by Jess Kidd
‘Sir Edmund’s servants are loyal and discreet.’
‘You passed the child’s nurse, Mrs Bibby, off as—’
‘A seamstress, restoring the hangings in the west wing.’
‘The west wing being where the child was kept hidden?’
‘Yes.’
Bridie relights her pipe, thinking, smoking with relish. A movement in the corner of the room catches her eye. Behind the potted palm, next to the window, the dead man from the chapel-yard stands. He is rummaging down the front of his drawers. He glances up and, catching her eye, looks momentarily confused, then melts into the wall. Bridie waits, marking his point of departure, but there are no further emanations of a phantasmal nature.
‘Mrs Devine, are you quite well?’
‘I am, of course.’ She waves her empty glass in the direction of the decanter Cora has left on the sideboard. ‘Would you be so kind, Dr Harbin?’
Bridie is on her fifth glass and Dr Harbin has hardly tasted his first. He drinks Madeira like a maiden aunt, but it’s of no matter; the investigation is loosening up nicely now.
‘Have the police been informed, Dr Harbin?’
Dr Harbin looks cagey. ‘They were called by a servant who thought that a robbery had occurred.’
‘And it had, of course. But the police weren’t told of the theft of the small and secret daughter?’
‘No.’
Bridie nods; it’s as she expected. ‘The perpetrators have yet to make any demands?’
‘As I left there had been no word. Sir Edmund is willing to pay any ransom.’
‘Ransoming the child may not be the intention of her abductors.’
‘Whatever their intention, my employer wants his daughter found as a matter of urgency,’ Dr Harbin counters coldly. ‘Sir Edmund will recompense you for your trouble and your utmost discretion. And hopes that you will accept a generous bonus on the safe return of the child.’
Bridie frowns. She has the bones of the case – a stolen secret heir, missing nurse – but not the meat of it.
‘There’s a great deal you’re not telling me, Dr Harbin.’
‘I’ve told you everything Sir Edmund entrusted me to tell you.’
‘Even so, you’re a bit light on the old observations, the facts as they stand, for a man of science. The doctors I know love to put their guinea’s worth in.’ On Bridie’s face a notion of a smile. ‘Are you sure you’re not the valet, sir?’
Dr Harbin puts down his glass and stands abruptly. He steps forward, threat flickering darkly behind his spectacles. He reaches his hand into the pocket of his frock coat . . .
With a rush and a blur Ruby Doyle strides out from the wall and stands in front of Bridie, in a fighting stance. One hand is raised in a formidable fist, the other hitches up his spectral drawers.
Bridie stifles a laugh.
Dr Harbin, undeterred (seeing nothing but thin air between himself and Bridie Devine), pulls his hand out of his pocket.
In it sits nothing more dangerous than an envelope.
***
Bridie contemplates the envelope on the mantelpiece as she smokes her pipe distractedly, not altogether alone in her parlour.
Ruby has taken the chair opposite, having made a great act of kicking the departing doctor up his arse. He sits with his top hat between his knees, pulling on the side of his magnificent moustache; his gaze roams the room but mostly it falls on Bridie.
Cora comes in without knocking. ‘What did the bollock want?’
‘You heard, you were outside the door with your ears flapping.’
Ruby straightens up. ‘Does this one see me? Ask her.’
‘Cora,’ says Bridie, pointing at Ruby in the chair, ‘what’s that?’
Cora glances over. ‘A chair.’
‘And on the chair?’
Cora steps forward and runs a large hand over the arm of the chair and the back of it. Ruby crouches in the seat.
‘Lint, dust, fluff,’ says Cora. ‘Is this about my housekeeping?’
Bridie looks at Ruby. ‘Not at all.’
Cora turns down the gas-lights. ‘You took the case, then?’
‘They want the child found.’
Cora studies her. ‘And are you ready for that, after last time?’
‘Am I to decline?’ Bridie asks. ‘Even mutton is no longer on the menu. I’ve no idea what meat you’re serving but it’s hard to get down.’
‘It’s even bloody harder to run down,’ mutters Cora, mutinously. ‘Well, it’s up to you. If I can help, I will.’
Cora the loyal, since the day Bridie brought her home. A decade has passed since Bridie first set eyes on Cora, huddled in a bear cage.
It had been a rapid descent for Cora, from circus noblesse to livestock. She had long changed hands, from her unwed mother to the orphanage, the orphanage to a travelling circus. Cora had toured the country as headlining act Gertrude ‘Tree-Topping’ Gigantes and long-term mistress of Benny Whitlow, a well-respected showman from the north of England. When Benny died unexpectedly his nephew inherited the show and Cora along with it. Benny’s nephew devised new and sordid variations of her act, to satisfy select audiences with infernal tastes. The beatings started when Cora refused him. They worsened when she tried to run away.
Bridie, visiting the circus to investigate the alleged theft of an audience member’s emerald-set brooch, heard tales of a giantess held captive in a bear cage. She explored the camp and found Cora.
Bridie threatened Benny’s nephew with the law. When that didn’t work she threatened him with a pistol. In an act of glorious defiance Bridie picked the lock of the bear cage, liberated Cora, and the pair of them walked out of the circus in broad daylight. Benny’s nephew had no doubt, from the look on Bridie’s face, that she would shoot anyone who tried to stop them. Thereafter, Cora appointed herself Bridie’s housemaid. Bridie hasn’t had a decent meal since.
Cora lays a frugal fire. ‘You leave tomorrow for the scene of the crime?’
‘Maris House, Polegate.’
‘A proper nob?’
‘Sir Edmund Athelstan Berwick, no less.’
Cora grunts. Nobs are one and the same to her. She gets up, wiping her hands on her apron. At the door she turns back, nursing a question.
‘I’ll find her, Cora,’ says Bridie.
‘Else you know where she’ll end up?’
Bridie nods grimly.
Cora gives her a stern, sad, splay-toothed smile and is gone, whistling down the corridor with the coal-scuttle clanking against her muscled calves.
Bridie settles back in her chair to smoke her pipe and watch the mean little fire in the grate.
‘Where will the child end up? If you don’t find her?’ Ruby’s voice is soft.
‘You, sir, followed me home from Highgate Chapel, entered my home without invitation and eavesdropped on my confidential business.’
‘I did, madam,’ admits Ruby, his expression unrepentant.
Bridie studies him carefully. He is no less wondrous now than he was in the chapel-yard. She sees him in perfect detail, from the mud on his boots to the loose button on his drawers and unravelling bandages on his fists. Yet through his bare chest she can see a tapestried cushion and the antimacassar on the chair behind him.
‘Why are you here, Ruby Doyle?’
‘There’s no life at all in that chapel-yard.’
Bridie ponders this. ‘Why would you not be in a Catholic church-yard?’
‘I am where my friends saw fit to put me.’ His face falls. ‘They drank the money.’
‘Ah no, they put up that nice headstone for you,’ says Bridie, kindly.
‘So they did.’
Bridie rekindles her pipe, giving it a few rapid shochs. She squints at the dead man through the smoke. ‘I’m not in the market for a haunting.’
Ruby opens his bandage-bound hands. ‘I’m not haunting you. I just thought seeing as we’re old friends—’
‘You would follow me home and haunt me. As I
told you before, I don’t know you.’
Ruby leans forwards and lowers his voice. ‘Now, what did the big fella in the dress mean about the stolen child? Where will she end up?’
‘Don’t digress. Cora is not a fella, she’s a lady.’
The ghost looks incredulous.
‘I’m not joking.’
The ghost looks sceptical.
‘You heard what Dr Harbin had to say, you were there hiding in the wall.’
‘Rum bloody cove.’
Bridie smiles wryly. ‘Thank you for saving me from him.’
‘In my experience, if a fella hops up and reaches into his pocket he’s likely to produce something that will sting a bit.’
‘I appreciate your solicitude, Ruby.’
A polite nod. ‘You were saying, about the child.’
‘The stolen child, as you yourself heard from Dr Harbin’s testimony, was born different. What Cora was alluding to are the three reasons why a child who has been born different—’
‘Like little Christabel Berwick.’
‘Like Christabel Berwick, should have been taken. For the obtaining of a ransom, for the collection of a private anatomist, or for a life as a circus curiosity.’
‘A private anatomist?’
‘A loose term, Ruby, I use it to denote individuals of considerable means with an unhealthy interest in the darker aspects of nature’s diverse bounties.’
‘How is the child different?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine, Ruby.’
Ruby sits quietly, lost in his ruminations, absently stroking the battered silk of his spectral hat. Then: ‘I’m at liberty, if you’d like a bit of assistance with the finding of the child.’
‘I work alone.’
‘Would you not make an exception, for an old friend with time on their hands?’
‘I wouldn’t.’
Ruby points to the picture over the fireplace. ‘That’s Ireland there.’
‘Wicklow.’
‘It’s a likeness: the mud and the hills and the rain.’
‘I hardly remember it.’
‘I knew it was you,’ he says, ‘as soon as I saw you standing in the chapel-yard with your red hair spilling out from under your wee cap. I said to myself, “Holy Mother of God, there goes Bridget. Green eyes and a biblical temper.”’
‘What do you know about my temper, or my eyes?’ Bridie puts the bit of her pipe between her lips.
‘I’m tormented watching you.’ There’s a gleaming smile on him now.
Bridie narrows her eyes. ‘Meaning?’
‘What I’d do for a smoke.’
‘Then don’t watch me.’
They sit before the fire.
When Bridie glances up she finds Ruby studying her. Feeling a sudden heat in her cheeks, Bridie moves her chair further from the hearth.
Ruby casts her an arch look. ‘It was you that conjured me up out of the ground, Bridie. I heard your little feet trotting above me and up I came, running after you.’
The tenderness in his saying of her name is not lost on her. She runs a stern eye over him. ‘You were already conjured up, Ruby, slumped against a tomb. Besides, how could I conjure someone I don’t know?’
Ruby stands. He arranges himself in front of the fire, as if warming his backside. ‘And you really don’t know me?’
‘Jesus, just tell me,’ says Bridie, and immediately regrets the saying of it.
There in Bridie’s words is her trust in the truth of it: that they have known each other. And there in her words is her wanting of an answer.
On Ruby’s face: triumph. The anchor tattooed on his arm lowers itself gracefully. The mermaid smiles into her looking-glass.
‘You’re the investigator, you fathom it.’
And with that, he drifts through the wall with a wink.
Chapter 3
The nurse, Mrs Bibby, sits with her bad leg on an upturned bucket. Strong and square of body and delicate of wrist and neck, with long deft pickpocket’s fingers, she gives the impression of heavy ballast combined with nimble grace. She is in midlife, but truth be told she has never looked young. In her physiognomy one can detect the vicissitudes of decades of hard and soft living. There is something predatory about her, a wild slyness to her eyes, which are very blue and very wide apart. She has a flattened nose and negligible eyebrows. A wide, generous mouth takes up the rest of her face, with several teeth to each side lost. This gives her the air of a raffish tomcat. As does the scar above her eyebrow, the deep nick to her ear lobe and the stump of her missing index finger. Her hair, a greying mouse, is moulded into a remarkable arrangement; a severe parting in the middle with two fluffed cones high on each side of her head. Her face is mesmerising, moving as it does from wide-eyed innocent to vinegary crone in a matter of seconds.
The child, it seems to the nurse, never tires of watching her, or of listening; but then Mrs Bibby’s voice, like her face, changes constantly. Every kind of voice lives inside her, from prim to wheedling, high-stepping to raucously lewd. After the previous nurse, who lay face down sleeping off her gin habit for the best part of six years, Mrs Bibby is a spectacle.
The child is observing her now; her eye peeping through the door of the vestry cupboard left ajar. This is where the good doctor saw fit to lodge the mite. He has brought lanterns and set them about so she can be kept in sight.
Mrs Bibby winks; the eye disappears. She returns her attention, forthright but caring, to Dr Harbin.
‘With all due respect,’ she says smoothly, ‘I would advise you to rein it in, sir.’
The doctor, who is pacing the length of the room, halts. ‘We can’t afford this delay, Mrs Bibby. What if the buyers renege? If they find out that he knows that he’s been . . .’
‘Rooked, sir?’ completes Mrs Bibby.
The doctor grimaces.
‘Well, he would have to find out at some junction, he’s all eyes and frigging ears. But those Parisians, now they’re at a distance. And I ain’t about to tell them you’ve bubbled your rightful buyer.’
Dr Harbin stares hard at her.
Mrs Bibby throws a devoted look up to the ceiling. ‘Before my light and saviour, ain’t we in this together, Doctor?’
‘What have I done?’ he whispers. ‘Of all the people to cross.’
The inky dabs of his eyes dart behind his spectacle lenses. There’s a newly haggard aspect to the doctor’s countenance, as befits a damned man.
‘This whole enterprise is slipshod.’ His eyes fall frostily upon the nurse. ‘How could there be no carriage?’
‘The jarvey was delayed, sir, wheel trouble, it can’t be helped.’
‘And when he arrives I know what I’ll find: a drunken coachman with a team of glue nags and a superannuated carriage that I could outpace on foot.’
Mrs Bibby’s expression remains unchanged but there is a note of irritation in her voice. ‘Would you have it above-board, all traceable-like?’
The doctor doesn’t answer.
‘Still, we found this place to hole up in and ain’t that a fountain of luck, sir?’
‘Mrs Bibby, we are not even a mile from Maris House yet.’
‘Dr Harbin, all plans have their hitches. I doubt if Sir Edmund will have the coppers out searching.’
‘Bridie Devine, she’ll be searching.’
‘Then we’re frigged, entirely!’ she laughs. ‘Doctor, take heart, soon we will be across the Channel.’
‘What if—’
‘And the French will be clamouring to buy your little oddity of nature.’
The doctor rubs his pate with the flat of his hand in a comforting, polishing motion. He turns to her and opens his mouth.
‘It’s all arranged, sir,’ Mrs Bibby says quickly. ‘Carriage, Dover, first light.’
Dr Harbin starts pacing again. ‘It must be tomorrow – the road is long, the risks increasing—’
‘You’re right there, Doctor,’ pipes up Mrs Bibby in a helpful tone. ‘He might catch up
with us yet, to say nothing of the other collectors out there. With an eye and a nose for goods on the move that they can add to their cabinets of curiosities, their wonder rooms. Oh – you know about them collectors, do you?’
Dr Harbin’s face says he might.
‘Mercenary types, Doctor. Un-gentlemanly.’
‘I’d rather not think about that.’
‘Word gets around, don’t it?’ She gives him a contented smile. ‘Risk of ambushor. Or being stopped by coppers.’
‘Coppers?’
Mrs Bibby nods, blithely. ‘Sir Edmund may not alert them but they’ll be out there all the same, meddling. In villages, along the lonely roads, suspecting, searching.’ She points at the vestry cupboard. ‘Try explaining that.’
Dr Harbin is harried. ‘What should I do?’
Mrs Bibby picks up her book. ‘Oh, staying sanguine is all you can do, Doctor.’
The doctor collapses into a chair. From time to time he shakes his head with something like disbelief.
Mrs Bibby feels for him. This is strong business for a weak man.
‘And impromptu burials.’ He gestures with disdain at the muddied knees of his trousers. ‘Promise me that.’
Mrs Bibby merely looks at him, placidly, half-amused.
‘Do you realise how hard it was to get that body out from under Mrs Puck’s bloody nose?’ The doctor seems unnerved at the thought.
‘Our fallen comrade,’ laments Mrs Bibby. ‘As I said: all plans have their hitches, sir.’
She watches the doctor a moment, then returns to the book in her hand.
The child shuffles to sitting along the wall of the vestry cupboard. She wears a costume so that she will not bite herself or others. It is made of strong material and buckles. It is a job of work to get out of it; despite that, she has a foot loose. There is some slack in the ankle strap so she can shift along the cupboard floor.
‘The Kraken is short-tongued tonight,’ says Mrs Bibby from the chair.
The child nudges the cupboard door open a bit wider with her foot.
‘Playing mum? You understand more than you let on.’ Mrs Bibby puts down her book and reaches for the bottle on the table next to her. ‘Because I am dosed to the gills on Mother Bibby’s Quieting Syrup and enjoying this pleasant change of scenery, we shall have an instructive story.’