Shanghai Sparrow

by Gaie Sebold

  “Yes, Mama.”

  And they had left the little cottage that was home, and had gone to the town where Uncle James lived.

  Watford

  IT SEEMED TO Eveline almost unbearably noisy and crowded, an endless, shouting, roaring muddle of people and carriages and factories, roars and rattles and bangs. Trees stood at regimented intervals along the pavement – sad, bumpy, amputated things – and the houses were shoulder-to-shoulder like toy soldiers crammed in a box.

  Uncle James’s house was large and broad with great imposing windows that seemed to frown down on the passers-by. Its bricks were a shade between mustard and dried blood. Two grey stone lions sat bolt upright and snarling on the gateposts, each with one front paw resting on the upper rim of a blank shield. Dark laurel, with its hard, shiny leaves and bitter dusty bark, grew along the drive.

  “I don’t like it,” Eveline declared, matching the house glare for glare.

  “Be good, Eveline,” Mama said. “We must be grateful to Uncle James for taking us in.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “This is home now, my poppet.”

  A SERVANT LET them in, and they stood in the high chilly entrance hall, which smelled of what Eveline later realised was Uncle James: his pomade, his expensive coats that were always a little too tight so that he sweated even more, his reeking, fussing, overpowering self.

  He eventually emerged to greet them. His big red face, with its blobby nose, made him look rather like a giant baby. He moved with something of a baby’s awkwardness, and creaked when he bent. “Well, well,” he boomed. “Here we all are.” He made no move to embrace his sister, nor she him. “Jacobs will show you to your rooms,” he said. “I’ve arranged for dinner to be brought up to you.”

  “Thank you, James,” Eveline’s mother said. Her voice was flat and weary.

  They were tucked away into a small gloomy chamber near the top of the house. Mama had looked at it when they moved in, and sighed, and then simply started to put their things away as best she could. Many of them went into a bare-floored dusty room which seemed to be used mainly for storing broken chairs. “He’d have put us in servants’ rooms, if not for fear people would talk,” she said, one day, in that absent way she did when she forgot Eveline was there. It happened more often now, and later she would scoop Eveline into a hug and tell her she was her precious girl and that Mama was sorry, sorry to be such a dreadful neglectful mother, and that she would do better.

  Mama seemed to have got smaller since Papa died, and smaller still since they had moved to this big strange house. She was reduced and sad and frightened.

  Eveline didn’t know what Mama was frightened of. Perhaps the angels. Sometimes Eveline woke up in the night and stared fiercely into the darkness, daring the angels to come and try and take Mama or Charlotte. She planned traps for them in her head, and even built one out of boxes and broom handles, but they never came. She wasn’t afraid they would take her, she knew she was too naughty for angels to come for her. They only came for good people. The village women with their bonnets and sharp noses had told her so.

  She didn’t think they would come for Uncle James either, because Uncle James was horrid. He was big and loud and always in the middle of things, usually talking about something in a loud voice, about Important things he had done and Important people he had met and Important things he had said to them. He did something to do with the Town, which was very Important, but other people did not seem to realise how Important he was.

  Conversation at meals, and before them, and after them, was dominated by Uncle James talking about how he had told people things and they had not listened, and how they would, mark his words, regret it. And how he had been passed over.

  Eveline imagined that passed over meant Uncle James being handed like a big sack from one person to another, like pass-the-parcel, and thought perhaps that was his job. She even tried to explain it to Charlotte, how Uncle James got passed from someone to someone else, and that if they held onto him long enough to listen to what he was saying, then they won. She thought the other people in the Town offices must have very strong arms.

  Charlotte only stared and gurgled. Mama, on the other hand, hovering in the doorway, had gulped, and her face had wrestled with itself, until she lost and laughed as Eveline had not heard her laugh since Papa died. She had told Eveline, as sternly as she could while laughing, that she must never talk about Uncle James that way. Eveline had disobeyed, but she had only talked about Uncle James and his job as the Parcel when Mama could hear. Making Mama laugh had become Eveline’s job.

  A few streets away were the mills. Hundreds of workers passed every day, going to and from their shifts. The first time Eveline heard them she woke in the night, thinking that the river had burst its banks and was rushing past their doors, and had peered out of the window to see, instead, a river of people shuffling along in the predawn darkness, like ghosts that had lost their way.

  Eveline was not allowed outside alone as she had been at home, so instead, she explored the house. She ventured into the other rooms, which felt very tall and chilly after the cottage, and were full of heavily carved furniture upholstered in dark red velvet. All the tables had the oddest feet, like the claws of birds clutching a ball, and everywhere were photographs of solemn heavy-chinned people in elaborate frames and candelabras of brass or glass with hanging crystals and maps and paintings of piles of dead birds or overdressed men on fat horses or soppy-looking girls making sheep’s-eyes at skinny men in armour. It was a great deal bigger than the cottage, but despite the height and the cold it felt stuffy, as though all those things somehow tangled up the air and stopped it moving about.

  Eveline missed home, with its chairs still dented by her father’s weight, and the space by the fireplace which was just big enough for her and a book, and her mother’s workroom, and her father’s fossils, and the shaggy garden with its snuffling hedgehogs and its secret treasures of raspberries and currants and sweet apples. Uncle James’s garden was a gravel path and a statue of a rather silly-looking young man standing in what looked to Eveline like a thoroughly uncomfortable position, and two stiff rows of rosebushes, with flowers no-one was allowed to pick.

  She missed the woods most of all.

  She became extremely good at getting into rooms she was not supposed to be in, and hiding from the servants in the smallest and most unlikely of spaces once she got there. The guest-rooms were dull, once she had bounced on the beds and explored the drawers, finding nothing but spare unused linens tucked away with lavender bags. The servants’ rooms held only the few clothes they owned that weren’t uniforms, a few photographs in cheap frames, spare shoes, and here and there a sprig of St John’s Wort to keep off the Folk. Eveline thought it must be working, since she’d seen not a sign of them since she arrived. She missed the little mischievous fairies and the funny rude goblins and the strange beautiful nixies. She missed Aiden too. She still had the crystal, but she seldom wore it. It lived in her box of precious things, and sometimes she stroked it and wondered, when life was especially dull or miserable, whether to call on Aiden for help, but it never seemed that things were quite bad enough.

  Uncle James’s dressing room was smelly, but oddly fascinating. He had a great many pots and bottles of things with pictures of smiling gentlemen on them which proclaimed themselves to be Tonics or Elixirs or Revitalising Lotions. Some of them smelled very nice indeed, and Eveline would dip a finger into them and rub them on her skin and pretend she had been invited to a party.

  One day the manservant came in while she was there, and Eveline scooted under the chaise that stood against one wall. Here, she discovered a mysterious box which proved, rather disappointingly, to contain a couple of corsets, like Mama’s, only a great deal bigger and without any lace on them. She asked Mama why Uncle James had corsets, and was told that it was to keep his stomach in. “Like the old Prince Regent,” Mama said, smiling. “Now you mustn’t mention them, my dear. He thinks no-one kn
ows, for all he creaks like a ship at sea. Always vain, my brother. If he’d only use his legs instead of his carriage, and eat a little less, there’d be no need for them... but there.”

  Though the kitchen smelled inviting, Eveline rarely ventured there after the first time. The cook had a large nose and big hands and a skinny face with flaring patches of red on his cheekbones, as though he had been slapped.

  A girl barely older than Eveline was hastily peeling carrots. There were potatoes piled next to her and apples beyond them. Amidst all that food, she looked hungry.

  The cook turned from the roast he was preparing, saw Eveline and snapped, “This is no place for you! Girl, take her back to her mama.”

  The girl flinched and the knife slid off the carrot and into her finger, blood welling dark.

  “Clumsy chit!” The cook aimed a slap at her head, then grabbed the girl’s shoulder and propelled her towards Eveline. “Take her out of my kitchen. And no hanging about and gossiping above stairs.”

  The girl ducked past Eveline, clutching her wounded finger to her chest. Eveline turned to the cook. “You’re horrid. You’re a horrid man. The angels won’t come for you.”

  He turned back to the stove, muttering about paupers and hangers-on. Eveline wondered what a hanger-on was. It sounded like somebody trying not to fall off something, holding on as best they could.

  Perhaps he meant her mother. Eveline understood in some dim way that that was what Mama was doing, just hanging on, as best she could.

  She wanted Mama happy again. She knew what had made Mama happy before, but Mama was not working; the sounds were all silent, wrapped up in cloth and dust. So one day Eveline had gone rummaging about among their things from the cottage, unwrapping baby clothes that Charlotte had grown out of and her own old toys, shoving them aside impatiently, until a dial beamed up at her from among its wrappings like a friendly face made of numbers.

  She had always been told that the mechanisms were very delicate, and must be handled with the greatest respect. She was afraid to get them out in case she broke something. She sat on the dusty floor – the maids never bothered with this part – and thought.

  There was a flicker of movement at the corner of her vision, and there, sitting up, looking at her, as though it was waiting to be noticed, was a mouse.

  Eveline looked at the mouse. Then she tore bits of the wrapping away in a nibbled-looking way, and made a hole in some of Charlotte’s old baby clothes with her teeth, and went and told Mama that mice were getting into their things.

  And Mama had gone and looked and had seen the dial and had pulled out the mechanism from its wrappings. It was a small rosewood box with tiny brass levers, and on its top a little thing like a rabbit’s ear made of wire which when the box was wound moved from side to side. Eveline remembered the sound it made, a sweet high note that swooped and rose, swooped and rose, and always made her smile.

  Mama had turned the box in her hands for a long time, then she had gone to the room next to where they slept and cleared some of the folded clothes from the long table that stood at one end.

  It was a battered, stained table, but Mama didn’t care. “Look, Evvie. Solid as a rock,” she said, shoving it with her hand. She set the little ormolu clock Papa had given her on the table, and began to unpack the rest.

  Eveline sat happily surrounded by familiar things, drawing traps for angels on a sketchpad, as the dim room filled with the sounds she remembered, soft and subtle and magical sounds, intermingled with the scratching of Mama’s pen as she made notes and occasional soft exclamations of pleasure or frustration.

  The clock chimed the hour. “Now, Eveline, that will do,” Mama said. “It is time I took you both out.”

  And so it went on for a few months. Mama would work for an hour, then she would take the girls out or teach Eveline some history or nature, or read them both a story. Eveline grew out of her clothes, and Mama, frowning and muttering, lengthened them and let them out.

  One day Eveline found her with one of her own dresses, a pretty primrose-coloured silk, laid out on her lap, squinting as she unpicked the seams. “Do you need your dress let out, Mama?”

  “No, my love, I’m going to alter this for you.”

  “Oh. But what will you do?”

  “I’ve other dresses, Eveline. And who is to care what I wear nowadays?” For a moment she looked lost and grey. “Not even me,” she said, quietly, to the crumpled silk in her lap.

  Eveline, not understanding but knowing only that Mama was sad, put her arms around her.

  Mama was no dressmaker, and the dress bagged in places and was too tight in others, but Eveline primped and danced in it for Mama and managed to make her smile, though it was a trembling smile and when Mama hugged her she whispered fiercely in her ear, “I will do right by you, Eveline. I will, I promise.”

  Mama kept the sounds of her work very quiet, and most of the time they were drowned out anywhere but her own room by the constant roar and pounding of the nearby factories. But of course, eventually the rest of the house noticed.

  Uncle James hauled his bulk up to their rooms to see what Mama was doing. He poked at her papers and asked her questions.

  Mama, pleased and excited, alive again, had shown him everything.

  And for a while Uncle James had gone quiet and thoughtful and had smiled at Mama and Eveline and even Charlotte, whose existence he normally completely ignored.

  SCRAPS OF CONVERSATIONS, arguments. “James, of course I am grateful for your assistance, but...”

  “Madeleine, you do realise that if anyone should happen to think that you have been concentrating on these things and been neglectful...”

  That word, that word which always made Mama fearful and quiet. “I would never neglect my girls, James. Never.”

  Sometimes Uncle James’s friends came to the house. Eveline peeked through the bannisters at the men in black and white, like magpies, and the ladies in their huge-skirted dresses, floating like great water-lilies. Good smells drifted up the stairs along with their voices. At first Eveline liked these parties, even though she was not allowed to attend; it was good to hear the house fill up with the sounds of other people, and interesting to watch them all. There was the thin stooped man with the long sad face who she thought of as the Crow, because he walked along just that way, with his hands behind his back, his head dipping with every step. The Sugar Lady, always dressed in pale sweet colours, always smiling and tilting her head so her soft brown ringlets danced and fluttering her pale hands. The Dog Man, who had a bristly moustache that made her think of terriers, who snapped out his words, yapyapyap, making people laugh, and the Sugar Lady would rap his wrist with her fan.

  The second time she saw Dog Man he looked up, right to where she was hiding behind the bannisters. She drew back, but she knew he had seen her.

  But there was no punishment, no summons to Uncle James’s study. So the next time there was a party she risked it again, and this time, Dog Man looked for her on purpose, and winked.

  It became a little game of smiles and expressions. She began to look forward to his visits. Apart from Mama, there were no grown-ups to take her the least bit seriously, or treat her as anything other than a nuisance or extra work. Dog Man seemed to like seeing her there.

  Mama, on the other hand, hated these parties.

  “James, please. I am happy to eat in my rooms.”

  “Madeleine, they will say I am keeping you locked in the attic. Don’t be foolish. Come down. And do try to make yourself presentable.”

  “But the girls...”

  “Surely you don’t expect me to allow children at the table? And besides, I am sure Eveline can watch her sister for a few hours. Can’t you, Eveline?”

  Eveline looked from one to the other. If she said yes, Mama would have to go to the party. If she said no, Uncle James would talk again about how she was ill-disciplined and should be sent away to school. She had a deep terror of being sent away from Mama and Charlotte. The angels m
ight come for them while she wasn’t there to watch. Or other bad things, things she did not know the names of, things that hung like ghosts in the shadows of the house, might happen to them.

  “I can watch her, Mama. Go to the party. You can tell us all about it afterwards.”

  Mama’s face twitched, and then she smiled. “Very well.”

  “Tell me what Do – the man with the moustache says to make everyone laugh so.”

  “Oh, that’s Everard Poole. I think his jokes are too sophisticated for young ladies!” James said, pleased and expansive now he had got his way. “Well, well, must go and check on things, lots to do!”

  What he had to do Eveline didn’t know, since it was the maids who cleaned and the cook who cooked and his man who sent out the invitations (she had sneaked into his study and seen the cards, written out in the manservant’s neat, careful, rather square hand, instead of Uncle James’s blotchy sprawl).

  “Make myself presentable,” Mama said, scowling at the mirror. “I believe your Uncle is hoping to marry me off, Eveline. Let us disabuse him of that notion, shall we?” She put on one of the black mourning dresses she had stopped wearing a month ago, which was now too big and had never suited her to begin with, and twisted her hair up into a rigid bun. She pinned a large, ugly mourning brooch Purple-Bonnet had given her to the front of her dress. “There. Do I look sufficiently discouraging?”

  Eveline giggled. “You look like a witch, Mama.”

  “Perfect. Be good, darling, and remember Charlotte’s posset.”

  Charlotte had a weak chest, and as the weather got colder, had to be given hot possets and flannels, to stop her coughing. Eveline had got tired of asking the beastly cook to do it, since he always made a great fuss as though it was a huge trouble for him. She watched him make it until she worked out how to do it herself, and did so, now, when he was out of the way.