The Star of the Sea (41 page)

What precisely he was seeking can never be known; and if a striking remark from the diaries contains any clue, it is possible he had little enough idea himself. He had heard it said often in his navy career that a hanged man experiences erection at the moment of death. It was how David Merridith had come to feel now. ‘Choked, strangled; a deathly stiff.’

He began to take more and greater risks. Soon even Whitechapel was not enough for him. Spitalfields. Shoreditch. Mile End Road. He drifted down to Stepney where the entertainments were darker; eastward into Limehouse where children carried weapons; down towards the riverfront, around Shadwell and Wapping, where even the police were afraid to venture at night. At least once he described himself as a journalist from Ireland; another time an Oxford professor of criminology; the owner of a brigantine; a manager of boxers; a man on the search for his runaway fiancée. Many years later he was still remembered on the docks; the wolfish aristocrat known as ‘Lord Lies’.

A city skulked in the shadows of a city. In the culverts and warehouses, boys would fight dogs; drugged women could be hired for the price of a newspaper. But women were not the interest of the prowler any more. ‘Woman delights me not, nor man either,’ he wrote, paraphrasing Hamlet in the masquerade of madness. The opium you could find there was strong and raw, straight off the ship from China or Afghanistan, illegal to buy without government licence but thrown around the wharfage like rice at a wedding. A single half-grain caused the stars to explode; a pod of grains made you think your heart was bursting. David Merridith chewed it by the juicy mouthful, until his tongue blistered up, and his gums and palate bled, and he flew like a death angel through the clouds over London. He came to like the tang of his own mouth’s blood. Sometimes he thought he had no heart left to burst.

Between Sutton Dock and Lucas Street was Hangman’s Quarter, a plot of rubbled and rat-swarming wasteland where the
girls were half dead with hunger and disease. Often he tried to speak to them, to give them money or food, but they did not understand that by now he only wanted conversation. Some of their images appear in his manic drawings; their faces like grave-cloths hanging on fists, blackened by the cudgels and boots of their pimps. It became his place of final resort. Every night ended in Hangman’s Quarter. He never went near the women now; he watched from the ruins as they fought and touted. And he drew those mastered women like a knife draws blood.

Perhaps watching them and being there carried the risk he needed now. Risk as narcotic. It made him feel he existed.

One night a constable approached him in the Mile End Road and said this was no place for a gentleman to allow himself to be seen. Merridith tried to appear affronted at what he called the impertinence, but the officer – an Irishman – quietly persisted. The way he kept calling the aristocrat ‘sir’ made it abundantly clear who had the power here. ‘A gentleman might even find himself blackmailed, sir.’

‘I don’t care for the tone of your insinuations, Constable. I merely got lost on my way home from a walk. I was dining with my father at the House of Lords.’

‘That Your Honour may find his direction, so. Next time perhaps you’ll accompany me to the station. I can show you a little map the Sergeant keeps in the cells.’

Through the toxified haze of his neural firings he was vaguely disappointed when the policeman walked away. What he wanted, he realised at that giddying moment, was not to be secretive but to be discovered and disgraced. To be kicked into the gutter and spat on by the respectable. Recognised for the untouchable he knew he was.

He returned to his townhouse that sweltering night shaking with an emotion he thought must be fear. We know he spent most of the following afternoon talking alone with a minister of religion; though what was discussed we do not know. Whatever it was, it appears to have changed nothing. At dusk that evening he was seen in Whitechapel.

That was the night he became aware that he was being followed. Near Christ Church Spitalfields he noticed him first: that tall,
cadaverous, unusually dressed blade with the huntsman’s short jacket and the mop of russet curls. His complexion apart, he might have been a gondolier. He was smoking a cheroot and staring up at the moon. Something about him took Merridith’s attention. For a while he didn’t quite know what it was. But then it occurred to him in a moment of fierce clarity ‘like the one immediately before the opiate brings sleep or stupefaction’. It was the man’s very nonchalance, his casual air. It marked him out like a pointing finger. He was the only man in the East End at midnight who did not appear to be selling or buying.

He saw him again in King David Lane, again at the bottom of Ratcliff Road, standing in the light of a gin-shop doorway and reading a newspaper that was folded in half. The sound of raucous singing was coming from the groggery: a song of the beauty of Whitechapel girls. Merridith watched for fifteen minutes. The man never turned a page of his newspaper.

Two women drifted towards the Viscount and briefly tried to tout him. A lamp-man illuminated the naphtha globes on the corner. A window opened. A window closed. A coach went past in a clatter of wheels. When he looked again, the man was gone.

Perhaps just paranoia: an hallucination of some kind; like the clack of footsteps behind him in the soot as he crossed by the match factory to find a hackney. But three mornings later he saw the man outside the house, peering down curiously into the below-stairs area. As though sensing the gaze from the drawing-room window he had looked up slowly and steadily to meet it. A foxlike face. Ginger sideburns. He smiled and tipped his hat and walked casually away, as leisurely as if he owned Tite Street and all its inhabitants and had finished making inventory of his possessions.

For weeks afterwards Merridith dreaded the arrival of the mail, certain it would bring an extortionist’s missive. He sat awake at night in a chill slick of sweat, cursing himself for his weakness but mostly for his stupidity. Laura would leave him. The boys would be taken away. It would be Laura and the boys who had to bear his disgrace.

On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, he realised he had contracted an infection. A discreet consultant doctor, a former college-mate at Oxford, had taken care of matters in a briskly efficient way. He had made no accusations; asked no questions.
Probably he did not need to ask. But Merridith would have to be careful, he counselled. He had been fortunate this time but might not be again. Gonorrhoea could cause insanity. Syphilis could kill. Such dreadful diseases could be passed to his wife. Given the sleeping arrangements at Tite Street that would have been impossible, but he appears to have made up his mind to swear off the East End.

December came. Laura and the boys returned from Sussex. Christmas was peaceful enough in the Merridith household that year. He began to calm down, to take less laudanum. In April the family engaged a controversial new physician, a pioneer of hypnotism and other unorthodox methods: he prescribed the smoking of hemp to soothe the patient’s nerves. It seemed to work, at least for a time. A strong swimmer since his boyhood on the shores of the Atlantic, Merridith took to bathing in the Serpentine early in the morning. The journals start to display a lighter touch: a man emerging from a long, fearful night. By summer he had become a regular at a Turkish Baths near Paddington, where he was ‘thrashed about by chubbies with the branches of trees’. He exercised at the gymnasium at his Mayfair club and ‘chucked about the medicine-ball like a champion bloody pugilist’. Relations with his wife evidently improved a little, though the use of separate bedrooms was always to remain. Sestinas and villanelles appear in the diaries, rather workmanlike little sonnets but not entirely unimpressive. (One, perhaps importantly, is entitled: ‘Reparation’.
⁴
) That he had done harm to ‘the unfortunate of the East End of London’ perhaps gave him cause for a deal of careful thought; so it might appear from his numerous large donations to the church groups and charities working in that area. In October 1844, he writes in a margin: ‘Certain painful events of the last several years have come to seem as those from the life of some other man; a creature with little to do with myself.’

And then one morning at breakfast what he had dreaded finally happened. His winnings from the raffle were delivered through the door.

¹
At the time of revising the present edition of this book (1915) Lord Kingscourt’s executors still insist that the drawings may never be published, and that only selected quotations from the journals may be used. (Mysteriously, one of his drawings appeared in a pornographic work published anonymously in London in the late 1870s. In fect it is not one of his ‘Whitechapel’ sketches but a copy of ‘The Three Graces’ from the book of symbols
Emblematum Liber
(1531) by Andrea Alcation, which Lord Kingscourt made while honeymooning in Italy.) The daybooks in which the Whitechapel drawings were made are kept under lock and key at the ‘Secretum’ or Secret Museum for Obscene Works at The Department of Antiquities, British Library, London. – GGD

²
‘Towards the end of the run occurred an unsavoury incident, recollection of which has never quite left me. A Negro cabin-lad, formerly a slave, was being cruelly set-upon by a drunken Commodore when a young Irish Lieutenant, Viscount Kingscourt of Carna, happened upon the scene. Contrary to every rule, the Commodore had stripped the boy. A brawl ensued during which the Viscount struck his superior officer. The former had been Middle-Weight champion at Oxford University, a matter the latter discovered ere long. It was only at the intervention of the Viscount’s father that profounder unpleasantness was avoided.’ From
Four Bells For the Dog-Watch: A Life at Sea
by Vice-Admiral Henry Hollings K.C.M.G. (Hudson and Hall, London, 1863.)

³
Though he was never a committee member of any such body, he appears to have made regular financial contributions to one: a society established by Dickens and his friend Angela Burdett-Coutts (of the banking family) ‘to rescue betrayed and unfortunate girls’. – GGD

⁴
Permission to reproduce has not been granted by the executors. – GGD

I
N WHICH
D
AVID
M
ERRIDITH EXPERIENCES A NUMBER OF GRAVE
R
EVERSALS
.

He looked at it for a time as it lay on the salver.
Kingscourt. Tiet Street. Chelsea. London
. It was not the error in spelling that gave away the contents, but the anonymously careful print in which the envelope had been addressed. No copperplate hand that might be identified: the exaggerated neatness of the poison pen.

‘Is something the matter?’ the Viscountess asked.

She had not seen the letter, Merridith knew that. Easily he could have pocketed it and waited until later to read it. But he did not try to conceal it; nor his fear. Instead he ordered the servants to leave the room immediately and he waited until his wife returned to the table. His thoughts at that moment may only be guessed. His actions we know about; and they seem perhaps strange.

He told Laura Markham he had loved her always, that he always would, as long as she would have him. But what was in this letter could not bring them happiness. It would change things between them, possibly for ever. He had suspected it was coming. Now it had come. She might feel she had to leave; he would understand if she did. He would leave the house himself if that were her decision. But whatever the letter’s contents, he could not hide any more. He had hidden for so long; the time had come to face things. Did she understand what he was asking? Could she bear to be asked it? She said she did – or thought she did – and would stand by him now, no matter the cost.

Opening the envelope, he sliced into his fingertip. A smear of betraying blood may still be seen across the first page.