by Jess Kidd
Ruby groans.
The carriage draws up outside a new brick house on the outskirts of a village.
Bridie checks her pocket-watch. ‘There’s still time to have a few words with the doctor before we catch the train. Find out why he’s a lie-low.’
On Bridie’s arrival at Dr Harbin’s house she immediately establishes two things. First, the doctor is nowhere to be found and, second, his laundry woman doesn’t know if she’s on her ear or her arse. Mrs Swann came to collect the wash and found the whole house turned over. Bridie feels for her, the large, baffled and vaguely hostile woman who stands in the hall still in bonnet and shawl. Mrs Swann becomes more amenable when Bridie mentions her acquaintance with the doctor and Sir Edmund.
‘This bodes bad indeed, Mrs Devine,’ says Mrs Swann. ‘See here – the doctor’s hat and coat – the doctor, wherever he is, hatless and coatless! I have never known him to go out thus.’
Bridie follows Mrs Swann into the parlour.
Ruby goes ahead. ‘I’ll take a look around.’ He melts into the wall.
Anything that can be broken is broken. The potted parlour palms have been seized and dragged across the carpet. Chairs lie slashed and books torn to pieces.
‘They’ve gone through like a dose, ma’am.’ Mrs Swann points at the leather case up-ended on the floor. ‘The doctor’s medical bag is there. He would no sooner leave the house without his medical bag than fly up into the sky.’
Bridie follows Mrs Swann into the surgery. The room has been ripped apart with an even greater ferocity. Panelling has been prised from the walls, seats knocked from chairs and every last drawer smashed like driftwood.
Cabinets have been wrecked, boxes of vials and bottles shattered, their contents drip still on shelves. Bandages and dressings have been thrown like streamers around the room.
On the floor, under the desk, a cigar butt. Bridie picks it up.
Ruby returns, by way of an open door this time. ‘The rest of the house is ransacked, there’s nobody else here.’ He glances at the object in her hand. ‘What is it?’
She rolls the butt between her two fingers and sniffs it. ‘Hussar Blend, sold in a cheap tobacconist’s near Bart’s. A favourite of medical students, but an uncommon choice for a fully fledged doctor.’
‘Why is that?’
‘It’s like smoking cat shit and straw, Ruby.’
Bridie turns to Mrs Swann, who is standing nearby tutting at the carnage. ‘Did Dr Harbin smoke these cigars?’
Mrs Swann peers at her. ‘Is it me you’re talking to now, ma’am?’
‘It is, Mrs Swann.’
‘Then, no, ma’am, I’ve never known the doctor to smoke in his life or countenance it in others. He disagrees with it wholesomely.’
Bridie picks through the contents of Dr Harbin’s writing bureau, tumbled and torn-up papers and pamphlets and letters.
‘The child,’ says Ruby. ‘What about Dr Harbin’s child?’
Bridie turns to Mrs Swann. ‘Where’s Myrtle?’
‘She’s in the garden, ma’am, but I can’t get no sense from her.’
‘Can you show me?’
Mrs Swann leads Bridie into a kitchen strewn with smashed crockery and dented pans. They slip on spilt semolina and scattered tea. The pantry door is off its hinge.
Bridie surveys the damage. ‘The question is: were they simply destruction-bent, or wild to find something?’
Mrs Swann looks dismayed. ‘If they did take anything, ma’am, how would we ever know with all this ruination?’
Myrtle sits on a wooden bench set into the hedge in the vegetable garden. Bridie can only see her hand; it is rocking a doll’s wicker crib.
When Bridie approaches, Myrtle stops and holds a finger in front of her mouth. ‘Shh, Rosebud is sleeping.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Finally.’
Myrtle’s hair is burnished to a rich brown in a shaft of autumn sun that falls in this sheltered pocket of the garden. But the child’s face is pale and her eyes dull.
Bridie takes a seat next to her. ‘Rosebud is a world of trouble.’
Myrtle nods wearily. ‘She is, Mrs Devine, she really is.’
From the house comes the sound of Mrs Swann doing battle with dust-pan, mop and bucket. It’s a modest spot, but comfortable, for a doctor and his young daughter (the doctor’s wife having expired introducing Myrtle to the world and the doctor showing no fancy towards remarrying, as far as Mrs Swann can see). In the garden the last leggy beans wigwam and dusty cabbages sprawl. Around them the hives are busy, the bees dance in the sweet-apple air of the orchard. Ruby reaches up to the fruit, as if he’d like to pick one. Remembering, he retracts his hand, folds his arms and wanders on.
Bridie turns to the child. ‘Where’s your papa, Myrtle?’
‘Don’t know really, Mrs Devine.’
‘Did your papa turn the house topsy-turvy?’
‘No, someone came.’
‘Did you see them?’
‘No, I heard them. Bang, bang, crash. So I hid, like this.’ She stops rocking the crib and presses herself into the hedge.
Bridie nods. ‘Was your papa here when they came?’
Myrtle thinks for a while. ‘Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Papa slips in and out.’ She makes a shape with her hand. ‘Like a grass snake.’
Myrtle stands and pulls Rosebud from the crib. Holding the doll by the ankle, she pulls a scrap-book out from under the mattress and hands it to Bridie.
‘You mean for me to look at your scrap-book?’ says Bridie.
Myrtle sidles up to her elbow and leans over to turn the pages for her.
‘What’s this?’ Bridie points at a drawing of a stout woman with blue lines streaming from her mouth and nose and hands.
‘That’s the old nurse before the new nurse.’
Ruby moves closer to look.
‘What are these blue lines, Myrtle?’ asks Bridie.
Myrtle rubs her nose. ‘Water. She’s drowning.’
‘Drowning? So that’s a wash-tub she’s in?’
Myrtle laughs. ‘That’s not a wash-tub. She’s sitting on a chair and that’s the fireplace.’
‘I don’t understand, Myrtle. Where would the water be for her to drown in?’
‘Christabel makes the water come.’ Myrtle takes the scrap-book from Bridie’s hands and closes it. She puts it back under the crib’s mattress, drops Rosebud in on top and covers all with a quilt, patting down vigorously.
‘You didn’t see this happen, did you?’
Myrtle shakes her head. ‘No, Mrs Bibby told me about it.’
‘People don’t drown in armchairs,’ Bridie says kindly. ‘Do you think Mrs Bibby meant to scare you with that story?’
‘She’s worse stories than that,’ sniffs Myrtle. ‘She killed a gentleman and a lady and chopped them up. She put the lady in a picnic hamper.’
‘Mrs Bibby told you this?’ asks Bridie, incredulous.
‘Oh, yes,’ says Myrtle, mildly. ‘And she was nearly caught, once when she was Lil, once when she was some other name. But she’s no fruit of the gibbet.’
Myrtle sits down and rests her head against her hands with a deep sigh, gazing around with tired eyes at the bees and the cabbages, the windfalls and the dying leaves.
‘Mrs Swann said I can stay with her until Papa comes home, for as long as that takes. I told her that Papa will never be back.’ Myrtle pauses. ‘Then Mrs Swann said I could only stay until next Tuesday.’
‘Why won’t your papa be back?’
‘Because he stole Christabel.’
Chapter 11
In the parlour above Wilks’s of Denmark Street, Cora Butter is swaddling a specimen jar. The contents of this jar are disturbing to Cora’s peace of mind. She moves it carefully, so as not to drop it, or joggle it unduly. Heaven forbid that the contents would find some egress. The creature is attached to its home by a web of wire and the glass seems strong and the stopper well made. But this doesn’t reassure Cora. She has studied the thing in the ja
r for the longest while, unnerving herself in the process. Sometimes she’s certain she sees its fist twitch, or a bubble escape from the nubbin of its nose. But she is mistaken: the beast is beyond dead, its features frozen, its little barrel chest still. Knowing from Bridie what collectors do and what they are capable of, Cora has looked for the connection, the tell-tale splice where flesh meets scale, the crinkled ridge. But if there is one, Cora can’t see it. She carries the jar downstairs and lays it in the borrowed perambulator alongside a comprehensive box of pastry delights from Frau Weiss’s bakery and a few bottles of adulterated Madeira (for it’s never nice to go visiting empty-handed).
Cora ambles back up the stairs to the parlour. ‘The infant abomination is tucked up tight and ready for its outing. ‘You ought to leave it with Dr Prudhoe,’ she says, peevishly. ‘Let him find a home for it among all the nasty articles he has in his workshop.’
‘It worries you, Cora?’ asks Bridie.
‘It gives me bloody nightmares. Who would create something like that?’
Ruby Doyle, who is standing by the parlour window, casts Cora a sympathetic glance. Having no answers for her (at least none that she could hear), he turns his attention outside again. The street is hopping: the living swarm before Ruby’s dead eyes – costermongers doing the go-around with trays of oranges and nuts; street performers limbering; kitchenmaids sallying forth with market baskets, eyeing the ribbon vendors and eluding the coalmen. Tribes of pickpockets, fleet-footed miscreants, thread through the traffic. Here trots a dapper wag, high collar and resplendent whiskers. There steps a blue-eyed beauty in a fetching bonnet. Ruby wishes himself a frock coat and a new top hat, a hot shave and a good breakfast, a scarlet cravat, a pair of kid gloves and a pocket-watch. He would give the world just to saunter out onto the streets as a living man again, to look and be looked at.
‘I miss being seen,’ he announces. ‘I was a spectacle.’
‘You still are,’ mutters Bridie.
She folds the note she has just dashed into an envelope. It is addressed to the Reverend Edward Gale, Highgate Chapel. The subject of the note: Mrs Devine craves an audience with the vicar at his earliest convenience. For Bridie’s mind keeps returning – via the Winter Mermaid and the puncture bites on Myrtle Harbin’s arm – to the walled-up infant in the crypt with teeth like a pike. She needs to examine the corpses again, in decent light and preferably without the curate Cridge leering over her shoulder.
‘Will you get this across to Highgate today, Cora? I can’t understand why the vicar hasn’t responded to the letter I sent before I left for Maris House. You say there’s been nothing from him?’
‘Not a word.’ Cora takes the letter.
‘I’ll have to go back.’
‘Tramping all over, spending shoe leather. You should entreat Dr Prudhoe to come here to Denmark Street. Dragging that awful jarful miles out of town and into the country.’
‘I need the walk; I want to think, Cora. And besides, it will be no effort with the perambulator.’
Cora concedes to that. The contraption handles beautifully and is spacious enough for three babies sardined. And it’s sturdy. Six of Mrs Ackers’ offspring can be simultaneously borne by it: on top, inside and in the parcel rack beneath. Mr Ackers, a master coachbuilder, has put his expertise into this vehicle. The suspension is without equal and the lines as pleasing as a barouche.
The Winter Mermaid will be conveyed in style and safety.
Cora nods. ‘Well, the thing is intact yet and it’s already come all the way from Polegate.’
‘That’s the spirit.’
‘I knew it would be offensive when I read handle with care on that crate.’ Cora wrinkles her nose. ‘Fancy sending that item to me.’
‘How else would I have got it past Mrs Puck? I put it in a box and told Mr Puck it was my microscope and there would be hell to pay if it arrived broken.’
‘Won’t they miss it?’
‘With Sir Edmund’s present worries?’ Bridie catches Cora’s disapproving expression. ‘I’ll return it, of course. Once I work out its bearing on the investigation.’
‘You might have packed the family silver.’
‘You’re right, Cora. But this jar is worth much more.’
*
Bridie finds the walk to Brixton pleasant, for the day is fine yet. Over Waterloo Bridge: carriages and carts and horses and humans, moving in and out of the maw of the great metropolis. She heads past St John’s and Waterloo Station, the breweries and printers and tanneries, towards clearer air and Kennington Road. Mrs Ackers’ perambulator glides ahead, now and again people stop Bridie to pry and coo, only to be disappointed of an eyeful of a fine fat baby.
Ruby walks alongside her with the awkward, deferential air of a new father, pointing out divots and holes in the road, scowling at carriages and carts that swerve too near as on they go, leaving behind Kennington Park and St Mark’s. Bridie steals a look at Ruby. He catches her and smiles back, his brown eyes full and kind and hot on hers. She feels the sudden keen pain of something like sadness. If he wasn’t dead and she was inclined – she is inclined. She could just imagine a life beginning and ending with him. Ruby drunk home with his boots on in bed – oh, the rows and the making up! Having a rabble of dark-eyed children to him. Growing old and the familiarity of his touch, his thoughts, his breath, his fingertips smoothing a lose hair, his lips bent to her neck. And she’s awash with sorrow, because she can’t have a dead man. The sudden watery lustre to her eyes she blames on the freshening air.
The walk does her good, the early afternoon fair and breezy. Bridie pushing a baby carriage with an incredible cargo down onto the Brixton Road, towards St Matthew’s and the Hill. And there is the White Horse tavern and the pleasingly untidy run of villas. A mill’s sail turns into view above the trees. Just beyond lies the women’s prison, further in the distance the water works.
Ruby steals a look at Bridie. She catches him and smiles back, her eyes full of devilment and who knows what thoughts and oh, he could kiss her for that. She walks fast, her widow’s cap and black bonnet slipping back, her cape discarded and bundled under the perambulator, so that Ruby sees the contours of her fine, strong body in motion, the open, easy grace of her. For all the world like a proud mother. Ah, now, another smile glimpsed and caught, green eyes shining, and does she feel herself liquid and would she pour herself into his arms and abandon reason and cleave to him? A life ending and beginning with her – her roaring, him drunk home, in the bed with his boots on, brawling and loving, serenading. Their raucous children, green-eyed, please God. A babe on the knee before the hearth and his London Illustrated self, pinned on the wall. Bridie. Growing old together and the familiarity of her touch, her voice, his fingertips threading foxy autumn hair. Ruby wipes his eyes briskly on the back of his hand, a fault of the freshening air, and notes a rough bit of road coming up.
Prudhoe’s windmill is the second one along. The first is functioning: full-rigged with burr-stone and bed-stone, gears and brake-wheel, quant and moving sails. As a youngster Bridie would follow Valentine Rose to the top of that windmill, creeping up the ladders past the miller, to make-believe they were in the crow’s nest of a ship. They would lie on the floor listening to the wash of the sails and the creak of the ropes. The fields below were the sea, the wind through the grasses the changing tide. The Surrey House of Correction (as they knew it then) was another ship approaching. Ahoy! The inmates were fearsome pirates all! Or sometimes the prison was just a moored hulk, lying heavy in the water with its cargo of doomed souls.
Prudhoe’s windmill once looked like its tidy neighbour but the sails stopped long ago, and as far back as Bridie could remember the roof has been promised a lick of bitumen. Windows have been opened haphazardly in the body of the building and there’s a ring of them at the top with a balcony under. This gives something of a lighthouse feel and floods Prudhoe’s workroom, located on high, with beneficial light and air.
There is no sign of Prudhoe at
his windows today. Although he could be looking out, for his eyeglass is trained often on the landscape. Prudhoe surveys all of London from his panopticon on Brixton Hill. From the north-east window: the Thames framed, and at its curve Bentham’s Penitentiary. From Barry’s Parliament Prudhoe’s eye follows the bend of the river on to Covent Garden, then to Denmark Street, through to Bloomsbury and his enemies at the Pharmaceutical Society. A tilt of his head right, there’s the old Roman Road eastward.
Several large ravens patrol the balcony belligerently, keeping a gimlet eye on proceedings, stopping only to stretch a claw, or peck under a wing. Intermittently there is bickering among the guards, conducted with much flapping and posturing and dark cawing. A system of buckets and winches runs down the outside of the building. Everything from specimens to babies, bread rolls to nitrous oxide, has been hauled up the side of this windmill. The original workings, the millstones and the wheeled gears, lie discarded in the garden. Prudhoe claims he dismantled the works in protest at Cubitt’s confounded prison treadmill – nothing should have to spin, grind and labour at the behest of another. Besides, his sails were sweeping up all his neighbour’s wind and Prudhoe was no miller. And without the machinery, perfectly round rooms could be cramped with every comfort to accommodate Mrs Prudhoe, Prudhoe and the orphans.
The orphans, a great tribe of children of all ages, shapes and sizes, run backwards and forwards across the garden screaming. Mrs Prudhoe, a short, plump delight of a woman in a wide felt hat, is hoeing carrots with a baby on her hip. She raises her hand to Bridie in greeting.
Nothing grows in the Prudhoe’s garden but foundlings, washing and gritty long-tailed carrots.
Mrs Prudhoe points to the perambulator with a grin. ‘You’ve brought me a new charge, Bridie?’
‘Haven’t you enough?’ laughs Bridie.
‘Never.’ s Mrs Prudhoe jiggles the baby on her hip until it giggles.
She calls over two children from a savage crew chasing the life out of a chicken. They come directly, each the spit of the other, with pale green eyes and fierce red hair on end.