Diner ceased reading and folded the newspaper. He’d bought the London Times, I thought, even though we had so little money. And so it was all over. I looked out of the area window and could just see the hard, white January sky. The ground, too, would be as hard as bone. I wondered if they had buried the King, or what they had done with his body.
‘Augustus was right,’ I said. ‘He was sure that they would kill the King.’
‘He will be satisfied, then, since his prophecy has been fulfilled.’ Diner stood up and began to pace the room, flinging his body forward, turning, pacing, turning again at the same spot and pacing back. A grin, fixed and curious, lit up his face. I could not hear Thomas but I knew he would be grizzling up in the attic, and that Philo would be trying to soothe him. Why did nature give children teeth with so much trouble? I clung to the thought of Thomas.
‘It is my turn to prophesy,’ said Diner, ‘and I think I will be as successful as Augustus. We shall have war. France wants war: we saw that against Prussia and Austria. Now we shall go to it.’
‘They will not fight here,’ I said, thinking of Thomas upstairs. ‘It will all be far away.’
‘You think so. Come, Lizzie, I want to show you something.’ He smiled, and held out his hand. He looked very ill. ‘Let us go and look at the cellars.’
These vaulted cellars were his pride. They ran out under the pavement, and were fine rooms in themselves. They were barrel-vaulted and a man could stand upright in the centre. The walls were brick-lined. There were shelves for a wine cellar, although we had no fine vintages laid down. Preserves could be stored in brick alcoves, hams hung and cheeses ripened. Every precaution had been taken so that rats and other vermin could be kept out, or, if they got in, could be trapped easily. Philo did not like to go down there, and besides, we lived from day to day on what we bought in the market, often at the end of the day when things were cheap. There was not money enough for the kind of housekeeping these cellars allowed.
We went out across the area, Diner first, carrying a candle, and I behind him. He unlocked the cellar door and pushed it open, then stood aside to let me go first. There were steps down, because of the slope of the hillside. I heard him lock the door behind us. Cold came up to meet us as we descended. There was another door ahead, close-fitting and sealed at the base to keep out the rats. I knew how a rat could seem to melt its bones to squeeze into the narrowest space.
I moved aside, Diner turned the key and there we were.
‘Close the door behind you, Lizzie. We will not trouble to lock this one, since there are only ourselves down here and the outer door is locked so that no one can get in from the street.’
What street? I thought. There was only raw mud and stones, and how could there be any passers-by? And yet he had shut us in here. I was uneasy but I would not show it.
‘Have you got the key safe?’ My voice piped thinly and I wished I had not asked.
‘Of course.’
He lifted the candle high and spun shadows around the vault. This was the first cellar, and another door led to the second. It was all as well built as the house itself but even so I thought that I could smell the earth pressing in upon the bricks.
‘We are under the pavement,’ he told me, and I knew that in his mind he was seeing the finished pavement with its fine stone slabs, and not the rutted earth which really existed. ‘Imagine these walls, Lizzie, lined with enough stores to keep a household fed for a year.’ He moved close to the wall and examined the work. ‘This will last for two hundred years,’ he said. ‘It is sound work. Look how well the bricks are laid. I had to stand over the men here. They would have skimped the work, calculating that what lay underground would never be seen, but they were under my eye and so they did not dare. Look, Lizzie, the mortar is perfect. Come, let us go further in.’
‘It is cold down here.’
‘My foolish Lizzie, you should have put on your shawl. Come here, let me warm you.’
He drew me close. He held me tightly but he was not warm himself, and I shivered.
‘We must go back,’ I said, but he did not answer. I listened and thought I could hear the earth settling around us, but Diner noticed nothing. He ran his hand over the bricks as a man might run his hand over the flank of a fine horse.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘this will stand in two hundred years.’ He leaned forward, and to my astonishment he laid his cheek against the wall and closed his eyes. ‘I built this,’ he said.
I stepped forward and took the candle out of his hand. ‘It is well built, Diner,’ I said.
‘Shall we not stay here, Lizzie? Is this not a fine house for us? I think I shall sleep well here,’ he said. ‘I do not sleep well at nights. Perhaps you have noticed.’
‘You did not come home last night.’
‘No. I walked. I don’t know where.’
‘I would have walked with you if you had asked me.’
‘Would you? I think I could not ask you to do that. Hold the candle steady.’
‘I cannot. The cold makes me tremble.’
‘Don’t you know that we are under the earth? It is always cold here. We must get used to it.’
‘No,’ I said, as firmly as I dared. ‘I shall be under the earth long enough, but for now I prefer the sun. Or the fire, in winter. Come back with me into the house.’
I spoke as if I had the key in my hand. I turned with the candle and moved to the door without looking to see if he followed. Sure enough, I saw his shadow stir on the wall. There was the faintest chink of metal, and then he held up the bunch of keys and scrutinised it.
‘We did not lock the inner door,’ I said, and we passed through it together.
At the second door he stopped, and fumbled.
‘Pass the key, Diner. I have the candle here.’
I did not look at him but held out my hand as if I had no expectation of refusal. He put the bunch on my palm, with one key separated from the others. It fitted the lock. It turned easily. The door opened and we stepped out into the area. Cold swept across us and whiteness glared. For a second I thought we had died and come into another world.
‘It is snowing,’ said Diner.
Flakes fell on my sleeve and clung there. One touched the candle flame, making it sizzle. I crossed to the kitchen door with snow squeaking under my boots. How quickly it had covered the ground; or perhaps we had been underground for longer than I’d thought. I was chilled but I did not want to go indoors. The tender, dazzling snow-light was wonderful after the coffin air of the vaults.
‘Come, Lizzie,’ said Diner. He took my arm in his grasp. ‘You are chilled. You must come inside.’
I remembered how I had believed we were more ourselves in the kitchen than anywhere else in the house, but today I could not feel it. Even my thoughts were prisoned. We came in, the door shut behind us and Diner pushed the bolt across. He took hold of my shoulders and turned me to him. My throat tightened.
‘Lizzie, do you truly love me?’
‘You know that I do.’
I thought he would take his questioning further, as he had done before, but this time he did not. His eyes searched my face. I wished I knew what he was looking for, or if he would be satisfied. When he took me in his arms he was shuddering as if the cold had pursued him into the house.
‘You must not leave me,’ he said into my hair.
‘You must not think of that. I am here, with you.’
‘If I could sleep at night, my thoughts would not be in such disorder. I can never tire myself enough to sleep.’
‘Not even if you walk all night?’
‘My thoughts grow strong with exercise. They are perverse. I have the devil in me sometimes, Lizzie. Do you feel it?’
‘There is no such thing. The devil is a tale for children.’
‘You learned that at your mother’s knee, I suppose, where other children learn their catechism. All the same I cannot separate myself from the idea that there is something moving within me which is not myself. So
metimes I seem to hear its breath – but in the vaults it is quiet. Didn’t you feel that, Lizzie? Shall we go there again?’
‘Not now, Diner.’
I would not go there again, ever. I felt the breath of something cold at my ear and at the back of my neck.
‘Another time, then,’ he said, as if it was a promise between us, and then he pulled away from me suddenly. His voice changed: he was the old, authoritative Diner again. ‘I have work to do, Lizzie. We cannot be maundering here. I must go to the Exchange. And there is the order of Portland stone for the staircases – they want their money on the nail, but they shall not have it. I will beat them yet, Lizzie!’
His eyes glittered with purpose but they glanced aside and did not quite meet mine. The look of illness was wiped away as if a hand had passed over him, but I was not reassured. Diner looked more strange now than he had done when he laid his face against the cellar wall.
‘I have made mutton stew,’ I said.
‘It will take more than mutton stew to keep us out of the debtors’ rooms at Newgate,’ he said. ‘I am going now, Lizzie.’
‘When will you be back?’
‘I cannot say. Keep some food for me. My credit is used up at the chophouses.’ He laughed, as if I should laugh with him, and went up the stairs to find his coat.
I let him go, although afterwards I thought I should not have done. He had asked me if I perceived a devil in him and I had not answered him. He had said he felt breath within him that was not his own. But then, whose could it be?
23
There was only one person whom I wanted to see. She would look up as I came in, and give me her smile.
‘Well, Lizzie! It’s much too long since I have seen you. Where have you been? Come here and let me look at you.’
I would kneel by her desk. She would brush back my hair and scrutinise my face.
‘You’re pale. You haven’t been sleeping. How are you, my treasure?’
There was so much I wanted to tell her, but I could not speak. I gazed into her face. Lines pulled tight over her cheekbones, but her look was what it had always been. Warm, curious, searching, as if there was nothing in me that she did not want to know or hope to love.
‘My girl,’ she said, and she stretched out her hand and laughed.
‘Am I so comical?’ I asked.
She stretched her hand towards me but she was receding. I could not see her face any more, only her hand, stained with ink, and then even this vanished.
But this time my imaginings left me cold. This was not my real mother but a doll of my brain who moved and spoke as I chose, and could never surprise me. I had married Diner but I had not moved beyond her. I had stayed where I had always been, sitting by her skirts, repeating her phrases. Her friends used to praise me because I played for hours with a flock of sheep carved from wood. I made a sheepfold for them and tended them, but sometimes I would put a barrier at the entrance and one lamb would remain outside, bleating pitifully, until I relented and let him in. I could lose myself in such games because my mother was there, working, talking not to me but to her companion, as close to me as if she held me in her arms.
And yet I would often wake and find her absent, and there would be Hannah telling me that Mammie had had to go to Hampstead, or the Highlands of Scotland, or even once to Italy for more than three months. She could not take me with her because I’d had a putrid fever and it was not safe for me travel. The water in Italy was dirty. I would be better at home with Hannah. When she returned I was angry and would not look at her. Every time she smiled at me I turned my head away, and talked to Hannah, or my doll. I must have thawed to her slowly, I suppose. I remember how she gave me a piece of fine lace to make a doll’s coverlet, and I tore it and pretended that the cat that lived in the rooms opposite us had stolen in and ripped it with its claws.
Hannah scolded me. She always saw through me.
Well, they were not here, either of them. I went upstairs, and gave directions to Philo not to take Thomas outside. The room was warm and he was fast asleep with his backside humped into the air. He had formed the habit of rolling over like that and neither Philo nor I knew whether it was good for him or not. I bent over the cradle and heard him snuffling into his sheet. His cheek was red where he had pressed his cheek into a fold of his blanket. The curdy, intimate scent he brewed filled the cradle. I wanted to lift him and kiss him but of course I could not disturb him.
Philo was quite well again. I was teaching her plain sewing and she had taken to it eagerly. I picked up the nightdress she was hemming for Thomas, examined it, and gave it back to her.
‘That is very good, Philo. See if you can finish both nightdresses this afternoon. I’ll be back later, before it’s dark. Keep the fire well built.’
‘You’re never going out in this.’
The snow had stopped, although the sky was heavy and yellow with another fall to come.
‘Only for a while. Don’t you like the snow, Philo? Don’t you think it’s beautiful?’
She shook her head vigorously. She snipped a fresh piece of thread with her needle between her lips, and when she could speak, she said, ‘I like it by the fire.’
Of course she did. She must have starved with the cold often enough when she was a child, and learned to dread snow and ice. It was never the barefoot, ragged children who shrieked with delight as they ran out into a snowy morning.
‘Make sure he doesn’t cry.’
She nodded importantly, and bent to her sewing again.
I wrapped myself in my cloak, put on my boots and took a basket so that if I met anyone it would look as if I was going to the shops. But I chose another direction, towards St Andrew’s, the new church. Augustus had paid a fine sum for Mammie’s grave-plot, but her stone could not be set for another three months. The sexton said that the earth must settle.
I had not been there since her burial. When I was a child and I used to frighten myself sometimes by imagining Mammie’s death, I always saw myself visiting her grave daily to plant flowers and water them with my tears. The reality, now that it had come, was that I avoided it. I would walk a long way round so as not to pass the church, let alone go into the graveyard. There had been burials there for centuries, but most of the older graves were lost in long grass and willowherb. The new part, close to the splendid stone church, was well tended but not as beautiful. Augustus had bought the plot on the border between old and new. He had chosen it so that Mammie’s grave would be shaded by a lime tree in summer.
I paused at the end of our terrace, and looked back. Snow hid the rawness of construction but it could not hide the gaps. Foundations were heaped with snow. Roofless houses gaped. Diner’s terrace looked like a centuries-old ruin. There were footprints over the high pavement – still unpaved – but these were half filled with snow that had fallen after those who had made the marks had walked away. No one was working now; nothing moved down the length of the terrace. From our chimney and a couple of others, smoke rose straight up, dirty against the yellow sky.
A pair of crows flapped across the depth of the Gorge, cawing. I shaded my eyes to follow them and then I heard their low, hoarse cry. They were ravens, not crows. Diner had taught me the difference, and how to look for the shape of the bird in flight in order to know it. He had picked out sparrowhawk, kestrel and buzzard, and shown me the ledges on the limestone cliffs where peregrines nested. I would look and see nothing, and then he would take my arm, point it in the right direction and make me follow the line of my finger until I saw the bird. He would show me the sparrowhawk drifting high up, waiting for prey. It expended no effort unless it had to, Diner said. It used the currents of the air as mariners use the currents of the sea.
The ravens vanished into the forest on the other side of the Gorge. I thought of the people who had lived in their hilltop forts on either side of the river, and how they would have drawn close to their fires in winter, huddled together, telling stories and waiting for spring to come while their bel
lies growled with hunger.
It was too cold to stand still for long. I turned my back on the terrace and picked my way onward, making tracks in the new whiteness. There were boys out in the streets, hurling snowballs. One ball whizzed past my head and I bent down, scooped up a handful of snow, packed it tight and hurled it back. The boys had not expected it: they scattered, whooping, to find fresh ammunition while I picked up my skirts and ran on through the snow.
The lych-gate was open. Someone must have come here after the snow had stopped falling, because there were crisp-edged footprints on the path ahead of me. I walked around the bulk of the new church towards the place where Mammie lay, and the footprints walked ahead of me. Two sets of prints, side by side, and then in single file where the path grew narrow. I found myself following them as they crossed the graveyard, until they led away from Mammie’s grave. I saw two muffled figures in the distance but I turned away from them. I had not come here to find company.
There was the mound of Mammie’s grave ahead of me. I had memorised the name on the gravestone next to her, so I would always find it easily. There was the lime tree, pollarded since September, its stumpy branches full of snow. When we had buried her the earth had been dark but today light poured upwards from the snowy ground. Even though there was no sun, I had to blink against the intensity of it.
Snow lay over her like a blanket. There was no trace of the raw grave I had last seen. If it had not been for the letters cut into the stone of the next-door grave I would not have recognised this place.
She was quite safe. Nothing could touch her; nothing could disturb her. There was nothing to be done here. Another time I could bring a root of pansies and plant it, or I could clip the grass if it grew too long over her. But for now the snow had taken care of everything, and made it beautiful. I believed that she was there, not lying on her back with her hands folded as I had seen her put into her coffin, but curled on her side under the snow where nothing stirred. She did not know that I was here. Even if she had known it, she would not have roused herself. She was far away, locked in a sleep that would never be interrupted.