Near the fireplace — where only a small blaze was smouldering — was a group of three women and a man and a number of sleeping children. There were a man and a woman lying on some straw in the middle of the room and an old woman in one corner by the windows, one of which was secured by battered shutters and the other stuffed with rags and paper where many of the panes were missing. The deputy who had admitted us joined three other men who were drinking in the opposite corner.
I led my mother over to the part of the chamber pointed out by the man, which was almost beneath the shattered ceiling.
She looked round and said: “How good it is to be back in my own dear room.”
Of course, we had nothing: neither mattress nor pillow nor bed-covering, and no dry clothes to change into, but I tried to persuade her to lie down on the bare floor. Filthy as it was, it was at least dry. She took no notice of my attempts, however, and was taking part in an animated conversation with people whom she imagined to be present.
The old woman, noticing our arrival, came hobbling over, bringing a rushlight. A smell compounded of cheap spirits and dirt issued from her. It was impossible to guess her age: her nose seemed almost to meet her sharp chin, white wisps grew from hideous lumps upon her face, and she was dressed like a pile of dirty laundry.
She looked at my mother who was now smiling and laughing as she stroked my jacket:
“Dearest Peter, I had such a foolish dream. You’ll laugh when I tell you. And yet it was too horrible to laugh at.”
“How do, my pretty pair?” the old woman said. My mother smiled at her and the old woman said: “Old Lizzie will make you welcome. Who are you fleeing from, that you come to this place? Is it a father or a husband?”
“Father and husband!” my mother repeated, catching at the stray words. “Dearest Father, I see you have arranged everything just as it was before.”
“Are you on your marriage journey?” persisted the old woman. “Is this your wedding day?”
“Why yes, I was married today,” my mother exclaimed.
Grinning, the old creature held the light closer to me saying: “And is this the fine young groom?” Then she started back with a cackle: “Why,” she said, “this is only a boy! Are you quizzing Old Lizzie? Fie,” she exclaimed with ancient coquetry, “you naughty creatur’! To vex Old Lizzie so.” Then, smiling toothlessly, she put her face down to my mother’s and said: “Why, I know what it is. Am’t I a downey not to have guessed?” She sniffed ostentatiously. “You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you, pretty dearie?”
My mother looked at her in bewilderment.
“I’ll wager you’ve had a treat of a kind gentleman, eh? Have you any to spare for Old Lizzie?”
I put out my hand to draw the old woman away.
“Leave her be,” I said. “She’s not well.”
The old woman stopped smiling and looked at me: “Is she your mother?”
I nodded.
“Poor creatur’. She has a church-yard skin. But Lizzie will tend her.”
She hobbled away and shortly afterwards returned with two ragged blankets and a heap of rags. I put one of the blankets on the floor to keep my mother’s head off the bare boards and laid the other over her shoulders, and though I managed to persuade her to sit, she would not lie down but continued to conduct an animated conversation with her imagined interlocutors.
“She should eat something,” I whispered.
The old woman shrugged: “Lizzie don’t have nothing.” Then she glanced towards the group of people near the fireplace: “But Lizzie can beg.”
She went over to them and I saw her gesticulating vigorously before she beckoned me across. They were Irish and could not speak English. Indeed one of them was a very old woman who sat gravely amongst the others with an unlit cob in the corner of her mouth, and seemed to think she was still in her peat-cottage. The two other women muttered together in Erse and then the elder of them offered me a piece of bread in a small bowl of milk and would not take the penny I proffered for it.
I could persuade my mother to eat only a mouthful or two for all the time she was talking to herself, though directing her attention to me as if I were someone else.
She gazed at me intently: “Dear father, is it truly you? I’ve been so frightened. Let me stay here tonight.”
The wind had been rising for some while and now a first shower of rain was suddenly flung against the windows like a handful of pebbles. I remembered how I had lain in my little bed-chamber in Melthorpe on many a winter night and heard a storm blowing, and how sometimes my mother had come to comfort me.
“Must I?” she cried in despair, more like a child than a grown woman. “But I don’t want to. What do I want with a husband? I want to stay as we are now.” Suddenly she seemed to listen closely and then turned and looked at me as if with dawning recognition: “Peter!”
At this moment the first flash of lightning lit up the room briefly and seconds later there was a roll of thunder.
“Try to sleep,” I said.
“Yes, sleep. It’s been such a long journey there and back again. But where is dear Mr Escreet? I want to tell him what a fright you all gave me. But now that I know it was only a game I believe I shall sleep at last.”
“Yes, my pretty,” said old Lizzie. “Sleep now and you’ll be grand as five-pence come the morrow.”
At this, my mother suddenly seemed to notice the old woman for the first time: “Who are you?” she exclaimed in alarm. Then more calmly she said with a pout: “Are you my watcher?”
“So you’ve been on that lay, have you?” the old woman cackled. “No, my dearie, I ain’t. Though I was a dress-lodger in my time, too. And I’ve been a watcher. We all comes to it in the end.”
“I can’t sleep for the storm,” my mother said childishly, for now it had broken upon us in its full force.
The wind rattled the windows and the thunder crashed and rumbled like cannon as if we were in the midst of a battle-field.
“Give me something to make me sleep, Helen,” she said to the old woman. “I promise I won’t tell Johnnie.”
“Lizzie sees you’re of gentle birth,” the old crone answered. “Why, my Guyneys, when Lizzie was a gel she was in high keeping. She kept company at Mother Kelly’s in Arlington-street. She was on the Town then. Why she was kept by a baronet’s son,” she said with a mincing flick of the head whose effect was grotesquely coquettish. “She lodged in Bond-street and rode down ’Dilly in her carriage dressed in a silk-gownd, and didn’t all the folks stare at handsome Lizzie then!” Then she added sombrely: “But he died shoreditch for he was foul of the strawberries — the only marks of a baronet that he lived to show, poor devil! — or I might have been a Lady.”
The old woman talked on in this vein and yet despite this and the vehemence of the storm, to my relief my mother lay back with her head against the heap of rags and closed her eyes. Once she opened them briefly and whispered something to the old woman who said:
“I don’t have none, dearie. Nor no blunt to buy it.”
At last, however, she fell into a fevered sleep, muttering occasionally and even opening her eyes several times and addressing people she believed to be present.
Suddenly Lizzie interrupted herself and looked at me sharply: “Have you any blunt?”
I shook my head.
“But you have rich friends?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer for the best: “My mother has. And when she is better we will go to them.”
She stared at me and then suddenly turned and hobbled away without a word. A few moments later I saw her go out of the room. I lay beside my mother on the naked boards, resolved to stay awake and watch over her.
The storm would not let me sleep anyway, for the wind was battering the house as relentlessly as waves crashing against cliffs. I heard tiles being stripped from the roof a few feet above my head and flung about like handfuls of playing-cards until they reached the ground. To my dismay water began to drip through the brok
en ceiling almost directly above us; then it became a trickle and within a short space of time the floor was damp.
Some time later the old woman returned. From somewhere she must have obtained money for she carried a stone jug from which she drank and now began to bawl out old songs. Then she tried to get the others in the room to dance. As the lightning flashed and the thunder roared, she began to pace around the sleepers huddled on the floor, loudly humming a minuet as her accompaniment and grotesquely curtseying to an invisible partner with all the flirtatiousness of fifty or sixty years earlier.
“Stow that! You infernal damned witch!” one of the men drinking with the deputy shouted. But his companions clapped their hands and called out obscene encouragements.
She danced on, tripping and stumbling over the sleepers by the fire. The young Irishman cried out something and pointed towards the younger of the two women who was in an interesting — indeed, an extremely interesting — condition. The old crone merely laughed at him and danced the more furiously, swinging the jug around her as she pranced round the room.
When she stumbled into one of the children the Irishman came up to her and struck her in the face. She threw herself at him, trying to hit him with the jug, but he seized it from her and flung her into a corner. She picked herself up all the while screaming abuse at him like nothing so much as an alley-cat hissing and snarling at a dog. My mother muttered and opened her eyes but did not awake.
At last the old woman, still spitting curses, lay down on the heap of rags in a corner and quickly fell into a deep snoring slumber.
Despite the noise of the storm and my intention to stay awake, the exhaustion I had undergone was too much for me and some time after this I must have slept myself.
CHAPTER 50
When I awoke I could not remember where I was. I raised my head and looked about me. It was still early and only a very little light was coming in through the unshuttered but dirty windows. In the hearth the embers of the fire were glowing, and in the dim light I saw sleeping figures huddled together and memory returned. The wind and the rain were still blowing, but the worst of the storm had spent itself. I turned the other way and to my joy found my mother’s eyes upon me looking calm and as if restored to her right senses. She was half-propped up against the wall with the bundle of rags against her head.
Her expression was strange. During the night a change had come over her — and I did not know whether it boded well or ill. Her mental equilibrium was restored, but her eyes seemed to lie deeper, her cheek-bones were more apparent, and her lips thinner and disquietingly pale. She said something I could not hear and now that I looked more closely, I saw how weak she was, and that speech was a considerable effort.
“Don’t speak,” I said, getting up and moving nearer to her. “Save your strength.”
She tried to raise her hand to draw me down beside her but was too weak. I sat down and took her hand.
“There is something I must do,” she managed to mutter.
“Later,” I said. “Tomorrow will do.”
With an effort she shook her head and then went on so softly that I had to lean forward to catch her words: “Promise me,” she whispered, “that you will never go to the house.”
“Which house?” I demanded but she would not answer. “You mean your father’s old house, don’t you? But you forget, I don’t know where it is. Where is it?”
She said nothing.
“Why should I not go there?” I persevered.
She merely shook her head.
“Tell me,” I insisted.
“He might harm you.”
“Who? Whom do you mean?” I asked.
She made a great effort to utter the one word: “Promise!”
“How can I promise when I don’t know what I’m promising?” I said. “And why do you want me to promise now?”
As I spoke those words a sudden realization came to me: “No, Mamma! Everything will be all right.”
She let her head fall back but a few moments later she tried to speak again: “My pocket-book,” she whispered at last.
One hand clawed feebly at her pocket, hideously like the paw of a trapped animal. I reached in and removed the small leather-bound book I had seen so often. The piece of my map that I had given her fell out, but I saw that it still had something — a piece of folded paper or a letter — inside it. I was in a tumult of conflicting emotions. Was I at last going to learn about the mystery that had been withheld from me for so long? I showed the book to her and she nodded to me very slightly and then turned her head towards the fireplace.
“Burn it,” she said.
My chest constricted and I had to struggle to draw breath.
“No,” I cried.
“Please, Johnnie.”
I shook my head, staring at her in horror. Was I destined never to know the truth about my origins?
“Then give it to me.”
I handed it to her and she feebly leafed through it until, apparently finding what she sought, she seized a bunch of pages and tried to tear them out. It took all her strength before she succeeded, and then she lay back exhausted.
She passed the torn pages to me and said: “Burn these at least.”
I crossed to the slumbering fire flickering in the grate and shoved the papers a little way into its red heart. I looked back and saw that my mother was watching me. I pushed the papers all the way in and they took fire and flared up. When I had watched the handwriting turn silvery against the blackening paper, I went back and knelt again beside her.
“My darling boy,” she whispered, the words scarcely audible. “I don’t want to leave you like this.”
“You don’t have to,” I cried angrily. “What are you talking about?” Then more calmly I said: “Try to sleep now. It is still early. When it is day I will go out and buy us food. I have a little money still.”
In truth I had but five-pence ha’penny. When that was spent, I thought, we would have to beg in the streets unless we took the course which seemed to me the safest and surest: “Mamma, I know you dismissed the idea of going to Sir Perceval for help. But that was when you were so confused and frightened. You do see, don’t you, that it is crucial to his interest that we remain alive and well? And so he will want to help us to escape from our enemy and live securely and secretly. You do see that, don’t you, Mamma?” I repeated.
She muttered something and I leaned forward to catch it: “No,” she said softly.
“Yes,” I insisted. “I understand these things better than you. Mr Steplight wasn’t lying about that at least for I’m sure it’s true that Sir Perceval needs us to remain alive and well, especially now that the codicil is in the hands of our enemy. Listen to what I am saying. We will go to him soon and ask him for help. We will not ask him for very much money. Only a hundred pounds a year. That is nothing to a gentleman as rich as he.”
It was almost full day now and people were stirring in the room. I noticed old Lizzie watching us from her corner.
Suddenly my mother raised herself and looked at me with terrible intensity: “That’s nonsense! Why are you saying such things? Mr Assinder told me: Sir Perceval and his wife don’t care about us now. They don’t need us alive.” There was a terrible coughing deep in her chest. “Do you think I’m so foolish, you too?” she managed to gasp. “Must everyone lie to me?”
“Mamma, I don’t understand you. It’s me. Johnnie. I haven’t lied to you.”
“I know who you are,” she said with that same look. “You’ve always despised me for a fool.”
“No!” I cried. Then she began to cough as violently as if she were vomiting, and to my horror I saw flecks of blood spattering over her hands as she put them to her mouth.
I seized her arm and my hand almost closed round it, for it was so thin.
“Leave me alone!” she cried, shaking my hand away.
She stared round wildly and the pupils of her blue eyes seemed suddenly vacant now that I looked into them. And in that image of t
error there came to me the time I had watched boys in Melthorpe stoning a cat they had trapped. Blood was dribbling down her chin now and her lips had turned blueish.
“I’m so frightened!” she gasped. “Help me!” Then, to my horror, she cried out: “Mamma!”
As if in response, the old woman came across and looked at the blood with a kind of eagerness: “Aye,” she said. “As I feared. ’Tis the white plague.” Seeing my expression she added: “Consumption.”
“Get a surgeon!” I cried.
“Why,” she chuckled grimly, “there ain’t no sawbones as will come here. And besides, she’s too far gone now.”
My mother was gasping for breath and suddenly the old woman bent over her, pulled her head forward, and began thumping her on the back.
“Stop that!” I cried. She persisted until I seized her and pulled her violently away, and she retreated, muttering imprecations.
My mother fell back and lay quiet.
“I’m right, Mamma,” I went on after a minute, hoping to reassure her. “You’ll see. We will get some money from Sir Perceval and then we can rent a little house in Salisbury, like you said.”
Her head was turned slightly away from me now and I wasn’t sure if she heard me. I went on softly in case she was sleeping: “I will go to school and in a few years it will be time for me to be apprenticed and after that I will be able to keep us both.” As I spoke my voice broke. “You’ll see. It will be as it was before.”
I bent over my mother whose face was still turned away from me. Her eyes appeared to be open and I wondered if she were not sleeping after all.