Rachel was dawdling outside the Roman Baths. The early evening was already chill and dark, and a raw breeze angled through the damp streets, but Rachel had grown weary of sitting in the silent house, waiting for Richard’s return. So she wandered the nearby streets instead, watching people and horses and carriages; gentlemen emerging from the baths with their damp hair steaming; children playing in the gutter, keeping an eye out for anything that was dropped or would be easy to steal. They played in the drifts of dead leaves beneath the plane tree in Abbey Green, throwing them up into the air and laughing as they fell like rain around them. Rachel smiled as she watched them, and wished for a child of her own. Something to devote herself to. She eavesdropped on snatches of conversation, and carried a basket over her arm in the pretence of being out on some errand, but even as this cheered her up she felt herself becoming a parasite, drawing on the lives of others. She’d been searching her purse for the pennies to buy a baked apple from a man with a handcart full of hot coals, when she saw Starling hurrying by, unmistakable with her red hair catching the torchlight; pretty in spite of her sour expression.
Weeks after her move to Bath, Rachel still saw precious few faces that she knew. The Alleyns’ servant was walking down Stall Street, heading south at a smart lick that made the woollen skirts of her dress billow and flap. Tucked under her arm was a bulging jute sack, which Rachel recognised at once. Her heart picked up with some nameless excitement, and without thought she left the apple seller and made after Starling as quickly as she could. This girl had spoken the only kind words about Alice Beckwith that Rachel had yet heard, and she found herself wanting to hear more. Then she remembered the humiliating way the cook at Lansdown Crescent had treated her, and found herself equally keen to know the purpose of the bag of stolen food. The girl was easy to spot in the weaving mass of people, but she moved quickly, straight-backed and with her chin jutting out in front of her, like a challenge to the world; Rachel almost had to run to keep up with her. Her pattens made her clumsy on the cobbles, and she skidded as she hurried along.
At the bottom of Stall Street Starling didn’t pause, carrying on into Horse Street and then over the river via the old bridge. There she slowed, and turned to the east, to where the river curled northwards and the canal branched off it. She seemed to search amongst the boats and barges there. Rachel waited in the shadow of the bridge, and then followed at a safe distance. The wharf side was all mud and filth; her feet sank so deeply that she felt it seeping through the seams of her shoes, in spite of her pattens. The smell of the river was foul, even with the weather as cold as it had been; a dank, fishy reek, with putrefaction at its heart. Rachel took shallow breaths, following as discreetly as she could as Starling went along the wharf, speaking to the boatmen in turn. She means to sell her stolen goods, then?
It was mostly men, down on the wharves; men working and talking and making deals; spitting, eating bread from dirty handkerchiefs and swigging from bottles. A few gaudy young women loitered here and there, with messy hair and smudged rouge on their faces. They smiled and called out to the workers, and with a jolt Rachel realised that they were whores. She suddenly noticed some of the men giving her curious, measuring looks, and one of them grinned a mouthful of ruined brown teeth at her. Rachel pulled her shawl tighter around her neck, and kept her eyes down. She almost turned to flee back over the bridge, back to safety, but her nameless, insistent curiosity was stronger. Starling had stopped to speak to one man aboard a barge. A thick-legged patchwork horse stood by patiently, harnessed to the craft, and Rachel crept closer, straining her ears to hear what they were saying. Their breath steamed around them, pale in the torchlight.
‘That’s too much – come now, it’s a short enough distance,’ Starling told the bargeman, who was wizened and dirty. In the darkness it was hard to make out what his boat carried, but from the looks of him, Rachel guessed it was coal.
‘I needn’t carry the likes of you at all, if I so choose,’ the man pointed out, but his face wore half a smile.
‘You’re a rogue, Dan Smithers. A penny, then, and a song as we go.’
‘A penny, and a taste of your lips.’
‘A song is all you’ll get from my lips, or I’ll gut you with your own hook. Take it or leave it.’ Starling put her hand on her hip, and the bargeman laughed.
‘I bet you would, an’ all. Hop aboard then, for I’m behind time leaving as ’tis.’ Starling tucked the sack under her arm and jumped lightly onto the deck. Dan Smithers called out to his horseman, and the animal threw its weight into the harness. The barge eased away towards the mouth of the canal, from where it would pass beneath the pretty iron bridges of Sydney Gardens, and then out of the city. Starling settled herself down on top of the cargo, and as the boat vanished into darkness Rachel heard her voice, surprisingly sweet, drifting back over the water, singing a sad song about lost love.
Not selling the food then, but taking it somewhere – to someone? Resigning herself to not knowing, Rachel hurried back from the waterside, over the bridge and away from the bald, ugly stares of the river men. Against the pale yellow horizon, the black skeletons of trees stood stark on distant hills, and Rachel was suddenly saddened by her own curiosity about the red-haired girl, by the urge she’d felt to take part in her life, when she had no business to. She walked quickly back to Abbeygate Street, and only once she was standing in front of the shop, looking up at the lit parlour window that told her Richard had come home, did she realise that she didn’t want to go inside. She stood on the pavement, staring up stupidly, as if she had any other option. Richard might not necessarily be drunk, she reminded herself. He might be sweet, and tired, and tender for once. But he would want to lie with her, as he always did, and the prospect left her cold. How else do you hope to get with child, then? the echo voice chided her gently.
For a minute or two she stood on the pavement, and absurdly wished herself aboard the barge with Starling, drifting steadily out of the city, rather than going into her home, and to her husband’s bed. The servant girl always moved with a purpose; always had a steely gleam in her eye. She was not cowed, even when Rachel caught her thieving. Whereas I am constantly cowed. By my husband, by Josephine Alleyn, and her son. And her cook. Rachel’s shoulders sagged wearily at the thought. And as she stood there, she remembered something Starling had said to her earlier that day. She was too good for this world. She remembered the serving girl’s obvious grief, and the significance of the words became plain to her. Starling believes that Alice Beckwith is dead. Rachel had a sudden strange feeling in the pit of her stomach, like a warning, and she waited a while longer in the street, trying to decipher it. But the night breeze bit at her fingers, and the streets were emptier now, and she could not linger for ever. So she squared her shoulders, and lifted her chin like Starling did, and went inside to Richard.
His mood was light and affectionate, and Rachel felt some of her anxiety dissipate. Richard took her hand and smiled as she came in, and led her to sit with him on the sofa. He had closed the shutters, and banked up the fire; the room was close and cosy with warmth and low light.
‘How are you, my dear Mrs Weekes?’ he said, leaning his head back to look at her. With the firelight glowing on his skin and hair, and curving into the contours of his face, he was angelic. It was hard to imagine the angry way he sometimes spoke to her. There is a beast in all men; that was what Jonathan Alleyn had said. But he had been speaking about himself, and Rachel refused to believe it.