The Conviction of Cora Burns Read online

  And the cruel irony of her outburst was that the prison likeness was probably still inside Samuel’s pocket. If only she’d applied some cunning she’d have got it back from him easily, with an upward flick of her petticoat and a lick of her lips. Then he’d have been slavering for a feel of her whenever he came near the kitchen, and perhaps she would have been too. And he’d have guarded the secret of her convict past. Instead, she’d half-killed him; had scarred him anyway. Maybe for life. He’d think of the crazed gaolbird who did that to him every time he saw his reflection.

  In the yard, metal scraped against stone. Taking care to stay in shadow, Cora moved nearer to the window but she could see no sign of Samuel through the grime. The stable doors were still shut and the water in the trough was unrippled. She caught the ghost of her face in the glass; scratched, bedraggled, mad-eyed. Yes, that was who she was, and who she had been for as long as she could remember. A troublemaker and a bully. Unreliable. Unhinged.

  Cora began to pace, back and forth across the brick floor of the wash-house. Six paces one way, six the other. The same number, she realised, as the breadth of her cell. In those first days in prison, as she’d paced, she’d let herself recall the crime that had brought about her conviction. But the pacing had worsened the drip of blood down her leg and the soak of thin milk through her prison jacket. The ceaseless motion had made thoughts of the Union house leak out too; a recurring vision of a small girl carrying a smaller boy across the schoolyard. It might have been Alice, but Cora could feel, like a missing limb, the weight of a child on her hip. And was it Cora too, who’d pushed the petticoat into his mouth? She could not say if he’d squirmed or bitten or kicked. She had no sense, either, of how long it had been until he was still. Surely if she’d been the one who’d done it, she would remember all this. She knew for certain that her own child had made no fuss. Perhaps he’d been too little.

  Cora’s breath shivered on to the wash-house pane. She put her hand inside her stays and pulled out the half-medal. It had dulled since she cleaned it but the markings were still clear, as were the words: IMAGINEM SALT. Perhaps in that distant time before Alice came, Cora had been a meek and docile child, unwilling to hurt so much as a featherless starling. Or perhaps, like the severed coin, Cora had been made wrong from the start; cursed by her place of birth and her mother’s blood.

  The scene in the Union house privies was a blank blot in her memory like a hole in vision that came from looking at the sun. The only person who might colour in the blank was Alice. Cora went to the washing line and wiped the half-medal on the soaked sleeve of the print dress. And as she pushed metal and twine back inside her stays, her hands no longer shook.

  vinegar

  Cora slipped inside the scullery, wet sleeves slapping against her arms. She struck a Vesta and the gas mantle fizzed into an orange flame. Shadows jumped around the plate rack. She leaned against the wall, too numb to shiver. If anyone came in, she could try to make out that she had been in here all along, scouring the tin lining of copper pots, but before she had time to pick up the bowl of soap and flour paste, a draught of gravy-soaked air blew into the scullery.

  Cook’s face was red, her voice quiet. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  Cora saw that her soaking bodice required some sort of explanation. ‘In the wash-house. My dress had got stained with bird mess.’

  ‘All afternoon?’

  ‘And I was looking for brambles, like you asked.’

  ‘Did you find any?’

  ‘No, Cook.’

  ‘Where’s the bowl?’

  Cora’s heart quickened as a lie began to form in her mouth. But Cook cast a look over the wet bodice and clicked her tongue.

  ‘Save your excuses. I need you to come now and take the girl her tea.’

  The tray on the kitchen table was already made up with a plate of thickly buttered white bread, tea in a china cup and a hot egg wrapped in linen. There was a teaspoon beside a tiny silver cup and a metal lever with a hole in one end.

  ‘You’d best help with the egg. Take the top off for her. Or she’s like to make an almighty mess.’

  Cora’s teeth had begun to chatter so fast she could not ask if the top was the same as the shell.

  As Cora entered the parlour, Violet looked up wide-eyed and silent. Thin light hissed from the overhead mantle and flames licked across the orange coals in the grate.

  ‘Shall I pull this table forward for you?’

  Violet blinked but did not otherwise move. She sat on the worn edge of the leather armchair, her green dress almost hidden by an overlarge white apron. Her eyes did not leave Cora. One of the pupils was still larger than the other, making the eye look black. Her gaze seemed widened with suspicion. Perhaps word of the prison bonnet had already spread.

  The tray rattled as Cora set it down on the card table, too far from the armchair for Violet to reach. But if she was going to play Miss Hoity-Toity, that’s where it would stay. The egg, as Cora unwrapped it from the linen cloth, was almost too hot to touch.

  ‘Cook says I’m to help you with this egg. How do you want it?’ Violet stared at her in silence. ‘Shall I peel off the shell?’

  At this, Violet lowered her eyes to the egg, squinting as if it was a thing she had never seen before then she raised one shoulder in an indifferent shrug. Cora clenched the hand that was itching to give Violet a clip around the ear.

  ‘Well, I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what to do. There’s this spoon here. Maybe you could eat it with that. And this thing here…’

  Cora picked up the implement with the hole and the lever then dropped it back on to the tray when the girl refused to respond.

  Cora sniffed. ‘Is that all, then?’

  Without looking up, Violet gave a quick nod of her head and Cora shut the parlour door harder than was proper. The girl, who had so recently seemed to want Cora for a friend, now hated her. Cora told herself she should not care nor even be surprised. That was what always happened once anyone saw her true character. Just as Samuel now had. And perhaps that was also why Alice had disappeared.

  Yellow light spilled under the kitchen door into the dusk of the passage. Cora took the tray in one hand as she went in then reeled from a reek of vinegar. Ellen stood holding a saucer beside a large figure reclining, head back and eyes closed, in the Windsor chair. Ellen looked up at Cora and her jaw tightened. Then she went back to dabbing an acrid handkerchief from the saucer of vinegar to the seeping wheals across Samuel Shepherd’s face.

  A chink opened in Samuel’s eye, then widened as it came to rest on Cora. She stood, frozen by his gaze, just inside the door.

  He winced. ‘God damn it!’

  The vinegar-soaked handkerchief leapt up in Ellen’s hand. ‘I’m sorry. There’s a thorn.’ Her face reddened as if about to crumple with tears. She turned to Cora. ‘Get me a needle, can you?’

  Cook, stirring at a copper stew-pan on the range, watched Cora open the dresser and take out the mending box. Neither her expression nor Ellen’s gave a clear sign of what Samuel might have told them. Cora’s cold hand trembled as she pulled out the needle with the finest point. A glint in Samuel’s half-open eye followed her as she brought it towards him.

  Ellen laid the handkerchief down and flattened her hand for the needle. ‘You know what happened, don’t you?’

  The needle hovered. Ellen’s palm was as good as a pincushion to stick it in. ‘What?’

  ‘To Samuel. Behind the stables?’

  Samuel shut the slit of his eye. ‘Leave it, Ellen.’

  ‘No, I won’t. Why did she not try to help you or go to find Timothy? She must have heard the commotion.’

  The thump of Cora’s heart warmed her and the lie came easily. ‘I didn’t.’

  Samuel’s eye flashed from Cora to Ellen. ‘Well, I’m all right now. Just get on with your surgery, Doctor Beamish.’

 
Ellen’s head shook as she bent over Samuel’s face with the needle. ‘I don’t think you are all right, Samuel. And how could she not have known? There must have been a fearful noise when he attacked you.’

  He. Cora’s heart skipped a beat. So Samuel had also lied. To protect her, or to protect his pride? Either way, Cook and Ellen did not know what Cora had done.

  Painfully, Samuel licked his lips. ‘Aye well. It would have made no difference. That pony won’t take no notice of anything when he gets the devil inside him.’

  Cook rapped her metal spoon on the edge of the stew-pan then pointed it at Cora. ‘If you was in the wash-house you must have heard the racket.’

  Cora shrugged. ‘That old pump makes a racket as well.’

  ‘Not as much as a crazed horse trampling a man into thorn bushes.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Samuel pushed Ellen’s hand with the needle away from his face. ‘That’ll do!’

  He sat upright and rubbed his neck. Cora saw that his hands, like his face were covered in a web of raised cuts, but most of the scratches were shallow. In a few days, they should have healed without a mark.

  Ellen held up the needle with its tiny black trophy on the point. ‘I’m sorry, Samuel. It was a deep one. But I think I’ve got it all out now. Let me just dab that last bit with vinegar.’

  ‘No thank you. I’ll live.’ He stood up and pulled a crusted oil can from the shelf below the table. ‘I’ll take the storm lamp to the stables so I can check the pony over for scratches.’

  Ellen folded her arms. ‘You must tell the master to get rid of that Hector. He’s vicious.’

  ‘He’s a beast, Ellen. Savagery is in his nature. If something riles him, like an over-tight harness or a horsefly bite, he’ll turn nasty and he doesn’t care who is in his way.’ Samuel shot Cora a look that flickered with disgust. ‘He’s too tangled up in his own selfish desires to consider the upshot of his violence.’

  Cora had seen that look all her life; in the eyes of the workhouse orderlies, the female attendant at the asylum, the wardresses at the gaol. Her voice, steely and remote, seemed to come from a different part of the room.

  ‘And what is the upshot of violence? For the horse?’

  ‘I shall put him in a nose twitch and hope it teaches him better manners.’

  ‘You think cruelty will make him gentler?’

  ‘If he can’t learn to be civil he’ll find himself at Bristol Street horse fair.’

  Samuel began pouring oil into the storm lamp but his hand faltered as Cook emptied the vinegar from the saucer into the slops bucket on the floor beside him. She spoke sharply.

  ‘It’s up to the master what happens to that horse, Samuel Shepherd, not you. And it will pay you to treat that animal with respect or the damage he could do you might be a sight worse than those scratches on your face.’

  Samuel winced and his face looked even redder. Perhaps he, like Cora, suspected that Cook knew more of the truth than she was letting on. She raised her chin at Samuel as he lit the oil and pulled his cap low over his brow.

  ‘And keep an eye out for that enamel bowl. There’s no telling what might have happened to it.’

  transformation

  As the print-covered buttons slipped, one by one, out of each damp hole, exhaustion slid through Cora’s limbs. Apart from a few grazes to her hands and more than usually dishevelled hair, she looked the same as she had when she’d got dressed that morning. But she no longer felt like herself; her mind seemed liquid; her body no longer whole.

  She looked away blankly as Ellen came in from the scullery and put her night things on the table in a neat pile. As Ellen began lighting a candle, Cora felt a sudden stab of fury.

  ‘Is even my candle not good enough for you, Ellen?’

  Ellen kept her eyes on the flame before her. ‘I need one of my own tonight. To go upstairs.’

  ‘Upstairs?’

  ‘I’ll be sleeping there from now on.’

  There was only one reason that Ellen would want to sleep in a cold cramped attic room instead of the warm kitchen.

  ‘Can’t even stand to be in the same room as me?’

  ‘Well, I’m not really a scullery maid any more, am I? Mrs Dix said that part of my recompense for the extra kitchen work would be to sleep with the upper servants.’

  Cora stepped out of her petticoats and dropped them over the blanket on her bed. In their usual contortionist’s jig of dressing and undressing beneath a nightdress, neither Cora nor Ellen had seen more than a brief flash of white flesh on the other.

  ‘Where? There’s no spare bed up there.’

  ‘I’ll be sharing Susan Gill’s for now.’

  Cora snorted. ‘Does she not object?’

  Ellen shrugged. ‘Weather’s turned so she doesn’t mind.’

  ‘And you don’t mind being a human hot water bottle?’

  ‘At least I shall be away from your nastiness.’

  Cora felt her thoughts dissolve into rage. ‘If you think I’ve been nasty, you haven’t seen the half of it.’

  Before Cora quite knew what she was doing, her stays were unhooked and her drawers loosed. Then, in a cloud of white-hot fury, she tugged her shimmy over her head and stood naked before Ellen in the candlelight. Not even her hair, still coiled under her cap, covered her breasts. The only thing against her white flesh was the half-medal hanging on its greasy twist of twine.

  ‘Is this nasty enough for you?’

  Ellen scrabbled her night things from the dresser and went to the door, tears filling her eyes. ‘There’s something very wrong with you, Cora Burns.’

  The door closed in a draught of mould-spiced air. Without bothering to spit on her fingers, Cora squeezed out the candle’s flame then dropped, still naked, to the mattress, wrapping herself in the mound of cheap blanket and petticoats and hoping she would never again have to come out.

  Cora struggled to fix her eyes on the orange light ebbing behind the bars of the kitchener. Usually, she could stare at it for only a minute before her aching limbs relaxed and her eyelids closed. But tonight, the room started to peel apart like a smashed mirror. She seemed to be falling into a waking nightmare with madness dancing at the fringes of her mind. If it took over, as it had before, she would not want to ever wake up. The orange coals in the burner became suddenly darker and, in what seemed no more than a blink, the glow was swallowed into blackness.

  Then Cora jolted awake. There’d been a sudden noise; perhaps the chimes of the long-case clock or a lump of grey coal shifting in the grate. But it moved again. There was something in the room; closer than a crumble of ash, bigger than a rodent. And there was breathing; a thin inhalation followed by a shuddering breath out.

  The sound was too light and womanly to be a male intruder. Was it Ellen? Perhaps Susan Gill had kicked her out and she’d come creeping back to her old bed. But the breathing seemed fixed in one place a few paces from Cora’s face.

  Cora inched the blanket away from her ear. Every nerve concentrated on the silence. Was that another breath? A footstep? Someone or something was standing just beside her. Cora listened, for seconds, or perhaps minutes, eyes trained towards the sound. Slowly, the black kitchen turned to grey. And a dull white shape emerged from the gloom.

  It was a woman. With long thin hair loose over her nightdress and her hands before her, clasping and unclasping. As Cora’s eyes strained on to the hazy outline, an icy tremor slipped through her. Was this ghostly visitor someone she knew? Was it Alice? Cora looked harder into the dimness, stifling the horror rising in her gut. Because there was another with good reason to haunt her. Cora’s mouth began to open. I didn’t kill him, she wanted to say, it was Alice. But if the mother of that poor little boy in the Union house was now a spirit, she would know truth from lie.

  Cora gripped the bedclothes as the woman’s whimpering grew into words.

&nbs
p; ‘Why?’ Dull eyes stared as the mouth quivered. ‘Why did you take what was not yours? You must have known the harm it would do.’ The shady figure shuffled closer, the voice firmer. ‘Why have you come back? Can you not see how you torment me?’

  Cora’s limbs locked stiff as she recognised the voice, and saw too the outline of the woman’s long nose. Not a ghost; just the missus. She must have slipped down the back stairs without Mrs Dix seeing her. And now she was in the kitchen, weeping.

  ‘You ended my life, Annie. Killed it. As good as a murderess. Evil you are. Bad through and through. A vile serpent…’

  The voice choked. She seemed suddenly to be beside the kitchen table where the knives, rubbed in mutton fat to keep their shine, were laid out for the night. The mistress’s hands folded and unfolded above them like a trapped bird.

  Then, in a rush of air that made Cora’s eyes snap shut, the mistress swooped down at her. Cora expected to feel a carve of red warmth across her skin, but when she opened her eyes she realised that she was not harmed, and the mistress, muttering and sniffling, had turned towards the door. Then she was gone. Cora listened, frozen, to the creak of each tread on the back stairs. The footsteps stopped. A door upstairs clicked. And then there was silence.

  A lump of anguish wedged in Cora’s throat. The missus might be deranged but her words held truth. Bad through and through. Cora had done damage to so many people that the words could have been spoken by any of them. And it was only right that she should be tormented by a lunatic because she was as good as one herself. Why else would she have wanted to kill that little boy, or her own babe?

  She turned on to her side and a trail of tears slid across her nose. It wouldn’t be long until she’d hear Cook stirring. Then Cora would need to be up and raking the grate into the ash bucket; laying sticks and fresh coal into the range. She shut her eyes. How could she carry on scouring pots and polishing boots as if nothing had changed? How would she even raise herself from this mattress? As Cora thought of the day ahead, she forced her face against the greasy pillow, but the howl that choked out of her lungs was too savage to smother.