by Paul Butler
The paper was fine enough but not bonded. One edge was uneven as though it had been torn from a book. The other edge was yellowed as though from long exposure to the sun. I laid the towel next to the sink behind me and opened it up. The writing was in pencil but in a fine, cultured hand. “To the miss with the golden hair that lives on Meeting House Hill.”
My head spun with twin, opposing whirlpools of danger and relief, and perhaps something softer and more soulful, which I could not quite place. It was almost as though the hand of providence had saved me. What would this note have cost me were it not for Mrs. Stevens’s fifteen-year-old red-haired daughter? I wondered. A magician’s noose had slipped from my neck and the audience could applaud my escape. But the danger was not gone as the man still lurked, and his boldness startled me.
“I had to stop mother from taking the note from me,” she said coming very close, her green eyes flitting from the note to my face. “She said it isn’t proper to send a note without a signature or a proper introduction, but it’s such a beautiful music box and a nice note – it’s well-written, don’t you think?”
“It is beautiful, Miss Louisa, but you should be careful.”
She took the note back quite suddenly, not exactly snatching, but quickly enough to set my fingers itching to hold it again.
“You sound just like my mother. Careful of what? How can a music box hurt me?” She shook her head in hurt and frustration. “And anyway, what would you know about it?”
“You’re right, Miss Louisa,” I said feeling heat rise dangerously to my face, “what can I know?” I made to turn back to the dishes but she stopped me.
“You don’t understand,” Louisa continued, her brow furrowed, I suspected, as much with some latent desire to apologize as with anger – she was not naturally unkind. “None of you do. This is the first time anything like this has happened to me – something exciting, something unexpected. And you’re all finding fault with it.”
I wanted to tell Louisa there would be a hundred such opportunities, that she shouldn’t put too much weight on the first. But as she herself had said, what would I know about it? I was four years older than her and my hands spent their time in someone else’s sink, scrubbing someone else’s floor, making someone else’s bed, and preparing someone else’s food from early in the morning to late at night when I was too tired for hunger myself. The little music box she held forlornly in her slightly trembling hand, its admiral butterfly motionless and waiting to be wound into motion again, signified more to me than I was prepared to admit. To me, the elegant little toy was a mirage of home; it was comfort, and better times, my mother’s fingers running through my hair as I sat by the hearth; it was an aching wish for Mary, one that I could not afford. The music box had captured all these threads of yearning, and worse; the sight of the brightly polished metal in Louisa’s hand tugged at a knot of envy in a region close to my heart.
I knew this to be inappropriate to the point of wickedness. But I could not get beyond the feeling. Whoever the giver, and whatever the means of delivery, something of beauty that was meant for me had been waylaid. Those shining berries, the bright wings and the simple, charming tune were mine.
Four
Tommy
A short time before dawn I hauled myself from my bunk and wandered out into the hot, breezy night. The taller of O’Brien’s horses and his favourite, lost somewhere between drowsiness and agitation, trotted in circles and chugged through her nose. She eyed me, enviously I thought, and tugged at her tether as I clambered over the gate.
The city was motionless beneath me, submerged in an ocean of moonlight. I heard no drunken, stumbling footsteps echoing up street canyons as of old, no breaking bottles, no rebel yells, no fiery domestic brawls. And it was the tail end of Friday night; tomorrow was the last working day of the week. The Salvation Army had sucked the lifeblood from the town, it seemed. Respectability, like godliness, hung over us all like a funeral pall. The very names they gave their master, “Lord,” “God,” “Lord God,” were indistinct, muffled syllables; they described an outline, a shadow, not a recognizable person with a face. I didn’t hate the Salvation Army people though. There was nothing in them to hate, nothing personal in their judgments.
It was the Catholics I really despised, but not because they lacked imagination. There was colour at least in their version of the Almighty. There were doves, lambs, the magic of water turning into wine and wine into blood; there was one who was really three, and three who were really one. No conjurer’s act had more colour than a Catholic Mass. But Catholics were vicious. They anatomized your soul. They opened you up, peering into your spiritual innards, a bright lantern flooding the secret places while their inquisitive fingers probed. I hated Catholics because I was one. They, and only they, claimed the right to reject me.
I told myself that I didn’t know where I was going, but of course my feet knew better than my mind the secrets of my heart. They would carry me in one direction only. In a short while I was descending into Meeting House Hill. The street, like all the others, was silent, awaiting the moment when sunrise would peer over the rim of the ocean and burn in the now-darkened windows. I stood in the middle of the road, a few houses away from hers.
The breeze dropped suddenly and I felt exposed, more so than yesterday when I had left the music box on the doorstep. Then I had been lost in the activity of late afternoon, the delivery boys and men, the workers trudging from the harbour to the upper reaches of the town. Now I was quite alone, the only object to see for any who might peel back a curtain. I took a step or two more so that the dark opening of her doorway was revealed to me.
There was nothing.
My pulse quickened to the certainty that my music box had made it inside the house. Without making any decision to do so, I paced swiftly through the half-opened gate and into the shadowed entranceway, losing myself in the darkness. My fingertips touched the cool glass of the front door, and I took in the fragrance of light dew against the pane, the ghost of polish long washed away by nature. Something tugged hard at my chest and I felt an overwhelming longing to be on the other side, to join my gift and the recipient. I could almost take the risk, even if it meant breaking into the house before dawn, even if it meant arrest and imprisonment. She has taken it into the house, I thought; she has taken it into the house and this gives me the right. The glass before me was an imposter.
My heart pounded with danger and my breathing became erratic. Don’t be a fool, I told myself. Wait. Think. Wait.
My pulse began to calm at last. Sweat dampened my forehead, its trickling progress seeming to whisper of a narrow escape. I turned around, slowly facing the street, half expecting to see some young constable standing in the half-light, truncheon at the ready. But there was no one. I slipped off the front step but then froze. A new sensation had overtaken me.
Faint and muffled, and emanating from somewhere deep within the home was a noise I was not expecting to hear. At first I told myself it must be a clock chiming the hour. But the notes continued to fall and rise to a familiar tune. It was certain. She, alone in her bedroom, deep into the night, was playing the music box I gave her.
Kathleen
I was buried deep in dust covers, layer upon layer, their folds around my neck and torso. Each time I peeled one away, another wrapped tighter. Breathing was impossible and the cabin swayed with the motion of the sea. Somewhere the music box was playing its dainty tune but its charm had turned into mockery. A tang of salt water invaded my mouth and I realized the ocean was pouring onto me, flooding my cabin. With one violent gasp, I writhed against the covers. Then suddenly everything changed.
It was night and the dust covers, save one that knotted itself beneath my shoulder, were gone. A gust of wind creaked against the window frame. Grit particles skittered down the outside of the wall as though in response. This was not a cabin. This was my room in St. John’s. The sal
t water on my tongue was not the ocean but a stray tear from my nightmare which had found its way through my lips.
I sat up and turned around in the darkness, smoothing the sheet which had become crumpled beneath me. One thing I had not imagined; the tune from the music box. The mechanical chimes were coming from Louisa’s room directly below mine. Was it this, I wondered, and not my entrapment, which had squeezed tears from my sleep?
I could picture in vivid detail the dark eyes of the stranger – the odd sensitivity in the fine lines, the way they implied the laughter of some distant time, a golden memory of some hearth around which warmth and humour held sway. Despite the stale odour of tobacco and spirit, despite the feral appearance, it was he who the music conjured for me in this post-dream state. There had been a moment in that little shop when I had actually felt the warmth from his body and the sensation had not, in truth, been unpleasant.
The music ceased but commenced again a second later. She was playing it over and over.
I got out of bed quickly, surprised at my annoyance. The music box might wake Mrs. Stevens, I told myself. This, surely, was why I was angry. If she slept badly tonight it would be me, rather than Louisa, who would bear the brunt of it.
Wide awake suddenly, I stepped to the door, took my dressing gown from the hook and slipped my arms through, pulling it tight around me. I was too agitated to challenge my logic. Mrs. Stevens was a very heavy sleeper and Louisa knew this, hence her comfort in opening the box.
I opened my door as quietly as I could and slipped into the landing. Feeling my way along the banisters I found the top step and descended softly. The house creaked, not in direct response to my movements. This dwelling was a maze of interconnected parts. A footfall upon a stair could cause an opposite beam on a lower storey to squeak. A blast of wind against a lower-storey window could cause the upper eaves to yelp in protest. It was a living organism connected by nerves.
I reached the lower landing while the tune was still playing and I drew close to Louisa’s door. But before I could knock, another noise, louder than the music box, announced itself from the main floor below. It was a rhythmic tapping like that of a cat, determined to gain admittance by beating its paw against the window glass.
I turned from Louisa’s bedroom, and hesitated for a moment. I had never seen a cat on the window ledge of the sitting room, and the semicircle of coloured glass on the front door was much too high for an animal. I tried to imagine how one of the trees in the little front garden might have stretched far enough to be within reaching distance of the glass, or how, even if a tree were close enough to reach, the breeze, which was unusually gentle tonight, could have produced such a steady, staccato rhythm.
I drifted toward the main staircase and, holding the banister, began to descend. The tapping became louder and I stooped to glimpse the glass segment of the front door. It had become clear this was the source of the sound. I stopped four stairs from the bottom and gripped more tightly onto the banister. Even through the ghostly, distorting blue of the glass, I recognized the wild hair and the unkempt beard. He had pressed his face close to the pane, his nose touching. He must have seen me approaching because the tapping stopped. So, at last, did the tune from the music box.
I was trapped. I was the reason this mad person was tapping at my employer’s door so deep into the night. I was the reason stolen goods were upstairs. No one but I could untangle this web because no one else knew about it. Here I was, near dawn, wide awake, fully aware of the danger I had brought upon Mrs. Stevens’s home, a danger of which she was as yet entirely unaware. Whichever way I looked at it, I was culpable.
Did he know it was me? I wondered. He couldn’t possibly see who it was in the darkness of the hallway, through the coloured glass. But he wasn’t afraid, clearly.
There was nothing else for it. I creaked down the last of the stairs and tiptoed to the door, turning the lock as quietly as I could while through the distorting pane a mournful, bloated eye gazed down upon me.
I fired myself up for anger, knowing this might be the best hope for both of us, and I noticed he took a step backward when I opened the door partly and put my head through the gap.
“Have you taken leave of your senses?” I hissed at him.
He had that same silly, embarrassed grin he had worn on the street when he had tried to give me the music box. The breeze spun around the street then hushed itself as though trying to overhear what passed between us.
“And maybe I have at that. Maybe I have,” he said mildly, his hands palm-up and outstretched as if trying to say the whole matter was beyond his control.
A milky paleness diluted the ink of the sky; dawn was arriving.
“Go home, you fool,” I told him, more sympathetically than I meant to. “Go home before you get us both into –”
“I’ll go,” he interrupted, loudly enough to make me step outside quickly and ease the door near-closed behind me; I didn’t want his voice to carry inside the house. “I’ll go if you take a walk with me.”
‘“Take a walk’?” I repeated, my chest convulsing with something like laughter. “Take a walk?” Grit from the step dug into the soles of my bare feet and there was a panic of unshed tears behind my defiance; why could I not shake off this madman?
“The sun is rising,” he said, his dark eyes watering with emotion, his voice soft and respectful. “It’s a new day. Please. If you do I promise you’ll never see me again unless you want to.”
I stared at him for a moment more. Leaves rustled gently like faint applause. He had promised, that was something. He knew he was a nuisance and he had named his price for getting him to leave me alone.
“Wait at the end of the street,” I said pointing up the hill. “I’ll join you in five minutes.”
Five
Tommy
“You’re happy this morning, Fitzpatrick,” said the Norris girl. It was neither a question nor a statement. To Norris, conversation was a stick with which you prodded people.
I whistled the ditty louder not looking up from the bucket.
“I said, you’re uncommon cheerful this morning, Fitzpatrick.”
She stood over me, her shadow cast over the cow. Its hooves shuffled. I leaned to one side, tipping my stool, then flicked a teat. Milk splashed over Norris’s apron.
“Ah! You devil!”
“That’ll teach you. The animals need space, you little fool.”
“I’ll tell Mr. Brine!” she said, stomping off in the direction of the house, but I knew she wouldn’t tell O’Brien because O’Brien would have no time for her complaint and she knew it.
I could tell from the slow and rhythmic hiss of Ryan’s bucket that his eyes were on me too, but I didn’t care. It was a fine, sunny day and I was as high and weightless as the few white clouds that floated in the ocean of blue.
Kathleen had walked with me this morning. I had told her about the books I was reading, about Huckleberry Finn, which she had also read, about Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus, which she had been too afraid to start. This had been my triumph. She had been startled at first. She had looked deep into my eyes, trying to tell if it was a trick, if I really was as well-read as I pretended. Once she knew I was in earnest, she told me about herself – about Dublin and London; about her father, his military whistle while he shaved, and a one-room “temporary” home in England’s capital; about a young sister, Mary; about a wealthier, more respectable branch of the family and an uncle who was a priest; about her people feeling unworthy because of this, something I could easily understand. I wouldn’t mind betting I was the only person in St. John’s who knew this much about her. There had even been a moment of tingling contact when she shushed me, cupping her palm over my lips.
I had to calm myself then and I asked her about the music box, how she liked it. She went very quiet all of a sudden. She didn’t have the
music box, she said. The daughter of her mistress did. Suddenly I wanted to kiss her; her disappointment made her even prettier. But she drew away when I moved closer and glanced up at the dark windows looking down at us. We had returned to the house in which she served.
She had stood looking up at me for a moment, a smile playing upon her face.
“Are you satisfied now?” she had said. “Now you can keep your promise and leave me alone.”
It is the law of gravity that when you try to push something away it will only pull all the harder toward you. She had given me every answer I would ever need in that glance toward the house. It told me that her position, the possibility of being seen, was the only reason she had eluded my embrace. If there had been no one to see us, no job from which she could be dismissed, she would have been mine. But I wanted to prove my patience so I merely nodded and smiled as I watched her make her way through the back alley to the servants’ entrance. There was a stiffness about her neck as she walked; I could tell she was resisting a backward glance.
Kathleen
It had been a strange day. Louisa had avoided me since this morning. And worse, there was the look.
She had run upstairs with a distracted air the moment she had finished breakfast. There had followed the first few notes of the music-box ditty, then silence. After a few more moments she had thundered back downstairs again – although a slight girl, she had the most extraordinarily heavy step – coming into the dining room with her head held at an odd angle like someone with a secret.
I had been clearing away the last of the breakfast things and passed her in the doorway, giving her a smile as I did so. She had looked up with narrowed eyes and I thought for a moment she might spit at me.
I had spent the day wishing I had some excuse to ask her about it although I realized that, even if I could find one, I was half afraid of the answer. What could she have heard early this morning? I had been so careful about the noise. Even if she suspected me of an assignation why did she think that the man was one and the same as her own mysterious suitor? Except of course that he was.