Rack & Ruin

by Carol Hedges

  ****

  Daisy Lawton’s world is a world away from both the Lamb & Flag and Bow Street police office. It is so far away that it could even be on another planet, or in another galaxy. It is a world of fans and flounces, of linens and laces, of button kid boots and sweetly trimmed bonnets.

  And here is the heroine herself just coming up the front path of the nicely appointed house in Fitzroy Square. She is carrying a bouquet of hot house flowers. She pauses on the step to bury her nose into their sweetness.

  Daisy enters the house, handing the bouquet to the parlour maid with instructions to put it in water and take it straight up to her bedroom. Mama does not approve of flowers in bedrooms, declaring that the scent gives one bad dreams, but Mama is out at a Ladies’ Committee Meeting and won’t be back until much later, so she won’t know.

  As for her adored and adoring Papa, who is probably operating on some poor person (Daisy pulls a face), he is completely at her mercy and can deny her nothing. She removes her bonnet, carefully fluffing up the feathers before hanging it up, then mounts the stairs to the first floor.

  Daisy pushes open the door to her room, uttering a little sigh of contentment. How lovely it is: the pretty rosewood dressing table with its framed bentwood mirror and lace runner, the bright sofa cushions and striped Turkey carpet. And her soft little bed with its crisp white sheets, canopy, and quilted coverlet.

  How nicely Mama has done it. When she left, this was a little girl’s room, with bars on the window and toys on the floor. Now it is the room of a young lady ready to enter the world. Without taking off her outdoor shoes, Daisy throws herself onto her bed and laces her hands behind her head.

  She is the luckiest girl in London, she thinks. She really is. She has everything she could possibly want. Wherever she goes, every male eye follows her - of course she isn’t supposed to notice this, but she does.

  And if she plays her cards right she might, eventually, be on track to receive that longed-for proposal of marriage. Her sails are set and her future is secure. Daisy daydreams of a lovely house, a handsome indulgent husband, a carriage with matching bay horses and a wardrobe full of dresses and bonnets.

  Later, dressed in one of her new pink silk gowns and with her hair combed and curled, she makes her way downstairs to the sitting room, passing the open door of the dining room, which is set for dinner. The table sparkles with silverware and trailing ivy falls decoratively from vases.

  Tonight is a special dinner, for it is Papa’s birthday, and in honour of the occasion the best china and the nicest wines have been selected. A saddle of mutton with caper sauce is to be the centrepiece of the feast, with lemon syllabub and tiny ratafia biscuits for dessert.

  Daisy is smiling as she enters the sitting room, where Mama and Papa are waiting for her.

  “Now my Daisy-duck, what have you been up to today?” Papa says, rising from his armchair, his face brightening.

  Daisy hurries over to him, leans forward and bestows a kiss on his whiskered cheek.

  “Oh, I have been very busy doing lots of things, Fa,” she says. “And I have learned a new tune in honour of your birthday - I shall play it for you after dinner.”

  “I should like that very much.”

  She dimples her thanks, then holds out a small parcel.

  “Now what could this be?” her father says, feigning total astonishment.

  “Oh Fa! It is my present to you. Open it at once!”

  He sits, carefully unfolding the pretty wrapping paper to reveal a pair of slippers embroidered with purple and yellow pansies.

  “Do you like them? I sewed the design myself.”

  “My favourite flower.”

  “Pansies mean ‘loving thoughts’, Fa.”

  “I shall be honoured to wear them.”

  He unlaces his shoes and puts on the new slippers.

  “Oh Fa! You can’t go in to dinner in your slippers!” Daisy scolds.

  “As it is my birthday, I think I may be allowed a little indulgence for once - yes Florence, dinner is served? Then let us dine!”

  He rises, offering one arm to his wife, the other to Daisy and together, they make their way to the dining room to enjoy the birthday dinner.

  What is left of the mutton is congealing in its fat, the house still in semi-darkness, all occupants abed, when Daisy’s adored father gets up, shaves and hurries off to University College Hospital, to perform the first operation on his list.

  By the time Daisy rises, refreshed and radiant, he has already operated on four people. Life on the edge of a knife. And as in life, so in surgery: One tiny slip, and the future is altered forever.

  ****

  It is a few days later, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in the merry month of May, and our two bank clerks are off on an omnibus ride. Edwin Persiflage and Danton Waxwing sit on the top deck and light their cigars. Smoking is their one vice. At least it is the only vice they think of as a vice. The rest are more job skills.

  Persiflage and Waxwing do not think of themselves as mere friends, they are so much more than that. They are men who are going places. Men who make things happen. Their acquaintance began when Waxwing, the younger of the two, joined the London and County Bank in Islington as a junior clerk and was given the desk next to Persiflage.

  It didn’t take them long to recognise in each other the qualities that would make their partnership greater than the sum of its parts. Anger and resentment. In Persiflage, who has had his feet knocked off every rung of the ladder of life from the very beginning, anger had become so innate that it had become almost an art form of its own.

  Now the omnibus carries them towards St James’s Park where they have a date. Or rather Persiflage, who has superficial good looks and a predatory charm that appeals to a certain type of naive lower-class woman, is meeting a young lady.

  They are not exactly ‘walking out’ in the accepted sense of the phrase, more just walking. Though if you asked the young lady, who is small, blonde and fluffy and goes by the general nickname ‘Millie girl’, she might tell you a different tale, being prone to referring to ‘my young man who works in a bank’.

  The two first set eyes on each other in the second gallery of the Royal Alhambra Palace and Music Hall where Millie was with a group of girls out for a good time, and Persiflage was in a similar position with some of the young bank clerks.

  Having eyed each other up during one of the intervals, they edged closer during the next one and struck up a conversation. As you do on a night out.

  As soon as Persiflage learned where Millie worked, he offered to buy her a glass of Bass’s pale ale and one thing leading to another, a slightly tipsy Millie ended up being escorted home by a stone-cold sober Persiflage who couldn’t quite believe his luck.

  And now here they are, the two young clerks, spruce and brushed and carnation buttonholed. They alight from the omnibus and approach the park, where sheep safely graze and birds sweetly sing.

  And here is Millie standing in the entrance with another young lady, rather plain and pale and thin, whom she introduces gaily as ‘my best friend Affie’. Affie has come along to occupy Waxwing’s attention.

  The spare wheels eye each other in grim silence while the introductions are made. But proprieties must be obeyed and so Waxwing offers her his arm, which she takes, eliciting a lot of winking from Millie, who declares that “See, I told you. This is such fun, innit?”

  The two couples, one slightly more uncoupled than the other, walk towards the lake. Millie keeps up a bright stream of chatter, occasionally glancing over her shoulder to catch Affie’s eye and nod significantly. They reach the little stone bridge and halt to admire the view.

  “I say Millie girl, that is a ripping bonnet you’re wearing,” Persiflage remarks lazily.

  It is the first thing he has said since they greeted each other, not that he has had much opportunity to speak. Millie girl is not a great believer in silence, regarding it as a hole that needs to be filled.

  “Oh - d
o you like it, Eddy?” she says, tossing her head. “I think it is ever so fetching. Soon as I saw it I said, oh, that is the bonnet for me. Lavender is the latest colour.”

  Persiflage, who couldn’t really care less about women’s bonnets, smiles vulpinely.

  “What you think of Affie’s bonnet, Mr ... umm?” Millie girl asks the hapless Waxwing, for whom all females are a mystery; the one he is currently squiring being no exception.

  “Very nice.”

  “See, Affie! I told you he’d like it. Now then Eddy, I’m that parched I could drink up the lake,” Millie throws back her head and laughs coquettishly. “A nice cuppa tea’d go down a treat.”

  They stroll to the tea stall and over a mug of hot and very sweet tea, Edwin asks Millie girl about life at the Palace of Westminster, where she works as a skivvy. So she tells him all the latest news and gossip, to which he listens very intently, never taking his eyes off her face for a second. Occasionally he stops her, and asks her to go over some piece of gossip, or enlarge upon another.

  Eventually Millie girl runs out of news and tea and the two couples make their way back to the omnibus stop. There is a bit of amicable horseplay involving the lilac bonnet and a stolen kiss, but Millie girl is careful not to let things get out of hand, because she knows that a girl playing fast and loose is a girl who won’t end up at the altar with a ring on her finger.

  That evening, having dined on a plate of stewed eels at the Ratcatcher’s Daughter, (the sort of public house that never features in any tourist guide to the city) Persiflage sits in one of the basketweave chairs and reflects on what they have gleaned from the naive Millie.

  “I hate them all,” he remarks, the words dripping sourly from his lips like unripe lemons. “The rich, the privileged, the MPs. Never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Never got their hands dirty. Living on the backs of the starving poor. Faugh!”

  “I must say, that stuff Miss Miller told us about the state banquet was interesting. We could dine well on what got thrown away, by the sound of it.”

  “Not just us. Whole streets could have dined well off it. It will not do.”

  “No.”

  “Somebody has to stand up and say: enough is enough.”

  “Yes.”

  “It might as well be us as anybody else.”

  “I agree.”

  Persiflage reaches under the shared bed and pulls out the small wooden box. He lifts the lid and extracts a note book, a pen and a bottle of ink.

  “I must write up the day’s events,” he says.

  “I shall go out for an evening constitutional then, and leave you to it.”

  Persiflage gives him a brief nod. Waxwing takes his hat from the windowsill and leaves. Persiflage turns to a blank page and writes in a neat clerkish hand:

  Hind Street Anarchists. Information received May 10th 1863.

  ****

  A short distance away Fred Grizewood is drowning his sorrows in a pint of warm, cloudy beer. The public house he frequents is called The Engineer, an irony that usually brings a wry smile to his face every time he crosses the threshold.

  Since the gruesome discovery of the dead babies, however, Grizewood finds himself distinctly irony-deficient. Indeed, he has sunk into depression. Now he stares into his glass, wishing that Finding Dead Bodies on A Working Site had been covered by one of the many civil engineering courses he attended.

  From that fateful day, the young engineer has had to deal with members of the public who have turned up in their denizens to gawp at the crime scene, totally ignoring all the prominently posted Danger signs.

  He has had to engage new navvies, because the original ones refused to work in such a tragic place. And every day, about a third of the new ones say they aren’t coming back either, having heard the gruesome tale from the previous gang.

  He has seen articles in the popular press depicting the discovery in increasingly lurid and inaccurate terms. And to cap it all he has had to run the gamut of various religious crackpots who’ve stood and shouted at him and waved placards saying that Railways are the Work of Satan and All who Work on them are Trying to Break into Hell.

  To add to his woes, the Board of the Bayswater, Paddington & Holborn Bridge Railway Company have been exerting constant and unremitting pressure upon him to finish the work on time.

  Before coming out, he has written a desperate letter to his mentor Mr Joseph Bazalgette, addressed to his Morden home, seeking his advice.

  Grizewood finishes his beer, and orders another. He is becoming an advocate for the curative powers of alcohol. Sober, he feels unhappy, inhibited. Drunk, he experiences a wild feeling of elation, of possibility.

  He does not think his father, a senior cleric in the Church of England, would approve. Not that he approves of anything his youngest son does. Not that he knows. The estrangement between father and son has lasted years.

  Back home, it takes him a long time to fall asleep. It always does. Time crawls, broken-backed. He hovers on the brink of sleep, unwilling to let go and allow himself to be gathered up into the net of dreams.

  He knows that he will dream the same thing. He always does. He is standing on the edge of a trench, looking down. From the walls protrude tiny feet and hands. He staggers, falls to his knees, spreads out his arms.

  In the small hours of the morning, he will wake up to find himself crying.

  ****

  The approval of parents is something Letitia Simpkins is choosing not to think about as she sits in her night-gown on the bentwood chair in the small, stuffy bedroom that is just big enough for her but not suitable for her two brothers, which is why they occupy the bigger, nicer room that looks out on the garden.

  You’d be hard put to swing a cat in her room. Not that she has tried - and anyway the cat decamped two houses ago, fed up with having its tail pulled and only being fed intermittently. Letitia remembers the cat with some regret. It was the only sentient being in the house who seemed pleased to see her.

  She folds her hands in her lap and thinks about the events of the afternoon when she attended the first of the series of lectures at the Regent Street Ladies’ Literary & Philosophical Society.

  Miss Sophie Jacques, a young woman with bonfire-bright eyes, a determined chin and an intense expression spoke upon the topic How Higher Education Could Change Women’s Lives.

  As Miss Jacques mounted the dais, carrying her sheaf of notes, a shaft of sunlight suddenly lit up her hair so that she seemed to Letitia all light, glowing like some bird.

  She started speaking, and suddenly the other women in the room disappeared. It was as if she was speaking to Letitia alone. She sat very still, very upright in her seat, her eyes fixed on the small figure on the dais, drinking in the words.

  They still sound in her head. She can recall every one of them.

  “We are bred for marriage, yet we cannot actively pursue it, but must sit passively and wait to be chosen. Everything we may wish to have or wish to be must come to us through a single channel and a single choice. Home, happiness, reputation, ease, pleasure yes even the bread we eat must come to us through a small gold ring.”

  There was much more on similar lines, delivered with fervour and conviction. Letitia had only ever sat through the monotonous drone of her teachers. She didn’t know there was any other way to impart knowledge.

  Afterwards, when the applause had died down and everyone converged on the table at the back where tea and biscuits were being served, Letitia remained in her seat, ice-hot with excitement. She felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, something infinitely precious, a diamond.

  On her return, she had gone straight upstairs, taken out her hairpins and rearranged her hair so that it resembled Miss Jacques. She tied a belt round her waist, as she had seen her heroine do also. Newly fashioned inside and out, she had marched downstairs to supervise her brothers’ studies.

  In her skirt pocket was - oh joy - Miss Jacques’ visiting card, handed to her by the Great One her
self as she was leaving the hall. She was to be ‘at home’ to visitors at her lodgings tomorrow. Her kind friend Sarah Lunt secured her the invitation.

  Now Letitia sits and listens to the sounds of the night. Pipes gurgle. In the distance a church clock chimes two, the sound muffled. Sleep nags at her, but she can’t give in to it, not yet. In the hazy region between sleep and full consciousness she sees herself with new clarity.

  She has been given hope - the radiance of it burns through her like a religious feeling. Somebody recognises that she should have the same chances in life as her two brothers and is prepared to fight for her to have them.

  Since she has returned home from school, all the colours have vanished from her life. She has been imprisoned in a world that was only black and white. She didn’t realise it until now, when all the colours have come back.

  Letitia isn’t sure how exactly she is going to attain her life chances; it is enough to know that they are out there somewhere, just waiting for her.

  ****

  Night is a time when street space simmers with peril and evil. You might call it superstition, or fear, but either way it is wrong to pretend that the night is like the day, but without light.

  In the dark, sounds are more tangible than objects. Listen. You hear bells sounding the quarter-hour; the unsteady footsteps of faltering drunks. You hear the scuttling and squeaking of rats, bold and brazen in a street with a dead wall on one side. A man with no home and a chronic sniff bewails his lot. A woman sobs her misery to nobody but herself. A child, weakened by hunger and neglect, lies in a gutter and raises its voice to a pitiless sky in one final cry of despair.

  ****

  The engineer wakes slowly feeling as if he is rising to the surface through a mud bath. Most days are like this. He opens his eyes. Morning light drips around the window blind, not getting far. For a few minutes, he lies staring at the stained ceiling as if amazed to find it there, or himself under it.