Things in Jars

by Jess Kidd

‘Here are the twins.’ She nudges the nearest. ‘Say hello to Bridie who brought you here, remember?’

  The children drone a greeting with one eye on the chicken, which is getting away.

  Bridie nods at them. ‘You’ve grown. Don’t you remember me?’

  They frown, unsure. A year in the life of a five-year-old is an eternity after all.

  ‘Prudhoe’s inside,’ says Mrs Prudhoe. ‘He’ll be glad to see you, he’s had no visitors he likes recently.’

  ‘Does he ever have any visitors he likes?’

  ‘Yes: you.’ Mrs Prudhoe regards Bridie craftily, her eyes full of mischief. ‘And Valentine.’

  ‘Will you not start?’

  Mrs Prudhoe laughs and squeezes the baby’s chin and the baby laughs and dribbles the more.

  She gestures at the perambulator. ‘If you and the lad stir yourselves, you could fill that and give me some more delicious babies to eat.’ She nibbles the baby’s hands ferociously until it hiccups with joy.

  Bridie glances at Ruby. He looks away.

  Because Prudhoe’s workshop is at the top of the building he can pull the ladder up when he’s had enough of the world. However, today he must be in a cordial mood for the ladder is down. This is the only region of the windmill where chaos is not allowed to reign and orphans gain no admittance. Unless they can write in a neat hand, step silently and read Latin.

  Bridie doesn’t suppose that Prudhoe ever lies on the floor and fancies himself in a crow’s nest. Every moment of the chemist’s waking day (and sleeping night, for this is when he dreams up his best inventions) is spent on his work. Ask him what he does for a living and he will only admit to the following: testing the stomach contents of the deceased. These arrive daily from all corners of the country in the jars that Mrs Prudhoe winches up to him. Prudhoe also gives evidence at inquests, compiles broadsides, writes scathing letters to medical journals, and enjoys being written about scathingly in medical journals. He holds certain truths dear to his heart. Namely, that most members of the medical profession are inordinately stupid. Moreover, women should have the uncontested right to enter the medical profession, being, as a general rule, notably less stupid than men. Further, that a rural doctor will take, on average, three months to realise that his patient has been poisoned, whilst a town doctor is four times more likely to poison his own patient in the first place. Testing the stomach of a relatively fresh corpse is one thing. Testing a three-month-old snear of rot is another. Based on his experience in the arena of criminal behaviour, law and justice Prudhoe has also developed several unwavering beliefs. These being: that lawyers (both for the prosecution and for the defence) are the devil’s own horned bastards, the accused are always guilty and there are more efficacious tests for arsenic than Marsh’s but none are as beautiful.

  He comes from a long line of apothecaries. Raised at the back of a chemist’s shop, his baby days were spent bathed in the jewelled red and blue light thrown down by the glass carboys in the window. Behind the counter his father stood, as his forefathers had before him, guardians of walls of drawers, cabinets of stoppered bottles, rows of jars. Gatekeepers to an esoteric world of unguents and potions and powders. They sold opiate dreams for fractious babies to exhausted mothers, or ointments to unfaithful husbands with the itch. They poisoned and cured in equal measure and everything they dispensed came with a good old-fashioned bracing purgative.

  As a young man, Rumold Fortitude Prudhoe decided to tip his boom and strike out alone, across waters uncharted. Not for him a life behind the till. He hated the bowing and whispering, the constant interruption of customers, with their hopes and distresses and bodily functions. Prudhoe wanted to expand the fabric of science, medicine and his own mind. His full-steam experimental nature has not changed since the day, as a medical student, he licked a stain on a bed sheet to determine the tincture that put a rich widow to death. Neither has his burning curiosity waned. Mesmerism, spiritualism, vegetarianism, time-travel using magnets and the therapeutic potential of hallucinatory substances are recent areas of interest.

  Prudhoe’s shelves, curved of course, are packed with periodicals, pamphlets and books, ranged in deliberate disorder, for the doctor likes juxtapositions.

  Several well-scrubbed workbenches are set up with the equipment of Prudhoe’s various trades. Bearing stills and spirit-lamps, mortars and pestles, beakers and flasks, evaporating dishes and crucibles, tripods and funnels, clamps, stands and test-tubes.

  Presently Prudhoe is at one of his workbenches staring with rooted concentration at a substance in a small round dish. Prudhoe is the opposite in stature to his wife; an elegant whipcord against her soft, round, fruity plumpness. Of average height, Prudhoe is lithe with a sinewy strength and graceful of posture and limb. Only his hair betrays his age: it is white, but thick withal, and kept long, plaited and fastened with a black velvet ribbon. His face is steep of forehead, straight of nose, firm of chin and trim of whiskers. His clothes are as finely made as him, although cut on the austere side. His chief adornment is a single pearl drop ear-ring, which he wears unselfconsciously and slightly in the manner of a high-seas privateer. His eyes, amber-toned, kind by default, and given to peering, squinting and periods of sustained observation, are capable of great warmth and that rebellious glint which always indicates an unfettered mind. In Dr Prudhoe’s countenance, refinement meets rogue.

  ‘Bridie . . .’ Prudhoe holds a slim hand up, his eyes on the dish. ‘Indulge me, two more minutes.’

  The sound of a bell from below alerts Bridie to a delivery. She opens the window onto the balcony and retrieves the swaddled jar from a hoisted bucket. A raven takes the opportunity to follow her inside, greeting Bridie with a low threatening chuckle.

  Ruby has settled on a chair next to a bureau, with his hat on his knee. There’s a despondent look to him Bridie hasn’t seen before.

  The raven flutters up beside him. She edges sideways along the top of the bureau, claws slipping on polished wood, and fixes Ruby with one barbarous eye.

  ‘The bird sees me!’ exclaims Ruby, brightening.

  ‘She’s a raven,’ whispers Bridie. ‘She sees everything.’

  The raven, unruffled, begins to preen her feathers.

  Prudhoe studies the photograph. ‘First principles, let’s reconsider the evidence: Christabel is special, how?’

  ‘She stirs memories, provokes angry thoughts, has colour-changing eyes, bites like a pike, attracts gastropods, raises dampening mists and drowns people by manifesting water.’

  Prudhoe nods. ‘To substantiate this, we have the scars on the arm of the doctor’s daughter, a pile of empty snail shells and a sodden patch under the rug in the nursery which forms the shape of a person, possibly a body laid out?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘The eyes of this child are pale, it is true, and oddly fogged, but the art of photography can accomplish many extraordinary effects.’ He hands the photograph back to Bridie. ‘And Sir Edmund Berwick claims to be her father?’

  ‘A dubious claim. I think he might have collected her. Do you know him?’

  ‘Only by correspondence. He has a broad interest in marine life, some freshwater, nothing land-based. No birds, with the exception of wading birds.’

  The raven hops down from the bureau and up onto the back of Prudhoe’s chair. With a tender croak she rubs her beak in his hair. He puts his hand up to pet her and she nips him.

  ‘Nasty, darling.’ He turns to the jar on his desk. ‘What I’d like to know is how Sir Edmund acquired the Winter Mermaid. On Mrs Eames’s death her late husband’s collection would have passed to Gideon, but with the son dead—’ He hesitates, continuing slowly. ‘The Eames estate went unoccupied whilst lawyers rumbled and distant relatives laid claim. The Winter Mermaid sank without a trace . . . It’s not impossible it was stolen and sold by some dishonest servant.’

  Prudhoe has opened the door and let a spectre of the past in. It whistles through the room; stale fear, bitter hurt. Bridie rememb
ers to breathe, to calm her kicking heart.

  ‘As to the Highgate remains, you see a link between the walled-in infant and this preserved mermaid here?’

  Bridie nods. ‘They are somehow connected, Prudhoe.’

  ‘The formation of the teeth?’

  ‘Yes, primarily.’

  ‘You know, of course, the story of the Feejee Mermaid?’

  ‘That turned out to be part capuchin monkey, part salmon. Are you saying that Christabel is a Feejee Mermaid?’

  ‘I’m saying, Bridie, that people can be tricked, or they can trick themselves. There are children with all sorts of strangenesses running around this windmill. Some are a little unusual, granted, but all of them are human.’

  ‘I know, but this case is different somehow.’

  ‘The Winter Mermaid is a marvel, it is true.’ Prudhoe smiles dryly. ‘I’m not sure that I would have had the audacity to abstract her from under Sir Edmund’s nose.’ He chooses his words carefully. ‘But she’s not real; whoever put her together was a genius. Likewise, the child you seek, however unique, will be just human.’

  ‘And the snails and the fog and the changing eyes . . .’

  ‘Such stories have a potency, Bridie. And a further thought, perhaps: the theft of Christabel could only raise interest among collectors.’

  Bridie reflects on this. ‘You think that her abduction is a hoax set up by Sir Edmund and Dr Harbin?’

  ‘Isn’t it a possibility?’

  ‘And the dead young woman, is she a hoax too, Prudhoe?’

  ‘The best-laid plans go wrong. She may have been involved, or just an innocent bystander. The vagrant said she had been haunting the grounds.’

  ‘So, the baronet and the doctor, intending on selling the child, staged the whole thing to drum up intrigue and raise her price?’

  ‘It’s happened, I recollect another case—’

  ‘Then they chose me as the person least likely to find her,’ says Bridie, quietly.

  Prudhoe frowns. ‘I don’t know where you are heading with this.’

  ‘My last case.’

  ‘You did everything you could to rescue that child, Bridie. Valentine told me you couldn’t have done more. You made yourself sick over it.’

  ‘I didn’t find the child, though. I mean, not in time.’

  ‘Neither did the police.’

  ‘A boy lost his life because of me, Prudhoe.’

  Prudhoe shakes his head. ‘You know that’s not true. Have you forgotten the people you have found? And saved? I haven’t. There’s a fair few of them chasing my bloody chickens.’

  Bridie looks to the windows. She sees nothing but sky from where she’s sitting. She wishes for an eyrie and a ladder to pull up.

  ‘Cora, for one, would be the first to put you straight.’ His voice softens. ‘You help individuals the police wouldn’t help, couldn’t help. You barely make a living and sometimes you take great personal risks. It worries Mrs Prudhoe.’

  ‘You’re one to talk, with the bedsheet-licking test.’

  Prudhoe laughs. ‘Have you considered what you will do with the child when you find her?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Let me guess: you’ll return her to Sir Edmund and claim the reward?’

  ‘I rather thought I would bring her here to chase chickens.’

  ‘You’ll never be a rich woman.’ He glances at her. ‘You’ve stopped attending lectures these last months.’

  ‘I’ve been spending my money on Madeira.’

  ‘Will you be back? Garrett is making news, you know.’

  ‘Good for her.’

  Prudhoe’s expression turns triumphant. ‘The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries is still reeling. Garrett was in, out and got her credentials while they were there, scratching their arses. Blackwell, Garrett, women with gumption, claiming their rightful—’

  ‘Yes, Prudhoe, I know. Garrett will make a doctor yet,’ says Bridie, leadenly.

  ‘If the other students stop petitioning against her, the pismires.’

  ‘She has her supporters, too.’

  ‘Medical women—’ begins Prudhoe.

  ‘Are precisely what the world needs,’ Bridie adds, before he does. If they move swiftly on to Seacole and Nightingale he might exhaust his favourite topic by nightfall.

  Prudhoe, catching a note of flatness in her voice, studies her intently. She is downcast; he can see that. She is watching the raven worry the hem of an ottoman, only she is not really seeing anything.

  ‘Are you sleeping, Bridie?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Are you eating, well and regularly?’

  ‘These are Mrs Prudhoe’s questions.’

  He points at the jar and the Winter Mermaid in it. ‘Lester Lufkin would buy that. If you could teach it to juggle.’

  ‘Lester Lufkin is a toad.’

  ‘Ringmaster Lufkin is the Grand Panjandrum now.’ Prudhoe leans forward. ‘His circus is invading Chelsea in a fortnight’s time. He is planning an extravaganza with a nautical flavour. The Cremorne Gardens will be reborn as Neptune’s watery paradise.’

  ‘He’s taking over Cremorne Gardens?’ asks Bridie, surprised. ‘Why didn’t I know this?’

  Prudhoe looks at her kindly. ‘You’ve been otherwise absorbed.’

  ‘Then a child with fantastic maritime properties would fit the bill with Lufkin,’ speculates Bridie.

  ‘She would sell more tickets than a two-headed dogfish.’

  ‘Where’s Lufkin now?’ says Bridie.

  ‘He’s camped out in the wilderness, Hounslow Heath, planning his incursion. You will be paying him a visit to see if he’s got wind of your stolen child?’

  ‘I will, of course.’

  ‘It’s a tonic to see you working again, Bridie.’

  Bridie attempts a smile.

  ‘And Valentine?’ Prudhoe asks genially. ‘Have you seen my boy recently?’

  Bridie steals a glimpse at Ruby. He is following, with fascination, the raven’s bid to open a decanter of port wine.

  ‘He gives me work sometimes.’

  ‘He does, of course. Valentine holds you in the highest regard, in every sense.’

  There is the sound of cut glass ringing as the raven raps the decanter with her beak.

  ‘Quite right too, my evil love.’ Prudhoe turns to Bridie. ‘Elodia suggests a glass of something, now that we’ve discussed the matters in hand.’

  ‘Elodia? Are you naming your ravens again?’

  ‘Only the most gorgeously villainous. I’ve enough to keep up with the names of my human flock. It appears that Mrs Prudhoe can never have enough nestlings.’

  Bridie laughs.

  Prudhoe gets up and bustles around finding glasses. ‘And we shall have a smoke. What’s in your pipe today?’

  ‘Your Bronchial Balsam Blend.’

  Prudhoe grimaces. ‘A concoction not without side effects.’

  ‘Your concoctions never are.’

  ‘My latest and my greatest’ – he casts a look at the raven – ‘was inspired by my corvid muses; Prudhoe’s Arial Excursion. Will you partake, madam?’

  ‘Ah, Prudhoe, the case—’

  ‘On account of today being the day that it is?’

  ‘What day is today?’

  ‘September equinox, reason enough to celebrate.’

  Bridie laughs. ‘You old Druid!’

  Prudhoe grins.

  Night has long fallen by the time Bridie bumps Mrs Ackers’ perambulator over the threshold of her Denmark Street abode. What with the distance walked and with Bridie’s protracted negotiations with Hackney cab drivers diverse, who, on seeing the proportions of Mrs Ackers’ perambulator and the condition of the intended passenger (pipe in mouth, widow’s cap crooked, tendency to converse with thin air), were apt to pass by and leave the fare uncollected.

  Ruby follows Bridie inside. She closes the door and turns to him.

  He’s all out, even for a dead man. His face pale in the gas-light Cora
leaves on in the hallway when Bridie is likely to be late home.

  The tattooed mermaid on his shoulder is sulkily plaiting her hair. An inky rope bumps the anchor up his bicep.

  ‘Ruby Doyle, about Valentine Rose . . .’ Bridie stops.

  The effects of Prudhoe’s latest creation have turned her mind to something glutinous, so that it’s hard to find a right-angled thought.

  She takes a deep breath and strings easy, difficult words together. ‘He’s a friend, Ruby. A good friend, an old friend, just a very good old friend.’

  ‘Right you are,’ Ruby replies, his eyes liquid-black and brilliant. ‘I’ll say goodnight, then.’

  Bridie could kiss his eyes, his moustache, oh, his glorious mouth—

  ‘Ruby—’ She reaches out to touch him, but he’s already gone.

  She stumbles and turns to the perambulator. And, lifting the swaddled jar, dances the specimen up the stairs to a rousing rendition of ‘Listen to the Mockingbird’.

  With effort, Bridie unlocks the cabinet in the parlour, unwraps the Winter Mermaid and pushes her onto a shelf. Now there are three specimens in a row, all very different. To the left of the mermaid, a common dormouse with the look of something a cat had good sport with: Bridie’s own apprentice piece. To the right of the mermaid, a human heart, its intricate workings splayed and open to the eye, prepared by Dr John Eames. Each of these specimens speaks of moments long gone, when these perishable scraps were examined, chosen and meticulously preserved.

  They disturb the natural order of things: life – death – dust.

  Here is time held in suspension.

  Yesterday pickled.

  Eternity in a jar.

  May 1841

  Chapter 12

  Bridie’s new home was complicated. First there were names to learn: Bill, William, Will, Kate, Maggie, Mr Greaves, Mrs Donsie, Eliza-you-know, the silly gooses: Bad Dorcas and Tiny Mary. And those were just the servants. Then there was the family. Apart from Dr John Eames there was Mrs Maria Eames, his wife, and their children, Master Gideon and Dead Miss Lydia.

  If Dr Eames resembled a long-faced, sad-eyed, courteous horse, then Maria Eames showed as a huffish thoroughbred. She was long of limb and thin of hair, which was tawny in colour and dressed fuller by the artifice of her lady’s maid. Her nostrils flared permanently with some perceived slight, her blue eyes were prone to flashing, rolling, gleaming and glittering (like all individuals with a splenetic temper). She had two speeds, depending on the time of day (and, it was reported, her consumption of laudanum): supine or stampeding. Her voice held affected vowel sounds she uniquely developed as a girl for her presentation at court. She laughed chiefly through her nose, had a wealthy industrialist father (innovations in ball bearings) and loved nothing as completely and devotedly as her son, Gideon. It was a tragedy that Gideon did not return his mother’s fondness. As the ever-wise Mrs Donsie observed: both of them were the worse for it.