Half the World in Winter

by Maggie Joel

  How instantly everything could change.

  She let the curtains drop and turned away, pulling a shawl over her shoulders. Mrs Logan had gone and it was right that she go, indeed it was the only possible outcome. Father had gone out all day, searching for her. He had returned very late and one presumed—one prayed—he returned alone. Had she played a part in Mrs Logan’s departure? At any rate, things would return to normal now. A sort of normal. They would find a new housekeeper. And a new cook.

  In the meantime she could not sleep.

  The clock struck five and dawn was many hours off yet, not even a suggestion of it showed in the mid-winter eastern sky.

  A rapid but soft rap on her door flew her into a terrified panic. She got swiftly out of bed and opened her door, just a crack to see her father and he was not in his dressing gown but was fully dressed, so that she was confused and a little frightened.

  ‘Dinah, your mother—is she here with you?’

  Dinah gaped at him and silently shook her head, the confusion becoming now a cold knot of fear.

  ‘All right.’ He nodded, a slow, reassuring nod, but she could tell he was not calm at all and the cold knot hardened inside her. ‘Then I do not know where she is,’ he said. ‘She is not in her room or any of the other rooms so far as I can tell. I have gone down into the basement and into the garden and into the street as far as the square but I cannot find her.’

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ said Dinah.

  He nodded again, taking both her hands in his. ‘I thought I heard her go out—hours ago—but I wasn’t sure. When I went to check she was not in her room but I will find her,’ and he went out again to search.

  When he had gone Dinah ran silently from room to room, convincing herself with each room she entered that he was mistaken, and in each room her hopes were confounded. She went lastly to the drawing room and awaited her father there. His words ‘I thought I heard her go out—hours ago’ frightened her. Why had her mother gone out late at night, and alone? And why had Father let her? It was inconceivable, inexplicable. She began to pace the room.

  Eventually her father returned alone, silent and thoughtful and in need of a brandy to warm his frozen limbs, but he was prevented from having one because the liquor cabinet was locked and Mrs Logan had not seen fit to reveal the whereabouts of the key before her departure.

  ‘Damn and blast!’ he exploded, pulling at the handle and too angry to see the irony of it. Dinah found the keys in her mother’s room and hurried down to the cellar, snatching up the first bottle that came to hand, which turned out to be the last of the Quinta dos Calvedos cellared by old Mr Jarmyn in the fifties. But what did it matter, and she brought it upstairs anyway and watched her father open it and pour a quantity into a tumbler.

  Could this be my fault? Dinah wondered again. Have I caused this?

  ‘Mama must have gone to Aunt Meredith,’ she said for the third or fourth time, though her father had been to the house in Great Portland Street already and received no word of her. She thought of her mother in the weeks following Sofia’s accident, how she had seemed to lose something of herself. Dinah had lain awake night after night, thinking, What if Mama, too, should die, of a broken heart? Seeing her mother so altered had made the idea of it—of dying of a broken heart—no longer fanciful but something real and present.

  The Quinta dos Calvedos was clearly not to her father’s taste for he threw down the glass half drunk and returned to the liquor cabinet to tug vainly at the door. ‘Damn and blast! I know there’s some decent Scotch in there.’

  ‘I’m afraid Mama or Mrs Logan must have locked it and forgotten to unlock it,’ said Dinah. ‘It must date back to that time we saw Sofia in there about to help herself to the sherry—do you remember? I think one of the boys put her up to it—a silly dare or something. Uncle Austin got in a terrible state about it. You know, I don’t think he ever really knew who Sofia was. I think he always had some crazed notion that she was the child of one of the neighbours—or one of his neighbours from his father’s house in the 1840s. He always thinks Mama is the child of the house. He always calls Mama the pretty little girl, haven’t you noticed? It’s as though he still sees her as the little girl at his brother’s house all those years ago—’

  Dinah made herself stop. She did not know why she was babbling on about such nonsense except that it was better than just sitting here with her father who was getting more and more angry.

  But a strange thing had happened.

  At her words, which had seemed to Dinah innocuous enough, her father groaned and violently shook his head, pounding the side of his temple with the flat of his hand with a force that alarmed her.

  ‘She oughtn’t to have been drinking. She got too close to the fire and the pretty little girl tried to save her,’ he said as though reciting something he had learnt or had been told, and Dinah was lost. ‘She tried to save her but her dress caught alight.’ Dear God,’ he whispered, ‘it was the other way around. She tried to save Sofia.’ He got slowly to his feet, and his face frightened her. ‘We must find your mother.’

  Aurora had thought she had seen a little girl on the far bank but she had been mistaken. Had she looked up, instead, at the great iron edifice of Waterloo Bridge she might have noticed a solitary figure standing at the apex of the bridge leaning out and silently watching the flow of the great river beneath him.

  At first this solitary figure did not see her either: he saw Alice and, other than her, everything was black: the river, the night sky, his heart.

  Thomas had wanted to kill the young lady. He had purchased a knife and followed her with the intention of killing her. It was to be retribution. Justice. The horror of it surpassed even the horror of the train accident. He could not shake the image of it out of his head and he wondered if he might possibly go mad with it.

  He could not go home and he dared not return to his lodgings—which was a pity for a letter from his wife awaited him there, informing him of her intention to return home to him, and that she was carrying his second child.

  He had made things worse, a hundred, a thousand times worse, when it had seemed that the very worst thing had already happened.

  He looked down into the fast-flowing river and he understood what it was that made people jump. They said the Thames overflowed with the corpses of folk who had drowned themselves. He could well believe it. The miracle was that so many millions chose not to throw themselves in.

  He heard the muffled cry of a woman and saw on the river bank below the bridge a cloaked figure walk down the little steps at the water’s edge and rather than stop at the water that lapped over the lowest step, the figure simply continued onwards, walking very steadily into the water. For a moment he stared transfixed because the figure was ghostlike, a vision he must surely have conjured up from his own deranged mind, but the woman gave an involuntary gasp as the cold waters sucked against her cloak and pulled her under and he knew she was real.

  He cried out and ran down the steps at the side of the bridge then down the little steps at the water’s edge and he plunged in, wading, and the shock of the icy water numbed his brain. He could not swim and he could no longer see her but he plunged under the water and thrashed about like a madman, finding something that was soft and material-like and grabbing at it with both hands and pulling and pulling, and she came at last, a dead weight, and he slipped and they both sank beneath the surface and he felt a moment of sheer panic but he found his footing and, slipping and scrambling, he burst out of the water gasping for air and dragging her with him to blessed dry land.

  He lay there for a time on his back, and directly overhead was a single star burning very brightly. He did not believe it was a sign, he knew it was just a single star burning very brightly, but he wept and could not stop.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  London and the North

  ON A SUNDAY MORNING IN late January the city was slow to come to life but the river had been awake since dawn, since long befor
e dawn. The first barges taking coal upstream and bringing goods downstream were already chugging beneath the capital’s great bridges. Wherries dodged in between, taking passengers and cargo from one bank to the other. A naval frigate, here for a ceremonial duty, was being led by a tug to moorings on the south bank. Only the pleasure craft were tethered and silent, and would remain so until the spring.

  Those who had business to attend to were already working. Those who did not put on their Sunday best and prepared to attend church. And those who had neither business nor church to attend sheltered in doorways and beneath the arches of the same great bridges, shivering and praying they would make it through another day.

  Not all did.

  Thomas Brinklow, a lone figure on the river bank not far from the bridge where he had intended, the night before, to contemplate his future and had instead found himself saving a woman’s life, watched as a group of constables in a police launch pulled a body from the river.

  You could not save everyone, it seemed, and the profound elation he had experienced last night at the life he had saved was quelled a little. This person no longer needed his help, or that of any mortal man. The constables heaved the corpse onto their craft and turned towards the shore and Thomas removed his cap, though it felt like a futile enough gesture. There was little point in wondering who it was—there were too many things that could happen to a person in this city to make it worthwhile speculating on which of them had finished this poor soul off.

  The police launch reached the shore not ten yards from where he stood, and if they wondered at this strange-looking figure on the river bank in sodden clothes that smelt like the river they made no remark. Instead a constable leapt out and secured the moorings with an expert hand and they manhandled the corpse out of the boat and onto the jetty where they laid it whilst they paused to light their pipes and stand and smoke in the misty dawn.

  Thomas looked and saw this one, too, was a girl, her long skirts tangled and sodden and wrapped around her slim torso, her long, dark hair matted and stiff with the river’s detritus, her face bleached and empty of expression. After a time the constables roused themselves to lift her onto a stretcher. One of them tossed an oilcloth over her and they heaved the bundle onto their shoulders to carry her off, at which point Thomas turned away.

  The corpse was that of a starving, homeless girl called Annie who had once worked as a maid in a big house in Bloomsbury. She was taken to a mortuary and as no one came to claim her she was eventually buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave at Houndsditch.

  After many hours, his clothes still damp and reeking of the river, Thomas Brinklow returned to his lodgings and found the letter from his wife.

  And though he did not know it, a short distance away the woman whom Thomas had pulled from the river lay insensible in the house of a retired clergyman who resided in a modest house on the river’s edge and who had witnessed—as he witnessed on many winter nights—a poor soul attempt to end their life. But this soul was saved and the fact of it surprised him so much he was roused to leave his house and, rather than see the poor wretch arrested for her unlawful act, he had brought her to his house. Here, and to his great surprise, he found her to be, not a poor wretch at all, but instead a lady. It was many hours before the lady regained her senses enough to allow him to contact her people. For she had a family, and a husband, a pleasant-looking fellow but with a face ravaged by worry, who was even now at her bedside, pacing the floor in a way that caused the retired clergyman to question why it was the lady had attempted what she had the night before. But no doubt it was all part of God’s plan.

  The sky continued to be clear for the next two days but the temperature dropped and snow fell on Monday night and again on Tuesday night, blanketing the city and causing havoc on the roads. Horses slipped on the ice and had to be destroyed where they fell, carriages overturned in Regent Street, breaking bones and blocking the main thoroughfares. A hundred souls perished in the night, frozen solid in the doorways and beneath the arches in which they huddled, and a number of performances had to be cancelled at some of the more important West End theatres, generating a flurry of angry letters to the editor of The Times.

  Outside the city, the snowfalls were even heavier, and by Wednesday morning transportation in the provinces had all but ceased.

  In Birmingham, Christabel Logan looked out of her window and wondered if she would be able to catch her train. She had been staying at the Railway Hotel for the past four nights, awaiting a reply from a sister near Wolverhampton with whom she was hopeful of staying, but the sister had failed to reply until late last night. Now, dependent on the snow, Mrs Logan was in a position to leave the hotel and travel north. Would the trains be running? she wondered. They had been sporadic yesterday and she had sat by the window watching the comings and goings on the platforms below. She had stayed away from the hotel’s public bar downstairs, taking her meals in her room, feeling it was not quite proper, her a widow travelling alone.

  The letter, received at long last from the sister, had been brief and surprised, but she had offered her older sibling a place to stay, at least for the time being.

  Mrs Logan reflected that she had not seen her sister since her own marriage to Paul Logan, six years earlier. This particular sister, her youngest, had herself married a blacksmith and now resided in a small village to the north of Wolverhampton. They had a number of small children and, reading between the lines of the brief note, not much free space for a guest. But she could help with the children, could she not?

  At least for the time being.

  Mrs Logan put her things in her trunk and called the porter to take her luggage downstairs. She settled her bill and the porter, a kindly man who seemed to have some inkling of her dilemma, carried the trunk and her portmanteau across to the station and waited whilst she purchased her ticket.

  The platform was busy. A number of cancellations earlier that morning and the previous day had stranded people who otherwise would have travelled earlier. A farmer, perched on a crate of week-old chicks, waited wearily, sucking on a clay pipe, clearly not expecting the train to turn up. It did, twenty-five minutes late: the 11.50, a local stopping train scheduled to reach Wolverhampton a little before one o’clock. The train pulled into the platform and there was a flurry of doors opening and a bustle of trunks and crates and parcels loaded on board. The farmer with the chicks helped her to get her trunk on board and saw her settled on a seat in the second-class carriage before tossing his crate into the neighbouring third-class carriage.

  As she settled herself for the journey Mrs Logan hoped her sister or her sister’s husband would be waiting at the other end to meet her. She had replied to her sister’s letter by telegram to say which train she would be on but had received no reply. Well, no matter if they were at the station to meet her or not, she had the address and, if need be, she could hire a man and a cart and get herself there.

  All would be well.

  The train let out a great whoosh of steam and sounded its whistle. As it heaved its load out of the station and started on the journey northwest towards Wolverhampton, the train passed beneath the first of thirty-two sets of signals on the stretch of line between the two cities. A defective goods train, some distance away and travelling on the main Birmingham to Liverpool route, had been shunted onto the local line in order to make way for the oncoming Liverpool express. It was now blocking the Wolverhampton branch line, just north of Moxley. But both the stationmaster and the signalman at Moxley had been notified and the signals on the branch line would be set to ‘danger’ which would be enough to alert the driver of the oncoming local stopping train of the hazard up ahead.

  All would be well.

  She looked out of the carriage window, separated from her fellow travellers by her loss. And yet, despite her situation, Mrs Logan could not help but marvel at the wintery wonderland of snow-covered fields and white-roofed cottages and the frozen canal, the barges set solid in its midst. The snowfall of the pre
vious two nights—surely the last snowfall of the winter—had even caused ice to form on the signals in pretty icicles that glistened in the late morning sunshine.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  London and Oxford: February

  IT WAS A MONDAY MORNING, the last day of February. In Oxford, Hilary term was in full swing and Bill Jarmyn, standing at the window of his rooms, smiled as some unfortunate fellow was carried, wriggling and protesting, into the Quad and was ceremoniously tipped into the pond to a chorus of cheers. After some splashing about, the chap stood up, the water cascading off him, and made a sweeping bow which was greeted with a chorus of boisterous ‘hurrahs!’ from the crowd of onlookers. That same chap had been tipped into the pond before Christmas, Bill noted, and looking at the other chaps in the crowd, he saw that every single one of them had, at some time or another, ended up in the pond. Now the fellow was being hoisted onto someone’s shoulders and paraded around the Quad, dripping water, to a spontaneous rendition of ‘Rock of Ages’. The procession made its way through the gate and out of the Quad and all was quiet. And Bill stopped smiling and wondered why it was that no one had ever tipped him into the pond.

  Sixty miles away at number 19 Cadogan Mews the schoolroom was silent and deserted. The boys had started at a small prep school and, in the autumn term, Gus would be starting at Eton. Mr Todd had been forced to find himself a new position with a doctor’s family in Chiswick but, as that family had just commenced a one-year Grand Tour and had taken him with them, he was not complaining.

  Uncle Austin was not in his room either. He was in the third hour of the battle, his troops had just charged the Russian lines and Austin found himself temporarily cut off from his men. The smoke from the battery of guns up on the hillside and from the shot of the percussion muskets created a fog that smothered everyone and everything, a fog that caught at your lungs and made you choke and that reduced visibility down to an arm’s length. It was disorienting, even for the most hardened soldier. It made you lose your way. He realised he had become cut off from his men.