Whitechapel Conspiracy

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. Honoré 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?