I woke when my bedroom window was pulled closed, Makepeace having gone and closed each and every one. Sleep had taken me and washed me up on the shore, disoriented as to what the time was: all the light was wrong. I snatched the pouch into my fist for safekeeping, before Makepeace saw it.
She came and sat beside me, put her hand to my forehead, a forked line of worry running across her own, but I had no fever, all I had was the cold truth brushing up against me and I wondered if I’d be strong enough to withstand it.
“Your father was born in a storm, did you know that?” she said. I shook my head. I knew nothing of my father’s life outside of this house, outside of the dolly house.
“The men had gone bokra-choring, sheep stealing, his father lost his life for it at the end of a farmer’s gun.” The Romany words flushed into me with familiarity but their meaning disappeared like smoke in the daylight.
“All my husband’s belongings were put to the flame, lest the spirit remain and weigh heavy on the living. I was to move into his parents’ caravan with the baby. But I’d had enough of the road and the country life, the selling of baskets and pegs, the silver across my palm for a fortune told. I wanted to strike out and find my own fortune, not have it dictated to me by my in-laws. I wanted more. In the dead of night I took our horse and all I owned tied into a shawl strapped to my back, and with another shawl strapped the baby to my front. I sold the horse to the first person who offered me money for it on the outskirts of the city, on Makepeace Lane, and I changed my name accordingly. At night we slept under the twisted canopies of hedgerows, hedgehogs rootling for night crawlers around us, waking to hayricks alive with sparrows.”
Why was she telling me this? All the hairs on my arms stood on end, the shiver running feverishly across them as the thought formed in my head. That baby was my father. Makepeace was my grandmother. Makepeace nodded her head, reading the doubt in my frown. “Yes, child. This is the truth. Amberline never wanted me to tell you, but I can tell you now he’s gone.” She looked away then, but I could see the pain in her face, the mastery of her tears.
“I walked into the heart of the city and picked another street, all the colourful painted doors and beautiful whitewashed steps, polished door knockers like horse brasses on fair day. I knocked proudly on each and asked for work and was turned away from every one. My baby strapped to my chest was a repellent to employment, but I would not surrender him as a foundling or return him to the life I was so desperate to leave behind. He cried for the breast and I took him down to the riverside, settling beneath a willow, watching the hair-like leaves waft in the water and the gaping mouths of the little fishes dart, listening to the happy suck, wondering what I would do next, when a young lady approached me, her miniature image dozing beneath a silk coverlet in her arms. She was dressed in a long muslin gown, her hem tainted green, stained by the grass. A snug little red velvet jacket cloaked her, damp at the breast where her milk sprang. The lady took me on as a wet nurse for her baby in exchange for a room and meals. She was Mrs Fitzroy. She’d lost her husband in the wars and was glad of company for herself and her baby daughter, Ada. She employed me as her wet nurse first. Later I became her housekeeper.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I said, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. How could she have kept me at a distance for so long?
Makepeace’s eyes clouded over. “We’re all the family left that each of us has got, Eglantine.” She took my hand in hers. I wanted to pull away. This was my grandmother, the only family I had left in all the world, and she was holding my hand. My emotions shot through me with as much force and colour as looking at the diamond through Old Sweet’s loupe, all of them overlapping and vivid. All her little tendernesses added up. Housekeepers didn’t tend to the children of the house as she did. But she was my father’s mother, her bedroom was the tiny room off the kitchen, bereft of light.
“You have lived like a servant.”
“It was your father’s idea, Eglantine. I’d kept this house for years already by the time it came into his possession,” she said.
“And how did he come to own this house?” I said, the truth hovering somewhere between us, but I was unsure if she would pin it down, for once and for all.
Makepeace sighed and looked out the window. “Amberline and Ada grew up side by side, he was the shadow to her light. Their games and laughter filled the house. But when Ada came of age, Mrs Fitzroy decided it was no longer appropriate for her to be so close with a servant’s boy. Amberline was old enough to earn his keep. But this sent him into a temper. His taste of fine things only made him want more. He found a job at a stable, but he felt it was beneath him, shovelling shit and hay. He became wilful, uncontrollable. He’d steal to buy Ada gifts and fancies. It was when Mrs Fitzroy discovered his gifts to Ada that she sent him away.”
She released my hand to smooth the chatelaine chains along her skirt. “He made this for me, did you know?” she asked, trying to divert my attention. Her chatelaine was more lock than key. It was a weight that had anchored her to my father, to his house.
“You haven’t answered my question,” I said. I would not let her distract me.
Makepeace sighed. “I didn’t see him for some time, though I ached to hear of him. And then, one day he reappeared, with his fine clothes and money in his pocket. He didn’t tell me where he’d been or where the money had come from and I knew better than to ask. And in his arms he held you. He left you in my care while he paid his respects to Mrs Fitzroy. I knew he was keen to see her face at his change in fortune. And I was amazed and relieved, for I not only had my son back, but I had a new grand-daughter, named for me. I kept you quiet in the kitchen. But not long after Amberline returned, Mrs Fitzroy died. Amberline only had to ask for Ada’s hand and she gave it. Your father passed you off as a foundling and Ada, soft-hearted creature she was, took you in. When he married her, the house – and all her wealth – became his. I stayed on as housekeeper. He wanted it so.”
The walls seemed to press in on us; this house had been the centre of my father’s empire? I looked at the ceiling and the floor. The house was just an illusion. It wasn’t made of four safe walls and a sheltering roof, it wasn’t a place of safety and refuge, it was my father’s masterstroke, his biggest theft yet.
“You must believe me,” Makepeace said, “too long I’ve kept it to myself. The weight of it.”
Our home was something my father had taken by stealth. All of me was incendiary. I wanted to see the house burn. The last of my father’s litany of thefts gone in smoke. But the place was so damp, I doubted a flame would bother to take.
“What about my mother?” I said and saw Makepeace flinch, not realising how much she had given away, forgetting how the silences usually fuelled my questions about my mother. “When did I come to live here without her?” Makepeace looked at me. All the pieces shone dangerously and I struggled against putting them together, not wanting to see the blade that they had become. “He was married to them at the same time?” Makepeace went pale with the truth of what I had gleaned.
“He’s my son, Eglantine. What was I to do? Even as a boy he was full of his own thoughts and ideas. When I tried to teach him his letters, they wouldn’t stick, he was all for playing tricks with his hands, unable to sit still. I came and saw you and your mother every chance I could.”
“What sort of excuse is that?” I prickled.
“The Rom in him loved your mother, but he craved being a gentleman and marrying Ada gave him that. He was his own man, Eglantine, I’d no more influence over him as a grown man.”
Outside a cat wailed and sent my heart racing, for my ears perceived it as a child’s cry first before I made sense of the sound. Makepeace, too, sat a little higher, stiller, until we both breathed again. She squeezed my hand gently in hers and I felt the papery dry skin of her hand. I wept. Angry tears. My own doll held tight in my fist, my first theft, I was a thief’s daughter, whatever way I looked at it. He’d stolen this house, and all the contents of it. I was just another spoil. And somehow, still yet unbeknownst to me, he’d stolen my mother from me. I’d no proof, but I felt it in my marrow.
At the first opportunity I got, I took the pillowcase of money and my doll and consigned them to the darkness at the bottom of the cellar. I’d not be his walking legacy, the keeper of his flame. I’d not be the strength of his hands.