The River Sings

by Sandra Leigh Price

  “Did you see anything in the water?” I asked Little Egg, but she had fallen asleep on my shoulder, her dribble falling in the crease of my neck. The river had a strong current, yet she had remained where she’d fallen in, the waters closing over her, the roots of the willow tangling her in their grasp with all the grip of a parent’s arms. Perhaps the river had kept her safe, saving her from the rush of the current, knowing I would come. Perhaps I owed the river my thanks. The water seeped down between my bandages and my wounds, and as they dried I felt them contract and squeeze in waves. My arm was throbbing with its own tidal force, the fever washing over me, propelling me.

  I was filled with the rush of the current, I had got us safely back to London.

  “Papa,” Little Egg called, sing-song. “Papa?”

  How much time had passed? Quickly I pulled off my muddy boots and I slung the sack I had beneath the table. Had he returned? Would he be able to see my betrayal by the things I had used for escape?

  She looked at me with her father’s bright blue eyes, clear and unclouded. “Where’s Papa?”

  My attention was drawn to the fireplace – was the wood freshly laid? Did I fill that bucket of water on the floor? A loaf of bread remained untouched on the table. I put my hand against it. Was it still warm? Could Amberline be back? His coat wasn’t behind the door, nor his hat. I wiped the road from both our faces and hands and I set to kindling the fire to life. Little Egg broke into song behind the curtain and I thought nothing of it, coaxing the flame, blowing on it, willing it into being, hoping for it to climb up the chimney and resemble a fire that had never been cold. My arms sang with their own flames and I carefully unbound the bandages; the smell that rose from them made my breath catch. I had turned to the muck of the tide, my own skin rancid. The bandage was filled with dirt and broken filaments of leaves. I tossed the tattered cloth into the flames but it only smouldered, still damp from the river. A vile smell filled the room before the fire consumed the bandage, took its essence and burned brighter. On my knees I prayed to Dark Sarah to keep us safe, Little Egg and I, while Little Egg played behind the curtain, a little imaginary conversation going on, as reassuring as birdsong, as breath, as the stars in their heavens.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Eglantine, 1838

  The house felt different. Makepeace and I had grown accustomed to being two, but now we were three again and it felt like we were tilting all at one end of a boat, the damp overleaping the bounds to tip us in the deep. For the first night Fookes was with us all I did was listen to the sounds of his movements. The pound of his step. The pour of the pitcher and the replacement of the jug on the stand. I heard the long stream of his piss in the chamber-pot and I fumed. My father had never made those sorts of sounds, he was all stealth, I hardly ever heard him come or go.

  I lay awake for hours. I got up and dressed and lay back down, knowing the house was dark and quiet, as I liked it. In my hands I weighed the pouch I’d found in my father’s drawer and ran my thumb over the leather, over and over, closing my eyes and imagining it to be my mother’s skin. I put it to my lips, and kissed it, hoping a picture of her would come at my call, the image of her face, the sound of her voice, but nothing came. My memories of her only came with the sound of water. I got up and opened the window to let in the sounds of the river, a substitute for her voice. I was listless, neither able to sleep nor rouse myself to go downstairs and warm my hands around the kettle waiting for it to boil. I rolled the pouch in my hands, tempted to open it, yet frightened that if I did, whatever remnant of her remained would be but a breath out the window. Makepeace had made sure all of Ada’s things had been burned and broken when she died so that her spirit would be free. But had my father in keeping this kept a little of my mother’s spirit for me?

  I heard Fookes get up and begin the whole splashing, pissing, stamping routine. For a shoemaker, he had the footsteps of a horse, all clip and clop, his shoes striking like flint on the floors. I listened as he neatly skipped down the stairs and then silence at the bottom.

  “Good morning, Mrs Makepeace,” he chortled, his voice threading up the stairs to me. Makepeace bid him good morning in reply and I heard him follow her down to the kitchen; the dining room was never used now. The cloths and silver had all gone to the likes of Old Sweet at a trifle of their worth.

  I tucked the pouch into my pocket and followed down the stairs. I heard Fookes’s voice alive with the morning, all confidence to Makepeace’s quiet questions, and I felt resentment rise in me as I walked into the kitchen.

  Fookes stood up and his napkin fell to the ground as I entered; he quickly swooped it up and nodded at me.

  “Morning, Miss Eglantine,” he said and I was embarrassed by his manners. Makepeace was bent over the stove, sausages spitting fat in the pan.

  “Good morning,” I said quietly and took my seat, poured tea into my cup, and wished for the usual balance of quiet that Makepeace and I thrived upon. Fookes was unaware; he crowded the kitchen with his company.

  “Did you sleep well?” he said, all brightness, and I wanted to tell him that he was as noisy as the newly planned railway trapped in a wooden box. If only I had all his little hammers and nails I’d shut him up.

  “Well,” I said, hoping he’d leave me to my breakfast, but he would not be stopped, he was all rolling stone and I was moss.

  “The river is mighty noisy, isn’t it?” he said by way of making conversation.

  Makepeace walked over with the pan and slid the sausages onto his plate. “You’ll grow used to it, Mr Fookes,” she said.

  “I’m sure I will,” he said amiably, sticking his knife into a sausage and spearing it with his fork, before it disappeared into his mouth and he was blessedly silent for a moment.

  I drank my tea and felt my appetite disappear with the longing for quiet, to hear my own thoughts, my fingers pressing the roundness of the pouch as if it was a fruit I was checking for ripeness, trying to feel what it contained, its skin taut as rosehip. The bell rang at the door and Makepeace stood and went to answer it, her chatelaine its own little echo, leaving me alone with the sound of Mr Fookes, his cheery nature shining out of him so that I averted my eyes to avoid his smile.

  “How long have you lived here, Miss Eglantine?” he said, and I was forced to look up at him, unused to the dance of polite conversation.

  “Most of my life,” I replied. “This house is my father’s house.” I smelled the start of something burning.

  His eyes followed me as I took a cloth, opened the stove and rescued Makepeace’s loaf that had started to turn from gold to brown. I tipped it out onto a board, the steam from it swelling the kitchen with the sweetness of yeast.

  “Your father, is he …” Fookes began.

  I placed the bread on the table, shaking so much that a knife fell into the butter, sending a golden smear onto the cloth.

  “He’s not dead,” I said. “Not that we know of.” My voice quavered and I grew angry with myself. Makepeace and I had tied the ends of our lives together and remade the knot, and here was Fookes snapping at it with his questions like a loose thread. “He was transported to your beloved Colony,” I said and watched Fookes’s face lose all its curious, kind shine. I felt a gust of air come down the stairs as Makepeace closed the front door, I breathed it in, lightened by saying it, the words free.

  Makepeace came back down into the kitchen, tucking a piece of paper into her apron, and I looked at her stricken face, worried she’d overheard me. Fookes would be leaving us sooner than we thought after my outburst, he’d not want to lodge with us now.

  “Tell us of your people, Mr Fookes,” Makepeace said, falling into the nearest chair, her hands in her pocket.

  Fookes told us of his mother and father and his six brothers and sisters on the small farm holding. How his oldest brother would take over the farm, how he’d gone and got him apprenticed to the shoemaker in the nearest village. A kindly man who’d offered him a share of his business on completion of his appre
nticeship, but Fookes didn’t want to be tied to the village, not when he’d heard that there were fortunes to be made in the Colony.

  He looked at me then and smiled, but at what? Was he gloating? I looked over at Makepeace, she was a million miles away.

  “Fortunes?” Makepeace echoed. She picked up the teapot and poured, a spill into her saucer.

  “Yes, Mrs Makepeace, fortunes. If it’s not the wool and the sheep there for the grazing, it’s for supplying all the things that money can buy. I plan to set myself up a shop in Richmond, along the Hawkesbury River, the ripest of places, to make the finest footwear that money can buy, the best crafted shoes that the Colony has seen.” He was all hope and optimism. They were strange things to find in our house, as if a celandine had taken root in the kitchen damp and had unfurled its double crown of yellow petals and drawn my eyes against my will. We had become seasonless with my father gone. Spring came as a surprise and Fookes’s brightness made me angry that he was here and my father was not, sitting in his chair full of his grand plans. He’d made Makepeace and me living ghosts haunting the house of his making. And here was Fookes, oblivious, drunk on his dreams and his chances; he’d make his fortune if he couldn’t find one. My only skill was to take another’s fortune. My jealousy turned in me like a curling snake.

  I stood to leave and wished Mr Fookes good day. Makepeace poured the tea from her saucer into her cup and banished it in a sip. I turned to leave.

  “Miss Eglantine?” Fookes said, and I looked at him. “Is your shoe giving you trouble? I can fix it later if you like.”

  I looked down at my shoe, my stockinged heel peeking out like a shy foreigner.

  “Thank you,” Makepeace said on my behalf when I wasn’t forthcoming with a response.

  I leapt the stairs to the nursery and slammed the door when I got there, delighting in the echo of it across the house, the reply of the glass rattling in the windows. What was I doing in this house? All my father’s ideas for me had come to fruition, I was merely his instrument with only one purpose.

  I took the pouch from my pocket and rolled it in my palm. What would my mother have wanted for me? Surely she wouldn’t have wanted me to live as a thief, trapped by my father’s expectations, without the chance to become the woman I was meant to be.

  Very carefully I undid the leather tie around the neck of the pouch, vigilantly avoiding the knot that had been left tied in the cord that would have hung around her throat. At first the leather wouldn’t give way, it had grown as old and hard as shoelace; I plucked at it gently, persistently with my nail until it gave a little space for me to be able to untwine it, dirt sprinkling in my hand. With the lace free, the pouch still remained closed; it sat like a bulb in my hand ready for the earth. I listened to the house, but all was quiet. I got up and superstitiously closed the window; whatever remnant of my mother had remained in this small leather pouch small as a hare’s heart, I wanted it to remain with me.

  The leather had fused at the top of the pouch, the sides of it dried together like a healed wound. One part at a time I pulled it open until the contents were revealed to me in a circle of leather.

  My hands shook. My heartbeat kept time with hers, it had measured my life from its earliest beginnings. Only now I sensed how the absence of her had marked my life apart.

  Here were her precious little things. Four seeds, a tarnished threepence from the year of my birth. A thin gold wedding band. A baby’s tooth, an iron needle, a lock of my dark hair tied with a delicate thread. The confetti of dried flowers, some crumbled, some petrified, some folded back into themselves as if returning to the bud. A tiny branch of coral. A patch of ragged red velvet. A smooth white stone. Each thing I picked up and held in my palm I marvelled at – these things my mother had kept so close to her, lining them up in size from largest to smallest, wondering at each of them, letting them roll in my palm, feeling my mother’s presence in every one.

  I hardly heard Makepeace come in.

  “She’s in the room with us, you know, she always has been,” Makepeace whispered as she cautiously stepped over the threshold and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. “It is the tradition to destroy all of the dead’s possessions, home, horse, clothes, so the spirit does not linger. Your father knew that, but still he kept that putsi.” Around the house floorboards creaked slowly one after another, though no feet stirred.

  “What was she like?” I asked. The more I thought of her face the more it receded from my memory.

  Makepeace sat beside me on the quilt; the seeds rolled towards her, disappearing beneath her seat, and she carefully plucked them out.

  “She was young, too young to die. And she loved you fiercely.”

  I swept the tears from my eyes. “What are they?” I had no idea what those seeds were for.

  Makepeace rolled them around her palm. “These are beans, dried beans. They are to cast a fortune,” Makepeace continued. “Four in a row means someone is coming, two grouped to the left mean a man, two to the right mean a woman.”

  “You can’t really suggest that they can predict a fortune?” I asked incredulously, gathering up all the other little contents and tucking them back in the pouch.

  “I don’t know,” Makepeace said, weighing them in her hand.

  “Cast them for me,” I said bluntly and Makepeace looked up from the beans. A wind whipped up outside and sent a gust of air down the chimney and around our legs like a homeless cat.

  “It’s been a long time. It is something we would do in the camp in lean times in winter, when no one wanted our hand-made bone buttons or wicker baskets or their pots and pans mended. We’d knock on the doors of the big houses and cast fortunes for scullery maids and valets and occasionally the lady of the house if the master was out. I just read the beans as I saw them.”

  “Cast them,” I repeated and the wind pitched itself against the window and shook in its pane, startling us.

  Makepeace closed her eyes and ran her fingers over the beans, her face creased in concentration, her lips moving silently, before she shook them in her fist in each direction and dropped them palm down, fingers outstretched, and together we watched as they fell, weightless as snow. I looked at their resting place and saw no discernible pattern. Makepeace looked at them ashen-faced, but they communicated to her and to her alone. Four little beans that had survived all this time, polished as pearls and buffed by the nap interior of the leather pouch.

  “What does it say?” I prodded, the silence growing, muffling my ears.

  “Nothing,” she said with finality and swept the beans into her palm.

  I grabbed her wrist. “Tell me,” I demanded.

  She looked at me, her cheeks growing red, a thin line of perspiration atop her lips, so I squeezed her wrist harder, feeling the frailty of her bones as she flexed her hand beneath my grasp. I released her, ashamed of myself.

  “A journey is what they said, a journey beyond all you know, a crossing, a departure of no return,” she said very quietly.

  My sorrow swelled up within and crashed down upon me. Makepeace poured the beans back into the pouch carefully, tenderly patting them back into the safety of their skin, and I flinched, expecting the righteous deserts of a slap.

  “But not alone, Eglantine, not alone,” she hummed and patted my hair. “Far from alone. Beans are but seeds after all.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Eglantine, 1838

  Until Fookes mended my shoes I held doubts as to whether his word was true or not. That case full of his tools looked barely used, but Fookes held good to his word. I left my shoes at his door last thing at night, waiting as my head hit the pillow for the strike and ring of those fine silver-headed hammers and nails, but I heard not a thing. In the morning, like a fairy story, they were more than repaired at my door, they had been fully restored to an even better state than the original shoemaker had made them. The heel had been hammered back into the sole, the leather had been buffed and shined. I took them back into the nursery an
d slipped them on, and there I saw what he’d done. On the sole of one shoe he’d tooled a flower, an eglantine. On the other shoe he’d tooled the hips. All of me stiffened with anger: what did he expect in return? My mind frothed with what I would say to him, the licence, the indignity, what gave him the right?

  Something scratched at my toe. Out on the floor fell his card – FRANCIS FOOKES SHOEMAKER – finest leathers and craftsmanship. May the Manufacturers of the Sons of Crispin be trod upon by all the World – and it took all the wind out of me. He should have tooled all the thorns, because that is what I was, no petals, no hips, just half-wild and full of prickles.

  I went down the stairs and knocked on his door, all ready with my thanks and appreciation, but there was no sound from within the room, so I knocked again. My knuckles on the wood went unanswered. Had he already gone down to breakfast? I listened for sounds in the kitchen, but there was no rise and fall of voices. My curiosity overrode my better judgment and I pushed open the door a little, expecting to see him asleep in the bed, but I saw nothing, the room neat, the bed appeared not to have been slept in. On the threshold I waited, straining to hear any sound of movement in the house, before I let the room swallow me.

  Inside, the smell of lavender soap engulfed me; his towel on the nightstand was damp. On the floor a telltale drop of sudsy bubble, a rainbow caught in its white net, a dark whisker from his shaving. Across the dresser he’d made a makeshift workshop, all his tools rolled out on a piece of leather to protect the wood, the old nails of my shoes bent in a pile.

  My fingers lingered on the drawer and I pulled it out, my heart skipping a beat; the joints long since beeswaxed made a small scream, wood on wood. There were all his linens, his clothes, his neckcloths, his trousers – all filling one drawer. My fingers slid around the edges of them, testing for the thing I sensed but couldn’t see, a sense all their own, so that I was able to slide out the oblong shape I felt beneath Fookes’s things without one item of clothing losing its folded edge.