‘It’s cold. Turn the heat on, Willa.’
‘Here’s your coffee. And pastries.’
‘Aren’t I lucky that I can still eat croissants and never gain any weight?’
‘Yes. Lucky, that.’ Willa folds more towels, then says, ‘You know, the strangest thing happened at the market a few weeks ago.’
‘I’m sure. All things are strange to you.’
‘I thought I saw one of the Fitzgerald ladies.’
Clovis doesn’t miss a beat. ‘Ha! That is strange, considering they’ve been dead for over a hundred years.’
‘Hmm. Yes.’ Willa pauses and scratches her head as if she’s thinking very hard. ‘At the time, you said you read about their deaths in the paper. Which paper was that, do you remember?’
Now she has Clovis’s full attention.
‘I think it was The Times, or maybe it was The Illustrated London News, or maybe …’ Clovis pauses, her voice takes on that familiar edge when she is taut and defensive. ‘Maybe I read it in one of the hundreds of London’s papers at the time.’
‘Well, I only ask because I searched through many of the London news publications during that year, that month exactly. It is amazing how many papers are archived at the British Library,’ Willa shakes her head in wonderment, ‘just amazing. And I found no record for those sisters. Isn’t that odd?’
‘Indeed. Amazing. But not surprising.’
‘And even more amazing is that there is no record of their death. What do you think of that Clovis?’
‘Not much.’
‘Oh, and did you see this?’
Willa holds up The Guardian’s culture section. One of Rafe’s paintings is splashed across the front page with the headline: An Anonymous Success.
‘He brings danger to us with that egotistic display.’
And with that Willa nearly falters. Her mission is for Clovis to be threatened by her, not Rafe.
‘No, he doesn’t. He covers his tracks and he’s good at it, too. They’ll never trace the works back to him.’
‘They had better not.’
‘After I saw – or thought I saw – one of the Fitzgerald sisters, it kind of jarred my brain, you know? Kind of set things off. I started thinking about poor Mrs Mockett – what was her name now? Nora, that’s it.’
Clovis brushes the crumbs off her lap and noisily scoots her chair back. She walks to the window, where she stands with folded arms.
‘I always thought her death was so, oh I don’t know, strange, I guess,’ Willa continues. ‘She was such a careful and precise lady. How many times had she crossed Commercial Road by then – I don’t know, hundreds? Thousands? I wondered at the time, and whenever I think of her, I still wonder if she might have been pushed.’
Clovis blinks as the black crow on the patio looks for its breakfast, poking its head in moss-covered cracks.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Oh, I know, I know, stupid of me. Silly, dumb Willa.’ She picks up the stack of laundry just as Finn enters the kitchen, murmurs a good morning and retreats upstairs. Then she waits, she waits an eternity for Clovis to knock on her door. But Clovis doesn’t come. Finn goes back to his conservatory and she can hear the presence of Clovis’s silence in the kitchen, digesting her innuendos.
While Willa packs her bag for a day at the market, Clovis finally climbs the stairs, but she doesn’t even pause at Willa’s door. Anxiety, Willa’s old, unwanted friend, crawls into her gut. She sits on her bed and rocks. How will I ever perform the next phase if I can’t even wait patiently? She remembers to breathe slowly and deeply, and eventually the rocking stops.
She wraps up in her coat and a fur hat, grabs her things and prepares to leave for the day, none the wiser as to the effect of her performance. Just as she opens the front door, Clovis calls her name and comes downstairs again, still in her dressing gown.
‘It’s been a while since our last session. Perhaps tonight? You look as if you could use a little de-stressing.’
Willa heaves her bag higher on her shoulder and summons an even voice, ‘It’s late night at the market, Christmas shopping hours, I won’t be home till midnight.’
‘Oh, all right, some other time,’ Clovis says, equally measured.
Willa nods and makes to go, then stops and turns around.
‘I’m not at the market tomorrow. What about tomorrow night?’
Clovis shrugs. ‘Sure.’
Willa waits until she has turned the corner to Tooley Street before she texts Finn. When he acknowledges her message, just for good measure, and because every moment for the next twenty-four hours must be played perfectly, she tears her mobile apart and throws it in a bin.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Willa closes her eyes at the first notes of the glass armonica. She thinks of knobs on taps and mentally turns them to the off position. The music in her head stops. She evokes images of samples of her new work, replacing the tones that once held her captive. She imagines sewing shadows on their faces, thick eyebrows and dark lashes, embroidering them into recognizable women on fine silk, muslin and cotton organdie. They are the women of her life: the girls from the orphan asylum, the female prisoners in Millbank, the working women of Limehouse, London’s lost prostitutes found on every corner, the women in her study courses. She will never run short of subjects. She calls upon them now to help her.
She places the jade cicada in her pocket so that when Clovis finds it she will feel secure that Willa is still the same superstitious girl with no mind of her own.
Downstairs in the sitting room Clovis continues to play as Willa takes the first steps down to the reckoning.
‘Sit down, Willa.’
Clovis lowers her voice to a perfect, peaceful pitch.
‘Close your eyes, allow the music to relax you.’
Clovis plays
