An Almond for a Parrot

by Dray Wray

  ‘Mr Quibble,’ said Mr Attaway, ‘was Victor Wrattan’s lawyer when he was accused of participating in the murder of the girls at Mrs Inglis’ school. Mr Quibble, I see, is a signatory to this document. He was a witness at your clandestine marriage, Miss Truegood. I suggest that we investigate Mr Quibble’s part in the murder of your father, and what appears to be a conspiracy to pass off Ralph Spiggot as your husband.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to say,’ said Cook. ‘They didn’t want anyone finding that bit of paper you’re holding. The master told me to keep it safe in case fortune should deal him a better hand. That murderer must have thought he’d have the marriage certificate amongst his papers at the Marshalsea. But he didn’t, because he’d given it to me.’

  My life had turned on a card when I was twelve. That one act had altered everything. How ironic that unwittingly Mr Truegood had married me to the man I have loved most. For my husband, as the wedding certificate stated, was Avery Fitzjohn.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Once I saw the spirits of the dead, but I have never seen your shade. Where are you, my love? Where are you? I see only the threads of memories that are too short to stitch our lives together.

  I stayed at the fairy house after the trial was over. I had no desire to see anyone, go anywhere, do anything but lie in my bed, feeling our baby grow, watching the leaves on the tree outside my window turn red and fall. When they were all gone, I felt, so would all hope of knowing what befell you.

  Queenie tried consoling then turned sharp as was her way. All words, kind or angry, were to me but a reflection of the weather. The days were windy, filled with fog and rain. Mr Crease called my melancholy the black dog of Newgate.

  ‘A hound,’ he said, ‘with its teeth in your soul.’

  My birthday came and went and still the black dog wouldn’t let me go.

  November arrived bitterly cold and near all the leaves had fallen. Only three clung to the one tree I could see. Two fell the night of the storm when the wind howled as loud as all the sorrow in me, rattling the windowpanes. In the morning, the morning of one leaf left on the tree, Sir Henry Slater arrived.

  ‘I insisted on seeing you. Queenie couldn’t bar me and Hope told me to try,’ he said. ‘My dear, you look like a tragic Venus rising from a cloud of counterpanes.’

  ‘I am not good company, sir,’ I said.

  ‘No, but you are a delight for the eye to feast upon. Let me speak and you listen.’

  My maid brought a tray of hot chocolate and its sweet aroma filled the room.

  Sir Henry sat on a chair next to my bed and took a sip. ‘I thought you would be amused to know that the Countess Angelina has unexpectedly cheated her mother and Lord Frederick of their designs and escaped into the arms of Jesus, becoming his bride in a convent of unfulfilled virgins.’

  ‘I wish I could feel some pity for her but I cannot.’

  ‘Indeed. But I haven’t just come to prattle. No, I am here on a serious matter, one that is close to your heart. There is news, Tully. As you refuse to see him, Mr Attaway asked if I would try. He is in urgent need of instructions.’

  ‘If it is about Lord B’s estate, I have no instructions.’

  ‘It is not.’

  ‘Is…is it about Avery?’

  ‘Not directly. But it concerns a certain Mr Quibble who might have some knowledge of his fate.’

  I sat up. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Mr Quibble has been arrested for fraud and debts, and taken to the Marshalsea where he is in the prison block awaiting trial. Mr Attaway thinks there is a good chance that if convicted he will be transported.’

  ‘In the Marshalsea, you say?’

  Colour must have returned to my face, for Sir Henry said, ‘Ah-ha! So you are alive alive-oh. Mr Attaway wants you to know that he is seeing Mr Quibble this afternoon, and he thought, as a woman of strong opinions, that you might wish to join him and ask the lawyer yourself what befell Avery Fitzjohn. But if you are indisposed…’

  I was out of bed. ‘Of course I will join him,’ I said. ‘I have a black dog that needs to be returned from whence it came.’

  ‘I don’t see any dog, black or otherwise,’ said Sir Henry. ‘Is it a riddle? Let me solve it while you dress.’

  I had no thought as to what I might wear and would have put on the first robe that came to hand if Hope hadn’t intervened.

  ‘This is the first time you will be seen in public since your trial. You must make an impression.’

  I chose one of Lord B’s favourites, a deep red gown, printed with peonies, my stomacher let out to accommodate my growing belly. Round my neck I wore a fur muffler. I looked in the glass and could see an outline of who I used to be. By the time I reached the hall I almost felt myself again.

  I asked Ned to accompany me and the three of us set out in Sir Henry’s carriage to Southwark. I could almost smell the Marshalsea before I saw it. All prisons smell the same but this one had the added perfume of the damp Thames air that clung determinedly to its walls.

  Mr Attaway was waiting in his carriage in the prison courtyard. Tubbs was standing outside it, wrapping his arms about him and stamping his feet on the hard ground.

  ‘The air alone here is murderous for a weak chest,’ said Sir Henry.

  ‘Which fortunately, Sir Henry,’ I said as Ned helped me down, ‘you don’t have.’

  ‘Touché, my dear.’

  Sir Henry stayed in his carriage, sniffing his nosegay for fear of catching jail fever.

  Tubbs bowed when he saw me. ‘A bitter day, Miss Truegood.’

  I left Ned with Sir Henry. It had begun to snow. The flakes that landed turned grey, defeated by so much grime. I doubted the building would ever be turned white by the magic of snow.

  We made our way past the gatehouse and into the Marshalsea, a place so full of the mists of ghosts that they seemed to outweigh the living.

  Mr Attaway pulled his scarf up round his face and walked with purpose, unaware that, as he did, he fragmented the spirits.

  ‘There are a lot of people who want to see Mr Quibble,’ said the turnkey. He had a poxed and greedy face, and eyes that stared more to the side than the front. ‘A lot of people. People with grievances, if you gather my meaning.’ Mr Attaway didn’t answer and the turnkey took a new angle to the conversation. ‘This is no place for a lady,’ he said to me. ‘Though we have quite a few as inmates.’ He glared at me when I too failed to respond. ‘You remind me of someone. I’m sure I’ve seen you before.’

  I pulled the veil of my hat a little further down my face.

  We reached the prison quarters that were kept for serious crimes. Here no prisoner was allowed out of his cell except to be taken to trial. We walked down a long corridor with oak doors either end and cells on each side. The turnkey opened a cell door and we were greeted by the smell of shit, the chamber pot having recently been used.

  ‘Take that away,’ Mr Attaway said, wrapping his scarf more tightly round his nose and pointing to the offending item. Tubbs handed the turnkey a coin, a necessary incentive. The turnkey and the smell retreated.

  Mr Quibble was sitting on a low trundle bed. He showed no inclination to stand or even acknowledge our presence.

  ‘Mr Quibble, you are acquainted with Miss Truegood, I think? We are here,’ said Mr Attaway, ‘to ask you for the truth of what happened to Mr Avery Fitzjohn on the day he disappeared.’

  ‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ said Mr Quibble. ‘Now leave me alone.’

  ‘I have reason to believe you do know,’ said Mr Attaway. ‘That and more besides, for in my opinion you are implicated in the perpetration of fraud in connection with Miss Truegood’s marriage.’

  ‘I have not one word to say to you,’ said Mr Quibble.

  As he spoke, I alone could see the ghost of a monstrous man push urgently through the wall into the cell. He looked like a bully back such as would be employed in a cheap whorehouse. He went to Mr Quibble and rested his vast hand on the lawyer’s he
ad. Mr Quibble shuddered though he knew not what at.

  ‘A lie is cheap,’ said Mr Quibble. ‘The truth is costly.’

  ‘I will not give you a penny,’ I said.

  ‘Then you will never know the truth,’ said Mr Quibble.

  The ghost was watching me. ‘He’s mine,’ he said. ‘Leave the black box to me and I will make him sing.’

  By the look he gave me I felt certain of it.

  ‘We are finished here,’ I said to Tubbs. ‘Please call the turnkey.’

  Huffing and puffing, the turnkey arrived. ‘Leaving so soon?’ he said. ‘Does the smell of legal farts offend you?’

  I turned to Mr Quibble who looked amused. ‘By the time the oak door at the end of this corridor closes behind me, it will be too late, Mr Quibble. You will be left with the company of a spirit, a spirit that will terrorise you to the day you die.’

  Mr Quibble trembled in mock amazement. As the cell door closed, I willed the ghost to appear to him.

  ‘Perhaps, madam,’ suggested Tubbs, ‘it would be better if Mr Attaway saw Mr Quibble alone.’

  ‘Knowing Miss Truegood, I doubt that it will be necessary,’ said Mr Attaway, adjusting his spectacles.

  ‘What is a black box?’ I asked Tubbs as we walked slowly away from the cell.

  ‘In the vulgar tongue, it means lawyer.’

  ‘I thought so.’

  ‘That lawyer will go to his grave without exercising his tongue,’ said the turnkey as we reached the end of the corridor.

  He had his key in the last lock and was preparing to let us out when we heard Mr Quibble scream.

  ‘Come back! Madam, come back, I’ll tell you everything. Don’t leave me with him – come back, I beg you.’

  The turnkey looked at us in astonishment. ‘Blimey!’ he said.

  Mr Quibble was still screaming as we arrived at his cell door.

  ‘You stay here,’ said the turnkey. He unlocked it nervously for it sounded as if there was someone inside with Mr Quibble.

  The lawyer was crouched at the back of the cell. His tormentor had a look of triumph on his face.

  ‘Make him go away,’ said Mr Quibble. ‘Please, Miss Truegood, please.’

  ‘What’s rattling your dice box?’ said the turnkey. ‘There ain’t no one here.’

  Mr Attaway nodded at Tubbs who fetched three coins from his pocket and handed them to the turnkey. He took them with a grunt and left us, closing the cell door behind him.

  ‘The truth, Mr Quibble,’ I said. ‘The truth.’

  ‘It will condemn me,’ he said.

  The ghost moved closer to him.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Mr Quibble. He could see the spirit as clearly as I and, never taking his eyes off him, he began. ‘I was introduced to Mr Truegood when he was on the brink of losing everything. Unbeknown to him, he had…he had an asset in his daughter.’ He seemed to waiver for a moment but started again, speaking fluently as lawyers do. ‘My client, the second Lady Fitzjohn, was recently widowed and needed a simple soul to marry her stepson. Frederick, her son by Lord Fitzjohn, was born illegitimately but she was determined he would inherit his father’s title and estate. Lord Fitzjohn had been persuaded by her to insert a clause in his will stating that if his legitimate heir, his son Avery Fitzjohn, married before he reached his majority, the boy would forfeit his inheritance in favour of his half-brother. It wasn’t difficult to arrange. Ply a young gentleman with enough wine and he would marry a goat if you told him too. After the service, Lady Fitzjohn’s brother assured me the boy was being sent abroad and was as good as dead. Mr Truegood was paid off and as far as I was concerned it was the end of the matter.’

  ‘But it wasn’t the end of the matter, was it, Mr Quibble?’ I said.

  The bully back moved closer to the lawyer, looming over him.

  ‘Leave me alone – it’s the truth,’ said Mr Quibble.

  ‘Tell the lady about that vicious grubshite,’ said the bully back.

  Mr Quibble flinched. ‘Some four years after this,’ he said, ‘I renewed the acquaintance of an old client, Victor Wrattan.’

  ‘Tell her where,’ said the bully back.

  ‘I don’t have to,’ said Mr Quibble.

  Tubbs was alarmed for he could not see or hear the ghost, only the effect he had as he lifted up Mr Quibble and threw him against the wall.

  ‘Tell her where!’ barked the bully back.

  ‘Do not concern yourself, Tubbs,’ said Mr Attaway. ‘Miss Truegood has the situation in hand.’

  ‘I tell you, sir,’ said Tubbs, ‘the very devil is in this cell. I feel it, sir, I feel it.’

  ‘At Mrs Morton’s,’ said Mr Quibble. ‘She ran a molly house and engaged me for legal work.’

  ‘And you kept a book of all them that practised sodomy, and you blackmailed them, didn’t you?’ said the bully back.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I did.’

  ‘Yes, you shit, you blackmailed me,’ said the ghost.

  ‘Did you blackmail Victor Wrattan?’ I asked.

  ‘Good Lord, no – I held my life too dear! Mr Wrattan is a violent man, ruled more by his temper than by reason. For all that, he was clever. He told me he’d learned that Mr Truegood’s daughter stood to inherit a fortune on the day she turned eighteen. When I told him about her clandestine marriage, he suggested rather than see a fortune go to waste, we’d both profit if it could be proved that Miss Truegood had in fact been married in the Fleet to his friend Mr Ralph Spiggot. I had in my possession one copy of the original marriage certificate; your father, I assumed, held the other. He was heavily in debt again but couldn’t be persuaded to hand it over. And he couldn’t be relied upon to stay quiet so Wrattan called in a gambling debt and Mr Truegood was brought to this place.’

  ‘And in this place, Victor Wrattan murdered him.’

  ‘That was nothing to do with me,’ said Mr Quibble, quickly. ‘I only wanted the marriage certificate in my hand before I produced a false one showing you were married to Ralph Spiggot. But Wrattan couldn’t find it.’

  ‘You cockroach!’ said the ghost. ‘I should have lifted my boot and crushed you under it when I had the chance.’ He pulled Mr Quibble to his feet. ‘You stand up when you talk to a lady.’

  ‘Go on, Mr Quibble,’ I said, unmoved by his plight.

  ‘My heart,’ said the lawyer. ‘I can’t breathe.’

  ‘Then let me pull you from yourself,’ said the bully back.

  ‘No, not yet,’ said I, firmly.

  ‘Miss Truegood,’ said Tubbs, ‘who is it you are addressing?’

  ‘Quiet, Tubbs,’ said Mr Attaway.

  ‘To complicate matters further,’ continued Mr Quibble, his hand clutched to his chest, ‘Avery Fitzjohn, who I thought dead, reappeared, very much alive, wanting his clandestine marriage dissolved so he could remarry. Neither he nor Lord Frederick knew the name of the girl he had married in the Fleet. At this time, I was continually engaged by Lord Frederick to rescue him from the many scrapes he found himself in.’ Mr Quibble, I could see, enjoyed recounting this part of his tale for some colour came back to his grey features and he let go of his chest. ‘He never paid my bills. He came to me with a cock-and-bull story of how he was going to steal the affections of a wealthy French countess from his brother, marry her and restore his fortunes. The man is a piss-head with feathers for brains and any fool could see that the countess would never marry him. But Lord Frederick was immoveable. He wanted rid of his brother.’ Quibble turned to me. ‘There. I’ve told you the truth. Make this thing be gone.’

  ‘When I couldn’t pay you, you had me arrested,’ said the bully back. Tubbs, for the first time since I had known him, had stopped buzzing and was still, white with fear.

  ‘Tell her what she wants to know,’ said the bully back. He pressed Mr Quibble to the floor.

  In a whisper, Mr Quibble said, ‘I, too, wanted Mr Fitzjohn gone. I sent a message to him, telling him I had discovered the name of his wife and asking him to call on me. Lord Fred
erick arranged for him to be accosted before he reached my chambers. I wasn’t interested in what the thugs did with his brother as long they removed him.’ Mr Quibble was on his knees. ‘That is the truth – I swear I never saw him that day.’

  ‘Because of you,’ said the ghost, ‘they hanged me.’

  ‘Madam,’ screamed Mr Quibble, ‘make him go away – please.’

  It was as if the core of me had turned to ice.

  I said, ‘Three times, Mr Quibble, you conspired to ruin Avery Fitzjohn, and twice your conspiracies came close to ending my life.’

  ‘He is mine,’ said the bully back. ‘He belongs this side.’

  I nodded.

  We left the Marshalsea. The black dog had found its rightful master.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  This, then, should be the end of my letter to you. A letter that has no address other than a family vault. Yet I cannot bring myself to let the ink dry on the final full stop. It would be as good as admitting that you are dead. I refuse to let you become a ghost; these words be your only flesh. I have travelled too far with you at the very heart of me. The love I have for you will last, it must last until I meet the ferryman.

  This is the only way I can talk to you. Your voice is lost to me, your replies I will never hear. I often dream of the night I was taken to the Fleet to be married. I see you coming from behind the curtain.

  ‘Marriage is murder,’ you say and put your hands up to remove your mask.

  I long to see your face but at the same time am filled with dread that all that is left behind the mask is a skull.

  I loved you, I love you, and the love that was so precious to us had nothing to protect it. We were but puppets, our strings pulled by the desires of others, used for their cruel design alone. I will not easily let that love be devalued. I will not let go of my belief that you are alive somewhere. But where? And why don’t you come to me?

  I called our daughter Ava. Her birth changed me, gave my world a weight that it hadn’t possessed since you vanished. The love I feel for this small stranger who looks like you and daily unwraps into a blue-eyed, curly-haired little girl surprises even me. When she smiles, you smile back at me. She has helped in part to dull the madness of desire.