This Thing Of Darkness (86 page)

‘But the road that Lord Melbourne’s government is following will take us there just as surely as if Mr Cowper were to lead us there himself. You maybe satisfied of it. Already there has been one attempted revolution this year, in Newport. The factory system and the workhouses are not just breaking up families - they are literally starving our people to death. Are we not Christians, gentlemen? It would be an act of the most extreme injustice, I adjure you, if the wants of our population were not provided for. We must act, we must act humanely, and we must act now. This country must be governed in the interest of
all
its citizens, be they farmers or factory-men, rich men or poor. It must be governed by men of experience. Men who have been trained to lead from an early age, for the benefit of all. I have served this country as the captain of one of her naval brigs for eight years. Most humbly, gentlemen, I put myself forward and I promise you of my service.’

FitzRoy stepped back, to huge acclaim from the red fraternity, most of them farmers in from the countryside, who stamped, whistled and clapped with wild enthusiasm. The mayor called for a show of hands. Granger, the Liberal candidate, took the mercantile vote as expected, perhaps half the crowd packed into Palace Green. Cowper, to general laughter, polled seven votes. Sheppard, to another mighty cheer, carried perhaps twenty or thirty men with him - fewer, he reflected bitterly, than were even on his campaign payroll. FitzRoy took the other half of the electorate, some six hundred or so voters, to more ringing cheers and applause all round.

‘Should you like to request a poll, Mr Sheppard?’ asked the mayor, as if the result had been in any doubt.

‘No, I should not,’ hissed Sheppard, scarlet-eared, whereupon the mayor raised his voice and declared to the general populace that Thomas Granger and Captain Robert FitzRoy had been returned unopposed as Members of Parliament for Durham City. A vote of thanks was proposed to the mayor, the city aldermen and all the constables, and the crowd gradually dispersed to seek further merriment down in the town.

‘I am extremely sorry,’ offered FitzRoy to Sheppard, ‘that today has not gone as you would have hoped.’

‘It was a plant,’ spat Sheppard.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You heard me. All your voters were Londonderry’s men. All those farmers were his tenants. They were instructed to vote for you. The entire poll was hocussed from start to finish.’

‘I am sorry, Mr Sheppard, but that is nonsense and you know it.’

‘It is the truth, and you know it. And what is more, the whole world shall know it - I give you my parole to
that
, Captain FitzRoy.’

 

‘A Bill to require and regulate the examination of all persons who wish to become masters or chief mates of merchant vessels - the honourable and gallant member for Durham City proposing.’

FitzRoy rose from the government benches. The temporary chamber of the Commons was perhaps a third full. High above, the featureless white-painted ceiling and the broad crescent-shaped windows immediately beneath were doing their best to brighten matters, but there was no countering the claustrophobic feel induced by the lack of light and the lack of width at ground level. Here only four rows of seating lined the walls, hemmed in by an overhanging gallery and an acreage of sombre walnut panelling. FitzRoy found himself staring through just a few feet of frowzy air at the faces of the Liberal MPs opposite. Even though it was the middle of the afternoon, the pendulous gas chandeliers, swaying gently on their immense chains, lent the lower part of the chamber an intimate, almost nocturnal feel, more suited to a gaming-house than a debating-chamber. Certainly, that was how a great many of the members appeared to view it: there were MPs in frock-coats and muddy riding-boots, MPs with their waistcoats and cravats loosened, an astonishing number of MPs wearing their hats, MPs reading newspapers, MPs fast asleep, even one member who had stretched out horizontally along a nearby bench, his hat shielding his slumbering eyelids from the gas-glow. If anything, FitzRoy noted with distaste, a majority of the offenders were to be found on the Tory side of the house; many, he felt, seemed extremely young to be charged with the responsibility of representing a constituency. It was considered normal, he had discovered, for MPs to pay little or no attention to the proceedings of the House - as long as the stenographers got it all down, that was sufficient - and normal for MPs to show utter contempt for every convention of polite society. As he prepared to speak, his disciplined sea-captain’s eye took in much that was to his distaste.

‘Gentlemen, the British mercantile marine is now immense. There are upwards of twenty thousand vessels of fifty tons burthen or more. Many of them carry fee-paying passengers.’

‘I say, Fitz, hold that noise down. We were keeping it up pretty tolerably at the stump last night,’ murmured a young buck nearby, his feet crossed on the back of the bench in front, his hands reclining behind his head, a meerschaum pipe jutting from his teeth. His friends guffawed in sympathy.

‘And yet there is no examination of any kind with respect to the qualification of the officers. There are too many instances in which the indignation of Englishmen has been roused at the conduct of those who are entrusted with the command of these vessels.’

‘It was a regular knock-down,’ enthused another of the young bucks.

‘You should join us tonight, Fitz,’ said a second. ‘A play and oysters, swallow off a few bumpers of claret, then off to a finish in Waterloo Road for champagne-and-madeira and the most beautiful women in London.’

‘Best hundred guineas you’ll ever spend,’ sniggered a third.

FitzRoy cleared his throat. This was tougher than Durham.

‘I once met a ship in the Pacific Ocean, which was no fewer than six and a half degrees out of her longitude. Upon my asking her captain how this was, he replied, “Why, sir, we do not come here to navigate, we come here to fish”!’

‘We’ll procure you a finer fish in the Waterloo Road than you’ll ever catch in the Pacific, Fitz,’ muttered one of the young blades, and all of them hooted with laughter.

‘This Bill proposes that examining boards be set up in all our principal ports, to issue certificates to masters and chief mates of merchant vessels. Only a regulating system of this kind can avoid untrained officers obtaining command of these vessels by corrupt means.’

‘And would those corrupt means,’ boomed a blotchy-faced old Radical from beneath a wide-brimmed hat on the cross-benches, ‘include the many instances of corruption detailed in
this
document?’

There was a cheer from those on the opposition benches who had been paying attention as he produced a pamphlet and waved it above his head. FitzRoy knew the document all too well: it was entitled
The Conduct of Captain Robert FitzRoy R. N. in reference to the Electors of Durham and the Laws of Honour, exposed by William Sheppard Esq.
The same thing happened every time he tried to speak. Sheppard’s men had been as efficient as ever, and had flooded Westminster with copies.

‘If anyone should get up in this House,’ he snapped, ‘and state that I have obtained my seat by corrupt practices, I will tell him that it is a foul lie and a calumny!’

‘Go it, Fitz!’ chortled one of the Tory bucks merrily, amid warm government applause.

‘Do you deny, sir, that according to a member of your own party, you have lost your station as a gentleman?’ shouted the blotchy Radical, to rival cheers. The House had woken up now, and both sides of the chamber were becoming interested in the spat.

‘Tell us about how you can predict the weather again!’ hooted an opposition MP, to howls of merriment.

‘Order, order!’

The speaker intervened at last, and called upon Mr Chapman to second FitzRoy’s Bill, and William Gladstone, president of the Board of Trade, to welcome the measure on behalf of the government. The brief flurry of activity over, the House settled back to its slumbers.

At the close of business, FitzRoy left the chamber and strolled up to the United Services Club in the Mall along with a few other ex-military MPs, escaping - as was their wont — the noxious vapours that wafted up from the river marshes on damp summer days. The Mall was leafier and cleaner than Westminster, and he always felt that a few lungfuls of fresh grass-scented air helped to blow away the fetid vulgarity of Parliament.

As they mounted the steps to the USC, the air was split by a terrific crack, the report beating against FitzRoy’s eardrums like tiny fists. He turned, as did his fellows. An extravagantly dressed figure stood in the street behind them, a long riding-whip gripped tightly in one hand, scarlet with anger to his ear-lobes and visibly shaking with nerves. It was Sheppard. The black leather thong snaked through the air, as if it were about to stripe FitzRoy’s skin; but then, apparently, its owner thought better of the idea.

‘Captain FitzRoy!’ he shouted, with a strangled, high-pitched cry. ‘I will not strike you. But consider yourself horsewhipped!’

Still trembling, Sheppard continued to swirl the whip in a slow loop about his head, the tip swishing provocatively close to FitzRoy’s eyes with every circuit. FitzRoy raised his umbrella, caught the whip with a snap and jerked it harmlessly out of his would-be assailant’s palm. ‘Mr Sheppard. You are presumptuously impertinent,’ he said grimly.

‘And you, sir, are a liar and a coward!’ shouted Sheppard, his voice struggling to force its way from his fear-constricted throat.

With an inarticulate cry of despair he hurled himself at his enemy, both fists whirling blindly. FitzRoy hit him once, cleanly and powerfully and not without a certain satisfaction. The young man went down as if he had been battered with a blacksmith’s hammer, and lay groaning in the road. FitzRoy kept his fists raised.

‘Captain FitzRoy, do not strike him again now he’s down!’ came a voice.

‘There is no need,’ breathed FitzRoy, his eyes blazing. ‘I would not soil my hands upon the rascal.’

‘Do you call yourself a gentleman, sir?’ cried the agonized Sheppard, from the ground.

‘Never mind, sir,’ spat FitzRoy, contemptuously.

‘I say you are a cowardly knave, sir!’

‘Never mind, sir.’

‘The question must be brought to the issue! I will have satisfaction, sir! Captain FitzRoy — I challenge you to a duel!’

A rictus of astonishment seized the little crowd.

‘Are you afraid to accept, Captain FitzRoy? Or will you have your reputation vilipended still further?’

‘I am not afraid of you, you cur.’

‘Then you had best find a second prepared to stand up in your behalf!’

 

FitzRoy’s office in the temporary House of Commons was small to say the least, but it certainly did not seem large enough to hold Allen Gardiner. Although lacking in size, the man exuded the enthusiasm of an Alsatian dog. Talking to him was like being licked.

‘Like yourself, sir, I am a former naval officer!’ Gardiner’s speaking voice came complete with exclamation marks, and the accompaniment of waving arms. ‘Like yourself, sir, I believe that only the word of God can save the savage from eternal damnation! During my years in Zululand, it was I who converted none other than King Dingaan himself to Christianity!’

This was not necessarily a feather in Gardiner’s cap, even if he seemed to think so. The ‘Christian’ King Dingaan had recently put to death 283 Boer settlers, men, women and children alike, and had torn out the heart and liver of their leader Piet Retief for use in ceremonial witchcraft.

‘I apprehend from your expression that you have read in the newspapers of King Dingaan’s, ah, aberration. It did make mortal blood-thirsty reading, I grant you, and I was ultimately obliged to leave Zululand in some haste. But many are the complicated circumstances in savage lands that make uneasy reading in cold British newsprint! One should not always take the newspapers at face value! I myself, sir, hold no brief for the slanders and slurs of our Liberal press regarding the Durham election!’

FitzRoy sighed. Sheppard had been writing to
The Times
again.

‘You oblige me with your concern, Mr Gardiner. Forgive me, but did you say that you were a representative of the Church Missionary Society, or the London Missionary Society?’

‘Neither, sir! I am a representative of the Patagonian Missionary Society, a new body founded by myself and the Reverend George Packenham Despard, with the object of bringing our Christian civilization to the Godless peoples of Tierra del Fuego! Mr Despard has been in contact with the Reverend Joseph Wigram, of the National Society for Providing the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, who has informed us of three savages educated, on account of your far-sightedness, sir, at St Mary’s school in Walthamstow. I have heard tell from the Church Missionary Society, sir, of your brave attempts to found a Christian mission in Tierra del Fuego. I apprehend that there is a savage yet alive, by God’s grace, who is familiar with the teachings of Our Lord Jesus Christ — am I not right? A savage by the name of Jeremy Button? We of the Patagonian Missionary Society intend to establish contact with this Jeremy Button, and to found a new mission with all haste, with the object of spreading God’s word among his people! We intend to do so, sir, before the perverse and corrupting influence of the Church of Rome can beat us to the mark! Are we to have your blessing, sir?’

Gardiner’s arms had been revolving like the sails of a windmill during this last speech. Now he sat back as if waiting for a biscuit. Simply being in the man’s company made FitzRoy feel weary.