Little Bones (21 page)

‘Two glasses, Jane,’ said Mrs Swift. ‘Tonight we are companions.’

Mrs Swift had decided she could not stand another night of miserable anguish alone. She’d had enough of staring into the fire and listening out for footsteps. As they could do nothing regarding their predicament, with the doctor away, perhaps they should make the most of it.

‘A fine feast of a supper,’ Mrs Swift beamed, her fingers swooping onto the nearest circle of bologna. ‘Jane, you have done us proud.’

After a few sips of wine Jane felt more relaxed. Perhaps Mrs Swift was right. What was the point of worrying? Worrying would not bring the doctor back, give him a medical training or produce the necessary certificates.

‘I’m sorry we didn’t get to Brighton, ma’am. I know how much you miss it.’

‘It’s the past I miss,’ said Mrs Swift. ‘Our old life.’

After another glass of hock, Mrs Swift told Jane that in their former life they were not Dr and Mrs Swift, but Fred the Magnificent and his voluptuous assistant Mamie. ‘Does that shock you?’ she said.

‘He was a magician?’ said Jane. ‘A conjurer?’ And suddenly she could see it. Dr Swift producing things from his top hat. Coat sleeves. The sky.

‘We worked together. We had a marvellous life.’

Smiling, Jane moved to the edge of her seat. She tried to see Mrs Swift as Mamie, smiling in the footlights and gesturing with her hands. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘At first we travelled the country, spending summers in seaside theatres, usually perched at the end of a pier. Brighton was the best. Oh, ask anyone in the business and they’ll tell you that Brighton is the jewel in the summer season crown. It was everything we had hoped for. A wonderful theatre. Enthusiastic audiences. We settled. We were there for three seasons. We married. We had a lovely little house near the promenade. A life of dancing and parties. We were well known in the town and thought we had it made. Then the manager didn’t renew our contract. Oh,’ she said sadly, ‘we weren’t the only ones. Things were changing.
He
wanted bigger acts from the Continent. He said people were tiring of the smaller acts like ours.’

‘Did you go to another theatre?’ asked Jane. ‘Another seaside town?’

Mrs Swift shook her head. She admitted to their debts. The life of dancing, restaurants, parties, and the house by the sea, did not go hand in hand with a small-time magic act. ‘It was me,’ she said. ‘I was greedy.’

‘And Miss Silverwood?’

‘I had a friend,’ she explained. ‘A dancer in a show. A lovely-looking girl who got herself in trouble with a stagehand. I took her to a place I had heard about. It was in the darker side of Brighton in a large house that was once used as offices. Irene Silverwood was there. A queue of wretched girls were standing on the stairs with very gloomy faces and pocketfuls of money.’

‘A queue?’ said Jane.

‘Perhaps I exaggerate. It was a long time ago, but it was very busy, I do remember that. One girl had come all the way from Sussex, saying she had heard this place was the best. Whoever would have thought it? It wasn’t cheap. My friend had pawned most of what she owned, and the stagehand had reluctantly sold a brooch of his mother’s, or something like that. Miss Silverwood knew my husband from the old days, when he’d worked the East London circuit. We got talking. She wanted to move into London. She needed someone else. And she knew my husband was something of an actor.’

‘You went into it together?’

‘No,’ Mrs Swift shook her head. ‘It was always just my husband and Miss Silverwood. I have never been
to
Axford Square, or any of the lodging houses. Even if I could leave this house I wouldn’t go. Miss Silverwood trained him of course. She said she would only use the tincture and some manipulation, because she had heard of things going wrong with hooks and syringes.’

‘He does a very good job, ma’am.’

‘But what’s to become of us now?’

Jane was quiet for a moment. ‘You were magicians,’ she said. ‘Do you still have a wand? Couldn’t you make us disappear inside a little cloud of smoke?’

‘If I did have a wand,’ said Mrs Swift, ‘believe me, I would use it.’

Jane woke with a headache. The stale taste of the wine had coated the roof of her mouth. The thumping made her eyes hurt. Then the thumping turned into a thudding. To her horror, she knew the noise was coming from downstairs, and someone was banging hard on the door.

She moved slowly. Her bare toes were cramping on the cold floor tiles. She could see the door moving, the letterbox shaking, and she could only think the worst.

When she turned the key and pushed, she smiled. She sucked in the cold fresh air. The doctor was standing on the doorstep. Large as life. He must have forgotten his keys.

‘You’re back, sir,’ she said. ‘Thank God.’

‘That’s right,’ he told her, quickly stepping inside. ‘I have seen the sergeant, and I have presented myself to his colleagues.’

‘You have, sir? And have they set you free?’

‘Obviously,’ he smiled. ‘They have heard my part of the story, and as they would with any gentleman, they believed me.’

‘Oh,’ smiled Jane. ‘Won’t Mrs Swift be pleased!’

Whistling, making breakfast from what poor remains she could find, Jane heard his wife laughing. Pulling plates from the greasy stack, she thought she would spend the day cleaning. She would wipe every last crust and crumb from the floor, mopping up all the fatty residue. It would be a fresh start. Carrying the tray to the dining room she stopped on the threshold. The saucers started rattling.

‘Miss Stretch,’ said the sergeant, ‘I am placing you under arrest for theft and for the administration of abortive mixtures.’ As the sergeant continued speaking, giving dates, citing the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, and a barrage of addresses, the breakfast was lost, the tea, the scraps of fatty bologna, and the stale cream crackers fell around Jane’s feet. The only thing saved being the small china cup that had fallen from the sky, now rolling miraculously unbroken by the sergeant’s polished boots.

THROUGH THE CARRIAGE
window, she could see nothing but black brick and sky. The sergeant talked with a constable about a horse race and the amount of spice his cook had used in a batch of pork pies. ‘Fair set my tongue on fire. Mind you,’ he added, ‘it was a good excuse for a drink.’

Jane was numb. Frozen. She had not been handcuffed, but the seat was like a very narrow shelf and she was thrown against the door at every turn. At Bow Street, she was spat on by three pickpockets, freshly caught and bleating their innocence, though their vast collection of gentlemen’s wallets told a different story. ‘Serious crime,’ the sergeant told the desk clerk, indicating Jane, and the pickpockets gave her a cheer.

She was taken behind the counter and into a room at the back. It looked like a well-managed parlour. A fire was burning, a table was set with a fine lace cloth, and hanging on the wall was a portrait of the queen. ‘Do take a seat,’ the sergeant told her. ‘Mrs Fletcher will bring us some tea.’

‘Tea, sir?’ Jane looked amazed. Why was the sergeant
offering
her refreshment when she had just been arrested and told she was a criminal?

‘Don’t you drink tea?’ he said, ringing a little bell, prompting the woman to appear, wheezing and tutting, putting down white cups and saucers, as if they were sitting in a tea room.

‘You have all your wits?’ the sergeant asked her.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Because if you are as witless as you look, we could save time and money and have you taken straight to the asylum.’

Jane stared at her tea. It looked very brown. The woman, pencil-shaped and abrasive, was throwing coal onto the fire. The sergeant, keeping his eyes on Jane, dropped three lumps of sugar into his cup, mashing them down with his spoon. ‘I missed breakfast,’ he said. ‘I hate missing breakfast.’

Jane said nothing. Through the door she could hear a scuffle turning into a fight. The sergeant yawned. ‘You do know why you are here?’ he said. ‘You understand your arrest?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You don’t?’ He gave her a wry little smile. ‘You worked with Dr Swift, you told me so yourself.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘A gentleman, would you say?’

Jane swallowed. ‘I would, sir.’

‘I spent a good few hours with the doctor last night,’ the sergeant said. ‘He was very generous and forthcoming. He told me all about you, Miss Stretch.’

‘Me, sir?’

‘How your family had left his house with a debt,
leaving
you behind, how his wife, a lonely childless soul by all accounts, took pity on you, and how you took advantage of them both.’

‘No.’

‘Oh yes,’ he nodded. ‘Yes.’ He found a notebook inside a drawer and tapped a pencil deep into the paper. ‘While the doctor was busy examining his patients, you were doling out abortive mixtures behind his back. It seems you had a regular little business going on.’

‘No, sir,’ she told him. ‘I did not do that.’

‘You never offered women this?’ The sergeant pulled a bottle of the tincture from behind a small brass correspondence box. ‘Exhibit one.’

‘Yes, sir, but that’s the tincture, sir, the purgative.’

The sergeant laughed, saying for such a moon-faced cripple she had a way with words. He looked closely at the bottle, examining the label. ‘So you gave the women this … purgative?’

‘Occasionally, sir. Though the doctor usually did it.’

‘No.’ The sergeant reddened. ‘You took bottles of this purgative from inside a locked cabinet.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Yes. Tell me, Miss Stretch, what does this mixture actually do?’

‘It releases things, sir,’ she said, feeling a nerve twitching in her eyelid. ‘But I only ever did what I was told.’

‘Oh, and I’ll bet you made a pretty profit,’ said the sergeant. ‘How much does a bottle like this fetch?’

‘I don’t know, sir, but you can buy it from any chemist shop in London.’

‘You can buy arsenic too, but it’s how you use the blessed grains that really matters.’

‘You can get it very easily, sir,’ she persisted.

‘So why did Mr Treble have to take one of your bottles from the cabinet? A bottle with your number on it? Why couldn’t he walk into a chemist shop and buy a bottle for himself?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘And why would he need it?’

Jane shrugged. Knotting her hands, then pulling the ends of her sleeves, Jane told the sergeant she had only ever done what the doctor had instructed her to.

‘Are you certain?’

‘I am, sir.’

‘And how are your ears?’

‘Sir?’

‘I said, how are your ears?’ he bellowed.

‘They are very good, sir.’

But the sergeant, now rising from his chair, was having none of it, saying he only had to look at Jane’s head to know the workings must be mangled. She must have misheard. What kind of respectable doctor would risk his career with illegal activities?

‘I did not mishear, sir.’

‘And I am saying that you did!’

Pacing the room with his great meaty hands clasped behind his back, the sergeant said that Jane was in a most convenient position to take these bottles of purgative. Then he pondered the contents of the doctor’s cabinet. The inside of his bag.

‘Did you have a key to his cabinet?’ the sergeant asked.

‘No, sir,’ she blurted. ‘The cabinet was always unlocked,’ then she reddened, as if she had tripped herself up. ‘There was nothing in it,’ she spluttered. ‘Really, sir. The cabinet was empty of all his medical things.’

The sergeant laughed. ‘A doctor’s cabinet empty of medical things? Now, I have heard it all! What did he keep inside this cabinet? Ming vases?’ He rang the bell and an eager-looking constable appeared. ‘Put her in a cell,’ the sergeant said. ‘Did you know I missed my breakfast? I’m famished.’

At first the cell was strangely comforting with its bare quiet walls. Jane sat on the hard bench and a few strips of light came struggling through the great iron bars at the window. The cell was quiet, but soon her head was swimming with words: the girls praying for forgiveness; the doctor telling Jane to
Hurry up, hurry up, we haven’t got all day! A poor wretch called Vicky is having a terrible time; turns out it might have been twins
; her father singing; the priest saying the Eucharist; Mrs Swift wants another slice of pudding,
three slices!
Edie laughs; a few foreign words slip from the mouth of the Frenchman;
Girls
, says Johnny Treble,
they kill you
.

With her face in her hands, Jane opened her eyes to concentrate on the warm dark space of her palms and the rhythm of her breathing. Why was she here? Why her? She thought about the doctor, walking up to the desk at Bow Street. The tincture bottles rattling. His appointment book lost, along with his certificates.

Forty minutes passed, and all she could do was wrap her arms around herself, and though she had no
appetite
, she pictured the sergeant with his plate of greasy eggs, licking his lips, taking great long slurps of his tea. She examined every inch of her cell, the cobwebs, carvings (a skull and crossbones in her opinion showed great artistic talent), the plain iron candlestick sitting high and defunct on the wall, the gaslight with the mesh around it.

When the door opened, Jane jumped to her feet and a policeman beckoned with his clattering hoop of keys, saying she looked like one of the freaks he had seen as a boy camping on Wandsworth Common. Next, she was marched into a room where a man sat at a high oak desk, looking rather like a vicar, a pen in his hand, his face dour and impassive, barely looking at Jane at all as he asked for her name and the sergeant quickly read out the charges. It was Mr Blake the magistrate who gave the nod and the long wheezy grunt which refused to grant bail, and they were to keep Jane Stretch
incarcerated
– he dragged out the word through his teeth. Then he was onto the next miserable specimen, a boy who had burgled a fish shop.

‘Come on,’ said the policeman, kicking at her ankles. ‘We’re off.’

Jane followed him through a hall, reeking of disinfectant, and into a bare draughty room where a raw-faced woman in a grey uniform was waiting with a pair of handcuffs. It was these chafing cuffs more than anything that made Jane want to cry. What harm did they think her poor free hands would do them? The warden wore a very cruel expression, taking pleasure it seemed from pulling Jane by her wrist and clamping her in iron.