Clovis drags Rafe out and through the front garden to the pathway where two people stand waiting outside the carriage. Constance and Verity follow, but stop short at the garden when they see that the Fowler servants are the picture of health, appearing as the exact same young people they were almost ten years ago. Distracted for a moment by this surprise, Rafe’s crying shocks them back to their last sight of him.
Constance runs to the carriage and Rafe breaks free.
‘Auntie Connie!’
Before he reaches her, Clovis snatches him back by the tail of his black coat.
‘Remember, Rafe. Remember everything,’ Constance calls out.
He nods to her and places his hand on his chest where under his white shirt he has hidden his chain.
The driver is anxious to depart and heads off with a crack of his whip. The horses lurch forward leaving their piles in the street.
Constance is unaware how long she stands in the cold before Rachael and Nancy come out with her cloak and gently place it on her shoulders. The lavender cashmere skims the sodden ground. Nancy and Rachael would not in usual circumstances dare touch their employer, but every rule has exceptions. The young women hold her firmly as they lead her back inside Lawless House. Constance roams from room to room where all the preparations for the feast day mock her. She cannot find her sister and has no voice to call out to her.
An awful sound emanates from the Tower Room. Constance finds Verity cowering on the floor, garbling some sort of indecipherable prayer in a voice that shrieks like a banshee. With no wish for the maids to see her sister so contorted, Constance begins the work of prising Verity away from the curve of the wall. It is a long, painstaking task for Verity does not want to be moved. Her arms flail and she stubbornly makes her legs heavy. Wisps of Constance’s hair fly out from their pins and her full skirts are mangled in the effort as she drags her sister to Rafe’s bed. Heaving her onto the mattress aggravates her sister’s chanting and screeching. Constance can stand it no longer. She slaps her once into a desperate silence.
The day is done. They sit in the boy’s room in darkness.
‘I will offer her money,’ Constance whispers, as the wind blows branches against the window. ‘She has a weakness for it. We will buy three visits a week. No, perhaps one, one visit a week, to begin.’
Verity moans.
‘We shall go to Limehouse tomorrow,’ Constance continues. ‘We will deliver more of his belongings. Clothes and things. What about that, sister?’
Verity does not respond. They sit in silence.
It is past the maids’ time. They should be gone for the evening but Constance hears their footfall downstairs. With whatever they are occupied, their kindness knots her throat.
The night grows darker still, the Tower Room, frigid.
Verity stirs at last. Constance hears her open her dry mouth.
‘She has not the slightest bit of tenderness towards him. No tenderness, Constance. He will have no love in Limehouse.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
On the busy Commercial Road, Nora Mockett dreams of the shops of Regent Street and their large plate-glass windows that can be illuminated by gaseliers all evening long. She imagines sliding the lights down to her chosen product, shining light directly on it. What joy.
The door of Mockett’s shop opens and her lovely daydream disintegrates. With her metal nib poised mid-air, she cannot believe her eyes and actually blinks, in spite of herself. It is not possible …
Clovis Fowler stands before her – completely unchanged. How can it be? Dumbfounded, Nora simply stares at the radiant woman. She cannot tear her eyes away, even while she comprehends that Mrs Fowler is relishing every second of her stupefied gawking.
Clovis tilts her head an inch or two.
‘Mrs Mockett?’
‘Mrs Fowler,’ Nora manages.
Nora is further astounded when from behind Clovis’s enormous skirts the servant girl, she cannot remember her name, steps into view. She, too, is unchanged.
‘I am here on business with Mr Mockett.’
‘Indeed.’ Nora gathers strength in spite of her light-headedness. ‘And is he aware of your … return?’
‘No, but I had hoped I would not need an appointment to see an old friend at his place of business.’
Nora might be mistaken, but she senses a proprietorial tone in Mrs Fowler’s voice and she is more than a bit uneasy about it. She must find her footing again.
‘Mr Mockett is currently on a house call. I don’t expect him until after the lunch hour.’
‘Tell him I will return tomorrow, won’t you?’
‘Of course. I trust you found your home to your satisfaction?’
‘Indeed. The attention to the boy’s room is particularly noticeable.’
‘And is your son home with you now?’
‘He is. Perhaps I will let you meet him when I return.’ She turns to leave and pauses. With her back to Nora, ‘He is a handsome young thing.’
‘The reason I enquired about your house …’
‘You were paid well to look after it,’ Clovis clips. She loses patience with this woman.
‘After you were taken away, your neighbours pelted the windows with rotten fruit and vegetables,’ Nora continues. ‘They smashed eggs against your front door. The knocker was torn off and auctioned to the highest bidder at the Black Horse. We bought another to replace it. Then we set a couple of boys on watch at the house until the revellers grew bored.’
‘Who won the knocker?’ Clovis asks.
‘I do not know him.’
‘You will be reimbursed. And then I wish to hear no more of your good deeds.’
‘My word. Prison doesn’t half strip you of your manners.’
The door slams.
Later that evening, while Owen works late to fill last-minute orders, Nora sits at her dressing table and pours three fingers of whisky. She opens her folded vanity mirror and sets it on the table. Positioning the three bevelled mirrors so that she may catch all angles of her face, she turns the lamp up a notch.
‘Be brave,’ she whispers.
The evidence stares back at her. The morning bloat takes a larger portion of the day to diminish, so that only now, late in the evening does it sink to wherever bloat goes. The beginning of a jowl disturbs her more than her crinkling smile. Puffed skin hangs above her eyelids. She positions one of the end mirrors to catch her profile. It is her first sight of a developing second chin. She closes her eyes. Until this day she had always considered that she was ageing well.
Her hands with their veins visibly pulsing under thin skin slide her dressing gown off her shoulders. They stroke the tiny crevices between her breasts. Nine years have done this to her. And nine years have not laid even a finger on Clovis Fowler, or her poor wispy slave.
Something stirs in the deepest part of her, from where all of her fears rise, from where all her sorrows are stored. She has not been – what? – strong enough, clever enough – to admit it. Even when he is overtaken with the terrifying long deep slumber and she waits for him to wake, she is so relieved when he does that she cannot bear to question the mystery. It is grotesque and too horrific to imagine.
Owen still has a full head of hair unlike most his age. Granted, it is bristly, but it is there, thick and plentiful, absent of the slightest grey. She glances at her mirror again. She has been experimenting with hair dye to hide her own grey strands that multiply daily. Whatever does this mean? Fear grabs her. He comes up the stairs now. She folds the mirror, turns the lamp down a notch and climbs into bed.
‘Owen, do take your clothes off, I want you naked.’
‘You only have to ask once.’ He throbs at her suggestion.
When he is in bed, she throws the bedding off him and raises the lamp.
‘I want to look at you.’
It is the only occasion in their marriage when Nora begins a night’s lovemaking with dishonesty. She strokes him with one hand, the other holds a lamp while she conducts her surv
ey. He is amused and flattered that her eyes appear to travel lustily down his body. It takes only a few minutes to discover what she needs to know. Now that she seeks it, it stares her in the face so blatantly, so obviously. He has not aged at all these last few years. She kisses his face, noting only two slim wrinkles resting near the corners of his eyes and nowhere else. He is fifty-four for God’s sake!
There is an urgency in the way she takes him tonight. With her hands and her mouth, she does everything she can think of to him without allowing him that sweet release, and when he is almost in agony she finally places him in her. She changes positions to surprise him so that he holds on longer than he ever has before.
Nora Mockett abandons all her fear for one blessed moment until she is shuddering, and she screams out into the wicked, wicked night.
It took a year of diligence. A year of cajoling, planning, and explaining to Owen Mockett and the storm-faced boy how important it was to conduct tests. To warm the ten-year-old to the inevitable, Clovis mimicked family with Rafe. Once more she called upon her time in north Iceland, when her aunt’s large family sat by the fire and pots hung from chains full of moss porridge and meat. When their vigorous storytelling set against the blasted, howling wind whittled away at the bleak sunless hours. Her interpretation of that setting reborn in east London was startlingly diminished when it became apparent that the only storytelling talent she possessed was that of lying. Surprisingly however, Finn, somewhat shyly at first, filled the boy’s imagination with tales of his former seafaring life, and the summer of his astronomy-filled nights in Iceland. And once, upon the turn of the autumn into winter, the boy smiled at Finn’s account of waking to the tongue of a sheep licking at his face.
In the meantime, Clovis filled Owen Mockett’s thoughts with glory. Seduced by the possible results of replicating Rafe’s magical essence, which included acknowledgement from royalty and making scientific history, he braced himself for the first day of experiments with those riches in mind.
So it was, that late at night while Nora Mockett slept upstairs, the first session began in the back room of the apothecary. It was the taking of skin that hurt most. Rafe shrank from the lancet. Mockett looked at Clovis and questioned her with his raised brow: Is this necessary? Her answer was given when she held the boy down.
CHAPTER FORTY
‘I cannot find her anywhere. She is not at the market, nor on Park Street. The stanhope is here. The servants have not seen hide or hair of her. Where could she be?’
Constance paces in front of Percy, who has come directly from Holborn.
‘She is always home before dark.’ She realizes she repeats herself. ‘She could have fallen into one of the train pits. Oh the damnable railways! They ruin us! Or, she has been accosted. Oh Percy, what if those awful foreign men have her? For God’s sake. What shall we do?’
‘Constance, calm yourself,’ Percy entreats her. ‘I will send for a constable immediately.’
‘I have done it. God Almighty, Percy. Do you think me an idiot?’
‘Of course not. Perhaps she is at St Mary’s.’
‘It was the first place I sent Thomas. It is that cruel woman who has twisted the knife. I offered her money and I could not believe it when she refused. She would not bend. We have been to Limehouse many times to see him. How humiliating it was, too. To stand on the street and be refused entry! She sent her husband out to tell us it was no good. We could not see Rafe, not even for a moment.’
‘I am sorry. I am so sorry, dear Constance.’
‘Weeks ago, I forget how many, he stood at the window crying. Crying, Percy! He revealed a world of unhappiness on his face in just those few moments. Then she pulled him away and it was our last glimpse of our poor boy.’
‘You must keep trying. Persistence in all things, Constance.’
The drawing room is in disarray. Cushions are piled in one corner of the sofa; a few tumble to the floor. A tea tray with remnants of late night crumbs clutters the occasional table. The fireplace needs scrubbing.
‘I have not let the maids in here since last week when we returned from Limehouse. It was a distressing journey home.’
‘Do you think Verity is in Limehouse?’
‘Well, Percy, I shall tell you now. The Fowlers are no longer in Limehouse.’
‘What? Where are they?’
‘We do not know. We have asked everyone in the neighbourhood. We have gone from door to door, from business to business, and they have disappeared like a night mist. The house sits empty. They owe no debts to anyone in Limehouse and they have not been turned out. They have stolen away with the boy.’
‘I know a few men who will make enquiries. We will find them.’
‘On that terrible day when our husbands and our sons … when they died, I swore I would never let anyone I love slip from my grasp ever again. Look at me now, Percy. Rafe and Verity, both are gone.’
Verity had sneaked away from Lawless House earlier in the afternoon when Constance took her daily walk in Regent’s Park. The clashing of china and the sounds of lunch being cleared away were her cue that now is the time to steal away without observation.
Her mourning dress, the same one she wore after her father’s death, folds around her limbs so lightly. Compared to the current stiff and heavy petticoats it feels as if it is made of a few raven’s feathers.
She strides up Park Street to the high street where the shopkeepers toss her a lean glance. The street never lacks a mourning ensemble and they pay scant attention to a veiled woman. Not so when she enters the Mother Black Cap on the high street. Heads turn and a path clears. Verity seeks the publican. She lifts her veil, and nudging her dark spectacles down her nose a bit, states that she is in need of a short stage, and asks at what time may she rely upon it.
‘There ain’t none reliable, madam, but one should stop soon.’
‘As I thought,’ she replies. ‘Whisky.’
‘Yes, madam. Right away, madam.’
She tastes the whisky and almost spits it out. Something is wrong with it. It burns her tongue and has lost its sweetness. She verges on purchasing another when she is told the short stage has arrived.
It has a gloomy sturdiness, older, smaller and less comfortable than a stagecoach. For two hours it rattles and rumbles, stops short, stops long and rolls. Four miles seem an eternity as the coachman commands it to unburden its chassis of passengers, and groan with new ones. The streets pass by but she has no interest in the vast swathes of the city unfolding in the approaching evening. At Fleet Street she grasps the leather strap and alights.
‘Do I wait for you on my return trip?’ the coachman asks.
‘What?’ Her attention is elsewhere. ‘No, no thank you.’
Fleet Street abides its law of mayhem and frenzy with scuttling pedestrians and horse-drawn traffic at their peak. A solitary figure stands perfectly still in the lively and bustling entrance to Temple Bar; beckoned by the lavender girl with a few bunches, she empties her coin purse into the girl’s basket.
‘Cor! Thank you, mum.’ She attempts a curtsy.
When Verity enters Temple Gardens the wind whips up, rustling the trees, shifting the gritty dirt. Stacks of law books dwarf the shadows of men in chambers. Young clerks scratch across the pages.
Verity has not visited the Mulberries since that day.
It was the empty house on Three Colt Street that shut her down. Hopeless and angry, she felt mechanically unable to keep going. She always knew the possibility existed, that Rafe would be taken from her and Constance, and now she is faced with the truth, that she never believed anything other than what she wished to believe.
Hunger did not ghost her when she tried starving herself to a slow death. Nor did weakness or pain from lack of nourishment. It is as it should be. Her failure brought her here, the place where sorrow first became her companion.
The black water is wild and forceful in its flow this evening. She waits for the river traffic to lighten at Temple Stairs, inching eve
r closer to the edge of the steps.
She marks the high tide and how the Thames spits angrily at her, spraying her face and sloshing her boots. Slowly, the water fades from her vision and is replaced with a spinning zoetrope of images. There is her son. She asks God’s forgiveness, for she finds it difficult to recall the details of his face. Her husband is beside him, holding his hand. Then comes her exquisite mother who glows with life and reaches out to her.
The zoetrope disappears and the faces of those she loves shine up at her from the jet-coloured water. They are the faces of a family, her family, and all that ever mattered to her in the world.
With her veil and dark glasses still in place, Verity leans forward with her arms spread wide. She thinks of herself as an offering, like the tall, wooden cross the priest offers the river each year in the Blessing of the River ceremony. Her weight slowly transfers and she leaps.
Filth and sewage fill her nostrils. The roaring voice of the Thames muffles the cries of witnesses. The shock of the cold and the struggle to breathe does not frighten her. She welcomes the blackness as she sinks and the water pushes her north.
But what is this? The glow of the gas lamps flickers into her view. Her body floats to the surface as the currents throw her to the bank and deposit her shivering and as dirty as the Thames itself. Crawling back into the water, cursing the evil that would rob her of an instant death, she flings herself in again until she is carried along another mighty current. Again she goes under; deeply and forcefully it carries her down, down – and then again she floats up, up and is thrown back to the shore. Impossible, she thinks as she drags her limp body to its knees. Her veil and spectacles have been washed away and her long, silvery-white hair hangs wet down her back. Sediment clings to her drenched clothing.
Verity wipes muck from her face. What agony is this? She cannot still be alive.
Dazed and shivering, still kneeling, she turns to fix her view on something, anything recognizable. Pagoda-like piers. Winding stairs. A river busy with small steamers and their lamps glaring through an approaching fog. Human and boat traffic of the Thames. And she is still here. Utterly, shockingly, impossibly, still here. She crosses herself again and again.
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