Chapter 5 The Coroner's Clerk

He came to the shop on the Sunday evening, after the chapels had let out and before the pubs had filled, which was the only hour of a Cinderthorpe week when the streets were quiet. Prudence let him in through the side door and took him into the weighing room, where the fire was banked and the lamp was low, and gave him a chair and a cup of the honest porter she kept for a customer's chill, and he sat turning his hat round and round in his hands as though he could not decide what to do with a thing that was not a pen. Ephraim Cope was twenty-six. He had been a schoolmaster's son and a schoolmaster's pupil, and had been offered a clerkship in a solicitor's office in another town and turned it down because his mother needed him, and had come to Mr. Cobley's desk at nineteen and sat there for seven years, copying out the last words of the dead for a living. He had a round, unfinished face and a habit of saying exactly what he thought and then looking surprised that it had been said, and he had a memory that a librarian would have envied. "I brought the list," he said. "You may look at it and give it me back, and I will say nothing about having brought it, and you will say nothing about having seen it. That is the whole of the bargain." "That is a poor bargain for you. You risk your place." "I am not risking my place. Mr. Cobley will never know, and if he does, he will know it as a thing a good clerk does, which is to see that the law is not played for a fool." Ephraim's mouth went crooked. "Also I am tired of writing of gastric fever. There is a great deal of gastric fever in my depositions, Miss Ruddock. I began to count it last winter, out of the boredom of the work, and I could not stop. It is a very convenient verdict. It fits any body you like, and it offends no one rich." He unfolded a sheet of paper on which he had written, in a small round clerk's hand, a table of names. Prudence read it by the lamp. Eleven names, since the autumn. The dates they had fallen sick, the dates they had died, the names of the society visitors who had carried them their sick money, and in his own neat column, at the bottom, their occupations. A laundress. A cooper. A weaver's two children. A needlewoman. A watchman from the kiln. A man who had kept the canal gates. A hawker's wife. Two more whose work was given as nothing, which in Cinderthorpe meant no work at all. "All in the same quarter of the town," Ephraim said. "All within a mile of the chapel. All on the society's books. And all of them paid their death benefit out of the same account, which I know because the account is sworn to me every quarter and I have the figures." The figures. He told them to her slowly, because he knew she would want them twice. The Unity's income from its members' levies had been falling for three years, as the town's trade fell; that was no secret and no shame. But the fund from which the sick and the dead were paid had in that time come to hold, on the sworn statements, almost exactly what it had held before, which could not be true if men were dying at twice the rate and the levies were falling, unless something had been put in by a hand no one could see. Or unless the figures were not the figures. "You are saying Skell is covering a hole," she said. "I am saying the arithmetic does not close, and that a man who keeps the arithmetic and the key and the cordial all in the same room is the only man who could make it close." Ephraim put his hat on his knee. "Eleven deaths bring eleven death benefits, and every one of them is paid to the family, or to the society for a pauper's funeral, and every one of them is a charge the fund must meet. You do not shorten a fund by killing its members. You shorten it by not paying, and you cannot not pay a dead man's benefit without a lying book. But a man who has *already* been lying the book, and has been found out by a member who reads the annual account, may find that member very troublesome, and may find that member's death very convenient indeed." Prudence was silent. It was a colder shape than the one she had come with. A poisoner for money she could understand; the town had its stories of women who put arsenic in a husband's tea for a burial club, and they were told with a shudder and a wink. But a man who had put the poison into a medicine that two hundred poor people drank as a comfort, so that one particular man among them would sicken and die of the same thing as his neighbours, and no one would ever know which death was meant, was a man working in a different dark altogether. "You are certain of the hole in the fund?" "I am certain the sums do not close. I am not certain what the hole is. It might be a bad investment. It might be a loan. It might be a man's hand in the till." Ephraim met her eyes. "But I have read every quarterly return for four years, and I have never once seen a member put on the sick list and then, when he died, the cause given as anything but fever, unless he was old enough to die of being old. The society has a great gift for fevers. It is a wonder of the town." "Then we need the cordial tested by a man they cannot dismiss." "Where will you get such a man? Cinderthorpe has three doctors and they are all at the Unity's table. The county analyst takes a fee and sits at the pleasure of the magistrates. You would need a chemist of standing, and every chemist of standing in this town owes the Unity a customer or a cousin or a debt." There was another road, and both of them could see it, and for a while neither of them walked down it in words. A chemist with no register was still a chemist, and the copper foil did not ask to see a licence. She could test the cordial, and had tested it; she could test a dozen bottles, and meant to. The difficulty was never the testing. The difficulty was whose word a coroner would weigh when the foils were laid on his table, and the answer, in Cinderthorpe, was plain enough to have been printed on the wall of the court: not hers. Ephraim had watched Mr. Cobley weigh the evidence of a gentleman against the evidence of a servant many times, and the gentleman had not once been found the heavier, and it was not because Mr. Cobley was a bad man. It was because a gentleman could afford to be believed and a servant could not afford to be doubted, and the law, which was made by gentlemen, had been shaped all its life in the direction of that difference. "So we do not go to the coroner with a bottle," Prudence said. "We go to him with a body." Ephraim looked at her for a long moment. He was a clerk, and he had spent seven years reading the paper trails that death leaves, and he understood before she said another word exactly what she was proposing and exactly what it would cost, which was his clerkship, and possibly his mother's room, and possibly his liberty. He did not flinch, which she had not expected, and he did not agree at once, which she had. "I know," Prudence said. "I have been thinking of it all day. There is one road left, and it is a bad one, and it wants a body." Ephraim looked at her. "A body?" "Mr. Figgis was buried on the second of November," she said. "He has been in the ground a matter of weeks. If we can get a sample from him, and if it blackens the copper in a man's hand that is not my hand, then there is no doctor in Cinderthorpe can talk it away, and no jury either." Ephraim's hat stopped turning. "You are talking about an exhumation." "I am talking about an exhumation." She put the list back in his hand. "Do not answer now. Go home and think about your place, and come back on Wednesday if you still have the stomach for it. And on your way home, do not pass under the chapel window. Mr. Skell keeps a light in it, and I would rather he did not learn that you and I have met in the dark." ---