The Poison Thread

by Laura Purcell

  I did not despair of her letting me perform such an experiment. The picture she presented was one of tranquillity. Her hands moved smoothly as she picked at clumps of oakum. Certainly, the arms were muscular, but not in a menacing way, the definition of the biceps being a natural occurrence in those who work for their bread.

  ‘You want to talk to her, I suppose. We’ve been short on murderers, since the hangman took Smith.’ Matron did not wait for my response before she clanked her keys and let us in.

  The girl glanced up as I entered. Dark eyes, framed by stubby lashes, tracked my movements. Her hands stopped their motion. The rope fell slack. I swallowed, feeling every tendon in my throat. How could she bear to hold the thing, knowing her life might end with such a rope around her neck?

  ‘Butterham, this is Miss Truelove,’ said Matron. She gave a sniff that might have been disapproval. ‘Come to visit you.’

  I sat down on the one chair provided in the cell. Its legs were uneven; I had to adjust my skirts.

  Ruth looked me full in the face. Not impertinent, precisely, but curious. I must confess to a twinge of disappointment. She was a plain creature, almost masculine, with a strong jaw and eyes set too far apart in her head. The nose was curiously flat. Flat nose, flat mind, they say. But then I have noted that murderous thoughts seldom trouble the pretty and the fashionable.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ she said.

  ‘Not yet.’ I tried a smile – it felt rather foolish. She did not speak with a child’s voice. Hers sounded tired, harsh. Something in its depths caused the hair on my neck to prick up. ‘I come to visit all of the women. Especially those with no kin.’

  ‘Well, you can suit yourself, I suppose, a rich woman like you.’

  She began to pick at the rope again. As her hands moved, her eyes drifted over the mug, trencher and Bible neatly laid on the windowsill. I noted how deft she was, how continually handling the oakum had stained her nails and the creases in her fingers black. ‘Perhaps I do have the liberty to come and go as I please. But I do not attend for my own amusement. I come for you. To offer some comfort.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  She did not believe a word of it. Perhaps there has been no kindness in her short life.

  ‘I’ll stand outside,’ said Matron. ‘The observation hatch is open. No funny business, Butterham.’

  Ruth did not deign to reply.

  The door clanged shut, and I was alone with the child murderer.

  Strange to say, I have never called upon a prisoner who had more self-possession. Grown women like Jenny Hill have sobbed on my shoulder, or begged me for mercy. Not she. This was no weeping girl, no child in need of mothering. The more she picked at the rope, the more it seemed to resemble a pile of human hair in her lap.

  She killed her slowly, by degrees.

  I shook myself. I must not leap to conclusions: not all silences are sinister. After all, the crown of her head looked enlarged beneath that fuzzy hair – it might be that her organ for Dignity was overgrown. Or that she had never known the meaning of the word comfort. How could I expect her to turn her thoughts upwards and repent if she had been starved of sympathy? She needed to learn what it was to have a friend. She needed me.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Matron calls you Butterham. It is the way of the staff here, I believe. But I should like to address you by your Christian name. You do not object to my calling you Ruth?’

  She shrugged. The muscles on her shoulders pulled at her serge gown. ‘If you like.’

  ‘Do you know why you are here, Ruth?’

  ‘I’m a murderess.’ No pride in the title – little shame, either. I waited, sure of more to follow. But she just went on impassively picking, with none of that torrid explanation or madness I have come to expect.

  It chilled me.

  ‘And who was it that you killed?’

  Her brow clouded. She fluttered her short lashes. ‘Oh, I suppose – a great many people, miss.’

  I was not prepared for that. Were there others the police had not discovered?

  The blasted rope dust irritated my eyes, making it hard to think. Perhaps Ruth did not know the exact allegations against her? We have had instances where the enormity of a prisoner’s deed wipes their mind of the incident. Had she suppressed the memory of killing her mistress? Did she merely parrot the keepers when she told me she was incarcerated for murder? I decided to tread cautiously.

  ‘Indeed? And are you sorry for what you have done?’

  Two yellow teeth worried her bottom lip. ‘Yes. Well, I mean, it depends, miss.’

  ‘Upon?’ I could not prevent the note of incredulity that crept into that word. ‘Are there qualifications for remorse?’

  ‘Some I never meant to kill. The first, they were an accident.’ Her voice hitched, the first crack in her facade. ‘Then there were others . . . I tried to stop. I tried to stop it, but it was too late.’ A sigh. ‘I’m sorry for those ones. But . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There were a few . . .’ That strong chin jutted out, took possession of the face once more. ‘A few I hated.’

  My tongue itched to call Matron back. If what Ruth said was true, there were more murders the police should be made aware of. Yet to ‘peach’ on her, as the prisoners say, so early in our acquaintance would ruin any chance of gaining her trust. I would never get my fingers on that scalp and prove what she truly was.

  ‘So . . . you do not regret killing the people you disliked?’ I reproached.

  Her dark eyes pinned me. ‘What do you think?’

  She unnerved me, yet I had a small glimmer of hope. Her expressions of hate were reassuring in their way; proof that she had acted in passion and was not a cold-blooded killer, as I had first apprehended.

  Her fingers worked of their own accord while she watched me: scratching, tearing. Skilful, in a frightening way.

  ‘I wonder they have employed you thus,’ I said at last. ‘Picking is a dirty business. Would you not prefer to make shirts or knit stockings? I am sure if I spoke a word to Matron, she would let you into the sewing room.’

  A quirk at the corner of her mouth. Not a grin, exactly, but bordering on it. ‘Oh, Matron wants me in the sewing room all right. Had to fight her tooth and nail to stay in here. Don’t you think it’s rum? They lock me in this place, search everyone who enters in case they slip me something. Then, casual as you like, Matron tells me to go to the sewing room!’

  ‘Why should she not? Do you not find sewing a wholesome, industrious occupation?’

  For an instant, her face lit up with humour. ‘Oh, miss!’

  ‘What is it? I do not understand you.’

  ‘It’s in the sewing room that I’m most dangerous!’

  Perhaps she was a trifle mad, after all. I decided I would leave off telling Matron about the other murders until I was quite sure they had taken place. It would be mortifying to be fooled by the ravings of a delusional prisoner and have Matron snickering behind my back.

  ‘Sewing is not dangerous. There is a small risk, I grant you, with needles and pins but they are careful. They always have an attendant to supervise. You cannot really hurt someone with a needle, Ruth.’

  She cocked her dark head. I felt gooseflesh, skittering over my skin.

  ‘Can’t I?’

  2

  Ruth

  If I’d been born a boy, it never would have happened. I never would have picked up a needle, never known the power I possessed, and my life would’ve gone down some other path. I might have been able to make my way in the world, to defend my mother. But instead I shared the fate of all girls who are poor of pocket: I was tied to my work, like a needle tethered by thread.

  You can live your life through a piece of sewing; that’s what people don’t realise. You can ply your needle with any emotion in the human heart and the thread will absorb it. You can s
ew with tenderness, you can stitch yourself from panic to calm, you can sew with hate. Sewing in a fury never got me anything except tangled skeins and botched seams, but you can do it. Better to wait for hate. A slow, measured hate. No one can tell it’s there, simmering in your fingertips, except for you and the needle.

  People say hate is a wasted emotion, a destructive force you can do nothing useful with. They’re wrong. I’ve gripped rage, I’ve wielded it like a weapon. But look at your face, miss. You’ve never hated one of your fellow creatures, have you?

  It takes someone special to make you feel it for the first time. A person you would love, if they’d only let you. But their scorn shrivels you up, like a crape gown in the rain. They show you an image of yourself, and it’s weak and loathsome, even to your own eyes. Yes, it takes someone with a peculiar talent for cruelty to make you hate them like that.

  Someone like Rosalind Oldacre.

  She was a doll of a girl. Long, blonde curls. When she walked, it was with poise, a maturity far beyond the rest of us. Of course the teachers adored her. I could tell you about many things she did to me, that year when I was twelve, at Mrs Howlett’s finishing school. But there was only one that really mattered.

  It happened on an afternoon in early autumn, when the days began to close in. The school bell rang and we all poured out into crisp, cool air. Already the moon bobbed above waves of grey cloud. Braziers burnt in the square. I scurried across the cobbles, watching the other girls peel off into the side streets.

  Going home ought to be the best part of the day, but for me it was a time of heightened awareness, where every sound and sudden movement made me jump. It was the time I needed to run.

  There was a passageway opposite the school, at the other end of the square. If I could make it through that quickly, I’d be safe for the rest of the evening.

  Sometimes I was fast enough.

  Not that day.

  That day Rosalind was already there, lurking in the shadows that filled the passage. I stumbled to a halt beside a brazier as I caught sight of her. A bonnet concealed her blonde curls. Beneath it her expression was stiff.

  ‘Butterham.’ I’d always liked my name before, but now it sounded shameful, inappropriate on her rosehip lips.

  Other girls trailed at her heels, their faces turned into a confusion of shades and hollows by the flames in the brazier.

  ‘Let me pass,’ I begged.

  ‘You’re poor, Butterham. You were made to take orders, not give them to your betters.’ The dusk heightened her looks but it was a terrible beauty, a frightful one.

  ‘Let me pass!’

  ‘I do not see how I am stopping you.’

  Her slender frame didn’t fill the passageway. I might slip past her, but there were others behind, their eyes shining in the gloaming like rodents’ do. A gauntlet of girls. Dare I run it?

  I launched myself forwards and tried to shove through but Rosalind caught me, her fingers sharp at my waist. ‘Not fast enough, not strong enough! I would not employ you. How ever will you earn your bread?’

  Girls massed around me, penned me in. Something hit my nose and pain fizzed to the back of my throat.

  Rosalind was right: I wasn’t strong, then. I couldn’t push my gabbling words through my lips, let alone break free from her grip.

  Hands scuffed at my bodice. Material ripped. ‘You are not a lady, you shouldn’t be wearing these clothes! You belong in the gutter, Butterham. You’re a rat, a beast!’

  They hooted. Cold air rushed inside my smock as they exposed my corset, my shift.

  ‘Look at this,’ Rosalind laughed to a girl behind her. ‘Tight lacing. She’s trying to be fashionable! You’ll never get a good silhouette, Butterham. Not with these corset bones.’ Her fingers nipped at my waist, tight, tight. ‘Cheap. What are they, cane? Goose-quill?’

  I screwed up my courage and spat in her face.

  All at once, she dropped me. My cheek hit the cobbles with a crack. Before I could gather my wits, her black, pointed boot flew towards me. Pain exploded in my ribs.

  ‘You see? They are really very weak supports.’ The girls gathered about her, each a malicious shadow. Row upon row of dark feet. ‘Cane bones are useless in a corset. How long will it take for them to break?’

  It took longer than you’d think.

  * * *

  The streets were winding down for the evening by the time I dragged myself up and back towards home. Gone were the milkmaids and the fruit mongers; in their place lay orange peels and heaps of manure. No running boys, no clattering wheels. Only the sellers of second-hand clothes shambled by, and the pie man – I couldn’t see him but I smelt him, rich and meaty through the coal smoke.

  The refuse of market day lay on the cobbles and I, the refuse of all things, walked over it. Hateful, unwanted. My feet pattered across puddles, around horse dung, and every step was agony. A cold, fearful sweat had coated me from head to foot, leaving salt crystals to rub raw beneath my shift.

  I had a cloak – too short for me, but still serviceable – which I used to cover my bodice. I didn’t want Ma to see the footprints and the rips. Even so, I couldn’t conceal my limp. I couldn’t control the sharp intake of breath every time a snapped corset bone poked into my skin. As for my bonnet, I dragged it behind me on its broken ties.

  If I didn’t get inside the house and upstairs without being seen, I’d have to tell my parents everything. That would be more painful than another beating.

  Our house was modest, hunching in a terrace of identical siblings near the river. Three rooms up, two down, and an ash privy behind. Many had it worse. When I pushed open the battered, unvarnished door and stepped inside, the air was clean, if chill. Ma sat in the window, syphoning the last rays of the sun.

  My ma was always marooned in a sea of material: cheap linen, cambric, wads of muslin. Sometimes I fancied it sucked the colour from her, leaving another grey streak in the black hair, another cloud in the blue eyes.

  I crept towards the stairs.

  She didn’t hear me come in. Her focus on the eye of her needle was complete. I watched her lick the thread and slot it through the tiny hole in one smooth motion.

  My foot creaked on the bottom step.

  Ma jumped. ‘Ruth?’ Rising stiffly to her feet, she stared across the white expanse of cotton separating us. ‘Whatever happened to your bonnet?’

  Was it too late to run? I took another step up, but she was already fussing about the linen, pushing aside piles to make her way over to me.

  ‘Nothing, nothing happened,’ I said hurriedly.

  ‘It doesn’t look like nothing! Your bonnet is crushed! I told you to mind it, we cannot afford another.’

  Why did she care about the bonnet? It was I who needed sewing together.

  She grabbed the hem of my cloak, pulling me back towards her. ‘How could you be so careless? I have nothing to replace the ties, let alone the time . . . You’ll just have to wear it like that and look foolish. Perhaps then you’ll learn to keep things nice.’

  It was too much. On top of all the pain, Ma scolding! My eyes began to prick and sting, as if I’d taken every pin from Ma’s cushion and rammed them through my pupils. ‘I’ll never have nice things. Never!’

  ‘What do you mean, Ruth? This was the best—’

  ‘No!’ I yelled. ‘Everything I wear, everything about me – it’s ugly!’

  A beat.

  ‘Ugly!’ A mother’s indignant horror, high-pitched. But I was too quick for her – I saw. I saw the second before her expression changed. It was in her eyes, red-rimmed and bloodshot: shame. She had known, all along. ‘What put a wicked thought like that inside your head?’

  My tears came gushing out. I cried, in those days.

  ‘Oh, Ruth!’ She took me into her arms. Those infernal corset bones scratched against my bruises like claws. That, an
d her familiar scent of linen and faded rose petals made me cry even harder. ‘Forgive me. I didn’t think . . . Was it the other girls? Did they do this?’

  Of course, it never would have happened to Ma: petite, elegant Ma. I’d failed her. Failed her with my eyes too far apart, my blunt chin.

  I sobbed.

  ‘My poor darling.’ She took out her handkerchief, the one with the monogram in the corner, the only one left from the old days, and dabbed at my face. ‘You sit down and cry it out. I’ll fetch you some supper.’ She stroked my hair behind my ears. ‘Don’t worry, my Ruth, I’ll fix your bonnet. We’ll find a way.’

  She sat me in the chair with the shiny seams and a moth-eaten antimacassar: the best chair in the house. Not that it was comfortable to me, sitting bruised in a broken corset. Placing the handkerchief on my lap, she disappeared into the kitchen.

  Pots rattled. Trying to steady my breath, I picked up the handkerchief and ran my fingers over the monogram. Old, friendly stitches, worn and loose. J T. Jemima Trussell. The Ma of the past, before she met Pa, before her fingers turned scaly. I closed my eyes, rubbing the letters, praying somehow they’d transform me into that young lady.

  ‘I can stitch the rim up good as new,’ she called from the kitchen. ‘We’ll have to replace the ties, but I’m sure I’ll find something in my stores.’ Another clatter. ‘It isn’t very squashed. If we stretch it out, the shape might come back.’

  Wait until she saw the state of my gown beneath the cloak. Even kind Ma would struggle to cast a fair shade upon that.

  She reappeared with a heel of bread and a wedge of cheese sweating on a plate. She held a cup in the other hand. ‘Tea. It will make you feel better.’

  ‘We can’t afford it,’ I replied instantly.

  ‘Just this once.’ She coaxed the handkerchief out from between my fingers and replaced it with the hot cup. Warmth bit into my palm but it was a good pain, satisfying.