Anticipation (12 page)

‘Who said so?’

‘He did, not half an hour ago. I came directly to confirm it.’

Babs wonders if Porsham is listening at the door. ‘What business is it of yours?’

‘I am representing Mr Boucher.’

‘To be what?’

Abraham bows his head, as if awaiting applause. ‘I am his lawyer, madam.’

There is a long pause, during which my great-aunt finds her breakfast has begun to disagree with her, and Abraham helps himself to a seat on the chaise.

‘I ask you again, Miss Harding, was my client here with you last night?’

Babs turns her back on him, and continues to stand. ‘I don’t know what you can mean by such a question.’

‘What time did he leave?’

‘I haven’t said he was here.’

‘After ten o’clock? Is that correct?’

Who else, apart from Porsham, witnessed Cross Tony enter
and leave? Half of Spitalfields, for all Babs knows.

‘I must have an answer, madam.’

‘And I must understand, Mr Abraham, to what these uncivil questions tend.’

‘I’m sorry if I offend you,’ the lawyer says coldly. ‘The matter is simply this — if Boucher were here with you between eight and ten, he could not have been elsewhere at nine, when a certain crime is alleged to have been committed.’

Babs turns. ‘What crime?’

‘A gentleman from Hatfield was robbed of his handkerchief and a sovereign.’

‘And he believes it was Boucher?’

‘He has sworn to it.’ Abraham watches her closely. ‘But I am right, am I not, in saying that the gentleman is mistaken?’

‘Yes,’ she says, at length. ‘He is mistaken.’

‘Ah.’ The lawyer crosses his ankles and leans back, crushing her grandmother’s silk cushion against the arm of the chaise. ‘And the sovereign found on Boucher, it was given to him by you? For your —
experiment
, as he called it?’

Babs nods.

‘And you will bear witness to this, in court?’

‘Certainly not!’

‘But you must.’ Abraham releases the cushion rapidly. ‘He’ll hang without you.’

Babs considers the creased brocade, its delicate briar roses. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

‘Madam!’ The lawyer looks really quite shocked. ‘Have you no regard for justice?’

‘It’s quite impossible. You must understand.’

‘You value your own reputation above the fate of an innocent man?’

Babs wonders what kind of fool would not. She raises her eyebrows and stays silent. Seconds pass. A child squeals in the street.

‘Scandal,’ says Abraham, after a while, ‘is a curious thing.’

The butcher’s boy trots past the window; they hear him tap on the door.

‘Sometimes it’s best to tell a story yourself,’ the lawyer continues. ‘Before others tell it for you.’

Babs stares at him.

‘There must be other witnesses. If you will not testify to Boucher’s presence here, you will force me to make enquiries. Find someone else who will.’

Babs walks to the window, inadvertently catching the eye of Mrs Mott in her sitting room across the street, who nods politely before returning to her sewing. The front door closes, and the butcher’s boy, the remains of his mutton over his shoulders, gives her a grin.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she says. ‘It would be — an injustice, if the court were not told the truth. If I did not speak.’

‘It would.’

‘I could not live with such a thing on my conscience.’

‘Indeed not.’

Babs sits down, at last, opposite Abraham, on the edge of what was once Hal Hardynge’s favourite chair. She leans forward, holding her knees, and looks into the lawyer’s eyes. ‘You will write to let me know,’ she says, in a low voice, ‘the date of the trial?’

‘I will.’ His tone is soothing. ‘Be assured, madam — you’re making the right decision.’

‘Of course.’ She nods slowly. ‘Thank you, sir. For helping me to it, I mean. I don’t know what I was thinking.’

‘I knew you’d come to it. That you couldn’t send an innocent man to his death. You’ve a good heart, madam. I can tell.’

Babs bows. She watches the lawyer’s black top hat recede down Fournier Street until it is swallowed up in the market crowd. She examines Abraham’s card once more before placing it in her notebook along with her drawing of Boucher’s skull. Then, carefully, she readjusts the lace curtain, leaving no gaps, and smooths the gold silk straight on the cushion.

‘Porsham,’ she says, when the butler brings her lunch, ‘if that man Abraham calls again, you’re to tell him I’m not at home.’

I
nnocence, thinks Babs as she watches Anthony Boucher hang, is a coy little bird. It has all the greys of a market sparrow.

Of course, her attendance at Newgate today is not without risk. But in this elevated grandstand seat — a second-floor window above a pie shop — and dressed as Jones, she considers it a small one. The only man who might recognise her for who she really is has a bag on his head, and is surely, by now, no longer seeing even its inside.

While the reporters write up their accounts of the condemned’s final moments, already the bulk of the crowd is drifting away, leaving the apprentice anatomists to complete negotiations and drink away the regulation hour before their purchase can be cut down. From the high spirits of its students, it appears that Mr Guise’s School has prevailed.

Babs sips her black tea. The smell of fatty mutton sidling up the stairs is making her nauseous.

At last, the bell of St Sepulchre begins to strike nine. The three dead men are drawn back up onto the platform. Around the scaffold, small groups — an old woman in a jaunty yellow dress, a broad-shouldered boy ready with his barrow — gather to reclaim them. But none is as eager, as impatient with formality, as the band awaiting Anthony Boucher.

Once Babs has seen his body safely delivered onto Guise’s dog-cart, she descends to the street, and making her way up to Holborn, hails a cab to Golden Square.

‘You’re just in time, Mr Jones,’ says Mrs Guise at the door. ‘We’ve a space or two left. One pound sixpence a ticket.’

The smell in the lecture room is worse than the pie shop. It is
not so much the corpse, which has been decently washed, as the students, packed shoulder to shoulder and giving off a tavern reek of tobacco, cheap sausage, sweat and beer. Below that, there is the room’s usual smell, the faint but indelible butcher’s stall mixture of old blood and fat and sawdust.

The anatomist pulls back the sheet, and for the first time, Babs looks down on Boucher’s naked body, soft and vulnerable as a sleeping child’s, unconscious of watching eyes. Below the furrowed neck and blueing face, the slabs of deltoidei and pectoralis major, is the swell of a little paunch, a cherub penis curled in a thicket of fur. Ankles oddly delicate, flimsy almost, beneath the white width of calf and thigh.

Guise begins with the usual reanimation tricks, his electrical currents adding a delicate hint of burning meat to the general miasma. The newer students watch with appropriate awe as the dead man’s muscles dance. But this is not what Babs has paid to see.

Next, the heart is extracted and made to beat again, its movements minutely observed before its chambers are dissected. When Guise opens the stomach, Babs’ own revolts. She turns her head away, pressing her nose and mouth into the cloth of her cloak, clean and cologne-sprinkled.

‘Looks like we paid for a fine last supper!’ she hears Guise say, and the students laugh.

‘Oi, get out if you’re going to throw up,’ her neighbour hisses. ‘You spew on me and I’ll nob you, I swear.’

Eventually, the demonstration reaches its climax. The saw finishes its work, and there they are, laid bare at last — all the glistening secrets inside Anthony Boucher’s head.

The extracted organ of his mind does not appear deformed by his adventures — Babs can see no scars, no signs of violence before this morning’s. She pays an extra six shillings to hold what remains of it afterwards, turn the parts of the brain to the light. Study the inside of its empty case, the fossae it has sculpted. To trace, with her own fingers, the shapes of Boucher’s thoughts, the passages they wore into his bones.

My disappointed aunt feels nothing to surprise her.

Of course, I have no real proof of any of this. I know, for sure, no more than Maggie found out, one dry fact at a time, as Christmases came and went and the 1980s rolled by. The skeleton of a story — odorous, yes, redolent of Harding DNA, but far from being certain.

So what, if Babs’ notebook details her examination of Anthony Boucher on the night of the crime for which he was convicted? So what, if she sketched his head? So what, if the Old Bailey’s records show she was called — and failed to appear — as a witness in Boucher’s defence? Babs was a busy woman, after all. (Though two weeks after the trial, her notes reveal, she did find time to attend his dissection in Golden Square.)

Just because Maggie found reason to suspect my great-aunt’s virtue, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the lover Babs took in the summer of 1832 was Anthony Boucher. (And whose was that
late-night
yearning for rough trade? My mother, back in 1981, ’82, ’83, supplied no such detail.)

But my story isn’t impossible. It can’t be eliminated. When impossibilities are discarded, here it remains — just a hop, skip and jump from the truth. And if it’s just my imagination adding flesh to Babs’ bones, well, who better to knit her old skeleton back together again? Blood and muscle, heart and brain, I don’t have far to look for a template.

Babs, the perfect example of Harding genes, every chromosome fully expressed from beginning to end, red head to tripping feet. It’s true, of course, that she herself did not pass on a single allele to me. Yet I find myself all too at home in her skull. It’s the same shape as mine — that much, at least, is a matter of record. And I swear I can feel her, sometimes. An echo behind my eyes as I shop for a new pair of jeans, drive my car into the office. My envious aunt. How well, I wonder, might we have walked in each other’s shoes?

A flight of rosellas squawks across the lawn, and Ella starts and stares.

As the early morning quiet reassembles itself, I see the grass is getting long again — my disobedient carpet of kikuyu refusing, despite the lateness of the season, to give up and lie low.

We’ve taken to walking around the island twice a day now, Ella and I. Once in the evening, after Jake has gone, before I start making dinner. And this first-light circuit, when the grass is wet and the harbour damped down flat and the tuis knocking and wheezing like William Biggs before his first cigarette of the morning. A jacket over my pyjamas, a coffee in my hand, pohutukawa leaves sticking to my gumboots and the city soft across the water.

Perhaps as a result, it’s beginning to feel a bit small. The island, I mean. I’m thinking of getting a new track cut in down at the
high-tide
line, a longer circuit through the mangroves. Maybe even a boardwalk. It’s something I could ask Jake to do, after he finishes the boatshed.

And I’m going to have to find a gardener. I’ve managed by myself since Malcolm retired last year (or said he did, at least — I’ve noticed his van still parked around town). It seemed easier that way. But out here beyond the edges of the lawn, the order I imagine, sitting at my kitchen table, is snaking away under wreaths of convolvulus, outbreaks of dandelion and five-finger and necrophilic mushrooms.

Perhaps I should let it go. All things revert to type, sooner or later. Creeper and fungus will have their day. I could let the island get on with expressing itself, let herons colonise the roof and old man’s beard pull down the orchard. No one would care but me.

In the rhododendron walk, a heron is stabbing frogs. Ella growls. It feints at us with its dagger beak and flaps off into the Norfolk pine.

Ella looks back at me. ‘Good dog,’ I say. A reflex.

We stop at the top of the old boatshed steps, Ella disdaining the sticky, root-studded sweep of mud below. Together, we gaze at the gold-sand beach across the water.

It isn’t real — the sand is dredged up from under the gulf somewhere, displaced scallop shells spread over the black ribs of the reef, the sour mud, like icing. Eventually it will all wash away.
But for now you can’t tell the difference between the fake beach and the soft-fringed paradise it aspires to be, and you can’t help but admire it.

Ella whines. ‘Next week,’ I lie.

Back up at the house, she shivers and looks pointedly at the unlit fire.

‘It isn’t cold,’ I tell her.

That’s where so many of us go wrong. The facile assumption of others’ care.

I rinse the mosquitoes out of my coffee mug and turn the machine back on for another cup. It must be after eight — the sun is starting to angle in under the verandah. My watch is upstairs, but there’s no need to keep an eye on the time. It’s Saturday. No Jake.

There are no clocks in my house. I can’t stand to hear minutes tick away. You might as well have some bloke in the corner with a cloak and a scythe, tap-tap-tapping a finger-bone on his watch.
Just look at the time.

The refrain of my childhood.
Hurry up, Janine. We don’t have very long.
Maggie was right about that, as it turned out. She needn’t have worried, though. We were always going to get there early.

Back in November of 1832, my great-aunt Babs is also concerned at the passage of time. In her case, however, it’s the calendar, not the clock, that is proving irksome.

Two months after the death of Anthony Boucher, Babs is late, and not fashionably so. Grossly, criminally, unforgivably late. As a scientist, she can hardly avoid the knowledge that her body is in a regrettable condition.

What does she do now? I’m guessing, like Maggie before me, I admit. But surely Babs’ craniometric survey of East London can be put to good use? Surely she knows, already, the name of the very woman to whom she can turn?

So I give you a Mrs Brawn (why not?), living not in the rookeries, with a cesspit handy to her yard, but at an admirable house in the
Poultry, at which Babs is not in the least ashamed to call. They haven’t met before. But Mrs Brawn’s reputation precedes her. In a certain sector of Whitechapel — the music hall girls, in the main — her various skills are held in high esteem.

Mrs Brawn, it is said, can fix anything. And it’s true. In Babs’ case, all that’s required is stoicism, a stiff maternity corset and a week or two at Mrs Brawn’s cousin’s country home in Kent.

When the time comes, I’d like to imagine Babs travelling down as Jones, not so much for secrecy as comfort. The other passengers on the Dover mail wondering, behind their newspapers, how a man so young could have attained the girth of an honourable member past sixty. But my great-aunt is in no condition to climb down any fig tree. She would have no choice but to make the journey south as herself, more or less, white and faint and confined, jolting towards deliverance one pothole at a time.

How could she not be glad to be rid of it, this millstone crushing her insides?

And yet she won’t let go of it entirely.

She has a pet name for her trouble. Rook. (It’s the name Babs will write on the cast she makes of a foundling boy’s skull, though for all but a month of his seven years he’s been christened Edgar. Little Edgar, my anchoring fact. He’ll pop up in the strangest of places.)

They’re picky about whose babies they let into the Foundling Hospital these days. There’s an embarrassing interview to endure, an application procedure. But a respectable governess, seduced against her will, is always a hit with the board, and the actress hired by Mrs Brawn makes the petition prettily and well.

Babs does have some part in the process. She sends the token to pin to little Rook’s gown. In return, she receives a registration ticket. Two means of knowing him, if she chooses, all the years of his life. A number too long to remember, and a brooch containing a lock of Anthony Boucher’s hair.

She doesn’t need either, as it turns out.

She knows him instantly. Among a yard full of children on visiting day, she can spot the shape of his skull, can sense the nearness of Boucher’s blood, the scent, sawdust-sweet, that filled
her hormone-sharpened nostrils five years before and has never fully departed.

‘What’s your name?’ she asks him, under a pale blue April sky.

‘Edgar.’

And then there are the eyes.

‘What should you like to be, Edgar, when you grow up?’

This half-breed of good and evil, with a cleric’s skull and a footpad’s gaze, roughly conceived and gently carried.

‘I want to go over the seas.’

‘Ah!’ Babs smiles. ‘A sailor!’