The Conviction of Cora Burns

by Carolyn Kirby

  ‘So, F.2.10, will you be in here long?’

  Cora had no idea what to say. ‘Yes, ma’m.’

  Squinty-Eye squinted even harder but the new wardress pressed on.

  ‘What I mean is, how long shall you serve?’

  ‘Nineteen months, ma’m.’

  The woman’s eyebrows arched and she licked her lips with a salacious tongue. ‘Goodness! For what offence?’

  Cora opened her mouth but found that she could not speak.

  ‘Attempted murder,’ Squinty-Eye squeaked. ‘Tried to do away with her babby so he wouldn’t grow up bad as her. But the little imp must have been too quick.’

  Her face wrinkled into a snicker and the new wardress’s eyebrows brushed her crimped fringe. The cackling voice was loud enough to carry right along the perforated iron galleries and all ears on the female wing would be pressed to the doors. Everyone would now know. The new wardress’s eyebrows sank into a frown as she slammed the cell door and clanked the key in the lock.

  It was that same night when Cora took the frenzy. The gaslight fizzed and the red light behind her eyelids began to burn. She pushed herself face down into the plank bed, but could not shut out the light or sleep, or even lie still. The wardresses always knew there would be trouble if anyone started pacing about at night but Cora could not stop herself. There was a nagging ache at the base of her gut where her babe had been. And once she had let the thought of him in, the ache became a stab.

  She took up her prison skirt from the narrow bench and rolled it into a tight bundle that fitted into the crook of her arm. But it was too small and too weightless. The blanket stripped from the plank bed and wrapped around the Bible was better. Cora folded one end of the coarse felt to give the semblance of a head. The bundle had a weight and a jointed feel that allowed her mind, if she closed her eyes, to bring him to life.

  As she paced, she let herself rock the bundle, trying to think of a song that babies liked but she doubted she’d ever known one. Even so, a nasty tuneless hum came from her mouth and grew louder. Her eyes would not stay closed; a bash against the bench made them flip open. Then she saw the grey lump in her arms with a too-big head folded into a grimace, and could think only of the thing that had slid out of her after the babe in a mess of meaty gore.

  Her shriek echoed as the blanket bundle ripped open and the Bible punched the gaslight cage. Cora’s hands slammed against plaster until red smears decorated the white walls. Then a key rammed into the lock and the cell door sprang open. Cora clenched her bloody fists and the new wardress, still on duty, cowered behind Squinty-Eye.

  ‘What you been doing?’

  Cora heard herself screech. ‘Killing what came out of me.’

  The wardresses edged closer leaving the cell door wide open. Behind them, the gallery seemed to murmur with concentration.

  The new wardress had a softer tone. ‘Do you mean your baby?’

  She moved towards Cora warily but there was a determined look in her eye.

  Cora felt herself begin to shake. ‘Not my babe! The nasty raw carcass of his twin.’

  Both wardresses were in front of her now, hemming her into the corner. In the half-light, Squinty-Eye’s gnarled face still had a look of concern.

  ‘And was it joined to your nice babby with a twisty cord?’

  Cora began to nod, heavy tears dripping from her chin. Then she took hold of her nightdress collar and gave it a hard downward tug with her bloody hands. The sweat-drenched cotton ripped, opening her breasts to the air. But in that instant, both wardresses pounced. Each grabbed an arm and wrenched it behind Cora’s back.

  Cora lashed out with her feet but Squinty-Eye deftly avoided the kicks. The new wardress was so fired up that she did not notice the blows. Between them, they pinioned Cora to the plank bed, roping her arms and legs to each corner. Squinty-Eye stood back panting, hands on her hips and sniggered down at Cora.

  ‘You silly mare! There was no “twin”.’ She gave a howl of laughter. ‘It was the afterbirth that was all, what the child feeds on in the belly. Without it they’d die.’

  The new wardress, glowing with triumph, wiped her hands on her skirts and asked if they should put a blanket on Cora, at least over her bare top parts. But Squinty-Eye said no, leave her to cool down and work up an appetite for gruel. She’ll be on nothing else for the next month.

  Cora held her breath until the door locked. She was glad of the cold. Shivering would keep her awake for the whole night so that she might regard the warm fold of madness inside her brain and decide whether or not to fall into it. She understood now why lunatics succumbed to that tiny private world that no one else might enter. Losing her reason seemed like such an easy path.

  And it was a path that she should, by rights, have already taken. Why did they not lock her in a padded back ward as soon as the little workhouse lad was killed? Only, perhaps, because she was not really to blame. It might have been Alice Salt alone who’d covered the boy’s face until he was still. Cora could never understand herself without knowing what had really happened in the schoolyard privies. And for that, she must keep her wits long enough to find Alice.

  Cora resolved, then, to stop herself thinking of the small body that had come out of hers. If the babe was to visit, he must do it, along with that other little boy, only in dreams. That way, she’d be sane enough on her release to look for her workhouse sister. Icy draughts skated over Cora’s clammy nakedness but her trembling had stopped. The point of her existence was now clear. She breathed the fetid prison air and smiled.

  Thirty-one

  December 1885

  procurer

  Cora’s knuckles rapped on mahogany then she held her breath and listened. The master, without doubt, was in there. Earlier that morning, as she was carrying away the untouched breakfast tray, she had seen him shuffling down the main stairs in his brocade dressing gown and then heard the thwack of the study door.

  The half-medal was sticky in her hand. She knocked again.

  ‘Yes?’

  His voice was bad-tempered but weak. As she went in, he glowered up, his pen hovering above a page dense with handwriting and crossings-out. A litter of similar pages covered the carpet around his feet. He seemed unsurprised to see her.

  ‘So? What is it?’

  ‘I have something to show you.’

  ‘You have, have you?’

  Cora stretched out her palm, the dirty twine dangling. She could not tell whether he even looked at the half-medal but he gave a sharp sniff as if at some brown sloppiness on the sole of his shoe.

  ‘It is one of yours, sir.’

  ‘Is that a question or a statement?’

  Cora hesitated. Wrong-footed by his calmness, she could not think how to reply.

  A smile ghosted across Mr Jerwood’s lips. ‘Come, girl. Do not underestimate me.’

  The accusations that had swilled around Cora’s head since seeing Annie Bright began to slip away. Perhaps the master was so fenced about by his cleverness and high standing that nothing Cora could reveal or threaten would leave any dent. Of all the questions that had come to her, she could remember just one.

  ‘Did she steal it?’

  Mr Jerwood sighed. ‘She may have later become a convict but she was certainly not a thief.’

  Sudden coldness ran through Cora. There had not even been mention of a name yet the master understood exactly. Everything she’d imagined must be true. Her hand closed over the half-medal and dropped to her side. She had not realised how terrible it would feel to be right.

  The steel nib tapped on the inkwell.

  ‘Is that all?’

  For the first time, Cora recognised something familiar in the crease of Mr Jerwood’s mouth. She saw too how his coldness and cleverness might, in a gentleman, be counted virtues. Her fist tightened on the half-medal.

  ‘No. I have
a proposition.’

  He snorted. ‘You think that I would any longer be interested…’

  ‘In what I have to say, yes, you will.’ Cora took a step closer. ‘But first, I want to know how you were able to find me.’

  ‘Find you? No, no. I did not look for you, nor even know of your existence. I simply came upon you by chance and then noted a lineal resemblance.’ He smiled faintly and red thumbprints seemed pressed on to his cheekbones. ‘Your token, there, confirms definitively my intuition.’

  Cora felt the ice at her core melt into rage. This man was more criminal than her or her mother, yet he would never be locked up. She surged forward, looming above the shrunken figure in the chair. The sharp point of the half-medal spiked her knuckles. How easy it would be to punch the coin into his eye. Blood and ink would spatter his handwritten papers. The wound would be savage enough to revenge even Annie Bright’s miserable life. But Cora let the half-medal bite only into her own hand.

  ‘I think the time has come, sir, for you to pay your dues.’

  ‘What?’ The master’s laugh was hard and hollow. ‘You think that anyone would believe your unlikely tale? Who’s to say that your father is not some canal-side ruffian? For I daresay that sort would have been very much to her taste.’

  White heat seared but Cora lowered her face slowly and steadily towards the master, her physical strength pulsing over him. There was a satisfying up and down movement in his throat.

  ‘Ah no, sir. You mistake me. It is not my own story, nor even Annie Bright’s, that people will find most shocking.’

  He blinked and for the first time Cora saw a flutter of uncertainty behind his eyes.

  ‘Whose then?’

  ‘Come, sir, you cannot be ignorant of the criminal trial that has been in all the newspapers these past months.’

  ‘I do not see how…’

  ‘The guilty gentleman had taken a young girl for his own purposes from her impoverished family by means of cash. And for that, this gentleman was convicted of procurement and abduction and he now finds himself residing in a gaol cell. Newspapers throughout the land denounce him as a procurer.’

  Mr Jerwood stared at the writing on his desk. His face did not flicker but his skin, already pallid, seemed to whiten.

  ‘And so, by this, you seek to extort something from me?’

  Cora took a long breath and made sure to remember the words she had prepared.

  ‘For myself, I seek only the wages owed to me. And my underthings and boots for decency’s sake.’

  His eyebrows raised. ‘Nothing more?’

  ‘Not for me. But there is most certainly more due to Violet and her family.’

  A noise that was both cough and laugh ripped the stuffy air. ‘Ah yes.’

  Cora straightened and did not bother to lower her voice. ‘You have done wrong by them all and now you must put things right.’

  ‘And why do you imagine that I would?’ He turned to face Cora, his gaze re-lit. ‘All you think you know is nothing more than servants’ tittle-tattle.’

  ‘It certainly is not. None of them have said a word.’

  ‘So on what basis do you make any allegations?’

  The half-medal pushed from Cora’s balled fist like a chisel. Again, she stilled the itch to punch.

  ‘They are not allegations, they are facts which I learned from a talk with Mrs Flynn on my visit to her home in Coventry Street.’

  Dullness drew across the master’s eyes like a gauze curtain and Cora knew that she had won. But she would leave him in no doubt.

  ‘So I think it only fair that you should compensate Violet for all of the years that you have made use of her. And you can do this by giving her a proper education and sufficient provision until she can make her own living as a teacher.’

  ‘You have it all worked out.’

  ‘Her family must be provided for too and Letty, if she wishes it, be placed in the same school as Violet.’

  ‘Must?’

  ‘Do not underestimate me either, sir. I know that when Violet was not much more than a babe-in-arms you bought her, like a laboratory animal, to be measured and examined throughout her life as a specimen in your collection. This tale is a sensation which would be of great interest, I’m sure, to the Birmingham Gazette. And perhaps, even, to the police.’

  He tried to smile but his mouth quavered. ‘Oh bravo. Very clever. Except for your surprising failure, whilst you have me in such a fix, not to seek more for yourself than a pair of boots.’

  ‘You agree then, to my proposition?’

  ‘As long as, once you leave this room, I never set eyes on you again.’ He picked up the pen with a sarcastic flourish. ‘And so, Miss Burns will that be all?’

  ‘Excepting to ask, for Cook’s sake, that I may stay here and finish my work for today.’

  Cora waited for his frosty nod of assent before turning her back on Thomas Jerwood. As she let her hand loosen from the half-medal, its jagged edge seemed suddenly blunt. Cora could now see that whatever parts of her nature had come from her father or her mother, the fierceness of the grit inside her was all her own.

  farewell

  Next morning, as if it were a Sunday, Cora dressed in her Melton jacket and linsey skirt but she left the print dress that she had worn through the past months folded on the scullery counter.

  Cook was sitting in the kitchen with an elbow on the table and a hand on her brow. She looked up as Cora came in and sighed.

  ‘You’re definitely going then.’

  Cora went to the dresser for her belongings. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you do to offend him?’

  ‘He just didn’t like my face.’

  Cook shook her head. ‘There’s only two weeks until Ellen goes. I shall never fill both posts at this time of year. No one will brave the mud.’

  Cora picked up her clean underthings and pocket. She knew that if she could stay, she’d likely be able to take Ellen’s position and then, in time, work herself up to be a kitchen maid. But her path lay elsewhere and she knew not to look back. She wrapped her things inside the nightdress.

  ‘I’ve done everything in the scullery. Potatoes, boots, pans, knives. That should help get you by.’

  ‘It grieves me to lose you, Cora.’

  ‘Me? Why?’

  ‘You are a rare worker. And honest.’

  Cora laughed. She shook her head as she stuffed the old muslins she used as handkerchiefs into the pocket. Cook tapped the corner of a blank white envelope against the scrubbed tabletop then angled towards Cora.

  ‘He’s left this for you.’

  ‘My wages?’

  ‘I suppose. Although it doesn’t feel like there’s any coin. Apart from one perhaps. You should open it and make sure he’s not diddling you.’

  ‘It’ll be right.’

  She pressed the thick envelope carefully inside her pocket. Then Cook held out a sheet of yellow paper folded twice and addressed: To Whom It May Concern.

  ‘Here is your character.’

  Cora nodded and pushed it into the pocket then she told Cook that she was going to the privy. But as the kitchen door closed behind her, she slipped towards the main house, tip-toeing over the parquet floor past the study towards the morning room where she knew that Violet would be.

  At first it seemed that the room was empty. Then she saw the girl on the window seat, her knees tucked up beneath her and her green dress almost hidden by the folds of the curtain. Violet’s heavy lids flickered. Her face was shiny with perspiration and the unnatural redness of her lips was puckered and cracked.

  Cora crouched into the milk-sourness of the child’s breath. ‘I must say farewell, Violet.’

  ‘Don’t go. I’m poorly.’

  ‘I have no choice.’

  ‘Because of the photograph?’

&
nbsp; ‘In a way.’

  ‘Was that you in it?’

  Cora shook her head.

  ‘But she looked just like you.’

  ‘It was my mother.’

  Violet’s brow wrinkled with confusion and a tear ran down her cheek.

  ‘I wish you were my mother, Cora.’

  Cora took hold of Violet’s hands and folded them into hers. The girl’s skin was paper-white and despite her hotness she was shivering. How fragile she seemed. It was so easy for any child to disappear; in a shudder of nameless fever, as much as in a press of petticoats. Cora’s own son, she knew, was as likely dead as alive. Nature may have already passed a verdict on her deeds.

  Violet’s limp fingers suddenly gripped. ‘What is to become of me, Cora?’

  ‘Don’t fear, Violet. Mr Jerwood will look after you. He has promised.’

  ‘But what if he doesn’t? Who else will help me?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘How can you? Where will I find you?’

  ‘You can write to me.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Care of Thripp & Son, Corporation Street. Can you remember that?’

  Violet nodded solemnly and wiped at the salty trail on her face. Cora prised her fingers from the girl’s and stood up.

  ‘I will go and tell Cook that you are not well and must have some toast water in your room.’

  Violet gave a bleary smile as Cora, with a lurch of her heart, closed the door.

  In the privy, once she had tied on the pocket, Cora opened out the sheet of ruled yellow foolscap written in Cook’s neat childlike hand.

  To Whom It May Concern

  CORA BURNS

  I have known this person for some months since she came to work for Mrs Jerwood as ‘Between Maid’. Mrs Jerwood is indisposed and I have authority to deal with servant matters in the kitchen and scullery. Cora is a hard worker and a quick learner who is decent, respectable and reliable at all times. She is fit and strong and has done a grand job with – knives, pans, crockery and glassware. She is unafraid of dirty work – coal boxes, skirtings, windows and the like. She keeps herself neat and clean. Her appetite is modest. She has slept without complaint in the kitchen and her constitution is tough. The reason for her leaving is entirely the result of her employer’s circumstances and not the girl’s conduct. It saddens me greatly to have to say goodbye to Cora. I would recommend her for scullery, maid-of-all-work or even housemaid positions in any respectable establishment.