FOR SOME WEEKS NOW, WILLIAM HAD BEEN busy at the table from first light until dusk, his glasses pinched tight to his nose and a lamp pulled close, but not a single pair of shoes had he made. Instead, he seemed to have set up business as a conjurer, magicking up tiny, wonderful things – a roomful of furniture for a fairy, perhaps, or a very house-proud mouse.
The chairs and tables, beds and dressers William made looked tiny and as light as air, but the tools he used to produce them were solid enough – a sharp knife and a chisel, a plane and a sanding block, glue and files and clamps and a hammer for nailing. The materials were not dissimilar to those he used in his everyday trade – leather, wood, offcuts of metal – but he also took himself off to see a man in the High Street who made tables and chests decorated with all sorts of inlays and carvings, and from him he bought sheets of wood so thin it felt like paper, and scraps of ivory, and pieces of something he called ‘mother-of-pearl’, from the insides of shells, that glowed in lamplight like the sky at gloaming.
Helen was enchanted by this miniature world, and before long, she had persuaded William to let her help dress the tiny beds with hangings and eiderdowns, and cover the seats of the chairs and the backs of the settles with silk. She had never owned such fine stuff herself, and William gave her the money and sent her out to buy it special – but scraps only, he said, for the things they were making were so small, they had no need of anything larger than a handkerchief. That set Helen to thinking, and she suggested she embroidered some flowers on the back of a settle, in coloured silks. She practised on a rough piece of linen first, till she was pleased with her stitching and felt it wouldn’t shame any pixie or fairy. When she showed William he was well pleased, and said she should begin on the settle directly; he had only a few days to finish the work before it would be gone to the customer, and delighted he would be with it, too. William had finished all of the carpentry, by that point, and all there was left to do was the last of the sanding, and varnish it with shellac, but first William planned to trace patterns on the wood with ink, to look like inlay or poker-work.
As they worked, William told her a story about a man who voyaged to a land of tiny people called Lilliputians, and went from being their prisoner to living happily amongst them for a while in a city they had there. Then he pissed on a fire to put it out and was sentenced to have his eyes put out, and so he ran off. This was part of a book written by an Irishman, William said, a clergyman called Swift who preached in Dublin long ago. Then he spoke a little of his mother, who had greatly loved this story. She took in piecework, he said, doing fine stitching on linen articles. Her own mother had taken in bales of flax and spun it for the linen merchants to weave on their great looms. Their work had helped keep a roof over the family’s head, and they had a few shillings left over now and then as pin money moreover, to buy a thing they fancied at market. That was how his mother had bought her book about Lilliput. His grandmother had been no reader, though, and instead she coveted items of fashion. He told a funny story about how, in her great age, she had wanted a pair of gloves with ears of corn embroidered on the fingertips in metal threads, but when she had saved enough money to buy them, she found they didn’t fit her hands, worn and swollen as they were with spinning and with age.
Helen looked at her own rough hands and thought to ask about William’s wife, whether she had a gift for fancy work or the stomach for plain honest labour, but in the end she kept her mouth buttoned closed – better not to ask a question if the answer could hurt you, she knew, for all your heart wished to do it, in the way your tongue always sought out a sore bit in your mouth and worried at it until it was worse.
When at last their work was finished and all the varnishes and finishes cured and hard, Helen wrapped the pieces in soft paper and packed them carefully in a box. As she picked up each piece to wrap it, she saw how William’s skill had grown as he worked, so the first pieces seemed rough, almost, clumsy by comparison to those he had made last. She missed the sight of them on the dresser, when they were all packed away and ready for William to deliver.
‘Where are they going?’ she asked, thinking perhaps they were for a child.
‘A doctor asked me to make them for his wife,’ William said. ‘To furnish a fine little house he has bought for her.’
‘Why would a grown woman want a thing like that?’ Helen asked. ‘I thought it would be a plaything for a wee lass.’
William snorted. ‘After all our hard work?’ he said. ‘Nah, Nelly, these are too good for play. They’re to be admired, like a collection, only in a cabinet shaped like a house instead of a chest of drawers.’
Helen knew nothing of such things, and told him so. William told her about the clergyman he had worked for and how he had had a great glass-fronted cabinet filled with drawers, each only an inch or two deep, and there were scores of them, and in each there were shells and stones and rocks with strange things in them, that looked like bones.
‘What did he want with dirt like that?’ Helen wondered.
‘He said there were things to learn from them,’ William said. ‘I never understood quite what, but then I was a young lad and I had lasses on the brain, Nelly! Come to think of it’ – he snagged an arm around her waist – ‘I’ve not changed mightily since then, have I now?’
The next day, around noon, William set off with his box and returned that evening well pleased with his payment.
‘Did the wife like them?’ Helen asked. She hoped her sewing had pleased.
‘And how would I know that, Nelly?’ William laughed. ‘Sure I only gave them to the Doctor at his rooms in Surgeon’s Square. I never saw his wife at all!’
With his words, something chimed in Helen’s memory and all of a sudden, she felt uneasy.
‘How did you come by the commission, William?’ she asked. ‘Who is the Doctor man?’
‘Well, now . . .’ William’s ears had gone red, and he seemed to be having difficulty meeting her eye. Then he cleared his throat and looked at her. ‘Knox, his name is,’ he said.
‘Knox . . .’ Helen repeated. ‘Is that not the man . . . When the auld man died, is that not the man that gave you the money for his corpse?’
‘It was,’ said William. He looked at his feet.
‘How came you to take a commission from him?’ Helen asked. ‘The way you told it, he just came and gave you money for the auld man’s body. And that was half a year ago! You only started working on the doll’s house gear after the turn of the year. How can you have had such a commission from a man you never saw but once?’
William scratched his jaw. ‘I did . . . see him more than once,’ he said.
‘Why? When?’
‘Och, Nelly,’ William said, after a second’s pause. ‘I didn’t say anything because I knew you would worry. You see, there was a man from Cheshire lodging in the room upstairs, so there was. A miller, I think he was, and he took the jaundice. You know, where a man turns yellow? Well, Margaret was near distracted, worrying that word would get out and no one would want to lodge here, and so Hare and I went up to see him and—’ He made a strange gesture with his hands, lifting them to the height of his chest with the palms turned upwards.
‘And what?’ Helen asked.
‘Well, what do you think?’ said William. ‘When we went up there, he was dead. And we thought of Margaret, and the panic that was on her, and . . . we took him to Surgeon’s Square that night.’
Helen felt as though her legs had turned to water suddenly, and she sank down in the chair. William crouched in front of her, rubbing her hands.
‘Oh, Nelly, Nelly,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. I never would have done it, but I wanted to help William and Margaret.’
‘How much did you get?’ Helen asked.
‘Ten pounds,’ William said. ‘And . . . there was another one who—’
Helen goggled. ‘Another one? Three of them?’
William didn’t answer and instead stared at his feet, his face aflame. ‘Ach, Nelly,’ he said at last. ‘They were poor folk, living in a lodging house. So what if they went off to help the anatomists in their work?’
‘William,’ Helen’s voice sounded odd to her own ears, high somehow, but flat – ‘we’re poor. We live in a lodging house.’
‘Och, that’s different,’ said William.
‘How? How is it different?’ Helen demanded. ‘If I died, would you not send word to my father? So my own folk would know what had become of me?’
‘Of course I would,’ William said. ‘But you live here with me, and William lives with Margaret. These folk had no one. We had no way of letting their people know what had happened. Surely you see that, Nelly! We didn’t know their people or even their place. The best they could have hoped for was a pauper’s grave, far from home.’
Helen didn’t know what to say to that. It was true, and yet . . . ‘There’s no shame in a pauper’s grave,’ she said. ‘And more than that, we should be thankful the city buries its dead when there’s no one else to do it.’
‘Well, I suppose so,’ William said, ‘but what of the harm to Margaret’s business, Nelly? What of that? If the city were to have sent a coffin, and men to lift it, then it would have been all over Edinburgh that two folk had died in this house, and then three! Sure, no one would ever have wanted to stay here again, or they’d be after a room at half price for fear it held the plague.’
Helen took a deep breath.
‘It’s wrong, William,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what you say. It’s wrong, and that’s all there is to it. Now you have a choice. You can promise me, right now, that this is the end of it. You’ll make your living honestly, as you’ve told me your mother did, and your grandmother did, or you won’t live with me anymore. Then you can do as you please.’ Even as she said it, she thought the words rang hollow. Would she really have the courage to up and leave William?
But William didn’t seem to have noticed. There were tears running down his face, and he laid his cheek on her knee.
‘I promise, Nelly,’ he said. ‘I only did it to help William and Margaret, sure I did. I’m an honest man, Nelly, with an honest trade. I’ll never do anything like it again.’
‘And no more drinking,’ Helen said. ‘You’ll do things in drink you’d never do sober. I know it, William, and so do you.’
‘No more drinking,’ said William, his voice muffled by her skirt. ‘I promise.’
Helen sat there while his tears soaked into the poor fabric of her skirt. She could choose to believe him, or she could leave. She thought of the little chairs and tables and dressers and beds. The man that had made those was not a bad man. Maybe a weak one, but not bad. She would choose to believe him, but she would do her level best to get them out of this house, out of the influence of William Hare. Until then, she would watch William like a hawk.