The Scent of Murder (8 page)

‘It’s all right, Edie. This is Doctor McCleland, who I work for. She just wants to have a look at you.’

She does?

‘Take your headscarf off, there’s a good girl,’ Annie said kindly. Edith swallowed, drew the back of her hand across her nose and sniffed. The tip of her nose and her cheeks were red from the cold almost to the point of excoriation.

‘Have you hurt your head, Edith? Is that why you are wearing a scarf?’ Dody asked gently.

The girl flicked frightened eyes from Dody to Annie. ‘Yes, miss.’

‘Come on, let me have a look. I won’t hurt you,’ Dody said, reaching behind the girl’s head to undo the scarf’s knot. She could barely suppress a gasp when she saw that the scullery maid’s head had been shaved in a fashion brutal enough to leave her scalp a criss-cross of small cuts.

‘Who did this to you, child?’ Dody asked, aghast.

Annie answered for Edith. ‘Mrs Hutton, of course. Said she had no time for no
paraffinalia
— and Edith had such beautiful hair, didn’t you, love?’

‘Annie,’ Dody said, ‘be so kind as to fetch my medical bag. I’d like to put some disinfectant on those cuts. Edith and I will meet you inside by the kitchen fire.’

Annie nodded and returned to the house.

‘Oh, no, miss, it’s quite all right,’ Edith protested. ‘Cook’ll have me ’ide if I don’t get these birds done.’

Dody picked up one of the girl’s icy hands, noting the pattern of painful chilblains along the sides of her fingers. ‘You’ll work more efficiently in the warmth. Let me help you to get these feathers tidied up and then we’ll move you into the kitchen.’

They had only filled half the sack when, with a great crash, the yard door burst open and in bounded Mr Cole. Edith let loose some piercing shrieks, rushed behind Dody and clutched at her, cowering and sobbing.

The dog had been swimming. Dody could see what was coming next, but the girl’s clinginess prevented Dody from taking cover. The tail started, then the hips, and then the dog’s whole body twisted and shook into a spiral of spray, drenching Dody with filthy water. When the dog had finished, she managed to turn and take hold of Edith by the shoulders, the girl digging her fingers into Dody’s forearm.

‘It’s all right, it’s all right. It’s only Mr Cole. He won’t hurt you.’

The girl took no comfort in the words and continued to shriek. Oblivious of the fuss he was causing, Mr Cole ambled towards the scullery door, a feather stuck to his nose, and scratched at it with his paw.

‘For goodness’ sake, what’s that racket about?’ Mrs Hutton opened the door, an enamel plate of scraps in her hand. She saw Dody. ‘I’m sorry, Doctor McCleland, I did not realise you were out here too. Edith, you’ll be letting go of the lady immediately, if you know what’s good for you.’ She put the plate down and Mr Cole wolfed his meal in a matter of seconds. ‘You’ve got to get used to dogs if you want a permanent position in this house, my girl,’ she added.

Edith let go of Dody and bowed her bald head, tears continuing to stream down her face. ‘Ever so sorry, Miss McCleland, Mrs ’Utton.’

Dody put her arm around the shaking girl, and felt the bones of her shoulders through her coarse cotton dress. Mrs Hutton looked down her long aquiline nose at both of them. If Dody had not been present, the wretched girl would probably have been in for a thrashing. Dody felt the colour flood her cheeks as her anger rose. No one should have that much power over another.

‘Whose idea was it to send the girl out to the yard when it was the dog’s feeding time?’ she asked.

‘Birds are plucked in the yard at Cook’s convenience,’ Mrs Hutton said. ‘This is too large a household to account for the foibles of one simple girl, Doctor. Off you go, Edith; finish the birds in the kitchen. You may leave early today provided your work is done. I’ll have Philips bring the cart around to take you back to the workhouse. Hurry up.’ Her tone softened slightly. ‘Don’t you worry about the dog, he’ll stay inside with Sir Desmond now.’

Edith curtsied, picked up the feather sack and birds, and scuttled into the kitchen.

‘The dog stays in the house in the evenings?’ Dody queried.

‘He does. The master doesn’t like Mr Cole roaming the grounds after dark.’

‘But I saw him out last night.’

‘The dog’s day-to-day care is my responsibility. I always know his whereabouts. Until he joined Sir Desmond in the dining room yesterday evening, he was snoring by the kitchen fire.’

Then which dog had Dody seen? A sudden chill bored into the skin at the nape of her neck. Her shiver did not go unnoticed by the intractable housekeeper.

‘Is there anything else, Doctor McCleland?’

Mrs Hutton stared down at Dody — trying to intimidate her, Dody thought. She knew all about these kinds of tactics, albeit this woman was surely even worse than Dody’s superior at the mortuary, Doctor Spilsbury.

She glared back, holding the housekeeper’s eye with her own. ‘Yes. I’m obliged to tell your mistress about the brutal way you shaved that girl’s hair.’

‘As you wish, Doctor McCleland,’ Mrs Hutton said, calmly turning to head back inside, Dody’s statement having apparently not worried her at all. ‘And it was another dog that you saw,’ she added as she closed the scullery door behind her.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In the small attic bedroom, Edith slipped out of her scullery maid’s uniform and hung it on the peg on the door, ready for when she returned to the Hall the following week. Wearing nothing but a thin cotton chemise, she poured cold water from the washstand jug, washed the day’s grime from her face and hands, then changed into her workhouse uniform. She stepped into the grey worsted skirt, tighter already after three days at the Hall, fastened the buttons on her matching blouse and tucked it in. The feel of the fabric against her skin was like hessian compared with her scullery maid’s uniform. Over her blouse and skirt she put on her blue smock, shawl and, lastly, a cambric cap to cover her cut head.

She wanted to leave Annie a note saying goodbye; she liked the posh London maid, but she was slow with her letters and didn’t dare keep the head groom, grumpy-faced Mr Philips, waiting. Hurrying down the back stairs, she peered anxiously around the yard to make sure there was no sign of the dog, then scampered into the paved area on the other side of the gate where the tradesmen made their deliveries.

‘’Bout bloody time too,’ Philips complained as she climbed into the cart. The head groom was a small, weedy man with skin as rough as pork crackling. Word was that once, in a temper, he’d broken a stable boy’s arm.

‘Be raining stair rods soon.’ He pointed a twig-like finger towards Uckfield, where ominous black clouds billowed against the grey sky, then curled his whip across the pony’s back.

He said nothing more to Edie until they reached the Green Witch in Piltdown. As he pulled up outside the public house, he told her to stay where she was.

A damp wind slapped at Edie’s cheek and made the pub’s sign — a green-faced witch in a pointy black hat — groan on its hinges. Edie hunched into her shawl and wished Philips hadn’t left. Even being with him was better than being left outside alone in the gathering dark. She tried to imagine what it must be like inside. She’d never been in a pub, nor tasted a beer, neither. Despite the pub’s horrid name, it’d be a warm, jolly place if the laughing voices spilling from its glowing windows were anything to go by.

Within minutes Philips reappeared with a couple of lads, who relieved him of some heavy crates from under a canvas sheet in the back of the cart. One of the lads chucked Edith under the chin and said something to Philips she didn’t understand — must have been cheeky, she thought, ’cos they all laughed and made rude signs with their fingers.

When they took off again, Philips was swigging from a bottle and before long he broke into song:

Hush-a-bye baby in the tree top,

When you grow old your wages will stop,

When you have spent the little you made,

First to the poorhouse, then to the grave.

‘Not for me that ’orrible place, no sir-ee,’ he said when he’d finished singing. A sharp finger dug into Edie’s ribs. She wasn’t expecting it and nearly jumped from her skin. ‘What you so jumpy about anyhow — guilty conscience, Edith Pratt?’

She said nothing. If in doubt, hold your tongue.

Philips looked to the gloomy sky and sniffed the air. ‘God ’elp me. If we don’t get a move on, I’ll be in for a drenching tonight.’

The cart jolted as he increased the pony’s pace. Edie’s leg inadvertently touched his and she shuffled as far away as she could across the bench seat.

Philips’s dried old face split into a grin. ‘What ya done that fer? I ain’t the one with the creepy-crawlies in me ’air.’

Shame heated Edie’s innards. She pulled the shawl tighter around her lower face and stuck her tongue out at him, taking care he wouldn’t see. Pooh to him, she thought. And this was just the start of it, the taunting. There’d be merry hell when she finally made it back to the poorhouse.

They trundled along the pot-holed road and less than an hour later the poorhouse loomed, a brooding blot of darker grey on grey. It might be a black thundercloud to those who did not know it, but the place was stark as day in Edith’s mind.

Sitting on the Piltdown side of Uckfield about five miles from the Hall, the poorhouse was a huge three-storeyed building, its four main wings built in the shape of a cross, with several smaller wings as offshoots. Between the wings, fenced exercise yards segregated the seven different classes of inmates: infirm males, infirm females, able-bodied men, able-bodied women, mothers and children under the age of seven, girls aged seven to fifteen and boys aged seven to fifteen. Each class had a separate dormitory situated above the yards, and its own dayroom. There was only one schoolroom. The girls who weren’t working were schooled in the morning and the boys in the afternoon. The only places where the inmates ever glimpsed members of the other classes were the chapel and the dining hall, and even there they were only allowed to sit with their own.

Edith had been taken away from her mother when she was seven, and sent to live with the ‘big girls’. After that she was only allowed to see her mother for half an hour a week, or not at all if either of them had broken one of the long list of workhouse rules. She remembered how her mother smiled; how she was always sucking at her fingers, red and sore from the hours she spent every day pulling apart bristly pieces of rope — oakum picking. Ma said it was only a matter of time before they would both be out of the place. Sometimes she would send Edith signals when they were on different sides of the chapel.

Once her mother was caught making cheer-up signs to her, drawing a half-circle in the air in front of her mouth, and then they weren’t allowed to see each other for a month. Not long after that, her mother had died from the fever.

Now that Edie was older she knew her mother had been lying about getting away from the place. For someone like Ethel Pratt, with no money and a bastard child, the only way out of the poorhouse was feet-first. At least Edie, thanks to Lady Fitzgibbon and Mrs Hutton, had been given a chance.

Philips dropped Edith on the path between the workhouse gate and the inmates’ vegetable patch. Rows of knobbly brussels sprouts and lacy cabbages were about the only things that now grew in the hardening earth.

The wind picked up and the first drops of rain began to fall. Mr Clover, one of the workhouse porters, opened the heavy iron gate, then heaved it closed behind her, locking it with a large key. The sounds of Philips’s cart rumbled off into the distance.

Mr Clover had a face as wide and flat as a shovel, and a head too big for his stocky body. He tended towards two expressions: unbearable sadness, whereby his mouth would turn down so that it almost touched the tips of his dirty winged collar; and extreme happiness, when it raised itself up to his meaty earlobes as if pulled by a string. Everyone knew Mr Clover was a simpleton — some said he was dropped on his head when he was a baby — and Edie suspected that was why he was employed here, like some sort of see-no-evil monkey. New girls sometimes laughed at the way he talked, always repeating things when there was no call to do so, or copying other people’s voices when he was upset about something. Edie didn’t think he was funny; he was just Mr Clover to her. She liked him, even if he was a bit daft. Sometimes he gave them sugar mice. ‘Mice for his sugar an’ spice,’ he’d repeat over and over again. At least he was never cheeky with them or hurt the girls in any way, as some of the other porters did.

‘You’re ’ome early,’ Mr Clover said. He spoke slowly, as if his words had to struggle through glue to get out.

Edie kept her head bowed lest he notice she had no hair poking from under her cap. ‘Mrs ’Utton let me go early, that’s why,’ she said.

‘Good woman, that. Let me go early.’

Edith agreed. Mrs Hutton might have nicked her head when she was shaving it, but she never thrashed her or sent her to bed with an empty belly. She always tried to be a good girl for Mrs Hutton. If Mrs Hutton liked her enough, perhaps she’d get a full-time job at the Hall and be gone from this place forever. She’d been going well, she thought, till that bloody dog come in today and spoiled everything.

Just then dogs began to bark down the road. Oh, no! she said to herself. Must be ’cos I thought that bad word, the one with the ‘B’. God can read your mind: that’s what Matron and Master said.

Edie screwed her eyes shut and tried to banish her bad thoughts.

‘You all right, love?’

‘Yes, thank you, Mr Clover.’ Be polite, like. Good girls is always polite, she thought.

‘Be off with you, then,’ he said through his fixed smile, ‘so I can ’ave me supper. Silly bugger, always late, don’t know why I married you.’

Mr Clover lived at the gatehouse with his equally simple wife. People said she was even stupider than he was, though she could cook all right. Edie did not have to wonder what she was cooking tonight; the sweet odour of mutton stew rode hot upon the damp air.