The Shifting Fog (16 page)

Mr Frederick Hartford, who will be giving an important speech
in the Parliament tomorrow on the aerial defence of Britain, gave
me today some of his views on the general question at Ipswich,
where his motor-car factory is located.
Mr Hartford, brother of Major James Hartford V.C. and son
of Lord Herbert Hartford of Ashbury, thinks that Zeppelin attacks
are to be warded off by producing a new light and fast type of
one-seater aeroplane, of the kind proposed earlier this month by
Mr Louis Blériot in the
Petit Journal
.
Mr Hartford said he does not believe in building Zeppelins
which, he says, are awkward and vulnerable, and, on this latter
account, are capable of operating only at night. If the Parliament is
amenable, Mr Hartford plans temporarily to suspend his manfacture
of motor-cars in favour of the light-weight aeroplanes.
Also addressing the Parliament tomorrow is businessman Mr
Simion Luxton, who is similarly interested in the question of
aerial defence. In the past year Mr Luxton has purchased two
of Britain’s smaller motor-car manufacturers and most recently
acquired an aeroplane factory near Cambridge. Mr Luxton has
already commenced the manufacture of aeroplanes designed for
warfare.

Mr Hartford and Mr Luxton represent the old and new faces
of Britain. While the Ashbury line can be traced as far back
as the court of King Henry VII, Mr Luxton is the grandson of a
Yorkshire miner, who started his own manufacturing business and
has since had much success. He is married to Mrs Estella Luxton,
American heiress to the Stevenson’s pharmaceutical fortune.
 

Until We Meet Again

That night, high in the attic, Myra and I curled up close in a desperate bid to stave off the icy air. The winter sun had long since set, and outside the angry wind shook the rooftop finials and crept, keening, through cracks in the wall.

‘They say it’s going to snow before year end,’ Myra whispered, pulling the blanket up to meet her chin. ‘And I’d have to say as I believe them.’

‘The wind sounds like a baby crying,’ I said.

‘No it doesn’t,’ Myra said. ‘It sounds like many things but never that.’

And it was that night she told me the story of the Major and Jemima’s children. The two little boys whose blood refused to clot, who had gone to their graves, one after the other, and now lay side by side in the cold hard ground of the Riverton graveyard. The first, Timmy, had fallen from his horse, out riding with the Major on the Riverton estate.

He’d lasted four days and nights, Myra said, before the crying finally stopped and the tiny soul found some rest. He was white as a sheet when he went, all the blood having raced to his swollen shoulder, eager for escape. I thought of the nursery book with its pretty spine, inscribed to Timothy Hartford. 

‘
His
cries were hard enough to listen to,’ Myra said, shifting her foot so that a pocket of cold air escaped. ‘But they were nothing next to hers.’

‘Whose?’ I whispered back.

‘His mother’s. Jemima’s. Started when they carried the little one away and didn’t stop for a week. If you’d only heard the sound. Grief to make your hair turn grey. Wouldn’t eat, nor drink neither; faded away so as she was almost as pale as he, rest his soul.’

I shivered; tried to accord this picture with the plain, plump woman who seemed far too ordinary to suffer so spectacularly. ‘You said “children”? What happened to the others?’

‘Other,’ Myra said. ‘Adam. He made it older than Timmy, and we all thought he’d escaped the curse. Poor lad hadn’t though. He’d just been swaddled tighter than his brother. There wasn’t much his mother would allow him do more active than reading in the library. She wasn’t planning on making the same mistake twice.’

Myra sighed, pulled her knees up higher to her chest for warmth.

‘Ah, but there’s not a mother alive who can stop her boy getting into mischief if mischief ’s in his mind.’

‘What mischief did he get up to? What was it killed him, Myra?’

‘In the end all it took was a trip up the stairs,’ Myra said.

‘Happened at the Major’s house in Buckinghamshire. I didn’t see it myself, but Clara, the housemaid there, saw it with her own two eyes, for she was dusting in the hall. She said he was running too fast, lost his footing and slipped. Nothing more. Mustn’t have hurt too bad for he hopped himself up, right as rain, and kept on going. It was that evening, Clara said, that his knee swelled up like a balloon—just like Timmy’s shoulder before—and later in the night he started crying.’

‘Was it days?’ I said. ‘Like the last time?’

‘Not with Adam, no.’ Myra lowered her voice. ‘Clara said the poor lad screamed with agony most of the night, calling for his mother, begging her to take the pain away. There was no one in that house slept a wink that long night, not even Mr Barker, the groomsman, who was all but deaf. They just lay in their beds, listening to the sound of that boy’s pain. The Major stood outside the door all night, brave as anything, never shed a tear. 

‘Then, just before the dawn, according to Clara, the crying stopped, sudden as you like, and the house fell to a dead silence. In the morning, when Clara took the lad a breakfast tray, she found Jemima lying across his bed, and in her arms, face as peaceful as one of God’s own angels, her boy, just as if asleep.’

‘Was she crying, like the time before?’

‘Not this time,’ Myra said. ‘Clara said she looked almost as peaceful as him. Glad his suffering was over, I expect. The night was ended and she’d seen him off to a better place, where troubles and sorrows could find him no more.’

I considered this. The sudden cessation of the boy’s crying. His mother’s relief. ‘Myra,’ I said slowly, ‘you don’t think—?’

‘I think it was a mercy that boy went faster than his brother, is what I think,’ Myra snapped.

There was silence then, and I thought for a minute she had fallen to sleep, though her breathing was still light which made me think she had not and was just pretending. I pulled the blanket up around my neck and closed my eyes, tried not to picture screaming boys and desperate mothers.

I was just drifting off when Myra’s whisper cut through the cold air. ‘Now she’s gone and expecting again, isn’t she. Due next August.’ She turned pious then. ‘You’re to pray extra hard, you hear? ’Specially now—He listens closer near Christmas. You’re to pray she’ll be delivered of a healthy babe this time.’ She rolled over and pulled the blanket with her. ‘One that won’t go bleeding itself to an early grave.’

Christmas came and went, Lord Ashbury’s library was declared dust-free, and the morning after Boxing Day I defied the cold and headed into Saffron Green on an errand for Mrs Townsend. Lady Violet was planning a New Year luncheon party with hopes of enlisting support for her Belgian refugee committee. She quite liked the idea, Myra had heard her say, of expanding into French and Portuguese expatriates, should it become necessary. According to Mrs Townsend there was no surer way to impress at luncheon than with Mr Georgias’s genuine Greek pastries. Not that they were available to all and sundry, she added with an air of self-aggrandisement, particularly not in these testing times. No indeed. I was to visit the grocery counter and ask for Mrs Townsend of Riverton’s special order.

Despite the glacial weather, I was glad to make the trip to town. After weeks of festivity—Christmas, and now New Year—it was a welcome change to get outside, to be alone, to spend a morning beyond the range of Myra’s endless scrutiny. For after months of relative peace, she had taken particular interest in my duties of late: watching, scolding, correcting. I had the uneasy sense of being groomed for a change I was yet to see coming. Besides, I had my own secret reason for welcoming the village chore. The fourth of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels of Sherlock Holmes had been printed and I’d arranged with the peddler to purchase a copy. It had taken me six months to save the money and would be the first I had ever bought brand new.
The Valley of
Fear
. The title alone made me thrill with anticipation. The peddler, I knew, lived with his wife and six children in a grey-stone back-to-back that stood to attention in a line of identical others. The street was part of a dreary housing pocket tucked behind the railway station, and the smell of burning coal hung heavy in the air. The cobblestones were black and a film of soot clung to the lampposts. I knocked cautiously on the shabby door, then stood back to wait. A child of about three, with dusty shoes and a threadbare pullover, sat on the step beside me, drumming the downpipe with a stick. His bare knees were covered in scabs made blue by the cold.

I knocked again, harder this time. Finally the door opened to reveal a rake-thin woman with a pregnant belly tight beneath her apron and a red-eyed infant on her hip. She said nothing, looked through me with dead eyes while I found my tongue.

‘Hello,’ I said in a voice I’d learned from Myra. ‘Grace Reeves. I’m looking for Mr Jones.’

Still she said nothing.

‘I’m a customer.’ My voice faltered slightly; an unwanted note of inquiry crept in. ‘I’ve come to buy a book?’

Her eyes flickered, an almost imperceptible sign of recognition. She hoisted the baby higher onto her bony hip and tilted her head toward a room behind. ‘He’s out the back.’

She shifted some and I squeezed past, heading in the only direction the tiny house afforded. Through the doorway was a kitchen, thick with the stench of rancid milk. Two little boys, grubby with poverty, sat at the table, rolling a pair of stones along the scratched pine surface.

The larger of the two rolled his stone into that of his brother then looked up at me, his eyes full moons in his hollowed face. ‘Are you looking for my pappy?’

I nodded.

‘He’s outside, oiling the wagon.’

I must have looked lost, for he pointed a stubby finger at a small timber door next to the stove.

I nodded again; tried to smile.

‘I’ll be starting working with him soon,’ the boy said, turning back to his stone, lining up another shot. ‘When I’m eight.’

‘Lucky,’ the littler boy said jealously.

The older one shrugged. ‘Someone needs to look after things while he’s gone and you’re too small.’

I made my way to the door and pushed it open. Beneath a clothes line strung with yellow-stained sheets and shirts, the peddler was bent over inspecting the wheels of his cart.

‘Bloody bugger of a thing,’ he said under his breath. I cleared my throat and he spun around, knocking his head on the cart handle.

‘Bugger.’ He squinted up at me, a pipe hanging from his bottom lip.

I tried to recapture Myra’s spirit, failed, and settled for finding any voice at all. ‘I’m Grace. I’ve come about the book?’ I waited.

‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?’

He leaned against the cart. ‘I know who you are.’ He exhaled and I breathed the sweet, burnt smell of tobacco. He wiped his oily hands on his pants and regarded me. ‘Fixing my wagon so it’s easy for the boy to manage.’

‘When are you going?’ I said.

He gazed beyond the clothes line, heavy with its sallow ghosts, toward the sky. ‘Next month. With the Royal Marines.’ He brushed a dirty hand across his forehead. ‘Always wanted to see the ocean, ever since I was a boy.’ He looked at me and something in his expression, a sense of desolation, made me look away. Through the kitchen window I could see the woman, the infant, the two boys staring out at us. The dimpled glass, dull with soot, gave their faces the impression of reflections in a dirty pond. The peddler followed my gaze. ‘Fellow can make a good living in the forces,’ he said. ‘If he stays lucky.’ He threw down his cloth and headed for the house. ‘Come on then. Book’s in here.’

We made the transaction in the tiny front room then he walked me to the door. I was careful not to glance sideways, careful not to glimpse the hungry little faces I knew would be watching. As I walked down the front steps I heard the eldest boy say, ‘What did the lady buy, Pappy? Did she buy soap? She smelled like soap. She was a nice lady, wasn’t she, Pappy?’

I walked as quickly as my legs would carry me without breaking into a run. I wanted to be far away from that household and its children who thought that I, a common housemaid, was a lady of substance.

I was relieved finally to turn the corner into Railway Street and leave behind the oppressive stench of coal and poverty. I was no stranger to hardship—many times Mother and I had only thinly scraped by—but Riverton, I was learning, had changed me. Without realising, I had grown accustomed to its warmth, and comfort, and plenty; had begun to expect such things. As I hurried on, crossing the street behind the horse and cart of Down’s Dairies, my cheeks burning with bitter cold, I became determined not to lose them. Never to lose my place as Mother had done.

Just before the High Street intersection, I ducked beneath a canvas awning into a dim alcove and huddled by a shiny black door with a brass plaque. My breath hung white and cold in the air as I fumbled the purchase from my coat and removed my gloves. I had barely glanced at the book in the peddler’s house save to ascertain it was the right title. Now I allowed myself to pore over its cover, to run my fingers across the leather binding and trace the cursive indentation of the letters that spelled along the spine,
The Valley of Fear
. I whispered the thrilling words to myself, then lifted the book to my nose and breathed the ink from its pages. The scent of possibilities.

I tucked the delicious, forbidden object inside my coat lining and hugged it to my chest. My first new book. My first new anything. I had now only to sneak it into my attic drawer without raising Mr Hamilton’s suspicions, or confirming Myra’s. I coerced my gloves back onto numb fingers, squinted into the frosty glare of the street and stepped out, colliding directly with a young lady walking briskly into the alcove.

‘Oh, forgive me!’ she said, surprised. ‘How clumsy I am.’

I looked up and my cheeks flared. It was Hannah.