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In Which Another Mother and Son Are Reunited
His wife. The words spun ’round and ’round in Pickett’s brain as he trudged in the direction of Denmark Street. His wife. If, as the apple seller’s cryptic conversation seemed to suggest, he was seeing a world in which he did not exist, then it was his existence that had led, eventually, to his father’s transportation. And what of his father’s wife? Had his own birth prevented his father from marrying? Or was it possible that the wife in question was his own mother? If that was the case, then his birth—no, he himself!— had caused his mother to decamp.
The thought caused his steps to flag as he turned into the street where, if Moll were to be believed, his father now lived. Although by no means genteel, Denmark Street was not as disreputable as the notorious rookery that bordered it. The seventeenth-century houses lining both sides had gradually been converted to commercial purposes, with most of its remaining residents living in rooms in the upper stories while shops and ateliers occupied the floors at street level.
Pickett walked slowly down the street, peering through the darkness for the house number Moll had indicated. He found it, and noted that here was one of the few buildings that still reflected its residential beginnings. The paint on its front door was cracked and peeling, but the front stoop had been swept clean, and curtains of cheap lace hung in the windows. In any case, it was a step up from the house where he and his father had lived with Moll. Taking a deep breath, he strode up to the front door and knocked.
To his surprise, it opened almost at once, in spite of the lateness of the hour. A woman stood there holding up a lantern, the better to see the unexpected caller. Or, perhaps, to allow the caller to see her. For the soft yellow glow illuminated a woman clad in a neat but worn dress of blue cotton, a still-attractive woman in her early forties with fine gray eyes and soft waves of brown hair lightly touched at the temples with threads of silver that gleamed in the light.
“So there you are,” she said, smiling warmly at him. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“I—I know you,” he stammered, suddenly assailed by an avalanche of half-remembered impressions: a gentle hand on his forehead, a soft voice singing a lullaby or reading aloud from a book. “I thought I’d forgotten, but I know you.”
“I’m glad,” she said simply. “It’s been a long time, Johnny.”
Her speech had more in common with his wife’s than with his father’s, but he was so taken aback by what she said that it did not occur to him until much later to wonder at the way in which she’d said it. “You know who I am?” he asked, fighting back an unmanly urge to burst into tears.
“Of course I do! Why wouldn’t I?”
He shrugged. “No one else does.”
“Well, no,” she conceded. “But it’s a little different for me, you see.”
“Because you’re my—”
“Because I no longer exist, either,” she said apologetically, cutting off the words he would have said. “At least, not in a form you would recognize.”
He considered this qualifier. “Then you’re dead,” he deduced.
“Was there ever any doubt? Surely you cannot have thought I would have willingly abandoned you!”
“Moll—my stepmother, at least that’s what Da called her—she said Jack Pickett lived here with his wife. He—he married you, then?”
The fine eyes twinkled with mischief. “My dear boy, do you dare to cast aspersions on your mother’s honor? What sort of woman do you think I am?”
“How should I know?” he asked, spreading his hands in helpless frustration. “I always assumed I must be a—Da never told me any different. He never talked about you at all,” he added apologetically.
Far from being wounded by this revelation, she lifted one delicately arched eyebrow. “While you, on the other hand, chatter like a magpie about the things you feel the most deeply.”
He acknowledged this verbal hit with a self-conscious little laugh.
“In fact,” she continued, taking pity on him, “we married on the fourth of April, 1783—almost a full year before your own birth. Prompt, perhaps, but quite proper. If you have any doubts, you have only to go to St. Giles-in-the-Fields and look in the church registry.”
He made a mental note to do exactly that, even as he realized that he would not find his own baptism recorded there the following spring; after all, he’d never been born.
“Mum,” he said, trying out the name he could not remember speaking, “is this”—his gesture took in not just the two of them, but the street on which they stood and the wider world beyond—“is all this real?”
She considered the matter for such a long moment that he feared she would not answer. “I think,” she said with great deliberation, “that it might be, under certain circumstances.”
“If I don’t exist,” he deduced.
She inclined her head in agreement.
“But if I did exist, then you—wouldn’t.”
“Nonsense! No one lives on this earth, no matter how brief their stay, without leaving some trace of themselves behind. A part of me would always exist, in the person of one rather extraordinary young man. On the other hand, if one does not exist”—she shrugged—“it’s as the poet said: ‘No man is an island.’ Every life touches other lives, and if that touch is removed, then those lives are changed, sometimes in rather unexpected ways. But I think you’re beginning to understand that for yourself.”
“You give me too much credit, ma’am,” Pickett said with some asperity. “I don’t understand any of this!”
She turned away, glancing over her shoulder into the depths of the quiet house. “I wish I could explain, but I’m afraid I haven’t the time. I don’t think your father ought to find you here, for he would be bound to ask questions—you are so very like him, you know—and since he’ll be getting up for work soon—”
“ ‘Work’?” Pickett echoed, with a skeptical lift of one eyebrow that was highly reminiscent of his magistrate.
“Yes. He is underbutler for Lord Sedgewick. He might have been butler by now, were it not for his determination to spend his day off, and the evening of his half-day, beneath his own roof. Then, too, most butlers are forbidden to marry unless they happen to wed the housekeeper, and your father would not hear of my occupying such a position.”
Utterly uninterested in the domestic arrangements of upper servants, Pickett gave a cynical little laugh. “I hope Lady Sedgewick remembers to lock up her silver.”
“You wrong him, my dear,” she scolded gently. “You don’t really know him.”
Pickett could not agree. “I know enough,” he said darkly. “Maybe more than you do.”
A board on the floor above them creaked, and she glanced uneasily upward. “I’m afraid I haven’t time to debate the matter with you. You must go.”
“I—I had hoped I could stay here,” he confessed, and although he had not intended to beg, he could not deny that his voice held a plaintive note.
“Yes, I know you did. But there are—reasons—why that is impossible. Take care, my dear boy.” She patted his cheek, then gave him a little push and closed the door gently but firmly behind her.
To Pickett, standing alone and abandoned in the street, it seemed as if his life was unwinding in reverse, like thread uncoiled from a spool. From the elegant town house in Curzon Street where he lived with his wife, he’d gone to Bow Street and a two-room flat in Drury Lane, then to a coal merchant’s house along the river, and, finally, to the narrow streets and back alleys of St. Giles. He recalled bitterly the daydreams of his childhood, when he’d imagined how different his life might have been if his mother had still been there instead of the hostile and frequently drunken Moll. Well, now he had the truth, and it appeared there was very little to choose between them. If this was the vaunted “mother’s love,” subject of so much sentimental verse, he thought it vastly overrated.
Still, he had no desire to be discovered there by his father—on that, at least, he and his mother were in full agreement—so he retraced his route to the river, shivering with every step. He’d lost his coat in fleeing the constable, and given his waistcoat to the unfortunate Miss Braunton, and his thin cambric shirt offered little protection against the sharp wind. Finally, having nowhere else to go, he was forced to seek shelter from the elements beneath a bridge. Weary of body and battered of spirit, he collapsed onto the ground, pausing only long enough to pull a few crumpled sheets of abandoned newspaper about his ears in an approximation of a blanket before succumbing to an exhausted slumber.