After Alice (11 page)

 

CHAPTER 26

L
ydia had had no difficulty persuading Siam to return with her to the Croft. “Your Mr. Winter will find us there,” she said. “He's on an errand of foolishness or mercy, or perhaps both.”

Siam made no reply. Perhaps, Lydia thought, that description characterizes Mr. Winter's attention to Siam, too.

Lydia thought it wouldn't be proper for them to walk abreast, though she wasn't sure why. She pressed ahead, remarking over her shoulder, “Mind the burrs,” and “We'll turn here, it's quicker.” They passed into a grove of saplings. For a moment they were out of sight of any rooftops or chimney pots, cows or river. The June greenery gave off its smell of sour and sweet fervor. She almost felt drunk. How wild the world was, when you paused to look over the stile, out any window, across the herbaceous borders of propriety, 1860s version.

She stopped and turned, without forethought. She faced Siam. He had just leaped over a spot of puddle and so he was right at her chin. He couldn't back up because of the mud. She didn't retreat either.

“How do you find it, traveling about with him?” she said.

How fast the shutters flew up, how fast the drapes were drawn! A look of uncomprehending stiffness such as one might catch from a Welshman. Siam said, “Mr. Josiah he make all the bookings and such.”

“Tell me about where you were born. Tell me about your family.”

“Nothing to say 'bout that. It's all—­” He made a gesture with his hand. “All gone.”

“We have little in common, but we have that,” she said. “My mother is gone, too. She died some months ago.”

He shrugged. She guessed that he knew there was nothing to say. They had nothing to give to each other. Grief cocoons the newly bereaved, and sometimes they never escape.

“I am going mad,” said Lydia. “Always responsible for Alice, always tending to my desperate father. Neither the matron of the house nor the daughter.” Oh, but she was sounding like Miss Armstrong now. “How do you manage, going from here to there? Are you escaping owners who would enslave you and bring you back to whichever southern state you fled from? Or do you have a destination? Is there a home for you ahead?”

“Mr. Josiah my home,” he said. His eyes were glazed. He looked over Lydia's shoulder. A wind pushed the leaves about. It was like being swamped in a green tide rolling in.

“Are you being followed even in England?” she asked. He would not answer.

“You was looking for your sister,” he said at last.

“She can look after herself. She'll show up when she's hungry. I want to know more about Mr. Winter.”

“I can't say. He away with that blue jay woman.”

She took that to be a caution. Calling Miss Armstrong a blue jay! “Is he often scarpering off with single women?”

“Let's go.”

“I see,” she said. It wasn't so much pity as irritation that turned her heel once more. She heard in his avoidance of the subject something untoward about the character of Mr. Winter. Her annoyance was shot through with a surge of bile and regret. The resulting admixture might have been called rage. She kept her voice still as a tyrant adult might. “Very well. Back to the morgue.”

A tension had arisen between them. When he stopped to pick up a stone or a feather or whatever attracted him, she didn't wait. By the time she reached the Croft, he was quite a few steps behind. She didn't hold the gate.

“Well?” asked Mrs. Brummidge.

“Alice is out larking somewhere with Ada Boyce, it seems. Miss Armstrong is rounding them up.”

“Quite right, too. And Mr. Winter's young charge? What did you do with him?” Mrs. Brummidge looked foul and censorious.

“What do you think I did? I slaughtered him and pushed him in the river.”

“You need a nostrum for your wild panics, my girl. But one distress at a time. Mr. Darwin rang for your Mr. Yankee to walk him to the privy. His bowels are unsettled, he said.”

“Father will have to do it. For all I know, Mr. Winter has gone into town with Miss Armstrong. Perhaps they have eloped.”

Along, now, came Siam. Shuffling at the door.

“I think not. My laddio,
you
can attend Mr. Darwin. Go to the parlor and see if he will come with you.”

“T'aint my place,” he said.

“Well, it certainly isn't mine!” snapped Mrs. Brummidge. “This house is in an uproar today. Go and offer some help. I've luncheon to get on the table.” She turned back to the oven and peered inside, batting against the steam and sniffing judiciously. “Not one of my better efforts, but it'll have to do.” She turned. “What are you waiting for, child? Do as I say.”

Still he did not move. He juggled his hands in his pockets.

“What do you have there?” said Mrs. Brummidge, all glower. “Pocketed something from the Master's vitrine, have you? Turn out your pocket, let me see, or I'll be sacked for theft. I won't find another position at my age, not like this one.”

Siam brought out a handful of treasures. Rather than hold them out in his open palm, he dropped them on the tabletop. Two stones from the riverbank. A bit of old conker shell, its auburn shine from last September all weathered to grey. A black ebony pawn from a chessboard.

“That
isn't
from the set in the parlor. Upon my word, I believe it is.” Mrs. Brummidge turned pale. “Mr. Clowd's chess game is useless without all its pieces. As I've been told often enough and no mistake. You've no right to go sneaking about and lifting things from us. I don't care what your heathen background. You ought to know better by now. You're in
England
.” She pronounced that with especial force, as if every knee should bow. “Miss Lydia, make him put it back, and bring him to apologize to the Master.”

“I only holded it,” said Siam. “I warn't taking it.”

“You took it out of the house.”

“Didn't know I was going out. Anyhows, now it's back.”

Mrs. Brummidge wouldn't discuss it further. “Miss Lydia.” In that tone, the cook's word was law. She turned to withdraw the joint from the oven. “Drawing room, young lady. Have him replace the object at once. Then to the parlor, where you will see that this fellow apologizes for his behavior, and offers to help Mr. Darwin, poor soul, with his cramps and ailments.”

Lydia had been docile, almost amused at seeing Siam upbraided. “Come along,” she said. She led him up the steps and through the passage to the front of the house. Her father was in the parlor with Mr. Darwin. The door across the corridor, the door to the drawing room, was closed. “We don't even
come
in here anymore,” she said. “I can't think when you found the moment to steal around our house on your own. You might have opened any door and . . . found me unprepared for company.”

“When Mr. Josiah took Mr. Darwin out to visit the necessary. I just standing in the hallway. And your father, he crying or something. I coon't go back in there. So I look around in this room 'stead.” His hand on the doorknob.

“Very well. Go in again.”

He opened the door. The drawing room was still shaded with curtains. Outlines, dust, a faint odor evocative of Mama. It had been Mama's room primarily. They did not use this room now.

“Why they cloths up on the picture?”

“It's not a picture. It's a mirror,” said Lydia at the doorway, gasping in small silent intakes, keeping her voice level. “A practice in this country to drape the mirrors when someone dies. It's outrageous that you've made me come into this place. Put back the piece now, I don't like to be here.”

“Who do,” he muttered.

“That's a rude thing to say as a guest, in this house, in this nation.”

“I'd leave iffen I could.”

“You may get your chance.” She felt light-­headed and fiery. “I'll tell your dallying Mr. Winter, when and if he ever returns, that you've stolen from us. Perhaps he'll reconsider whether to keep on endorsing your
bid
for
freedom
.” She went further then, swayed into recklessness by the miasma of loss in this chamber. “I do believe it may be the law of the land that thieves are exported. Certainly a fair number of felons have been marched to World's End and sent down under, never to return.”

“Down under.” He said it with the sound of an oracle, slow and horrified at what was emerging from his mouth. He set the pawn upon the chessboard so softly there was no little click of ebony upon marble tile square. None of the other ebony pieces, nor their ivory twins, shuddered or flinched. The world was dead.

“Down under,” she said again. “Oh, what's the bother?” There was noise from the kitchen, a warm deep note, Mr. Winter. He'd expected to meet up with Lydia again but she rejected him summarily, for his courtly attention to that stupid governess. He deserved whatever he got. “There he is. I shall go tell him at once of your perfidy. Wait here.”

She closed the door. He was alone in the dark, waiting.

Down under. Back home. What was the difference, what difference did it make? In a half hour, had he undone everything merciful that had happened to him in his otherwise merciless existence?

Who had he become, just by menacing this jittery white girl? He felt altered, other than himself. Nothing was like it had been before.
Am I even Siam?
he wondered. He had not always been Siam, he'd had another name. At Dover, the minister of customs had examined his papers and then asked a question in an accent too quaint for an American boy to understand. Mr. Winter had given the tiniest nod of his head, so he'd murmured, “Yes I am.” But the officer had heard “Siam.” He'd written that down on the paper. Siam had had a ready-­made alias he hadn't intended to choose.

The room was so dark. He felt gone, invisible, as if he had no more presence. All for a little black toy that had no face. He went past the checkered board on its table. He ventured to the mantelpiece and found a footstool by the hearth. He climbed up, and pushed aside the purple cloth that hung over the looking-­glass.

The light was poor. Siam couldn't see himself at first.

“He's in the drawing room,” came Lydia's sharp voice in the passage. “Go say your piece, Mr. Winter.”

A knock at the door. “Are you in here?” Mr. Winter's voice angry.

The boy might have answered “Yes I am,” or “Siam,” or even “Samuel,” had he been in there. But the drape was settling across the looking-­glass. The room was empty.

 

PART THE SECOND

There are bits and pieces of the Thames all over Oxford, runnels and reaches and backwaters—­“more in number than your eyelashes,” Keats said—­and beneath the very centre of the city runs the Trill Mill stream, a gloomy underground waterway in which it was discovered, one day in the 1920s, a rotted Victorian punt with two Victorian skeletons in it.

—­
J
AMES
/J
AN
M
ORR
IS,
O
XFORD
, PAGE 31

 

CHAPTER 27

A
noisy place and dark, the world has always seemed to Siam. A millstone working upon its quern not grain but shale, or glass, something splintery. The last light with any real warmth had been at home, long ago, in a place and a time that no longer existed, with ­people whose names he didn't say even inside his own mind. As if by thinking of them he might betray them anew. Might put them to some further punishment beyond that which had been accorded them by the slave-­hunters.

Now, the boy is momentarily impressed by the silence. The drape on the other side hasn't fallen all the way back, it seems. An uncovered triangle of glass, hardly the size of his hand, remains. He climbs down onto a footstool placed in
this
room just where he had positioned it in the
other
. Curious. He is stealthy, a cat making no noise. The room is very like the one he has just left; equally dark, shrouded. It's too gloomy to know what sort of room it is. Possibly a second parlor. He hopes this isn't the room where Mrs. Clowd is laid. He wouldn't want to be in a dark place with a spooky corpse.

He puts his hand to his face, palm side in because he knows the back of his hand is darker and will reflect less. Creeping up to the mantel and keeping as low as he can, he peers through his fingers across into the room from which he has escaped. Beyond the dark room with the chessboard, out in that passageway, a vector of summery light suddenly sluices, describing a wedge of golden swimming motes. Into the glare, struck as if by fire, Miss Lydia advances, and steps a foot into the dark other room. Her ghoulish pale hair falls upon her neck. Her hand lingers on the doorknob uncertainly. She opens her mouth and says something. Her expression betrays vexation, perhaps the start of worry. She may be calling his name, but he can't hear it.

In the absence of sound, he hears traces of things that he heard in a handful of hidey-­holes from Georgia to Tennessee to Pennsylvania and other places. He and his party had learned to disappear in a split moment, sometimes stowed all together, sometimes separately. But he'd always been with one or the other of them, never alone. A smokehouse in the Blue Ridge steeps, a sugaring shed in Brooklyn. Smoke and sugar. And once in the gritty mouth of a coal mine, where they'd huddled in darkness, afraid to strike a match for fear of firedamp, that methane monster.

Disembodied words from the memory of those moments attach themselves to the soundless speaking of Lydia, who is addressing someone in the corridor behind her.

Don't know the names they'd be using, farmer; but when you got black rats in the woodpile no need to know their names before you trap them.

If we find you're harboring stolen property, we'd not be averse to burning this ham house down.

Sending cargo up north, ma'am? Ma'am? Why, you look like you near swallowed a sack of saltpeter, ma'am. Not going to harm a whisker on your old chin, ma'am. Put down your gun, it's liable to make a row and waken the cooey-­doves.

Behind Lydia, into the room, comes Mr. Josiah. Siam can't see his face clearly; Lydia is in the way, and so are the tears in Siam's eyes. He doesn't dare wipe them; the movement of his hand would attract attention. He squeezes his lids shut. Even through closed eyes he can sense when the light has gone out of that other room. When he cautiously looks about, he sees the light has largely disappeared from this room, too.

There is no telling when that missie will come back, hunting him. Siam doesn't want to plot an escape route in the bright sunshine of an Oxford noon. He'll hide here till tempers cool and his brains warm up. He has to think about what next. He hunches down to his haunches and makes his way forward, feeling the edges of tables. He brushes against the chess set. But that was in the room he just evacuated. Another set here, an identical one? Even in the anonymous dark, he can feel the forward pawn, just like the one he has just replaced. A little thing to bring him such trouble. It meant no harm—­as if things could have meanings.

Oh, but now he's knocked it on the carpet, and can't make it out in the gloom. He leaves it be.

As much out of habit as not, he backs up into the open hearth, which is clean, clear of andirons and ashes. If someone opens the door, he'll be simply shadows, no more, the ghost of smoke.

In Cheapside last week, in London, he'd come across a chimney sweep at dusk, fresh from his day of labor. Boy or stunted man, bowed by a hawking cough, that person stared at Siam. Bright eyes alert in his sooty face. He'd said something to Siam. Blessing or curse, neither Siam nor Mr. Josiah had known, for the fellow's mouth seemed thick with growths that made an already difficult accent into an impossible language. But though his words had been hooded, and the spit on the paving stones viscous and bloody, the sweep's eyes had looked full of pity and mercy. When he gathered up his brooms and his brushes and turned away, it seemed to Siam like losing another brother.

At this memory, Siam thinks he might climb the flue. He has done this before, once, stealing through the big house with Clem the time he was loaned to pick the cotton fields of Bellefleur or Bellerive or Bellefuck or wherever it was. Clem had later been found out and beaten, but he'd never let on Siam was trespassing in there, too. Siam wonders if the chimneys here are made the same way, with protrusions for the hands to grasp. He'll find out.

He makes a start of it by feeling to make sure the space is wide enough for his head and his shoulders. He stands up, gingerly, into the darker dark. He raises his hands and gropes, and locates a hold. With one hand on the brick and the other pressed against the wall of the flue, he pulls himself up so his feet are not standing in the hearth anymore. He wedges himself a few feet upward, angled in the flue like a twig in the neck of a brown glass bottle. But he can't find a second brick with which to pull himself higher. Then the first one breaks in his hand. With a mighty crash, he slips to the hearth. Somehow, against his plans and hopes, he smashes through the hearth, or maybe it opens on a hinge for the dumping of ashes into a cellar. He continues falling through the dark. Eventually I'll reach the kitchens and fetch up in a pot of stew, and ruin their lunch, he thinks, and almost begins to laugh, as if his despair has a bright aspect to it. Still he falls. The kitchen must be a long way down, he thinks, halfway to Hell.