‘See that strange person yonder, Sobriety. Do you see whatever it is she is carrying? What colour is that called?’
Sobriety looked, squinting a little. ‘That is mauve.’
‘Oh yes. How odd it is that she should have a thing wrapped in mauve.’ While the male murmur nearby estimated numbers of bricks multiplied by distance, I tilted my head at Sobriety. ‘I know several young ladies—Mr Hadley’s friends’ daughters, probably Gwendolyn’s
girl—no doubt hunting, as we speak, for sufficient yards of mauve silk to carry them through the Season.’
We two began to stroll toward the distant figure. Mr Brent still stood just behind the knot of frock-coated gentlemen (all now gripping their hats), leaning in to their talk while keeping a respectful distance from his social betters, and not noticing, perhaps, that we ladies were slowly moving away from the group. Our veils danced up behind us in paired arabesques; I tugged with each hand at the sides of my skirt, pulling against the efforts of the wind to turn it up like a teacup. Sobriety had brought the umbrella and contrived to hold the material of her own skirt down with it. The wind gusted this way and that, the cages beneath our skirts causing a wobble with each puff. Punch, I thought, would be well-amused at our minor struggles with the elements.
The two veils pirouetted to the left. There was a sound, a very small sound carried to us, sharply different from the hissings and clankings and thuddings of the works, and the rattle and squeal of the train that had just come to a halt to receive its dirty load. It was a strain to distinguish it, this tiny new sound: It may have been a bird. It was, indeed, a faint cheeping between gusts, between bursts of shoutings, impacts, bangings and Mr St George’s murmurings. Or… Here, in this part of the heath, I could see no birds to speak of. Or… There were many birds, of course, dabbling in the ponds at a distance behind us, but they were in the wrong direction for the wind to carry their cries. The tiny cawing came to us again.
‘Ma’am! ’Tis a baby! That is a baby that woman is carrying!’
A baby, of course! How many creatures mewl in that fashion… My mouth fell open, such was my surprise.
Chapter Eleven
The figure up ahead broke into a trot, alongside the embankment and heading, it seemed, for an entrance.
‘She is a girl, Sobriety, a mere girl.’
The girl’s hair broke loose from whatever bound it and blew out in lank, dark streamers.
We stopped still. The men, still discoursing, were some yards behind us. We stared at the girl with her bundle, which, since we were now near enough to see, was moving—wriggling, I thought, rather like a blue caterpillar—as well as wailing in bursts, between breaths.
I had a creeping realization, my gloved hand to my mouth: This is a pauper girl heading for empty tunnels with a baby wrapped in a fashionable shawl (those are fringes dangling there, in gold, I think. Yes, and a tassel). There was a certainty, suddenly, like the brush of a great dark wing, of something very wrong…and then I felt a great lassitude, a reluctance heavy as over-thick custard to be the one to mend this problem.
Surely this is nothing, I argued with myself. This signifies nothing, or somebody would have acted. This is not a circumstance, surely, that would depend on me. Surely, not on me.
Within my chest, my heart lurched and I felt suddenly ill with apprehension.
A baby. ’Tis a baby… It was a fact that could not be got around.
I glanced around at the men—quite distant now—but they were laughing together and entirely heedless of what we women saw, or, indeed, were barely aware of us at all. One would have to be unusually forthright to attract their serious attention. It would take time. I looked back at the girl, now slowed to a stride over by the completed
embankment. It was clear she knew this uneven landscape well. Perhaps she spied her doorway into one of those long, dark tunnels lined with bricks.
‘That is not her baby,’ I said, at last. ‘I cannot see how this pauper girl can have a baby, or at least not one wrapped as it is.’ I found myself tapping my fingers against my mouth—made, oh, so nervous, testy indeed, with the opposing desires to be doing something and to be assured that nothing needed to be done.
This is not right. It cannot be right. There must be something done. I knew this to be true.
Sobriety, at any rate, was heeding my concern, and had already started off again, walking fast and billowing out sideways as she went.
Look there, she acts while I merely make conversation. At last, and it was as if pulling away from glue, I pattered off after her, even while pieces of gravel jabbed at my feet through my thin soles.
‘Mr Brent!’ I called over my shoulder, but it was apparent Mr Brent did not hear. His head was hidden behind a black-clad shoulder; his body bent forward and taut with interest as somebody’s hand sketched a conversational parabola.
Sobriety was moving further on, and so I must catch up.
If this wind worsens, we shall turn into kites and fly up across London, petticoats and drawers and all. We might cause alarm to travellers in hot air balloons! I could not help but let out a little huff, a giggle, a spurt of my own excitement (while I thought it absurd to feel so, and it did not sit well with that sick anxiety) but found it difficult to both laugh and breathe, puffed out as I was with the effort of keeping up with Sobriety. My lungs were embattled from the constriction of my stays and from this unaccustomed trotting. I heard Sobriety’s own panting up ahead.
We were drawing closer to the girl and her wriggling, blue burden, had nearly drawn abreast of her—though still separated from her by several yards of muddied, gravelled, and rutted ground—when she succeeded in pulling open some manner of door into one of the tunnels, and disappeared.
We stood a moment, each with a hand at a heaving breast and staring after the vanished girl.
‘We shall…have to…pursue,’ Sobriety said with difficulty.
‘Oh, heavens…I suppose so.’ I looked back at Mr Brent, who still stood at the edge of the male coterie. I made to slow my breathing, as Sobriety began to pick her way to the embankment and the tunnel opening, arms out for balance, holding the furled umbrella in counterpoint.
‘Hi! Mr Brent!’ I called, loudly, and then stopped for a moment, startled at myself. I had not shouted in that way since I was ten, if ever. I felt myself redden both with the effort and with self-
consciousness, almost hoping none of the men would hear me after all.
Yet that would be ridiculous. Mr Brent ought to be with us. I drew another breath.
‘Mr Brent! You must come!’ Mr Brent looked around at that, and so I gestured to him to follow and turned to join Sobriety. Ladies must not go adventuring unaccompanied, I thought, and felt for a light-headed moment that all had so suddenly become wildly absurd.
While it was not far, the walk to the entranceway was slow with the necessary picking and hopping from dryish patch to dryish patch, and silent with concentration, barring Sobriety’s whispered ‘oh!’ and ‘tcha!’ as mud adhered to our petticoats and water spread upward in a brown stain. We clutched at our wilful skirts.
We reached the small entrance to the tunnel, a heavy metal door with a large handle, which at first Sobriety tugged, and then I did, and then both of us together, grunting as we pulled. The door opened.
That girl is strong. Or we are weak. And, oh! It is so very dark in there!
We peered in, veils streaming and pulling in the wind behind us, skirts and petticoats snapping like sails; even our bonnets shifted and tugged a little, although securely tied under our chins. The entranceway was not only dark, but was itself meant for men going about their business, not for ladies in wide skirts, who would have to enter sidelong, tilting our unwilling cages and partly folding them up so as to squeeze through.
Sobriety, adjusting and tilting, was first to enter. She hovered a moment, turned and spoke. ‘There is a m
etal ladder here.’ She glanced behind herself. ‘But it is not too far to the bottom.’
I believe I was unaware for a second how my mouth hung open. ‘A ladder?’
This grows worse, minute by minute!
‘Yes. It is perfectly safe. And newly built, after all. You will have to face the wall to climb down.’ Sobriety spoke slowly and deliberately—in order, I knew, to impart confidence and dispel fear—as she had spoken once to Cissy when an enormous rat had not only been discovered but had then backed, yellow-fanged and hackles on end, into a corner of the dining room.
And yet she is breathless, too, now as then… It was a little comfort to me to know this of her.
‘Face the wall?’ I felt myself fixed to the spot where I stood.
‘Yes. I will be just ahead. You will be perfectly safe.’ I looked at her. ‘But we must do it, if that girl is not mother to the babe, as you believe.’
Perhaps Sobriety could do it herself? I took a breath. No, of course not. Little Sobriety alone in a tunnel with a desperate baby thief? No.
‘All right. I will follow you.’
Sobriety began to sink from sight, her face, colourless against the darkness massed behind her, turned away and downwards.
I glanced around to where Mr Brent, hat clutched to his head and greatcoat bellying in the wind, had almost reached the point where he must pick his way over messy ground to us. He looked across and I put my finger to my lips to prevent his speaking. I then arranged myself, entered and turned to face the descending wall, a hand on each of the metal holds. My heart beat so that I thought it fought to escape my very bodice. I shook a foot clear of petticoat before stretching out in search of a first rung.
Lord, my knees are shaking. And my arms! They quivered with the strain of holding my own weight, were shot through with pain with both the holding and the stretching upward, as I descended. I was so utterly unused to this kind of activity. There was a tension at my seams and the whispered tearing of something giving way at the armsaye. At least my paletot would conceal the disaster to my dress. A drop of perspiration trickled from under my bonnet down the side of my face. Can I hold on? Will I fall? I twisted my head to one side and saw Sobriety waiting below, a grey blooming in the gloom.
It did not take long to reach the floor, I suppose, though my arms ached with the weight they had had to bear. Neither was it, when my eyes adjusted, as lightless as it had first seemed; after all, daylight still showed in one direction, where the tunnels were still being constructed, as well as from the open entranceway above our heads. We peered into the shadows the other way, a yawn of blackness whence came the echoing cries of the baby and the receding scuffle of feet.
We have no light to follow. What now?
We began to walk slowly toward the sounds; I reached for Sobriety,
who held my gloved hand with a grip both tight and tense. For comfort, I brushed my other hand against the curved brick wall. We had not gone far before Sobriety stopped, and so did I. I realised I heard a crooning, along with the whimpering of the baby, and then we saw a flare of light.
Of course, the girl has her own bit of candle.
A mere twenty feet away, and there she was. Her face was there, of a sudden, in a circle of yellow candlelight dimming into shadow. She was on her knees as if at worship before a small nest of musty clothing and a thin blanket, in which the mauve-wrapped baby kicked and cried. She had settled the babe into its nest, and reached with arms and fingers like sticks to twitch the cloths about him. Her face in profile, thin and so without flesh as to seem very small indeed, bore a look of great concentration. Her eyes were enormous, and her lips parted with the beginnings of a smile.
We moved forward on tiptoe.
I had a sense of being both a part of and witness to this scene: Dark shadows creeping, the moments inching closer to the point where this poor girl will lose her tiny god. Poor girl, or villain?
Then there came the heavy footfalls of Mr Brent rushing up behind us, calling, ‘Ma’am, what are you doing?’ His voice boomed.
Oh, Lord. Shh!
The girl squeaked, and looked around. Her face, blurred in the half-light, held still a moment, before knowledge settled on it of doom borne upon her by our three figures swaying at the edge of light. Then she began her shouting, a shrieking that bounced against the walls of the tunnel and added fear to fear until the whole cavern was filled with her overlapping, clamorous voices. The baby wailed its own cacophony through it all.
‘Stay away! Stay away! This is my place!’ Her eyes were young and round, but what her age was it was hard to tell: she was so thin, small as a bird. I thought she was like that street boy—these children akin in their hunger—crouching there on the tunnel floor before her little nest. The girl looked from one crowding, vague figure to the other and back, eyes dark and dazzled by candlelight, jutting her small chin at us. Deep shadow drew the shape of bone; her face was like the weather-cleaned baby egret’s skull I had once held as a child.
I stepped a little further into the weak light, close to the baby. It did not feel as if I had made any decision to move so, yet I did, and my heart banged once more against the very whalebone.
Gracious, what am I doing!
‘Ma’am!’ Sobriety whispered, close behind me. The girl made to pick up the baby, floundering forward, but I was there first (to my surprise) and crouched down to place my hand on the howling bundle.
I drew breath to shout above the noise, ‘Child, child. This is not your baby, is it?’ As I spoke, the infant stopped its noise to draw breath, and not your baby, is it? echoed throughout the tunnel, repeated and repeated until there was silence, and the baby began its noise again.
The girl looked away and we watched her face pucker. See them both, these children, I thought, looking from one wailing face to another. Yet . . . I picked up the infant and struggled back to my feet, one hand on the wall to steady myself. A sharp smell of urine hovered in an unseen cloud over a small pile of discarded cloths. My arms continued weak from unaccustomed use, and the baby was heavy. Fleetingly, I recalled that I had not often held my own babe when he had been one. This child’s face was messy from tears and mucus, his eyes swollen pink from crying. The shawl about him was loose and he squirmed a little as I held him. I considered for a moment handing the baby to Sobriety, but it was as if the thought had spoken itself aloud and Sobriety had answered ‘no’, shifting in haste away in the darkness.
Of course not.
I settled the baby further into the crook of my arm and with that small shock of long-forgotten yearning, felt its snuggled warmth.
‘You’re goin’ ter take ’im away, aincha? ’E’s all I got!’ The girl was hugging herself now; she swayed, stretched her own hand toward the baby and then pulled the hand back, empty. The candle flame wavered with her movement, and all of our shadows swung looming and shrinking, back and forth as if on strings. I closed my eyes a moment against the giddying, before I could speak again.
‘But he is not yours, child. You took him from his mother, from his home, did you not?’ The baby coughed and ceased his noise. He moved his head as it lay in my arm, perhaps to look about himself, and took a long breath that shuddered. I glanced down at him. He had pushed his little fist into his mouth and was making sucking noises.
‘’E’s mine, and so I took ’im. She could spare ’im.’ The girl half reached again for the baby as I held him, pulled back her hands and wrung them. ‘’Er life is like a picture, coloured like a winder in a church…’ Her voice petered out into a whine and then she was silent a moment, shut her face from us and began to shuffle away, sniffling from the candlelight into the dark.
She called out again, her voice disembodied: ‘’E loved me, ’e did!’ There was a whimpering, which receded. When she spoke again, it was in tremolo, and dry with too much crying. ‘And I would love ’im, and keep ’im warm with my own body, and feed �
��im before I ate any meself.’ Her voice grew yet smaller, seemed made up of echoes now. ‘More than you would, you cow, done up all tight and smelling sweet. You couldn’t love anyone like I could. You couldn’t be ’is friend and ’is—’
Mr Brent seemed suddenly to find his voice. ‘Oi! That’s enough of that, my girl! You stole this baby, and you must answer for it!’
It made me jump. I had quite forgotten Mr Brent was with us there. The girl’s footsteps were very quickly padding away, her ‘No!’ already distant, and Mr Brent made to rush past Sobriety and me. But his movement stirred air that doused the girl’s candle and we were all left in darkness with only a glimmer, grey in the distance at the end of the tunnel. I heard Mr Brent’s hesitation.
‘Oh, leave her, Mr Brent. She is unhappy enough.’ Have a care, have a care. Why must he insist so, without thought? There was much, much too much pain in this cold and dusty air.
The baby had removed his fist from his mouth and was subsiding now into hiccups. I thought, I have no stomach for the punishment of children. I looked toward the baby’s small wet face, though I could not see it. He sniffed.
Sobriety was evidently feeling about for matches in the purse at her waist, realised (of course) that she had none, and smiled at Mr Brent when he handed her his own packet of lucifers. She struck one alight, lit the candle in her hand, the umbrella under her arm. Her small figure was so apparently prepared for all of the surprises of today. How did you climb down here with that?
‘Perhaps we should walk to the tunnel’s end, rather than attempt to climb with the baby.’
I feel as if I have been at the sherry! I giggled, though I felt I had no breath, and did not rightly know which of many emotions was now uppermost. We have only begun—the police, the child’s parents . . . I took a deep breath. ‘Sobriety, you are absolutely right. Lead on!’
What Empty Things Are These Page 9
