The Painted Bridge A Novel

TWENTY-ONE





Anna fell into step with Catherine and got hold of her arm.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Coming with you, of course.”

“Why?”

“I knew you weren’t listening. I have to go to the fair tonight. I must see the Fasting Girl before she goes back to America.”

“Catherine, go back home this instant. I’m ordering you to.”

Catherine giggled.

“I refuse your order, Mrs. Palmer.”

In front of them, the round gray dome of St. Paul’s waited patiently under the clouds. She couldn’t drag Catherine back by force but all her instincts were against taking her. If she had his daughter with her, Abse was certain to come after her. Anna would have to throw the girl off once they reached London. It was the only way. She would lose Catherine in the streets and let her find her own way home. She was old enough.

“Alright. If you absolutely must. Come on.”

Anna had no idea where the road might be and judged it better to stick to the heath, where they would be harder to find. She picked up her skirts and hurried on, heading toward the distant outline of the cathedral. Catherine followed, keeping pace, and the two of them ran through frozen bogs, through reeds and grasses as high as their waists and up onto higher ground—dodging through stands of elms and oaks, the ground underneath sharp with acorns. They encountered a farmer on his horse and by unspoken agreement slowed their pace and began to talk loudly about the benefits to ladies of taking a walk. As soon as he was out of sight, they picked up their skirts and ran again, faster than before. The dome grew bigger and more distinct with every glimpse they caught of it as if it too was on the move, advancing to meet them.

They reached the top of a hill and Anna stopped, bent double, gulping in cold air that hurt her chest. Catherine had both hands clutched to her stomach and could barely speak.

“I’ve got a stitch,” she gasped. “Let’s rest. I can’t go any farther.”

The top of the hill was flat and dotted with smooth stones, carved with names and dates. They sat, recovering their breath, surrounded by sky on all sides, the great panorama of London spread out before them. Scores of steeples pointed up from between lines of slate roofs. To the east, plumes of black smoke rose in columns from factory chimneys. The river snaked its silver path through the middle of everything and the city sent up a distant blur of sound at odds with the sharp detail that met their eyes.

Catherine spread her arms wide and tilted her face to the sun.

“Isn’t it wonderful, Mrs. Palmer? To be free.”

“Let’s carry on, Catherine. We’re not safe yet.”

Anna didn’t feel free. She wanted to be far away from Lake House and unencumbered by Catherine. She jumped up from where she sat and hurried on down the hill, encountered a path and began to follow it. It grew wider and better trod as they went. Before long, the sound of a train whistle pierced the air. Anna saw the man-made glint of a railway line through the trees. The air took on a smell of smoke and baking bread.

At a ditch with a plank laid over it, Anna stopped. They were close enough to a marketplace to hear voices and the neighing of horses. She tucked her hair back into her combs and examined a tear in her skirt. The idea of being in a crowd frightened her. She felt as if she’d become different from other people while she was shut away, that they would know it just by looking at her. She forced herself to cross over the ditch, walk on to where the path ended by a ragged line of barrows and stalls and join the people, affecting a nonchalance she didn’t feel.

Men and women were selling onions, pots and pans, old clothes from carts and ramshackle stalls. Anna and Catherine passed a man pattering about early birds and worms, his arm strung with watches on chains. Anna stopped and stared at a pyramid of oranges balanced on a sack on the ground, with a single cut half of the fruit glistening at the front. She felt as if she was seeing an orange for the first time. The color was full of life and heat, as if the sun had squeezed itself into it.

“Where shall we go?” Catherine said, raising her voice over the hubbub. “Now we’re here?”

“I’m going to my sister’s house in Wren Street.”

“You never told me you had a sister.”

“I’ve got four.”

“No brothers?”

Anna shook her head.

“Are you hungry, Catherine?” Catherine nodded. “Then wait here a minute.” Anna reached out and squeezed Catherine’s hands. The flush on her cheeks had subsided; the girl was white again with shadows under her eyes. “Stay here and don’t move.”

Anna made her way on through the crowd, following a singsong voice until she caught up with the watch seller.

“Excuse me, sir.”

He had ringlets in front of his ears and kind, brown eyes.

“Want to purchase a timepiece, missie? You won’t regret it.”

She pulled off her glove and held out her hand. The turquoise stones in her ring were bright in the sun, the gold coils of the snake shone.

“Will you buy this from me?”

“Take it off,” he said. “Let’s have a gander.”

“I’m not taking it off until we agree on a price. It’s gold and it cost ten pounds. I only want eight for it.”

He took her hand in his, turned it this way and that, then brought her wrist to his mouth in a quick movement and bit the gold between his teeth.

“I’ll give you five.”

“Seven.”

“You trying to put me out of business? Six pounds and ten bob on top for goodwill, miss.”

“Done.”

He let go of her hand and loosened the neck of a leather pouch around his waist, counting out the pound notes and four half crowns. She took off the ring and gave it to him.

“God bless,” he said, his eyes curious, the ring already secreted somewhere out of sight.

Anna looked down at the bare fingers of her left hand. The ring had left no mark and she felt easier without it. She’d only expected to get four or five pounds for it—it had cost Vincent six. She pulled her glove back on, sliding the folded notes inside it, and felt a sharp pang of loss. She’d forgotten her knife, the little penknife from Egypt that Captain Newlove gave her when she was eight years old. Left it behind in its dark hiding place.

She stood for a minute among the shoppers and hawkers then walked a few steps farther away from where she had left Catherine—past a man selling brooms, another flicking at a pile of old books with a feather duster. She felt she ought to pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t in a dream, a dream of escape from which she would shortly wake. They would be certain to have raised the alarm by now. She must hurry to her haven at Louisa’s house. First, she had to rid herself of Catherine. Slip away out of this market and disappear into the streets of London.

Anna stopped and leaned on a plane tree. Its bark peeled up in strange shapes and shades that looked like maps of the moon. The air was filled with the twittering of caged birds. A line of a dozen or more thrushes were trapped in wicker baskets that swung from a wooden pole hung between two branches of the tree. Their song was piteous. She clasped her hands over her ears and began to retrace her steps, hurrying back by the stacks of books and piles of turnips, past heaps of kindling and slabs of churned butter. She must at least get some food inside the poor girl before she left her. Would find a way to give her a half crown as well.

Catherine was rooted to the spot where Anna had left her, her eyes darting in all directions, her body stiff. From a distance, she looked twelve years old again. She burst into tears when she saw Anna.

“Where have you been? I thought you’d abandoned me.”

“Look!” Anna showed her the ends of the notes emerging from her cuff. “We have funds, Catherine. We can eat.”

She bought an orange, asked the costermonger to cut it into quarters, and they ate in silence, sucking out the flesh, juice running down their chins. Anna ate the peel as well, chewing it up between her back teeth, the bitterness as satisfying as the sweetness. She felt as if she was eating life. At the edge of the market they stopped again, this time for two cups of green pea soup with chunks of hot bread. They sat on a stone bench by a water trough and ate—more slowly now. Anna finished first. She brushed the crumbs off her lap and tucked the remaining notes down inside her boot, tying the lace tight and straightening up again.

Catherine wiped the inside edges of the cup with her finger, licked the line of green sludge off it. She tossed her bread in the direction of a pair of wary strays crouched by an old crate.

“Come on, pusses,” she whispered, holding out her hand to them. “Don’t you love cats, Mrs. Palmer? I do.”

Anna sighed.

“Are you ready, Catherine? We’ve got a long walk still.”

“Of course I’m ready. I don’t want to miss the Fasting Girl, Mrs. Palmer. I need to be at Vauxhall early. Will you come with me?”

“I suppose I’ll have to. I can’t let you go on your own. Come.”

Beyond the market lay an area of terraced houses, the narrow, cobbled streets full of people. Women chatted over gates, boys rolled battered hoops or dragged puppies along on strings and men leaned on walls, smoking thin cigarettes. The women looked with quick interest at Anna’s and Catherine’s snagged skirts and ruined boots and the men turned their heads, their attention caught by some quality of excitement in them—by Anna’s escaping hair and Catherine’s pale, bluish complexion.

Anna walked fast and kept her eyes fixed on a spot a few yards ahead of her as she’d learned to do when she first came to London; you couldn’t look at every person you passed or greet strangers, as you did around Dover. You had to see without seeing, otherwise you would drown in people.

Her pleasure at being on the streets, back in life, was spoiled by a constant terror—of hearing someone shout her name, feeling a hand on her shoulder. She tried to shake off the sense that anyone and everyone might apprehend her, drag the pair of them back to Lake House.

A little farther on, in a high street, Anna hurried Catherine by a man passed out drunk by the side of the road with his trousers open, pulled her past a woman clouting her child and a pickpocket stalking an old lady, walking close at her elbow. They carried on, over a canal with a boat gliding along it, past Moroni’s ice warehouse—so wide it occupied three plots—past dank passageways and public houses squeezed between foundries and workshops, toward the new railway station.

“What should we say, if anyone asks?” Catherine said.

“Nothing. Just keep quiet and stay close to me.”

“Shall I be your sister too?”

“If you like.”

Catherine looked pleased.

“I always wanted a sister. You’re so fortunate.”

“You think so?”

“You’ve got four of them. And you’re not imprisoned in your father’s house.”

“I don’t have a father, Catherine. Or a house.”

Catherine clapped her hands.

“You’re like Aurora Leigh, Mrs. Palmer. She was an orphan too, ‘in this unroofed and unfurnished world.’”

They turned into a wide thoroughfare of solid houses, their brass door plates and whitened steps gleaming. A constable walked along the other side of the street and Catherine waved at him. Anna grabbed her wrist and pulled down her arm.

“What did you do that for?” she whispered urgently. “Keep your eyes down and carry on walking.”

It was too late. He’d crossed the road and was standing in front of them—so close that Anna could see the dried blood from a razor cut on his chin and the shine on the neck of his serge tunic.

“Excuse me, sir,” Catherine said, smiling up at him. “My sister and I are lost. We are trying to reach Robin Street.”

“Wren Street,” Anna said.

The policeman set about explaining the way he would take himself. He took a long time over it, drew a map with his pencil and tore it carefully from his notebook. Anna pretended to study the map, her heart beating so hard she felt the policeman must be able to hear it. She forced herself to turn and face him, smile her thanks. He winked at her, touched his helmet and stood aside to let them pass, looking after them for longer than seemed necessary.

She waited until they got around the corner then whirled toward Catherine, trembling with rage and fright, her hands on her hips.

“He might have arrested us. Taken me back! How dare you put us at risk?”

She could have slapped the girl. Catherine looked startled.

“Don’t treat me like a child, Mrs. Palmer. If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have been able to get away at all.”

The little map bore no relation to the city they encountered. Roads led them in circles and each one looked the same as the last. Without the advantage of elevation, they couldn’t see St. Paul’s. Despite Catherine’s pleas, Anna refused to ask further directions. She’d been to Wren Street many times and she had a sense of where it was, if not an exact one. Their steps slowed as they wandered past taverns and coffeehouses, putting off hawkers of buttons and beads, sidestepping beggars and drunks. Anna gave a penny to a woman sitting on the stone steps of a church with a baby at her breast, another one to a blind singer standing under a tree. She let Catherine put a threepenny bit in the hand of an old man in the tattered remnants of a naval uniform.

“God bless,” he said, looking at them with rheumy eyes, raising his hand in a salute.

* * *

By the time they reached Wren Street, it was mid-afternoon. The sun had disappeared behind dense gray clouds and the temperature was dropping. The cold bit at their flesh; fragile sheets of ice were re-forming across the smashed puddles. Catherine was shivering so much she couldn’t speak. They limped past a pair of housemaids huddled up to their suitors on the corner with their hands under the boys’ coats. The street was narrower than Anna remembered. The houses stood nose-to-nose, the fanlights over the doors small and neat. Gas lamps illuminated cosy-looking drawing rooms where the curtains had not yet been drawn for evening, rooms that looked to Anna as if they sheltered harmonious, happy lives of a kind she had never really known.

“Come on, Catherine. Nearly there. I hope my sister is at home.”

She reached number 6 and climbed down the area steps, clinging to the handrail, ignoring Catherine’s protest that they were creeping in like Gypsies and ought to announce their arrival at the front door. Anna pushed her way through an unlocked door into the kitchen and breathed in its steamy fog.

“Clear off,” said a woman standing at the range, replacing the lid on a pot. “I’m not buying. What have you got anyway?”

“Is Mrs. Heron in?”

The cook looked her up and down.

“Who wants her? The cat’s mother?”

“Her sister. Tell her that her sister wants her.”

They waited while she delivered the message then heard a shout and a pair of feet running down a wooden staircase. Louisa took one look at Anna and collapsed in the doorway, her crinoline tipped up like a shuttlecock.

* * *

On her knees in her bedroom, Emmeline made a vow. If God returned Catherine to her, she would believe in Him properly, as she had always known she should. She would fast every Friday, attend church twice on Sundays and embroider ecclesiastical vestments. Make a pilgrimage up a stony hillside on her knees, like the Catholics in Ireland. Become a missionary in Africa. She closed her eyes. “Dear God, if you have to take a life, please let it be mine. Take me, I beg you. Leave my little girl safe.”

The commotion outside the door increased. Querios was shouting orders at Fludd. Martha Lovely’s voice rose in protest, somewhere farther away. Fanny Makepeace’s iron tread in the corridor made the boards shake. The house was in uproar. The sanctuary of her bedroom, the fringed mantel cover, the dusted rosewood expanse of the dressing table, the twin miniatures on the wall of her mother and father, was always under siege. Now it was breached entirely. There was nowhere she could get away from what had happened. She could go to Timbuktu and not escape it.

Emmeline buried her face in the baby dress, felt the soft linen against her skin, the raised pleats of smocking across the bodice, and inhaled the faint scent of cedarwood. It was her own fault. If she’d agreed to the outing, Catherine would still be here. Or they might be at the fair together, watching the dancing bear, the jugglers. She’d never enjoyed fairs herself and hadn’t understood how much it meant to her daughter. Such a small thing to have granted, it seemed now. Emmeline made a solemn promise to whatever great power saw fit to witness it that if she was spared, she would grant Catherine anything. Always.

One of the patients, the Reverend’s wife, had disappeared at the same time. Lovely had lost sight of the patient, she said, after slipping on the ice. Poor woman had searched everywhere before she returned distraught to report Mrs. Palmer missing. Catherine was out in the grounds at about the same time and there was no trace of either of them. The gatekeeper swore on his own daughter’s life that the gate hadn’t opened all morning, that he never took his eyes off it and that no one had passed on the road. No woman could climb the walls of Lake House. They looked low enough from the road but there was a ditch running round them on the inside that made them eight feet tall. The pair of them had vanished into thin air.

Querios was convinced that they were still somewhere in the house or the grounds. He’d had Fludd and the groundsman checking the bushes and glasshouses, the shrubbery. Indoors, the maids were searching the attic, the cellars. There were cupboard doors banging, the drag of bed legs on bare boards, drawers that hadn’t opened in years squeaking in protest as they were hauled out on their runners and shoved back in again. No cries of delight, of discovery.

Emmeline knew Catherine wasn’t hiding in a broom cupboard. She hadn’t told Querios about Catherine’s request to go to the fair. It wouldn’t help anyway. Catherine hadn’t said which fairground or even why she wanted to go. Emmeline hadn’t thought to ask. Catherine wasn’t a lover of spectacles. Tricks. She would have thought she’d hate to see monkeys smoking pipes, horses forced to rear up and walk on two legs.

She closed her eyes and asked God to forgive her wandering thoughts, to hear her prayers. She would accept anything in her life except that harm should come to her daughter. God had to agree that it was wrong for Catherine to suffer before she was an adult woman. Still a child, really. And it was so cold. Such a bitter, bitter day. The light already beginning to dim. She pressed the smock against her eyes, trying to ward off visions of Catherine lying in a ditch with her ankle broken or being kidnapped by the lion tamers at a traveling fair.

Sometimes she still missed her own mother. At this moment, she felt her absence as keenly as if she was a child lost in a strange place. And she was forty-two. Catherine wasn’t yet sixteen. She was out in the world alone, unchaperoned except perhaps by a lunatic. Her father never noticed anything, had willfully refused to see what was happening with her. Emmeline threw the baby dress over her head and began to cry into the red satin bed cover.

The door opened. She heard Querios enter, felt him standing next to her, looking down at her.

“Emmeline, really. This is no time to indulge in the vapors.” She remained on her knees, her arms spread across the soft warmth of the bed, her face buried in it. It seemed impossible that she would ever move again.

“I’ve got up a search party in the grounds. Benedict’s gone to ask around in the village.”

“It’s too late.”

“If all you can do is be hysterical, you’d better stay here.”

“I’m not hysterical, Querios.”

His voice softened.

“Don’t worry, Em. She’s probably set her heart on a bonnet or something.”

“She’s run away to London, Q. To a fair.”

He tutted.

“Don’t be ridiculous. What would a girl like Catherine be doing at a fair?” He shut the door sharply behind him.

“There are no girls like Catherine,” Emmeline said to the empty air. “There is only Catherine.” She started to howl.