‘What? Where are they?’
‘We do not know. We have asked everyone in the neighbourhood. We have gone from door to door, from business to business, and they have disappeared like a night mist. The house sits empty. They owe no debts to anyone in Limehouse and they have not been turned out. They have stolen away with the boy.’
‘I know a few men who will make enquiries. We will find them.’
‘On that terrible day when our husbands and our sons … when they died, I swore I would never let anyone I love slip from my grasp ever again. Look at me now, Percy. Rafe and Verity, both are gone.’
Verity had sneaked away from Lawless House earlier in the afternoon when Constance took her daily walk in Regent’s Park. The clashing of china and the sounds of lunch being cleared away were her cue that now is the time to steal away without observation.
Her mourning dress, the same one she wore after her father’s death, folds around her limbs so lightly. Compared to the current stiff and heavy petticoats it feels as if it is made of a few raven’s feathers.
She strides up Park Street to the high street where the shopkeepers toss her a lean glance. The street never lacks a mourning ensemble and they pay scant attention to a veiled woman. Not so when she enters the Mother Black Cap on the high street. Heads turn and a path clears. Verity seeks the publican. She lifts her veil, and nudging her dark spectacles down her nose a bit, states that she is in need of a short stage, and asks at what time may she rely upon it.
‘There ain’t none reliable, madam, but one should stop soon.’
‘As I thought,’ she replies. ‘Whisky.’
‘Yes, madam. Right away, madam.’
She tastes the whisky and almost spits it out. Something is wrong with it. It burns her tongue and has lost its sweetness. She verges on purchasing another when she is told the short stage has arrived.
It has a gloomy sturdiness, older, smaller and less comfortable than a stagecoach. For two hours it rattles and rumbles, stops short, stops long and rolls. Four miles seem an eternity as the coachman commands it to unburden its chassis of passengers, and groan with new ones. The streets pass by but she has no interest in the vast swathes of the city unfolding in the approaching evening. At Fleet Street she grasps the leather strap and alights.
‘Do I wait for you on my return trip?’ the coachman asks.
‘What?’ Her attention is elsewhere. ‘No, no thank you.’
Fleet Street abides its law of mayhem and frenzy with scuttling pedestrians and horse-drawn traffic at their peak. A solitary figure stands perfectly still in the lively and bustling entrance to Temple Bar; beckoned by the lavender girl with a few bunches, she empties her coin purse into the girl’s basket.
‘Cor! Thank you, mum.’ She attempts a curtsy.
When Verity enters Temple Gardens the wind whips up, rustling the trees, shifting the gritty dirt. Stacks of law books dwarf the shadows of men in chambers. Young clerks scratch across the pages.
Verity has not visited the Mulberries since that day.
It was the empty house on Three Colt Street that shut her down. Hopeless and angry, she felt mechanically unable to keep going. She always knew the possibility existed, that Rafe would be taken from her and Constance, and now she is faced with the truth, that she never believed anything other than what she wished to believe.
Hunger did not ghost her when she tried starving herself to a slow death. Nor did weakness or pain from lack of nourishment. It is as it should be. Her failure brought her here, the place where sorrow first became her companion.
The black water is wild and forceful in its flow this evening. She waits for the river traffic to lighten at Temple Stairs, inching ever closer to the edge of the steps.
She marks the high tide and how the Thames spits angrily at her, spraying her face and sloshing her boots. Slowly, the water fades from her vision and is replaced with a spinning zoetrope of images. There is her son. She asks God’s forgiveness, for she finds it difficult to recall the details of his face. Her husband is beside him, holding his hand. Then comes her exquisite mother who glows with life and reaches out to her.
The zoetrope disappears and the faces of those she loves shine up at her from the jet-coloured water. They are the faces of a family, her family, and all that ever mattered to her in the world.
With her veil and dark glasses still in place, Verity leans forward with her arms spread wide. She thinks of herself as an offering, like the tall, wooden cross the priest offers the river each year in the Blessing of the River ceremony. Her weight slowly transfers and she leaps.
Filth and sewage fill her nostrils. The roaring voice of the Thames muffles the cries of witnesses. The shock of the cold and the struggle to breathe does not frighten her. She welcomes the blackness as she sinks and the water pushes her north.
But what is this? The glow of the gas lamps flickers into her view. Her body floats to the surface as the currents throw her to the bank and deposit her shivering and as dirty as the Thames itself. Crawling back into the water, cursing the evil that would rob her of an instant death, she flings herself in again until she is carried along another mighty current. Again she goes under; deeply and forcefully it carries her down, down – and then again she floats up, up and is thrown back to the shore. Impossible, she thinks as she drags her limp body to its knees. Her veil and spectacles have been washed away and her long, silvery-white hair hangs wet down her back. Sediment clings to her drenched clothing.
Verity wipes muck from her face. What
