Half the World in Winter

by Maggie Joel

  ‘Then I ask again, how do you account for this?’

  Mrs Logan drew herself to her full height, which meant she was eye to eye with her mistress.

  ‘Are you accusing me, Mrs Jarmyn?’

  The underground train had broken down and they were stuck in the tunnel between Farringdon and Aldersgate Street. The carriage had immediately filled with smoke and steam, generating much alarm amongst the passengers and making everyone cough and hold handkerchiefs to their mouths.

  ‘This is intolerable,’ someone said for the third or fourth time, and a young lady in an Empire-blue cloak fainted and had to be helped to a seat. Lucas gave up his seat to an elderly gentleman whose face was turning an alarming puce colour and who held a hand to his chest.

  ‘Actually a breakdown is not an uncommon occurrence,’ another man further down the carriage said.

  ‘They ought to be able to guarantee by now that the trains do not break down in the tunnels!’ the old man with the puce face retorted. ‘And what about the smoke and fumes? It’s poisonous, you know. It’s a well-known fact the drivers die of it eventually.’

  ‘Good Heavens!’ said one of the ladies, though not the one who had fainted.

  ‘I believe the company would dispute that,’ Lucas observed, and they all turned to him. ‘They use coke from the highest quality coal and pre-burn it. If you pre-burn it for long enough, that removes any traces of sulphur. In fact, it’s probably better than the coke used on any of the main-line railways.’ He smiled. And it was certainly better than the fuel used on the NWMR, he added privately.

  ‘Naturally the company would say that,’ said the man further down the carriage.

  ‘There’s really no need to be concerned. There have never been any major accidents.’

  ‘What if another train comes up behind us!’ said one of the ladies, fanning herself at a great rate, and a flutter of concern rippled the length of the carriage.

  ‘I can assure you, that cannot happen,’ Lucas replied. ‘There is a signalman positioned at each station who indicates with the man at the next station if the line ahead is clear or if there is a train on the line. It’s simple, but remarkably effective. And they have a fail-safe system of interlocking points and signals.’ He smiled to back up his words because he could see they had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘You appear very well informed, sir?’ said the elderly gentleman suspiciously.

  ‘Just an interested amateur.’

  (He did not add—at least not out loud—that they could also take comfort in the fact that, at this depth, it was safe to assume that the signals would not freeze.)

  His fellow passengers were not reassured by his words, he could see that; indeed one or two of the gentlemen were looking distinctly uneasy and a loud clang followed by an echoing thump from further up the line did nothing to alleviate their anxiety.

  But there really was no need to be concerned.

  ‘This really is intolerable!’ said the man in the tall hat for the umpteenth time, and the man further down the carriage told him, somewhat tersely, to be quiet.

  It was intolerable. Lucas moved from one foot to the other. He had long ago stopped reading the depositions from the accident survivors. It seemed bad form to read them when stuck in an invidious position in a railway tunnel. And he had no wish to be quizzed further. It did not seem prudent to inform his fellow travellers that he was a director of a railway company.

  He was feeling a growing sense of unease and the stationary underground train, stuck in such a vulnerable position in a tunnel hundreds of feet beneath the Earth’s surface, was surely the cause of his unease. Yet there was something more. Something nagged at him: the decision at the board meeting; the deranged man at the front door, a man whose life he had helped to destroy; the lie to his family—though, surely, that was for their own good, their own protection? The collusion, then, between himself and the servants against his own family—how had he got himself into that situation? But again, it was surely for the best of reasons. He and Mrs Logan, side by side, moving the furniture in the dark as the deranged man attempted to break down the door; Mrs Logan barring his way and refusing to leave as he had opened his front door to the man; Mrs Logan coming to him in his study and laying a hand on his arm.

  He shook his head, realising that he had reached the core of his unease. She had seen him break down and, for one blinding, dazzling moment, her face had not been the blank, neutral, composed face she had always shown to him.

  The train shuddered and let out a blast from its whistle. A moment later it jerked forward and they were moving. The relief inside the carriage was palpable. A number of people cheered, some laughed; at once everyone was buoyant and brave except for the man in the tall hat, who said, ‘I should jolly well think so too!’ but no one cared what he said.

  They pulled in to Aldersgate Street station and, though it was not his stop, Lucas jumped off the train and made his way up to the surface, where he stood for a moment in the rain, enjoying the cool drops on his face and the air filled with the smell of smoke and horses and the sounds of men and carriages. He was but a shortish walk from Half Mitre Street but the revelation of a few minutes ago had turned the world on its head and he stood on the corner of Beech Street unable to go one way or another.

  A hansom passed and he was astonished to see the maid, Hermione, seated in the cab, leaning out of the window and waving at him like a lunatic.

  The temperature in the cellar had fallen a degree or two. Aurora and Mrs Logan faced one another at the end of the first row, furthest from the cellar door, in a corridor perhaps two yards wide formed by the row of shelves on either side. The shelves had been solidly constructed; good British oak had been used. Yet these same shelves had been here getting on for thirty years, straining beneath the constant weight of hundreds of pounds of bottled wine. Every now and then the wood settled with a creak.

  No one had spoken for a minute, two minutes.

  Mrs Logan leant back against the nearest shelf, as though to give herself space between herself and her employer, and the shelf gave slightly. Above their heads, the crates that had been placed on the top-most shelf wobbled.

  Aurora put out a hand to the shelf, touching the wood, pondering its construction. It became apparent to her that the shelving was free-standing and not affixed to the floor or the wall—an oversight, surely, by the joiner who had constructed it.

  ‘I can assure you I am not in the habit of stealing from my employer,’ said Mrs Logan.

  ‘And, yet, the ledger clearly shows someone has taken those bottles. And once Mr Jarmyn is presented with this proof, there can be only one outcome.’

  ‘I cannot believe Mr Jarmyn would think such a thing.’

  ‘Really? You must feel very secure in your place here, Mrs Logan. You must have a very strong desire to remain. Why is that, I wonder?’

  Even in the dim light she could see Mrs Logan turn quite pale and she seemed unable to reply.

  Faintly, Aurora heard a door slam in the distance followed by footsteps above them. The force of the door slamming directly above their heads caused the ceiling to vibrate, and the crates above their heads creaked. Again, Aurora reached out to steady the timber shelves. Really, now that she studied them closely, it was quite shoddy workmanship. Old Mr Jarmyn Senior cutting corners as usual.

  ‘Careful, Mrs Logan. That crate above your head appears quite unsteady.’

  ‘Watch out!’

  It seemed to Aurora that the shout came from a great distance, that one moment she and Mrs Logan were alone in the cellar, the next Lucas had appeared from behind her in the doorway and was running at them, just as the crate on the topmost shelf became dislodged. Both she and Mrs Logan put out steadying hands to the shelves on either side of them, both gaped upwards in wide-eyed horror as the crate teetered for an agonising moment. But it would not fall, it was secure. And then, somehow, it was not secure, it was plunging downwards towards them—towards Mrs Logan, who was di
rectly beneath it. And Aurora saw that Lucas had not, in fact, run at them. He had run at Mrs Logan; his warning had been aimed at her alone.

  He reached her and pushed her aside the second before the crate landed, with a terrific crash of glass and splintering wood, onto the very spot where Mrs Logan had been standing. Instantly the floor was awash with wine and broken glass. Aurora found herself standing amidst a pile of it, and she sidestepped to avoid the worst of it.

  ‘Dear God, you might have been killed,’ Lucas gasped.

  Aurora looked down to see Mrs Logan sitting on the floor, a hand raised to her face, which was shocked and deathly pale, and Lucas kneeling beside her in the spilt wine and the broken glass just as though it were not there. He reached up and his fingers brushed against her cheek and he peered into her face and Aurora reeled.

  She left the cellar, though afterwards she had no memory of walking outside. In the kitchen Cook was standing in the middle of the stone-flagged floor grasping a dead pheasant by its legs, its head hanging limp, its neck broken. ‘Somebody have an accident, did they?’ she inquired, and a trickle of blood dripped steadily from the pheasant’s mouth onto the floor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  DINAH HAD GIVEN THE DRIVER of the hansom an address in Seven Dials though she instructed him to go via Great Portland Street, which was in completely the other direction but it could not be helped for this was where she was to pick up her cousin, who was even now standing on the corner.

  ‘I thought you were never coming!’ exclaimed Rhoda indignantly as she climbed into the cab. ‘Your note distinctly said ten o’clock. It is now half past!’

  ‘I know and I’m sorry. It has been a horrid morning. Horrid.’ For a moment Dinah saw the letter postmarked Madeira on the eighteenth December and she could not go on. But she would not tell Rhoda about the letter, no, she would not do that to her cousin. Instead she said, ‘There was a development in our house.’

  ‘What kind of a development?’

  ‘Father forbade me to go out (though he would not say why!) and Mama did not know why either. But our housekeeper—’

  Dinah paused and found she could not speak the woman’s name.

  ‘Mrs Logan?’ suggested Rhoda, clearly mystified.

  ‘Yes. That … person. She informed Father of my going out (even though I had said it in private and only to Mama) and then she attempted to prevent me from leaving—though she too refused to say why! It is …’ she cast about for the correct word, ‘… an outrage!’

  ‘Yes, indeed!’ agreed Rhoda, readily enough. ‘Though it does seem odd that Mrs Logan—’

  ‘I hold her entirely to blame for my tardiness, for my being forced to go against my father’s wishes and for—’

  Dinah could not go on. She made herself look out of the window so that Rhoda would not see the flush that had risen to her face at the memory of what had passed in her father’s study.

  ‘This is all very odd,’ was Rhoda’s analysis as the cab turned into Oxford Street and became instantly entangled in a log-jam of cabs and carriages all trying to feed into Regent Street.

  ‘What did you tell Aunt Meredith about our going out?’ said Dinah, having got her emotions under control. She somehow found it difficult to imagine her cousin lying to Aunt Meredith.

  ‘That I would be writing letters in my room all morning and should not like to be disturbed,’ was the reply.

  ‘Oh.’ Dinah regarded her cousin in some surprise. ‘What if she does disturb you?’

  ‘Then she will find I am not there.’

  The cab jerked forward and squeezed into the stream of traffic heading east.

  ‘But she won’t disturb me,’ added Rhoda quietly. ‘And if she did and if she found me not there, she would say nothing.’ Rhoda looked down at her gloved hands in her lap with a frown and Dinah understood this to mean that, since Roger’s death, her aunt was not the same. She understood this and did not question it.

  And so she had liberated her cousin from deepest mourning and somehow she had assumed it would prove a bigger challenge than it had turned out. She felt a little deflated.

  How would her aunt react, Dinah wondered, if she found out the reason for this excursion. She might be very angry. On the other hand, she might wish to have accompanied them. Rhoda, however, had been adamant her mother was not to find out. They sat in silence as the cab made its way slowly towards St Giles.

  The spiritualist woman had replied to Dinah’s letter by return-post, giving an address in Seven Dials to which they were to go at eleven o’clock. Dinah had brought money—the woman would want money, there was no question of it—but how much?

  Of course, she would be a fraud.

  The cab darted forward as a gap appeared in the traffic, then lurched to a juddering halt again almost at once and Dinah stared out of the window. The woman would be a fraud, of course she would, but if she was not? If she had really been contacted by Roger, would she not also be able to contact Sofia? And what would either of them have to say?

  ‘But that was the man!’ declared Jack, almost jumping up and down in his frustration at not being believed. ‘It was him, I tell you! The man I saw on the night of the dinner party trying to break down the door! It was him!’

  They had returned from an excursion to the British Museum. Mr Todd believed strongly in excursions to broaden the inquiring mind. Today they had pondered the ancient treasures of Rome and Greece, returning on foot via Montague Place and thence into Cadogan Square, and passing them in something of a hurry, on the far side of the square, had been a wretched-looking fellow in a cap, ill-fitting breeches, workmen’s boots and no jacket at all, though the air was bitingly cold.

  Jack had at once started up and pointed after him excitedly.

  Gus and Mr Todd had been less than impressed.

  ‘I thought we had finished with all this nonsense about a man at the door,’ observed Gus in a bored voice. He was consumed with the problem of how many antiquities (some unearthed and already crumbling in some poorly maintained foreign place, and so many others yet to be discovered) could be rescued and brought to London before they were destroyed forever. It seemed an immense, an insurmountable problem. He could not believe Jack could still be talking about an imaginary man at the door.

  ‘I am afraid I do not follow you, Jack,’ said Mr Todd with a confused smile. ‘What man is this?’

  ‘He believes he saw a man trying to enter our house by force,’ explained Gus. ‘Yet strangely enough no one else seemed to see it.’

  ‘Mrs Logan saw it!’ Jack retorted triumphantly.

  Gus raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Strange that she has neither said nor done anything about it.’

  ‘She admitted it to me. She said it was our secret.’ Even as he said this, Jack appeared to realise it seemed improbable.

  Gus laughed. ‘A secret? Oh well then, you had better keep the secret.’

  ‘But she saw it!’

  ‘Saw what, exactly?’

  ‘Scuffs on the carpet!’

  Gus scoffed. Even Mr Todd appeared unconvinced by this overwhelming and undeniable evidence of a struggle.

  ‘Perhaps you had a bad dream,’ he suggested, and Jack almost burst with indignant rage.

  ‘Look—there is a constable! I shall tell him!’ And with that he scooted off and flagged down Constable Matlock, who had reached the end of his beat and was preparing to turn around. By the time Gus and Mr Todd caught up to him Jack had relayed his sighting of the man and was defiantly awaiting the policeman’s proposed course of action.

  ‘I hardly think so, young sir,’ the constable replied with an indulgent smile. ‘I’ve been patrolling this stretch all morning and I think I’d have noticed if the man you describe had come anywhere near it.’

  Dismayed and crestfallen, Jack had stormed up to the house and demanded to be let in. Gus, who was feeling much better now about all the lost antiquities, had followed at a more sedate pace, whistling to himself.

  The address
in Seven Dials was number 1 Brown’s Passage Buildings, an inauspicious sort of an address that had caused their cab driver no end of problems and in the end he had had to ask directions. He had deposited Dinah and Rhoda on a corner, not wishing, it had seemed to Dinah, to venture further into the murky warren of passages and alleyways that made up the Dials. Then he had swiftly moved off, not waiting to pick up another fare.

  When the cab had gone, Dinah stood perfectly still and Rhoda stood beside her, very close, her hand on Dinah’s arm.

  It had been a cloudy though still bright mid-morning when she had boarded the cab in Cadogan Square but here the daylight was little more than a feeble, smoky glow that allowed for only a glimpse of buildings and alleyways and doorways and the restless, moving mass of wretched people who resided within them. Instinctively they both moved backwards against the wall of the nearest building, clutching onto each other as a sea of gaunt and hollow-eyed faces reared out of the mist, stared at them and vanished, one after another. Something crunched beneath their feet and they both looked down at the detritus of fish remains, animal faeces and oyster shells that littered the ground and as one they held handkerchiefs up to their noses.

  ‘I have been to Whitechapel,’ Dinah declared, ‘which is much worse! Do not lose heart, cousin. We are quite safe.’

  But in Whitechapel they had had Mr Briers who had swept a clearway through which she and Miss Parson could safely pass. Here, it was just her and Rhoda.

  ‘Come,’ she said firmly, ‘this must be the building.’

  She had no idea if this was the building, but the cab driver’s directions had brought them to Brown’s Passage and Brown’s Passage Buildings must be somewhere along this alleyway. They walked the length of it, stepping over rotting food matter and disturbing a feasting rat, and there was only one doorway to be seen so at this doorway they presented themselves. The door stood ajar. Dinah knocked.

  ‘Hello? We are looking for …’ she consulted the letter, ‘Mrs Moore.’