Imogen Robertson - Anatomy of Murder

Harriet began to feel guilty. “Then I have been keeping you from your duty, my lord. And you may have to treat for peace with Lady Sybil.”

He patted her knee. “No matter, my dear, this do will rattle on a while yet. And Lady Sybil and I are old enemies and get great satisfaction from our battles. Now-the music. And give my regards to your husband, if he might have any use for them.”

Harriet thought of James in his room in Highgate, then of him in shirtsleeves in his cabin, looking up at her with a quick smile from his charts and logs. She had had some hopes that when the war with America was concluded he might be persuaded to take up the life of a country gentleman. They had been much separated since Stephen’s birth and she had wished to know her husband better-another ambition that put her apart from much of the company in the room. She thought of the open fields surrounding Caveley, the orchard there. She had been told the harvest had been splendid this year. Usually, she and Stephen would walk among the pickers and help serve their midday meal in the yard. This year, she had been in London.

Harriet recalled Justice Pither’s low outhouse and Fitzraven’s body lying under the oil lamp. The taste of champagne began to turn a little bitter in her mouth. She remembered seeing the girl selling milk from the pail in Berkeley Square and wondered where she was laying her head tonight; thought of the abandoned children who did not find their way to the Foundling Hospital. A man to her right, his chin receding into the lace of his cravat, gave a braying laugh. She turned to watch him wave his soft white hands in the air. His audience, two young women, their high color painted on and in nooses of emeralds and silks, laughed back up to him, fluttering their eyes and flirting with their fans. When she noticed her hands again she realized her fingers were white around the glass. That little thrill of sitting in the Royal Box at His Majesty’s, the pleasure of taking Sandwich’s arm that she had felt, now disgusted her. “Vanitas vanitatum, omnis vanitas,” she murmured, then stood and allowed the earl to guide her forward.

Jocasta reached the top of the stairs and paused a moment to get her breath back. Boyo whined and a voice shouted out from behind the closed door, “Who’s there? One of you vermin brings a dog in here, I’ll kill it and eat it in front of you.”

The door was pulled open so hard it rattled against the wall behind, and Jocasta could have sworn she felt the whole house shake. A woman peered out, sniffing the air of the corridor as if there was blood in it. She was a vast mound of a female, a tower and ball of flesh squeezed into the shape of a woman with stays and skirt. Her skin was slick and shiny with grease and her thin and scrappy hair was glued down to it in black wisps; her fingers clutching at the doorframe while she peered around at them on the landing were fat as sausages, the skin pulled tight over them as if they were about to burst.

Jocasta looked straight into her half-swallowed eyes and said, “You touch my dog, missus, and I’ll curse you with boils so mean so you can’t sit for a month. Don’t think I won’t or can’t-I can and I will.”

“What do you want?” The woman turned back into the room as she said it, swaying her huge body from side to side as she went, but left the door open. Jocasta took that as invitation enough and walked in. The garret was larger than she had expected, but very dark. There was a window or two, but the glass was long gone and the gaps stuffed with rags or covered with paper. A stove was going in the middle of the room, a vast armchair beside it, black where it had been sat on, and sunk into, and four or five boys slinking into the shadows where the incline of the roof hit the floor. The stench was as bad here as in the hall, and all the worse for the heat in the room. As Jocasta felt the boys watching her from the shadows, the fat lady went up to the pot and sniffed it.

“News of Clayton,” Jocasta said, trying to see farther into the shadows.

“What-he stolen from you?”

“No.”

She didn’t seem to care much, picked up a spoon to stir whatever was stewing and licked her lips. “Not that it’s my business if he did. Anyway, I ain’t got no news of him. He ain’t here now. Wasn’t here last night.”

“Has that happened before?”

“Do I look as if I had any share in the whelping of him? It’s no matter to me who comes and goes. Though he did always seem to be hanging about. That one!” She turned and spat at her feet. “He’d dare to come home with the hunger on him and not so much as a handkerchief.”

Jocasta stood still a moment. Her head was starting to ache with the smell and the heat. She had begun to turn to go when a voice spoke up from the dark.

“He’s always here. Been here every night for a year. But he ain’t coming back.”

Jocasta couldn’t see the face of the boy who had spoken. He was a shadow among shadows.

“Why do you say that?” she asked.

Another voice, softer and with a foreign lilt to it, sounded up from the other side of the garret. “Tonton Macoute took him, lady.”

Despite the heat, a new chill began to grow and turn in Jocasta’s belly.

“What did you say?” she demanded.

The same soft voice spoke again; it lapped at her ears like the slap of water in a clean brook. “He’s a giant and speaks so sweet and moves like a cat, but his knapsack is full of little bones. He’s a devil-man. I never saw him before last night, just heard tell of him and smelled him in the shadows, but I saw him leading Clayton off as I came home.” As he spoke the little boy crept forward into the room. His face was dusky brown like sugar, and he looked up at her with large brown eyes and blinked. “Tonton Macoute took him.”

The fat lady kept stirring the pot, her face expressionless.

Another boy piped up, “He takes boys that stay out too late, and girls too if he can find them for the crack of their bones. Everyone knows that. Where else do you think the children go, lady?”

Sam had inched into the room. “Anyone seen Finn today?” he said, his voice high and full of tears.

The boys shook their heads without speaking and began to shuffle back again into the shadows. Then the dusky-faced child spoke again from the depths under the eaves.

“Tonton Macoute.”

Jocasta turned and walked out, pushing Sam in front of her. The pot on the stove bubbled and belched a little and the fat lady kept stirring, her face shining in the steam.

Harriet found Crowther at the very edge of the crowd preparing to enjoy Manzerotti and Isabella’s performance. He watched her as she approached. Even at first glance it was clear she was not of a type with the other women in the room. It was not simply the lack of diamonds around her neck, or the relatively casual arrangement of her hair and dress-Crowther had seen some concoctions on the heads of other ladies there that must present some danger to their spines-but there was something in the air around her that seemed a little foreign. The men and women in the room knew it. Some were fascinated by it, perhaps, but most it repelled. Her life at sea, her adventures at his side had perhaps acted like some alchemical fire, and turned her into some other substance than the usual flesh of man and woman. Whatever process had occurred- was occurring-it might well, he supposed, lead to estrangement from her sister, even from her own children in time. He believed, however, that even if she had known when her husband bought Caveley how events might make the raw stuff of her develop, she would have walked the same path with her bright green eyes open.

As Isabella began to sing, he turned his attention to himself. Was it his own otherness, his own separation from the body of men who made up his country, that had perhaps brought them together? Crowther had for many years feared and distrusted being bound to any other being in any way; he had cut those connections with his scalpel, and in all that time successfully defended his isolation even from his own sister, yet he had to confess there was a bond here, something in the complementary way their intellects functioned, though she frustrated or exhausted him at times with her impatience, her leaps of logic, her teasing. However, the more she distanced herself from the norms of the world, from her family and more quotidian commitments, the stronger the bond between them grew. He had thought her arguments with Rachel merely an annoyance, but now, for a moment as he thought of them he felt a touch of selfish pleasure. He looked down at the cane he held in front of him, the fat silver bundle of foliage under his thin fingers, and expected to feel ashamed. He did not.