The Conviction of Cora Burns

by Carolyn Kirby

  Each Sunday since then Cora had loved to feel the surprising weight of the leather-bound book in her hand. The pages made a satisfying squeak as she bent them back and forth.

  ‘While we’re singing, we’ll tear one up,’ Cora declared.

  Alice stared at her for a moment. ‘But they’ll see us.’

  ‘That’s the whole point, isn’t it? We’ll find out how bad we really are. But if we inflict exactly the same amount of damage, they’ll give us the same punishment.’

  As it turned out though, despite their crimes being identical, Cora was treated worse. The Chaplain’s face turned puce beneath his whiskers when he noticed the confetti of printed words around the girls’ feet. Lottie Bolger smirked as Cora and Alice were hauled out of the line and marched to the superintendent’s office.

  ‘But why did you do it?’

  The superintendent’s expression above his clean white collar and knotted tie was puzzled. He was a youngish man with children of his own and he seemed more curious than annoyed.

  Cora bit her lip to kill a grin. ‘It was just for a lark, sir.’

  She felt the warmth of Alice standing next to her but didn’t dare look. A snigger was already simmering and if their eyes met, she knew that they would both dissolve into hiccupping, bladder-loosening hilarity.

  The superintendent shook his head. ‘My goodness, Cora Burns, you have been here long enough to know better. You will spend the daylight hours of next week alone in the refractory cell and endure a potato diet for the rest of this month.’

  Alice seemed to get away without any time at all in the bleak. And potatoes were her favourite so she didn’t mind the short rations. Perhaps the superintendent thought that Cora must have led Alice astray. There was no point Cora trying to tell him that it was the other way round.

  That stretch in the bleak gave Cora time to think about the plan. The first thing she’d do was accidentally drop a dinner bowl in the dining hall and stamp on it to make sure that it smashed. She’d pick out a good big fragment with a sharp edge and hide it between her skirt and her petticoat. Then, maybe the next day, she and Alice would get Percy through the railings while no one was watching. What would happen next was not so clear, but that was the point of the dare; it would tell her how brave she really was, and how bad. She did not like to admit even to herself about the place of sharp china in her plan except that she could not now rid from her mind an image of two letters, A and C, entwined together and glistening red against a background of soft white skin.

  Eleven

  October 1885

  reflection

  Cora had imagined the morning room to be a place draped with black crêpe, the curtains permanently closed but as she opened the door from the entrance hall and squinted against the brightness, she realised her mistake. A high bay window, looped with muslin curtains, flooded the room with sunlight. The comfortable-looking armchairs were covered in pale flowery print as faded and old-fashioned as Cora’s frock.

  Cora was not surprised to see Violet bent over the writing table beside the curved window. She’d seen the girl enter the room just before Susan Gill thrust a bowl full of dirty brushes into Cora’s hands and told her to go in there too. There was something guarded in Susan Gill’s eye as she gave out her instructions for black-leading the grate but Cora took this as another sign of the housemaid’s condescension.

  Cora put the enamel bowl of brushes on the hearth and unscrewed a glass jar. A heady waft of turpentine leaked into the room. Violet, with the end of her plait pressed between her lips, looked up from the spread of white paper. Then she jumped off the chair.

  ‘Oh, Cora! I thought you were Susan.’

  ‘Good day, miss.’

  ‘I’m so glad it’s you. I’d thought there mayn’t be time before I go.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘To make my sketch of your friend.’

  Cora put the turpentine jar back into the bowl. A stick of leading left a black smudge on her fingers.

  ‘Oh, you must forget about that, miss. It might get you into trouble.’

  ‘No it wouldn’t! I am meant to do my drawing practice this morning anyway. I have my charcoals here. Sir won’t mind if I do portraiture instead of still life. Please Cora, let me try.’

  She kneeled down beside Cora, their skirts touching. The girl’s widened pleading eyes and soft white skin caught at something in Cora’s gut.

  ‘All right. If it’s quick.’

  ‘Yes, I promise. Here, come and sit by me.’

  Violet pulled another chair to the narrow table and Cora perched on the edge of the cushioned seat. Clearing the loose sheets, Violet pulled forward a large wire-bound pad with plywood covers and turned to an empty page.

  ‘First, the outline. What was the shape of her face?’

  ‘It’s hard to say.’

  ‘Was it a round face, or square? Or something in-between; an oval, like yours?

  ‘An oval, yes.’

  Picking a spindly black stick from a metal tray, Violet sketched two curving lines on the blank paper.

  ‘And her eyes, were they like yours too?’

  ‘It has been a long time.’

  ‘Think back.’

  Cora seemed to feel the chair spin beneath her. ‘She looked a little like you, I suppose.’

  ‘But she is a grown-up now, like you?’

  ‘Yes. Just like me.’ Cora’s voice thickened. ‘She was my sister.’

  ‘Your sister? Oh Cora, you should have said. It makes everything so much easier.’ Picking up the sketch pad and the stick, Violet bounded to a walnut sideboard in the window alcove. ‘Come over here.’

  Cora had to lean down to see Violet’s reflection in the wide mirror. The sight of her own face next to it stopped her heart. She had seen herself only in shop windows or public bars. The looking glass at the asylum was a grainy thing that had never revealed, as this one did, the creaminess of her skin or auburn tint in her dark hair. But it was her own eyes that astounded Cora. They were so full of pigments; dove-grey flecked with hazel and lilac, that she could not put a name to their true colour.

  Violet picked up the charcoal stick and addressed Cora’s reflection. ‘I shall draw our two faces into one; the girl and the grown-up.’

  She glanced from Cora back to herself and then to the stick on the page. Lightly, then with more definition, she sketched curving lines across the paper. The tip of her tongue slipped out of the corner of her mouth as shapes began to emerge; a clear outline of the cheek and chin, deft shading around the eyes and lips. The drawing was done with a child’s boldness but was recognisable as a real person. The face was not quite Cora and not quite Violet; neither a girl nor a woman. Was it Alice? Cora couldn’t say.

  ‘You draw well, miss.’

  ‘Do you think so? Could this be her?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  Violet was bent over the paper, smudging the shadows with a fingertip. She looked up when Cora didn’t reply.

  ‘Alice Salt.’

  ‘But your name is Burns, isn’t it?’

  ‘She was boarded out to the Salt family and took their name.’

  A look of pain shot across Violet’s eyes. ‘I will help you find her, I promise. We’ll write this minute to the Gazette.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?

  ‘I… I don’t have any money.’

  ‘It’s only threepence a line.’

  ‘Even so…’

  Violet’s eyes roamed the ceiling for ideas. ‘We could ask if they would print it for free because I am a child with no funds of my own but seeking a long-lost sister who was last seen… where was she last seen?’

  ‘In the Birmingham Poor Law Union Workhouse. Eleven years ago.’

  Violet bounced on her toes. ‘A sister last
seen in the poor house? How could they refuse? I will look in the Gazette for the directions of their office.’

  ‘Do you have an envelope? And a stamp?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t.’ Violet looked suddenly crestfallen. She tore the sketch from the pad and held it up, her chin quivering. ‘And it seems such a good likeness.’

  But Cora’s gaze had dropped to the new top sheet of the sketch pad. ‘What’s this other drawing?’

  ‘My still lifes. The medallion collection.’

  Cora leaned closer. ‘Can I see?’

  ‘Do you like it? This is my favourite medallion, with the rabbit.’ Violet pointed to the sketched roundel on the page. ‘And I like the boat. But not the mechanical equipment.’

  ‘Are these the coins that are in the box in the library?’

  Violet nodded.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Mr Jerwood’s annual medallions. He has designed one for each year of his married life. See, this shows the boat he sailed along the Bosphorus and the year: 1875.’

  ‘The year? Where does it say that?’

  ‘Here at the bottom, of course. In Roman numerals.’

  Violet pointed to the jumble of charcoal letters: M, C, X… copied with a slight slant around the curve of the coin’s circle. Roman numbers. Cora had never heard of such a thing.

  ‘What year is this one? With the rabbit?’

  Violet’s lips moved silently as she counted on her fingers. ‘1881.’

  ‘And why a rabbit?’

  ‘Some experiment he was pleased with that year. It involved rabbits.’

  ‘And what are the words around the edge?’

  ‘I don’t know what they mean but I copied the letters exactly. It is Latin.’

  Cora stared at the neat pencil drawings. Perhaps IMAGINEM SALT had a Latin meaning too.

  ‘And Mr Jerwood had these medallions made for himself? You can’t buy them from a shop?’

  ‘Oh no, they mark something special that he did himself.’

  ‘Which foundry made them?’

  Violet giggled. ‘How should I know?’

  Cora took a step back and checked in the mirror that her expression appeared blank. But her heart was racing. Mr Jerwood’s medals looked so similar to the half-moon of metal around her neck that they must, surely, have all been made by Salt & Co. Perhaps the master would be able to direct Cora to the foundry. Cora promised herself that she’d somehow find the courage to show him her half-medal and ask. She just needed to find a reason to converse with him in private.

  Then Violet lifted up the charcoal portrait and turned to Cora. ‘Shall I keep this safe until you get the money for a postage stamp and an envelope?’

  Cora put her head on one side and her mouth into a smile. ‘Can you not help me a little more? Mr Jerwood must have lots of writing things. Would he even miss just one envelope and one stamp?’

  ‘But they are in a drawer in his study. And he keeps it locked.’

  ‘Susan Gill has a key. Perhaps, you could test how brave you are by asking her to let you in and say it’s on the master’s instructions.’

  ‘And then steal an envelope and a postage stamp?’

  ‘It isn’t really stealing, is it? It’s just using an everyday item from the house where you live. Otherwise, you would be stealing the lead from your pencil every time you wrote, or the paper from the hook whenever you used the lavatory.’

  For a moment Violet’s face was serious. She pushed herself on to the tips of her toes. Cora began to count. Then Violet’s heels dipped down and she burst out laughing, holding her stomach as she giggled.

  ‘You are so funny, Cora. And I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘I am.’

  With a mischievous grin, Violet set off at a skip out of the morning room.

  Cora stared at the charcoal face on the table, hardly able to breathe. Alice seemed suddenly closer than she had been in a dozen years. Cora needed only to ask Thomas Jerwood for the missing piece and the puzzle of her half-medal would be solved. Perhaps the master would be glad to assist, because Cora could also convey to him, quite truthfully, the result of the experiment on Violet.

  Eagerness to do wrong on a scale of one to ten – seven and a half.

  Time – five seconds.

  feathers

  With the copper unlit, the scullery air was jagged with cold. Early morning fog beaded the spider’s web on the outside of the pane. At the sink, Ellen was ripping downy feathers from a white-eyed bird but she kept looking up, flushed and restless, through the misted glass to the curve of the drive beyond.

  Cora rose, irritated, from the low stool in the corner where she was knifing mud from boots.

  ‘I thought I was meant to be cleaning those birds.’

  ‘You don’t know how.’

  ‘How can I learn unless you show me?’

  Ellen shrugged. ‘All right.’

  She moved aside so that they could both stand on the raised wooden duckboard at the sink. Even with its feathers, the pigeon in Cora’s hand was solid and heavy; more like meat than a living thing.

  ‘Just get a good grip on a few feathers at a time and pull quick, like, but don’t yank at it or you’ll rip the skin.’

  Cora began to pick at the grey feathers but even the softest were reluctant to pop out of the bird’s flesh. The exposed skin was spotted with blood.

  ‘Is this right?’

  Ellen was looking out of the window. ‘Take care with the pheasant. It’s been in the larder a few days. And keep the head nice. Master likes to see plumage on the table.’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why do you keep looking outside, Ellen? For Samuel?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Why then?’

  ‘My brother may call.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Look! That’s him now.’

  Ellen’s hand flew to the strings at her waist. She bundled off her apron and ran out of the door making a draught that floated wispy feathers on to the sink’s wet grime.

  A stocky man in a brown bowler hat and corduroy jacket was crunching toward the house. In his arms was a baby about a year old with corn-coloured curls. Their voices moved inside; the baby’s grizzle, Ellen bleating something about a bonnet and a deep laugh that must be her brother. Then, over a shuffle of boots, Samuel’s voice was at the back door too. Cora’s insides tugged. She hadn’t seen him since the ride on the pony trap and hadn’t spoken to him since the tack room. She’d keep away.

  A mound of blood-tipped feathers covered the half-stripped creature in the sink. The eyes were tight closed and the beak slightly open. Cora jabbed at the wing and it moved as if still alive but the skin was purplish and loose. It tore in two places as Cora pulled on a feather. She folded the bird belly-side down on the tray to cover her mistake.

  The big rust-coloured game bird gave off a musty smell as she lifted it into the sink, the head drooping forlornly to one side. The long tail-feather cut into her hand but Cora kept pulling it and pressing down on the body until something seemed to crack and squash inside. She looked closer, and inside the soft nest of down was a writhing knot of maggots. With a gulp of air, she let the pheasant drop into the sink. Then, grabbing the tray of naked headless birds, she fled from the scullery.

  In the kitchen, everyone was crowded into the warmth belching from the range. Ellen’s brother stood to one side with a teacup in his hand while Ellen bounced the wary-eyed baby on her hip. No one looked round as Cora came in. Not even Samuel.

  Timothy, sitting on the Windsor chair in his stocking feet, chewed his pipe as he spoke.

  ‘Still on the railways then?’

  Ellen’s brother took a slow sip from his cup and shook his head. ‘I had a much better offer from Mr Dawson, the brick merchant. He supplies all th
e builders round here. Said I was the best man for the job by a mile. I’m the only one he trusts to come and see the foreman at the site across the way. So I thought I’d bring young William along for a ride on the wagon.’

  Ellen bounced the baby more vigorously. ‘Aww! Did he like it? Did he like the gee-gees?’

  The baby’s bottom lip stuck out above the shiny dribble across his chin. Ellen swung him towards Samuel.

  ‘Say hello to Samuel, he took your da’s place in the stableyard. Perhaps he’ll take us to see the pony.’

  Samuel flicked his cap on to his head and pulled the brim low. ‘I wouldn’t get too close to that pony till he’s had his mash. You best stay here where it’s warm.’

  For a second, as they watched Samuel leave, Ellen’s face and the baby’s appeared identical; the same golden curls and china-blue eyes, the same expression of dismay. The baby looked around the room and caught Cora’s eye, then burst into a wail of tears.

  Everyone around the kitchener joined into a general cooing and ahh-ing as Ellen bounced William into quietness. Cora left the tray of waxy game birds on a corner of the table and slipped out of the room. In the scullery, she took a long breath and lifted the pheasant up by two fingers around its neck then dropped it on to the board.

  Her heart was ablaze. How did she not recall anything about her own child’s hair? She had only seen him in darkness but should still have been left with some recollection of what he’d looked like; whether his hair had been thick or thin, black or fair. Perhaps she had not even bothered to look.

  The cloying air rising from dead game again threatened to choke her. Taking care to avoid the creeping maggots, Cora scooped the loose feathers into a bucket and went outside. A white sun pressed through the fog. Cold air bit her throat. Something about the scene in the kitchen had made her feel desolate but whether it was the closeness of the family resemblances or the accusing look in that baby’s eye, she couldn’t say.