The River Sings

by Sandra Leigh Price

  “Yes?” he said and squinted through his pince-nez at me, the light striking the lenses gold so that, disconcertingly, I was unable to see his eyes.

  “How much for these?” I asked, lifting the hatbox onto the countertop and hearing the collapse of his coins beneath the broadsheet. He peered over the pince-nez at me, his eyes poring over me. I flipped the lid of the box and he pawed through it, looking over the make of the shirts and the wear in the hat band before he flipped out the loupe and examined the gold in the cufflinks, the diamond in the tie pin. He held this item particularly close to his field of vision, tilting it to the light.

  “They ain’t worth much, that ‘diamond’ is paste for one thing,” he said, lowering his loupe, looking at me again.

  “Are you quite sure?” I said, pulling myself upright and haughty, hoping that he’d respond to the force of my will, my tone, my superior manner. But it just made him look at me more.

  “Do I know you?” he said, his eyes greasily following the outline of my body, and I shivered with revulsion, glad for the barrier of the counter between us.

  “You know my father, Amberline Stark,” I said and watched his response with a sense of satisfaction. He recoiled and I relished that his pince-nez fell from the bridge of his nose.

  “Know him? I was glad to see the back of him, bound for Botany Bay and not too soon,” he said.

  I felt blood whoosh in my ears as steadily as holding a seashell there; the rest of the world turned quiet.

  “Don’t think I don’t know your kind, Mr Sweet. You’ll pay me a fair sum for the items or you may just find yourself on a prison hulk begging for Botany Bay.”

  He stood there and looked at me and I felt my skin hum and burn.

  “You are a piece of work, Miss Stark, a piece of work, just like your bastard father and your whore gypsy mother,” he said and I saw he was just waiting for me to crumble, to cry, to wilt like some poor flower picked and not put in water. He didn’t know that I was like a willow, my roots ran deep and unseen, interlacing against whatever fate would hurl at me; I’d seek out the water regardless.

  I pushed my father’s hatbox to the ground on the other side of the counter and with it the veil of the broadsheet, enjoying the sound of the coins falling onto the counter, the pound notes falling like ash all around. Sweet had no time to speak. He was too shocked. At first he stood with his mouth open, trying to shape an expletive, but then his moneylender’s conscience got the better of him, his instinct to retrieve his money and the goods, and when he bent I lightly swept all the coins he had been carefully counting, disappearing with a clink into my pocket before he even had a chance to look up.

  The doorbell didn’t make a sound when I opened it and I left it open as I went, Old Sweet cursing at the top of his lungs, down on his knees gathering his precious notes.

  My fingers danced through the coins in my pocket and I felt all that my father had taught me: the lightness of my fingers, the delicate lift, the thrill of the theft – the only thing I had skills in but was unproved on my own, until now.

  When I returned, two men were carrying out all the items from the study in wooden crates. Makepeace held the door open for them, the books as heavy as carrying a tree between them. With great effort they loaded them onto a cart, the horse sidestepping beneath the weight. I hoped that Makepeace had flicked through the pages before she allowed them to be packed, never knowing what things my father might have cached.

  “What did you get from Sweet?” she asked, frowning as I cupped the stolen coins in my hand.

  “He was feeling generous,” I said before sweeping in the door, tingling with equal parts shame and thrill at what I had done.

  “It’s a start,” Makepeace said. I knew she was talking about repairs and living expenses, but she was more right than she knew, for what had my father really trained me in, what other skill did I have except for the lightness of my fingers and the secrecy of my touch?

  Everything extraneous was sold – Ada’s old things from the nursery: the doll’s house, the rocking horse, the nursing chair, the cradle, until all that remained was the chest of drawers, a mirror and my narrow bed. My father’s room the same. In the dining room Makepeace carefully dusted and packed ornaments and candlesticks in straw-lined cases and took whatever she could get for them. Yet the money we raised was not enough: the roof needed repair, the chimneys had to be swept, the house was in constant complaint.

  In the morning, a poor boy, soot black, came with his rods and brushes, carefully removed his two mismatched and ruined shoes and placed them on the canvas cloth Makepeace had laid out to protect the floor, then he crawled up through the hearth in bare feet, all the better to grip the blackened stone. I looked at those two sad little shoes and listened to him scuttle upwards, his bristling brush being pushed into the spaces where he no longer fitted. Soot rained down until the cold hearth was covered in black ash. Fireplace after fireplace he climbed up, his face growing blacker as he went, and still his little shoes remained. In my father’s room an old bird’s nest came down, blackened twigs and feathered down, a dead baby bird’s bones white as teeth. How easily that boy could have been me, how easily I could have been him.

  Makepeace dismissed him with a few coins and a slice of bread which he fell upon, his mouth as wide as a cat’s before it was gone. When Makepeace disappeared into the kitchen, I saw to it that he was paid a little extra and told him to keep some aside from his master. The copper pennies in his hand had all the brightness of the sun compared to the soot that encased him; why, even the lines of his palm had been erased as if he had no past and no future. He was about to leave when I bid him wait a moment and I returned with a pair of old shoes I’d found at the bottom of my father’s wardrobe, old and worn, not like the neat shoes he always wore.

  “What are you doing?” Makepeace said, coming back from the kitchen with a glass of milk for the chimney boy.

  He looked stricken at the items and dropped them on the floor, the lines around his eyes crinkling with apology.

  “Miss?” he said imploringly.

  “Better he have them than they moulder,” I said and picked them up, but Makepeace stepped forward and snatched the shoes away, the milk spilling from the cup in her hand.

  The poor sweep looked as if he would cry, a single tear tracking through the soot. I took the milk and gave it to him and he drained the cup, a white tideline above his lip, a dark shadow of soot left on the cup. I eased the shoes out of Makepeace’s hands and gave them back to the boy. She just let him have them. Her own tears fell. Makepeace took the cup in her hand, a foreign thing, and came to herself. The shoes were too large by half. Makepeace disappeared and returned with rags. Together we bundled them into the toes of the shoes until the boy’s feet fit, the laces tight.

  “Thank you,” he said, his tongue sticking to the top of his mouth.

  Makepeace picked up the old shoes gingerly by the heel and went to bid the boy good day.

  “May I have my shoes back, ma’am?” the sweep asked. “I’ll give them to me brother, for he has none.”

  Makepeace gave them back to him and we watched him go down the stairs, his brushes over his shoulder, his old shoes in his hand, whistling.

  “The boy is in want of a bath,” Makepeace said and she was right, if a wind blew it would turn the street to a storm of black dust. He was in want of more than that. He was in want of his own mother. I looked at Makepeace, a mother in want of her own wayward son. But what of my mother?

  We needn’t have worried about having the chimneys swept, for soon we didn’t have any coal to coax a fire, inviting the damp to spread. It crept up the walls from the cellar and spread into the kitchen; it turned the potatoes a sharp green and Makepeace had no choice but to throw them away. When it rained, the water found a way to slip beneath the slates and slowly pool somewhere in the cavity of the roof, making a puddle of a stain appear on the ceiling of the nursery. The wallpaper in the drawing room grew speckled with mildew.
It felt as if the house had gone out in sympathy with the boat that transported my father, mimicking the sensation of the waves. Money danced through our hands so we had hardly any to live on.

  A loaf of bread sat on the table, untouched. Neither of us willing to take the first slice. It sat, a white accusation on the breadboard, for how long would it last once we started eating it? But Makepeace knew how I felt, she didn’t urge me out onto the street, to send my hands, butterflies at her bidding, through the pockets of strangers. She didn’t say a word. Our utter dependence on my father became more obvious with each day that passed, with each bill that we paid. All I craved was an orange, or a glass of milk, so knowing that the money sat in the cellar became a torment, until I could stand it no longer.

  Waiting until Makepeace’s soft snores cut through the cold air, I coaxed a wick to the fire and waited for it to kindle, before I opened the cellar door. The damp rushed up to meet me and I struggled to protect the candle from a gust. I breathed and waited, thinking Makepeace had heard me, but she slept on. The only sound the echo of a drip.

  Each stair seemed more slippery than the one before, the candle sending a golden ripple across the wet wall. How did we continue to live in it? It was a house built on water. The pillowcase was where I had left it and my pride made me reluctant to pick it up again, but I thought of the warmth the coal would bring, the luxury of butter on our bread, a new pair of thick stockings for Makepeace and me, and it propelled me. The candle sputtered when I put it on the stair, the air so damp I feared it would extinguish the flame, so I hurriedly lifted the pillowcase into my hands and let the knot untwirl; with each spin it felt lighter than I remembered. Inside, all that remained was my poor Miss Poppet, her familiar smooth head cupped in my hand. The idea of warmth and butter and stockings receded and hot tears cut through the cold of my skin. Where was the last of my father’s money? I clutched Miss Poppet to my chest and felt like a child again, tiny and insignificant.

  “Eglantine?” Makepeace’s voice came from the top of the stairs and I quickly stuffed my poor Miss Poppet back in her cocoon of cloth and let her be. Childish props would not hold me up. The candle sputtered with a black hiss, forcing me to walk by Makepeace’s light. I took each step with my hand running along the wall until it was wet and I walked into the kitchen, where it was not much warmer than the cellar.

  “’Tis spent,” Makepeace said as she closed the cellar latch, but it was no repellent to the damp air which seeped up beneath the crack and swirled around our ankles. “I’m sorry. I had no choice. Your father …”

  Hearing his name pained me; I missed him. Any mention of him invoked his absence, made my thoughts linger, made the question scratch at me, the question that might never be answered now – what had become of my mother? My thoughts would circle around, a maze without entrance or exit.

  Makepeace looked at my hands, green with moss or mould, and picked up the bucket of water, sprinkling drops on the ground before she poured some water into a bowl.

  “Why do you do that?” I said, having seen her do it many times before, my voice all frustration.

  Makepeace didn’t look up. “It’s for the spirit in the water, to say thank you,” she said, taking my hands in hers and plunging them into the bucket, applying the last of the soap to the grime.

  “Is there nothing in those lines of my hands? Is nothing written? You were raised a gypsy, surely you can see something there?”

  Makepeace shook her head.

  I took the soap from her and dug it into the lines of my hands. I was no longer a child, I scrubbed at every inch of them until the skin of them was red, trying to dissolve all the lines of my past and future until the soap disappeared. Makepeace pulled my hands out of the water, kissed my palms and folded them in hers.

  “I’m sorry, Eglantine, it was your other grandmother, Sarah, who had the gift for reading palms, not I.”

  My other grandmother. My mother’s mother. She had the gift for reading palms and I’d never even known her name, nor been allowed to give her even a shape in my mind. All I’d been permitted was half of a family and even that I’d been only allowed to view through the shadow and fog of my father’s lies.

  Makepeace held my gaze. She may not have been able to read my palm but she read my mind. In that moment we both knew that it was inevitable: for us to survive, I needed to put my hands to better use.

  Out on the street without the shadow of my father I had felt all his lessons course through my hands, the street a pocket. I kept telling myself that this was just a game, knowing that it was the furthest thing from it. Makepeace and I both depended on what lessons my father had taught me, but it sat uneasy on me, the pressure upon me to be more than the apple of his eye.

  The street was full of reminders of my father. A costermonger’s tanned face had his smile as he pulled the silver change out of his pocket; the cut of a minister’s black spotless clothes; a lady bending down and giving her child a piece of orange, the perfume of it following me down the street. How could I choose which pocket to take from, knowing there would be no gentle bells ringing if I got caught nor affectionate press of my hand against his jacket. There would be no praise.

  I watched a servant girl with her pressed apron and cap go up to the costermonger, his sing-song call ending as she arrived to peruse the fruit, saving his banter for her. And I watched her face colour with each of his compliments, each cheek turning ripe as a plum. When he turned to serve another customer, I plucked her pocket of a small purse, and was gone.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Patrin, 1821

  Amberline had still not returned and I made up my mind. I gathered whatever was of value and bundled it into a carpet bag and with Little Egg at my feet, her warm hand in mine like a seed, went down to the pawnbrokers, ignoring the constant hum of my skin.

  We walked into the shop, so full of stock that daylight barely penetrated the insides. A greasy lamp on the counter threw a pool of light over the claws of a stuffed bear, a silver teapot and a rack of plates, porcelain moons. Mr Sweet sat behind the counter. He watched me walk towards him, his feathered eyebrows raised above his pince-nez, like an owl upon spying a mouse. At the counter I spread out the things that had been in our home; he hardly suppressed a scoff as he’d seen them all before, having passed through his shop already. How easily I had been seduced by the idea of the home Amberline had promised for the three of us. The vardo I’d been raised in was a palace compared to it, for it moved with the seasons. We followed the sun, the seasons, the work. Peg-making, berry-picking, basket-making.

  Old Sweet turned a small cup in his hands and fingered the fringe of our frayed tablecloth until he ferreted to the middle of the pile and pulled out the silver heart that Amberline had made for Egg. He rolled it in his palm. Little Egg watched from my skirts, her eyes wide. I’d kept it from her, saving it for this very day, to pay for whatever she needed.

  “Stark won’t be happy,” Old Sweet said. His incisors were made of gold. Amberline’s happiness held no sway with me.

  “What will you give me for it?” I asked, wanting to be gone from the shop, more like a tomb, all the discarded objects squeezing out the air, exhaling dust.

  Sweet’s teeth gleamed in a grin as he handed me a few coins. “I’ll hang on to this one,” he said. “I’ll charge Stark double to have it back.”

  “And the rest?” I said, needing to feel the road moving beneath my feet.

  “That’s for the lot. Now be off with you and your gypsy brat.”

  I cursed him under my breath but was glad to go.

  The wind ruffled our bonnets and teased the hem of our coats and I felt the wind propel each footstep we took and the chance of undoing all the tangle of our lives. The burn throbbed in my arms, but I ignored it, though at times it pulsed so much that it was like a blinding light caught in the corner of my eye that I could not blink away.

  “Mama?” Little Egg said, her little legs skipping to keep up. I hadn’t realised I had been stridi
ng so fast, the wind at my back, a human sail. I pulled her up into my arms.

  “We are going to the country,” I said. But was I doing the right thing tearing her away from the only life she’d known and her precious father? But it was he who had abandoned us, not leaving word or hope of his return, treating the truth like silvered baubles to be melted down with brass and called gold. Fool’s gold. And I had been the fool.

  “Papa?”

  “He’s had to go away for a little while,” I said and felt the creep of guilt – for I knew he loved her, but I knew also that we’d always come second to the sight of a more glittering prize. Amberline was all magpie, all bravado. His eye was always on the shine. The quick grab and theft of it. His kingdom made of glitter, facet, carat, coin. My kingdom I ached to return to – green canopy, red wagon, leaves and water. At the heart of it I wanted to place my daughter, to keep her safe, that would be my blessing, that I owed her. To see her thrive, beyond the soot, the smutty fog and the never-ending hoarfrost of grime.

  The city receded as I pushed forward; a skylark wheeled above our heads in the blue, transfixing Little Egg’s eye. The only birds she’d ever seen were the gulls and the crows that scavenged in the dust heaps and the shoreline of the Thames. The traffic reduced to the odd farmer’s wagon, their horse bits singing past us, my heart singing along with it, music to my ears.

  I lifted Egg onto my back, all the skin on my arms screaming, and walked with her strapped there with my shawl. When night fell we camped beneath a hayrick, wrapped close together in my woollen cloak. At first light I hoisted my still-sleeping girl onto my back, the shawl keeping her close. The last of the evening stars were extinguished one by one with my footsteps.

  I walked like that for three days, keeping to the quiet paths, the ones that ran like a snail’s trail, silvery through the long grass and overgrown, my eyes to the tops of the branches, the arrangement of stones, the twisted knots of grass, the signs that would lead me home.