Cupids (8 page)

My crime with the grain freed me from all that, at least for the while. But I knew there would be a cost and even sensed that, like interest upon a debt, this price might be subtle and rapidly multiplying. Guy unshackled me on the homeward voyage and even raised my stature in Bristol, but now he has turned me into the arrow of his desire and the receptacle of his guilt. I may be godless, but I do not mean to gamble my soul on the mere hope it may be worthless. Like a good investor, I will share the risk. Like Guy, I need a proxy.

Bald ivy trails like rope up the Egret wall. One tendril creeps its way toward Helen's window and I am filled suddenly with a sense of the daring and dramatic. The feeling seems appropriate enough. As an adventurer I am, after all, selling the notion of danger. And I know enough of risk to suspect that, like crime, it can be infectious.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Helen

T
HE BIRD SCUTTLES ALONG
the window ledge again, this time pecking at the glass. I turn from the sound, drawing the blanket around me, shivering not so much from the ice splinters reaching through the walls as from the prickle of wool. I am in some unknown darkness between the opposite extremes of terror and excitement. But, then again, are they opposites? Like the two contrary directions of a hoop, they seem to emerge as one and the same. The flame inside me teases
every
fear and expectation. I can hardly tell pleasure from pain, fear from anticipation.

No one made clear the relevance of the visits several days ago, least of all Bartholomew. But I know that the sudden shift of Mr. Guy's interest from Mr. Egret to his late brother's wife, the visits from the old gentlemen and the judge who acts as the family notary, surely all point to the information I gave to Bartholomew that night in front of the dockside fire. All these things could only mark some change in financial fortunes. Should I be in fear of the stocks for betraying my master's confidence? I hear the whoosh of his cane once more; feel the stab of the metal against my mother's skull. It is this one brutish act together with its likely consequences that stand out when I think of him now. I even remember more details of the occurrence long darkened by memory. I hear again my mother's whispers behind Mr. Egret's half-closed bedroom door, and feel the creak of the stair upon which I crouched. Like swooping butterfly nets my ears managed to catch from my mother's lips two hushed names, “Mr. Egret” and “my Helen,” both in pleading tones.

Then, like a rolling wave, a phrase from Mr. Egret tumbled into a hiss: “Remember your place!” There was a shriek and then a sob, and the collapse of knee upon floorboard. I rushed in to find her crouched upon the rug, tears of blood dropping into her cupped hands.

Why the change? Why the return of memory? No lasting grudge accompanied me all these years from girlhood to the present. The assault merely faded into a rumour, a whispered confidence from Bertha. If I retained any resentment in this home it was against the hair-tugging Eliza. And even this faded when Eliza's childish spark crusted into distaste. Once I was out of the schoolroom, and no longer shaming her slowness in learning, I was scarcely a threat.

Am I kneading the past until it takes the shape and texture that most justifies my betrayal of him? Mr. Egret's sudden loss of temper, his blow, is the only thing that fits such a purpose. There are other aspects to his character. He did keep my mother under his roof when, husbandless, she became round with a babe. Most masters would have turned such women from their door.

I shift again, wool scratching my chin. Remorse is surely beside the point when the hammer of the law might at any hour of the night beat its way through to my bed at dawn and drag me screaming through the mob. As if in premonition of such an event the bird scratches at the window again, this time with unusual persistence. I wonder if fear, as well as guilt, is distorting my vision. Perhaps there will merely be more of the same: creaking silence while the foundation of the house continues to settle to a new reality. There has been no commotion at all since Mr. Whip's visit. I heard none but the most routine of conversations between Mr. Egret and his sister-in-law. Today there was the silent roast lamb at one o'clock, Mr. Egret's afternoon retreat to his study at two, his gruel and bread at five, his bed at eight, and now the same untroubled snoring from Bertha. Surely if things are terribly wrong under this roof, it would seem so. But nothing has changed. Does Mr. Egret know about the visits and simply not care? Or will he remain in the dark until the next visit from his banker, which could come on any day? Will the house suddenly explode into uproar?

I simply do not know enough about the dealings of the world to make a decent guess, although I do know that nothing is more important than property and that no purse can ever be threatened without exciting the most extreme of passions. It is difficult then to imagine how a catastrophe of some sort can be avoided.

I have never entered the circle of women and men who look upon money as more than bread, milk, and oats for today and tomorrow. Food and shelter are the only currency I know. But I can see the feverish activity behind Bartholomew's upward climb to riches and I understand the significance well enough. He is thinking not of today or tomorrow, but next month, next year; an old age in safety and opulence; a life without labour. Perhaps there are nobler yearnings too: a wife and family, a growing tribe. Of course a colonial boy would have to think that way; he is forging a new limb of history.

I am breathless at the thought and my face stings with heat. In the vision of his family that skipped through my mind, I realize, the hair that curled under the bonnet of Bartholomew's pretty wife was black, like mine; her eyes, though indistinct, were brown, also like my own. The vision is not only noble in its way, but exciting.

Still, something in me recoils from the baseness of money. The sovereign he dropped into my hand was a shock greater even than his theft of the pendant. That trinket merely had to be replaced. Bartholomew's sovereign, however, was a different matter. The boy clearly believed he had purchased a piece of information from me, a slice of intelligence that I had no right either to possess or to give. The moment I felt the gold upon my skin, I heard the turning of a heavy lock. I had taken and passed to another someone else's secret. I could give back the payment it had earned, but I could not undo the crime.

Yet even as I imagined the hammering of prison shackles upon my wrists, something other than fear was sparked. It was another kind of token I had wanted from Bartholomew, not the golden kind. Even in disappointment I carried on searching my palm for some message beyond the crude metal, and then I lifted my gaze to scan his face. Was I searching for a softness there that might belie the ugliness of the transaction?

I did find something, a word not said but thought, perhaps even passed between us; I was his
accomplice
. Was there not a strange intimacy in the word? Better than “partners,” the term he had employed by the dockside fire.
Accomplice
is soft and clandestine, the sound of lovers collapsing into a hollow, the hushed folding of limbs, the whisper of infinite trust. Each crossing of our paths — the slipping of notes at dinner, the dropping of a coin in my palm — had the silken texture of true understanding. We were in it together, even though I hadn't any sense of where the journey was taking me.

The bird knocks upon the pane so hard, I turn upon the bed and raise my head. There's another thump as I steady myself on an elbow and try to peer through the misted glass. Something is pressed up against the pane. I have seen wood pigeons fighting over a mate, and the grey object that rises and falls against the smearing glass seems like a wing at first. But then I perceive some larger bulk, a twisted branch perhaps, of which the object making contact is only part. Only it makes no sense as there are no trees on this side of the house. Startled now, and drawing comfort by Bertha's steady outward whistle, I swing my legs and let my feet touch the cool wooden floor.

Wrapping my nightshirt snugly around me, I pad toward the window. A step or two from the pane, I stop, breath suspended, ears numbed. A hand, fingers white, bloated against the glass, appears from darkness. My first thought is that a nightmare has spilled its banks, a breach occurring in the wall between waking and sleep, and that all manner of phantasms will soon tumble into the world — men with beaks and feathers, disembodied hands, seaweed monsters and skeleton armies — unthinkable horrors which have so far been made palatable to men and women only by the swift dissolving forgetfulness we associate with dreams.

The window frame judders and I catch the outline of a face looking through the glass; something cracks, and there's a shimmer of dry leaves, then a thump far below. Whatever was up there has fallen, I realize, but the face and form remain with me with their suggestion of thick wavy hair and a tapered chin. It was surely Bartholomew. No thought at all imposes itself between this realization and my blind descent on the curling stone staircase. As I daren't light a candle I feel my way down the wall as an insect feels with probing hairs, my thoughts all the while dancing over calculations of falling — three storeys: twenty feet, thirty — and juggling visions — Bartholomew with a broken shoulder, a broken wrist; Bartholomew dead.

My bare feet pad along the carpet and stone to the front door and, very carefully, I turn the horseshoe lock. The door gulps open to a rain-streaked night and Bartholomew stands before me, a trail of dead ivy on his head, but otherwise apparently alive and well, a pained, imploring look upon his face.

“THIS IS NOT A decent place,” I tell him, liking neither my words nor the hint of a whine in my tone. “The Crossroads has a reputation. You should not have brought me here.”

“This is a private room, Helen, not a regular part of the tavern,” he replies, a soft, feather-like quality in his voice. “It isn't used by other patrons. My cloak covered your entry and will shield you from any eyes upon your leaving.”

Of course this is true enough. No one is around and, even if they were, they would catch hardly a glimpse.

I know that whatever strange alliance we seem to have formed, we lie far beyond any consideration of what is or isn't seemly. To speak to him as lovers in courtship speak would be to miss the point somehow. It would be taking something brave and new and trying to mould it into an object of uniform drabness. Still, it's an effort not to be like this. Beneath his cloak that still drips despite the tongues of fire that leap behind the grate, I am in a nightgown only. Beneath the nightgown I am naked. Under the table the bare soles of my feet skim ridges of sawdust. A nudging voice, my poor dead mother, tells me a tavern is not a place for a decent girl no matter the hour, and it's now close to midnight. A dry fold of his cloak, warmed by the fire, touches my neck as though to encourage me, to prickle me into the reality of the comforts I may claim. Bartholomew is strangely silent, his brow furrowed, his fingers tracing patterns in the sawdust on the table before him.

“Why did you risk yourself in so foolish a way tonight?” I ask gently.

“I had to see you.” He looks up at me now, his eyes startling in their blueness.

“Why not wait until morning?”

A sad smile passes over his face.

“Because you, like me, are a servant. You own nothing of your life, least of all your time.”

“So you bring me another sleepless night. Thank you.”

“Have you had many since we met?” His eyes glisten, sad yet playful.

I pause for a second. “Yes,” I say, “many.” I feel the sudden lightness of an unburdening.

He smiles. “We must meet sometime, Helen, and are only we free to do so when our masters sleep.”

I weigh the idea for a moment. Everything he says is pleasing, the implication that our fates are joined, the suggestion that we are equal in servitude and that we must then understand each other with the minimum of explanation. But I've been here before, and know that comfort can flip like a coin into trickery.

“You are hardly a servant,” I tell him. “You are Mr. Guy's deputy.”

“Not exactly, Helen,” he says, raising his tankard to his lips, sipping and lowering it slowly. His eyes are all the while on me, and strangely intense. “Guy's deputy is a man named William Colston. He is in Cupers Cove still.”

“But you are not a servant,” I pursue. “Not like me.”

“No, not like you,” he says. “I am beneath all servants, Helen. The rope around my neck ensures that. I must do Guy's bidding no matter how foul the task.”

There is heat and bitterness in his face now.

“Why? What rope?”

His head merely shakes in answer as though shrugging off a fly, and his gaze returns to the tankard before him.

“Lies,” he says, “just lies. But the false witness of a gentleman is worth more than the truth on the lips of a thousand peasants. Guy is wielding the accusation over me. This is why he has me follow him around in the guise of a friend, and attend the feasts to which he is invited. I am the eyes that covert on his behalf, the ears that eavesdrop at his command, and the hands that steal at his pleasure. I am a wretched, miserable slave, my Helen.”

“What about Mr. Egret's pendant? How was that theft committed on his behalf?”

He is surprised by the question, I can tell. His body lurches sideways as though avoiding a knife throw.

“For once I decided to use the skills gained under his command, but for a different purpose. I had to, Helen.” His hand jumps across the table to mine, and I feel the warmth of his fingers. His eyes search my face, almost pleading now. “I had to be sure of you. I had to know that you had the courage.”

“Courage for what?” I tug my hand back, but not strongly enough to break contact. “Don't trick me again, Bartholomew.”

He holds my gaze for a moment and he is close enough for me to feel his breath upon my face. He seems like a man in turmoil, but with Bartholomew I have learned to distrust my own judgment.