In silence we packed all that would fit into a small bag; not all of the recommended list of items would fit, so Makepeace made me dress in as many layers as she thought I could stand, and with each tie of petticoat and shirt I felt the tightness around my waist increase, the heat threading up and down my torso in waves, and I willed the sickness to heal. My hands began to shake at what we were to undertake, at the thought of leaving, of saying goodbye. All the unsaid surged around us, Makepeace and I doing our best to avoid each other’s eyes, both of us stewing in our thoughts. Makepeace led me down to the kitchen and made me eat though my stomach rebelled, making me drink a cup of milk and the cream. She filled my pockets with bread for sustenance and protection and sewed whatever remained of the coins to my chemise, so that I was like Saint Sarah, readying for the moment to be carried into the ocean. We sat waiting in the cool of the kitchen for the sun to fall out of the sky and into the river. My father returned at the first sign of darkness, he had made all ready, but neither Makepeace nor I acknowledged him.
“Have you your doll, Eglantine?” my father said and I looked at him, treating me like a child from now until the end of time. I nodded and he sighed.
Under the cover of darkness, we scuttled along the street to the waterman’s stairs. My shoes slipped on the mossy steps. Makepeace led the way, her lace cap grey as moth’s wings, catching the last of the light to the wherry waiting at the bottom of the steps. My father stepped in with ease, his sea legs still upon him, and he reached out his hand to guide me in, but cumbersome as I was in my layers, I’d not take it. My skirts dipped to the black dye of water before I took my seat and watched Makepeace hitch up her skirts with one hand and twist them to the side, her stitched and worsted stockings revealing themselves like a stork’s bony knees. She sat down beside me and patted my hand as I felt the ripple of her movement into the boat, the river stretching in all directions, black as molasses, crumbs of starlight stuck in it, forever shifting. From out on the water the lamps of various vessels swung like pendulums, but our lantern remained unlit.
My father took an oar, pushed it against the jut of the step and for a moment the rocking ceased as we glided and I felt myself go still at the relief of it, but it was brief. My father started rowing and Makepeace and I sat on our watery pew, her hand curling around mine, and I focused on counting my father’s long strokes rather than let tears fall, little traitors from my eyes.
My father kept a cracking pace, panting with his labour. We passed cargo ships and under the shadows of bridges, the black strip of shadow beneath them darker than the inside of an eyelid. The river lulled me and I felt my eyes close watching the dark peaks and swells of the Thames, until I fell asleep and dreamed each of them was a watery hand reaching out of the water, but I didn’t know if they were ferrying me onward or trying to pull me down. I woke with a start, my father’s command in my ears bidding us to pull our cloaks over our heads, against the light.
Beside us loomed a huge ship, its hull high above us, pouring off it the sound of singing; my father rowed harder then, using the oar to push off from the leviathan and with his steady strokes we cleared it. At some distance I saw the British Naval standards flying and felt my father’s need to be quick, for to be seen by them would return him to nothing but a fish in their net. I’d been hasty, harsh, angry. What would I have done to leave a prison, a banishment, a hell?
“Father,” I whispered, but he bid me be quiet with a slight click of the tongue.
“The voice can carry across the water,” he whispered, his voice disguised by the splash of the oar, and he pulled us further downriver. The clouds raced above us, rushing in their own celestial waters; which star would guide me? My father steered closer to the bank, out of the lanes of further vessels, the buildings petering out and turning to the shapes of trees, willows washing their fronds in the water.
My father paused for a moment and was about to light the lantern when the moon slipped out of a pocket of cloud and looked down on us, an eye, whether benevolent or not, time would tell.
“You were born in the river, did you know that, Eglantine?” my father said, and I felt the surprise of it – how could one be born in a river. “I wasn’t supposed to be there, but how could I keep away? I wanted to see my child. My, how your mother laboured, until her own mother led her into the water to ease her pain. She pulled you out of your mother and out of the water and I felt the earth spin beneath my feet with my unworthiness, my unreadiness to be a father.”
My father’s voice drifted off and I begged for him to continue. Born in a river. How much of my past had he locked up in himself? How I wanted all those stories, the brightest, shiniest things, better than silver or gold, and now the time to pry them was diminishing, no matter how fast and slender my fingers, already melting, disappearing.
“I never was going to let you go,” he said, his voice quiet, and I felt the river swell around the wherry. “I’d not have sold you off, nor the house, not if my life depended on it, but I fed him the possibility of it, bait on the line, to reel him in.”
It burned that he used me to win his own freedom. “Always your instrument, more than a daughter,” I said, and my father went quiet. All of me was conflicted – I’d lose him.
We reached an inlet and he manoeuvred the boat down along the breeze as the night grew darker. I ran my hand in the water and splashed it up onto my face, trying to keep myself awake.
My father stood and removed his coat and stepped out of the boat. The water splashed up to his thighs as he led it to the sandy side of the bank, disturbing the swans who slept in the reeds, ghost galleons silently pushing out from the safety of their cover, their feet spinning beneath the water, their cygnets balls of down on their backs.
“I’d keep my promise, Eglantine, I promised to protect you, to keep you safe. I promised your mother, the day she passed you through the ship porthole into my arms, when she was arrested for the crime I’d committed. I’d promised her father, Josiah, when I’d been too cowardly to speak up and the law broke his neck for it.” My father’s voice grew rough in his throat, dry as paper. Here was the truth out of his mouth and he expected me to believe it? How could I believe anything that he said? He’d made not only my mother pay for his crimes, but my grandfather also. I stepped backwards and felt my footing falter, Makepeace’s hand caught my arm, but I shook it off. His words made the skin at my neck pucker and rise, heat and itch. This was the first I’d heard of it, of my other grandfather, my mother’s father. All the love that belonged to me, all the love of a complete family, my father with his dreams of grander things had denied me. He’d stolen enough from me. I retched, but all that came out was bile. I wished he’d never come back at all.
The dawn was approaching through the thick mist, slowly lightening the sky. It clung to our clothes like the finest of lace, made of spider web and water.
My father held out his hand for me to step onto the side of the riverbank but I didn’t take it, not knowing why we’d stopped here. All there was were reeds and grass and a lone oak, a bower over my head; last season’s acorns crunched underfoot. Makepeace stayed in the boat.
“This is where she lies, Eglantine,” my father said, “this oak tree is her mark.”
I stepped backwards, my spine hitting the trunk, my breath squeezed out of me, the bark pressing through all the layers of clothes on my back, willing her to me. But the tree was just a tree.
“How is her mark an oak and not a stone in a graveyard? Didn’t she deserve better?” I said, bitterness spreading through me.
“Once I reclaimed you from the prison hulk and got to the cover of the shoreline, I kept watch, ready to turn myself in for her. I had you settled and calm, a piece of marzipan gripped in your palm, asleep from exhaustion. All I wanted was to get you safe, get you back to the house, to provide for you. But the uniforms followed not long after and came closer towards us and I took cover in the tree roots, pulling my coat over our heads. They came to shore with their load, with their dead. With your mother. How I wanted to leap on them, pummel their brains at the comments they made, their collars turned up against the cold. They were cursory, barely scraping the topsoil from the riverbank before tossing her into the hole and sprinkling the dirt back over. To them she was nothing more than a doll of rag and flesh. I heard their rum-soaked voices from across the water, slurring the words to a shanty song, and I waited until they disappeared altogether before I crept out and pulled away the soil with my bare hands, wiping the dirt from her face and kissing her lips. I dug deeper into the earth for her resting place, not wanting the first flood of the river to send her out into the waters. Before tucking her under the soil, I placed an acorn in each of her hands as she once told me her mother did for a lost child, so that whoever came past would know their resting place, and so the dead would not be lonely.”
I heard all the birdsong then, now the whole tree was singing, alive. In the blue light the twin trunks of the tree swayed, the roots stretching down to the water, shoring up the soil of the riverbank, dipping into the water. The leaves’ dark shapes moved, their tips painted gold with the sun’s thin light. In the pockets of soil around the tree bloomed foxglove. Petals for her slippers.
“How would you know one tree from another?” I said, my voice pouring out of me, an overfilled bucket from the well. “How many trees line this riverbank, why this one?”
My father ran his hand over the bark and picked up an acorn from the ground. “That is what I was worried about too, hoping that you’d kept your doll. All the time I was away, I hoped you were taking good care of her, hoped that if I didn’t return you’d find where to look,” he said.
I pulled my doll out of my pocket and held her aloft in the air, the sunlight striking the glass of her earrings and sending diamonds of coloured light across my face. My hands shook or she shook in my hands, impossible to tell which. How many times had I held this doll, how many times had I told her all my secrets, asked her my many questions and waited for the first voice that ever spoke my name to reply? When all the time she’d been made of wood and my fancy.
“She is just a doll,” I said. “How could she have told me anything?”
A wind came across the water and started to ruffle the leaves and swirl around Makepeace’s cap. I watched as she carefully removed it and slipped it into her pocket, stepped out of the boat and came to stand beside me. All the while the oak leaves murmured in unison, flipping their green sides silver and back again. All whispers. All hums.
“Lift her dress,” my father said and I wanted to laugh. I’d lifted her dress many times, helped her in her toilet, but it had never been removed completely. I tipped poor Miss Poppet upside down, her skirts falling around her face like a daisy’s petals.
“Turn her around, look,” my father said, and I did. Miss Poppet’s back was its same usual wooden self, scratched and marked, familiar. “Look again,” he said. And I saw. There on Miss Poppet’s back was a crudely carved map, the tree marked with a star, the inlet an arrow, the river a road – all these little signs my father had recorded for me so I’d find my way back. I looked at him, bent as he was, unsure in the dawn light whether he held the tree up or the tree held him. Whatever had happened to them along the way, there had been a point as fixed as a patrin, that they loved each other, that they loved me.
I pulled Miss Poppet’s skirts down, smoothed her clothes and had a look at her dear familiar painted face, her eyes upturned in a perpetual smile. I dug a hole close to the trunk with my hands, flicking dirt away and leaves and acorns. The hole refilled, but I kept digging. A magpie chirred above me and I looked up, the morning light hitting his plumage all dark iridescence, his eye caught by Miss Poppet’s shining face as I laid her in the grave I had made, before sweeping the dirt over her. My mother had turned into a tree, so it seemed only right that I return my doll to the oak she was, a seed of a different kind. I took all the acorns I could find and circled where she lay.