Finally, she plucked out the laces of my corset, wiggled it free, then placed it neatly on the chair in the corner of the room beside the rest of my stacked clothes. From there, she faced me, and her gaze descended over my body like she was examining me for clues. I had to turn away from her, for I could feel my skin flushing.
I heard her come closer and open my case. She made no sound of surprise as the stolen trinkets tinkled amidst my gowns. She found my creased cotton nightdress without comment, then looped it over my head and pulled my arms through.
‘It was my mother’s husband,’ I said, taking up the corner of the bed covers and slipping in between the sheets. ‘He would lose something on the floor, under the table, say, and as he looked for it, he would find the time to look under my skirts as well.’
I swallowed. The explanation had been an attempt to thank her, so she would understand why I had reacted so absurdly, but it felt like I had vomited up my past, and now it lay between us, ugly and stinking, as something to be avoided. I shied away from it, pressed my cheek against the pillow, and squeezed my eyes shut.
‘Did your mother not stop him?’ At the foot of the bed, Luella kicked off her boots. I peeked at her and saw her delicate fingers undoing the buttons at her sleeves and watched her as she removed her gown. She held it to her chest in an embrace, then laid it out on the floor so that it seemed as if there was a third woman in the room with us.
‘Mother didn’t see what she didn’t want to.’
A pallet bed was set up beside mine, and Luella stepped into it.
‘You can sleep in here with me,’ I said.
‘A maid should not be in the same bed as her mistress.’ There was a hint of sarcasm in her voice, then the faintest of laughs, and she slipped in beside me.
We kept good space between us. Both of us were too still, as if we didn’t trust each other or ourselves. Below us, the inn door kept opening and closing as more and more men seeped out into the night and returned to their wives.
I watched the whitewashed walls flicker with the fire. The room was sparsely furnished; there was nothing good to steal, and that was the purpose of it. I liked the bareness of it – like the walls of a church, it soothed me.
‘How did you meet Frank?’
His name whispered in the golden glow caused a pain to simmer under my ribs. What I would have given for it to have been him lying beside me.
‘When Mother married, the last time. He was working for my stepfather as an apprentice blacksmith. My stepfather always said how he was doing Frank a favour, for his father had been a drunk and his mother a whore who’d died before he knew her. He liked to kick Frank when he made a mistake and called him Dog.’
‘Why did your mother marry him? He sounds a beast.’
I laughed. Was it really hard to guess?
‘Money. He’d done well for himself, though half of it was through crooked business, not that my mother minded. And he was old enough to die within a few years.’
‘So he’s dead now?’
‘Don’t know.’ I hoped he was. I hoped he was rotting in the earth, that the worms had eaten through his eyeballs and had shat him out, returned him to his proper state. ‘Frank and I … We saved each other, you see. We got each other out of there.’
I remembered Frank and I running out of the village, bags heavy with whatever we had managed to steal, clattering and jamming against our backs. I remembered our hands gripped together. I remembered the calluses on Frank’s palms, the likes of which I’d never seen or felt before, and the burns which patterned his skin like tattoos, and how I kissed them that night as we lay at the edge of a forest, panting, sweating, laughing, crying. I remembered how the moonlight lay across his face, making his eyes as black as buttons and his skin like polished silver as we planned our future.
‘You loved him,’ Luella said, and her voice was flat.
Something hot bled towards my temple: a tear. I wiped it off my skin, then tucked my hand under the covers again.
‘So much that it hurt.’
‘I suppose love always hurts,’ Luella whispered, and there was a catch in her throat. I thought perhaps she had been in love with a boy, and her heart had been broken. Or perhaps she was thinking of her father.
I woke at dawn. We had not drawn the curtains, and the sunlight stretched on to the bed, warming my legs and nudging me awake. We had less than a day’s journey to Frank; if we moved now, we would be there by dinner time at the latest.
Frank would be sleeping now, I imagined. Were his dreams filled with blood and poison like mine had been? Did his stomach churn? For mine surely did when I thought of how Luella’s last night alive had been spent tucked beside her killer.
Luella’s lips were parted as she breathed deeply in sleep. Her head rested on the pillow with her hair spread out all around her in frizzy ringlets. Her chain was still about her neck, still hidden behind her chemise. She held her hands together before her face as if in prayer, her knuckles were grazed, and one fingernail was broken so low that the flesh had torn and bled a little. That nail was probably stuck in Paul Meadows’ jacket.
I should have roused her, for she would be eager to get going, to get to Frank and kill him, but I let her sleep. There had been a softening in me towards her. If I left her sleeping, walked out of the inn and slipped away to some new place where she could never find me and Frank, then we would all be safe.
I crept out of the bed. A floorboard squeaked as I hobbled to the chair in the corner of the room. I would do without my corset and petticoats and reached only for my dress. I picked up my shoes and my bag, and with one last look at Luella, whose face now glimmered in the sunshine, I tiptoed to the door.
The key caught and clunked. Luella stirred, though her eyes remained closed. The door hinges needed oiling, but I was out on to the landing and tripping down the stairs, and still there was silence all about me.
The bar was littered with cups and glasses. Buckets full of beer and spit and tobacco oozed their stench into the room which seemed larger than it had done last night. I found a few shillings in my purse and placed them on the counter, for Luella would not have the means to pay for our stay, and I did not want the landlady fighting with her. Then I sat on a stool to put my shoes on, and in a moment, I was out of the inn.
Had it really only been yesterday that I had begun this journey with Luella? Had it only been twenty-four hours since I had left the womb-like state of Miss Grey’s house? Time had seemed to stretch; a day had become a week, a lifetime. There was something like a bond which I felt with Luella now. It was because of the incident with Paul Meadows, I had no doubt – after all, she had saved me – and there I was, leading her into a trap! So yes, I was sad to creep away like that without a goodbye, but it really was the best thing to do for her, for us all.
Lifting my heels as best I could, I made my way towards the road. Over my shoulder, I checked the window of our room, but the sun reflected in the glass so that I could not see beyond it. I hoped Luella would still be sleeping. I hoped her grazes would heal, and as they healed, I hoped she would forget about me and Frank. I hoped she would never see me again.
I would walk all the way to Frank if I must; I could not risk meeting Luella in a stagecoach, for no doubt she would come looking for me. It would take me days to reach him if I could not beg a lift, but I thought someone would take pity on a crippled woman who could pay them in silver for their kindness.
And it was when I was imagining what I would say to a passer-by – some sad story of how I had fallen and no good Christian had cared to help me – that I was startled by a voice.
‘Bonnie?’
Behind me, her dress dragged carelessly over her head so that the hem of it was turned up around her knees and her hair was stuck out on one side, Luella trotted towards me. She stopped a few feet away, and I had to look at the ground so I did not see the disappointment in her face.
‘You was leaving me.’
There was a stone near the
tip of my shoe, and I kicked it into the ditch. ‘It is better this way.’
‘You promised me you would take me to him.’
‘It is a bad business, Luella. Bad things will happen.’
‘What about the boat? What about being free?’
‘You are free now, Luella. You are free to go from here as an innocent, without the stain of murder on your conscience. Can’t you see?’ I stepped towards her, reached for her, but she flinched out of my grasp. ‘I am trying to help you.’
She waited, and I was sure that she was doubting herself. Her frown was deep, her eyes wide. I took the chance to persuade her more and dropped my bag on the ground, retrieved my purse, and showed her the five-pound note.
‘Have this. Take it and go to Bristol, to the docks there. Board a ship to America like we said we would. Start again, Luella, free of sin. Start a new life and forget about me, forget about Frank.’
‘My father,’ she whispered, and her hand fluttered to her chest. The chain had worked free of her bodice so that I could see the locket which dangled from it. Samuel’s likeness must have been in there, and the thought made my skin crawl.
‘Forget about your father! His death, I mean. Take the memories with you, the happy ones. You cannot bring him back, you cannot change what has already happened, but you can change what is about to happen.’
She was not looking at me, but staring blindly into the distance as she clutched the locket. I held my breath, too scared to breathe in case I roused her from the dream of freedom in America. And I was just about relaxing, thinking I had done it, thinking that I had changed her mind, changed our fates and saved us all, when her gaze returned to me.
There are always choices in our lives. I have often looked at life as I would look at a map and seen the roads cross and diverge and separate. Each direction takes us somewhere different, and our decisions lead us unknowingly to our destinations.
Luella could have taken us all on a different path; instead she continued on a doomed journey, forcing us all along with her.
She thrust the money back at me. ‘Take me to Frank.’
I opened my mouth to try to reason again, but she spoke above me.
‘Take me to Frank, Bonnie, as you promised you would. You owe me, remember?’
She was referring to last night, and now I knew why she had defended me so valiantly; it was a weapon to use against me. I felt the treachery deep inside, a knife of sickness through my stomach.
She trudged towards the inn. ‘Come on, I’ll help you dress properly, and then we leave.’
After breakfast of a boiled egg and toast, we mounted the stagecoach. Neither of us was speaking to the other. I turned my face to look at the view while Luella closed her eyes and feigned sleep.
We were alone in the carriage. No one bothered much with stagecoaches because of the railways, and though I had been against the idea initially, I was grateful to be away from the bustle of train crowds with just Luella and my thoughts and guilt, for it meant I did not have to pretend quite so much. And, of course, the journey was slower and gave Frank more time to prepare.
The land grew flatter, and we could see for miles over the chequerboard pattern of fields, the majority of which were a golden colour, like patches of sand, for the hay was drying in the sunshine. The heat built as the morning passed until I had to use my hat to fan my face. Luella woke as the breeze caught her flushed skin, and she rearranged herself, pulling at the material under her armpit so that I could see the dark patch of sweat there.
‘Where are we?’ she asked, her voice thick as she licked her lips.
I shrugged. I was loath to talk to her.
She pushed herself towards the window, cast her face out into the air, and breathed in deeply. ‘We are close.’
‘Close to where?’
‘Bridgefield.’
I had hoped we would pass the turning for her hometown before she woke. Begrudgingly, I nodded.
‘Want to call in?’ She did not respond to the acidity in my voice. ‘Tell them all what you’re planning?’
She rolled her eyes to the sky. ‘Don’t be childish.’
‘It is not me who is the child here.’ She was ignoring me now and staring out of the other window. ‘How old are you, anyway?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Christ. So you were how old when …’
‘Ten. Just. It’d been my birthday the week he got arrested.’
Sickness waved through me. A child. To see her father die, to see the hangman, to be left …
‘What happened to you after? Where did you go?’
‘To live with my grandmother. She’s at the edge of the town by the woods, a squat little cottage where the rain runs inside the walls in winter.’ She threw her words like pins, seeing which would make me squeal.
‘In summer, though, it must be pretty.’
‘Oh yes, very pretty, you’re right. Grandma has a garden around her cottage, and the most beautiful flowers grow there. Flowers of all colours: sunshine yellow, sapphire blue, and blood-red, all coming out to say hello. The red ones are my favourite.’
She had grown odd again. Her lips were peeled over her teeth, white from their dryness but streaked with lines of red where the skin was cracking. Her eyes glittered from within, and the sight of her made my stomach turn.
‘Should you like some water, Bonnie? You look queer.’
‘You have water?’
‘No.’ She laughed, cackled rather. ‘But you’d like some. Maybe we should stop at the next inn we see. We could have a feast, a last supper, if you like! If I’d’ve known you had five pounds on you, I would’ve drunk rum and port last night and chucked shillings at that Meadows bloke’s eyes to stop him tickling you.’
I wondered if she had not already been on the rum, for it sounded like it. ‘Tickling me, you say?’
She shrugged. ‘Just a word for it. Pa would say that he were having a tickle with Ma when I were a little ’un. Just a little tickle.’ She ran her fingers over my knee and laughed when I hit her hand away. ‘You have a tickle with Frank, back when you loved him?’
‘Luella, calm down. You are embarrassing yourself.’
She slumped against her seat and pouted, and in the next instant, the lunatic glint had disappeared, and she was morose once again. ‘Grandma said that’s all men want, to have a good tickle. Is that right, Bonnie?’
‘Why are you asking me?’
‘Because I think you’ll tell me honestly.’
Honestly? Wasn’t it only yesterday that she was chiding me for thieving, and no thief that I’ve known has ever been called honest. ‘Most men, yes. But some, I think not. I think some value love more than just tickling, as you call it.’
‘Really?’
She was examining me again, searching for a reaction. Beads of sweat were building at my hairline. ‘Have you a handkerchief?’
Luella opened her bag and took out a patch of cotton. She held it for a moment, unsure whether to part with it, then leaning forward, her eyes pinned on me, she held it out. I thought perhaps there was something on it like a stain of blood or mucus that she was embarrassed to show me, and for a moment, I too wavered before I felt one bead trickle down my forehead. I snatched it from her without looking at it and wiped my face, and still she stared. It was then that I glanced at the plain white cotton, and then, with a sudden rush that almost made me gasp – but not quite – I saw the name, embroidered in red stitches, in the corner.
Somehow, I remained silent. The air was taut between us.
‘He dropped it when he were being arrested. It were dirty from all the boots what trampled it, but we saved it.’
‘We?’ My voice was nothing more than a breath.
‘Ma and me. Neither of us wanted to wash it. It smelt of him, see. We kept it crumpled and filthy for months, long after he’d gone.’
‘It’s clean now.’
‘Grandma.’ She spat the word.
I tore my eyes away from it and mad
e myself smile, though I think it must have looked more like a grimace, for it surely felt painful. ‘At least you have something to remember him by.’
Luella took it from my fingertips and dropped it into her bag again. ‘Yes, it really is the perfect thing to remember my pa by.’
‘And your locket too,’ I said, trying to be light. ‘You keep a part of him close to your heart always.’
She took the locket in her hand and opened it so that only she could see. ‘This is all for you,’ she whispered, then pinched it shut. ‘How long until we reach Frank?’
Chapter 5
I’d had my eyes shut for the last several miles and had been thinking of winters and snow and ice on the windows, trying to cool myself, when the scent of the sea roused me. Peering out of the window, I could see that the land around us was shallow, and the road we journeyed along seemed to have sunk into the earth.
We were close.
I thumped the roof of the coach. ‘Is there an inn nearby?’
The driver’s voice boomed back. ‘Less than a mile.’
Luella sat up straight and clutched her bag. ‘This it?’
‘Not quite. I need rest first.’
‘You’ve been resting all morning.’
‘You will have to wait!’ I pinched the bridge of my nose; I had a headache building behind my eyes.
We dismounted outside a half-timber-framed building where a wooden sign with a picture of an oak tree upon it hung under one of the casement windows. A cat stretched in the sunshine on the grass before the door, lifted its head, and squinted at us as we passed. Luella cooed at it, and it meowed back at her.
The Royal Oak was quiet inside, and the landlord jumped to greet us, his only customers. He made us up a table by the large window which overlooked the road, and Luella was pleased that she could watch the cat from her seat. The landlord brought us a jug of water, gave us his best glasses and a bottle of wine, and offered us napkins which looked as if they hadn’t been out of their locked cupboard for years. He was disappointed when I asked only for bread and salted butter – my stomach needed something plain to ease its nausea – and insisted on bringing us thick slices of ham and a salad picked from his vegetable patch only that morning.
Convenient Women Collection Page 6