“But I can’t go about my business.”
“You can’t?”
“You’re blocking the way. That’s my tea shop.”
Day smiled. “Ah, very good, sir. Then you have the opportunity to clear up a small mystery for me.”
“A mystery?”
“Do you have anyone working for you here? Small fellow named George Hampstead? A bit jumpy?”
“No.” The man pulled himself up to his full height. “I’ve never had anyone working here except me. Never a need. What’s going on here?”
“Well,” Day said, “it’s all a bit complicated. Do you have a few minutes to spare?”
21
The contractions were coming every few minutes, and Claire didn’t know what to do. She curled up under the coverlet and hugged her knees and closed her eyes and tried to imagine the tiny life inside her. One day that life would be a person. One day that life would be a policeman or a housewife, a mother or a father, a living breathing human being. But right now, that life wanted to come out.
Claire reached under the edge of the mattress and brought out her diary. She unsnapped the catch and opened it and looked over the last entry she had made. Nothing much. Nothing that made her proud. Just a jot about feeling lonely and having trouble getting the buttons right on Walter’s shirts. There ought to be something more there. What if she died in childbirth? It was more than possible. Dr Kingsley told her not to think of such things, told her she was safe and healthy and that he would do his all for her. But he didn’t know. He’d never felt a contraction, he’d never given birth.
She turned a page and took her pencil and bit her lower lip. Another contraction hit and she grimaced, almost made a sound, but didn’t. At least there was that. She felt like pushing back against that pressure, but she was afraid of what might happen if she did.
Instead, she thought of her baby and what she could tell it. Her eyes closed, she felt the room moving, and she remembered skipping rope when she was a girl and hadn’t worried about dying. She thought about what it was like to be a child, and she hoped that she would be able to make her baby feel the way that she had when she was young. She opened her eyes and she wrote in her diary:
My skipping rope,
It passes over and it passes down.
My skipping rope,
She couldn’t think of anything that rhymed with down. She felt dizzy and unconnected, so she concentrated harder on the words. She crossed out the second line and wrote It passes under and it passes up. This posed the same problem. Cup? What did that have to do with skipping rope? Pup? Maybe the child was skipping rope with a dog? That seemed unlikely.
She tossed her diary aside and lay watching the ceiling swim around above her. There were more than enough nursery rhymes for children. She didn’t need to write her own.
Another contraction hit. She clenched her teeth and moved to her hand to her stomach. And then she felt something warm and wet moving under her bottom and up to the small of her back, and she pulled aside the blanket and there was liquid soaking into her fresh linens, a whole day’s work undone by her rebel body. Tears sprang to her eyes and she wiped them away.
Another contraction, this one the worst yet. Terrible pain, and why was it necessary to feel such pain when childbirth was such a common thing? She tensed up into a ball in the wet spot, but it wasn’t a spot, it was an ocean, and she clenched her hands into fists and thought about her horse, the little horse her father had given to her on the occasion of her thirteenth birthday, and she wondered if that horse was still galloping about somewhere on her parents’ land wondering why she didn’t visit it anymore. Why didn’t she take it apples and ride it anymore?
The pain passed, although she could still feel it, a faint drumbeat like her pulse somewhere far away. She sat up and looked down and there was blood in the bed, blood mixed with something clear and viscous, flecking the coverlet and soaking into her nightgown.
“Fiona!”
She licked her lips and concentrated on not panicking, except that everything felt wrong. Her body was somebody else’s body and it didn’t fit her properly, hadn’t been hers to begin with. She gasped and closed her eyes; again there was a twinge low in her belly, a soft strum of muscle and grit, and she screamed as loud as she could.
“Fiona!”
22
Jack stood patiently in the center of the parlor while Cinderhouse moved around him. The tailor had Jack try on the jacket first. Elizabeth sat quietly in his chair in the corner of the room, watching them alter one of his suits. The jacket’s shoulders were broader than Jack’s own shoulders, but not by much, and the slight difference helped with the sleeves. Jack’s arms had always been much longer than average and his enforced starvation hadn’t altered their length. Cinderhouse silently noted a few things, then had Jack try on the trousers. They were a bit long, but the tailor pinned up the hem of the left leg, made sure it broke properly against the top of Jack’s foot. He measured Jack’s waist, using a piece of the same twine they’d tied Elizabeth with, and had Jack take the suit off again.
Cinderhouse retired to the dining room table and began to sew, while Jack rooted through the drawers in Elizabeth’s bedroom until he found a pair of underpants that fit him well enough if he bunched them up at the waist. He found a smoking jacket in the closet in the hall and put that on, too, and paced about the house, barefoot. He hovered over the bald man for a while, watching him work, but the tailor kept pricking himself, his hands shaking with fear, and so Jack wandered away. He didn’t want blood on his new suit. At least, not just yet.
He found half a stale loaf of bread in the kitchen cupboard, along with a cheese that wasn’t much more than rind. He ate them too quickly and was only halfway through the bread when he had to step out the back door and vomit it all back up. After that, he ate slowly, swallowed a little bit of water with each mouthful.
When he felt satisfied that he would hold the bread down, he went back to the parlor and stood in the shadows under the stairs and watched Elizabeth struggle with his bonds, unaware that he was being observed. Jack’s gaze settled on the mantel. Cinderhouse’s tongue was nailed to the forward edge. It had stopped dripping and was beginning to shrivel a bit around the edges. It had always fascinated Jack how long a person’s tongue was once it was out of the mouth, free to stretch itself out a bit.
Now he missed Cinderhouse’s chattering. Only a little. The bald man still expressed himself with grunts and gestures, but of course that was the most rudimentary and imprecise of languages. Jack frowned and wondered if he ought to have punished Cinderhouse in some other way. Left him with his words so they could have a proper conversation.
Then he realized that what was really needed was a second tongue on the mantel. Two tongues might converse with each other. What secrets would they tell? He left the shadows and went in search of his medical bag. It was still on the floor against the wall where he’d left it when they’d first entered the house. He opened it and rummaged through until he found a fine scalpel, still dotted here and there along its short sharp blade with Jack’s own blood. He went back to the parlor, and Elizabeth stopped struggling when he saw him. Jack smiled at him in what he hoped was a reassuring way and removed the gag from the homeowner’s mouth. Elizabeth started to say something, but Jack shushed him and went right to work.
When he had finished, he left the gag loose around Elizabeth’s neck so he wouldn’t choke to death on his own blood. Jack pounded a nail through Elizabeth’s tongue into the edge of the mantel. It made a fine companion piece to Cinderhouse’s tongue, although there were subtle differences between the two pieces of meat, not the least of which was that the bald man’s tongue was much more ragged at the far edge where it had been torn out. Absolutely fascinating to see the many variations the human body worked upon itself. God’s wonders were truly infinite.