Shanghai Sparrow

by Gaie Sebold

  She opened the bundle and took out the cunning little folding steps that Beth had made – damn, the girl was clever, Ma Pether would have snapped her up in no time. They snicked open, unfolding like the legs of a crane fly, a jointed stick poking up from the top. She nipped up them and looked over the fence.

  There was more drugged meat in the bag, but nothing patrolled the garden, no dogs barked. There were no lights on. She wasn’t sure of the time, but she wouldn’t have long before the maids were moving about, lighting the morning fires and getting the boiler and the oven going.

  The pantry window it was, then.

  She swung herself over the fence, picked up the steps with the stick, swung them over, and ran down them, leaving them where they were. Quicker on the way out.

  The path was not swept as it used to be, slick with fallen leaves slimy with frost. Some of the roses had died, others were overgrown tangles. Maybe no-one cared for the garden any more.

  The pantry window was where she remembered it, but it looked horribly small. Eveline was still skinny – a few weeks of decent grub hadn’t made up for years of underfeeding – but when she’d last made it through that window she’d been considerably smaller. Still, she thought, it could be done. There was nothing else for it – even if she could talk her way in as she had at the house in Stepney, she couldn’t afford to wait until the servants were astir.

  Still, she wasted a precious minute chewing her lip and checking the breadth of her hips. Even once she was certain that she could wiggle through the opening – assuming she could open it – she hesitated.

  What’s the matter with you, Duchen? Ma Pether’s voice jabbed in her head sharp as a glass splinter. If you can do the job, get on – if you can’t, get out!

  That snapped her back to herself. She unlaced the heavy shoes and left them below the window. She carefully extracted an eyedropper – whisked from Miss Prayne’s medicine cabinet – and dripped oil on the window’s hinges. Next she took a roll of oilcloth from her bag and unwrapped it to reveal a stack of squares of brown paper. The smell of treacle rose into the air, a sweet dark phantom. She’d had to guess at the size. She picked one carefully from the stack, stuck it to the lower left pane. It overlapped all around. Good. Now she had started, everything else went away; memory and grief and fear retreated. Her animal senses scanned the night, alert for trouble. Her mind was all on the paper, the window, the small hammer from the toolbox in the Old Barn. One quick tap and the window broke, almost silently, the glass adhering to the sticky paper. She peeled it away – careful, don’t cut yourself, Evvie – and levered out the remaining few splinters of glass with a cloth-wrapped hand. Hand through the gap, and there’s the latch. Rusted and stiff, but moveable. Now. Ease the window open. Oil’s killed the squeak. Smells of cabbage and mice. Watch out for mousetraps. Enough light, just, to see the edge of the stone sink. Bag in first, then easy does it, wriggling like a fish, stronger now after those Bartitsu lessons, more control, hands on the upper frame, pull through. There.

  Wait. No lantern yet. One of the maids used to sleep down here in the cupboard-bed next to the pantry door. Listen.

  No breathing, no sighing. The door of the cupboard-bed’s closed. Creep up close, listen, nothing. Ease the door open.

  Empty, the bed not made up. No-one’s slept here for some time, by the mouse-droppings and dust. She can hear them, skittering about – things have changed since the old days, cook wouldn’t have stood for that.

  Find the bag, take out the lantern, all darkened but for a single small gap where the light can shine through. Light the lantern, sweep the little light around the kitchen. There’s the green baize door to the main house – not that way. Up the narrow servants’ stair, to the passage running behind the walls so the owners won’t be disturbed by the coming-and-going of those who bring their food and hot water and morning paper.

  It runs all the way to the top of the house, to the rooms that were theirs. If she’s lucky and quiet, she can come and go like a breeze, and no-one will even know she’s been here.

  Of course, if there are servants sleeping up there... she pauses, caught on the stairs, her hands going cold. What if there are? There’s no-one in the cupboard bed – maybe the maids sleep in Mama’s old workroom now?

  What if someone’s bed is right above the hiding place?

  Won’t know until you look, Evvie.

  She forces her feet to start moving again.

  Hand on the door at the top of the stairs before she remembers the hinges; drop, drop, not much oil left, another door to go yet.

  Hood the lantern, ease the door open.

  The corridor is narrow and cold. The same worn strip of rug, faded to colourlessness, lies limply on the bare boards. A draught whistles up between them, making the rug shudder and stroking her stockinged legs with chill wispy fingers. Up here, the noise of the factories is less muffled. There are no thick carpets and plush furniture to soak it up. Thu-bump, thu-bump, an angry heartbeat.

  Three closed, silent doors, and suddenly she cannot remember which is the one she needs. She’s only enough oil left for one more. Think. Mama’s workroom was the biggest – surely that means it’s the middle? No, wait, which way did she used to turn, coming out of their room? She can’t remember.

  And she can’t stand here. Worst thing you can do on a job is freeze.

  Going to Mama’s room that dreadful morning and finding it locked. Why can’t I remember? All the doors look identical, faded paint, round handles. Move!

  She holds her breath, drops the smallest possible amount of oil on the middle door’s hinges. Checks, it’s not locked. She eases it open.

  Two beds. Humped figures. One shifts, the sheets crackling; she shuts the door hastily but quietly, heart bumping in her chest so loud you could hear it over the factories. Along to the end one. Oh, there’s hardly any oil in the dropper, she should have brought more, stupid Evvie, remember what Ma Pether said about kit, think of everything, then think again. One last drop squeezed out, a thin pitiful thing.

  The door’s locked. Using her hairpins will give the oil time to soak in a little. This is taking too long – no, Evvie, stop thinking, just do your job.

  Click.

  Careful, careful, ease the handle round and the door opens. The hinge whines. Stop. Wait. No-one stirs. Open it a little further, the hinge is silent, it’s open just enough to see.

  There are no curtains. The room is empty, sulphurous light spilling yellow-grey across the dusty floor. She edges through the gap, eases the door shut behind her.

  Empty. Even Mama’s table is gone. At least a week’s worth of dust. All her past, that last bit of her childhood, gone.

  But not everything, not quite. The board with the splintered edge is still there.

  She drops to her knees, takes the shaped bar from her bag (she’s been busy in the Old Barn, has our Eveline, not at work the school would approve, but a girl needs tools to deal with life’s difficulties, she does indeed). Eases it into the gap, careful, careful; the nails scree as they pull loose from the wood. Wait, listen.

  No sound of waking, footsteps, alarm.

  And there’s the tin. There’s the boy in the blue suit, and his ever-loyal dog who doesn’t care that he’s a spoiled brat, faint through the fog of dust. A tear lands on the lid, and where it lands the boy’s suit is still bright blue as a half-remembered summer sky.

  Eveline is just carefully levering the floorboard back into place when she hears the sound of movement.

  She goes completely still, completely silent, barely breathing, only her eyes moving, flickering over the room. There’s nowhere to hide except the great cupboard in the wall, and she knows that door will squeal, it isn’t hung properly, it squalls against the frame whenever it’s opened or shut, she remembers. Mama stopped asking to have it planed after a while. There’s the window, but it’s three stories down onto the area steps, even if you were lucky enough to miss the black iron railings that jab up like spears.


  The space under the floorboards? Not without getting up another board and that’d never go unheard.

  The dust isn’t thick enough for her footprints to be clear but she takes care to blur them as she rises and drifts quiet as smoke across to the door, to stand just behind it. The narrowest of safety, but all she has. She clutches the tin to her, can’t risk putting it in the bag where it may clank and rattle against things.

  “Maitland!” A harsh whisper. “What are you doing? You woke me.”

  “I heard something!”

  “You never.”

  “I did. I’m going to fetch Jacobs!”

  “Oh, that’ll please him, getting him up. You want to be run ragged all day because he’s missed his sleep? Well, I don’t. Stop messing about and come to bed!”

  Ease the clip into the lock, find the point of pressure, wait.

  “I tell you it’s the ghost! We’ll be murdered in our beds!” Click while the maid is talking and the door is locked again, should have done it on the way in, stupid Eveline.

  “Did you hear something? Like... like bones?”

  “Will you stop about bones and ghosts, there ain’t no ghost but you wandering around in your nightgown like a loon. Come to bed before you get the whole house up!”

  “I shan’t sleep a wink.”

  “Can’t nobody sleep.” Another voice, older, sharper, and strangely familiar. “Not with you two rattling about in the middle of the night.”

  “Oh, Miss Clarence, it’s the ghost!”

  “Stuff and nonsense. You had a dream, is all.”

  “But I heard something, and there was a figure, it came and looked at me in my bed!”

  “Dreaming.”

  “I wasn’t, Miss Clarence! I swear, there was something there!”

  “No such thing as ghosts. Far more likely to be a burglar.”

  Someone gave a small shriek.

  “Be quiet,” the older voice – Miss Clarence, why did she know that voice? – snapped. “Let’s see, if there was a burglar, who went into a perfectly empty room...” – the door handle turned, and Eveline held her breath – “seems he was considerate enough to lock it after him. Now if you fancy going downstairs and checking the sideboard for the silver, maybe he’ll have been considerate enough to save you from cleaning it like you should have done last week.”

  “But what if it wasn’t a burglar?”

  “Lord save us all from hair-witted bumpkins. There are no ghosts in this house.”

  “Mr Lathrop died here, though, didn’t he? With a terrible expression on his face. And the poor lady...”

  “What nonsense have you been listening to? Mr Lathrop died of the gout reaching his heart. Should think that’s painful, which would account for any expression he might have had. And there’s been no lady died here.” Harriet. Harriet the maid. Housekeeper, now, by the sound. Still here, along with that wretch Jacobs. Hello, Harriet, wonder what you’d think if you knew I was barely a foot from you?

  “His sister died, though, didn’t she?” The stupid maid went on. Shut up, you daft creature, and go back to bed so I can get out of here! “Maybe it’s her ghost come back to haunt us all! Oh, oh, what if –”

  There was a flat, hard crack and the maid squealed. Eveline winced in sympathy.

  “Be quiet, you stupid creature,” Harriet said. “The poor lady isn’t haunting anyone.”

  “It could be...”

  “No it couldn’t. Even if there were such a thing as ghosts, she’s not dead.”

  “But that’s what...”

  “Yes, well, that was the tale that Mr Lathrop had put about, because no-one wants talk about madness in the family. It was his man let it slip. She’s in the Bethlem Hospital, poor creature, but she’s not dead, so no ghost of hers is walking this house. Now get back to bed, the pair of you. And you’re not to gossip about Mrs Duchen! Not a word! I hear that’s got out, or I see you in this corridor again outside when you’re meant to be, I’ll see you both turned off without references. Now get to your beds.”

  Grumbling and protests faded away down the corridor, as Eveline stood frozen, staring at the closed door.

  Still alive?

  Still alive and locked away?

  Mama?

  A bright haze came over her vision, her legs wobbled, and Eveline only just stopped the tin sliding from her grasp to clang and clatter on the boards.

  She crumpled to the floor, pressing her hands to the sides of her head as though she could hold onto her thoughts, stop them spinning. It was a trick. It had to be a trick. But what if it wasn’t? What if her mother really was alive? A sudden flood of warmth rushed up from her feet. It seemed to expand her tightened abdomen, her hunched shoulders, relaxing the stretched muscles around her eyes.

  Boom-thud, boom-thud, went the factories. The sound seemed to have got inside her head, and she stared at the tin, at the smeared ghost-face of the blue-clad boy, hearing boom-thud, boom-thud, sitting paralysed among the dust.

  Ten minutes before, she had been Evvie Duchen, sharp Evvie, Evvie the Sparrow, a spry little fringe-dweller alone in the crowd of them, always scraping for a crumb, always with one eye open for a bigger bird, or a cat, or a cruel boy with a stone. Even under Ma Pether’s eye she’d had to duck and scrabble, had known Ma Pether came first and everyone else after.

  “My mama’s alive,” she said, and her voice sounded like a little girl’s voice, a little girl in a clean pinafore, her hair lovingly brushed. A little girl who still had a mother and a father, a sister and a home.

  A banshee wail roused her from her stupor. Shift-change at the biscuit factory. She should be out by now, should have been out before.

  But... Mama. Alive, and locked away.

  Had Harriet known? Had she known all along?

  It hardly mattered now, though there was a growing, roiling fury in Eveline’s belly that demanded someone pay, for the years of lies and the fear and the belief that they were completely alone. And for Charlotte. Someone owed Charlotte a life. Uncle James should pay, it had been his lie, but Uncle James was dead.

  Bedlam. She had to get to Bedlam, and find Mama.

  But first she had to get out of this vile house.

  No, first she had to think. All the staff – except for two new maids – were still here, which probably meant Uncle James hadn’t died long ago. They must be waiting for whoever had inherited. Perhaps whoever it was was already there – not that it meant anything to Eveline. What did, what might, were Uncle James’s papers. If any of them were still in his office, there might be something there to help Mama, or to confirm or deny what Harriet had said.

  She had even less time now, and more to do.

  She remembered where Uncle James’s office was. Locked, but a hairpin dealt with it – and his door had been oiled and properly hung. No squeaks for Uncle James.

  There was a desk she didn’t recognise – bigger and glossier, with ball-and-claw feet. Fancy, but worth less than it looked like – she knew cheap masquerading as expensive when she saw it, it had been one of Ma Pether’s first lessons. Don’t let Fancy take yer eye. Quality’s what’s there, or ain’t. Fancy’s just the stuff on top. Dress a rat in a lace collar and it’s still a rat.

  Not much in the drawers. Expensive writing paper, ink dried to a scum in its bottle, sealing wax. Nothing she could find relating to Mama.

  She paused, one hand on the leather top. Where might he have kept such things? Or would the lawyers have it all? She knew about lawyers. Enough, at least, that she trusted them as much as she would a starving dog.

  Nothing. Eveline felt a sudden hard, brutal desire to set the house alight. Burn it all up, every stick and scrap of it. If she couldn’t punish James, or Harriet, she’d punish the house.

  But that would do no-one any good. And she’d already been here too long.

  One more place... if it hadn’t been cleared out already.

  The dressing room still smelled like Uncle James: pomade and sweat and Gentleman’s Hair
Tonic. The chaise still stood in the corner. She dropped to her knees.

  Yes. The case was still there. The case where Uncle James kept the things he didn’t want anyone to know about.

  The corsets lay there, thick pink cotton ribbed with bone, like the corpses of some strange animals desiccated by the wind. Wrinkling her nose with distaste, Eveline reached underneath them.

  There. A flat leather case, bound about with red lawyers’ ribbon. She opened it just long enough to see her mother’s name written on the top page, and shoved it into her bag with the tin.

  Eveline unlocked the bedroom door, and peered around it. The corridor stood empty and quiet... except at the far end, where the door to the servants’ stairs was just closing on the glow of a candle, a flicker of black skirt showing as it did.

  Arse and damnation, she’d left it too long. The servants – or one, at least – had given up on any more sleep and made for the kitchens to get a start on the day. Now what? Follow her down, and try and slip past? Or down the front stairs, banking on no-one coming out that way for another two hours? But then she’d have to get out of the front door, with the risk that anyone coming up to lay a fire would see her clear as day as she fadgetted with the lock. And she’d have to leave Beth’s contraption, which would make it clear, along with the broken window, that someone had been in.

  Her rapid shallow breathing caught, hooked in her throat. The window. If whoever had gone down went into the pantry... no time to wait.

  Swift and light, she padded along the almost pitch-black corridor, and through the servants’ door. She left it open behind her for what little light there was and headed down the stairs, horribly steep and narrow in the dark. She was going too fast and her foot slipped, she caught herself with one hand on the wall, hearing a faint ‘chink’ from her bag where something – maybe the metal bar – hit the tin.