The Conviction of Cora Burns

by Carolyn Kirby

  As months went by, the asylum shrank in Cora’s mind from a vast warren of odd-smelling wards and bath-houses, to the few well-trod rooms where she had some sway. She got the measure of the laundry. When it was her turn in the receiving room, she never touched the foul linen herself. Instead, she ordered the inmates about from a downdraught of fresh air at the doorway. The imbeciles eyed her warily as they knew how sharp her tongue could lash.

  Gradually, Cora began to speak more freely in the servants’ hall. In the early days she had been overwhelmed by the thought of conversation with grown women or, even more alarmingly, with the men. She had never really known any of the opposite sex, apart from Mr Bowyer and a particularly kind medical man who had examined her during her months in the workhouse infirmary and manipulated her chest. At the Union house, all of the overseers and paupers that she saw were female. So, it was in the servants’ hall at the asylum that she had her first chance to observe the male of the species. And, on the whole, she liked what she saw. Very much.

  The outdoor workmen, in particular, always commanded her attention. They seemed like a breed apart from any of the people she had so far known in her life. They would come into the servants’ hall in their sweat-stained shirts and moustaches, frisking and braying to each other like young horses released into a spring paddock. They laughed and cuffed each other around the head, eyes twinkling. She started to smile at their improper jokes, sometimes directed at her, and then to laugh out loud. Smithson, the stoker, was burly as a Suffolk Punch but had the sharpest wit. It was Jimmy though, the gasman, who she waited for most expectantly each dinnertime. He was not especially tall and he had the same drooping moustache as the rest of them, but his every movement was as lithe and powerful as a rich man’s riding horse; one that you couldn’t take your eyes off as it swept by.

  Once, Smithson came in unwashed and complained that the coal dust was turning him into an African. An African elephant more like, Jimmy said. Cora giggled and asked Smithson how long was his trunk. Everyone roared. When Jimmy nodded at her and winked, her stomach squeezed in on itself like a wrung-out soap-bag. That night when the gas was turned off but the bedroom mantle was still glowing, Jane revealed that Jimmy had already asked her to accompany him to Michaelmas fair. The darkness seemed to heighten the smugness in Jane’s voice. Cora lay awake, listening to the lunatics’ shrieks and muffled obscenities, and imagined what she might do to prevent the outing.

  And so, she came to be waiting in the shrubbery for Jimmy to finish his shift. As soon as she stepped towards him and raised her petticoats just a little too high, she saw the look in his eye and knew that she had won. An actual bead of dribble ran down his chin. Already undressing, she followed him into the ventilation duct. By the heaving end of it, the half-medal, moist with sweat, was all that she still had on.

  This was only the first of countless frantic couplings in all manner of places around the asylum in the months that followed. Sometimes they couldn’t stop laughing with the outrageousness of what they were doing and the unspeakable thrill of it. Sometimes, behind the coal-house or in the dead space beneath the water tower, she’d make him crawl to her like a dog, panting and licking, as she lifted her petticoat higher, inch by inch, above her stocking-tops. Sometimes he would put his hand over her mouth and press it hard saying ‘someone will hear’, but she would laugh and shriek all the louder.

  She took her own enjoyment in what they did together, and liked to think up ways for him to increase her pleasure. But a good part of her satisfaction in the affair came from the look on Jane’s face whenever she saw Jimmy and Cora smirking at each other across the servants’ hall. Jane’s hoity-toitiness began to dissolve and her eyes sometimes glazed with the blankness of a melancholic.

  It was Jimmy who noticed before Cora herself when the inevitable happened.

  ‘Your tits look bigger,’ he said to her after they’d finished an especially acrobatic congress and were lying sticky and entwined in the dust of a tool shed. ‘And your belly,’ he added.

  ‘It’s them custard puddings,’ Cora replied, laughing. ‘I can’t stop myself.’

  But Jimmy’s eyes suddenly lost their greediness for her. He no longer winked and threw bits of crust at her across the table. And when her courses still refused to flow he stopped turning up at the usual places. One Tuesday, when the summer blossom was starting to turn into hard little fruits, he did not appear at all. Smithson told Cora, his face reddening through the coal dust, that Jimmy had got himself a plum position with the Corporation. Cora knew she’d never see him again.

  Her belly did not seem to care about the anguish inside her. It took no notice of all the food that she was pushing aside. Bigger and rounder it got. She told the housekeeper that her navy bodice was too small and she was given a roomy Melton jacket without any question. Perhaps the housekeeper put it down to the effect of the asylum’s very superior fare over that of the workhouse. But soon the new jacket was tight. Cora let out the seams one evening and Jane was too pasty and distracted to ask why she was altering it already. Cora knew that, eventually, the Melton jacket would not fit her at all. And then, she had no earthly idea of what she would do.

  Twenty-Three

  December 1885

  an engagement

  Because the afternoon was so crisp and the mud ruts on the track would be rock-hard, Cook had paid a call at Tyseley Farm to deliver a plum pudding and select a goose from their yard for the Christmas table. Ellen had gone with her. And so, with Susan Gill occupied by the dining room silverware, Cora found herself alone in the kitchen for the afternoon. In the cold scullery there were potatoes to peel and boots to polish but they could wait.

  Cora’s breath gauzed the window pane. Outside, clipped bushes threw frost-filled shadows on to the bright lawn and rooks squabbled in the naked branches. She went to the dresser and felt for her bundle stuffed beside the truckle bed. The paste-head doll was wrapped in fresh-laundered pudding muslins and an assortment of cotton print scraps. Susan Gill had shrugged and pulled a face but had nevertheless handed them over along with a few short lengths of white ribbon. Cora sat in the Windsor chair with the mending box on her lap and began to sew the oddments together to make a dress for the paste-head doll.

  It was to be after the fashion of a christening robe, although she had only ever seen one once in an illustrated newspaper’s pen and ink sketch. The baby princess’s gown seemed to fall from the Queen’s stocky lap right to the floor. There was not enough muslin to make the doll’s robe so outlandishly long, but the print strips would make flounces to cover the feet. And she could decorate the yoke with ribbon. Her clever needlework would turn the home-made doll into a gift that any little girl might be pleased to receive. She should get a few shillings for it, at least, on the Bull Ring.The doll’s head rested against Cora’s stomach as she sewed muslin pieces around the lumpy sacking torso. Dense with clotted glue, the head had a lifelike weight to it and the pinhead eyes reflected a prick of light from the window. Cora’s scalp crept up and she covered the doll’s face with her apron.

  It had been Christmas time when she’d first felt that the lump inside her was indeed a real child. After Christmas Eve supper, the asylum servants had been gathered around the piano singing oh! bring us a figgy pudding… and Cora felt a kick inside her belly that was so queerly separate from herself it made her cry out. The housekeeper’s eyes turned to her and narrowed. So she’d said she was going for an early night and had spent Christmas Day in her bed. By the following Christmas, she’d been inside Birmingham Gaol for most of the year. Christmas now seemed like a festivity designed only to rub the noses of poor incarcerated wretches into the mire.

  The kitchen door rattled suddenly with a pull of outdoor air. Boots too heavy for Cook or Ellen pounded the passage floor. Then the kitchen door sprang open, pushed by a thicket of green foliage and behind it, as she had feared, was Samuel Shepherd’s face, beaming. As his eyes fell
on Cora, the smile died.

  ‘I thought it was Cook in here.’

  ‘She’s paying a call at the farm. Ellen too.’

  ‘Oh. I just… Susan Gill asked for Christmas greenery. I thought to bring it in here and see if Cook wanted mistletoe for the kitchen.’

  ‘She might.’

  He took a few steps forward then hesitated and stayed by the table, his arms filled with the ball of waxy leaves and translucent berries. The cuts to his cheeks and brow had healed to no more than scratches. His eyes skittered across the room.

  ‘Shall I leave it on the table?’

  ‘On the floor would be better.’

  ‘Aye, sorry.’

  Cora wondered as he bent down what she had ever seen in him. It was true that he was tall and broad-shouldered but everything else about him was dull. He had none of Jimmy’s mesmerising physical grace, nor his easy confidence. Samuel’s jokes were rarely funny. But Jimmy’s wit had been intoxicating enough to have her shedding her clothes for him even without his firm muscles and dark eyes.

  Samuel stood up with such a lame attempt to avoid Cora’s gaze that she almost laughed. But she’d do better not to rile him. He knew too much about her. And she needed him to keep what he knew to himself.

  ‘I hope your wounds are no longer painful.’

  Samuel shot her a wary look. ‘They was only scratches.’

  ‘Even so, I’m sorry you were hurt. It was a shock to me. I mean, the likeness…’

  ‘I meant nothing by it, you know. I was not even sure it was prison garb you had on until you flew at me like a banshee.’

  Samuel’s scratches reddened but there seemed more anger in his face than embarrassment. Cora clutched at the doll on her lap, the head still hidden in her apron.

  ‘Do you still have the likeness?’

  He shook his head. ‘It went into the tack room grate.’

  ‘I’m obliged.’

  ‘Give no thought to it.’

  He cleared his throat and Cora wondered if he might try to spit through the bars of the kitchener but instead he turned to go.

  ‘Wait, Samuel.’

  Cora rose up, sticking the needle into the doll’s body and bundling it with the fabric on to the seat of the chair. Samuel seemed to flinch as he saw her come towards him and Cora put up her hands in reassurance.

  ‘I’m glad there is no bad blood between us, Samuel. And just to make full amends, please let me pay back what I owe you. I have a sixpence amongst my things.’

  ‘No, don’t…’

  As she swept past him to the dresser, he took a pronounced step back so that her skirt would not touch him.

  Her coins were folded into the pocket that she kept inside the Melton jacket. She rummaged amongst her night things, keeping them shielded from his sight. Then she turned around with the silver sixpence between her thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Here. Take it.’

  ‘I don’t care about your pennies.’

  ‘Please. I don’t wish to be in your debt. Have the kindness to accept it.’

  His eyes narrowed as he regarded her for a moment and then put out his flattened hand. Cora bowed her head as she placed the sixpence on his palm.

  ‘Thank you, Samuel.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  Now that she was close to him his voice seemed gentler. His hand with the sixpence moved up towards hers.

  ‘Samuel!’

  They both looked round at the burst of air and light. Ellen stood at the doorway, her blue bonnet haloed by wisps of fair hair and her cheeks rosy from the cold. Her mouth was smiling, but dismay lined her brow. Samuel sidled away from Cora, flushing.

  ‘I just brought in some greenery…’

  Ellen came towards them. Two bunches of shiny brown onions tied together by their dried stalks, were hanging around her neck. She gave Cora a sideways look and lifted the stringed onions over her head, laying them on the table. Then she went to Samuel and slipped her arm around his. Her dark gloved hand twined around his wrist.

  Then, huffing and blowing, Cook swept through the open door and closed it behind her.

  ‘Coldest we’ve had all year.’ She dropped a swede, big as a football, on to the table and chuckled as she took the pin from her hat. ‘He wanted us to bring carrots and parsnips too but this was as much as we could carry.’

  Cora thought how much younger and almost pretty Cook seemed with a smile on her face.

  Then Ellen stepped forward, pressing her lips into a simper and pulling Samuel with her so that they both stood square to the dresser. Her mouth wavered into a frown and back again before she spoke.

  ‘Samuel and I think it’s time for our announcement.’

  Cora bit her cheek. What a stuck-up little trollop Ellen could be, for all her simpering. Cook hung her bonnet on the back of the chair and sat down, her smile fading.

  ‘I see. What have you planned?’

  ‘Well…’ Ellen looked at Samuel and her voice rallied. ‘We are to be married at New Year.’

  Cook seemed unimpressed. ‘Congratulations. And how shall you live?’

  Ellen gave Samuel’s arm a slight but distinct squeeze with her brown glove. Samuel’s face twitched and he looked up from the heap of leaves and berries on the floor.

  ‘I was to tell Timothy today, but it will not matter if you know first. Ellen’s brother put in a word for me and I have an offer from Mr Podesta the furniture remover and haulier at Handsworth. It is a good position. In charge of the stables. And it comes with a room above.’

  Cook put her elbow on the table and rubbed her forehead with two fingers.

  ‘So that will be enough, will it? To keep you both?’

  ‘Ellen has some savings put by.’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  The room seemed to throb with unsaid resentments.

  Cook sighed. ‘Well. Good luck to you both.’ She turned to Cora. ‘I shall ask Mrs Dix to contact the registry regarding a scullery maid but this is a poor time of year. Ellen may be gone before we find anyone else. We shall be very grateful to have you in place as tweeny in the meantime.’

  Cora nodded and tried to smile and say, yes, Cook, then wish joy to the seemingly happy couple but she found that her heart was so unexpectedly leaden at the news of the engagement that her voice had clotted in her throat.

  game

  Susan Gill had instructed Cora to bring the basket of fireside brushes and cloths to the library directly, yet the hearth was hardly dirty. A quick wipe over to remove some feathery ash and a few charred nuggets of coal was all that was needed. Cora wondered why the master, according to Susan, had been most particular in wanting Cora to do it straight away. His reason, she suspected, would be connected in some queer way to the presence of Violet, who sat sullen in the leather armchair.

  The girl was shuffling, sulkily, through a handful of visiting cards on her lap. Cora ran the floor cloth over the tiles with the weight of watching eyes on her back. As she turned to repack the basket, she expected Violet to be observing her from the armchair but the girl did not look her way until Cora rose to go.

  ‘Are you done?’

  ‘There wasn’t much to do, miss.’

  ‘Can you not stay a short while?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Cora wondered if her outburst in the morning room had been forgiven, but Violet’s cool manner suggested otherwise.

  ‘I have a game. My guardian said I might play it with any of the servants who came to the library this morning.’

  And he knew, Cora thought, that she would be the only one. She threw an involuntary look at the bookshelves.

  ‘Very good, miss. I’m glad to assist.’

  Violet’s face softened as she pulled a footstool in front of the armchair. ‘It is a word game. You must take a turn to pick up a word card and
then write down as many other connected words as occur to you within the minute. Whoever writes the most wins.’

  The visiting cards seemed only to have one word written on each. Cora stopped herself protesting that Violet had already seen all of the words and would therefore have an advantage. The point was not to win but to be seen, by the master, to be playing. Cora nodded and kneeled by the stool.

  Violet went to the cluttered side table by the window, returning with a pencil, paper and a small brass cylinder. The hollow centre of the cylinder revealed glass bulbs at each end, one half-filled with white sand. Violet placed a pile of scrap paper at either side of the footstool and the cards, face-down, between them.

  ‘The hourglass is set for one minute exactly. I shall go first and show you what to do.’ Violet took hold of the brass cylinder with one hand and the stack of cards with the other. ‘Ready? One, two, three…’

  The hourglass and the first card were flipped over together. On the word card, Bee was written in a careful adult hand.

  Violet grabbed the pencil and began to scribble on her scrap of paper. White sand, almost noiseless, swished through the hourglass. Then the pencil stopped and Violet put the end of it between her teeth as she looked up at the window. Cora frowned at the upside-down list: honey, flower, hum, fly, hive, comb, nectar. But words, surely obvious, like sting, pain, swat, queen, worker, grub, forage, were missing. The last grain of white sand fell.

  ‘Time’s up.’

  Violet hit the pencil-end against the footstool. ‘Oh, bother! I’ve just thought of another.’

  ‘How many do you have?’

  ‘If you’ll let me have petal, twelve.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Your turn now.’

  Cora took up the pencil and Violet, shuffling with eagerness, turned both hourglass and a word card. The word was Ladder.

  As Cora began to write, she found that her hand could not keep up with her thoughts; step, up, down, climb, rung, fall, sway, grasp, downwards, upwards, backwards, reach, clutch… She filled one side of the paper then turned it over. The blank space was squeezed out by a partly cut-through column of printed type: