When we returned to the house it was as quiet as it had ever been; all Fookes’s belongings had been neatly packed for the following morning, his room left tidy, waiting for the next lodger, his baggage beside the door. I passed my father’s old room and all that came from there was a gust from beneath the door. Makepeace had strewn my room with blossom and Fookes and I were glad to disrobe, to catch the fleeting breezes that the river sent, ripples of goose flesh across our skin.
That night, as Fookes’s breath was hot on my neck, sleep deserted me. All of me was strained to what was to come – Fookes’s departure – the house a port between the near and far away. The man at the Coronation loomed large in my mind. If my father had returned, he’d broken the terms of his sentence, and the law would be only too willing to wed him again to the clap of iron. Makepeace would have told me, surely? Did she know? I no more believed in her fantastical Mr Brown than I did the man in the moon. I strained to listen to the room below, but I heard nothing, nothing but the sound of our own breathing.
Fookes and I rose before the dawn, dressing reluctantly, our clothes heavy and hot, slowing us down. Our footsteps were quiet on the stairs, Fookes carrying all that he had come with. Makepeace had made him a parcel of food and she’d left it on the bottom step, wrapped in brown paper and string.
I opened the door and interrupted a blackbird mid song, his notes familiar and commonly beautiful, yet struck against the growing glow had the feeling of an elegy, its notes the lilting things of what we wanted to say. Fookes made me promise to come to him otherwise he’d be forced to turn around and come and get me, and I made him promise not to forget me. The river heard our promise and it caught the light like a mirror did the sunshine, sending its glare into our eyes.
“We’ll build our own house, just you and me,” he said, kissing my face, my eyelids, my cheeks, my hair, my mouth. “Something as fine as in Mr Lycett’s book.”
And I nodded, not wanting our parting to be tainted with my argument, for there’d be time enough for Fookes to know how it came to be that I’d been raised in this house here, this house that was haunted by the water, time for him yet to know. If my father had returned, he’d not only have the law to answer to, but he’d have me as well. I was a woman now, I’d have my questions answered, I’d know all I wanted to know.
Fookes leaned close to my ear and whispered, “You don’t have to steal any more,” and folded some of his precious money into my hand. My fingers instinctively clasped it before I tried to hand it back to him.
“I did it only to keep us above water,” I said, frightened Fookes was breaking things off, but he twined his arm around me and drew me closer. His mouth was sweet and soft on mine, then I leaned close to his ear and whispered my secret, our secret, and he stopped and looked at me, his whole face lit before he twirled me down off the stair and into the street and back onto the stair again. His love retied me in a new knot that I didn’t want to be untangled from.
“I’ll see you in Richmond,” he said, neither of us wanting to say goodbye. I tucked the coin heart inscribed with my name into his palm and hoped my name would stay in his heart.
As I watched him walk away, the dawn made everything pink, like the petals of my namesake eglantine, concealing the smog and smut, making the world rosy. I watched Fookes until he turned and waved, then rounded a corner and disappeared from my sight. I felt the pouch around my neck throb then, the doll in my pocket turn, two compasses spinning to a false north, directing me to gaze upward towards the house, a slash of light concealing the barb beneath, the face in the window looking back at me.
I was in the front door and up the stairs, pushing at my father’s old door with my shoulder, but the door was still locked and would not give way. I hit it with my fists and felt the wood shake my bones.
“Eglantine.” My father’s voice was familiar and strange, but I would not turn around. I was frightened to turn around in case I’d imagined him. The money Fookes had given me fell to the floor, Makepeace swept it up into her chatelaine.
“Turn around, let me see you, it’s been so long,” he said. And I did as bid and saw my father, smaller and thinner than I’d catalogued him in my memory, his face concealed in a grizzled beard, his skin darker than I recalled, his eyes crinkled at the corners.
“Dear God, you are no longer a little girl,” he said. But I’d not been a little girl when he left, I’d already begun my menses, already concealed in my stays, already stunted in the ways of the world. His arms reached out towards me and I dutifully stepped into them and embraced my father, the bones in his back protruding beneath my fingers, his hair curling around the collar of his jacket, unkempt, his pocket gaping, my fingers in and out of it as he’d taught me, though there was nothing there. Still the same scent of him. He gently pushed me back to look further at me and I felt embarrassed by the scrutiny.
“The spit of your mother,” he said admiringly and I went to cover my throat protectively, the coral rope around my neck, the red of my birthmark, the pouch hanging there, exposed to his glare. “You found it,” he said, his voice choked, and reached out a finger to touch the pouch, but I stepped backward, fearing he would snap the cord and claim it for his own, the only thing I had to remember her by.
“Oh, daughter,” he said, “the things I have seen, the things I have done.” He started crying then, but I was unmoved, as river-smoothed as stone. He grew silent as we both heard Makepeace in the kitchen, but still he cried, no handkerchief to catch his tears. I would not offer him one of my own. “Eglantine,” he said, “your mother, she’d be so proud of you.”
“Proud of what? Becoming your creature?” I replied, the vehemence in my voice surprising me. He glared at me, his eyes glistening and wet.
“She gave it to me to give to you,” he said, his voice lost in the constriction of his throat. “She left the knot tied, to bind you to her. Makepeace would have had me burn it, but I kept it, though it may have taken away Patrin’s peace. I kept it for you.”
His words made the world go white before my eyes. My own tears welled in my eyes, sending facets of light across the room. I swept them away with the back of my hand before I began to walk away, leaving him standing there, a shadow of himself. I’d not give him the consolation of comfort.
There was a loud progressive rap at the front door and we both froze, my father’s fingers to his lips as he faded back up the stairs. The pounding began again in earnest and I rushed down the stairs, thinking it was Fookes returned, but Makepeace was already standing in the hallway, hesitant, her eyes flitting to the staircase, to me, suddenly making me complicit in her concealment of my father. She shook her head. The banging continued, but the door’s hinges had rusted and the damp had made it swell in its frame.
“Eglantine,” he called to me quietly from the top of the stairs, his voice strangely calm, lost in the pounding of the door. The familiarity of it hurt. I’d pushed all that I had missed of him down into myself, concealed and private. I’d banished him as easily as the judges had done, finding it less painful just to close him up in my memory, behind a door without a key. I recalled a particular feeling when I was small, a surprise gift of memory of my mother laughing, of us being three points of a triangle, a family, when I’d been the apple of his eye.
The knocking ceased and we stood there, waiting for it to begin again, my father stepping quietly on the stairs, his feet avoiding the squeaky ones, his feet remembering, until finally Makepeace slid a finger between the curtain and glass and found the doorstep clear.
My father shambled past us down towards the kitchen and all I could do was stare.