The River Sings

by Sandra Leigh Price

  DEDICATION

  To Little Jackie Winter

  &

  to my Noble & True.

  Both

  all that’s bright in the world.

  EPIGRAPH

  “Give the child into my hands, and I will do my best to bring you off. If you are saved, your child will be saved too; if you are lost, your child is still saved.”

  “It don’t signify to you with your brilliant lookout, but as to myself, my guiding-star always is, ‘Get hold of portable property’.”

  Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One: Patrin, 1819

  Two: Eglantine, 1825

  Three: Eglantine, 1825

  Four: Eglantine, 1825

  Five: Patrin, 1818

  Six: Patrin, 1818

  Seven: Patrin, 1818

  Eight: Eglantine, 1833

  Nine: Patrin, 1818

  Ten: Patrin, 1818

  Eleven: Patrin, 1819

  Twelve: Eglantine, 1833

  Thirteen: Patrin, 1819

  Fourteen: Patrin, 1819

  Fifteen: Eglantine, 1833

  Sixteen: Patrin, 1819

  Seventeen: Eglantine, 1833

  Eighteen: Patrin, 1819

  Nineteen: Patrin, 1819

  Twenty: Patrin, 1821

  Twenty-One: Eglantine, 1833

  Twenty-Two: Patrin, 1821

  Twenty-Three: Eglantine, 1838

  Twenty-Four: Patrin, 1821

  Twenty-Five: Eglantine, 1838

  Twenty-Six: Eglantine, 1838

  Twenty-Seven: Patrin, 1821

  Twenty-Eight: Eglantine, 1838

  Twenty-Nine: Patrin, 1821

  Thirty: Eglantine, 1838

  Thirty-One: Eglantine, 1838

  Thirty-Two: Eglantine, 1838

  Thirty-Three: Eglantine, 1838

  Thirty-Four: Eglantine, 1838

  Thirty-Five: Eglantine, 1838

  Thirty-Six: Eglantine, 1838

  Thirty-Seven: Eglantine, 1838

  Thirty-Eight: Eglantine, 1838

  A Note About the Book

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise for The Bird’s Child

  Copyright

  ONE

  Patrin, 1819

  When my waters broke a whole river poured out of me and splashed into the dirt at the foot of the vardo. My mother let out a cry. Amberline rose to his feet, the horse brasses he’d been polishing fell to the ground. He stood palms outward, barehanded, his frightened face staring at me.

  “Quick now,” my mother said and took the short knife from her waistband and slit the knot that bound me to my apron.

  “Quick, what?” Amberline said and I saw the panic in him, fumbling for his knife and unsure what to do with it. The sun hit it, slashing a blinding light across my eyes, and I felt the fist squeeze inside my womb, the fierce desire of my baby to be born.

  “And you call yourself a Rom,” my mother said to Amberline, disgusted. She tugged at the red satin ribbon that he had given me to hold back my hair and threw it at him. It fell to the ground at his feet. My hair closed around my face like a curtain.

  My mother led me away from the camp just as my father rounded the rise of the nearest field. He carried a few rabbits by their swinging ears, snared for our dinner, and came running as he saw me in my mother’s arms, though I was unclean.

  Together they steered me towards the riverbank, the willow fronds rippling aside for the three of us, my father kissing me on the forehead before he left us, the leaves closing in behind him. On my boots were the drops of water of my own making; I had leaked all the way to the river, my baby was turning the tide within me.

  My mother lowered me to the ground and pulled the boots from my feet and the skirt from my waist, and I felt the cool air from the waterside brush up against my bare legs. The smell of the meadowsweet came from beneath me where I’d crushed it, the iron-flood of my blood wend out of me like a road for my child’s tiny feet to follow.

  The sun rose higher in the sky, gold striped with the willow’s green. With each crest of pain my sight turned pale, the whole world drained of colour, my spirit coiling up inside me, trying to make the largest distance possible between the pain and itself; but I couldn’t hide from it, it pulled at all my senses, demanded my attention, stole my breath, until I was the pain itself. My mother bent down between my legs and inspected me then cursed under her breath. How long had I been labouring? I was outside the limits of time, pain was my minutes and hours, my before, my after.

  “Come, child, stand upright,” she said, her hands clutching protectively beneath my arms as she lent me her strength, my legs no stronger than barley stalks. I saw the worry on her face, but she had no time to conceal it.

  “Walk,” she commanded, and the pain took me and turned the world to light, taking all my breath and strength. My mother held me and waited until the summit of the pain had passed. “Walk, Patrin, walk.”

  Walk? How could I walk? My feet had a memory of their own and made their own way, like a sleepwalker’s, not quite believing in the solidity of the earth. My mother walked me towards the water, steering me past the nettles, slipping on the bankside silt, but still she held me up. When my feet hit the water I gasped at the coldness of it and the baby slid in my belly, as tricksy as a salmon avoiding the fisherman’s worm, the water numbingly creeping up my knees, thighs, waist. Between my mother and the river, the water held me up.

  With every pain that racked my body, my mother made me walk against the current, the cold splashing up into my face, my hands floating upward in the water like shells.

  “Keep going, Patrin,” my mother whispered in my ear and I kept moving, a living clock against the tide. Until my mother dipped her head beneath the surface, tiny fish, darting close to my bare legs beneath the clear water, scattering at her approach. The river shimmered with diamond light and from the willows’ canopy came the tchhh-tchhh of magpies talking as my mother breached the water, telling me to push, before she dipped below the surface again. My body obeyed and all around me the water changed from gold to red as my blood bloomed upward.

  And then there she was, held in my mother’s arms, brought up out of the river, water pouring off her tiny limbs. The cord that bound her to me looped around her neck like a coral necklace, her head crowned in dark hair. My mother held her out towards me and I snatched her, her skin slippery in my hands, fearing the worst, her lips tinged blue. I peered into her scrunched face, waiting. Where was her first breath? Very carefully my mother unlooped the cord from around my baby’s fragile neck, red sinew, coral banded with my own blood. I breathed in the scent of her damp dark head and I was frightened to love her. My mother tied a knot at my baby’s navel and took her knife and hacked through the umbilical cord, knotted tight as a heart. She let it loose in the water and it slithered beneath the surface like an eel. Seized again by the squeezing of my womb, I felt the heat of my blood surge out into the river.

  “’Tis just the afterbirth, baby has no need of it now,” my mother said, and I watched it, seabloom of my love’s making, disappear downstream. With a wild sadness I covered the baby’s lips with my own and breathed, a kiss of air. I waited and tried again. Her little lungs rose and fell but once. I whispered her secret name in her ear and her chest rose and fell again with her own breath.

  We waded to the shore, my mother, my baby and I, blood running down my legs and into the mud. I held on tight to her and willed her to live. My mother took her from my arms and dried her with my old patched skirt and wrapped her tight in her shawl. Would she wear a swaddling cloth or a shroud? I didn’t know. I sang to her, my lips pressed to he
r head that smelled of earth. I sang and I sang and I saw her little chest rise and fall again and I held my own breath, just to let her have the more. My mother gathered dry sticks from around us and set to striking her flint to make a fire and I saw my baby turn rosy like the dawn. Her eyes opened and she blinked and looked at me, her mouth opening and closing with a little yawn, a twitch of her nose no bigger than the nub of a mushroom. She yawned again then started burrowing into my chest, seeking the comfort of my nipple.

  “Come along, girl, she’s hungry,” my mother said, pulling down the shoulders of my sodden blouse. My baby’s mouth latched on and my whole body sang like the catgut string on a fiddle. As she fed she kneaded my breast with her tiny hand, her little nails surprisingly sharp. I watched her drink of me, marvelling. The magpies above us still chattered, observant, and I stood outside my own self, except for the pressure on my nipple. The ground felt warm beneath me and I was surprised to see I was sitting in a pool of my own blood. My mother bundled my old skirt and wedged it between my legs and told me to be still and that she would be back soon.

  While I waited I ran the tip of my finger over every downy contour of my daughter’s face and saw the blood caught in the folds of her neck and wondered if that was what had made her pause for breath.

  I must have fallen asleep, my spine against the trunk of a willow, for when I woke there were women around me, pulling an oiled cloth over a branch and securing a tin pot over the flames, the smoke and smell of bitter herbs making my eyes water. The rags between my legs had been replaced and my baby slept against me, the skin on her hand almost as translucent as damsel flies’ wings.

  “Drink this, child,” my mother said, holding a cup to my lips, and I drank the brew down, knowing that it would give me strength.

  “She’s bonny for being so early,” my mother said, lifting the baby into her arms, and I saw how capable her hands were, how practised after the babies she had borne and now had grown, practised on me, her youngest and last.

  “She has the gift for roving, a traveller’s feet,” she said, unfurling the shawl, and together we looked at her little naked form, all pink, perfect, each toe a bean. My mother took a bottle of oil from her pocket and dripped a few drops upon her palm, before rubbing her hands together to warm it and stroking it along the tenderness of new skin.

  “But she’s not been baptised yet,” said one of the Lee women, standing outside the heated ring of the fire, a gathering of kindling in her arms. But my mother ignored her. We both knew she’d been born in the river, so she was as good as baptised already. A magpie hopped onto a lower branch to watch my baby’s skin glow golden in the firelight and my mother swaddled her in fresh linen and handed her back to me, placing her in the basket made by my mother’s hands. But the Lee woman wouldn’t be put off by my mother’s silence.

  “It’s bad luck,” she said, her eyes observing the magpie closely; the magpie looked just as closely back before it set off on its chastisement, its mate flying closer down to the ground.

  “Two for mirth,” my mother said, ignoring her and stoking the fire with a branch so it roared.

  The sky streaked violet. A kingfisher flashed across the surface of the river, a fish flip-flopping between its beak before disappearing down its throat. The baby was still sleeping, but the rising and falling of her chest was enough to satisfy me. To ignore the roar of hunger upon me I blew across her features and watched her tiny eyelashes flit at my breath. I didn’t dare move the position of my arms that had made her perfect cradle. The magpies hadn’t left my company, they took turns, wildly falling from the branches to scavenge the remains of my bread, their iridescent tail feathers all a rainbow caught in a pool of oil.

  The squeak of Amberline’s fine boots sent them back to the safety of the lower branches, their eyes in his direction and rightfully so. He was all sparkle, his fob chain a silver dangle, swinging backward and forward in the closing light, drawing their attention. My mother would have warned him to be quick about it, mindful of the tsinivari, spirits, that would follow on his heels at sunset, drawn by a new life. But beneath the oiled cloth, protected from the chill, with the river running alongside, I felt no harm would come to me while ever I held my charm of a girl in my arms.

  “Patrin?” he called to me tentatively, unable to see us hidden by the canopy of willow and oilcloth.

  “Here, we are here,” I said and he ducked his head beneath the shivering leaves and stood still at the sight of her. He gathered his senses and crouched down beside me, dropping the sack of supplies close by. His eyes fixed on his sleeping daughter.

  “Why are you left out here on your own, it’s not right,” he said, his finger reaching out to stroke her cheek, before awkwardly turning to embrace me. Above us the magpies started up their chatter and I pulled away. His touch foreign and strange, the river still rippled through my skin, she had made me her mother.

  “May I hold her?” he said and I carefully lifted her into his awaiting arms, immediately feeling her absence in my own. “Eat something, gather your strength.”

  I undid the wrapped cloth my mother had sent down with him from the camp – cheese and rabbit still warm from the fire and a flask of milk. I pulled out the cork and drank it down, the cream of it, thick and sweet. The rabbit melted on my tongue. I threw a few crumbs for the magpies and they swept the ground with their fine tails just to gobble it down, hopping from one foot to the other for more.

  Amberline took no notice, he took in every fresh feature of our daughter, as if he could stamp her on his mind’s eye, a tremor in his hands.

  “She’s small, is she not?” he said, his voice very low.

  “She’s a little early is all,” I said and he gestured with his chin for me to take her, which I willingly did. Out of his pocket Amberline pulled a little silver heart and gently wove the pin of it into the foot of her swaddling cloth, his thumb preventing the tip of it touching her.

  “Made it myself. For our daughter,” he said, the word large and new in his mouth. The silver heart had been cut from a coin, the king’s head defaced and made blank, waiting for her name. I flipped the other side, marked with the date of her birth, twenty-fourth of May 1819. The last of the sunlight struck it gold and a magpie dropped to a lower branch to peer at it, his green-feathered tail nearly close enough for me to pluck a feather.

  “It would be finer of course if we had been in London and I had my tools about me. Perhaps when we return,” Amberline said emphatically, and I felt the breeze come off the water and I shivered and held our daughter closer. What would the likes of us have to do with London? It was only ever a place we skirted. We kept to the road and the common and the fields permitted to us.

  “Does she have a name?” he said and the baby woke at the loudness in his voice and burrowed towards my chest. I rested her on my lap and pulled down my blouse for her to have the breast.

  “She has only her secret name, hers for all her life but known only to me and her.”

  “And I her father, am I not to know it?”

  I shook my head. “She’ll get her name for the world at the baptism.”

  Amberline’s eye was drawn to a splash in the water, but it was only the kingfisher again at his supper.

  “Have you sent word to your mother? Perhaps she’d like to attend her naming?”

  Amberline rubbed his hands across his face, the tips of his fine city fingers blackened by the work of camp life.

  “I don’t think it is possible,” he said, the strain in his voice. I had almost asked just to hear him say it; I’d been asking about his parents since his arrival but he always found a way to slip between the questions. All I had ever gleaned was that his father was dead and his mother was somewhere in London.

  “I look forward to having you back at the camp,” he said then leaned towards me and kissed me softly on the lips before he bent his head and kissed our daughter. I should have pulled back, not let his lips touch mine, impure as I was until the baptism. “I don’t kn
ow why you can’t come back now. The baby is born, all is well,” he said, his fingers lingering on the curve of her cheek. Our ways were as foreign to him as the moon.

  I watched him walk back to the camp, knowing how hard it would be for him amongst the men who’d somehow keep the conversation to things Amberline would have no knowledge of just to see him slip, his words caught in their snare.

  The stars pricked themselves out across the last of the blue until my eyelids grew heavy.

  I was suddenly alert as if I’d never closed my eyes at all. I looked out into the downpour.

  There was someone out there, their dark shadow cutting through the raindrops.

  “Amberline?” I called, but no human sound replied, all I heard was the rushing of waters. I felt around in the darkness for the knife Amberline had brought with the bread and cheese. My fingers hit its handle, but the more I reached for it in the darkness, the further away it slipped from my grasp, until its tip pricked me.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” I shouted, using the trunk of the willow to help me to my feet. But the figure remained where it was and I found my feet planted in the ground, unable to move even if I wanted to. The figure moved towards me and I held out the knife in front of me, but like a dowsing rod it pulled my grasp to the direction of the water. So I dropped the knife, the moonlight wavering on its blade in the mud.

  “Speak!” Would someone hear me from the camp if I screamed? Suddenly my ears were crowded with the sound of gushing water, beyond sense. “I don’t understand,” I cried and the water turned to a low babble, the shapes of words bubbling out, popping in my ears, but I couldn’t make them out. “In the name of Saint Sarah, show yourself,” I said. The figure swelled towards me like a wave, then disappeared back into the water. The rain ceased, but all the world dripped around me. The basket was missing. My heart leapt in my chest and I ran down to the water’s edge in the pre-dawn light. All along my path were spread the weeds of the river like flowers, an offering, my feet slipping on them. I heard her, her little voice concealed by the reeds; my blood surged as I waded into the water, the stones at the bottom slipping beneath my feet. I brushed the reeds away and their stalks scratched at my hands, my blood dissolving into the water, until I was surrounded by them. The sound of her coo turning to a cry drove me onward until my hands hit the wicker of her basket.