The smell: beef on the turn, dead flesh. I retched and bucked away. No use – the odour thickened until I could taste it. Rancid.
Where was it coming from? I couldn’t see; there was nothing before my eyes but suffocating black.
A squelch. Gingerly, I flexed the fingers of my left hand. They moved slowly, weighted with a thick, sticky liquid.
Drips. Scarlet splashed, vivid against the black. Another spot. Another. Faster.
Scarlet melded to red, then claret. Purple mixed in, blending gradually like colour on Pa’s palette. Only this wasn’t paint. Not with this warmth and density. It was another liquid, a liquid I knew.
It was in my ears, up my nose, running from my lips. Hot, sharp. Drowning me.
A knock fell on the front door. I jerked awake, spluttering. My room solidified around me, the same chips in the floorboards and blackened paper peeling from the walls. No blood stained my sheets. The liquid I’d sensed was only sweat, beading above my top lip and sticking my hair to the back of my neck.
Naomi woke up, too. She screamed in a guttural way she’d never done before. The noise seemed to pierce through my skull.
Floorboards thumped as Pa went downstairs – either to answer it or escape through the kitchen. I didn’t hear which. I was too busy peeling myself from the damp sheets and trying to pacify Naomi.
It wasn’t her baby face I saw in the crib but a malefic thing, full of rage. She must be starving – that was the only explanation. She’d gone all night and most of the morning without milk or pap. I swept her up, sniffing her bottom as I did so.
Naomi hadn’t passed a motion in her clout, but she smelt wrong. Her buttercream scent had soured. Veins stood out in her forehead as she bawled. Her nostrils bubbled; I wiped them with the corner of the blanket and brought away foul-smelling slime.
Ma was still asleep. Juggling Naomi into one arm, I poked her awake.
‘She needs milk.’
‘Hmmm?’
‘Naomi. You need to feed her.’
‘Oh.’ Scarcely opening her eyes, Ma fumbled at the neck of her nightgown. I handed the baby over and turned my face away.
Naomi snuffled, a pig at its trough.
‘She’s ravenous, poor soul,’ said Ma. ‘I don’t think I am producing enough milk for her. Are you still giving her the pap?’
‘Yes, but she eats less and less of it. Is there a way you can make more milk, Ma?’
‘Only by eating good food. Drinking wine.’
By doing all the things we could no longer afford to do. I thought for a moment. ‘Can’t you take in more work from Mrs Metyard? I’ll do it. Then maybe I can buy some proper food for you, not just baked potatoes off stalls.’
Before Ma could answer, Naomi spluttered and coughed.
It was no ordinary cough: deep-throated, more like a bark from a hound. I twisted around to look.
Something was wrong. Naomi looked wrong. Instinctively, my hands reached out and I transferred her to my left shoulder, where I administered three sharp taps to her back. Milky vomit trickled down my sleeve.
‘Is she all right?’ said Ma.
‘I think it just got stuck in her throat.’ I lifted Naomi off my shoulder and stared into her face. Her glassy eyes met mine. Then she coughed again.
I needed to change my shift, so I handed her back and left Ma vainly shushing her while I returned to my room.
Even by the light of day, I couldn’t unfasten my corset. The hooks felt solid, as though they’d rusted into the metal eyes. Contorting myself, I loosened the laces and spent painful minutes half-strangled by my shift as I tugged my arms out of their sleeves. Now the corset was against my skin: breathing with me, moving with me.
Naomi’s cries swelled. They held all the static charge of a thunderstorm, massing at my temples.
As soon as I was dressed, I went back for Naomi. She cried less when I held her, but she didn’t stop coughing. More of that dark brown slime crusted her little nostrils.
Ma touched her forehead. ‘She must have a cold. Feel how warm she is.’
‘I’ll run for the doctor.’
She caught my arm. ‘Easy, Ruth. It’s only a cold. You had plenty of them when you were a baby.’
‘What can I do for her?’
‘Not much. We’ll give her some Godfrey’s Cordial and keep her warm – that’s right, tuck the blanket up under her chin. If she isn’t better by tomorrow, we’ll purge her with rhubarb and castor oil.’
But she wasn’t better by the next day. She was worse; feverish and fretful. Ma’s rhubarb and castor oil moved her bowels, but she didn’t suffer any less. After I juggled her into a fresh clout and wiped her eyes, nose and mouth, I stood back to inspect her.
It was bad. At first I thought she was hunching up her shoulders, but on closer examination I saw she had a bull neck, swollen to twice its usual size. The inside of her mouth looked grey. On the surface of the skin around her throat I saw small circles, like pressure points. There was an unpleasant movement in my chest. ‘Can you breathe, Naomi?’
She barked at me.
I gave her some more cordial, three drops on to her tongue. It smelt like treacle and sassafras. Naomi took it, uncomplaining, from my treacherous hands, trusting me to make her better.
Neither of us realised what those hands had already done.
She stopped crying. All she wanted to do was sleep. Ma thought it heralded an improvement, but that brassy cough remained, waking me throughout the night.
Sewing was impossible. Every time I picked up a needle my stomach soured with worry. Ma tackled the Metyard work alone, squinting by the light of Pa’s oil lamp. Every few hours, I ferried Naomi to her for another attempt at nursing.
‘She won’t suck,’ Ma told me. ‘It’s getting worse every day.’
I looked into Naomi’s wizened face with its dilated pupils and willed her to drink. All she did was cough.
Tears gathered in Ma’s eyes. ‘She’s thin, Ruth. I don’t know what to do.’
My heart stumbled. I knew, as all children do, that when an adult cries all hope is lost.
‘We must send for the doctor,’ I said. That was all I said, in those days, when I still held faith in medicine, in natural philosophy.
‘Run for Mrs Simmons. Her husband was a physician, God rest him. She’ll know what to do.’
I sped there and back like the hounds of hell were at my heels. Mrs Simmons came willingly. She was a good woman; matronly in a plump, lace-collar fashion.
We ran straight to Pa’s studio. Mrs Simmons removed her glove and pressed her fingertips to Naomi’s damp forehead. Then she looked in her mouth. ‘God help us.’
Ma gripped Mrs Simmons’s arm. ‘Do you know what it is?’
‘Yes. I’ve seen it before.’
Silence.
I asked the question Ma couldn’t. ‘What is it, Mrs Simmons?’
She hesitated.
‘What?’
‘I’m so sorry, my dears. It’s … it’s the strangling angel.’
Ma screamed.
‘The … what?’
Mrs Simmons placed a hand on my shoulder. It felt unbearably heavy. ‘The strangling angel has visited your sister.’
It couldn’t be possible. Could it?
I tore out of the studio, almost knocking Pa back down the stairs. ‘What is it?’ he cried. ‘Ruth, what’s happened?’
Ignoring him, I darted into my room and slammed the door behind me. I made it as far as the crib before my knees buckled. Naomi’s blanket lay on the bottom, its silver angel winking. I took it in my shaking hands. Then I began to rip.
The fabric gave way like water. Faster, faster. Seams unravelled. White shreds flew into the air. My nails tore but I couldn’t stop until every last piece was obliterated. I had to unpick every stitch.
‘Ruth!’ My mother’s voice.
Panting, I looked down and saw what I’d done. The crib was a rat’s nest of frayed cotton and snapped threads. There was no silver, no trace of the angel.
‘Ruth, come quick!’
I thought destroying the blanket would cure her. But as I entered the studio, I saw the desk cleared and Naomi laid upon it, the adults gathered around her. Her lips were dark. Between them her tongue protruded, shockingly pink.
‘I’m sorry, Naomi, I’m so sorry.’ Apologies tumbled from my mouth. ‘I never meant …’
Naomi’s eyes rolled back. White filled the space beneath her lashes. There was a prolonged, rattling wheeze. Then she went still.
Ma’s sob ripped through the house. The adults moved around me, crying, praying, trying to restore life, but they fell into the background.
All I could see was the side of Naomi’s neck, the marks resembling fingerprints. They changed colour, became bloodless and grey. Trembling, I stretched out my hand.
My fingertips fitted exactly.