TWO

The omnibus came to a halt at the terminus, that dispiriting point where every remaining passenger must climb down and proceed on foot. Louisa, who’d dropped a glove, been groping on the floor for it among chestnut peelings and sharp stalks of straw, was the last to alight. Usually, she took a cab from Canonbury to Antigua Street, but since the fog descended three weeks earlier, drivers could only be persuaded to travel south of the river only for three times the regular fare.

The horses’ steaming breath mingled with the vapor as she set off through the square and past a noisy tavern into the ladder of streets beyond, her handbag hidden under the wing sleeve of her wrap. Robbers were flourishing in the obscurity. Murderers too, according to Rosina’s cousin, who was a police officer. The wooden pavement was slippery underfoot and Louisa walked close to the walls and hedges that separated the houses from the street, reaching out her hand, feeling through the kid of her glove the prickly brush of privet, the graze of brick.

A half-moon emerged, low in the sky over the top of the roofs of the Greenwich terraces, lighting a dingy-looking circle of cloud. It pulled Louisa along Antigua Street and through the iron gate of number 27, where a congregation of faded silk roses hung from the gatepost.

Mrs. Hamilton opened the door, a raw-chinned baby imprisoned in one arm.

“If you could see yourself in, missus,” she said. “I’ve got my hands full.”

The woman pressed herself against the coat stand and Louisa edged past her along a narrow hallway, walked down the decrepit wooden steps to the back parlor. The little window was draped in its customary swag of purple velvet and the air was heavy with the scent of a burning incense tablet, the room dimly lit by a single oil lamp hanging from a beam. Despite the thickness in the air, the powerful scent of musk overlaying a reek of tomcats and burnt potatoes, it was cold, the fireplace empty. Mr. Hamilton’s clients were staying away, Louisa supposed, due to the atrocious weather. She wouldn’t have come herself if she’d had any choice.

From his place behind a table, Mr. Hamilton nodded at her. “I saw your note. Be seated, Mrs. Heron.”

Louisa settled herself on the chair opposite him and rested her hands on the softly furrowed cloth, palms upward. Malachi Sethe Hamilton was Romany by origin; it was the source of his special gift and, she thought sometimes, of his peculiar manners. All year round, he wore a broad-collared coat that reached to his ankles, the hem embroidered with fishes and bulls, scorpions and prancing goats, a pair of twins holding hands. His hair, neither gray nor white, issued from the sides of his head in two matted pelts, leaving the dome naked and exposed. Louisa imagined the inside of it, stuffed like an overcrowded drawer with visions and voices and dreams.

People said that he’d adopted the name of Hamilton on arrival in London, the day he stepped off the boat. Many things were said about Mr. Hamilton, but in her years of consultation with him, Louisa had found no reason to doubt him. He had never been wrong.

“I have a question for my mother.”

Mr. Hamilton nodded.

“You want Mama’s advice, about a journey.”

Mr. Hamilton’s powers of discernment gave Louisa a sense of safety. In the cramped back parlor, she felt as she had when their father, a sea captain, used to tell her and her four sisters stories around the fire, in his periods of shore leave. All too soon, Father would be gone, but the stories remained. Thinner and less satisfactory than by the firelight, but present nonetheless, worlds in themselves, resistant to time or breakage, pilfering by older sisters.

“Yes, Mr. Hamilton. I want you to ask her whether I should take my daughter abroad. Her doctor insists on it. But I . . .”

“Somewhere warmer than our own island? A place far away from here?”

Louisa nodded, overcome with gratitude. Mr. Hamilton knew the questions before she uttered them. It was remarkable.

He closed his eyes, his face creased in effort.

“Speak, dear lady,” he intoned, taking hold of Louisa’s hands on the table. “Speak to us, by your kindness.”

Louisa’s hands were cold and his warm around them, rough-palmed, one finger constricted by the bright wedding band he’d affected lately. The new Mrs. Hamilton had appeared one day in spring, visibly with child, answering the door with an unspoken challenge in her eyes. The baby was crying upstairs and there was a faint disturbance of the air that could be something or nothing.

Louisa’s voice was a whisper.

“Do you hear anything, Mr. Hamilton?”

He didn’t respond. Mr. Hamilton sat not more than three feet away from her but Louisa had the distinct sense that he’d left the room, no longer inhabited the large and flesh-rounded body that she saw before her. The silence around them altered. It became full and complex, layered with possibility, and the hairs rose on Louisa’s arms and spine as Mr. Hamilton’s lips parted, seemed to struggle.

“I expected you sooner.” A high, true voice, quavering a little, issued from the mouth of Mr. Hamilton. It was the voice of Louisa’s mother. “My poor Izzy.”

The childhood nickname that her mother invariably used now, although when she was alive she’d called all of the older girls by their full names. Hearing her voice again, Louisa saw in her mind her mother as she’d been when Louisa was a child, when Amelia Newlove had seemed to represent through her slight frame the entire mystery of womanhood. For a moment, Louisa forgot what she’d come about. She bowed her head and blinked back tears.

“Oh, Mother. I miss you so.”

For what she estimated afterward had been a whole minute, there was silence. When Amelia Newlove’s voice came again, the tone was altered, a bleak authority entered into it.

“Death is near,” she said.

Louisa felt a chill that began at the base of her spine and spread through her body. Her teeth began to chatter.

“What shall I do? Tell me, Mother, please.”

“The way is far,” said the voice. “Make haste, Izzy.”

Mr. Hamilton closed his mouth and shuddered. He dropped Louisa’s hands and began mopping at his brow with a spotted handkerchief, sweat pouring from him, drops scattering like rain from his chin and cheeks as if he had undergone a great exertion. Taking a swig from the pint pot on the table, he cleared his throat. “Clear as day,” he said, his own voice returned to him in all its gruff depth. “I take it you heard her?”

“I heard her.” Louisa’s throat was so dry she could barely utter the words. “I almost wish I had not.”

“No cause to take fright, Mrs. Heron. Death’s always near, when you come to think of it. You walk on bones in London.”

“But what shall I do? What does it mean?”

“That’s for you to decide.”

Mr. Hamilton shifted his chair back from the table and stood up. Something about him had altered. His lined forehead appeared not a map of other realms but the face of a tired man, and the coat looked shabby, faintly ridiculous, as if he’d stumbled out from a fancy-dress party. His voice, when he spoke, was hoarse.

“Awful foggy, ain’t it? They’ve suspended the shipping again.”

Louisa handed over the half-sovereign, climbed the wooden steps, and let herself out. Pulling her wrap over her shoulders as she closed the door behind her, drawing it up around her cheeks, she groped her way back along Antigua Street toward the terminus.

She had a peculiar feeling of recognizing nothing, of the way back being different from the way out, as if already she had traveled far from everything that was known to her.