Anatomy of Murder

9

“Sam,” Jocasta said, when they had something inside them and Boyo was chasing rabbits in his dreams in front of the fire, “you made any friends since you left the workhouse? Other boys who might be keen to earn a penny or two is my meaning.”

Sam wrapped his arms around his knees. “Couple, I suppose.”

“Will you fetch them along in the morning, bright and early times?”

He nodded, then reached out his hand toward the coverlet that spent its days draped over Jocasta’s settee. “It’s pretty,” he said. “Did you patch it yourself, Mrs. Bligh?”

“I did, boy.”

“Like your skirt.”

“Like the skirt.”

“It’s so many colors. .” He shifted and settled on the floor with his hands under his head. Jocasta watched him. No one had ever waited for her before. She’d never, it seemed to her, in all the years she tramped through, been looked for and expected by another being. She sniffed.

“It’s patchwork. I’ve read cards enough for every draper’s girl in the Strand and they know my likings. However small an offcut, if it’s jewel-bright or patterned they’ll save it for me, and bring it along next time they need to know if their fella likes them. Then there’s the tailors and maids, and oftentimes if you know where to go, you’ll find some old thing a lady’s worn dancing about in the candlelight that’s worth paying for, for the bits in the folds that have not faded.” Sam’s eyes were open, and she saw that, as she spoke, his eyes were dancing across the patterns and colors of the coverlet. The bits of silk caught the firelight from the air and shivered with it, and the poplin and cotton seemed to glow with a pulse.

“Times I sit here,” Jocasta murmured, “and I think to mesel’, What things have you seen? to one square or other. Were you a dancing dress in a fine house, bunched up in a fat wardrobe with a dozen others, or were you stretched by the back of some sour red-faced old justice drooling after the next bribe to find, and spitting on the floor?” His eyes were closing. “Times I’m sitting here, Sam, I feel like a dragon in her lair sat on a great pile of jewels and stories. .”

His breathing was a sleeping pace now, and she turned and picked up a plain blanket from the end of her bed and dropped it over him. She sat a while longer in the dying firelight though. It seemed that when she had seen that pert little girl in the back of the wagon, her head all bloodied and her eyes closed, the world had cursed and roared at her. It reminded her of when, as a child, she had seen a man dead and watched another walking away from the body. She had told then, and been cursed as a storyteller. She’d been stubborn, but not stubborn enough. She earned a reputation as a liar that followed her around the valley, and never got a man or child to hear and believe her. She could still see the man in the green coat disappearing into the woods. It hadn’t helped that she’d been so scared she’d run up the fell and shivered an hour before heading back to her aunt’s house where she bided. The story of the baron’s death was being chanted outside every door in the village by then, and they thought she was just trying to draw eyes to herself. Not for all her weepings would they listen, and they hadn’t today neither, though she’d felt like a child again, crying against the storm, shouting and baying as if she could stop the world from turning. She was not a child now, however. There’d be a way, a way to watch and gather and patch it all together and make the seams strong. She’d make a noose of it all for Mother Mitchell and Milky Boy’s necks, and for all it was strung together with her sewing, it’d throttle them. Then she’d pluck that brooch from Mother Mitchell’s corpse and bury it in Kate’s grave with her.