Little Bones Read online

  She played games in her head. If she could think of a girl’s Christian name for every letter of the alphabet, Agnes would be back before morning. Agnes, Beatrice, Caroline, Daisy. She almost did it. She managed to X. If she could count to fifty without blinking, Agnes would be back. Her eyes were tired, she made a slow fifteen. If she could hum the national anthem before another cab appeared …

  When she finally slept, Jane’s dreams were full of panic. She was supposed to meet Agnes, she was late. Her legs wouldn’t move. She had to send her sister a letter but she hadn’t any paper. Then her stamps had blown away and she’d forgotten the address.

  Friday came and went. There was no sign of Agnes. Steeling herself, Jane walked to the market, asking for work at every stall and barrow, where the faces, usually grim, grunted ‘no’. A nearby confectioner, feeling high-spirited on account of his daughter’s wedding, gave her a chunk of coconut ice; a woman in a pawnshop said Jane looked the very spit of her little cousin Hetty, and could she stand there a minute while she shouted for her ma to come and have a look, which she did, humming and nodding, saying her poor niece died not long since, and did her bones come in useful with the telling of the weather?

  As day dragged into evening, Jane spoke to the gypsy selling sprigs of white heather; Miss Lucille Edgar: Face Ablutionist & Beautifier; a knife-grinder; a chestnut man; a flower-seller, her fingertips swollen with pollen. She offered to sweep the barber’s shop floor, to polish all his glass, but, snapping open his cut-throat, that foppish coiffeur growled like a grizzly, and Jane turned on her heels and ran.

  In a plush top hat and waistcoat, Jeremiah Beam strode up and down the pavement, his working girls in rented rooms, sleeping, drinking watered gin and reading penny dreadfuls. From a nearby doorway Jane watched the men, some with silver-topped canes, others in thick tweed overcoats or soiled market aprons, as they asked for these girls by name – Violet, Lily, Iris, Rose. ‘Every one a flower,’ said Jeremiah. ‘We have a blonde, who’s amply proportioned both fore and aft, we have a charming brunette, and we have a new little redhead, still smelling of the schoolroom. That one, sir? That’s my Iris, be gentle.’

  Shivering, Jane watched these murky faces leaning from their windows, with their painted eyes and sullen carmine lips, and she wondered if Agnes had found a new life away from all this sordid gloom. Was she really a lady’s maid? A seamstress? Or had she left London altogether?

  Despite the bitter cold, Jane kept moving through the bustle, past the woman selling pig’s feet, the man with the sheet music spilling from his pockets, the boy with PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD written on boards and tied across his shoulders.

  ‘Why?’ asked Jane, suddenly finding her voice.

  Puzzled, the boy scratched his head, because he wasn’t used to questions, unless it was some gin-riddled sot asking the way to Drury Lane. ‘Why what?’ he said.

  ‘Why should I prepare?’

  ‘No idea,’ he told her. ‘This sign could say “Sing for the Devil” and I’d wear it all day for the shilling.’

  ‘Who gives you the shilling?’

  ‘Some idle preacher who would rather sit in the Cock than carry it himself.’

  ‘Does he keep any more?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not one, and these signs are heavy – if you weren’t crippled already, you would be soon enough.’

  On Catherine Street, a man played a mournful-sounding squeezebox, and was it any wonder people hurried by, ignoring his upturned hat, because he was worse than all the pipers, not half as good as the Italian street musicians, and who’d want to hear that kind of noise when life was miserable enough without it?

  And then the rain came down, slowly at first, fat splattering drops, then quickening, pounding, sending the boy with the sign back into the Cock and even Jeremiah went inside, where his bleary-eyed girls quickly sprang into life.

  Jane was sodden. Beneath an advertisement for Quaker’s Rolled White Oats, she stood shaking like a dog, the cheap blue dye from her shawl dripping down her back and bruising the length of her skirt.

  Next morning, Mrs Swift was propped in an armchair with so many cushions it was hard to see where she began and ended. Her face was a circle, her eyes almost lost inside the deep puffy sockets. She was pouting, and her pigeon-grey dress, tight everywhere but especially around the bust and upper arms, seemed to add to the dreary parlour’s atmosphere.

  ‘Where is your mother?’ asked Mrs Swift.

  ‘Kent, ma’am.’

  ‘And your sister?’

  ‘Vanished.’

  ‘So they’ve left their little cripple high and dry?’

  Jane could feel her hair moving in the room’s stuffy heat. Her left knee was aching so she shifted her weight to the right. ‘I have threepence, ma’am,’ she managed.

  ‘Threepence? What threepence? You owe me more than threepence! Have you heard of debtor’s gaol? The asylum? Have you seen the workhouse with its great big iron gates?’

  Jane nodded. Everyone knew the gaol and she was familiar with the workhouse, though would hedge a little bet on the asylum being worse, having witnessed more than one bony hand reaching through the bars, inmates crying out like foxes in the wind, and all of them mad as March hares.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake sit down, you are giving me a neck-ache.’

  Perched on the end of the sofa, Jane had the appearance of a small starving owl. Her dress had dried, but the blue dye remained, like the sea in a mildewed atlas. Her fine feathery hair was tied in a small fraying bundle, her nose raw around the nostrils, her thin pink mouth trembling at the edges. She clasped her hands. Her left foot was tapping.

  ‘Your age?’ asked Mrs Swift.

  ‘Fifteen, ma’am.’

  ‘Are you useful?’

  ‘Oh yes, ma’am, I’m useful.’

  ‘And honest?’

  ‘Very.’

  For obvious reasons, Mrs Swift pulled a dubious face. ‘And are you clean in your habits?’ she asked.

  ‘I am usually very particular,’ said Jane, looking at the creases in her skirt and the dirt that had dried on her fingers.

  Mrs Swift nodded curtly, then it seemed she might be thinking some very deep and interesting thoughts, like a person listening to a minister barking on about heaven, or a scholar perplexed, or a servant weighing up a fatty side of brisket. The room was quiet, a few pale flames rising from the ashes, as Mrs Swift glanced towards the clock. It was getting close to dinnertime.

  ‘I am going to help you,’ she said at last. ‘You will work for my husband, live in the attic, and have something of a home.’

  ‘Oh thank you, ma’am!’ Jane almost fell from the sofa in gratitude. ‘I will not let you down.’

  But it seemed Mrs Swift wasn’t listening, pushing herself from her seat, muttering something about Tuesday, chicken soup, and beef and oyster pudding.

  Later, stepping between chamber pots, broken stools and cracker tins, Jane chose the only attic room with a bed in it. She moved the junk until her arms ached. A fireguard. Oil canister. A brown leather trunk that could not be budged and would do very well for a table. Arms throbbing, she remembered the other rooms she had slept in, usually small, always shared. She pictured the old house by the river where they had lived happily enough until her father, in and out of their lives like an Irish fiddler’s elbow, had insisted on moving to smaller, cheaper places, easily abandoned.

  Her new room was comfortable enough, and she liked being closest to the sky. There was a small rag rug in pleasant shades of blue by the bed, and a few brass hooks for her clothes. Pacing the room, doing giddy little twirls, Jane suddenly managed to laugh because not only had she landed on her feet, but also if Agnes did return, chances were, she would find her. Yet as the light began to fade, Jane began to worry. She was not a new kitchen maid or a scullery girl. She would not be sweeping hearths, or mopping greasy floor tiles. She was a doctor’s assistant, and what did she know about medical matters?

  Sitting on her bed,
she thought about the box her mother had kept for emergencies. Oil of cloves. Smelling salts. Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, ‘Rapidly cuts short all attacks of epilepsy, colic, palpitations, hysteria’.

  Doctor’s assistant! Was that the same as a nurse? Nurses wore very smart uniforms, but they did all the dirty work, they did not just wipe clammy foreheads and straighten up the bed-sheets. So far, she had only ever sorted beads, run errands, swept floors, cleaned, and been a general dogsbody. How would she manage? Pressing her face into her hands, Jane tried picturing the worst bloody injuries in order to prepare herself. Gouged eyes. Mangled limbs. Burns. Only last month, she had heard of the girls in the Wilson Hat Factory fire jumping through windows, skirts billowing like yacht sails as they escaped the thunderous flames, only to be killed outright on landing. ‘Skulls split like eggshells,’ Agnes had told her. ‘The pavement was scarlet for weeks.’ And, blowing out her candle, Jane could see those desperate girls, their skirts whirling in the thin trail of smoke, their arms entwined, dancing.

  Now the room felt very empty, and the moonlight made shadows like kites across the wall. Every so often she could hear the wind banging into the window. She could feel it on her face. It made a high, thin, singing sound.

  *

  The doctor held his fists across his desk, asking Jane to choose one, which he opened. Empty! Her little heart sank. Then with a short puff of breath he reached behind her ear, and sitting in the upturned palm of his hand was a small glass paperweight patterned with coral.

  ‘You must keep it,’ he told her. ‘It fell from the sky as I walked down Chancery Lane; it very nearly killed me.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said, quickly examining the bony white branches and the fine green bubbles before slipping it into her pocket, where the weight of it dragged down her skirt.

  The doctor smiled and Jane could feel herself blushing, because in all honesty he appeared to be a gentleman, and nothing like those doctors she had visited for her bones – charlatans she supposed, with their boxes of veterinary instruments, pots of cure-alls and greasy white coats. Around Dr Swift, with his sharply trimmed beard, there was the scent of tobacco, boot polish and limes.

  ‘Things often fall from the sky,’ he warned her. ‘Last week I caught a very pretty teacup. It was more or less perfect, not so much as a hair crack in it.’

  They were sitting in the small back room. Mrs Swift had called it ‘the consulting room’, though with the messy desk, the large mahogany bookcase and clumpy swivel chair, Jane wondered how the doctor might reach towards the patient to do any consulting at all.

  ‘I am a visiting doctor,’ he explained. ‘I go into the world of the theatre, treating chorus girls, West End stars, and everything in between.’

  ‘West End stars?’ Jane suddenly felt giddy.

  ‘It has been known, though discretion must be used in all cases, because I have sworn an oath, and you must do the same.’

  ‘I would not tell a soul, sir, about anything.’

  ‘Then good. I will take you at your word, and trust in your God-given honesty.’

  ‘Is that my oath, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘Did you mean it?’ said the doctor. ‘Do you swear to keep what you will see to yourself?’

  Jane nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then that is your oath,’ he said.

  He explained that gossip was rife, especially in the fragile itinerant world of the theatre, and as his assistant she would see all manner of things that were often very personal, or indeed, unusual.

  ‘Like tattoos,’ he said. ‘Last Wednesday evening, I was treating a respectable-looking soprano. The girl was young, shy and demure, yet when she lifted her chemise I came face to face with a ruby-eyed dragon penned in indelible ink.’

  Jane reddened. ‘But I thought only salts had tattoos, or wrestlers and the like? Why did she have a tattoo?’

  The doctor leant towards her, narrowing his eyes. ‘I did not ask,’ he said. ‘I did not mention that inky beast at all, because we are discreet with the patient and discreet with the world. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then good,’ he smiled, the skin around his eyes crinkling like paper. ‘It is almost seven o’clock and we should proceed to Axford Square.’

  ‘You have a trap, sir? A fly? Should I call for it?’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘I have nothing but my boots. The traffic in town clogs up the lanes: why sit in a carriage twiddling your thumbs when you could be wending your way on foot?’

  ‘What if it was an emergency, sir?’

  ‘If it was an emergency, then I would run.’

  And so they walked, through the early theatre crowds, past a winding hurdy-gurdy that set Jane’s teeth on edge. The streets were busy, and most of the shops still open for business: the ironmonger’s, the purveyors of sporting goods, Mr Locke the book man, his covered stall spilling with what appeared to be dictionaries and guides to flora and fauna, the print-maker next door in his black splattered apron, wiping ink from his red and blue fingers.

  In St Martin’s Lane, where the buildings rose in dirty gingerbread lines, the chop houses squeezed next to drinking clubs, and where a tail of tatty stalls offered cheap second-hand items, a man the size of a wardrobe was selling tiny bird-shaped whistles, his rubbery lips making the most delicate sound. Jane smiled at him. He waved his little bird, and she almost tripped around the corner into a boy with scabs and rotten teeth touting for dog races and cockerel fights. ‘All hush-hush, and no harm done to anyone but the cocks, who let’s face it, might look the worse for wear when they fall into the soup pot.’

  Quickly doffing his hat, ignoring the boy’s spit and grimace, the doctor turned into Axford Square, a crescent of tottering houses – said to remind people of Bath – in very reduced circumstances. By now Jane was almost breathless, legs aching, her neck slightly cricked in case something else should fall from the sky, a fan perhaps, or a lace-trimmed hankie, nothing too weighty or life-threatening.

  The doctor stopped at the door and knocked. They had to wait a couple of minutes before the door was opened by a harassed-looking serving girl.

  ‘My dearest Nell, I think you will find I am expected.’

  *

  When the girl and the doctor disappeared, Jane shuffled along the hall with its faded threadbare rugs, and, standing precariously on tiptoe, peered into the large foxed mirror to examine her teeth, which if truth be told were the least crooked part of her body. She studied the pictures, the gilt-framed scenes of the sweet idyllic countryside, with its gambolling lambs, red hens, and doe-eyed herds of cattle that made her think of Kent. When the doctor came through the door, the remnant of a cigar squashed between his fingers, Jane smoothed down her apron and pulled her cuffs straight before folding them back (thrice) over her childlike hands.

  ‘Upstairs,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

  It was a tall, narrow house, its windows edged with cracked coloured glass. The walls on the staircase had been papered, and the paper had not been properly aligned, so the flower and trellis pattern broke off in all directions and when Jane pressed her finger against it, she could feel a soft bubble. Eventually, they reached a closed white door at the end of a landing. The doctor knocked, and a very soft voice answered back.

  ‘In we go,’ he whispered, pushing at the handle. Stepping into the room they met with a thin woman in a billowing nightgown sitting propped like a doll in a bed.

  ‘Miss Martha Bell?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The doctor bowed, and Jane followed suit, making the woman smile. ‘So you’re a double act?’ she said. ‘A distinctly comic turn.’

  Smiling indulgently, the doctor pulled a chair towards the bedside, telling Jane to clear all the mess from the sheets – the open periodicals, damp handkerchiefs, the plate of greasy cake crumbs – which she did, all the time glancing at the patient, with her dull inky hair, jittery fingers, her skin the colour of slightly rancid milk.

  T
he doctor washed his hands with a piece of yellow soap, and Jane was there to pass him things, an ointment, a flannel, and something resembling a spoon.

  ‘You are certainly inconvenienced,’ the doctor said afterwards.

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘You must not be hasty,’ he said, reaching for a towel. ‘It’s an important decision, and you must sleep on it.’

  ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Or the day after that.’

  ‘Can the girl stay?’ she asked.

  He looked at his watch. ‘I can give you ten minutes,’ he said.

  After Dr Swift had left the room, Jane suddenly felt awkward, and not knowing quite where to put herself, she moved around the room, tidying things.

  Miss Bell asked, ‘What exactly ails you?’ What do the doctors have to say about it?’

  Jane stopped. She could feel her face burning. ‘That my bones, miss,’ she stuttered, ‘when they were trying to grow, didn’t know what they were doing.’

  ‘Poor bones. I once knew a man whose wife played his ribcage like a xylophone, they were a very popular act.’

  ‘I like the music hall.’

  ‘You do? Haven’t you heard?’ said Miss Bell. ‘The music hall is dying. It’s a slow and painful death, and I am sick of it.’

  They said nothing after that. Miss Bell closed her eyes, Jane watched the clock, and a few minutes later the doctor was calling her downstairs.

  The side streets were empty. A cold wind whipped through the clouds, revealing all the crooked constellations of the stars. ‘A rare sight in London,’ the doctor whistled. ‘Reminds me of my time in Brighton, where the sky was a picture every night.’

  ‘You lived by the sea, sir?’

  He nodded. ‘The house was almost touching the shingle, the waves drumming like a heartbeat, like the constant steady ticking of a clock.’

  And though Jane thought he sounded like the sickly-faced poet Agnes had once taken a liking to, she knew what he meant about the waves, because she had lived by the river, she had visited Margate, eating winkles with the rest of them, laughing at the puppets, digging the sand, and all to the sound of the sea.