“Father,” I whispered, but he bid me be quiet with a slight click of the tongue.
“The voice can carry across the water,” he whispered, his voice disguised by the splash of the oar, and he pulled us further downriver. The clouds raced above us, rushing in their own celestial waters; which star would guide me? My father steered closer to the bank, out of the lanes of further vessels, the buildings petering out and turning to the shapes of trees, willows washing their fronds in the water.
My father paused for a moment and was about to light the lantern when the moon slipped out of a pocket of cloud and looked down on us, an eye, whether benevolent or not, time would tell.
“You were born in the river, did you know that, Eglantine?” my father said, and I felt the surprise of it – how could one be born in a river. “I wasn’t supposed to be there, but how could I keep away? I wanted to see my child. My, how your mother laboured, until her own mother led her into the water to ease her pain. She pulled you out of your mother and out of the water and I felt the earth spin beneath my feet with my unworthiness, my unreadiness to be a father.”
My father’s voice drifted off and I begged for him to continue. Born in a river. How much of my past had he locked up in himself? How I wanted all those stories, the brightest, shiniest things, better than silver or gold, and now the time to pry them was diminishing, no matter how fast and slender my fingers, already melting, disappearing.
“I never was going to let you go,” he said, his voice quiet, and I felt the river swell around the wherry. “I’d not have sold you off, nor the house, not if my life depended on it, but I fed him the possibility of it, bait on the line, to reel him in.”
It burned that he used me to win his own freedom. “Always your instrument, more than a daughter,” I said, and my father went quiet. All of me was conflicted – I’d lose him.
We reached an inlet and he manoeuvred the boat down along the breeze as the night grew darker. I ran my hand in the water and splashed it up onto my face, trying to keep myself awake.
My father stood and removed his coat and stepped out of the boat. The water splashed up to his thighs as he led it to the sandy side of the bank, disturbing the swans who slept in the reeds, ghost galleons silently pushing out from the safety of their cover, their feet spinning beneath the water, their cygnets balls of down on their backs.
“I’d keep my promise, Eglantine, I promised to protect you, to keep you safe. I promised your mother, the day she passed you through the ship porthole into my arms, when she was arrested for the crime I’d committed. I’d promised her father, Josiah, when I’d been too cowardly to speak up and the law broke his neck for it.” My father’s voice grew rough in his throat, dry as paper. Here was the truth out of his mouth and he expected me to believe it? How could I believe anything that he said? He’d made not only my mother pay for his crimes, but my grandfather also. I stepped backwards and felt my footing falter, Makepeace’s hand caught my arm, but I shook it off. His words made the skin at my neck pucker and rise, heat and itch. This was the first I’d heard of it, of my other grandfather, my mother’s father. All the love that belonged to me, all the love of a complete family, my father with his dreams of grander things had denied me. He’d stolen enough from me. I retched, but all that came out was bile. I wished he’d never come back at all.
The dawn was approaching through the thick mist, slowly lightening the sky. It clung to our clothes like the finest of lace, made of spider web and water.
My father held out his hand for me to step onto the side of the riverbank but I didn’t take it, not knowing why we’d stopped here. All there was were reeds and grass and a lone oak, a bower over my head; last season’s acorns crunched underfoot. Makepeace stayed in the boat.
“This is where she lies, Eglantine,” my father said, “this oak tree is her mark.”
I stepped backwards, my spine hitting the trunk, my breath squeezed out of me, the bark pressing through all the layers of clothes on my back, willing her to me. But the tree was just a tree.
“How is her mark an oak and not a stone in a graveyard? Didn’t she deserve better?” I said, bitterness spreading through me.
“Once I reclaimed you from the prison hulk and got to the cover of the shoreline, I kept watch, ready to turn myself in for her. I had you settled and calm, a piece of marzipan gripped in your palm, asleep from exhaustion. All I wanted was to get you safe, get you back to the house, to provide for you. But the uniforms followed not long after and came closer towards us and I took cover in the tree roots, pulling my coat over our heads. They came to shore with their load, with their dead. With your mother. How I wanted to leap on them, pummel their brains at the comments they made, their collars turned up against the cold. They were cursory, barely scraping the topsoil from the riverbank before tossing her into the hole and sprinkling the dirt back over. To them she was nothing more than a doll of rag and flesh. I heard their rum-soaked voices from across the water, slurring the words to a shanty song, and I waited until they disappeared altogether before I crept out and pulled away the soil with my bare hands, wiping the dirt from her face and kissing her lips. I dug deeper into the earth for her resting place, not wanting the first flood of the river to send her out into the waters. Before tucking her under the soil, I placed an acorn in each of her hands as she once told me her mother did for a lost child, so that whoever came past would know their resting place, and so the dead would not be lonely.”
I heard all the birdsong then, now the whole tree was singing, alive. In the blue light the twin trunks of the tree swayed, the roots stretching down to the water, shoring up the soil of the riverbank, dipping into the water. The leaves’ dark shapes moved, their tips painted gold with the sun’s thin light. In the pockets of soil around the tree bloomed foxglove. Petals for her slippers.
“How would you know one tree from another?” I said, my voice pouring out of me, an overfilled bucket from the well. “How many trees line this riverbank, why this one?”
My father ran his hand over the bark and picked up an acorn from the ground. “That is what I was worried about too, hoping that you’d kept your doll. All the time I was away, I hoped you were taking good care of her, hoped that if I didn’t return you’d find where to look,” he said.
I pulled my doll out of my pocket and held her aloft in the air, the sunlight striking the glass of her earrings and sending diamonds of coloured light across my face. My hands shook or she shook in my hands, impossible to tell which. How many times had I held this doll, how many times had I told her all my secrets, asked her my many questions and waited for the first voice that ever spoke my name to reply? When all the time she’d been made of wood and my fancy.
“She is just a doll,” I said. “How could she have told me anything?”
A wind came across the water and started to ruffle the leaves and swirl around Makepeace’s cap. I watched as she carefully removed it and slipped it into her pocket, stepped out of the boat and came to stand beside me. All the while the oak leaves murmured in unison, flipping their green sides silver and back again. All whispers. All hums.
“Lift her dress,” my father said and I wanted to laugh. I’d lifted her dress many times, helped her in her toilet, but it had never been removed completely. I tipped poor Miss Poppet upside down, her skirts falling around her face like a daisy’s petals.
“Turn her around, look,” my father said, and I did. Miss Poppet’s back was its same usual wooden self, scratched and marked, familiar. “Look again,” he said. And I saw. There on Miss Poppet’s back was a crudely carved map, the tree marked with a star, the inlet an arrow, the river a road – all these little signs my father had recorded for me so I’d find my way back. I looked at him, bent as he was, unsure in the dawn light whether he held the tree up or the tree held him. Whatever had happened to them along the way, there had been a point as fixed as a patrin, that they loved each other, that they loved me.
I pulled Miss Poppet’s skirts down,
smoothed her clothes and had a look at her dear familiar painted face, her eyes upturned in a perpetual smile. I dug a hole close to the trunk with my hands, flicking dirt away and leaves and acorns. The hole refilled, but I kept digging. A magpie chirred above me and I looked up, the morning light hitting his plumage all dark iridescence, his eye caught by Miss Poppet’s shining face as I laid her in the grave I had made, before sweeping the dirt over her. My mother had turned into a tree, so it seemed only right that I return my doll to the oak she was, a seed of a different kind. I took all the acorns I could find and circled where she lay.
THIRTY-FIVE
Eglantine, 1838
By the time we left my mother’s grave the morning was already full upon us, the daylight stippling the water with blinding light. We’d stayed overlong, my father exhausted from his efforts. He pulled the wherry into reeds and obscured it before he urged us to hurry as we headed off past the river’s edge over into some farmer’s furthest field, a few sheep dotting the distance like wool waiting to be spun, the long grasses damp and slippery underfoot. Makepeace and I moving alongside my father, hindered by the drag of our wet skirts.
It was midmorning by the time we reached some semblance of a village. Makepeace and I approached the local inn and asked for a room in which to bide the time until the sun fell back down into the river, somewhere to wait for night. We were shown to a room, small and soot-blackened, a faint damask furred across the walls. Makepeace asked for refreshment and we were given ale and cheese which we happily drank and ate, putting aside some of the cheese for my father who as a precaution had decided to take refuge in a copse we had passed outside of the village.
Makepeace and I lay down on top of the counterpane, which smelled of oily hair and unwashed bodies, grateful for the ease of weight off our feet. As soon as I closed my eyes I was back on the river, my ears full of the slap and pull of my father’s strong back taking us across the waters, my hand trailing in the V of the wherry’s wake, a barnacled finger reaching up and circling my wrist, neither pulling me in nor letting me go. I woke, all of me hot. I sat up in the bed and pulled at the top of my blouse and looked at the threads of my own skin, red, raised and bleeding in the mirror. This birthmark had its own tides. I traced each bump and rise of it like the raised ridge that joined a globe. Would I yet cross that line myself? I thought of that rope going around my poor grandfather’s neck and my poor mother drowned in saving me. Would it be me who paid the debt for my father’s crimes?
Makepeace woke as the village church bell chimed ten o’clock, the day still staining the sky.
Together we made for the copse of trees, sticking close to the buildings, the village quiet. The only sound came from far in the distance, someone playing a fiddle and a blackbird’s twisting note drawing a close to the day.
Shadows were long inside the copse and Makepeace took my hand as if I was a child still, afraid of the dark. A chill came out of the earth, dark and damp. Makepeace stood just outside, whistled and waited for a response; an owl replied and my father limped into sight, his coat half torn from his shoulders, a large gash across his shirt.
“Father,” I said and ran to him, but he held up his hands to fend me off and I saw the darkness spread on his shirt, his blood a river from the source of him. We eased him to the ground and Makepeace tore at her petticoats, turning the strips of them into wads of bandage to stem the flow.
“What happened, Amberline?” she said, pulling his tattered coat from his shoulders, tearing another strip of bandage to bind him in, no light or time to take a measure of his injury.
“Royston showed up, must have followed us all the way, the devil,” he said between breaths, his skin blue with shadow as Makepeace bound the wound tight, the bandage around his ribs.
“But he got the worst of it,” my father said and gestured over his shoulder.
I stood up from my father’s side, my hands sticky with his blood, and stepped further into the trees, snapping twigs and leaves, unsure of where exactly my father’s assailant was. The moon was freshly risen like new baked bread, but its light was not strong enough to penetrate the canopy. My skirts caught on something and I tugged at them to release them, but whatever held them would not let go.
There leaning against a tree was the gentleman my father had taught a lesson, his hand wrapped around the edge of my skirt.
“Come closer,” Royston demanded and tried to reel me in by my skirt. I tried to pull it out of his grasp, and slapped at his hand till he released it, the last of his strength he’d used just to hold on.
“Your father will get the noose for this,” he said, “and none too soon.”
I looked down at him, unable to stand if he tried, and spat on the ground at his feet. I tore my own petticoat and tied his wrists, his hands uselessly trying to fend me off, his eyes white with fear. I ran my hands over his body, to feel if he was bleeding anywhere, but I found nothing damp except his own piss. His leg was at a sharp angle; my father had concussed him and perhaps had broken his leg, but I felt no wound upon him.
“And then you’ll be mine to do with as I wish,” he said.
I took another strip of petticoat and rammed it into his mouth to shut him up; I’d no more space in my ears to hear his voice, I could barely hear myself think, all my heart pounded, wanting to exact some sort of punishment upon him.
My fingers ran their old course, lightly through his pockets, and I pulled out a watch on a fine chain, a pouch of coin, a mirror concealed in a slip of velvet. I had no want for them except to destroy them. The watch and mirror I dropped and felt the crunch run up my leg as I stamped them into the ground; the coins I threw into the air and heard them rain down in all different directions. My father had risked me as his snare to catch his own freedom, but no more.
From the gloaming I heard a noise and I stood back, but it was only a plume of breath from the man’s horse, come back for his master. I reached for the animal’s bridle and he, kindly beast, took pleasure in being led, my voice a whisper.
Makepeace whistled and I followed the sound. Together we helped my father up and onto the horse. Noises floated up from the village, the sound of dogs and crying, and Makepeace hesitated.
“Mother, take her, take her now, before it’s too late,” my father said. I reached for his hand and cupped it to my cheek.
“Go, Eglantine, go. Don’t make the mistakes that I did. Don’t be fooled by things that glitter and shine and think they are equal to a life. You were my one jewel, and it’s taken me my whole life to know it.”
Makepeace slapped the horse’s hind and my father urged it on into the darkness, the vibrations of its gallop running up my legs. My father’s arms were around the horse’s neck, holding on for all he was worth.
“Come, girl, come,” Makepeace said. I had no time to think, no time to pause and gather myself.
We saw their fiery torches before they saw us and Makepeace made haste for us to melt into the hedgerow, our clothes getting caught on thorns, branches and brambles as she bid the shadows be our cover. We disturbed a vixen from her den, she up and appeared, her copper little mask in the moonlight, nose a-twitch before disappearing back to her kits. There were probably two score men, their feet falling into march, splashing in puddles and talking low.
“They say he’s a violent man and we are to keep our wits about us,” an older voice said.
“He’s bound to be,” said another, “especially where he’s been. Keep your eyes to the shadows, watch for him now, unless you want his knife at your throat and your gizzards on the ground.”
I knew they were talking about my father, but he was not the father I knew; with their words they were painting him as a monster. When they passed by us the lit torches made a sound like all the world burning, everything made its tinder; the heat of the flames flared on my face, on my neck, a sweat trailing around my birthmark and asking for a scratch. The smell of the fat-soaked cloth used as a wick made my stomach turn, but whatever came back up into my
mouth I swallowed rather than make a sound. Beneath us, in the ground, the foxes listened.
We waited until the torches were but a pinprick on the horizon before we broke cover, then we walked as fast as our feet allowed us, keeping close to the hedgerow, away from the road, until we heard the rushing waters and I felt it rush through me, beside me, with me, leading us to the port. All the sails were pulled at by the wind, like a giant’s sheet whipping dry on the line.
Makepeace paid a handsome fee for my immigration papers and graced the palm of a ship’s captain to bribe me aboard. She took my face in her hands, smoothed away the hairs that had escaped their bounds and drank me in.
“Holy Sarah be your guiding star, my darling,” Makepeace said, her kisses wet on my eyelids, her tears on my cheeks. She pulled out the pouch concealed at my throat, pulled out the wedding ring within it and slipped it on my finger. “You know your mother called you Little Egg? She was determined to give you your own name,” she said tenderly, “but I hope that we’ve done right by you.” She reached her hand out and placed it on my belly.
“But what about you? What about Father?” I said, the ocean sending soft spray over us.
“Our fates are already written,” she said, leading me to the gangplank, the captain waiting at the top, eager to conceal my arrival in the darkness.
As I walked forward, looking at the waters below, all dark reflections of things I couldn’t make out, a huge shout sounded and I turned around.
I heard Makepeace’s startled cry. A group of men appeared, a living wall between us; my father, held up between two of the men, his head lolling to one side. Makepeace rushed over to him. She tried to say something, but her voice was stolen by a blow, her cap knocked to the ground. One of the soldiers caught me in his sight and I felt all the terror of it. Makepeace was on the ground, her chatelaine crushed beneath a soldier’s boot.
The River Sings Page 27