The Devil's Road E-Book

Jean-Pierre Ohl

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus Europe 2019
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 469

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

While draining a pond during work for the construction of the Stockton to Darlington Railway George Stephenson's workers discover a female corpse with a dagger stuck between her ribs—could it be that of Lady Beresford, the French wife of a local baron who disappeared under mysterious circumstances twenty years ago? The identity of the victim is at the heart of Jean-Pierre Ohl's novel, a richly woven tapestry set during the rise of capitalism in England. The Devil's Road has a Dickensian range of characters from the indolent liberal lawyer Bailey, with a taste for Byron's poems and madeira wine, his imperturbable clerk Snegg, the activist worker Davies and the 'Corporal', a veteran of the Napoleonic wars and demonstrator wounded at the Peterloo Massacre—there is even a role for the young Charles Dickens working in the blacking warehouse.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title

THE AUTHOR

THE TRANSLATOR

PROLOGUE

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

EPILOGUE

COPYRIGHT

THE AUTHOR

Jean-Pierre Ohl has combined a career as a bookseller with his writing.

He is the author of three novels Mr Dick or The Tenth Book, The Lairds of Cromarty and The Devil’s Road, all published in English by Dedalus.

He lives in the Dordogne.

THE TRANSLATOR

For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995.

He has published over eighty translations from German and French. His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years.

His translations have been shortlisted four times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000, The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008 and The Lairds of Cromarty by Jean-Pierre Ohl in 2013.

“WINE! I WANTTOBEADRUNKENPAWNONTHECHESSBOARD.”

MICHEL OHL

PROLOGUE

Diary of Leonhard Vholes, intended readership: none

London, 3rd March 1824

Nothing else exists apart from this hand that is writing.

Is it even known to whom it belongs? Am I a good man? Certainly not. Otherwise why would I pay a rogue such as Robert Grant? A bad one, then? Well, I do give alms of my own free will, and I am moved to tears by the death of a child.

Grant makes himself comfortable in the chair facing me. For a moment I thought he was going to put his feet up on my desk, as I’m sure he does on the greasy tables of the dives in Seven Dials. But he sees the look on my face. And then he takes a book out of his pocket. I recognise it immediately: Du contrat social, ou Principes du droit politique by J-J. Rousseau, citizen of Geneva. The Beresford seal is very prominent on the flyleaf and Danton’s dedication covers the whole of the title page. As I drop the volume into a drawer an odd metallic ‘click’ can be heard.

“I thought you might be interested, in connection with the name of Beresford…”

“Where did you steal it from?”

He sits up straight, feigning indignation. A good actor. Second-rate, but all the same…

“I didn’t steal it, Mr Vholes. Someone gave it to me. In trust.”

“Grant, I find it hard to believe that anyone is naive enough to entrust anything at all to you.”

“Sometimes you can’t choose the person you have to trust, sir.”

Guile, instinct, professional know-how. Grant’s mind leaps from one object to the next, like a cat after mice. It doesn’t follow any rule, any general plan but, in keeping with our age, is solely led by the prospect of immediate profit. Cats are incapable of drawing up an overall plan to eradicate mice but they still manage to do that.

“Who? Where? Why?”

“I knew someone who spoke like that, sir. A guard. On the bridges. He just asked questions. And he always got a reply, some true, some false. By using his whip.”

I play along with him and pretend to look for the whip. Grant is amused and raises his hand as a sign of surrender.

“In Marshalsea prison. In the cellar. An old man with a face like a knife-blade…” He thinks for a moment, then adds, “Not that old, perhaps. He goes by the name of Perkins, but I’d stake my life on it being a false name.”

A debtors’ prison! Can you imagine a more absurd establishment? Poor people, who are unfortunate enough, are required to pay back money they don’t possess – and it’s done by putting them in prison where they are deprived of all means… and what is more, they’re forced to pay a daily fee!

“What is this cellar?”

“The dungeon of the old Borough Prison. That’s where they put the debtors who don’t even have the twopence a day to pay for a room and food: they’re fed with the scrapings from the bowls until they’re declared insolvent.”

“But it’s obvious they’re insolvent. Why else would they let themselves be cooped up in a rathole?”

“I’m not the one who decides that, sir.” Grant draws back into his chair and puts on a deferential air. “It’s you, the legal gentlemen.”

“I’m a lawyer, not a magistrate and even less the minister of justice. This man, does he have small eyes, very close? A broad forehead?”

“Very broad, given that he hasn’t a single hair on his head. As for his eyes, I can’t say.”

“About six feet tall? His hands long and slender.”

“I’ve only seen him lying on his mattress. His hands, yes, certainly.”

“Speaking like a gentleman?”

“As for that, yes, not a man from my class. If it really is the lord in question he has come a hell of a long way down in the world… but you have clients over there, you can go and check yourself. Unless you’d rather not have a chat with him…”

Grant allows himself a brief smile. What precisely have I told him about Beresford? I can’t remember.

On the opposite side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields the windows of the other chambers are going dark one after the other, following some complex scheme of annihilation, sometimes vertical, sometimes horizontal, like pawns devoured by an invisible castle and bishop. Soon the chessboard is empty and all that remains of life around is concentrated in the sound of the elms rustling in the wind. But you can’t make out the leaves or branches any more, just an inchoate mass that seems to be coming closer.

As far as I’m concerned, I completely lost interest in the chess game a long time ago. Since my queen was taken.

“Yes, I will go. When I’ve got time. What did he want?”

“Money, for God’s sake! He wanted me to sell the book so that he could get out of the cellar and sleep in a proper bed, at least for a few days.”

“There are two sovereigns, one for you, one for him.”

“He thinks the book is worth a lot more.”

“Prices have fallen. Try to find out more. Discreetly. And now off you go.”

“At your service, sir.”

Once I was alone I opened the drawer and took out the book. My iron ruler came out with it, as if attached to the leather by an invisible force. Strange… why the hell would anyone hide a magnet in a book?

I

Edward Bailey’s Rude Awakening

Darlington, County Durham, March 1824

At the moment when the navvies reach the pond four o’clock rings from a church tower: the bell doles out the chimes slowly, grudgingly, the way one throws scraps of old meat to dogs – and, indeed, a dog barks at a nearby farm, alerted by the men’s arrival. A few sunbeams weren’t enough to brighten up the afternoon, and now large clouds are arriving from the west. The pond is giving off a foul stench – like the smell that clings to old clothes. The shadow of a copse of birches, very long already, runs across a strip of ground dotted with weeds, then hits the oily surface, black with no reflections, that absorbs everything.

They’ve been working since dawn, only stopping to eat their lunch. There are twenty of them, the oldest hobbling along clutching his ribs, the youngest still has to start growing a beard. The newcomers have no idea exactly what a ‘railway’ is and why they are moving along a line indicated by posts and string, flattening the humps in the terrain here, filling its ruts with earth mixed with bricks there.

The foreman, Alan Forbes, surveys his men to assess how tired they are and eventually announces a fifteen-minute rest. Those who have some tobacco fill their pipes, the others just sit down to contemplate the expanse that seems to consist of viscous oil: here and there unknown shapes touch the surface without quite breaking through, like elbows or knees under a dirty sheet.

Most of the men are Geordies but in one corner there are also three Highlanders who mostly talk in Gaelic. Coming from the south, Forbes sometimes has the impression he’s in a foreign country, the interminable aaas and the guttural rrrs seeming like a meaningless outer layer that has to be stripped off to reveal the actual words. The Highlanders, driven out by a new wave of evictions, have come south and crossed the Cheviots in the hope of finding work in the mines round Bishop Auckland, but at the moment the mines aren’t taking on any more men, even though there is plenty of coal waiting to be extracted: the extreme slowness of transport by river makes it uneconomic for the owners to extract more.

“That’s what the railway is going to be used for,” Forbes explained during the lunch break. “To take the coal down to the sea more quickly. Then everyone will have work.”

In the meantime most of his men don’t seem unhappy with their lot. The work is hard but adequately paid, the foreman demanding but honest. And George Stephenson, the engineer, has promised a good bonus if they keep within the planned time limit. Travers, one of the old hands, knew Stephenson when he was a simple mechanic in Killingworth mine: “A real genius at improvising! Give him two knitting needles, a piece of string and a bedpan and he’ll make you a clock.”

Jim Doughty stretches and lets off a few oaths. He came from Yorkshire a couple of months ago where he’d worked in several cotton mills before the pay slumped, along with the price of cotton, while at the same time the price of bread was rising. He’s a fat man, very slow with a stubborn look on his face and an expression that varies between incomprehension and mistrust. Looking for someone to talk to, he sits down beside Canning, a newcomer who is wearing a black armband.

“Where are you from?”

Canning sighs as he unlaces his boots. They were originally of good quality but the rain and the lack of care have dried out the leather; now they’re too small and his ankles are swollen and hurt.

“Clitheroe,” he replies at last.

“Never heard of it. What were you over there?”

“A weaver. But there’s no work for me any more.”

“These bloody machines doing a man’s work,” Doughty says, trying to sound like a man who’s in the know.

Canning pulls a face. “It’s not the mechanisation that’s the problem. There weren’t any machines in our valley before I left but the master simply threatened to buy some if we didn’t agree to have our wages lowered. But even with two shillings less we could still manage.”

Without them realising it a worker called Sam Davies is following their conversation.

“So what happened then?” Doughty asks.

“The master came back and told us we had to remain competitive: the men in Barrow, the next village, were working for three shillings less and he was going to deal with them alone. So we accepted.”

“Accepted what?”

“The three shillings less. We didn’t even go to Barrow to check up. The roads were frozen and they said there was typhoid there. But I’m sure he told them the same – that we in Clitheroe had agreed to work for three shillings less.”

After taking time to think it over, Doughty understands the trick and chuckled, “My God, he really put one over on you there!”

“So what would you have done, then?” It is Sam Davies asking in a toneless voice. “You’d have thumped him, would you?”

Doughty turns to answer the challenge and opens his mouth to reply, but then hesitates. Davies hasn’t said more than ten words the whole week nor done anything threatening, but there’s something about him that gives the others a vague feeling of apprehension. Perhaps it’s the scar that does it. Despite the cap that he never takes off, everyone has seen the deep gash running across his forehead until it vanishes under the peak, but so far no one has had the courage to ask him how he came by it, nor why he keeps on drawing letters in the soil with a stick during breaks. What is more, no one dares to laugh at his odd habit of placing a kind of kiss on the rind of his cheese before each meal. Standing up, somewhat to one side, he looks at the gently sloping edges of the pond, at the place where a bank of mud emerges from the dirty water.

Doughty decides it is safer to concentrate on Canning.

“Who’s the armband for?”

“My wife.”

Canning pulls a face again. He gives the impression that he’s remembering two things at once, one pleasant the other bitter, and that these two memories are pulling his lips in opposite directions at the same time.

“We closed up the house and went down into the valley, where the cotton mills are. But they only take on women down there because they can pay them less. Hattie worked for five weeks and then… she fell ill.”

“Those who stayed up in the villages didn’t fare any better,” says Forbes, coming over to join them.

While he smokes, the foreman never stops scrutinising the surroundings, looking for suspicious movements or sounds. He knows what happened to the surveyors who went to check out the line of a future railway in Lancashire: they were given a thorough thrashing and left for dead. According to one Tory newspaper the farm workers had “gathered together spontaneously to defend their ancestral traditions.” The more likely explanation is that a landlord determined to preserve the copses where his foxes had their lairs or a company with toll roads had bribed some vagrants to do it.

“I was in Heptonstall not that long ago,” Forbes goes on.

“I know where that is,” Canning says, massaging his ankles.

“The first person I met was a man with a huge pack of woven wool on his back. He’d sold his mule and was about to set off on a ten-mile walk to the factory. The village seemed deserted, there was a vile stench in the streets. Then I saw this lad sitting outside a cottage. When he saw me, he stood up and said, ‘There’s something for you inside, sir.’ ‘For me?’ I asked. ‘Yes, sir, since there’s only you to see it.’ It was very dark in the cottage. My father was a weaver. We weren’t rich, but we had chairs, a table, beds, candlesticks, a chest of drawers for the linen and a clock. In the boy’s cottage there was nothing. Dirty water was seeping up through the flagstones on the floor; it came from the river and the river… was teeming with things, the boy said. So I then asked him what there was there for me and he pointed to a straw mattress with two figures under some sackcloth on it. He told me his father was dead while his mother was still alive, though frankly I couldn’t tell the difference between the two. Then he asked me for a penny.”

“Did he tell you why?” Doughty asked.

“Yes, it was for his funeral club.”

“What the hell is that?”

“At the Sunday school every boy gives a penny. It’s to pay for their coffin when they die.”

Thinking it’s a joke a young lad with tousled hair guffaws. Travers gives him a resounding slap.

“From mud we come, to mud we shall return,” Canning declares, as if he was reciting something.

“You mean dust,” Forbes replies between two puffs of smoke. “‘For dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.’ It’s in the Bible.”

“No. I know what I’m saying. Dust is dry, it’s clean and it doesn’t smell. That’s for the rich. As for us, we’re mud.”

A puff of wind shakes the branches in the trees but doesn’t even ruffle the surface of the pond. The old mule that pulls the equipment cart pricks up its ears. Behind the tops the gloomy mass of Wooler Manor with its ruined chapel can be made out.

“Still,” Doughty finally says, “I don’t see why we should have to drain this blasted pond when there’s a perfectly good road that goes round it.”

“It’s not carts that’ll have to go that way,” Forbes explains, “it’s wagons. The line of the rails has to be as straight as possible. Just imagine you’re in the train zigzagging. Your paunch would be wobbling this way and that.”

That gets a few laughs, though the tousled lad, looking at Travers out of the corner of his eye, doesn’t dare join in.

“Well I’ll be damned if I ever get into a contraption like that!” Doughty mutters, pulling in his stomach. “Coal, all right… beasts, if necessary… but people?! At more than ten miles an hour, or so we’re told… with smoke everywhere and making one hell of a racket! If you want my opinion, it’s not Christian.”

“Because you, great tub of lard that you are, know what’s Christian and what isn’t?” mocks Sam Davies.

Forbes notices the dark look on the face of the man with the scar and sees Doughty clench his fists as well. He immediately gives the signal to go back to work. It’s starting to get dark anyway, rain is coming and there’s still a lot left to do. Following the foreman’s instructions, the Highlanders start to dig drainage ditches while others put in drainpipes at strategic points; up to their thighs in mud, Doughty, Travers and the young lad with the shock of hair are pushing the water towards the pipes with their spades and watching the water slowly run off. Every time they take a step they have difficulty pulling their boots up out of the sludge, producing a strange sucking noise, a sort of spine-chilling plaintive lament.

“Careful where you put your feet,” Forbes warns. “You don’t know what there is down there.”

At certain places the sludge is so thick that it just won’t flow towards the drains and simply stays there, forming vast concretions like putrid molasses that have boiled over from a pan and then have to be cleaned up. Seeing this, the Highlanders start to swear and curse in Gaelic. In other places fortunately, the work is going better and soon the knees and elbows are sticking out above the sheet of mud, revealing their true nature: an overturned tree stump draped with interlacing roots, a millstone, an old shaft of holly that some boy must have thrown as far as he could, ending up with it sticking in the soil like a spear. Thanks to these marker points, the progress of the operation is soon visible to the naked eye. Relieved, Forbes can now concentrate entirely on keeping watch. A gang could well be ensconced in the woods, waiting to fall on them when it starts to get dark. He can almost see them there, hiding among the trees with their forks and cudgels, their faces set and their stomachs empty.

But out of the corner of his eye he sees Sam Davies moving along the edge of the pond, crouched down as if he was following some tracks in the mud.

“Davies, what are you up to there?”

Instead of replying, the man with the scar shouts at Doughty, who is wading along a few metres away from him, “Stop there, not another step.”

With two strides Sam is beside Doughty and, pushing him unceremoniously aside, bends down: there, in a place that was under water a few minutes ago, a metallic object has appeared. While the others gather in a circle round him, he rolls up his sleeves and plunges his hands into the mud to make it flow away more quickly, revealing the dagger, then an indistinct form into which it is stuck.

“What it is?” Doughty asks.

Davies, with a look at the fat man, loosens his cap a bit. “What do you think?”

Others come to help Davies clear away the mud and the object lying on the bottom of the pond takes shape, becomes clearer until there’s only one word for it:

“A corpse!” someone finally says.

The shadows of the workers stretch out over the skeleton which, by contrast, seems tiny. Sam Davies takes a piece of lace covering the bones and roughly cleans it on his jacket. “An article of ladies’ clothing. Torn.”

The dagger is an old weapon but in pretty good condition. The silver hilt is decorated with the design of a castle between two hills. All those who know the region turn their heads to look at Wooler Manor.

Doughty frowns. “Just a minute! That’s not at all like that dump over there!”

“Shut up,” Travers snaps. “You know damn all.”

One of the men goes to fetch a sack from the cart, undoes the seam and lays it down beside the human remains. As delicately as possible, as if they were dealing with a newborn baby, Canning and Davies place them on the canvas. Travers wraps the dagger up in a handkerchief. All the while Forbes is examining the mud by the side of the pond, looking for whatever had attracted Davies’ attention, but everything has been trampled on.

“That’s bad,” the foreman mutters. “Very bad.”

***

Scratch, scratch!

Edward Bailey wakes up but keeps his eyes closed. He’s not really awake anyway, he slips into that intermediate state, so much appreciated by lazybones and poets, in which the mirage of dreams continues along with very agreeable real sensations: the warmth of the blankets, the softness of a pillow. There’s not a sound coming from the alcove where his co-tenant, Solomon Deeds, must still be asleep, fists clenched. No noise from outside, either, which is remarkable in London, even in this quiet little street; it must be early, or perhaps it’s Sunday. Scratch, scratch! But in that case why is his landlady bringing up the kettle? And, above all, why is she scratching at the door instead of giving three sharp knocks as she usually does?

Let her scratch. Edward Bailey wants to enjoy this lazy state a bit longer and to go over all the reasons he has to be pleased with life. Twenty-five, bachelor of laws, an iron constitution, able to drink the night through and do a headstand in the morning. Drawers full of perfumed letters, his memory full of rakish episodes. But that’s all over now: tomorrow – or the day after, he can’t remember – a mail coach will be taking him to the awe-inspiring, wild north! Darlington, what a pretty name for a town. Castles à la Walpole, fields of daffodils straight out of Wordsworth, cliffs to make Scott turn pale, lochs where Ossian could have swum. Up there he’s going to marry Miss Margaret Raffle, the most beautiful girl in the world, and become the partner of her father, a prosperous lawyer. So…

Scratch, scratch! Woofwoof!

Mrs Delaware hasn’t got a dog. And she doesn’t bark herself, except when we spill some madeira on ‘Uncle Mortimer’s table’.

Now Edward is truly awake.

“Go back to where you came from, you obnoxious beast!”

The creature outside doesn’t give up, on the contrary it scratches, yaps all the more, and after a long minute of torture Edward decides to open his eyes. Yes, the old divan he’d had as a student is there, which is hardly surprising since he paid Mrs Delaware three times what it was worth when he left London. And also the ivory hand he bought one evening in a Covent Garden second-hand shop. He remembers having succumbed to an irrational compulsion: the trinket was neither remarkable nor heavy enough to serve as a paper-weight, but there was something about the delicate fingers, the realism of their articulations that had appealed to him. The hand seemed to be alive. “With all your conquests, you won’t be needing it, so how about lending me it for tonight,” Solomon used to joke.

But as for the rest, oh Lord, the rest…

No, Solomon’s gone and it’s not London any more. The little flat in Holborn has been replaced by the summerhouse at the bottom of the Raffles’ park, tiny and poorly heated, but for all that preferable to the house itself. Through the window he can see that repulsive cube bought twenty years ago from a ruined squire: two storeys of boredom, two grim rows of five windows (you’d throw yourself out of all ten of them if it were possible), two chimneys stuck on either end of the roof, like two prison guards. And all that more than a mile away from the amenities of Darlington… to live out in the country or on one’s estate… that gives a man status, it appears.

Now Aloysius Raffle has reached his final status – under ground, in the graveyard. Edward is the last living partner of Raffle, Raffle, Raffle & Bailey. Dead too is his beautiful mother-in-law, the wife of Aloysius. And dead – if it ever existed – is Margaret’s love for Edward. And Edward’s for Margaret?

Woofwoof.

“I’m coming, you misbegotten hound! Just you watch out!”

Edward gets up, puts on a dressing gown, while thinking it was absurd to get dressed for the sake of a dog, and sets off for the door. But on the way he stops at the mirror on his little dressing table. Thirty-four but looking more like forty-five, bags under his eyes, hair falling out all over the place, terrible headaches the morning after a night out – and recently that has been every morning. Where have his seductive smile and sparkling eyes gone? How long is it since he touched a woman’s body without remuneration agreed in advance?

He lets in Titus, his wife’s horrible mongrel. But what kind of mongrel? The offspring of a dwarf bulldog and a dropsical poodle? Of a rat and a mop? Of a wriggly worm and a bowl of mouldy porridge? You could treat a good twenty mangy dogs with all the excess skin hanging down from its belly, its neck, its chin; you could fill a bale of hay every evening with all the hair it scatters wherever it goes. In his wildest dreams Edward hands Titus over to Mr Bramby, the local upholsterer, and, a few hours later, receives a blood-stained rug in return. And to say that this four-footed abomination in a way represents Margaret, that it is her messenger, the last tangible link between the two of them! One of the servants has fixed a basket to its back with a leather strap. While Titus nibbles away at his slippers, Edward bends down and takes out the letter. Margaret’s writing, elongated, sinuous, looks like a snake that’s swallowed a spring:

You must come over at once. She is at the door!

Edward sighs. He opens a drawer and files it with a good twenty similar communications: She’scoming to get me! Don’t abandon me, she’scoming! My God,shehas taken hold of me!etc. Then he imagines his next conversation with Margaret. He knows her replies in advance, it’s a scene from a play without rhyme or reason performed by two terrible actors:

“Edward, I beg you, don’t leave me alone with her!”

“But there’s only the two of us in this room, Margaret, no one else…”

“But I can see her, I can feel her, she’s right next to me, she’s…”

Curled up in a ball beside the hearth, Titus seems to be attempting a conjuring trick by which he’d disappear inside his own skin. Edward, too impatient to wait for this to happen, slowly creeps round the hairy clump until he can pick up the poker, that he hides behind his back. With one leap he tries to skewer his enemy, but his thrust is too short: Titus, yapping dashes off back to his mistress, leaving, on the tip of the poker, a tuft of hair like a dervish’s moustache.

“Oh, Master Bailey,” says Effie, the little maid he encounters on the stairs. “One of the Spalding’s servants has just come by. You have to go and see Sir Walter at once.”

Edward has never mastered the Darlington accent, he always has the impression people are speaking through a foghorn.

“What do you mean, at once?”

“That’s what he said, sir: at once.”

Under any other circumstances he would have found the tone of this summons unbearable, but he is ready to jump at any pretext to delay his confrontation with Margaret. He puts on more formal attire, takes his stick and decides to go to Spalding’s on foot. In order to avoid the road and its traffic, he goes through a little wood then cuts across the fields.

Smug and sly beneath the sun, the Skerne flows down to meet him following a long detour: after spending some time wallowing among the rushes of a swamp, it has remembered it is meant to be a river and heads off south to swell the Tees. On a clearer day, the scabs of the coal mines could be made out. Before him Darlington is basking in the sun. Nine-arched Stonebridge, with its parapet split in the middle, looks like a drunk who’s fallen asleep across a ditch. The bell-tower of St Cuthbert’s mounts guard over this charming scene of provincial dullness.

No, there’s nothing awe-inspiring or wild here. For landscapes such as you find in Romantic engravings – hills, gracefully dotted with sheep and bushes, stretching away to infinity – you have to take the interminably long road up Weardale or Swaledale. Much too far.

His imagination, the little bitch, really fooled him!

Solomon Deeds was also imaginative, but at least he made something of it, epigrams, lines of verse, five-act plays: admittedly very bad ones, totally unwatchable to tell the truth, but at least something concrete. Edward’s imagination, on the other hand is not of the stuff to create works – not even doggerel verse. All it does is twine itself round reality like ivy, that looks vigorous but breaks off whenever you try to climb it. That isn’t the way he’s going to get back on his feet, as Doctor Trees puts it.

And there are the first houses on North Road: large and opulent but unpretentious. The Quakers set the example when they settled in this district, beyond the traditional limits of the town, and they were soon followed by townsfolk who felt constricted by the old alleyways round Market Place or, on the other hand, by gentlemen weary of the mud of the countryside. Instead of being situated beside the road, like the houses of the Quakers, Spalding’s residence is tucked away behind a big garden with banks of flowers and hedges. “Here I hear about everything, straight away,” the master of the house said to Edward one day. “Anyway, soon nobody’s going to be living out in the country.”

A heavy-lidded butler informs Edward that Sir Walter is “undergoing treatment” and puts him in the library to wait. It’s not a room he knows; the couple of times that Spalding saw him previously he was taken straight into his study, but generally day-to-day business is done with Snegg. Looking round the shelves Edward can’t see anything interesting. No sign of Byron, Shelley or Blake, for example, which is unsurprising given the style of house. With his finger he caresses the spine of a novel by Walter Scott, magnificent in its leather binding, but quite obviously never read, no more than the few other novels round it: Defoe, of course, and Richardson’s Pamela. Only the books on economics show signs of frequent use.

All at once he notices, on the mantlepiece above the fireplace, the portrait of a stunningly beautiful woman: a woman of a beauty that is both disturbing and hostile, totally alien to the prosaic nature of the room and to the poor physical standards of the Spalding family. The model, with long, black tousled hair, is glaring at the painter and, through him, the observer, awestruck by such magnificence beyond reach. Her prominent cheekbones, her olive skin, her thick eyebrows and fleshy lips suggest a Latin origin, perhaps Spanish. Some filmy lace on the low neckline of her dress is still moving to the rhythm of her breathing. She doesn’t look as if she’s posing but as if she has materialised for just a few seconds in the painter’s field of vision and it is only patient memory work – doubtless sharpened by ardent admiration – that has enabled him to reconstitute the scene. Perhaps she turned round in an abrupt movement, suggested by a slight twist of the shoulders.

“Hhm hhm. Sir Walter will see you now, sir.”

Still under the spell of the portrait, Edward follows the butler up to the first floor to find Spalding in an armchair upholstered in green velvet, his left leg stretched out on a stool. There is a dressing on the big toe.

“Ah, Bailey, my dear boy. You’re going to save my life. These stupid servants don’t know how to tie a bandage. They pull it tight, as if I were a Clydesdale. And Trees with his ointments and foul potions isn’t much more use either. Would you be so good as to take that off, otherwise my head won’t be clear enough to talk to you.”

As he is gradually released from his agony Sir Walter emits a crescendo of ecstatic sighs, which Edward finds a trifle too demonstrative.

“Oh the gout, my dear friend, the gout! That’s what’s in store for you, just you remember that. Too much meat, too much gravy, too much wine, they all say… too much of everything! But what is there to live for, then?”

The bare toe now stands proud, a monstrous protuberance attached to a tiny white foot, worthy of being exhibited in a chamber of horrors.

“It’s just as I told you, Bailey, you’ve saved my life. There’s a good samaritan behind that reprobate air. And that reinforces my opinion that you’re obviously the very man we need.”

Having said that, Sir Walter contemplates the ceiling blissfully, heartened by the renewed throbbing of the blood in the arteries of his lower limb. When he looks down again, his face has its habitual expression: superficial affability beneath which there appears an iron will and a great aptitude for getting what he wants out of people.

“You’ve heard the news?”

“Not yet.”

“A skeleton. Stephenson’s men have found a skeleton at the bottom of a pond.”

“Stephenson?”

Spalding emits an irritated grunt. “Where have you been, Bailey? Stephenson, the engineer who’s building the line. The whole town is talking of nothing but him.”

“Of course, Stephenson,” Edward says, vaguely recalling having had in his hands – or, to be more precise, seen pass through the hands of his clerk Snegg – a large number of deeds of conveyance transferring property to the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company. “Where was that?”

“Near Wooler Manor.”

Sir Walter’s meaningful silence and knowing look spark off no response in Edward. He does know the place, of course. If there is one spot in the area worthy of interest, it is surely Wooler Manor. Before he became too lazy he used to go there for walks occasionally. He doesn’t particularly like the Gothic style of the house itself, a sort of imitation of Walpole’s villa in Twickenham, but he does acknowledge a certain boldness in its pretentiousness and the neglect appeals to him: the ivy creates complicated designs on the façade, giving a Byzantine touch to the arched windows, the belfry and the darker turret beside it. In the neglected park common shrubs have sprung up beside august centuries-old oaks, weeds are climbing the parapets, water lilies cover the surface of the large stone basin where, so it is said, there are carp of antediluvian size. Not far away is the chapel, that is at least genuine Gothic, from the same period as the former castle. A nice walk. But he still hasn’t the least idea of what is expected of him now.

“A vagrant must have drowned,” he suggests cautiously.

“Huh! The remains still had some shreds of decent clothes. And then they also found a dagger belonging to the Beresfords.”

A further silence. A further meaningful look. No reaction from Edward. Sir Walter rolls his eyes. “How long have you been living in Darlington, Bailey?”

“Nine years.”

“My God, nine years… and one would think you’d just arrived from the moon. Nine years and you haven’t heard people talking about Beresford… when not a minute passes without someone here mentioning his name! It’s true that he wasn’t one of your father-in-law’s clients – but at least you’ve just met Lady Beresford.”

“Sorry?”

“Down below. In the library.”

“You mean… the portrait?”

Clearly ready to overlook Edward’s ignorance – or perhaps moved himself by the beauty of the portrait – Sir Walter clasps his hands over his stomach and explains patiently, “It’s my Uncle Henry who painted it. The artist in the family. After some fruitless attempts he threw away his palette and went and got himself killed at the Battle of Castlebar in a fit of pique at not having become Gainsborough… or at not having managed to seduce the beautiful baroness, who knows. Anyway, having seen Lady Beresford once when I was young, I can tell you that it’s a mediocre portrait.”

“Really!”

“She was a thousand times more beautiful in the flesh, but enough of that. The Beresfords hardly mixed with local society at all. Not prestigious enough in their eyes. Robert Beresford had brought his wife Mathilde back from France and they lived a reclusive life at Wooler Manor with only the Baron’s younger sister, Ophelia, for company. When she died, in 1803, the situation at the manor suddenly took a turn for the worse. There was talk of arguments, even of open and violent quarrels between the couple. To cut a long story short, they suddenly left, each on their own, or so it seems. Since then it’s been a lawyer in London who manages their property… yes, in London, though don’t ask me why. Ouch!”

Edward looks at the gouty toe again. It seems to have become even more swollen, even redder – he felt you could almost see the pain throbbing in the damaged tissue.

“It’s a real torment, I can tell you. Pour me a drop of brandy, will you?”

“So early in the day? Are you sure that’s…”

“Yes, confound it, I am sure.”

Imaginary or real, the effect of the brandy is immediate. Spalding resumes his contemplation of the ceiling, gasping with relief.

“Excuse me, Sir Walter, but…”

“Shh! Wait. Just wait a moment… until it has its full effect… where was I now? Oh yes – all that’s none of our business, of course – people such as the Beresfords do what they want with themselves, with their time and their money, they travel wherever they like…”

“All the same, a trip lasting twenty-one years, that’s not normal…”

“That’s not the problem. The trouble is there’ve been rumours… below stairs,” Spalding points at the floor. “Based on the evidence of a drunken valet and a hysterical lady’s maid.”

Edward grants himself a mouthful of brandy and contemplates the gouty aristocrat. “What kind of evidence?”

“The wagging of idle tongues. Beresford is supposed to have made terrible threats to his wife, then, later on, had himself driven to Durham, alone.”

“Hmm. And Mathilde?”

“Disappeared.”

“All the same…”

“Shut up! There was a discreet investigation that didn’t produce anything unusual. Those are just rumours, I tell you, lackeys’ gossip. Nowadays people will take any excuse to besmirch the noblest flowers of society. So now you’ll see why the discovery of this skeleton is… inopportune?”

“Inopportune, true, but I still don’t see how…”

“I must say it looks as if you can’t see very much today.” Without really raising his voice, Sir Walter has given the conversation a different tone, as if he had tugged at an invisible string. “Lord Glendover is in London and will not return that soon. As for myself, I’m no good for anything at the moment,” he went on, pointing at his toe. “And the other justices of the peace in the district, they are available, of course, but totally incompetent. Now this is a matter that demands some skill, tact and above all impartiality. Or, to be more precise, a convincing appearance of impartiality.”

Edward stares, wide-eyed. Spalding claps his hands over his stomach and goes on, after a short pause, “My idiot son admires you – because you know a few words of Latin, because you criticise the government, rail against the church and have a huge repertoire of dirty songs.”

“He must be the only one in the whole of Darlington.”

“Indeed. In the eyes of most people you are an idle fellow come from the capital to get your hands on an old family fortune and have a good time at the expense of your in-laws. A bit of a reprobate, as I said just now. Morally and politically.”

“And you share that opinion?”

“To a great extent. But I grant that you have a certain mental agility, even if you haven’t given great proof of it this morning… and sometimes, if you have to repair a piece of furniture, you need a part that is slightly twisted and therefore the only one that can take a suitable shape…”

“I presume I am that part.”

“You are above all a source of problems. A dilettante with vaguely liberal ideas. A vacillating Benthamist.”

“I hereby declare that I execrate Jeremy Bentham and all his works.”

Spalding frowns. “Really? You surprise me. Even I don’t reject everything he says. His panopticon prison, for example – there’s a good idea. It ought to be put into practice, then perhaps the ex-convicts would behave better. And according to the newspaper Bentham’s working on an amendment to the poor law at the moment: instead of the poor being paid to stay at home and do nothing, as they do today, they should be confined in workhouses where life would be so hard no one would want to stay there – resulting in great savings for the royal purse, and for ours! Excellent! Problem solved!

“To return to our own problem: Glendover has give me full power to appoint an assistant Justice of the Peace. If I call on right-thinking men such as Price or Paisley, all the Whigs of the county will come down on us, claiming we’re trying to hush the matter up. You, on the other hand, will enjoy the benefit of doubt, at least for the time you need to make sure that the Beresford family has nothing to do with the business of this skeleton.”

“And if they do have something to do with it?”

“Dr Trees will perhaps have more to tell us about that in a couple of days’ time when he comes back from his blasted congress in Newcastle and will deign to examine the remains. But in any event your task will be to reconcile our sacred duty to justice with the demands of maintaining public order.”

Edward almost choked as he swallowed his brandy. “What a nice way of putting it, Sir Walter. It reminds me of the farmer who wanted to sell his laying hens while still collecting the eggs.”

“Still, I know that you are capable of achieving this tour de force… in the world we live in, my friend, everything has its price…”

Spalding suddenly seems very cordial. Edward stays on his guard. “So far you have received much and given little. Look on the favour I am asking of you as a very small tax on the advantages you have enjoyed for nine years. Anyway, I’m sure that everything till turn out for the best and what you have to do will not bring a blush to your cheeks. By the way, it is Cobbold, the policeman, who will be in charge of the enquiry – under your orders, of course.”

Edward grimaces. He doesn’t know the fellow but he’s heard people talk about him. And not to his advantage either.

“Don’t worry,” Spalding immediately goes on with a soothing gesture. “I know that in the past he has been rather… heavy-handed, but we do need someone we can rely on. And in contrast to him, you will have the role of the nice Justice of the Peace, close to the right people, you should be happy with that… right then. Since you accept your nomination…”

“Have I accepted it, Sir Walter?”

“Oh, come now, Bailey…”

It’s no longer just cordiality, it’s almost affection. Now Edward is genuinely concerned.

“Now be reasonable, my lad,” Spalding says, fluttering his eyelashes like an old actress. “Don’t force me to…”

A threat, however unbelievable that might seem. What on earth could he threaten me with? To withdraw his custom? That would be good riddance, Margaret has enough money for both of us. Edward prepares a haughty reply, but something makes him hold back, one of those premonitions he finds ridiculous from a novelist’s pen. This isn’t about Sir Walter’s custom. There’s something else.

Spalding closes his eyes. It’s as if he’s counting up to ten before he opens them abruptly and fixes them on Edward. “Keep me informed, Justice of the Peace Bailey. And, oh, before leaving would you be so good as to hide the brandy and redo the dressing? Without squeezing, of course. If my wife should find out that I’ve been disobeying doctor’s orders she’ll crush my other toes…”

Edward Bailey and Solomon Deeds: the Inseparables. Bailey, the reveller, the rake, inveterate punster, Deeds, the sensible man who only went to bed with the idea for a poem. One evening they were walking up and down Piccadilly Terrace, right next to where Byron lived, at the time when the craziest rumours were going round about the great man’s private life, his relations with his half-sister Augusta, and abuse was being hurled at him in the Lords because of his liking for Bonaparte. They waited for hours to see him; they had come to assure him of their support against the vile tongues, the morality-bashers, those who envied and derided him, the warmongers, the odious Tories and the treacherous Whigs. But when his limping silhouette finally appeared, when his handsome, icy countenance passed before them, they didn’t dare approach him, nor chant the special encomium composed by Solomon: “All glory to the immortal author of Childe Harold, glory be to his name, glory to his works and may his enemies vanish into their graves.”

Under the influence of this memory, Edward walks up Northgate, then High Row. When he reaches Market Place he briefly entertains the idea of going on to Bull Wynd, the most… accommodating alleyway in Darlington where perhaps a charming young woman… but no. Pulling himself together, he turns to the right.

In their little apartment in Holborn he and Deeds would read Wordsworth and Scott together by candlelight, the remains of chops on the table along with two glasses of madeira, mediocre but as precious as nectar. No other sound but the crackling of the sparse fire in the grate and the music of the words in their heads full of dreams and yearning. Deeds sitting up straight in his chair, Edward stretched out on his divan. The silence and beauty of Coleridge, the calm and the passion of Blake.

He still has the books, here in Darlington, but they no longer serve any purpose. They were a canvas for his imagination, a kind of mould giving shape to his undisciplined ideas. But then they turned their backs on him. Without Solomon Deeds, without their interminable discussions, the books no longer have anything to say to him.

The Raffle Chambers, Skinnergate: as always for the last nine years he goes from one Raffle to the next. He’s surrounded by Raffles: dead Raffles (innumerable), an ex-Raffle (Margaret), a stone Raffle, paper Raffles on headed documents, Raffles in paintings, Raffles on seals, Raffles in brass on the original plate for the chambers – Raffle, Raffle & Raffle, lawyers – while his own name is a negligible codicil on another smaller, more modest brass plate. ‘Raffle, Raffle, Raffle’ is the rhythm his shoes, bought with the Raffles’ money, beat out on the pavement. Good morning Mr Raff – Mr Bailey,’ the chemist says. He may have won a prize in the raffle of life, but now he’s having to pay for it.

He keeps on walking – he hasn’t walked so much for ages – and then something very rare happens. He starts to find it all very funny. His life. Or, rather, the backside of his life. The arse of things. As if the door of a squalid hovel had opened on a ravishing whore. He bursts out laughing, so much so that an old lady gives him an outraged look. He’s still laughing as he reaches the chambers, a building of massive architecture he would have called Rafflian if the adjective had existed. Striding across the floor, deformed by the tread of millions of Raffles, he enters Snegg’s tiny office, a room he much prefers to his own office for the simple reason that Snegg is there – there’s nothing worse than a silent tête-à-tête with the files in the Raffles’ chambers.

Snegg’s office. A bastion of order at the heart of chaos. An oasis of hard-working constancy amid a desert of negligence and idleness. Everything there is classified, filed away in drawers, dossiers of all sizes or archive boxes. Once there Edward, as usual, sprawls across the only armchair, reserved for clients and, still laughing, watches the clerk going about his duties.

He is perched on his ladder so that he can reach the upper level of the archives – the oldest – then he comes down again, holding a piece of paper, slips the document into a file open on his desk and directs a quizzical look at his employer. The only odd thing about his fairly ordinary mild, round face is the almost total lack of eyebrows.

“No, Snegg, you’re not dreaming. I have come to the chambers and I am in a good mood… at least I have been for the last five minutes. On reflection, it’s probably due to Sir Walter’s big toe. It didn’t occur to me right away, but there’s something priceless about having the big, gouty, stinking, fiery red toe of one of the most important notables of Darlington under your nose, don’t you think?”

“I do indeed think that in certain circumstances big toes can have great comic potential.” His voice is soft, with a slightly reedy tone, but also a hint of something metallic, as if a country stream with a charming babble had been diverted through a complex maze of pipes, ducts and cascades. Even as he speaks, he continues to attend to his work and starts rummaging through an appropriately labelled box of old newspapers.

“You’re quite right – again! You can laugh at everything, absolutely everything.” Here Edward is more or less repeating the words from a speech he made as a schoolboy and which brought him a great success. “I’m flabbergasted at how close to each other wild delight and absolute despair are. Heads I laugh, tails I cry.”

Snegg takes a carefully cut-out article, then another, and puts them in the file as well. From time to time he smiles at Edward, emitting words of encouragement or questioning grunts, like an adult who doesn’t want to upset a child nor be too distracted by its babbling.

“Just a minute,” Edward goes on. “When you think about it, that metaphor doesn’t work! We can only see one side of the coin at a time, while with a bit of practice it’s possible to imagine the tragic aspect of existence and its totally ridiculous side at one and the same time.”

For a few seconds Edward watches the clerk, who is once more perched on top of the ladder, at the other end of the room this time – it slides silently on a rail – busy but always ready to take part in the conversation, enigmatic through his very ordinariness, like all the things we see everyday without looking at them properly.

“Snegg, do you think anyone from the chambers has ever been appointed a deputy Justice of the Peace?”

“Hmm. Certainly not your father-in-law.” The clerk comes back to ground level, completes the file on his desk with two or three further items, finally sits down and puts his fingers together as if he were saying a prayer to his own memory. “I would have known. And little likelihood of Mr Raffle being thus appointed for, as you doubtless know, he left all the work to his brother and spent his time drinking and betting on the horses…”

“Yes. He’s the only member of the family I might have felt some affinity with.”

“And anyway, he probably thought ‘Justice of the Peace’ was the name of a cocktail or a racehorse. As for Mr Raffle, the father of the last two… well, I never knew him but it seems he was a very proud man and I’m sure that if he had had that honour he would have had it engraved on his tombstone.”

Edward stares out of the window at the lowering clouds. Then he gets up. “You see before you a remarkable creature, neither a cocktail nor a racehorse but a recently appointed deputy Justice of the Peace.”

“Excellent, sir.”

“I suddenly feel a bizarre enthusiasm for this task. My intention is to go down in history as the most punctilious, the most scrupulous and honest Justice of the Peace there’s ever been. I don’t care what Spalding’s instructions are, I will root out the truth, even if that will destroy the entire British social system. But…”

“But?”

Edward frowns, putting on a show of concern – all those parts he played in farces during his student days come flooding back to him. “But I’m just an incomer. I need the help of someone born and bred in Darlington, someone who knows the town like the back of his hand, someone whose profession means he knows everybody’s secrets – a doctor, for example, a priest. Or else… yes, why not someone in the legal business? Someone who has his ear to the ground, whose eye misses nothing, who knows who’s being unfaithful, who drinks too much, who owes money and who’s lending it, who votes Tory and who votes Whig, who takes the pro-governmental newspapers and who the Leeds Mercury or Cobbett’s Political Register. To put it in a nutshell: an exceptional person capable of assembling a complete dossier on the Beresford family in… let’s say a couple of days.” Edward emits a heart-rending sigh. “Alas, I can’t really see where we’d find such a rare bird.”

“It doesn’t seem such an impossible task, Mr Bailey… yes, I think a man like that is available.” And with a faint smile Snegg dips his pen in the inkwell, writes something on the cover of the file he’s been putting together and hands it to his employer.

“‘The Beresford Affair’?” Edward is dumbfounded. “But, Snegg, how… how on earth could you…”

“To be honest, I wasn’t sure, but Sir Walter’s messenger dropped in here before going round to your house. It seemed unusual to me for him to want to see you forthwith and, though I can’t say why, I immediately linked it to the business of the skeleton everyone’s talking about. And since I had nothing urgent on hand…”

Edward can’t take his eyes off the file, if only to convince himself that it really does exist. He wonders how Snegg managed to complete something so quickly after thinking of it. His own projects are no more precise than the turbulence on the surface of a river and had as much chance of completion as Titus had of winning the prize for the most beautiful pedigree dog. With him cause never led directly to effect – the mechanism must be jammed.

“It’s a real magnum opus! What’s in it?”

“Articles from local and national newspapers – the affair caused a great stir – various notes made by your father-in-law on the people involved, letters from Mr Dull, his great friend and colleague in Durham who looked after the interests of Lord Robert Beresford and, like Mr Raffle, had a very elastic conception of the notion of a professional secret…”

“Spalding also mentioned a lawyer in London.”

“We’ll come to him… your father-in-law kept absolutely all items of information he deemed useful on his actual and potential clients, their likely opponents or anyone of a certain repute and stature who had any connection at all with Darlington. He used to call it ‘covering his rear’.”

“I’ll never have the patience to read all that.”

“I skimmed through the major items just now while I was putting them together. I can give you a summary, if you like.”

A sunbeam pushes the clouds aside and peers in through the window, setting the china inkwell on the desk aglow, while the brass clasps on the files, the gilt-edging of the old law books and the drawer-handles sparkle – as do Snegg’s eyes at the prospect of finally exercising his faculties on an interesting task. As for Edward, he is once more in his preferred position, sprawled across an armchair, legs dangling, head back, eyes on the ceiling, waiting for what is to come.