The Murder of Patience Brooke
Read The Murder of Patience Brooke Online
Authors: J C Briggs
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion’d so slenderly
Young, and so fair!
Loop up her tresses
Escaped from the comb,
Her fair auburn tresses;
Whilst wonderment guesses
Where was her home?
Who was her father?
Who was her mother?
Had she a sister?
Had she a brother?
Or was there a dearer one
Still, and a nearer one
Yet, than all other?
‘The Bridge of Sighs’
Thomas Hood
(1799–1845)
3
The Man with the Crooked Face
11
Constable Rogers has an Idea
THE SINGER
Thrown on the wide world, doom’d to wander and roam,
Bereft of my parents, bereft of my home.
The singer’s voice was a high, horrible, falsetto: mocking and caressing at the same time.
The woman leaning against the railing on the steps seemed to sway. Her head fell forward; suddenly, shockingly, blood gushed from her throat, soaking her dress, dropping in fat red gouts on to the step.
The singer vanished into the curling loops of fog, the voice fading, the last note dying away then lost in the dark.
Fog. Fog in the kitchen, creeping like an inquisitive guest, fog tip-toeing around the cupboards and the chairs, bending into the copper in its brick setting, folding itself under the table and peering out of the window, looking at itself trying to get in. Mrs Georgiana Morson, resident matron of Urania Cottage, Charles Dickens’s home for fallen women, aware of the pinching cold of the flagstones, standing amazed with her candle in her hand, wondered how it had got in when she had shut the door at ten o’clock. In the light of one candle, the fog looked sinister, an uninvited visitor. Mrs Morson felt somehow afraid of its yellowish ghostly presence. But she was not too afraid to go forward across the large, square, stone-floored apartment where she saw that the door was open and that more fog was swirling in. Her practical thought was to close the door and shut it out.
It was as she was shutting the door that she saw that there was someone outside on the steps which led up to the garden. It was the figure of a woman – an unusually tall one; she appeared to be standing against the railings, her head bowed, her hair falling about her shoulders and her dress open, revealing naked shoulders and the full white bosom upon which there appeared to be some ruby-coloured jewels. Mrs Morson speculated that she might be someone looking for sanctuary – there was something about the figure which suggested exhaustion, as though she had reached the end of her endurance. Young women came to the Home recommended, but once or twice one would turn up unannounced, hoping for help, having, perhaps, run away from some bully of a man.
Mrs Morson held up her candle. In the flickering light, she saw how one of the red jewels seemed to tremble, and slide down the white skin. Then another and another so that they formed a scarlet pool gathered in the V of the dress. She went up the first step to look more closely; then she saw that the woman was not simply standing against the railings but that she was tied to them. She lifted up the chestnut hair which tumbled about the shoulders, and realised that the red was not jewels but blood; and that the metallic smell was blood; and that the blood had soaked into the woman’s dress; and that it was a great apron of blood, clinging to the limbs, and staining the white lace of the underskirt. And her eyes travelled down to the sticky pool of it next to her own foot, and she saw the naked feet of the woman shod in red. She looked up again at the white throat encircled by a slash of scarlet, up again at the white face. It was one she knew. It was the face of Patience Brooke.
Mrs Morson stepped back; she saw now that the woman was not unusually tall, she was hanging from the railings and had only seemed to be standing upon the third step up. Mrs Morson had seen death – her doctor husband had died early and she had nursed him, but he had died in his bed, her holding his hands. A child had died at a few months old – a terrible time but an explicable death from scarlet fever. She had delivered the dead child of a servant girl. She had once seen a man die in the street. Passing a crowd one afternoon, she had seen through a gap a policeman supporting a man whose legs were mangled and whose head was a mass of blood. Nearby was the wagon that had run him down. But she had never seen a murder, and Patience Brooke had been murdered.
Mrs Morson stood, still as stone, unable to tear her horrified eyes from the brutal gash in the white throat. Her heart seemed to have ceased its beating; the silence gathered round her like a cloak, stifling her so that she could hardly breathe. Time itself stopped as she stared at the figure. There was a sudden, terrible movement when the head nodded and the chin knocked against the chest, and was still again. The silence broke when time restarted; Mrs Morson heard the distant chimes of the clock of St Mark’s. She listened as each stroke sounded through the foggy air. It was eleven o’clock now. She must act quickly. Her horror at what she had seen was superseded by her natural practical resolution and her quick understanding that this could not be known until she had sent for Mr Dickens. No one must see. The girls were in their beds and had been since nine o’clock – not likely to come down until morning. Davey was in his cot in the little room off the kitchen, fast asleep she hoped, but she must wake him and he must take the message. Mr Bagster, the gardener whom she would normally have sent for, was away at his daughter’s at Kensal Green. But first, she must cover Patience. Time later to think what it all might mean. She went back through the kitchen and into the passage that led to the front of the house. There was kept an assortment of cloaks; she took one which she draped over the hanging woman.
Now paper and pencil. These were kept on the table for lists and notes. She wrote her message:
Mr Dickens, you must come immediately. Patience Brooke is dead this night. Bring our friend, Superintendent Jones, if you can. G. Morson.
Now she must wake Davey. Opening the door to the little room off the kitchen, she saw that he was huddled under his blankets, his head buried in his pillow. There was something about the hunched form that suggested fear. What might he have heard – or, worse, seen? Mr Dickens could ask him later. Now, he must take the horse and trap and go. She approached the cot and touched his shoulder. The boy remained still. He was not asleep.
She whispered to him. ‘Davey, you must help me. I do not know what has happened but I need your help, however afraid you are. You must go to Mr Dickens and bring him.’ The name of Mr Dickens roused him as she knew it would. He stared at her with those transparent hazel eyes. He was afraid.
‘Get dressed. I will wait in the kitchen – but be quick, I beg you.’
In a minute or two, he was ready. ‘Take the note. Go to Wellington Street first. We must hope he is there – if not, go to Bow Street, send in the note for Superintendent Jones.’
She opened the door on to the fog and on to the shrouded form by the railings. Davey hurried up the steps, keeping his head averted, and then he was dissolved into the fog. He would go out of the side gate into the private lane to the stable. She waited in the stillness, straining to hear the sound of the stable door opening and the clink of the harness which must be followed by the sound of the trap and its horse. It must. Davey would not run away, would he? She did not know what had frightened him but he could have nothing to do with the figure at the railings. He could not. Of that she was sure. He would go for Mr Dickens whom he revered – the man who had rescued him. He was intelligent, sensible – if he had to go to Bow Street, surely someone would send the note in for the superintendent. She did not dare think that Davey would come back alone. The silence seemed to congeal around her. The stillness was solid. She realised she was holding her breath, waiting.
Then she heard it. The stable door creaked. Mrs Morson let out a ragged breath. The faint metallic clink meant that Davey was harnessing the horse and putting it into the traces. She held her breath again and heard the sound of wheels and then the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves as he walked down the lane. She imagined Davey squinting through the fog, hunched over the reins, making his way to the road where he would turn right and on to London. He was turning now and the clip-clop sounds were faster, then fainter. She waited still until the sound faded away and she was left in the misty darkness with dead Patience on the steps where the blood pooled into a sticky, black wetness.
She went back into the kitchen, not wanting to close the door on the dead one outside, but if she left it open she knew that she could not stop her gaze from turning on the shrouded thing. She closed the door. The candle was nearly burnt down now, but there was a faint glow from the great black range. She lifted the iron lid and put on more coal from the scuttle bedside the range. In the darkness she sat thinking of Patience Brooke and her terrible death and mysterious life.
Patience Brooke had come from nowhere. Mrs Morson had employed her. Mr Dickens had met her and had agreed. It was unusual, for most girls came through official channels. George Chesterton, Governor of Coldbath Fields Prison, had given some of his female prisoners a letter written by Dickens which offered the chance of a new kind of life, a quiet home, a means of being useful, peace of mind, self-respect and the possibility of being restored to society, albeit in another country; some came from the workhouse and others from ragged schools or orphanages. But Mrs Morson knew – or thought she knew until this moment – that Patience Brooke was not a girl from the streets for whom the Home, so named by Mr Dickens, was a chance of redeeming a wrecked life. She was not a fallen woman. She had stood on the doorstep one day in her neat, shabby grey dress and black bonnet under which the chestnut hair was tidily coiled. Mrs Morson wondered at the significance of that hair tumbling over naked shoulders. Patience Brooke had brought nothing with her – nothing at all, not even a handkerchief. With her thin pale face and her quiet manner, she reminded Mrs Morson of the governess, Jane Eyre, in the novel she had read. It was clear that she was educated and Mrs Morson employed her to help her teach the girls in the mornings. Patience Brooke told not a thing about her past; in that she was like Davey though for a different reason – Davey simply could not speak; Patience would not.