37
She sits in one of the broad bay windows of the Nonsuch library, a small figure set against the fading glow of fiery sunset. She makes Nicholas think of a handmaiden patiently awaiting her fate while behind her back Rome burns.
She wears a plain woollen kirtle, her hair tied neatly back from her face. Now Nicholas can see the livid burn mark along one cheek. In the light from the candles that John Lumley has had placed in the sconces, her skin gleams as though an artist has just this minute finished painting her upon his canvas.
Lizzy Lumley kneels on a cushion in front of her. Nicholas hangs back a little, in awe of this young maid whose courage and endurance he cannot even begin to measure. Gabriel Quigley waits nearby. He’s been commanded by his master to make a written record of what transpires, Francis Deniker’s hand being still a little less than firm. Lumley has taken Quigley aside and told him that Nicholas is no enemy. He seems unconvinced. He casts malevolent glances in Nicholas’s direction, as though he’s considering calling up a couple of the handier servants and having him dropped down the nearest well. Perhaps he’s regretting he didn’t make better use of his knife. Nicholas massages his hip. The bleeding has stopped and he’s sure the wound is not substantial. But it still smarts.
No one present can be certain the girl they call Betony will be persuaded from her self-imposed silence. Everything is down to Nicholas now. He runs his tongue around his mouth so that the dryness in this throat will not rob him of a clear voice at the critical moment. His heart pounds in his chest. He begs Eleanor to give him the courage to act, to give him the wisdom not to shut off Elise Cullen’s voice for ever by a thoughtless word or gesture.
‘There is no need to be afraid, child,’ says Lumley gently. ‘We have summoned you here only out of love. You are in no trouble – none. You are amongst friends. You are safe. Do you understand that? Quite safe.’
The girl has made fists of her hands. She gently rubs the knuckles together. Still she says nothing in reply. Then, to Nicholas’s immense relief, she gives the faintest of nods.
‘Good,’ says Lumley, smiling. ‘Now then, child, I would beseech you to listen carefully to what Dr Shelby has to say to you.’
Quigley casts Nicholas a glance that says: what fresh deceit are you about now? But he takes paper, nib and inkpot from his scrivener’s box and lays them out carefully on a table by one of the windows. ‘I’m ready, my lord,’ he says.
‘Gentlemen, in mercy’s name be careful,’ urges Lizzy in a whisper.
‘I’ve been sent by a woman named Alice Welford,’ Nicholas begins, realizing that his first words to Elise Cullen are a lie – Alice Welford has not the slightest idea he’s here.
Sometimes a lie is what we have to tell if that’s what it takes to reach a greater truth, Eleanor tells him. You lied to John Lumley to get here. But now the truth is right here in front of your eyes. Don’t start fretting about your conscience now, Husband.
‘Alice Welford told me a story,’ he continues, stepping out into clear view, ‘about a young girl named Elise–’
The girl’s head turns towards the sound of his voice, as though she were a wooden manikin connected to his hand by an invisible cord.
‘Alice would look after this girl when her mother Mary could not. She’d make sure she had a bowl of paplar for breakfast, that her clothes were washed regularly. And it wasn’t only Elise that Alice looked after. This girl had a little brother named Ralph. You remember Alice Welford, don’t you… Elise?’
He means this to put her at ease; but the foolish grin that takes over his face comes from somewhere he did not expect. It has stolen up on him. It has ambushed him not with joy, but with a complicit agony. It is the smile he realizes he’s been saving for the child Eleanor was to have given him. It’s been sitting inside him all this time with nowhere to go.
‘Alice told me that Elise Cullen had a fine voice,’ he says, feeling the tears stinging his eyes. ‘Elise used to trill like a pipit – that’s what she told me. A pipit. Never silent. Not for a single moment.’
Now the girl’s face is fixed so intently on his that her eyes seem to be boring into him.
‘A pipit is such a little bird,’ he says, narrowing the thumb and index finger of his left hand to illustrate, ‘but by Jesu, how our good Lord loved to hear her sing.’
The effect of his words takes even Nicholas by surprise.
One moment the girl is sitting as inanimately as a carved saint in a shrine, the next she hurls herself from her seat. The cushions go flying. A candle sconce clatters against the floor, the wax splashing like blood. Nicholas ducks into a run before he even knows it, anticipating the chase – a pursuit he knows will silence the pipit’s song for ever.
But Elise does not flee. Instead she throws herself into Lizzy Lumley’s arms. The sorrow and the fear come bursting out of her in a torrent of heaving sobs. Her body writhes as though a host of invisible demons is beating her with rods of fire. She clings so tightly to Lizzy that Nicholas must struggle to confirm there’s something else spilling from her mouth other than her cries of anguish: words!
Ralphie… oh, little Ralphie… I’m so sorry, Brother – so sorry… Forgive me… I should never have called to the angel…
38
Night has slipped in before Elise Cullen recovers enough to tell her story. At first her voice is so weak, so faltering, that Nicholas fears it cannot possibly bear the weight of the words it must carry. But Elise Cullen is no stranger to burdens. She has endured the weight of her little brother on her back along weary miles of country lanes, borne the trials of living in the open, through summer heat and winter chill. She’s faced hostility and violence from almost everyone she’s met on the way. So – quickly – the voice begins to strengthen. Soon Elise Cullen is all but singing like the songbird Alice Welford said she was. And she confirms everything Alice had told him: the journey through a succession of increasingly rundown stews and tenements of Bankside; the sudden decision, made one day last summer, to take herself and little Ralph away, to the place her mother had often told her about: Cuddington, where a rich and kindly relative lives in a great house. As he listens, Nicholas hears in her voice the desperate longing for a better life than the one she’d been dealt. He thinks of his own – the future he’d anticipated with Eleanor and their children. Why is it so easy, he wonders, to build our lives on such treacherous hopes?
Lizzy lays a hand on the girl’s knee. ‘But you have found your refuge now,’ she says gently. ‘It is here.’
Does Elise know what has happened to her brother? Nicholas wonders. And how did she herself escape Ralph’s fate? He would ask her directly, but how do you speak of murder and mutilation to a maid who’s suffered what Elise has suffered? Instead he asks, ‘Who was the angel, Elise? You spoke of an angel – said you should never have called to her.’
At this, Lizzy says, ‘She’s tired, Dr Shelby. Let her rest.’
But Elise has too many words inside her still waiting to be let out. ‘He was my brother, sir. I was carrying him on my back. It was hot, and I couldn’t manage another step. Then the angel found us.’
‘An angel?’ says John Lumley, wondering if the child is about to claim divine visitation.
‘We had left London by the Fleet Bridge, three days before, I think it was. I was so tired, so hungry. We were crossing a stream. Then a woman came to help us. I thought she must be an angel – I’d been praying so hard for one to come.’