Rachel smiled at the compliment, but she still wondered about Mrs Alleyn’s strange exclamation, and repeated glances; and she wondered about the red-haired serving girl she’d glimpsed at the top of the stairs. And while she could not have said what any of it meant, or if it was significant, it only added to her unusual suspicion that she had been watched, and that much had gone unsaid.
From the hill where Lansdown Crescent sat, aloof, the rest of the city was a tangled mess. As they descended into it there seemed to be less light from the sky, even; the air thickened with the stink of human endeavour. Rachel stepped around piles of horse muck and oily puddles, but could not keep her shoes from getting spattered. Pattens, she made the mental note. I must acquire a pair of pattens. Richard left her near the abbey, to meet with a man on business, and Rachel walked a convoluted route back towards the house above the shop. She was starting to enjoy the noise and bustle of the narrow cobbled streets, which in places were scarcely wide enough to allow two people to pass without their shoulders bumping. What had once seemed like crowding had come to feel more like community.
Since her retreat from Milsom Street, she had taken to exploring the narrower streets behind and between, where the backs of buildings piled on top of one another as they marched up and down the city’s steep hills. Everywhere were tangled gutters and gables and rough cobble walls; chimney pots like rows of broken teeth, stable doors and sink holes, outdoor stairs and crooked sheds; all making a mockery of the strict and serene façades that faced the front. Here Rachel was not noticed, she was not remarkable. She drifted through the hotchpotch, learning its hidden paths and places; the steep, mossy steps that carved unexpectedly beneath a terrace of houses; the butcher’s shop built into the arches beneath a road, where cooks and housekeepers queued for the best cuts in Bath. Here there were no confectioners selling fudge or candied fruits, no glovers with wares in silk or kid leather. Here there were coopers selling barrels and baskets, and cobblers hammering new soles onto men’s work boots. There were rag shops and haberdashers, and communal bake ovens for those too poor to have their own. Rachel had begun to feel that she knew the city better now than she ever had before.
Buying a paper cone of hot chestnuts from a barrow boy, she checked over her shoulder a couple of times, to be sure Richard was nowhere around, before turning into the street that led to Duncan Weekes’s lodging house. She hadn’t been sure that she would visit him until that exact moment, but curiosity convinced her to. It had been several days since she’d spoken to her father-in-law outside the Moor’s Head, and she now understood that Richard would never consent to her calling on him. Just as the old man foresaw. He warned me not to ask, but he lied about the bad blood between them, and the cause of it, she thought, uneasily. How could he refer to his wife’s death as ‘matters long past’? Richard had said such damning things about his father that Rachel was having trouble reconciling his portrait with the sad old man she had met, who had praised her kindness and gentility. Underneath the blame and anger there must be love. Is there not always love between parent and child? She thought of Mrs Alleyn, whose life had been so blighted by her son’s misadventures and persistent affliction. But she does not abandon him, and I should not abandon Duncan Weekes so very easily. Not until I have his version of these events.
She had the worrying feeling that she might come to regret her decision, but she needed to know; because if what Richard had told her was true, then perhaps any love between him and his father had indeed died, and the reconciliation Rachel hoped for would be impossible. It was disquieting, that she should feel too nervous of her own husband to ask him what exactly had befallen his mother. Keep that curiosity secret, urged the soft voice in her mind. Still, the sadness in Duncan’s eyes fretted at her memory, and he had praised Richard with unmistakable pride. He loves his son, that much is clear. And he seems to have precious little else left to him. Duncan Weekes was the only kind of father that remained to her, but as she made her way to him, Rachel prepared herself to sever all connection with him should Richard’s condemnation prove well founded.
The building she came to was tall and narrow, cramped awkwardly between warehouses and workshops in the southwestern reaches of the city, near the riverside with all its mud and stink. The walls were streaked with soot, the windows opaque. Washing lines were strung from the upper storeys, and threadbare clothes hung limp in the still air. On the front steps sat a little girl no more than three years old, dressed in a canvas pinafore and a tattered cap. She gave off a strange, unwholesome smell, like fish and milk. Rachel bent down with a smile.
‘Hello, little one. Do you live here? What’s your name?’ she said. Shining wet trails ran either side of the child’s mouth, from her nose to her chin. She regarded Rachel with steady, wide eyes, and said nothing. Rachel took out her handkerchief and tried to wipe the girl’s face, but she shied away, got up and ran down the steps. Just then the door opened, and a woman with a pinched face came out carrying a basket on her hip. She squinted suspiciously at Rachel as she slipped in through the open door.
Inside it was cold and damp. A gloomy hallway with bare floorboards, where the sounds of footsteps and voices and children crying came creeping through the walls. There was a stink of tallow and ammonia. Duncan Weekes’s lodging was on the lowest floor of the house, so Rachel went to the stairs at the far end of the hallway, and down into stagnant darkness. Small as it was, the basement was divided into two rooms, and Rachel turned to the one on the right, as instructed. Her hand was shaking slightly as she raised it to knock. She thought of the rooms on Abbeygate Street, and how poor she’d thought them at first. Now the place where her father-in-law lived put a knot of shame and disgust in her stomach, and she fought hard to smile as she heard the bolts slide back within. Duncan Weekes looked almost frightened as he peered out, eyes all rheumy and bloodshot. His wig was off, revealing the scanty grey shreds of his own remaining hair, and without it he seemed smaller, denuded. He smiled and gave her a slight bow, and all the while radiated a kind of anxious shame.
‘My dear Mrs Weekes – it is so kind of you to call, so kind… I had not thought you would. I fear the condition of my lodgings must disgust you…’
‘Nonsense, Mr Weekes,’ Rachel murmured, but could not make herself convincing. She smiled to belie herself, and handed him the cone of chestnuts as she came inside. ‘Here – they’re still warm.’
‘Thank you. Too kind. Come now – come and sit by the fire.’ Duncan Weekes bustled clumsily, clearing a cup and a half-empty bottle of wine from the mantelpiece, and the fallen pages of a newspaper from the single armchair by the hearth. He had but one room, and that was cramped and dark. A narrow bed was against the back wall, with a trunk at its foot; beneath the only window, which was high in the wall and let in little light, stood a plain desk and a bentwood chair, and next to the door was a chest of drawers. The fireplace was mean – just a small grate for coals, a sooty hotplate for a kettle, and nothing more. It cast a meagre circle of light and warmth. Duncan Weekes fetched the bentwood chair and sat down opposite her, awkwardly, with his hands on his knees.
‘And how are you, my dear? How is my son?’ he said keenly. There was wine on his breath, and she saw his glance drift to the bottle he’d removed from the mantel. He snatched his eyes back guiltily, his face wearing a constant apology. He is ashamed. Of himself, as much as his poverty. And so eager to befriend me. Rachel felt a renewed resolve – that if she was wrong to disobey her husband, still it had not been wrong to come to these poor lodgings, to take this first step.