‘So,’ Rose asked me. She had a forthright look about her. A grown-up, take-no-nonsense look. ‘What is your name?’
‘Tom,’ I said. Which was the truth. But then I worried about the truth of me, and how it was dangerous. So I lied about my surname, for the first of many times: ‘Tom Smith.’
‘And so, how old are you, Tom Smith?’
I had to be careful here. The truth – eighteen – probably wouldn’t have been believed. And if it had been believed then it would have been dangerous for her to know. And yet I simply could not tell her the age she most likely assumed, thirteen or fourteen.
‘How old are you?’
She laughed at me. ‘I asked you first.’
‘I have sixteen years.’
She didn’t bat an eye at that. I suppose I was lucky in that when the condition took hold I was already tall, thick-necked and broad-shouldered. ‘Your eyes look older,’ is all she said. Which I found a marvellous comfort, as everyone in Edwardstone had been convinced I was set in stone in my early teens.
‘And I have eighteen,’ she said. ‘And Grace has ten.’
This was fine. This talk. It was fine. But I didn’t want to reveal any more. I couldn’t. I was a dangerous secret. It was better for them not to know about me.
They gave me a meal of bread and parsnip pottage and cherries.
Rose’s smile was like warm air. ‘You should have been here yesterday. We had pigeon pie. Grace is a master pigeon-catcher.’
Grace mimed catching a pigeon and twisting its neck.
A moment passed. Then, inevitably, another question.
‘Why did you come here?’ Rose asked.
‘You invited me.’
‘Not here. Why were you heading to London? On your own? What are you fleeing from?’
‘Suffolk. If you had ever been there you wouldn’t even question it. It is full of pig-headed superstitious hateful people. We were from France, you see. We never fitted in there.’
‘We?’
‘I mean, when my mother was still alive.’
‘What happened to her?’
I stared at Rose. ‘There are some things I would rather not talk of.’
Grace noticed my hand, the one holding the soup spoon. ‘He is shaking.’
‘He is also across the table,’ Rose said. ‘You can speak as if he is here.’ Then her eyes were upon me again. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘If the price of this food and a night of comfort is to talk of painful things then I would rather sleep outside in a ditch.’
Rose’s eyes flashed with anger. ‘You will find Hackney has some excellent ditches.’
I put down my spoon and stood up.
‘Do they never jest in Suffolk?’
‘I told you I am from France. And I am in no mood for jesting.’
‘You are a sour thing, aren’t you? Curdled like milk.’
Grace made a show of sniffing the air like a dog. ‘He even smells sour.’
Rose was stern with me. ‘Sit down, Tom. You have nowhere to go. And besides, you must stay here until you have paid us what you owe.’
I was a mess. I was confused. There was too much intensity inside me, after three weary days of walking and grieving. I wasn’t angry with these sisters, I was grateful to them, but that gratitude was swallowed up inside the pain of closing my eyes and seeing Manning’s hands.
‘You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Don’t hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
Rose nodded. ‘That is all right. You are tired. And other things. You will sleep in the boys’ room.’
‘The boys’ room?’
She explained it was called the boys’ room because there had been two brothers – Nat and Rowland – but they were both dead. Nat had died of typhoid when he was twelve, and poor baby Rowland had died of a mystery cough before his first birthday. This led on to an explanation of how their parents were dead too: their mother had died of ‘childbed fever’ (a common thing back in the day), a month after giving birth to Rowland, which explained the baby’s frailty, and their father had died of smallpox. The girls seemed quite matter-of-fact about it all. Though apparently Grace often woke in the night, having nightmares about little Rowland.
‘See,’ Rose said, sprinkling salt on my shame. ‘Plenty of sorrows to go around.’
She took me into the room. There was a little square window about the size of a portable television from 1980. (When I lived in a hotel in São Paulo in 1980 I watched a lot of TV. It made me think of the small square Hackney window.) The room was spare and modest but the bed had blankets and even though the mattress was stuffed with straw I was so tired that the queen’s four poster itself wouldn’t have seemed any comfier.
I fell on the bed, and she pulled my shoes off and she looked at me, and the motherly sternness she had displayed before melted away and she said softly, as if to my soul itself, ‘It will be fine, Tom. Rest now.’
But the next thing I knew it was the dead of night and I was sitting up in bed awake from the sound of my own scream with a fat full moon outside the window and my whole body was shaking and I could hardly breathe. Terror was flooding into me from every side.
Rose was now there, holding my arm. Grace, behind her, yawned sleep away at the doorway.
‘It is all right, Tom.’
‘It will never be,’ I said, half delirious.
‘Dreams are not to be believed. Especially the bad ones.’
I didn’t tell her the dream was a memory. I had to try instead to deny the reality of what I knew and dream up a new one, as Tom Smith. She sent Grace back to bed and stayed there beside me. She leaned towards me and kissed me on the lips. It was just a peck, but a peck on the lips was not just a peck.
‘What was that for?’ I asked.
I could just about see her smile in the moonlight. It wasn’t a flirtatious smile. It was a plain, matter-of-fact one. ‘For you to have something else to occupy your mind.’
‘I am not sure I have ever met someone like you,’ I said.
‘That is good. What point would my life have, if there was a duplicate?’
There was a tear in her eye.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘This was the bed Nat slept in. It’s strange. The space where he was being filled again. That’s all. He was there, and now he isn’t there.’
I saw she was hurt, and for a moment I felt selfish in my own grief. ‘I can sleep somewhere else. I could sleep on the floor.’
She shook her head and smiled. ‘No, no.’
Breakfast was rye bread and a small cup of ale. Grace had some ale too. It was the one drink people could afford that they knew wouldn’t kill them. Unlike water, of course, which was basically Russian roulette.
‘This is my house,’ Rose explained, ‘and the lease has passed to me now my parents have died. So, so long as you live here, you must live by my rules. And the first rule is that you will pay us what you owe, and after that you can pay us two shillings a week as long as you stay here. And help us fetch the water.’
As long as you stay here.
It was quite a nice prospect, having somewhere I could stay indefinitely. And the cottage was a sufficient home. Dry and clean and well aired and smelling of lavender. A bunch of lavender, I now noted, stuck out of a simple vase. There was a fireplace for when the weather became cool. The cottage was a little larger than the one in Edwardstone, with separate rooms, but the same level of care was taken to keep everything as clean and tidy and well scented as possible.
And yet, the offer of indefinitely staying there – if that is what it was – made me feel sad.