I found Charlotte alone in her bedroom, lying face-down on the bed and weeping as if her heart would break. She was unclothed from the waist up, wearing a ragged pair of boys’ trousers, and looked as though she had been scraped from the gutter, which I supposed she had. I went to kneel at her bedside.
‘Don’t cry,’ I said. ‘You are home now. What’s there to cry about?’
She sobbed harder. Where was Agnes? I sat back on my heels, entirely at a loss for how to comfort her. I moved about, lighting candles and wishing anybody else was here – Ambrosia, Doctor Mead. They would know what to do.
Bess would know what to do.
The bed she had slept in was still there, neat and conspicuous in the corner. I could not look at it.
A moment later a flustered Agnes appeared in the doorway with the copper bath that hung in the kitchen, and a pail of heated water. I helped her set it before the fireplace and she emptied the steaming pail into it.
‘Come on, Miss Charlotte,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you in here and you’ll be right as rain.’
Charlotte sobbed and sobbed, resisting the maid with an iron will. Agnes and I looked at one another helplessly, as if the other might have a better idea of how to tame her. Maria arrived with a tray of hot buttered crumpets and a cup of chocolate, setting it on the little table beneath the window, but Charlotte ignored it. I went to take the dreadful flea-bitten trousers off her, and she smacked me away, her small fist meeting my face.
I held my cheek in shock, and felt a flash of fury. ‘Stop crying this instant!’
She did, for one second, two at the most, and there was such hatred in her eyes I felt as though I’d been hit again. Then she began roaring so hard she began to choke, and several dreadful primal noises came from her dirty, bare little body before she bent double and vomited on the carpet.
Who was this changeling? The placid, good girl who’d been taken from me had been utterly defiled. Her hair was coming down from its pins all knotted, and her face and neck were streaked with dirt. She looked as though she’d been crawling through coals. Why did it feel now as though she was the captive and we the thieves? None of us knew what to do with her, but Agnes knelt to wipe up the contents of her stomach with her apron, while Maria clung in pale-faced shock to the doorframe.
‘Maria,’ I said calmly, ‘please go to Bedford Row to Doctor Mead’s house, and have his housekeeper wake him. Tell him to come at once with a tonic for shock, and something to help her sleep.’
Maria gaped and nodded, then fled downstairs. I approached Charlotte as one might a rabid dog, and told her she must have a bath to wash off the disease. She cowered away from me, and before I could get hold of her she dashed past my skirts and ran naked from the room.
‘Charlotte!’
We found her just as she was about to slip like an imp before Maria into the street. The cook caught her at the last second, dragging her back inside by her armpits and slamming the door before collapsing against it. ‘Oh, oh!’ she cried, clutching her chest. ‘Oh, Miss Charlotte!’
‘Get to your room,’ I bellowed, pointing at the staircase, and she leapt past me with the most almighty screech and ran up them as if they were on fire. ‘Maria, go now to Doctor Mead, go!’
The cook gasped and panted her way from the house. Hearing Charlotte’s unbearable cries, and feeling quite terrified of her, I had no choice but to find the key and lock her in until she’d calmed down. I told her through the door that she was to bath herself and eat the crumpets, and only when she was quiet would the door be unlocked.
I waited until the noises she made subsided to a stubborn, exhausted whimper, and fetched a chair from my bedroom, placing it outside her door to sit and wait for Doctor Mead, shivering so hard my teeth chattered.
He arrived half an hour later, at half past one in the morning, striding upstairs in three leaps. When I finally unlocked the door Charlotte had not bathed herself or eaten a mouthful; she was sitting in her trousers on the bed, with her arms wrapped around her knees, shuddering violently. I waited outside while he looked her over, spending almost an hour in the room with her, and giving her a draught of something. I watched through the gap in the door as he sat with a cool, clean hand on her forehead, waiting for sleep to arrive, but before it did she spoke from her pillow.
‘Where is Mama?’ They were the first words she’d spoken since arriving home.
‘She is just outside,’ he murmured. ‘You can see her in the morning. She is very glad to have you home.’
‘Not her,’ she spat. ‘My real mama. I want my mama.’ Tears came again, silently this time, from her, and also from me.
I wiped my eyes, and a minute or two later, Doctor Mead blew out the candle and closed the door, finding me in my chair on the landing. I felt very cold still, and he suggested we go down to the kitchen for something warm to drink, and gave me a draught to sleep, too, slipping a little bottle into my hand.
‘She will be better in the morning. You must be so relieved,’ he whispered, as the long-case clock ticked from below.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Maria and Agnes had a sherry to celebrate her return, clinking their glasses together in triumph, but I shook my head when the bottle was offered. I wished I felt the same straightforward relief, as if the whole matter was no different from a favourite necklace being found down the back of a cupboard. But for me it was much more complicated. They had not seen the way Charlotte shrank from me, as though I was the devil himself.
CHAPTER 20
She was not better in the morning. Agnes brought me breakfast in bed, and I asked if she had been into Charlotte’s room yet.
‘She ain’t in plump currant,’ was her reply. ‘I expected that draught the doctor gave her would have knocked her into next week, but she’s awake.’
‘Is she ill?’
‘She’s stopped crying, but there’s a warmness to her I don’t like. I opened the window for some air, but then she seemed cold, and pulled the coverlet up to her chin.’
‘She might have a fever; it would not surprise me, with her being dragged through all manner of filth in the streets. Doctor Mead is working today but said he would call later.’
Agnes nodded, and appeared withdrawn.
‘Is that all?’
‘It’s jess . . .’ she began with uncertainty, ‘. . . the little girl’s been asking for her mama.’
‘I shall go in once I’ve eaten.’
Agnes nodded, both of us pretending she had been referring to me. I busied myself with the breakfast things and she left, closing the door quietly behind her. Charlotte was just across the hall – I could move the tray from my lap, put on a bed jacket and pad across to her room in a matter of seconds. Instead I sat gazing into the middle distance as my eggs and coffee went cold.
As I was dressing, the door-knocker rapped downstairs, and I heard a male voice, and Agnes’s. Then the voices turned urgent and firm, and there was the sound of the front door closing – no, it had slammed. A moment later a great racket began outside the house: a man shouting in the street. I expected a beggar or a drunk had come calling – sometimes the farm boys passed along Devonshire Street, laced with drink after an evening’s diversion in the city, but it was not eight o’clock in the morning. I tugged at my sleeves and went downstairs to the withdrawing room to look out.
Bess’s red-headed brother was bellowing obscenities at the house. I had forgotten him entirely, remembering suddenly his presence in this very room the night before. He saw me at the window, and his fury grew more focused.
‘Oi, thornback!’ he bellowed. ‘I want my money!’
His voice cut through the glass like a hot knife through butter. A bruise purpled at his eye that had not been there before, and his lip had been cut and dried. There had been a fight, then, in the hours between him leaving my house and coming back. I realised, with interest, that I was not afraid of him. The idea of him breaking into my house or threatening me did not send me into a dizzy panic. If
, I decided, he forced his way in, I would kill him dead with whatever was to hand: a poker, a knife, a bottle. I felt quite calm about it, and drew the curtain.
‘Mort bitch!’ he yelled. ‘Give me my money. We had a deal. A hundred pounds and she’s yours. You got her, ain’t you? I want my hundred quid, you hear me?’
There was a short silence, and then a chink as something small and solid hit the window glass, followed immediately by a disruption as what sounded like more than one person apprehended him. Ned: that was his name. How changed my mind had been these past days; it was as though all the anxiety and dread of the last thirty years had lifted, like a pair of boots being removed after a long day’s walking. And it had happened not through Charlotte’s return, but when she had disappeared. In a way, this trauma had cauterised the other, sealing it in a way I’d never expected it could be.
Ned came again a while later, hammering at the doorknocker, and then went around the back, jumping over the wall and doing the same at the kitchen door. Maria chased him off with a meat cleaver, like a character in a comedy. I watched her brandish it at the gate, howling at him to stay away, and then I went in to Charlotte. I had expected to find her in a similar state to when she’d arrived, distressed and hiccuping but made more docile, perhaps, by Doctor Mead’s draught. This Charlotte was worse. She was vacant and vapid, with a despondent gaze and utter disinterest in her surroundings, least of all me. A child-sized chair had been placed facing her bed, and I settled myself and my skirts on it with some difficulty.
‘Are you feeling better?’ I asked.
She was pale, with violet shadows beneath her eyes, which rested somewhere in the middle of the room, as though she was watching something particularly dull. I moved, and the little chair creaked.
‘I am so glad Mr Bloor found you. You had us quite worried.’
Silence from Charlotte; there was no noise even from the street below. No gin-addled man bellowing obscenities. I wondered if she had heard Ned, if she knew him. He was frightening. Perhaps she did know him, and he had terrorised her. Perhaps he’d done something terrible to her: scolded her or hit her, or worse. I tried to recall if Doctor Mead had examined every inch of her for marks and bruises. But then there were the type of bruises that could not be seen, that bloomed inwardly – had they been looked for? He said she would not speak of where she had been or what she had seen there, and potential horrors began to appear to me, as though I was flicking through pictures in a magazine: Charlotte left abandoned in a freezing garret with no food; Charlotte forced to beg for money on the streets; Charlotte sitting in a corner as Bess and some faceless lover fought or fornicated in front of her.
‘Did . . . did anyone hurt you?’
She might have been asleep, if her eyes had not been open.
‘Was there a man there? Did anybody frighten you?’
Her arms were locked beneath the counterpane. Agnes had been right: there was a sheen of sweat on her forehead, and her hairline was damp.
‘Would you like to play a game?’ I looked around for a means of distraction, but all her books and magazines and toys had been tidied away.
‘Or a lesson, perhaps?’
If she would not respond in English, I doubted she would in French. I sighed, feeling helpless. Why after six years did I not find this any more natural? When she had been a fat-cheeked baby she had not rejected me, and I longed for those simpler days when the wet nurse brought her to me. I had thought taking in a baby would make me maternal, forcing me into motherhood in the way that a dog thrown in a river will swim. The ease with which Bess had attended to Charlotte, the beatific indulgence that Ambrosia bestowed on her children, even the mothers at church, who so clearly existed in tandem with their children – they were all like pairs of wheels on a carriage, moving together in unison. I knew I would never be like them, even if Charlotte lived with me the rest of her life.
‘I wish you would speak, Charlotte.’
Silence.
‘Charlotte.
‘Charlotte.
‘For heaven’s sake, look at me!’
Then I noticed something: her fist was closed tightly, as though she was gripping something.
‘What is in your hand?’
She gripped tighter. It was the only signal she had heard me.
‘Charlotte, what’s in your hand?’
I did not know why I cared so much, why the only impulse to touch her came not from sentimentality but suspicion. I prised her fingers open, though she resisted, and made a noise akin to a protest, a whimper, which made a crack inside me but did not force me to stop. A coin fell onto the bed. I do not know what I’d been expecting, but it had not been this – a letter, perhaps, or a token of sentiment. The coin was bronze and dull, the size of a crown, but I pounced on it a second before Charlotte did, pushing her hot little hand away. It was not a coin after all, but a ticket to the Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens.
‘Why do you have this?’
She had fallen mute again, but it was a hostile muteness this time: her black eyes burned with fury.
I got up to go, dropping the coin into my pocket.
‘I hate you.’
I had one hand on the doorknob, and stopped. She was looking directly at me with a loathing more clear and intense than I could ever have expected from a child.
‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.
‘I hate you. I hate it here. I want my mama.’
I thought about slapping her, about dragging her from her narrow bed and hitting her legs or her palms. I had never done it before, had never needed to, but now a clear venom rose in me, tingling my fingertips, burning my neck. The last time I’d felt it come was the day I’d attacked them in the withdrawing room, and since then it had lain dormant, it seemed, until now. It cared not what twig it was poked with, just that it had been poked. I let it raise its stupid head and look around, and I kept very still, and when it realised the deep emotion it had been woken by was fear – yes, the same as before, but not the life-threatening kind – it yawned and curled again, sinking into slumber.
I closed the door and left her.
Her crying woke me that night. The sound of her sobbing spread over the surface of my dream, and lifted me from it. I lay in the thick dark listening to her, and wanting to go to her, but her disdain for me was like a wall of fire outside her door. I heard feet creaking the boards above me, and shuffling down the stairs, and Agnes – sweet, faithful Agnes – going in, already shushing and murmuring as she opened Charlotte’s door, and for a moment the crying escaped into the house. I gathered myself and got out of bed, and waited at my bedroom door for Agnes to come back out. I heard her comforting the child, and Charlotte’s guttural, wretched sobs.
‘Mama,’ she cried, over and over. It died gradually, and Agnes hummed and soothed, and five minutes passed, then ten, then the door opened.
‘Agnes.’
The older woman yelped like a kicked puppy. ‘Oh, madam! You did give me a fright.’
‘Why is she still crying?’
Her white cap bobbed in the darkness.
‘Do you think something happened to her when she was away?’
‘I don’t know, madam,’ she whispered.
‘She is not the same child.’
Agnes did not speak.
‘Has she told you anything about where she was?’
‘No, madam.’
I waited. The clocked ticked in the hall. Doctor Mead had come again after supper with a little case of bottles that tinkled as he carried them up the stairs, like Agnes bringing the decanter to me in my bedroom. With a sinking feeling, I wondered if Charlotte would be like me now.
Winter showed no sign of giving way to spring, and the next morning dawned cold and grey. Charlotte’s condition worsened. A fever took hold, soaking her nightgown and the bedsheets, and she lay wilted on the mattress with the window open to the street. I was anxious about letting miasma in, but Agnes said fresh air was the only thing for a fever, and began makin
g poultices for her chest and soaking rags for her forehead. She had been ill before, but only once or twice, caught both times from Maria, who suffered colds. This time was different, like the grief and unhappiness had curdled inside her and mutated there. Doctor Mead had called it shock. I sat beside her bed on the tiny chair, or else on the landing outside her room with the newspaper.
Shortly before noon I went to fetch something from the withdrawing room, forgetting instantly what it was, because to my great surprise a man was sitting in my chair.
I did not know him, but something told me I’d seen him before. He was quite at ease, with one ankle resting on his knee, tossing a paperweight from one hand to the other. He was perhaps twenty-two or -three, with a shock of dark hair and serious black eyebrows. He was frowning, but there was something non-threatening about the way he did it: an intentness, a curiosity, perhaps, almost like a scholar puzzling at an equation. I froze in the doorway, but before I could open my mouth, he held up a hand as if in greeting.
‘Mrs Callard,’ he said. ‘Just the person I wanted to see. Rum ken you got here.’ I took a breath to scream, but he went on: ‘I know you’re handy with a poker, so before you empty your lungs, I’ll level with you. I ain’t weaponed.’ He held out his jacket, which hung empty either side of him.
‘Who in Heaven’s name are you?’ My voice was more assured than I felt. ‘How did you get into my house?’
He made a self-deprecating gesture. ‘It was the work of a minute. Them window locks you got, they’ll bend over for anyone with a crowbar. They should be lead, really; I’d have them changed if I were you.’ He said this conversationally, and I gaped in speechless horror.
‘What do you want? Let me guess: you are another acquaintance of Bess’s.’
‘Another?’
‘Or Ned’s, rather.’
The playfulness vanished from his face, and he gave me a hard look. ‘Not his, no.’
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