Free The Scent of Murder by Felicity Young Page B

conscience, Edith Pratt?’
    She said nothing. If in doubt, hold your tongue.
    Philips looked to the gloomy sky and sniffed the air. ‘God ’elp me. If we don’t get a move on, I’ll be in for a drenching tonight.’
    The cart jolted as he increased the pony’s pace. Edie’s leg inadvertently touched his and she shuffled as far away as she could across the bench seat.
    Philips’s dried old face split into a grin. ‘What ya done that fer? I ain’t the one with the creepy-crawlies in me ’air.’
    Shame heated Edie’s innards. She pulled the shawl tighter around her lower face and stuck her tongue out at him, taking care he wouldn’t see. Pooh to him, she thought. And this was just the start of it, the taunting. There’d be merry hell when she finally made it back to the poorhouse.
    They trundled along the pot-holed road and less than an hour later the poorhouse loomed, a brooding blot of darker grey on grey. It might be a black thundercloud to those who did not know it, but the place was stark as day in Edith’s mind.
    Sitting on the Piltdown side of Uckfield about five miles from the Hall, the poorhouse was a huge three-storeyed building, its four main wings built in the shape of a cross, with several smaller wings as offshoots. Between the wings, fenced exercise yards segregated the seven different classes of inmates: infirm males, infirm females, able-bodied men, able-bodied women, mothers and children under the age of seven, girls aged seven to fifteen and boys aged seven to fifteen. Each class had a separate dormitory situated above the yards, and its own dayroom. There was only one schoolroom. The girls who weren’t working were schooled in the morning and the boys in the afternoon. The only places where the inmates ever glimpsed members of the other classes were the chapel and the dining hall, and even there they were only allowed to sit with their own.
    Edith had been taken away from her mother when she was seven, and sent to live with the ‘big girls’. After that she was only allowed to see her mother for half an hour a week, or not at all if either of them had broken one of the long list of workhouse rules. She remembered how her mother smiled; how she was always sucking at her fingers, red and sore from the hours she spent every day pulling apart bristly pieces of rope — oakum picking. Ma said it was only a matter of time before they would both be out of the place. Sometimes she would send Edith signals when they were on different sides of the chapel.
    Once her mother was caught making cheer-up signs to her, drawing a half-circle in the air in front of her mouth, and then they weren’t allowed to see each other for a month. Not long after that, her mother had died from the fever.
    Now that Edie was older she knew her mother had been lying about getting away from the place. For someone like Ethel Pratt, with no money and a bastard child, the only way out of the poorhouse was feet-first. At least Edie, thanks to Lady Fitzgibbon and Mrs Hutton, had been given a chance.
    Philips dropped Edith on the path between the workhouse gate and the inmates’ vegetable patch. Rows of knobbly brussels sprouts and lacy cabbages were about the only things that now grew in the hardening earth.
    The wind picked up and the first drops of rain began to fall. Mr Clover, one of the workhouse porters, opened the heavy iron gate, then heaved it closed behind her, locking it with a large key. The sounds of Philips’s cart rumbled off into the distance.
    Mr Clover had a face as wide and flat as a shovel, and a head too big for his stocky body. He tended towards two expressions: unbearable sadness, whereby his mouth would turn down so that it almost touched the tips of his dirty winged collar; and extreme happiness, when it raised itself up to his meaty earlobes as if pulled by a string. Everyone knew Mr Clover was a simpleton — some said he was dropped on his head when he was a baby — and Edie suspected that was why