The Street Philosopher

The Street Philosopher
Matthew Plampin

An elegant, powerful novel, set in Victorian England, a time not so different from our own… perfect for fans of THE INTERPRETATION OF MURDER and THE SHADOW OF THE WINDAmbitious young journalist Thomas Kitson arrives at the battlefields of the Crimea as the London Courier’s man on the ground. It is a dangerous place, full of the worst horrors of war but Kitson is determined to make his mark. Under the tutelage of his hard-bitten Irish boss Cracknell, and assisted by artist Robert Styles, he sets about exposing the incompetence of the army generals.Two years later, as Sebastopol burns, Thomas returns to England under mysterious circumstance. Desperate for forget the atrocities of the Crimea, he takes a job as a ‘street philosopher’, a society writer reporting on the gossip of the day. But on the eve of the great Art Treasures Exhibition, as Manchester prepares to welcome Queen Victoria, Thomas’s past returns to haunt him in the most horrifying way…

MATTHEW PLAMPIN

The Street Philosopher

Copyright (#u7fcc8949-39d0-557d-9c58-046430f3ea08)

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

First Published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Copyright © Matthew Plampin

MAP © John Gilkes, 2008

Matthew Plampin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007272433

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2009 ISBN: 9780007310043

Version: 2017-05-04

For my father, who kept on about it.

It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artistinterested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring backword from the men who are fighting to those who want thewar to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message,but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousysouls.

Paul Nash, Letter from Passchendaele,

October 1917

Contents

Title Page (#ud7222618-b282-5fa4-a030-722e47b7b51c)Copyright (#ud9da14c7-36a5-5cfa-824a-bc1592c8ea90)Dedication (#ub9b9b68b-d74a-5ea2-9984-ce56c2afc46d)Epigraph (#u6ec1756c-e8e1-50c5-a086-c32ca0d65b5f) Map Crimean Peninsula September 1854 (#u19a23247-0446-53ce-af7b-b3aa7fb2cae3)Chapter One (#ub2ee7f80-741a-5339-a5dd-ecb695947a53)Chapter Two (#u78bdce2a-adbe-56d8-85bb-9354c098d676)Chapter Three (#u1e71a038-98ea-555c-a131-3150db7fb8b1)Chapter Four (#u372c1a18-7e49-53da-8d0e-183ba690ffc4)Chapter Five (#u1e444b71-c5e6-558a-a58b-f6386ceac582)Manchester May 1857 (#u28bdc045-b346-514d-8165-508693eb39b8)Chapter One (#ua7246c18-d08d-5f51-90c8-1793e0b620aa)Chapter Two (#u0f9bc57c-5ca7-54b8-bdfa-03b88af951bf)Chapter Three (#u872c65a9-379a-5509-9654-73e397630ec0)The Valley Of The Alma, Crimean Peninsula September 1854 (#u92113d37-8aad-585b-9085-944f6a0c75dd)Chapter One (#u74eb4994-5298-5523-8e03-c5348ba08bbb)Chapter Two (#u9a1f94a7-2aac-5020-930b-33b7953f7c78)Chapter Three (#ub667a31a-f51d-52ab-8aa4-fd2e0b91bdb3)Chapter Four (#u95cfc6bf-d0c9-50b8-be75-7454cef5532f)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Manchester May 1857 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Before Sebastopol, Crimean Peninsula October–November 1854 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Manchester May 1857 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Before Sebastopol, Crimean Peninsula January 1855 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Manchester June 1857 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Before Sebastopol, Crimean Peninsula June 1855 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Manchester June 1857 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)At Seajuly 1857 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Crimean Peninsula September 1854 (#u7fcc8949-39d0-557d-9c58-046430f3ea08)

1 (#u7fcc8949-39d0-557d-9c58-046430f3ea08)

Kitson’s well-worn boots crunched through the shingle as he walked down towards the shore. It was a cold, unwelcoming afternoon. The sky was low and slate-grey, and the waters of the bay churned with a heavy swell. Sea birds croaked dismally as they hung, wings outstretched, on the brisk wind. Most of the men who filled the landing zone were in uniform, but there were enough ragged-looking civilians among them for Kitson to stride past without remark. Reaching a small rise in the stony beach, he paused to scratch his beard and take stock of the scene around him.

On this, the third day of the invasion, it was the turn of the Earl of Cardigan’s Light Brigade to disembark. Kitson pulled a pocketbook and pencil from his shabby, faded frock-coat. Squinting, he peered out at the rows of troop transports and frigates anchored in the deeper waters, and attempted to make out their names, jotting down those he could see. There were so many vessels in the bay that the horizon was obscured by a dense forest of masts, funnels and rigging. The echoing blasts of their steam horns drifted over to where he stood scribbling intently into his book.

Flotillas of long rowing boats were ferrying soldiers from the transport ships. Teams of blue-jacketed sailors, seemingly impervious to the cold, waded out into the surf to drag the boats’ prows up onto the beach. Landing planks were thrown down, and hussars poured out, their scabbards held over their heads to avoid any chance of a freak spray or splash rusting the blades within. Against the dull, washed-out tones of the afternoon, their uniforms seemed intensely colourful, a vivid combination of rich blacks, glowing reds and acid yellows. The blue-jackets stared as the cavalrymen calmly returned their sabres to their belts and strolled slowly inland as if the Crimea were already theirs. Kitson scanned the crowds of plush busbies and brocade-encrusted jackets, noting the regiments for his report.

The breeze changed direction, and a faint, inhuman shrieking reached the correspondent’s ears. He stopped writing mid sentence. A bone-white horse was dangling over the side of one of the larger iron-screw steamers, suspended from a small crane. Leather straps were fastened around the creature’s torso, its legs hanging limply down as it cried out in terror. Beneath it, rocking precariously on the waves, was a crude raft, made from several rowing boats lashed together. The squat black form of an artillery piece already sat awkwardly upon it, tied down with rope; the makeshift platform was unbalanced by its weight, and tipped drunkenly with the rise and fall of the sea.

After a short, tense descent, the horse’s hooves touched the raft. Several sailors reached out at once, unfastening the straps and patting the beast’s neck and muzzle reassuringly. The horse slipped on the shining planks, but was quickly on its feet again, nostrils flaring as it snorted with distress. Already, the next was on its way down, a chestnut this time, whinnying loudly as it came; and before long, three warhorses stood upon the raft as it floated unsteadily beneath the overcast sky.

Disaster was so inevitable, and so familiar, that the blue-jackets greeted it with weariness rather than alarm. One of the horses became tangled up in the cords holding down the gun and, immediately panicking, started to kick and flounder, screaming as it did so. The others promptly reared up, shaking off the men who tried to settle them, adding their voices to what was soon a piercing chorus. With a sharp whipping sound, straining ropes started to snap. A second later the gun toppled overboard, pulling the horse caught up in the ropes after it. Both vanished instantly into the murky brown-green water. The raft lurched upwards on the side where the lost gun had stood, causing the two remaining horses to fall, and then slide off messily into the sea.

Back on the beach, Kitson winced and made a quick entry in his pocketbook.

A few other rafts, similarly troubled, bobbed and span among the looming iron-clads. Some of the transport captains, seeing the mayhem below, had decided to dispense with any attempt at conveying the horses to shore and were simply having them pushed from the deck, leaving it to the beasts themselves to find their way to the beach. Kitson watched them tumble down the sides of the tall ships into the waves, legs kicking wildly, landing in an explosion of foam. He tried to trace the dots of their heads as they swam for the shore. Some of them he lost; others didn’t seem to be moving at all, so slow was their progress. His eyes started to ache with the effort.

Blinking, Kitson remembered the telegram, which he’d tucked inside the pocketbook’s front cover. He pulled it out. The crumpled piece of yellowed paper bore terse words from O’Farrell back in London, shouted out in mechanical script: Illustrator Robert Styles STOP Lands Eupatoria sixteenth SeptemberSTOP HMS Arthur STOP. It had arrived about three weeks earlier, at the telegraph office in Varna. Cracknell, predictably enough, hadn’t been impressed.

‘Men dropping dead from bloody cholera all around us, not a drop of decent brandy for five hundred bloody miles, a bloody great war about to commence, and what does our editor send out to his brave correspondents? A bloody illustrator!’

Kitson had muttered his concurrence. Inwardly, however, he’d been intrigued, and pleased that the London Courier’s reporting team was to be enlarged. After months spent following Richard Cracknell through the brothels and slums of Constantinople, and then trailing behind him across the meadows of Bulgaria, Kitson had come to feel almost as if he were a manservant rather than a junior reporting partner. The thought of a peer, an equal, had a distinct appeal–and what was more, this Mr Styles, as an illustrator, a professional artist, would surely be a man of some culture. He’d know about the successes and failures of the Academy Summer Exhibition, at least. Kitson longed for such conversation in a manner he wouldn’t have thought possible half a year earlier.

Before him, the waiting hussars yelled encouragement as horses started to reach the shore. Kitson looked up from the telegram. The blue-jackets in the sea were attempting to get hold of the dazed animals before they could stagger out of the water, but the men were inexperienced, and allowed many to escape. Once on the beach, the horses shook their manes, looked quickly about them, and then bolted. One, a grey, charged by close to where Kitson stood, hooves clattering through the stones, eyes wide with fear, water streaming down its sea-darkened flanks. Several hussars gave chase, raising their arms in the air, whistling shrill signals that, on this occasion, the highly trained horse failed even to notice.

The stiff breeze knocked off one of the cavalrymen’s busbies. Cursing, he left the pursuit and strode crossly to where it lay amongst the pebbles.

Seeing his chance, Kitson tucked away the telegram and turned over a fresh page in his pocketbook. ‘Excuse me, trooper, but might I enquire as to your orders? D’you know when are we to move upon Sebastopol?’

The hussar was a tall corporal with a thick blond moustache, dressed in the blue overalls of the King’s Royal Irish. He snatched up the busby and brushed it roughly with the back of his hand. Then he looked at Kitson, irritation written plainly on his face. ‘What?’

‘I’m from the London Courier,’ Kitson explained. ‘We are reporting on the campaign.’

‘And why the devil would you be doin’ that?’

Kitson met the man’s hostile stare with a brief, amiable grin. He had been asked similar questions many times before, in the same suspicious tones, and had a standard response. ‘Why, so that the British public might read of the heroism of their troops, of course, and the progress of their noble undertaking, thereby easing—’

The hussar was not listening. ‘I cannot be seen conversin’ with the likes of you,’ he interrupted impatiently, tugging the busby’s golden strap under his chin. ‘Now get out the damned way.’

His shoulder struck hard against Kitson’s as he sprinted off after the errant horse, which was now somewhere amongst the piles of supplies that covered the rear of the landing zone. Kitson staggered, losing his footing for a moment, and dropping his pocketbook as he waved an arm to steady himself. As he stooped to pick it up, the telegram fell from beneath its cover. Caught by the wind, the slip of paper curled away across the stones, rising up into the air. For a moment, Kitson considered giving chase; but then just watched it go.

The H.M.S. Arthur, one of the older frigates in the bay, was anchored a good distance from the beach with her sails rolled. As her passengers were non-military, she had been allocated only two longboats, making the disembarkation painfully, tediously slow. In addition, the ship was taking on cholera cases for immediate transport back to Scutari. Every longboat from the Arthur, after it had been pulled up on to the stones and disgorged its civilian cargo, then had to be loaded with pale, moaning soldiers, each one bound to a stretcher, before it could sail back. Like every other operation that day, lifting the sick up to the ship once they reached her was made many times more difficult by the swell. At least two had been lost to the waves.

The invalids were receiving a great deal of attention from those leaving the Arthur. The majority were soldiers’ wives who had been camped out with the army throughout the miserable summer in Varna, but left behind when the invasion force had set sail for the Crimea. Rows of anxious faces, framed by grimy bonnets, poked over the deck rail, both hopeful and fearful that someone familiar might be among those being carried aboard so precariously. They gasped when the sailors stumbled, and they wailed when men went into the sea; but they’d already seen far too much death that year to be badly shocked.

Kitson approached the cholera cases awaiting evacuation. They were laid out in lines across the shingle like rotten railway sleepers. He looked at the soldiers’ stained uniforms, streaked with vomit and faeces, their waxy, agonised faces, their rigid limbs that poked out awkwardly from under their blankets like snapped branches, and felt nothing but relief that he had so far managed to escape infection. This cold-hearted reaction would have shamed him six months earlier. Like the soldiers’ wives, however, like everyone on the campaign, he had grown somewhat hardened against the misery of others.

He picked his way around to where the disembarked wives had gathered in a large crowd, huddled against the wind, shawls drawn in close around them. Many were calling out names at the invalids, in the slight hope of eliciting responses from them. The only able-bodied men present were the servants of the few officers’ wives who had been obliged to travel aboard the Arthur, standing alongside their mistresses, a little apart from the grubby spouses of the common soldiery. There was no one present who might conceivably be Mr Styles. Kitson perched on a coil of thick navy rope and lit a cigar, settling down to wait.