The Linnet Bird: A Novel (20 page)

I
T SEEMED ODD AND YET,
somehow, I did not think it strange. I simply stayed there, in the house on Whitefield Lane, with no discussion, no plan. After our conversation, Shaker had disappeared, perhaps for one hour or possibly two, as I had no notion of the time. I felt strangely detached, sitting at the polished table, as if my mind were somewhere above my body, floating loose and confused. Mrs. Smallpiece, after her brief bout of religious fervor and convulsive fit, appeared exhausted, almost as dazed as I was, as if something had fled and left her empty and either she wasn’t aware or didn’t care that I sat in the room with her. Eventually she slowly made her way to the horsehair screen in the corner and went behind it, emerging in a fresh dress. Then she returned to her chair and flipped the pages of her Bible endlessly but didn’t read from it. The two of us sat there, separate islands, waiting, I felt, but for what I didn’t know.

There were footsteps on the stairs, a heavy set and a lighter, almost scampering set, and a stout woman clattered in with an ash pail. She stopped at the sight of me and the young girl with one milky blind eye bumped into her back. Mrs. Smallpiece dully scolded her about being late. The woman dropped the empty pail. “How was I to know you were having company?” she demanded. “Does that mean extra for dinner as well? That beef might not stretch. Does Merrie have to set the table for three?”

When she didn’t get an answer, she turned on her heel and stomped out of the room, her ample backside swaying indignantly. The girl ran after her. In a moment I heard thumps and knocks from the staircase, as if the woman were dusting or polishing it with a great deal more noise than was necessary.

Shaker returned, carrying a rolled-up flock mattress and crisp sheets, a new-looking pillow and blankets, which he arranged along the wall opposite his mother’s bed. Mrs. Smallpiece watched but said nothing.

Then he carried in the small tin-plated box and took up the coal shovel from against the fireplace. I rose, holding the shawl tightly around me, and together we went down the stairs.

“Good day, Nan,” he said, as we passed the stout woman on her knees sweeping out the sitting room fireplace. “And to you as well, Merrie.” The woman stared at me openly, without replying. The girl held a figurine in one hand and a dusting rag in the other. Like the woman, her hands stopped what they were doing and she looked at us with her one dark blue eye, the milky one turned inward.

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
M
RS.
S
MALLPIECE
’
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.

S
HAKER 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 answered. “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.