The Linnet Bird: A Novel (10 page)

“Rise yerself, now. You bin lyin’ here the full clock round.”

“Please,” I whispered, trying to lick my lips. “Drink. A drink, please.”

The woman appeared not to hear me. She wore a gray shift that made her look like one long, thin slice of gray—her hair, skin, and covering. “The surgeon’s been in and stitched you up.” She had to shout over the screams and curses and prayers that filled the air. “Get dressed; there are others wot need the bed. You’ll go through that door, there,” she said, pointing to one side of the long room. She dropped my boots onto the floor, then threw the green dress, stiff with blood and stinking of foul dampness, onto the edge of the bed. There was a moth-eaten brown woolen scarf stuck on the blood of the bodice. “You had nowt else with you, although the boots are a damn sight more than many we see of a night. Now move yerself.”

“Surgeon?” I whispered, for the first time looking around here. “Where am I?”

“Wot?” the woman said, leaning closer.

“What is this place?” I asked again, a slow dread coming to me.

“It’s the Fever Hospital of the Brownlow Hill Workhouse.”

I raised my head at this, even though that movement brought a fresh wave of pain. “No one comes out of hospital alive. Am I going to die?”

The woman shook her head. “Idjit. The only reason your sort believe you die if you come to a hospital is because none come but those a breath away from dead. It’s not our fault if they’re too far gone to be helped. You was lucky. Some kind soul took it upon himself to drop you in front of the door with your wound bound up in that scarf. Otherwise you’d have bled to death. Hurry up now, girl. If you’ve no home go on up to the workhouse. You’ll be assigned a job there when you’re able.” And then she turned and left.

I lay still, trying to breathe around the pain, trying to stop the swirling in my head, trying to remember.

The horror of what had passed came back to me as if I’d been struck. “No,” I said, closing my eyes again. “No.” The room, with its sweet stink. I could remember lying on the rug in the house on Rodney Street, surrounded by the smell of burning hair. The hair, and the shears. And the man . . . the man I’d killed. That I’d murdered. Was I to be found out, hauled off to jail, and eventually hanged, my body thrown into a pit of quicklime with other murderers?

What had happened after that? Another memory. It was dark, and I was wet. Was it just the dream again, the dream of my mother floating under the surface of the Mersey? But I had been cold, so cold, and now I remember thinking
Mother? Is that you, Mother?
I had felt the watery push and sway of someone floating behind me. Not Mother. Clancy. The voices of the men called Gib and Willy. It was Willy who had saved my life, who had brought me here.

Moaning involuntarily, I managed to sit up on the mattress, stained deep brown from an ancient combination of blood and vomit and urine and feces. Drawing deep breaths, I tried to quell the nausea that the pain brought on. I awkwardly pulled off the gray, threadbare shift someone had put on me, pursing my lips with the effort, not caring that the old woman in the bed less than a foot from mine was studying me with clouded eyes. There was a thick strip of blood-soaked flannel wrapped around my chest. Getting into the dress seemed an impossibility but there was no one to help. I knew the woman who had spoken to me would have been one from the workhouse herself, her face showing no flicker of compassion.

I eventually managed to get myself dressed, partly due to the torn bodice. The old woman reached out and, with a thickened yellow fingernail, touched my green silk skirt, smiling toothlessly and muttering something incomprehensible. I dropped the brown scarf onto her bed and she snatched it up, sniffing at it and patting it as if it were a small animal. I shoved my feet into my sodden boots, leaving them undone, and stumbled through the long room of groaning, piteous men and women, stumbled as if still in the nightmare. I had to pass through a number of sections of the building, unconsciously reading the names of the wards:
Insane,
with its padlocked splintered doors that didn’t block the desperate shrieks and garbled voices;
Scald and Itch,
with low moans and muffled weeping;
Smallpox,
which was eerily silent, and finally, somehow worse than the screams and heavy silence, was the cacophony of lonely sounds that poured through the doors of the ward simply marked
Children.

Stepping out into the misty gray of morning, I avoided the workhouse to the left of the hospital, taking the path that led down to the main road. I walked and walked, knowing that if I fell I would be hauled back to the workhouse. I walked as the mist blew away and a watery sun threw pale shafts. As I neared Vauxhall Road and the locks of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, I dully noticed the early morning crowd of spectators in Lock Fields. They were watching two young men who would likely be fighting over some all-night argument in one of the many public houses that lined the area.

I walked in my heavy boots and spoiled dress, at times bent over nearly double as I struggled around the pain. People parted in front of me. I felt as old as the crone waiting to die in the next bed in the Fever Hospital, the crone who loved green.

R
AM
’
S MOUTH OPENED
when I finally fell through the door.

“Wot—” he started, but I pushed myself to my feet and wove across the floor and lowered myself onto my pallet. The pain made it impossible to lie in any position but on my back. I plucked at my blanket but couldn’t get it over me. I lay with my eyes open, and Ram came to look down at me. “Wot’s happened to you?” he asked, his eyes taking in the torn dress and the dirty flannel wrapped around me, my shorn hair. I saw the familiar look of growing anger around his jaw. “I thought you’d run off on me when I went round yesterday and nobody answered my knocking. Look at the state o’ you. Would you not do as you were told for the gentlemen? Did they have to punish you?”

I closed my eyes.

“I should punish you as well. That dress cost me a right pretty penny,” he said. “You’ll have to stitch it up as best you can and sponge out the blood.” His voice rose, but there was a wavering to it, a tone I hadn’t heard before, as if it was an effort for him to sound angry. “They’ll never take you back at the bookbindery if you lose more than a few days. And I’m out of pocket for any night work I could get you, as well, at least for a while. If you didn’t look such a God-awful mess—what the hell happened to your hair?—I’d clout you one for all the trouble you’ve brought. Useless cunt,” he growled. And then, a minute later, his voice dropped and the blanket fell over me. “Best lay still for a while,” he said, and then it was his hard palm at the back of my head, lifting it, and the rim of a cup touched my lips, and when I opened my mouth cool water flowed down my throat.

I swallowed and swallowed, but made no sound. If I had been a crying sort of girl, I surely would have wept then.

E
VENTUALLY THE FESTERING
and oozing around the dirty sutures on my breast abated and the delirium stopped. I knew it had been some time that I’d tossed in my bed, perhaps a week or even two; all had faded into periods of pain and thirst and light and Ram with spoonfuls of watery gruel and lifting me onto the chamber pot, all mixed in with deep blackness. But that morning, an unidentifiable length of time after what I would forever call the nightmare, I sat on the edge of my pallet and looked around. I was alone, lightheaded yet strangely more alert than I could ever remember. My mind was clear, tight and sure, focused. I was coming fourteen, and I knew now I was old enough to make a choice. There were two of them: I could stay or I could leave.

If I stayed, I would go back to the desperate, exhausting tedium of the bookbindery—if they’d still have me—or if not, another factory, for pauper’s wages taken by Ram Munt. And I’d also continue to be pimped out by him, receiving for those efforts nothing but the spurt of slime deposited in or on me.

If I left, my future was uncertain, but at least I would have a say in it.

The choice was simple and obvious.

I went to the fruitwood box and took out the mirror. I stared at myself and saw that what I had felt happening, as I tossed on my damp sheet, was true. My face was even thinner than usual, which was a temporary thing, but it was my eyes that showed the change. They had an intenseness, grown darker and larger, and they glittered with something that I had no name for. My pale hair stood up around my head with the look of a pullet, but the lack of curls and new angular cheekbones had taken me from child to young woman.

I unwrapped the strip of muslin I had exchanged for the dirty flannel. The stitching on my breast was dark. I touched it. The skin was raised and sealed in a twisted, ropy seam. It was beginning to harden, and I knew that with the hardening of that skin something deeper had also grown dense and rigid. Resistant and unyielding.

I cleaned up the green dress and stitched the rent. I hunted out and found coins Ram had hidden away about the room—my money, what I’d earned. The only thing I was sorry about was that Ram seemed to have drunk most of it away, and it was a pitiable sum for the years of work both on my feet and on my back.

And then I ate the heel of bread I found on the table, holding my hand over my mouth as I swallowed, willing myself to keep down the first solid food I’d had for so long, took a drink of tinny water, and walked out. I left the miserable room on Back Phoebe Anne Street, left the miserable court with its trickle of human waste running down the shallow gutter in the middle, left the blocks of leaning, back-to-back, vermin-infested buildings.

I wore the sophisticated green gown and a clean shawl and a straw bonnet, and under my arm I clutched the fruitwood box with its mirror, book, pendant, and my folding knife. The bit of money was twisted in an old handkerchief, which I’d sewn onto my underskirt.

“T
HIS IS MY TERRITORY,
” the tall, raw-boned woman said, eyeing the golden fringe poking out from my bonnet as, a few hours later, I stood along Paradise Street, filled with its sailors’ lodgings and doss-houses.

“It’s a free street, isn’t it?” I said, my tone matching hers.

“How long you bin workin’?”

“Close to three years,” I told her.

“Not around ’ere, you ain’t. I knows every girl in a square mile. But you do look as if you knows your way around.” She studied my face. “You’re young. Younger’n most. From what I can see most likely the curse ain’t even on you yet.”

I didn’t answer.

“How old are you?”