Shanghai Sparrow

by Gaie Sebold

  Eveline waited for him to come back for the tray, but he never did. The next person to unlock the door, the following morning, was Uncle James. Jacobs followed behind him and scooped up the empty tray. Charlotte sat on the floor, banging on the boards with a spoon.

  “Eveline. I have some grave news, child.” Uncle James looked at the window, the walls, the floor, anywhere but at her. “Can you make that child be quiet?”

  Perhaps he had told Everard-Dog-Man what she had said and he had decided he didn’t want to marry her after all. That would be good, except then she would have no reason to go visit Mama. She would have to think of another one. She took the spoon gently out of Charlotte’s hand, and gave her an ancient doll with one arm missing. Charlotte banged the unfortunate doll on the boards instead.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yes, Uncle James.”

  “I’m afraid it’s your mother,” he said, looking out of the window. “You must be brave.”

  The words fell into Eveline’s mind like small, cold stones. “Mama?” She felt the earth shudder and tilt.

  “She was very sick, Eveline. And now she’s gone.”

  Jacobs fumbled the tray as he was taking it out of the door, and paused, righting the tilting bowls.

  “But where’s she gone?”

  “Sir... should I perhaps fetch the cook? One of the maids?” Jacobs said.

  “Leave this to me, Jacobs.” Uncle James bent down, enveloping her in a fat, thick cloud of scented pomade and sweat. “She’s with the angels now.”

  “Like Papa?”

  “Yes, child, exactly like Papa. You must be a good brave girl.”

  And Uncle James straightened up and turned to Jacobs, and the world went to shards and swirled away like broken china tipped down a well.

  SHE WOKE UP to see Harriet by the side of her bed. “Look at you, you poor little thing. Here, eat some of this.”

  Eveline looked at the spoon, with its burden of soup. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with her. “Mama.”

  “Yes, child, I’m afraid your mama is gone. Your Uncle told us. I’m very sorry. She’s with the angels now.”

  “Like Papa.” Eveline had stopped being angry at the angels some time ago. She’d decided they weren’t real in the way the Folk were real. She didn’t have anything to be angry with, anyway. Everything was cold and empty, inside and out.

  “Eat your soup.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Well, I’ll leave it here. I’ve fed your sister, don’t you worry.”

  “Thank you.”

  Harriet looked at her for a moment, shook her head, sighed, and went out.

  Eveline hugged her knees and stared at the wall. Mama was gone. Mama wasn’t ever coming back.

  She looked at Charlotte, who was babbling to the one-armed doll. Charlotte didn’t understand. Charlotte didn’t realise they were all alone now.

  It was several days before Eveline could think properly again, and realise that this meant Everard-Dog-Man didn’t have to ask permission of anyone.

  No-one in the house would help them. They were all scared of Uncle James, or on his side.

  She only had one person left to turn to, and that was Aiden. But to find Aiden they would have to leave, and go into the woods.

  SHE WAITED UNTIL the house was silent, or as silent as it ever got. The thud and boom of the machines never ceased. The clouds, thick and rolling, underlit by the gouts of flame that roared from the factory chimneys, loured close over the blackened rooftops. A few cold stars blinked in the gaps, pinned against the sky.

  Eveline crept into Uncle James’s study, her bare feet wincing from the cold tiles of the hall. His desk was locked, but his coin-purse was in the pocket of the jacket he had left hanging over the chair, and she knew where he kept a roll of notes in the tankard on the mantel. She paused before taking the notes; it felt, somehow, more like stealing than the coins. But she knew that without money she and Charlotte wouldn’t get far. Everyone needed money. If Papa’s money hadn’t disappeared, they wouldn’t have had to come live with Uncle James and none of this would have happened.

  She tucked the notes into the pocket of her apron, but the bulge they made was obvious. If she was caught, she’d be in a great deal of trouble. She’d be in trouble anyway, but more if they found the notes.

  She lifted her skirt and tucked the notes inside her underwear, where the fall of her skirt covered them.

  Back in their rooms, she put on all her own warmest clothes and Mama’s winter coat, which was too big for her. She rolled up the sleeves and wrapped a belt around her waist, pulling the excess material up over it so the coat didn’t drag about her feet. The coat still smelled of Mama. She pulled the collar close around her face and breathed deeply, taking a little comfort and courage from the faint, sweet memory of perfume. Last of all, she took the crystal Aiden had given her and hung it around her neck.

  She roused Charlotte, hushing her sleepy protests. She didn’t protest loudly or for long. Once so lively and mischievous, she had become too thin, too quiet, since Mama had gone. Eveline dressed her in all the warm clothes she could find, until the little girl could hardly toddle.

  She left her boots off and carried Charlotte, whose head was already drooping heavily against her shoulder. She turned the handle of the great iron-heavy front door, and pulled.

  The door didn’t move.

  She’d forgotten the bolts.

  The bottom one came loose, eventually – though she winced at every scrape it made against its brackets. The top one she couldn’t reach.

  There was nothing in the hall except a fragile little pot stand, barely able to support the ugly sharp-leaved plant in its massive, acid-green pot, writhing with embossed figures that seemed to grin and caper at her as she stood clutching the sleepy child.

  Back door. She would have to go out the back door.

  She scurried desperately through the sleeping house, her feet whispering on the cold tiles, stopping to take some bread and cheese. The kitchen still held a faint warmth; she wished she could take some with her as she opened the servants’ door (the bolts here were easily reached with the help of a kitchen chair) and the cold grabbed her like a big hard hand. She paused to pull her boots on, propping Charlotte next to her, then wrapped her scarf around her head, pulled the door to behind her, and started down the steps.

  She hurried through the regimented roses, bare sticks now, rigidly strapped to their supporting posts, and opened the garden gate that led onto the alleyway behind the houses. It was a narrow, muddy track between high fences, stinking and shuffling with rats, piled with discarded rubbish and heaps of rag. A bare filthy foot stuck out of one of the heaps, and Eveline stared, horrified. The foot withdrew into the rags, convulsively, like the leg of a wounded spider. Eveline clutched Charlotte tighter and ran as best she could.

  Once out of the alley she looked back at Uncle James’s. The house hunched against the sulphurous sky. There were no lights on. No windows flew open, no shouts competed with the boom and thump of the factories. It looked not one whit different from the day they had arrived, as though the three of them had never been there at all.

  She had picked a time between shift changes. The streets were almost entirely empty except for a few figures huddled in doorways.

  It wasn’t long before she had to put Charlotte down. Charlotte whimpered and held her arms up to be carried. “No, Charlotte, you have to walk now. Come on, soon we’ll see Aiden! He promised. He’ll find us somewhere much nicer than Uncle James’s. And nice things to eat and everything. Come on. Look, we’re out at night-time. We’re having an adventure, aren’t we?”

  Charlotte did not seem very impressed with the idea of an adventure, but nonetheless stumped along beside her sister, stiff in her layers of clothes, occasionally rubbing at her eyes with her fists.

  It seemed a terribly long way to the edge of town. As the houses went on and on, Eveline began to be afraid that she’d forgotten t
he way, that they were walking not towards the woods but away from them. It was very cold. She paused several times to wrap Charlotte’s scarf more firmly and tug her own down towards her eyes and up towards her nose.

  Charlotte began to whimper again. “Foots,” she said. “Foots.”

  “Do your feet hurt?”

  “Foots.”

  There was nowhere to sit, so Eveline lifted Charlotte up. Her little shoes were cracked and leaking; Eveline had put three pairs of stockings on her, but her feet were already wet. Eveline knew wet feet could be lethal, everyone said so, only the other day she had heard Harriet talking about an aunt of hers who had got her feet wet and died of the croup.

  She wondered if they should turn back. She would be in terrible trouble.

  As she straightened up, she caught a glimpse of something above the roofs at the end of the street, a black bristle against the louring sky. Trees! Not just someone’s garden, but a proper thick mass of them.

  “Look, Charlotte, the woods! Not far now. Come on!”

  She held Charlotte against her shoulder, and walked as quickly as she could. Charlotte grew heavier with every step. The houses grew smaller, more like cottages, further apart. Gradually they fell away, and then they were on the road, in the woods.

  The factories still thumped away, but here the sound was reduced to something less brutally present, an angry but impotent ghost thumping its fist on an insubstantial table.

  “Aiden!” Eveline called. “Aiden!”

  There were no glimmers of light, no sounds of the Folk. Perhaps they weren’t far enough in. She kept walking. Eventually she turned off the road; perhaps the Folk didn’t like the road. Besides, someone might come along and see them, and make them go back.

  Under the trees it felt warmer, but the path was muddy and harder to see. Charlotte began to cry, a low, breathless whimper.

  “Aiden! Aiden!” Eveline’s throat hurt; her cries faded to croaks.

  So dark, and the baby so heavy. She staggered, no longer sure where the path was. Then her shoulder hit something, something else scratched her face. She had walked into a tree, and only just avoided bashing Charlotte into it.

  She couldn’t see, and she couldn’t carry Charlotte any longer. She sat down, and held her sister on her lap. She didn’t realise she was crying until the tears chilled on her face.

  There was a faint patter of something around her, like snow; she was no longer sure where she was. It had been so cold, but it wasn’t any longer. She had been doing something important, but she was so tired.

  A young voice. One she knew. “Aiden,” she mumbled. Aiden was here. It was all right. Aiden would take care of them.

  She woke hours later, stiff and cold. The branches of the trees were black lace against a clear chilly sky.

  Charlotte was asleep on her lap, fragile eyelids stained purple like the petals of violets. Eveline looked around, muddled. She’d thought Aiden had found them, but it must have been a dream. They were still in the woods, in the mud, alone.

  Eveline sighed. They must not have got far enough into the woods. She patted Charlotte’s cheek. She would be hungry when she woke. Eveline hoped she would be able to persuade her to eat some of the bread and cheese, at least.

  Charlotte didn’t move.

  “Charlotte, wake up.”

  The little girl lay limp and quiet. Eveline patted her cheek, harder, and Charlotte’s mouth fell open, her chin drifting a little to the left.

  She knew at that moment. Although she shook the baby and tried to stand her up and wailed her name and screamed it over and over to the black wet unmoving trees, she already knew that Charlotte was dead.

  Aiden hadn’t come, she had only dreamed it, and Charlotte was dead and she had killed her, taking her out in the woods at night with her weak chest, and her feet had got wet and now she was dead.

  Eveline clutched the heavy cold little body and rocked, until the sun had risen and she heard the first carriage rattle along the road, not very far away.

  She laid Charlotte on the ground and gathered wet brown leaf mould and mounded it over her as best she could, though she couldn’t bear to cover the little girl’s face with the slimy cold stuff. Instead she took off one of the shawls Charlotte had been wrapped in, and laid that over her. There were things one should say, she knew that. She could not remember what they had said at her father’s grave. Had anyone spoken over her mother? She didn’t know. They hadn’t let her go to her mother’s funeral. She hadn’t even known the day.

  “Goodbye, Charlotte.” She wanted to say something else, wanted to say she was sorry, but sorry wasn’t a big enough word. Sorry was a feather drifting on the wind.

  She turned away and began to walk, finding herself eventually back at the road, or anyway at some road. She hardly cared if someone found her, but though the occasional carriage passed, no-one stopped. At some point she remembered she had the crystal in her hand. She dropped it indifferently in the mud.

  And she walked, and kept walking.

  SO SHE HAD walked, and she had begged and been chased off and slept in ditches and dodged men who were like Everard-Dog-Man but poorer and dirtier, and sometimes she didn’t manage to dodge, and she had learned to kick and butt and bite and sometimes just to endure. And finally she had found herself in London, which was louder and filthier and far more full of people than Watford. She had tried to get maid work, but she was too young and dirty and had no references. She soon learned to go to the servants’ entrance, but even there she seldom got past the door. She stood supplicant before the servants of those great fine houses, sometimes catching glimpses of warm kitchens stuffed with food, and was told to go away, that she was a thief and a gypsy, that the police had been called, that she was a disgrace.

  Sometimes people were kind. Sometimes a cook or a maid or a knife-boy would slip her a bit of food. But no-one would hire her.

  She saw girls her own age and younger going with men for money. Having lost the last of her innocence on the road, she knew that that was what she’d run from, that was what Dog Man had wanted, and that was why Charlotte was dead. Sometimes she thought that if she hadn’t run, at least they would be warm and fed; but having lost so much, she’d rather starve than do it now.

  She was close enough to starving when she tried her first pocket, and failed. At the second, she was nearly caught. At the third she succeeded. Not much, a handkerchief. But you could sell handkerchiefs, if they were good enough, and then you could buy sausage or a bit of bread, and survive another day. She’d found it hard to resist a nice handkerchief ever since, no matter what else the mark might be carrying.

  She learned. She learned to be quick and clever and to play the innocent if she was caught. She learned that if you approached someone rightly you could get them to give you their handkerchief and think they’d got the better of the bargain. She learned not to encroach on other thieves’ territory – or at least, not in ways they’d notice and chase you for.

  She fell in with Ma Pether and found, for a little while, something like a home again, and something like a family.

  The Britannia School

  EVELINE WOKE TO the harsh clanging of a bell, with the memory of dreams fading in her head. Mama and Charlotte and Aiden, all long gone. Now there was only Eveline.

  Miss Prayne was standing at the door swinging the bell from side to side. Her movements were vague and flat, and the bell rang without rhythm: clang-ca-clang bang tang. “Up, girls,” she said. The day had only just started, but she looked worn-out, like a cloth washed so many times it had lost most of its colour.

  A double row of iron bedsteads stood on bare boards. Eveline’s bed was under a window, where a draught snuck about the frame, and farthest from the door.

  There was an unlit fireplace at one side of the room, smaller than the ones downstairs. Either side of it were two unmatched dressers; one had been good, once, but was now so chipped and battered it would fetch no more than a pound at best. The other had been che
ap to start with and had got no better. One of its drawers was missing both knobs, and the others stuck at various angles. Each held a jug, a bowl, and a small plate with a knob of pallid soap.

  Hastings shuffled over to the dressers, yawning, picked up the jugs and went out.

  The girls began to dress, shuffling their nightgowns off and their clothes on under the covers. Eveline followed suit; better to do what they all did for now.

  Hastings returned with the jugs full of water.

  The girls began to line up. Treadwell was first. Eveline and Hastings were at the back of the queue. Eveline because she was waiting to see what happened next, Hastings because Treadwell had given her a shove and told her to wait her turn.

  One by one they washed, put their hair up in front of the tiny rust-spotted mirror, and lined up again by the door. By the time Hastings and Eveline got to the water it was grey and scummy. Eveline scrubbed her face vigorously none the less.

  Through it all, Miss Prayne stared at a point somewhere beyond the far wall, as though watching something much more interesting than a gaggle of adolescent girls jostling for position and dropping hairpins.

  Breakfast was porridge and bread, Assembly another speech about how lucky they were. Eveline, starting out with a full belly for the second day in a row and spare bread tucked in her pockets, was beginning to agree – though all the jaw about what rubbish they would all be without the Empire got her properly riled.

  After Assembly came Disguise, run by the waspish and over-rouged Miss Fortescue.

  She looked Eveline over. “New blood,” she sniffed.

  She lined up pots and bottles, brushes and sponges and dyes. “Gutta-percha, putty, greasepaint, mortician’s wax – don’t make that face, girl, we don’t scrape the stuff off corpses. Wigs. Real hair is best, horsehair will do in a pinch or at a distance. Tools of the trade. But most of the time you’ll barely need all this. It’s in stance, voice, gait. Old women and young men move differently. Someone hiding a secret makes different gestures from someone declaring their love. Keep your eyes open. Watch. Go to the theatre, get backstage. Actors love to talk, and if you can get them off the subject of themselves, they’re a treasure-box. You there, new girl. Go behind that screen and take off your outer things.”