The Penny Heart (55 page)

‘Peg did give her a chance,’ he mumbled sheepishly. ‘But the fool wouldn’t do the sensible thing and leave. I asked Peg to make her go away, but the Harper woman was obstinate. And then she went in search of liquor in the basement . . .’

His voice trailed away. We set off, Michael swaying as he hauled Mrs Harper’s corpse across the mire. A rectangular foundation pit, large enough for the engine’s housing, came into view.

‘Ah,’ I said, splashing behind him through drenching puddles, ‘the scene of our great fortune.’

A path ran around the pit, where workers had abandoned heaps of earth and tools, and even a rusting wheelbarrow. Ponds and rivulets glimmered in the ceaseless rain; the ground was as dark and sticky as pitch. Michael edged forward to the bank of mud. Some dozen feet below us, the pit contained a sump of filthy water. I stood behind him, as close as I dared, and uttered a prayer for the poor woman. Then Michael tied a large stone to her skirts and lifted her high, swung her back, and then cast her forth. She tumbled awkwardly, poor soul, into the coal-black waters beneath. There was barely a splash as her body sank. ‘That’s good,’ he muttered. ‘She’s sinking at once.’

We returned together to the gig to fetch Peg’s body. Both of us were drenched. Michael’s hair dripped long with rainwater; his coat was sodden, his lean bones stood jagged, his eyes were huge. Halfway back to the pit he stumbled and dropped Peg in the mud, and the blanket that covered her fell away. The wound to her chest had left an oval stain across my gown where the knife was still embedded. He lifted her tenderly in his arms and trudged on.

At the lip of the pit he halted again, panting for breath. I took a last look at Peg as she lay ungainly in his arms. The false raven tresses were, of course, merely horsehair, and now hung clotted with mud. Her eyes stood open in a glazed resentful stare. She was a grotesque mannequin, no longer animated by whatever chameleon spirit had played at being Mary, or Peg, or whichever character most suited her purpose. I waited for Michael to cast her away, but instead, he lifted her in his arms and passionately kissed her open mouth. He was sweating, his skin oyster damp; the old handsome features bleary and raw-eyed. Then, turning to me, he glared with streaming eyes. ‘You! You have ruined everything. Why did you ever come back?’

I started back, shielding my face, my own hot tears blurring my vision.

He sank to his knees, cradling her lolling head; I felt he wanted to roll, swine-like, in filth. I had seen enough.

‘I am going,’ I called, and began to step heedlessly back through the sucking ground, dully aware of Michael’s eternal facility to crush me. I was already some thirty feet nearer to the gig when I looked backwards to see if he was following me. He was not. Still he knelt over Peg’s corpse like a tragic lover, filthy and distraught.

Even those events we mark clearly with our own eyes can deceive us; I had learned that lesson well from Peg. If memory is, as the ancients say, a tablet of wax marked with a stylus, what happened next was gouged so deep that the wax itself was near destroyed. Propelled by disgust, I again set my head down and picked my way back to the gig through ankle-deep puddles. I started as a sound rang out, a wordless scream that split the air – anguished, terrified, miserable. In the moment in which I turned, I heard a long, splintery splash of water. I looked dimly about through the sheets of rain. The edge of the pit lay empty – both Michael and Peg had vanished from this earth. Stupefied, I scanned the landscape for them, convinced that my eyes betrayed me. Then I ran back to the pit through sucking mud, my lungs bursting. By the time I reached the rim I found nothing moving, save two conjoined rings, slowly dilating in the water. ‘Michael!’ I screamed at the empty air, wondering if this was some final, cruel trick the pair had played on me. I grasped a stick and threw it feebly into the water. Nothing surfaced. I stood stunned as the rings of water expanded ever more slowly, until the black surface at last grew still. Had Michael leaped after his lover in a fit of despair? I did not know. I could no longer set one rational thought before another. I was alone, shaking and sobbing in that graveyard of dreams.

The dismal sounds of morning broke around me. A few birds awakened and uttered lonely calls. The horse shook a flurry of rain from his coat, jangling his harness. I was so wet and cold that I wondered how I might ever peel off the second skin of my bloodied mourning gown. Then, like a long-forgotten vision, I remembered Henry waiting in the kitchen with Nan, and that I could feed him in bed with a good hot fire before us. The rain was already washing away our footprints in the churned earth. The coming day would discover no sign of the night’s events. I returned to the pony cart and turned it around for Delafosse.

32

London

Summer 1796

~ Orange-flower Sugarpaste ~

Chop and pulverise your orange-flowers and pound them with gum dragon dissolved in a glass of water. Add a glass of orange-flower water and as much sugar as is necessary to bring it to a supple paste consistence, and mould as you will into small cakes, flowers, lozenges, as you will.

The Professed Cook, or The Modern Art of Cookery, Pastry and Confectionary Made Plain and Easy by Bernard Clermont

I spent almost a month at Delafosse, in a state of exhausted half-life. I let Nan care for little Henry and me, all the time keeping the fire in my chamber banked up high, and the curtains drawn. Dear Nan brought me caudles of egg and brandy, game jellies, and herb-rich stews. Except to dismiss the sisters from the kitchen, I didn’t leave my chamber at all.

I felt I must sleep for a hundred years, safe in some pocket of lost time, before I could wake and find the world alive again. And each time I woke to feed Henry, the memories that blazed in my mind – the glint of a knife-point in the darkness, Mrs Harper’s icy handclasp in the larder, and Michael’s wordless anguish as he vanished from this world – those images dissolved slowly away, like crimson scars fading to new pink skin. No constables or magistrates came knocking at my door with unanswerable questions. The new owner of Whitelow did not demand to search the foundation pit. I would have liked to hibernate there in my old chamber, in the blue tester bed beneath crewel-work tulips, with the bed curtains wrapped tightly around us.

‘He should be baptised, mistress,’ Nan said, winding bands of linen tightly about Henry’s wriggling form.

‘One day. In my religion he should wait until he chooses to be baptised himself.’

‘That’s a shame. I never did get to showing you this.’ Nan pulled a paper parcel from her apron and handed it to me. Inside was a miniature cradle, smaller than my hand, painted to look like wood. It contained a tiny peg-sized baby, swaddled in bands. At first I thought it was made of yellowing ivory, but it had a powdery texture.

‘Is it made of sugar?’

‘Aye. It’s a device for a christening cake. I fancied the little one might ’ave it.’

I looked at it closely; it had the look of an antique from a bygone age. ‘It’s very old. And beautiful.’

‘This come with it. You ’ave a look. I never did learn how to read me letters.’

I opened a fading, yellowed paper. As I read it out loud to Nan, my eyes stung with pity: poor Hannah Croxon had made such efforts to give Michael a good and free life.

Again I picked up the tiny figure of a baby; only this time it struck me as a crude depiction of a human being, like a tiny corpse in a shroud.

‘And now he’s dead,’ I said. ‘That beautiful baby she rescued.’

Nan’s milky eyes looked up into my face, sagging mournfully in their great web of wrinkles. ‘Mr Michael?’ She had never asked me why he hadn’t returned.

‘Yes. He died with her. I think he chose to.’ I held out the crib to her. ‘I can’t take it, Nan. Even though he was Henry’s father. I want to break the link now.’

Nan ran a mottled fingertip along the length of the sugar figure. ‘After I got this from Miss Hannah, I allus knew the bairn were safe,’ she said. ‘I never even knew he come back here.’

I didn’t tell her I guessed someone else had known and had used that knowledge cruelly. Tenderly she wrapped the sugar baby up again in its manger of dusty paper.

A letter arrived, giving Michael notice of the end of the twelve-month’s tenancy at Delafosse. With it was enclosed an advertisement for the property’s sale, stating that the land and house were expected to command £1,000. Michael’s strongbox contained more than that sum; almost £3,000, or half of the £6,000 my land was worth.

I drew back the curtains on a window-rattling, wind-whipped autumn; the trees were shedding flurries of ochre leaves. Across a pearly sky, a flock of swallows crisscrossed in agitated arcs. I leaned forward on my elbows and wondered at myself. It was not only Michael that I was cured of; I had fallen out of my dream of living at Delafosse; with its untameable acres and incurable decay. I made plans to depart.

The only letter I wrote was to Mrs Barthwaite, informing her I was sorry I could not pursue our acquaintance as I was leaving Earlby for good. My health, I wrote, was not strong enough to withstand the damp northern winters. That one letter, I surmised, would inform the entire neighbourhood of my departure.

I burned Peg’s things, and Michael’s too. The monstrous hoard of food I found in the basement was given to the church to distribute to the poor. I took only my own goods, and what I thought would prove useful of the new furniture. Beyond that, I wanted nothing that carried the taint of my time at Delafosse Hall.

*

My house in London is newly built, upon land that was once an orchard. It has crisp rectangular walls, and stands hugger-mugger in the crowded heart of the square. I chose it for its high arched windows that flood my parlour with light from floor to ceiling. From here, I can watch a ceaseless cavalcade of passers-by, carriages, horses and wagons, that cheer me with their incessant reminder that life drives ever onwards. The house is modest and secure; only four narrow floors radiating from the elegant curlicue of a staircase. I want to hug the freshly-plastered walls tightly in my arms; it is a house I can never get lost in.

The captain is well-contented with his quarters, a modest suite of rooms overlooking the stables. I promised him a life of ease, but he will not hear of such idleness. He spends each morning overseeing the stables, and the management of our provisions, too. He has assisted me with matters of business, the deposit of my money at a bank at interest, and the purchase of our home; proving an altogether kindlier advisor than that bulldog, Mr Tully. Then, his duty done, my old friend sets off in his scarlet coat for his day’s perambulations. He has never quite recovered from that savage blow to the head, his hearing is declining, and his back is not so straight, but he is the happiest of fellows, saluting passers-by smartly, and jesting with mop-twirling maids from the neighbouring houses.

Today I have the whole of a summer’s afternoon before me; and down here in the kitchen, I am indulging a whim to learn to bake.

‘Why, it’s what you’d call perfect, ma’am,’ says Sal, my maid-of-all-work, as we unpack my first ever fruit cake from its brown-paper wrapping. It is of modest size, but well fed with brandy, covered with almond paste, and has a top layer of snowy sugar icing as smooth as white glass.

Sal is another welcome refugee from Mrs Huckle’s. Nan would not come south with me, so I settled an annuity on my unlikely saviour. After expressing a hankering to return to her birthplace in Skipton, she lives there now in a doll-sized almshouse, where I hope she may happily end her days.

‘Mama, for me?’ warbles Henry, toddling across the room, his stubby fingers reaching for the cake.

‘Tomorrow.’ I playfully bat his fingers away. ‘Here. Try a sugar rose petal.’ He chews tentatively on the sugar paste, then rolls his eyes in mimicry of bliss. In part I have learned to cook because I still cannot trust a stranger’s food to pass Henry’s lips. I do not suspect my servants of ill will, quite the contrary; it is only my belief that we sometimes give our trust too easily. And Henry is the gold-crowned sun of my universe, a giggling infant whose world is a bounty of small miracles. Now he tugs at Sal’s sleeve, bursting to show her his peg-soldier, whittled and painted by the captain, standing guard at the gate to the yard. I nod at her to follow him, and return to the beautification of my cake.