by Sara Collins
What you’ve brought is a man. A long sleeve of bones, twisting in his woollen jacket. He looks even more downcast than you. I see his eyes darting around, taking in the little pallet, the green mould curling up the walls. He wrinkles his nose. It’s a salt box, for God’s sake, I want to tell him, a cell for the condemned. It’s not supposed to be fresh.
‘This is John Pears,’ you say. ‘Who was to have been yesterday’s surprise.’
He rakes his hair off his head, grips it in his fist. ‘I’ve come here to tell you in person how sorry I am . . . Miss . . . Langton.’
‘Dr Pears was until recently assistant to Dr Wilkes,’ you say. The doctor keeps his head down. You give him a sharp look. ‘You’ve come to say something, Dr Pears. Say it.’
He sinks onto the mattress, hooks his hands on the great pegs of his knees. ‘I was present during the post-mortem of your mistress, Miss Langton. I told Mr Tomkin, last Friday – I ‒ I don’t know how to say this.’
You snort. ‘Best way to say something is to say it.’
Pears heaves the words out. ‘I don’t think she had any wounds to speak of when she was brought in.’
A stumbling doubt shakes through me. ‘She wasn’t cut?’
‘She was. But I think it was after the fact. When I came to examine her there were clear signs that those injuries had been inflicted post-mortem.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I think her wounds were inflicted sometime between the time of death and the time of autopsy. I conducted a very careful examination. I’m sure of it. The incisions were too neat, pale around the edges . . . such a small quantity of blood . . .
‘And when we opened her, there was a distinct odour in her stomach contents. A smell like bitter almonds ‒’
Yes. I know it. All too well. I take a step back, straight into the table. The moment snags, and snags me with it.
‘‒ an indicator of opium. Her lungs and sinuses were congested, her heart also. There was cyanosis of many of the organs, including the skin. Signs of poisoning. Taken together with my suspicion about the nature of the wounds –’ he shrugs ‘‒ I told Wilkes we should test. Argued for it. But he refused. The laudanum had been prescribed, he said, and therefore was not a matter to concern ourselves with.’
You interrupt, impatient: ‘Wilkes swore on cross-examination that there was no reliable test.’
Pears hinges backwards, against the wall. ‘No test for opium. But there are ways to detect morphia, which is its active principle. Dr Wilkes would have been correct to say other evidence would be necessary before any sound conclusion can be reached. But, considering what I suspected, about her wounds ‒’
‘Sound conclusion about what?’ I say, the words dredged up from my throat, slow, dry as cotton.
‘About whether it could have been a case of death by poisoning.’
There’s a whip of anger in your voice. ‘All we needed, Dr Pears, was a grain of doubt. A grain. The only thing that determines whether the prisoner’s shown the rope or the door.’
What you mean is something that would have had the jurors looking in another direction: some other murderer, some trickster excuse. But this? This has shaken loose the thought that’s been there all along, one I haven’t looked at, because I didn’t want to see it.
I put my hands over my ears, blocking out Pears’s noise. But nothing ever blocks Phibbah. Men got their hands full with the big deaths, we make do with the small ones. I thought about how she’d always mutter to herself while she was fixing up her potions, that list she tapped out through her teeth. Boiled gully-root to flush a womb, or crushed peacock-flower steeped in river water. If those failed, tinctures in the milk, a needle through the fontanelle. Ground cassava root if it was the mother not the baby you wanted to kill.
The mother, not the baby. The mother and the baby. The baby, then the mother.
A cold moment of truth.
Here, at last, was a terrible certainty, which had come matched with an equally terrible doubt.
Pears unfolds himself with a click. I want to sweep him off the bed, so that I may lie in it. ‘But who would have cut her? Why did Wilkes lie?’
‘Same reason I didn’t testify, I’m sure.’
You scoff. ‘Because you’re cowards?’
He reaches up to tug on his cravat, turns to me. ‘It was I who searched out your lawyers. Said I’d attest to my findings and let Wilkes swear to his. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I thought it could be a difference of opinion. Some surgeons search only for what they expect to find.’ He drops his chin. ‘I thought we’d simply let the jurors decide.’
He works his mouth, as if getting ready to spit, or cry.
‘I thought – foolishly ‒ But I received a letter. From the hospital. I was told only that the family had made their wishes plain. Concerned about any hint that she’d been an addict, let alone any suggestion of . . . self-murder. Though it could have been pure accident, of course. It happens. Ladies exceed their doses, having built up a tolerance, over time.’ He looks up. ‘I wonder whether ‒ Wilkes might have been pressured to make those wounds himself. But, regardless of who made them, they were made post-mortem. I’m sure of it.’
For the first time since that terrible night, my heart is still. But always that stabbing grief. And now rage as well. At Pears. At the Benham family. At Wilkes. Reputation is everything. I can see just how Sir Percy would have done it. Threats. Guineas. Sweet-talking. Thinking there had been one murder, what harm in making it two?
‘I’m very sorry,’ Pears repeats.
Oh, if he says that one more time, I’ll stopper up his throat.
You jerk your hat back onto your head. ‘Cut this long tale of yours short, Pears. The tests were never carried out. You’ve repented, you’re now prepared to swear, have assured me you won’t go clucking off this time, et cetera, and we hope – you’d better hope – that it isn’t too little, too late.’
Then you tell me, more gently, that Tomkin is submitting a letter to the judge as we speak, including a transcript of what I’ve just been told. ‘I don’t suppose it needs me to tell you we don’t have much time.’
Pears looks at me. ‘There was one more thing. I didn’t believe the wounds sustained by Mr Benham were consistent with the knife that had been produced. That knife was double-edged, and the gashes were too narrow. I suggested that another search should be made, for some instrument that could cause the skin to contract around it after it had been pulled out.’
This I do not want to hear. I take a step back. There’s a rattle from the street. A cart overturning. Rocks pelted at the walls. I hope you’ll think that’s why I jump.
‘Are you all right? Miss Langton?’ I hear you, from far away: ‘She’s overcome, and no wonder. There has been an egregious miscarriage of justice, and you had no small part in it . . .’
I put my hand to my throat. I’ll tell Pears. I’ll tell him. No search would have found that weapon. Here it is. Memory, clear, cold. Where it has always been. Benham’s face. He’s shouting. I’m shouting too. His face twists in front of me. The scissors twist. My hands.
But you’re already preparing to leave, which I tell myself gives me permission to say nothing. Before you do, you ask me to focus on the events of that night. You say it will help my case to remember as much detail as I can. Anything I can think of, which you will put together with Pears’s word. ‘Best as you can remember.’ Give me something I can save your neck with. My best hope now is to throw myself on the court’s mercy, you say. No hope for a pardon, but leniency, perhaps.
Chapter Fifty
I’ve heard nothing from you since. But Sal came and found me this morning. How it made my heart leap to see her. I tried to give her my attention, push other thoughts aside. She hadn’t been at the trial, she said, because the old bastard’s children had come for her. They’d just appeared on the doorstep one day, bailiffs in tow. Apparently, there’s been no end of trouble for her since my trial. Everyone in Lon
don knows where the School-house is now. The old bastard’s children claimed Sal was their property, left to them in his will. Mrs Slap said she had to go, not to bring any more trouble. For six weeks she’d been a maid. Sal, a maid! I tried to picture her with bucket and soap and rags. Oh, she made me laugh, with her tales of seasoning their tea with their own piss! She’d been able to buy herself back, with all her savings from the School-house. All her lovely coins, poured out in a golden stream, right into their grasping hands.
She grinned. ‘I suppose I rather pay them than pay some lawyer to fight them. And I got my free paper now.’
She told me the broadsheets are saying that the Devil was in me and put it in my head, that I wanted to carve the Benhams and boil their bones into soup and that I do not repent of it, save that I didn’t get that chance. I didn’t want to talk to her about any of it. I asked her about Laddie, but she knew nothing. Laddie’s made himself a loose thread. I suspect he didn’t want to face their questions, or their English justice.
We held hands, we watched the candles dwindle and burn. She’d brought me food, a blanket, some paper and a pen. Added to the sheaf you had already left.
Best of all, a copy of Moll.
I won’t say more about Sal’s visit. It was like that elephant, so long ago. No matter what I write, you won’t know what it was like. She did bring one last thing, which I saved until she left. A letter. I opened it, pulled one of the candles closer. It was from Miss-bella, addressed to: ‘Frances, former housemaid and latter-day whore’, care of THE SCHOOL-HOUSE. I suppose she must have read the papers too. Perhaps it amused her to write me at the brothel rather than the gaol.
Frances,
I do hope this reaches you.
My husband is long gone and Phibbah even longer. Therefore I must write you.
I heard he gave you away as soon as you got to England, which must mean he knew how close death was for him. I believe it is also close for you.
It has outraged my brother that I am writing to you. His sister, penning a letter to her husband’s bastard! I think he saw it as the last sign, if he needed one, of how this place has rotted me like a thrown-away apple.
My husband’s bastard. Those are my words. My brother’s were not as delicate, though I don’t intend to spare your feelings in this. In fact, I intend to be as cruel as I can.
My husband’s bastard. And now my confessor.
I was the one who told you. I did that to be cruel as well. As long as I live, which will now be mercifully brief, I will be cursed to go over and over back to that porch, to your mulish answer when I asked you what you were doing in that coach-house with my husband. Cleaning, you said. Cleaning! As if anyone inside or outside that house was fooled by then into thinking you a maid. I told you he was your father. His bone and his flesh. Oh, I could see the horror on your face. You said you were going to be sick. You vomited on my rosebushes – do you remember that?
The things the two of you did were abominations, even in a place awash in abominations.
But I am not writing you about that. I am writing about your mother. You used to ask about her. Over and over. I used to hear her, when you asked, telling you to leave her alone. She was the reason he brought you to live in the Great House, you know. She is, I suppose, the reason I was kind to you at the start. I wanted to hurt her. I even made sure I was the one to name you, that she’d have not even that small serving of a mother’s joy. He was fond enough of her, in his own way. (These things are very seldom black and white, are they?) Fond enough to promise that you would never be sold away, that you could come up out of the quarters, that you would not be put in the fields. You were never to know the truth. But she’d have told you, just as I did, had she still been here. I’m sure of it. Anything to stop what the two of you were doing.
I suspect there were others before you. Babies, I mean. If there was one person on that whole estate who knew how a woman could go about saving herself from children she didn’t want, it was your mother. Before you came, Langton used to say the pair of us – she and I, I mean – were barren as a pair of shipboard hens. Ha! You proved him wrong, and then it was only me. The idiot. He was as blind as all men to anything that would suggest his own inadequacy, or a woman’s choice. Those herbs she gave me. I made a joke of it. Give me this day, my daily orangeade. The thing that saved me from having to bear his children. And for that, I am grateful to her.
I don’t understand how you slipped through your mother’s cracks. Perhaps she was tired, by then, or perhaps her usual tricks just didn’t work. However it happened, you were Langton’s only child, and I take pleasure in that.
You were born, she ran away, and then he hunted her down and dragged her back and he ordered Manso to take his chisel to her teeth. But he cut off his own nose to spite his face, as they say. She didn’t hold the same appeal after that. Oh, but he was fond of her. He made her those promises, after all, about you.
I learned the hard way that this is a place where a man keeps his concubines and his bastards in plain sight. The very woman who’d spit in your porridge in the morning could be fornicating with your husband that night.
How it destroys all of us.
I am tired. I will finish this. Where was I?
Your mother.
In the Bible, Laban gave to his daughter Rachel his handmaid Bilhah, to be her handmaid. And Rachel’s sons were the sons of Bilhah, her handmaid.
We were Rachel and Bilhah, she and I.
My husband no doubt believed that in the next life she and I will still be out on that porch, surrounded by dying English roses, me with the tea, her with the fan.
I think he is wrong.
Mrs A. Langton
My stomach clenches. I’m back in the dining room, telling Langton about the orangeade, telling myself I was only speaking the truth, forgetting how many sides the truth has. I can’t see how terrible it will be, because all I’m thinking about is me. Fear makes my mouth dry as salt. I’d seen it, of course, during the years that followed, who she was to me; there was, after all, only one woman it could have been. All those times I’d asked her, perhaps I was just waiting for her to tell me. She hated me sometimes. But I believe there was love, too.
So many things to tell her. How guilt has run through me, all this time, keeping time with my blood. How, even now, to think of it, to write of it, makes both leap in my chest. How sorry I am.
A child’s understanding is dark. Sometimes light is blinding. I shake the letter out on my lap and read it again. And then I’m on the porch. I watch Miss-bella’s slow hands reaching for the glass. Phibbah behind her with the fan. The orangeade. That’s how they managed it. Not poison, those herbs in Miss-bella’s glass, but her daily dose. Make sure she stayed barren. But in Jamaica there were two truths. One, all bush medicine is obeah if they say it is. And two, white women never take the blame.
Chapter Fifty-One
Light skims the bars. I feel the mattress shift. Madame sits next to me. She has her little black book, her quill. She’s making her notes. Any minute, she’ll take off her boots and pull me into her lap, and kiss me, and I will never want to open my eyes and let her go. Nothing between us but a tendon of breath and this fresh morning, rinsing everything with light. I’ve even managed a little sleep. Then I huddle my knees in, to watch her walking away, lavender silk brushing her ankles. She looks over her shoulder, tears in her eyes, shining like ice. What can I say to make her stay?
And then the sudden knowledge. A flare of light.
What would you take with you if you could leave?
I claw my way to my feet, bang my fists across the door, cry out for the keys. No answer. No one comes. For the first time in this god-forsaken place, all is wretchedly quiet. Not a shuffle. Not a whisper. I knock until my hands are numb, until I feel my own frustration beating through my skin, like a second heart. Then I stop, listen to the walls creaking around me. I serve other masters now, and nothing will happen until they come.
At last,
I’m permitted to send word out, and then follows the agony of waiting.
That single silent nod of yours slams into my throat. Prickles salt into my eyes.
I had hoped to be wrong.
‘It was behind that portrait,’ you say. You give me a sharp look. ‘Tucked in against the frame. How did you know? More to the point, why could this not have occurred to you during your trial? Tomkin found Meek and asked him to go back to the house. They went together. He noted the contents, if you’re interested? This is a copy. The document itself has gone off to the judge.’ You hold it up, gingerly, like something that might leave a stain.
And I snatch it, so I can read it myself.
Death is the only thing that scares me now, and yet the only thing that can take away my fears.
I am sorry.
It strikes me that these may be the last words I will ever read, these last words she ever wrote, and I read them greedy as a calf at a teat. Delivered by the woman in red, tucked behind her frame.
I am sorry.
‘It bears her signature. Here.’ I point. ‘Ritte Delacroix.’
‘Yes,’ you say. ‘Self-murder. There can be no doubt.’
The long dark days following my trial, it seems even the skies have turned black with spite. Fits of lightning at the window, so the light seems to slice the walls. I pace my cell. A felon should never dwell on her own verdict. It’s a waste of time, when time is all she has left. Yet I’m sad to say that’s precisely what I do. I think about my trial, about you, about that defence you concocted. You’re all the talk here, even though you lost. That sleepwalking defence. Lushing called it science, but it seemed closer to magic if you ask me: a black shade drawn down ‒ by sleep or intoxication ‒ then a kind of dreaming madness in its wake. That was your own spell, to make them think me an automaton, a zombi. Then I stop dead in my tracks, struck by the thought that it was the very spell some would say Langton cast, the minute I set foot in that coach-house. Stripped of my free will. But death can be a choice too, the dark link between dreaming and madness. Her melancholia that same black link, opium the shade she drew down on herself. All those rotten branches, growing from the same black root.
