The Unseeing Read online

  “The problem with that theory, Miss Pike, is that Miss Gale doesn’t herself appear to subscribe to it.”

  “I appreciate it’s difficult to understand, but you see, her spirit has been crushed. Her mind is disordered. She isn’t responding as you might expect her to. I know she can at times seem distant, but I think that’s a sign that she’s protecting herself. I dealt with a similar case a few years ago.”

  “A woman accused of concealing a crime?”

  “In a way. It was a dreadful business.” She leaned in closer. “The Parish took a little girl away from her mother, claiming she had badly beaten the child. Initially, the woman refused to defend herself and was really quite hostile when we tried to help. Over time, however, it became apparent that the real culprit was the woman’s lover. It took us months to persuade her to speak out against him.”

  “But I don’t have months, Miss Pike. I have four weeks. If I am to find in Miss Gale’s favor, she must give me the information I need.”

  The woman sat back and looked at him shrewdly. “And what exactly is the information you need, Mr. Fleetwood?”

  “If Sarah Gale can prove that she acted under duress—that Greenacre forced her to act as she did—then she may have a defense. That is all that I can say at present.”

  “You must agree, sir,” said a long-faced woman in black bombazine, “that this is a case that demonstrates the complete lunacy of capital punishment. How can they send a woman to the gallows on such flimsy and disputed evidence?”

  Edmund did in fact agree. He had never believed in the principle of lex talionis—an eye for an eye. He could not, however, discuss these things freely here.

  Instead, he said, “The problem is that the jury found her guilty, notwithstanding the circumstantial nature of the evidence. In order for me to recommend that that verdict be overturned, I need something more than mere conjecture.”

  “But it is the wrong way around!” said Miss McAdam, her red face even more flushed. “You’re asking her to prove her innocence, when the prosecution failed to prove her guilty!”

  “But she was found guilty.”

  “Oh, by twelve imbecilic men who had already made up their minds before they heard a word of what was said in court. Put twelve women in a jury box and they would never have found Sarah Gale guilty. It’s simply ludicrous that we have no criminal court of appeal. No offense to you, sir, but there should be a proper process for challenging this nonsense.”

  “Miss McAdam, I fully support the idea of an appeal court, but as we are where we are, I must do the best I can.”

  “Indeed you must, sir. The power has been placed in your hands. You must use it wisely.”

  For the next half hour, the women impressed upon him the arguments as to why Miss Gale should be pardoned: she had been blinded by love; she was entirely ignorant of the whole affair; she had been coerced into silence; she was the unwitting victim; she was unsound of mind and thus incapable of seeing what Greenacre had done. Edmund made his way through the sandwiches, murmuring assent where appropriate and responding where to do so would not be to give away too much. As he chewed, however, it occurred to him that if Sarah was indeed mentally disordered, as both Miss Pike and Dr. Girdwood seemed to believe, that might mean not that she was oblivious to Greenacre’s crime, but that she was, as Price had said, precisely the sort of woman who was capable of covering up a murder and plotting her way out of prison.

  • • •

  He escaped from the meeting a little after two o’clock on the pretext of having another appointment. In a way, he did. He was already in Mayfair, only a few minutes’ walk from his father’s house. Over the past few weeks, his father had left several notes requesting that Edmund call upon him. He could postpone it no longer.

  Edmund made his way to Grosvenor Square and climbed the stone steps to the grand house. Only a few seconds after he rang the bell, the door was opened by the small maid, her scrubbed face bunched into a nervous smile. She bobbed down in greeting.

  “Mr. Fleetwood, sir.”

  “Hello, Milly. I’m here to see my father.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, scuttling off around the corner.

  He took off his hat and walked down the wide, dark hallway into the library, his boots clicking on the polished wooden floor. Nothing had changed. The same tall bookshelves stood against the walls filled with leather-bound legal volumes—Hansard, Halsbury’s, and Acts of Parliament. On the walls hung engraved portraits of previous Lord Chancellors and other celebrated lawyers of the last century. To the right was a cabinet of parchment scrolls and by the window stood a large mahogany desk with a shaded green lamp. The only sound was the clinical tick of the library clock.

  It was in this room that his father used to punish Edmund and his brother for what he perceived to be their misdeeds. “Spare the rod and spoil the child, Alice.” He remembered the thwack of leather on skin, the smart of pain, the sting of tears in his eyes.

  “You took your time.”

  He started at the voice close behind him.

  “I’m sorry, Father. I wanted to come sooner, but I’ve been busy lately.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you have.” His father appraised him briefly. “You’ll have a drink with me?”

  “No, thank you, Father.”

  “Yes, you shall. Milly!” The maid was there within moments. “Two rum and waters.”

  “I really don’t—”

  “Come, now. We are celebrating, are we not?”

  “Celebrating?”

  “Your appointment, Edmund! The salvaging of your legal career.”

  Edmund regarded his father. Although he was nearer now to seventy than to sixty, he still cut a clean figure, slim-built with silver hair trimmed short. He was dressed, immaculately as always, in a blue coat, striped waistcoat, and dark trousers. Edmund wondered for whom he was making the effort.

  “My career didn’t need salvaging, Father,” he said quietly.

  “No? Then why did you write to me asking for money?”

  Edmund felt his face blaze. “A temporary issue. I haven’t been paid for all my work of late.”

  “Well,” his father said, with false levity, “now you won’t need financial assistance, will you? And you stand a chance of making a name for yourself—raising your profile on the back of a fallen woman.”

  Edmund swallowed. “I’m not sure that she’s what you’d call a fallen woman.”

  “Come, come, Edmund. The Times describes her as an ‘unfortunate.’ We all know what that word means.”

  “She was living with Greenacre as his wife.”

  “Ah, but she was not in fact his wife, was she? No. Then there is little difference between her and a common street prostitute.”

  There was a pause. Edmund listened to the slow tick of the library clock. He wished himself anywhere but there. “That is not what she stands accused of.”

  “No, indeed, she was convicted of something far worse. You see, once a woman has begun to descend the slippery slope of immorality, there is no limit to what she’s capable of. Falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus. Remember that, Edmund. Once a woman has lost her sexual scruples, then she will stop at nothing.” He smiled tightly. “I would know, of course.”

  “Father, that’s unfair. That was hardly the same thing.” Edmund was still not entirely sure what crime his mother was supposed to have committed, but he hoped it had given her at least some brief happiness.

  Milly came back into the library with a silver tray bearing two crystal glasses, which his father picked up. He planted one in Edmund’s hand.

  “To your success.” His father knocked back the rum and returned the glass to the tray. “Edmund, are you not grateful? Do you refuse to toast your own appointment?”

  The smell of rum made the bile rise in Edmund’s throat. He had always hated the stuff. Milly hovered
nervously with the tray. Resignedly, he put the glass to his lips, closed his eyes, and gulped down the liquid, trying his best not to gag. He placed the near-empty glass back on the tray.

  “Thank you, Milly.”

  She bobbed into a brief curtsy and then rushed from the room. There was an uncomfortable silence.

  “Have you heard from your mother?”

  “Not for a while.”

  Edmund had in fact received a letter from her only a few days ago, but it was best to avoid any conversation about her. As a child, his father had prohibited him and his brother from speaking of their mother at all. At first, Edmund had made the mistake of asking his father where she was and whether he could see her. He recalled the look on his face, the sound of the air compressing as his father’s hand landed flat on his cheek. He did not ask again.

  “Well, it’s good to know you don’t care to visit either of your parents.”

  “As I said, Father, I’ve been busy.”

  “Yes, yes. Your new case.” His father moved over to one of the wing chairs and sat down. “Tell me: how is it progressing? What methods are you using?”

  Edmund also took a seat. “I’m obtaining an affidavit from Sarah Gale regarding her history while at the same time questioning her about the key events.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t think that the correct course of action?” Edmund asked, irritated.

  “Personally, I wouldn’t have thought her life story particularly relevant. What matters is what happened that night. And there is a danger that you will be drawn into her narrative. But of course it is your investigation.”

  “Yes, Father, it is.”

  After a long moment, his father said, “And do you believe her version of events?”

  “There are some inconsistencies, but as a witness, yes, I find her credible.”

  His father laughed. “Ah, you mean you find her attractive. It is true that she is handsome, then?”

  “Do you mean to imply that I have been drawn in by her womanly charms and am incapable of forming an unbiased judgment? Really, if you think so little of me, why did you recommend me to the post?”

  “Oh, Edmund, Edmund,” his father said, placing his hand on his son’s arm, “I was only toying with you. I’m sure you’re doing a perfectly decent job. I just want to ensure that you do the best you can. It is not only your name, after all, that will be associated with the outcome.”

  Edmund moved his arm away. “Why put me forward if you were worried about how it would reflect upon you?”

  “Well, it could work out to the advantage of us both. I am at that point in my career, remember, where they will be considering me for judgeship. They will no doubt consider my life—my family in the round. And if you were able to impress the Home Secretary—”

  “Of course. I should have known this was about furthering your own interests.”

  “Really, would it be such a chore to assist your own father? The man who has paid for your education and upbringing, who has assisted you even in the matter of procuring a wife?”

  His father placed an emphasis on the last word that stung Edmund to the quick. For not only had he introduced him to Bessie, but he had spoken to her father when Edmund wished to court her. At the time, Edmund had thought it a surprising act of kindness. Only later did he understand it was simply a further means of controlling him.

  “I must make the decision that I believe to be right,” Edmund said. “Not the decision that is most likely to secure your advancement, or my own. After all, there is a woman’s life at stake. But perhaps you had not considered that.”

  He declined the offer of supper and left shortly afterward, his pulse racing, a pain in the back of his throat. While he wanted to believe himself different from his father, the truth was that it was not just Sarah Gale’s fate that concerned him: it was his own.

  15

  “The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.”

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  That night the cry came again, a thin strangled sound.

  For a few minutes, Sarah lay on her side, listening, thinking. She climbed out of bed, wrapping the blanket about her, and walked over to her water basin. The room was ice cold.

  “Stop crying,” she whispered.

  Silence. Then a frightened voice. “Who’s there?”

  “My name’s Sarah. I’m in the cell next to yours. I’m speaking through the pipes that connect the basin to the wall. Go over to your own basin.”

  Footsteps. Then a faint voice. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes. It’s Lucy, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Lucy Grimshaw.”

  Sarah had seen the girl that morning, washing in the taproom, her pointed shoulder blades protruding from her stained prison chemise as she sponged herself with water from a bucket. Although her frame was childish, there was something determined-looking about her, a wiry strength.

  “You know what I’m in ’ere for?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said. “I know that you deny it.”

  For a few moments, neither woman spoke.

  “I hear you crying every night,” Sarah said eventually.

  “I’m sorry. I try not to; I promise you I do.” There was a pause. “It’s my fault, you see. I prayed every day that he’d die—that I’d lose the baby.”

  “You don’t need to—”

  “I do need to, though. I’m going out of my wits in here with all my thoughts and fears and not a soul to talk to.”

  Sarah crouched on the ground and rested her chin on her arms.

  “I willed him dead,” the girl said, “but I didn’t kill him. That’s the God’s honest truth.”

  “You don’t have to prove anything to me. My name is Sarah Gale. You know what I was convicted of.”

  “Yes.”

  There was silence save for the sound of water dripping. Sarah knew that the girl was waiting for her to speak out and deny the crime. Instead she asked, “Was he stillborn?”

  “I think so. He never made a peep.”

  “There was no movement?”

  “No, nothing, but they say I should’ve called a doctor,” Lucy whispered. “Even if I thought he were dead. They say he could’ve been alive. An’ maybe he was; maybe I got it wrong.”

  The girl had begun to cry again, quietly.

  “What color was his skin?” Sarah said.

  “Miss?”

  “I was a nurse, Lucy. I’ve seen stillborn babies before. What color was his skin?”

  The girl had stopped crying. “He were a deep pink.”

  “With red lips?”

  “Yes, that’s it. Cherry red. I tried to wash his face, but the skin…it were like I was washin’ it away.”

  “Then he was dead, Lucy. Dead long before he came out.”

  No answer.

  “Do you understand?” Sarah asked, louder. “You didn’t kill him. He died in your womb. You don’t need to feel guilty.”

  Sarah wished there was someone who could tell her the same: that none of this was her fault. That it would be all right. But no one had ever told her that. It had always been her fault.

  “Will you tell them that?” Lucy said finally. “Will you tell the beaks what you just told me, ’bout how he must’ve been dead if he looked like that?”

  In the darkness, Sarah smiled. “I would, Lucy, but it wouldn’t do any good. They wouldn’t believe a word I said.”

  • • •

  For some time after that, Sarah lay on her mattress, her body curled into a ball, thinking of her own baby. Rose, she had called her, after her sister. She had never known what caused the child to die—whether it was the poverty of her own diet, or the squalor of her surroundings, the walls that bloomed with damp, the bed that crept with bugs. Either way, she came into the world dead, her ti
ny body distended and broken, her perfect mouth blood-red. Sarah had wrapped her in a blanket and held her and held her until the midwife pried the child from her arms.

  Sarah squeezed her eyes shut. Lactational insanity, they had called it: the darkness, the panic, the searing hatred like a fire in her brain. Best not to think of that time. Push it from your mind.

  She tried instead to imagine George, a soft, warm presence in bed beside her just as he had been those nights when they lived alone in that little room. “Will you tell me a story, Mama?” But the image warped and twisted and she could envision him only as he would be if the worst should happen: alone, hungry, and afraid.

  Eventually, abandoning the idea of sleep, she drew the gray blanket around her shoulders and kneeled on the stone floor at the foot of her mattress. All at once she was a child again, kneeling next to her sister in the nursery, breathing in the smell of freshly laundered sheets, head down, hands pressed together, whispering:

  Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness:

  According unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.

  Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

  What a thing to make a child recite. Perhaps it was no wonder she had turned out as she had.

  • • •

  Miss Pike was one of the first visitors to arrive the following morning. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes glistened black.

  “I have met with Mr. Fleetwood,” she told Sarah. “He is on our side, I can tell, but he needs to be persuaded. I did what I could, but he will only truly believe it when he hears it from you.”

  “Hears what from me, Miss Pike?”

  The other woman gave her a hard look. “You know what Mr. Fleetwood is, Sarah?”