Scandal at High Chimneys (28 page)

“Mind, I couldn’t possibly have known Lord Albert Tressider was there to get material for blackmailing Master Victor too….”

“Blackmail? Tress?”

“Well, sir, didn’t he blackmail Mrs. Damon in another way? That gentleman’s a beauty. He wants everything he can get, in every way.

“According to Victor, he turned up at Victor’s rooms when Cherry was there yesterday afternoon. At the time Victor didn’t think he’d heard anything, but Mr. Tress is nobody’s fool. He’s not likely to tell us what he saw when he followed Victor to the country. If he could get his fives on that letter, to hold over the head of an unstable young ’un who presumably would now be a very wealthy young ’un, he needn’t demean himself by marrying Celia Damon after all.

“In any event, you and Miss Kate here ran away to London. I had to set the trap immediately. And I thought it would catch the weasel. The danger—”

“Yes?” Clive prompted. “The danger?”

Whicher, standing by the chimneypiece, glanced round at Kate.

“The danger was that Victor mightn’t go himself to get the letter. He might send a deputy. And Miss Kate was in London. What’s more, she was alone in these rooms because there was nowhere else to send her except Mivart’s Hotel, where she wouldn’t go. If Victor
should
turn up there to see you, and throw himself on her mercy, and tell her the whole story, and ask her to get the letter for him … eh?”

Now it was Clive who sprang up.

“You thought he’d dare do that? To the girl he was trying to get hanged? And Victor thought he could persuade her?”

“He did persuade her. You write devilish good stories, Mr. Strickland, but you don’t understand much about criminals. That’s the answer.”

“In what way is it the answer?”

Whicher looked down at the fire.

“The Victor Damons of this world, you know, think they can persuade anybody of anything. Most often they do manage it. They never think they’re in any real danger, they never think
they
can hang from a gallows, until they feel the bracelets on their wrists. They’ve got too little imagination, and then too much. That’s all.”

Kate spoke out strongly.

“He didn’t persuade me,” she said. “It was only that I couldn’t bear it any longer. When
he
told me he wasn’t my brother, I was ready to help him because it wouldn’t be helping him; I knew it would be leading him into a trap. Clive, can you forgive me?”

“For what?”

“For letting him be taken? And bribing the hall-porter at Mivart’s to say I hadn’t been there?”

“But there’s nothing to forgive!”

“Isn’t there?” Kate shivered. “When I went into that promenade, I was horribly frightened. I was afraid he wouldn’t be following me to watch from a distance, though he said he would.”

“Well, ma’am,” observed Whicher, “it was a risk we took too. The betting was in favour of his following you; I thought he couldn’t help himself. And by that time Hackney had an officer watching both of you.

“Nothing was certain. Mr. Strickland was supposed to take off his hat when Cherry gave the letter to somebody at the counter. That would give the signal to the Peelers; we were hidden where whoever got the letter couldn’t see us. We couldn’t ha’ foretold his friend Tress would turn up.

“So it’s almighty lucky Master Victor took up a position not far from the Peelers when you ran to him with the letter, and Cherry followed and denounced him as she was supposed to do. Without that confession …”

Whicher rubbed his jaw, disturbed at what he remembered.

“You see, sir,” he added to Clive, “there was one other matter I didn’t tell you, though Hackney mentioned it when we were at the Alhambra this afternoon.

“It was easy to remember that nineteen years ago Mr. Damon lived at a place called Fairacres, near Doncaster in Yorkshire. It was easy to go to Scotland Yard yesterday and ask ’em to telegraph to the Doncaster police.

“They got the news from Yorkshire, right enough. Mr. Damon’s real children were Miss Celia, born in August, 1845, and Miss Kate, born in July, 1846; their births were registered in the parish. What’s more, the clergyman who baptized ’em is still alive. He remembered how a Mrs. Mary Jane Cavanagh, a young widow, came there as nurse just over twenty years ago and not over twenty-one years ago, as she’s claimed since.

“Harriet Pyke’s child, that proved, was nearly two years old when Mrs. Cavanagh was put in charge of the boy. Mr. Damon didn’t leave any record except an account in his will. If Mrs. Cavanagh destroyed the will, everybody was used to accepting Victor as a real son; it’d be done so quietly that nobody would have ever doubted. We could have shown he wasn’t a real son, to be sure, but proving murder was a different matter if we didn’t get a confession. Tell me, sir: if you thought the child was a daughter, which of the young ladies did you imagine was the one?”

“I thought it was Kate.”

“Ah,” murmured Whicher.

“Me?” cried Kate. “Why?”

“Because Celia and Victor both have brown hair and grey eyes. Harriet Pyke was described as dark, and you’re dark.”

The faintest shadow of a smile hovered round Whicher’s mouth.

“You won’t see very clearly, sir, if you maintain two people are brother and sister just because they have brown hair and grey eyes. Thunderation! You might as well prove Master Victor was Harriet Pyke’s son because he’s got a taste for booze too.”

“Clive!” exclaimed Kate. “You thought…. But didn’t it horrify you?”

“No. I can’t say it did. What does rather horrify me,” Clive spoke doggedly, “is this question of tainted blood. I could have sworn the murderer, whoever else it might be, wasn’t Harriet Pyke’s child at all. Are we reduced to believing that Victor shot one person and strangled another because he was the son of a woman who did the same?”

“No, by George!” Whicher said sharply. “But you
can
inherit an unstable temperament; we all know that. And then, if you’ve got solid motive enough, and you learn you’re the son of a murderess and believe you’re going to act like it anyway …”

The hush of the drugged hours, of suicides and bad dreams, held the town outside. Whicher went to one of the windows overlooking Brook Street. He threw back the curtains.

“It could apply to millions of people sleeping out there,” he said. “I’m not what you’d call an educated man, sir, but a cove named Hamlet puzzled about that before any of us was born. It’s all in what you think you are, sir. Thunderation, yes! It’s all in what you think.”

The End

T
HIS NOVEL ATTEMPTS TO
present, through the medium of the formal detective story, an accurate picture of life at several levels of society in the year 1865. It may vary from accounts with which the reader is familiar: chiefly from those of Victorian writers themselves, who were prevented by social taboos from telling the whole truth even when they wished to do so. Therefore I must beg leave to offer documentation.

With the obvious exception of High Chimneys and one other place, every scene in the novel is set at a real address in a real street. In some parts of London the topography has changed almost as much as the manners and customs. But these events are seen through the eyes of Clive Strickland, who is a man of his time and has not the gift of prophecy. He cannot be expected to read the future in any sense. It would be the height of clumsiness for the author to have intervened, explaining on every occasion what it was that Clive didn’t know. That is another reason why I beg the reader’s indulgence for these notes.

1 TOPOGRAPHY

With the aid of
Wyld’s New Plan of London
(published by James, Wyld, Geographer to the Queen, 457 West Strand, June, 1866), and H. B. Wheatley’s
London, Past and Present
(London: John Murray, 3 vols., 1891), we can reconstruct the background exactly as it was in 1865.

It must be remembered that Piccadilly Circus did not yet exist. Neither did Shaftesbury Avenue. A part of their site, between Oxford Circus and the top of the Haymarket, was occupied by a disreputable district known as the Regent’s Quadrant. For remarks about the Quadrant, see Mr. Serjeant Ballantine’s
Some Experiences of a Barrister’s Life
(London: Richard Bentley & Son, eighth edition, 1882). The Argyll Rooms stood on the site of the Trocadero. Oxford Circus, at that time, was called the Regent Circus.

Only one other main change affects the novel. Charing Cross Road, which runs from Oxford Street south to Trafalgar Square, did not exist either. A part of its site was then occupied by the Crown Street mentioned in chapter eight.

The opening of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, in the eighteen-eighties, was a desperate bid to abolish some of the worst slums in the world: the district of St. Giles’s, which no longer exists as a separate entity. Today, if you stand at the top of Charing Cross Road and look down the little street bearing southwards to the left, you will see all that remains of St. Giles’s High Street, with St. Giles’s Church in the distance.

2 POVERTY, CRIME, PROSTITUTION

The nightmare squalor of St. Giles’s is depicted in several novels by Charles Dickens. More particularly, for our own purposes in this story, Dickens wrote a factual article,
On Duty with Inspector Field,
in the issue of
Household Words
for June 14, 1850; it may be found in any edition of
Reprinted Pieces.
The account begins at St. Giles’s police-station; it explores, with vivid detail, the night-scenes in the shadow of St. Giles’s Church and on the slum-fringes of Oxford Street after dark.

Even Dickens, however, did not dare tell all the truth about economic conditions in the eighteen fifties and sixties; Mr. Podsnap and his kind said they did not exist. For the whole truth we must try Henry Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor
(London: Griffin, Bonn and Company, 4 vols., 1862).

Mayhew’s four volumes, a compilation by various writers of which he was editor, will turn unsqueamish stomachs today. The first three were originally published in 1851; the last, the “extra” volume called
Those Who Will Not Work,
published in 1862, is the one which mainly concerns us. Since squalor and degradation are not necessarily interesting no matter how pitiable, and since night-life and prostitution are always interesting no matter how squalid, emphasis in this novel has been placed on the last two. They are presented exactly as they existed, without exaggeration or prettification.

When first published, it would appear, Mayhew’s work did not blow up the polite roof because it would have a limited appeal to the casual reader. Even in our times, anyone except a student may well quail at the prospect of wading through four volumes of which each contains five hundred large pages of small print in double columns.

But a knowledge of the fourth volume is necessary for an understanding of Victorian night-life. The curious in such matters, who would learn without going blind over small print, are recommended to
Mayhew’s Underworld
(London: William Kinder & Co., 1950), an abridgment admirably edited and arranged, with a pertinent introduction, by Peter Quennell.

3 NIGHT-LIFE, REPUTABLE AND OTHERWISE

Mayhew’s accounts must be amplified by others which followed. In 1865 the authorities were growing seriously alarmed by a widespread and uproarious night-life which extended over an area stretching (on today’s maps) from Oxford Circus to Piccadilly Circus, and from there to Leicester Square, with all the fringes round about.

In 1865, with the law forbidding the sale of liquor after midnight, began the clean-up campaign which culminated when the Alhambra Music-Hall lost its dancing-license in 1870. The excuse for revoking it was the dancing of the can-can in a musical extravaganza. One present-day writer has expressed wonder at this, pointing out that the Prince and Princess of Wales had watched the can-can at the Lyceum without interference or protest on anyone’s part. But by 1870 the authorities were ready to seize at any excuse.

Engravings of the Alhambra as it looked then will be found in H. G. Hibbert’s
Fifty Years of a Londoner’s Life
(London: Grant Richards, Ltd., 1916), together with lore about the curious night-haunts in Leicester Square and a full list of all shows at the Alhambra from 1864, the beginning of Strange’s management, to the outbreak of World War I.

Two sharp clarifications, however, must be made here.

First, the Alhambra ballet then must not be confused with the decorous post-1870 Alhambra ballet of later years; and neither must be confused in any sense with the classic ballet of today.

Second, with one or two exceptions, all theatres offering stage-plays presented a drama so respectable and indeed so painfully moral that you could have taken your grandmother to see it.

Unless you occupied one of the boxes, it is true, your grandmother would have been infernally uncomfortable. In 1865 Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft took over the management of a little theatre in Tottenham Street (on the site where the Scala now stands) and rechristened it the Prince of Wales’s. Only in subsequent years did the Bancrofts introduce such luxuries as carpets on the floor, orchestra stalls which threatened to abolish the pit, and other refinements we find described in Marie and Squire Bancroft’s
Recollections of Sixty Years
(London: John Murray, 1909). Even then the theatre was often a rowdy place.

For instance, Charles Reade’s dramatization of his own novel,
It Is Never Too Late to Mend,
opened at the Princess’s Theatre, in Oxford Street opposite the Pantheon, on October 4, 1865. Some account of the near-riot on the first night is given in Bernard Falk’s
The Naked Lady
(London: Hutchinson & Co., 1934).

The last-named book has a misleading title. It is a biography of Ada Menken, who in October, 1865, was appearing at Astley’s in
Child of the Sun;
and who, rumour to the contrary, did not appear naked or anything like it in
Mazeppa
earlier during the same year. Being a friend of Charles Reade, she was with him at the first night of
It Is Never Too Late to Mend.

Despite protests from the audience at “too realistic” prison scenes in a rather naïve story, the play had the (for then) amazingly long run of 124 nights. It was what current slang called a “screamer,” or success; had it failed, the world of fashion would have described it as a “gooser.”