The Regency Detective (12 page)

Swann stopped and turned.

‘Be careful of Wicks,’ said the magistrate. ‘I have heard it said he carries with him a cutlass.’

Swann acknowledged the warning and then continued on down Avon Street, the stark contrast between the grandeur of the upper town he had only recently witnessed and the overcrowded, neglected area he had now entered, becoming only too apparent once more.

After Swann had left for Fitzpatrick’s office, a letter had arrived at the house in Great Pulteney Street. It was addressed to Mary and after Emily had brought it to her, Mary had opened it, set the envelope down on the table, sat down and begun to read the letter.

Thursday
20
th October, 1803

My dearest niece

I hope this letter finds you in good spirits after the melancholy of yesterday – perhaps the ball lifted your spirits somewhat.

I am not known for my ability to offer explanations for my actions so please accept this as a once in a lifetime revelation. I have found in life that if one wants to make the most of it and have people respect you, one has to speak their mind and let their actions follow their words in the same way. This is why my manner is forthright and straight to the point. Life is too short to tittle-tattle away endless hours. I may have been a little forward yesterday but please believe me that my heart was in the right place and I only have your wellbeing in the foremost of my mind.

In regard to my invitation for this evening, which I do most sincerely hope you will be present at, I will send a carriage for you at six o’clock. There will be other passengers being picked up, so if you choose not to come then merely send the coachman on his way. I would be disappointed if you did not attend but would adhere to your wishes. However, all I would say is that I believe the evening, and especially the guest speaker, you would find to be very enlightening and I know that it would change your way of thinking in regard to certain aspects of what constitutes being a member of the female persuasion. With this in mind I have enclosed a relevant pamphlet. It is taken from a longer work, but I believe that it best represents my own thoughts on certain aspects of education and so therefore at some time in the past, I had the excerpt printed as a pamphlet. I suggest that if you can read it before tonight, then both the guest speaker’s talk and any conversations arising from it may, in the words of the pamphlet itself, allow the mind to ‘be cultivated and its real powers found out.’

As I remarked at the funeral yesterday and will state once again in this correspondence, you have been educated like a man but you are now going to be educated as a woman. This is your first lesson, for want of a better analogy.

Yours

Aunt Harriet

Mary had already made up her mind, on the journey home from the funeral, that she would attend. She took the pamphlet out of the envelope and began to read.

A Theory on the Education of Women

Only within the ranks of the uneducated and the general male population will you find the widely held belief that education is not important to a woman’s self-development. Yet, not only is it essential for the full developmental potential of each individual female, it is also vital to the wellbeing of the entire community to which she belongs; education providing as it does, the link between society as a whole and each separate individual.

The way in which this male-dominated nation regards this specific connection, however, highlights the core problem inherent in our society today. The focus on the more factual-based curriculum in our educational system therefore places the emphasis on more measurable assessment elements, in order to ensure successful outcomes rather than highlighting the actual process of learning. This then leads on to the asking of the question as to whether we are not just failing the entire female population through this emphasis, but society itself, through the positive contribution a properly education woman could bring to its development.

This indeed does seem to be the case unfortunately, because instead of creating a social solidarity, in which there is a sense of belonging by all and a feeling that the collective membership of that society is more important than any individual member, the ordinary female sees the education process as no more than turning their gender into ‘more suitable companions for their male counterparts.’

Since the time of Plato, his only fault being in that he was born a man, the great philosophers and thinkers of successive societies have turned their attention to education and the three key questions which always need to be addressed: What is education for?; By what process do we learn?; and what should determine the content of education?

For Plato, most specifically in The Republic, he reached the conclusion that education does not appear to be an end in itself, but a tool of social control, which produces the type of people the State requires. Yet herein is the paradox, which successive male governments, despite their schooling in the classics, seem to have constantly missed, and that is Plato wants each ruler of this State to be the type of philosopher who is capable of seeing beyond the passing shadows of sense experience to reality itself. What this means, and for women especially, is that it is not enough for the individual to only learn and accept the values of the society undertaking the teaching, but paradoxically to be able to question and change them at the same time. This, I believe, is achieved through learning the actual process of learning, rather than the subjects which are learned.

In the girls’ school that I run in Bath and the teaching that is undertaken there, the students are not working towards a final examination or certification as their sole objective for going through my educational system. What they are learning, or at least what we endeavour to teach, is that it is the process of learning which is more important than the outcome. This way of teaching therefore gives the students the opportunity to think on their own merit and not to become the mere organs of repetitious nonsense. What I hope is gained from my school is the craft of learning, which leads to the individual’s expression of that skill throughout the rest of their lives. Through this, they can become manifestations of Plato’s Philosopher-King idea, or at least the female representation of it. The more a student can learn this craft and be able to express it, the more authentic they will feel as a woman and subsequently, the stronger any communication will become between members of their own gender or, and this is the real crux of the matter, any conversation they may participate in with men.

One example of this, I believe, is the act of reading of ‘worthwhile’ books. It has been acknowledged as truth universal by many, including Wollstonecraft, that full employment should always be given to the human mind and that it should be employed from early an age as possible. The most fundamental way in which this can be cultivated is through reading books and periodicals that contain ideas or arguments that help to expand the mind and thoughts of the reader. Through this, the idea of one’s own opinion emerging from their reading, rather than the mere form of repetition, soon becomes apparent. For I believe that after a short interaction, it can easily be ascertained as to whether the person one is conversing with has an independent mind or else they are merely the organ of regurgitating the words of others whose works they have only memorised and not instilled or interjected any of their own consideration.

When one truly has an independent mind, therefore, and this can be cultivated largely through reading, as well as conversing with like-minded compatriots, it becomes a resource in itself and the individual is no longer reliant on other’s thoughts, beliefs or opinions. When this situation is achieved, then the mind will be thus cultivated and its real powers found out.

It has been 2,300 years since Plato spelled out his ideas on the ideal educational state, but hopefully one day this male government will fulfil his idealism and create an educational system that attends to the actual needs of all its learners, both male and female; and so turning out authentic members of society who not only value what they have learnt but are able to apply it in order to make the society in which they find themselves better.

Before Queen Anne visited at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Bath was firmly entrenched within its medieval walls. There were four gates, one for each of the compass points – north, south, east and west – and these were the only ways in and out of the enclosed city. After Anne’s patronage, however, the self-contained conurbation rapidly expanded outwards in all directions: to the east, parades were swiftly built, to be followed later by Great Pulteney Street and the pleasure gardens at Sydney Vauxhall; to the west, the magnificent Squares, Beauford and Queen being the most prominent; and to the north, the crowning architectural triumphs of the King’s Circus and the various crescents.

To the south of the city walls, towards the river, was a different matter entirely though. Despite being one of the main routes in and out of Bath, by way of Horse Street and the Old Bridge which spanned the River Avon, both significant architectural developments in their own right, the majority of the southern region had not been built upon. Historically and practically, there was a very good reason for this: the whole area was situated on a flood plain.

Until the onslaught of the property development boom which took hold during the eighteenth century, livestock had grazed on much of the area, with meadows such as Ambury Mead, King’s Mead, and the Ham providing an abundant and plentiful supply of flora. These willow-fringed pastures were idyllic in summer, but after the heavy rains of autumn and the melting snows from the surrounding hills in spring, each year saw this terrain flood and disappear under fast-flowing water as the Avon broke its banks, turning them at a stroke into quagmires and rendering it wholly unsuitable land upon which to build any type of residential dwellings.

It had been suggested, during one of the initial outpourings of building work which sprung up elsewhere in the city, that the whole area south of the city walls might be cultivated into a pastoral area, along the lines of Oxford’s Christchurch Meadow. This was quickly dismissed, however, within the climate of unbridled greed and expansion that held the city in its tight grip throughout the entire century and it was not long before elegant and fashionable lodging houses were being designed and built with only the flimsiest attempt at flood prevention.

Once the inevitable and regular flooding happened, of course, the fashionable lodging houses swiftly became unacceptable as dwelling-places to the upper and middle class visitors they were intended to attract and as the buildings became almost unliveable to all but the poorest of occupants, the whole area soon became run-down. It was not long before the district became known after the largest street within it, which itself had been named after the river it led down towards. And so it was that the Avon Street district, locally known by many of its inhabitants simply as ‘the hate’, became synonymous with the most poverty-stricken and desperate section of the population that resided in this most famous of cities.

No sooner had Swann left Fitzpatrick, after their walk around the upper town, and begun walking down Avon Street, on his way to find Wick’s headquarters, than he saw Tyler in the distance. The pickpocket was sauntering down the road, stopping briefly at various stalls to converse with the owners. Swann decided to follow Tyler, to gain an insight as to how he spent his days and to try and gauge his standing in the community. In London, Swann had compiled a huge dossier on known criminals, their features, characteristics and habits, and instinct took over as he followed the pickpocket into the notorious Avon Street district proper; an area, as he now witnessed, where even though it was still only late morning, prostitutes openly solicited for trade and collapsed drunks, both male and female, already littered the streets. Swann passed the entrance to a yard; from inside the unmistakable sound of copulation reached his ears.

A little further on and Tyler turned down a side alleyway. As Swann crossed to follow, another man, his head down, hurried by in the opposite direction. As their paths crossed, Swann instantly stopped in his tracks, as if physically struck. His bewildered expression showed he was attempting to assimilate something; something, in fact, as he would later realise, he was experiencing now but that belonged to the past, a feeling from another time, another place, another life. After only the briefest of moments, however, Swann turned in the direction the man had been going, but there was no one there. Swann stared transfixed at the empty space where he imagined the man had walked only moments before. He retraced his steps back up to the corner of that particular street and looked in both directions, but the man was nowhere to be seen. Swann turned back and continued on the way he had been going, although Tyler was now out of sight and had also vanished.

Swann carried on his way down the street, taking each step as if in a daze, with his mind reeling, trying to locate in his memory where he had met the person before. It was no good, he had to recover himself and a little further down he sat on the small wall to give some time to think what exactly this was all about. Somewhere deep inside, however, he already knew, but with the shock of the actuality of it being in his presence, it took a little longer for the recognition to ascend the subconscious and make itself known in consciousness. The man who had just crossed Swann’s path had been the accomplice of Malone on the night Swann’s father had been murdered. Although only seeing him for the briefest of moments, Swann had ‘seen’ the scar with his peripheral vision, the mark of the wound his father had inflicted with the poker.

Swann took a few more moments to recollect the experience fully in his mind. He was now the twelve year old boy, as he replayed the scene where he had left the sanctuary of the kitchen and peered around the door into the hallway. There was his father, struggling with an intruder. Before they fell into the front room, however, Swann was rudely brought back to the present by a tug on his sleeve.