The Conviction of Cora Burns

by Carolyn Kirby

  She gave a start at the sudden clatter of the stool that she had wedged against the scullery door falling to the floor.

  ‘Cora?’

  Ellen’s eyes had a cold glimmer as she pushed into the room. Cora stuffed the envelope into her skirt and picked up the stool.

  ‘Am I wanted for something?’

  ‘Aye. A box of coals. For the master’s bedroom.’

  ‘Before he retires?’

  ‘He already has. And says he doesn’t want any vittles at all. Just some coal bringing up.’

  ‘Right.’

  Ellen glanced sideways at Cora’s skirt where a stiff corner of paper stuck out of the pocket.

  ‘Who was that gentleman with you on the drive?’

  ‘The doctor that took the missus away.’

  ‘Where has she gone?’

  Cora snorted and folded her arms. ‘Where d’you think? To the lunatic asylum.’

  ‘Oh my! What did the doctor want with you?’

  ‘Only to thank me for clearing the mess she made on the stairs. Anyways, I’ll go for the coal.’

  Cora reached for her shawl from the doorpeg and Ellen jumped back to let her by.

  The glow from the kitchen was dulled by a squall of hard rain. A thin line of white light picked out the brick path from the blackness around it. Gusts whipped around Cora’s head as she opened the coal-house door and reached inside for the shovel. Lumps of coal punched into the box. She tried to picture how her mother’s face would be if they met. Might it crumple satisfyingly with tears of guilt as Mary Burns, shocked into speaking, begged Cora’s forgiveness? Cora would take her time weighing up how to reply: I forgive you or I don’t.

  But, in truth, it was just as likely that Mary Burns’ face would yawn and gurn before breaking into the high-pitched cackle of an imbecile. Or then again, if Mary was anything like her daughter, the muteness might be just a clever ruse. Everyone knew that the grub was better in the asylum than the workhouse.

  Cora hauled the laden coal box into the house and pressed her weight against the back door until it clicked shut. At the top of the back stairs, she stopped to wipe her face with a clean corner of her apron. The cotton came away from her skin damp with rain and coal dust and still smelling faintly of lunatic’s vomit. Cora held her breath, and realised that someone nearby was crying.

  Mrs Dix’s door was nearest. Perhaps she was heartbroken that she could no longer spend all day watching a mad-woman sleep. But the whimpering was too thin and distant to be the housekeeper. Cora went softly along the landing to the door between the master’s and the mistress’s bedrooms, and put her hand on the doorknob. The crying had become no more than a shudder of breath.

  Violet’s bedroom must once have been only a cupboard. There was no fireplace and the window was as high and meagre as a prison cell’s. On the miniature bed, Violet looked as big as a grown-up.

  Cora placed the coal box gently by the door and went to kneel at the bed. She put a hand to Violet’s hair. The girl’s face did not rise and she mumbled fitfully into the pillow.

  ‘Is it Cora?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did they take her? Do you know?’

  ‘To the asylum.’

  ‘What is it like there?’

  ‘Clean and bright and warm.’

  ‘But scary? Full of lunatics?’

  ‘Don’t fret. She will be looked after and made better.’

  ‘It is not right, though. This is her home.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were fond of her.’

  ‘When I was little, I used to call her mamma even though she said my own mamma would not like it. That was when she was well sometimes.’

  ‘Perhaps when she returns from the asylum she will be well again.’

  Violet rolled over. Her face was creased and scarlet; her eyes pooled with tears. She put a finger to her lips and signalled for Cora to lean closer. The high window made a bang in the wind and the mantle flared. Gas fizzed through Violet’s whisper.

  ‘Do you think he will send me to the asylum too?’

  ‘Why do you think such a thing?’

  ‘Because he says the experiments are at an end. There is nothing more for me to do.’

  ‘But he’ll look after you, I am sure.’

  ‘Like he has looked after her?’

  Cora could not think how to answer. There were indeed asylum stories of ‘inconvenient’ people being abandoned in the private wards. And if they stayed there long enough, they would become mad anyway.

  ‘Can you take me to my real mother, Cora?’

  Cora sighed. ‘I don’t know…’

  ‘I long to see her, and my sister, more than anything.’

  ‘Let me think on it.’

  Very solemnly, Violet took hold of Cora’s hand and planted on it a hot kiss.

  ‘Thank you, dear Cora.’

  Cora felt her own throat tighten as she tip-toed back to the coal box and closed Violet’s door gently behind her.

  There was no answer to her knock at the master’s bedroom so, as quietly as she could, she let herself in. A hissing wall-light, turned down low, threw a dim glow across the cluttered room. The tapestry bed curtains were half-pulled and a shape lay unmoving beneath the damask coverlet. Cora picked her way between the piles of papers and books towards the fireplace. A medicinal scent of camphor cloaked a deeper odour of bodily staleness.

  In the corner of the room, something moved and Cora’s stomach gave a jolt as she saw a woman’s face. But it was only her own reflection looking back at her from the cheval mirror. Her heart was still beating too fast as she bent to the grate. Orange veins riddled between the dark embers. Carefully, she lifted the coal-box lid and used the tongs to select a few dusty pebbles of coal, placing them beside the brightest spots in the fire.

  ‘Who is it?’

  She froze. ‘Cora, sir.’

  ‘Oh yes. Cora Burns. It had to be you.’

  His voice was slurred. Perhaps he had been drinking.

  ‘I’ve come with coals, sir. To keep your fire alive.’

  An unpleasant snorting came from the bed. She placed a final coal in the grate and carefully poked in some air, then replaced the tongs on the fire stand.

  As she stood up, she could not help but look at the bed. The master had propped himself up on one elbow, a grey fog of hair around his pallid face, his eyes piercing into her. But then his body, beneath the covers, began to shake. The shaking grew to a heave. Cora tried to look away but couldn’t. Was he laughing at her? Or doing something unspeakable? The snuffling and racking from the bed continued and Cora darted for the door. But as she slipped out, she realised that she’d heard such a sound before, many times in fact, at the asylum, where it was far from uncommon to hear a man weep.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  FROM: Thomas Jerwood Esq.

  An Essay on Nature, Nurture and Negative

  How may human paternity be established beyond doubt? It is a question which has perplexed the male of the species down the generations. For, whilst motherhood is an undeniable fact, fatherhood can be regarded as a relationship that is always under suspicion.

  Take, by example, the experience of a most august scientific friend of mine who has generously agreed to the retelling (with complete anonymity) of his own sorry attempt to discover consanguinity with a person who was otherwise a stranger. The circumstances of his salutary tale had begun more than twenty years earlier when my friend, most unhappy in his marriage and frustrated by repeated failures in academia, found some solace in an anthropological study within his own household. The subject of this study was his kitchen maid; a lively, willing girl who was always pleased to engage in his investigations. The more world-worn readers amongst you will have no surprise in learning how this unsuitable association progressed, or that it ended with the gir
l falling into a shameful condition that consumed my scientific friend with regret.

  Happily for my friend, the kitchen maid departed the household of her own accord before her condition was entirely apparent. Enquiries were made thereafter into her whereabouts but she had disappeared so completely that my friend could only conclude that she had returned to her north-country home, or had adopted a new name. There the matter seemed to end until, many years later and quite by chance, my friend found himself again confronted by the kitchen maid. He found her in the very lowest situation of society imaginable, yet the girl had not apparently aged nor changed in any way he could divine, except for the colour of her eyes. The reader may jeer. What sort of man of science is he, you might ask, to ignore the obvious? This girl was clearly related to the kitchen maid; perhaps even her daughter and so, quite possibly, his own. Yet I must sympathise with my friend’s initial disorientation. The very striking resemblance of the two females threw him back into the stew of youthful emotions that had infused his sweet but doomed liaison with the kitchen maid.

  The daughter’s name gave no clue to her parentage but sensing the accuracy of his intuition and the possibility for a prodigious advance of his anthropological studies, my friend invited the girl to take up a place in his household. At this point, knowing my own interest in heredity, he asked me for advice regarding the best way to establish his new servant’s paternity without her having any awareness of his investigations. The two methods which I recommended, namely: the composite photographic likeness, and the numerically quantifiable moral test, have both been described in contributions of mine to earlier issues of this journal (viz. Character, Crime and Composite Photography WQ Summer 1885, Experiments in Human Nature WQ Autumn 1885) and I shall not bore the loyal reader by repeating my commentary on these techniques. Suffice it to say that a correlation of physiognomy and character is the best measure for determining paternal kinship that we currently possess.

  I will not embarrass my scientific friend with an account of the subterfuge he embarked upon in order to obtain the data – photographic and otherwise – for his comparisons. He was nevertheless successful in producing a composite likeness of himself and the girl, as well as several well-observed moral test scores. The results of these investigations, however, were not conclusive. Although some of my friend’s facial measurements were replicated in the girl, her maternal resemblance was overwhelmingly dominant. Measures of intelligence and character may have pointed to features in common with my friend’s highly developed rational mind, but these were counteracted by the girl’s illogical urges. These must stem, he assumed, from the same excess of passion that had been displayed by her kitchen maid mother. In the end, my friend began to feel that the girl he had found was, indeed, his own offspring but sadly, no test yet invented could prove it.

  I was most disheartened by my inability to assist but this episode at least allowed me to revise my theory of human development which has been so long in germination. My photographic endeavours have also provided a simile which, I hope, illustrates my conclusions. In my analogy, the production of a man is likened to the manufacture of a photographic print. The flash of creation (by which I mean conception in the case of the human and a timed exposure of light in the case of the photograph) determines the influence of Nature. It is then Nurture (upbringing in the case of the human, or the developing process in the case of the negative plate) which provides the detail, the finesse and the fulfilment of the final outcome. Any photographer, amateur or otherwise, will tell you the many ways in which inadequate skills in the developing room can alter or indeed ruin a perfectly good image. Excessive or inadequate application of chemicals, an accidental ingress of light, clumsiness, or a fault in the timings can all result in a final print which is too light or too dark, or which is lacking in definition and detail or which, indeed, is fatally smudged. I do not need to spell out how accidents and errors in the upbringing of a child can have parallel effects.

  So I must ultimately conclude that nature and nurture have separate but complementary effects on the ‘negative’ that is each human being. One force cannot be said to have pre-eminence over the other; both are working together to fashion the final product. Although it may have taken me many years to arrive at this theoretical position, I now feel the truth of it with vital conviction. I must therefore declare that my long study into the workings of heredity and human development is at an end. Although I feel sympathy for the pain and anguish expended by my scientific friend in his quest for proof about his natural child, I must also confess that I cannot help but be glad of his travails. Without them, I should not have reached my final conclusion which, I have no doubt, will stand firm against the buffeting of newer theories and more sophisticated research for many years to come.

  Thomas Jerwood Esq.

  Spark Hill, Warks.

  Twenty-Nine

  December 1885

  the hot-house

  Cora had visited the Botanical Gardens once before, although on that occasion she did not actually go in. It had been a summer Sunday and she had been persuaded by the asylum kitchen maids to join them on a jaunt. They had taken the horse-drawn tram to Edgbaston but once they’d got to the Gardens’ wrought-iron entrance gate none of them wanted to pay two bob for a ticket.

  Instead they’d walked up and down the leafy road outside, peering through gateways and over the top of a high wall at the oddly coloured trees and glass-house roofs. Cora had larked about and got rowdy. Soon, they were all bent double, laughing hysterically and drawing frowns from boater-clad passers-by. Those same respectable onlookers, now on a fur-collared Boxing Day stroll, might have recognised Cora from her previous visit, but she could not quite connect herself with that careless shrieking girl.

  Today, there was no bother about the entrance fee. She gave her name at the turnstile and was handed a ticket left for her there by Dr Farley. The rotating iron cage screeched as she pushed through into the gardens. There was little to see; the bare trees were unremarkable and the beds dug over and brown. She was glad she had not wasted her own money. The doctor had even said that he’d pay for the trams.

  And Cora had nothing better to do with her day of Christmas leisure. She might as well see his mad-woman for herself and then tell the doctor to his face that he was wrong. How could Cora have lived for two years in the same building as her own mother and not known? But if by some queer twist Dr Farley was right, then she’d acquaint Mary Burns with a few opinions that would keep the woman dumbstruck even if she’d a mind to start talking.

  At the end of the gravel path, a metal arrow pointed to the glass-house door. Inside, Cora gasped into fetid air that was as warm as a July heatwave. Giant ferns, impossibly green and glossy, surrounded a stone pond where orange fish rippled the brown shallows. Water trickled and dripped. Somewhere nearby, voices whispered. The stench of stale water gave Cora a sense of being inside a glass vase of week-old cut flowers and she felt suddenly suffocated by the humid air.

  Then a cool draught crackled through a fan of stiff pointed leaves.

  ‘Miss Burns?’

  The doctor’s softly checked trousers and tweed jacket were almost hidden by the tangle of foliage.

  ‘Would you come this way? The air is more agreeable.’

  He was holding open a glazed door, his eyebrows frowning despite the smile on his mouth. Cora passed through into fresher air and breathed in a whiff of lavender and lemon. Winter sunlight beat through a wall of glass.

  Dr Farley nodded to the left. ‘I told Mary to wait here in the Arid House. She is a little agitated, but mostly on account of the excursion. I am not sure when she last left the asylum.’

  Cora had already seen the woman wearing inmate-brown. She was sitting on a park bench at the far end of the long glass terrace and surrounded by dead-looking plants with needled columns and spiny pads. The woman’s head was tilted up at the glass roof with an expression as empty as t
he sky. In that instant, Cora knew who she was.

  Dr Farley indicated for Cora also to sit while he remained standing on the terracotta path. His voice became loud and deliberate.

  ‘Mary, this young lady here is Cora. We have talked about a person of that name several times.’

  The woman glanced at Cora but there was no flicker of recognition. She stared down at her hands folding and re-folding them on her knees. Dr Farley’s voice became softer.

  ‘You remember, don’t you, Mary, that when you had a child, you called her Cora?’ Dr Farley nodded to Cora. ‘Perhaps it might help if you were to address Mary directly.’

  Cora, still standing, wetted her lips. There were several questions she had fashioned over the years in preparation for this moment. Did it give you satisfaction to abandon your child to the workhouse? Did you never consider what damage your neglect might do? But the pitiable appearance and strange familiarity of the woman in brown robbed Cora of her conviction. The woman’s gaunt, agitated bearing supplied answers to those particular questions that were more forceful than words.

  Cora took a breath and sat down beside the woman. ‘I’m Cora.’ The woman’s hands quickened their folding. ‘And I’m glad to meet you, Mary.’

  The woman twitched and her hands clenched into a grip that whitened the tips of her fingernails. Then her lips moved and a groan burbled in her throat. Dr Farley leant down, eyebrows flexing.

  ‘What was that, Mary? Did you say something?’

  A slight mumbling whispered from her lips. The woman’s dull hair, pulled into a plain knot, was streaked with grey; her china-blue eyes ringed with redness.

  ‘Not…’

  Cora came closer. ‘Yes, Mary?’

  ‘Not Mary.’

  Dr Farley hovered on bent knees. ‘What did she say?’