The skeleton army, p.1
The Skeleton Army, page 1
The Skeleton Army
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part 2
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part 3
Extracts from the Oxford Mercury, 29 April 1882
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Part 4
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Historical Note
Acknowledgements
The Oxford Mysteries
Canelo Crime
About the Author
Also by Alis Hawkins
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
For Olivia, Morgan and Juliet, the lights of my life.
Part 1
Chapter 1
March 1882
Basil
The rumours were everywhere in St Thomas’s. Going about the parish that morning with the relieving officer, we heard the same whispers again and again.
‘Trouble’s back at the Ayotts’ door.’
‘Ernie Ayott’s gone back on the bottle and got into a fight.’
‘Maud Ayott brought her husband home last night covered in blood. Been set upon, he had.’
Once my parish duties were done, instead of going back to Jesus College, I made my way to the Ayotts’ tiny dwelling in one of the many courts that squatted, dark and damp, amongst Oxford’s breweries.
‘Mrs Ayott, I came as soon as I could. How is your husband?’
Maud Ayott shook her head, even as she held her front door open in invitation. ‘My Ernie’s gone, Mr Rice.’
Feeling monstrously tall in the low-ceilinged room, I gazed down at her dignified composure. Maud Ayott was a tiny woman, but she had the upright stance and self-possession of a duchess. And the steel those outward signs betokened had stood her in good stead; life with a profligate drunk for a husband had forced her into the role of family breadwinner. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said inadequately. ‘I hadn’t realised that his injuries were so severe.’
The Ayotts’ daughter, Lucy, spoke up from the corner where she was standing over her father’s body. ‘Whoever beat ’im didn’ want ’im livin’ to tell the tale, that’s the truth.’
I glanced at the blanket-covered form. ‘Have you called the police?’
‘Oh, they been all right,’ Lucy said, ‘for all the good they were.’
Her mother didn’t contradict her. ‘Because it was Ernie, I reckon they thought it was no more’n ’e deserved.’
‘That constable’ – Lucy produced the word as if it were an insult – ‘he just said, “Been in the wars, ’an’t ’e?”’
Angered but, regrettably, not as shocked as I would once have been by the constable’s dismissiveness, I turned back to Maud. ‘Whatever life your husband previously led, Mrs Ayott, nobody deserves to be beaten to death. Still less do they deserve a blind eye from the police.’
‘Said ’e’d ask about,’ Mrs Ayott said. ‘The constable. See whether anybody seen Ernie on ’is way ’ome—’
‘On ’is way home from a meeting at the barracks!’ Lucy interrupted. ‘’E was still in ’is uniform. Look.’ From the floor next to her father, she picked up a jersey and unfolded it for my inspection. On the knitted, navy blue wool – now spattered with dark patches that I took to be blood – the words ‘SAVED DRUNKARD’ had been embroidered in red capitals. ‘He always wore it to meetin’s. So that new folk’d know ’e was saved. And what from. But that constable reckoned ’e’d been on the beer again, I know ’e did.’
‘May I?’ I asked, motioning towards Ayott’s body.
‘It’s not a pretty sight,’ Maud warned.
I turned back the blanket. Maud was right. Surely not even she would have recognised her husband had he not been wearing his Salvation Army ‘uniform’. Both his eyes were swollen shut and his nose was broken and deformed. A gash had split one eyebrow, and though it had been carefully washed clean of blood like the rest of the body, I imagined it had bled copiously. I pulled the blanket lower, careful not to cause embarrassment to the two women by revealing Ayott’s nakedness. Livid bruising continued over his shoulders and torso. I feared Lucy might be right: her father had not been meant to survive.
I turned my attention back to Maud, whom the night had turned from wife to widow. ‘The lady over the road told me that you found him on the High Street.’
Maud nodded. ‘Not fifty yards away. Just lyin’ there. God forgive me, I thought he’d been back to the pub. Men are weak, aren’t they? Men like Ernie, I mean,’ she amended, lest I take the remark personally. ‘I feel ashamed now. There I was callin’ ’im all the names under the sun…’
‘Was he conscious when you found him?’
She shook her head. ‘Carried ’im ’ome dead, we did.’
I didn’t question that ‘we’. I knew that, at the first cry of ‘Help!’ in the street, any number of doors would have opened to help her.
Had Ernie still been alive, Mrs Ayott and her neighbours might have carried him up the narrow, precipitous staircase in the corner of the bare little room to his bed. Instead, his wife had laid him before the cold hearth, a poignantly redundant cushion under his head.
The tender placement of that cushion struck me as a most touching indication of the reconciliation that had taken place between Ernie and Maud when he’d been ‘saved’ at a Salvation Army gathering and had started attending meetings. For years, Ernie Ayott had led his wife a merry dance and, for the six months prior to his salvation, he had not lived with her and his children, but with the woman Maud referred to as his ‘red-haired fancy piece’, one Clara O’Hare. I imagined that her neighbours had thought Maud a fool to take him back.
The now bloodstained cushion had been the one nod towards luxury in the whole room, everything else being workaday and battered, if scrupulously clean. Maud took in piecework for one of the local milliners, and woe betide either of her children if they allowed anything to besmirch the materials she worked with.
I glanced at the table under the window. Sitting there, Maud might work without the aid of a lamp, and I imagined her son cleaning the window for her every morning, wiping off the smoky film that covered everything in this part of Oxford. The combined industry of four major breweries and the nearby gas works meant that the air in St Thomas’s always left the taste of coal smoke in the back of one’s throat.
With her needle, and a determination which pushed her to work around the clock when necessary, Maud Ayott had kept both her children in school – Lucy until she was thirteen, a feat almost unprecedented in this parish, where most children were lucky to find themselves in school at all, even now that their attendance was mandatory.
‘Did the constable say he’d inform the coroner?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Maud confirmed. ‘Said it it’d be best if we laid Ernie out afore Dr Hussey comes to see ’im. So ’e can see ’is injuries.’
Lucy pulled the blanket back up, but this time only to her father’s chin, and sat on her haunches, gazing impassively at his face. ‘Everybody said ’e’d never stick it, that ’e’d go back to the drink. Never know now, will we?’
I wondered whether Lucy herself had believed in her father’s dramatic conversion. Perhaps, as long as there was coal for the fire and bread on the table, she had been prepared to believe it. Often enough, prior to Ernie Ayott’s taking up with his other woman, the house had been cold, and Maud and her children had gone without food. As a member of the Board of Guardians for the Oxford workhouse union, I’d visited Mrs Ayott only once, when in desperation she’d applied for outdoor relief. Though, in theory, workhouses rendered the need to support people in their own homes unnecessary, in practice, the predicament of a woman like Maud Ayott inspired a self-interested muni
‘Lucy and Len were at a Band of Hope meetin’ when I wen’ out to look for Ernie,’ Maud said, as if that explained Lucy’s mood. Which, perhaps, it did. Ayott’s daughter had been denied the chance, however fleeting, to say goodbye to him.
‘That constable ’ad it all wrong,’ the girl said, with a fierce look at her mother. ‘Said “once a drunkard, always a drunkard”. ’Cept, if ’e’d bothered goin’ to the pubs, they’d’ve told him – Dad never put a foot inside a one of ’em any more.’ She rose and, taking something from her pocket, came to stand before me. ‘This was pinned onto ’is jersey with ’is Salvation Army badge.’
I took the scrap of paper she proffered and unfolded it to be confronted with a block of print.
The so called Salvation Army
NEEDS STOPPING.
When they march
WE MARCH.
We won’t let them rule our streets.
If you’re with us
JOIN US.
The Skeleton Army in Oxford.
I looked up at Lucy who motioned for me to turn it over.
On the reverse was a handwritten message. At first glance, the penmanship was unremarkable. Each letter was well formed but stood alone, as if the writer had never learned cursive script. However, the letters were perfectly even and the spelling faultless. In addition, the orthography had a distinctive feature: each ‘e’ had a little curl inside the closed loop of the letter, as if it had been begun with a slight flourish.
This is a warning to the
so called Salvation Army.
Leave Oxford now or there
will be more like this.
Or worse.
Chapter 2
Non
The editor of the Oxford Mercury looked up and ran his tongue over his top teeth. ‘This won’t do, Miss Vaughan. It reads less like an inquest report and more like an obituary. If, that is, this paper printed obituaries of St Thomas’s drunkards. Which it manifestly does not.’
He tossed my report on the inquest into Ernest Ayott’s death onto the table between us. It was the first inquest I’d been allowed to cover, and I knew I’d only been asked to do it because all the men had been busy with something more important than the death of an unemployed drunkard. I’d hoped that getting it done the same day would be a point in my favour. Apparently not.
I stared at my boss. Everybody at the paper called him ‘Berry’. His real name was Alconbury but that wasn’t the reason. He just had a very red face. All the time.
I managed not to look down at my rejected piece and kept my eyes fixed on him. ‘I thought, given the seriousness of the case, and with the involvement of the Salvation Army, that a bit more background was needed,’ I said.
‘Never mind what’s serious and what’s not. This man’s dissolute life and apparent reformation is all hearsay—’
‘That’s not—’
‘And how do I know this?’ Berry barged on over me. ‘Because you haven’t quoted it as coming from any kind of reliable source. If any of what you put in there’ – he waved a hand – ‘had come out at the inquest, that would’ve been a different matter. But it didn’t. The one bit you got right was quoting Dr Hussey.’ He snatched the sheet of paper back up again and glared at it as if it offended him before reading my own words to me. ‘The police constable’s conclusion, with which Dr Hussey concurred, was that the note pinned to the body was the work of a troublemaker.’
‘Even if the note wasn’t really from the Skeleton Army,’ I interrupted before he could carry on, ‘and that’s not necessarily proven, whatever Dr Hussey says, I still think people need to know that the war between the Salvationists and the Skeletons is getting more serious.’
‘That’s another thing.’ Berry looked down at my report to quote some more of my ‘hearsay’. ‘Mrs Ayott stated that she believed that the note had been left by the Skeleton Army,’ he read, ‘the anti-Salvation Army group who have, on numerous occasions, taken to the streets to disrupt Salvation Army processions and who push their way into meetings at the so-called barracks with the purpose of heckling speakers and engaging in the singing of bawdy songs while hymns are in progress.’ He looked at me over his spectacles. ‘Did Mrs Ayott say all that?’
‘She definitely said she thought the note was left by the Skeletons.’
‘But she didn’t say any of the rest of it, did she?’
‘No, but our readers need to know who the Skeleton Army are.’
‘It’s not your job to decide what our readers need to know! Or to explain something that’s only conjecture. Your explanation tells our readers that the Mercury gives this claim credence and acknowledges the existence of the so-called Skeleton Army in Oxford. Which we don’t.’
This was the difference between academic essays, which were all about explanation and opinion, and journalism, which was all about stating facts. I thought I’d managed to separate the two in my mind, but I’d been writing essays for so long that that kind of thinking just kept slipping back in. Being a student didn’t always sit well with trying to make a living as a journalist.
‘Did the coroner ask Mrs Ayott who she thought was responsible for the note?’ Berry demanded.
‘No, but she—’
‘“No” was all the answer I required, Miss Vaughan.’ He stared down at me. It wasn’t that he was particularly tall, but two or three inches’ difference is all you need to look down at somebody. ‘I’ll admit, I’m disappointed in you. You showed real promise when you were covering women’s meetings and horticultural society reports. I thought you were ready for this. Obviously, I was wrong. Perhaps you should go back to Somerville and concentrate on your studies.’
I could tell him as often as I liked that I lived with a landlady in town and not at Somerville Hall, but as far as Berry was concerned, if you were a woman studying in Oxford, you belonged at Somerville. He didn’t even seem to have heard of the other female students’ residence, Lady Margaret Hall.
I wondered what he’d say if it’d been Basil Rice who’d discovered Ernie Ayott’s body, not Ayott’s wife. If Basil had commented on the Skeleton Army in Oxford, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we? Basil was a fellow at Jesus College, and he sat on the city’s Board of Guardians. A very different kettle of fish from Maud Ayott, milliner’s outworker.
I gritted my teeth. ‘I apologise if I made a misjudgement. But Mrs Ayott isn’t the only one who believes that the Skeleton Army were responsible for her husband’s death.’
‘We’d be a laughing stock if we printed what people believe, Miss Vaughan. We might as well print—’
Gossip. He didn’t say the word, but it hung in the air between us. I could see the letters hovering there, as if some of the inky letter-slugs had escaped from the compositors’ cases and flown, click-clacking into the office.
‘—Nostradamus,’ he finished, finally. ‘And then there’s your barb at the end.’ He turned the sheet of paper over. ‘The Oxford police have yet to discover any reliable evidence as to the perpetrators of this outrage.’
‘Which is true,’ I said. ‘Everybody in St Thomas’s is furious about it.’
‘It’s not about whether it’s true. It’s about your tone. You’re clearly saying you think the police are dragging their feet.’ Berry glanced down at his chair as if he’d only just realised we were both still standing. He obviously hadn’t expected this conversation to go on so long.
I looked him in the eye. ‘The police are dragging their feet.’ I was trying to sound reasonable rather than defiant. ‘As far as they’re concerned, it’s one fewer drunkard to arrest for disorderly behaviour.’
‘It’s not our job to criticise the police. This whole’ – he flailed for a word again, briefly – ‘fabrication is not only inappropriate in its eulogising of a drunkard, it lacks factual accuracy. And facts are our stock in trade.’
And so they might be, but Berry only printed very carefully selected facts. Facts that weren’t going to upset the Mercury’s subscribers.
I glanced down at his desk. It was piled high with documents full of the kind of facts he approved of. Local directories and gazettes, almanacks, handbills, not to mention a thick pile of that week’s London papers which he’d be going through with a fine toothed comb looking for interesting – factual – items to include in that week’s paper.
