The Murder of Mary Russell

  It never occurred to the innocent governess that a young sailor’s natural habitat lay not in afternoons beside the Serpentine, idling amongst the idle classes. Even less did she pause to wonder what Jimmy Hudson saw in her, an unbeautiful woman two years older and an inch taller than he. If she’d been home, around friends and family, there might have been someone to ask the question—but by the time Sally had friends around her, it was too late. She had fallen for him, this rogue with the lovely hair and the careless, crooked grin, head over heels. And although there was some doubt in her own mind about whether her virtue would survive to a wedding, in the end—to her pride and his astonishment—it did. For the rogue had taken a tumble of his own, into the dark brown eyes of a shy and awkward Scottish girl, and he gave her a ring and a name before he gave her a baby.

  What he did not give her was the full truth about how he earned a living.

  Their son was born, early and ill-formed, on a cool spring morning five months and three days after their wedding vows. Mother and father held their tiny blue-skinned child, they heard its thin cries dwindle and cease, they watched the life leave it. Hudson went out and got drunk. Two days later, he came home to find his wife delirious with fever.

  If James Hudson had been as hard-plated as he imagined, matters would have been simple. He’d have bathed his wife’s face and held her hand and watched her die, before going on with his life. But Sally was his one weakness, his hidden truth, the one whose belief made him real.

  He panicked.

  London in 1854 was a city of gangs, from those in Parliament to those of the blackest rookeries. Jim Hudson’s habitual gang was in the middle of those extremes, a wide-spread corporation of criminal activity under the absolute rule of a man known as The Bishop. The Bishop was ruthless, but fair—and smart. He knew that sometimes the fist was called for, but that sometimes a hand outstretched, especially if it had money in it, could be a powerful way to buy a man’s loyalty.

  The Bishop listened to his desperate underling. He thought about young Hudson’s history, his past usefulness in matters related to shipping and the passage of valuables through the docks, and he considered the young man’s future potential. In the end, he nodded. Agreement was reached. Doctors were sent—good doctors, not stinking blood-letters with gin on their breath and filth around their finger-nails. A nurse came. Sally walked the edges of life for a week, two…and then backed away from the eternal cliff.

  By which time Hudson owed The Bishop a considerable debt.

  In the spring of 1854, Britain went to war with Russia over the Crimean Peninsula. During the summer, ten thousand Londoners died from the cholera. In the autumn, James Hudson moved from a dockland informer into one of The Bishop’s burglary gangs.

  He was small, strong, and as a sailor, easy with heights even in the dark. His job was to enter the house through windows left unlatched by a paid-off servant, letting his partners inside. One of those partners was a man he’d known for months, a wiry, foul-mouthed, and cheerful cracksman in his forties. The other Hudson was less happy about: a lad of fourteen who was new to the job, although he had lived in crime all his life. The Bishop’s son—his only son—was there to learn his father’s trade from the inside, and a less compliant apprentice would have been difficult to find. Nobody who worked with the surly and self-important lad enjoyed the experience, but Jimmy and his cracksman learned how to make him feel important without risking the job. And the boy was bright enough, if one could talk him around his tendency to hit first and think later.

  Hudson did not tell Sally what he was doing, or how much they owed The Bishop, merely that he’d need to work the occasional night. Sally could be disapproving, at times, and love her or not, that Scots righteousness of hers could wear on a man’s nerves. How did she expect him to make a living? Would she rather he went to sea, to be gone for months on end?

  By the spring of 1855, Hudson and his partners were entering two or three houses a month. The Season being fully under way meant that family jewels had been retrieved from bank vaults for the ladies’ throats, and since maids knew well where the necklaces and tiaras were kept…

  Still, even with The Bishop’s iron fist in control, it was just a matter of time before someone got careless. On April 27, a lady’s maid was arrested. She talked. The dominos of The Bishop’s organisation began to tumble—not that the man himself was in danger of arrest: The Bishop owned enough policemen to deflect an armful of warrants, and to free his son from worse crimes than house-breaking. Still, the lower levels of his network began to file into Newgate Prison.

  James Hudson was tucking into his dinner when news reached him that the cracksman had been taken. Within the hour, he was pulling Sally from their tiny house, pushing her and a pair of trunks into a hired cart, and hushing her protests, not with a fist (though he was tempted) but with a sharp word and a promise that he would tell her all, later.

  London was too hot for this upper-storey man. Edinburgh would be a risk, since everyone knew where Hudson’s wife hailed from. Plymouth or Southampton were tempting, but surely the first places anyone might look for a sailor. Instead, the young couple’s flight continued west.

  On the first of May, Sally and Jim came to Falmouth, a small but active port town on the coast of Cornwall. They stored their trunks and walked through the streets until they found rooms bright enough to bear and cheap enough to afford. There, on the straw mattress behind the closed door, Hudson sat down with his wife at last. He took Sally’s hand, and told her exactly why they’d had to flee.

  When she took back her hand and got to her feet, he thought she was about to leave him. Half of him wished she would. But the fact that her illness had driven them to this gave Sally pause.

  She stood for a long time at the little window, her spine rigid and unreadable. However, the longer she stood, the better his chances, so he sat, waiting, until she called him daft and an idjit and a list of other names. But she was there, and so Hudson swallowed his pride and his retorts (She’d lost the baby; she’d gone and got sick!) to hang his head and agree that yes, he was a fool and yes, he should have told her. He said yes, too, when she laid down the law and said that he would have nought more to do with crime. That they would work like decent folk and pay back the debt by honest means, no matter how long it took.

  Hudson knew the chances of buying their way back into The Bishop’s good graces were nil. But he said nothing. She came to sit beside him on the rough bed. When she slipped her hand into his, it was enough to be going on.

  They both found work, he in the docks, Sally at a busy coaching inn. May went, and June. As July wore on, Hudson began to breathe again. The waxed threads reappeared, and his clever fingers resumed their darting knots: a pair of earrings took shape, in a dark red that echoed the chestnut gleams in his wife’s hair. In August, the Queen and Albert were entertained at Versailles. In September, Sebastopol fell to the British. Two weeks later, Sally told him shyly that she was pregnant again.

  Ten days after that, on October the seventh, Hudson was walking down a street when he saw a familiar face: one of The Bishop’s men from London.

  He ducked into an alleyway, trotting rapidly away from the docks to weave a circuitous path home, glancing over his shoulder the entire way.

  He hadn’t been seen, he was pretty sure. And although Sally had left already for work, he reassured himself that the man had never met her, had no reason to know what she looked like, and they were even using different names, here…Nonetheless, he poured himself a generous level of gin, standing at the window behind the thin curtains, and spent the day in an agony of nerves, convinced that Sally had been seized.

  When at last he heard her feet on the stairs, the gust of relief instantly converted his fear to blind rage.

  He managed not to hit Sally—she was pregnant, after all—but her hair tumbled down as he shook her, and the fear in her eyes made his anger flare all the hotter.

  But only for an instant. He turned to splash th
e last of the spirits into his cup, dumping it down his throat like cold water across a fighting dog.

  By the time she understood, confession had soured the gin in his gut and his fury had given way to exhaustion. He collapsed onto the side of the bed, head in hands.

  “Ah, Sally, what’re we going to do?” he groaned.

  “Ye should go.”

  “Where? If I go back to London, I’ll be arrested. Or worse. I’ll have to let The Bishop know where he can find me. Maybe he can make use of me out here.”

  “Is…” Sally hesitated, then forced herself to ask. “Is what you did a…hanging offense?”

  “No! Nobody got hurt. But it’d be transportation for sure. And what good will I do you and the baby for seven years in Australia?”

  They sat listening to the silence. After a bit, Sally straightened on her chair and took a breath. “What about getting work on a ship? Just for a time.”

  “What, shipping out?”

  “It needn’t be for long, just to get you away. A month, say, then get off the ship at the next port and work another ship back. You write and tell me where to meet you. I could make my way to Liverpool, or Hull—York, even, to get away from ports. Jimmy, we could be together when our son is born.”

  He raised his head, fighting hope. “But what if you have to leave here? How would I ever find you again?”

  “My sister.” The only person from Sally’s past who still wrote, who still loved her. The only person Sally knew she could trust, absolutely. “Write to Alice. She’ll always know where I am.”

  They talked it up and down, but in truth, there was little choice. In the wee hours, he wrapped tender arms around her, his fingers apologising for the bruises on her shoulders. Before light, his sailor’s bag was packed, his feet carrying him towards the docks.

  That very day he set sail upon the barque Gloria Scott, a heavy old tub bound for Australia with, in addition to its crew, eighteen soldiers, four warders, a doctor, and a chaplain—because (the irony made him grin uncomfortably) the ship also carried thirty-eight felons wearing the chains of transportees.

  Sally stood on the hill above town, wrapped in her thickest shawl, skirts tugged about by the chilly October wind, and watched her husband sail away. When the ship had faded into the Channel mists, she resolutely turned back towards the town and resumed her job at the inn.

  —

  A month later, a spurt of seven letters and a small parcel arrived all at once, posted from Gibraltar, addressed to the inn. Sally took them from the innkeeper in wonder, and carried them safely home.

  The paper-wrapped parcel contained a lengthy letter, crumpled from the string, encircling an object that must have taken Jimmy every spare minute of the trip to that point. He’d made a dolly longer than her hand, with stubby extremities and a knob for a head, stuffed firm with kapok. Tens of thousands of tight little knots had gone into its making, and a great deal of thought: it even had a face of sorts, picked out in black thread, and a tuft of long black hair gathered into a plait. In a post-script, the letter said that, depending on whether the baby was a boy or a girl, Sally could cut the hair or leave it long, and sew the doll a dress or a sailor suit. She ran her fingers over the little figure’s taut waxed-linen surface, feeling her husband’s hands on every tiny bump. How many hours had this taken him? What had been going on all around him while he worked, what conversations, what kinds of men at his side? Holding it to her face, she could smell the sea and the smouldering lamps, and the tobacco the others had smoked while he worked. She could smell his life, far away.

  She gave the manikin a kiss and sat it against her cup of cocoa while she sorted the envelopes by date, feeling the thickness of each, studying his writing on the outside. Then Sally Hudson dove into her husband’s words like a starving thing.

  The first two letters had little to say beyond the boredom of shipboard work, the tedium of the food, and how much he missed her. The two after that had clearly been written following a ration of rum, as his wandering hand transcribed an equally meandering stream of thoughts, plans, complaints, and sorrows. The next one picked up a bit, describing the odd behaviour of the chaplain and the willingness of some of the soldiers to lose money at cards. He added, as an afterthought at the bottom:

  PS. I don’t suppose you’ll approve of me playing cards but when time hangs heavy I can only tie so many knots. And anyway its savings for our future my lovey.

  His next letter mentioned the chaplain again, then went on to describe a troublemaker among the prisoners, an extraordinarily tall minor aristocrat named Prendergast who had defrauded a wide selection of City merchants of a stupendous amount of money. The police, it seemed, had not only been unable to find the money, they did not even know just how much it was. And Prendergast wasn’t the only rich criminal on board the Gloria Scott: almost all the transportees were convicts of a financial nature—fraud, bank theft, forgery. Some of them were so clever, Hudson wrote admiringly, it was a wonder they’d been caught.

  Hudson’s final letter ended saying he planned to post the letters when the ship put into Gibraltar. However, he added, he had decided not to leave the ship himself until Cape Town. He would write her from there, to let her know when to expect him.

  That letter did not come.

  Weeks crawled by: Christmas, New Year’s. Her belly grew, although to her great relief, where the first time she had been constantly ill and aching, this time went without problem. If only she would hear from Jimmy, all would surely be fine.

  Then in January, Sally overheard two men talking. In an inn, rumours lay as thick underfoot as the wood chips absorbing the slops, but over the following days, she heard this one from too many directions to ignore.

  The transport ship Gloria Scott was lost at sea.

  Sally told herself that the old barque was just late. That Jimmy had slipped away in Cape Town, that the letter telling her had been lost. Surely he would appear soon. As for the ship herself being sunk, it was not due into Sydney until February: it had just put in elsewhere along the way for supplies, or repairs. Sally laid a hand on her belly, and closed her ears to the cruel whispers.

  As the five-month mark crept up, Sally waited in dread for her womb to fall still, for early labour to start. But nothing of the sort happened. The baby kicked, her back ached, her belly grew.

  And, she lost her job. The innkeeper said he would be pleased to have her back—she was a hard worker, a friendly face, and a step up in class from most serving maids—but the men came for a good time, not a reminder of home, so she’d have to take the next months off.

  Without money, without Jimmy, the only person Sally had was her sister. So she left careful instructions with the innkeeper: what to do if someone came asking for her, and what to do if a letter arrived. She then went back to Edinburgh, her head over the heaving rails all the way. Once there, her hoarded savings bought her a few weeks in a tiny room a mile from her sister’s trim, airy house. Alice had clean windows, a garden, and two servants; Sally had no carpets, a common standpipe in the yard, and a stinking lavatory at the back, two flights down.

  Sally went into labour on a soft spring morning in early May. At the height of things, she chanted Jimmy’s name, over and over, even though by this time, she was certain he was dead. Alice caught her small, red, perfectly formed niece with her own clean hands, having elbowed aside those of the midwife at the last minute.

  Sally gave her daughter the haughty name of Clarissa, and nursed her and loved her and cried over the poor fatherless bairn.

  Six days later, a letter arrived. Much travelled, stained by damp, bearing her sister’s address.

  Posted from Sydney.

  There had been an uprising of the prisoners on board the Gloria Scott, Jimmy wrote, the ship taken over, some of the sailors joining in mutiny—a mutiny funded by the aristocratic rogue Jack Prendergast, who’d managed to smuggle a portion of his ill-gotten gains on board. Some of the sailors, dissatisfied with the captain and the conditions
belowdecks, went along with the takeover; others drew the line at outright murder. The objectors were shoved onto a small boat with sailor’s clothes, basic provisions, and a compass and chart—but before the Gloria Scott could get under way again, a powder-barrel deep in her bowels was set alight, either deliberately or from a stray spark. The ship’s hull ripped into a million pieces, every porthole and hatch punched out, her mast uprooted. In minutes, where the barque had been was nothing but smoking wood and shredded canvas.

  The row-boat, which had been set adrift little more than an hour before, turned back to the wreckage. There among the floating spars and ravaged bodies, they found a survivor clinging to some boards. (Sally frowned absently at her husband’s emotional—one might almost say personal—description of this stunned, burned creature.) They rescued the sailor, took on board a few more still-sealed kegs of provisions, and turned again for the distant coastline.

  The explosion’s smoke-cloud rose high, however, and the coast of Africa was a well-travelled route. Sure enough, the following day another Australian-bound ship hove into view.

  Nonetheless, Hudson wrote, some of the men in the boat had been participants in the initial hours of mutiny, up until murder began; others, the prisoners, had now been handed a chance at freedom. In those lonely dark hours, pulling slowly away from the drifting timbers, the survivors came to an agreement: they would say nothing of the name Gloria Scott. A new ship was conjured up from their imaginations, a story built around it. By the time the brig Hotspur plucked them from the waves, they were the survivors of the passenger ship Amelia, which had gone down with all hands apart from them.