Scarlet Widow Page 5

  When she opened her eyes, she found she was lying on a bed in a small upstairs bedroom. Outside, it was beginning to grow dark, although it looked as if it had stopped snowing. There was a jug and a basin on a washstand on the opposite side of the room, and a woodcut of St Sebastian, the martyr, tied to a tree and bristling with arrows, his eyes rolled up towards the heavens.

  She sat up. Her coat and her gown and petticoats had all been hung over the back of a chair, and she was wearing nothing but her shift and corset, although she was covered with a thick knitted blanket. She lifted the blanket and saw that her shift was stained with blood, although it had dried now. So the porter had stabbed her. He must have been holding his clasp-knife in his hand when he pushed her. He couldn’t have cut her too badly, however, because she didn’t seem to be bleeding any longer.

  He had killed her father, though. Her father was actually dead. She lay back and covered her face with her hands, although for some reason she couldn’t cry. She felt completely dry, as if she had no tears left.

  She was still lying there when she heard footsteps coming upstairs and then a knock at the door, although it was open. She stayed where she was, with her face still covered. She didn’t want the next part of her life to start happening, not just yet.

  ‘How are you feeling, Bea?’ asked a kindly woman’s voice. ‘You look just like one of them saints lying on a tomb.’

  Beatrice took her hands away from her face. Molly had her head tilted to one side and was smiling at her sympathetically.

  ‘We’re all so sorry about your dear papa. Such a good man. Always had time to listen if you was sick with some pox or other, and always ready to give you a cordial even if you didn’t have the chink for it.’

  She sat down on the side of the bed. She had a large wart on her upper lip and very thick eyebrows. She took hold of Beatrice’s hand and said, ‘Dicky Andrews says he’ll help with all the arrangements, if you want him to. But you probably have relatives, don’t you? Aunts and uncles, someone you can turn to. All we want you to know, darling, is that you won’t be left to do everything on your own.’

  Beatrice didn’t know what to say. She still couldn’t cry, but she felt so exhausted that she couldn’t even find the words to tell Molly why she and her father had come to The Fortune, and that her mother’s body was lying in the back room. She was so tired that she could have closed her eyes and fallen asleep forever. At least if she did that she would see her parents again.

  ‘The constables came,’ said Molly. ‘We told them what happened, and who done it. They know the fellow, so they’ll probably grab him sooner or later. He’ll be dancing on nothing when he does.’

  ‘I can’t work out where he cut me,’ said Beatrice, lifting up the blanket again.

  ‘Well, you’ll forgive me, darling, but I took the liberty of looking, and he didn’t.’

  ‘But where did all this blood come from?.’

  Molly squeezed her hand. ‘You lost your mama, didn’t you, so you had nobody to tell you. But what it is, you’ve started your flow.’

  Beatrice frowned at her. She didn’t understand.

  ‘You’ve fallen off the roof,’ said Molly. ‘You’ve had a visit from auntie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re a woman now, Bea, my darling, in more ways than one.’

  Seven

  ‘As much as I would like to, Beatrice my dear, I simply cannot take care of you,’ said her Aunt Felicity. ‘Our house is full to capacity already, what with my brother’s family now that he is bankrupt, and my father who is in his dotage. I would, believe me, if only I had the room, but I believe you will be far more comfortable with your cousin Sarah in Birmingham.’

  Beatrice said nothing. She was standing in the parlour in front of the fire, which had burned low now so that it was reduced to hillocks of hot white ashes. Apart from Aunt Felicity the funeral guests had all left. There were glasses and plates to be washed and dried and put away, and the floor to be swept, and then she didn’t know what she would do, except lock the front door and climb the stairs to bed, like she used to do when her father had drunk too much and dropped off to sleep in his armchair.

  Aunt Felicity’s chaise was waiting outside in the early afternoon gloom, ready to take her back to her house on Blackheath, south of the river. She was anxious not to leave her return too late because of the snafflers who came out on the road when it began to grow dark.

  ‘You will have to sell the business,’ she said. ‘It should fetch a fair amount of money, though, and that will pay for your fare to Birmingham and cater for your needs for quite some time to come. I have a lawyer friend at Lincoln’s Inn, Mr Lacey, whose clerks can manage the sale for you.’

  ‘Thank you, Aunt Felicity,’ said Beatrice. ‘You’ve been very kind to me.’

  She had met her cousin Sarah Minchin only once before. Sarah had come down from Birmingham to stay with them when Beatrice was seven or eight years old, and she remembered her as a tall, sharp-nosed woman who had seemed to find everything in life disagreeable – her bed, the food that Beatrice’s mother had served her, the smell of the London streets, the weather, even the dresses that Beatrice had been wearing.

  ‘A young girl should always look obedient and demure,’ she had said of a red pinafore that Beatrice’s mother had made for her. Beatrice had had no idea what ‘demure’ meant, but she had assumed it meant sour-faced, like cousin Sarah.

  *

  When Aunt Felicity had left Beatrice went into the darkened shop and looked around at all the gleaming bottles arranged on the shelves. It was so silent. The smell of herbs and spices permeated everything, even the wooden counter. She found it almost impossible to believe that her father was dead and that her life here was all over. She had always imagined that she would be working with him until he retired, and that the Society of Apothecaries would accept her as a member, even though she was a girl, and that one day she would be running the business herself.

  Her father had taught her so well that she believed she could almost run the business now, on her own, but she knew that it was impossible.

  She went back into the parlour and started to clear up. Only fifteen mourners had come to the funeral because the snow had made it so difficult to send letters to all of his old friends and acquaintances who might have wanted to pay their respects, and equally difficult for any of them to travel here. He had been laid to rest in the crypt of St James’s, next to her mother, whose body had been retrieved by the constables from The Fortune of War.

  As she carried a candle up the narrow stairs to her bedroom she stopped halfway and started to sob. She stood there, gripping the banister rail, with tears running down her cheeks, trying to swallow her grief and almost choking on it.

  In a city of more than seven hundred thousand people, she had never felt so alone in her life.

  *

  Cousin Sarah was there to meet her when the stage chaise arrived mid-afternoon at the Rose Inn in Birmingham. It was a very cold day, but bright, and the coach had made good time from Selly, which had been their last stop for refreshment and changing horses.

  A broken spring had held them up the day before at Banbury, but it had taken them only three days to cover the hundred and twenty miles from London. Beatrice had been able to afford fivepence for an inside seat, and she had been glad of that, especially on their first day, when they had been overtaken by a ferocious hailstorm as they passed through Watford and the passengers on the roof had been chilled and soaked through in spite of their heavy cloaks.

  Beatrice didn’t recognize cousin Sarah at first, not until she came pushing her way through the crowd in the courtyard, calling out, ‘Beatrice! Beatrice! Here, you silly girl! Here!’ as if she were calling a pet dog.

  Cousin Sarah was not nearly as tall as Beatrice remembered her – in fact, she seemed tiny and very thin. Under her plain black bonnet she had a face like a ferret, with close-together eyes and protruding front teeth. She was wearing a dark grey cape and g
rey suede gloves.

  ‘Thank goodness you’re on time!’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought I might catch my death if I had to wait out here any longer! My goodness, girl, you look appallingly wan! You’re not sickening for something, are you?’

  ‘I’m just tired,’ said Beatrice. Although cousin Sarah was so prickly she found it an unexpected relief after the journey to be met by somebody who cared about her, and she was very close to bursting into tears again.

  The postilion heaved down her brown leather trunk from the roof of the coach and a toothless porter dragged it over to her, grinning. ‘Jeremy!’ snapped cousin Sarah, turning around. ‘Jeremy, where are you? That boy!’

  A young man of about seventeen appeared from out of the crowd, wearing a thick bottle-green coat and a black cocked hat. He was tall and well-built, with wavy brown hair that reached almost down to his shoulders. Beatrice thought he was quite handsome, although his lips were rather full and red, as if he had been illicitly eating strawberries, and his eyes were a little sly.

  ‘This is my youngest son, Jeremy, your first cousin once removed,’ said cousin Sarah. ‘Jeremy, this is Beatrice, my dear late Clement’s girl, and you must make her feel at home.’

  Jeremy lifted his hat and gave Beatrice a deep mock-bow. ‘You’re welcome to Birmingham, Beatrice,’ he told her. ‘I hope you’re happy here. You’ll find it exceedingly dull after London, I expect, but we’ll do our best to keep you amused.’

  ‘Jeremy, behave yourself,’ snapped cousin Sarah. ‘The poor girl is recently bereaved and the last thing she is looking for is amusement.’

  They left the courtyard and went out to the road where their carriage was waiting, a plain maroon chaise with a worn-out leather top. Two tired-looking horses stood between the shafts and up on the box sat an elderly coachman with a tall hat and mutton-chop whiskers who looked even more exhausted than the horses. Jeremy lifted Beatrice’s trunk on to the back and they all climbed in.

  ‘Wup,’ said the coachman, with a desultory shake of the reins, and the horses went shambling off.

  ‘You’ve brought only this one piece of luggage?’ asked cousin Sarah.

  ‘Aunt Felicity is sending more on,’ Beatrice told her. ‘The rest of my clothes, and all of my father’s books and his laboratory equipment.’

  ‘What on earth would you want those for?’

  ‘I could mix medicines for us, whenever we have need of them.’

  ‘You? The very thought! You’re only a child!’

  Beatrice thought of what Molly had said to her, about becoming a woman, but she didn’t like to argue. Instead, she said, ‘Papa showed me how to make all kinds of tonics and cordials and pills, for almost any ailment you could think of. And how to make magic tricks, like candles that you can never snuff out, no matter how hard you blow on them, and little pieces of paper that can dance by themselves.’

  Cousin Sarah blinked at her disapprovingly. ‘You’re newly orphaned, Beatrice. I hardly think that frivolities like that are very becoming during your period of mourning. Or, indeed, ever.’

  Beatrice couldn’t help thinking that her father would have loved her to carry on with his ‘mysteries’, especially if they cheered her up. But she turned her head away and said nothing. Even if she was a child, she was old enough to accept that it was very generous of cousin Sarah to have offered to take care of her. More than that, she knew that she had absolutely nowhere else to go.

  *

  Birmingham seemed so small to Beatrice after London, but it was very much cleaner. Although every chimney around the town was smoking furiously, a strong wind was blowing from the high snow-covered moors to the west, so that the air smelled quite fresh. The main street was roughly cobbled and very steep, crowded with market stalls and lined on both sides with shops and houses. The pavements were much wider than in the City, and better swept, but Beatrice couldn’t help noticing that most of the shoppers who were walking up and down them were very unfashionably dressed. Most of the men still wore full wigs and ankle-length coats, and only a few of the women wore wide-hooped farthingales.

  Their labouring horses pulled them slowly uphill, with the coachman occasionally wheezing ‘Wup! Wup!’ to them, without much optimism. They reached High Town and then turned up towards Pinfold Street where cousin Sarah lived. As they turned, she pointed out a grand baroque church on the crest of the hill, built in gleaming white limestone. ‘That is where we worship, Beatrice. St Philip’s. You will be able to say prayers there for your poor papa.’

  Beatrice gave her a fleeting smile, although she didn’t need to go to church to say prayers for her father. She spoke to him all the time, wherever she was, inside her head – and he spoke back to her. She could still hear his voice, and hear him laugh.

  They drew up outside cousin Sarah’s three-storey house, in the middle of a terrace of five brick-fronted houses which faced directly on to the street.

  ‘Here,’ said cousin Sarah, as Jeremy helped them down from the carriage. ‘This will be your home now, Beatrice, for the rest of your life.’

  *

  Although the house looked narrow and nondescript from the outside, it was spacious inside, with high ceilings and tall windows that looked out over a small apple orchard at the back. Cousin Sarah showed Beatrice the parlour, with its formal furniture and chiming ormolu clock and slightly distorting mirror over the fireplace. Then she took her into the dining room, with its shiny mahogany table and empty shield-back chairs, and finally into the kitchen, where a fat, black-haired woman in a long white apron was perspiring freely and boiling up a leg of mutton in a large black pot.

  ‘This is Elizabeth,’ said cousin Sarah. ‘Elizabeth, this is Beatrice. I am sure the poor girl must be hungry after her journey. Perhaps you would cut her some gammon, and some slices of bread, and pickled onions.’

  Elizabeth lifted up her apron and buried her face in it to mop up the perspiration. When she dropped it again she said, ‘I’ve yet to start the fish soup, Mrs Minchin.’

  ‘You’ll manage, Elizabeth,’ cousin Sarah replied, although Beatrice thought that it sounded more like an order than an expression of confidence. ‘Besides, when she is rested, and changed, Beatrice will assist you. Our scullery maid, Jane, is away this week in Edgbaston for her mother’s funeral, and our housemaid, Agnes, is out shopping. You can peel potatoes, can’t you, Beatrice? And your mama must have shown you how to set a table.’

  They left the kitchen. Beatrice glanced back and saw Elizabeth scowling as she ladled the scum with a slotted spoon from the surface of the boiling mutton. ‘Come along, Beatrice,’ said cousin Sarah. ‘I will show you to your room.’

  They climbed the main staircase until they reached the landing. Cousin Sarah touched the tip of her finger to her lips and then pointed to the door on the left-hand side. ‘That is Roderick’s room. We are always very quiet when we go past Roderick’s room.’

  She paused, and when she saw that Beatrice didn’t understand what she was talking about, she said, ‘Roderick, my husband. Your cousin-in-law. Not long after Jeremy was born he was kicked in the head by a horse and since then he has suffered from a very unpredictable demeanour. So we do our best not to disturb him.’

  ‘I see,’ said Beatrice, although she couldn’t imagine what cousin Sarah meant by ‘a very unpredictable demeanour’.

  They climbed another staircase, steeper and narrower. On the topmost floor there were two large bedrooms and a much smaller room, facing the back of the house.

  ‘Oliver’s room and Charles’s room,’ said cousin Sarah, opening the doors to both the larger rooms. ‘They are away at the moment, Oliver in India and Charles at university.’ She opened the door to the smaller room. ‘This will be where you live, Beatrice.’

  There was just enough space in this room for a single wooden bed with a blue patchwork quilt, while under the window stood a pine table with a jug and a basin on it, for washing. The only other furniture was a small bow-fronted wardrobe, with two drawers underneath
. There wasn’t even a chair.

  On the wall beside the bed hung a framed engraving of a bearded man in a long blue cloak. ‘St Philip,’ said cousin Sarah. ‘A great worker of miracles. Did you know that he was crucified upside down? But he still kept on preaching, even as he hung there.’

  At that moment, Jeremy came up the stairs, lugging Beatrice’s trunk. It bumped loudly on every tread and cousin Sarah hissed, ‘Ssshh! We don’t want your father to have one of his fits.’

  Jeremy said, ‘He’s asleep, mother. I looked in on him.’

  ‘All the same, I don’t want you waking him up. At the moment I have quite enough to cope with.’

  Jeremy left the trunk on the landing and went back downstairs, deliberately whistling as he went.

  ‘That boy,’ said cousin Sarah. ‘He’ll be the death of me one day.’ She looked around the room. ‘I’ll leave you to unpack, then. Once you’ve done that, come down to the kitchen and help Elizabeth. We have seven for dinner tonight, from the parish council, and she always gets herself into such a panic when she has to cook for more than four.’

  She went to the door, but then she stopped and said, ‘Before I forget... the proceeds.’

  Beatrice frowned at her. ‘What proceeds?’

  ‘The proceeds from the sale of your father’s business. Felicity told me that you realized quite a reasonable sum. Two hundred and forty-three guineas, I believe, after your lawyers and auctioneers had both been paid.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘You brought the money with you, I assume?’

  ‘Yes. Aunt Felicity said that you would have a strongbox to keep it safe.’

  ‘Well, yes, because I will depend on it to pay for your board and lodging, not to mention your clothing and any other incidental expenses that may arise in the coming years.’

  ‘I’ll bring it down for you, cousin Sarah, so soon as I’ve changed.’

  Cousin Sarah gave her a ferrety smile. ‘Don’t be too long, then. And put on something plain, with an apron. I don’t care for frivolous dress in this house, and besides, you have work to do.’