Chapter 19 London
Chapter nineteen
London
Crispin Fairweather came home from the office to find the Fairweather family seat—a humble but artfully appointed Bloomsbury terrace house—jammed full with his mother’s friends, talking about Art and Philosophy with capital letters.
Such talk did not agree with him, so he slipped into his father’s study.
“Oh, hello, old chap,” said his father, looking up from a letter.
Crispin sat down and loosened his collar while his father poured him a drink.
“Shouldn’t you be keeping the rabble in the other room out of trouble?” Crispin joked.
His father laughed. “Shouldn’t you, if it comes to that?“ He gave his son a sidelong glance. “Some of the girls are rather pretty, especially when they argue with you.”
Crispin sniffed. “If you’re talking about Penny’s friends, those girls wouldn’t give a civil servant a second look. A first look, even! Not unless I was trying to unchain one of them from the front steps of Parliament. And I prefer to leave that to the policemen.”
“Don’t let your sister hear you talking like that,” his father warned, with a slight wince.
“I certainly won’t, sir,” Crispin said. “I don’t fancy an acid attack at the breakfast table.”
“You don’t support the ladies in their crusade for the franchise, then?” his father said, in a tone that was, on the surface, merely curious.
Stephen Fairweather was the most diplomatic man Crispin knew, which was probably why he was so highly esteemed by his colleagues at the War Office.
“I don’t know,” said Crispin, growing serious.
“I suppose it would be fair. It’s just—there are so many things that are unfair, and that’s just one.
I mean, it’s not as if we’re burning them at the stake.
I could hardly get to the office the other day because of one of their agitations.
They’re sure to get what they want in the end.
Why must they make such an ungodly fuss over it in the meantime? ”
“Why indeed?” his father said calmly.
His father picked up an envelope at his elbow, absently. “Do you know that the Prince of Wales has made it privately known that he wants the Oath of Accession altered?”
“I did hear something about that,” Crispin said cautiously, sensing a trap.
“He says that in its present form—promising to defend his realm from popery and such, in rather highhanded terms—that it is offensive to Catholics, who are his father’s faithful subjects, and he hopes will be his one day. And the Prime Minister agrees with him.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Crispin said, swallowing his drink.
“Does it? Looking at it one way, it’s just one unfair thing, isn’t it? Hardly the worst. We’re not burning them at the stake anymore, are we?”
Crispin sighed. This was one of the many reasons Crispin, as a boy, had sworn he would not enter the civil service—because his father was so awfully good at it all.
In the end, Crispin had surrendered to his fate, but he had steered his course for the Colonial Office to avoid unfavourable filial comparisons.
“Have a look at this,” his father said, unfolding the paper and handing it to him. It was a sketch of a man in dark glasses, well-drawn in a familiar style.
Crispin quickly got out his spectacles. “What is it?” he asked, glad for the change of subject.
“A sketch by your old friend, Philip Dugdale,” he answered, a little drily.
It was no secret that Crispin had been relieved when that sullen young man from Yorkshire had left their terrace house to share a flat with another student.
Philip had shown no appreciation for Crispin’s attempts at politeness, nor his apologies for Penny’s rudeness, and he’d always hidden from their mother’s ragtag circle.
“The subject of this charming portrait,” his father continued, “is somebody who passed himself off as a herpetologist from the Smithsonian in order to get himself inside Wormwood Abbey. He tried to steal something from the Ormdale Menagerie—and assaulted one of the girls with chloroform to do it.”
“Chloroform?” exclaimed Crispin. “That’s dramatic! Which girl?”
“The younger one, Una. You met her at Edith’s wedding, didn’t you, all those years ago? She’s grown up and rather a stunner now.”
Crispin restrained his impatience at his father’s preoccupation with female beauty. “But the assault—is she all right?”
“Oh, right as rain, never fear, the blackguard didn’t touch her, just knocked her out while he was looking for the family relic..”
“The what?”
“Something that was meant to belong to Saint George. Isn’t that something?”
Crispin stared at him. “Saint George? The patron saint of England?”
“The very one.”
“Well, don’t let the press get hold of this, they’d have a field day! They’ll be on about secret societies before you can sneeze,” Crispin said, giving him back the drawing. “And they already treat that family like something out of Madame Tussauds.”
“Funny you should say that; the Worms family wouldn’t give Tussauds permission to have their likenesses in the gallery,” his father said.
“I should think not!” Crispin exclaimed.
Crispin might make light of it to his father, but he had a rather vivid memory of two girls carrying flowers and dragons at Cousin Edith’s wedding ten years previously, and he had seen Una’s photograph in The Strand last year.
It had made enough of an impression on him that he preferred to downplay it, especially to his father, who had developed an irritating habit of nudging him in the direction of the female of the species.
Crispin heard something in the hallway and laid a finger over his lips.
Getting up, he reached for the doorknob, but before he could fling it open his sister burst in, her cheeks pink with excitement.
“So this is where you are hiding!” Penny Fairweather cried.
His father slipped the drawing between some papers on his desk and locked it.
“Yes, Penny,” said Crispin dryly, “hardly surprising, since this is where I always hide when that crowd comes round.”
“Aren’t mother’s friends dreadful?“ said Penny. “So frivolous about everything! Fancy going on about Art and Music when there’s a war between the sexes happening, right on our doorstep! But listen, there’s a girl here tonight whom I brought.
She was imprisoned and got close to being force-fed, Crispin, and I’ve told her my brother works for the very rogues who did it and she’s going to tell you all about her sufferings and melt your heart of stone. ”
She thumped his shirt front.
“Stones don’t melt, Penny,” Crispin said. “If you really want to get into journalism, you’ll need to unmix your metaphors. And I work for the Colonial Office, not the Home Office. I don’t have anything to do with the police.”
As he said it, he remembered his encounter with the Home Secretary earlier that day. Had it meant anything at all?
Penny looked at their father. “Is he really one of ours?”
“A question I ask every day,” sighed Crispin.
Penny seized her brother’s tie and tightened it until he coughed in protest. Then she dragged him off to the parlour for the aforementioned heart-melting.
Once there, Crispin listened politely to Miss Whatever-Her-Name’s tale of martyrdom, punctuated with Penny’s irreverent observations, which regularly reduced both of the girls to fits of laughter.
Crispin’s mind was somewhere else entirely. If he’d inherited anything from his father, it was an ability to detach himself from his circumstances while maintaining an inscrutably civil demeanour that offended no one.
So he thought of another girl, dressed all in white, who’d looked at him out of a photograph in a magazine with wide eyes, and held a creature from myth in her arms.
If anyone could melt a heart of stone, he thought, it might be her.