Scarlet Widow Read online

  Before she left she took the key out of the door and held it up. ‘In case of fire,’ she said, and dropped it into her pocket. ‘Wouldn’t want to have you locked in here, would we, with your bed ablaze, and us unable to get in to save you?’

  *

  That evening, after she had bid goodnight to the last of her dinner guests, cousin Sarah came downstairs into the kitchen. She was wearing a plain blue satin round gown and her hair was tightly braided.

  In the scullery, Beatrice and Agnes, the housemaid, were already starting to wash the plates and cutlery, while Elizabeth, the cook, was sitting at the table, scouring her pots as if she had a grudge against them.

  Agnes, when she had returned from shopping that afternoon, had turned out to be a small, busy girl with a large bosom and a protruding bottom and a round face with a button nose and two of her front teeth missing. She got on with her work without any fuss, and spoke in a very matter-of-fact way, but her Birmingham accent was so thick that Beatrice had difficulty understanding what she was talking about.

  ‘Burt-triss, joos bring me the plights from the tie-bull, would you?’ she asked, as she tipped an enamel jug of hot water into the sink.

  Cousin Sarah stood watching them for a while and then she said, ‘I’m retiring now. I will see you in the morning, Beatrice – I hope you sleep well. Agnes – my tea at half-past six, please. I have much to do tomorrow. Elizabeth, the caper sauce was very thin, and the Reverend Bute had a fish bone in his soup which almost choked him.’

  Elizabeth said nothing, but banged down her iron pot.

  ‘Goodnight, cousin Sarah,’ said Beatrice. ‘And thank you.’

  Cousin Sarah gave her a thin, self-satisfied smile, as if Beatrice had complimented her for her saintliness, and then left them to finish clearing up. It was past nine o’clock now and Beatrice was feeling deeply weary. Three days of being jostled in a coach, jammed in with five other people, had made her ache all over, especially her back.

  ‘You go on oop now, Burt-triss,’ said Agnes, as Beatrice started to dry the soup tureen. ‘Me and Elizabeth can finish the rest. Look at you, girl, you’re worn ragged.’

  Agnes gave her a lighted candle and Beatrice tiredly climbed the stairs to her bedroom. She paused on the first landing and listened. From Roderick’s room came harsh, irregular snoring, but on the other side she heard cousin Sarah’s voice, speaking very low and very fast, as if she were giving instructions to somebody in a hurry.

  Beatrice tiptoed over to cousin Sarah’s door and leaned close to it in an effort to make out what she was saying. All she heard, though, was, ‘...name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.’ This was followed by the creaking sound of cousin Sarah climbing into bed.

  Beatrice went up to her own room. When she opened the door she found that it was so cold in there that she could see her breath, and so dark outside that she could see her reflection in the blackness of the window, a pale ghost staring in at her. She didn’t undress before she got into bed, although she pulled off her mob cap and unbuckled her shoes and loosened the strings of her corset. She buried herself in the patchwork quilt and lay there, huddled up, shivering, too cold even to cry. The flannelette sheets were rough and damp, as if they hadn’t been dried properly after washing.

  For a while she could still hear clattering echoes from the kitchen downstairs, but after twenty minutes or so the house became silent and she fell asleep.

  *

  She dreamed that she was back in the corner of the chaise as it jolted and bumped its way towards Banbury. She was almost overwhelmed by the huge hooped gown of the woman sitting next to her, and the bony knees of the man sitting opposite kept jabbing into hers. Outside, the landscape was beginning to grow dark and a few large flakes of snow were tumbling down. In the distance she could see leafless elm trees, with inky crows perched in them.

  The woman turned to her and it was Molly, from The Fortune of War. She winked at Beatrice and said, ‘You’ve fallen off the roof, my darling. Fallen off the roof.’

  The next moment there was a juddering crash and her bedroom was suddenly filled with light and dancing shadows. She twisted around in her quilt and sat up in bed, her heart beating hard. For a few seconds, she couldn’t work out if she was still dreaming or if this was real.

  Standing in her bedroom doorway, holding a long candle in his hand, was a wild-looking man, completely naked. His hair was as bouffant and grey as a dandelion-clock, and his eyes were glittering and deep-set under his forehead. He was bony and emaciated, except for his stomach, which was so swollen that his navel protruded. He was leaning forward and grasping his erect penis tightly, as if he were afraid that if he let go of it he would lose his balance and fall over.

  ‘Well! Well! The Lord and all of his seraphic host be praised!’ he exclaimed, his eyebrows rising and falling suggestively with every word. ‘My dearest Sarah told me that we would be having a young girl for a house-guest! But she didn’t tell me how comely you would be!’

  He took one staggering step towards her, and then another.

  ‘Throw back your coverlet, my dear, and let a frozen fellow feel the warmth of your bed and your body!’

  Beatrice shrank away from him, pulling her quilt up to her neck. He stood by the side of her bed, candle in one hand and penis in the other, and ostentatiously licked his lips.

  ‘We shall have such a night together, you and me!’ he told her. ‘You shall give me children, to be my obedient heirs, and I can dispossess those treacherous sons of mine who seek to rob me of my fortune!’

  Beatrice said, ‘Cousin Sarah,’ but she was so frightened that she could only manage a whisper. She cleared her throat as the wild man took another step nearer and was about to shout out, ‘Cousin Sarah!’ when Jeremy appeared in the doorway, with his own candle-holder raised. He was wearing a nightcap and a long white nightshirt.

  ‘Father!’ he snapped, as if he were talking to a disobedient child. ‘What are you doing in here? Go back to your bed this instant!’

  The wild man cried out, ‘Wooo!’ and pivoted around, startled, letting his candle fall to the floor. He nearly fell over sideways, but Jeremy seized his scrawny arm and pushed him back towards the door.

  ‘Quick, Bea! Beatrice! The candle!’ he said. Beatrice climbed out of bed and picked it up, just as the proddy rug was beginning to smoulder.

  Jeremy pulled and pushed Roderick downstairs. All the way down, Roderick made a high keening sound in the back of his throat, more like a disobedient dog than a man, and when he had returned him to his room, Jeremy slammed his door quite loudly. None of this seemed to disturb cousin Sarah, however – or else she was used to it. Beatrice sat on the side of her bed holding the candle until she heard Jeremy coming back upstairs.

  ‘I’m so sorry for that!’ he told her. ‘He didn’t hurt you, did he? His mind has gone completely.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Beatrice, trying to sound brave, although she was shivering from cold and shock.

  Jeremy sat down on the bed next to her. ‘If he ever bothers you again, you must cry out for me immediately. I’ll always come at once. You should really lock your door at night.’

  ‘Your mother took the key away. She said it was too much of a risk to lock the door, in case of fire.’

  ‘Oh, she has a terror of that. Her own parents died in a fire when she was young. She saw them beating at their window with their hair alight and there was nothing she could do to save them.’

  ‘That’s terrible!’

  ‘Well... she was taken in afterwards by her aunt, which is why she felt duty-bound to take you in. She has little natural sympathy for other people, Bea, I know that, but she strongly believes in doing her Christian duty.’

  Jeremy put his arm around her shoulders and said, ‘There… are you feeling better now? I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll bring you a wooden wedge that you can push under the bottom of your door at night so that father can’t get in.’

  ‘Th
ank you,’ said Beatrice. ‘But what if there is a fire?’

  ‘I’ll kick the door open and rescue you, don’t you worry about that.’

  Jeremy took the candle-holder from her and she climbed back into bed.

  ‘Sleep well, Bea,’ he said, with a smile. ‘You and me, we’re going to be great friends, you wait and see.’

  He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. Then he stood up and left the room, quietly closing the door behind him. Beatrice pulled the blankets tightly around her and lay in the darkness with her eyes open. She almost wished that she believed in ghosts, so that she could feel her mother bend over her as she always used to.

  ‘Goodnight, mama,’ she whispered. ‘Goodnight, papa.’

  But there was no answer, and outside the city of Birmingham was silent except for somebody drunkenly singing in the street.

  Eight

  She first saw Francis on the morning of 17 March, as they returned from the Sunday morning service at St Philip’s – Beatrice and Jeremy walking in front, while cousin Sarah followed a few steps behind with Mrs Shelley, their widowed neighbour, whose stiff black skirts bustled noisily on the pavement when she walked and who never stopped talking about how unfortunate she was.

  ‘Why did the Lord pick on me, of all people? What did I ever do to deserve such wretchedness?’

  It was a chilly morning but the sky was clear, apart from a long thin streak of cirrus cloud, and already the plane trees were budding green.

  ‘You fell asleep in the sermon,’ said Jeremy.

  ‘I did not,’ Beatrice retorted. ‘I simply closed my eyes so that I could give all of my attention to what the Reverend Bute was saying instead of watching you pulling all those foolish faces at me.’

  ‘What was it about, then, the sermon?’

  Beatrice tilted up her nose and didn’t reply.

  ‘Go on, then,’ Jeremy persisted, ‘if you were concentrating your mind so hard, what was it about?’

  ‘It was about shepherds.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t. It was about lepers.’

  ‘Well, there’s an echo in that church. Lepers, shepherds. Shepherds, lepers. They both sound nearly the same.’

  ‘They don’t at all. And shepherds’ fingers don’t fall off. Well – perhaps in the winter, if they get frostbite.’

  They rounded the corner into Bell Street, and as they did so they found that a party of twenty or thirty people was obstructing the pavement – men, women and children. They had all just come out of a large house overlooking the main market square and they were talking and laughing and shaking hands. Beatrice thought she had never seen people look so cheerful on a Sunday morning. Perhaps it was because they hadn’t been to St Philip’s and had to sit through the Reverend Bute’s interminable sermon about lepers.

  ‘He put his hand inside his cloak, and lo! when he pulled it out, it was leprous like snow. And God said, “Put your hand back inside your cloak,” and lo! when he pulled it out a second time, it was restored like the rest of his flesh.’

  Beatrice and Jeremy had to walk around these people, into the road, and Beatrice could hear cousin Sarah tutting loudly behind her and saying, ‘Really! They have no consideration for the church, and no consideration for others, either.’

  One of the men heard her, because he stepped aside to let cousin Sarah pass and said, ‘My deepest apologies, Mistress Minchin.’

  Beatrice turned around, and when she did so she became aware of a tall young boy standing next to the man who had just apologized. He was staring at her, this boy, as if he knew who she was and exactly what she was doing here. Not only that, he looked as if he was upset because she hadn’t chosen to acknowledge him. He was dark-haired and very thin, and dressed entirely in black except for the tight white knotted handkerchief around his neck. Beatrice thought he was really quite handsome, but very gangly, as if his arms and legs had suddenly grown longer overnight but his body hadn’t yet caught up with them. It was the expression in his eyes, though, that really caught her attention. Saintly, almost. She could almost believe that he understood everything she was feeling: how lonely she was, how much she was grieving for her mama and papa, and yet how hard she was trying to make the best of her new life here in Birmingham with cousin Sarah.

  ‘Who was that?’ she asked cousin Sarah, looking back over her shoulder.

  ‘Geoffrey Scarlet,’ she snapped. ‘He owns the bookshop in the High Street and lives over the Swan Tavern. He publishes a weekly newspaper, the Birmingham Journal. Tittle-tattle, most of it.’

  ‘I meant that boy who was with him.’

  ‘Don’t turn round, girl. We don’t want them to think that we have the slightest interest in them – which, of course, we don’t. They’re Nonconformists. That means they don’t agree with the traditions of the church, or respect its authority. There’s far too many of them in Birmingham. It’s a hotbed. We have more Quakers than you can shake a stick at, and Radical Dissenters, too. I can’t think what the world is coming to.’

  Beatrice looked over her shoulder again. She could see that the boy had stepped out into the road in order to watch her as she walked up the street.

  ‘Do you know his name?’ she asked cousin Sarah.

  ‘Whose name? What are you talking about?’

  ‘The boy.’

  ‘I said don’t turn round! He’s Geoffrey Scarlet’s son, Francis. Why on earth would you want to know that?’

  ‘She’s smitten!’ hooted Jeremy. Then, to Beatrice, ‘You are smitten, aren’t you? Smitten with Francis Scarlet! Of all the noddies!’

  ‘Of course I’m not,’ said Beatrice. ‘He did stare so, that’s all, and I was wondering why.’

  Jeremy tapped the side of his nose with his finger and winked. ‘Perhaps he’s smitten with you, young Bea! Not that I’d wish you such bad luck!’

  *

  Over the months that passed, Beatrice saw Francis almost every Sunday. As soon as he saw her walking home from St Philip’s after communion he would step out of the crowd of Nonconformist worshippers on the corner of Bell Street and stare at her until she reached Lea Lane. She would glance back at him now and again, over her shoulder, and give him a quick, coy smile.

  Cousin Sarah would catch Beatrice glancing behind her and would turn round herself, to see what she was looking at.

  ‘Beatrice? That Scarlet boy isn’t giving you the eye again, is he?’

  ‘I’ll go back and lamp him, if you like,’ said Jeremy, turning round, too.

  ‘Oh, Jeremy, don’t be foolish!’ Beatrice told him. ‘I was turning round because I couldn’t hear Mrs Shelley talking to your mother and I thought we might have left them behind.’

  ‘Now then, Beatrice!’ cousin Sarah admonished her. ‘There’s no call for cheek!’

  Now and again, Beatrice saw Francis in the town, too. He was always with his father, or his mother, or one of his sisters, so they couldn’t stop to talk to each other. Beatrice usually had Jeremy with her, too. She was beginning to like Jeremy, but he hardly ever left her alone. If cousin Sarah sent her to the grocer’s for salt, or butter, or down to the butcher’s for pig’s liver, Jeremy would insist on coming with her. He would even carry her basket, ignoring the derisive hoots of his friends. ‘Going shopping, Jere-mary?’

  Wherever she was in the house, upstairs or downstairs, he always seemed to be there, too, offering to help her with whatever she was doing, whether it was cleaning the cutlery or changing the beds or shaking out the rugs. Either that, or he was simply watching her.

  He was funny, though, and most of the time he was cheerful. He showed her how to play the Game of Goose, on a coloured board with sixty-three squares.

  ‘If you land on a goose, you’ll be rich and successful,’ he told her. ‘If you land in a bad place, like an alehouse, then you’ll be miserable and poor. Like me, I always end up in the alehouse.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say that,’ said Beatrice.

  Jeremy shrugged and smiled. ‘When you’ve been livin
g here with my mother long enough you’ll probably come and join me. Better to be drunk than downtrodden.’

  *

  One morning in mid-July, when cousin Sarah was attending a church meeting, and Agnes was out in the garden hanging up the washing, Beatrice took the key from the hook in the kitchen and went down to the cellar. All her father’s equipment had been stored down there – his jars of dried spices and glass retorts and bottles of poison and vitriol – but it was his notebooks that Beatrice was looking for.

  She found them in a wooden box at the very back of the cellar, wrapped in sacking. There were five books in all, bound in brown leather, and each of them was crowded with her father’s neat, tiny writing. He had described in detail all the preparations that he had mixed up for hectic fever or milk leg or lupus vulgaris. Not only that, he had written up all of his ‘mysteries’, his scientific experiments, such as making dead mice run across the room, or chicken feathers spontaneously catch fire, or a person’s hair rise up from their head as if they had seen a ghost.

  She took the notebooks up to her room and hid them under her bed, but almost every night she took one out and read it until she was too tired to read any more, or cousin Sarah came halfway up the stairs and called out, ‘Beatrice! Put out that light at once and go to sleep!’

  When she read her father’s words she could almost hear him talking to her, and hear him laugh the way he had done when he surprised her with one of his magic tricks. She touched the lines that he had written with her fingertips and whispered, ‘I love you, papa, wherever you are.’

  *

  One year passed, and then another, and another. As time went by, Beatrice took over more and more of the domestic chores and by the time she reached her fifteenth birthday cousin Sarah often left her in charge of the whole household while she went to visit her sister or her friends, often for two or three days at a time.

  Just before Christmas that year Agnes became pregnant by the son of a local carter, although she told nobody but Beatrice. She begged Beatrice for pennyroyal oil from her father’s stores, in order to bring on a miscarriage, but Beatrice refused to let her have it. She knew from her father’s books that a pregnant prostitute from Bow had once asked him for pennyroyal oil. Even though she had taken only two small spoonfuls of it, it had been enough to poison her and she had died. Agnes kept on begging her, but Beatrice continued to say no, and in the end Agnes fell on the frozen cobbles in the market and lost the baby naturally.