The River Sings

by Sandra Leigh Price

  We ploughed on through the streets towards the centre of the city, a shoal of people all waiting, jostling, animated. Fookes kept close to me and we marched onwards through to the thickest part, a human road towards Westminster Abbey, his hand gripping my elbow to prevent us getting separated, our feet barely touching the ground.

  By the time we got there, the princess had already entered the abbey and the crowd were in a hush of whispers, as if they too were inside the walls and witness to the miraculous ceremony. All around us people bustled. I smelled a man’s cologne, a lady’s skirts pushed up against my own, the smell of pickled herrings on someone’s breath. The breath squeezed from my body. Fookes looked at me with concern, but I dismissed it, seeing his whole face lit like a child at a fair. “God Save the Queen” started to sing from the front of the crowd, Fookes’s voice joining the mass of voices. But there was still no sign of the new queen, we were all subjects waiting, the sun hot on our heads. Around my neck I felt my perspiration pool, and I longed for a glass of water, anything wet, when someone caught my eye. He had his back towards me, tall in his stovepipe hat, the coat familiar and tattered, looking against the crowd, looking for something the rest of us weren’t looking to see, our eyes towards the abbey. The man surveyed the people around him, and when he saw me he looked as if he had found what he was looking for.

  From inside the abbey there was movement and the people responded to it with a huzzah upon their lips. I stood on my tiptoes to try to catch a glimpse. Fookes put his hands around my hips and lifted me, and for a moment I caught sight of her, a smear of thick satin, a slash of scarlet, a glint of light, the new queen fast as a butterfly, before I landed back on the ground, Fookes’s face flushed and smiling down at me.

  “Did you see her?” he shouted, but I could barely hear him in the melee, the singing and calling her name, Victoria.

  I nodded and looked over Fookes’s shoulder, but the man had disappeared through the crowd like a salmon, darting against the tide, his hat just one of the many that bobbed like flotsam and jetsam above my eyeline.

  The desire to run started in my feet, the urge to escape the mass, but I was wedged into my few inches, a handkerchief-sized piece of the London street, so I was forced to step sideways, shuffling through the crowd, as if trying to find my seat at the theatre. Here and there a pocket presented itself to me, an invitation to my hand to dart quickly inside it, pluck whatever was in there and let the crowd sweep me on, but all I did was hold my doll, encased in my own pocket all that much tighter.

  From the swell in front of me I heard a shout and I froze, thinking someone had called thief. Then the sound came upon the sound of thousands and the tide swept me forward towards the front. If I had just dug my elbows into the nearest Londoners, my feet would have left the ground and I would have been carried aloft with them.

  The drums pounded in time with my heart, a high throttling beat, followed by the blast of trumpets, the glint of which I could see in the distance, the sunlight striking them gold. Then guns pounded the air, deafeningly close. All around me thousands of hands clapping, a cacophony of flesh on flesh. All their voices a-roar – and I was plunged forward and almost lost my balance in the crush of all those people wanting to glimpse their new sovereign and majesty, a celestial angel of satin, diamond, ermine and red velvet. Red like the birthmark around my neck.

  Fookes scooped an arm around me and pulled me upward as I struggled against a wall of people and noise. I shouted but the sound of my voice was muffled by the density of the crowd. My ears pounded with the peal of the city’s bells chiming throughout my body, all heralding a new era, a new empire all on the shoulders of a new queen, but I carried a new weight, a new concern. The man who had spied me in the crowd was surely my own father.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Eglantine, 1838

  When we returned to the house it was as quiet as it had ever been; all Fookes’s belongings had been neatly packed for the following morning, his room left tidy, waiting for the next lodger, his baggage beside the door. I passed my father’s old room and all that came from there was a gust from beneath the door. Makepeace had strewn my room with blossom and Fookes and I were glad to disrobe, to catch the fleeting breezes that the river sent, ripples of goose flesh across our skin.

  That night, as Fookes’s breath was hot on my neck, sleep deserted me. All of me was strained to what was to come – Fookes’s departure – the house a port between the near and far away. The man at the Coronation loomed large in my mind. If my father had returned, he’d broken the terms of his sentence, and the law would be only too willing to wed him again to the clap of iron. Makepeace would have told me, surely? Did she know? I no more believed in her fantastical Mr Brown than I did the man in the moon. I strained to listen to the room below, but I heard nothing, nothing but the sound of our own breathing.

  Fookes and I rose before the dawn, dressing reluctantly, our clothes heavy and hot, slowing us down. Our footsteps were quiet on the stairs, Fookes carrying all that he had come with. Makepeace had made him a parcel of food and she’d left it on the bottom step, wrapped in brown paper and string.

  I opened the door and interrupted a blackbird mid song, his notes familiar and commonly beautiful, yet struck against the growing glow had the feeling of an elegy, its notes the lilting things of what we wanted to say. Fookes made me promise to come to him otherwise he’d be forced to turn around and come and get me, and I made him promise not to forget me. The river heard our promise and it caught the light like a mirror did the sunshine, sending its glare into our eyes.

  “We’ll build our own house, just you and me,” he said, kissing my face, my eyelids, my cheeks, my hair, my mouth. “Something as fine as in Mr Lycett’s book.”

  And I nodded, not wanting our parting to be tainted with my argument, for there’d be time enough for Fookes to know how it came to be that I’d been raised in this house here, this house that was haunted by the water, time for him yet to know. If my father had returned, he’d not only have the law to answer to, but he’d have me as well. I was a woman now, I’d have my questions answered, I’d know all I wanted to know.

  Fookes leaned close to my ear and whispered, “You don’t have to steal any more,” and folded some of his precious money into my hand. My fingers instinctively clasped it before I tried to hand it back to him.

  “I did it only to keep us above water,” I said, frightened Fookes was breaking things off, but he twined his arm around me and drew me closer. His mouth was sweet and soft on mine, then I leaned close to his ear and whispered my secret, our secret, and he stopped and looked at me, his whole face lit before he twirled me down off the stair and into the street and back onto the stair again. His love retied me in a new knot that I didn’t want to be untangled from.

  “I’ll see you in Richmond,” he said, neither of us wanting to say goodbye. I tucked the coin heart inscribed with my name into his palm and hoped my name would stay in his heart.

  As I watched him walk away, the dawn made everything pink, like the petals of my namesake eglantine, concealing the smog and smut, making the world rosy. I watched Fookes until he turned and waved, then rounded a corner and disappeared from my sight. I felt the pouch around my neck throb then, the doll in my pocket turn, two compasses spinning to a false north, directing me to gaze upward towards the house, a slash of light concealing the barb beneath, the face in the window looking back at me.

  I was in the front door and up the stairs, pushing at my father’s old door with my shoulder, but the door was still locked and would not give way. I hit it with my fists and felt the wood shake my bones.

  “Eglantine.” My father’s voice was familiar and strange, but I would not turn around. I was frightened to turn around in case I’d imagined him. The money Fookes had given me fell to the floor, Makepeace swept it up into her chatelaine.

  “Turn around, let me see you, it’s been so long,” he said. And I did as bid and saw my father, smaller and thinner than I’d catal
ogued him in my memory, his face concealed in a grizzled beard, his skin darker than I recalled, his eyes crinkled at the corners.

  “Dear God, you are no longer a little girl,” he said. But I’d not been a little girl when he left, I’d already begun my menses, already concealed in my stays, already stunted in the ways of the world. His arms reached out towards me and I dutifully stepped into them and embraced my father, the bones in his back protruding beneath my fingers, his hair curling around the collar of his jacket, unkempt, his pocket gaping, my fingers in and out of it as he’d taught me, though there was nothing there. Still the same scent of him. He gently pushed me back to look further at me and I felt embarrassed by the scrutiny.

  “The spit of your mother,” he said admiringly and I went to cover my throat protectively, the coral rope around my neck, the red of my birthmark, the pouch hanging there, exposed to his glare. “You found it,” he said, his voice choked, and reached out a finger to touch the pouch, but I stepped backward, fearing he would snap the cord and claim it for his own, the only thing I had to remember her by.

  “Oh, daughter,” he said, “the things I have seen, the things I have done.” He started crying then, but I was unmoved, as river-smoothed as stone. He grew silent as we both heard Makepeace in the kitchen, but still he cried, no handkerchief to catch his tears. I would not offer him one of my own. “Eglantine,” he said, “your mother, she’d be so proud of you.”

  “Proud of what? Becoming your creature?” I replied, the vehemence in my voice surprising me. He glared at me, his eyes glistening and wet.

  “She gave it to me to give to you,” he said, his voice lost in the constriction of his throat. “She left the knot tied, to bind you to her. Makepeace would have had me burn it, but I kept it, though it may have taken away Patrin’s peace. I kept it for you.”

  His words made the world go white before my eyes. My own tears welled in my eyes, sending facets of light across the room. I swept them away with the back of my hand before I began to walk away, leaving him standing there, a shadow of himself. I’d not give him the consolation of comfort.

  There was a loud progressive rap at the front door and we both froze, my father’s fingers to his lips as he faded back up the stairs. The pounding began again in earnest and I rushed down the stairs, thinking it was Fookes returned, but Makepeace was already standing in the hallway, hesitant, her eyes flitting to the staircase, to me, suddenly making me complicit in her concealment of my father. She shook her head. The banging continued, but the door’s hinges had rusted and the damp had made it swell in its frame.

  “Eglantine,” he called to me quietly from the top of the stairs, his voice strangely calm, lost in the pounding of the door. The familiarity of it hurt. I’d pushed all that I had missed of him down into myself, concealed and private. I’d banished him as easily as the judges had done, finding it less painful just to close him up in my memory, behind a door without a key. I recalled a particular feeling when I was small, a surprise gift of memory of my mother laughing, of us being three points of a triangle, a family, when I’d been the apple of his eye.

  The knocking ceased and we stood there, waiting for it to begin again, my father stepping quietly on the stairs, his feet avoiding the squeaky ones, his feet remembering, until finally Makepeace slid a finger between the curtain and glass and found the doorstep clear.

  My father shambled past us down towards the kitchen and all I could do was stare.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Eglantine, 1838

  My father was bent over the fireplace, snapping kindling between his fingers, feeding the flames, though the day was already thick with heat. I heard Makepeace go upstairs, leaving my father and me alone. I slid into a chair and watched him, the familiarity of his movements, the slight whistle as he raised the fire even higher. Why had my father and Makepeace kept silent about his return? I prickled with questions, I was fierce with them, but I sat and waited, I’d get my mark in sight, but he was in the rhythm of his movements, oblivious to me. From under his shirt he pulled a pouch and tipped on the table a silver reticule, a thimble and a watch chain. The gall of it.

  From Makepeace’s pots and pans he found what he was looking for, a little iron pot and trivet, and he sat them in the flames, letting out a satisfied sigh at the bend of the flame around the base of the pot, sending the black soot of it glowing.

  “Yesterday’s harvest?” I asked, jolting the table, watching the silver shift and threaten to drop onto the floor. My father turned around and swept the silver into his hand, placing it in the pot.

  “Don’t think I didn’t notice your fingers lace my pockets. I taught you well, my girl,” he said, peering into the pot, the smell of the metal beginning to melt sending acid into my mouth, I swallowed it back down.

  “As instructed.” I frowned and my father stepped back and looked at me, surprised.

  “Don’t be like that, we’ll remedy that, my girl, now I’m back,” he smiled, his front tooth broken, and sat beside me, clasping his hands over mine. “We’ll fix this house back to the glory that it once was, we’ll make it a fine home again.”

  I looked at the walls, the bricks spoiling with damp, the salt crusting them, sucking up any moisture that had been in the mud; on the floor already were anthills of brick dust. What held the house together was lies, I was not going to add mine to the mortar.

  “And how do you expect me to do that?”

  “As I taught you, my girl, as I taught you,” he laughed, patting my hand before adding more wood to the fire, giving his mercurial stew a little jiggle with a stick. “All the time I was away I thought of the account of my life, of the promise I made at your mother’s death to keep you safe, the promise I had failed to keep, the distance that I had to overcome to keep it,” he said.

  “You came back for me?” I said in disbelief, the melted silver beginning to bubble, to send a rippling reflection on the wall of the hearth like the rain did through the window, my father and me submerged in the kitchen. I felt hot, perspiration bleeding into the fabric beneath my arms. How had his teaching me to be his shadow kept me safe when he’d get me to filch from the devil himself if we needed it? He turned and faced me and I felt as small and as inconsequential as I had when I was a child.

  “Of course I did. And I taught you well to provide for yourself and Makepeace,” he said. “You still carry your doll in your pocket, I see. Why did you leave her in the cellar, oh so cold and all alone?”

  I wrapped my fingers around her in a protective fist; why had he shown such interest in her to take her, my first theft, and return her to my room, unless he was interested in returning me to being his mere apprentice?

  “Do you know how you came to get her?”

  I looked at him as I would do a mark, trying to see the value of what he was trying to say and why he was saying it now.

  “Your mother had tried to run away from me. She packed you up at her first opportunity and took you to try and find her mother, her people, to beg to be let back into their ways with their vardos and fires and superstitions, shunning the beginnings of the life I was forging for us.” My father’s voice increased in volume. “Makepeace told me.”

  I had to hold firm to myself not to get swept up in his words; he’d been married to Ada all the same while, the life he’d been forging was all for him and for him alone. But I let him unwind his story, just to see my mother float up in it, just to glimpse her name, to feel her close.

  “Her father, Josiah Scamp, had been a man above honour, he’d worked as a ratcatcher for all the grand houses and estates which they travelled through. Your mother returned to the grounds of Kensington Palace, all the windows, Eglantine, so many, all like the cuts on a stone; we’d been there once to clear out the rats and it was her hope that she’d find her mother there, but to no avail. All she found was the young queen-to-be and you found your playmate.”

  What was he talking about? The queen had been my playmate? The first time I’d seen her surely had
been at the Coronation, that flash of ermine and satin? My mind raced, my memories all began and ended with the water, the river, the sounds of voices coming across it.

  “How do you know I took the doll, that I stole it? I was but a child,” I said.

  “Because you are my child and your fingers are fine instruments. Why wouldn’t you take something that caught your eye, when she already had so many? She’d not have missed it. You could return it to her now, but she has plenty of baubles and playthings by the looks of it.”

  I turned the doll in my pocket, dancing her through my fingers like a coin. I had no recollection of such a thing, all I recalled was the feeling of her, safe beneath my chin, just as my own head was beneath my mother’s. All of us coiled within the other like life within a seed.

  “And what of Josiah, why was he a man above honour?” I said, pushing against the sweep of him. Of my mother and her family I’d been told nothing, he’d wanted to keep me all for himself. The thief’s daughter.

  My father wrapped a rag around his hand and turned his back to me to face his silver. He lifted it from its trivet and poured the silver into a keepsake Fookes had brought back for Makepeace: a Coronation cup with a fine picture of the young queen’s likeness staring out from a cartouche. The cup steamed with its metallic brew and my father’s face was bathed in the steam. He picked up the mug and sat it in a shallow bowl of water to cool it before it cracked the mug and ran over the table.

  “He saved my life,” was all he said. “And I owe to him and your mother to make more of what remains of it. Will you help me, Eglantine?”

  “But I’m to leave and go join my husband,” I said, feeling anything that was mine shift and tilt, give way to the will of him.

  My father laughed. “To meet your little shoemaker? Married by the old ways, a bit of water and a shared cup. Makepeace told me. Hardly binding, is it? You’ll stay and help me rebuild my empire, my girl; too long it’s been allowed to crumble.”