Things in Jars

by Jess Kidd

  The child looks at her blankly.

  ‘You are going out into the world, Christabel, and it is only right that I should prepare you. Impart some of my wisdom and experience, so to speak.’

  Christabel is silent.

  ‘Such as, people in polite company don’t use their feet to eat snails.’

  As if in defiance, Christabel delicately picks up a snail between her two toes and bends her face to her foot.

  ‘It’s not well-bred,’ adds Mrs Bibby. ‘At least use your fingers.’

  The child, inspecting the snail, ignores her.

  Mrs Bibby takes a nip, corks the bottle and lays it in her arm crook. ‘All right, so. In the old days . . .’

  There lived a witch. And how do you recognise a witch? They run orphanages in Wanstead and like eating babies. This witch ran an orphanage and was an expert in selecting the choicest of babies. She enjoyed the plump babies with savoury gravy and drop dumplings, the lean ones she’d spatchcock and griddle with onions. Above five years old children were stringy and barely edible. One day a girl came in who was thin and five and there was no eating on her. Let’s call her Dorcas. Life at the witch’s house was difficult for Dorcas. She was—

  ‘What was Dorcas like?’ muses Mrs Bibby. ‘I’m frigged if I can remember.’

  Dorcas was a plain girl with a limp to her left leg. This was on account of her mother trying to lose her down the privy when Dorcas was born. A policeman fished her out by the ankle – and shook her by the ankle to get her started up again. Her mother swung for it and Dorcas’s leg was never the same. It wasn’t the policeman’s fault of course, you never can tell if a good act will turn bad, no more than if a bad one will turn good. At the witch’s house there were beatings and starvings (in that respect it was the same as every other orphan house Dorcas had lived in). Now it came about that one day a new baby arrived. The baby was not more than six months old and a fine fat chap with smiling blue eyes and rosy-pink cheeks. Dorcas, knowing the baby’s fate, for the other orphans had told her all about the witch’s tastes, devised a bold plan which would free all of the orphans, including herself, from the witch’s tyranny—

  Mrs Bibby breaks off. ‘Put that bloody snail down. I see what you’re doing.’

  Christabel stops licking the snail shell and eyes the nurse through the open cupboard door.

  ‘You heard.’ Mrs Bibby waits.

  The empty shell is delicately dropped on the flagstones. The foot slowly retracts itself into the cupboard.

  Mrs Bibby nods.

  Dorcas already knew how to do for rodents. You got the poison from the store, put it in the mush the rats liked and then you waited. Sometimes the high stink said that the rats had crawled somewhere to die. Dorcas was the one to go after them. It was a job she liked because no one else had the stomach. Dorcas decided that if she grew up she would become a rat-catcher. In the meantime, she would poison the fat baby; the witch would eat the baby and thereby be poisoned too. It would be quick for the babe (if the rats were anything to go by), saving him a long roasting . . .

  Mrs Bibby pauses, leans forward, biting her lip against the pain from her leg and peers into the cupboard. The child has her eyes closed, she has worked one of her hands lose from her restraints and holds it between her head and the cupboard wall, palm to cheek. The child, roused by Mrs Bibby’s silence, shambles upright.

  ‘You want the rest of the story?’

  Christabel looks at her with unblinking pearl eyes.

  ‘The relentless demands of it.’ Mrs Bibby, wincing, takes another nip from her bottle.

  Dorcas mixed up the poison in a milk jug, enough for a score of rats. Then she put the poison packet away at the back of the store. Dorcas knew that if the witch suspected anything she wouldn’t eat the baby and it might be a while before another fine plump baby came to the orphanage. Then she set flour, suet and a mixing bowl in readiness for the dumplings and laid a place at the table and put the cruets ready. Her preparations complete, she lugged the fat baby boy up into her lap and fed him the rat medicine. He waved his fists with delight when he saw the spoon coming, but when he tasted it, his face crumpled and he spat out the mixture and began to cry. Dorcas, who had picked up babies all her life, swung him backwards over her knee to surprise him. Her trick worked, his mouth opened, Dorcas spooned the poison in. Fighting with the baby made her hot and cross. She didn’t realise how hot and cross until his body went limp, his mouth bitter with poison, his face flushed and his curls damp on his head. How her arms ached. Dorcas was not much bigger than the baby after all. She put the baby in a roasting tin, tucked a napkin over him and waited.

  ***

  The child wakes to a brightening morning. The vicar’s vestments, his cassocks and surplices, hang above her. She touches the hem of a stole with her free hand, strokes it between her thumb and forefinger. A sudden scramble in the cupboard and the child snatches.

  ‘Going fishing?’ laughs Mrs Bibby, who has been watching her.

  The nurse is even more tom-cattish than usual. The fluffed cones of her hair are lopsided and she has scratches across the bridge of her nose and on her cheeks. While Christabel has been sleeping Mrs Bibby has been fighting.

  Christabel opens her fist, carefully, carefully.

  ‘Oh, strong wriggler!’ Mrs Bibby mimes feeding herself and the child mimics newt to mouth.

  She kisses the newt.

  ‘One of your subjects, Lady Berwick, like these ladies and gentlemen.’ Mrs Bibby gestures at the snails that stud the vestry walls. More are making their way across the floor towards the cupboard. They puddle the flagstones; there will be a moat of them soon.

  The child inspects the newt’s spotty body and tail, its limbs and digits and the shiny disks of its eyes. She strokes its snout with its two neat nostrils, with the tip of her fingernail. It wiggles, and, holding it tighter, she puts it into her mouth, biting the head clean off. She looks down at the body in her hand. A twitch, a shudder and still.

  ‘Poor little bleeder.’ Mrs Bibby smiles.

  The child strokes the newt’s soft belly against her lip, watching the early sun slant across the flagstones, following the snails.

  Chapter 4

  Bridie Devine travels neat and light with her old leather case and short cape, her white widow’s cap and ugly black bonnet. It is early yet, just after dawn. Below her, rats swarm along the ancient covered rivers, the lost tributaries, Styx-black and subterranean, under London’s feet. Above her, gulls wheel through still air. She crosses over the bridge. Mud-larks wrapped in rags are coming down to the low-tide, fog-wound Thames. Clinging to their long staffs, they walk out from the bank. The mud accepts them, sucking their little limbs sore with possessive kisses. They wade out into freezing water, watched by the stately herons that survey all with an ornamental disdain. The herons listen too, to the thin high song of the mud-larks, a song of things lost and found, of spools and nails, bones and coins and copper wire.

  It is early yet and the costermongers are rising tired. They have felt the weight of their barrows all night as they bucked and swore between the juggernauting omnibuses of their dreams. The factory workers, too, are climbing from the warm sour pits of their families to walk to work with a heel of bread in their pockets and their hair on end. Kitchen maids wake into their bodies and find themselves already up and staring at the cold coals of the unlit breakfast fire. Above them, their mistresses turn on frilled pillows, dreaming of steaming teapots and pug dogs. The senior clerks are rising in the suburbs, fastening collars and finding their omnibus fares. The junior clerks are checking for cuff fray and putting their patched and polished best foot first. They join the legions wearing London Bridge’s pavement smooth twice a day.

  It is early yet, and here are the ladies of the town about to turn in after a supper of new hot rolls straight from the bakers. They loll, hatless and bare-armed, red-lipped and rouged, in early morning doorways. Smoking, laughing, calling, they smile at Bridie, some address her by name,
the lone woman walking the waking city.

  Or is she alone?

  Bridie checks behind her. Still nothing.

  Ahead is Victoria Station, with its smart new train shed roof to shield the distinguished residents of Pimlico and Belgravia from the offensive emissions of the train: smoke and steam and the clatter of passengers and the hallooing of guards and the screeching and hissing of engines. Bridie passes the wooden huts erected in lieu of brick-built buildings when the works’ fund ran out due to the smart roofing.

  She checks behind her. Nothing still.

  And now she sees him: dim in the brightening morning, the dead man, sloping round a hut, walking towards her as if he’s been waiting for ever. Ruby Doyle, his dark eyes glowing, wearing little more than a top hat, drawers and a smile.

  Bridie looks out of the window of the London Brighton & South Coast Railway carriage, watching the landscape change before her eyes. River and road, village and farm, the world remade at every moment. Coal smuts fly past and the train ploughs forwards, fire-bellied and smoke-spitting, a mystery of steam pressure and pistons, a miracle of gauges. The engine is a painted comet, its tail rattling behind with every class of passenger hanging on. Many undertake this mode of transportation with nervous trepidation, as well they might; it is well known that regular rail travel contributes to the premature ageing of passengers. Unnatural speed and the rapid travelling of distances have a baleful effect on the organs. Hurrying can prove fatal, notably when combined with suet-based meals, improving spirits and fine tobaccos. The worst offender: the new-built, gas-lit, steam-hauled carriages of Hades which will convey a passenger between Paddington and Farringdon under the very ground of the metropolis. According to reports miscellaneous, the passenger (smoke-blinded, nerve-rattled, near-suffocated) will emerge from the experience variously six months to five years older.

  On the over ground train: there is no portion of it wholly conducive to safety or comfort. First-class offers all the advantages of tasselled curtains but is apt to be stuffy. Third-class promises an atmospheric ride buffeted by the weather and a choking stream of smoke. Second-class passengers have a roof but worry about their proximity to third-class.

  In second-class there is additional cause for concern today: a woman who talks to herself. Small and handsome, with fine eyes and an ugly bonnet, she has been whispering emphatically to the empty seat opposite her since the train left Victoria Station.

  Now she is ignoring the empty seat and staring silently out of the window.

  The other passengers glance sympathetically at each other and return to their books or their musings.

  The peace doesn’t last.

  The small, handsome woman begins to eye the seat belligerently. ‘That is not the point,’ she announces, in a fierce whisper.

  She listens awhile to the empty chair, chewing her lip. Then: ‘You are not a help, you are a hindrance – following and haunting and heckling—’

  She hits her forehead with the heel of her hand. More than one passenger jumps. ‘If I remember, you will vanish?’

  There’s an audible tutting from several occupants of the carriage.

  A red-faced gentleman seated in the corner intercedes waspishly. ‘If you would kindly lower your voice, madam.’

  Bridie turns to him, maintaining a haughty tilt to her nose. ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘You do realise, madam, that this is a second-class compartment?’

  ‘I am not here by choice, sir.’

  The red-faced gentleman raises his eyebrows.

  ‘I am here under the auspices of my employer,’ Bridie continues. ‘If I was situated in third-class I would no doubt be enjoying a song and a meat pie right now. In first-class, I would be partaking in cigar and some tip-top-gallant gossip.’

  The red-faced gentleman opens his mouth to speak. Bridie holds up her hand.

  ‘But, being as second-class is gloomier than a funeral carriage, I am forced to make my own entertainment, sir, which is talking to this . . . seat.’

  The confounded red-faced gentleman closes his mouth.

  Bridie extends a recalcitrant glare to the rest of the passengers, who shrink into their frock coats.

  ‘Furthermore,’ she hisses to the seat, ‘I will in future be ignoring your lascivious grins, cryptic messages, baggy-arsed drawers and illuminated bloody muscles.’ She narrows her eyes. ‘What person, in full possession of their reason, would choose to swagger through eternity half-naked with their boots undone?’

  The red-faced gentleman looks on helplessly.

  ‘All the legions of the glorious dead,’ she informs him, pointing to a patch of air, ‘and I’m plagued by that.’

  At Polegate Station Bridie finds Sir Edmund’s carriage waiting to convey her to Maris House. The weather has turned and the rain lashes with no let-up. Although it is early afternoon the lanterns on the carriage are already lit and the rain runs from the waiting coachman’s nose and cap-brim. It pours, too, from the tails and bridles of the horses.

  The ride is bad: the brougham has poor suspension, and the roads are rough in parts. The interior has been made sombre with dark-coloured plush and has the faint smell of mice and straw. The upholstery is thick enough to offer some protection to the fundament, but the experience is like being shaken to death in a velvet-lined horsebox. With no outward view from the steamed-up windows Bridie has time to contemplate the Berwick crest on the opposite wall of the carriage: two rampant moles and a baffled griffin.

  The horses, skittish, slide on the rain-washed road, their ears flat. The driver doesn’t know what’s got into them; they’ve been acting queerly since he picked up Sir Edmund’s London visitor. He can’t imagine why; it’s only one lone woman in an ugly bonnet. He blames the weather and the dark road through the woods to Arlington. The horses brace their flanks against the lurching movement of the carriage as the iron-trimmed wheels slip into divots and potholes.

  When the rain relents, Bridie puts down the window and looks out at a shabby inn and a muddy farm, a duck pond and a deserted village green. Then there are just trees again and a few fields. She sits back in her seat and bounces on.

  And where is Ruby?

  He has sculled up onto the roof of the carriage, where he lies smiling at the rain that falls through him. He blesses every mud-spun field that passes by and every cloud above him.

  He grins. She hasn’t changed a bit. God love her.

  The light is dying when the driver pulls up at the gates of Maris House. A stiff breeze is blowing the weather over; the clouds are no more than tattered dishrags now. The driver helps the visitor down. She’ll walk up to the house to get some air, she says, as she finds her pipe. A way up the drive she hears the sound she hasn’t been listening for – a footfall with a loose-laced step to it.

  She doesn’t turn, but rather concentrates on her first impression of Maris House as she approaches.

  Sir Edmund’s home is an architectural grotesque, the ornate façade the unlikely union of a war-ship and a wedding cake. A riot of musket loops, carved shells, liquorice-twist chimneys, mock battlements, a first-floor prow and an exuberance of portholes. On the carved stone pediment above the wide front door Neptune cavorts with sea nymphs. The lower floor windows are festooned with theatrical swags of stone starfish and scallop shells.

  For all this, the house looks unlived in.

  Rounding the side of the building, Bridie sees that the servants’ quarters give the best welcome; the lights there have been lit.

  A new pack of dogs have been let loose in the grounds, in the stead of those poisoned the night of the abduction. They run to Bridie and press their noses into her hands briefly, to find that she is not made of hot panic like peasants and poachers. Nor is she made of woolly fear like the men of the road who wash up on lawns casting for alms. This woman is made of boot polish and pipe smoke, clean cloth and the north wind. And as for the dead man walking behind her, well, he means no harm. He smells only faintly of the afterlife, cold an
d mineral, like new snow. The dogs return to the business of scratching and sprawling in their kennels, for there are no intruders here.

  Sir Edmund Athelstan Berwick is following a circuit that runs from the terrace to the rose garden, the rose garden to the dovecote, the dovecote to the pond, and the pond to the rhododendron vale. It is a vigil that pre-dates the theft of his daughter; Sir Edmund has long had an unquiet mind.

  He has been ruminating on the curses of his bedevilled existence. Sir Edmund has been blessed with supernatural bad luck. As a consequence he is uncommonly superstitious for an engineer and amateur naturalist – a man of industry and science! He keeps a rabbit’s foot always upon his person and banishes black cats from his estate. Otherwise he draws comfort and perturbation in equal measure from the invigorating ministries of Mr Darwin. So that when he is not considering his own eternal damnation, his head fairly clangs with questions apropos brave science, religious dogmatism and the length of a giraffe’s neck.

  Sir Edmund steals himself daily against forces which lie in wait to punish him for his dark and secret infatuation with unnatural nature. Sir Edmund is a collector, an insatiable, relentless collector, with an interest in anomalies and mutations, aberrations and malformations of life in or around the realm of water. If it swims or paddles or blows bubbles in any way oddly, then he’ll have it killed, stuffed or put in a jar and brought to his private library. Sir Edmund has sold off half his ancestral estate to fund his passion and participated in schemes ruinous to his peace of mind. Like the oologists who destroy future chicks in their lust for the egg, so the forces of acquisition and preservation, discovery and destruction wage war in Sir Edmund as in every collector. Take John Hunter. On one side of the coin: anatomist, surgeon and distinguished scientist. Flip the coin over: sick-man stalker, coffin robber, rabid boiler of an Irish giant’s bones.

  Sir Edmund has done wrong in his collecting. He has been ruminating on his wrong-doing and on the punishments (legal and spiritual) he might reasonably expect. And so rounding the house in a heightened state of remorse and morbid dread, Sir Edmund readily mistakes Bridie Devine for a retributive being of the underworld. A banshee perhaps, or a malevolent imp; it is dusk and her bonnet has the air of a demonic presence perching mid-flight. It takes Bridie several minutes to coax the baronet out of an hydrangea.