The Street Philosopher (38 page)

Charles Norton walked up the steps of the Exchange with his managers arrayed around him. They strode between the building’s massy columns, through its grand doors and on towards the main Exchange room, at the steady pace of businessmen with deals to make. Usually, it brought the proprietor of the Norton Foundry enormous satisfaction to enter this cavernous chamber in such a manner. As he stepped on to the floor, the long rows of fluted pillars stretching away on either side of him and the great glass dome gleaming up above, he would feel like a senator in ancient Rome, or a lord taking his place in some exalted feudal hall. Today, however, was different.

The vast crowd gathered there was quiet to the point of taciturnity. This was quite normal; there was never any vacant gossiping or laughter in the Exchange. The room echoed with hushed murmuring as laconic phrases passed back and forth, accompanied by winks, nods and a range of other coded gestures. This was the sound of Manchester’s best minds doing the business that had made their city so prosperous. These men were Norton’s brothers-in-industry, his own kind–but today he was deeply wary of them. Gathering his nerve, he kept walking until he stood in the very centre of the room, in the disc of weak sunlight that was projected down through the dome.

Slowly, the Exchange noticed Norton’s arrival, and a change of feeling swept through the crowd. Every eye turned
towards him. Could this be a show of respect, he wondered with momentary hope; could his fears be entirely without foundation?

He soon saw that this was not the case. The looks directed at him were positively unpleasant–snide smirks and leers, and even the occasional glare of censure, as if he was complicit in some terrible crime. Agents and exchange clerks started to mutter behind their hands and pocketbooks, the bolder and more malicious among them pronouncing certain words with a purposeful loudness, intending that he should hear.
Sodomite
, they hissed;
bugger-boy
.

After a few minutes of this, the Foundry managers excused themselves uncomfortably and left the building. Charles knew straight away against whom these foul accusations were being levelled. Full of helpless, indignant anger, he resolved to face these scoundrels down, to show them that as well as being obscene and ungodly, what they claimed was groundless slander. But it soon became clear that no matter how much resilience he displayed, no one would do business with the Norton Foundry that day. Backs were turned and noses were lifted; even William Fairbairn, whose acclaimed floating mill and bakery could not have been realised without his assistance, would not even speak to him. In the space of two short days, it seemed, he had become an outcast. Enraged, bewildered and humiliated, he departed to a mounting chorus of low jeers.

Out in St Anne’s Square, Charles fired a curt ‘home’ at the coachman before throwing himself into his carriage. As it rolled off, he took the shining top hat from his head and dashed it to the floor. Sitting back, trying to regain his calm, he sifted through the events of the past thirty-six hours once again.

Mr Twelves had failed to appear on Saturday night, either with Bill and Jemima or without. The coach-and-four had returned bearing but a single passenger: his daughter, in a state of intense anger. Something had plainly taken place that evening, but she would not reveal what it was, no matter how voluble and furious his demands. She would not even look him in the eye, in fact, and had swept upstairs
to her rooms with barely a word. Forcing himself to be patient, he had retired vowing to hold his peace and see what the following day would bring. Bill spending a night away from Norton Hall was hardly unusual, after all. There could be any number of explanations for this turn of events.

Then, the very first thing on Sunday morning, before Charles had even dressed for church, a note had arrived from Mr Twelves terminating their contract with immediate effect. Charles had not known what to make of this. Twelves was not a man easily upset. As he had gone about the observances of the Sabbath, Charles had grown increasingly convinced that he had been outfoxed somehow. Terrible suspicions began to gather in his mind. What might the fiend Cracknell and that damned street philosopher have told his disloyal children? He had prepared himself for a tempestuous confrontation. Neither, however, had appeared; Bill did not return from the city. Jemima did not so much as open her door, refusing even to admit her maid. Charles had dined alone, and went to bed severely disquieted.

He could never have dreamed, however, that the new day would bring such a staggering development. It was beyond his ability even to contemplate. There simply
could not
be any truth in it. Charles Norton stared numbly at his boots, his head nodding with the motion of the carriage.

The next he knew, they were pulling up in front of Norton Hall. Stepping on to the gravel, he noticed that the front door had not been opened to admit him. He walked over slowly; still it remained firmly, obstinately shut.

‘Where the deuce is that butler?’ he muttered under his breath, rapping on the stained glass panel set into the door with the end of his cane.

Eventually, the door was opened by a stammering, scarlet-cheeked parlour-maid, who revealed that the butler had resigned his post and left for the city. Charles, doing his best to hide his dismay, soon discovered that a number of the other servants had also abandoned his household. And what was more, Jemima had still not emerged from her chambers. He decided that this had gone on for quite long enough. Storming upstairs, he hammered on her door, demanding
to be admitted. When this did not elicit a response, he strode back to the landing rail and took a deep breath. Then he charged shoulder first.

The lock was a delicate one, designed for the purposes of privacy rather than to serve as a barrier against determined assailants, and it broke with a loud crack. The sitting-room door flew inwards, depositing Charles Norton on the carpet. Jemima considered her father coldly from behind her writing desk. They got to their feet at the same time, one with rather more poise than the other.

‘Jemima, explain yourself!’ he shouted as soon as he was upright again–quite neglecting, in his fury, to straighten his skewed necktie. ‘Tell me what happened at the Belle Vue, this instant!’

‘Surely you know,’ she replied. ‘Have your black-suited men not reported back to you?’

He pointed at her. ‘Don’t you
cheek me
, my girl, or I swear—’

‘You tried to trap us. You tried to trap your own children.’

Charles rolled his eyes at this. ‘I had to, don’t you see? Where is your brother?’

Jemima glared at him. She had been determined to preserve her self-control should this encounter occur, but it was slipping away nonetheless. ‘He will have left the country by now. I don’t know his destination. Your spies uncovered a little more than they were expecting.’ She recalled the scrawled note left on the seat of the coach-and-four, waiting for her when she came to depart the Belle Vue.
Don’t know
what we’ll do,
it had said.
Damn him for this! My life in Manchester
is quite finished! Keane says America, and I’m inclined to agree.
Leave too, Jem, for God’s sake! Leave while you are still able!

Her father was aghast at this revelation, but he quickly recovered his sense of moral superiority. ‘They were a necessary evil. You were consorting with my enemies, Jemima!’

‘You mean with those who actually know the truth about you, about your marvellous success out in the Crimea–your railway spikes, your wretched buckles!’

Charles crossed his hands in front of him and looked at
her severely; he had already guessed that these matters were involved. ‘You speak of things that are beyond your capacity to understand. I’ll thank you, however, not to take the word of strangers over that of your own father. We are bound by blood, and I will not have you—’

‘Tell me that you did not know of the murders,’ Jemima broke in with forceful impatience. ‘Tell me that you did not know what your friend Nathaniel Boyce had done to acquire that panel when you agreed to smuggle it back.’

This caught him unawares. He stared out of the window, brow furrowed, refusing to answer.

‘Very well then, Father, tell me that you did not leave Anthony in Balaclava whilst you were off making your deals. The risks of that place were well known. You were responsible for him–he was there to assist you. But you went up to the plateau with your murderous friend and you left him. Is that not so?’

Charles was silent for another tense half-minute, his face turning brick red; then he burst into speech. ‘How could I have possibly known, Jemima? How do you expect me to have—’

He stopped, suddenly running out of words. His attempt at righteous, indignant wrath was undercut entirely by the guilt in his voice. Turning away from his daughter with a heated exclamation, he marched from the room and thundered down the stairs.

Jemima sat again, putting a hand to her aching forehead. Wiping away an unexpected tear, she glanced at the valise that sat packed and ready in her bedroom, and then up at the clock on the wall. There were still several hours to go.

Boyce made a quick survey of the cobbled stable-yard at the rear of the Albion Hotel. Most of those employed there were engaged in the preparation of a large, imperial blue barouche for an afternoon drive; rather optimistically, in Boyce’s view, as the heavy clouds gathering overhead held a clear threat of rain. Striding swiftly past this vehicle, he headed for the stall closest to the gate–the meeting place proposed in the anonymous note left for him that morning at the Albion’s front desk. Seeing him pass, a fat-faced fool he supposed must be the head groom called out an impertinent salutation, whilst doffing a cheap-looking cap. Boyce ignored him.

The stall contained a single, aged grey. There were no stable-hands within earshot. Boyce stood stiffly beside it, taking a cigar from his coatee to create the appearance of a gentleman soldier who had merely stepped outside for a quiet, solitary smoke. He did not have long. There was a call he had to make, for the sake of form; and then he was due to dine with a group of prominent noblemen, all keen collectors of Raphael, in town for the Queen’s visit to the Art Treasures Exhibition.

‘Are you there?’ He hissed this through gritted teeth, looking straight ahead rather than into the stall, so that anyone watching from a distance would not be able to tell that he was addressing someone.

‘That I am, sir,’ replied a voice from inside. ‘May I come out, d’ye think? I don’t know what they’ve been feeding
this poor beast, but by God, even Hercules himself would balk at sweeping up this stinking mess.’

‘You stay where you bloody well are. I will
not
risk anyone seeing us together, do you understand?’ Boyce fingered the unlit cigar. Since the loss of his hand, lighting the damn things was something of a challenge. At that moment, he could not chance an error, a spillage of matches perhaps, that would inevitably prompt some idiot to rush over and proffer his assistance.

A soft chuckle came from the stall. ‘No need for such a tone,
Brigadier
.’ The speaker moved forward from the shadows, placing a large hand on the old grey’s neck. Boyce glanced over to make an assessment. He was a typical example of his kind: badly dressed and groomed, tall but with a swaggering, stooping posture that marked him out as an irredeemable degenerate. The faintest touch of a smirk lingered on his square, low-born face. It was plain that this wretched fellow considered himself something of a buck. ‘I am a professional, afore all else. No one will see me.’ There was a portentous pause. ‘Twelves is my name.’

‘I don’t give a damn what your name is, knave. What was the meaning of that note? Explain yourself, this instant.’

Twelves seemed to be deriving some insolent amusement from Boyce’s assertive manner. ‘My meaning is simple. I have information on your enemies. My men and I have been watching them these past few weeks, and we could be useful to ye. Useful indeed.’

‘So you discovered my … acquaintance with Norton.’

Twelves looked away. ‘Not too difficult, Brigadier, if I may say.’

Boyce thought for a moment. The situation was becoming ever more pressing. The Queen would be in Manchester the very next day. It was unbelievable that Norton had failed to deal with this. The man was a fool, and they’d both paid a heavy price for his ineffectiveness. Their connection would have to be severed. The scandal of Norton’s sodomite offspring was certain to ruin the Foundry. Boyce was confident that none of this disgrace would ever touch him personally; Norton could not reveal anything about their deal, about
the
Pilate
, without incriminating himself as well. But it was a vexatious blow all the same.

‘What do you know?’ Boyce asked.

‘Thomas Kitson’s address, for starters. A tenement on Princess Street, not a quarter-mile from this very spot. We’ve kept a close watch on it. I don’t doubt that there will soon be contact between ’im and Mr Cracknell.’ Twelves cleared his throat. ‘If ye were to provide the necessary payment, we’d be happy to follow ’em, see what they’re up to. Or we could—’

‘Kill them,’ Boyce instructed. ‘Kill them both, tonight. This has to end. I need not remind you that Richard Cracknell has proved tiresomely resourceful. There will be no more mishaps or unwelcome surprises.’

‘Ye have my word on that.’ The investigator scowled. ‘It would be hard to imagine another interruption as abhorrent as the unnatural filth my men and I witnessed in the Belle Vue.’ He shook his head. ‘Can’t have any link with such deviancy in my line of work. Does untold damage to a man’s reputation–and reputation, Brigadier, is all. Shall I assume that ye are also out of whatever arrangement ye might have had with that wretched family, sir?’

Such upright decency, Boyce thought, from a paid assassin. ‘There was no arrangement. Remember that. We were merely acquaintances.’

The slightest of smiles returned to Twelves’ unsavoury features. ‘Very well.’

Boyce replaced the unlit cigar in his coatee and brushed the cuff covering his wooden hand. ‘I will leave your imbursement here at the Albion, with notice that it is for a local apothecary. It will be a generous sum for the work. Should you be caught, I will of course deny all knowledge and leave you to your fate.’ He turned his head a fraction, meeting the hired man’s eye. ‘Be sure that you tell them at whose behest it is done. And make Cracknell suffer. I wish him to suffer.’

‘He will, sir, never fear. They both will.’ There was now a note of something very like admiration in Twelves’ voice. ‘May I say, Brigadier, that it is always a pleasure to serve a
gent who knows ’is mind. I can truly respect that.
No qualms
. One thing ye encounter a fair amount in this trade, sir, is qualms. Norton had ’em in spades. Cause no end of bother.’

Boyce frowned, his tolerance for this meeting at an end. ‘I do not ask for your damned
respect
,’ he snapped. ‘Just do as I order.’

He swivelled on his heel and walked back towards the hotel.

Cregg reached into his pocket for the bottle. It was crudely cast from brown glass and had no label. He could not remember purchasing it, or what it contained. There were only a couple of swallows left, at any rate–reckoning that he’d need the steel, he popped the cork and drained it in one. The liquid caused an involuntary twitch, and then a deep shiver. He smacked his lips together, flipping the empty bottle around so that he held the neck, and then brought it round abruptly against the wall beside him.

With reverential care, Cregg lifted up the broken end. The jagged edges glittered in the gaslight that seeped into the alley from the square beyond. You can keep your rifles and your bayonets, he thought–give me a good sharp bit of glass any day of the bleedin’ week. He stole to the alley’s mouth, and took a careful look at the open ground beyond.

Piccadilly was heaving with crowds. Teams of labourers and carpenters were busy preparing the decorations to mark the Queen’s procession through the city the following day. Multi-coloured poles were being erected along the length of the main promenades, and capacious wooden balconies were going up in front of almost every building. Beneath the flat orange light of the gas lamps, wagons loaded with flags and banners were being emptied, their contents hung everywhere that could possibly accommodate them. Around this industry, large numbers had gathered simply to watch and chatter. Many of these spectators had umbrellas under their arms and glanced up frequently at the sky, which had grown increasingly stormy as the afternoon’s light faded.

All of this stood in his favour, Cregg decided. The combination of crowds, colourful banners and rainy gloom meant
that he’d be able to get across the square without drawing any undue attention to himself. Then he could get his satisfaction, and melt away like the darkness at dawn. He had a notion that whilst the crushers were busy mopping up at the hotel, he could do a spot of robbing on the London Road or thereabouts with a good chance of success, drumming up some ready funds to get him on the next train back to the Metropolis, and away from this arse-hole of a city for good. The plan seemed so simple, so damn sound, that he cursed himself for not settling on it sooner.

He studied the entrance to the Albion Hotel. It was lit up brightly against the evening. He’d have to keep a close lookout, and pick his moment carefully.

Leaning down to check the makeshift sackcloth dressings he’d applied to his leg, Cregg felt suddenly unsteady, his head light. He wondered how many days it had been since he’d eaten anything. His eyes seemed to be losing their focus. He blinked, and the orbs of gaslight that lined the promenade each produced a twin, a perfect double that slowly drifted back over until the two images aligned and became one once more. He knocked the back of his skull against the bricks behind him three times, took a few deep breaths and then peered out at Piccadilly again.

The Royal Infirmary stood opposite the alley, rising up imposingly in the centre of the square. Cregg’s dizzy stare roamed from the columns of the portico, up to the dome and then settled on the main body of the building beneath. A lamp had just been placed in a window on the first floor. Beside it, a nurse was leaning down to help a man with a heavily bandaged head to sit up in his bed, so that he could see something of the preparations underway outside. The nurse was solicitous and gentle, even taking hold of the man’s arm to help him to the sill. Cregg wiped his watering eyes and gulped, unwanted remembrance of his own time in hospital coming to him with ugly clarity.

After falling before the Redan, Cregg had been out for the best part of four days. He had awoken from this black slumber to find himself bound and bleeding in the hospital at Scutari. His bed was in the cellars, away from all daylight, where
the low stone arches echoed dully with screams and whimpers, and the ragged sound of weak men vomiting. The nurses were but distant, pale figures, drifting like phantoms through the corridors.

Confined to this grim dungeon, Cregg grew confused. The agony from his wounds was constant, gnawing, utterly unbearable. The face, at first, was particularly bad. He was beset day and night by fat Turkish flies, which tried to crawl in amongst the bandages and lay their eggs in his tattered cheek. He could not sleep, and in the tomb-like darkness a voice in his head started to mutter nasty things. It reminded him repeatedly who was to blame for his ordeal–who had mashed him up, killed his pals, and deserved to bleedin’ well die himself. And it did not stop once he was back in old England either; only liquor, he soon learned, an earnest devotion to hard liquor, could quiet its jabbering.

Some whistles from across the square pulled him back to the present. A small crowd had gathered around the entrance to the Albion. The porters were attempting to keep them back as a fancy carriage was waved up to the door. Inside the hotel, he saw the briefest flash of a red sleeve. It was time for him to act.

Cregg started out across Piccadilly, the bottle sliding a little in his clammy palm. He stepped over a pile of pale flower garlands, which were about to be strung up between the gaily-coloured poles. The first drops of rain fell upon his ruined features as he hurried on.

He passed by the glossy horses, all champing at their bits, and the coachman, who was pulling up his collar against the breaking storm. He’d go for the neck. There’d be no quarter for the bastard then–he’d be certain to breathe his last on the cobbles of Manchester. And what a well deserved end it would be.

There he was, stepping out of the hotel: Colonel Boyce. Now trussed up as a general or some such, but still the same old bleedin’ Boyce, pretty much unchanged in Cregg’s eyes. See how he steps towards his carriage, the crippled veteran fumed, so full of his own worth, and his power over the rest of us! And those moustaches, those bleedin’ moustaches,
so sharp and huge! Boyce had presided as Cregg had dangled half-naked and bloody from a cartwheel, his head lolling, weathering the lash; Boyce had cowered beneath those rocks at Inkerman, whilst Major Maynard was lost to the Russian guns; Boyce had jutted into view at a dozen skirmishes afterwards, directing decent men to their doom whilst staying safely in the rear. And Cregg was willing to bet the shirt off his back that it was Boyce who had ordered him to the Forlorn Hope for the first assault on the Great Redan.

For a long second, Cregg was so overwhelmed by the sight of his intended victim that he stood transfixed, almost fearful, like a rabbit before a stoat; then his hatred, his resolution flowed back into him. He shoved aside the handful of people who stood between them, the broken bottle ready in his hand.

‘It might–could—’ Nunn began. He stopped, shaking his head in frustration. Boyce paused just before the door, regarding him with some impatience. ‘It seems to, to—’

‘Come on, Mr Nunn,’ said the Brigadier-General. ‘Out with it, man.’

‘R-rain, Briga-Brigadier,’ Nunn mumbled. ‘It seems to be about to… about to—’ He stopped, wiping away the excess of spittle that had gathered around his lips with a handkerchief kept in the sleeve of his dress-coat expressly for this purpose.

‘Rain?’ Boyce looked out of the nearest window, over the heads of the crowd. ‘So it has arrived at last. Honestly, this wretched city. Tell the porters to bring an umbrella, would you?’ Nunn started to amble uncertainly across the lobby. ‘Actually, Mr Nunn, stay where you are. I’ll see to it.’

They called him an idiot, but this was not true.

For a long time after his return from the war–a year, they told him–Nunn had not been able to remember anything. His parents, his sisters, his oldest friends, all had come before him, and had managed to elicit no response whatsoever. Francis Nunn, First Lieutenant of the Paulton Rangers, seemed to have lost his mind to a piece of Russian shrapnel.

Then, quite unexpectedly, his father received a letter from none other than his former commander; and within a week, Brigadier-General Boyce had arrived at the Bath sanatorium in which Nunn had been sequestered. The effect of this distinguished visitor’s presence upon him was pronounced and immediate. He had struggled to stand the moment Boyce first entered the room, and soon began to speak, to answer simple questions–far more than he had done since his return from the war. The Brigadier-General had stayed for several days, spending long hours alone with him, discussing their time in the Crimea together. These conversations had proved a stern mental test for the depleted young officer. Boyce had been keen indeed to learn what he could or could not recall.