We continued along the river, the trees thick with green cover, ghostly spirals of smoke creeping above the canopy. Occasionally a clearing, farmhouse, horse, sheep. The lowing of a cow.
At a point along the river, at a jetty made of raw planks, the riverman tied up the boat and looped the rope around a split post. He helped me and then he helped Cora Gooseberry, who had been the strength of my arms, the fulfilment of my desire, her grip the wish of my fingers. The taste of river water in my mouth, a bubble of it blocking my ears. Riverling, it said. All of me had been enveloped in the river’s embrace and I’d not been afraid, but now walking on the dry earth and feeling the water shed from me, the fear began to swell at how close I’d come to drowning.
“Just up that way, Cora will show you, Mrs Fookes,” the riverman said and I felt the earth firm beneath my unsteady feet. The name Mrs Fookes made me want to look over my shoulder, not familiar with the sound of it, my new name.
Coach, carriage, wheelbarrow, cart. Where shall I live? Big house, little house, pig-sty, barn. My mind drowsily circled the old rhyme beneath the beating of the afternoon sun as Cora Gooseberry kept a steady pace, waiting for me a few steps ahead when I lagged.
We kicked up clouds of dust that seemed to turn and spin golden. Ahead of us a creature ran up the rough bark of a tree and watched us. Rooko-mengro. Tree fellow, though it was no squirrel I’d seen. A kakkaratchi, a new magpie, swooped low in the flickering trees, a black and white streak alongside them, before it stopped and sung for me a carol, a full chortle of joy.
Over the rise a church had been built and a graveyard opposite, but I didn’t want to linger there, I’d had enough of graveyards in this life. Sloping away from the church was a hill, canopied in tree branches, framing a small glimmering slick of water, a beautiful lagoon that acted as a mirror to the sky; clouds unfolded above and below like a bolt of fabric, the wind blowing it wide. A black swan cut through the glassy water. Beside the lagoon was a shelter made from branches, a living tent, a blanket folded inside, waiting for the occupant to return. Cora pointed the way I was to go and I kissed her cheeks in thanks. She patted my stomach with a tender hand and ambled away, the silvery trees falling in behind her.
I walked up the hill, past a grand house with a fine garden, to where a marketplace was packing up for the day, and was met by the smell of fruits and vegetables that had turned overripe in the sun. Opposite was a field of scraggly grass, where I stopped. There was Fookes, stripped to the shirtsleeves, his back bent away from me, taking the beating of the sun as he took a brick in one hand and a scoop of mortar in the other.
I stood there for a while, all of me wanting to call out to him, but I hesitated. Our promises back in London were fogged by all that had happened since. I followed his steady, familiar movements – his hat perched on his head, the tilt of his head – until I could stand it no longer.
“Fookes,” I called and I watched him stand up and put his hands to his forehead to shield his eyes from the light. “Fookes.” I longed to reach out to him, but I stood, still damp from the river and my own sweat, and waited. Uncertain.
“Eglantine?” he said, the mortar slipping from his trowel into the dirt, followed by the trowel itself. He moved fast, the mortar on his hands suddenly on me, wrapped around the growing girth of me, his lips on mine.
“How did you get here?” he said in disbelief. “Your ship is not due.” He wiped the sweat from his face into his hair and held me back from him to take me in and I felt changed from the young woman at my father’s house. “Eglantine,” he said again, my name lost in the press of his kiss. “Why, you all soaked through!” His hands outlined the shape of my face, catching in the wet tendrils of my hair, a rope to reel me in with and kiss me again. His thumb traced the strand of coral he’d given me at our wedding and I saw the silver heart inscribed with my birth on a cord on his chest.
“Do you not see it?” he said, a catch of excitement in his voice.
“See what?”
Fookes led me around the boundary of a ditch, bricks grew up in one, a wooden peg pulling string taut between them, a phantom wall.
“Our home, well the start of it,” Fookes said proudly. Fookes was ruddier than he’d been back in England, his skin beneath my fingers hot and unfamiliar, the sun burrowing into him. He’d been remade from sunlight, as would I be. The light was an elixir for us all. I put my hand against the bricks of the chimney breast which stood a sort of tower attached to an inner wall around which the house was being built. I closed my eyes and breathed in all the smells of this new country and couldn’t place any of them, warm and dry like a sort of spice. When I opened my eyes the external walls, yet to be built, shimmered in the air.
Together we walked through the invisible rooms of the house that would soon be our home and I felt my mother’s blessing in every pore of my skin, in my every breath and beat of my ragged heart. I had been her baby, my mother a gypsy, my father’s lady, and now I’d be my own queen.
Fookes cupped my hands in his as he told me of an old tradition, to bless the house, to leave something in the hearth or the threshold, something tucked and secret, something to keep us safe against life’s storms. As he spoke I knew what I must do. I carefully eased them off and handed them to Fookes, still sodden and thick with river water, and felt the heat of the earth rise up into my feet. These shoes that had been dipped in all the world’s waters. Half rose. Half hip.
Fookes lifted me up and in all my life I’d never felt so light. In a cavity of the flue I tucked my shoes that had travelled so far, and I was reminded of the little baby shoe my father burned with their spotted foxglove petals against the fever. So small.
Back on the ground I looked into Fookes’s face and I saw myself in his pupil, a tiny image. My breath quickened, for it seemed my mother looked back at me from his eyes.
“Eglantine?” Fookes said, concern on his face.
“Just then I saw myself in your pupil. I saw myself, yet I saw my mother,” I replied but felt what I’d said to be overfanciful and wished I had kept it to myself. A soft breeze came, curled around us, ruffled our hair and flipped the leaves of the gums, their white bark as sinuous as limbs. A strange bird coo-eed out in the breeze-tossed branches.
“Do you know what the word pupil means?” Fookes said. I shook my head. The grass ran like water with the wind. “You’ve heard the expression ‘apple of my eye’?” And the wind seemed to blow beneath my clothes and my skin, and my father’s words hushed in my ear, the quick scatter search for the marzipan in his pocket. I shivered.
“It was my father’s name for me,” I said quietly. Fookes took my hand in his and at his touch my father’s voice vanished from my ears.
“Someone once told me that pupil means little doll, when you can see yourself in another’s eye.” Out of habit I dipped my hand into my pocket for the secure clutch of that little wooden body, as long as a seedpod, as familiar to me as my own skin, but I knew she was entombed now with my mother.
Fookes lifted my face and looked right into my eyes, not the little doll’s, not his reflection. He looked right at me. And I felt a strange hush fall; the wind dropped and let me be. All the little stars in God’s heaven were as numerous as the freckles inside the cup of a foxglove blossom. The cicadas chanted their hallelujahs until they rang in my ears and I felt my own skin stretch and shift in time with them. A moth danced between our faces, drawn to the flame. And I felt my baby unfurl and stretch, growing. Waiting to be born.