by Jess Kidd
He leant very close to her ear and breathed softly the words.
‘Get out of my fucking house.’
Bridie called the puppy Willow. He was all bright-eyes and black velvet, soft nose and tiny nipping teeth. For two weeks she neglected her duties while Dr Eames watched her romp up and down the lawn, laughing at her shining-faced joy. Here was Bridie as he had never seen her: as a child.
Then Willow disappeared.
Two days later, when Dr Eames was away, Willow came back.
A wet sack on the nursery floor.
Bridie knew, as soon as she opened the door. It was the smell.
She opened the sack. Skinned and jointed, like a rabbit for the pot, was the little dog. With his eyes cloudy-blind, set in a pared-back skull. His milk teeth revealed in a final snarl.
Eliza helped Bridie bury Willow under a rose bush. Then she held Bridie and stroked her hair as Bridie recounted the story that Gideon had told her, about the thief’s apprentice and the surgeon’s son. When Bridie looked up, Eliza’s hazel eyes were burning and her face was very pale.
‘Keep away from him,’ Eliza said. ‘And I’ll do what I can to keep you safe.’
September 1863
Chapter 13
Bridie, wrapped in a shawl, sits in her night-time parlour; her eyes are dark in the low light and her hair tumbles loose. The house is quiet, apart from the bass rumble of Cora snoring in her attic room. That hardly bothers Bridie, for her mind is miles away. Denmark Street is quiet, too, tonight. Flaxman’s Eclectic Theatre has long discharged its playgoers and amateurs. The residents are sleeping now: the engraver, the tassel-mould maker, the knob-turner, dyer and weaver. Bridie’s landlord Mr Frederick Wilks, bell-hanger, is sleeping too, in the stiff embrace of his ancient coat. As rigid as a rasp, as straight as a chisel, propped in the tool cupboard till morning. But the rooftop cats and the basement mice are awake, of course. As is Frau Weiss, the baker’s wife, always the last to bed and the first out of it. Dredged with flour, rocked rhythmical by kneading, and rendered poetic by Riesling wine, she can be heard (as she can be on all clear nights) composing odes to the moon.
And beyond Denmark Street?
A raven hop will land you in the wild black sea of the Rookery, where the inebriated lilt and pitch all the hours of the night, reciting words less lyrical than those of Frau Weiss. Where draughts come cutting through paper-patched windows and every cellar, attic, room and corridor holds a family, or three. Listen: there’s the clattering of dropped bottles, a tumble on a broken staircase, a catcall, a slap. A curse scatters the rats. There’s the thin cry of a drugged infant. Perhaps there is sleep too, tonight, among the slop buckets and wet sheets and the stinking drain, between the late-night squabbles and early-morning fights.
And beyond?
The metropolis isn’t sleeping, not really. For every Londoner in bed there are ten awake and up to no good – on the fly, on the loose, on the tiles!
The moon knows; she sees all. Tonight, she’s our guide, for it’s late and every self-respecting raven will be perched in her own black-feathered embrace. Let the corvid sleep!
The moon sees the beauty and cruelty of London: her whores and drunks, saints and murderers, thieves and lovers and fighters.
The moon sees every back alley and yard, scrubland and marsh. Where the rowdy gather, to shout and swear and spectate, as dogs with gory muzzles rip each other’s barks out. Where fighting cocks pounce and slash each other to red shreds of feathers. Where men with bare fists keep on coming, spitting: teeth, snot, blood and tears.
These men are a far cry from the professionals, those who fight with design, sidestepping maiming blows; those who do more than just batter each other to numb meat. Fighters who give a show – the crowd is in awe of their speed and skill.
But it is in the back alleys and muddied fields that the fast-burning stars of the ring are born. Where men with gleaming skin step forward, shake hands, wink or glare. Where Ruby Doyle’s name is spoken still and his skill and his wondrous tattoos remembered. The Decorated Doyle! A nowhere-to-knockout sailor who sparred with glorious fighters galore and thrashed them in style. As great as Tom King even, or Jem Belcher! A lion-hearted life cut short in the meanest of tavern brawls.
But the dead boxer hears none of this as he sits watching the living red-haired woman drowning in thought in the gas-lit gloom of her night-time parlour. He would hold her hand, small in his own, if he could. He leans forward and the movement is enough; she looks up.
‘What is it, Bridie?’ he says softly.
‘The Winter Mermaid.’
‘Go on.’
‘I told you about Dr Eames, the original owner? I was his apprentice.’
‘You did.’
‘Well, I lived with him and his family for a while, as a ward of sorts.’
Ruby waits for the story Bridie has been unable to tell him.
‘I was all right there, for a while,’ Bridie says, avoiding his eyes. ‘Until I came up against his son, Gideon.’
‘What happened, Bridie?’
‘Gideon Eames committed a terrible crime against a young woman, a servant in his household. He protested his innocence, despite evidence to the contrary.’ She pauses. ‘I found that evidence.’
Bridie sits. Gaze sunk. Body taut against the memory. Ruby wills her to breathe.
‘He was a young man of bad character from a good family. There was hope that with the right influences he could reform.’ Bridie exhales. ‘So, the matter was dealt with discreetly. Gideon was sent overseas with his reputation intact and given every incentive to stay away and every deterrent not to return. He was an adventurer, it seems, dying a hundred deaths.’ She shakes her head. ‘God help me, but I prayed for every story to be true. Then finally, an obituary in The Times, a reputable eyewitness, a captain, confirmed that Gideon Eames drowned off the coast of Western Australia.’
‘So he was dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that was the end of his story, right there?’
‘Yes.’
Bridie stares into the fire. ‘It was just the shock of seeing the Winter Mermaid in that peculiar room, not expecting it.’
‘It was a shock all right,’ smiles Ruby, weakly.
‘And why wouldn’t it be there, with Sir Edmund a collector? Didn’t Agnes mention the specimens?’
‘She did.’
‘As Prudhoe said, after the death of Mrs Eames and the wranglings over the estate, the doctor’s collection could have ended up anywhere.’
‘There you are then. You’ve no cause for fretting. Past is past, for good or ill. It can’t bother you in the present.’ Ruby sits back with a nod, apparently pleased with his dead man’s wisdom.
Bridie, saying nothing, refills her pipe and lights it.
Chapter 14
Not a bad place to hole up. Where is it? Hougham Without, on the fringe of the village. Which is just as well, if things get unordinary.
Only a short hop to Dover, says the doctor.
The jarvey lies buried in the garden out the back of the cottage.
Mrs Bibby had known him from a baby, strapping, brutal, London-reared, so when he had cried she had cried with him. With Betty Reckoner’s snout pressed between his ribs.
It had been stop-start on the high road, with the driver expressing an interest in throttling her young charge. But Mrs Bibby had persuaded him from that course of action.
On arrival, the driver had carried the trunk into the cottage without a bother on him (Mrs Bibby, gun cocked, ready for any kind of debate).
Then he reared up, with the burning urge to carve the child’s throat out and stamp on her curly head. The long and the short: the child put her teeth on the lad and then it was over.
He had stood, grown man that he was, with his bitten hand clamped under his armpit, sobbing, like a boy with a bee-sting.
‘Close your eyes, son,’ Mrs Bibby had said as she took aim. ‘It will help me no end.’
The chi
ld watches her from inside the wicker trunk; Mrs Bibby sees her face framed by the hole she’s gradually gnawing bigger. The child’s eyes track the doctor as he paces across the room and back again. He crosses the floor in three steps with his long legs but the child keeps up with him, captivated, it seems, by movement.
‘I am undone,’ moans the doctor, just in the door with his hat and coat on. ‘There is no buyer in Paris. There is no sailing from Dover. He has found out and warned them off.’
‘You don’t know that, sir.’
‘For what other reason would the Parisians renege on a deal previously so entreated for?’ He lets out a sharp sigh. ‘The agent informed me that no French circus or collector would have any further dealings with me or my merchandise.’
‘We ought to count our blessings, Dr Harbin,’ says Mrs Bibby. ‘We still have the child. We can try the London market.’
‘What makes you think we can find a buyer in London? If the French are not prepared to buy a stolen child, his stolen child—’
‘Isn’t it worth a try, sir?’ she says crisply. ‘From what I understand London collectors are most wanton and competitive. They take risks, sir, and rarely question the provenance of their acquisitions.’
Dr Harbin shakes his head. ‘I’m done with this business: if some criminal or other doesn’t ambush us, then we’ll be found out by the police—’
‘Of course, if he catches up with you, then you really will be in shit straits.’
The doctor may be weeping. It’s hard to tell, given the thickness of the glass in his gig lamps.
Mrs Bibby smiles her cattish smile, her voice pleasant, fond even. ‘Don’t lose heart, dear doctor.’
Dr Harbin takes off his spectacles and searches for a handkerchief. ‘I’m as good as in the ground.’
‘You are, sir, but accept my counsel; be stout of spirit and we’ll strike for the city. If we’re fortunate we’ll make the vend. Then you can buy yourself a little sea passage to the dim distance.’
‘What choice do I have?’
‘Then it is decided. London is the place.’
***
‘She is changing,’ says the doctor, taking off the chain-mail gauntlets. ‘She’s cutting her adult teeth.’
Christabel draws her legs up and turns her face towards the wall. She regards the doctor down the scythe of her cheekbone, her eye darkening to black.
Dr Harbin walks to the window. ‘She needs to be in water. Her limbs will atrophy.’
Mrs Bibby has her revolver trained on him, although the doctor never lunges, cries or gets carried away, no matter that his mind is in tatters. It’s the last shred of his professional pride that he can hold himself at a remove from the patient, even a patient like Christabel.
‘Has there been hair loss?’ he asks the nurse.
‘Mine or hers?’ She points to the hairballs in the corners of the room.
‘She’ll start sloughing soon.’
‘Sloughing?’
‘Shedding her skin.’
‘Christ. What will be underneath it?’
‘More of the same; Christabel, only bigger.’ The doctor pauses. ‘It’s what they do, according to the late Reverend Winter.’
‘An’ he was the expert,’ murmurs Mrs Bibby.
‘Then there are nature’s portents.’
‘The seagulls breaking their necks to get in the windows, the snails and the frigging newts, you mean? And that . . .’ She points at the walls already running wet.
‘Soon she will attract a lot more than a few snails and seagulls,’ warns the doctor.
Mrs Bibby swabs the floor, for the doctor has told her to leave no trail. She collects fallen curls, wispy and white, empty snail shells and needle teeth. Christabel lies readied in the hall, safe inside a plain rectangular wooden box. A casket, not unlike a coffin, only the doctor won’t hear of it. Lined with blankets and with air holes set inconspicuously under the rim. Made by the local carpenter, to the doctor’s design, it’s an improvement on the wicker trunk. The hired carriage will be here directly. Mrs Bibby will leave the windows open. Try as she might she can’t get the smell out of the room; like a hot day at Billingsgate fish market.
Rain like this will turn the roads to soup and add hours to the journey to Gravesend. The hired driver is uneasy, why wouldn’t he be? This one with the leg, the breadth of her shoulders, her leering eyes and her pickpocket’s hands. And this other one: the doctor, a twitching, shifty type of customer. To say nothing of that box: he was convinced he felt something move inside it when he lifted it into the carriage (for they would have it in there with them for all the space inside) – a sudden pitch and slump. They paid three times over, up front. That buys hush and that alone would make a man uneasy. Then there are the gulls. He’s never seen such a gaggle. Covering the roof of the cottage and the garden and the fields all about. The horses shy and worry and snort, eyes wide under their blinkers; he has sent it down the reins to them, his disquiet. He considers upending the lot of them from the carriage and riding on, but he’s spent the money in his mind a hundred times over. This will be bad business, of that he is sure.
Mrs Bibby sits with Betty Reckoner up under her shawl, liking the cool feel of the gun in her palm. The doctor is asleep next to her, his head lolling with the motion of the carriage, his mouth open, his spectacles fogged. The walls of the carriage are already running wet. Mrs Bibby hears the accompaniment of gulls, screaming overhead. Thank Christ the carriage hasn’t stopped for long enough for the snails to climb on board.
The doctor snores in his sleep. This is all the conversation Mrs Bibby wants from him. She’d given him a draught before leaving the cottage. A calming tonic, she said, thus ensuring a peaceful ride for herself and the Kraken. More fool him, a doctor, for taking it, but nowadays he’s hardly making good judgements.
Mrs Bibby’s mind runs on cutting the dead weight, sharpening up this venture. She studies the doctor. He has proved a poor thief and a nervous dealmaker: he hasn’t the mettle. Unlike herself. She was born for bad business. If not the legs, she’s the tooth and the claws and the backbone for it.
There is a tapping sound from inside the casket at Mrs Bibby’s feet. She extends her good foot and kicks it.
‘Stop that and go to bloody sleep.’
Silence. Then the tapping again on the side of the casket, a sharp, repeating rhythm.
‘Once for yes, twice for no, do you understand?’
Silence, then twelve taps. Silence, another five.
Mrs Bibby smiles. ‘All right, so. Because the doctor is dosed off his shiny pate here’s a story, just for you, Kraken. In the old days . . .’
Dorcas and Della were fished out from the silty bottom of the Thames – for this is where the fog otters had led them, of course. They were landed on the bank blinking and spluttering and gulping, and, found to be delirious, taken to St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The doctor on duty listened carefully to Dorcas’s account of life at the reformatory, as to the chain, the cat-o’-nine-tails and the laying on of paws. He proposed a plan. He would offer the girls gainful employment; they would live in his house and learn to be servants, and there would be no corporal punishment. On their arrival at the doctor’s house, a lovely spot by the river, their hopes were sunk. The doctor’s wife agreed to take plain limping Dorcas but refused lovely Della. She well knew that a pretty orphan is likely to grow into a pretty housemaid and pretty housemaids only brought vexation to their mistresses. Della was found a position with another respectable family in a nearby village.
Dorcas was ill-suited to domestic servitude. She hated working hard and taking orders and being separated from Della. One day the nurse took sick and Dorcas was charged with caring for the daughter of the house, a flouncing little nit. The doctor’s wife, when she wasn’t baffled on laudanum, would dress the child exactly like her and the pair of them would simper and pout around the drawing-room all day: the mother, being the queen, the daughter, the princess.
The princess,
like the queen, was an insufferable idiot. She would talk at length about her silks and her chiffons, her ribbons and her baubles, all the while coveting what was in her mama’s grown-up jewellery box.
Dorcas began to attend to what the princess was saying.
The queen, it transpired, had sapphires the size of greengages and rubies the size of plums.
Dorcas began to think of a way to get her thieving reformatory-school hands on the queen’s jewellery box.
It just so happened that the princess’s favourite toy was a golden ball; she would throw it in the air and catch it, giggling, a thousand times a day. One day the princess was playing by the river when she tripped over her own satin-shod foot and dropped her ball; her ball went rolling into the water.
The princess was beside herself with grief!
Dorcas seized her chance. Noticing that the ball had, in fact, become lodged in the mud of the bank, she told the princess that she would go into the water and retrieve the golden ball. On one condition – that the princess brought her mama’s jewellery box to her. The princess, desperate, promised. Dorcas told her to shut her eyes for she must change into an eel in order to swim down into water, with eyes to see in the murk and teeth to hook up the ball. The princess stood with her eyes closed and Dorcas picked up the ball from the bank, spat on it and placed it in the princess’s outstretched hand. The princess was delighted, of course, and she skipped and spun in a nauseating fashion.
Unbeknownst to Dorcas, the princess’s brother, the young prince, had been watching from a nearby tree, laughing heartily to see his detested sister tricked. He also knew what Dorcas was yet to find out – that the princess would renege on the deal and refuse to bring Dorcas the jewellery box.
Dorcas went walking with a riding crop, whipping the head off every flower she met in fury. Until she ran into the young master of the house.
And a deal was made between them.
If Dorcas helped him get rid of his hated little sister he would steal Mama’s jewellery box for her. Although, he admitted, everything in it was paste.