Birdcage Walk

by Helen Dunmore

  I reached the house, looked up and sure enough, there was a light. Hannah must be stirring already. I tried the main door but it was locked. I did not want to pull the bell and so I thought: I will make Hannah come to the window.

  I stepped back and crossed the street until I could see the kitchen window clearly. Candlelight bloomed yellow. Hannah was there for sure, but Augustus would be still fast asleep. He was never an early riser.

  ‘Hannah,’ I said, not loud enough for her to hear, willing her to hear me. ‘Hannah.’

  I would bring her to the window. I would make her come to me. I thought of her and the threads that had bound the three of us close. I thought of her rising from the fire, and coming over to the window to look out, without knowing why she did so.

  ‘Hannah,’ I urged her again. ‘Hannah, come to the window.’

  She did not come. I saw that the street was not fully dark any more: the black was thinning into grey. It was no longer night, but morning, and Hannah could not hear me. I had tried to touch her mind, but it resisted.

  I went back to the door and jangled the bell until I heard the sleepy slur of feet over the floor. It was one of the girls downstairs, with her hair down her back, yawning her night-breath into my face, and cross too, at being woken. I brushed past her protests and went up the stairs in the dark. I knew the way well enough. I knocked on the outer door, at first gently and then hard, because Hannah was awake. I knew it. There were sounds from inside. Footsteps, scuffling; quick low voices that I could not quite make out. Why didn’t anyone come? I rapped again, loudly, to frighten them. I would rouse the house if I had to. After a moment’s silence I heard footsteps approaching the door.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s me, Lizzie. Open the door.’

  ‘Lizzie! Wait. Wait a minute.’

  The bolt did not slide. Instead there were footsteps going away, another silence and then I thought I heard a door shut. The footsteps came back, the bolt slid, the key turned and then the handle. There was Hannah, blinking at me as she held up her candle.

  ‘You made me wait long enough,’ I said, and stepped inside.

  ‘Good gracious, child! Whatever are you doing here at this time?’

  Hannah looked old, crumpled, unwelcoming: it was all quite different from how I had pictured it.

  ‘I saw your light,’ I said. ‘I knew you were up.’

  ‘It’s far too early. The household’s still asleep.’

  The household! Who did she mean: Augustus? Caroline Farquhar? Had Caroline come back? It’s far too early. Hannah spoke as if I were a visitor who should call at the proper hours. I was shocked, and angry too. There she stood, blocking the kitchen door, but behind her I could see the glow of the fire. I realised that I was very cold. I had not put on my boots and the frost had struck through my thin shoes.

  ‘Why have you come here, Lizzie?’ It was an old woman’s voice, querulous, complaining.

  ‘To see you,’ I said. ‘Or so I intended. Let me warm myself and I’ll be off again, since it’s clear enough that I’m not welcome.’

  Hannah took no notice of my anger. She answered as if I were still a noisy girl at home: ‘Hush, Lizzie, don’t speak so loud. You’ll wake Augustus.’

  She shut the door to the staircase and shooed me before her into the kitchen. But as I crossed the passage, I looked along to the door of Mammie’s room. There was a light in there too. Augustus wasn’t sleeping: Hannah had lied.

  ‘Good morning, Augustus!’ I said loudly.

  ‘Don’t disturb him!’ said Hannah, so sharply that if I had not known her and Augustus I’d have thought she was afraid.

  ‘Why has he a candle burning, if he is asleep?’

  ‘He has bad dreams,’ said Hannah. She had hold of me by the sleeve, tugging me into the kitchen. ‘Sit down by the fire, Lizzie, and I’ll make you some tea.’ She shut the kitchen door firmly. We never did that.

  I sat down and listened like a fox while I warmed my hands. Yes, here they came again: muffled sounds, footsteps, voices. There was someone else there and Hannah didn’t want me to know it. She and Augustus had secrets together. It went through me like a knife that Augustus had found another woman already, and the two of them were wallowing in my mother’s bed.

  Hannah had her back to me as she measured out the tea. I stood up swiftly and silently, went over to the door and eased the handle open. She turned at the draught but I was already through to the passage. I saw a flicker of movement at the bedroom door. Someone had been about to come out, but had gone in again on hearing me. The door was ajar. I ran to it and pushed it wide. There was the bed, tumbled, with the clothes slipping to the floor. Augustus stood in the middle of the room, fully dressed.

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked. He did not seem surprised to see me: he must have heard my voice.

  ‘Why, Lizzie, what do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean. There was someone in here with you. Where has she gone?’

  A strange look came on to his face. I saw that he understood me. I turned to search but he put out his hand.

  ‘No, Lizzie,’ he said. ‘Wait.’ He took hold of my wrist and looked into my face as if he were sorry for me. ‘It is not what you think. Not at all.’

  ‘Then what is it? I know that you have someone here and you are hiding her from me.’

  His eyes scanned me. ‘Did you come here alone?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Your husband does not know that you have come here? No one knows?’

  ‘Diner knows nothing. He’s still asleep.’

  ‘Can I trust you, Lizzie?’

  ‘What do you mean? What are you saying? Trust me? Leave hold of me, Augustus. I promise you, I will find her.’ I began to pull away. I was sure that he would not use force, and I was right. I shook him off and he did not try to hold me. Instead he folded his arms and said quietly:

  ‘You may come out now, Will.’

  A hand came out from under the bed, and then a foot. The bedclothes slithered as a figure crawled out and levered itself to its feet.

  ‘It is all right,’ said Augustus. ‘Lizzie, don’t be frightened. Mr Forrest is a friend of ours.’

  ‘He must be a very intimate friend, to be hiding under my mother’s bed.’

  The young man smiled. He was dusty: he glanced down at his clothes and noticed it, but refrained from brushing himself clean. He was tawny, with very bright hazel eyes and a white skin like a girl’s. He appeared not in the least embarrassed.

  ‘Lizzie is our dear Julia’s daughter,’ explained Augustus. I thought he would have done better to explain the young man to me, but he did not, and the young man did not seem to think it necessary either. I saw how uneasy Augustus was. He was trying to think what was to be done.

  ‘Why were you hiding under the bed?’ I asked. A stain of colour flowed into the young man’s white face, but he smiled and his eyes sparkled.

  ‘I was practising,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘In case you had been someone else. Someone very much less welcome.’

  I saw him glance at Augustus, a look that meant the same as those words Augustus had said: Can I trust you, Lizzie? But who were they to doubt me?

  ‘This is Augustus’s house, not mine,’ I said. ‘He may do as he chooses. You have no need to explain yourself to me. But my mother has not been dead three months, and she died in that bed.’

  I had not intended to say it. I always kept my feelings well hidden from Augustus. He could think me cold if he liked.

  It was the young man who made me speak: Will Forrest. I said his eyes were very bright, but when I looked close at him – I could not help doing so – I saw that it was not exactly brightness. They were soft, and full, and brilliant all at once. I could not easily look into them. He was not very tall: three inches taller than me, perhaps, as we stood almost face-to-face. His skin was as fine as a girl’s but there was something about him so utterly unfeminine that it drove the c
omparison away. Now he was brushing off the dust.

  ‘You must think me very strange,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mr Forrest is on his way to the colony of Virginia,’ broke in Augustus. ‘He will take ship from Devon. He is taking his leave of his friends along the way.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. Will Forrest remained silent and smiling. There was something between them, as palpable as smoke in a room. They were not going to tell me. If Mammie had been there she would have known everything, and I would have known everything through her, but now I was cast out.

  ‘Mr Forrest will not see much of the New World under my mother’s bed,’ I said. ‘Do you take me for a spy, Augustus? I shall go home.’

  ‘And you will say nothing?’ He could not help himself.

  ‘Of course I will say nothing.’

  ‘She deserves better than that,’ said Will Forrest. ‘Miss Lizzie – Miss Elizabeth—’

  ‘Mrs Tredevant,’ I said.

  ‘Oh – you are married. I had not thought of that.’

  ‘You had no need to think anything. You had never clapped eyes on me until two minutes ago.’

  ‘Of course, you are right. It seemed that I had known you for longer.’ He held out his hand, as frankly as a brother, and I took it. The skin was soft but the hand itself was strong. He held mine for a moment and then very quickly – almost as if shyly – he put it to his lips and just as quickly gave it back to me. But I knew already that he was not shy.

  ‘Mrs Elizabeth Tredevant,’ he said. It sounded like the name of another woman, older than me, guarded, respectable, over-ready to take offence or to guide others into the pattern of right behaviour. He drew out each syllable and then seemed to throw the name away as if he also knew that it was not really mine. He went on, ‘I have written a poem, and consequently I am likely to be taken up for sedition. What Mr Gleeson said to you is true: I intend to take ship, but not to the New World. This old one interests me too much. I am going to the Highlands of Scotland. I shall set sail for Glasgow and then travel on to Oban and thence by fishing-boat to a small town … After that, if I walk north for thirty miles or so I shall reach a place where I can be forgotten in less than a fortnight.’

  ‘The Highlands.’ Mammie had travelled there once. She told me of clouds smoking over mountaintops, of islands like a handful of flung and shining pebbles, of cliffs so high you could barely see to the foam beneath, of girls walking ten miles with creels of fish on their heads. ‘They say it is very beautiful. I should like to go there.’

  ‘Connoch is the nearest town to my friend’s cottage. You would not call it a town, Miss Lizzie – it is a straggle of a street merely, no more than a fishing village. Boats come and go, and I shall be rowed in late at night when it is dark. No one will notice me. There’s a house where I may stay safely overnight and in the morning I shall take the road north. It is a track scarcely wide enough for a loaded donkey. It goes over the moor, and then it follows the brow of the sea-cliff for miles. After that I must go inland a little and cross a glen which is always dark even on the most brilliant morning. My friend Alexander says there was a great slaughter there centuries ago and the land has not forgotten it. You may see eagles there. You climb again to the pass and after you have gone through it the land opens out again, very bare and desolate. He has advised me to buy a leather water-bottle and fill it wherever I can. At last, when you have given up hope of anything but walking over the edge of the world, you come to the sea again. The path dips down the side of the mountain to a bay where there are four cottages. Two are empty, in one there is a blind old woman who lives alone, and then my friend lives in the fourth, closest to the water. He has a boat, and catches fish. He makes his fire of peat turves. He grows potatoes in a bed of rotted seaweed and they come out as clean as eggs. He is making a new translation of Virgil: the fourth Georgic. It will be very fine.’

  ‘Does he live alone?’

  ‘Yes. He has a wife and two daughters in Glasgow, but they have not accompanied him.’

  ‘You speak as if you have seen it all.’

  ‘No, I have never been there. I have not even written to Alexander for months. My letters are intercepted, you know. I think he may be angry at my silence, but as soon as I see him I shall explain everything.’

  ‘Are you quite certain that he is still there?’ I thought of Will walking over the mountains with his pack on his back and his leather water-bottle, his feet dusty and blistered. What if he came to the cottage and there was no smoke from the chimney, only a door hanging open?

  Will smiled. ‘Of course he will be there. He’ll make me a bracken bed, if he has no mattress for me. He is the most generous of men. I shall bring enough oatcake in my pack that I shall not be a burden to him. I shall catch fish and pick mussels off the rocks, and dig his potato beds for him. In the evenings Alexander shall play his flute. He plays very well, Miss Lizzie, you would like to hear him.’

  ‘But winter is coming. Won’t you be lonely?’

  ‘I shall miss London. I am a Cockney, you know. I need the stir and dirt and bustle of it around me. But I would rather bounce on the waves in a cockleshell with a fish-hook in my hands than sit still inside a prison.’

  ‘Your friend will be glad to see you. It will make a change from having only one old woman to talk to.’

  ‘The sunsets, he says, are the longest and most exquisite he has ever seen. He climbs out over the rocks to the westernmost point and sits with his back against a boulder, watching them. The old woman, I believe, scarcely speaks English.’

  ‘One might tire of sunsets.’ I spoke dryly but I longed to see it all. Will Forrest had a way of speaking which kindled the words and made everything leap into being. I could see it too: the rough track and the eagles soaring.

  ‘There is a mark on your face,’ said Will. His colour deepened.

  ‘Where?’

  He pointed. ‘Just there, on your cheek.’

  ‘Oh! I expect it is from when I was making up the fire.’ I rubbed hard, to wipe off the smut.

  ‘I think it is a bruise,’ said Will.

  ‘Oh yes. I knocked against the dresser in the dark. I had forgotten.’ I felt the heat rise in my own face. He was looking at me so closely, and yet it was entirely different from Diner’s scrutiny.

  ‘It is nothing much,’ he said. ‘It is only where the light catches it.’

  ‘You must take more care, Lizzie,’ broke in Augustus, and we both turned. We had quite forgotten him.

  But Augustus was not accustomed to being forgotten. He cleared his throat, clapped his hands and said, ‘You must sleep, Will. You have not closed your eyes all night, and you have had your clothes on these past three days at least. Lizzie and I will leave you now. Hannah will bring your breakfast and then you will rest. Give me your boots. I will take them to be mended.’

  Will did not protest. It was true: he looked very tired. His face was pinched and pale now that the colour had receded. His hair stood up where he had run his hands through it. I wanted to settle it with my own fingers.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Forrest,’ I said, and perhaps he thought I was still hostile, for he nodded to me as if we were acquaintances who had met by chance in the street.

  14

  I sat by the kitchen fire in silence while Hannah prepared a plate of bread and ham and clattered pots on the shelf until she found the mustard. She had blown out the candle: it was full morning. Diner would be wondering where I was. I knew that I should leave, but I did not stir. I put my hand stealthily to my cheek, where Will Forrest had seen the bruise.

  Augustus came in with Will Forrest’s boots in his hand and his coat over his arm. He put the boots by the door.

  ‘Give me the coat, Augustus,’ I said. ‘I will brush it.’

  The hem was clagged with mud and the whole coat stained and spattered. There was a tear in the sleeve. Perhaps he had scrambled through a hedge while he walked those forty miles westward. It was an expensive coat but worn an
d shabby, and I wondered again about who Will Forrest was and how he lived. I took a stiff brush from the drawer.

  ‘I will go down and brush this in the yard,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Hannah. ‘The girls downstairs will know it is not Augustus’s coat. They are full of gossip.’ She spread out a drawsheet over the floor. ‘Brush it over this, Lizzie, and I will shake out the sheet after.’

  Hannah was preparing spiced ale so that Will Forrest would sleep well. She was more animated than I had seen her for weeks. Thomas did not rouse her as this young man had done. I brushed and brushed at the coat until all the loose dry mud was out of it, and then I sponged the stains. I hung it up behind the door while Hannah bundled the drawsheet together.

  The ale was mixed and now Hannah heated the poker in the fire as she did at Christmas. When it was red-hot she plunged it into the pewter mug full of ale. It hissed and steamed and a smell of nutmeg filled the kitchen. She put the mug on to a tray with the food, and said, ‘I’ll take this in to him now.’

  When the door closed after her, Augustus said, not looking at me, ‘You will say nothing of all this, I know, Lizzie.’ But I thought that he was not quite certain of me, and my temper rose. I would tease him a little.

  ‘A woman can have no secrets from her husband, you know, Augustus.’

  He turned to stare at me. He did not recall that he had said this to me himself not many months before. Now he was in a quandary. He would have to reveal his true opinion of my husband, if he were to prevent me from betraying Will Forrest to him. I watched him think it out, with his mouth slightly ajar.

  ‘How can you be so sure they won’t come here looking for him?’ I asked.

  Augustus hesitated. ‘They think he has gone north already,’ he said at last. ‘He took the mail to York several days ago, and he believes that he was followed to Lombard Street by a spy. He made sure to state his destination clearly and then he left the mail at the second post, doubled back, walked forty miles until he was west of London and then took the mail to Bath, and so onward to Bristol.’