Hitching my nightgown up to my waist, I fumbled on my hands and knees, inch by inch, up the steps. The third one down was rotten – I must remember that – but I hadn’t kept count of the treads. If I should fall through—
Suddenly it was there beneath my fingers. Something creaked, ominous. Ivy snorted in her sleep.
I held myself rigid, listening. Surely she’d hear my heart, hammering in my chest?
‘She’ll kill you if she catches you.’ Nell. Quiet as a whisper.
‘I know,’ I said softly.
‘You won’t be able to free her. It’s not like the coal hole.’
‘I just want to give her some food.’
I heard her turn on her pallet. ‘I know,’ she said, echoing me. ‘I left some in the kitchen for you.’
After a few attempts, I managed to pick the lock with a long needle. Gently, I edged out into the corridor and pushed the door closed behind me.
Everything lay wrapped in velvet silence. Only faintly, in the distance, the carriage clock ticked.
I turned my head. This wasn’t the place I knew: it was a funereal version, a ghostly version. Familiar objects appeared changed. I was lost and alone in the dark.
It was scent that led me in the right direction: burnt bread and fat, reaching out to me through the night. Stumbling into the kitchen, I heard the sullen patter of the rain outside and the wind, sighing in its wake. My hip smacked, hard, into the corner of the table. I blew out my breath between clenched teeth. Something wet on my nightdress. Not blood? No – it was water. Nell had left a roll of bread and a mug of water close to the edge, where I could reach them.
Clutching the little supper took both my hands; I couldn’t even grope my way through the darkness now. The mug handle burnt cold against my fingers. Shakily, I rounded the newel post and began to totter up the carpeted stairs.
The water sloshed in its mug, lap, lap, against the clay. It was the loudest sound I ever heard.
My hand tightened around the bread, squeezing the life from it. It wouldn’t be any less wholesome for being crushed. But if I should leave crumbs on the carpet . . . Better not to think of that. Better not to think at all.
I’d resolved in my mind that it didn’t matter if I died, that I was willing to run any risk for the sake of Mim. Yet when I gained the top of the stairs and the floorboard creaked, my body let me down. I began to tremble. Not just tremors: fierce, uncontrollable shaking that chattered my teeth.
What was I doing there? Was I mad?
I couldn’t remember where the captain’s room was. I only remembered the whip. Did I turn left or right? Suppose he’d heard the floorboard, just then, beneath my feet? Suppose he was already waiting for me?
Biting back the tears, I flew forwards in desperation. I thought – I thought – it was to the right. Why did it all look so similar in the dark?
Water dripped on to the carpet. I was too flustered to care about that. Two doors stared back at me, blank and secretive, showing nothing of the horror that lay within. There was no time: I had to choose.
I took the one on the right.
It was unlocked. Slowly, slowly, the door swung on its hinges.
My vision flickered. The images came disjointed: bulky shapes; a fire, swooping in the grate. A length of rope hanging from the ceiling. Drooping against the wall, her hands tied, as mine had been, a figure.
‘Mim?’ I croaked.
A sigh.
It was her. I’d heard her breath a thousand times: at my side, sewing; sleeping in our bed.
Relief loosened my grip on the mug. And then something moved.
It uncurled gradually in the corner, something dark and slender. With it came a powerful scent, sickly sweet, slicing through the fug of the captain’s tobacco.
Lily of the valley.
‘Get out.’
‘Kate?’
‘Get out, do you hear me?’
I did, but only vaguely; her voice crackled in my ears. I fought to keep my feet, to stay upright. ‘What are you doing to Mim?’
Kate took a step forward and I saw her, draped in flickering orange light. Soot flitted out of the dwindling fire, into her hair. It wasn’t curled now but plaited, thick down her back. She looked like an angel fallen in flames.
‘Get out,’ she growled. ‘Or do you want me to call my mother?’
Her hand reached for the fireplace, for the poker.
God forgive me, I couldn’t hold my ground.
I dropped the roll and the water, and I ran.
34
Ruth
You didn’t come to me for a happy ending. Obviously, she died. But the chaplain says death isn’t the worst thing that can happen, and I believe he’s right. For what befell me in the time that followed was much, much worse.
They waited until Sunday, when the shop was shut. Never a word to me in the meantime about my visit upstairs, or how Mim fared. Nell said they’d forbidden her the captain’s room, and she hadn’t heard them talk about Mim. None of us had an inkling the poor girl was dead, until that Sunday.
We were gauging cartridge pleats in the skirts of ball gowns. It was an awful business, trying to line up the rows precisely and gather them together. Oppressive shelves of cloud pressed down outside. There was no real light. Every time my needle reappeared from beneath the fabric it seemed like a miracle: shining, despite the dull matt surface of all about me. We’d been working even longer, with Mim absent and Nell engaged elsewhere. One day it was five and twenty hours, straight.
I was almost relieved when I heard feet thud into the workroom; it was a chance to pause and rest my sight. But then I looked up, saw Kate, and my relief vanished as quickly as it’d come.
Beneath her arm lay a rolled-up bundle I knew well: the knives Billy brought me to do the corsets, and the small saw. My things. Seeing them in her clutches was invasive, like watching her hold up my drawers.
‘You’re needed, Ruth. Come along.’
I pushed out my stool, grating its legs against the floor. ‘Does someone want a corset?’
‘Come along!’
There was too much work to leave, but I didn’t dare argue with her – not after that night. Clear in my mind was the image of Kate, wild-eyed and gilded by fire. She hadn’t punished me for sneaking up the stairs.
Not yet.
With the malevolent gaze of the twins upon me, I followed Kate out of the attic, down the stairs to the living quarters. How different they looked by day. Bright, richly furnished – but no less sinister for that. Something tainted the air. Not the powdery, floral scents I’d come to expect. They were gone, submerged beneath this other smell. No, not a smell. It was a stench.
It throbbed with more and more power, until at last we stopped outside the captain’s room. Here the odour coated my tongue, unspeakably strong.
‘Mim,’ I whispered.
Kate’s hand trembled as she turned the key. Blue veins stood out above the fragile bones. I had cause to remember them, after. To remember how different veins looked, with something flowing through them.
The door creaked open.
I’ll never forget the blast from that room: ripe, fetid. There was a solidity to it. Both Kate and I choked.
‘About time! In, in. Quick march.’
Kate shoved me before her, into the claws of the reek. She came in behind me, closed the door and locked it again.
Only then did I begin to see.
The captain bent over the fire. Flames capered, giving him a grotesque, gleeful look. The false hair stuck to his face wilted in the heat.
‘The fire takes all,’ he crowed, ‘the fire tells no tales.’
It was too much: the heat, the smell and the fear. I fell to my knees.
‘Up, up!’ Kate tugged at my sleeve, dragging me across the carpet. I didn’t mind how the friction h
urt my skin. I would rather have been pitched into the fire myself than see what I saw, on the other side of the room.
Mim was in the wardrobe.
Crumpled, swollen about the abdomen. No hair left on her head. One of those monsters had taken a razor and cropped it close to the scalp. I didn’t need to touch her to know that she was dead, and had been for at least a day. The stiffness of death had worn off. In its place came a juicy, overripe look. My beautiful Mim, reduced to this.
‘What have you done?’ I wailed. ‘What have you done?’
I wished that I could cry.
There was a thump by my side. Kate had dropped my tools.
‘You were her friend,’ she said haltingly. ‘Your hands have the greater right to touch her.’
Even then, I couldn’t follow the diseased, twisting course of her mind. I stared blankly at the knives and the saw, as if they were memories from a former life.
‘Cut it off!’ the captain ordered. ‘We need to incinerate it. Too easy to identify the body, with the missing finger.’ Seizing a poker, he stirred up the blaze.
The harsh crackle of the logs filled my ears. Everything seemed to be happening in a reality separate from my own. ‘Cut . . . ?’
‘You need to cut off her right hand with your bone saw,’ Kate explained. As if she was telling me how to make a stitch. ‘We’re going to burn it in the fire.’
The words sank through me, dragging me down with them, stone weights in my stomach. I may have done terrible things in my life, but this was beyond the pale. They wanted me to dismember my only friend.
‘I won’t do it!’ I shrieked. ‘You can’t make me do it!’
Beneath his monstrous facial hair, the captain smiled.
Kate was matter-of-fact. ‘You have to. If the skeleton is found with that hand still attached, it will be quickly identified as Miriam and traced back to us. It needs to be done. You’re the only one who can do it.’
‘I won’t. I don’t care what happens to me!’
‘But you do care what happens to your mother. Don’t you?’
It winded me. In my mind’s eye I saw poor Ma, lifeless like Mim. ‘But . . . you don’t even know where my mother is,’ I stuttered.
The captain leered. His breath was a blast of tobacco. ‘Oh yes I do. I’ve got my eye on the blasted wench and I’ll be sure to make her pay. Wasn’t she considered a beauty once? Pah! A damned scarecrow she is now. She sold her hair. It will be her teeth, next.’
They hauled me to my feet. Strong hands, clamping each arm.
What could I do?
Desperate plans rushed through my mind. Suppose I grabbed my knives and stabbed them? Could I manage to kill both of them? It wouldn’t bring Mim back. It might even put Ma at risk. But God, dear God, how I wanted to make them pay.
Strange to say, what I remember most are the touches of beauty. A fine web of veins. The inside of Mim’s palm, which was once so pink against the brown, set like grey marble. She was more beautiful than Rosalind or Kate would ever be. Even in death she put them to shame.
When I’d finished, the captain offered up Mim’s severed hand to the fire’s blistering embrace. Orange tongues licked around the fingers, charring them, releasing the most terrible fumes.
I collapsed, vomited all over the hem of Kate’s dress.
Revenge is a dish best served cold. That’s what they say, isn’t it? I tried to be cold, crouched there on the floor. To think, to let all my hate burrow deep inside like maggots.
I had a way to inflict pain: my own, special way. Hadn’t it landed me in this mess in the first place? Perhaps now it would be my salvation. My escape.
No one would suspect. If I rushed headlong in my fury, slicing my way out of Metyard’s, I might end up on the gallows. Ma might die. But if I bided my time . . . I would punish them. I would punish them without leaving a trace.
Kate was slowly turning the green of Rosalind Oldacre’s wedding trousseau. ‘We can’t burn it all. The smoke, the smell . . . All the neighbours will be round. We’ll have to think of somewhere else to put her.’
‘God damn it all, you’re right.’ The captain stared at the conflagration, pushing Mim’s hand in ever deeper with his poker. Something spat and sizzled.
‘We can’t carry her to the river. We would never make it that far. And if a boat found her . . . It would be clear she hadn’t drowned.’
All things Kate should have considered, I thought furiously, before she killed Mim.
‘Could we bury her?’ Kate continued to fret. ‘There isn’t enough ground in the yard. But if . . .’ She froze, staring straight at me. ‘That’s it! The coal hole. Captain? Do you think the coal hole is deep enough? We can put her in there with some quicklime, just until the flesh rots and we can bury the bones. Would the neighbours still be able to smell her in the coal hole?’
To them Mim was no more than that: an odour to be concealed. Not entitled to her final resting place in a churchyard or beneath a marble urn, but rotting in the darkness of the coal hole with spiders scuttling around. It was even worse than Pa, buried on the Devil’s side of the church. At least the sun touched his unmarked grave, now and then.
‘It’s the only defensive position we can take.’ The captain dropped the poker, letting it clang against the fireplace. ‘I’ll be vanguard, you bring up the rear.’
Flicking out the tails of his red coat, he seized Mim’s left arm and the stump of her right hand. I’d wrapped a swathe of muslin around it but fluid leached through, an accusation against him.
‘We won’t make you come with us,’ Kate told me as she swallowed her gorge and hoisted Mim’s bloated legs.
As if that was some kind of mercy. As if I wouldn’t have to sit in the kitchen and eat my meals with the knowledge that my friend was festering beneath my feet.
‘Isn’t your young man going to come and help you carry it away?’ I spat.
To my surprise, Kate flinched. ‘Billy mustn’t learn of this. Do you hear me? Not with the wedding so close.’
I snorted.
What would he think, seeing the tools he’d given me put to such use? Would he shrink from the stained bundle, rolled up with my blood-gummed saw? Would he even care?
At that moment, I despised him. I despised him for understanding what Kate was, and agreeing to marry her all the same.
‘I think Billy knows what goes on here.’
The muscles in Kate’s cheeks trembled. ‘He doesn’t know this, Ruth. No one has ever died before.’
They lumped Mim’s poor body out of the room, staggering under her dead weight. I was glad she was making them retch. Getting back at them, in the only way a corpse could.
They deserved far worse.
Once more, I found myself alone in the captain’s room. The terrors of whip and rope seemed trivial now. Blood and vomit patched the brown carpet. They were the only suggestions that Mim had ever been alive.
The Metyards had taken everything from me. There was no memento, nothing to hold. When Naomi died, Ma had cut off a wisp of her downy hair. I would’ve liked to do the same with my friend, but even that was denied to me. All that remained of her here was a clump of damp carpet. The hand in the fire was already more charcoal than skin.
That hand . . . I’d seldom seen it empty. Even at night it was occupied, turning the bone gaming fish that her mother had left to her.
Where was the fish?
Frantically, I riffled through the wardrobe. She must have taken the fish when she ran away; there was no chance that she would leave it behind. But had she dropped it in her struggle with Mr Brown? Or was it still tucked in a pocket on the body, headed for the coal hole’s sulphur depths? I searched as though my life depended on it. I think, in some strange way, it did.
There. A scrap of white, deep in the corner. Reaching in, I took the fish reverently into my hands.
A fin of the tail had snapped off. Blood must have spilled on it, trickled into the cracks of the engraving. The word Belle’s stood out now, bold in brown.
‘I swear to you,’ I whispered, addressing the only part of Mim I had left, ‘they’ll suffer for what they’ve done. All that you’ve endured will look like nothing – nothing! – after I’m through with them.’
35
Dorothea
I am more disturbed in my mind than I can possibly express. How could I be otherwise, with a recital such as this?
That poor girl.
Is it not odd, how print distances you from an event? You read an account in the paper and it looks just like a novel, a story that someone has invented. Dressmaker Slays Apprentice. Very well. On the next page you half-expect Knight Vanquishes Dragon.
But Miriam did live, and she also died. Horribly. I thank heaven the remains have since received a proper Christian burial!
I try to push the unpleasant images from my mind and do useful, everyday chores like changing Wilkie’s water dish and blowing the husks from his seed bowl. Yet in every action I perform, I am dreadfully aware of my hands. I see Miriam’s hand, melting in the fire. I see Ruth’s fingers, about the saw.
I wondered, did I not, just what those stained hands, picking at the tar, were capable of? The truth is an unbearable weight upon me. It is much worse because, in this instance, I find that I believe her.
Not necessarily in all particulars. I have nothing but her own assertion that Mrs Metyard was either so enamoured of or abused by her husband that she attempted to assume his likeness. This may be the imagination of an overstimulated girl. But the manner of the death, and interference with the body . . . This much I know is true.
Would that Ruth’s were the only macabre tale dogging my thoughts, but David is full of another story, fresh from Putney. There, a female trunk, without limbs or head, has been discovered in the stables of one Mr Daniel Good. The man himself remains at large, much to the confusion of the six police divisions intent upon catching him. This would be horror enough, yet the circumstance which perturbs me is the fervour it has sparked within David.
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