Sweet Songbird

by Sweet Songbird (retail) (epub)

  The sound she made, and the sharp movement of her head were softly bitter, and needed no words.

  He sat in the chair opposite her and waited, patient as a cat.

  He knew her too well; she could not remain silent. ‘You were there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked down at her clasped hands, concentrating fiercely upon a small ring that glinted upon the little finger of her right hand. She had bought it in Paris during a happy shopping expedition with Genevieve. She remembered now the colourful crowds that had thronged the vast new many-floored store with its great glass dome and its sweeping staircase. She had thought it a palace…

  ‘He was very brave.’

  The opal glimmered, palely beautiful, within its circle of diamonds. She had thought herself outrageously extravagant, but Genevieve had waved an airy hand. ‘Pouf! Extravagant, yes – to spend your own money! A month – two months – and the gentlemen will be queuing to buy such baubles!’

  ‘Kitty?’

  She raised her head dully, but said nothing. There seemed at that moment to be nothing to say.

  ‘They gave me these at the prison. I thought you would want them.’ The sad little bundle lay at his feet.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He took a long breath. His face was haggard, his dark eyes deeply shadowed. She looked back at the gleaming ring, turning it nervously on her finger.

  ‘Is there anything I can do—?’ The words were spoken with difficulty.

  She shook her head, suddenly and fiercely. ‘Luke – please – go away.’ For the first time she lifted her eyes to his, painfully direct. ‘Please. Just go away.’

  He looked at her for a long moment, and it seemed to her that he might have been about to say something. Then, very abruptly, he stood. ‘Of course. I’ll see you in a few days. When you’ve had a chance to—’

  ‘I don’t want to see you again.’ She heard the flat words with a kind of detached surprise, as if a stranger had spoken them in her voice. He loomed above her, his presence so powerful that it was like a cloak of darkness around her. She hunched herself against it, as a child might hunch against the cold. ‘Leave me alone,’ she whispered miserably, and at last the tears had started, easing a little the ache in her burning eyes and the suffocating constriction about her heart. ‘Leave me – alone!’ She would not break in front of him. She fought it, clenched against it, flinched as he dropped to one knee beside her, his movements as always smoothly graceful, his eyes on a level with hers.

  ‘I can’t do that now,’ he said at last, his voice oddly harsh, ’can I?’ and was gone, leaving her to the desolate relief of tears.

  * * *

  That the possible and ominous significance of those words did not immediately strike her was in the circumstances understandable. Three months later she had cause to remember them, and to understand their meaning, but at the time, and for the weeks that immediately followed that awful day, she lived in an imprisoning daze of misery that precluded logical thought and cut her off from her fellows and from the comfort they tried to offer. Only Michael was any consolation to her – him she tended, fiercely and devotedly, and as he lay sleeping in her arms or gazed at her, wakeful, with dark, innocent eyes, she searched for and found the resemblance she longed to see. Matt was not dead but reborn; here in her arms with a new life and a new chance: and this time she would protect him. This time he would be happy.

  Inevitably, however, the worst of the agony passed and in the end the night came when, exhausted, she slept at last. A week after that came the day that her first waking thought was not for her brother. Like a nerve-pain in an amputated limb the anguish of Matt’s loss – and particularly of the manner of it – would never leave her. But she could – she knew she must – learn to live with it. Very gradually her life returned to something resembling normality. To Amy Buckley’s delight Kitty and Michael moved in with her – they could not, after all, trespass on Pol and Barton’s hospitality forever. The arrangement worked remarkably well – Amy adored Michael from the start and was more than happy to help care for him, Kitty’s child in a way making up for the lack of her own. And so Kitty, who had long ago abandoned her first thoughts of having Michael fostered somewhere away from her, was able to consider picking up again the threads of her life and her career, knowing the child to be always safe and cared for.

  The first message that had come from Pat Kenny she had ignored – not with any thought of deliberate discourtesy but simply because she received it whilst her unhappiness was deepest, very soon after Matt’s death. By the time he approached her again, however, a month later, she had already begun to recognize the necessity of a return to work. Her savings had dwindled alarmingly. For Michael’s sake, if for nothing else, she must make an effort to renew old contacts and step back onto a stage before a fickle public forgot her existence altogether.

  And so at his second invitation she visited Pat Kenny in his impressive new office in Leicester Square and discovered that her sojourn in Paris had done – from a professional point of view at least – nothing but good. She was surprised at the favourable terms Kenny offered – until a couple of days later when, twice in a space of three days, other music hall owners approached her, each eager to be the one to bring Le Gamin back to the London stage, and she realized to her surprise that she could in fact have demanded more. ‘Well, there’ll be no worry about money anyway,’ she told Amy with some relief. ‘I need new costumes, of course, and there are other expenses – but there’ll be plenty left over.’ She reached a finger to Michael who lay, quiet and content, in his day cot by the fireside. Nearly four months old now, he was a sturdy child, well-tempered and rarely ruffled – as indeed, with his entire world peopled with the devoted slaves that were Kitty, Amy and Pol, he had good reason to be. He reached with an uncertain, pudgy fist, gurgling in his throat. So far as Kitty knew no one had discovered his existence and so far as she could see there seemed no reason to suppose anyone ever should. To the outside world he could safely and anonymously be presented as Amy’s child.

  ‘When do you start?’ Amy also indulgently offered a small, work-calloused finger and Michael grasped it eagerly.

  ‘In six weeks. At the Hippodrome.’ The Hippodrome was one of the largest of Kenny’s newly acquired theatres in the heart of London. ‘We start rehearsals in ten days.’ Kitty ran a finger, gently regretful, down the smoothly soft baby cheek. ‘I’ll have to wean him, I suppose.’

  ‘He’ll be all right,’ Amy said. ‘He’s as strong as an ox and perfectly happy. He’ll come to no harm.’

  Kitty, hearing in her friend’s voice her pleasure in the thought that now the baby would be wholly hers to care for, quickly suppressed a small, unworthy twinge of possessive jealousy. ‘You’re sure you won’t mind looking after him for me?’

  ‘Oh, of course not! We’ll do very well together, won’t we, little man? Eh? Won’t we—?’ She tickled the child under the chin and he chuckled richly.

  Kitty smiled a little sadly. ‘I’m sure you will.’

  She started rehearsals ten days later and the small menage very soon settled into a comfortable and happy routine. At first she found the strenuous rehearsals appallingly hard work, as muscles that had not been used for many long months protested painfully at this sudden and energetic baptism of fire. Her voice too had lost a little of its power and long hours were spent each morning with a voice-coach, an irascible old man who clearly believed that his time could be better spent than in training a flibbertigibbet girl to sing outrageous popular songs. However, he knew his business well and although more than once Kitty had to restrain herself from flinging the nearest moveable object at his testy, disapproving head she knew that those expensive, patience- and temper-testing hours were well spent. Her voice improved and strengthened as, with the endless, exhausting rehearsals, did her muscles and her stamina. As the first night approached she discovered at last that poor Matt’s death had slipped if not entirely to the back of her mind at least to a
small corner where it could rest in peace, the pain transmuted to an ache of loss that she knew she could bear, if not easily, at least without damage to herself.

  Late one afternoon, on her way home from the rehearsal hall, she called at Pol’s and was more than a little disconcerted to discover Lottie drinking tea in the kitchen as Pol busied herself at the stove. With Lottie was her daughter, Poppy, a small angel of a child, lovely as her mother must have been at her age and with apparently nothing of her dead father in her at all. She sat at the table beside her mother, subdued and docile, eyes downcast, small hands, nails bitten down to the quick, forever at her mouth despite the number of times Lottie with absent and automatic sharpness slapped them away. Taken aback and unwilling – or perhaps, she had to admit to herself, unable – to face the other girl’s overt dislike and hostility, Kitty made hasty excuses and, despising herself, retreated, hearing – as she well knew she was intended to hear – Lottie’s voice clearly behind her before she closed the door – ‘Hoity toity! Some people think ’emselves just too good ter live in this world, eh?’

  Strangely the brief encounter disturbed her more than she liked to admit, reminding her as it inevitably did of the one person she struggled not to think of: Luke Peveral. He had not been near her since the day of Matt’s execution. She did not, she told herself fiercely, want him near her – and then found herself miserably wondering if Lottie and her angel-faced child lived with him now in his bell-tower eyrie. She was troubled that night with dreams of him that startled her awake in the darkness, her body betraying her, aching for the touch of him, who had not touched her in a year. Yet with the daylight her stubborn resolution renewed itself. She had meant what she had said – for Michael’s sake and her own, she had meant it. She never wanted to see him again.

  She might have known, she told herself later, what self-deluding folly it was to have believed that her wishes in that as in anything else could possibly carry any weight with Luke Peveral.

  * * *

  He came a week to the day after her successful opening for Kenny at the Hippodrome. Tired to exhaustion, yet filled as always with the strange tension of energy that a performance on stage inevitably produced in her, she let herself into the little house in Pascal Street to find waiting for her a strained and white-faced Amy who, fearful but stubborn, had kept silent company with the intimidating visitor who had forced his way with steely courtesy into her home an hour or so before and now waited calmly by the parlour fire.

  Kitty it was who broke the silence, savage anger in her voice. ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’

  Amy cast a quick, worried look to the ceiling, above which lay the room in which Michael slept.

  Luke, who had stood when she entered the room, regarded her, cold and unsmiling. ‘We have to talk.’

  ‘No,’ she said, flatly. ‘We don’t.’

  ‘Oh yes, we do.’

  Something in the tone, in the cool, relentless eyes brought a small throb of fear to her heart. She stared at him, stone-faced. In the silence poor Amy, flustered, looked from one to the other. ‘I’d – better leave you together?’ she asked hesitantly, looking almost pleadingly at Kitty.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind?’ The courtesy was caustic. Kitty levelled at him a look that might have killed.

  ‘Kitty?’ Amy asked, uncertainly.

  ‘There’s no need,’ she said, the brusque words harsh, ‘he’s leaving. We’ve nothing to say to each other that hasn’t already been said.’

  From above their heads came the thin thread of a child’s cry. Amy froze. By not so much as the flicker of an eyelash did Luke betray surprise. Neither did Kitty’s expression change; from the moment she had seen him somehow she had guessed.

  ‘You know,’ she said.

  ‘Of the child? Yes.’

  ‘Spider?’

  His hesitation was barely noticeable. He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Who then?’ As she said it she knew, and the shock was like a physical blow.

  ‘Matt,’ he said, his voice absolutely devoid of emotion.

  Michael cried again.

  ‘I’d better go to him.’ Amy cast one worried look at Kitty then scuttled from the room, closing the door behind her. They heard her bustle up the stairs, the clip of her footsteps on the floorboards above them. The crying stopped.

  ‘You have absolutely no right to be here,’ Kitty said, steadily enough, though her heart was pounding as if she had run a mile. ‘You have no rights over me. No rights over him.’

  ‘I disagree.’

  It seemed to her that the two implacable, passionless words were the most threatening she had ever heard. She held herself still, head up, eyes steady.

  ‘He is my son,’ he said.

  Breath would be wasted denying it, and she knew it; instead, sudden anger bolstering her courage, she said, very softly but very clearly, ‘And one day you will be taken, as Matt was taken, but with better cause. Shall your son and I visit you then, in the condemned cell? Is that what you want?’

  Violence lay deep in his eyes, but his voice was controlled. ‘Would you keep him from me entirely? Would you deny me my son?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, flatly.

  She saw the dangerous flare of volatile temper, forced herself not to flinch from it. ‘A boy needs a father,’ he said.

  ‘A father such as you?’ In her terror for her child she made no attempt to disguise her scorn.

  ‘Is surely better than none?’

  She lifted her chin. ‘I doubt it.’

  She saw then his control snap, saw the violence of his movement towards her and in the confined space of the small room could not avoid it. He caught her shoulders in a savagely painful grip. Despite herself she cried out sharply. The pressure of his fingers did not lessen. ‘Listen to me!’ He shook her, fiercely. ‘Listen, damn you! We’ll be married. The child will have a name. A home. Isn’t that what you want for him?’

  Despite the pain the sudden surge of outrage at his words all but choked her. ‘What name?’ Her voice matched his in savagery. ‘What home? He has a name! Michael Daniels. My father’s name. An honourable name. And he has a home. What better would you offer him? Are you mad? Do you think that after what’s happened I’d let you within a mile of my – my – child?’

  ‘Our child!’ He shook her violently again, and his face was murderous.

  She was too furious now, too fearful for her child to be cowed. ‘No. Never that. Never our son, Luke. My son. Carried alone and borne alone—’

  ‘Your fault, not mine! You should have told me!’ He almost threw her from him. She staggered. He turned from her, his tall silhouette limned darkly forbidding in the lamplight, and when he spoke his voice was ice-hard. ‘I’ll have him, Kitty. Whether you will it or not.’

  She caught his arm, and, surprised at her own furious strength, spun him to face her. ‘Kill me first,’ she said, ‘for it’s the only way.’

  ‘Don’t tempt me!’ he snapped harshly. ‘I’ve done worse for less.’

  She stepped back from him. For a long moment they glared at each other, and in the raging silence all hope of harmony died.

  Above their heads the floorboards creaked as Amy rocked the disturbed child to sleep.

  With no further word then he turned and left her, the slamming of the door behind him reverberating through the fabric of the little house. She stood where she was, shaking, her hands to her face, teeth gritted against tears.

  ‘Kitty—?’

  She did not know how long she had stood so, shuddering, her face buried in her spread hands. She lifted her head.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Worried, Amy hovered by the door, small face a picture of concern and fright.

  ‘I’m – yes, I’m all right.’

  Amy glanced a little fearfully over her shoulder. ‘Has he gone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well’ – the little woman made a gallant attempt at a smile – ‘that’s a relief anyway.’

  Kitt
y dropped, suddenly and weakly, into the nearest armchair. ‘Short-lived, I’m afraid,’ she said, grimly weary. ‘He’ll be back.’

  (ii)

  It was beyond doubt that Luke Peveral did indeed have every intention of returning to the house in Pascal Road, beyond doubt too, Kitty knew, that his clear intention was to possess his son no matter what she might try to do to stop him. But in the event, and almost as if she had wished the ill-luck upon him, Fate, in the shape of the law that he had so long and so cavalierly flouted, stepped in, and it was a very long time before anyone but Spider or Lottie saw him again.

  It was Pol who broke the news to Kitty that he had been taken. ‘They’ll put ’im away fer sure this time,’ she said, not without some grim satisfaction. ‘’E won’t talk ’is way out o’ this one so easy, you mark my words. Taken red ’anded ’e was – it’ll be a stretch in the steel fer matey this time, you see if it isn’t. Ten years, I shouldn’t wonder. Shame they’ve stopped shippin’ ’em out to Botany Bay if you ask me – that’d ’ave solved a few problems, eh?’

  Kitty was surprised at her own reaction; after an initial wave of relief, of which she was quickly ashamed, she found herself horrified for Luke. For all their differences, for all her changed feelings towards Luke, she never would have wished this upon him. Ten years’ imprisonment would kill him or drive him insane, she was sure – or at the very least harden and embitter him beyond redemption. She remembered the day he had spoken of his hatred – his fear – of prison life and shuddered. Better if they had killed him as they had Matt. She heard only once directly from him – a brusque message delivered through Spider that he wanted her under no circumstances either to attend the trial or at any time to attempt to visit him. Through Lottie via Pol she heard some weeks later that in fact the worst fears had not been realized – judicious bribery had ensured if not an escape from punishment at least a more lenient sentence than had been expected. Luke Peveral was to spend two years in gaol.