by Lyn Gardner
The unlined wooden coffin had been placed on the great dining table of Easingford Hall. The coffin maker stepped back to allow the new Lord of Easingford, Henry Edgar Easingford, to approach the open coffin. His eyes midnight dark, Lord Henry placed the tiny corpse of his nephew, Edward, into the coffin, next to the body of the child’s dead mother, Lily.
The baby was still tightly swaddled in the fine linen sheet that the midwife had wrapped him in before she’d handed him to his uncle. Henry had taken the crying child to his own chamber, and there, away from prying eyes, he’d gazed for a moment at the tiny butterfly birthmark on the back of his nephew’s neck that marked him out as an Easingford child. Then he had picked up a feather bolster and pressed it over the child’s face.
Now Lord Henry placed a blue ribbon and a small silver cup engraved with the family name and butterfly crest into the coffin. This burial might be hasty, but tradition dictated that no Easingford should be buried without a reminder that he or she was part of a great and noble family, rich enough to bury silver with their dead.
The coffin was made of elm, not the polished oak that the coffin maker knew it should be. Poor Lady Lily had been a great heiress in her own right, and her tiny baby son, Edward, would have been the new Lord Easingford had he lived. But a polished oak coffin took time to make and Lord Henry was in a hurry to bury his brother’s wife and newborn son.
The coffin maker, Joe, kept his head bowed respectfully, but he wondered what the baby’s father, Frederick Edward, the previous Lord Easingford and Henry’s identical twin brother, would have made of such indecent haste. But Frederick Easingford had been laid into the cold ground a mere six months previously after an accident while out riding with his brother.
Lord Henry claimed that the influenza epidemic sweeping the county meant the dead had to be buried quickly and their infection buried with them. Even now the horse and carriage stood harnessed on the curved drive in front of the remote house, ready to convey the coffin to the moorland church where the parson, Oliver Dorset Woldingham, was waiting to conduct the funeral service.
Lily had been Oliver’s rich cousin. Village gossip said that Oliver, who was poorer than the mice in his own church, had been in love with her.
Joe looked uneasily at his wife, Abigail, the village midwife. She brought children into the world; he helped people on their way out. But not these kinds of people. Not the gentry. Everything about it felt wrong. It was as if Lord Easingford wanted to wipe away all evidence of his sister-in-law and nephew as soon as he could. The corpses of mother and babe were barely cold.
The Hall was almost deserted: most of the servants had been dismissed over a week ago, with the influenza epidemic cited as the reason. Only the cook, the under-maid and a stable boy had been retained to care for Lily Easingford and her younger sister, Sarah Dorset. Sarah was an orphan of sixteen, who had come to live with Lily after the death of their father, Lord Dorset. When Lily’s husband died, Sarah had become Henry’s ward. Like Lily, she was reputed to have a great fortune of her own.
When she had first come to live at Easingford last year, Joe had spotted her out on the moor several times, dancing and running and jumping as if she were still a small child. Her voice had carried as sweetly as a curlew’s. Some in the village disapproved, considering her behaviour to be unladylike, but Joe didn’t. He liked to see a young girl as full of life as the moor itself. Recently he had stumbled across her weeping in a blaze of heather, and she had risen like a startled golden plover and fled, but not before he had seen a livid red mark on her cheek.
Everyone in the village knew that the doctor had called on her ladyship yesterday. Cook said he had shaken his head and said that unless the baby came quickly the mother would be dead of influenza before it could be born. Then the doctor had fallen sick and been too ill to attend either the dawn birth or the death that had followed before the milky sun was fully risen. It was now just lunchtime.
Abigail had been sent to tend her ladyship as she gave birth. She had been collected from the village by the stable boy in a cart after midnight, and they had trundled on the track across the moor under a moon of beaten silver. The labour was already far advanced, the mother sinking fast. Abigail knew she should have been called earlier.
The coffin maker could see from his wife’s stiff back and the way she bit her lip that she was unhappy. Unhappy and frightened. By the unseemly haste to bury the dead. By his lordship’s grim-set face. By the headstone that was already being carved by the stonemason to mark the passing of “Lady Lily Easingford and her stillborn son, Edward Frederick Dorset Easingford”. Most of all she was unhappy and frightened by the word “stillborn”.
“That bairn was alive, bonny and bawling, when I swaddled him,” she had insisted over and over to her husband, pacing restlessly as he had hammered the coffin together behind the stables. “There was nothing to be done for her ladyship. All the doctors in the land could not have saved her, but the babe breathed, I know he did. His lordship only had him a few minutes alone and that’s when the breath went out of him.”
The coffin maker put a finger to her lips. It did no good to make trouble. Not if they wanted to go on living in Easingford, the Yorkshire village where he had been born and generations had been born before him. Besides, the child was well and truly dead now. Babies did die. It was the way of the world.
Abigail knew that, more than most. She had given birth to five babies and not a single one had survived for more than a few days. Joe had made the five little coffins himself, and laid their tiny bodies inside, the last just a few days previously. All Abigail wanted was a child to look after and love but there would be no more babies. It was unfair, but the world cared nothing for fairness.
Joe watched Lord Henry as he looked into the coffin. His lordship’s face was composed in an aspect of sorrow, but his eyes – cold, dark and unwelcoming – said something else. With a jolt, the coffin maker realised that his lordship wasn’t unhappy that this mother and child were dead. He was pleased. Lord Henry couldn’t quite control the tiny smirk of triumph that played at the corners of his mouth, a smirk that said I’m head of the Easingford dynasty at last, lord of all I survey.
Joe shivered. Maybe Abigail was right when she said that the bairn had been born blooming and healthy. He lowered his head further in case Lord Easingford saw in his eyes what the coffin maker knew. Knowledge could be a dangerous thing. It could get you killed.
“It’s time,” said his lordship curtly. “Hammer the lid down. Then bring the coffin to the carriage. I’ll send the stable boy to help you lift it.”
The coffin maker slid the elm lid into place and began to nail it shut with the tack, tack, tack tattoo that marked every death. Lord Henry pressed a guinea into the coffin maker’s hand and strode away. The coffin maker and his wife both knew they were being paid to keep quiet. It was blood money.
The last nail was being tapped into the lid when they both heard something. The coffin maker turned silk-pale and dropped his hammer; Abigail put her hand to her mouth, a circle of surprise. There it was again – a sound no louder than the mew of a kitten. It was unmistakably coming from the coffin.
Joe started to tear at the coffin nails with the claw of the hammer, his fingers trembling. He peeled off the elm lid, and he and Abigail looked down into the coffin. The baby’s blue eyes stared back at them as if astonished. For a tiny moment it seemed as if the baby smiled at them. Abigail lifted the babe from the coffin and put him in the crook of her arm where he fitted perfectly. The baby snuffled against her, his breathing shallow but certain. Abigail adjusted the linen swaddling cloth, her fingers grazing one of the tiny, almost invisible butterflies stitched into each
corner of the sheet.
“We must tell his lordship,” Joe said, his voice hoarse with surprise and terror.
“No,” said Abigail quickly. “That’s the last thing we should do if we want this baby to live. We must take him, keep little Edward safe. Far away from here.”
“You would make us child snatchers,” her husband said quietly.
“We’ll be murderers else,” she replied, fixing him with her steely gaze until he was forced to look away.
“We’ll be denying him his birthright,” said Joe.
“We’ll be giving him his life. Do you think he would survive more than a few hours here unprotected?”
“We’ll have to leave Easingford. Leave our whole lives behind.”
“We’ll go to London. Disappear into the crowd.”
Time was running out. They could hear the stable boy’s heavy tread in the hall. Joe nodded at Abigail, who put the baby in her basket and left the room, heading below stairs to the kitchen where she could slip out of the back door. Joe reached into the coffin and stuffed the ribbon and tiny silver cup in his pocket.
“God and your ladyship forgive me,” he whispered. He quickly began hammering the lid back into place. “We’ll keep him safe. I promise.”
Joe and the stable boy hoisted the coffin. It was light, as if her ladyship’s bones were made of feathers. They carried it carefully to the door, out into the hall and through the vast stone doorway of Easingford Hall to the carriage.
When they’d left, the great dining room was as silent as an empty church. Then a girl crept from behind the thick damask curtains. She was dressed all in black, mourning for her sister. Her pale face was scoured with tears.
“Sarah! Sarah! We are ready for the church.” Lord Henry was calling her.
The girl’s eyes darkened with fear and her hands trembled. She slipped towards the door that led to the kitchen stairs, opened it quietly and vanished. A few minutes later she reappeared at the front of the house, her eyes downcast.
“There you are, girl. You have kept us all waiting. Get in the carriage and show some respect for your dead sister.”
Sarah’s eyes blazed; two peony spots blossomed on her cheeks. “When did you ever show her any respect, Henry?” she hissed.
His lordship seized her by the wrist and dragged her towards the leading carriage where Joe and the stable boy waited. Henry pushed her into the carriage and slammed the door shut, and then he walked around to the other side. The stable boy ran to open the door for him.
The window where Sarah sat was slightly open. Sarah looked directly at the coffin maker.
“You and your wife are good people,” she said. “The secret is safe with me. God protect you and my nephew, Edward.” She spoke so softly that nobody else could have heard.
Joe’s stomach lurched. The girl knew what he and Abigail had done. As soon as the carriage and the cart disappeared, he gathered his tools quickly and strode across the moor towards the village as fast as he could. Before the Reverend Oliver Dorset Woldingham had concluded the funeral service, Joe and Abigail had set off for London with the rightful Lord of Easingford sleeping peacefully in a basket, little dreaming of how lucky he was to be alive.
Rose Campion leaned out of the dormitory window on the top floor of Miss Pecksniff’s Academy for Young Ladies and gave the drainpipe a hard tug. It was safely secured to the wall. Rose’s hands still smarted from where Miss Pecksniff had brought down the ruler on her palms, delivering each blow with a gleam in her eye that suggested she was enjoying herself immensely and only regretted that she hadn’t given Rose a really good beating sooner.
Rose and Miss Pecksniff had been at war from the moment Rose had arrived at the Notting Hill school. Her mop of unruly conker-coloured hair, slate-dark eyes and unladylike rosy cheeks seemed to instantly annoy the head teacher. Her ink-blotched pinafore (she’d been trying to write a song for her music-hall act in the hansom cab on her way to the school) was the final straw. Miss Pecksniff had stared appalled as Rose, glimpsing the velvety-green lawn, gave a whoop of joy, leapt from the still-moving hansom, ran on to the grass and turned a cartwheel. Rose had never seen a flourishing patch of grass, let alone a lawn, in muddy Southwark. It was perfect for practising cartwheels.
“Come here at once!” said Miss Pecksniff, her voice like an angry wasp and her pale-blue eyes bulging in horrified astonishment. “Young ladies never turn cartwheels and they are never, in any circumstances, permitted to walk on the grass.”
“Why ever not?” asked Rose cheerily, genuinely interested.
“Because I say so!” snapped Miss Pecksniff.
Rose was surprised. Whenever she asked a question of her guardian, Thomas Campion, owner of Campion’s Palace of Varieties and Wonders, he always tried to answer it, even though recently he had said that Rose had more questions than he had answers for and the only solution was to send her to school.
Rose was clever enough to know that the war with Miss Pecksniff was one she could never win. She’d made a promise to Thomas that she would stay at school, as he wanted, for at least a year, and she never broke her promises. Well, only if it was really necessary.
Rose knew that Thomas was only trying to do his best for her. He’d been trying to do that every day since the summer’s morning almost thirteen years ago when he’d found her, just a tiny babe, wrapped in half a threadbare linen sheet by Campion’s stage door. Rose was always eager to hear the story. But Thomas found it hard to talk about; he’d lost his wife and infant twin daughters to the measles just weeks before.
Thomas had raised her as a daughter, taught her to read and write – both of which she picked up with astonishing ease – encouraged her to perform at Campion’s and given her an enduring love of Shakespeare. Thomas said the playwright was a genius and Rose agreed. Rose dreamed of one day starring at the Lyceum or the Haymarket, and dazzling theatregoers with her Rosalind from As You Like It or Viola from Twelfth Night.
She loved Thomas and Campion’s fiercely but she still liked to imagine that when she became the most famous actress on the London stage the mother who’d abandoned her would at last come and claim her as her own. She enjoyed visualising over and over in her head the tearful and deeply moving moment when they were finally reunited and her mother begged her forgiveness.
Thomas told her that if she was going to be a great actress she needed to see a bit of life. Thomas hoped that school would give Rose a glimpse of a different world from the rough and tumble of life at the music hall on the south side of the Thames. Campion’s was a well-known landmark situated down Hangman’s Alley on what some whispered to be an old plague pit. Everyone said it was haunted. Hardly a day went by without one of the ballet girls claiming to have glimpsed a stranger’s face behind hers in the dressing-room mirror or to have seen an apparition of a lady in grey staring down at her from the otherwise empty gallery.
Such claims made Rose scoff. She didn’t believe in ghosts. Ghosts were about death, and Rose was full of life. Although she looked like an angel – albeit an often slightly grubby one – she could be a right little devil who thought nothing of hitching up her skirts if it helped her run faster, or giving the Tanner Street boys a mouthful if she caught them trying to sneak into Campion’s without paying. Seeing how bright she was, Thomas wanted Rose to have thebenefit of a proper education; unfortunately, the hefty fees charged by Miss Pecksniff fooled him into thinking her establishment would provide one.
Rose knew that this other world, with its elocution and deportment lessons, and the gossipy young ladies who looked down their little snub noses at Rose, was not for her. She belonged at Campion’s. She rubbed her fingers that still bore the indentation of the sharp edge of Miss Pecksniff’s ruler and angrily remembered the head teacher’s words from that morning.
“That one,” Miss Pecksniff had snarled, bringing the ruler down as hard as she could, “is for always questioning my authority.” Miss Pecksniff’s exertions had made tendrils of hair escape from her
bun so it looked as if her thin, pinched face was surrounded by tiny dancing worms. Her pale-blue eyes were feverish. Thwack. Thwack. Rose shut her eyes but refused to flinch. Thwack. She bit the inside of her cheek. She would not be broken by Miss Pecksniff.
“That one is because you don’t belong here with decent, well-bred girls,” shouted Miss Pecksniff, her fury rising at Rose’s lack of tears, “and this one is because Thomas Campion does not pay his bills.”
Rose opened her eyes wide. She was shocked. If there was one thing that Thomas always did, it was pay his debts. It was a matter of honour.
“You’re lying,” shouted Rose, and to Miss Pecksniff’s astonishment she grabbed the ruler out of her hand and broke it clean in half. Miss Pecksniff shrieked loudly as other members of staff came rushing to her aid. The handyman, Jarvis, was a great burly man who grabbed Rose and pulled her arms behind her back, holding her wrists roughly.
“She’s like a wild animal!” cried Miss Pecksniff. “Lock her in the dormitory until I’ve decided what to do with her!”
Miss Pecksniff longed to expel Rose but she knew she couldn’t send the child home with her hands so red and raw from the beating. What she had told Rose was not entirely true: Thomas Campion had been very late paying the current term’s fees, but he had paid up, apologising profusely for the delay and even paying her interest on the money. Miss Pecksniff would decide what to do with Rose over luncheon.
Rose gave the drainpipe another tug, just to be sure, then she dropped her carpet bag out of the dormitory window. It fell on to the gravel below with a crunch. Rose held her breath, fearful that somebody would hear. But nobody came, so she hitched up her skirts and scrambled on to the window sill. Taking a deep breath, she swung herself out on to the drainpipe. Despite the pain in her hands, she clung to it like a monkey and began to climb carefully down. She reached the bottom without injury, apart from a ragged tear in her knickerbockers when they caught on a nail in the brickwork. She picked up her bag and turned towards the open gates at the end of the drive. She stomped viciously across the middle of the wet lawn, leaving a very visible trail of boot marks in the manicured grass. When she reached the road she set off at a run towards Southwark.