The Murder of Mary Russell (5 page)

“Nothing's wrong yet, but I have to commit a felony.”

“What?”

“Jimmy canna come back, it's too dangerous. I don't know when he'll be able to send me the money for passage. Papa won't even speak to me, Mama will nae cross Papa, you've nought to spare, and even if I convince the government to send me on an assisted fare, as a domestic, I don't have two pounds. It'd take me months of scrubbing floors to save up. The only way I can get to Australia is to be transported.”

“I…” Alice said faintly.
“Transported?”

“I have to commit a crime. And if I act rough, they'll want to be rid of me.”

“But…what about Clarissa?”

“Oh, she'll come with me—they send bairns, too. Saves the cost of the workhouse. But it might take weeks, for the trial and all, and I'll not have my daughter in a gaol cell.”

It was a mad scheme, suitable only for a desperate woman. Sally had asked around about the law, and general opinion was that the chances of a fresh-faced young governess being transported—a punishment designed to rid a nation of troublemakers—was minuscule. She would need to stand in court a reprobate, shameless and without principles. There was one crime admirably suitable to her purpose.

That afternoon, Sally knocked at the door of the house where she had been born. The maid who answered gave a scornful glance at Sally's dress and opened her mouth to tell her the trade entrance was at the back.

“Hello, Hazel,” Sally interrupted. The maid paused for a closer look before stepping back in astonishment. Sally gathered her skirts and pushed past into the foyer. “Would you please tell my mother I'm here?”

After a moment of goggling, Hazel closed the door and fled up the stairs. The instant her black skirt disappeared, Sally darted down the hall to her father's office. Inside of three minutes, she had what she needed, and crossed back into the drawing room: her mother would want a formal setting when she confronted her wayward daughter.

Sally loosed her bonnet ties, but did not take it off. Nor did she sit, just stood with her hands clasped, listening to the silence overhead. After a time came the sound of a door opening.

She half expected the maid with a command to leave. But the tread was heavier, and approached with an air of determination.

Her mother had not paused to change clothes; the sight of her simple tea dress brought Sally a faint hope. “Hullo, Mama.”

“What are you doing here?” At the frigid disapproval, hope died.

“I came to give you something, Mama.” Sally pulled open her little bag and took out a cheap brooch. She worked the clasp, and opened it to show her mother what lay pressed behind the glass: the tiniest wisp of light brown hair, snipped from the back of Clarissa's head that morning. “You have a granddaughter. Her name is Clarissa, after Grandmamma. Clarissa Huds—”

“You need to go, before your father comes home.”

Sally froze. Slowly, her hand curled around the locket. Her daughter's precious hair, for this.

“Leave, now.”

“Yes, Mama.” The little locket shut with a faint snap. She laid it onto the polished surface of the table at the end of the sofa, and said, “I am going away for a time, to be with my husb—yes, Mama, we are married, and I love him. Clarissa and I will be at Alice's house this evening, if you wish to meet your granddaughter.”

And she left.

Three hours later, the police came to her sister's house. They arrested Sally for stealing two expensive necklaces from the safe in her father's office. Necklaces her grandmother had bequeathed to Sally, many years before.

They could not find the necklaces themselves: not on her, nor in Alice's house, and not in the room Sally had been living in, over in the bad part of town. No trace of either necklace was found—but she did not deny she had taken them. Sally Hudson stood before the judge and admitted her guilt—boasted about it, even, in an accent considerably lower class than her natural voice. She was condemned to seven years' transportation to Australia, her father's courtroom curses ringing in her ears.

When the ship sailed, the third week of November, little Clarissa sat on her mother's hip. Tied firmly to the child's pudgy wrist was a crude dolly made out of knotted string. A curiously heavy dolly, for beneath its stubby exterior nestled ten gold guinea coins, proceeds from a hasty visit to a pawn shop. In her valise, Sally had two additional pieces of treasure, a going-away present from her sister: a matched pair of French porcelain tea-cups that, like the necklaces, had belonged to their grandmother.

On a blistering February day in 1856, the ship dropped anchor in Fremantle. It had not been a bad trip, as these things went. Once free of Edinburgh, Sally had let surface her native demeanour and superior accents, confusing the ship's warders enough that they moved her into “general” class, allowing her to avoid the worst food and the hair-shaving shame of those marked with “crime.” Still, she had heard terrible things of the conditions that awaited female transportees, and she joined the jostling queue coming onto the docks with her heart in her throat.

Sally was doubly cursed—or perhaps, in this case, blessed—by a plain face and a babe in arms. She passed safely through the gauntlet of officials gathered to pluck up the prettiest girls as “servants,” only to find herself beneath the probing eyes of the next rank of would-be “employers”: working men with fewer resources, yet similarly interested in slaveys and wives. At the end of the process lay a wing of the prison to which transportees were theoretically bound, but before she reached that, her husband's face appeared, looking older and gone dark with the Australian sun, but as charming as ever.

She drew her first deep and unimpeded breath in what felt like years. He
had
received her letter, sent by fast clipper before she left Edinburgh, and he had managed to get from Sydney across a continent to the last remaining dumping-ground of Britain's convicts.

She ran the last steps to fling one arm around him, startling a wail of protest out of the child she carried in the other. She was laughing through tears of joy as she introduced her husband to his small, dark-haired daughter.

Hudson bent over the child, marvelling as her little fingers wrapped shyly around his. The palm of his hand was scarred, Sally noticed—a burn, months old, that caused the hand to curl somewhat at rest. For a moment, she thought of the letter she had read a thousand times, his heartfelt description of that mutinous survivor dragged from the ship's burning wreckage…But she shook the thought from her mind, and looked into his face instead.

“I called her Clarissa,” Sally told him. “I hope that was all right?”

“Beautiful. She has your eyes.”

“Poor thing, hope she doesn't have my looks.”

“She'll be 'right,” her husband said, an Australian-sounding expression that rather lacked the romance Sally might have wished. Still, she was here, and the family was together at last. It would, indeed, be right.

It took some weeks, sweltering in the tropical summer, but the contrast between Sally Hudson—a literate, married young mother—and a recent influx of Fenian convicts encouraged the overburdened warden to hand over a Conditional Pardon and a transfer of her person to Sydney.

There the Hudsons resumed their married life, bolstered by the golden inheritance she had claimed from her father's safe. And if she studied Jimmy's back sometimes, when he stood up from the tin bath or slept shirtless in the heat of summer, if her eyes traced the foot-long scar along his shoulder-blade and wondered if it had been made by a piece of burning ship's timber, she never said a word. Certainly he never did—mere mention of the event turned him first pale, then taciturn. Everyone who came to Australia had a past they were leaving behind, not the least James Hudson. In any event, he'd hardened during their months apart, and his patience was short: it was not wise to venture remarks that could be taken as criticism.

A second daughter was born in 1859, a little blonde-haired, blue-eyed imp with whom Jimmy fell instantly in love. They named her Alicia, after Sally's one faithful Edinburgh relation, and Jimmy bought the infant a real doll, and a lacy dress, and a little painting of an English shepherd to go over her cot.

Jimmy's work on the docks, which half the time brought him home stinking of raw wool, also left him in a position to pocket tips when a shipment of some value was being loaded, on or off. He no longer hid what he was doing, and although Sally could not condone his criminal acts, neither could she claim that she did not know what James Hudson was. The fine balance between the husband's goals and the wife's disapproval sometimes came to a head, and Jimmy did not always stop at a shaking. Sally lost a tooth once. Another time she was left with a ringing in her ear for weeks. However, this was her bed, one that she had made herself, and he never hit the children—not with his fist anyway. A lot of wives couldn't say the same.

Jimmy did provide, give him that. Sally did not have to find work outside of the home. She hired a series of small, malnourished girls, some locals, others transported from England for stealing a loaf of bread or apples from a tree. She let them sleep in the kitchen while they learned a few basic skills and lost the gauntness of their faces, she taught them their alphabets, then freed them to work for some other wife with slightly greater resources.

Neither Hudson spoke of how they had come to Sydney, although between Jimmy's nightmares and his horror of the sea, over the years Sally had picked up most of the story. Their daughters learned not to play “shipwreck” in Papa's hearing, as Sally's tongue avoided the use of words such as “mutiny” or “explosion.”

In the course of time, Sally was given her Certificate of Freedom. She could have returned to Britain, after that—and was tempted from time to time, when Jimmy was in a black temper. Twice he was arrested, once convicted: the four months he was gone were the hardest yet. The only thing that kept Sally from being thrown into the streets with two little girls and a growing belly was the last remaining gold guinea, the one she'd not told Jimmy about. The coin she'd kept against the day when she would want to return home…but she didn't, quite.

When he came out and found her not starving, he accused her of having sold herself, of finding a pretty boy to pay her way. The split lip he gave her nearly sent her to the docks to beg for passage, but by that time, she was so heavily pregnant that even if she'd had the money, the thought of giving birth at sea was more than she could face.

In 1866, Sally Hudson went into labour for the fourth time. Thirty-four hours later, her second son was born. She held him, whispering love and welcome into his wet little scalp. Then the blood started to come. The haemorrhage poured into the rough bed in a scarlet tide. When it ebbed, with it went Sally's strength, her colour, and then her life.

Little Jamie lingered. Clarissa nurtured him desperately, day and night, teasing drops of milk and sugar-water between his pale lips, warming him against her childish chest, dropping only briefly into sleep before she jerked awake again to feed, change, and warm her brother. She talked to him, sang her mother's songs to him. Days passed. Clarissa was oblivious to her father, her sister, her mother's funeral, her own needs: nothing mattered but her tiny brother, that he continued to draw breath. And he did, his cries weak and his motions listless, but he kept living. Clarissa's hopes solidified, making her fiercely protective of the sickly scrap of humanity—and then the fever took him, and he was gone, too.

Clarissa Hudson was ten years old when this happy childhood ended.

W
ithout a wife, with his son taken, James Hudson fell into the bottle. For months, he managed to forget: his loss, his dignity, his two living daughters. He would stir himself in the morning to go buy them breakfast, then come home at midnight with Alicia's favourite sweets rather than bread, or a little straw bonnet to go with her threadbare dress. Once, he gave Alicia a rag doll crawling with fleas. More often, he came home with nothing at all. On the rare nights when he and food were there at the same time, they would eat, and he would sit with his arms around little Alicia telling her stories until she squirmed away from his smell. Clarissa wondered if it wasn't better when he ignored them.

He would weep, and revile himself for their neglect, for his wife's death, for the fact that her two beloved daughters spent their days playing on the streets with the prozzie's brats. (“What's a prozzie, Papa?” Alicia would ask, until Clarissa hushed her.) After a while, he would stagger out, and disappear until the wee hours.

Sometimes he failed to come home at all, leaving the girls shivering together in a dark room, Clarissa trying her best to distract her hungry sister with stories of her own.

Were it not for the nice ladies downstairs (who were friendly and generous so long as the girls played silently in the mornings, for the ladies did not wake until noon) and the oncoming summer, the girls would likely have followed their brother before Clarissa could figure out how to feed and clothe her sister and herself. But it was October, and the extra warmth of the days gave Clarissa just that little bit extra distance between the two of them and death. Courting couples watching the little sailing yachts along the waterfront would toss a child a coin to be rid of her hungry gaze. Market stalls were busy enough to hide a short thief. Clothing, drying on lines instead of before kitchen fires, called out for a nimble new owner. Even the nights were warm enough for comfort.

Alicia was not as easy to mother as little Jamie had been, being both demanding and unappreciative, but Clarissa found her sister's greed oddly reassuring after Jamie's faint interest. She threw herself into the task of giving her sister first survival, then comfort, and eventually the triumph of a childhood. She stole for Alicia: food, clothing, hair-ribbons, toys—even coins from the pockets of her father's trousers as he snored. She fought to keep her sister clean. She made sure Alicia continued with the school that had been so important to their mother, and turned a deaf ear when Alicia whined that she wanted to stay home like Clarrie. When all else failed—when the cold rain fell and they had no dinner—she summoned their mother's entertainments, inventing little plays about their neighbours, acting out the various parts on the stage of their cramped and dreary room.

However, Sydney was not a big city, and The Rocks a crowded neighbourhood. The police began to recognise the scrawny child with the brown hair. Five months after Sally's death, one of them was quick enough to lay hands on her.

The three Hudsons were living in a squalid room above an even more squalid grog shop, two streets from the docks where Hudson only occasionally worked. Still, it wasn't all bad. Allie had a pet rat—rather, she had taken a liking to one of the smaller rats that had a comical mark on its face like a moustache, and fed it scraps from the bread Clarissa brought her. Clarissa had taken care to earn the affections of the few men in the house, docks workers who watched over the two girls to some degree. And the door had a latch on the inside. Matters could have been worse.

The policeman, fingers clamped around Clarissa's bony wrist, used his other hand to rattle the doorknob. When it failed to open, a slap from a meaty palm sent a shudder down the entire hallway.

“Hudson!” he shouted.

His reply was silence—but a latched door meant someone was home. Before he could change the flat of his hand for the point of his shoulder and rip the flimsy door from its frame, Clarissa reached past him to tap on the wood with her fingernails.

“Allie?” she said, then corrected herself, in a voice that might have come from the other side of the globe. “Alicia? It's me. Open up.”

Often, her sister didn't. If Allie had food, if Allie was annoyed or bored or in the middle of a game, she was quite capable of leaving Clarissa out in the hallway until their father's uneven tread rose up the stairs. But today the sound of motion came from within, followed by a small voice with native Sydney accents. “Clarrie? Who's that man?”

“Don't fret, Alicia, it's just the nice policeman checking to see we're all right.”

After a moment, the latch slid aside. A tiny blonde girl with cornflower eyes looked up at Constable Taylor, clutching to her chest a crudely-made doll in a dress amateurishly sewn from what looked like a man's silk handkerchief. The constable deposited Clarissa inside the room before letting go of her wrist and shutting the door behind him.

It was easy to see that the father was not there. But the sight that did meet his eyes had him pulling off his constabulary hat and running a hand over his hair.

The lodgings-house was one of those that had been born decrepit, and by now was held together by dirt, damp, and the stained news sheets that papered the wallboards. The bare floorboards were rough enough to draw blood from incautious feet, and the furniture amounted to one bed, two stools, four mismatched tea chests acting as storage, and a rickety table set with a single candle-stick in which rested a stub of cheap tallow candle.

But unlike most—unlike any other the policeman had seen in this district, come to that—the thin blanket on the room's bed was neatly pulled up; the smaller mattress in the room's corner similarly tidied. The tea crates held folded clothing, the family kitchen-ware (two plates, three mugs, and a few spoons), and some old toys. An attempt had been made to clean the floor. The spalled paint around the door was scrubbed to the wood beneath, and the sash window—the constable had to walk over for a closer examination. On the inside, the cracked panes were spotless; on the outside, the lower half of the window had been similarly scrubbed. He turned to measure the older girl's arm with his eyes: the end of the clean patch looked about the distance that Clarissa Hudson's arm could reach without her actually standing outside on the frame.

As he said to his wife over the dining table a few hours later, that half-clean swath of window was one of the rummest things he'd ever seen.

In front of his knees was the table, one leg broken and propped on a brick. The light from the half-cleaned window fell across another thing he didn't see much in these parts: books. Four of them, all but one looking as if they'd been kicked about on the cobblestones. Beside them was a slate with a painfully drawn series of ABCs on it, written with the morsels of pale chalk-stone gathered in a clam-shell.

He picked up the new-looking book, wondering who she'd stolen it from. “McGuffey, eh? Who's the schoolgirl?”

The two girls spoke simultaneously.

“Me,” said the little tow-head.

“We both are,” said Clarissa.

He turned his head to look a question at the brown-haired child he'd nabbed stealing apples.

She explained. “Alicia goes to school, then she comes home and learns me. Helps her remember.”

And, he thought, helps the older one not to forget.

“You've had some learning yourself, I think.”

The girl raised her chin. “My mother taught me. She died. I told her I'd take care of Allie—of Alicia. So I do.”

“Where's your father?”

“He's at work,” she said promptly. Her dark eyes were as open and honest as the sky. If he didn't know better—if he didn't know his patch as well as he did—he'd almost have believed her.

“Sure he is. Well, you tell your Pa to come find me. I want a word with him.”

“Indeed I shall tell him.” The policeman laid the book back on the table, hiding his smile at the girl's proper accents.

But the younger child was frowning up at her sister. “Clarrie, why're you talkin' so fun—”

“Hush, All—Alicia. And call me Clarissa.”

“But, Clarrie—”

“Thank you, sir, for bringing me home.”

“And don't you take what don't belong to you, hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

A right lie, he thought.

His heavy tread across the room set the window to rattling. He turned at the door to look again at that hard-won arc of clear view, then at the table.

“I might shout you a couple of slate pencils and the odd book, if it helps you mind your
p
s and
q
s.”

From the expression on the girl's face, he might have been tantalising her with the offer of a full Sunday roast.

That night when their father came back, Clarissa said nothing about the police. As soon as his snores began to change the next morning, she slipped out to beg a mug of tea from downstairs, setting it onto the table with yesterday's uneaten crust of bread.

When Hudson sat up, dropping his feet to the floorboards and his head to his hands, she scrambled up from the corner where she'd been helping her sister sound out words, and stood before him with cup and bread in hand.

He squinted at her. “What's this, then?”

“Mrs Murdy had the billy on, she gave me a cup.”

“Good of the old bat. What'd you have to give her for it?”

“Just a smile.”

“Little liar,” he said, but not without affection.

He took a swallow of the powerful, tepid liquid, then tore off a corner of the tough bread with his stained teeth and washed it down with more tea. Alicia had come up to watch the bread disappear. When there was one bite left, he noticed her stare “Had your breakfast yet, Allie girl?”

“Yes, she did,” Clarissa answered, but when Alicia shook her blonde head, he held out the bread. She snatched it and crammed it in her mouth. He rumpled her curls, ignoring her shift away from his hand, and looked at his other daughter. “You got more tucker for yourself?”

She had not. “I'll eat later, thank you, Papa.”

He nodded and finished the last of the tea. “Thanks for that, child. We'll have our own kitchen again soon.”

“Papa, Officer Taylor wants a word,” she said.

His eyes narrowed. “Why? What'd you do?”

“Nothing! Nothing at all, he just…I was down the greengrocers, lookin' at apples, and he—”

“Were you stealing again?”

She eased back, one eye on his hand, but this time it was the younger sister who flung down an intervention.

“Clarrie did an act, Pa,” she said. “For the copper.”

The distraction worked. Hudson's gaze moved over to Alicia. “An act?”

Clarissa glared at her sister, but that just urged Allie on. “Yair, like she was flash 'n' all.”

“What're you talking about, child?”

Alicia turned to her sister, all sweet innocence to hide her glee. “Show him, Clarrie! Talk like you did.”

If Pa got into his head that Clarrie was sometimes acting on
him,
telling him things he wanted to hear instead of the truth, she'd suffer. She ought to get out now. Let Allie take the brunt of it for once. But she gave her sister's wide blue eyes a last glare, then turned to the man on the bed. “Papa, it's just a game I was playin' with the copper. Acting, like. If you sound more, well, quality, people sometimes leave you alone.” He stared hard at her, and she grew uneasy: any threat to Papa's pride was a venture onto dangerous ground. Still, his frown did not seem to be one of anger, for once, so she held off leaping for the door.

“Show me,” he said.

“Pa, it's just a—”

“I want to see. How you talked to Officer Taylor.”

Papa's breath stank, his eyes were red pools, he hadn't shaved in a week, and she wanted, wanted,
so
wanted her real father back. But ten-year-old Clarissa Hudson took a deep breath and obediently summoned the personality she'd worn for the copper.