Birdcage Walk (9 page)

Early on Monday morning, while the baby slept on and the light from outside was still too insipid to penetrate the thin curtain, Charlotte rose quietly. She realised she had slept fitfully since Saturday afternoon, barely venturing out of the room and allowing Annie to believe she had caught a chill. Annie relished the role of nurse, especially to her sharp-tongued sister, and so Charlotte had been carefully ministered to, with cool flannels on her brow and bowls of hot broth to sip off a tray in her bed. Her sleep during the last two nights had been studded with vivid dreams of the large house in George’s drawing. In one dream that became a nightmare, she was trying to climb the steps up to the broad front door. Though there were only half a dozen to scale and it was urgent that she get to the top, her legs felt as though they were stuck fast in the ground. She hadn’t been able to get higher than the first of them before she’d woken herself up.

Dressing quickly without washing, she felt more awake than she had for weeks and, keen not to be cooped up in the house a moment longer, resolved to spend the day out. Annie had been kind to her, but she was reluctant to see her sister this morning, her temper liable to reignite when she realised that Charlotte had no intention of finding any work today. As for Ted’s knowing, conspiratorial glances over breakfast—Annie was bound to have worried about her to him—Charlotte thought they might be even worse than a fresh dose of Annie’s wrath. She wanted only to be alone, and the best way to be alone that she knew was to immerse herself in the press of the crowds close to the river.

She had barely got outside the door, chewing on a dry crust as she went, when she stopped dead. An almost impenetrable fog had descended and she could see the outline of the stick factory opposite only dimly. The gas lamps on the New North Road were still lit at this hour, and they glowed eerily through the opaque air when she reached them. The fog was freezing and it curled around her thin shoulders like a dank, greasy cloak. Determined to get to the river nevertheless, she kept her eyes down on the cobbles just ahead of her feet, her ears alert for the sound of carriages that might knock her down.

As she walked, the image of George’s drawing of the mysterious girl inevitably came to the forefront of her mind; Charlotte could only be grateful that she hadn’t also appeared in the dreams about the house. She retraced the lines of the face George had so carefully committed to paper, far more painstakingly than he had her own image. She had thought the face plain when she first turned to it but, with consideration and a heavy pessimism that had gradually set in, she now found herself preferring the stranger’s round eyes to her own slanted pair. Likewise the simply arranged hair Charlotte knew would shine like a looking glass in sunlight, quite unlike her own unruly waves and tangles.

Continuing southwards, she sped up to warm her blood. Though she had been heartily sick of the past summer’s relentless heat, she now felt a pang for its languorous warmth. Breathing in, the yellowed fog tasted bitter, as though everyone in London had lit their dirty fires in unison. She walked by instinct rather than design, feeling the land fall gently away under her feet as she neared the great river.

There wasn’t often the opportunity, not with Annie or her mother before her asking where Charlotte was going, wanting to account for her every waking minute, but if she ever had craved some sense of escape, then she had always been drawn to the Thames. No matter how many times she saw it, it was always broader than she remembered, its murky water surging along in an alarming show of power. On days when the wind was up, the pale, foaming crests of small waves could be seen. She thought it must be what the sea looked like.

She wound swiftly through the tangle of roads close to Poultry and Threadneedle Streets. The hem of her skirts had been dragging in the dirt and when she noticed, and hoisted the cloth up an inch or two, she received a whistle for it from a nearby hawker who’d glimpsed her through the veiled air.

When she arrived at the river she found she was slightly further west than she had intended, the fog disorientating even her sound sense of direction. She realised she had wandered almost to Billingsgate Market, the chilly reek of fish forcing her to breathe shallowly.

Without pausing, the smell turning her stomach at this early hour, she took off towards London Bridge. Walking briskly, it wasn’t before she had reached the section of iron fretwork that overlooked the very centre of the river that the freezing air lost the fish market’s stench. Looking about her was a strange sensation, knowing the familiar sights that were surely there but rendered invisible by the fog. The loss of those landmarks made her more aware of the noises emanating from the river. As well as the churning of the water, she could also hear the lightermen and stevedores that worked on it, the morning shift having just begun. Through the dense, jaundiced air she caught the odd warning shout from one to another, and the clank and shudder of metal on wood as the ships were unloaded. The sounds seemed to shimmer closer and then retreat as the swirling air blew them this way and that.

Leaning far out over the surging water, Charlotte gulped down the air that had come from the east. As she did, it freed her hair from its fastenings and whipped it around her face. Peering down into the roiling, murky depths far below, the fast-running water just visible through the haze, her eyes lost their focus and the small pencil drawing swam into view once more. George didn’t know any girls, not apart from his sister and her. She didn’t think he knew any girls at the print. She’d met him there a few times after his shift, and the outpouring of exhausted workers after the bell had been exclusively male. He’d lived in Hoxton all his life and though she’d only been in Avebury Street for six months or so, she already knew more people to nod to in the street than he did. If there was another girl who had taken his fancy—and her stomach lurched again at the notion—then it must be someone to do with the house in his sketchbook. A servant girl or a ladies’ maid. Otherwise it could only be someone he’d met by chance in the street, which seemed unlikely. Of course, that was how he’d met her, and it seemed that most of their private business these days—that which didn’t involve drinking in the pub—was done in the street. There were enough disused passageways, dripping with mould and damp but secluded, if you knew them.

Charlotte’s hands gripped the metal rail hard. She had never felt such jealousy before; there hadn’t been any need. The men she’d stepped out with in the past had simply been there until she didn’t want them anymore, or they’d had to go away—like Joe, when he was posted to South Africa with his regiment. She didn’t even tell one fellow she’d thrown him over—her ma had moved them around often enough that Charlotte could simply vanish on him. She had quite liked that; imagining him calling on her and finding new tenants there instead. She’d pictured him walking slowly home, a bit humiliated, not quite the man he’d thought he was.

Not that that he hadn’t done anything to deserve it. He’d been a married man and, some months into their courting, had been stricken with a belated sense of remorse for his cheating. She’d grown sick to the back teeth of watching him, head in hands after they’d got up to anything, suddenly wracked with guilt that hadn’t seemed to impinge on his enjoyment five minutes earlier. A couple of times he’d threatened to tell his wife; come clean with her because she deserved the truth, she was such an honest, godly woman and the all the rest of it. Charlotte had been livid with him then, not just because her name would have been dragged through the mud if it got out—Annie’s horror would have been bad enough—but because it seemed so laughably obvious that he was just trying to salve his own guilty conscience, imagining himself as some sort of martyr to his own irrepressible sense of justice and truth.

“Bit late to feel sorry for it now, isn’t it?” she’d said contemptuously and he’d shaken his head sadly and gone off with his face all mournful, like a good dog who’d been kicked. In the end, it was a blessed relief when her ma had announced they were off the very next week—she owed money to the landlord, a pious type who was too fond of the sermon and the shilling to be paid in any other way.

But it didn’t seem so simple with George. She found she was all at sixes and sevens over him, by turns fearful and furious, as though her old knack of carelessness had been stolen when her back was turned. She looked over in the direction of the shrouded south bank, the bank she’d never set foot on, and felt tears swell behind her eyes like they had so often during the last couple of days. They made her nose block and a headache spread through her skull like a wet sponge and she stamped her feet hard to ward them off, half wishing the bridge beneath her would give way. She would fall then, her skirts billowing and slowing her, until she gently broke the surface of the water and sank willingly to the bottom. But the bridge remained stubbornly solid and she was soon lost in her miserable thoughts again.

There was little denying that he had been avoiding her lately, not spending half as much time with her in the evenings as he used to. Their last proper outing together hadn’t felt right to her but she’d chosen not to think about it too much. Once again they had ended up at the pub, and he’d gone from sober to weary drunk after only a few glasses of spirits. Where the drink had enlivened Charlotte, the neat gin had caused George to slump a little on his stool, and made him unsteady on his feet when he went to relieve himself. He had told her afterwards that he’d been sick outside work the next morning, he was that far gone.

It made such a disappointing contrast to the chat they’d had in the same pub some weeks earlier, the chat that had so cheered her up at random moments since, the memory of it a hidden glow deep inside her where no one could snuff it out. It was a while ago now, but she’d thought of that night so often that it had become one of those memories that loses none of its detail and lustre with the recalling, and instead becomes ever more polished and bright, like a good pearl.

The pub had filled up later but Charlotte and George had arrived early enough not to have wait at the bar. The late afternoon sun had still filtered in through the etched windows when they sat down, cut glass flowers and vines reflected as bright shards on the varnished tables. As she and George had taken their first sips, she fell into talking about Annie, making fun as she always did of her sister, though without malice.

“You’d never know it to look at her now but Annie used to be skinny like me,” she’d said. “It’s since she’s had the baby she’s had to be poured into that corset of hers.”

George smiled but looked down at his glass. Charlotte thought, not for the first time, that he was soft, but found it didn’t rile her as it might have done with others.

“You think I’m being spiteful but I’m not. It’s just that she’s gone so matronly I don’t even recognise her from the back now. You won’t catch me letting that happen if I have any of my own.”

George looked up at this. “So, when you going to have ‘em, then? You’re getting on a bit now aren’t you?”

She smacked him on the arm and laughed, glad he wasn’t always so serious. “Cheeky sod. Course I want all that, just like anyone—husband and family and a little house to keep. What did you think?”

“I didn’t think anything, Lottie, and it’s nice to hear you say so, that’s all. I didn’t know you were like that. Sometimes I think that marriage would be like putting you in one of dad’s cages and closing the door.” He blushed, and took a large swig of the gin he’d bought to match hers to cover it.

Charlotte had felt her heart hammering in her chest: he had imagined her married. Surely that meant he’d thought about her being married to him. She smiled at him shyly.

“Well, you got me all wrong then, mister. I know I might seem like that compared to old Annie, with her baby clamped to her hip and her big backside and never coming down the pub unless it’s Christmas, but I’d like it for myself one day, I would.”

George nodded slowly, his eyes on his glass. He went to stand up then, the excuse of fetching more drinks on his lips, but Charlotte hadn’t finished.

“I’m 23 soon, you know, I can hardly believe it,” she said. “Someone’s going to have to make an honest woman of me soon or there’s no hope.” She laughed but her eyes, she knew, had been eager. “So what about it then, eh?” she said softly. “You going to do the honourable thing?” She drank up and handed her empty glass to George with a wink, to lighten her words.

“Play your cards right,” he’d said as he took it from her, their fingers briefly touching, before striding to the bar to order the next round.

If she’d told Annie about it she would probably have laughed, but Charlotte felt as though she and George were promised after that, like it was a private pact that would for the time being remain unspoken of. She’d somehow liked that better than if he’d bought her a cheap band of metal to wear, so soft that it would have moulded and warped to the flesh of her third finger. No, she liked that it was a tight, warm secret surrounding them like a blanket. Even when he’d later said he couldn’t remember, she’d told herself not to feel hurt, that he remembered somewhere, and that if she could just recreate an evening like that one, then she would reinstate the memory, as well as his shy pride in the idea.

But it was too late now, of course. George had found someone else, someone who he thought looked like a wife who’d bear his children, not some flighty thing who would turn out to be someone he’d regret. She cringed at the thought of telling Annie what she had seen in the sketch book, Annie who was always telling Charlotte that George was as keen on her as mustard. It would shame her to tell her sister the truth of it, and how she hadn’t charmed him so cleverly after all. Annie would tell her that she must keep her chin up and find someone else, and quick. She would think Charlotte would forget soon enough, that her sharp little sister would always have her pick of admirers.

So she would keep it to herself. She turned now, back towards the familiar north bank and the side of London that she had never ventured beyond. Even more briskly than she had come, she set off in the general direction of Hoxton, and without another glance through the mist at the water that sloshed irritably around the stone arches beneath her feet.