The Linnet Bird: A Novel (19 page)

I studied the windows, clouded from the heat, framed with crisp curtains. The wide mantel boasted a round clock in an Amritsar case, crowded by a collection of china dogs. A thick fringed rug covered the floor, warm under my feet. An oak dresser beside a horsehair screen held an assortment of glass ornaments, shells, japanned trays, and gaudy biscuit boxes. The room indicated every sign of decency and prosperity.

Over the dresser hung a painting, a rendition of some foreign-looking temple in blues, greens, and whites. Although the painting itself was, even to my eye, poorly executed, the colors—the brilliant hues of the background of blues and greens surrounding the stark white of the temple—were somehow pleasing, so different from the usual watercolors seen in every hotel and dining room.

“What is that painting of?” I asked, when I’d finished my story.

Shaker looked from me to the painting and back at me, as if puzzled by my question. Or perhaps surprised. He said a strange name, something that sounded like
Tajatagra,
and changed the subject. “So you’ll have to begin again, then, with saving?” Shaker asked. He continually pushed his untouched cup of tea, now grown cold, back and forth on the well-polished tabletop, just a fraction of an inch each time. He could not remain still. I suspect he didn’t drink his tea as his palsied hands would cause the liquid to slop over the sides, and I also suspected that this would embarrass him.

I sighed. “I can’t think of it. But of course I will. For what other option is open to me? I’ve lost everything, save for my mother’s pendant. What choice do I have?” I repeated, and ran my fingertip around the lip of the cup.

Shaker’s mother spoke then, making both of us jump. “What choice? You ask what choice you have?” She let her tatting drop into her lap and stared at me over her shoulder. “Do you not know the wonders of the Lord?” Her voice was too loud—partial deafness or simple anger?

“I used to go to church. With my mother, when she was alive, and then for a while after she died.” I tried to keep my voice respectful for Shaker’s sake, but already I hated this woman, with her suspicious eyes and attempt at a pious expression.

She shook her head. “And what would your mother, rest her soul, think of your sinning ways now?”

“Really, Mother,” Shaker said, stealing a glance at me. The flush rose on him again.

But his mother ignored his mild admonishment. “Do you think she would approve? Do you think the Lord in His Glory approves of your wicked, filthy ways?”

I drank the last mouthful of my beef tea, then carefully set the cup onto the table.

“I’m simply a working girl, doing what I can to get by, Mrs. Smallpiece,” I said, letting a slightly imperious tone creep into my voice.

The woman’s eyebrows, bushy and gray, rose into her forehead. “And proud of it, by the sounds of you. You live in an underworld of prostitution and crime, making light of our concepts of respectability, of purity and prudery. Trying to pass yourself off as a lady won’t work with me. I can see you trying to clamber over the fences we’ve had to build to protect ourselves from the inferior likes of people like you. I know you for what you are, through and through. I’ve known others like you. For didn’t I—”

“Don’t, Mother,” Shaker interrupted. “Stop. It will do no one any good. You know what may happen if you upset yourse—”

“Pride has nothing to do with it, as you must know, being so well informed of my life,” I interrupted, staring at the old woman. I didn’t care what Shaker thought now. I wouldn’t be bullied by this dried-out hag. “I started in a bookbindery beside my mother as a child of six. For my work my mother was given enough pennies a week to buy an extra bit of bacon and a loaf of cheap bread that was half chalk and a packet of tea leaves mixed with ones already used. I’m sure you know this sad story, don’t you, Mrs. Smallpiece? At least in theory.” I glanced around the cozy room. “You really have no idea, do you, sitting in your comfortable house in your comfortable street, knowing each day of your life that you would be cared for and watched over? If I were still working there at the bookbinders, I would now be making enough to rent a corner of a room in a lodging house, and pay half of my wage to the crimp who cheated everyone under her roof, and live on the same ration of bacon and chalky bread and weak tea. And perhaps one day I would marry and move to another corner of another stinking room, and I’d have children and still go to work at a factory, and my life would continue on until either childbearing or endless work killed me.”

As I spoke, I heard my voice shift wildly, like sand under pulsing waves. I heard my drawing room voice swing into the rough northern tones of Back Phoebe Anne and Paradise. I heard the inflection of my mother’s soft Scottish lilt, and then it was back to the throaty, plummy tones I had tried so hard to perfect in the candelabra-lit dining room in the hotel near Lord Street. I couldn’t hold on to one voice; in my distress I was flying in all directions, the babble of a madwoman’s voice as surely as my appearance was of one now.

“So I chose the only other way that I hoped might get me away from that future. Or at least I thought it would. I should have known it was only a dream. I should have listened to the person who told me I was simply a girl with the stink of the Mersey waterfront in my nostrils and I would never be any better than that,” I finished, realizing my voice had, at the end, gone unpleasantly shrill. I stood, trying to ignore the cramping and rush of fresh bleeding. “I’m sorry, Shaker,” I said, pointedly ignoring the old woman now. “I had no call to speak rudely to your mother but it’s time I was off, back to where she believes I belong.”

But Mrs. Smallpiece had also risen, and approached me, one shoulder lower than the other, her face, on that side, drawn down as well. I saw a dull fire in her faded, deep-set eyes. “I could offer you salvation. One so young as you, perhaps it hasn’t set fully yet. The evil.”

“Salvation?” I asked. “Salvation?” A small sly noise, a derisive snick of laughter, slipped from between my lips. I looked at Shaker, but he was studying his cup.

“If you take the Lord Jesus into your heart, offer up your soul to Him, there may be a chance for you to renounce your ways.” Mrs. Smallpiece tried to lift her shoulder and her chin stuck forward. “For I also was once guilty of lustful thoughts and performed lewd acts of the flesh, yet the Lord saw fit to shine his light on me and I was pulled from the claws of the Devil. Yes, I was pulled from those claws, although not before they had sunk deep within me—” And here she flung her head in Shaker’s direction. “And my punishment for my sinning was him, there, born little better than a cripple. A son useless in body, unable to provide a daughter-in-law to care for me, unable to give me grandchildren.” She turned her oddly glowing eyes to Shaker. “Useless,” she repeated, her voice rising to the beamed ceiling with a high, hollow echo.

I refused to look at Shaker; I kept my eyes fixed on the old woman.

Saliva bubbled on her bottom lip and her eyelids fluttered rapidly, as if the fire I had seen there threatened to burn her. “I have accepted my punishment, kept him when others would have left him to die. And for that I was saved. The Lord in His mercy is all knowing and all seeing, Hallelujah sayeth the Lord, Hallelujah oh Lord oh Lord save us.” Her words came louder and faster, suddenly tripping into each other until they were merely a cacophony of grunts and garbled syllables, a speaking in tongues that sent a chill up my spine. And in the next instant her eyes rolled heavenward and her knees buckled. She fell to the floor and her body shook with rhythmic tremors, her heels beating a staccato rhythm on the floorboards.

As the acrid smell of urine filled the room I bit so hard on my bottom lip that I felt the skin split.

Shaker knelt beside his mother, his hand under her head, turning it to one side as her tongue protruded and forcing a smooth piece of wood he pulled from his pocket between her clenched gums. Eventually the tremors lessened and finally ceased. Shaker gently lowered her head to the ground, removed the spit-soaked wood, then took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped her face. With a practiced motion he lifted her as if she were no more than a husk and laid her on the narrow bed along one wall, tucking a large flannel under her wet skirt.

He opened the window to rid the room of its smell of piss and sweat.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not meeting my eyes. “She’ll be fine shortly. She hasn’t had one in a long while; these fits only occur when she’s greatly agitated. They started after her apoplexy, a few years ago. I urge her not to excite herself,” he added, finally turning to me, and there was something in his face, some quiet desperation, that made me pity him. “She’ll be calm when she wakes. It’s as if these occasional cataclysms allow her to return to her normal state for a long time afterward,” he went on, as if assuring himself that it was all actually normal, that his life with this needy and overbearing woman was fine, that he was in some way grateful for her not abandoning him, even though it was clear it was he who had to care for her.

I looked at his mother. The sight of her yellowy sclera and the line of drool shimmering down her bristled chin made me reach for the chair behind me and I sat down heavily.

Shaker sat across from me again, his mother’s still body stretched out a few feet from us. “I told you, you can rest here as long as you wish. And then I’ll help you get home.” He was looking at me. “How old—do you mind if I ask? How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

I saw the look of surprise flicker across his face before he could stop it. “Seventeen?”

“I’ve always looked younger—” I started, but in a rush of understanding realized I had misinterpreted his surprise. “How old did you think I was?” I knew, even after this brief time, that it was difficult for Shaker to hide what was in his thoughts.

“I assumed you were closer to my age—twenty-three.”

I went to the small gilt-framed mirror hanging on the wall beside the window and looked at myself in bright daylight. For years I had seen myself only in the forgiving flicker of candlelight, the softening rosiness of gaslight, always in my thick layer of powder and rouge. And now I saw that I had truly become a creature of the night.

My skin, untouched by sun for so long, had the pallor and texture of a two-day mushroom. The moon-shaped scar at the side of my mouth, created by the heavy blow of a ringed hand, stood scarlet. My hair, which I had always thought of as golden, now was dry and somehow bleached of its depth of color, like winter straw. My eyelids were shadowed purple, as were the bruised-looking pouches beneath my eyes, emphasized by caked traces of powder. And my eyes themselves—the gold flecks that had once glinted in the brown irises, lighting them, were gone. The gold had disappeared, gone from my hair, and from my eyes.

I saw Shaker’s face behind me. Watching me. His face held the same pinched, defeated look as mine.

I backed away, shaking my head. “What’s happened to me?” I whispered, not asking Shaker but myself. I didn’t
know the hollow-eyed woman in the mirror. She bore a resemblance to the ruin of the woman I had called Mother. Where was Linny, little Linny Gow, the child with the clear eyes and hair like the ripest of summer’s pears?

“You’ve had a shock,” Shaker said quietly. “I expect that once you feel better—”

“No,” I said, sitting again. “No. That’s not it.”

We sat in silence, listening to the quiet ticking of the clock. The sky was darkening and the breeze at the slightly open window lifted the strands of hair around my face. “I don’t know what I mean,” I finished limply.

Mrs. Smallpiece gave a small murmur and then turned her head from side to side. Shaker helped her to her feet and got her settled in her chair. Her chin slumped against her chest, but Shaker took her Bible from a shelf and put it into her loosely curled hands.

“Do you believe in signs, Miss Gow?” he asked.

He was tall; I had to tip my chin to look at him. “Signs?” I thought of the baby. She had been my sign. But how did you interpret it when the sign didn’t mean what you thought it had? Was that another sign in itself?

Although the room was still quiet, sounds from outside grew louder. The urgent barking of a dog, the far-off lowing of cattle, the closer chiming of church bells. The breeze suddenly turned to wind, causing the curtain to billow in an arc, reminding me of the sail of a ship.

“I believe in signs,” I finally said.

Shaker lowered the window with a thud and then, leaning against the sill, the light behind him, stared at me. “I do too, Miss Gow,” he finally said.

“Linny. Please call me Linny.”

A slow flush rose up his neck again. “I believe you are my sign, Linny Gow.”