Searcher

by T J Alexander

  While the uninvited visitors tramp around on the floorboards above, muttering and measuring and recording things in the leather-bound book, she cannot help slipping quietly down the stairs to the landing, and gazing again at the spot where she found William on the bleak night of his death. She can see precisely the place where his head was lying, although the stains that were left on the wood have been scrubbed away. He was still alive when she found him, but she knew the moment she saw him that he would not live long. The doctor later said that it was apoplexy, but everyone else said it was the drink. Even now, when she stares at the spot where he lay, it all seems unreal.

  ‘Mrs Flint!’ calls a breathless voice from below.

  It is the new beadle, Benjamin Beavis, fresh faced, bright eyed and out of breath.

  He looks little older than young Will, she thinks.

  The beadle has been hurrying, and his cheeks are flushed, either with exertion or embarrassment. In one hand he carries a small parcel wrapped in grey paper and untidily tied with string.

  ‘I am so sorry about the intrusions,’ he murmurs, ‘so very sorry, but alas …’

  His hand holding the parcel waves vaguely in the air as he searches for words.

  ‘No need to apologize, Mr Beavis,’ replies Adah, hearing the tightness in her own voice, ‘this is your home now.’

  ‘I brought you this. A small present.’ The beadle thrusts the grey parcel into her hands and retreats up the stairs to join the trustees.

  Adah unties the string. Inside, neatly folded, is a limp strip of linen embroidered in cross-stitch with a pattern of pink and blue foxgloves. She has no idea what it is meant to be used for.

  This in return for a home, she thinks. But the beadle’s intentions are good. They are not unkind, these people. Only they see her as a problem. They made her Searcher merely out of pity after William’s sudden death, and when she began to assert herself – asking to be allowed to stay on in the courthouse – the pity turned to irritation. All of them bar one will be glad when she has left, and would be happier still if she would quietly relinquish her role as Searcher. But that she will not do; not, at least, until she has found the dead child’s name.

  Suddenly she is immensely tired. She struggles up the flights of stairs and wanders into her empty bedroom, desperate for somewhere to sit down and rest her feet. The only furniture left in the room is a single upholstered chair, which stands near the window, and she sinks into it with an involuntary sigh. She can distinctly remember her father-in-law buying a pair of these chairs for two pounds, which seemed a terrible extravagance at the time. Mr Cansdell insists that they are only worth one pound four shillings the pair, and she is too exhausted to argue.

  Weak sunlight shines through the open shutters onto her face. Outside in the street, an infant is wailing with that abandoned utter grief that we all feel from time to time, but which only the very young are allowed to express. Then a dog starts to bark, and a man’s voice from across the road shouts, ‘Stop that damn racket,’ though she can’t tell whether the words are addressed to the infant or the dog.

  She stares at the blank face of the silversmith’s house across the road, remembering that strange moonlit night when she saw a dark shape moving in the street below. Today, in broad daylight, it seems impossible to imagine. A carriage rattles past, and a couple of children bowl a hoop over the cobbles, yelling with panic and delight as it escapes from their hands and careers unaided towards the gutter. Everything seems normal, calm, bathed in sunlight. Yet in her head Adah can still evoke those strange midnight sounds that she heard from the door below: the rattling, the scratching of nails and the little whimper …

  There it is again. She catches her breath. A scratching sound, and the sound of a sigh, somewhere close at hand. Her heart begins to race, but almost at once she realizes her mistake. This time, the sound is not coming from an invisible being in the street below, but from someone who is standing just outside her bedroom door. The door is barely ajar, so she can see nothing but the dark shadow of a man on the landing outside. Not one man but two, their heads bent together, speaking quietly to one another.

  ‘It’s Jonah Hall,’ says the soft voice of Beadle Beavis, ‘he will have to go.’

  The reply is an inaudible mutter from one of the trustees.

  Adah is conscious of eavesdropping on a conversation she is probably not meant to hear, but is too tired to move.

  ‘It’s the drink,’ continues Beavis, ‘just like poor Flint in his last days. There’ll be another tragedy if we don’t act soon.’

  ‘I thought Hall seemed such a sober man,’ murmurs the other. ‘He’s a regular at church on a Sunday, and I’ve never seen him have more than half a jug of ale. Are you sure of this?’

  ‘I found him asleep on the watch at five this morning,’ says Beavis, ‘fast asleep. I could barely rouse him. It’s the second time. Thursday it was the same story, but today was worse. His mind was wandering … Talking of ghosts.’

  ‘Ghosts?’ says the other sharply.

  ‘Ghosts in the street at dead of night, is what he was saying. Muttering. Incoherent.’

  Beavis drops his voice to a whisper, which somehow only serves to make his words carry more clearly.

  ‘He was muttering about that dead child. Says he saw that dead child’s ghost in the street. Swore to it, hand on his heart. “I saw her face in the lamplight. The same child,” he said. I’ve no doubt he believes it himself. It’s drink or delirium. He’ll have to go.’

  Jemmy Harbottle, the landlord of the Green Dragon, flings the used tankards into the water butt with an energy driven by anger. Small waves of grimy water slop over the side of the butt, creating a gradually spreading stain on the flagged floor. The air is full of the smell of spilled drink, pipe smoke and stale urine.

  The fire in the big open hearth is barely alight, and the room is growing cold. Jemmy ought to poke the fire and put on more logs, but he can’t be bothered. He is angry at the emptiness of his inn, which by this time of day should be beginning to fill with men off the ships, angry with his wife Betsy who has been making eyes at that evil-faced lodger next door again, and particularly angry at the young woman who has been sitting in the corner of the bar for the past hour, staring silently at the bottle of gin on the table in front of her. He has no idea who the woman is, but secretly blames her for the fact the inn is still empty at four o’clock in the afternoon. She’s bad luck, that woman.

  The only other living creature in the inn is the mangy, ageing mongrel dog who sleeps, snoring audibly, amongst a jumble of baskets and empty barrels under the battered oak settle. The smoke-darkened walls of the room are lined with shelves which bear an assortment of bottles, jugs and bowls, a cage containing a moulting stuffed parrot, an array of scrimshaw brought back by a sailor from the Azores and the skull of a baboon, whose hollow eyes stare balefully out over the empty room. The tattered cloth which hangs from the blackened rafters above was once decorated with an image of St. George impaling a curling green dragon, but is now so frayed and faded that only a faint trace of scales and horse’s hooves remain.

  The woman who sits in the corner is thin and gaunt, with wisps of pale dry hair falling over her eyes. Her bony hands are cupped around the gin bottle, from which she occasionally takes a tentative swig. Most of the time, though, she just sits and stares. Jemmy observes that she might be pretty, if her face wasn’t so bony and so streaked with tears. Too bony to appeal to him. She sits absolutely still, making no sound at all, with the tears rolling steadily down her cheeks, creating slowly expanding damp marks on the threadbare green shawl around her shoulders.

  Jemmy’s mood is not improved when the door swings open and another woman walks in: a smallish, plumpish, middle-aged woman with curling hair under a blue bonnet. She looks completely out of place in the Green Dragon, and Jemmy’s anger rises another notch.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asks sourly, staring at the woman’s freckled face and her slightly faded frock and gow
n. Not really poor, he thinks, but not rich, either. Jemmy prides himself on being able to make these judgements in an instant.

  ‘Give me a drink of clean water, and I’ll give you a penny,’ says the woman, returning his stare. Her eyes are grey and surprisingly shrewd.

  ‘Water?’ exclaims Jemmy in disgust. ‘Ain’t yer got no water at home? What are you here for, if not for the drink? Looking for a lost husband?’

  ‘No, looking for a lost mother. I am the Searcher of the Liberty of Norton Folgate. We have had a dead child brought to our courthouse. I am trying to find who she was and where she came from.’

  The Green Dragon is the fifth inn in Shadwell that Adah has visited today. Her feet are sore from walking, and she is growing nauseous from the sour smells of the inns, and weary of hostile gazes from landlords and patrons alike. But the further she goes, the deeper the urge becomes. She cannot stop now. Somewhere in this city is someone who knows the name of the dead child, and she is going to find that person. I am haunted, she thinks. Ghost or no ghost, I am haunted by that child.

  ‘If you’re from Northing Falgate,’ says Jemmy, ‘what are you doing in these parts? More likely the child’s from your end of town.’

  ‘She looked as though she might be a foreigner. Perhaps a child off a ship, or her father might be a Spaniard. They told me I should try Shadwell.’

  Jemmy Harbottle gives a snort. ‘That’s right – Shadwell. We’ve got ’em all here, all right. Spaniards, Laskars, Malays, Chinese, mongrels, brindled, take your pick. Some of ’em probably lose a child from time to time, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  He turns back to his tankards, flinging them into the water butt with deliberate viciousness. His back is still turned as his speaks again, and she can’t make out his words. When she asks him to repeat himself, he turns and mutters, half-reluctantly.

  ‘Unless it’s got something to do with that madwoman.’

  ‘Madwoman?’

  ‘Mad or drunk,’ says the landlord, ‘or probably both. Screeching at the top of her voice, over and over.’ He puts on a horrible falsetto in mimicry. ‘“They’ve stolen my child again, they’ve stolen my child again! Take me out to the ship!”’ Then, returning abruptly to his normal register, ‘But she didn’t say nothing about Northing Falgate. Just “Take me out to the ship! Take me out to the ship!” She wasn’t no foreigner, either, far as I can tell.’

  ‘She wasn’t mad.’ It is the woman in the corner who has spoken, suddenly and clearly, lifting her tear-stained face.

  Adah turns and looks at her more closely. The woman is probably not much more than twenty, but seems older. There are dark shadows under her eyes, and the nails on her fingers have been bitten down to the quick.

  Adah walks over and pulls up a chair to the young woman’s table.

  ‘Tell me,’ she says softly, ‘do you know this woman who says her child’s been stolen? Where can I find her?’

  The landlord gives another snort, and speaks before the young woman has a chance to respond.

  ‘Davy Jones’s locker is where you’ll find her. Jumped in the river and drowned herself yesterday evening, she did. The officers of the watch are still out looking for the body.’

  ‘Poor soul,’ murmurs the young woman. ‘God rest her. She wasn’t mad, just troubled. She’d lost a child years back, she said, and now another one had disappeared. I don’t know why, but she was sure that a sailor’s wife had stolen it. A little girl, she said. She was wild with grief, but she wasn’t mad. I think she meant to swim out to one of the ships, but they say she just sank like a stone.’

  ‘You didn’t see this happen?’ asks Adah.

  ‘No, I wasn’t there. Just heard about it from the girls I live with. Two of them was on the quay, not more than a dozen yards away when it happened. But I’d spoken to the woman right here.’ She points to the settle at the other side of the room, where the dog is still wheezing and twitching in its sleep. ‘Right here, she was, two days ago. She’d had a bit to drink, but she wasn’t drunk, nor mad, neither. Said she’d loved her little girl. Hunted for her for days. “My little Rosie,” she called her. I felt sorry I couldn’t help her. Told her so. She said, “Never mind, dearie. It’s just good to talk to someone with a kind face.”’ The young woman gives a wry laugh. ‘That’s funny. There’s not many as think I have a kind face.’

  Rosie. Adah repeats the name quietly to herself, thinking of the child’s waxy face in the shadows of the watch room. Rosie.

  ‘And the mother, did she tell you her own name? Did she have a husband, other children?’

  ‘I don’t know about that. She didn’t speak of no husband, nor of children, except that she’d lost another one years ago. But she did tell me her own name. Catherine, she was called.’ The young woman pauses. ‘Catherine something or other … It’s gone. Catherine … something beginning with C.’

  Adah reaches out and takes the young woman’s cold hand in her own. The hand is stiff and unresponsive, but the young woman doesn’t draw it away.

  ‘Thank you, my dear,’ says Adah. ‘Thank you, you’ve been very helpful. Is that why you’re crying? Are you crying because Catherine drowned?’

  ‘No,’ says the young woman, with such finality that Adah feels she can’t pry further.

  Most mysteries, she thinks, have no answers. That’s something she learnt from living with William for twenty years. Most puzzles are never solved. You find one answer, and then it just proves to be the start of another mystery. And the biggest mystery of all is the least solvable of all.

  Rosie. That might be the child’s name. But then again, this mother’s tragedy might just be a coincidence. The child who died in that abandoned stable-yard might have been this lost Rosie, or she might not. And anyway, the mother is dead, and no-one here seems to know any more about her. This door has closed as quickly as it opened.

  Adah puts down the penny on the landlord’s counter, even though she can’t afford it, and he never bothered to give her the glass of water.

  She is about to leave the inn when the young woman in the corner suddenly lifts her head again and says, ‘Creamer.’

  ‘What?’ asks Adah, confused.

  ‘Creamer,’ says the young woman. ‘That’s what she said her name was. The mother. Catherine Creamer. Or it might have been Cramer. But I think she said Catherine Creamer.’

  *

  The river is close to flood, its turbid dark waters frothing and splashing against the cobbled quay as Adah makes her way home in the rapidly gathering darkness. The wind has risen, and threatens to blow the cloak from her shoulders. The figures who pass her by move swiftly, hunched against the gale, hurrying towards the warmth of their homes or of neighbouring inns. Lamps on the ships moored in midstream toss in the dark, sending reflections like flames dancing across the furrowed surface of the water.

  At the far end of the quay, a group of people has gathered around the dark mound that lies on the ground. One of them holds a lantern high, while the rest peer down at the shapeless form at their feet, speaking to each other in low voices which reach Adah only as wisps of sound snatched away by the wind. Two of the men hold long grappling hooks, and as she approaches, she sees their small skiff drawn up against the stone jetty.

  There is no mistaking the shape on the ground. The circle of light from the lantern falls on dark, sodden cloth, from beneath which extend strands of long black hair and a white, claw-like hand and arm, streaked with river mud. The body of the drowned mother has been found.

  For a moment, Adah hesitates, wondering whether to join the group around the dead woman, to ask questions, to peer at the woman’s face, looking for some resemblance to the dead child. But the very sight of that white lifeless arm chills her. Instead, she turns away and heads homeward, listening all the while to the long-forgotten words which sprang unbidden into her brain the moment she heard the dead woman’s name.

  Catherine Creamer.

  It is like some snatch of tune that you have heard long ago an
d forgotten, and hearing it again, find it circling maddeningly in your brain, like a fly in a closed room.

  She can hear her husband William speak that name. She can see him in her mind’s eye, sitting before the fire, pipe in one hand, talking to someone. When would it have been? Six, seven years ago. Maybe more. Adah can remember nothing else. Who was William talking to? What else did he say? Nothing returns except those two sentences, spoken in the pitying but slightly smug tone that we use when speaking of others’ misfortunes.

  ‘Poor Catherine Creamer,’ William is saying, and she can hear again the very rise and fall of his voice as he says it. ‘Poor Catherine Creamer, just like poor Mrs Dellow. Whoever would have thought it could happen again?’

  The Child’s Story

  June 1819

  IN THE DAYS WHEN old Father Sheehan came to call, Sully and the child used to play the hiding game. Sully would take her down to the little scullery at the back of the kitchen, which always smelled of mildew and onions, and they would sit there, listening to the footsteps and distant voices that came from the priest and Mamma as they spoke in the room above.

  ‘Let’s play at being as quiet as mice,’ Sully would whisper, feeding her little pieces of cheese, and the child would giggle silently into her pinafore.

  But then Father Ambrose, new to the district, arrived, and it seemed that they didn’t need to play the hiding game any more. She and Sully could go up to Mamma’s drawing room, and stand in the corner of the room next to the black and gold cabinet that she loved more than anything else in the world. When she was smaller, the cabinet was so high that she could not see the top of it unless Mamma lifted her up. But once she grew taller, she could gaze in wonder at all the things laid out on the shiny black lacquered wood: the strange and beautiful things brought back by the Captain from the Indies and the Fijis and the coasts of Tartary.

  ‘Look, this is an elephant,’ Mamma liked to say, ‘see his long trunk? The Captain brought this picture all the way home from Bengal. And this is a seashell from the Sandwich Islands. Listen – put it closer to your ear. Can you hear the sound of the sea in the shell?’