The Unseeing Page 10

  “Miss Hinkley,” she said, as the warder made to leave, “who is the prisoner I heard crying in the night?”

  The warder shook her head. “It’s a sad one, that.” She spoke in a hushed voice, for the warders were not supposed to converse with the prisoners—only to bark orders or directions. “She’s a young girl, accused of killing her own baby. They brought ’er here yesterday from one of the county jails. She won’t eat a morsel; says she just wants to die. It’s a sorry business.”

  “Why did she kill her child?”

  Hinkley lowered her voice still further. “She was a maid and hid from her master the fact of her being with child. As many do. They found ’er at the bottom of some stairs with a knife, a pool of blood, and a dead baby. I don’t sanction it, Sarah, Lord knows I don’t, but you can’t help but feel a bit of pity for the poor thing. She would’ve lost her situation and the baby would’ve probably been taken from her, so I s’ppose she decided the baby had to go. Happens often enough.”

  “Does she admit that she killed the child?”

  “No, ’course not. As you know very well, no one in this place admits anything. She says that the knife were to cut the cord and that the baby were dead when it came out.”

  “Well, maybe it was.”

  “Maybe it was, and maybe it weren’t. The end result is the same.”

  “Did anyone hear the child cry?”

  “Bless my soul, Sarah, I don’t know every bit of detail. I only know she ain’t eaten a thing since she got here—just weeps. They should’ve turned a blind eye to it, that’s what I says. Let her get on with her life.”

  Turning a blind eye: Sarah knew all about that. As she sat at her sewing, she thought of her mother, her mother who might not have cut off her breath at birth, but had instead stifled her slowly, first with discipline and prayer books and a corseted, conditional kind of love; then with advice books, etiquette manuals, and silence. Sometime after her father’s visits began, Sarah’s image of herself began to warp, like a reflection in a distorted looking glass. In her eyes, her body became bloated and monstrous, her thighs ugly pale slabs of meat, her face puffy and disfigured. She would starve and pinch her flesh to punish it, leaving dark bruises on the soft white skin.

  Her mother must have noticed her weight loss, but did nothing about it. Perhaps she approved. After all, she herself was rake thin, picking at food at meal times and boasting that she had no appetite. Laudanum does that.

  Meanwhile, Rosina began to draw strange things: dead birds. Children without faces. Men with the heads of beasts. Sarah listened at the door of the parlor as their drawing teacher, a shrewd green-eyed woman, told their mother that Rosina’s mind was disturbed.

  “There’s evidently something distressing her, Mrs. Farr. Have you considered what it might be?”

  “And tell me,” Sarah’s mother had replied, “what qualifies or entitles you to comment on anything other than my daughters’ drawing?”

  Up until that point, Sarah had wondered how much their mother knew: whether she was oblivious, or whether she was aware of what was going on, but drowning it all out with a brown fog of laudanum and false laughter. That conversation confirmed what Sarah feared: that her mother knew, but had chosen not to see. Was this punishment, perhaps, for her brother’s death? Or had she always hated her daughter? Sarah’s heart bunched into a tight fist. The process of hardening had set in.

  12

  “The head thus cured is very highly flavoured, and most excellent eating. The receipt for it is new. It will be seen that the foregoing proportion of ingredients, with the exception of the treacle, is for one half of the head only, and must be doubled for a whole one.”

  —The Art and Mystery of Curing, Preserving, and Potting All Kinds of Meats, Game, and Fish, A Wholesale Curer of Comestibles, 1864

  The omnibus traveled past the warehouses and workshops of the Edgeware Road and turned left onto Harrow Road. This must, Edmund thought, be the same route that James Greenacre had taken that night, holding Hannah Brown’s head, wrapped in brown paper, on his lap. Edmund could imagine him, descending from the omnibus in the darkness, walking through the falling snow to the Regent’s Canal, and dropping his parcel into the black water.

  Edmund alighted at Paddington Green and walked past the tall elms to a handsome brick house looking onto the east of the Green. He was shown up to a beautifully decorated parlor, where a man with red hair sat writing at a bureau. The man rose from his chair when Edmund entered the room and shook his hand firmly.

  “We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

  This was Dr. Girdwood, parish surgeon for Paddington: the man who had carried out the original postmortem on Hannah Brown and confirmed that the body parts fitted together.

  “You came to view Miss Brown’s head when I put it on display in Paddington Workhouse.”

  Edmund felt his cheeks blaze. “Yes, well, it seemed an interesting opportunity. I’d been following the case, for professional reasons.”

  “Then you must be pleased that this commission has fallen into your lap. A stroke of fortune, is it not?”

  Edmund was no longer so sure of this. He smiled but did not reply.

  When they had settled beside a low japanned table, he said, “Dr. Girdwood, the questions I want to ask you are rather gruesome in nature, so you must forgive me.”

  “Mr. Fleetwood,” the doctor laughed, “I spend my days with the dead and the dying. I doubt you can unnerve me. Please go ahead.”

  “Well, first, you said at the trial that you thought that Hannah Brown had died from an injury to her right eye.”

  “Yes. There was a wound in the eye itself, above the pupil, and there was a mark, a round ecchymosis, surrounding the eye—an extraordinary black eye, if you like.”

  “What do you think caused the injury to the eye?”

  “It’s difficult to say. The circumstance of the eye being ruptured would imply great force. It might have been the result of a blow with a fist, or it might have been a hard object. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific.”

  Edmund nodded, thinking of Greenacre’s large hands, balled into fists.

  “Thank you. My second question may also be rather difficult to answer. Greenacre admits that Hannah Brown was killed in his house on the evening of the 24th of December and he says that he cut up the body in his workroom. Assuming that’s true, how much blood would have been spilled during the killing and the cutting? Is it likely he could have had the place spotless two days after the murder such that Sarah Gale could have had no inkling as to what took place there?”

  “Good gracious, man, you might want to be talking to a butcher rather than to me!” Girdwood’s tone was good-natured. “How much blood would there have been? In short, a huge amount. Greenacre slit the woman’s throat shortly after death—possibly while she was still alive—and then cut the body to pieces with a knife and a carpenter’s saw. The head, when I saw it, was drained of blood. He may, of course, have used a vessel to catch the blood, but he maintains that he didn’t. If that’s true, then the floor would have been covered in blood. There have been experiments to show that blood will flow for up to sixteen hours after death.”

  The doctor poured himself a measure of whisky.

  “I’ll also give you my opinion that Greenacre didn’t kill her in the kitchen, as the prosecution argued. There were traces of blood found in the main bedroom when the police checked it nearly three months after the murder.”

  Why, Edmund wondered, had the police not mentioned this to him? “Were the stains obvious?” he asked.

  “They were small specks, but visible to someone looking carefully. As to whether Sarah Gale would have noticed, well, that’s a very tricky question to answer. We don’t know how well Greenacre covered his tracks. However, you may have heard one of the witnesses—I forget her name now—talking about how she visited the house some
weeks after the murder and the place stank of brimstone.”

  “Miss Edmonds,” said Edmund. “She said that there was an overwhelming smell of sulfur.”

  “That’s it. Now, why would that be?”

  “I assumed it was to do with his furniture making. I understand that molten sulfur is sometimes used to produce decorative inlays.”

  “Perhaps,” said Dr. Girdwood, “but it’s also used to fumigate rooms after disease. Greenacre might have done so in this instance because he was concerned that the house was not rid of the smell of blood.”

  “The house Sarah Gale had been living in.”

  “Exactly. And of course there were the boxes belonging to the dead woman that had been left in the house. She must have seen those.”

  “She says Greenacre told her that Hannah Brown had left after an argument and that the boxes and their contents were part payment for money she owed him.”

  “I’d find that a hard pill to swallow,” replied the doctor, “but we don’t know what Sarah Gale was going through at that time. She seemed during the trial to be in a state of denial, perhaps even hysteria.”

  “Hysteria?” Edmund was surprised. “Wouldn’t that demonstrate itself in a more agitated appearance?”

  “Not necessarily,” Girdwood said. “Malaise of the female mind can take all sorts of forms. I was struck by how unnaturally calm she appeared to be for the majority of the trial and yet on occasion she seemed to be seized with panic.”

  Edmund thought back to Sarah’s demeanor in the courtroom: outwardly composed, if pale. He had not seen the moments of panic, but maybe his attention had been diverted. Perhaps he had not been looking carefully enough.

  “She may,” the doctor continued, “be suffering under some sickness of the mind such that she is unable to put the pieces together unable to see what should have been obvious. It’s even possible that she witnessed the killing and has since erased it from her mind. I’ve seen that sort of thing before, usually in men returning from the horrors of war. They shut out certain events because they’re too painful.”

  “But do they forget them completely?”

  “In some cases, yes. Or they remember them only in dreams or as hallucinations.”

  Was that possible, Edmund wondered. Could that account for her anxiety? He had visited her twice more in the past week and had noticed that, whenever he asked her directly about Hannah Brown, she grew tense and agitated.

  “Thank you,” Edmund said. “I am much obliged to you.” He stood up and removed his hat from the table.

  The doctor remained sitting. “I haven’t formally examined Sarah Gale so of course I can’t offer a proper medical opinion, but my suspicion is that she’s not altogether there. There’s something missing. If I were you, I’d be very wary of accepting her version of reality.”

  • • •

  Edmund had persuaded the Governor that he needed to see Sarah in a private room. He hoped that without the warders circling the room like crows swooping for carrion she might feel freer to speak her mind. He had not, however, expected to be taken to her cell.

  “There’s nowhere else for you to meet,” the matron told him shortly as she led him through the watchful silence of the women’s quarters. “If you’ll insist on a private meeting, we need to make sure it’s somewhere where we can keep an eye on her.”

  Edmund smiled viciously at her back. “And why is that, Miss Sowerton? Has she carried out any acts of violence during her time here?”

  He could almost feel the woman bristle. She half turned to him so that he caught her blunt face in profile. “In my experience, sir, it’s the ones that seem calm and quiet that are the most dangerous. But of course, you wouldn’t know that.”

  They arrived at a low black door and the woman drew back a shutter and leaned forward to peer inside the cell. Then she drew out one of her many keys, unlocked the door, and pulled back the bolt.

  When Edmund entered the room, the first thing he noticed was a strong tang: the animal smell of tallow candles mixed with damp. Sarah stood before them in her normal blue prison attire, but her cap was slightly pushed back and several strands of her hair had come loose. Edmund saw that her skin was even paler than usual, her brown eyes even darker and larger by contrast. Her long lashes shimmered as if she had been crying. Perhaps the doctor had been right about her mental state: perhaps she was broken.

  “Mr. Fleetwood wanted to see you in your cell, Gale.”

  “As you know, Miss Sowerton, I simply wished to see Miss Gale somewhere more private than the legal visitors’ room so that we could discuss matters relating to the investigation without…interruption.” He looked about the sparse room: the whitewashed stone walls, the miserable little window, the small cluster of battered objects. “There is only one stool,” he said.

  The matron gave him a blank look. “Then you will have to sit on the bed, sir, won’t you?”

  She turned and left the cell, slamming the door closed behind her. Edmund heard the bolt slide back into place and felt for a moment the sharp terror of imprisonment. This was a mistake, he thought. They were too close together in the confined room and he felt that he was trespassing on Sarah’s private space. It was almost as though he had come upon an animal in its lair.

  Sarah had not moved since he entered the cell, but stood rigidly. Now, however, she gestured to the stool and said, “You must sit down, sir. I can stand.”

  “No, no. I won’t hear of it.”

  “Well, then I will sit here.” Sarah perched on the end of her bed and took up a piece of sewing. She seemed slighter than she had before; her face sharper, paler.

  “Miss Gale, you will forgive me, I hope, for saying that you do not look well. Are you ill?”

  She glanced up. “I’m just a little tired. I’ve not been sleeping well.”

  Edmund wondered if she was kept awake by nightmares, by the resurgent images that Dr. Girdwood had mentioned as a symptom of trauma. “Bad dreams?” he ventured.

  When she did not respond, he said, “Some say that dreams are made up of the things we dare not think about during our waking hours. Do you think that’s what your dreams are, Miss Gale?”

  She licked the tip of a piece of thread and passed it deftly through the eye of the needle. “Others say dreams are the means through which the spirit world communicates with us.”

  Edmund gave a bark of laughter, but Sarah did not smile. “You don’t believe in a spirit world, Mr. Fleetwood?”

  He spread his hands. “I’m a lawyer. I only believe in things for which I have clear evidence.”

  “There are people who firmly believe they’ve seen and heard spirits.”

  “Oh, people often think they have seen things that they can’t possibly have seen. Ask any barrister and he’ll tell you that three witnesses can see the same event and yet give three completely differing accounts of it under cross-questioning. Throw in the lights and smoke and other deceits used by your average medium, and it’s no wonder people believe they’ve seen ghosts.”

  He could see from Sarah’s expression that he had annoyed her and he cursed himself for not having taken her more seriously—she might have revealed something.

  After a few moments, he said, “I must ask you, Miss Gale: the day you and George returned to Greenacre’s house—Boxing Day.”

  “Yes?” She was still looking down at her sewing, making tiny, neat stitches.

  “It was only twelve hours or so after Greenacre had disposed of Hannah Brown’s head and cleaned the house of blood. You said that you noticed the boxes, and that he explained those, but did you not notice anything else strange about the house? The smell of sulfur, for example.”

  Sarah shook her head and continued her stitching. “There was no smell of sulfur that I recall. And yes, James had cleaned the house and washed the floor, but he said he’d done that for my homecoming
—to make it nice for me.”

  “And you thought that plausible? The man who’d thrown you out less than a week earlier?”

  “I dare say it seems very foolish now, but at the time I believed James was genuinely sorry for his behavior toward me.” She raised her eyes. “He could be kind, you know.”

  Kind. A man who had dismembered a woman’s body with a carpenter’s saw and calmly distributed the pieces about town. Edmund found it difficult to believe that such a man was capable of kindness.

  After a few moments, he said, “Miss Gale, I have just come from seeing one of the surgeons who gave evidence at your trial: Dr. Girdwood. You remember him?”

  She nodded.

  “He told me that when the police searched Greenacre’s house they found spots of blood in the bedroom.” He looked at her. She had stopped sewing. “You’d been cleaning the house, hadn’t you? And staying in the bedroom?” He paused. “You must have seen them.”

  Sarah put her sewing on the bed beside her. After a time she said, “It was not Hannah Brown’s blood.”

  “How do you know?”

  She breathed out. “Because it was mine. From an old argument.”

  Edmund blinked. An image flashed before his eyes of Sarah’s head, thrust back against the wall, her face wet with blood. “Why on earth did you stay with him?” he asked, almost without meaning to.

  Sarah twisted her hands together. “Mr. Fleetwood, it’s difficult to explain to a man like you why I’d stay with a man like him. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Edmund thought suddenly of his own mother, her spirit sapped by years of his father’s sarcasm and silence.

  “In fact,” he said, “I think I would.”

  Sarah’s expression suggested she did not believe him, so he continued.

  “You see, someone very close to me was ill-used. Not physically, but…let us just say that I recognize that a person may stay with another in circumstances that are not…ideal.”

  Sarah stared at him for a moment. “And this someone…Did she stay?”

  “She was not, as it turns out, given the opportunity.”