Things in Jars Read online

  Jess Kidd was brought up in London as part of a large family from County Mayo and has been praised for her original fictional voice. Her first novel, Himself, was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards in 2016 and she was winner of the Costa Short Story Award in the same year. In 2017, Himself was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and longlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger. Her second novel, The Hoarder, a tale of a lonely care worker, was described as a ‘a lyrical gothic detective saga’ (Guardian) and ‘a brilliantly imaginative tale of secrets and lies’ (Daily Express). Both books were BBC Radio 2 Book Club picks.

  @JessKiddHerself | jesskidd.com

  Also by Jess Kidd

  Himself

  The Hoarder

  First published in Great Britain in 2019

  by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Jess Kidd, 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 376 5

  Export ISBN 978 1 78689 375 8

  eISBN 978 1 78689 374 1

  Typeset in Bembo by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  For my mother

  Contents

  Prologue

  September 1863

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  May 1841

  Chapter 7

  September 1863

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  May 1841

  Chapter 12

  September 1863

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  May 1843

  Chapter 18

  September 1863

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  May 1843

  Chapter 23

  September 1863

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  August 1843

  Chapter 26

  October 1863

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  September 1843

  Chapter 29

  October 1863

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  October 1843

  Chapter 35

  October 1863

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  February 1837

  Chapter 43

  October 1863

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  October 1863

  Chapter 46

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  As pale as a grave grub she’s an eyeful.

  She looks up at him, startled, from the bed. Her pale eyes flitting fishy: intruder – lantern – door – intruder. As if she’s trying to work out how they all connect, with her eyes cauled and clouded.

  Is she blind?

  No. She sees him all right; he knows that she sees him. Now her eyes are following him as he steals nearer.

  She’s pretty.

  She’s more than pretty. She’s a church-yard angel, a marble carving, with her ivory curls and her pale, pale stony eyes. But not stone – brightening pearl, oh soft-hued!

  He could touch her: stroke her cheek, hold the wee point of her chin, wind her white curls around his finger.

  Her lips are beginning to move, pouting and posturing, as if she’s working up to something, as if she’s working up to sound.

  Without further thought he puts his hand over her mouth, his skin dark against hers in the lantern-light. She frowns and her feet beat an angry tattoo despite the restraints and the coverlet is off. She has two legs, like a girl. Two thin white legs and two thin white arms and not much else in-between.

  Then she stops and lies still, panting.

  The touch of her: she is like nothing in nature. Skin waxy and damp, breath cold: an unnatural coldness, like a corpse living.

  And that smell again, stronger now, the sharp salt of the open ocean, an inky seaweed tang.

  She fixes him with her pearly eyes. He feels the slick nubs of her teeth and the quick, wet probe of her tongue on his hand.

  The man fancies that his head is opening like an easy winkle, the child is tapping and probing, her fingers are inside his mind. Touching, teasing the quivering insides. She is dabbling and grabbing as with a jar of minnows, splashing and peering as with a rock-pool. She hooks a memory with her little finger and drags it out, and then another and another. One by one the child finds them, his memories. She cups them in her palm, shimmering, each a perfect tear.

  A boy slips on wet cobbles, himself, following a cart with a potato in his hand.

  A woman turns in a doorway with the sun on her hair, oh, his brother’s wife!

  A four-day-old foal stands in a green field, a pure white flash on its lovely nose.

  The child tips her palm and watches the tears roll away.

  Panic floods the man. Something swells in him – a pure and compelling disgust, a strong sudden urge to finish this creature off. To throttle her, stove in her face, snap her neck as cleanly as a young rabbit’s.

  A voice inside him, the lisping voice of a child, mocks him. Isn’t he the most ruthless of bastards, wouldn’t he smother his own mother without a care? Hasn’t he done all things, terrible things, not stinted on the things he’s done? And here he is frightened to grant the kindest of mercies.

  The man looks at the child in dismay and the child looks back at him.

  He loosens his grip on her and takes out his knife.

  A lantern dips and flares in the doorway and here’s the nurse. An ex-lag with a few years on her and a lame leg, clean of garb but not of mouth, used to bad business. Likes it, even. The others behind like her personal guard – two men, neckerchiefs up around their faces. Odd birds; elbows tucked in, heads swivelling, light-stepping, listening, blinking. With every step they expect an ambush.

  ‘Don’t touch her,’ the nurse says to him. ‘Get away from her.’

  The man, looking up, hesitates, and the child bites him, a nip of surprising sharpness. He pulls his hand away in surprise and sees a line of puncture holes, small but deep.

  The nurse pushes past him to the side of the bed, glancing at his hand. ‘You’ll regret that, my tulip.’

  She makes a show of pulling on fine chain-mail gloves and unhooks the restraints that hold the child to the bed, dressing her in a harness of strong material, one limb at a time, buckling the child’s arms across her chest, lashing her legs together. The child lunges, open-mawed.

  The man stands dazed, flexing his hand. Red lines track from palm to wrist to elbow, the teeth-marks turn mulberry, then black. He twists his forearm and presses his skin. Sweat beading on his forehead, his lip. What kind of child bites like this, like a rat? He imagines her venom – he feels it – coursing through him, from arm to heart, lungs to bowels, fingertips to feet. A blistering poison spreads, a sudden fire burning itself out as it travels. Then the lines fade and the marks dull to no more than pin-pricks.

  All the time the creature watches him, he
r eyes darkening – a trick of the lamp-light, surely! Two eyes of polished jet, their surfaces flat, so strangely flat.

  The nurse is speaking low, standing back to direct. ‘Roll her, bag her, make haste, watch her mouth.’

  They wrap the child in canvas, a staysail to make a hammock of sorts.

  The man, manipulating his arm, examining the pin-pricks, suddenly finds himself beyond words. He makes a sound, a vowel sound, followed by a string of gargled consonants. He drops to his knees, like one devotional, and falls backwards onto the hearthrug. He would scream if he could, but he can only reach out. He lies gasping like a landed catch.

  From the floor he watches the two men lift the bundle between them. They move with deliberation, as if underwater.

  The nurse limps over, lantern in hand, and looks down at the man. Her diagnosis: he is in a bad way, face as grey as his county-crop. Not old but already life-waned – and now this.

  He begins to sob.

  The nurse could sob too for the loss of a good thief, the kind who’d abstract the teeth from your head without the opening of your mouth.

  She kneels with difficulty. ‘Close your eyes, lad,’ she whispers. ‘It will help me no end.’

  Trussed in a canvas hammock she’s no weight. But the two men would carry a far heavier burden with greater ease. Of course they’d humoured the nurse, heard her stories in the tavern with a few inside them. But they see it now, in the child, as she said they would: all kinds of wrong.

  What of the man fallen? They baulked to touch him after. The carrying of him would be worse than the leaving of him and they feel the leaving keenly. The child swings swaddled between them, big-eyed in the lantern dimmed; oh, they see it now, in her. By the time they reach the landing the men are sweating with the effort of not dashing her head against the wall. One would shoot her through the eye in a heartbeat; the other would cut her throat in a blink. At the top of the stairs they are in danger of hurling her down.

  The nurse keeps them in check. Giving whispered orders, steadying them with her strong fingers on arms and ribs.

  Bringing them back to the job in hand, for the money.

  ‘Don’t think on it!’ The nurse speaks urgent and low. ‘Don’t think on anything. Hoist her, aye, and we’ll be gone.’

  The big house is silent tonight, but for our intruders moving through corridors with their trussed burden and breath-held shuffle. Awake to loose floorboards and creaking doors and light-sleepers.

  But the servants slumber on. The housekeeper, tidy-bedded, neat of nightcap and frill (like a spoon put away for best), inspects the linen cupboards of her dreams. Smiling at immaculate piles, heaven-fresh, as clean as clouds. The butler, proper, even in his nightshirted sleep, patrols an endless cellar. The bottles giggle in dark corners. They ease out their corks and call to him in honeyed voices. They sing songs of laden vines and sunny hillsides and duty forgotten – liquid bewitchment! He grips his lantern and will not stop. The housemaids, in their attic nests, are dreaming of omnibuses and pantomimes. The cook snores fruity, unpeeled and well-soaked under warm sheets, as solid and brandy-scented as plum pudding. She dreams of matchless soufflés; she hunts them down as she sails in a saucepan over a gravy sea. All are senseless in the tucked-in, heavy-breathing, before-dawn quiet.

  The big house is silent tonight, but for our intruders, hurrying out of the servants’ door.

  The dogs lie poisoned in the yard, their muzzles flecked with spittle, a breeze ruffling their fur. This is the breeze that came over the sea, miles inland, past wood, fields and lane to whisk the gravel on the drive and dance around the rooftop chimney pots and whistle through the keyholes.

  The mice are wakeful and so too is the mean-eyed kitchen cat who needles after their fat pelts, sly and silent. This snake-tailed curse of the larder watches the figures hasten across the cobbled courtyard, throwing moonlit shadows in their wake. The barn owl sees them as they round the house. She ghosts above on silent wings.

  The lord of the manor. He, too, is awake.

  A lamp burns in his study as he frets and puzzles, considers and adjusts. He bends over his writing, his handsome whiskers peppered with grey, his brow furrowed. He could be a fortune-teller, the way he’s inventing the future, coaxing and muttering it into being.

  The shadows pass outside, crossing the terrace.

  Perhaps hearing their footsteps, the lord of the manor looks to the window, but, remarking no change in the night sky, returns to his plans.

  The shadows move quickly over the lawn, towards the gate, two with swag slung between them, one following, limping.

  The bundle is cradled over the ground. The child feels the grass whip under her canvas hammock. She feels the night air on her face and takes a breath of it and lets out a sigh you can’t hear.

  The sea rocked asleep, now wakes and answers, a refrain of waves and shale-song. The rain in the sky that is yet to fall, answers; a storm gathers. All the rivers and streams and bogs and lakes and fens and puddles and horse troughs and wishing wells wake and answer, adding their voices; faint and rushing, purling and gurgling, muddy and clear.

  The child looks up. For the first time she can see the stars!

  She smiles at them, and the stars look back at her and shiver.

  Then they begin to burn brighter, with renewed fever, in the deep dark ocean of the sky.

  September 1863

  Chapter 1

  The raven levels off into a glide, flight feathers fanned. Slick on the rolling level of rising currents and down-draughts, she turns her head, this way and that. To her black eye, as black as pooled tar, London is laid out – there is no veil of fog or mist or smoke-haze her gaze cannot pierce!

  Below her, streets and lanes, factories and workhouses, parks and prisons, grand houses and tenements, roofs, chimneys and tree tops. And the winding, sometimes shining, Thames – the sky’s own dirty mirror. The raven leaves the river behind and charts a path to a chapel on a hill with a spire and a clock tower. She circles the chapel and lands on the roof with a shuffling of wings. She pecks at brickwork, at lichen, at moth casts, at nothing. She sidles up to a gargoyle and runs her beak affectionately around his eyes, nudging, scooping.

  The gargoyle is a creature designed to vomit rainwater from the gape of his mouth onto the porch. The parishioners (when there were parishioners) blamed the blocked gutters, but it was always the gargoyle, holding back only to let go a sudden flood upon the faithful below as they stood at God’s threshold, looking up to the heavens, flinching.

  The raven hops to the edge of the porch roof and peers down.

  A woman is standing below: she looks up, but she doesn’t flinch. Bridie Devine is not the flinching kind.

  What kind is she then?

  A small, round upright woman of around thirty, wearing a shade of deep purple that clashes (wonderfully and dreadfully) with the vivid red hair tucked (for the most part) inside her white widow’s cap. She presents in half-mourning dress, well-cut but without flash or fashion. On top of her widow’s cap roosts a black, feather-trimmed bonnet of a uniquely ugly design. Her black boots are polished to a shine and of stout make. The crinoline is no friend of hers; her skirts are not full and she’s as loosely laced as respectability allows. Her cape, grey with purple trim, is short. This is a practical woman, or at least a woman who finds it practical to be able to fit through doorways, climb stairs and breathe. At her feet, a doctor’s case, patched and antiquated, the leather buttery from handling.

  She takes from her pocket a pipe. Here’s a teaser: a fast habit in one so seemly? And isn’t there is canniness to her smoking in the shelter of a deserted chapel (and not puffing down the Strand with a chinful of whiskers and a basket on her head?).

  The raven eyes her with interest.

  The woman winks at the bird. There is a world of devilment in her wink. The raven responds with a soft caw.

  The bird gauges the gargoyle. No water falls; the gargoyle is dry-mouthed, the lips frame an empty grimac
e.

  Reassured, the raven takes to the air.

  Bridie Devine watches the raven fly out of sight. Now all that’s moving in this chapel-yard are her thoughts, she thinks. The occasional cart or carriage passes the open gate. Otherwise there is a wall of a decent height between Bridie and world and that is enough.

  Bridie breathes out, turning her face up to the sun: autumn warmth, fuller-bodied and lovelier than summer heat, with the mellow dying of the season in it. Bridie welcomes it on brow and cheek. That the sun has found a clear patch of air to shine through (in these days of smoke-haze and mist and fog) ought to be appreciated.

  Bridie is alone with the sun and her thoughts and her pipe.

  The pipe is unremarkable: clay-made, shaped to sit snug in the hand or in a tooth gap, of a cheap variety favoured by Irish market harpies. Short of stem and small of bowl so that the nose of a hag may overhang and keep the rain off the tobacco. The pipe may be unremarkable but the contents are anything but. To her usual twist of any mundungus Bridie has lately been adding a nugget of Prudhoe’s Bronchial Balsam Blend. A crumbly, resinous substance which burns with a pleasant incense scent followed by a lancing chemical stink. This is less unpleasant than it sounds, being simultaneously bracing and dulling. You add lots of Prudhoe’s Blend for colourful thoughts and triple that amount for no thoughts at all.

  Prudhoe’s Bronchial Balsam Blend is just one of the recreational creations of Rumold Fortitude Prudhoe, experimental chemist, toxicologist and expert in medical jurisprudence. Prudhoe’s previous legendary blends, Mystery Caravan and Fairground Riot, proved either blissful or petrifying. As such, these blends continue to attract loyal followers among his more adventurous friends, Bridie being one of them.

  But now Bridie’s pipe is empty. She has smoked it all.

  Bridie puts the bit of her empty pipe in her mouth, just while she’s thinking. A drop more tobacco would be nice. It wouldn’t have to obliterate her thoughts, just line her lungs. She’ll smoke anything; earthy and wholesome or treacly and nasty, costermonger’s dust or gentleman’s savour.

  As if in answer, in the far corner of the chapel-yard, a wisp of smoke wends its way up into the air.