She opened it, still standing on the crate, and flicked carefully through the colour plates in the front. ‘Here it is.’ Without taking her eyes from the page, she stepped down. ‘The Fox’s Lament.’
Ben came to stand by her, adjusted his glasses away from the light. ‘Intricate, isn’t it? Not my cup of tea, but that’s art for you. I can see what you admire about it.’
‘It’s beautiful, and somehow sad.’
He leaned closer. ‘Sad?’
‘Full of melancholy, yearning. I can’t explain better than that, something in the fox’s face, some sort of absence.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t explain.’
Ben gave her arm a squeeze, murmured something about bringing her a sandwich at lunchtime, and then he was gone. Shuffling in the direction of his stall, more particularly the customer in his stall who was juggling the pieces of a Waterford chandelier.
Cassandra continued to study the picture, wondering how it was she felt so sure about the fox’s sorrow. That was the artist’s skill, of course, the ability through precise positioning of thin black lines to evoke so clearly such complex emotions . . .
Her lips tightened. The sketch reminded her of the day she’d found the book of fairytales, when she’d been filling time beneath Nell’s house as upstairs her mother prepared to leave her. Looking back, Cassandra realised she could trace her love of art to that book. She’d opened the front cover and fallen inside the wonderful, frightening, magical illustrations. She’d wondered what it must feel like to escape the rigid boundaries of words and speak instead with such a fluid language.
And for a time, as she grew older, she had known: the alchemical pull of the pen, the blissful sensation of time losing meaning as she conjured at her drawing board. Her love of art had led her to study in Melbourne, had led her to marry Nicholas, and to everything else that had followed. Strange to think that life might have been completely different had she never seen the suitcase, had she not felt the curious compulsion to open it and look inside—
Cassandra gasped. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Suddenly she knew exactly what she had to do, where she had to look. The one place where she might uncover the necessary clues to Nell’s mysterious origins.
That Nell might have rid herself of the suitcase occurred to Cassandra, but she pushed the notion aside with some certainty. For one thing, her grandmother was an antiques dealer, a collector, a bowerbird of the human species. It would have been completely out of character for her to destroy or discard something old and rare.
More importantly, if what the aunts had said was true, the suitcase wasn’t a mere historical artefact: it was an anchor. It was all Nell had that linked her to her past. Cassandra understood the importance of anchors, knew all too well what happened to a person when the rope that tied them to their life was cut. She had lost her own anchor twice. The first time as a ten year old when Lesley had left her, the second as a young woman (was it really a decade ago?) when, in a split second, life as she knew it had changed and she’d been cast adrift once more.
Later, when she looked back upon events, Cassandra knew it was the suitcase that found her, just as it had done the first time.
After a night spent combing through Nell’s cluttered spare rooms, becoming distracted, despite her best intentions, by this memento or that, she’d grown incredibly weary. Not just bone tired, but brain tired. The weekend had taken its toll. It came over her quickly and profoundly, the weariness of fairytales, a magical desire to surrender herself to sleep.
Rather than go downstairs to her own room, she curled up beneath Nell’s bedspread, still in her clothes, and let her head sink into the downy pillow. The smell was breathtakingly familiar—lavender talcum powder, silver polish, Palmolive laundry flakes—and she felt as if she were resting her head on Nell’s chest.
She slept like the dead, dark and dreamless. And next morning, when she woke, she had the sense of having been asleep far longer than one night.
The sun was streaming into the room, through the gap between the curtains—like the light from a lighthouse—and she watched, as she lay there, the pieces of dust, hovering. She could have reached out and caught them on her fingertips, but she didn’t. Instead, she allowed her gaze to follow the beam, turning her head towards the spot at which it pointed. The spot high up on the wardrobe, where the doors had come apart in the night, to reveal, on the top shelf, beneath a clump of plastic bags full of clothes for St Vinnie’s, an old white suitcase.
11
The Indian Ocean, nine hundred miles beyond the Cape of Good Hope, 1913
It took a long time to get to America. In the tales Papa had told her, he’d said it was further than Arabia, and the little girl knew it took a hundred days and nights to get there. The little girl had lost count of the days but it had been quite some time since she’d boarded the boat. So long, in fact, that she’d grown used to the sensation of never ceasing to move. Getting sea legs, it was called; she had learned all about it in tales of Moby Dick.
Thinking of Moby Dick made the little girl very sad. It reminded her of Papa, the stories he read to her of the great whale, the pictures he let her look at in his studio, pictures he’d drawn of dark oceans and great ships. They were called illustrations, the little girl knew, enjoying the length of the word as she said it in her mind, and one day they might be put in a book, a real book that other children would read. For that’s what her papa did, he put pictures into storybooks. Or he had on one occasion. He drew paintings of people, too, but the little girl didn’t like those, the eyes that followed a person across the room.
The little girl’s bottom lip began to tremble the way it sometimes did when she thought of Papa and Mamma, and she bit down on it. In the beginning she had cried a lot. She hadn’t been able to help it; she’d missed her parents. But she didn’t cry much any more, and never in front of the other children. They might think she was too little to play with them and then where would she be? Besides, Mamma and Papa would be with her soon. They would be waiting for her, she knew, when the boat arrived in America. Would the Authoress be there too?
The little girl frowned. In all the time it had taken to find her sea legs, the Authoress had not returned. This puzzled the little girl for the Authoress had given many stern instructions as to how they were to stay together always, avoid separation no matter what. Perhaps she was hiding. Perhaps it was all part of the game.
The little girl wasn’t sure. She was just thankful that she’d met Will and Sally on the deck that first morning, otherwise she wasn’t sure she’d have known where to sleep, how to get food. Will and Sally and their brothers and sisters—they had so many the little girl had a hard time keeping count—knew all about finding food. They’d shown her all kinds of places on the boat where an extra serving of salt beef might be found. (She didn’t much like the taste, but the little boy only laughed and said it might not be what she was used to but it did for a dog’s life.) They were kind to her, for the most part. The only time they became cross was when she refused to tell them her name. But the little girl knew how to play games, how to follow the rules, and the Authoress had told her that was the most important rule of all.
Will’s family had a set of bunks down on the lower decks, with lots of other men, women and children, more people than the little girl had ever seen gathered together in one place. They had a mother travelling with them, too, though they called her ‘Ma’. She wasn’t at all like the little girl’s own mother, she didn’t have Mamma’s pretty face and lovely dark hair set up on the top of her head by Poppy each morning. ‘Ma’ was more like the women the little girl had sometimes seen when the carriage passed through the village, with tattered skirts and boots that needed mending, and lined hands like the pair of old gloves Davies wore in the garden.
When Will had first taken the little girl downstairs, Ma had been sitting on the bottom bunk, nursing one baby while another lay crying beside her.
‘Who’s this then?’ she’d said.
‘She won’t say ’er name. Says she’s waiting for someone, that she’s meant to be hiding.’
‘Hiding, eh?’ The woman beckoned the little girl closer. ‘What you hiding from then, child?’
But the little girl wouldn’t say, just shook her head.
‘Where are her folks?’
‘I don’t think she’s got none,’ said Will. ‘Not so as I can figure. She was hiding when I found her.’
‘That right, child? You alone?’
The little girl considered this question and decided it was better to agree than to speak of the Authoress. She nodded.
‘Well, well, then. Little thing like you, all alone on the seas.’ Ma shook her head and jostled the crying baby. ‘That your case? Bring it here then and let Ma take a little look-see.’
The little girl watched as Ma unhooked the latches and lifted the top. Pushed aside the book of fairytales and the second new dress to reveal the envelope below. Ma slid her finger beneath the seal and opened it. Plucked a small pile of paper from within.
Will’s eyes widened. ‘Banknotes.’ He glanced towards the little girl. ‘What should we do with her, Ma? Tell the porter?’
Ma stuffed the banknotes back inside the envelope, folded it into thirds, and tucked it down the front of her dress. ‘Not much point telling anyone on board,’ she said finally, ‘not that I can see. She’ll stay with us till we get to the other side of the world, then we’ll find out who’s waiting for her. See how they’d like to thank us for our troubles.’ She’d smiled then, and dark spaces had appeared between her teeth.
The little girl didn’t have much to do with Ma, and for that she was glad. Ma was kept busy with the babies, one of whom seemed always to be attached to her front. They were suckling, or so Will said, though the little girl had never heard of such a thing. Not in people, anyway; she’d seen the baby animals suckling on the estate farms. Those babies were like a pair of little piglets, doing little else but squealing and drinking and fattening. And while the babies kept their ma busy, the others looked out for themselves. They were used to it, Will told her, for they had to do so at home. They came from a place called Bolton and when there were no babies to tend their mother worked in a cotton factory, all the day long. That’s why she coughed so much. The little girl understood: her mother was also unwell, though she didn’t cough the way Ma did.
In the evenings there was a spot where the little girl and the others would sit, listening to the music coming from above and the sound of feet sliding across shiny floors. That’s what they were doing now, sitting in a darkened nook listening. In the beginning, the little girl had wanted to go and see, but the other children had only laughed and said the upper decks weren’t for the likes of them. That this space at the bottom of the crew ladder was as close as they were likely to get to the toffs’ deck.
The little girl had been silent, she’d never come across rules like those before. At home, with one exception, she was allowed to go where she pleased. The only place she was forbidden was the maze that led to the Authoress’s cottage. But this wasn’t the same and she’d found it difficult to understand what the boy meant. The likes of them? Children? Perhaps the upper deck was a place where children were not allowed.
Not that she wanted to go up there tonight. She felt tired, had felt that way for days. The sort of weariness that made her legs seem as heavy as forest logs and doubled the height of the stairs. She was dizzy, too, and her breath was hot when it passed her lips.
‘Come on,’ said Will, tiring of the music. ‘Let’s go look for land.’
A scramble and they were all on their feet. The little girl pulled herself up and tried to catch her balance. Will and Sally and the others were talking, laughing, their voices swirling around her. She tried to make sense of what they were saying, felt her legs shivering, her ears ringing.
Will’s face was suddenly close to hers, his voice loud. ‘What’s the matter? Are you all right?’
She opened her mouth to answer, and as she did so her knees buckled and she began to fall. The last thing she saw before her head hit the wooden step was the bright, full moon, shimmering in the sky above.
The little girl opened her eyes. A man was standing above her, serious-looking, with bumpy cheeks and grey eyes. His expression remained unchanged as he moved closer and plucked a small flat paddle from his shirt pocket. ‘Open.’
Before she knew what was happening, the paddle was on her tongue and he was inspecting her mouth.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Fine.’ He withdrew the paddle and straightened his waistcoat. ‘Breathe.’
She did so and he nodded. ‘She’s fine,’ he said again. He signalled to a younger man with straw-coloured hair who the little girl recognised from when she’d woken earlier. ‘There’s a live one here. For God’s sake get her out of the sickbay before that changes.’
‘But sir,’ said the other man, puffing, ‘this is the one what hit her head when she fainted. Surely she should rest a bit—’
‘We don’t have sufficient beds for resting, she can rest when she’s back in her cabin.’
‘I’m not sure where she belongs—’
The doctor rolled his eyes. ‘Then ask her, man.’
The straw-haired fellow lowered his voice. ‘Sir, she’s the one I was telling you about. Seems to have lost her memory. Must’ve happened when she fell.’
The doctor peered down at the little girl. ‘What’s your name?’
The little girl thought about this. She heard his words, understood what he was asking of her, but found she couldn’t answer.
‘Well?’ said the man.
The little girl shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
The doctor sighed, exasperated. ‘I don’t have the time or the bed space for this. Her fever’s gone. By the smell of her she’s from steerage.’
‘Aye sir.’
‘Well? There must be someone there who’ll claim her.’
‘Aye sir, there’s a lad outside, the one what brought her in the other day. Come to check on her just this minute, a brother I should say.’
The doctor peered around the door to look down at the boy. ‘Where are the parents?’
‘The lad says his father’s in Australia, sir.’
‘And the mother?’
The other man cleared his throat, leaned closer to the doctor. ‘Giving the fishes a feed somewhere near the Cape of Good Hope, most likely, sir. Lost her leaving port three days ago.’
‘Fever?’
‘Aye.’
The doctor furrowed his brow and sighed shortly. ‘Well, bring him in then.’
A young boy, skinny as a sapling, eyes as black as coal, was hoisted before him. ‘This girl belongs to you?’ said the doctor.
‘Yes sir,’ said the boy. ‘That is, she—’
‘Enough, I don’t need life stories. Her fever’s gone and the bump on her head’s healed. She’s not saying much at this point but no doubt she’ll pipe up soon enough. It’s most likely attention-seeking, knowing what happened to your mother. That’s how it is sometimes, especially with children.’
‘But, sir—’
‘That’s enough. Take her away.’ He turned to the crewman. ‘Give the bed to someone else.’
The little girl was sitting by the rails, watching the water. White-tipped peaks of blue, rippling beneath the wind’s touch. The way was choppier than usual and she surrendered her body to the rolling motion. She felt odd, not ill exactly, just strange. As if a fine white mist had filled her head and settled, refusing to drift away.
It had been that way since she’d woken up in the sickbay, since the strange men had looked her over and sent her off with the boy. He’d taken her downstairs to a dark place full of bunks and mattresses and more people than she’d ever seen before.
‘’Ere.’ A voice at her shoulder. It was the boy. ‘Don’t forget your case, then.’
‘My case?’ The little girl glanced at the proffered piece of white leather luggage.
&
nbsp; ‘Cor!’ said the boy, looking at her strangely. ‘You really have gone bonkers, I thought you was just pretending for that doctor fellow’s sake. Don’t tell me you don’t even remember your own case? You’ve been guarding it with your life the whole trip, just about tore us apart if any of us so much as looked at it. Didn’t want to upset your precious Authoress.’
The strange word rustled between them and the little girl felt an odd prickling beneath her skin. ‘Authoress?’ she said.
But the boy didn’t answer. ‘Land!’ he called out, running to lean against the rails that ran around the deck. ‘There’s land! Can you see it?’
The little girl came to stand by him, still clutching the handle of the small white suitcase. She glanced warily at his freckled nose, then turned to look in the direction of his pointed finger. Far in the distance she saw a strip of land, trees of palest green all the way along it.
‘That’s Australia,’ said the boy, eyes trained on the distant shore. ‘My pa’s there waiting for us.’
Australia, the little girl thought. Another word she didn’t recognise.
‘We’re going to have a new life there, with our own house and everything, even a bit of land. That’s what my pa says in his letters. He says we’re going to work the land, build a new life for ourselves. And we will, too, even if Ma ain’t with us no more.’ The last he said in a quieter voice. He fell silent for a moment before turning to the little girl and cocking his head towards the shore. ‘Is that where your pa is?’
The little girl thought about this. ‘My pa?’
The boy rolled his eyes. ‘Your dad,’ he said. ‘Fellow what belongs with your ma. You know, your pa.’
‘My pa,’ the little girl echoed, but the boy was no longer listening. He’d caught sight of one of his sisters and was running off shouting about land being sighted.