‘Can you be sure?’
‘The water was very cold, which would have kept her submerged for longer than if it had been summertime. Her skin was waterlogged, but not unduly so. The epidermis was loosening at the hands, the nails in the nail beds – and yet it had not deteriorated further than that. Had it been longer – say four or five days – then the skin at her hands and feet would have peeled away like gloves and stockings—’
‘Jem,’ murmured Will. ‘You are speaking to a lady.’
‘And yet one who has asked more questions than she has answered,’ I said. ‘Your friend, madam, has been treated shamefully. Don’t you want to know who did this? Will you not do what you can to help us find her murderer?’
But my description of peeling skin had troubled her, and I saw that she was crying. I offered her my handkerchief, but she ignored me, dashing away her tears with the back of her hand. ‘Yes, I knew Mary Mercer,’ she said. ‘I knew her because she had been on the streets. After that she came here.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘About a week ago.’
‘How long did she live here?’
‘Ten months.’
‘Out of an indenture of twelve?’
‘The girls have twelve months here, yes. After that they must emigrate, or find a situation.’
‘And so she ran away?’
‘No. At least – I don’t know. Perhaps. She may have done. She took work on the Blood. Some of the girls go there.’
‘The Blood?’ I said. ‘Neither Dr Cole nor Dr Antrobus mentioned that they knew her.’
‘Perhaps that is because they did not know her,’ replied Miss Proudlove. Her face was in shadow, but I sensed a change in her. Her voice was flat now, angry and controlled.
‘Do the women here have possessions?’ I said.
‘No.’
‘None at all?’
‘They are given all they need when they arrive. If they run away then Dr Birdwhistle says they are stealing.’
‘Even their clothes?’
‘Even their clothes.’
‘Do you say they are stealing?’
‘I don’t say anything,’ she replied bitterly.
‘It doesn’t seem a very joyful place,’ said Will. ‘Despite the homeliness Dr and Mrs Birdwhistle insist upon.’
‘No one from the streets is joyful,’ she replied. ‘If they are it is only thanks to the gin. And when they come here, well, sometimes they find there was something to be said for the freedoms they had before.’
‘I knew Annie before she came here,’ I said.
‘Did you, sir?’ She threw me a disdainful glance. I had not made a friend of her by sharing that information, I could see.
‘I’m trying to help you,’ I said.
‘Help me?’ she laughed. ‘I’m not dead, Mr Flockhart. I don’t need your help.’
‘Then what can you tell us about Mary?’ said Will. ‘If we know who she was, her history, her habits, the places she went and people she knew, then perhaps we can find out what happened – find justice, at least. Goodness knows, Miss Proudlove, if she found herself on the streets before she came here then she had little enough of it while she was alive. Besides, do you want to see more girls in the mortuary? What if she is only the first?’
‘I knew Mary when she was here, that’s all. She was a good girl. Quiet. Intelligent.’
‘And because of that she became a nurse on the Blood?’ I thought about the visit Will and I had paid to the upper ward of the floating hospital ship, the darkness and the gloom, the men hunched beneath their blankets, the sound of dice and cards, the silhouette of a tall, slim woman bending over this patient, the clink of the spoon against the bottle. ‘You work on the Blood too, Miss Proudlove,’ I said. ‘Don’t you?’
‘I make no secret of it,’ she said.
‘And you knew Mary Mercer when she was there?’
‘I did. She was there every day. I go only once or twice a week.’
‘And you knew Mr Aberlady?’
‘Of course. Why?’
‘Because we are almost certain that Mr Aberlady watched Mr Quartermain and me pull Mary Mercer from the waters of Deadman’s Basin.’
She said nothing.
‘Now he is dead too.’
‘Yes,’ she said after a moment. ‘I am sorry to hear it.’
I handed her the two sixpences I had taken from the Toads, one from Mary, one from Aberlady. Miss Proudlove turned them both over and over in her fingers. On one side, the crown and the date, on the other side, the fern and flower. Forget-me-not. A secret unspoken.
‘Were they lovers?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. Her voice sounded flat. Her eyes were downcast, the tokens now still between her fingers. I took them from her.
‘And this key?’ I said. ‘Have you seen this before?’
She blinked. ‘Why, yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I have.’
‘Where?’
‘Here at Siren House. It is Dr Birdwhistle’s key.’
We all have stories, ones we whisper to ourselves to explain the direction our lives have taken; others to distract us from the lives we lead. We tell stories that make us seem worthier or more interesting than we are; stories behind which we hide our fear and self-doubt. We learn them from birth – who we are, where we come from – the narratives of others weaving in and out of our own until we can hardly distinguish one from the next. My name is Gethsemane Proudlove, and I have a story like no other.
When you meet me, you will ask me the same question everyone asks: ‘Where are you from?’ You will think it is merely a polite, indifferent inquiry. An expression of interest. ‘Where are you from?’ In fact, you are telling me that I do not fit in. That I am a curious, exotic thing whose presence must be explained before it might be accepted. It is a judgement on my fitness to be here at all. I can see by the way people look at me that they are often surprised that I speak English, let alone that I speak it better than they, for my mother is keen that I talk like a lady – my voice low and decorous, any rough sentences or harsh vowels smoothed and rounded. That’s what the gentlemen like, after all, especially from one as unexpected as I.
My mother is what might be romantically termed a courtesan. She never talks about her own history. Any stories of slave ships and whips, and cruel masters beneath blazing skies are no more a part of her story than they are of mine, for there have been Proudloves in London for hundreds of years. And yet still people stare. Do they expect me to boil them up in a cooking pot? To walk naked and barefoot, to wear a grass skirt or have a bone through my nose?
‘Where are you from?’
‘Lambeth,’ is my answer. ‘My mother’s womb,’ is another. Sometimes I say ‘Grosvenor Square’, just to see their faces. Looking at the crowds that fill the teeming streets, the people who pour in from the countryside, from Scotland, Ireland, Kent, Norfolk, Sussex, Oxfordshire, my own roots sink far deeper into the sticky London clay than any of theirs.
My mother describes the man who keeps her as two things: ‘a gentleman’ and ‘your father’. He pays for my mother to serve his needs alone, and she rents out rooms in her house to other women in the same line of business. Our gentleman father does not wish to be reminded of his paid-for couplings with a black woman on the back streets of Kennington, and the fat, pale boys and girls, begotten with his fat, pale wife are the only progeny he is prepared to acknowledge. Whenever he comes, Erasmus and I are packed off into the kitchen, out into the yard or upstairs into our rooms, so that he might not be reminded of his weakness.
Erasmus is taken away from us when he is nine. He and I attend the dame school on Neptune Street and both of us excel, though as he is a boy his destiny is always going to be different to mine.
‘Erasmus is to make something of himself,’ my mother says. ‘We are not to begrudge him his opportunities in life.’ The money she takes from our gentleman father pays for Erasmus’s education, and he is sent to school in the co
untry, far away from the world of quims and cocks that spawned us both. I don’t see him for years. He writes and says he will come to get me one day, but I never believe him.
I stay with my mother. She knows no other trade but the one she is born to. ‘There will always be men,’ she says, ‘and they will always have their needs.’ She says that their fat, colourless wives spend their days lolling on sofas, and can do nothing to relieve them. That is why they come to us, night after night, their cabs creaking and rattling in the darkness, their footsteps hasty and furtive on the path between the bushes. My mother keeps the greenery thick, so that they have to push through it to reach the front door. She says the gentlemen like it that way, that it reminds them of why they have come.
We are not a house with a great number of different visitors. The girls keep a warm and cosy sitting room each, and their gentlemen stay for hours, for my mother insists that her girls be more than just holes for men to squirt into and leave. That is something that might be got on any street corner in London, and if that is all they want then that is where they might get it. Far better to offer the gentlemen something more substantial, she says, something worth returning to again and again. Something worth paying for.
Every day at eleven o’clock my mother’s girls assemble in the downstairs parlour. She has me read The Times to them, so that each might ask her gentleman, ‘How was the city today, my love?’ or ‘I hear the Company’s shares have fallen in value this week’ and ‘Do you think Mr Peel will do such and such?’ They must know what is playing at which theatre, the rules of cricket and who has won, what the news is from the Continent, from India, from America. They should seek opinions, she says, and then nod and smile and pretend they have never heard anything so fascinating and intelligent in all their lives. Then, they are to do as their gentlemen wish, whatever it might be.
And my role? What my mother plans for me is unclear. She seems hardly to know herself, though she keeps me away from the gentlemen. For a time, at least.
Chapter Nine
I can’t put it off any longer,’ said Will, as we left Siren House. ‘I must go back up to Deadman’s Basin. The area has to be cleared before anything else can happen and I have to finish my drawings, my measurements.’ He sighed. ‘It reminds me of St Saviour’s,’ he said bleakly. ‘The buildings, the shadows, the wet stinking earth—’ He pulled his tall hat down low over his forehead. ‘Am I never to find a commission that doesn’t involve the reeking mud of London?’
‘Not while you stay in the city,’ I said.
‘But here is where the work is so here is where I must stay. I have some men coming tomorrow, men and carts to begin clearing the area. In the meantime, I need to look around again so as to be sure where to start. Besides, I cannot bear the idea of it standing there, that terrible muddy basin, that poor girl—’ He shook his head. ‘I have to destroy it. There’s nothing about this commission that fills me with pride or pleasure – a warehouse is hardly a glorious achievement for any architect. But I must get on with the job, so that Deadman’s Basin can be wiped off the face of the earth forever.’
I did not like the idea of him being alone there, but I could see that he would not be persuaded. ‘What about you,’ he said. ‘You’re going to the Blood?’
I nodded. ‘It’s still early, and there’s plenty to do. But I will come and find you after lunch, once the ward rounds have been done and I am confident that Mrs Speedicut knows what she’s doing.’
‘But you’re not staying there at night? You are coming home to sleep?’
‘It’s usual for the apothecary to live on board—’
‘But these are not usual circumstances.’ He took my arm, his face tense. ‘Don’t stay aboard, Jem,’ he said. ‘Not at night, for God’s sake. Think what might happen.’
‘Nothing will happen. And the only thing I am thinking of right now is a pot of coffee—’
‘But you will not stay the night—’
I patted his hand. ‘We must get through the rest of the day first.’
I approached the Blood from the west. Looking up, I could see the grey smudge of a face at the apothecary window. Mrs Speedicut – that pebble-like visage was unmistakable. I was relieved to have her aboard, for all that she and I had our differences. She was right when she said the Asylum was no place for one such as her. She was used to sickness and disease that could be seen and managed – sputum, blood and pus were the elements of Mrs Speedicut’s universe. The mad – with their curious behaviour, their unexpected laughter, or their strange doltish silences – she had been unable to comprehend. Well, I thought, she would find plenty of sputum, blood and pus on board the Blood.
The shutters over the gun-ports were open now, the windows too, and as I drew closer I could hear the sounds of shouting and the rasp and clatter of brooms and brushes. On board, the place was busy with nurses and orderlies – I’d had no idea there were so many of them, for they had been largely absent on my previous visit. Now, they were everywhere, a dozen cross-faced women with dirty aprons and mutinous faces, a half-dozen burly tattooed men heaving laundry and scrubbing decks. I could see that Mrs Speedicut was making her presence felt. A hospital matron for thirty years, violence, both physical and verbal, had always been her preferred means of persuasion. She threw things – scrubbing brushes, blocks of soap, mousetraps – at anyone who failed to obey. Everywhere there was evidence of industry. The door to the laundry stood open, the great copper tubs within filled with a bubbling soup of soap scum and ancient grey bedding. The air was heavy and damp, the steam that billowed out a reeking brew of urine, dirt and carbolic. From below deck came the sound of brushes chafing at wooden boards and the wet slop and flail of mops. An orderly stumped up onto the deck carrying a sack, lumpen and heaving.
‘Rats,’ he said to me. ‘Caught twenty of ’em this morning.’ He grinned, and added in a tone of deep awe, ‘That new matron whacks them with a broom handle, quick as you like!’ I watched him toss the squirming sack into the river.
Across the deck, I noticed that the door to Aberlady’s quarters – now my quarters – was standing ajar. I pushed it open. Inside, the room was boiling hot. A man was standing over the snake’s glass enclosure. He was small, no taller than five and a half feet, but bent over, as if from a lifetime of stooping beneath the timbers of the ship’s low ceilings. His ancient frock coat was as black as pitch, his neckerchief grey with age and repeated washing. His face too was hoary, etiolated from years spent in the dark, close wards of the Blood. In his left hand he held a dead rat by the tail. At the sound of the door opening, he turned. In the bright light of Aberlady’s room his tin eye looked garish, its gaze unwavering. His real eye blinked at me, moist and curious.
I had met him only once as a child, though I had thought about him for a long while afterwards. At the time, I had not realised that his eye was false, but had noticed only that he looked strange – unusual, like I did. Even then he had mostly stayed below, in the dim world of the tween decks. I had thought he was hiding. Hiding, the way I wanted to, from the scrutiny of others. Now that I was older I knew better: a man like Dr Rennie did not fret about his injured face or the stares it might elicit. I wondered now what it really was that had kept him on the Blood for so long.
‘Dr Rennie,’ I said. ‘Good day, sir.’ His hand beneath mine was cold and dry. In the fingers of his other hand the dead rat swung like a furry pendulum.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘Jem Flockhart, sir,’ I said. ‘I believe you knew my father. He was apothecary at—’
‘St Saviour’s. Yes, yes,’ he smiled and pumped my hand up and down. ‘A good man. Had a daughter with a birthmark, I seem to remember.’
I felt my blood turn to ice. ‘It was a son,’ I stammered.
‘A son? Oh no. No, the son died. And the mother too. A very sad business. But a daughter remained to him.’
‘It was a son. Me. I am his son. And I am the replacement apothecary here too, for a while at least
, now that Mr Aberlady has gone.’
‘You?’ His tin eye, gimlet sharp, stared up at me. ‘Well, well,’ he said after a moment. He chuckled softly. ‘It seems I owe your father three guineas. I told him he’d never pull it off. And yet here you are. Jemima Flockhart, gentleman-apothecary.’
‘I’m Jem Flockhart, sir, after my father. My father was Jeremiah—’
‘Oh, of course, of course,’ he waved a hand. ‘You must be whoever you wish to be, my dear. I’m too old to care, and your father’s dead, poor fellow, and not likely to miss his three guineas now. You say Aberlady is gone?’
‘Dead, sir.’
‘Dead!’ He stared at me with his mis-matched eyes, and his chin trembled. ‘Are you sure? The poor fellow. How on earth—’
‘I believe he was poisoned, sir. Can you think of anyone who might want to do such a thing? Had he many enemies?’
‘Enemies? No.’
‘What of his friends?’
‘Aberlady had no friends. Not here. Not apart from me, of course.’
‘Not even Dr Cole and Dr Antrobus?’
‘Especially not Dr Cole and Dr Antrobus.’
‘What about Dr Sackville?’
‘Ha!’
‘Or Dr Proudlove?’
He glanced over my shoulder, at the open door, the bustling deck, his expression suddenly fearful. I turned to look – had there been a movement, a shadow at the door? I stepped out, but there was only an orderly flailing a mop in a careless figure of eight against the side of the ship. I recognised him as the fellow with the clipped ear who had helped to drag Aberlady from the river.
Back inside, Dr Rennie was staring vacantly at the rat in his hand as if surprised to see it there. ‘You were saying, sir? About Mr Aberlady?’
‘Was I? I can’t imagine why,’ he said. ‘But if poor Aberlady is dead then this will be your room now, will it not? You are no doubt wondering what I am doing in it.’
‘And how, sir,’ I said. ‘For I thought I alone had the key.’
The Blood: What secrets lie aboard? (Jem Flockhart Book 3) Page 11