by Paul Butler
Two
Tommy
It was just possible, I reckoned. I could make her love me. A policeman had been within earshot, but she hadn’t called him. For goodness’ sake, she had whispered, her eyes alive with fear as well as anger, at least hide it! She had even moved a half-step closer to me as if to shield my crime from the eyes of passersby.
I knew the feel of a rebuff – the cold, hostile glance, the sterile retreat. I had experienced these things often enough. True rejection does not hesitate when a policeman is near. It does not take a half-step closer or involve itself in a crime of which it is entirely innocent.
I watched her walk away, pleased to see a studied air about her neck and shoulders. She was trying too hard not to look back. I sank into the recess of the nearest doorway, the jeweller’s shop. And there, at the crossroads, where Prescott Street rose toward Duckworth Street, she did look around, scanning the shoppers. When she moved on again, she did so at a slower pace.
I followed.
Kathleen
I was glad that although the house was small, the back entrance led straight into the scullery from which I could access the servants’ staircase. This meant that on my days off, such as today, I could enter and leave without setting foot in the main part of the house. I felt secure behind this thin veil of privacy, and was not expecting the voice which wafted up from the sitting room before I could reach the third or fourth stair.
“Kathleen, is that you?”
I stopped, took a breath, and used my palm to scoop a tear off my cheek.
“Yes, Mrs. Stevens,” I called back. I knew I would have to show myself, so I turned upon the creaking step, wiping my face again, and descended to the scullery. I pushed open the door through to the main hallway and hesitated once more. The sound of a man’s voice came from beyond the sitting room door. His words reverberated around the darkened space, their quality and tone – like the rumble of a distant locomotive engine – reminding me of Uncle Patrick who was a priest in Dublin and, much to my father’s chagrin, the success of the family. There was a pause in the conversation.
“Would you come here for a moment, Kathleen?” Mrs. Stevens said in her best hostess accent – a delicate, almost timid version of her usual voice.
It was a month since I had started in her employ and I had grown used to the nuances of her speech. I knew when she had company and in how high an esteem that company was held; I could tell she was full of admiration for the man in the sitting room.
I entered and my gaze fell upon him immediately, a man not young, not old, perhaps forty. His high, sloping forehead was as smooth as a rock under a thousand-year-old stream. He had a broad, thick moustache that covered his top lip and obscured most of his mouth. Although the light from the window was dim, the inner lace curtains being half drawn, the soft pink of the wallpaper tinted his skin the colour of raw pork sausages. His blue eyes were curiously mild and vulnerable, like those of a child.
“Kathleen,” my employer said in a voice carefully balanced between politeness and authority, “this is my cousin by marriage, Dr. Glenwood. He lives in New York.”
I curtsied quickly. Dr. Glenwood glanced at Mrs. Stevens.
“Dr. Glenwood is engaged upon some very important work and he may wish to talk to you regarding some small help you may be able to give him.”
I turned to Mrs. Stevens as she spoke. Her words had seemed measured, careful even, and her gaze remained steady upon my face as though she was expecting an answer. My head shook slightly. Had I missed the question? Mrs. Stevens closed her eyes for a moment, half sighed, then continued. “This work, I believe, is not onerous.”
I waited for more but realized they were both waiting for me.
“Of course, ma’am. I would be glad to help.”
“There, Dr. Glenwood,” said Mrs. Stevens, breaking into a smile. “There is a willing volunteer for you.”
“Perfect,” said Dr. Glenwood. His pale eyes narrowed and I knew he must be smiling. The mantelpiece clock struck the hour. Its tone was so similar to the music box I thought for a moment the next few notes would ring to the tune of All Things Bright and Beautiful. Instead, the clock merely chimed the same note through four evenly spaced silences. I felt sad for the proud robin redbreasts and the shining berries, and found myself wishing them a home. Mrs. Stevens’s clock was carefully wrought in gold but had little of the music box’s charm.
Dr. Glenwood had taken his own timepiece from his waistcoat and now stared at its face. “Would tomorrow evening after supper be a suitable hour?” he asked of Mrs. Stevens but also glanced at me.
“I’m sure that would be acceptable,” Mrs. Stevens replied.
I found myself backing out of the room, and was glad to catch a nod from my employer confirming that this was the right thing to do.
_____
My room here was a small attic space and it had taken me a while to settle. Although our home in London had been a single chamber, it was large and I had grown used to the traffic of people. Here, everything was silent save for the odd creak and groan of the floorboards and the frequent gusts of wind against the pane. When I opened my eyes each morning I expected the world I already knew to flood my waking vision. I was ready to see my father shaving in a far corner, my mother darning on a chair, and Mary darting between the two of them like a wingless moth. But in every direction there were only blank, sloping walls a few feet from my bed. I still adjusted my eyes upon waking in the hope that, like curtains of sleep, these walls would melt away, revealing the family I had lost.
I had been in Mrs. Stevens’s employ for so short a time. Mrs. Stevens and her daughter, Louisa, had spent their early spring months in London with Mrs. Stevens’s sister. When they prepared to return to St. John’s they found themselves in need of a new maid. My father’s employer on the underground train provided both the news of the position, and the reference needed to secure it. With scarcely time to think, I was scooped up in the preparations of a mother and daughter whose faces and manners were alien to me. My first few days with Mrs. Stevens were spent preparing for the voyage. Then there were ten days aboard the ship, then two weeks in this twilight city that seemed to slip through all my attempts to place it. There was the hurry of making the house habitable again, removing dust covers, beating cushions, chairs, mats, and carpets all in a constant cloud of dust which rose, swirled, resettled but never seemed to leave.
St. John’s seemed to carry faint echoes of Dublin and London. In both those cities I had breathed in the same combination of soot, grime, and stone as here. I had seen the same confident, stocky merchants with their thick waistcoats and their businesslike airs. There were more of that type here, or rather a greater concentration in the population. There was fashion here too, but it came with a certain self-awareness and no shortage of stares. Parasols, top hats, and fans meant more in St. John’s because there were fewer of them. Those who wore them did so with a flourish.
This was the Americas too, or so the atlas told me. You could clearly view the rugged terrain from the town, the bald hills rising on every side. The landscape reminded me of the pioneer adventures I had read. I could imagine savages hiding behind the overhanging rocks, patiently watching the merchants and barrel boys far below. I could sense their taut fingers and their twitching bows.
At other times thick wreaths of fog drifted into the harbour and I was in Ireland again – an Ireland of folk tales and legends, of the plague-carrying giant whose footsteps shake the earth; of great sea monsters whose breath can in an instant change the ocean climate from sunshine to crystal ice. London, America, Dublin, and the fogs of Ireland’s western shores – this place was a bewildering series of elsewheres.
_____
I sat down on the edge of my bed, feeling the prod of a spring through my dress. I wondered what Dr. Glenwood’s “very important work” could be and my mind spun in a
circle through every shade of experience. I thought of my mother’s darning and sewing, of my cooking and cleaning. I saw myself reading to the old and infirm as I had in Dublin on Sundays.
They would hardly arrange a meeting after supper if I were to cook for him, and I didn’t know whether Mrs. Stevens even knew I could read; she had certainly never asked. All I knew was that his “work” could require none of these abilities, and the help to which they referred was not only beyond my experience, but possibly beyond my imagination too. Why on earth had I agreed to a task about which I knew so little?
The frame of my little window creaked in the breeze and I gazed through the pane. It was the same sky that had hung over Dublin and London, the same scudded ridges set amidst a deep and receding blue. But here it was tainted; everything it looked down upon was treacherous to my senses. This sky had no business to remind me of home.
Three
Tommy
I filled my pipe slowly and gazed at the shadows that danced like spirits against the broken cartwheels along the wall. The light was in constant motion even though the paraffin lamp hung unmoving from the crossbeam. One of the mares beyond the partition was restless. I could hear the occasional snort and the dragging of hoof against straw.
I wondered whether the young woman had seen it yet. I tried to imagine her expression. Would that put-on anger melt into a smile? Would she wonder about the sender? Would she think through the scene we had played out together as I myself had done so many times this evening? Would she think of us as two strangers in a lost city? Perhaps it was on the doorstep still, a silent witness of these strange and tender thoughts. Perhaps it would not be discovered until the full light of tomorrow’s dawn revealed its dew-stained parcel. What chain of events might be set in motion by that find?
Young Ryan, the boy who occupied the only other bunk in this L-shaped section of barn, had just turned in. He poked his head around the corner as I sang a line from the music-box ditty, then disappeared from sight just as quickly.
“You remember what Mr. Brine said about smoking in the barn,” came his disembodied voice. “And about burning the lamp.”
I waited to see if the head would poke around the corner again, but it didn’t.
“Now goodness,” I said drowsily, ignoring for the moment the heat rising in my belly, “that’s a bold and courageous voice coming out of nowhere in this little barn. But where is it coming from? Is it my own pipe, turned against me? Has the good Lord given this little tube the power of speech? Or perhaps it’s one of the lice hopping around on the mattress? Maybe I offended the little brute by rumpling the sheets of his own little bed?”
“You know who said it,” came the grudging reply.
“Ah William, my lad,” I mused as if to myself, “that’s a fine Irish name you have there. There’s a priest named Father Ryan who’s been saying the Mass sometimes at the Catholic Cathedral just along the way there. He’s visiting from Ireland, I believe. You must be related.”
I could feel the hesitation from the bunk around the corner. I sucked upon the stem and watched the first smoke of the evening rise toward the ceiling.
I threw a sleepy glance in the direction of his quarters. In a moment his face – pink with embarrassment – appeared around the corner again. “No, we’re not related,” he said, his eyes fixed at a point in the floor midway between us. He waited for a moment, then dropped out of sight again, the bed creaking in a decisive I’m going to sleep now manner.
“Ah, I was sure he had to be related, you look so similar.”
“I don’t know him,” came the answer.
“Ah you never know, young William, you never know.” I took another puff. “The Ryans were always known to be prodigious breeders, whether within wedlock or without. The wearing of a cassock would never make a difference to that. Sure the man could be your own father.”
The silence was intense. The smoke hung above my bed, unmoving. He moved, stalled, knocked something, then, judging from the various groans of wood, sat up. I had never laid a glove on the lad, but it seemed he knew better than to do anything rash. I watched the corner closely. Not a hair or a finger showed itself.
“What are you calling me, Fitzpatrick?” came his voice, hoarse and uncertain.
“Now goodness, there’s the little flea again disturbed in its rest. It must be the flea ’cause a man would know not to use that tone of voice without showing himself for a reckoning.”
There was a long silence, then a sigh.
“No one’s threatening you, Fitzpatrick,” Ryan said at last.
“That’s a great comfort to me, lad. A great comfort. We are all part of the divine plan, and we all want to be loved.”
“What about the light, Fitzpatrick? He’ll see it if he looks out tonight or if he goes about his rounds. And he’ll smell the smoke in the morning. He’ll think it was me.”
“Are you volunteering to take the blame?”
“What?”
“If Brine smells the smoke, you’ll say it was you? That’s a touching offer, lad.”
“I’m offering nothing, Fitzpatrick, and you know it,” he replied. An impatience bordering on desperation had come into his voice. “I just don’t want to get into trouble.”
“It’s a sad thing when a fellow countryman deserts you for the sake of a measly character like O’Brien, a man who can’t even stick to the name his country gave him, who drops the O of his mother tongue so that the folks here might mistake him for solid yeoman stock of old England.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” came a curiously muffled reply. Did the boy have his head under blankets in an attempt to block out the sound of my voice?
“You don’t know what I’m talking about, Ryan,” I said more loudly, “because you are ignorant of the world and uneducated in your mind.” I took another draw of my pipe. “Are you really happy to spend your life milking cows and sawing wood for the likes of Brine with his small-town swagger and his Sunday tweeds?”
“You do,” came the soft answer. The bed creaked sharply as though fear had flexed the body which lay upon it.
I was silent for a moment. The heat inside my belly swirled and I knew I was lost somewhere between extreme violence and tired resignation – I had spun between these two extremes with alarming swiftness of late. I turned on my bunk and let my arm drop to the floor, a hand groping. It gripped the book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I had picked up a few days ago when I raided a trunk down on the harbour. I drew the book upon my chest and lodged the pipe in the corner of my mouth. The hanging lamp burned steady enough to make out the text.
“You have a point there, my lad,” I murmured. “You do have a point.”
Kathleen
I froze when I heard the shriek. It was Louisa’s voice, but frantic and distorted like that of an animal caught in a trap. I stilled my hands, which were submerged past the wrists in soapy dishwater. I listened and readied myself for some emergency.
Mrs. Stevens’s voice succeeded. Although I couldn’t hear her words, the tone, which was mildly scolding, allayed my fears. Louisa’s squeal became a ripple of laughter.
Then through the closed scullery door, there seeped a gentler noise – mechanical yet melodic, cheerful yet edged with melancholy. It confused me for a moment with its odd melding of the familiar with a quality entirely out of place. And then I placed it – the tune, the tone, the pitch; it was the music box. I watched the rim of water skim against the hairs on my forearm, and felt a wave of sickness.
I listened hard to the sounds emanating from the dining room. I was waiting for a deeper voice, one that may belong to an officer of the law. But Louisa chatted on, unconcerned, and Mrs. Stevens cooed affectionately, but still not entirely happily, with her daughter.
“I’m going to show Kathleen” – I caught these words, and the gentle objection
from Mrs. Stevens, because Louisa was by now approaching the kitchen. I stiffened and frowned toward the submerged supper dishes. The door flapped open and the flutter of activity that was Louisa followed.
“Kathleen,” Louisa began, “guess what’s happened?”
Keeping my hands in the water, I turned. Louisa’s cheeks were flushed and she held the music box up in one hand, the other behind her back. For a fleeting moment I hoped it might be something else, a different music box with squirrels, not birds; acorns not berries, anything that might distract my mind from the obvious; that the stranger had stolen a music box for me, and that, despite my protestations, the purloined item had made it into the possession of the household in which I was serving.
But the berries shone bright in the gaslight from the scullery ceiling, and the robin redbreasts were in mid-chirp just as they had been in the shop, beaks forever open apparently singing the tune Louisa now played. The lid was open and the red admiral butterfly turned on its dais.
“Isn’t it lovely?” said Louisa, and I could see tears forming in her eyes.
“Yes,” I said mildly, “did you buy it at one of the shops?”
It was the first thing I could think of to say and it sounded unnatural in my ears, like I was hearing someone else speak.
Louisa looked up at me and grinned broadly, her cheeks even more purple than before. She took a step closer. I turned around more fully drawing my hands from the sink and lifting the hand towel from the rail. I backed hard against the sink, hiding my hands in the folds of the towel.
“That’s just the thing! It was outside, wrapped in newspaper, on the doorstep, and . . .” She took a furtive half-glance behind her to see that her mother wasn’t in the room, then brought her hidden hand into plain view. There was a piece of folded paper in it. She thrust it so suddenly into my towel-enfolded hands that I had to grab the corner before it fell. “. . . This note was inside the box.”
