The River Sings

by Sandra Leigh Price

  Out on the street it was raining, but my father was undeterred, he walked on regardless with me at his side, his strides so long I had to double my step to keep up, leaping the worst of the puddles, but still I felt the water seep up through the stitching in the soles of my shoes, wicked into my stockings.

  “Where are we going, Father?” I asked, raindrops falling into my mouth, but he wouldn’t answer. I thought we were walking in the direction of the dollyshop and Old Sweet. The streets were changing around us, the river had turned to a blur of grey, the rain and cloud obscuring the horizon so that I didn’t know where the sky ended and the land began, and when we stopped and I looked around I was disoriented. My father had led me to a high street; light from the shop windows glowed on the road as golden glitter. Noise roared from the public house as the door opened and dispersed as the door closed. Huddled in the doorway, sheltering from the rain, was an older woman in a red skirt, her shawl wrapped around a young boy. My eyes were drawn to his feet, the strange shape of his boots, until I realised that what I was looking at were his poor blackened feet and ankles. On seeing the woman and boy my father grabbed hard at my arm so that I felt his fingers squeeze through my clothing, clutching me to the very bone.

  “Look away, Eglantine, avert your eyes,” he said sternly, but I stared. I knew what they were, he didn’t need to tell me, they were what my mother was. They were gypsy. My father pulled at my arm so hard I thought I’d cry out.

  “Do you remember all I taught you, Eglantine?” he said, so that my mind whirred with all the lessons wrapped up in games, my hands the hunter, people’s pockets my quarry, but I still couldn’t keep my eyes from the gypsies, the Rom. The part of me that was my mother sung out to them, drew my eyes towards them.

  The woman was neatly dressed in her red skirts and coat, a pair of silver earrings threaded through her ears. Her hair was tied up beneath a simple straw bonnet, knotted under her chin with a black velvet ribbon. The boy, too, wore a coat, with short trousers, though tattered at the hem. The woman’s eyes burned into my father with curiosity, every inch of him she examined and assessed. My father walked towards them, the grip on my arm tight, until we were right beside them. My father’s hand on the doorknob.

  “Move,” he said, but the woman held her head up, her spine straight.

  “Drabaneysapa!” She spat at his shoes so that the phlegm sat there, a dull jewel. My father looked at it disgusted and shook it off into the rain and reached for the door to the public house so that the woman and boy were forced to step out into the rain. Even inside I felt the burn of their eyes on our backs.

  “What did she say, Father? What was that word?” But he either wouldn’t answer me or couldn’t hear me in the roar of voices.

  He found us a table, ordered a chop and ale and we sat in our own silence as we watched the hub around us.

  “This is a regular stopping point for travellers on the coach, Eglantine. Everyone is just passing through.” He was right, all the clusters of people were wedged in with their luggage like bookends holding them up on their tired journey, everyone except us. A man in a leather apron came and placed our food in front of us, the ale slopping onto the table, which he hurriedly wiped away with the flat of his palm onto the sticky floor. My father paid him and the man went back through the mess of people.

  “Look at their faces, Eglantine,” my father said. “All they are interested in is getting refreshments and meeting the next coach to get them to their destination. They are not keeping watch of their possessions, their portable property. They are too busy being portable property themselves.” My father drank his ale slowly and carefully ate his chop so as to not get grease on his clothes. For food or portable property I had no appetite, all I thought of was that gypsy woman and boy in the doorway.

  “Father, that woman, what did she say? She was gypsy, wasn’t she?” My father now wiped his hands vigorously on his handkerchief and drained his ale.

  “Maybe she was, but she’s nothing to do with the likes of us, Eglantine, nothing at all.”

  “But my mother, she was gypsy, she was Rom,” I said, the noise bubbling around me.

  He’d not be able to ignore my question now. He kept wiping his hands though the grease was long gone from his fingers.

  “I’ve not forgotten her,” I said.

  My father looked at me then and ran the back of his hand gently across my cheek with such surprising tenderness I felt tears spring to my eyes. I banished them with a blink. My father stood up and walked through the crowded inn, eel-slippery; as he passed between the travellers I barely saw his hands, nor the expression on his face. He made it to the bar and back again, taking his seat beside me, nodding at me to look at his hands beneath the table. In one hand he held a locket, in the other a small purse. He pulled up his trouser leg and deposited his haul into the confines of his sock.

  No one noticed anything. No one called Thief!, all continued as before.

  “Your turn, Eglantine,” he said and smiled at me. I felt all the love he had for me push me on. I stood, uneasy on my own feet, and wove myself through the tangle of people. No one paid attention to me – what was I but a slip of a girl with her father for all anyone cared to see, absent of luggage, ready to easily lighten anyone of theirs. My eye was full of the shine, all I saw were the things I could take – a reticule; a watch chain; a pocket opening, the inside lined with coins like a nest with eggs. They were in my hands without thinking, the owner of them none the wiser. I walked back to my father, the smile on his face a beacon. My father’s pride in me glowed in my chest as we left. The gypsy and the boy, long gone.

  My father clasped my shoulder, with a quickness in his step. Around the corner he retrieved the locket and inspected it, finding a blonde curl of hair, which he promptly flicked into the oncoming path of a chandler’s wagon. The hair disappeared into the tread of dirt and dust until it was gone and it made me uneasy. A baby’s first curl. My father led me to Sweet’s and pawned the locket, not of pure enough silver for him to bother melting it down; his pockets jangled with coin, an invisible tambourine for us to walk the beat to.

  “What shall you have, Eglantine? What would you like for yourself? Name it and I’ll get it for you. A reward for your first success,” my father said, his voice full of brightness. But what I wanted was the truth about my mother but I knew he wouldn’t give it to me if I asked.

  “I’d like a new pair of boots,” I said and my father grinned at me.

  He walked me back to the house and left me to let myself in. I stood in the doorway as he walked down the street, the rain having lifted, turning the world to pearl.

  Makepeace was waiting for me so I gave her the money Sweet had given us and she carefully placed it in her chatelaine. I set to waiting to see what my father would bring, but he didn’t return.

  At supper Makepeace and I ate very quietly in the kitchen, waiting for him, but he didn’t come.

  “What did your father say again?” Makepeace said, trying to hide the quaver in her voice; her fork waltzed around the plate, a solo dancer.

  “He said he was off to buy some boots,” I said and looked at the clock, hoping it had answers.

  Come bedtime, my father still had not arrived home. I threw the covers off and made for the window to keep watch, the river dark with secrets. Not even a waterman crossed its surface or a barge, no lights shone except for the moon. The raised rope of my skin began to itch and burn and I couldn’t resist the scratch.

  When the morning came my neck was raw and my father still had not returned.

  “Go to the dolly house and see if he’s there,” Makepeace said in the kitchen, the fire not lit in the grate during her all-night vigil.

  “How do you know about it?” I said, feeling the cold seep through my clothes, making me feel exposed; my father’s secret had now become mine and I felt the weight of it.

  “How do you think, child? Your step-mother Ada’s family owned this grand house and that sad one as well. Ther
e is nothing that goes on that I don’t know about. Quick now, make yourself scarce,” she said. The emotion in her voice alarmed me.

  I walked the streets, scouring every man’s face, shaded by a hat or not, but none was my father. The wind skipped across the river, sending spray into my face like a handful of stones.

  It was at the dolly house door that I realised my father had the key. The lone window was dark with a curtain. I listened at the door before I knocked, but there was no reply. The burn around my neck hummed with its own heat and I was overcome with thirst. I walked the few steps to the well and bent over it, feeling the cool of the water calm my panic, but before I could drink I watched the ripple that I thought had been my own reflection transform into another’s. I turned to look around, thinking someone stood behind me, but no one was there.

  My father didn’t appear that day or the next. Makepeace and I rattled around the house, alert to all perceptible sounds. On the third evening a mad knocking came at the front door and Makepeace swooped for the handle, her chair tipping over with a slap. I was at her side in an instant.

  A small ragged boy stood on the doorstep with a piece of tattered paper in his hand. Behind him all the sounds of the river billowed while he stood waiting as Makepeace read, before she took a coin from the purse in her chatelaine and pressed it into his hand. The boy was gone from the doorstep and into the fog with barely an outline of him remaining.

  Makepeace told me to get my coat on and I did as I was told. Father had been arrested and was being held at Newgate.

  THIRTEEN

  Patrin, 1819

  The trial came and my father remained resolute: he would not implicate Amberline, and neither would Amberline confess his role in the theft. When the judge passed sentence my mother howled beside me. I felt myself disappear and grow transparent, faint as water. Her hand gripped my back. It was all that held me up.

  The news of my father’s sentence was a patrin of its own. Overnight, Rom came from far and wide to plead for his clemency, faces I hadn’t seen as a child, all moths around his light, all hoping. Both my brothers and their families appeared but they were as powerless as we were. A list of my father’s good deeds, his royal connections, his standing in our community, all fell on deaf ears. We were Rom, without land or house, tolerated but not accepted. Good enough to harvest crops and catch your rats, but not good enough for justice.

  They led him out at daybreak and he stepped out of the lockup blinking, his head bowed until he was clear of the lintel and then he stood tall. My mother ran and threw her arms around him, her face buried in his neck, and he tried to caress her hair though his hands were manacled as if he were a danger to the world. My father. My mother was removed by one of the constables and I trailed beside him and reached for his hands, just wanting to feel them, his strong fingers dwarfing mine as they had when I was small, his touch telling me all was right in the world. He reached and kissed me on the head and then Little Egg and I felt the earth turn beneath my feet as the scaffold came into view.

  My father mounted the steps with dignity, his feet leading him on, his eyes kept on us and not the gibbet that awaited. There were a dozen people waiting and I felt sick to the core. From behind me I felt Amberline’s arm wrap around my shoulders, his arm as leaden as a yoke; he’d left the cover of the woods for this, the danger now over for him. My mother stood with my brothers. She looked and saw Amberline and spat on the ground.

  The hangman held the length of rope in his hand and was ready to loop it over my father’s head, when my father quietly spoke. The hangman released him from the manacle and someone below reached up towards my father and handed him his own rope. My father took it, thick and twisted, a rope made strong by a Rom’s hands. The ground beneath my feet roiled. My father, steady of hand, tied the knot that would kill him. He pulled the rope straight of any kink and tested it with a final tug, before he placed the noose around his own neck, a savage garland. My father looked up, squinting into the sun, until he found our faces.

  “You see what you’ve brought me to,” he said, and I shivered before I realised he wasn’t addressing me at all. “Live soberly and take care of your wife and family.” His meaning was only too clear, his message for Amberline. I felt him stiffen beside me.

  My father gave the signal. The hangman, his job diminished by my father’s own assistance, quickly dropped the trapdoor. I closed my eyes. There was a loud snap, the creak of the rope and the sound of the gathering wind. I couldn’t breathe, the inside of my eyelids held a darkness I thought I’d never wake from. I heard my mother’s gasp and cry and wanted to go to her. Amberline pulled me away.

  That afternoon my father’s body was claimed and made ready for burial. My mother wouldn’t let anyone else prepare him. It was she who cleaned his body, washing his face and tying a clean diklo around his poor broken neck in a fragile knot, not daring to tie it close to his poor bruised and broken flesh. She polished his boots and buckles and placed a coin in each of his hands and all I could do was stand behind her and watch, for she’d not let me help, she’d not spoken a word to me, nor caught my eye. When Little Egg cried she looked up only briefly, blinking as if surfacing from a dream, startled by her surroundings, her face softening, before the reality of what occurred scattered her expression and she resumed the mask she needed to get her through.

  My brothers had dug the grave and all the men carried my father’s body in its coffin to its resting place. Amberline offered to help, but they ignored him, spurned his offer to assist as if he was nothing at all. Little Egg reached out her hand towards the wood as it passed, but I scooped up her hand and tucked it away.

  With my father lowered into his grave, we each took a handful of good dark earth and it hit the coffin like thrown cake, until my brothers snatched up the shovels and filled the grave. Their arms and backs in steady motion didn’t cease in their action until the surface was near smooth. My mother carefully bent and scooped out a hole; I thought she was digging down again, until I saw the branch of thorn by her side; it would grow, sustained by the earth and my father’s goodness. My mother’s expression was stone. We would come each year on this date to tie red thread and ribbon in his remembrance.

  We made our way back to camp, all the other vardos and wagons making ready for the night, set up further away from my parents’ vardo, keeping their distance for the spark that would come. My mother took no rest nor water; she gathered the few possessions that were her own in a small pile on the grass – her clothes, her herbs, a bundle containing her needles and thread, a Bible. I went to help her but she waved me away. My brothers led the horse away and nodded to me, but ignored Amberline. How much did they know of Amberline’s role in my father’s death? If they had known the whole of it, they’d have plunged a knife into his heart, just as they were about to do to the horse.

  My mother smashed all their fine china onto the floor, the clatter of it ringing through the night disturbing a pigeon who’d already set for the roost. She’d be forced to live with one of my brothers and his wife now.

  “What is she doing that for?” Amberline said, confused at the storm growing around us, his hand curling protectively around my shoulder. But what could I tell him? These were our ways. All that had belonged to the living must be destroyed; his act had led to not only the death of my father but the destruction of my mother’s home and all their worldly possessions. My mother threw out the silver teapot and tray, sugar bowl and spoons and they landed at our feet. Amberline stepped back. My mother came out of the vardo with a shovel and started dashing them into the ground. Little Egg began to cry at the sharp sounds. Amberline took her into his arms, unrolled her small angry fist and blew a puff of air into her palm. At this, she hushed and he held her close to his chest. My mother smashed with her shovel and the side of the teapot split, collapsed like an overripe fruit. My mother looked up at Amberline.

  “Want these too, do you?” she said bitterly, still striking down with the shovel. She drew my father’s
knife from her belt, the one that Amberline had given him, and submitted it to the same attack, watching the pattern on the blade disappear, mangled to ribbon. When she had finished I went to gather them into a sack for her, but she held her hand up against me, she would not have my help. She tied a rope around the sack again and again, as if it were rats inside and not silver, the sickening tie of the knot made me lose my footing, though I stood on solid ground, Amberline’s hand steadying my elbow.

  My mother turned in disgust and went to the wood pile, gathered all the wood she could and took it inside the vardo. I heard the strike of her flint, I knew it would have shaken in her hands. She struck again, the flame must have caught. A curl of smoke followed her out over the threshold as she stepped down and stood apart from us, watching. All the camp was silent.

  “Is she deranged, Patrin? Should we try and stop her?” I shook my head and took Little Egg back in my arms.

  The fire had caught and the whole interior glowed, the flames licking at the roof, the floor. The wooden beams started to crack and spit as the heat released the oils from the wood. The fire hit my father’s bottle of brandy and it exploded and encouraged the flames to go higher, popping out the wooden shutters of the window, using the curtains as a bellows – in and out they were sucked until the flames devoured them completely. From the doorframe the fire started to venture, sending its fingers curling around the frame until the fire ran all across the exterior. With a whomph all the air was sucked out of the vardo; the roof danced with spitting flames, the smoke stung my eyes and made me cough. I pulled my shawl over Little Egg’s head to shield her from the ashes that had started to fall, a bitter snow, but my mother would not step back. She shrugged off my touch, her skin hot from the fire; her dark hair grew grey from the falling ash, her face was lit with the fire, her eyes feverish with grief. The walls of the vardo collapsed in on themselves as we heard the horse scream, the blade ending its life, and for a moment the walls of the vardo remained, painted in blinding light, then were gone, the remains of my family’s life a heap of burning wood.