by Tanya Moir
Even for Maggie, this is enough for one day.
Back at Bradbury Street, I consult the encyclopaedia on the subjects of gas and ovens. I look up to find my mother staring at me. Here I am on her floor, an untidy heap of socks and skivvy and dungarees. The very last vessel of Harding blood.
Maggie is an unstoppable force. Since she can’t go forward, she has to go back, slamming into the Harding family history like the moving ball in a Newton’s cradle. But there are twelve thousand miles of ocean to cross before we can see what pops out on the other side.
Hand in hand, we battle equinoctial gales on the corner of Dee and Tay streets, spend our Diamond Plan payout on money orders and sheets of stamps. Before the days begin to lengthen again, the first manila envelope arrives in our icy letterbox. I cut out a stamp with a man wearing funny tights. It’s all very exciting.
What has deathless energy brought hurtling back? My great-great-grandfather, Harry Harding.
Look! Already we know where he was on a Saturday morning in 1914. St Mary’s Road, Wimbledon. In the vestry of that very church, signing the register with a hand no longer steady as a surgeon’s. Witness to the marriage of his son Edward, Chemist, of 32 Onslow Gdns, South Kensington, and Evelyn Stone, of Vineyard Hill Rd, Wimbledon, Spinster.
In another few months, The Lancet’s obituary in hand, Maggie and I learn that Harry is eighty-eight at the time — a man who came late to all things in life, including its ending. And then, at Sarah’s, we find his face. The oldest in the wedding group in Evelyn Harding’s album.
Look! He has Maggie’s smile.
He’s a sweet old thing, this Harry, round-headed and stooped, one side of his face half sliding away, slipping out of his control. (All little old men are sweet, are they not? Sweet, and safe, and toothless? They were never, surely, strong-armed lords of the house, scourges of their children, full of hopes and expectations that did not in any way include their present situation.)
What can he tell us, this charming old gent? Not much, I suspect. He’s faded like a carpet. We’ll have to get our fingers in there, open up the roots of the pile, turn him inside out, if we want to see his true colours. He might have forgotten them himself by now. And besides, here on Ted’s wedding day, there are things Harry doesn’t know.
For instance — on a morning eight months later he will be dead in his bed, watched over by a white china phrenology bust, in the very same room where Ted was born. Maggie’s only one envelope away from having Harry at a disadvantage. Still, at his age, the development could hardly have surprised him.
Harry Harding, MRCS, DSO, Pugh medallist. An exemplary surgeon, we are told. Maggie is so proud. Because surely we must have inherited more from him than a smile? This must be where my mother gets it from. Her unsqueamishness. Her iron stomach. That enquiring scalpel of a mind.
Of course we must learn Harry’s story, fill in those eighty-nine years between his beginning (Islington, 31 January 1826) and his end (Blackheath, 14 February 1915). There is an age between them. Scientists that we are, though he is our blood, we must dissect him coldly. But where should we start? Where will we find him most himself? North or south of the Thames? In the house of his death, or his childhood?
Maggie’s hand hovers uncertainly. She needn’t worry. The story is on its way to our letterbox now. Harry Harding is about to be laid open to us, his old skeleton revealed, by the News of the World of 16 February 1915, and Alfred Jennings’ diary.
And as it happens, we discover Harry on neither side of the stinky Thames. His story begins in the middle.
Harry
ONE
On the morning of 22 April, there’s a spring tide bubbling up around the Repel, raising a slurry of shit from the mud beneath the latrines to slap against her timbers. Indeed, it almost seems the old ship might be called upon to float, if she’s still capable of the feat, which any man with eyes in his head would have to consider unlikely — across at the Arsenal, the gunners are making odds of two to one against her.
My great-great-grandfather isn’t a betting man. Nor is he aware of the rising water. Harry is sitting at his desk, ankles crossed neatly under his chair, his right knee jigging. The smell coming in through the porthole is enough to make a blowfly gag, but he’s immune to it by now. He winds an escaped curl of hair round his finger, sucks at its end, and lifts his feet for the convict scrubbing the surgery floor, all without conscious thought.
What is going through his head? If I listen, surely I can hear, through the helix of our shared DNA, the rumble of his mind? An echo of the surging Thames? Or is it the beating of my own blood?
‘By Jove,’ Maggie, scalpel poised, would have him say — and why not, because this is London, long ago and far away, and if we have any sense we’ll tether him here, wrap him up in a good ‘Od’s blood!’ so he doesn’t splatter all over our clean Invercargill day.
So, ‘By Jove,’ says Harry to himself, on 22 April 1856 — a Tuesday. ‘Harding, old boy, you’d better get this thing right.’
Three hours ago, it was a mess here in Harry’s brain, his thoughts jostling down towards Woolwich Docks in a hackney cab, treading on each other’s toes, bumping knees and elbows. The price of flour, and the ignorance of writers to The Times, and the number of ginger cats in Blackheath. Which shirt he should wear tonight, and if his top hat is sufficiently clean, and should he follow Bart’s lead and sell government bonds, and whether he really dare spend so much of Berkeley’s money on the pair of pearl-handled pistols that will one day hang above my grandparents’ Kent logfire. A slither of everything and nothing, in other words. It wouldn’t have done for us at all.
But at this precise moment — three minutes past ten on the Tuesday we’re making — we’ve got him close to where we want him, approaching that singularity of mind which we demand of the dead, and if Maggie makes her incision — there! — I can almost believe she might find it. The one thing. The point of difference we’ll be wishing to see before very long. What makes Harry him, and not us.
Because my great-great-grandfather is at work now. His brow — our brow, narrow and white — is furrowed like Maggie’s over the heel of an argyle sock, like Sarah’s watching a bottle of gin, like a face I can make in the mirror. And when Harry works, he’s a man of focus. That’s the beauty of it for him.
The way everything else falls away, that second before he slips the knife into someone’s skin, blood blooming unnoticed as he presses down into the truth below. And afterwards, when he looks at his notes, when the pattern begins to hum. The parts to come together. It fills his head, this search for a tune that he can’t quite catch. His urgent knee moving up and down, double-time to the tick of the clock. Unaware of the fifty-eight more years allotted to him, Harry, at not quite thirty-one, thinks he feels the narrowing of time.
But retract that Harding focus, and look! There’s something below, a knot of strange tissue, a lump distending the node of his concentration. Here it is, the thing Maggie and I will never have. A most un-Harding-like inflammation.
Violet. Of all the things Harry isn’t thinking about at 10.04 a.m. on Tuesday, my great-great-grandmother — so Maggie will argue in weeks to come — is the most important.
Violet Harding. Where is she now? At home in Blackheath, with the baby.
The five-day-old son whose shrimp-fist Harry kissed and tried not to hate this very morning. The child he planted in Violet’s body like a flag.
Ah yes, here’s the worm at the heart of the cyst. Prod it and watch it squirm.
Because Violet could have had any husband. And though Harry’s delighted at how things turned out, delicate flower that she is, who could trust her judgement?
He knows that she’s fond of him, of course. But Harry has always suspected there are men Violet would love more. He sees candidates every day, striding out of Mayfair clubs, pulling up in brand-new landaus outside their private banks, taking officers’ salutes outside the barracks. And baby Hal is Harry’s final proof. Every time his w
ife looks at the child, Harry sees the love she is capable of. He sees that he is, indeed, the wrong man.
Is it true? What does that matter? Here it is, my great-great-grandfather’s belief, looped over the blade of Maggie’s knife, alive and wriggling. And with a deft little flick of her wrist Maggie can reveal its reverse, pin the tail that Harry is chasing. Because just as firmly as Harry believes Violet’s lack of love to be a truth, he also believes, if he tries very hard, that he can make it not so.
He might do it tonight. If he wears the right shirt, and his hat is clean. If he gets his speech just right. That’s why, three decks above the Thames, Harry is doing his best to think only of Berkeley’s heart.
It’s fair to say that Harry would be nothing without Berkeley. You’d better meet him now, before we go any further. But what’s the best way to approach him?
If we go back four months, we can take the Repel’s boat. We’ll find him waiting for us a few miles upstream, at the top of the landing stair that leads into Millbank Prison. We couldn’t miss him if we tried. His height is down in the prison record books as six foot four in his stockinged feet.
He stands head and shoulders above his guards, wearing his forty pounds of iron to great effect, self-conscious as a woman in new jewels. There’s an Arctic wind blowing down the Thames, but he doesn’t shiver. His regulation shirt is tight across his chest. Between his brown breeches and fettered ankles jut calves — now stockingless — that were the envy of his footmen. Ben Berkeley, it must be said, has a body made for chains.
The tide is in. For half a second, as he is helped down the slippery landing stair to our boat, Ben considers the option of the river. But the moment is lost. Securely clipped to the gunwales, he watches the brown Thames flow by beneath his fingers.
The journey down to Woolwich is a long one. He loses his ridiculous little glazed prison hat to the wind, and several times he is recognised, and called to. It amuses him to see that his guards, all six of them, look nervous. But his circumstances prevent him from responding to his admirers as politely as he would wish, and Ben’s last salute to his fellow Londoners must be confined to a surreptitious nod, and a shrug of his famously fine black eyebrows.
Am I making him out to be fearless? He’s full of fears, of course, bulging like a bag of weasels. But he’s not afraid of the Repel. Not yet. Not until he sees her. Her old carcass rising from the shallows as if from a grave. Spectres cling to the stumps of her masts, and Ben stares. He’d cross himself if he could. As the boat gets nearer, the undead resolve into drying breeches and shirts, the prisoners’ laundry hung from the Repel’s spars. Still, they make Ben think of gibbets, and the soft white stretch of Kitty’s neck.
He takes a deep breath — ungrateful as yet for the wind that is sweeping the Repel’s customary bouquet downriver — and tells himself that surely no other man in England has ever laid out money to be sent here. Might he not pay double, right now, to be brought away again? But the question is moot. There’s no one to take such a craven request. He’s tied to the hulk and his courage. Whatever the future might hold for Ben Berkeley now, he’s not going back upstream.
The boat lands him at Woolwich Dockyard. From there, Ben’s guards trot him towards the hulk’s spiked gangway at a pace that demands his full attention. But as they pause to unlock the mid-gate, he has some seconds to look around him. Away to his right, a party of elderly men is at the light work of breaking stones; below, in the tidal mud, fitter men are urged at cutlass point into the Arsenal Barracks’ sewer drain.
Ben comforts himself with the thought that the governor will surely wish to receive a prisoner as famous as himself. With luck, the man has prepared him a fine long speech, and its worthy delivery will take some time.
He’s right. Ben is not sent into the mud this particular day. Or the next. Because the following morning at half past six, when the roll is called, he expresses a wish to see the doctor.
‘No!’ squeaks the child at his side.
‘Don’t do it, mate,’ says a voice behind him.
‘Quiet there! No talking!’
Ben is braced for argument, armed with a reluctant schoolboy’s bag of tricks, has rehearsed, through the damp small hours of the night, a wheeze and catch in his breathing. But the ward officer shows him straight to the surgery door with an odd little smile and a hand that is almost fraternal.
There is no queue.
The officer raps three times with his truncheon. ‘One sick, sir!’
There is silence. Then a scrape and a scurry, and a bloodless boy with the face of a flatfish opens the door. Behind him, pretending to take inventory of his specimen jars, is Harry.
Ben watches the surgeon as he would a throw of the dice. An insignificant object, frog-shouldered and slight, upon which — through his foolhardiness, and no merit of its own — his fortune has come to depend. Harry Harding is not in any way Ben Berkeley’s equal. And yet Ben is afraid — more so than he has ever been in his life — of the way the little man might roll.
Harry, not wishing to appear overeager, turns slowly from his jars. The manoeuvre complete, shock causes him to sit down more quickly than he’d planned. Beneath the desk, his fingers twitch at such serendipity.
‘Name?’ he enquires coldly, though he knows it perfectly well.
Ben Berkeley smiles a little, but supplies it with good grace. Despite his reputation for gentleness, he is, Harry notes, ferociously chained. Gauging the prisoner’s reach and step, my great-great-grandfather wagers the man couldn’t swat a fly.
‘You may leave us,’ he tells the guard.
‘The Last Highwayman,’ Harry nods, when the door has closed. ‘I’m honoured, I’m sure.’ In his excitement, his tone falls a little short of the sarcasm he intends. Berkeley bows his head. Harry betrays himself further with a smile.
The Last Highwayman! In this modern age of thugs and cowards, when a gentleman might find himself strangled and left for dead in the Mall for the sake of his cigarette case, in these cynical times, how Ben Berkeley blazed — bright and doomed as a comet — across the Essex nights! Not for him the garrotters’ wicked arts. Berkeley showed them how a real man robbed, back in the golden days, when robbers looked their mark in the eye and thieves still had a conscience.
The papers adored him. He stole from the rich, and in doing so gave to the poor, if only by means of their entertainment. He made the ladies of Epping swoon in their carriages (and some of the gentlemen too, if the truth be told, including a famous West End playwright). Indeed, to be robbed by Berkeley was last autumn’s most fashionable distinction: one cartoonist had the rabbits unable to sleep for the traffic jam of fine ladies flaunting their jewels at midnight in Epping Forest.
Harry can scarcely believe that the greatest criminal of the day — of many a day — is now standing here before him. For over a week now, ever since rumours of his coming began, Harry has racked his brain for some cause to examine Benjamin St John Berkeley.
He crosses his ankles, squeezes his knees together and leans forward. ‘What,’ he asks, resisting the urge to call the highwayman ‘sir’, ‘is your complaint?’
‘It’s of a private nature.’ Berkeley eyes the boy in the corner, who has returned to cleaning out the leech tank.
Harry raises his red eyebrows. ‘Do you think this is Harley Street, man? Speak up!’
Berkeley is silent.
‘You needn’t trouble yourself about him,’ Harry adds, bluff called. ‘The lad is deaf and dumb.’
‘My complaint,’ begins Berkeley at last, and then sighs. ‘It’s difficult, sir. You might say that it is … an affliction of the heart.’
Harry’s own organ gives a little leap of joy. He uncrosses his ankles. ‘Of the heart, you say? What symptoms do you suffer?’
‘Pain,’ says Berkeley, bleakly.
‘In the heart itself? Is it constant, or intermittent? Does it worsen with exercise? Do you feel it both standing up and lying down?’
‘I feel it constant
ly. I have no rest, sir — it will not leave me.’
‘A pain of what kind? Can you describe it?’
‘It’s like a weight,’ says Berkeley thoughtfully. ‘A great black weight on my chest.’ He looks down at his chains. ‘It’s very heavy.’
Harry blinks. He sees it in his mind, this great black weight. A malign growth around the robber’s heart.
‘When did it begin?’
‘Last year, sir.’
It is too good, too good! Harry’s feet do a little jig. ‘Around the time of your crimes? But before, or after?’
‘I believe I felt it first soon after the death of Sir Adolphus Greene.’
‘Ah! I see.’
‘You know what’s wrong with me?’
‘I may have an idea.’
‘I have an idea myself, sir.’
‘Well? Out with it, then!’
‘I think it’s my conscience.’
Harry’s head hums. He is speechless. He raps both hands on the desk to recover himself. ‘But you feel it physically, man? A constriction, yes, in the chest? Show me where.’ Seeing that Berkeley, chained as he is, can hardly comply, Harry hurries across the room to place his own hands on the patient’s chest. ‘Is it here? Or here?’
‘It’s everywhere,’ says Berkeley, some way above Harry’s head. ‘And I know, sir, that you’re the only man who can cure me.’
Harry can feel the man’s heart through his palm. It’s beating very fast.
‘You’ve heard of my research?’
‘Indeed, sir. And also … of your connections.’
Harry is so intent on his examination it takes him a moment to grasp Berkeley’s meaning. As he does so, his shoulders slump. He is making a fool of himself. He removes his hand from the convict’s shirt and returns to his desk.
‘I think you must know I refer to your brother the judge, sir.’
‘I think I must know that you do.’
Why is it that a man will scrabble so to save his body from exterior discomfort, but give not a single thought to the greater dangers that assail it from within? It’s most frustrating. Harry has long since despaired of the minds of common men, but from Benjamin Berkeley he’d expected more.