Scarlet Widow (6 page)

The porter’s friends pulled at his clothing. One of them was so drunk that he fell sideways into the snow, and said, ‘Shit!’ The others said, ‘Come on, Sticker, you’ve done it good and proper this time! Come on, leave it! Come on, before the horneys gets here!’

The porter hesitated for a moment, still defiantly holding up his clasp-knife, but his friends pulled at him again and he ostentatiously shut away the blade and followed them back across the street. The snow was falling so thickly now that they had all disappeared in seconds.

Beatrice was trying to turn her father over so that she could see his face. Mr Andrews knelt down beside her and said, ‘Let’s take him inside and see how bad he’s been hurt. Duncan! Charlie! Give us a hand here, would you!’

Three men lifted Clement off the step and carried him into the bar, where they cleared a table and laid him down. His eyes were closed and his face was grey. Blood was sliding from the sides of his mouth and his breathing was shallow. Mr Andrews unbuttoned his waistcoat and his shirt, which was soaked with blood.

‘Can somebody fetch me some rags?’ Mr Andrews called out, and a middle-aged woman untied her apron and said, ‘Here, Dicky, use this.’ Beatrice recognized her as Molly, the wine-seller, who was usually walking up and down the streets with her basket of bottles.

There was so much blood leaking out of Clement’s chest and stomach that Molly’s apron was rapidly soaked, too. Beatrice could see that the porter had stabbed him in the chest – two shallow wounds in his breastbone, but a much deeper wound between his ribs – and had then stabbed him twice in the lower left side of his stomach. The wounds in his stomach were gaping like the mouths of dying fish and there seemed to be no way to stop them bleeding.

Beatrice was trembling with shock. She laid one hand on her father’s forehead and said, ‘Papa! Papa! Can you hear me, papa? It’s Bea! It’s your angel, papa!’ But her father’s eyes remained closed and only a single bubble of blood came out from between his lips.

Molly had brought some muslin rags from behind the bar and Mr Andrews folded them up and pressed them hard against Clement’s chest wound.

‘Come along, ’pothacree, don’t give up on us now,’ he said, but Beatrice caught him looking up at Molly and his expression was grim.

‘Can’t we take him to the hospital, Mr Andrews? He needs a surgeon, doesn’t he? Somebody to sew up all of those cuts.’

Mr Andrews pressed his fingertips against the right side of Clement’s neck to feel his pulse, then he bent his head close to Clement’s face.

‘I think it’s too late for that, Mistress Bannister.’

‘What?’

‘I do believe your father’s passed away. He won’t need to go to St Barthomolew. He’s on his way to see St Peter.’

Beatrice stared at her father and she knew with a dreadful sinking sensation that Mr Andrews was right. A subtle change had come over his face – an emptiness, which he had never had before, even in his deepest drunken sleeps. He might have been comatose with gin but he still had colour in his cheeks and he always looked as if he might open his eyes at any moment and say, ‘My God! My head! Where am I?’

Not now, though. He had left her, and the body that was lying on this table was as dead as her mother in the chilly back room.

She backed away. As she did so, one of the men in the bar said, ‘Look at you, girl! He got you, too! Didn’t you feel it?’

Numbly, Beatrice turned around. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘What do you mean he got me, too? He only made me bang my head.’

But the man pointed to the floorboards where she had been standing, and there was a trail of blood. Panicking, Beatrice opened her coat and looked down at herself. There was no blood that she could see on her dark blue gown, but now that the man had brought it to her attention she could feel wetness on her legs and her petticoats. She lifted up the hem of her gown and saw that there were rivulets of blood running down her calves. She looked across at Molly and said, ‘
Look
!’ in the faintest of voices, and then she collapsed.

*

When she opened her eyes, she found she was lying on a bed in a small upstairs bedroom. Outside, it was beginning to grow dark, although it looked as if it had stopped snowing. There was a jug and a basin on a washstand on the opposite side of the room, and a woodcut of St Sebastian, the martyr, tied to a tree and bristling with arrows, his eyes rolled up towards the heavens.

She sat up. Her coat and her gown and petticoats had all been hung over the back of a chair, and she was wearing nothing but her shift and corset, although she was covered with a thick knitted blanket. She lifted the blanket and saw that her shift was stained with blood, although it had dried now. So the porter
had
stabbed her. He must have been holding his clasp-knife in his hand when he pushed her. He couldn’t have cut her too badly, however, because she didn’t seem to be bleeding any longer.

He had killed her father, though. Her father was actually dead. She lay back and covered her face with her hands, although for some reason she couldn’t cry. She felt completely dry, as if she had no tears left.

She was still lying there when she heard footsteps coming upstairs and then a knock at the door, although it was open. She stayed where she was, with her face still covered. She didn’t want the next part of her life to start happening, not just yet.

‘How are you feeling, Bea?’ asked a kindly woman’s voice. ‘You look just like one of them saints lying on a tomb.’

Beatrice took her hands away from her face. Molly had her head tilted to one side and was smiling at her sympathetically.

‘We’re all so sorry about your dear papa. Such a good man. Always had time to listen if you was sick with some pox or other, and always ready to give you a cordial even if you didn’t have the chink for it.’

She sat down on the side of the bed. She had a large wart on her upper lip and very thick eyebrows. She took hold of Beatrice’s hand and said, ‘Dicky Andrews says he’ll help with all the arrangements, if you want him to. But you probably have relatives, don’t you? Aunts and uncles, someone you can turn to. All we want you to know, darling, is that you won’t be left to do everything on your own.’

Beatrice didn’t know what to say. She still couldn’t cry, but she felt so exhausted that she couldn’t even find the words to tell Molly why she and her father had come to The Fortune, and that her mother’s body was lying in the back room. She was so tired that she could have closed her eyes and fallen asleep forever. At least if she did that she would see her parents again.

‘The constables came,’ said Molly. ‘We told them what happened, and who done it. They know the fellow, so they’ll probably grab him sooner or later. He’ll be dancing on nothing when he does.’

‘I can’t work out where he cut me,’ said Beatrice, lifting up the blanket again.

‘Well, you’ll forgive me, darling, but I took the liberty of looking, and he didn’t.’

‘But where did all this blood come from?.’

Molly squeezed her hand. ‘You lost your mama, didn’t you, so you had nobody to tell you. But what it is, you’ve started your flow.’

Beatrice frowned at her. She didn’t understand.

‘You’ve fallen off the roof,’ said Molly. ‘You’ve had a visit from auntie.’

‘What?’

‘You’re a woman now, Bea, my darling, in more ways than one.’

‘As much as I would like to, Beatrice my dear, I simply cannot take care of you,’ said her Aunt Felicity. ‘Our house is full to capacity already, what with my brother’s family now that he is bankrupt, and my father who is in his dotage. I would, believe me, if only I had the room, but I believe you will be far more comfortable with your cousin Sarah in Birmingham.’

Beatrice said nothing. She was standing in the parlour in front of the fire, which had burned low now so that it was reduced to hillocks of hot white ashes. Apart from Aunt Felicity the funeral guests had all left. There were glasses and plates to be washed and dried and put away, and the floor to be swept, and then she didn’t know what she would do, except lock the front door and climb the stairs to bed, like she used to do when her father had drunk too much and dropped off to sleep in his armchair.

Aunt Felicity’s chaise was waiting outside in the early afternoon gloom, ready to take her back to her house on Blackheath, south of the river. She was anxious not to leave her return too late because of the snafflers who came out on the road when it began to grow dark.

‘You will have to sell the business,’ she said. ‘It should fetch a fair amount of money, though, and that will pay for your fare to Birmingham and cater for your needs for quite some time to come. I have a lawyer friend at Lincoln’s Inn, Mr Lacey, whose clerks can manage the sale for you.’

‘Thank you, Aunt Felicity,’ said Beatrice. ‘You’ve been very kind to me.’

She had met her cousin Sarah Minchin only once before. Sarah had come down from Birmingham to stay with them when Beatrice was seven or eight years old, and she remembered her as a tall, sharp-nosed woman who had seemed to find everything in life disagreeable – her bed, the food that Beatrice’s mother had served her, the smell of the London streets, the weather, even the dresses that Beatrice had been wearing.

‘A young girl should always look obedient and demure,’ she had said of a red pinafore that Beatrice’s mother had made for her. Beatrice had had no idea what ‘demure’ meant, but she had assumed it meant sour-faced, like cousin Sarah.

*

When Aunt Felicity had left Beatrice went into the darkened shop and looked around at all the gleaming bottles arranged on the shelves. It was so silent. The smell of herbs and spices permeated everything, even the wooden counter. She found it almost impossible to believe that her father was dead and that her life here was all over. She had always imagined that she would be working with him until he retired, and that the Society of Apothecaries would accept her as a member, even though she was a girl, and that one day she would be running the business herself.

Her father had taught her so well that she believed she could almost run the business now, on her own, but she knew that it was impossible.

She went back into the parlour and started to clear up. Only fifteen mourners had come to the funeral because the snow had made it so difficult to send letters to all of his old friends and acquaintances who might have wanted to pay their respects, and equally difficult for any of them to travel here. He had been laid to rest in the crypt of St James’s, next to her mother, whose body had been retrieved by the constables from The Fortune of War.

As she carried a candle up the narrow stairs to her bedroom she stopped halfway and started to sob. She stood there, gripping the banister rail, with tears running down her cheeks, trying to swallow her grief and almost choking on it.

In a city of more than seven hundred thousand people, she had never felt so alone in her life.

*

Cousin Sarah was there to meet her when the stage chaise arrived mid-afternoon at the Rose Inn in Birmingham. It was a very cold day, but bright, and the coach had made good time from Selly, which had been their last stop for refreshment and changing horses.

A broken spring had held them up the day before at Banbury, but it had taken them only three days to cover the hundred and twenty miles from London. Beatrice had been able to afford fivepence for an inside seat, and she had been glad of that, especially on their first day, when they had been overtaken by a ferocious hailstorm as they passed through Watford and the passengers on the roof had been chilled and soaked through in spite of their heavy cloaks.

Beatrice didn’t recognize cousin Sarah at first, not until she came pushing her way through the crowd in the courtyard, calling out, ‘Beatrice! Beatrice!
Here
, you silly girl!
Here
!’ as if she were calling a pet dog.

Cousin Sarah was not nearly as tall as Beatrice remembered her – in fact, she seemed tiny and very thin. Under her plain black bonnet she had a face like a ferret, with close-together eyes and protruding front teeth. She was wearing a dark grey cape and grey suede gloves.

‘Thank goodness you’re on time!’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought I might catch my death if I had to wait out here any longer! My goodness, girl, you look appallingly
wan
! You’re not
sickening
for something, are you?’

‘I’m just tired,’ said Beatrice. Although cousin Sarah was so prickly she found it an unexpected relief after the journey to be met by somebody who cared about her, and she was very close to bursting into tears again.

The postilion heaved down her brown leather trunk from the roof of the coach and a toothless porter dragged it over to her, grinning. ‘Jeremy!’ snapped cousin Sarah, turning around. ‘Jeremy, where are you? That
boy
!’

A young man of about seventeen appeared from out of the crowd, wearing a thick bottle-green coat and a black cocked hat. He was tall and well-built, with wavy brown hair that reached almost down to his shoulders. Beatrice thought he was quite handsome, although his lips were rather full and red, as if he had been illicitly eating strawberries, and his eyes were a little sly.

‘This is my youngest son, Jeremy, your first cousin once removed,’ said cousin Sarah. ‘Jeremy, this is Beatrice, my dear late Clement’s girl, and you must make her feel at home.’

Jeremy lifted his hat and gave Beatrice a deep mock-bow. ‘You’re welcome to Birmingham, Beatrice,’ he told her. ‘I hope you’re happy here. You’ll find it exceedingly dull after London, I expect, but we’ll do our best to keep you amused.’

‘Jeremy, behave yourself,’ snapped cousin Sarah. ‘The poor girl is recently bereaved and the
last
thing she is looking for is amusement.’

They left the courtyard and went out to the road where their carriage was waiting, a plain maroon chaise with a worn-out leather top. Two tired-looking horses stood between the shafts and up on the box sat an elderly coachman with a tall hat and mutton-chop whiskers who looked even more exhausted than the horses. Jeremy lifted Beatrice’s trunk on to the back and they all climbed in.