The River Sings

by Sandra Leigh Price

  When they led my father out from the cells to the dock, my heart tiptoed in my chest. My father looked around, confused at the sea of faces. He stood straighter when he looked up and recognised us, his hand floated up from his shackles. I cried out for him, but Makepeace tugged on my arm to silence me. My father tripped as he took the stand and the crowd tittered until he righted himself and stood straight again, running his hands through his greasy hair.

  The charge was read out and he was asked his plea. “Not guilty.” His voice filled the court and someone upon hearing him for the first time would feel obliged to believe him. His voice was honey.

  “But you were caught red-handed,” a judge said, frowning, and looked at his papers then looked my father up and down. The most senior-looking judge cleared his throat and spoke and my ears filled with the roar of my own blood.

  “The prisoner is guilty. He is sentenced to fourteen years. In the Colony of New South Wales.”

  My father turned to us, his eyes wild, gulping air, showing his bound wrists to us but we had no way to throw him a rescuing line. Makepeace raised her hand out to him, but his time upon the stand was up and he was being led by the court officer to the cells below. The next to be banished was already being led to the stand to await the judgment of the law. A judge stifled a yawn with the back of his hand.

  Makepeace and I returned to the house and I saw it with different eyes. Before it had been the only home I recalled, never seeing it as anything more than the place where I lived. But as Makepeace and I walked along the river, the current running alongside us like a silent companion, the silence brewed between us. Our lives had been emptied of my father’s life in a word – guilty – and Makepeace and I would be alone in the house, rattling around like my doll did in my pocket.

  As we walked up the step together and entered the house, I realised what a big house it was for the three of us, let alone two. Makepeace put her key in the lock and opened the door, and the whole house seemed to whisper my father’s absence.

  Makepeace went down to her room that was next to the kitchen and I wandered like a will-o’-the-wisp through the rooms of the house. Nothing appeared to be the same; it felt as if the whole house had been submerged and dragged up again, things distorted and dripped. How was it that we had this house after all? How shabby and old it seemed now Makepeace and I were alone in it; without my father the very walls turned into a different kind of cage. How was it that we had all these rooms, when all those in that cell had hardly enough room to stretch their arms? The sitting room as I walked into it felt overstuffed, the damask creeping off the walls and onto the furniture. I looked up at the ornate moulded ceiling, the glass in the window, that wavered, the bubbles trapped in the glass. Airless and crowded, though I was alone in the room. I pushed at the sash of the window and found the damp had wedged it shut, so I hit it again and again with the heel of my hand, until the wood gave way. In blew the breeze from the river, bringing with it many sounds; a seagull hovered just outside the frame of the window and was gone; the curtains disappeared out the window with a suck, but still I couldn’t breathe.

  I raced up the stairs, the balustrade as cold as water beneath my palm, to where Ada’s room had been and was left bare, and I pushed the window open and let in the air. It whipped in and filled the room, finding the walls and space to its liking, like a cat spiralling on a lap.

  Up the stairs to the nursery, the wind cooled the damp sweat on my back. It was filled with all the things of childhoods before me, things I had played with but which had never been mine. All the fancies a childish heart dreamt of: rocking horse, dolls, shelves of books with coloured spines. A doll’s house replica of the house stood pride of place on an elegant pair of wooden legs. I stepped closer and put my eye to the window. I was grown a giantess to spy on the little inhabitants: a little cook in the kitchen, her arms up to her elbows lost in a bowl; a little family sitting around a dining table, plates as big as buttons; a maid laying a fire in the sitting room; a grandmother sleeping in her bed, her gold-rimmed glasses on the tip of her nose; up the staircase the same paintings hung; a gentleman sat at his desk in a book-lined library, his quill feathered as if with eyelashes. And in the nursery a governess in her serge uniform rocked a tiny baby in a cradle beside a miniature doll’s house as tall as a match.

  Were we prisoners now in this house just as the doll’s house kept the dolls prisoner? My father had been imprisoned. Was this our fate too? All I could hear was the roar of water, the room slipping beneath the surface. The little doll flipped in my pocket like a landed fish and spurred me to action. The wind was already rattling the sash waiting for me; the nursery windows rose at my touch, pushing my hair across my face and chasing the wind through the doll’s house, the tiny curtains whisked out the tiny windows.

  Only my father’s rooms remained.

  Walking down the stairs I smelled the brine of the river fill my lungs; the breezes made my skirt billow around my legs like a sail. The wind had already pushed open the door to my father’s study and made the pages on his desk flutter and spill to the floor. The window wouldn’t give, no matter how I shoved at it. The sash had been nailed shut, but the wind still came through; I wedged open the door to allow it admittance.

  I stood outside my father’s bedroom door, my hand on the wood, and listened, half expecting to hear sounds of my father bustling around inside, but all that I heard was the wind already pushing beneath the door crack. Who was I to let it wait?

  Inside the room it was as my father had left it. All was neat. All was quiet. His bed was made, his drawers all closed. A pair of cufflinks lay on top of his dresser; the wind pushed one to the floor with a clink. I opened his windows and let the air come swirling in. Cautiously I opened the drawers, feeling them glide – every item was perfectly folded, drawer after drawer of handkerchiefs with his own monogram. Why so many handkerchiefs? I ran my hand under the rim of the drawers, seeking a secret spring. Nothing. I pulled open another drawer; his shirts all ordered. On his dresser were bottles of powder and lavender water and his long razor that he would shave with every day, the pulse of his neck so close to the blade, his Adam’s apple bobbing close with a swallow. With a quick tug I pulled the drawer free and shook all those handkerchiefs on the bed and with them fell all that my father had hidden – gold coins fell out and I felt hot as if the devil’s own breath were warm upon my face. I stripped my father’s pillow of its case and rushed to fill it, stealing from the master thief. Just as I had finished I saw something remaining in the drawer and I felt time spin.

  It was a little leather pouch, the cord around it tied with a knot, though the cord had been cut. Gingerly I plucked it from the drawer, a splinter of wood keeping the cord from coming free, and then there it was, a familiar reassuring little measure in my hand. I held it to my nose and breathed deeply, and with my eyes closed for the briefest of moments I felt her with me, it was something of my mother’s. I stood frozen with the wind coming at me from all directions; a spit of rain came through the window, a sun shower, a fox’s wedding. All the doors slammed with the gust throughout the house, one after the other like a series of fireworks, waking me to myself. What would happen to us if these things of my father’s were found here, what fate would befall us? Part of me wanted to hurl the pillowcase and its contents out into the street, but I realised this was what paid for our clothes, our comforts, our bread, and we might yet have need of my father’s provisions. The walls wavered in front of my eyes; this house might just as well be made of water.

  I curled the leather pouch in my fist, took the pillowcase with me to the nursery and threw it beneath my bed for a temporary home. I’d bury it somewhere, until it was needed. What world had my father brought me into, what world would it become? My father had instructed me to be his hands, to continue his bitter trade. Why couldn’t I determine my own fate, put my hands to a better use? But what use would that be? My father had trained my fingers from the earliest, his ten white servants, and they
knew nothing else. Other girls my age would know how to sew and mend and make. But all my father had me truly learn was how to steal, how to take, without regard for the consequences. Where was my father now? Was he already on board the ship that would transport him, or was he still waiting in the cells? Would we even know if he survived the voyage? If I continued as my father wanted me to, what would prevent me falling the same way, bound for Botany Bay, my own life dropped like a stone to the bottom of a well?

  I lay on the bed, not caring that my boots hit the coverlet. I took the pouch from my fist and placed it on my forehead as though it was a poultice, then reached for my doll in my pocket, my fingers travelling the worn grooves scratched in her back. I closed my eyes, surrendering to whatever wind would blow, feeling myself adrift as if the house was already a part of the river, already gone with the tide.

  SIXTEEN

  Patrin, 1819

  The little room divided with a curtain became more like a vardo, but devoid of wheels and horse. The fire didn’t thrive as it did in a circle of stones but struggled in the hearth, which I had scrubbed trying to expel the grime. Every morning Amberline left to try to increase our fortunes and every day he returned with his feet soiled from the street, his footprints making a mockery of my cleanliness as he bustled in, always animated with the plans and schemes that were more alive in his head than they were in practicality. No matter how I cleaned the window it was covered in a film of soot that renewed itself every day.

  The rhythms of the day were my reason, the things I held on to, to stop the world from slipping. Without my father, the world that I had known had ceased. My grief was mine alone, for Amberline bid me look forward and not behind. But how could I? Every time I picked up Little Egg and held her in my arms I remembered her in his arms, strong as branches, her feet clothed in the little loving shoes of his own making. I saved my tears for when Amberline was sleeping and Little Egg was at my breast, her head becoming damp from them.

  My namesake signs were unreadable. I was lost. My father would have known the right thing to do, the right way to go. I willed his voice to my ears, to speak to me, to guide me, but all I could hear was the sickening crack of his poor neck. In the city nothing made sense; sounds seemed closer but they were an echo from far away; there were no trees or plants in our lane that turned with the seasons, just a woodland made of brick, stone and wood. But for Little Egg and Amberline I was rootless. My father had tried to teach me the ways to divine water, to feel the way in my hands, but without him I was made a husk by my grief.

  One morning I woke with the boom of silence in my ears, the quiet slamming my face. Did I dream the door closing? Disoriented, I sat up in the bed, my breasts stinging hot with milk, already dampening my shift. I reached for Little Egg but her truckle was empty, the bedding cold. Frantically I tripped out of the bed and stumbled past the curtained division – my daughter was not nestled in her father’s arms. The hearth billowed cold ash onto the floor and dirtied my feet. I tiptoed up to the window and willed them to appear but all the glass would show me was the curtain of soot that the city had woven.

  I opened the door, my shift flapping around my legs, the sound of the lane rushing up to me – the waterfall of a bucket being emptied into the gutter, a door being slammed, a cart turning on the road, a stick flickering in the wheels – but no sign of Amberline and Little Egg.

  My feet turned as cold as the stone I stood on in the threshold, unable to move. How had my world shrunk to several square feet? My past world had been the earth wide, the heavens long; the hedgerows and woodlands, the rivers and waterways had been my boundaries, as familiar to me as the lines on my palms, but now I lived in a prison of walls.

  I stood there for an hour, my neighbours walking past, all but ignoring me as I became made of shade, when around the corner a gentleman walked with a child in his arms, a fine blanket wrapped around her delicate limbs, and I wondered what gentleman would be seen walking down this dark corner of earth with his precious child. He wore a felted beaver fur topper and finely pressed trousers, a stripe running through them, a neat coat buttoned over his chest. When I heard his voice float up to me my horizon wavered, my impulse to run vanished – the voice was unmistakably Amberline’s. When he looked at me in my shift, hair wild, my toes turning blue, his face darkened.

  “Give her to me, Amberline.” I shook, apoplectic with anger. But Amberline just continued walking, his pace unhurried, knowing that daily the walls of my entire world had shrunk to the confines of this room, chained as I was by invisible ties to the circumference around the hearth.

  As soon as he was in reach I snatched her from his arms. My daughter looked up at me contentedly and I felt that soft blanket between my thumb and forefinger, soft lamb’s wool finely knitted.

  “Why did you take her? Where have you been?” I said, clutching her to my chest and not wanting to let her go ever again.

  Amberline deliberately closed the door, the ominous click of the latch. All the time on the doorstep I had thought that once I got my daughter back in my arms I would pack all I had into a bundle, strap Little Egg to my chest and seek out my mother and beg her forgiveness.

  “I’ve been for a walk with my daughter,” Amberline said glibly and I felt blood race into my face.

  “In those clothes? I’ve never seen them folded in our chest of drawers.”

  “Well one can hardly expect you to be taking her for air. Look at you, Patrin, you look like a madwoman. Get dressed, brush your hair. Make yourself presentable.” I saw myself through his eyes then and I was frightened – would he seek to have me committed? Or worse, take my daughter away?

  “Surely I’ve a right to know if you are taking her anywhere,” I said, trying to calm myself, feeling Little Egg reach for my breast, between my shift, her mouth opening and closing for it on the surface of the fabric.

  Amberline tossed his hat onto the table and shrugged his coat off his shoulders, carefully placing it on the back of a chair. Upon our daughter’s little head was a new bonnet, edged with a little strip of lace like hawthorn blossom around her face.

  “My mother has a right to see her grandchild,” Amberline said matter-of-factly.

  His mother.

  His mother, my aunt, our daughter’s namesake. She remained in London yet Amberline had said nothing. What else had he kept from me? Had he told her about the sacrifice of my father for him, for us? I felt I’d be sick and moved to the table to feel something solid beneath my hand.

  Amberline emptied his pockets onto the table – a silken handkerchief, a reticule, a watch chain – all clattered and spun. Little Egg moved her head in the direction of the sound and smiled as I pulled my shift down, relieved to have her skin on mine, the quiet snuffle and suck, but it didn’t extinguish the anger in me.

  “Was my father’s sacrifice not enough for you?”

  Amberline looked coldly at me. “What would you have me do, Patrin? Hang with him?”

  “But for everything he did for you – he took you in, he let you court me, everything against my mother’s better judgment. Did you even thank him?” I felt my blood get hot, Little Egg’s cheek burned against my breast. I longed for air, cool, wide open gusts of it.

  “I chatski tsinuda de tehara, vai de haino, khal tut,” I said beneath my breath. The true nettle stings from the beginning. I clutched the putsi around my throat.

  “Are you cursing me now too, just like your mother? I’m stealing to give us a life, Patrin. A chance in the city. There is no future in the Romanyjib and Romany ways.”

  “Well they were good enough when you needed them,” I said and spat at his feet.

  Amberline prickled with a silent rage and snapped the putsi cord from around my throat. I grabbed at his wrist, Little Egg still at my breast, but he was too tall for me. He held it between us, that little chamois pouch that my mother had given me, and let it dangle in the air – my neck burned from the cord being tugged.

  “Amberline,” I said. “Please?”
I put out my hand. “I’m sorry.”

  But his eyes darkened as he looked into the fireplace and I thought he’d burn all I had brought from the camp, turning it to ash. Amberline hesitated, then tipped all the contents onto the floor – strands of hair, my mother’s and mine twisted together; angelica leaves, rosemary and acorn, the little piece of fraying velvet the German duchess had given me, the river’s perfect stone – all trampled beneath his foot. He weighed the leather pouch in his hand with contempt before he tossed it on the ground, storming out the door. I bent down and gathered up each precious thing and looped the putsi back around my neck, tucking it deep into the folds of my clothes, away from Amberline’s fingers. Little Egg’s lips fell from my nipple, a dribble of milk pooling in the birthmark around her neck, turning the red strands of it white.

  That night I slept lightly, keeping my senses tuned to Amberline’s movements, the trust between us as tenuous as a spider web. Unlike the bond between Little Egg and me, a bond that stretched stronger than skin, an umbilical cord of the spirit. When I woke in the night disturbed by my dreams, Eglantine stirred, her eyes blinking at me in the darkness; I could hear the kitten-shaped yawn of her thirsty mouth as I too yawned. I was afraid to return her to the makeshift cradle lest Amberline take her without my knowing, so I kept her close, in my arms.

  SEVENTEEN

  Eglantine, 1833

  I woke when my bedroom window was pulled closed, Makepeace having gone and closed each and every one. Sleep had taken me and washed me up on the shore, disoriented as to what the time was: all the light was wrong. I snatched the pouch into my fist for safekeeping, before Makepeace saw it.