Turning the Stones

by Debra Daley

  I push past the cadger towards the stairs. As I reach the bottom step, the gloom in the hall fluctuates. The back door has opened and the sound of violent footsteps turns my stomach to water. Up the stairs I rush and fling myself through the door into a parlour. There is a glimpse of startled faces. I tear through a grand vestibule and out the front of the house and sprint away.

  I reach a street corner, gulping at the air. But I cannot get my breath, because I am confronted by a sight that causes me to gasp anew. I have arrived nearly exactly where I started: in the thoroughfare of well-bred pale stone houses. There, some fifteen yards away, is my friend the sycamore tree.

  With a cry of despair, I spin on my heel and race off in the thickening rain without the slightest idea where I am going.

  As I hasten onwards, my hair drooping under the influence of the rain, it occurs to me that I do not have my makeshift cloak. I must have lost it during my wild charge, but I have no recollection of its falling from my shoulders. How unreliable is memory. Mine has locked away the events of yesterday evening and refuses to show them to me. Have I somehow brought this forgetfulness to bear on myself because I lack the moral fibre to admit to a crime? Well, here is something I will admit: I feel, somehow, guilty. As I slope along in this fading light I expect at any second to feel a heavy hand grasp my arm. I expect to be detained under suspicion.

  Just now I almost cannoned into a gentleman stepping out of a print shop. He barely acknowledged the collision for his head was lowered over a news sheet that claimed all his attention. No doubt he will soon be riveted by my story, which is that of a bolting lady’s maid and a body slashed to ribbons at a patrician address. The printers will junket with my likeness and my name and no one will care for the truth – whatever that should be – or even listen to my part. If only I had the protection of the Waterlands. If only they could stand up for me and vouch for my good character – but I cannot drag them into this. Imagine the publicity. The embarrassment of it.

  I am dodging and diving now among constricted streets and evening is coming on. The public lighting here is very scant and I fear that the cloaked figures appearing at the mouths of the dark entryways around me cannot be other than villains and wild-bloods. The thought of being abroad in this hard town at night adds weight to my already considerable burden of fright. It is with some relief that I discern the rumble of heavy traffic nearby and I head towards it in search of the security of a crowd.

  I find myself on the edge of a manic thoroughfare watching a whirligig of carriages, carts and unstoppable sedan chairs. I hover at the kerb, shivering and panting. A long minute passes before my eye falls with a start of recognition on a red brick building on the far side of the road.

  I believe I know this place! Is it not Piccadilly?

  Eliza and I came here the other day with Mr Paine – it already seems a lifetime ago – to visit his peruke-maker, who keeps a shop in that building. I remember we were almost mown down by a coach coming out of the inn next door. The inn has a substantial frontage, cleft by a covered archway. As I gaze at it my heart suddenly lifts. For here is my way out of London.

  In a second I have struck out, dodging pats of dung and riders who insist on bringing their steeds to a canter even in the jam of traffic. The inn is called the White Bear, I see. The schedule inscribed on its door tells me that coaches and diligences depart from here daily at five o’clock in the morning for the port of Dover. There is also a night coach at seven for Bristol and all points west. In a flash, patting at the moneybag in my pocket, I resolve to take the night coach. Dover would be more convenient for France – without an explanation for the scene I awoke to this afternoon, what can I do to save my life but flee from England? But I cannot delay until morning for the coach south. I will try for a passage from Bristol.

  And yet I hesitate to enter the yard of the White Bear. Should I return to Eliza in Poland Street and tell her what has happened – or rather that I do not know what has happened? She would never take me for a murderess, would she? And perhaps Mr Paine could help. But I know it is pointless to entertain such a notion. It is beyond their skills to smooth over such an unholy mess. Mrs Waterland could do it, perhaps, but she is two hundred miles away in Cheshire. And besides …

  It gives me a queer feeling to say this, but a shiver comes over me at the thought of Poland Street and intuition tells me to stay away.

  I pass under a covered entranceway into a long yard made gloomy by the rain and by dilapidated wooden dwelling houses that rise three storeys above the stables and coach houses and hinder the light. There is a straggling crowd standing at shelter in a doorway.

  A voice cries, ‘Looking for a seat, missus?’ A crone in a frayed mantle and a cross-barred petticoat jerks her thumb towards a door set in a crook of the wall.

  It leads to a vestibule and a booking office. Huddled up on a stool at a sloping desk in a corner of the office, next to a window glazed with imperfect glass, the book-keeper has just lit an evening candle. The atmosphere is pungent with the stink of rancid tallow. There is a large plan of London affixed to the wall with a red line running through it like a knife cut.

  The book-keeper raises his head with a sideways glance that gives him a shifty look. He is a swarthy man with many chins and a twisted wig cut as close as a lawn. He says at once that he can offer me nothing, neither for Dover nor for Bristol.

  I am aware that my appearance must present a slatternly sight and I fear the book-keeper does not believe I have the funds to buy a seat. But perhaps he sees my desperation, because he offers me a constrained smile and says that an outside place is available on the night coach, but only as far as Reading. At the George Inn in Reading I may hope to connect with a morning coach to Bristol.

  The inept X that I make on a page of his ledger is quite convincing, I believe, and so is the lie regarding the name I give him. ‘Ann Jones’ slips easily to my tongue.

  *

  The night coach west has turned out to be a disreputable piece of work. There are ten of us heaped up here on the roof like human baggage: an apprehensive woman with red, gummed hair under a white cap, holding a child tightly to her chest; a whiskery, oblong-shaped couple; and a cluster of rough men talking out of the sides of their mouths. ‘Last night was a belter, all right,’ says one of them. Another blows out his cheeks with a hoot of laughter, ‘You’re right there, Frank. Blow me tight if it weren’t.’ The inside of the coach is swarming with drovers and their dogs. They are staging up to Swindon, I hear, after selling their beasts at Smithfield. Our coach is aptly named the Demon – certainly it seems to possess an unclean spirit. Two enormous lamps on each side of the body and another on the hind boot show up the deficiencies of the turn-out – the unkempt horses in cobbledtogether harness, the driver in a tatty greatcoat, and the lack of a guard. The boot is packed with bags of wool, apparently. ‘Or so they say,’ one of the men remarks with a tap on the side of his nose. I cannot make out his meaning exactly, but there is an unsavoury air about the entire enterprise and I have the feeling that our journey is likely to be exposed to every possibility of mishap.

  I am riven by the fear of capture. The half-hour I was obliged to wait before the coach departed felt intolerable. I hung about in an agony of nerves, trying to keep out of sight in the stables. But even though we are on our way now, staggering through the western precincts of London, I expect at every stage to find us flagged down and myself arrested. What a pathetic dodge it was to give a false name to the bookkeeper at the White Bear. That will not fool a determined hunter for a second.

  My memory still refuses to disclose the sequence of events that brought me to that bloody bedchamber, and this amnesia makes me suspect myself. Shall I wake up tomorrow to find that I have killed a man? I will admit that, like most people, I have a capacity for anger and animosity, but does that make me capable of taking a life? Will you believe me when I say that I am innocent? I yearn for that understanding.

  *

  The light has go
ne and our surroundings are as dark as a bag now. It suddenly occurs to me to wonder: who is this you to whom I plead my case?

  *

  At the village of Hammersmith we changed horses and a knave in a mashed hat and a sour coat took a seat by my side. I am frightened of him. His head lolls on his shoulders with the reeling of the coach like something unhinged. He keeps pestering me with a black velvet scarf, which I am sure he has stolen. ‘Come now, wench,’ he wheedles, ‘only pay me a little florin for this lovely scarf.’ The harassment continues as we cross a heath in a descending fog. The road is a queasy one and the darkness intensifies my fear.

  ‘Give us a florin then.’ The nagger dangles the scarf in my face. He grins at the fellow sitting on the other side of him, who is similarly ragtag and sinister. ‘She won’t pay up,’ he sniggers. ‘What do you say, shall we make her?’

  Fortunately for me, his neighbour chooses that moment to vomit over the railing of the coach. By the time the ensuing commotion has settled, there are dull spots of light visible ahead. The presence of an inn must not please my tormenter at all, because he seizes his chance, as soon as the Demon slows, to make a hurried departure. In fact he scuttles with such haste on to the packets piled in the boot and thence to the road that he leaves behind the scarf. And now it is mine.

  I wrap myself in the scarf’s soft velvet. What a boon it is in this sharp night air. And its blackness offers a fleeting sensation of invisibility. Nevertheless, I eye with anxiety the arrival of a new passenger. He is a well-upholstered individual carrying a pannier – the coach sagged quite significantly as he came aboard – but as he settles among us with a genial expression on his big face, my tension slightly eases. The pannier contains a brace of leverets, he announces. They have hung for twentyfour hours and he does not expect them to raise a stink. The woman with the child looks up and observes that there is nothing worse than a green leveret. She ducks her head suddenly as if regretting her remark and presses her lips to the forehead of the sleeping toddler in a flutter of kisses that seem to have the effect of reassuring herself as much as the child.

  She is not alone in her need of comfort. My own longing for solace is so grievous, I have begun to pour out my woes to a phantom auditor. To you.

  *

  The horses that have been put on at our last change are wretchedly used up – an old piebald with swollen hind legs and a couple of nags that can scarcely stand, with bald patches on their coats where the harness has rubbed – yet somehow we lurch on, hour after hour in the black night, occasionally shifting our haunches on the hard roof. I continue faint and cold and worrying at things that are beyond my understanding. Why, for instance, am I dressed in my good gown and petticoat? For I have suddenly recognised them as such – is not the gown my best blue lustring satin and the petticoat the peach taffeta that Mrs Waterland gave me to wear in London? I have stared a hole in my petticoat this past hour, but I cannot bring to mind in any way the occasion that caused me to put on this attire.

  This coach is fiendishly uncomfortable and yet I am so tired I almost dozed off just now despite the cold mist and the jouncing about. But I forced myself awake. I should not like to lose my grip on this brass rail and crash overboard. On my journey down to London with Eliza, the driver set off so precipitously from one of the inns – I think it was the Cock in Stoney Stratford – that a woman fell from the roof of the coach. I remember glimpsing a cinnamon petticoat spilled on the cobbles. There ensued an altercation between the coachman and the woman’s husband, the coachman shouting that it was not his fault the passenger had not secured herself, and since she was not dead he had nothing to answer and must get on. The other outsiders threw down the couple’s luggage and a bundle, which turned out to be a small child. With a crack of the lash and a hi-ho, we set off, abandoning the injured family in the yard.

  I have learned my lesson in that regard. Here I cling securely to my perch, not daring to get down even to stretch my legs between stages. In any case, now that we are in full night, there are watchmen stationed at the yards of the inns. They are well rewarded, I have read, for apprehending suspects of felonies. And so I imprison myself on the roof of the Demon, afraid most of the time even to catch the eye of my fellow passengers. Above, black clouds sail across a black sky. Below, the wheels thunder.

  To whom do I make these observations?

  It is to you: my mysterious, nameless mother.

  Of course it is you to whom my story is addressed. It is you whom I desire to convince of my truthfulness.

  I have nothing at all of you save for the knowledge that you gave birth to me. But this stark fact, that I am connected to you by an unbreakable bond of blood, is the only prop I have in my hour of need. How strange and rare and potent those words: my mother. The thought of you at this bleakest of times makes my soul feel less forsaken, even though you are dead.

  Because I am sure you must be dead – you are, aren’t you?

  Well, I will not let that be an obstacle. You seem very real to me now. Often unseeable things seem real to me. I have always been prey to torrents of sense impressions. It is as though none of my doors is ever quite closed. Is that a tendency I inherited from you? Perhaps you might have thought, too, as I do, that there is more to the world than meets the eye. I will even go so far as to say that the human mind might have a capacity for communication that has not yet been entirely revealed to us. That possibility excites me. It brings me to wonder if you could even actually hear me now or read my thoughts, in a manner of speaking, from some other plane of existence.

  Well. You see I go too far with these notions. I will admit that I am fanciful.

  It is such a comfort to talk to you.

  I beseech you with all my heart to listen to me – for if not you, who else?

  The Cursing Stones, Connemara

  April, 1766

  A soft day it was today, wasn’t it, with the sun shining in and out behind the rain and a little gathering of clouds late in the afternoon. I waited until twilight came on and then my two feet brought me to the place of the stones. I suppose, Nora, you might have seen me from your high perch, going about my mission.

  Few things can be more terrible than the words ‘The devil bless you’, but say them I did as I stood before the cursing stones. I made nine circuits around them, walking against the direction of the sun. At the end of each circuit I called out, ‘Your souls be damned for what you have done!’ I felt myself tremble in the core of my body and a blast of wind arrived that made me wonder if someone from the other side had come to see what I was up to. But they would have known I had a right to be there. I told the wind to go back and so it went.

  Each stone I petted like the head of a darling babe and then I whispered in its ear the penalty that must be paid by those people. Hard though it was, I turned the stones leftwards. Lookit, those stones there are not much larger than a child’s ball but it is a business to move them. They make you work at it. There is a reluctance, Nora, on their part. But if it were easy the curse would not be worth a tinker’s dam.

  As I wrenched the last stone in the direction of the devil, didn’t it seem to me that it let out a groan – but whether of horror or of sorrow I could not say. But I will tell you that it frightened me to hear that cry. Impossible it was to know if the stone was in sympathy with my loss or if it lamented being brought to such vindictive work.

  Night Coach to Reading, Berkshire

  April, 1766

  We have arrived at the Saracen’s Head, a few furlongs, I am told, out of Slough. As we passed beneath the inn’s swinging sign, I caught a glimpse of a forbidding image painted on its boards, an Arab whose turban was pinned with a sickle moon, before the sign knocked off the leveret-keeper’s hat. The rest of us were obliged to duck before we turned into the yard to avoid a braining. Peeping over the rail, I see no sign of a burly overcoated watchman with his lantern. I am thankful to note that the further we travel from London, the less prevalent are these apprehenders, but I do not
come into the yard of an inn without flinching.

  Two lads have run out from the dark tavern to cheer our change with a tray of cold sausages and a bucket of spirits. I sacrifice one of the pennies in my moneybag in order to purchase a cup of gin. I hope that it will help to soften the bolus of anxieties that is jammed in my chest, but I have swallowed only a mouthful of it when someone jogs my arm and the gin spills in my lap. A youth begs my pardon. Where has he come from? I don’t remember his climbing on board at the last stage. He seems to feel the heat of my stare, because he turns up his collar, pulls down his hat and pretends to fall into a doze.

  As I am about to throw down my cup to the lad in the yard, my line of sight is drawn to two men some yards behind him, who appear on horseback from under the covered entranceway. Fearfully I shrink down on the roof and draw my scarf over my head. The men dismount and turn their pale faces towards the coach and it seems to me that they are watching the two or three disembarking passengers. Then the men lead their horses to the water trough on the perimeter of the yard. Is it possible for me to say at this distance that one of them is similar in build to the footman who pursued me in London?

  But if he were the footman, he would have had me brought from the coach at this pause. Or do they mean not to have me arrested at all, but to take me off at a lonely spot on the dark road and, and …? You see how I go spinning into a helix of conjecture and consequence that brings the sweat to my armpits and a lurch to my heart, while forgetting that this is entirely my own speculation.