She left Juno sitting and reading them yet again, emotionally exhausted, and yet unable to put them down.
She walked to the omnibus stop, her own mind in turmoil. She could not speak to Pitt, which was what she wanted above all else. Tellman had very little knowledge of the world in which people like Dismore and Gleave lived, or the others who might be high in the Inner Circle. The only person she could trust was Aunt Vespasia.
Charlotte was fortunate in finding Vespasia at home and without company. She greeted Charlotte warmly, then looked more intently at her face and settled to listen in silence while the story poured out: everything that first Tellman had learned, and then Gracie’s realization of the truth as she stood alone in Mitre Square.
Vespasia sat motionless. The light from the windows caught the fine lines on her skin, emphasizing both the strength of her and the years. Time had refined her, tempered her courage, but it had also hurt her and shown her too much of people’s weaknesses and failures as well as their victories.
“The Whitechapel murders,” she said softly, her voice hoarse with a horror she had not imagined. “And this man Remus is going to find the proof and then sell it to the newspapers?”
“Yes-that is what Tellman says. It will be the biggest story of the century. The government will probably fall, and the throne almost certainly,” Charlotte replied.
“Indeed.” Vespasia did not move, but stared with almost blind eyes into some distance which lay within her rather than beyond. “There will be violence and bloodshed such as we have not seen in England since the time of Cromwell. Dear God, what evil to match evil! They would sort out one corruption to replace it with another, and all the misery will be for nothing.”
Charlotte leaned forward a little. “Isn’t there anything we can do?”
“I don’t know,” Vespasia confessed. “We need to learn who it is that is guiding Remus, and what part Dismore and Gleave play in it. What was Adinett doing in Cleveland Street? Was he seeking to find the information for Remus, or to prevent him from finding it?”
“Prevent him,” Charlotte replied. “I think…” Then she realized how little she knew. Almost all of it was conjecture, fear. It involved Fetters and Adinett, but she was still not certain beyond doubt how. And there was no room for even the smallest mistake. She told Vespasia about Gleave’s visit and his desire to find Martin Fetters’s papers. She described her own sense of threat from him, but said here in this clean, golden room it sounded more like imagination than reality.
But Vespasia did not decry the impression. She continued to listen intently.
Charlotte then went on to tell her about Juno’s conviction that there were new papers, and their visit to Thorold Dismore, and her belief that he was a true republican and fully intended to use all he could find or create to bring to pass his own purposes.
“Possibly,” Vespasia agreed. She smiled very slightly, and with a sadness that lay deep behind her eyes. “It is not an ignoble cause. I do not agree with it, but I can understand much that it strives for, and admire those who pursue it.”
There was something in her which prevented Charlotte from arguing. She realized with a sense of loneliness how much older Vespasia was than she, and how much of Vespasia’s life there was about which she knew nothing. And yet she loved her with a depth that had nothing to do with time or blood.
“Let me consider it,” Vespasia said after a moment or two. “In the meantime, my dear, be extremely careful. Learn what you can without jeopardizing yourself. We are dealing with people who think little of killing individual men or women in order to accomplish their purposes for nations. They believe ends justify means, and think they have the right to do anything they consider will serve what they have convinced themselves is the greater good.”
Charlotte felt a darkness in this light room, and a chill as if night had fallen early. She stood up.
“I will. But I must tell Thomas. I-I need to see him.”
Vespasia smiled. “Of course you do. I wish I could also, but I realize it’s impractical. Please remember me to him.”
Impulsively, Charlotte stepped forward and bent to put her arms around Vespasia, and held her, their shoulders close. She kissed her cheek, and then left without either of them speaking again.
Charlotte went home by way of Tellman’s lodgings, and to his landlady’s consternation, waited over half an hour for him to return from Bow Street. Without prevarication she asked that he take her the following morning to meet with Pitt on his way to work at the silk factory. Tellman protested the danger of it to her, the unpleasantness, above all the fact that Pitt would certainly not wish her to go to Spitalfields. She told him not to waste time with protests that meant nothing. She was going, with or without him, and they both knew it, so it would be altogether better if he simply acknowledged it so they could agree upon arrangements and get a good night’s sleep.
“Yes, ma’am,” he conceded. She saw in his face that he was too aware of the gravity of the situation to make more than a token argument to satisfy conscience. He saw her to the omnibus stop again.
“I’ll be at the door in Keppel Street at six in the morning,” he said gravely. “We’ll take a hansom to the underground railway station, and a train to Whitechapel. Wear your oldest clothes, and boots that are comfortable for walking. And maybe you could borrow a shawl to hide your hair; it would make you less noticeable from the local women.”
She agreed with a sense of foreboding, and yet an anticipation inside her at the thought of seeing Pitt.
When she got home she ran up the stairs, washed her hair even though she would hide it under a shawl, and brushed it until it shone. She had not intended to tell Gracie, but she could not keep it secret. She went to bed early, and found herself too excited to sleep until long after midnight.
In the morning she woke late and had to hurry. There was barely time for a cup of tea. She drank it too hot and left half of it behind when Tellman knocked at the door.
“Tell Mr. Pitt we miss ’im terrible, ma’am!” Gracie said quickly, blushing a little, her eyes steady.
“I will,” Charlotte promised.
Tellman was on the step, the dark shape of a hansom looming behind him. He looked thin-shouldered, gaunt- faced, and she realized for the first time how much Pitt’s disgrace had affected him. He might loathe admitting it, but he was deeply loyal, both to Pitt himself and to his own sense of right and wrong. He might resent authority, see its faults and the injustices of differences in class and opportunity, but he expected the men who led him to observe certain rules within the law. Above all, he had not expected them to betray their own. Whatever his origins, Pitt had earned his place as one of them, and in Tellman’s world that had meant he should have been safe.
He might deplore the social conscience, or lack of it, among those of the officer class, but he knew their morality, at least he had thought he did, and it was worthy of respect. That was what made their leadership tolerable. Suddenly it was no longer so. When the fixed parts in the order of things began to crumble, there was a new and frightening kind of loneliness, a confusion unlike anything else.
“Thank you,” she said quietly as he walked across the damp footpath with her and handed her up into the cab. They rode in silence through the morning streets, the clear, gray light catching the windows of houses and shops. There were already many people about: maids, delivery boys, carters fetching fresh goods in for the markets. The first milk wagons were waiting at the ends of the streets and already queues were forming as they turned in towards the station.
The train as it roared through the black tunnel was far too noisy to allow conversation, and Charlotte’s mind was absorbed in anticipation of seeing Pitt. It had been only a matter of a few weeks, but it stretched behind her like a desert of time. She pictured how he would look: his face, his expression, whether he would be tired, well or ill, happy to see her. How much had the injustice wounded him? Was he changed by the anger he had to feel? That thought cut so deeply it caught her like a physical pain.
She sat bolt upright in the train seat. She did not realize, until Tellman moved beside her and stood up, gesturing to the door, how she had been clenching and unclenching her fingers until they ached. She stood up as the train lurched to a stop. They were at Aldgate Street, and they must walk the rest of the way.
It was broader daylight now, but the streets were dirtier, more congested with carts and wagons and groups of men on their way to work, some trudging, heads down, others shouting across to each other. Was there really a tension in the air, or did she imagine it because she knew the history of the place, and because she herself was frightened?
