The Skeleton Army, page 31
She therefore finds herself impaled on the horns of a dilemma: should she endure the current inequitable situation which benefits her or exert herself for the common good and find that her own independent intellectual labours are significantly curtailed?
As I’d written that last paragraph, I’d realised that I was no longer impaled on the horns of that dilemma, because the current situation didn’t benefit me very much any more. It had become clear that, whatever the reason, posts that I was perfectly suited for – like Professor Rhŷs’s research assistantship – weren’t going to be offered to me, so if I wanted to stay in academia, I would have to take the AEW’s offer of a job at Somerville and, like the AEW committee, resign myself to playing the long game. The question was, did I want to stay in academia?
I explained the business with the research job to Tarley, who was gratifyingly outraged.
‘I’m not surprised Mr Rice couldn’t find the right time to talk to you about it,’ he said. ‘He knows Rhŷs isn’t playing fair with you.’
‘Well, it’s all done and dusted now. It’s important that somebody does the job, and I’ve told Basil he should do it.’
Tarley’s eyes were soft. ‘You’re a staunch friend, Rhiannon Vaughan.’
I couldn’t reply because a lump had shoved itself down my throat, so I just leaned over, turned the sheet of paper over and tapped the last sketch. ‘Nearly finished.’
As I moved, my hand touched his and a jolt of something shook me.
Tarley had felt it too. His eyes were on me.
‘Read,’ I said.
The Nonconformist
Miss Nonconformist finds herself in an even less enviable position than the Autodidact. She often struggles with the inclination to abandon her sisters who quietly, diligently and with great determination promote the cause of women’s higher education, so that she can strike out with those few intrepid females in the so-called ‘feminist’ vanguard who advocate not only access to higher education but greater independence for women in all spheres, not excluding entry to parliament and the professions.
The Nonconformist’s instinct is to jump the Oxford ship and strike out into the world with her bold sisters, but to do so is to mutiny on the very vessel which has carried her to her current position. How can she act in a way which, through its outraging of public opinion, might cause those in a position of influence to decide that what she’s become is too high a price to ask society to pay for the advancement of, at most, a few hundred clever females each year?
That is the Nonconformist’s dilemma. Should she do great things and inform public opinion as to what women are capable of, and, in the process, alienate many potential allies, or work quietly behind the bastions of female education so that, in a generation, there may be an army of women who may do great things, an army which the public and those men who would call them ‘unnatural’ would not, any longer, be able to deny or denigrate? Should she, in short, think of herself or the sisters who will come after her?
Tarley turned his head to look at me. ‘A mutineer? I don’t think so, Non. If you want to continue the nautical analogy, I see you more as a pilot, moving from ship to ship, taking each one in the direction it needs to go. They may all end up in the same dock, but they take a different course.’
‘Angharad says I’m trying to have my cake and eat it,’ I said. My heart skipped a beat as I said Hara’s name. Until this moment, I’d never told a living soul that she and I spoke to each other.
‘Angharad?’
‘My dead sister.’ I’d told him that I’d had a twin sister who’d died when we were little, and he knew she’d been deaf. But until now he hadn’t known her name.
I hadn’t told him how Hara had died, and I wasn’t sure I ever would.
His eyes didn’t move from mine, his expression didn’t change. He just waited for me to explain.
‘When I was little – when she’d just died – I could see her. And I’d talk to her like we’d always done – with my hands.’
We hadn’t known that there was a language for deaf people. British Sign Language had never been heard of in our little corner of Cardiganshire and neither had the possibility of Hara attending a school especially for children like her. So, I explained to Tarley, we’d invented our own language. I dare say it was rudimentary compared to official sign language, but when you’re six there’s a limited number of things you want to say to each other.
‘After she died, I carried on talking to her.’
Tarley put his hand over mine, just for a second. ‘Thank you. For telling me.’
I felt the same jolt as before. ‘Yes, well,’ I mumbled, ‘don’t mention it to my mother. She saw me talking to Hara one day not long after we’d buried her, and she carted me off to the minister to be exorcised.’
Tarley blinked but didn’t say anything. He was probably worried that Welsh ministers regularly exorcised small children.
‘Oh, don’t worry. The minister had more sense. He said it was quite normal for people to see their loved ones for some time after they’d died.’ Ministers of religion are experts in death and dying if nothing else. ‘And, after that, I spoke to Hara in my head, where my mother couldn’t see.’
Tarley’d never met my mother. She’d caught the train in Llandysul and made her way to Oxford for Christmas, but Tarley’d been at home with his own mother.
‘Can you imagine Mam meeting Tarley?’ Hara asked. ‘She’d be embroidering sheets and making a christening gown before she’d even got home!’
She’d never spoken a truer word. Tarley was everything my mother could want in a husband for me.
I didn’t tell him, but there was one question Hara had never answered. I could ask ‘Where did you go that day on the beach?’ or ‘Did somebody take you?’ as often as I liked, but my sister had never responded.
Tarley’s eyes were on me. ‘And you’ve carried on speaking to each other ever since?’
I nodded without looking at him. I didn’t want to talk about it any more. I’d told him. That was enough.
Instead, I reached over and took the sheets of paper from his lap. I’d been reading and rereading, writing and rewriting those damned sketches for weeks, and I still wasn’t entirely satisfied with any of them. They weren’t the kind of thing I really wanted to write, but I had to produce something which would catch Morley’s eye.
But, after reading the Nonconformist sketch, something was tickling the back of my mind.
There was something about the notion of mutiny, and of those around you thinking that what you’d become was too high a price to pay for what you wanted…
Picking my way through the words I’d written to the thoughts that were trying to form in my head, all I could say when Tarley asked, ‘What is it?’ was ‘Silas Cantwell’.
‘What about him?’
I carried on thinking as I spoke. ‘What if,’ I said slowly, ‘he thought that the price he was paying for his place at Balliol was too high?’
Chapter 58
Basil
Walking back to college after a rather unsatisfactory meeting with Jowett and the Vice Chancellor, I was greeted at the main gates by Non and Askew. ‘We need to speak to you, urgently,’ Non said.
I was probably less enthusiastic in my response than I might have been. Not only had Evans and Jowett found fault with my failure to use my perceived influence with the Salvation Army to prevent the skirmish at the Promenade, but they had absolutely refused to countenance cancelling the Procession of Boats which was due to take place later that day. I had tried my best to convince them that public safety was in jeopardy, but neither had been persuaded that cancelling such a popular event was the right course.
I was feeling bruised, frustrated and in need of coffee.
‘How is Langridge?’ I remembered to ask as I guided Non and Askew across First Quad to my rooms.
‘Improving rapidly under Lily’s ministrations,’ Non said. ‘I don’t think the injury to his head is as bad as the doctor feared. He’s still very bruised and sore, but he’s awake and eating, so we’ll rear him, as my mother would say.’
I was very glad to hear it. Langridge’s continued membership of the Salvation Army was, to some extent, my doing, and I couldn’t help feeling responsible for what had happened to him. The knowledge that he had sustained no lasting damage was a great relief.
‘You’ll be pleased to know, Askew,’ I said, as we made our way up my staircase, ‘that the Procession of Boats will take place as scheduled. The Vice Chancellor feels that a significant showing of police officers will mitigate any risk to the public.’
Ostensibly a celebratory procession of all the racing eights past the Head of the River – the title given to the boat that had topped the first division in this year’s races – the Procession of Boats had become one of the major events of Commemoration Week. College barges, normally used only as changing rooms for crews, sank low in the water beneath the weight of guests who flocked to watch the college crews give the traditional salute to the winning boat.
‘To be honest,’ Non said, looking around curiously as she crossed the threshold of my rooms for the first time, ‘I’m as worried about the rowers as the spectators. It would be easy to tip a whole crew into the river while they’re standing up in the boat, giving their salute.’
Traditionally, all the rowers in each crew – bar stroke and bow, who remained seated to balance the boat – rose to their feet when they came abreast of the Head of the River, their oars held vertically aloft, and gave three cheers as they hoisted their blades in the air. And Non was right: eight-oars were notoriously unstable. Tipping rowers into the Thames would be child’s play.
‘Let’s hope that the constables patrolling the towpath and the bank behind the barges will be enough,’ I said, stirring the fire before I put the kettle to boil.
I took down my coffee tin. ‘Now, what was so vital that you had to come tearing down from Shene Road?’
‘Something occurred to me when Tarley and I were rereading my article for the Pall Mall Gazette,’ Non said. ‘From what Silas Cantwell told you, we know that he hasn’t been the most popular person in St Thomas’s – not with him getting more education than the other boys, then going to work at Balliol.’
‘True.’
‘Well, what if he was sick and tired of being looked down on as a traitor?’ Non asked. ‘What if he joined the Skeleton Army as a way of proving that he might be educated but he was still a Tomrag – still loyal to his roots?’
‘Joined the Skeleton Army?’ I was momentarily baffled.
‘How long has he been a supposed member of the Salvation Army?’ she asked.
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘So, it’s entirely possible that he hasn’t been a member since the beginning? That he started going to meetings at the barracks with the Skeletons to make trouble?’
‘Yes. As it happens, I know for a fact that that’s exactly what he did.’ I told them that Cantwell had admitted that he’d first gone to the barracks to disrupt proceedings.
‘Then, apparently,’ Non said, ‘he saw the light and joined the ranks of the righteous.’ She was watching my reaction intently. ‘But what if he didn’t? What if he joined the Salvationists as a spy?’
‘And then,’ Askew leaped in, ‘he realised that he could do more than spy. He could sabotage.’
‘I think he’s been an agent provocateur all along,’ Non pronounced triumphantly.
‘An agent provocateur?’ I was vaguely aware that I’d come across the phrase in connection with actions by the French police to disrupt revolutionary cells, but I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.
‘Somebody who infiltrates an organisation and then persuades its members to do things that will ruin its reputation,’ Non summarised.
I poured coffee beans into the grinder. If I was going to withstand Non in full hypothetical flow, coffee was an urgent priority. ‘And your evidence?’ I asked.
‘I should’ve known the first time I saw him, outside Vincent’s Club,’ Non said. ‘I’d read enough to know that the Salvation Army make a rule of keeping to the poorer areas and appeal to the people who are ignored by the church.’
‘Except that, if we take Cantwell’s own words at face value,’ I countered, ‘the Army preaches to its own, and his own are undergraduates.’
But Non ignored me, determined to find fault with herself for not jumping to her rather extreme conclusion sooner.
‘Then there was the fact that he wrote the note he left on Ernie Ayott’s body on a Skeleton Army recruiting flyer,’ she went on. ‘Handy that he just happened to have picked it up that very evening, wasn’t it? Far more likely that he had some in his pocket because he’d been distributing them. And what about him being on the tram with Matty Beasley that time?’
I could see that Cantwell’s being seen with Mr Beasley looked suspicious; but only because Non didn’t know that the two young men had been childhood friends.
‘But the clincher,’ Non battered on, before I could enlighten her, ‘was the fact that both the Salvationists and the Skeleton Army arrived on the Broad Walk by water. How likely was that to happen unless the same person had had a hand in both plans?’
Askew now took up the theme. ‘We know Cantwell goes to meetings and wears a jersey,’ he said, ‘but has he sworn the oath or whatever it is they do to be properly committed?’
‘Salvationists sign a document that commits them to a certain way of life,’ I said.
‘Which includes obeying orders,’ Non said. ‘And when has Silas Cantwell ever done that?’
She was right. Lizzie Lyall had more or less admitted that she didn’t have control over what Cantwell did.
‘But isn’t that just proof of his zeal?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps he hasn’t signed up for another reason.’
Non drew breath to say something but Askew cut in. ‘The thing is, Mr Rice, despite what Cantwell says, the only effect his picketing’s had is to turn influential people against the Salvation Army. Insulting the Vincent’s Club men in the street, singing temperance hymns and distributing ribbons outside their ball. And the Salvationists turning up yesterday on the Broad Walk was never about temperance. It was purely about orchestrating a confrontation with the Skeletons.’
‘His so-called campaign to preach temperance to undergraduates and people of influence,’ Non continued their joint onslaught, ‘is just an excuse to infuriate the University authorities and persuade them to support restrictions on Salvation Army activities. Or even support throwing the Army out of Oxford altogether.’
‘Which is a lot easier now they don’t have a barracks,’ Askew contributed.
I stared at him. ‘Are you suggesting that Cantwell is an arsonist as well as an agent provocateur?’
‘The descending dove was his idea,’ Non pointed out. ‘He could easily have waited somewhere outside once the circus moved into the hall, then slipped in while everybody was distracted.’
‘And Miss Langridge?’ I asked incredulously. Surely she wasn’t suggesting that Cantwell was a murderer?
‘The coroner and the police both thought that the arsonist had been surprised by Thea, that they hadn’t realised she was there.’
‘Oh, so you’ve decided that Miss Langridge’s death was nothing to do with Ernie Ayott’s confession after all? That Cantwell just killed her on the spur of the moment because she’d seen him setting fire to the barracks?’ I stared at the pair of them. This was a frankly ridiculous extrapolation from the known facts. ‘You’ve met Cantwell,’ I protested. ‘You’ve sat and eaten with him, surely you don’t think he’s got it in him to kill?’
Non’s face was pensive as she stared at me. ‘I think, when we’re scared, we all have it in us to kill in self-defence,’ she said.
‘But Miss Langridge would have been no threat to Cantwell.’
‘Not physically, no. But if she’d exposed him as an arsonist, that would have been the end of him at Balliol. No more studying. No becoming a doctor. Everything he’d worked for his whole life would’ve been gone.’
That much was true. But somehow, I still couldn’t see Cantwell as a killer. And there was another objection to their thesis. ‘How do you explain Cantwell’s leaving the note on Ernie Ayott’s body pointing towards the Skeletons?’
But Non had thought of this, too. ‘I don’t think he loves the Skeletons any more than he does the Salvation Army. If Tarley and I are right, he only joined the Skeletons to prove he was still loyal to St Thomas’s. In which case, it would suit him if the city council came down hard on both organisations.’
The kettle was boiling furiously by now and I rose to take it off the fire. My mind was reeling at this slew of conjecture and my face obviously betrayed the fact because Non spoke again.
‘At the Promenade on the Broad Walk,’ she said, ‘I saw Silas Cantwell and Arthur Langridge talking just before Arthur ran up and threw his lantern at the Skeletons’ flag. I’m willing to bet that Silas planted the idea in his mind—’
‘Oh, steady on—’ I recalled how the Skeletons had beaten Langridge to the ground. Their retaliation had been inevitable, and I couldn’t believe that Cantwell would have incited such a reckless act in full knowledge of the consequences.
‘At the very least,’ Non interrupted, ‘he didn’t stop Arthur, did he? And that’s what a friend, especially one who really believed in the Salvation Army’s gospel, would have done, isn’t it?’
I took refuge in making coffee.
‘As it happens,’ I said, trying to find some foothold by which to climb out of this morass of uncomfortable conjecture, ‘when you accosted me outside college, I was on my way to see Cantwell. I promised Jowett and the Vice Chancellor that I’d use whatever influence I had with the Salvation Army to prevent any interference in the Procession of Boats.’
