Chapter Ten 1893 #7
Toby ground his teeth and let the memories come, hoping to purge himself of them.
The torment of being powerless as it all went wrong.
Kit looking up at him, anxious and trusting.
Theo’s desertion. The guilty verdict. He remembered being dragged out by two bailiffs.
He remembered Kit calling to him as he was taken away. The agony of impotence.
‘You all right?’ said the man next to him, forcing Toby back to the present. He had a hank of the man’s coat in his fist, and was panting for breath.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he muttered, and got out as discreetly as he could.
He wasn’t purged. Images of Kit’s trial followed him into his sleep, and sharpened into nightmares.
Still, compiling the court listings became the thing that engaged him most, though his colleagues called it a dogsbody job.
His round-ups were squeezed in towards the back of the paper; cramped, minuscule paragraphs amongst the abridged minutes of public meetings, the governesses looking for positions, and the adverts for Elliman’s Embrocation without which, it was claimed, no stable was complete.
At noon, he and the other staffers poured out of the paper’s premises on Bouverie Street, off Fleet Street, and into the chop-house on the corner, where a plate of hot food could be had for a few pence.
Irish stew, or steak and kidney pudding, or sausages and onions.
Baked apples and Bird’s Custard. It wasn’t a million miles from the food at Hatfield Hall, and Toby had developed a taste for it.
It stuck to the ribs, and kept him warm, and hunger was by far the best seasoning.
By spring, he was able to move to better lodgings.
He got his own room on a longer lease, in a house of multiple occupancy with a high turnover.
The privacy felt like a luxury. There was no bathroom, just a shared outhouse, and no hot water unless he bought more coal, lit the tiny fire and heated a kettle himself.
But it was cleaner and quieter, and the food the housekeeper provided was a bit better than before.
He might have afforded something a step up, but he’d decided to save as much of his salary as he could.
Lily was due to visit soon; he wanted to take her to a restaurant.
Lily stayed with Tom whenever she was in town, but Toby went to meet her off the train at King’s Cross, full of inexplicable nerves.
It had been three months since they’d seen one another, but he had no fear that she might have changed, or that he might like her less.
It was not even that she might like him less – though that was a distinct possibility.
So perhaps, deep down, it was the suspicion that he should never have proposed in the first place.
That something was lacking in him, though he couldn’t name it.
But being engaged to Lily gave him a reason to earn, and to save.
It gave him an end point to work towards: finally marrying her, and providing for her.
Her visits marked the distance to be travelled, and he’d learned that he needed that – a destination, and a waymarked route.
They walked along the river, and around Hyde Park, and talked a great deal.
They went for tea, and to the opera – Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, standing pit only – and Toby steadfastly refused to let her see his lodgings.
‘They’re not at all what you’re used to,’ he said. ‘I’m saving all my pennies, you see.’
‘How bad can they be?’
‘Dreadful.’
He didn’t say that the only women he’d seen there tended to stay for an hour or less.
‘I’m not as shockable as you think. And what do I care, in any case? We could be alone together,’ Lily said boldly.
‘Yes. And then your brother would shoot me in a duel.’
‘But he would shoot to miss.’ She smiled. ‘Tom loves you.’
‘In that instance, I’m not sure it’d help me.’
‘Dear Tom,’ Lily said fondly. ‘He seems to be getting along all right as a lawyer, doesn’t he?’
‘Better than I thought,’ Toby agreed.
‘Surely you never doubted his ability?’
‘Not his ability, no. What I find it hard to picture is him ever being stern.’
Lily laughed. ‘No, I can’t either. But then, don’t you remember what he told us that time?
That they’d celebrated the birthday of a colleague by filling his umbrella with pencil shavings?
So, I’m not convinced how very po-faced it all is there.
’ Lily laughed. ‘How far are we from your rooms, anyway?’
But Toby would not be moved on the issue.
They could not marry until he was able to keep her in something at least approaching comfort.
And who on earth knew when that might be?
Until then he would behave properly, and do nothing that might upset Tom, or call Lily’s virtue into question.
But he was learning the subtle ways in which Lily showed her disappointment.
The press of her lips. Her long silences.
‘So very proper – and stubborn.’ She gave him a sideways look. ‘Then walk me back to Tom’s. Slowly.’
She looped her arm through his, leaning close, and felt the notebook in his inside pocket.
‘What’s this? Something to read, in case we run out of conversation?’
‘No. It’s just work. I’ve been noting some thoughts on a few of the cases I’ve seen coming through the courts. The ones that trouble me most, I suppose.’
It was those where some moral question was raised, or a particular social ill was illustrated.
Often, they were murders. Capital cases where things were not clear cut; where the means and motive were unclear, or were so pitiful that to convict for murder seemed profoundly wrong.
Like the factory worker who’d smothered to death his young sister.
She’d been dying of a lung condition that was drowning her a bit at a time, and had begged him for a swifter end.
He was sent to the gallows. But the gentleman who’d used his silver-topped cane to beat to death an elderly pauper who’d begged for a farthing was acquitted of murder on grounds of self-defence.
‘You see,’ Toby explained, ‘it seems to me that some judgement of intention ought to factor into the apportionment of punishment. At least as much as the outcome does.’
‘Isn’t a murder a murder?’
‘I suppose I would say not,’ Toby said.
Lily still didn’t know about Kit. She hadn’t seen with her own eyes that causing a death was not the same as being a murderer.
‘And if the charge must be murder,’ he said, ‘then must all murders weigh the same? Do some not tip the scales of justice more steeply than others, and more readily?’
‘I do not know. But it sounds as though you do.’
‘Too often I see wealthy men, men with powerful friends, let off or given a lighter sentence when they have committed some crime – even if that crime is murder. Provocation is pleaded, or self-defence, when, for the common man, the same judges will turn entirely deaf to any extenuating circumstance. If the mitigation is valid at all, surely it must be valid for all?’
‘Agreed.’
‘And yet it is not. The system is skewed. Justice ought not to have bias, but anyone who follows the courts will see plainly that it has.’
‘And what does your editor say to this? At the newspaper?’
‘The editor? I have no idea. I hadn’t discussed it with anyone, until you asked just now.’
‘Toby.’ Lily stopped walking and turned to face him. ‘Why ever not?’