She nudged her head against the pillow, indicating it had.
“Have you anyone to go to? Clarke has received terrible news,” I lied. “Her mother is poorly—I intend to offer what solace I can, I’ll be quite at home there, and that means we shan’t be living in the upstairs room.”
Bertha Grizzlehurst absorbed this information. Had she not been quite so mousey or quite so silent, she might have been a friend, I thought, for she took in blows and bitter news with a stoicism her husband entirely lacked.
“What happened last night—that changes everything. Now he has wounded you, who is to say how far he can go?”
She said nothing, but her face grew whiter than the leadworks dust which blew down Elephant Lane.
“This is for you.” I pressed the cursed silver watch into her hand, exactly as Clarke had wanted me to do. “No, no! You’ve been feeding us supper for two years without payment. I ought to have made you take it before now—forgive me. If you pawn this, you should have enough money for travel expenses and some left over to settle elsewhere. After, you’ll have to take life as it comes, but we all do, don’t we?”
She gave me a thankful blink; I brushed her cheek and she took the watch, tucking it into the bosom of her dress.
“My brother has a farm near Canterbury.” Her voice always grated unexpectedly in my ears, as if a toast rack had spoken. She sat with an effort; apart from her other unspeakable injury, her lip was fat as a bloodworm and her ribs much abused.
“I’ll help you sort everything. Come.”
“What will Hugh think?” She sounded as if he were a small boy who needed minding.
“I’ll take care of Mr. Grizzlehurst,” I vowed. “You may count upon that.”
• • •
You will see Bertha again soon enough. She needs time to recover,” I soothed, pouring two more generous glasses of head-splitting gin.
Hugh Grizzlehurst had returned to find me cooking supper, a jug of gin on the table. He was rheumy-eyed, his jowls hanging like nooses and the whites of his eyes nearly as crimson as the puddle I had cleaned. It fell to me to improve his spirits: thus the gin and the two beefsteaks and the mashed turnips with butter and thyme.
“Poor Bertha.” He snorted back tears and mucus; I had set about returning him to blind drunkenness and was by seven in the evening approaching success. “I never . . . I ’ate to think of ’urting my girl. It was an haccident, you savvy?”
I spooned gravy over the plates, seating myself. “Bertha understands. I certainly do as well. I only regret that Clarke had to leave so precipitously.”
We ate, Mr. Grizzlehurst sniffling into his beefsteak; when we had finished, I placed both my palms upon the table.
“This house is too empty without Clarke and Mrs. Grizzlehurst.” I traced the wood with my finger, playful. “Finishing this gin at Elephant Stairs would be just the ticket—the stars are out, and the night is quite clear.”
You used to watch the stars through the skylight with Clarke wrapped around you, lazy as a pair of kittens, just as you did back at school on the rooftop, and now you won’t feel the weight of her arm over your waist ever again.
Hugh Grizzlehurst hoisted the half-empty gin bottle; he had far outpaced me, and his mouth wore a slack, wet quality. “Gimme ’alf a tick to fetch me coat.”
It was a three-minute walk to the waterfront, which was littered with crumbling stairways to the Thames—Princes Stairs, Church Stairs, Rotherhithe Stairs; so late, the streets had cleared and the air lost the graininess of a long day’s labour in an ashen metropolis. A single dustman passed us, tipping his flat cap, and a vague, chill sweetness overlay the perennial aromas of fish and refuse.
Hugh Grizzlehurst and I sat at Elephant Stairs with the treacly brown water lapping at our feet, and Mr. Grizzlehurst lapping up the gin. He would make it all up to Bertha, he claimed; he would buy her trinkets, take her on holiday to Brighton, compose poems in her honour. His arms swept like scythes, winding down in a jerky, mechanical fashion until he collapsed against the stone step.
“What that woman is, she is hexceptional. The habsolute devotion—and after losing two wee ones. Well, never again, Miss Steele, I can hassure you.”