Chapter Ten 1893 #6
It was true, though he knew it wouldn’t last long.
He was a terrible teacher, irrepressibly impatient.
The boys – and one girl – ended up hating him, staring in mute fury at their books.
One lad had even burst into tears at one point.
He had yet to last a month with any one student, before being thanked and dismissed.
And perhaps word had got about, because he wasn’t exactly inundated with enquiries.
‘What we really want to know,’ Mona said, ‘is when we might meet your Lily? I’m sure she’s a wonderful girl.’
Toby swayed a little, and sank into a chair. ‘I don’t suppose there’s anything to eat, is there?’
Mona gave him a critical look, then headed for the kitchen. ‘Tea’s brewing, and I’ve made some mince pies.’
‘A mince pie. Thank you. That would be perfect.’
‘And as for tomorrow,’ David said. ‘You’ll never guess? The vicar has sent us a rib of beef. How about that?’
‘Will we be required to change our name to Cratchit?’
‘Hardly. He had it from Lord Stitchcombe, but it’s too much for Mrs Nimrod’s digestion; they always have turkey. He wants to see you – Nimrod. To congratulate you on your honours, I suppose. Well, you’ll see him at midnight Mass, in any case.’
Toby winced inwardly. Nimrod would also want to know what he planned to do with his degree.
Why he hadn’t applied for a fellowship. Why he was penniless and aimless and squandering it all.
So, he steeled himself and they went to Mass, and he spoke to the vicar, and sang ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’; then the next day they roasted the beef and opened their presents by the fire – socks and a notebook for Toby – and did their very best to enjoy the time. It was as flimsy as a house of cards.
Kit had loved Christmas; the magic of it got him every time – hook, line and sinker.
Starry-eyed at the decorations and presents; rapt at the singing of carols; greedy for the feast. Now it turned out that he’d been the source of all that magic.
Without him they were just going through the motions; and though nobody said it, Toby knew they all felt it.
Once they’d eaten, Toby set off into the afternoon darkness, through the village and up to the castle.
His breath made clouds, and he didn’t have a ha’penny for the box.
There was nobody around to see. The ruins were just as he remembered them, yet seemed smaller too.
He’d thought he might sense Kit there, but there was nothing.
It didn’t feel like home any more; none of it did.
A sliver of moon hung in a sky the colour of glass.
Hallewell House was down below, casting a golden glow from every window.
Faintly, he heard a piano playing, and voices singing.
Perhaps Theo and her husband. They hadn’t been at St Mary’s, much to his relief.
He stared and he listened, until he hated himself for doing it.
The figure he must cut, shut out in the cold like a stray animal. Take a hint, fella.
His anger bubbled up, and it felt good.
Toby travelled back to London the day after Boxing Day, ostensibly because snow was forecast and he couldn’t risk getting stuck in Hallewell, but really because he needed to go. The Meriwethers simply didn’t work as a threesome, and the longer he stayed the more painfully obvious it became.
When he got back to his room, which he shared with three other men in two sets of bunks, it was freezing.
There was a letter from Lily, but he didn’t open it.
He had a supper of cold beef and potatoes wrapped in paper, and four of Mona’s mince pies, and beyond that, he realised with sudden, shocking clarity, he had nothing at all.
He spent a precious shilling on a bottle of truly awful gin, and drank in the new year with it.
Tom had invited him to a dinner at the apartment he shared with another junior solicitor, but Toby had lied and said he would still be down in Hallewell.
He drank until the gin blotted out the tobacco-stained wallpaper and the baleful glare of the gas light; until it smoothed the knots from his shoulders and the lumps from the stained mattress.
He went to bed at five past midnight with a pillow over his head to muffle the snores and farts, the yells and slammed doors of his neighbours.
In the middle of January, Toby’s money ran out – he had to hide from the landlady. Lily wrote to say she was coming to visit. Toby panicked.
‘You’re an idiot,’ Tom said, when Toby finally confessed to his situation over a lunch that Tom would pay for. ‘Did you think we’d let you starve? Hm?’ He poked his fork at Toby across the table. ‘You’re a Womersley now. Or as good as.’
‘I believe in advancement through merit, not in asking for favours. I wanted to make my own way.’
‘Meriwether.’ Tom sighed. ‘I mean this with tremendous affection, but you just aren’t a . . . you aren’t . . . convivial. I know you’re a damn good chap underneath it all, but upon a first encounter . . . Well, put it this way: you’re just not the sort who will ever charm his way into anything.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You have plenty of other good qualities,’ Tom assured him, and Toby almost laughed. ‘You’re diligent, loyal, moderately bright . . . But you don’t warm to people, so they won’t warm to you. And you don’t even know what sort of position you’re looking for. Do you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then.’ Tom loaded his fork with ham pie and gravy. ‘Let us help you.’
‘Us?’
‘Your friends. You do have some, you know, though you seem to have forgotten.’ Tom was serious. ‘And whilst one might not necessarily need friends in high places, Meriwether, one does need friends. No man is an island, and all that.’
‘Womersley, I . . .’ Toby shook his head. ‘I’m a complete flunk.’
Tom nodded. ‘I’m inclined to agree with you.
When did that shirt last see soap? And you’ve lost two buttons.
But it’s a temporary state, Meriwether. It’s nothing that can’t be set right; and it must be set right.
’ He aimed his fork at Toby’s chest again.
‘Can’t have you marrying my sister looking like that. ’
‘How do I look?’
‘Like Oliver Twist,’ Tom said, then laughed.
‘Not even Bob Cratchit, then.’
‘Hm?’
Toby sighed. ‘Getting to university was everything,’ he murmured. ‘It was everything, you see. All through my school days, and the dreadful time when my brother died . . . Through all of it, my focus was on simply getting there.’
Tom blinked rapidly, and behind his bluff good humour Toby saw sympathy. He saw care, and something that bordered on pity. Which only made it worse.
‘I do understand,’ Tom said quietly. ‘And few in your shoes would have had the . . . the grit to achieve that aim. Now we must simply turn that grit to some other task. And I shall find it for you.’
Tom loaned him the money to visit a barber and buy a new shirt and jacket.
He said he would put out a few feelers. It took less than a week.
It turned out that Campbell Franke-Grosvenor, their Castleman friend from Durham, was godson to the owner of The London Daily News.
A few messages exchanged hands, and Toby was slotted into the post of junior copy editor and court news reporter.
He didn’t even attend an interview; he just had to turn up and do as he was told, and he would be paid a hundred and thirty pounds per annum.
The ease with which it was all arranged appalled Toby, as well as coming as a huge and guilty relief.
The London Daily News was a liberal paper, at least.
He confessed to the help he’d been given in a letter to Lily.
He supposed it would make her think less of him; as a woman, she would certainly be given no such advantages.
I must say I’m glad to hear it, she wrote back.
I’ve been on at Tom for the longest time to persuade you to be helped.
And don’t go thinking less of yourself because of it.
You aren’t the son of an earl, Toby. You’ll still have to do the work.
So, he got stuck in. The copy-editing was easy enough, and quite satisfying.
Weeding out spelling and grammatical mistakes, and reordering sentences for clarity before articles went to be typeset.
The court reports were more interesting.
He didn’t have to attend every hearing – that would be impossible.
But he toured the Crown courts weekly, collecting the schedules and verdicts as they were reached.
These he was supposed to summarise to an extreme of brevity – which court, which judge, the plaintiff, defendant and verdict.
The London Daily News certainly had no time for the lascivious gore of the Illustrated Police News or the penny dreadfuls.
There were plenty of frauds, thefts and assaults.
Plenty of failed petitions for divorce, and men sued for breach of promise of marriage; plenty of men suing their wives’ lovers for compensation. A scattering of murders.
One day, curiosity got the better of him, and Toby ducked into the public gallery of the Old Bailey during a trial for murder.
The clerk called them to order and the judge sat, and Toby broke into a sweat.
All he wanted to do was leave but he made himself stay, as his mind spat up images of Kit in the dock below, rocking from foot to foot as Lord Paxton-Nevis leaned forward beneath his tasselled canopy and fixed Dr Heinemann with a stony eye.
Either the young man is of sound mind, and a murderer through and through, or else he is a cretin, a danger to all who encounter him . . .