The Whitechapel Conspiracy Read online

  Gleave let out a cry of outrage, half rising to his feet.

  Adinett was set like stone, uncomprehending.

  The gallery erupted in astonishment, and journalists scrambled to get out and report to their newspapers that the unbelievable had happened.

  “We’ll appeal!” Gleave’s voice could be heard above the melee.

  The judge commanded order, and as the court finally settled to order again, and a kind of terrible silence, he sent the usher for the black cap he would place on his head before he pronounced sentence of death upon John Adinett.

  Pitt sat frozen. It was both a victory and a defeat. His reputation had been torn to shreds for the public, whatever the jury had believed. It was a just verdict. He had no doubt Adinett was guilty, even though he had no idea why he had done such a thing.

  And yet in all the crimes he had ever investigated, all the hideous and tragic truths he had uncovered, there had never been one for which he would willingly have hanged a man. He believed in punishment; he knew it was necessary, for the guilty, for the victim and for society. It was the beginning of healing. But he had not ever believed in the extinction of a human being, any human being—not John Adinett.

  He left the courtroom and went out and walked up to Newgate Street with no sense of victory.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  “Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould,” the footman announced without requiring to see her invitation. There was no servant of consequence in London who did not know her. She had been the most beautiful woman of her generation, and the most daring. Perhaps she still was. In some people’s eyes she could have no equal.

  She entered through the double doors and stood at the top of the stairs that led in a graceful curve down to the ballroom. It was already three-quarters full but the steady buzz of conversation lessened for a moment. She could command attention, even now.

  She had never been a slave to fashion, knowing well that what suited her was far better than merely the latest craze. This season’s slender waists and almost vanished bustles were wonderful, as long as one did not allow the sleeves to become too extravagant. She wore oyster satin with ivory Brussels lace at the bosom and sleeves, and of course pearls, always pearls at the throat and ears. Her silver hair was a coronet in itself, and her clear gray eyes surveyed the room for an instant before she started down to greet and be greeted.

  Of course, she knew most of the people there who were over forty, just as they knew her, even if only by repute. There were friends among them, and enemies also. One could not stand for any beliefs at all, or even simple loyalties, and not earn someone’s malice or envy. And she had always fought as she believed, not always wisely but always with a whole heart—and all her very considerable wit and intelligence.

  The causes had changed over half a century. All life had changed. How could the arbitrary, adoring and unimaginative young Victoria have foreseen the beautiful, ambitious and amoral Lillie Langtry? Or how could the earnest Prince Albert have found anything to say to the scintillating and eccentric Oscar Wilde, a man whose writing was so compassionate and whose words could be so glitteringly shallow?

  And there had been an age of change between then and now, terrible wars that killed countless men, and clashes of ideas that probably killed even more. Continents had been opened up and dreams of reform had been born and died. Mr. Darwin had questioned the fundamentals of existence.

  Vespasia bowed her head very slightly to an elderly duchess but did not stop to speak. They had long ago said everything they had to say to each other, and neither could be bothered to repeat it yet again. Actually, Vespasia wondered why on earth the woman was even at this diplomatic reception. It seemed a remarkably eclectic group of people, and it took her a moment’s thought to perceive what they could have in common. Then she realized that it was a certain value as entertainment ... except for the duchess.

  The Prince of Wales was easily recognizable. Apart from his personal appearance, with which she was perfectly familiar, having met him more times than she could count, the very slight distance of the people surrounding him made him more noticeable. There was a certain attitude of respect. No matter how funny the joke or how enjoyable the gossip, one did not jostle the heir to the throne or allow oneself to trespass upon his good temper.

  Was that Daisy Warwick smiling across at him? A little brazen, surely? Or perhaps she assumed that everyone here tonight already knew their intimate relationship, and no one really cared. Hypocrisy was a vice Daisy had never practiced. Equally, discretion was a virtue she exercised selectively. Unquestionably she was beautiful and had a certain air of elegance about her that was worthy of admiration.

  Vespasia had never desired to be a royal mistress. She thought the perils far outweighed any advantages, let alone pleasures. And in this instance she neither liked nor disliked the Prince of Wales, but she did rather like the Princess, poor woman. She was deaf, and imprisoned in a world of her own, but still she had to be aware of her husband’s self-indulgences.

  A far greater tragedy, which she shared with perhaps fewer other women, but still far too many, was the death of her eldest son earlier this year. The Duke of Clarence, like his mother, had also been severely afflicted with deafness. It had been a peculiar bond between them, drawing them closer in their almost silent world. She grieved alone.

  A dozen feet from Vespasia, the Prince of Wales was laughing heartily at something told to him by a tall man with a strong, slightly crooked nose. It was a powerful face, intelligent and impatient, although at the moment its expression was alive with humor. Vespasia had not met this man but she knew who he was: Charles Voisey, an appeals court judge, a man of profound learning, widely respected among his peers, if also a trifle feared.

  The Prince of Wales saw her and his face lit with pleasure. She was a generation older than he, but beauty had always charmed him, and he remembered her most ravishing years when he himself had been young and full of hope. Now he was tired of waiting, of responsibility without the respect and the reward of being monarch. He excused himself from Voisey and moved towards her.

  “Lady Vespasia,” he said with undisguised pleasure. “I am so pleased you were able to come. The evening would have lacked a certain quality without you.”

  She met his eyes for a moment before dropping a slight curtsy. She could still make it seem a gesture of infinite grace, her back ramrod straight, her balance perfect.

  “Thank you, Your Royal Highness. It is a splendid occasion.” It flickered through her mind just how splendid it was, like so many others these days, extravagant, so much food, the best wine, servants everywhere, music, chandeliers blazing with light, hundreds of fresh flowers. Nothing that could be imagined to add to the glamour was missing, nothing stinted.

  There had been so many occasions in the past when there had been more laughter, more joy, and at a fraction of the cost. She remembered them with nostalgia.

  But the Prince of Wales lived well beyond his means, and had done so for years. No one was surprised anymore at his huge house parties, shooting weekends, days at the races where fortunes were gambled, made and lost, at his gargantuan dinners or overgenerous gifts to favorites of one sort or another. Many no longer even commented on it.

  “Do you know Charles Voisey?” he enquired. Voisey was at his elbow, courtesy demanded it. “Voisey, Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould. We have known each other longer than either of us cares to remember. We should telescope it all together.” He gestured with his hands. “Take out all the tedious bits between and keep only the laughter and the music, the good dinners, the conversations, and perhaps a little dancing. Then we should be about the right age, shouldn’t we?”

  She smiled. “That is the best suggestion I have heard in years, sir,” she said with enthusiasm. “I don’t even mind keeping some of the tragedy, or even the quarrels—let us simply get rid of all the tedious hours, the exchanging of phrases that neither of us means, the standing around, the polite lies. That would take yea
rs away.”

  “You are right! You are right!” he agreed, conviction in his face. “I did not realize until this moment how much I had missed you. I refuse to allow it to happen again. I spend years of my life in duty. I swear I am not convinced that those I spend it with are any better pleased with it than I am! We make utterly predictable remarks, wait for the other to reply, and then move on to the next equally predictable response.”

  “I fear it is part of royal duty, sir,” Voisey put in, “as long as we have a throne and a monarch upon it. I can think of no way in which it could be changed.”

  “Voisey is a judge of appeal,” the Prince told Vespasia. “Which I suppose makes him a great man for precedent. If it has not been done before, then we had better not do it now.”

  “On the contrary,” Voisey retorted. “I am all for new ideas, if they are good ones. To fail to progress is to die.”

  Vespasia looked at him with interest. It was an unusual point of view from one whose profession was so steeped in the past.

  He did not smile back at her, as a less confident man might have done.

  The Prince was already thinking of something else. His admiration for other people’s ideas seemed highly limited.

  “Of course,” he dismissed airily. “The number of new inventions around is incredible. Ten years ago we would not have conceived what they could do with electricity.”

  Voisey smiled very slightly, his eyes on Vespasia’s for an instant longer before he replied. “Indeed, sir. One wonders what may yet be to come.” He was polite, but Vespasia heard the faintest thread of contempt in his voice. He was a man of ideas, broad concepts, revolutions of the mind. Details did not hold his regard; they were for smaller men, men whose view was conceived from a lower level.

  They were joined by a noted architect and his wife, and the conversation became general. The Prince glanced at Vespasia with regret, a shred of humor, and then played his part in the trivialities.

  Vespasia was able to excuse herself and moved on to speak to a politician she had known for years. He looked weary and amused, his face deeply lined, full of character. They had shared personal crusades in the past, triumph and tragedy, and a fair share of farce.

  “Good evening, Somerset,” she said with genuine pleasure. She had forgotten how fond of him she had been. His failures had been magnificent, as had his successes, and he had carried them both with grace.

  “Lady Vespasia!” His eyes were alight. “Suddenly a breath of sanity!” He took the hand she offered, barely brushing it with his lips in a gesture rather than an act. “I wish we had a new crusade, but this is beyond even us, I think.” He glanced around at the opulent room and the ever-increasing number of men and women in it, laughing together, diamonds blazing, light on silks and pale skin, swathes of lace, shimmering brocades. His eyes hardened. “It will destroy itself ... if it doesn’t see sense in the next year or two.” There was regret in his voice, and confusion. “Why can’t they see that?”

  “Do you really think so?” She assumed for a moment that perhaps he was speaking for effect, a little dramatic overstatement. Then she saw the tightness of his lips and the shadow over his eyes. “You do....”

  He turned to her. “If Bertie doesn’t curtail his spending a great deal”—he inclined his head momentarily towards the Prince of Wales ten yards away, laughing uproariously at someone’s joke—”and the Queen doesn’t come back into public life and start courting her people again.” There was another guffaw of laughter a few yards away.

  Somerset Carlisle lowered his voice. “Lots of us suffer grief, Vespasia. Most of us lose something we love in our lives. We can’t afford to give up—stop working because of it. The country is made up of a few aristocrats, hundreds of thousands of doctors, lawyers, and priests, a million or two shopkeepers and traders of one sort or another, and farmers. And dozens of millions of ordinary men and women who work from dawn to dusk because they have to, to feed those who depend on them, the old and the young. Men die, and women break their hearts. We go on.”

  Somewhere at the far end of the room the music started. There was a tinkle of glass.

  “You can’t lead people from more than a certain distance away,” he went on. “She isn’t one of us anymore. She has allowed herself to become irrelevant. And Bertie is too much one of us, with his appetites—only he isn’t indulging them on his own money, as the rest of us have to!”

  Vespasia knew that what he said was true, but she had not heard anyone else put it quite so boldly. Somerset Carlisle had an irresponsible wit and a high sense of the bizarre, which she knew only too well. She still felt a note of hysteria rise inside her when she thought of their past battles and the grotesque things he had done in his attempts to force through reform. But she knew him too well to think he was joking or exaggerating now.

  “Victoria will be the last monarch,” he said almost under his breath, a harsh edge of regret in his voice. “If some people have their way ... believe me. There is unrest in the country more profound than anything we’ve had in two centuries or more. The poverty in some places is almost unbelievable, not to mention the anti-Catholic feeling, the fear of the liberal Jews who’ve come into London after the ‘48 revolutions in Europe, and of course there are always the Irish.”

  “Exactly,” she agreed. “We’ve always had most of these elements. Why now, Somerset?”

  He remained silent for several moments. People passed them. One or two spoke, and the others nodded in acknowledgment but did not intrude.

  “I’m not sure,” he said finally. “A mixture of things. Time. It’s nearly thirty years since Prince Albert died. That’s a long time to live without an effective monarch. We have a whole generation who are beginning to realize we can manage fairly well without one.” He lifted one shoulder slightly. “I don’t personally agree with them. I think the mere existence of a monarch, whether that monarch does anything or not, is a safeguard against many of the abuses of power, which perhaps we don’t realize, simply because we have had that shield so long. A constitutional monarchy, of course. The prime minister should be the head of the nation, and the monarch the heart. I think it is very wise not to have both in the one figure.” He gave a twisted, little smile. “It means we can change our minds when we find we are mistaken without committing suicide.”

  “It is also who we are,” she said, equally softly. “We have had a throne for a thousand years, and the notion of it far longer. I don’t think I care to change.”

  “Nor I.” He grinned at her suddenly, lighting his face with a wild humor. “I am too old for it!” He was at least thirty-five years younger than she.

  She gave him a look that should have frozen him at twenty paces, and she knew it would not.

  They were joined by a slender man, little more than Vespasia’s height, with a shock of dark hair threaded through with gray at the temples. He had very dark eyes, a long nose and a sensitive mouth, deeply lined at each side. He looked intelligent, wry, and weary, as if he had seen too much of life and his compassion for it was growing thin.

  “Evening, Narraway.” Carlisle regarded him with interest. “Lady Vespasia, may I present Victor Narraway. He is head of Special Branch. I’m not sure if that is supposed to be a secret or not, but you know a score of people you could ask, if it interested you. Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould.”

  Narraway bowed and made the appropriate acknowledgment.

  “Thought you’d be far too busy ferreting out anarchists to waste your time in chatter and dancing,” Carlisle said dryly. “England safe for the night, is it?”

  Narraway smiled. “Not all the danger is lurking in dark alleys in Limehouse,” he replied. “To be any real threat it would have to have tentacles a great deal longer than that.”

  Vespasia watched him closely, trying to make some estimate in her mind as to whether he believed as Carlisle did, but she could not separate the amusement from the sadness in his eyes. A moment later he was making some remark about the foreign secreta
ry, and the conversation swept past the subject and became trivial.

  An hour later, with the strains of a waltz sweet and lilting in the background, Vespasia was enjoying an excellent champagne and a while seated alone, when she was aware of the Prince of Wales a dozen feet away from her. He was in conversation with a solidly built man of middle age with a pleasant, earnest face and a quiff of hair that was thinning markedly on the top. They seemed to be speaking of sugar.

  “... do you, Sissons?” the Prince enquired. The expression on his face was polite but less than interested.

  “Mostly through the Port of London,” Sissons replied. “Of course, it is a very labor-intensive industry.”

  “Is it? I admit, I had no idea. I suppose we take it for granted. A spoonful of sugar for one’s tea, and so on.”

  “Oh, there is sugar in scores of things,” Sissons said with feeling. “Cakes, sweet pastries, pies, even some things we might have supposed to be savory. A sprinkle of sugar improves the taste of tomatoes more than you would believe.”

  “Does it really?” The Prince raised his eyebrows slightly in an attempt to look as if the information were of value to him. “I had always thought of salt for that.”

  “Sugar is better,” Sissons assured him. “It is mostly labor that adds to the cost, you see?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Labor, sir,” Sissons repeated. “That is why the Spitalfields area is good. Thousands of men needing work ... an almost endless pool to call upon. Volatile, of course.”

  “Volatile?” The Prince was still apparently lost.

  Vespasia was aware of others within earshot of this rather pointless exchange, and also listening. Lord Randolph Churchill was one of them. She had known him in a slight way most of her life, as she had known his father before him. She was conscious of his intelligence and his dedication to his political beliefs.

  “A great mixture of people,” Sissons was explaining. “Backgrounds, religions and so on. Catholics, Jews, and of course Irish. Lot of Irish. The need to work is about all they have in common.”