Theirs Was The Kingdom (75 page)

Elsie Griddle was featured in both sepia photographs and this was clear from the captions. Without them one would have been unlikely to connect the pictures, for the one on the right, underscored
Market Harborough, aged twelve
, was that of a chubby, pigtailed child in neatly pressed clothes, staring into the camera with the half-mischievous expression that children seemed to take with them to photographers’ studios. The other photograph, captioned
Elsie. Aged fifteen, Maida Vale, 1885
, was of a sallow, unsmiling young woman in a hitched up skirt that exposed one gartered leg bare to the thigh. The upper half of her body was naked, save for a kind of turban and she was holding a tray of fruit.

Her small breasts, supported by the edge of the tray, made nine of a row of seven pomegranates. The pose was not so much lewd as silly. It braced him, somehow, to meet Stead’s glance.

“You compiled this case history yourself?”

“I spent nine hours interviewing her, before we sent her on to Booth’s Salvation Army shelter. It’s all there, if you’ve time to read it.”

“I’ll read it. But first I should like to hear it from you.”

Stead sat and carefully crossed his legs, the gesture implying that he was now so sure of his audience that he could afford to make light of Elsie Griddle. “It’s not untypical. Given time I could produce a thousand Elsie Griddles. I thought she deserved a dossier because the police traced her parents by means of that earlier photograph.”

“She’s in prison now, as a prostitute?”

“She hanged herself, more than a month ago.”

Adam looked back at the photographs, closed the file, and laid it down. The silence in the room was embarrassing. Over in the tideway a tug hooted, its sharp, fussy blasts emphasising the nonstop grind of traffic heading north and south over the bridge. Somewhere below a vanboy laughed and the sound, in that heavy silence, was charged with mockery. He stumped over and slammed the window shut.

“Tell me about her.”

Stead half-closed his eyes. Behind the crackle of Old Testament fire and brimstone, Adam thought he detected a showman dressing the stage, positioning the players, and setting up the old Aunt Sallies. He was as sharply aware of this as if Stead had been ringing a handbell and shouting, “Roll up! Roll up! The finest show in Babylon!” But somehow it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter a damn. What mattered was Elsie Griddle, a suicide at fifteen. That, and Stead’s superb journalistic flair.

His mind returned to the second Babylon article, in which Stead had cited methods used to recruit child prostitutes.

“Was she employed at one of those stores or hooked at one of the servants’ registry offices you wrote about?”

“No, she was recruited on her own doorstep.”

“Then somebody paid her parents money?”

“It wasn’t like that either. Her people were decent folk. Very poor, of course, but church going. They probably still are. As I said, this is just one case in a thousand. To follow through half of them one would need a hundred trained investigators. Elsie’s pander posed as a curate, so where was the harm in allowing him to take Elsie and two other girls to London to see the sights? She had never been to London. Her mother saw her off. She saw her again, after they had cut her down. A matter for the police? Yes, it was that, of course. But what chance do the police have of tracing a man travelling under a false name and posing as a clergyman, when the trail is a year old? And even if they did, how would they set about proving a charge of abduction the way they intend to prove mine?”

“She must have been around fourteen then and there were three of them. When they realised what was expected of them… there must be other factors.”

Stead, all showman now, opened his eyes, sat upright, and banged so hard on the desk that everything on it quivered. “Good heavens, man, of course there were other factors! The other girls were taken off on some excuse by two well-dressed women. Elsie stayed with the ‘curate,’ who bought her a meal in a restaurant off Leicester Square. He gave her two glasses of wine and when she complained of giddiness he whisked her upstairs. His client was waiting for her, in the best room in the house. An Asiatic from a foreign embassy, who would pay as much as ten guineas for a virgin. Elsie cost eight. The agent had his own way with her after the client had left.”

“She could have gone home… gone to the police…”

“After two experiences such as that, and at ten o’clock on a winter’s night in a strange city? Come now, Mr. Swann, you didn’t make a fortune using that kind of logic.”

“After that she went on the streets?”

“After that she was trained as a decoy. She had a spell in hospital with venereal disease, and another in gaol for soliciting. In my opinion, it wasn’t either experience that drove her to suicide.”

“What then?”

“The fact that she had been the means of trapping other girls. That was brought home to her at the Salvation Army shelter, and I should have foreseen it. She wasn’t ready for the impact. She needed time to adjust. You never think of these things until afterwards.”

He stood up. “I still haven’t mentioned what I came here to tell you, Swann. Miss Avery is due at Southampton this afternoon, with that child Lily there’s been all the fuss about. I botched that too, as you’ll learn when the warrants are out.”

“Warrants? Against you?”

“Me, Bramwell Booth, Mrs. Jarrett, who was a procuress but has been working with us for years, and one of my reporters.”

“Deborah too?”

“No. She played a walk-on part this time. They won’t charge Deborah.”

“They won’t charge any of you. How could they? Your motives were never in doubt, not even among your most powerful enemies.”

“They’ll charge us none the less. The law has been passed now and they can’t afford not to.”

“But that’s monstrous! You got the Criminal Amendment Bill on the Statute Book.”

He seemed to expand momentarily. “Yes, I did. It’s a beginning, I suppose.”

He seemed indecisive for a moment. Finally he said, “Miss Avery and the child will come ashore without publicity. My information is they haven’t traced their movements in France. If you wanted to accompany me to Southampton we could travel in separate compartments and the press wouldn’t connect us. Would you care to do that?”

“No. I’ve correspondence to attend to… Would you trust this material in my charge for forty-eight hours? I could undertake to return it by registered post.”

“Why not?” He smiled, bleakly. “The tip of the iceberg isn’t the lethal part, Mr. Swann. Could your clerk find me a cab?”

“He’s under orders to.” He crossed to the speaking tube, blew into it, and gave Tybalt the instruction. Stead watched him, his stance and expression still indicating a certain indecision.

Adam said, “It’s my opinion that you still haven’t said what you came here to say. Would it help if I told you that the correspondence I had in mind is concerned with what came out of that briefcase?”

“Possibly.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “See here. I’ll appeal, if I have to, but I’m hanged if I’ll beg! You said just now that I have plenty of support and so I have. But it’s support from the committed people who are already bracketed with me. The cranks, you understand, Mr. Swann? It’s not the cranks who count in the end. This society is divided down the middle, as you’ll have decided for yourself if you followed this controversy as carefully as I think you have. The cranks on one side, the laissez-faire battalions on the other. But there’s a third group holding back and they’re the people who’ll decide this issue, and all similar issues in the future. I take it you are not a religious man, Mr. Swann? You don’t believe in a Creator, in a spiritual purpose, an afterlife?”

“I’ve never been sure, one way or the other. I’m resigned to uncertainty. Cheerfully, I might add, for there are enough problems here in all conscience.”

“One of Bradlaugh’s ilk,” Stead said, “and I don’t quarrel with that. ‘There is more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds…’” He was at the door now his hand on the latch. “I’m tired of leading the committed, Swann. The Booths, the Josephine Butlers. The Cardinal Mannings, even. The enemy has adjusted to them, you understand? They recognise their tactics and head them off without much trouble. We need back-stabbers now. Defectors, if you like, from inside the citadel. Men who have made their pile without compromising themselves. They exist, but I only know one and I’m looking at him.”

He raised his hand in farewell and then he was gone, descending the stairs lightly so that Adam was not sure of his departure until he heard hoofclops in the yard below.

He turned back to the desk, seating himself, swallowing Stead’s untouched brandy, and then methodically sorting through the odds and ends the editor had tipped from his case. He read each of them carefully. Once, twice, three times. And every now and again he made notes on a scratch-pad. He sat there a long time undisturbed, having warned Tybalt to leave him in peace. Then, having sealed Stead’s material in two large envelopes, he took sheets of headed note-paper and wrote two letters, one brief, the other covering three and a half pages of Swann-crested stationery.

The first, addressed “Mr. Burbage, c/o
Lloyd’s Newspaper
” was no more than a note. It said, “Dear Mr. Burbage, You may recall me as ‘Mr. Smith.’ We met outside the lodgings of Miss Avery, in Frederick Street. It would seem to me time to declare myself as Miss Avery’s guardian and state in writing my position concerning her efforts on behalf of Mr. W. T. Stead. I am, as you will see from the heading, a regular advertiser in your publication. Or rather I was, for I no longer care to associate myself with a journal whose aim it has been over the last few weeks to denigrate a man who has my unswerving support. Sincerely, Adam Swann, Man. Dir. Swann-on-Wheels.”

It was an easy letter to compose. The other, addressed to
The Times
as the most neutral of the London papers, occupied him the better part of two hours. He was never very relaxed with a pen in his hand. Composition demanded patience, and he had always been short on patience. At last, however, it was done, a forthright declaration of intent, set down without emotional stress of the kind one of Stead’s “committed” would be likely to use in respect of the contents of those buff envelopes. For he had taken Stead’s point. Back-stabbers are not required to use ornamental daggers. A bread knife will do; or a butcher’s cleaver. Only in the final paragraph did he allow himself the luxury of a flourish when he wrote, after five drafts, “Mr. Stead, by direct inference, has linked the capital of the British Empire with Babylon. After examining his evidence, much of it unpublished and unpublishable, it is my opinion he does Babylon an injustice. For Babylon, so far as I am aware, was free of cant. It flourished centuries before St. Augustine arrived in England.”

For a man unfamiliar with the trick of putting his abstract thoughts on paper it had, he thought, a certain impact but he felt no personal satisfaction as he read it over, folded the sheets, and addressed the envelope. He was only conscious, as never before, of needing a bath.

5

He was not much surprised to find Deborah waiting up for him when he returned home an hour after dark. Or, for that matter, to hear from her that Henrietta had gone to bed, after a restrained greeting and a somewhat embarrassing supper. Auntie was tired and upset, Deborah reported. Uncle Adam was having one of his moods. Uncle Adam had flounced off the night before. Auntie should be thoroughly used to this kind of display on his part, but she had discovered she was not. It was some time now since he had engaged in a sulk that properly belonged in the nursery, where the tantrums lived.

This at least coaxed a grin from him as he ate his cold veal and ham pie, and drank half a bottle of claret, topped off by what Deborah regarded as a very generous cognac. She said, watching him with a flicker of amusement, “I gather it was all on account of me,” and he said it was, but added that since then the issue had broadened somewhat to include himself.

“How do you mean? You haven’t seen her in twenty-four hours.” And then as he went on eating, “Do you want me to tell you my part in it now? Where I’ve been and what I’ve been about? That was what Stead had in mind when he gave me my marching orders as soon as I stepped ashore at Southampton.”

No, he said, her part in it could wait upon tomorrow’s
Times.
“You’ll realise then I’m in as deep as you are. Go to bed. You must be exhausted.”

She took this as it was meant—a signal of dismissal—and kissed him just above the right ear. “I’ll keep out of the way in the morning. The last thing I should ever want was to come between you two.”

“You’ll never do that,” he said, “for I’m still the gaffer here and don’t any of you ever forget it! Apart from that I’ve got my strategy organised, and your aunt never had any to match it on big issues. Did you ever think otherwise, all the years you’ve lived here?”

“Never once,” she said, “but you scared us sometimes by pretending to abdicate.”

He thought about that, smiling as he went upstairs and taking no pains, as he usually did when she retired before him, to tread silently. It was not difficult to advertise his approach in this way. Every stair and every floorboard at Tryst had an individual note of protest. Some, he was fond of saying, could play a madrigal.