The Unseeing Read online

  He excused himself and stepped out into the darkening evening. At least he could say now with certainty that she had not been at Greenacre’s house on the night of the murder. The Wignals had no reason to protect Sarah: they evidently despised her.

  Outside, the wind had picked up. As he walked back toward the main street, a door creaked on its hinges and swung shut and a dog barked. Thinking he heard the light tread of footsteps close behind him, Edmund turned back, but saw only rags hanging on washing lines overhead, moving in the breeze like phantoms.

  9

  “Before the rest of the dura mater can be seen, the brain must be taken from the head. To facilitate its removal, let the head incline backwards, whilst the shoulders are raised on a block, so that the brain may be separated somewhat from the base of the skull… For the division of the nerves of the brain, a sharp scalpel will be necessary.”

  —Demonstrations of Anatomy; Being a Guide to the Knowledge of the Human Body by Dissection, George Viner Ellis, 1840

  When she opened her eyes, Sarah saw a split face before her, the skin so pale it was almost translucent, the setting blood a deep crimson. The right eye protruded from its socket. The other stared right at her, glassy, accusing. She shook herself free of the image and sat up, shivering in the cold air. It was nearly dawn and a watery light trickled in through the small, dirty window. All at once, she was gripped by a sense of dread and fear: how many more dawns would she see before her time was up?

  She would ask to see the Ordinary today. Having witnessed his sermons in the prison chapel, Sarah knew that he had little love for the felons of Newgate, but maybe she could soften him. She was good at that. Maybe, given the right words, he would help her get out of this place.

  At nine o’clock Dr. Cotton arrived. Close up, Sarah could see that his nose was pitted, his surplice grimy. His gray eyes grazed over her briefly. He did not smile. He did not sit down.

  “You asked to see me?” He refused to meet her gaze, but instead stared over her shoulder.

  Sarah’s stomach fell. She considered saying then that there had been an error—that it was someone else who wanted to speak to him. But she had to try to convince him, undignified though it might be.

  “I wanted to ask for your assistance. I wondered—”

  “You’re the one who helped James Greenacre, aren’t you?” he said across her. “Cut that woman’s head off.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. It’s not what you’ve heard.”

  “Ah, another innocent. The authorities really should be more particular as to whom they lock up.”

  “Reverend, I did not do what it is claimed.”

  The Ordinary looked at her then, in the eye. “Unlike people, and unlike courts, God cannot be fooled, Miss Gale. He watches us, all the time.”

  “I know that, Dr. Cotton. I’m telling the truth. I seek your support in persuading the Home Secretary to pardon me.”

  He stared at her coldly. “You seem not to have accepted the reality of your situation—the inevitability of your fate.”

  Sarah wondered how he thought she should demonstrate that she recognized her predicament. Did he want a display of emotion and supplication—wailing, beating her chest, tearing her hair, perhaps? But then he would say she was mad.

  “I’m fully aware of the reality of my situation,” she said. “That’s why I’m seeking your help. I don’t know what else to do or who else to turn to. I have a young child, you see, who would be all alone—”

  “If you want to save yourself,” he said, interrupting, “then you must repent and beg the Lord’s forgiveness. Then you must confess. Then you must provide restitution. That’s the procedure, Miss Gale. That’s how it works.” He made it sound like the application procedure for some insurance scheme. “So, are you going to confess?”

  She looked at him, at his fleshy, red-veined cheeks and swollen drunkard’s nose. He wanted her confession to make into a pamphlet and sell: her story for ready money—it was one of the perks of being prison Ordinary. “But, Reverend, I cannot repent for something I did not do.”

  The Ordinary turned away. “Then you’re wasting my time. Without contrition of the heart there is nothing I can do for you. You are past redemption.”

  She stood up to protest but realized it was futile. She did feel remorse, of course she did, but she could not provide him with the confession he wanted.

  He cast her a final look of scorn mixed with disgust and then left the room, shutting the door hard behind him.

  • • •

  Later, in the large, stone-walled bathhouse, Sarah held on to the cold slippery sides of the trough and lowered herself into the tepid brown water. The bottom of the slate bath was covered with a curious cement material, slimy against her skin. She used the pitted bar of yellow soap to clean herself, feeling the sharper lines of her body where the fat had fallen away. After a few weeks of Newgate’s regime, she no longer looked much like a child-bearing woman. She was beginning to resemble the skeleton she would become.

  Sarah looked carefully at her hands, at the tendons standing out from the bone, the tangle of blue veins visible beneath the skin. She imagined the flesh melting away, decay setting in, the bones picked clean by animals or maggots. Or would she be anatomized—the skin peeled from her face and the organs removed from her body, specimens for the study of others? This, Gentlemen, is what an evil woman’s heart looks like: observe how strangely it is formed. This is the kidney of a murderess—you see how the infection took root long ago.

  She turned her hands palm up to expose the latticework of tiny cuts on the soft underbelly of her arms. What would they make of these when they examined her cold body? A sure sign, Gentlemen, of a diseased and dangerous mind.

  James had declared that, if he was indeed to hang, his corpse should be given over to science. How like James that was. Most other people would be horrified at the prospect of being cut into pieces after death: that was why surgeons had to resort to paying resurrection men to procure corpses for them. But not James. No, he would like the idea of being preserved for the education of others, of his organs and brain being labeled and catalogued and discussed by students and academics. He was thoroughly modern, or so he would have others believe. When they had first met, he was full of plans to travel to Hudson Bay and make his fortune in trading. She was to come too, with George, and they would create new lives for themselves away from the stench and squalor of London. At other times, James would return late from the White Lion Radical Committee Room, inebriated, overexcited, and full of schemes for his future political career.

  She traced a thin scar that ran from her neck down to her breastbone: a memento of the nights when he came back in a different temper altogether. It was a shard of mirror, he had used: a piece of the looking glass he had found her looking into. “Not so pretty anymore,” he had said, when it was done. As time had gone on, those nights became more frequent, more brutal, and she had grown increasingly sickened by her own willingness to tolerate it all. She remained brittle on the outside, but hollow, like an empty shell worn thin by the tides.

  Lying motionless in the now cold bath, Sarah cursed herself for not having left him long ago, for not having recognized their relationship for what it was—a cesspit of manipulation and obsession. And her punishment was that she was to be dragged down with him, drowned in another woman’s blood. Unless. Unless she could somehow wriggle out of the net that had been cast. Unless she could convince Edmund Fleetwood that she should be pardoned. She was still unsure whether he was really looking for a way to help her, or whether he was merely playing a game. Did he seek her story only as a trophy—the proof of his cleverness? She wanted to believe him good, but she could not be sure. He was, after all, an ambitious young man. A case this famous must be a rare prize, the breaking of a convicted criminal rarer still. And yet his face was gentle.

  • • •

 
As she dried herself with her coarse towel and stepped back into her clothing, Sarah felt herself watched. She turned and saw that the prisoner who had threatened her in the exercise yard stood to the right of the doorway, her back against the wall, her arms folded, her pale face half in shadow. For how long had she been standing there?

  Sarah hurried to dress, struggling to pull on her stockings and shift over still-damp skin and stealing glances at the other woman, who regarded her with narrow eyes, gray and cold as a winter sky. Emily Rook: charged with battering another woman with an iron bar.

  “Nasty piece of work, that one,” Hinkley had told Sarah in a whisper. “She’s been in ’ere a few times since I started—always for violent offenses. I’d keep well away from ’er if I were you.”

  But now there was no way of avoiding her. She would have to pass Rook in order to leave the bathroom. Sarah kept her eyes ahead and her back straight as she walked across the wet stone floor.

  When she was a yard or so away from Rook, the woman said quietly: “What? Think yourself too good to talk to me?”

  Sarah refused to look at her.

  “Well, I’ve been watching you, Gale. I’ve seen you simpering and sniffling and batting those dark lashes of yours.” Rook spoke in little more than a whisper. “You might be able to fool him, but I know what you are.”

  Sarah carried on walking, not looking back, her heart hammering against her chest.

  “Yes, that’s right, Gale, you run along.” The woman spoke more loudly now, seeming not to care whether the warders heard her. “But there’s nowhere in here I can’t get to. When I want you, I’ll find you.”

  • • •

  That night, when Sarah finally slept, it was to dream of a surgeon’s chamber, pure white, with a high stone table upon which a body lay shrouded. Approaching the table, she knew it was Hannah Brown beneath the cloth, her gray-tinged feet protruding from the end of the sheet.

  The surgeon was the red-whiskered man who had given evidence at the trial. “You must not be afraid,” he told Sarah. “It’s the only way.”

  She realized with horror he meant to anatomize the body before her. He drew from his coat a knife, which glinted silver in the white light of his room. When the man spoke again, he was not the surgeon, but Edmund, dressed in a surgeon’s coat.

  “The truth is inside, you see,” he said. “It’s a matter of finding it and cutting it out.”

  As he drew back the sheet, she saw that it was not Hannah at all but herself, lying motionless on the table. About her neck was the mark of the hangman’s rope, cut deep into the skin. She tried to move to show Edmund she was still alive, but her limbs would not respond and even her eyes remained shut. She tried to scream but it was merely a rasping in her throat, and, no matter what she did, she could make no sound. The knife approached but there was nothing she could do. She knew with terrible certainty that she would die. As the cold blade touched her skin, Sarah opened her eyes.

  10

  “Trial by jury is generally an admirable institution…but it sometimes fails, the commonest source of failure being that the conflict of evidence does not bring out the whole truth.”

  —A General View of the Criminal Law of England, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 1863

  When Edmund arrived at Carpenter’s Buildings, he found Greenacre’s house boarded up, the door bolted. Outside, a group of children played at hopscotch and a small boy in a torn blue jacket and dirty cap lingered near the gate.

  “Do you know who looks after the house now?” Edmund asked him, but the boy did not answer. Instead, he backed away from him and ran.

  After a few minutes, a woman in a cheap print dress approached Edmund.

  “You want to look at the house?” She had a tired face, lined by age or hardship. “They ’ad to board it up to stop people traipsing through it all the time,” she said. “The landlord ran tours of the place till a few weeks back, but people kept thieving bits, as souvenirs. It’s for sale, you know.” She pointed to the bill in the window.

  Edmund smiled. “I’m sure it will be for some time.”

  The woman shrugged. “It’s a shame—it’s a fine house. The best one in this street. Not that that’s sayin’ much.”

  “Do you live here?”

  “Yes, just across the way, at number eleven.”

  “You knew them, then?”

  “Mr. Greenacre and Miss Gale? Yes, I did—least I knew Miss Gale.”

  Odd, thought Edmund. He had been told that everyone in the area knew her as Mrs. Greenacre.

  “Did you know her well?”

  The woman’s expression hardened. “Are you a newspaper man?”

  “No, no,” said Edmund. “I’ve been appointed to investigate Miss Gale’s appeal for clemency. I’m trying to work out what happened in that house.”

  She eyed him suspiciously. “There was a man here before said he was investigatin’. Asked me questions. I’m sure he was with the newspapers.”

  They both stood staring at the shuttered windows awhile.

  “I can pay you for your time,” he said.

  “I have a key,” the woman said shortly. She drew a ring of keys from her pinafore and selected a steel one, which she inserted into the lock of the wooden door. The smell when they entered was of wood dust with a hint of something else that Edmund could not identify.

  The woman wrinkled her nose. “Well, this is it,” she said.

  There was a fireplace, a rocking chair, and a table with two wooden chairs drawn up to it. A burned-out candle, melted down to a puddle, stood on the table. Already, spiders had begun to make the place their home and cobwebs covered the hearth. The woman opened the shutters so that a box of light fell across the table.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  “Mrs. Andrews.”

  “You gave evidence at the trial,” Edmund said. “I remember you now.”

  The woman shuddered. “I could tell they’d made up their minds ’bout her from the beginning. She didn’t stand a chance.”

  “You don’t think Sarah Gale knew about the murder?”

  “She couldn’t have. She weren’t at the house when it happened. And if you knew her as I did, you’d know she couldn’t’ve taken the dead woman’s dresses, or jewels, or helped him hide the body or any of them other things she’s supposed to’ve done.” Her voice was thick with anger.

  “My mind remains open, Mrs. Andrews. It’s because of that I’ve come to look at the evidence myself, rather than assuming what was said at trial was correct.”

  She looked at him uncertainly.

  “Why do you say she couldn’t have taken Hannah Brown’s possessions or helped Greenacre?”

  “She’s a kind soul—softhearted. She was always giving bits of money or food to the poorest children around ’ere, even though she ’ad next to nothing herself.”

  “You saw her here the day after Christmas Day, didn’t you?” Edmund asked.

  “Yes, I saw her on the day before Christmas, in the morning, and the day after, on Boxing Day.”

  “How did she seem?”

  “No different from usual.”

  “From what I understand, most people here don’t seem to have spoken to Miss Gale, except perhaps to say ‘Good morning’ now and again. And most assumed she was Mrs. Greenacre.”

  “Well, that’s London for you, ain’t it? People don’t notice their neighbors and takes no time to get to know them.”

  “How did you come to know her?”

  For the first time the woman smiled, exposing broken teeth. “Sarah came to our house one day asking for some water. Our side of the way is better supplied than theirs, see. We got to talking, and it turned out we was both trying to make a little money by sewing and shoe binding. My husband, Joseph, is a shoemaker, but he don’t make much. After that, we’d often lend things to e
ach other and I’d come fetch her when I knew the water was on.”

  So Sarah had often borrowed water, Edmund thought. That meant that the fact she had borrowed water after the murder was not, as the prosecution had claimed, proof she had cleaned blood from the floor.

  “You were in similar circumstances,” he said.

  “Maybe. We was both poorer than many in this area. And we both had young children. I’d often mind her little boy if she had errands to run.”

  “What kind of a man was Greenacre?”

  Her eyes narrowed for a second. “I didn’t really know ’im,” she said.

  “Did you believe him capable of murder?”

  “I believe there’s plenty capable of anything round ’ere.”

  “But you didn’t see or hear anything that you feel you ought to tell me?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t. And I fancy that those that claims they did was more interested in the rewards than the facts.”

  “What do you mean? No reward was offered.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Well, p’raps they just realized they’d remembered it wrong, then.”

  “You mean the Callows? They changed their story?”

  Mrs. Andrews looked at him appraisingly for a moment, as if assessing a hand of cards. “First off they claimed it was women they ’eard shouting. It weren’t until the trial that they decided it were a man and a woman arguing. You ask me, they didn’t hear nothing save for the clink of their own gin glasses.”

  “Do they still live on the road?”

  She shook her head. “No. Long gone. Good riddance to bad rubbish.” She stepped forward. “You’ll want to look in the back room.”

  They descended a step into the workroom, which connected to the kitchen. It still contained some of Greenacre’s tools and buckets of old varnish and paint. Planes of wood were stacked against a far wall and there was still a whiff of turpentine in the air. At the back of the room was a heavy oak table. Edmund caught the woman’s eye for a second but she looked away. This must have been where Greenacre had cut up the body. Edmund ran his hand over the tabletop, which was covered with a fine film of dust, and imagined Hannah Brown clamped to the table; he heard in his mind the sound of metal on bone. There was a darkening of the wood in the center: a bloodstain, or simply the grain of the wood?