whisper. ‘He has that on his side.’
‘Indeed. Pray remove your scarf.’
Mrs Carbury came a step closer.
Mr Cross undid the loose knot that held the scarf, let the ends fall away, and freed his neck from its folds.
Holdsworth stared fixedly at what was revealed. Mrs Carbury sighed.
‘Mr Cross will not object if you inspect more closely,’ Lady Anne said to him. ‘Of course these things look worse as they begin to heal.’
Holdsworth came closer to the little man and looked down at his neck. Mr Cross obligingly tilted his head this way and that. The skin above the Adam’s apple was marked with a smudged and swollen circlet of purple and blue. He swallowed, and a grimace passed across his face as though even that movement caused him discomfort.
‘You must be on your guard if you see my son, sir,’ Lady Anne said. ‘He tried to strangle Mr Cross.’
5
When Holdsworth left Golden Square that morning, he did not know whether he would accept Lady Anne’s commission. He could not rid himself of the memory of Elinor Carbury’s face. He walked slowly down towards the river. It was only when he reached the Strand that he realized Mrs Carbury reminded him in some way that he did not entirely understand of Maria. Maria had been fair-complexioned and small of stature, whereas Mrs Carbury was dark and tall. But the two women had a similar build, and a similar habit of looking very directly at one.
The Strand was full of shoppers and noise. He walked slowly towards the City. After all that had happened, he was very tired. He was foced to stop on Ludgate Hill, where three sedan chairs and their bearers had entangled themselves; the chairs were swaying dangerously and the bearers were swearing, and the chairs’ occupants were rapping on the glass and, in one case, screaming. Through the racket, Holdsworth heard somebody behind him say his name. When he turned he found Mrs Farmer was at his shoulder with a basket on either arm. Her face was pink, the skin damp with the heat.
‘Madam – good day to you.’ Holdsworth tried to bow but the crowd made that difficult.
‘I looked for you this morning, sir,’ she said, ‘but you had slipped out of the house before I was awake.’
‘I am in the habit of rising early. May I relieve you of those baskets?’
She thrust them at him. ‘I wish to speak to you, Mr Holdsworth. We cannot do it here. Let us cross the road – I am going home.’
She threaded her way between a stationary wagon and a coach and passed unscathed on to the other side of the road. Nature had made her a short, broad woman with a nose like a beak and the smallest of chins. With a little help from Ned, she was now broader than ever, for she carried within her their first child and she was within a month or so of her term. Holdsworth followed, marvelling at the way the woman strode through the foot passengers in an unswerving straight line as though they were the Red Sea and she had been miraculously assured that they would part before her, as indeed they did. With Holdsworth in her wake, she set off down Newbridge Street. She was taking him out of his way – so far as he had any plan, he was making for Leadenhall Street.
As they were passing the Bridewell Hospital, Mrs Farmer stopped so sharply that Holdsworth almost collided with her. ‘Have you seen Mr Farmer today, sir?’
‘Yes – I have.’
‘And did he find the opportunity to mention that we shall soon need your room?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘We both regret the necessity,’ she said in a perfunctory way. ‘But when the baby is born, we shall need to house the nurse somewhere. Besides, I am sure you yourself must wish to remove somewhere more convenient.’
Holdsworth did not ask in what way convenient, or for whom. Instead he listened to the mournful rattle and clanks of the treadmills and stared through the hospital’s gates at a group of vagrants picking hemp under the shelter of the arcade. He did not wish to become one of those. He did not want the poorhouse, either.
‘It will not take you long to find somewhere,’ Mrs Farmer assured him, or even herself. ‘I am sure Mr Farmer will give you every assistance; that is, everything within his limited powers, though of course his resources are much stretched at present. But perhaps there may be somewhere in Leadenhall Street.’
He bowed. A corner in a cellar, perhaps, or the bench in the workshop where he left the barrow. Mrs Farmer might even have calculated that he would be useful there, a night-watchman who required no wages.
They crossed Blackfriars Bridge and turned along Bankside. Neither of them spoke. The house came into view, with Goat Stairs beyond. He fixed his eyes on the worn paving slabs beneath his feet to avoid looking at the stairs themselves and the water slapping and rustling at the foot of them. Gulls flew up around him, their wings beating with a swift, irregular rhythm. On the ground he saw the head and tail of a dead fish, lying among its own entrails. Above him, the wheeling birds cried savagely, waiting to return to what was left of the fish. They twisted in the air like scraps of charred paper above a bonfire.
Gulls would eat anything. He had seen men and women pulled from the water with their eyes pecked out and the fleshy parts of their faces eaten away. It was lucky that Maria had been found so soon, her body wedged against a cable a few yards downstream, or she might have suffered the same fate. It came to him very suddenly, and with the force of a revelation, that he did not want to be here any longer. He did not want to be beside the river. He did not want to be in Leadenhall Street either. He would not be a ghost in his past life.
‘What’s that?’ Mrs Farmer said, for she had sharp ears when she wanted to hear, and he had muttered the last words aloud.
‘Nothing, madam.’
A moment later they entered the cool, dark hallway of the house on Bankside. Holdsworth left the baskets on the kitchen table.
‘I do not wish to be inhospitable, sir,’ Mrs Farmer said, resting her hands on her great belly.
‘You are kindness itself,’ Holdsworth said and stared at her until she looked away.
The mound was near the west wall. The earth was no longer freshly turned, no longer as shockingly naked as a suppurating wound. Nature had scabbed it over with a tangle of weeds and grass. The wooden marker was askew and Holdsworth had abandoned the struggle to make it stand upright. Sprays of herb Robert had sprouted around it, a green ruff, and Maria had liked green, growing things. She had tried to grow plants in tubs in the dark, damp yard behind the house but the experiment had not been a success.
When the mason in Queen Street had finished his work, and when Holdsworth had paid him, there would at least be a proper headstone. The stone itself was waiting in the yard. Unless Holdsworth could pay the balance of the money, it would soon have another inscription. But at present he could not even find the price of a good dinner and new shirt.
In the early days, he had worried that he would come to the grave and find it robbed. He had no faith in the gatekeeper’s honesty, and in any case the boundary walls of the burial ground were ruinous in several places. Despite attempts to prevent them, the resurrection men had plied their grisly trade in the past. A few weeks ago, Holdsworth had found an old woman weeping inconsolably beside the empty grave of her late husband.
As Holdsworth passed out of the gate at the corner of Red Cross Street, he saw a familiar figure leaning against a mounting block and paring his nails with a pocket knife.
‘John,’ Ned Farmer said. ‘I thought I might find you here.’
‘You might have saved yourself the trouble and found me at home.’
Farmer pushed up his wig and hat and scratched his scalp. ‘I wanted to speak to you away from the house.’
‘Then let us walk back together, and you may speak all you wish.’
Farmer took his arm and they set off in the direction of the river. ‘First, I am to command your presence at supper.’
Holdsworth looked sideways at him. ‘I should not like to intrude.’
‘Mrs Farmer will not brook a refusal. It is all arranged. I saw Sal coming in with our supper not twenty minutes since, and she is dressing it at this very moment. The nicest-looking veal cutlets you could hope to see, wrapped in a cabbage leaf and accompanied by a most tasty-looking rasher of ham. You must not disappoint us.’
