ACT TWO

I walk round and round Dennis Watts’s tiny parlour, round and round, hands locked together, fingers twisted into a knot, arms and shoulders pulling, pulling, as if my muscle can grow into wings to fly my way out of this bottomless hole and take her with me, but all I can think of is her on that bed upstairs. She lies as still as a statue, beyond fear, beyond misery, and yet she is falling further and further into limbo.

It is where they go sometimes, Mrs Watts has told me, when the baby passes. The good soul has given her a sleeping draught and hopes that when she wakes she will be back with us again, but no one can tell. Sometimes they stay in limbo. Sometimes the midwife gives a poor missus a doll to hold, and she clings tight and coos and tries to nurse it while she strokes its raggy hair. I don’t want any doll for Mary Ann; I want her to know her bab is gone, for only then can she go on living. But what if that costs her too much? Isn’t it better for her to stay in limbo land? I don’t know, can’t guess — I only know you don’t float in limbo. You fall.

When I heard she’d eloped with Franz, I gave myself a talking-to. Get a grip on yourself, Rodnia, you’ve always tried to show her that she should strive for what she wants, even though you wonder if you made yourself plain, and you never quite knew what she wanted. And if this is what she wants, to keep her child and marry that man, however much you hate the fellow, then God’s teeth, be happy for her.

But all I could see in my mind’s eye was her toppling through a great empty void, her arms out as if to meet a lover.

So I was the first to urge Mr B to get on her trail, to seek out all the cab drivers at the market, find one who remembered picking up a gent and lady in the family way from the hotel very early in the day, and where he had taken them. And when Mr B told me how he’d found her at Isis House, and the story Franz had told about the stillborn child, I thought: So that’s how she has fallen, and what a terrible hard place to land. But still my mind saw her splayed in the air and her fall was not broken, but went on and on. So I came to that huge fearsome tomb of a house on my own, and scouted around, and it came to me that I had one more place to climb up and do a rescue, as I’d done at Seymour, and though there was neither flood nor pouring rain, it was going to be quite the trickiest rescue I’d ever done.

Mrs Watts has a draught ready for me too and tells me I need to sleep, and Jesus knows I’m as done up and lathered as a nag that has galloped day and night, but still it comes to me I should keep watch, lest those blackguards find out where we are and come after us. And I want to be at her bedside when she wakes, though it might not be for hours yet.

What a ride I’m on, what a jade, up in triumph one minute and down on the ground the next, back in the saddle, kick in the spurs, onwards. For there was triumph, I’ll admit. Came too soon, perhaps. When I found the ladder, climbed to the window, how pale those villains at the sight of my pistol, how quick and brave Mary Ann in her escape. And how finally I’d done my trick again, so near the same as the one in the Big Top in Mr Lillie’s circus, the leap to the ladder, the grip to stop myself sliding. Never thought I’d have the pluck for it again, but needs must … And triumph too, I guess, though I’m not proud of it, that I’d been right about Franz Richardson all along. Not that I’d ever guessed he was in league with that wicked doctor. Always thought him the complete scoundrel, though, with his fancy airs and lady-baiting charm and, when he thought you weren’t looking, his hard appraising stare.

Ah, Rodnia, you prize idiot, why didn’t you speak out when you had the chance? Tip off Mr B, warn Mary Ann when you saw the way she looked at the fellow? Because I had no proof he’d done anything but play the piano like a pretty gentleman? Sure, but if I’m honest, there was more. It was because he was handsome and strong and athletic and graceful and tall as a tree, and all he needed to do was hang upside down with his red mop dangling and he’d be the spitting image of Mr Ludovic. Jealousy cripples the mind and withers the heart, I’ve always reckoned so, and I didn’t want to go through all that crippling and withering again, no sir, all to no purpose or, even worse, to the purpose of destruction. I thought that if he won Mary Ann, and who knew if he would, maybe he’d turn out worthy of her. So for a long time I did nothing. But deep down I knew damn well nobody was worthy of her, least of all that red-crested rat.

It was when we were in Seymour, out at night in our rescue boat on the flood, that I truly saw him for what he was, and then I had my chance to take a leap, and I flubbed it.

I rowed in the prow, Franz rowed with his back to me in the middle of the boat, so at least I didn’t have his noble mug before me, and a Seymour man by the name of Carnie sat in the stern with the tiller and a lantern under a tarp. We were all wringing wet, especially our feet. The world roared, the water ran hard, the rain seemed to fall only in the circle of Mr Carnie’s lantern: beyond, all was black. Every now and then a sudden wrench of the tiller, to dodge an eddy or a drifting tree. We were following a distant screaming, whether man or beast we could not tell.

So far we’d rescued and taken to the hotel three families, a farmhand with an empty beer bottle in his mitt, a calf, a crate of hens. It was I who did all the rescuing. One biddy and her five grandchildren wouldn’t come down from the roof of their barn. They sat in a row like jam jars snug on a pantry shelf, and that got me antsy. I yelled: ‘Get in this damn boat or you’ll be a-farming in hell.’ Mr Carnie said there was no call for language in his boat, and Franz told me to pipe down, and I said I’d see them both in hell before I’d leave anyone to drown, and Franz said he wasn’t taking lip from a jumped-up little horse wrangler, and I said that was rich, coming from a piano-wrangling streak of piss, and meanwhile the biddy climbed down into the boat. So then I shinned up to the roof and took the kids one by one in my arms and tossed them into the boat to their grandma and Mr Carnie, and the youngsters laughed as if it were a game. And all Franz did was what he did each time: hunch over his oars and scowl at me as if he hoped I’d miss, and a young one or two would splash into the black water.

The screaming was louder. Mr Carnie raised his lantern high and shouted. I stared over my shoulder at a huge cherry tree in blossom, and I almost wanted to laugh at such a festive sight in the blackness. In its high branches squatted a thin man and a scrawny boy clutching a bundle, and it was the boy who screamed, baring furious little teeth. ‘Mercy,’ said Mr Carnie. ‘It’s Reverend Cameron and his lad.’ He steered our boat closer, and the white flowers rained on us. I stood in the prow with my coil of rope and threw one end up to the minister, who caught it and stared at it as if it were a snake. I shouted at him to lash it to the branch but I couldn’t wait for his fumbled knots. I was up that rope like an organ grinder’s monkey, and the boy stopped screaming, but his mouth stayed open. Slowly I coaxed Mr Cameron down the rope, and he fell the last foot like a bundle of wet umbrellas, muttering Bible talk. I slid down behind him with the boy under my arm. Franz reached out to separate us, then squealed, drew his hand back sharpish.

‘The little bastard bit me.’

‘No more than you deserve,’ said I, and he took a swing at me. It wasn’t a slap and it wasn’t a punch neither, something in between, and it missed, and he nearly fell, and I hoped he’d go over into the water, but he didn’t, although everything rocked to blazes and Mr Carnie shouted: ‘No fighting in my boat’; and the boy screamed again and tried to climb back up to the tree, for he’d left his bundle behind. I stopped him, climbed back up myself, hoping Franz wouldn’t seize the oars and row the boat away and leave me stranded. Back I came with the boy’s treasure in my teeth, a bulging hessian bag the size of two fists, drawn tight at the neck. I offered it to the boy, but he shook his head. I ruffled his hair into wet peaks, pushed the bag inside my own shirt. It was warm and throbbed against my skin.

‘For God’s sake let us get back to the Royal before anyone punches a hole in my boat,’ said Mr Carnie, glaring at Franz and me in turn while a pink glow rimmed the eastern sky, and Mr Cameron screwed his eyes shut and whispered his prayers.

The queer thing was I felt as frisky as a colt, for why would Franz shout at me and call me names and try to hit me? Only because he was jealous, realised he had a rival, someone with a lot more agility and pluck than he could summon as he crouched over his oars. If he took me serious, then maybe Mary Ann would too. I’m not sure how far I thought that out, but that mystery throbbing under my shirt pepped me up no end. And so when we came back into the Royal, I burned to go straight to her, to look up into her sad beautiful eyes, to declare myself hers. Didn’t work out like that, of course. Such a fine suitor, dripping mud and showering sodden blossom over the ballroom, tongue locked in my mouth, no doubt stinking of the sewer, all I could do was reach into my shirt and draw out what felt like my own warm, beating heart and place it on the tray in her hands.

And when I next saw her, the boy’s pet rabbit was gone, and she was angry with me, berating me for thinking so ill of her red-haired darling, prize poet, hero of the flood, who had rescued so many single-handed while I sat hunched over my oars. She had misconstrued, but how could I tell her the truth without laying bare my crippled mind, my withered heart?

The truth is, it is not enough to go out and rescue families from rooftops, or ministers and boys from cherry trees, or my beloved from a house of villainy. It is necessary, but it will never be enough. For she goes on falling, falling, as Miss Emmeline fell from the trapeze, and I cannot save her. The only one ever worthy of her love, her little bab, has been stolen from her — not by blackguards, but by God Himself. Can’t fight that. Can’t do anything but take Mrs Watts’s sleeping draught and hope for blackness. For a while at least.