The Unseeing Page 15

  “He was married before he met you, wasn’t he?” Edmund asked.

  “Yes, James had had two wives, both of whom died. I know the press has claimed that he dispatched them both like some monstrous Bluebeard character, but the reality is far more mundane. One died of a putrid throat and the other, I believe, fell from a horse.”

  Edmund cleared his throat and Sarah looked up at him. His expression suggested he did not believe her. Perhaps he had swallowed the newspapermen’s stories. Perhaps he was imagining James burying his previous wives in the cellar, as he then said: “When did you move into his house?”

  “In September of that year, not long after James himself had moved to Carpenter’s Buildings.”

  “And were you…content there?”

  “Well, it wasn’t a particularly lovely house—it’s in the poorer area of Camberwell and, when the wind blows from the north, you can smell the fumes from the glue factory nearby. However, it’s surrounded by fields of corn and meadowland full of wild flowers. After the Ratcliffe Highway, it was a sort of paradise.”

  She could picture the house now: the kitchen with its copper saucepans and little stock of crockery, the bedroom with its iron bedstead and hip bath. She would stand at the window looking down onto the garden, where she had planted flowers with George: sweet briars, summer jasmine, snapdragons. It felt like home.

  “We lived together there fairly happily at first, so it seemed to me,” Sarah told Edmund. “I did all of the housework and the washing, and took in pieces of sewing to work on in the evenings. George stayed with me in the mornings and was cared for in the afternoons by a woman who also minded some of the other children in the area. Aside from her and a couple of others on the road, I didn’t speak too much to people. Most assumed I was James’s wife, which was fine with me. In my mind, we were married, really, even if we’d never gone through the ceremony. Of course, the judge held that against me later.”

  For an instant, she saw before her the judge in his long, white wig: “You had united yourself to him, sharing his society and bed, without being joined to him by any moral or religious tie.” As though that were proof enough of her criminal depravity.

  “What did you think of James at that stage?” Edmund asked.

  “I suppose I knew from the beginning that he was an impulsive and ambitious man. He left his father’s farm in Norfolk when he was little more than a boy and came to London with nothing. Yet by the time I met him, he was prospering: as well as his carpentry work, he was running a large grocery shop in the Kent Road and he had several other properties in Camberwell. He always had schemes as to how he would make money or make his name. James couldn’t just be a cabinet-maker, you see: he had to be a politician, a person of standing.” Sarah smiled bitterly. “I should have foreseen that as soon as he was given the opportunity to enrich or improve himself, he would take it, even if that meant hurting me.”

  “Hence casting you aside for a woman he believed could help him with his business.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But, in fact, she lied about that, didn’t she?”

  Sarah lowered her gaze. “James thought Hannah Brown had been dishonest about her property.”

  “He claimed, didn’t he, that she’d been trying to claim credit in his name at a shop on Long Acre? That’s what they were arguing about.”

  Sarah did not answer, but thought only of Hannah’s anxious face: “He’ll understand, won’t he? I’ll tell him when the time’s right.”

  Edmund was watching her intently. “Did it surprise you to learn that’s what sparked his anger?”

  Sarah licked her lips. “James is a proud man. No doubt he felt that she’d insulted his intelligence. He didn’t kill her, though.”

  “Miss Gale, you don’t believe that. You know what happened: he lost his temper, as he had done so many times with you, and he struck out. Perhaps he didn’t intend to kill Hannah Brown, but he did.”

  Sarah felt tears filling her eyes. “No,” she said quietly. “That’s not what happened.”

  Edmund frowned. “Miss Gale, it was one thing not to give evidence against Greenacre at the trial, but now that you have both been sentenced to death, you must reappraise your situation. They will not reprieve Greenacre, no matter what his petition claims. In refusing to speak out against him you are harming only yourself.”

  Sarah gazed at him through a film of tears. If only it were that simple.

  • • •

  That night Sarah lay in the dark listening to the whispering of other women in nearby cells. She could not hear what they were saying; it was just a sound like leaves rustling in the wind or skirts dragging along the ground. She thought of how she and James used to whisper to one another, lying in that room that smelled of tallow and rosewater and of their own bodies. Sweet things, kind things, things that made her hot and shivery inside. James would trace the outline of her features—her jaw, her neck—with his rough hand and tell her how beautiful she was. It was as if she were being seen, truly seen, for the first time.

  When had it begun to change? Somehow, the sweetness turned, like milk gone bad. And he was so far inside her that when he twisted the knife she felt every turn. James had a way with words: he always knew what to say to buoy people up and make them trust him. But he also knew what would cut the deepest. He began with little slices, barely perceptible, and then, when she was broken down, moved on to the bigger incisions. It became a game for him, she thought. How far could he go? How much would she bear?

  Toward the end, Sarah felt she had been carved out from the inside. Hollow. By the time he told her about Hannah Brown, she did not even have it in her to be surprised. Why would he want her any longer—a worn-out whore? And yet the jealousy still tore into her flesh and took root. It was from there that the hatred began to sprout, growing into something over which she had no control.

  Hannah Brown. Tall and high-chested, with a thick rope of hair. She might have worn satin and a velvet hat with feathers, but she had a plain, peasant’s face and dull brown eyes, the color of the filthy Thames.

  • • •

  A scream pierced the silence.

  A few moments later, Lucy’s voice came through the pipes. “What in God’s name was that?”

  Sarah climbed out of bed and ran over to the sink. “It’s probably just a new girl, frightened,” she said. “Or maybe someone with the drunkard’s terrors.”

  Often, women were brought in drunk and left to dry out, shaking and shouting and hallucinating alone in their cells. This scream was different, however; it was more like a howl of pain. Perhaps, Sarah thought, the woman was in the dark cells, those cells that she had never seen, and which she was not even sure existed save for in the prisoners’ whispered stories.

  Another scream came, then another and another until it was almost constant. Sarah screwed her eyes tight shut and tried to stop herself from imagining what punishments the prisoner might be undergoing, but through her closed lids, she saw flashes in the dark: manacles, twisted limbs, lacerated flesh.

  Lucy, perhaps thinking something similar, said uncertainly, “It could be poor mad Mabel, couldn’t it?”

  Mabel was one of the many convicts who should, by rights, have been in an asylum, not a prison: a woman with frightened eyes who would sometimes crouch on the ground and moan like a wild animal. But this was not one of Mabel’s cries.

  Abruptly, the sound stopped, as though the woman had been struck down or gagged. The empty silence that came after was almost worse than the screams.

  “How’s a woman supposed to keep herself sane in this god-awful place?” Lucy asked after a time. “I’m going stark staring mad within these walls. If I ever get out, it’ll be in a strait-waistcoat.”

  Sarah rested her head against the stone. “I’ve begun to think of it as a game, Lucy. A horrible game, but a game I have to win.”

 
“What kind of game?”

  “A bit like Deerstalker. Remember that one?”

  “No, I never heard of it, but then my family was never much of a one for games.”

  “It was a parlor game my sister and I played as children,” Sarah said softly. “Both the deer and the stalker are blindfolded and then guided to opposite ends of a large table. When the game begins, they move as softly as they can around the table, the stalker trying to catch the deer and the deer trying as best as she can to escape. The quieter you keep, and the more carefully you move, the more likely you are to win.”

  For a moment, a silence hung between them. “And are you winning, Sarah?”

  “I don’t know yet, Lucy, but I hope so. My life depends on it.”

  19

  “Criminal women, as a class, are found to be more uncivilized than the savage, more degraded than the slave, less true to all natural and womanly instincts than the untutored squaw of a North American Indian tribe.”

  —“Criminal Women,” M. E. Owen, Cornhill Magazine, 1866

  4 June 1837

  It was dark by the time Edmund headed home, and raining again. For the past week, the streets of London had been almost constantly wet, turning the filth of the roads into a river of muck that splashed onto his trousers and seeped through the stitching of his shoes as he went from one interview to another, meeting the people who might have seen something, who had known Hannah Brown or James Greenacre, who had opinion after opinion but no solid evidence. As he made his way back along the lamp-lit street, trying to work out what his next step should be, he heard the whoosh of wheels and turned to see a flash of light, before the carriage accelerated through a puddle, splashing him with foul, stinking water. So much for the start of summer.

  Once back in his chambers, Edmund struggled to remove his boots. His stockings were wet through and clung to his feet.

  He reminded himself that at least he was warm and well fed, his belly full from a hot meal in the Old Bell Tavern and a fire already blazing in the grate. Sarah, however, would be cold and fearful in her damp, dark cell. It was in the evenings that he thought of her most, imagining her sewing by a solitary candle. Edmund had visited her several times in the past few weeks to put further questions to her as they arose and to eke out the rest of her story. He knew her well enough now to know that she recognized that she was running out of time: she grew increasingly agitated and, he noticed, had begun to pick worriedly at her lip. And yet, despite that, and despite her evident desperation to see her son and sister, she continued to hold something back; she continued to shield Greenacre.

  Just as he managed to remove the second boot, there was a knock at the door. Edmund cursed quietly and struggled to get his boots back on. Bessie was away visiting her sister and he had given Flora the evening off. His boots squelched slightly as he made his way downstairs.

  When he opened the door he saw a tall man in one of the new, blue police uniforms standing outside. The man took off his leather-topped hat so that the rain fell onto his hair.

  “Officer. Do come in,” Edmund said.

  The policeman stepped over the threshold and wiped his shiny black boots carefully on the rug before following Edmund into the parlor. He stood awkwardly, holding his hat in his large hands.

  “I understand that you’re looking into Miss Gale’s case.”

  “I am,” Edmund said. “Won’t you sit down?”

  The policeman sat stiffly on the edge of the sofa. In the lamplight, Edmund realized he was younger than he had first thought. Five and twenty at most. His features were small and round, almost babyish.

  “I was one of the officers on the investigation. I was there during the arrests, in fact.”

  “Yes, I remember you from the trial,” Edmund said.

  “I hear you’re reinvestigating the matter,” the officer said.

  “Not reinvestigating exactly, but looking again at the evidence to ensure the original conviction was correct. As I explained to Inspector Feltham, I’m not attempting to second-guess the police or—”

  The policeman put up his hand to stop him. “I’m here in a personal capacity rather than as an officer of the law.”

  Edmund nodded. “There’s something you want to tell me?”

  “Yes.” He paused. “I was a bit concerned when we found Miss Gale that she might not have been quite herself: that she might have gone along with what Greenacre said because…” His voice trailed off.

  “Because?”

  “Because he made her.”

  Well, Edmund thought, this was worth putting his boots back on for.

  “Go on.”

  The policeman scratched his head. “When we arrested Greenacre, he told us he’d never heard of Hannah Brown—that he’d never met her. Eventually, he admitted they’d been engaged to be married. Sarah Gale, when we spoke to her, seemed startled and grew tearful when Inspector Feltham talked about the body pieces being found. When we asked her when she’d last seen Hannah Brown, she claimed she couldn’t remember. We left the two of them in the room alone for a few minutes in order to dress, though we kept a close watch outside. When they came out, Miss Gale’s neck and chest were blotched red and she looked like she’d been crying. She changed her story after that. She gave a statement at the station, saying she hadn’t seen Hannah Brown since the twentieth of December.”

  The policeman removed a paper from his jacket and passed it to Edmund. Edmund held the document under the lamp and read through it quickly. It conflicted with the statement Sarah made subsequently when she said that she had last seen Greenacre and Brown the day before the murder—not something she would have forgotten. The language was quite clearly not hers.

  “Why have I not seen this statement before?” Edmund asked. “And why is this the first time I’ve heard that Sarah was shocked and distressed on learning of Hannah Brown’s death?”

  The policeman squirmed in his seat. “I think it was felt by more senior officers that the information wouldn’t help the case.”

  “Because it suggested that she was ignorant of the murder? And that she was saying whatever Greenacre told her to say?”

  The policeman was silent. Then he said, “Sir, this must be kept between us.”

  “Inspector Feltham asked you to keep quiet about it, presumably.”

  “We were under a lot of pressure to get the convictions. He said that she was putting on an act when we arrested her. If the original statement was disclosed, it would just have confused things.”

  Yes, thought Edmund. It would have undermined the prosecution case.

  “Well. You have been most helpful, Officer…”

  “Sir, I ask you again not to use the statement. I fear for my position.”

  Edmund looked at the policeman; his baby face, broad shoulders, his large hands. He remembered his name now: Pegler.

  “I understand,” Edmund said. But to understand was not to agree.

  • • •

  The following morning, Edmund sat alone at the breakfast table trying to identify inconsistencies in Sarah’s witness statements.

  Flora appeared as he was pouring himself more coffee. “Your father for you, sir,” she said in her usual monotone.

  “My father? Are you sure?”

  “That’s what ’e said, sir. I didn’t ask for proof. ’E’s in the parlor.”

  When Edmund entered the room, he saw his father standing awkwardly looking at the books on the bookshelf.

  “Father, this is…unusual. Has something happened?”

  “No, no. I was just on my way to court and thought I’d call to find out how you were all getting on. Where’s Bessie? Where is that grandson of mine?”

  Edmund regarded him suspiciously. “They’re staying with Bessie’s sister in Kent for a day or two.”

  “I see. Anything wrong?”

 
“No,” Edmund said, although it struck him that perhaps something was wrong.

  Bessie usually visited her sister only when there was some particular occasion: a birthday, a ball. There was no such event to draw her to Kent now. “They merely wanted to get away from London for a few days, and I of course needed to stay here to complete my work.”

  “Yes. I’m sure. In fact, I wanted to check—”

  “That I wasn’t making a mess of it.”

  “Merely, Edmund, that you had everything you needed. If you wanted any assistance, I’m sure it could be arranged.”

  “Thank you, Father,” Edmund said tightly, “but I have everything I require.”

  “You have formed a conclusion?”

  Edmund felt his chest tighten. “I have not, but there is time yet.”

  “Not very much time. Your report’s due by the end of this week, isn’t it?”

  Edmund struggled to contain his annoyance. The last thing he needed was to be reminded of the deadline. “I am drawing close.”

  “She has not confessed, I take it. You need to push her into a corner, Edmund. Trap her. Make her realize that this is her last chance for salvation.”

  “Father, I appreciate that you would prefer her to be guilty and have decided she is so on the basis of newspaper articles, but you have never met her. And, as I have told you, my conclusion will be based on the truth, not on what might be convenient to your reputation.”

  His father tutted. “I would be more concerned about your own reputation, my boy. John won’t be granting you any more commissions if you don’t provide a clear answer on this one.”

  “I can manage without any further commissions from the Home Secretary.”

  “Oh, yes? You have alternatives, have you? Well, I hope you’re not expecting any handouts from me. I am not a bottomless well. I have other commitments.”

  “I assume you’re not referring to Mother’s allowance,” Edmund said quietly. “It is, after all, very meager.”