Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

The day after Bella returned to us I read the above entry in Baxter’s library, first making sure nobody saw me. Weeks later I learned that Bella and Baxter had separately done the same. We were all too full of plans for Bella’s future to investigate or call up the past together — we hoped it would leave us in peace. Only Baxter had used the information to prepare for the past calling unexpectedly on us. As we hurried home from the church that cold Christmas morning only he was in a serious frame of mind. I had been infected by Bella’s eager curiosity and a crazy sense of the General’s importance. I had no fears that he would take her from me, but thought my love-life might be entering history as the love-lives of Rizzio and Bothwell had done — not enough for me to end disastrously, just enough to make me famous. Even a remark by Baxter did not cure me of that delusion. As we approached number eighteen we saw the General standing within the study window, glaring down on us. Bella shivered. Baxter said gently, “His left eye is glass — he always stares straight forward to make the right eye match it. No great general has been wounded as often as de la Pole Blessington.”

“O the poor lad!” said Bella, and waved encouragingly up at him. He gave no sign of seeing this, yet I suddenly feared pity might draw her toward him.

When we entered the study he continued staring out of the window with his back to the room. The old manufacturer was huddled in an arm-chair by the fire. He glanced at us briefly while Bella and I sat down together at the table, then went on gazing into the flames. The General’s lawyer and doctor sat primly on the sofa beside the detective. Seymour Grimes was the only visitor who looked comfortable: he held a glass of whisky filled from a decanter Mrs. Dinwiddie had left in easy reach. Baxter went straight to a bureau, unlocked it and brought out a sheaf of papers. He laid them on the table and asked no one in particular, “Does the General prefer to stand?”

“Sir Aubrey usually prefers to stand,” murmured the General’s doctor cautiously.

“Good,” said Baxter. He sat where he had a clear view of everyone and began talking at once.

“In a world as thickly peopled as ours nearly everyone must have several others who look and sound like them. Has anyone a better reason for thinking Bella Baxter is Victoria Blessington?”

“Yes,” said the old manufacturer. “A week ago I got a letter from a man called Wedderburn. He told me my Vicky was living here, with you. I contacted my son-in-law and was told he had received a similar letter a fortnight before, but had done nothing about it.”

“It was a madman’s letter!” said the General’s lawyer swiftly. “Wedderburn not only said Lady Blessington had been his mistress, he said she had been the mistress of Robert Burns, Bonnie Prince Charlie and a string of celebrities leading back to the garden of Eden. Are you surprised that the General ignored such an epistle?”

“Yes,” said the old man, scowling at the flames. “That letter was the only clue to my Vicky’s whereabouts in three whole years. We should have moved heaven and earth to find her when she first disappeared, but Dr. Prickett here said, ‘No need to call the police — I am sure it is a temporary derangement — a public scandal will only unhinge her further — if you love your daughter, give her time to return home of her own free will.’ Of course Prickett only says what Sir Aubrey wants him to say. I know that now, though I did not know it then. Days passed before Scotland Yard were told, and they handled the whole business very quietly because. . because. .” (he made a noise between a chuckle and a sob) “. . Blessington is the nation’s darling — an example to British youth — Lord Palmerston said so! The newspapers never printed the story and nothing was discovered. Or if it was, nobody told me. So as soon as I read Wedderburn’s letter I employed Grimes here. Tell them what you found out, Grimes.”

The detective nodded, sipped from his glass and spoke in the rapid lingo of a London native. He was an ordinary man of about thirty: so ordinary that I noticed nothing personal in him except his style of speech, which left out first-person pronouns.

“Was called to investigate Lady Blessntn’s dispearance seven days ago, three years after event. Lady vanished fromerome sudden being disturbed distressed distraught and in the famly way — eight months and a fortnight pregnant which often drives the fair sex round the twist poor things. Obtained photoportrait of lost lady, a goodun. Came to Glasgow pursuing information in letter from Duncan Wedderburn esquire and find said gentleman incarcerated in locked ward of Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum, positively no admittance. Lady B vanished from 49 Pochester Terrace 6 Febry 1880 so examined all police and Humane Society records of distraught or mindless female vagrants apprehended or otherwise detected in Glasgow after that date. Notice female of Lady B type seen diving from bridge into Clyde river on Febry 8 and fished out by Humane Society employee, one George Geddes. Showimphoto. ‘Thatser!’ sezee. ‘Where now?’ says I. ‘Corpus unclaimed,’ sezee, ‘so taken to University Medical College by police surgeon on Febry 15,’ sezee — wrongly. Godwin Baxter was police surgeon but College ledgers show Mr. Baxter delivered NO corpses there on Febry 15 or anytime after, because on Febry 16 College gets letter fromim saying he is resigning from police work in order to concentrate (sezee) onis private practice. Which he certainly did. By end of Febry coalman, milkman, grocer, butcher deliverin to 18 Park Circus know Mr. Baxter as a resident lady patient. Paralysed. By April she is walkin but childish. Three years later she sits here bloomin like a rose and fit to marry again. Good luck to you, Miss or Lady B!”

Seymour Grimes raised his glass to Bella and swallowed the contents.

“I like that man,” whispered Bella so intensely that I did not know if she understood him. Everyone else looked at Baxter.

“Your chain of reasoning has a missing link, Mr. Grimes,” he said. “You tell us that George Geddes (a popular and respected person in this city) says he recovered a dead body. 26How can the corpse he retrieved sit with us here, when you say it lay for seven days in a mortuary?”

“Can’t say — not my department,” said the detective, shrugging his shoulders.

“I believe I can cast light on this dark business,” said the General’s doctor, “if Sir Aubrey allows me.”

The General gave no sign of having heard him.

“This is my home, Dr. Prickett,” said Baxter. “I not only allow, I request you to give your opinion.”

“Then I will, Mr. Baxter, though you will not like it. The London medical world is aware that since the start of this century the Glasgow surgeons have been putting electric currents through the nervous systems of dead bodies. It is on record that in the 1820s one of your sort animated the corpse of a hanged criminal, who sat up and spoke. Public scandal was only prevented by one of the demonstrators severing the subject’s jugular with a scalpel. 27Your father was present at that demonstration. I have no doubt he passed on all he learned to you, who were his only assistant, apart from ignorant nurses. Sir Colin was notorious for knowing more than he shared with his colleagues.”

“God,” said Bella in a dull voice I had not heard from her before, “when we left the church today you said you were going to admit that you lied to me. I think I know now what the lie was. My pa and ma never died in an Argentine train crash. You invented that to hide something worse.”