Sons of Fortune (43 page)

Abercrombie’s card bore a printed address (or “direction,” as his mother always insisted on calling it) in Fitzroy Square. But this had been scratched out in ink and another address written below it: Basement, 6 Cleveland Street.

The move was small in geographical terms but half a world away in terms of social cachet, as Caspar saw the moment he entered Cleveland Street. It proved to be one of those hybrid London streets compounded out of the district that surrounded it. There were houses for artisans and tradesmen who served the West End. Rooms for the living-out servants, window cleaners, and knife grinders who made a living in Bloomsbury. Rooms for City clerks. Small shops. And the inevitable sprinkling of brothels.

Number six had no basement—at least, none that was visible from the front. It was a tobacconist and confectioner’s shop with a handsome bow window. Caspar went inside.

“Mrs. Abercrombie?” he asked the man behind the counter. “Does she live here?”

The man was very old. His head, disproportionately large, seemed to float in the gloom. Stray reflections of it moved in long, pale pencils of light on the sides of the glass jars around him, like ghost acolytes. He shook his head. “No,” he said solemnly.

“I was given this address.”

“She died last night.”

“Died!”

“Or over Christmas anyway. You can’t be sure, this cold.” It was the tone in which he had discussed the weather with customers for over seventy years.

“Oh, Lord!” Caspar said. His whole strategy depended on getting a free puff in the
Companion
; and now it was ruined.

“What’s it to you, young sir?” the man asked.

“Did she say anything…” Caspar began, and then had to fight a terrible impulse to laugh.

A joke had gone around Fiennes last term:

Asclepius
[to Crito]: Where’s Socrates?

Crito
[who has been weeping all night]: He’s dead! He swallowed poison last night.

Asclepius
: Damn! Bother it! [Hoping against hope] I don’t suppose he said anything about that chicken he owes me?

Caspar hadn’t found it very funny—too far-fetched, he thought. Yet there he was, actually halfway through asking: “Did she say anything about an article for
My Lady’s Drawing Room Companion
?”
when the memory of the joke hit him. Only a small attack of intense throat-clearing saved him.

The man was looking at him in bewilderment.

“The editor sent me around for her copy,” he explained. “It’s late.”

He could see the man disbelieved him, and Caspar knew why: Anyone who looked less like an office boy or printer’s devil would be hard to imagine.

He glanced down at his clothes and gave a light laugh. “Oh! My uncle is the editor. The office boy didn’t come in today. I’m just helping.”

The man shrugged then. What was it to him? Her rent was covered and the parish would bury her. “Go down and see,” he said, nodding toward the passage that led from the side of the shop into the back regions of the house. “They’re laying her out now.”

It was almost pitch black. He stumbled and groped his way toward the balustrade that guarded the downward flight of stairs, the only feature he had recognized in the brief sweep of light before the shop door had closed again behind him. The darkness accentuated the smells of tobacco and spice and twist and confections…and another smell, which at first he thought was the black odour of a damp basement. But as he descended the stairs he thought it might instead be the smell of death. Suddenly he had to fight a fear of going into that room.

He knocked at one door. Silence. A laugh came from behind another door. He knocked there.

“Wait, my darlin’!” a woman’s voice cried out. She laughed again.

He tapped at the third door. After a while a naked filthy child of about five opened it. Inside he glimpsed such a scene of degradation as he did not know existed. The floor was awash in excrement. There were perhaps a dozen people inside. He could not tell, for the only light and air came in where two bricks had been knocked out of the wall, high up near the ceiling. He pulled the door quickly shut and held his nose and mouth as he stumbled toward the only remaining door.

It was from this basement that the once-genteel Mrs. Abercrombie had told the world how lived My Lady Stevenson and the Duchess of Wherever and Viscountess Whatnot in their gilded palaces! He knocked at what had been her door.

“Yus?” a coarse female voice cried.

He waited out of respect.

“Yus!” The cry was petulant. He went in.

Mrs. Abercrombie, a pauper, was obviously due no very great respect. She lay, for the most part naked, on a dirty deal trestle that was not one of the room’s furnishings. In fact, the room had very few furnishings: a mattress and blankets on tea chests in the corner. A big box trunk, open and almost empty. It held a few items of patched and faded clothing, well rummaged about by the two drunken crones who were now sitting in a giggling stupor beside the corpse.

“If you come fer the writin’ desk, my lovely, you’re too bleedin’ late!
’E
got ’is thievin’ ’ands on it.” She nodded at the ceiling.

He looked around the rest of the room and saw it was completely bare. At least Mrs. Abercrombie had had a window—all three square feet of a window. There was nothing in the way of paper. If there had been, it would have gone by now. The only hope was that it was in the writing desk, if she had written any copy at all.

He looked at her corpse; it was almost a skeleton already.

“She was starved,” he said, more to himself than to the women.

“Yus, but it wasn’t that what done for ’er,” one of them croaked.

“No,” the other cackled. She showed no teeth. “’Twas the cold, see.”

He began a silent prayer for her soul but the woman who had spoken first suddenly sprang up and whipped away the threadbare shift that half covered the corpse. “’Ere!” she cackled. “Want to see if she can still wink at yer?”

And, howling with helpless, drunken laughter, the two old hags tried in vain to pry apart those cold shanks of thighs, locked in rigor.

Caspar fled to the sane, mean world that began at the stairhead; the mad laughter pursued him all the way.

“Yes,” the old tobacconist said in the same conversational tone as before. “It’s the Other Nation down there, young sir. She had no right there, either.”

Then Caspar saw he was holding an envelope between his fingers. “Would this be what you were sent for?” he asked.

With relief Caspar walked to the counter, but the man clutched the envelope to him. “What would be the name of the periodical again?” he asked.

“I told you,” Caspar said, his heart beginning to race. “
My Lady’s Drawing Room Companion.
”

The man looked and pieced it out, syllable by syllable. Caspar felt sure he would then hand over the letter, but he looked up and said, “And the address, sir?”

Oh, Lord!
Caspar thought.
What was the bloody address!
He had seen it. “There’s two,” he said, playing for time. “The printer’s, and the office. Which has she put?” He did not expect the man to answer.

Think, think, think!
It was a part of London he’d never been to. Near the Strand—that was the picture he had. And a tree. That was a picture, too. It came to him suddenly and he almost shouted it out.

“Wych Court, is it?” he asked in careful carelessness. “Or the other one?”

Mercy! The man handed him the envelope, and then snatched it back. “Is she due any pay for it?” he asked.

Caspar prepared to face him down. He had already purloined the writing desk; he wasn’t getting any more—not without working for it. “What would the cheapest respectable funeral cost?” he asked.

“As a favour?” the man said. “I know an undertaker as’d do one for a tenner.”

That probably meant he could get one done for five.

“I’ll see what my uncle says,” he said, pointing at the envelope. “That may be worthless old rubbish.” Still the man would not let go. “And we’ll never know unless I get it to him in time for this issue, will we?”

That finally persuaded the man.

“Get those two hags out of her room at once,” Caspar said. “I’ll be back this afternoon.”

***

He found he could not forge her writing well enough to pass inspection, so he wrote the whole thing out again in as close a hand as he could manage. She must have been very cold and weak, he thought. And he personally wouldn’t have given tuppence for the information—a thin gruel of tittle-tattle. At the end he tacked his own nugget:

There was a time when every article in our households had a voice. To those with ears to hear, it spoke of its maker, for in those halcyon times no line divided artist from craftsman. How different are these days of ours, when artists who have been no nearer to our Birmingham iron foundries than the ticket office of Euston station mould sprays and wreaths and ferrous tributes to be poured out in limitless repeats by ironfounders who, though they may yearn to add a touch here, a fillip there, may not deviate one hairsbreadth from that which the remote artist has dictated.

Worst to suffer are those intimate articles never seen on public display, most especially that abomination, the French cast-iron bedstead. Leave it in a hotel in Dover, and it greets you next night in Reading, next in Macclesfield, next in Clitheroe…Dumbarton…John O’Groats. And think not, gentle reader, to escape to Iceland, for the man who so sprinkled the bedchambers of this fair land of ours with his deadening uniformity is even now in ballast for Reykjavik, you may be assured.

How fortunate we are, then, that among those emporia which are universally acknowledged as leaders in taste and elegance there is at least one, Avian’s by name, where they are prepared to reverse this dispiriting trend. How fortunate, too, that we have at least one noted manufactory of beds, The Patent Hygienic & Artistic Bed Company, where the artist works beside the craftsman, and both have their voice. The result is a bed that is sturdy cast iron in its utilitarian parts and elegant hand-carved wood and wellfound brass in its artistic
achievements.
[Caspar italicized the word to give it an heraldic ring.]

Are we equally fortunate in our arbiters of excellence? It is they, the great ladies who lead London Society, who, by their patronage (or lack of it), will breathe life upon, or crush, this tender flower of artistic revival among the leviathan outpourings of smoky industry. It seems the question is already answered, for Lady Stevenson of Hamilton Place (“Of course,” I hear you say) has installed the very first of these new beds in her son’s room, and more, we understand, are to follow. And this,
mirabile dictu
,
is before the beds have even appeared at Avian’s! Other noted furnishers, we understand, hold the manufactory in siege for their supplies.

He bought a day suit off a surprised footman of about his own build, had a cab brought around to the back door, and set off for Wych Court. It was early afternoon.

Wych Court was in a seedy part of town, not quite Holborn, not quite Inns of Court, not quite Fleet Street. But it was quite the best centre for secondhand books, quite the worst for dirty books, and quite the liveliest for editorial offices of journals and magazines. If Grub Street had an heir in modern London, it was here, just north of the Strand.

Caspar told the cabbie to wait. Then he ran upstairs to the
Companion
offices and, putting on his cockiest Yorkshire, asked for the editor. It was a superfluous question. The editor sat on a six-inch dais in lordly isolation, three feet from his assistant, on the right, three feet from his clerk, in front of him, and three feet from his copytaster, to his left. The whole office was half the size of Caspar’s bedroom.

“Mrs. Abercrombie’s copy,” Caspar said. “She’s sorry she’s late, but…”

The editor groaned. “Put it there,” he said pointing to a deep basket on the clerk’s desk. He had the face of a henpecked eagle, fierce from a distance, hesitant when seen closer to.

“Nay,” Caspar said. “She wants an answer and some money at once. It’s very hot is this. And if ye don’t buy it, I’m to take it on to the
Realm
.”

All four looked at him with open mouths. They were obviously finding it difficult to believe that Mrs. Abercrombie had issued orders so peremptory—or even that she had issued orders at all. The editor began to splutter in a high-pitched whine. “She…she…she what!”

“Mrs. Abercrombie?” the assistant said.

“I don’t believe it!” the copytaster added.

Caspar looked at the clerk, who just grinned back at him encouragingly.

“Are ye going to read it or aren’t you?” Caspar asked impatiently. “She’s very badly and I’m to get her physic on the way home.”

“Hot?” the editor asked. “What does that mean…
hot
?”

“You just read it.”

At least he looked at it. “That’s not her hand,” he said.

Caspar swallowed. “I told you,” he said “She’s badly. She spoke it out and I took it down. Except the last bit,” he added defensively. “She just told me, like, what she wanted and I wrote it meself.”

The man flipped through the sheets. “Usual rubbish,” he said to his assistant. Then Caspar saw his eye get caught by the addition. He read a few lines, darted a sharp look at Caspar, resettled himself in his chair, and read again from the top.

The clerk pulled a face that said
Good for you!

The editor finished and looked at Caspar with the deepest suspicion. “You wrote that?” he asked.

“Aye,” Caspar said belligerently. “What’s wrong wi’ it?”

“Yorkshire tyke like you!”

“Oh ah!” Caspar said. “Just because we don’t talk soft, like you, you all think we’ve no education up there.”

“Where did you get yours, may I ask?”

“Sheffield Wesley College.”

The Sheffield Wesley College had taken a whole-page advertisement in
White’s Directory for Leeds, 1853
. It being out of date and Nora having no further use for it, the book had hung in string-looped sections in the boghouse at Quaker Farm last summer, to be used as lavatory paper. Caspar, thinking the prospectus for this school made it sound a much more progressive place than Fiennes, had torn off the page and kept it. He could have told this man everything about the Sheffield Wesley College.