The old crone whispers furiously, stiff icy hands clutch Sylvia’s own, loving her now. Finally loving her.
Telling her secrets to keep.
The Baby Farmer
Mama had typhus from the lice most likely, she was a God fearing woman a went to church twice a week a prayed every day three times, once in the morning on her knees all of us on our knees, once at supper at the table a once at bedtime, me a my sisters in white nighties like kneeling angels in our dark cold room beside our bug-ridden bed. The men a boys still at chores other than Willy who was to small just a baby. This was before the accident with Sarah Ann mind you so there was still the three of us sisters not including little unborn Sarah Ann who we called Annie so that she was put apart from her dead sister, who was just a babe when we took her spirit, Mama a I made her an angel but not for the Cause she wasn’t the devil come back mind ye she was a saint I believe but Mama was mad by then with the typhus a needed show me the way. I don’t blame no one not Mama or Papa who worked hard to support all of us children, no I blame no one but me it is on me that it fell to a me who will answer to the Maker in Heaven. But I’m no monster a it all served a great purpose one that ignorant folk will never know or understand due to its higher nature God given nature. The Cause to hold back the flood of evil the second coming of the Tyrant from the flames when he wakes from his bed of fire, but I wish not to speak no more on that now in this text, but the Devil the Devil oh God he come back with vengeance upon the earth a we crusaders must slay the angels of the sinners to keep him stayed oh God witness my burden O Lord. My soul may be cursed it is for God to judge in Heaven but there are those that say it was for money that I did so much harm but there were other reasons real reasons behind it all, reasons behind me putting them babes in the cold water after tying their necks tight a those who bear witness to this journal in my hand Amelia Dyer, will know the truth of it. I will speak no more on it now, praise Him, so it will be to the past I write of and my childhood home, quaint, poor but loving, my father a shoemaker was well-known through Pyle Marsh a Bristol but he sold all through England even to gentlemen. He was kind to us children a to Mama even after she fell ill a was not herself. She would scream a lot all the time really a not eat or use the privy properly a I would be the one to clean after her a care for her a feed her. She was a God fearing woman as I said but she cursed at me in her fits of rage a tear her clothes a run naked through the house a Thomas would bar the door a tackle her to keep her inside a she cut him once a called me a devil a wicked a crafty bitch a she called Thomas a cocksucker if you believe it, a Christian woman! But she was mad a I found out later that I’d be mad as she without the typhus a got locked up twice for killing the children a makin them angels protecting all of us protecting the world while waiting for Jesus a I KILLED them with my hands, how I did it is I would strangle them with sewing tape I purchased in great amounts, before I put them in the river. This is my confession so I will say it because no one will read these words other than the priest who sees me every day who I will give these books to so there you want it fine I killed them all. That is between me a God in Heaven a the priest but my soul is not damned for I have a higher calling although there were times when I looked into their eyes as I murdered them knotted that tape around their tiny necks a watch them go cold that I confess now I found fascinating perhaps enjoyed it perhaps enjoyed it too much when I saw their eyes bulge a they would try to scream once I smiled...
There was a knock at the door.
Catherine jumped in surprise, put a hand to her chest, felt the rapid pounding of her heart. She heard loud thunder outside and felt a surge of triumph. She threw the useless confessional pages down on the coffee table where they splayed atop the well-worn black leather cover of her study Bible. She closed her eyes, steadied her breath. She wasn’t used to visitors, though this one was rather expected. She prepared herself.
The knock came again.
She stood gracefully and cocked her blonde head, waiting to hear a baby’s cry, silently cursing the priest for being so voracious in his announcement.
Catherine moved quickly through the cottage, stopping only once to put an ear to the nursery door. Satisfied all was silent, as it must be, she continued to the entrance, threw the bolt, and opened the door to a sheet of heavy rain and the tall, dark hooded figure of Father Samuel Ramsey, dripping and breathing heavily.
“Father Ramsey, please come in,” she said, and stepped back from the threshold.
The priest entered, pushed the hood off his bald head, wiped rain from his ruddy cheeks. “Miss Holbrook,” he said in a breath while passing by her into the house.
“Well, make yourself at home,” she said, joking but unnerved by his aggressive demeanour.
He was a problem, to be sure, but one she felt confident was under control. And besides, Catherine had to admit he was a handsome man, although nearly a decade her senior. Tall and well-built, powerful and housing a rich voice that caused great anguish to the sinners he lectured during service at their local parish. His head was clean of hair and nicely domed in a masculine way, his brows prominent and near black, matching the dark of his bold eyes and olive complexion. He was Sicilian by birth but raised in Reading, and aside from their current living proximity and mutual affections he contrasted her in every way; with her pale hair and bleached-looking skin, her light blue eyes, short stature and dainty frame, she may have been his ghost, or he her shadow.
And yet they fit so well together when desire struck, as human bodies, even the most contrasting, will occasionally do.
For his part, Samuel felt no special guilt for his sexual relationship with the young, and quite single, Miss Holbrook. Yes, of course, he had vowed a life of celibacy, but he had prayed on it and, as his conscience weighed so clearly on every other front of priestly vice—drinking, smoking, gambling, or worse, far worse—he allowed himself the occasional tryst with a responsible, consenting adult. Of what he considered the far greater of this world’s many temptations he was, quite thankfully, guilt-free. He consoled himself in the knowledge that he had done much good in this small village on the outskirts of Bristol—encouraged the locals to church, helped the needy and infirm, volunteered his free time to the betterment of the community. His flock loved him, he knew it to be true, and he loved them. Every child, every family, every widow. What happened with Catherine was worrisome to him at first, and looking back he still wasn’t certain how he’d fallen in with her. But he had the feeling, for reasons he could not articulate—for suspicions possibly unwarranted, for fear of a growing malice—that his relationship with the lovely Catherine Holbrook was coming near to an abrupt end.
It started when she had invited him, many times, for tea, to discuss an idea for an orphanage she wanted to open under the church’s name, right there in Kingsbury at the top of Ashley Hill. It was also during this time that his suspicions were first aroused.
The old abandoned cottage on Ashley Hill once belonged to a matron named Stoke and several of her sisters, the eldest of which was left at the altar by a villainous man who absconded with the dowry the sister’s father had put forth. The father, now a penniless widower, left the cottage to his daughters and died of pneumonia soon thereafter. Ever since the incident, and the untimely death of their beloved father, the sisters never left the large cottage other than for supplies or the occasional morning stroll. There was rumour of a distant uncle, a brother of the mother who had sadly perished giving birth to the youngest. This uncle, it was said, sent them a small fortune on which to live comfortably. There was further rumour that this same uncle had tracked down the dowry bandit, cut off his fingers and toes and fed them to the man one by one until the altar dasher finally succumbed to gagging on his digits, choking to death, quite painfully, on his big toe. The sisters, meanwhile—Samuel thought there were four or them, or perhaps five—had grown old in seclusion and with a profound distrust of the greater world. When the last elderly sister finally passed away, the cottage was will
ed to the church, more for tax shelter purposes, Samuel thought, than goodwill, for the building was near uninhabitable.
But here, two decades later, Miss Holbrook had taken the new priest by the elbow and whispered to him of her plans for the orphanage.
“Really more of a nursery,” she’d said, “a place for the unfortunate to raise their babies in peace and safety, knowing they are well-cared for.”
During their third meeting in as many weeks about the plans for the would-be Stoke orphanage, while emphasising a particularly passionate point, she placed a hand on his knee. When he showed no resistance, she moved in closer, their breath mingling, eyes locked. She slid her hand up to his crotch, squeezed his response, and laid her mouth on his. After a three-second internal debate, he allowed himself to be seduced.
And so it went, two or three times a week he would visit under pretence of creating plans for the orphanage, and they would succumb to every lustful human desire they could dream up. When enough of his parishioners were whispering about the relationship, he decided they had best come to some action terms as it pertained to the Stoke place, or suspicions would arise with even more fervour. For if there was no orphanage, how, then, had the two been spending all that time?
Over the next several months, many changes occurred. For one, most noticeably, they began having far less sex. It seemed the lustful priest’s timing was consistently off, catching her at her bad time of month, or recovering from a mild illness, or lain flat with an aching head. Still, he would sit with her and discuss their plans for the orphanage, promises of more physical future rendezvous inferred, if unspoken.
It was during these times of abstinence that Catherine first introduced her desire to know more about his predecessor, Father Henry.
Samuel had come by for afternoon tea and was disappointed when tea is exactly what he was served—tea, and nothing more. They’d sat on her sun-dappled patio and eaten cakes while she buzzed about her recent discovery in regards to the elderly, and recently retired, parish priest.
“Sorry,” he’d said, irritated at being once again stood up for entrance to her bedroom, “but what’s so damn interesting about him?” Father Henry was retired after all, and well into his nineties. He had only a year prior moved off to live in his childhood home, now abandoned and in need of a great amount of repairs, really just an old farmhouse with a dead orchard and empty stables that the old man planned on converting to a library. The house was on a remote patch of land owned by his family for generations, well past the outskirts of London. It was no secret that Father Henry had hardly been well-received in the community when he was present, so what interest could she—could anyone—possibly have in the old priest?
“I heard the most fascinating story about his, let’s see, his grandfather I think. Did you know,” she said, leaning absently toward him, brushing one long finger over his bared, bald head and down his cheek, in a most sedating fashion, before tucking it between the firm skin of his neck and the contiguous white collar, “that his grandfather, also a priest, was the man who heard the confession of the most notorious serial killer in all of England?”
“Who?” he said, baffled by the strange turn of topic. “Jack the Ripper?”
“Okay, fine,” she said, smiling, removing her hand from his neck to pick up a cake and nibble at its edge with her perfect white teeth, “the second most notorious.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, setting the scalding tea down, suddenly uncomfortable.
“The Ogress of Reading, of course,” she blurted, gaping at him as if she had informed him of the Prime Minister’s death and he was the last to know. “The Angel Maker, they called her.”
“Called who?” he said, the sun causing the back of his neck to perspire. “You’ve lost me.”
“Amelia Dyer, of course.”
Samuel racked his brain, then quickly remembered the ghoul of which she spoke. “The baby farmer?” he said, and she smiled.
“The very one.”
He paused, thinking. “They say she killed, what, four hundred babies,” he said, and remembered, at that moment, two things simultaneously:
Firstly, he remembered hearing about Amelia Dyer when he was in primary school back in Monreale. One of the children had chosen her as his topic for an essay on Historical Figures of England. The teacher was so aghast that the boy in question was suspended and his parents brought in for counsel. None of the children, he included, would have paid it a lick of thought but for all the trouble the boy got into. Once that happened, well, of course they simply had to know what all the fuss was on about. He and several other of his mates found the information easily enough in the public library where they read a short passage about her accompanied by a most hideous, most terrifying, mugshot. He remembered, conjuring the image again after all the years, how haunting her face had been. Ghastly. A true face of evil, he’d thought at the time, staring at her doughy skin, her sunken dark eyes, her creased frown. The black Victorian lace tight at her neck gave her oval visage a phantom appearance, as if it were coming at him, manifesting from the dark itself. For several weeks he imagined her face in the shadows of his childhood bedroom, lurking in the corner as a patch of moonlight, or a reflection, waiting for him to close his eyes so she could fully form and approach, a white line of sewing tape spread like thin rope between her extended hands, ready to wind around his neck while he slept.
The second thing he remembered was in-line with the topic of Father Henry. He recalled, as a fragment, a conversation he’d once had with the old man, having just announced his intention to retire near London—back to his roots, he’d said. Samuel inquired about any remaining family he might have there and the withered priest had become sullen, commenting that his family—or rather, the family’s history—was the one thing keeping him from going back at all.
“You see,” he’d said, sherry in both their glasses as they sat in Henry’s office, soon to be given over to Samuel, “my family has a long history in the London area. My father was a priest for many years, but fell from grace. Became a drunkard, a womanizer. He left the church, got married to a fine, kind woman. My mother, of course.”
“Well,” said Samuel, “surely it’s a positive remembrance? It sounds as if he turned things around, eh? You turned out quite well, sir.”
Father Henry had chuckled, slurped at his sherry. “Yes, well, it wasn’t so bad except the same thing happened to his father before him!” Henry laughed at that, a cruel joke seeking levity amongst the ruins of his ancestral tree. He stared into his glass. “A line of failures, you see, Father Ramsey. My grandfather... well, he had a very hard job, and he lived in a hard time. It wears on a man. Even though we are men of God, we are still men.”
“How so?” Samuel asked. “I mean, how was his job... so very hard?”
Father Henry set down his glass, leaned forward so his voice might be softer though still audible. Samuel stared intently at the old man’s glossy blue eyes, the bushy white eyebrows, the thin hair, the sagging jowls.
“My grandfather,” said Henry, quietly now, “had a parish on the west side of London near St. Paul’s Cathedral, along with a quaint church he pastored named St. Sepulchre. Within his community, his province of responsibility as ordained to him by the bishop, lay... a darkness. A small spot of hell on earth.”
Samuel swallowed the sweet sherry, set down his glass. “What kind of a hell are we speaking of, Father?”
Henry tilted his own glass quickly to his mouth, finished the liquor in one swallow. He smacked his lips, set the glass on the leather blotter atop his fine old oaken desk, and whispered the word, “Newgate.”
Samuel thought a moment, then came up with it, his eyes wide. “The prison? But that was shut down...”
Henry nodded, poured more sherry from the decanter into his glass, then topped off Samuel’s as well. “That’s right, in 1902. Of course, by then they had jailed and killed more men and women, and yes, children, than you or I could fathom. Hangings by the dozens
with mobs watching, screaming for blood, for vengeance... for entertainment, I suppose. They must have executed well over a thousand souls in those bloody yards.”
Father Henry trailed off, but Samuel was beyond intrigued. “And this was your... grandfather’s... what? You were saying, his responsibility? As part of his parish? His congregation?”
Henry nodded. “It was his jurisdiction. Newgate fell to him. He’d been the one brought in to hear the confessions, the final words of the damned, before they were strung up like pigs for the slaughter. Some claimed their innocence, of course, begged him for help, pleaded with him for their souls. Some did not beg, or feel remorse, or bear wishes for repentance. These were the worst of the worst. Pure evil on earth. Killers, rapists... and this was at the end of the century, mind you. Some of the most gruesome killers in history were running around in London at the time, and my grandfather, well, he got to meet quite a few of them. Got to hear their deeds, see? It finally broke him, I think. He couldn’t take it anymore. He left the church, turned his back on helping souls, revoked his oath, took a wife, just like my father did.” Henry chuckled. “Two generations of failed priests, and now me. It seems I’m made of holier stuff than my ancestors.”
“There’s still time, you could ruin it yet,” Samuel said, raising his glass.
“Third time lucky, I suppose,” Father Henry said and gave a dry chuckle as the two men of God toasted to Father Henry’s presumably thwarted fall from grace.
Remembering this conversation, the priest’s disposition changed toward Catherine, his senses became more alert, his attention focused.
“Yes,” he said cautiously, “I know of her.”
“Then you know of Father Henry’s relationship to her of course,” she said, sipping her tea silently.
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