The Butcher's Hook

by Janet Ellis

  Jane is so full of her answer that she swells as if she’s about to burst. ‘Mr Levener said that Fub’s cousin Margaret arrived. He told me that Fub is sweet on her. Mr Levener said it was best to leave them together. He said she is very—’

  But I cannot hear her any more. I feel as if I am underwater. I am freezing cold, although I’m by the stove and a fire burns in the grate. Jane speaks to me, but her words distort and I cannot make sense of them. ‘Beautiful’ . . . ‘since they were children’ . . . ‘very sweet-natured.’ On she goes, swimming happily while I flounder and sink. I have only one thought: that I must see him, nothing else matters.

  ‘What did Levener bring today?’ I ask, struggling to keep my voice level. She gestures to a linen shroud. When I unwrap it, its meaty contents remind me so forcefully of Dr Edwards’ punctured thigh that I gasp. ‘Not good enough,’ I manage. ‘I must tell him.’

  ‘What is the matter with it, Mistress?’ Jane hurries after me, but I am resolute and outpace her. ‘Not good enough,’ I mutter. I do not mean the meat.

  The ground sticks to my feet, slowing me down. After the rain, the mud and muck combine to make a thick glue. My shoes are overwhelmed with it, making shire-horse hooves of my feet, and it climbs stealthily up my clothing. What would normally take an hour takes two, and by the time I reach Meek Street, I am weary and sore.

  If I had dropped from the skies, Fub could not be more surprised to see me. ‘Anne!’ he cries, before he remembers he should not use my name unless we are alone.

  We are not alone. Summoned by my noisy entrance, a girl stands by him. She blinks when she sees me, then curtseys. Underneath my coating of grime, she can see that my dress is good. ‘Mistress Jaccob. Can I . . . can we help you?’ Fub says.

  He looks from one to the other of us. He does not know which way to turn. The girl and I are like spinning tops. He’ll have to run hard between the two of us to keep us moving. Who would he catch if we stopped?

  ‘Indeed you can.’ I am in no hurry now. ‘Your master delivered an inferior cut to us this morning. Do you know why this happened?’

  While he searches for an answer, I look at the girl. Her skin is such a pure white, it’s as if she carried a lamp in front of her to illuminate her face. Coils of dark hair fall to her shoulders. Her eyes are set apart and open wide. When she smiles at me, the corners of her mouth turn up to describe a neat half-moon, revealing her pearly teeth. She appears wholly delighted with the world about her. If I stood before her holding a basket of kittens, she could not look more entranced.

  ‘Oh,’ she breathes, ‘Mistress Jaccob. You must have walked a very long way. Can I fetch you some water?’ She has a sweet, small voice, like a child’s. You would need to be very close to her to catch everything she says and the closer you got, the further into those blue eyes you’d fall, till you were mired in her syrup. ‘I have not been outside today myself, but the rain must have made quite a quagmire of the streets.’ Her glance falls to my sodden hem.

  ‘No, thank you. I do not mind a bit of mud.’ I greatly wish that I stood here in my finest clothes and had a carriage waiting.

  ‘Frederick says I should be carried everywhere, I have such a dislike of dirt!’ The way she calls him by his proper name seems to add inches to his waist and years to his age. ‘Ever since we were children,’ she continues, ‘Frederick could always tease me by threatening to get my clothes messy.’

  ‘Perhaps you could bring a fresh order before nightfall?’ I speak to him as if she’s not there.

  ‘Before nightfall,’ Fub nods.

  Margaret begins to plait her hair. As she weaves the thick strands, they loop and twist through her fingers, lithe and black as eels.

  With much panting, Levener squeezes through the doorway behind her, Bet following him. Margaret moves towards them as if she is on castors. The hem of her dress sways a perfect inch above the floor.

  The butcher stands beside her, so close he’ll surely baste her with his fat, and slips one broad arm around her waist. ‘Mistress Jaccob!’ he squeaks. ‘Thus you meet my cousin’s daughter. Only let loose in the city because Fub will squire her and keep her from harm.’ He closes one porcine eye in a wink.

  Bet takes up position on the other side of her: they make a daunting triptych. My teeth are on edge. ‘Two little buds, ayee,’ Bet sings, looking from Fub to Margaret, admiring them. ‘And when he’s fully apprenticed, they can ripen together!’

  A rush of sweet saliva floods till my mouth is full. My stomach drops as if through a trapdoor and my head feels light. I am going to be sick. I must not empty my guts in front of this doll and these puppets. I hurry outside, muttering a curt goodbye as best I can.

  Leaning against a wall, out of sight, I bend double and vomit until I’m empty. I ache all over and feel so tired that if I found a bed in the street, I would lie down on it and fall dead asleep. Wiping my mouth where sour bile clings, I wait till I am steady on my feet before I set off home.

  I hear hurrying footsteps behind me as I walk and gather myself close in case a thief follows, then go more quickly until I am running – but the footsteps keep pace. When I feel a hand on my shoulder, I gasp, but only because I know whose hand stops me. Fub has been running, too, he puts his hands flat on his thighs and bends over to catch his breath.

  ‘Anne! You were as fast as a dog after a hare!’ He grabs me and pulls me in to a doorway. We must have all our conversations in lintels or porches, apparently. Both of us are breathing fast.

  ‘What should keep me or slow me down?’ I am trying to be cold, but my anger bounces away like spilled apples.

  ‘Anne,’ he puts his hands on my cheeks and lifts my face, ‘take no notice of that stupid chatter. I am my own man and neither Titus nor Bet nor anyone else will decide my life for me.’

  ‘Are you sure, Frederick?’ I say. ‘She is sweet as a pup and twice as silly. Are you sure you would not like that in your bed tonight?’

  He goes to kiss me but shrinks away. ‘You smell rank!’ He looks at me in disgust.

  ‘Thank you for your sympathy, Fub. I was unwell. I think I must have eaten a maggoty loaf. I am quite recovered now. I shall dine heartily tonight.’

  ‘What is this nonsense about poor meat?’ Fub looks sideways at me. ‘Were you speaking the truth?’

  ‘I wanted to see you, Fub. Jane told me some tale about your cousin. I was . . . I felt . . .’

  ‘Does Jane think we should replace the order, then?’ he shakes his head. ‘You had better be careful who you involve with all this.’

  ‘All this?’ I spit. ‘We are not ‘‘all this’’, Fub.’ I want to cry.

  He does not look at me. ‘Tell Jane you mistook,’ he says, serious and angry. ‘I cannot have Levener think he mis-sold you a whole side of beef. Or Jane, either. There’s too much business in that. That was fine stock and it has swum and run for miles to get here, too.’

  ‘But will you come to me? Tonight?’

  He pauses, rubbing his chin. ‘I cannot. Not on account of Margaret, Anne.’ He sees me flinch.

  ‘Call her that girl, Fub. Or, my cousin. But do not use her name to me. It sounds too much like an endearment. Why may you not come?’

  Fub is chewing his lip, looking at me as if I were an errant child. ‘I must dine with the Leveners,’ he says, reluctantly.

  ‘With her, then?’

  ‘Marg— yes, she will be there. It is a long-held arrangement. I cannot come—‘

  ‘Stay home, then!’ I cut him short. Margaret would not put her lily-white hands on a man’s person and stroke him upright, would she? Give her a little knife and see what she does with it: she’d pare an orange, not chop up a man. Fub cannot possibly choose her over me. It would be like taking a monastic vow, she’d be so chaste and pure. I almost tell him what I’ve done, but there’ll be plenty of time for that. Let his world spin as it does for a litt
le while longer before I change its trajectory with a few words.

  ‘We can deny ourselves one night,’ I say. ‘Next time we meet will be all the better for it.’ And I put my hand to him.

  He laughs. ‘You are bold, we are in the street!’ He does not move my hand away but pushes where I rub. I let him grow and thicken, then stop abruptly.

  ‘Enough, now.’ And I leave him, laughing at his expression. For the second time today, I touch a man and see on his face that dozy acquiescence, that same succumbing ardour. There was no answer from me to Dr Edwards as he wriggled and squirmed; only when Fub grows do I respond. But it turns out that they are much the same in their appetites, those two.

  I look at every man I pass with curiosity and my fingers twitch to tease them. I could easily make trees from all their little acorns. There would be a veritable forest for me to walk home through, if I chose.

  It is growing dark. If Dr Edwards has not been moved yet, he will become first stiff, then wet with dew. His little parcel of food will get stale then mouldy. Insects will crawl on to him and make new homes for themselves. How very interested he would have been in these events; how much he would have liked to witness his own decay. He was always the eager scholar.

  My father is standing in the hall, next to the fireplace. His face is wet and I wonder if he has come in from a rainstorm, although I know I have just walked through dry streets. I realise then that he weeps. His tears have no separate tracks – instead they course in a wide, steady stream like water over a weir. He raises red, swollen eyes at me. He might have been in a fight, so defeated and bruised does he look.

  ‘Oh, Anne,’ he wipes his eyes with his bunched fingertips. ‘I have to tell you such a sad and terrible thing.’

  I run through a list of potential sorrows. There is only one I can think of that might make him weep. The baby must have died. Infants can perish suddenly while they sleep, with no warning or sickening, can’t they? To have two threats to my happiness removed on the same day would seem more than serendipity. If that’s the case, I must have strange gods on my side. I prepare to sympathise with this loss, to muse on her little soul being now with the angels and suchlike, when he cries: ‘Dr Edwards is murdered!’ and I have to stifle my disappointment. Of course, this news has already travelled here.

  For a moment, I cannot think of the best thing to say. Should I ask how he was killed? Or who found him?

  My father looks at me from under his heavy brow, his face wetter than ever. ‘My friend,’ he mutters through the downpour. ‘To be set upon and dispatched while he rested in a meadow. He was not even robbed. What motive could there possibly have been? He was stabbed through the heart a dozen times!’

  How altered this information already is. As one person passed it on to another, each must have embellished what they heard to tell a better tale. They’ll have him dismembered and disembowelled before another day’s done. I stand by my father and pat his arm. The fabric of his coat is so thick I have to repeat the gesture more forcefully twice before he notices.

  ‘He was such a good tutor to you.’ My father inclines his head to me and places his paw over my little mitt; he is already larded with sentiment and enjoying his own performance. ‘And a dear friend to me.’ Dr Edwards would have been surprised by this epithet: my father has never been a man to whisper endearments to the living. ‘Any one of us could be so brutally, cruelly dispatched.’ He sniffs violently. It is his own end he fears and mourns, not Dr Edwards’.

  Jane comes from the kitchen, holding the frill of her blouse to her face as though she fears breathing in the air around the friend of the deceased. ‘Terrible, terrible,’ is all she can manage, throwing the words to us like corn to chickens, then scurrying away.

  ‘This is indeed most dreadful,’ I say, gravely. ‘A fearful death. How are they going to catch the man who did it?’

  ‘They think it must have been several men,’ my father replies, his eyes drying now as he gets to the business of the law. ‘For he would have fought off a single person. He was not a fragile man, after all.’

  But, I think, in a curious way when I slid the knife in he did not resist or cry out my name but rather gave himself up to it. That alone was noble of him at the end. In the future, I might set about raising funds to erect a statue in his memory. It would depict Dr Edwards with his trousers at half-mast, holding a book.

  ‘You smile to remember him, that is good.’ My father regards me almost kindly. ‘It is well to think fondly of him.’

  ‘I shall think of him often,’ I say honestly.

  ‘Anne,’ my father speaks ponderously, as though saying his last words. Unfortunately, they are not. ‘I have spoken to Onions. We have cleared up the misunderstanding. He will call again.’

  I do not trust myself to open my mouth the smallest bit. If I were to make any sound, it would be to shriek like a banshee.

  My father takes my silence for acquiescence. ‘Good, good. Elizabeth is a silly woman. If there is a wrong way of doing things, she’ll take it. She was ever thus,’ he inclines his head, as though what he tells me is benign. ‘I know you are fearful of marriage, but when the time comes . . .’

  I leave him while he is still speaking. Let him speculate on my feelings. He will never know what they are, but fearfulness is not on the list of possibilities.

  My mother joins us for dinner and we all three sit in silence. My father is wallowing in his grief, indulging each heavy sigh and shake of his head. For once, Jane does not have to suffer his comments and something like peacefulness blankets the room.

  I am not calm. How can it be that I decided to take a man’s life, then executed him quite neatly all by myself, and yet I cannot choose my own future? I have a fierce headache, so I peck at my food. After my mother has excused herself and while my father pours himself more wine, I bundle a piece of pie into my skirt to have later, when I feel better.

  All is still and shuttered and I am eating alone in my room, when the house is almost lifted from its foundations by a scream. Brushing grease from my hands and wiping my mouth, I hurry out on to the landing.

  On the floor above stands Jane, in her nightgown. Her shoulders rise and fall with her gasping breath as she sobs and shakes. Grace attempts to comfort her. ‘Ssshhh,’ she murmurs, tucking Jane’s hair into her nightcap as tenderly as you console a wakeful, frightened child.

  I pause for a moment, listening for any other sound in the house, but the noise has only woken me. ‘What on earth is the matter, Jane?’ I ask, climbing the stairs with speed.

  She mutters something, pointing into the dark corner of the stairwell.

  ‘What did she say?’ I ask Grace, hoping to get more sense from her.

  ‘She says she saw a ghost,’ Grace says and both women cling to each other as if the spectre rose again.

  ‘Who would haunt the house? Is it Dr Edwards who has come? What does he want here?’ I look nervously about; perhaps he will write my guilt with his dead hand.

  ‘Dr Edwards?’ Grace looks thoroughly bemused. ‘I don’t know who that is. No, she saw your grandmother, as was recently deceased.’

  ‘She walked out of the wall,’ Jane says. ‘All pale and wan, she was.’

  ‘Whatever you saw, it was not her ghost, Jane.’ I feel my shoulders sink with relief. ‘She will have better things to do in the next life than scuttle round trying to frighten you in this one.’ I hear Grace laugh quietly.

  ‘Why would you think Dr Edwards would haunt us?’ Jane asks me, suddenly brisk. ‘He has his own family to visit.’ She must imagine the dead with a list of addresses, ticking off each one as they call on them.

  ‘I was thinking of the person most recently gone and so violently taken, that’s all. My grandmother lived a good life and died well; her spirit won’t be restless. But a murdered man can’t be at peace so easily, can he? If anyone was going to roam, it would be him.’
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br />   ‘Come back to bed, Jane.’ Grace guides her gently back to the little room they share.

  Alone in the darkness, I shudder, though I am not afraid of Dr Edwards in death any more than I was when he was alive.

  Chapter 22

  My father is to attend Dr Edwards’ funeral. Of course, I may not go, but I decide to walk by the graveyard at the hour of his interment, to see how many and what kind of people mark his passing. The air is unseasonably cold; winter seems to be giving autumn short shrift and promises frosts and ice before too long. The mud is rising from the road in hard, thick ridges and I have to clamber over them. Making my way like this is tiring and I have to watch my step constantly lest I slip.

  Ahead of me, although similarly struggling with the terrain, a boy walks more briskly. He has on a red waistcoat, wearing it over his jacket as it is much too big for him. Something about the colour and cut of it is familiar. With a start, I realise it belonged to Dr Edwards. He wore it on the day of the fair; I had to walk the long route home beside it after he’d sent Fub packing.

  ‘Oy!’ I call to him.

  He turns, his little fists up ready for a challenge if needs be. He nods when he sees me. ‘Dr Edwards’ friend,’ he says, in that grown up voice of his. ‘Dr Edwards as was. Late of this parish. Did you hear of his awful, terrible fate?’

  ‘It’s lucky I did, otherwise you’d be telling me in a strange and jaunty way.’

  ‘I’m not speaking ill of him, only being factual.’ He looks at me carefully, as if deciding how to proceed. ‘Do you want to come to his lodgings, Mistress? You might like a keepsake, as you knew him well.’

  ‘Is there anything left?’ I indicate his garb.

  He looks down at it, disdainfully. ‘No one else would want this. It’s still got his victuals stuck on it. I’m only wearing it to keep me warm from place to place.’

  ‘Have others picked over his belongings?’ We fall in step, as much as we can, as we go over all the little hills and dried runnels.

  The boy shoots me a knowing glance. ‘He did not have visitors. The law has been, to see if his murderer came there and whether they walked out together. But he went off alone. I saw him go.’