The Conviction of Cora Burns

by Carolyn Kirby

  ‘What is it?’ Violet was plucking at Cora’s sleeve, her face twisted with concern. ‘Is it from Alice?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘From someone we knew. A schoolmaster.’

  Mr Bowyer’s face became sharper in her mind; his thin white cheeks with freckles the same colour as his hair. There were places in her memory where his face should be clear; the time when he gave Bet Fulton ten raps on her open palm and looked as if he would burst into tears himself; the time Cora noticed him fall asleep even though he was standing bolt upright at the blackboard; and the time he’d winked and slipped a Peek Frean Pearl into her hand. But in all of those recollections, his face was partly clouded; she could see his watery eyes but not his long nose; the greased-down hair but not the slight chin. Her only memory of his whole face in sharp focus was when it froze in horror beside the defaced body of a lifeless boy.

  Violet was leaning over Cora’s arm, her eyes skimming the letter. ‘Oh, he wishes to see you. But that’s good, isn’t it? He might help you.’

  Cora clawed the letter into a tight lump. ‘No. No. I can’t see him.’

  Then, with a sudden burning inside her, Cora sprang from the armchair towards the fireplace. Her skirt almost brushed the flames as she cast the letter into their blaze.

  ‘Oh! Cora.’ Violet stood with her hands pressed against her cheeks. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘I should have known. Only upset comes from stirring up the past.’

  ‘No, Cora. You are wrong. I should love more than anything to meet my mamma and papa and if I did have a sister…’

  Cora turned to Violet, her eyes flaring.

  ‘You do. A sister who is as like you as Alice was like me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve seen her and I could tell you all about how she lives and how you came to be separated. But believe me, you do not wish to know.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’

  ‘If you’ve got any sense you’ll not ask me again.’

  Violet’s chin crumpled and her eyes glazed with tears. ‘I thought you were my friend, Cora Burns. But you are the nastiest person I’ve ever met.’ Teardrops slipped down Violet’s cheeks. ‘Go away. And don’t ever speak to me again.’

  ‘Very good, miss.’

  Cora’s curtsey swept over the hearthrug but she was not quite out of the room before bitter regret washed through her. What had possessed her to say anything at all, let alone something so vicious? Violet was right. Cora might sometimes seem like a decent person, but her true, hateful self would always burn through. The morning room door slammed behind her but the mahogany could not entirely drown the sobs of the child on the other side.

  jars

  Brandied steam fogged the kitchen as Cook lowered a dark and dripping muslin ball into the big copper pan. Boiling water seethed, spitting around the pudding’s innards and muffling the click of the door as Cora slipped in and to began to ladle mincemeat into jars.

  Cook didn’t look round. ‘Well?’

  Violet’s luncheon meats, Cora realised, had been forgotten entirely.

  ‘She does not want anything.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Said she wasn’t hungry.’

  ‘Is she ill?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Cook released the pudding’s muslin tail and turned towards Cora, wiping her hands on her apron.

  ‘You look none too well neither. Is it something catching?’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  Cook came closer. ‘You’d best go and tell the master if the child is unwell. He wants to know directly about anything like that.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Why not? Lord, you look white as yon muslins.’

  Firmly, but with surprising gentleness, Cook clamped her hand to Cora’s forehead and kept it there. She looked so searchingly into Cora’s eyes that she must surely, Cora thought, have seen the turmoil behind them. Until ten minutes before, Cora had entirely forgotten that Mr Bowyer ever existed. But now the picture of his stricken face in the privy block would not leave her mind. Might he have seen who did what to the little boy? Or had he come in too late to know of anything except the child’s death? A sudden heave of guilt clamped Cora’s heart. For a second, she thought she would dissolve into a snivelling heap and cling to Cook’s skirts.

  Cook took her hand away. ‘You feel cool. But I’m hot as a stoker’s shovel so I can’t tell. What have you eaten?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Directly you come back from upstairs, have one of those crusts I’ve been keeping along with a spoonful of new mincemeat. Kill or cure.’

  ‘Yes, Cook.’

  ‘Off you go then.’

  At the top of the back stairs, Cora gripped the banister. With each breath, it felt as if something sharp was pressing into the bottom of her lungs. Violet must be told, as soon as could be, that Cora had spouted a lot of nonsense in the morning room on account of a sort of fit she’d had, brought on by the shock of the letter, and in truth, she knew nothing at all of Violet’s family.

  Cora hovered at the top of the stairs, waiting for a minute to pass before going back to the kitchen. At this moment, she’d sooner flounce to the stables and tap Samuel for a sixpenny loan than confront the master with a lie about Violet. A rustling at the bottom of the stairs made her look down. Susan Gill’s coiled hair and the top of her starched cap wavered above a basket of folded sheets. Cora jerked away from the banisters towards the sink room then realised it was too late. She pressed herself against the wall to let Susan up.

  ‘Burns. Have you anything pressing in hand?’

  Susan rested the wicker basket on the banister.

  ‘Cook wants me to bottle the mincemeat.’

  ‘Well, I’ll have you for ten minutes to help with the master’s bed.’

  ‘Cook…’

  ‘She’ll not mind for ten minutes. Put a hand to this basket with me.’

  Cora took hold of the woven handle and helped lug the basket along the landing. Was Susan one of those in the house who’d guessed that Violet had a street urchin for a twin? She was sharp enough to have worked it out, and selfish enough not to have done anything about it. The basket jabbed into Cora’s waist as Susan stopped at the laboratory door. Cora’s heart quickened.

  ‘I thought…’

  But Susan had already rapped on the door with her free hand. It sprung open. Despite the chill air, Mr Jerwood’s face was flushed and glossy. The near-white strands of hair that habitually covered his scalp had fallen over and stuck out like a railway signal. His eyes flickered from Susan to Cora and back again.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you please, sir. Am I in order to do your sheets?’

  ‘Yes, yes. But remove the papers carefully from the bedcover and replace them exactly.’

  The linen basket creaked as Susan made a quick bob of assent before turning towards the landing window.

  ‘Wait.’ There was a squeak of urgency in his voice. ‘Cora Burns. I should like your assistance in here. I am sure that Susan can manage the bed alone.’

  Mr Jerwood opened the door to the laboratory. Susan nodded quickly and pursed her lips as she took the full weight of the basket.

  The laboratory door closed behind Cora. Perhaps Violet had already told the master what she’d heard of her origins and from whom. He might not even deny the truth of it, he’d just tell Cora to change out of her clothes and leave. For a moment, Mr Jerwood pulled at a pointer of wayward hair and stared at the floor. He seemed to have forgotten that Cora was there.

  The laboratory was more orderly than Cora had before seen it; the bench scrubbed clean, the apparatus folded neatly at one end. Amongst the measuring sticks and chain-link scales, her gaze fixed on an appliance that appeared to be a stereoscope. It
had the same long stick frame but this one was marked off in inches, and fixed to it was a card with a single sentence in printed type which became smaller and more difficult to read as the sentence progressed… the light-haired men in America were more affected than the dark-haired by every form of disease except chronic rheumatism…

  Mr Jerwood patted the loose hair to his skull and seemed suddenly roused.

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Heavy lifting.’

  ‘Sir?’

  His grey eyes focused on her. ‘The job I have for you.’

  ‘In here?’

  ‘Yes. Look behind you at all of those specimen jars.’

  Cora turned to the four rows of shelves, one on top of another, that held an array of differently sized jars. Inside each one, bathed in yellowy liquid, was something dead. Mr Jerwood’s arm swept across the display.

  ‘You will notice that they are arranged by phylum: mammals, birds, reptilia, amphibia, fish. But I am concerned for… for the strain upon the joinery and wish them to be rearranged by weight.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Come it is simple. All I wish is for you to put the vessels in order of weight; heaviest here at the bottom continuing in a line left to right, and then proceed to the next shelf until you have the lightest there at the very top.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Mr Jerwood went to the window and wheeled forward a set of short library steps.

  ‘I shall first remove all of the jars, and then you may begin your task of rearrangement.’

  ‘Shall I not lift them down, sir? I’ll take good care.’

  ‘No, no. You must gauge their weight purely by eye as you replace them. Some of the vessels are wide and squat, others tall and thin, and you must apply your mind to the volume of liquid in each one in order to divine its relative weight.’

  Hairs needled at the back of Cora’s neck. What did it matter to him how she did the job as long as it was done? She watched him scoot up the steps and come down cradling the jars. Each dead creature was whitened by the fluid and bent out of shape by the curve of the glass. She recognised the snake folded inside a tall cylinder, and the black and white rabbit which had so recently been chewing on hay in the now empty cage on the floor.

  Was Violet also one of the master’s specimens to be measured and tested? Once his experiment was over, the child could not be put into a glass jar but she still could be cast out as coldly as Mr Jerwood had dispatched the rabbit. And sending a girl like that to Coventry Street was as good as doing away with her.

  The last jar containing a bloated spiny fish was positioned on the table. A label glued to the glass read: diodon antennatus. Mr Jerwood’s hand again went to his hair.

  ‘There. Now be quick about it. Quick as you can.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He went to the workbench by the door, opened a notebook and leaned over it with a silver pencil in his hand, but did not start to write.

  As he’d said, the task was easy. Cora concentrated on the size of each specimen jar hard enough to banish thoughts of Violet and Mr Bowyer. She reached up first to the high shelf with the lightest jars of unnameable creatures. The labels were no help. Even when she found an animal that she recognised, like the rabbit, the inked words meant nothing: oryctolagus cuniculus. Science must have a language of its own.

  The rabbit was not quite the heaviest of the jars. There was one left on the floor, pushed against the wall. As Cora bent to take hold of it, she cast a sideways look at the master. He was still leaning over the bench, silver pencil poised and pretending, she sensed, not be looking in her direction. The last jar was a fat, thick-glassed thing as heavy as a bucket of coal. Cora had already pulled it out and cradled it in her arms before she looked into the liquid. The small floating face wore an expression of resignation that deadened Cora’s brain. She opened her arms and let the child go.

  The jar hit the linoleum with a gunshot crack. Vinegary sourness wafted from the seeping fluid. Mr Jerwood was already running to his stack of photographic equipment by the window and returned, muttering, with an earthenware bowl. Gently, he lifted into it the fractured jar and the miniature baby. The tiny preserved face, now open to air, seemed almost set to break into a wail. Cora clutched the edge of the table and could not take her gaze from the half-closed eyes and opening mouth: homo sapiens 8 mens. gest. The child had once had life, if not breath.

  Mr Jerwood looked up at her from the floor, his eyebrow raised. ‘It had a particular effect upon you, this specimen?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. It slipped out of my hand.’

  ‘Was it the shock? Of seeing something so close to your own sensibilities?’

  ‘No, sir. The glass was greasy.’

  But his half-smile showed that he did not believe her, and that he knew full well the cause of her prison term. Rage spurted suddenly inside her. What right did he have to mock or to judge?

  His smile quivered. ‘Perhaps you were distracted by fellow feelings for the poor woman who brought a doomed child into the world.’

  Cora made a lunge for the door. ‘I’ll go to the scullery now, for a floor cloth.’

  And before he could reply, she had stepped around the bowl with a too-small baby boy in the shards of his glass coffin and fled from the laboratory with no intention to return.

  Twenty-Two

  1881-82

  laundered

  On her first walk through the asylum, the place had not seemed so different from the workhouse. Cora had glanced to each side of the attendant’s blue jacket as she followed him along the wide central corridor. Smaller white-walled passages connected the maze of wards and workrooms; a familiar smell of cabbage and drains was spiked with polish and disinfectant.

  Male and female seemed as separated here as they had been across the canal at the Union house. The inmates that Cora saw did not look especially mad. In a day room a girl in a brown linsey dress, not much older than Cora, sat on a wicker chair staring at a pile of crochet on her lap. As Cora passed the door, the girl glanced up and gave a faint smile.

  Beyond the attendants’ mess room, the dispensary and the china store, they arrived at a door marked Housekeeper. The whiskery attendant gave a firm rap and a stout but neat woman appeared. She looked Cora up and down then confirmed that yes, she had arranged with Mrs Catch for the new girl to come today. She was to share a room with the other laundry maid.

  They showed Cora the servants’ hall, the flushing lavatories and heated washrooms and then the small clean room with two iron beds that she was now to inhabit. Cora sat on the thin mattress and felt a shivering swoop of hope. This was a situation she might be proud of, a comfortable place where she would have to work hard but would be looked after and treated fairly.

  Then, Jane Chilvers returned from her afternoon off. She was a tallish girl with dark hair who said that she was nineteen, but Cora didn’t believe her. Jane tinged her every utterance with sly condescension. She made out that she’d never before known anyone from the workhouse and widened her eyes with astonishment and fake concern when Cora admitted that she had always lived there. Cora soon realised that this was part of Jane’s intention always to be, in her own mind at least, one rung higher than everyone around her. She spoke of her family home as a villa although Cora suspected there was no dwelling of that description on Pitsford Street.

  The icy sheets smelled faintly of mould. Cora climbed between them with the half-medal clutched in her fist. IMAGINEM SALT. Yes, she could easily imagine Alice lying, instead of Jane, in the other squeaky bed across the narrow room. Did she have any family? Jane asked in the darkness. Only a sister, Cora replied, a twin sister, but they had been separated as children.

  Perhaps that was the truth. As she tied the half-medal on a string, Cora realised that if it helped her to find Alice she might at last know for sure. And Alice might not be far away. She could even be working at the asy
lum as an indoor servant or female attendant. But as the weeks passed and Cora came to know all of the staff, she realised that she would have to look for Alice elsewhere.

  On the first Monday, Jane introduced Cora, in her new navy blue dress and white bib apron, to the laundry. A predictable reek of dirty clothes and stagnant water greeted her as they entered the block. It was not much bigger than the workhouse washrooms but noisier and more complicated. The building was split into a honeycomb of smaller rooms; a foul-linen receiving room, male wash-house, female wash-house, mangle room, steam drying-horse closets, and a repeat of the whole arrangement for the staff laundry. The servants’ things were to be laundered entirely apart from those of the lunatics.

  Jane said that she and Cora, overseen by the laundress-in-charge, were the only paid servants in the laundry. The rest of the women there were inmates, though quiet ones who should not give any trouble. Some of them grinned at Cora, toothless and stupid; others stared at her blank-eyed. The bigger rooms were noisy. Any conversation amongst the women at the soaping troughs was impossible when the revolving machine was in motion. Cora thought that it must run on electricity, as did the mechanical wringer in the mangle room. Both made a racket like a brewery dray across cobbles.

  Cora must have looked as horror-struck as a piglet at the slaughterhouse, when Jane, nastily, put her first off in the receiving room. Cora’s assistant there was a bug-eyed woman who could not speak for constantly sucking her thumb. All morning, the porter brought dirty washing in wheeled wooden trugs and emptied it on to the floor to be sorted into male and female, soiled and foul. Cora’s permanently startled assistant could use only one hand for the task as the other was in her mouth. Cora had not smelt so much puke, shit and piss in all her time at the workhouse laundry as she did in that first morning at the asylum. She saw very clearly then what kind of companion Jane Chilvers would be and vowed not to let the bitch take advantage again. Before long, she would feel the acid sting of Cora’s true nature.