by Jess Kidd
Bridie thinks on none of this as she reaches Denmark Street. All that’s on her mind is a pot of coffee and perhaps another pipeful.
‘Inspector Rose is waiting for you in the parlour. He’s been here for some time.’
‘What’s his business, Cora?’
‘Wouldn’t say, but he’s taken five cups of tea, a portion of mutton cobbler and the last of the cold collation. He’s a decent appetite on him. I’ve knocked him up a quick fool. You know, for afters.’
Bridie passes her cape to Cora, who shakes it, wrings its neck and hangs it up. The two of them look in the parlour door, opening it just a crack. Rose stands deep in thought, in front of the instrument on the mantelpiece. He draws forward, as if to touch it, but thinks better of it and clasps both his hands behind his back.
Cora nudges Bridie. ‘He’s very distinguished in that coat, is he not?’
‘Peacock,’ mutters Ruby and struts past them into the room to stands against the mantelpiece with an air of the patriarch about him.
Bridie follows. ‘Rose, I hear you’ve been fed.’
‘I had no choice in the matter.’ Rose takes Bridie’s hand, his eyes warm on hers.
‘Of course you didn’t. Where do you get these flowers? Each one is a miracle.’
In the policeman’s buttonhole is a rose of an exquisite colour: the palest peach.
Rose unpins it and hands it to her. ‘Find it a drink and it’s yours.’
Ruby looks to the heavens.
Cora brings the tea tray, tiny in her colossal hands. She puts it, just so, on the table beside the inspector. ‘Afters, sir.’
Adjusting her mob cap, she takes a dusting rag the size of a bed-sheet out of her vast apron pocket and begins to run it slowly along the shelves of the bookcase. With an ear turned towards the proceedings.
Rose glances at Cora.
‘I’ll only tell her after,’ says Bridie.
Rose nods. ‘Sir Edmund has escaped from Newgate. I know you consider the man innocent of the charges against him—’
‘Of course he’s innocent.’
‘That’s as may be, Bridie, but if you see hide or hair of him I need to know.’ Rose picks up the dish and the spoon.
Bridie looks on, mystified: over by the bookcase Cora has stopped dusting and is mouthing something emphatically and pointing at the door.
Rose turns and Cora stops abruptly.
‘This is delicious, Cora,’ he says, ‘what is it?’
‘Gooseberry,’ she says.
Ruby curbs a smile.
‘Is there any end to your talents, Cora?’
‘No, Inspector Rose,’ says Cora, with one eye on the door. ‘There isn’t.’
Sir Edmund sleeps next to the kitchen range on a couch Cora has made up for him. Blood from his most recent dental extractions is drying at the corners of his lips. Cora has dressed him in a knitted hat and stockings and acres of worn cotton that she has hitched up and tied about his waist.
‘Is he wearing one of your gowns, Cora?’
‘His own clothes are drying. I lent him my second-best sprigged.’
‘Well, let’s get him up and on his feet.’
‘Couldn’t we let him sleep on a bit? It wouldn’t do any harm, would it?’ says Cora, in a waspish tone, as if to offset her kind-heartedness.
‘We need to give him a chance to tell his story, before we hand him over to Rose.’
The man moans in his sleep.
‘Can’t we keep him a while? I’ve never met a baronet.’
‘He belongs to Newgate, Cora. But let him rest awhile.’
It is night when Sir Edmund wakes. He refuses food but will accept a cup of tea.
Cora puts the kettle on the hob, sets cups and saucers and takes the teapot from the dresser. The baronet sits at the kitchen table. He is a forsaken figure in Cora’s old dress, with his face roughly wiped, like a slattern’s infant, and a rag on his lap with which he stems his bleeding gums.
‘I’ve killed no one, but my actions led to those people’s deaths,’ Sir Edmund discloses with grave dismay.
Cora, settled in the corner, tea in hand, glances at Bridie.
‘Go on, sir,’ says Bridie.
Sir Edmund nods, hardly able to meet her eyes. ‘I wish to make a confession, Mrs Devine, pertaining to the wrongful acquisition of the child latterly known as Christabel Berwick.’
‘Begin at the beginning, Sir Edmund.’
It took three visits. On the first visit they sat down with the Kelly family in a cottage in sight of the sea. Ellen was present, but not the child that the baronet and the doctor had heard tell of. The child who had brought them to the wilds of Ireland. Ellen’s brother, the head of the family, listened. Ellen’s brother’s wife, the real head of the family, listened too. The visitors told the family it was fortunate they had arrived when they did, with the infant young yet, not even half a year. They showed the family scientific drawings and read them passages from the writings of Reverend Winter of Highgate Chapel. When the family remembered the rumours about their ancestor Margaret, the visitors steered them to sunnier waters. Namely: a new life for Ellen’s child, one of security and comfort, specialists and medicine.
Ellen said she hadn’t thought of her daughter as sick, thanked the strangers politely for their interest and declined their offer.
On the second visit, Ellen was encouraged by her brother to show Sir Edmund some local attraction – a holy well in a horse trough, a ring of magic stones in a freezing field, that sort of thing. Sir Edmund was tender with the girl and by degrees she told him what she knew of her family history and of the circumstances surrounding her confinement.
The Kelly women of Bantry Bay, she had told him, are famously lovely but every few generations a true beauty is born. The last being Margaret, who had hair the colour of sand and eyes the colour of sea shallows. Her skin was as smooth as a pebble, and her voice was like the waves moving over those pebbles. Margaret was on the beach one day when a wave came for her and she was lost to the sea. Until she walked back out of the water days later, barely wet. In a few months more she was delivered of a child and the child was said to have been remarkable.
Ellen had thought of Margaret the day she came round to herself, lying prone on the beach, a good way down from where she’d been collecting seaweed, and with no recollection of getting there.
Ellen thought of Margaret when her belly began to swell.
When she craved crab and ate it raw, shell and all. When she craved fish and ate it raw, bones and all. She drank sea-water by the bucketful.
Ellen thought of Margaret when she was delivered of a daughter. She called her Sibéal.
In the first days the baby roared down the rafters and would not feed. Ellen offered a world of things to the child but she would take nothing. Until, on a cold day, the cat went to sleep in the cradle, curling up with the baby for warmth. Ellen found the child covered in blood. Her panic abated when she saw that the child was unharmed. Ellen realised that the baby had killed and pulled the cat apart, eating only the bones and leaving the fur, flesh and sinew. Realising what her daughter needed, Ellen brought her cuttlefish and carcasses, kept to the cottage and prevented prying visitors. Few people saw the infant, the priest being one of them (he left as quickly as he arrived, for the mother, it was said, would not ask for forgiveness for a sin she’d never committed). Word spread wide and wider still. All the way to Polegate, to the baronet and the doctor.
On the third visit, with her brother’s encouragement, Ellen walked out to the cliffs with Sir Edmund. The night fell and it was beautiful. Ellen sang a song about a merrow in land-locked love. Sir Edmund was enthralled, although he understood not a word.
While they were out walking, Ellen’s brother (a practical man who, his wife told him, only wanted good for his family) and Dr Harbin concluded their negotiations. The doctor left with a small bundle, slipping along the track back to the hired cart. Sir Edmund cordially thanked Ellen for her song, and left her
at her gate.
It took several months for Ellen to arrive at Maris House, but arrive she did. She was no longer the soft, delightful girl Sir Edmund remembered. He tried to reason with her but she cried and hectored, wailed and threatened. Her brother and his wife had spent the money and she had seen none of it. She wanted return of the child who she’d never agreed to give up. Sir Edmund refused and threatened her with the police and with the asylum if she persisted in asserting her claim. He warned her that no one would believe the word of a peasant over a baronet. Ellen left.
Thereafter, from time to time, she would slip back to Maris House, silently, covertly. Sir Edmund made sure that the child was kept secret and secure at all times, for he did not doubt the mother would snatch her if she could. Sometimes months would go by without Sir Edmund seeing Ellen Kelly, then, without warning, she would turn up: a shadow on the lawn, a pinched face at the window. For five years she haunted him: until the day she was found dead in the chapel-yard.
*
In the cold quiet that fills the kitchen, Sir Edmund, his attire incongruous, gathers acres of sprigged cotton around him with all the dignity of the condemned.
Cora speaks first. ‘You wronged Ellen Kelly, sir, you wronged mother and child.’
The baronet nods numbly.
When Bridie retires she leaves the key in the latch. She can do no more for him and no less.
In the early hours a figure can be seen walking east towards the quondam Blackfriars Bridge. With the crossing point lately demolished there is no route across. This is the place where the Fleet deposits its tribute of dead dogs to the Thames. The figure descends the steps, dressed in worn cotton; the broken stonework of the bridge fills his pockets. He is a tall man, gaunt, with the look of a martyr of old; biblical, afflicted. Or he has the countenance for Old Father Thames; he has the expression of one who has known dark currents and noxious pollutions. A heron regards him with lofty disdain. The figure stops and stands still. Heron and figure stay motionless for the longest time. The figure is the first to move; when the world is a liquid wash of early morning grey, he steps into the water, his eyes raised to the lightening sky.
Chapter 32
The ancient mariner watches his wife carefully. Whenever she goes out she checks the lock on the repair-room door and hangs the key around her neck. Then she shouts through the door.
‘Christabel, do your worst. Bill Tackett’s head is an empty pond; the minnows have long swum away.’
Then she limps off with her leer and her rotten foot to spend the day drumming up buyers for her stolen child.
Bill tells his wife that this is no place to keep a small girl.
It is dank and dark and the rats that live in the old ship-chandlery shop are three-foot-long and as fat as well-made loaves. Clever and malevolent with yellow teeth and thick worm tails, the type that carry off infants. They are a torment, Bill should know, skittering up the moment you close your eyes. Felonious, they are, making off with a ball of hair, a nail or a tooth, to squabble over what they’ve thieved.
The ancient mariner stands outside the repair-room door with his heart in pieces. He tells the child, through the door, that he would kill his wife, if only he was brave. He tells the child he would set her free, if only he were sly. Plans form in Bill’s mind, astounding him with their complexity and cunning. But in the time it takes him to assemble the requisite tools, being stiff of body and forgetful, his wife is back.
Bill Tackett tries, without success, to remonstrate with his wife. He pleads with her to return the child to her rightful home, no good will come of this.
His wife answers him. ‘Husband, pray tell, what lives in your cash-box?’
Bill shakes his head in despair.
‘I shall tell you, sir: pebbles and gull feathers.’
‘It is wrong, wife. To sell an innocent for money.’
‘She is no ways innocent, husband. Think of those children she drowned: them girls, them poor small girls. Three little mud-larks – dead outside our door!’
Bill narrows his eyes. ‘How could she have drowned those poor little bleeders? She was locked in that room all the time.’
‘Did those wee girls die a natural death?’ asks his wife, with a gleam in her eye.
Bill is silent. He cannot deny the increasement of unnatural happenings around the shop since the child’s arrival. What with the sea-birds circling and the great surging of snails up the walls and the bloody newts by the bucket-load.
‘Those mud-larks, husband, were found with every stitch dry on them, and their lungs brim-full of water. And you asked me, “Wife, what kind of foul death has befallen these mites?” and I told you, “Death by Christabel.”’
Soon enough, Bill’s wife returns triumphant.
‘The child has been sold, she’ll be on her good way tomorrow.’
‘Then you are finished, wife.’
She studies him. ‘Come and meet her, why don’t you, husband, before she goes?’
He snarls. ‘Won’t she do for me?’
‘And you her friend and her protector, always with her best interests at heart!’ Bill’s wife smiles. ‘What are you thinking?’
Bill takes off his sou’wester and neatens the rope knot on his breeches. Then (because he is no old fool, whatever his wife says) he pockets a paring knife before following his wife into the repair-room.
*
Mrs Bibby rests with her leg up on the corner of Christabel’s open casket. The child lies inside it. She’s not worth tuppence, by the looks of her, although she’s been sold for hundreds.
‘You may not seem your best,’ observes Mrs Bibby. ‘But you are not dying. You are sloughing.’
Christabel looks at her blankly.
‘According to the late Dr Harbin,’ adds Mrs Bibby, ‘and the even later Dr Winter, who was a written expert in whatever it is that you are.’
Christabel closes her eyes.
‘Elsewise ain’t you a flower in your pretty new dress?’ says Mrs Bibby brightly.
Christabel is motionless.
They sit in silence, until Christabel opens her eyes again and taps the side of the casket with one cracked finger. She is gazing down the ridge of her cheekbone at Mrs Bibby, her eyes lightening from ink-black to the palest opalescent grey; maybe a trick of the candle-light.
Mrs Bibby nods, a little sadly, if truth be told. ‘All right, so. On the occasion of our paths diverging, Kraken. In the old days . . .’
Two ladies there were, who lived in a shop by a creek and sold wonderful treasures, like rowlocks and monkeys’ paws, pitch and storm lanterns. One lady was called Della and one was called Dorcas. The shop was quiet and cosy and they had all the things they needed and most of the things they wanted. Della had a parlour and Dorcas had a pocket-watch. It was Dorcas’s wont at low tide to walk out along the foreshore to see what the water had left behind. A bottle-glass gem, a love knot of twine – gifts for her grey-eyed love, Della! Della sat waiting for her outside their shop, wrapped in the coat Dorcas had made for her. A patchworked coat of a thousand pelts with a silver-grey collar.
One day, when Dorcas was walking by the water, she came across something curled up in the pebbles and mud. Believing it to be a sleeping eel she picked it up and put it in a bucket and took it back to the shop. When she rinsed it off she found, of all things, a perfect little girl! With pale stony eyes and sharp little teeth and bright white curls. Della clapped her hands in delight and called her Christabel.
And so, the baby grew and was often to be seen in the shop window, rock-a-bye in her fishing net cradle, or busy with her story-books in her lobster-pot high chair. The child was everyone’s friend and would wave and smile at every passer-by, showing her fierce fingerling’s teeth. Sometimes a customer would come inside, taken by the sight of the odd little girl. Della and Dorcas refused to part with their bonny water baby, although they had offers from fine scientific gentlemen who heard about their precious find and came from miles around to meet her.
>
As the child grew the shop shrunk and Christabel became bored and listless watching out of the shop window. She was a miraculous fish in a dull creek. Which wasn’t her purpose at all.
One day the circus came to town, and with it, the ringmaster.
The ringmaster had a grand plan. He would make Christabel the most famous act in all the world. She would travel, meet queens and kings and dignitaries, be feted and admired. She might even, one day, be persuaded to speak out loud to her legions of admirers, or at the very least publish her reminiscences. When she was ready to retire, she would leave the circus and return to her friends in the old ship-chandlery shop.
Della gave Christabel her many-pelted coat and Dorcas gave Christabel her pocket-watch.
And so Christabel went off to make her fortune.
Mrs Bibby glances over at the child, who is, thankfully, asleep. She’ll put the lid on now and then it will be done. She takes a quick swig from the bottle beside her and wipes her eyes with the hem of her shawl. Blame where blame’s due; she holds the bottle up to the light, tilting it this way and that. Then she swallows the dregs.