Audrey looks up and finds she has been walking the wrong way. She has come to the corner of Old Bodlewell Lane and Low Street, just above the ferryboat landing. A steep flight of nearly concave marble steps leads down to the water, where a chain stretches between the East End and Monkwearmouth. The hand-cranked ferry is just leaving the other side, and the landing is deserted except for a little girl playing by the water’s edge. If Audrey squints, she can make out a tightly wrapped bundle leaning against the railing, while the girl splashes up and down the bottom steps, chasing terrified green frogs. Why does this child look familiar? Audrey wonders, drying her eyes. As she watches, the little girl catches a creature’s leg between her teeth, then stares off into space as it stretches and croaks and struggles to get away; she has forgotten about the frog as she watches the flat-bottomed ferry making its way from Monkwearmouth. This is too brutal, really, Audrey thinks, and runs down the steps to release the poor panicked thing.
“Please, let me have it,” she says gently, cupping her hands under the little girl’s chin. “You wouldn’t want to be caught that way.”
The little girl in the pink gingham dress looks up, the green bit of rubbery creature pushing its suction toes against her swollen face. Dear God, thinks Audrey. What happened to this child? Seeing the lady’s eyes so full of kindness and sympathy, the girl slowly opens her mouth. The frog drops to the ground and quickly jumps away.
“My name is Miss Audrey Place,” Audrey says softly. “I know you, don’t I?”
“You gave me a blanket,” replies the child, ducking her chin and looking away.
“How did you come by those nasty bruises, Pink? It is Pink, isn’t it?” Audrey reaches out and gently touches her cheek, making the little girl from Mill Street shiver. The left side of her face, from her jaw up to the bare slit of eye showing, is swollen black and purple.
“Look,” says Pink, reaching into her mouth. “I have a loose tooth, too.”
“Were you in a fight?” Audrey asks.
Pink shakes her head. “I am just a bad watcher. I never get it right.”
“You were watching someone?” asks Audrey, feeling herself about to cry again.
“A friend of mine,” Pink says with a nod. “You gave her a blanket, too.”
“I did indeed,” Audrey whispers, feeling worse than she’s ever felt in her entire young life. She looks away so that Pink will not see her tears and notices that the baby has slid down the steps until it is lying on its back, deciding whether or not to cry. Pink’s eyes follow hers and she runs over to get it.
“See why I get punished?” the little girl says, exasperated. “See what I always do?”
Pink comes back and sits on the next-to-bottom step with the baby in her lap. Audrey, in her expensive brick red poplin dress, walks down and sits on the muddy step beside her. Together they watch the chain-operated ferry ratchet across from Monkwearmouthhorses hang their heads to keep balanced; mothers draw their children close to keep them from leaping off the back. Another frog hops across the hem of Audrey’s dress and this time Pink makes no move to bite it. The older woman holds out her hands and it hops up; she can feel its elastic throat swell against her fingers. Poor little frog, she thinks, you didn’t ask to be a plague.
“This is nice,” Pink says at last.
Why has her desire to help the man she loves gotten one woman dissected and an innocent girl beaten? It is not fair. This little girl should be watching green plants grow, bread rise, and suns set, not watching sickly babies and the caskets of her father’s lodgers.
“Pink,” Audrey says slowly, deciding what she must do. “If I become a wealthy matron and have a big house of my very own, would you like to come and work for me? I will have many things there that will need watching.”
“I would like that,” says the little girl, her pinched pink nose threatening to run with emotion. “But then who would mind the baby?”
“I have a feeling that by the time I am married, Jesus will be minding that sweet babe, dear.”
“Da says Jesus is a bloody git who won’t take care of no one.” Pink smiles, getting her father’s words exactly. “I must be better than him.”
Audrey looks at Pink incredulously, but says nothing. This is how I shall make amends, she thinks. I will take this child into my house and teach her how to read and write. I will tell her Bible stories and buy her dolls and
brush her hair. I will take her away from those that beat her, and raise her to be a happy and much-loved child. Henry will bless herI am sure he will.
“What is your favorite name, Pink?” asks Audrey, determined that this girl should have a new name to go with her new life.
“Mike,” says Pink.
“No, what is your favorite girl’s name?”
“Auuuudrey,” she whispers, giggling a little and looking away.
“That’s my name,” laughs Audrey. “Wouldn’t you like one of your own?”
“Then… Geraldine,” Pink whispers. “That was my mother’s name.”
“Geraldine it is.” Audrey smiles at such a little girl having such a long name. “When you come to work for me, I will call you Geraldine.”
Pink giggles wildly and the baby in her lap blows happy spittle bubbles in response.
Yes, it is in her power to stop the suffering, thinks Audrey, greatly pleased with herself. She reconsiders the petition she was about to abandon and how much it might mean one day for this little girl to know she values their two bodies the same. The Sunderland Herald offices are not far off. What better way to reach the entire population than to print her petition as an open letter to the town?
The sun is setting and the river has grown still as the Monkwearmouth ferry reaches the Sunderland side and everyone clatters up the steps around them. So many poor haggard faces, so many stooped and sullen sons and daughters, beaten down by their day’s labours. Oh, poor tired mother, dully tugging apart her brawling children, whose bony clenched fists fly dangerously close to Audrey’s head. Oh, exhausted flyblown farmer, leading your nag up the depressed marble stairs and over the skirt of Miss Place’s fine poplin dress. Copperas-stained shovels and splintery crates of apples, thoughtless boots and muddy hems, have you no regard for the brave Samaritan in your midst, whose only thought is for you and how she might devalue her own body for your elevation? Elbow not her tidy hair, knee her not in your blind surge up the bank; she lives to serve you.
They come and they come, thinks woeful Audrey, buffeted and knocked until Pink flings up her arms to shield her. How can it be they see me not?
Ounday, Sunderland’s day of rest, comes at last.
On Friday, Gustine asked John Robinson to send word back that Dr. Chiver might find her on the town moor near the pump where they first met, since she obviously could not reply in kind. On Saturday, she worried he had not forwarded her message and asked him again, whereupon he replied that of course he had, and what did he look like, a carrier pigeon? Saturday night she couldn’t sleep, petrified she had annoyed John Robinson into revealing her holiday to his brother, Whilky. She needn’t have worried. John had always been the private, nonviolent one of the family, preferring, even as a child, to draw pretend beer for the other boys rather than play at being Dick Turpin, cutpurse, or Robert Drummond the Sunderland Highwayman. He was no powder keg like his brother; her secret was safe with him.
Now she sits in the brown grass by the cemetery with the promise of Henry’s letter in her lap, waiting for him here as only a week ago she found him waiting for her at the Labour in Vain. No one has ever written to her beforenot a love letter, not a birth announcement, not a poem. Nothing. Until John Robinson passed off Henry’s note, she had never experienced the simple thrill that comes from having put into one’s hands a piece of paper originating elsewhere, rich with words meant only for oneself. You see, Gustine does not belong to the papered class, dashing off notes at the slightest provocation-Jane, dear, Please come to dinner Sat. 7 P.M… . Dearest Mrs. M. We called today at 3, but sadly found you not at home… . Franklin: Cook requires butter, cheese, fresh eggs, tripe (enoughfor eight). She does not yet take words on paper for granted, to be burned, as John Robinson suggested, before her landlord finds out the doctor’s written her, but instead ranks Henry’s note somewhere near the Rosetta stone for mysteriousness and magnitude of import. Of course she knows it would be safer to destroy an incriminating document she cannot even read, but let’s be fair: who ever chooses to destroy the “first” of anything they are given? Would you have smashed the tablets of the Ten Commandments, had they come into your possession? No, you would have been weaker than Moses; we daresay that like Gustine, you too, would have selfishly hoarded your first communication from One so far above yourself.
She traces the “G” in the first line and the “H” in the last, but as for the other letters spiked across the thick and creamy paper, she has to trust John Robinson that they spell a day in the country. We are going on holiday, she tells her baby, who stripped of his blankets looks rare and important in his linen christening gown, wool skullcap, and felt booties, propped against her knees so that he might have a view of the other children playing on the town moor. On this unseasonably warm day, it seems all the progeny of Sunderland is out. Nearby, a gang of boys spanghew toads, which is the local way of saying “put them on a board upon a fulcrum, jump upon the board, and send them sailing across the moor to be smashed to a jelly.” The boys whoop and dance, factor complicated configurations of frogs, unlikely anytime soon to run short of ammunition. On her other side Gustine hears a young girl patiently explain that a horse’s hair, left in a puddle overnight, will turn into an eel. The girl and her friend run squealing off to seed the moor with eels from their own scalps, while the spanghewers let fly a flurry of green missiles behind them. These will be your friends one day, Gustine whispers to her child, drawing him more fully into her lap. When the doctor is done with you, it will be safe for you to kill things, too.
As if on cue, the doctor’s carriage, the one he brought to Mag Scurr’s a week ago, clatters to a stop beside her.
“Gustine? Is that you?” He leans out and squints, recognizing her more by the baby, she thinks, than anything else. He’s never seen me out of my dress, she realizes, taking his hand, climbing up and settling herself under the lap robe he holds out for her. Last night, she called on one of Mag Scurr’s competitors, where she counted out from her cache of carefully saved coins enough for a secondhand shawl to cover the stained and worn fawn-coloured factory shift. She couldn’t possibly leave the house in her blue dress without chaining herself to the Eye, and Gustine was damned if she would allow the old woman to ruin the first holiday of her life. Of course, as luck would have it, the only silk shawl she liked that was ample enough to cover all the holes in her shift was an indigo and black paisley that reminded her of a thousand watching eyes anyway.
He looks awful, Gustine thinks, taken aback by the dark circles under his watery red eyes. He has shaved for the occasion and wrapped a fresh cravat around his neck, his hair is combed forward fashionably, but nothing serves to hide the worry and exhaustion etched into his face. He looks like a very different man than he who stepped out in front of the theatre not even a week ago. But then again, she is a far cry from the lovely lady in the lame turban who accompanied him.
“You brought the baby,” Henry says, glancing over. “Good.”
Gustine adjusts the child on her lap and lapses into silence. Usually, she has no trouble keeping up idle chatter with men; she’s learned several safe topics of conversation: weather, chuck ball, pubs, and sex. But none of these seem quite appropriate to discuss with Dr. Chiver. As they speed along Low Street back toward the centre of town, she’d like to ask him where they are going, but even that simple question gets stuck in her throat. His eyes are fixed on the broken cobblestone street ahead, and one might assume he was alone in his carriage for all the attention he gives her or her baby. This is a strange beginning to a holiday.
“The weather certainly has turned fine today,” Gustine ventures.
“Yes, it has.” Henry whips the horses a little faster, anxious to get out of town. Holmes Wharf flashes by, and the steps down to the ferryboat landing; they pass the corporation offices where Audrey’s father keeps an office; then they are whizzing by the dormant volcanoes of Sunderland Bottle Works. Henry hangs a sharp right and holds out a coin for the man at the little tollhouse.
Well, here is something new at least! Gustine has never been atop the Iron Bridge before, and as they fly across it now (over the spot where she found Dick Liss staring up from the mud, into the dizzying heights of blue sky, so high above the town that she can look down onto the bald heads of buildings bristling here and there with ragged terns’ nests), even as she is utterly convinced that, any second, she and her child will be bounced from the rig to their deaths, Gustine wishes they might hang suspended here, right in the middle of the bridge, so that she might look down on Sunderland and all the tiny men in it, feeling for once in her life what it is to be tall. But before she can express the thought, they are descending into the familiar gray warehouses and tenements on the Monkwearmouth side, where Gustine, though she has never been here before, feels depressingly at home, the slatternly streets of Monkwearmouth being as squalid and airless as any lane near Mill Street.
Henry seems to relax, though, the moment they cross the bridge. He reins in the horses to a fast trot and leans back against his seat, looking at her for the first time.
“I have much to discuss with you today,” he says, thinking it would be easier if she looked more like herself. As it is, she is almost unrecognizable out of her blue dress, hardly whorish at all, just another pale and underfed East End adolescent. Her blonde hair falls loose around her shoulders and she wears some sheer and shapeless undergarment that is mostly hidden by a shawl, holding the overdressed infant on her lap like a popish Christmas pageant baby Jesus. She looks at him expectantly, but his own eyes falter.