Beautiful Lies (35 page)

‘The Socialists believe you have done great harm to their cause.’

‘All of them? Then I have done the impossible. They have never before managed to agree on anything.’

Maribel did not smile.

‘Madam, I cannot say I am sorry. I do not answer to the Socialists. I answer to my conscience and to God, and I am accustomed to making enemies. I regret nothing. There is not a man in all of London who can doubt the fire in my belly.’

‘No indeed. You have promoted yourself indefatigably.’

‘I have promoted the truth, madam. And I shall continue to do so, for as long as I have breath in my body. I do not care for the admiration of others, only for the courage to do what is right.’

‘Courage? It takes such courage to stand up here drinking champagne while others are beaten and imprisoned for the cause you claim as your own?’

Webster’s milky eyes were cold.

‘You must be very sure of your own virtue, madam, to cast aspersions upon mine.’

Maribel did not answer. In the square more men were being hauled to the Black Marias. Where was Edward?

A girl in a starched cap brought cups of tea on a tray. Maribel took one, though the thought of drinking it made her queasy. Setting it on the windowsill she crushed the remains of her cigarette in the saucer.

‘Sweet heaven!’ Mr Ackermann cried.

He pointed to the north side of the square. Beneath the lofty pediment of the National Gallery, some fifteen feet above the whirling maelstrom of the mob, a troop of perhaps three hundred Grenadier guardsmen marched in slow formation. They stood, resplendent in their scarlet coats and bearskins, between the great white columns of the gallery, as though making their entrance upon a Greek stage, their chins raised, impervious to the tumult of the fighting beneath them. Then, in a single movement, they took up their rifles and fixed bayonets.

The room drew in its breath.

‘They would have the fountains play blood,’ someone said quietly.

Maribel clasped her hands, pressing them to her mouth. Almost directly below the window several men were attempting to edge their way behind a column of mounted police. They wore scarves wrapped over their mouths and, though the brims of their hats obscured their faces, it was plain from the respectability of their coats that they were gentlemen. One man’s hat was broad-brimmed, low-crowned in the style of the Argentinian gaucho. A police horse tossed its head frettishly, its eyes rolling, and, ducking his head, the man in the broad-brimmed hat ran a hand over its dark flank. The hand was white and narrow, with long elegant fingers. Edward’s fingers. Maribel gasped, pressing her forehead against the glass.

‘I cannot imagine it is much of a comfort to your husband,’ Webster said conversationally, ‘that, while he faces the police batons, you are making it your business to estrange what little press patronage he still has left.’

Maribel hardly heard him. Instead she watched in horror as a shout went up. Immediately several of the mounted policemen closest to Edward turned, wheeling their mounts about so that the horses’ heads jerked up, spittle flying from their mouths. Standing up in their stirrups, the policemen set upon his band of protesters with their truncheons. The men were trapped, surrounded on all sides by the press of horses. They were not armed. They raised their arms to protect themselves, twisting away as the blows rained down on their heads and shoulders. Clamping their batons in both fists, the policemen smashed them into the men’s faces, their skulls, their chests. One horseman kicked his feet from his stirrups, driving his metal-capped boots again and again into the men’s ribs and abdomens.

The broad-brimmed hat was knocked aside. Maribel saw the red-gold gleam of Edward’s hair, the curve of his cheek, as he glanced upwards to see a policeman raising his truncheon in both hands. There was nothing Edward could do, nowhere he could go. With all his strength the policeman brought it down on Edward’s forehead. There was a hesitation, like a stoppage in time. Then blood burst from the wound, coursing down Edward’s face. He raised his hands, his mouth open, his eyes rolling back in his head. The policeman struck again and he crumpled, slack as a doll, and was gone.

She had known immediately that he was dead. It was not possible that a man might sustain a blow like that and live. Edward was dead. They told her afterwards that she cried out, beating the windows with her fists until the glass rattled in the frame. She did not remember.

They took her away to a place where she might lie down. The room was small and hot with buttoned leather chairs and a walnut table, padded on all four walls with gilt-tooled books in cages of gold mesh. Lady Worsley patted her arm. Someone else brought brandy and put the glass to her lips. She swallowed without looking up. The brandy burned her throat.

Some time later a man in scuffed brown boots came to tell her that Edward had been arrested and taken with Mr Burns to Bow Street Police Station. Maribel had not understood. The man, whom Maribel did not think she knew, twisted his hat between his fingers and told her that, though Edward’s head wound was severe and he had sustained a number of other contusions, his injuries were not sufficiently acute to require him to be taken to hospital. It was Mr Burns, he told her, who had helped him to safety, albeit with several policemen as an escort, Mr Burns who, using his hat as a makeshift bowl, had brought water from the fountain so that Edward might wash the blood from his face. There were them who did not like Mr Burns, he said solemnly, but Mr Burns was a good man.

Maribel thought of Edward using a hat as a bowl, Edward with his arms behind his back in a Black Maria, Edward walking and breathing with bloodstains on his shirt front, and she wept and gasped to herself, rocking in her chair with her face pressed against her knees. When at last the spasms ceased, and the heaving in her chest was quietened, the man she did not know had gone. She sat up and wiped her face and drank a little of the water offered to her by Lady Worsley.

‘You have been very kind,’ she said several times. ‘Please do not let me detain you.’

Still Lady Worsley looked at her with her head on one side and stroked her wrist and would not go.

‘Let me take you home,’ Lady Worsley said. ‘You have had a terrible shock.’

Maribel shook her head.

‘I must go to my husband,’ she said.

‘My dear, you are in no state –’

‘I must go to my husband.’

‘Let me at least call you a cab. And have a supper packed for your husband. He will need something to eat.’

Maribel felt the lump rising again in her throat, the threat of tears. She swallowed hard, nodding.

‘Thank you. Truly.’

‘I am glad to help.’

While Lady Worsley made the necessary arrangements, Maribel asked for pen and paper. At the walnut table she wrote to Edward’s mother, and to Henry, informing them of Edward’s situation. They would need bail, if they were to get Edward out tonight, and she asked if either might be able to help in raising the necessary sum. When she had signed the letters she sealed the envelopes and took them to the front desk herself, asking that a boy might be found to take them directly.

A doorman escorted her to the hansom under the cover of an umbrella. Trafalgar Square was deserted. The rain fell heavily, pocking the pools of the fountains and scattering the gaslight into tiny fragments of gold. By morning the blood would be washed away. Maribel gathered her cloak about her and, clutching the warm package of Edward’s supper like a child in her lap, ordered the driver to take her to Bow Street.

D
ESPITE THE SEVERITY OF
Edward’s injuries he was not permitted to return home that night. He was charged with assault and unlawful assembly and passed the night with Mr Burns in an unheated police cell. He was not given a blanket. The next morning he was at last released, his bail stood for him by his uncle, Colonel George Wilcox. Wilcox, who was not a blood relative but married to Edward’s father’s sister, was at pains to stress to his nephew that he acted out of loyalty to Edward’s mother and not because he approved in any way of Edward’s actions which he considered not only unlawful but contemptible. In the lecture that followed, in which much was made of Queen and country, several allusions were made to Wilcox’s Victoria Cross, awarded to him at the Crimea.

Kept awake all night by the pain in his head and the racket of the other inmates, Edward endured his uncle’s blandishments without protest. He looked ill and dishevelled, his wound a dark gash in his battered face. His shirt front was splattered with dried blood. In the cab on the way home he closed his eyes, murmuring only that he supposed the old man should not be begrudged his money’s worth.

At Cadogan Mansions Maribel drew her husband a hot bath and summoned the doctor who inspected Edward’s head and closed the wound with several workmanlike stitches. Edward’s shoulders and chest were dark with bruises, his cheek grazed from his fall. His lip was split, his eye bruised. When the doctor pressed his stomach he gasped with pain. The doctor diagnosed a broken rib and likely inflammation of the inner organs resulting from kicks to the abdomen. He was also running a fever.

‘Nothing that time will not heal,’ the doctor told Edward, shining a light into his blackened eye.

‘Oh, I shall get time,’ Edward said. ‘I am under no illusions about that.’

The trial was scheduled for seventeen days hence to allow sufficient time for preparation of the men’s defence, but neither Edward nor his counsel held out much hope for clemency. The mood in the country did not favour them. Bloody Sunday had been condemned by Fleet Street almost without exception. There was little sympathy for the hundreds of ordinary men and women who had suffered injury, many of them critically.

The protesters, the newspapermen asserted, had received their just deserts. The riots had been motivated neither by an enthusiasm for free speech nor a reasoned belief in the innocence of Mr O’Brien but by a sordid zeal for unrest and by greed for the spoils of plunder. Though Edward insisted that the police had attacked protesters without provocation, that they had, under express orders from their superiors, hit out at unarmed women and children, concentrating their assault on those least able to retaliate, the newspapers were, for the most part, unstinting in their praise for Warren and his men. The
Daily News
and a handful of other minor Liberal journals murmured uneasily about coercion and the whiff of martial law, but their protestations were drowned out by jeers and the clamour of exultant Tory indignation. Righteousness had triumphed. The people of London had been protected and defended against ruffians and criminals. If a few of these felons ended up dying in the process, most editors agreed, then they could blame no one but themselves.

Only the
Chronicle
continued openly to back the cause of the protesters. If anything, Webster’s leading articles grew more forceful. The newspaper opened a Defence Fund to secure bail and pay fines, the details of which were published daily. It was said that the board of the
Chronicle
were very unhappy, that words had been spoken. The Sink of Iniquity scandal had served, in the opinion of many of its members, to degrade the solid reputation of their newspaper but there could be no doubting its effect on their profits. Webster’s obdurate support of the rioters, by contrast, had little commercial advantage. The starving poor were not in the habit of buying newspapers.

The fever, and the blow to the head, left Edward weak and dizzy. For several days he was obliged to remain in bed, his head wrapped about with bandages. The bruise around his eye leaked blue and purple stains into the pale skin of his temple. Visitors were forbidden, except for his mother, who came every morning, insistent that she should take her turn with the nursing. Maribel could hear the murmur of their voices from her desk in the drawing room, as she smoked and pretended to answer letters. In the afternoons Edward occupied himself with writing and with reading the newspapers, which he left strewn in angry despair about the counterpane. His bedclothes exhaled the scent of his mother’s expensive perfume.

‘Don’t read them,’ Maribel said. ‘They will only make you ill.’

Edward ignored her.

‘Listen to this one,’ he said, holding up the
Times.
‘Apparently Mr Burns and I led an “insane rush” on the police line before we were captured. Captured? They make us sound like street thieves – or Indians. I should have worn a war bonnet.’

‘Red, dearest –’

‘“The mob was kept moving by the police.” “Kept moving” being the accepted legal jargon for trampling the crowd with horses and beating them indiscriminately.’

Maribel tried to take the newspaper from her husband but he twisted his body away from her, holding the pages out of her reach.

‘“It may be hoped that the magistrates will not fail to pass exemplary sentences upon those now in custody who have laboured to the best of their ability to convert an English Sunday into a carnival of blood.” So it has come. Russia is arrived. The victors write the history and it shall be so. No more humbug of “the protection afforded by law to the humblest citizen”. The honest man is to be blamed for the unprovoked and brutal assault upon his person and there shall be laurels for the Police Commissioner who incited his uniformed brigands to riot and murder.’

He cast aside the newspaper and picked up another. Maribel sighed and lit a cigarette.

‘As for Mr Harrison at the
Morning Herald
, it is his considered opinion that my attitude to law and order is incongruent with the magistracy that I hold in three counties of Scotland and that my criminal behaviour renders me unfit for the offices of both Member of Parliament and Deputy Lieutenant. Of course there is no suggestion of the criminal behaviour of the police. I saw one poor woman in distress begging a police inspector if he had seen a child she had lost. His answer? He called her a damned whore and knocked her down. Do you think that the
Morning Herald
consider that “congruent” with his position?’