in the same way that the first above-ground railways must have done to his father’s generation. Trains, travelling at unimaginable speeds in subterranean tunnels! Surely it was a marvel. He never tired of it, when others complained bitterly of sulphuric fumes and smoke and the possibility of a breakdown. But these trains were perfectly secure: they had a system of interlocking points and signals that was fail-safe. There had been no fatalities, no major accident, in seventeen, eighteen years of operation. They were safer, at any rate, than taking a train on the North West Midlands Railway.

  The underground train picked up speed and careered around a corner. The standing passengers swayed and staggered and reached up to grasp the leather straps that hung from the ceiling. Lucas looked up, observing his fellow passengers, his ear cocked to the sounds of the engine, avoiding the pile of depositions that rested on his knee. Usually he enjoyed travelling on these trains. But not today.

  The girl who had died, Alice, had been nine years old. The same age as Sofia. Did that make it better or worse? He could not decide. The child had been impaled. A brass rod had gone straight through her. It was an appalling way to die. Better or worse than to be burnt alive, to lie in a state of near-death for ten terrible days? He could not decide. If she had been thrown a yard to the left, half a yard to the right, she would have dodged it. She was the only one in the carriage to die.

  They had sat at the inquiry that first day, he and Kemp, and watched this man, Brinklow, give his account of the incident, and his simple, unemotional words had been worse than any of the hysteria and fury of the other witnesses. The man had gone to his child after the accident, unaware of her terrible injury. And the child had been alive. Then she had died.

  Lucas rubbed his chin, frowning, but the image would not be dislodged. It was surely enough to turn a man mad, in a single instant. He remembered Sofia, a column of flames, then Sofia a blackened, destroyed thing that was not Sofia at all.

  Did I go mad? he wondered. Did I go insane in that instant?

  He could not decide. Who did this man, Brinklow, blame for his child’s death? Fate, the train driver, the railway company? God?

  The underground train had slowed, but now it picked up speed once more and the standing passengers braced themselves and tightened their grips on whatever came to hand.

  He knew who he blamed for his own child’s death and it was not God.

  She does not want me here, Aurora realised. She wishes me away, gone—or dead—then she would be free to take over the household. To take over Lucas.

  She stood at her window as down below Mr Todd and the boys returned home from an excursion and a heated discussion broke out in the street between Jack and Gus.

  Could Mrs Logan—a housekeeper!—really picture herself the wife of Mr Lucas Jarmyn, director of the North West Midlands Railway Company, son of the celebrated industrialist Samuel Jarmyn? It was hard to credit. And yet the idea, once formed, would not be dislodged.

  But the inventory was to go ahead. Aurora was still mistress of this house. She wrapped a shawl around her shoulders for it was sure to be cool in the cellar. Downstairs she could hear the boys moving about, bickering, then the querulous tones of someone older, and she thought for a moment that it was Lucas before realising it was Mr Todd, the tutor.

  She had not seen Lucas since last night in the drawing room.

  Do you really believe a husband does not know when his wife is a drunk?

  She moved restlessly about the room. Mrs Logan had done this. Lucas had said nothing prior to Mrs Logan’s arrival; now suddenly he was accusing her. It was Mrs Logan who had planted this idea of her drinking in his head, it had to be, and she had had six months in which to water and nurture the idea.

  She pulled the shawl closer about her shoulders and made her way down to the kitchen, pausing to wish Cook, who gave her an astonished look, a brief good morning then making her way along the passage to the door of the cellar.

  Since the events of last May Mrs Logan had been the custodian of the key to the cellar. If stock was missing, would it not cast Mrs Logan in a very different light? She thought of the maid—Clarice? Clara?—in the first years of their marriage. Some bottles of sherry had gone missing and one had been found in the maid’s room. The girl had been dismissed at once though she had protested her innocence in an impassioned, rather pitiful way, to the end.

  Mrs Logan was already there at the cellar door, awaiting her, her face composed and blank. The perfect housekeeper.

  ‘Do you have the key, Mrs Logan?’

  ‘Of course.’ She produced it from a chain that hung around her neck and fitted it into the lock, turned it and opened the door. It creaked open and from beyond a cold, slightly musty smell seeped out. The cellar was really little more than a stone-flagged scullery that Mr Jarmyn Senior had had converted for wine storage sometime in the fifties. Four narrow rows of shelves ran parallel to one another leading away from the door; a single tiny window, barred and little more than a ventilation hole, had been placed high up near the ceiling. The temperature was distinctly chilled and Aurora again pulled her shawl closer about her.

  She led the way in, raising the paraffin lamp to head height to light her footsteps. Mrs Logan had brought with her the ancient ledger that some previous mistress of the house in her father-in-law’s day had started and in which had been listed, in minute, florid script, the details and dates of each consignment. The newer entries denoting the wine merchant’s more recent deliveries were recorded in Mrs Logan’s own handwriting towards the back. There had been a recent delivery, it appeared, for a number of crates were stacked on the floor near the door and some had been placed on an upper shelf, still unpacked, and Aurora silently noted this surprising oversight by her housekeeper.

  She took the ledger and opened it, leading the way to the nearest shelf. Some of the Cognacs and Armagnacs dated back to the fifties and were stored high up on a handful of dusty shelves in the furthest corner of the cellar. The newer items—endless rows of Champagnes and Sauternes and the hocks and clarets that Lucas preferred—were on the shelves nearest the door. The bottles lay on their sides, the labels facing upwards, and in her former role as mistress of the house she had come down here regularly checking the bottles for cork seepage. No doubt Mrs Logan performed this vital task now though Aurora could not recall ever instructing her to do so. She studied the neatly written lists in the ledger.

  ‘There should be two dozen Veuve Pommery, one crate of Jacquesson containing twelve bottles, then six Giesler and ten Bourlon.’

  Why do we have so much Champagne? she wondered. We almost never drink it.

  Mrs Logan counted. ‘Two dozen of the Veuve Pommery … twelve Jacquesson … six Giesler and … ten Bourlon.’

  Aurora recorded this in the ledger and moved to the next shelf. They continued in this fashion to the end of that side of the first row, then began to work their way back up the other side to the first of the Cognacs and Armagnacs.

  ‘There should be two dozen of the Larressingle, an unopened crate of Janneau and one of Delamain,’ read Aurora. She waited. Was there a longer pause than usual?

  ‘The Janneau is opened and there are … four bottles used,’ corrected Mrs Logan. ‘The Delamain also is opened and … five … six bottles have been used.’

  ‘No, it distinctly says both crates delivered last month and both unopened.’

  There was a silence. From the kitchen they heard a roar of hissing steam and a curse from Cook. The cat yowled some way off.

  ‘Could you have forgotten to record in the ledger that these had been consumed, Mrs Logan?’
r />   Mrs Logan shook her head. ‘Quite impossible. Every last bottle is recorded.’

  ‘And yet here we have a distinct discrepancy. And oddly, I do not recall us consuming either of these recently. How do you account for this?’

  Mrs Logan looked down at the stone-flagged floor and appeared to be considering the question. ‘I cannot account for it, Mrs Jarmyn. It is inexplicable to me.’

  ‘Could they have been taken without your knowledge?’

  ‘I do not believe it likely that Mrs Varley or Hermione could have got in here without my knowledge. And Annie, the same. It is simply not possible. I never lend this key to a single person. It does not leave my sight other than at night when it, along with the other household keys, is locked in a drawer in my room. The lock on the cellar door has not been jimmied, the window is secure. When I come in here, I let no one in bar myself.’

  ‘Then,’ said Aurora, speaking in a low, steady voice, ‘as it is not they who have taken the lost items, who can it be? Who else has a key? As far as I am aware there is only one key and you have it.’

  For everyone knew there was only one key to the cellar.

  ‘I believe you have a key, Mrs Jarmyn.’

  Except of course only a foolish mistress had but a single copy of a key lest the original was mislaid.

  ‘I? Is it likely I have taken items from our own cellar and not remembered it?’

  She studied her housekeeper’s face in the dim light cast by the lamp. Mrs Logan gazed at a spot over her mistress’s left shoulder, her face composed. But was it composed? Was there not a small patch of colour on both cheeks? It was hard to tell in this light. Aurora felt her grip on the lamp, on the ledger, tighten.

  ‘That is not for me to say,’ said Mrs Logan in her quiet, dignified way.

  The shadows jumped around them as though a sudden breeze had knocked the lamp though, aside from the tiny ventilation window high above their heads, the room was sealed from intrusions and no breeze had entered the room. Aurora stilled her hand and the shadows too became still.