by Jess Kidd
Most often Dr Eames sent the junior doctors, but sometimes he conducted his own business; risking a lungful of feculent Fleet river air, he would take the short walk from the hospital, tipping his hat to the Golden Boy mounted in the wall above the pub, to make the needful exchange with his agent in a private corner.
On the day in question (the day Dr Eames acquired a small girl into the bargain) the corpse was laid out in the cellar, as always. It had shiny brown skin, a big round gut and one shoe. Gan said it was a Spaniard and Bridie liked the sound of the word.
Spaniard, Spaniard, Spaniard.
She said it again and again softly to herself as she inspected the Spaniard from every side, walking around the table.
Then they got its clothes off and Bridie rinsed them and hung them out the back to dry. It would be her job to press and fold them and wrap them in a neat bundle to bring them down to Monmouth Street and get a good price for them. Then Gan wiped the corpse down with a rag and covered up its Articles with an old sheet. Then, whistling, Gan took out his comb. He would do just about everything to make a cadaver presentable. The landlord put his head round the door and asked if Gan wasn’t going to give the deceased a shave.
The deceased had been spotted down-river, an easy catch, and fresh. Gan and Bridie had reeled it to the side of the rowing boat, roped it onto a plank, towed it behind them and then hauled it up the river-bank.
Gan, as always, was first to arrive. As soon as the Spaniard was seen, a hunched shape in the water.
Gan was eyes, nose and ears, attached to a long coughing gristle of a man.
If anyone died, Gan Murphy knew about it.
If someone fell in the river at Chelsea, Gan would hear it in Vauxhall.
If someone keeled over friendless in Holywell Street (possibly striking his head on the way down), Gan would hear it in Chancery Lane.
He’d hear it with those great cockleshell ears he had, like dinner plates.
And what about Gan’s eyes?
He could spy a fresh-dug grave at a hundred paces and a failing man at fifty. If Gan Murphy followed you home you knew you were doomed.
And what about Gan’s nose?
One sniff and he would tell you the age on a corpse and why it had expired. Gan would get right up close and take a deep breath. He knew the workings, he didn’t need to take anything apart. Not any more.
‘This one,’ Gan took a slow inhale, ‘is less than a day old, fell in the river, flathered.’ Gan pressed the dead man’s gut, hard and low, and it let out a soft fart. ‘He left on a good feed of drink. Good man himself.’
Bridie thought the corpse looked ashamed, so she smoothed down its eyebrows and patted its arm.
Gan rested the bit of his pipe in the slot of a missing tooth. He lit it and pulled on it and spoke through the smoke, hardly moving his lips.
‘Leave that alone. Get out front, girl,’ he said. ‘Watch for the doctor.’
Then Gan sat down and stretched out his long legs and started to concentrate on bringing up a good deep cough.
It was common knowledge that Gan skipped Dublin after being apprehended near Kilmainham Gaol with a pocketful of human teeth. It was less well known that Gan had been a gentleman, a man of science and a renowned surgeon, before the drink and the loss of his inheritance at the gambling table. All or none of this might have been true, Gan wasn’t saying anything; it suited him to keep his past a mystery. But Bridie had her suspicions. For one, Gan could play piano so beautifully it would make you weep. For two, Gan would spend a month’s wages on the best bottle of wine to be had in London and drink it, slowly, whilst wearing the shoes he had pulled from a dead vagrant’s feet.
On the day John Eames bought Bridie Devine for a guinea she was out the front of the pub throwing stones into the gutter. She could hear that a fight had broken out. It had been fermenting for days, the landlord later said, two lads head to head, over a girl, a debt, a slight, a slur. Insults were traded and then punches. There was a push, a shove, a knife appeared, and then it was all over.
Bridie heard the shouting, the jeering and then the silence.
It was the silence that did it. Silence always spelt trouble.
She ran back inside in time to see the fella slide along the wall, his face baffled.
The other fella was looking at the knife in his hand, then at the fallen man, then back at the knife again. As if he was trying to solve a puzzle, as if he was trying to work out how the two were connected.
Bridie shouted for rags and strong drink. Someone was sent into the cellar for Gan, although they knew full well Gan wouldn’t come if he was smoking and having a cough for himself.
The child knelt down next to the fallen man. It was a fatal wound and the fella knew it. Bridie could see it in his eyes.
‘Keep still, fella, keep still,’ she said. The dying man showed the whites of his eyes like an animal trapped; he snorted like an animal trapped.
‘Keep still,’ she said. ‘All right, so?’
The man nodded.
She had her two hands in his chest, as if she was holding him together, but she couldn’t stem the bleeding and soon she was dressed in his blood. She fed whiskey into his mouth for the pain, holding the glass in one hand and his chin in the other. His teeth chattered, he choked and swallowed, whiskey and blood mixed. He held his lips pursed like the beak of a baby bird and looked for the glass again, until blood frothed up from his mouth.
When he died he fell sideways with his legs fidgeting and Bridie held his head lest he brain himself on the flags.
She stroked his hair. ‘There,’ she said. ‘There now.’
When he was finally still she got up, wiped the bottle on her skirt and put it back on the bar.
The men bowed their heads. The murderer started to cry.
Dr John Eames sat in the corner with his hat in his hands, astonished. Not by the sudden savage loss of life, for he saw that every day at St Bartholomew’s, but by the sight of this small girl, elbow-deep in gore, her face a picture of furious compassion.
When Gan Murphy sold Bridie Devine it was the first and only time anyone had ever seen him cry, for the wee girl was like family to him.
Gan had, of course, made great and preposterous claims for her. He solemnly informed Dr Eames that Bridie could amputate a leg by the time she was five years old (with a little help with the saw) and draw a clean gall-stone at seven. For wasn’t Bridie the last in a long line of illustrious Dublin surgeons? Celebrated men who once lived on Merrion Square and owned carriages and paintings but who had fallen on hard times through no fault of their own. When Bridie’s entire family died of poverty (and the sicknesses and the calamities attendant) Gan, who considered himself the family’s last friend, had brought her to England, seeking to make a living for them both in London. He had cared for the child ever since, at his own expense. Dr Eames nodded but he hardly listened. He couldn’t take his eyes off Bridie. She sat in the corner with her hands on her lap and her dress turned red.
Money changed hands and then there was a handshake. The body of the knifed man lay on the floor, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere behind the bar and his top lip pulled back, like a horse smelling the air. A few of the men carried him downstairs and laid him next to the Spanish bloater. By the time the constable called there would be one body in the cellar. The pot-boy brought sawdust and swept the floor, so that the room smelt like a butcher’s shop.
Gan, with his eyes brim-full, told her to go with Dr Eames.
‘You’re no longer a resurrection girl, Bridie,’ he said, wiping his face with his sleeve. ‘From this day forwards you’re a gentleman surgeon’s apprentice.’
September 1863
Chapter 8
The day will change to night before the wheel is fixed. The rig is off the Dover Road, mud-sunk five miles out of Battle, the driver frantic. Thankfully the doctor is not with them, else he’d be hopping and whinging.
‘We’re deep in the mire,’ says Mrs Bibby, dragging out
the letters of the word, mire. ‘All the trouble we go to for you, chick.’
Soldiers on a manoeuvre pass by and stop. They help with ropes and horses and planks.
Mrs Bibby watches them from inside the carriage, with her pale blue eyes narrowed and her wide tomcat mouth a taut line. Christabel is in a wicker trunk found in the vestry. Under her shawl Mrs Bibby keeps an Adams revolver ready. The gun goes by the name of Betty Reckoner.
The child pushes her finger through a gap.
‘Knock that off,’ Mrs Bibby hisses.
The child pulls her finger in again.
Mrs Bibby leans close to the trunk. ‘No tricks,’ she says, low and harsh, ‘or this will go very fucking bad for you. Do you understand?’
The child runs her teeth along the wicker. It would take her no time to get out but for her restraining suit.
Mrs Bibby is still angry with her and she, perhaps, is still angry with Mrs Bibby.
Earlier, Mrs Bibby, demonic from the pain in her leg and the effort of feeding the child (wedged as the big woman was in the vestry cupboard), had snatched the headless newt the child was playing with. She had thrown it away, and called Christabel a godless little heathen.
Christabel screamed. It was a scream loud enough to shatter the church windows and loosen the roof tiles and crumble the font and melt the candles on the altar. Then Mrs Bibby hit her until the child was silent with shock – steering clear of the mouth end.
Mrs Bibby won’t be bit again.
Three days in, green to the job, the child got the teeth in. In a way Mrs Bibby had been tickled, the child hanging from her toe like a tide-pool crab. The leg was already frigged: she’d long had a limp like a timber-toed sailor. The bite would make no difference; she’d known worse poisons. But it did, the bite; it did make a difference. But Mrs Bibby apportioned no blame and believed that the child felt no remorse. She fancies they are alike in understanding the law of bite, or be bitten.
A rasping sound as Christabel goes at the wicker. Mrs Bibby lets her.
The carriage straightens, then pitches and lurches. A horse whinnies and a rope gives way with a singing scream. The sound of swearing and curses and new plans being made. More ropes are brought and a dray-horse.
It starts to rain; it patters on the roof of the carriage and spits slantways in at the open window. Mrs Bibby watches as the child pushes her finger through the hole and waits and waits. A raindrop falls on her fingertip.
The finger is drawn back inside the trunk, carefully, carefully. But the raindrop has already rolled away.
*
When the child wakes they are moving and the light has all but faded.
‘The Kraken stirs,’ says Mrs Bibby. ‘It’s a long way yet to Dover and the white cliffs and a bad stew and a passable beer. The Walmer Castle suit you?’
She uncorks her medicine bottle, a pop in the dim of the carriage.
‘Well, now, will we have another story?’ a conciliatory tone to Mrs Bibby’s voice, a rough good humour in it.
Christabel creaks the lid of the trunk in answer.
‘If you learn to speak between here and the Walmer Castle the next story is on you.’
The carriage slows to a stop.
‘What’s this jarvey up to?’ moans Mrs Bibby. ‘Have we not had the high commotions today?’
The child scuffles in the trunk to get a better view.
‘Listen.’
Mrs Bibby’s ear is out beyond the jarg of the carriage and the shuffle of waiting horses. Harking for a coachman on the turn, a constable, an ambush by a collector betrayed—
The sound of pissing.
The coachman clears his throat and climbs back up into the cab. The horses walk on.
‘False alarm.’ Mrs Bibby is surprised at the relief in her own voice. ‘All right, so. In the old days . . .’
There was this reformatory school, a stern, cheerless building, designed by learned, well-respected men for the containment of friendless, errant girls. It had heavy doors and an abundance of locks and wrought-iron staircases. The girls worked in the laundry, which steamed and hissed and was as hot as Satan’s own wash-tub. Dorcas knew that she was lucky to be here, considering she’d poisoned a poor dear babe. She hadn’t been hanged, nor had she been sent overseas to the Lord Only Knows What Hole to die of fevers miscellaneous. The reformatory school was run by—
Mrs Bibby stops. ‘How old are you supposed to be, Kraken? Six, isn’t it?’
Christabel makes no sound.
‘Bears, the reformatory school was run by bears,’ she declares with grim glee. ‘Should make it more palatable if you are a child.’
Bears ran the place. Big Warden Bear, Bigger Warden Bear and Even Biggest Warden Bear. Big Warden Bear had arms like a stevedore and a chain. Bigger Warden Bear had no teeth and a cat-o’-nine-tails. Biggest Warden Bear had a wall-eye she used to see around corners. She didn’t need a weapon; she just used her massive paws. Dorcas, who was famous for the crime of poisoning a poor dear babe, had felt the chain, the cat-o’-nine-tails and the paws. The skin on Dorcas’s arse was as hard as foot-skin and she had no feeling in her fingertips.
Dorcas planned her escape. Only this time she would take a friend.
Dorcas would only ever have one friend – let’s call Dorcas’s friend Della. Della had big grey eyes and soft brown curls. She was kind beyond kindness to everyone and everything.
Dorcas planned their escape carefully. Out through the main gates, hidden in the cart that came to drop off the dirty laundry and collect the clean laundry all washed and pressed by the inmates. On a Friday with the workaday week all but over, the bears would send out for refreshments. The next Friday, Dorcas and Della watched the cart being loaded. When the pot-boy came across from the Bell, Dorcas pushed Della into the cart and under the tarpaulin and climbed in behind her. In a while the cart began to move.
Della was scared but Dorcas whispered in her ear until she became calm and fell asleep. Dorcas told her that she would find a home for them and become a rat-catcher. She would make a warm coat for Della with the pelts of the loveliest rats she’d caught. A patch-worked coat with a tabby-cat collar! Dorcas would become wildly successful at the rat-catching. Della would have a parlour and Dorcas would have a pocket-watch.
Della woke when the carriage stopped. When the men took off the tarpaulin Dorcas grabbed Della by the hand and they ran.
As bad luck would have it, the men decided to give chase.
As good luck would have it, night was falling and a fog was unfolding and Dorcas ran towards it, pulling Della behind her.
Dorcas didn’t know where they were, only that there were warehouses and factories, narrow streets and tumbledown houses, jumbled in a row like snaggled teeth. She kept running, towards where the fog was thickest, holding fast to Della’s hand.
Perhaps the god of errant friendless girls was looking down on them that day, but soon Dorcas and Della were not alone. Dashing beside them: a pair of magical creatures – formed of no more than the fog. Two dancing fog otters! With dog-like heads and lithe twisting bodies.
Della slowed to watch, Dorcas tugged at her, urging her to run. And then, from everywhere it seemed, came the sound of shouting. The fog otters startled and swam away. Dorcas, Della’s hand still in hers, plunged after them, her eyes wide open but seeing nothing, hardly knowing where they were running—
The carriage slows and stops.
‘Oh, frigging hell, what next?’ says Mrs Bibby.
The carriage rocks a little as the driver climbs down. The horses stamp and humph. Mrs Bibby frowns in the dark; if this is an adjustment of harness, or a fiddling with the lanterns, fine. But here are footsteps, rounding the carriage, stopping outside the door.
There is a rustling; it is Mrs Bibby rummaging in her skirts, under her shawl, followed by a sharp, metallic click.
Then her voice calling out into the pitchy-black, all sweet and calm-like.
‘Is there a problem, driver?’
; Chapter 9
All manner of spirits might be knocking about in a grand old pile like Maris House, or indeed any place with a bit of history to it. Some spectres rattle doorknobs and throw cats and fog looking-glasses. Others are satisfied with causing cold patches on the landing. Some sit up at the breakfast table with their elbows in your kedgeree while you read the obituaries. Others dwell, provokingly, just out of eyeshot. Our business is not with these. It is with but one manifestation: the constant Ruby Doyle, who, flickering with the lustrous light of the afterlife, keeps watch by Bridie’s bedside during the hours of the night.
A vision; lost in his own grave-defying thoughts.
The inked heart on his chest shrinks to a peach kernel, then opens, petal by petal – a lotus flower! – only to close again. The mermaid on his shoulder bites her nails, her tail-fin rippling absently. The skull grinds its teeth in a slow, sad, deliberate way.
And Ruby gazes down upon Bridie.
Pale-lipped and lovely in the moonlight, the contours of her face gentle in her sleep. The mad foam of her hair, nightcap forgotten, spills over the pillows.
Towards dawn, when she begins to mutter in her sleep, Ruby is there. When she calls out, her brow furrowed, Ruby is there. He speaks low and kind to her through her troubled dreams. And he wonders about these dreams; for there is much that Bridie hasn’t told him about her life – a child bought for a guinea, a woman alone with her her back to the past – and much that he will not ask. Stories, particularly the bad ones, are told in their own time. And so, for now, it is enough that she turns her face to him, like a flower to the sun, and that she sleeps.
For the first time in a long time Bridie will not rise from her bed in the early hours, hot and cold with remembered demons, to see the dawn in with a pipe and swollen eyes. Instead, she sleeps right through, and when she wakes she will blame her good night’s rest on a plump feather bed, country air and a dinner of digestible meat.
Just before she wakes, before she starts to stir, Ruby Doyle will sink into the wall with his hat in his hand and a new liquid brilliance to his dark eyes.