Until Fookes mended my shoes I held doubts as to whether his word was true or not. That case full of his tools looked barely used, but Fookes held good to his word. I left my shoes at his door last thing at night, waiting as my head hit the pillow for the strike and ring of those fine silver-headed hammers and nails, but I heard not a thing. In the morning, like a fairy story, they were more than repaired at my door, they had been fully restored to an even better state than the original shoemaker had made them. The heel had been hammered back into the sole, the leather had been buffed and shined. I took them back into the nursery and slipped them on, and there I saw what he’d done. On the sole of one shoe he’d tooled a flower, an eglantine. On the other shoe he’d tooled the hips. All of me stiffened with anger: what did he expect in return? My mind frothed with what I would say to him, the licence, the indignity, what gave him the right?
Something scratched at my toe. Out on the floor fell his card – FRANCIS FOOKES SHOEMAKER – finest leathers and craftsmanship. May the Manufacturers of the Sons of Crispin be trod upon by all the World – and it took all the wind out of me. He should have tooled all the thorns, because that is what I was, no petals, no hips, just half-wild and full of prickles.
I went down the stairs and knocked on his door, all ready with my thanks and appreciation, but there was no sound from within the room, so I knocked again. My knuckles on the wood went unanswered. Had he already gone down to breakfast? I listened for sounds in the kitchen, but there was no rise and fall of voices. My curiosity overrode my better judgment and I pushed open the door a little, expecting to see him asleep in the bed, but I saw nothing, the room neat, the bed appeared not to have been slept in. On the threshold I waited, straining to hear any sound of movement in the house, before I let the room swallow me.
Inside, the smell of lavender soap engulfed me; his towel on the nightstand was damp. On the floor a telltale drop of sudsy bubble, a rainbow caught in its white net, a dark whisker from his shaving. Across the dresser he’d made a makeshift workshop, all his tools rolled out on a piece of leather to protect the wood, the old nails of my shoes bent in a pile.
My fingers lingered on the drawer and I pulled it out, my heart skipping a beat; the joints long since beeswaxed made a small scream, wood on wood. There were all his linens, his clothes, his neckcloths, his trousers – all filling one drawer. My fingers slid around the edges of them, testing for the thing I sensed but couldn’t see, a sense all their own, so that I was able to slide out the oblong shape I felt beneath Fookes’s things without one item of clothing losing its folded edge.
There in my hands was a book, too thin to be a Bible. The red cloth boards were stained and worn. I opened the cover and saw the strange beast and bird on a verdant page and I felt the cold spread down my arms, numbing my fingers. Views of Australia. I peered into the image as if it were merely a window, with a childish hope of seeing my father there, a bright dot on the horizon. I flicked through the pages with desperation, almost squinting at the light on each page – a moon pausing through its transit to peer through the clouds at a Romany camp. I blinked again, the people were the natives. Another page, the township glowed against the green, the body of bright water, a little figure in a blue coat made me hesitate, his back towards me.
Downstairs the clock struck the hour and I hurriedly flicked to the end of the book, ready to return it to the drawer, to hide any sign of my trespass, ready to fold all the light and shade of those images into my mind as I would a jewel to wonder at its facets, when I saw the false back to the book. Outside, a magpie clittered and my fingers itched to see what was in the false space. I heard the front bell chime and Makepeace’s slow ascent from the kitchen below. I slid off the false endpaper, made of card, just a fingertip width to see what was inside, struck with the ingeniousness of it, when I saw the wedge of notes, a hundred pounds or more.
I’d never seen so much money in one place; I ran my fingers over it. How long would that much keep us going? My father had the ability to fan money and know its count, but that was a skill I hadn’t mastered. Here was Fookes’s fortune already, the money with which he’d build his shop and his new life, kept safe in the secret of the book. My fingers knew what they were doing before I did; they skimmed the surface of the pile, gentle as a breeze, and slipped what I had taken into my pocket. I slid the false endpaper back into place and concealed the book carefully in amongst the linens where I’d found it, even more disgusted with myself than when I had entered. What stopped me from a new life? My father had worn the convict chains, not I, yet why did I feel their weight? The sins of the father carried on the weight of his child, they were a warning, yet they were not enough to deter me. My father perhaps had been right, what else had my hands been moulded for, but this?
I closed the door to the room and made my way down the stairs. Makepeace stood at the front door.
“Have you seen Mr Fookes?” I said. “I wanted to thank him for mending my shoes.” But Makepeace didn’t answer me. She remained standing with her back to me. “What is it? Who was at the door?” I said, feeling the uneasiness seep up through my feet and hands, feeling the urge to bolt the door.
Makepeace turned and looked at me and I saw that something had frightened her. An envelope was in her hand.
“Come with me,” she said and I gave her my elbow to lean upon, her footsteps uneven. She seemed glad for the steadying weight of my arm. We made our way down to the kitchen, the remains of breakfast long since over. Two cups of old tea. A plate scraped clean. She led me to her room.
“Sit,” she said and handed me the envelope. It was addressed to us both. I bristled, the envelope had already been opened, why hadn’t we opened it together? Inside the envelope was one small single sheet of paper folded in half with some sort of plant wedged between its fold.
“Careful now,” Makepeace said and I took heed, slowly unfolding the paper. There was nothing written on the page, not a word. Inside were only the pressed petals of some sort of golden-flowered plant, the pollen smeared a mirror image on the opposite part of the folded page. I leaned down and smelled it. Sunshine. I picked up the envelope again, there was no return address.
“What is this plant?” I asked.
But Makepeace shook her head and pulled out a book from her bureau, a small Bible, my heart making a racket in my chest.
“Open it,” she said and I flicked back through all the Lord’s words to the once blank pages, and read the names and dates written with different hands, the light of a small window barely bright enough to read by.
There was Amberline Stark joined to my mother’s name Patrin Scamp 1818 with my name and birthdate beneath. And then there was my father’s name joined to Ada Fitzroy 1821. These marriages proved what I had always known, that my father had had two wives. I slammed the Bible shut.
Patrin, Patrin – my mother’s name. I said it aloud in the stuffy room and my hand reached for the doll in my pocket as was my habit, but she was in the cellar. “Patrin,” I said again and my palm burned hot. I said her name a third time and her love for me tore through my chest, a physical thing. I needed her more than ever. At the small windowsill sat Makepeace’s little garden pots – the foxgloves bursting through the soil, a pot of straggly rosemary, comfrey. A remedy in each. If only a plant could be pounded by the mortar and pestle to make a simple to fix my situation. But it was I, Eglantine, who was the green thing, pounded by life and circumstance, destined to be turned into something else, but a remedy for what?
Makepeace opened the Bible again and pulled out more envelopes that I hadn’t seen, four in all. She laid them out on the coverlet in the order they had arrived and then placed the contents on top of them, a strange posy. A strange blossom pressed and preserved, the petals red and waxy curlicues. A strange sparse daisy-like thing that felt like flannel beneath the fingers. Tubular scarlet blooms tipped with white, strung in a row delicate as a necklace. The most fragile flower was a vibrant purple, each of its petals delicately fringed like something one would find at the haberdasher’s rather than something nature would make. I sighed and the yellow pom-poms of pollen, the most recent arrivals, rolled off their paper and onto Makepeace’s coverlet.
“I’ve never seen any of these flowers in my life, if that is what they are,” she said, “and I know not the uses of them.” She looked at me. “But I know who sent them. One each year.”
“But no letter? No words?”
“Sadly, though he tried, he never learned them. He was unable to sit still, always moving.”
The thought of my father finding these plants, picking them and finding someone to address them to us filled me with sadness. Who knew what hardships he’d had to endure, what his loss of us had been to him? What sort of life had he carved for himself out of that wilderness? I thought of Fookes’s book with its hidden fortune, its strange beasts and birds, its glowing pages of land and water. I had willed that little figure in the blue coat to turn around and speak to me, and now he did, his voice flowers. My mother was as mysterious as a ghost, but my father had raised me, even if it was in his peculiar way, yet now I hardly recalled the details of his face, the texture of his voice. I’d been but a girl when he left, would he even recognise me? Makepeace lifted the blooms and placed them carefully back into their corresponding envelopes, a dust of pollen on her hand.
Fookes was waiting for us in the kitchen when I came out, his coat shoulders damp with mist, a fine net of it weighting the ends of his curls, his eyes falling straight to my feet.
“Are they to your satisfaction, Miss Eglantine?” he said.
He tried to rein in the optimism in his voice, his hope coiling up through him like a vine. I stood and looked at him and I saw it, caught it fleeting yet unguarded, his high regard for me. Blood rushed to the tips of my ears. Why else had he taken his awl and made his pictures for me, except for a show of his handicraft and regard?
“They are fine, Mr Fookes, very fine indeed.”
It was Mr Fookes’s turn to blush then, his mouth breaking into a grin.