The Street Philosopher (39 page)

A few months afterwards, Nunn had received the appointment. He found himself dressed up in a uniform once again, and dispatched to the Brigadier-General’s headquarters. He was, he slowly came to understand, an aide-de-camp, and a captain. His duties seemed to consist of little more than following Boyce around, opening doors for him, standing behind his chair, and sitting in his carriage. Nunn experienced some unease at this strange new life, but was unable to identify its cause. He felt as if his brain was wrapped up in stifling gauze, as if every word he tried to utter was a fiendish puzzle he simply could not solve; as if even the very simplest of actions was a double-time march up a steep hill with a full field pack strapped to his back.

The Brigadier-General returned with an umbrella. ‘I do hope this latest downpour won’t delay us any further,’ he said briskly, handing the leathery contraption to Nunn. ‘Colonel Bennett told me that poor Wray is usually asleep by seven. I wouldn’t want to have to make the journey out to Bennett’s place again on another occasion.’ The Brigadier-General looked at his aide-de-camp. ‘You remember Wray, Mr Nunn, don’t you? You have spoken of him before.’

Nunn blinked, trying his hardest to think. Nothing came to him.

The Brigadier-General sighed. ‘No matter, Mr Nunn. Do not trouble yourself.’ He gestured towards the carriage outside.

Summoning all his powers of concentration, Nunn opened up the umbrella, stepping through the Albion’s double doors as he did so. There was only a narrow stretch of open ground between the doors and the carriage. The wide umbrella almost covered it completely. He held it up in the air with a reasonable approximation of smartness, and Brigadier-General Boyce emerged into the wet Manchester evening.

Nunn’s reactions were not what they once had been–far from it. But he noticed the man in the torn coat moving quickly around the carriage’s rear wheels, and he saw the lights of the Albion glint upon something sharp in his hand. Instinctively, he swept the umbrella from over the Brigadier-General’s head and pushed it hard into this man’s path. The attacker tried to keep coming, snarling loudly, going for Boyce now like a mad mastiff. A broken bottle speared through the fabric of the umbrella as its metal spokes bent and collapsed. Nunn felt the glass cut into his upper arm. Still pushing with the umbrella, he proceeded to beat the man down with his other hand, balled into a hard fist.

Nunn’s long convalescence had not diminished his physical strength, and soon the attacker was lying defeated in the gutter. Nunn then forced the hand holding the bottle to the ground, treading on it firmly, shattering the weapon. The attacker cried out as the fresh shards were pressed into his palm, and reached around with his other hand to claw at Nunn’s boot. With a start, Nunn saw that it lacked a number of fingers. He leant down and peeled back the remains of the umbrella.

Up until then, everything had happened too rapidly for the crowd to follow, but as the torn flaps revealed a hideously disfigured face, contorted with crazed energy, they recoiled with a gasp. Nunn found that there was something extremely familiar about this face. He stood very still, studying it carefully, spectral recollections drifting slowly over him.

‘’Allo, Lef’tenant Nunn!’ said the attacker boisterously, in an East London accent. His defiant grin exposed further the extent of his mutilation. ‘Cat got your tongue,’ as it, cock? What you doin’ still trailin’ around be’ind that cunt in there? Eh?’

Nunn turned. The Brigadier-General was seated in his carriage, not even bothering to look out of the window to discover what was transpiring in the street behind him.

‘I’ll get you yet, Boyce!’ bellowed the attacker, suddenly furious. ‘I’ll get you! You bastard!’

Two constables arrived at a run, one urging Nunn to step back whilst the other struck his stick against the attacker’s jaw, and then across his shoulders.

‘Shut your noise, ye hear?’ said the policeman harshly to the disfigured man sprawled at his feet. ‘Or d’ye want more?’

The man spat out a bloody tooth with a sneer. ‘You ain’t got nothing that I ain’t tasted before, Peeler.’

The stick rose and fell. More policemen arrived, and made their own enthusiastic contributions to the felon’s subjugation. The constable at Nunn’s side apologised to him for the inconvenience. He nodded absently, and climbed into the carriage.

The vehicle’s springs creaked under Nunn’s weight. He sat down opposite Boyce, lost in perplexity. His commander was busy attending to his moustache with his remaining hand, the left, helped by the small grooming kit that was kept on board the coach at all times for this purpose.

‘Who was that ruffian, then?’ inquired Boyce incuriously. ‘Some drunkard, I suppose?’

Nunn stared out at the dome of the Infirmary, which wore a gleaming patina of rainwater, and the drenched labourers in the square below, toiling on despite the deluge. ‘C-Cregg. I think. A private …’

Boyce looked up keenly, closing the mirror. ‘Yes, I remember the name. It cannot have been him, though. He was killed before the Redan on the same day that you and I received our injuries.’

Nunn put a hand to his brow. His head was throbbing. ‘There’s something else, Brigadier. Something about dr-drawings.’ He sighed in exasperation, and felt hot tears welling in his eyes. ‘Wicked drawings. And there’s more besides, b-but I can’t recall what it–what I …’

Boyce paused, as if considering this, and then shook his head with grave certainty. ‘No, Mr Nunn, my apologies, but
I can recall nothing about any drawings, wicked or otherwise. That is but a product of your beleaguered mind, I fear, as is your encounter with this long-dead infantryman. I would advise you to let such treacherous thoughts go, so that they can trouble you no longer.’ He studied Nunn’s arm, as if noticing the cuts on it for the first time. ‘Some of those are rather deep. Come, we must go back inside and have them properly dressed.’

As one who watches Manchester with a dedicated eye, your humble
correspondent cannot help but observe that much is currently being
said around the provinces of our busy city on the subject of disgrace.
Gossip of an exceptionally scurrilous sort is shuttling back and forth
across every shop counter on
Deansgate
; it is drifting in whispers
around the august warehouse-palaces of Portland Street and the
reading rooms of the Athenaeum; it is being shouted lustily over the
playing fields of Peel Park. Every word of it, needless to say, concerns
a pair of young gentlemen from two of our foremost families. It is
being reported with ludicrous confidence that these men are holed
up in the cellars of one of their fathers’ premises, a corrupted cabal
at their disposal, laughing at us all; and elsewhere others swear
that they have been seen climbing together on to a train at Bank
Top, loudly proclaiming their intention to escape to the Far East,
where they will be able to indulge their aberrant appetites in absolute
freedom. The term ‘disgrace’, of course, is frequently and vehemently
applied.

We do not seek to comment on the
gentlemen’s
alleged crimes,
or to speculate as to their whereabouts. We do, however, find
ourselves thinking that this term, with all it implies, is lamentably
excessive. Should it not rightly be reserved for those who have
committed acts of grievous harm–for those who have wronged
their fellow man, or betrayed a sacred trust? These two souls have
injured nothing but our sense of propriety, a fluid notion indeed
in a city such as ours. All we ask for is some consideration of the
complexities involved in this sad matter. Language, when so misused,
when so hysterically twisted, stands in danger of losing its meaning
completely.

Kitson reread this, his final paragraphs of street philosophy, and folded up the piece of paper on which it had been written. He knew full well that Thorne would not print the piece. The
Star’
s role was to fan the flames of scandal, not to attempt to dampen them. But he bound the report up anyway, along with his letter of explanation, and pushed both under the door of the magazine’s office. A gust of wind ran up the straight back of Corporation Street, carrying a cold spattering of rain. Kitson started back down towards the traffic of the warehouse district, heading for his attic, his mind taken up entirely with what he was about to do.

As he reached King Street, he was pulled from his thoughts by a sudden commotion a short distance up the pavement. A team of constables, about eight strong, had emerged from an alleyway, carrying a writhing man between them. They were heading for the classicised bulk of the new Town Hall–built, like so many of Manchester’s more recent public buildings, on the Athenian model–which also housed the ‘A’ division of the city police in its basement. This was most probably an uncooperative felon being taken down to the cells. Their captive could be heard cursing with all his might, demonstrating an insane passion which, along with his ragged, grimy clothes, indicated that his was a life of drunken vagrancy. He was not a Manchester man; there was a cockney twang to his obscenities. Kitson watched this fractious party with mild interest. Then the vagrant started to shout about the Crimea.

‘Shelled, I was! Bleedin’ shelled, by those bastard Russians!
Shelled
! Look at me legs, me face! All ’cos o’ that toff cunt back there! What you protectin’ ’im for?’

‘Stop your cursing, villain,’ ordered one of the constables as he attempted to grab hold of this indigent veteran’s thrashing legs, ‘or I shall make blessed short work of ye!’

At once, Kitson felt certain that this man was known to him. Ignoring the quickening rainfall, he walked over to get a better look. That distinctive pattern of injuries, with severe wounds to the face, hand and leg, coupled with the
crowing, indignant whine of a voice, left no room for doubt. The scarred man being borne unceremoniously towards the station was the private he had treated as the Redan’s guns had roared all about; the same one he had met in the advance parallel in the last minutes before the assault, who had insisted that he knew Cracknell. Kitson also remembered that he had heard his name, a single syllable he couldn’t quite recollect, in the Belle Vue Gardens only two days previously, when a witness had identified him as the perpetrator of that brutal attack upon the factory operative.

The felon was hauled inside, still screaming; and a dark form lodged in the corner of Kitson’s eye as abruptly and painfully as a speck of grit. He turned slowly to see a short, swarthy man in a worn black suit, writing something in a notebook. This man was standing some twenty yards from him, on the corner of Cross Street–the most straightforward path back to Princess Street and Kitson’s tenement.

He cursed under his breath, deciding immediately to head towards Piccadilly and then double back down Fountain Street. Setting off at speed, he ran straight into a loud checked waistcoat, well filled by the person inside it. A thick arm wrapped around his shoulders and steered him into an alleyway.

‘They are watching your domicile as well, my friend,’ Cracknell imparted calmly, ‘They want us both, and not for a spot of earnest remonstration.’

Kitson ducked under his arm and leant heavily against the alley wall. He’d known that this encounter was inevitable. Cracknell was not yet finished in Manchester.

‘I think it’s time we had a proper jaw, don’t you? All we’ve managed so far have been snatched moments–the briefest of meetings under some rather unfortunate circumstances. You must agree that we owe one another a civil conversation, at least. We should drink a glass to our fallen friends. To James Maynard.’ Cracknell paused, eyeing Kitson slyly. ‘To Robert Styles.’

Kitson did not allow himself to react to this. It was surely significant that after several weeks of determined evasion,
Cracknell was suddenly so keen for them to talk. Perhaps, he thought, this was at last a chance to draw some answers out of him. He looked around, refusing to meet his former senior’s questioning gaze. The black-suit at Cross Street appeared not to have seen them. ‘The police have your henchman.’

Cracknell shook his head with a rueful laugh. ‘Oh no, my association with Mr Cregg ended a good while ago. He developed a worrying taste for stabbing people, as you might well remember. I heard that he’s just tried to do in a certain Brigadier-General, in fact, over on Piccadilly, outside the Albion Hotel–that’s where they caught him.’

So Boyce was in Manchester. The second stage of Cracknell’s revenge was imminent.

‘No, that business at the Belle Vue–the distraction he caused–was purest serendipity. Good fortune has shone upon this little undertaking of mine. I am not a pious man, Thomas, but as I said to you at the Polygon, there is a higher agency at work here. Justice is being done.’

‘You’re just cutting that crippled soldier loose, then, without a backward glance? Leaving him to the Manchester police?’

Cracknell merely grinned, then tapped Kitson’s shoulder with the cane he was carrying. ‘I have a place in mind. Will you accompany me?’

Kitson nodded reluctantly, thinking that if nothing else Cracknell probably represented his best chance of evading Twelves and his minions.

They walked the length of the alley at some speed, soon coming to Market Street. Carts trundled past, bearing cargoes of banners, flags and poles, their wheels churning in deepening puddles. Kitson grimaced as cold raindrops splashed against his shoulders. Cracknell, however, was swinging his cane with complete nonchalance, entirely indifferent to the muddy rainwater that was saturating the cuffs of his ill-fitting trousers. He led them a short distance towards Piccadilly before weaving across the road and starting up the gentle hill on the other side.

Smithfield Market appeared between the buildings ahead
of them. The iron-and-glass pavilion was lit against the premature darkness brought by the weather, and a great crowd was taking shelter beneath it. A group of mill-girls were screaming as they pushed each other out under the jets of water that cascaded from the market’s overflowing gutters.

Cracknell turned, craning his neck, peering back down the hill. ‘They’re following,’ he said. ‘Come, Thomas, this way.’

Kitson looked back also, and could see nothing but shops shutting up and people rushing to escape the downpour. Cracknell, meanwhile, had disappeared down a narrow lane across from the market. Kitson hurried after him.

The rainfall seemed to slacken off almost completely, reduced to the odd stray drip. Looking up, Kitson saw that this was not due to the passing of the storm, but to a multitude of decrepit balconies, strings of forgotten washing, and the lean of the subsiding tenements, all of which were blocking the water’s path to the ground below. The only illumination came from the occasional candle flickering forlornly on a window ledge. Infants played in the gutter, their tiny hands full of slopping sludge. The stench of faeces and urine mingled thickly in the air with the sweet reek of decay.

They turned, and turned again; Kitson grew uncomfortable. Despite a number of months’ residence in Manchester, he had seldom ventured so far into its darker regions. But Cracknell seemed perfectly at ease in the stinking alleys, the dilapidation and misery causing him no apparent concern. He was walking fast. Kitson was having to exert himself simply to keep up. Old memories returned to him, memories of trailing behind the senior correspondent as he pursued his pleasure amongst the dusty stones of Constantinople; and later as he chased the army across the battlefields of the Alma Valley and Inkerman Ridge. There it was, that same broad back, confidently leading the way, utterly convinced of its own imperviousness.

‘Ancoats,’ Cracknell declared, waving his cane around, ‘in all its tumbledown fury. Never mind that bloody Exhibition,
this district is Manchester’s most notable achievement–although I think we can bet that on the morrow, the Royal nose will not be brought within a half-mile of its many distinctive smells. They say that Ancoats is to Manchester what Manchester is to England: the fundament of the fundament. D’you know, Thomas, I honestly think that the simple fact of this place, and the way the working people must live within it, is justification enough for the destruction of their masters, whatever else the grasping bastards might have done.’

‘Well, you have certainly destroyed Charles Norton,’ Kitson replied curtly. ‘You have destroyed his entire family.’

Cracknell chuckled. ‘Oho! Is that
pique
I hear there? If you are referring to your widow, Kitson, do please recall that I warned you quite explicitly that there would be trouble in that quarter. And I make no apologies for being a little ruthless. A cat in gloves, my dear fellow, catches no mice.’

‘She knew nothing of her father’s business. Neither did her brother, for that matter.’

‘But pain, Thomas, is purgative, and that family needed a bit of bloody purgation, did it not? Your widow has her charms, I’m sure, but she watched her father’s rise without questioning it for a moment. She took up her rooms in his mansion, and bought herself great wardrobes full of fine clothes, without a single second’s hesitation.’

Kitson formed tight fists inside his pockets, digging his nails into his palms. ‘She had just lost her
husband
, damn you. She was hardly—’ He stopped himself. There was absolutely no point continuing with this argument.

A dozen filthy faces were regarding them silently from a nearby cellar. After waiting with a sarcastic smile to see if Kitson had any more to say, Cracknell started off again. They came to an area of open ground–a small yard before the steep rise of a gigantic mill. Impassive brick walls stretched upwards, hard and featureless after the diseased jumble of the alleyways. Running along their tops, at least thirty feet above the ground, were the windows, thousands of small panes arranged in lines inside a leaden grid. The dirty glass
glimmered weakly, offering only the very slightest suggestion of gas lighting within. A great droning, crashing noise issued from this austere building, drowning out the splashing and trickling of the rain. It ran on and on, a continuous three-second cycle of disastrous, unbearable sound, clattering away incessantly. This, the tireless rhythm of the power looms, was difficult enough to endure out in the yard; the effect on those confined inside, Kitson thought, must be of another order altogether. The two men crossed the cobbles hurriedly, eager to be away.

Cracknell led them on towards the Oldham Road, Ancoats’ great thoroughfare and the site of some of the city’s largest factories. Chimneys towered above the lanes, pumping out smoke that seemed to vanish shortly after it had left them. Kitson put a hand up to his face; there was wet, sooty dirt sliding across his cheek, driven on to it from the atmosphere by the pouring rain.

‘Cracknell, where the hell are we going?’

‘Somewhere close. You’ll like it, Thomas, I promise.’

A long row of pawn shops and pestilent-looking boarding houses brought them to a large junction lit by a single sputtering lime-light. Cracknell stopped under a tavern sign, checking the streets for black-suits. The symbols upon this sign had mostly been obscured by dirt, but Kitson could just make out a heraldic shield, some feathers, and a crude scroll on which had been painted
The Trafford Arms
. He recognised the name. It was a popular inn and concert-room, whose custom consisted entirely of the operatives from the mills found all around it. They stepped inside.

The sounds of a lazy jig, played on fiddle, drum and flute, drifted through a large room with a balcony and a low stage. It had been built in what could loosely be described as the Tudor style, with the uneven wooden beams left exposed, and it was packed to the rafters with working people of both sexes, each with a jar of ale in their hand. Many had pipes or cheroots also, and tobacco smoke filled the Trafford Arms as water fills a bucket. Animated conversations were underway, the music almost lost amidst the raised voices and bursts of laughter. It was warm; Kitson was suddenly
aware of the cold drips that were running down his back and legs.