The Conviction of Cora Burns

by Carolyn Kirby

  ‘I just laid a fire.’

  ‘But you haven’t cleared the ash.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What sort of household have you been used to? The grate should be cleared completely before a fire is lit. Not to do so would be slovenly.’

  Cora thought, fleetingly, of how Susan Gill’s face might look if her head were rammed against the wire thing by the window, one of those coloured glass balls gouging into her cheek. Blood would pool on the patterned carpet and spatter the armchair’s cracked leather.

  ‘Clear the ash now and take it to the midden. And Violet, you’re wanted in the laboratory.’

  The girl folded her hands across her stomach and went to the door. Susan Gill held it open.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve been told, Burns, not to touch anything in this room without particular instruction.’

  ‘No. I haven’t.’

  ‘Well, you have now.’

  Cora curled her lip at the closing door then tipped coal dregs from the pail on to the fire. Black dust bloomed over yellow flames. She raked out the hearth, shovelling ash and hot cinders into the pail. Chips of burning coal fell through the grate and glowed red in the grey embers. That girl was about the same age as Alice had been when Cora last saw her. Apart from that they were not much alike; Violet’s eyes were blue not hazel and her hair sleeker and more coppery than Alice’s had ever been. But Cora’s throat still tightened with longing.

  She grabbed the bucket half-filled with ash and went on to the landing. The next door was open far enough to reveal a thin slice of workbench and a man’s arm in a dark blue sleeve protector laying out chain scales and rubber tubing. An unseen child, who must be Violet, coughed.

  Outside, thin grey clouds bruised the reddening sun. Cora took a long breath of damp air. She mustn’t let herself get accustomed to the richness of the food here or to the quietness of night hours. It couldn’t be long until they threw her out. Nothing she did in the house seemed to be right, but she’d never known how to live except with hundreds of others.

  She crossed sodden grass to the smouldering midden and emptied the bucket. Fine white ash clouded up.

  ‘The between girl, is it?’

  Across the waste heap, a young man with wayward light hair leaned on a pitch-fork. He pulled at an imaginary cap and gave a teasing smile.

  ‘How do.’

  Then he drove the points of the pitchfork into the ground and stood, feet apart, with his thumbs tucked into the little pockets of his waistcoat. His smile widened.

  ‘Samuel Shepherd. Under-gardener. Pleased to make your acquaintance.’

  Cora nodded but did not reply. She disliked his brash stance, although it was clear from his broad shoulders and twinkling eyes why Ellen was sweet on him. Cora imagined that if she went up to him there would be a smell of saddle leather and clean straw. She turned away sharply making sure not to lift her skirts too high over the wet grass.

  Samuel shouted after her. ‘Don’t go! Stop here wi’ me a while. Just to be friendly, like.’

  Cora didn’t look round but could sense his eyes following her to the door.

  In the library, flames had begun to crackle in the grate. Cora took up the short poker, but as she stabbed air into the coals, one of her ears seemed to go deaf with a sudden whoosh of air. She blinked and looked around. The sharp noise had come, she felt sure, not from the fire but from somewhere behind the bookshelves. Another sound, like a high-pitched cry, was coming from the same place.

  Quietly, Cora went to the wall of books and breathed in their odour of papery staleness. Her finger skimmed the tooled lettering on the spines: Infant Nursing and the Management of Young Children; A Manual of Photographic Manipulation. So many unimaginable combinations of words must be behind each one.

  ‘I can’t do it, I just can’t.’

  Violet’s voice was as clear as if she were in the room. Cora held her breath and listened for Mr Jerwood’s reply but none came. Gently, she pulled out a volume of Travels in the African Interior and put her ear to the empty slot on the shelf. Through the wall, metal clunked against wood and a long whistling sound grew higher in pitch until it disappeared into silence.

  Cold air whispered out as Cora pushed the book back into place. Then she hurried across the room towards the hearth where the leaping orange flames had already died to black. But before Cora got to the grate, something made her stop dead.

  It was in the middle of the room, in a dark wood cabinet displaying outlandish figurines with oversized private parts. But Cora’s eyes were drawn to an open velvet-lined box near the base. It held a collection of shiny coins slightly bigger than half-crowns. Engraved on each was an object; a boat, an open book, or some queer instrument that Cora couldn’t make out, and each was circled by a band of capital letters.

  Cora bent closer but then, in a flash of lilac and white, the library door burst open. She sprang upright and hurried to the fireplace, hardly able to breathe. Although she’d need a closer look to be sure, the tightness in her chest was telling her that she was right. For, despite each one being so luminous and still a circular whole, the coins in the box looked like brothers and sisters to the tarnished half-medal that was tucked inside Cora’s stays next to her heart.

  Six

  1874

  sisters

  Keeping Alice by her turned out to be easy. Each day, Alice moved forward in the schoolroom until she sat at the same desk as Cora right in front of Mr Bowyer. No one seemed to think it odd.

  As Cora wrote on the blackboard, she developed a habit of glancing over her shoulder after every three chalk loops. Alice’s encouraging smile was always there. Mr Bowyer seemed a little irritated by this new habit and asked Cora more than once what in heaven she was doing but he never gave her much of a telling off. She knew too many of his secrets.

  In the dining hall, Cora always saved a narrow place on her bench for Alice. When it was Cora’s turn to give out bread and dripping, Alice always got the freshest slice. That summer in the workroom, when all the girls were learning to knit socks, Alice seemed to get away with just holding Cora’s wool. Together, Cora and Alice chanted the stitches out loud almost in one voice until their overseer Millie Leggatt, a girl of fifteen who could knit as fast as a loom, told Cora to shut her mouth.

  The other girls, click-clacking with their steel needles, sneered but weren’t bold enough to say anything. They were jealous because Cora and Alice had become as close as sisters. Cora patted Alice’s hand and smiled at her sweetly, ignoring the puzzled looks and the giggles. The others no longer mattered.

  As the year went by and the air in the dormitory turned from damp to stuffy, the two girls’ need to speak when the others were around seemed to evaporate. Language became not words but a glance or the turn of a head. When the other girls came close, Cora and Alice would both scowl. Alice learned quickly how to make even the biggest girls back off with the stamp of her foot. Cora started to dare Alice to be bolder; to rub a muddy finger down Emma Jeake’s clean pinny or spit in Mary Smith’s water cup. Alice never refused a dare and Cora burned with pride as her friend became stronger and more fearless. The thrill of mischief bound them closer. They would entwine their fingers and press their bodies together, standing on tiptoes and beaming, delirious with the triumph of getting away with it.

  Soon, in order to preserve the excitement, the dares had to become riskier. On a rainy day in May they hung back in the corridor by the schoolroom as the others filed in a crocodile towards the dining hall. Cora pulled at Alice’s sleeve and asked her if she needed the privy.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ Alice replied.

  ‘But could you go, if you had to?’

  Alice’s eyes widened. ‘What are you on about, Cora?’

  But Cora could see by Alice’s furtive smile that she knew. As Alice lifted up her skirt to squat down right there in the corridor, Cora pressed
both hands over her mouth to stop herself screaming with laughter. She almost laughed herself into a faint.

  Alice was giggling uncontrollably too by the time she’d finished and wiped herself on her petticoat. The classroom door was shut but Mr Bowyer was still in there and might have come out at any moment. The girls clasped each others’ hands as they ran squealing to the back of the dining hall queue.

  No one owned up to the mess in the corridor. So Molly Pearce who was known as a habitual bed-wetter got the blame. Mr Bowyer gave her six raps of the ruler on her palm and made her stand, snivelling, at the front of the class for the rest of the afternoon.

  As summer began to steam, Cora and Alice pulled themselves further away from the other girls. They liked to loiter on their own at the far end of the schoolyard especially when the infants were still out at play. Cora would tell Alice about what she could remember about being in the infants’ quarters herself. None of the girls from that time were still in the Union house. A couple of the boys she recognised at chapel, but they never made any sign from their pews that they remembered Cora.

  On a July morning that made the asphalt sparkle, Cora and Alice stood with their faces pressed into the railings of the infants’ yard. They could almost touch the toddling, pinafored figures on the other side who prodded each other and sucked snotty thumbs. One of them, an ugly ginger thing, tried to pick up a stone and fell backwards, his brown skirt flying up to expose his tiny parts. He righted himself clumsily and burst into retching sobs.

  Alice giggled. ‘I thought that one was a girl. Why do they all wear the same? You can’t tell lads from lasses.’

  ‘It’s always like that, isn’t it, with little ones?’

  ‘Not in our house! Ma always put Arthur in a little red flannel waistcoat. He had to have skirts on account of getting caught short, but it didn’t seem right to put him in frilly pinnies as well.’

  Cora looked away not wanting Alice to see her confusion. Was everything, even the way that small children were dressed, entirely different beyond the Union house walls? A huddle of shaven-headed toddlers in clumpy ankle boots and rumpled stockings surrounded the screaming boy who was ignored entirely by the two bent old women in workhouse bonnets who sat on a nearby bench.

  Then the asphalt by Cora’s feet began to squeak. A baby bird, quite large but featherless, was slumped on its bloated belly, a tiny blue heart beating under translucent skin.

  ‘Alice, look.’

  But in a swirl of air, the sole of Alice’s boot ground down on to the gasping bird. Cora stared at the fledgling’s lifeless hooded eyes.

  ‘Oh Alice! I thought we’d look after it and feed it scraps until it could fly.’

  Alice picked up the dead thing by its claw. ‘Da always said it was kindest to kill them quicker than a cat would.’

  Tears pricked at the top of Cora’s nose. She would never know as much about the world as Alice already did. Then a cold finger touched Cora’s cheek.

  ‘Don’t fret, Cora. I’ve killed all sorts. Pigeons, hens. A rabbit once. As soon as you’ve done it, you feel so brave and strong that you get a lovely tingle all over.’ Alice’s eyes glistened. ‘I bet you could do it too, Cora, as long as the thing wasn’t too big.’

  Cora swallowed. ‘Like a cat?’

  ‘They’re too scratchy. Best try on something that can’t fight you off.’

  ‘A lamb?’

  ‘Where would you find a lamb around here, you ninny?’

  Alice’s gaze had drifted to the smallest children on the other side of the railings and Cora felt an ache of unease.

  ‘Do you mean… a babby? But that would be wicked.’

  Alice giggled. ‘You are wicked though, aren’t you, Cora?’

  The shiver that went through Cora was electric. ‘Am I?’

  ‘Well, you won’t know for sure whether you are or you’re not until you try. Maybe…’ Alice nodded towards the crying boy, ‘… try on that one who just tripped over and showed us his fella.’

  Alice began to laugh. Then she took hold of Cora’s hands and their fingers locked together, excitement fizzing between them. And, as the dreadful course they had set became suddenly inevitable, Cora laughed too, harder and harder, until trickles of hot tears squeezed out of her eyes and creased her cheeks with salt.

  Seven

  October 1885

  focus

  Outside the scullery window, hooves crunched on gravel and Ellen’s laugh trickled through Samuel’s low utterings. Although Cora couldn’t make out the words or see them all climbing on to the pony trap, she could picture Ellen squashed between Samuel and Cook on the narrow rocking seat. As they picked up speed and the trap began to vibrate, Ellen’s leg beneath her skirts would knock against Samuel’s and then stick to it like flypaper. Cook would pretend not to notice. And Ellen was dull enough not to realise how badly all that sort of thing was likely to end.

  The hooves stamped then quickened and grew fainter. Cora felt a needle of envy that Ellen was included on the excursion for Cook’s messages. But at least that got her out of the way. Cora stood to one side of the window before opening the top buttons of her bodice and slipping the half-medal over her head. Its drab surface was spattered with black spots around the lettering. She laid it on the wooden counter and dipped a scrap of dampened hessian into the tray of brick dust. Whenever she’d tried before to clean it, soap and water seemed to make the metal duller than ever. Now, as she rubbed with dust, tarnish turned to shine. The bronze glinted with new-penny lustre and the fine etching became vivid; spindly rods rested on grass and poking out from a swathe of drapery was a dainty toe.

  Outside in the passage, Cora listened for a second but the house was quiet. Earlier, she had seen Susan Gill go towards the parlour with a basket of dusters. The master, she suspected, was downstairs in his study. What he did all day, she couldn’t imagine. It was an odd sort of photographer who had no customers and rarely left the house. Maybe being a gentleman was a job in itself.

  She tip-toed up the back stairs and kept to the carpet runners along the landing. The doors were tight shut. At the library, she put her ear to the panel. If someone caught her inside she was ready with a story about looking for a lost pin from her sleeve that might have become lodged in tufts of carpet ready to pierce the soft sole of an indoor shoe. Cora’s hand went to the doorknob. She twisted and pushed but the door didn’t budge. She tried again, rattling the metal latch against the frame.

  ‘Would you mind?’

  Mr Jerwood was standing behind her on the landing, navy blue sleeve protectors covering his white shirt to the elbow. Cora’s hand flew away from the door but too late, he must have seen. Her stomach flipped.

  ‘Beg pardon, sir, I was just looking for my pin. You see, I…’

  ‘Do you have a moment?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Come this way, if you would. I need your assistance. It will not take long.’

  He put his arm to the open laboratory door, beckoning her in. She could think of no way to refuse.

  The laboratory was a narrow room but tall and bathed in light. Jars filled with floating dead things lined the shelves along one wall; a workbench ran along the other. At the far end, beside the tall window framed by black curtains, was the mahogany camera that Cora had last seen in Birmingham Gaol. Mr Jerwood closed the door.

  ‘Very good. I merely require some assistance with focus.’

  He turned his back to her and moved aside a large pair of pincers with sliding metal pointers and a wooden gauge. Cora thought again of Violet’s anguished voice: I just can’t… She felt her pulse quicken.

  ‘And so,’ Mr Jerwood went to the tripod, ‘if you would stand again with your feet inside the chalk marks.’

  ‘Sir…?’

  His eyes darted around the room and then locked on to hers. ‘As you did before.’

  The
same camera. The same photographer. She could still picture the shadow of window bars against a glossy brown wall. He smiled, gesturing to the pair of white loops chalked on the linoleum.

  ‘You remember our first meeting now?’

  She nodded. It seemed stupid to lie. The master bent to look into the back of the camera and turned a brass screw at the side of the device that seemed to compress the leather bellows behind the lens.

  ‘Good. I expect you were somewhat confused when you first arrived here. And our perception of other people can be much affected by setting and attire. The change in your own demeanour demonstrates this remarkably well.’

  As he was talking, his hand had moved to the lens-flap and lifted it for a second or two. Cora’s heart missed a beat. Perhaps he had taken her likeness.

  ‘Very good.’ The master’s hands rubbed together. ‘And I have your likeness from… before, if you wish to see it.’

  He didn’t wait for an answer but reached to the shelf above the workbench and lifted down a pasteboard box labelled: Composites 1884 –. Removing the lid, he pulled out a stiffened photographic print. Cora’s own face, wary and flint-eyed, stared back at her from the ugly prison bonnet.

  Mr Jerwood made a noise that was almost a cough. ‘What do you think of yourself?’

  Cora shrugged but her lips were pressed together tight enough to stop her yelling at him to burn the thing that very minute. Anyone in the house who saw it would know instantly what she really was.

  The master continued, almost merry. ‘What, I mean, do you see in this face? A victim of fate and of the depravity of men? Or someone determined to have her own way however heavy the cost to others?’

  Cora felt herself flinch. He knew. The details of her conviction must have been revealed to him as readily as a stationmaster’s pocket watch. Rage swelled in her chest but her voice compressed to a whisper.