Scarlet Widow Read online

  ‘Mama, I should go for the doctor.’

  ‘There’s no need for that. Your father is making me up a mixture to ease my cough. I need sleep more than anything else.’

  She coughed again, and this time she retched into her handkerchief, and it was flooded red with blood.

  ‘Papa!’ called Beatrice, in a panic. ‘Papa!’

  She heard her father hurrying up the stairs. He came into the chamber in his long white nightgown and gently moved her to one side so that he could sit on the bed next to her mother. She coughed again and sprayed his nightgown with speckles of blood.

  ‘Bea, please bring me a cloth,’ said her father. ‘Anything will do. You’ll find some in the bottom drawer there.’

  Beatrice pulled open the drawer and took out a small linen tablecloth, which he unfolded with a shake and gave to her mother. She coughed some more, holding the cloth over her mouth, but she brought up no more blood, only pink-streaked sputum. Her father held her shoulders as she sat struggling for breath, her chest rising and falling with a sharp crackling sound.

  ‘How do you feel now?’ he asked her after a while, and she nodded, although her eyes kept darting around the room as if she couldn’t understand what she was doing there.

  He turned to Beatrice and said, ‘Bea, there’s a cup of water on the kitchen table, as well as a green glass bottle. Would you please bring them up here? And a spoon, too.’

  When Beatrice had climbed back up the stairs, carrying the cup and bottle, her father helped her mother to sip a little water. After that, he gave her two spoonfuls of the emerald-green medicine that he had prepared. ‘There, my dearest. Betony water and lungwort, mixed with a little honey. That should ease the rheum on your lungs. Try to get some sleep now. You should feel much better in the morning.’

  He helped her to lie down and turn on her side, and he drew the pale yellow blanket up to her neck. The chamber was warm and stuffy, but she was shivering and perspiring and her teeth were chattering.

  He took Beatrice back to her room. ‘She is so much worse,’ said Beatrice, worriedly, looking across the corridor at her mother lying in bed. ‘This morning she said it was only a cold. Why is she coughing up blood?’

  ‘I believe she may have the consumption,’ said her father. ‘Let us pray not, but we will see how she feels in a few hours’ time. The physic I have given her should help.’

  ‘Will we have to take her to the hospital?’

  Her father said, ‘St Thomas’s? No. I can treat her here at home just as well as any of the doctors in that cesspit. But before you go back to sleep, Bea, do ask God to take care of her, won’t you, and make her well again?’

  Beatrice nodded and hugged him. His beard prickled her cheek and she thought of the rat, with its bristly fur, and then she thought of what her father had said about preserving people. She could see her mother staring at the candle beside her bed, her beautiful mother with her dark curls spread out across the pillow. She didn’t want to think about losing her, or what would happen to her if she died.

  Her mother started coughing again and so her father kissed Beatrice on the forehead and went back to his chamber, and closed the door.

  Beatrice climbed back into bed and lay there for a long time with her eyes open. It was hard to say a prayer, with her mother continually coughing, let alone sleep. When she did eventually doze off she dreamed that she walked into the parlour to find her mother sitting by the window, holding up her embroidery hoop. As she approached her, however, she saw that her needle was poised but her hands were motionless.

  ‘Mama,’ she heard herself saying, in a blurry voice. ‘Mama!’

  But her mother didn’t answer, or even turn to look at her. Before she was halfway across the parlour, Beatrice realized that her mother was dead and that her father had turned her into wood.

  *

  Three weeks later, Beatrice awoke one morning and the house was silent.

  Her mother had been coughing and coughing almost continuously for days and nights on end, but now she seemed to have stopped. Outside, on Giltspur Street, it was warm and windy. She could see waste paper flying past her upstairs window and hear the muffled cacophony of street peddlers shouting and cartwheels grinding on the cobbles. Inside, however, the air was stifling and there was no sound at all.

  She drew back her blankets and went across to her parents’ room. Her father was kneeling on the floor beside the bed, his head bowed, holding her mother’s hand. Her mother was lying on the pillow with her eyes closed, perfectly still, not breathing.

  ‘Papa?’ Beatrice whispered.

  Her father turned to her, and she had never seen anybody’s face look so stricken.

  ‘Mama is with God now, Bea,’ he told her. ‘From now on, it’s just you and me, with nobody to care for us but ourselves.’

  Four

  The day of Nancy Bannister’s funeral was warm, but gloomy, with low grey cloud. Before the service she lay on view in the parlour, dressed in a white woollen shroud with her head resting on a white woollen pillow, as required by the Burial in Woollens Act.

  Beatrice approached the coffin with her father holding her hand. Without a word he lifted the flannel that covered her mother’s face. Beatrice pressed her hand over her mouth. She could scarcely believe that this figure was her mother. Her face was the colour of ivory, and her eyes were as deep and dark as two inkwells.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed, Bea,’ said her father. ‘Your mother is in heaven now, smiling and laughing. This is nothing more than the body that bore her suffering for her.’

  The coffin was carried from the parlour into the street outside, where a hearse drawn by two black horses was waiting to take it the short distance to St James’s Church in Clerkenwell Close. A silent procession set off, led by the balding young parson, the parson’s mute, and a feather-man with a tray of black ostrich feathers balanced on his head. It began to feel like rain.

  In the church, in a high, sing-song voice the balding young parson extolled Nancy’s virtues as a wife and a mother and then commended her soul to God. The church echoed so that it sounded as if three parsons were all talking at once. The bell was rung six times, as was customary for a woman. Afterwards, the bearers took Nancy’s coffin down to the crypt to join more than two hundred others from St James’s parish who slept together in the darkness.

  The rain didn’t start to patter down until the funeral guests had returned to the house, and then it began to dribble down the windows like tears. Nancy’s sisters, Jane and Felicity, served tea and cinnamon cake, while Clement handed round glasses of port wine. His hand trembled as he did so, and his face was so ashen with grief that he looked ill.

  ‘Now you shall have to be the lady of the house, young Beatrice,’ said her Aunt Felicity. ‘No more schooling at Mrs Tutchin’s, I imagine.’

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ said Clement. ‘Bea shall carry on with her classes, just as before.’

  ‘But, Clement! How on earth will you manage? You don’t look at all well, if you don’t mind my saying so! I don’t want to be back here before Christmas for another funeral!’

  Clement shook his head. ‘Every young girl needs French, and mathematics, and logic, as well as cookery and plain-work. But Bea shall help me with the business, too. She has always shown a great aptitude for mixing medications, ever since she was old enough to hold a spoon. She preferred it to baking biscuits with her mother. One day, you mark my words, she will be London’s first and most celebrated female apothecary.’

  ‘A female apothecary? I can hardly see that being acceptable! Especially one so young and so pretty! How many gentlemen will feel comfortable coming to a female apothecary, especially if they have any kind of private ailment?’

  ‘I doubt if it will be any fewer than those who ask me every day of the week for calomel lotion. It’s never for themselves, you see. It’s always for a “friend”.’

  Beatrice said, ‘Calomel lotion? That’s for the French disease, isn’t it, papa?’
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br />   ‘Oh! I’m quite shocked!’ Aunt Felicity exclaimed, throwing up her black-gloved hands. ‘The girl is no more than twelve. What does she know of the French disease?’

  ‘Actually, I’m thirteen in three weeks’ time,’ said Beatrice. ‘And papa has never made a secret of people’s illnesses and where they catch them from.’

  Clement put his arm around Beatrice’s shoulders and gave her an affectionate squeeze. When he looked down and smiled at her, though, she saw more pain than hope in his eyes, and she could tell how much he was suffering.

  *

  As summer gave way to autumn, and then to winter, Beatrice tried to keep up her attendance at Mrs Tutchin’s academy every day. Mrs Tutchin was young and blonde-haired and almost skeletally thin. She was the wife of a banker, although she was childless herself. There were nine girls in the class altogether and Mrs Tutchin taught them manners and deportment, and how to speak colloquial French, and how to add up and multiply. She also showed them how to sew on buttons and embroider, and how to bake a lardy cake with raisins folded into it.

  Beatrice loved the academy because Mrs Tutchin was so gentle and soft-spoken and smelled of diluted rosewater. She was patient with all of her girls, but especially sympathetic to Beatrice because she knew how much she missed her mother. Sometimes, when Beatrice was bent over her sewing, she would come and stand behind her and gently rest one of her bony hands on her shoulder, as if she were reassuring her that her mother was watching over her.

  Every week, though, it became harder for Beatrice to find the time to attend the academy, even though Mrs Tutchin’s house was only three streets away, at the top of Snow Hill. Now that it was colder, and it was growing dark so early in the day, her father was becoming more and more depressed and erratic in his behaviour. He had started drinking – only in the afternoons at first, with his dinner, but then he started to take a glass of genever before he opened the shop, and more glasses throughout the day, from a brown stone bottle that he kept hidden under the counter. Almost every evening he would fall asleep in his armchair in front of a gradually dying fire, and every night she would hear him stumbling upstairs to bed when the fire had turned to ashes and he had woken up shivering.

  Almost every morning she would have to wake him because he was still snoring thickly when it was time for him to open up the shop – wrapped up tightly in his blankets but fully clothed and crusty-eyed and reeking of stale alcohol.

  He would open his eyes and stare at her as if he didn’t know who she was. Then he would sit up and croak, ‘I’m sorry... I’m so sorry, Bea. It won’t happen again, I swear to God.’

  Once he had washed himself and changed his clothes and come downstairs to eat breakfast with her, he was almost back to his old self again, especially if she served him oatmeal gruel with butter and wine in it. By then, however, it was often too late for her to go to Mrs Tutchin’s and her father would coax her to stay at home and help him prepare his medicines because he had such a backlog of prescriptions waiting to be filled, and so many customers who were beginning to lose patience with him.

  ‘I’m blessed by God to have such a clever daughter,’ he said to her almost every day, kissing her on the top of her head. ‘If only your mother could see you now!’

  Beatrice would put on a long linen apron and a stiff linen bonnet, and her thick wool cloak, too, if it was cold, because there was only a small wood-burning stove in the outhouse to keep her warm. Then she would sit all alone for most of the morning, making up pills and powders and lotions and bottles of various cordials, following the recipes in her father’s dog-eared notebooks.

  Some of the medicines took her hours. One of Clement Bannister’s most popular cure-alls was Mithridate, which was claimed to be effective against poisoning and animal bites and even the plague. It contained over fifty ingredients, which Beatrice had to measure out in very precise quantities – including opium, cardamom, frankincense, saffron, ginger, anise, parsley and acacia juice. Once measured, they all had to be pounded together in honey. Almost as popular was Venice Treacle, which had sixty-four ingredients – roots, herbs, peppers, even bitumen and animal parts, like roasted adders – although it was much more expensive.

  Apart from these, Beatrice had to mix up a mouthwash of dried marigold petals and erigeron, as a remedy for chronic toothache. For nosebleeds, she would stir together comfrey and plantain water, sometimes adding yarrow.

  Every time she smelled the pungency of yarrow leaves, she thought of the song that her mother used to sing to her when she put her to bed. If she wrapped yarrow leaves in a handkerchief, her mother had told her, she would wake up in the morning and know who she was going to marry.

  Thou pretty herb of Venus’ tree,

  Thy true name it is Yarrow.

  Now who my husband he will be

  Pray tell me thou tomorrow!

  She could almost hear her mother’s clear, high voice, and it was so hard to think of her lying in the crypt of St James’s Church, dead, cold, and in darkness.

  One of her father’s best-selling preparations was Bannister’s Patented Hair Invigorator, but she hated making it because it smelled so rancid. For this, she had to boil up houndstooth leaves in water, with a little oil and salt added, and then mould a poultice with pig fat which she had to buy at Smithfield Market, just up the street. The balding customer was supposed to spread this on his scalp overnight, covered with a hot towel, and wash it off in the morning.

  She didn’t like making calomel lotion, either, because the mercury in it stained her fingers black. It was supposed to cure the French disease, or syphilis, but she had seen for herself the effects on those men who had used it for any length of time. Their gums were rotted red-raw, all their teeth had dropped out, and their jawbones were so decayed that they could hardly open their mouths to speak.

  All the same, they still came into the shop and begged her father in mumbling voices for more because they believed they were taking too little of it, rather than too much.

  *

  On the last Monday of the year, Beatrice was rolling out a long pipe of pills when Clement pushed open the outhouse door with a bang that made her jump. He stepped unsteadily inside, bringing with him a gust of icy-cold air. Behind him, snow was falling fast and thick and silent. The walled herb garden was blanketed with snow and Clement had snow melting in his hair and in his beard.

  ‘Bea, my darling!’ he cried out. ‘Why aren’t you at Mrs Chew-chin’s?’

  ‘Papa – the door! It’s freezing!’

  ‘What? Oh, yes, I’m sorry! Can’t have my daughter catching her death! My lovely daughter sent by God!’

  He came up to the workbench and stood next to her, swaying slightly.

  ‘Papa, have you been drinking again? I hope you’ve locked up the shop.’

  ‘What? The shop? Yes, yes, I’ve locked it! Locked it securely! Locked it up tight as a drum!’

  ‘Perhaps we’d better go into the house. I was going to give you mutton for your dinner, with boiled potatoes and carrots. But you can have bread and cheese if you’d rather.’

  She started to rise off her stool, but Clement laid his hand on her shoulder and gently pushed her back down.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked her. He frowned at the long rope of dry white paste that she had rolled out on to a blue Delft tile, ready for cutting up.

  ‘I’m making those carminative pills you asked me for. You said they were urgent, because you’d run out of stock.’

  Clement leaned forward and sniffed. ‘Ah, yes. Peppermint and fennel and anise, guaranteed to settle the stormiest of stomachs. Good girl. Blessedly good girl. But you can stop for now.’

  ‘I thought you needed them in a hurry.’

  He tilted his head from side to side as if he had a stiff neck. ‘You’re not at Mrs Chew-chin’s?’

  ‘No, papa. Don’t you remember? You wanted me to stay here and make you some carminative pills and some lung syrup.’

  ‘Did I? Well, even if I d
id, you don’t have to. Not any more. You can stop now. You can put aside your pestle and we’ll do something much more amusing instead. Something to make us laugh instead of cry.’

  He stared at the workbench for a few long seconds without saying anything, his eyes unfocused. Then he looked back at Beatrice and said, ‘I’m so tired of crying, Bea. I don’t want to cry ever again. I was standing in the shop. I was standing in the shop and that woman came in. What’s her name? She always wears green. She came into the shop and said she needed something for melancholy.

  ‘I was just about to suggest my tincture of borage when my throat choked up as if I had swallowed thistles and tears began to roll down my cheeks. Right in front of her. She was nonplussed, but I couldn’t stop myself. I thought, this woman is asking me how to cure melancholy? Me? When I’m still wracked with grief for your mother. Wracked, that’s a strange word, isn’t it, wracked? Wracked, wracked, wracked! But it feels exactly as it sounds.’

  ‘Papa—’ Beatrice put in, but her father carried on talking as if he hadn’t heard her.

  ‘She said that her husband had recently passed away and that she had been suffering from deep depression ever since. Do you know what I told her? I told her the truth. I told her that there is no cure. I told her that she could drink three bottles of my tincture of borage every day until her face turned green to match her coat and her bonnet. But there is no cure. Not for death, Bea. Not for death.’

  Beatrice reached out for him and held both of his hands. ‘Papa, you should come into the house and have something to eat. Your hands are so cold! I could make you a hot drink of chocolate, if you like.’

  ‘Chocolate?’ he said. ‘What good is chocolate?

  Then he stared at Beatrice intently and asked, ‘Why aren’t you at Mrs Chew-chin’s?’

  ‘You wanted me here, papa. Now come back into the house.’

  ‘We shall entertain ourselves!’ he said, loudly, like an impresario addressing a theatre audience. ‘Today, we shall make lightning! And smoke that changes colour! Smoke! And fire! Today, we shall tear paper into a thousand pieces and make those thousand pieces dance like a snowstorm! We shall melt pewter spoons into puddles! We shall set off explosions so loud that we will be deaf for a week thereafter! But we shall laugh! And dance! And we shall make ourselves as happy as we ever have been!’