Little Bones

by Janette Jenkins

  ‘How did he know there were five thousand?’ asked Jane. ‘Did he count them?’

  She had already tried counting all the people in the picture, the men with their outstretched arms, the wide-eyed boys on their knees, but she was five years old, had never been to school, and she could only get to twenty.

  ‘Of course he did,’ said her father. ‘Otherwise, how would he know how many fishes he’d need?’

  Jane tried again with the counting. She used her fingers. Lost her place. She wondered if she’d counted some people twice. And were they all inside the picture? She looked at their faces. One or two of them didn’t look very happy. Perhaps they’d been hoping for beefsteak, or sausage, and were very disappointed with the fish? Still, she told herself, if they didn’t like it they could always have the bread, though it might be very dry without some butter.

  Music

  She heard it in her sleep. Her father singing. A fiddle playing. He sang songs about an ocean, girls in America, bright cornfields, his mother. When Agnes was running outside, or playing tag, or skipping, he would sing Jane special songs, and she would close her eyes and see the pictures, the room of couples dancing, tall cities, red dresses. The music would be racing. She could feel the vibrations through her fingertips. Sometimes, he would hold her in his arms and sing as they bobbed between the furniture. ‘It’s our ballroom,’ he’d say. ‘Don’t forget to curtsey when you see the Prince of Wales.’ The walls were gold. There were plump painted cherubs. Giant chandeliers. Plates of cake and juicy black grapes. A woman held a fork to her lips. The cake was vanilla. She could taste it.

  Beads

  While her mother worked at the coffee house, and her father made his rounds of all the local taverns, singing heart-wrenching songs that had grown men sobbing into their ale pots, Jane and Agnes were watched by a woman called Liza Smithson. Liza had the sisters sorting beads by size and colour for the stringers who worked in the rooms upstairs making complicated necklaces.

  Liza liked to talk. Had the girls ever noticed how her skin was lightly tanned, like a biscuit? Was she a foreigner? Not likely! She was a Londoner, and proud of it, born not ten minutes from this place, where her mother still lived with her over-fed greyhound and costermonger dad.

  ‘Yes, I have lived with foreigners, and though God made us all, He certainly made us different,’ she said, rattling a bead box, ‘and don’t let them preachers tell you otherwise.’

  Liza had recently returned from India, where she had worked for Mrs Eloise Dunstan-Harris, initially as her maid, but on arrival in Madras she had been shunted into the kitchen where the cook needed taking in hand.

  ‘And what a scene of horror I came across,’ Liza shuddered. ‘The tables were crawling, the air black and buzzing with strange-looking flies, and the door was blocked with rubbish. Oh, the cook was a brown woman who didn’t know any different, but I couldn’t have the mistress and the little ones perishing from the filth. Now him I wouldn’t have minded coming down with the worst kind of ague, because – and may God forgive me – he deserved it, for things you would not like to hear about.’

  ‘I would,’ said Agnes.

  ‘No you wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘Believe me.’

  Jane’s left hand was full of small red beads. The sun was shining. On Liza Smithson’s mantelpiece there were rows and rows of strange foreign objects, small mirrored birds, painted vases, and bright paper elephants standing trunk to tail. Pouring the beads into a wide clay pot, Jane looked closely at Liza, who with her scraped black hair and deep brown eyes might have been mistaken, at least once or twice, for a bone-fide Indian. She wore a pale lemon dress with embroidery on the sleeves. Had someone sewn those interlocking diamonds in Madras? Jane imagined the room to be scented with fat foreign flowers, pink probably, and perhaps upstairs a tiger was guarding the stringers, weaving in and out of the tables, flicking his orange-black tail like a whip.

  ‘What’s India like?’ asked Jane. Agnes groaned. She’d had enough of India. She’d had enough of beads. She was seven years old and should have been in school, sitting at a desk, learning numbers and doing things with chalk. Her friend Grace Pooley went to school. Grace Pooley could write her name and more. She said her teacher, Miss Howe, smelled like warm batter pudding.

  Smiling, Liza leant back in her armchair, sending dust motes from the cushions flying into the sunshine. ‘Like most new things, it was terrible at first, but then you get used to it, and then you miss it when it’s gone.’

  ‘Can’t you go back then?’ said Agnes, in such an insolent manner that Liza sent her straight upstairs to help the stringers form their necklaces.

  ‘Why do people go to India?’ Jane asked, rolling a bead between her small clammy fingertips.

  ‘To do their duty to the Queen,’ she said. ‘To show them how it’s done.’

  ‘How what’s done?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, flicking back her hand. ‘Everything.’

  Liza told Jane that as a cripple she might do very well abroad, where the Empire’s colours were usually cheering and the sun would burn the pain from her bones like a deep and constant mustard bath. The food, when prepared in a hygienic manner, could prove very interesting to the taste buds, if you were willing to take a leap in the dark and try it. ‘To this day,’ Liza told her, ‘I add a good shake of spice to everything, from mutton chops to porridge.’

  As Jane continued sorting beads, pulling them from the great mixed pot, some beads so small they slipped inside her fingernails, Liza carried on with her tales of Indian life. Sipping ginger and hot water, she described the great white house with liveried servants, the men wearing wrapped sheets around their heads, a thing they called a turban. Mrs Dunstan-Harris and her children liked to keep inside the house and well-trimmed gardens, though grand invitations often stood against the mirror, from maharajas, viscounts and missionaries. Like most of the English abroad, the mistress had been terrified of disease and would inspect the servants’ hands whenever she saw them, buying enormous blocks of coal-tar soap, boracic acid and turpentine, though she never entered the kitchen, saying her appetite would certainly be ruined.

  ‘Tell me about the food,’ said Jane. The clock was moving slowly. She’d had nothing that morning but a glass of buttermilk and a small piece of bread. Her mouth was watering. ‘Please?’

  As Jane sat salivating into the beads, Liza, now in her element, went into great detail describing such dishes as chitchee curry, pilau and burtas, a greasy vegetable concoction served up at breakfast. ‘The master ate this food with gusto, but the mistress and the children required English food, food they could recognise, or at least attempt to recognise.’

  ‘Like what English food?’

  ‘Game pie, toad-in-the-hole, apple fritters. Of course, we did what we could in the circumstances, and though I was generally pleased with the results, the children turned their noses up, the girl was wasting away, and the mistress said things might look the same, but nothing tasted English.’

  ‘I would have eaten it,’ said Jane. ‘I would have eaten the curry and the burtas.’

  ‘I did make a good breakfast burta,’ Liza laughed.

  Later, walking home with Agnes, who was grumbling about the knots she’d had to tie and the thread that kept breaking, Jane was still in India. She looked towards the sun, sitting in a dirty blanket of cloud above the river. Could that really be the same yellow sun that glared down on the Indians, where the servants used fans to cool the air and flick away the flies? ‘Oh, they can do it in their sleep,’ Liza had said.

  ‘I don’t like Liza Smithson,’ said Agnes.

  ‘Don’t you like the necklaces?’

  ‘I don’t like the necklaces and I don’t like the smell. It makes me feel sick.’

  ‘I like the smell,’ said Jane. ‘I like everything.’ Liza Smithson’s house smelled of smoky flowers and spices, smells that were a lot more pleasant, Jane thought, than those hovering in their own back room. Sitting down to a supper of pig’s
liver and cabbage, Jane asked her mother if she’d ever heard of burtas.

  ‘Is that another name for bunions?’ she said.

  That night, watching Agnes unfasten her plaits and brush her hair until it crackled, Jane could see her own breath. It was freezing.

  ‘Ma didn’t fetch the heated brick, I’ll not sleep for the cold,’ said Agnes.

  ‘Think of hot things,’ said Jane. ‘It will make you feel better.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Like the flat iron.’

  ‘Like hell,’ Agnes said, repeating the words of her father and thinking of the laundry. ‘I’d rather freeze than think of that.’

  Jane dreamed of heat. Of fine yellow spice and gardens bursting with flowers, like open umbrellas. The world shimmered. In the wide clear sky, birds with musical wings darted in and out of the trees, where tigers growled gently and peacocks licked honey from the brown hands of the servants wearing long wrapped sheets around their heads. Monkeys chattered. A girl peeled fat ripe mangoes and fed them to an elephant. Liza Smithson was there. She was stirring a cooking pot. A place was set at the table.

  ‘Jane!’ Liza called. ‘Your burtas are ready! Come wash your hands and eat!’

  Jane ate. She had two platefuls. Three.

  In the morning, she could smell the onions on her fingers, the silky wet butter, and the bitter-sweet tang of the lime.

  Three

  The New-Born Year

  IT WAS ALMOST 1900 and catalogues, some from as far away as Milan, New York and Montreal, were being perused for the latest viewing instruments. All across England, telescopes were being dusted off and raised as men looked for answers in the deep celestial heavens. In towers, on high windswept hills, on the rocking bridges of sailing ships, in poky offices and paper-strewn studies, books were read, papers written, charts were drawn and carefully consulted.

  Mrs Swift was getting nervous. ‘People say the world is going to end,’ she said. ‘Or at least it will tremble when the clock strikes midnight.’

  ‘And why will it tremble?’ said the doctor. ‘Sheer excitement? Or perhaps from utter relief?’

  But Mrs Swift refused to take any chances when it came to her favourite ornaments, rolling them into tea cloths, hoping to save her lone shepherdess when the new shiny century made its agitated appearance.

  Standing with their heads tipped, Jane and the doctor looked into the sky above Regent’s Park. ‘But what does it say?’ asked Jane, trying to string the flickering stars into some kind of message. ‘Is the world really going to end? Will everything be lost?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said the doctor. ‘The start of this coming year will almost be the same as the last.’

  ‘But the century has finished.’

  ‘Like the centuries before it. All things must pass.’

  Jane and the doctor passed a man standing on a crate quoting from the book of Exodus as they walked through the ice towards the cracked boating lake, the moonlight making milk of the water.

  ‘My sister is very fond of parks,’ said Jane, watching a group of girls, laughing, arm in arm.

  ‘Really?’ said the doctor. ‘I hear most people are.’

  ‘She tells me they are a respectable place for finding a young man.’

  ‘She does?’ The doctor laughed. ‘And I am sure she is right,’ he said. ‘Though I suppose you might fare better at a social gathering. Are you fond of them?’

  Jane shrugged. The only gatherings she had ever really known (apart from the occasional funeral, christening or wedding) were the impromptu parties her parents had thrown, the house crammed with the drinkers they’d pulled from the tavern: Irish bricklayers, watermen, and whoever else could bring an extra jug of ale. At first she would stay downstairs with Agnes, as her father sang his heart out and Mr Jones played the fiddle. Later, they would crawl beneath the bed, the dusty floorboards rattling as they tried to block their ears and hum themselves to sleep.

  ‘Miss Silverwood is hosting a party,’ the doctor said. ‘Tomorrow evening. Of course, I can’t attend, because I cannot leave my over-anxious wife on such an auspicious evening, but would you like to go?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Yes.’

  All the next day Jane wondered what she might wear to the party. 1899 would soon be 1900. Guests would make an effort, yet what did Jane have but her two plain dresses and her aprons? The blue was faring better than the grey, but it was still washed out and mended. She would look ragged.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the blue dress hanging from the hook on the wall, Jane thought about Agnes, who could sew velvet onto collars, tuck waists or cut a bolt of cheap fabric and make it look like something recently fashioned in Paris. Oh where are you Agnes? I need you! I need you! I need you! By eight o’clock, she was very close to tears. At ten past, she could hear Mrs Swift gasping and wheezing, negotiating the steep splintery flight of narrow attic stairs.

  ‘Are you all right, ma’am?’ said Jane when she appeared at her door, gulping like a goldfish out of water.

  ‘Perfectly, just a little squeezed and a little out of breath.’

  ‘Did you need me, ma’am?’

  Mrs Swift shook her head and sat on the end of the bed. The springs made a groaning sound. ‘No,’ she puffed. ‘I was thinking of this party.’

  Jane asked Mrs Swift if she would like to go, thinking her very ordinary day dress, with the mutton grease on the sleeve, looked like a gown compared to her own poor outfit.

  ‘Most definitely not, but I will lend you something to wear.’

  ‘You would, ma’am? Really?’

  ‘Of course it would have to be something to make your own dress a little more dignified, a necklace perhaps, or a shawl. A lovely silk sash would brighten you up no end.’

  Moving downstairs, slowly, like a woman with a badly sprained ankle, Mrs Swift eventually made it into her bedroom, where she reached for a small leather case, pulling out a turquoise scarf, which she tied around Jane like a medal sash, pinning it at her shoulder with a ribbon-shaped brooch.

  ‘But what if I should lose it, ma’am?’

  ‘You won’t lose it,’ she said. ‘Anyway, it is nothing but twisted metal and glass.’

  Jane glanced into the mirror, to be met by a much improved version of her tattered former self. She straightened the sash a little. She pressed her finger over the brooch.

  ‘The next time I see you a new century will have dawned,’ said Mrs Swift. ‘Or the world will have ended, and we’ll be floating like ghosts towards the next one.’

  ‘In heaven, ma’am?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  Jane took a long deep breath. ‘Is it right to go to this party, ma’am,’ she asked, ‘without so much as a chaperone?’

  Mrs Swift turned and tilted her head. She gave a small wistful smile. ‘Do you know Miss Silverwood?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really, ma’am, no.’

  ‘Miss Silverwood’s parties are always very informal, no chaperones are ever required, though if you would like the doctor to walk you to the door, then I am sure he would be willing.’

  Jane felt nervous, but she told Mrs Swift that there was really no need for the doctor to go out of his way, yet by the time she arrived in Axford Square, she was wishing he was with her. Closing her eyes, she knocked on the door, and then she pushed at it, finding the hall already full of people laughing and talking. She suddenly felt breathless. Where should she go? How should she behave? All these people were strangers – the shiny, pretty girls with feathers in their hair, men with loosened neckties, a raven-haired woman with a face like Cleopatra who sat at the bottom of the stairs stroking her wide fur collar as if it were a sleeping Persian cat. What would they think about Jane? Would they sneer at her bones? Would they snigger? A few faces looked up, and as one or two of them smiled warmly, Jane battled on.

  The house had been transformed, though Jane could not quite see how Miss Silverwood or Nell might have done it. The furniture l
ooked more or less the same, the stiff leather sofas, the low carved tables, the plants shooting leaves in all directions, but instead of girls wringing their hands, dark moons beneath their eyes, these crushed visitors were joyous, their eyes sparkling, their hands chinking glasses, while somewhere in the background someone was playing a piano.

  Since Jane had started working for the doctor, Nell had always been friendly, and now here she was, wearing a dark green dress and a clutch of yellow bangles, her arms outstretched and rattling. ‘You look dazzling,’ Nell said, fluttering her lashes. ‘“Dazzling” is a word I picked up tonight, I swear it’s a word they all use at least a dozen times a minute. Everything is dazzling, from my eyes I’ll have you know, to the icing on the coffee cake I made this afternoon. Oh, they’re a lively bunch all right, and only one or two to be avoided, including that chap over there.’ She pointed to a man in a dark velvet jacket. ‘He’s known as Archie Racer, having lost most of his worldly goods, including his second wife, on a race at Epsom Downs.’

  ‘Where’s Miss Silverwood?’

  ‘I’ve really no idea,’ said Nell, handing Jane a glass of lemon. ‘You know, I think she might have left us to it.’

  ‘You mean she isn’t here at all?’

  ‘She’s famous for her disappearing act. That woman might be anywhere.’

  They moved into the kitchen, where the table had been draped with a stiff white cloth and held rows of green bottles and small plates of food. There were jugs of holly. A clutter of silver knives and forks. The sink was crammed with dirty pots and pans. ‘There’s only so much a girl can get round to,’ said Nell, waving a hand and helping herself to a pastry. ‘I’ve been up since the crack of dawn, sweeping floors, mixing cakes, and though I could never call myself a cook, they haven’t turned out badly.’

  As they pushed through the crowds, a man in a Turkish silk hat patted Jane on the head. ‘Oh that’s Henry,’ said Nell as they inched their way into a corner. ‘Theatrical agent, and on the whole, harmless.’