Lawless and The Devil of Euston Square (17 page)

“Look at that arm,” Worm marvelled. The man’s limbs seemed to me unremarkable.

“That’s one of England’s finest athletes, is it?” I asked. “To be honest, I was expecting some frivolity with horses, or at least hoops and mallets.”

Worm clucked at my ignorance and led me over to the clubhouse, which he called the pavilion. This was crowned by a clock the image of the Euston one, only smaller. As we approached, we were assailed from the balcony by a familiar wheedling voice. “Sergeant!” Roxton Coxhill hailed me. “Do come up, won’t you?”

The slovenly guard attending the stairs opened a single eye. “Members and players only,” he mumbled. “You members or players?”

“All right, Jenkins,” Coxhill’s voice came down the stairwell, “he’s with me.”

The Professor and Worm slunk silently up the wooden staircase, the guard too weary to object, and we entered a long dining room set for a great luncheon. The walls boasted trophy cabinets, bats, balls and stakes bearing illegible signatures. I examined a daguerreotype of a solemn group of fellows wearing outlandish blazers. They brandished their bats as if they were still boys, which would have seemed amusing if they were not now most likely running the country.

“Glad to see you, old chap,” said Coxhill, grasping my shoulder. “Do accompany me on a circuit around the boundary. I have some information of interest to you.”

“Information?” I nodded. “I must find the clockmaker. Have you seen him?”

“I’ll just fetch my pipe.”

The boys had cornered a whiskered cricketer. He was dressed in cream flannels, padding affixed round his legs and his gloves sewn with rubber spikes.

“You’re E M Grace, ain’t you?” said Worm. “I heard your cover drive is hexquisite.”

“I heard,” said the Professor, anxious not to be outdone, “that you bowl the ball from behind your whiskers. So as they won’t see the spin, of course.”

“Of course,” the man laughed.

“Would you like to see a trick, sir?” the Professor said. Ignoring Worm’s dismay, he soldiered on. “Observe this ha’penny. I put it into my ear, and, with a shake of the head, it vanishes–” A look of doubt crossed his face. He shook his head again, and stuck his finger in his ear. Looking rather alarmed, he consulted Worm in an urgent undertone.

“God Almighty.” Worm peered in the Professor’s ear, cursed under his breath, then cuffed his friend about the head. “Why can’t you stick to your spinning top?”

“It’s called a diavolo,” retorted the Professor.

“Spinning top, I said,” Worm hissed. “Blimey. Is there a doctor in the house?”

By good fortune, Grace himself was a medical man. While he inspected the Professor’s ear, Worm confided in me. “Professor’s never got the hang of it. You have to distract their attention. That’s where the magic lies.”

There was applause outside, and Grace looked up in exasperation. “You’ll have to go to the Children’s Hospital. I haven’t the equipment here, and I have to bat.” He pulled on his gloves, and strode manfully out.

“We’d best be going,” said Worm, looking thunder at the Professor, who steadfastly avoided his gaze. As Coxhill emerged, pipe in hand, Worm dragged his friend away with a scowl. “Oi,” he shouted as the Professor stomped off down the stairs, “I told you. Easy on them boots.”

Coxhill took my arm in a vice-like grip. Barely lunchtime and he smelt of liquor. He led me out to walk around the boundary rope. It seemed a shame to keep this vast expanse of green for these strange antics, when it could have been a park or a golf course.

I hoped I might get something useful out of Coxhill. But he took it upon himself to explain the game to me, breaking off only to applaud, and I could barely get a word in. All I could see was men in the distance, evidently having epileptic fits and practising their golf swings.

When we passed in front of the more expensive seats, the assembled society of straw boaters, petticoats and parasols so drew Coxhill’s attention that he barely spoke to me at all. I was surprised how lax the general behaviour was. People lounged on their benches as if they were in their private back gardens. Fine ladies shouted out like fishwives. And all sorts of intimate conversations seemed to be held in every corner, while nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to the game. Of course, Coxhill thrived on this. He shook hands with top-hatted gentlemen, plumped himself down beside unattended ladies with hampers, and offered tips to sharp gents with field glasses. Every so often I glanced back at the clubhouse in hopes of spotting the clockmaker.

“Disraeli is right, you know,” said Coxhill, leading me on past the cheaper seats. “Individualism is all but dead. It’s only we entrepreneurs who keep the flame of ingenuity alight. Lovely shot, Mr Grace.” He applauded, and gestured that I should do likewise. “As I was saying, my father practically owned the White Conduit Club.”

“I thought they called this the Marylebone Cricket Club.”

“Quite, quite. One must get accustomed to the newfangled names. One turns one’s head for a moment and the city has transformed itself. Marvellous, I suppose, though a tad disorientating. They used to play down at White Conduit Fields, you see.”

I explained that I was a newcomer to London.

“It’s an age ago now. Down at the old Great Northern terminal. It was father sold the land to the railway barons. Made his fortune.”

“I thought your father was a teacher.”

“That’s right, old chap.” He looked pleased that I had remembered. “A brilliant man. Taught at Heidelberg University, you know. That’s how we come to know the royals, you see. It was Albert who introduced him to Mama. Dear Mama.” His voice quivered and he fell silent, staring into the middle distance. His grip on my arm tightened, until the crack of splintering wood broke the spell, and he turned back to the field. “Well bowled, Charlie. Marvellous!”

I stared out into the middle. I tried to picture Wardle as a youngster, hurling a ball at a man with a bat. The image eluded me. Instead I found myself recalling my own father’s fury when I came home from school sports with a chunk gouged out of my index finger and was useless in the workshop for weeks. “What did your father teach?” I asked.

He stared at me in puzzlement for a moment, as if he had forgotten where he was. “Engineering,” he declared vigorously. “A genius with machinations of every kind.”

“Was it he who founded your hydraulic enterprise?”

“Not a bit of it,” he rejoined. “The HECC is the product of my genius, if I may so put it, and mine alone. You know, father wouldn’t have got on in the modern climate.”

“Mr Coxhill–”

“Do call me Roxton, old chap. Father was too much of a gentleman, you see. Too cautious. Of course, there are hazards with up-to-the-minute knowhow. That’s the territory. But one must be bold. Take risks. Should there be little losses, well, why else does one insure oneself?”

I looked at him. This must be it. A flood of verbosity he had poured out, but there might be sense hidden in it. I breathed in sharply. “You mentioned that you had some information.”

“Time enough, old man.” The teams began walking off the pitch, though I had seen nothing conclusive in the play. Coxhill hastened towards the clubhouse, hurrying to shake the hand of an energetic young man. “Jolly good, young Charlie. You really ought to up sticks and throw in your lot with us southerners.”

“I should, should I?” said the man. His voice was so familiar it was uncanny. “Well, I’m off south, all right.”

“I say, Constable, come and meet this young fellow. I daresay it’s him you’ve come to see, no?” Coxhill tapped the side of his nose, before vanishing in a haze of social niceties.

The young cricket player regarded me with a sardonic look that threw me quite off my guard. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Charlie Wardle.”

My jaw dropped open. I introduced myself in subdued tones, and he led me back up the steps to the dining room.

“Work with the old man, do you?” His eyes narrowed. “Has he sent you?”

“No, no. He gave me the day off.”

“Oh yes? How d’you like working with him, then?”

I fetched around for an appropriate answer.

“Say no more,” he smiled. “Someone’s got to do to it, eh?”

I laughed. “Do you not see eye to eye?”

“We have our differences,” he grinned. “He says I’m a republican agitator, I call him a lily-livered loyalist. Still, if you’re not for reform when you’re young, they say you’ve got no heart.”

The bewhiskered medic, standing in the changing room door, overheard us and tutted. “You are misleading the officer by omission, Charlie.” He turned to me. “They go on to say that if you’re not against reform when you are old, you have no brains.”

“Do they, Dr Grace?” Charlie grinned. “I’d rather have heart than brains any day.”

“That, Charlie, is why you are still bowling and I am still batting.”

Charlie invited me to lunch with him. I found a quiet spot in the corner while he went off to change his boots.

“Forgive me,” I said when he returned. “Are you not on the same team as the man with the whiskers?”

Charlie snorted. “The two changing rooms are not for the home and away teams, they’re for gentlemen and players.”

“I don’t follow, I’m afraid.”

He laughed. “I’m not surprised. In simpler terms, I get paid and he doesn’t need to. Toffs and peasants, see? You’ve got a lot to learn about cricket. Tuck in.”

Charlie Wardle was thoroughly engaging and I took to him at once. He was a textile worker, skilled, yet he had lost one job after another. He blamed the mechanised factories, which he called prison camps, run by faceless committees and shameless entrepreneurs.

“Where’s the end to it? They buy things up on a whim, then cast us aside when they’re done without fear of retribution. It’s madness. Father’s never forgiven me.”

“What for?”

“Moving to Lancashire. And the Preston strike. I went to gaol, see.”

“Because of the strike?” I looked at him in surprise, then recalled the news. “Ah, the riots too?”

“I’d take part in it all again, if it came. Which it will. Cotton’s drying up, with this bloody war in America. They’ll have civil war again here, if they don’t watch. Which side will you be on?”

“That depends,” I said. “We Scots were a bit taken aback last time you chopped the King’s head off.”

He laughed. “Look, I’m for reform. I may even be a republican. But father, he thinks that makes me a Chartist, or some kind of communist. He’s all out-dated. He wouldn’t know a communist if one smacked him in the nose.”

I recalled Chartism from Miss Villiers’ letter, but the word communist was new to me.

“Look what we’re up against. Thousands of years of feudalism, held together by aristocrats whose only interest is keeping the wealth in the hands of as few as possible. The newspapers pretend the issues are dead, but that’s just propaganda. D’you know there’s a war going on in this country?”

“Money talks,” I said. “Industrialists buy papers in order to control information.” It occurred to me that I was parroting what his father had said to me.

He looked at me with a new respect. “Point taken. But why need anyone go hungry? That’s what they were asking in ’48. The powers that be don’t like the sound of that.” He jabbed at his potatoes belligerently, putting on a pompous voice. “Keep them in their places. Down the mines. Off and fight Johnny Russian.” He spoke in an undertone. “All these people, if they’ve knives and forks on their tables but no food, well, they’ll end up cutting something. Wouldn’t you think?”

I gestured around us. “Should you really be hobnobbing with the other side?”

“Know your enemy.” He cut into his pie and watched the juices flow out with satisfaction. “And you don’t half get good fodder here.”

“A fairweather reformist.”

He laughed again. “I spout off about ideals and ideologies, yes. But I’ve no illusions. Whatever presses men together, even if it’s exploitation, can promote liberty. But you have to educate the hopeless, marshal the disinherited. Organisation’s the key.”

“Organisation,” I nodded, reminded of Worm and his long-term planning for the Professor’s boots. “That’s how you’ll transform society?”

“Maybe” he grimaced. “Not me, though. I’m sick of the old satanic mills. I’m off to Australia. It’s Stephenson I have to impress now.”

“The rocket man?”

“Heathfield Stephenson.” He pointed out a gent smoking on the balcony. “Captain of the All England Eleven. That’s the other thing father can’t forgive me for. I’m a better cricketer than he ever was. They’re touring Australia this winter.”

“Going to start a peasants’ revolt?”

“They don’t have peasants in Australia.” He chuckled. “Not yet, at least.”

“What’ll your father say?”

He considered for a moment. “He’ll be glad to see the back of me.”

I might have said the same of my own father, were I the one headed for the Antipodes.

“Five minutes, gents,” called E.M. Grace.

“Is that clock still broke?” exclaimed the man with the moustaches. “Can’t we afford a bloody watchmaker? I thought the club owned half of England.”

Charlie gave me a look.

“Clockmaker Jew fellow’s up there now,” Coxhill called out. He pointed to a ladder up to a trap door in the ceiling. “Fixed in two ticks, I’m sure.”