by Jess Kidd
The infant is held suspended in the fluid by fine wires. Sound asleep in its glass womb.
Bridie turns the jar and the picture changes.
At the back of the head, just under the wispy curls at the nape of the baby’s neck, there is a line of scales. Subtle at first, then swelling into a filmy dorsal fin, slight but proud, that follows the spine down to end in the sweep of a curled tail. A tail as muscular as a salmon’s: small, yes, but strong and pliant-looking. There is something diabolic at play: here, just below the hipbone, where the soft white marble of the baby’s chest and belly turns mottled green, deepening to a rich jade towards the caudal. The fins are tissue-thin, flesh-toned, touched at the tip with crimson.
Bridie turns the jar again and comes face to face with the creature, thankful that the eyes are sealed, the pupils inky shadows behind the lids. Cheekbones ridged, like the curve of a gill. And inside the open rosebud mouth, teeth, just barely visible, pointed, pike-like.
‘It’s called the Winter Mermaid.’
‘Is it real?’ whispers Ruby.
‘No one could ever test it,’ says Bridie. ‘Legend has it that the preservation depends on a perfect seal.’
‘Is it old?’ asks Ruby.
‘Perhaps a hundred years.’
The mermaid on Ruby’s shoulder swims down to his wrist, slipping past the inked anchor. She stares into the jar and then recoils, darting back up the length of his arm, retreating into his armpit.
‘I’ve seen this specimen before.’ Bridie smiles stiffly. ‘It’s one of a kind.’
‘Tell me,’ says Ruby.
She exhales. ‘It used to belong to the anatomist and surgeon Dr John Eames. I saw it then.’
‘You knew this John Eames?’
‘I was his apprentice; I was sold to him as a child for a guinea.’
Ruby waits. Watching her. Knowing there’s a story and knowing that Bridie is trying to find the words to tell it.
Her eyes are riveted to the jar. ‘It’s exactly the same as the first day I saw it, Ruby. It’s as unbelievable now as it was then.’ She looks up at him. ‘It changed everything.’
May 1841
Chapter 7
The man uncovered the jar.
Bridie was too old to cry and too proud to scream and she wanted to do both.
Too old – how old was Bridie?
No older than ten, no younger than eight, her gaffer had said: small for her age either way.
Bridie drew a breath and stepped closer to the jar. Although her feet were telling her to run and her head was agreeing.
‘Take a good look,’ the man said. ‘And tell me what you make of it, Bridget.’
Bridie felt the man watching her, his eyes on her. He wanted to see how she reacted to it, this jarred nightmare. And she knew, somehow, that her actions would determine her future, here, with him, in this house.
Bridie reached out to touch the glass, then, realising the filth of her hand, withdrew it and hid it in her skirts. Begrimed beyond belief, she was more out of place in this fine room than the abomination in the jar before her. Oh, and it was a fine room: with glass-fronted cabinets and a polished-wood desk and shelves of leather-coated books. And framed by the window, lawn as far as the eye could see, then the sails of boats in the distance. But Bridie was gazing at the jar, not at the view.
She took a sly peek at the man.
He had blue eyes, gingery whiskers and sandy hair touched grey at the temples. His face was long, with a habitual expression like that of a sad, dignified horse. There was a grave smile in his eyes, which, Bridie would soon realise, smiled more than his mouth. He was of fair height and even-featured, although somewhat sharp of nose and thin of lip. He was calmly spoken, polite to all people (addressing everyone in the same manner, irrespective of station) and dressed well, if sombrely.
His name was Dr John Eames and he had acquired Bridie for a guinea several hours ago. Now he was waiting to see what he had bought.
Bridie looked back at the jar and the unholy horror inside it.
What would her old gaffer, Gan Murphy, advise?
When in doubt, take it apart, girl.
Dead frogs, birds, rats, cats, and once a poor dog hung by street children. All carefully dissected. Bridie would pore over their secret workings for hours, admiring the mechanisms of limb and wing, blowing through a dead bird’s windpipe, reviving its song.
Afterwards Bridie would gather up the scraps and give them a proper burial in a tobacco box or some such, never forgetting to pick a flower, or a leaf, or to say a prayer over the grave. In this she was respectful.
When in doubt, take it apart, girl.
Bridie glanced at the man. He was waiting.
She wiped her hands as best she could on her skirts (which were as filthy as her hands) and produced her pocket-knife.
The jar would have to be prised opened, the liquid sniffed, the creature pulled out like an ugly pickle, shaken off, landed on the table . . . Bridie applied her knife to the seal on the lid.
‘No!’ Dr Eames started up, a hint of amusement in his voice. ‘The seal must stay intact. Put your knife away, child.’
Bridie pocketed her knife.
‘Have you ever seen a specimen like this before, Bridget?’
Bridie thought of the late-night trips to the hospital with Gan to conduct business. Dissection tables, buckets of gore and dripping sacks; she’d seen a lot. Had she seen anything like this? Not in her life.
‘I don’t know as I have, sir.’
Dr Eames regarded the baby in the jar with a look of affection. ‘Is it a miracle of nature or a marvellous trick?’
‘It is a trick, sir. Babies don’t have tails.’ Then a terrible thought surfaced in Bridie’s mind. ‘Oh, sir, they killed it, the baby, to put it in the jar there.’
Dr Eames shook his head. ‘No, Bridget, the specimen was already dead. They put it in this glass jar to preserve it in special fluid, to keep it for all time. They felt it was too important to lose.’
‘How do you know it was dead?’
‘I am a doctor.’ Dr Eames smiled.
Bridie looked unconvinced.
‘So, Bridget,’ he said. ‘What are we calling this specimen?’
Bridie had no bloody idea. ‘A fish baby?’ she hazarded.
‘It’s called the Winter Mermaid.’
It was a lovely name and here was a lovely word:
Mermaid, mermaid, mermaid.
Bridie said it again and again softly to herself as she inspected the Winter Mermaid from every side, walking around the table.
When Bridie looked up again she saw that a young woman was standing by the door.
‘Eliza is our housekeeper, she will help you settle in,’ said Dr Eames.
Eliza bobbed to Dr Eames and nodded at Bridie. She barely noted the mermaid in the jar. Bridie wasn’t to know it yet, but Eliza took everything with a pinch, for she had seen it all, working for Dr Eames.
Eliza was lovely. She had kind hazel eyes and glossy brown hair and a neat clean dress.
Bridie felt the full shame of the filth of herself. She was a shocker. Not just with London grime, but with blood. Although it had dulled to a dirty brown now, up her arms, caked to black under her fingernails. There was blood, too, all down the front of her dress, dried to rust, her skirts stiff with it. And her boots were thick with the worst of London’s mire. Bridie’s cheeks burned scarlet. It was as if her body was suddenly shouting out in that room that smelt of soap and polish, candle wax and cut flowers: Here I am, it roared, all sour armpits and sweaty arse, caked neck and greasy hair, rotten feet and pestilential breath.
‘Miss Bridget valiantly attempted to save a man’s life today, Eliza,’ said Dr Eames, as if by way of an explanation for the state of her. ‘I consider that very brave, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir, Miss Bridget has a very brave countenance.’
Eliza smiled at an incredulous Bridie, sending her heart swooping.
Dr Eames rounded
the desk. He went to pat Bridie’s head but, thinking better of it, he put his hand on her shoulder and smiled sadly into her eyes.
‘You go with Eliza now, she will show you around the house.’
Bridie glanced once more at the jar.
‘The Winter Mermaid will be here when you return, Bridget.’
Eliza offered Bridie her hand. Bridie hesitated but then she took it, wondering how Eliza could see past the dirt.
*
The housemaids boiled up the copper and peeled Bridie’s clothes off. With each garment there were low murmurs of awe. The tin bath was emptied three times and soap of a most stringent preparation applied. Bridie’s hair was dowsed and brushed and the worst tangles cut out; she watched them through her watering eyes as they fell onto the laundry-room floor, hairy red spiders. She was scrubbed dry and given a beautiful thing to eat, which was a sugared almond, and promised another when she was dressed.
Then she was put into clothes that had belonged to Miss Lydia before she died.
There were layers and layers of clothes. For every layer Bridie was accustomed to wearing there were two more. A shift, lace-trimmed pantalettes, petticoats, a boned corset, a maroon dress made of shiny stuff, a little cape, a pair of stockings, buckled shoes stuffed with paper to fit. With each layer Bridie shrunk further. With each layer Bridie felt stranger and stiffer. So that now when she moved she felt like a puppet discovering its limbs for the first time. Then the maids led Bridie upstairs to the nursery and showed her Dead Miss Lydia’s toys.
‘What happened to Miss Lydia?’ Bridie asked. ‘That I’m wearing her clothes?’
But the maids looked puzzled and shook their heads.
Bridie tried again, much slower and with an English accent.
The maids gave Bridie another sugared almond and called for Eliza, and Eliza told Bridie that Miss Lydia had died falling out of a window when she was not much older than Bridie.
‘She had been leaning out to feed a nesting blackbird,’ said Eliza. ‘So said Gideon.’
The maids who were folding linen in the corner of the room exchanged glances.
‘Who is Gideon?’
‘The young master, Dr Eames’s son. Gideon is away at school.’ Eliza patted Bridie’s arm. ‘Which is just as well, for Gideon isn’t always very kind, but he is very handsome and clever and one day he will be a great doctor like his father.’
‘Will he push me out of the window too?’ asked Bridie. ‘Like Lydia?’
In the corner of the room, one maid let out a cry and the other dropped a pile of petticoats.
Eliza looked at them coolly and then turned to Bridie. ‘Gideon won’t harm a hair on your head, for I will be looking out for you. You will be my second child.’
‘You have a first child?’
‘I do. He’s quite small yet and his name is Edgar Kempton Jones.’
‘He sounds just like a gentleman!’ said Bridie.
One of the maids in the corner smirked. The other nudged her.
Eliza frowned at the maid. ‘Are you finished, Dorcas?’
The bigger of the two maids scowled and bobbed.
‘Then see to Mrs Eames’s linen,’ said Eliza sternly. ‘Mary, you help her.’
Eliza watched the maids file out of the room. She turned to Bridie. ‘They are silly gooses.’
Bridie laughed.
Eliza lowered her voice. ‘The big one with the limp is called Bad Dorcas. Dr Eames got her from the reformatory.’
Bridie widened her eyes.
‘But I am the housekeeper, so they have to listen to me.’ Eliza showed Bridie the big hoop of keys she carried at her waist so she that could lock everything away so Bad Dorcas didn’t steal it.
‘Why did Dr Eames bring Bad Dorcas here?’
‘Dr Eames likes to help unfortunates.’
‘Were you in the reformatory, too?’
‘Not at all,’ Eliza laughed. ‘I met Dr Eames at the hospital and he offered me a job. I had been a housemaid before I was married, you see.’ Her expression became troubled. ‘But then I found myself alone and sick and poor.’
‘And unfortunate?’
‘In a way.’
‘But then you came here.’
Eliza’s face brightened. ‘Edgar was born here.’
‘And you became the housekeeper.’
‘Not at first. I was a maid, but I worked hard and learnt what I could.’
Bridie nodded. Eliza was a widow and a mother and a housekeeper and young for all of that. Bridie could tell by the sorrow and the steel behind Eliza’s soft looks that she had experienced far worse in life than the scorn of housemaids.
‘All’s well though, Bridget.’ Eliza squeezed her arm. ‘And you’ll meet my little boy Edgar tomorrow and we’ll show you around the house. It’s a lovely house, with orchards and a stable and right near the river. You can almost see Windsor Castle!’
‘Can you see the Queen?’
Eliza laughed. ‘You can! Strolling up and down eating ice cream on the battlements with the little princesses and princes.’ She smiled at Bridie kindly. ‘You are not all that far from London, although it is different, isn’t it?’
‘It is too quiet,’ said Bridie very seriously.
Eliza laughed again and then, because she had work to do, she left Bridie with a story-book that had belonged to Dead Miss Lydia.
When it grew dark, one of the silly gooses brought candles in. When it grew darker, the other silly goose came in, the one that was Bad Dorcas, and took Bridie’s clothes off her and put different clothes on her and put Bridie into the bed.
Then Eliza came in to kiss her goodnight and told her she looked like an Irish princess with her red hair and buttermilk skin, and she blew out the candles because she knew Bridie wasn’t afraid of the dark.
And Bridie wasn’t, of course. But she was afraid of the idea of Gideon, because she didn’t want to be dead like Lydia.
Bridie lay in the bed open-eyed, tracing the squares thrown across the ceiling from the moonlit window.
She didn’t cry, for after all, wasn’t this better than what she was used to?
A world away, in London, her old gaffer Gan would be having a pint for himself. If she were there now she would be under the table with the tavern cat, or traipsing up the road to buy tobacco, or fighting with the local boys.
When it was time to sleep they would go up to the room they had above the ship-chandlery shop and Gan would pull out two straw pallets, one for himself and one for herself.
Then Gan would have a good cough and a spit and lie down and smoke. Bridie would say her prayers:
‘God bless Gan and myself and the tavern cat.
‘God grant eternal rest to Mammy, Daddy, James, John, Theresa, Margaret, Ellen and little baby Owen.
‘God grant that bastard Paddy Fadden a kick up his hole and severe death to him and his gang, of a slow and a terrible variety.
‘God also wash us up a few more dead fellas so that Gan can earn a coin. And may they not be too far gone and have a head and two arms and two legs and be the kind the doctors like to play with. But only if they are dead anyway, not so’s they would have to die, unless you’ve a mind for them to be Paddy Fadden and his gang. For then that would be like killing the two birds with the one stone and would be much appreciated, dear Lord, who is above.’
Then Bridie would lie on her straw pallet listening to the ebb and flow of Gan’s breath, the guttering and the grunting, the rasp and the hack.
Tonight, in the big house, Bridie said her prayers in the same way she always did. Only she added Eliza and Edgar and Dead Lydia to her prayer list. She might add Dr Eames, too, once she knew him better, and Mrs Eames, if she was nice. Bridie definitely wouldn’t add Gideon or Bad Dorcas, but might rather ask God to smite them a bit.
She listened to the unfamiliar sounds of Albery Hall, inside and outside. The owls hunting and the wind through the trees and the floorboards settling. Somewhere in the house a door closed, then anothe
r, then all was like the grave.
Bridie turned over in the bed as best she could, for Eliza had tucked her in with fierce efficiency. There were layers of sheets and quilts and counterpanes, a barrage of pillows and bolsters. Maybe Eliza knew that Bridie might cut her lucky. Maybe Bridie would have bolted that first night if she could have got out of the bed. And if she knew where her old boots were: she wouldn’t get far in Dead Miss Lydia’s shoes, they were velvet and not for tramping.
Then there was the Winter Mermaid, and all the other wondrous things Dr Eames might show her: sights she did and did not want to see.
Bridie closed her eyes and tried to ignore the powerful smell rising from the bed: soap and pressed linen, clean wool and sun-aired feather mattresses. Bridie doubted she would get used to that.
***
Bridie had seen Dr Eames a few times before the day he bought her for a guinea. She had seen him at the Fortune of War public house. Dr Eames was a surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. He was making a name for himself, popular with his students, steady, not too much the showman and well known to her gaffer.
Gan was an old hand: he persisted, although the work of the London Burkers – Bishop, Williams and May (do not say their names within the four walls of the Fortune of War. Do not think them!) – nearly did for the trade. Their ghosts have grown as stale as the beer. How many years hanged? Decades now – Christ! A constable still called at the pub, although not in earnest. Since the Act, the anatomists had a better supply of cadavers, with the unclaimed poor from the hospitals, the prisons and the workhouses (although there was, of course, the woeful drop in hangings). There was less of a need to engage a friendless visitor to London in conversation. After the Act, work was slack for the resurrectionist unless there was an order to fill, something specialist. It still went on although the surgeons denied it, even as they buried their families in fortified coffins and set week-long guards at the church-yard.
Gan liked Dr John Eames because he never bargained. He just glanced at the corpse and paid full price, or else he took up his hat and walked away. If he bought it he would shake Gan’s hand and call him Mr Murphy.