Half the World in Winter

Maggie Joel

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781925266528
• eBook ISBN:
  9781925267945
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

It is London, 1880, and Lucas Jarmyn struggles to make sense of the death of his beloved youngest daughter### his wife, Aurora, seeks solace in rigid social routines; and his eighteen-year-old daughter Dinah looks for fulfilment in unusual places. Only the housekeeper, the estimable Mrs Logan, seems able to carry on.

A train accident in a provincial town on the railway Lucas owns claims the life of a young child and, amid the public outcry, a father journeys to London demanding justice. As he arrives in the city on a frozen January morning he finds a family with a terrible secret tearing their lives apart.

CHAPTER ONE

London

NINETEEN CADOGAN MEWS WAS a smart, double-fronted, white-painted terrace in a row of such dwellings erected in the early 1850s for gentlemen of business and their families. It was situated in a discreet and elegantly proportioned laneway off Cadogan Square in a part of Bloomsbury just then becoming fashionable. The house had been purchased originally by Mr Samuel Jarmyn, entrepreneur and wealthy industrialist, in the autumn of 1854, soon after its completion. Following Mr Jarmyn’s sudden and unexpected demise not long after, it had become the home of his only son, the current Mr Jarmyn, and his family.

It was a five-storey house, including the below-stairs rooms and the servants’ quarters in the attic, which allowed for a gentleman of not-insignificant means along with his wife and up to six children, plus a staff of four, to live quite comfortably. And during the current Mr Jarmyn’s tenure, the house had contained all these people. But now Mr Jarmyn’s eldest son had gone up to Oxford and first one and now a second housemaid had departed at short notice and, since June, the curtains had remained drawn and every mirror in the house was covered.

It was now early December and by late afternoon it was bitterly cold in the house but still no fires were lit in the grates.

Dinah Jarmyn, coming in from the garden, pulled her shawl closer about her shoulders, and wondered if her father would ever allow another fire to be lit in the house again. She had recently turned eighteen but as the family had been unable to observe the day Dinah had slipped from girlhood to womanhood silently and unseen. Her hair was now up and she had her own calling card but as she and her mother made no calls this meant very little. Dinah was her father’s child, perhaps more than his other children, having his watchful grey-green eyes and the long Jarmyn face, the blunt jawline and slender nose. What she inherited from her mother was harder to define. ‘You will be a great beauty like your mother, Dinah,’ Mr Jarmyn had observed solemnly a few nights earlier, and the way he had said it had made it seem like a judgement.

Dinah shivered. Two of the housemaids had left already. Better, they had told the housekeeper, Mrs Logan, to seek employment elsewhere than to stay in a house that was forever cold. And who could blame them? thought Dinah. Would she, too, not depart given the choice? But she did not have a choice: she had no position to resign from and there was no employment she could seek elsewhere.

The grates were swept clean—a boy had come during the summer and flushed out the chimney, leaving soot on the carpet which Mrs Logan had tried in vain to hide but that her father had, inevitably, seen and railed against. The boy had not been back—though, as the chimney had not been used since, his presence was hardly required.

It was curious though, that despite no fire having been lit since June, still one could smell burning.

Dinah shivered a second time, turning to close the door to the garden behind her with numbed fingers. She had ventured out to cut some of the first winter jasmine from the steep bank at the end of the garden and intended, now, to take the bright yellow flowers upstairs to arrange them in a vase. She laid the flowers on the hallway table then paused. She had found, in amongst the tangle of jasmine roots and the damp and rotting last-summer foliage at the base of the ancient sycamore, a button: brass, round, a tunic button, green-tinged and dirt-encrusted where it had lain in the undergrowth. She rubbed at the dirt just enough to make out the circular inscription Montis Insignia Calpe, words which Dinah, not having a word of Latin, could not translate.

She looked up. The ground-floor rooms were all silent. Her father had gone out immediately after lunch stating neither his destination nor his purpose which, on a weekday, would have meant a meeting of the board of directors. But on a Sunday afternoon, what business could he have?

Dinah rubbed her hands briskly together, placed the button on the silver letter tray on the hall table and went upstairs in search of a suitable receptacle for her flowers.

As Dinah surmised, her father, Mr Lucas Jarmyn, had not attended a meeting of the board of directors. He had gone out, though his business had taken him only as far as a bench in nearby Russell Square where he had sat for a time talking to no one and, to the casual observer, doing nothing very much at all, and now he had returned and was upstairs in his study going through the monthly accounts.

The accounts were, strictly speaking, his wife’s affair and in the early years of their marriage Mrs Aurora Jarmyn had run the household with the precision, zeal and authority of a ship’s purser. But in recent times his wife’s control of the accounts, indeed her interest in them, had waned. As often as not it fell to Mrs Logan to settle the monthly accounts and to reconcile the various household expenses. But, whilst relying on one’s housekeeper to keep the household afloat might suit some men, Mr Jarmyn preferred to cast an expert eye over the figures himself. Not that he had ever had reason to fault the estimable Mrs Logan, who was in her accounting abilities as she was in all aspects of her housekeeping, which was to say, flawless.

He reached the end of a long column of figures and was pleased to observe that the figure Mrs Logan had recorded tallied with his own. He paused, knocking the ash from his cigar into the grate, where it lay in a small grey pile and where it would remain until someone thought to sweep it away as this fireplace, like every fireplace in the house, was empty and unlit.

But Mr Jarmyn no longer felt the cold.

In a small room on the second floor, directly above Mr Jarmyn’s study, Uncle Austin, formerly Major Austin Randle, late of the 8th King’s Hussars, was also at home that Sunday afternoon, though as the major rarely left his room and never ventured beyond the front steps of number 19 Cadogan Mews, his presence went unremarked. The little finger of his left hand was missing, sliced off in battle on a frozen Crimean plain close on three decades earlier—a deformity that might play on other men’s minds. Today the loss of his little finger was not Uncle Austin’s most pressing concern: he was, at this moment, balancing on the window ledge of his second-storey room cackling delightedly at the pigeon that had just alighted on his arm.

Mrs Logan, the estimable housekeeper whose monthly figures Mr Jarmyn was even now perusing, came into the room just at the point at which Uncle Austin was preparing to launch himself off the window after the pigeon and into certain oblivion.

Mrs Logan held the elevated position of housekeeper at 19 Cadogan Mews despite being only in her thirty-third year, and after three years with the household was a veteran of Uncle Austin’s unusual flights of fancy. She wasted no time now in fainting or hysteria, nor any of the customary responses that the sight of an old man making ready to jump out of a second-floor window might elicit. Instead she hurried into the room stating firmly, ‘I don’t think so, Major!’ and made a grab for his coat-tails at the critical moment, thus preventing a very nasty accident.

Lord knows, they did not need another nasty accident in this house, thought Mrs Logan as she hauled the mildly protesting old man back into the room and made fast the window. And who, she tutted, had left the windows unsecured? Annie, the housemaid, was the most likely candidate, a girl whose grasp of even the most rudimentary concepts was limited. But as Annie had, last night, quit the household there was little chance of asking her.

It was annoying, Annie quitting like that (here Mrs Logan tugged on the window fastening to assure herself it was secure) and only a month after Agnes quitting. ‘Too cold’! Whoever heard of such a thing? In other households, a girl came to the house at age ten and stayed until she either got married, was pensioned off or died. She didn’t stay five minutes then hand in her notice claiming the house was too cold.

Mrs Logan turned her attention on the old man. The major was seated quietly in an armchair. A pleasantly attentive smile suggested he was happily awaiting her ministrations and, not for the first time, Mrs Logan wondered if the old man had even the slightest idea who she was. His small black eyes watched her with a keen intelligence that belied the aborted leap of death of a moment earlier and, were it not for the missing finger and the scar, he could have been any elderly gentleman sitting down to his four o’clock cup of tea and toasted muffin.

The scar was hard to ignore. It snaked from mouth to temple, slicing the left side of his face in half. At its deepest point the groove was perhaps a quarter of an inch thick, and a vivid purple-red that changed colour occasionally when the major got upset. The shot that had caused this scar had been fired by a sharp-eyed Cossack at Balaklava in the autumn of ’54. It had penetrated his skull and a small piece of it was still lodged there today. What was left of the major following this encounter with the Cossack was this black-eyed old man who sometimes sat patiently awaiting his tea and sometimes attempted to leap from his second-floor window.

It was to be hoped that the major was no more aware of his circumstances than a newborn baby was of its. And yet often he was quite lucid: a memory of childhood perfectly recalled, a fellow officer minutely described. But of the last twenty-six years he remained steadfastly unaware. He was Mrs Jarmyn’s uncle, her father’s younger brother, though he often greeted Mrs Jarmyn as though she were a complete stranger. Whom he imagined all the other people in this house were, the Lord alone knew. Still, he was always very polite when he ran into them.

‘There now, Major, all safe and secure,’ Mrs Logan observed, giving the window lock a final rattle. ‘We’ll leave the flying for another day, shall we?’

Annie the housemaid had quit. But she had not left quite yet.

On the floor above Major Randle’s room, in an attic with a steeply sloping ceiling that, for two years, she and Agnes had shared, Annie sat and contemplated her future.

She had quit.

It was not something she had thought she would ever do. Yet here she was on her final morning with her small bag already packed, and here was the chipped enamel jug she had daily washed from but never would again, and there the narrow bed she had lain in, shivering.

Would she have taken this step had Agnes not already done so a month earlier? She wasn’t sure. They had talked of it, the two of them, in the dark when the family were asleep downstairs, and it had been Agnes who had first said she was going to quit.

‘But where would you go?’ Annie had replied, pulling the flannelette sheet up to her chin because with Agnes’s words a vast chasm, pitch black and bottomless, had opened up before her.

‘Don’t matter. Away from here. Away from her,’ had been Agnes’s reply.

But these were just words. Anyone could say ‘I’m going to quit’, couldn’t they? It didn’t mean you were actually going to do it.

But Agnes had done it. Annie had come into their room one Tuesday afternoon after lighting up to find Agnes jamming her few belongings into a battered old trunk, her face set hard and angry.

‘I’ve quit. Told ’em I’ve had enough,’ had been her explanation and Annie had stared at her, open-mouthed.

‘But why?’ Though she knew why, of course.

‘I ’eard her!’ was all Agnes would say. And truth be told Annie did not care to hear more.

She shivered. They had both smelt the burning, smelt it every single day. The drawing room always smelt of burning. You couldn’t escape it. But what had Agnes heard? She had heard her. But what, exactly?

Whatever it was, Agnes had gone and exactly where she had gone (‘I got a sister in Bethnal Green, she’ll help me. I’ll get another place, if I want one. Maybe I don’t want one’) Annie did not know.

So Annie had gone on alone and though Mrs Logan had said another girl would be joining them shortly, the new girl wouldn’t be Agnes, would she? And in the meantime Annie was alone, upstairs in her room, shivering, her feet blue with cold, the major stalking the downstairs rooms and planning who knew what mischief.

And the ghost. The ghost was in the drawing room.

A creak downstairs made her gasp. It was the floorboards settling, just the floorboards.

Last evening, when darkness had long fallen and the house was in shadows and the light from the lamp in the hallway had flickered in the draught, the master had ordered her to fetch something from the drawing room.

She had stared at him, panic-stricken. They never went into the drawing room, and certainly never after dark, not even the family! But the master had said, ‘Annie, there is a book I require in the drawing room. Please fetch it for me.’ And because she had gaped at him, he had added, impatiently, ‘It is the Squires, girl. Squires’ Study of the Workings and Evolution of the Railway Steam Engine,’ as if knowing the title of the book might somehow make a difference. As if he thought she could read.

She had fled his gaze and tried to locate Mrs Logan but Mrs Logan could not be located so Annie had found herself standing outside the door to the drawing room, in the dark, with the shadows flickering all around her and her hand that was raised to the door handle shaking so violently she wondered if she would be able to o...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• PROLOGUE
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CHAPTER SIX
• CHAPTER SEVEN
• CHAPTER EIGHT
• CHAPTER NINE
• CHAPTER TEN
• CHAPTER ELEVEN
• CHAPTER TWELVE
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
• CHAPTER NINETEEN
• CHAPTER TWENTY
• CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
• CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
• CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
• CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
• CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
• CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
• EPILOGUE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• AUTHOR NOTE AND SOURCES