by Rosie Thomas
Afterwards Nancy found a quiet moment in a corner of the kitchen to take her younger brother aside.
‘I’m so glad Bella and Harry are here,’ she said.
Harry was deep in conversation with the two Crabbe boys. They were lively in the warmth of his attention.
‘I know. Bella makes everything possible for me. She is magnificent, isn’t she? And Harry is a good fellow.’
‘Arthur, listen to me. Why don’t you and Bella just run off and get married? You love each other, you’ll make each other happy, so why waste any more time?’
‘You know why we can’t, Nancy. The bloody inheritance. Parental approval and all that rot.’
She seized his arms. They were as solid as teak.
‘What does Harry think? Does he care about your pedi-gree?’
Bella’s brother wasn’t imaginative, or unconventional by as much as a hair’s breadth, but Nancy instinctively knew that his opinions were to be relied upon.
‘Ah, I’m pretty sure Harry would give us his blessing. We went through a lot together and he’d say I’m a decent enough chap even though we’re only theatre people.’
‘So, does the damned money matter? Couldn’t the two of you just live on your army pay, in some ordinary little house, have some children and grow old together? The Boltons should be grateful to have you to father their grandsons anyway. There isn’t a man in the world braver or more decent than you.’
His handsome face fell. ‘I don’t know about that. I do know I’d gladly live in a hut and eat nothing but potatoes if that’s what it would take, but I don’t want Bella to have to do the same. What is all this, Nancy?’
It was wanting to see her brother happy. Lion wasn’t here today – he was still at Stadling because old Mr Stone was unwell. He had written her a thoughtful letter as soon as he heard about Eliza, and she had to acknowledge to herself that she didn’t mind all that much about him not being present. Lion didn’t have a sombre dimension, at least as far as she was concerned. Their existence together was only concerned with pleasure.
‘I met a woman. She came to a seance, you know,’ she hastily added to Arthur. ‘She is rich, titled, and married to a good man who cares for her.’
What had Gil said at the Ritz?
I would do anything, anything at all, to make Celia feel happier.
How would it be, she wondered, to have a man say the same about her? Arthur had Bella, and Jinny had Ann. Devil had loved Eliza in a way their children couldn’t even fathom and the loss of her was turning him before their eyes into an old man. If she was not to experience it for herself, it seemed more important than anything in the world that Arthur shouldn’t miss the chance of happiness.
‘This woman is like Ma. Addicted to morphine.’
Arthur listened, leaning against the sink with his arms folded.
‘Poor creature,’ he said at the end. ‘I am sorry for her, but what’s your point?’
The point was about money and captivity, the divide that existed between Arthur and herself and people like the Boltons and the Stones, and the troubling dimensions of privilege, but she didn’t try to explain how Celia loomed in her mind as the dark obverse of Bella’s light.
Nancy only begged him, ‘Please, Arthur. Marry her as soon as you can, won’t you? Don’t let anything stand in your way, least of all a name and an inheritance.’
It was late in the evening before the house finally emptied.
Jinny and Ann and Lizzie between them had left everything clean and tidy so there was no work to do. The Boltons had gone, and Nancy noted how tenderly Bella said goodbye to Arthur. Jake was the last to leave. Devil was drunk and he stumbled as Arthur took him upstairs and saw him to bed. Arthur would share the attic bedroom with Cornelius, as they had done when they were boys, before returning to his regiment in the morning.
Nancy knew she would not sleep.
As soon as the house lay dark and silent she let herself out into the garden to watch icy stars pricking the patches of sky between black roofs and chimneys. She listened and waited, and after a moment a solid waft of soot-impregnated earth, dense with cats and crumbling city bricks, rose into her mouth and nose.
She breathed in the sour waft, allowing the Uncanny to creep up on her. She did not dare even to formulate the thought, but perhaps Eliza was near. She bent her head, studying the shape of her shoes against the cinder path, and caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. The London reek was strong enough to make her gag, ancient layers of shards and dirt compounded with manure and smoke and rotted vegetable peelings, pressing like a mask against her face.
The soaking girl was standing beside a vegetable bed. Her hair streamed over her shoulders and her eyes were dark holes in her white face. Nancy heard the drips from her clothing pattering on the earth.
‘What do you want?’
There was no answer. The apparition never spoke. This time the little thing sadly raised her arm and pointed towards the house. The dripping grew louder.
Nancy looked to see what she was indicating. There was a gust of wind, and the clothes prop supporting the washing line jerked free and fell sideways.
The house burst into a sheet of flames.
Within seconds the kitchen was roaring like a furnace and ravenous tongues of fire flickered out of the attic windows, painting the sky with a lurid crimson wash. Plumes of sparks shot upwards. Nancy began to run, reaching out with her hands until the furious heat singed her hair and the palms of her hands. This was a foreshadowing of something that had not yet come about. She must save whoever was in the heart of the fire.
The soaking girl stood aside as she stumbled past her. Now Nancy could barely move. Her feet seemed to be sucked down by heavy mud, hot over her ankles. She struggled for a forward step and to draw a scorching breath into her lungs.
She must get inside, into the fire. Someone she loved was burning, helpless, burning, burning.
A black figure was outlined against the blaze.
For long seconds it seemed to hang motionless and then it broke free and barrelled towards her, surrounded by a corolla of flame. The figure spun in an agonised circle before it crumpled and collapsed in a flaming heap.
A few steps nearer. Now close enough to smell the charred reek of skin and hair.
It took all her strength, another step. Fall to her knees beside the burning body.
Reach out, trembling fingers.
Not burning any longer, just a dark huddled shape. Damp, solid, not hot at all. A sob caught in Nancy’s mouth as she ran her hands over it. It wasn’t a human body, not a living thing, merely a bundle of sacks.
She raised her head.
The Uncanny receded, leaving her breathless. The sockets of her eyes were painted with flames, her lungs and throat were choked with soot, but the house wasn’t on fire. The dark windows reflected only the night sky, the back door stood open on a slice of deeper blackness.
Slowly, painfully, Nancy got to her feet.
She wasn’t sure now if she had glimpsed what had been, or what was still to come.
She was terrified of fire, and she hadn’t even known it until this moment.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Late one evening in the icy depths of February, Nancy came back from the theatre to Waterloo Street and found a letter waiting for her. The Palmyra was an engine that had to be kept ticking over; there was no question that either she or her father had been able to take any time off after Eliza’s death. She studied the envelope for a moment in the dim light of the hallway before carrying it through to the kitchen.
The rest of the house was already in darkness. Nancy had the electricity of performance jerking in her as well as a headache that clamped her temples. She settled by the warm ashes of the fire, telling herself that she would put it out properly before she went up to bed.
She hadn’t yet given up her whitewashed room in Covent Garden, but she would soon have to. Cornelius tried to insist that he and Devil could manage the house on t
heir own but it was clear that they could do no such thing. Devil had never been domestically inclined. Without Eliza at its centre the house grew cold and dismal, the haphazard cooking stopped and Cornelius began to withdraw into silence. If she lived at home again, Nancy thought, she could at least be company for her brother and do her share of the housework. It would mean a big change in the freewheeling way she and Lion coexisted. Devil was broadminded enough not to ask questions if she were sometimes absent overnight, but there would be no question of Lion sleeping at Waterloo Street.
Nancy was still Lion’s girl, yet an antiphonal vagueness about their future had developed between them. She thought too often about Gil, although she tried to contain her longing for him.
She raked the embers in the range to stir up a flame before noticing the jam jar on the kitchen table. Nancy smiled to see it. It held an arrangement of the last frosted leaves and shoots from the feverfew bush in the garden, placed next to a scribbled note that simply read ‘Omadood, darling’. As predicted, Jinny had lost her job. As a stopgap she was working as a van driver for Shaw’s Exotics, but this only occupied her mornings. She had taking to coming over and spending the empty afternoons with Cornelius in the garden.
Nancy picked off the leaves one by one and placed them on her tongue. She bit and then chewed, letting the rankness flood her mouth. Jinny knew that feverfew calmed her friend’s headaches.
She sat down in her father’s old chair and used his penknife to slit open the envelope. The card inside it was square and heavy, cream-coloured and embossed with a business address she didn’t recognise. The handwriting in black ink was fluent and decisive.
Gil Maitland wrote that he had seen the announcement of her mother’s death in The Times – once he had recovered himself a little, Devil had insisted on placing it – and he sent his deepest sympathy. He added that he very much hoped Nancy would agree to see him again.
He thought of her constantly, he said. He signed it ‘GM’.
She let her head fall back. The letter contained barely a hundred words, but the few lines set up a storm of conflicting emotions. She wanted to meet Gil more than she had ever wanted anything, and to know that he felt something similar only intensified the urgency.
Wheedling half-reasons for allowing herself to accept Gil’s invitation circled inside her head. What about Celia? A sick woman, with an illness that was so close to Nancy that it felt almost like her own. Perhaps she could after all do something to help her, where she had not been alert enough to do it for Eliza? The intention seeded itself and sprang up, fertilised by her seething desire to see Gil.
Would it be so very wrong?
Lion only ever did what he wanted to do, and the routines of her own life seemed suddenly lonely as well as hard. Nancy rarely felt sorry for herself, but as she sat there by the fire and remembered the glorious dinner at the Ritz she was assailed by a longing for ease and security. Just for an evening – perhaps – it would be wonderful to let go of the Palmyra and her family’s needs and the shadow of the Uncanny, and do what she wanted.
Without giving herself time to consider further she found a sheet of paper in a drawer and wrote a reply. Yes, she said. She rummaged deeper for a stamp and an envelope and so as not to leave room for second thoughts in the morning she put her coat on once more and ran to the postbox in the next street.
When she came back, panting from the dash through the darkness, she raked the ashes in the range to make sure that not a single ember glowed.
Gil’s reply came by return. He suggested a time and a place for them to meet, and she agreed.
Piccadilly was crowded with well-dressed people hurrying to theatres and restaurants. A legless man with a chalked placard reading ‘Help Me’ leaned against a pillar and Nancy stopped in her tracks. Gil dropped a coin into his hand.
‘God bless you,’ the soldier muttered.
Without saying a word Gil took her arm and they passed into the web of streets to the north of the thoroughfare, reaching an alley that led in turn to a silent cul-de-sac. Gil rang the bell of an anonymous-looking house and they were admitted to a drawing room. Groups of well-dressed men and a handful of women sat talking in armchairs as a pianist played softly. It was a long way from the rowdy parties Nancy was used to frequenting with Lion.
‘What is this place?’
‘It’s called Fifteen. If I don’t want to stay at home I come here to play cards, or to talk or read. It is the antithesis of a Pall Mall club and nothing that takes place here goes beyond these four walls. What will you have to drink?’
‘I’d like a whisky.’
‘What an excellent woman you are.’
They sat side by side in an alcove at one side of the room. A decanter was brought on a silver tray and placed on the low table. Nancy curled her fingers round her glass.
‘Tell me a little about your mother? If that wouldn’t be too painful for you?’
Nancy began uncertainly.
‘I … didn’t know until almost the end, but Eliza was a morphine addict too. Pneumonia was the cause of death, although she was already so weak I think almost anything would have been too much for her to withstand.’
‘I am sorry you had to bear that, Nancy. It’s a rather cruel coincidence, don’t you think?’ After a moment he added, ‘Will you tell me some more? I wish I’d had a chance to meet her. She sounds remarkable.’
For almost the first time in her life Nancy began to talk without first considering what she was going to say.
‘Yes, she was remarkable but she was unlucky. My older brother’s birth was a difficult one.’
It was like opening her heart and letting the words and the pain flood out. She found herself talking and talking, about the burden of the Uncanny and about Cornelius and Arthur, Devil and the Palmyra and Feather and Jinny and the suffragists, and about Eliza – most of all about Eliza. Her mother was always inside her and it made her sadder to think that they had never been truthful with each other, not in the way she seemed able to be with this man who was a stranger.
Gil listened, taking it all in, drinking his whisky and sometimes asking a question.
‘I can’t describe to you how much I miss her,’ Nancy said at last. ‘Or how sorry I am for what didn’t happen between us, and should have done. And now never can happen.’
She was pleating the folds of her skirt and suddenly the smells of sea salt and sun-bleached wood swept over her. Gil reached out and very lightly stroked her hair.
‘I am afraid this is probably a very vulgar question. Couldn’t you use your gift to reach her? On the other side, isn’t that the phrase?’
Barely moving in case he withdrew his hand she whispered, ‘I am clairvoyant and precognisant, but I can’t control what reaches me. What does come through is often very dark. My voices don’t chat about happy times, and I never see buried treasure. It’s a pity, isn’t it? I sometimes hear words and phrases, but they are often iterations of what I already know or have heard elsewhere. I think I am only a mouthpiece. Those people I knew or cared for don’t speak to me. Or I don’t hear them.’ She raised her head. ‘I do hope you won’t use this information to destroy my stage career. I told you, I need the money.’
‘Nothing within these four walls.’
The salt-air smell faded.
She said, ‘This has been a rather one-sided conversation so far. Am I allowed to ask you an even more vulgar question?’
‘Go ahead.’
She thought for a moment. ‘Have I imagined that there is a connection between us? I don’t know how else to describe it.’
He lifted a strand of her hair. ‘No, Nancy. You haven’t imagined it.’
‘But we’re also separated, aren’t we? By Bruton Street, and the Bentley, and this.’ She gestured at the room. ‘I really mean by money, I suppose. I think of wealth like the ramparts of a fort, rearing up to the sky. Have you always been rich or did you earn it? Or marry it?’
He gave his rare laugh, genuinely amuse
d now. He had all the easiness the rich possessed, Nancy thought. It was only small people like herself and Arthur and Jinny Main who took note of its presence and absence.
‘I certainly didn’t marry it. Celia’s family, the de Laurys, can trace their history back to the Conquest but her father, the Earl, is in straitened circumstances these days. I inherited a new Victorian fortune, based on cotton manufacturing, as I told you that night in Fleet Street.’
He remembered their conversation even though it was four years ago.
‘I still have the handkerchief you gave me,’ she told him. It lay in the drawer of her bureau.
‘You don’t have chilblains any longer.’
They looked at each other. A moment crept by while the import of what was happening dawned on them both.
‘Celia and I were judged to be an appropriate match by both sides, which is the way such things happen. We aren’t very much alike. The Bentley is flashy because I chose it. The de Laurys owned the London house and they made it over to us on our marriage. The arrangement of it is much more Celia’s province than mine.’
‘She’s so young.’
Nancy meant to be the mistress of such an establishment.
He said quietly, ‘It’s what she was born to do.’
At some point this evening, Nancy understood, Gil Maitland and she had crossed an invisible line. She couldn’t work out precisely where it had been, but her breath became tight in her chest while her limbs felt loose as a puppet’s. It wasn’t the whisky. It was something much more dangerous because they stood on the same side now. Everyone and everything else – Lion, Celia, their families – was left on the far side.
She asked, ‘Why did you come backstage with Celia that first time?’
‘I’m ashamed to tell you. I thought that if I passed you some information you couldn’t otherwise know, between us we might be able to work out a convincing message from Richard. And if you delivered that message, because Celia believes in you she might think she really will meet him again. I know how much that would mean, and it might make her feel better. And therefore make my life a little easier. You wouldn’t countenance it, remember? I told you, I am ashamed.’