My father was bent over the fireplace, snapping kindling between his fingers, feeding the flames, though the day was already thick with heat. I heard Makepeace go upstairs, leaving my father and me alone. I slid into a chair and watched him, the familiarity of his movements, the slight whistle as he raised the fire even higher. Why had my father and Makepeace kept silent about his return? I prickled with questions, I was fierce with them, but I sat and waited, I’d get my mark in sight, but he was in the rhythm of his movements, oblivious to me. From under his shirt he pulled a pouch and tipped on the table a silver reticule, a thimble and a watch chain. The gall of it.
From Makepeace’s pots and pans he found what he was looking for, a little iron pot and trivet, and he sat them in the flames, letting out a satisfied sigh at the bend of the flame around the base of the pot, sending the black soot of it glowing.
“Yesterday’s harvest?” I asked, jolting the table, watching the silver shift and threaten to drop onto the floor. My father turned around and swept the silver into his hand, placing it in the pot.
“Don’t think I didn’t notice your fingers lace my pockets. I taught you well, my girl,” he said, peering into the pot, the smell of the metal beginning to melt sending acid into my mouth, I swallowed it back down.
“As instructed.” I frowned and my father stepped back and looked at me, surprised.
“Don’t be like that, we’ll remedy that, my girl, now I’m back,” he smiled, his front tooth broken, and sat beside me, clasping his hands over mine. “We’ll fix this house back to the glory that it once was, we’ll make it a fine home again.”
I looked at the walls, the bricks spoiling with damp, the salt crusting them, sucking up any moisture that had been in the mud; on the floor already were anthills of brick dust. What held the house together was lies, I was not going to add mine to the mortar.
“And how do you expect me to do that?”
“As I taught you, my girl, as I taught you,” he laughed, patting my hand before adding more wood to the fire, giving his mercurial stew a little jiggle with a stick. “All the time I was away I thought of the account of my life, of the promise I made at your mother’s death to keep you safe, the promise I had failed to keep, the distance that I had to overcome to keep it,” he said.
“You came back for me?” I said in disbelief, the melted silver beginning to bubble, to send a rippling reflection on the wall of the hearth like the rain did through the window, my father and me submerged in the kitchen. I felt hot, perspiration bleeding into the fabric beneath my arms. How had his teaching me to be his shadow kept me safe when he’d get me to filch from the devil himself if we needed it? He turned and faced me and I felt as small and as inconsequential as I had when I was a child.
“Of course I did. And I taught you well to provide for yourself and Makepeace,” he said. “You still carry your doll in your pocket, I see. Why did you leave her in the cellar, oh so cold and all alone?”
I wrapped my fingers around her in a protective fist; why had he shown such interest in her to take her, my first theft, and return her to my room, unless he was interested in returning me to being his mere apprentice?
“Do you know how you came to get her?”
I looked at him as I would do a mark, trying to see the value of what he was trying to say and why he was saying it now.
“Your mother had tried to run away from me. She packed you up at her first opportunity and took you to try and find her mother, her people, to beg to be let back into their ways with their vardos and fires and superstitions, shunning the beginnings of the life I was forging for us.” My father’s voice increased in volume. “Makepeace told me.”
I had to hold firm to myself not to get swept up in his words; he’d been married to Ada all the same while, the life he’d been forging was all for him and for him alone. But I let him unwind his story, just to see my mother float up in it, just to glimpse her name, to feel her close.
“Her father, Josiah Scamp, had been a man above honour, he’d worked as a ratcatcher for all the grand houses and estates which they travelled through. Your mother returned to the grounds of Kensington Palace, all the windows, Eglantine, so many, all like the cuts on a stone; we’d been there once to clear out the rats and it was her hope that she’d find her mother there, but to no avail. All she found was the young queen-to-be and you found your playmate.”
What was he talking about? The queen had been my playmate? The first time I’d seen her surely had been at the Coronation, that flash of ermine and satin? My mind raced, my memories all began and ended with the water, the river, the sounds of voices coming across it.
“How do you know I took the doll, that I stole it? I was but a child,” I said.
“Because you are my child and your fingers are fine instruments. Why wouldn’t you take something that caught your eye, when she already had so many? She’d not have missed it. You could return it to her now, but she has plenty of baubles and playthings by the looks of it.”
I turned the doll in my pocket, dancing her through my fingers like a coin. I had no recollection of such a thing, all I recalled was the feeling of her, safe beneath my chin, just as my own head was beneath my mother’s. All of us coiled within the other like life within a seed.
“And what of Josiah, why was he a man above honour?” I said, pushing against the sweep of him. Of my mother and her family I’d been told nothing, he’d wanted to keep me all for himself. The thief’s daughter.
My father wrapped a rag around his hand and turned his back to me to face his silver. He lifted it from its trivet and poured the silver into a keepsake Fookes had brought back for Makepeace: a Coronation cup with a fine picture of the young queen’s likeness staring out from a cartouche. The cup steamed with its metallic brew and my father’s face was bathed in the steam. He picked up the mug and sat it in a shallow bowl of water to cool it before it cracked the mug and ran over the table.
“He saved my life,” was all he said. “And I owe to him and your mother to make more of what remains of it. Will you help me, Eglantine?”
“But I’m to leave and go join my husband,” I said, feeling anything that was mine shift and tilt, give way to the will of him.
My father laughed. “To meet your little shoemaker? Married by the old ways, a bit of water and a shared cup. Makepeace told me. Hardly binding, is it? You’ll stay and help me rebuild my empire, my girl; too long it’s been allowed to crumble.”
Too long I’d been his creature, his proxy, his doll. I’d chosen Fookes as much as he’d chosen me. Neither of us had stolen each other’s hearts, what we had we had given freely. I’d have my life as if it were a kingdom and I’d live it as my own queen. I stood from the table and swept all with my hand. Time slowed. The dish of water made a crown of droplets before it splashed onto the cobbles and turned the colour of blood, the dish clattering beneath the table, spinning on its base. The Coronation mug hit the ground and cracked, the silver, half cooled and half cooked, oozed out like a wound that wouldn’t be stopped, leaving a silver pool on the floor.
I opened my drawers and piled everything I owned on the bed; I’d not had time to gather all the things that Fookes had collected, I didn’t even have a bag. Makepeace came through the door, her chatelaine silently folded into her skirt.
“What on earth are you doing?” she said, looking at all my linens, my few clothes and my bonnet on the bed.
“Did you know about his plans? To keep me here for himself, to be his hands and eyes and ears and not follow Fookes at all?” I said and Makepeace began to cry. I stood transfixed by it, her tears welling up in her eyes, her face cracked and contorted. She reached into her pockets for a handkerchief, but on finding none swept the lace cap from her head and wiped her face. Makepeace had been my one constant, the house’s erstwhile keeper, my guardian, my grandmother, she’d been all the family I’d had to rely upon.
“I kept his return secret, yes,” she sobbed, “but I did it for you, to allow you your peace, your chance to follow the road that called you.”
“So you encouraged me to marry Fookes to get out of my father’s way?” I said, folding my clothes into the smallest parcels that I could make of them.
Makepeace came and put her arm on mine. “I encouraged you to find your way out, to find some life, to have your own fresh start,” she said and I looked at her face, washed with tears. “But what am I supposed to do? He is my child, Eglantine, the baby I gave birth to and raised as best I knew how. All these years he was gone from us, but for him to return, is it not a miracle? Isn’t it the will of Saint Sarah, to bring him home across the waves? Perhaps one day you’ll understand what a mother’s love is,” she said. She looked at me squarely in the eye until I had to break her gaze.
My father appeared in the doorway and looked at all my belongings spread out, some in piles, some still strewn, and looked from Makepeace to me.
“Amberline, you owe it to her, the truth about Patrin. She has the right to pay her respects,” Makepeace said and I watched my father lean on the doorframe, letting the house support him, bear the weight of whatever he’d withheld from me all this time.
“When is your ship due to sail? Though why you’d want to go to that forsaken place, it’s beyond bearing, but I see now that you are your own woman, Eglantine, and I’ve been too hasty. Forgive a poor father who has missed his family for wanting to keep you close, to make up for lost time.”
But I knew about time, you never made it up, it was as shimmering as a rainbow in a raindrop and was only allowed its allotted space before dispersing. I could no more make up time than be back in my mother’s womb nor alter the creature I’d become at my father’s making, but I could surge forward, read my own signs, strike out, my feet were Romany after all, my shoes yet tried as a traveller’s.
“A month,” I said, looking at him briefly before I continued ordering my clothes. I felt all my hackles rise; would he bar my way through the door, would he turn the key and try to keep me his own little convict?
“Would you stay this month then and not leave early? Let me make it up to you, Eglantine. All the time I was away all I thought of was returning to see you grow, but you’ve gone and grown into a woman without me.” He managed a smile and straightened himself. He walked towards me, a limp in his gait that he tried to disguise by walking slowly.
Makepeace stood, watching, and I tried to catch her eye, but she wouldn’t look at me; between the two of them I felt the pull of the third, the tiny swell of a human life.
What was a month? For one born already it was but a cluster of days in a season, but for an unborn baby it was like my mother’s namesake, a patrin, the signs of the leaves, each month a different message telling it to grow, to turn, to unfurl into the baby it would become. For the first week my father took to his bed, the miasma of London air seeping into his lungs with a wild cough rattling through the floorboards. Makepeace gave him teas and broths and concoctions made from the simples she bought, her own herbs neglected by inattention, while she helped me gather all the things the immigrant guide suggested – Fookes’s money disappeared into six chemises, six pairs of stockings, two flannel petticoats, two lighter petticoats, two pairs of good shoes, one warm cloak with hood, one hat or bonnet for hot weather; our needles worked in unison in the kitchen listening for my father’s call. At the back of my mind was always the thought that he’d prevent me from going, that the knocking would come again. Makepeace and I dared not open the door, we kept the curtains drawn and took extra care in case it was the law. In the night my father called out, his shout into the silence making me wake in a sweat.
As he gained his strength he bade me sit by him and show him my hands, my long fingers and fine wrists, his hands running over their veins and the shape of my nails, and I let him.
“Remember the game we used to play, Eglantine, how light your touch was? Do you think you can still remove the handkerchiefs without the bells ringing?” I drew my hands away. He shuffled over to his chest of drawers, forgetting that Makepeace and I had cleared the lot out to take in lodgers. He opened the drawer and on seeing it bare shut it with a bang.
“Was there anything of mine kept?” he asked, but there was nothing to say that would satisfy him.
“You don’t know what you are heading into, Eglantine,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed in his clothes that Makepeace had laundered and mended. I’d not go pluck coins for him as if they were just fruit from an overhanging tree. He licked his thumb and wiped a thread off his jacket. “It’s not bloody Eden, not by a long shot, no Elysium, it’s at the end of the earth.”
“Well what is it like then?” I said, watching him flex his fingers and shift his coat onto his shoulders.
“It’s hell, that is what it is. But you can make hell hospitable if you can deal with the devil. The voyage was death, but once we were all chucked off the ship we were assigned masters to work for, but allowed to return to our own huts and have the evenings for ourselves. I’d never felt more like a Romany in my life, living in a lean-to, the weather mild, seeing the stars wheel across a southern sky, woken by the crazed caw of the cockatoos sharpening their beaks on the bark of my hut.
“The first master I had was a kindly man who had me mind his sheep and move them from pasture to pasture, but it is an idle man’s job and my mind grew idle until the blacks came and helped themselves to the flock and my master returned me to the depot. My next master was a despot, tight with the food and quick with the punishment, but I’d not be a slave to any man. He was a Methodist minister who avoided the rum and lived closer to the town. He picked me from the depot to care for his horses, though the only thing I knew about horses was from observing how gypsies dealt with them when I lived with your mother’s family, but I knew that rum was worth more than gold to some. He kept jugs of it in his stable, not to drink but to use as currency, so I took my chance and filtered off whatever I could, replacing it with water. From my cot next to the horses I woke every morning with the smell of the sea, the air crisp with eucalypt and a possum who used to scratch his way across the roof, furrier than a cat he was and had a louder hiss as well. When I rode my master to the city for his services, I’d wander off down to the harbour to watch the tall ships unload their goods and scavenge any remainders, the sailors all chattering their different languages like a flock of parrots, selling off whatever I’d harvested from my dry Methodist until I was able to buy myself some sailor’s clothes and sign on, knowing this house with you in it waited for me.”
I looked at him squarely, sensing the thin gossamer threads of a lie. It wasn’t his words that gave him away, it was his hands, they grew stiller and stiller as his story went on.
Bang, bang, bang! My father and I started at the mad knocking again; the sound of it made my father shrink into himself, every pore of him listening. Though he’d regained his robustness, his skin browned by the sun, he seemed to blanch and go transparent, his hand to his heart, breathing ragged. The knocking was persistent and determined for the good part of a quarter hour and then at last it went quiet. Makepeace appeared in the doorway, her mortar and still in her hand, the blooms of the foxglove mashed beneath the pestle. She bid my father open his mouth and she dipped the tip of her finger in the mash and wiped it on his tongue, leaving him gasping for a sip of water. I passed some to him and he drank it down.
“The man is still on the doorstep, Amberline,” Makepeace said. “He seems most determined to strike camp there. Who is he and what does he want?” My father looked at each of our faces, lay down and turned to the wall. That man was the truth my father was hoping wouldn’t speak.
Makepeace and I left him and closed the door, the sound of the knocking started up again and echoed through the house, leaving Makepeace and I stranded on the landing, feeling like the house was being demolished knock by knock around us.
“Come, Makepeace, out with it, who is it at the door?”
But she shook her head. “He’s not said a word. His heart has been strained by all he’s been through. He makes light of it, tells it like a snippet from the papers, but I’ve seen his back, turned to rope with the lash,” she said, her voice wedging in her throat. The knocking continued.
The banister was slippery beneath my hand as I held on to it for support and took each step as slowly as possible, avoiding the step that creaked, avoiding walking on my heel, I needn’t have worried for the knocking concealed any sound that I made. Makepeace’s footsteps followed behind me, her chatelaine silenced.
I stood behind the door, watched it rattle in its frame and when the knocking halted again I opened the door an inch, wedging my foot behind it. On the doorstep stood a gentleman of means – his coat collar high around his neck, a snowy cravat tied with a fine knot at his throat. As soon as he saw me he swept his hat from his head and raised it in the air, his hair oiled down, pressed with the circle of the hat, like the puddle of water one made when adding water to yeast.
“Good morrow, miss, I’m here to make an appointment to see Mr Stark, who I believe is at this residence,” he said, his vowels so round that I could have stuck my finger in his mouth and popped a bubble.
“And who are you to be asking?” I said bluntly, not liking the cut of him, his fine clothes, his tone.
“A gentleman, that is all. You may call me Mr Royston. And you are?” he said, leaning in, his hand coming around the door like an insect. “Don’t tell me – his daughter, he’s spoken highly of you, he has, all the way from Sydney to London.” He looked me over as if I was a piece of porcelain that had endured the fire only to be found wanting with a hairline crack.
“Whoever you are, sir, please state your business and be gone,” I said, standing closer to the gap of the door, ready to throw my weight on it if I needed to. I’d not be intimidated by a dandy.
“Of course he gave me a pretend address, but I caught him in the noose of his own lie now, didn’t I? Just tell your father, Miss Stark, that I’ve come to have his debt settled and to take rightful ownership of all he promised me,” he said and laughed, reaching out his hand to touch my cheek. Shocked, I used my shoulder to try and force the door closed, but his hand was already on my neck, his arm barring the door from closing.
“It’s Mrs Fookes, I’ll have you know, and my father is in New South Wales,” I said, extracting his hand from my neck, readying my knee for his groin.
“Is he now?” His eyes smiled. “If he reneges his side of our agreement,” he patted his coat pocket, “I’ll be forced as any good citizen should to notify the correct authorities as to his whereabouts.”
“You do that,” I said, “for he’s not here, and they’ll arrest you for the nuisance you are.” With great effort I pushed the door closed. He narrowly avoided having his fingers broken with the force of it.
Makepeace and I stood behind the door, waiting for the blows to rain down on the other side, but they didn’t come. I was livid, still feeling the damp suede imprint of Mr Royston’s gloved fingers on my neck. I looked to Makepeace, but she wouldn’t meet my eye.
My father stood at the top of the stairs, shaking his head.
“What tangle have you made, Amberline?” Makepeace said beneath her breath. “Untangle it.”
He beckoned for us to come to him and I railed at being bid to do anything at all at his command, but I saw how unsteady he was on his feet.
He sat back on the bed, his head in his hands. “Forgive me,” he said.
“Forgive you for what?” Makepeace said, the anger staining her cheeks red so that she looked painted in rouge like a doll. “What is this ‘agreement’?”
“He found out who I was, the marks on my back sign enough that I was no sailor, and I made a bargain that wasn’t mine to make, to keep myself safe until I returned,” my father said, broken and slumped.
“What did you promise, Amberline?” Makepeace said. My father was silent. But Makepeace had no patience left for him. She slapped him on the face, her hand cracking like doom, and my father, child-surprised, looked up at his mother in shock.
“I promised our home to him, this house,” he said so quietly it was a strain to hear him.
“After all we’ve risked to keep it?” Makepeace said, her voice rising.
My father looked at the floor, avoiding our faces and I recalled the touch of the man’s hand on my skin, the lines at my throat prickled hot with panic, frightened of what he was going to say.
My father spoke again, barely able to make the words with his mouth, the ghost of his voice came through his lips. “And I promised him Eglantine.”
I was mute with my own fury. I was not some thing to barter for and exchange.
“You’ll fix this, Amberline, and you’ll do right for once in your life,” Makepeace said. “You’ll take Eglantine to see where her mother lies and then we’ll take whatever is needed to bribe her onto a boat to New South Wales and get her free of this mess, even if you have to go and steal it yourself.” Her voice was firm.
“And you’ll do it tonight,” she said before leaving the room and taking me with her.