But before Solomon could answer, the bullies flung open the door into the prison and disappeared down the corridors shouting, ‘Keeper. Oh, Keeper. Knock, knock.’
The wizened warden chuckled to himself, ‘They’ll rue today.’
Solomon scratched his head. ‘I’m here on behalf of Beresford.’
Unperturbed, the warden relit his pipe and, not bothering to hear out Solomon’s request, waved him away, not caring where he went. It was by pure chance that he met the young guard who had helped him carry Boxty to the hospital.
‘Can you take me to the sentry box where Martin Coffey’s gun and clothes were found?’
The young guard’s name was Michael and his pale complexion gave him an unearthly quality that was eerily amplified by the greenish gloom of the corridors.
‘Has Boxty lost his mind?’ Michael asked Solomon.
‘Just frightened out of his wits,’ Solomon replied.
‘And now Martin’s dead,’ Michael whispered. ‘Makes me fearful of working here.’
Solomon didn’t answer. They proceeded deep into the gaol, silent, until Solomon frowned and asked, ‘Who’s the Cut?’
Michael’s pale blue eyes flicked anxiously up at Solomon’s face. ‘No one I know of,’ he lied, pointing ahead. They passed into a T-shaped corridor and were bisecting it when Solomon looked behind and saw the two bullies who had been in reception pull out weapons and start banging at the wall and shouting, ‘Garnish, garnish.’
‘Come on.’ Michael pulled him quickly away.
Solomon trotted after him. ‘What’s garnish?’ he enquired.
‘Money for cleaning out slop, for the candle maker, for the necessaries. Every inmate is obliged to pay garnish.’
‘To the Cut?’ Solomon probed.
‘Here we are.’ Michael led the way down a dreary flight of steps into a narrow room lined with peeling plaster where two men in the process of sitting down jumped to their feet and humbly saluted.
‘No need for formalities,’ Solomon waved them back to their bench, ‘I only have a few questions, for the Board,’ he said, and was immediately distracted by the splatter of red stains running up the crumbling plaster. ‘Is that blood?’ He peered closer.
‘It is,’ a bearded man with a large growth protruding from his forehead confirmed. ‘Did ye know Martin?’ he asked.
Solomon shook his head.
‘Pity.’ The bearded man’s eyes glinted quickly at his friend. ‘Only, if ye knew him well, ye might tell us if those are his.’
He pointed a filthy fingernail at a pail standing against the wall. Solomon looked into the bucket. There, shivering shiny and black and glistening with scarlet blood, were what looked like two kidneys and a corner of heart on a bed of wobbling intestine.
‘Jesus.’ Solomon retracted his head.
The bearded man and his friend snorted, choking back the laughter.
‘Ah, it’s not funny,’ the bearded man growled, his bulbous eyes straining to keep themselves attached to their sockets.
Solomon cocked an eyebrow and stared up the wall. ‘He was sliced open.’
‘Put up a fight,’ the bearded man nodded. ‘See?’
His discoloured fingernail pointed further up the wall where, lodged in the moist plaster work and gleaming dully, was a musket ball. His companion grunted in agreement and that was when Solomon noticed a wad of shredded rags in the second man’s hand.
Solomon made a quick note. Weapon discharged. ‘Are they his clothes?’ he asked.
The second man nodded, stray wisps of hair sprouting from his bald pate, his eyes desolately staring at the mess of bloody material between his palms. He held out the shirt; it fell in strips from a seam in the shoulders and was stained with dark patches of purple-black blood.
Michael let out the faintest moan. ‘I’m not staying here,’ he whispered. He left and the man with the beard scratched the growth on his forehead and looked at his friend.
‘What is it, Smithy?’
The other man clacked his tongue and flung the rags into the bucket.
‘Bastard owed me money,’ he grumbled.
Solomon left the two men scrubbing the cell and retraced his steps to the reception room. He was closing the door at the top of the narrow steps when he heard someone screaming.
‘Stop, stop, leave me alone.’
The cries came from the corridor and there was something about the voice that tugged at Solomon’s memory. He rushed into the green passageway, a door was flung open with a loud bang and the inmate ran out, familiarly dressed in only a shirt, his skinny legs white and naked. It was Charlie and he was desperate.
‘Someone, help me,’ he cried, running towards Solomon, his whole face charged with agonised terror.
Solomon skidded to a halt.
‘Come here, ye faggot.’
A slight man, with narrow shoulders thundered after Charlie, grabbed him by the hair and slammed his skull into the wall.
‘Hey,’ Solomon roared, rushing to Charlie’s defence. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
The man stopped, still holding Charlie by a fistful of hair. He glared at Solomon.
‘Fuck off,’ he bellowed.
Charlie crumpled to his knees, his forehead bleeding. He sobbed over and over.
‘Leave me alone. I’ll get it. I’ll get the money.’
Despite his size, the man’s free hand curled into a fist and came down hard on Charlie’s right arm. Solomon heard the snap.
‘Jesus, stop,’ he shouted, lurching forward, desperate to retrieve Charlie from his awful predicament. He grabbed the man’s forearm, hauling on it, trying to prise it away from its trajectory, aiming this time for Charlie’s ribs.
The man pushed Solomon back, sending him flying against the wall, his sinewy body strong beyond belief. Solomon felt his ribs crack. He gasped for air, winded. The man laughed, his breath coming in snorts. He was exerted but in no way tired. He paused to look at Solomon doubled over, still hanging onto Charlie by the hair. Charlie fainted in and out of consciousness with the pain.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ the man said, noticing the contents of Solomon’s bag strewn across the flagstones.
Solomon clutched his stomach and tried to stand upright.
‘I’ve been sent on behalf of the Board.’
The little man didn’t bat an eyelid. He had an angular face comprised of blades and indents, a protruding forehead, a jutting jaw and a pointy chin. His eyes were empty and hard and a red scar ran across his purple complexion to the edge of his snarling mouth.
‘Bullshit.’
The little man hauled Charlie upright and heaved him into the wall again.
‘You owe me fifty pounds,’ he said, kicking Charlie, who howled frantically.
‘You’ve broken his arm,’ Solomon yelled.
‘You going to pay for his accommodation?’ the little man asked.
Solomon’s heart dropped like a lead weight into the pit of his stomach. The man beating Charlie was the Keeper.
‘I – I . . .’ Solomon stuttered.
‘Is that the arrangement?’ and like a light the Keeper dropped Charlie’s battered body, pushed past Solomon and dived at the open carpet bag, greedy fingers riffling through Solomon’s belongings, quickly snatching up his day’s earnings.
‘That’s mine,’ Solomon roared, running to get his things. Before he knew what had happened, the Keeper’s fist ploughed into Solomon’s face and the pain of his nose being shoved into the middle of his skull sent a shock through his whole body. He was launched backwards into an endless black.
8
The Cure
Janey Mack sat on the high stool, her legs stuck out, checking and looking and rechecking again.
‘Aren’t they the nicest pair of boots ye ever seen in yer whole life?’ She was wearing a sage-green shift with a pale undershirt and a brown short jacket trimmed with two faded orange bows. She admired the buttons running up the side of her boots and the neat little heel
capped with a half-moon of steel that made her feet tap wherever she walked.
‘They are the nicest boots,’ Merriment said, filling out the order form for Misses Phillips’ Engine. She sealed it with a blob of wax. It was almost time to close up. The light was waning and the markets were long empty. The only traffic on the road were civil servants heading home for supper or down Dame Street to Lizzy’s Coffee House for a pastry or next door to Hannifan’s Chop House for a slab of meat and a pint of ale. Business had picked up. Today Merriment had had sixteen customers. She was pulling the shutters across and contemplating cooking something to eat when the door opened and a frail old lady with a hunched back furtively stepped in and looked about.
‘Ye closing up?’
Her voice was a whisper. She was weighed down by material. Her long dress consisted of layers of old and battered lace that had once been supported by a whalebone hoop. The skirts hung and dragged and disguised the fact that she had a club foot. Her cloak was lined with moth-eaten ermine and her periwig was discoloured and molten in patches. Everything she wore was a relic of a more prosperous time, when she was young and wealthy, long before her dowry had been swindled and she had been reduced to a penny-pinching old dame.
‘Come in,’ Merriment said warmly. Janey Mack sidled from the stool, a little afraid of the ancient, tattered lady moving through the twilit room like an injured crow.
‘Janey, you head on into the back and I’ll be in in a minute.’ Merriment quietly flipped the shop sign and lit a candle. ‘Now, madam, how can I help you?’
‘I live on Hanbury Lane,’ the lady began. ‘I’m a neighbour of Misses Byrne’s.’ Merriment nodded. The old lady brushed the edge of her wig near her temple. ‘I believe you know her housemaid, Anne MacCarrick?’
‘Yes.’ Merriment waited.
‘And you’ve provided a friend of Anne’s with a cure for a bad-tempered father?’
Merriment nodded. The old lady looked particularly grotesque in the candlelight, her sunken face retained the barest hint of defiance but her general demeanour was one of downtrodden surrender. She reached a gloved finger onto the counter and drew arthritic circles as she tried to figure out a way to ask for what she needed.
‘I was never pretty,’ she said, swallowing back her pride. ‘Always had the hump and the foot. But my father was relatively well off. He ran a little business on the corner of Skinner’s Row. I met Harold when I was seventeen and could be told nothing.’
She pinched her mouth together, patting the edge of her periwig and touching her temple, mustering up the courage to tell everything.
‘I fell.’ She clacked her tongue and snorted with derision. ‘When my father discovered I was with child he . . . well.’ She waved the end of the story off, looking away. ‘I never saw my family again. I married Harold and he has diminished me in more ways than I can count. He has beaten me, reduced me.’
She leaned wearily on her walking stick. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled.
Merriment waited. The old lady spent a long time staring at the countertop, sometimes sighing, sometimes clacking her tongue, always looking like she was on the verge of saying something. At last she shook her head and turned.
‘It was all my own doing,’ she said firmly. ‘I made my own bed and I’ve to lie in it.’ She looked up at Merriment, her eyes filled with a resolute pain: fifty years of hurt that spun on the thin edge of a decision she had made when she was a young and foolish girl of seventeen.
‘I must go,’ she said flatly. ‘Sorry to bother you. You won’t breathe a word to Anne?’
‘No,’ Merriment whispered.
‘All right.’ The old lady patted her periwig and took a deep breath, turning slowly.
Merriment watched her hobble towards the door, the sudden terror of her own old age flashing before her.
‘Does he have spasms?’ she blurted out.
The old lady stopped, half-turning. In profile she was bowed into the shape of a question mark.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied.
‘Delirium tremens?’
The old lady shook her head, her hump moving back and forth a fraction.
‘All I know,’ she said sadly, ‘is that he hates me. I enrage him.’
Merriment nodded.
‘Wait here.’
When she went into the back room to fetch a jar of dried green seeds, Janey Mack was twirling in her new shift and dancing in front of the fire.
‘Is the aul’ one gone?’ the little girl asked, tottering to a halt.
Merriment made the shape ‘no’ with her mouth, then frowning, she added, ‘Don’t set yourself alight. Move back from the flame. Do you want your legs to end up like your hand?’
She went back into the shop, shutting the door behind her, and placed the seeds on the countertop. The old woman was leaning near the candle now, her lower jaw moving from side to side, her eyes staring intently at Merriment’s hands, obviously in two minds about what she was doing.
‘This is a pacifying cure,’ Merriment told the old lady. ‘It has anti-spasmodic and narcotic properties.’
She got the mortar and pestle and ground a portion of the seeds into a fine powder. The old lady stared, her grey eyes following the movement of the pestle. Merriment tipped the powder into a cardboard box and pushed the lid down.
‘It’s called Passiflora incarnata. The blooms remind people of the thorns worn by Jesus.’
The old lady’s eyes glazed with unexpected tears. She hid her face a moment behind her crooked, swollen fingers, her whole frame shaking with a mixture of guilt and hope.
‘It’s a strong sedative,’ Merriment told her, sliding the box forward. ‘Sprinkle it on his food, or into his drink. Do it three times a day or whenever you feel he’s getting out of hand.’
The old lady took the box, looking at it a moment, contemplating it in the yellow throbbing candlelight. Merriment tried to read the old lady’s troubled face.
‘I haven’t given you enough to kill him,’ she said. ‘Just enough to subdue his mania. Even if you poured the whole box into his dinner he wouldn’t die.’
The old lady’s head bobbed, her wig slipping a little on her narrow skull.
‘All right,’ she said hoarsely. ‘It’s just . . .’ She paused, staring at the little box like it contained her soul. ‘I was reared religious. Devout. If I do this’ – she looked deep into Merriment’s eyes desperate for guidance – ‘I’m lost, aren’t I?’
Merriment took in a long slow breath, her heart swelling in her chest. The whole idea of God made her uncomfortable. She’d been too long at sea, too far away from the rituals and the habits of the city to remember what being devout even meant. She had long ago lost faith. God was a haphazard concept only to be called upon in high winds and rough seas and even then he didn’t respond.
‘If you killed your husband,’ Merriment said gently, ‘then you would most certainly be lost. But since you are helping him to be calm and less poisoned by hatred, then . . .’
She left the sentence hang, wishing she could back track from the moral dilemma the old lady was dragging her into. The old woman nodded sadly. She stared at the box for a long time. Still she didn’t move. Merriment heard the town crier ring the half hour. It was half past seven.
‘I only have a penny ha’penny,’ the old lady confessed, embarrassed by all her failings. ‘How much more will I owe you?’
Merriment patted the old lady’s hand.
‘See if it works first. If it works you can pay me the penny ha’penny.’
The old lady kept her eyes on the counter, filled with the shame of having to beg for favours. She was unable to look up.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, slowly turning to leave.
‘Here.’ Merriment couldn’t stop herself. She grabbed a box of green tea mixed with Aurum metallicum from a glass case and shoved it into the old lady’s hand.
‘For your arthritis.’
The old lady couldn’t speak. Merriment saw her o
ut and fastened up the door, her heart squeezing in her chest. Unless business improved she may well be looking at a harsh old age herself.
If you keep giving away your stock, business won’t improve, she thought, squeezing her chin and rubbing her hands over her face.
She pressed her back to the door and closed her eyes, a cold realisation washing over her that she was out of her depth and there was only one thing for it.
‘I’ll have to see Beresford.’ An old longing unexpectedly fluttered up out of her belly bursting across her heart. It had been so long since she had wanted the comfort of Beresford’s steady thinking, so long since she had rested in his arms. Why now? She pinched the bridge of her nose, confused by the ache of tender memories. He loved his wife. She tried to quash the recollection of Peg Leeson’s pearly white skin, repressing any notion that they might be connected. He loved me, she thought forlornly, swallowing back a lump of regret. Then, by way of rational thinking, she tried to convince herself that they were unsuited. But nothing could quell the idea that she would like to see him. I could thank him for sending business my way. She half smiled at her own neediness. And then ask him for money. Charming. She took in a long, slow breath and tried to stop the scalding thoughts, pushing all hopes of Beresford away.
Janey Mack popped her head out into the shop and grinned.
‘You all right?’ she asked.
‘Starving,’ Merriment rallied and smiled.
‘She was like a witch,’ Janey Mack said marching into the shop, pounding her new boots hard on the floor to hear the dandy sound they made.
Janey Mack’s rattle and hum dispelled Merriment’s anxiety. The little girl babbled and twirled and pulled subjects out of the air, intoxicated by her new-found prosperity.
‘What’ll we have for supper?’
‘Fried potatoes,’ Merriment said, and the little girl’s eyes popped out on stalks.
After supper when Merriment was re-bandaging Janey Mack’s hand the little girl looked up at the ceiling and asked, ‘What’s in the third room, off the landing, next door to Solomon?’
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