You will see Bertha again soon enough. She needs time to recover,” I soothed, pouring two more generous glasses of head-splitting gin.
Hugh Grizzlehurst had returned to find me cooking supper, a jug of gin on the table. He was rheumy-eyed, his jowls hanging like nooses and the whites of his eyes nearly as crimson as the puddle I had cleaned. It fell to me to improve his spirits: thus the gin and the two beefsteaks and the mashed turnips with butter and thyme.
“Poor Bertha.” He snorted back tears and mucus; I had set about returning him to blind drunkenness and was by seven in the evening approaching success. “I never . . . I ’ate to think of ’urting my girl. It was an haccident, you savvy?”
I spooned gravy over the plates, seating myself. “Bertha understands. I certainly do as well. I only regret that Clarke had to leave so precipitously.”
We ate, Mr. Grizzlehurst sniffling into his beefsteak; when we had finished, I placed both my palms upon the table.
“This house is too empty without Clarke and Mrs. Grizzlehurst.” I traced the wood with my finger, playful. “Finishing this gin at Elephant Stairs would be just the ticket—the stars are out, and the night is quite clear.”
You used to watch the stars through the skylight with Clarke wrapped around you, lazy as a pair of kittens, just as you did back at school on the rooftop, and now you won’t feel the weight of her arm over your waist ever again.
Hugh Grizzlehurst hoisted the half-empty gin bottle; he had far outpaced me, and his mouth wore a slack, wet quality. “Gimme ’alf a tick to fetch me coat.”
It was a three-minute walk to the waterfront, which was littered with crumbling stairways to the Thames—Princes Stairs, Church Stairs, Rotherhithe Stairs; so late, the streets had cleared and the air lost the graininess of a long day’s labour in an ashen metropolis. A single dustman passed us, tipping his flat cap, and a vague, chill sweetness overlay the perennial aromas of fish and refuse.
Hugh Grizzlehurst and I sat at Elephant Stairs with the treacly brown water lapping at our feet, and Mr. Grizzlehurst lapping up the gin. He would make it all up to Bertha, he claimed; he would buy her trinkets, take her on holiday to Brighton, compose poems in her honour. His arms swept like scythes, winding down in a jerky, mechanical fashion until he collapsed against the stone step.
“What that woman is, she is hexceptional. The habsolute devotion—and after losing two wee ones. Well, never again, Miss Steele, I can hassure you.”
“Two?”
Dread crawled up my neck as I recalled her silence following a very important question.
Now he has wounded you, who is to say how far he can go?
Hugh Grizzlehurst returned to the theme, muttering in spasmodic fashion that he would forgive her for running from him.
“And if she tries to stay haway again, well.” Mr. Grizzlehurst shook his head regretfully. “Then I’ll ’ave to learn the bitch twice over that marriage is a sacramentation. She’ll not hescape me, not my Bertha—never you fear for that.”
We fell silent. The waves churned and I thought of going to bed that night alone, thought of the many times when I had jolted awake shaking and felt Clarke’s soft lips murmuring against my shoulder, remembered the way she would reach up to trace loving patterns on my collarbone until I fell asleep again, and that she never chided me come morning. Then and there I vowed that Clarke should escape me; I should never seek her out, never threaten her fragile freedom, for all that my chest felt as empty as the wide spaces between the stars she so adored.
When my employer lost consciousness, I was not surprised; and when it was discovered by fishermen that Mr. Grizzlehurst had been deep in his cups and fallen into the Thames, drowning, I was not surprised either, for I had pushed him.
Volume Two
THIRTEEN
“Know, that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself elected the involuntary confidant of your acquaintances’ secrets: people will instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to talk of yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy. . . .”
A partial veil must be drawn over the subsequent period, reader—not because I wish to conjure a false portrait, but because redundancies are the enemy of narrative, and I rehearsed the same self-annihilating scene long after Clarke’s departure.
After killing Hugh Grizzlehurst, for instance, I carried the remainder of the gin home and drank my fill. Upon the morrow, my skull felt as if a horse had kicked it, and my stomach practically leapt into my chamber pot, but there’s more gin where that came from, I thought, and Clarke was gone, would be gone always, and I only faced what I deserved.