Half the World in Winter Read online

  MAGGIE JOEL grew up just outside London and moved to Sydney in the early nineties. She has been writing fiction since the mid-1990s and her short stories have been published in Southerly, Westerly, Island, Overland and Canberra Arts Review, and broadcast on ABC radio. Her first novel, The Past and Other Lies (2009), was chosen as the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Pick of the Week’. Her second novel, The Second-Last Woman in England (2011), was awarded the 2011 Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Christina Stead Award for fiction.

  First published in 2014

  Copyright © Maggie Joel 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 090 8

  eISBN 978 1 74 269 859 5

  For Richard, Dominic and Rebecca

  —sorry I didn’t end up using the dinosaurs or the aliens

  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

  PROLOGUE

  The North of England: December 1880

  BY THE TIME IT ARRIVED at Dawley, the 1.55 p.m. local train from Shrewsbury to Birmingham was already twelve minutes late. It had left Shrewsbury two or three minutes behind schedule, was further delayed by signals and other trains ahead of it and now three additional third-class carriages were being attached to the rear of the train to accommodate a large Sunday school excursion party. This would add a further eight to ten minutes to the delay and the stationmaster peered at his fob watch and shook his head.

  Seamus Proctor, the driver of the train, waited in the engine’s cab, smoking patiently. His fireman, Evans, pulled off his cap and mopped his brow with a rag, streaking his face with oil as he did so. It was a bitterly cold afternoon but the heat from the boiler was fierce.

  ‘This’ll slow us down,’ Seamus remarked, nodding his head towards the rear of the train where the additional carriages were being hurriedly attached.

  He had buried his wife the previous day.

  The railway company had allowed him the day off. The funeral had been held in the morning, the ground so frozen you wondered how the gravediggers had been able to dig her grave. It had been a brief ceremony: the rector had had a streaming cold and there had been another burial party already gathered at the church gate.

  Seamus leant out of the cab window watching the stationmaster’s frantic attempts to supervise the coupling of the new carriages and he thought about his dead wife. They had been married twenty-seven years.

  ‘Company won’t like this,’ replied Evans, standing up and leaning on his shovel so that he could stretch his back. ‘Three carriages behind the last brake-van.’

  Seamus made no comment. He was aware of the railway company’s regulations and he was aware there was nothing actually stating how many carriages could or could not be placed behind the final brake-van. It wasn’t usual, it might be frowned on, but it wasn’t against regulations. Besides, the railway company would be more concerned about the additional time lost if they stopped to move the brake-van to the end of the train.

  Evans had said nothing to him about his wife’s death. It was quite likely Evans did not know. Why would he? Seamus had said nothing. It was no one else’s business. This morning he had got up at the usual time, made his cup of tea and his breakfast, carved a hunk of bread and cheese for his lunch and left the house before dawn. Just as he always did.

  He smoked silently in the cab as outside the party of Sunday schoolchildren and church people surged along the platform and boarded the train.

  He lived in a small railwayman’s cottage in a purpose-built terrace behind the station. They had lived there, he and his wife, since the day of their wedding. Twenty-seven years. He had been a young man then.

  A passenger, a young fella in a cap and his Sunday-best shirt, came hurrying up the platform holding the hand of a little girl, his daughter perhaps. The girl skipped and twisted this way and that to see everything, jumping when a burst of steam shot from beneath the engine and startled her. Seamus took the end of his pipe out of his mouth and smiled at her and she smiled back and waved. The young fella, her dad, spoke to her sharply, and the little girl pouted. Seamus winked at her and watched as they boarded the third-class carriage behind the engine.

  When his shift ended, late in the evening, he would return home to an empty house.

  A blast from the stationmaster’s whistle and an urgent waving of his flag indicated they were—at last—ready. Seamus gave two short blasts from the train’s whistle, startling a circling crow, released the engine brakes, opened the throttle and they eased out of the station.

  ‘Twenty-one minutes late,’ observed Evans.

  The bell of the internal communication cord rang once. It was the test ring the head guard was required to make on leaving every station where carriages had been attached or removed. Regulations stated it was supposed to be rung prior to leaving the station, not once they were under way. Seamus gave a resigned pull of the cord in acknowledgement.

  They now had fifteen carriages, including the three just added, plus the engine, the tender, a luggage van and two brake-vans, one behind the luggage van, one behind the twelfth carriage.

  ‘It’s the fair,’ said Evans, shouting above the roar of the engine. ‘In Wolverhampton. There’s a big fair on.’

  Seamus shook his head. A fair on the Sabbath. And in December! Whoever heard of such a thing?

  There had been frosts the last seven nights and this morning there had been a sprinkling of snow in the fields around Shrewsbury. Ice hung from the trees and from the eaves of the cottages they passed. The third-class carriages would be bracing—though, no doubt if you were going to a fair, you would put up with it. The cab of the engine was the only place to be on such a day. That, or before the hearth in your home.

  He thought of the hearth in his cottage, which would be cold when he returned home.

  The distance to Wolverhampton was eighteen miles
and it was, by and large, a straight run aside from the Sutton Hill incline and the tunnel a mile or so further on. Beside him, Evans shovelled coal into the firebox for all he was worth, pausing only to check the pressure gauge.

  The train shot through a cutting that soon became an embankment with a slight and steadily increasing gradient as the line ahead passed over the canal at a place called Lea’s Crossing. All the signals were in the ‘clear’ position so the train was able to pick up speed. It was travelling at around thirty miles per hour as it approached the bridge.

  ‘Shall I make a brew?’ shouted Evans, slamming the firebox shut and breathing heavily through his mouth.

  Seamus nodded at his fireman. The signal at the approach to the bridge was also clear. At this rate they might pick up two or three minutes—unless someone decided to attach more carriages at Wolverhampton. The train was already straining under the additional weight and they lost a bit of speed on the incline before rattling over the bridge. Seamus glanced down and saw that the canal beneath them was frozen solid, a barge tethered unnecessarily to a mooring. It wouldn’t be going anywhere today.

  When he saw the stationary goods train on the line ahead of him his first thought was that it must be on a siding. In the second that he realised that there was no siding, that the train was on their line and that they were going to hit it, he shut off the steam, threw the engine into reverse and gave out a whistle to tell the guard to apply his brakes. Beside him, Evans had dropped the kettle and was frantically applying the tender brake. Instantly the cab was filled with steam and the horrifying screech of the wheels braking and sending up sparks, and the thump of the couplings behind them straining.

  ‘We’re going too fast,’ shouted Evans. Seamus knew they were travelling too fast. He knew that their combined brake-power would not stop the train in time. He wondered why all the signals had been in the ‘clear’ position—could he have misread one of them? He thought about his dead wife.

  The Birmingham-bound passenger train hit the stationary goods train at twelve minutes past three in the afternoon. The engine and tender ploughed into the rear of the goods train, throwing the last three wagons of that train off the line and down the embankment. The engine and tender of the oncoming passenger train were crushed and almost completely destroyed by the force of the collision.

  The driver and the fireman were killed instantly.

  The third-class carriage behind slammed into the tender and was thrown from the tracks on the other side to the goods wagons, coming to rest on its side some yards from the line. Carriages two and three were also taken off the line, their couplings braking, and rolled into the canal. Carriages four, five and six and the luggage van were all swung to the left, destroying the walls of the bridge but remaining upright. The first brake-van’s front wheels came off the rails, its axles breaking and its wheels flying off and coming to rest some yards away. The second brake-van and the remaining nine carriages, including those carrying the Sunday school excursion, remained on the lines, sustaining only broken axles and damage to their interiors.

  The time from the engine cresting the bridge to the last carriage coming to a standstill was twenty-three seconds. In the circumstances it was a miracle only three people died.

  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.