Imogen Robertson - Anatomy of Murder

Graves reached out a hand and rested it on the older man’s shoulder, still admiring the paper in his hand.

“Very well, Mr. Crumley. I had been wondering how many more copies we could possibly sell, especially as every back room in Town will be trying to copy and produce their own versions as we speak, but this will draw them in. You have caught Miss Marin’s likeness very well. I did not know you saw her before today, or Manzerotti for that matter.”

Mr. Crumley shrugged his shoulders. “Neither I had, but the boy was in the pit on Saturday night and I got him to describe them both as I drew.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to where his apprentice skulked, inky and shy in the doorway. Susan waved at him cheerily. He blushed to his ears and withdrew. “It’s a little like riding blind, but once you get the idea of which questions to ask, it’s no great thing. Though I was glad when I glanced in earlier to see that Miss Marin at least was a match.”

Harriet beamed at the paper in front of her. “You have Manzerotti to the life as well.”

Crowther spoke for the first time since entering the shop. “I must leave you to the admiration of Mr. Crumley’s artistry. I have an appointment at the British Museum.”

Harriet handed the song sheet back to Graves. “And I am to go to the Foundling Hospital and meet Mr. Fitzraven’s most recent patron. I hope for the sake of his soul I shall find one being in London who will speak well of him.”

Graves placed the sheet on the countertop. “As do I, though the hope is not strong, Mrs. Westerman.”

“How do the pictures work then, Mrs. Bligh?”

Jocasta and Sam had been directed up this path by a young woman sweeping the steps outside one of the better houses on Tiburn Lane. For the chance of getting her cards read she had been chatty enough, and was glad to tell them about the older woman coming running down the lane yelling for help till Old Beattie had hauled his cart over, and then the younger man following with the lady in his arms all broken. She had watched them go up this way too, and reckoned by her memory of the pattern of her duties done that there had been no more than half an hour between Kate turning up this way looking happy and bright, and her sad return.

The way was muddy, and Jocasta thought it an odd walk to take on a Sunday with the clean paths of Hyde Park so close, but it had been chosen for its quietness. London was pushing out west like a growing baby stretches and pulls out its mother’s belly for new space. Here they were near its edge and limit. On one side of the way sat the high brick wall of one of the fancier houses, on the left as they walked was hedgerow and a view of the fields. As they cleared the backs of the gardens, she sniffed the air and it tasted of green things hiding away for the winter, and woodsmoke. The quiet settled on her. It was a way that led up to the Marylebone Burying Grounds, now becoming overrun with new rich life and buildings, if you followed it, but Jocasta reckoned the little party could never have got that far and back in half an hour. It took her a few moments to hear Sam’s question, and a few more to answer him.

“Hard to say it outright, stripling.”

“The cards tell you things though?”

“That’s how it seems to me. The different pictures have different thoughts attached to them. When they are laid out, those thoughts come together. The Frenchman I met called them Tarot.”

Sam had picked up a stick from the way and began fighting the earth with it as they went along. Boyo snatched at the other end and they tugged against each other. Jocasta sniffed and rubbed her nose. It reminded her of her younger brother when they used to go walking along the old Corpse Roads behind Brumstone Bridge. He’d be near forty now, probably with children of his own if he’d lived. She had no way of saying if he had.

Sam stopped a moment and looked up at her. “I was watching when you were laying them out yesterday. And for that girl just now. They look pretty. Most of them.” Boyo, seeing the game was paused, dropped his end of the stick and headed into the hedgerow.

“I’ll show you their manner of speech sometime,” Jocasta said slowly. “If you want.”

His face shone, and he ran ahead along the path with a skip. The young can shed things. Not that she had, not entirely, but Sam’s face was bright again for now. He was not thinking himself orphan and poor, nor of the girl with her head stove in. He only knew he was rested and fed and had power over his limbs-and that was sufficient.

Jocasta walked on, looking over the ground right and left with no clear idea what she was searching for in the scrappy grass. She could hear Boyo yapping at Sam’s heels up ahead. The image of Kate in the back of the cart kept coming in on her, though. Her little face had been unmarked, and she had looked more of a child than ever, just her hair all disarranged and her bonnet hanging back from a ribbon around her neck. Such a little face for all its pride. Jocasta could have covered it with the palm of her hand. She imagined doing so and lifting her hand away to find the woman breathing again, as if she’d just forgotten the trick of it for a moment and needed reminding. Her husband had been looking down on her, whiter than ever and wondering, with tears in his eyes.

There had been a boy in Jocasta’s village who used to love to catch rabbits in the woodland on the flanks of the hills around Derwentwater. He came back past the water pump dark-eyed one day and Jocasta was told he’d found one living and suffering in the traps, and had had to break its neck. Terrible sound an injured rabbit makes, like a baby stuck with something sharp. He grew accustomed in the end, of course, and six months later had been one of the ringleaders of a badger baiting out the back of the Black Dog. Still, she had remembered that look, and it came back to her now, thinking of Fred bent over his wife’s corpse with his mother like a crow behind him.

Jocasta’s eyes flicked up. They were roughly abreast of the brick kiln now. It smoked into the air, tall above the trees and hedgerows, a great upturned funnel firing the building blocks for all the spreading habitations of London. Up ahead of her, where the path reared up to cross the hedgerow through the trees into the next field, she could see Boyo worrying at something on the ground, and Sam standing over him. Boyo was yapping. Jocasta walked on a little quicker.

Within moments of the carriage turning into the grounds of the famous Foundling Hospital, it became clear to Harriet that her visit here was likely to be an expensive one. First she saw the extensive gardens laid to turf, the modest solidity of the building itself, but then she saw the children. Young girls in high caps and white aprons over their brown skirts; small boys in red flannel waistcoats-all, she thought, out of infancy, but younger than Susan. They stood or walked about in twos or threes, and all turned toward her as she passed. There were so many of them, and these were such a tiny proportion of those born into dreadful want. Neither building nor gardens suggested great softness or comfort, but here was something like a paradise in comparison with the squalor of the city. This is what other beings with money or talent had brought to their city. Mr. Coram had built this refuge, Mr. Hogarth had filled its walls with paintings, and Mr. Handel had crowded it with music. Harriet looked at her hands and wondered if there might be better use for them than turning over the secrets of the dead.

The kindly looking matron who showed her in and escorted her toward the parts of the building where the committees met and the records were kept spent the time of their walk telling her something of the place, and with each story she told, Harriet could feel guineas bleeding from her purse into the charitable trust.