The Dress Lodger (42 page)

Before tonight, could the Eye have ever imagined herself dancing? Clasping hands with each collier, bowing and sashaying down the line from one to the next? And yet she does, having watched enough couples in her evenings out with Gustine to know how it’s done. It is something new for her, and exhilarating, like holding the baby. Men touch her, she freely touches back. The dress lodger could not have been more wrong about her shadow—no matter what malevolent motives were assigned her (and many were certainly proven true), the Eye’s touch never had the power to kill. Maim, yes, or wound; her hands, clasped inside those of her dancing partner, could have gripped the handle of a knife and driven it home; but to say her touch—or for that matter, her gentle cradling of a baby—was of itself lethal must must have been, as Henry suggested, merely superstition.

That is, before tonight.

It is one of those strange twists of fate that her break with Gustine has given the old woman the very powers the girl always feared she possessed. Now when she spins from man to man, laughing deep and throaty with the rest of them, she has no idea she is whirling each one off into cold blue agony. Or that later, when in her new mood of charity she shares her unfinished meat pie with a hungry old waterman, the munificent crumbs will go down his gullet blue and bitter, only to come back up tonight. She knows she has begun to feel queer over the last few hours—light-headed and concentrated at the same time, like an actor who, though she has no more lines, must stay in costume to take her bows with all the rest. But she has no suspicion that vengeance will be visited on object and instrument alike. Despite the

heat of dancing, the Eye is strangely cold and achy, and if she were to glance down at her capering shadow on the snow, she would find that it, too, had become unmistakably blue.

Aw, don’t leave us, Mother! cries the pitman, falling to his knees in mock beggary as she walks away, back up the bank. Who will dance with me?

But Eye cannot linger here all night. There on High Street, she sees a baker setting a blackcurrant pie on his windowsill to cool, and beyond him, a turquoise bird of paradise matted in a printer’s window. As far as the Eye can see, a shining path stretches out before her. And she is a genius again, if only for a single night, who, finally freed of watching, might follow wherever the blue will take her.

Someone to see you, miss.” The Places’ girl Crimmons slips into the parlour wearing her most disapproving scowl. It is eleven o’clock at night, and long past time for callers. Who else but Henry would come by at this hour? Yet Crimmons says, No, miss, it’s not him. Says she’s a friend of his. A Miss Potter, but she doesn’t have a card.

Audrey is sitting in her chair by the fire, where she has been taking up one of her old worsted wool pinafores for Pink. It has been packed away for years among outdated patterns and ragbags of buttons and trim, but with a few alterations and a good airing, it should suit the little girl nicely. Going through her old trunks had soothed her after the awful fight with Henry, in the way only cherished girlhood things might. She reread letters written to schoolmates about young men who were not her fiance; sighed over pressed roses from former darlings’ boutonnieres and scores of crowded dance cards. Poring over these little mementos served two purposes: first to balm her bruised self-esteem with the recollection of former triumphs, and second to make her feel vaguely traitorous, so that her better side might rush to her fiance’s defense and repair the romantic treachery, even if committed only in memory. So she has spent the last hours sewing and remembering, putting Henry beneath all other lovers, then tearfully raising him up. Lost so long in dusty memories, she is quite disconcerted to be faced with a strange young lady—a “friend” of her fiance’s of whom he has never made mention—observing her from the doorway. Shortsighted Audrey squints at the pale young woman, elegantly dressed as if having come straight from a party, and blushes at her own disheveled appearance.

“Good evening, Miss Potter,” Audrey offers, rising. “I fear I wasn’t expecting company.”

The newly christened Miss Potter, for her own part, is more than a little surprised by what she finds inside. She had expected to discover the privileged Miss Audrey Place perched upon a gold and pink chair, outfitted in her lame turban and ostrich feather, earrings dimpling her lobes and matching necklace clasped around her long white throat; playing cards and sipping champagne maybe; or perhaps merely admiring herself in a hand mirror. Against the Audrey she constructed, it would be easy to walk in, say her piece, and leave. But the reality is so utterly different. Henry’s fiancee is dressed in a simple, patched yellow wrapper (which she put on for comfort once Henry and her godfather Clanny left), with her hair combed out and braided loosely down her back. Her weak eyes are still a bit red and swollen, from crying and doing fine needlework in low light, for Audrey did not think to light the lamp with just herself in the room, and instead squinted close to the dying fire. Her slippers are worn and stitched with tiny blush roses, so she does not go barefoot around the house; nor must she wear her outdoor shoes as lodgers are forced to do. The fact that Audrey’s oldest, most comfortable clothes are still so much finer than anything Gustine has ever owned herself is perhaps most disheartening of all.

“Please, do come in,” Audrey urges.

The room is as casually elegant as its occupant, with muted silver and green trellised wallpaper, gray wainscoting, and cheerful floral carpets scattered about. Nautical decorations, as befits a shipping fortune, grace every blank space, with no less than five studies of the Wearmouth Bridge (West View) upon one wall and portraits of schooners hung like revered members of the family upon the other. Even the marble mantelpiece recalls the sea, carved as it is with fishes and tridents and a smooth white anchor over its keystone. Upon it, in all its sentimental glory, sits the ubiquitous Sailor’s Tear, erupting with pink autumn mums to match the painted rim and handle.

“Let me just light the lamp.” Audrey says, removing a porcelain bowl perched on the lamp’s chimney and turning up the wick. “I apologize for the smell. We’ve been heating vinegar and cloves over it to keep away the cholera morbus.”

“Crimmons said you are a friend of Dr. Chiver? You must forgive my memory, and remind me where we’ve met?” Audrey asks disingenuously, for now that she can see her better, this young lady, with her crushed dress and scratched face, hardly looks like someone her fiance would know. And why the silence, why the queer timing of this call?

“We’ve never met,” Gustine replies at last, in her most careful Fawcett Street voice. “But I thought we should speak.”

“Pray, don’t be mysterious,” says Audrey, meaning it, for her nerves can’t take much more of this. “Come sit down and take some tea with me.”

Gustine had not planned to sit and make conversation. Her rage was to sustain her in thrusting out the sailor’s bundle with a blunt explanation before coldly taking her leave. But seeing this girl so close to her own age, alone and vulnerable in this dim, silent room, has taken her aback a bit. With a guilty glance at The Sailor’s Tear she accepts the chair opposite Audrey, and tucks her package behind her skirts.

“Please pardon the mess,” Audrey nods to her sewing and the pillaged trunks at her feet. “I was taking up a dress for a little charity case I hope to rescue. She’s been raised like a heathen, and lives among the lowest of the low; but I’ve taken an especial interest in her and hope to do a bit of good. Won’t you have a cup?”

Miss Potter refuses with a shake of the head. “What do you have planned for your charity girl?” she asks.

“Oh, I’m not sure yet. She’s fit for nothing, I would daresay, though her father gives her all sorts of dreadful tasks. I think that’s half the reason I’m so attached to her. Her father is so cruel, whereas my father has always been so good to me.”

Here is your opening, thinks the dress lodger. Hand her the bundle. Do it now, she wills herself.

“Now, how do you know my Henry?” Audrey asks.

Gustine would like nothing better than to tell the truth, but the truth does not fit her plan. “He cured me of a fever,” she says flatly instead.

“Oh, a patient!” Audrey’s relief is palpable, for she had been feeling more than a little alarmed by this pale, disheveled woman, visiting after eleven at night. “You are much better, I hope?”

“Much,” replies Gustine. “We had our final consultation only hours ago.”

“You’ve seen him tonight?” asks Audrey eagerly, then quickly catches herself. “I’m afraid we had a bit of a row earlier, and I’ve been so desperate to apologize. How did he look?”

Gustine remembers the effigy Henry, falling to cinders before his house. “Not especially well,” she replies.

“I was afraid of that.” Unbidden, tears leak from Audrey’s already primed eyes, and all disloyal thoughts of other men are washed away. “My future husband is the gentlest man on earth,” she says, happy to speak well of him and make amends for her rebelliousness of earlier. “He desires only to do good in this world, and so often, I don’t comprehend how my careless actions might imperil his work.”

“How can you say that?” Gustine asks, unable to imagine any sort of rift between the doctor and this accommodating girl. “No matter what the consequences, surely he must appreciate such an act of heroism on your part.”

“You speak of the petition in today’s newspaper?” Audrey buries her face in her hands and weeps in earnest now. “Please don’t remind me of my wretched stupidity. I don’t know what possessed me to print that!”

“You didn’t mean it then?” asks Gustine.

“No, of course I meant it.” Audrey blows her delicate nose on an old scrap of fabric. “I honestly believe, Miss Potter, that the poor will never follow where the wealthy do not lead. We are educated, we are the rational and far-seeing. How can we expect the ignorant to move beyond superstition if we espouse it? But Dr. Chiver has shown me how misguided my methods were.”

And this poor girl doesn’t know the half of it, Gustine thinks. If she suspected that her petition was responsible for the riot even now raging, she would surely perish with grief. But this will not do, Gustine thinks, giving herself a shake. She did not come here to admire or sympathize with Audrey Place. She came here to make her pay.

“Has something happened to Dr. Chiver?” Audrey pales at the grim look on Miss Potter’s face.

Of course she would think of the one closest to heart and home. “No. Nothing has happened to the doctor,” Gustine replies, sparing her the knowledge of the riot. This is far more difficult than she expected. She planned this all out while she cleaned the mud from her dress and repinned her disarrayed hair. Down by the river, she created a shared pain to take to Miss Place’s house. Now is not the time to weaken. “I have come because you and I have something in common,” she says.

“What is that?”

“Our fathers have both been long away at sea.”

“Yours too?” breathes Audrey. “Is it not awful being fatherless? Where is your father now?”

“In Riga,” replies Gustine.

“What a coincidence! So is mine!”

“I know. In fact, I have just tonight had news from there.”

“News of my father?” Audrey starts from her chair. “I can see it in your face. Please tell me—he is trapped behind the Quarantine there, and we’ve had no word for months.”

Gustine had practiced the speech on the way over: a dry account of Captain Place’s death, interjected with cold expressions of sympathy for the writhing agony he must have suffered before finally perishing alone in a strange land and being ultimately dumped at sea. Now that the time has come, however, she finds the speech dying on her lips. Audrey leans forward eagerly, feverish to hear what this stranger has to say, but Gustine’s carefully rehearsed words fail her.

“I met a sailor who was to give you the news,” Gustine says helplessly, speaking as she would to a friend, “but I thought it might be kinder coming from another woman.”

“Oh dear God, no.” Audrey shakes her head, knowing immediately from Gustine’s tone and expression what is meant. “No. No!”

“I am so sorry.”

“Father!” Audrey screams, throwing herself onto Gustine’s narrow bosom. Gustine’s own tears are still too close to the surface not to be affected by another’s weeping, and she finds herself struggling through the story the sailor told her: of cholera coming aboard ship, of the letter home the captain had in his hand when he died, and of his crew’s difficult journey back to Sunderland. The young girl but halfhears, sobbing in Gustine’s arms. Now that you have crippled her, finish her off, the voice of vengeance speaks in her ear. Reach down behind your skirts and present her the package. Take your delight in seeing her press the miasmic clothes to her tear-stained face, breathing in the deaths of continents. She belongs to him; she is one of them. Comfort not the woman you came to kill. Finish her off, Gustine.

But it is so very, very difficult. As many times as she tells herself she cannot be called a murderer, that the clothes were on their way here with or without her, she recognizes the workings of her own assassin heart. She could have interrupted the inevitable; life and death were in her power as surely as they have always been in Henry’s. And yet she has chosen death, for herself and the girl, as surely as Henry has always chosen it. Stop thinking this way, she wills herself. Present the bundle. Punish them. But even as Gustine fires herself, the tears of this poor fatherless girl dampen the flames. Were she only a little less trusting, a little more haughty; if she had only been wearing the matching earrings and necklace, the dress lodger could have gone through with it. But look at her— this girl does not deserve to die for Henry Chiver’s sins. She will suffer enough being married to him.

“I must go to my mother,” Audrey says, sitting up weakly and wiping her eyes. “How can I ever repay you?”

Gustine shakes her head, thoroughly ashamed of having come here. She has no more words, could not summon up the Fawcett Street platitudes of a Miss Potter if she tried. She hides the bundle behind her back, inching toward the door and the river, where she will destroy them for good. “I am sorry,” she whispers in the doorway, as much to her unavenged child as to the brokenhearted girl.