The Long Utopia

17

THE CHARTISTS’ DEMONSTRATION was planned for April 10.

Before the event, Luis took the trouble to find out something about the movement’s aims and ambitions – as anonymously as he could, and mostly from the Morning Chronicle, which was a liberal and campaigning newspaper, copies of which were kept as props in the Victoria theatre. It was a difficult time for Britain, if you took the picture as a whole: the Irish starving, the Scots struggling to recover from the Highland Clearances of the century past, and considerable unrest among the urban poor in the industrial cities. There were riots in the mines, stories of weavers smashing their looms – and reports of ‘Chartists’ being arrested.

The Chartists were agitators for political reform, following the lead of proponents in the House of Commons itself. Luis learned they had had some successes, with parliamentary Acts to limit the use of children in the factories, for instance. But over the years there had been trouble with assemblies, demonstrations and strikes. Here and there troops had been called out, the Riot Act had been read, a few Chartist heads had been broken. Up to now the troubles had mostly been ignored by the political classes. As seen from London, the whole thing was just another symptom of the general awfulness of the northern industrial cities, which the old landed establishment affected to despise.

Luis himself had mostly ignored this too. Luis Ramon Valienté, alone since boyhood, concerned for only the integrity of his own skin, didn’t see himself as part of a wider society at all. And besides, the disturbances had barely touched his own life. He could sympathize in the abstract with the plight of a child worked to a premature grave, but it was nothing to do with him.

Things were different now, however. This spring of 1848 was indeed a season of rebellion and uprising across Europe – even in such capitals as Berlin – and everywhere governments trembled and monarchies tottered. So far Britain had been free of such revolutions, but the continued flight of well-heeled refugees across the Channel was sending shudders down the spines of the wealthy and powerful. Riots even in London, in Trafalgar Square and elsewhere, had done nothing to calm nerves.

And now, in this ominous spring, the Chartists had called for a mass rally on Kennington Common, outside London. The ambition was to gather a throng a million strong and to march into the city. All this sounded an unlikely threat to Luis – surely it would blow over. This was poky, grimy old London, not some hotbed of ferment like Paris.

‘Not a bit of it,’ Hackett insisted. ‘I have sources. The government is bringing regiments into town, the homes of ministers are being guarded, special constables are being recruited, the Royal Family are being removed from the capital, and so on and so forth. All under cover, of course – but I’ve seen one of the secret stashes of weapons they’ve prepared myself, at the Admiralty. They’re determined this isn’t to be the tipping point into a wider revolt. And that’s where you and I come in, Valienté, my friend …’

His plan, it seemed, was for the two of them to infiltrate the mob, and to use their abilities to ‘damp down the fire’, as Hackett put it.

All this seemed alarmingly vague to Luis. What, were they to go slipping sidewise in the midst of a restless crowd of discontented unwashed being whipped up by political agitators? And besides, the whole scheme defied every instinct he’d developed over his lifetime to keep his ‘Waltzing’, as Hackett called it, a secret.

But his hesitation seemed to have been anticipated by Oswald Hackett, who began to speak with heavy emphasis about arrangements he’d made with certain special constables. These fellows had no idea what Hackett might be planning – Hackett had given only vague and mendacious hints that he and Luis were themselves agents of the government – but they’d agreed to work with Hackett, giving him the nod to identify certain ringleaders, foreign agitators and other troublemakers.

And Hackett gazed steadily at Luis as he spoke of those friends among the constables. His unspoken message could not have been clearer: Run away, my lad, and these constables of mine will be down on you like a Lambeth rat on a bit of mouldy cheese.

Luis saw, then, that he had no choice; he would have to go through with this farcical operation, striving to keep his own head intact in the process, and see what came of it next.

As it happened, on the morning of the great assembly it rained hard enough to drown more than a Lambeth rat, and spirits were thoroughly flattened.

A throng did turn up on the common at Kennington, but there was no million here as the Chartists had hoped for, there were mere thousands, ten thousand at most, Luis guessed. As well as the police they were faced by special constables guarding the bridges to the city, among them a goodly number of the rich and ministers of the government, Hackett said, volunteering in order to protect their own wealth and what they saw as the virtues of a constitution which needed no hasty reform, thank you. In the end the only outcome was the presentation of a comically inflated petition to the House of Commons – that, and a few scuffles and arrests. Luis thought the coffee-stall holders did a brisker business than the constables.

But still, in the midst of this relatively blood-free uprising, Hackett went to work with a will, and Luis had no choice but to follow him.

The plan was simple. A constable would point out a troublemaker. Luis would Waltz to dexter or sinister, approach the suspect’s position through the silence of the forest, spin back and grab him bodily – or occasionally her – lift him off his feet and Waltz one way or the other, and just dump the bewildered wretch amid the trees. No matter how hard they struggled when taken, the victims were always utterly baffled by their transition from one noisy world to the sylvan silence of another, and more often than not crippled by nausea too. Then it was a case of walk away a few yards and hop back into the melee; and, just in case anybody had seen the Great Elusivo pop mysteriously out of existence, Luis took care not to come back to the same spot and reinforce the impression.

At the end of the assembly, Hackett had told Luis, these temporary exiles would be rounded up from the forest, returned to Mother England and delivered into the arms of the constables.

‘And,’ Luis had said, ‘if they blab about their experiences, about us—’

‘Who to, the constables? Who’s to believe an agitator spouting a lot of nonsense about trees and bogs in the middle of London? Especially if it’s in French or German. Or even Gaelic – ha!’

‘And if they come to some kind of harm—’

‘What, if they get run down by a boar or swiped by a bear? Or, perhaps, the very act of being Waltzed over might kill ’em; some of my family legends hint at that possibility. Well, if so, nobody will grieve. Or even know. We’ll leave ’em to a godless grave widdershins, and au revoir.’

In the end the work proved easy enough. Luis could look after himself in a fight, and the exertions of his illusion act had built up his bodily strength. The only cost to him was a few digs in the ribs, a kick on the shin, and one beauty of a black eye. Many of those identified for transportation were indeed foreign agitators, mostly French, and Luis was surprised at the extent to which the English movement had been infiltrated. He wondered if Hackett might after all have a point in his windy and unlikely scheme, if it all worked out so easily as this.

At one point, as he stood over yet another dizzy, nauseated Frenchie spewing out words faster than he spilled his guts – and, comically, wondering why his shoes were falling apart, their sole nails having been left behind in London (Luis himself always wore sewn-leather slippers) – Luis, taking a breather, caught the eye of another young man standing over his own doubled-up agitator. The man, tall, sinewy, grinned and waved. ‘Mine’s a Scotsman, would you believe? Pining for the Bonnie Prince. But earlier I grabbed a big Irish lad and I hoped it was Feargus O’Connor himself, but that mastermind of the Chartists eludes us …’

Until that moment Luis hadn’t known that he and Hackett weren’t alone here, working this crowd. But of course Hackett would recruit others – and of course he would keep it all a secret even from his allies, clutched close to his own chest.

Luis recovered his composure and called back, ‘Mine’s a French.’

‘So I hear. Coarser language than you’ll hear in the Marseilles docks, I’d warrant. Rather jolly fun, this, isn’t it? Well, back to the grindstone; those agitators won’t apprehend themselves – be seeing you!’ He winked neatly out of existence.

So it was back to work for Luis too. At the end of the day he made off without incident.

And, to his blank astonishment, Oswald showed up that evening at Luis’s theatre, and said that they had an appointment with royalty.