The Poison Thread

by Laura Purcell

  ‘What I mean,’ I hurried on, blushing now, ‘is that if you work with the chaplain to amend your character, I believe that the shape of your skull may change.’

  ‘And that . . . matters?’

  ‘It matters to me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if I can prove this, it will help so many others. Mothers will be able to spot the warning signs in their children and turn them down another path. Penitentiaries will know, from a simple touch, if a prisoner has truly reformed. It will mean that we are no longer bound to follow the dictates of our wilful bodies. It will mean that we can make a difference, that we can change.’

  I stopped, out of breath. My voice had grown louder. Ruth was regarding me curiously with her dark eyes, and I felt a rictus of shame.

  What if the other prisoners overheard, or Matron? They would think I was hysterical. Deluded. A female out of her depth, wading where only men should tread. Perhaps they would be right. Deep down, I am aware that I seek proof primarily for my own peace of mind. The benefits to mankind at large are a welcome addition – not the purpose.

  But as for Ruth, she did not pronounce an opinion. She only rolled her shoulders in their sockets, making them click. ‘You can measure my head if you like,’ she sighed. ‘They’ll do it anyway, I expect.’

  ‘They?’ I echoed.

  ‘The doctors.’ She tilted her head. It looked fragile at that angle. Held on by a mere thread. ‘The doctors will do it when they cut me up.’

  Anatomists. I had forgotten, but Ruth was right: when they hang a murderer, the body is turned over to the surgeons for medical science. They will not baulk at the corpse of a child. In fact, they will pay more.

  ‘Try not to dwell on such things.’ I shivered, though in truth I was dissecting her in my mind’s eye. I could not help it. ‘I know it is difficult, but try not to imagine . . . that.’

  She watched me. Something ignited in that dark gaze. ‘But I don’t need to imagine it, miss. I’ve been there.’

  It was in her pupils as they dilated: all the blood and the horror. She has stood in the presence of death. She has peeled back the skin and found . . . what? Do I really want to know?

  ‘I remember what it sounds like,’ she went on, gently, like a caress. ‘The cut, the saw. How it smells. You forget who I am, miss. I’ve seen it all before.’

  Try as I might, I could not produce an answer to that.

  16

  Ruth

  As it happened, I did need the sleep forced upon me. At the break of dawn, my companions began to stir. I awoke to see them throwing off their covers and rising to their feet.

  I copied their movements, rubbing my bleary eyes. Four girls lined up in single file, ready to shuffle up the steps and through the door. Like me, they wore long-sleeved, high-necked nightgowns worked in grey linsey. One of them seemed to be the same girl in duplicate. Perhaps I was still half-asleep.

  I took up the rear of the line. Directly in front of me stood the girl who had signed Mrs Metyard’s document. It was she who’d shared my bed, who owned that strange object made of bone. For some reason, the knowledge made me glad.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I whispered.

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘Your name?’

  Her answer was so quiet, spoken down and into the chest, that all I caught was the letter M.

  ‘Mim?’ I interpreted. There was no response, either to confirm or deny, so Mim she became to me from then on.

  My bare feet were cold on the floor. I shivered, trying not to let my teeth chatter. The other girls didn’t appear bothered by the wait or the chill; they just looked weary.

  Finally the lock moaned and Kate’s face appeared.

  ‘Come on, then.’

  We marched up the way I’d come yesterday: through the corridors and the lumber room. The ghost of Ma seemed to hang there with the unwanted material.

  We crossed the next threshold and stopped on a tiled floor, by the off-white sink. Today, four buckets sat in it. Without being asked, Mim collected them, two in each hand, and went outside.

  It promised to be another hot day. Mist and dew were already melting away from the desolate garden. Mim went to the pump and plied the lever. Despite the rust, water spluttered out.

  No one spoke. Kate was moving around in the lumber room while the other girls stood with their heads down, staring at their feet. Two of them were the same. Lanky brown hair, low brows. Thin, pursed lips. They must be twins. The expression on their faces would have curdled milk.

  The third girl was different. Older, to judge by the shape of her body. She had pale, freckled skin that looked like an egg, and cinnamon hair. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Her countenance was a perfect blank.

  Mim returned with the buckets, one at a time. Only after all the buckets were lined up did she notice that there were four of them and five of us. She hesitated, but Kate barked, ‘Twins share.’

  One of the twins, the taller, shoved me to the side as she made her way to stand opposite her sister. I suppose before I arrived, she’d always had a bucket of her own.

  ‘Quickly,’ Kate said.

  They stripped naked. Averting my eyes, I agonised over what to do. The corset . . . How could I get it off? I’d look mad, wearing it next to my skin, instead of over a shift, and keeping it on to wash. Desperately, I reached beneath my nightgown and tugged at the hooks. Useless. They were clamped into the eyes, unyielding as the teeth of a bulldog.

  I sponged myself as best I could, washing beneath the cover of my nightgown. You would think I’d stink to high heaven, after the days I’d been trapped inside the corset, but I didn’t. Neither did the material mark with my sweat. The corset looked exactly the same as it had when I first put it on.

  Kate gathered up items from a clothes-horse in the lumber room and threw them at us. The girl with the cinnamon hair moved to grab the first shift, her feet squeaking on the wet tiles. Apparently there was an order to collection, which the others knew. I assumed my clothes would come last, and they did.

  We were all dressed the same: in a plain cotton shift, a single petticoat and the caramel dress I’d seen Mim wearing the day before. None of the items fitted well. Still, they had the virtue of being clean.

  Kate gave one of her grunts and marched out of the lumber room. The others trooped after her, except for Mim. She stayed to empty the buckets.

  Kate’s dress bobbed in front, leading the way. Blue, this morning. Peacock blue. The colour of feathers, jewels and mountain waterfalls. I could taste it.

  The workroom was in the attic. We didn’t travel up the carpeted staircase I’d glimpsed that first day but another, rickety structure with treads that complained. They led to a space with a high ceiling. Two rectangular tables and several stools occupied the floor. Everything was spotlessly clean.

  There was no fireplace and very little room to move around the stools. Waist-high cupboards lined the back wall. There were skylights, but they were high up and distant as the sun itself. No doubt too much light would fade the material we worked on. Material mattered in that world. Taffeta, paduasoy, tulle: they were the pampered monarchs. Flesh and blood came cheap.

  All of the girls took a stool – these were assigned, too. Kate banged a new seat into place at the end of a table and said, ‘Ruth.’

  I didn’t realise she knew my name. It sounded strange on her tongue.

  I sat. Kate stood behind my stool. I felt the warmth of her body, caught a trace of her scent: lily of the valley.

  ‘Slops,’ she said. ‘You start on slops.’

  I opened my mouth to ask what she meant, but the next minute she dumped a pile of half-sewn shirts, chemises and cheap cotton day-gowns before me. Slop work, or piecework, as Ma had called it: the ready-made items requiring little skill.

  Even here, they wouldn’t let me touch
the good stuff.

  Kate unlocked a drawer beneath the table and slid it open. Needle points glittered before my eyes. Tiny bayonets. None of them safe.

  One of the twins took a needle first, followed by her sister, then the freckled girl. I hung back.

  ‘Ruth. Needle.’

  A weapon. I was choosing a murder weapon.

  ‘Take one.’

  I grabbed one of the smaller needles at random and took my stool again.

  I rolled the needle between my thumb and index finger. My stomach lurched. Already I felt the power buzzing in my hand. Tempting. This wasn’t my own needle, yet it was alive, sentient. Capable of things I didn’t want it to be.

  I swallowed.

  The others had already started their work. Kate stared at me, thunderous.

  I had no choice but to begin.

  I promise you I tried. I tried to empty my mind, to erase myself, to become nothing as I sewed.

  It didn’t work.

  * * *

  By the time Mim thudded up the stairs and sat on the stool by my side, I’d already dwelt upon how much my back hurt and wondered where Ma might be. It was a relief to stop sewing, just for a second, and hand Mim the next piece of work in the pile.

  Mim and I were both on slops. The twins were improvers and the other girl, the older girl, seemed to be the Second Hand.

  Of course, Kate was in charge. She worked at a separate table, drawing designs and cutting them out. She had a pair of shears, fastened to her table with a length of rope.

  Nobody spoke. I only heard their breath: in and out, in time with the snip of Kate’s shears. My stitches followed the rhythm.

  Now and then, I dared to look up. My eyes took everything in small sips: the room, the girls. They were so remote from me, they might as well have been the women I was sewing for. Nameless, without character. Could I really see out years of my life in this place? Even if I managed to control my traitorous stitches, I would grow up without any prospects of marriage, without even the chance to make a good friend.

  I shifted in my seat. My corset nipped. It was the only thing that understood, the only thing that knew me.

  After about three hours, a tinny, whining sound made me jump.

  ‘Miss Metyard,’ said a voice. ‘Would you be so kind as to attend in the showroom?’

  Kate threw down her shears. She went to the corner and leant over what I’d thought was a pipe for gas. ‘Please allow me a moment, I will be down directly,’ she said into the bottom.

  I stared. The voice she used to speak through the pipe was entirely different from her usual, brusque tones. And that genteel person on the other end – it couldn’t be Mrs Metyard? The pipe must lead into the showroom, I supposed. Customers could hear it.

  Taking off her apron, Kate brushed down her peacock-blue dress. All of the girls paused to watch her. She looked over at Mim, her jaw tight.

  ‘Tea,’ she said.

  A scrape as the girls pushed back their stools and rose to their feet. Kate passed through the door with Mim in her wake. A different order, this time, for us to descend the stairs.

  I still went last.

  When we reached street level, Kate peeled off towards the showroom, while Mim led us workers to the kitchen. The Metyard house was like a rabbit warren; you didn’t know where the next twist or turn would take you. Or at least, I didn’t.

  The kitchen had a range and a copper that whistled as it steamed. Like our sleeping quarters, the walls looked damp. No doubt all the laundry was hung out here to dry. There was a long, knife-marked table with benches running down either side. The twins claimed one bench immediately, and the elder girl sat opposite them.

  I wavered. I would rather sit next to Mim again, but she was clanging pots around. It seemed she was the maid, as well as a slop worker. Reluctantly, I crept over and sat next to the elder girl.

  She shifted to the side, ever so slightly. Making space for me, or pulling away? The twins both gave me the same look: like a mule with its ears put back. I wasn’t welcome here, any more than I’d been at school.

  Although the freckled girl was the eldest, and seemed to be the highest-ranking seamstress, Mim served the taller twin first. Next came her sister, then the freckled girl, then me. Last of all, Mim herself. This was the hierarchy they’d established for themselves.

  It didn’t surprise me: two are stronger than one. The twins had an air of insolence and self-regard. They weren’t pretty, but they’d managed to develop the sneer and the languid manner of the fashionable misses at school. It must be nice, to have an ally like that. A sister who would never leave your side. I remembered Naomi, her little cheek resting on my chest.

  The corset pinched.

  Grateful to hide my face, I looked down at my breakfast. The liquid Kate had called ‘tea’ was even worse than Ma used to serve: dingy with a sort of film. Beside it sat a slice of unbuttered bread.

  ‘Thank you, Mim,’ I said.

  The twins sniggered.

  ‘We don’t usually talk at meals.’ It was the freckled girl next to me. She wasn’t scolding, but she didn’t sound kind, either. Her voice was much like her expression: blank.

  ‘Why?’

  She bit her lower lip. ‘Habit, probably. From the Foundling.’

  ‘You were at the Oakgate Foundling Hospital?’

  ‘Yes.’ A downward note. That was the end of the conversation.

  I bit into my bread, mulling this over. Ma had mentioned, once or twice, that Mrs Metyard used to own a shop in London. I thought she’d take her apprentices from the city too, not the local home for unwanted children. But Mrs Metyard sought out girls with no ties, no family. For what terrible purpose, I couldn’t have known, back then.

  ‘What are your names?’

  From the exasperated way the taller twin groaned, you would have thought I’d asked her to recite an epic ballad. ‘Ivy,’ she hissed. Pointing to her double, ‘Daisy,’ and finally, ‘she’s Nell. Now will you shut your trap?’

  ‘It’s her first day,’ Nell said quietly. ‘Don’t be too hard on her.’

  Ivy glared.

  ‘I bet you miss your mother,’ Mim whispered to me.

  It took all my self-composure not to cry. ‘Yes. I do. And I expect you . . . did you ever know your mother?’

  Her face suddenly smoothed, as linen does when you pass a flatiron over it. ‘No, but I’ve got something of hers. Sometimes mothers at the Oakgate Foundling Hospital leave a token with the baby, in case they come back to claim them. My mother left a bone gaming fish.’

  ‘Not sometimes,’ Ivy mocked, clearly eavesdropping. ‘They haven’t left tokens at the Foundling for decades. You get a receipt now. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘So your ma was stupid,’ Daisy added. ‘As well as a gambling whore.’

  Mim slammed a plate on the table. A crack ran through it. Her hand was shaking. ‘At least she cared. At least she left me something.’

  ‘Probably by accident.’ Daisy grinned. ‘She meant to bet you on the faro table.’

  Ivy wasn’t smiling. ‘You’re for it now, Blackbird. You’ve broken a plate. Dear me. What will Mrs Metyard say? I hope no one tells her.’

  ‘Hold your spiteful tongue!’ Mim’s cry sent a shiver through me. She wasn’t shy and reserved after all. The same rage that lit my heart burnt within her.

  It was a thread, tugging us together.

  17

  Dorothea

  The day had to come, of course. I have reached the age of five and twenty. Mama survived but two more years before she passed from this life. What a melancholy reflection.

  Despite Pa’s doom-laden prophecies about my eccentricity, I seem to have retained my popularity in the neighbourhood – or at least, my money has. All day the bell has been clanging, sending maids running to and from the door to receive gif
ts. Wilkie was not amused. However, he was impressed with the bouquet that arrived early this morning, which I made Tilda position in a jug by his cage. He came right up to the bars and tilted his head to regard each flower.

  ‘There’s no note on this one, miss,’ Tilda said knowingly.

  ‘Why, how very odd.’

  Nodding bluebells – those for ‘constancy’. Yellow acacia means ‘secret love’. The message of pink camellia is ‘longing for you’. Oh yes, I know very well who they are from.

  I wonder how my birthday celebrations should progress, were I now David’s wife. Would we have the leisure or means to mark the day at all? I think I should prefer to be surrounded by policemen and their worthy ladies, rather than the guests at my ball. I feel they would be an improving influence upon me. David points me in the correct direction, just as I assist Ruth. A droll thought indeed!

  I do hope David has not spent too much upon my flowers. For myself, I have been positively frugal. Papa gave me a bank note for a new gown, but I only laid out a fraction of it, saving the rest for my future with David. The dressmaker has not done badly. I have a little creation in daffodil silk, with a pointed waist and cartridge pleats in the skirts. The sleeves fall off my shoulders into five rows of lace flounces. A fabric flower sits in my corsage, matching the fresh ones Tilda shall arrange in my hair. All in all, I will not disgrace myself, although perhaps the guests will be expecting something more from a lady of my means.

  I find I cannot commission clothing these days without a thought for Ruth Butterham. It discomforts me to imagine young girls sewing in cramped conditions to construct my ball gown. Naturally, I do not believe Ruth’s absurd claim that she wove hate into her stitches, but still the question remains: do they despise me? Do those seamstresses hunch on their stools, plying their needles, full of bitterness for the lady who makes their fingers work? Perhaps the plight of distressed seamstresses is another cause I shall take up. Papa cannot complain – it is at least related to fashion.

  He is in a fidgety mood today. It pleases him to host a party and display our house to advantage, yet I feel him glance at me as a fruit monger regards his wares: eager to sell them before they grow soft. No one wishes to be saddled with overripe goods. As a daughter well married, I could still be a credit to him, yet if I remain unwed for much longer . . . I shall be an embarrassment. An encumbrance. The things Papa hates most of all.