I walked beside Shaker through a number of streets. The sun had come out and it was warmer than it had been for several days. We stopped at a muddy lane that led to a small church surrounded by dark yews.
“There’s a graveyard here, but we would have to seek permission. The church’s rules, of course.”
I nodded. “And what would the rule for an unbaptized bastard child be?” In the next sentence I answered my own question. “A shallow grave in unhallowed ground, among unclaimed drunks and paupers. No. I don’t want to forever think of Frances in a place like that.”
“There’s somewhere else,” he said, slowly. “I just didn’t know what you wanted.” He turned, and again I stuck to him like a shadow as we walked through the small village of Everton. I’d heard of Everton. Beyond the houses and shops was countryside. I’d never been in the country.
After a ten-minute walk we emerged onto a quiet road. Shaker stopped and parted a hedgerow and I stepped through. We stood in a small copse of hawthorne trees. The ground was soggy with fallen leaves, and twigs snapped under our feet when we moved. There was no sound but the dripping of the darkened boughs. There was the unfamiliar smell of grass after a rain. I breathed it in; the smells that were mine were the oiliness of the docks, rotting food thrown from stalls, animal and human offal in the streets, and the overpowering odors of the men—either the pungent unwashed smell of one class or too much cologne and hair pomade of another. In front of us, one brave holly bush showed the beginnings of scarlet berries in the wintry air and the long grass was soft and only beginning to lose its rich green. “I thought perhaps here,” Shaker said.
“Yes,” I said. “This is a good place. This is the right place for her.”
Using the coal shovel, Shaker helped me bury Frances under the holly bush and then backed away. I found a small, pink-streaked rock and nestled it into the freshly turned earth at the top of the small mound, then said a prayer for her. I knelt there for a time—again, time that had no length or breadth. I was aware of Shaker somewhere behind me. Finally he put his hand under my elbow to help me up, saying, “I like to come here and think. Nobody else seems to bother with it. She won’t be disturbed.”
And then we walked back together in silence, slowly, because I was still weak. When we entered the dining room Nan and Merrie were just leaving and there was a pot of savory stew bubbling over a steady fire, a fresh loaf of bread on the sideboard. The three of us had our dinner in the narrow but comfortable dining room with its wallpaper an elaborate tea-rose cluster design only slightly faded, broken horizontally by a white dado freshly painted. We sat at a table smelling of beeswax polish and ate from delicate plates. Although their pattern was unrecognizable through decades of washing, and there were a few nicks in some of the edges, the china retained an unmistakable delicacy. We sat and ate without speaking, each in our own thoughts, as if we had done this all our lives.
Chapter Twelve
I SLEPT ON THE PALLET IN MRS. SMALLPIECE’S ROOM THAT NIGHT, a deep, dreamless sleep, a sleep I hadn’t had for months or maybe years, maybe since I was a child sleeping beside my mother. As I woke the next morning, through habit I put my hand to my waistband and then my belly. My eyes opened wide in the morning light as I realized both were empty, and I remembered all that had happened.
“Where is Shaker?” I asked, seeing Mrs. Smallpiece working on a piece of needlework in front of the fire. My voice surprised me; it was almost timid.
“He’s at work, good, honest work, as all God-fearing people should be.”
I rose and smoothed the sheets and folded the blankets, patting the pillow into shape.
“Chamber pot’s behind the screen,” she said, her voice pinched, as if it hurt her throat to have to offer me the opportunity to add my own night water to her smelly pot. “Best do something with that hair; you’re a sight. There’s a comb by the washbasin.”
“Where does he work?” I asked, with that same rather cowed tone.
“At the Lyceum,” she answered shortly.
“The Lyceum on Bold Street?” I knew the place well; right on the corner of Bold and Ranelagh streets, it was a Gentlemen’s Club, an impressive building with a small, grassy treed semicircular area enclosed by an open iron fence. I had passed it often, admiring its columns and the broad marble steps leading to its grand recessed entrance.
She nodded once. “Hurry yourself. And when you’re done take the pot down and empty it in the privy at the back, then come back up here and help me with my hair. I dismissed that useless Nan—she and her lazy bacon-faced daughter expect to be paid good money for next to no help. Now that you’re here to take on their jobs,” she added, and I opened my mouth to protest, but she didn’t give me a chance to speak. She put down her needle and held up her hands. The joints were swollen and twisted; it must have been painful for her to sew. “More suffering for my sins,” she said. “You’ll be afflicted by something for your own wickedness, if you haven’t been already. And the child was better born dead; it would have been an idiot, being fathered by hundreds.”
I took a deep breath to stop myself from hissing something back at her, all traces of my former tentativeness disappearing with her words. A hot rage swept over me at her cruel mention of my perfect child. I stepped behind the screen, thankful to be out of her view for even the time it took me to relieve myself. And I had no intention of staying, even though I hadn’t let myself think of Paradise Street since the day before. The last thing I would ever do would be servant to a miserable old woman with an eye cold as a haddock.
SHAKER ARRIVED HOME for the evening meal looking somehow different than he had when I’d first seen him in the Green Firkin. It was something more than being clean shaven, his long hair neatly combed. It went deeper than that. What had changed in his face?
We said hello to each other when he came in, both of us suddenly shy.
“I don’t think she’s prepared a proper meal in her life,” Mrs. Smallpiece complained. “I had to talk her through every step. Although she does have strength in her hands. And you know I can barely handle the stairs, what with my legs, so at least she was of some use in the fetching and carrying.”
Shaker nodded, clearing his throat as if embarrassed. “Did Nan not come in to help today, Mother? And what of little Merrie?” He looked around. “Who is serving dinner, then?”
When his mother didn’t answer, I spoke up to fill the silence. “Your mother told me you work at the Lyceum. In the Gentlemen’s Club. I’ll serve,” I said, and he stiffly lowered himself onto his chair. I took the plates of mutton and boiled potatoes from the sideboard and set one in front of Shaker, one in front of his mother, and one at my place. I passed the gravy boat, aware of the heavy pall of awkwardness that had appeared out of nowhere. Was the awkwardness because I was serving him dinner? Or was it because I was no longer in distress? Because I no longer resembled the rouged and apolloed whore who had clung to him in the public house? Or the desperate, bedraggled creature with her hair hanging around her face as she blustered over her beef tea with her pathetic story of lost dreams, or the hunched, keening mourner beside the tiny grave marked only by a pink-streaked rock?
I had combed through my hair and twisted and secured it neatly at the back of my head, my face was scrubbed clean, and I had pinned Mrs. Smallpiece’s shawl primly across my chest. Did I frighten him more now, as an ordinary young woman who was waiting on him as he sat at the table?
He picked up his fork. “Please, Miss Gow. Linny. Sit down. Actually, I work in the library. As well as the News Room that’s part of the club, there’s a subscription library upstairs, owned by the club’s members.” Then he lowered his head over his food, and I was careful not to look at his attempts to get a full forkful to his mouth without losing half of it back onto the plate. Long minutes passed, broken only by the sound of the silver on china and collective chewing and swallowing.
Suddenly he looked up. “Do you read?”
“She does,” Mrs. Smallpiece an
swered. “I had her read to me. You know these eyes of mine can barely make out the print now. And I chose Scriptures that she needed to read. ‘Thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting’ was one I thought applied to her, after her immoral life. ‘Ye have plowed wickedness, ye have reaped inequity, ye have eaten the fruit of lies—’”
Shaker interrupted her. “I suspected you might,” he said, as if it were I who had answered him. “And I take it you can write as well?”
“I haven’t, not for a long time, but as a child I could. My mother taught me.”
“I see,” he said, and that was all, and I suddenly recognized that what was different about his face was his expression. He no longer had a lost look, an empty melancholy.
IT WAS TOO EASY to go upstairs to the soft pallet with the thick blankets after I had washed and dried the dishes.
The next morning Mrs. Smallpiece dug through her wardrobe and unceremoniously threw one of her old frocks across my pallet. The cheap, badly made, and low-cut dress I’d been wearing—my garish working dress—was, I knew, completely unwearable in Everton. I put on the drab brown broadcloth, eying with chagrin the much-darned shawl and badly out-of-style bonnet she also unearthed for me. The dress was a poor fit, hanging loosely. I felt as dull as the unflattering outfit.
I once again followed Mrs. Smallpiece’s instructions as she put me to work after breakfast, polishing the mismatched silver—the dinnerware as well as a tea service and the gravy boat—peeling vegetables delivered to the back door by the costermonger, and making biscuits and the pastry for a beef pie. A gilt-edged card was delivered, and after reading it and mumbling “How pleasant,” Mrs. Smallpiece deposited it on a silver tray that sat on a small mahogany table near the front door. She had me read to her again from the Bible, but after five minutes her head began to nod and finally dropped to one side, her mouth open. I wrapped her shawl around me and slipped away to the clearing with its holly bush and sat with my fingers tracing the smooth grooves of the pink-streaked stone. The pain in my body was healing but there was a deep sadness that throbbed through me ceaselessly. If I was to return to Paradise, it would have to be by tomorrow—the third day in a row I had been away—or Blue would give my spot, both on the street and in the room, to someone else.
But that night Shaker came home smiling broadly—a smile that looked out of place on his narrow face. He had secured a job for me in the library. I could start the following week.
I set the plate of biscuits on the table with a thud. “You did what?”
My tone made Shaker’s smile disappear. “I said I was able to get you—”
“Did you think to ask me if I would like a job in a library? I haven’t made up my mind as to what I plan to do next. You are very kind, but I’ve just stayed this long to get my strength back, as you suggested. I haven’t made up my mind about anything.”
Shaker stood there for a moment. “Haven’t you?” he asked.
I fidgeted with the bread knife. “And besides, who would hire me without even meeting me? Who would hire a complete stranger?”
“I told my employer—Mr. Ebbington—that my cousin, Linny Smallpiece, the daughter of my father’s brother, has come from Morecambe to live under my roof and is in sore need of a position.” His voice had taken on an unfamiliar, cold quality, a quality that I recognized as indignation. Somehow it shamed me, although I refused to show it. “No, I told him when he asked, she has no letter of character, as she’s spent her life caring for her invalid father, but I told him I could attest for you, and would assume full responsibility. I don’t make a habit of lying, Linny,” he said, “but I chose to lie today.” And I felt even worse for my superior airs of a moment ago. I looked down at the crusty tops of the biscuits.
“Mr. Ebbington has put his faith in me. I have worked for him for seven years, my own position assured for me by my father before he died. He and Mr. Ebbington were good friends. The only truth in all of this is that my father did have a brother in Morecambe, although he died four years ago and had no children.” His trembling had increased, moving up his arms so that his whole body now shook.
“What would I be expected to do?” I asked, after a long moment, meeting Shaker’s stare.
“There wasn’t even an actual position available, but Mr. Ebbington told me he had been thinking of bringing in someone with a fine hand to catch up on the recording of the books. Although I am responsible for overseeing that the ordering and receiving and placement of books is carried out properly, of course I can’t write with my . . .”—he looked down at his hands with a hateful sneer—“with these, and although Mr. Worth, who is quite elderly, signs the books out for the members, there seems to be a problem keeping up the required recordkeeping. So that is what you would do—keep the records of the books up to date. If, of course, you don’t find it beneath you.”
I lifted my chin. His last sentence, and its tone, stung. “What is the pay?”
“A florin a week. Paid monthly, of course.”
Two shillings a week. More than factory work, but not a whole sight better. And I could turn a far better profit in a few slow nights on the street. Behind me, a drop of rain fell softly on the grate, sizzling on the slow fire. The yeasty smell of the fresh biscuits filled my nostrils. The cold November rain ticked against the front windowpane, although the sound was muffled by the heavy closed curtains. The dining room was heated and fragrant with the smells of cooked food; although its furniture and fittings and floral carpets were well worn and had obviously been established in their positions for many years, somehow I found a deep comfort in this.
I imagined being out in this weather, waiting, hoping the rain wouldn’t convince the customers inside the taverns and music halls to go straight to their warm beds and cold wives instead of having a quick one for less than the price of the carriage ride home. I thought of the putrid odor of the Scot in his fine brougham, of the rough, probing fingers of the fishmonger. I thought, with a queasy lurch, of raising the shears over the syphilitic lunatic’s face on Rodney Street, of the press of the point of my folding knife into Ram Munt’s throat under the gaslight on Paradise.
I thought of baby Frances, and the way her tiny curled fingers looked as if they were trying to hold tight. I never wanted to carry another stranger’s child, knowing that should it occur again I would have to destroy it before it took a firm hold.
I thought of the tall sailing masts of the ships down at King’s Dock, and knew I would never set foot on board.
I also knew I had fooled myself, as perhaps my mother had fooled me, with stories of being more than what I was, of expecting more than I should. I knew I was giving up, but I was too weary, at that moment, to fight any longer.
“Fine. I’ll take the job.” The rain lashed against the window now, the accompanying wind creating a low moan around the sash. “Thank you, Shaker.” And as I thanked him, I wondered when he would be coming to me for payment in exchange for what he was offering.
AFTER DINNER, Shaker asked me to come to his room, his eyes not meeting mine. I remained expressionless, nodding once. So the payment was to be immediate, then. His mother acted as if she hadn’t heard his request. I wondered how Shaker would face her afterward, and also wondered why he didn’t at least wait until she was asleep. I was surprised at his boldness and wondered how my healing flesh would accept him.
But I could never turn him down, no matter how often he wanted to take me. I owed him this much, at least.
When I followed him through the door he went to his desk and I straight to his bed—the same bed I had bloodied only a few days earlier—and lay on my back, turning my face to the wall as I hiked up the brown skirt. There was silence, and I looked back at Shaker to see why he hadn’t begun to unbutton his trousers and come forward.
“No,” he said, in a hushed, shocked voice, and I saw that he had turned scarlet, still standing by his desk. “No,” he repeated, drawing his gaze from my uncovered legs. “I—I wanted to ask your help. By
writing something for me. I’m unable to hold a quill, as you know.”
I felt an unfamiliar heat in my cheeks, and knew that for the first time I was flushing as Shaker had, something I didn’t know I was capable of. I twitched down my skirt and went to the table where a large book lay open.
“This is by Bernard Albinus,” he told me, clearing his throat. His cheeks still held that high color but he spoke in a normal tone, as if he had not just seen my nakedness. “He was the most important descriptive anatomist of the last century. As well as the human skeleton, he’s illustrated the muscles of the body and the complete system of the blood vessels and nerves. I’ve taken the book from the library an embarrassing number of times. If I could have a set of notes of the most pertinent areas of my study—those on the nervous system—I wouldn’t have to keep taking the book out and trying to memorize passages. So I wondered . . . if you could write out the information I show you.” He pulled out the chair for me.
“But won’t your mother think . . . what will she think of me being here, in your room . . .” I left the sentence unfinished.
“Never mind about her. Much of her is no more than noise.” He made the rough, clearing sound in his throat a second time. I recognized it, now, as a habit, when Shaker was uncomfortable. “She wasn’t always the way you see her. I remember her laughing and enjoying herself while my father was still alive.” His face softened, and his eyes took on a faraway look.
I tried to imagine Mrs. Smallpiece laughing, Shaker as a boy, and his father, the three of them sitting at the dining room table we’d just left.
“My father was a physician,” Shaker volunteered, “although he did much more than simply prescribe drugs. He also chose to do the work of a surgeon, even though that was below him on the medical hierarchy. Instead of the expected—taking pulse and dealing with the hysterics and melancholy of the more affluent—he actually dealt with the body and all its frailities. He set bones, found remedies for skin diseases, performed surgeries at the infirmary. He sometimes allowed me to accompany him to the homes he visited and to listen and watch. That’s where I found my love of the profession. He was a kind man, my father, knowing I could never follow his path but never speaking of it. He treated many of Liverpool’s needy, usually for no payment but their gratitude. Because of that, my mother was forced to live a much more frugal life than she would have if my father had stuck to the physics for the wealthy and demanded his price. However, even though we live a fairly simple life, my father’s reputation was such that my mother can still consider herself included in what she sees as the grander social scene.”
The Linnet Bird: A Novel Page 13
