“What do you want for it?” My father’s voice was firm, but I heard the little catch in it.
Sweet took a pencil from his waistcoat pocket and scribbled an amount on a piece of paper and slid it across to my father. My father read it and scoffed, flicking it to the floor.
“You must take me for an idiot, Sweet.”
“No, not an idiot. That would be going too far. I’d say a sentimentalist, that is all.”
My father took out two coins from his pocket and slid them across the counter, then took my hand and walked out of Sweet’s Emporium, the bell pealing at our exit.
Outside, the colours lingered in my eyes and flashed when I looked up at the sky, a strange flare of lightning. On my own hand I saw colours splash there as if I had been staring at the sun. Had the light from the diamond infected me and given me a fever of the eyes? The low cloud bore down on me, but the colours whipped through them and distracted me, so I walked with my head down. Everything I passed glowed with a particular radiance – a raindrop on the low-hanging foliage of a tree, my own fingernail shone like a shell and I felt elated. A butcher’s wagon rolled past leaving a trail of blood behind it on the road, perfect ruby droplets that held their shape before dissolving into the dust. I wanted to ask my father where we were going, but his silence pressed down on me and I knew better than to ask.
It was a lane he led me to, dirty and dank, the washing draped across it like a sad banner whipping against the wind. We passed a well in the middle of the street and I thought I heard the wind spiral down it to ruffle the water at the bottom. I dropped my father’s hand and ran to the edge, feeling the need to peer in to see diamonds shining on the water, but my father pulled me back, his hand so firm on my arm that it made black spots dance on my eyes.
He led me to a door, so familiar as if I’d seen it in a dream, pulled a key out of his pocket and led me into the darkness.
My heart knock-knock-knocked against my ribs so loud I thought it would alert someone, but there was no one here. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move, but it was merely my own reflection caught in an enormous cracked looking glass.
My father walked further in and kindled a light.
“I’m sorry for what I did, Eglantine, I was not in control of myself; I just wanted the whole business to be laid to rest,” my father said, looking at me seriously. I nodded, unsure of exactly what he meant. “You are and always will be my daughter, Eglantine. All I have will one day be yours. You are the only one I can trust.” His words lay heavy on me.
A large clock ticked at me, its pendulum a golden moon swinging back and forth; its ticking grew louder in my ears as I took courage and stepped further in. Tentatively I peered around the corner of a curtain: a small dead fire in the grate, a bed, the long blue shadows of the afternoon filling the room early. On the table were gouges in the wood, I ran my finger across them, roads of wood. On the floor had fallen a piece of card, I turned it upright and saw that it was a silhouette of a family of three. I heard a cry and it sent the hairs on my neck on end and made my heart pound. The sound had come out of my father. He held the little silver heart up to his lips.
“What is this place?” I said.
“It’s where we lived, your mother and I and you.”
The tears started to spill out of my eyes then, fractious little rainbows. I squeezed the doll in my pocket in a bid to stop them coming, I would not cry. How could I cry over what I didn’t remember? But the tears came anyway. My father handed me the heart cut from a coin and turned to the fireplace, rain already pouring from the eaves outside, a torrent out of nowhere. A puddle swelled at the doorway, then started seeping beneath. He carefully removed his coat and hat and, after wiping the dust away, laid them on the table, before he piled whatever wood remained into the grate. When he found it not enough, he picked up a chair, held it above his head and smashed it on the ground, sending the legs spiralling into the air. The crack of it upon the wood frightened me, I felt the vibration of it run up my legs. He struck the floor again, until the chair was nothing but kindling. He gathered up the pieces and rammed them into the fireplace then pulled a tinderbox from the mantel and struck and struck and struck, but no flame would come to his bidding.
“Damned damp,” he said and took a piece of paper out of his pocket, brought the flint to it and coaxed the tiniest of flames before the rest of the fire caught on wood, chair and all. The flames leapt upward like hair being pulled out by its roots.
My father went around finding whatever he could to stick in the fire: the only other chair, the silhouette, an old apron, a scarf, a petticoat, a pair of stockings. As the last of them was consumed by the flames I realised that they must have been my mother’s things, whatever remained of hers disappearing from me a second time. Next came the bedding, the sheets, the pillows. He hauled the mattress off the bed and dragged it across the floor, mildew patterning the underside like a map. He took the knife concealed in his boot and slit open the mattress and out spilled amongst the horsehair all sorts of silver and gold pieces – brooches, earrings, a set of rosary beads, a hair comb, a watch. My father sifted through the rest of the horsehair, feeding some of it to the flames, but the acrid smell of it made us both cough. Once he’d made sure there was nothing of value left, he swung the door open and dumped the remains of the mattress in the street. From the doorway I watched him wrestle with it in the rain as if he was fighting a whale, before he came back in, his clothes patched with rain. The room grew hot and he left the door open and swept the remaining horsehair out into the street and I noticed with fascination as the puddle at the doorway remained unchanged, if anything it appeared to grow. My father’s boots splashed right through it, oblivious. He stomped on the bed frame and split the slatted wood then piled it beside the fire to wait its turn, until nothing remained behind the curtain except an old blanket. My father plucked it up and dragged it towards the door, revealing what was left beneath it: one tiny leather baby shoe. I walked over and picked it up and held it in my hands.
“Father?” I said and he stopped to stare at me, before he saw the shoe. The blanket dropped to the floor in a pall of dust. He reached out his hand to the tiny shoe and traced the fine stitches in the leather, his eyes watering with the smell of the burning smoke, the dust. He took the shoe from my hand and shook it. Out onto the floor fell the spotted petals of a foxglove. He wept then, silent and angry, and threw the small elfin shoe into the fire. I cried out, but it was no use, the leather had already caught the flame and started to turn black before my eyes. My father had kept the past sealed up in these rooms and now he was trying to obliterate it, before I had a chance to learn anything.
“It was mine, wasn’t it?” But he wouldn’t answer me.
My father pulled out a small cast-iron pot and threw all the silver jewellery in it then held it over the flames with a clamp. I clutched the heart tightly in my palm, I’d not let him have it, he’d have to wrench it out of my hands. But my father seemed to have forgotten about it, absorbed in the slow dissolve of metal.
When we left I kept the heart in my palm, until I grew frightened I would drop it in the darkening streets, so I placed it in my mouth like a dead man, a coin for the ferryman, and prayed my father wouldn’t ask me anything.
When we arrived home I noticed my father’s hands were blackened with soot, his clothes dusty. Both of us dripped all over the floor. Makepeace took one glance at my father and said nothing. My father disappeared upstairs to his room. I made sure I heard the door click before I spat the heart into my palm, crest side up, the metallic flavour making my teeth vibrate in my head for using my mouth like a purse.
“What is that?” Makepeace said.
“Father found it at Sweet’s.” She glared at me then and I was made aware that I’d said something I shouldn’t. She ran her hand over my hair. I had nothing more to add. I couldn’t tell her about the place my father had taken me, the sound of the blade as it ripped through the mattress, the jewels that fell o
ut of its stuffing. The last traces of my mother gone with the smoke.
Makepeace led me up to the nursery, muddy footsteps and all, and helped me remove my wet things, hanging them on the back of a chair, thick with water. Would I know my way back to the home I’d had with my mother? I ran my fingers through the thick wet plush of my coat, a track with my finger, a secret map through all the ocean of streets.
That night I stood at the window of the nursery and tried to catch sight of the way to the place where we had lived as a little family, but I could not see beyond the side of the house. The river was lit with strange lights in the distance and on the wind a voice called, but I neither heard what the words were nor who was speaking them. All I felt was a strange sensation in my chest, an unfurling, the sense of a seed that had been washed with rain pushing up through the darkness.
FIVE
Patrin, 1818
My father was lost in the stroke of his knife on the hazel branch as he removed the bark from a forked branch, Jupiter’s head resting on his boot, the warmest place by the fire. My mother was asleep in the vardo and I was watching the fire from the top step. Our horse was tied to a tree at the edge of the camp, covered with a blanket; I heard him cropping the grass. This was all I knew, yet I craved something, although I couldn’t exactly name what it was. I wanted to be other than a child, I wanted to find the shape of my own life.
When Amberline walked right into camp, his boots were so soundless and so fine that the firelight licked their polished surface. We didn’t hear him because he didn’t make a sound, no one challenged him, my father’s dog, Jupiter, didn’t even look up. Amberline’s fancy boot heels made no strike upon the ground, no twig snapped beneath his step. His footsteps were silence, he walked like a thief.
But I saw him. I’d been watching from the shadow of the vardo, sitting on the step thinking I was dreaming. His pocket watch swung, a silver charm, to and fro, a will-o’-the-wisp, until he walked out of the darkness and into the circle of light.
My father leapt to his feet.
Jupiter bared his teeth at the stranger, knives of ivory.
“What do you want?” my father growled, his strong arms and chest as broad as an ale barrel, his knife resting in the palm of his hand.
“Please,” the stranger said. Closer to the fire I saw he was from the city: his clothes, though splattered with mud at the trousers, were of a fine material and neatly cut; the lapel of his coat was velvet. The stranger held out his hands to my father to show him that he was unarmed and all I saw was the milk-white clean of his hands.
“Can I stay?” he asked. “Just for a few days, mind,” he hurried on, confident in his request as if my father had already granted it.
“Why would we do that? We know not you nor your people.” My father spat on the fire, the flames hissed. Jupiter was up on his feet by my father’s side, his head lowered, his eyes tracking the stranger’s movements, just waiting for the command, a long thin whine coming from his brindled snout.
“But you are my people,” he said and he leaned closer to my father. Jupiter growled and my father’s fingers spread across the hilt of his knife like a spider’s legs, ready. “Please.” Jupiter’s barking echoed around the clearing and sent a bird complaining into the night. My mother woke and ducked her head out of the vardo doorway, brushing past me on the stairs.
“Hush now, Jupiter,” my father said, his hand on Jupiter’s collar.
“Say your piece, boy, and let it be done,” my mother said.
The stranger lowered his voice, I tried to listen, but his words were lost to the crackle of the flames as they danced upwards, making their faces glow, and all watched in surprise as my father slapped the stranger into an embrace, a rough kiss on each cheek and the offer of a bed beneath the wagon. I heard his name for the first time. Amberline.
My mother bristled when she came back into the vardo. She rummaged in an old wooden chest and pulled out a horse blanket, ragged and rough. Why did she give him this one when we had others that were more fit for a guest, fit for kin? My mother only kept this blanket to jam beneath the door when the winter winds bit.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Go inside, child,” she said as she went back outside, but I didn’t move. My father resumed his seat by the fire, the forked hazel branch back in his hands, the blade back to the whittling. Jupiter lay uneasy at his feet, ears already dowsing the direction of the stranger. My mother stood and handed Amberline the blanket until her instinct made her look up. I didn’t need to be scolded like a child, I stood and went inside the vardo.
My ears were keen to every sound. I heard the stranger as he crawled under the vardo for the night, the thwack as he hit his head, a smothered curse. I heard him settle and stretch and yawn. But sleep evaded me knowing he slept beneath me.
In the early light I woke and leapt down from the vardo. And there he was, sitting by the coals of the dying fire, using a handkerchief to buff the toes of his boots. He looked up at me and I felt my whole skin turn red like a rabbit stripped to the sinew, but I kept walking to the river, bucket in my hand.
There was a mist rolling off the river and with each step that I took it rolled closer, making the grass but patches of green beneath my feet. A swan glided past, the colour of its orange beak cutting through the glare of the mist. I took my own ragged boots off and tied the laces together before slinging them around my neck: I didn’t dare leave them on the riverbank in case the fog conceal them so well I never found them again. I hoisted up my skirt and petticoat and knotted them above my knees and slipped into the water; the trickle of it running across my bare feet made me gasp. The water rustled all around me as if it was speaking.
I looped the bucket handle over my wrist and let my hands dangle in the water as the sunlight struck the fog golden. Around me, disguised in the treetops, all the birds sang the sun brighter and light flickered across the surface. I leaned down and drank from the lip of the river, the end of my plait dragging in the water, and suddenly a face loomed into the water beside mine. I quickly stood up, blinking water from my eyes. Had I the gift?
I hurriedly skimmed the bucket across the surface of the water, flicking out a tadpole with my thumb, and strode out of the river.
And there as the fog lifted was Amberline walking towards me, a grin across his face as he took in the sight of my legs, my wet feet, my knotted skirt, my petticoat patched and patched again. Was it disdain I saw there? Him, in his fine clothes, every button on his coat matching, his trousers now sponged clean. A fine shadow of a beard grew across his face. How long had he been watching me?
“Good morning,” he said with a smile so I thought he was mocking me. In a blind flash of anger, I emptied the contents of the bucket over his head. His blue eyes lit up with the shock of it. I saw his fingers clench and unclench as he stared at me. I turned and walked away, the sound of his laughter silencing the birds.
When I made it back to camp with my bucket refilled alone further downstream, he was bent over my mother’s fire, the old horse blanket around his shoulders while his beautiful city clothes lay spread out over the bushes to dry.
“Daughter, do you know what happened to our guest here?” my father asked and I looked him straight in the eye.
“Must have been the slippery soles of those city boots,” I said, pouring the water into the kettle and hanging it over the flames that quickly rushed towards its blackened bottom. The stranger’s eyes followed me back to the vardo, my father’s voice calling to me.
“Come, my daughter, and meet your kin.” He was kin? How could he be? His hands were smooth, free of callouses. His boot soles were barely worn. What had the likes of him to do with us?
“Patrin, this is our kinsman, Amberline Stark, his family have long had ties with us Scamps. He will be staying with us for a while,” my father said.
Why was he staying with us? I’d never even heard of him, I’d never heard of the Starks.
“Hello, Patrin,” Amberline sa
id, rising in his horse blanket, and I took satisfaction in his changed state. He bobbed his head to me, unable to offer his hand, but it was his knees I saw now.
“Patrin, is that a boy’s name?” he said and if I’d had that bucket I would have swung it until the wooden side of it smacked his head.
“A fine name for a boy or a girl, Amberline, as it was my father’s own.” That made him pull his blanket tighter around him. “And a fine name for my firstborn daughter.” My father ushered me closer towards Amberline. “Now, Patrin, say good morrow to our kinsman.”
“Good morrow,” I parroted, quick and short.
“Good morrow, Patrin,” he said, his eyes smiling, blue as a magpie’s egg and all delight. I couldn’t look away. His hair started to dry in waves around his pale face that had been kept from the wind and rain. How was a gentleman our kin? My cheeks roared, self-conscious of my braid resting on my breast and leaving a damp mark where my heart beat wildly. I met his smile with my own.
Later, Mother and I went out to harvest the hedgerow that grew not far from our camp. We climbed a slight rise and the river ran like a silver ribbon, dazzling to the eye in the sunshine.
The sun grew hot on our backs as we bent to snick at the long tangle of hazel, ash, beech and dogwood, all while the sap was low, sending the creatures that called it home scratching deeper into the undergrowth. My mother was unusually silent, her hair pulled tight beneath her scarf, not even a hum at her lips, but all of me buzzed with questions. The knife slippery and my fingers fat as I worked alongside her. The smoke from our fire curled in the distance, my thoughts unable to leave off from our guest.
“So who are the Stark family, Mama?” I asked, unable to keep my questions from coming out of my mouth “And how come I’ve never heard of them?”
My mother stood straight, put her hand in the small of her back and stretched, leaning her face into the sunshine, in no rush to answer me. Slowly she wiped the perspiration from her face with her hand and took a long deep swig from the skin of water. I thought she hadn’t heard me so I repeated my question and in doing so watched her twitch with irritation.
The River Sings Page 4