by Jess Kidd
Bridie is glad of the time alone in the privacy of her own room; she is in an irritable mood. After leaving Prudhoe, she took a hackney to Highgate Chapel to make another request, in person, to examine the walled-up corpses. She found the vicarage closed, with a note pasted to the front door. The note suggested the imminent return of the vicar. After waiting some considerable time, Bridie left, with a distinct sensation of being watched to the gate by the vicar and, like as not, his unsavoury curate Cridge.
Bridie unties her petticoats and steps out of them and sits down at her dressing table. She unpins her hair and begins to brush it out. Without the distraction of Cora’s gossip, Bridie studies her reflection. Her chemise is undone and her auburn hair falls about her face in rich waves. Her hair makes her look paler, older. Her eyes are fine, she can see that, and her shoulders are lovely, smooth and well formed. She wonders if she should have taken a lover, she wonders if there’s still time for one, she wonders if she wants one at all or if she ever did.
What of the late, fictive Mr Devine? Bridie took his name but never fleshed him out. Although sometimes she fancied he was an ill-fated young doctor who died serving the poor; a fever contracted at a sour bedside.
Otherwise: spinster, governess – old maid! Alone? Unchaperoned? Heavens!
Hear the rattling of her womb, a pea! Bosoms, blossoms withering; lips, untasted; legs, unparted. Roll up! Roll up! Still some life in her, some plumpness, some heat! Those haunches! Check her teeth. Who will take her? Who will take her?
Perhaps a widower, a clerk, with ten children and a pianoforte, a model of application and perseverance – of self-help! He reads Samuel Smiles aloud to his family daily. No? Then a gentleman of letters, triple her age with a stoop – she can read to him aloud while she tucks him into bed! Or, perhaps a love-match with a well-turned rogue, who will woo her, wed her and make her coffee just right. Nothing is too much trouble, my dove! Prudhoe will receive her stomach lining in due course.
And all at once Bridie is filled with the hot rage that comes over any sane woman who rails against her market price, or the damnable fact that there is a market price in the first place. She glares into the mirror.
What about a lover?
Her glare softens.
She tries to see herself through their eyes: lips open, a blush of pleasure on her cheeks, hair wild to tangle around fingers and kiss.
There’s a polite cough outside her door.
Bridie slips on her nightgown, wraps a shawl around her shoulders and pushes her hair haphazardly under a nightcap.
At the door she listens; she can hear him shuffling on the other side. He’ll be pulling up his drawers, his feet loose in his boots. His tattoos will be roaming over his glistening skin. Over the swell of his back and his wide shoulders, the gun-brig’s cannon smokily blasts an inky, circumnavigating blot. The mermaid circles the anchor on his bicep in surprise and curls up in his arm crook.
Bridie touches the door. This is where his chest would be. She closes her eyes and imagines the path of her fingers along his chest, his neck – him taking her hand in his and kissing her palm. His other hand pressing, softly, so softly, into the small of her back as he pulls her towards him, as he bends his face to hers.
‘Are you decent, Bridie?’
She steps back from the door.
They sit together before the fireplace, as is their way now of an evening, Bridie smoking and watching the fire, Ruby watching Bridie.
Bridie tells him Prudhoe’s news, her face expressionless. She stumbles only once when she names Gideon Eames. Ruby notices how she holds her pipe a little tighter and talks a little slower than usual, with careful deliberation. He listens without interruption until she is finished.
He smiles at her, but the smile is forced, so no smile at all.
‘You are a fine, fierce grown woman,’ he says. ‘This Eames fellow will have a hard job bullying you nowadays.’
Bridie doesn’t answer.
‘What do you think he’ll do, Bridie, with him just returned and the eyes of London on him?’
‘You don’t know him, Ruby.’
May 1843
Chapter 18
Bridie sat alone in the hay barn at Albery Hall. It had been a miserable morning. Last night Gideon had arrived unexpectedly, weeks before the end of term. It was the worst possible time. Dr Eames would be away for days, having been called to give evidence at a trial as a medical witness. What’s more, Mrs Eames was in a powerfully spiteful mood. This was a cursed combination; mother and son having full freedom to exercise their whims, unchecked, for a whole week.
But in twelve months Bridie had learnt a lot. She was no older than twelve, no younger than ten now, and she knew the lay of things. She could all but disappear when she had to.
With Gideon home Albery Hall was deserted. A house tended by invisible hands, shadow servants. No one loitered in the yard, or joined Mrs Donsie by the range, or had even the briefest of exchanges on the stairwell. Those who could, found excuses to have business elsewhere, volunteering for errands in town.
The potting shed was Bridie’s regular refuge, or the laundry when it wasn’t washday, but the barn cat had not long delivered of kittens and Bridie was in the habit of feeding her breakfast kipper to the new mother. Being anywhere near the stables was risky; Gideon liked to ride and would have a whip with him. But Bridie daren’t move the cat, for the gardener said it would confuse her and she would eat her babies. Instead, Bridie had pledged to visit every day, for the cat looked haggardly, her black and white fur dulled. Her young fell over themselves, tumbling and mewing, the tiny pink cuts of their mouths opening and closing. Bridie had found a box with high sides and filled it with clean straw. She had put the family in it so that the kittens didn’t have so far to wander before the queen had to scruff them and carry them back to the nest.
The cat licked Bridie’s hand and Bridie stroked her head, carefully and with great respect.
The stable door opened and slammed closed. The cat blinked.
Footsteps down to the last stall, adjacent to the hay barn, and the creak of the gate.
‘You agreed. I have the money—’
‘And I thank you, but the terms have changed.’
The horses snorted and shuffled in their stalls.
The cat went wide-eyed and the kittens stopped mewing. Bridie crouched to peer through a crack in the wood slats and saw only the twitch of the tail of the roan foal.
‘All I’m saying—’
‘I know what you’re saying, Gideon.’
The foal’s hooves rustled the straw; she was unsettled by the intrusion.
‘You’ve lain with others, what’s the difference?’
A pause. Then: ‘I’ll have it.’
‘When I can help you?’
Bridie couldn’t see Gideon’s face but she knew the expression it wore from the sound of his voice: blue-eyed sincerity.
‘Mother won’t tolerate another of father’s bastards in the house,’ he said, quietly.
There was silence but for the soft snuffling noises of the foal.
‘Come now, I’ll make it quick. You’ll hardly feel a thing.’
Eliza, for it was Eliza there in the stable with Gideon, said something low that Bridie couldn’t catch. Then there was a muffled cry and the sound of something thrown against the wall.
The foal took fright and ran around the stall.
Hardly knowing what she was doing Bridie picked up a hayfork. She hit the wall with it as hard as she could.
The mother cat startled and fled, leaving her kittens behind.
Next door: scrabbling, hastening from the stall, the stable door flung open, boot-heels striking the cobbles all across the yard.
Bridie gripped the hayfork.
She could hear the foal quieting by degrees. Nothing else. And Bridie began to think there had been two sets of boot-heels. That Gideon had given chase.
She kneeled to look. The foal passed by, calmer now.
A sudden darkness
Then a blue eye, widening.
September 1863
Chapter 19
In London, rumours are carried upriver. Something’s happening to the Thames: it’s is not just rising, it’s becoming clearer, sweeter and calmer. Gone are the vicious undertows, the spiteful currents. The watermen are mystified. The mud-larks, too, are confused. They stand on the bank with their long poles and their little blue feet, eyes widening as the Thames softens and deepens by the day.
Something miraculous is happening.
Everything that has ever drowned has begun to surface again. Not the dead dogs and broken bottles, but the priceless beautiful things. Roman coins and pagan brooches turn and twinkle under the surface of the water. Viking swords rise up majestically. It’s just a case of rowing out and seizing them. But try as they might, no one can catch this ravishing treasure; as they draw nearer, the river gifts shimmer and vanish. Many lose their lives in pursuit, plunging in after the sinking riches.
Some Londoners report hearing music, late at night, emanating from the river. Consensus has it that it is choral and either sung backwards or in a foreign language, Greek or Italian, who knows? Soon it can be heard all the way from Blackfriars to Barnes.
Coming up from beneath London’s streets, another new sound: a tumultuous rushing. The ancient rivers of London, newly awoken and gathering force, now erupt. Flooding lane and street, drowning basement-dwelling families and overwhelming cesspits.
Then there is the rain. Great drops of the stuff, a constant patter on every window and shutter, tin can and bucket.
And the Thames keeps rising.
Bridie is watching the rain from the parlour window above Wilks’s of Denmark Street. Specifically, Bridie is watching the passage of the rain across the glass. Today the raindrops are meandering upwards, as well as downwards, sometimes changing direction mid-path. She frowns, certain that this is not the way rain usually moves. Maybe she can attribute this aberration of nature to Prudhoe’s Bronchial Balsam Blend, along with the dead man picking at his bandages in the corner of the room. Her musings are interrupted by a letter, brought into the room by a triumphant Cora.
‘It’s from Highgate Chapel.’
Reverend Edward Gale appears at the door of the vicarage with a lop-eared rabbit under each arm. Bridie, who is well-versed in the eccentricities of the clerical classes, maintains a neutral expression. She follows the vicar into the vestry, where he puts down one rabbit; the other he holds, nuzzled against his cheek.
Reverend Gale is a thin, wild-haired man with the burning eyes of a prophet. His beard is kept long, sometimes to his knees, and is often studded with twigs. The vicar is known to frequent hedgerows.
Reverend Gale, reluctant French master of the Cholmeley School and the superannuated vicar of the school chapel, is living out his doddering years in charge of his assembled menagerie. His current flock consists not of pupils (free or pay-boys) or miscellaneous parishioners (they have decamped to St Michael’s for the benefit of newer facilities and understandable sermons) but of God’s much more worthy creatures.
The chapel is full of them.
A one-eyed badger sleeps in the choir stalls, a vole family nest in the vestry, mice run riot, shredding hymnbooks. A broken-winged duckling swims in the font and hedgehogs snuffle under the pews.
This is Reverend Gale’s preferred congregation.
Several years ago, the vicar came to the realisation that human animals were beyond his ministries. Being, as they are, block-headed and irredeemably fallen. Oh, the most eloquent of sermons – wasted! Reverend Gale thus resolved to avoid human animals, or if the necessity arose, be more economical in his dealings with them.
He frowns at Bridie. ‘Well?’
‘You summoned me, sir.’
‘Remind.’
‘The matter of the corpses found in the wall of the crypt, Reverend Gale. I wanted to re-examine—’
‘Gone.’
‘Gone, sir?’
The vicar shrugs.
Bridie is surprised to find that she is hardly surprised. ‘Your curate, Reverend, is he about by any chance?’
Reverend Gale holds up one finger, goes to the door of the vestry and calls. ‘Widmerpole.’
They wait.
Reverend Gale rolls his eyes. ‘Widmerpole.’
A neat, grey-haired man comes in carrying a ciborium full of birdseed. He has frayed cuffs, a round honest face and a mild-eyed expression that speaks of either inborn placidity or hard-won resignation.
‘You’re not Cridge,’ observes Bridie. She turns to the vicar. ‘You had another curate, Reverend? A young man named Cridge?’
Reverend Gale taps Widmerpole on the forehead. ‘This one: twenty years.’
Widmerpole bows. ‘What Reverend is saying is that I’ve been curate here these last two decades. There has been no other curate in recent times, madam.’
Bridie inhales. ‘A young gentleman by the name of Cridge showed me into the crypt on my previous visit; slight stature, large head and a tendency to sneer?’
Reverend Gale and Widmerpole glance at each other.
‘Do you know the gentleman I speak of?’
Reverend Gale reddens and shakes his head.
‘No,’ says Widmerpole, to his shoes. ‘Sorry.’
‘This matter of the corpses in the crypt, Reverend—’
‘Translate.’ Reverend Gale points a long finger at Widmerpole.
Widmerpole looks closely at the vicar’s face as if reading some complex communication there. Then he turns to Bridie. ‘Reverend has no idea where the remains of the deceased are. Upon entering the crypt the day after your visit he found them gone. Vanished!’
‘Is that so?’ asks Bridie.
Widmerpole bites his lip. ‘Assuredly, probably, conceivably, yes.’
‘So, you didn’t sell the bodies? Perhaps to the young man with the unfavourable aspect masquerading as your curate?’
Reverend Gale hides his face in the plush of his rabbit.
‘Undoubtedly, most possibly, plausibly, no,’ Widmerpole translates.
‘Then I’ve had a wasted journey,’ Bridie says. ‘I’m investigating the case of a stolen child, whose father is a gentleman of some standing. Peculiar as it seems, I thought that the bodies in your crypt would cast light on the matter.’
‘Sorry, we can’t help you,’ says Widmerpole, not without remorse.
A hedgehog bumbles against Bridie’s foot and makes a big to-do of rolling over.
Bridie smiles with delight and bends down to it, all snout and spines and wicked little eyes. ‘Ah, this wee fella.’
Reverend Gale nudges Widmerpole and nods.
‘Would you care for a cup of tea, Mrs Devine?’ asks Widmerpole.
Bridie ignores the interrogative stare of the elderly donkey stabled between a cabinet and an aquarium in Reverend Gale’s library. The tank is full of crustaceans that have been liberated from seafood emporiums. The donkey, finding no response from Bridie, turns to Ruby and fixes him with a baleful eye.
‘It can see me.’
‘It’s a donkey, Ruby, it sees nothing; it’s short-sighted.’
The donkey turns its long ears, following their conversation.
‘It can hear me too.’
‘It can of course, it has the ears for that.’
Reverend Gale takes a seat opposite, next to the donkey, and they wait in companionable silence for Widmerpole and the tea, with no more sounds than the ticking of the clock and the scuffle and patter of the vicar’s various charges.
Widmerpole returns with a tray and sets it down. Reverend Gale leans forward, gently removes a dormouse from the sugar bowl and pops it into his pocket.
After the tea is poured, the curate and the vicar look at the photograph of Christabel. Widmerpole makes sympathetic noises and Reverend Gale makes none.
Halfway through his second cup of tea the vicar has an epiphany. He sits bolt upright on his chair, with his eyes
wide, and points to the bookcase.
‘Winter!’ he exclaims. ‘Winter!’
Widmerpole follows his gaze with dawning comprehension. ‘What Reverend is saying is that he may not have the curious remains that you wished to view again—’
‘Briefly!’ Reverend Gale barks.
Widmerpole flinches. ‘Reverend would, however, like to share with you his scholarly findings and speculations on the matter as to the identity of said bodies.’
Bridie leans forward. ‘You know who they were?’
‘We think we do. If this could, in a way not presently clear to us, assist you in the finding of the child—’
The vicar groans. ‘Book.’
Widmerpole sighs and rises and goes over to the bookcase. Moving a bird’s nest, he chooses a book and, blowing a downy feather from the top of it, hands it to Bridie.
The book is leather-bound and mottled with age. Bridie turns to the frontispiece.
On the Manifold Wonders of Fresh and Salt-water Creatures:
A Scientific Observation
By Rev. Thomas Winter
1771
‘Winter – like the Winter Mermaid,’ Ruby remarks.
Bridie nods.
‘Get on.’ Reverend Gale waves at Widmerpole.
‘Reverend would like to put forward his potted findings. The book, as you see, has an indifferent title but was written by a great naturalist.’
Reverend Gale grunts in agreement.
Widmerpole continues. ‘Reverend Winter was the vicar of Highgate Chapel and master of Natural Philosophy and Latin, the latter end of last century at Sir Roger Cholmeley’s School. He was also the foremost authority on the merrow.’