Theirs Was The Kingdom (72 page)

He recalled afterwards how Deborah’s name cropped up towards the end of a chat that had started with Henrietta expressing an opinion that Gisela was pregnant, and tailed off with him telling her that Giles, although no salesman, might be worth his keep as a peacemaker when the viceroys went to bickering again, as they surely would if the business struck a bad patch.

She had said, after a longish pause, “There’s still Deborah, of course. Do you think we’ll ever succeed in pushing her over the hump before it’s too late?” He said, chuckling, “If, by the hump, you mean a cheerless spinsterhood, no, I don’t, Deborah has other fish to fry.”

“Oh, stuff and nonsense,” said Henrietta, kicking her legs free of the sheet and settling herself with her hands clasped behind her head. “All fish are tiddlers compared with getting a husband and the longer she leaves it the more limited her choice. It isn’t as if she was a frump, like most unmarrieds her age. Why on earth don’t you steer someone her way? He would have to talk like a college professor, but you must know plenty of men who would be attracted to her. She doesn’t look a bluestocking and only gives herself away when she begins to talk.”

Digesting this he told himself that, had a man been asked to select the extremes of womanhood, he could not have done better than to cite Henrietta Swann and Deborah Avery. How did one begin to explain to a sensual minx like Henrietta the social conscience and intellectual curiosity of a woman like Debbie? It was too hot to try anyway, so he said, “A man doesn’t waste time parading possibles before a woman as sharp as Deborah. All one does is to wait and hope. She’ll probably stumble on someone when she’s in her forties.”

“And what’ll be the use of that, for heaven’s sake?”

“It wouldn’t be the slightest use to a wanton like you,” he said, leaning on his elbows and looking out over the moonlit paddocks, “but all Debbie needs from a man is companionship. So long as her health and vitality hold out, she’s enough to occupy her, take it from me.”

They forgot Debbie then, for she joined him at the window, lifting her face to the kiss of the south wind that drifted off the escarpment in tiny, teasing gusts, so leisurely in their approach that one had to listen for them in the foliage of the trees. But he remembered their exchange of views when he read the first of Mr. Stead’s articles a day or so later, for then it was clear that he had made a very accurate guess concerning Avery’s daughter, and what she was about just then. It was a long way short of husband-hunting.

2

He bought the paper at the foot of Ludgate Hill, a trader’s instinct warning him that something sensational was being hawked, for the newsboy’s stocks were diminishing as fast as he could distribute copies and the circle about him continued to widen as more and more top-hatted, frock-coated city gents moved in from Blackfriars, Fleet Street, or down the incline from St. Paul’s.

It was, of course, Stead’s broadsheet. He would have been surprised had it not been. The
Pall Mall Gazette
, God bless it, could always be relied upon to divide the nation into two warring camps, until the next broadside dissolved old alliances and formed new ones in British smoking rooms, suburban trains, and basement kitchens too, where it was usually smuggled in with the milk or the muffins.

Today’s issue qualified for that distinction. A single glance at the lead story assured him that few British patriarchs, whilst they would themselves enjoy every word of Stead’s latest sally into the stewpots, would leave the paper lying around the house for the edification of wives, daughters, and domestic staff. The main feature, blazoned in headlines that other editors might use to announce a run on the banks or the collapse of the government, screamed, “The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon.” Stead was astride his favourite hobbyhorse again, mounting another attack on city vice that would send temperatures and circulation soaring wherever the journal went on sale.

He carried his copy up to the tower, cleared his desk, and sat down to enjoy one of his favourite slack-hour occupations—that of observing the English through the lens of their Fourth Estate. He looked for no more than the usual generalisation of organised vice, according to the gospel of St. Stead, but had not read half a column before he decided that this was no ordinary diatribe, of the kind that had put a government in power on the strength of a few thousand butchered Armenians, and turned it out again by catching the flood tide of public indignation concerning that crank Gordon, who let himself be shut up and slaughtered in Khartoum. This was the scream of a soul in torment, so highly personalised and so fully documented that it was obvious that the crusading editor had done his own reporting.

Even so, it was not until he saw a subheading “Child of Thirteen Bought for £5,” that the full significance of the article was apparent. He understood then the lengths to which this strange, dynamic man had gone to make his point, and what a journalistic triumph he had achieved, preparing the ground for a promised series of revelations that were designed to force the government to act upon the subject of child prostitution or make way for legislators who would. Every line, every word, was a barbed arrow, aimed at the complacency of the men who had swept this particular scandal under their Turkey carpets; the attack had been mounted with a degree of journalistic skill that was rare, even for Stead. Nothing was spared the reader save the child’s ultimate violation, and even that was implied by a long row of asterisks. The virulence, and the recklessly stated detail of the article, almost took his breath away, but what was even more unusual was the fact—obvious to all but the most cursory reader—that Stead had assembled the facts himself solely in order to vouch for them.

There was an account of an interview with a brothel-keeper in the Mile End Road, and an even more graphic report of Stead’s interview with a certain Mrs. Jarrett, a professional procuress of virgins, the oldest of them fifteen. And following that, as a horrific climax, the tale of “Lily,” the theme-bearing thirteen-year-old, whom Stead claimed had been purchased on Derby Day from a gin-sodden mother, conveyed to a house in Regent Street, and closeted with a would-be seducer. Stead must have been hard by at the time, for he wrote of the child’s cry as “the bleat of a helpless lamb.”

But that was only an opening salvo, fired on July 6th.

Adam Swann, half English, half Gascon, had fewer illusions about his fellow-countrymen than most men who did business with them. He had come to admire a great many things about the English, among them tenacity, inventiveness, and buoyant self-confidence that Continentals mistook for arrogance but was not, for it stemmed from the heart rather than the head. He admired their steadiness and courage in peace and war, their deep and genuine concern for the basic freedoms of press and Parliament, and, above all, their almost mystical reverence for the law. But there was one aspect the English had that irritated and puzzled him ever since his return home after a youth spent in the East. He could never come to terms with English double standards as regards sex, and their gloomy habit of regarding it as an exclusively male function, locking the door on it socially and conversationally, and fostering the doctrine that any woman who found pleasure in it deserved nothing but social ostracism and a whipping at the hands of her natural lord and master or, failing him, the nearest available male.

It had always seemed to him that this attitude was not only at variance with all the noisy demands for fair play that the English voiced at home and abroad, but also incubated a domestic tyranny that made a mockery of marriage, courtship, and even debauchery, extracting the juice of human kindness from any legalised embrace and all the fun and frolic from unlicensed relationships. This double standard was not Stead’s main target in his blistering “Maiden Tribute” series. As a dedicated social missionary, self-righteous maybe but indubitably sincere, he was concerned, as always, with the under-privileged, and here Adam could applaud the fellow. If the man could beat some of the dust out of the hypocrisy of the English, then Adam Swann, for one, wished him well, and made sure of the next instalment by reserving a copy at his regular newsstand outside London Bridge Station.

If he suspected that Stead had shot his bolt in the first broadside, he was very much mistaken. Falling to with diabolical glee and reckless, it seemed, of the risks of libel or the label of public purveyor of pavement filth, the crusader warmed to his work in Instalment No. 2, recounting dealing with two younger procuresses, Miss X and Miss Z, who were prepared to offer wealthy customers medical certificates of virginity with the goods supplied and had, in fact, delivered three of a promised five virgins to Stead himself on a wholesale basis and at a price that allowed a second profit.

There was ample evidence in this issue that Stead was not acting alone in his investigations, for he spoke of a group of eminent adjudicators known as the “Mansion House Committee,” said to include the Archbishop of Canterbury and His Eminence, Cardinal Manning. Stead wrote of agents prowling the country for Irish girls and country girls whom they could corrupt and sell on commission, and had somehow contrived to get these vultures to explain the methods they employed—a pledge of marriage, a good situation, enlistment on the staff of a respectable business house employing a hundred or more young girls, and the like.

In a subsection of his third article published on July 8th (the
Gazette
was already banned from newstalls and selling on the streets at half a crown a copy), Stead wrote of a regular purchaser of children known as The Minotaur, who claimed to have debauched over two thousand working-class children. In addition, he all but named brothel-keepers, who freely admitted that Her Majesty’s Judges and legislators at Westminster were among their most lucrative customers, and mentioned certain servants’ registry offices and emporia as clearing houses for white slaves, alleging that some of the more spirited of the victims were drugged or strapped down for the initiation. In his final article, devoted to a summing-up, he described London as “the greatest market for human flesh in the world.”

Adam, reading each successive article with the detachment of a man familiar with the stews of the Near East and India, was neither shocked nor surprised by the revelations. What did astonish him was the terrible furore caused by the campaign, for here, if one was looking for it, lay the hidden sources of the practices Stead had chronicled. Here, out on the streets, was the blatant hypocrisy of a society that conducted family prayers, prosecuted pioneers like Bradlaugh and Annie Besant for advocating contraception, and even went as far as to describe table legs as “limbs” and adorn them with handsewn frills lest their curves should overheat the imagination of the young.

Slowly, but with a scorn that made him feel curiously isolated from his fellows, he watched the temperature of the capital rise day by day until it was at fever heat. Nothing in his experience had occurred on this scale before. It was as though London was in the grip of a steamy epidemic that advertised itself in the expressions on the faces of soberly dressed men clamouring for copies of the journal, in the quips exchanged by his customers and workforce concerning Stead’s latest revelations, but, above all, in the mounting demand that this man, who had had the hardihood to lay the facts before them, should be exposed for what, in the opinion of a majority, he was—a lewd and scandal-mongering opportunist, prepared to go to any lengths to sell his newspapers, even if his articles enabled foreigners (who had no standards of decency!) to jeer at Britain as a whited sepulchre.

Adam saw this, but the issue was not really personalised until he read the savage counterattacks made upon Stead in rival newspapers like
The Times
,
Lloyd’s News
, and above all, the conservative
St. James’ Gazette
, that took a high moral tone and branded the
Pall Mall Gazette
and its staff as pedlars of grubby fantasy. It was only then that he was able to gauge the extent of Stead’s vulnerability, and it occurred to him, for the first time since the Maiden Tribute series had appeared, that Stead’s danger surely extended to all his associates, particularly a woman associate like Deborah Avery.

It made him very uneasy then concerning her, especially when he recollected that he had not seen or heard from her in over a month, and prompted him to tell Tybalt he was likely to be absent for an hour or so and take a cab to her lodgings in Frederick Street, off the Gray’s Inn Road.

It was here, standing on her doorstep and knocking repeatedly without being able to rouse anyone inside, that he had a curious sensation of having played the same role in the same setting a long time ago. The recollection was so vivid that he paused with his hand on the knocker, thinking back nearly a quarter-century to a time when, in search of her father, then his partner and financial sponsor, he had come seeking him in nearby Guildford Street, to be told that he was in flight from the bailiff ‘s men and the Metropolitan Police.

He was a man not much given to premonitions, but he had one then and it made his stomach cartwheel, so that he thought, irritably, “Now what the devil ails me? What am I doing here, behaving as though the world was falling about my ears? Deborah is an expensively educated adult and if she insists on associating herself with Stead that’s her business, not mine!” He turned away with the intention of hailing the cabby who had dropped him here before the vehicle merged into the flow of traffic moving towards King’s Cross.

At the foot of the steps, however, he found his path barred, and in a way that increased his sense of unease. A young man was looking him directly in the face and saying, in the friendliest manner, “You won’t find her, sir. The old dragon inside says she’s gone abroad but we don’t believe her. Are you a relative?” But Adam, now thoroughly alerted, growled, “No, I’m not, young man, although I fail to see what concern it would be of yours if I was! We haven’t met, have we?”