Elijah’s Mermaid (44 page)

‘There is no need.’ Samuel was blunt. ‘Cruikshank won’t risk any adverse exposure. And Tip Thomas won’t bother us any more.’

‘How can you be sure?’ Freddie asked – which was when Mrs Hibbert stepped forward, announcing through the sway of her veils, ‘Because Mrs Hibbert has murdered him.’

When she spoke that way, as if in the third person, the hairs prickled up on the back of my neck.

‘Murdered!’ Freddie looked back in alarm. His hands gripped the chair’s velvet arms.

‘Is he really dead?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Samuel Beresford curtly replied. ‘Everyone has had the most terrible shock. It’s probably better we talk in the morning, when we have all eaten and rested . . . when we can decide what’s best to do.’

That was when Pearl began to sob, and that was when I noticed the smell. It seemed to grow stronger with every moment, what with all the flesh warming and all the ice melting, and there in the dancing glimmer of flames I saw the rusty-coloured streaks that were staining Mrs Hibbert’s gloves, a match for those smeared on the folds of Pearl’s gown, over which, now and then, she wiped her hands – her hands which were splattered with – what? Was it blood?

When Pearl shifted position her skirts rose up and I saw that she wore no stockings or boots, that her feet were naked and crusted with filth, beneath which were blisters, and scarring cuts.

‘Pearl . . . your feet!’ While trying to keep my voice calm, I
asked, ‘Freddie, do you have any bandages? I must fetch some water . . . some towels. Look at her feet. Look at the blood.’

Before he could answer I’d reached the door, from which Mrs Hibbert stepped aside, allowing me to run out to the hall, from where I fully intended going on up to my room, to bring the jug and washing bowl. But I’d only reached the base of the stairs when I heard Freddie’s voice, such arrogant tones. ‘Madam Hibbert. I think you should leave this house. A brothel keeper turned murderess is hardly fit company for . . .’

‘Mrs Hibbert is not in this room,’ she broke in, and again she spoke of herself as through another person’s mouth, to which Freddie swiftly responded with, ‘By God, are you now turned lunatic! Why, if only we’d left you in Chiswick House then all of our problems would now be solved . . . instead of which,’ his expression was filled with venom, ‘you have added yet more difficulties. I respectfully ask that you leave us in peace. Go back to your life of depravity. Why, I’d call the police and have you arrested if not for the hatred I felt for Tip Thomas. For his demise, I applaud you!’

Elijah began to protest, consumed with a new-found energy. ‘But, Freddie . . . where can Mrs Hibbert go? Whatever she might have done in the past, this woman has helped to save my life.’

‘Elijah is right,’ Samuel interjected. ‘Surely Mrs Hibbert deserves our thanks . . . a roof over her head, if only tonight, until she can make some other arrangements? If you will not extend that charity then I most certainly will!’

At that point, I was thinking that Freddie was right – about Tip Thomas’s death, that is. I was thinking,
Good riddance to bad rubbish! I for one am glad he’s dead, whatever the method of his end
. It was a wicked thing, I know, and perhaps my heart had turned to stone, as villainous as his had been. But, honestly, I cared not a jot as to whether Tip Thomas lived or died – only glad that Elijah was here and safe,
whatever
the cost of his freedom had been. If I’d had to, I would have done it myself. I would have killed with my own bare hands. We should sing and
dance to celebrate, for the world was a far better place without
him
, and—

What happened next, what a shock that was! I had to clutch on to the newel post to stop myself falling to the ground – when I heard what I did, when I saw what I did, the drama unfolding within that room, when Mrs Hibbert shouted out, Frederick Hall, are you deaf as well as blind?’

A swift rustle of silks as she set down her bag, and then raised her hands to lift her veils, during which act Pearl was pleading, ‘No, Mrs Hibbert, no . . . not that!’

Mrs Hibbert’s hands slowly lowered, and another scent of that bloody tang when she walked to the farthest end of the room, very near to the engraving, ‘Isabella . . . The Pot of Basil’. A glint of light flashed over the glass, just as it had when I saw it first, and Mrs Hibbert leaned closer – and Mrs Hibbert raised her hands, taking hold of either side of the frame, then flinging that picture to the floor, where the fracturing glass rang out like a bell then snapped beneath Mrs Hibbert’s feet when she turned to walk back towards the hearth, when she started to raise the veils from her face, when Pearl lifted her hands to cover her eyes as if she could not bear to look and see what horror now approached.

At that point, from where I was standing, I saw no more than the gauzy black fabric still draped at the back of the woman’s head. But I could see Freddie well enough, and the dread expressed on his features then, and how he recoiled and staggered back, almost stumbling into the grate – at which Samuel cried, ‘Dear God, Freddie! Whatever’s wrong? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!’

Such dramatic reactions. I knew not why, but my ears had registered something odd, and that was Mrs Hibbert’s voice – quite different when she had shouted at Freddie, still tinged with a foreign accent but the intonation no longer French – though what it was, I could not tell, listening hard when she carried on, ‘If you wish to know my name then you need only
ask Mr Frederick Hall, who has,’ she turned to face him again, ‘indeed seen a ghost rising up from his past.’

‘Who are you?’ Pearl asked, her hands no longer concealing her eyes, which were full of shock and confusion. At her side, Elijah stiffened, a high colour flooding through gaunt cheeks while he stared at Mrs Hibbert and asked, ‘You and Freddie . . . you were acquainted before?’

I wanted to say,
Of course they were! Don’t you remember that day in Cremorne?
But Freddie was already speaking, such disbelief in his groaning voice. ‘Dear God. Can it be? What witchcraft is this? They told me you’d died. Tip Thomas . . . he told me himself. I never had reason to doubt him.’

‘
You
deserve to die, the same as him, for the life you both condemned me to, when you threw me out of this very house and took me to that brothel . . . when I was still grieving for Gabriel Lamb, the man I loved and would have wed.’

‘You were only to stay until after the birth.’ Freddie’s response was petulant, like that of a child who has knowingly sinned but remains indignant at being discovered. ‘I did more than most in such circumstances. I paid for your confinement there, a doctor and midwife to attend. You know very well, it was all arranged. The child to be sent to the Foundling, and you to start your life anew . . . released from the stigma of your shame.’

A child being sent to the Foundling – just like Elijah – just like me? I could hardly begin to take this in, staring with an open mouth when she fell to her knees and began to weep. ‘To live without shame . . . when they made me a whore! They took my babies away from me. They told me they had died at birth, when I’d seen them move, when I’d heard them cry, when I’d looked into their open eyes . . . the boy’s so like his father’s had been. But I was ill with the loss of blood. They said I was delirious. They said I had been dreaming.’

She broke off for a moment, taking a deep and trembling breath before being able to carry on. ‘They brought another child to me, one whose mother had drowned in the Thames.
They forced me to suckle that child as my own until
she
was taken away as well. Tip Thomas was jealous of anyone who dared to grow too close to Pearl. But it broke my heart to lose her too, when he moved me to that Limehouse slum. Things happened there. Things I could never speak about. But nothing was worse than my grief for Pearl, for my children who’d died, for Gabriel, the man I’d loved . . . after which only hatred grew in my heart,’ a black finger was stabbing at Freddie then, ‘for you, Frederick Hall, for that devil Tip Thomas, for what the two of you did to me. All of these years my only wish has been to see you burn in Hell. And now one of you is already there.’

Her voice was meeker again when she asked, ‘Can you imagine how it feels . . . to think that my children were living when I always believed them dead, when you left me in such misery? What had I ever done to you . . . to deserve that fate, to be left alone, enduring a life that no woman would choose if she had any say in the matter!’

Freddie was visibly moved. The heel of one hand was pressed hard to a temple. His voice was deep and strained when repeating, ‘But Tip Thomas . . . he told me . . . he said you were dead. You have to believe I speak the truth! I would never have left you in that place. My conscience . . . my affection would never permit it. But as far as the children were concerned . . . you must realise, I had to think of the company, to consider my reputation!’

I heard breaths that came too loud, too fast, though by then I was hardly able to tell which were his, which were mine, which Elijah’s, which Pearl’s – all of us equally shocked at this news, though Pearl was the first to recover enough to ask in a voice small and tremulous, ‘But I don’t understand . . . where is the
real
Mrs Hibbert? Why did you imitate her voice? Why do you wear her clothes . . . her veils?’

The answer was blunt. ‘Mrs Hibbert died. Tip said it was shortly after you left. He said she was riddled with syphilis, that she’d lost her wits as well as her strength. He showed his true
compassion then when he left her to rot on the steps of the Lock.’

‘The Lock?’ Pearl frowned with confusion.

‘The Lock Hospital,’ Samuel curtly explained, his gaze still intent on this story’s narrator – that is, when not glancing from her to me. ‘For those who suffer venereal disease, where most of them go as a last resort, though rarely to emerge again, except to be buried in unmarked graves.’

Pearl moaned, ‘Oh . . . poor Mrs Hibbert.’

The woman whose name had still not been said – though I knew it, of course I did by then – now continued to explain, ‘Since you left Cheyne Walk the business declined. Many felt they’d been duped at the time of your sale. Many never returned again. All that was left were some lonely old men who liked to gamble more than whore, who treated the house as a gentlemen’s club, dining with the veiled madam, listening when she read from her filthy books. In the end Tip feared he would lose them too . . . the revenue they still brought in. He needed to find a new Mrs Hibbert to pretend that things carried on as before.
I
am educated.
I
am literate, well able to mimic her Gallic tongue. I am as French as
she
ever was!’

‘But why did you do it?’ Samuel asked.

She exhaled a long sigh. ‘That first year Tip kept me locked away. That was when he had me caring for Pearl. And then, later on . . . well, what could I do? Where was I to go? I had not a penny to my name. He said he would find me . . . he’d ruin me. But then, I was already ruined. Tell me, what was the alternative? To starve, to sell myself on the streets? And, more recently, playing Tip’s madam, I was free of those other depravities, though,’ her voice was raised and passionate, ‘I would gladly live through every year, every second and minute of my disgrace, for if I had not been in Cheyne Walk I would never have found my son again, when they carried him in, half dead, half drowned, when little by little I came to learn how Frederick Hall saved infant twins from being raised in the Foundling and
then sent them to live with Augustus Lamb . . . Augustus, the father of Gabriel . . . Gabriel, my own betrothed.’

At that, she swung round to look at me, and when I stared back at her unveiled face everything else in that room seemed to fade. This was the face I once saw as a child, when I woke and heard someone calling my name, when my window glass reflected the eyes of the woman I thought my mother’s ghost. But she was no more of a ghost than I, and we both found our eyes spilling with tears, Elijah’s the same when he cried out, ‘I should have known. I should have guessed . . . those times when you nursed me without the veils . . . the resemblance to Lily. But I thought I was imagining things.’

His muffler fell as he struggled to stand, that movement causing a little draught, and the fire’s flames went surging up, casting a sudden flashing of red to illuminate Freddie’s features, revealing the desperate panic there – such emotion that I had never seen in a man as confident as he – except for that night when I’d first arrived, when coming to look for Elijah, when Freddie had spoken about Isabella, when he’d given me her miniature.

Freddie did something dramatic then, holding his hands out beseechingly as if to embrace both Elijah and me – and I almost stepped forward, towards him, but was blocked by Isabella, from whose mouth fresh truths were gushing out as she held me in her moist dark stare. ‘Lily, you must not be deceived . . . this man tried to creep into my bed when Gabriel’s body was barely cold. And when he discovered my pregnancy . . . what desire or compassion did he show? This so-called benevolent gentleman cast me out without a day’s warning.’

She was panting, sobbing, hands clutched at her breast. Silver beads of spittle flew from her lips when she looked at Freddie again and cried, ‘This man is the liar and hypocrite who claimed
my
condition might cause
him
disgrace!’

‘But, Isabella,’ Freddie retorted, ‘can’t you try to see how it was for me . . . how gossip would compromise the firm? Only later did I realise how foolish . . . how hasty I may have been,
that if you had lived I would make you my wife, and raise your children as my own. But I was deceived as cruelly as you when that fiend Tip Thomas arrived at the door, telling me that you were dead, handing over two sleeping newborn babes.’

At that, his eyes met Elijah’s. ‘How could I manage? A man alone! What if you woke and started to bawl? I did consider farming you out, but there are such tales of extortion and blackmail, of infants doped, then left for days . . . dying from thirst, starvation, disease.’

Elijah was sitting down again, all colour draining from his cheeks as he stared at Freddie through bloodshot eyes. ‘Whatever change of heart you might claim to have suffered afterwards, you condemned our mother to misery, to the vilest of any human trades . . . when you had every means to support her, secretly, if you so wished, with no shame whatsoever. Instead of which you made the choice to hide her away in a brothel. And then you hid us in an orphanage!’