The Conviction of Cora Burns

by Carolyn Kirby

  Nought

  April 1865

  born

  Here you come. I put down my hand and feel your little head between my legs. Your skull, cupped in my palm, swivels. Bone grinds against bone and I cry out, Lord help me! Although I am forbidden to speak, even now. They push me down on to all fours, hands and knees pressed on to the slimy newspaper that is spread over the boards. Black letters swirl into red as I strain and bellow through clamped teeth. My shift is pulled up so that it hangs around my neck like a dripping cheese muslin. Something inside me gives and your whole head pops through. Then the rest of you slides out of me in a hot, squirty rush. There’s rot and rust in the stone-damp air.

  I collapse on to my side and reach out for you, warm and slippery with Lord knows what. Your face, swathed in lardy grease, glows white in the gaslight. Blood smears your tiny limbs. They start to wrap you in an old flannel rag and wipe the muck from your nostrils. They are too rough and I hear your voice. Good lungs on her, they say and smile. Not a thing I’ve seen them do before. They call me Mary and I wonder who that is.

  I try to sit up but there is a mound of something under me that’s in the way. One of them gets the knife with its dull rusty blade. Someone should have cleaned it with brick dust. Their eyes are wary when they see me looking but how could I try anything in this state? They ask me what your name will be. I touch your cheek and smell the sweetest spot on your milky newborn head. Cora, I say. It seems right for you who came from the heart of me. Then they pull you away. The ugly one grabs at my belly, squeezing the doughy softness, feeling for something. Hold still, she says with a hard hand on my shoulder and a terrifying gleam in her eye, you aren’t quite finished yet.

  One

  October 1885

  prison stays

  ‘Hold still.’ The photographer looked up from his device but avoided Cora’s eye. ‘No. Stiller than that. For a count of four. And please do not blink.’

  Did he think her made of metal? Glowering, she pressed her ribs against the prison stays. The camera gave off a gin-sharp whiff of ether.

  ‘Ready now?’ He twirled a scrap of grey hair around his middle finger then lifted the lens-flap. ‘One… Two…’

  His fidgetiness was vexing. And it was a liberty to take her likeness just before release as if she was a habitual criminal. Meaning it to look like a mishap, Cora blinked.

  The photographer’s stone-grey eyes locked on to hers, and then something in his countenance shifted. His face, less comical than Cora had supposed, seemed to whiten. It was as if he had seen, through his lens, the hidden awfulness of her crimes. Her stomach pitched.

  ‘Beg pardon, sir.’

  ‘Once more, then.’ His attention slid to the floor. ‘Stay on your mark.’

  Cora’s clogs shuffled inside the chalk-drawn feet on the boards and again the photographer looked into the lens. It was a dry-plate camera; dark shiny wood and black leather bellows. Expensive. And he didn’t look much like a prison photographer; his coat was too clean.

  He lifted the lens-flap and started to count but his voice this time was twitchy.

  ‘One…Two…’

  In the corner, the stout wardress folded her arms into a threat. Window bars threw a black grid on to the glossy brown wall.

  ‘…Three… Four…’

  The lens-flap squeaked shut and the photographer’s mouth formed a shape he must have intended to be a smile. As he bent to the equipment at his feet, he slipped a sideways glance at Cora.

  ‘And now I have some questions for you.’

  ‘What sort of questions?’

  The wardress lunged, keys beating against skirts, and a finger jabbed between Cora’s shoulder blades, making her stumble forward. The photographer continued to rummage in his bag then placed a sheet of printed paper on the lid of the wooden travelling box. He took out a silver pencil, holding it up to the light to push an exact amount of lead from the point as he slid another look at Cora.

  ‘So, your name is Cora Burns?’

  She shrugged and the wardress poked her in the arm. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty, sir.’

  Something in his stance stiffened. ‘Do you know on which day you were born?’

  ‘July the twenty-ninth.’

  ‘I see, very good. Few know it so well.’

  Of course she knew the date of her birth, but that wasn’t it.

  ‘Do you have a trade?’

  ‘Oakum picker.’

  ‘I meant before you were committed to this place.’

  Cora knew perfectly well what he’d meant but the keenness of his curiosity seemed improper, even for a likeness-taker.

  ‘Laundry maid, sir.’

  ‘In a private house?’

  ‘No, sir. In the Borough Lunatic Asylum.’

  There was no jerk of distaste, only a raised eyebrow. He bent forward to write, backside stuck up in the air and breeches ballooning over his felt gaiters. If her release hadn’t been so near, she’d have laughed out loud.

  ‘What, pray, has been the length of your sentence?’

  ‘Nine… nineteen months.’

  ‘And your crime?’

  She’d guessed this was coming but the question still brought a flutter to her belly. A sudden vision of a bootlace in her hands choked the words in her throat.

  The wardress glared. ‘Tell the gentleman!’

  But the photographer waved a hand. ‘No matter, madam. I can find out soon enough. The girl’s reticence does her credit.’

  Cora fought a tug of dizziness as she pictured him writing her offence on to his sheet of bond.

  ‘And your parents, what sort of people are they?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I never knew them.’

  ‘They are dead?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  His fingers tapped a complicated rhythm on the travelling box and his high forehead creased. ‘So what else can you tell me of yourself?’

  ‘I was brought up under the Board of Guardians. In the Union workhouse.’

  ‘You were a foundling?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘How so?’

  The silver pencil fluttered between his thumb and forefinger. Cora wondered, briefly, whether to lie but she’d a fancy to see his reaction to the truth.

  ‘My mother abandoned me here when I was not three months old.’

  ‘Here? At the gaol?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘At the gatehouse, do you mean?’

  ‘No, sir. She gave birth to me in her cell and when she departed from here left me behind.’

  He stood straight now and unmoving. ‘So, your mother was a convict too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And her crime?’

  ‘I know only her name, sir. Mary.’

  The photographer sprang forward to write.

  Cora breathed out and pressed tight fists into the coarse apron across her stomach. She was glad that she would never know the answer to his last question for it was not impossible that the cause of her mother’s conviction had been the same as her own.

  seams

  Her liberty clothes, as Cora put them on, smelled like day-old wash-water and everything was too big. Inside her Melton jacket, pale thread dotted the dark seams where she had let them out, month by month, to the final weft in the cloth. Now, the jacket hung loose in the wrong places and seemed to point to the part of her that was missing.

  ‘Burns!’ The squinty-eyed wardress shouted from the discharge
desk on the other side of the folding screen. ‘Out. Now!’

  Now? Not likely. The wall-eyed bitch could wait. Cora wrapped her plaid shawl cross-wise over her stomach and tied a knot behind her back to pull the loose jacket tight. But the thought of how constricting the jacket had seemed last time she wore it brought a pang of emptiness. In the asylum laundry, she’d had to leave her shawl dangling over her belly to cover the gap between eyelets and hooks. They’d all looked sideways along the soaping-trough and must have guessed the truth. The shawl still had a whiff of asylum soap.

  Cora turned to the dirty window. Her reflection was vague but she licked two fingers and rubbed quick circles along her hairline. A few stray wisps bounced into curls and a shiver went through her. No one could tell her not to do it any more. Through the shadow of her head on the glass, the red-brick gables of the asylum poked above the prison wall. And in the smoky distance, a gleam of wet slate marked the workhouse roof from the grey sky. Her whole life had been spent in these three buildings. Each, in its different way, had been worse than the last. But the thought of spending even one night anywhere else made her mind freeze over like the wash-house tap on a January morning.

  ‘Out, I say. Now.’

  Cora smirked to her reflection and felt bolder. ‘Even if I’m not decent?’

  ‘You? You’ll never be decent.’

  The wardress’s good eye followed Cora across the room and watched her drop the striped prison garb into a jumbled heap on to the counter. Others might have given her a slap for that but the wardress was old and lazy, like her eye.

  ‘Watch it, F.2.10. You’re not out yet.’

  ‘Going to lock me up again, are you?’

  ‘I could. And then you wouldn’t get this.’

  The wardress tapped the corner of a brown envelope on the counter. It was addressed in a flowing hand: F.2.10.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You want it then?’

  Cora shrugged.

  The wardress placed the envelope between them and ran her finger down a column in the leather-bound book. Then she reached below the counter and held up a small sack sewn into the shape of a pocket. A long string threaded in and out of the hemmed opening. Preserving Sugar was still stamped in faint ink across the canvas.

  ‘Yours?’

  The wardress emptied Cora’s belongings across the counter; sewing scissors and a bobbin of white thread, a grey handkerchief, a lump of grimy soap and, on its loop of greasy twine, the half-medal. Then the wardress thrust her hand inside the pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper, furred along the folds. Cora held her breath as she read from it out loud.

  ‘Where Born: Birmingham Gaol, Female Quarters… Name and Maiden Surname of Mother: Mary Burns…’ Her good eye seemed to stay on Cora as she read.

  ‘Yes. It’s you all right.’

  Cora wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of asking what she meant.

  ‘What about my money? I had more than a sovereign when I came in here.’

  ‘Patience, girl.’

  The wardress opened a drawer and counted sixpences and coppers into a pile.

  ‘One, two, three… four shillings and sixpence.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘The rest has been expropriated. Which means…’

  ‘I know what it means. But what about my last month’s wages from the asylum? Another pound.’

  ‘Also expropriated. Paid from the Asylum Committee of Visitors direct to the gaol in order to fund your board and keep during your sentence. The governor has kindly made you this discharge allowance for food and lodging until you find work.’

  ‘I’m much obliged. I shall book a room at the Grand Hotel.’

  ‘Think yourself lucky to get anything.’ The wardress pushed the pile of coins across the counter and dipped a pen in the inkwell. ‘You’ll have to sign for it.’

  Cora scratched a spidery signature. She tried to remember the last time she’d written anything but couldn’t. The wardress turned the ledger around and her face set into a toothless sneer.

  ‘That’s right. Cora Burns. Born to crime.’

  Cora held out the pen with a smile as bright as she could fake. ‘Like you were born always looking the wrong way?’

  ‘Think you’re clever, don’t you? But I’d wipe the smile off your mouth if I was to tell you about your ma. Hardly the full shilling, that one.’

  Cora flinched. ‘My mother? What do you know of her?’

  ‘I know that her and you are two halves of the same bad penny.’

  The sneer dissolved into a cackle and bile rose in Cora’s throat. An oyster of spit on that misshapen eyelid might be worth an extra night or two in the cell. But a starchy prison bonnet would flatten her already flimsy curls, and she’d not yet found out what was in that letter.

  Cora bundled the birth certificate and her other belongings back into the pocket. She grabbed the brown envelope and stuffed that in too, then pulled up her skirt to thread the pocket strings around her waist, not caring who saw the stains on her petticoats.

  ‘Can I go now?’

  The wardress winked her good eye. ‘Make the most of it. Won’t be long till you’re back.’

  the towing path

  Piles of sawn wood chequered the narrow wharf below the prison wall. Each stack seated a gang of porters, all sucking at clay pipes. Cora threaded between them, head down, until one of the men coughed and she looked up. The man gave her a toothless grin then puckered his blackened lips for a kiss.

  Cora stared at him blankly for a moment before sticking out her tongue as far as it would go. Then, without waiting to hear the taunts, she ran. And, as she careered past the lock and on to the towing path, she heard herself break into a laugh as loud and mirthless as a lunatic’s.

  Her lungs heaved and her old boots pinched in new places. Cora stopped, panting, to let a towering barge-horse go by and realised how unused to movement she’d become. The lad poked a stick at the animal’s shaggy fetlocks and a big eye rolled white behind the blinker. From the horse’s flanks, rope sliced through dull filmy water to a longboat loaded with coal. At the rudder, a dirty-faced woman shouted a greeting but Cora’s stare was fixed on the grey buildings across the cut.

  Her hand slipped then through the familiar slit in her skirt seam and into the pocket. She felt for the small semi-circle of metal and let it lie like a bruise on her palm. The bronze was dull and brown as a Coronation penny. She ran a fingertip over the bumps of the raised image and the jumble of engraved letters.

  … MDCCCLXI IMAGINEM SALT…

  A tiny bronze hand pointing gracefully to the word SALT was the only part of the picture that anyone could put a name to. The other lumps and lines formed a cameo of indistinct drapery.

  Cora now had no doubt that the missing half of the medal would reveal not only a meaning to the muddle of letters but also the slight frame and winsome face of Alice Salt. Who else but Alice could have given Cora the half-medal with its misspelt instruction to “imagine Salt”, and kept hold of the portion that showed her own face? As the solitary hours in her cell had ticked by, Cora’s childhood companion and the cold inkling of what they might have done together, had come to occupy all of her waking thoughts. For only Alice knew what had really happened.

  Cora’s palm closed over the sharp corners. Two halves of the same bad penny. Maybe that old witch of a wardress had thought up her nonsense about Cora’s mother when she’d seen the half-medal on the discharge-counter. As if Cora cared anything about Mary Burns. The name was nothing more to her than faded letters on crumbling paper.

  A whiff of boiled bones from the soap factory blew across the canal. Suddenly feeble, Cora sank between two scraggy bushes on to mud hardened by coal dust. She looped the twine over her head and, unhooking the eyes at the top of her too-loose jacket, shoved the half-medal inside. Then she reached into th
e sugar-sack pocket for the envelope. Paper crackled as it opened.

  To: Prisoner F.2.10

  This is to direct you to a situation as Between Maid in a gentleman’s residence. Although you have no character to present, Mr Thomas Jerwood makes this kind offer as the means to a prisoner’s moral restoration and upon the understanding that should any concern about your conduct arise, you will leave forthwith. You will join a staff of four indoor servants. Your terms will be £8 per annum. Kindly make your way to The Larches, Spark Hill, Warks and report to Mrs Dix (Housekeeper) upon your arrival.

  Capt GN McCall, Governor

  The governor, like his nasty wardress, must be having a jest at her expense. Eight pounds a year was an insult. Half what she’d got as a laundress. And how could she be fitted to domestic service? She’d never been in a house. Cora stared at an oily rainbow on the canal as she tore the letter into a scatter of white paper across the black earth.

  She heaved herself up and saw the poke of brick gables through nearby trees. The Borough Lunatic Asylum was the nearest she’d ever got to a home. Sometimes, when they’d all been at dinner in the servants’ hall and the outdoor men had come in with gossip and jokes, she’d thought that they might almost be a family. She could still smell the asylum air steeped with mutton fat and floor polish, and imagine her own silly face grinning at the gasmen and the stokers.

  With a horrible belch, Cora leaned over a thin bush and retched up a mess of runny oatmeal on to the sooty leaves. The skilly looked and smelt about the same as it did when she’d eaten it that morning. She spat the last of it on to the ground then wiped the back of her hand across her mouth.

  It was time to make haste, however sickly she felt, towards the wide smoky blur of the town. On the way, she couldn’t avoid passing alongside the workhouse but she’d keep her eyes fixed on the tottering cranes at the goods yard and a distant gleam of roof-glass from New Street Station. As she walked though, a shrill clang from the belfry caused Cora to turn. She could not then help seeing the rows of dirty windows and close-packed chimneys. The sight of the Union house brought a sudden ache to her throat and a picture to her mind, clear as a photographic likeness, of the first time she had seen Alice.