Her Hertfordshire upbringing served her in good stead when she reached the stables. It was nothing to saddle the Margrave’s finest horse — an Arabian gray — seat the boy across the pommel and head out over the fields for the Hamburg road. At a gallop. In Hamburg she was able to dispose of the horse to a suspicious but profit-loving dealer after she explained in her rudimentary German that her husband had been injured in Oldenburg, and that she needed to raise money so she could rush to his aid. The horse trader flashed a complicitous, full-toothed grin, gave her a fifth the animal’s worth and wished her husband well.
By nightfall she was at Cuxhaven. A boat was leaving for London, via The Hague, at six the following morning. She had just enough to cover her fare after purchasing two bottles of laudanum from the chemist and some milk and groats for her son. All night she sat huddled on the dock, jumping at every sound, expecting von Pölkler to swoop down on them at any moment. Finally, at dawn, the passengers were taken aboard, the captain weighed anchor and the schooner moved out into the bay. Fanny stood at the rail and watched the shore recede as a tall, mustachioed figure on horseback thundered out onto the dock, fist raised in anger. The commotion was sudden and violent. There was the sound of a gunshot, voices carrying across the water like the cries of the damned. But just then the wind came up and took hold of the sails like a great gloved hand, and the shore was lost in the gray wash of the waves.
♦ ♦ ♦
If there was triumph in that escape, a feeling that she had been able to react in a crisis and marshal her inner resources to outmaneuver a vastly superior force, the grimness of her homecoming all but annihilated it. There was no one to meet her, no one who cared whether she was alive or dead, returned safe to England or forever trapped in exile. Ned was gone, her parents would bolt the door and latch the windows against a fallen woman. Cook, Bount and the Bankses would sooner run naked through the streets than look at her. She was even cheated of the little patriotic jump of the heart that a first glimpse of the Tower or the spires of St. Paul’s might have given her — the German vessel put in at Gravesend, and she had no money even to hire a fisherman’s smack to take her up the river. As it was, she had to beg a ride with a man hauling a cartload of chickens to market. The cart jostled, a cold rain fell, the child cried, the chickens stank of scale and excrement, the man put a hand on her thigh.
They wound their way into London through the stinking slums of the East End. Soot hung in the air. Children were begging on the streetcorners, women lay drunk in the alleys. Two pigs gorged on the offal in the gutter, a madman was selling invisible Bibles, a woman with cancer of the throat offered to drink a gallon of water and vomit it up for a penny. After the carter let her down in Poultry Lane, Fanny wandered the streets for hours, aimless, the child tugging at her arm. She had nothing but a few worthless pfennigs in her pocket, no place to stay, nothing to eat, and what was worse, she was down to her last few drops of laudanum. She’d been pacing herself, trying to make it last, but already her stomach was beginning to crawl. The rain fell like fire and brimstone.
Sometime that night or the next, she found herself on Monmouth Street, grimly plodding through the rain, looking for medicine, food, shelter, warmth, medicine, medicine, medicine. The child had been crying steadily for hours, pulling back at her hand, tugging at her skirts, whining that he wanted to lie down and sleep. Her own legs felt like lead and her back ached as if she’d been hauling pails of milk all night or laboring over the butter churn. She had the dry heaves. Her throat burned with a raw desperate thirst that no amount of water could quell.
She finally stopped outside an old clothes shop to sift through a pile of refuse in the hope of coming up with something to quiet the child. There, in the midst of fouled rags and fragments of glass, lay a fish head, slick with wet and trailing a pale bubble of bladder and intestine. Her stomach turned, but the boy snatched for it. He crammed it in his mouth as if it were a crumpet or sugar bun and she began to scream, scream with disgust and despair and a mounting hysteria that fed on the thought that she had finally given way and would never be whole again, when the door behind her fell open and a pale stream of light trickled out over the cobblestones.
“ ‘Ere, ‘ere, wot’s the matter?” a rusty voice creaked at her back.
The massive wooden sign heaved on its hinges: Rose’s Old Clothes, it said, moving in the wind. Rose’s Old Clothes. An aged woman stood in the doorway. She was withered with years, her spine frozen at an angle, a bunch of skinless knuckles clutching at the head of a cane. Fanny’s screams caught in her throat. The child sat in a puddle and worked at the fish head with quick fingers and teeth. “ ‘Ere,” the old woman repeated. “Come in now and warm yerselfs by the fire. It ain’t much, but it’ll do ye better than the wet of the streets.”
Inside, Fanny and the boy hunched before the fire, dark mountains of clothes heaped up around them. The old woman shuffled out from the back room with a handful of coal and a bowl of crowdie for the boy. While the boy ate she settled herself beside Fanny and looked up at her with a knowing eye. Fanny was trembling, Saint Vitus’ dance and tic douloureux. She couldn’t hold the cup of broth the old woman forced into her hand. “Like a tumbler o’ Mother genever, dearie? Or is it somethin’ stronger ye’ll be wantin’?”
Fanny hung her head and asked for laudanum — if the old woman could spare it. “I’ve got a stomach problem,” she added, sotto voce.
The old woman clawed her way up from the floor and trundled off into a darkened corner where she rummaged through a mound of soiled garments for what seemed like hours. When she finally hobbled back to the fire, the breath whistling through her lungs, she clutched a blue bottle in her hand. “Tincture,” she read from the label, “of opium. That wot ye want, dearie?” The old woman was grinning. Suddenly a crazed primordial squeal flew from her lips: “Eeeee!” she cackled. “Eeeeeeeeee!”
Fanny grabbed the bottle from her and held it to her lips. Almost immediately the tightness in her throat was gone. The rodents stopped gnawing at her stomach, the blinding pain in her head began to soften, dissipate, finally losing itself in a pool of numbness. She took another drink, then another. After awhile she lay back and watched the ceiling revolve in an accelerating whirl of planets and satellites, fiery suns and the cold black reaches of space.
♦ ♦ ♦
She woke at dawn. A man and a woman were standing over her. The man sported a yellowish blood blister on the tip of his nose, the woman clutched a broom to her chest as if it were a shield. “Wot the bloody ‘ell you think you’re doing in my shop?” the man said.
Fanny sat up, dazed, and felt around her for the child. The child was gone.
“Well, speak up, you slattern,” the woman hissed.
Fanny felt as if she’d been thrown down a flight of stairs and hit with a mallet. Panic was beating at her ribs. “I–I. . the old woman—”
“Old woman?” the man said.
“She’s daft,” the woman spat, edging closer with the broom.
“No, no — you don’t understand. She’s got my boy. Right here, last night, she—”
“Out of it,” the man snapped. “Out before I calls the constable. ‘Ear? Get out.”