All night I listened for the sounds of the new lodger moving beneath, but aside from the odd shuffle the room was silent, as if he had slippers made of thistledown. Fookes was in his room, I heard the tap of his footfall, the faint sound of his cough, the sound further away and soon it would be on the other side of the world. How dare Makepeace suggest I could do worse, when I didn’t know the parameter of any other human being – no relationships other than those I fostered in this house, not knowing anyone other than my father and my grandmother? I was rudderless in knowing what sort of man Fookes was. He had all the attributes of a kindly gentleman portrayed in the pages of the newspaper – neat and polite, manners learned at his parents’ knees, all the old courtesies, but what did that translate to me, thief that I was? All I knew was that when I was near him the air changed, like a window open in my soul, a gulp of breath.
At dawn, before the house stirred, I walked barefoot down the stairs and leaned my ear against the door of my father’s old room, the grain of the wood rough against my cheek, hearing nothing except my own heart knocking against my chest, loud as if I was knocking on the wood, my mother’s pouch hanging a conduit between flesh and door. The key was in my palm and I was certain that the room was empty. In the distance a cart splashed in the ruts of the road. I held the handle and turned the key to silence the chance of the wind rattling the door.
The room was empty, the bed unslept in. Why would Makepeace lie and say there was a new lodger if there wasn’t one? I stood behind the door and made myself look at the room again; something was different, something had shifted. I teased the curtain open a little, the light trickling in, a pigeon rested on the sill, his mottled grey feathers smeared against the glass, before he disappeared into the morning. What was I missing? The drawers were empty, the bed was made but there was an indentation along the length of it as though an invisible guest still lay there; the mirror above the mantle showed me the whole room back in miniature, a porthole of the room. That was when I saw it, feeling sick to my core, frightened as if a spirit stood behind me till I realised it was a coat hanging, the length of a man, on a hook behind the door.
The coat was deeply soiled, the hem had soaked up a great deal of water and had turned the lower half of the coat a different shade. A long tear had been mended in the lining, stitched roughly with some sort of string or twine, the cuffs soiled, the buttonholes made ragged by mismatched buttons, some just a stick stitched on tight and used like a toggle. I ran the fabric through my fingers as if I was a blind person, my eyes closed, the familiarity leaching into my fingertips, and let my fingers swim into the pockets, careful not to touch the sides as if fearing a slap; it had once been such a fine article, the sorrel colour of a fine horse’s coat, but now it was worn to threads on the shoulders. All that the pocket contained was a sprig of rosemary, the tiny blue flower still in the bud. The owner of the coat I was in no doubt of, though worn and travelled, distressed and repaired.
The whole house was silent except for the shout of my thoughts. I stepped out of the room, locked the door behind me and palmed the key. Fookes turned the handle of his door, so I made haste back to my bedroom, filled with confusion. I pulled on my stockings and shoes. The red birthmark around my neck began to sting, the leather of my mother’s pouch brushing against it; I pulled my blouse away, the skin an accusation. There was a quick rap on my door.
“Come in,” I said, thinking it was Makepeace, my mind so dammed with questions I didn’t know which one would trickle out first. But it wasn’t Makepeace, it was Fookes.
“May I come in?” he said, standing on the threshold. “May I speak with you privately.” He didn’t wait for me to reply but entered, closed the door quietly behind him and stepped towards me, all of my mind rushing and loud.
“Makepeace won’t be happy that we are in here alone,” I said, panic spreading all down my neck.
“She’s gone out, before dawn, I heard her go,” he said, stepping closer. “She might be back at any moment, so please let me speak.” He put up his hands, seeing that I was keen to sweep him out of the room, all of me bristle and broom.
“I didn’t make myself clear yesterday, and for that I’m sorry, I’m not a man of words.” His voice made my skin prickle. He reached and took my hand and I looked at my fingers, foreign as fish, in the net of his. “Eglantine …” His hand was hot and dry and it pulled me closer.
“What is it that you want, Mr Fookes, Francis?” I said, unable to stop the twist of sarcasm in my voice. “There is nothing I can give you.” I pulled my hand away.
“No, it is what I can give you. Yesterday when I spoke of your coming with me, I didn’t mean for you to come as some piece of luggage but as my wife, Eglantine. Would you accept my hand?”
I felt twisted with my cruelty, his earnestness stoking my sting. “But I don’t know you, Mr Fookes. I know nothing of your plans, your person, you’ll be gone in mere weeks,” I said, feeling the ugliness of the words as I said them, “and you are, after all, a mere tradesman, a shoemaker.” My father’s words were in my mouth. I was his puppet even still and I would remain so. I had become what he had wanted of me, regardless of what I felt; even though we were separated by the span of the globe, I still did his bidding.
Fookes’s face blanched, each of my words filching any affection and regard he might have, my sleight of hand damaging his estimation of me. I saw myself in his eyes: small, dark, a thorn. But as I said those words I meant the opposite – I didn’t care if he was a shoemaker or a chimneysweep, I cared for him however he came. His hands were honest hands that practised an honest trade, unlike mine, and soon he’d be gone, just another person I loved who would leave only a silhouette as a memory of themselves, sharp and black.
“I’m afraid I don’t believe you.” Fookes stepped forward, his face so close. I willed him to defy my bitter resistance.
Gingerly he reached a fingertip and ran it the length of the raised and angry birthmark that swelled at my throat. His touch made me ashamed of all that I had said. What had I done to deserve him? But instead of pushing him away with the tide of it, I pulled him in closer.
“But I have done things, things that you would not approve of,” I made myself say, feeling the burden of all that my father had made me become, of how much I wanted to say yes to Fookes. “I’m a thief,” I said, “that is how I provide, it is all I know.”
Fookes placed his mouth on mine and kissed me, the fractious knot dissolving into disarray. A tangle of arms. His skin warm as light.
I never laid eyes on the mysterious Mr Brown. Occasionally I heard a cough or a cry that woke me from sleep, but often I wasn’t sure if it was some other sound, a passer-by in the street, the house settling, a sound coming from across the river. His coat sometimes appeared in the corners of my dreams – I was wearing it, a scarecrow flapped in it, a drowned person floated in it – leaving me distracted, unfocused, awake and listening to the house again. Fookes came silently in the night, barefoot, his tread the only thing I listened out for, his mouth the only thing I craved.
The night before the Coronation I hardly slept, the night hot, my skin sticking to the sheets. I got up and pushed open the sash of the bedroom window, hoping for a lick of the breeze, but there was none. The night was still with anticipation. The darkness was filled with carousing song; celebrations had started early, the sun was but a hope on the horizon.
Makepeace had brought up water from the river before dawn split the sky and land. She had twice boiled it for good measure, sending the kitchen thick with steam, until the house was filled with the hot cloud of it. The table was laid with our wedding breakfast, a cake dusted with sugar, a bowl of raspberries, a jug of cream and a bottle of whiskey. While the water cooled, Makepeace dressed my hair in sweetpeas she’d found wind-sown in one of her pots, tenderly threading them through my braids.
“Your mother would have loved to have seen this day,” she said, holding me at arm’s length and taking me in. “Your father too.” Her emotions stuck in her throat. If Makepeace’s old ways were true, if all the things of the departed weren’t destroyed their spirit would linger, then whatever remained of my mother remained on earth, lingering still, caught in the pouch which hung close to my skin. Was that why my father had never destroyed it, was it his gift to me: if not a living mother, a spirit one? I closed my eyes and tried to imagine her face, but all that came to me was the sound of water.
I heard Fookes’s footsteps on the stairs and felt my heart chirr like a magpie as he neared. Fookes gently swept my hair to the side to bare my neck, around which he draped a simple strand of coral, the little click of the clasp; his breath on my neck made me shiver, bedecked as I was, a religious icon, made out of portable property ready to be carried on a procession through the streets. The coral nestled right across the mark the Lord had given me at birth; in the side of the copper pot I saw my reflection bulge, the scar on my skin and the strand of beads intertwining.
“It was my mother’s,” he said and the gap widened of how much I didn’t know about him – his parents, his life. I told myself that we’d fill these in, these pages of the book our lives were yet to write, but the cavernous lack of knowledge yawned up at me, making me wonder if he’d be waiting for me after the months at sea; would the equator act as a magnet did on a watch’s mechanism and send his affection for me haywire? While lying in the circumference of his arms all these thoughts were kept at bay, but for how much longer? It had been arranged that I’d follow Fookes a few weeks after his departure, unable to get a berth on his ship, and I pushed the thought of his loss out of my mind, though it was but hours away.
“Now join hands,” Makepeace said and we did. “You are promised to each other from this day forward.” Fookes looked at me and grinned, a line of perspiration atop his freshly shaven lip. “Now drink from the cup.” Makepeace handed it to Fookes and then myself, still hot so that it scalded my tongue, burned my lips. “You ever will drink from nothing but the same cup else,” she said, wrapped the cup in a cloth and bid us step upon it; the crunch and grind of the porcelain sounded beneath our heels. Makepeace kissed us both. We drank whiskey, ate cake and made ready to join the throng of people to welcome the new queen.
Fookes held my hand and we went out into the morning. The whole city seemed to buzz, a hive waiting for their new queen bee, but for Fookes and me it felt like a celebration just for us. From the fronts of the buildings hung flags, limply waiting for the wind to turn them to banners. Already people milled in the street, taking up vantage points. Hawkers set up their wares in carts – Coronation pies, mugs, ale. Fookes tried to flag a hansom cab, but no driver would stop, all were occupied, urgently trying to make their way through the growing congestion.
A newspaper boy sang out in a pure voice, “Three thousand and ninety-three gems, the Black Prince’s Ruby, St Edward’s Sapphire, a cross pattée will crown her.” And I had to stop and lean into the gutter, Fookes’s hand on my back as I retched the whiskey, the cake and the raspberries into the street, the paperboy’s chant like a rhyme, the sort of portable property my father would covet in one spectacular item. Fookes bade me sit and catch my breath, but the excitement of the crowd bobbed me along, and I was keen to see her, the doll a happy little wooden fish rolling in my pocket.
We ploughed on through the streets towards the centre of the city, a shoal of people all waiting, jostling, animated. Fookes kept close to me and we marched onwards through to the thickest part, a human road towards Westminster Abbey, his hand gripping my elbow to prevent us getting separated, our feet barely touching the ground.
By the time we got there, the princess had already entered the abbey and the crowd were in a hush of whispers, as if they too were inside the walls and witness to the miraculous ceremony. All around us people bustled. I smelled a man’s cologne, a lady’s skirts pushed up against my own, the smell of pickled herrings on someone’s breath. The breath squeezed from my body. Fookes looked at me with concern, but I dismissed it, seeing his whole face lit like a child at a fair. “God Save the Queen” started to sing from the front of the crowd, Fookes’s voice joining the mass of voices. But there was still no sign of the new queen, we were all subjects waiting, the sun hot on our heads. Around my neck I felt my perspiration pool, and I longed for a glass of water, anything wet, when someone caught my eye. He had his back towards me, tall in his stovepipe hat, the coat familiar and tattered, looking against the crowd, looking for something the rest of us weren’t looking to see, our eyes towards the abbey. The man surveyed the people around him, and when he saw me he looked as if he had found what he was looking for.
From inside the abbey there was movement and the people responded to it with a huzzah upon their lips. I stood on my tiptoes to try to catch a glimpse. Fookes put his hands around my hips and lifted me, and for a moment I caught sight of her, a smear of thick satin, a slash of scarlet, a glint of light, the new queen fast as a butterfly, before I landed back on the ground, Fookes’s face flushed and smiling down at me.
“Did you see her?” he shouted, but I could barely hear him in the melee, the singing and calling her name, Victoria.
I nodded and looked over Fookes’s shoulder, but the man had disappeared through the crowd like a salmon, darting against the tide, his hat just one of the many that bobbed like flotsam and jetsam above my eyeline.
The desire to run started in my feet, the urge to escape the mass, but I was wedged into my few inches, a handkerchief-sized piece of the London street, so I was forced to step sideways, shuffling through the crowd, as if trying to find my seat at the theatre. Here and there a pocket presented itself to me, an invitation to my hand to dart quickly inside it, pluck whatever was in there and let the crowd sweep me on, but all I did was hold my doll, encased in my own pocket all that much tighter.
From the swell in front of me I heard a shout and I froze, thinking someone had called thief. Then the sound came upon the sound of thousands and the tide swept me forward towards the front. If I had just dug my elbows into the nearest Londoners, my feet would have left the ground and I would have been carried aloft with them.
The drums pounded in time with my heart, a high throttling beat, followed by the blast of trumpets, the glint of which I could see in the distance, the sunlight striking them gold. Then guns pounded the air, deafeningly close. All around me thousands of hands clapping, a cacophony of flesh on flesh. All their voices a-roar – and I was plunged forward and almost lost my balance in the crush of all those people wanting to glimpse their new sovereign and majesty, a celestial angel of satin, diamond, ermine and red velvet. Red like the birthmark around my neck.
Fookes scooped an arm around me and pulled me upward as I struggled against a wall of people and noise. I shouted but the sound of my voice was muffled by the density of the crowd. My ears pounded with the peal of the city’s bells chiming throughout my body, all heralding a new era, a new empire all on the shoulders of a new queen, but I carried a new weight, a new concern. The man who had spied me in the crowd was surely my own father.