The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter

by Theodora Goss

  “And then one day, she heard a knocking at the door. She wondered who it could be, because no one ever visited that house—Hyde had no friends. She opened the door, and who should it be but the police. They said he was wanted for murder, and would she know where to find him? ‘No,’ she told them. They asked her if they could come in and look around. ‘Certainly,’ she said. So they looked around, and they questioned her again, and the housekeeper who lived with them. After a couple of hours, they left, knowing no more than when they had come. She thought he would show up after a while, that he had gotten himself in trouble and was hiding, but would eventually return. He never did. She stayed until the end of the lease, then sold the furniture and moved to cheap accommodations in Spitalfields. And that’s where I was born. We damn near died of hunger, although she worked hard enough, walking out with gentlemen while the butcher’s wife minded me. But the windows were cracked, and the wind blew in, and we had scarcely a blanket between us, with nothing to eat most nights. I was so hungry, I would have eaten the rats, if I could’ve caught them. . . .”

  “To think that you were born in such a place!” said Mrs. Poole. Suddenly, her heart swelled with pity for the poor orphan child, and she regretted her earlier harshness.

  MARY: It’s a good thing Mrs. Poole is sorting laundry, or whatever she’s doing. I don’t want to hear what she would say to that!

  DIANA: How do you know her heart didn’t swell with pity? Mrs. Poole can say what she likes, but she always gives me the largest chop and the most pudding.

  CATHERINE: That’s because you’re so scrawny.

  DIANA: How do you know? Wouldn’t it be rich if our precious Mary wasn’t her favorite after all?

  MARY: For goodness’ sake, can you just finish your section?

  DIANA: You were the one who interrupted in the first place.

  “Yes,” said Mary, also feeling a surge of pity for her long-lost sister.

  MARY: Oh please!

  “One day,” continued Diana, “Mum ran into a friend from Barstowe’s, who promised to speak for her, and Mrs. Barstowe agreed to take her back, although she usually turned away girls who’d been foolish enough to get with child. I was four or five, then. The girls would take care of me while Mum was working. They all liked to play with me. They were still children themselves—the youngest girls at Barstowe’s were fourteen. Mrs. Barstowe wouldn’t take them younger. ‘I have standards, I do,’ she used to tell us. They sang to me, and told me stories, and made me clothes out of their cast-offs, decorated with bits of ribbon and lace that gentlemen had given them. As I grew older, they taught me games and rhymes, and even my letters. I learned about the world—there’s no place in it for girls whose parents aren’t rich and respectable, or who have Lascar blood in them, or who are addicted to laudanum. One step off the path of respectability, and that’s where you end up: Barstowe’s.

  “It was a happy enough life for me, though maybe not for the girls there, until Mum became ill. One day, she started coughing, and she just kept doing it until blood started coming up. Mrs. Barstowe called the doctor and paid for the medicine herself, but finally Mum was too sick and had to go to St. Bartholomew’s. That was where she died, in one of the common wards with their long rows of beds. The girls took me to visit, but several days later they told me she was gone. Mrs. Barstowe herself held my hand as I watched her being lowered into the ground, in the graveyard next to the hospital. She was wrapped in a shroud, and all I could see of her was her hair hanging out, like blood on the ground. I’ll never forget the sight of it, or the stench of the corpses.

  “I was only seven, but the girls talked to Mrs. Barstowe and she decided I could stay, if each girl gave up enough of her pay to support me until I was old enough to support myself. All the girls agreed, though they had little enough themselves. They called me their mascot, and said I would bring them luck. A week later, Mrs. Barstowe called me into her parlor and said, ‘There’s a gentleman here to see you on behalf of your father, Diana.’ ”

  “A gentleman?” said Mary. “I thought it was my mother who took you from that place—Mrs. Barstowe’s—to St. Mary Magdalen. Although how could she have known that Hyde had a child? Mrs. Poole, I think my mother had her secrets as well.”

  “Or was trying to keep your father’s secrets, like as not,” said the housekeeper.

  “I never saw your mum or any other woman,” said Diana. “All I saw was a man in a frock coat and top hat. He said he was a lawyer who’d been sent to take me away from Mrs. Barstowe’s to a place where I would be educated and cared for. Well, little did I know that it would be Our Lady of Dullness! If I had, I would have kicked and screamed before letting him take me. But I thought he was going to take me to my father, and Mum had always told me he was a rich man.

  “So I went with him, and did I ever regret it! The girls at Barstowe’s had let me wear their dresses and jewelry, and put rouge on my cheeks, and perfume on my wrists. They had laughed and sworn and gotten drunk. At St. Mary Magdalen’s, I had to wear a gray dress with a white pinafore. My hair had to be up in braids and under a cap, so it was proper—how they pulled it, braiding it in the mornings! There were no more bonbons, no more magazines with pictures. Just prayers and sewing. I swore under my breath and tangled the thread, just to make the sisters mad!”

  “But what about this man?” said Mary. “Do you remember his name?”

  “He never gave a name, at least not to me,” said Diana.

  “Was he short and crooked, like Hyde?” asked Mrs. Poole.

  “No, he was tall and straight, like a lamppost. He had sharp eyes that looked me up and down, and thin lips that he pressed together with disapproval when he saw how I was dressed. He carried a cane with a dog’s head in silver as the handle—I kept looking at it because it was so lifelike. I wished it would bark.”

  “Mr. Utterson!” said Mary. “Mrs. Poole, I’m completely mystified. Why would Mr. Utterson have been involved in this affair?”

  “Well, he was your mother’s solicitor at the time,” said Mrs. Poole. “Could he not have made all those arrangements for her—the documents, the account, even the child?”

  “You’re talking about me as though I’m invisible,” said Diana, once again pushing her big toe into the hole in the sofa and giving it a good tear.

  “But Mr. Guest didn’t know about any of those arrangements,” said Mary. “Why would Mr. Utterson not have informed his own clerk?”

  “Perhaps Mr. Utterson didn’t trust him,” said Mrs. Poole. “Would you?”

  “Not as far as I could throw him,” said Mary.

  DIANA: Have I done the he said she said enough now? I’m getting tired of this.

  CATHERINE: Oh, all right, I’ll finish it up for you and revise what you’ve written to make it sound like a proper narrative. And to take out the cursing! Go do whatever it is you do.

  DIANA: Wouldn’t you like to know!

  CATHERINE: Not particularly.

  Yes, her mother must have known. About her father and the experiments, about Hyde . . . Mary imagined Mr. Utterson, in his somber frock coat and black top hat, with the gold chain of his pocket watch just visible, getting into a hansom cab and ordering it to take him to Barstowe’s. The cabbie must have grinned, to indicate that he understood what a gentleman such as Mr. Utterson would be doing there. It would have been so distasteful.

  And then arriving at the whorehouse, walking in and speaking to Mrs. Barstowe herself, asking for the child. Being presented with Diana, with her tangle of red hair, got up like a—well, like one of those girls. She could imagine him shuddering.

  He must have been acting for her mother. Mary had wondered how her mother, who was already ill, had managed to set up a bank account and bring Diana to the Magdalen Society. This explained it: the lawyer had done all. And of course Mrs. Jekyll could not have gone to a whorehouse to pick up the daughter of her husband’s assistant—or, if Mary’s hypothesis was correct, her husband’s daughter by another woman. Ma
ry put her head in her hands. This affair resembled a jigsaw puzzle. One corner of it was starting to fit together, to show a picture. But there were so many other pieces that had no place as yet: Beatrice Rappaccini, the poor girl this morning with her brain cut out, and S.A., whatever that meant.

  “So, are there any more sandwiches?” asked Diana.

  “Not for you!” said Mrs. Poole. “I have a bit of jelly roll left, and that will be for Miss Mary, because she’s barely eaten anything. You’ve eaten quite enough! But that’s the last of the sugar, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll go to the bank tomorrow and close the account Mr. Utterson opened,” said Mary. “I didn’t have time today, what with the corpse and long-lost sister and all.” That will be the agenda for tomorrow, she thought, mentally making a list. If she could arrange it neatly in her head, then perhaps the events of the day wouldn’t seem so bewildering. Clerkenwell, wherever that was, Bank of England to deposit the funds so they could buy sugar, Royal College of Surgeons to see the Poisonous Girl, back to Regent’s Park to meet with Holmes and Watson. She wondered what Beatrice Rappaccini could tell them. Would she know what their fathers had been doing, what sorts of experiments they had been conducting? Would she know what S.A. stood for?

  Diana gave an enormous yawn.

  “All right, to bed with you,” said Mary. One problem at a time, and the immediate problem was Diana.

  MARY: As it so often is!

  And then began the ordeal of getting Diana into bed, which involved several trips to the bathroom, innumerable glasses of water, and a headache for Mary, since Mrs. Poole declared early in the process that the heathen could stay up all night, as far as she was concerned. Mary ended up giving Diana half of the jelly roll Mrs. Poole had brought up for her.

  Finally, the admonition “You say you’re fourteen, but you behave like a child” had its effect. Diana lay tucked into bed in what had once been Mary’s nursery, and Mary collapsed into a chair in her own bedroom. She was so tired!

  Once, her days had passed quietly, one after the other, in the routine of caring for her mother. She had ordered meals, responded to the nurse’s complaints, paid bills. That “once” had been only a fortnight ago. In that fortnight, her life had changed completely, and she had the disquieting sense that it would continue to change, perhaps in ways that were not particularly pleasant. She had longed for adventure, and now that it was happening to her, she was not sure how she felt about it. Today she had been to Whitechapel, seen a corpse, and gained what was presumably a sister. What would tomorrow bring?

  The most difficult part, the part she did not want to think about quite yet, was the revolution a day had made in her memories of her father. The tall, kind, distant father she had known . . . At least he had not been a Dr. Rappaccini, experimenting on his own daughter! Or daughters, because there was after all Diana. Was Diana, in a sense, the product of his experiments? Why had Hyde wanted a child, and a girl specifically? Perhaps he had simply been jealous of his alter ago and wanted a daughter of his own—if Dr. Jekyll had Mary, then he would have Diana. Or was there something more nefarious behind it? Those thoughts went around and around in Mary’s head. Would it never stop aching? She should have asked Mrs. Poole for something, one of those patent medicines the housekeeper kept in her dispensary. But Mary did not want to wake her, or make a trip downstairs through the dark house.

  There was nothing to do now but get some sleep. She pulled on her nightgown and slipped between the covers. The nursery was next to her bedroom, and until she fell asleep, Mary could hear, through the walls, Diana snoring. It was a strangely comforting sound.

  The next morning, Diana was up before she was. Mrs. Poole had dressed her in one of Mary’s old dresses, which would have been given to Alice in another year. “Her own clothes will need to be washed,” said Mrs. Poole. “Though I don’t know what good it will do—I’ve never seen dresses that have been mended so many times! They’re about to come apart at the seams. And such cheap material, that scratchy gray wool! Thank goodness her coat is in a reasonably decent state, and I’ve made her polish her boots. But I’ve had to give her a pair of your gloves, and one of your hats.”

  After a breakfast of toast, eggs, and coffee as a particular treat for Diana—“Coffee, heavenly coffee!” Diana sang, dancing around the morning room, and Mary had to admit that she had a good singing voice—they walked first to the bank where Mrs. Jekyll had kept an account for Diana, and then to the Bank of England, to transfer funds. Thirty-five pounds, five shillings, three pence, in what was now Mary’s own account. She withdrew a pound, in change, and put it into her purse. Oh, to have money in her purse again! Mrs. Poole would be able to buy sugar, and perhaps there would be jelly roll for tea. And then, with Diana complaining that her boots pinched, they made their way to the Royal College of Surgeons, to see the Poisonous Girl.

  CHAPTER VII

  The Poisonous Girl

  Mary and Diana crossed Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Mary had never been in this part of the city—there were so many parts of the city she had never seen, although she had lived in London all her life. She sighed, remembering weeks when she had barely left the house for fear that her mother might suffer another of her attacks—thank goodness for Nurse Adams, who had been so reliable, although very expensive. But here she was, after a long walk from Threadneedle Street. Somehow she had expected Lincoln’s Inn Fields to be fields, but as so often in London, the name was deceptive: it was simply a park, surrounded by streets lined on two sides with respectable buildings in the Georgian style. On the other two sides were Lincoln’s Inn, where barristers plied their trade, and the Royal College of Surgeons. As she and Diana walked through the park, under a canopy of ancient oaks, Mary remembered the park she had seen yesterday in Whitechapel, with poor children playing in ragged clothes. How strange that the word “park” could describe such different places! The rain had stopped, but whenever the wind blew, which was often, large wet drops would fall on their heads from the branches above. Mary kept her umbrella up and tried to cover them both, but Diana always walked either ahead or behind her, not caring whether she got wet.

  As they left the park, they saw the facade of the Royal College of Surgeons with its gray columns, looming like a great mausoleum. There was already a line of visitors stretching down the stone steps. Mary could see respectable men in frock coats and bowler hats, mothers with children pulling at their hands and asking if they could go play in the park, maids on their day off, boys in dirty trousers who would obviously not be able to pay the entrance fee, but probably hoped to sneak in and catch a glimpse of the Poisonous Girl before they were ejected by the porters. She checked to make sure she had the advertisement with her, folded into her purse.

  “Are you here to see the poisonous beauty?” asked a young man with a sparse attempt at a mustache, presumably one of the porters. He had an official look about him and was holding a sheaf of pamphlets in his hand. When Mary nodded, he told her to line up behind the others. At 10 a.m. precisely, the line began to move. The visitors who had been waiting filed into the entrance hall, handing the porter either an advertisement or the requisite number of shillings and pence. In return, he handed them a pamphlet. Mary glanced at it quickly. At the top of the page was written The Poisonous Girl! A wonder of modern science! Discovered by Professor Petronius, M.D., D.Phil., member of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. She did not have time to read the rest. The line was filing past a set of stairs marked TO LIBRARY, and through a pair of doors that opened into a large chamber. In the middle of the chamber was a wooden platform, with a table on it. On the table was a collection of objects—Mary had no time to pay them closer attention, although she noticed that one was a canary in a cage.

  “Now that’s more like it!” said Diana, turning and staring upward. The chamber was two stories high, with a balcony running around it. On both the first and second floors, the walls were lined with wooden cabinets. Through their glass fronts, Mary could
see anatomical specimens of various sorts: skeletons, but also row after row of glass jars filled with what were presumably parts of the human body. It looked like the pantry of a frugal housewife who, instead of pickles, had put up hearts, livers, spleens.

  “Come on,” she said to Diana, pulling her along by the collar. The audience to see the Poisonous Girl was a large one, and Mary wanted to get as close to the platform as possible. It was obviously the stage on which Beatrice Rappaccini would stand and—do what? Mary had no idea. Would she simply be put on display, like the freaks that were shown at the Royal Aquarium—the bearded women and dog-faced men? Mary had never seen one of the shows herself, but she had heard about them from servants. Alice, the scullery maid, had gone once with Mrs. Poole and could talk of nothing else for a week. She pushed through the crowd and secured a space for them at one corner of the platform, somewhat crushed between a woman in a violently purple walking suit and a man with a monocle. The woman gave her a look as Mary pushed her way in, as though she were some sort of recently discovered and unwelcome beetle. Well, she told herself, politeness has no place in a murder investigation.

  When the audience had been kept waiting just long enough to start getting restless, the porter said, “Make way, make way, for Professor Petronius!” The crowd parted, and a man in a theatrical black cloak, with enormous side-whiskers too black to be entirely natural, walked to the platform. He looked around at the audience, clearing his throat once or twice while the crowd quieted down and waited expectantly. Then he spoke in a voice that carried to the back of the room.