I woke suddenly and realised the steamer had left Georgetown. Folding my hands together, I said a little prayer that Ruby would make her way home safely. I was stiff and sore from sleeping on my rough bed of ropes. I stood up and stretched. All around lay the dark waters of the Bay of Bengal. A soft dawn light rippled on the surface of the sea.
On the other side of the bay was India. Everything would be different there. Without the big girls making trouble, Mr Arthur would be his old self. Perhaps the Indians would love the Lilliputians and there would be no more money worries. And Tilly and I would be friends again.
I took Topsy and Turvy out of my pocket and stared at their little clay faces. I’d had them since I was tiny but Tilly was right, I wasn’t a baby any more. I kissed each of them on the forehead, shut my eyes and threw them over the side of the steamer. I didn’t hear them splash in the water. Nor did I search for them. I kept my gaze fixed on the distant horizon.
30
BREAD AND WATER
Poesy Swift
The next day, I sat up in the bow of the steamer with Charlie and Lionel, watching the waves churn white around us. It always smelt better in the bow, away from the stink of the coal. The sea air coated our skin but it was nice to lick your lips and taste the saltiness. It made all the troubles of the night seem like a bad dream.
Charlie was practising palming a coin, turning the coppery penny between his fingers and over the back of his knuckles and then slipping it into his palm. I loved to watch the way his hands worked, the way his bones and sinews rippled with movement, the way the coin disappeared between his fingers and then reappeared again as if he really had magic in his skin.
Lionel had a deck of cards and fanned them out, fiddling with their corners.
‘You shouldn’t bring them up here to practise. They’ll warp from the sea air,’ said Charlie. ‘Or blow away.’
‘They’re my cards,’ said Lionel.
‘Well, if you lose them, don’t think you can borrow mine.’
As if on cue, a gust of wind swept up over the bow and blasted the three of us. I held onto my skirts but Lionel lost his grip on the fanned-out playing cards and they scattered across the deck. We all dived onto our knees and started crawling about, trying to help him retrieve them, but two lifted into the air and over the railing.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Lionel defensively. ‘I can still do most of my tricks without them.’
Charlie said nothing, but our eyes met and I knew that look of scorn and pity. Since the terrible show with Danny McGee, Lionel had been trying to learn Charlie’s magic, but he couldn’t master the sleight of hand. It was as though his man-sized, meaty fingers had grown too big to manage the deft moves.
‘We should get back down to the dining hall,’ I said. ‘We’ll be late for rehearsal.’
‘We don’t need to rehearse again today,’ said Lionel. ‘Mr Arthur says we should have some lessons.’
Charlie laughed. ‘Good, I’ll teach Poesy coin tricks. That’s the only lesson she’s likely to get this week.’
‘Oh will you shut up. Mr Arthur says some nosey parker asked about our “teacher”. So we’re to have lessons.’
‘Who with?’ asked Charlie.
‘Mr Arthur himself. He says he’ll teach us parsing.’
‘What’s parsing?’ asked Charlie.
‘I think it’s a ball game,’ said Lionel.
‘No, it’s actually something to do with grammar,’ I said.
Then we all fell silent, each of us pondering how long these lessons might last.
We were on our way back to the dining room when we heard Mr Arthur shouting. It ricocheted through me, bruising my heart and lungs. I couldn’t bear the thought of any more trouble. He wasn’t arguing with one of the girls but with a man with a strong accent. Lionel quickened his pace. Charlie and I hung back, hoping the argument would settle before we could be caught up in it.
‘I will not have passengers on my ship treated as criminals,’ shouted the Captain. ‘Especially not a young lady.’
‘She’s not a young lady,’ said Mr Arthur. ‘She’s a mere child. And a wretched, wilful one at that. As her guardian, I have the right to discipline her.’
‘Not on my ship.’ The Captain spoke with a Dutch accent, clipping each word. ‘Bread and water! You give instructions to my galley to serve this girl bread and water! What sort of a pirate vessel do you think I am running?’
Charlie looked at me and raised one eyebrow.
‘Ruby! She must have come back in the middle of the night,’ he whispered. ‘Who else could it be?’
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so relieved in my life. If Mr Arthur had her locked up, at least she was safe with us again. I took Charlie by the wrist and dragged him into the hallway. I had to hear the rest.
Mr Arthur had drawn himself up to his full height but the Captain towered over him. ‘In Penang, sir, this “young lady” attempted to run away with the first mate of the Tracchus. When it became clear to her what the cost of a fare home would be, she rightly came skulking back to our troupe, her family. I am acting in loco parentis for the child and I believe such behaviour should be punished.’
The Captain pushed past him. ‘You are not fit to be in charge of these children,’ he said, his ‘r’s rolling out of his mouth in a garbled rage.
Mr Arthur stood by as the Captain unlocked a nearby cabin door.
‘Come, child.’
Ruby stepped out, her eyes wild, her face gaunt and pale.
She walked past Mr Arthur as if he wasn’t even there. She walked past all of us as if she were alone on the wide sea. She looked thinner, the lovely full ripeness in her cheeks gone. Her movements were odd and jerky, like those of a broken wind-up toy. She wasn’t the same girl that had led the stampede on the ship in Singapore harbour. She made her way up to the upper deck, clinging to the railing on the stairs.
‘You, child,’ called the Captain, pointing at me. ‘Follow the girl and mind she gets some fresh air. And, boy,’ he said, laying his hand roughly on Lionel’s shoulder, ‘go and fetch the matron and tell her the girl has been set free.’
Ruby came and slept in our dormitory, dragging her bedding from the other cabin and rolling it out on the bench beside me – the only empty space left. She had a bruise on her cheek and her eyes were flat and almost colourless. She lay with her back to me all night, but in the early dawn I was woken by the sound of her crying. I curled my body around her and drew her closer and after a while her sobbing slowed.
‘You had to come back, Ruby. For Beryl and Pearl. Your sisters,’ I whispered. ‘They thought they’d lost you.’
‘I hate them,’ she said.
‘Who?’ I whispered, hoping that the other girls wouldn’t wake.
‘Men. The Butcher and every man in the Empire.’
‘But Mr Arthur was so worried about you,’ I said.
Ruby shut her eyes. ‘Nobody cares about me.’
I wanted to say, ‘I care about you,’ but instead I pressed my forehead against her back and held her tightly until she fell asleep.
31
MESMERISM
Tilly Sweetrick
India. The littlies fussed and fizzed at the prospect of seeing elephants and nabobs until I wanted to slap them. We should have been mourning the fact that we weren’t arriving in America. The steamer docked at a port and then a small ferry took us upstream to Calcutta. We chugged up the Hooghly, a wide, wide river with palm trees on its banks and glistening, brown-skinned men swimming from the ghats.
Calcutta wasn’t what I expected. It was beautiful and terrible with its Eden gardens, wide avenues, dilapidated mansions and piles of rotting figurines on the bank. The Butcher said they were effigies from puja ceremonies that the Hindus held, and he knew the names of their gods: Kali and Shiva. He made a remark about Kali being a teenage girl. As if that black-and-blue monster effigy with water washing through her was a girl. It made me shudder.
We crowded i
nto gharries for the ride through the city. Somehow, I was stuck with all the Fintons. Or they were stuck with each other. You could see they were no happier about it than me. Eloise, Eunice and Eliza didn’t often seek each other’s company.
Charlie Byrne climbed up beside the driver and turned back to grin at us. ‘India,’ he said. ‘At last.’ He was a strange boy. He seemed to slip on a different skin from the moment we stepped off the ferry and onto the ghats, and his green eyes had grown brighter, like shiny glass.
‘Pooh, what’s so special about India,’ said Eunice. ‘I don’t know why we couldn’t do a season in Rangoon.’
‘You say the stupidest things, Eunice,’ said Eliza. ‘You know Mr Arthur won’t take us there.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why can’t we go there?’
‘Because of what happened when he was tiny, only as big as Daisy. Mr Arthur’s brother was murdered in Rangoon.’
‘No he wasn’t,’ interjected Lo. ‘He shot himself.’
Eliza’s face grew red and splotchy. ‘You weren’t there. Arthur was. Arthur says he was murdered. He saw Jimmy lying on the top of the stairs, dead.’
‘So he was murdered with his own gun and it was found under him, still clutched in his own hand?’ said Lo, pursing her lips. ‘Mrs Essie was there too. It didn’t stop her going back to Rangoon.’
‘Mrs Essie didn’t find the corpse,’ said Eliza. ‘If I found you dead and bleeding outside my room, I would never feel the same about that place again. I would never want to go back there. What is wrong with all you people? Can’t you see he’s only human? He’s a man and once he was a boy.’
Eliza could make all the excuses she liked for the Butcher. It didn’t matter what had happened to him when he was little. It was who he had become that mattered to us now.
Calcutta was white and grey – all the lovely grand buildings were streaked with stains from the monsoon. There were people in uniform everywhere, which was a good sign. I liked having soldiers in the audience.
We rode past the Victoria Memorial where white stone lay in great piles and brown men glistened with sweat, past bazaars where swarms of Indians bustled from one stall to the next, past beggars and tea-wallahs. Our hotel was an old building with rusting iron lacework that bled brown stains down the walls. As soon as we were through the lobby, Poesy was beside me. She came up the stairs with her arm linked through Ruby’s, as if she was Ruby’s new best friend. But Ruby’s face looked odd and twisted and her mouth sunken, as though she’d been sucking on sour limes.
We stood out on the balcony overlooking a narrow street teeming with natives. Poesy took a deep breath and made her usual sort of remark, about how the city smelt delicious – a sweetness of milky tea and spices. She always noticed the strangest things.
‘Look,’ she said, pointing, ‘Isn’t it lovely.’ A woman stood on an opposite rooftop hanging out coloured cloths, a line of saris floating in the breeze beside her.
‘That’s a bad sign,’ I said. ‘We must be right on the edge of Blacktown.’
‘Why must you spoil it, Tilly?’ said Poesy.
‘The Butcher should have found us lodgings closer to the theatre.’
I looked at the brilliantly coloured floating saris and then down at my day dress, looking tattier and greyer every day. It was awfully threadbare too, and I felt another surge of irritation with the Butcher. As soon as we were in our rooms, Thrupp made us take everything off, except our petticoats, to ‘reduce wear and tear’. So we sat about feeling like paupers.
At breakfast the next morning, Charlie Byrne had his Magician’s Annual propped open in his lap as he spooned egg into his mouth. He always had his nose in a book, or else his hands would be flitting like wings as he practised his tricks.
‘Do you ever read anything other than magic annuals?’ I asked.
‘ ’Course I do,’ he said.
‘Well, can you lend me something then? I’ve read my magazines so many times I’m utterly bored. Anything will do. Anything.’
So on a hot Bengal afternoon, while we lay about in our petticoats on our beds, I picked up Charlie’s book and began to flick through the pages.
‘Charlie’s lent me this,’ I said, waving the book at Poesy. I rather liked that it annoyed her, even if we were pretending we were friends again. She was helping Daisy tie her curls with rags so that they wouldn’t snarl while she took her afternoon nap. She pretended not to hear me but I knew her ears had pricked up. Miss Poesy thought Charlie was her special possession. She didn’t like to think of any other girl owning pieces of him.
I turned back to the book and I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand on end as I read. Mesmerism. It was a how-to book of mesmerism. I’d seen a magician do it once on stage in San Francisco. He’d made a man quack like a duck. ‘We should try this,’ I said. ‘Try a little experiment in mass hypnosis!’
‘What?’ asked Poesy.
I didn’t bother to answer. I just held the book up and pointed at the title. She took a step closer.
‘You shouldn’t even think about it. Mesmerism is dangerous. I saw Mrs Annie Besant do it in Melbourne and she said you could paralyse the brain with hypnosis. She says Indian magic men hypnotise everyone in their audiences to make them believe in their conjuring. But you have to know how to go about it properly. People can hurt themselves with their thoughts.’
‘I don’t believe any of the girls in this room have a single thought inside their airy heads,’ I said.
‘Don’t be flippant, Tilly. I’m serious,’ she said, pouting.
‘I’m serious too. A serious mesmerist.’
Half an hour later, while the littlest and most of the big girls lay sleeping, I opened the door to the connecting bedrooms and ten of us gathered in the middling girls’ bedroom. Ruby sat alone on a stool beside the window. Since Tempe and Clarissa had gone, she’d turned very moody. So now she sat gazing out over Calcutta, only half listening to me, as I read out the instructions for mass hypnosis.
We pushed some of the beds closer together and made everyone join in, even Ruby and Poesy, so there were four girls on each bed.
‘All right, then,’ I said. ‘I will be the mesmerist and I am going to hypnotise all of you. If it works, it will be as if you were having a nap. And if it doesn’t work, and you all fall asleep, then we still will be having a nap, so all will be well.’
They obediently closed their eyes and listened as I chanted, ‘Relax and listen to the sound of my voice. There is only my voice. Relax and listen to the soothing sound of my voice. There is only my voice.’
Iris giggled and I gave her an evil look so she shut her eyes again, though I was trying not to laugh myself.
‘You will do what I say. You want to do what I say. You cannot keep your eyes open. They are too heavy. They must stay closed and allow you to concentrate entirely on the sound of my voice. There is nothing else. Drowsy. Sleepy. My voice. Heavy. You are growing sleepy.’
I kept my voice monotonously low and soothing, describing how everyone’s limbs were growing leaden as I willed them to sleep. Actually, I think I might have made a very fine mesmerist. Instinctively, I understood how to hold an audience in my thrall. Poesy opened one eye and shut it again quickly when she realised I was looking straight at her. Without stopping my monotonous drone, I tiptoed over to her and gripped her chin in my hand. Her eyes flew open in alarm but I held them in my gaze, firm and steady. I pinched her chin so hard that tears sprang to her eyes. But she didn’t cry out. I had to admire her for that.
I tiptoed around the circle of girls, checking to see which ones were peeking and which were in thrall to my voice. Some of them seemed to be nodding off. Ruby sat upright with her eyes shut. There was something odd about her face. Her mouth was slack and her hands hung limply by her side. She looked like a sleepwalker. I realised I might have cracked it. I had mesmerised Ruby Kelly.
I focused all my attention on her. I felt a little shiver run up my spine. I’m not sure if it was fe
ar or the thrill of success.
As the other girls slept on or opened their eyes to watch, I asked Ruby to raise one hand in the air. And she obeyed me. I focused all my attention on her now, the blue cloth-covered book in my hand. The first thing it described was autosuggestion, so I tried it. I didn’t mean any harm.
‘Now, when I say the word “duck”, I want you to say “quack”.’
When I said ‘duck’, Ruby obediently replied with a ‘quack’.
‘She’s faking this,’ whispered Iris. But I knew I’d done something extraordinary and I was determined to prove it to Iris and all the others.
‘Now, Ruby, you are going to go back in time. I have the power to take you back, back, back to other times in your life. I want to take you back to when you were a little girl. Let’s say your seventh birthday. You are seven years old again, Ruby. It is your birthday today. What presents did you get?’
Ruby’s eyes rolled back beneath their lids. Her face twitched. For a moment she said nothing, and then she spoke in a different voice. A younger voice.
‘Oh, a doll. A pretty doll. Thank you, Mama. No, I don’t want to share it with Beryl. It’s my doll.’
Everyone snickered behind their hands. I grinned at the others, triumphant.
‘Now let’s take you forward again. Through the years, past all your birthdays. Don’t stop at any one event. We are taking you to last week. To Georgetown. You remember when you were in Georgetown, don’t you, Ruby? In Georgetown on the island of Penang?’
I saw Poesy’s hands flit at me as if to signal me to stop, but it was too late. Ruby was there, back at our last day on the island of Penang. Slowly, gently I prompted her through each hour of the evening. It seemed to be going swimmingly until she began to whimper.
‘And then, you walked down to the harbour,’ I said, keeping my voice smooth and steady, so as not to break the spell.
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