Scarlet Widow Read Free Page A

‘The girl is no more than twelve. What does she know of the French disease?’
    ‘Actually, I’m thirteen in three weeks’ time,’ said Beatrice. ‘And papa has never made a secret of people’s illnesses and where they catch them from.’
    Clement put his arm around Beatrice’s shoulders and gave her an affectionate squeeze. When he looked down and smiled at her, though, she saw more pain than hope in his eyes, and she could tell how much he was suffering.
    *
    As summer gave way to autumn, and then to winter, Beatrice tried to keep up her attendance at Mrs Tutchin’s academy every day. Mrs Tutchin was young and blonde-haired and almost skeletally thin. She was the wife of a banker, although she was childless herself. There were nine girls in the class altogether and Mrs Tutchin taught them manners and deportment, and how to speak colloquial French, and how to add up and multiply. She also showed them how to sew on buttons and embroider, and how to bake a lardy cake with raisins folded into it.
    Beatrice loved the academy because Mrs Tutchin was so gentle and soft-spoken and smelled of diluted rosewater. She was patient with all of her girls, but especially sympathetic to Beatrice because she knew how much she missed her mother. Sometimes, when Beatrice was bent over her sewing, she would come and stand behind her and gently rest one of her bony hands on her shoulder, as if she were reassuring her that her mother was watching over her.
    Every week, though, it became harder for Beatrice to find the time to attend the academy, even though Mrs Tutchin’s house was only three streets away, at the top of Snow Hill. Now that it was colder, and it was growing dark so early in the day, her father was becoming more and more depressed and erratic in his behaviour. He had started drinking – only in the afternoons at first, with his dinner, but then he started to take a glass of genever before he opened the shop, and more glasses throughout the day, from a brown stone bottle that he kept hidden under the counter. Almost every evening he would fall asleep in his armchair in front of a gradually dying fire, and every night she would hear him stumbling upstairs to bed when the fire had turned to ashes and he had woken up shivering.
    Almost every morning she would have to wake him because he was still snoring thickly when it was time for him to open up the shop – wrapped up tightly in his blankets but fully clothed and crusty-eyed and reeking of stale alcohol.
    He would open his eyes and stare at her as if he didn’t know who she was. Then he would sit up and croak, ‘I’m sorry... I’m so sorry, Bea. It won’t happen again, I swear to God.’
    Once he had washed himself and changed his clothes and come downstairs to eat breakfast with her, he was almost back to his old self again, especially if she served him oatmeal gruel with butter and wine in it. By then, however, it was often too late for her to go to Mrs Tutchin’s and her father would coax her to stay at home and help him prepare his medicines because he had such a backlog of prescriptions waiting to be filled, and so many customers who were beginning to lose patience with him.
    ‘I’m blessed by God to have such a clever daughter,’ he said to her almost every day, kissing her on the top of her head. ‘If only your mother could see you now!’
    Beatrice would put on a long linen apron and a stiff linen bonnet, and her thick wool cloak, too, if it was cold, because there was only a small wood-burning stove in the outhouse to keep her warm. Then she would sit all alone for most of the morning, making up pills and powders and lotions and bottles of various cordials, following the recipes in her father’s dog-eared notebooks.
    Some of the medicines took her hours. One of Clement Bannister’s most popular cure-alls was Mithridate, which was claimed to be effective against poisoning and animal bites and even the plague. It contained over fifty ingredients, which