The Conviction of Cora Burns E-Book

Carolyn Kirby

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 470

Beschreibung

Short-listed for the Crimefest/Specsavers Debut Crime Fiction Award 2020 Longlisted for the Historical Writers Association (HWA) Debut Crown award 2019 To believe in her future, she must uncover her past... Birmingham, 1885. Born in a gaol and raised in a workhouse, Cora Burns has always struggled to control the violence inside her. Haunted by memories of a terrible crime, she seeks a new life working as a servant in the house of scientist Thomas Jerwood. Here, Cora befriends a young girl, Violet, who seems to be the subject of a living experiment. But is Jerwood also secretly studying Cora...? With the power and intrigue of Laura Purcell'sThe Silent Companionsand Sarah Schmidt'sSee What I Have Done, Carolyn Kirby's stunning debut takes the reader on a heart-breaking journey through Victorian Birmingham and questions where we first learn violence: from our scars or from our hearts.

Leseprobe

Nought

April 1865

born

Here you come. I put down my hand and feel your little head between my legs. Your skull, cupped in my palm, swivels. Bone grinds against bone and I cry out, Lord help me! Although I am forbidden to speak, even now. They push me down on to all fours, hands and knees pressed on to the slimy newspaper that is spread over the boards. Black letters swirl into red as I strain and bellow through clamped teeth. My shift is pulled up so that it hangs around my neck like a dripping cheese muslin. Something inside me gives and your whole head pops through. Then the rest of you slides out of me in a hot, squirty rush. There’s rot and rust in the stone-damp air.

I collapse on to my side and reach out for you, warm and slippery with Lord knows what. Your face, swathed in lardy grease, glows white in the gaslight. Blood smears your tiny limbs. They start to wrap you in an old flannel rag and wipe the muck from your nostrils. They are too rough and I hear your voice. Good lungs on her, they say and smile. Not a thing I’ve seen them do before. They call me Mary and I wonder who that is.

I try to sit up but there is a mound of something under me that’s in the way. One of them gets the knife with its dull rusty blade. Someone should have cleaned it with brick dust. Their eyes are wary when they see me looking but how could I try anything in this state? They ask me what your name will be. I touch your cheek and smell the sweetest spot on your milky newborn head. Cora, I say. It seems right for you who came from the heart of me. Then they pull you away. The ugly one grabs at my belly, squeezing the doughy softness, feeling for something. Hold still, she says with a hard hand on my shoulder and a terrifying gleam in her eye, you aren’t quite finished yet.

One

October 1885

prison stays

‘Hold still.’ The photographer looked up from his device but avoided Cora’s eye. ‘No. Stiller than that. For a count of four. And please do not blink.’

Did he think her made of metal? Glowering, she pressed her ribs against the prison stays. The camera gave off a gin-sharp whiff of ether.

‘Ready now?’ He twirled a scrap of grey hair around his middle finger then lifted the lens-flap. ‘One… Two…’

His fidgetiness was vexing. And it was a liberty to take her likeness just before release as if she was a habitual criminal. Meaning it to look like a mishap, Cora blinked.

The photographer’s stone-grey eyes locked on to hers, and then something in his countenance shifted. His face, less comical than Cora had supposed, seemed to whiten. It was as if he had seen, through his lens, the hidden awfulness of her crimes. Her stomach pitched.

‘Beg pardon, sir.’

‘Once more, then.’ His attention slid to the floor. ‘Stay on your mark.’

Cora’s clogs shuffled inside the chalk-drawn feet on the boards and again the photographer looked into the lens. It was a dry-plate camera; dark shiny wood and black leather bellows. Expensive. And he didn’t look much like a prison photographer; his coat was too clean.

He lifted the lens-flap and started to count but his voice this time was twitchy.

‘One…Two…’

In the corner, the stout wardress folded her arms into a threat. Window bars threw a black grid on to the glossy brown wall.

‘…Three… Four…’

The lens-flap squeaked shut and the photographer’s mouth formed a shape he must have intended to be a smile. As he bent to the equipment at his feet, he slipped a sideways glance at Cora.

‘And now I have some questions for you.’

‘What sort of questions?’

The wardress lunged, keys beating against skirts, and a finger jabbed between Cora’s shoulder blades, making her stumble forward. The photographer continued to rummage in his bag then placed a sheet of printed paper on the lid of the wooden travelling box. He took out a silver pencil, holding it up to the light to push an exact amount of lead from the point as he slid another look at Cora.

‘So, your name is Cora Burns?’

She shrugged and the wardress poked her in the arm. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty, sir.’

Something in his stance stiffened. ‘Do you know on which day you were born?’

‘July the twenty-ninth.’

‘I see, very good. Few know it so well.’

Of course she knew the date of her birth, but that wasn’t it.

‘Do you have a trade?’

‘Oakum picker.’

‘I meant before you were committed to this place.’

Cora knew perfectly well what he’d meant but the keenness of his curiosity seemed improper, even for a likeness-taker.

‘Laundry maid, sir.’

‘In a private house?’

‘No, sir. In the Borough Lunatic Asylum.’

There was no jerk of distaste, only a raised eyebrow. He bent forward to write, backside stuck up in the air and breeches ballooning over his felt gaiters. If her release hadn’t been so near, she’d have laughed out loud.

‘What, pray, has been the length of your sentence?’

‘Nine… nineteen months.’

‘And your crime?’

She’d guessed this was coming but the question still brought a flutter to her belly. A sudden vision of a bootlace in her hands choked the words in her throat.

The wardress glared. ‘Tell the gentleman!’

But the photographer waved a hand. ‘No matter, madam. I can find out soon enough. The girl’s reticence does her credit.’

Cora fought a tug of dizziness as she pictured him writing her offence on to his sheet of bond.

‘And your parents, what sort of people are they?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I never knew them.’

‘They are dead?’

‘I suppose.’

His fingers tapped a complicated rhythm on the travelling box and his high forehead creased. ‘So what else can you tell me of yourself?’

‘I was brought up under the Board of Guardians. In the Union workhouse.’

‘You were a foundling?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘How so?’

The silver pencil fluttered between his thumb and forefinger. Cora wondered, briefly, whether to lie but she’d a fancy to see his reaction to the truth.

‘My mother abandoned me here when I was not three months old.’

‘Here? At the gaol?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘At the gatehouse, do you mean?’

‘No, sir. She gave birth to me in her cell and when she departed from here left me behind.’

He stood straight now and unmoving. ‘So, your mother was a convict too?’

‘Yes.’

‘And her crime?’

‘I know only her name, sir. Mary.’

The photographer sprang forward to write.

Cora breathed out and pressed tight fists into the coarse apron across her stomach. She was glad that she would never know the answer to his last question for it was not impossible that the cause of her mother’s conviction had been the same as her own.

seams

Her liberty clothes, as Cora put them on, smelled like day-old wash-water and everything was too big. Inside her Melton jacket, pale thread dotted the dark seams where she had let them out, month by month, to the final weft in the cloth. Now, the jacket hung loose in the wrong places and seemed to point to the part of her that was missing.

‘Burns!’ The squinty-eyed wardress shouted from the discharge desk on the other side of the folding screen. ‘Out. Now!’

Now? Not likely. The wall-eyed bitch could wait. Cora wrapped her plaid shawl cross-wise over her stomach and tied a knot behind her back to pull the loose jacket tight. But the thought of how constricting the jacket had seemed last time she wore it brought a pang of emptiness. In the asylum laundry, she’d had to leave her shawl dangling over her belly to cover the gap between eyelets and hooks. They’d all looked sideways along the soaping-trough and must have guessed the truth. The shawl still had a whiff of asylum soap.

Cora turned to the dirty window. Her reflection was vague but she licked two fingers and rubbed quick circles along her hairline. A few stray wisps bounced into curls and a shiver went through her. No one could tell her not to do it any more. Through the shadow of her head on the glass, the red-brick gables of the asylum poked above the prison wall. And in the smoky distance, a gleam of wet slate marked the workhouse roof from the grey sky. Her whole life had been spent in these three buildings. Each, in its different way, had been worse than the last. But the thought of spending even one night anywhere else made her mind freeze over like the wash-house tap on a January morning.

‘Out, I say. Now.’

Cora smirked to her reflection and felt bolder. ‘Even if I’m not decent?’

‘You? You’ll never be decent.’

The wardress’s good eye followed Cora across the room and watched her drop the striped prison garb into a jumbled heap on to the counter. Others might have given her a slap for that but the wardress was old and lazy, like her eye.

‘Watch it, F.2.10. You’re not out yet.’

‘Going to lock me up again, are you?’

‘I could. And then you wouldn’t get this.’

The wardress tapped the corner of a brown envelope on the counter. It was addressed in a flowing hand: F.2.10.

‘What is it?’

‘You want it then?’

Cora shrugged.

The wardress placed the envelope between them and ran her finger down a column in the leather-bound book. Then she reached below the counter and held up a small sack sewn into the shape of a pocket. A long string threaded in and out of the hemmed opening. Preserving Sugar was still stamped in faint ink across the canvas.

‘Yours?’

The wardress emptied Cora’s belongings across the counter; sewing scissors and a bobbin of white thread, a grey handkerchief, a lump of grimy soap and, on its loop of greasy twine, the half-medal. Then the wardress thrust her hand inside the pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper, furred along the folds. Cora held her breath as she read from it out loud.

‘Where Born: Birmingham Gaol, Female Quarters…Name and Maiden Surname of Mother: Mary Burns…’ Her good eye seemed to stay on Cora as she read.

‘Yes. It’s you all right.’

Cora wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of asking what she meant.

‘What about my money? I had more than a sovereign when I came in here.’

‘Patience, girl.’

The wardress opened a drawer and counted sixpences and coppers into a pile.

‘One, two, three… four shillings and sixpence.’

‘And the rest?’

‘The rest has been expropriated. Which means…’

‘I know what it means. But what about my last month’s wages from the asylum? Another pound.’

‘Also expropriated. Paid from the Asylum Committee of Visitors direct to the gaol in order to fund your board and keep during your sentence. The governor has kindly made you this discharge allowance for food and lodging until you find work.’

‘I’m much obliged. I shall book a room at the Grand Hotel.’

‘Think yourself lucky to get anything.’ The wardress pushed the pile of coins across the counter and dipped a pen in the inkwell. ‘You’ll have to sign for it.’

Cora scratched a spidery signature. She tried to remember the last time she’d written anything but couldn’t. The wardress turned the ledger around and her face set into a toothless sneer.

‘That’s right. Cora Burns. Born to crime.’

Cora held out the pen with a smile as bright as she could fake. ‘Like you were born always looking the wrong way?’

‘Think you’re clever, don’t you? But I’d wipe the smile off your mouth if I was to tell you about your ma. Hardly the full shilling, that one.’

Cora flinched. ‘My mother? What do you know of her?’

‘I know that her and you are two halves of the same bad penny.’

The sneer dissolved into a cackle and bile rose in Cora’s throat. An oyster of spit on that misshapen eyelid might be worth an extra night or two in the cell. But a starchy prison bonnet would flatten her already flimsy curls, and she’d not yet found out what was in that letter.

Cora bundled the birth certificate and her other belongings back into the pocket. She grabbed the brown envelope and stuffed that in too, then pulled up her skirt to thread the pocket strings around her waist, not caring who saw the stains on her petticoats.

‘Can I go now?’

The wardress winked her good eye. ‘Make the most of it. Won’t be long till you’re back.’

the towing path

Piles of sawn wood chequered the narrow wharf below the prison wall. Each stack seated a gang of porters, all sucking at clay pipes. Cora threaded between them, head down, until one of the men coughed and she looked up. The man gave her a toothless grin then puckered his blackened lips for a kiss.

Cora stared at him blankly for a moment before sticking out her tongue as far as it would go. Then, without waiting to hear the taunts, she ran. And, as she careered past the lock and on to the towing path, she heard herself break into a laugh as loud and mirthless as a lunatic’s.

Her lungs heaved and her old boots pinched in new places. Cora stopped, panting, to let a towering barge-horse go by and realised how unused to movement she’d become. The lad poked a stick at the animal’s shaggy fetlocks and a big eye rolled white behind the blinker. From the horse’s flanks, rope sliced through dull filmy water to a longboat loaded with coal. At the rudder, a dirty-faced woman shouted a greeting but Cora’s stare was fixed on the grey buildings across the cut.

Her hand slipped then through the familiar slit in her skirt seam and into the pocket. She felt for the small semi-circle of metal and let it lie like a bruise on her palm. The bronze was dull and brown as a Coronation penny. She ran a fingertip over the bumps of the raised image and the jumble of engraved letters.

… MDCCCLXI IMAGINEM SALT…

A tiny bronze hand pointing gracefully to the word SALT was the only part of the picture that anyone could put a name to. The other lumps and lines formed a cameo of indistinct drapery.

Cora now had no doubt that the missing half of the medal would reveal not only a meaning to the muddle of letters but also the slight frame and winsome face of Alice Salt. Who else but Alice could have given Cora the half-medal with its misspelt instruction to “imagine Salt”, and kept hold of the portion that showed her own face? As the solitary hours in her cell had ticked by, Cora’s childhood companion and the cold inkling of what they might have done together, had come to occupy all of her waking thoughts. For only Alice knew what had really happened.

Cora’s palm closed over the sharp corners. Two halves of the same bad penny. Maybe that old witch of a wardress had thought up her nonsense about Cora’s mother when she’d seen the half-medal on the discharge-counter. As if Cora cared anything about Mary Burns. The name was nothing more to her than faded letters on crumbling paper.

A whiff of boiled bones from the soap factory blew across the canal. Suddenly feeble, Cora sank between two scraggy bushes on to mud hardened by coal dust. She looped the twine over her head and, unhooking the eyes at the top of her too-loose jacket, shoved the half-medal inside. Then she reached into the sugar-sack pocket for the envelope. Paper crackled as it opened.

To: Prisoner F.2.10

This is to direct you to a situation as Between Maid in a gentleman’s residence. Although you have no character to present, Mr Thomas Jerwood makes this kind offer as the means to a prisoner’s moral restoration and upon the understanding that should any concern about your conduct arise, you will leave forthwith. You will join a staff of four indoor servants. Your terms will be £8 per annum. Kindly make your way to The Larches, Spark Hill, Warks and report to Mrs Dix (Housekeeper) upon your arrival.

Capt GN McCall, Governor

The governor, like his nasty wardress, must be having a jest at her expense. Eight pounds a year was an insult. Half what she’d got as a laundress. And how could she be fitted to domestic service? She’d never been in a house. Cora stared at an oily rainbow on the canal as she tore the letter into a scatter of white paper across the black earth.

She heaved herself up and saw the poke of brick gables through nearby trees. The Borough Lunatic Asylum was the nearest she’d ever got to a home. Sometimes, when they’d all been at dinner in the servants’ hall and the outdoor men had come in with gossip and jokes, she’d thought that they might almost be a family. She could still smell the asylum air steeped with mutton fat and floor polish, and imagine her own silly face grinning at the gasmen and the stokers.

With a horrible belch, Cora leaned over a thin bush and retched up a mess of runny oatmeal on to the sooty leaves. The skilly looked and smelt about the same as it did when she’d eaten it that morning. She spat the last of it on to the ground then wiped the back of her hand across her mouth.

It was time to make haste, however sickly she felt, towards the wide smoky blur of the town. On the way, she couldn’t avoid passing alongside the workhouse but she’d keep her eyes fixed on the tottering cranes at the goods yard and a distant gleam of roof-glass from New Street Station. As she walked though, a shrill clang from the belfry caused Cora to turn. She could not then help seeing the rows of dirty windows and close-packed chimneys. The sight of the Union house brought a sudden ache to her throat and a picture to her mind, clear as a photographic likeness, of the first time she had seen Alice.

Two

1874

the Union

She slipped in without Cora noticing. Only when Mr Bowyer rapped his cane on his desk did Cora look around from the blackboard, a nub of chalk between her fingers, and see a new face on the last row. The girl’s bonnet was tied loosely and had slipped back to reveal the just-shaved bristles on her scalp. Her cheeks had the red flush of skin unused to warm water.

Mr Bowyer’s cane whacked again, nearer this time. Cora felt a sigh of air on her neck before the slap of birch against the blackboard.

‘Where is the date, Cora Burns?’

Cora stiffened. But she did not flinch, especially as the new girl was watching. Her hand wrote Friday 3rdApril and stayed steady through the chalk loops.

‘Now Cora,’ Mr Bowyer said, ‘continue with your problem.’

Cora was always called to the front for problems. She had come to realise, quite recently, that Mr Bowyer, although he seemed like a man, was not very old, probably not much older than the biggest girls in the upper dormitories. And he was not very good at problems. Sums, he could more or less manage. But when it came to working out the number of threepenny herrings to be purchased for eight shillings and sixpence, or the weight of each fancy bun in a two-pound dozen, he had to call Cora up to the front. He never let on to her that he couldn’t work it out for himself and she kept his secret. There was unspoken payment for her silence. Once, he had given her a shop-bought biscuit. But she had never seen a fancy bun, or a herring.

When the bell rang and they went to the yard, Cora pushed herself to the front of the crush and laid hands on the girl as she came out of the school room door. That was what she always did with new ones; she’d pull them by the ear and give their wrists a Chinese twist, just so they knew that Cora was the toughest, the cleverest, the one who’d been here the longest. But this girl was different. There was a strange familiarity about her that made Cora entwine her arm in a friendly link and walk her slowly around the tall metal pole of the giant stride. For once, Cora didn’t mind that Lottie Bolger had grabbed one of the chain swings before her.

Chilly spring air made the new girl shiver in her workhouse calico. Cora pulled her closer.

‘Have you been in here before?’

The girl looked at Cora then slowly shook her head.

‘What’s your name?’

The new girl blinked. ‘Alice Salt.’

Cora’s laugh had a cruel edge. ‘That’s a funny name. Alice Salt; all is salt.’

Alice flushed. Despite the blotched skin, her face was a pretty oval with tiny cupid lips and almond-shaped eyes under thick brows. They seemed like the same shaped eyes, in fact, as Cora’s own. And Cora’s might also be the same shade of violety-grey but she had never looked in a glass clear enough to know.

All of the Bolger girls were rattling the chains on the giant stride and staring at Cora. Normally, she’d have taken this as a challenge, called them pikeys and threatened to spit in their beds, but today she turned her back. She tightened her arm on Alice’s elbow.

‘I’m Cora Burns. I’ll look after you but you must do as I say. How old are you?’

Alice licked her cracking lips. ‘Nine.’

Cora’s eyes narrowed. Skinny little runt if she was nine.

Tears began to pool at Alice’s eyelids. ‘Today’s my birthday.’

Birthday? Cora had never heard such a lot of stuck-up swill. She put both hands on Alice’s wrist and forced the skin in opposite directions. A teardrop slipped through Alice’s dark eyelashes and spilled down her cheek. But she didn’t make a sound and her hand stayed on Cora’s sleeve. Perhaps she did have guts after all. Cora wiped the drip from Alice’s cheek and felt a twinge of remorse. She almost confessed that she was angry only because the date of her own birth was a blank. She might be nine as well, but couldn’t be sure.

Then Cora looked down at Alice’s wrist and jerked back in panic. A wheal of red skin puckered up Alice’s arm into her sleeve. Alice saw Cora’s expression and smiled through her tears.

‘Don’t worry, you didn’t do that. It was from japanning.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Don’t you know?’

Cora grabbed hold of the scarred wrist, twisting it again to show that she was the one who’d ask the questions round here.

Later that night, when all the hoo-ha had died down and there was only spluttering and coughing in the dormitory, Cora made herself stay awake until the snuffling started. It would always get going as soon as the new girl thought no one could hear. Cora pulled back her covers, about to slip along the facing rows of iron beds, but a shivering figure in a too-big nightdress was already there at her bedside. Alice’s face was washed in grey moonlight. She seemed almost to float on the cold air that slid through gaps in the floorboards.

‘Will you budge up for me, Cora? I can’t get to sleep on my own.’

She stole between the sheets and Cora pulled the lumpy blanket over their heads pressing herself around Alice’s bird-like limbs. Alice wiped a hand across the burbling from her nose and whispered.

‘I don’t like that bed. Who was in it before?’

‘Betty Hines.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Her mother came for her, but it won’t be long till she’s back, I’d say. The mother’s a widow and sickly so Betty’s in and out of here like a rat in a drain.’

Alice turned in the bed and Cora could make out her eyes shining in the darkness.

‘I hope your mother doesn’t come for you, Cora.’

An odd tightness gripped at Cora’s chest. She knew that she must have had one once but mother was just a word. She had never before imagined her own to be a living, breathing woman. Cora swallowed the tightness away and cut a hard note into her voice.

‘It’s best not to have a mother. Everyone who does can’t stop blubbing.’

Alice put her hand on Cora’s. ‘I don’t have a mother either.’

‘Is she dead?’

Alice shook her head. ‘I thought Ma was my mother until she told me that I was boarded out to her from the Parish. And now I’m nine, the Guardians expect me to get the same to eat as a grown-up. So Ma can’t keep me any more.’

It took Cora a minute to comprehend what Alice was telling her. ‘If she’s not your real Ma, who is?’

But Alice could only shrug, her eyes glistening with tears.

In the next bed, Hetty Skelling coughed in a way that made Cora suspect she was wide awake and listening. Cora rubbed her big toe on Alice’s icy foot and put her lips almost inside Alice’s ear. Her voice was quiet as breath.

‘We’re the same then, you and me. And that’s why, from now on, we’re going to be sisters.’

Three

October 1885

a likeness

By the time Cora got to Corporation Street the lights were coming on. An eggy whiff followed the lamp-lighter as he sparked each post into a fizzing yellow glow. Above the traffic, windows began to gleam, one on top of another, five sandstone storeys high. Shopfront mirrors glinted on to packed rows of tobacco pipes and toffee tins.

Cora stepped aside for a butcher’s lad carrying half a pig on his shoulder. The coldness of the beast’s waxy skin breathed across her face. She shrank away from it into the dazzle of a window and winced. Nothing had shone that bright for a long time.

It was a photographer’s shop with a display of framed portraits. The sitters were placed in artificial scenes; a tennis party in a blurry woodland glade, a father trying not to laugh as he rowed his daughter in a pretend boat across a painted lake. All of them stared into the same void just beyond Cora’s left shoulder.

She found herself scanning the black-and-white faces for anyone who might be a grown-up version of Alice. It was far-fetched, she knew. But if Cora held her breath for long enough she could still feel the beat of Alice’s heart inside her own. So somewhere in the town’s teeming streets and courts and terraces, Alice must live. Perhaps at this very moment she could be on Corporation Street, scouring these same unsmiling faces for one that looked like her Union house sister.

Curling gold letters spelt out HJ Thripp & Son on the shop’s glass door. Cora pushed it open and a bell rang. Shelves and cabinets groaned with boxes of gelatine plates, fancy frames and viewing devices. The air reeked of camphor.

‘Yes?’

The man’s elbows rested on a glass-topped counter, his long beard almost sweeping the top of it. He gave Cora a smile that wasn’t entirely pleasant and she tried not to look at him as she spoke.

‘I’m after a likeness.’

‘Very good. My son can do it presently.’

‘I want it done now.’

‘Do you indeed?’

‘I’ve no need for a print. I just want you to take the likeness.’

‘Well, I’m busy. I’ve no time to change the scenery or lend out fancy attire.’

‘That doesn’t matter.’

The man, Mr Thripp she supposed, looked her up and down. ‘A tradeswoman’s portrait is it? In your working clothes, with some tools of your trade?’

‘No. A plain likeness, done as I am. How much?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Two shillings.’

‘How much if you keep it, to go in your window?’

‘In the display? I hardly think…’

‘I’ll pay two and six.’

Mr Thripp straightened and came around the counter putting both thumbs into the little pockets of his discoloured waistcoat. He was a big man and seemed to fill the shop.

‘Let’s see how well you take before I decide.’

He pulled back a curtain and beckoned Cora through, pointing her to a padded chair beside a small table. Thin twilight fell from a wide glass panel in the ceiling. Mr Thripp went to the battered wooden camera already set up on its tripod and he slotted a flat box into the top.

‘Now then, put your elbow on the table, lean your cheek upon your palm and look up at my birdie in yon corner.’

He pointed at a stuffed bird fixed above the doorway, its red and blue plumage deadened by dust.

She turned to face him, putting her hands in her lap. ‘No. I’ll look straight.’

He shrugged. ‘That will not flatter. But it’s your half-crown.’

After unscrewing the camera’s lens cap, he flicked a switch on a tall lamp topped by a shiny disc. Light exploded. Cora told herself not to blink as black spots floated across her vision. The light faded slowly and Mr Thripp replaced the camera’s cap. Then he took the plate-holder out of the camera box and disappeared into what seemed to be a cupboard. A line of orange light glowed along the bottom of the door. Glass clinked.

Cora looked up at the skylight and tried to blink away the silvery blotches swimming across her eyes. The chances of finding Alice like this must be slight. Perhaps she should run off now and save her shillings. She couldn’t imagine how she’d get any more.

But then the cupboard door opened and Mr Thripp was back in the room. He was holding a sheet of white blotting paper behind a dripping glass plate. Vinegary fumes needled through the shreds of smoke.

‘Not bad, as a matter of fact. Quite a singular face. Fetching in a way. It might make some stop and look.’

‘So will you put it in the window?’

‘Well…’

‘And should anyone ask for me, you’ll make a note of their name and directions?’

‘Now, now. I’m not some kind of registry. I’ll display the portrait for a period but that’s all. Of course, if you want them, prints may be had. At sixpence each.’

Cora turned away from him to reach into her sugar-sack pocket. As she pulled her hand out of her skirt, she felt his eyes on her.

His voice thickened. ‘And when the throngs begin to clamour for you, to where should I direct them?’

She shrugged and swallowed an urge to smash a nearby jar of purple liquid into his beard.

‘I’m seeking a situation. So I’ll return here to enquire.’

‘What’s your trade?’

‘Laundress.’

His gaze slid over her, a smirk on his lips. ‘You could try Mrs Small’s on Bordesley Street. A common lodging house. She usually has something for young laundresses.’

‘Are you having me on?’

‘Why?’

‘Am I to wash her “smalls”?’

His face jolted as he grasped the joke. Then he smiled. ‘Sharp one, aren’t you?’

He slipped the glass plate into a china tray of liquid on the shelf. Cora watched her own unsmiling monochrome eyes ripple under the water. Mr Thripp wiped his hand on a rag and stretched an upturned palm towards her.

‘Let’s call it two shillings then.’

Cora took care, as she dropped the coins, not to touch his skin. ‘You’ll put the likeness in the window tonight?’

He gave a mocking incline of his head. ‘Anything else, miss?’

‘Yes. Which way to Bordesley Street?’

common lodging

‘Mrs Small’s lodging house. Is it down here?’

The man grinned orange in the light from a tobacco-stained window. ‘Why you going there, love?’

‘For work.’

He winked and held up his beer glass, pointing it down the half-lit street. ‘That way. Sheep Court.’

The rattling of an unseen train across the overhead viaduct relieved Cora of any need to thank him.

She turned her back to the ale-house and walked from one smoky circle of lamplight to the next as quickly as the raw blisters on her heel would allow. In a beam from an alley lamp, a chalk sheep was drawn roughly on to damp bricks. The same beam lit up a skinny dog laid flat on the pavement. Cora wondered if the dog was dead but as she stepped over it the mangy tail twitched.

Squeals funnelled along the entry. The din got worse as the passage widened to a space between tall dilapidated houses. The court was heaving with kids and not a clean face on any of them. The loudest yelps came from three boys hurling themselves around on ropes hung from the lamp post topped by a leaping yellow flame. The air reeked of privies.

At Cora’s feet, a small girl seemed deaf to the wails of the baby trying to pull itself upright on her dirty pinny. Cora shouted over the bawling.

‘Which is Mrs Small’s?’

The girl’s wizened face looked up at her. ‘Got anything to eat?’

The baby stopped crying and looked up too, wobbling on fat little toes that squelched into the mud. There was no telling if it was a girl or a boy but it wasn’t as big as Cora’s own child should be by now. He’d be walking properly. Running, even. Cora shivered. For a second, she sensed the exact pressure of a child that size on her hip, although she had never, as far as she could remember, held one. She blinked the thought away.

‘No, I haven’t.’

The little girl shrugged. ‘Don’t know then.’

‘Grasping little blighters round here, aren’t you?’

Cora felt inside her skirt and into the pocket for a farthing but could find nothing less than a penny. She held it out to the girl who snatched the coin and scooped up the baby. Cora followed them across the court. The boys, sensing something happening, left their scuffling around the rope swings and ran after them squawking like seagulls behind a night-soil wagon.

‘Oi Missus! Missus where y’going?’

The girl with the baby was pushing against a door. Wood scraped and paint flaked. The baby started to yowl. Cora placed herself in the doorway to keep the other kids out.

A throaty voice came from the darkness of a passageway. ‘Who is it?’

Then a woman’s head appeared from an inside doorway; metal curlers flopped on to her shoulders and swung around her ears.

‘I’ve come about the situation.’

‘What situation? Who sent you?’

‘Mr Thripp. The photographer.’

‘Oh, him. Come in then if you like. But tell them kids to go to hell.’

The children seemed already to have melted away.

Cora followed the woman into a dingy parlour but stayed by the doorway and tried to ease the weight off the throbbing on her heel. The woman sat at a round table covered with a threadbare Turkey carpet. On an upright chair, a girl about Cora’s age stared into the empty grate. The women’s frocks, now faded and frayed, must once have dazzled. Neither of them seemed to be wearing stays. The older woman with the curlers, Mrs Small presumably, let her gaze drift over Cora.

‘Done it before, have you?’

‘Laundry, do you mean?’

‘Is that what you think the situation is for?’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Well, there’s always washing to do. And we don’t seem to get round to it very often.’

The girl at the fireplace tittered but Mrs Small’s face stayed straight.

‘Where have you worked before?’

‘In a big laundry.’

‘Which one?’

Cora hesitated, but couldn’t see much reason to lie. ‘At the Borough Asylum.’

‘Was you an inmate there?’

‘No!’

The woman smirked. ‘All right. Keep your hairpiece on. Why’d you leave?’

‘I… I couldn’t work any more.’

‘Was you ill?’

‘Yes. That’s right.’

‘Did they give you a character?’

‘Yes, but I seem to have lost it.’

‘Oh well. We don’t care about characters here. Just the opposite in fact.’

She exchanged a glance with the girl at the fireplace who giggled louder and Mrs Small joined in with a strange gurgling noise. It was the indecency of their laughter more than anything else that suddenly made Cora realise what sort of work really went on at Mrs Small’s. She winced at the pain inside her boot.

‘How much would you pay me for the other work, besides the laundry?’

‘No, no. It doesn’t operate like that. You’d be welcome to use one of my bedrooms, but you’d pay me rent, see, each time.’

‘How much?’

‘Three shillings an hour. Arrangements made inside the bedroom is between you and your visitor.’

Cora kept her face still. That’s what it was then. A bawdy house. On Bordesley Street. That bastard photographer would get his reward for this lousy joke. She could almost hear the smash of the cobble through the fancy sign-writing on his window.

Mrs Small put her hands on her knees and leaned forward. ‘What do you say then? You seem like a tough sort of girl who’s not going to go sissy on me.’

Cora wondered if that was how the rest of the world saw her. Perhaps she looked to Mr Thripp as hard and slatternly as these women.

The girl by the empty fire turned her grin to Cora as she waited for the reply. But at the sight of the girl’s pale oval face, Cora’s heart dropped in her chest.

‘Alice? Alice Salt? Is that you?’

The girl turned to Mrs Small and frowned. ‘Why’s she calling me that? She must be one of them loonies from the mad-house. Don’t let her work here.’

The girl’s features looked suddenly shrunken, her skin dimpled by pocks. No, not Alice. Nothing like. Cora almost felt herself lunge towards the fireplace. She imagined the heaviness of the girl’s head between her hands and the crunch of her face against the grate until blood dripped on to cold ash. But Cora gulped down the quiver in her throat.

‘Well, don’t trouble yourselves on that score. I wouldn’t work for you filthy whores if it was the last job of work in England.’

Paradise Street

Cora caught hold of a stone balustrade as her boot rubbed the skin from another blister. Tobacco and beer fumes blasted from open mahogany doors and she shrank away from the drum-roll of empty beer casks along the pavement.

No one had given her anything to eat since the skilly she’d later thrown up on the towing path. Her head was light as a soap bubble. She reached inside the sacking pocket to feel what coins were left. Two and sixpence. But she had no notion whether that was enough for a pie as well as lodging. Cold panic rippled through her empty stomach.

‘’Taters! Hot ’taters!’

The street seller didn’t look old but was bent double beside his cart. When he saw Cora stop, he reached up to creak open the iron hatch. A velvety whiff of coal smoke and baked potatoes wafted out.

‘Tuppence a ’tater.’

‘Let me see them first.’

He put his hand straight into the oven then held the potato in front of Cora’s face. ‘Cooked right through. Guaranteed.’

They usually weren’t but Cora was too hungry to argue. Sixpence was the smallest coin she had and she handed it to the seller in exchange for the hot, sticky potato. Even before her teeth went into it she knew it was bad. She spat a mouthful of black slimy muck into the road.

‘Bleedin’ hell! I’ll have my sixpence back if you please.’

‘No you won’t. Swearing like that. And you’ve eaten my ’tater.’

‘You can’t call that a ’tater. And it was supposed to be tuppence.’

‘Well, I’ve got no change.’

‘You bastard.’

‘Watch your mouth, girly. There’s a copper over there.’

‘I’ll go and get him for you, shall I? Tell him about your swindling?’

‘Go on then. Or are you frit he’ll know you for a bad ’un?’

The potato man’s smirk tightened the knot in Cora’s belly. Could he smell the prison stink of carbolic and drains still hanging about her clothes?

She turned her back on him and went to the edge of the wooden pavement. Iron-rimmed wheels rumbled past and the brisk trot of a cab blew her skirt against her legs. She’d get her own back on that bleeding ’tater man if she ever saw him again. Kick his cart over and watch it crumble into the flames.

A carthorse strained past, its metal shoes skating on slippery cobbles. From under its belly, a murky face appeared, and then a whole boy, scuttling close to the ground and wielding a long-handled shovel to fling manure on to a soil heap. Then he noticed Cora.

‘Shall I see you across the road, missus?’

Irish. She might have known. A flat cap was pulled down over the sweeper-boy’s ears and one of his boots was clearly bigger than the other. Cora ignored him and launched herself off the pavement. A cart thundered by. But she kept her eyes on a beacon of yellow light beside the black stillness of a boarded-up church. Rickety piano tunes pulled her through the traffic. A pub was just what she needed to cloak herself in beery warmth, and a pint of porter would fill her up and take away the taste of rotten potato.

The Waterloo Bar’s heavy door swung open easily. Cora leaned into the crush at the tap room counter, wedging herself between two men with drooping moustaches who shouted for ale and whisky. Her face, in the engraved mirror behind the bar, was a ghostly oval. She scanned the reflections of the other female faces; a woman with sagging feathers in a week-old hairdo, a flower-seller holding out a fist of limp violets, her hair loose and matted about her shawl. By the wall in the jug-and-bottle queue, a girl with the grey complexion of a maid-of-all-work clutched a bucket. But there was no trace of Alice in any of their faces.

‘Bitter?’ The young barman bounced his fist on the counter.

‘No.’

‘What then?’

A line of bottles glistened against the mirror.

‘Gin.’

He banged down a zinc measure and reached below the bar for an earthenware bottle.

‘Threepence.’

Cora drank it in one gulp and closed her eyes. Heat flared from her throat into her chest and her gut.

‘Another. Double.’

The barman eyed her as he swept the coins off the counter and poured more spirit into the cloudy glass. Cora went to the back of the room, clutching the glass. She ignored the Evening, my lovely, from a swell with side-whiskers and a checked suit and kept the glass close to her lips as she drank. The Irish sweeper was bobbing around below the bar, emptying the slops pails into a milk can. He took a swig from each pail as he went.

Gin started to work into Cora’s brain. She tried to count the gilt burners flaring across the mirror but they circulated so fast she couldn’t tell real from reflection. Brass hand-pumps whirled along the bar. Her eyelids drooped.

As the sweeper went past, she reached out to him and caught his sleeve.

‘Where can I sleep round here?’

‘I’ll take you, missus. Only a penny.’

‘You charge, do you? For a bit of friendly advice? Bastard…’

But he was already at the door, beckoning her like a stallholder at Michaelmas Fair.

She stumbled towards him and clung on to the boy’s greasy sleeve as they left the tawny light of the pub and went into blackness. She blinked lazily. The air was so dark it was hardly worth prising her eyelids open. Her bad foot banged against stone and the shiver of pain opened her eyes. A sheer wall soared up.

‘In here.’

He was climbing up steps and into a tight opening in the wall. Cora followed. Her petticoat snagged on metal; sharp masonry grazed her palm. Then she popped through the block-work opening into cold still air. A cavernous void opened up around her.

‘What’s this?’

‘Christ Church.’

‘Tha’s no good… tomorrow’s Sunday.’

‘It’s all right, missus. Nobody comes in here any more.’

Cora slumped down between the wall and a dust-coated pew. Arched windows of silvery glass swirled like a kaleidoscope. As she reached down to unfasten her damned boots, her eyes closed.

When they opened again, the chancel was filled with light. Cora squinted into piercing whiteness at painted clouds that floated above the high wooden galleries. Her tongue was fat and slimy; her neck ached. God, she needed a pail. As she pressed numbed fingers against damp stone floor, cloth tightened around her legs. Her skirt was open at the waist and pulled down over her petticoat, almost to her knees. Jesus. What had happened last night? The pub, the man in the checked suit, that sweeper-boy, the loosened bootlaces…

And then, suddenly clear-headed, she felt for her pocket. She stood up shaking her skirts, then crouched down to look under the pews. The soles of her feet pressed on icy flagstones. She was barefoot as a gypsy. God in heaven. It wasn’t just the pocket with her last shilling that had gone, but her boots too. And the birth certificate with her mother’s name. She would never see it again.

The laugh that welled up in her echoed into a strangled moan. She stood up, clinging on to the pew with one hand. With the other, she pulled open her jacket and felt inside her stays. The rubbed-smooth edge of the half-medal was still there. For all the bloody good that would do.

Where in the world would she go? There was no one to tell her. No one even to ask. The workhouse would take her in, but she’d sleep in the canal before going back through that grim archway. Or there was Mrs Small’s. It wouldn’t take long to earn a new pair of boots there. That other place, the gentleman’s residence, was so far off her feet would be in shreds by the time she got there, and she had no notion which way to go. But she could remember directions for the house and the name of the gentleman.

Four

FROM: Thomas Jerwood Esq.

An Essay on Character, Crime and Composite Photography

I am indebted to Capt McCall, Governor of Her Majesty’s Prison Birmingham, for his kind invitation to capture the likenesses of prisoners, male and female, who reside under his jurisdiction.

His offer was made consequent to my previous contribution to these pages (viz. An Essay on Criminal PhysiognomyThe Wyvern Quarterly, Winter edition 1884). This essay piqued the interest of the governor (and other discerning readers) in the connection between physical appearance and felony. Do murderers, for example, always possess sunken eyes (as many have conjectured), or bigamists a weak chin?

In some quarters, however, my words stirred up not a little controversy. I had assumed, perhaps naively, that the foundation of my thesis (as proven by Prof Lombroso and others) was unquestionable. Surely all that remained for this theory to be put into practical usage was identification of specific links between each type of facial feature and particular offences. I therefore decided, as a man of science, to take this urgent endeavour upon myself. For, once these links have been catalogued, the crimes of any villain will be revealed by a study of his face.

‘Not so,’ says, amongst others, Mr JW Armstrong of Erdington (see Letters,WQ Spring 1885). This gentleman’s objection rests upon his doubt that criminal tendencies are rooted in biology. ‘Crime,’ he says, ‘is simply a skill which may be learnt through instruction and practice in the same way as playing the piano. A baby is no more likely to be born to crime than he is to emerge from his mother’s womb able to play a polka.’ Mr Armstrong’s witticism lays bare the full extent of his ignorance. For crime, unlike performance on a musical instrument, requires a felon to contravene the civilising codes of his society. The convict must, therefore, be possessed of a criminal character.

Thanks to Governor McCall’s generous invitation, my growing collection of prisoner portraits will soon allow me to rebut Mr Armstrong once and for all. The process of establishing correlation between particular facial features and common criminal offences has required me to perfect a vital technique (resting upon remarkable recent advances in photography) which allows the photographic portraits of several individuals to be merged into one. This technique, namely composite photography, requires much delicate work but if done well, the composite likeness becomes a pictorial average of many individuals.

I have already been able to produce several prisoner composites categorised by crime. When perpetrators of the same offence are merged into one image, a dominant facial feature tends to become apparent. My investigations seem to prove, for example, that house burglars are marked out by the prominence of their jaws, ruffians by the luxuriance of their eyebrows and fraudsters by the thinness of their lips. These early results are tentative only due to the still limited extent of my prisoner portrait collection.

There is no doubt that composite photography will, more generally, produce all manner of unforeseen breakthroughs in the study of the human species. It may, for example, come to be used as a reliable test of consanguinity. Where parentage or a sibling relationship is in doubt, the ease with which faces (e.g. father/mother + child) are melded into one could determine the closeness of their blood ties.

Indeed, I believe that composite photography can be used to show the transmission of criminal physiognomy down the generations. I now have in mind a single experiment that will harness my twin preoccupations with character and heredity to prove beyond doubt the hereditary nature of crime. I trust that readers of this journal (other than Mr Armstrong and his ilk) will have no difficulty understanding that criminality, as a facet of character, is subject to the same biological rules of heredity as bodily physique. An addiction to crime runs through the generations of a family as surely as short stature or red hair.

Mr Armstrong will, I daresay, argue that temperament is separate from anatomy but his predictable scepticism has done me a service by stimulating my imagination. Through unceasing contemplation of these questions, I have devised a rigorous method for the study of criminal character using moral tests combined with the numericalmeasurement of human behaviour. The method proceeds thus: a convict is released into a normal domestic setting and presented (under clandestine observation) with a range of dilemmas designed to probe moral fibre. These choices may be trivial or more perplexing. Traps, as it were, can be laid. The ‘captive’ subject’s reactions are recorded and then assessed on a scale of one to ten.

I know full well that my raw material is the human being and so this experiment is fraught with difficulty. Its exercise is also dependent upon the possibility (perhaps slight) of finding a suitable individual who may be photographed and secretly observed. Furthermore, the study will have weight in the field of heredity only if a similar investigation has been carried out on his criminal parent.

This whole endeavour is hampered by the laboriousness of the composite photographic process and my own nervous fatigue. In recent weeks, my ideas have proliferated at an exhausting rate and my camera has hardly been idle. Should I, however, retain sufficient mental strength to continue, I am confident that my labours will uncover clear evidence for the biological heritability not only of criminality, but of the chief attributes of character within us all.

T Jerwood Esq.

Spark Hill, Warks.

Five

October 1885

leaves

The Larches was a square white house, neither old nor new, with tall windows and a shallow slate roof. Across the lane from the entrance gate, an open field was scarred by rickety scaffolding and piles of new bricks. But once Cora was on to the curving carriage drive, holly thickets cloaked the disagreeable outlook.

Gravel clung to the rag bindings on her feet as she crunched towards the house. Earlier, when she’d stopped at a wrought-iron drinking fountain, some boys had pointed and jeered: Clodhopper! She’d cursed and sprayed them with water from the steel cup. The mud-crusted sacking had done its job, though. Her feet, like her head, throbbed but she was still walking.

She stopped at the wide front door. Her fist seemed to make no noise against black lacquer so shiny that she could almost see herself. No one came. Cora peered into a gap in the gauzy curtain covering a nearby window. The crush of furniture, upholstery and ornaments seemed to leave no room for people. But an orange fire blazed in the tiled hearth. Someone must be there.

The driveway led to a jumble of roofs and outbuildings at the rear of the house. Mustard-bright trees ringed a metal-fenced paddock where a pony cropped lush grass and threw Cora an indifferent glance. Damp petticoats wrapped her legs and her head pounded with each step. No one had seen her yet. It wasn’t too late to turn back to the familiar flat greyness of the town. But her feet, screaming for rest, led her to a half-open back door.

The brass handle was brown with wear. Cora pushed on it and pungent warmth drew her into the dim passageway.

‘Hello.’

She coughed but couldn’t quite make herself speak again. To her right, the corridor widened into a parquet-laid hall where a long-case clock ticked. To the left, the narrow passage was lined by doors; one half-open on to a windowless pantry, another, covered in green baize, oozed a smell of meat dinners. Heart pulsing, Cora pushed her thumb against it.

The lime-washed kitchen looked dingy in the weak light from an overshadowed window. A scrubbed table covered in bowls and knives filled the centre of the room; plate-crowded shelves lined the walls. At the far end, a long black kitchener spewed heat and a whiff of gravy into the stuffy air. Two copper pans bubbled on the top-plate. And next to the range, in a Windsor chair, a girl in a print dress was quietly snoring.

Cora moved closer. The girl’s mouth dribbled against the chair’s wooden spokes. Her skin was pale as milk. Even asleep, she got on Cora’s nerves. Cora picked up a fork from the table and held it over the girl’s head. The weight felt expensive and Cora glanced at the door, half-wondering whether to make a run for it. But she wouldn’t get far on a fork, even a silver one.

She moved her hand sideways, then let go. Metal clattered on stone. The girl stretched her arms and slowly opened one eye. Then she sprang out of the chair.

‘Oh, Lor’! Who’re you?’

‘Cora Burns.’

‘What are you doing in here?’

‘I’ve come about the situation.’

‘What situation? There isn’t one.’

‘Between maid.’

‘A tweeny? We don’t have one of those.’

‘I think you’ll find, if you ask Mrs Dix, that you do now.’ Cora nodded at the range. ‘Don’t let them pots catch.’

The girl gave her a sideways look as she picked up the silver fork from the floor. Then she went to stir the pans. Apple sauce. Beef gravy. Cora’s stomach groaned. The girl turned and stood awkwardly.

‘Did Mrs Dix send for you?’

‘Yes.’

‘So why’d you come on a Sunday afternoon?’

Cora shrugged and took a step nearer. ‘Is she here?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Will you fetch her for me?’

‘She doesn’t like being disturbed on a Sunday.’