by Kate Morton
Whether Georgiana made any attempt to contact her family after Jonathan’s death, and as her own health deteriorated, is unknown. However, in this writer’s opinion, it seems unlikely. Certainly, a letter from Linus Mountrachet to an associate, dated December 1900, suggests that he had only recently learned of Eliza, his little London niece, and was shocked to think that she had passed a decade in such terrible conditions. Perhaps Georgiana feared that the Mountrachet family might be unwilling to forgive her original desertion. If her brother’s letter is anything to go by, such fear was unfounded.
After so many long years spent searching abroad, trawling the seas and scouring the lands, to think my beloved sister was so near all along. And allowing herself to suffer such privations! You will see that I spoke truth when I told you of her nature. How little she seemed to care that we loved her so and longed only for her safe homecoming . . .
Though Georgiana never made such a homecoming, Eliza was destined to return to the bosom of her maternal family. Georgiana Mountrachet died in June 1900 when Eliza was eleven. The death certificate names her killer as consumption and her age as thirty. After her mother’s death, Eliza was sent to live with her mother’s family on the Cornish coast. It is unclear how this family reunion was effected, but one can safely assume that, despite the unfortunate circumstances precipitating it, for the young Eliza this change of location was a most fortunate occurrence. Relocation to Blackhurst Manor, with its grand estate and gardens, must have been a welcome relief, offering safety after the dangers of the London streets. Indeed, the sea became a motif of renewal and possible redemption in her fairytales.
Eliza is known to have lived with her maternal uncle’s family until the age of twenty-five, however her whereabouts thereafter remain a mystery. Various theories have been formulated as to her life after 1913, though all are yet to be proved. Some historians suggest that she most likely fell victim to the spread of scarlet fever that enveloped the Cornish coast in 1913. Others, perplexed by the 1936 publication of her final fairytale, ‘The Cuckoo’s Flight’, in the journal Literary Lives, suggest that she spent her time travelling, seeking the life of adventure championed by her fairytales. This tantalising idea is yet to receive any serious academic attention and, despite such theories, the fate of Eliza Makepeace, along with the date of her death, remains one of literature’s mysteries.
There exists a charcoal sketch of Eliza Makepeace, drawn by the well-known Edwardian portrait artist, Nathaniel Walker. Found after his death amongst his unfinished works, the sketch, entitled The Authoress, hangs currently in the Tate Gallery in London. Although Eliza Makepeace published only one complete collection of fairytales, her work is rich in metaphorical and sociological texture and would reward scholarship. Where earlier tales like ‘The Changeling’ show a strong influence from the European fairytale tradition, later tales like ‘The Crone’s Eyes’ suggest a more original and, one would venture, autobiographical approach. However, like many female writers of the first decade of this century, Eliza Makepeace fell victim to the cultural shift that occurred after the momentous world events of the early century (the First World War and women’s suffrage to name but two) and slipped from readers’ attention. Many of her stories were lost during the Second World War, when the British Library was robbed of entire runs of its more obscure periodicals. As a consequence, Eliza and her fairytales are relatively unknown today. Her work, along with the author herself, seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth, lost to us like so many other ghosts of the early decades of the century.
1 See Thomas R. Collins, Sketching the Past (Hamilton Hudson, 1959), and Reginald Coyte, Famous Illustrators (Wycliffe Press, 1964).
14
London, 1900
High above Mr and Mrs Swindell’s rag and bottle shop, in their narrow house by the Thames, there was a tiny room. Little more than a closet, really. It was dark and damp with a fusty smell (the natural consequence of poor drainage and nonexistent ventilation), discoloured walls that cracked in summer and seeped through winter, and a fireplace whose chimney had been blocked so long it seemed churlish to suggest it should be otherwise. Yet despite its meanness, the room above the Swindells’ shop was the only home Eliza Makepeace and her twin brother, Sammy, had ever known, a modicum of safety and security in lives otherwise devoid of both. They had been born in the autumn of London’s fear, and the older Eliza grew the more certain she became that this fact, above any other, made her what she was. The Ripper was the first adversary in a life that would be filled with them.
The thing Eliza liked best about the room upstairs, indeed the only thing she liked beyond its bare status as shelter, was the crack between two bricks, high above the old pine shelf. She was eternally grateful that the slapdashery of a long-ago builder, combined with the tenacity of the local rats, had begot a nice fat gap in the mortar. If Eliza lay flat on her stomach, stretched herself right along the shelf with her eye pressed close against the bricks and her head cocked just so, she could glimpse the nearby bend of the river. From such secret vantage point she was able to watch unobserved as the tide of busy daily life ebbed and flowed. Thus were Eliza’s twin ideals achieved: she was able to see, yet not be seen. For though her own curiosity knew no bounds, Eliza didn’t like to be watched. She understood that to be noticed was dangerous, that certain scrutiny was akin to thieving. Eliza knew this because it was what she most liked to do, store images in her mind to be replayed, revoiced, recoloured as she pleased. To weave them into wicked stories, flights of fancy that would have horrified the people who’d provided unwitting inspiration.
And there were so many people to choose from. Life on Eliza’s bend of the Thames never stopped. The river was London’s lifeblood, swelling and thinning with the ceaseless tides, transmitting the beneficent and the brutal alike, in and out of the city. Although Eliza liked it when the coal boats came in at high water, the watermen rowing people back and forth, the lighters bringing in cargo from the colliers, it was low tide when the river really came to life. When the levels dropped sufficiently for Mr Hackman and his son to start dragging for bodies whose pockets needed clearing; when the mudlarks took up position, scouring the stinking mud for rope and bones and copper nails, anything they could find that might be swapped for coin. Mr Swindell had his own team of mudlarks and his own patch of mud, a putrid square he kept guarded as if it contained the Queen’s own gold. Those who dared cross his boundary line were likely as not to find their waterlogged pockets being fleeced by Mr Hackman next time the tide dropped.
Mr Swindell was always hounding Sammy to join the mudlarks. He said it was the boy’s duty to repay his landlord’s charity wherever he could. For though Sammy and Eliza managed to scrape together enough to cover the rent, Mr Swindell never let them forget that their freedom rested on his willingness not to advise the authorities of their recent change in circumstances. ‘Them Do-Gooders what come sniffing round would be very interested to learn that two young orphans, likes of yourselves, has been left to fend alone in the big old world. Very interested indeed,’ was his common refrain. ‘By rights I should of given you up soon as your ma breathed her last.’
‘Yes, Mr Swindell,’ Eliza would say. ‘Thank you, Mr Swindell. Very kind of you it is too.’
‘Harumph. Don’t you go forgetting it neither. By the goodness of me and my missus’s hearts you’re still here.’ Then he would look down his quivering nose and, by sole virtue of his mean-spiritedness, set his pupils to narrowing. ‘Now if that lad, with his knack for finding things, would find his way into my mud patch, I might be convinced you was worth keeping. Never did meet a lad with a better nose.’
It was true. Sammy had a talent for turning up treasures. Ever since he was a tiny boy, pretty things had seemingly gone out of their way to lie at his feet. Mrs Swindell said it was the idiot’s charm, that the Lord looked after fools and madmen, but Eliza knew that wasn’t true. Sammy wasn’t an idiot, he just saw better than most because he didn’t waste his time i
n talking. Not a word, ever. Not once in all his twelve years. He didn’t need to, not with Eliza. She always knew what he was thinking and feeling, always had. He was her twin after all, two halves of the one whole.
That was how she knew he was frightened of the river mud, and although she didn’t share his fear, Eliza understood it. The air was different when you got near the water’s edge. Something in the mud fumes, the swooping of the birds, the strange sounds that bounced between the ancient banks of the river . . .
Eliza knew also that it was her responsibility to look after Sammy, and not just because Mother had always told her so. (It was Mother’s inexplicable theory that a bad man—she never said who—was lurking, intent upon finding them.) Even when they were very small Eliza had known that Sammy needed her more than she needed him, even before he caught the fever and was nearly lost to them. Something in his manner left him vulnerable. Other children had known it when they were small, grown-ups knew it now. They sensed somehow that he was not really one of them.
And he wasn’t, he was a changeling. Eliza knew all about changelings. She’d read about them in the book of fairytales that had sat for a time in the rag and bottle shop. There’d been pictures, too. Fairies and sprites who looked just like Sammy, with his fine strawberry hair, long ribbony limbs and round blue eyes. The way Mother told it, something had set Sammy apart from other children ever since he was a babe: an innocence, a stillness. She used to say that while Eliza had screwed up her little red face and howled for a feeding, Sammy had never cried. He used to lie in his drawer, listening, as if to beautiful music floating on the breeze that no one but he could hear.
Eliza had managed to convince her landlords that Sammy shouldn’t join the mudlarks, that he was better off cleaning chimneys for Mr Suttborn. There weren’t many boys Sammy’s age still engaged in sweeping, she reminded them, not since the laws against child-sweeps were passed, and there was no one could clean the narrower chimneys over Kensington way quite like a skinny lad with pointy elbows made just for climbing dark and dusty chutes. Thanks to Sammy, Mr Suttborn was always fully booked, and there was much to be said, surely, for regular coins? Even when weighed against the hope that Sammy might pluck something valuable from the mud.
Thus far the Swindells had been made to see reason—they liked Sammy’s coins, just as they’d happily taken Mother’s when she was alive and doing the copy work for Mr Blackwater—but Eliza wasn’t sure how long she could keep them at bay. Mrs Swindell in particular had difficulty seeing beyond her greed, and was fond of making veiled threats, muttering about the Do-Gooders who’d been sniffing about looking for muck to sweep from the streets to the workhouse.
Mrs Swindell had always been afraid of Sammy. She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation. Eliza had once heard her whispering to Mrs Barker, the coal-whipper’s wife, saying she’d heard it from Mrs Tether, the midwife that delivered the two of them, that Sammy had been born with the cord around his neck. Should never’ve made it through the first night, would’ve breathed his last when he took his first but for the work of mischief. ’Twas the Devil’s work, she said; the boy’s mother made a deal with Him downstairs. You only had to look at him to know it—the way his eyes stared deep within a person, the stillness in his body, so unlike the other lads his age—oh yes indeed, there was something very wrong with Sammy Makepeace.
Such tall tales made Eliza even more fiercely protective of her twin. At night sometimes, when she lay in bed listening to the Swindells arguing, their little daughter, Hatty, bawling over the top, she liked to imagine dreadful things happening to Mrs Swindell. That she might fall, by accident, into the fire when she was washing, or slip beneath the mangle and be squeezed to death, or drown in a vat of boiling lard, head first, skinny legs the only part of her that remained to evidence her gruesome end . . .
Speak of the Devil and she shall appear. Round the corner into Battersea Church Road, shoulder bag fat with spoils, came Mrs Swindell. Home after another profitable day spent hunting little girls with pretty dresses. Eliza pulled herself away from the crack and shimmied along the shelf, used the edge of the chimney to ease herself down.
It was Eliza’s job to launder the dresses Mrs Swindell brought home. Sometimes when she was boiling the dresses over the fire, minding not to tear the spider’s-web lace, Eliza wondered what those little girls thought when they saw Mrs Swindell waving her confectionery bag at them, the confectionery bag full of shiny bits of coloured glass. Not that the little girls ever got near the bag to know the trick that had been played. No fear. Once she had them alone in the alley, Mrs Swindell got their pretty dresses off them so fast they didn’t have time to scream. They probably had nightmares afterwards, Eliza thought, like the nightmares she had about Sammy stuck up the chimney. She felt sorry for them—Mrs Swindell on the hunt was a fearful thing indeed—but it was their own fault. They shouldn’t be so greedy, always wanting more than they already had. It never ceased to amaze Eliza that little girls born to grand houses and fancy perambulators and lacy frocks should fall victim to Mrs Swindell for such small price as a bag of boiled sweets. They were lucky all they lost was a dress and some peace of mind. There were worse losses to be had in the dark alleyways of London.
Downstairs, the front door slammed.
‘Where are you then, girl?’ The voice came rolling up the stairs, a hot ball of venom. Eliza’s heart sank as it hit her: the hunt had not gone well, a fact which boded ill for the inhabitants of number thirty-five Battersea Church Road. ‘Get downstairs and ready the supper or you’ll book yourself a hiding.’
Eliza hurried down the stairs and into the rag and bottle shop. Her gaze passed quickly over the dim shapes, a collection of bottles and boxes reduced by darkness to geometric oddities. By the counter, one such shape was moving. Mrs Swindell was bent over like a mud crab rummaging in her bag, sifting through various lace-trimmed dresses. ‘Well don’t just stand there gawking like that idjit brother of yours. Get the lantern lit, stupid girl.’
‘The stew’s on the stove, Mrs Swindell,’ said Eliza, hurrying to light the gas. ‘And the dresses are almost dry.’
‘Should think so too. Day after day I go out, trying to earn the coin, and all’s you have to do is get the dresses laundered. Sometimes I think I’d be better off doing it myself. Shove you and your brother out on your ears.’ She puffed a nasty sigh and sat in her chair. ‘Well, come over here, then, and get my shoes off.’
While Eliza was knelt on the ground, massaging the narrow boots loose, the door opened again. It was Sammy, black and dusty. Wordlessly, Mrs Swindell held out her bony hand and beckoned slightly with her fingers.
Sammy dug into the pocket at the front of his overalls, pulled out two copper coins and laid them where they were due. Mrs Swindell eyed them suspiciously before kicking Eliza aside with her sweaty stockinged foot and hobbling to the moneybox. With a slant-eyed glance over her shoulder, she pulled the key from the front of her blouse and turned it in the lock. Stacked the new coins atop the others, smacking her lips wetly as she calculated their total.
Sammy came to the stove and Eliza fetched a pair of bowls. They never ate with the Swindells. It wasn’t right, Mrs Swindell said, for the two of them to be getting ideas about their being part of the family. They was hired help, after all, more like servants than tenants. Eliza began ladling out their stew, pouring it through the sieve as Mrs Swindell insisted: it didn’t do to waste the meat on a pair of ungrateful wretches.
‘You’re tired,’ Eliza whispered. ‘You started so early this morning.’
Sammy shook his head, he didn’t like her to worry.
Eliza glanced towards Mrs Swindell, checked her back was still turned before slipping a small piece of hock into Sammy’s bowl.
He smiled slightly, warily, his round eyes meeting Eliza’s. Seeing him like this, shoulders deflated with the day’s heavy labours, face plastered with the soot from rich men’s chimneys, grateful for the mo
rsel of leathery meat, made her want to wrap her arms around his small frame and never let him go.
‘Well, well. What a pretty picture,’ Mrs Swindell said, clapping the moneybox lid shut. ‘Poor Mr Swindell, out in the mud digging for the treasures what put food in your ungrateful mouths—’ she waggled a knobbly finger in Sammy’s direction—‘while a young lad the likes of you is making free in his house. It ain’t right, I tells you, it ain’t right at all. When those Do-Gooders come back, I’ve a good mind to tell them so.’
‘Does Mr Suttborn have more work for you tomorrow, Sammy?’ Eliza spoke quickly.
Sammy nodded.
‘And the day after that?’
Another nod.
‘That’s two more coins this week, Mrs Swindell.’
Oh, how meek she managed to make her voice!
And how little it mattered.
‘Insolence! How dare you backchat. If it weren’t for Mr Swindell and me, you two snivelling worms’d be out on your ears, scrubbing floors in the workhouse.’
Eliza drew breath. One of the last things Mother had done was to obtain an undertaking from Mrs Swindell that Sammy and Eliza should be allowed to stay on as tenants for as long as they continued to meet the rent and contribute to the household. ‘But Mrs Swindell,’ Eliza said cautiously, ‘Mother said you undertook—’
‘Undertook? Undertook?’ Angry bubbles of saliva burst in the corners of her mouth. ‘I’ll give you undertook. I undertook to tan your hide till you can’t sit down no longer.’ She rose suddenly and reached for a leather strap hanging by the door.
Eliza stood firm though her heart was thumping.
Mrs Swindell stepped forward, then stopped, a cruel tic trembling her lips. Without a word she turned towards Sammy. ‘You,’ she said. ‘Come over here.’