‘No hearse, Mrs Swindell, no mourners. Just a burial, a grave of his own.’
‘And just who do you propose to arrange all that?’
Eliza swallowed. ‘Mrs Barker’s brother is an undertaker, perhaps he could do it. Surely if you ask, Mrs Swindell . . .’
‘Waste a favour on you and your idjit brother?’
‘He’s not an idiot.’
‘Stupid enough to get himself trod on by a horse.’
‘It wasn’t his fault, it was the fog.’
Mrs Swindell sucked more soup across her bottom lip.
‘He didn’t even want to go out,’ said Eliza.
‘Course he didn’t,’ said Mrs Swindell. ‘It weren’t his sort of caper. It were yours.’
‘Please Mrs Swindell, I can pay.’
Twin brows shot skyward. ‘Oh you can, can you? With promises and moonbeams?’
Eliza thought of the leather pouch. ‘I . . . I have some coin.’
Mrs Swindell’s mouth dropped open and a trickle of soup escaped. ‘Some coin?’
‘Just a little.’
‘Why, you sneaky little wench.’ Lips tightened like the top of a coin purse. ‘How much?’
‘A shilling.’
Mrs Swindell screeched with laughter; a horrendous noise so foreign, so raw, that her little girl began to bawl. ‘A shilling?’ she spat. ‘A shilling won’t buy you the nails to drive shut the coffin.’
Mother’s brooch, she could sell the brooch. It was true Mother had made her promise not to part with it unless the Bad Man threatened, but surely in a situation such as this . . .
Mrs Swindell was coughing now, choking on her unexpected mirth. She gave her bony chest a slap, then set little Hatty scuttling across the floor. ‘Stop with your caterwauling, I can’t hear myself think.’
She sat a moment, then narrowed her eyes in Eliza’s direction. Nodded a few times as a scheme took shape. ‘All your begging’s set my mind. I’m going to see to it personally that the boy gets nothing better than he deserves. He’ll have a pauper’s funeral.’
‘Please—’
‘And I’ll have the shilling for me troubles.’
‘But Mrs Swindell—’
‘Mrs Swindell nothing. That’ll learn you for being sneaky, keeping coin hidden. Just you wait until Mr Swindell gets home and hears about this, then there’ll be hell to pay.’ She handed Eliza her bowl. ‘Now get me another serving and you can take Hatty up to bed.’
Nights were the worst. Street noises took on a garish quality, shadows lurched without reason and, alone in the tiny room for the first time in her life, Eliza fell victim to her nightmares. Nightmares far worse than anything she had imagined in her stories.
In the daytime, it was as if the world had been turned inside out, like a garment on the line. All was the same shape, size and colour, but utterly wrong nonetheless. And although Eliza’s body performed in the same way it had before, her mind roamed the landscape of her terrors. Again and again she found herself imagining Sammy at the bottom of the St Bride’s pit, lying, limbs askew, where he’d been tossed amongst the bodies of the nameless dead. Trapped beneath the dirt, eyes opening, mouth trying to call out that there’d been a mistake, he wasn’t dead at all.
For Mrs Swindell had got her way and Sammy had received the burial of a pauper. Eliza had taken the brooch from its hiding spot and gone as far as John Picknick’s house, but in the end she couldn’t bring herself to sell it. She’d stood out front a full half-hour, trying to decide. She knew if she sold the brooch she’d receive enough money to bury Sammy properly. She also knew Mr and Mrs Swindell would want to know where the money had come from and would punish her mercilessly for keeping such a treasure secret.
But it was not fear of the Swindells that decided her. It wasn’t even Mother’s voice, loud within her memory, making her promise to sell the brooch only if the phantom man came threatening.
It was her own fear that the future held worse than the past. That there would be a time, lurking in the foggy years to come, when the brooch was the lone key to her survival.
She turned around without setting foot inside Mr Picknick’s house, and hurried back to the rag and bottle shop, brooch burning a guilty hole in her pocket. And she told herself that Sammy would understand, that he had known as well as she did the cost of life on their riverbend.
Then she folded his memory as gently as she could, wrapped it in the layers of emotions—joy, love, commitment—for which she no longer had need, and locked the whole deep inside her. Being empty of such memories and emotions felt right somehow. For with Sammy’s death Eliza was half a person. Like a room robbed of candlelight, her soul was cold, dark and empty.
When was it that the idea first came to her? Later, Eliza could never be sure. There was nothing different about the day in question. She opened her eyes in the dim of the tiny room as she did each morning and lay still, re-entering her body after the harrowing stretch of night.
She pulled back her side of the blanket and sat up, placed bare feet on the floor. Her long plait fell over one shoulder. It was cold; autumn had surrendered to winter and morning was as dark as night. Eliza struck a match and held it to the candle wick, then looked up to where her pinafore was hanging on the back of the door.
What made her do it? What made her reach beyond the pinafore to the shirt and breeches that hung behind? Climb inside Sammy’s clothing instead?
Eliza never knew, but it felt right, as if it were the only thing to do. The shirt smelled so familiar, like her own clothes and yet not, and when she pulled on the breeches, she savoured the curious sensation of bare ankles, cool air on skin accustomed to stockings. She sat on the floor and laced up Sammy’s scuffed boots, a perfect fit.
Then she stood in front of the small mirror and looked. Really looked as the candle flickered beside her. A pale face stared back. Long hair, golden red, blue eyes with pale brows. Without letting her gaze slip, Eliza picked up the pair of sewing scissors that sat in the laundry basket and held her plait out to the side. The rope of her hair was thick and she had to hack through. Finally it dropped into her hand. No longer bound, the hair on her head fell loose, shaggy around her face. She continued to cut until her hair was the same length that Sammy’s had been, then she pulled on his cloth cap.
They were twins, it was little surprise that they should look so similar, and yet Eliza drew breath. She smiled, very slightly, and Sammy smiled back at her. She reached out and touched the cold glass of the mirror, no longer alone.
Thump . . . thump . . .
Mrs Swindell’s broom end on the ceiling below, her daily call to start the laundering.
Eliza picked up her long red braid from the floor, unravelling at the top where it had been detached, and tied a piece of twine around its end. Later she would tuck it away with Mother’s brooch. She didn’t need it now; it was of the past.
17
London, 2005
Cassandra had known the buses would be red, of course, and double-decked, but to see them trundling by with destinations like Kensington High Street and Piccadilly Circus above their front windows was nonetheless startling. Like being dropped somehow into a storybook from her childhood, or one of the many films she’d watched where black beetle-nosed taxis scurried down cobbled lanes, Edwardian terraces stood to attention on wide streets, and the north wind stretched thin clouds across a low sky.
She had been in this London of a thousand film sets, a thousand stories, for almost twenty-four hours now. When she’d finally woken from her jetlagged slumber, she’d found herself alone in Ruby’s tiny flat, the midday sun slanting between the curtains to cast a narrow ray across her face.
On the little stool beside the sofa bed, there was a note from Ruby:
Missed you at breakfast! Didn’t want to wake you—help yourself to anything worth scavenging. Banana in the fruit bowl, leftover something in the fridge, though haven’t checked lately—may be all too gruesome! Towels in the bathroom cupboard if you’
d like to get clean. I’m at the V&A until 6. You must drop by and see the exhibition I’m curating at the moment. Something v. v. exciting to show you! Rx
PS Come early afternoon. Wretched meetings all morning.
So it was, at one pm, with her stomach growling, Cassandra found herself standing in the centre of Cromwell Road, waiting for the traffic to stop its seemingly perpetual flow through the veins of the city so she could cross to the other side.
The Victoria and Albert Museum stood large and imposing before her, the cloak of afternoon shadow sliding rapidly across its stone front. A giant mausoleum of the past. Inside, she knew, were rooms and rooms, each one full of history. Thousands of items, out of time and place, reverberating quietly with the joys and traumas of forgotten lives.
Cassandra bumped into Ruby directing a group of German tourists to the new V&A coffee shop. ‘Honestly,’ Ruby whispered loudly as they herded away, ‘I’m all for having a café in the building—I like a good coffee as much as the next person—but nothing gets my goat like people who breeze past my exhibition in search of the Holy Grail of sugarless muffins and imported soft drinks!’
Cassandra smiled somewhat guiltily, hoping Ruby couldn’t hear her own stomach grumbling at the delicious smells emanating from the café. She’d actually been heading there herself.
‘I mean, how can they pass up the opportunity to stare the past in the face?’ Ruby flapped a hand at the rows of treasure-stocked glass cabinets comprising her collection. ‘How can they?’
Cassandra shook her head and suppressed a rumble. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Ah well,’ Ruby sighed dramatically, ‘you’re here now and the Philistines are but a distant memory. How’re you feeling? Not too jetlagged?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘You slept well?’
‘The sofa bed was very comfy.’
‘No need to lie,’ Ruby said with a laugh, ‘though I appreciate the sentiment. At least the lumps and bumps stopped you sleeping the day away. I would’ve had to ring and wake you up otherwise. No way I was going to let you miss this.’ She beamed. ‘I still can’t believe Nathaniel Walker once lived on the same estate your cottage is on! He probably saw it, you know, drew inspiration from it. He may even have been inside.’ With her eyes bright and round, Ruby hooked an arm through Cassandra’s and started down one of the aisles. ‘Come on, you’re going to love this!’
With mild trepidation, Cassandra prepared herself to muster up a suitably enthusiastic reaction no matter what it was that Ruby was so keen to show her.
‘There you are then.’ Ruby pointed triumphantly at a row of sketches in the cabinet. ‘What do you think of those?’
Cassandra gasped, leaned forward to get a better look. There would be no need to pretend enthusiasm. The pictures on display both shocked and thrilled her. ‘But where did they . . . ? How did you . . . ?’ Cassandra glanced sideways at Ruby, who clapped her hands together in obvious delight. ‘I had no idea these existed.’
‘Nobody did,’ said Ruby gleefully. ‘Nobody except the owner, and I can assure you she hadn’t given them much thought in a very long time.’
‘How did you get them?’
‘Purely by chance, darling. Purely by chance. When I first conceived the idea for the exhibition, I didn’t just want to rearrange the same old Victoriana that people have been shuffling past for decades. So I ran a little classified advert in all the specialist mags I could think of. Very simple, it just read Wanted on loan: artistic objects of interest from the turn of the nineteenth century. To be displayed with loving care in London museum exhibition.
‘Lo and behold, I started receiving phone calls the day the first advert appeared. Most of them were false alarms of course, Great Aunt Mavis’s paintings of the sky and the like, but there were pieces of gold amongst the rubble. You’d be surprised the number of priceless items that have survived despite the slightest care.’
It was the same with antiques, Cassandra thought: the best finds were always those that had been forgotten for decades, escaped the clutches of enthusiastic DIY-ers.
Ruby looked again at the sketches. ‘These were among my most prized discoveries.’ She smiled at Cassandra. ‘Unfinished sketches by Nathaniel Walker, who’d have thought? I mean, we’ve got a small collection of his portraits upstairs, and there’s some at Tate Britain, but as far as I knew, as far as anyone knew, that was all that had survived. The rest were thought to have—’
‘Been destroyed. Yes, I know.’ Cassandra’s cheeks were warm. ‘Nathaniel Walker was notorious for disposing of preparatory sketches, work he wasn’t happy with.’
‘You can imagine then how I felt when the woman handed me these. I’d driven all the way out to Cornwall the day before and had been traipsing from one house to another politely declining various items that were entirely unsuitable. Honestly—’ she rolled her eyes skyward—‘the things people thought might fit the bill would amaze you. Suffice to say, when I arrived at the house I was just about ready to call it quits. It was one of those white seaside cottages with the grey slate roofs, and I was on the verge of giving up when Clara opened the door. She was a funny little thing, like a character out of Beatrix Potter, an ancient hen dressed in a hausfrau’s apron. She ushered me into the tiniest, most cluttered sitting room I’d ever seen—made my place look like a mansion—and she insisted on making me a cuppa. I’d have preferred a whiskey at that point, the day I’d had, but I sank down into the cushions and waited to see what utterly worthless object she was going to waste my time with.’
‘And she gave you these.’
‘I knew what they were immediately. They’re not signed, but they’ve got his embossing stamp on them. See in the upper left-hand corner. I swear, I started to shake when I saw that. Nearly knocked my cup of tea all over them.’
‘But how did she get them?’ Cassandra asked. ‘Where did she get them?’
‘She said they were amongst her mother’s things,’ said Ruby. ‘Her mother, Mary, moved in with Clara after she was widowed, and lived there until she died in the mid sixties. They were both widows and I gather they were good company for one another. Certainly Clara was delighted to have a captive audience to regale with stories about mother dearest. Before I left she insisted on showing me up the most perilous flight of stairs to take a look at Mary’s room.’ Ruby leaned closer to Cassandra. ‘What a surprise that was. Mary might have been dead for forty years, but that room looked as if she was about to arrive home at any moment. It was creepy, but in the most delicious way: a slim little single bed, still made up perfectly, a newspaper folded on the bedside table with a half-completed crossword on the upper sheet. And over beneath the window was a little locked chest—tantalising!’ She finger-combed her wild grey hair. ‘I tell you, it took every bit of restraint I could muster to resist tearing across the room and ripping the lock open with my bare hands.’
‘Did she open it? Did you see what was inside?’
‘No such luck. I remained mercifully restrained and was ushered out a few moments later. I had to content myself with the Nathaniel Walker sketches and Clara’s assurances that there’d been no more like them amongst her mother’s things.’
‘Was Mary an artist too?’ said Cassandra.
‘Mary? No, she was a domestic. At least she was to begin with. During the first war she’d worked in a munitions factory and I think she must’ve left service after that. Well, she left service in a manner of speaking. She married a butcher and spent the rest of her days making black puddings and keeping the chopping boards clean. Not sure which I’d have liked least!’
‘Either way,’ Cassandra said, frowning, ‘how on earth did she get her hands on these? Nathaniel Walker was famously secretive about his artwork, and the sketches are so rare. He didn’t give them to anyone, never signed contracts with publishers who wanted to retain copyright of the originals, and that was the finished artwork. I can’t imagine what would have made him part with unfinished sketches like the
se.’
Ruby shrugged. ‘Borrowed them? Bought them? Maybe she stole them. I don’t know, and I must admit I don’t much mind. I’m happy to chalk it up to one of life’s beautiful mysteries. I just thank god she did get her hands on them, and that she never realised their value, didn’t find them worthy of display, and was thus able to preserve them so beautifully for us through the entire twentieth century.’
Cassandra leaned closer to the pictures. Though she’d never seen them before she recognised them. They were unmistakeable: early drafts of the illustrations in the fairytale book. Drawn more quickly, the lines scratched eagerly in an exploratory fashion, filled with the artist’s early enthusiasm for the subject. Cassandra’s breaths shortened as she remembered feeling that sensation herself when she began a drawing. ‘It’s incredible, having the chance to see a work in progress. It says so much more about the artist, I sometimes think, than the finished work ever could.’
‘Like the Michelangelo sculptures in Florence.’
Cassandra looked sideways at her, pleased by Ruby’s perspicacity. ‘I got goosebumps the first time I saw a picture of that knee emerging from the marble. As if the figure had been trapped inside all along, just waiting for someone with enough skill to come and release him.’
Ruby beamed. ‘Hey,’ she said, alight with a sudden idea, ‘it’s your only night in London, let’s go out to eat. I’m supposed to catch up with my friend, Grey, but he’ll understand. Or I’ll bring him, too, more the merrier, after all—’
‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ came an American accent, ‘do you work here?’
A tall black-haired man had come to stand between them.
‘I do,’ said Ruby, ‘how may I help?’
‘My wife and I are mighty hungry and one of the guys upstairs said there was a coffee shop down here?’
Ruby rolled her eyes at Cassandra. ‘There’s a new Carluccio’s near the station. Seven o’clock, my shout.’ Then she pressed her lips together and forced a thin smile. ‘Right this way, sir. I’ll show you where it is.’