by Tobias Hill
There was no answer. He stood up. Called out again. ‘William. William? Miss Rice?’
Nothing came back to him but his own rising echoes. Daniel stepped out between the boxes and walked fast to the end of the colonnade. Beyond the last columns a staircase curved downwards, lit by grimy windows, and two panelled passages ran off into darkness. He took the staircase down, followed a hallway carpeted with dust past a roped-off stairwell and a room with bloodstone fireplaces, the walls stained with entrenched damp, the floorboards groaning underfoot. Immediately he was lost.
He stopped, listening. There was sound everywhere, none of it close. A background noise of people, echoes of whispers, whispers of echoes, the clatter of distant dishes. He wondered how long William and Miss Rice would look for him. Or if they had lost him on purpose. William leaving Haymarket for a rainier day.
He had guessed he’d come down to the ground floor, but it felt as if he were underground now. Ahead the floorboards had given way completely, the carpet sagging into the space under them. Further on, the passage darkened, and Daniel could see nothing. He turned back, trying to remember his steps. It was a moment before he saw the figure waiting for him.
It was no more than ten yards away. It was all dark, skin and clothes, camouflaged into the dimness. In the absence of light it seemed too small to be human. He thought of Victoria, as if she might have followed him. Only as the figure began to walk towards him did he realise there was something in its hands. A length of metal.
It stopped in front of him, waiting. He saw it was a child. It was dirty in a way Daniel had never seen, even on chimneysweeps. Soot had worked its way into its nostrils, the insides of its ears. Only the eyes were still white.
‘You’ve lost your way.’ It was an old voice, deep and breathless. Odd in a child. Out of place, Daniel thought, as a ship in a bottle. It repeated itself. ‘You’ve lost your way. I saw you do it. You was looking for me.’
‘The footprints.’
‘Aye.’
He hesitated, lost for words. The child’s feet were bare, he saw. Only the nails stood out as pale half-moons.
‘You live here? In the palace?’
‘These last two years now.’ It shifted the metal length from one hand to the other. Daniel saw it was a candlestick, old and tarnished.
‘And no one finds you?’
The figure hawked and spat. Daniel caught a flash of teeth. ‘They knows I’m here. They don’t see me. I knew you, else you wouldn’t have seen me. I kept my eye on you and all.’
‘You say you know me?’
‘I seen you afore. In different clothes.’
Daniel put a hand out. The figure stepped away from it. Under the hoarseness of the voice there was an accent. A brogue, something Irish. He had heard it before, once, at a time when he had no name for it.
‘I thought you was Joseph and Mary.’
He bent down, staring into the blacked-out face. ‘Martha?’
‘I didn’t think to see you again.’
He stayed there, on his haunches, facing her. He tried to guess how old she was. But it had been years since he had seen her, and she was too small, stunted with malnourishment. He shook his head. ‘You had a mother. Brothers.’
She stepped back again. ‘I make do for myself now.’
‘How do you eat?’
‘I make do. I forgot your own name.’
‘Daniel Levy.’
She cocked her head, gesturing backwards. ‘Shall I lead you out, Mister Levy?’
‘That would be very kind.’ They began to walk. Light outlined the figure in front of him. Her thinness was like that of the creature roosting in the morning room. ‘It is good to see you, Martha. How did you end up here?’
‘Fergal showed me. That was my brother. He was a skivvy for the footmen here. I don’t know where he is now. Maybe the workhouse. After I found my own ways. Tom showed me his ins and outs when I came.’
‘Tom?’
‘He’s gone now too. He lived here. They caught him a year ago now. I don’t know what they done with him.’ Her head turned, rat-thin, grinning. ‘I seed the crown. The Queen liked it, did she?’
‘You were there, this morning?’
They reached the roped-off stairwell. Martha ducked under it. ‘I seed from the fireplace. I sleep up the chimneys. There’s space aplenty. There’s shelves and nooks big as rooms. The sweepers’ boys know my places. They say nothing. I thought your crown was beautiful.’
When he looked up Martha was waiting for him. Her expression was the same, he realised, only hardened. Still anxious, as if there was something to say and no time to say it. ‘There was two of you.’
‘My brother and I, Salman. Yes.’
Martha turned and began to walk again. ‘Are you jewellers to the Queen?’
‘We work for the Crown Goldsmiths.’ They came out at the top of the stairs. Tail-ends of candles illuminated a distempered corridor. To the far left he could see a broader chamber, better-lit, cluttered with empty pedestals.
‘At last! I know my way from here. Without you I would have been lost for days.’ He took out his purse, felt for the half sovereign he knew was there, extracted its heavy weight and passed it to Martha. She bit into it, hungrily, as if gold were edible.
‘Can I work for you, Mister Levy?’
‘I…’ There were mirrors on the passage walls. He caught sight of himself as he struggled for words. His spectacles opaque with candelight. ‘I am a shopman. The company is not mine, Martha. I have no jobs to give–’
‘I can fetch and run. I can clean. I can copy newspapers. If you give me a needle, I can stitch two ways.’ She watched him, waiting. ‘I should live here as I have done. I should like to work for you, Mister Levy.’
He felt his heart lurch and give, falling away inside him. He leant back against the palace wall. ‘You say you can read?’
She lowered her head. ‘Some.’
‘Do you know Ludgate Hill?’
‘Well enough.’
‘There is a sign above my shop, a golden salmon. A gold fish. Come on Sunday, at noon, to the back door. Creed Lane. Half a shilling for a half-day each week, is that fair to you?’
She raised the candlestick in her hand. ‘I can get linen and candles and more.’
‘No.’
‘Aye. Then what?’
‘Then you shall learn to write.’
Midnight. London clean with snow. The sky above it emptied out into a broad black vacancy.
‘Tell me what else.’
‘There is nothing else to tell. The Queen, the child.’
‘Damn the child, Daniel.’
‘There is nothing else. Bridge said he would fix a day next month. William and I walked back. He wanted me to go with him to the Haymarket.’
‘Why?’
‘He was happy to have seen the Queen.’
‘And you were not. In four years this is the best news we have had.’
‘I’ll not go back there.’
‘Why?’
‘I felt ashamed.’
‘Ashamed of what?’
‘You were not there.’
‘Of being unable to afford the expense of a fire? Ah, Daniel. Ashamed of chance? In this trade no word carries more weight than hers. With the right thing said at the palace, we will be set clear for life. Wake up.’
‘I am not asleep.’
‘You lie. You remember how it was when we arrived at the docks? The English looked at us as if we were Ali Baba and his last thief. And nothing has changed except our clothes. Inside we will never be like these people. Are you ashamed of that?’
‘No.’
‘We are always dhimmi.’
‘We have been here four years, Salman.’
‘Aye, four years, and no one yet has rolled out the bloody red carpet. Eh? We have had no chance until now. The Queen of England wishes to see us. What more do you want?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why will you not go?’
>
‘I don’t know.’
‘Say you will come with me, Daniel.’
On the window sill, three ale bottles, emptied. An end of bread still uneaten. The tincture bottle turning the moon blue. Two men on the pallet bed, not sleeping. Light reflected in their eyes.
‘Daniel. ‘Phrates. Please.’
‘If that is what you want, then I will come.’
A was an Archer’s Arrow;
He kept it very nice;
He hunted Buck and Calling Birds,
And Frogs and Harvest Mice.
‘Good. You have copied the first line?’
‘Aye.’
‘Let me see.’
January, the first Sunday to have sun. Two figures sat on the steps outside the Creed Lane door. The child reading slowly, painfully, each word a step trudged forward. Her writing a cipher.
‘Good. What is a calling bird, do you think?’
‘I know not.’
‘Nor I. Go on now.’
B was a Butcher’s Dog,
Which was not very small;
The Butcher fed it Sausages,
Until it would not growl.
Laughter. The girl leant into it as she began to cough. Daniel took the chapbook from her. ‘There. Enough this time. You’ve done well.’
‘I’m not tired.’
Her face looked weary from coughing. He held out five pence. ‘It is too cold.’
‘Not for me.’ She took the coins. Squirrelled them away.
‘For me then. I’ll catch my death from letters. In the spring we will study longer.’ He wondered if Martha had ever had a teacher of any kind. There were schools, he thought, that might still take her. He would have to look into that.
There was the sound of the bolt being drawn back. They both looked up as Salman came out. He smiled down at the child absently, pulling his black coat closer. ‘Good morning, Martha. How is your reading?’
‘Middling.’
Daniel made room for him as Salman sat down. ‘It isn’t so long since I was learning myself. My brother is a fine teacher, eh?’ He turned to Daniel. ‘A little bitter to study out of doors.’
Daniel lowered his voice, tucking the alphabet back into his pocket. ‘George will not let her inside.’
‘Still? She is cleaner than him. She has never been mucky as George Fox, have you, Martha?’
She giggled, teeth chattering in the wind. ‘When I was mudlarking.’
‘Mudlarking?’
‘A fore the palace. My mother made us.’
Daniel watched them as they talked. The child’s profile alongside his brother’s. Martha’s face was clean but grey, as if the coal dust had indelibly marked her. Beside her, Salman looked washed out. His skin had lightened, as if the white heat of the crucibles had affected its chemistry. His eyes were still dilated in the winter sun.
‘Raking the mud. Scunging down the pipes. There was rope and bones and iron. I don’t think you’ve ever seed anyone so mucky. I know places where you’d go head over ears in mud.’
‘From sewers to palace. In a fortnight, you know, we shall be under Her Majesty’s roof ourselves.’
‘Mister Levy said.’
‘Oh, and am I not Mister Levy? What do you call me?’
She squinted up at Salman. ‘The little Mister Levy.’
Daniel sat back. ‘How was your sleep, Salman?’
‘Dreamless.’ Salman turned away from him. ‘There’s an errand you could run for me, Martha. James Ryder, across the Hill. Look for the apothecary’s sign. There’s a penny for you and five shillings to settle with him. Bring what he gives you.’
She stood up and took the coins. Her smile fading, as if money were serious business. Not happy, Daniel thought. Nothing so careless. Contented, though, and that was something.
She nodded goodbye to him and went without looking back. He felt Salman rise beside him, still talking as he went inside, although Daniel was no longer listening. After they were both gone he hunched forward, the cold working into his hands and feet. The backstreet lay silent around him. Even the rats had been driven in by the cold.
I am ashamed of jewels, he thought. The realisation came to him out of nothing, for no reason; or as if it had been waiting to find him alone. It was what he had meant to say, three weeks ago, in the attic room. What are you ashamed of? Salman had asked him. And he had not known what he meant to reply.
I am ashamed of jewels. It felt as if it had always been waiting to be said. What Salman wanted most of all was something he wanted nothing of himself. He remembered Jane Limpus. The candle between them. His life had been decided by his brother’s desire.
He shook his head, stood up and went back into the workshop, bolting the door behind him, locking it. The benches and wheels stood quiet for the Christian sabbath. Daniel went on through into the showroom. The blinds were drawn. In the gloom he stood, feeling the displays around him. Silver and carbuncles in domes of glass. A lick of bile rose up in him.
He thought of what was done for jewels, and what was felt for them. The way the doing was bound up in feeling, the feeling blind to whatever had been done. Victoria Guelph’s clenched hands: he thought of that. Rachel’s abandonment. For days he thought of these things, the spectacles hurting his eyes, his back stiffening as he waited for custom. By then it was already years too late.
* * *
Pavlov has strange ideas of days. I wait in Urawa while the long Japanese autumn begins to cool and Mel and Nicola pack up and go home to New Zealand. Weeks go by, whole slippages of time, although I have nothing to measure them by except the slow depletion of my money. Once I walk the grey miles to the Bekhterev home, the city air pungent in my throat, but there is no one in and no one answers the note I leave. Once I telephone my sister. She says I’m so close, just around the corner, why don’t I stop by. Come and stay, Anne says. Why don’t you come and stay? And I have no answer any more, no reasons. She doesn’t ask about the jewel. I would thank her for that if I could.
In November the weather turns cold for good. The day Pavlov rings it snows for the first time. I take the train across Tokyo and walk from the station, listening to snow clomp off the cherry trees.
He opens the doors and grins. There is a precision screwdriver behind his ear. ‘Checkmate, Katharine! Fun and games. Come in. Come.’
‘I don’t have time for chess.’ I follow him inside. Someone is cooking in the flat upstairs. The smell of grilled meat and soy fills the unlit rooms. Only the computer is on, a blue plaque in the gloom. I wonder, too late, how much time Pavlov has spent on my behalf. Looking for something I no longer believe can be found. Guilt twists its way into my stomach. ‘How have you been? How is the umbrella business?’
He waves me over to the laptop, his eyes catching its light. ‘Now, you will see something to make you happy.’
His hands move fast over the keys. I sit down in the only chair. There is a smell of mould in the bedroom, overriding that of cooking. Cups and plates are stacked around Pavlov’s hardware. The unease rises up in me again.
‘Where are Anna and the children?’
‘Oh –’ he shakes his head, preoccupied ‘– look, please.’
When I turn to the screen a woman is smiling back at me. A lean, tanned face. Incautious eyes. A passport booth photograph, an orange curtain corrugated behind her curly hair.
‘Who is this?’
He points at the Japanese text. ‘June Patricia Lewis. For five years she has worked on the island of Shikoku. Her employer has been the I Wish They All Could Be Californian English Conversation School, Takamatsu. Her working visa ended when she left this company ten months ago. But, you see here, she is still in Japan. Living in Takamatsu. She has worked illegally as a teacher and a hostess and also doing some – dancing, maybe. The police are very cross with her, and soon they will send her home. She is twenty-eight years old, divorced, American citizen, degree from San Diego University in Spanish. Every week she telephones a number in Oakland.’
‘Pavlov –’ I look at the woman on the screen, the apparatus of her life laid open ‘– how long have you spent working on this?’
He squats down. ‘This is nothing. Wait and see.’ He drags down the cursor. A second page appears. There is no photograph this time, only a solid wall of script. Pavlov smiles between us, the computer and guest, waiting.
‘I can’t read Japanese.’
‘Oh, well. This is the story of the other Lewis. On Shikoku there are only two. But this Lewis is different from the first. Here, I found the death certificate for Mari Murasaki. She died in Tosa in 1987. Her maiden name, this is Lewis.’
I lean into the blue light. ‘Tosa.’
‘Not really what you would call a city. It is very remote. The far side of Shikoku, the Pacific side. So now, you see, here is a signature on her death certificate. This name is Hikari Murasaki. This says he is her son. A Lewis in disguise. Here is the address he gives for funeral arrangements. Near Tosa, just along the coast. Do you want vodka, Katharine?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Okay, sure. So next I look for bills. This name, Hikari Murasaki, and this address. But there is nothing. The house has no telephone, no registered parking space, no electricity or gas. The man has no tax record. For twelve years they are invisible, this man and his house. No one is invisible by accident.’
He reaches out, switches the computer off, turns to me in the dark. ‘He is hiding from something. Maybe it is you, Katharine.’
I sit still, thinking it over. Pavlov goes into the kitchen and comes back with sweet tea in tulip glasses. He watches me warm my hands as he drinks.
‘It could be me,’ I say eventually. ‘If not, there are others.’
Pavlov nods and smiles. ‘The people with money.’
‘The people with money.’
‘But then you think this is the one? I have found what you are looking for?’
‘Maybe.’ I say it quietly. Admitting it only to myself. Pavlov stands up and takes the tea glass out of my hand before he claps me on the back.
‘Just as I have said all along! If you are looking for something, you must come to Pavlov. And now we will celebrate.’
We sit in the kitchen, drinking vodka, eating Tuc crackers from a plastic plate. There are pictures of the children on the grease-stained wall above the mini-cooker. I look at them while Pavlov talks, drawing in the air the infinite methods of his ingenuity.
