The breath of men and horses smokes. They are looking across at us, shading their eyes against the glare of the snow.
‘Who are those men? Do you know them, Lizzie?’
‘No.’
‘Then tell me why they are looking at you.’
‘They are merely curious. They are surprised to see a woman out on the river in such weather.’
‘Be damned to them and to their curiosity. Draw your cloak over your head, Lizzie, so it hides your face. Bring my coat close around you.’
The horses have stopped. They fling up their heads and the men gentle them. I think I can hear the snorts of the horses across the water, but I have to look over my shoulder to see them now. The men are conferring. A wild hope leaps in me that they are uneasy about me: that they are asking each other how they may help me. Diner bends to the oars and rows faster. I look back again and the horses have turned. The riders are going back to the city. They have seen the heavy yellow cloud ahead of them over Wales, and they are uneasy about the weather. They have not thought of me at all.
‘Why do you look back, Lizzie?’
‘I was looking at the horses. The sky is growing very dark ahead of us. I think we shall have more snow.’
He does not answer. It is less easy now to see the detail of the bare trees, the reeds and the grey heron that each stand their territory along the bank. The air is growing thicker and more grainy.
‘We must find shelter,’ I say.
‘Do you think I should build you another house?’ he asks, and gives a bark of laughter. We are almost at the Horseshoe Bend. I would never have thought we should have got here so fast, but with the falling tide and the strength of the current, Diner’s rowing is more a matter of keeping us on course than of making way. He has judged it all well.
I see nothing ahead of me but whiteness as the river widens. We will come out into the sea, with its eddying channels and banks of mud and sand to trap us. Whatever Diner intends, it will make no difference. We will be caught there. The boat will overturn. Our boots will fill with water and our sodden clothes will drag us down. I suppose we will struggle but I cannot think of that. We will both drown and no one will know what has happened. If they ever find us our faces will be so mauled that they will be unrecognisable. And it will be so cold.
Thomas will not even remember me. Philo will believe that I have taken my money with me, and abandoned them.
If only I had not always defended Diner. I persuaded Mammie and Augustus that I could imagine no better husband. I bristled like a cat when Hannah sniffed and criticised. I kept from them all the signs that troubled me.
Thomas. My arms imagine his hot, damp weight. For an instant I smell his baby scent of milk, urine and new bread. I feel the quick pulse of his heart. If Thomas were here, I would do anything to protect him. If he were here, I would act.
I hear the clack and creak of oars in the distance. Another boat, not ours. When I glance behind, I see it, slowly coming clear out of the fog. A longboat, three times the size of ours. Now I can pick out the figures at the oars but I cannot yet see their faces. There are three pairs of oarsmen – no, four. The oars rise and fall in perfect rhythm as the boat glides towards me. I wonder that Diner does not see it gaining on us. He looks up, and then bends to his oars again without giving the least sign of alarm.
They are coming close. They are going to pass alongside us within yards, and still Diner does not see them. They are muffled in their cloaks, but then, as they come alongside, their hoods slip back from their faces.
I see them all. There is Augustus in the bows, rowing in the first rank with Caroline Farquhar beside him. She rows hard, as if she were born to it. Behind them Susannah, paired with Richard Sacks. And there’s Hannah! Who would have thought she still had the strength to pull an oar? But there she is, paired with Will Forrest, whose red hair glows like a beacon through the icy fog. I see Philo too, and the dressmaker who made Lucie’s silk dress. I know that they will have Thomas with them. Philo would never leave him behind. He’ll be snug in his cradle at the bottom of the boat, wrapped up like a caterpillar against the cold.
Their faces turn to me. Their eyes search for mine, although they do not break the rhythm of their rowing. Now I hear their breathing, hard and deep with effort. All at once they lift their oars and drops of water fall from the blades as their boat shoots alongside. They are smiling with relief because they have caught up with me. They have come for me, I know it, and I know they are waiting for me to come to them. I stretch my arm as far as I can, hoping to touch one of their oars. In perfect symmetry, the oars fall. The last of them sweeps through my outstretched hand but I do not feel it and it makes no mark.
As the boat passes I see her, sitting in the stern. She has her writing-board on her knee and she is scribbling down notes. She looks up as she sometimes does, pondering, and then she sees me. Her gaze sweeps over me like the beam of a lighthouse, illuminating everything, and then it returns to settle on my face. As their boat surges on she looks back, leaning on her elbow, watching me. She continues to hold my gaze until the boat vanishes into the white curtain of snow and mist ahead of us.
I am so cold. Soon I will be too cold to think. I must think now, while I can. That is why they came. I must act.
I shift on the seat, watching Diner closely. At once his eyes are on me like a cat’s. I cannot wrestle him to take control of the boat. He has the oar and he can batter me with it. He does not stop rowing but his eyes never leave my face.
I remember the sugar in my pocket. My fingers are clumsy in my gloves, so I strip them off and burrow deep into my petticoats. I come on a sugar-shaving, sharp as glass. I take it out.
‘What are you doing, Lizzie?’
‘Lean towards me. Open your mouth. I have something for you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Close your eyes and open your mouth.’
‘What is this, a game?’
‘A good game.’
He will not close his eyes. I show him the sugar on my palm, and then I bend forward until I feel his breath on my fingers.
‘Open your mouth.’
And he does. I slip the sugar between his teeth.
‘Swallow it. I have more.’ I take another splinter of sugar and feed it to him. ‘It will give you strength.’
‘Strength!’ His face crumples oddly, as Thomas’s does before he cries. He stops rowing, and his right hand drops from the oar. It tilts up sharply and I just save it as it begins to slide towards the river. I drag it back into the boat. Diner does not move or attempt to touch me. He is still holding the other oar, but loosely, as if he has forgotten what to do with it. I pull it into the boat too. We turn slowly, drifting sideways.
I fetch another piece of sugar out of my pocket. It is not the last, thank God: I have put in more than I thought.
‘I wish I had the wine for you as well.’
‘I wish you had.’
I look down, and as I do so I glance sideways. We are being pushed towards the elbow of the bend. I put another piece of sugar between his lips.
‘You are not afraid that I will bite?’
‘I am not afraid of you, any more than I am afraid of myself. You are too much part of me.’
‘Ah, Lizzie,’ he says, as if my words pain him, ‘if you knew me, you would want no part of me.’
‘I know you,’ I say, and I do. A fierce light has burned all the foolishness out of my heart. He has deluded me but I have also deluded myself, and willingly. I have wanted him to be what he never was.
‘I did not mean to kill her. It was my weight that bore down on her. If it had not been for the stone when she fell she would not have died. Do you believe me, Lizzie?’
I stroke his cheek with my right hand, and one by one I offer him the last shavings of sweetness. We are coming into the bend fast. The mud glistens where the tide has sluiced it down. Black seaweed clings to the bank. I dare not take the oar to guide us in.
‘I have
visited her many times,’ says Diner. ‘You did not know, Lizzie. You thought I was at Grace’s Buildings. I was unfaithful to you.’
‘You were never unfaithful,’ I say quickly, for I do not like this direction of thought. ‘Lucie is dead.’
‘That makes no difference,’ he says, and sighs. ‘You said once that to kill was to cross a river and that there was no way to return. How did you know that?’
‘I spoke without knowing.’
‘Is there more sugar?’
‘I think it is all gone now. But there is still sweetness on my fingers.’
I put them into his mouth. I feel him suck them, as Thomas used to do, until all the sweetness is gone. With a soft bump, we graze the bank, float off and then come in again. Diner stares around like one waking.
‘Why have we stopped here?’
‘The river has brought us here.’ I do not stop stroking his cheek as I gather my skirts around me. ‘It is too cold for us on the river, Diner. We must come ashore here. We must find shelter or we will die of the cold, out on the water.’
The boat is lodged. Soon it will be stranded, as the tide continues to fall. Diner glances at the bank and then the water, and knowledge returns to him. I get up, slowly, holding his hand. I make myself move simply although I am in a fever of calculation. Slowly, steadily, so that there is no clear moment when I can be stopped, I step out on to the suck of the mud. I know it cannot be too deep here, with the reeds growing so thick. It will not hold me fast.
‘You must help me a little,’ I say as I let go of his hand.
He too stands, and steps out of the boat, but he is heavier than I am and sinks deeper.
‘Step quickly,’ I say. ‘Do not let your weight rest on the mud.’
The mud wants to hold us but I will not let it. At each step I cling to the reeds and pull myself up by them. The mud is harder now. On the last step I tug my boot free and the mud releases it with a gross squelch. I am on solid ground, sweating.
A half-hour later I could not have done it. The water would have sunk too far and there would have been too much mud. I wipe my hands with a bunch of dead grass, and then I scrub them with snow. Diner watches but does not attempt to clean himself.
‘My Lizzie,’ he says. Our breath comes in gouts of white between us. He does not try to touch me but he stands too near. My body quivers with awareness of his. ‘Where will you go now?’
Surely he is teasing me. He cannot mean to let me go. Or he is testing me, waiting to see if I will run?
‘We must follow the towpath,’ I say, as if I have never dreamed of separating myself from him. ‘We must find shelter before the snow comes.’
‘You know that I cannot come with you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You must go alone.’
‘Without you?’
‘I have another engagement, Lizzie. Isn’t that what they say?’ He smiles, as if at his own absurdity.
‘Yes.’ I know I must agree, I must please him, I must not go against him now. Against my will my hand creeps out and lays itself on his sleeve. My body has not caught up with what my mind knows. It remembers his body and mine, conjoined, not to be parted. One flesh. My hand presses his sleeve.
He does not respond. He was one flesh long before I knew him, and not with me. I look at my own hand and hate it: I am a slavish thing to myself. I snatch my hand away from him.
‘You understand me very well, Lizzie,’ he says. ‘You say that she is dead but I cannot help myself. Wherever she is, I must visit her.’
He steps back. He glances behind him, measuring the distance, and then he turns to me again. ‘You must keep my coat, Lizzie,’ he says, and he fastens it more securely over my cloak. He nods, as if he is satisfied, and then he turns away again, lifts his boots high, as I did, and climbs down the bank. The mud sucks but it cannot hold him. He shoves the boat hard and as it begins to move he throws himself into it.
He takes the oars again with the old mastery. The drugged, dreaming look has gone. He is the same man who strode out of his house each morning, to oversee the building of the terrace. It was his own vision, and nobody else saw it. It would be realised despite everything. He always knew that.
He lifts his hand to me for a moment.
He will turn the boat. He will fight his way upriver, back to the meadow and the landing-place. He will return to Lucie.
I watch, shading my eyes, as he rows out to the middle of the river. But he does not turn. He does not fight the current. He steers until the boat points west and when the current takes him he digs in his oars and rows strongly, as if he wants to go even faster. He is going with the flow of the tide towards the sea. He is at the next bend, rowing hard. I cannot see him well. I blink to clear my eyes, and then I understand that it has begun to snow, and that it is the thickening flakes which hide him from me. I blink again, and he is gone.
29
The old woman puts me on a stool by her fire and clatters her kettle on to the trivet. Pictures appear and bloom in my brain, more real than the tongues of flame in the fire. I have been drugged with cold but I did not know it. I think she understands it for she takes off Diner’s coat but not my cloak, and wraps a blanket around me. It stinks of onions but it is warm. The coat collapses to the floor, sodden with mud, and she picks it up, chirruping, and hangs it on a hook beside the fireplace.
The kettle clatters. Heat stuns me: I cannot stir. After a while she puts into my hands a tin mug of hot spiced ale. I lift it to my lips and scald myself gladly. The ale goes down and spreads out to my fingertips.
‘I have not got a halfpenny,’ I say.
She nods. She knew as much, and it does not matter. I remember that I have a handkerchief in one of my pockets. I will give it to her when I can move my fingers. There are chickens in the corner of the room, bunched together and clucking to themselves. A cot in the corner; a deal table; two stools. Strings of onions and bunches of herbs hang from the ceiling. I begin to see it all as the ale warms me until my feet tingle with returning blood.
She found me on the towpath. She had a bundle of firewood on her back, but she stopped for me. There were not many words between us, or I don’t remember them. I think she believed that I had tried to throw myself into the river, and thought better of it, and that was why I stood so shocked and shaken with the cold. She tugged at my sleeve, nodding to me as if I was simple. She would not let go of me until I understood that I was to come with her.
I would never have found the place on my own. She led me over a stile, across a field and into a copse, and there it was: a stone hut – a single room, black with smoke, thick with a brew of smells. The warmth hit me like strong drink and I staggered. She put me down on the stool and I have not moved since. If it were not for the old woman I would still be on the towpath now. I would be picked up in the morning, frozen.
The old woman is busy at the table. I turn my head and watch her cut a chunk off a black loaf, which she hands to me, showing me that I should dip it in the ale and swallow it. The bread is very hard. She has no teeth so I think she must always take her food like this. I thank her, and swallow the sweet, stale bread. It goes down into me like life itself.
‘Iss ee ungray?’ she mutters, in a voice so thick and toothless that I can barely make out the words.
‘Yes.’
She stands, reaches to a stone shelf and fetches down an egg, which she coddles tenderly in her hand. In this cold weather there will not be many eggs. She breaks the egg into a bowl and whisks it hard with a little whisk made of twigs; then, nodding at me, she places the bowl in my hands. I must swallow it. I lift the bowl to my lips, tip it, and make myself swallow the egg. After that I hand back the bowl and take another drink of ale. The bread is gone. The old woman strokes my head as if I am a child, and I thank her. If I had my bundle I could give her some linen. I reach into my pocket but there is no handkerchief. I remember the blindfold and shudder all over.
She fetches a chicken and brings it
to me in her arms, holding it close to me as if to make us acquainted, and then she sets herself down on the other stool next to me, with the chicken in her lap, stroking it. The firelight plays on her face, which is seamed with dirt and wrinkles into patterns which look like the crazing of a field after drought. She stares into the fire and croons to the chicken, or to me, or to herself. She smells sour, gamey, like a creature of the woods and not a woman.
There is a pile of wood built high along the wall. A barrel of water stands in the corner, and a crock which must hold oats or flour, for there is a wooden measure on its lid. A couple of blackened pans hang on hooks above the fireplace. Everything is almost within reach because the place is so small.
We sit for a long time and then she says something about a babby, but I cannot make out the rest of her words. I am startled for a moment, thinking that somehow she knows about Thomas, but that cannot be the case. She must mean a grandchild of her own, or more likely a great-grandchild. But she sees that I do not understand and she points to my belly. Of course, she believes me to be a girl in trouble who has come here to throw herself into the river and end it all, as others have done before her.
‘No,’ I say, ‘no, there is no babby.’
She takes no notice of my words. She reaches to stroke my belly through the blanket and she chuckles as she does to the birds. The chicken does not like it. It sets up a flurry of jealous squawks until she smooths it again.
I sleep there for two nights. I tell the old woman my name, but she does not tell me hers and she never uses mine. Perhaps she cannot hear me, although she is quick enough whenever one of the chickens stirs. The day turns on them. She feeds them grain by hand, or the peelings from our vegetables. If she has nothing else to give them, they peck on a heel of black bread. Each morning she sweeps out the bed of dried reeds and rushes she makes for them in the corner of the room. I go out and scavenge for wood, taking care not to be seen. I skin and joint a rabbit that the old woman has caught in her trap. I sleep on Diner’s coat, on the floor beside the old woman’s cot, and I relieve myself in the lean-to privy. Her eyes are not good enough for sewing, although she has needle and thread in a box on her shelf, so I mend her cloak where it has ripped as she foraged in the woods. She does not light candles, although she possesses three. Once the brief daylight has gone, we sit by the fire. I hold a chicken in my lap and smooth down its feathers, as she does. Sleep overwhelms me: I have never been so tired. The past is hidden. There is only this room, the chickens, the rankness of living and the old woman’s face. I sleep more than I have slept since I was a child.
Birdcage Walk Page 28