The night was like a hood pulled down over London; the river churned as we passed and it eerily threw up its own light towards us, a world of drowned stars. Was my mother’s starry face amongst them? All was darkness except for the dogged determination on Makepeace’s face as we made our way to see my father.
Newgate Prison’s cold metal-studded doors were bolted against us, but Makepeace rapped hard enough to wake the dead, until the door opened and she pushed a coin in someone’s hand and one by one the bolts were unlocked to admit us.
We walked down into the holding cells, the echo of the key in the lock, the jarring of the bars, the sickening stench that rose up to our nostrils with each step. The turnkey to the cells where the men were held put out his hand and Makepeace shed yet another coin. I felt the damp wick up my skirt; a rat’s furred shape crossed our path and I heard Makepeace swear under her breath. We were led through the dim light and the dank walls that trickled with rivulets to a shadowy cell where the turnkey halted. I peered in, only to see a cluster of poor grubby souls crammed together, resting however they were able, tossed about like shipwrecked survivors, abandoned and exhausted though the ship was still to sail. The cold bars bit at my cheek, but look as I might, I couldn’t see my father anywhere. The men grew aware of our presence at the door, poised and alert as if we had the means to let them out. Oh, I would have if I could have, every last one of them. The despair of them.
“He’s not here,” Makepeace whispered close to my face.
“Father?” I shouted. “Father?” My voice echoed and if any men had been asleep they weren’t now.
“Eglantine?” My father moved from the back of the cell, made from shadows until he stood before us. Makepeace stepped back and looked at him. If not for the fine cut of his coat, I doubt she would have recognised him. His face was grimy and crowned with a black eye.
I looked at his hand that reached towards us and saw then how my father stood apart from his cellmates, in his clothes, his manner, his demeanour. I took his hand, my arm pressed by the damp bars on either side, my cheek scratched by metal, lime rust scraping against my skin, just to get closer.
“Father,” I said, wanting reassurance. I looked at the lock and back to the turnkey who held a ring of keys, like a giant’s chatelaine, wondering which key would open it, rusted as it was.
“I’m sorry, Eglantine, I didn’t get you your boots,” my father said and attempted a smile. Someone laughed behind him. I looked down at his hands, his fingernails silted up with grime. Makepeace frowned at him, at his attempt to make light.
“Amberline,” she said, her hand reaching through the bars for his other hand, holding it to her. My father kissed both our hands, before he reached through the bar to wrap around me, in an awkward embrace, my father, Makepeace, the bars and I.
“What happened, Amberline?” Makepeace asked. “What went wrong?”
My father hesitated. His eyes fell to his hands, looking at them in disbelief, his faith in them shaken. “I thought I saw her,” he said very quietly.
“Who?” I said. To see my father transformed from a gentleman to a prisoner unnerved me.
“I was in a crowded street, beside me was a woman with a child in her arms, wrapped in a fine blanket. In the child’s drowsy fist was a coral-handled silver rattle close to dropping. It was the sort of rattle you should have had, Eglantine, wrought so finely. The mother was distracted by a street singer, as were those around us. No one paid attention to my fingers as I caught the rattle in my grasp and concealed it without a sound. But as soon as I placed it in my pocket, my whole pocket mysteriously filled with water and started to drip, splashing my trousers, my shoes, the road. The singer stopped singing and the baby cried. Then the mother turned to look at me and I saw her face, Patrin’s face looking back at me. I was apprehended and charged and brought here.” My father put his hands away under his armpits and I felt water run down the back of my own neck, the cells dripping with their own rain.
“Eglantine, listen now and listen closely. It’s up to you now, you’ll provide for us,” he said, close to my ear. I smelled the sourness of his breath. “You’ve learned all I could teach you, it’s up to you to keep yourself and Makepeace safe.”
“But we could sell the house, Father, let Makepeace go. Let me come with you,” I said. Makepeace stiffened beside me.
“No, the house is our one non-portable asset, Eglantine. We’ll not sell it, I’ve worked too hard to keep it, I’d not have a misstep make us lose it. We’ll not return to the old ways.” The turnkey appeared and I felt the cold seep up from the floor. “And I’d not have you leave Makepeace or England and follow me to God knows where. Makepeace will be your guardian and you be a good girl. Remember what I taught you,” my father said. We were escorted out then, Makepeace’s coin having run out.
Makepeace and I awaited the day of the trial, and like an out-of-control wheel it came too soon. The court was a hive of noise – weeping, shouting, screaming, howling – until the judges walked in. Their grey wigs fell down the sides of their faces like aging cocker spaniels’ ears. The stalls were quiet until the judges sat and then there was a burst of noise. The awesome might of the Empire was in the scrawl of their hands as they sat above, looking down on us all.
For the next few hours we sat perched listening to a world of inventory – a stolen pocket handkerchief, a filched loaf of bread, a length of satin ribbon, a fork, a thimble, a plank of wood, a bushel of tea, a bristle brush, a dozen iron nails, a pamphlet, a pair of stockings, a funnel, a cooling pie, a lace parasol, a gentleman’s tie, a bobbin of thread, a pat of butter, a vial of laudanum, a shawl, a pair of sturdy hobnailed boots, a skein of rope, a saucepan, a ladle, a pair of woollen mittens, a pair of kid gloves, a posy of violets, a cake of soap, a bottle of castor oil. Imprisonment, banishment or death dependent on the value of the goods. Above a shilling, most received His Majesty’s one-way ticket, but some were unlucky to get the rope. When those unfortunates heard the news most of them crumbled and pleaded for clemency, mercy, that they were a mother or a father, as if their parenthood would save them. In some instances the judges commuted their sentence, but others were left with it, the thought of it already crushing their throats.
When they led my father out from the cells to the dock, my heart tiptoed in my chest. My father looked around, confused at the sea of faces. He stood straighter when he looked up and recognised us, his hand floated up from his shackles. I cried out for him, but Makepeace tugged on my arm to silence me. My father tripped as he took the stand and the crowd tittered until he righted himself and stood straight again, running his hands through his greasy hair.
The charge was read out and he was asked his plea. “Not guilty.” His voice filled the court and someone upon hearing him for the first time would feel obliged to believe him. His voice was honey.
“But you were caught red-handed,” a judge said, frowning, and looked at his papers then looked my father up and down. The most senior-looking judge cleared his throat and spoke and my ears filled with the roar of my own blood.
“The prisoner is guilty. He is sentenced to fourteen years. In the Colony of New South Wales.”
My father turned to us, his eyes wild, gulping air, showing his bound wrists to us but we had no way to throw him a rescuing line. Makepeace raised her hand out to him, but his time upon the stand was up and he was being led by the court officer to the cells below. The next to be banished was already being led to the stand to await the judgment of the law. A judge stifled a yawn with the back of his hand.
Makepeace and I returned to the house and I saw it with different eyes. Before it had been the only home I recalled, never seeing it as anything more than the place where I lived. But as Makepeace and I walked along the river, the current running alongside us like a silent companion, the silence brewed between us. Our lives had been emptied of my father’s life in a word – guilty – and Makepeace and I would be alone in the house, rattling around like my doll did in my pocket.
As we walked up the step together and entered the house, I realised what a big house it was for the three of us, let alone two. Makepeace put her key in the lock and opened the door, and the whole house seemed to whisper my father’s absence.
Makepeace went down to her room that was next to the kitchen and I wandered like a will-o’-the-wisp through the rooms of the house. Nothing appeared to be the same; it felt as if the whole house had been submerged and dragged up again, things distorted and dripped. How was it that we had this house after all? How shabby and old it seemed now Makepeace and I were alone in it; without my father the very walls turned into a different kind of cage. How was it that we had all these rooms, when all those in that cell had hardly enough room to stretch their arms? The sitting room as I walked into it felt overstuffed, the damask creeping off the walls and onto the furniture. I looked up at the ornate moulded ceiling, the glass in the window, that wavered, the bubbles trapped in the glass. Airless and crowded, though I was alone in the room. I pushed at the sash of the window and found the damp had wedged it shut, so I hit it again and again with the heel of my hand, until the wood gave way. In blew the breeze from the river, bringing with it many sounds; a seagull hovered just outside the frame of the window and was gone; the curtains disappeared out the window with a suck, but still I couldn’t breathe.
I raced up the stairs, the balustrade as cold as water beneath my palm, to where Ada’s room had been and was left bare, and I pushed the window open and let in the air. It whipped in and filled the room, finding the walls and space to its liking, like a cat spiralling on a lap.
Up the stairs to the nursery, the wind cooled the damp sweat on my back. It was filled with all the things of childhoods before me, things I had played with but which had never been mine. All the fancies a childish heart dreamt of: rocking horse, dolls, shelves of books with coloured spines. A doll’s house replica of the house stood pride of place on an elegant pair of wooden legs. I stepped closer and put my eye to the window. I was grown a giantess to spy on the little inhabitants: a little cook in the kitchen, her arms up to her elbows lost in a bowl; a little family sitting around a dining table, plates as big as buttons; a maid laying a fire in the sitting room; a grandmother sleeping in her bed, her gold-rimmed glasses on the tip of her nose; up the staircase the same paintings hung; a gentleman sat at his desk in a book-lined library, his quill feathered as if with eyelashes. And in the nursery a governess in her serge uniform rocked a tiny baby in a cradle beside a miniature doll’s house as tall as a match.
Were we prisoners now in this house just as the doll’s house kept the dolls prisoner? My father had been imprisoned. Was this our fate too? All I could hear was the roar of water, the room slipping beneath the surface. The little doll flipped in my pocket like a landed fish and spurred me to action. The wind was already rattling the sash waiting for me; the nursery windows rose at my touch, pushing my hair across my face and chasing the wind through the doll’s house, the tiny curtains whisked out the tiny windows.
Only my father’s rooms remained.
Walking down the stairs I smelled the brine of the river fill my lungs; the breezes made my skirt billow around my legs like a sail. The wind had already pushed open the door to my father’s study and made the pages on his desk flutter and spill to the floor. The window wouldn’t give, no matter how I shoved at it. The sash had been nailed shut, but the wind still came through; I wedged open the door to allow it admittance.
I stood outside my father’s bedroom door, my hand on the wood, and listened, half expecting to hear sounds of my father bustling around inside, but all that I heard was the wind already pushing beneath the door crack. Who was I to let it wait?
Inside the room it was as my father had left it. All was neat. All was quiet. His bed was made, his drawers all closed. A pair of cufflinks lay on top of his dresser; the wind pushed one to the floor with a clink. I opened his windows and let the air come swirling in. Cautiously I opened the drawers, feeling them glide – every item was perfectly folded, drawer after drawer of handkerchiefs with his own monogram. Why so many handkerchiefs? I ran my hand under the rim of the drawers, seeking a secret spring. Nothing. I pulled open another drawer; his shirts all ordered. On his dresser were bottles of powder and lavender water and his long razor that he would shave with every day, the pulse of his neck so close to the blade, his Adam’s apple bobbing close with a swallow. With a quick tug I pulled the drawer free and shook all those handkerchiefs on the bed and with them fell all that my father had hidden – gold coins fell out and I felt hot as if the devil’s own breath were warm upon my face. I stripped my father’s pillow of its case and rushed to fill it, stealing from the master thief. Just as I had finished I saw something remaining in the drawer and I felt time spin.
It was a little leather pouch, the cord around it tied with a knot, though the cord had been cut. Gingerly I plucked it from the drawer, a splinter of wood keeping the cord from coming free, and then there it was, a familiar reassuring little measure in my hand. I held it to my nose and breathed deeply, and with my eyes closed for the briefest of moments I felt her with me, it was something of my mother’s. I stood frozen with the wind coming at me from all directions; a spit of rain came through the window, a sun shower, a fox’s wedding. All the doors slammed with the gust throughout the house, one after the other like a series of fireworks, waking me to myself. What would happen to us if these things of my father’s were found here, what fate would befall us? Part of me wanted to hurl the pillowcase and its contents out into the street, but I realised this was what paid for our clothes, our comforts, our bread, and we might yet have need of my father’s provisions. The walls wavered in front of my eyes; this house might just as well be made of water.
I curled the leather pouch in my fist, took the pillowcase with me to the nursery and threw it beneath my bed for a temporary home. I’d bury it somewhere, until it was needed. What world had my father brought me into, what world would it become? My father had instructed me to be his hands, to continue his bitter trade. Why couldn’t I determine my own fate, put my hands to a better use? But what use would that be? My father had trained my fingers from the earliest, his ten white servants, and they knew nothing else. Other girls my age would know how to sew and mend and make. But all my father had me truly learn was how to steal, how to take, without regard for the consequences. Where was my father now? Was he already on board the ship that would transport him, or was he still waiting in the cells? Would we even know if he survived the voyage? If I continued as my father wanted me to, what would prevent me falling the same way, bound for Botany Bay, my own life dropped like a stone to the bottom of a well?
I lay on the bed, not caring that my boots hit the coverlet. I took the pouch from my fist and placed it on my forehead as though it was a poultice, then reached for my doll in my pocket, my fingers travelling the worn grooves scratched in her back. I closed my eyes, surrendering to whatever wind would blow, feeling myself adrift as if the house was already a part of the river, already gone with the tide.