Chapter 3 #2
But what had he done in London all those months ago?
Tennant remembered that, too. He’d left without saying goodbye, dashing off a short note in Kent before sailing for France.
Julia’s first letter was decidedly cool.
The last was warmer. More cheerful. Friendly, damn it.
Well, what did I expect? But the silence had stretched well beyond a month.
Tennant pushed away from the balustrade and turned his back on the river.
Christ, he thought. Paris was the worst place in the world to be alone and longing for someone.
There was nothing to do but return to London and pick up the threads.
Dropping things and picking them up again—or not—had come easy to him before he met Julia.
Part of it was temperament; some of it was circumstance.
Unlike Julia, Tennant hadn’t grown up in a loving family.
And a broken engagement had walled him off for a while.
Later, after he’d changed careers, he’d lost touch with army friends.
Two he’d left behind in Crimean graves. His colleagues at Scotland Yard regarded him with suspicion.
He was a “toff,” not one of the lads. And to make matters worse, he was the commissioner’s godson.
The old boy network damned him in their eyes.
In fairness, he’d made little effort to change their opinion.
Tennant pulled out his pocket watch. He crossed the bridge and waited near the left bank entrance. What did a General Staff officer in the French Army want with him? The usually communicative Jules Picard had shrugged in a way that might have meant anything from “I haven’t a clue” to “Don’t ask.”
After a ten-minute wait, a scarlet-tasseled peacock—his midnight blue uniform crisscrossed in gold brocade—strode toward him, brilliant in the city’s monochrome twilight. He spotted Tennant, shifted a hinged leather case to his left hand, and extended his right.
“Ah,” Colonel Chabert said, withdrawing it when Tennant raised his bandaged fist. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting. You return to London immediately. It is true?”
“I take the train to Calais tomorrow morning.”
“If you will be so good, it is the wish of the General Staff that you deliver this case to Sir Richard Mayne at Scotland Yard.” He passed it to Tennant. “Here is the key.”
Tennant pocketed it. “May I know the contents?”
“Intelligence gathered about the Irish Republican Brotherhood.”
“The Fenians?” Tennant said. “What is the French government’s interest in Irish independence?”
“We recovered the bulk of our rifles from the Lyon warehouse, but a thousand are missing. An informant tells us that Romilly sold them to a ‘man in square-toed boots.’ An Irishman.”
“The guns are heading for Ireland?”
“England. We believe they are steaming toward Southampton. We want our rifles back. In return, the case in your hand includes lists of names; prominent among them is Patrick McGrath. He moves between Ireland, England, and France like a phantom.”
“And McGrath is …”
“The agent who bought the guns. The documents in the case provide information about American funding for the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fenian plans to—”
“Overthrow British authority in Ireland?” Tennant shook his head. “It’s been tried, and it’s failed many times.”
“Something new is afoot. Not pitched battles by soldiers but a stealthy campaign of terror.”
“A war from the shadows?”
“Precisely. The targets will be high and low. A police station or a train station bombed. As for your royals …” Chabert held Tennant’s eye. “Queen Victoria has survived—what is it—five, six attempts on her life?”
“Are you saying—”
“We have no specific intelligence that points to the queen. Still, such a horror would be a coup.”
“But one difficult to pull off,” Tennant said. “Since Victoria’s widowhood, she rarely appears in public.”
“Ah, she must emerge sometime,” Chabert said. “One cannot grieve in private for a lifetime. Not when one is the queen. And from what I’ve read, criticism of Her Majesty’s isolation is growing.”
“True enough,” the inspector said. “When is this ‘campaign of terror’ to begin?”
Chabert looked at him, surprised. “You have not heard about Friday’s bombing? It has begun.”
Julia had left early for the clinic on Friday morning.
Her coachman threaded the carriage through Bishopsgate’s morning crowds, slowing the horses to a stop on Duke Street.
Mr. Ogilvie waited for a funeral procession of black-hatted men to exit the Great Synagogue and turn off the road before flicking the reins.
Julia opened a medical journal, resigning herself to one of those endless drives to Whitechapel.
She was wrong. When they turned left at Whitechapel High Street, it felt like they’d traveled from a circus into a tomb.
Julia counted on one hand the carriages and carts that passed in the opposite direction.
It was midmorning, yet there was little foot traffic along the usually crowded pavements between Irish Court and Half Moon Passage.
They rolled past the White Swan public house, its shutters down.
Most mornings, Julia would see early drinkers queuing up for their first pints.
She spotted a woman clutching a net sack in her left fist and a child’s hand in her right.
She hurried, head down, keeping close to the buildings’ walls, vanishing into Plough Court.
It was a mixed neighborhood of English Protestants and Irish Catholics. Perhaps they sense trouble, she thought. They took the prime minister’s ban on crowds to heart and are staying indoors.
Traffic on foot and by wheel picked up after Commercial Street.
Julia’s coachman had to wait for a break in the stream of pedestrians to turn right onto Fieldgate Street.
He stopped the carriage on the other side of Plummer’s Row, where the road was wide enough to turn the carriage.
The coachman jumped down to open the carriage door.
Julia said, “All seems as usual here, Mister Ogilvie.”
“Aye, but it was a strange ride. You’ll be all right?”
“Of course.”
But her coachman looked doubtful as he glanced back and drove away. Julia paused before walking on, listening to deep, resonating bongs as someone sounded a newly cast bell at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
At first, Julia had found most of the neighborhood’s sounds, sights, and scents alien.
A clanging ironmonger occupied a soot-stained building with peeling paint.
Next to him, a carcass butcher’s headless pigs hung from a line like pink washing.
But five years after Julia signed her lease, her neighbors were like old wallpaper in an often-used hallway.
Julia walked past the shops without a glance.
The doctor crossed the street and entered her clinic through its front door.
She stood and listened. The quiet told a story: the night had been peaceful.
A woman with dark, graying hair as streaked as the wings of a black-and-white magpie emerged from the men’s ward with a basin of soiled bandages in her hands.
Somehow, Nurse Clemmie’s white cap always looked as clean and starched at the end of the day as it did in the morning.
“You’re early, Doctor,” the head nurse said.
“No private patients on my books today.”
So Julia inventoried the drugs cabinet instead. She’d shelved the last bottles of carbolic solution when Kate Connelly knocked on the door and entered the office.
Her maid held up two letters and passed them to Julia. “They came in the morning post. Doctor Andrew sent me along, thinking you’d want to read them straightaway.”
“Bless him. And you, Kate.”
The top one was postmarked BERLIN. Cancellation stamps tattooed the envelope, telling a story of delay.
Tennant had sent the second from Paris a week earlier.
The misdirected Berlin letter explained the long silence, but it would tell her nothing about his present circumstances.
She hoped the Paris note would be more informative.
“You’ll be getting on with your reading,” Julia’s maid said, backing away.
“Stay a minute, Kate, and I’ll send a brief reply. You can drop it in the pillar box on Whitechapel Road.”
Julia fished around in her top drawer for a letter opener, her head snapping up when the clinic’s front door banged, and shouts erupted.
Nurse Clemmie opened the office door. “It’s Sergeant O’Malley with two ambulance wagons of patients injured in a prison explosion.”
The big policeman filled the doorway. “We’re hoping you have some empty beds, Doctor.”
“Who have you brought us?”
“Four men, two women, and a little lad. The worst of the injured went to St. Barts and the London Hospital. Doctor Franklin is hoping you can take these patients unless—”
“We’ll manage.”
“He’d be sending Doctor Barnes to you, but the London is swamped. And they’ll be needing the young doctor there tomorrow, so he’ll be missing his usual Saturday.”
“No matter. I’ll be here.”
Constables carried in bloodied victims on stretchers, starting with the women and the child.
“Take them to the women’s ward,” Julia said. “Jackie?” She looked around for Jackie Archer, the clinic’s young orderly. “Bring up cots from the storeroom. Put one in the women’s ward for the boy and another four in the fever room.”
O’Malley waved over a copper who turned away from a stretcher, looking white in the face. “Help the lad with the beds.”
Kate touched Julia’s arm. “What can I do?”
“Will you take the carriage home and tell my grandfather I need his help?”
“Mister Ogilvie can do that. I’ll send him along with your message.”
“All right, Kate. We’ll need bedding for seven extra beds. Use the cart by the door. Nurse Emily will show you what to do.”
Julia bent over the young boy’s stretcher. The child stared up at Julia as she cut away his bloody shirt. She was relieved to see the boy’s wounds were largely superficial, with one deeper gash producing most of the blood.