Scarlet Widow Read online

  Each of their faces was concealed by a flannel duster – not to give them dignity, but to spare any visitors the sight of their collapsing features as they decomposed. Although the room was so chilly, and most of the bodies had been recovered from an ice-cold River Thames, the smell was still so strong that Beatrice pulled up her sleeve to cover her nose and mouth and tried not to breathe too deeply.

  ‘Take a squint at this one!’ said Robert, lifting the duster from the face of one of the men. The man was cross-eyed, with patchy ginger hair, and his tongue was sticking out sideways, as if he had died while trying to make his friends laugh.

  ‘Please – I don’t want to,’ said Beatrice, turning away ‘I just want to get home.’

  ‘How about this young lady – she was the one who tried to save her children from drowning!’

  Beatrice couldn’t help but look. The woman was white-faced, very young, no more than nineteen or twenty, with a pointed nose and the razor-sharp cheekbones of somebody who had never had enough to eat. Her brown eyes were staring at the ceiling and her mouth was stretched wide open.

  Before Beatrice could turn away, the woman let out a high, breathy whine, which ended in a squeak. Beatrice jumped away in fright.

  ‘She’s alive! Robert! She’s still alive!’

  Robert took hold of her hand again and gave it a shake, as if to shake the silliness out of her. ‘Nah, Bea, don’t worry, they often does that. It’s the gas in their bellies. You can come in here some summer evenings when it’s warm and they’ve been lying here all day and they’ll all be whistling and farting and moaning and complaining. It’s like they’re saying, what are we doing here dead, when we should be in the bar, having a pint of ale and playing ombre?’

  He lifted the duster that covered the face of the woman in the shroud and peeked underneath it. ‘Don’t know why they brought this one in, though. She’s a bit far gone for the surgeons, I’d say.’

  Again, Beatrice didn’t really want to look, and yet she couldn’t resist it. Even though the bodies disturbed her so much, and their smell made her feel so nauseous, she found that they fascinated her. How had they died? Why had they died? That cross-eyed man, who had probably had a heart attack in mid-guffaw, or that panicky-looking young woman, caught forever in a soundless scream – she and Robert could stare at them and make remarks about them, but they would never be able to explain what had happened to them. They were all here, all nine of them – but they were all gone, too.

  She nodded towards the woman in the shroud. ‘Why is she wearing that funeral gown? She looks as if she’s all ready to be buried.’

  ‘That’s because she was buried once,’ said Robert. ‘Either that, or laid out ready. John Welkin never says where he gets them and the surgeons never ask. There’s been plenty dug up from churchyards, and even some gone missing from people’s front parlours while they was lying on view.’

  Beatrice stepped cautiously forward, her sleeve still pressed against her nose and mouth. The woman was lying directly under the window, so that she was illuminated by the cold, colourless light reflected from the snow outside. That made her look even whiter and even more ghostly than she already was. As she came closer, Beatrice could see that her eyes had fallen in, and her cheeks were hollow, and the skin around her mouth had shrunk so much that she was lipless.

  ‘Bet they’ll boil off her flesh and use her for a skelington,’ said Robert. He lifted the duster a little further, revealing the woman’s hair. It was dark, and wavy, and immediately she saw it, Beatrice realized who the woman was.

  ‘Put it back!’ she shrilled.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘That flannel! Put it back! Cover her face up!’

  Robert frowned, and hesitated, but then he did as he was told and dropped the duster back over the dead woman’s face.

  ‘I have to go home!’ said Beatrice, and started to cry. ‘I have to go home now! I have to tell papa!’

  ‘Bea, what’s the matter?’ Robert asked her. He tried to take hold of her shoulders to calm her, but she twisted herself away from him and went to the door that led out to the back yard. She tried to turn the key, but she was holding the hessian bag in one hand and the lock was too stiff.

  ‘Robert – please – I have to go home! I have to tell papa!’

  Robert unlocked the door for her. Outside, the yard was cluttered with beer casks and wooden boxes full of empty glass bottles. It was still snowing, thick and fast.

  ‘Bea—’ said Robert. ‘I don’t understand! It isn’t me who’s upset you, is it?’

  Again he tried to take hold of her arm but she pulled away from him. Her mouth was turned down in misery and her eyelashes were stuck together with tears.

  ‘That’s my mama, Robert!’

  ‘What?’

  Beatrice pointed back into the room. ‘That’s my mother! Your precious John Welkin, who lets you keep dead men’s pennies, he’s stolen my mother out of her coffin!’

  With that, she stumbled across the yard and tugged open the rickety back gate.

  ‘Bea!’ called Robert, but then she was gone. He heard the gin bottles clanking in her bag as she ran along the alley. ‘Bea!’

  He stood in the snow for a few moments. Then he went back inside. The nine dead bodies were all there waiting for him. He went over to the body of Beatrice’s mother and stared at her. He tried to see if there was any likeness, but she was so emaciated that it was hard for him to imagine what she must have looked like when she was alive. He was still standing there when Mr Andrews came in.

  ‘What are you doing, you young laggard? There’s pots to be washed and the floor to be swept and I need you to take a message to St Thomas’s for me!’

  Robert said, ‘Yes, Mr Andrews. Sorry.’

  Then, as he followed Mr Andrews back into the bar, he said, ‘Do you believe that God ever plays games with us, Mr Andrews?’

  Mr Andrews turned around and frowned at him, as if he were an idiot. ‘Of course God plays games with us. What do you think we’re here for?’

  Six

  She beat furiously at the back door of her house and called out, ‘Papa! Papa! Let me in! Papa! Let me in!’

  It seemed to take him forever to realize where she was. Eventually, however, she heard him coming along the hallway. He unlocked the door and opened it, and stared in bewilderment at her standing in the snow.

  ‘What are you doing back here? Why didn’t you come in the front way?’

  She threw herself at him, and gripped his coat tightly, and sobbed so hard that she could hardly breathe. Her father patted her on the back and said soothingly, ‘What is it, Bea? What’s happened? Come on, tell me. Why are you crying like this? Has somebody hurt you?’

  He closed the back door and steered her inside, into the parlour, where the fire was blazing. She stood in front of it, quaking.

  ‘You brought my genever, then,’ he said, taking the hessian sack and setting it down on the side table. ‘So why are you so upset, my darling?’

  ‘It’s mama,’ wept Beatrice, her chest heaving with distress. ‘Mama is lying in The Fortune.’

  Her father sat down in his armchair and drew her close. ‘I don’t understand you, my darling. Mama is in heaven. You know that.’

  Beatrice emphatically shook her head. ‘I don’t mean her soul. I mean her body. Her body is lying in The Fortune, with all the bodies of drowned people.’

  ‘Bea, listen to me. Your mother’s remains are lying in the crypt of St James’s. They can’t be in The Fortune, of all places. You must have made a mistake.’

  Beatrice opened her eyes wide and almost screamed at him. ‘They stole her body! The resurrection-men! They stole her body and they’re going to boil it down until she’s nothing but a skeleton!’

  ‘Ssshh, shh!’ said her father, holding her wrists to restrain her. Then he looked at her very intently and said, ‘You mean it, don’t you? It is her.’

  ‘She looks so sad,’ Beatrice wept. ‘What are we going to
do-o-o?’

  Her father stood up and started to button up his coat. ‘We’re going to go and claim her, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to take her back and have her reverentially returned to her coffin. And whoever took her, we’ll have him brought before the courts and punished for grave robbery. Come on.’

  ‘We should go by the alley,’ said Beatrice. ‘Some drunken men were causing trouble in the bar and they might still be out in the street.’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ her father told her. ‘It takes more than a gang of rowdy tosspots to frighten me.’ He lifted down his heavy brown cloak, shrugged it over his shoulders and fastened the clasp. Then he put on his three-cornered hat and held out his hand. ‘Come along, Bea. Be a brave girl.’

  Beatrice reluctantly took his hand. She was desperate to rescue her mother’s body from that terrible chilly room at the back of The Fortune, but she wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to see her again, the way she was now, so fleshless and so irrevocably dead. The decomposing woman who was lying on that trestle table with a flannel over her face – that wasn’t the same mama that she prayed to every night. The mama she prayed to was warm and laughing and lively, with sparkling eyes.

  They went out into the snowy street and started to walk towards Pye Corner. The two children who had been huddled in the bookshop doorway had gone now and Beatrice felt a pang of regret that she hadn’t taken them any hot soup.

  Her father sensed something and asked, ‘What? What is it?’ but she shook her head and said, ‘Nothing.’ Her mother had said, ‘We may wish to, Bea, but we can never save them all. Only the Lord can do that.’

  They reached The Fortune of War. Clement was just about to push open the doors when a harsh voice called out, ‘Oi! You there! Yes, you!’

  Clement turned round. The greasy-looking porter in the floppy cap was sheltering in a doorway on the opposite side of the street, along with the man with a smile like a clown, and three more of his drunken friends.

  ‘Not you, you lobcock!’ the porter shouted. ‘That pretty little troublemaker beside you, that’s who I’m talking to! That sweet young baggage who had me knocked in the smeller and then thrown out before I could finish the tank I just paid for!’

  He came staggering out into the street and was almost run down by a two-horse chaise that came rattling round the corner. ‘Bastards!’ he screamed at it, shaking his fist. ‘Baaaassssstards!’ When the chaise had disappeared into the snow, however, he straightened himself up, tugged down his bloodstained waistcoat, and continued to cross the road with the weaving determination of the very drunk. His friends followed, weaving and swaying in the same way, so that the five of them looked as if they were making their way towards them across the deck of a ship.

  Clement said to Beatrice, ‘Get inside. I’ll deal with these fools.’

  But Beatrice clung to his cloak and begged him, ‘Don’t, papa! Leave them! It doesn’t matter! They won’t come inside, Mr Andrews won’t allow them!’’

  ‘No,’ said her father. ‘I’ll not have you terrorized by anyone, especially ruffians like these. You’re my angel, remember? My angel and my saviour.’

  Beatrice looked up at him and she could see that he was having difficulty focusing on her. It was then that she realized that he was almost as drunk as any of the porters.

  ‘Papa, come inside, please!’

  By now, however, the greasy-looking porter had come right up to them and was standing with his fists on his hips and his legs wide apart to keep his balance. The dried blood on his upper lip made him look as if he was wearing a black moustache.

  ‘Do you know what I wanted?’ he said, in a soft, slurred voice, which was all the more threatening for sounding so reasonable. ‘A kiss, that was all I wanted! Nothing more! Just to show how highly I thought of her. I wasn’t asking for a wapping.’

  ‘You’re foxed,’ said Clement. ‘Be on your way, you and your friends, before I have you locked up for menacing.’

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ the porter demanded.

  ‘No, I don’t, and I don’t care, either.’

  ‘Well, you should care, because they call me Sticker.’

  ‘I told you, I have no interest whatever in who you are, or what they call you. Leave us be.’

  Clement opened the door wider and tried to push Beatrice inside. At that moment, however, the porter took three clumsy steps forward and appeared to punch Clement in the chest, three times, and then to punch him twice in the stomach. Clement gasped, and lifted one arm as if to protect himself, but it was too late by then. He dropped on to the doorstep like a marionette with its strings suddenly cut.

  ‘Papa!’ cried Beatrice. She knelt down beside him, but as she did so the porter tilted forward and hit her, too, so that she fell back and struck her head against the door jamb. He was about to make a grab for her arm when the door was pulled opened wider and Mr Andrews appeared, brandishing a long mahogany cudgel.

  ‘What in the name of Jesus!’ he exclaimed, and then, ‘You again, you slubberdegullion! I thought I told you to stay well away! Robert, run for the constable!’

  ‘Don’t you dare to speak to me like that!’ the porter retorted. ‘Not unless you want sticking, like this fellow!’

  He held up his right hand and waved it from side to side, and it was now that Beatrice could see that he was holding a bloodied clasp-knife, and that his fingers were glistening with blood, too. Although she was stunned from knocking her head, she managed to lean forward and drag back her father’s cloak. His coat and waistcoat were soaked with warm blood, and his blood was beginning to run across the doorstep and into the snow, staining it pink.

  ‘You’ve stabbed him!’ she cried. ‘You’ve stabbed him! Mr Andrews, he’s stabbed my papa!’

  ‘That’s it!’ said Mr Andrews. He stepped over Clement and confronted the porter, swinging his cudgel. ‘My boy’s gone for the constable and you’ll be dangling for this!’

  The porter’s friends pulled at his clothing. One of them was so drunk that he fell sideways into the snow, and said, ‘Shit!’ The others said, ‘Come on, Sticker, you’ve done it good and proper this time! Come on, leave it! Come on, before the horneys gets here!’

  The porter hesitated for a moment, still defiantly holding up his clasp-knife, but his friends pulled at him again and he ostentatiously shut away the blade and followed them back across the street. The snow was falling so thickly now that they had all disappeared in seconds.

  Beatrice was trying to turn her father over so that she could see his face. Mr Andrews knelt down beside her and said, ‘Let’s take him inside and see how bad he’s been hurt. Duncan! Charlie! Give us a hand here, would you!’

  Three men lifted Clement off the step and carried him into the bar, where they cleared a table and laid him down. His eyes were closed and his face was grey. Blood was sliding from the sides of his mouth and his breathing was shallow. Mr Andrews unbuttoned his waistcoat and his shirt, which was soaked with blood.

  ‘Can somebody fetch me some rags?’ Mr Andrews called out, and a middle-aged woman untied her apron and said, ‘Here, Dicky, use this.’ Beatrice recognized her as Molly, the wine-seller, who was usually walking up and down the streets with her basket of bottles.

  There was so much blood leaking out of Clement’s chest and stomach that Molly’s apron was rapidly soaked, too. Beatrice could see that the porter had stabbed him in the chest – two shallow wounds in his breastbone, but a much deeper wound between his ribs – and had then stabbed him twice in the lower left side of his stomach. The wounds in his stomach were gaping like the mouths of dying fish and there seemed to be no way to stop them bleeding.

  Beatrice was trembling with shock. She laid one hand on her father’s forehead and said, ‘Papa! Papa! Can you hear me, papa? It’s Bea! It’s your angel, papa!’ But her father’s eyes remained closed and only a single bubble of blood came out from between his lips.

  Molly had brought some muslin rags from behind the bar and Mr
Andrews folded them up and pressed them hard against Clement’s chest wound.

  ‘Come along, ’pothacree, don’t give up on us now,’ he said, but Beatrice caught him looking up at Molly and his expression was grim.

  ‘Can’t we take him to the hospital, Mr Andrews? He needs a surgeon, doesn’t he? Somebody to sew up all of those cuts.’

  Mr Andrews pressed his fingertips against the right side of Clement’s neck to feel his pulse, then he bent his head close to Clement’s face.

  ‘I think it’s too late for that, Mistress Bannister.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I do believe your father’s passed away. He won’t need to go to St Barthomolew. He’s on his way to see St Peter.’

  Beatrice stared at her father and she knew with a dreadful sinking sensation that Mr Andrews was right. A subtle change had come over his face – an emptiness, which he had never had before, even in his deepest drunken sleeps. He might have been comatose with gin but he still had colour in his cheeks and he always looked as if he might open his eyes at any moment and say, ‘My God! My head! Where am I?’

  Not now, though. He had left her, and the body that was lying on this table was as dead as her mother in the chilly back room.

  She backed away. As she did so, one of the men in the bar said, ‘Look at you, girl! He got you, too! Didn’t you feel it?’

  Numbly, Beatrice turned around. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘What do you mean he got me, too? He only made me bang my head.’

  But the man pointed to the floorboards where she had been standing, and there was a trail of blood. Panicking, Beatrice opened her coat and looked down at herself. There was no blood that she could see on her dark blue gown, but now that the man had brought it to her attention she could feel wetness on her legs and her petticoats. She lifted up the hem of her gown and saw that there were rivulets of blood running down her calves. She looked across at Molly and said, ‘Look!’ in the faintest of voices, and then she collapsed.

  *