You feel a foot prod you. You fight to make a sound, but there is no more air coming in or out of you. Your body is a broken puppet. You feel a strange floating sensation: now you’re looking down on your body from above. It’s lying in the gutter, and a pair of constables are looking down on it.
Your body is all wrong angles, black with mud and red with blood. Your face looks waxy and empty, like a mask. You feel a stab of pity for the poor, used body, but it isn’t yours anymore … you are leaving it behind.
One of the constables is dragging your body out of the gutter. ‘This girl’s not getting up now, Jim. Probably has a broken neck – she was mighty battered when that horse ran her over. Oh, now here’s something …’ He has felt the bracelet in your petticoat’s hem. ‘Seems she has some stolen jewellery on her, too.’
It’s not stolen! you want to shout. It’s mine! I need it! But as you think the words, the need and the anger drop away from you. Your mind is washed clean of its memories and desires. You are rising up through a dark tunnel, and a warm light is thrown down upon you. It’s even more beautiful and inviting than the tavern door.
You feel like a child running into your mother’s arms – you are rushing upwards towards the light like a twig in a flood. Then you are inside the light, and the light is inside you, and you are everywhere and nowhere all at once. You remember this feeling of boundless peace: you were here before your life began, and now you have returned here … after your life has ended.
To return to your last choice and try again, go to scene 5.
You snap the row of stitches along your hem, fish out the precious bracelet, and show it to the stretcher-bearer.
‘Will this be enough to get my ma a decent funeral?’ you ask.
He puts your ma’s body down gently on the cart and steps towards you, leaving the second man behind with the cart. He tugs the rag away from his face, and you see now that his face is kind and gentle, though ravaged by smallpox scars.
He’s lucky to still be alive, you think.
‘Now, what did a wee lass like you do to come by a treasure like that?’ he asks warmly.
‘I saved a lady from a horse. It was panicked ’cos her carriage broke,’ you whisper. ‘Happened just yesterday.’
You can see from the way he nods earnestly that he believes you. ‘Do you have any family left?’ he asks you huskily.
You shake your head.
‘I know what it feels like,’ he tells you. ‘Sometimes I wish it’d been me who was taken instead. I had the pox and survived, but my little daughter didn’t. She would have been about your age, had she lived. Claire, her name was.’
He heaves a sigh. Then his large, bear-like hand reaches out and wraps over yours, folding the bracelet into your palm.
‘You keep this,’ he says. ‘And don’t tell anyone else you have it. I know another way to get your ma a decent burial.’
He introduces himself as Mr MacIntosh, and invites you to his home, to meet his wife and have some tea by the fire. Mrs MacIntosh turns out to be as humble and warm-hearted as her husband. Their surviving children have all grown up and left home.
They explain that Mrs MacIntosh works as a cook in a mansion on the outskirts of London, which is in need of a girl to help cook, clean, chop kindling and feed the animals. You can hardly believe your luck, especially when you learn that there is a stable too, with six fine horses in it.
You agree to give your first month’s pay to the MacIntoshes, to pay for a simple but respectable burial for your ma. They have room for you to stay the night, and clean clothes for you to put on before you start work at the mansion in the morning. You sew your bracelet back inside your petticoat hem, as that seems as secure a place as you can think of for now, and you feel very grateful to have met such a kind couple.
The next morning you discover that the lord of the mansion, however, is anything but kind-hearted. He looks you up and down with distaste, his upper lip sneering under his wiry moustache.
‘Couldn’t you find anything better?’ he asks Mrs MacIntosh, as if she had gone to the butcher’s for roast beef and come back with a chicken bone. ‘Very well, then – but mind she doesn’t get under my feet, or I will throw her back onto the scrap heap from whence she undoubtedly came.’
He agrees to give you a few hours away from your duties later that week to travel with Mr MacIntosh to a garden cemetery, where your ma is buried in the shade of an elm tree with a simple tombstone. There’s no money for a priest, but Mr MacIntosh recites a Bible verse, and you sing an Irish song. Ma can rest in peace now. You’ve done the right thing.
Back at work, you’ve made friends with Elsie, the serving-girl, who is gossipy and good fun, and only a few years older than you.
‘The master used to have a missus,’ she whispers eagerly over the potato peelings one day, ‘and they say she drowned, but you know what I reckon? He killed her!’ She continues breathlessly, ‘I was in the dining room one day, setting out the lunch, and suddenly I feel him there – you know, like ice on my spine! And I turn around to see him standing there, staring – just staring, right at me – with a knife in his hand!’
‘Oh, hush, girls,’ butts in Mrs MacIntosh.
