The Murder of Mary Russell (3 page)

C
lara Hudson's dark hair had gone mostly grey before she realised that childhood was not intended to be a continuous stream of catastrophe and turmoil.

At the time, while she was living it, the constancy of hunger, discomfort, dirt, and uncertainty, with the occasional punctuation of death and fists, was simply the price of existence. One fought, one prevailed, and one hugged to oneself the rare days when an actual dinner was set upon a clean table, with a family around it. Trust was a snare, safety a delusion; together they led to blood drying upon the floor.

Clara Hudson was born Clarissa, a haughty name for a child who drew her first breath in a seedy Edinburgh room without so much as a washbasin in the corner. Her mother named her. Her father was not there to be consulted.

Clarissa's mother, the former Sally Rickets, was not haughty—although neither had she been born in a lodgings-house. Sally had once Been Better. Sally had Come From Money, although not enough of it that she could turn her back on Society's demands. As a girl, she was both clear-sighted enough to recognise the deficiencies in the mirror, and romantic enough to feel that lack of beauty would not matter if only the right man came along.

Romance and realism make for a volatile mix. In Sally's case, the mix gave rise to a painful shyness, driving Sally to the shelves of the circulating library and turning her wit to blushing awkwardness at any social gathering. Wit she had, along with glossy brown hair, skill with the needle, and an odd gift for mimicry (witnessed by few outside her family), but as her twentieth birthday loomed, Sally's heart went unclaimed. Another girl might have sighed and put away romantic dreams in favour of some youth with sour breath but good prospects. Sally raised her chin and declared that she would seek employment.

In the best tradition of the novels she adored, she took a job as governess, hiding even from herself the secret conviction that she would thereby meet a mysterious and intended mate. Instead, she met Jimmy Hudson.

Sally's employers moved from Edinburgh to London in the autumn of 1852, to be close to the father's expanding business interests. It was a lonely position, that of governess: too grand for the servants, too low for the family. Some nights, Sally felt very far from home.

But Sally did her best by her two young charges, seven-year-old Albert and his little sister Faith. She taught them their lessons and manners, entertained them (and occasionally coaxed them into obedience) with improvised plays, and took them for walks in this vast, filthy, fascinating, and crowded city from which an empire was ruled. Twice in the spring of 1853, Victoria herself rode past in a grand carriage. The second time, the Queen gave the children a nod.

That summer, young Bertie (four years younger than his namesake, the Prince of Wales) was given a model sailboat for his birthday. Sally's walks with her charges grew more cumbersome, as the great wicker perambulator that she already had problems wrestling along the streets now had a boat perched across it. One scorching August day, the little boat came to grief on some weeds in the Round Pond. Bertie began to wail, his sister (who was working on a new tooth) threw in her screams, and with increasing desperation (Bertie's mother had made it clear that the young master was not to ruin any more clothing) Sally looked around for some urchin she could pay to fetch the craft. In vain.

Then out of nowhere, a young man appeared. He stripped off his jacket, kicked his shoes onto the path, and waded out for the diminutive yacht.

The figure that climbed from the water, trailing mud and water weeds from a pair of irretrievably soiled trousers, was no lady's idea of young Lochinvar. The man—boy, really—was small and wiry, with an odd amble to his walk that suggested a bad leg and rather less white to his teeth than a hero ought to have. But his straw-coloured hair was thick and his grin was friendly, and although the boldness in his cornflower-blue eyes would normally have alarmed her, the young man did no more than tug his hat at the governess before turning his attentions to her charge.

“Captain, sir, I believe your ship has come to grief. May I make a suggestion or two, to keep it from happening again?”

He and young Bertie bent over the ship, instantly deep in the arcane subtleties of jibs, mizzens, wind direction, and the placement of ballast. After a bit, Sally moved little Faith into the shade and got her settled with a hard biscuit.

Sally watched as the two males returned the boat to the water. It tipped for a moment, then found the wind and took off, neat as could be. Bertie ran along the pathway in pursuit. His rescuer watched for a moment, then retrieved his jacket and shoes, bringing them over to the bench where she sat.

“Thank ye,” she said. “I couldna' think how I was going t'explain another set of spoilt trews to the lad's mother.”

“Happy to help,” he said. He sat at the other end of the bench to put on his shoes. He smelt, she noticed, of sun and baking linen, not of the tobacco that permeated the pores of most young men. Pleased, Sally allowed her eyes a surreptitious glance, noticing first the bracelet of intricately knotted string he wore around his wrist, then further down, the state of his stockings.

“Och, sir, but look at ye! I shall pay for the launderin'.”

“Wouldn't think of it,” he said.

“I insist.”

“Then you'll have to strip them off me yourself,” he said.

She went instantly scarlet. He laughed.

Now, another man with that same exchange, and Sally would have wrapped her dignity around her and taken her leave. But the laugh had been a nice one, neither cruel nor forward. The sort of tease a brother might have made. The stranger finished tying his laces, brushed ineffectually at his sodden trouser legs, and restored his hat to his head.

“Sir,” she found herself saying, “I dinna even know your name. Whom shall I tell young Albert it was, that came to his rescue?”

He paused in the act of rising and swivelled on the wooden slats, as if seeing her for the first time. After a moment, he doffed his hat and smiled—and if she felt a pulse of alarm, it was small and far away, lost beneath the twinkle in his eyes. “James Hudson, at your service.”

“Well, I thank ye, Mr Hudson. My name is Rickets. Sally Rickets.”

“You're from Scotland, Miss Rickets?”

“That I am. Edinburgh.” She made a noise like a clearing of the throat, then continued in accents considerably closer to those of London town. “It will take me a good long time to lose the accent, I fear.”

“Oh, don't do that, the real you is charming.” She blushed again, less furiously. Mr Hudson's head tipped to one side. “So tell me, Miss Rickets. Do you make it a habit to bring your young captain here?”

Up to then, she had not.

The rest of the afternoon passed in a flash. He bought the children a sherbet from a passing vender, and a lemonade for her. He told them stories, outrageous tales of sea creatures and exotic places; some of them might even have been true. At some point he absent-mindedly drew a tangle of waxed thread from a pocket and set about knotting it in patterns, as another man might fiddle with a pipe or gold watch. When Bertie came back to the bench, grubby though unruined and pleased with his skills, he demanded to know what his new hero was doing, and was shown the lower portion of a miniature lanyard. An hour later, the child had the finished object in his hand.

From that day on, Kensington Gardens became a regular part of the week. Often, Jim Hudson was there. And more often than not, Sunday afternoons, Sally's half day of freedom, were spent in his company.

Within the month, she wore a delicately knotted bracelet around her left wrist.

Hudson was a sailor who'd grown tired of the life. He'd gone to sea at the age of thirteen, sent by his father in part for the money, but also to get the lad away from a doting mother who petted and spoiled her only child. Seven years later, a docking in Portsmouth coincided with his twentieth birthday and a growing conviction that life might hold other, less arduous, possibilities for a man of brains and determination. He was full of himself, was Jimmy Hudson, quick of wit and of temper, a curly-haired, blue-eyed charmer who had learned to conceal from his fellows the sure belief of his superior nature. Critics might say James Hudson felt the world owed him life on a silver platter. Himself, he said that the world was there for the taking.

It never occurred to the innocent governess that a young sailor's natural habitat lay not in afternoons beside the Serpentine, idling amongst the idle classes. Even less did she pause to wonder what Jimmy Hudson saw in her, an unbeautiful woman two years older and an inch taller than he. If she'd been home, around friends and family, there might have been someone to ask the question—but by the time Sally had friends around her, it was too late. She had fallen for him, this rogue with the lovely hair and the careless, crooked grin, head over heels. And although there was some doubt in her own mind about whether her virtue would survive to a wedding, in the end—to her pride and his astonishment—it did. For the rogue had taken a tumble of his own, into the dark brown eyes of a shy and awkward Scottish girl, and he gave her a ring and a name before he gave her a baby.

What he did not give her was the full truth about how he earned a living.

Their son was born, early and ill-formed, on a cool spring morning five months and three days after their wedding vows. Mother and father held their tiny blue-skinned child, they heard its thin cries dwindle and cease, they watched the life leave it. Hudson went out and got drunk. Two days later, he came home to find his wife delirious with fever.

If James Hudson had been as hard-plated as he imagined, matters would have been simple. He'd have bathed his wife's face and held her hand and watched her die, before going on with his life. But Sally was his one weakness, his hidden truth, the one whose belief made him real.

He panicked.

London in 1854 was a city of gangs, from those in Parliament to those of the blackest rookeries. Jim Hudson's habitual gang was in the middle of those extremes, a wide-spread corporation of criminal activity under the absolute rule of a man known as The Bishop. The Bishop was ruthless, but fair—and smart. He knew that sometimes the fist was called for, but that sometimes a hand outstretched, especially if it had money in it, could be a powerful way to buy a man's loyalty.

The Bishop listened to his desperate underling. He thought about young Hudson's history, his past usefulness in matters related to shipping and the passage of valuables through the docks, and he considered the young man's future potential. In the end, he nodded. Agreement was reached. Doctors were sent—good doctors, not stinking blood-letters with gin on their breath and filth around their finger-nails. A nurse came. Sally walked the edges of life for a week, two…and then backed away from the eternal cliff.

By which time Hudson owed The Bishop a considerable debt.

In the spring of 1854, Britain went to war with Russia over the Crimean Peninsula. During the summer, ten thousand Londoners died from the cholera. In the autumn, James Hudson moved from a dockland informer into one of The Bishop's burglary gangs.

He was small, strong, and as a sailor, easy with heights even in the dark. His job was to enter the house through windows left unlatched by a paid-off servant, letting his partners inside. One of those partners was a man he'd known for months, a wiry, foul-mouthed, and cheerful cracksman in his forties. The other Hudson was less happy about: a lad of fourteen who was new to the job, although he had lived in crime all his life. The Bishop's son—his only son—was there to learn his father's trade from the inside, and a less compliant apprentice would have been difficult to find. Nobody who worked with the surly and self-important lad enjoyed the experience, but Jimmy and his cracksman learned how to make him feel important without risking the job. And the boy was bright enough, if one could talk him around his tendency to hit first and think later.