Avery & Blake 02 - The Infidel Stain (39 page)

‘Nat was the leader: direct, clear-headed; people were drawn to him. Woundy was a good organizer and good with money, but he was domineering and impatient with debate. He listened to Nat though. Blundell was an infidel, a performer, a clown; blasphemous, lecherous, but people would laugh as they heard his message.’

‘Do you remember a man called Heffernan?’

He looked mystified.

‘Irishman, landowner with radical sympathies.’

Carlile’s dull eyes lit up. ‘The Irishman? I’ve not thought of him for years. He didn’t live in Spa Fields. He took a house nearby. Never took him seriously. He seemed to me a callow creature, but he idolized Nat. And Connie too. Nat wanted to learn the law, and Heffernan had studied it in a casual way, so he helped him. I always thought he was playing at politics, and at the first sign of trouble he would rush back to his comfortable life, and so it proved.’

‘How long did Spa Fields last?’

‘It worked well enough for a while, but it could not sustain itself, and there were always factions and disagreements. There were many different breeds of radical. Most of us were Spenceans, but there were Owenites, blaspheming infidels, those who believed in free love and those who did not. Those who advocated rebellion and revolution, those who thought we should farm in common. Those who championed equality and the rights of the female, and those who thought women should keep their mouths shut. Those who had a taste for power and wished to dominate just for the sake of it. And these divisions were sharpened because Spa Fields never produced quite enough to get by. Heffernan’s money, I believe, met some of the shortfalls.’

‘Where did Wedderburn and his friends stand?’

‘Does it matter? Never came to much.’

‘I think so.’

‘They wanted the abolition of the stamp on the newspapers, universal suffrage, education, the rights of women and infants, they denounced the corruption in government, and scorned the Church that justified it. They wanted the wholesale reform of Parliament, land reform and redistribution. Nat went to prison for the right of
free speech, he sold books banned by the government. He attended political gatherings.’

‘I thought Spenceans believed in revolution,’ said Blake.

‘They did, and you can see how well they succeeded.’

‘How did Spa Fields end?’

‘It fell away around ’24. It was too hard to keep it going and feed everyone. Some blamed its demise on Connie and Nat.’

‘Why?’

Carlile closed his eyes slowly. A spasm of pain passed across his face. Then he opened his eyes again.

‘Connie held that marriage vows were the bonds of women’s servitude, legalized prostitution. She said she would belong to no man and her body was hers to do with as she wished. You should have seen her at twenty. She was a fine-looking woman, capable and bold – some said too bold – afraid of no man’s censure. She had arrived on her own, took over the teaching of the little children, and took up with Nat. He was entranced by her. The others, Woundy and Blundell, were no less enthralled, and for a while she seemed to bind them all closer. It was about the time I was released from gaol. Then she took Heffernan as a lover. He was puppyishly adoring, and handsome in his milk-sop way.’ Carlile’s mouth puckered with disapproval.

‘And he had money,’ I said.

Carlile glanced at me. ‘I should have said that money was not of great importance to Connie. Having taken them both as lovers, she announced that she would live with them both.’

‘How did Nat take that?’ said Blake.

‘He said he shared her belief in free love. To tell the truth, I think it hurt him but he accepted it, and perhaps it was eased by the fact that Heffernan’s passion for Connie did not diminish his idolization of Nat.’

‘And Woundy?’

‘There were those who said she went with Woundy too. Maybe she did. She had the measure of him and he took her at her own estimation. He was an argumentative soul, ready for a spat, ambitious, and from what I heard, age never mellowed him, but I believe he cared more for her and Nat than for anyone else.

‘Well, some denounced Connie’s connubial arrangements. Many of the men argued that women were the weaker sex and should not have an equal voice. They held her up as an example of the dangers of letting a woman have her head. Some of the women worried their men would take other women. There were yet others who coveted Nat’s position in the community and wished to undermine him. Some called for them to be expelled; others supported them. They divided the community.

‘Eventually Connie fell pregnant. She would not say who the father was. Nat and she chose to leave.

‘I heard Woundy left the cause some time in the late ’20s and set about making himself a fortune. Much good it did him. Blundell I heard little of after Spa Fields. He went on making his speeches for a while, but he spent more time in his cups than out of them. As for Heffernan, he disappeared back to his lands and privilege. Perhaps his father threatened to disown him. Never heard of him again, until a few years back, there he was, a Whig Member of Parliament. The party which perpetrated the workhouse, and imprisoned Chartists and radicals alike.

‘I kept up with Connie and Nat for some years. We were all scratching a living. He was in and out of prison for selling banned books, seditious libel – much the same as I. They brought the boy – what was his name? – up as Nat’s, though most thought he was Heffernan’s son.

‘I took over the Blackfriars rotunda in 1830 and renamed it the Temple of Reason. We held political debates and lectures. Nat spoke once or twice; Blundell did too, I recall. But Nat never quite became the leader I hoped he would. Then he wrote to me in the early ’30s saying he was giving up the cause. He simply walked away from it. He was worn down, I suppose, it was too hard on Connie and the children, and he did not like the new breed of radicals. They judged us and spurned our republicanism; they had no interest in public education or women’s rights. It seems to me they are no closer to getting what they want than we were.

‘I heard Nat was in Holywell Street selling lewd books. I suppose he was driven to it. Plenty of radical printers from the old days took
to it – Dugdale and Woundy among them. I am told,’ he said disdainfully, ‘that it provides a decent living. I did not see Nat again. I lost the little I had and went to live in Enfield. London was too hard, and I could not bear what my sons had become. Now I live on their charity and must be grateful for it.’

‘You beat stamp duty,’ said Blake, ‘we have a free press.’

‘Yes. They brought it down to one penny in ’36. Then the steam presses came and the paper got cheaper. Now the poor can buy and read what they will. And what do they choose?
Woundy’s
fucking
Weekly
. I hope Eldred enjoyed the joke while he could.’ He began to cough, and the sound brought the son, Thomas, to the room.

‘That’s enough now,’ he said, fussing over the old man’s blanket. ‘You must conserve your strength, Father.’

Carlile moved only his eyes. ‘For what?’

‘Why, to get better, Father.’

The old man gave him a look and the son retreated behind the chair. ‘Let me finish, Thomas,’ Carlile said, ‘I get few enough visitors.’

‘You believe you failed,’ Blake said.

The old man scowled. ‘The people would not rise. They did not care enough. We were too divided. And we were riddled with informers. Authorities knew our every move. I know that now. Didn’t then. They tried to turn me a few times in prison, I always refused, but others were tempted.’

Blake said, ‘Do you know a man called Charles Neesom?’

The old man lay back on his bolster. ‘He was a bookseller. Good enough type. Tight with the Chartists now.’

‘Did Wedderburn know him?’

‘Dunno. But we are a small tribe, the radical booksellers and printers; we congregate at the same places – the Harlequin in Drury Lane, the Mulberry Bush up near Islington.’

‘Where would I find Neesom now?’

‘He had a bookshop in Brick Lane. Perhaps he still does.’

‘Do you know Renton O’Toole?’

‘The fool O’Toole? Dirty, grubbing little fellow. Believes in nothing. I came across him.’

‘He had quite an animus against Eldred Woundy.’

Carlile gently rubbed the skin around his mouth with a finger. The flesh seemed tender and he winced a little. ‘I would not know about that.’

‘Do you have any thought as to who might have killed these men?’

‘No.’ The old man gave a rattling cough. ‘Honestly, I do not. I always hoped that man could be ruled by rational thought and reason, but I have come to think that almost anyone, under the right circumstances, is capable of inflicting great cruelty and violence on their fellow men. How else do you explain how the well-fed, rich men of Parliament can so basely and brazenly deny the needs of those who suffer so visibly before them on the streets of London?’

‘Father,’ said Thomas anxiously.

‘No, never enough!’ said Carlile, suddenly riled. ‘Never enough! I have seen such injustice, such poverty, such mistreatment of the poor, such unjust bondage; I have seen so many men spent and used up in the struggle against it. And yet it seems to me worse now than it ever was. The city is on the edge of the abyss; the poor packed into ever smaller rookeries, living in their own shit.

‘I never had much time for poetry, satires and allegories and such. They seemed to me to be a way of hiding what ought to be said straight out. But there’s a poem by old Billy Blake – William as he liked to call himself; the man from whom, Mr Blake, you are so keen to disclaim any association – which cuts to the heart of things.’

In a sudden movement Carlile rolled back his blankets and levered himself on to his feet, using the arms of his chair. He swayed for a moment, then pulled himself erect, fixed his eyes on a point above our heads and began to declaim. As he did so he rapped out a rythmn with his stick on the floor, and though his voice was now hoarse and much diminished, one could tell that in its prime, it had been a powerful instrument.

‘I wander through each chartered street,

Near where the chartered Thames does flow,

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,

In every infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forged manacles I hear.

How the chimney-sweeper’s cry

Every blackening church appals,

And the hapless soldier’s sigh

Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most through midnight streets I hear

How the youthful harlot’s curse

Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,

And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.’

As he finished speaking, Carlile sagged. Blake caught him and helped him back into his chair.

‘No one remembers old William Blake,’ Carlile said, his breath coming in wheezes, ‘except old men like me. He was mad much of the time, and he abandoned the true struggle for his visions. But what he wrote is as true now as it was then. The rich own the city; the poor are exploited and suffer; and in the end all are blighted by inequality and cruelty.’

He closed his eyes and he seemed to diminish and become once more a sick old man.

‘I have said all I can, Mr Blake,’ he said. ‘I am used up. You will have to fathom the rest out for yourself.’

Blake, his eyepatch on, his shuffling gait adopted once more, had passed through Temple Bar into Fleet Street towards the east.

‘Jeremiah!’ I shouted after him – the noise was, as ever, too great almost to think. ‘Surely we must go back?’

He continued on his way and I was forced to run after him. ‘We must relieve Miss Jenkins of O’Toole and you must rest.’

‘It won’t be long before Loin comes looking for me. There’s always a chance he may find me. So I must do one more thing today. And Miss Jenkins will manage, though she’s likely to be eaten out of hearth and home and talked to death by O’Toole.’

‘Where do you wish to go?’

‘To see Neesom, the Chartist, in Brick Lane.’

‘The Chartists? Who set a watch on your rooms, sent a spy to steal your papers, and attacked me?’

‘I must have my notes, and I said to Connie I would do what I could for Daniel. I am sure Neesom knows where he is. Besides, I need to warn them.’

‘
Warn them?
’ I said. ‘Jeremiah, please tell me you are joking. These men are dangerous revolutionaries.’

‘Your natural order is not necessarily my natural order, William.’

‘I see,’ I said between gritted teeth. ‘Yesterday you casually insulted Lord Allington. Today you plan to warn a band of dangerous conspirators their plot is known. Men who plan the downfall of the country and regard you as an adversary. It is stupidity.’

‘The conspiracy is doomed,’ he said. ‘London will not rise. It never does. There are informers everywhere. You and I uncovered two in a day. The coppers already know everything they need to.’

‘They are desperate men who will find some other violent way.’

‘Neesom is not foolish; he is desperate in support of a cause he
believes doomed to failure. You heard what Carlile said. They see their fellow men starving and in distress. They have spent years working peacefully for their cause to no avail. They are driven to conspiracy, but they are doomed to failure.’

‘Good men. Even the Pole who wishes to set light to everything?’

‘The Pole, I grant you, is mad.’

We seethed at each other. ‘I do not understand this.’