The River Sings

by Sandra Leigh Price

  There in my hands was a book, too thin to be a Bible. The red cloth boards were stained and worn. I opened the cover and saw the strange beast and bird on a verdant page and I felt the cold spread down my arms, numbing my fingers. Views of Australia. I peered into the image as if it were merely a window, with a childish hope of seeing my father there, a bright dot on the horizon. I flicked through the pages with desperation, almost squinting at the light on each page – a moon pausing through its transit to peer through the clouds at a Romany camp. I blinked again, the people were the natives. Another page, the township glowed against the green, the body of bright water, a little figure in a blue coat made me hesitate, his back towards me.

  Downstairs the clock struck the hour and I hurriedly flicked to the end of the book, ready to return it to the drawer, to hide any sign of my trespass, ready to fold all the light and shade of those images into my mind as I would a jewel to wonder at its facets, when I saw the false back to the book. Outside, a magpie clittered and my fingers itched to see what was in the false space. I heard the front bell chime and Makepeace’s slow ascent from the kitchen below. I slid off the false endpaper, made of card, just a fingertip width to see what was inside, struck with the ingeniousness of it, when I saw the wedge of notes, a hundred pounds or more.

  I’d never seen so much money in one place; I ran my fingers over it. How long would that much keep us going? My father had the ability to fan money and know its count, but that was a skill I hadn’t mastered. Here was Fookes’s fortune already, the money with which he’d build his shop and his new life, kept safe in the secret of the book. My fingers knew what they were doing before I did; they skimmed the surface of the pile, gentle as a breeze, and slipped what I had taken into my pocket. I slid the false endpaper back into place and concealed the book carefully in amongst the linens where I’d found it, even more disgusted with myself than when I had entered. What stopped me from a new life? My father had worn the convict chains, not I, yet why did I feel their weight? The sins of the father carried on the weight of his child, they were a warning, yet they were not enough to deter me. My father perhaps had been right, what else had my hands been moulded for, but this?

  I closed the door to the room and made my way down the stairs. Makepeace stood at the front door.

  “Have you seen Mr Fookes?” I said. “I wanted to thank him for mending my shoes.” But Makepeace didn’t answer me. She remained standing with her back to me. “What is it? Who was at the door?” I said, feeling the uneasiness seep up through my feet and hands, feeling the urge to bolt the door.

  Makepeace turned and looked at me and I saw that something had frightened her. An envelope was in her hand.

  “Come with me,” she said and I gave her my elbow to lean upon, her footsteps uneven. She seemed glad for the steadying weight of my arm. We made our way down to the kitchen, the remains of breakfast long since over. Two cups of old tea. A plate scraped clean. She led me to her room.

  “Sit,” she said and handed me the envelope. It was addressed to us both. I bristled, the envelope had already been opened, why hadn’t we opened it together? Inside the envelope was one small single sheet of paper folded in half with some sort of plant wedged between its fold.

  “Careful now,” Makepeace said and I took heed, slowly unfolding the paper. There was nothing written on the page, not a word. Inside were only the pressed petals of some sort of golden-flowered plant, the pollen smeared a mirror image on the opposite part of the folded page. I leaned down and smelled it. Sunshine. I picked up the envelope again, there was no return address.

  “What is this plant?” I asked.

  But Makepeace shook her head and pulled out a book from her bureau, a small Bible, my heart making a racket in my chest.

  “Open it,” she said and I flicked back through all the Lord’s words to the once blank pages, and read the names and dates written with different hands, the light of a small window barely bright enough to read by.

  There was Amberline Stark joined to my mother’s name Patrin Scamp 1818 with my name and birthdate beneath. And then there was my father’s name joined to Ada Fitzroy 1821. These marriages proved what I had always known, that my father had had two wives. I slammed the Bible shut.

  Patrin, Patrin – my mother’s name. I said it aloud in the stuffy room and my hand reached for the doll in my pocket as was my habit, but she was in the cellar. “Patrin,” I said again and my palm burned hot. I said her name a third time and her love for me tore through my chest, a physical thing. I needed her more than ever. At the small windowsill sat Makepeace’s little garden pots – the foxgloves bursting through the soil, a pot of straggly rosemary, comfrey. A remedy in each. If only a plant could be pounded by the mortar and pestle to make a simple to fix my situation. But it was I, Eglantine, who was the green thing, pounded by life and circumstance, destined to be turned into something else, but a remedy for what?

  Makepeace opened the Bible again and pulled out more envelopes that I hadn’t seen, four in all. She laid them out on the coverlet in the order they had arrived and then placed the contents on top of them, a strange posy. A strange blossom pressed and preserved, the petals red and waxy curlicues. A strange sparse daisy-like thing that felt like flannel beneath the fingers. Tubular scarlet blooms tipped with white, strung in a row delicate as a necklace. The most fragile flower was a vibrant purple, each of its petals delicately fringed like something one would find at the haberdasher’s rather than something nature would make. I sighed and the yellow pom-poms of pollen, the most recent arrivals, rolled off their paper and onto Makepeace’s coverlet.

  “I’ve never seen any of these flowers in my life, if that is what they are,” she said, “and I know not the uses of them.” She looked at me. “But I know who sent them. One each year.”

  “But no letter? No words?”

  “Sadly, though he tried, he never learned them. He was unable to sit still, always moving.”

  The thought of my father finding these plants, picking them and finding someone to address them to us filled me with sadness. Who knew what hardships he’d had to endure, what his loss of us had been to him? What sort of life had he carved for himself out of that wilderness? I thought of Fookes’s book with its hidden fortune, its strange beasts and birds, its glowing pages of land and water. I had willed that little figure in the blue coat to turn around and speak to me, and now he did, his voice flowers. My mother was as mysterious as a ghost, but my father had raised me, even if it was in his peculiar way, yet now I hardly recalled the details of his face, the texture of his voice. I’d been but a girl when he left, would he even recognise me? Makepeace lifted the blooms and placed them carefully back into their corresponding envelopes, a dust of pollen on her hand.

  Fookes was waiting for us in the kitchen when I came out, his coat shoulders damp with mist, a fine net of it weighting the ends of his curls, his eyes falling straight to my feet.

  “Are they to your satisfaction, Miss Eglantine?” he said.

  He tried to rein in the optimism in his voice, his hope coiling up through him like a vine. I stood and looked at him and I saw it, caught it fleeting yet unguarded, his high regard for me. Blood rushed to the tips of my ears. Why else had he taken his awl and made his pictures for me, except for a show of his handicraft and regard?

  “They are fine, Mr Fookes, very fine indeed.”

  It was Mr Fookes’s turn to blush then, his mouth breaking into a grin.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Patrin, 1821

  Egg gave a small shout; Amberline had returned, looking finer than ever in his new clothes, flushed almost. A lone white flower hung deprived of water in his buttonhole. Where had he been? Our daughter ran out to him, flying into his arms, and he kissed her scarlet cheeks until she crowed. He placed her back down on the ground gently and looked at me, his hands running down the length of Egg’s braids, seemingly thinking they had grown. He pulled out a reed that had caught in her hair and thought nothing of it, just t
ossed it onto the flames.

  “Patrin?” he said, his hand blessedly cold on my face.

  “Papa, Papa,” Egg sparkled and the weight of my answer hung in the room. Was our secret going to come out of her mouth? Would she give us away?

  Little Egg clambered up into his arms. My tongue was as dry as a husk in my mouth.

  “Patrin?” He walked over to the bed, pulled back the covers and looked at my arm that felt as if it was writhing, turning into a fish, all my skin shimmering from side to side.

  I heard the scrape of the bucket, the slam of the door, the slop of his return as he came back with it filled from the well. He brought in a bowl of water laced with salt and dabbed a cloth drenched with the saltwater onto my arm. It stung but the fever was lapping me in waves. Still I burned. When I woke again strips of bark were pressed up against my arm, tied carefully with rag, a cold flannel on my head. He held a cup of water he was trying to get me to sip, but I barely found the space in my throat to swallow.

  When I opened my eyes again Amberline and Little Egg were at the table, their voices low. With a calloused thumb he peeled the thick flesh of an orange.

  “Watch this, Eglantine,” he said and drew her to him, squeezed the orange skin so a fizz of fragrant oil arced across the room, hitting a beam of sunlight. Egg tried herself, but had not the strength in her fingers to release the golden spray. Amberline popped a segment of orange in her mouth instead and her eyes crinkled and lit up at the taste. The room was bright with the smell of oranges.

  From her pinafore pocket Egg pulled a small doll made of wood, dressed in the finest silk, embroidered with delicate red roses across the bodice and sleeves, picked out again at the hem. I’d never seen the doll before; where had she got it? A blue silk sash shimmered around her waist. I tried to sit up in the bed. Around her doll’s face were dark little curls, framing inquisitive eyes, a bright curious painted smile and rouged cheeks. From her little ears hung two glass earrings. In the doll’s arms was a tiny baby, bonnet edged with the same embroidery as the mama, its minuscule mouth a red dot. The cold wound down my back, but Egg was so absorbed in the dainty sweetness of her new treasure that she thought of nothing else. I recalled the little blonde girl with her dolls in the long grass and their picnic of petals.

  “Where did you get it from?” Amberline asked.

  “It’s mine,” Little Egg said, her words sounding true, but I saw through the glass of them to her wanting. By saying it aloud she attempted to make it true. “I took her.”

  “What a fine creature she is, fit for a queen. You are the apple of your father’s eye.” He smiled at her, his hand on her hair, praising her.

  What had I done? Here she was emptying her pockets like her father did. I was as much a thief as Amberline was, for I had taken Little Egg’s chance to have the life she deserved, what else could my Little Egg be but a thief’s daughter?

  Egg crawled into his lap and began looking in his pockets, and with each brush of her hand against the lining he squashed it flat against his jacket and she laughed. He closed his eyes, waiting for her fingers to dart in and out. The more she tried the more she laughed, until her fingers looped on something. She pulled it out gleefully and marvelled at her catch, a piece of marzipan shaped like an apple. He’d set the bait for her to find, starting to teach her his ways, but where would that lead her? At what cost to herself? Amberline caressed her face and delighted in her relish of it, as she chewed through the painted red flesh and winced at the sweetness. Marzipan was not so sweet after all.

  In the night the fever swelled. I kicked the blanket off and drowned back into sleep, but when I managed to pull my eyes open again the world turned to water, our room filled with it quickly as a bucket from the stream. Egg sat on the side of my bed, her hair rippling upwards with the current. Her new little doll and its muslin baby darted in amongst the reeds of her hair. A row of little bubbles leaked out of her mouth like a strand of pearls.

  Little Egg, I called and found my mouth and lungs full with water. She looked up and with a kick of her legs floated above the bed, her arms wavering through the water. She bid me follow. My limbs were weightless. Little Egg flung open the door and I reached for her shoe, but it came away in my hand, an oyster shell. Once out of the door the street had vanished.

  In its place was a river and it pulled me with its will, the current its fingers. Egg turned and made sure I was behind her, her little hand unfurling to reach mine. The dolls were like cleaner fish, hovering close to her arms, closer than I could get. I kicked against the water, trying desperately to make for the surface, but the river was master and the waters rose higher. The river weed twined around my ankles and pulled me down, my hand reached for Little Egg, but she was further down.

  On the riverbed, in the streaming green light, the sound of the water bubbling in my ears, was a large figure reclining on a bed of purple loosestrife, Ragged-Robin and cuckoo flower. Above me the world darkened as the lily pads closed ranks and dimmed the light. I clutched at the roots of the trees with my fingertips, trying to find my way down. Something whipped past my eyes and I reached for it, hoping it was Little Egg’s hand but it was just the knobbly flower of the bur-reed. The figure was concealed in the silt, but I knew that eye.

  Little Egg’s doll now fluttered around me and I saw the ripples of her breath slice through the water. A large barnacled hand rushed through the water in front of me, the coil of our hair that I had thrown in the well ringed around his finger, a dark band, reaching towards Egg. I desperately clutched for her fingers, but she was beyond my grasp. The large barnacled hand caught my fingers as if they were merely fish in a net. All of me longed for breath.

  I opened my eyes. Little Egg was holding my hand and I was drenched in sweat. Amberline’s mother sat on a chair beside the bed, the sound of rain from the eaves confused me, the music of the water still clinging to me, a fever dream.

  “Mama,” Egg whispered loudly. I looked at the little wooden doll in her arms, the hem dripping and staining the coverlet.

  “Where is her little one?” I croaked, not realising how rasped my voice had become. Little Egg looked down forsakenly, her hand patting the bedclothes, flipping up the blankets. She poked her head under the bed, but there was no baby there.

  “She will show up,” Amberline’s mother said quietly. “Let your mama rest now, Eglantine.” I tried to look in the bedclothes myself for the missing doll, but my own arms were strapped with stiff bandages and I had not the strength.

  “Rest now,” she said.

  Little Egg slipped off the bed and was flicking back the covers of her own bed, her footsteps prowling all corners of our home. But I knew, try as she might, she’d never find it. The last thing I’d seen of the great barnacled creature was the contents of his other hand, great reedy bobbins cupped like a cradle. Within his fingers’ confines, the tiniest doll, the little ruffle of her bonnet fluttering like a fin, her face like a pearl.

  In the morning the fever had broken and they came. The shanglo, the constables. They knocked on the door and let themselves in when it delayed in opening. They pushed past Little Egg and she fell on her bottom and she howled. I tried to raise her up with my arms, weak as they were, to hold her close.

  “Where is your father?” I whispered into her dark hair.

  Little Egg watched the strangers, in their black muddy boots, making marks all over the floor that I had struggled to keep clean, their rough handling of our few possessions. A cup fell from the table and rolled to the floor. It didn’t break, but it spun on its base around and around, like a spinning top. One of them ran his hands around the lip of the table and there on a hidden shelf he pulled out something wrapped in cloth, his face as animated as Little Egg’s had been as she’d pulled out the marzipan, the victory of it, and I felt the dread pull down at us. As if it was a gift, he unwrapped it slowly, his fingers taking delight in the unveiling, but I knew what it was, I felt it in my arms, licking across my skin. And there it was, the bri
ghtest thing in the whole room, a little gold oblong which had once been the widow’s chatelaine, sunshine captured in metal, and we were to be punished for it. That was the fire for them, their hands overturned everything and they were rewarded for their harvest, for on the ground lay things that Amberline had yet to sell or transform, the floor littered with pieces of silver.

  They put their arms on me and I felt my father’s strength surge in me, they were the rats not I.

  “It will be better if you leave the child with someone, a neighbour,” the shanglo said, but I’d not leave my child with any of them, I’d not release my grasp of her. I shook my head. They gripped my elbow and went to lead me out.

  “For mercy’s sake let me change out of my nightgown and dress my child,” I said and the shanglo holding my elbow looked at me, and I felt the fabric of my nightgown press around me in the draught, worn and thin, sour with the sweat of my fever. The shanglo looked to the door and the chimney and the small pane of our window and saw there’d be no escape, so they left just as they’d come, but I knew they waited on the other side of the doorway, their shadows filtering under it.

  Quickly I dressed Little Egg and myself in every piece of clothing we had, stuffing the pockets with whatever food we had, feeling under our bed for anything Amberline may have stashed there, but found nothing. Just as we shrugged on our coats the door swung open and the shanglos took us away.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Eglantine, 1838

  The longer Fookes stayed in the house the more accustomed to him both Makepeace and I became, so that it seemed implausible that he would be hitching his star to a ship and following it to the other side of the world.