Mrs Stark wiped her face with her hands, took what coins she had in her chatelaine and handed them to me through the bars, along with food wrapped in cloth. She kissed her fingers and reached her hand through the bars to my head. “Saint Sarah keep you safe, Patrin, you are more like your mother than you know.”
My tears pricked at my eyes, but I would not let them fall.
The day came for my sentencing. We were led to the court to face the judges and I pleaded my innocence, but what weight did my words have? They fell through the air like dust. The judges dispensed their verdict, banished for life, without return, banished instead of the noose, and they looked at me as if I should be grateful for their mercy from upon high, but all I thought of was my child. How would I keep her safe?
They came for us in the night-time, chained together, human links in life’s necklace, and bid us step up into a boat. Little Egg, scared of the darkness and the sounds of people crying, cowered with terror in my arms, her little hands gripping my neck.
All the city glittered, lamps, candles, lanterns, lights – all the shine for Amberline – spilling out onto the water, a rippling road made of light, though we were headed to the darkness. All this time I had waited for Amberline to come and see us, to come and say the gold was his, that it had nothing to do with us. I had waited in vain for him, he’d no more save us than His Majesty would.
As the boat pulled away from the shore the sound of people wailing increased, the last of England, the last time of walking the ground of their loved ones, no more to see their faces, we were bound for a living death. I wrapped my cloak around Little Egg and prayed to Saint Sarah to deliver us. The boatmen rowed on the river smooth as a conspiracy, aiding our removal from all we knew, cutting through the water and pulling us onwards, out into the darkness, away from the shore. I longed to put my hand in the water and will the spirit of it to keep us safe, to keep us from moving away with the rower’s current, to hold us still and guide us, every ripple and slap of water a patrin, to guide us back to the shore.
In the distance I saw a ship loom out of the darkness and my heart darted in my chest like a swift, Saint Sarah had heard my cry. But as the boat sculled towards it, I saw it was no ship, that it wasn’t even worthy of the name, it was a ship in shape only. All sails, all masts, all gone. It was only a hull. A lantern was lit and hung off the prow, revealing the red coat of a soldier keeping watch. A cry went up from our boat; I covered Little Egg’s ears, she was stiff with fear, mirroring my own. And the prison hulk before us responded, all those already entombed in her sounded a bitter welcome – the striking of wood on wood, calls and cries, snatches of voices, the shout of names, despair meeting despair. A high-pitched whistle rang above it all.
Our boat saddled aside the hull and a series of ropes was sent down and fixed with knots before we were forced to climb a rickety staircase that ran up the side of the boat like a badly stitched wound. Faces stared at us from close range through the portholes, distorted by the lack of light and the glass. Above a soldier shouted and like cattle we were placed on deck, the chains hitting the wood. Little Egg, exhausted, slept on my shoulder; the creep of fever still swirled in my limbs, but I willed it away, the weight of her head the only thing that kept me tethered. I would keep her safe. On an old and rotten rope whipped someone’s laundry stretched out between two broken masts. The whip and blow of it the most normal sound in the world, but out here in the middle of the waters it sounded like the lungs of death. I looked up at the night sky and every star was extinguished with cloud. They called our names and counted us then led us below. We were the Empire’s slaves.
Down below the deck the smell rushed at us – all the sweaty, sick and crowded were caged together like animals and we to join them. Somewhere someone was singing too-ra-lai and Little Egg whimpered in her sleep, all the while my arms burning, the fever licking up me like a flame.
How many days were we kept from the light? How many days did I lie on damp straw, Little Egg in my reach? She held her doll to her chest while she layered it a bed of straw, her glass earrings catching the light. When I woke again, someone was holding a cup of water up to me, but it was not even a raindrop. I could have drunk the whole river if I put my lips to it.
One night I heard our names being called, coming to me across the water, quiet at first, then insistent. The river called my name, I was sure of it. The spirit of the water had come to deliver me. Patrin, it cried, Patrin. I staggered to my feet and peered through the porthole, where I saw a lantern swaying like a wrecker. Amberline was there, standing at the helm of a boat, the oars still, a veil of rain coming through to drench me.
“Patrin!” Amberline cried.
Amberline’s words were like salt when I craved water.
“Hurry, pass Eglantine out to me, Patrin, before the soldiers come,” he said and I stood and looked at him. Little Egg was asleep on the straw, her hair crowned with it, wrapped in my own cloak. Could I give her up? Someone cried out in their sleep and it startled me. This was only the start, here on this prison ship; we had the voyage to survive, not to speak of the country they would banish us to.
“Patrin,” Amberline called again.
All of me longed to keep her, but gently I lifted Little Egg into my arms, happy to feel that weight of her, the hot warm life of her in my arms, and I began to tremble. How would I be able to give her up? I buried my nose in her neck, her hair, the soft plumpness of her cheek. If only it were possible to place her back in the safety of my body, I’d be able to keep her safe, but what was my body, damp and broken, I could barely hold her weight. I tucked her doll in her pocket, she’d not be without it.
Amberline reached towards her, his hands clutching around her tight. I saw in his face that he loved her, but what of my love? My love was stronger than oceans, stronger than water, stronger than rope. Her little shoe fell off into the dark lap of waters below with a little plink.
“For God’s sake, Patrin, jump,” Amberline shouted. The guards were coming, their shouts echoed out across the water. I squeezed out of the porthole, feeling my clothes tear, the threads holding me, I kicked against the air. Shouting came from behind me. The water rushed up to me as I fell; Amberline’s hands reached for me, trying to steady the boat in the water. Little Egg woke, her little voice calling, “Mama!” All of me reached for her, though the river was as cold as I was hot. Behind me a splash, a guard swore as he too entered the water, his scarlet coat turning black as it soaked up the river.
“Hurry, Patrin,” Amberline shouted, but the guard was a stronger swimmer than me. The water creased from his pounding stroke, close to reaching for me.
I pulled at the cord around my throat, not daring to break the knot. She and I were both strands meeting, she and I of the same thread, my daughter and I. My love was like an end of the knot, the more you pulled at it, the tighter it became. I threw Amberline the putsi. The guard was so close I smelled the rum on his breath.
Little Egg’s head rose and fell with the lap of the waters, so close but I couldn’t reach her. “Mama,” she cried again and somewhere along the riverbank a curlew woke and replied to her.
Amberline’s hands hesitated on the oars. “Go!” I screamed. What good would it be for all of us to be taken? “Keep it for her. Tell her that I loved her. Keep her safe,” I said and felt the whole river swell beneath me, my hands shaking, all of me already longing for her. The guard’s arm was on me then, pulling at me, I had no strength to struggle against him. The river knew me and I knew it. I owed it as much as I did my father.
“I promise,” Amberline said. “God keep you safe, Patrin.”
Amberline gathered the oars to himself and began to row, lost in the shadow of the hulk. I watched the clouds part, the stars spitefully revealing nothing, but I heard the movement of the water in their wake, the startled sob of her cry winnowing out in the darkness, until I was washed with a wave.
THIRTY
Eglantine, 1838
In the morning I
woke with a start, blood rushing in my ears as I listened to the house: Fookes’s familiar steps below as he made his ablutions, the long stream of piss into the chamberpot, the sound of his yawn winding up through the floorboards. But the house felt different, the echoes somehow denser, thicker, my ears muffled like the sensation of snow covering the street, everything coming to me as if softened by eiderdown. I flung off the bedclothes and stood up. Outside, a hot sheen was already rising off the river, a fug in the making. On the stairs Makepeace’s chatelaine jingled and went silent. Today was my birthday and my doll sat on a chair, innocent of her arrival, her smiling eyes looking back at mine. Surely it was Makepeace who’d found her and replaced her upon her throne, a childhood gift recovered.
I dressed and slipped on my shoes, one still damp from the puddle in the cellar, my feet concealing Fookes’s posy – the petals and the hip. Makepeace was back on the stairs, swiftly closing Ada’s old room behind her, startled to see me.
“Happy birthday, my girl,” she said, kissed me on both cheeks and swept me down the stairs with her, my arm caught up in hers. A spicy sweet smell met us halfway down the stairs and I felt my stomach flip-flop with hunger.
In the kitchen Makepeace had baked buns sprinkled with currants, the butter was already soft, yellow peaks from the heat of the kitchen, a thick puddle of sunshine. From the folds of her pockets she extracted a small box wrapped in brown paper. “It’s just a little something,” she said.
“But I thought the doll was my present,” I replied, and Makepeace looked at me strangely. Fookes bustled into the kitchen and looked at the small box in my hands.
“It’s your birthday?” he asked and I nodded. “Many happy returns.” He grinned and I looked at his open face and found myself smiling in return. “Aren’t you going to open your present?”
I looked at the box in my hands, wriggled off the twine. Inside were two gold loops, a pair of earrings, each hanging with a little piece of glass that caught the light, sending a blue streak across the kitchen wall. Where had she got them from?
“They are beautiful, thank you,” I said, folding her in my embrace, feeling her smallness, the sharpness of her bones. She was growing frailer.
“See, a lodger makes the difference,” she said, reading my mind. “Come, let me make a hole in your ears and you can wear them,” she said and sat me down by the fire. Fookes took his seat opposite and flipped and rolled up his shirtsleeves in the growing heat. Makepeace took a needle from her chatelaine to the fire and let the tip glow red, before she brought it over and brushed the hair from my neck.
“Saint Sarah bless you,” she said as she ran the tip of the needle through my ear. I smelled the iron of my own blood and it made my stomach swirl. Black spots suddenly painted on everything, including the inside of my eyelids, as she pushed the wire into the hole; the glass dangled against my jawline. Fookes poured the tea, piled a scoop of sugar in and bid me drink. I was barely able to hold the cup, such was the tremor in my hands. Makepeace repeated the needle to the flame to my other earlobe and the threading of the wire into my flesh and I felt a wave of darkness leap up and claim me.
When I came to I was back on my bed, my doll staring at me, my earlobes throbbing, and I wondered in that moment between the dark and the light whether we had swapped places, that she was the living one and I was as heavy as wood, kept in the dark and the damp, the first evidence of a crime.
Makepeace sat on the bed while Fookes stood nearby.
“If it’s no trouble, Mr Fookes, your room would be more suitable for the new lodger, but the one across the hall is more than ample for your needs. And it is quieter,” Makepeace said.
“No trouble at all, I’ll move my things whenever it is convenient,” he said.
I sat up and felt the room tilt, my ears heavy as anchors.
“Eglantine?” Fookes said and rushed forward to help me.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, dismissing the spin of the room.
“You need something to eat is all,” Makepeace said, already up and off to gather a tray, leaving Fookes and I alone. He lifted the doll off the chair and placed her in his lap.
“What’s this?” he said, plucking the pouch off the floor; it must have fallen from my pocket. I had to control my impulse to snatch it back from him, frightened he would try to open it, the last remnants of my mother’s lost life.
“It was my mother’s,” I said and he smoothed the leather over his leg, the knot holding true.
“The cord – I can fix it for you if you like? So you can wear it around your neck,” he said and looked at me. “Let it be my birthday gift for you, humble as it is.”
“But leave the knot, the knot …” I said, my thoughts stumbling over my words. The knot she had tied with her own fingers, with it, her spirit tied to me, I was sure of it.
Fookes handed me the pouch and bounded down the stairs, quickly returning with a piece of leather cord, needle and thread.
“You just show me where you’d like it,” he said and he sat beside me, sewing the cord with his nimble hands, pushing the metal through the tough leather, just as the needle had pushed through my flesh, his stitches neat and small. When he finished he looped it over my head and I felt the cord nestle close to the skin of my neck, brushing against it soft like a lip.
I listened to Fookes as he moved things across the hall, fading to silence when he entered Ada’s old room. Makepeace came upstairs with the tea and breakfast buns as if I was an invalid, and with quick fingers I made sure the pouch was concealed completely beneath my blouse.
“Who is the new lodger?” I said.
Makepeace put down the tray, a shake to her hand sending the china cups and saucers chiming against each other.
“A private man of middle age, a widower. I’ve said we’d afford him his privacy. And Lord knows we need the added income,” she said.
“So why does Fookes have to change rooms? Surely my footsteps will bother the new lodger,” I said, stamping for effect. I prickled with indignation.
Makepeace looked up at me. “I don’t see why it’s a concern of yours,” she said tartly.
I felt tears smart at my eyes, Makepeace had never spoken harshly to me, not my whole life. Why would she speak to me like that now?
Downstairs there was the sound of something falling, all Fookes’s tools scattered on the floor. We both heard Fookes curse and listened to his footsteps as he began to gather them. The colour returned to Makepeace’s face.
The sound of the footsteps came up the stairs.
“I’ve cleared the room, Mrs Makepeace,” Fookes said, “not much to clear really.”
“Won’t be long now, Mr Fookes,” Makepeace said.
“Yes, goodbye to old England forever and all that,” he said, looking at me. “Are you recovered enough now for some air, Miss Eglantine? With your permission of course, Mrs Makepeace. I thought a walk down by the riverside before the day gets too hot?”
“It’s up to Eglantine,” Makepeace said and bustled out of the room.
I swung my legs off the bed. Fookes took two buns and filled his pockets with them and followed me down the stairs. Outside in the street, the salt was already heavy in the air, warmth soaked into us like a liquid. He offered me his arm and I took it, glad to twine myself onto him, steady as earth, feeling Makepeace’s words run through me. Perhaps she was right, perhaps I had been kept sheltered, kept as my father’s prize when I had no shine at all.
The river unspooled in either direction like mercury, rippling and silver, barely distinguishable from the sky. A heron dipped out of the air and barely caused a disturbance in the water, before retrieving a fish, its scales blinding, as if made of metal, before it disappeared down the heron’s throat. A lighterman went past in the distance with his pole in the water, the languid glide of his heavy load, the pole disappearing and reappearing with a song in his lungs reaching out across the water.
“So what’s in the pouch, if you don’t mind me asking? What makes it s
o special?” Fookes said quizzically, pulling a bun out of his pocket and handing it to me, before pulling out the second one for himself, biting into its crust and flinging a morsel onto the silty rocks below for the seagulls to squabble over. At first I bristled at such a question. I looked at the bun in my hand and though I’d been hungry suddenly lost my appetite; the tide had dragged in a threshing of duckweed, perhaps I would be better supping from that.
“It was my mother’s, that is all I know. Inside are a few bits and pieces, lucky charms I suppose,” I said, feeling all my words were shaped false. “I’m sad to say it, but I don’t remember her at all.”
“Nothing at all?” Fookes said, plucking out a currant and putting it in his mouth.
“Nothing except the missing of her.” I picked up a stone, hurled it across the water and waited for it to skip, but instead it sunk straight down, swallowed like medicine.
“What happened to her?” Fookes asked gently, his sleeve brushing my own, but I stepped away.
“I don’t know,” I said. How didn’t I know? Why had no one told me? I’d been fed on half-truths and bitter silences and now they soured my stomach, I wanted to retch over the edge of the river.
“Ask Mrs Makepeace? I’m sure she knows everything,” he said and laughed nervously, and I smiled at him. She would know, but she wouldn’t tell; that tale belonged to my father, but he’d never tell it now.
“So does your ship leave from London, Mr Fookes?” I said, keen to move on, away from all the gall that swirled in my own head.
“No, from Southampton, where I’ll stay at the immigrant depot, before being tugged out to sea to meet the ship.”
“Depot?”
“A hostel of sorts, where they try and get everyone used to shipboard life, so staying here with you and Mrs Makepeace is luxury.”
The River Sings Page 23