What Empty Things Are These

by Crozier, J. L. ;

  There was blood, a clarion of blood spreading scarlet through to Sobriety’s under-petticoat, an announcement—a warning—of the blood-sodden drawers beneath. A drop fell to the timber floor even as I stood there. A small moan came from Sobriety who, from the set of her shoulders, knew why I had arrested my fumblings but had not turned to see.

  ‘I can finish, madam, thank you so much.’ Now she did turn herself a little, made to hold the bloodied patch away from my sight, said, ‘I know where my things are, and can find them more easily than you,’ addressing somehow the air between the bedroom door and my right shoulder.

  I responded to a patch of wall visible beyond the coiled roll of her hair. ‘Of course. I shall fetch you tea.’

  ‘Tea?’ Sobriety said, voice wavering into a whisper, trembling finger to the wet corner of her eye.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and pressed past my maid (felt her, in that tiny crowded room, so warm and yet faintly trembling) and through the door.

  From Mr Hadley’s room, I rang for Cissy, and straightened my husband from his slide in my absence to a sidelong heap. Cissy came and I asked for tea, and a sweet biscuit, and went many times from bed to window, window to bed—Lord, Lord, Lord, my thoughts chanted—in an agitation thickened by the ache of menses while I waited. I was curt with the child who pouted, cross from the trip to and from the kitchen just as she and Mrs Staynes had begun folding laundry.

  Once Cissy was gone back downstairs, I carried the cup rattling on its saucer to Sobriety, now in her chemise under the bedclothes, her face hot and damp. I placed the saucer and cup in the small space beside the plate of food, where it seemed it would stay without falling. We watched it for a moment.

  ‘Drink the tea and eat some food, and sleep,’ I said.

  Sobriety smiled a little.

  I raised my eyebrows and compressed my lips. A little in imitation of Mrs Staynes. ‘Don’t you laugh at me.’ Sobriety gave a weak huff of laughter.

  I looked around the room. The bundle of bloodied underclothes was rolled tightly under the bed and I pulled the bundle out while Sobriety’s gaze slid away. Holding it to one side, hiding it for the moment behind the bell of my skirt, I said, ‘Later, this evening, if you are feeling better, I think we could sit together and I shall read to you.’

  Sobriety turned toward me.

  ‘Perhaps the latest piece from Mrs Oliphant.’

  Looking at her, I thought: We will sit in the yellow circle of lamplight, I with Mrs Oliphant in hand, you with needle and lace.

  It had always been in this way, in reading to each other and sewing or undertaking some small task, that we had passed our evenings when Mr Hadley was gone on business.

  Sleepily, Sobriety smiled again. I smiled too, for it was a joyous thing, while unaccustomed, to be so evidently trusted.

  I took the bundle to the kitchen and burned it while the kitchen was empty, watched as the avid flames embraced it, with Cook below in the coal cellar, with Mrs Staynes and Cissy in the scullery, with the back of Albert’s head in the doorway where he sat in half-hearted sunlight, jerking vigorously as he rubbed polish onto his boots.

  Part Two:

  In which Adelaide and Sobriety, newly become tourists in London, are surprised at what they find

  Chapter Nine

  Awaiting the seasonal change

  By A. Hadley

  We have moved beyond the season of mists and into that of fogs and driving rains, an angry season, which leaves us wrapped all the day in shawls, blowing on fingers. The weather vents itself beyond our windows and we remember, and yearn for, a gentler time of softer showers and zephyrs stroking the cheek like the warm breath of babies…

  I rolled the blotter over the paper and read again what I had written. And will it do? I thought. Was this as young, as foolish as my former childish works on the Lord of Rothesay? My cheeks grew warm. It was carefully done, yes, and ladylike; it would not cause discord. I felt I crept around the edges of the community of writers, very quiet lest I be noticed. Nay; very quiet lest it be noticed that I have nothing to say.

  What else might I say?

  Well. Perhaps I say something, but nothing very well. I smiled sadly at myself and my pretensions.

  Picking up my pen wiper and rubbing slowly at the nib, as in meditation, I thought on my use of the name A. Hadley. It was both to dash at the thing—actually writing in public—and away from it, perhaps. It was bold in one way, for all those acquainted with me would certainly know this was I. And yet I clung to ambiguity too, just a little. It was done, perhaps, to appear a private person, since I did not state my given name. As if I might run and hide, at a pinch, I thought, while I knew this would not be possible. And yet I fancied it, this notion that I stood, in naming myself thus, a little aside, a little in the shadows.

  I placed the pen, its wiper, the blotter, and my few pages of writing back in the writing box and closed the lid. At the very least, the taking up occasionally of a little writing task concentrated the mind and was, in its way, soothing. Yet only if it was a privately done thing. What a quandary was this desire to set my opinions in public and yet to stand behind the curtains, at one and the same time.

  When my duty in the sick-room was done, I would take my writing box back to my morning room, and Cissy would replace the table by the window.

  Mr Hadley’s breathing had a faint whistle to it today.

  Pressing down between my fingers, wriggling and stretching them, I held my hand out for my inspection. Yes. Kidskin gloves, fawn, scallop-edged; a simple three-button length. A favourite pair. And I had on my fine wool paletot, sleek over my gown, my newest bonnet, neat and smart off the face, a veil swept back for now and stirring in the air. I stood at the top of the steps at the front door for Sobriety’s return with the umbrella. Mr Brent waited below with the landau, both sections of its roof folded back today; the horses mouthed their bits, shifted with a leathery creaking and snorted in gusts.

  I gripped an envelope addressed to Mr Thackeray of The Cornhill Magazine, which held the small piece of writing, those elegant few lines about the weather (it affects us all—who is not interested in it? I thought, while still my cheek warmed at the very subject) penned just yesterday. I had made a fair copy of it that morning. We would post it while about our business in the city.

  Then there was Sobriety, saying, ‘My apologies, ma’am, it was Cissy on the stairs with the polish and we would keep moving the same way, like a dance, before I could get past her…’ I laughed and we picked up our skirts to bob-bob down the steps to where Mr Brent had the carriage door open for us.

  We sat, arranged the great whispering piles of our skirts, careful of the metal hoops beneath, which, though between two sets of petticoats each (flounced, in my case), might pinch perhaps or bend a little out of shape with uncareful sitting. I had on my gently figured green, whose colour was reflected in the tartan-style Sobriety was wearing—so well-chosen of her. Hers was my last year’s street-

  wearing best, taken in and taken up invisibly through her inimitable needlework, and made the plainer now with the removal of certain flounces (Sobriety always removes the flounces when a garment is for her own use—such a Methodist!). I myself had worn it only once or twice, and so Sobriety had not sold it on but kept and made it her own, bent closely over the garment for many hours.

  We are well-paired.

  We brought our veils over our faces, tucked our gloved hands into the sleeves of our paletots.

  Mr Brent said, ‘Hup!’

  The carriage stirred and hesitated, wheels grinding on the grit of the roadway; then it gained pace with that smoothness owed to Mr Brent’s daily grease and polish. The horses’ hooves tic-tocked, their haunches bunched and flexed like well-muscled velvet. The sky was low with cloud, but the great billows glowed white, not grey, with only a tinge of acrid yellow as the city’s mark.

  I cann
ot imagine rain today. There will be no rain. I closed my eyes a moment to feel the air move against my face.

  It would be such a full day ahead of us. Earlier that morning, I had been unaccountably stirred, impatient with anticipation. Unable to play the serene. Almost, I had been glad of my hour with Mr Hadley, had sat at his bedside with the door ajar, some part of my attention on Sobriety’s small thumpings and rustlings nearby as she straightened my room. I sat reading out loud to Mr Hadley—slowly, to quell this nervous buzzing—from journals and newspapers a little as he had, until so recently, read to me, though I now explored the details of these tales and opinions where once he read only what he felt I ought to know. I glanced at his vacant face. And one reads to him because one might otherwise forget he is there. The thought crossed my mind with its dreadful admission.

  Are you there, Mr Hadley? And then, Are you there, George?

  Social notes, colonial business of some interest to investors in the City, the theft of a tiny baby from its peaceful home in north London. His poor mother. Sipping at coffee, I read until Albert came with his master’s shaving bowl, brush, and towel, so that I might at last search out Sobriety for bonnet and gloves and coat.

  See how we go to see the world?

  ‘How are you, Sobriety?’

  ‘Very much better, ma’am.’

  I felt we smiled like girls with a secret between ourselves, kept behind our veils, as we passed along treed roadways, occasional walled gardens to left and right, and the park receding behind us. Like foreigners, travelling from wealth and unhurried suburban

  quiet—the clip-clop made indolent with birdsong, the shiver of leaves, a wall with a trained spread of late roses—to a place of more urgent energy. The breeze began to carry the smudged smells of a hundred thousand distant lives and occupations.

  Houses and places of business soon drew close to the street itself, tall and narrow and pressed together, an occasional figure indistinct in a room beyond a window. Meat hung bloody on a butcher’s hooks; further on, hats stood on stands behind mullions. Somewhere behind those houses, a band of brass and wind was playing, creating discord with a man and his barrel organ a-wheezing by the side of the road.

  What a clamor! All of this, rubbing together like a file against metal, I thought and was pleased with myself. A file against metal.

  Women and children with trays called out; an old man cried ‘Lucifers!’ and rattled a packet. Men with canes halted to consult a paper or a watch. One checked his shoe, with the culprit mongrel, I surmised, in a doorway six steps on scratching its dull fur into a storm of hairs. There was a knot of dusty men with caps or bent toppers cracking with age, their discussion busy with elbows and arms.

  The landau jolted over a pothole and the mush of rotted refuse within it. There was a smell of gas—an inkling at first and then altogether present before we passed through this part of the street—from a leakage somewhere.

  ‘What a throng it is, Mr Brent!’

  ‘This is the gentler part of the day, ma’am.’ Mr Brent’s profile spoke a moment before he turned his head back to the street.

  An omnibus passed us, heading back whence we had come, and heads turned toward the landau. My cheeks heated. Veritable impertinence. But with a subtle turn of our own veiled faces, Sobriety and I took care not to seem to notice.

  It had been an hour perhaps, or it felt so, with progress now slowed markedly and the people poorer, concentrated, and busier; even the children intent somehow on their own survival, brisk on dust-grey legs spindly as birds’.

  One boy, carrying brush and woven scoop, ran into the street and among tall grinding wheels, into the mince of horses’ legs and their sharp hooves. He was gone from sight for the space of a held breath and then was back to the kerb with his load of fresh manure.

  I held my breath at the danger to the child—I went cold for an instant thinking how he might have been crushed. Then I had my hand to my breast as he raised to the street eyes in a face grey and hard as stone, and greasy with ill health. The realization of the boy’s inevitable fate came to me: See how he is aged, as if he had no use for youth here; that he must reach age, then old age, then death quickly, quickly, to get it done… I wondered what the child’s age would be (Who would know without young pink chubbiness to go by?) and imagined him of Toby’s years; though Toby stood, when I had last seen him, half a head taller than this boy, with hair a soft fall of curls and no broom’s head stiffened with lice. This boy’s eyes passed across my own and, though he would not have seen my gaze behind the veil, I felt he both saw and hated me. Then I recognized that this was not hatred but an indifference born of distance. I thought, This child exists so far from cologne and veils and kidskin that they do not exist, that I do not exist, and recognized in this, after all, something of Toby. Oh Toby.

  The street boy turned away a fraction, and I saw a small version of himself stood just behind his elbow with a much-buckled bucket, into which was emptied the scoop of manure.

  The landau passed the boys by. I turned toward Sobriety to see… To see what? To see perhaps if Sobriety had seen, but Sobriety faced away, her veiled profile blurred and shadowed. I fancied there was a breeze-like grief breathing from my maid, from my friend, felt Sobriety had herself gone a distance, perhaps with this boy, or the smaller boy, who might have been like her own if she had not…if George were still…

  Surely not. I repeated it to myself. Surely not. But then, I knew that if he were capable of smiting, like Jehovah with his hair a white nimbus, or taking possession like…like…there was a confusion in my mind that would not raise a picture beyond a muscled, struggling, sourly-reeking blackness, a panting…then he could indeed cast away, throw away, exile, condemn my poor, good Sobriety…

  The danger that had faced Sobriety now rushed in all its ice-water reality into my consciousness, and I worked to slow my breathing, shallow and fast now in empathetic fear.

  Mrs Lewes, she who wrote as George Eliot, though there was a sympathy for her character who had gone astray—that Hetty in Adam Bede (that I had read last year) who caused the death of a living child—understood nothing, nothing, I realised then. The woman who is left with a child out of wedlock is left also as bearer of everybody’s shame. Everybody else may wash his hands of sin, while the woman is bowed double with it. See how my Sobriety, in all her Methodist innocence and…and straitness, is threatened and made guilty, and put in danger…

  There was a loud ringing of metal upon metal. I did not see where it came from, and it left its jangling on me for many minutes.

  The air was denser with the approach of the river, ‘our thick Thames’, as George had often called it. His attention had been much attracted to subjects such as the river and effluent, as had everyone else’s since The Great Stink, during that stifling summer when Members had fled Parliament itself rather than choke on the river’s rising miasma. Sobriety and I raised scented handkerchiefs to our noses. We should all carry herb-scented pomanders, as the Elizabethans once did, I fancied…

  The breeze blew from the water—there was the river as a darkling suggestion between alleyways, though I could not be certain until the shape of some river craft slid past, like something over oil. There was no avoiding the stench. I had forgotten this, I thought, and yet so far still from the docks. Craning a little to see if Mr Bazelgette’s works were evident at this point on the river, I could see nothing and in any case remembered his sewer building was not planned for, this far down. At least not yet; later, perhaps. I had not paid enough attention to Mr Hadley’s opinions to remember the details.

  Perhaps there will be a change in direction of this breeze soon.

  In my pocket was the list I had made after the very long talk the household had had together yesterday, and now I pulled it out.

  I had known the household meeting would take some time, and had called all of the staff to my morning room. They left the door open a
nd Mr Hadley’s too, upstairs, so that we would hear if there were—this seemed most unlikely—an accident, perhaps if he suddenly slid out of bed. I asked them all to sit, with tea for everyone. The two men, creaking from time to time as they shifted, were over-large in their silence.

  Cissy giggled, was heady with the excitement of the unusual. She sat at the edge of the footstool I had embroidered myself but used very little (for there were parts where frequent unstitching had weakened the fabric, demonstrating, once again, my lack of

  diligence in matters of embroidery). Several pastoral scenes—languid, sun-drenched farming, and one of boating—that had belonged to Mama, hung on the wall behind the girl. The thought came to me: How foreign is a field of corn to this Manchester-bred child.

  Mrs Staynes said, ‘Cissy!’ The girl stilled her giggles. Instead, she kept up a theatre of sighs and gasps whispered in the background of my description of this house’s forthcoming economic state of affairs upon the passing of Mr Hadley. The long discussion that followed was held mostly between me, Mrs Staynes and, occasionally, Sobriety. Cook, Cissy’s aunt who nevertheless rarely reproved the child in her frequent excitations, said little and filled the delicate chair by the window with her girth and a sense of kitchen steam—odd, I mused, without her apron or a ladle in those pink hands.

  ‘Rooms’, I had noted, leaning at my small bureau over paper more usually used for letters of invitation than for lists, ‘to be closed’. This would save on time spent cleaning, and expense on heating or lighting; though they may have to be reopened when Toby was at home during the term break, if it were needed, though surely this would be rare. Mrs Staynes, who stood at attention throughout the meeting like the seemly sentry that she considered herself to be, crossed her housekeeper’s gloved hands in front where the keys hung on their chain. Master Toby’s visits were indeed, she agreed, sufficiently infrequent.