by M. J. Tjia
Amah nods slowly. “Uncle Chee said you thought this. Why, Jakub, why do you think this?”
Jakub’s dark eyes study the older woman for a moment. He takes a notecase from his coat pocket, flips it open. “Do you remember this?”
He places a photograph onto her lap. The print isn’t clear. It’s as if the posing couple stands amid a light fog. Amah squints. It takes her a moment to work out who the strangers are in the picture, but then she recognises the tattered pheasant feather poking up from the woman’s bonnet, the bonnet that was so cherished because it had once belonged to Mrs Preston. Li Leen. It was a photograph of herself, many years beforehand. Standing next to her, a very young Chee. No gut yet, smooth skin like Jakub’s. His hair braided into a long queue, which hangs over his shoulder, snakes down his front, reaching just above his hip.
Amidst the wonder, Amah feels a dip of sadness to see her young face. Oval, like her mother’s. “I can’t remember ever seeing this.” She smiles, thinking of the day Chee corralled her into the stall at the fair, how she’d grumbled that the devil would take their souls. Oh, that day, it was so cold. Much colder than today. Down by the docks in Liverpool it was always icy, even when the sun peeped out and the locals shed their coats and rolled their sleeves up. She can almost feel a shiver tickle up her spine as she thinks of it.
Then her eyes catch what she’s holding, bundled in her arms. A baby. Its dark eyes gazing into the camera.
“That’s me, isn’t it?” he asks, pointing at the child.
There’s no use denying it. Even in such an old, faded photo, it’s clear that the angles of the skull, the ears as neat as a shell, are Jakub’s. “Where did you find this?” she asks.
“In the pocket of an overcoat Papa gave to me to take on my travels. He said the coat served him well when he was on the seas, himself. I suppose he’d forgotten the photograph was in there.”
Amah thinks quickly. “Yes, he visited me with you. In Liverpool. To give your poor mother a rest.”
Jakub shakes his head slowly. “No, Auntie Leen. Papa didn’t even know Mother then.”
Amah frowns. “But of course he did.”
Again, Jakub shakes his head. He points once more at the photo, this time at Chee. “I’ve heard Mother say many times that she never knew Papa with his long plait. That he had already chopped it off by the time they met here, in Limehouse.”
Amah leans back against the wall. She stares down at the photograph and lets out a long breath. Miriam, and her constant chatter.
Her eyes find Jakub’s. “So what do you think this means?”
“I think…” His eyes fall from hers. “I think you’re my mother.”
His mother? Amah? Out of all the scenarios she’d mulled over and over again, she never thought the silly boy would come to that conclusion. “What?” A smile creeps to her face, but she can’t help herself, it’s so ridiculous.
Uncertainty puckers his brow. “You’re my mother.”
Taking his hand in hers, she rubs his skin. “No, no, Jakub. I am not your mother.” She wants to say she has always loved him as a mother would, that one of the saddest days of her life was when she was parted from him, but the words stick in her throat. Tenderness has never come easily to her; she prefers to use words that bite, that are as sour as a green nectarine. Words that guard her innermost feelings.
The door creaks a little as a gust of wind whistles through, and the men in the next room start up a new game of mahjong, stirring the hard tiles around on the tabletop.
Jakub withdraws his hand from hers and crosses his arms, tucking his fingers into his underarms. “I know the truth, Auntie Leen. Papa told me of the ship you came in. I’ve been to Liverpool and seen the passenger list.”
“But why? What does that prove?”
“I needed to find out who my father was. Even if he is a blackguard.”
Amah shakes her head, frowning. She doesn’t understand him.
His eyes search hers for a moment, then flick away again. He mumbles something that she doesn’t quite catch.
“What?”
“I said, Papa told me of how on that voyage one of the English gentlemen attacked you. Of how you didn’t say anything because what notice would they take of two Chinese servants?”
Amah recalls that black night. The sharp stench of smokestack fug, the dusty floor, the brandy on his breath as he slobbered against her neck.
“No, no.” She goes to grasp Jakub’s hand again, but they’re still shoved into his underarms, away from contact. “You have it all wrong, Jakub. And in any case, even I am not certain who it was that came to our cabin that night.”
“But it must have been one of them,” says Jakub. His eyes are red, entreating. “Lovejoy, McBride, Hunt…”
Amah covers her mouth with her fingers. Her eyes are wide as she watches him. She thinks again of how he’s no longer her boy, her sweet boy, but a man, and what is a man not capable of? “What have you done, Jakub?”
His head hangs low so that his dark hair flops onto his forehead.
The mah-jong players stand from their table, chat to a group of men seated against the wall. They pull coats on and form a straggly procession to the door. Kung is the first through, says something to Chee, mimes the eating of soup. Chee waves his hands, no, and the men go on their way. As they trudge through the front door, cold air blasts through the gap. Amah watches the closed door for half a minute before turning back to Jakub.
“What did you do, Jakub, when you found out about these men?”
“The first one I tracked was McBride. He was still in Liverpool. I hadn’t been watching him for half a day before he rushed off and caught the stagecoach to London. I caught it too, and I tried the whole time to build up the courage to speak to him, to ask him of that time, but I couldn’t.” He stares between his knees at the floor. “He booked into an inn in Soho, but I lost him when he ran for an omnibus. That’s when I went in search of Pidgeon. His whereabouts weren’t too difficult to discover. I thought I might find something at his house that linked him to that voyage—to you—but just as I was jimmying his window open he arrived home. Scared the life out of me.” A ghost of a smile plays at the corner of his mouth. “So I returned to Soho, waited for McBride to come back. The next thing I knew, I was watching him enter Heloise’s house.” His eyes swivel around to Amah. “And I thought that confirmed it.” He holds his hands to his temples. “Why else would he be at Heloise’s home, if not to visit you?”
Amah shuts her eyes. “I always knew Heloise befriending those men would lead to trouble.” She opens her eyes again, letting out a loud sigh. “She met that Pidgeon first. I don’t know where. At one of those ridiculous scientific lectures she sometimes attends. I think she liked that he had visited our part of the world—the East Indies. She’s never ventured there, herself, but she’s always been fascinated by it. Always pestering me for stories.” Amah thinks of the first time she glanced through the peacock’s tail into Heloise’s drawing room and recognised Pidgeon’s long face and Hunt’s wiry figure, although his cleft chin was obscured by the grey whiskers he now sported. The shock had shuddered through her body, ringing in her chest, her fingertips, her ears. Later, she’d berated Heloise for inviting them, but that girl always did whatever she wanted. And Amah couldn’t bring herself to explain why the men had stirred such terrible memories.
Her mind returns to the evening when McBride visited Heloise’s. “I saw you that night, standing on the corner,” she says to Jakub. “I thought I was mistaken, and when I saw McBride… What did you do then, Jakub?” Her heartbeat quickens. She wills him to get to the point, tell her what he did. But she wants him to not tell her too.
“I waited. When McBride left, he was escorted to the door by another man. I heard him mention the name Lovejoy several times. Another name from that passenger list.”
“And then?”
“I followed him back to the main road. He stopped in a coffee house for nearly an hour, writing som
ething, and then returned to South Street—your house—but this time he just stood out the front by a street lamp.”
“What was he doing?”
“Waiting for something.”
“And you?”
“It was awkward. He was watching the house, I was watching him. And it was bloody freezing. So I loped off home. Spent the night in Limehouse.”
She searches his face for signs of a lie. His face is relaxed though.
“And Lovejoy?” That little girl, cut throat. Lovejoy, the blood spilled on the ground. Sliced almost to the bone. The kris. Did he steal into Heloise’s house and take the kris?
He shrugs. “Took me a few days to find out where they lived. I didn’t realise that he and his daughter had been murdered.” His hands drop to his lap, where they lie open.
“You saw Heloise?”
He looks up at her, surprised. “Yes. I did. That was a shock.” His eyes search hers for a moment before dropping to his hands again. “That’s when I really thought I was on the right track. That you two were still in touch with these men for some reason.” His voice has become tight, his brow creased, he looks sad. “But what I really couldn’t understand—can’t understand—is why you got rid of me? Why didn’t you keep me, like you kept Heloise? Now that I know Papa—Chee—isn’t really my father, it makes so much sense. Why he always disapproves of everything I do, that I say, that I think, even. Why didn’t you keep me in Liverpool with you? Why did you send me away with him? Is it because you couldn’t stand to be reminded…”
“No, Jakub, no.” This time Amah catches his left hand, presses it in hers. “No. You have it all wrong.”
Her eyes follow the fine hair on the back of his hand, the calluses on his fingers. His nails are chewed to the quick, so that the flesh swells bulbous at the tips, and folded into the creases of his skin are fine lines of dirt. At any other time she would flick his ear, ask him if he was a monkey or some other animal and tell him to wash.
She clasps his hand once more, then takes her hand back, and laces her fingers together in her lap. Turning slightly away from him, she stares at the lit joss sticks, at their glowing, red tips.
She’ll have to start at the beginning. She’ll have to revisit that time on the Dukano. She tells him of Chee fetching her from her stepfather’s house, of how she became Mrs Preston’s maid on the boat. Of the English words Mrs Preston taught her, of the pretty finch she kept in a cage. Her voice falters over the riot in Sarawak, and she doesn’t mention the night she was attacked at all. She pauses for a moment as two men return to the hostel, walk through to the back room, closing the door behind them.
“I was a stupid girl, Jakub. Just a stupid, young girl.” Amah’s voice is hushed. “I didn’t recognise what was happening right in front of me. I didn’t realise…”
“What?”
Amah thinks back to the damp sheets, Mrs Preston writhing in them, tearing the bedding from the mattress. “She was so sickly. So ill, for so long.” The stench that came off her skin. Sweet, but not a pleasant sweet. More feral, like the smell of rotting fruit.
“What was she sick with?”
“They were all sick. Dysentery.” Shit and vomit everywhere. In the corridors, soaked into the carpets, splattered on the porthole windows from men leaning over the side of the boat.
Everyone’s guts bloated with their illness, ready to burst. And Mrs Preston, her small stomach bulging, even though she hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink for days. A puzzlement to young Li Leen. “I was so stupid. I knew nothing.”
“Nothing of what?”
Of the dark whelp that slipped from Mrs Preston’s lower body, wet and shining and mewling.
“She was pregnant. My poor Mrs Preston was with child and I didn’t know it.”
They’re both silent. Someone moves furniture across the wooden floors in the next room, voices are raised on the street.
“You’re saying…?”
“I’m saying,” Amah’s voice is heavy, “I’m saying Mrs Preston was your mother.”
“But…” Jakub lifts his hand, turns it over, gazes at his olive skin that is far darker than Heloise’s. Heloise, with her twilight eyes, her golden skin. She’d always taken after her father.
“Chee is your father.” She thinks of that morning when her Uncle Chee came into the cabin with a bucket, how he dropped it so water sloshed across the floor, his wide eyes when he spied the wriggling creature in Amah’s arms.
Jakub’s mouth remains open as he gapes at her. “Papa?” And then, “Mrs Preston?”
Amah nods. “Jane. She was a very special lady. I loved her very much.”
“What happened? Where is she now?”
Amah’s chest constricts. Mrs Preston’s fingers were so cold, so weak, when she took hold of Amah’s wrist and whispered in her ear. Li Leen, my dear friend, you must keep him. Make sure he is safe. My family would never understand our love. Her hot breath smelt of decay, weeping sores spotted the corners of her mouth. It was the only time Amah had ever seen her Uncle Chee weep, knelt by the bed, his head next to Mrs Preston’s on the pillow.
Mrs Preston knew she was dying. Who could survive such a loss of blood, such a high fever?
“She only lived for one more day, Jakub. Luckily we were not far off Liverpool then. I pretended you were mine. Nobody really cared.” Except for Luba, the head cook and barber from Africa, who kept them supplied with what little fresh water he had, some flour, a little treacle for the baby. “So, it was not me who deserted you, Jakub, it was your father who wanted you back. As soon as he was married to Miriam, and knew he could look after you, he came and took you from my care.” Amah remembers the day, a bright day, the sky almost white it was so blinding. She knows it was just one occasion of many that helped form the fibrous scar tissue over her heart.
She stares down at the photograph again, at the baby’s little coffee-bean eyes that are so like his father’s. Has he never noticed this?
“Come back to your papa’s house, Jakub, and we will tell you all. They have been missing you.” She touches his wrist. “We can eat some of your mother’s dumplings.”
CHAPTER 32
The rest of that evening is very bleak indeed. Having returned the kind young man’s overcoat with Hatch, I shiver the whole way home in a cab. When I arrive, only one lamp’s alight in the front hallway. Before taking himself off to bed, Bundle must have assumed I’d be away all night. It’s an occurrence that happens often enough, after all.
I stare up the stairs for a good minute before I can drag myself to my bedroom. Everything feels cold: my feet, the silk of my dress, the banister as my fingers brush its surface. I hold my palm to the tip of my nose. Icy. Pausing halfway up the staircase, my eyes take in the rosy carpet, but really, I see the claret stain again, smeared across the throat I had run my tongue along not five hours ago.
Luckily, when I reach my room, embers still glimmer in the grate, so I throw more wood on top, stoke the fire. Looking down, I can now see clearly the patches of mud—and worse—caked into the skirts of my gown, and a crimson blotch lines the rim of my hem. I tug at the buttons, loosen the stays, until the gown falls to the floor, closely followed by my petticoats and undergarments. Shrugging on my dressing gown, I stare into the flames and think of Cosgrove’s hand, drooped over the side of the stretcher, pale, bare…
“Heloise, you are home late.” Amah stands in the doorway. She has a woollen shawl thrown about her shoulders and her hair is tied in a plait. In one hand she holds an ivory bonnet, and in the other, the silk thread and needle with which she is embroidering it.
I nod, plonking myself down into the armchair. “Why are you still awake?”
Amah walks into my room. “I got home late. I visited Uncle Chee’s. Jakub was there.”
“He’s back? So maybe that was him I saw the other day.” My brain is so muddled with weariness, shock, grief, it takes me a moment to realise the meaning of this. “But why would he be in Stoke Newington? Near th
e Lovejoys’?”
Amah stares down at me for a few moments, then pulls the dressing table chair close by me. She settles into it, her back straight. “It was him. I was very afraid,” she says, “very afraid he was involved in your business, but I have found out what was going on. He was only…” she thinks for a moment, “sulking. We have talked now.”
“Tell me, Mama.” My head feels so heavy I rest it against the armchair, the pressure of it reminding me of the bruise at the back of my head. Shifting my head so it’s in a more comfortable position, I peer at Amah through half-closed eyes.
She doesn’t speak straight away. She rubs her face with the flats of her hands, up and down. “I’m so tired.” Picking up the embroidery again from her lap, she pulls the thread taut, ready to sew. “That boy. He’s been avoiding me. Us. I thought—I really dreaded—that he was behind the violence against those men.”
“Who? You don’t mean McBride? Pidgeon?”
Amah nods, then shakes her head. “All that talk of a Chinese man wanting revenge, threatening them all.”
“But why would Jakub care about these men?” How silly of her to jump to that conclusion. There are plenty of other Chinese men who could be responsible. “And in any case, if you were with Jakub this evening,” I glance at the gilt clock on the mantelpiece. It’s almost 1.25 a.m., “it could not have been him.”
“Why do you say this?”
“Because Cosgrove was murdered tonight. The same as the others.” My hand reaches for my throat and my stomach clenches tight. I will miss him. I will miss the excitement that trembled in my belly whenever I encountered him, thought of him. Such a beautiful man. Wasted. But I can’t let my feelings overcome me in front of Amah. She wouldn’t understand. Worse, she’ll think I’m being ridiculous.
I swallow, glance at Amah. “And we now think that the culprit might be an Indian fellow. Someone who wears a turban. You know these Londoners, they think all us brown foreigners are much the same.” My eyes are dry and scratchy, and sadness scorches my chest. I know it’s Cosgrove’s death that upsets me, but I take my shortened temper out on Amah. “You didn’t answer me. What interest does Jakub have in these men anyway?”