The Murder of Mary Russell

by Laurie R. King

  Then my chest thumped and my thoughts jostled to assemble some kind of order. Moving with great deliberation, I spread out my hands from the shoulders down, to illustrate a complete lack of threat. “So,” I said. “No tea and biscuits, then?”

  There were, it seemed, any number of ways to get by in Sydney—and more so, Melbourne—if one had the use of an innocent young face. According to Pa, men with yellow fever—fresh from the gold fields—were just aching to have someone take their coins from their pockets and free them up to go find more. It was doing them a kindness, really.

  Clarissa knew this was a story, but playing along with it kept him happy—and sober—for the first time since Mama died. More important, it allowed her to take care of Alicia. Proper care.

  Two weeks after the policeman’s visit, Clarissa stood on a busy street before a big man with a high hat and a thick gold chain across his waistcoat, her heart thumping as she sobbed and stammered out an incoherent tale about losing the shilling her mother had given her to buy milk for the baby and how Mum would beat her…

  It had taken her some time to decide on this man among all the others bustling past, just as she’d hesitated over the pretty new frocks Papa had bought, ending up in a once-pretty, now-faded dress and a pair of shoes that looked like the well-cared-for hand-me-downs they were. Pa grew impatient, waiting for her to pick her target, but when she saw this one, she’d gone right forward because he seemed…happier, somehow, in a way that made him feel even larger than he was. It was years before she learned a word for it: “expansive.” Which sounded like “expensive,” and that was right.

  The man with the gold chain had spotted her sobbing and stopped; listened to her where another might have circled past; frowned in sympathy where most would have just frowned. In the end he held out not a replacement shilling, but an entire half sovereign—then laughed when her wet eyelashes opened wide. “Can you use that, then, little girl?”

  “Oh, sir, I can, yes I can.” Then she remembered her act, and was quick to add, “My little brother will eat so well, thanks to you!”

  Her first lesson: no man in a good suit would turn away from a little girl with clean clothes, nice manners, and tears in her big dark eyes.

  When she took the coin back to her father, waiting around the corner, he crowed in triumph. His praise flowed over her like water on a desert plant. And—was it magic, or a secret message?—the coin had been born the same year as she: it bore the date 1856 under Victoria’s profile. It went into his pocket, as did the handful of smaller coins that same act won them during the day, and they ate well that night.

  Then, two days later—magic upon magic—Papa gave her back that very coin, strung on a golden chain. In an instant, Clarissa’s lingering hesitations fled. Her father loved her when she helped him, and that was all she needed to know.

  Of course, Alicia spotted the necklace. Clarissa glumly undid the clasp to hand it over—but Papa said no, it was hers. Even when Allie threw a huge tantrum—even when she whined for days and days, playing with it around Clarissa’s neck, begging and sulking—Papa held solid.

  Allie’s mood lasted for a week. Then, to Clarissa’s surprise, it suddenly stopped. It was rare for Allie to let go a pet hurt, but after Papa took her out for a row in the harbour—by herself, leaving Clarrie at home—the younger sister’s woebegone expression was replaced by smug satisfaction and the occasional cryptic and knowing remark.

  Still, she was happy, and Clarissa had her necklace. From then on, whenever a doubt surfaced about the rightness of what she was doing, Clarissa Hudson only needed to grasp the coin around her neck to know that she would do anything, anything in the world, for her father.

  There were other lessons, as the weeks went on. The second, rather more complicated lesson came about a month after the first.

  They were working on what Pa called a “Job” (but she secretly thought of as “Cheats”) near the railway station, in the early afternoon. The railway was important, because he had to catch a train. The time of day was, too, since there should have been a lot of people through the station not long before, but not too many people in now. And, there had to be a train coming very soon, but not one for a good while afterwards.

  Papa went into the Refreshment Room for a cup of coffee while Clarissa waited across the way, in a corner where she could see him but no one would notice her. There was a small valise at her feet, so that if anyone asked, she was simply watching it while her mother went to care for her little brother, thank you very much. After a while, Papa looked at the clock over the counter, then stood up. She watched more closely now: he would want her in a minute.

  Papa walked over to the man selling the coffees and ices and showed him something in his hand. The two men talked, then Papa turned to point at the table.

  I just found this under the table, he was saying. I don’t know much about ladies’ jewellery, but it looks pretty valuable.

  Half a minute later, Clarissa rushed in breathlessly. Ignoring Papa, she asked the Refreshment Room man, “Oh, sir, my mother lost her pearls! Did anyone report finding them? She said she’d give five pounds reward!”

  The two men looked at each other, then Papa held out the necklace. “Are these them?”

  Clarissa exclaimed and reached for the pearls, but her father’s hand retracted, just a little. He and the other man consulted without saying anything, then Papa looked at the clock again.

  “I’ve got to catch the train. You want to give me two pounds? I’ll let you keep the rest.”

  “I don’t have two pounds,” the man said.

  “Ah, too bad.” Papa made as if to slip the pearls into his pocket, then stopped. “Think you could just borrow it from the till?” He turned to Clarissa, as bright-eyed and innocent as the sparrows pecking crumbs outside the door. “Is your mother far away?”

  “She’s just down at the bank, to see if they found it there.”

  The bank was about three minutes away. Mention of a bank also made this “Mama” sound like a woman well able to redeem her lost pearls.

  Reluctantly, the man gave Papa his two pounds. The two men smiled after Clarissa, bouncing away to tell her mother the joyful news. Papa left. And at the end of the man’s day, he owed the till two pounds, and had in his pocket a string of pearls already losing their paint.

  As they made their way home, Clarissa asked her father if the man wouldn’t have to replace the money in the till.

  “A course he will, honey.”

  “He seemed nice.”

  “He was a Mark. If he’d thought of it first, he’d have done the same to us. Two pounds—you clever girl!”

  Her father’s jubilation left Clarissa feeling oddly empty, as if she’d taken more from the nice man’s pockets than two pounds. Thus, the second lesson: a person felt clever, but not entirely clean, after a Cheat.

  It was driven home a few days later, when her regret at taking a coin from a man who looked as though he needed it more than she did led to her handing back the coin—and her father slapped her so hard, he loosened a tooth. She did not try that again.

  But for the occasional blow apart, their “Jobs” made Papa happy, which was a new and exhilarating experience for little Clarissa Hudson. She also relished being Another—a girl with clean skin and confidence, someone who knew she was going home to a mother and a shining house, someone who was…better. When she put off the Act, her tongue returning to its natural place in her mouth, her head dropping to its normal angle, she missed the Other Clarissa.

  Still, if it kept Papa happy and Alicia fed and warm, what did her own feelings matter?

  Over the following months, the Hudsons’ Cheats grew more complicated. They took longer to plan, and they brought in more substantial sums. They moved from their room in The Rocks to a place with a less interesting night life but sweeter air. Clarissa learned to call the men “Marks”—which turned out to be not a name, but a description, as if they were nothing more than stains in need of a good scrubbi
ng.

  Clarissa’s third lesson was one she discovered slowly, and on her own: it was best to leave the Mark with some taste of happiness: praise him, give a touch of self-satisfaction, leave him with a brush of humour. Doing so not only made the Mark less suspicious, it also felt more like an exchange than a bald theft. Like those birds that traded one shiny object for another.

  This was a lesson she kept to herself.

  There were others—even formal lessons, of a sort. That winter, while Alicia sulked off to school every morning, Clarissa attended a very different sort of classroom.

  Pa called the weasel-faced old man an “Acting Professor,” although to Clarissa he was the Cheat Teacher. The thin, intense, rather smelly creature her father found to educate her young and nimble hands reminded her of a wonderful story by Mr Dickens that she had read to Allie during the lonely nights. Unlike Fagin, the Professor was a solitary figure, not one who gathered a band of young thieves around his hearth.

  Clarissa tried, hard, to make her father and teacher proud of her, but in the end, even though she’d practiced so many times that she woke at night with her fingers making the dip in Alicia’s curls, both men reluctantly agreed that the straight picking of pockets was not her strong point. She was better at palming goods, since the key to that was diverting the Mark—and the distraction was where she shone: a little girl bent over a skinned knee, or weeping over a lost puppy, or holding up a found coin in wonder was the most compelling thing in the world, and if James Hudson’s own fingers had had more skill, the pair would not have needed to look further for their income.

  However, Hudson had spent too much time at rough work to be a smooth pickpocket, and he refused to bring in another partner. Instead, they concentrated on the more involved realms of criminality, those resting on Clarissa’s dual talents of mimicry and reading the Marks. Their most reliable Cheat was The Found Note-Case, akin to the pearl necklace, which began with her hesitating at the door of a grog shop with a note-case she had found, and ended with Hudson leaving that saloon a couple of bank notes richer.

  Lesson four: greedy people made for the easiest Cheats. And, she found, those with the least guilt attached. For example:

  A pretty Saturday afternoon in the late spring; a busy Melbourne street; a brown-haired girl who looked no older than fourteen (though she was) perched awkwardly on the edge of a bench amidst the unfamiliar bulk of a crinoline, her hair swept up and ringletted beneath a bonnet; clearly a young girl attempting to look older than she was. She sat a short distance away from a busy jewellery shop, shoulders hunched and head down, either fascinated by some small object in her hands, or fighting tears. People passed her by, as oblivious of her as she was of them, until a courting couple approached, hand on arm at a primly decorous distance.

  When they were ten feet from Clarissa, she glanced up. The girl stopped, pulled from her springtime euphoria by those big, dark, brimming eyes. Her beau would have pressed on, perhaps even more briskly having spotted the tears, but his young lady’s arm—and her concern—anchored him in place.

  “What is the matter, dear?” the girl exclaimed.

  Clarissa hastened to dash away the tears with a childish hand. “Oh nothing, it’s nothing at all, not that you can help with. But thank you,” she added politely, blinking a clear, wide-eyed signal of distress.

  The pretty girl lowered herself to the bench with the automatic swing of hips that betrayed a recent abandonment of steel hoops in favour of horsehair bustle. She reached out a gloved hand for Clarissa’s bare one, somehow catching one of her glove’s tiny buttons in the object Clarissa was holding.

  “Oh!” Clarissa grabbed for it, working its satin cord free. When she had succeeded, her two hands held it out for a moment. All three young people studied the small, black velvet draw-string bag, until, with a cry of loss, Clarissa’s head bent down to cover it, her shoulders heaving.

  The story soon came out: a dangerously ill mother, a father honourably dead, a family so reduced in circumstances that all Clarissa had to sell was the ring left by her beloved grandmother.

  “Nanna—that’s what we called her,” Clarissa said with a brave smile. “Nanna wore it all her life. When Granddad bought it, the ring cost a year’s pay. She always used to tell us the story, of how he came to her father with the ring and a solemn vow: that he would love her even when all the diamonds of the earth…” She had to choke out the next words over a sob. “When diamonds had crumbled to dust. And he did. They were so in love, like newlyweds even when they were old and grey. They died within days of each other, both in their nineties, and left me the ring. It’s worth hundreds. If I sell it, I can save my mother’s life. But…”

  Her voice trailed off into her hands.

  The young woman’s arm went around Clarissa’s shoulders, she bent close to hear the words. “What? Oh child, what is the problem?”

  Clarissa sat upright, taking a sharp, steadying breath. “I thought perhaps Mr Barnaby—the jeweller—would buy it, since he’s the one who told Mama it was worth two hundred guineas. But it seems he has plenty of the new diamonds just now—coming out of South Africa? And people want a new ring, instead of one with seventy years of love behind it. I need the money today, if—” Another sob, bravely stifled. “If Mother is to have her operation. I shall have to tell her doctor that she must come home, for a time. Until I can find someone who wants it.”

  Clarissa raised her hand, and the sun caught fire on her ring finger: the cluster of many diamonds set into rose-coloured gold sparkled, it danced, it threw the sun about as her hand turned this way and that.

  Then the dazzle winked out like the death of promise as she slipped the ring back inside its pouch, prompting a faint protest from the girl at Clarissa’s side.

  The girl looked up at her beau. He eyed the small velvet bag uneasily. The silence grew electric—

  To be broken from an unexpected direction.

  A small man with hunched shoulders, worn tweeds, and a jeweller’s loupe in his hand paused beside the trio.

  “Hello, young lady. I am really terribly sorry we couldn’t convince Mr Barnaby to purchase that lovely ring of yours. But you were right, it’s worth a great deal more than the ten guineas he was offering.”

  The young man peered down at the fellow, taking in the magnifying lens he carried. “Er, you’re a jeweller?”

  “That I am, young man. Though unfortunately, a jeweller without much cash just at the moment. The races, you know?” He gave a rueful chuckle. “Otherwise I’d have offered this young lady eighty guineas for that shiny bauble she’s got, and made a good bargain out of it. Well, I’ve missed my chance. I wish you luck, my dear.”

  He tipped his hat first to Clarissa, then to the couple, and walked on.

  The young man watched him go. When he turned back, his face wore a very different expression. Speculative, perhaps. One might even say it held a touch of greed.

  “Young lady,” he purred. “I hate to see you in distress. Perhaps I might help you out, and take that ring off your hands. Now, how much is it your mother needs for her operation?”

  Clarissa blinked up at him. The young man’s lack of reaction when “the jeweller” said ten guineas told her there was more than that in his note-case. How much more? “The doctor said it would be thirty-five pounds altogether,” she lamented. The eyes made a fractional retreat. “—but he said that if I could pay him twenty-five now, I could work the rest off over the coming year.”

  That speculation returned to his gaze.

  The girl rose, laying one hand on her beau’s manly arm. “Oh, Freddie, we could help this poor girl, and save a life! And…” Her voice drifted away in a blush, indicating that Freddie had not actually spoken for her hand yet. Strictly speaking, a ring was premature. However, was this not a minor point when balanced against seventy years of deep and abiding love?

  The girl’s blush deepened when Freddie reached into his breast pocket. Clarissa and her father were long gone by the time
Monday morning came along, and a real jeweller told Freddie that the paste diamond in his hand was worth, at most, five shillings.

  As their success grew, as Clarissa matured, the Cheats became more sure, more complex, the partnership more seamless, their clothing more clearly of the upper classes—hers, at least. Her father never did look entirely comfortable in expensive clothing, even when his hands grew softer and he’d had his teeth attended to. Still, compared to visitors from Britain and Europe, rich Australians often had the hands of labourers, and Hudson had been in the country long enough to sound native. As their Cheats pushed up into Society, her accents and attitudes grew more assured, the amount of money each one brought in grew.

  They also spent much of every year travelling, despite James Hudson’s loathing of sea journeys. The very first year of their operations, 1867, they spent two weeks in Melbourne, nearly twice the size of Sydney, and found the change of scenery both a relief and a financial triumph. Alicia went along on some of these expeditions, but without making the younger Hudson girl a part of their Act—a thing neither of them even considered—it was not a success. Matters came to a head on Clarissa’s twelfth birthday. In May of 1868, her father pronounced it time they bought a house, a real house with a kitchen and a garden. They could have a dog, even. Wouldn’t Clarrie like that? Allie surely would.

  Twelve-year-old Clarissa Hudson stared at her father, and put her foot down—something she never did, since overt protest threatened to bring his hand.

  “Allie’s almost nine,” she said. “And you and I are always gone. She’s been ducking school, Papa. She’s up till all hours, and—”

  “She’s not going back up The Rocks to play with those prozzie brats, is she?”

  “No!” Her father’s horror of prostitution, enforced with profanity and violence, would have made her deny it even if Allie had moved in with one of their former neighbours. “Nothing like that, Papa. But she needs a proper upbringing, if…if she’s not going to go wrong,” she added slyly. “She needs a family.”