The River Sings

by Sandra Leigh Price

  It was a morning for washing, the sun already striking under the curtains with the promise of heat. Makepeace asked me to strip all the sheets in the house as she got the copper ready. I knocked on Mr Fookes’s door and he bid me enter, the curtain already pulled back, sunshine spilling on the floor. He was sitting on a chair in his shirtsleeves, hammering at a piece of leather between his knees as he fixed a sole to a shoe.

  “Miss Eglantine,” he said, leaping up and sending the nails he had resting between his lips spinning across the floor like so many compass needles all seeking their north. Immediately I stepped in and bent low to help gather them as Fookes did also, our heads hitting together. His forehead met my cheekbone with a smash.

  “Oh dear Lord,” Mr Fookes said, rushing towards me on hands and knees, and I leaned back against his bed, my hand to my face, all the world condensed to the brightness of my pain. Fookes pulled my hand away and ran his fingers over my cheek, the pads rough like a cat’s tongue, and I sat dumbfounded.

  “Are you hurt, Miss Eglantine, does it hurt when I touch you?” he asked. It did the opposite of hurt. It felt like a spark newly kindled. He looked at me with such concern that I felt a laugh bubble up in me against my will and spill out, but he took my laughter for a cry. “Forgive me, Miss Eglantine, I’ll get Mrs Makepeace,” he said, his face so earnest and remorseful.

  “Please, Mr Fookes, I’ll be fine in a moment,” I said, feeling the laughter bubble up inside me again, knowing how cruel it would be if I let it free. A tear hung in my eye, fractured with light before it escaped and ran down.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, taking a handkerchief from his pocket, clean and unsullied, a plain piece of linen free of initials, free of spoils hidden in the corners, and offered it to me. I took it. Both of us still sitting on the floor, our spines resting, side by side.

  “Mr Fookes,” I began.

  “Francis will do,” he said.

  “Likewise Eglantine.”

  I looked at him again but found I didn’t know what to say, all my words had been extinguished just by the proximity of him.

  “Let me take those,” he said and carefully took the nails from my hand. I let him take them when I could have easily just tipped them into his palm. He gently opened my fingers and together we looked at the dents they had made in my skin, phantom pink nails printed in my flesh.

  “I’m sorry, I should have looked where I was going,” I said. “I’ll be all right in a few moments and I’ll leave you to get on with your work,” I added, the throb beginning in my cheek. “What are you making?”

  Fookes leapt up from his place beside me and I felt the draught rush into the space where he had been and was only too glad when he retrieved the half-made shoe and returned to the floor beside me. “It’s the latest fashion,” he said and handed me the dainty slipper. I slid my hand into it and looked at the shape of it against my skin; the leather was soft but strong.

  “It’s not finished yet, but it will be soon. I’ve made a dance shoe into a leather shoe, for the changed conditions.”

  “Fit for the princess, soon to be queen,” I said and he broke into a broad grin.

  “Let me show you something,” he said. He got up again and went to his drawer, his hands locating the corners of the book, and I felt a quick flash of shame. I’d looked through his things and taken his money, I had trespassed on someone who’d shown me only kindness. I thought I was going to be sick. Again he took his place beside me.

  “My uncle was a shoemaker, it was him who I was apprenticed to,” he said as he laid the book open on our laps, diligent not to knock the corners of the pages; this was his precious thing – a thing of print and paper – what worth would my father find in it? Nothing metal shone. Was Fookes trying to catch me out? Did he know? I kept my eyes on the book and off his face, listening for the catch in his voice.

  “One day a fellow came to get his shoes repaired, in poor form they were, and my uncle did his best to breathe new life into the old leather, cutting a new sole. My uncle said he was a rather strange character, scented with gin when he came to collect the shoes; though he had nothing to pay for their retrieval he was most desirous of their return as they’d travelled all the way around the world, he having arrived from the Colony with his daughter. His name was Lycett. In offer for my uncle’s services he gave my uncle this fine copy of the book he’d made.” Fookes ran his hand over the page with a proud caress. “And my uncle in turn gave it to me, a gift upon my leaving.”

  “I thought you’d leave our company after you found out about my father,” I said bluntly, feeling the weight of the book on my lap, knowing that the pages hummed with light.

  Fookes looked me straight in the eye. “Why would I do that? It’s not your crime, it’s not your punishment,” he said and all of me wanted to believe him – we’d taken our succour from my father’s thefts, just as much as from mine. My mother had lived a life upon the open road, but all I had was the make-do of the wind in the windows, the sounds of the river, the water that seeped up through the foundations of our house as if trying to carve for me a road made of damp for my feet to walk upon. My pouch in my pocket rolled. Was this why the house kept trying to give itself away to water, was she trying to liberate me in the only way she could?

  “After all, if Mr Lycett can return a free and changed man, who’s to say your father can’t?” Fookes said brightly, trying to cheer me, turning the page for me to see the glowing light, each picture seeming to capture the dawn or dusk of the day, a pink flush. With each page turned, the air stirred and I looked at Fookes’s face beside me, lit by its own glow. He didn’t know what crime I had committed against him. Makepeace called up the stairs for the sheets.

  Makepeace said nothing when I went down with the sheets bundled like folded sails in my arms, but she looked at the bruise forming like a blue pansy on my face, her hands reaching out to touch it, and I stepped away, unsure why.

  That night when the house was still I woke up with all my senses spiked and alert. I sat up in bed, perspiration dripping from me. I knew what I must do. My feet cat-quiet, I tiptoed into Fookes’s room and stood listening to his breathing. In the dark I made out his arm flung over his head, his covers kicked to the foot of the bed. The drawer opened with a squeak and I cursed silently as I slid the money back into the secret slot, smoothing down the pages until I was satisfied their disturbance would remain undetected. Fookes turned in the bed and I felt my heart thud, and I froze. Fookes mumbled and then slid back into his dreams. Before I left, I nimbly drew the blankets up over him.

  Fookes’s door barely closed with a click when I heard something slide through the letter slot in the front door, light as breath, and I was down the stairs, propelled by my fear. There on the floor was an envelope. I swung open the door, not caring that I was in my nightgown, not caring that it was night. All the sounds of the river sang loud – the lapping of high tide, the carousing of voices far in the distance, the cut and sluice of a boat on the water, a cat wailing on a wall. I ran down the front stairs, to the road, but look as I might in both directions, all I could make out was shadow.

  Reluctantly I returned to the house and carefully closed the door, not wanting to rouse Makepeace or Fookes. I lit a candle and tried to still my hands, the contents making a shape in the paper, the writing addressed to Makepeace and me as per usual. The paper was damp and made no noise when I tore it open – again, there was nothing written inside, my father knew nothing but his name – but there was a flower there, the petals intact and true, not pressed with time and sea air, not a clock of time’s passing but newly plucked, vivid with life, small as it was. A forget-me-not.

  At breakfast the next morning Fookes sat opposite me, his eyes wandering to the bruise that crowned my face. Makepeace had already given me comfrey to take its thundercloud colour away, the blue of forget-me-not, but I said nothing of that either, it remained in my pocket.

  “Mrs Makepeace, with your permission, would Eglantine accompa
ny me today? I’ve some things to buy for my kit and I would like a woman’s opinion,” Fookes said before finishing his bread and butter.

  Makepeace took a long glance at me and at Fookes. “As long as you are back by dark, I don’t see why not. But please bring her back, Mr Fookes, with fewer bruises than you find her with.” Fookes blushed before he bustled out of the kitchen to ready himself.

  “Am I to have no say in it?” I asked as Makepeace wiped her face with her hands and rested them on the table.

  “Would you dislike it so much?”

  The kitchen seemed too hot, too stifling. The weather was turning, as was I. My mother’s pouch bounced in my pocket as I stood up.

  “Go on, Eglantine, soak up the sunshine like a sponge.”

  I took the latest post from my pocket and passed it to her. “Won’t you join us?” I said. Makepeace looked pale; when was the last time she had seen the sun?

  She peered into the envelope and tucked it into her blouse.

  “Next time. Too long we’ve lived like birds in a cage, my dear, we’ll have forgotten how to use our wings.”

  I looked at Makepeace, she wouldn’t meet my eye.

  By the time I retrieved my bonnet and coat, Fookes was waiting for me, his hat in his hands, the brim spinning through his fingers, making a circumference of it, a small globe. Together we stepped out into the street. I paused for a moment and I let the sun seep into my skin, beneath my eyelashes, like a river made of gold.

  Fookes offered me his arm and I looked at it, unsure of what he meant by his deliberately protruding elbow before I realised what was being offered, his safe escort. I wrapped my arm around it and felt the heat of him through the fabric of his coat sleeve, and was glad to take it for the city as we came closer was all hub, an assault on my ears; each street we moved through overlapped the roar of the next until I felt I was under the water. Makepeace was right, we’d both been cooped up too long – chained to the house as if it was our keeper.

  We entered a shop and Fookes ordered all he needed – leathers and nails, a new coat and hat, a few metres of fine silk and velvet – he let me choose the colours – the silk blue, the velvet green. The fabrics to the touch felt like plush; I drew a road with my finger upon the nap. The packages were wrapped in brown paper and string and Fookes offered me his elbow again as we set off.

  “When does your ship sail, Mr Fookes, Francis,” I said. I had grown so accustomed to the sounds of him in the house that I realised it would soon be very silent without him.

  “The day after the Coronation,” he replied. That was only a few weeks away, the shops were already starting to brim with things to celebrate Princess Victoria taking the throne – mugs, flags, ribbons and rosettes all printed with her handsome young face on them. Every time I looked at them I thought of my poor doll down in the dank cellar – had I really stolen her or was that just another tale of my father’s?

  “Do you think she’s looking forward to being the queen?” I asked, feeling pity for her. “The gaze of the world trailing her every movement, the attention on her womb, the wondering when she will spring forth a prince?”

  Fookes stopped then looked at me and I felt his arm stiffen beneath mine. Had I offended him?

  “Would that be so bad? To marry the man of her choosing, for them to make a little family of their own?” he said, the street moving on around us. “Who’d care what the world thought, the world be damned.”

  An elderly woman walking past with a basket full of turnips, the dirt raining down her skirt, muttered under her breath at his language, but for me his words were a spark. Would that be so bad, to start out anew, have my own family, shake off the ties that bound me to the house by the river, to the actions of my father? Would he have me if he knew? When I said nothing, Fookes and I walked on. His packages wrapped up in brown paper and string occasionally hit my legs, my fingers brushed against the opening of his waistcoat pocket, a fingertip on the lip of the lining, my fingers swimming in and out of the pocket as my father had taught me, but I hit upon something, calloused and warm, Fookes’s own fingers met mine through a slit in the lining, the frayed edges tangling our fingers together.

  Our fingers were joined like two fishes as we walked along the riverside, the river like a glistening road, two seagulls taking their rest side by side, their orange beaks crossed, bobbing along the water, until the sight of the house made me extract my hand, feeling all the windows were eyes.

  Inside Fookes smiled at me, then hauled his packages upstairs.

  “Makepeace, I’m back,” I called but she didn’t reply. In the kitchen the fire had died down, but the smells of bread and meat were still thick in the air. Her bedroom door was ajar, but she wasn’t inside. My fingers held air in my pocket. Where would be the harm in retrieving my doll?

  The cellar door took some shoving, the wood having swelled in the damp. The stairs wetter and darker than I remembered, my foot slipped with each step. I retraced my steps, retrieved a candle and took it down the stairs with me, my hand shielding the flame as it danced, the pucker and suck. The walls had grown greener. The pillowcase still sat at the bottom of the stairs and, resting the candle on a stair, I lifted it, feeling the moisture on its edges and braced myself for finding my doll turned into something rotten and green like an ear of unripe corn. But as I reached into the pillowcase, my hand found nothing, the whole thing had been emptied, drained. I shook it, turned it inside out, but not even a dust dolly remained. I held the candle aloft and looked throughout the cellar – the low-lying puddle like a mirror at the bottom, the river rising up through the ground, the invisible member of our household. Something floated on the surface, I fished out the item with my shoe. A plain pocket handkerchief made of coarse stuff, old and worn and unfamiliar. Could it have been in the pillowcase and floated down? Had it been there since I brought the pillowcase down to the cellar? But if it had, wouldn’t it have sunk by now? I dropped the handkerchief on the stairs, the haste of my movements extinguishing the light.

  The kitchen was still bare of life. I walked slowly up the stairs, my shoes slippery with water and slime; I could see the trace of my footsteps behind me. I went past Fookes’s room and heard him happily whistling. The sound of it broke my panic, but my toes grew colder, the ice travelling up my spine, shooting down my arms.

  Back in my room I flicked off my shoes, the toes of my stockings tinged green, and leaned behind the door, feeling the house shift beneath my feet, my breath ragged. Sitting on my bed, as if the room was inhabited by the ghost of the child I had been, was my little wooden tuck-comb doll, her dress fringed with the same green tint as my stockings, like lace made of purslane, her hands limp. The glass of her earrings still shone. Her painted face still dear and sweet, her little mouth as red as a rosehip. Who had put her here? Makepeace? The ghost of my mother? I picked up my doll and held her, the familiar shape of her in my hands made me feel small and insignificant, as if my hands had been made only to hold her, her wood carved to fit their shape.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Patrin, 1821

  How quickly the wheel turned, our fates caught now in the spokes of it, trampling us beneath. We were taken to a holding cell, dank and crowded, but I kept all my attention on Little Egg in the hope it would keep her from the darkness and desperation that surrounded us. She asked for her papa, her arms hot and sticky around my neck, tears leading her to exhaustion. She slumped in my arms that barely had the strength to hold her up with the throb that emanated from them. Amberline. There wasn’t a part of me that wasn’t angry at him; for all the sacrifices made for him, he treated us like any other piece of silver to be melted down for his own purpose. We were but shining things that had caught his fancy, not for what we were but for how we all of us could serve. My father, my mother, myself and Little Egg lost to the fire of his ambition.

  All the other bodies pressed around us, their smells overwhelming me. I rested my back on the bars, their cold a comfort, slipped down to the ground and slept.
My mother came to me in my dreams, her hand brushing the hair from my face, and I longed for her to speak to me, to hear her voice that had comforted me when I was a child, woken from a bad dream in the vardo, the footsteps of the magpies on the roof as they rattled at the dawn. I woke hearing my own name with a fierce ache. My mother was gone, the vardo was ash and there was no dawn seeping from the horizon.

  “Patrin.”

  I blinked. Amberline’s mother was on the other side of the bars. “Patrin,” she said and I struggled to understand where I was, disoriented. Little Egg’s tight grip around my neck brought me vividly back to my surrounds.

  “Patrin,” she said, “take this.” She thrust a bottle through the bars, but the distance felt too far for me to reach, though she was close enough. My arms felt like anchors. Mrs Stark took the cork out of the bottle and pushed it through the bars again, bidding me drink. This time I managed to reach out my weighted arms and the bitter liquid trickled through my cracked lips, spilling onto my clothes, splashing onto Little Egg’s head, though she didn’t wake.

  “Patrin,” she said, but I could barely stay awake. “This is no place for a child. Let me take Eglantine, let me keep her safe,” she said, and I felt all of me spring to alertness, all of me not fuel for the fever just yet.

  “A child’s place is with her mother,” I said.

  “Patrin, please, think of the child.” She reached out to touch a part of Egg’s exposed soft arm.

  “I am thinking of my child,” I said, feeling ears listen amongst the crowded cell, but that didn’t deter me. There was one bucket for thirty or so women to relieve themselves in; we had only the privacy of our own hearts.

  “I know what your father did to save him, Patrin. Now let me save your daughter as Josiah saved my son,” Mrs Stark said and Little Egg stirred in my arms.

  “What of Amberline? Too much of a coward to come now, too much of a coward to come forward then,” I said, easing my tight grip on Egg’s arm. She sighed in her sleep, her breath feathered on my neck. “I’ll not give her to you, she’s all I have in the world, Amberline’s seen to that,” I said.