‘Ah, a Searcher,’ says Samuel, shifting uncomfortably on his chair, and tilting his head in the opposite direction. ‘I would indeed be happy to help you if I can. Very happy. Particularly in the light of the kindness that your late husband showed me in relation to the matter of the crowbar. As it happened, his advice on the crowbar indeed provided the clue to solving that whole crime, and securing a conviction in a case that otherwise might have …’ His voice tails off for a moment.
‘But, Mrs Flint,’ he resumes, ‘you should be aware that I was not the officer in charge of the case of Sarah Stone. It is true that I was engaged in making some of the inquiries, alongside my fellow officers, but my part in the whole investigation was quite minor, one might indeed say, almost peripheral. The person who was in charge was, if my memory serves me rightly, Ebenezer Dalton.’ He pauses again to reflect and then, before Adah can break in, continues. ‘Yes, I believe that I can say with considerable certainty that it was Ebenezer Dalton, though our fellow officer Moses Fortune may also have had some part to play. But, you understand, only a peripheral part, like my own. And of course, all our inquiries were ultimately under the direction of Sir Daniel Williams, who prosecuted the case. You would surely be better to direct any inquiries you may have about this case to Mr Dalton. Or better still, should you not speak to Sir Daniel himself? Although he is a very busy gentleman, I am confident that he would find time to speak to you, given your position as Searcher of the Liberty of Norton Folgate, and given the fact that this gentleman, the nephew of the Liberty’s overseer – or did I hear you say, the nephew of the Liberty’s former overseer? – is also involved in this inquiry. Surely Sir Daniel is the person best able to answer any questions you may have.’ And here he gives a little wave of his hand in the direction of the portrait, almost as though he expects Adah to direct her questions to the paint and canvas in their gilded frame.
Adah, who has been giving some thought to this interview, now leans forward in her chair and endeavours to look Samuel Miller in the eye.
‘Mr Miller,’ she says more gently. ‘My husband William used to say how careful you are in your investigations. He had the greatest respect for your abilities. That is why we have chosen to come to you, and not to Sir Daniel. We believe that we can have confidence in the answers that you will give us. We are troubled by the evidence of some of the witnesses at the trial, which suggests that Sarah Stone may have been pregnant with a child of her own. May I ask you one question? The destinies of innocent people may hang on the truth of your answer. Were you really satisfied in your own mind at the time that Sarah Stone was guilty?’
‘What can I say?’ cries Samuel, gesticulating with distress. ‘I was there on the deck of the East Indiaman moored in the Thames. We went out to the ship, you see. When Sarah Stone’s landlady and her father informed us that their tenant had stolen a child, and was now on board ship with her husband – or, I should say, her common-law husband, for the landlady expressed her suspicions that the pair were not married, and those suspicions, as it eventuated, proved to be correct – when we learnt all this, we realized there was not a moment to lose, so we fetched Catherine Creamer and took her with us to the ship. The Hugh Inglis, it was, if I remember correctly. That was the name of the ship. An East Indiaman, moored out in the Thames. We had to take a carriage out to Gravesend and then board a small boat out into the river, and ascend the ship’s ladder onto the deck, and it was a wild winter’s day with the waves threatening to come over the side of our boat and the ladder swaying so much that I came over quite dizzy as we climbed it. I was there with Dalton at the moment when we took Mrs Creamer up the ladder onto the deck of the Hugh Inglis. She, I may say, never faltered, even though the ladder was swaying and bumping on the side of the ship in the wind. From the moment we set off on our journey, she had been so, what should I say? So much in a fever to see her infant again. Even as she reached the deck, we heard the cry of a child. To tell the truth, I myself was not quite sure at first whether it was a child or just the cry of some sea bird. But Mrs Creamer knew it at once. “My child!” she exclaimed, “My child!” Or perhaps it was “My Molly!” And when she saw Sarah Stone with the child in her arms, Mrs Creamer instantly ran at her to snatch the child from her arms and hug it to her breast. I saw it all with my own eyes. She said, “This is my child.’ How could we deny the evidence of the mother herself?’
Adah Flint looks at him intently for what seems like a very long moment. ‘So you did have your doubts,’ she says at last.
‘What can I say, Mrs Flint?’ pleads Samuel again, ‘It was such a strange case. Unlike any other that I have encountered. And child-stealing, as perhaps you know, had only just been made a crime at the time when it occurred. I do believe that the law against child-stealing had been passed that very year, perhaps no more than five or six months before this crime occurred. This was such a famous case. Reported in all the newspapers, and cried out by the town-criers. Indeed, to tell the truth, in the weeks after we had the hand bills printed, we had any number of people coming forward to claim the reward, telling us that an infant had mysteriously appeared in their neighbour’s house, or that they had seen a strange woman in an alleyway with a baby in her arms. All sheer mischief or fantasy, as it turned out. So when Sarah Stone’s landlady came forward to tell her story and claim the reward, yes, I did indeed have my doubts that she was telling the truth. I had serious doubts. I spoke to Sir Daniel about them. But the date that the landlady gave us matched the date of the kidnapping perfectly, and Sir Daniel was so eager that we should solve this notorious crime. So we took Mrs Creamer out to the ship on the Thames where the landlady had told us we could find Sarah Stone and her sailor, with the baby that they claimed as their own, and when Mrs Creamer instantly recognized her child … What else could we do? What else could we do but believe her?’
‘And did you not wonder why Catherine Creamer had described the kidnapper as being about forty, while the woman you arrested was not much more than twenty? Did you not doubt the story told by Elizabeth Fisher, who at first gave her name as Mary Brown?’
‘I was troubled by it, I must confess. But women of that class, you know, often give names that are not their own. And once Sir Daniel had interviewed her, she became so very insistent that her name was indeed Elizabeth Fisher.’
‘And you did not question her neighbours? Or employ a Searcher to examine the person of Sarah Stone to see whether there were signs that she had borne a child?’
‘But do you not see?’ cries Samuel, rising from his chair and starting to pace about the room, wringing his hands. ‘Do you not see? By then it was too late!’
‘What do you mean, too late?’
Samuel does not answer for a moment. He walks to a table in the corner and fumbles randomly with objects on its surface, straightening a crooked pile of books, before turning back towards them and saying, ‘It was too late, Mrs Flint, because – but surely your own investigations, your own very thorough investigations, must have revealed this to you already – it was too late because …’ His voice drops to a mere whisper, which she fails to hear.
She raises her eyebrows questioningly, and Samuel Miller clears his throat and repeats, ‘Because the child was dead. Because the child was already dead. We took the child from Sarah Stone’s arms, and gave her to Catherine Creamer. Mrs Creamer seemed so certain that the infant was hers, and that Sarah Stone was the woman who had stolen it. We believed her. We were sure we would find proof that this was true. It all seemed so clear. But then, the more we investigated, the less the pieces fitted together. The woman in Rosemary Lane said that her name was Mary Brown, and then that it was Elizabeth Fisher. Sarah Stone’s mother said her daughter had borne a child and fed it with her own milk, and then the young girl came forward to speak of having drawn Sarah Stone’s milk. All the pieces began to fall apart. But then the child died. What were we to do? What were we to do, Mrs Flint? After all the ignominy to which the law was exposed after the blunders that were m
ade with the case of the child-stealer Harriet Magnis, and after all the public interest in the case of Catherine Creamer’s infant, how could we admit that there was doubt about Stone’s guilt? How could we admit, after the death of the child, that we might, after all, have made a mistake?’
‘But, Mr Miller,’ says Adah Flint, her voice quiet, but her gaze unwavering. ‘If you made a mistake, do you not see what you did? Not only did you blight the life of an innocent woman. If you made a mistake, there must have been a third child: Sarah Stone’s own infant. Did it never occur to you to ask, if Sarah Stone gave birth, what happened to her child?’
‘Ah, no,’ says Raphael, speaking for the first time, ‘surely we know now what happened to the infant daughter of Sarah Stone. She was taken from her mother’s arms and given to Catherine Creamer, and within a month, she was dead. The true question is this: whatever really became of little Molly Creamer?’
But Adah Flint knows the answer to that question. With a horrible dawning certainty, as she rises from her seat to leave the room with only a brief nod to Samuel Miller, Adah realizes that she has known the answer to that question all along.
Magpie Alley
‘Have you money for a cab?’ she asks Raphael, as they run down Lambeth-Street towards the main thoroughfare. ‘There’s not a moment to lose, and it’s too far to walk at this hour.’
‘Where are you taking me?’ cries Raphael, following in her wake.
But Adah does not want to put her thoughts into words. She needs first to confirm her fears with her own eyes.
‘Spital Square,’ she says.
The cab that stops for them is shabby. Its interior smells strongly of stale tobacco. Adah perches stiffly on the seat, looking down at her hands. The nail of her left thumb digs into the skin of her right thumb, just below the knuckle.
‘Let it not be too late,’ she says silently to herself, over and over again. ‘Let it not be too late. If we are too late, after all this, how will I live with myself?’
Raphael watches her questioningly, but says nothing.
For seemingly interminable moments, their progress is blocked by a great, slow-moving cart, laden with sheep being brought in from the country to some London slaughterhouse. Adah tries to quell her rising frenzy of impatience. After so many months, what difference can a few minutes, or even a few hours, make? And yet the frantic words run like a prayer through her head. ‘Let it not be too late. Let it not be too late.’ The plaintive bleating of the sheep from the cart in front of them is a mocking echo of the fear in her heart.
It is already dark by the time they alight from the cab at the entrance to Spital Square.
‘Can you fetch two lanterns?’ says Adah. ‘But don’t light them yet.’
Without a word, Raphael disappears through the front door of his house and re-emerges a few moments later carrying a brass lantern in either hand and a tinder box tucked under his arm. Adah runs ahead of him down White Lion Street and into Blossom Street, looking up to see the wavering candle light behind the un-shuttered windows of her own house as they pass. Young Will promised to stay home with the other children this evening; she can only hope that he has kept his word.
Already gasping for breath, she reaches the laneway that leads off Magpie Alley, and begins to fumble with the twine that ties the gate shut. But the knots have been pulled too tight, and refuse to yield to her shaking fingers.
‘Let me do that, Adah,’ says Raphael. He sets the lanterns and tinder box on the ground and, to her surprise, produces a small, sharp sheath-knife from his coat pocket, and proceeds to cut the twine with a swift slashing motion. The flimsy gate collapses to one side, and Raphael stoops to light the lanterns, handing one to Adah. She leads the way along the dark path beyond.
The weak swaying flame of her lantern casts a wavering pattern of light on the rutted path and stray branches of hedge on either side. Her cloak catches on a bramble, and she feels the cloth tear as she pulls it loose. Damp clinging strands of cobweb brush against her cheek. Beyond, she can feel, rather than see, the wasteland open out before them.
‘This is where Rosie Creamer’s body was found,’ she says over her shoulder to Raphael. ‘Watch your step. Don’t trip. There are boulders hidden in the grass.’
The area ahead is so dark that she can barely make out the jagged shape of the ruined stables, silhouetted against the fainter blackness of a hazy night sky, devoid of moon or stars. She moves cautiously, one step at a time. Grass and twigs crunch beneath her feet. Everything looks so different in the dark. She cannot recognize the spot where Rosie Creamer’s body once lay: the grass has grown tall, and she is no longer sure of her bearings. The lamp light picks out a tangle of withered creeper, the skeleton of a dead thistle. Raphael says nothing, though she can hear his uneven breath behind her.
For an instant, her heart stops. A human form seems to be crouching in the corner by the stable wall. But as she moves closer, the patch of darkness changes shape, resolving itself into a harmless pile of logs. The evening air is still warm and slightly foggy, and the smell of soot hangs heavy over the city.
All is silent. Then a dog barks in the distance, and a sudden movement in the air startles her: a glimpse of shadowy wings as an owl launches itself into the night with a ghostly cry. Am I mad, she wonders, to think that there could still be life in the midst of this desolation.
As Adah approaches the entrance to stables, Raphael catches hold of her cloak and pulls her back.
‘You’re surely not going in there?’ he says.
‘But I must,’ answers Adah. ‘I should have known … I think she’s in there.’
‘Can we not wait until morning?’
‘No, Raphael. No. I must find her.’
The void ahead is like the mouth of death itself. There is a musty smell of decay that was not here when she came here before in daylight. Just inside the stables, where the straw is piled by the entrance, something gleams for a moment in the reflected light of the lantern. She bends down, and finds two bottles lying on their sides, one empty, but the other half full of some pale liquid. Behind them is a small pile of shrivelled things that emit a faint, familiar odour. She squats amid the straw and touches them reluctantly. They are dry and fibrous. Apple cores. A pile of apple cores, chewed so thoroughly that little more than a few shrivelled pips and strands of woody stem remain.
She lifts her head. ‘Molly,’ she calls, helplessly. ‘Molly. Are you there?’
The darkness within seems to swallow up her words.
‘Have a care, Adah!’ cries Raphael. ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t drop the lantern.’
As if in reply, she stands and holds the lantern higher, hoping that it may cast some light on the obscurity within, but she can see and hear nothing. She stood in this very spot with Hetty Yandall, half a year ago now, sensing the presence of a living thing in the recesses of the stable. If only I had looked properly then. If only …
There is no sound from within except for a very faint fluttering and a momentary high-pitched squeak. Bats, somewhere in the skeletal rafters above. She steps forward across the creaking fragile wooden floor. The darkness embraces her like a shroud. The musty smell is growing stronger. One step after another, holding her breath. And then, as she looks down, she sees that she has almost trodden on the small bony human hand that extends from under a pile of straw and crumpled cloth.
‘Oh no!’ she cries.
Desperately holding the lantern high with one hand, she sweeps the straw away to reveal the shadowy shape of the child who lies on her side, knees drawn up towards her chest, one stick-like arm half covering her face. The child does not stir.
‘Oh no!’ cries Adah again, bending down to touch her. But as she does so, she realizes that the child’s unmoving arm is warm. She grasps it, feeling the bone beneath the papery skin. Not warm but hot, burning up with fever.
‘She’s alive, Raphael. She’s alive!’
She bends and tries to lift the child’s head and shoulders
from the floor. Long matted hair half obscures the little girl’s face. The body feels startlingly light, but it is somehow tangled up in the ragged cloth that covers her. The child makes no sound. Though her mouth is half open, Adah cannot hear her breathing. But she is surely alive.
Raphael is at her side, already thrusting his lantern into Adah’s hand.
‘Hold this,’ he says. ‘I’ll take her.’
He stoops down, sweeps the child into his arms and stumbles back towards the murky haze of the open air. Adah scrambles after him, trying to light his path, no longer thinking of the bats overhead or the uneven ground underfoot, but only of the burning heat of the human bundle that Raphael carries in his arms.
They run back down the dark pathway into the street, Raphael leading her now. As Adah flounders through the flickering darkness, her mind swirls with thoughts. They must find a bed for the child to lie in, but there are no spare beds in the Blossom Street tenement. Perhaps she could ask Richard and Will to sleep on the floor? But what if the child’s fever is contagious, and her own children fall ill? As she reaches Blossom Street, her hands are already groping under her shawl for the key chain that hangs at the waist of her dress, but Raphael has not slackened his pace. With the dark bundle of the child clasped in his arms, he is running down the lane, past Adah’s front door towards White Lion Street.
‘Where are you going?’ cries Adah, suddenly confused and afraid.
Raphael shouts something in reply, but she cannot make out his words. She follows him frantically over the slippery cobbles of Blossom Street. In White Lion Street, an old woman pushing a laden wheelbarrow looks up to stare with blank frightened eyes. What if we meet the officer of the watch? We must seem an alarming sight, thinks Adah – a tall man carrying the ragged, unconscious body of a child; herself pursuing him as fast as her legs will carry her. But luckily the night fog is thickening and the streets are almost deserted.
In Spital Square, Raphael finally slackens his pace, and stops to hammer at his own front door. Adah sees the widening crack of light, as Stevens answers the summons and exchanges a few words with his master before opening the door wide to admit him. Adah, following Raphael up the stone steps and through the hallway, finds herself being led into a room she has never seen before on the ground floor of Raphael’s house.
Searcher Page 17