it that she did. I won’t have it, girls who think nothing of running up a debt and too good to pay it. She stooped in the end. They always do. What am I to do now, eh? Thieving little idiot!’
When Armstrong drew his hand away from his eyes and opened them, he looked like a different person altogether. With sorrow he looked around the small, mean room. The boards were bare and draughty, a broken pane let in knife blades of cold air. The plaster was pitted and blistered. Nowhere was there any bit of colour, of warmth, of human comfort. On the stand beside the bed there was a brown apothecary bottle. Empty. He took it and sniffed. So that was it. The girl had taken her own life. He slipped the bottle into his pocket. Why let it be known? There was little enough to be done for her, he could at least conceal the manner of her passing.
‘So who are you, eh?’ Mrs Eavis continued, now with a note of calculation in her voice. And although it seemed unlikely, she was hopeful enough to suggest, ‘Family?’
She received no answer. The man put out a hand and drew down the lids of the dead girl, then bowed his head for a minute in prayer.
Mrs Eavis waited testily. She did not join him at ‘Amen,’ but as soon as his prayer was done, picked up where she had left off.
‘It’s just that if you are family, you’ll be liable. For the debt.’
With a wince, Armstrong reached into the folds of his cloak and took out a leather purse. He counted the coins into her palm, then ‘Three weeks, it is!’ she added as he was about to put the purse away. He gave her the additional coins with a sense of distaste and her fingers closed around them.
The visitor turned to look again at the face of the dead girl in the bed.
Her teeth looked too large for her and her cheekbones jutted in a way that suggested, whatever Mrs Eavis said, that the young woman hadn’t benefited greatly from the landlady’s meals.
‘I suppose she must have been pretty?’ he asked sadly.
The question took Mrs Eavis by surprise. The man was of an age to be the young woman’s father, yet given the fairness of the girl and the blackness of the man, that was most unlikely. Something told her he was not her lover either. But if he was neither, if he had never seen her before, why pay her rent? Not that it mattered.
She shrugged. ‘Pretty is as pretty does. She was fair. Too skinny.’
Mrs Eavis stepped out on to the landing. Armstrong heaved a sigh and, with a final, sorrowful glance at the cadaver on the bed, followed her out.
‘Where is the child?’ he asked.
‘Drowned it, I expect.’ She gave a callous shrug that didn’t interrupt her progress down the stairs. ‘You’ll have only the one funeral to pay for,’ she added maliciously. ‘That’s one blessing, anyhow.’
Drowned? Armstrong stopped dead on the top stair. He turned and reopened the door. He looked up and down, left and right, as if somewhere – in the gap between the floorboards, behind the useless wisp of curtain, in the chilly air itself – a piece of life might be concealed. He pulled back the sheet, in case a small second body – dead? alive? – might be hidden in its flimsy folds. There were only the mother’s bones, too big for the flesh that contained them.
Outside, Ben was stroking the mane of his new friend Fleet. When Fleet’s owner came out of the house, he was different. Greyer. Older.
‘Thank you,’ he said distractedly as he took the reins.
It occurred to the boy that he might not find out what all this had been in aid of – the arrival of the interesting stranger in the street, the victory that had won him the blazing marble, the mysterious visit to Mrs Armstrong in Mrs Eavis’s bad house.
With one foot in the stirrup, the man halted and things took a more hopeful turn. ‘Do you know the little girl from this house?’
‘Alice? They don’t come out much, and Alice follows behind her mother, half hiding, for she is the timid sort and pulls her mother’s skirt over her face if she thinks somebody might be looking at her, but I have seen her peeking out once or twice.’
‘How old would you say she was?’
‘About four.’
Armstrong nodded and frowned sadly. Ben