JUNE

Monday, 17th June

I cannot think how to begin. The words won’t come. They are pushed out by other words, not my own – words I first read on a park bench in New York ten days ago, and which have rung in my head ever since. I have tried to write that I don’t believe it, that I will not believe it. Then I try to write that I am afraid. My hand and pencil are like stone. When I last wrote in these pages, there were few enough certainties, but now even they are fractured, grown dark. The seasickness left me this morning, and I have been trying to begin, encased in this little cabin – a tiny seed floating towards rocks, back towards England. We are only a few hours away now. Sometimes it feels like a coffin, but I have no wish to go on deck. There is little sense of movement in these waters, just the rhythmic thud of the engine and the occasional pounding of children’s feet along the passageway outside. They make my heart pitch each time they come by, and I think with failing courage of that sea-faring superstition – children are a sign of good fortune.

We learned that and many such beliefs on the journey out. Sneeze to the left for luck, a shark following means death, whistling raises a wind. In steerage, these sailors’ myths hung in the air like the stench of unwashed bodies and rotting food. It was impossible to write. I suppose being nearer to the water, we felt more keenly how our lives depended on the whim of the gods. It was in every violent creak of wood and thump of wave, each roll and lurch, as if we were in the belly of a whale rather than aboard a steamship. I wish now there really were such easy signs to point to and say, ‘This is a warning; this the signal to go back; here is where the darkness seeps in.’ There is little mention of sailors’ lore in cabin class, but then there is no one here I wish to talk to. I am alone.

Or perhaps the signs were always there – if I had known how to look. Her uneasy sleep, the dreams that furrowed her brow and made her cry out. I put it down to the strain of leaving, the discomfort and shock of steerage. We were a long way from Finton Hall where each pleat and fold of the laundry is scoured for bedbugs before being allowed upstairs. Onboard, we slept side by side with strangers, women who farted and snored and sang and moaned. Our low dormitory with its rows of bunks made me yearn even for the little attic room I shared with Mary. We took one walk together after we had laid out our beds, but the missus refused to linger, even when a fiddler started up and drew a crowd. The dirt, the coarse voices and language, the lack of privacy – she can’t ever have been in the middle of such life before. The number of languages spoken, the different smells and clothing made me feel we were in a miniature, floating world. It is a collection I think Mr Gethin would covet. I was shocked myself by the noise and crush of it, but I saw it all the more keenly through her eyes. There was nowhere to wash, the drinking water tasted dank, we all had identical bowls and spoons like orphans or prisoners. The food at least was not awful, but I could barely bring her to touch it. Many had brought their own, and the air became thick with wafts of fermented goods, cured meats, onions, cabbage, and cheese turning rancid. When we looked into a family room where a group of women were feeding their babies, she turned swiftly on her heel and hurried back to our bunks. I thought she must regret leaving Edward.

Seasickness found me quickly. The port floating away so determinedly once we set off gave my stomach a turn in itself. I watched the land as if simply keeping my eyes on it would keep it from disappearing. Some part of me believed we would always be able to see one shore or the other, that the sea couldn’t be so big. The water swirled greenish close to the sides – sometimes pond dark, sometimes light as a spring leaf. I remember staring at the unending churn of it until I frightened myself with the thought of falling – the desire, almost, to fall. After that I could only sit miserably on the deck while my stomach churned in kind, unable to think properly, never mind write. I thought the missus must feel the same, lying under her blanket so long, but when the storm hit a few days later, it was she who tended to me. While every part of my body was swimming or squirming about like maggots in a bucket, she found a large tin bowl from somewhere. Keeping it steady enough to contain the vomit was impossible – the stink was just another feature of the unendurable but unending misery. When I finally woke to a calm ship and sore stomach, she was motionless under her blanket again.

Two days after the storm, things happened that even I could recognise for the bad omens they were. I was feeling well enough to return to the deck for fresh air – cold, restless air by then, the hoary breath of the ocean. The ship had become another big house I was trapped in, with first-class passengers above us in every sense. I heard there was even a library on the upper deck, which gave me a feeling of foreboding, as if we had never truly left Finton Hall at all. I could hear a band playing on the saloon deck, and was thinking I might be able to persuade the missus—

It has become harder and stranger to call her that. So much has changed besides our names since we left England. We are not the people we were, or thought we were. Mrs Gethin – no, that is worse. Clara then.

Clara.

I had hoped she might come out from the unhealthy fug of steerage if she knew there was music playing, but when I went below she was up for once, kneeling on the bunk and surrounded by the contents of her bag – shawls, music sheets, writing materials, bottles from her toilet. As I arrived, she had just started on mine.

‘It’s gone.’

She meant her money. All of it. It had been in a pouch she kept close under the blanket, but she had forgotten to take it with her to the water closet. She spoke in violent gasps, and her hands shook as she pawed at my belongings. Third class had taught her the meaning of money at least. The loss of so much of it – our security vanished in a moment – made me lightheaded with disaster. Fresh waves of nausea rolled through me. There would be no time to get our bearings – finding work would be urgent from the moment we stepped off the ship. Service, of course, for me. And for the first time since I left Finton Hall, the question came about Clara – what if she was not successful as a singer? The possibility had never crossed my mind in England. To me, she sings like an angel, but what do I know of the professional theatre, of its demands and expectations? What would become of us if she failed?

My own savings were still hidden under my petticoat. It would be enough perhaps to put a roof over our heads for the first night in New York, buy us food for a few days. I gathered myself and was leaning in to whisper that much when she stopped suddenly and stared into the bag. My mind raced as she lifted it out, and we both looked at the flint mill and then at each other.

‘You stole it?’

Absurdly, I wanted to protest. Not that I had taken it, but that it was stealing. I nodded.

‘Why?’

It wasn’t a question I had asked myself, even when I packed it in place of lighter, more useful things at Mrs Cole’s.

‘I wanted to take something from him. Something he cares about.’

She looked at me steadily.

‘And … I don’t want to forget what happened.’

It was too difficult to explain that I also felt the need to rescue it – that I was somehow releasing the dead miner from Gethin’s grip. She weighed it in her hands, thinking, then dropped it back into the bag and silently held out her arms to me. It was an awkward embrace, twisting towards each other on the bunk, not a word spoken. She retreated into herself again soon after. Nothing more was said about the money, but I felt the loss of it lodge in my gut like a needle.

What more to say of our passage? What else was there to warn me? The sickness never fully left me. To distract myself from the awful rolling sensation, I trespassed one day, opening doors I shouldn’t. Ladders reached down. I had thought we were already in the ‘downstairs’ of the ship, crammed as it was with servants and labourers, all rushing to the land of freedom to find themselves new masters. But I found a world below that. I heard and felt the boiler room before I saw it – a clanging and raging that shivered my skin and rattled my skull. When I finally stood on the threshold, I thought I was looking into hell. Heat and flame and flesh. Men shovelling and shovelling, load after load of coal into the furnace, then raking out the ashes in a ferocious cycle, their streaming backs and huge arms glowing in the burning light. They looked like punished gods. I remembered Gethin’s face lit up in the same way by the sparks of the flint mill, his gleeful laughter, and felt sweat break out on my brow. He was still with us, even there. It was coal from mines such as his – perhaps even his own – powering the very means of our escape. The creeping dread I had felt in Liverpool returned. I watched the stokers, toiling dangerously below the surface out of sight, just like their brothers digging themselves to death in the mines – the end the same as the beginning – and for a moment I was in Clara’s bedroom again, watching helplessly as Gethin snapped the canary’s neck.

America finally appeared as promised, a new world, safe and solid and thrilling. Passengers grinned at each other in the sunshine and sweet-smelling wind, their faces drawn and pale from the journey – I expect mine was the same. I ran back downstairs and dragged the blanket off the missus.

‘We are here. There is to be an inspection and then they are putting us onto barges.’

She looked at me from somewhere very far away and shrank back. I took hold of her hand and whispered the name she had chosen for her new life.

‘We are here. Remember who you are.’

The inspection passed in no time – they barely looked at us – and we were herded onto barges and steamboats like cattle. The missus held onto me and followed like a silent, scared child. Her other hand covered her eyes – the sudden sky-wide glare after so long must have hurt.

Gulls flew overhead, crying out harshly. Cormorants perched on boat masts with their wings spread out to the sun like sentinels. The bay was as unreal as a picture – all the boats and ships were clean and colourful, brightly painted in whites, reds and blues. There was none of the smoky grime of the Thames traffic or that hazy pall hanging in the air.

I pushed forward to the front of the steamboat so Clara could see better. At first, she seemed unable to make sense of the view, as if it was all just shape and colour and no meaning. But as we drew nearer, her eyes fixed on a huge round building surrounded by a mighty wooden fence at the edge of the island, and emotions moved over her face like reflections on water.

‘It is Castle Garden, Harriet.’

Her fingers grasped mine tightly. I glanced at the people closest to us. Hearing my real name spoken out loud was like looking down to find my skirt and petticoat missing. She took a breath in and then let out what might equally have been a cry or a laugh.

‘It’s where Jenny Lind sang. The first time she came to America.’

I smiled at her as I would at a child or an invalid.

‘I know, my dear.’

She never took her eyes off it, even when we were right underneath and being called to disembark – I had a job getting her to move. We shuffled quietly from sea to land, clutching bags and blankets. After a final medical inspection, during which my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, Clara walked into Castle Garden with her back straight and her chin up as if she was walking onto a stage. Her eyes lifted above the mass of bedraggled and anxious immigrants to the rafters. They call the main bit the rotunda, and it’s enormous. All signs of the theatre have gone, but I still think she was seeing an enraptured audience rather than crowds of tired travellers, perhaps even hearing applause in the great hum of hundreds being examined and registered and sent on their way under one roof. I wished she would stop acting so queenly and look more like the rest of us. We gave the names we had used on the ship to a clerk. Clara had sense enough to play the part of a domestic servant, talking in a voice that mimicked mine so well I almost laughed with nerves. We were asked if we were staying in New York and then pointed past the ticket desks towards the exit. I almost hesitated, as if it might be a trick. But we were through. The rotunda swarmed in front of us in all its busy-ness and purpose, and we were free to join the other immigrants, free on American soil. I gripped Clara’s hand and pulled her into the crowd.

People were clustering around food stands – the smell of fresh bread nearly made my knees give way – or hurrying to make use of the luggage delivery depot, letter-writing departments, exchange brokers and a hundred other welcoming services it seemed. I crouched behind someone’s trunk to delve into my skirts and untie the purse from my petticoat, then led Clara to the right queue. While waiting to change our paltry fortune into American coins, I overheard two men agreeing they would go back to the labour exchange next. I asked them where it was, and they said a different building outside the rotunda.

‘They got jobs need filling all over the country. We’re cabinet-makers, heading west.’

The one who spoke had an open face, and I felt my shoulders relaxing. If there was plenty of work, we could make a beginning – or I could. Clara didn’t look like she was going to be any help, standing by my side with that faraway look – the men kept flicking glances at her. But I felt my courage returning. It was good to be able to look at two friendly faces and smile into another’s relief. The other man was slower to talk, but I caught him eyeing me with interest more than once and had a sudden, unexpected, sense of Robert – a flash of grey eyes. It was the first I’d thought of him. The talker asked about us, and I answered as we’d rehearsed.

‘Housemaids. And I’m a seamstress.’

‘That’s right.’

Clara spoke up suddenly, snapping into life beside me.

‘Maids of all work really.’

I looked at her in surprise. She gave them and then me a wicked grin.

‘For our sins.’

The men laughed, and I stared with my mouth open, flummoxed by this strange new companion. She began talking in her new voice as naturally as if she’d been gossiping with tradesmen her whole life. They recounted funny stories about the voyage to each other, as if it had all been a merry escapade, and then the men reached the front of the queue and bade us goodbye.

When our turn came, I collected our strange American coins with a lighter heart and tucked them away in my bag. Clara stood to one side, studying her hands and turning them over curiously. She spoke softly in her normal voice.

‘I fear I have been neglected by my lady’s maid. Look at these nails.’

They were cracked and dirty. I also noticed the streaks inside her collar, the greasy hairline, and we all still carried the stench of steerage with us, filling the rotunda with its rotten air. Picking up her bag and moving her on, I told her she was a thorough disgrace.

She gasped and looked delighted.

‘Filthy. Like a chimney sweep.’

I don’t know why our grimy state made us weak with laughter, but we were brought to a standstill, bags and blankets dropping at our feet. Other immigrants passed with wondering glances as we doubled over, speechless. Clara straightened finally, one hand on hip, the other on the front of her dress, feet set wide, and let out a great sigh. It was not the posture or bearing of a lady – far too natural and carefree for that.

‘Did I hear one of the clerks say there was a washroom?’

We gathered our belongings, and this time it was she who took my hand and near danced us through the crowd, humming something spritely. I had a job to keep from knocking into people and was laughing and scattering apologies in our wake when she came to a sudden stop. Her grip on my hand tightened. I looked up at a row of tall boards giving the names of boarding houses and lists of prices in different currencies. Beside them, runners called to the crowd and handed out cards. I saw the sign she was looking at. The Miner’s Arms. An ordinary enough name for a public house, but I felt a cold breath on the back of my neck. The runner saw us looking and rushed forward, offering to take us there at once. Clara took his card wordlessly and turned to me, eyes wide. Then she laughed again, too loud, too hard. The wild look returned that I had seen so often in the mirror at Finton Hall. I pulled her away.

‘Let’s wash first.’

As we weaved between people, we came across a monkey sitting on a man’s shoulder, baring its teeth at us. Clara stopped and chattered to it in her maid’s voice, laughing with real delight when it reached out and tugged a lock of her hair loose. Looking wilder than ever, she announced a pet monkey would be her first purchase. Monkeys alarm me even more than horses and, anyway, we had no money, but I noticed the card for the Miner’s Arms had slipped from her hand to be trodden underfoot, so I agreed – as long as we could call it William.

We found a washroom, where I half stripped to soap the most offensive parts of myself but didn’t change into my clean dress. Saving it for when it mattered, I reasoned. Clara scrubbed at herself until her skin turned red, all the while singing a bawdy song at the top of her voice. I don’t know where she’d learned such a tune, perhaps listening under her blanket in steerage. She flicked water at my astonished face and leaned down, laughing again and half-naked, to pull out the skirt of the green dress I had added the balayeuse to at Mrs Cole’s. I touched her arm.

‘Not here?’

The excitement was carrying her too far, I thought, but she firmly removed my hand. Her eyes were dark.

‘I didn’t come all this way to creep in like a criminal, unseen.’

Doubt must have shown in my face because her expression changed to mischief, and she prodded me in my stays.

‘Such worry, Harriet! Find us something to eat and wait for me outside.’

There were long queues for the bread stands in the rotunda. I stood in one for ten minutes before I remembered my purse was no longer under my skirt but in the bag I had left with Clara. On my way back, I could see the thickness of the castle’s brown, stone walls in the gateway – as wide as a man is tall. On impulse, I walked between them, as if they were no more than cobwebs, and into the sunshine of the yard. The warmth of it hit my freshly washed face, and I felt the lightness of having nothing to carry and no one to attend to. It was in that moment, I think, that I truly understood I was free, the moment it settled in my bones as a certainty. I caught the shouts of street hawkers outside the gates, a whiff of a cigar, another of baked apple, and heard my stomach growl.

Clara still wasn’t outside the washroom when I returned – I remember thinking I would have to learn great patience – but then I couldn’t see her inside either. Bags vanished too. A nasty memory of finding her and Edward gone from Serle Place flashed into my mind. The same knot tied itself tightly in my belly. Walking back out, I got the sense that something was wrong. There was a shift in atmosphere, a dip in the hubbub, as if Castle Garden had slowed suddenly and caught its breath. And then a pinprick of sound. It seemed at the centre of the change, pulling everything towards it. I hurried back into the rotunda. Some people were still bustling out, dragging children and belongings; others had paused and turned their heads, catching the same shift I had. The sound continued, growing louder, and then floated out into what was clearly a musical note, a voice singing. It filled the building, reaching up to the very dome.

I rushed forward and stopped again just as abruptly next to an old man in dirty corduroy trousers. He was staring open-mouthed at the singer. Clara was high up on a bread stand above the crowd. The dress made her a silken green vision amongst the coarse wools and dirty cottons clustering around her feet. Her hair was caught back, bare except for a ribbon woven through it. She was the girl in green from the portrait, only matured and in the full bloom of her beauty.

But the sight of her was nothing to how she sounded. I recognised the song from the musical evening – the one by Handel. In the drawing room it had given me goosebumps; there, in the cavernous space of the rotunda, it was frightening. The words came back to me – let me weep over my cruel fate, let me yearn for freedom. I clutched the sleeve of my neighbour’s coat, but he didn’t notice. Her voice was enormous, like nothing I had heard before. It was the sky, and we willingly lifted our hearts to its unearthly light, its velvet darkness. I was hearing the sunshine and storms I had seen sweeping across the landscape when I met her for the first time in the hall. Back then, it had been a strange and troubled mistress I greeted. I had wanted only for her to notice me so I might be of service. God, if I’d known. I watched her giving herself, every bit of herself to the music and knew I had done the right thing by coming with her. Even without Edward. My doubts about the professional theatre turned to dust. I believe there were many in that room who felt their burdens were lifted clean off them, even if just for that moment.

The emigration depot had come to a standstill, so it was easy to spot the handful of figures pushing their way through the crowd. Two of them were already close to the stand. I came to my senses. Officials of the depot, maybe police, on their way to put an end to this distraction from business, to save the foolish woman from breaking her neck, no doubt. My heart stumbled, sick suddenly with fear. I let go of my old friend – his mouth was still open but he had shut his eyes – and started weaving towards her.

Clara lifted a hand to her throat. She was delivering the final note into the spellbound room, and even as I ran towards her, I felt a kind of exultation that Gethin had not been able to silence her after all. In spite of all his power, she was finishing her song before an audience of hundreds. When the note ended, she lowered her head. There were still sounds drifting in from outside, bangs and shouts from the baggage department, but the silence that descended over the rotunda was a physical thing. It was as if a mighty cannon full of streamers had been fired out over the crowd and everyone was now waiting for each individual piece to float down and settle on them. When the last of it had come to rest, the place shattered into a thousand different responses – clapping, laughing, yelling in different languages, caps thrown in the air. Clara opened her eyes again and looked around. I could see her letting it come to her, drinking it in, her voice reflected back in the beating of all those glad hearts. Then her expression changed. It was as if the theatre was falling away in front of her eyes, while the tired and stinking reality of the immigration depot reasserted itself. She looked with confusion down to one side. Hands reached up; someone in a blue uniform and cap was climbing up beside her. I started pushing through more forcefully. A dense crowd had formed. When I looked up again, she was down from the stand and disappearing into a press of bodies. I tried to squeeze between, but it was impossible. The crowd was being pushed back, people knocking into others and treading on feet.

They were bringing her through. The man in blue uniform led the way while reaching back to keep a hold on her arm. Another followed. The crowd renewed its applause as she passed. She kept her eyes cast down. When a fresh round of cheering broke out, I saw a small smile form itself, hovering over her lips. Her fear and confusion seemed to melt away. I was pushed back as others were forced to make way for the party, but I saw her look up. For a moment, I couldn’t remember her name, her American name. My mind scrabbled about in a panic and caught it by the neck. I shouted it twice, flinging it over the crowd. She turned a fraction and our eyes met. I beckoned and pointed to myself.

‘Tell them!’

The smile vanished. She shook her head in tight movements, eyes black and fierce, mouth a hard line. I was being commanded. My voice failed, and I was knocked back again.

I kept up with the party as the crush loosened and saw another two men carrying our bags. They took her to a door near the washrooms where they were met by two more. There was some discussion, and she was taken through along with our luggage and the door shut. I didn’t understand where they were taking her, or why. Three of the men were still outside. I tried to get close enough to hear their conversation, standing as if I belonged to a family huddled by the wall, but I was still too far away, and the child had started to cry. The father tapped my arm and held out a loaf of bread. I shook my head, distracted. Finally, one of the men by the door broke away. As he started to run off, another called something, and he turned for it to be repeated. His colleague bellowed.

‘It’s Gethin. G-E-T-H-I-N.’

The ground rocked under me as if I was back on the ship. With a nod, the man set off again at a run, and I realised the one who had bellowed was looking at me. Frowning, he said something to the other, who turned. I jerked to life, blinked and tottered towards them before I even knew what I meant to do. They watched me approach.

‘Beg your pardon, sirs. What’s happened to that lady that sang?’

I made myself into Betsy, wide-eyed and worried. The frowner, who was older, cut off his companion who seemed about to talk.

‘Why?’

‘Oh, she sang so beautiful, didn’t she, sir? I hope she’s not in any trouble for it.’

‘Not for singing, no.’

‘Oh.’

I looked confused. His stare was as unflinching as a bull’s.

‘Do you know her?’

‘Know the lady? No, sir.’

‘Did you come off the City of Brussels?’

‘That’s right, sir.’

‘Did you see her on board?’

‘Oh no. Not ’til she got up there the way she did.’

He didn’t blink once.

‘So you weren’t travelling together?’

I let my face fall open, and then laughed as if he’d just paid me an outrageous compliment.

‘With a lady like that, sir?’

I giggled again and could see his interest start to drain. The younger one was trying to weigh down his expression with the same authority.

‘She’s wanted in England.’

‘Oh!’

I put everything into it I thought Mary would – shock and a gleam of excitement.

‘What for?’

‘What’s your name?’

The bull had swung his attention back. I gave the name I had registered with, trying to look pleased to be asked.

‘Who are you travelling with?’

‘My family, sir.’

He looked over my shoulder at the family by the wall.

‘And you’re sure you haven’t seen her before?’

I nodded and gave an apologetic smile. After another pause, during which his frown deepened, I stammered that I should go. Only the younger one said goodbye. Forcing myself not to look back, I walked straight up to the little family as if I belonged to them. The father smiled and – thank God – held out the loaf again. I took it this time and tore off a chunk, though nearly choked trying to swallow a bite, and then made a fuss of the still-sobbing little girl. Her mother was more than happy to pass her over to a stranger. I prayed silently and desperately that the policemen couldn’t see or hear that they were French.

There were no shouts, no running footsteps, no hands taking hold of me. Not as I dried the little girl’s tears or thanked the man for his bread. I needed to go somewhere quiet to think, somewhere I wouldn’t be discovered. Walking as if to return to the washrooms, I carried on between the great walls, past the labour exchange and found myself joining the stream of people flowing out of the landing depot.

She had shaken her head at me, not wanting them to see me, but what was I to do? I couldn’t just leave her to be dragged back to Gethin. The smells and cries I had caught snatches of inside the depot burst into colour and life as I left it. Hawkers with food – most of it foul-looking when I saw it close up – and tobacco stands, runners hassling newcomers with offers of lodgings or work, red-faced men shouting about conveyances and hotels. I dodged anyone who came near me, though it seemed to be families that were most under attack – a man with wild whiskers swept a baby right out of its mother’s arms, so the rest of the family had no choice but to follow. I followed too. We headed towards the city through a park that was so beautiful and perfumed after the stink of Castle Garden, it didn’t seem real.

I struggled to understand how we had been discovered. The shortest way to find out would be to go to the police myself and explain – surely they had no right to make her go back; deserting a husband wasn’t a matter for the law. I came to a sudden stop. Edward. She had kidnapped his son. Fear sapped the strength from my limbs. Were they looking for me too? They had my bag; the flint mill was in it and all of our money.

There were benches along the avenue. A man was sitting on one, smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper. Smart shoes and groomed moustaches, clearly not an immigrant. I sat down next to him. The quiver of his moustache showed me the odour from my dress had reached him. He glanced sideways, folded his paper and stood up.

‘Excuse me, sir? Have you finished with your newspaper?’

He looked at me doubtfully. It was bewildering to think that for some people this was an ordinary day, an ordinary park, and for others the very hinge on which their lives were turning. After a moment’s hesitation, he held out the treasure. My thanks didn’t touch him.

I wasn’t hopeful, but I needed to find out if Edward had been discovered too. Perhaps they would release her if she told them where he was. My breath caught at the thought. If Edward was returned to Gethin it would be worse for him than if he’d never been taken. But I also knew in my heart that even if Clara gave up her son, Gethin would never let her go so easily. My eyes darted about the tightly packed columns of print. I couldn’t guess if a wife deserting an MP in London and stealing his son would hold any interest for people in New York, even if it was known she was fleeing this way. The pages were full of news about electoral fraud. There was an article about an asylum. Weddings, obituaries, weather.

The weather yesterday in London and neighbourhood was fair.

That’s what it said at the bottom of a column. I felt on the wrong end of a horrible joke. We had left London nearly two weeks ago and had been travelling further away every day since. It was terrible to be able to read in black and white what the weather was doing there yesterday, as if we had been tricked into a circle or come no distance at all.

When I found it, I didn’t know it at first. TELEGRAPHIC NEWS. Large print at the top of the page. My chest tightened. Beneath the headline, a list of the main stories from around the world: an assassination attempt, a massacre, a New York rowing team in England, and amongst them:

Murdered baby is MP’s missing child

Not the right MP, not with murder in the sentence. But my back had turned cold. Something dark was twisting in my bowel. My stomach started to revolt, and I had to lean over the back of the bench as it tried to rid itself of the morsel of bread I’d eaten.

Missing child.

Her face in the cab in London, the things she had said, her nightmares. My own sense of foreboding. I wiped my mouth, hands shaking, and forced myself to seek out the story.

In a shocking turn to an already extremely painful case, the body of a baby found in the River Thames was last week identified by its own father, Mr Gethin MP of Finton Hall, Hertfordshire. The body of the five-month-old boy was discovered by a lighterman close to Blackfriars Bridge in London on May 29th. It had been placed in a large carpet bag and there was cord wrapped around its neck. Chief Inspector Vince of the Metropolitan police said Mr Gethin had been anxious for the safety of his wife and son since they went missing on May 25th. The police have been working tirelessly to find Mrs Gethin and believe she may have left the country.

Details slotted into place – the date, the place in the river, the carpet bag. My body twisted so I could retch again. I spat and rested my forehead against the back of the bench, eyes closed. Waves of nausea and horror washed over me, one after the other. I don’t know how long I sat like that. The very discomfort of the position somehow kept my mind from plunging into total darkness. A bruise formed on my forehead, and it helped to press it. Without warning, tears came. Gouts of burning grief for Edward that I thought would smother me. People tried to talk to me, some with the best, others the worst intentions, but I was too fiercely elsewhere in my head. After a long while – hours, I think – it dawned on me that I was not in the hands of the police, and God knows, if they had been looking, they would have found me by then. I became aware of New York, a few hundred yards away, tall and solid and clanking with cranes and traffic and rough beginnings. Thoughts drifted towards me. Unthinkable thoughts, but they came anyway. What if I kept walking? Disappeared into America? What if I carried this burden silently into a new life?

A woman walked past me pushing a pram. She was looking into it and speaking to the baby with such love in her eyes, I was nearly sick again. My mind rebelled at the thought of returning to so much loss. What could I possibly do for Clara with Edward gone, if it was by her own hand? She didn’t want me to show myself – perhaps she was trying to save me from the consequences of her own madness. It chilled me to think of her smile as the police led her away, as if a part of her had known all along this was as far as she could run, that she would never escape Gethin.

Let me weep over my cruel fate.

America yawned to my left. I could feel its energy, its newness. Freedom was a stone’s throw. I stood up, but in standing, remembered another burden. I felt it as my skirt shifted, a weight I had been carrying without noticing for weeks. The pear-shaped choker, sewn into the hem. It stopped me as sure as if a hand had taken hold of my dress. I remembered the master placing it on her dressing table. I remembered the portrait, the canary, the cruelty. What if the newspaper account was untrue? What if I was seeing what someone else wanted me to see? Question marks are cannily shaped. They caught me with their hooks.

I am tired of writing. The hooks, the not knowing, have not let me go, pulling me back almost as far across the ocean. I am scared of arriving, and I am also desperate for this journey to be over. There are thumps and voices from the other cabins, passengers preparing to leave. The children have returned, pounding down the corridor as if they are not children at all but a terrible reckoning bearing down on me. I brace myself every time they pass my door, and my mind instantly, against my will, returns to the last time I saw Edward, drugged but alive still in Serle Place. Could I have known? Could I have saved him then? The questions tear at my heart. I cannot even answer for myself.

Tuesday, 18th June

There is a narrow alley behind Annie’s house. The wall is high, but there is a wooden door, rotten enough for a person on the outside to see into the yard. I waited, feeling out of place in my new cloak and gloves, but also hopeful – it was early evening, threatening rain, and the washing was out. My guess was right. After less than half an hour, Annie appeared, humming in that leisurely way of hers and hauling a basket. I felt my heart start to pound and doubts surfacing again that I had spent days arguing down.

‘Annie.’

I knocked softly on the wood, and then again, harder.

‘Annie.’

She peered at the door.

‘Who is it?’

‘Harriet.’

I had left without a word, after all her kindnesses. After a long pause, she put the basket down and walked towards me. The door shook as the bolt was pulled free. It opened a few inches, and we stared at each other.

‘Sweet Jesus.’

She threw it wide and reached out an arm to pull me through, but I held back.

‘Wait. Is Andrew home?’

‘Not yet.’

I tried to read in her face what she knew, but there was only shock and puzzlement.

‘Am I in trouble, Annie?’

Her mouth fell open slightly. She leaned in closer, whispered.

‘Christ, Har, we’ve been worried out of our minds about you. Come in, for God’s sake; it’s not Andrew you need to fret about.’

Her words didn’t hold much comfort, but I let myself be drawn into the yard. She bolted the door again and, turning, looked me up and down. I saw her take in my new clothes, the good quality chip bonnet with its ribbons and feathers, my pristine travelling bag. She was kind enough to look beyond them, put her curiosity aside.

‘Are you hungry?’

I was starving. Standing on the upper deck as the ship slid into port yesterday, I wondered if I had eaten my last meal as a free woman. In my lodgings and on the train, I was too anxious to eat at all.

Annie fed me cold potatoes and beef. Her kitchen was warm and smelled faintly of lye. The plain food cooked by a good friend tasted so good, I couldn’t speak. She waited until I was finished and then silently slid a newspaper across the table. I had already seen it. News was the first thing I looked for after safely and freely setting foot on the docks. I had hoped to hear Clara herself through the reports – an explanation or even confession, but she has not spoken since her arrest. She is a sensation all the same. The story has been talked inside out by the newspapers, taking up more space than the war congress in Berlin. I have arrived in the middle of a national obsession. Her trial is to begin in a few days, but her guilt is already decided.

‘Have they written anything about me?’

Annie was watching me carefully, as if I was a barrel of gunpowder someone had set down in her house. She shook her head. I lowered my fork, glanced from the paper back to her.

‘How do you know then?’

Her head shook again faintly.

‘We only know you went with her to Liverpool and probably to America. Is that where you’ve been?’

I stared at her.

‘How do you know we went to Liverpool?’

She ran her tongue over her top lip.

‘Robert saw you. He …’

I stood up, knife and fork clattering on the plate, and turned away to lean against the sideboard. It was my fault then. He’d found me again somehow. Annie rose as I did and followed, standing close but not touching.

‘Did she do it?’

I turned to look at her.

‘I don’t know.’

She searched my face. I didn’t want to tell her about the carpet bag or how she had drugged Edward or any of the damning details that had crushed me into my berth the whole way from New York.

‘She promised me we’d come back for him. She said he was somewhere safe.’

Annie lifted a hand to the front of her dress protectively. I felt the unspeakable thought writhing to the surface. The muscles in my face screwed tight.

‘She took him while I was buying food. What if … what if she didn’t go somewhere safe? What if she really drowned him, and I … I did nothing?’

Annie put her arms around me and held on while the wave of horror crashed through me again. When I was washed up on the other side of it, she drew back.

‘Come into the parlour. Tell me everything.’

I have been so long used to hiding the truth, to keeping my heart shut and bolted against discovery, I found at first the lock had rusted. Turns out simple truth-telling takes as much practice and care as lying. It came out in awkward bursts and disjointed thoughts, but as I talked my way back into Finton Hall, the memories and words began to flow together until I was being carried along on a torrent of confession, it felt like. An unburdening finally. Annie listened to it all in silence. She looked more thoughtful than horrified when I described the master and his friends. Difficult to shock a policeman’s wife, I suppose. My doubts about Clara came out in spite of myself, but also my yearnings for a different life, for a different reason to live. My true mistress wasn’t the wretched woman in Newgate who had lied to me; it was the miracle she turned into when she sang. I don’t know what to call it – a state of grace, the purest part of herself revealed. What difference does it make if it’s divine or human, if it redeems just the same? But that was before Edward – before the newspaper that tore up the past and the future and shattered my heart.

I told Annie everything, how sitting on the bench outside Castle Garden I had all but chosen to step into a new life until I felt the weight in my petticoat and remembered what I had sewn in there.

‘Where is the choker now?’

Annie’s eyes flicked about my new dress as she asked it, making me smile for the first time.

‘I pawned it.’

She hooted.

‘They must have thought you stole it.’

I suppose I had. It took a few tries to find the right broker, one whose customers pawned gems and silks rather than ragged bedding and children’s boots. I learned to play the proud and tight-lipped lady’s maid, hinting just enough at an abandoned mistress. I out-performed the musty stink of my dress, and the broker pretended to believe me. All I know is that the master must have spent a fortune on that necklace. I was richer than years in service could have made me and that was just the pawnbroker’s sum. Walking out into the New York evening, I knew I wasn’t going to spend the night in an immigrant boarding house.

‘Do you have much left?’

I shook my head.

‘Not after the ship. Dollars aren’t worth much here.’

It doesn’t matter, though I didn’t know how to explain that to Annie. The money itself isn’t important. I chose a ready-made dress in a department store and had it altered there too. They have great tall mirrors so you can look at yourself from head to toe. It was like seeing myself for the first time – free of roles, free of place, neither a maid nor an immigrant. Or rather, I could be those things if need be, but I was this woman in the mirror first. New York showed me to myself.

It showed me other things too. Walking the streets, I saw new kinds of camera for sale that anyone could use, portable and, while my purse was full, affordable. A different life had beckoned, shadowy, difficult, independent, and I thought of Milton’s poem and the ‘talent’ – the money that was meant to be used by the servant to make something more, something bigger. But it was a dream of another life, one I might have known if my path had been different. The woman I saw reflected in the mirror was always going back to Clara. She was stitched into me. Edward too. He died the very day I thought I was running with him to freedom – I couldn’t leave even his ghost behind.

Then in the telegraphic news, it was reported that two hundred miners had been killed in a pit explosion in the north. It was nothing to do with Gethin, but it made me think of the flint mill and how he had loved it for its deadly light. He would have it back now. I recalled Clara’s expression when I tried to explain why I had taken it, and the way she held out her arms. I walked to the booking office and spent the money on my ticket home.

Annie was looking at me a little wonderingly.

‘What will you do?’

She sounded as if nothing I said would surprise her.

‘I have to see her.’

‘Har, you can’t.’

‘What did I come back for then?’

‘It’s not safe.’

‘No one’s looking for me, are they?’

She stood up abruptly and walked to the mantelshelf. Pulling something out from under the clock, she returned and handed me an envelope. It had my name on it.

‘Robert thought you might write to me. He asked me to send you this if you gave an address.’

I took it from her, turned it over in my hands.

‘He’s the reason we were caught, isn’t he? He told the police.’

Annie cleared her throat and clasped her hands together.

‘He also saw the baby they pulled out of the river.’

I felt my face and throat tightening again. She carried on.

‘He’s not … You have to …’

She sighed impatiently.

‘Oh, just read it, Har. It explains everything.’

Dear Harriet,

It is my dearest hope that if this letter is in your hands, it means you are far away from London. You may not yet know the role I played in Mrs Gethin’s arrest, and I do not write this in expectation of your forgiveness. My only hope is that, knowing the facts, you will understand the importance of keeping away from your mistress and will not be tempted to show yourself. That I was acting firstly out of concern for you and later in the service of my profession is of no comfort to me. I will not urge my motives on you but simply set down what happened.

I followed you to your lodgings in Warren Street after you delivered my shirts to Annie and Andrew’s house. They were worried about you, and it was clear to me from our conversation that you were hiding your real address. You spoke of seeing a man steal bread on Gray’s Inn Road. No omnibus route from Aldgate would take you through that part of town. I hoped to speak with you about it when we met again at the tearooms. When you left in distress, I chose to look for you at your lodgings later that evening. The maid became nearly hysterical when I said I was a policeman, but I learned eventually there was no resident with your name. A room had been let to a seamstress calling herself Helen D – she could not properly recall the surname. She allowed me into your room where I found scraps of paper in the fireplace. Put together, they showed that day’s date and an address in Serle Place.

I went there and watched from a doorway in the street opposite. At around three o’clock in the morning, a hackney cab stopped at the entrance to the court. When it pulled away, I saw a cloaked and laden figure let into the abandoned shop, which I later understood to be Mrs Gethin. A few hours after, you came out and I followed you to the market and back. When you left the address once more with a man and luggage, I was able to follow you to Euston Station in another cab. There, I recognised Mrs Gethin, though she was dressed as a working woman. I learned from the clerk that your tickets were for Liverpool. The man returned to Serle Place, and there I stopped following him.

You had already hinted at cruel behaviour from Mr Gethin. Your secrecy and Mrs Gethin’s disguise painted a clear enough picture. As no crime had been committed and I had followed you for personal rather than professional reasons, I resolved not to interfere. I heard nothing about it from any quarter for several days and began to think I had misinterpreted the situation. My own work occupied me fully as the body of another baby was recovered from the Thames, which I am sure is the victim of the baby farmer I spoke to you about. The child had the same material wound around his neck as her other victims, and he matched a description given by a mother in Sheffield whose letters were discovered in my suspect’s house.

Two days later, I was summoned by my chief inspector, who told me Mr Gethin had alerted the police about his wife’s disappearance and had voiced concerns for the safety of his son. A discreet investigation was underway, and I had been informed because of my specialist work. I think you will understand that with a child missing, I was obliged to tell him I had seen Mrs Gethin at Euston Station with a tall young man and a maid. Against my better judgement at the time, I didn’t name you. I now bitterly regret mentioning you at all.

The next afternoon I tried to escort the mother who had arrived from Sheffield into the mortuary to identify the baby. I was prevented and told the child had already been identified and the case was out of my hands. I applied to my superiors without success. Next day, it was in the papers. Mr Gethin had identified the child himself. His wife was now at the centre of a major hunt. Liverpool was mentioned. I have tried to argue that the child could be both Mr Gethin’s son and also the most recent victim of my suspect. They tell me the evidence contradicts that, but when I push for details, I am warned off. There is increasing pressure on me to stop asking questions, and I believe it comes from high up, above my immediate superiors.

Even without Annie’s (vehement) testament to your character, I do not believe you would ever knowingly be involved in the harming of a child. Mrs Gethin’s innocence or guilt is beyond my knowledge – I don’t know how she was employed while I followed you in the market – but I believe there are powerful forces working to bring about her conviction. I have no right to ask for your trust, but please be careful, Harriet. By leading them to Liverpool, I may have cost an innocent woman her freedom, and I do not begin to calculate the injury I have done to you. I pray that you are still unknown to them. If it is in my power to assist you in any way, I hope you can believe that I remain,

Your humblest servant,

Robert Ansell

The mother from Sheffield. She filled my imagination like an angel of mercy. I confess in that moment I was little able to consider her own dreadful plight. All I could think was – is it true? Is there even the smallest chance that the dead baby isn’t Edward? I re-read the letter three times, thoughts spitting like hot fat, until Annie couldn’t wait any longer.

‘Well? What do you think?’

I couldn’t tell her. There was so much that was painful rubbing alongside the desperately thin hope, jostling for space. If I had never gone to Annie’s, I would never have met Robert again, and I would now be in America with Clara, forging a new life. We would have walked through Castle Garden’s gates together, felt the energy of New York calling us both, begun what we had come to do. Robert’s determination to know my business was calamitous – a reckless and powerful beast, springing into my life from nowhere. It had ripped our careful plans to shreds with one swipe of its claws even as we thought ourselves safe. I could not have known the lengths he would go to. The man had stood outside Serle Place all night.

‘Fuck …’

I leaned my head in my palm, went to stand up, sat down again, hands in fists either side of the letter in my lap. It was also true that I might not have heard the news so soon. And what would I have done if I had seen the newspaper article – what would Clara have done? Or would we have returned in ignorance in six months or a year like she said and not been able to find him? Because there was something else in Robert’s letter that offered a different glimmer of possibility. If the baby was Edward, nothing would bring him back, but perhaps the worst had not happened. I smoothed the letter out. What if Clara gave Edward in good faith to a baby farmer? I turned to Annie.

‘The safe place she told me about. She could have paid this woman to look after Edward. It might be she never meant him to come to harm.’

Annie pursed her lips.

‘Why isn’t she saying that then? She’s not said a word to defend herself.’

‘I don’t know. But she read my diary with your letter in it – it might have given her the idea to send Edward to a foster mother.’

It had plagued me relentlessly that my own diary might have prompted the missus to go down that path. Annie looked grim.

‘If she read my letter, she’d also know it’s an easy way to be rid of a child for good. Plenty of mothers know what they’re paying for when they hand their babies over.’

Such a possibility existed – of course I knew that too, but all the same I wanted to stop Annie’s mouth.

‘Why are they covering it up then, not letting Robert find out if the baby farmer was part of it?’

She leaned forward, softer.

‘It’s likely they have good reason, Har, or it might be some daft politics between the City boys and the Met – it’s not Robert’s patch. But he’s beside himself, you know. He looks like a ghost.’

‘So he should.’

My voice rose.

‘He’s right not to expect my forgiveness. Who does he think he is following me and going into my lodgings?’

‘A worried friend?’

I all but spat. She sighed.

‘He couldn’t have known it would lead to this, Har.’

I didn’t answer, and she continued.

‘You don’t know that she isn’t where she deserves to be – you admitted it yourself. What matters is that you mustn’t try and see her. What if they put you in the dock too?’

I nodded to stop her fixing me with her warning stare. The door rattled soon after and delivered Andrew into the room. I couldn’t help but feel alarmed at the sight of his uniform – guilty even – though I know he’d disobey twenty chief inspectors before crossing Annie. We talked it all through again over tea – his pink cheeks and wide, astonished eyes make me wonder how he commands respect on the streets. I reluctantly agreed to them letting Robert know, but not to meeting him myself. Somehow, if we were both in the same room, I don’t know whom I’d hate more. I’m bedding down in the parlour. Annie hugged me goodnight and made me promise I would keep clear of the Old Bailey. Seems I must turn the lock on my heart again.

Wednesday, 19th June

I gave the name I used in America. Walking through the passages and gates of Newgate with the other visitors, my heart in my mouth, I was reminded strangely of Castle Garden. The prison is a square rather than a rotunda, but it shares the same slab-walled authority, designed to hold humanity at will or at bay. Its very sheerness is frightening. I felt a familiar sense of stepping onto a different shore with an unknown country ahead of me, but this was a darker place – a land of endings not beginnings.

There was a walkway separating us, lined by two rows of bars and iron grating. A warder patrolled between the shouted conversations of prisoners and their friends. I don’t know what I thought our meeting would be like in such a place. My mouth was dry. I realised I was scared of meeting her eyes. And then she was in front of me, wearing a clean gown, her hair dressed much as it had been when she sang in Castle Garden. I would have said she looked unexpectedly well if she hadn’t been staring at me in horror. Her fingers gripped the bars.

‘Why are you here?’

I stuttered, my mouth working without sound. She shook her head.

‘You must go. Go far away from here. You should not have come back.’

‘I can’t. They are covering up the truth. The police and Mr Gethin.’

I mouthed it at her. She shook her head again, and I shouted over the hubbub.

‘Tell them everything, ma’am. Who did you give him to? Did you pay for him to be fostered?’

She frowned, not answering.

‘I know someone who can help. But you have to tell the truth, tell them where you took him.’

The warder was close by. Clara glanced at him and brought her face right up to the bars.

‘He’s safe.’

An icy hand ran down my back. I couldn’t believe it. She was smiling.

‘Ralph will never have him.’

‘But …’

I stared across at her, terrified that the real distance between us was greater even than the guarded passageway. For the first time, I wondered what exactly she meant by ‘safe’. Perhaps she hadn’t lied. She saved the servants at Finton Hall by dismissing them. What if she believed she was saving Edward by destroying him?

‘What do you mean Ralph will never have him?’

A kind of panic seized me.

‘Where is he?’

She continued smiling, as if I was the one who couldn’t see straight.

‘They will find you guilty, Clara.’

I was suddenly angry.

‘I’ll tell them what happened. I’ll get up in court and tell them everything.’

Her face changed, swift as a cut, from gentle to savage.

‘You must go. Don’t let them see you. Please.’

Her voice faltered on the last word. She dropped her hands from the bars and stepped back.

‘Wait.’

I shouted it so loudly the warder turned towards me, but Clara had gone. Shaking, I staggered back between the looming walls and heavy gates and into the street. It had all happened in an agonising rush, more like having dust kicked in my face than a conversation. I came away less certain about what I think than before.

Annie was furious. There wasn’t any good pretending I’d been three hours fetching a bottle of beer for our tea. I forgot to pick it up anyway. She slammed the lid on the copper and threw wet linen about with the same reckless energy as she had at Mrs B’s. Finally, she kicked a bundle out of the way that was waiting on the floor and sat down opposite me, red hands flat against the wood.

‘What’s the hold she has on you? You jilt William, leave all your friends for America, and now you’re risking your own neck when she’s as good as hanged already.’

I flinched. She’d been tiptoeing around me so far, but I’d made her as mad as Clara had made me.

‘You think they’ll hang her?’

I heard how small my voice sounded. Annie made an exasperated noise and scraped her chair back. We didn’t talk about it for the rest of the evening or mention it to Andrew, who bore our uncomfortable silence without comment, nursing it carefully as if we’d placed a sleeping wild cat in his arms. It’s awake now though – I can hear them above me, Annie’s barely suppressed outbursts. Strange how I was less lonely and more certain of my own edges in New York where there wasn’t a single soul who knew me.

Friday, 21st June

My medicine – or punishment – was Robert.

‘Someone has to talk sense into you.’

Annie led him into the kitchen where I was mending a bobby’s shirt for her and then stood by the back door as if to stop me from bolting. Which was as well – I had an impulse to flee the way I had arrived. The paleness of his skin made the birthmark more vivid. His eyes were flinty, but there was a hesitancy that hadn’t been there before. He stood in the doorway, holding his hat out slightly as if it was a gift he was worried might offend.

‘I’m glad to see you, Harriet.’

I bit down on telling him I couldn’t say the same. Snapped off a piece of thread before answering.

‘Thank you for your letter.’

He nodded, gestured at a chair.

‘May I?’

I shrugged.

‘I won’t be stopped from going to the court, so you can save your breath.’

He paused in the middle of sitting down and then lowered himself slowly.

‘I could go for you.’

‘What good would that do?’

He put his unblemished hands on the table.

‘What if you’re seen?’

I didn’t speak.

‘You’re very loyal to her.’

Loyal is a difficult word. It sounds so like a good thing. Every way of answering I could think of balled in my throat. After a moment he carried on.

‘You don’t believe she is guilty?’

‘Mostly, no.’

‘But you are not sure?’

I looked up, ready to tell him I was done with his questions and that he’d caused enough trouble with his meddling but was silenced by the emotion in his face. His eyes had turned dark velvet and there was something like recognition in them. I found myself simply answering instead.

‘At the gaol, I wondered if she believed she had saved him from his father, that she had done the right thing by killing him. If it was her that did it. I don’t know.’

Robert leaned forward with an earnestness that made me uncomfortable. That beast with all its power and determination to know the truth was still stalking about.

‘Why do you think that?’

‘She said Mr Gethin would never have him – she honestly wanted me to believe that. It was the way she was smiling.’

Annie blew air through her lips. Robert kept staring at me as if my face was covered in fine print that he had to squint at to read.

‘Do you remember the clothes the baby was wearing before she took him away?’

It wasn’t the question I was expecting, though I could answer easy enough. I had changed Edward, straightened his bonnet, loosened his collar so he could breathe.

‘A white dress, buttoned at the top, with a knitted blue jacket and bonnet.’

‘Good quality?’

‘Yes.’

Annie cut in.

‘The baby farmer would have taken them if they were worth something.’

One of Robert’s fingers tapped soundlessly against the table.

‘The body in the Thames was wearing an old nightshirt.’

‘There you are.’

‘If it’s the same baby.’

We both looked at him. Annie put a hand on her hip.

‘Why would Mr Gethin say the baby was his if it isn’t? And if Edward is alive, whoever’s got him would come forward surely, or leave him somewhere – they must know what’s going on.’

Laurence.

‘I need to find Laurence.’

Robert lifted his chin.

‘The man at Serle Place, who took you to the station?’

‘Yes, he was the footman at Finton Hall. He helped Clara – I don’t know how much, or what he knows.’

‘You said he was a brute.’

Annie was doing well to keep her voice down. I could see how she saw it: an unnatural woman, a depraved servant. Her arguments were straight and sharp as a blade.

‘He’s not come to save her, has he? They most likely did it together. He’s the last person you want to run into.’

I watched the muscles working in Robert’s face. It wasn’t until he had said that about the baby not being Edward that I understood the catastrophe happening in his own life – his beloved police force turned rotten again, his very career threatened. He had worked hard to catch that baby farmer; he wanted the baby to belong to the woman from Sheffield. In the kitchen he turned back to me, eyes a perfect storm.

‘You should be at the trial.’

I think my mouth fell open.

‘No one else knows the details of their lives like you do. You’ll see what I can’t.’

It was the answer I hadn’t been able to find for Annie. I nodded, feeling relieved, and at the same time very frightened.

Monday, 24th June

I knew there would be a crowd. They had been queueing up since dawn to see the upper-class baby murderer, eager to know if she was as beautiful as the newspapers said. Beauty and horror together make for a special fascination. Robert policed us a path to the door and with a word to the man there, got us up to the public gallery. We could have sat at the front, but we had already decided neither of us should make ourselves too obvious. Mr Gethin was almost out of view in a seat on the right. The sight of him stabbed fear into my heart. Quiet, reserved, serious. Unremarkable in a sea of other men. To look at him – and he would have known people were doing little else – one would think he couldn’t hurt a fly. But on the same side in a different row was Mrs Trevelyan. Pale and patient with her hands folded in her lap. I could have sobbed to see her.

The judge was announced first. I would never have thought watching a man walk into a room and sit down could have such a violent effect on my guts. Then Clara’s name was called. The dock is below and just in front of the gallery, so when it came to it, I could hardly see her at all. Once people had sat back from craning to look, I saw the top of her head, her hat placed forward with a single feather, a style that suits her well. I wondered if it was Mrs T bringing her clothes.

I hate the courtroom. It’s a pit of life – as if a giant child has been out creature-collecting with a wooden bucket. I felt at any moment the wigged specimens bunched together on the right might start crawling all over the plainer bodies in the lower section (many bald pates on show), or the fidgety public would finally spill over and drop from the balcony on silk threads. The jury in banked seats opposite the wigs, on the other hand, looked pinned in place, two orderly rows of waiting grubs.

When the court was settled and the jury sworn, a clerk read out the charge. Hearing Edward’s name spoken, I was crushed again by the weight of loss and had to fight hard against tears. Clara was asked for her plea. She didn’t speak. Her silence stopped everyone’s breath; the whole courtroom was suspended without movement like dead things pickled, until the judge lowered his head and ordered a plea of not guilty to be entered.

From then on, I felt it was all running away from me. The lawyer employed against her, a Mr Frith, began a speech that made my hands go clammy where they clutched the edge of the bench. Robert looked at me several times as facts rang around the court – Clara’s violence towards her own portrait, her coldness as a mother, her harsh treatment of servants. The prosecutor’s voice was as sure and firm as the wooden panelling running around the room. It straightened the jury’s spines and gave the gallery a platform on which to build their prejudices. There was tutting and shaking of heads all around me, gathering blood lust.

‘But what reason could there be for Mrs Gethin’s behaviour?’

The prosecutor paused as if genuinely mystified and let the question flutter about the court.

‘A woman with youth and beauty, marrying into a life of luxury her own family could no longer provide, all the comfort and splendour of Finton Hall, a baby. A beautiful son.’

He stopped again, letting us all think about that beautiful son.

‘Was it the Honourable Mr Gethin?’

He spun around suddenly and pointed.

‘Was he a terrible husband? This man who campaigns ceaselessly for the rights of fallen women? Was he so tyrannical and cruel, so brutal in his treatment of his own wife that she was driven to acts of violence? And did this cruelty all take place in the same home that he also opens to society’s most desperate, the lame and the friendless, providing employment and shelter for those who can find it nowhere else?’

His head turned back to the jury, a smile of disbelief flickering around his mouth. Several of the grubs actually smiled back.

‘Well, let’s say that he was – a brute, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Why then should the servants be made to suffer? Why then would a mother turn from her innocent child, a child in need of her protection? And why later would she strangle that same innocent and throw his body into the Thames?’

There was a flinching intake of breath in the gallery as if that was the first they had ever heard of it.

‘No.’

The lawyer became grim, almost angry.

‘Today you will hear what sort of a woman Mrs Gethin is. You will hear it from those closest to the family, those who witnessed – and suffered – her behaviour for years. A resentful, implacable, grasping woman, whose unfounded malice towards her husband was based on sheer vanity.’

He produced a piece of paper.

‘A husband who offered her everything that was good.’

He held the paper up and shook his head.

‘But she didn’t want what was good.’

Lowering it, he began to read. It was the police account of her singing in Castle Garden. The official wording made her performance sound both vulgar and ridiculous, and he put on the apish expression of a music hall comedian to describe her climbing the bread stand. Titters of laughter went around the crowd.

‘And for this …’

He held the paper high again, a torch of truth.

‘For this she murdered her own baby son.’

I don’t know how I didn’t stand up and start screaming. He went on to speak about the recent spate of murdered infants found in the river. Robert kept wiping a hand across his mouth, as if to make sure it stayed shut, especially when it was claimed that Edward’s murder had been designed to look like a baby farmer crime. My stomach writhed so terribly, I thought I would bring up my guts onto the floor of the gallery.

Witnesses came to a stand between the jury and judges’ bench: a lighterman who had found the baby in the Thames near Blackfriars Bridge, not very far from Serle Place; the doctor who performed the post-mortem; the constable who had first been called – Robert leaned forward in his seat. It wasn’t easy to hear up in the gallery – or see. A carpet bag was shown to the jury, and I strained my eyes trying to make out if it was mine. I had to look away from the length of fabric and the baby’s soiled nightshirt.

Then it was the new nursemaid that I hadn’t seen before. Her words were particularly hard to catch. Pretty and young – one of Clockface’s – but stiff as a peg doll.

‘She’s terrified.’

I would have been too with the whole court staring at me, but I saw what Robert meant. She looked as if her eyes might roll into the back of her head. The lawyer led her through her time as Edward’s nursemaid, how Clara had wanted to keep Edward in her room the night they disappeared. Then he pointed to the nightshirt and asked if she recognised it. Even from the gallery, we could see she was shaking. She began to say something, but the judge cut across to tell her to speak up.

‘It might … it might be Edward’s.’

‘Might?’

She jerked her head back as if the word was a slap.

‘He … had one very like that.’

‘She’s lying.’

Robert whispered it urgently in my ear.

‘With the stains, it’s difficult …’

‘Take a closer look.’

The lawyer gestured for it to be taken over to her, but she shrank back.

‘No, I’m sure. I’m sure he had one like that.’

There was a break soon after, and everyone shuffled out, discussing Clara’s certain guilt. We stayed on the street nearby, too restless to find somewhere to sit or eat. The air was close. I pawed at a dropped playbill with my boot.

‘Why didn’t Clara’s lawyer question her? No one even asked if Edward’s nightshirt was missing.’

Robert was smoking a cigarette, head down, other hand jammed in his trouser pocket. He rubbed his forehead with his wrist. Smoke hung in the muggy air.

‘No one is trying to prove the baby isn’t Edward.’

I wanted so much for it to be true, what he had said at Annie’s. Or perhaps I just wanted him to carry on believing it, even if I couldn’t.

‘Do you really think it isn’t him?’

He blinked as if his eyes were tired.

‘Annie’s right – there is too much against it. But something’s off or they wouldn’t have shut me out.’

‘Why don’t you tell her lawyer about your baby farmer?’

‘There’s no evidence now.’

‘But the material you said he was strangled with?’

‘Too common to mean anything on its own, and anyone could have read about it in the papers from the other murders.’

I could feel the claw around my chest again, dragging me to the edge.

‘But her lawyer must …’

‘Her lawyer is there for form’s sake because it’s a murder trial. The judge has to appoint one if the accused won’t or can’t pay.’

I thought of the choker, my second-class cabin and new clothes. Robert carried on grimly.

‘If she won’t speak and the evidence is against her … All he has that I can see is that there are no witnesses who actually saw her with the carpet bag.’

I swallowed with difficulty. If I told him she had taken mine when she took Edward, would he stop doubting she was guilty? If I said it out loud, would I?

‘Is that enough to stop her being convicted?’

‘Unlikely.’

He stamped on the cigarette.

‘Do you want to go back in?’

There was still a big crowd waiting for their turn in the gallery. Robert looked down the line, which started just behind me, and then sharply over my shoulder. He put out a hand to take my arm, and I spun around, expecting all kinds of horrors. It was Mary. She stood a little apart from the crowd, staring hard.

‘I thought it was you.’

The last time I had seen her she was lying unconscious on Clara’s bed in Finton Hall. I stepped forward, but she retreated as far, stumbling as her foot slipped off the kerb. There was something bruised about her. The brightness had gone, though the determined little animal was still there.

‘I’m looking for Laurence.’

She didn’t meet my eye as she said it. I remembered the keening noise she had made at the foot of his bed that night.

‘We want to find him too.’

She flashed me a look and another at Robert.

‘He was meant to come back.’

More people were joining the queue. She glanced furtively amongst them.

‘When?’

‘After he helped her.’

She tossed her head towards the court.

‘He was supposed to come back two weeks ago.’

I stared at her.

‘You knew he was helping the missus escape?’

She didn’t answer but carried on darting looks at everyone and everything in sight.

‘I’m not supposed to be here. Mrs Trevelyan said not to. But I don’t know where else to look.’

‘Mrs Trevelyan?’

She sniffed.

‘I’m at the vicarage now. I took the train this morning.’

Robert stepped into the road and threw up his arm, hailing a cab.

‘We shouldn’t be talking out here.’

Mary regarded him blankly. I introduced him as a friend of mine, but she hardly seemed to listen. He fixed her with one of his flinty looks as a growler rolled up.

‘Let us take you to the station. Harriet will write with any news.’

He seemed in a hurry. Mary hesitated. Her hand moved across the front of her dress in a familiar gesture.

‘You will?’

I nodded. We found each other, I think, in the look we shared. It was as if we were back in Finton Hall, still haunted by a place we shall never set foot in again. As she turned to the cab, I thought I saw a new fullness to her body in the way her skirts swung and felt a horrible misgiving. The journey was strangely silent. Questions screamed in my head that I couldn’t ask in front of Robert, but when the carriage jerked to a stop, he didn’t move.

‘Stay where there are people at all times. I’ll meet you at Annie’s later.’

‘Are you going back to the trial?’

His eyes flicked to Mary and away again.

‘There is something I need to do.’

He paused and put a hand on my arm.

‘Go straight back to Annie’s. Don’t go to the trial by yourself.’

We found a table in the refreshment room while we waited for her train. I watched her over scalding cups of tea neither of us touched.

‘Mrs Trevelyan has been looking after you?’

Mary nodded faintly.

‘She looks after everyone. Even her.’

‘What did Laurence tell you?’

She gave me a quick look on the slant and didn’t answer.

‘Did Mrs Trevelyan know what Laurence was doing?’

She shrugged.

‘A bit. He wouldn’t say much about it.’

‘About the missus?’

Tears glistened in her eyes, and she wrapped her arms around her middle.

‘I don’t care about her.’

She meant it. Her voice was low and hard.

‘We’re getting married.’

It came out like a challenge, or even a threat. Again, she wouldn’t meet my eye. I tried to smile my way back into her sight.

‘You’re going to have a family?’

She took a deep breath and nodded, held herself tighter. Of course, the father was Laurence. My first awful thought was foolish – the soirée was too recent for her to show.

‘What will you do?’

‘I can stay at the vicarage until my time. Laurence will have found a place …’

She was forced to stop, lips clenching together to keep from trembling.

On the platform, I took her hands in mine; they were limp and cold.

‘I’m happy for you, Mary, I really am.’

She looked up uncertainly. The old twitching whiskers, working me out. Tears pricked my own eyes as I smiled at her. I waited until she seemed to accept it and kissed her cheek.

‘Robert will find him. I’ll write when there’s any news at all.’

It wasn’t going to be good news, and I could see she knew it too. Rattling back to South London on the omnibus, all I could think was that if Laurence was coming back, he would have written himself.

Annie all but jumped on me when I returned, pulling me into the parlour and locking the door behind us as if an army of murderers was at my back.

‘Robert sent a message. You mustn’t go out again.’

She was bunching her apron up in both hands. I thought how it made her look like a child.

‘He spoke to someone from the City police. They found a body in the rubble where the street’s been knocked down. He thinks it’s your footman.’

Later

Robert came back just after six, asking if I was home before Annie had the door half open. The sight of me seemed to take the strength from his limbs. He collapsed into a chair without even a greeting and stared into the unlit fire. I sat down opposite.

‘Is it him?’

He ran a hand through his hair, then fumbled in the pocket of his waistcoat.

‘Do you recognise this?’

He passed me a man’s ring.

‘From the little finger of the right hand.’

It was heavier than I expected and horribly real. I felt my heart grow sick under the weight.

‘Mary would know for sure. But, yes, I think so.’

I looked at him and my voice collapsed to a reluctant whisper.

‘Did you see him?’

He nodded.

‘The body was still at the mortuary. It looked like him. What was left.’

I sat up so I could take a deeper breath and glanced at the kitchen door, ready to run if I had to retch.

‘What happened?’

He shook his head.

‘They can’t tell how he died. His injuries are great, but they might be from the wall falling in. There was certainly a fight, though, marks on his hands …’

He rubbed the knuckles of one of his.

‘But he’s been dead at least two weeks.’

‘Two weeks?’

‘At least.’

I saw Laurence’s wink as he turned away from me on the platform, how he had jogged back towards the street. He might have been dead before we even left England. Annie was standing back a little, like a spectator.

‘What does it mean then? Was he murdered?’

Robert shifted so his elbows rested on his knees. He rubbed his forehead.

‘Unknown, at the moment. But the body must have been hidden by someone. Unless they were outrageously careless about searching the buildings before knocking them down.’

I asked what had made him go back there.

‘A feeling. Your friend – Mary – said she hadn’t heard from him for a fortnight. That’s not very long after you left Serle Place.’

He slapped both hands hard and flat against his thighs and stood up, turning to face the mantelshelf. His body was strung rigid. Annie glanced at me.

‘You couldn’t have stopped it, Robert.’

He spoke to the wall, one hand over his mouth.

‘I gave my chief inspector the address. He passed on everything I said to Mr Gethin. I suspect he’s in his pay.’

I barely caught his next words.

‘I might as well have been working for him myself.’

He turned again, arms hanging by his sides.

‘I’ll try and find out more tomorrow.’

His eyes found mine. It was like looking into a bruise.

‘Leave London. Go to your parents, anywhere, at least until the trial’s over and everything’s calmed down.’

Annie nodded, stepping forward.

‘I’ll have Andrew go with you to the station when he comes off his round in the morning.’

I became aware of the cosy parlour, the polished furniture, the postcards above the fireplace. It’s better that I don’t stay here. I don’t want to bring any more trouble. They both looked relieved. I didn’t tell them that I can’t go home though, that I don’t trust my mother not to write to Gethin. At the door, Robert turned to say goodbye (in the corner of my eye I saw Annie slip into the kitchen). I don’t blame him anymore. I don’t even blame myself. Neither of us ever held enough of the pieces – we were always going to be looking at the wrong picture. I spoke first.

‘Thank you.’

He winced. Silence tightened between us. The furrows in his brow deepened.

‘You know, Harriet, I don’t know who’s guilty. I don’t even know how many crimes have been committed.’

For a moment, he looked like a bewildered child.

‘But they are going to get away with it.’

I lifted my hand and very lightly touched his birthmark. It wasn’t the sweetheart or even motherly gesture it sounds like. I think I wanted to touch him in the way one wants to touch a struck tuning fork. He took my hand in his and ran his thumb once over the rutted skin down the side of my finger. I thought I’d mind, but I didn’t. When he’d gone I found I was still holding Laurence’s ring in my other hand.

What do I know? What do I want? The truth? I think I am blind to it. I keep looking for what isn’t there. Scratching at these pages in snatched hours, borrowed corners – who is it for? If words are like stitches, I have been pushing the needle too far all this time – catching at myself with the thread without realising. If I try to stand and lay it aside, I can’t – it is stitched into me now. I turn Laurence’s ring over and over between my fingers in the candlelight. He risked everything to save us, and he didn’t run. I don’t know what else he did, but he didn’t run. It is enough – leaving London and Clara now is no more possible than stepping out of my own skin.

Tuesday, 25th June

Andrew escorted me all the way to the station and, maddeningly, into the carriage – I discovered the persistence in him that Robert so admires. I was able to slip out again while he was distracted by a talkative lady on the platform and made it to the Old Bailey in time to sit in the second row against the wall. It was a different crowd of spectators from yesterday, newly eager. I wondered if Clara could hear the whispers and rustlings above her, a gentle, deadly hissing. A newspaper I picked up on the way to the court reassured me I had missed nothing decisive from yesterday afternoon – more laying out of facts about the murder and Clara’s whereabouts. Today the lawyer was moving on to Clara’s character, calling witnesses to support his earlier conjuring of an unnatural witch.

I slapped a hand to my mouth, dread worming through my guts as Clockface stepped up. To my mind, she was sewn firmly into the fabric of Finton Hall like a monster in a nightmare – she should have melted into air beyond the gates. But there she was, looking as real and self-assured in front of the court as she ever had wielding a carving knife at the head of the servants’ table. I watched helplessly, swallowing down panic – a rabbit tricked by a stoat. No trace of the spitefulness and hate that laced every encounter with the missus. Not a word of French. Only a trustworthy servant and helpless looker-on to her master’s misfortune.

The truth, nothing but the truth. Cook and housekeeper to Mr Gethin for fifteen uneventful years before his marriage. A new mistress – difficult, peculiar even, but Sarah Clarkson had known worse. Until it was worse. Cruel and frequent dismissal of staff without notice – a lady’s maid, housemaids, parlour maids, pageboys. Managing the household had become impossible. Violent outbursts against everyone, particularly Mr Gethin – in front of the servants, no less – and damage done or threatened to his priceless collection. Her own portrait, a gift from him, she tried to stab and rend with a knife. Yes, a knife.

The lawyer took his time. Mrs Clarkson – the respectable upper servant, both remote and intimate in the lives of her betters – would linger in the minds of the jury, her words recalled as gospel. There was shifting about in the gallery as people left for fresher air or to reclaim their own lives and dramas; others took their place, whispering, rustling. I leaned forward to hear better.

‘Oh, everyone loved little Edward. He was a delightful baby …’

Clockface tried to smile but cut her voice off as if with emotion. The lawyer smiled in sympathy.

‘Everyone?’

She nodded.

‘The whole household …’

She hesitated, as if reluctant to say it.

‘All except his mother, Mrs Gethin. She wouldn’t have him with her.’

She delivered at least half her answers directly to the judge, drawn as always, I realised, to the most powerful man in the room. What she wouldn’t do for them, these untouchable gentlemen, to win their attention, their approval. Gethin must have seen that, her great need to feel raised up, but also her desire to smite those beneath – he had watched her bullying the knife-cleaner. She might have stumbled on his secrets as I had, or it’s possible he chose her because he sensed they were cut from the same cloth. Instead of shrinking in horror from the truth, she had readily embraced it, feeding her own lust for power from the source. Abominable kin, Clara had called them. The lawyer narrowed his eyes.

‘It is usual, is it not, for a lady of Mrs Gethin’s position to leave much of the care of her child to a nurse?’

Clockface looked troubled.

‘But she almost never saw him, nor entered the nursery and … well, we all thought that was for the best, to be truthful.’

‘Why is that, Mrs Clarkson?’

She turned again to the judge.

‘The times she did go up, she was violent. Frightened the wet nurse half out of her wits by throwing things about and smashing them. Gifts for the baby.’

There were gasps and mumblings in the gallery. My veins ran with ice. Lizzie must be waiting to come out and say it was all true. She wouldn’t even have to dissemble like the bitch in the dock. The lawyer raised his eyebrows, but Clockface continued unprompted.

‘She seemed to detest the child.’

‘Detest is a strong word.’

She nodded sadly.

‘We believed it was on account of her feelings for the poor mite’s father. I heard her say that any child of his would be a curse or cursed itself.’

There was more unrest in the gallery – someone tutted right next to me – and the judge called for quiet. I tried to imagine Clara saying that – was it possible she could have said that? Then a familiar, hated voice in my ear, like an echo.

‘Do you think that is true, Watkins?’

I started and went to jump up – even before turning to look at him – but Barrett grasped my wrist, hiding the movement by leaning into me.

‘Sit down.’

I pressed myself into the wall, head turned away.

‘You have a choice, Watkins.’

I don’t know how he made me hear him. He was stealthy as a spider in the corner of a web, wrapping its victim in invisible threads. His words, barely more than air, bound like iron.

‘Child stealing and murder.’

He tutted again.

‘The court won’t be merciful.’

My skin was clammy and cold at once. He cleared his throat softly.

‘Not with your history of violent acts.’

I jerked in my seat, but he leaned closer against me, breathing stuffily through his nose.

‘Nobody wants to believe a lady would kill her own child, do they, Watkins? But a servant?’

He breathed in as if considering possibilities.

‘A criminal character who savagely attacked a gentleman, half blinding him – who took advantage of her master’s absence and tricked her way into a position above her station, one who could manipulate a weak-minded mistress …’

Sweat pricked my upper lip. I couldn’t move.

‘Do you see, Watkins? Your policeman can be made to testify that he saw you. The landlady in Liverpool will be able to identify you.’

Clockface had disappeared from the court below, and I heard Lizzie being called. I knew she would innocently condemn me too, simply by telling the truth as she saw it. The door opened, but it wasn’t her that stepped through. A child I thought at first, and then the net that had been thrown over me cinched tight. Not ‘Lizzie’, of course. Lily. She was neatly and fashionably dressed – the clothes looked too new – her head held high. A boldness showed in her face, but there was a hardness there as well, a worn look. Barrett shifted his position slightly and nodded towards her.

‘Your fellow servants in particular remember the influence you enjoyed.’

Her voice was as deep as ever. She answered questions readily, with a note of insolence. I could feel the gallery liked her – a tiny queen holding court, conscious of her power. The story went the same way as before – a hard mistress, a lovely baby, disturbing behaviour. My voice trembled.

‘Why are you doing this?’

Barrett’s reply, when it came, was dry and flat.

‘You know why.’

Lily was doing everything she’d been told to – paid to, no doubt, though I could see that avenging herself on her former mistress was wages enough. It was all about Clara and Edward – she told the lawyer she’d heard things that froze her blood.

‘Such as?’

She looked straight at the dock, at Clara.

‘I heard her tell the master that she wished his son was born dead.’

The gallery gasped as one. Lily’s eyes flickered around the court. She was enjoying herself. In her own mind, she was beyond harm, making her own choices, but I knew that no matter whose clutches she had fallen into since leaving the charity, she was still as much Gethin’s victim as if she had stayed at Finton Hall. She would never know how Clara had tried to save her. Barrett’s voice was soft as silk.

‘I’m sure you value your life, Watkins. Why should you throw it away for a mistress who would happily watch you hang? Do you think she’d speak up to save you?’

Lily’s small chin lifted.

‘And I heard her telling her lady’s maid who she was very thick with that she’d as soon dash his brains out as own him for any of hers.’

The public broke into voice with chatter and outrage. Irritable calls for quiet came from the judges’ bench. I couldn’t breathe. Barrett leaned into me.

‘You have more sense than that, Watkins. Certainly more sense than that rutting dog of a footman.’

A coldness I’ve never felt before ran down my spine. Laurence. Signs of a fight, Robert had said, injuries that might have been caused by falling masonry – or not. Barrett was so close it was as if he was talking in my head. His next words chiselled themselves into my skull.

‘As I said, you have a choice. All you have to do is tell me, and I’ll let you walk away. Tell me where she’s hidden Edward Gethin.’

The court lurched sideways. I felt as if I was falling against the wall. My head whipped around to look at him. His eyes had narrowed so, they were all but shut. I could feel his will pressing against my mind, his certainty that I would answer. That I could answer. Something like laughter boiled up under my ribcage, hard and frantic. Clara was innocent. I turned front again. There were still shouts for calm. Lily was smiling to herself. The air couldn’t get into my lungs. Clara was innocent, and Gethin had lied about the dead baby being Edward. He didn’t know where Edward was. Barrett was still looking at me, eyes beginning to widen. My evident shock had tripped him. He could see in my face that I knew less about it than he did. But I was over the edge – nothing below me – and starting to fall. Gethin’s monstrous lie had conjured this courtroom, this crushing machinery of the law, the noose threatening Clara’s neck. Robert’s words rang through my head. They’re going to get away with it.

‘It’s not Edward! They’re lying!’

I was on my feet. The room swirled around me – faces turned my way, a mass of searching eyes from every direction.

‘It’s not Edward!’

I kept shouting it. The court had turned silent at first, but then voices from the bench started barking orders and the fuss around me started up again, louder than before. There were jeers to shut my mouth and counter cries to let me speak. Barrett had quickly stopped trying to tug me back down. Two constables were fighting their way across the gallery. I was yelling again that the baby wasn’t Edward when Clara stood up and turned to look at me. She had to arch her back slightly over the rail of the dock. Our eyes met and my words cut off as sure as if her hands were squeezing my throat. She looked at my frantic face with something like wonder, but it was her calmness that shut my mouth. It seemed to make its own space in the press of the court, as if we had fallen into a quiet spot. Her eyes were clear.

A constable reached me and began hauling me along the narrow space between benches.

‘You fool.’

Barrett hissed it at my feet, his sleek face roughed out of shape for the first time. Hands clutched at me as I stumbled along, some helping, some pawing at my body. I began to understand what I had done. Terror flew at me in black flurries, dreadful wings beating. The master would never let me walk away now. He always wins. Everyone in the gallery was staring at me, and every single eye seemed changed at once to the lover’s eye in the cabinet at Finton Hall – a hundred of them, brimming with hate and now also triumph, and all reflecting the image of a gallows. Barrett was right – they would not hesitate to hang a servant.

I thought my legs were going to give way beneath me when there was another shift in the attention of the court. A different voice had spoken that caused an instant hush below. The gallery caught it and leaned forward. Even the constable paused. Clara was still standing, facing the bench with her hands on the rail. Everyone was now staring at her. A judge ordered her to repeat what she had said.

‘I plead guilty.’

Her voice commanded the stunned court, as if a sentence was being passed on us. She spoke steadily and without emotion.

‘I killed my son. I put him in that carpet bag and threw it into the Thames.’

The silence continued for a beat, and then the gallery burst into an uproar. It was impossible to hear anything being said below, but I saw a figure rise slowly from the seats on the right. The master stood with one hand on the back of the bench in front of him, the other half raised towards the dock. To the rest of the court, his expression must have been exactly that of a man hearing such awful words from his wife. Shock, amazement, horror. But I saw what was rippling beneath it – rage. It writhed up from the depths of him. He had thought he could predict what Clara would do, but he was wrong. With her false confession, she was condemning herself, but she was also defeating him. To the world, Edward was now officially dead, forever out of his reach. I watched fury filling his eyes like blood, hot and blinding, and understood that Clara had won.

Wednesday, 26th June

She has escaped hanging. Mrs T returned to the court to hear the sentence this morning while I waited in her hotel room. Yesterday, she was already in the street when the constables dragged me down from the gallery. News of what was happening inside had spilled out of the building already, and the pavement was full of people pushing towards the door. Somehow, she pulled me free and into a cab.

At her hotel, I sat on a dusty chaise longue and told her about Barrett, about the night in Serle Place and how I hadn’t known for certain the baby wasn’t Edward until now. She kept saying, ‘Oh my dear,’ and the stars creased around her eyes. I am glad Clara has her for a friend.

‘Do you know where Edward is? Did she tell you?’

She shook her head and picked at the fingers of her glove.

‘Clara wouldn’t tell me her plans. She thought it safer. I …’

She stopped playing and yanked the glove off, finger by finger.

‘I couldn’t believe what I was reading in the newspapers.’

I saw she had also been forced to ask herself terrible questions. She had seen Edward’s blood on her own hands too. I leaned forward.

‘She has put him somewhere. I think only Laurence knew.’

She looked up, abruptly eager.

‘Mary has been beside herself about him. Where is he?’

I told her what Robert had told me. Afterwards, she was quiet for a long time. I took Laurence’s ring from my pocket and held it out to her.

‘Mary should have this.’

She took it without speaking. Every now and then she gave a little shake of her head and a corner of her mouth twitched.

‘That dreadful man. To think he is an MP.’

I needed her to come back to me. I wanted her to have all the answers.

‘Why did he say the murdered baby was Edward?’

She shook her head again.

‘I can only imagine to force Clara’s hand, so she would have to give up the child, and he could say he was mistaken in his grief. Who knows what depths such a man may sink to? He must never have believed she would let it go to trial, that she would sacrifice herself like this to keep the child safe from him. He underestimated her.’

She smoothed her skirt over her knees in a deliberate, careful movement. Her voice seemed trapped in her throat.

‘As did I.’

She sent for Tabby, who arrived this morning and waited with me through the terrible hours Mrs T was in court. I wrote to Annie and Robert, but otherwise sat without employment, unable to speak. Tabby sewed and filled the silence with nothing very much, trivial news from the vicarage. She was full of scorn for Mr Trevelyan.

‘He pretends he can’t see what’s right in front of him. Won’t read the papers, won’t look at Mary, who’s clearly growing a child right under his roof, and he acts as if his wife has come to London for the shops. He complained that Gertrude’s jam was too sweet though – we had to scrape her off the kitchen floor.’

Mrs T’s knock came just then. After all the waiting, my courage failed at the last moment. It was Tabby who trampled over her dropped sewing and grappled with the lock. Mrs T was talking before the door even opened. Clara’s lawyer had marshalled doctors and pushed for the court to find her insane. She was found guilty of murder but escaped the noose. As Mrs T said, a woman killing her baby is shocking, but putting a noose around a lady’s neck is an even greater affront to the natural order of things. The judge, at least, couldn’t stomach it. He has sentenced her to be locked up in an asylum.

Thursday, 27th June

We were allowed to see her in her cell this morning before she was moved. I was frightened of how she might be, imagining dark wells of fury or despair, but she rose to greet us in the stony, narrow room as if we were old friends entering the drawing room of Finton Hall. I was the one who fell into a passion, throwing my arms around her and sobbing. She pressed me to her until I had recovered, then made me sit with a handkerchief on the hard platform that served as a bed. It was the handkerchief I had embroidered with her fake initials for America. Mrs T told her about Barrett threatening me in court (but not about Laurence). She did her best to make Clara change her mind and tell the truth about Edward.

‘Don’t call him that.’

It was the only sharp word I heard from her. She quickly softened and smiled.

‘Edward is a Gethin name.’

They regarded each other silently for a moment, and then Mrs T nodded faintly. She pressed her lips to Clara’s cheek and stepped as far away as the cell would allow. Clara sat down next to me and took my hands.

‘If I told them where he is, it wouldn’t save me from the asylum. Do you understand that?’

I nodded, sickened. It was true. She had done enough to be considered dangerous and unnatural by every innocent and blinkered looker-on. I hated everyone then. Not just the guilty – the master and his lot – but every Gertrude and Mr Trevelyan who sat so complacently on their sluggish morals.

‘It will be my consolation that Ralph will never know where he is.’

Her eyes bored into mine, burning away my thoughts and making me sit up. She held my gaze.

‘I don’t mind what he becomes, rich or poor, so long as he is free of his parentage.’

My heart started to quicken, already beginning to understand. Clara leaned forward and whispered in my ear. It took few words, less than a minute to say. She drew back enough to watch my face.

‘Do you understand?’

My hands gripped hers so tightly it must have hurt. She was staring at me intently.

‘Will you do this for me?’

I nodded. The enormity of it rolled out, vast, a new landscape.

‘But you … You can’t spend your life in an asylum.’

I was fighting to breathe again. The lines and planes of her face seemed to grow sharper, as if a mental struggle – an act of will – had brought her more into being.

‘Why not? When I can do no more, and my son is safe? I shall always have that.’

I saw a thought hesitate behind her eyes. When she spoke, her words faltered.

‘It is true, Harriet, that I found him – I found his existence – difficult. After he came, I was ill – I have never known such darkness. I knew by then what kind of man his father is. To have brought another life into that hell was more than I could look at. I saw only that my own life was over. Ralph would take the music from me somehow, and I knew I wouldn’t survive it. When I decided to escape, it was blindly, as a creature simply fighting to save itself. I would have left my child behind. I would. But Harriet …’

It was her hands gripping mine now.

‘That would have killed me too in the end. There is no doubt. It wouldn’t have mattered if I were singing in the finest theatres in the world. You made me see that. Reading your diary, I knew I would never have any life at all if I left him for that monster to corrupt. That’s why I kept reading your diary; it was my guiding light.’

Her eyes filled with tears and something desperate.

‘I never wanted to be a mother. I didn’t want a child with us in America.’

It was as if she was pleading with me to believe her.

‘But I love him. I love my son.’

She paused. The words seemed to summon strength, renewed certainty.

‘I do this for him willingly.’

It was clear that she had decided, but I still couldn’t let it go.

‘What about your life now, and everything you planned for? To be shut up and locked away …’

My voice broke off. She smiled, squeezed my fingers.

‘But don’t you remember, Harriet? They also serve who only stand and wait.’

I saw she was beyond me. There was only one question left, and the words came thick on my tongue.

‘His name, Clara? What do you call him?’

She hesitated, then touched my cheek gently with her fingers.

‘You decide. I know you will choose well.’

I don’t know how I took my leave of her. When I was at the door, she called me back, almost timidly. Her expression had changed. It was trembling, full of light.

‘I sang well? Did I not?’

There were tears in her eyes. She smiled hopefully, like a nervous child. I remembered seeing the heavens and mountaintops when I first heard her, the way she had flung her voice over fields and hedgerows on the way to the vicarage like springtime itself, the thousands in Castle Garden whose arrival in a new land would forever ring with the beauty of her song. I told her all this in whispers, holding her close to me, until the warder shouted, and we had to go.