‘Isn’t this fine, Richard, isn’t it just fine!’ Sophie Williams danced a little jig, oblivious to the strict looks of the sober locals, all dressed up in their Sunday best and on their way to church.
‘It is,’ replied Richard, slightly embarrassed at Sophie’s exuberance. ‘If we hurry on, we should see the river quite soon.’ He sounded anxious to escape from the citizens of Twickenham.
The young people had travelled to Twickenham by train and planned to walk along the river to Hampton Court. They had considered bringing their bicycles but Richard was not sure how suitable the roads and paths would be for two-wheeled traffic and he had an irrational fear of punctures.
Sophie Williams was twenty-one years old. She worked as a teacher in an elementary school by day and as a devoted campaigner for the suffragist cause by night. She was tall and slim with liquid blue eyes and wore her independence like a badge.
‘There is Eel Pie Island, Sophie. Should you like an eel pie for tea on our way home?’
‘I’ve only had eel pie once in my life,’ said Sophie. ‘I think it was by the sea somewhere when I was small and it didn’t agree with me. Maybe I should try again!’
They struck out boldly along the river path. A steamer from London was approaching the island, clouds of steam rising from its twin funnels and important hoots from its siren. The passengers stared eagerly at the sight of their landing stage and a faint cheer sounded across the March morning. There was a bright sun but a stiff breeze which blew the Thames into tiny waves that rippled against the banks.
Richard Martin was twenty-two years old. He was a slim, studious-looking young man with masses of curly brown hair. He lived with his widowed mother and worked as a clerk in Harrison’s Bank in the City. Richard had been there for five years now, studying at home in his spare time to improve his knowledge of commerce and banking. He went to evening classes to learn French and hoped to move on to German soon – Harrison’s had wide connections with other houses and merchants in Hamburg and Frankfurt and Berlin.
‘I’ve just got another three pupils in my class,’ said Sophie, as they struck out towards Teddington Lock. Richard had not known Sophie for very long but already he felt that he had a close acquaintance with the pupils in her care and the other two teachers in her school.
‘How many have you got now?’ he asked, keen to reduce matters to the safety of numbers. Richard had always been very proficient at numbers, equations, mathematical calculations that were invaluable to his work in the City.
‘Forty-seven,’ said Sophie. ‘Forty-seven six-year-olds.’
‘Do you think you should be paid according to the numbers of pupils you have?’ said Richard, looking for a formula in wide application in the Square Mile.
‘Nonsense, absolute nonsense.’ Sophie laughed. ‘I’d be perfectly happy to have fifty or sixty, particularly if they were all as well behaved as some of them. Little Mary Jones and Matilda Sharp are as good as gold. I wish I could say the same about some of the boys.’
Richard suspected, but he would never have dared say it, that the girls, potential voters all, might receive favourable treatment in Miss Williams’ class. Overhead a group of seagulls crying out against the wind hurried on towards the rich pickings of Teddington Lock.
‘That’s the one they call the coffin lock,’ said Richard, pointing to a deep tomb of a lock with water many feet below the river. ‘And that huge one there, the barge lock, can take a steam tug and six barges at the same time.’
He wondered if some of the produce shipped in and out of London and financed by bills of exchange underwritten by his bank passed through this very lock.
‘Just think of it, Sophie, somebody might send wool for America from the Cotswolds through here. And it would be paid for at each end through the bank!’
Sophie didn’t seem very excited at the thought. ‘You’re a romantic, Richard,’ she said, ‘a true romantic. For some people it’s poetry or music, for you it’s bills of exchange! But come on, if we don’t hurry up we’ll never get to Hampton Court at all.’
Richard was quite upset at being called a romantic. He didn’t feel romantic about locks. But he knew he felt very romantic about Sophie. She had a toss of her head that turned his heart every time he saw it. But he didn’t know if Sophie had any room for romance in her soul. She was so filled with the righteousness of the cause of women that she seemed to have no time for anything else.
‘You don’t want to have anything to do with girls like that, Richard,’ his mother had said to him when he told her of his new friend who lived at the far end of the street. ‘They don’t know how to care for a man. They’d probably rather be men, running round in those strange pantaloons and smoking cigarettes and wanting the vote for Parliament. Whoever heard of such a thing. Your father wouldn’t have let any of them in the house.’
‘But she’s very pretty, Mother, very pretty indeed.’
‘They don’t care about things like that, those new women,’ said his mother, a lifetime of scorn whipped into the phrase ‘new women’. ‘They’re not interested in finding a nice young man and settling down properly.’
His own new woman was striding ahead of him along the path. Richard hurried to catch up. ‘Wait for me, Sophie,’ he cried, breaking into a trot.
She turned and smiled. ‘That makes a nice change, Richard. Men asking for women to wait so they can catch up!’
She turned and, as if contradicting her own words, she ran off down the path, calling back as she went, ‘Can’t catch me! Can’t catch me! That’s what they say in the playground!’
Eventually he did catch her and there ahead of them was the Tudor front of Hampton Court Palace, with the King’s Beasts on guard around the entrance gate.
‘Cardinal Wolsey, wasn’t it?’ panted Richard. ‘It was built by Cardinal Wolsey in fifteen hundred and something or other?’
‘It was built by Cardinal Wolsey,’ said Sophie, moving effortlessly into teacher and suffragist mode in a single sentence. ‘Then he had to give it to Henry the Eighth. I expect he maltreated some of his wives down here. What right did he have to cut their heads off just because they wouldn’t give him another male to maltreat another generation of women? It’s dreadful. Just because men have the power they think they can abuse women as though they were cats or dogs or something like that.’
Richard groaned inwardly. He hadn’t made the connection between Hampton Court and the suffragist cause when he proposed this expedition. Now he suspected this tirade could go on all afternoon.
‘Really, it’s all so unfair,’ said Sophie, looking, to the young man, impossibly attractive as her eyes flashed with indignation. ‘I have to go to a meeting of the Women’s Franchise League this evening. I shall remind everybody of how we are surrounded, even in our history, especially in our history, by the great injustices done to women by men. There is talk of another petition for the suffrage. This time we shall get more signatories than ever before.’
Richard stared at her hopelessly, helplessly. If she felt like that about men, he wondered to himself for the hundredth time, how could she ever engage her emotions with one? Was conventional love incompatible with her views? Was his mother right all along?
‘Come along, Sophie, you can keep talking as we go along. What do you say to one of those pies on Eel Pie Island?’
In a gesture that lit up his heart like a sudden flash of lightning, she squeezed his arm briefly and ran ahead. ‘I’d love one of those pies, Richard. Can’t catch me!’
Every day the reluctant army made its way across London Bridge. Every day the slaves of Money and the Market went to their temple in the City by steam railway, on foot, by bus, by underground railway, by horse and carriage.
On Monday the rumour might be that there had been further finds of gold in the Rand. On Wednesday it might be that there was a great loan to be floated for a railway to link the remotest parts of Russia. On Friday it might be the flotation of another great manufacturing interest, the shares guaranteed to reach levels well above par in a day or so for those wise or foolish enough to buy them well in advance.
But of the identity of the corpse floating in the river there was no information. The popular papers printed stories on the body until even their over-fertile imaginations ran out. The procession of bounty hunters continued to make their way to the police offices, protesting their certainty of the corpse’s identity and barely concealing their greed for the gold of the insurance companies.
Powerscourt, as requested by the Commissioner, had put the word about Mayfair and Belgravia. Lady Lucy, a veteran of such missions now, had invented a story of an aunt of hers in the Highlands who had disappeared one winter day and not been found for a month, when her corpse was found floating in a swollen stream, grossly disfigured. She worked conversations round to this story all across her considerable acquaintance, but she caught nothing. Powerscourt’s sisters, pressed reluctantly into service, did their best but failed.
Only William Burke, Powerscourt’s financier brother- in-law, held out a faint glimmer of hope.
‘I’ve known men disappear for quite a long time – the pressure of debt, the fear of being hammered on the Exchange,’ he had said thoughtfully to Powerscourt in his club, savouring a glass of their finest claret. ‘I’ve known even more who should have disappeared and saved their fortunes while they could. But it seems a bit extreme to arrange to have your head cut off as well, unless there was some question of inheritance.’
Sometimes the police were hopeful. Occasionally they would find what they felt were genuine cases of lost or disappeared persons. Constables would be despatched to houses in Muswell Hill or Mortlake, Camden Town or Catford, to make inquiries. Always the disappearance seemed to be genuine, but the height or the age was wrong. The body itself remained in splendid isolation in the refrigerated mortuary of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, watched over by a couple of porters and a flock of unruly medical students.
And then, on a blustery Monday evening in April, at ten o’clock at night, there was an imperious knock on the door of the Powerscourts’ house in Markham Square. Lady Lucy was deep in Jude the Obscure. Powerscourt had fallen asleep by the fire, dreaming of cricket matches and late cuts in the summer months ahead.
‘Mr William Burke, my lord, my lady,’ said the footman.
A rather weary financier strode into the room and fell gratefully into an armchair by the fire.
‘I have just returned from the Continent. I’m on my way home to see Mary and the children, if any of them are still awake.’
‘Some tea? A glass of wine? Maybe even some lemonade to quench your thirst?’ Lady Lucy was quick to offer comfort to the traveller.
‘What a capital suggestion that lemonade is, Lady Lucy. Those trains are very dusty. Lemonade would be just the thing.’
‘Francis, you remember the corpse in the river, the body by London Bridge? Well, I think I may have some news but I am not sure. I have been to Germany on business, to Berlin, that frightful city, so very Prussian,’ Burke shook his head, ‘and to Frankfurt and to one or two other places. The only person of my acquaintance who fitted the description of the corpse – Oh, thank you so very much.’
Burke paused to drink deeply of his lemonade.
’That is uncommon good for a weary traveller,’ he said to Lady Lucy with a smile. ‘Maybe we could make something of it in the way of business. Where was I?’ He looked round suddenly as if he wasn’t sure if he was in Frankfurt or Chelsea.
‘Ah yes, the only person of my acquaintance who fitted the description of Francis’ body was Old Mr Harrison of Harrison’s Bank. I think he was christened Carl-Heinz but he came to be known over here as Carl and he was certainly the right age.’
‘How old would you say he was, William?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘Probably over eighty. Maybe well into his eighties. I made discreet inquiries in the City – you cannot imagine what impact it could have on a private bank’s standing if its founder had been found floating in the Thames without his head – and the word came back that he was in Germany, either Frankfurt or Berlin.
‘Now . . .’ He paused to smile again at Lady Lucy, thinking that five years of marriage had made her even prettier than when he had first met her. ‘. . . it might seem odd for a man of that age to go off to Germany at this time of year – in a few months it would be different – but he was always a tough and resourceful old bird. However,’ Burke leaned forward and looked Lady Lucy full in the eye, ‘I made more discreet inquiries when I was in Germany. I said I’d heard he was in town, would he care for lunch or dinner, that sort of message. But everywhere the answer was the same. Carl Harrison was not in Frankfurt. Carl Harrison was not in Berlin. Carl Harrison was not and had not been in Hamburg. I must have been misinformed. So.’ He rose and clicked his heels together in the German fashion and bowed. ‘No Old Harrison in Germany. No Old Harrison in London. But why should they say he was in Berlin when he wasn’t? Over to you, Francis.’
Powerscourt was looking at his fingertips, rubbing them slowly together. But it was Lady Lucy who spoke.
‘Could he not have gone somewhere else, William? The Italian Lakes, or somewhere on the Rhine, perhaps. It would be so dreadful if this corpse was that poor old man.’
‘I don’t think he was poor.’ Burke laughed cheerfully, a man reputed to be able to value the top men in the City to the nearest ten thousand pounds. ‘Certainly not poor.’
‘No matter how rich you are you shouldn’t have to end up like that. If it was Old Mr Harrison,’ said Lady Lucy, defending the rights of the dead.
‘I’m not sure how to proceed,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It’s unlikely that further inquiries in the City will make any progress. Maybe somebody should scout around their house in the country – Oxfordshire, did you say it was, William?’
‘It is,’ said Burke, resuming the mantle of business. ‘But please be very careful, very discreet. The Harrisons may know that I was behind the inquiries made in Lombard Street. Word will surely reach them that I made further inquiries in Germany. We need to be very careful indeed.
’And I must be off home. Thank you so much for the lemonade. You won’t forget that you are coming to me for the weekend in the country, to be there at the installation of my new vicar? I never realized that when I bought the house and the land I bought an incumbency as well!’ William Burke laughed in the joy of his own prosperity. ‘You have to read a lesson, Francis, you will recall. And I’ve got the Bishop coming as well. Publish it not in the streets of Gath, as the parsons say,’ Burke smiled at his hosts, ‘but I saved his whole diocese from bankruptcy three years ago. But that’s another story.’
With that William Burke, financier and man of property, departed into the night. ‘Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘come back, come back.’
Powerscourt had disappeared into his own thoughts. Lady Lucy was used to it by now. She smiled at her husband as he stared into the dying fire.
‘Sorry, Lucy. I was only wondering what to do. I think we need somebody to work their way in towards the Harrison house, the village, the neighbours, the postman, that sort of thing.’
‘I know who you are going to send.’ Lady Lucy leaned against his shoulder and put her arm round his waist. ‘You’re going to send Johnny Fitzgerald, aren’t you? Well, you just tell him to be careful. That other time he was nearly killed because of you, and that was in the depths of Northamptonshire. I don’t see why Oxfordshire should be any safer for him.’
Lady Lucy remembered the emaciated best man at their wedding, policemen guarding the doors, a wounded Fitzgerald strapped up like a mummy, almost fainting as he stood by the altar.
Powerscourt smiled at his wife, remembering Johnny Fitzgerald’s speech as best man at their wedding. ‘We’ll take care, Lucy. Very great care.’