The Conviction of Cora Burns

by Carolyn Kirby

  ‘How much would you pay me for the other work, besides the laundry?’

  ‘No, no. It doesn’t operate like that. You’d be welcome to use one of my bedrooms, but you’d pay me rent, see, each time.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Three shillings an hour. Arrangements made inside the bedroom is between you and your visitor.’

  Cora kept her face still. That’s what it was then. A bawdy house. On Bordesley Street. That bastard photographer would get his reward for this lousy joke. She could almost hear the smash of the cobble through the fancy sign-writing on his window.

  Mrs Small put her hands on her knees and leaned forward. ‘What do you say then? You seem like a tough sort of girl who’s not going to go sissy on me.’

  Cora wondered if that was how the rest of the world saw her. Perhaps she looked to Mr Thripp as hard and slatternly as these women.

  The girl by the empty fire turned her grin to Cora as she waited for the reply. But at the sight of the girl’s pale oval face, Cora’s heart dropped in her chest.

  ‘Alice? Alice Salt? Is that you?’

  The girl turned to Mrs Small and frowned. ‘Why’s she calling me that? She must be one of them loonies from the mad-house. Don’t let her work here.’

  The girl’s features looked suddenly shrunken, her skin dimpled by pocks. No, not Alice. Nothing like. Cora almost felt herself lunge towards the fireplace. She imagined the heaviness of the girl’s head between her hands and the crunch of her face against the grate until blood dripped on to cold ash. But Cora gulped down the quiver in her throat.

  ‘Well, don’t trouble yourselves on that score. I wouldn’t work for you filthy whores if it was the last job of work in England.’

  Paradise Street

  Cora caught hold of a stone balustrade as her boot rubbed the skin from another blister. Tobacco and beer fumes blasted from open mahogany doors and she shrank away from the drum-roll of empty beer casks along the pavement.

  No one had given her anything to eat since the skilly she’d later thrown up on the towing path. Her head was light as a soap bubble. She reached inside the sacking pocket to feel what coins were left. Two and sixpence. But she had no notion whether that was enough for a pie as well as lodging. Cold panic rippled through her empty stomach.

  ‘’Taters! Hot ’taters!’

  The street seller didn’t look old but was bent double beside his cart. When he saw Cora stop, he reached up to creak open the iron hatch. A velvety whiff of coal smoke and baked potatoes wafted out.

  ‘Tuppence a ’tater.’

  ‘Let me see them first.’

  He put his hand straight into the oven then held the potato in front of Cora’s face. ‘Cooked right through. Guaranteed.’

  They usually weren’t but Cora was too hungry to argue. Sixpence was the smallest coin she had and she handed it to the seller in exchange for the hot, sticky potato. Even before her teeth went into it she knew it was bad. She spat a mouthful of black slimy muck into the road.

  ‘Bleedin’ hell! I’ll have my sixpence back if you please.’

  ‘No you won’t. Swearing like that. And you’ve eaten my ’tater.’

  ‘You can’t call that a ’tater. And it was supposed to be tuppence.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got no change.’

  ‘You bastard.’

  ‘Watch your mouth, girly. There’s a copper over there.’

  ‘I’ll go and get him for you, shall I? Tell him about your swindling?’

  ‘Go on then. Or are you frit he’ll know you for a bad ’un?’

  The potato man’s smirk tightened the knot in Cora’s belly. Could he smell the prison stink of carbolic and drains still hanging about her clothes?

  She turned her back on him and went to the edge of the wooden pavement. Iron-rimmed wheels rumbled past and the brisk trot of a cab blew her skirt against her legs. She’d get her own back on that bleeding ’tater man if she ever saw him again. Kick his cart over and watch it crumble into the flames.

  A carthorse strained past, its metal shoes skating on slippery cobbles. From under its belly, a murky face appeared, and then a whole boy, scuttling close to the ground and wielding a long-handled shovel to fling manure on to a soil heap. Then he noticed Cora.

  ‘Shall I see you across the road, missus?’

  Irish. She might have known. A flat cap was pulled down over the sweeper-boy’s ears and one of his boots was clearly bigger than the other. Cora ignored him and launched herself off the pavement. A cart thundered by. But she kept her eyes on a beacon of yellow light beside the black stillness of a boarded-up church. Rickety piano tunes pulled her through the traffic. A pub was just what she needed to cloak herself in beery warmth, and a pint of porter would fill her up and take away the taste of rotten potato.

  The Waterloo Bar’s heavy door swung open easily. Cora leaned into the crush at the tap room counter, wedging herself between two men with drooping moustaches who shouted for ale and whisky. Her face, in the engraved mirror behind the bar, was a ghostly oval. She scanned the reflections of the other female faces; a woman with sagging feathers in a week-old hairdo, a flower-seller holding out a fist of limp violets, her hair loose and matted about her shawl. By the wall in the jug-and-bottle queue, a girl with the grey complexion of a maid-of-all-work clutched a bucket. But there was no trace of Alice in any of their faces.

  ‘Bitter?’ The young barman bounced his fist on the counter.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What then?’

  A line of bottles glistened against the mirror.

  ‘Gin.’

  He banged down a zinc measure and reached below the bar for an earthenware bottle.

  ‘Threepence.’

  Cora drank it in one gulp and closed her eyes. Heat flared from her throat into her chest and her gut.

  ‘Another. Double.’

  The barman eyed her as he swept the coins off the counter and poured more spirit into the cloudy glass. Cora went to the back of the room, clutching the glass. She ignored the Evening, my lovely, from a swell with side-whiskers and a checked suit and kept the glass close to her lips as she drank. The Irish sweeper was bobbing around below the bar, emptying the slops pails into a milk can. He took a swig from each pail as he went.

  Gin started to work into Cora’s brain. She tried to count the gilt burners flaring across the mirror but they circulated so fast she couldn’t tell real from reflection. Brass hand-pumps whirled along the bar. Her eyelids drooped.

  As the sweeper went past, she reached out to him and caught his sleeve.

  ‘Where can I sleep round here?’

  ‘I’ll take you, missus. Only a penny.’

  ‘You charge, do you? For a bit of friendly advice? Bastard…’

  But he was already at the door, beckoning her like a stallholder at Michaelmas Fair.

  She stumbled towards him and clung on to the boy’s greasy sleeve as they left the tawny light of the pub and went into blackness. She blinked lazily. The air was so dark it was hardly worth prising her eyelids open. Her bad foot banged against stone and the shiver of pain opened her eyes. A sheer wall soared up.

  ‘In here.’

  He was climbing up steps and into a tight opening in the wall. Cora followed. Her petticoat snagged on metal; sharp masonry grazed her palm. Then she popped through the block-work opening into cold still air. A cavernous void opened up around her.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Christ Church.’

  ‘Tha’s no good… tomorrow’s Sunday.’

  ‘It’s all right, missus. Nobody comes in here any more.’

  Cora slumped down between the wall and a dust-coated pew. Arched windows of silvery glass swirled like a kaleidoscope. As she reached down to unfasten her damned boots, her eyes closed.

  When they opened again, the chancel
was filled with light. Cora squinted into piercing whiteness at painted clouds that floated above the high wooden galleries. Her tongue was fat and slimy; her neck ached. God, she needed a pail. As she pressed numbed fingers against damp stone floor, cloth tightened around her legs. Her skirt was open at the waist and pulled down over her petticoat, almost to her knees. Jesus. What had happened last night? The pub, the man in the checked suit, that sweeper-boy, the loosened bootlaces…

  And then, suddenly clear-headed, she felt for her pocket. She stood up shaking her skirts, then crouched down to look under the pews. The soles of her feet pressed on icy flagstones. She was barefoot as a gypsy. God in heaven. It wasn’t just the pocket with her last shilling that had gone, but her boots too. And the birth certificate with her mother’s name. She would never see it again.

  The laugh that welled up in her echoed into a strangled moan. She stood up, clinging on to the pew with one hand. With the other, she pulled open her jacket and felt inside her stays. The rubbed-smooth edge of the half-medal was still there. For all the bloody good that would do.

  Where in the world would she go? There was no one to tell her. No one even to ask. The workhouse would take her in, but she’d sleep in the canal before going back through that grim archway. Or there was Mrs Small’s. It wouldn’t take long to earn a new pair of boots there. That other place, the gentleman’s residence, was so far off her feet would be in shreds by the time she got there, and she had no notion which way to go. But she could remember directions for the house and the name of the gentleman.

  Four

  FROM: Thomas Jerwood Esq.

  An Essay on Character, Crime and Composite Photography

  I am indebted to Capt McCall, Governor of Her Majesty’s Prison Birmingham, for his kind invitation to capture the likenesses of prisoners, male and female, who reside under his jurisdiction.

  His offer was made consequent to my previous contribution to these pages (viz. An Essay on Criminal Physiognomy The Wyvern Quarterly, Winter edition 1884). This essay piqued the interest of the governor (and other discerning readers) in the connection between physical appearance and felony. Do murderers, for example, always possess sunken eyes (as many have conjectured), or bigamists a weak chin?

  In some quarters, however, my words stirred up not a little controversy. I had assumed, perhaps naively, that the foundation of my thesis (as proven by Prof Lombroso and others) was unquestionable. Surely all that remained for this theory to be put into practical usage was identification of specific links between each type of facial feature and particular offences. I therefore decided, as a man of science, to take this urgent endeavour upon myself. For, once these links have been catalogued, the crimes of any villain will be revealed by a study of his face.

  ‘Not so,’ says, amongst others, Mr JW Armstrong of Erdington (see Letters, WQ Spring 1885). This gentleman’s objection rests upon his doubt that criminal tendencies are rooted in biology. ‘Crime,’ he says, ‘is simply a skill which may be learnt through instruction and practice in the same way as playing the piano. A baby is no more likely to be born to crime than he is to emerge from his mother’s womb able to play a polka.’ Mr Armstrong’s witticism lays bare the full extent of his ignorance. For crime, unlike performance on a musical instrument, requires a felon to contravene the civilising codes of his society. The convict must, therefore, be possessed of a criminal character.

  Thanks to Governor McCall’s generous invitation, my growing collection of prisoner portraits will soon allow me to rebut Mr Armstrong once and for all. The process of establishing correlation between particular facial features and common criminal offences has required me to perfect a vital technique (resting upon remarkable recent advances in photography) which allows the photographic portraits of several individuals to be merged into one. This technique, namely composite photography, requires much delicate work but if done well, the composite likeness becomes a pictorial average of many individuals.

  I have already been able to produce several prisoner composites categorised by crime. When perpetrators of the same offence are merged into one image, a dominant facial feature tends to become apparent. My investigations seem to prove, for example, that house burglars are marked out by the prominence of their jaws, ruffians by the luxuriance of their eyebrows and fraudsters by the thinness of their lips. These early results are tentative only due to the still limited extent of my prisoner portrait collection.

  There is no doubt that composite photography will, more generally, produce all manner of unforeseen breakthroughs in the study of the human species. It may, for example, come to be used as a reliable test of consanguinity. Where parentage or a sibling relationship is in doubt, the ease with which faces (e.g. father/mother + child) are melded into one could determine the closeness of their blood ties.

  Indeed, I believe that composite photography can be used to show the transmission of criminal physiognomy down the generations. I now have in mind a single experiment that will harness my twin preoccupations with character and heredity to prove beyond doubt the hereditary nature of crime. I trust that readers of this journal (other than Mr Armstrong and his ilk) will have no difficulty understanding that criminality, as a facet of character, is subject to the same biological rules of heredity as bodily physique. An addiction to crime runs through the generations of a family as surely as short stature or red hair.

  Mr Armstrong will, I daresay, argue that temperament is separate from anatomy but his predictable scepticism has done me a service by stimulating my imagination. Through unceasing contemplation of these questions, I have devised a rigorous method for the study of criminal character using moral tests combined with the numerical measurement of human behaviour. The method proceeds thus: a convict is released into a normal domestic setting and presented (under clandestine observation) with a range of dilemmas designed to probe moral fibre. These choices may be trivial or more perplexing. Traps, as it were, can be laid. The ‘captive’ subject’s reactions are recorded and then assessed on a scale of one to ten.

  I know full well that my raw material is the human being and so this experiment is fraught with difficulty. Its exercise is also dependent upon the possibility (perhaps slight) of finding a suitable individual who may be photographed and secretly observed. Furthermore, the study will have weight in the field of heredity only if a similar investigation has been carried out on his criminal parent.

  This whole endeavour is hampered by the laboriousness of the composite photographic process and my own nervous fatigue. In recent weeks, my ideas have proliferated at an exhausting rate and my camera has hardly been idle. Should I, however, retain sufficient mental strength to continue, I am confident that my labours will uncover clear evidence for the biological heritability not only of criminality, but of the chief attributes of character within us all.

  T Jerwood Esq.

  Spark Hill, Warks.

  Five

  October 1885

  leaves

  The Larches was a square white house, neither old nor new, with tall windows and a shallow slate roof. Across the lane from the entrance gate, an open field was scarred by rickety scaffolding and piles of new bricks. But once Cora was on to the curving carriage drive, holly thickets cloaked the disagreeable outlook.

  Gravel clung to the rag bindings on her feet as she crunched towards the house. Earlier, when she’d stopped at a wrought-iron drinking fountain, some boys had pointed and jeered: Clodhopper! She’d cursed and sprayed them with water from the steel cup. The mud-crusted sacking had done its job, though. Her feet, like her head, throbbed but she was still walking.

  She stopped at the wide front door. Her fist seemed to make no noise against black lacquer so shiny that she could almost see herself. No one came. Cora peered into a gap in the gauzy curtain covering a nearby window. The crush of furniture, upholstery and ornaments seemed to leave no room for people. But an orange fire blazed in the tiled heart
h. Someone must be there.

  The driveway led to a jumble of roofs and outbuildings at the rear of the house. Mustard-bright trees ringed a metal-fenced paddock where a pony cropped lush grass and threw Cora an indifferent glance. Damp petticoats wrapped her legs and her head pounded with each step. No one had seen her yet. It wasn’t too late to turn back to the familiar flat greyness of the town. But her feet, screaming for rest, led her to a half-open back door.

  The brass handle was brown with wear. Cora pushed on it and pungent warmth drew her into the dim passageway.

  ‘Hello.’

  She coughed but couldn’t quite make herself speak again. To her right, the corridor widened into a parquet-laid hall where a long-case clock ticked. To the left, the narrow passage was lined by doors; one half-open on to a windowless pantry, another, covered in green baize, oozed a smell of meat dinners. Heart pulsing, Cora pushed her thumb against it.

  The lime-washed kitchen looked dingy in the weak light from an overshadowed window. A scrubbed table covered in bowls and knives filled the centre of the room; plate-crowded shelves lined the walls. At the far end, a long black kitchener spewed heat and a whiff of gravy into the stuffy air. Two copper pans bubbled on the top-plate. And next to the range, in a Windsor chair, a girl in a print dress was quietly snoring.

  Cora moved closer. The girl’s mouth dribbled against the chair’s wooden spokes. Her skin was pale as milk. Even asleep, she got on Cora’s nerves. Cora picked up a fork from the table and held it over the girl’s head. The weight felt expensive and Cora glanced at the door, half-wondering whether to make a run for it. But she wouldn’t get far on a fork, even a silver one.

  She moved her hand sideways, then let go. Metal clattered on stone. The girl stretched her arms and slowly opened one eye. Then she sprang out of the chair.

  ‘Oh, Lor’! Who’re you?’