A Question of Guilt

15

Three weeks later, on the morning of Wednesday, April 27, 1910, King Edward VII arrived at Dover from Calais in the royal yacht Alexandra. He had journeyed by train across France from Biarritz, with his usual pause in Paris. Biarritz saw the English king a week or two every spring. He ate, drank, smoked cigars, played baccarat, strolled the promenade in the Atlantic breezes which sprayed the sea along the rocky coast, drove into the Pyrenees in his Mercedes, the royal motor-engineer Mr Stamper sitting next to the chauffeur, poised to jump out for the breakdowns.

The machinery of State meanwhile clanked round the King. Mr Asquith had kissed hands on appointment as Prime Minister in the Hotel de Palais. The King's suggestion that a British cabinet meeting be held the following week at the Hotel Crillon in Paris, was thought placing the convenience of the Monarch too noticeably above the proprieties of the Constitution.

King Edward returned among rumours of Mr Asquith's demand he create sufficient new Liberal peers to swamp the House of Lords, and bring it to the prime minister's bidding. A royal threat was enough. The House of Lords would fight for their right to throw out budgets, but not at the price of being overwhelmed by a pack of upstart bounders. He returned also to a buzz about his health.

The King went to the opera, he saw Lord Kitchener and the pictures at the Royal Academy, he went to the opera again, he went to Sandringham and to Mrs Keppel's house in Grosvenor Street. On Thursday, May 5, he failed to welcome Queen Alexandra back from her Mediterranean cruise, and Buckingham Palace announced that he was suffering a severe cold.

The next morning, the King's doctors declared that he gave rise to anxiety. His horse _Witch of the Air_ won the 4.15 at Kempton Park. They sent for the Queen. The Queen with sublime understanding sent for Mrs Keppel. At six o'clock, the doctors proclaimed his condition critical. Saturday morning's _Times _appeared with thick black lines separating all its columns.

His people were shocked. The reticence of the bulletins had drawn knots instead of crowds to the Palace railings. The King had worn the crown of scandal, but earned the affection of his easygoing, race-loving, self-indulgent subjects as deservedly as his nickname 'Tum-tum.' He was crowned with France and Russia his country's implacable enemies. He died leaving them enduring friends.

'You'll enjoy the royal funeral,' Eliot told Nancy that Saturday evening. 'We do those sort of things terrifically well.'

Eliot heard the doorbell. There were hurried footsteps on the stairs. The door flew open without a knock. Ruston appeared with Wince, who carried a brown attachй case. Both stopped, staring at Nancy. She sat on a stool between the fireplace and Eliot, who stood unmoving, hands in pockets, resentful of the interruption.

'We're just going out to dine. Can I offer you fellows a b and s?'

Ruston's gesture brushed aside brandy and soda. 'I want to speak to you, Eliot. In confidence.'

'Miss Grange's discretion is as remarkable as her intelligence.'

'I must insist on seeing you alone.'

Ruston sounded angry. He called every week, his business trivial-generally chiding Eliot on not distributing the movement's tracts among the doctors, lawyers, ministers of religion and similar professional men who might afford him confidence. Eliot objected that he was too busy patching the sick poor to ring middle-class doorbells. He knew that Ruston himself wrote the tracts, and thought them intellectually powerfully persuasive.

Nancy stood. 'I've anyway to see Frau Ebert about our Sunday dinner,' she said accommodatingly.

'Why must you keep company with that woman?' asked Ruston peevishly as the door shut.

'Marat was married and even the incorruptable Robespierre was not celibate.'

'Women interfere.' Wince laid the attachй on the table, unlocking it with a key on a bunch from his trouser pocket. 'And talk.'

'What we are to say musn't reach another ear, Eliot, even in a whisper. You'll swear to that?'

'I can hardly give my sacred oath if we regard the Bible as capitalist propaganda. You can't have it both ways.'

'It makes no difference if you agree or not,' Ruston told him impatiently. 'The only way to keep a man's mouth shut is assuring him that his head will come off if he opens it. You know we can do that, don't you?' he asked menacingly. 'Remember what happened to Thompson.'

Thompson was a young schoolmaster Eliot had known in the movement before leaving for Champette. While Eliot was in Switzerland, Thompson's body had been found in Hackney Marshes with a bullet in the brain. Neither Eliot, nor seemingly Ruston, nor certainly Scotland Yard, had a precise notion of the murderer or the motive. But the reference was enough to make Eliot uneasy.

'I'd never tell my old woman so much as the time o'day.' Wince was spreading on the table the yard-long sheet of an Ordnance Survey map. 'She'd always look out someone to pass the news to.'

'Well, Eliot, now's a chance to show what you're made of.' Ruston's smile was more sarcastic than inspiring. 'His Imperial Majesty Kaiser William II will soon be within our shores. Our fat King's funeral is May 21, a fortnight today. As his nephew, the Kaiser's importance in the ceremony will be separated only by our new King George from that of the corpse.'

Wince nodded, producing his curly pipe and tobacco-pouch.

'I don't think anyone knows at the moment when the Kaiser will leave Berlin, not even the Kaiser himself,' Ruston continued. 'He's due to attend a lecture next week by the outspoken Mr Theodore Roosevelt at Berlin University, and he won't miss the chance of presenting himself as a man who can appreciate American politicians. Particularly one demanding Britain to get out of Egypt. What we're pretty sure about is our friend's route. The Imperial yacht Hohenzollen will berth here at Sheerness, on the north-west corner of the Isle of Sheppey.'

Eliot looked obediently at the map. The oval island in the Thames Estuary, some ten miles by five, was separated from the north Kent coast by a narrow reach of sea choked with sandbanks. To the west lay the mouth of the River Medway and Rochester, reminding Eliot of Charles Dickens. To the east, the tiny port of Whitstable, reminding Eliot of oysters.

'We shall know when Kaiser Bill arrives with no more trouble than reading the newspapers,' Ruston resumed enthusiastically. 'We'll know the time his train leaves for London, because there'll be a reception committee in feathered hats at Victoria. That'll be announced in advance by the newspapers as well.'

Wince held a match over his pipe-bowl with one hand. 'Bin spyin' out the land for just this chance the past three years. Sheppey itself we can ferget. It's a military area, see? Barracks up there, at Garrison Point.' He indicated with a stubby finger of his free hand. 'Railway runs straight sahth for three and a 'alf miles, crosses the water at King's Ferry Bridge. It's all marshland, flat as yer 'and. They'll station a platoon up 'ere on Barrows 'ill ter keep a sharp lookout on anyone moving abaht.'

Wince seemed to Eliot an unlikely military man. Then he recalled some remark by Ruston of Wince in Dusseldorf on a month's training 'for active service.' Perhaps Wince's shambling personality was a careful disguise. Eliot knew that he spoke fluent German and French, and had a quicker head for figures than himself.

'The branch line joins the main London, Chatham and Dover tracks just 'ere, another three miles further sahth. It's still flat an' covered with orchards-as you'd expect in Kent-so you can't see far. Then it runs west for five miles, nearly all in cuttin's, 'ard against the old Roman road ter London. See that curved cuttin' there, ahtside a village called Cold 'arbour?' Puffing clouds of smoke, Wince tapped the map decisively. 'That's where we're going to do it.'

'Do what?' asked Eliot.

'You're being deliberately obtuse,' said Ruston irritably. 'Blow up the Kaiser.'

'You're mad.'

'What do you mean, Eliot?' he demanded angrily. 'Are you with us, or aren't you? You've known perfectly well that's our plan, since January. You chose to live here cheaply and in comfort, and now you're asked to do something in return you're showing up as a coward.'

'I'm not a coward. It's just that I'm not interested in murdering people.'

'Oh, damn you!' Ruston banged the table. 'We're going to change the history of the world. And you're no more serious about it than a cricket match.'

'I don't see why you should pick me to do your dirty work.'

'Let me explain our plan.' Wince seemed unconcerned with the argument. 'We've got a couple of blokes 'oo'll be in the firin'-line. Railwaymen, from the Great Northern.'

'Members for ten years, utterly reliable, both been to Dusseldorf and trained with explosives,' said Ruston warmly.

'There won't be nobody watchin' the line most o' the way. Stands to reason, don't it? They'd need 'arf the army. An' wot's the point? The Kaiser's a popular chap, the King's cousin. They'll send a tank engine ahead of the royal special, so if anyone's provided a rather generous detonator, or removed a rail or two on the sly, the driver and fireman'll get it in the eye, not 'is Imperial Majesty. Our men will set orf the charge as the train goes across, then run for it.'

'They won't run far,' Eliot said.

Wince continued calmly, 'There'll be a carriage an' pair with another of our blokes, getting them to Chatham along the main road in less than an hour. In Chatham, we've an 'ahse they can lie low in, as long as they like.'

'Where'll you get the dynamite from?' Eliot asked. 'You can't buy it at the Army and Navy Stores.'

Ruston smiled smugly. 'It's under your feet.'

'So far, there seems nothing for me to do, anyway,' Eliot pointed out. 'I don't care going along just for the excitement.'

'You are the hub of the operation, Eliot. Your orders are to take a room in the _Bull and Mouth_ inn at Sittingbourne for the week of the funeral. Sittingbourne is exactly where the two railway lines join. Our two railwaymen are heroes of the people, but they are unschooled. They can barely read and write. We need an intelligent man to pass messages, to free the snags, to extemporize should anything go wrong. A well-spoken fellow like you will create not a breath of suspicion. You won't use your own name, of course. Choose any you like,' Ruston ended generously.

'Lenin?' suggested Eliot.

'You must take this seriously,' Ruston repeated angrily.

'I take extremely seriously the certainty that I shall be arrested and hanged, as colonel of a regiment of two illiterates.'

'Then you will be a martyr,' Ruston assured him solemnly.

'Why not go instead? Wouldn't you like to be a martyr, too?'

'To be frank, I am too important to risk.'

'I've thought of another objection.'

'What's that?'

'My father will undoubtedly be sacked by the Duke.'

Ruston glared. He checked what he was about to say. 'I interpret this foolish attitude as embarrassment at having to perform your duty, when you had every intention of avoiding it. We shall be back tomorrow.' Wince began folding his map. 'I have important things to accomplish tonight.'

'And I am becoming late for my dinner.'

Eliot was evasive about the visit until sitting in the corner of a narrow French restaurant in Soho. It was one of the few open, the evening after the King's death. The tables were crude, the floor sawdusted, the walls lined with scrolled mirrors, the ceiling over the gas-globes thick with dead flies. Eliot said it served the best veal in London.

'They wish to change my duties from pushing political tracts through clergymen's letter boxes to blowing up the German Emperor,' he announced.

Nancy stared, mouth agape. 'Oh, God save us,' she muttered. 'But it's crazy.'

'I know. The only effect of the plan will be the locking up of its perpetrators.'

'There's a lot about this movement you've never told me of, isn't there?' She was more frightened than reproachful.

'There's a lot I don't know myself. You must have guessed the house is a staging-post for comrades from the Continent? Scotland Yard certainly has our address, but as we're doing nothing illegal I don't give a tinker's cuss. There's German money behind it, which probably accounts for the Kaiser's privilege as the target. Communism's a German phenomenon. Marx and Engels were Rhinelanders, remember. Over there, it's a voice demanding to govern. Here it's just a voice, to which the British workers are as deaf as to the street-corner evangelists.'

Eliot reached for her hand across the zinc-topped table with paper cloth. 'I can't forgive myself for getting you mixed in this, dearest. I should have told you at the beginning, but of course I was scared you'd just fly off.'

She was concerned only at his being mixed in it. He said ruefully, 'When I joined, I suppose I'd have blown up the Duke and my father with him. Now my ideas upon the British revolution are as gentlemanly as Carlyle's on the French one. I still want a revolution, but only in the abstract.'

The fat proprietor in his tight alpaca coat presented the burgundy. Eliot sniffed, sipped and nodded. 'Ruston's probably as appalled at the scheme as I am, but too frightened to admit it. I've the idea that Wince is the boss, really. Everything is so devious in a revolutionary body, I suspect for the fun of it.'

'We must leave the house at once,' Nancy said firmly.

'You must. You're going home to New York by the next boat.'

'Of course I'm not.'

'Nancy, my darling-love is sweet but life is sweeter.'

She looked scared. 'You mean we're in danger?'

'If they're ruthless enough to kill the Kaiser, they certainly are to kill me.'

The proprietor served their _blanquette de veau a l'ancienne._ 'Ruston tried to scare me about one of our comrades who was found shot,' Eliot resumed. 'Though I doubt for ratting on the movement. He was a young man afflicted with the same malady as Oscar Wilde. He had strange business with important men who would have mourned him by cracking a bottle of champagne.'

'I'll go to New York if you come too. That'll solve everything.'

'I can't leave overnight, like Mrs Crippen. No more than Dr Crippen could. I've patients depending on me.'

'They can go down the road to the Royal Free Hospital. They survived before your surgery was there.'

'They'd think poorly of me. And I don't care to run away. It would blow a hole in my political career.'

'Why not stay in New York? There'd be no trouble, Fixing you a licence to practice.'

He was silent for some time. 'No,' he said.

'Do you suppose the whole plan's a fantastic dream of those two men?' Nancy suggested more cheerfully. 'My father gets threats against his life every month. Nothing happens. He just passes them along to Pinkerton's.'

'I shall emulate Gilbert's admirably sagatious Duke of Plaza-Toro in similar circumstances,' Eliot decided. 'I shall send my resignation in, the first of all his corps, O!'

'Go to the police,' she suggested eagerly. 'You know enough about Ruston and Wince.'

'Enough to get them both hanged on the same morning. But I can hardly denounce them without incriminating myself.'

They decided the safest plan was an anonymous letter to Scotland Yard, warning of an attempt upon the Kaiser during his train journey to London. Eliot calculated it would line the railway with policemen, to scare away the two unlettered assassins. They must move house instantly, Nancy insisted. Eliot recalled Crippen's remark about leaving Hilldrop Crescent. He suggested they bought the fag-end of the lease. Nancy agreed. Scrubbed and stripped of its pink hangings, the house was tolerable. 'At least, there's no dynamite in the cellar,' Eliot told her.

Preparing the anonymous letter on Sunday morning was a fresh experience as alarming to Eliot as preparing to blow up the royal train. He tore a sheet from a cheap exercise-book, wrote in pencilled capitals, and took the Metropolitan Railway to post it in the City. That afternoon he walked with Nancy up Camden Road to Hilldrop Crescent. A dark girl about sixteen in a brown dress and an apron opened the door. The antipathy to servants had died with Belle.

Eliot gave their names. The girl shrugged, and called into the house, 'Madame!' Ethel appeared, smiling. 'I read about you in the paper,' she said admiringly, remembering Nancy. 'This is Mademoiselle Valentine, the doctor and I brought her over from Boulogne last week.'

Eliot brought a smile from the girl by addressing her in French. 'Oh, I do wish I could speak like that!' Ethel clasped her hands together. 'Valentine is living with us _au pair,_ as the French say.'

On starvation wages, as the English say, Eliot thought.

'I hope she'll improve my French conversation. The doctor speaks the language perfectly, of course. He's out, seeing Mr Marr at Aural Remedies,' Ethel apologized. 'Even on a Sunday, would you believe it? But Mr Marr's very useful to the doctor. Do come in.'

She led them into the parlour, with comfortable assurance as mistress of the house. The room was still pink, but the bows had gone from the picture-frames, the photographs were cleared away. It was full of clothes-a fur coat, overcoats in brown, black and cream, a feather boa, jackets and skirts, an armchair Filled with lace-edged silk blouses and coloured underskirts, another with pink nightgowns, stockings and stays. Eliot counted seven pairs of shoes lined across the carpet, black, blue, black-and-white and pink. The card table was piled with hats. A square wicker basket used by performers 'on the road' stood empty, its side stencilled in thick black letters BELLE ELMORE. Before the fireplace was a dark, middle-aged woman in a brand-new heliotrope costume made for someone shorter and fatter.

'This is Emily Jackson.' Ethel's voice was fond. 'She was my landlady at Constantine Road. I was giving her some of poor Belle's clothes. It seems such a shame, just having them eaten by moths, doesn't it?'

Nancy made a sympathetic remark about Belle dying so far from home. 'It was a great shock,' said Ethel solemnly. She looked quickly from Eliot to Nancy. 'Mrs Jackson was more of a mother to me than a landlady. She knows all about me and the doctor before…before…'

'The doctor's one of the nicest men I ever met,' asserted Mrs Jackson warmly.

'And now the poor King too has gone to his rest,' sighed Ethel.

As this seemed to raise death from a personal to general subject, Eliot mentioned his interest in the house.

'Yes, the doctor did give notice, for sure,' Ethel said. 'But now we're thinking of staying till September. It's so difficult, finding somewhere nice. And the doctor's getting a bit more cheery now. A few days in Boulogne did him the world of good, even though somebody stole his luggage going across. Would you believe it! It was his leather hatbox, one moment it was there, the next it had vanished. I told him to inform the French police, but he said they'd never lift a finger to help an Englishman. If you're looking for a place, why not ask the house agents we pay the rent to? They're Lown amp; Sons, 12 Ashbrook Road, at the bottom of Highgate Hill.'

Eliot thanked her. 'They haven't wasted much time, dividing the spoils,' he remarked, as they walked back to Camden Road.

'Do you suppose he'll marry her?'

'Oh, yes. He's dreadfully sentimental.'

They left Camden Road two days later, a moonlight flit with a couple of cabs, one full of Nancy's luggage. Lown and Sons had found them a furnished terraced house opposite the Postmen's Office with the Royal Arms over the gate, in the road running east from Hilldrop Crescent to Kentish Town railway station. Nancy immediately engaged two servant girls and a cook. Eliot knew Ruston could find him any morning at the surgery, but had grown a shell of indifference. He did not somehow feel the sort who ended up on Hackney Marshes.

'This ghastly plot has disillusioned me about anything done in the name of 'The People',' he confessed to Nancy, in their new living-room with the green-striped wallpaper and plants in brass-pots. 'Who are 'The People'? The humans I treat every day in the surgery. Not very worldly, not lettered, full of prejudice and superstitions, stupid but shrewd. Often noble-a man will crack a joke rather than infect his family with his terror of coming death. Our democracy is the benevolent management of their organized misapprehensions, that's all. They need leadership for their own survival, not the survival of their leaders. But Ruston talks about, 'The People' in the arrogant abstract, and seeks an easy ride to political power on their backs. I'll always support the underdog, but not one only ambitious to be the top dog.'

At seven in the evening of Wednesday, May 18, the Hohenzollen anchored off Sheerness. She had been escorted from Flushing by the cruiser Kцnisberg and the despatch-boat _Sleiper, _by four British destroyers from the Shivering Sands buoy. The Kaiser travelled with Dr Neider his personal physician, Count Eulenburg his Master of Ceremonies, General von Plessen and Vice-Admiral von Muller, and Baron von Reischach his Master of Horse. Reading this roll-call in _The Times,_ Eliot wondered if all six would shortly be shot in fragments into the Kentish air. The newspaper mentioned to his discouragement that Scotland Yard had received a hundred anonymous warnings of assassination attempts against the Kaiser, which they took as malicious hoaxes.

On Friday, Eliot's paper told him the Kaiser would leave Sheerness at ten, to be met at noon by King George at Victoria station. Eliot walked down Brecknock Road for his usual morning's work. At eleven, he abandoned the struggle. Nancy had returned from her rounds. He left her the patients, found a cab in York Road and directed the driver to Victoria.

The crowd in the triangular station forecourt would reassure the Kaiser that his popularity exceeded that of his country-if he arrived, Eliot thought. The newspapers had laid cosy emphasis on the rulers of Prussia and Britain being cousins for the first time since George II and Frederick-William I. Eliot pushed his way towards the scarlet-tunicked guardsmen, their officers with black crepe armbands, drawn behind the cordon of policemen. He nervously imagined the stir among the officials in gleaming top hats and morning coats beyond. He already heard the whisper through the crowd which swelled into the horrified cry, 'The Kaiser-killed!' He saw himself tortured with remorse, agonized with fear for Nancy, awaiting the knock on the door for policemen to bundle him into the black Maria, to join Ruston and Wince in the dock of the Old Bailey, and with luck breaking stones on Dartmoor for the rest of his natural life.

King George arrived in a landau, with an escort of Household Cavalry. He entered the station. Ten minutes later he reappeared with the Kaiser in a black overcoat. Eliot cheered so loudly that people started looking at him.

The funeral was the spectacle Eliot had promised Nancy. The silent crowds were so thick in St James's that fainting ladies were succoured on the pavement by vinegar-soaked sponges suspended from the balconies of White's club, ladies not being allowed inside in any condition. The Kaiser rode on King George's right, immediately after the gun-carriage. Behind the monarchs of Europe and Mr Theodore Roosevelt, King Edward's favourite terrier Caesar was led by a gillie in Highland dress, a white Scottie interloper joining them in Piccadilly all the way to Paddington Station, where the coffin was slid into the white-domed mortuary saloon of the Royal train, last used for Queen Victoria, on No 2 platform for Windsor.

The Kaiser left after the weekend. His farewell lunch at Buckingham Palace continued with earnest talk to his host in Victoria Station waiting-room, though twice informed his train was ready to leave. Next morning's Times reported his arrival at Port Victoria, a few naval buildings and a coastguard station, the rail terminal against a jetty over the river Medway. He changed aboard the Hohenzollen into Admiral's uniform to receive officers of the Royal Navy, and at 6 on the morning of Tuesday May 24, he left British shores. The Kaiser never saw them again.

At item at the bottom of the account caught Eliot's eye.