Behind the curtain the silhouettist’s scissors snipped through the black card with a crunch and a snick and within three minutes the portrait was done, the wasted cardboard unwound like orange peel on the floor. He handed the silhouette to Amberline like a prize and I saw our bodies shrunk to shadows, the three of us, and I shivered, though I saw no fault in it.
Amberline disappeared in a wave of people and returned minutes after. I knew he’d been unable to resist the opportunity, the parade of people running past his fingers like a shoal. I knew his pockets would be lined with precious metals, his fingers miners, but he returned to us with warm chestnuts or to twirl Little Egg by the side of a brass band or to watch Punch and Judy’s loud complaints.
We threw crumbs at the seagulls and laughed at their squabbles over penny cakes. A lady, a widow she told us, was wound in by the sound of Egg’s chirp and came up and asked me questions about her sleeping and teething, happy for a reprieve from her loneliness. She jingled her golden chatelaine, with a thimble turned bell on it, waiting for a smile, her dark cuffed wrist resting on Egg’s leg. The tenderness of that touch made me long for my mother, abandoned by her daughter, denied her grand-daughter, made widow by her son-in-law. Little Egg’s face shone with the happiness of the sound, the bunting above her head like a row of colourful birds bobbing in the breeze.
The widow passed Amberline as she drifted off into the crowd and I was wary. Amberline was too bright, his movements too large and animated, drunk on the sound of all the coins in everyone’s pockets.
“Would you like to see something wonderful?” he said and Little Egg began to skip in anticipation. “Hurry along now.” What could Amberline have to surprise us with next? His surprises were like cold water. Amberline led us a roundabout way home. His steps became more excited. He began to rush as he led us onward.
Street by street the houses began to change, growing neater, whiter, finer. Little gardens, flower boxes, blooms. Horses on the road had high-stepping gaits. The ladies we passed on the footpath wore lace collars and sleeves, their slippers made of satin, tiny pearls around their throats. Their hands concealed in gloves, their fingers and wrists encased in a second skin. I carefully concealed my hand around Little Egg’s and the other in my skirts, hoping they wouldn’t see the wear in mine.
Amberline led us into a singular street, the afternoon sunlight striking all the street-fronted windows golden. We were probably less than a mile from where we lived and here even the sunlight was brighter, the street facing the riverfront.
“Here we are,” he said, straightened his spine and held himself aloft.
“But what are we looking at?” I asked, watching him dissemble and transform, turn gentleman before me. He dropped my hand and offered me his elbow and we walked down the street slowly at a measured pace as if we belonged there.
“What are we looking at? Can’t you see it? Look at that glass, is it not fine? How much light it lets in. Not a speck on that doorstep. The proportion of the windows.”
I looked at the house and all he pointed at, but I saw only another pillar of stones, glass and wood. What value did it have to me? All the windows were just eyes that watched the world go by. The house was no better than a cage for wild things.
Amberline, frustrated by my lack of excitement, crouched down close to Egg and hoisted her up into his arms.
“What can you see, Eglantine?”
Her face looked earnestly from me to him; I saw that she didn’t want to displease him, that the question confused her.
“House,” she said tentatively.
Amberline waited for her to say more, to say what she saw, and my breath caught in my chest. He peered into her face and the new dress he’d bought me felt constrictive, suffocating. If I could have torn it off right there in the street I would have. Across my skin, a crawling sensation of ants on the march, and I felt the panic get beneath my skin. Is this where he took her to see his mother? Did he hope to install our daughter there without me? Why would he show it to her, unless to introduce it as her new home? My child was my whole world. The earth I walked on, the heavens I slept under. What need did I have of such a fancy house and fine manners? Or for a vardo and the Romanyjib? If I had my daughter, I had my everything. But Amberline was all silver, all mercury, all hot and cold. I had no way of reading him.
Amberline looked away, distracted by the sound of horses.
A fine landau approached the house, and the driver sat dressed in smart livery, whip poised in the air like a question mark, before he brought the horse to a sharp stop. A cloud of spit formed at the horse’s mouth. How hard had he ridden it? A young woman, her maid beside her, sat in the landau, their faces obscured by their bonnets. The driver jumped down and offered the young woman his hand, and I watched as her blonde ringlets bobbed around her face, her kid slipper hit the path, and the pearls around her throat, white as the tip of a fox’s tail. I was overcome with the whiteness of her. I stared at Amberline. Had we been made puppets again so he could quarry his mark? But his face was turned away from me, looking directly at her, the shadow of his hat obscuring his face, his shoulder turned as they trailed up the stairs. The maid carried the purchases wrapped in brown paper and string and opened the door. The young woman had her fingers on the doorframe, ready to close the door and dismiss the street. But something on the street drew her eye and she looked towards us, then Amberline stepped forward, relegating us to the shadow.
Her face lit up in recognition of him and he smiled back at her, a smile that I’d never seen, a smile that he had kept in reserve, just for her. And just as it came it vanished as her name was called through the house and echoed down to us on the footpath, thrown like a vandal’s stone. Ada. She turned and disappeared into the house. Who was she and how did Amberline know a woman like that? Amberline would not meet my eye, dissembler.
The darkening sky ran like a river above us, streaked with catkins of clouds, as we continued our walk home. I had tried to keep it bright and clean, being as house proud as any Rom, but now it seemed seedy and dark and small. And we were to be trapped in it with our fine clothes, fireflies in a jar.
All of me burned with the shame of being paraded like his actress. From beneath the hem of my new dress, my old battered boots still peeped, scuffed and worn. They stuck out, false notes in Amberline’s song. Our dresses were nothing but costumes in his great play. But what were our parts? How were we to behave? We were mere figments of his imagination, characters of his invention rather than living flesh.
Amberline’s feet dragged as we turned into our enclosed lane, the displeasure coming off him in waves as he closed the door to the world. I watched his face, but he gave nothing away, yet I felt it as surely as a twisted branch or twig pierced through a leaf. Amberline pulled the silhouette out of his pocket and placed it on the mantelpiece upside down. He fumbled inside the rest of his pockets and pulled out all the things he’d stolen. Just as I’d suspected, the widow’s chatelaine the last thing to fall, all its chains tangled, so that it looked like a golden beetle trapped in his hand.
I took off our dresses, folded them back into the box and returned our limbs to our old clothes. Carefully I eased off Little Egg’s boots, two matching blisters red as yew berries on the back of each of her heels.
Amberline spun the chatelaine in his hands and the sound of the thimble striking the other chains made Egg grin so he did it again.
“’Tis so fine a piece,” he said and I knew what he meant – each chain held something delicate: a tiny pair of scissors, the point shaped to a beak; a case for needles; a piece of ivory slid between two ornately carved gold pieces; a clock as big as my fingernail.
“I hope it didn’t hurt her to take it,” I said but he ignored me.
“It would be a shame to melt it down, the workmanship is quite something. It’s too distinctive to pawn.”
With his pliers he carefully undid the link that held each piece, until the chatelaine was dismantled, the pieces of gold from t
he aide-mémoire like plucked butterfly wings.
Amberline kindled the fire and the flames gathered at his touch, the room growing hot and stuffy. He fed the fire wood, sticks and twigs until all our faces glowed with the heat of it. The metallic smell made our eyes water. I sprinkled flour on the table and Little Egg climbed up on the chair, ready to continue her letters, learning the letters of her name in a sprinkle of flour upon the table, just as I had learned mine with a stick in the dirt, though she was probably too young to remember them. On my lap she grew restless, the letters powdering together, but I persevered. She was more interested in making clouds by smacking her palms together or blowing a trail with her lips, but I took her finger and started again each time. A woman in charge of her letters could rule her own world, I thought. All I could write was my own name.
The smelting billowed black smoke into the air and it made both our noses run. Piece by piece Amberline fed the chatelaine into the fire, holding a pestle over the flames in the fireplace with a pair of iron grips.
“Amberline,” I said, but he ignored me, the metal dissolving in front of his eyes more captivating than we were. All that shone he felt he was king of. Silver was his religion, gold his god.
“Amberline,” I said again, louder. He turned in his blacksmith’s glove and apron and, though he looked at me, it was as if his thoughts were elsewhere. He steadied his wrist to pour the liquid metal into a mould. But Egg in frustration rammed the table. The wood shuddered violently at her push at her twisted letters and Amberline lost his grip.
Everything moved slowly. The liquid gold spooled through the air, serpent like and glowing as I shoved my little girl away, and she with unsteady feet wobbled on the chair and I stepped in front of her. The gold slithered onto my skin, feeling wet, but then the skin of my arm began to burn with it as the metal pierced deep. The smell of my own flesh cooking. The pain made me pant. Amberline lifted the bucket of water and tipped it over me, my poor skin hissing, an insult of steam, but the bucket had only a dribble. My knees weakened, Amberline at my side, supporting my weight. Egg’s voice came from far away, calling me. The world drained from my eyes.
When I woke my arms were bandaged by my side and Little Egg was asleep beside me. How long had she been waiting for my eyes to open? I felt her breath on my legs through the thin blanket and hear the steady rhythm of her sleep. She’d climbed gingerly up onto the bed and snuggled around my legs, keeping clear of the stiff branches of my arms in case she hurt me more. All I wanted to do was take her in my arms and run my hands through her lovely flyaway dark hair. On the chest of drawers sat a clean roll of bandages and a brown jar of ointment. The burn on my arms turned to a low throb, sleep tugging at my eyelids.
When I woke again I heard voices from the other room, whispers thinly coming from behind the curtain. One was Egg’s chirrup but the other was a woman’s. Panicked, I sat up in the bed and swung my feet over the edge, feeling the pulse of the burn spread across my arms, up into my neck, down my fingers. From the gap in the curtain I saw Amberline’s mother sitting with Little Egg as she quietly twiddled with all the little silver pieces hanging off her chatelaine, listening. I strained to hear and when I did I felt the ache for my own parents surge up through the ground and into my feet, the earth calling to me.
“Let me tell you of Dark Sarah,” Mrs Stark said, her hand on Egg’s hair. “Black Sarah, Sarah of the Sea.”
“Who is she?” Egg said, her voice rushing up to me. How was it that I hadn’t told her? How had I let the city take over our stories? I’d told her nothing of her other grandparents. I’d tell her of them, her grandfather who made a rat dance into his sack, her grandmother who helped her come into the world.
“Sarah was dark and she was comely and like her people before her she wore travellers’ shoes. She knew the road and the road knew her. One day she had a dream that the Virgin and her maids – all three Marys – were banished from a faraway kingdom, lost upon the sea. And it was Black Sarah who saw to their rescue.
“She read the signs. She raced down to the shore and saw their vessel tossed upon the waves. She threw her cloak out across the water, where it turned into a boat for them to step safely upon, Black Sarah at the helm, guiding them to shore.
“And now on the twenty-fourth of every May, the Romany people descend on the Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in France. They take the statue of Black Sarah and dress her like a doll, before they walk with her upon their shoulders into the ocean to recreate the journey she made and to bring a good year. Your birthday, Eglantine.”
Amberline’s mother looked up then, her attention drawn by the movement of the curtain.
“Mama,” Egg cried and ran to me, embracing me around the middle. Even her hair as it brushed my bandages made my skin scream. Amberline’s mother’s cap lay upturned on the table, inside it a little twist of sweets.
“Patrin, you should be resting,” she said, getting to her feet and guiding me back to the bed, her steady hand in the small of my back. Egg’s aniseed breath filled my nostrils.
“How long have I been asleep for,” I said; the shadows on the wall were longer than I imagined, stretching all around us like a canopy.
“As long as you needed,” she said. “How is the pain?” I watched Little Egg’s face looking up at me, frowning with concern. The pain was like a new skin, a web pulling tight, needle sharp.
“Where is Amberline?” I looked at the black sooty marks on the table; the gold that had spilled had been gouged out, had the same happened to my skin? Had he peeled the gold off the surface of my skin like candle wax?
Amberline’s mother produced a little wooden spinning top from her cavernous pockets and presented it to Little Egg in her palm.
“Child, try spinning this,” she said and Egg’s face lit up at the wonder, the thank you slipping out of her lips as she crouched on the floor for its mad spin.
“Look the little hare, he runs as it spins,” she said delightedly. Egg was absorbed.
“Where is Amberline?” I asked again.
Amberline’s mother lowered her voice. “I don’t know.” The sound of the spinning top’s base bashing over the grooves between the floorboards boomed loudly.
My mind was spinning, spinning, spinning. How many days had she been here, how many days had Amberline been gone? How much time did I have remaining to me?
I reached for the jar I kept beneath the bed, a few pennies was all that was in it. My arms sang with burn, as did my anger. I’d been a lovelorn foolish girl, seduced by a pair of leather boots and a man’s city ways. And now here was the chance I’d been waiting for. I’d given it all up – my family, my traditions, my place in the world – for a kiss and a honeyed word from a so-called kinsman. I was greener than a spring bud when Amberline plucked me and now my life felt more like stunted wood. Surely the sap still ran, green to my green heart.
The top stopped spinning and Egg held it still before setting it spinning again, the hare running for its life across the city, hoping to reach the hare’s corner, the little edge of field the farmer left for its protection from the harvester’s hand.
Amberline’s mother undid my bandages and I winced at her touch. The gold had left nasty scarlet scalds running across my arms, roads not travelled glaring up at me, my constant reminder. I prayed to Black Sarah as I had as a child for our deliverance, for my arms to heal well enough to carry Little Egg, for I had no horse or vardo, all I had were my arms, burned and afflicted as they were. Carefully she rewrapped them and left the ointment and clean bandages. She looked into my face and I wondered if she saw that green leap through me. All of me was sprung to the task of it.
TWENTY-ONE
Eglantine, 1833
Without my father’s constant income we’d soon be without funds. My father had left a trail of bills that we had to pay unless the house was to be taken from us. Each day brought a new bill – the coalman, his tailor, the butcher, the baker. Makepeace and I learned to beg for extensions, but they would still
have to be paid. The money that we raised was no match for the march of living.
I did what was necessary then and went to my father’s room and stripped anything of value from it – a pair of cufflinks, a diamond tie pin, a drawer full of linen shirts hardly worn, a beaver top hat in a lush blue silken case; all my father’s portable property would keep us afloat yet. I took what I had to the pawnbrokers my father had taken me to as a child, and it was there that I’d go to see if I could wring a little pity from my father’s associate. Makepeace watched as I left, knowing what cargo I carried, but she nodded her consent. She knew as well as I that my father’s return was something we never dared hope for.
I wore the worst of my clothes, the skirts faded from washing, but as I made my way through the streets to where I recalled the shop, I saw that Makepeace and I were queens in a kingdom compared to the rest of our neighbours who survived like rats only blocks away. What did they do if their menfolk were gone across the seas?
Sweet’s Emporium had changed in the intervening years. The sign hung precariously from a rusted hinge and my heart sank: if the shop wasn’t doing well, what hope did I have of getting a good price for my father’s things?
I pushed open the door, the bell a dull thud against the glass as if it couldn’t be bothered. Old Sweet was at the counter, sitting like a toad in the circle of light his lamp made, but he didn’t look up, too busy counting his money. As I made my approach he gently drifted the broadsheet of a newspaper atop the surface rather than have me play at guessing his accounts.
The River Sings Page 16