The Linnet Bird: A Novel

by Linda Holeman

  Mother kept her head lowered as he told his story. She was always tired, exhausted after her fourteen-hour days at the sewing press in the Pinnock Room at the bookbinders, surrounded by piles of schoolbooks waiting to be covered: Goldsmith’s England, Mangnall’s Questions, Carpenter’s Spelling, and, of course, the towering stacks of Pinnock’s Catechisms.

  “I was never one to turn away a maid in distress,” Ram would go on. “I took her in, didn’t I, took her in and gave her a meal and a strong fire to warm herself. She might have been proud at one point, aye, but it didn’t take long to persuade her that my roof and my bed were a damn sight better than what waited for her out in the streets.”

  Sometimes he changed the details; in one version he stopped her as she was about to throw herself off the miasmal banks of the River Mersey into the cold gray water. In another he fought off a band of longshoremen who were trying to force themselves on her in the shadow of the old grave dock where the ships of the slave trade had once been repaired.

  “In due time I even let her use my name, so she didn’t have to carry the shame of a bastard child,” he’d go on, looking into my face. “This is where you come from,” he’d usually add at this point, glaring at me now as if I were about to argue. “And don’t you forget it. No matter what fancy tales your mother puts into your head, you were born and raised on Back Phoebe Anne Street. You’ve the smell of the Mersey in your nostrils and you’ve been marked by the fish; there can be no mistake about the origins of one what bears the mark of the fish. You’re the daughter of a sailor. Any fool could figure that out.”

  He was referring to the birthmark on the soft skin on the underside of my forearm, just above my wrist: a small, slightly raised port-wine stain in an elongated oval with two small projections at one end. It did have the shape of a tailed fish, I had to admit, but I didn’t believe it had anything to do with the blood that coursed through me.

  While the man I then called Da ranted this old and tedious story about his saving of my mother, I sat, like her, impassive, but only because she kept her cool thin hand on my arm, her broken thumbnail, rimmed with ink, absently stroking my birthmark. It was so much harder for me to sit quietly than it was for her, and I don’t believe it had anything to do with my age. I saw then, young as I was, that she had nothing left in her to stand up to him or anyone; she accepted Ram Munt and his rude manners in a way I couldn’t understand. I burned with shame for her and with hatred for him for as long as my memory went back.

  While I struggled with the rage that made my breath quicken, my mother’s face showed nothing as she listened to Ram’s familiar chants. Had she always been so accepting, so beaten? Occasionally she tried to elicit pity for him, telling me what damage had been done to him as a boy forced aboard those ships. “He was beaten daily, and used for the men’s pleasure whenever they felt the need,” she’d said. “It hardened him. Try to think of what he might have been like as a boy, as a child called Ramsey,” she said once. But I couldn’t. Nothing would make me lose my hatred of him, for how he treated her.

  After he’d stumble to bed when his weekly tirade was done, I’d put my arms around my mother. “Never mind him,” I’d whisper. “Tell me about Rodney Street again,” I’d urge, knowing this was her one shining moment, her only story, and her mouth would turn up in a faint smile and she’d tell me the beloved tale, one more time, about her job as a lady’s maid when she came to Liverpool from Edinburgh, and her liaison with a fine young man who spent one rainy December in the grand Georgian home on Rodney Street. Mother said she was sure he was of noble blood, so fine were his features, his back so straight and hands so gentle, his manners and way of speaking enough to make her weep just remembering. His name, she said, was for her only to know, and it would do me no good to have knowledge of it. When his visit was over and he’d had to leave Liverpool, he promised her he’d be back for her by Candlemas or, at the very latest, the end of March, Lady Day. He had plans to visit America in May and he was going to take my mother with him. To America, she said.

  Here my mother’s face would glow softly from within and she would sit quietly, remembering. But the story had no further happiness. The fine young man didn’t come back to Rodney Street, and eventually it was discovered what Frances Gow had been up to. She was unceremoniously dismissed, in shame, without a character to ensure her of another job, and it was three weeks after this, destitute and desperate, that Ram Munt had offered her shelter.

  “I really had no choice, Linny, none at all,” was the way she always finished. “I tried to find him—your father. I went back to the house on Rodney Street so many times and stood, hidden in shadows across the street, in case he might come again. He’d have no way to locate me, after all. And then after you were born, I had a chance to talk to the girls in the kitchen, but they swore they’d never seen him again. What else could I do, Linny? He never knew about you. If he had, he’d have married me, I know,” my mother said, “for he really and truly loved me. There seemed no other way for me, and so I did what I had to do.” Here she’d look in Da’s direction, where he lay sprawled, facedown across the bed, his snoring a steady muffled drone.

  Every few months she’d get down the carved fruitwood box she kept hidden in the back of the dish dresser. The box contained a small round mirror backed with ormolu, the Wordsworth book that contained The Green Linnet—the poem about my name—and a heart-shaped pendant of warm gold. Upon its surface, designed with the tiniest seed pearls, was a bird—my mother told me she thought of it as a linnet. In its beak was a branch of miniature green stones that Mother said were emeralds. Ram Munt said they were cheap glass.

  “He gave me these things, your father did. The mirror, he said, because he loved to look at my face. The book, because he loved to hear my voice as I read aloud. And the pendant, he told me, was his heart to mine,” she’d say, rubbing her fingers over the softly glowing surface. “It will be yours one day, Linny. To remember that you may have the smell of the Mersey in your nostrils but it doesn’t run through your blood.”

  I always nodded and smiled; I listened to that story, over and over, right until the day my mother died, quickly and soundlessly, taken by a rapid fever that sucked her already thin body of every ounce of life. I was well past ten and had worked alongside her at the bookbinders since I’d turned six. I had started as a gatherer, collecting the massive piles of sheets sent from the printer and running them to where the folders sat at wide tables. Once they had flattened the foldings of each sheet with a small ivory or bone folding knife, the sheets were collated and then taken to the sewers. My mother had worked the sewing press, joining the groups of sheets with a curious kettle stitch. She could sew two or three thousand sheets a day. Just before my mother died I had moved up to a folder and owned my own small bone knife. If all went as planned I would eventually become a sewer when I reached fourteen.

  Every Sunday, for the first year after her death, I visited her simple grave in the low-lying area of the cemetery of what was known as the Sailor’s Church—for the Mersey flowed right past it at the bottom of Chapel Street. Of course it was really Our Lady and St. Nicholas Parish Church. I would stay there for some time, hidden amid the damp, nettle-fringed headstones and poorer crosses, my fingers tracing the letters of her name—Frances Gow—carved with shallow strokes into the unpainted wooden cross. I always thought of how Da wouldn’t even pay to have the bells rung as she was buried, so there was only a sad pauper’s funeral for her, with some of the other sewers from the bookbindery and a few of our neighbors come to stand at the end of the cemetery, and not even a cup of tea for them afterward.

  My mother had deserved more than that, and I hated Da anew, each Sunday, with the memories of how he hadn’t treated her properly, even in death.

  On one of these visits, on an afternoon dark with rain, a great black bird watched me from a foot away, its cruel beak jabbing the thin, beaten grass. I saw its orange, unblinking eye and shivered, and as it rose into the air with a s
napping of wings like wet sheets being shaken, I decided I would try to find my father. A child’s dream, surely, but often it is the dream that becomes reality and necessary for hope. And so I set off further north than I had ever been in the city, up to Mount Pleasant, and by asking numerous times eventually found Rodney Street.

  It was a long way from Back Phoebe Anne Street, but if the weather was clear I would often go there on a Sunday after that, walking up and down the quiet and most prestigious street in Liverpool, looking at the Georgian homes with their upper balconies of fine wrought iron. I saw girls that I knew to be my age, but how different they looked. Back on Vauxhall Road I looked like every other girl with my too-short, patched, and stained work dress, my miserable scuffed boots, my ragged shawl. The girls here wore beautiful dresses and capes of velvet. Their stockings were clean and undarned and their shoes gleamed, sometimes with silver buckles. Their hair was tied up in satin ribbons, their skin unmarked, their eyes clear as they gazed right through me. I was nothing, a poor girl from down near the docks. No one spoke to me except for one stout matron who pushed past me on the street as I stood looking at one of the fine houses. “Be on your way, girl,” she huffed. “This is a respectable street. We don’t need your kind here.”

  I ignored her. I didn’t care what she or any of the other people in Mount Pleasant thought of me. I carefully studied each man I saw, whether walking along the street or riding by on horse or, if he was visible, through the windows of the polished broughams and high-wheeled phaetons, looking for the face I saw in my head, one that had gold-flecked eyes shaped like mine, that had my own fair hair.

  I knew what he would look like, for I’d made him as real as my mother’s story.

  And at the end of each of those fruitless Sunday afternoons I’d make my way back toward the lower end of the city. As the houses grew smaller and closer together, turning to miserable and squalid dwellings, I felt the pinch of my own life. The feeling was true and alive as my heels, rubbed raw with boots from the pawnshop, grown too small.

  SURELY MY MOTHER had been a lady’s maid, for didn’t she know how to read and write, and wasn’t her voice gentle, her speech patterns—although carrying a soft Scottish brogue—cultured? And she knew the proper way to do things; she insisted that I sit up straight at our simple meals, a clean rag spread on my lap, and instructed me how to hold my knife and fork and cut small bites and chew slowly and discuss pleasant subjects at table. She helped me with my reading and even spent a few pennies from each of her pay packets buying spoiled Pinnock’s Catechisms from the office of the bookbinders. She could purchase one of the little sixpenny schoolbooks for a ha’penny if it were flawed and unsalable—the pages put in upside down or the cover marred. This was our secret; Da would never have allowed her to spend money on anything as unimportant as a book. I kept them hidden under my own pallet and most evenings, when my mother was asleep and Da out at a tavern or public house, I’d read until I fell asleep.

  My favorites of these readers were the dozens of volumes in the Friend to Youth series. There were questions and answers on subjects ranging from history to business to geography to poetry. Of course I couldn’t be choosy; once, the only new one I had to study for a whole two weeks was A Catechism of Mechanics: An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Machinery.

  My mother also taught me to look people in the face when I spoke to them and she always, always corrected my speech, telling me that if I spoke like the people on the street and in the factories I would never rise above them. “And you must get yourself away from here, Linny,” she’d often say. “There’s more than this, more than the street and the work. I can’t bear to think of you never knowing anything else.”

  Da laughed at her, asking her what she meant about rising above anyone. What did she think she was getting me ready to be—did she imagine I’d become a lady’s maid, as she claimed she had been? “She’ll stay at the bookbinders with you, a well-respected trade, and then find someone to marry her, get her away from my table. Let someone else worry about feeding her.”

  But my mother never stopped planning. It was as if she were desperate, determined to never let me forget that she hadn’t come from this place, and that I must leave it by any means. Dreaming of a better life for me seemed to bring her the only moments of happiness she knew.

  “She could be a governess, if given a chance. She has a fine way with reading. She would be perfect as a governess,” she’d said one night at supper. “If only she had the proper clothing, she might, through the church, be put in touch with the right people. It need never be mentioned she’s from off Vauxhall Road. She’s perfected my voice. It could be said she’s come down from Scotland. Her background need never . . .” Her voice trailed off. She had a dull sheen on her brow and more than once during the meal of bacon crumbled into boiled potatoes, which she didn’t touch, she put her hand to her forehead, then pulled away her fingers and looked at them, as if in surprise. “If she were but given a chance,” she repeated, the unusual flush on her cheeks growing even deeper, “my girl would do me proud.” There was a dangerous spark in her eyes, and interpreting it as boldness, I matched it with my own, speaking out as I never had around Ram Munt.

  “I know what I’d like to do,” I said, and my mother turned to me, her mouth in a strained smile, expecting, I’m sure, my agreement with her on her vague plan, even though we both knew that a girl from the low end of Liverpool could never pass as a governess. “I’d like to decorate the books at the printers.”

  The odd smile faded. “What do you mean?”

  “I’d like to be a finisher, like Mr. Broughton in the Extra Finishing shop.”

  Her face darkened. “When have you been up there, to the third floor?”

  “The overlooker sometimes sends me up with messages for Mr. Broughton. There are beautiful things there.” I smiled, remembering. “I’ve seen him laying a book with gold and then stamping it with heated tools. There were ever so many tools—rounds, scrolls, diamonds, and all the letters. And Mr. Broughton can create whatever design comes out of his own head, pressing those hot shapes and letters. Oh, think of it! To create such a wondrous—” I stopped, seeing disappointment on my mother’s face, hearing Ram’s snicker.

  “But that’s not a job for a lady,” my mother said. “No woman could ever do that. You know it’s only boys brought in as apprentices to the finishers. And that of course only men are clever enough for the Extra Finishing. Whatever would put that idea into your head?”

  Now I couldn’t admit that Mr. Broughton had let me experiment more than once in those few moments of stolen time. I had washed vellum and colored initials and even stamped gold tooling into a ruined piece of calfskin. He seemed to enjoy the clandestine activities—quickly showing me this and that, glancing over his shoulder all the while—as much as I did.

  Da’s snicker had turned to laughter and he enjoyed himself for a full minute before telling me, as he wiped at his eyes, to do what I did best—fill his bowl with more potatoes—and to never again mention such ridiculous plans as governesses or finishers.

  Later that evening the fever that had been toying with my mother for the last twenty-four hours took a firm grip.

  And less than a year after she died, Da brought home Mr. Jacobs.

  Chapter Three

  AFTER THE VISIT FROM MR. JACOBS, RAM KEPT ME BUSY. I never again called him Da; I rarely addressed him at all, but if I did, it was by his name. Ram couldn’t bring customers to our second-floor room on a regular basis, afraid that if the landlord got wind of what was going on we’d be thrown out or, worse for my father, the landlord would demand a percentage. Instead, after I came home from my ten hours at the bookbinders, he’d make me change out of my ragged and stained work dress into a clean, childish frock and pinafore he’d bought from the pawnshop. I’d plait my hair, put on the straw bonnet with blue ribbons he’d brought home along with the dress and pinafore, and then he’d take me to the customers.

  I never knew
how he found the men. They were always old, or so they seemed. And they were men who liked what I was then, a small, delicate child who appeared at the doors of their hotels or lodging or boarding houses, my hand held by the short, broad, loutish fellow.

  There were all manner of men. Most came to Liverpool on business from London or Manchester or from Scotland or as far away as Ireland. Some were rough, and some were kind. Some took ages to finish and others were off almost as soon as I lifted my skirt and sat on the edge of the bed or leaned over a table.

  While I might visit two unknown men some nights, an hour each—Ram was always waiting to knock on the door to collect the money when their time was up—there were also regulars who paid for the whole evening. I had a Monday, a Wednesday, and a Thursday. These three became quite dear to me, really, because they were the kind ones; they would rather see a child smile than cry. With them I knew what to expect and from them I learned about myself.

  Monday insisted on calling me Ophelia and always wept after his rather lackluster, predictable performance, giving me bags of sweets and stroking my hair. He told me about Shakespeare, quoting from his plays and sonnets. Monday said he was a playwright as well, like Mr. Shakespeare, but could get no recognition. He said when he’d grown obsessed with his need to have his work taken seriously, ignoring all else, his wife left him, taking their young daughter. At this his tears turned to deep sobs and he would shake his head, gazing at me in the rumpled bedding as if it grieved him terribly to have me near him, and yet he couldn’t keep away. “My innocent,” he’d say, wringing his hands. “So innocent, so pure, but one born of a need to understand life’s mysteries. I see it there in your face, your desire to make sense of all that’s around you.”