Beloved Poison

by E. S. Thomson

  Lily sighed. ‘Dr Bain came back about an hour, an hour and a half after you’d left the first time. He seemed – different.’

  ‘How “different”? Agitated? Anxious? Afraid?’

  ‘All those things. I never seen him like it before. Usually he din’t seem bothered about nothing. He sat in that chair and said “Not this again,” and I said “What?” and he shook his head and said “Never mind what.” Then he went all silent and just stared at the fire. Well, I wondered what were the matter. It were a bit peculiar. So I gets up and I goes to the window and looks out at the fog and just to be sayin’ somethin’ I says “Look how thick its getting! Mrs R says it’s a night for the Abbot when it’s like this,” an’ ain’t I glad not to have to go out to look for trade on such a night—’

  ‘You told him a tall story?’ I said.

  ‘It ain’t a story,’ said Lily, ‘it’s the truth. And I didn’t tell it. It’s Mrs Roseplucker’s story and she told it. She remembers it. Just you ask her. She’ll tell you. She were there, back then when the Abbot was abroad.’

  ‘What’s this got to do with Dr Bain?’ I snapped.

  ‘That’s what I’m tellin’ you,’ said Lily sulkily. ‘I’m tellin’ you what I said to Dr Bain. I happened to mention the Abbot—’

  ‘And did Dr Bain ask?’ said Will. ‘Did he ask about the Abbot too?’

  ‘Seemed mighty interested,’ said Lily. ‘Asked me all about it. But I said it was for Mrs Roseplucker to tell, not me. Then he gives me the coffin and says “Look after this for me. Keep it hid and don’t show it to no one till I come back for it. Unless anythin’ happens to me.”’

  ‘Like what?’ I said. ‘Did he say what he was expecting to happen?’

  ‘No. Just said that I were to give it to “young Mr Jem at St Saviour’s Apothecary”.’ She shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘I thought it were a bit peculiar like, but there’s many a gentleman what’s odd in his ways. It’s best not to ask ’em too many questions, so I just smiles and says “Yes, sir, o’course I will, sir.”’ She got off the bed and crossed the room to fling another lump of greasy coal onto the fire. ‘P’raps he thought the Abbot were after him, too.’

  Lily turned to me. ‘Look, I know he were your friend, and it’s sad to lose friends.’ She smiled, but her expression was bitter. ‘I should know. There’s not many what lasts long in this game. If the pox don’t get you first there’s only the streets once you’re too old for a house like this. So I’m sorry he’s dead – sorry for you.’

  I nodded. But they were just words, and Dr Bain simply another customer. ‘Did he pay you to look after the coffin?’ I said.

  ‘A thick ’un,’ said Lily with a grin. She plunged a hand into her pocket and drew out a sovereign. ‘I’d not do nothing for nobody otherwise.’ I nodded, and handed her a shilling. It was all I had left in my pocket. Lily looked at it in disgust. ‘P’raps you ought to save that for Joe Silks.’

  ‘Joe Silks?’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s got the other one.’

  I frowned. ‘What other one?’

  ‘The other box. There were two. Dr Bain said the other one was with Joe Silks. Lives in Prior’s Rents—’

  ‘I know where he lives,’ I said.

  ‘Well then,’ said Lily. She turned her back, her expression sulky. ‘You know where to go then, don’t you?’

  As patrons of Mrs Roseplucker’s, we were supposed to leave by the back door. But I was not yet ready to go, and I led Will back towards the parlour. The place was warmer than ever. The virgins had appeared and were sitting side by side, slumped on the ragged brocade sofa in poses that suggested a complete absence of stays. Their legs were parted sloppily beneath their skirts, and their expressions were bored. Both held a pamphlet. One had folded hers into the shape of a bird, the other, the girl who had brought the coffin to the apothecary, was using hers to fan her face. It was one of Mrs Magorian’s favourites: WHAT IS WOMANHOOD?

  ‘Has Mrs Magorian been here?’ I asked.

  ‘You mean that interfering doctor’s wife?’ said Mrs Roseplucker, staring at me accusingly over the top of her penny blood. ‘She was here all right. Her and her little troupe of ladies. Telling me how to run my own house.’ She shook her head. ‘They should come in the evening and hand out them leaflets to the gentlemen upstairs. They might find they knows one or two of ’em quite well.’

  ‘And Eliza? Was Eliza with her?’

  ‘That pretty girl? The young one?’ Mrs Roseplucker’s horrible old lips parted in a leer. ‘Worried what she might say if she knew you was here?’

  How glad I was that Will and I had been upstairs. Eliza thought well of me, she trusted me and loved me like a brother. Imagine if she had found me in a brothel! I would appear brutish and hypocritical, no better than any other man she knew. And yet I was not like them. I was not like any of them. All at once I wanted to shout it out, to declare myself to anyone who would listen – but I didn’t.

  ‘Eliza. That her name, is it?’ Mrs Roseplucker frowned, and put down her dog-eared copy of The Vampyre Returns. ‘Looked just like one o’ Mrs Goldberg’s girls,’ she said. ‘I never forget a face, though there’s been many what’s paid me to pretend otherwise. Fanny Bishop, that’s it! Mrs Goldberg died a long time ago and I don’t know where young Fanny ended up but she looked just like your Eliza.’ She laughed, a peculiar rasping sound, like the scratching of a yard brush. Then she added, ‘She’ll never have you, you know.’

  ‘I know that,’ I muttered. ‘And she’s not my Eliza. She’s not anyone’s.’

  ‘Ain’t she?’ said the old madam. ‘That’s what you think. She’s bin plucked, that one, you can tell it a mile off! Din’t you know?’ She leered. ‘You ain’t as clever as all that then, are you?’ She sat back, shaking her head. ‘Fanny Bishop,’ she murmured. ‘Why, I ain’t thought about her in years. Pretty girl. Leastways she was till she got her teeth bashed in one night. Mrs Goldberg weren’t quite so partic’lar as I am about what sort o’ gen’lemen she let into her house.’

  ‘Perhaps it was the Abbot,’ I said.

  ‘The Abbot?’ Mrs Roseplucker turned her watery eyes upon me. ‘Well now, why’d you go and mention him, I wonder?’

  ‘Can you tell us about him?’ said Will.

  ‘Oh, yes, tell us about the Abbot,’ cried one of the virgins, sitting up. ‘There’s nothing else to do and you tell such a good story, Mrs R. Go on. Please.’

  ‘It makes me shiver,’ said the other. ‘Even if I’ve heard it a dozen times. Tell us again.’

  Mr Jobber, who had been sitting motionless behind the parlour door, clapped his hands like some gigantic village idiot. The girls pulled their chairs closer.

  ‘Ten shillings,’ said Mrs Roseplucker.

  ‘Ten shillings?’ I said. ‘For a story?’

  ‘It was worth that much to your dead man.’ Mrs Roseplucker looked at me and grinned. Her wig, that tangled nest of ringlets, had slipped back. The scabs on her scalp matched her scarlet dress. ‘And you wants to know what I told him, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, it’s not worth ten shillings to me,’ I said.

  ‘Ain’t it then?’ Mrs Roseplucker licked her lips. ‘Don’t you be so sure o’ that, Mister Jem.’

  She leaned forward in her chair, and waited; her scarlet skirts smouldering in the heat of the fire. Silence fell. No one sniffed or coughed, no one fidgeted. All eyes were fixed upon her. In the grate, a lump of coal shifted and a belch of yellowish smoke rolled out. I had no money at all, other than the shilling Lily had refused. I turned to Will. He was already rummaging in his pockets.

  Mrs Roseplucker grabbed at Will’s half-sovereign, stowing it away in some secret nest beneath the tattered frills and flounces of her dress. ‘It was a long time ago now, my dears,’ she said, settling back on her cushions. ‘But no one knows better than I what terror the Abbot brought to St Saviour’s parish. They said he was a ghost, a spirit tormented by the wretchedness that had come to these once-proud street
s; streets that ladies and gentlemen had once walked down and where fine carriages had passed; where orchards and gardens and fields had been laid out, as rich and green as Eden itself.

  ‘But those places had vanished beneath the city. They were rendered foul and pestilent, filled with stench and decay, the residents given over to lust and greed. The Abbot of St Saviour’s, so they said, turned in his grave to see his beautiful grounds so despoiled, and he rose up from his tomb to walk the earth, weeping for those lost and innocent times.’

  Mrs Roseplucker’s small moist eyes were fixed upon me. She spoke to the room, but I knew she was telling her story to me. And she had chosen that time and place, that audience, for a reason. After all, she could quite easily have refused to say anything.

  ‘What was he looking for, this ghostly abbot? Some said he was driven by sorrow to walk the parish until he found innocence and truth.’ Mrs Roseplucker gave a grin, and a gentle wheezing laugh. ‘Well, my dears, he’d be looking a long time before he found much of that around here. And those who thought it were fools.’ Her voice grew harsh. ‘For the Abbot of St Saviour’s was as wicked as the rest of them, and he was lookin’ for a young girl to slake his appetites. Yes, missy, you might well gasp, though I know you’ve heard it a hundred times. For the Abbot was no more a ghost than you or I, though it suited him well enough to let others think so. An’ sure enough he seemed like a ghost to those what saw him. Fast, he was. Flittin’ through the fog without a sound, silent as the night itself.’

  ‘He weren’t a ghost at all, then?’ whispered one of the virgins.

  ‘That’s right, my dear,’ said Mrs Roseplucker. ‘They saw him from afar, a dark, hooded shadow drifting through the fog and so he seemed a ghost more than a man. They said those who saw him hadn’t long for this world, as the Abbot had seen their sinful ways and had marked them out for death.’

  I recognised Mrs Speedicut’s version of the tale, and thought of my own bald and colourless rendition, delivered to Will in the chapel beneath the herb drying room. But Mrs Roseplucker’s adaptation was vividly coloured by the bloodthirsty realism of Reynolds’ Penny Weeklies. A mere ghost story would never do. I glanced at Will. Were we wasting our time here? But he was listening intently.

  ‘Carry on, Mrs Roseplucker,’ he said. ‘You are quite the Scheherazade.’

  Mrs Roseplucker frowned. ‘The what?’

  ‘Do get on,’ I said. ‘The Abbot. You say he wasn’t a ghost at all?’

  ‘Who was ’e then?’ cried the other girl. ‘Who was ’e, Mrs Roseplucker?’

  ‘Nobody knows,’ said Mrs Roseplucker. ‘But he were a man right enough. And he liked young girls too. How do I know? Cause I were one of ’em, that’s how!’

  ‘You?’ The word burst from me before I could stop myself.

  ‘I weren’t always like this,’ snapped Mrs Roseplucker. ‘I were a beauty once. Men called on me day and night. The King himself asked who I was!’

  There was a moment of silence while we all looked at the wretched pox-ridden Mrs Roseplucker and tried to imagine beauteousness. It was too much for the imagination.

  ‘Never mind about that,’ thundered Mrs Roseplucker. ‘I were a beauty and that’s all you need to know.’

  ‘So what happened?’ I said.

  ‘I was walking towards Fishbait Lane. It was dark that night, dark as pitch. No moon, and the fog was up, thick as you like – great curtains o’ the stuff, sometimes lifting a bit, then falling thicker than ever. It choked me to breathe and neither light nor lantern made no difference to how far you could see.’ Her voice dropped to a low and husky whisper. Her eyes were wide in her skeleton face, her arms stretched towards us, bony hands projecting from the stained flounces of her crimson sleeves as though she was back in the past, groping fearfully through the Georgian fog. The effect was both unnerving and dramatic. ‘I was lost,’ she whispered. ‘Lost in the very streets I knew as well as I knew my own body.

  ‘I stopped and waited for a moment. Perhaps the fog would lift and I would be able to get my bearings. But it was too thick. And cold! Cold as the grave.’ She shivered. ‘And that’s when I felt it.’

  The clock ticked. Mrs Roseplucker looked around at the faces turned towards her, allowing the questions to grow in our minds.

  ‘Felt what, Mrs R?’ cried one of the virgins, unable to bear it any longer. ‘Felt what?’

  ‘I knew there was someone nearby,’ whispered Mrs Roseplucker. ‘I could feel him. And if I listened hard enough I could hear him too. Breathin’. In and out. In and out. In . . . and out. Close, but invisible. And his breath was shaking, like from excitement, or fear. And I heard his steps. Quiet, they were, and slow; creeping footsteps as though he were walking on the very edges of his shoes. Coming closer? I couldn’t tell. Behind me? I couldn’t tell that neither. I cried out. “Who’s there?” No answer came. But I weren’t alone any more. I knew it from the chills on my neck and the feel of my hair standing on end.

  ‘I waited. Nothing happened. No one came at me, and after a while I says to myself “Well, my girl, are you going to stand here all night like a dog tied to a tree? Get home to your bed right this minute!” I took five paces – and as soon as I did, I knew he was there. I heard those footsteps again. Faster now and nearer, nearer all the time, no matter how I ran. Behind me!’ Mrs Roseplucker’s voice rose to a shriek. ‘I turned, and there he was. Tall and black as night, cloaked from head to foot, bearing down on me in his terrible dark hood.’

  ‘It were the Abbot,’ shouted Mr Jobber suddenly. It was the first time I had ever heard him speak. His voice was a great, deep bellow, his eyes wide with horror as he rose to his feet. ‘Run, Mrs Roseplucker! Run for your life!’

  ‘I tried to run, my dear,’ said Mrs Roseplucker. ‘I tried to run but it was too late. He had his hands on me, round my throat, then over my mouth and nose. But I was young and strong then and I’d been expecting him, and, bless you, but it weren’t the first time I’d had to fight a man off. He held me tight, but I wriggled like an eel. I stamped my feet and jabbed my elbows. I had a hat pin in my pocket and I poked ’im, hard! Lord knows but that ghost could scream, and scream he did. He let me go just a bit and I got away, and I’ve never run so fast in all my life. I ran and ran, and as soon as I saw the infirmary lights I knew where I was.’

  ‘So who was he?’ I said.

  ‘No one knows,’ said Mrs Roseplucker. ‘They kept seeing him, though, when the fog was up. For years he came and went. And the girls disappeared. Street girls. No one cared whether they lived or died, and maybe they’re alive still, somewhere about, but they disappeared from St Saviour’s parish all the same.’ She shrugged. ‘Then he vanished.’

  ‘When did he vanish?’ said Will. ‘Can you remember?’

  ‘Years ago now. Some says they see him still. When the fog’s up. But I don’t believe it.’ She shook her head. ‘No one’s seen the Abbot for twenty years or more.’

  ‘I’ve seen him.’ We turned, all of us. Lily stood on the threshold in her shift and shawl, her face pale as a corpse beneath her tangled yellow hair. ‘I saw him,’ she said. ‘The Abbot. Out in the street. That night Dr Bain came.’

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Why didn’t Dr Bain come to me if he was worried about something?’ I could not help but feel jealous. ‘Why did he choose a whore and a street urchin over his closest friend?’

  ‘Maybe there were things he didn’t want to talk to you about.’

  ‘That doesn’t make me feel any better,’ I said.

  ‘Well, as he’s not here to explain himself, perhaps, as his closest friend, you should do him the courtesy of trusting his motives.’

  I fell silent. He was right, of course. How foolish I was to feel snubbed by a dead man.

  ‘So,’ said Will. ‘We must try to follow Dr Bain’s way of thinking.’

  ‘He might not have wanted to speak to me about his fears. I accept the point. But what other reasons might there be for his behaviour?’


  ‘Perhaps he was afraid that he would put you in danger if he told you anything,’ said Will. ‘So he took some precautions. He may well have resolved to explain himself the next day – I doubt he expected death to come quite so promptly, even if he was afraid of something, or someone.’

  ‘Mm.’ I was still not convinced.

  ‘You said it yourself,’ said Will. ‘A whore and a street urchin. Who would guess that a doctor might entrust anything to such an unlikely pair? Who would ever find out but you – assuming Dr Bain was not able to reclaim his secrets for himself.’

  ‘It makes sense, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘I think we can assume Dr Bain found something in the coffins when he returned from Mrs Roseplucker’s. Then he split up his discovery, and deposited the knowledge with two separate people, so that if anything did happen, he might trust them to tell you, and trust you to figure it out.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that I had anything more than the most slender of acquaintances with Dr Bain, but despite his flaws he struck me as a good man – a good friend – and an intelligent one.’

  For a while we walked together in silence. We were the same height, and our stride measured the same distance. We were hardly ever out of step when we were together. I said, ‘The woman who visited him the night he died – I wonder how on earth she got him to ingest aconite?’

  ‘Are you sure that’s what killed him?’

  ‘The signs are unmistakable. Surely he would not be so naive as to eat or drink anything she had given him. Unless he had no suspicions.’ I shook my head. ‘But perhaps we are trying to run before we can walk. The question is, who was she?’

  ‘She was Mrs Catchpole,’ said Will. ‘Remember what she said at Dr Bain’s funeral? “He has tricked them all. He was sleeping, only sleeping. I saw him, and I knew.”’