Birdcage Walk (15 page)

Earlier that evening, as the cheap clock on the Matthews’ mantel struck five, its insides clunking mournfully, Charlotte scraped back her chair and pulled her cloak off one of the pegs by the front door.

“Where you off to then, madam?” asked Annie, looking up from the pot she was scouring, her face taut with ready irritation. “It’s dark out.”

Charlotte faced the spotted mirror over the fire and pinned her hat on.

“I’m just off to meet George,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “We might go for a walk,” she added, knowing that Ted would be at the pub later and that Annie would ask him about her presence when he finally stumbled back to their sagging brass bed.

He looked up at her now, a wry smile curling his lips.

“You two kissed and made up, then?”

“A walk?” interrupted Annie. “What do you want go walking on an evening like this for? It’s bloody freezing tonight. Winter’s well and truly here. You two must be soft in the head.” But Charlotte had already stolen out of the door in her usual quiet way, the door handle clicking silently into place behind her.

Outside, it was as cold as Annie had warned. Beneath her lace-up boots the ground perceptibly crunched and as she stepped out in the direction of north, she felt the slippery give of the ice layer under her weight and made her steps more careful.

Though the new frost made the going perilous, especially in the undisturbed lanes she threaded through to save time, the night was steeped in the cold light of the moon. Pausing at the bridge over the Regent Canal, she steadied herself by grasping its dank bricks and looked up. Not a solitary wisp of cloud hung in the sky, leaving the overarching view of the scattered stars unhindered. Even the weak, sulphurous glow of nearby gas lamps couldn’t much diminish the pinpoints of clear light. Charlotte tipped back her head and looked until she thought her neck might snap from the chill and strain. Tentatively putting her foot out, she set off once more, the low-slung Northern Star marking her path.

By night, and in the surprise cold of an evening in early winter, the journey she had traced carefully in her mind for the last two weeks seemed longer, further hampered by the gripless soles of her heeled boots on the treacherous ground. After a time, she looked up from her feet and realised that the character of the surroundings had subtly altered. Though the houses weren’t yet grand, they were better cared for, by the wives of postmen and clerks. Brass door knockers and letterboxes gleamed in the moonlight and there were clean lace curtains at the windows, white froth in the eerie glow.

Down Avebury Street there was always someone larking around or having a row, but here the decorous silence made Charlotte’s footfalls rudely audible where she hadn’t noticed them before. As she reached the end of one road and turned into another, higher wages and neighbourly propriety was yet more evident, demonstrated by the neat, narrow gardens that protected each house from the road. Instead of the terraces she had always known, these houses were paired off like love birds, a slim corridor of gaping black between each set. Despite the ice Charlotte quickened her pace—not even the sharp moonlight could penetrate this street’s darkest corners and she could sense the prickle of her hairs rising in the beginnings of fear.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before she had passed unscathed through Canonbury’s deserted streets to find herself at the southern edge of Highbury Fields. According to her directions, she was only a street or two away from her goal now. At the thought, her stomach churned over her meagre dinner of dripping and toast. George’s sketch had shown the house to be large, but as she finally turned off Highbury Grove into Aberdeen Park, she was shocked at how grand they were—and all but a mere walk from her own.

Each property was slightly different from the last, the very opposite of the sort of houses she had always lived in; identical terraces thrown up together in a great hurry, with nothing to mark them apart until their tenants bestowed on them varying degrees of filth and disrepair. The houses here did not deign to lie in a row; the road swept around, its curve punctuated by a string of curlicued lamps, jet shards on a silver chain in the cold light. A small circlet of grass topped with a chapel nestled at the street’s heart.

As she continued, the houses growing ever larger, even her breathing became audible in this new degree of silence. At last she came to a stop outside the gate of a looming, porcelain white villa. This was the one, she could make out the name painted on the front door’s fanlight in a swirling script of gold.

Most of the upper windows were dark, but as she tiptoed closer the enormous downstairs drawing room window, which had been obscured by a dense thicket of yew trees, came suddenly into view. From it into the bitter evening poured a thick, golden light that, surveyed from the gloom, made the air feel colder still. Starting to shiver, she realised then that she had not thought beyond the journey to the house. Now that she had found the place that might or might not contain George she felt paralysed. She could not conceive of lifting the knocker and letting it fall noisily against the door painted so shinily black that it looked like sticky molasses. If they had never heard of him she would look like a madwoman. If he was inside, he would be angry that she had turned up like a bad penny in the middle of this better situation he had forged for himself. She could not give herself away, but it seemed just as impossible to leave so soon after arriving, after such a difficult walk, and still with no proof whether George had lied or not.

The house wasn’t very old; it was only half a century since the fields that had, for millennia, rolled inexorably down to the Thames had been levelled here, and these stucco villas, built for the prosperous merchant classes, been raised in their place. Forcing herself to stop mooning and changing her mind, Charlotte put her hand out to the ornate coils and flourishes of the gate and carefully felt for the freezing catch. With a dull clank of iron it lifted and the gate swung open.

Stepping through, mindful that the worn soles of her boots didn’t sound on the flags, she suddenly sensed, with a cat’s instinct, that someone’s eyes were on her in the dark. Preoccupied with her mission, she first looked up at the house’s darkly blank windows, where she knew someone could be spying in safety, the streetlamps and the glare of the moon leaving her blind and exposed. Nothing stirred. Remembering the street behind her, she whirled round, but her cloak caught on the gate and sent it swinging again, its metal hinges grating loudly. As the noise echoed around the silent street she darted further into the garden, edging into the deep shadows cast by the yew trees.

Though she may have imagined the unseen pair of eyes, her instinct to hide was true: from her shadowed part of the lawn, she could now discern an approaching footfall. She tensed, so alert that the creak of frost-bitten twigs and leaves under her feet seemed horribly audible. Then, so fearfully loudly to her sharpened senses that her heart stumbled in its rhythm, a jauntily whistled tune rang out. Judging by the ponderous steps that accompanied it, she realised it must be a policeman on his rounds.

He, evidently not expecting to be overheard by anyone on this particular corner of his beat, absentmindedly switched from whistling to humming, a music hall ditty Charlotte recognised, though he ran through it tunelessly. Eventually his song became faint and Charlotte indulged herself with a shaky exhalation of breath that rose up in a ghostly plume.

She waited until the vibrations of his footsteps had retreated to the very edge of her hearing and then counted to a hundred before reverting to her plan of approaching the lit window. She had been badly frightened, but her determination to solve this mystery of George’s whereabouts steadied her. Besides, she felt safer in the seclusion of the garden than she had on the road, where her shadow had been thrown long by the streetlamps. Crossing the grass quickly, she found that the top of her head was level with the sill, the high panes of glass rising above her, and permitting a glimpse of nothing more revealing than the ceiling of the room inside, with its central plaster rose and the large lamp fashioned out of crystal droplets that hung from it. Needing to see more, she bent down and looked for something to stand on. She tried to lift an iron boot-scraper that stood by the front door, but it was so heavy it seemed soldered to the ground. Pulling at it instead, it abruptly tipped and then scraped noisily across the stone flag. Charlotte stopped dead, ears pricked, hands on the cold iron trembling. The worst realised, she heard the footsteps on the street beyond the hedge approach again. They were faster than before, and without the accompaniment of music. There wasn’t the time to return to the dark embrace of the yew trees so she simply crouched where she was, hiding the pallor of her face and hands in the fabric of her cloak.

The policeman peered at the open gate and cast his eye over the lawn. Nothing seemed disturbed and no one had come to the window, but the garden was swaddled in shadow. He wondered if he ought to have a proper look around. But then, glancing at the clock on the green and seeing that it was almost time for him to return to the well-laid fire and piping hot tea of the station, he reached in to pull the gate closed, took a last, cursory look, and was gone.

Charlotte remained still long after he had gone, her shaky breath dampening the material of her cloak where she held it tight to her face. She could no longer fully retrieve the urge she had felt to see into the room but neither could she bear the thought of following the policeman out onto the main road. With the extra strength that so often accompanies fear, she carried the scraper over to the window and then stepped up onto its sharp edge, feeling the cold ridge of it through the thin soles of her boots. Slowly, she raised her head until she could finally see the interior of the golden room—only to find it empty, at least of people.

Quite close to where she stood, but separated by the glass, squatted a large oil lamp. Its glass casing was etched with the patterns of flowers, blooms reflected softly onto the wall behind, and Charlotte’s chapped red hands outside, which were grasping the sill so that she didn’t slip. A huge fire was ablaze in the grate and, beyond it, at the far end of the room, stood a Christmas tree that skimmed the high ceiling with its uppermost needles. A crimson ribbon had been run through and around the branches, while dozens of glinting ornaments reflected the firelight. Beneath the lowest dark green fronds a small pile of presents had already been placed, dressed in shiny paper to match the baubles suspended above.

Just then the door opened and Charlotte dropped down quickly, watching the opaque cloud of her breath fade agonisingly slowly on the pane that she had pressed herself against. She waited, her head safely under the wide sill, but when no one shouted out or even came to see and she could hear only muffled voices in unhurried conversation, she straightened up to peer inside once more. Where there had been no one, a portly figure now sat with her back to the window in a capacious winged chair, the only indication of her sex in the two small hands that rested on the arms, their pudgy fingers crowded with rings. Another figure sat on the chaise in front of this lady, while the third, a man, perched stiffly next to her. It took Charlotte a moment to realise that this last person was George. He was quite transformed in the rich light of the room, and from the seeping warmth of the fire. His face seemed smoother and his mouth had relaxed out of its habitual grimace, even from this distance.

The figure next to him was a girl, and Charlotte suddenly realised with a jolt that it was the girl from the sketch, or someone very like her. If she’d seen her on the street, Charlotte would have said the girl was more plain than pretty, her forehead too high and her hair an indistinct, muddy shade between dark and fair, and poker-straight with it. Yet in the firelight that same hair gleamed like polished oak and, as she talked on to the others at length, the words softened and blurred by the glass, the colour heightened in her cheeks until she was almost beautiful. Charlotte could see that she had a small plate in her lap, but it seemed that her eyes dropped to its solitary sandwich more out of occasional shyness than any interest in eating it.

Charlotte found it easier to look upon the strangers than George, who was so painfully familiar and yet so altered in his new surroundings. When she did, he was looking at the smaller figure next to him and smiling. At this, Charlotte felt a sudden surge of fury, directed at this fool from the same streets as her who was all spruced up in some rich man’s parlour. Losing her concentration, she half slipped off the scraper, which almost overbalanced and knocked against the white stucco of the wall. Her eyes still locked on George, she saw him suddenly glance over at the window and stare hard at the corner where she perched. Frozen, she couldn’t move but stood perfectly still, holding her breath as he said something to the two ladies, who both started, and then placed his plate carefully down on the table.

Late to action, Charlotte dropped down and resumed her crouching position under the sill. She sensed rather than heard George cross the room and look out. There was a slight chance he hadn’t seen her properly: surely the brightly-lit room would have made her invisible, as the shadows had obscured her from the policeman before. She turned slowly so she was facing the door, ready to clatter down the path and through the gate if anyone appeared there. Still no one came. After a long pause, the conversation resumed as it had done before, the lower cadence of George’s voice chiming with the girl’s softer, higher tones.

By now, Charlotte’s feet felt unwieldy, almost frozen in their shoddy leather boots. She had done and seen enough tonight and certainly didn’t dare look in the window once more. As noiselessly as she could, she crept back down the path and slipped through the gate. Turning out of Aberdeen Park, she allowed her heels to clip on the brittle covering of ice, some of her defiance returning now she was back on public land. As she continued down Highbury Grove from the road where George somehow remained undisturbed, the small church atop its circlet of green marked the hour, its bell feebly ringing in six o’clock. It was a mere hour since she had left Annie and Avebury Street, and yet it seemed like part of some long ago day. She realised that the prospect of the unknown journey north and the vague notion of resolution that lay at the end of it had kept her buoyant. Now that sense of anticipation was replaced with the sort of blunt sorrow that made her want to weep right there in the unfamiliar street, a leaden finality in her stomach, making her clutch it as she walked slowly south.