Chapter Fourteen 1898
Chapter Fourteen
Cassandra stirred in her sleep, draping one arm over her eyes.
The sun was throwing incandescent light through the crack in the curtains, right on to her pillow.
It would wake her soon, which was good. Toby didn’t like to leave while she was asleep – that was too perfunctory, even for him.
It was three in the afternoon. From four o’clock, the risk of their being discovered grew exponentially, and Toby preferred to be gone well before that.
He stared at the elaborate ceiling rose, waiting a few more minutes.
From the street below came the whirr of wheels and quick clatter of hooves, and pigeons cooed on the windowsill.
Cassandra opened one eye. ‘What time is it?’
‘Just gone three.’
‘Oh dear.’
With a sigh, she turned on to her side to face him, pushing back her mane of dark hair. Her family were Spanish on her mother’s side, and her eyes were even darker than Toby’s. A sloe-eyed society beauty.
‘Then you’ll be up and away like a jack rabbit at any moment,’ she said. ‘Won’t you?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to outstay my welcome.’
She laughed. ‘Go on then, get dressed. I can see you’re itching to.’
Toby pretended not to notice her pique when he did exactly that.
With a resigned expression she swung her feet to the floor, crossed to the basin and began to wash between her legs.
She was still graceful, even then. At thirty-seven she was a full decade older than Toby, but there was little sign of it.
Her skin was smooth and olive-hued, her limbs sinuous.
But her face was her trump card – she turned heads wherever she went.
She’d turned Toby’s in an instant. Not just beautiful, but animated, knowing, and unashamed.
Toby was under no illusion that he was her first extra-marital lover, nor that he’d be her last.
She put on a chiffon wrap and came to knot his necktie for him.
‘It’s a very clever trick,’ she said, raising one eyebrow. ‘Pretending not to care for me.’
She was only half mocking. The other half, he couldn’t quite decipher.
‘I do care for you, Cassie.’
‘Lord Warburton’s son sent me a poem. I think he possibly even wrote it himself.’
‘Oh? Was it any good?’
‘Hm. Not terribly. It compared me to Helen of Troy.’
‘Oh dear. Well, your face might very well start a war – albeit a domestic one.’
‘I thought it was rather sweet. Aren’t you jealous?’
‘How can I be jealous? You aren’t my wife. If I let myself be jealous over you, I’d drive myself mad.’
‘Oh? Then it’s only control, Toby? Not coldness?’
He caught her eye. ‘You tell me. Am I cold?’
‘Not in there.’ She nodded towards the rumpled bed, shrugging one shoulder. ‘But out of it . . . Perhaps I shouldn’t have you back again.’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘Oh, go away, then! Go and write something worthy for your socialist cranks, that nobody will take any notice of.’
‘People might, one day. And they’re not cranks.’ He turned to her, relenting. ‘Don’t be angry, Cassie – you’re the one with the husband.’
‘A husband who could ruin you. Or shoot you.’
‘And you as well, don’t forget.’
He took her hands, kissing her knuckles, left then right. ‘You are exquisite, Mrs Pridde, and I am not worthy.’
‘No, you’re not. Now go. I need to get dressed before my louse of a husband staggers back from the House.’
The bed in which they’d so recently rolled belonged to the Right Honourable Havelock Pridde, the MP for Greenwich, though the house with the fine bedroom was in Bedford Place, in Bloomsbury.
Pridde was twenty-three years his wife’s senior, and one of those men who saw no hypocrisy whatsoever in keeping a string of mistresses while flying into a fury should any whiff of a story involving his wife reach his ears.
He’d actually taken a shot at one of Cassandra’s former lovers, and had subsequently bullied a police superintendent into reporting that the gun had gone off accidentally.
The horse pulling a passing cab had taken the bullet in the shoulder, and been put down. Pridde had paid off the driver.
Which, Toby thought, said everything that needed to be said about the man: a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, dripping with entitlement, who made his way through life by buying what he couldn’t simply take.
Toby was rather pleased to be cuckolding him on a regular basis.
He sometimes wondered why on earth Cassandra had married a man like Havelock Pridde, but supposed the reasons were the same as whenever a woman married – wealth, status, security, children.
Plus he’d probably bullied her into it. Small wonder she was becoming petulant, and took lovers both to amuse herself and to keep score.
Lily Womersley had married, Tom had written to tell him.
After an engagement of only four months, to a man who owned a fair chunk of the Scottish lowlands.
MacDonald? McDonnell? Toby had forgotten the name already.
The tactful tone of Tom’s letter suggested that Toby was expected to mind about it, but he didn’t.
Lily was far better off, and so was he. Still, there was a faint pang of .
. . something. A distant whiff of the chaos he’d tumbled into when she ended their engagement.
Rita was expecting again, Tom wrote in the same letter.
Toby was godfather to their firstborn, a son also named Thomas; and after him had come a little girl called Penelope.
Toby shook off thoughts of Lily and babies as he trotted down the back stairs of Pridde’s well-appointed home, nodded to the scullery maid as he passed through the kitchen, and exited via the tradesman’s door.
The soul of discretion. It was a twenty-minute walk up Tottenham Court Road to Osnaburgh Street, and the offices of the Fabian Society, where Toby was under-secretary, but since it was Saturday he went south instead, across the river via the granite arches of Waterloo Bridge, to his rooms on Cornwall Road, on the top floor of a small terraced house, conveniently located right next door to a pub.
He’d lived there for two years now, sharing the cost of a daily housekeeper with the couple downstairs.
The pair weren’t married – he was a senior clerk in a bank, and had left his wife to run away with their children’s piano teacher.
She had a charming laugh, and they laughed all the time – their voices drifting up through the floor, above the din from the nearby sawmill.
It made Toby notice that he hardly ever laughed.
The meals they cooked, on their new gas stove, helped mask the pervasive reek of a local linoleum works.
Toby didn’t cook, beyond the boiling of eggs and occasional grilling of cheese.
The housekeeper made him a pie or a casserole, if he asked the day before; else he ate in the pub, or in a café on workdays, in Regent’s Park with all the nannies and their charges on the way to the zoo.
Sometimes he snatched something from Pridde’s kitchen; sometimes he missed a meal altogether and drank strong, penny-a-pint beer instead.
He endeavoured to steer clear of wine and spirits.
Toby had a small bedroom separate from the sitting room, and a tiny kitchen with a sink and a range that often went out, and had to be coaxed patiently into heating any water.
The privies – dank and smelly – and wash-house were in the backyard, shared with two neighbouring houses.
In his sitting room Toby had a pair of upright armchairs he’d got at a kerbside auction, and a pedestal table with two ladder-back chairs where he spent most of his time, either eating or writing.
The rest of the decor was sparse and functional.
Beyond some hooks and a small mirror that hung by the door, he had no ornaments, no pictures.
The housekeeper was a motherly sort, and he sometimes came home to find a few ox-eye daisies in a jar on the mantelpiece, or something like a decorative toffee tin, which he wasn’t quite sure what to do with.
Later that evening he was marshalling at a public lecture of the Fabians, in Essex Hall – ‘The Moral Aspects of Socialism’.
Taking the register, minuting questions from the floor, and writing it all up for the society annals afterwards.
But before that he wanted to proofread his own latest tract.
It was going to be published by the London Society for the Humane Reform of Prisons, which had campaigned for years for an end to hard labour in prisons: men made to climb a giant tread-wheel until their legs gave out.
Men made to turn a metal crankshaft, stirring a paddle through sand, to earn enough food to subsist on.
Men made to break rocks on Dartmoor until they simply died.
The national policy of hard labour, hard fare, hard board was finally on its way out, but had not gone yet.
Men were still kept in silence, day in and day out, and refused even a few minutes a day to talk to anyone.
They still slept on boards rather than on mattresses or in hammocks.
They were still fed nothing but bread, suet and gruel, day in, day out.
The policy had been designed to make prison life as miserable as possible. It killed hundreds every year.
The main focus of Toby’s pamphlet was on raising the age at which the death penalty could be handed down.
At present, there were no legal age parameters.
Seventeen-year-old Charles Dobel, hanged for murder in 1889 – the same age, the same year, as Kit.
Eighteen-year-old Samuel Smith, hanged in Winchester in 1896; eighteen-year-old George Nunney, hanged earlier that year, though the evidence against him was circumstantial at best. Toby’s argument was that no person not yet twenty-one should be hanged for any crime.
And if some of his arguments for that overlapped with a call for complete abolition, then so be it.