The Unseeing Page 11

  When Edmund was thirteen, his mother had been exiled from the family, after his father had discovered she was having an affair. At least, he assumed that was what he had discovered. It had never been discussed. His father had taken Edmund and his brother to Scotland to visit a cousin’s estate. When they returned, their mother was gone and they were not to speak of her.

  “Suffice to say,” Edmund continued, “that I appreciate that you might have stayed with James Greenacre for reasons that are not immediately obvious to me.”

  She was still watching him. “Yes.” Her brow creased. “You’ll have seen only the side of James that the press has chosen to print: the villain, the brute, the fraud. But he could also be eloquent and charming and sometimes tender.” Sarah rubbed at her raw knuckles. “And I don’t want you to think there were many arguments like that. He just lost his temper sometimes. Besides, if I’d left, where would I have gone? I had very little money and a young child to feed and clothe. The alternative would have been to throw ourselves upon the scant mercy of the parish, or…” She looked away.

  Edmund thought of the women who stood in the shadows of Haymarket, in faded silk dresses and rouge. He thought of the woman who had pressed herself against him in the alleyway off Fleet Street; of the girls with bruised faces in the slums of St. Giles. “Would those options have been worse than staying with Greenacre?”

  “Yes, Mr. Fleetwood,” she said firmly. “They would.”

  “Some of the newspapers,” Edmund said, choosing his words carefully, “referred to you as a fallen woman.”

  Sarah gave a lopsided smile. “It’s a funny expression, isn’t it: ‘fallen woman’? As if women fall by themselves, by accident.” Her voice was sharp. “Most, I think, are pushed.”

  Edmund waited for her to say something else, but she did not. “So, you…?”

  “So I stayed with James, despite everything. I came to think of his little outbursts as the price I had to pay for security. But of course it was no security at all, for once he found a woman whom he thought had money, he turned me out of the house.” Her tone had grown cold, her expression hard.

  “Then why go back the moment he asked you, if you knew by then that he would drop you in a trice the moment he had a better option?”

  “I was afraid—of him; of what would become of George and me on our own. I suppose I’d come to depend upon him, and not just for the money. Without him I was…nothing.”

  A memory surfaced in Edmund’s mind of him being taken, as a child, to some tearooms somewhere—all green drapery and mahogany—to see his mother. Perhaps it was the first time he had seen her after her enforced exile. Edmund recalled the smell of wood polish and the expression on his mother’s face when she had seen him and his brother.

  “You mustn’t worry about me. I’m really not worth worrying about.” He gazed now at Sarah’s delicate face, the graceful line of her throat. He felt a sudden overwhelming tenderness toward her: a need to protect.

  “Is that why you’ve kept silent for Greenacre?” he said softly. “Because you’re afraid he’ll hurt you? You know he can’t harm you here.”

  He saw her body tense.

  “I’m not keeping silent for him,” she said. “I didn’t speak out about Hannah Brown’s death because I didn’t know about it.” Her expression closed. The vulnerable Sarah had disappeared; the defenses were back in place.

  Edmund pressed his lips together. “I see.”

  Sarah looked him straight in the eye. “I’m telling you the truth.”

  He nodded slowly. He had thought he was getting somewhere.

  “Let’s go back to before all of this happened, shall we?” he said. “You told me before about your early life in Lyme. Why did you leave Dorset?”

  For a moment, she was silent, chewing her lip, but then she looked up at him. “The same reason your brother left London, Mr. Fleetwood. We needed to escape.”

  13

  “It follows that, so far as crime is determined by external circumstances, every step made by woman towards her independence is a step towards that precipice at the bottom of which lies a prison.”

  —A History of Crime in England, Luke Owen Pike, 1876

  “It all started,” she said, “when the war ended.”

  In 1815, when Sarah was fourteen years old, a quarter of a million soldiers and sailors came back to a country that had no jobs for them. That, combined with the beginnings of mechanization, led to an economic crisis of proportions not known in her lifetime. Riots began in Kent in June and by mid-November they had spread to Dorset.

  “When we had people to dinner they spoke of laborers breaking machines, of crops set on fire, of a tenfold rise in poaching and theft. It didn’t occur to me then that any of that might affect us.

  “The following year was the year without a summer. I remember the rains and the cold and the news of the harvests failing. That was the summer my father disappeared. I came down one morning to find my mother on the hall floor, weeping. All I knew then was that he had gone. Only later did I find out that my father had invested all his capital in ruinous speculations and left us with almost nothing.”

  Sarah looked at her hands: at the broken nails and chafed skin. “At some point, I suppose my father must have realized things were going wrong with his business. At some stage he must have known that we were close to financial ruin. And yet he never made a contingency plan. For all his calculating and planning and writing ledgers, he never created a scheme to protect his family if things went wrong. He simply abandoned us, and the whole house of cards collapsed.”

  Sarah pictured their mother’s white face and glassy eyes as she explained to her daughters that they had to leave the house. Although they had known that things would change, neither of the sisters had appreciated the magnitude of it until that afternoon in the front room, the curtains drawn. Her mother told them that they were going on an adventure. Sarah understood that they were being thrown out of the house. That beautiful house that she had always assumed they owned was in fact only rented from a woman who had long ago lost her patience over the many bills that had been left unpaid.

  “Before we left, Mother walked slowly about the house, touching the things we had to leave behind: the leather-bound books, the glass baubles, the velvet chairs, the piano. Because it turned out none of them actually belonged to us.

  “We packed our clothes and books into trunks and took the stagecoach to London. We set out at night so, I suppose, that our neighbors wouldn’t see our disgrace as we left.”

  It had taken them two days to reach London. Sarah remembered waking early to see the mist-shrouded fields turn into a tangle of streets and alleys. The chimneys grew taller and the threads of smoke thicker, and then the dome of St. Paul’s appeared over the brow of the hill. Not that she knew what it was then. Nor did she know the meaning of the dark cloud hovering above it, black in the center and bottle-green at the edges. Only later was she told that it was London fog—that dark cloak of coal dust and dirt that hangs in the air like a canopy shrouding the city. At the time, she supposed it to be a presentiment of doom, which in a way it was.

  They reached the outskirts of the city in the early morning and London was already awake. It was the smell that hit her first, an exhilarating smell of ordure and people and life and death. Then the noise: the clash of hoofs and rolling of wheels, the shouts of costermongers, the ringing of church bells.

  “Our mother had secured us lodgings in Golden Square, an area north of Piccadilly Circus where many of the properties are let out to families and single gentlemen. It was a considerable step down from where we’d lived before, but still a decent place with two bedrooms and a front parlor.

  “Those first days were ones of excitement. My sister and I wandered about the Pantheon on Regent Street and the Burlington Arcade in Piccadilly looking at the displays in the illuminated shop windows—sparkling
jewelry, silks and velvets, fancy stationery.” She saw in her mind the baker’s shops with cakes and jellies gleaming from behind the glass like splendid jewels; the sweet shops stacked with tier upon tier of Berwick cockles, Kendal mint cake, and candied fruits—delights that now seemed unimaginable. Sarah spent her days at Newgate in a state of almost constant hunger, a gnawing sensation only briefly abated by the inadequate meals. What she wouldn’t give now for a suck of sherbet or a mouthful of delicate, cream-filled pastry.

  “It was only after we’d been there a week or so that our mother told us that we were nearly out of money, and then things of course became rather different. We moved into smaller and meaner lodgings. My sister and I began taking in sewing to make a little money. Our mother visited friends and relatives of my father’s to try to secure their assistance, but either she didn’t make our situation plain enough to them, or they wanted nothing to do with us. Either way, no money came.”

  She glanced up at Edmund.

  “That must have been very humiliating,” he said.

  “Yes. For my mother especially. In the space of only a few months, she’d been reduced from a society wife in a small town to a penniless nobody in a city of faceless thousands. Her husband had deserted her, and her friends had turned the other way. She sank fairly quickly after that into a haze of alcohol and laudanum and kept mainly to her shabby little room.”

  Sometimes, when Sarah knew her mother to be drugged beyond comprehension, she would stand next to her bed and whisper things to her.

  “Did you hear him creep to my room at night? Did you know what it was he was doing to me? Were you too weak to confront him, or did you simply not care, you miserable bitch?”

  There had been one evening, toward the end of her mother’s illness, when Sarah looked up midsentence and caught her sister’s reflection in the looking glass above the mantel. She had been listening to every word. Sarah froze. For a few seconds Rosina held her gaze. Then she stepped forward and placed her hand on the back of Sarah’s neck.

  “I should have done something to stop him,” she said. “I will never forgive myself for not doing anything.”

  • • •

  “Miss Gale?” The lawyer was looking at her and she realized she had been staring at him without seeing him.

  “You were telling me about your mother.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. She died fairly soon after that.”

  “How did she die?”

  Sarah paused, thinking of the sickroom table with its stock of medicines and powders. “From the symptoms, they supposed it was disease of the liver.”

  “And your father?” Edmund said. “Did he come back?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “He abandoned you?”

  “Yes, I suppose he did.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Fleetwood. I never heard from him again.”

  “Surely he must have heard of your mother’s death.”

  Sarah lowered her eyes so he could not read what was written in them. “I don’t know, sir,” she said. “But at all events, from then on, we were truly on our own.”

  • • •

  Long after Edmund had left, Sarah continued to think of that time, of her mother’s cold body as they dressed her in her one good dress. By then, all of the jewelry had been sold, save for the eye brooch, and the gold and pearls from that were needed to pay for the burial. The miniature, however, Sarah kept.

  They buried their mother in the burial ground at St. James’s, for that was all they could afford once the doctor and the pharmacist and the clergyman had been paid. There was a reason the place was cheap. The graveyard, packed with the broken bodies of the poor, bulged several inches above the level of the street and the air was thick with the stench of decay.

  The sisters stood close together, the only mourners, the black from their newly dyed dresses leaching out in the rain, as the clergyman mumbled through an abridged version of the Order for the Burial for the Dead.

  “And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold…”

  The sexton, holding a handkerchief to his face, began to clear the muddy soil away with his spade.

  “I held my tongue and spake nothing,” the clergyman intoned. “I kept silence, yea, even from good words.”

  The sexton dumped their mother’s shrouded form into the shallow grave and sprinkled it with lime.

  “Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts,” continued the clergyman. “Shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer…” He was backing away from the grave, his hand over his mouth.

  Rosina put her arm around Sarah, who, by now, was shaking. The sexton shoveled a few inches of earth over the body and threw down his spade.

  “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore.”

  As the clergyman spoke the final words, Sarah pulled away from Rosina and retched into the mud.

  “Amen.”

  14

  “It might, perhaps, be thought that if any law were required to regulate the relations between parent and child, it would be found innate in the human breast. But human nature has so many weaknesses, to say nothing of positive evil impulses, that we cannot allow ourselves to trust to it alone.”

  —Cassell’s Household Guide, circa 1880s

  He was at the bottom of a well. He knew that someone or something was coming for him and that he needed to get out. It was wet and cold and black as pitch. Water dripped onto his face and all around was a strange smell of fungus and decay, of unknown things rotting or growing. He tried to find some crevice in the slimy walls into which he could dig his fingers so as to drag himself up, but he could get no purchase on the moss-covered bricks and his fingers ran with blood from where the stone had torn at them. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a woman singing but he could not make out the words. He knew that it was Sarah. He knew that there was an important message in her song and wanted desperately to be able to go to her but the walls remained slippery and impossible.

  Edmund wrenched himself from sleep and lay upon his sweat-soaked pillow, gradually filtering the fragments of dream from reality. He realized that he had left one of the bedroom windows open the previous night and a cool morning breeze ruffled the curtains and the chintz hangings of the bed. From the street below came the sound of a coster girl, singing:

  O ye tears! O ye tears! I am thankful that ye run;

  Though ye trickle in the darkness, ye shall glitter in the sun.

  The rainbow cannot shine if the rain refuse to fall,

  And the eyes that cannot weep are the saddest eyes of all.

  Edmund turned to look at Bessie, but her side of the bed was empty, and the sheets, when he felt them, were almost cold.

  “What were you dreaming?”

  He saw with a start that she was sitting in a chair to the side of the bed, watching him.

  “I was dreaming…” He hesitated. “I don’t remember. Something ghastly.”

  “All that blood,” Bessie said, looking out of the window. “All that evil.” She drew her silk dressing gown closer around her. “It’s no wonder you have nightmares.”

  “No,” Edmund said. “Perhaps not.” But it was not the crime itself that had seeped into his dreams. It was the woman. Perhaps Bessie knew that, because her gaze, when she held his, was sharp as a knife.

  “You must be careful, my love.”

  • • •

  “May I take those for you, sir?”

  A porter in a faded uniform hung Edmund’s coat and hat on a peg and led him into a dark wood-paneled room where conversation was in full flow around a large rosewood table.

  As he entered the room, an ample-chested woman stood up
to greet him. She had a broad red face that suggested a liking for the brandy bottle. “Mr. Fleetwood, please come in. Seat yourself. I am Miss McAdam—I chair the meetings.” Edmund had, after receiving several requests, agreed to meet with the British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners.

  A second, slighter woman dressed entirely in black came forward and took his hand. “Do make yourself comfortable. I’ll order us some tea.”

  “Thank you, Miss…?”

  “Pike. But you must call me Verity. I’ve been assisting Miss Gale and supported her petition. I’m very pleased you could join us.” She smiled and then disappeared into the vestibule.

  “Mr. Fleetwood, tell us,” the red-faced woman said, “are you convinced of her innocence yet?”

  Edmund took a seat at the table. “You’ll appreciate that I cannot divulge my thinking to you at this stage. It’s a complicated case.”

  “On the contrary, young man, it’s perfectly simple. Woman A leaves house. Man kills woman B. Woman A comes back to house and knows nothing of the whole wretched business. There’s not a shred of evidence against her.”

  “There are factors that argue against Miss Gale. The pawn tickets, the jewelry, the fabric—”

  “Yes, and you know what they call such factors? Circumstantial! You will be pleased to hear, Mr. Fleetwood, that I myself have read extensively on legal matters.”

  Edmund’s heart sank. Fortunately, Miss Pike returned at that moment with a tray and he insisted on helping her with laying out its contents: a silver teapot, a dish of sandwiches, a plate of orange segments sprinkled with powdered sugar.

  “I do apologize, Mr. Fleetwood,” she said in an undertone. “Miss McAdam thinks she can win arguments by increasing the volume of her voice.”

  “I’m a barrister. I’m used to that.”

  Miss Pike smiled at him, exposing a row of neat little white teeth, shiny like a string of pearls.

  “You will find that we are split into two camps here,” she said to him confidentially. “There are those who subscribe to Miss McAdam’s theory that Miss Gale knew nothing of the murder and there are those who, like me, think that Sarah may have known something of the horrid affair but was prevented from speaking out. I’ve seen this sort of thing before, and I believe James Greenacre wore her down with months of cruelty, emotional and physical.” She poured some tea into a china cup.