Mrs. Engels (26 page)

“Priorities? If you want the wretched crib so desperate, couldn't you ask him to buy it when the yoke is born?”

“I could, I suppose. But there'll be so much to do, and so much will be asked of him then. I want to get as much as I can out of the way by my own account and without disturbing him before time.”

It's the rational sense she makes that worries me most.

“Stop your worrying, Lizzie. It's all going to be grand.”

She puts a hushing hand on my arm and then goes off for a little tour of the shop, humming and purring on her way. The shelf of clocks, which Lambert must keep wound as a torture for his wife, count out a ragged time,
tick-tick-tock-tick-tock-tock-tock
—

The door opens and Lambert ducks back in carrying a little purse. Mary takes it from him. Doesn't stop to count what's in it before gathering her yards and hurrying out:
rrrrring-a-ding-ding-ding-ding!

“Terrible sorry,” I says on my way out after her, “do pardon us, please,” though I imagine he's delighted to get away easy as he does, not the whiff of a haggle left in our wake.

Round the corner again and I light on her tearing, crinoline aflare, towards the cradle shop.

“Mary!” I call out to her. “Slow down, for godsake. Remember you're not well.” And I've a share of complaints myself.

By the time I make it into the shop after her, the purse has already been handed over, and a man the shape of a skittle, bald of pate and bulging at the waist, is putting the coins into little piles on the counter. Over his shoulder peers a woman dressed as a nurse; dressed as one, but not an actual one. I can tell, for I saw many nurses in the lock hospital and got to know them well, and none of them bore semblance to this one, none wore a hat of this shape or an apron of this cut, none wore faces of this knit. The only reason this one is here is to make the customers feel easier about parting with their mint. The only reason this one is here is to sell more crib.

“Good afternoon,” I says, beating my chest to get the lung going.

“Oh, and
that,
” says Mary, gesturing over her shoulder without turning round from the counter, “is my sister.” Her shoulders are rising and falling with her heavy breaths, and her voice, I notice, has gone weak and whispery. “That's only my sister, Miss Burns.”

“How do you do, Miss Burns?” the nurse-body says.

“Alive,” I says.

The nurse-body doesn't break from her fearsome stare. The skittle glances up from what, at this stage, must be his third tour through the coins.

“Don't mind her,” Mary murmurs to them. “Don't mind her, and tell me, please, what's left to pay off.”

The nurse-body produces a book from a drawer. She opens it—
creak
—and puts it on the counter in front of the skittle. He runs his finger down the page.

“Ah, here we are,” he says. “Mrs. Engels, no?”

“Aye, that's it,” says Mary.

He takes his pen up and dips it. Scribbles something down. “Six shillings and sixpence from three pounds and ten makes three pounds, three shillings, and six.”

I watch Mary nod, then watch as the nod turns into an ill-looking loll. She leans forward onto the counter and looks in danger of slumping onto it. I don't move to prop her, for it's only a rig she's playing, a dodge to get something off the price. Or just to make a pageant of her condition.

The skittle looks over his spectacles. “Mrs. Engels?”

She doesn't answer. She's too busy wiping her face of a wet that isn't there.

“Mrs. Engels?”

“Aye?”

“Did you hear what I said? There's three pounds, three shillings, and sixpence owing on the cradle.”

“Aye, that's quite right.” She rubs her handkerchief over the palms of her hands and sweeps back what's come loose from her hair. “Three pounds, three shillings, and six, that's where we are.”

“At the rate you're going, you should have it bought outright in no time.”

“In no time, thank you. Thank you.”

She turns and, with a feeble toss of her shawl, shows me she's ready to leave. I smile a vague thanks to the two behind the counter and reach for the door. On my way out, though, I hear a noise behind me, a creaking and a whimper, and glance back to see Mary stumbling in her boots. I look to the nurse-body. She narrows back at me, mistrusting the scene. Mary reaches out for the closest object that will take her weight. She finds the iron railing of a cot. The nurse-body coughs a rigid cough.

“Please read the sign, Mrs. Engels.”

Mary moans.

“We ask customers to kindly not touch the items on display. If you need to rest, you are welcome to sit there.” She raises an arm—rod-stiff, no elbow in it at all—and points to the pair of chairs by the door.

“Don't worry yourself,” Mary says, and steps away from the cradle. “I'm grand. It's all grand.”

Step. Shuffle. Dodder. Totter.

I'm beginning to feel anxious. I move back inside, but am wary of going to aid her. I'm lost as to what part I'm supposed to be playing in this game, or what she hopes to gain by it. Final she makes it to the seat and sits heavy onto it.

“Do you think—” She presses the backs of her hands against her brow, then her cheeks.

“What is it, Mrs. Engels?” the skittle says. “Are you unwell?”

“Do you think I could bother you”—swallowing and licking her lips—“Can I ask you for a glass of something to drink. I don't know, all of a sudden, I feel—”

A gurgle and a heave then, and she's letting vomit. Frozen, we watch it outpour. Follow it drain down over her and collect into a puddle on the floor.

Then the hysterics. From the nurse, a cater-and-wailing I can't make end nor side of. From the skittle, an unmanful shrill.

“My boards! My good boards!”

I rush over to Mary, kneel beside her, and push her head down between her knees. More comes, gushes, splashes onto my sleeves and seeps into my trail. The oysters we ate in Smithfield are there, black globs of flesh in the stew, though I doubt they're to blame, for I had the largest share and I feel in perfect hale.

“Get her out!” the skittle shrieks. “Get her onto the street!”

But there's no shifting her now. It's pouring too fast and too heavy. All we can do is bide for it to waste.

Minutes, it takes, and minutes more for her breathing to return.

“Lizzie,” she says then, and I have to pull close to hear her under the howling of the other two.

“Aye, Mary?”

“I think I vomited.”

She turns to look at me. I glimpse death dark in her cheeks and in the pits round her eyes. “Christ, Mary, what's happening?”

“Naught. Lizzie. Naught at all. Only we'll need to get a cab back. Have we any ready left on us?”

“We do, I think. Can you stand?”

“Well, no one's going to carry me, are they?”

I pull her onto her feet. Her hair is matted and she smells like a drain broke. The skittle and the nurse-body pinch their noses and jig at the edges of the creeping pool.

“You'll have to pay for the cleaning! We'll have to add it to your account!”

I put a hand round Mary's waist and steer her towards the door.

“For the love of Christ,” I says, “be a bit useful and hail us a cab.”

We wait outside in the air. It doesn't take long for the skittle to find us something, so desperate is he to get rid of us from the thereabouts of his shop.

“Stop!” he yells at whatever is passing. “Stop please!”

He throws himself in front of a cab before it can get full round him. I'm left to help Mary up alone while the driver busies himself with his horse. The skittle and the nurse-body hover by the shop door and keep their safe distance. Mary is burning a fever and is weak as water. I need to get both hands onto her bustle and heave to get her in, and it's only then, doing this, that I see it on the back of her skirts: the stain.

It's a sight to make you think of Jesus at the post. It's a sight I see and understand, and yet I disbelieve it and tell myself it can't be true. Despite the number of babbies that have come and gone before, despite of all of those that have swelled her up and then let her down, still I can't own that this blood is real. I imagine telling Lydia and it coming out sounding like a lie.

“A miscarriage in a cradle shop, Lizzie? Are you pulling my leg or what?”

Back at the house, the day-maid Aggie is putting her coat on to leave. I give her an extra shilling to run and fetch Dr. Gumbert and Frederick.

“I don't need the doctor,” says Mary. “Just get me Frederick. I want Frederick.”

By my fierce eyes, Aggie knows to ignore her.

I sponge Mary in the bath and put her in the bed with a pan by her side and a dish of beef tea on her lap. Soon Dr. Gumbert comes and gives her something to sleep.

“Tell me this is the last time, Doctor,” I says to him when she's snoring. “One of these times will have to be last.”

“This may well be the last, Lizzie,” he says. “This may well be. Get some rest, both of you, and I'll be back in the morning.”

When it's getting dark and gone time for excuses—the rogue better not even try to come at me with any—Aggie knocks and says she's looked every place, the Mill, the Club, the Hall of Science, the Exchange, the Warehouse, but he's invisible to be found, and nobody could tell her where he is. Which can only mean he's taken one of his personal days, the ones he thinks we don't know about, to go and hunt the foxes. I thank Aggie and give her the next day off for her troubles. She thanks me in return and asks is there anything she can do.

“Keep tight about this,” I says. “That's all I want of you.”

He doesn't come that night, or the next. Five days we have to bide for him to grace us.

“I'm told you've been looking for me,” he says when final he makes it through the door, fresh of face and looking younger by years. “I was away in the country.”

“With the foxes again?”

“Is that a crime, Lizzie? Your tone certainly suggests so.”

I sigh and nod in the direction of her chambers. “She's waiting for you in there.”

He looks at the door, and now it's his turn to sigh. He lets it out, long and loud. “I
told
her I'd be away and wouldn't be around. Is everything all right?”

“Frederick?” Her voice comes though the wall with surprising force. “Frederick, is that you, my sweet love?”

He freezes like a thief caught by the light of a peeler's lantern.

“Coming, my dear,” he says, and strides forward.

I catch his cuff. “For the love of Christ, leave off her for a bit.”

He takes my look and gives me one back that says, “I'm sure I don't know what you mean.”

But he's no dullard. He understands what has happened and is only acting oblivious to smooth his path past me.

“Oh, Frederick,” I hear her say when he goes in to her. “My darling Frederick, thank God it's you,” she says, as if he was the savior of her situation and not its first cause.

“My Irish lass,” he says, “what has you like this? What have you done to yourself now?”

And once again we're but where we are: torn between what is and what ought be; blest and curst in even portions.

XXV. Hereafter a Blank

There's rules for sending letters to the house. Frederick's five commandments. One: close your envelopes careful. Two: seal them over the glue so the wax touches all four flaps. Three: send secret things in a pack. Four: when addressing your letter, don't use his name but put “Miss Burns” instead. Five: put no other envelope of address inside. Anything breaking these rules ought be handled with care and treated with suspicion.

“Know anything about this?” he shouts through the wall.

I leave the landing skirting boards and go in to him. He's waving a bit of paper in the air. On account of the sudden weather—the heat now pounding at us along with the rain—he has stripped his top down to his innerwear, and is damp all over and pongs of mead.

“What is it?” I says.

“You tell
me.
”

“I don't know, I've never seen it before.”

“It came with first post. I threw it out because I judged it another of these sham begging letters we have been getting. I did not think on it again until I heard you outside. It's addressed to “Mrs. Engels,” which I can only presume to mean you. I wanted to show it to you to be certain it is not anything to worry about or report.”

“I'm not expecting anything, Frederick.” I'm firm in voice. “It's naught only the usual litter.”

I rub my rag around the base of a lamp.

“What does it say, anyhows?”

“Here.” He holds it out. “Have Pumps read it to you. I really have to get back.”

I call Pumps to the parlor and give it to her.

“Drop that face and give me the gist.”

“It's just an address.”

She reads it out.

“Again.”

She reads it again, and I have it this time.

“What's the signature?”

“There is none.”

The address is in St. Giles, but on the Covent Garden side. I can tell by the women with baskets on their heads: flowers for the Market. I knock on the door. He's dressed in his coat when he answers.

“We'll go down the road. I know a quiet place.”

We walk through the heat of the lanes and passages.

“Aren't you too hot in that?” I says.

He looks at me out the side of his eye. “You haven't changed.”

“You have. You're gone soft. And you've lost the best of your hair.”

He orders me a gin. He has a lemonade. He pays for them himself. Counts out from a pile of coppers in his hand.

“You've been asking after me, Lizzie.”

“I have.”

“What for?”

“Don't let your head swell. I only wanted to see if you're all right.”

“I'm grand. Alive.”

“I can see that.”

“What wind blows you to London? Are you down here now with your man?”

“I am. We're up on Primrose Hill.”

“Well for some.”

I take from my drink. It bites my throat. “So Killigad told you, then.”

“Killigad?”

“The priest in the church here.”

“Oh, him. It was another voice told me, but it could well have come first from him. I don't know him personal, I go to another place, St. Patrick's, but I know he's a friend.”

“I thought the Church looked dark on you and your kind.”

“Arrah, that's only the bishops, putting on a face. They preach against rebellion, but they know, as well as anyone, that fighting against Protestantism is fighting against England and fighting for Catholicity is fighting for Ireland.”

The quick heat of the drink has given me a cramp in the stomach. “Have you eaten, Moss? We should get you something to eat. We should go to a restaurant.”

“A what?” He shakes his head. “I have enough to eat. If you have any loose money on you, you can give me that.”

“I'm not giving you any money, Moss. I don't know where it'd go.”

“It won't go to the drink, Lizzie. Can't you see I'm off it?”

“How do I know you're not just putting that on for my benefit?”

“Christ, you really haven't changed.”

“Does anyone?”

He sighs and shakes his head. “What are we doing, Lizzie? What has us here together?”

“I don't know.”

“What do I mean to you?”

“An old friend. It's a big place, this London.”

He doesn't say anything to that. Stares into the lemonade he hasn't touched.

“How much do you need?”

“Anything you can spare.”

“What's planned? What are you all scheming?”

“It's all work for the good.”

“Ireland.”

“What other good is there? Have you gone entirely English in your feelings, Lizzie?”

“Nay, Moss, of course not. Only I made a promise to myself not to get involved. I don't want to know anything about it.”

“I'm not asking you to be involved. It won't be like last time. We only need a bit of funding, is all. To get things rolling.”

I imbibe in a single gulp, and it goes down easier. “I'll see what I can do.”

I get up to leave. He takes my hand. I let him have it. “I'm off, Moss. I've a dinner to serve at home.”

“Well, now we know where to find each other.”

“I'll be in touch.”

At the door, I risk a glance back. Once such a gradely man, he's become large and hard-breathing. And yet I feel I've never been without loving him. Which puts me in a place where I don't know how anything will be. All I know is that my life will hereafter be blank, and any color of thing could arise to fill it.

“How are things going to be now?” I says when I open up to the dark morning and see Frederick there, blue-nosed and white-cheeked from the cold and the shock.

He doesn't answer me, just stands there looking like the heart's been torn alive out of his body.

I step back and hold open. The glow of the candles reaches out to take him in. He stoops under the doorpost—the house isn't built for the foreign body—and I see then he's brought Dr. Gumbert with him.

I bob a curtsy. “She's in the bedroom.”

We all go in. While Gumbert looks her over, Frederick paces the flags, window to chimneypiece, as if impatient for her to rise out of her death to greet him. I stand and watch the fire in the grate perish.

“Didn't you see anything ailing about her?” Gumbert asks.

“Nay,” I says. “It's like she wasted overnight.”

Behind me I hear Frederick's tread make a sudden halt. “She had a cough,” he says. “But we presumed it the effect of a cold. And she had pain from time to time but—”

I finish to save him from further excuses. “But the Lord Himself knows Mary liked to indulge in a headache.”

“Hmm,” Gumbert says, and goes back to his examining.

I poke at the fire though I know it's in vain. In truth, I'm scattering the coals and choking the flames. Frederick doesn't take up his pacing again. The room is still to the silence of his halting. I turn and am met by his eyes snuffed like yesterday's lamps. I test a smile on him, but it makes no impression: a howl hitting a wall and no echo coming back.

“Are you all right, Frederick?” I says. “Can I get you something?”

“
Nein.
Thank you, Lizzie.” He goes to look out the window, and there he stays, looking, even though there's naught to see, for I've darkened the panes.

Feeling more alone than I've ever felt, I turn from his back to the bed. Gumbert has his hand inside her night rail and is feeling round her belly. I don't know which is worse: to follow the lump of his hand under the flannel or to move up to her face where the grimace waits.

I knew this was going to happen.

You're not meant to know, but when you look back you sometimes remember a feeling that's like a prior knowing. The face she made from the bed last night—her eyes rolling up before the lids had come down—was the same she used to make from the bloodied child sheets, and I had a sense that this was the last time I'd see it, that this was her farewell to me.

This is it, I thought. This is her now, gone.

I'd pictured her dead before. In those moments of selfishness and envy when thinking can't be controlled or kept from the evil corners, I imagined what I'd gain if she were to die and pass over. I imagined a world that didn't contain her, that didn't brim over with her, and I felt freer in it, and better off. But flickerings of this kind can't be compared to the knowing of real death. Such knowing occurs like an awakening, a sudden switch from night to noontide. “All these years,” it says, “all these years you've ignored the pallor of death worn over her. If only you'd opened your eyes you'd have seen she's been dying since the first time she swole with a babby for him. Now the hour has come to grant it. She had no living child to make her suffer in the rearing, but instead had enough dead to knock her down and leave her eternal wrecked.”

And what an awakening it is! What a rousing! What a wrenching from what is comfortable and safe! For though I can still say in my mind that it was
him
who made her sick, the rage in my heart keeps being against
me
; against
me
for letting her be done by him; against
me
for watching by as he killed her by inches.

Says Gumbert: “Hmm, it's probable her heart gave way.”

Says I to myself: “God forgive me, but I can well believe it.”

Frederick sees him out. I follow their whisperings as far as the sitting room. They slink outside to speak private among men. I go to the window and twitch the blind. They're stood in the middle of the road, in the full force of the wind. Frederick's head is bent so far forward it's near resting on Gumbert's shoulder. Gumbert's mouth is brought to licking distance of Frederick's ear. Looking at them, it makes me wonder do they think I've lost my senses altogether. Can't I see them? Don't I know what they're talking about? “A bad death,” they're saying. “A consequence of the lush and the search for pleasure.”

Frederick comes back in and leans against the wall. Scratches at his forehead. In his arrangement there's hardness and there's wildness. He hunts the room for something to accuse. By now I've learnt to know him and to trust him, but I'm not free of fear. Saints of men have been known to make dreadful acts under the influence of grief.

“What day is it?” he says.

“Tuesday,” I says.

He's yet to cry; we've both of us yet to do it. I think to be held might help bring it on and get it past. I move into the room where it'd be easy for him to come and give onto me, if such was his desire and intending. And indeed he does come to me. But instead of an embrace he takes my hand and lifts it—lifts it as if to lead me to a dance or to kiss it—and then lets go of it sudden. Drops it so that it falls limp into my skirts. And a relief, it is, for he'd begun to squeeze it hard.

What he does now I wish Mary could be alive to see: he charges past me to her room, flings open the door, throws down by the side of the bed, and prays.

“Mary, Mary,” he says between his German orations, “Mary, Mary, forgive me, Mary.”

It's a bad and awkward scene to watch. A voice speaks inside of me: “Get up out of that and let her rest in peace. I'll not have you easing your conscience telling her things that matter little now.” And there's pleasure in it at first, hearing what's innermost, but I soon judge it cruel. To silence it, I set myself to making the place ready.

I think the end of every task will bring an end to Frederick's supplications, but I'm wrong. He stays down: elbows dug, hands melded, throat scratched by the volume of godly words fetched up. When I've done all I can do on my own, I go to him and put a hand on him. Mary's bottom lip has slipped from the top, and her jaw has fallen down. She's glaring at us. And who'd blame her?

Frederick lifts and turns his face to me.

“What now?” I says again, for I need to know. Mary was the only true kin I had on earth. Nobody could split us. We were got in the same tin or we weren't got at all. When I looked in the glass, two faces looked back. Is there a place possible with myself alone in it? “Tell me, Frederick, what's to happen?”

Letting a quiet moan, he says, “We'll talk about it after the funeral,” and then, as if a bell has rung, he starts his crying. The sorrow in me is a deep feeling too, but I don't allow it, not yet. It'll get naught done but pour itself more.

I send the neighbor's boy out for Lydia and Father Logan. They're here in no time and with all the bits needed to wash and compose her.

“Is
he
all right?” Lydia whispers, gesturing at Frederick collapsed over himself on the elbow chair. “Will he want to help?”

I shake my head. “He's grand where he is for now.”

Lydia asks can she have the night dress we cut off Mary. She wants it to make new patterns with, and I give it to her glad. As Beloff used to say, “Every good bit of cloth ought be made into something else.”