Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  “Verily!” She’d reversed her previous opinion that Annie overdid the verilys. There could never be too many verilys.

  “… Massa and Missis have long gone before me,

  Soon we will meet on that bright and golden shore,

  There we’ll be happy and free from all sorrow,

  There’s where we’ll meet and we’ll never part no more.”

  Alice wasn’t too keen on that double negative in the last line. She had her grammatical standards.

  When they arrived they moved with speed, rescuing possessions from a sinking ship or a burning house. They would not have much time. Charlotte had seen the workmen walking away about half an hour earlier, and they would soon be back. They immediately realized that there was to be no choice about the panels. They would be able to carry only one away in the baby carriage, and the only one that was loose and undamaged – apart from its name being broken away from the bottom edge and one decapitated Sister – was the one for Macbeth, lying propped up against the front wall like a target in the butts.

  Alice had run along the front of the building, and down the nearest side, but all the others were fixed firmly in place. They had all been mutilated, by the look of it, the broken figures lying on the ground beneath. It was like an illustration of Ancient Rome after the carnage of an invasion. She thought of her stories, destroyed, trodden into the earth. She had faint memories of grim-faced Roundheads despoiling statues in churches, shooting up at inaccessible angels and virgins, broken figures falling down to earth, shattering. Rocks burst through hallelujahing hosts, saints exploded, and cold bright light illuminated the dimness. The Roundheads would have liked this demolition of the Shakespeare Castle, competitively jostling to become involved in the destruction. They didn’t like the theatre. They’d closed all the theatres in England, and silenced all those voices of grief and joy.

  Panting, staggering, Alice and Charlotte lowered Macbeth into the baby carriage, which dipped noticeably under the weight.

  “You’ve been overfeeding this child,” Alice complained.

  “Quadruplets,” Charlotte corrected, maternally patting Macbeth and the Three Weird Sisters.

  “I hope Mama doesn’t have quadruplets.” Alice visualized her mother with her arms vastly extended out at each side, two infants under each arm, all scowling like miniature sour-faced Mrs. Twemlows, or a surfeit of Chinky-Winkies. (Was that the plural for Chinky-Winky?) Nursing them didn’t bear thinking about. Whole teams of wet-through wet nurses – bosoms alertly poised for instant access – would work tirelessly night and day.

  Charlotte tickled Macbeth under the chin.

  “Coochi, coochi, coo! What an adorable child!”

  Her last two sentences – if the former had been a sentence – were Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s verdict on Linnaeus. They were still awaiting Mrs. Albert Comstock’s verdict. The suspense of not knowing whether the child would be allowed to live.

  Alice had heard Mrs. Albert Comstock described as being “of the Jonathan Swift school of child management.” She hadn’t known what this meant, but it had not sounded good. She thought it was something to do with Mrs. Albert Comstock’s size, a reference to the Brobdingnagians.

  A vastly magnified illustration from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland came into her head, the same one that she had recalled yesterday afternoon: a gargantuan Duchess with a gargantuan baby on her knee, the pose Mrs. Albert Comstock adopted with her succession of sulky-faced Pekineses. Myrtle Comstock – slightly older than she and Charlotte were – was, there was no doubt about it, verging on the Brobdingnagian.

  “Coochi, coochi, coo! What an enormous child!”

  She must try that the next time she saw her, rail at her, spurn her, curse her, drive her mad. Alice believed in using her time usefully. Come to think of it, Myrtle displayed an unmistakable facial likeness to the Pekinese: this, surely, must awaken maternal feelings deep within the Comstock Bosom. Oliver, her baby brother, looked nothing like the rest of the family, and was a pretty child whom Alice could quite enthusiastically have coochi-coochi-cooed in the absence of his mother. Mrs. Albert Comstock regarded him with distinct distaste: perhaps this was Jonathan Swift’s sub-Herodian attitude to male infants. Speak roughly to your little boy,/And beat him when he sneezes …

  All the girls she knew were being presented with baby brothers. Perhaps Mama might have a boy this time, and Papa would love him more than he loved her and her sisters. She would like to have a brother.

  Macbeth was safely stowed in the baby carriage. They scurried about, rather hopelessly scooping up whatever came to hand, figures broken from the panels, larger pieces of stained glass. The hall tiles were beautiful, and undamaged, but so firmly fixed that it was impossible to remove them. She kneeled down, and pulled at the edges, trying to insert her fingernails, but she could not loosen them. They had words written upon them, illustrations. And by and by a cloud takes all away. She did not recognize these words. You and I are past our dancing days. These she recognized, and felt wise. I know thee not, old man. All the words were sad. They stretched all around, beneath her feet – she walked across the speeches – strewn with dirt and debris, and would soon be shattered by sledgehammers. There was no time to read anymore, and she ran back down the steps into what had once been outside. Now there was no longer any distinction between what was inside and what was outside. She scrabbled about in the broken fragments of terra-cotta, with a particular purpose in mind, wishing that there had been passing idlers to pause and ask what she was doing. “What the deuce is she doing?” That’s what they would ask each other. (They would be men.) “I’m looking for a witch’s head, of course!” was what she would have replied, a sentence she was rarely given the opportunity to employ. She found one head, the size of a broken chess piece, but it was not the head of a witch. It wore a crown, and looked like a king. There had been a small execution a short while earlier, the death of a deposed monarch in the ruins of his overthrown castle. Reenter MACDUFF, with MACBETH’S head.

  “For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground/And tell sad stories of the death of kings,” she said, showing the head to Charlotte, picking at the crown to remove the mud. (“For God’s sake!” tended to be Allegra’s response – if Mama was not in the room – when she quoted Shakespeare, but Charlotte was ever ready to look impressed.) She’d just read Richard II. Richard hadn’t been executed with pomp and formality on a high-raised stage; he’d been stabbed to death in the dungeon where he had been imprisoned at Pomfret Castle. She’d looked for Pomfret on a map of England, so that she could see where Richard had been killed, but she had been unable to find it. It wasn’t in the index. She knew that it was somewhere in Yorkshire. Perhaps it was near Thornfield Hall. “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” That’s what Richard said. He’d been listening to music and crying as he said this, because the music was a sign that someone loved him, and soon afterwards Exton had come in with the other murderers and killed him.

  “We can’t take anything else,” Charlotte said, as Alice added the head to what they had salvaged. She sounded out of breath, and looked – as Alice must herself – dusty and crumpled.

  It was not just a matter of time. The baby carriage was packed to capacity, and weighed down. It looked bowlegged – if wheels could be so described – an unfortunate camel conveying Sphinx-like Mrs. Albert Comstock in the direction of the Pyramids during her Egyptian holiday.

  Alice made a gesture to embrace the building in front of her.

  “Goodbye,” she said, not feeling in the least foolish. She felt – part of her surveyed what her feelings were – obscurely tearful.

  “Goodbye,” Charlotte said, equally solemnly.

  She remembered the Hamlet panel, and looked up above the entrance. She would have wanted to rescue this, if she could have reached it – it was on a higher level, it might not have been damaged – but it was no longer there. It was larger than the other panels, and there was a deep space where it had once been. It
seemed to have been neatly and properly removed: there were no broken fragments of terra-cotta left in the stone. She ran back inside, looking at the bottom of the wall, searching for an angled pink piece of statuary. Nothing. She ran back down to the front, looking in places where she had looked already. She didn’t know why she was searching for it; it would have been too large, too heavy, for them to move, but she knew she wanted to see it again. She knew that there would be nothing left to save the next time they came there.

  “We couldn’t take it, in any case,” Charlotte said, knowing what Alice was doing. She was arranging a little blue blanket on top of what they had rescued, making comfortable a sleeping overweight infant. “It’s time we went.” It was one of the few occasions on which Charlotte had been the one taking the initiative.

  As they pushed the baby carriage through the gates – one of them, they saw, was detached from its moorings, and leaning back against the wall – Alice was looking backward all the time, like Mary Benedict in reverse. She was looking at the shadowed space above the entrance, as though she could read the shape of the missing figure in the recess, straining her eyes to see, straining her ears to hear the vanished cries of the peacocks.

  Ten years later, at the funeral of Albert Comstock in Woodlawn Cemetery, she wandered away from her father and mother and sisters, her little brother, the other relatives, in search of Reynolds Templeton Seabright’s grave. She had been disappointed by Albert Comstock’s elaborate tomb, completed for him months before his demise. (Mrs. Albert Comstock – energized and full of enthusiastic ideas – had overseen the construction, like an ambitious houseowner constructing a costly summer house.) Despite persistent rumors, it had not possessed a space for advertising the latest bargains at Comstock’s Comestibles, a useful service for economically minded mourners. Like Green Wood Cemetery, Woodlawn had been designed for Marvellian green thoughts in green shades, the serene contemplation of the pattern of life and death, the transience and the persistence of being. Philosophically inclined picnickers could pack a skull in their hamper, neatly positioned next to the thinly cut sandwiches and well-polished apples, and could contemplate it in some rural glade amidst the tree-shaded gravestones, lost in deep musings on all that had gone before. And this was all that had come into her mind: day-old pies handsomely reduced in price for the shrewd and observant purchaser.

  She had found the gravestone of Reynolds Templeton Seabright.

  It bore the Hamlet panel from the Shakespeare Castle – this was the purpose for which it had been removed – and a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe: Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! They must have started the demolition of the castle the moment that the old actor was dead. Alice hadn’t known that he was dead on the morning she had come across the almost completed demolition. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they had started to demolish it with the old man still inside, a premature destruction, his heartbeat still sounding within the shell.

  Alice and Charlotte had to push hard, and keep the wheels aligned straight ahead. There would be no turning corners with this overloaded wagon. They saw the workmen – a group of about seven of them – walking up the footpath from Longfellow Park, and tried to look as if they were innocently strolling past, perambulating some well-behaved and well-nourished child. One of them waved. Alice had a momentary picture of a shortsighted laborer kindheartedly reaching into the baby carriage and gently chucking a miniature Richard the Third or a miniature Henry the Fourth under the chin. (“He’s very small, isn’t he? Why is he wearing a crown?”) It would probably be the first time ever that Richard the Third had been coochi-coochi-cooed. (“What an adorable king!”)

  Charlotte saw the expression on Alice’s face. She waved back to the workman, and the two of them began to increase their pace, trying not to show how much they had to exert themselves to do this. The wheels were creaking alarmingly. (“What do you feed him on?”)

  “The two little girls walked away from the Shakespeare Castle in the late morning of a day in the winter,” Charlotte prompted, looking at Alice.

  They walked on a little way farther.

  “The two little girls walked away from the Shakespeare Castle in the late morning of a day in the winter.”

  Charlotte was determined.

  After a while, Alice spoke.

  “Counterclockwise,” she said. A ghost story in daylight.

  She began.

  “The two little g-g-girls walked away from the Shakespeare Castle in the late morning of a day in the winter …”

  She could still tell her stories, clockwise and counterclockwise. She knew the details of every panel, and the order in which they had been positioned around the walls.

  First, Macbeth.

  Second …

  The workmen were behind them now, walking across toward the opening in the wall, to complete the job they had started. Alice and Charlotte, instead of heading back to Charlotte’s house, were starting down the road past the orchards toward Alice’s house. They gripped the handle of the baby carriage firmly, their hands side by side, about to begin a duet at a piano, leaning back at an angle to prevent it from hurtling down the descent. One of the workmen was whistling a tune Alice recognized. Workmen always whistled. She stopped speaking, and listened, turning back a little in the direction of the music.

  Charlotte answered the unasked question.

  “‘Shew! Fly, Don’t Bother Me,’” she said. There were few songs she didn’t know.

  After a pause, in which Alice did not continue with the story, Charlotte spoke the first line of the song, again prompting.

  “I think I hear the angels sing …”

  “… I think I hear the angels sing …” Alice picked up the cue, but she sang, instead of speaking. Charlotte joined in.

  “… I think I hear the angels sing,

  I think I hear the angels sing,

  I think I hear the angels sing,

  The angels now are on the wing.

  I feel, I feel, I feel,

  That’s what my mother said …”

  “That’s beautiful, girls!” the workman who had been whistling called across to them. “I think it’s me can hear the angels sing.”

  They giggled, as girls must – girls must giggle, workmen must whistle – and left, as they arrived, pushing the baby carriage and singing, but walking slowly, not running. They were not – in fact – pushing the baby carriage, so much as being drawn downhill by its weight, digging in their heels to prevent it from running away with them, dragging them downward to their doom. They felt like tiny Miss Stammers, being taken for a walk by her enormous dogs.

  “… I feel, I feel, I feel,

  I feel like a morning star,

  I feel, I feel, I feel,

  I feel like a morning star …”

  (It would be the workmen who would wield the morning stars as they destroyed what remained of the Shakespeare Castle, obliterating the surviving figures, splintering the unbroken glass, the spiked balls swinging around on chains until they were just blurs, wrecking as the walls roared down in clouds of dust.

  (With the goddess of beauty they would destroy. They would destroy with the mother of love, the queen of laughter, the mistress of grace and of pleasure.)

  “… I feel, I feel, I feel,

  I feel like a morning star …”

  Their singing became increasingly breathless. They stopped as they approached Chestnut Street, some time later, feeling like morning stars. They didn’t want anyone to hear them, and to come out and see what it was that was burdening the baby carriage. It would be too much of a surprise to peel back that blue blanket and see what lay within, a baby with the face of King Lear. (“That beard really suits him, bless him!”) If they’d taken Linnaeus with them, they could have laid him protectively across the top of the smuggled haul of Shakespearean refugees. There he’d have wobbled, Linnaeus the First, precociously encouraging his teeth to emerge by chewing gummily on Richard the Third’s hump, the hindquart
ers of Henry the Fifth’s horse, and throwing any inquisitive peerer off the trail by being what ought to have been there, a baby in a baby carriage.

  They entered the garden via the back entrance, and went into the stables, the cobblestones bright with newly scattered straw, as if packing cases had been prized open. They had a visitor. Dr. Twemlow’s horse was chomping away like a creature never fed, the carriage angled across awkwardly. He himself was probably in the kitchen, also chomping. He had a tendency to wander into kitchens, exclaiming at the delicious smells he had detected with the aid of his trained medical nostrils, and cooks could take a hint. His mama did not feed him properly. That was the general opinion.

  There was a pause as Charlotte seized the opportunity to lavish endearments upon an unfamiliar horse. She’d dart into the road to launch herself upon any promising-looking beast, and no stables remained unexplored. “Promising” encompassed all horses that looked sad, neglected, or unwell; “promising” encompassed most horses. She’d convinced herself that her loving attentions were all that could draw them back from the very brink of death at the hands of a cruel master, cramming straw into their panicky resisting mouths. Dr. Twemlow’s horse looked as unimpressed as most others, and attempted to bite her. Charlotte patted away for a little while longer, drew her fingers lover-like through its mane, muttered “There’s a good boy! There’s a good boy!” and only desisted when a determined lunge from the good boy almost knocked her off her feet. She behaved throughout as if nothing that happened had come as any surprise to her. As it happened most times she sought to persuade passing horses that she alone loved them and cared for them, this would have been fairly easy to do. You traced her progress down the street by listening for the sounds of whinnying and rearing, as cursing riders came crashing down to earth. “There’s a good boy!” she muttered once or twice more out of habit – from a safe distance – as the good boy rolled his eyes and lashed out with his back legs.