The Whitechapel Conspiracy Read online

  Charlotte looked away. “I know. Anything could happen to him, and it would be days before I’d even hear.”

  “Nothing will happen to him,” Emily said quickly. “And I can see that he’s safer there than still where they can find him.” But there was more courage in her voice than conviction. She hurried on. “What can we do to help?”

  “I’ve been to see Mrs. Fetters,” Charlotte replied, mimicking the same positive tone. “But she doesn’t know anything. I’m trying to think what to do next. There has to be some connection between the two men that they quarreled over, but the more I learn about Martin Fetters, the more he seems an unusually decent man who harmed no one.”

  “Then you aren’t looking in the right places,” Emily said frankly. “I assume you have tried all the obvious things: money, blackmail, a woman, rivalry for some position or other?” She looked puzzled. “Why were they friends anyway?”

  “Travel and political reform, so far as his wife knows.” Charlotte finished folding the last of the sheets. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

  “Not especially. But I’d rather sit in the kitchen than stand here in the linen cupboard,” Emily responded. “Does anyone quarrel seriously over travel?”

  “I doubt it. And they didn’t even travel to the same places. Mr. Fetters went to the Near East, and Adinett went to France, and he had been to Canada in the past.”

  “Then it’s politics.” Emily followed her down the stairs and along the corridor to the kitchen. She said hello to Gracie in a matter-of-fact way. In no one else’s house would she have spoken to the maid, but she knew of Charlotte’s regard for her.

  Charlotte put on the kettle. “They both wanted reform,” she went on.

  Emily sat down, nicking her skirts expertly so they were not crushed. “Doesn’t everyone? Jack says it’s getting pretty desperate.” She looked down at her hands on the table, small and elegant, and surprisingly strong. “There have always been rumblings of unrest, but it’s a lot worse now than even ten years ago. There are so many foreigners coming into London and not enough work. I suppose there have been anarchists for years, but there are more of them now, and they are very violent.”

  Charlotte knew that. It was in the newspapers often enough, including the trial of the French anarchist for the assassination of Carnot. And she knew that in London they were largely in the East End, where the poverty was worst and the dissatisfaction the highest. That was the official excuse for sending Pitt there.

  “What?” Emily said quickly, seeing her sister’s expression. “What is it?”

  “Are they really a danger, do you think? I mean, more than the individual lunatic?”

  Emily considered for a moment before answering. Charlotte wondered whether it was to search for the right words, to examine her knowledge, or worst of all, if it were a matter of tact. If it were the last, then the instinctive answer must be very ugly. It was not Emily’s nature to be indirect, which was quite different from being devious, at which she was brilliant.

  “Actually,” she said quietly when Gracie had brewed the tea and brought it, “I think Jack is really worried, not about anarchists, who are only individual madmen, but about the feeling everywhere. The monarchy is very unpopular, you know, and not just with the sort of people you would expect, but with some who are very important and perhaps you would not think.”

  “Unpopular?” Charlotte was puzzled. “In what way? I know people think the Queen should do far more, but they’ve said that for thirty years. Does Jack think it’s any different now?”

  “I don’t know that it’s different.” Emily was very grave. She chose her words carefully, weighing them before she spoke. “But he says it is much more serious. The Prince of Wales spends an enormous amount of money, you know, and most of it is borrowed. He owes all over the place, and to all kinds of people. He doesn’t seem to be able to stop himself, and if he realizes what harm it is doing, then he doesn’t care.”

  “Political harm?” Charlotte asked.

  “Eventually, yes.” Emily lowered her voice. “There are some people who think that when the old Queen dies that will be the end of the monarchy.”

  Charlotte was startled. “Really?” It was a surprisingly unpleasant thought. She was not quite sure why she minded. It would take some of the color out of life, some of the glamour. Even if you never saw the countesses and the duchesses, if there was no way in the world you would ever be a lady, far less a princess, it would make things a little grayer if they should not exist anymore. People would always have heroes, real or false. There was nothing essentially noble about the aristocracy. But then the heroes who would be put in their places would not necessarily be chosen for their virtue or achievement; it might as easily be for wealth or beauty. Then the magic would be gone for no reason, no gain.

  All of which was a silly argument, and she knew it. What mattered was the change, and a change born of hatred was frightening because so often it was done without thought or knowledge. So much could not be foreseen.

  “That’s what Jack says.” Emily was watching her closely, her tea forgotten. “And what bothers him the most is that there are powerful interests who are royalist and will do anything to keep things as they are ... and I mean anything!” She bit her lip. “When he said that, I pressed him what he meant, and he wouldn’t answer me. He went quiet and sort of ... into himself, the way he does if he isn’t well. It seems an odd thing to say, but I think he was afraid.” She stopped abruptly, looking down at her hands again, as if she had said something of which she was ashamed. Perhaps she had not meant to reveal so much of what was vulnerable, and therefore private.

  Charlotte felt chilled. There was too much to be afraid of already. She wished to know more, but there was no point in pressing Emily. If she had been able to tell her then she would have done so. It was an ugly and lonely thought. “You don’t realize how much you value what you have, with all its problems, until someone threatens to destroy it and put his own ideas in its place,” she said ruefully. “I don’t mind a little change, but I don’t want a lot. Can you have a little change, do you suppose? Or does it have to be all or nothing? Do they have to smash everything in order to make any of it different?”

  “That depends on the people,” Emily replied with a tight, sad little smile. “If you’ll bend, then no. If you won’t, if you do a Marie Antoinette, then perhaps it’s either the crown or the guillotine.”

  “Was she really so stupid?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just an example. No one’s going to behead our Queen. At least I don’t imagine so.”

  “I don’t suppose the French imagined so either,” Charlotte said dryly. “I wish I hadn’t thought of that!”

  “We aren’t French.” Emily’s voice was firm, even angry.

  “Tell Charles I,” Charlotte retorted, picturing in her mind Van Dyke’s sad, brilliant portrait of that unfortunate man, stubborn to his beliefs right to the scaffold.

  “That wasn’t a revolution.” Emily retreated to the literal.

  “It was a civil war. Is that any better?” Charlotte argued.

  “It’s only talk! Politicians having nightmares. If it wasn’t over that, it would be something else—Ireland, taxes, an eight-hour day, or drains.” She shrugged elegantly. “If there isn’t something awful to solve, why would we need them?”

  “We probably don’t ... at least, most of the time.”

  “That’s what they’re afraid of.” Emily stood up. “Do you want to come with us to the National Gallery and see the exhibition?”

  “No, thank you. I’m going to see Mrs. Fetters again. I think you may be right—it’s probably politics.”

  •

  Charlotte arrived at Great Coram Street a little after eleven o’clock. It was a most unsuitable time for calling on anyone, but this was not a social visit, and it had the one advantage that she would be excessively unlikely to run into anyone else and have to explain her presence.

  Juno was delighted to see
her and made no pretense to conceal it. Her face was full of relief that she should have company.

  “Come in!” she said enthusiastically. “Do you have any news?”

  “No, I’m sorry.” Charlotte felt guilty that she had achieved nothing more. After all, this woman’s loss was far greater than her own. “I have thought a great deal, but to no avail, except more ideas.”

  “Can I help?”

  “Perhaps.” Charlotte accepted the offered seat in the same lovely garden room as before. Today it was cooler and the door was closed. “It seems that ambition for political reform was the obvious thing that Mr. Fetters and John Adinett had in common and about which they both cared very deeply.”

  “Oh, Martin cared intensely,” Juno agreed. “He argued for it and wrote many articles. He knew a lot of people would feel the same, and he believed it would come.”

  “Do you have any of the articles?” Charlotte asked. She was not sure what use it would be to see them, but there was nothing better she could think of.

  “They will be among his papers.” Juno stood up. “The police went through them, of course, but they are all still in his desk in the study. I ... I haven’t had the heart to read them again myself.” She spoke softly, with her back to Charlotte, and she went straight out and across the hall to the study, leading the way in.

  It was a smaller room than the library, and without the tall windows and sunlight, but it was still pleasant and very obviously well used. A single bookcase was full, and there were two more volumes on the leather inlaid desk. Shelves behind were stacked with papers and folios.

  Juno stopped, the light going from her face. “I don’t know what we could find here,” she said helplessly. “The police didn’t find anything more than the odd note regarding a meeting, and two or three written when John ... Mr. Adinett ... went to France once. They weren’t in the least personal, just very vivid descriptions of certain places in Paris, mostly to do with the Revolution. Martin had written some articles about the same places, and Adinett was saying how much more they meant to him with Martin’s vision than they had before.” Her voice thickened with emotion as she remembered such a short time ago when so much had been different.

  She walked over to the shelves behind the desk and pulled out a number of periodicals, sifting through the pages. “There are all sorts of articles in here. Would you like to read them?”

  “Yes, please,” Charlotte accepted, again because she knew of no better place to start. She would glance at them, no more.

  Juno passed them across. Charlotte noticed on the covers a line saying that they were published by Thorold Dismore. She opened the first and began to read. It was written from Vienna, by Martin Fetters, as he walked about the city and stood in the places where the revolutionaries of the ‘48 uprising had struggled to force the simpleminded Emperor Ferdinand’s government into some kind of reform of the crushing laws, the burden of taxes and the inequalities.

  She had intended only to skim through, catch a flavor of his beliefs, but she could not omit a sentence. The words leapt vividly to life with a passion and a grief that held her so completely she forgot the study in Great Coram Street, and Juno sitting a few feet away. She heard Martin Fetters’s voice in her mind and saw his face full of enthusiasm for the courage of the men and women who had fought. She felt his outrage at their defeat in the end, and a longing that someday their goals would be achieved.

  She turned to the next one. This was written from Berlin. In essence it was the same. The love of the beauty of the city and individuality of the people was there, the story of their attempts to curb the military power of Prussia, and in the end, their failure.

  He wrote from Paris, perhaps the article to which John Adinett had referred in the letters Pitt had found. This piece was longer, filled with an intimate love of a glorious city stained with terror, a hope so vivid it hurt, even through the printed words on the page. Fetters had stood where Danton had lived, followed his last ride in the tumbrel to the guillotine, where Danton had been at his greatest, where he had already lost everything and seen the Revolution consume its own children in body—and more dreadfully, in spirit.

  Fetters had stood on the Rue St. Honore outside the carpenter’s home where Robespierre had lodged, who sent so many thousands to their bloody deaths and yet never saw the engine of destruction until he rode to it himself, for the last time.

  Fetters had walked in the streets where the students manned the barricades for the ‘48 revolution that gained so little and cost so much. Charlotte found tears thick in her throat when she finished it, and she had to force herself to pick up the next piece. And yet had Juno interrupted her, asked for them back, she would have felt robbed and suddenly alone.

  Fetters wrote from Venice, which he found the most beautiful city on earth, even under the Austrian yoke, and from Athens, once the greatest city republic of all, the cradle of the concept of democracy and now a shell of its ancient glory, its spirit defiled.

  Finally he wrote from Rome, again of the revolution of ‘48, the brief glory of another Roman republic, snuffed out by the armies of Napoleon III, and the return of the Pope, the crushing of all the passion for freedom and justice and a voice for the people. He wrote of Mazzini, living in the papal palace, in one room, eating raisins, and of his fresh flowers every day. He wrote of the deeds of Garibaldi and his fierce, passionate wife, who died after the end of the siege, and of Mario Corena, the soldier and republican who was willing to give everything he owned for the common good: his money, his lands, his life if need be. If only there had been more like him, they would not have lost.

  She put down the last paper on the desk, but her mind was filled with heroism and tragedy, past and present alive together, and above all the inescapable presence of Martin Fetters’s voice in her mind, his beliefs, his personality, his fierce, life-giving love of individual liberty within a civilized whole.

  Surely if John Adinett had known him as well as everyone said he did, he must have had an overwhelming reason for killing such a man, something so powerful it could conquer friendship, admiration, the common love of ideals? She could not think what such a thing could be.

  Then a thread of thought came, like a shadow passing across the sun. Could they have been wrong about murder after all? Had Adinett told the truth all along?

  She kept her eyes down so Juno would not see the doubt in her. It was as if she had betrayed Pitt that the thought had even existed.

  “He wrote brilliantly,” she said aloud. “I not only feel as if I have been there and learned what happened in those streets, but as if I cared about it almost as much as he did.”

  Juno smiled very slightly. “He was like that ... so alive I couldn’t have imagined he would ever die, not really.” Her voice was gentle, far away. She sounded almost surprised. “It seems ridiculous that for everybody else the world goes on just the same. Part of me wants to put straw down on the streets and tell everyone they must drive slowly. Another part wants to pretend it never happened at all, he’s just away somewhere again, and he’ll be back in a day or two.”

  Charlotte looked up at her and saw the struggle in her face. She could understand it so easily. Her own loneliness was only a fraction of this. Pitt was all right; he was just a few miles away in Spitalfields. If he gave up the police force he could come home any day. But that would answer nothing. Charlotte had to know that he had been right about Adinett, and why, and she had to prove it to everyone.

  Perhaps Juno had to know just as urgently, and the darkness in her face was fear as to what she might find out about her husband. There had to be something vast ... and at least to Adinett, unendurable.

  And secret! He had gone to the gallows rather than speak of it, even to excuse himself.

  “We had better look further,” she said at last. “What we want may not be here in this room, but it is the best place to begin.” It was also the only place, so far.

  Juno bent obediently and opened the desk drawers. For one
of them Juno sent to the kitchen for a knife, and then pried it open, splintering the wood.

  “A pity,” she said, biting her lip. “I don’t suppose it can be mended, but I didn’t have the key.”

  They began there since it was the only one specifically protected from intrusion.

  Charlotte had read three letters before she started to see a pattern. They were carefully worded; the casual glance would have found nothing remarkable in them—in fact, they were rather dry. The subject matter was theoretical: the political reform of a state which had no name, whose leaders were spoken of personally rather than by office. There was no drama, no passion, only ideals; as if it were an exercise of the mind, something one writes for an examination.

  The first letter was from Charles Voisey, the appeals judge.

  My dear Fetters,

  I read your paper with the greatest interest. You raise many points with which I agree, and some I had not considered, but on weighing what you have to say, I believe you are quite right in your thinking.

  There are other areas in which I cannot go as far as you do, but I understand the influences which have affected you, and in your place I might share your view, even if not the extremity of it.

  Thank you for the pottery, which arrived safely, and now graces my private study. It is a most exquisite piece, and a constant reminder to me of the glories of the past, and the spirits of great men to whom we owe so much ... as you have said, a debt for which history will hold us accountable, even if we ourselves do not.

  I look forward to conversing with you further,

  Your ally in the cause,

  Charles Voisey

  The next one was in a similar tone; it was from Thorold Dismore, the newspaper proprietor. It too was largely in admiration for Fetters’s work, and requested that he write a further series of articles. It was very recently dated, so presumably the articles were yet to be written. There was a rough draft of Fetters’s acceptance. There was no way of telling whether the final had been sent or not.