Beloved Poison

by E. S. Thomson

  When she stood up again, her face was inches from mine, her pupils dilated like a fox at bay. I could see a vein pulsing in her neck in time with the beating of my own blood.

  She put up a hand to comb my hair off my face with her fingers. ‘Do you bind yourself?’ she whispered. ‘So that no one knows?’

  I swallowed, and pointed to a length of freshly laundered muslin, draped across the chair on top of my clean shirt and britches.

  She picked it up. ‘Raise your arms.’ She leaned closer, and passed the muslin around my back. She began to wrap it about me, folding it across my chest. She slipped a hand beneath, and held my right breast in her hand while she pulled the fabric taut. She did the same with the other, holding it close, pressing against me with her hand, my nipple a cherry stone in her palm. She pulled the muslin tight, and pinned it closed. My breasts ached beneath, until I realised I was holding my breath.

  ‘Poor Jem,’ she murmured. ‘All this time and I never knew. How lonely it must be for you too.’

  ‘Lonely?’

  ‘To pretend. Always, forever, pretending to be someone you’re not.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. My voice seemed to snag in my throat. All at once I wanted to touch her, to taste her, to forget my sorrows with her even for a moment. At the same time there was something about her words that made me uneasy. But I could not think what it might be, my senses were distracted – how beautiful she was, how warm and vital, close enough that I could feel the heat from her, smell the scent of her hair—

  ‘I know what it is to keep a secret.’ She put up a hand, and traced the outline of my breast beneath my bindings.

  ‘What secret?’ I whispered.

  ‘Mine,’ she said. ‘And now yours.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Do?’ She smiled. ‘Only this.’ She put her hands to my face, and kissed me on the lips.

  We lay with our arms around each other. I told her about my twin. My brother. How I had taken his place. She listened in silence. Then, ‘I had a brother too,’ she said. ‘Once. I never met him. He died before I was born.’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘No one knows. My mother never speaks of it.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘Of course not. He lives with the daily disappointment of a daughter. It’s the one thing that he and my mother disagree about. She loves me. He does not.’

  I had guessed as much. But she was moving too quickly: a dead sibling? That I had never imagined. I had heard no rumours of such a child, not even from Mrs Speedicut. ‘Your brother,’ I said. ‘Was he a baby when he died?’

  ‘He was older. Perhaps ten, or twelve.’

  ‘It must have been a long time ago.’

  ‘I suppose it was. My mother never got over it, I think. She never mentions him, but she keeps mementoes.’

  ‘There are no mementoes of my brother,’ I said. ‘Other than me. I have been brought up as though I were him.’

  ‘But you cannot wish it otherwise, surely. You have such freedoms.’ She sounded jealous, resentful almost.

  ‘I don’t know anything else,’ I said. ‘And I would make an ugly woman. I am so tall and thin. My birthmark too—’

  She put her small, cool hands to my face. ‘But you’ve always been special because of it. You are always concealed, always mysterious.’

  ‘It’s hideous.’

  ‘It’s you, Jem,’ she said. ‘Without it you would be someone else entirely, and what use would that be? Your Mr Quartermain would say the same.’

  ‘Will?’

  ‘Will, is it now?’ She smiled. ‘He’s in love with you, I think?’

  ‘How could anyone love someone so ugly, so disfigured?’ I turned away. I could not bear for her to look at me. Instinctively, I put my hand up to cover my birthmark, as I always did. And yet I drank in her affection like a plant trapped in the barren earth. ‘I’ve always hated it.’

  ‘And I’ve always envied you for it. You’re safe behind it. Safe from harm. No one sees you, they look at your mask, they marvel at it, then they turn away. They judge you for who you are, not how you look.’

  ‘Everyone is judged by how they look. People look at me and see something horrible. It’s a poor start to any acquaintance.’

  ‘But you have lived your life as a man. It’s a man’s character that matters, not his beauty. Men accept you as one of them, as an equal, no matter what your outward appearance might be. You can be clever and witty, opinionated and confident. You can answer men back and speak your mind to anyone without being thought mad. You can walk with a stride, and eat off your knife, and go out alone at night and laugh loudly and spit into the fire—’

  ‘Do you want to spit into the fire?’ I said.

  ‘I want to spit!’ she cried. ‘On my beauty, and on the fact that it’s held in such high regard. What use is such a thing? To be valued simply because of the curl of one’s hair or the redness of one’s lip? My father hates me because of it, my mother fears me. I’m bred to be a wife, and nothing more. What servitude is that?’

  ‘Your father hates you because you’re beautiful?’

  ‘He used to beat me because of it.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He said I’d been sent to tempt him, to test his lust and sinfulness, but that he was not a man to give in to such things, and that he would beat the whore’s gleam out of my eyes.’

  I felt my blood turn cold. What language was this for a gentleman to use against his daughter? Was he not supposed to be her protector, her champion and defender? But I could make no sense of my thoughts, and I tried to put them from my mind. And yet, how expert her lips and fingers had been, how skilled in finding those secret places. Had she mapped those desires upon her own body, or had she been taught by other, coarser hands? ‘And did he give in to those . . . those temptations?’

  ‘No.’ She spoke quickly. ‘But he often beat me for it.’

  ‘Didn’t your mother stop him?’

  Eliza shook her head. ‘In her eyes he’s never wrong, you must have seen it. She said that he did such things for my own good. Afterwards she comforted me with fairy tales – she said I was a changeling; the baby of a fairy queen, swapped at birth.’

  I remembered Eliza in the physic garden, prancing through the lavender with a crown of marigolds on her hair. ‘You were Titania,’ I said.

  ‘And you were Oberon, King of the faeries, in your mask of autumn leaves. Do you remember when I found that fairy ring under the rowan tree?’

  But I was not so mercurial, I could not flit through the conversation from one thing to another like a butterfly in a flower bed. And she had told me such things . . . such unexpected, terrible things – about herself, about her father. There was something rotten concealed behind the veneer of respectability so carefully guarded by Dr Magorian. It was something that connected everything – the coffins, Dr Bain, Mrs Catchpole – something that tainted all who knew of it, and it could not be left in the shadows of the past. ‘Do you know your brother’s name?’ I said.

  She looked surprised. ‘No.’

  ‘Have you asked?’

  ‘Once. I asked my mother. She had no idea what I was talking about – or at least, she pretended not to. I assumed it was a topic too painful to acknowledge. I didn’t tell her I’d seen her keepsakes. Another time I went to look for his grave in St Saviour’s churchyard. I couldn’t find it.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think you’d find him there.’ We were silent for a moment. Then, ‘May I see them? The keepsakes?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘I can’t say why. I don’t even know why. All I know is that my father has taken my place in Newgate and I must prove his innocence. Nothing else matters. And I was imprisoned on the word of your father. What wickedness would drive him to engineer the arrest of an innocent man—’ I stopped. Dr Magorian was her father, after all, no matter what he’d done. I expected her to object, to defend hi
m, but she did not. Instead, she kissed my hand. ‘I’ll do all I can for you – and your father. But how might my mother’s mementoes help you?’

  I could not answer. I thought I knew all about St Saviour’s, about the people who worked here, but it appeared that I knew hardly anything at all. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But there are too many secrets at St Saviour’s and I need to know why. Why does your mother never speak of this dead child? Why does your father do all he can to keep the past away from the present?’ She looked up at me, her arm behind her head, her face closed and serious. I stared at her hair, dark against the pillow, at the smooth curve of her breast, hip and thigh. What did she want from me? Why was she here? And I had so many things to do . . . all at once I saw myself for what I was – lazy, selfish, thoughtless. My father needed me and here I was, on my back. I turned away. ‘There can be no secrets,’ I said. ‘Not any more. Only that can save my father now.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Magorians lived in a square Georgian house. It was plain-fronted, but large, and set back slightly from the street behind a small apron of grass and a row of tall black-painted iron railings. It was not part of a terrace, but stood alone, dark and box-like, its upper windows shuttered, its walls black with soot. On one side it was separated from the surrounding houses by a narrow lane. On the other side was St Saviour’s physic garden.

  The front door was at the top of a short flight of steps. The windows below these were filled with frosted glass to thwart the gaze of the curious public, for the lower-ground floor of Dr Magorian’s house had long done office as an anatomy school. It was at the back of the house that Dr Magorian prepared his vast array of anatomical specimens. The specimens themselves were exhibited in Dr Magorian’s private anatomy museum which was housed on the top floor, beside the ‘discussion room’ in which Dr Catchpole had infected himself with venereal disease. A narrow flight of stairs led from the lower-ground floor to the museum at the top. None but Dr Magorian and his medical friends – colleagues and students – were allowed to use those stairs, or to enter the medical rooms. The floors in between – the ground floor, first and second floors, were where Dr and Mrs Magorian lived with their daughter.

  Eliza ran up the steps and vanished inside. We had decided that I should wait in the street until she reappeared at the door, having checked whether she might successfully get me into the house without being seen. The usual traffic of people, carts, cabs, animals, made their way up and down the thoroughfare. It made for a convenient place to wait without being noticed, and I stood beside a whelk vendor without appearing out of place.

  The day was warm, for the time of year, the air still and close. The smell of brine and shellfish mixed with the stink of drains and horse dung. Beside a lamp-post a scruffy Italian boy exhibited a tortoise in a box for a penny-a-look. A fat woman in a tattered black dress squatted on the pavement, like a gigantic crow, selling flowers from a hand cart. A man lay drunk in the gutter at the head of an alleyway and a girl with a basket of watercress in each hand stood wearily against the railings on the opposite side of the street. I saw a pair of students, medical men from St Saviour’s, strolling arm in arm towards the chop house on the corner of Prior’s Lane. Cabs and carts rattled past and a boy herded a pair of bullocks down the street, his left eye showing the first purple marks of a black eye. He was a long way from Smithfield and the animals looked exhausted, their haunches dripping blood from the goad he had used mercilessly upon them. I stood back, so that I was half hidden by the whelk stall, and looked towards the infirmary, its clock tower still visible at the far end of St Saviour’s Street.

  And then I saw him. Dr Magorian! I drew back. Had he seen me? He was striding towards me, though he was still some distance away. My first instinct was to vanish, before he noticed me, into the physic garden. And yet, I could not. I could not wait for another opportunity, another chance to discover the truth. I had to continue what I had started. But how could I? How could I slip into Dr Magorian’s house while Dr Magorian himself approached? Eliza had to open the door, or all would be lost. I saw Dr Magorian pull out his silver pocket watch and squint at its pale dial. Now! I thought. It has to be now—

  At that moment the door to Dr Magorian’s house opened, and I bounded up the steps.

  I was unused to such fashionable surroundings. The thick carpet on the polished wooden floor, the smooth white plaster of the cornice, the rich, gold-framed landscapes on the walls – how different Eliza’s world was to mine. How warm and stultifying it seemed, hemmed in with overstuffed chairs, stifled by curtains and cushions as soundly as any padded cell at Angel Meadow. The rooms my father and I inhabited above the apothecary were simply furnished – if he was happy with an iron bedstead, an oaken bench and a ewer and pitcher, then so was I, and the only colours that brightened the drab palette of my daily life were found in the bottles upon the apothecary shelves and the neatly tended beds of the physic garden. I took a deep breath. How I longed for that place now, with its clean, sweet scents. In the corner of Dr Magorian’s hall, on a tall spindly-legged mahogany table, a large bunch of white, flawless lilies burst from a Chinese vase. Their stamens had been neatly clipped, and their heavy aroma was clogging the air as thick as honey.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ I said. From the yard at the back of the house came the steady ‘thwack . . . thwack . . . thwack’ of a carpet being beaten. The rattle of a coal scuttle echoed from the direction of the parlour.

  ‘My father is at Dr Graves’s,’ she replied. ‘My mother is upstairs, asleep.’

  ‘And your mother’s mementoes?’ I did not tell her that her father was no longer at Dr Graves’s, but was, in fact, approaching the house.

  ‘They are in her room,’ whispered Eliza.

  ‘Where she is sleeping?’ I heard the maid in the parlour pause in her labours with the coal scuttle. Eliza’s face took on a pinched and hunted look. Her nostrils flared as if scenting danger. ‘Quickly!’ She put out her hand to me. ‘You wanted to see them, did you not?’

  ‘But your mother—’

  ‘Is insensible with laudanum,’ she hissed. ‘You might dance a hornpipe on her washstand and she’d not wake.’ Behind me, at the front door, there came the sound of footsteps, the rasp of boots being scraped clean. ‘My father!’ Eliza gripped my arm, her face set in an expression of terror. We heard the maid cross to the parlour door. Eliza vanished up the stairs. I bounded after her as, at my back, the door opened.

  Mrs Magorian’s room was dark and stuffy. The curtains were drawn and the shutters closed. There was no light other than that given off by a pair of candles – one on the mantel, the other at Mrs Magorian’s bedside. The embers glowed through the bars of the grate like a dragon’s eye.

  ‘She sleeps every afternoon until three,’ whispered Eliza.

  ‘What about the maid?’

  ‘Dilys?’ Eliza grinned, her teeth white in the gloom. ‘She’s gone out. She fancies herself a cut above now that she’s a lady’s maid. She takes a walk with one of the medical students while Mother sleeps.’

  The ambitions of medical students were generally set high above anything a lady’s maid might have to offer. ‘No doubt I’ll see her in the Magdalene ward before long,’ I muttered.

  We crept across the room. The air was heavy with the musty, sweetish smell of camphor. Beneath this, I could detect Roman camomile, rose water and citrus. But none of it could mask the thick, stale reek of exhaled laudanum. On the far side of the room Mrs Magorian’s bed loomed. The sheets glimmered white in the glow of the bedside candle, the counterpane a rich midnight-coloured damask. Mrs Magorian herself was lying on the bed. For some reason, I had expected her to be inside it, trapped within the starched white sheets like a fold of paper in an envelope. To see her fully clothed, lying on her back as if laid out, her face a white mask in the sepulchral darkness – I drew back. Had her eyelids flickered? Had her hands, resting on her abdomen, trembled? Perhaps she had decided not to take her laudanum that aftern
oon and was not asleep at all. I recoiled into the shadows.

  Eliza glided forward and took up the bedside candle. ‘Mother?’ she whispered. ‘Mother?’ There was no reply. Perhaps it had simply been the dark jumping as the coals shifted and flickered in the grate.

  Eliza moved silently. She skirted a small table laden with medicine bottles and pulled open a door adjacent to the bed – a dressing room, no doubt. It brushed against the thick Persian carpet with a deep sigh. Behind the door the void was filled with dark shapes – a dress mannequin, a large wardrobe, a tower of boxes. I thought I detected a sudden movement, a tall thin shadow shifting warily in the darkness, and all at once I saw a face staring out at me – horrible, darkly disfigured, blinking in the gloom. He looked straight into my eyes, his mouth opening to shout out – and then I realised that I was staring at my own reflection in a tall dressing mirror. My cry choked in my throat.

  Behind us, Mrs Magorian let out a sigh and shifted on the counterpane. ‘No,’ she murmured. Eliza licked her fingers and pinched out the candle flame. We stood without moving in the oily darkness. ‘Please!’ Mrs Magorian moved her head on the pillow. ‘No more,’ she said. ‘No more.’ Then, she was silent. Somehow, I knew she had woken.

  We heard the rustle of her silks as she moved on the bed. ‘Dilys?’ she said. ‘Is that you?’ There was a sigh. ‘Another candle, Dilys.’ Her voice was sleepy again now. Her breathing deepened. Eliza relit the candle.

  The walls of the dressing room were lined with shelves crammed with hats, muffs, scarves and furs. Eliza went directly to a small chest of drawers set against the far wall underneath a tower of hat boxes. She pulled open the bottom drawer and drew out a cotton bag, rather like a pillow case in size and shape. My heart struck hammer blows against my ribs, my eyes seeming to stretch in my head as I peered into the gloom. What relic would be revealed? Into my mind’s eye rose the image of a coffin-shaped box, inside it that familiar kidney-shaped package, the rust-coloured rags, the handful of dried flowers. These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him . . . Eliza unfolded the end of the bag and pulled out – a shirt. There followed a pair of ‘hussar’ pantaloons, a pair of stockings, a short jacket of boiled wool, a cap, a pair of boots.