The Painted Cage (10 page)

Reggie was busy before the mirror, brushing his
sideburns,
smoothing his hair. ‘I must go back again to the club, they’re waiting for me. I’ll be late. Will you mind a quiet dinner by yourself?’ His voice was coaxing. She knew he already planned his success in a universe far from her.

‘Of course not,’ she told him, glad suddenly to be alone. He smiled at her in the mirror without turning his head. This evening was only a foretaste, she thought, of a pattern that would dominate their lives. Reggie was now bound to the welfare of others, to their convenience and
command. He changed, and she brushed his coat and then watched from the window as he strode from the hotel and turned in at the club next door. He stopped to wave, then disappeared. She continued to sit, her chin on her hands at the windowsill. Below, the street was silent and the sea beyond dark against the lights of fishing boats and liners. The waves slapped against the wall of the Bund, a comforting sound, unalterable and consistent.

She had no idea what time it was when Reggie at last returned. She awoke to his weight flopping down, fully dressed, beside her. Beyond the window the light was grey, and there were sounds outside as if the day already stirred. Reggie caressed her with desire. She pulled back as she always did now, frightened for the child.

‘It does no harm, they say it does no harm,’ Reggie whispered. His chin was rough with stubble, his voice blurred by drink. At her resistance he pushed her away.

‘As you wish, then. There is no need; I can have my fill in Yokohama.’ His voice slurred into sleep, and soon she heard him snore. She felt relief, but instead of finding sleep again she lay awake until light crept across the floor.

Mrs Easely had not lied about the dearth of vacant houses on the Bluff. They found several in the Settlement,
unsuitable
to their status. On the Bluff there was only one to be considered. An agent took them to it on a day
miserable
with rain.

The house was not as Amy had imagined any home on the Bluff to be. It was a green-painted, two storeyed clapboard affair in an unprepossessing hollow. It was narrow and awkward; the garden was tiny with a ragged pine and loquat trees and a few azalea bushes. The kitchen and the servants’ quarters were separate from the house. There was a stable for two horses. The rooms were not large, and had a sadness about them that no efforts would correct. There was no dressing room for Reggie. But the glassed-in verandah that adjoined the main bedroom could be used as such, suggested the agent who showed them the place.

‘Always a trouble to find accommodation up here. Wait
on in the hotel, I would suggest. The spring always sees a good turnover, much more on the market then. They’re all settled in for the winter now.’

She could wait no longer, Amy decided. Already she was awkward and heavy; bending and stretching were an effort. There was no choice. It did not help, she thought, that they saw the house in rain. The large bay window, set at the top with a frieze of stained glass, could be a small conservatory and the balcony of the drawing room was both southerly and broad. It would have to do.

She would have liked a house like Mabel’s; charming, white and ivory-covered with turrets and gables, lawns and shady trees. Mabel’s conservatory was set with plants thicker than a jungle. And within the house her taste, perfect in itself, was unrestricted by the meagre thoughts of meagre people, bogged down within finance. Mabel’s visions took wing upon Patrick Rice’s easy fortune. There were rooms of precious chinoiserie, there were carpets from China and Persia, a study with books and leather chairs where Patrick Rice relaxed, surrounded by
paintings
and photographs. Mabel’s boudoir was a pink satin world of extravagant femininity. It was impossible to think Mabel Rice could live with less.

Amy looked at the peeling green paint of the house before her. Even if the home of her dreams were available, they did not have the money to acquire it or to pay the rent. In a way, Amy thought carefully, it was all for the best. Considering the need to move somewhere quickly, so obvious to all, and the lack of any house but this, no one – not even Mabel – need know they had not the money to hope at this moment for better.

But the house was little different in or out of rain. The only bonus was to discover on a sunny day, from the bedroom window, the summit of Mount Fuji. Mabel Rice was silent as she walked about the empty rooms.

‘There was nothing else available,’ explained Amy. ‘You know I can’t wait, not in my condition. I can’t have a baby in a hotel. It will have to do to settle us in. I’ve no choice but to be practical.’ Amy did not lie.

Mabel Rice sighed and threw up her hands, she wore
a hat made entirely of bows. ‘What can you do with a monstrosity like this? I would never have considered it.’ She sounded annoyed. Her ingenuity would be taxed to make even a little of a place like this. It went without saying that she would supervise the house.

‘We’ll have to go down to Bentendori and to Arthur Bond’s and Lane Crawford tomorrow. You’ll have to place furniture orders quickly, or even buy secondhand. There’s always a lot of that around in a community with so many comings and goings,’ Mabel snapped. She had hoped Amy would establish herself upon the Bluff with more aplomb than this green and lugubrious house. Still, no one could deny the dearth of houses and the need of the poor woman to move somewhere quickly. Nothing need reflect upon Mabel.

Slowly, in the weeks ahead, the house began to take some shape. Whatever shape it could, as Mabel caustically remarked. Windows were draped and walls recovered, paint smelled throughout the place. The house consumed both women like a benighted cause, cementing them in intimacy. Amy felt already established in Yokohama through the aura of Mabel Rice.

At last the house was ready. The Redmores moved in and took up their position upon the Bluff in a neat, green residence in a dull cul-de-sac that left much to be desired. But the best had been made of a bad situation, they moved in on a wave of pride and prepared for the pleasures that were now their right as residents of the Bluff.

The
Japan
Weekly
Mail
summary of news:

Once more the court room was packed; many had come from Tokyo. It was the thing to attend. Gentlemen who could not be present sent their wives instead. Seats were cordoned off for ambassadors and dignitaries. The secret darkness of reality was irresistible. Everyone knew the Redmores; it was close enough to be indecent. It made you feel sick, said Winnie Ewart in the Ladies’ Reading Room. She had stamped out a book for Mrs Redmore a week before the murder. But they did not yet know if it was murder, reminded Miss Brittain, the missionary. God’s ways are wondrous, sighed the Reverend Percival; the woman was a faithless flirt and it was terrible to hear
the details, like the madness of the heathen. He hardly knew how to sit in court. She had eaten roast beef at the Redmores’ and there had been also an ice cream bombe, Mrs Figdor remembered. The food seemed to lie in her stomach still. A grand chap, Reggie Redmore, they agreed at the club, but if you forgot to respect her as the man’s wife it was easy to see what Mrs Redmore was. Gossip stopped bridge parties and legation balls, men took extra time at the club to discuss it, women affected a shudder as they fingered a glove, waiting for more news. Exasperated hostesses declared the topic taboo, a special card game was introduced at tea parties to divert the conversation. The train from Tokyo was packed as the trial began. In faraway London,
The
Times
and the
News
of
the
World
were reporting the case in full. During the long weeks of arrest in her room at the Consulate jail, such excitement meant little to Amy. Movement stilled as she entered the court and took her chair again.

The prosecution had been through and through endless medical evidence. They determined what Amy already knew, the presence of arsenic in Reggie. The grisly details of dissected viscera continued until her stomach turned at the mention of livers weighed, bladders spliced, intestines cleaned and measured. And worse – these parts belonged to poor Reggie for whom, in spite of all, she wished no such gruesome revenge. In the end they established, to her surprise, the presence of lead and some specks upon the stomach wall of solid white arsenic. This was
something
apart from the Fowler’s Solution of Arsenic Reggie had taken for years and that, before his death, Amy had openly bought for him. She had seen then nothing to hide. The traces of Fowler’s Solution found in Reggie were determined insufficient to account alone for death. Jack Easely fought hard to establish that Amy had never bought the white arsenic so mysteriously found in Reggie’s guts.

Dr Dixon had performed the post-mortem. He was a narrow-shouldered man with a face of mournful, kindly folds. He had no patience for the way Robert Russell set effusively about work that might end in a hanging.
He braced himself for the sarcasm favoured by the Crown.

Then the question of arsenic tolerance comes in. Do you know of cases?’ Robert Russell’s eyes were steely.

‘Facts are plentiful,’ Dr Dixon replied, looking across at the woman in the dock in whose face he could define no evil, ‘to show that in some persons arsenic can be increased slowly until ordinarily poisonous doses can then be taken with impunity. I almost know of a case of tolerance to Fowler’s Solution of Arsenic, because I know the person and I know of his marvellous tolerance to other narcotics and am told on the best authority that it extends to Fowler’s Solution.’ Dr Dixon rambled on. The
prosecution
did not interrupt.

‘Have you heard of a well-authenticated case of
tolerance
to Fowler’s Solution?’ Robert Russell leaned forward with an inquiring smile.

‘No, I have not,’ Dr Dixon was forced to admit.

‘You don’t know of cases of addiction to Fowler’s Solution?’ Mr Russell echoed, his smile gone.

‘No.’

‘Are they common?’ snapped Mr Russell.

‘I do not
know
of cases,’ Dr Dixon repeated.

‘Except the case you have stated?’ Robert Russell drew back scornfully.

‘That’s the only case I know, but since this trial began I have heard of men making the wildest statements as to the quantity of arsenic they have taken….’

‘You are not asked for hearsay,’ Judge Bowman
interceded.
Mr Russell nodded in agreement. Dr Dixon exuded quiet misery. No mention had been made by the
prosecution
of his evidence at the inquest. This was left to Jack Easely to resurrect in his cross-examination. But first came the need to chastise Dr Dixon’s dislike of his putrid work.

‘You were unassisted in your post-mortem work, I believe?’ Jack Easely asked.

‘Entirely.’ Dr Dixon nodded.

‘If you had not been so utterly exhausted by your work,
as you told the court earlier today in previous
examination,
would you have proceeded to determine the amount of lead in the body, which you have failed to do?’

‘Yes, I would have collected and determined the
quantity
and the arsenic too, and tested it afterwards.’

‘If not weary of your work?’ Jack Easely pressed.

‘Yes, I would have carried the case further if I had the curiosity, but I had unpleasant matters about my
laboratory
and my colleagues had to be considered.’

They battled on to establish that the deposits of lead and white arsenic were the causes of death, not the Fowler’s Solution Amy had been seen to buy.

‘The deceased died on Thursday, 22 October. Severe stomach irritation first manifested itself on Monday 19 October. Is it possible that white arsenic was taken on the 19th when this condition appeared?’ Jack Easely asked.

‘It is possible.’

‘In that case, the white arsenic specks discovered in the post-mortem could have remained unabsorbed until the time of his death?’ Mr Easely questioned.

Judge Bowman looked down with raised eyebrows. ‘If this white arsenic was taken on the 19th, might death not have resulted until the 22nd?’ he asked for himself.

‘Death might not have resulted until it did.’ Dr Dixon nodded in confirmation.

He was pleased to be led at last by Mr Easely to his evidence given in the inquest, to prove the case for
eccentricity.
In his profession he saw the oddest exceptions to the rules.

‘There are peoples who have made their fortunes by arsenic, fire-eaters and arsenic-eaters, who swallow the arsenic and have the power of receiving it. And the case of the Styrian peasants is well authenticated. They take dry white arsenic in large amounts to benefit their
respiratory
powers and for the pleasurable effect upon the sensations. They can take from four to five grains of white arsenic in a lump.’

‘Is there any reason why one who is not a Styrian
should not be able to accustom himself to swallow the same dose?’ Mr Easely inquired.

‘No, not that I am aware of, except for want of
knowledge,’
Dr Dixon replied. Jack Easely nodded in satisfaction.

Amy felt more hopeful today. The months since Reggie’s death seemed to her longer than her life. They kept her now at the Consulate, in a tolerable room, not in the jail like a common criminal. A warder sat in the corridor, the children came most days. Time seemed starkly divided. By day was the endless public scourging, in the dark the pain of a private torture that never let her sleep. In her dreams Yokohama appeared as ripe and overblown as the soft-fleshed fruit of the loquat tree in the garden of her home. A flesh so fragile it must be picked and eaten before it was pocked to ugly brown sores by the birds that settled on it. They oozed those sores the summer through and the maggots quickly claimed them. At other times, as she lay on the narrow bed, Yokohama dried to a landscape of dusty old bones. A sour wind blew about the Bluff. She awoke in a sweat to strands of grey light in the room and wondered which was real, the Yokohama she had known or the dreams that consumed her nights. She remembered again that first ride upon the Bluff with Mrs Easely; she remembered Mount Fuji, intractable and waiting. Yokohama seemed then a fantasy, evolved that they might flirt, like sunlight on a lake, mercurial as fire, of no more substance than a shadow. Beneath the light, beneath the sweet air, there was always the stench of death. They had taken no notice of it. Upon the Bluff fantasy was the condition of life, the contagion of their spirits.

Next, Dr Monroe took the stand and confirmed for Robert Russell a conversation he had had with Reggie in the spring of 1893, when Amy had returned for a time to Somerset.

‘Mr Redmore confessed to me he had taken arsenic on account of his complaint. He stated to me that it relieved the pain of stricture of the urinary tract for which he had come to consult me.’

Whatever the motive of Robert Russell in establishing this fact for the prosecution, Jack Easely was quick to follow through in a volley of neat smashes.

‘Did you treat him for anything else?’ He asked at once in cross-examination.

‘Am I obliged to answer, my lord?’ Dr Monroe looked up at Judge Bowman in annoyance.

‘Yes, I think so. I suppose so.’ Judge Bowman was hesitant, disliking the question as much as Dr Monroe, nervous of what might follow. Jack Easely stood his ground. Dr Monroe stretched his neck within his collar.

‘He consulted me about an attack of gonorrhoea.’ It was not the kind of confidence one made public about a gentleman one knew. Dr Monroe clenched his teeth.

The court was silent, Amy blushed, Jack Easely cleared his throat. The atmosphere stretched tight as skin upon a drum. People looked up, their voyeuristic thoughts piled about Amy until she felt naked and exposed. There were more men than Reggie who suffered from excursions into Yokohama’s pleasure quarter. Nor was she alone in the reaping of unwanted gifts passed casually and callously on. Although known widely as a good sport, Reggie never laid claim to being a good man. But a lack of virtue in Reggie was not counted as a fault. For his sex there were many words to describe the failing, each condoning in discretion or humour all that was damned in her.

In comparison she had been called flighty, she had been called shallow, she had even been called a prostitute. She lowered her eyes and remembered what the newspapers had said about her. ‘Mrs Redmore is not what the world calls a “good woman”.’ “Mrs Redmore does not belong to that class of woman – let us hope they are largely in the majority – whose moral fibre is proof against the disintegrating influence of the major lex ….’ And this from a publication that stood up for all it thought she was denied. What was said by some others she had put out of her mind. Certainly, in their terms, she was not
good
.
Yet she was no different from so many. Mabel Rice, Enid Desmond and Lettice Dunn sat before her in court, hands clasped demurely, virtue for today tied tighter than their corsets. They watched her – even Mabel – as if she were different. She twisted her rings and looked down at her lap.

Jack Easely continued with Dr Monroe. ‘When he told you he found relief from the pain of stricture with arsenic, had you any reason to disbelieve him?’

‘No, it was not in my experience, but I knew that arsenic was
par
excellence
the specific for neuralgia. I believe it might relieve the pain of stricture.’

The presence of stricture might cause pain in urination?’

‘Undoubtedly,’ Dr Monroe confirmed.

‘Is pain in urination not also a symptom of arsenic poisoning?’

‘Yes.’ Dr Monroe nodded again.

‘Might pain, then, if actually proceeding from arsenic poisoning, be easily mistaken for that produced by
stricture
of the urinary tract?’

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘Is this really so?’ Judge Bowman interrupted with an annoyed frown.

Jack Easely nodded to him. ‘Yes. So if the deceased took arsenic habitually over many years to relieve the pain of stricture, he might unwittingly be inducing the very pain he was taking arsenic in the hope of
stopping
?’

‘He might do. Increasing it, he might be bringing pain about,’ Dr Monroe answered in sudden interest.

‘And finding no alleviation he would be apt to take larger doses in the hope of stopping it?’ Jack Easely pressed on.

‘Oh yes. It is a possibility, certainly,’ Dr Monroe agreed.

There was a stir throughout the court. Robert Russell was grim, his face hard as statuary. Jack Easely turned to glance at Amy. She returned a slight smile at this success,
but knew as well as he that whatever they won this round might be destroyed in the next. What defence could she offer for Dicky Huckle? All Yokohama waited to hear.