Whitechapel Conspiracy

“Of course, or how else would we speak of them, except in dream? But I know you have worked for reforms, as I have, and injustice outrages you also.”

Now she was uncertain. He was not an easy man, but perhaps it was a rare integrity which made him so. It was not impossible.

Had Adinett killed Martin Fetters to prevent a republican revolution in England? That was a very different thing from reform by changing the law, by persuasion of the people who had the power to act.

She smiled back at him, and this time she meant it.

A moment later they were joined by Lord Randolph Churchill, and the conversation was no longer personal. With an election so close, naturally politics arose: Gladstone and the whole troubled issue of Irish Home Rule, the rise of anarchy across Europe, and dynamiters here in London.

“The whole East End is like a powder keg,” Churchill said softly to Voisey, apparently having forgotten Vespasia was still within earshot. “It will only take the right spark and it will all go up!”

“What are you doing?” Voisey asked, his voice full of concern, his brow puckered.

“I need to know whom I can trust and whom I can’t,” Churchill replied bitterly.

A cautious expression flickered in Voisey’s face. “You need the Queen to come out of seclusion and start pleasing the public again, and the Prince of Wales to pay his debts and stop living as if there were no tomorrow—and no reckoning.”

“Given all that I shouldn’t have a problem,” Churchill rejoined. “I knew Warren, and Abberline to a degree, but I’m not sure of Narraway. Clever, certainly, but I don’t know where his loyalties are, if it comes to it!”

Voisey smiled.

A group of young women passed, laughing together, glancing sideways and hastily composing themselves to a more decorous manner. They were pretty, fair-skinned and blemishless, dressed in pastel laces and muslin, skirts swirling.

Vespasia had no hunger to be their age again, for all its hope and innocence. Her life had been rich, her regrets were few; there had been an act of selfishness or stupidity here and there, but never for anything she had failed to grasp, nothing flinched from out of cowardice—although perhaps there should have been.

She did not find Somerset Carlisle and was conscious of a feeling of disappointment, suddenly aware that she had been standing a long time. She was about to excuse herself and leave when she was aware of hearing Churchill’s voice again just beyond a rose arbor. He was speaking hurriedly, and she could barely distinguish the words.

“ … refer to it again! It has been dealt with. It won’t happen again.”

“It had damned well better not!” another voice said in hardly more than a whisper, the emotion in it so intense the voice was unrecognizable. “Another conspiracy like that could mean the end—and I don’t say that lightly!”

“They’re all dead, God help us,” Churchill replied hoarsely. “What did you think we were going to do—pay blackmail? And where do you imagine the end of that would be?”

“In the grave,” came the response. “Where it belongs.”

At last Vespasia turned away. She had no idea of the meaning of what she had overheard.

Ahead of her, Lady Weston was telling an admirer about Oscar Wilde’s latest play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. They both laughed.

Vespasia moved out into the sunlight and joined them, for once actually intruding into someone else’s conversation. It was sane, trivial, funny, and she desperately needed to be part of it. It was brightly glittering and familiar. She would hold on to it as long as she could.

7

TELLMAN WAS STRETCHED to the end of his patience, trying to keep his attention on the string of burglaries that had been assigned to him. All the time he was asking questions, looking at pictures of jewelry, his mind was on Pitt in Spitalfields, and what Adinett had been doing in Cleveland Street that could possibly have been of such intense interest to Lyndon Remus.

His intelligence told him that if he did not apply his mind to the problem of the robberies he would not solve them, and that would do nothing but add to his troubles. Nevertheless his imagination wandered, and completely uncharacteristically, as soon as the hour came when he could excuse himself from duty for the day, he did so. Without waiting for a word from anyone, he left Bow Street and started making serious enquiries as to the habits of Remus: where he lived, where he ate, which public houses he frequented and to whom he sold the majority of his stories. That pattern had changed over the last year or so, there being a steady increase in the number sold to Thorold Dismore, until over the months of May and June it had been almost exclusively so.