Behind the Sun (42 page)

James crossed the courtyard and entered the hospital, looking for Harrie. Under his arm he carried a parcel containing a small, good-quality winsey blanket, a gift for Rachel’s infant, due, he knew, in the next week or so. He hadn’t a clue what to buy but the woman in the shop had told him he couldn’t go wrong with a blanket. He was sure she’d thought he was the father, especially when he’d mentioned the Female Factory, which had been rather embarrassing.

He couldn’t see Harrie in the larger of the hospital rooms, but Sidney Sharpe, doing his rounds, would know where she was.

‘Mr Sharpe, good afternoon.’

His fingers still pressed against the wrist of his patient, Sidney Sharpe nodded. He was counting, so James waited until he had finished.

‘I’m looking for Harriet Clarke,’ James said when he had.

‘I believe she’s in the store room.’

‘Thank you.’

Mr Sharpe waved him closer. ‘Just a moment, Mr Downey, before you speak with her I should tell you that her friend Rachel Winter died yesterday.’

James felt as though he’d been struck very hard in the face.

‘During accouchement. I thought you should be aware.’

‘I — yes — thank you.’ James blinked, feeling a lump in his throat the size of an apple and hot tears behind his eyes. ‘Cause of death?’ he managed to ask.

Mr Sharpe shrugged, though not without sympathy. ‘Not entirely sure. As usual I will be entering “childbirth” on the death certificate. Apoplexy, perhaps?’

Harrie was indeed in the store room, or what passed for the store room; James had noted during earlier visits there wasn’t much in it. She was sitting on the floor rolling up laundered bandages. He knocked and when she looked up he was shocked at the state of her face. She had been crying so much her puffy eyes were half closed, her nose was bright red, a rash was developing beneath it, and even her mouth looked swollen.

His heart swelled painfully and instantly he was back sitting in the grubby chair in the foyer of the King Hotel, reading the letters from Beatrice and Victor. He knew how Harrie was feeling, but he didn’t know what to do about it.

‘Sidney Sharpe just told me,’ he said at last.

Harrie nodded and returned to her bandage-rolling.

‘I’m so very sorry, Harrie, I really am.’

Another nod.

‘Do Sarah and Friday know yet?’

Quick shake of the head.

James wondered if he should just go. But there was something he had to know. ‘The child: was it healthy otherwise?’

At last, a spark of life: Harrie gave a watery smile. ‘Do you want to see her?’

James almost fainted — he’d just assumed! He felt an idiotic grin stretch across his face. ‘I would very much like to see her, Harrie, thank you.’

Harrie led him through the hospital to a small room filled with pregnant women and new mothers. And there was Janie Braine, sitting on a chair with her child Rosie in a basket at her feet and a swaddled infant at her breast.

‘Hello, Mr Downey,’ she said. ‘Come to see the little one?’

James noted that Janie’s poor, unattractive face didn’t look much brighter than Harrie’s, but at least now she had a replacement for Willie, whom James had known she’d loved.

‘Fancy a cuddle?’ The infant’s mouth made a popping noise as Janie disconnected her from her nipple and handed her up to James.

To a round of somewhat sarcastic applause from the other women, he settled the child in the crook of his arm, grateful he was accustomed to juggling Beatrice’s children, and looked down at her. Given how beautiful her mother had been, she wasn’t actually very pretty. She had large, round, protuberant eyes that were almost black, a tiny pursed mouth, a scrawny neck and a shock of wheat-coloured hair. In fact, she looked a lot like a pink-and-gold monkey.

‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ Harrie said.

‘Very much so,’ James agreed. ‘Does she have a name yet?’

‘Charlotte. That was Rachel’s choice.’ Harrie fiddled with the swaddling cloth around the baby’s head. ‘Or Lucas, if it was a boy. After his father.’

There was a flat silence.

Harrie said, ‘In the end, Keegan did kill her, didn’t he?’

‘Where is the body now?’ James asked.

Sidney Sharpe dried his hands on a towel. ‘In the mortuary.’

‘Will you be performing a post-mortem?’

‘To what end?’

‘I for one would be interested in knowing what actually caused her death. You said yourself you couldn’t be sure.’

‘I have never performed a post-mortem on a Factory patient. There has been the occasional inquest after a death, but to be frank those deaths have never attracted enough import to warrant a post-mortem examination.’

‘Would you have any objections if I did?’

‘A post-mortem? On Rachel Winter’s body?’

‘Yes.’

Mr Sharpe stared at James. ‘Where would you do it?’

‘In the mortuary, I suppose.’

‘Then you’d better hurry up. The hearse is arriving at four o’clock.’

The Factory mortuary was located just inside the outer wall, a short distance from the gatehouse. The interior was very cool, as was intended, and dark, no windows having been built into the structure’s walls. James lit all four lamps, as well as two borrowed from the gatehouse. The combined odour and smoke emitted in the airless environment was a little distracting, but helped to disguise the faint but distinct whiff of decomposition coming from the mortuary’s three occupants.

In the centre of the chamber was a waist-high wooden bench on which to rest caskets when corpses were being collected. James had covered it with an oilcloth to collect any body fluids, though he was anticipating little mess, given that Rachel’s heart had stopped beating almost twenty-four hours earlier.

He laid the body out, firmly reminding himself that this was simply a cadaver, an empty shell, that the bright, headstrong, troubled girl he had known as Rachel Winter had gone. The arms were crossed over the chest; as rigor mortis was still evident there was little he could do to alter that, but in any case he doubted he would have need to investigate the chest cavity.

The body was dressed in a clean, pressed shift and had been carefully washed, by Harrie no doubt, the jaw tied shut with a length of muslin knotted on top of the head. The eyes were closed but the pennies had slipped off and become caught up in the folds of the shroud. He would reposition them when he’d finished, although no doubt the undertakers would steal them before the body went into its grave.

James removed the muslin strip, gathered together the hair, still spectacular even in death, and arranged it so it all hung over the end of the bench, then draped a cloth over the body’s neck and chest, tucking it beneath the shoulders. He opened Mr Sharpe’s case of surgical implements and selected a scalpel. Working carefully but deftly he cut around the hairline from one side of the jaw to the other, the cold, waxy flesh parting bloodlessly, then pulled hard on the scalp, applying gentle pressure to muscles unwilling to relax, and flipped it back to expose the skull. Leaving the scalp still attached he scraped away the tissue covering the bone, reached for the drill and made a small indentation in the skull on the right side near the top. He then fitted the point of the centre-pin of Mr Sharpe’s trephine into the dent, lowered the trephine’s crown and started turning. It took him less than twenty minutes, but not operating on a live patient he wasn’t having to employ any finesse. When he felt the teeth of the crown break through he removed it, picked out the round section of bone and put it aside. Moving a lamp closer he took a pair of long-handled tweezers and began to poke around.

As he left the mortuary the undertaker was just arriving, preparing to back his black wagon up to the door.

James remembered he’d left his gift in the store room and fetched it before he found Harrie again, this time kneeling in the kitchen garden collecting herbs for poultices.

‘This is for Charlotte,’ he said.

‘Oh, I thought you’d gone. Thank you.’

‘Harrie, I performed a quick post-mortem investigation of Rachel’s body and —’

Slowly, Harrie stood up. ‘You did what?’

Perhaps she didn’t understand the terminology. ‘A post-mortem. An internal investigation of the possible cause of death.’

Such an expression of revulsion crossed Harrie’s face that James thought she was about to faint. He reached out to take her arm,
but when she slapped him viciously away he realised her horror had suddenly turned into virulent hostility.

‘You went into that…charnel house, while she was all alone, and
cut
into
her
? That’s
revolting
! How
could
you?! For God’s sake, she’s dead now, couldn’t you have just left her alone?’

James had never seen Harrie so angry. Her face was as white as marble and her whole body shaking. She swung her basket of herbs at him and he only just managed to dodge it.

‘You’re as bad as Keegan! You’re
disgusting
!’ She burst into wild tears. ‘Get away from me, go on! Get out!’

Stunned at how quickly everything had gone so terribly wrong, he turned and walked away, barely noticing Janie as she crossed his path, heading for the garden. His face burning, he made his way to the front courtyard to the internal gates, passed through and told the porter to fetch his horse. As he waited he heard the sound of running feet and whipped around, heart thudding, but it was only Janie.

‘You’re a bloody idiot, you are,’ she said, and thrust a note at him. ‘This is Harrie’s letter to Friday and Sarah, about Rachel. There’s no post today. The least you can do is deliver it yourself. Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?’

And as she marched off he asked himself the same question.

Friday sat in the visitor’s room, staring down the turnkey. The mot had a moustache and could do with a good splash of arsenic and quicklime to get rid of it.

James Downey had come to Mrs Hislop’s yesterday evening with Harrie’s letter; Jack, the idiot, had sent him down the alleyway thinking he was a customer because he’d been asking for her. He’d stood in the reception room, his face all stiff and his hands shaking, and handed her the letter, and when she’d read it she’d nearly hit the deck. He’d grabbed her, sat her on the sofa, said he was sorry about ten times, told someone to get her a cup of tea, then buggered off.

The pain in her chest and throat had been so awful she’d thought she was going to die. She’d felt like she couldn’t breathe, as though she were drowning on dry land. It had been like
daggers
. Mrs H had bunged her a full tumbler of brandy, given her a big, bosomy, perfumed hug and the night off, which had been really good of her, and she’d gone out and got on the gin. She couldn’t remember much, but she knew she’d been round to see Sarah, climbing over the fence and banging on the back door and yelling her name. Sarah had come down and then that Adam and that Esther cow had come out and there’d been arguing and shouting and the next thing she’d been in the Bird-in-Hand and this morning she’d woken up in the stable behind the Siren next to young Jimmy Johnson, who’d got a hell of a fright. She’d had an almighty headache and felt sick, but gin in her tea had fixed that.

Sarah had arrived just before she’d set out this morning, breathless from running, red-eyed and spitting nails, to say Esther wouldn’t give her the day off to go out to Parramatta to see Harrie, the baby or Rachel’s body.

So Friday had had to come out by herself.

The door to the visitor’s room opened and Harrie came in, looking as shattered as Friday expected. They hugged fiercely.

‘You can go now,’ Friday said to the turnkey.

‘Not likely,’ the woman said. ‘It’s not even a proper visiting day. You could be passing contraband.’

Friday opened her purse and offered a sovereign. The turnkey took it and left.

Sitting down at the table, Harrie reached for Friday’s hands.

‘Our beautiful girl,’ Friday said, her voice cracking.

Harrie nodded and they held on tight, crying, not caring that they were being ugly and messy, because it was only them.

After a while, Friday blew her nose and cleared her throat. ‘What happened?’

Harrie pulled her own handkerchief from her sleeve. ‘She had one of her headaches, a bad one. Mr Sharpe doesn’t really know but he thinks the strain of pushing…’ She gestured at her head. ‘It may have been too much.’

‘Was it quick?’

‘Not really. She suffered, Friday, and there wasn’t anything we could do and she refused the laudanum anyway and it went on for hours. I’m not even sure she was aware of the baby.’

They wept again at the thought of Rachel’s pain.

‘Were you allowed to lay her out?’ Friday said at last.

Harrie shook her head. ‘Not properly. All we could do was wash her and put her in her good shift, and tie her jaw and close her eyes. Janie helped. And then they took her away to the mortuary.’

Friday frowned. ‘But what about…?’

‘Mrs Dick said the undertaker would do all that.’

‘But that’s
our
job! The people who love her.’

Fresh tears trickled hotly down Harrie’s cheeks. ‘I know it is, Friday. I
know
that.’

When Harrie’s father, William, had died she had helped her mother lay out his body. They had bathed and shaved him, tied his jaw, plugged every orifice to prevent leakage, bound his elbows, wrists and ankles to keep his limbs straight, dressed him in his best clothes, laid him in his coffin and closed his eyes with pennies. There had been other essential tasks to see to as well. The clock had been stopped at the moment of his death to avoid bad luck, and Harrie had run down to the church to have the bell rung to announce his passing. The only looking glass they’d owned had been covered with black crepe to ensure her father’s soul would not be trapped in the house and prevented from crossing to the other side, and the doors and windows had been unlocked for the same reason.

There had been the funeral feast to arrange, with a lot of help from neighbours, and Harrie and her mother had sat constantly
with William Clarke’s corpse in their tiny parlour for three days and three nights until the burial. When the time had come his coffin had been carried out of the house feet first to keep his spirit from looking back and enticing other family members into the grave.