The Unseeing

by Anna Mazzola

  “Listen, Bailey, I’m not here to reprimand or punish you, and I’m nothing to do with the man I suspect you’re afraid of, James Greenacre.”

  As soon as he said the name, the boy tried to get up to run again. “No, please listen,” Edmund said. “Greenacre is dead. He was hanged. And I wasn’t sent by him. I’m a friend of Sarah Gale’s.”

  The boy’s wide eyes searched his face.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Edmund said. He had come armed—he removed from his pocket a twist of acidulated drops. He unfurled the brown paper, removed one of the sweets and put it in his own mouth, then held the bag out to the boy. Hesitating, Bailey reached out a thin hand and snatched one of the sweets.

  “You liked Sarah, didn’t you?” Edmund was not sure why he was talking about her in the past tense.

  “She were kind,” Bailey said eventually. “She’d give me things sometimes.”

  “She would want you to tell me the truth about what you know.”

  “I don’t know nothing,” he repeated, his eyes round with fear.

  Edmund smiled, his breath still labored. “You run fast, fastest round here, I’ll wager.”

  The boy did not reply.

  “You’ve been watching me, haven’t you?” Edmund said. “You’re good at watching. I’ll lay a crown you see things the other children are too slow to see.”

  The boy nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “That man, that man you’re afraid of, he’s dead now. Do you understand? He can’t hurt you. Did he say he would hurt you?”

  The boy looked around warily, and took another sweet in his hand. His nails were blackened with dirt. For some time there was just the sound of him sucking the sugar drop.

  “Bailey, it’s important you tell me what you saw, because you’re the only person who did see. You want to help Sarah, don’t you?”

  The boy nodded eagerly and Edmund felt a twinge of guilt. “Were you at the house on Christmas Eve, Bailey? Did you see something?”

  The boy pulled at his grubby shirt collar. “Mam locked me outside one night just before Chrissmas.”

  “Christmas Eve?”

  The boy nodded. “I was sitting on the steps.”

  “Yes?”

  “I ’eard shouting come from in Mr. Greenacre’s ’ouse.”

  “Who was shouting?”

  “Mister and some woman. Maybe the lady which come a few weeks before. I got closer to the door to lissen, which was when he comes out. He didn’t see me, mind. Just hooked it.”

  “Greenacre?”

  “Yes. It was snowing by then and I tried to get back into our ’ouse but the door was locked.”

  “So?”

  “So I crawled inter the little shed in the front of Mr. Greenacre’s garden. There were nowhere else for me to go, see…”

  “And what happened then?”

  “I saw ’er comin’ up the drive.”

  Edmund’s stomach dropped. “Saw who, Bailey?”

  “Miss Gale, sir.”

  He felt as though he were falling from a great height. “Sarah? You’re sure it was her?”

  “I’m sure, sir. It were dark, but I’ve seen ’er so often…”

  “What time was this?”

  “Late. Ten o’clock, p’raps?”

  “Could you hear or see what happened inside the house?”

  “There were more shouting. I could only ’ear part of what they said. They used bad words.”

  “Two women?”

  The boy nodded.

  “What did they say?”

  His urgent tone must have frightened the boy, as he shrank back and murmured, “I don’t know, sir. I don’t know nothing.”

  Edmund tried to keep the panic out of his voice. “Bailey, please try to recall what was said. You won’t get into any trouble.”

  The boy appeared to think for a moment. “The other woman, she called Sarah a bold-faced slut and a whore too. Things like that.”

  “And Sarah? Could you hear what she said?”

  Bailey shook his head. “She were more quiet. She called the other woman a liar, I think. They was juss fightin’. And then they stopped.”

  Edmund closed his eyes. “Did you see Sarah leave?”

  “No, I never. I went back home then and Mam let me in.” Edmund took out his handkerchief and rubbed the sweat from his face. He felt slightly delirious and wondered if he were falling ill.

  “Did you see Greenacre return home?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “And you promise me you’re telling the truth?”

  “Wish I may die if I ain’t. I’m just sayin’ what I saw.”

  After a time, Bailey said, “This won’t get her into trouble, will it? She were always kind to me.”

  Edmund stared at the boy briefly and then handed him the rest of the bag of sweets. He bent closer toward him. “It was good that you told me this, but it’s important you don’t tell anyone else. Do you understand?”

  The boy nodded.

  They wandered together back to Carpenter’s Buildings. The lane was deserted, dust, straw, and scraps of paper blowing up and down it in the breeze. After the boy had returned to his home, Edmund stood looking at Greenacre’s house with its windows shuttered against the world. So Sarah had been here on the night of the murder. What had she seen and done? Was she in the house when Hannah died? Had Sarah herself killed her?

  If he had looked closely he might have seen the clues, the mismatching pieces. Instead, he had chosen to create his own picture—a picture that was entirely wrong. He had criticized his father for his hypocrisy, but he was just as bad: skewing the facts to meet his own ends. The torn bill in the window flapped in the wind and a door creaked. A man came out of one of the adjoining houses and stood in the pathway staring at him, his arms folded. Edmund had been so certain and now the ground shifted beneath him, as though he were at sea. He pulled his jacket collar closer around his neck and walked back along the silent street.

  40

  “I closed my lids, and kept them close,

  And the balls like pulses beat;

  For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky

  Lay dead like a load on my weary eye,

  And the dead were at my feet.”

  —The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798

  Early the following morning, the first mate ordered all of the women to line up on the quarterdeck for the surgeon to examine them. Sarah’s flesh goose-pimpled in the morning air. She pulled her shawl tighter around her.

  “New regulations,” the surgeon said as he walked along the row of shivering women. He was a slight man, perhaps forty years old, in a black uniform with large brass buttons. “Before we leave, we are required to check that you are fit to make the journey. There have been complaints.”

  Complaints, Sarah assumed, from the authorities in Australia, tired of receiving convicts riddled with disease and incapable of work.

  The surgeon tried to inject authority into his voice, but he sounded nervous. She wondered if this was his first voyage or whether he knew what he was in for. He made his way along the line of women who stood bracing themselves against the wind, wrapping capes or wretched pieces of material around them. Pausing at each one, he asked respectfully for the woman to open her mouth as he placed a stick on her tongue so that he could see inside. He looked carefully at their hands and arms, leaning in close and asking questions quietly. Then he nodded, scribbled something in a little notebook, and moved on.

  Sarah noticed that, as the surgeon carried out his inspection, so the crew were carrying out theirs: looking over the women as though they were horses at a fair, muttering to one another and sniggering. Evidently they were picking out their choices. She reached her hand into her cloak and felt the reassuring cold touch o
f metal: the knife that her sister had concealed there, resourceful to the last.

  When the surgeon reached Sarah, he said, “Name, please.”

  “Sarah Gale.”

  She saw him tense. She thought he might ask her if she was “that Sarah Gale” but he merely glanced at her. She could not read his judgment.

  “If you wouldn’t mind opening your mouth for me…”

  Close up, she could see that his face was still smooth. Dark hairs stood out from the pale skin of his wrists.

  “Very good. Have you had any illnesses in the past year: Cholera? Typhus? Anything more personal?”

  Sarah shook her head. If there was something wrong with her, it was not of her body.

  “And is there any medical issue with which you need my help?”

  Yes, Sarah thought, I would like you to stop the nightmares, the waking visions, the images of a dead woman’s face that haunt me day and night. I would like you to look inside my mind and tell me what is wrong.

  But she said, as she had said to the judge at the trial, “Thank you, sir, but there is nothing.”

  The surgeon took her hand and turned it over. His touch was gentle. Then he let it drop and noted something in his little book. He moved on.

  • • •

  At ten o’clock, the women and crew assembled on the quarterdeck for “church”—the captain’s sermon. In other boats this might have been given by the chaplain, but there was no chaplain, and the surgeon was no public speaker.

  “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered,” the captain read, his hair blowing in his face. “Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile. When I kept silence, my bones waxed old…” Some of his words were stolen by the wind and carried over the water.

  “…Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.”

  The day had brightened and Sarah looked out across the prow at the millions of dots of light dancing on the Thames. Beside her, George squirmed.

  “The eyes of the Lord are upon you,” the captain was saying.

  And what, Sarah wanted to ask, is the point of him watching us if he does nothing to protect us? If he just watches a father abuse his daughter without intervening? If he watches a man grind a woman into the ground without stopping him? If he watches a woman die without stemming the blood? She had been told all her life that God was watching her, but it never made her feel protected or loved, only guilty and afraid. She looked at George, still fidgeting beside her. She did not want him to grow up under the same burden. He deserved to be free. He deserved to be happy. Could she give him that, at least?

  “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow,” the captain continued. “Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

  It had always struck her as such a beautiful passage, but could scarlet sins really be whitened? Surely there would always be a dark stain on the snow. It had been snowing the evening that Hannah Brown had died. As the captain spoke, Sarah’s mind slipped and returned to that night. All at once she was there, watching the flakes falling thicker and faster, her heart pounding, her mind screaming out:

  What have I done? What have I done?

  41

  “Vidocq, for example, was a good guesser, and a persevering man. But, without educated thought, he erred continually by the very intensity of his investigations. He impaired his vision by holding the object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, but in so doing he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a whole.”

  —“Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Edgar Allan Poe, 1841

  By the time he reached his chambers, the initial shock had worn off, leaving Edmund with a residual nausea. He knew he would have to tell Lord Russell that Sarah had been at Greenacre’s house on the night Hannah Brown was murdered. He had presented a Government Minister with a report that was patently untrue and it was now his professional duty to correct it. The consequences of fulfilling that duty were, however, almost too painful to contemplate. Edmund presumed that the Home Secretary would order that Sarah be retried for her part in the murder, but he might simply direct that she be hanged forthwith. Lord Russell had evidently been reluctant to commute the sentence at all, and, once he discovered Sarah had not only lied during the trial but in her petition to him and during the subsequent investigation, he might decide to dispense with her as soon as possible.

  Edmund felt a knot growing in the pit of his stomach. Sarah had deceived him—she had drawn him in and duped him, had looked into his eyes and lied. What was worse was that he himself was partly to blame: he had lost sight of what was real and allowed himself to become infatuated with the woman he was supposed to be investigating. Had she intentionally led him to believe that she cared for him, or had he just imagined all of that?

  “Will you be dining with us this evening?” Bessie had opened his study door and stood before him in her light blue dress.

  “I would be grateful if you would knock before just marching in here.”

  Bessie sighed. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Edmund, what is it that you do in here that’s so secret?”

  “I am merely asking for some privacy.”

  “Privacy?” She gave a high laugh. “Edmund, I barely see you anymore. And I have very little idea of what goes on in your private life. You’ve done your best to ensure that.”

  “Can you blame me, when you are constantly spying on me?”

  “Edmund, I’m not spying on you. I’m just trying to understand what’s going on, to fathom what’s happening to our marriage. You hardly speak to me these days.”

  Edmund did not respond.

  “Is it her?” Bessie asked quietly.

  “Is it who?”

  “Oh, please don’t play games with me. We both know who I’m talking about. Are you in love with her?”

  “What a question!”

  “Is it such a ridiculous question?”

  Edmund exhaled and turned away.

  “Is she in love with you?” Her voice was little more than a whisper.

  Edmund laughed. “On the contrary, my dear, she has tricked and undermined me. She has played me for a fool. There! Are you pleased now?”

  “Of course I’m not,” Bessie said. “But I did try to warn you. I told you she might well be lying but you wouldn’t listen.”

  “Ah, yes. My wife: the legal expert. My wife: the investigator.”

  “Well,” she said softly, “it seems I’ve been a mortal sight more observant than you.”

  Edmund felt a flush of anger and shame spread over his face. “Leave me.”

  “Edmund, please be reasonable.”

  “Please leave this room.” He could no longer bear to see her—she seemed at that moment to represent everything that had gone wrong, all the ways in which he had failed, all the ways in which his father had controlled him.

  Bessie stepped forward, her arms stretched toward him, and all at the same time Edmund, emotion rising within him, moved to push her away. The next moment she was on the floor, her face white with shock.

  “My God, Edmund. What’s happened to you?”

  Edmund stared at her distraught face and then looked down at his own hands as though they were no part of him. “Bessie, I’m…”

  Holding her skirts, she struggled to her feet.

  “Bessie, I’m so sorry.”

  He shut his eyes. In a moment of clarity, he saw that he had been ignoring and rebuffing her for months: his own wife. He was little better than his own father. “I’m so very sorry,” he murmured.

  But when he opened his eyes, Bessie had gone, leaving the door swinging open.

  • • •

  She did not appear for the rest of the evening. Edmund ate alone and then lingered outside the n
ursery door, listening to her speaking softly to Clem. He knew from the tone of her voice that she was reading him a bedtime story and he felt a rush of guilt as he realized he had not read a book to Clem for weeks.

  He made himself up a poor sort of bed with his coat and some cushions on the floor of his study. As he lay awake, the dull pressure of an approaching headache between his eyes, Edmund wondered if perhaps he was going mad. He had tried to keep everything ordered in his mind: to consider the evidence rationally. But now his thoughts were confused fragments—snowflakes whirling in a blizzard.

  As the night lightened into morning, he tried to recall the whole of Sarah Gale’s history as she had told it to him: her lonely childhood, their flight to London, her life as a poor seamstress, her miserable marriage. Perhaps, he thought, the entire thing had been a fabrication: a series of lies stitched neatly together to elicit his sympathies, to portray her as the innocent victim. Maybe, he thought with a shiver, Sarah knew all about his mother—all about his own feelings of guilt—and had chosen the role of abused woman for that very reason. Yes, she must have known, from what his father had told her, that it was the key to getting him to trust her.

  Edmund watched the shadow from the candle dancing on the smoke-stained ceiling. He felt like a cat who had been outwitted by a mouse, but there was still time to claw her back.

  42

  “As Lightning to the Children eased

  With explanation kind

  The Truth must dazzle gradually

  Or every man be blind—”

  — “Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant,” Emily Dickinson, 1868

  The first mate ducked belowdecks, and the women, sitting at the long deal table, grew silent.

  “Prisoner Gale!”

  Sarah’s heart dipped. From around her came a rustling of whispers as she stood up from the table and came forward. The first mate stretched his thin, colorless lips into an unpleasant smile.

  “You’re wanted up there,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the deck. “You’re to come with me.”

  He insisted on her climbing the ladder before him, and Sarah could feel his breath on her neck, his eyes on her back. As they ascended, she heard voices above, and as the voices grew nearer, she realized that she recognized one of them.