Eye of a Rook

by Josephine Taylor

  Margaret Street. He pauses on the kerb, looks down the road they take to church each Sunday: to All Saints, where he surrenders himself to voices made resonant by devotion, and where the rays of pallid light pick out the gold of Emmie’s hair like nothing other than a special form of holiness.

  Thank goodness Emily inherited her mother’s disposition; she did not need money to sweeten her appeal, although—and they admit this only between themselves, he and Emmie—it’s a pleasant addition to their married life. It has reduced the strain on Father’s face, too, the worries over the low income from their rather small estate and the cost of being a politician—ridiculous that such important work is unpaid—while all the time making certain his children do not go without. It’s hard to tell how low the family coffers dipped, but several conversations were had about staying in London the year round and renting out Hierde House. Bea had given a cry at the suggestion and he ’d had to contain his own emotion. Airton says we can stay on his estate whenever we like, Father had tried to console them; he ’d kept close ties with his old Rugby friend. He assures me we can treat it as our own. Then there had been the relief: a risky business investment paying off; Arthur’s own marriage to someone without great status, but with seemingly unlimited money. His father could not, at first, hide his warring feelings. But he ’d come around; Emmie is hard to naysay with her curiosity and her clear and honest gaze. And there’s no need to hide worldly concerns from her either; she may be young and lacking a fully rounded education, but she is subtle and pragmatic, he finds, and understands that if his family has benefitted from the marriage, so has hers. How many new and titled patients are now calling for her physician father might only be guessed. Certainly his carriage is becoming seedy with hard use, his horses always fagged. So there is a balance of sorts between the families, a fair—

  He jars to a halt at the edge of the footway and Regent Circus North rushes towards him, as it does every time and yet is always new, teeming with life: a mother and three daughters in their elegant barouche, each with the same doughy face stretched by excitement; the Hoy! of a cad leaning counter-ways from the back step of a tilting, top-heavy omnibus as if to save it from crashing to the ground; the tang of steamy droppings mingling with the smell of hot pastry, lilac flower, pea soup and the wafting Thames; a chattering, rattling, clanking and ringing of innumerable wheels and hooves and boots and voices. And amongst all this, men and boys with tatty brooms and clothes circle cabs, ’buses and vans, scooping up dung and throwing it in a brimming cart, even as more is dropped by trudging and trotting horses—those thousands upon thousands of doughty beasts without which London would seize up like an unoiled machine. And the din! Costers—men and women trundling their barrows laden with whatever they can scrounge the pennies to buy, whatever they can hazard a guess might sell—hawking their wares with throats made scratchy by the city air: Eels, pickled eels, best price in town! A nosegay for your lovely lady, sir? Pease porridge, fresh and hot! Here, buy a muffin for the little one, isn’t she a treat? … And this kaleidoscope of sight and sound and smell and taste; all this weaving and plunging and bumping of bodies whirls through his own body and is mirrored, muddily, in the windows of the stores at the intersection of Regent and Oxford in a riot of motion and colour. The Circus is London in miniature, a huge beast on mismatched legs, vast and lumbering, colossal and ungainly, yet it is a city to be admired, even celebrated, for its verve and the staunch adaptability of its people. The energy of the place fills him, gives him a sense of possibilities as broad as the long thoroughfare of Oxford Street.

  He can’t see the far side of the road through the haze, but he takes it on faith: lunges into a gap in the melee, side-stepping a pile of fresh manure, dodging a speeding cab with its clatter of wheels and hooves, skirting the inevitable puddles and barrows and sweepers, racing in front of a looming ’bus, knocking shoulders with a fellow crossing against him, finally making the footway. Then it’s east along Oxford at a clapping pace, stumbling here and there at wads of straw thrown to soak up the putrid muck at shopfronts.

  Away from the Circus, Oxford Street quiets a little and he can take in the surroundings, laugh mildly at his muddied boots, glad for the dry replacements waiting in chambers. The city streets are like a wave of filth in winter, and in summer a choking pall lies over them, but he still squeezes in this dash to chambers several times each week. He misses the long walks he’s been used to his whole life: the streets of Oxford, calmer by far than London’s, and the paths alongside the River Cherwell; the clutch and stretch of Herdley’s hills; the blossomed air of Rugby in the spring. In their absence he must settle for the rhythm of his stride and the way it jogs his loose, tumbling thoughts into unconsidered combinations, nudges them into more comfortable homes.

  Like his life before Emily. Lately he’s been thinking about it at odd quiet moments. His parents, the particular details of his upbringing. A taking stock of what they had, before it was sliced through by the guillotine of Mother’s death.

  It’s only recently he’s understood that his were unusual parents: they did not observe the distance from their children common to aristocrats; they allowed them physical and intellectual freedom; they encouraged them to treat the servants with respect and as if they had equal rights, though they didn’t, of course. “Before” held assumptions that he and Beatrice—maybe Cissy too, although she was so young then—did not realise until they were snatched away: trust in the myriad possibilities of their lives; the belief both parents would always be there to watch their futures unfurl.

  An arc of tea-coloured slurry. It’s a rumbling, tipping omnibus, the fault of that nasty hole near the corner of Poland Street—will it ever be filled? Arthur skips sideways; sees it splash up and under the raised skirts of two women looking for a gap in the crisscross traffic, instantly soaking their boots; hears their dismayed cries; strides on.

  But Mother was taken from them, and in her place came deep, dark, aching loneliness and the sense that he himself had suddenly to become a man—surrender the softness of his youth, hide the tearing in his heart; the growing understanding that he must turn from intimacy with the remaining women in the family and join a club determined by his sex, that he must assume responsibilities beyond his years and fulfil, now, only Father’s expectations. You must be at Christ Church, Father had exclaimed many times. Then, You must join Lincoln’s Inn. And, yes, he knew why this was so important: William Gladstone had been at Christ Church College in Oxford and was then admitted to Lincoln’s Inn. So he too must find his place in these communities of men: the monastic Christ Church, with chapel every morning, the tolling of Great Tom every evening, its cathedral and canonries, its debating and pranking; and Morrison’s chambers in the Inn, the senior barrister’s rooms fuggy with coal smoke and the sweat of young men competing for places at the bar, striving to become one of the wigged and cloaked.

  It has its own joy, this world of men, its own rewards for challenges met and overcome, its own hearty back-slapping bonhomie. Even so, the call of his early years remains: the still-barely-there sensation of being held and cherished, of being listened to with an open mind, an open heart. It was Mother, of course—his father always busy in Parliament, or shut away behind a definite door—it must have been Mother. She is just a shade now, though the scent of lavender or the unexpected glimpse of his own eyes—the gentle dip at their outer corners—can raise her with a sharpness that makes him gasp, and a rook’s harsh caw can return him to the moment he was told. And how she died? He’s unsure when he found out about the stillbirth, but he does remember Bea telling him, years after that time of numbing fog, that it had been another son and that Mother had lingered with childbed fever for many days. He remembers that he understood his father’s grief better after this, and that he drew closer to the man again after years of blame and distance. This past year has continued in the same vein: brought them mutual appreciation, a greater ease. Perhaps his new life as a husband has allowed a window to open on t
he view of his parents, previously lit—he sees it now—by the idealistic glow of childhood, then warped by the exacting righteousness of youth. Perhaps his marriage has permitted a new reckoning. Perhaps it is the workings of love.

  A smiling man strides towards him as he crosses Dean Street. He reaches the other side, stomps his icy feet in their stiff boots, rubs and beats his gloved hands; sees the man do the same, his smile widening. Arthur laughs along with his glass counterpart and the warmth runs through his tingling body.

  His father is a good man, he knows this now. A man who is warmly welcoming his new daughter to their Hierde House Christmas, a season he usually guards fiercely, as if to protect his reduced family from further catastrophe. A man committed to the nation, to finding solutions to all the problems this rush to the cities has brought—this dizzying propagation of machines, this animated trading with a larger, multitudinous world. And Gladstone has been his father’s man, from his lowly beginning and all through the inordinate length of time it took his star to rise. Finally, finally, Father had sighed at the birth of the Liberal Party five years ago, and they ’d clasped hands and downed ales and brushed tears from their eyes, father and son.

  Yet there has been a change since then, a cooling that is only now finding voice. Why is Father suddenly pulling away from his idol? Does he not wish to be in Gladstone’s cabinet when—one day, surely!—the man ascends to power? Where has his old enthusiasm for the game of politics gone?

  New Oxford Street. Another ten minutes or so and he’ll be there. The shops on either side of the road throng with women and men peering through plate-glass windows, exclaiming at boldly coloured trousers and the sparkle of gaslit dresses, milling in and out of store fronts, balancing parcels onto ’buses or into cabs. Father says this was a dangerous place, once upon a time, a rookery crammed with petty thieves, a maze of fetid courts and alleys to be avoided at night, or when alone. He says the new road changed all that, pushed the slums south and north. It’s hard to imagine how it used to be, and sometimes it seems to Arthur, sitting in the drawing room with his wife in the evening, that there is little to separate them, London’s rich and poor. They all drink the same water, after all, from cesspool to sink via the smelly Thames; they all suck in the same smoky air, feel it choke their bodies and their minds.

  And in important Westminster, it seems a hardening traditionalism is now choking his father’s mind, overcoming that early liberalism, the concern for those less fortunate, the emphasis on social equality that was so important to him and his wife.

  His wife. Maybe that was when it had begun, that movement towards a newly tough yet brittle attitude towards the powerless and the poor. Maybe that was when Father had begun to shut down, as if the plucking away of joy had left him fearful of life. He ’d lost, it seemed, his ability to believe in the possibilities of change, to trust in the fundamental goodness of things.

  And now, even as Gladstone seems on the verge of supporting the gift of voice to the lower classes—a right to vote, perhaps, at last—Father draws further away from that original goal, provisos and qualifications hedging his comments about his old hero and his old hero’s choices. And when he himself talks with Father, optimistic about the possibilities of further electoral reform, passionate about improved pay for the lower classes, laughing at the new and unfamiliar adulation of Gladstone in the provinces, then his father replies with a grunt, or the cryptic, We’ll see, shall we?, his tone filled with presentiments of failure and doom.

  How strange the way it has worked out!

  Bloomsbury Street is a black soup of soot, powdered granite and horse muck, but the pavers are a dryish path over the road and the boy Tommy is here, as always, sweeping filth from the crossing, growling at challengers to his turf. Sometimes an even smaller version also wields a ragged broom. Our Peter, Tommy introduced him one day, and Peter bobbed, Sir, and bounced on bare feet. Sometimes a girl approaches with a wooden tray of oranges, a rope digging into the back of her neck. Annie, he’s heard Tommy call her. All three have the same squat, industrious body and bowed legs, the same dark brown eyes, the same voice with an Irish cast. Now, as he strides across, Tommy approaches with the usual practised wink and outstretched hand—“Flip us a brown then, sir?”—and he gives the usual reply, dropping a penny into the urchin’s grey fist: “For dinner then, Tommy.” The lad always sports a scampish grin, but he is skinny and pale under the sticky grime coating his skin.

  What tragedies has this boy had to endure? Does a whole family wait for the day’s pennies? And so Arthur is reminded: no, we are not the same; I am one of the fortunate. The fog is browner here in St Giles, and even thicker down the side streets pointing to the river, the air more clogged with cinder and ash, the mud from rain and horses and chimneys more densely cluttered with broken glass, old newspapers, mouldering hats and shoes, and, sometimes, other ill-formed sludgy brown shapes he ’d rather not guess at. His boots give a squelch as he gains the black-pasted footway, and he toes the torn glove that hangs at its edge—hard to imagine it ever protected the hand of any woman, let alone a lady.

  But he must move on, even if his mind, unlike his feet, will not be turned from the slums and rookeries. They have not chosen to live in this muck, the beggars and vagrants, the poor and homeless. Though some of them are rogues and vagabonds, it is true, their lives filled with colourful dodges and thieves’ cant, surely this would change if they were given opportunity, or if their children were born into a better world. A kinder world. The people have turned against begging, Father said at dinner last week. Once they tolerated it, even looked with sympathy on those children trotted out to pull the coins from their purses—now, no more. But Arthur himself is not convinced that public self-righteousness is the right approach, or that treating homeless people with cruelty will benefit anyone. They have not chosen to be without a home, after all.

  What was it Mother said to him, all those years ago? We must fend for those who are not able to fend for themselves. Yes, that’s it. Kindness and fairness are things it seems he could not leave behind. It’s what first drew him to Gladstone: the politician’s work with prostitutes; the support of his wife’s charitable work—aid to orphans, to the victims of the cotton famine in Lancashire, to the homeless who slink in the shadows at day, only one step ahead of the bobbies. It’s what continues to draw him to Tom: his passion for bettering the lives of the sick and impoverished, especially children.

  He knows what Charles Reid would say to all this: “You hold yourself separate from that riffraff, my lad.” And of the walks that skirt poverty, flirt with danger: “Why mix with those dirty ne’er-do-wells when you can take a cab, y’know. Waste of time!” Arthur would like to respond, “We need to guard against the desire to blame those who are different from us for their misfortune,” but the words are like glue in his mouth. So he does not speak to Charles of his walks and has noticed how Emily, too, holds silent on the matter in her parents’ presence.

  But things are changing. He and Emmie have marked with relief the plans that are afoot—measures that will keep London at the heart of the civilised world, where it belongs. Like improving sanitation. He’s read the papers’ reports on the vast network of sewers mazing under the city; seen with his own eyes the preparation for a new embankment on the Thames, stonemasons consulting with engineers, pointing this way and that; spoken with Father about the drainage that will take the city’s waste beyond its own reach. Progress, all progress. And the poor and unfortunate have not been forgotten: Tom speaks fervently about the refuge that gives supper to homeless boys in Drury Lane, just a stone’s throw from this path he is making through London’s hectic streets. It’s one of many, his physician friend has assured him. Shelters that give food, a roof in winter.

  A blur of movement through the fog as Arthur turns down Little Queen Street. An official-looking fellow running with cane aloft and, beyond, men jumping and laughing in flashes of blue and gold—acrobats, from the looks. Are they trying to outrun the be
adle? Heading for Lincoln’s Inn Fields to entertain holiday-makers? He’ll do well to catch up with them! The beadle’s coat flaps as he runs, then swells as he stops and collapses at the waist. Up close Arthur hears the puff puff, like busy bellows, and sees the drops of sweat, despite the cold, on the beadle’s forehead. He should stop, commiserate or offer help, but the mischief suits his mood. And he must keep on, make chambers by nine, read through his lists and reacquaint himself with papers whose contents have been shunted to the back of his mind, all before racing to the courts. He’ll be cutting it fine.

  It’s two and a half years now since he joined Lincoln’s Inn and began his final training with Morrison. Eighteen months since being called to the bar, though it feels just weeks ago: the celebrations with his father and sisters, and with Emily, his then-fiancée, both of them overflowing with ideas and dreams. But being a barrister is no longer new to him. His heart no longer thuds a fierce tattoo as he approaches the courts, nor does he spend long nights worrying about troublesome cases. Morrison has him on Common Pleas settling civil disputes, reassuring or disappointing clients, pacing the stretched in-between hours up and down, up and down underneath the angels in Westminster Hall. Recently, the old barrister has threatened to move him to Chancery. You have a fine brain, Rochdale, he ’d rumbled through his lavish beard. Let’s see if we can’t have you sorting out some of the tangles. The idea of being caught in Chancery, though, appals him. The serpentine coils of decades-long disputes, the stacks of papers curling with age, the stale court air that insists on sleep.