“You look like Cinderella.” I laughed.
“You look like a washer-up.” Her eyes cut as deep as the comment. “Another menu?” She sauntered over and shoved the muslin at me, tugging the paper at the same time. “I’ll look at this. You finish the nursery.”
The nursery. For Aurora’s boys, should they come. Aurora’s last letter said her husband, Otto, wished to take them sailing instead. Jacob had hauled down two twin bedframes and unrolled two mattresses to air them out. The door, midway between Mr. Burton’s room and Eugenie’s, was never opened. She often paused in front of it, long enough to touch the wood panes before continuing. I thought of the family tree embroidered by her hand, each name remembered in silk: Catherine, Josiah, Theodore, Aurora.
None had thrived, she said. Her heart could take no more.
I forced myself up the stairs to the children’s room, shifting a rocking horse from one corner to another. The saddle leather creaked, unused but in need of oil. The horsehair mane could use a comb to dislodge the dust and regain its sheen.
My hand hovered above the changing table, watching my gray shadow snake and slip along the painted surface. Mrs. Burton would have had a midwife, I thought, to soothe the passage of her children to this world. I had dropped my baby like an animal in a barn, my hands pierced with wood splinters from my grip on a post, my lip split and pulsing in my fight to keep silent, the straw slopped with afterbirth and the stench of the cows in the stalls across.
It was midspring, the mud turned putrid from the rains. All the coin Albert’s wife dropped on the porch had been given to a Mrs. Framingham who promised she’d helped many other unfortunates. But she lied. There would be no good family for Ned in the future. The woman gave me a knife to cut the cord and a blanket to smother Ned. “There’s no soft place for that one or you now,” she said. “You can move on with no one the wiser.”
But where was there to go?
I did not put the blanket to his nose and mouth. He was a miracle, with his blue-black eyes so like Albert’s, frowning and reaching, tiny lingering touches. I wiped his black hair—so thick already, like my mother’s—and pulled in breath after breath of his sour sweetness. “You will be called Edwin Roderick,” I whispered. “After your grandfathers. You will be my Ned.”
But he grew fretful, and no amount of coaxing would make him take milk. Not mine, not the cows’ whose teats I twisted and squeezed for a few drops that I smeared inside his lips. His chest shrunk and stomach bloated, and I walked the length of the barn for three days to settle his colic.
On the third night, his face slackened, softening into a sweet composure. He stilled, then was silent, and then dead.
I was half mad; I muffled my screams in my palms and the fabric of my skirt. My skin burned where I scraped my nails, a useless effort to let out the bitterness that slid under my skin.
It was Albert’s door I took him to. The rain roiled in the street and drummed in the gutters. But Ned was warm; I’d wrapped my cloak around him and held him tight to my chest.
Albert opened the door when I knocked, his skin graying as he recognized me. He sidled to the small porch, clicking the door shut. “What are you doing here?” His shirt and vest were unbuttoned; his fingers shook as he struggled to redress.
“Don’t you want to see him?”
“Go away.”
“Albert. Albert.” My voice was a mewl. Not mine. Something else. “He looks like you. You should see him.”
I pushed the cloak away from Ned’s face, turned him to the lighted sconce.
Albert flinched. His jaw slackened. “What have you done?”
“He wouldn’t eat. I tried—”
He flipped the cloth back to its place. “Bury the thing and be done.”
“It’s too dark. He’ll be frightened. Hold him, Albert, hold him and—”
He grabbed my arm, yanking me down the steps and pulling me across the road. He glanced back at the house, at the windows alit and the immovable silhouette of his wife. He shoved me in front of him, grasping and grappling until we were past the neat houses and tree-lined streets, past the boarding houses and canals that snaked around mills, and tumbled down a slope to the Merrimack River. The water rumbled and roared, and Albert had to press his mouth close for me to hear him over its tumult.
“Give him here.”
“What are you doing?”
“You poor girl. My poor sweet girl.” His cheek pressed against mine, our skin slick with rain. “Give me the child.”
I fell back, digging my heels in the ground, only to have it give way. “You’ll throw him in the river.”
“Dig a hole if you want him buried, then.”
“No. No.” With my free hand, I gripped the long grasses that clung near the water, only to find them pulled in clumps, sod and dripping roots, nothing to gain hold of. Albert kneeled over me, staring with his blue-black eyes. My head snapped at the slap of his hand.
He pushed me to the ground and twisted my fingers until my grip was no longer on the babe. With a sharp tug, he wrenched the boy from me, leaving my cloak and blanket to fall nearby.
“Give him back.”
Albert held him in the crook of his arm, gentle as if the boy still drew breath, and pressed his lips to our son’s forehead.
Then he pitched Ned into the river.
“I’m sorry.” He wiped the back of his hand across his brow to push away the wet curls, took one last look at the water, then stepped over me and into the dark of the woods.
The nursery door clicked. Mrs. Burton stood at the entrance.
I squeezed my eyes shut to block the images, then roughed the heel of my hand at the tears I did not know had fallen. “Another quilt on each.” I sniffed and grabbed a corner of the mattress to drag it onto the bedframe.
“Lucy.”
“And bed warmers. This room doesn’t seem to warm up.”
“Lucy.” She lifted her chin and swallowed. “What was the babe’s name?”
“Ned.” I let out a breath. “His name was Ned. He did not thrive.”
She splayed her palm across her chest, over her heart. “It’s hollow, isn’t it? Here? I can never warm it all.”
“I’ve nothing to complain about. You have four times the cold.”
“One grief is not greater than another, Lucy. It is just grief.” She lowered her hand to her waist. “You’re a widow too young.”
I startled, shifting up so my thighs bumped a headboard. “A widow?” I glanced up at the drapery, the striped damask in lime and fuchsia that held us in. A widow. She thought me a widow.
Such an easy lie. Conjure a husband and give him a death. No stain on her image of me and a bit of sympathy to bind us close. It pricked me then: what she thought of me mattered. “I feel a thousand years old.”
We stood in silence, one on either side of the room, each alone with the mementos and marks of our pasts.
Chapter Sixteen
My life is measured in hours and minutes, breaths and regrets.
It seems only a flick of time, as if I’d just turned my head away from Cook, my attention caught on some immaterial object—a yellow leaf floating in a blue sky, a water stain browning a wall and awaiting Jacob’s repair, the whoop of John Friday as he worked the horses. I could glance back, I think, and there would be Eugenie, reworking an embroidery pattern. Looking up, eyebrow raised, as I entered the morning room to change the ash bin or the flowers. “Good morning, Lucy,” she would say, and return to her sewing.
I could count on my fingers the times we’d spent together or even passing each other in the hall. I even envied Mr. Burton his rare dinners with her, as silent and stilted as they seemed.
Then there were our nights, when she’d leave a slip of paper in the dust bin I carried, or folded in the linens brought down to wash. How I hungered for those nights. I wanted the taste of her kisses, the brush of her hand on my cheek, the soft words against my neck, the whispers as I read her correspondence aloud, and the titters at the cheap (but thr
illing) romances she loved to hear. I tasted desire: round and spicy, pepper hot. I tasted life: sharp and rough and hungry.
If I glance the other way, there’s no more kitchen and the sky is not blue and Eugenie does not hide a smile as I slip by and brush my hand to hers. But perhaps those were all lies anyway, lies I’ve told to keep myself sane. What does it matter, the story I tell? The words cannot undo what’s been done nor give life back to all those who’ve lost it.
Words can be twisted any which way. Move a sentence here, change a name there, shift a day or desire. Put words in one mouth or take some from another.
She stands accused of murder.
She stole a horse to flee her crimes.
She screamed and screamed at the men who caught her. A harridan drenched in blood.
She stole a bracelet of gold and emeralds from the wrist of a gasping woman. A thief.
She crushed another’s head and left the girl to freeze in the snow. Heartless.
She could account for none of it.
She could account for all of it.
She blamed the living.
She blamed the dead.
Unfortunately, the dead could not take the stand.
And the defense was too drunk to take advantage if they had.
Time slips. I never saw a reason to mark the cell wall: one way leads back to the horrible morning, the other runs in stitches to the gallows. Just a month ago, I stood in court. Or was it two? A young woman clutching a wood rail smoothed by the hands and sweat of those who gripped it before. My skirts didn’t quite hide the chains that bound my ankles or when my knees knocked and trembled, setting the manacles to clank and thump.
Heavy breath rolled from the balcony, foul with tobacco and spittle. The wood groaned from the weight of the crowd. They’d come to witness the judgment. The magistrate realigned his black cap and stared all around with his pale eyes before smoothing the paper under the heel of his hand.
“Lucy Blunt.” His voice was reedy and thin. The paper crackled and hissed as he pushed it across his bench. “You have been found guilty of the murders of Eugenie Charlotte Burton and Rebecca Louise White.”
No gasps. No women fainting and men charging forward as they did so often in the penny papers. Silence instead, shaped like an egg.
“But it was not me . . .” My voice failed me, and the judge took up his words.
“You are condemned by this court to hang by the neck until dead. May God have mercy upon thy soul.”
“It was not me . . .”
A single thomp of the gavel. An inward rush of air. Then the room a maze of sudden shouts and a crush of bodies jostling and shoving me from the box. I turned back to the balcony, my eyes scanning the swaying crowd. The woman I searched for was easy to spot, her red hair so shocking against the grays and tweeds of the audience and the white of her ermine stole. Once our eyes met, she kept hers steady upon me.
“Aurora—” I felt my throat swell with the fist of an impending sob. “Mrs. Kepple—”
But she could not stop this.
I was forced from the room and into the prison coach.
How black was the interior, the only illumination coming from a thin slatted opening near the roof. The light slipped and changed as the vehicle rocked and clattered on pavement and stone, my only window to what was left of the normal world—the bright-gold cupola of the courthouse narrowing to a blinding dot, the white-trimmed windows of brick buildings reflecting a wilted sky, the roil of dust at each corner the coach stopped, the smear of trees as we picked up speed.
My ankles stung, a crawling burn, where the cuffs bit the skin. I was near doubled over from the weight of the handcuffs and the chain that looped from my wrists to a metal ring on the coach’s floor.
The air was dank with the ghosts of those who had been passengers before me. I had seen such coaches pass when I was younger. My father made sure of our bearing witness. He brought us to the edge of Tryon Brown’s property, early, before we strode to the school and he took up his chalk and board. He tipped his hat to others who’d come to the fence to stare.
“There go the damned.” His grip was so tight on my shoulder I lost feeling along my arm.
Mother held John against her breast, patting and cooing, her head turned away from the black hulking carriage, her gaze instead on the leafless trees. “There’ll be buds soon. Look, John. Look, Lucy. Look up.”
My stomach knotted against the reek and gloom of the carriage and revolted, searing my throat with bile.
With a jolt, the coach stopped. We were deep inside the high granite of prison walls, the coach growing chill in the shadows like a tomb.
A guard in rumpled blue and a crushed kepi unlatched the door and released the chain from its mooring. He looked up at me and twisted the chains in his tobacco-stained hands. “Should have hung you already.”
A woman of no more than five foot and two stepped forward. Her dark hair was oiled to her skull and held in a tight roll at the base of her neck. Her brows were heavy and her chin cut sharp. She wore a woolen dress of indiscriminate color that I would come to know as matron gray. The wide leather belt was stiff and new, and four large keys hung from the leather.
“Let her down,” she said.
The guard grabbed my elbow and pulled. My foot caught in the chain and my knee slammed to the compacted earth. I twisted to relieve his grip, and found myself released and dumped to the ground, blinking into the white sky.
I tensed and rolled from the hand held out. But it was the woman who kneeled beside me and pulled me to my feet. She stared at me, her gray-blue eyes unwavering. “If I dismiss the guard, will you walk willingly to your cell?”
My head was heavy and I left it to drop.
She must have taken it as a nod, for she dismissed the man and turned to the metal door. “Come.”
The building was misshapen crumbling stone. The corridor was narrow, nine cell doors each side and nine above. The whole of it smelled of old shit and standing water. The first cell was shoved full of broken ladders and piles of tin lamps, the others—all full to the brim with trash and junk. The iron-barred door of the third cell was open. Waiting for me. The women’s wing with a cell for precisely one.
She pointed at a cot with sagging cotton straps. “Sit.”
Once I did, she cupped her hands, one resting in the other, and picked at her thumbnail. “I am your matron. If you are fair with me, I will be fair with you. Is that clear?”
I ran my tongue round my lips. “Yes.”
She unhooked her key ring and bent to release me from the chains. She did not let the irons clatter to the floor, but set them down and examined the cuts and red bruises on my skin. “I do not believe in hanging.” She scooped the irons and draped them over one arm. She stepped out to the hall and swung the door shut, turning the key in a well-oiled lock. “We will not lose hope.”
Matron has brought lip ointment. She rests the tin in her lap and spreads it on her palm to warm it. Now she dabs a finger to it, leaning close enough I can see her thumbnail bit to the quick, red and raw. She is fraying, my matron. I see the sag around her eyes and the sallow haunting her cheeks. I see it in the extra holes pierced in her key belt and the new turns of fabric at her waist. She has grown thin as a broom. I think she wishes she’d never applied for the job.
There’s peppermint in the ointment. It burns and freezes as she presses it to my lower lip. I grab for her hand but she’s too quick. She’s lifted it away. Sits back and fiddles with the tin, rolling it between her palms. It is black, with gold letters, and looks a cut above what she can spend.
She worries her lip, peering at me from under her lashes before shifting her gaze back to the ointment. Her narrow shoulders lift, just as they have in the past, though the confidence has grown faint. “Mrs. Kepple has written the governor directly. We could hear any time.”
Matron holds much faith in Mrs. Kepple’s sway over the governor. I hold much more faith in her husband’s wallet.
/> My heart thuds. “Will you be there? When I—”
Matron presses a hand to her stomach, her fingers curling the clasp of her belt. “We will not lose hope.”
“Do you still believe that?”
“I must.” She raises an eyebrow, then leans in again. This time she runs the balm all along my lip. Allows me to dip my finger to it, to smooth the splits and scabs. “Better?”
She escorts me to the laundry, as she always does, but her shoulders tilt forward and she turns away once I’ve crossed through and Gert has signed the paper to mark my transfer. Matron slows at the outer door and turns back. Her brows are locked in a deep frown. She watches a bluebottle fly that’s thumping the window glass. Then her gaze grazes her feet before landing on the grates along the windows.
“You must choose your last meal.”
She shakes her head, quick and sharp, and strides again down the hall.
In between the squeezing of water from sheets and shirts, I think about food. If I’m to choose the best meal, the last meal, I want to make certain it’s right. Cook said that flavors are particular and discerning in their friendships. Too much cinnamon can ruin a pork rub, and too little salt a chocolate cake. Beef tongue and a salad of pickled beets are quite a good mix, but pair the beetroot with capon and you’ve an ungodly disaster.
Arrowroot pudding.
Marmalade on crumbly biscuits.
Mint jelly.
Poached eggs.
Fresh milk.
Cook’s Indian pudding.
I’ve added others I’ve never tasted. Pineapple. Mango.
Will solace be found in a familiar taste last taken, or a new taste as the last to try?
“Now, that’s a question.” Gert listens to my list, pulling a strand of her frazzled hair until it stretches taut, then releasing and stretching it again.
“I think a good haddock and a warm ale.” She slaps her lap. “And snap peas. I’ve got a flush of them in the yard now.” With a grunt, she lifts a mound of wet clothes to the sorting table.
I watch Gert work. Her hands are a permanent red from the lye and all the scrubbing. They’re good hands. Strong and sure. I am confident she could get herself out of a muddle with one swing of her fist. She says she’s only done so once, and that it was to her Archie coming home with the perfume of another on his clothes.
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