Beautiful Lies

by Clare Clark

  The broad-brimmed hat was knocked aside. Maribel saw the red-gold gleam of Edward’s hair, the curve of his cheek, as he glanced upwards to see a policeman raising his truncheon in both hands. There was nothing Edward could do, nowhere he could go. With all his strength the policeman brought it down on Edward’s forehead. There was a hesitation, like a stoppage in time. Then blood burst from the wound, coursing down Edward’s face. He raised his hands, his mouth open, his eyes rolling back in his head. The policeman struck again and he crumpled, slack as a doll, and was gone.

  She had known immediately that he was dead. It was not possible that a man might sustain a blow like that and live. Edward was dead. They told her afterwards that she cried out, beating the windows with her fists until the glass rattled in the frame. She did not remember.

  They took her away to a place where she might lie down. The room was small and hot with buttoned leather chairs and a walnut table, padded on all four walls with gilt-tooled books in cages of gold mesh. Lady Worsley patted her arm. Someone else brought brandy and put the glass to her lips. She swallowed without looking up. The brandy burned her throat.

  Some time later a man in scuffed brown boots came to tell her that Edward had been arrested and taken with Mr Burns to Bow Street Police Station. Maribel had not understood. The man, whom Maribel did not think she knew, twisted his hat between his fingers and told her that, though Edward’s head wound was severe and he had sustained a number of other contusions, his injuries were not sufficiently acute to require him to be taken to hospital. It was Mr Burns, he told her, who had helped him to safety, albeit with several policemen as an escort, Mr Burns who, using his hat as a makeshift bowl, had brought water from the fountain so that Edward might wash the blood from his face. There were them who did not like Mr Burns, he said solemnly, but Mr Burns was a good man.

  Maribel thought of Edward using a hat as a bowl, Edward with his arms behind his back in a Black Maria, Edward walking and breathing with bloodstains on his shirt front, and she wept and gasped to herself, rocking in her chair with her face pressed against her knees. When at last the spasms ceased, and the heaving in her chest was quietened, the man she did not know had gone. She sat up and wiped her face and drank a little of the water offered to her by Lady Worsley.

  ‘You have been very kind,’ she said several times. ‘Please do not let me detain you.’

  Still Lady Worsley looked at her with her head on one side and stroked her wrist and would not go.

  ‘Let me take you home,’ Lady Worsley said. ‘You have had a terrible shock.’

  Maribel shook her head.

  ‘I must go to my husband,’ she said.

  ‘My dear, you are in no state –’

  ‘I must go to my husband.’

  ‘Let me at least call you a cab. And have a supper packed for your husband. He will need something to eat.’

  Maribel felt the lump rising again in her throat, the threat of tears. She swallowed hard, nodding.

  ‘Thank you. Truly.’

  ‘I am glad to help.’

  While Lady Worsley made the necessary arrangements, Maribel asked for pen and paper. At the walnut table she wrote to Edward’s mother, and to Henry, informing them of Edward’s situation. They would need bail, if they were to get Edward out tonight, and she asked if either might be able to help in raising the necessary sum. When she had signed the letters she sealed the envelopes and took them to the front desk herself, asking that a boy might be found to take them directly.

  A doorman escorted her to the hansom under the cover of an umbrella. Trafalgar Square was deserted. The rain fell heavily, pocking the pools of the fountains and scattering the gaslight into tiny fragments of gold. By morning the blood would be washed away. Maribel gathered her cloak about her and, clutching the warm package of Edward’s supper like a child in her lap, ordered the driver to take her to Bow Street.

  24

  DESPITE THE SEVERITY OF Edward’s injuries he was not permitted to return home that night. He was charged with assault and unlawful assembly and passed the night with Mr Burns in an unheated police cell. He was not given a blanket. The next morning he was at last released, his bail stood for him by his uncle, Colonel George Wilcox. Wilcox, who was not a blood relative but married to Edward’s father’s sister, was at pains to stress to his nephew that he acted out of loyalty to Edward’s mother and not because he approved in any way of Edward’s actions which he considered not only unlawful but contemptible. In the lecture that followed, in which much was made of Queen and country, several allusions were made to Wilcox’s Victoria Cross, awarded to him at the Crimea.

  Kept awake all night by the pain in his head and the racket of the other inmates, Edward endured his uncle’s blandishments without protest. He looked ill and dishevelled, his wound a dark gash in his battered face. His shirt front was splattered with dried blood. In the cab on the way home he closed his eyes, murmuring only that he supposed the old man should not be begrudged his money’s worth.

  At Cadogan Mansions Maribel drew her husband a hot bath and summoned the doctor who inspected Edward’s head and closed the wound with several workmanlike stitches. Edward’s shoulders and chest were dark with bruises, his cheek grazed from his fall. His lip was split, his eye bruised. When the doctor pressed his stomach he gasped with pain. The doctor diagnosed a broken rib and likely inflammation of the inner organs resulting from kicks to the abdomen. He was also running a fever.

  ‘Nothing that time will not heal,’ the doctor told Edward, shining a light into his blackened eye.

  ‘Oh, I shall get time,’ Edward said. ‘I am under no illusions about that.’

  The trial was scheduled for seventeen days hence to allow sufficient time for preparation of the men’s defence, but neither Edward nor his counsel held out much hope for clemency. The mood in the country did not favour them. Bloody Sunday had been condemned by Fleet Street almost without exception. There was little sympathy for the hundreds of ordinary men and women who had suffered injury, many of them critically.

  The protesters, the newspapermen asserted, had received their just deserts. The riots had been motivated neither by an enthusiasm for free speech nor a reasoned belief in the innocence of Mr O’Brien but by a sordid zeal for unrest and by greed for the spoils of plunder. Though Edward insisted that the police had attacked protesters without provocation, that they had, under express orders from their superiors, hit out at unarmed women and children, concentrating their assault on those least able to retaliate, the newspapers were, for the most part, unstinting in their praise for Warren and his men. The Daily News and a handful of other minor Liberal journals murmured uneasily about coercion and the whiff of martial law, but their protestations were drowned out by jeers and the clamour of exultant Tory indignation. Righteousness had triumphed. The people of London had been protected and defended against ruffians and criminals. If a few of these felons ended up dying in the process, most editors agreed, then they could blame no one but themselves.

  Only the Chronicle continued openly to back the cause of the protesters. If anything, Webster’s leading articles grew more forceful. The newspaper opened a Defence Fund to secure bail and pay fines, the details of which were published daily. It was said that the board of the Chronicle were very unhappy, that words had been spoken. The Sink of Iniquity scandal had served, in the opinion of many of its members, to degrade the solid reputation of their newspaper but there could be no doubting its effect on their profits. Webster’s obdurate support of the rioters, by contrast, had little commercial advantage. The starving poor were not in the habit of buying newspapers.

  The fever, and the blow to the head, left Edward weak and dizzy. For several days he was obliged to remain in bed, his head wrapped about with bandages. The bruise around his eye leaked blue and purple stains into the pale skin of his temple. Visitors were forbidden, except for his mother, who came every morning, insistent that she should take her turn with the nursing. Maribel could hear the murm
ur of their voices from her desk in the drawing room, as she smoked and pretended to answer letters. In the afternoons Edward occupied himself with writing and with reading the newspapers, which he left strewn in angry despair about the counterpane. His bedclothes exhaled the scent of his mother’s expensive perfume.

  ‘Don’t read them,’ Maribel said. ‘They will only make you ill.’

  Edward ignored her.

  ‘Listen to this one,’ he said, holding up the Times. ‘Apparently Mr Burns and I led an “insane rush” on the police line before we were captured. Captured? They make us sound like street thieves – or Indians. I should have worn a war bonnet.’

  ‘Red, dearest –’

  ‘“The mob was kept moving by the police.” “Kept moving” being the accepted legal jargon for trampling the crowd with horses and beating them indiscriminately.’

  Maribel tried to take the newspaper from her husband but he twisted his body away from her, holding the pages out of her reach.

  ‘“It may be hoped that the magistrates will not fail to pass exemplary sentences upon those now in custody who have laboured to the best of their ability to convert an English Sunday into a carnival of blood.” So it has come. Russia is arrived. The victors write the history and it shall be so. No more humbug of “the protection afforded by law to the humblest citizen”. The honest man is to be blamed for the unprovoked and brutal assault upon his person and there shall be laurels for the Police Commissioner who incited his uniformed brigands to riot and murder.’

  He cast aside the newspaper and picked up another. Maribel sighed and lit a cigarette.

  ‘As for Mr Harrison at the Morning Herald, it is his considered opinion that my attitude to law and order is incongruent with the magistracy that I hold in three counties of Scotland and that my criminal behaviour renders me unfit for the offices of both Member of Parliament and Deputy Lieutenant. Of course there is no suggestion of the criminal behaviour of the police. I saw one poor woman in distress begging a police inspector if he had seen a child she had lost. His answer? He called her a damned whore and knocked her down. Do you think that the Morning Herald consider that “congruent” with his position?’

  ‘Forget the Morning Herald,’ said Maribel. ‘Look at the letters that have come this morning. See how many champions you have.’

  ‘Among the Socialists perhaps. It is a commonplace for Socialists to be united in defeat. How many letters from my fellows in the House?’

  Holding her cigarette between her lips, Maribel leafed through the letters, her eyes narrowed against the smoke. There was one from Charlotte, another from Henry, and a good number scrawled on paper that was not quite clean. She could see no sheets of writing paper stamped with the portcullis of the House of Commons.

  ‘I’m not sure. If they have written personally –’

  ‘They will not write,’ Edward said. ‘My honourable colleagues share the opinion of the Fourth Estate. I am a revolutionary, a seditionary and an enemy of law and order. Not to mention a disgrace to the Commons.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you have always wanted?’

  Edward put the newspaper down. His smile was weary.

  ‘It is a dream come true,’ he said.

  ‘Red, you fight for the causes dearest to your heart. You provoke people and they do not like it. It has always been so.’

  ‘And the working man is no better off.’

  ‘You know that is not true.’

  ‘I shall go to jail as proof that the capitalist masters of London can treat their slaves in whatever way they choose. It is hardly a worthy cause.’

  ‘You will not go to jail,’ Maribel said without conviction, brushing ash from the counterpane.

  ‘There are Irish members imprisoned for simply speaking their minds.’

  ‘They cannot do that here. The Crimes Act only applies in Ireland.’

  ‘Legally perhaps. But do you think our government is troubled by a little nicety like that?’

  ‘They might ban public meetings but they cannot fix your trial. This is England.’

  ‘No. We are Russia now. Whatever my fate, it has already been decided.’

  Edward’s counsel was Mr Asquith, a skilled advocate and Liberal Member for Fife. The party, it seemed, was not yet quite ready to abandon him.

  Mr Asquith, while hardly more optimistic than Edward about his chances of avoiding imprisonment, was of the view that, given the testimony of a number of witnesses, Edward might be acquitted of the more serious charge of assault. He did, however, stress the importance of discretion in the weeks before the trial. Edward was to write nothing, to say nothing. The newspapers had made much of Edward’s reputation as an agitator, his contempt for the law. Any further suggestion of impenitence would gravely disfavour his cause. Edward chafed against such restrictions but he was obliged to acknowledge the prudence of Mr Asquith’s position. Instead, as soon as he was well enough, he occupied himself with close involvement in the preparation of his defence. The work engaged him and improved his spirits.

  Still the days passed slowly. Maribel smoked too much. At night she could not sleep. After the riots of the previous year she had gone with Mr Morris’s wife Jane and Mrs Besant to visit several prisoners in Millbank and the miserable gloom of the place had clung to her for days afterwards. The men had been held in narrow cells furnished only with a table, a hammock, a slop tub with a lid and a stick painted red at one end and black at the other. The stick was the only form of communication the prisoner had with his fellow man. If he wanted work he put his stick through a narrow slit in the wall of his cell with the black end out. If his needs were of a personal nature he showed the red end. It had been a mild day and yet the damp and the chill of the place had entered her bones, as though all the weed-clad, mud-scabbed ghosts of the river, the dregs of the desperate and the damned, had risen from the marsh to stake their claim there.

  When she thought of Edward in such a place, wordless, wretched, half starved, his long, elegant fingers bleeding from picking oakum, it was with agitation and, increasingly, with anger. In the newspapers’ leading articles and on their letters pages, Edward was not only damned as a revolutionary but disdained as a reckless exhibitionist, determined upon exploiting every moment to its dramatic full. Several cartoons lampooned his gaucho style, his broad-brimmed hats, his bandannas, the ornaments of Argentine silver on Pampa’s Spanish saddle.

  Maribel had never doubted her husband’s commitment, the sincerity of his opinions, but she wondered now whether it had been necessary for Edward to storm the police lines, to provoke so direct an assault. Others had not. George Bernard Shaw had decided to abandon the march when the police attacked, Mr Hyndman of the SDF too. Edward had declared them cowards, accusing Shaw of running away, but what was it that he had achieved that they had not, apart from arrest and a severe head wound? Edward was not a trades unionist or a self-taught labourer, after all. These were not his battles. He was a Member of Parliament whose power lay not in his fists but in his ability to press for constitutional reform. He knew as well as anyone that the debacle in Trafalgar Square would only serve to diminish what little authority he still wielded in the House. She thought of Mr Webster, who wore his prisoner’s suit of clothes to commemorate the anniversary of his incarceration, and it dismayed her, that Edward might not be so very different himself.

  As for what would happen to her if Edward were jailed, she refused to discuss it.

  ‘The Charterhouses, perhaps?’ Edward suggested. ‘Charlotte would love to have you.’

  Maribel put her hands over her ears.

  ‘You could go to my mother, I suppose.’

  ‘That is not funny.’

  ‘What about the Wildes? They say it is a Woman’s World in Tite Street.’

  It was a weak joke. The Woman’s World was Oscar’s magazine, to which he had recently been appointed editor. Maribel shook her head.

  ‘I do not need to go anywhere,’ she said firmly. ‘I shall manage quite well here
.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘I shan’t be alone. I have Alice. Not to mention Lady Wingate and goodness knows how many other lonesome lady companions. This building is packed to the gills with widows aching to commiserate with me.’

  Edward smiled. In truth, Maribel was afraid. It was not just the change in the other occupants of Cadogan Mansions, the sidelong glances and hurried ascents of the stairs. Since Bloody Sunday they had received a number of intimidating letters, several of them written anonymously, from citizens eager to inform them of the particularly low opinion in which they held Socialists in general and Mr Campbell Lowe in particular. Most came through Edward’s parliamentary office but a few, including one that itemised in careful detail the series of punishments the writer considered appropriate for offences of this nature, which he deemed Treason with a capital T, were addressed directly to Cadogan Mansions. It was discomfiting to think that these people knew where she lived.

  There were a great number of letters. It was no longer possible to deal at breakfast with all of the envelopes that came with the first post. Radicals of all descriptions wrote to express their support, friends their baffled affection. Witnesses offered testimony. Fellow marchers sent accounts of their own encounters with the police. Socialist groups praised Edward’s actions and invited him to lecture. A letter came from his constituency, signed by hundreds of well-wishers, another from Webster requesting a thoroughgoing interview for the Chronicle.

  ‘I have done a little digging, as newspapermen must,’ Webster wrote. ‘Though I doubt the meticulousness of many of my competitors, one must presume that they have done the same. Your father’s afflictions, the family’s subsequent financial difficulties, it would be hoped that these and other equally private matters might remain private. Alas, privacy is seldom the privilege of the infamous, and infamous, regrettably, is what you have become. I, however, continue as your advocate and, if I may be so bold, your friend. The cause for which you have battled so fiercely is my cause too, your fight my fight. Grant me the privilege of standing with you shoulder to shoulder. Let us share with the world the truth about you, your family, and your struggle for a better, fairer world, in your own words.’