The Unseeing Page 14

  “Only, it does not appear to relate to your sister, does it?”

  The man glowered at him. “Nor does it appear to relate to Sarah Gale, as was made clear during the trial.”

  “Did you know that the jewelry has gone missing?”

  Brown’s face betrayed no emotion. “Has it? How unfortunate.”

  He knew, Edmund thought. Maybe he and Feltham had agreed that it would disappear. Or perhaps Rosina had been right: perhaps the police had never seized it.

  “Did your sister wear that jewelry frequently?”

  “What has that to do with anything?”

  “Well, it doesn’t sound as though it was very distinctive,” Edmund said. “Just some gold bands and small jade earrings. I am wondering how you recognized the items, particularly when you seldom saw your sister.”

  “I do hope you’re not accusing me of lying, sir.”

  “I’m simply asking a question.”

  “I have a good eye for detail, Mr. Fleetwood. I can only hope that the same is true of you. And now,” he said, taking his gloves out of his hat, “I must return to my office.”

  The man had never seen the earrings; Edmund was sure of it. Sarah and Rosina had said they were carnelian: red.

  “One last question, Mr. Brown, if you’ll oblige me. Your sister agreed to marry James Greenacre very quickly. She moved into his house after only a few weeks of knowing him, and while there was another woman present. Do you know why that would be?”

  William Brown stood up, slipped the gold watch back into his waistcoat, and put his hat under his arm. “Mr. Fleetwood, I would have thought you would be capable of working that out for yourself. She was over forty. She was not an attractive woman, physically or otherwise. She married the first man who asked her. It’s just regrettable that he turned out to be a murderer.”

  Edmund remained seated and watched Brown as he walked rigidly toward the door. For the first time since he had accepted the commission, Edmund felt a surge of pity for Hannah Brown.

  17

  “‘Not a particle of evidence, Pip,’ said Mr. Jaggers, shaking his head and gathering up his skirts. ‘Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.’”

  —Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, 1861

  The waitress banged the plate down on the table in front of him and lifted the lid: kidneys with steaming marrow pudding.

  “What do you make of her, then?” asked Edmund’s father. “Guilty or not guilty?”

  They were in a chophouse on the Gray’s Inn Road, sitting on wooden benches amid the chatter of lawyers, the clashing of cutlery, and the crashing of plates on tables.

  Edmund tucked his napkin into his collar. “It’s still very difficult to say.”

  “Well, you must have some inkling. Have you not challenged her?”

  “Father, it’s not a simple matter of dragging the information out of her. I’m doing the best I can—and she’s much more forthcoming than she was at the outset—but I suspect she’s keeping something back.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she is, Edmund. I’m sure she is. Not that that necessarily makes her a criminal. What woman tells the truth about her private life? What man, for that matter? Everyone lies.”

  “Not everyone, Father.”

  Arthur Fleetwood ignored him and reached for the salt-shaker. “The important thing, as in any case, is to sift the insignificant lies from the important ones. She may well be keeping something back, but that does not of itself mean that she is lying about the murder.”

  “I had no idea you were such an authority on criminal investigations,” Edmund said.

  His father, impervious to his sarcasm, continued, “Remember that, while women are often very good liars, they are generally less capable of independent and complex thought. It will therefore be necessary to subject her account to rigorous scrutiny—test her on each point, push her, catch her out.”

  Edmund clenched his teeth. “Perhaps you would like to interrogate her yourself.”

  His father frowned. “I don’t think that would be appropriate. I am merely giving you a few pointers to help you draw out the true version of events.”

  He poured himself more wine.

  “Of course, it’s possible she is telling the truth. Perhaps she really did not know that Greenacre murdered the woman.”

  Edmund shook his head. “She was surrounded by Hannah Brown’s possessions. She’s an intelligent woman.”

  “Even the cleverer ones are easily led, Edmund. If Sarah Gale was used to accepting everything Greenacre said and aceding to his every whim, would she really have had the tenacity to question why the other woman’s belongings remained in their house? Think of Bessie. Does she challenge your every word and action?”

  Edmund felt his face grow hot. “I fail to see what Bessie has to do with any of this.”

  “Ah,” said his father with a slight smile, “I see I have hit upon a sore point. Bessie always was a little willful. As a young girl, she talked back even to her own father.”

  Edmund bit the inside of his cheek. His father never missed an opportunity to remind him that he had known Bessie first.

  • • •

  As Edmund walked to Newgate, he wondered whether his father could be right: whether Greenacre had oppressed Sarah to such an extent that she ceased to question what he said and did. It was typical of his father to expound on the wrongdoings of others without realizing that he was guilty of the very same thing. Even as a young child, Edmund had recognized the insults and snide remarks that his father made to or about his mother, in public as well as in private: she dressed inappropriately; she ate too much or in the wrong way; she was losing her looks; she spoke foolishly. He had a distinct memory of his mother in a deep red dress, her hair elaborately coiffed, diamonds at her neck, descending the spiral staircase to the hallway, ready to greet the guests who were arriving for some dinner or ball.

  “Good gracious, Alice,” his father had said as he looked up at her. “You might be a gentleman’s whore, not his wife.”

  Edmund had never seen him hurt her physically. In fact, he had rarely seen his father touch his mother at all. His abuse was of a different kind. Like Sarah, his mother had put up with it, gradually worn down to a husk. Like Sarah, she had stayed until she was thrown out. And the worst of it all was that he knew his mother had done it for them—she had stayed for him and his brother. Why had he not stood up for her? He had realized what was happening, but had felt powerless to stop it. He was not powerless now, however.

  Once again, Edmund was taken to Sarah’s cell, where at least a chair had been provided for him. It was several days since he had last seen Sarah and, in that time, she seemed to have grown thinner, her face sharper. Her sister was right that they were effectively starving her. There were dark smudges under her eyes and her collarbones protruded through her clothing. And yet there was something about her that stirred him. Something dangerous and dark and beautiful.

  When the warder had left and he believed that they were not watched, he passed Sarah the parcel that Rosina had given him, together with a fruit tart that he had purchased on the way to the prison. She looked up at him in surprise.

  “Your sister came to see me,” he said in explanation. “She is worried, with reason, that you are cold and hungry here and I agreed to give these things to you.” He did not mention that it was he who had bought the fruit tart lest it should seem like some form of a bribe or, worse, a lover’s gift.

  Edmund saw her waver as she considered whether to eat some of the food in front of him, but evidently hunger won over. She removed a piece of the tart from its paper, and bit eagerly into it, cupping her hand beneath her chin to catch the falling crumbs.

  “Would you prefer that I returned later?”

  She finished chewing and wiped a hand across her lips, which were moist wi
th jam. “Thank you, but I would rather that you stayed.”

  There was a pause.

  “What would you like me to talk about today, Mr. Fleetwood?”

  Edmund stared at her. It took him a moment to remember what he had intended to ask.

  “We talked last time we met about how you came to London. I wondered…what happened after your mother died? It must have been a very difficult time.”

  Sarah gave him a strange look, which he could not read. “My mother and I were never close.” She hesitated. “I was not, I suppose, a very good daughter.”

  Edward gave a lopsided smile. “How strange. Only just now I was thinking that I haven’t been much of a son to my own mother.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, I don’t see her as much as I ought.” Edmund shifted in his seat.

  “Because you are so busy?”

  “Partly. Partly because…” Because what? Because he felt he had failed her? Because he was ashamed of her? “I’m not sure, really,” he said. “I have no excuse, and she is quite lonely. My father and she parted ways some years ago.” Why was he telling her this?

  “And your father disapproves of your continued contact with her?”

  Edmund looked at Sarah, unblinking. “You are very perceptive, Miss Gale.”

  Sarah gave a half smile. “Not, it seems, when it really matters.” She met Edmund’s eye. Maybe it was true, he thought. Maybe she really had not known about Hannah Brown.

  After a pause, he said, “What did you do after your mother’s death?”

  “We moved to some cheaper rooms on the Ratcliffe Highway. You know of it, I suppose?”

  Edmund nodded. The Ratcliffe Highway ran from East Smithfield to Shadwell High Street. He had visited the area several times, seeking out witnesses on other criminal cases. He had seen the thin children playing in the gutters and the women with bloated faces waiting on street corners for trade.

  “It’s a rough sort of place,” Sarah said, “but we couldn’t afford anything better by that stage. The obvious thing would have been for both Rosina and me to find positions as governesses: that’s what most middle-class women turn to when their lives fall to pieces. But it would have meant we were apart. Instead, we found employment at a local dressmaker’s, sewing being about the only useful skill we’d been taught. It was hard work: long hours in poor conditions and no reliable pay. During the Season, ladies expected their new balldresses to be delivered the day after they’d ordered them, which sometimes meant sewing for twenty hours or more straight off. We couldn’t continue like that.”

  “So what did you do?” he asked carefully. Was this, he wondered, when she had become the “unfortunate” the newspapers spoke of? He knew that many dressmakers and seamstresses had to subsidize their earnings by going to the streets.

  “A woman who lived on the floor below us suggested that Rosina and I might try our hand at nursing. It isn’t generally considered to be a suitable profession for young women, of course, but we couldn’t have the same expectations as before. We could only hope to survive.

  “I found a woman in Walworth, Miss Vetch, who’d set up her own school, teaching the basics of nursing and midwifery to a roomful of girls. We attended her school during the day, and by night we took in needlework and lacework. It wasn’t easy. Part of the training involved attending patients in the workhouse and walking the wards in the poor hospital.” She shook her head. “The stench of the place…It stayed with me for days: sickness, dirt, and despair.

  “It was too much for Rosina. She was only fourteen then and she became…ill. I wrote to our old drawing teacher, who agreed to put her forward for a governess position, and she went to look after two little girls in a decent house off Portland Place.”

  “Leaving you on your own.”

  “Yes.” Sarah picked at her lip. “It was the first time we’d been apart. We were both very lonely, I think; but at least I knew Rosina was safe. And I saw her every other Sunday. Not long after that I obtained a situation as a private nurse in one of the big houses in Marylebone, caring for an old gentleman. I won’t pretend it was pretty work, but it was fairly paid and…well, that’s how it was for a time.”

  Edmund tried to read her face. She was not telling him the whole story, he was sure of it.

  “Why didn’t you become a governess yourself?” he asked. “Or some kind of schoolmistress? Surely that would have been preferable.”

  “I couldn’t find a position early on. And then, well, I’d been at low jobs for so long that I couldn’t get a character for work as a governess.”

  “There was nothing else you could do? You had been educated, after all.”

  Sarah gave him a blank look. “I was educated to be a gentlewoman, a wife. I was educated so that I should not work. There were very few options open to me.”

  Edmund nodded slowly. He suspected he knew the real reason she had been unable to get a character: she had sold herself, to save her younger sister.

  “When did you marry?” he asked. “I assume Gale is your married name.”

  She frowned. “It was a few years later, when I was three and twenty. Charles, his name was, though everyone called him Charlie. He was a sailor so I saw him only for a few months of the year, but it turned out that was plenty enough.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She paused. “Charlie wasn’t always a kind man, especially when he’d been at the bottle, and he resented my learning, meager though it was. He thought me above myself and he made it his business to take me down a peg or two.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Sarah gave a thin smile. “Two years after we married, when I was with child, he taught me my final lesson: he disappeared altogether. Sailed off on a cruise and never came back. For months, I tried to find him, but when I discovered that he’d absconded at Cape Town I gave up any hope of ever tracing him.

  “I’d lost my situation by then, being big with child, and was nearly destitute. Rosina brought me garments from her employers and their friends to sew and mend: dresses, shirts, bonnets. I was laid up, exhausted with the baby at that time and if Rosina hadn’t helped me, I…well, I don’t know what would have happened.”

  “And the child…?”

  “It was a little girl. She was born dead.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Edmund said, thinking of Bessie’s doomed pregnancies, his own grief. But then something else occurred to him. “That means that George is not your husband’s son.”

  “No,” Sarah said curtly. “He wasn’t.”

  Edmund waited for her to say something further. When she did not, he said: “He’s not Greenacre’s son either, is he? You didn’t meet Greenacre until after he was born.”

  “No, but James was often kind to George,” she said quickly. “He told him stories and sang to him, and sometimes he’d take him to the pleasure gardens and the zoo at Walworth.”

  “And threw him out of the house in the depths of winter.”

  Sarah looked away from him. “I said he was often kind. Not always.”

  “And often was enough?”

  “No, of course not. But I always hoped that things would get better. I wished that—” She stopped herself.

  “What was it that you wished, Sarah?”

  Sarah was looking at her hands. “I suppose a part of me thought that one day James and I would marry. That we would be a proper family. But of course it didn’t work out like that.”

  “No. No, it didn’t.” Edmund considered his words carefully. “Tell me about James,” he said. “How did you meet him?”

  18

  “Attentive and silent observation will frequently give an early insight into the game, and enable you to play your hand to more advantage, than by adhering to more regular maxims.”

  —Advice to the Young Whist Player, Thomas Matthews, Esq
., 1808

  It was in the August of 1835. Do you remember how hot it was that summer? The roads were covered in dust and the whole of London stank like the inside of a tannery. One Sunday afternoon, Rosina and I decided to escape the heat and stench and travel down to Camberwell Fair, as a treat for George, and for ourselves.”

  Sarah remembered it clearly. A tavern ranged from one end of the Green to the other, ornamented with chandeliers, lamps, flags, and banners, and from a distance the whole thing looked like a glorious multicolored patchwork quilt. Walking closer, they saw fortune-tellers and donkey rides, weighing machines and theater booths, drummer boys and acrobats, peep shows and freak shows. The Green swarmed with people in high spirits, many of them drunk, and men and women selling nuts and toffee apples walked through the throng carrying baskets and shouting out their wares, their calls mixing with the sounds of the musicians and the babble of the crowd.

  For a time, they wandered about looking at the shows and at the stalls; at the handwagons piled high with oranges, gingerbread, brandy snaps, and oysters. At dusk, the bands began to play, and Sarah and Rosina seated themselves in the tavern to take some beer and to feed George some warm milk and pieces of apple. A man approached their table and, without prelude, asked Sarah to dance. It was his hands she noticed first: large and capable with the nails clean and neatly cut. He had a coarse sort of face with a thick nose, but eyes that seemed to glint. James.

  “He was very charming to all of us,” Sarah told Edmund. “Making jokes and giving compliments and even paying for George to have a turn on the roundabout.”

  And even then, Sarah thought, Rosina had seen through him. “I met with James often after that. He brought me gifts: a bundle of oranges tied up in a handkerchief, a bright bird in a cage. He noticed me. After a time, we agreed it made sense for me to move into his house and to cook and clean for him. No doubt you’ll think that was improper as we weren’t married—I know many did—but I was still Charlie’s wife so far as the law was concerned, and I had a child. I suppose I could hardly have expected James to marry me.” She twisted her fingers into the fabric of her skirt. “And anyway, I was poor; I needed somewhere to stay.”