Page 69 of Murder on Cold Street
“Mr. Sullivan, as a young man, tried to flatter my uncle. My uncle did not care for flattery; he considered it an offshoot of chicanery.”
Charlotte pressed her point. “Since your uncle already did not like Mr. Sullivan, what was to prevent that casual dislike from sharpening into loathing, should he learn of what happened between Mr. Sullivan and Mrs. Treadles?”
Miss Longstead stopped. “Did Mrs. Treadles tell my uncle anything?”
“No, she said that she never told anyone anything until the police started asking questions. But your uncle could have perceived it, no?”
Miss Longstead shook her head vigorously. “My uncle was a simple man. It was his great virtue. But it was also... his great limitation. He was such a decent man, and life had been so decent to him, that he often did not perceive things, even if they were blindingly obvious to others.”
“Such as?”
Miss Longstead resumed walking, but did not answer Charlotte’s question. They covered nearly half the length of the garden before Miss Longstead said, “I think—I think I can trust you, Miss Holmes. I don’t know you very well but I feel that you are not a person given to... preconceived notions.”
Charlotte liked to think so herself, but she’d never been evaluated in this manner by someone she interviewed in the course of a case. “Thank you.”
Her answer sounded more like a question than a statement.
Miss Longstead drew an audible breath. “You asked me what my uncle did not perceive. Whenever we were in town, we always dined with Mr. Sullivan and his wife. But in all these years, my uncle never grasped that I hated to be anywhere near Mr. Sullivan. He continued to see this nephew for whom he had no affection, because Mr. Sullivan was the son of his favorite sister, and it was the right thing to do.”
Charlotte began to understand why Miss Longstead had hesitated for so long—and why she broached the subject only after she’d decided that Charlotte could be trusted not to hold certain views.
“My father was my uncle’s youngest brother. On my mother’s side, her father was an Anglican missionary, and her mother, a Sierra Leone Creole. My mother was born in Freetown, but spent most of her life in London. This was where she met my father, where they were married, and where they are buried.
“My mother was a keen reader of history. Although she died whenI was very young, I remember her telling me that I must know history, personal, tribal, national, and preferably that of the entire world.
“As I grew up, I dutifully read history. In recent centuries the history of black people has not been a happy one. So I turned to accounts of the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. It seemed such a grand, jubilant event, such a triumph of justice and humanity. A fairy-tale ending, almost.
“But in life, there are no happily-ever-afters, are there? Instead there was a backlash, one that gathered force as the decades went by. First came that essay by Thomas Carlyle, questioning the ability of those of African descent to handle freedom. Then, a disconcerting amount of support here in Britain for the South in the American Civil War. And in recent years, this circus of lecturers who go about expressing views that would have been unacceptable in the years just after abolition.”
Earlier, Miss Longstead, in conversation with Charlotte, had frequently looked toward Charlotte. But after the long silence, she’d spoken with her face set resolutely forward, as if she wasn’t entirely sure on her choice to trust Charlotte.
Or perhaps that was the only way she could contain the pain her words brought her.
“It was part of the reason I turned resolutely toward the sciences,” she went on. “The molecules and the forces of the universe do not care about my heritage, nor would they speculate in public forums whether I have brains enough to understand them.”
Charlotte had experienced plenty of such speculations because she was a woman, but never for her ancestry. If she had Miss Longstead’s ancestry, would she have successfully convinced the public that her unseen brother was a genius and that she herself could undertake all manners of investigative tasks on his behalf?
At last Miss Longstead turned again toward her, her beautiful visage earnest yet strained. “I don’t want you to think that my life hasn’t been a happy one. It has been a blessed, privileged existence,and I wake up thankful every day to have been given so much and loved so well. But it is impossible to remove myself entirely from the tides of history. Impossible not to feel, in spite of the cushioning of my own comfortable life, an anxiety over how much further attitudes will slide. I don’t believe slavery will be brought back, but I don’t think it is out of the realm of possibility that a new designation of inferiority might arise for people like me, either in my lifetime or my children’s lifetime.”
Her tone remained even, but her distress was palpable. Charlotte, not prone to strong emotions, felt a stab of horror. She, too, could not declare with complete certainty that what Miss Longstead feared would not come to pass.
“Mr. Sullivan, when he lived, made a point of never sitting down at our dinner table without bringing up the latest theories on African inferiority. He never presented it as his own opinion, but always as that of someone else. ‘Why, Uncle, have you heard of this lecture in Birmingham in which so-and-so, a professor of this-or-that-ology, stated that evidence points to a closer link between Africans and animals than between Africans and Europeans?’
“Perhaps at every dinner he attended he brought up the same subject, but somehow I don’t think so. It might have been presented as an intellectual debate for my uncle, but I never doubted that his true purpose was to rile and humiliate me.
“My uncle always immediately refuted the claims Mr. Sullivan brought up. Mr. Sullivan would spout more ‘evidence’ his ‘scholar’ du jour had presented. My uncle would dismiss that, too, and then advise him to be more critical in his thinking and not pay attention to every crack-brained theory raised by every quack who gets up behind a lectern.
“And he would not notice that I sat there white-knuckled, torn between throwing a goblet at Mr. Sullivan and running away to my room.”
Her voice had become very quiet. With the flapping of her capein the rising wind and the grinding of carriage wheels on the streets outside, Charlotte had to strain to hear her.
“I asked him once, my uncle, why he supposed that Mr. Sullivan was so interested in this subject. ‘We all are, aren’t we?’ was his puzzled answer. ‘It’s a debate of monumental importance. Already too much misery and injustice have been committed in the exploitation of Africans. So now the right views must prevail.’
“Afterwards I didn’t bring up the subject again. He did not understand that it stained my soul, each time Mr. Sullivan was allowed to mimic some supposed expert’s views that my ancestors are subhuman. My uncle did not understand that it was not curiosity or concern that drove Mr. Sullivan, but malice.
“Mr. Sullivan despised my uncle because my uncle did not care for him. He despised me because I lived the life of a lady while he must still work for a living, albeit a very good living. He could do nothing about my uncle, but he had power over me. And he could flex that power and denigrate me anytime he liked, because my uncle never put a stop to his antics.”
She turned once more toward Charlotte, her gaze beseeching. “Please, please do not think that my uncle didn’t care how others treated me. He cared deeply. Any servants disrespectful to me were immediately let go. And he gave the cut direct once, to a family who was snide about my presence at a country party.
