“That depends,” he replied.
“On?”
“On what I get in return. I don’t want to be too commercial here, but we deal in information and information has a price. You know that.”
“I thought you liked me.”
“Not that much.”
“I have promised to be absolutely discreet on the matter of Ravenscliff’s companies. It’s in my contract.”
“Good for you. But since when has discretion involved not telling me things? I will make sure nothing is ever traced back to you.”
“I can’t break my word so swiftly.”
“You could promise to break it after a decent interval, then.”
“You know perfectly well what I mean.”
“I do. I don’t want tittle-tattle. Mistresses, wild parties, Lady Ravenscliff’s lovers…”
“She has lovers?”
“I would imagine so. Ravenscliff was hardly a romantic figure, and she, so I understand, is foreign. But I have no idea. I was merely saying that I am not interested in such things. I am interested in money, that is all.”
“I’ve noticed that. You must tell me why one day.”
“If you don’t understand it will be pointless to try and explain. A bit like trying to explain Mozart to someone who is tone deaf.”
“But you are so poor yourself.”
“I am paid a perfectly decent salary. More than enough for my needs. That is not the point. Just because I cannot paint doesn’t mean I do not like paintings. And before you draw obvious parallels, you do not have to admire a painter to admire his works. Ravenscliff, for example, was a magician with money; I admired his skill and invention. That does not mean I admired him personally.”
“So? Tell me.”
Wilf shook his head. “We must have an agreement.”
I hesitated, then nodded. “Very well. Anything that might interest Seyd & Co. I might pass onto you. But I decide.”
“Fair enough. You wouldn’t be able to keep it to yourself anyway. You are a reporter. And I strongly doubt that you will find out anything.”
“Thank you for your confidence. Now, tell me about Ravenscliff.”
“Certainly not. I’m very busy today. I will provide you with information. Some information. The rest is up to you. Besides, I already told you that our own labours were confiscated.”
“Then what’s the point…”
“I prepared a summary of his career and current businesses—current as of about a year ago, that is. I must have forgotten to hand it over to young Seyd. Very forgetful of me. I will provide you with names. I will listen to your speculations and offer advice and tell you if I think you are going wrong. Which you will undoubtedly do.”
He levered himself out of his chair and opened a filing cabinet behind him. Pulled out a file and gave it to me.
It was only about five pages long. “Is that it?” I asked incredulously.
Wilf looked offended. “What did you expect? A novel? Every word counts. It is a distillation of years of knowledge. Our clients are financiers, not gentlemen of leisure with nothing better to do than settle down for a good long read. How many words do you need to describe one of your trials, in any case?”
I sniffed. “I was expecting a bit more.”
“You’ll survive the disappointment. Go and read it. Then, if you want my recommendation, go and read your own newspaper.”
CHAPTER 5
It was past five when I emerged, and a day of glorious weather. Not the sort of day to be working. Do not misunderstand me; I am a conscientious man. I work hard and have no trouble staying up all night or hanging around in the rain for hours when necessary. But sometimes the allure of life is irresistible. London, in all its glory on a spring evening, was everything that made work, however honest, seem very much a second-best option.
I loved London, and still do. I have now travelled to many cities, although at that stage in my life I had seen little, but have never come across anywhere which even remotely compares with it. Just looking up and down the street in which Seyd & Co. was located provided enough material for a dozen novels. The beggar sitting, as he always did, by the jeweller’s opposite, singing a song which was so execrable people gave him money to keep quiet. The delivery boys giggling to themselves over some joke. The bearded man in strange clothes walking quietly on the other side, keeping close to the wall. Perhaps he was the richest person in the street? Perhaps the poorest? The old man with a military cast to him, dignified and correct; a doorman or porter, whose best days passed some forty years previously when he breathed the air of India or Africa. But punctilious, with shoes shined and trouser creases pressed like razors.
The merchants and brokers and agencies and manufactories which could be found down the grimy little alleys and in the courtyards had not yet disgorged their occupants; they would stay as the light faded or until the work was done. Contracts were being drawn up, shipments prepared, cargoes checked over. Auctions of goods were under way in the hall over the road, which had drawn merchants in furs, just as earlier in the day the room had thronged with traders in wax or whale blubber or pig iron. The food stalls to feed the office boys and clerks were setting up; the smell of sausages and fish was just a faint tang in the air, although it would get stronger as the evening wore on. The odd pair walking together in conversation, one a huge African, dark as night, the other a pale-skinned, weedy-looking man with blond hair, Scandinavian, at a guess. Sailors probably, their ship docked a mile or so up river after a journey of thousands of miles to deliver its cargo of—what? Tea? Coffee? Animals? Guano? Ore? Precious jewels or dirty minerals?
Just one street. Multiply it by thousands and you have London, sprawling over the landscape, containing every vice and virtue, every language, every kindness and cruelty. It is incomprehensible, unpredictable and strange. Huge wealth and greater poverty, every disease you could imagine, and every pleasure. It had frightened me when I first arrived; it frightens me now. It is an unnatural place, as far from the Garden of Eden as you could imagine.
I had several things to do, and most of them needed the Duck. I had not eaten all day; I wanted to read Wilf’s words of wisdom and I needed to resign from my job. The Duck offered food, a quiet table and sooner or later it would offer the sight of my editor propped up against the bar, as he always was before he went in to oversee the production of the next morning’s paper. Robert McEwen was a man of predictable habits. At five-thirty in the evening he would travel from Camden to the newspaper’s offices. He would walk to the pub and stay for half an hour, rarely saying a word to a soul; under his arm would be a copy of that morning’s paper. If he was in a good mood, it would remain there, untouched. If he felt we had been beaten in some particular he would pull the paper out impatiently, look at it, put it back, or rap it on the counter. The office kept a boy in the pub especially to watch him. “He’s rapping,” would come the report, and a collective groan would go up. He would stump in, glowering, and sooner or later would lose his temper. Someone would be shouted at. An office boy would be cuffed around the ear. A pile of paper would be thrown at someone’s head.
Then the storm would pass and we could get down to business, and McEwen would become as he usually was: concentrated, moderate, reasonable and sensible. He could not be one without occasionally being the other, and the evening would pass until near three in the morning when he, and the paper, could be put to bed, duty done, the world informed, the presses rolling.
The Chronicle, to Robert McEwen, was not so much a newspaper, it was a mission. He considered it a moral force in the world. Most people—including the majority of those who wrote for it—thought it was just a newspaper. McEwen disagreed. He brought all the fervour of the lapsed Presbyterian to his task, and set about educating the public, and damning the powerful in error, with all the intensity of John Knox castigating sinners. The newspaper, it should be said, was a good one, but not noted for its sense of humour. Not for the Chronicle so much as a photograph, le
t alone the nonsense dreamed up by the Daily Mail, the cartoons, the competitions, or any of the other tricks devised to squeeze a halfpenny from the hands of the reading masses. My line of business he considered to verge on the frivolous, but crime is essentially a moral tale. Evil defeated, sin punished. Frequently, neither of these events happened and for the most part evil did very nicely indeed. But that too could point up a lesson.
Besides, McEwen had a weakness for a story, and the annals of the Bow Street Magistrates Court or the Old Bailey generated many a good one. I had even won his favour, or believed I had, for he was notorious for never encouraging anyone. His emotional range went from towering rage to silence, and silence was as near as he got to praise. My work generally passed without comment, but I had of late been asked to write editorials on the Liberal Government’s policy towards the poor and on its latest measures to combat crime.
I thus existed in two worlds, for journalism is as class-conscious as any other part of society. Reporters are the manual labourers; most begin as clerks or office boys, or work on provincial papers before coming to London. They are trusted with facts, but not with their interpretation, which is the prerogative of the middle classes, the editorial writers, whose facility at opinion is assisted by their perfect ignorance of events. These grand fellows, who like to lard their editorials with quotations from Cicero, are paid very much more for doing very much less. Few even consider the idea of spending hours outside a courtroom waiting for a verdict, or camping out by a brazier at the dockyard gates to report on a strike.
It was like a betrayal to go into the leader office—they do not even share the same room with us, for fear of contamination—and sit with pen and paper to enlighten the nation on the deficiencies of the criminal justice bill, or complain about rampant drunkenness due to the efforts of brewers to profit by driving the poor ever deeper into despair. I enjoyed it, though, and thought I was quite adept as well, although as often as not McEwen would rewrite my efforts so that my words advocated the exact opposite of my real opinions.
“Not the policy of the paper,” he said gruffly when I looked upset.
“The paper supports public drunkenness?”
“It assumes that people are sensible enough to look after their own interests. You, although an advocate of the working classes, seem to think they are too stupid to run their own lives. Write me the same opinion without being condescending to the entire population and I will print it. Otherwise you will maintain the supremacy of free choice…”
“But you don’t like choice when it comes to trade…”
He scowled at me. “That is a matter of the Empire,” he replied.
And it was. This was the paper’s Pole Star, the one consideration to which all other matters referred, which determined all the newspaper’s policies. McEwen was an Imperialist, a man for whom the defence of Empire was the first, only and greatest duty. He held strongly that we faced two great challenges, the envy of Germany and the greed of America. Both would bring the world to ruin rather than permit the continued supremacy of Britain across the globe. Piece by piece his editorials had constructed a coherent policy with which to educate the public and berate the politicians. Imperial preference in trade, to construct a trading block around the world which would develop the dominions—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa—into equal partners. A naval policy which would construct fleets of battleships able to take on Germany and any other nation simultaneously. A policy to encourage the production of children. Outright opposition to all welfare for the British population on the grounds that it would diminish the appeal of emigration, and divert money from imperial defence. This, of course, brought him into collision with the current government.
But central to all was Germany, and particularly Kaiser Wilhelm, whom McEwen saw as a madman, determined to foment a war. Once restrained by loyalty to his great-aunt, Queen Victoria, since her death this had been replaced by bitter rivalry with King Edward. Great Britain must prepare for war, and hope we would not be too weakened by the contest to meet the subsequent challenge from the United States.
The last election had been a severe disappointment—all the firepower of the Chronicle had been brought to bear on the task of ensuring that the Empire was handed over to the wise guidance of the Conservatives. To no avail. They had been decimated in 1906, and three years on they had been outmanoeuvred again. The Liberals had announced a shipbuilding programme for the Royal Navy, without actually placing any orders, announced a rise in the old-age pension without actually increasing it, announced education reform and so many measures costing so much that no one knew how they would be paid for. They had even put up income tax, to 5 per cent. The Prime Minister, Asquith, and his chancellor, Lloyd George, could reduce the editorial pages of the Chronicle to virtual incoherence as McEwen contemplated the full range of their folly. In my opinion the newspaper had become so obsessed that it risked boring its readership to death. Not that anyone consulted me on the matter.
Curiously, my failure to please on the subject of public drunkenness did not mean I was sent back to the reporting room; I kept on writing my opinions, and McEwen kept on changing them, although less and less as I learned how to sneak a radical opinion into an orthodox mould. My finest moment, perhaps, was to convert the paper into a supporter of votes for women, which McEwen held to be against the will of the God he no longer believed in. In sheer irritation I wrote an intemperate, and somewhat frivolous, editorial pointing out that it was contradictory to suppose women were going to produce the next generation of imperialists without their having an interest in the Empire itself. It appeared the next day, word for word, not so much as a comma changed.
I was certain that some terrible error had occurred, that my piece of paper had somehow been accidentally taken down to the printers and published by mistake. People had lost their jobs for much less than that. But no; the next evening, he nodded at me. And almost smiled.
“Why did you run that?” I asked.
“Because you were right,” he replied. “And I thank you for correcting me on the matter.” He never mentioned the subject again. Except that any trial or demonstration by the suffragists I was now sent to deal with, and after a few weeks I realised I would rather spend my time with murderers, who were very much more interesting conversationalists. Besides, many of the women had read my editorial, considered my arguments unsound, and liked to explain, at length, where I had gone wrong. Moreover, their reputation for moral laxity and free love was entirely undeserved.
I bought myself a drink and a pie and waited for McEwen to show up, largely unable to concentrate on the papers Wilf had lent me. I was halfway through both when my editor walked in. He was the sort of person who was not noticed in a crowd, except when he wished to be. And yet he was invited everywhere, had an entrée into the houses of the great. How was this so? He never struck me as a fine talker, was not notably handsome, not well connected through his family. It took me years to grasp that McEwen listened. When someone talked to him, whoever they were, they felt he was giving them his full attention. It is a rare gift, and one I do not possess myself; I have a tendency to judge others before they have even opened their mouths. McEwen could ferret out the good and the interesting amongst dowagers and dockers alike, and persuade them to take him into their confidence.
And there he was, propped up against the bar, looking not at all like a man able to exchange witticisms with debutantes or discuss tariff reform with cabinet ministers. Rather, he looked like a newspaperman about to go into battle once again. Slightly wary, preoccupied, preparing for the struggle that attended the daily rebirth of a newspaper as it began its great cycle from formless idea to wrapping for fish and chips.
“Good evening, sir,” I said. He was always referred to in this manner; in the world of the newspaper he was lord of us all. The fact that he was a mere employee himself, answerable to the owners, never occurred to any of us. In fact, no one knew—or particularly cared—who the owners were, as
their presence was never felt.
“Braddock.” It was a greeting, no more or less friendly than his usual salutation.
“I was wondering if I could have a word with you, sir…”
He took the watch out of his waistcoat and looked at it, then nodded.
“I was asked to go and meet a Lady Ravenscliff today, sir…”
“Taking it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The job. Commission, whatever. Are you taking it?”
“It’s a very good offer she has made. Extraordinary. I think I have to thank you…”
“Yes, you do. Good. I thought you’d go for it.”
“Might I ask why you suggested me?”
“Because it is a bit of a waste having you do crime stories. Good though they are, no doubt. But I think you need to spread your wings. You need to spend some time in the company of those people you dislike so much.”
“Why do you say that?” I tried to keep the hurt out of my voice, but did not succeed very well.
“You sympathise far too much with the people and lose sight of the facts. You write about a murder trial and are so caught up in the circumstances that you are quite capable of omitting the verdict.”
“I didn’t realise I was so inadequate,” I said stiffly.
“Yes, you did,” he replied simply. “You know it perfectly well. And please don’t think I have a low opinion of you. You’d be a good leader writer. Will be, once you lose the rough edges.”
“You mean I didn’t go to the right school, like those people you do give jobs to,” I said, more loudly than I intended.
“I did not recommend someone like that to Lady Ravenscliff,” he said evenly, “so don’t get resentful. I imagine she is paying you a fortune and you will gain inestimably from the experience as well. On top of that, there was something strange about Ravenscliff’s death, and I want to know what. You were the best person I could think of to discover it.”