The Painted Bridge A Novel

TWENTY-THREE





The ground was littered with sweet wrappers and handbills, with flattened apple cores and pieces of potato skin. Catherine skipped as they made their way past jugglers and stilt-walkers and a man leading what he proclaimed to be a leopard, prowling at his heel on a silver chain.

“It looks like a dog, with paint on it. Did you know Mr. Darwin believes our dogs are related to the dogs in ancient Egypt? Can you imagine Mrs. Heron’s spaniel trotting around the Pyramids?” Catherine laughed and put her arm through Anna’s, squeezed it with sharp fingers. “I’m happy, Mrs. Palmer. Happier than I have ever been. I feel as if I could die now, because I am so happy. Do you ever have that feeling?”

Anna smiled back at Catherine. She felt the excitement too, couldn’t help but share in some part of it despite a growing feeling inside that she must decide what to do. The firecrackers made her body start and her ears pop. The air was sharp with the smell of cordite, with burnt sugar and horse manure, overlaid with the sweet, musky odor of burning incense tablets. All around them, people strolled and laughed and jostled, bundled up in furs and mufflers, their faces lit by flares, grease lamps, braziers. It was good to be in a crowd. To be part of something.

They passed a costermonger shaking a perforated pan over the coals.

“Lovely chestnuts,” he said, winking at her. “Nice an’ ’ot.”

Catherine stiffened and began to tug Anna along, pushing her way ahead through the throng.

“There she is,” she said. “Oh, my Lord. Look!”

In front of them was a board propped on a tree, a painting of a dark-haired woman with sharp cheekbones. There was a queue of women and girls outside a marquee, a man announcing the One and Only, the Marvelous, the Miraculous, the Incredible, the Astounding American Fasting Girl, shouting through what looked like an ear trumpet. She had taken no sustenance this year, excepting the smell of flowers and exotic fruits. At eight o’clock this very night she would take a few drops of dew, brushed onto her lips with a feather. The Fasting Girl was indisposed after her journey, he added as they drew near. She would not speak to her admirers. They should not trouble her with questions.

“She’ll speak to me,” Catherine said. “I know she will.”

“You go in. I’ll wait for you outside. Go on—get in the queue. Here’s the money.”

“I’m frightened.”

“Why?”

Catherine hesitated, her expression pained.

“All my heroines have come from books. I’ve never known one in real life.”

“So?”

“I don’t want to be disappointed, Mrs. Palmer. People in books are whatever you want them to be.”

“She’s a performer, Catherine. Like an actress.”

“She isn’t. She’s just like you and me except that she lives off air and rain. She inhabits the spiritual realm.”

“Roll up,” said the man, bowing to Catherine. “Roll up, miss. Take the chance of a lifetime to see the Fasting Girl. Only sixpence.”

Catherine paid the money and joined the line of women and girls. Anna waved at her and walked on. She’d never been to a London pleasure ground. Vincent disapproved of them. The traveling one that had come to Dover at Whitsun was a smaller, poorer affair with the same magician every year, pulling the same rabbit out of his baggy sleeve.

Anna paused by a low wooden stage lit with swinging lamps and found herself in a ring of people, their faces illuminated by the light reflected from the stage. In the middle of it was a girl with long, dark hair down her back, dressed for a hot climate in shimmering bloomers that were loose around her hips but tight over her calves and ankles and a flowing, soft shirt in the same pink-and-gold paisley print. She nodded at the audience for silence and began to bend her body over backward from the waist. She went farther and farther, curling her chest on and on in a snakelike movement until her head appeared between the silky ankles. Her face was looking at them once again, this time with her chin resting on the ground. The crowd roared their pleasure.

The showman brought a lamp closer and put it down by her feet. She had a needle between the toes of one foot, a length of thread held in the other. They fell silent as she lifted her head up farther between her knees, brought her feet together and threaded the needle. A scatter of applause went up as she righted herself, shook her hair into place again and faced them, expressionless. A man passed around a hat, the crown hanging off the rim. Anna dropped in a halfpenny and passed by, thinking about the girl, wondering where she had come from and why.

Louisa had hurried them out of the house the way they came in, through the kitchen. She’d talk to Blundell after he’d eaten his dinner, she said. She would get an answer from him by morning. She would leave the kitchen door unlocked and they must take off their boots by the range, creep up the stairs and sleep with the children in the nursery. Blundell never saw the children in the mornings so he wouldn’t know anything about it.

Anna bought a slice of bread pudding from a boy with a tray on his head. He lifted it down and cut her a slice, sprinkled extra sugar on the top and passed it over on a square of paper. It was warm through her glove, fragrant with cinnamon and cloves. She ate it piece by small piece, exploring the raisins with her tongue, chewing the sweetness, feeling the warmth of it slide down her throat. There were peddlers everywhere—selling hoops, firecrackers, silk posies, things that might once have appealed to her but now seemed pointless. She finished the pudding and wiped her fingers on the paper, threw it down on the ground.

Wandering on, she found herself in a quiet part of the gardens where couples were consorting in dark corners, the women with painted eyes and lips, the men laughing loud and often. The moon was almost full, missing a sliver off the side as if someone had helped themselves to a slice. She ought to rejoin the crowd, return to the busy, lit area to wait for Catherine but the river drew her onward. The tide was high and the water gleamed with reflected lights from the boats anchored in the middle.

The smell of river water was rank and muddy, tinged with salt. The strains of the barrel organ had given way to the sound of waves from a tug’s wake slapping on the embankment down below, the deep rumble of a ship’s horn from farther upriver. Anna stood and stared at the shifting reflected light on the water. For the first time since she had jumped off the ice and onto the churned shore, she felt free. In the morning, she would be able to think and plan. In the morning, she would decide what she was going to do.

As she turned back to collect Catherine, her eye was caught by two people coming toward her from the other side of a flower bed. Anna stood, staring. The woman wore a short cape over broad, stiff skirts, a feathered bonnet, but it was the man who drew her attention. He was tall and dark, dressed in a long coat and smoothing his moustache with one finger. His head was bent toward his companion and as they walked the woman laughed and put her hand on his arm in a practiced gesture. Was this she? Was she looking at Maud Sulten?

Neither had seen her. Anna checked the urge to step out before them and drew back behind a tree, caught a drift of frankincense as they passed mixed with a sweet reek of violets. She stood motionless, gazing after them at the upright dignitary’s hat, the plume of feathers that waved from a bonnet beside it, the head cocked at an angle.

She leaned on the old tree, feeling dizzy. Its rough, cracked bark pressed the flesh of her arm through her cloak. A pair of cold hands covered her eyes from behind and she screamed and threw them off.

“It’s me,” Catherine said. “Don’t take on, Mrs. Palmer. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

* * *

At Lake House, lights burned in every room. The feverish search had given way to a vigilant waiting, a waiting focused on absence.

“It’s like a wake,” Emmeline said. “All we’re missing is the body.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Em. There’s no need to dramatize the situation.” Querios and Emmeline were in the study, Querios pacing the floor and Emmeline hunched in a shawl by the grate, her laudanum bottle clutched in her hand.

“They’re not here,” she said. “We have to face it.”

“She might have gone to Flo’s,” Querios said. “To her aunt’s house.”

Emmeline gave him one of her looks. “Unlikely. I can’t persuade her there for a visit so I can’t think why she would have run away to them.”

“I’ll call on them and find out,” he said, his voice more optimistic than he felt. “Probably find her playing charades with her cousins, tucking into one of Flo’s pies.”

“You might,” Emmeline said, bleakly.

* * *

Some hours later, in Chelsea, Querios Abse left the house of his sister-in-law, Florence Worth. He stood on the curb in the dark street, stamping his feet, trying to keep the murderous cold at bay. Catherine was not there and the mission had succeeded only in communicating alarm to the rest of the family. Catherine’s cousin Henry had insisted on throwing on his greatcoat and setting off to walk the streets in search of her. Flo was hysterical and her husband had departed with a neighbor to report Catherine missing at the police station.

Querios felt defeated. He racked his brains, trying to think where his daughter could have gone. He was forced to admit that he really had no idea. A church bell tolled eleven and he remembered his other pressing difficulty. Mrs. Palmer was missing too. Was it possible that the two of them were together? He had thought he could feel no worse than he did but his heart sank a little further, at the prospect of informing Palmer his wife had absconded. He would put that off till tomorrow. Or longer, even. First thing in the morning, he would ask Makepeace whom the Palmer woman wrote to, who her friends were.

For now, he saw no option but to try to get home.