The First House

by Robert Allwood

  She turned her hand up to the sky as she felt a drop land. As the rain increased its pitter patter, there was smoke visible through the marsh. Gold frowned. It wasn’t black like oil smoke, nor grey like wood. She started to run towards it. Wet soil flicked itself up and across her face; her arm moved up and wiped away the grime. In a shallow dyke she saw a body motionless next to a patch of stickyweed that smouldered unchecked.

  ‘Alex,’ Gold whispered to nothing.

  She hadn’t seen the man since the Tail. Since that awful day. Gold shivered; the scene was anodyne. A second of inflection passed through her before she acted. Her hair spilled across her jerkin as she crouched to judge the tracks on the ground. Alex had tried to crawl away, but was in too much pain, he had tried to stand, and was overcome. Something had attacked him on returning to London. She wasn’t strong enough to lift him up, but she could tend to him on the side of road. The trees provided some respite from the weather. She dragged him under shelter and stamped out the smoke; there was a strange heat that sat in the air, persisting. She gasped at Alex’s wound; it had burned the skin from the left half of his face, leaving a bloodied mess. His damaged eye winced at her touch. Her hands shook as she cleaned the wound, and removed dirt from it. Their tent formed part of a branch. Alex nestled at the base of the tree, two layers of cotton blanket underneath and one on top. Gold’s fire was sloppy with dry sticks scrounged about her, but it only needed to last until she signalled for help. She gripped her cloak around herself tight for comfort, and stared into the fire. Its flames licked and hissed with the raindrops that fell down from the canopy. She heard a familiar horn blow and responded with three from her own in return. Gold stood. She gathered Cyrus was close, and had brought aid. She spotted Cyrus riding at speed, before he saw her. Gold checked on Alex inside the tent. He had turned pale. She gripped his arm to wake.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, eyes wincing.

  ‘You know me,’ she said without taking her eyes off Cyrus in the distance. There was a pause in the man. Alex cocked his head at an angle, his mouth working over his next words before they came.

  ‘Frost’s daughter? Your name was Gold wasn’t it?’

  ‘Still is, sir.’

  ‘So, you all survived. Thank God. Good, that’s good.’

  She opened his good eye and glanced at his complexion. She held her cross in one palm and prayed that he would recover in good time. Cyrus, hooded and impatient, came to the camp and nodded at her, with no words exchanged between them. He manhandled and carried Alex out, back onto his feet and swung him onto his horse. Looking out across the woodlands she packed the tent and left the fire to drown. She noticed him taking firmer ground as Alex clung on, almost unconscious. Gold could only imagine what had happened. She packed everything and secured it. As she began to walk back home, she recalled Alex’s wound. It had to be of a rapid heat that scorched him. It left an injury like one she had seen when lightning had struck a farmhand from the previous year. She shivered, coaxed her legs into action, and took the slow road back to Houndbarrow.

  Gold preferred to enter Houndbarrow from the tunnels. Cyrus, she recalled, had shown her after she wondered how the smugglers and toshers moved around London so quickly. One night, when everyone else in the house was asleep, Cyrus placed one hand on her shoulder shaking her awake. He placed one finger up to his lips, hush. Gold got ready, laced on high boots and a slicker, put a pie hat on her head (to stave off drips from the ceiling of the sewer), and left the house without waking anyone. Cyrus slinked like a cat around the moonlit streets of London, his hand waved in the air when he wanted Gold to stop and be quiet. With a length of steel, he opened a grate, turned up the flame on his lantern, and measuring every step, made his way down into London’s depths. Gold’s eyes, when eventually used to the gloom saw Cyrus and other men about. The toshers. They were dressed as she was, armoured in long strips of waxed leather, boots long and thick enough to wade through the sea. They waved hello to her, bowing in mock ceremony, welcoming her to a hidden kingdom. All of them were men with cracked teeth, boils, or pocked faces. The undesirables, the lost and damned, the roughest life the city had to offer. In the next second, after waving back, the smell punched Gold’s nose as though it was a solid mass that clung to everything, cancerous and spreading its evil unchecked. It was the worst smell she had ever encountered, and would ever encounter in her life. Even after a bath the next day, and her clothes soaked in perfume, the smell lingered, imprinted in her memory forever. If there was ever another thing I could not forgive Cyrus for, Gold thought, it was introducing me to that stench.

  It was that smell that assailed her nose now, as Gold stepped through a hidden grate on the outskirts of the city. She stepped over refuse and moulded foodstuff, over faeces and clumps of fat, bones and brick. She gagged, closing a glove over her mouth; with the other, she placed a perfumed neckerchief over her mouth and nose, and wrapped it twice around her head before tying it. Gold tensed her legs, and began to wade through the filth. She counted steps until five hundred, about quarter of a mile. She grasped the ladder in haste, her body begging for fresh air and a hot, clean, bath. Above, on a street, a cover was popped open and two dark eyes peeked about. Gold climbed out, stamped off worst of the muck from her boots, and walked home, her lungs drinking in the fresher air.

  After a hot soak before supper, (her clothes left outside without comment) Cyrus thanked Gold in his own begrudging fashion. While she had grown into a young woman, Cyrus was now grey in flecks around his temples and grumbled as her father used to. Alex, laid to rest on a wood bench, was swaddled in the same blankets as he had arrived, his head supported by a feather pillow, candles circled around him in case Alex woke during the evening. To Gold, he appeared to be a shrouded saint, hallowed in death. He no longer shook; his breathing at ease. Gold removed Alex’s bandage and shut out the sun as best she could. With a candle in hand for light, she washed and cleaned the injury, and applied more ointment. Cyrus inspected her work, relieved that his friend was still alive after all these years. He told her of all the adventures they had shared. The fateful day of sailing to an island that, back then, did not exist on every map, and was not well known across the country. She could see it in the way Cyrus’ eyes would become blank sometimes. Inside them, at those moments, there were little fragments of time that tugged his heart in directions she could only guess at. Over the years Gold noticed Cyrus would take longer to return to reality after reminiscing. She always asked if he was happier then or now. He would always reply with now, but a sad smile would spread across his face. If it was a life full of regret that had greyed his hair, Gold had never asked.

  ‘Cyrus, his burn needs to air and this ointment applied every day until the swelling disappears. Just keep it clean and your friend will be fine,’ Gold said, folding her arms.

  ‘Yes, seems he’ll live. How did you find him?’

  ‘Saw some odd smoke over the hills, I went to have a look. If it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t have seen him. He was alone and without a horse, and there were two sets of footprints in the mud.’

  ‘He wasn’t alone then. Who was the second person?’

  ‘I don’t know, their footprints were light.’

  ‘A woman?’

  ‘Won’t he tell you all the details when he wakes up?’

  ‘He might. He might lie. Alex might not be the same friend from those years ago.’

  Gold huffed, flicked her hair, and left the old man to speculate in peace. She sought out his wife, Victoria, who sat, as usual, beside a lit stove in the kitchen. Gold had an inkling, ever since living with Cyrus and Victoria, that you could tell much of a person just by the rooms they frequented. The way objects and items were put away, the colours and decoration, and the little touches of personality. As of now, Victoria’s hands busied knitting warm gloves while the stew cooked; the kitchen’s surfaces immaculate, the stew colourful and heady in smell. Despite being a year older than Cyrus, Victoria’s beauty still stole looks
from other men in the city streets. There were few things not shared between the two women, ever since being forced to reside with each other. Gold remembered the awkward early days that ran into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years, before both women conceded that her stay was more permanent than expected. Victoria, and her open heart, was the absent mother she had never had: confidant, friend and shoulder to cry on. Even though Victoria was always available to vent problems or ease her sadness, Gold had not spoken of losing her father in a while, and no one had asked; which, she suspected, was out of consideration.

  ‘Victoria, I used your salve on Mr Alex. He’s at rest now. You may need to keep Cyrus away from that burn, he doesn’t know a thing about healing.’

  Victoria smiled at Gold and pinched her cheek in thanks. ‘Hello love. You know, I’ve told Cyrus it does more than keep the beams clean. He doesn't listen.'

  Gold fidgeted on her feet, bit her lip, and pulled on Victoria’s hands until they stopped.

  ‘Can I ask–how is she doing?’ Gold asked, her head nodding upwards.

  ‘She’s better. Her dreams are more… tranquil. Last night she had a pleasant one. It was of you, and us.’

  ‘She’s been talking in her sleep again.’

  Victoria sighed, and closed her eyes. ‘I know. I can hear her from downstairs. It always starts as whispers and then it becomes a full conversation. That part has never changed.’

  ‘But a conversation with who?’ said Gold.

  ‘With her true sister.’

  ✽✽✽

  Hazel was, for lack of a better term, an unnatural person. She looked as a girl should at her age, but there was a wicked sapience in her eyes, an intelligence that processed the world around her with ease. It was her inherent omniscience that had frightened Gold. The twin daughter of Lady Sarah Saville had unnerved even Cyrus, who considered himself worldly and hardened to such things. Upstairs, her room was a thick indigo over plaster, although in shadows and at night, it appeared black as coal. Hazel had covered the windows in thin strips of white cloth, which bled slices of daylight in, and danced softly whenever a draught was present. Every ornament to every piece of wooden furniture in the room was broken in some way; an aesthetic that weighed the room in stories. Hazel sat poised as a marionette on her bed with a tome balanced on her lap, shoulders relaxed, gaze serene. She breathed in deep as Gold walked up to her, her fingers tracing over the writing without pause, as though she could absorb the knowledge straight off the paper.

  ‘He’s a different man Goldie,’ said Hazel, without looking up from her book.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The one downstairs, the one you found.’

  ‘Alex? I never knew him well enough. Victoria mentioned… you’ve been talking again?’

  ‘Yes. Is there something wrong with talking?’

  ‘Well no, I suppose not. But who is it?’

  ‘I don’t know her name. She looks a bit like me, with red hair though.’

  ‘And what does she say?’

  ‘She’s scared–she has dreams like me.’

  ‘Nightmares?’

  ‘No. People call them waking dreams-you know the sort. Look, I’ve been reading about them. I’m trying to help her.’

  ‘For what reason?’ asked Gold.

  ‘I don’t know–I feel close to her, like we once knew each other.’

  ‘Do you think it’s yourself in the dreams? Hazel, are you afraid of something?’ Gold pursed her mouth. It was difficult to get through to Hazel once her mind was made up. She couldn’t keep pretending that she was her sister forever. Gold knew, at the back of her mind, there was a conversation in the future that would be difficult to navigate no matter how wise or prepared she became.

  ‘Please don’t look sad–I’m being stubborn again,’ said Hazel after a moment.

  ‘No, I’m being pig–headed. As long as you’re happy, that means everything to me.’

  They hugged before Victoria asked to join them for supper from downstairs. Once seated, with a knowing smile shared between them, Gold led them in Grace; the fowl she had caught earlier praised. Cyrus sat at the head of the table, his manners loose and uncomplicated. Victoria was ever the opposite, a napkin spread down from her delicate neck, her spoon taking no more than a thimble of stew each time. After, dishes washed, they took seats and huddled for warmth by the hearth. All listened as Cyrus recounted fables. Gold did not mind the fiction that was built in each one, and when he stalled in talking, Victoria reminded him of the next sentence, her eyes aglow in admiration. There was one story that caused Cyrus’s voice to crack and tears began to welt from the old man’s eyes. As Victoria comforted him, Alex woke beside them; his body shifting under the blankets. It was as if they had forgotten him in their reverie. He drank a mug of water, sipped some of the stew that was left in the pot, and gave thanks to have food in his belly.

  ‘I had dreams of the stories you were telling my friend, they became one in the same,’ he told Cyrus.

  Cyrus nodded and wrung his hands. He took a bottle from a cupboard and poured two cups. They drank the gin in a sombre inclination; both men conscious of the women around them. Victoria looked at Gold and Hazel, and summoned them up with a shake of her hand.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll leave the men to it. It’s been a long day husband. Don’t stay up long.’

  Cyrus shook his head and kissed his wife goodnight. Gold took Hazel upstairs and tucked her into bed; she doused all the candles but one, and left her to sleep. On the landing before the staircase, as Victoria retired, Gold listened to the men thank each other. They conversed of had passed in those years, and then fell into a comfortable silence, grateful friends together again. Her head sank against a bannister, body relaxed. With a waking dream that she could not resist, she soon drifted off herself.

  ✽✽✽

  Gold’s dream was lucid and fat; ripe with colour and imaginings. In the relative quiet of her room, Hazel focussed and slipped her mind into her sister like a glove. She found herself on a ship made of song and soft light that glided over the waves. Gold, on the prow, looked safe and happy, talking with a man. Hazel studied this man. He was indistinct, a blur; tall, imposing, in command. As the dream wavered, Hazel realised her sister was a lost soul, trapped in a world of her own making. Some unclear event had broken her heart and those wounds had faded with time. The dream repeated itself. To Hazel, it had the stickiness of déjà vu to it, like her mind was a stage, and Gold and others were actors reading a script. Gold had to find a part of herself that was missing, it was all she could think of. Ravens wheeled overhead and smothered the dream as her sister woke, neck stiff from leaning against a bannister.

  Hazel shook her head to dispel the magic, and hugged her blanket as the house settled. The murmurs of conversation downstairs came to an end. She could hear the soft tap of her sister’s feet as she went to her own room to sleep. Hazel’s room overlooked the jagged silhouette of Houndbarrow. Shouts and laughter in the streets would not die until the later. It was not a place for a happy childhood. She remembered days of mud and catcalls, scrapes and bruises; crude games and strict tuition. In the dark, Hazel got out of bed and edged her fingers along her dresser, until she found a cup and drank from it, cooling her throat. It would help her sleep easier amidst the creaks and sighs of the old house. Her first waking dream, at the age of twelve, was of howling tempests. Lightning, gales, and torrents of greasy rain would assault her mind in immanence. It was her sister who would always wake her, it was Gold who would always cradle her in the dark and comfort her. When Cyrus or Victoria asked if everything was well, Gold would always admit to the disturbance. Now Hazel knew that they all knew she was a freak. She had heard them whisper in secret through the floorboards. She had used her gift and dreamt their dreams that revealed what they thought of her. She glanced into a mirror suspended above her headboard and saw herself looking back. Her silver skin flared in the moonlight. She could not sleep any longer. Her thoughts a maelstrom.


  The stillness at night would reach out to her and show her gossamer and iridescent tangles that went to and fro. There was a dreamlike quality to London and its buildings; an unbreakable equation that suspended itself above all, daring to be solved. She had been reading for most of the day on how to quash dreams, or at least control them for her own benefit. It was an uphill struggle, as the dreams she had were not interpreted so easily. With her mind on sleep, she laid thinking of the other girl: the frightened one who spoke back to her in a dream with half–closed eyes and a well–to–do accent. She looked like her, a doppelgänger made flesh, expect instead of silver, there was a mass of red hair. The conversation was odd, a conversation which filled her with wanderlust. To go, to do something of life, as if fate had cut her loose and caution was a sin. In a way the feeling was overpowering, a taste of a life outside of these walls gave Hazel a hunger to be more reckless.