Scarlet Widow (4 page)

Beatrice took no notice. Her father stared at her with increasing desperation, clutching the arms of his chair as if he were afraid he would fall out of it, but she waited and kept her eyes on the fire until she was satisfied that it was well ablaze and starting to crackle. Then, without a word, she went out to the hallway and took down her thick brown woollen cloak, and put on her bonnet.

‘Bea!’ called her father, as she opened the front door.

She didn’t turn around, but said clearly, ‘I won’t be long, papa, I promise,’ and stepped out into the street.

The snow was whirling down furiously now and there was hardly anybody else about. A few carriages were making their way slowly through the gloom, like ghost carriages, their horses’ hooves slipping on the icy cobbles. Beatrice couldn’t remember it ever having been so cold.

At least the snow covered the heaps of household rubbish on the pavements and made the street appear reasonably clean, although the outline of a dead dog was still visible and there was a pale brown stain of raw sewage wending its way along the gutter.

She put up her hood and made her way to Pye Corner, blinking against the snowflakes that caught on her eyelashes. The Fortune of War public house was only six doors down, past a mercer’s and a grocer’s and a small shop that had been a bookstore and stationer’s until October, when the owner had died of what his physician had described only as ‘teeth’.

Two small children were huddled under a filthy quilted horse-blanket in the bookshop doorway, a boy and a girl. The boy was asleep, but the girl stared hollow-eyed at Beatrice as she passed, although she said nothing. Even Beatrice’s mother, at her kindliest, had told Beatrice that it was impossible for them to feed and shelter all the destitute children that they saw in the streets, but Beatrice made up her mind that after she had taken her father his bottle of gin she would come back and give these children mugs of hot parsnip soup, which she would make herself.

The Fortune of War stood right on Pye Corner. Halfway up its sooty brick frontage perched a small gilded statue of a boy, the Golden Boy of Pye Corner, who been put up there to mark the furthest extremity of the Great Fire of London, nearly three quarters of a century before. This morning he had a little pyramid of snow on top of his head.

Beatrice pushed open the door and went inside. She hated coming in here because it was dark and filled with pipe smoke and crowded with drunken men who would wink and leer at her and grin at her with their gappy teeth. The shouting and laughter were deafening.

‘And a welcome to you, my gorgeous little darling!’ called out a greasy-looking porter with a huge floppy cap and a bulging grey waistcoat. ‘Come here, sit on my lap why don’t you, and make a lonely man happy!’

He hooted with amusement and slapped his thigh, and all of his friends cackled, too. ‘You couldn’t find your pizzle, Jack, if it was tied to the end of your nose!’

Beatrice went up to the counter, where the red-faced publican was pouring out glasses of brandy. He gave her a smile and asked, ‘What’s it to be, then, Mistress Bannister? Another bottle of genever?’

Beatrice put down her sixpence. ‘Two, please, Mr Andrews. Papa says it will save me coming out twice.’

‘Oh, he’s a thoughtful man, your papa,’ said the publican sadly. ‘Wait there for a minute, I’ll have to go down to the cellar for it. These fellows here have been drinking me dry this morning. It may be good for business, but I won’t be sorry when this snow lets up and they can all go back out to work.’

He lit a lamp and then opened the cellar door behind the bar and went down into the darkness. Beatrice stayed where she was, with her elbows on the counter and her hands ostentatiously pressed against her ears so that the men around her would see that she wasn’t listening to their coarse banter about pizzles and jilts and pulling the pudding.

She was still waiting for Mr Andrews when somebody tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around and saw that it was Robert, a skinny young boy of about fifteen with wiry blond hair who worked at The Fortune as a pot-boy and cleaner. She liked Robert because he was handsome, in spite of his raging red spots, and whenever she came into the pub he always talked to her and made her feel pretty and grown-up.

‘Hey, Bea, you’re not back for
more
of the jolly old gin?’ he asked her.

‘Papa needs it for his tonic,’ said Beatrice. ‘He mixes it with marigold and betony water to keep away colds.’

‘Oh, you don’t say so?’ Robert smiled. ‘Keeps away colds, does it?’ He was wearing a floor-length leather apron and he reached into the pocket and produced a thin twist of paper.

‘Barley sugar?’ he asked her. ‘John Welkin give me some for helping him carry in some stiffs.’

He snapped the stick of barley sugar in half and offered her some, but she shook her head. She loved barley sugar, but John Welkin was a resurrectionist and she didn’t want to put anything in her mouth that a resurrectionist might have handled.

Robert bit off a piece and rattled it around between his teeth. ‘When I say stiffs, they’re
proper
stiff, most of them. Stiff as boards! They fell through the ice on the river last night, drunk as lords, and they’re all frozen solid.’

‘That’s so horrible! I don’t know how you can bear to touch them!’

‘Nah, they’re not so bad. At least they don’t pen-and-ink. Not until they thaws out, any road. And some of them have pennies in their pockets, which Mr Welkin lets me keep. Do you want to come and see them? He got a fair good catch this morning, and there’s not just drunks. There’s two kids, too, who were trying to skate, and their mother who tried to save them. You should see her face! She looks like she’s still screaming at them!’

‘No – no thank you. I’d rather not.’

‘Oh, come on, Bea! You never saw such a sight! It’s better than a freak show! And it’s free!’

Beatrice had seen dead bodies carried into the back room at The Fortune of War more than once, especially after low tide. Her father had told her that the pub had been officially appointed by the Royal Humane Society for the ‘reception of drowned persons’ found in the Thames. If their bodies went unclaimed, the surgeons would come round from St Bartholomew’s Hospital to see if they were suitable for dissection. If they were, resurrectionists like John Welkin would be paid ‘finishing money’ for their trouble, sometimes as much as four guineas.

Her father had told her all this in a strangely distracted way, which had made Beatrice wonder if he was secretly thinking of buying a body for himself in order to solidify it, like that bristly brown rat. She had changed the subject and said that she needed to tend to the suet pudding that she was boiling.

Robert shrugged and said, ‘Please yourself. I’d best be gathering up some pots in any case.’

He went over to the nearest table and started to collect up dirty tankards and glasses. As he did so, however, the porter in the huge floppy cap heaved himself up from the bench where he was sitting and approached the bar.

‘Well, now, my pretty little lamb!’ he exclaimed. He was swaying with drink and he came to stand so close that Beatrice could smell the urine that soaked his britches. He turned to her, grinning, and then without warning he hooked his arm around her waist and wrenched her roughly towards him. His eyes were yellow and his brown teeth were crowded together like some neglected graveyard.

‘You could give me a kiss, my little innocent, couldn’t you? What harm would a kiss do? About time somebody introduced you to the pleasures of the flesh, wouldn’t you say?’

Beatrice tried to wrench herself away from him, but he tightened his grip around her and laughed, so that she could feel his spit on her face.

‘Come on, my little charmer! Don’t deny that you want to!’

He tugged her closer still, but as he did so Robert crossed over to the counter and promptly put down all the tankards that he had been collecting up. Without a word he came around from behind Beatrice and punched the porter on the right ear. The porter shouted out, ‘
Shite
!’ He let go of Beatrice and lurched heavily back against the counter, his floppy cap falling over his eyes. Robert punched him again, on the bridge of the nose. Blood spurted out of both his nostrils and sprayed over his filthy grey waistcoat.

‘You maggot!’ the porter snorted, dragging off his cap and pressing it against his nose to stem the blood, ‘I’ll cut your tallywags off for that!’

Three or four other porters rose from their seats and gathered around Robert, with threatening looks on their faces. They were all just as ugly and filthy and just as drunk.

‘
You
,’ said one of them, pointing at Robert with a blackened fingernail. He looked as if he were smiling, like a clown, but he had deep horizontal scars each side of his mouth, as if somebody had dragged a butcher’s cleaver sideways between his lips. ‘You are on your way to get your neck wrung, boy!’

Robert glanced quickly from one of the porters to the other. The greasy-looking porter reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced a large clasp-knife, which he opened up with an elaborate flourish, like a conjuring trick. Blood was still running from both of his nostrils and he had to lick his upper lip every now and then to stop it dripping down his chin.

‘You’ll be singing a different tune from now on, sunshine,’ he said. He gave a bubbly sniff and then he added, ‘A very
high
tune, like a maiden, because that’s what I’m going to turn you into!’

Robert edged back, his fists half raised to defend himself, but he didn’t seem to know what to do. Beatrice felt her heart beating against her ribcage and she was so frightened that she was breathless. Five drunken meat-porters would probably do far more than hurt Robert, they would probably murder him – and they would probably hurt her, too. She suddenly thought of a dead woman she had seen lying in Hosier Lane once, her face bruised crimson and her petticoats dragged up around her waist, and a wooden shovel handle thrust up her.

She tried to grab Robert’s hand. He didn’t seem to understand what she wanted him to do and she had to snatch at it a second time before he took hold of it. He stared at her wide-eyed and said, ‘
What
?’ but she said nothing at all. She pulled him away from the counter and across the bar towards the pub’s back door.

The porters shouted, ‘Oi! Oi!
Oi
! You come back here, you little shite-cock!’ But Beatrice and Robert scrambled through the door together and Robert slammed it behind them. He turned the key in it and bolted it top and bottom. He was just in time. Two or three seconds later the porters crashed into it, so that one of its panels was split. There was a moment’s pause and then they crashed into it again, but it stayed firmly in its frame.

‘
Open up
!’ they roared. They sounded more like ferocious beasts than men. ‘
Open up this damned door or else
!’

Beatrice and Robert stayed where they were, staring at each other, not daring to speak. The porters kicked at the door and then they battered a chair against it, but after a few more desultory kicks they gave up. Beatrice could hear voices. It sounded as if Mr Andrews might have come upstairs from the cellar.

‘What are we going to do?’ she whispered. It was gloomy and very cold out there in the corridor, and there was a sickly sweet smell which made her stomach tighten. It reminded her of church.

Robert was about to say something when there was a sharp, quick knock at the door.

‘Robert? Are you out there, Robert? Can you hear me?’

‘Mr Andrews! I’m out here with Bea, the ’pothecary’s daughter!’

‘What’s been happening, for God’s sake? There was five or six fellows in here and they claim that you attacked them. They was bent on tearing you limb from limb if they could.’

‘I was defending Bea’s honour, Mr Andrews!’

‘What with, a double-headed axe? There’s more blood on the floor than Symond’s slaughterhouse!’

‘Mr Andrews!’ Beatrice called out. ‘Have they gone now, those men?’

‘Yes, my darling, I threw them all out. But if I was you, I’d leave through the yard, and back-slang along the alley to your place. If you go out by the front door, you may well find them waiting for you round the corner. They’re very drunk, to say the least, and I wouldn’t want you to come to no harm.’

‘One of them was trying to make Bea kiss him,’ said Robert. ‘That’s the only reason I lammed him.’

‘We’ll talk about that later,’ Mr Andrews told him. ‘Open the door so that I can give Mistress Bannister her two bottles of gin, and then she can go.’

Robert shot back the bolts and unlocked the door. Mr Andrews appeared, his cheeks even redder than usual. He handed Beatrice a coarse hessian sack with two heavy earthenware bottles in it, which clinked as she took them.

‘Give your papa my very good wishes,’ he said. ‘But also tell him he won’t never find the answer to his sorrows in Geneva. Only here at home, in London.’

Beatrice said, ‘Thank you, Mr Andrews,’ very quietly. She understood exactly what he was saying, and she felt better for his sympathy. He was one of the few people who seemed to understand how lonely she felt, and how hard she had to work to help her father, and how worried she was about his drinking.

‘You’ll have to come through the stiffatorium, I’m afraid,’ said Robert. ‘But don’t you worry. There’s none of them can hurt you, not in here.’

Beatrice hesitated, but then she thought about the drunken porters who might be waiting for her in the street outside and nodded, and followed him into the large back room. It was even colder in here, so that her breath smoked, and the only light came from a single high window. The walls were damp and flaking, with black patches of mould on them, as if they had caught the diseases of the people who were brought in here day after day.

This morning there were nine bodies altogether – five men, two women and two children. They were lying on trestle tables against the walls and on blackboards just above them the names of their resurrectionists had been scrawled in chalk, to lay claim for bringing them in. Three of the men were still dressed in coats and britches, although their shoes had either fallen off or been removed, revealing holes in their stockings or dirty bare feet. Two of them were dressed in grubby woollen shrouds, and one of the women, too, was wearing a shroud, but hers was much cleaner, as if she had just been lifted from her coffin. The other woman wore a heavy grey skirt with layers of tattered petticoats underneath, and black button-up boots with worn-down heels.