A Question of Guilt

'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…'