No Cure for the Dead

by Christine Trent

  * * *

  I found Clementina Harris in the basement of the Establishment, humming an unrecognizable tune as she folded sheets on the long table in the center of the linen room. The space was located next to the laundry room, and both were reached through a doorway at the far end of the kitchen. Shelves full of sheets, blankets, and pillowcases lined three of the upper walls of the linen room, which had previously been a butler’s pantry. Running beneath the shelves were cabinets and drawers that had once held silverware and serving pieces but were now repositories for bandages, scissors, and other supplies. We even had a body thermometer, but it was a clumsy thing at nearly a foot long, and it took twenty minutes for it to obtain an accurate reading, so I discouraged its use.

  She looked up and stopped humming as I entered.

  “Nurse Harris,” I began, facing her from the opposite side of the table where she was working. I held the knife behind my back.

  “Most people call me Clem, Miss Nightingale,” she said quietly. Harris was a stark contrast to the other nurses. She was tall for a woman, with an abundance of thick, auburn hair that I would venture to guess hadn’t been cut in years. She wore it in long loops draped over her head and down her back. Unbraided, it must have reached her knees. She had green eyes that radiated intelligence, but there was a quiet reserve about her that I suspected would not be easily breached.

  “Nurse Harris,” I repeated firmly. If I did not instill proper forms of address among the staff, I would never be able to make any other progress with them.

  Harris nodded respectfully. “Of course, Miss.”

  I pulled my hand from behind me and deliberately placed the knife down in the center of the table. It looked out of place atop a piece of muslin waiting for its turn to be sharply creased and folded into a square.

  Several silent moments elapsed, during which I could hear a clock ticking from somewhere in Mrs. Roper’s currently unoccupied kitchen.

  “I see,” she said. “You must have searched my room thoroughly for some reason to find that.” She resumed her folding, but now her fingers trembled.

  “Actually, Nurse Frye showed it to me.”

  Harris absorbed this quietly as she added her freshly folded sheet to a stack of completed ones. She lifted the knife and put it off to one side of the table as she picked up the bleached muslin beneath and began folding it as well.

  “I guess I am not so clever then, am I?” she admitted.

  Was she about to confess to a crime? I remained silent, waiting.

  “I have kept this knife near my person for protection for quite some time, Miss Nightingale,” Harris said, maintaining her calm composure. “I don’t believe there is a law against it.”

  “Protection from whom?” I asked.

  Harris shrugged as she dropped the folded muslin on her growing pile and picked up another piece of linen. She held it out and frowned at it, and I noticed, too, that part of the fabric was so weak that a hole was forming. She looked at me and I nodded in silent approval. She tossed the cloth to one end of the table and picked up another. I would have to speak to our outside laundress about being more careful to weed out linens that were no longer of use. Meanwhile, someone would need to figure out what could be done with the remaining part of the fabric that was still in good shape. It could be formed into napkins, bandages, or handkerchiefs.

  “Miss Harris?” I prompted the nurse, who had not answered me.

  She stopped what she was doing. “I come from Sussex, Miss, and don’t know much about the city, except for the stories I’ve heard about the slums and workhouses. Terrible places inhabited by criminals and run by them, if the rumors are true. But I needed good work, and figured I could protect my person if I had a weapon with me most of the time. I don’t carry it while I’m on the premises, I assure you.”

  Harris stared straight at me with those keen, sharp eyes, and I found that I believed her.

  She resumed her work and said, “But what you really want to know is whether I murdered that poor Caroline Bellamy.”

  Actually, it was the possible victim of her knife that interested me, but I agreed with her nonetheless. “Yes. Although Nurse Bellamy wasn’t stabbed.”

  “Interesting that Marg—Nurse Frye was so anxious to show it to you. Did she tell you I had done in Nurse Bellamy?”

  I considered whether or not to tell Harris exactly what Frye had said. Her curiosity was only natural if she was an innocent, but I wasn’t keen on divulging everything the other woman had said. However, I did need to know more from Harris.

  “No. She seemed to think that you had done in your husband.” Harris visibly twitched as my statement crashed like a crystal glass on the table between us.

  “My husband? How could she say such a thing?” She put a hand to her neck, and I realized she was reaching for a necklace that must have been hiding beneath her buttoned collar. “I would never have harmed Ralph.” Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes and she quickly sniffed them away. “Please, it is too difficult to speak of him.”

  Now I was overwhelmed with sympathy that she had perhaps lost a great love. Strict I might be on nearly every aspect of behavior, but I had a soft spot for the brokenhearted.

  “Very well. I have another question. Do the gin bottles in your room belong to you?”

  “Found those, did you? Now I see why Nurse Frye produced my knife. What a grand distraction.” Harris shook her head in disgust and reached for another linen to fold.

  “Are you saying the gin is Nurse Frye’s?” I asked. I had known in my heart that it was, anyway. Frye had all of the hallmarks of a drunkard, whereas Harris had none of them.

  “She is often in her cups,” Harris said. “I find she is much friendlier and easier to get along with when she is, so I take no exception to it. I doubt anyone else would wish to trade beds with me, anyway.”

  I doubted it, too. But there was still the matter of their shared quarters. “I must say, Nurse Harris, your room is in deplorable condition, particularly given that you’ve been here only about a week. You say you are frightened of the slum areas, but your living circumstances already resemble a tumbledown room in an East End rookery.” I said this more gently than I might ordinarily, as there was something about her that suggested I was dealing with an equal. “Surely you noticed there was a dead rat in there.”

  She was stoic under my lecture, merely inclining her chin toward her shoulder in a submissive gesture and making no excuse for the room she shared with Nurse Frye. I knew there were better than even chances that the blight of her room was Frye’s fault, so there was no point in thrusting my verbal spear any further into her heart.

  With my lecture over, Harris looked me straight in the eye. “I imagine the rat was one of Nurse Frye’s kills.”

  “One of her—kills? I don’t understand,” I said, openly puzzled. Did Frye make sport of them as men did pheasants?

  “She tries out various powders on them, to see what most effectively kills them. She has a stash of potions from her time at Allen and Hanbury’s.”

  I raised an eyebrow as I considered the implication of this. “Pardon me? Who are Allen and Hanbury?”

  “They prepare physics. Pastilles for the throat, neuralgic treatments, and the like.” Harris resumed her work with the linens. She was down to the last few sheets and blankets to be folded. “Supposedly they do a lot of work with the Americans, and they ship many of their pharmaceuticals to the West Indies.”

  “What did Nurse Frye have to do with them?” I couldn’t imagine Frye in any sort of scientific endeavor. However, it certainly made sense that she might seek out employment as a nurse after having worked in a pharmaceutical factory.

  Harris shrugged. “I think she was a packaging girl at their factory in Bethnal Green.”

  Bethnal Green was one of the shabby areas that Harris feared. “Do you know how she came to leave Allen and Hanbury?”

  A tan wool blanket was tossed onto the completed pile. “Oh, yes, she was q
uite forward with me about it. She was caught stealing the company’s products and instantly dismissed, but by then she had plenty of them stashed away in her personal belongings. That’s why she has so many of them to try out on pests. She says that what might cure a person’s cold might dispatch a rat, if administered in a large enough quantity.”

  Had inmate Alice Drayton been mistaken about which nurse had attempted to poison her? But why would Margery Frye harbor ill will against an innocuous, albeit garrulous, patient? Perhaps in her mental haze, Miss Drayton had mistaken Frye setting up a rat snare in her room for an attempt to poison her personally. Nevertheless, I had many more questions for Nurse Frye now, and at a minimum she would be made to produce whatever array of medical potions she possessed.

  It seemed as though every time I interviewed someone, I discovered secrets about someone else. I felt some urgency to revisit Nurse Frye, but I still needed to probe Clementina Harris a bit more.

  “Do you know if Nurse Frye was still associating with anyone from the pharmaceutical factory?”

  Another shrug. “I can’t say for sure, ma’am, but I do know she has a seemingly unending supply of medications.”

  “Where does she keep them?”

  “I truly don’t know. I don’t believe she keeps them in our room, but whether she has a hiding hole here at the Establishment or has them secreted with a friend, I couldn’t say.”

  It would seem I had reached the end of Nurse Harris’s insight, but I had one more question. “This knife,” I said, tapping the handle. “Perhaps you thought you might one day need your weapon against Nurse Frye?”

  Harris pulled the final piece of linen toward her for folding. “I do not know her to be violent, but who can say whether I might one day need protection from her? I did not know her prior to coming to the Establishment, if that is your real question, madam.”

  The sound of Polly Roper shuffling into the kitchen and clanging about with pots and pans signaled that she was starting work on the evening’s supper. The commotion gave Harris the opportunity to make an excuse about needing to prepare patients for their meals. She slipped away, leaving me in distracted thought until I heard Mrs. Roper cooing at Jasmine for having managed two more rat kills.

  I picked up the knife and tucked the blade down into my dress pocket. I would decide later whether to return it to Nurse Harris or lock it up somewhere.

  * * *

  I went upstairs, intent on finding Nurse Frye again, but first came upon Nurse Marian Hughes inside a patient’s room, straightening the covers over the sleeping woman. Hughes wore the same old lace-collared maid’s uniform I had seen her in the day I found Nurse Bellamy. It reminded me again that I needed to have standardized nurses’ uniforms made as soon as possible.

  I asked Hughes to come to my study when she was finished, and within ten minutes she was before me, modest and quiet with her hands folded before her.

  I invited her to sit down and she did so, again clasping her hands demurely in her lap as she gazed anxiously at me with those unnervingly pale eyes. She reminded me of a doe in the woods, ready to bolt if I inadvertently raised my voice or hand.

  “Nurse,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “As you are quite aware, I am investigating Nurse Bellamy’s death. Let me be clear that I am not accusing you of any misdeeds.”

  At that, Hughes visibly relaxed and I resumed a normal speaking tone. “Right now, I’m simply trying to know the nurses and other staff in my charge, since I have been here such a short time. I was in your room earlier—”

  Hughes stiffened again.

  “—and I must say I found your button collection to be both peculiar and interesting.” I lowered my voice once more, hoping she would stay still and not leap into the hallway as though I had a hunting rifle in my hands. “Why do you collect them?”

  “I’m sorry, Miss,” Hughes replied, her own voice a mere murmur. “I’ll remove them if they offend you. I didn’t mean—”

  “They do not offend me; they are only buttons. I am merely curious as to why you have such a vast number of them.” I folded my own hands on my desk, attempting to appear as nonthreatening as possible.

  “They are pretty,” she told me. “My first few buttons were from my mama’s best dress.”

  “Is your mother in London?” I asked, trying to put her further at ease.

  Hughes shook her head. “In heaven. With my papa.”

  It was, I thought, a very girlish way of explaining her mother’s death, but there was nothing suspicious in it. “How long have you been with the Establishment?”

  She bit her lip, thinking. “About a year, Miss.”

  I was ready to resume a normal voice again. “And how did you come here?”

  She frowned, and I sensed that she didn’t want to answer the question, particularly since she glanced sideways at the door, as if contemplating how many leaps it would take to pass through it. Apparently deciding against such an action, she finally looked at me again. “I was nurse to Mr. Benedict Maxwell in Southwark. He was Irish, come over because of the famine. But I didn’t find the position to be to my liking.”

  That raised my curiosity. “Yet you took another nursing job here?”

  “Yes, Miss. I didn’t mind the nursing, only the patient.”

  She seemed disinclined to elaborate. “Was he aware of your extensive lot of buttons?”

  Hughes nodded. Clearly she was not going to willingly offer any more information, and I would have to dig for it as though I were seeking the end of an oak tree’s tap root. I shifted the topic a little.

  “Did you wear that—uniform—in your work with Mr. Maxwell?”

  “Yes, Miss, it’s nearly all I have, except for my buttons and a little bit of fabric that I keep down in the linen room.”

  I nodded. “I plan to have new uniforms made for all of the nurses here. Plain gray with white aprons, caps, and cuffs. I wish to have harmony in how you all look.”

  I noticed a faint spark in those colorless eyes. “Really? I-I’m fair handy with a needle. I’m very clean, too. I wouldn’t dirty up any cotton or muslin for the trim pieces, Miss, if you would let me try to make the uniforms. Just a sketch is all I would need from you.”

  She sat back and waited for my reaction. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone on the premises might be talented enough to whip up a number of uniforms, and I wasn’t entirely convinced that she was, either. “Did you sew the dress you are wearing now?”

  She self-consciously fingered the lace at her neck. “I made changes to it, to try and make it more suitable for nursing work.”

  I noticed Hughes’s own voice was gaining the slightest bit of confidence. Perhaps this was a good way to bolster her poise. I made an instant decision. “We will try it. I will give you a rough drawing, and you shall make a dress that fits your own frame. If I find it acceptable, you can make uniforms for the other nurses.”

  “Thank you, Miss. You won’t regret it.” Her cheeks pinked with pleasure and all of a sudden she became much more talkative. “Nurse Bellamy admired my work, too. She was very nice to me and I was ever so sorry about her death.”

  “You say she was nice to you. Would you say you were friends?”

  Again Hughes frowned and glanced at the door. “No. Nurse Bellamy was not the type to have many friends. She was very pleasant to me, but then, I never did pry into her business at all. She didn’t like those who asked her lots of questions.”

  “Did many people ask her questions?”

  “Only in the way that women do. No one meant her any harm, I don’t think, but she was waspish if she believed that someone else was trying to learn too much about her.”

  If Bellamy had been that secretive, it might be difficult to truly discover who she had been. “Were there ever any gentleman callers coming and going?”

  Hughes’s hand flew to her neck again. “Miss! I would never presume to have men in my—”

  How quickly this woman skittered into fright and fluste
r. I held up a hand. “Not you. I mean, did Nurse Bellamy have male visitors?”

  “Oh.” She calmed down, her hand settling back in her lap. “Not that I noticed, but I make it a point not to notice such activities. I do my work and keep to my room.”

  Her private room full of boxes stuffed with buttons. Hughes was an odd little thing, but I could find no fault in her, especially since she seemed eager to please.

  I dismissed her, then retreated to the library to work on my chart detailing Caroline Bellamy’s death before seeking out Margery Frye or anyone else. I tugged on the bell pull in the room that led to the kitchen and told Polly Roper when she appeared that I wished to have a pot of tea. I sat down with my charts, and in short order, there was a knock at the door. Instead of Mrs. Roper, however, it was someone who quickly made it clear that she desired nothing more than to see my goose cooked over a roaring fire.

  CHAPTER 9

  An auburn-haired woman stood before me. I estimated her to be in her late forties based on the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes and the subtle streaks of white in her hair. She wore a treasure chest of jewelry on her person, including rings on several fingers. The gold and gems were set perfectly against her emerald-and-black-striped dress, done suitably for elegant daywear with its high neck and long sleeves. She wore the jewelry with a studious air of boredom, matched by her tone when she said, “Do you know who I am?”

  She was apparently someone I should be aware of through some clairvoyant process.

  “My apologies, madam; have we met?”

  She folded her hands in front of her waist. A ruby encircled by pearls glittered on her forefinger. “I am Lillian Alban.”

  Ah. Given how elegantly groomed Roderick Alban was, it made perfect sense that this was his spouse. They were like a matched set of Limoges vases, except I sensed that Mrs. Alban might have a hidden crack running down the back where no one could see it.

  “How do you do?” I said politely, my curiosity regarding her visit now quite sharpened.