Victorian Maiden (25 page)

Tom, yes, she remembered Tom – dear Tom; Tom, who knew everything and who thought she was a heroine ever as much as Grace Darling was. He had once walked from Knaresborough, all the way from the Castle Mill to the workhouse at Starbeck, and asked to see her after prayers one Sunday. It was not so long after her ‘unfortunate mishaps,' as everyone had insisted on calling them. 

He had looked odd, all dressed up in his Sunday best, without his usual collarless shirt and ragged waistcoat. He looked just as he had done in Mr John Walton's big parlour on the day he had invited them for tea, standing as if on hot coals. This time he was nervously passing a large bunch of red daisies and carnations from one enormous hand to the other. Mary had told her later that all flowers had meanings, and that the meanings of Tom's flowers were that even though she didn't know it, that she was truly beautiful, and that his heart yearned for her.

In the cramped space between the infirmary beds, Tom had knelt down on one knee and asked her – Elizabeth Beatrice Wilson – to be his wife.

But Tom's words and the words of the flowers had been as a foreign language to her. Why did they speak of marriage, of love and of beauty? Didn't they know, as everyone surely knew, that she was just a wicked, sinful harlot who had to be punished and punished until death's blessed relief?

She couldn't find words of her own for Tom, dear Tom, with his eyes that were filled with kindness. Perhaps that was why he had asked her – because he was kind. But how could she yoke something so good to such badness? So she had wept and sent him away. And he, giant though he was, had wept too, as he gently laid the flowers next to her; had taken her fingers for just a moment in his own, had kissed them, and then had gone.

But as she had lain in her bed through the long days that followed, hugging the flowers as if they might have been her poor, dead mama, they spoke to her still. They asked her if maybe, just maybe, dear Tom could have loved her, wicked and bad though she was. They told her that to Tom at least, she might truly be beautiful. And they reminded her of Old Rachel's words on her very first day in the workhouse; of how one day, she would indeed be beautiful, and of how one day, some kind gentleman would surely come and make her a handsome husband.

And as she hugged them as if they might have been her poor, dead mama, they made her believe it.

Because she was not well enough to leave the infirmary ward, Mary had volunteered, nay, insisted, on going to Knaresborough, to the Castle Mill, to find dear Tom and to tell him that Elizabeth had been foolish, that her head was indeed still muddled from the chloral hydrate Mary had given her for her pain and that of course, she would be honoured to be married to a man such as he.

But hours later, when she returned, Mary had wept too as she told her that, just like her mama, and Baby Albert and Baby Sarah before him, dear Tom had gone. He had returned, utterly distraught to the mill, had resigned his post to Mr John Walton, and had left. He had left on the very next railway train out of Knaresborough. And the worst of it all, the very worst part of it, was that no-one had known where he had gone. 

As she always seemed to be these days, Elizabeth was rocking endlessly to-and-fro as she sat perched on the very edge of her seat. And again, as she often seemed to be, she was quietly singing the lullaby under her breath. But it was only after Lucie and Atticus had been seated opposite her for several minutes that they came to realise that she was singing the same line over and over again.

It was, “First to the poor-house, then to the grave,” and Mary was regarding her with something akin to miserable anguish.

All at once Elizabeth seemed to notice them as they sat watching her.

“One and eight and eight and one is Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One,” she said to Lucie, and she smiled.

Her smile was like the sun breaking from behind a cloud over the Holy Island, with the blue of her eyes just like the sparkling blue of the sea.

“One and eight and eight and one and one and eight and eight and one… Where's my mama? Where is Tom?”

She looked at Atticus and her smile vanished, leaving only the empty shell that was the old woman she had become.

“I'm not wicked, I'm not wicked, I'm not wicked.”

Atticus looked suddenly flustered. He glanced to his wife in alarm and Lucie smiled patiently.

“No, Lizzie, we know that you're not wicked. I'm sure you will see Tom, and I'm certain that you will see your mama, very soon.”

“Mama is very poorly,” Elizabeth continued, and then stilled for a moment, her face suddenly distraught.

“Please don't let her die. Uncle says she will die, she will die, she will die. I shall have to go to the Annexe.”

She began to rock once more and to sing, loud and shrill, as if to smother her own words.

“Lizzie, dearest, your mama did die; she died nearly fifty years ago. Please try to remember.”

Mary sounded bone-weary, as if she was at the end of a very long and exhausting day. She reached forward and hugged the old woman, whose shocked and bewildered face peered back over her shoulder.

Elizabeth's eyes, bright and round, caught in a net of wrinkles, seemed to be staring into the Inferno itself.

 

“Elizabeth, you must prepare yourself, because I have some truly dreadful news for you. I'm so sorry, but your mama – my sister – has died.” 

Her uncle was standing over her. She could see the deep, full circles of his eyes: eager, ravenous; mocking his words, and boring down into her very soul. 

“You are an orphan girl now, and you will have to come and live with me at Sessrum House. We can grieve for your mama, for Beatrice, together. I've had a special new annexe to the house built. You can sleep there, where we won't be disturbed by the noise of the servants, and we can both remember your mama in peace. There will be lots of other children there too, and John, my son, will be there. You like John, don't you? I shall sleep in the Annexe with you all. Your Aunt Agnes is very ill and so I shall look after you myself and make sure that you are being a very good little girl.

You must always take care to be a good little girl for me, and always do everything exactly as I say, whatever I say. That way you can be an angel with Jesus and see your mama again some day, in Heaven.”

She remembered the deep, black circles of his eyes creeping down her body, lingering long after his mouth had finished speaking the words. His arm had crept around her and his hand had pulled her tight against the soft flab of his body. Then he had released her with another long, hungry look that, paralysed with grief though she was, froze her very blood to ice.

And then the arm had crept back and she could feel his fingers moving, moving all the time, pressing her and touching her as they stood in the wide, black ring around her mama's open grave. 

She needed to force herself to believe that it was really her mama in there, in that coffin; that her warm, soft mama was now inside that hard, wooden shell. 

Mary her governess had told her that it was a special safety coffin, with a little bell house that protruded above the grave on a long, bronze tube. If her mama should by some miracle still be alive, then pray God she would move and cause the little bell to ring the alarm across the graveyard.

She stared and stared at the little bronze bell house. Mary had explained that the bell inside was connected to a cord which in turn was carried by the tube to her mama's hands – those hands that were once so warm and soft, so full of a mother's love; those hands that would stroke her hair and gently rock her to sleep while she sang her favourite lullaby. 

She stared and stared at the little bell house, ornamented with tiny bronze cherubs, and she prayed for a miracle; for the bell to ring, and for her mama to be alive.

And it did! Just as the straps the bearers were using to lower the coffin into the grave fell slack, the bell-house slipped sharply to the side and the bell inside tinkled. The black ring of mourners began to murmur and whisper and her uncle's hands stopped moving.

The murmur died away and there was utter silence, save for one of the tall funeral horses snickering under its black, ostrich feather plume. 

“Pay no heed, pay no heed,” the vicar said, smiling, his hands spread in apology. “The coffin is merely settling upon the one beneath it. Rest assured the deceased has not been interred prematurely.”

A murmur rose and settled once more, and her uncle's restless fingers began to move again. 

She had been given special permission to attend her mama's interment: a time of horror and anguish, when only men could generally be expected to hold their dignity. Her uncle had insisted that because she was his own sister's daughter, she would be made of sterner stuff. He reassured her that if she stuck close by him, and allowed him to comfort her, and perhaps if he were to take her under his own great, black cape, she would indeed be able to cope admirably.

He had, despite his own grief, fulfilled entirely his duties as a loving uncle and renowned philanthropist. He had swept his cape around her to shield her from the prying eyes and carnivorous stares of the undertaker's mutes. He had held her tight as she had wept. He had even taken the precaution of gently massaging her chest under his cape in order to prevent her very heart from breaking in sorrow and grief. And then he had taken her in his own, black carriage, which led the procession back to Sessrum House for the funeral feast.

There, he had explained about her mama.

“Where will your mama be now, do you suppose, Lizzie?” he had asked.

“She'll be in Heaven, Uncle Alfie, with the Lord Jesus and the angels, and – and with my dear papa.”

“Will she, now?” 

Her uncle's voice had changed and it made her start. It was loud and coarse, and it hinted at bitterness and doubt.

The hooves of the horses counted out the seconds.

“Your mama was a very beautiful woman, Lizzie. Do you realise that?”

Elizabeth nodded. 

“Yes, Uncle Alfie.”

“She used to have a particular effect on many – very many – of the men around her. Can you imagine what that effect might have been, Lizzie?”

“No, Uncle Alfie.”

“She used to arouse them.” 

He smiled briefly at her look of puzzlement and a flash of ravenous hunger glinted in his eyes. 

“She used to arouse them physically as men, Lizzie, and she even, I will admit, on occasion used to arouse me.

Lizzie, there was an Italian writer who lived hundreds of years ago called Dante – Dante Alighieri. Now Dante Alighieri wrote a celebrated poem in which he described what he called the Inferno. Dante's Inferno is what you and I would call Hell. He wrote that it was composed of nine circles, each circle being full of worse sinners than the last. Now the eighth of these nine circles contained, amongst others, seducers and seductresses. And just as seductresses used the passion – the arousal – of others to entrap them, and to draw them into sinfulness too, so they themselves are whipped and driven by demons for all eternity; for eternity or until they have been punished sufficiently to purify their souls and be allowed entrance into Heaven. 

I'm very much afraid that your mama is in the Eighth Circle of Hell right now, being whipped by demons to purify her soul. I'm very much afraid that the sound of the bell ringing as she was lowered into her grave might well have been the demons disturbing the cord as they came to claim her soul and drag it away down to Hell.”

His smile was sinister as he paused again, delighting in the effect that his words were having.

“You are growing to be a very beautiful young woman yourself, Lizzie. You arouse the men around you. You arouse me on occasion, just as your mama once did. So as your loving uncle, I am going to help you to avoid your mother's fate. I am going to keep you out of the Eighth Circle of Hell by driving the wickedness out of you whilst you are still a young woman. I am going to undertake nothing less than the purification of your soul.

Tell me, are you familiar with the Beatitudes, Lizzie?”

She shook her head.

“They're verses in the Holy Scriptures, in the fifth chapter of the gospel of Saint Matthew. You may look them up yourself if you wish. Verse ten, for example, says: ‘Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.'” 

He paused again to allow the words time to soak through her grief and her newly born terror. 

“So you see, if you want to see your mama again in the Kingdom of Heaven, I must, as St Matthew commanded, persecute you. Do you see that, Lizzie? You're a wicked little girl. You deserved for your mama to die and you deserve, for righteousness' sake, to be punished. Those are
St Matthew's words, not my own.”

Elizabeth nodded once more, her expression a death mask.

“
Then,
Deus misereatur;
May God have mercy.”

Atticus Fox is deeply absorbed in a game of chess.

Sometimes, when his mind tends towards chaos and disorder and his thoughts begin to collide and intrude on one another, he seeks the silence and the solitude of night. It is then, when all is quiet and still, when the Ailing sleep and when the bandstands cease to fill the air with noisy distraction, that he can at last properly retreat into the sanctuary of his mind and set about examining the patterns and the paradoxes, the symmetries and the coincidences with which his profession on occasion, torments him.

He finds that it helps these musings and the flights of conjecture they release if he plays himself at chess. It also ensures that his mind remains wholly dispassionate and objective, since each and every move he considers requires that his viewpoint and allegiances must shift in full between the black, ebony and the white, ivory chessmen.

Was Elizabeth Wilson guilty of the brutal and frenzied murder of Alfred Roberts, celebrated philanthropist and benefactor of Harrogate?

The great weight of evidence points to the conclusion that yes, she must certainly have killed him. Whether in her mental state she could be considered guilty, as such, was an entirely different matter. She almost certainly could not.

Atticus particularly values his wife's opinion much more highly than the magistrate's in this. And yet something else is worrying at his mind about the death of Alfred Roberts, and about Elizabeth's part in it… something that will not be stilled. That is why he needs to seek the night of quiet contemplation.

The Assize sessions are only two days away now. Every time he looks in his diary, each time he makes an appointment, each time a date is mentioned no matter how innocent the context, he is reminded sharply of how Elizabeth will soon be forced to endure perhaps the greatest of all her life's many trials.

They have decided already that Elizabeth is unlikely to hang. Much more likely is incarceration in a prison or more probably still, in an insane asylum.

‘Asylum': He takes a moment out from his cogitations to consider the word carefully.

Tormented continually in her purgatory of thoughts, any restraint of Elizabeth there could hardly be considered as asylum.

She has failed the McNaughton tests, and the magistrate has declared her sane.

Will her inevitable incomprehension on the witness stand be construed as deliberate obstinacy by his lordship, and therefore as her contempt for his court? And will that presumed contempt possibly then irritate the learned judge sufficiently for him to send her, in spite of everything, to the gallows?

There will be a defence, of course. And as so often also in the game of chess, the best defence will likely be attack. But that attack would inevitably be an attack on the reputations and the good names of some of the stoutest pillars of Harrogate society. It would be an attack on society itself.

He slides the chess board around once again, and opens his mind fully to the cause of the white, ivory chessmen.

So, once again: Had Elizabeth Wilson, guilty or not of malice aforethought, committed the brutal and frenzied killing of Alfred Roberts?

Once again he is forced to conclude that yes, she had. But how can that possibly be? Yes, he had died by her hand, under her knife, but she hadn't the strength of either body or of mind to have carried out the deed herself. Surely it would have needed a different mind and strength far greater than hers to have murdered the man?

Stalemate.

He picks up a white knight from his board and holds it for a moment in his fingers, staring at it as he wrestles with the paradox. The knight is his very favourite chessman: powerful, chivalrous, romantic, the proverbial righter of wrongs.

And then all at once he sees it; he sees it all from the perspective of that little, white knight.

Checkmate.

The riddle is solved; the game is over at last. But for all that, his mind is not eased in the least. His is a brain that works much better in games of black and white, with rules and ordered squares of rank and file. But what he has seen could not be judged comfortably by order or by rules, and it is far from being black or white. He needs someone who understands the shades of grey between. Atticus glances at the little onyx-cased clock to the side of his desk. It will be two, long and agonising hours before Lucie will stir and wake from her bed.

Too long.