The Unseeing Read online

  “You were with Rosina on Christmas Eve, weren’t you? The day of the murder. At what time were you there?”

  “From about two o’clock, I think. I visited James’s house in the morning and walked from there to the house of Rosina’s employer, in Camberwell. She was working then for a family, teaching their daughters. George and I stayed with her until about half past eight o’clock.”

  Her story matched Rosina’s, but that in itself meant little.

  “Is there anyone who can confirm where you were after that?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Wignal, the couple who owned the lodging house where I was staying at that time. I saw Mrs. Wignal in the evening before I took George up to bed.”

  Edmund made a note of this.

  “And you saw James Greenacre at the lodging house on Christmas Day, the day following the murder. Did he give nothing away?” Edmund did not say it, but it occurred to him that Greenacre must have come to Christmas dinner straight from chopping up the body. He had a horrible vision of him carving the roast.

  “No, not that I noticed,” Sarah said. “He was perhaps a little melancholy, but I put that down to his having broken off the relationship with Hannah.”

  “And you accepted him back immediately?”

  Sarah lowered her eyes. “Yes.”

  Edmund thought about this. “Greenacre threw you and your son out of the home you shared with him a few days before Christmas so that he could marry this other woman. Then, only two days later, he invited you back to his house. Hannah Brown was gone, but all of her possessions remained. Yet you returned at once to live with him and didn’t question any of this?”

  “You forget, Mr. Fleetwood, or perhaps do not understand, that my situation was precarious. I had virtually nothing to live on, nowhere to stay, and a boy to feed.” She looked at him. “You know what happens to people in my situation, don’t you? They end up in the workhouse, separated from their children. Many would sooner die.”

  Yes, Edmund had read all about the workhouses: the institutions intended to punish the poor for their poverty and discourage them from seeking help. Children were kept apart from mothers, husbands from wives. Food was scant and disease was rife. You did not go into a workhouse unless you had absolutely no other choice.

  “So I was grateful to have him back,” Sarah continued. “It was never what you might call an equal relationship. I’m not proud of that, but that’s the way it was.” She spoke curtly and turned her face away from him.

  There was a long pause. Edmund could hear a young girl at the next table whimpering. After a few moments he said, “The statement you provided at trial was very short. Why was that? It was your only real opportunity to put forward your side of the story.”

  “I had very little to say,” Sarah replied. “Simply that I wasn’t there when Hannah died and that I knew nothing of it afterward.”

  Edmund nodded slowly. “The difficulty is that most people think you must have known.”

  “Yes,” she said tightly. “I’ve heard again and again that I must have known, that I must have suspected, that no woman could have lived in that house and not have known what had happened there. All I can say to that is that I did not know.” She still spoke quietly, but there was a violence in her voice that unnerved him.

  “I did not know he had cut her up there in that house where I lived with my son. If I’d known, I would have left. And I certainly wouldn’t have gone about town seeking to pawn the dresses of a woman I knew had been murdered.”

  Edmund conceded in his own mind that this was a good point. She would not have wanted to draw attention to herself. He decided to try a different tack.

  “Explain to me how it was decided that you should go abroad. Greenacre intended to take you to America, didn’t he? Was that a surprise to you?”

  Sarah folded her hands in her lap. “The speed of it was, I own, a little unusual, but not the idea itself. James had talked for years about going there. And now he was offering to take me with him—to pay for George and me to travel and start life afresh.”

  “How did he explain why it was necessary to leave so quickly?”

  “He said that a business investment had gone bad and that he owed money, so needed to leave immediately. That seemed plausible enough, as I knew the same had happened a few years before and he’d gone to America then too.”

  That must have been just after Greenacre’s first wife had died. Did Sarah know that? Did she know, when she returned to live in that house, precisely what Greenacre had done to Hannah Brown? Could she even have helped him? Edmund looked closely at her. A strand of hair had escaped from her white cap and curled down her face like treacle, dark brown against her milk-pale cheek. She did not look, he thought, like a criminal, but was it really possible to tell?

  “Were you pleased the relationship with Hannah Brown had ended?” he asked.

  Sarah rubbed at her jaw. “Yes, to be honest, I was glad she was gone. Without James, I’d have been back to where I was before—virtually penniless and friendless and with nowhere for George and me to go but a lonely lodging house.” She looked up at him quickly. “But I didn’t wish her dead.”

  “No, indeed,” Edmund said, although it occurred to him that she might very well have done.

  • • •

  “Now,” he said, “you’ll remember that yesterday I asked that you relate your personal history. I wondered if you could tell me about your childhood. It would be helpful—for the statement.”

  He saw her body tense. “There’s not much to tell,” she said. “I had a fairly strict sort of upbringing, I suppose.”

  “Strict in what sense?”

  “The usual sense,” she said, her tone flat. “We were to be meek and mild and fearful before God; He was watching us at all times and judging us. You know, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, yes, only too well.”

  She looked at him sharply.

  “My father was another firm believer in original sin,” Edmund explained. “He rather made it his mission to work our wickedness out of us.”

  He smiled, but there was no happiness in the memory of it, of being lectured, disciplined, and dragged to various terrifying locations—deathbeds, hospitals, poorhouses, and prisons—all as part of his education on the importance of seeking salvation. As a boy, Edmund had found it difficult to separate the idea of Our Father in Heaven from his actual father. Both were remote and frightening, capable of bestowing love but also of meting out punishment. Both were sometimes arbitrary as to which they dispensed.

  “So, yes,” he said. “We knew all about God’s wrath.”

  She looked at him with what might have been interest, but which might also have been suspicion. “We?” she said.

  “I had a brother. Jack.”

  His unsmiling ally. It had always been harder for Jack: he was gentler, more bruisable.

  “What happened to him?”

  “Jack always wanted to run away, to escape our life in London. Just after he turned twenty-one, he did it—secured a position in Bombay, serving in the infantry with the East India Company. I think he decided that fighting the natives was easier than fighting my father.” He gave a short laugh. “He’d only been out there for a few months when he contracted typhus fever. There was a letter…” He swallowed, remembering the day that letter had arrived, his mother’s screams.

  He realized that Sarah was looking at him intently. Her face seemed to have softened. Was this the key, then? To feed her pieces of his own story in return for hers?

  “You and your sister,” he said after a moment. “You’re very close. She was worried about you—has tried many times to visit you.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said. “Well, as children we only really had each other. We’ve always had to look after one another.”

  For a moment her expression was quite open, as though the mask had
slipped.

  “Tell me about that time,” Edmund said. “Tell me how it was.”

  7

  “A woman without a tongue is as a soldier without his weapon.”

  —The Old Wives’ Tale, George Peele, 1595

  “I suppose,” Sarah said, “we should start where I did. By the seaside. My father was a cloth merchant with a small factory in Lyme Regis in Dorset. It was there that I was born and there that we grew up.”

  Sarah recalled Lyme as a solitary and insular town surrounded by steep hills. A narrow road led down to the shore and to the square in the center of town, which housed the Three Cups Inn, the Lion Inn, and the assembly rooms. From there, shops and houses spread out along the coast and up the river, with the Shambles market sprawling up Broad Street.

  “We lived in a large, slate-roofed house at the top of Silver Street. From the bay window in my bedroom I could see the Cobb: the long gray stone wall that curves out of the water creating a harbor.

  “My sister and I were cared for by a succession of nursemaids. We spent our time in the nursery, in our secluded garden, or on the beach, collecting shells and looking for fossils. We saw very little of our parents. Father seemed always to be occupied with his work and our mother was either busy with her social engagements or lying in the parlor with one of her headaches.

  “They were very different people, my parents. My father was a dark, austere man who spent his days writing in ledgers and on charts and graphs. My mother, however, was like a shining jewel, the hard sides polished bright. When she was well, she liked nothing better than to play hostess: arranging tea parties and dinners and balls.”

  Sarah’s main memory of those years was sitting at the top of the stairs, listening to the tinkling music of laughter, the piano, the clashing of cutlery, and the chinking of glasses—feeling shut out and lost.

  “Occasionally, Rosina and I would be dragged out for my mother’s parties, awkward in starched petticoats and ribbons. We were never expected to speak—only to curtsy and smile and perhaps to play a piece at the piano. If we behaved well, we were given a treat—a sugar plum, an orange water ice.”

  She did not say what happened when they failed, and fail they did: crying, or sulking, or flinching when kissed. Then they would be locked in their room without a candle, assured that the devil would come for them if they cried out. Sarah had never forgotten the thickness of that darkness, nor the quality of that fear. She would whisper stories to Rosina to calm her: of children who overcame strange beasts, of woodland animals who outwitted their hunters.

  “When I was seven, our mother had another child: the son she had so long wanted. Both Rosina and I are dark, of course—brown hair, brown eyes like our father—but Oscar was a little blond boy with pale blue eyes and skin the color of cream. I remember this as a happier time. Mother spent less time prone on the chaise longue, and sometimes came up to the nursery. She commissioned a portrait of all three of us together.”

  Sarah paused. She could see the picture now as though it were before her: she and Rosina in white lace, their eyes cast demurely down. Oscar in between them, rosy-cheeked, dressed in black velvet with a white lace collar, staring straight out.

  “A year after that picture was painted, however, when I was eleven years old, both Oscar and I took ill with scarlet fever. I can remember the heat and the terror and the searing pain in my throat. But while I grew better, Oscar became more and more ill. They shaved his little head and covered it in wet rags. They bled him and bathed him and fed him broths and potions, but it was no use—the fever had spread to his brain.

  “Oscar died in the autumn of 1814, faded as the leaves fell from the trees. Rosina and I were not permitted to attend his funeral, nor to speak of him after that. His little clothes were folded away into a trunk and moved into the attic. And that was the end of the happier time.”

  Sarah swallowed. It felt strange to speak in full sentences after a month of only monosyllables—Yes, Miss. No, Miss. Her throat felt dry as sandpaper, her tongue spongy and tired.

  There was much more she could have said, of course. She could have told him of how, for weeks after her brother died, their mother had kept to her rooms; of how the house was suffused with an unnatural hush; of how they walked the halls like ghosts, afraid of the sound of their own footsteps.

  When her mother eventually emerged, something was gone. After a while, she had to mask her grief and return to society life. Children died all the time, after all. The parties began again, and the picnics, but it was as if a veil had come down over her. And the glazed look, which Sarah had noticed on occasion before, took up residence as her permanent feature. Although her mother never said it, Sarah knew that she thought God had saved the wrong child, or that she had somehow tricked fate. Indeed, Sarah herself came to believe that Oscar’s death was in some indistinct way her own fault, just as it was their fault that Jesus had died, sacrificed for their sins.

  The picture that had been commissioned of all three of the children together was removed from sight. Instead, her mother took to wearing a mourning brooch, typical of its time but always, to Sarah’s mind, strange: a miniature painting, surrounded with pearls, of Oscar’s eye.

  • • •

  Sarah noticed that the lawyer had stopped writing. While she had been speaking, he had been scribbling things down in his little book, but now he was watching her closely.

  “It must have affected you deeply, your brother dying like that. Particularly at such an impressionable age.”

  She shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  Perhaps she should not have spoken of it at all. She had little left now but her own secrets. And besides, she did not want him to think her damaged.

  Edmund closed his notebook. “Your sister asked that I do something for her.”

  Sarah straightened her back. “Do what, sir?”

  “She pleaded with me to apply to the Home Secretary so that she might be allowed to visit you, with your son.”

  Sarah felt the blood rush to her face and her heart quicken its pace. “And you—”

  “And I agreed to make that application and in fact did so this morning.” He looked at her levelly. “I cannot promise that Lord Russell will grant the request, but I put forward to him the reasons why I thought such a visit might be beneficial.”

  Sarah tried to read what was written in his eyes. What did he mean by beneficial?

  “I am most grateful to you, Mr. Fleetwood. You didn’t need to do that.”

  “No,” he said slowly. “And you didn’t need to tell me all you have this afternoon. But you did.”

  Sarah forced a smile. Had he believed what she had told him, or was he letting her know he could not be fooled? He too smiled as he got up to leave, but the smile, she noted, did not reach his eyes.

  We are like two chess players, she thought, as he walked away. Each trying to anticipate the other’s move.

  • • •

  “Special privileges, is it now?”

  Sarah gave a start. Miss Sowerton was standing to her right, only a foot or so away.

  “Miss?”

  “There’s many in ’ere would like to see their families and aren’t able, whose crimes are far less serious than yours. What about Eliza Sharpe?” The matron nodded toward a raw-boned, thin-lipped woman seated close by. She looked up when she heard her name. “Five children she’s got,” Miss Sowerton said, “and she ain’t seen ’em for months.”

  Well, let her see them, Sarah thought.

  “But then,” said the matron, her lip curling, “there’s not many can tell a story as pretty as you can, are there, Gale? Was that what your governess taught you, eh? Fancy sewing and lying?”

  So that was it. This woman did not hate her for her crime, but for her learning and her supposedly privileged past. “You should not have been li
stening to our conversation,” she said quietly.

  “Oh, is that right, Gale?” Miss Sowerton lowered her voice until it was little more than a whisper. “I’m in charge here. I’ll listen to whatever I want, whenever I want. And you dare talk back to me again and you’ll be locked in the dark cells quicker than you can blink.”

  The dark cells: that place of utter blackness beneath Newgate where those who refused to keep silent were shackled to the wall, gagged, and then left to their own private hell.

  Sarah looked away from her. She was stupid to have responded at all.

  “I’ll speak to the Gov’ner,” Miss Sowerton said. “If I ’ave anything to do with it, the next time you see your family will be on the gallows steps.”

  8

  It might almost be considered that some plan was arranged to place the different portions of the body as far as possible apart: certainly, had the Map of London been taken as a guide, and three equidistant points dotted off in the suburbs, none could have corresponded to the angles of an equilateral triangle more exactly than the three different places we have mentioned. The three points are full seven miles from each other: twenty-one miles must therefore have been traversed.

  —LONDON STANDARD, 8 FEBRUARY 1837

  James Greenacre was not what Edmund had expected. He had envisioned an ogre. What he saw was something far more subtle. When Edmund entered the legal visitors’ room, Greenacre rose to greet him and extended his hand.

  “Mr. Fleetwood. Do sit down.”

  Greenacre was flanked by two warders, despite Edmund having asked the Governor to ensure there was only one guard, seated out of earshot.

  “You mustn’t mind these two,” Greenacre said, noticing Edmund’s expression. “This is Villiers, and this Crowe. They’re good men. They’re merely doing their job.”

  “I’m sure. I had hoped to talk to you alone, however.”

  “I assure you I can speak freely in front of these men. I have no secrets now.”

  Villiers, a thickset man with dark whiskers, nodded and echoed Greenacre. “No secrets.”