What Empty Things Are These

by Crozier, J. L. ;

  Eventually, Sobriety’s voice came out of the dark.

  ‘I have decided, about Mr Broadford, should he ask for me.’

  There. You see.

  My voice came out at first as a whisper, so that I must clear my throat. ‘As he will. What have you thought?’ I know what you have thought.

  ‘He is a good man, and steady, and he looks to offer a good home and certainty. And so I will accept.’ There was a short silence. Sobriety spoke then as if to excuse herself. ‘I can be a helpmeet to him. I can make his home and life orderly. I shall make a home.’

  I wondered, but could not ask, where Sobriety’s family lay in all of this, who may or may not approve of this marriage. It did then occur that Sobriety might push the farmer-preacher away now, for how else to deal with the secret of the sin that had been inescapable but for which she could not forgive herself? Obedience to her father, the tenet knit into her very soul, would struggle, surely, with the secret that had also settled into place there. She must, simply, not tell.

  ‘But…’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Sobriety? What question can there be for you?’ What question can there be? I have no claim, I have no claim… I thought of nights to come, lying in stillness made absolute by the lack of companionable creaks from above, the movements of Sobriety’s small ministerings to her own dress and undress in that small, plain room that was her own. No more. Dear God, I feel so alone, and she is not yet gone, even.

  ‘Oh, none, really. But I will give him no answer until after Mr Hadley is gone.’

  The carriage lurched a little and settled, and the horses clopped on as if keeping time in the silence that followed.

  ‘I understand.’ I have no claim, I have no claim.

  ‘Yes. But even so, I do not intend to leave until you are prepared for it.’

  My eyes filled and I scrambled a moment for a handkerchief.

  ‘And it seems to me we may continue as friends.’

  There was a rustle as Sobriety reached for my hand.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Sobriety and Mr Brent had both, quite separately, miscalculated the distance to Madame Drew’s establishment. We were early, consequently, and quite clearly the first to arrive. Our vehicle stood alone in the silent street in its empty square where great houses stared dour and stately at each other across the dark and paved expanse. In our self-consciousness we chose to place the carriage in the shelter of a spreading street tree, seemingly merging with it as a puddled, shadow-like shape, next door but one to Madame Drew’s house. The landau lurched as Mr Brent descended, but I whisked my gloved hand at him. ‘No, no. Not yet, I think.’ I looked out. Great spills of black from trees were patched with moonlit greys. There were yellow puddles of light from streetlamps. Mr Brent nodded, and we felt the jerk of his re-ascent.

  ‘We shall enter when there is company. They may not take long,’ I told Sobriety.

  ‘I hope so. Have you enough of the rug?’

  Sobriety leaned over to ensure my lap was fully covered with the rug. She glanced up into the night, past my bonneted head. Something was agitating, apparently, at the edge of her vision.

  ‘Look there! How extraordinary!’

  I followed Sobriety’s gaze to where Madame Drew’s front door had opened of a sudden, so that there was a dim golden oblong against which a figure stood out in bell-skirted silhouette, swinging a large fringed shawl about her shoulders.

  Madame Drew’s door slammed. The figure, head down and arms clutching her shawl close-wrapped about her person, headed along the wide footpath past the houses of the great. The figure ran, absolutely ran (extraordinary!), with her tolling shadow swinging, looming and shrinking past the streetlamp—whose light revealed her as tall and stoutish, and the gathers and ribbons on her house cap sweeping back as she went—across the end of the square. She reached that heavy mansion, three houses wide and three storeys high, with which I was already acquainted. Almost no light showed in the tall windows stationed regularly across the frontage, or at the double doors nearly lost in the shadow cast by the portico and stolid columns, or in its bay windows blind in the darkness by the entranceway. Everything about the house spoke of absence, save for a very faint glowing as of a forgotten candle, or a night lamp turned right down and left, perhaps, in a corner on the ground floor.

  And where was that little whispering wife, the small Mrs Farquharson who wished so much for companionship? She, who grasped at friendship, apparently, from the first person to show consideration? Was she hid in those dark and silent rooms, or gone back to her bemedalled father to puzzle him, indeed, with her tenuous position and a child who may be seen as fatherless? Her fortunes tied, helpless, to those of her husband.

  So much falls along with that base man.

  ‘Is that Madame Drew herself, I wonder?’ The woman had reached the Farquharsons’ door. I whispered in Sobriety’s ear, for now Sobriety sat back in her seat the better to see from her own window, and I leaned across her, with my cheek brushing a tiny ribboned rosette in her bonnet. In turn, Sobriety moved her own head to one side a little to evade the edge of my headwear.

  ‘It may be.’

  There followed three heavy raps at the door of the louring mansion, and the sound echoed around the street. Madame’s shadow jerked back and forth in little impatient steps, while her figure was itself hidden in the dense, still shadow of the portico.

  ‘That is Mr Farquharson’s house.’ I slid the rug from my lap and held my hoops and skirt up to step the awkward space across the landau, crouching to avoid the roof but stepping upon Sobriety’s hem because I could not see it—so that I could sit opposite her. The carriage tilted and bounced on its springs until I had settled. We two peered into the dark to see if the woman had heard the jiggling and the creaking of the springs, or had observed the inch back and forward of the wheels—but we could see no sign of her noticing. The presence of Mr Brent, patient in thick overcoat with collar up to his ears and hat pulled down to them, did not attract the woman’s attention either, we assumed, his shadow and that of the carriage merging blackly and fortuitously with that of the tree.

  Instead, there was a further rapping at the door, a pause and then the woman stepped down the two entrance steps to see if there were any sign of habitation. Madame turned her head to left and right, old fashioned curls like well-sprung sausages swinging beneath her cap, and then began to call out.

  ‘Mr Farquharson, Mr Farquharson!”

  Sobriety murmured to me, ‘Surely she must know he is not there—’, when, as if we had been overheard, Madame Drew called out: ‘Mrs Farquharson, you must respond!’

  The woman’s voice was so loud now as to be straining. Distress had dried her throat, it seemed, so that she was quite hoarse. Around the square, shadows were appearing at many windows; something even seemed to shift in the one faint-lit window of the Farquharson house, though I could not be sure.

  Does someone in there listen, even as we do?

  I whispered, so that the words barely stirred the air, ‘If I were Mrs Farquharson, I would also be elsewhere. Away from those who would bang upon my door.’

  Sobriety’s eyes were round, concentrated on the drama in the street. ‘Yes. Mrs Farquharson is not there.’

  I touched her sleeve. ‘Do you think she might be American?’

  ‘This woman on the street? Oh, yes. Possibly.’

  The woman let out something like a bark. She paused a

  moment, her head turned upward toward the faint glow at that one window, and then she walked quickly, stamped across so that her skirt positively bounced, and shouted at the infinitesimal light. ‘Mrs

  Farquharson, it is outrageous! Where are my investments? What has your husband done?’

  There was no response, and the woman stood for a long moment until it was clear she listened in vain. There would be no response, whatever that small light re
presented. Madame Drew—for it must be she—then stepped back some paces and raised her voice to a wail, while the great façade continued all stony aloofness and jutting shadows. See, no longer a ship of hope.

  ‘Spillane, he promised me, he promised me! Mrs Farquharson, Mr Giles, Spillane, answer!’

  This last seemed to echo, but all then fell away into silence and Madame Drew stood looking up at the house, paced rapidly this way and that a few moments, her skirt swinging violently with each turn. She paused once more just where the feeble light shone, and called, ‘Again and again, I shall return. I assure you!’

  But the house and its faint light continued silent and at last she stamped and swung about, scurried along the edge of the square back to her own house, with her shadow billowing and shrinking once more past the streetlamp. Her door opened, there was a moment of dim light, and then it closed behind her.

  ‘She must be very anxious about something, to display herself so,’ I said, when the night’s silence had returned to the square, with nothing more notable than a thin cat purposeful across a pool of lamplight.

  ‘She has lost investments.’ Sobriety rustled a little on the seat opposite. I could see, beneath the night-grey florettes of the bonnet, Sobriety’s profile painted silver by the moon.

  ‘The inspector will not be surprised, I dare say, that there should be another such loss,’ Sobriety said. Looking across at my friend—so compact as she was there in the dark, a feature here and a fold there lined with hushed moonlight—I felt again a moment of separation, a sting that came and went like the stab from the finest of blades.

  See, she refers to him already. It is done.

  ‘Poor woman, I suppose.’

  I realised Sobriety still gazed into the street. ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘The cat…see the cat? It has a friend.’

  I squinted. And indeed there was a slight movement, ill-lit and grey, undefined so that one must blink to keep the image in the eye, at the entrance to the small laneway next to Mr Farquharson’s house. I fancied a figure there did, as Sobriety thought, cuddle the cat.

  ‘Look what we do to pass the time, spying on all the night’s goings-on! Poor Mr Brent must be chilled.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yet I am even more wary of knocking at Madame’s door by ourselves, with no other of her clientele yet arrived. A most peculiar and overwrought person!’

  ‘It does seem her second sight has failed her.’ We giggled together softly, and the carriage wobbled a little with it.

  The night fell silent again, weighing on all three, I fancied, with we women inside the carriage squinting through windows misting over from our breath, and Mr Brent atop, his own breath surely frosted puffs in this chilly night, like that of the two snorting horses shifting from haunch to haunch. One of the horses shook his head, and the clanking together of metallic pieces was crisp in the cool air.

  Sobriety rubbed at the window. The cat continued for the moment its mutual caress with the figure at the mouth of the alleyway next to the great house, and then apparently tired of it and jumped down. The small figure stepped out a small distance onto the footpath; the cat danced away as if to tease. Sobriety drew in a sharp breath.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It is she! It is the girl’

  ‘Girl?’ I rubbed at my own window. ‘Oh! The girl!’

  As we watched, the girl—she who had stolen Mr Farquharson’s child and had poured out her wordless yearnings toward him as he stood in the dock, and lurked and run through my imaginings as the most desperate of suggestions—stepped back into the alleyway. The shadows fell across her as a heavy curtain. We women sat a moment in silence, watching where, unseen, the young girl breathed alone next to the great, grand house, all of its windows empty and blind but for one, with its faint but steady glow, there, on the ground floor.

  ‘She should not be here,’ Sobriety whispered, finally. It was as if the girl’s vulnerability poured on misery-poisoned air from the alley in which she hid. We sat and gazed more, as the cat stepped back whence it had pranced, its own shadow stretching to a point behind it. It sauntered back down the street and slipped, ink into ink, into the alleyway. I shuddered as if from the stroke of an icy finger.

  ‘She should not be here,’ Sobriety said again. I reached for the handle of the carriage door.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Mr Brent was left by the carriage, standing by the horses with his hand awkward upon a halter. His eyes were on the black space of the alleyway, toward which we had gone—slowly, and with the air around our faces in a billowing and fading cloud from too-fast breathing. We drew close and the cat, slipping from the heavy blackness, an inkblot detached and animate, scampered away to lick itself by the streetlamp.

  ‘Child! We know you are there! Speak to us.’

  I held close to Sobriety, arm in arm, for the courage that it gave as she stared into the inhabited blackness, and for the warmth, since a little fear had set us both to shivering.

  And why are we afraid? We are not a poor, mad child with no bed but these cobbles and no roof at all.

  If only we could see…

  We held our breath a moment for the silence; and it may have been, I thought, that the tiniest movement—a scuffing against stone or brick—sounded from the lightless cavern of the alleyway. We breathed again, and the mist that came from our mouths joined into one small, ragged cloud.

  She sees us, two wrapped women entwined and alien, utterly foreign, utterly, as if we stepped from a painting—some kind of fantastical image of light and warmth—into the real world of cold and pain.

  ‘Speak to us, child. We have not come to hurt you. We would not.’

  There was a sniffle from the dark, and it seemed we could see movement in there, where some part of the darkness shifted. The very air here was not as the air in the great square with its trees and its flagstones; the laneway exhaled foulness from urine and faeces and rotting matter, which may have been either vegetable or animal.

  ‘Child?’

  ‘You.’ The voice was rough, without the music of a training in gentle cadences, yet it was very young. So far, the voice came steady and quiet. ‘You were there, before. In my tunnel. You took my baby.’

  ‘You know that was not your—’ I began, but the answer came back before I had finished, louder, with the beginnings of a metallic shrill.

  ‘You took my baby, and then you had them take ’im.’

  ‘Child, child…’ There was in the girl’s words and tone a loosening of despair that wrung in me a desperate pity in reply: poor girl, poor girl. I stepped into the darkness of the alleyway, hand in hand with Sobriety, toward that unquiet, thrashing spirit. She is mad with her delusions. But the girl by now was not listening, and continued with a voice stripped from loss and lack.

  ‘You had them take ’im, and ’e blames me! ’e blames me! Did you see how ’e did look at me, when I was ’is, ’e knew I was ’is…’ The girl took breath. ‘And ’e loved me. ’e did love me.’

  We stopped. My eyes were wide now and my belly, beneath the stitchings and the whalebone and laces, queasy with a slow-growing understanding. To have so misunderstood what this girl had told us in Mr Bazelgette’s tunnel. Knowledge prickled, settling into outrage that was as yet uncertain of its target—Mr Farquharson, of course, was more monster than any had imagined; he had used this girl for his lusts. But what of this girl, despoiled and now ruined? I had an urge to turn from the girl as something made unworthy and unclean, and then shook my head against such a thought. I took breath, and with it came pity interwoven, hopelessly, with a kind of shame that suffused everything, even though I could not say why. The childish voice continued.

  ‘More than ever that woman in his ’ouse, I am ’is wife, more than she is. She’d sit there dressed up like a doll, noddin’ and smilin’, noddin’ and smilin’…’
she said in a sing-song, with a sneer, perhaps, on that small young face dim in the dark, her facial expressions blurring the more I squinted to see. ‘Stoopid. Feathers. Lace. But ’e came to me, ’e would find me where I waited for ’im, and ’e would cover us in ’is coat till I could ’ardly breathe under ’is great weight, and push until I thought I would burst, and ’e would whisper to me—’

  ‘Dear God,’ Sobriety murmured.

  ‘—“Mine, mine, mine”, and strike me ’ard to leave ’is mark—’ The rusty voice broke off and began again, ‘—and then when my belly grew, ’e knew what it was, ’e did, and ’e brought me bits of food and money, and once a blanket.’

  We stood stock still, our breath puffing and vanishing, puffing and vanishing. We felt our faces paling in the cold; the stench reached out from the dark and wrapped around us.

  ‘And still I was so surprised, I was, when the pain came—I thought it would never stop…’ The girl’s voice trailed away, and the only sound for a minute or more was of the breathing of three people, broken eventually by sharp barking from somewhere nearby.

  ‘’E took the baby away. ’E gave it to that woman to look after, so she could wrap ’im up and feed ’im. I saw through the winder, many times.’

  The girl began to cry quietly, her voice wavering. ‘But I just wanted to smell ’im, my baby. I wanted to wrap ’im up myself.’

  The nearby dog paused, then barked twice.

  ‘I took my baby. But everything went wrong after that.’ She sighed. ‘Everything went wrong.’

  She took a breath. ‘Mr Farquharson, ’e—’ She stopped and took another breath. ‘’E was that angry, ’e wouldn’t talk to me. And then they took ’im away, and now ’is scent’s on me no more, and ’is marks all faded, and I ’ave no shillin’ to say I’m ’is…’