The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [58]
John felt the warmth of a hand on his shoulder. He knew its touch, its weight. ‘Patty!’ he said, turning.
‘I thought you was all alone,’ she said. ‘It’s dark in your room, ain’t it?’
‘It is dark. I am alone. Just that tiny window. Stars and clouds, never a bird or living thing. In hell. I’m alone in hell, Patty. At night, in darkness, doors get opened. Things happen.’
‘Hush, now. Don’t you want to know of your children? ’
Patty sat down beside him on the hard, sour cot and pulled his head onto her shoulder, a strong and comforting woman. Her heavy cool fingers held his brow. She pulled him into the smell of her. He snaked an arm around the soft curve of her belly and grasped the cloth on the far side of her waist.
‘The children are well,’ he said. ‘I know they are. They’re free. John carpentering for the railways. Charles a clerk to that lawyer. Anna Maria to marry. I want to come home.’
‘Why do you want to come home? The people aren’t free there either.’
‘They’re not shut up. They’re not locked away.’
She shook her head. ‘The land is fenced. Can’t walk across nothing.We’re kept in narrow tracks.The common land is owned.The poor are driven away, the gypsies also.’
‘The rich man is a tyrant and we are all prisoners. No one cares for the poor. They can burn ricks and riot. Nothing. Transportation. A whole continent is made a prison for them.’
‘You’re safer here.’
‘No, I’m not. At night . . .’
‘Shh. There’s someone here to see you.’
Mary approached the bed.
‘You! But how did you get in? Through the walls?’
‘What are walls?’
John laughed. ‘In your innocence you don’t know.’ While Patty held him, Mary approached, the beautiful child, barely taller than him seated, and kissed him, a flake of gold that fell spinning into his mind.
‘Sit beside me,’ he said. ‘Sit beside me. Now, here we are.’
Between the two women, John sat, his two hands joined with theirs rested in his lap, linked.
‘We’re together,’ he said.
The flow between them, kindling smiles from each other, their gazes touching, until John felt a warm drop on his right hand. Blood, branching immediately into the tiny channels of his skin. He looked up, saw the small wound beneath Mary’s left eye.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Why did you do this to me?’ she asked. ‘I was ever gentle.’
‘I was a child,’ he protested.‘I never meant.You were so pretty in the orchard. I wanted to touch you. I felt so far away. That’s why I threw the hazelnut.’
‘Look. My face is healed.’ The cut closed as he watched. Her skin resumed its placid surface like water.
‘It’s beautiful.’
Mary smiled back at him for a long moment. She held his gaze. She radiated love.
‘Do you miss your sister?’ she asked.
John felt his face crumpling. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And nobody ever asks.’ Along his side he hurt, frost-bitten, scoured by the winter wind, exposed.
‘They don’t know of her. Barely she glimmered in this world. You didn’t know her.’
‘She was a baby, my twin. Where did she go?’
Patty explained. ‘Into a rich man’s coffin. She died before baptism. She had to be snuck into holy ground.’
‘So she’s safe. But she would have been here. We would have loved one another.’
‘You say that,’ Patty said, ‘but you were a solitary child, dreamy and distant.’
‘Cause she wasn’t there!’
‘Here she is,’ Mary said, and placed into his hands a sleeping baby. Closed purple eyes, curled fingers, a blunt, breathing nose, a soft swirl of hair. The warm weight of her head lay in his left palm.
‘This is her,’ he said. ‘This is my sister.’
He looked up at Mary and Patty, disbelieving, overcome. When he looked down again, he held in his hands a bird’s nest. He didn’t recognise the type although he knew them all from his egg collecting. It was light, springy, tightly woven. Nor did he recognise the eggs. There were four of them.
‘There we all are,’ Patty said. ‘Better now.’
The eggs were white as bone china. They glowed, tender and natural, lightly resting against each other.
‘There we are,