He thinks at first she is being flirtatious, but then he sees that more tears have risen in her eyes. Will he be comforting her all night? He frowns a bit over her shoulder, for he only meant to drop by and scold her, then go straight back to work.
“What is it, dear?” He gathers her to him, but asks the question as neutrally as possible, hoping to escape with the shortest version.
“I have acted without your permission in another matter. Just this morning, I promised a position in our household to a poor little girl who is deeply troubled. You know her by the name of Pink, and she is as good a little girl as I’ve ever met—”
“Let me interrupt you, darling, and say that taking her in is impossible. I have seen a solicitor this morning, and signed papers to have that baby of Mill Street come live here with us. Of course, I’ll hire a nurse—I wouldn’t dream of burdening you with a foster child—but I’ll want no more than one stray around the house.” He breaks off at the look of distress on Audrey’s face. Surely they will not have to fight about this too.
“Oh, Henry, now I must tell you that what you wish is impossible,” Audrey cries.
“Audrey,” he says sternly, “this is not negotiable. I will not argue with you.”
“You have no argument from me. That poor child is dead. Pink told me this morning.”
Dimly, he hears her go on about Pink, how the poor girl is devastated and blames herself. He continues to hold his babbling fiancée as she pours out her plans for that odd urchin, but his mind is racing. The child dead? He was fine when Gustine left his house, was he not? God, he’d been so bewitched by the mother, he’d barely noticed the child. But now he could shake himself when he remembers. The child was cold and shivering, with unmistakably bluish circles under his eyes; looking back, he must have been in the first stages of cholera morbus.
“Has he been buried?” he demands abruptly, interrupting Audrey’s plans for Pink. She looks at him strangely.
“The child was illegitimate. I don’t believe the mother was allowed a Christian funeral,” she answers haltingly. “He was buried in the Trinity pit.”
Gone? Henry pulls her close once more to hide his deep agitation. The solicitor this morning had all but assured him that with the proper petitions, the child was his; and on that promise, Henry had been enboldened to dissolve his anatomy school and begin to plan a new future. He stares vacantly out the window above his fiancée’s blonde head, feeling the full weight of all he has lost. He tries to imagine what will come next, tries to picture going on with his work, but oddly enough, all that comes to mind is an experiment on the origins of life he once performed for his students, months ago, long before he met Gustine. He removed the shell of a four-days-incubated egg, submerging it in tepid water so that his students might observe the pulsing pinprick of blood that would one day develop into the chicken’s heart. The point was so small, it disappeared completely during contraction, only to reappear during relaxation, representing that moment between the visible and the invisible, betwixt being and nothing, that is the commencement of life. Had this child not in some fashion become that moment in Henry’s own re-creation? While it lived and he could observe it, a new life was possible; now that it has contracted and disappeared into the ground, all of his hopes must die with it. Whatever made him think he could escape the graveyard? Henry hides his burning face in his fiancée’s hair. His future lies buried with that baby in the Trinity pit.
Reverend Robert Gray plods across the churchyard, his black cassock fluttering below the hem of his greatcoat, his heavy boots sinking in the lathered quicklime mud that is supposed to be scrubbing his underground congregation clean of filth and decay. In his pocket, he carries a flask of wine, a jar of vinegar, and a rag—the wine for strength and comfort, the vinegar and rag to swab down her blistered knees and hands, for poor girl, she won’t stop patting the corrosive earth. As if it were still in her power to soothe.
He has watched her from the window of the rectory—what there was to watch, for she has not moved since early this morning, except to press her cheek against the soil or burn her lips with kisses. Please bury my child, she had begged him yesterday. Everyone says you are a friend of the poor. She was not one of his parishioners; he had never seen her before she appeared at his door in her inappropriate blue gown, cradling her tiny coffin. Reverend Gray is a friend to the poor, and he was instantly moved by the sight of this poor magdalene whose eyes were swollen nearly shut from crying, but the church has rules and it was not in his power to break them. The best he could do for an unbaptized bastard child, no matter how beloved, was the pit on the dark side of the church, a pit of suicides and unclaimed paupers, murderers and drunks. She has been sitting beside that fresh-turned earth ever since, a rippling blue puddle on a chemical winter landscape. He is relieved to see that an old woman has arrived, though strangely, she has made no move to comfort the girl, has merely waited outside the cemetery gate, fixed as a severed head upon a pike.
“Hold out your hands, girl, and let me see them,” orders the reverend, crouching down beside her. She mechanically presents her hands and he splashes the red, bleeding palms with vinegar. He swabs her raw cheek where she pillowed her head, and daubs at her swollen lips. “You can’t continue to lie here—you’ll soon have no skin left. Let’s stand up,” he says, pulling her by her armpits.
Her legs have fallen asleep from sitting in one position for so long, and they have trouble supporting her weight. She came early this morning and would stay through the long cold night if only he would let her.
“A friend has come to take you home, do you see?”
Gustine follows Reverend Gray’s eyes back to the gray hulking Fafnir just outside the gate. She is back again today, though guarding from a far greater distance than ever before. Rejoice shadow, you have won! Gustine is back in the dress, laced into her only means of support, now that her potter has succumbed. You are a pair again, after only a brief interruption. But to be fair, Gustine feels no pleasure on the Eye’s side, no triumph or even grim satisfaction. She looks at the old woman and sees only that: an old woman. A sad, defeated, maimed old woman. Since the death of her baby, they have become like twin ghosts haunting the streets of Sunderland. The girl and her shadow. The dress and the Eye.
The reverend gives her a little push. “Come on now. I have work to do. We must lock up.”
“I will be back tomorrow,” Gustine whispers, looking longingly at the ground.
Reverend Gray watches her wind through the mossy headstone garden and out through the iron gate, where she silently picks up her sentry. The old woman does not acknowledge her, but falls into step behind like the human shape of her own heavy sorrow. She is one of the oddest mothers he’s ever seen—so seemingly devoted, and yet when he asked for the baby’s name to record it in the register, she said he didn’t have one. She couldn’t think of a name to save him, she said; why should she give one to his gravestone?
When they are out of sight, Reverend Gray calls for his sexton to lock the gate behind him. He can spend no more time on this mother and bastard child. Cholera morbus has joined his flock, and tonight he must visit ten more who have shared its pew.
Last night she dreamed of a worm on the rim of a pitcher. Every squirm of his fat white body traced a crack until the pitcher crumbled to dust like an Egyptian mummy. Upon the heap of glass her child lay and did not bleed but slept so peacefully she hadn’t the heart to wake him.
She rarely dreamed of him while he lived; she thought of him incessantly during the day and imagined how he did while she was at work, but she almost never filled her nights with him. It seems like such a waste now: four months of dreams given over to foolish things like falling and flying when she could have been keeping company with her beloved son. She wishes she had all those nights back to dream over again.
Gustine stands in the doorway of Nescham’s fish warehouse, breathing in the briny oil of old halibut and mussels. The Quarantine patrol boat has left the tidal har
bor and is rounding Crach Rock, sweeping its mirrored oil lamp eye along the Monkwearmouth bank. It is the same barge they use to drag the bottom when some desperate girl takes final advantage of the River Wear. Not two months ago, she watched a pair of constables haul another limp woman face-first up the quayside steps. Back then, in the first flush of new motherhood, she couldn’t comprehend the impulse; now she has no trouble imagining herself laid out in Mag Scurr’s back room, a lump of clay and a swatch of blue silk for blazons.
We are what we do. It is how people know us. Gustine ferried clay and called herself a potter’s assistant. She bore a child and called herself a mother. She walked the streets and let men stretch her quim, but she never once thought of herself as a whore. She was a dress lodger; hers was but a rented self. Yet Dr. Chiver saw the truth. He saw she was a whore with or without the dress; and truly, have not all her other selves dropped away? She is no longer a potter’s assistant. She is no more a mother. Only Whore remains, kept alive by the dress and the Eye and the insistence of Dr. Chiver’s prying fingers. There is a reason every Wear suicide brought to Mag Scurr had a baby in her belly, Gustine now realizes. No woman kills herself for love, and rarely for shame. It is the cruelty of hope that does a woman in; for no matter how many men a woman has given herself to, she never holds her life cheap until she foolishly believed it to be valued.
It would be so easy to walk into the water. The patrol man swinging his big oil lamp eye would catch the top of her head as it sank beneath the surface and think no more of it than of a snapping turtle ducking under for a minnow. She could shrug off her tired flesh as she once did her clay rind at the pottery. And after all, why should she grow attached to it? It is rented no less than the blue dress on her back, and from a landlord far more cruel and vengeful than the one she left at Mill Street. It would be so easy to walk out and meet her sailor son. He is out there on his ship, his eyes turned toward shore. She can almost see him bobbing on the choppy waves, hear the plash of his wooden oars as he lays them across his knees and stretches out his arms to her.
Lost in her reverie, she does not see a small skiff brave the Quarantine searchlight as it glances left to the Sunderland side of the river, play dead like all the other empty tethered lighters until danger had passed, and quickly make its way to shore. A tall man, but gaunt as if he hasn’t eaten in weeks, drags his boat onto the quay, camouflaging it under some rotting net outside of Nescham’s. His tattered, buttonless jacket hangs loose, his once-tight white trousers bag about his knees. He has a long, equestrian skull with sad, gentle eyes and too many teeth for his small mouth. Beneath his arm, he carries a bundle of carefully folded clothes, tied up with string.
“Oh!” He stops short, nearly trodding upon her in the shadows. “I didn’t see anyone there. Are you lost?”
Are you lost? How funny that her dream should be broken by the same line used by Green-plaid and so many other men of Sunderland. Gustine awakes disappointed. This tall, storky sailor is not her son.
“No, I am not lost.” She sighs, too tired to lie. “I am just coming from Trinity Churchyard.”
“Excuse me for being forward.” He clears his throat. “But this is no neighbourhood for a lady to walk alone. I’ve been away for a while, but I know things haven’t changed that much.”
Neither moves from where they stand: Gustine in the doorway of the closed fish warehouse, the young sailor near his hidden rowboat. Her landlord has ordered her straight back to work, but she feels so dull and leaden, it is impossible to imagine propositioning this man. If it were only lying on her back and enduring, she might be able, but the hard work of charm and banter and intercourse … Have you ever known perfect love? she can just hear herself ask as he lifts her skirt. Have you ever had a helpless baby bird die in your hands? The young sailor looks nervously between her and Long Bank, torn between politeness and a strong desire to run away. I am not ready for this, thinks Gustine, sidling around the doorway past him. But she is too slow for his better nature. He has already abandoned his craft and is coming up the bank to offer his arm.
Well, it had to happen sooner or later. Now he will get a long look at her in the light, and she knows what will follow: either the proposition, the resignation, and the cold alley door against her back; or surprise, disgust, and a quick mumbled-excuse good-bye. But the emaciated sailor sees nothing untoward in her appearance. He presents his skeletal arm along with his sincerest wishes to escort her home. No, she couldn’t possibly, she lies, startled; it is too far.
“Please don’t trouble yourself about the distance,” he says. “I am just so happy to have the earth under my feet after far too long at sea.” He has a deep voice that he is shy about using, swallowing the ends of words and speaking as if through a drink of water. He looks too frail to lean upon, but when Gustine, touched by his gallantly pathetic manner, agrees to take his arm, she finds it surprisingly sinewy and strong.
They walk in silence, eavesdropping on the fog that like a gossip gathers little bits from all over town: the faraway whistle of Sunderland Bottle Works’ nightly shift change, a father shouting for his boy to come home, snatches of song from out-of-work men keeping warm on the docks.
The pitmen and the keelmen trim
They drink the bumbo made of gin
And when to dance they do begin
The tune is “Elsie Marley,” honey!
It is comforting to have someone to lean on, for Gustine hadn’t realized how very tired she was. He leads her slowly westward—the direction in which, she realizes, he automatically assumes she must live. Would you not like to rest? he asks more than once. No one has ever asked her that before.
“I am less tired now than before,” she answers for the second time. “And I am grateful for the company.”
“You’ve had a sad evening at Trinity?” the sailor asks after a few more blocks of neither speaking.
Gustine nods and feels her throat tighten.
“A relative?”
Another silent nod. The sailor seems to understand and share her quiet mood. “It is a dying time of year.”
He does not speak like most sailors she has known. He is not coarse or drunk or profane or boastful. He speaks like a boy who might have gone to school and read books. She takes a long look at his face, not turned away or shaded like The Sailor’s Tear. It is an open, respectful face.
“When my mother died last year, I used to go alone to the cemetery,” the sailor offers shyly, worried he might be overstepping his bounds. “My brother and sister would have gone, but I wanted my mother all to myself. I expect she enjoyed the company.”
“You loved your mother very much?”
“More than any person in the world.” He sighs. “It was hard putting her in the ground, but at least I knew her labours had come to an end. She worked every day of her life, worked herself to death to give my brother and sister and me a taste of something better. She deserved a rest. I’m sorry.” The sailor stops suddenly and observes her worriedly. “I’ve made you cry.”
She shakes her head, embarrassed that her tears are still so close to the surface. “No, it’s nothing,” she says. “The only comfort I have is that my child was spared having to work.”
“Oh, it was a child you buried?” asks the sailor, looking ready to cry himself. “Then I am doubly sorry, miss.” He tucks her arm a little tighter inside his and gives it an awkward pat.
“You’ve been a long time at sea?” Gustine changes the subject, unable to continue speaking of loss in this unfamiliar atmosphere of sympathy. She can feel the propulsion of the Eye following close behind, and knows what is expected of her. But not yet. Not yet.
“I suppose you saw me row in?” he asks, a little chagrined. “And hide my boat?”
“Yes.”
“Shall I turn myself in to the Quarantine patrol?”
“If everyone feels free to break the Quarantine, I don’t know why we’ve had to suffer it all these months,” Gustine responds matter-of-factly.
/> “Where I’ve been, I’ve seen the uselessness of Quarantine, miss. Something always sneaks through. I suppose I am proof of that.”
They walk a few blocks more in silence, but as if compelled to explain his lawlessness, the sailor soon continues.
“Cholera took our captain and first mate a month ago, and we’ve been trying to get home ever since. Imagine how it feels to be in sight of home but stuck just offshore, without fresh food, without communication, without medicine. Some of us couldn’t take it anymore.” He swallows almost all of that last and she has to lean in to hear him.
“And I’ve heard it doesn’t matter anyway—the cholera is already here in Sunderland,” the sailor says.
“So we’ve been told.”
“It devastated Riga, where we’ve just come from,” he tells her. “Some say the refugees from Moscow brought it. From what I could make out, they thought they were being poisoned and broke the military cordons, scattering across the continent.”
She doesn’t think he is going to continue, for they walk in silence past the dark Exchange building, the burning tar barrels of Queen and High Streets, as far as Playhouse Lane; but finally, as if he found his voice among the locked and shuttered theatres, her escort begins to speak.
“I remember the night our captain succumbed,” he says, looking not at her, but at his own big feet. “He was sitting on deck writing home to his family and I was sitting near him, like a dullard staring back at the smoky factories onshore, blaming him, blaming everyone for being stuck in that infernal port. We were flying our yellow Quarantine flags to show we complied with the law, but in our hearts we hated the Quarantine and would have broken through in a minute, just pulled up anchor after dark and risked the patrols. Only, our captain wouldn’t hear of it. He was not used to taking risks at sea and wanted nothing other than to get home to his family in one piece, even if we had to sit off the port of Riga for a year. He was a cautious man, our captain—not really a sailor, more of a businessman—and he actually believed a country drew up laws to protect its citizens! I remember the first mate asking him exactly who it was this Quarantine was meant to protect: us from them or them from us? The Quarantine was a joke, miss, if you don’t mind me saying so. We bought food off the local merchants who sailed out to us every day. They took our money and rode back into town. It was a joke, plain and simple. Just like here.”