The Conviction of Cora Burns

by Carolyn Kirby

  Cora turned her head away. She did not want him to see her face and somehow fathom her thoughts. Cold layers of certainty seemed to shed from her like the shrivelled leaves of desert plants.

  She put her mouth by the woman’s ear. ‘I know, Annie, I know.’

  Then, without a thought for the doctor standing close by, or for the over-dressed couple pretending to contemplate a prickly green ball, Cora unfastened the top three buttons of her jacket and fished inside for the twine around her neck, then laid the half-medal on her palm. Dr Farley stooped down but Cora cupped her hand above the woman’s lap so that only she could see the engraving.

  ‘Did you give this to your babe?’

  The woman blinked and slowly nodded.

  ‘That means you gave it to me.’

  For a second, they looked at one another straight. The woman’s eyes glowed with a brief glint of light, then her lids flickered and she looked back at her hands.

  Cora’s heartbeat filled her ears. ‘Where did you get it, Annie?’

  Dr Farley fidgeted above them. ‘Annie?’

  He swallowed and seemed about to say more but Cora would not let him break the thread she had spun.

  ‘Did it come from the house where you had a situation?’ The nod might have been mistaken for an intake of breath. ‘The house of Thomas Jerwood?’

  The woman’s eyes closed.

  Dr Farley stiffened. ‘Um, Miss Burns, if I might just…’

  ‘Did you take it, Annie, from Mr Jerwood’s collection?’

  Then the woman’s eyes opened wide and her head convulsed, her mouth working back and forth as if chewing on a lump of meat. Dr Farley leaned over her, determined not to miss the smallest utterance. But Cora raised her own voice with a forced indignation that she no longer felt.

  ‘Did you steal the medallion, Annie? Is that why you went to gaol?’

  The woman shook her head, tears pooling in her reddened eyes. And then, with a north-country voice as gentle as the glide of stream-water under a crust of ice, she spoke.

  ‘I did not steal it. Master gave it me.’

  maiden

  Light beamed from the kitchen but the rest of the house looked dead as an empty grate. Cora stood outside and felt the darkening air reach to the bottom of her lungs. It seemed as if, until today, she had been holding her breath for a very long time. Maybe even now everything would still go on as before. But she did not quite see how it could.

  Inside the kitchen, Cook had pulled the Windsor chair to the table and was holding an illustrated newspaper under the light. She looked up as Cora came in.

  ‘There’s tea in the pot if you want some.’

  Cora nodded as she folded her shawl. ‘Is anyone else back yet?’

  Cook shook her head. ‘Still out spending their Christmas boxes.’

  ‘Have you not been anywhere, Cook?’

  ‘I’d rather stay here and put my feet up in the warm.’

  ‘Is there no one you wish to visit?’

  ‘No.’

  Cora poured the tea into a cup and took it to the table. Cook sat back leaving the illustrated newspaper spread open. Beneath a heading Gaol for ‘Maiden Tribute’ Procurer, black and white etchings showed a heavily bearded man resting his hand on the shoulder of a small, terrified girl who wore nothing but a gauzy shift. Then, in the next illustration, the same man stood defiant in the dock before an angry-looking judge. Finally the same man, in prison stripes, sat forlorn behind his cell door.

  ‘How long have you worked here, Cook?’

  ‘Too long, I’d say.’

  ‘Longer than Mrs Dix?’

  ‘Longer than any of them.’

  ‘Was there ever a girl worked here called Annie?’

  ‘We’ve had lots of girls come and go.’

  ‘But did you hear of one who left quick? Because of something to do with the master?’

  Cook’s face clouded. ‘You should keep your voice down. Or better still say nothing about it.’

  ‘There was, then.’

  ‘It was before I came. In fact, I took her job as kitchen maid. Annie Bright they called her.’

  ‘What was said about her?’

  Cook shrugged. ‘That she left one night without a word. Everyone thought it was because she was in the family way. She was never heard from again.’

  ‘But it had something to do with…’

  Cora raised her eyebrows towards the ceiling.

  ‘It was servants’ gossip. Nothing more. I’ve managed to stay so long in one place because I don’t set store by such things or repeat them. What makes you so interested?’

  ‘You heard the missus. How she called me Annie as if she really thought that’s who I was. I’ve been thinking it must have been another servant here that caused her confusion.’

  ‘Perhaps you look like Annie Bright.’

  ‘Yes. I must do.’

  Cora lifted the cup to her mouth but found that her hand was shaking. The teacup rattled against the saucer and a dribble of brown tea slopped on to her skirt.

  ‘Are you planning to leave here, Cora?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  Cook sighed. ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

  ‘I hadn’t given it a thought.’

  But Cora saw with a crystal flash of certainty that she could not stay. It didn’t matter any more that she had no money and nowhere to go. She saw also what she must do before she left.

  She stood up. ‘Does anything want doing upstairs? Shall I take up some coals or hot water?’

  ‘No, no. Don’t trouble yourself. It’s still your Boxing Day.’

  ‘I’d rather be occupied.’

  Cook shrugged. ‘You could take Mrs Dix some pork pie. Help yourself from the larder if you want some too.’

  ‘Thank you. I will.’

  The odours of uncut bacon and over-ripe cheese that swilled from the open larder door almost made Cora slam it shut. But she put the oil lamp on a slate shelf and leaned her head against the basket hanging on the back of the door. Everything in the windowless room seemed tonight to have a longer shadow and a stronger smell. She had not eaten since morning but her appetite had evaporated.

  She might have inherited her mother’s face, but Cora could no longer blame the bad she had done on Annie Bright. The boy in the workhouse would have been suffocated, and Samuel scarred, and a bootlace wrapped around her own babe’s neck regardless of the blood running through Cora’s veins. Those crimes had come about because of the circumstances she had found herself in. Her feelings and provocations on each occasion had been entirely different, as had the aftertaste of the shame left by each outburst. Neither could she, in fairness, blame her faults on any inheritance from her father.

  Taking the lamp, Cora climbed the back stairs, her boot soles tapping in the silence. Along the landing, she put her hand to the brass doorknob and gently twisted, but the library was locked.

  ‘Cora.’

  She jumped, but already knew that the voice was Violet’s. The girl was in her nightdress, her coppery hair loose around her shoulders and her feet bare. Cora licked her lips as she tried to think of an excuse for trying the door, but Violet had already understood. She reached up to whisper in Cora’s ear.

  ‘I’ll say my needlework is in there and I’ll ask Mrs Dix for the key.’

  years

  Warily, Cora set the oil lamp on the tapestry footstool and glanced at the bookshelves as she mouthed a silent question: is he behind there? Violet, perched on the edge of the armchair, hardly bothered to lower her voice as she answered.

  ‘He hasn’t moved from his bed all day.’

  Cora nodded and bent down. A black silhouette bulged across the library curtains but the shadow was thrown by a small Staffordshire jug with a cheerful glazed face.

  ‘What
are you doing, Cora?’

  ‘Looking for something.’

  ‘Something to do with Alice? Did your teacher tell you where she is?’

  Cora breathed in and felt a pain under her ribs. ‘Alice is nowhere. Except inside me.’

  ‘Oh.’ Violet’s chin trembled. She looked down at her lap and began to bunch the nightdress into her fingers. ‘What about the dolly? Did you sell it?’

  ‘No, I threw it away.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was stupid.’

  Violet looked up aghast and Cora shrugged, but bit her lip as she turned away.

  The medallion box was heavier than it looked. Cora heaved it from the cabinet shelf with both hands and carried it to the stool. Inlaid doves cooed silently to one another on the lid.

  ‘What are you after, Cora? A medallion?’

  ‘Only half of one.’ Cora kneeled beside the footstool and pulled at the twine inside her collar. ‘The other part of this.’

  The half-medal revolved darkly inside the dazzle from the lamp.

  Violet blinked. ‘Is it yours, Cora? May I see?’

  Cora laid the token on the footstool and then lifted the lid of the velvet-lined box beside it.

  The medallions’ engravings looked sharper in the lamplight; the rabbit more furry, the boat more densely rigged with sails. Cora pressed gently on a velvet corner and the tray of coins tilted upwards. As she had suspected, there was another layer beneath. These medallions were also bordered by capital letters; a circle of words with a Roman number at the base, and each had its own picture: a hot air balloon, a desert pyramid, a measuring device. Both trays held twelve coins, but in the lower layer, one of the velvet roundels was empty.

  ‘Can you help me, Violet? Tell me what any of the words mean and the years?’

  Violet frowned. ‘I don’t know Latin.’

  ‘But you know the numbers.’

  She nodded, beaming, and came to Cora’s side to lean over the medallions. The tip of her tongue slid along her lip as her finger moved along the row.

  ‘1884, 1883, 1882, 1881…’

  ‘They are in order?’

  ‘Yes. 1880, 1879, 1878…’

  ‘What about this empty hole? Which year is missing?’

  ‘1863 has the microscope, then there’s the hole, then 1865 with the beehive. I always wondered what happened to 1864.’

  ‘Do you think that mine might be it?

  Holding the dirty twine away from the velvet, Violet fitted the half-medal snugly into one half of the vacant recess. Its bronze was more worn than the others but the coin was, without doubt, part of the same family.

  Violet’s face contorted. ‘Perhaps it used to say 1864 but the V got chopped off.’ She giggled. ‘I shouldn’t like my V to go missing. Then I’d be Iolet.’

  Cora saw then, punched into the corner of the box, the end of another name: ‘…onks & Sons’. It had been truncated by the lower layer of coins, which must also be removable.

  Her fingertips slithered around the velvet trying to get a grip but the tray was wedged into the box and her nails too short to find any purchase.

  ‘I need something to prise this out.’

  Violet jumped up. ‘A paper knife?’

  ‘Yes. Is there one?’

  Padding to the desk, Violet eased open the drawer then handed Cora a flat-bladed silver opener with a bone handle. Cora pushed the knife’s rounded end into the tight fissure between the box and the tray. Her heart gave a leap as the layer of coins, with the half-medal still in place, began to move. Gently, she levered out the tray. But the bottom of the inlaid box, apart from a lining of deeper blacker velvet, was bare.

  Cora banged her fist on the footstool and yanked out the half-medal in irritation.

  Violet stood up and backed towards the desk. ‘What’s wrong, Cora?’

  ‘I was sure it would be in here, the other half.’

  ‘Will the lining not lift up?’

  Cora pulled at the velvet but it was stuck down. She sighed and tucked the half-medal away, rubbing the back of her neck above the twine. ‘It’s not here.’

  ‘Let’s keep looking, shall we, Cora?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  ‘The chest of drawers? Or the ethnological shelves?’

  Violet came cautiously forward then, clutching to her chest the japanned photograph frame. She lowered the woman’s likeness into the lamplight.

  ‘Perhaps, Cora, there’s time for you to have a look at this for me first. I mean a really good look, and tell me if you see any resemblance to my real mother. Maybe when she was younger?’

  The monochrome woman gazed primly from the frame. Over-sized buttons ran up her billowing satin dress from skirt hem to throat. ‘Does she at all resemble the lady you met in Birmingham?’

  Cora thought of Mrs Flynn’s sallow face framed by a tattered shawl and almost laughed. But she brought the likeness closer to the light. She had not realised until now how young the woman in the likeness appeared. The sitter’s finger marked her place in the closed book on her lap, the toe of her shoe was just visible on the low stool.

  ‘She looks more like the mistress to me.’

  ‘Well, Mrs Jerwood is my mother’s cousin,’ confusion rippled across the girl’s face, ‘at least that’s what I was told.’

  ‘Have you ever looked inside the frame? There may be something written on the reverse of the print.’

  Two spots of colour had risen on Violet’s cheeks. She glanced at Cora, then placed the frame, likeness-side down on the footstool. Pressing her fingertips on to the pasteboard cover, she slid it, along with the cabinet-portrait beneath, out of the metal runners. Two likenesses, almost identical, fell side by side on to the stool. Violet looked from one to the other and back again.

  Cora bent closer. ‘Are they the same?’

  In both photographs, a woman sat in the same button-adorned crinoline dress, with one foot on a low stool and a closed book on her lap. But in the hidden print, her finger did not mark a page, and the whole of her slipper, as well as a bare ankle were displayed underneath the raised skirt.

  Violet picked up the first familiar image and turned it over.

  ‘FMJ 1861.’

  Cora’s pulse quickened. ‘Mrs Jerwood?’

  Violet nodded.

  ‘And the other?’

  Violet’s fingers hesitated over the new photograph. Shielded from the light, it had retained more sharpness of detail and tone. This might have explained why the other woman’s eyes appeared livelier and her hair a different colour, except that in truth, nothing about the two faces was the same. Their features were entirely unrelated.

  Violet glanced at Cora wide-eyed, then she turned the print over and read from the back in her deliberate childish voice.

  ‘AB 1864.’

  But Cora had already known what she would say.

  Thirty

  1884

  cell

  Thinking of it afterwards, Cora wondered if it was the whiteness of her cell that had pushed her into the frenzy. The walls and ceiling were lime-washed to such a dazzle that her eyes were hurt even by weak winter sunlight through the dirty window. At night, the caged gaslight burnt dimly but without rest. When she closed her eyes, the red glow behind her lids sometimes seemed even brighter than the mantle. Once or twice, at first, when she couldn’t sleep, she’d let herself imagine the clean darkness of the linen cupboard and the sweet-cheese scent of her babe’s lardy head. In those instants, he had become almost real. She’d swear she could feel his heaviness on her forearm and the dear tug of his little mouth on her teat. But she knew that she must not let herself drift into those thoughts. A soft hole at the centre of her mind beckoned her to fall into it.

  When she’d been brought, dripping with milk, from the Bridewell and stripp
ed of her liberty clothes, they’d given her a breast flannel to wear inside the prison stays. They had made no comment. Her condition must be common enough on the female wing. She’d rinsed and wrung out the sodden flannel each night. But as the days went by, the cloth became drier until there was nothing to wash away. After her third change of linen, the breast flannel was not returned to her. She had cried out in anguish at the loss. The babe was receding into her past. Soon, his slippery weight and special smell became only vague memories. Even months into her sentence, she would touch her breasts hoping for a blue-white drop that would keep the fact of his existence alive. Their dryness made her want to beat herself to a bruise.

  At first, the gaol had not seemed like much of an adversity. The hard certainty of each day had a familiar air: the rolling of the bedding into a tight bundle so that it could not be sat upon; the straightening of the tin cup and plate, and of the prayer book and Bible into the prescribed prison pattern; the pointless sweeping of the scrubbed boards. Cleanliness, as the squinty-eyed wardress liked to say, was the prisoner’s only luxury. As long, Cora thought, as you could put up with the pong of the lidded bucket.

  Sensations of the workhouse came back to her through the rough itch of the prison bonnet, or a gristly mouthful of boiled bacon, but most especially in the tar-sweat odour of the oakum shed. The winking and leering of toothless women as they unpicked coir ropes into hairy piles would always make Cora grateful for the empty confines of her cell.

  Even though prisoners weren’t supposed to speak to each other at all, the females always found a way to satisfy their nosiness. There was plenty of hoarse, underhand chatter in the exercise grounds. It was always: what you in for? And: how long? The wardresses would scowl and point from the perimeter, but they could rarely be bothered to walk over. Cora would sometimes reply: drunk and riotous – six weeks with labour, or larceny of a cheese – three months. Most of the other prisoners came and went so quick they didn’t cotton on. But a few, who were in as long or longer than Cora, would glower and put it about that she was a habitual liar. Which was saying something in such company.

  It was after the truth had got out, she later realised, that things went bad. Squinty-Eye had brought along a new wardress to show her how to check that the cell was in order. The woman, who seemed too tall and respectable for the job, tried to strike up conversation.