‘A gentleman would have offered me his hand to board,’ Rachel pointed out, coolly, but the bargeman only laughed.
‘Aye, ma’am. No doubt a gentleman would ’ave.’
Starling smiled at her indignity, though not unkindly. When she was like this – unguarded, in her element, she had a kind of buoyant confidence that Rachel admired, and envied. There was something resilient and indefatigable about her. Soon they were sliding beneath the ornate iron bridges of Sydney Gardens, between steep stone walls. The voices of walkers and hawkers and sweethearts echoed down to them; disembodied words drifting like ghosts along the water. Rachel shivered and pulled her coat tighter around her. Then they were out of the city and in darkness, save for the lamps on the prow and stern of the barge – two single flickering flames to hold back the night. There was no sound but the soft slapping of water on the hull, and the muffled clop of the horse’s feet. Rachel saw the first stars of the evening coming out, and excitement filled her; she felt as though she were escaping, somehow. But you will only have to go back again.
‘It’ll be a hard frost tonight,’ said Starling, her words causing pale shreds of mist to obscure her face. She was sitting cross-legged, her face half lit by the lamp on the prow, fiddling with a loose thread that trailed from her mittens. She is half a young lady, half a tavern wench.
‘How old are you, Starling?’
‘Possibly four and twenty.’ Starling shrugged.
‘Possibly?’
‘I’ve never known for sure. We always used my height to guess, but I was tall as a child and am not so tall now. So perhaps all our guesses were wrong.’
‘Doesn’t your mother know?’ said Rachel, confused.
‘I daresay she does, but since I’ve never known her, that doesn’t help much.’
‘You’re an orphan?’
‘I don’t know.’ Starling tipped her head to one side to look at Rachel, and continued. ‘I walked into the farmyard one winter’s day, wearing only rags. I was small – six or seven years old. Alice took me in, and cared for me.’
‘But if you were six or seven, you must remember your life before that, surely?’
‘I do not.’ Starling shrugged again. ‘I think I chose to forget; and forget I have. I sometimes have odd feelings, like warnings. Intuitions, you could call them. About people, or happenings. I think they might be lessons I took from that life before, but that’s all I’ve kept. The intuitions, and the scars.’
‘The scars?’
‘It seems I was beaten a good deal.’
‘Oh. That’s terrible.’
‘I have no memory of it, so it’s no trouble to me.’
‘And Alice decided to keep you? Did she try to find out where you came from?’
‘Not very hard, if she did.’ Starling smiled briefly. ‘Not when she saw how I’d been treated. If they’d wanted me back, they’d have come looking, wouldn’t they? I was only small. I couldn’t have walked so very far in the winter, with no shoes on my feet. They must have been nearby, and as happy to be rid of me as I was to stumble into Alice’s care.’
‘So that’s why you have such a singular name?’
‘Alice used to say that the starlings had brought me to her. They were making a row, coming in to roost, and then there I was, barefoot on the muddy yard with feathers in my hair.’ Starling smiled as she spoke, and Rachel saw how much she enjoyed this legend about her beginnings.
‘So she raised you as her own?’
‘As a sister, more or less. Alice was only seventeen or so herself when I appeared. It was a funny kind of upbringing – Alice treated me as her kin, and Bridget taught me how to be a good servant.’
‘Who is Bridget?’
‘She was Alice’s housekeeper, but also her guardian, and her gaoler. She was employed by Lord Faukes…’ Starling paused, swallowing. ‘She was employed by Alice’s benefactor to serve her, but also to keep her confined to the house and village of Bathampton. Alice never went further than the edge of it her whole life.’ Starling turned her face away sadly, as a vixen’s harsh shriek echoed across the water. ‘Apart from one time,’ she added, so softly that Rachel almost didn’t hear her. ‘It’s Bridget we go to see tonight; she’s old now, and infirm, and much reduced from when I first knew her.’
The cold was making Rachel wheeze; biting her hands and feet. Her teeth rattled together. Sudden movement in the lamplight startled her but it was only a barn owl. It ghosted along in front of them for a while, as noiselessly white as snowflakes, then vanished into the darkness like a secret. Rachel looked over and found Starling watching her with eyes gone huge in the lack-light.
‘It’s not much further,’ she said, as the yellow shapes of lit windows came into view up ahead. ‘Can you see the house?’ She pointed, and Rachel made out some tall chimneys and the straight line of a roof, perhaps three hundred feet back from the canal. ‘That’s the house I grew up in. That was the house where we lived, the three of us. Child, maid and crone.’
‘Is Bridget a housekeeper, still?’
‘No, she’s too ill to work; she lives on charity. She has no family of her own left. Only me.’
‘She is lucky, then, that you take the time to visit her.’
‘What else should I do? At times there’s been little love lost between us but… she is there in my earliest memories, and she was kind, in her own way. She is my family, too. All the family I have now.’
‘You could wed, and make your own family,’ said Rachel.
‘Perhaps I will, one day.’ Starling looked down and picked at her glove again. ‘The beard-splitters I meet aren’t the kind of men I’d care to wed.’ She glanced up apologetically, and Rachel was glad of the darkness to hide in.
When they arrived, Rachel disembarked more deftly than she’d boarded, and followed Starling onto a bridge across the canal. As the barge slipped away eastwards its lamps looked like tiny will-o’-the-wisps, dancing over the dark water.
‘How will we get back again?’ Rachel asked, suddenly afraid.
‘If we’re lucky, there’ll be a boat heading west that’ll let us ride. If not, it’s a brisk walk back, not much more than an hour. We might even feel warmer if we walk. What time must you be back?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes my husband…’ Rachel paused. It was too easy to forget that Starling knew her husband well; perhaps better than she did herself. ‘Mr Weekes usually stays out late,’ she finished, in a stunted voice.
‘Yes. That sounds like Dick Weekes. Always off caterwauling,’ said Starling, tonelessly. They made their way along the deserted village street. There were lights on in windows but no sounds of music or voices from within; Rachel found the stillness eerie.
‘Where is everybody?’ she whispered.
‘Those that aren’t in the pub will be tucked up indoors. It is All-Hallows’ Eve, after all. They’ve no wish to see their dead walking.’ In the borrowed light of a doorway Rachel saw the flash of Starling’s feral grin.
‘I should quite like to see some of mine again. Even if they were in spirit form,’ Rachel said softly. Starling’s grin evaporated.
‘Yes. So would I.’
At the top of the street they turned off onto a muddy track, pitted with frozen puddles and tunnelling between overgrown yew hedges. At the end of it huddled a row of three tiny cottages, single-storeyed, each with two small, square windows to either side of a narrow doorway, and a squat chimney poking up through the centre of the roof. They caught a whiff of the cesspit, and the reek of old ashes. Starling strode purposefully to the middle cottage and rapped her knuckles against the wood. She lifted the latch without waiting for an answer.
‘Bridget, it’s me! And I bring a friend with me.’ She glanced briefly at Rachel as she stepped inside, as if embarrassed to have used the word friend. Rachel followed close behind her, hoping for warmth, but, like at Duncan Weekes’s lodgings, the temperature barely rose inside the cottage. The air was stagnant; the only light came from a single candle on the mantelpiece, above a stove in which the last embers of a fire were dying.