The Nightingale Affair, page 25
Cox blanched. “No, that was Stanhope.”
“For a certainty? Remember, you and Stanhope both were with me when I was summoned to view the body.”
“Stanhope.”
“And you neglected to tell me this? On the night?”
But Cox had nothing further to say, it seemed.
“In the meantime,” said Field, “d’you happen to know where your old chum Stanhope is?”
He shook his head.
Field advanced on Cox until they were nearly toe to toe. “Detective Inspector Llewellyn will be calling on you in short order, eager to hear your memories of bygone days and to learn about your current activities, Nigel.”
Cox turned to Disraeli. “This is the sort of person your Reform Act would empower with the vote. Welcome to the end of the world, Disraeli!”
Meanwhile, having astonished the world by appearing in the House of Lords in company with another human being, the Duke did the same at Boodles, the exclusive gentlemen’s club. Once he and Jack Hall were seated at the Duke’s usual corner table, Seabury removed his hat and veil, and an attendant took and set them on a small stand placed there hurriedly for the purpose. The attendant quickly withdrew.
“So, what’ll it be, Jack?” said Seabury in his hoarse whisper. “D’you fancy a slice of roast fowl?”
“I’d rather the beef, sir,” said Jack Hall, glancing about in wonder.
Seabury’s gaunt, cadaverous face registered surprise. “Jack, I must ask you not to speak to me here, in case it might encourage others to do the same.”
A waiter appeared, looking silently at the paneling above Seabury’s head.
“Herbie,” said the Duke, quietly, “I’ll have the usual and a full bottle of the claret this time, in honor of my guest. He says he wants the roast.” Seabury shrugged, as though to say there was no accounting for tastes.
Herbie bowed in the general direction of the Duke and left them.
“Herbie is wonderful,” said Seabury. “I like a man you can count on.”
But Jack’s eyes were on a table across the room from theirs, where William Hythe-Cooper sat reading The Times. Jack froze, but moments later Hythe-Cooper folded his paper and left.
“Yes, my lord,” said Jack. “I, too, like a man you can count on.”
50
It was early morning, and Tom Ginty paused at the entrance to the stables at Great Scotland Yard, breathing deeply of the rich odor of horses. He heard the chatter of his mates as they mucked out the stalls, and the gentle whinny of their horses, having their morning feed. Tom found his row and walked down it toward Sallie’s stall. As he did so, and as his mates noticed him, their voices fell silent, one at a time. They carried on feeding and grooming their mounts, but no one spoke to him, no one looked at him. Not one.
Sallie’s stall was empty. Tom felt his world tilt.
“Where is she?” he said to the young man working in the next enclosure. He seemed not to hear. “Mick, where has Sallie got to?”
There was no answer. Tom turned about. There was Sergeant Butts walking toward him.
“Might be you have friends in high places, Ginty,” said Butts, “but you got no friends here.”
“Where’s my horse?”
“Your horse? You never had no horse and never will. Your friends in high places can force you back onto the Metropolitan, maybe, but not in the Mounted, oh, no.”
“Where is she?” said Tom.
Butts drew back a fist and knocked him flat. The room spun for a long moment. Tom put a hand to staunch the blood from his nose and lips and glared up at the man.
“Sauce, from the likes of you?” said Butts.
Tom struggled to his feet. “Where is she?”
“Just watch him, boys,” said Butts to the stunned recruits. “Watch him run cryin’ to his friends, watch him run to that Inspector Bucket, who only took him in outta pity for the tooth-bit creature.”
Tom flinched. He feared pity more than almost anything.
“Where is she?”
“Go find Sergeant Cooper. He says he’s got a very special beat for you to walk. For the select few, he says. Me? After disobeying a direct order, I only wish I’d ’a’ shot you dead on the spot.”
Tom stared at Butts for a long moment, then turned and walked toward the door, wiping the blood coming from his nose. One young recruit, fervently grooming his horse, said in a low voice as he passed, “Two of me brothers was in the crowd we didn’t shoot at that day, Tom. Gotta thank you for it, but we’ll be sacked if we have any truck with you.”
Tom put his head under a pump in the yard and cleaned his face. He found Sergeant Cooper, from whom he received the uniform and helmet of a constable, a map, and a whistle. No one would be assigned to partner him, he would be on his own, patrolling the banks of the Thames, all dug up now for the new sewer works going in, from the City to Chelsea and back again. All day, every day. Sergeant Cooper grinned. Not good-naturedly.
Tom dressed himself in the costume of a constable, drab by comparison to his former glory. He found one consolation, however: the helmet hid more of his tooth-bit ear. Tom took a deep breath and started walking.
51
Belinda Field was aggrieved.
When Inspector Field returned home, he found John Stuart Mill’s calling card and the note he’d left. At first he’d seemed grimly satisfied. To Jane, he said, “It’s political up one side and deviant down the other, just like I suggested to Mr. Disraeli. It’s not only women he’s going after but prominent males as well. Up till now, we’ve had no male corpses, but who knows if there mightn’t be one out there somewhere? He may have victims, male or female, we’ve yet to discover.”
Belinda spoke up. “This was just what was so upsetting to Mr. Mill. He was very worried about his stepdaughter.”
Field looked at her for a moment. “How do you know how Mr. Mill was?”
“He told me, didn’t he.”
Field and his wife looked at each other.
“Through the door, Belinda?” said Jane. “When he dropped off the note for Mr. Field?”
“Well, I didn’t like to leave him standing on the step!”
“Good God!” said Field. “You had the man in?”
“He was a perfect gentleman,” said Belinda.
“Of course he was, but what if he hadn’t been, Belinda!” Field was growing red in the face. “We’ve got a bloody maniac going about town murdering women, do you not understand that? Oh, do step in, Mr. I-Never-Met-You-Before! Have a seat!”
“I am seventeen years of age, but you treat me like a child!”
“Because you act like one!”
“All right,” said Jane, “that’s enough, both of you.”
Inwardly Belinda trembled. Now she never could tell her parents about the other man she’d invited in, never mind he was an old friend of theirs from their time in the Crimean War. He was just passing by and saw his friend Mr. Mill leave. The man didn’t seem to want anything, apart from knowing how everyone was and what they were doing, Mother and Mr. Field and Tom. No, he’d said, you needn’t tell them I was here. When I call again, I want it to be a surprise!
Belinda felt a wriggle of doubt in her belly. She turned and climbed the stairs.
“Now Charles . . .” said Jane in a warning tone.
But Field shouted after his daughter. “I just want you safe!”
Later that night, Jane Field knocked at Belinda’s door, opened it, and found the bedroom empty. Jane walked back to Tom’s room and rapped. When he opened the door, Jane said, “Missed you at supper, Tom.”
“We drilled until late.”
“I thought as much. Have you seen Belinda?”
“No.” Tom stood, suddenly alarmed. “Is something wrong?”
“Not at all, she’s about somewhere, I imagine.” She was about to go when she turned back. “Is that lip swollen?”
“Walked into a post, I did.”
“Everything all right, Tom?”
He looked at the woman who had taken him in and treated him like her own son. Out of pity, was it? “Right as rain, Mrs. Field, thank you. Let me know if you need help finding her.”
Jane hurried down the stairs and finally found Belinda sitting alone in the unlit back parlor, her chair beside the window.
“He’s right,” said Belinda.
“Who’s right?”
“About me being a child.”
Jane made her way across the dark room, found a chair near Belinda, and sat.
“I know he already regrets his words,” said Jane.
“Because he told the truth? He shouldn’t regret telling the truth. Funny it took so long for me to see it, come to that. I make mistakes all the time, one after another, I can’t seem to help myself.” The young woman looked up at her mother. “You told me I could be a Nightingale nurse, like you, but you don’t really believe it, do you?”
“Of course I do.”
The young woman looked out the darkened window again. “You have to say such things, you’re my mother. Isn’t that the same as men telling women ‘all will be well’ when really it won’t be? Isn’t that a way of keeping me quiet?”
Jane was silent.
“So I’m to stay here at home with the door shut and never admit anyone and never leave.”
“At any other time, Belinda, what you did today, inviting Mr. Mill into this house and treating him with courtesy and grace? Why, that wouldn’t be considered a mistake, it would have been the proper thing to do. It’s just that these are not normal times. It’s a gift you have, to be interested in people and wanting to talk with ’em. Not everyone’s got that, you know.”
Belinda continued to stare at the opaque window.
“A long time ago, Belinda, after I went out with Miss Nightingale to Scutari and then came back here to London, I was lost. All what I’d seen out there of the war never left my eyes, even when I slept. And that evil man out there, the one who spoke in my ear, who tried to stop my breath, he never left my thoughts. ‘So, no—that’s it,’ I said, ‘I’m finished, I’m not a nurse no more, I’m nothing.’ Here I had this very good man proposing marriage to me, Mr. Charles Field . . .” Jane smiled and shook her head. “Again and again, night and day, the fool! But I knew I couldn’t accept him, because I wasn’t any good anymore, as a nurse, as a woman, as anything.”
Belinda was staring now at her adoptive mother.
“I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I walked the streets. I needed to find a position, and quick, to earn my bread, but I couldn’t make out what that would be, so I just walked and walked and felt more like a ghost than a real person. And then I saw another ghost, comin’ toward me along the street. Haunted look on his face, a lost look. ‘Mr. Kilvert?’ I said. ‘Is that you?’ Josiah Kilvert was out there in the Crimean, serving with us at the Scutari Hospital, and then he’d gone back to Wales.
“Well, the two of us had a cup of tea, but he didn’t look at all well. ‘How’s your girl back in Kidwelly?’ I said, like an idiot. And he said, ‘She’s somebody else’s girl now, and I’m tryin’ to work up nerve to ask Inspector Field for a position.’ And then Belinda, I busted out cryin’, and said, ‘I think I’m tryin’ to ask Mr. Field for a position, too.’ And believe it or not, the two of us went together to Scotland Yard and found Mr. Field, and—well, I let Mr. Kilvert go first.”
Belinda hazarded a tentative smile. “But you didn’t nurse no more?”
“Oh, yes, when we were first married, I nursed at St. Bart’s and then St. Thomas. And now, you see, I’m nursing Miss Nightingale. You’ll make a fine, one, Belinda, just you wait.”
A long moment passed. Then Belinda said, “I had my bad man, too. I still see him when I dream. I don’t know how I’ll ever get away from him.”
“But you are away from him, Belinda. Well away. The man is dead.”
“You’re not just telling me ‘all will be well’?”
Jane sighed. Finally, she said, “A very wise, very kind woman once saw the fear in my eyes, and she gave me this, to scare away the bad people, the bad thoughts.”
Jane took a string from around her neck, at the end of which hung Mother Seacole’s totem.
“I’ve seen it before,” said Belinda, “and wondered how you could keep such a big thing round your neck.”
“You get used to him. Now I want him to be yours.”
She passed the carved wooden peg to her daughter, who looked at the totem, with his row of tiny sharp bright white teeth, and up again at her mother with a laugh.
“Well,” she said, “he’s a little scary himself!”
Jane laughed, too. “And a good thing he is, my dear! A good thing!”
The two women embraced. For a moment Belinda considered telling Jane about the other man she’d let in the house that day but then decided against it. It was too shaming, and she’d just begun to feel better.
“Thank you, Mum.”
52
Like all great cities, London began small: a clearing in the dense forest bordering a great snaking river. Lesser rivers and streams flowed among the trees into the big one, all teeming with fish and sparkling clean water. Tribes came and went, until finally invaders from the south claimed the clearing and soon started to pave it over. The Romans called the riverside village Londinium. There they thrived, building shrines to their gods and expanding their rule far to the north. Finally, nearly four hundred years later, they were forced to abandon their holdings in the island by urgent circumstances closer to home.
Centuries passed, and still the waters sparkled and the fish leapt.
But as Londinium became London, the smaller rivers were shunted underground to make way for the city above. Cesspits were dug alongside them. The human population grew. Finally, by the mid-1800s, Londoners’ waste, channeled directly into the Thames, had killed all the fish and made the river stink so horribly that members of Parliament had been moved to action. Joseph Bazalgette was appointed director of perhaps the largest civil engineering project since the Roman era. He came up with an audacious design and marshaled an army of workers to execute it. Together they would create vast embankments on each side of the river, through which would run his new sewer pipes. Now, in 1867, he was more than halfway through his massive project.
Today, one of his younger engineers had asked for an audience.
“You’ve encountered a problem, Ahmed?” said Bazalgette.
“Well, sir, I don’t know that it’s a problem, but it may become one. Right now, sir, it’s more of a strangeness.”
“Yes?”
Ahmed ran a hand through his hair. “My men feel we’re not alone down there, sir,” he said. “I feel we’re not alone.”
Bazalgette raised his eyebrows. “There are a great many of us working beneath the streets of London just now. Hundreds. You and your workers certainly are not alone.”
The two men, Bazalgette nearly fifty years old, Ahmed Selim, only twenty-six, stood together above a table on which was spread a diagram: a map of the sewer pipes of medieval London. The ancient pipes led toward the river, along with the buried rivers that ran beneath the city, all of them heading to the huge tube designed by Bazalgette to intercept these old lines and redirect what they carried, the fresh water and the sewage. No one ever had constructed a sewer pipe this large. Its creator claimed it would channel all the city’s waste downstream, even when rainfall was sparse, to pumping and treatment stations from which it would be released into the lower Thames estuary. When rain was plentiful, it would scour the tubes with ferocious speed. Bazalgette had calculated the size pipe needed for the entire population of London and then doubled it, to cries of extravagance from the politicians.
“I think of you as one of my more promising young men, sir,” said Bazalgette. “I’m trying to remember where you schooled. You’ve obviously had fine training.”
Ahmed looked from his boss to his boots. “Whatever I might know I learned in the kitchen, sir.”
“What do you mean, son?”
He looked up. “My school was the Barrack Hospital kitchen out at Scutari, sir, and I was taught by Mr. Alexis Soyer and Mr. T. G. Taylor. They always said, if you can make your way round a kitchen, you can make your way round most anything.”
Bazalgette looked at Ahmed in astonishment. “This was the famous French chef, Alexis Soyer?”
“And Mr. Taylor, sir,” said the young man. “After the war I made my way to London with help from Miss Nightingale.”
“Extraordinary. And this was the sum of your engineering training?”
The young man shrugged. “Running a big kitchen is a complicated affair. It’s all a kind of engineering.” He turned back to the map and put a finger on it. “Still, something’s not right, right about here. When we’re down there laying pipe or shoring up the old bricks, well sir, there are voices. My men hear ’em, and I hear ’em. It’s like, when our shifts end at the close of day, someone else’s begins. If there’s somebody down there digging who shouldn’t be, well, it poses a danger, don’t it? To the workers, to all of us. May I have your permission to go down in the night, sir? To listen and look?”
“Of course not, it’s not safe, you know that. What if it should rain? Even if you took another with you, it’s dangerous enough down there when the city above is in daylight. At night the perils only increase.” Bazalgette regarded the earnest young man. “Remember, Ahmed, the earth itself makes sounds beneath ground. It’s a mysterious globe we tread upon. I hope you won’t be too disappointed to realize it’s just the cries and lamentations of a fatigued world you hear.”
“Disappointed? No, sir, I’d be relieved if it’s only a downhearted globe talking to me and not two other blokes.”
53
Thanks to Detective Inspector Llewellyn, the morning papers all ran the same message: a person calling himself John Stanhope was being sought to assist the police with their inquiries regarding the roseate murders. Field read them with satisfaction as he ate an early breakfast. When Tom clattered down the stairs and headed for the street door, Field stood and shouted, “How’s it all going at the stables, Tom?”
