In the morning I woke with a start, blood rushing in my ears as I listened to the house: Fookes’s familiar steps below as he made his ablutions, the long stream of piss into the chamberpot, the sound of his yawn winding up through the floorboards. But the house felt different, the echoes somehow denser, thicker, my ears muffled like the sensation of snow covering the street, everything coming to me as if softened by eiderdown. I flung off the bedclothes and stood up. Outside, a hot sheen was already rising off the river, a fug in the making. On the stairs Makepeace’s chatelaine jingled and went silent. Today was my birthday and my doll sat on a chair, innocent of her arrival, her smiling eyes looking back at mine. Surely it was Makepeace who’d found her and replaced her upon her throne, a childhood gift recovered.
I dressed and slipped on my shoes, one still damp from the puddle in the cellar, my feet concealing Fookes’s posy – the petals and the hip. Makepeace was back on the stairs, swiftly closing Ada’s old room behind her, startled to see me.
“Happy birthday, my girl,” she said, kissed me on both cheeks and swept me down the stairs with her, my arm caught up in hers. A spicy sweet smell met us halfway down the stairs and I felt my stomach flip-flop with hunger.
In the kitchen Makepeace had baked buns sprinkled with currants, the butter was already soft, yellow peaks from the heat of the kitchen, a thick puddle of sunshine. From the folds of her pockets she extracted a small box wrapped in brown paper. “It’s just a little something,” she said.
“But I thought the doll was my present,” I replied, and Makepeace looked at me strangely. Fookes bustled into the kitchen and looked at the small box in my hands.
“It’s your birthday?” he asked and I nodded. “Many happy returns.” He grinned and I looked at his open face and found myself smiling in return. “Aren’t you going to open your present?”
I looked at the box in my hands, wriggled off the twine. Inside were two gold loops, a pair of earrings, each hanging with a little piece of glass that caught the light, sending a blue streak across the kitchen wall. Where had she got them from?
“They are beautiful, thank you,” I said, folding her in my embrace, feeling her smallness, the sharpness of her bones. She was growing frailer.
“See, a lodger makes the difference,” she said, reading my mind. “Come, let me make a hole in your ears and you can wear them,” she said and sat me down by the fire. Fookes took his seat opposite and flipped and rolled up his shirtsleeves in the growing heat. Makepeace took a needle from her chatelaine to the fire and let the tip glow red, before she brought it over and brushed the hair from my neck.
“Saint Sarah bless you,” she said as she ran the tip of the needle through my ear. I smelled the iron of my own blood and it made my stomach swirl. Black spots suddenly painted on everything, including the inside of my eyelids, as she pushed the wire into the hole; the glass dangled against my jawline. Fookes poured the tea, piled a scoop of sugar in and bid me drink. I was barely able to hold the cup, such was the tremor in my hands. Makepeace repeated the needle to the flame to my other earlobe and the threading of the wire into my flesh and I felt a wave of darkness leap up and claim me.
When I came to I was back on my bed, my doll staring at me, my earlobes throbbing, and I wondered in that moment between the dark and the light whether we had swapped places, that she was the living one and I was as heavy as wood, kept in the dark and the damp, the first evidence of a crime.
Makepeace sat on the bed while Fookes stood nearby.
“If it’s no trouble, Mr Fookes, your room would be more suitable for the new lodger, but the one across the hall is more than ample for your needs. And it is quieter,” Makepeace said.
“No trouble at all, I’ll move my things whenever it is convenient,” he said.
I sat up and felt the room tilt, my ears heavy as anchors.
“Eglantine?” Fookes said and rushed forward to help me.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, dismissing the spin of the room.
“You need something to eat is all,” Makepeace said, already up and off to gather a tray, leaving Fookes and I alone. He lifted the doll off the chair and placed her in his lap.
“What’s this?” he said, plucking the pouch off the floor; it must have fallen from my pocket. I had to control my impulse to snatch it back from him, frightened he would try to open it, the last remnants of my mother’s lost life.
“It was my mother’s,” I said and he smoothed the leather over his leg, the knot holding true.
“The cord – I can fix it for you if you like? So you can wear it around your neck,” he said and looked at me. “Let it be my birthday gift for you, humble as it is.”
“But leave the knot, the knot …” I said, my thoughts stumbling over my words. The knot she had tied with her own fingers, with it, her spirit tied to me, I was sure of it.
Fookes handed me the pouch and bounded down the stairs, quickly returning with a piece of leather cord, needle and thread.
“You just show me where you’d like it,” he said and he sat beside me, sewing the cord with his nimble hands, pushing the metal through the tough leather, just as the needle had pushed through my flesh, his stitches neat and small. When he finished he looped it over my head and I felt the cord nestle close to the skin of my neck, brushing against it soft like a lip.
I listened to Fookes as he moved things across the hall, fading to silence when he entered Ada’s old room. Makepeace came upstairs with the tea and breakfast buns as if I was an invalid, and with quick fingers I made sure the pouch was concealed completely beneath my blouse.
“Who is the new lodger?” I said.
Makepeace put down the tray, a shake to her hand sending the china cups and saucers chiming against each other.
“A private man of middle age, a widower. I’ve said we’d afford him his privacy. And Lord knows we need the added income,” she said.
“So why does Fookes have to change rooms? Surely my footsteps will bother the new lodger,” I said, stamping for effect. I prickled with indignation.
Makepeace looked up at me. “I don’t see why it’s a concern of yours,” she said tartly.
I felt tears smart at my eyes, Makepeace had never spoken harshly to me, not my whole life. Why would she speak to me like that now?
Downstairs there was the sound of something falling, all Fookes’s tools scattered on the floor. We both heard Fookes curse and listened to his footsteps as he began to gather them. The colour returned to Makepeace’s face.
The sound of the footsteps came up the stairs.
“I’ve cleared the room, Mrs Makepeace,” Fookes said, “not much to clear really.”
“Won’t be long now, Mr Fookes,” Makepeace said.
“Yes, goodbye to old England forever and all that,” he said, looking at me. “Are you recovered enough now for some air, Miss Eglantine? With your permission of course, Mrs Makepeace. I thought a walk down by the riverside before the day gets too hot?”
“It’s up to Eglantine,” Makepeace said and bustled out of the room.
I swung my legs off the bed. Fookes took two buns and filled his pockets with them and followed me down the stairs. Outside in the street, the salt was already heavy in the air, warmth soaked into us like a liquid. He offered me his arm and I took it, glad to twine myself onto him, steady as earth, feeling Makepeace’s words run through me. Perhaps she was right, perhaps I had been kept sheltered, kept as my father’s prize when I had no shine at all.
The river unspooled in either direction like mercury, rippling and silver, barely distinguishable from the sky. A heron dipped out of the air and barely caused a disturbance in the water, before retrieving a fish, its scales blinding, as if made of metal, before it disappeared down the heron’s throat. A lighterman went past in the distance with his pole in the water, the languid glide of his heavy load, the pole disappearing and reappearing with a song in his lungs reaching out across the water.
“So what’s in the pouch, if you don’t mind me asking? What makes it so special?” Fookes said quizzically, pulling a bun out of his pocket and handing it to me, before pulling out the second one for himself, biting into its crust and flinging a morsel onto the silty rocks below for the seagulls to squabble over. At first I bristled at such a question. I looked at the bun in my hand and though I’d been hungry suddenly lost my appetite; the tide had dragged in a threshing of duckweed, perhaps I would be better supping from that.
“It was my mother’s, that is all I know. Inside are a few bits and pieces, lucky charms I suppose,” I said, feeling all my words were shaped false. “I’m sad to say it, but I don’t remember her at all.”
“Nothing at all?” Fookes said, plucking out a currant and putting it in his mouth.
“Nothing except the missing of her.” I picked up a stone, hurled it across the water and waited for it to skip, but instead it sunk straight down, swallowed like medicine.
“What happened to her?” Fookes asked gently, his sleeve brushing my own, but I stepped away.
“I don’t know,” I said. How didn’t I know? Why had no one told me? I’d been fed on half-truths and bitter silences and now they soured my stomach, I wanted to retch over the edge of the river.
“Ask Mrs Makepeace? I’m sure she knows everything,” he said and laughed nervously, and I smiled at him. She would know, but she wouldn’t tell; that tale belonged to my father, but he’d never tell it now.
“So does your ship leave from London, Mr Fookes?” I said, keen to move on, away from all the gall that swirled in my own head.
“No, from Southampton, where I’ll stay at the immigrant depot, before being tugged out to sea to meet the ship.”
“Depot?”
“A hostel of sorts, where they try and get everyone used to shipboard life, so staying here with you and Mrs Makepeace is luxury.”
I turned back to look at the house, the sunlight striking across the windows; the house felt more coop than castle.
“Have you thought of leaving? What is here that holds you?”
I thought of a hundred things in an instant, but none formed itself into a coherent answer.
“There’s Makepeace, for one,” I replied.
“She come with you, find your father, be reunited. A new start for all of you,” Fookes said, and the pictures in Fookes’s books opened up in my mind’s eye, all the unfolding light upon the water, the strange animals caught in an oval of green, the small figure with his blue coat with his back to me. The thought crept into my mind of all those strange blooms that had arrived, what message did they hold? If he had found someone to write the address, how was it that he didn’t get them to write a letter? Five blossoms for five years; were they a message or a sign, but if they were how was I ever to read them? The ocean roared between their message and their meaning; how would we ever be reunited?
“You could come,” Fookes blurted, “yourself,” and I felt the blood pulse through to my newly pierced ears and felt that if Fookes looked at me long enough he’d see the truth skip through me, like a stone across the water. In the distance along the foreshore a figure bent down and walked like an oyster-catcher, eyes to the ground, scavenging the tide.
“Me, myself? Whatever would I do?” I said. Fookes knew nothing of my uselessness for real life. I’d grown as my father had wanted me, a jewel in the dark of its velvet case, until it had been time for me to show the lightness of my fingers, a harvester of pockets, my eye on the shine.
“Come with me,” Fookes said, placing his hand on mine, and I looked at it, floating over mine.
He pulled me towards him, I felt his body firm against mine; the roughness of his coat lapel scraped my cheek, his hand slid around my waist like I was something to catch, but he didn’t know what I was, I’d run through his fingers like water.
I was back at the house as fast as my feet allowed me. A door slammed upstairs and I sent the one downstairs swinging in reply, Makepeace appearing at the top of the stairs flustered and surprised to see me, her lace cap sitting slightly askew on her head, the silver starting to run through her dark hair.
“I thought you were on a walk with Mr Fookes,” she said breathlessly.
“Not any more,” I said, walking up the stairs, bristling at her question, with the touch of Fookes’s hand on my hip.
Makepeace moved in front of me, her body blocking my way. “What happened? Was he untoward?” Her questions buzzed in the air and all I wanted to do was smack them between my fingers and be done with them. Makepeace still barred my way, until I stood on the step beneath her. “Eglantine, answer me,” she said.
Though I was a full step below her, it was I who looked down on her. She took a step backwards but kept my gaze. She didn’t want answers to my questions, she was wanting to delay me. The door to my father’s old room was closed. I brushed past her and tried my hand on the door, but it didn’t give way to me, it was locked from the inside.
“Eglantine,” Makepeace hissed under her breath, “leave it be, our new lodger is resting.”
“When did he arrive?” I said. I’d not seen anyone approach the house, but then I’d been caught up with Fookes.
Petulantly, I stamped up the stairs and into my room, swinging the door, a bang to end all bangs, the sound echoing across the house.
Fookes’s question skimmed across my mind again and again and again. I strained to listen to the movements of the lodger, but I heard nothing, our new lodger resting like the dead. I kept to my room, listening, the room growing stifling with the heat. I opened the windows and all the brine and salt came waltzing in. There was no sign of Fookes down by the water’s edge, no sound at the front door or in his room. Occasionally I heard some faint sound, but it was no more than a pigeon’s flap or a rustle, for all I knew it may have been the wind singing down the chimney.
By early evening hunger drove me down to the kitchen. Makepeace sat alone at the table, sewing buttons on a shirt: fine linen, mother-of-pearl buttons.
“Is that for Mr Fookes?” I said, thinking it too grand for the likes of him.
Makepeace didn’t look up, her needle looping through the air, the tip of it catching a glint like a dust mote struck with light. “No, it’s for the new lodger,” she said, snapping the thread off with her teeth before affixing another button.
“Does this lodger have a name?”
Makepeace looked up and eyed me. “Mr Brown to you and me,” she said. “It’s too hot to cook anything in this weather, help yourself to bread, cheese and pickles.”
I looked at the cheese already sweating beneath its cloth. “Have you seen Mr Fookes?” I said, slicing the cheese, flicking off the mould and taking a bite, sharp and creamy.
“Not since you came in like the devil’s own,” she said and I felt my shame simmer.
“He asked me why I didn’t go with him,” I said, scoffing the cheese down, drinking a glass of water. I hadn’t realised how thirsty I’d become. “To the Colony.”
Makepeace lay down the sewing in her lap. “Is that such a bad thing?”
Her words struck me: why would she agree to such a thing, see it as a possibility? “I …”
“Are you too good for a shoemaker with plans to not just make do but make better?” she said.
“It’s not that,” I said, floundering.
“He’s not handsome enough, nor refined? You find him unsuitable?”
“No,” I said, I found him handsome enough; the tips of his fingers pressing my own had filled within me a sensation like hot and cold across my skin, his hand on my waist had done the same. “What good would I do him, I who know nothing of life or the world?” All I know is the inside of a stranger’s pocket. “He’d expect an honest woman for a wife, and in that I am sorely lacking.” Angry tears sprung to my eyes.
Makepeace stood up and came over to me, her hand resting on my cheek, dry amid all this clamminess. “You’ll learn,” she said, kissing both my cheeks. “You could do worse.”
As she came close to embrace me, I felt the familiar dance begin in my fingers, all the joints outstretched and ready, supple like a pianist who already heard the song she was about to play. Why would I fight it when it was all I knew? She didn’t even blink as my fingers unlooped the key from her chatelaine and neither did it make a sound as I dropped it into my own pocket. I was as subtle and as secret as the water that seeped from its secret river course to the earth beneath our cellar, wending its way upward through the dark.