Shadow of the Serpent

by David Ashton

  ‘Can you command a waltz, Mr Disraeli?’ she asked.

  For once the silver tongue was tied.

  ‘I – I – have done so at one time without causing offence or accident,’ he finally murmured.

  ‘Prince Albert danced the waltz quite beautifully,’ she murmured.

  She stood. Not looking at him. Gazing into a pleasant middle distance. Disraeli at last comprehended the nature of the silent invocation. His own wife had adored to dance but she was more inclined towards the polka, the rhythms of which he found … most unappetising.

  He laid aside the umbrella and approached his Queen.

  ‘Would Her Majesty consider honouring her most humble servant?’ he almost whispered.

  Without more ado, she held out her plump little arms, still encased in waterproofing, her hands safely covered from fleshly contact by the stout garden gloves. He took one of them in his, and put his other arm round her back in a discreet curvature.

  They waited in silence. Somewhere high above, a seagull screeched mockingly. Finally Victoria began to hum a tune under her breath.

  Disraeli, slowly, like a grandfather clock creaking into motion, began to move gingerly to the melody.

  She followed suit. They danced. Ghosts in a garden.

  Upstairs, Ponsonby could not believe what he saw. He bit hard into his knuckle to disprove hallucination, and then looked out once more.

  The figures still waltzed before his sight. Victoria and the funeral director.

  He would have found a measure of comfort, however, had he been able to catch the look in Disraeli’s eyes as he gazed over the head of his sovereign.

  They were bleak. Like a cornered beast’s. Fixed upon an uncertain future.

  A shaft of pale sunlight broke through the clouds and illuminated the dancers. The rest was gathering gloom.

  26

  He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth

  The battle afar off, the thunder of the captains,

  And the shouting.

  JOB, 39:25

  Gladstone had begun speaking at five o’clock precisely, was near an hour into his speech and appeared to be just warming up.

  He had first covered in intricate detail the financial profligacy of the Disraeli government turning an inherited surplus of six million pounds (a surplus created by a Liberal government in which Gladstone had been simultaneously prime minister and chancellor, one head being better than two, and a canny recognition that every chancellor’s sweetest desire was to dance on the dead body of his own PM so the only person you may have even the faintest hope of trusting is yourself) into an eight-million-pound deficit during six spurious years of unchecked imperialist annexation, false phantoms of glory.

  He then had a passing swipe at Victoria being declared these four years past the Empress of India, theatrical bombast and folly, although he was careful to lay the blame for that at Beaconsfield’s door.

  Now he was engaged on raising his audience to an almost mystical communion against the evils of plutocracy.

  But if truth be told, the People’s William was far from an egalitarian. The opportunity to make large fortunes did not arouse his moral repugnance, indeed it had his full approval. What he was sore against, however, was the flaunting of it. And his indignation over such display had a practical streak. Don’t shove your wealth in the faces of the poor, it may stir them up to resent their lot. They may rise against you, pitchfork to hand. And stick it in.

  His ideal would be for one to live well within one’s modestly acknowledged vast fortune and plough the money back into the land, or nurture the urban wage-slaves by building another factory to enhance their existence.

  However, if unable to aspire towards such philanthropy, then at least balance your books, refrain from coveting thy Afghan or Zulu neighbour’s land, don’t pick a fight with foreigners, and, when at home, don’t show off.

  Most especially round your wife’s neck.

  And yet, almost despite himself, the bain de foule, the adoration of the masses within which he immersed himself with growing addiction, aroused an evangelical fervour which lifted him to address the people directly, over the heads of the aristocracy, landed interest, the established Church and even, most specifically, the Queen.

  If Gladstone was aware that Victoria had always regarded direct address to the people as her prerogative and therefore the Royal nose had been put well and truly out of joint, he gave no sign of it.

  His oratorical style was at times ponderous, monolithic, but the slow sentences built up, fuelled by a boundless physical energy, till they created the impression of a mighty sea rolling in, wave after wave after wave.

  McLevy watched from amongst the crowd. All this oratory was giving him a blinding headache although he was prepared to admit a certain prejudice.

  The inspector detested politicians. Scavengers who would sacrifice their own children if they thought it would advance them one small step nearer to kissing the rancid arse of power.

  Gladstone, luckily, was unaware of this jaundiced view from at least one of his audience as he launched into a final but still lengthy salvo, on the subject it would seem of ‘the nation against selfish interests’.

  ‘We have great forces arrayed against us,’ he began, before dismissing out of hand the aforesaid aristocrats, gentry and Church, ‘… wherever there is close corporation, wherever there is a spirit of organised monopoly, wherever there is a sectional and narrow interest apart from that of the country, and desiring to be set up above the interest of the public, there, gentlemen, we, the Liberal Party …’

  Aha, thought McLevy, moved from the nation tae the party, have we?

  ‘… have no friendship and no tolerance to expect.’

  Gladstone paused for a moment. Earlier parts of his speech had been somewhat elevated and erudite, littered with Latin, marbled by Greek, but now he was moving in for the kill, the axe raised high.

  ‘But, above all these, and behind all these, there is something greater than these – there is the nation itself!’

  Now, we’re back tae the nation, McLevy reflected, the auld bugger’s faster on his feet than he looks.

  A prolonged burst of applause had allowed this seditious thought some room to express itself.

  McLevy glanced sideways at Mulholland who was apparently enthralled by this spouting torrent of words, this vast ocean of promises. The inspector, as previously noted, did not trust the ocean because he could not swim.

  Gladstone took a deep swallow from a glass of water and returned, refreshed, to the fray.

  ‘This great trial is now proceeding before the nation. The nation is a power hard to rouse, but when roused, harder still and more hopeless to resist …’

  There was a buzzing in McLevy’s ears. It could not be a lack of sustenance, for early afternoon in the Old Ship he had treated Mulholland to the constable’s favourite repast, boiled sheep’s head, though the inspector himself preferred it burnt black with the hot iron.

  Strangely enough, the dead body of Frank Brennan had given them both a fierce appetite, and after arranging for the body to be taken back to the mortuary to await examination, they had bolted for the tavern.

  Mulholland’s eyes had lit up at the contents of his plate, much the same as Herod’s viewing the head of John the Baptist, while McLevy looked on benignly.

  This had been a necessary sop before dragging his unwilling subordinate, by coach, some sixteen miles to West Calder, within whose townhall William Gladstone was making his last election address on the Saturday before the Monday poll. Sunday being the holy Sabbath, where all chicanery ceased under the stern eye of God.

  West Calder was not even in Gladstone’s Midlothian constituency but he had tramped the length and breadth of Scotland and, for some reason, this homely venue brought out the best in the People’s William.

  The place was packed up to the rafters, near up to fifteen hundred souls, all shapes and sizes, mostly honest working men and women in sober c
lothes. The town’s economy was based on oil-shale production, not the most romantic of occupations, indeed a grinding prospect, but their faces were alight with a hope and belief which may well have helped cause the painful vibration in McLevy’s head.

  Most of the poor buggers were not even franchised to vote, yet here they were being elevated into thinking they had a serious judgemental duty to exercise. A delusion of democracy. Gibble gabble.

  He could see Gladstone’s mouth opening and shutting but a curious feeling of numbness and separation came over him. It was as if his eye had become a lens which swept the scene in front of him like a telescope.

  This feeling of separation, as if seeing what was ahead like a screen upon which images were projected, had come to him in his life before but each time he contrived to pull shut the curtain of memory because it linked in some way with his mother; a certain gruesome picture at the back of his mind which brought with it a sense of vulnerability and childlike fear.

  But what was to fear at this moment? Nothing. So let the lens roam.

  Behind Gladstone on the platform various figures were seated and behind them others stood even farther at the back, almost out of the circle of the light.

  Beyond them were no doubt more diverse shapes in the darkness, and behind them even other shadows. Going farther and farther back till they lost accountability. Such is the nature of the political animal. One face after another till the mask drops and all that is left is a vacant space where something may have once been. Or stood. Like a ghost.

  Seated to the side was a self-composed elegant figure McLevy recognised as the 5th Earl of Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose to be precise. It seemed as if Rosebery had a bad smell under his nose, surely not the proximity of the People’s William? The earl never looked directly towards Gladstone but at a spot some two feet in front of the great man, which was where, according to rumour, one day he would wish to find himself positioned, ruling the roost as cock of the party.

  But for the moment Rosebery had to rest content with acting the great Scottish grandee who was hosting and masterminding the campaign. His eyes were half-closed giving a somewhat reptilian cast of feature and it was said he never slept. Too busy plotting perhaps. Spring is a great time for the plotting.

  A gaggle of private secretaries swayed to and fro in the background like the fronds of some underwater plant and one in particular caught McLevy’s eye. Tall, silver haired, he was in marked contrast to the stunted jobsworths who scuttled around him. He brought to the inspector’s mind Frank Brennan’s account of the doorway gentry who paid a price for Sadie Gorman that the poor old whore paid later.

  Though even Gladstone himself might fit that particular bill. But had not the doorway gentry said … a friend? He was making the purchase on behalf of a friend. And was Brennan killed because he might remember the half-seen face or the smell of carbolic soap? What to believe? That was always the problem.

  The silver-haired man moved out of the light and his place was taken by a woman who clutched some papers to her bosom as if they were a precious child.

  A stooped, pinched body, God knows the misfits this game attracted, but there was something familiar about her. Of course, the glasses, the thick glass put him in mind of George Cameron.

  A dig in the ribs brought him back. Mulholland frowned over as another burst of applause rent the air.

  ‘You were grunting,’ he said accusingly.

  ‘I was not,’ replied McLevy annoyed to be brought out of his reverie. He looked back to the platform to find that the woman, also, had vanished.

  ‘You were too, sir. Like a pig at the trough.’

  The inspector ignored this bucolic simile. His attention was fixed on the stage where Gladstone had raised his right hand and held it in front of him as if he grasped the globe of the world in his cupped fingers. As he drew breath to speak, McLevy noticed that the left hand, resting quietly by his side, was indeed covered with a black stock.

  The crowd kept a profound and impressive stillness as the sonorous voice rolled like thunder, the slight trace of a Lancastrian accent from childhood upbringing under the commanding Shakespearean tone. The man’s physical magnetism almost palpable, an eagle’s swoop of grandeur to lofty cadence. William in the high reaches.

  ‘Our nation is called to undertake a great and responsible duty. A duty which is to tell, as we are informed from high authority, on the peace of Europe and of the destinies of England …’

  What about Scotland? wondered the inspector.

  ‘… we have found its interests mismanaged, its honour tarnished, and its strength burdened and weakened by needless, mischievous, unauthorised and unfortifiable engagements of war. The nation has resolved that this state of things shall cease, and that right and justice shall be done! It shall – be – done!’

  Gladstone threw back his head like an actor who had delivered a successful speech – which, McLevy cynically supposed, was exactly the ticket. Playing a role. Like a mountebank selling quack medicine.

  For a moment there was silence then a full-throated roar of approval indicated a successful conclusion to the last act. Mulholland, caught up in the general enthusiasm, shouted something to the effect of, ‘Well done, that man! Fine words. Fine words. Bring home the bacon!’

  McLevy sometimes forgot how young was his constable but, at this moment, it was only too obvious and oddly touching to see his face alight, the blue eyes sparkling and the large hands, which had grasped many a criminal collar, clapping together for all they were worth.

  The inspector turned away and looked at the applauding audience behind them, perhaps Joanna Lightfoot would be amongst the worshippers, waving her drawers in the air or even brandishing the further proof she had promised McLevy.

  But he failed to see her tall, fashionable beauty amongst the hempen homespuns. Then his eyes narrowed.

  Father Callan. Coat up to his neck. Also, like the inspector, not putting his hands together. The little priest was unaware of McLevy’s scrutiny and his gaze was intent upon the platform where Gladstone was gravely acknowledging the adulation of the masses.

  What was going on here? A secret admirer? A Papish plot? Perhaps he was going to unveil himself and declare to the world that William, admittedly an unpromising name for such, had knelt and kissed the hem of the Pontiff? Or was it something quite other?

  As if McLevy had shouted out his name through the noise, the priest started, turned and looked straight at the inspector, listening to God on a full-time basis must bring its own acuity. His moonlike face registered a brief smile as McLevy’s eyes bored into him, but, in the manner of his calling, the countenance gave nothing away.

  In McLevy’s experience few of the Romanish icons did. Except Jesus. You could trust that agony.

  His priestly collar still hidden, Father Callan melted back into the crowd like a holy wafer on the collective tongue as they roared approval.

  Mulholland was standing by, with the dazed, slightly foolish look of someone who’d been running with the herd.

  ‘I didnae know ye to be such a radical,’ said McLevy.

  ‘I got carried away, sir. Glorious sentiments.’

  The constable still retained a rapt look in the eyes and McLevy had an obscure craving to puncture the dream.

  A malicious desire which did not speak well of him, but perhaps he was jealous of the young man’s expression of unstinted admiration for another. Few of us are free from jealousy; it follows us home like a black dog.

  ‘Sentiments is exactly what ye got. A hogwash of figmentation,’ the inspector remarked somewhat harshly.

  Mulholland’s face darkened but just before he opened his mouth to deliver one of Aunt Katie’s homilies of remonstrance, to wit, a man without belief is a dung fly in the midden of his own mind, the inspector noticed that the entire platform entourage, minus the Earl of Rosebery who had shot off in another direction, was moving through a crowd of well-wishers towards the side door.

  ‘Come on. Now’
s your chance!’

  McLevy hustled the bewildered constable on a course of interception and practically shoved him into Gladstone’s face as the great man was about to exit.

  ‘My colleague here has been riven tae the core, Mr Gladstone!’ he bawled like a fishwife. ‘He cannot resist the impetus tae tell you so in person, and commend your message to the nation. Go ahead, Mulholland!’

  A couple of the secretaries stepped forward protectively to shield their leader from this bellowing lunatic and his gormless beanpole companion, but Gladstone was apparently unperturbed. McLevy was struck by how much like a death mask his face now seemed. On the platform, his eyes had radiated energy and blazed with moral indignation, but now they were sunken back in his head.

  He seemed spent, a sheen of perspiration over his face, and looked all of his seventy years. Mind you it was the end of a long campaign and one and a half hours in West Calder might well be equivalent to ten in any other venue.

  Then, were a switch pulled, the man sparked into life as if a current had been shot through his body.

  He gazed keenly up at the tongue-tied, befuddled Mulholland.

  ‘I am gratified that you approve my humble offering, sir,’ he boomed. ‘Let us hope that your sentiments are shared by many, and we carry the day.’

  ‘It was fine, fine,’ mumbled Mulholland, wondering how in God’s name he found himself in such a pass. ‘You brought it home. My Aunt Katie always says, you can do no more than bring it home. That’s what God does.’

  Gladstone was not to be outdone in the nuts and bolts of deific referral.

  ‘And the same Almighty, in his wisdom, has wonderfully borne me through,’ he pronounced.

  He clasped his hand to Mulholland’s shoulder in order to indicate an end to the exchange, it was half past the hour of six and he had many more hands to shake.

  As Gladstone turned to go, however, McLevy had other ideas.

  ‘We are policemen,’ he said, out of the blue.

  This caused a momentary hesitation in the acolytes who had turned as one man and woman to leave with their leader.