I hammered on the door and waited. Nothing. I thumped it so hard, I felt the wood tremble.
“If you don’t let me in,” I shouted, “I’ll sit here until nightfall.”
I must have made a strange sight, sitting on the doorstep of a closed apothecary shop. I think every dog in Southampton came up to sniff me, and a stray pig too. As evening fell, a sharp breeze knifed off the sea. I could hear merriment from a tavern across the street and could smell – was that frying fish? Yes, frying fish. My stomach gurgled. Mama would be worried about me, but I couldn’t leave, not after all this time. I wondered if Master Anthony was enjoying a hearty meal in front of a roaring fire.
I stood up and kicked the door. “I’m still here!”
Nothing. Did he have a back way out? Was he long gone? No, there was a flicker of a candle behind the glass. I stretched up to tap the window, then pulled my hand back. If he hadn’t answered when I’d kicked the door, a mere tap wouldn’t bother him. I had to make sure he really heard me. There was pebble in my pocket. I’d found it down by the quay and picked it up because it was the shape of an arrowhead. I knocked it hard against the glass. Once. Just once. The glass cracked, fell apart and fell inwards. It was only a small pane, but there was a reason why only rich people had glass windows. Glass was very expensive. I stepped back, the pebble still in my hand. I could run. I should run. Right now!
The door flew open. The man was standing there. He looked over my head, up and down the street, as if he’d expected that someone grown had done the damage. Then he looked down and saw me. He pointed to the hole where the glass had been.
“Was that you?”
I nodded. Just like the fireworks, my fury had burned bright then disappeared. The anger must have been keeping me warm too, because now I felt the coldness of the evening. The wind felt like it wanted to slice my skin away. I shivered.
“Come inside,” he said. “Warm yourself up while you explain how you’re going to fix the window.”
The front room was the shop. Three candles burned on the counter and their flames reflected off the shelves of glass bottles. I could just make out the shards of glass from the window on the floor. I crouched over them, trying to brush them together with my hands. I wasn’t sure what I intended to do with them.
He bent over me. The flame flickered in his eyes. “Leave it, before you cut yourself.”
He straightened up and I followed him into a back room. There was little in there apart from a table, a wooden chair tucked under it and another chair drawn close to a small fire. A basket of kindling and small logs sat in a basket at the side of the hearth.
He pointed to the chair. “Sit there.”
The chair was warm from the fire. I reached down, grasping the arms to try and warm my palms. He prodded the fire with a poker, but the flames seemed to become even smaller. I thought it needed more kindling, but my teeth were chattering too much to tell him. I stretched my feet out towards what little heat there was and my toes started to uncurl.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sorry does not pay for glass,” he replied.
“I’ll … I’ll pay.”
“Do you have the money to pay?”
“I … I would like to earn money.”
“I have no means to employ you.”
He threw a handful of kindling into the fire. It flared up and he quickly laid a log on top of it. For a moment I wondered if he’d collected his wood from the common land. Had he been there and I’d missed him? I’d asked some of the women washing their linen on Houndwell if they knew of him. They hadn’t.
I said, “You have the means to help Mama and me make our fortune.”
“You’re mistaken.”
“Mama and I are poor,” I said. “We’ve lived in more places than I can name. Sometimes we have nowhere to sleep at all.”
“Do you have a roof over your heads now?”
“Yes. But it won’t be for ever. Mama didn’t ask to come to England, but she still has to suffer hardships.”
He drew the other chair from beneath the table and placed it across from me. “None of us ask to be here,” he said. “But once that choice has been made for us, we have to make the best of it.”
“That’s what Mama wants to do.”
“Perhaps so, but I can’t help you or your Mama.”
He was staring into the fire. He reached forward and lifted the burning log with the poker. Flames roared under it, then up around it as if the fire was swallowing it whole. A blast of heat hit my face. The earlier cold made it feel even hotter. He let the log drop again.
“Mama was born on an island far away,” I said. “She told me they called it Mozambique.”
She had told me how she’d lived in a small house with a roof made from palm leaves. She’d had to draw palm leaves for me as we didn’t have palm trees in Southwark. Some of the leaves were so big, she’d said, she could wrap me up in them. The Portuguese had been there for as long as she could remember, and she could speak Portuguese as well as her own language of Swahili. Now she only spoke Portuguese when she was sinking and her own language never, except for calling me mpendwa. When she’d first seen the Tower of London, it had made her think
