‘Pray do not upset yourself. We shall carry him with us, in our hearts.’
‘No, Mr Holdsworth.’ She folded her hands on her lap. She was a small, calm woman, very neat and self- contained. ‘I must stay with my son.’
Holdsworth took her hands in his, where they lay cold and unresponsive. She would not look at him. He did not care that the printing works were gone, and what was left of the Leadenhall business would go under the auctioneer’s hammer in a week’s time, and that there might not even be enough to pay their debts. But he did care that his wife had become a beloved stranger to him.
‘Maria, we still have some weeks to grow used to this. We shall talk it over, we shall decide when and how we shall come back here, if that is what you wish. Why, we may walk past the house any time we choose, if not come inside it. By and by, we shall become quite accustomed to the idea.’
‘Georgie sends his bestest love to Papa,’ said Maria, lisping like a child. ‘He says Mama and Papa mustn’t leave his dearest home.’
A sound like rushing water filled Holdsworth’s ears. He hit his wife, and his blow sent her cowering into a corner of the parlour. He broke a chair and put his fist through the window that overlooked the river.
He had never hit Maria before and he never hit her again. Afterwards he stood in the parlour, with the blood running down his hand where her teeth had broken the skin over the knuckles. He wept for the first time since he was a child. Maria stared up at him from the floor, her eyes full of pain and wonder. She touched the side of her head and stared at the blood on her hand. There was blood on her lips too. Blood spotted the bare boards. Who would have thought that one blow could do so much damage?
He picked his wife up and kissed her and cuddled her and told her that of course all three of them would soon be together again in heaven. But it was too late.
That night they went to bed early. To his relief, Holdsworth slept deeply. Sleep was the one refuge that remained to him, and when he stumbled on it, he embraced it greedily. In the morning he awoke to the sound of hammering on the door of the house. Maria was no longer by his side in the bed where Georgie had been both conceived and born. She had gone to the water by Goat Stairs.
It is strange how soon a life can collapse if the foundations are removed. In the moment of that abrupt awakening, it seemed to Holdsworth that he had lost everything of substance about himself. He still moved through a solid world in three dimensions, a world existing in time and populated with flesh-and-blood people; but he was no longer constructed from the same materials as they were. It was as if his body had passed through a chemical process that had altered its composition. He had become as formless as the fog over the river.
Unlike Georgie’s, Maria’s body was unmarked, apart from a split lip and a wound, little more than a graze, on the left temple. The wound was the colour of a damson and about the size of a penny piece. She was fully dressed.
At the inquest it was established by Holdsworth and two of his neighbours that Maria often took the air early in the morning, and that she was in the habit of walking to and fro along Bankside, often lingering in the neighbourhood of Goat Stairs where her son had died in the unfortunate accident the previous November. Much was made of the fact it had been very misty. Two watermen who had been about at the time said that you could barely see a few yards in front of you, let alone the dome of St Paul’s across the water. Then there was the condition of the stairs themselves, which were worn and much marked with green slime, and therefore slippery. The coroner, a humane man, had no hesitation in bringing in a verdict of death by misadventure in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
A few days later, Holdsworth watched his wife being lowered into the earth of the burial ground. They laid her in the same grave as her son. Holdsworth averted his eyes in case he should glimpse Georgie’s little coffin.
At the funeral, Ned Farmer stood at Holdsworth’s side, and Mrs Farmer was among the little crowd of mourners that clustered behind them. When they were young, Holdsworth and Farmer had been apprentices together. Farmer had been a big, bumbling, good-natured boy, and now he was a big, bumbling, good-natured man. The one astute decision in his life had been to marry the daughter of a wealthy printer in Bristol, though that decision had not been made by him but by the lady in question. Now her father was dead, and she his sole heiress, she thought it time for them to move to London and strike out there, for the capital was where fortunes were to be made in the printing and bookselling trade. She persuaded Ned to make an offer for what was left of the business that Holdsworth had built up over the years. It was not a generous offer but it was at least a certain one, whereas proceeding with the plan of auctioning everything carried a strong element of risk. Moreover, Ned said they would take over the lease on the house on Bankside too.
‘Betsy has taken a fancy to it, for the sake of the river and the convenience of it,’ he explained. ‘And she refuses to live over the shop. But I beg your pardon, John, the subject must be painful.’
‘It’s not the river pains me,’ Holdsworth said. ‘Or the house.’
‘No, of course not. But tell me – do you know where you shall live?’
‘I have not considered it yet.’
‘Then, if it would not distress you, you must live with us until you find your feet.’
‘You are very good. But perhaps Mrs Farmer…?’
‘Pooh, Betsy will do as I bid her,’ Farmer said. Optimism was another quality that had survived intact from Ned’s boyhood. ‘Consider it settled.’
Remaining in the house by the river, staying with the Farmers, was not a desirable arrangement. But it was a convenient one and avoided the need to make yet another decision.
Holdsworth knew that it would not answer for very long. In the old days, Maria used to say that he slept like the dead. But on his first night in the house at Bankside as the Farmers’ guest, he did not sleep like the dead, he dreamed of them instead.
He dreamed that, when they were burying Maria, he had seen Georgie’s tiny coffin at the bottom of the open grave. The lid was ajar and the wood was splintered, as if someone had tried to get in or out. The clergyman would not stop talking. A black tide rose out of the coffin. It came in waves, ebbing and flowing with the sound of the clergyman’s prayer, sucking back on itself only to surge ahead even farther.
Holdsworth woke but the tide continued to rise, crawling up his legs like treacle. Higher and higher it climbed, soaking his nightshirt. A hammer pounded his chest. He could not breathe and the pain was so savage he could not even scream.
Soon the black tide would reach his mouth. Then his nostrils. Then he would drown.
3
On the morning of Tuesday, 23 May 1786, John Holdsworth woke before it was light. He listened to the creaking of the timbers, the sighing of the winds in the casement, and the snuffling snores of the servant on the other side of the partition. He watched the first cracks of light appear between the shutters and gradually grow stronger. Shortly after dawn, he dressed, went downstairs in his stockinged feet, and slipped out of the house before even the maid was up. He had heard the Farmers quarrelling about his presence in the house the previous evening. He knew that Mrs Farmer had the stronger will, and it was only a matter of time before her side of the argument prevailed.
It was a fine morning: the great dome of St Paul’s shone white across the water, its outline sharp against the blue sky, and a drift of clouds like a convoy of sails lined the eastern horizon. The river itself was already crowded with wherries and barges. The tide was low, and the scavengers were out on both banks. The gulls wheeled and shrieked and snapped among them. The day was clearer than usual and the smoke that struggled up from innumerable chimneys might have been drawn with ink.
He walked beside the Thames to London Bridge. Only poor people seemed to be about at this hour. Poverty, he told himself as he made his way across the river, was a state that favoured useful instruction in the follies and weaknesses of human nature. He had never really noticed the poor in the days of his prosperity, except as irritants like lice or, at best, as bystanders in the great drama of existence in which their betters performed the speaking
