Book 1, Chapter 9 : The Breeze That Plucks Her Apron

THE BREEZE THAT PLUCKS HER APRON

The Fort Street deathmonger was Mrs. Gibbs, and on that first occasion when she called her pinafore was starched and spotless white with butterflies embroidered on its hem. May Warren was then just nineteen years old, scared stiff in her confinement’s final stage, but even through the unexpected pain and scalding tears she was aware that she had never known this woman’s like before.

It was still freezing and the outside lav was blocked with ice, which meant these last two days they’d had to burn their business on the fire. The living room still stank but Mrs. Gibbs made nothing of it, taking off her coat to show the splendid apron underneath, white as a lantern in the downstairs gloom, with summer moths in pink and orange thread ascending her stout thighs and winter paunch.

“Now then, my dear, let’s see what we’re about.” Her voice was like bake pudden, thick and warm, and while May’s mam Louisa made fresh tea the deathmonger produced a tin of snuff, small as a matchbox, with upon its lid the late Queen in enamel miniature. Thumb curled back so a hollow was produced between the bones where they met with her wrist, next Mrs. Gibbs, with great precision, tipped a measure of the pungent russet dust into the shallow cavity thus formed. Hand lifted and head lowered she swept up the heaped gunpowder in two fruity snorts, half in each barrel, which she then discharged explosively into a handkerchief, something of a brown study in itself. Beaming at May she put the tin away and got down to her work between May’s knees.

The young mother-to-be had never seen a woman taking snuff before and was just going to ask about the habit when contractions drove the question from her mind. May growled and moaned and at the kitchen door her mam appeared with tea for Mrs. Gibbs. She eyed her daughter sympathetically yet could not keep herself from pointing out that May’s own birth had been a worse ordeal.

“You think that’s bad, gal, you’ve got no idea, all of the trouble that I had with you. You’re not abed because we’ve got no fire upstairs, so you’re down here on the settee, but you be glad you’re not on Lambeth Walk, like I was, with your dad up on that roof.”

May huffed and glared and turned her face away towards the wallpaper behind the couch, smoke cured so that its pimply rose designs had each turned with the faltering indoor light into a sad-faced tawny lioness. She’d heard it told that many times before – the tale of how she’d come into the world on cobbles flecked with phlegm and orange peel, her dad perched like a gargoyle up above – as if it somehow made her mother proud to start a family tree that had its roots sunk in the poorhouse and the madhouse both.

She heard a muffled bump from the front room: her brothers or her sister playing up, most probably because they were all vexed to be shut in the parlor out the way. May’s sister Cora, lately turned sixteen, was keen to know what pregnancy entailed, while their Jim was as keen that he should not. Young Johnny, having reached the dirty age, just wanted to look up a woman’s frock.

Her mother, who had heard the noise as well, went tutting from the room to find its source, which left May on her own with Mrs. Gibbs. The deathmonger explored May’s private parts as though a fragile ledger of accounts, careful as a solicitor or judge. She seemed to be above the meat and mess the way May thought a druid might have been, unmoved while cutting a lamb’s throat at dawn. The hearth flames, greenish when they’d burned the shit, did not so much illuminate the scene as lend it a dull torture-chamber scowl and startle shadows from beneath its chairs. Fire-lit down one already florid cheek the older woman glanced up now at May. Ceasing her intimate inspection she next rinsed her hands and dried them on a rag, a tight smile signifying all was well.

“Let’s have some light in here, shall we, my dear? It wouldn’t do to have a baby born into a world without a bit of cheer.”

Taking an oil lamp from the mantelpiece and lifting off its milky covering, the deathmonger produced and struck a match. Touched to the limp black caterpillar wick it yielded a small flame of mystic blue, an engineer smell, safe and workmanlike. The lamp’s tall chimney, tiger-striped with soot around its base, flawed by a ghostly crack, was set back into place so that the room was steeped now in a pale, warm yellow glow. The worn-out curtains looked like velvet wine. The room’s glass surfaces shone like doubloons, a splendid glitter everywhere upon the mirror and barometer, the face of the slow-thudding Roman-numbered clock. May’s dark red hair burned bright as gorse at dusk, even where it was plastered to her brow or slicked down on her damp and gleaming mound. The dismal birthing-pit was quite transformed into a painting done by Joseph Wright of Derby, like his air-pump or his forge. May started to make comment on the change but halfway through was interrupted by her next contraction, the most wrenching yet.

When finally her scream broke like a wave into a shingle hiss of trickling sobs the frightened girl slowly became aware of Mrs. Gibbs close by, holding her hand, hushing and humming sympathetically, as natural and comforting as bees. Her fingers had a dry and papery feel, cool at least in comparison with May’s. Her voice took May back to the nursery.

“My goodness, dear, that sounded like it hurt. You’ve not long now, though, if I’m any judge. Just try to rest while I nip out the room and have a little conference with your mam. I think it’s better if she stays through there and keeps your sister and your brothers quiet, then we can manage things between ourselves without nobody sticking in their nose. Unless of course you’d rather she be here?”

It was like Mrs. Gibbs had read May’s mind. May loved her mam in the fierce, angry way that she loved all her family and friends, but just that minute she could do without Louisa’s tales of greater suffering, of waters broken far more copiously, as if pain and embarrassment were just a competition her and May were in. May looked up eagerly at Mrs. Gibbs.

“Ooh, no, keep her through there, if you don’t mind. If I hear her tell anybody else about how I popped out on Lambeth Walk with our dad watching from the bloody roof, I swear to God I’ll wring her bloody neck.”

Mrs. Gibbs chuckled, a most pleasant sound, like several apples rolling down the stairs.

“Well, now, we shouldn’t want that, should we, dear? You just sit tight and I won’t be two shakes.”

With that the deathmonger slipped from the room, removing with her a faint pepper scent of snuff, unnoticed until it was gone. May lay there on the settee, breathing hard, and heard the muffled chat from the front room. A single yelp of protest that May thought was probably their Johnny sounded, then the voice of Mrs. Gibbs raised sharp and clear despite the bricks and plaster in the way.

“If I was you, my dear, I’d learn my place. If a deathmonger says to do a thing, then you be sure that you do what she says. We shoulder life. We know its ins and outs. We’ve felt the draft at either end of it. What you’re most frit of, that’s our bread and jam, and none of us ain’t got no time to spare on ignorant, bad-mannered little boys. Don’t you dare leave that spot while I’m at work.”

There was a subdued mumble of assent, footsteps and doors closed in the passageway, then Mrs. Gibbs came back into the room, all crinkling smiles with Punch and Judy cheeks as if she hadn’t just that moment scared a cheeky twelve-year-old out of his skin. Her voice, severe with frost a minute back, was sweet and oak-matured as a liqueur.

“There, now. I think we’ve got things straightened out. Your youngest brother didn’t like it much and started on at me, but I was firm.”

May nodded. “That’s our Johnny acting up. He’s always full of talk and big ideas of him on stage or in the music hall, though doing what, he hasn’t got a clue.”

Mrs. Gibbs laughed. “He knows already how to make a show of himself, right enough.”

It was just then the pain-tide came back in, smashing her bones like driftwood, she felt sure, before receding with an undertow May knew could drag her off, out of this world. One in five mothers died in childbirth still, and May grew faint to think how many times these agonizing straits had been the last of life that countless women ever knew. To pass from this delirium to death, knowing the babe you’d carried for so long would in all likelihood be joining you, knowing your family’s lineage was crushed to nothing in the hard gears of the world, that bloody millstone grinding till time’s end. She clenched her teeth upon the dread of it. She whined and strained until her face went red, the freckles almost bursting from her cheeks, which earned a stern rebuke from Mrs. Gibbs.

“You’re pushing! You don’t want to push just yet. You’ll hurt the baby and you’ll hurt yourself. You breathe, girl. You just breathe. Breathe like a dog.”

May tried to pant but then burst into tears as the contraction drew back from its edge, subsiding to a mere residual ache. She knew that she would die here in this room, pretty May Warren, not turned twenty yet, breathing incinerated excrement. She had a terrible presentiment of some awesome occurrence bearing down – of the uncanny, hovering close by – and took it for her own mortality. She only gradually became aware that she was holding the deathmonger’s hand as Mrs. Gibbs crouched there beside the couch, wiping away the dew of May’s ordeal, crooning and whispering to her soothingly.

“Don’t fret. You’re doing well. You’ll be all right. My mam was a deathmonger before me, and her mam and grandmother before her. I wouldn’t like to swear in all that time we’ve never lost a mother or a child, but we haven’t lost many. I’ve lost none. You’re in safe hands, my dear, safe as they come. Besides, you’re from old-fashioned healthy stock. I understand you’re Snowy Vernall’s girl.”

May winced and shrugged. Her dad embarrassed her. He was half-barmy, everyone knew that, at least since he’d been took to court last year, had up for standing on the Guildhall roof after he’d spent all morning in the pub, drunk as a lord with one of his arms round the waist of that stone angel what’s up there, declaiming rubbish to the puzzled crowd that had collected down in Giles Street. What he’d been thinking of nobody knew. He’d worked at the town hall not long before, up by its ceiling on a scaffolding retouching the old frescos round the edge, but since his escapade up on the roof had been in all the papers it was clear he’d never have employment there again. Folk loved his high jinks, but it wasn’t them that his behavior kept in poverty.

The stunts ensured he seldom had a job, but that was not what May resented most. The pranks weren’t half the obstacle to wealth that her dad’s principles had proved to be, principles nobody could understand except her father and her barmy aunt. Two years before, in nineteen hundred six, a fellow who’d admired her father’s skills had offered him a business partnership, a glazier’s firm that he was starting up. He’d gone on to make thousands, but back then he’d promised May’s dad half-shares in it all, with one condition he insisted on: if Snowy could just keep out of the pub for two weeks the directorship was his. Dad hadn’t given it a moment’s thought. He’d said “I won’t be told what I should do. You’ll have to find your partner somewhere else.” The bloody fool. It made May want to spit, to think that she was lying giving birth in Fort Street, while the glazier had a house stood three floors high up on the Billing Road. If ever Dad walked past it with May’s mam he’d get an earful over what he’d done, cursing his family with impoverishment for generations after, more than like. May muttered some of this to Mrs. Gibbs.

Still smiling, the deathmonger shook her head.

“He’s thought of very well around these parts, though I can see he might get on your nerves if you were living with him all the time. The thing is, he’s a Vernall. So are you. Like deathmonger, that’s not a term you hear nowhere ’cept in the Boroughs. Even then, half them as says it don’t know what it means. They’re old names, and they’ll soon be gone, my dear, with all us what gets called them gone as well. Respect your father, and respect your aunt, her what you see with her accordion. They’re of a type I doubt we’ll know again, especially turning all that money down. Yes, you could be a rich girl now, but think. You’d have been too well off to wed your Tom, and then where should this little baby be? Things are for reasons, or they are round here.”

The mention of May’s husband got to her. Tom Warren treated May with more respect than any other man she’d ever known. He’d courted her like she were royalty, as if she were the daughter of a king and not that of a village idiot. The deathmonger was right. If May was rich she’d have thought Tom was after all her cash. If she’d been living up the Billing Road he’d not have got within ten yards of her. This child, that May wanted so desperately, would be one more unwritten human page.

Not that these facts let Snowy off the hook. He hadn’t acted for May’s benefit, but simply out of bloody-mindedness. He couldn’t have known that she’d marry Tom unless he was a fortuneteller too. As always, he had pleased his bloody self with not a thought for anybody else. It was like when he’d vanish up the Smoke, walk all the way to Lambeth, gone for weeks, and what he’d done was anybody’s guess. Oh, certainly he’d been doing his work and always had a pay-packet to show, but May knew that her mam Louisa thought that he had other women there as well. May thought her mam was very likely right. He was a lecherous old so-and-so who could be stood hobnobbing with his pals while looking goats and monkeys at their wives. May hoped none of it rubbed off on her Tom, who got on great shakes with his dad-in-law. That morning, as it happened, they were both off up the pub together, out the way. It had been May insisted that they go. She didn’t want Tom seeing her like this.

The light was sweet as butter on the hearth, spread thick on the brass knobs that topped the grate. The hunching shadow cast by Mrs. Gibbs across the rose-papered end wall seemed vast, that of a giantess or of a Fate. Made dreamy with exhaustion May could sense some great approach, some presence drawing near, but then the brute fist clenching in her womb tore out each flimsy thread of thought like hair.

This time, although the agony was worse, May did at least remember to breathe out, panting and gasping the way she recalled she had when this pain-bundle was conceived. The thought was comical and she began to laugh, then settled for another scream. Mrs. Gibbs murmured soft encouragements. She told May she was brave and doing well, and squeezed her hand until the flood had passed.

The upset jigsaw pieces of May’s thoughts were strewn across her mental carpeting, a thousand colored, slightly different shapes she was compelled to sort and pick among, establishing each corner, then each edge, distinguishing the blue bits that were sky from those that were the Easter-speckled ground. She patiently restored her picture of herself, of who and where she was and what was going on, but the rhinoceros of childbirth came stampeding through the place again when she’d not been expecting it so soon after its previous foray, and with a rough toss of its horn undid all of her efforts to compose herself. The deathmonger released her hand and moved down to the sofa’s end, between May’s knees. Mrs. Gibbs’s voice was firm and military, conveying urgency without alarm.

“Now you can strain and push. It’s almost here. Bear up, dear, and bear down. We shan’t be long.”

May sealed her lips upon her bubbling shriek and forced it down instead into her loins. She felt like she was trying to shit the world. She pushed and shoved although she was convinced that all of her insides were coming out. The hurt swelled up, inflating to a rim far wider than May knew she was down there. She’d burst, she’d rupture, she’d be split in two, need stitches from her gizzard to her ass. The howl she caged behind her gritted teeth was singing like a kettle in her ears, released to fill the cramped and golden room as she boiled over in a foaming rush.

There was a stifled gasp from Mrs. Gibbs. The baby’s head was out and if May looked down over the horizon of her waist she could just make out slicked-down ginger curls that were like flames, much brighter than her own. Mrs. Gibbs stared wide-eyed, as if she’d been briefly transformed to stone. Recovering, the deathmonger snatched up a folded towel and leaned in ready to receive the birth. Why did she look so pale? What could be wrong?

The moment seemed to shimmer in and out of focus, slide from real to dream and back. Did strong wind at one point blow through the house, though all the doors and windows were shut fast? What stirred the curtains and the tablecloth and the embroidered butterflies that swarmed on the deathmonger’s flapping apron hem? Mrs. Gibbs’s voice, heard as if through a storm, was saying one last grunt should do the trick, then the discomforts of the last nine months just melted out of May into the couch, into relief more blissful and complete than any she’d imagined in this world. Mrs. Gibbs took the sharp knife that she’d stuck blade-down into the fresh brown garden soil around the roots of a geranium, wilting and potted on the window sill. With one determined slice, she cut the cord.

May struggled to sit up, remembering the look that was on Mrs. Gibbs’s face when just the baby’s head was sticking out.

“Is it all right? What’s wrong? Is something wrong?”

May’s voice was ragged, an enfeebled squawk. The deathmonger looked somber and held up the towel-wrapped shape she cradled in her arms.

“I’m very much afraid there is, my dear. You have an awful beauty in this child.”

As she reached for her baby May daren’t look, squinting against the lamp and firelight both, the infant edge-lit copper down one side, the other cream. What had the woman meant? She realized with a sudden panicked lurch the baby hadn’t cried, then heard it mew. She felt the swaddled weight move in her hands and, flinchingly, risked opening her eyes, as on a furnace or the glare of noon.

Its head was like a rosebud: though scrunched tight May knew it would be glorious unfurled. Its eyes, the ghostly blue of robins’ eggs, were big as brooches, focused on May’s own. Their color was a perfect complement to the new-born child’s blazing orange hair, clear summer sky down at the terrace end, framed by Northampton brickwork set alight in the last rays of a descending sun. The baby’s skin was dove white, glistening as if beneath a talcum of ground pearl, dusted with highlight on the thighs, the toes, a canvas primed awaiting the soft brush of time and circumstance and character. The wonderstruck young mother’s drifting gaze lighted on her first-born’s extremities, always returning as though mesmerized to those eyes, that extraordinary face. It was as though the universe had shrunk down to the tube of a kaleidoscope, a gleaming well along the length of which, from each end, child and mother’s glances locked, adoring, mirrored and suspended in the amber of the moment for all time. May watched the pink purse of the hatchling’s lips work round the shapes of its first burbling sounds, quicksilver spittle in a glinting bead spilled from one corner, lowered on a thread. An aura seemed to hang round the event, lending a burnish, a renaissance glaze. She kissed the russet crown that had a scent like warm milk drunk in bed last thing at night, and knew that she possessed a treasure here. She realized that somehow she’d brought forth a vision of unearthly loveliness so exquisite it unnerved Mrs. Gibbs.

Belatedly, as though an afterthought, May also realized it was a girl.

“What shall you call her, dear?” asked Mrs. Gibbs. May looked round blankly, having quite forgot that there was anybody in the room save for her tiny daughter and herself.

She had agreed with Tom that, if a boy, their offspring should be Thomas, after him, whereas a girl would be named after her.

“We thought we’d call her May, like me” she said. The child’s ears seemed to prick up at her name, her round head rolling, shifting restlessly on the lamp-yellowed halo of the towel. Mrs. Gibbs gave a nod, a subdued smile, seeming to be not quite recovered yet from the new baby’s petrifying charm, its beautiful Medusa radiance. Was she afraid? May pushed the thought away. What, in a precious blossom such as this, was there to be afraid for? It was daft, just May’s imagination running wild, all of the superstitious tommyrot surrounding birth she’d picked up off her mam. It hadn’t been that many hundred years since them like Mrs. Gibbs were made to swear an oath they’d not do magic on the child, say any words while it was being born, or swap it for a fairy in its crib. That was before they’d called them deathmongers, back when such women were called other names. But that was then. This was 1908. Mrs. May Warren was a modern girl, who’d just produced a wonder of the world. She’d feed it, keep it clean, look after it, and that would do more good than paying mind to old wives’ tales and reading omens in a teacup or a midwife’s tone of voice.

The baby, cradled at May’s ample bust, was half asleep. May turned to Mrs. Gibbs.

“She’s quite a sight, my daughter, don’t you think?”

Mrs. Gibbs chuckled, tidying up her things.

“She is at that, my dear. She is at that. A sight I shall remember all my life. Now, cover yourself up before they all come trooping in to see her for themselves.”

The deathmonger reached down between May’s thighs where with a single move, deft and discreet, she pulled the afterbirth out with a tug of the cut cord, whisking it off before May even realized that it was there. While Mrs. Gibbs got rid of it somewhere May sorted herself out as best she could. Then, just as Mrs. Gibbs had said they would, the family crowded in to take a look.

May was surprised how well-behaved they were, tiptoeing in and talking in a hush. Her mam Louisa cooed and fussed about while Jim was bright red with embarrassment or joy, beaming and nodding in delight. Cora was dumbstruck by the baby’s looks, her face much like the deathmonger’s had been. Even their John was at a loss for words.

“She’s lovely, sis. She’s grand” was all he said.

Louisa made another cup of tea for everyone, and May had one as well. It was hot nectar, strong, with sugar in, and while her mam and sister carefully passed the baby round, May sipped it gratefully. The atmosphere, the low and murmuring talk with baby May’s infrequent drowsing cries, was like a church event, not even jarred when her Tom and her father came back home.

Dad smelled of beer, but Tom had nursed a half all morning long, which meant his breath was clean. May put her tea down so that they could kiss and cuddle before Tom picked up their child. He seemed amazed, kept looking back and forth between his two Mays. His expression said that he could not believe his and May’s luck at turning out this painting of a child. He gave her back, then went to buy May flowers.

Her dad, half cut, declined to hold the babe, which saved the trouble of forbidding him. He’d had six pints before noon, two for lunch, bought with caricatures and rude cartoons, the funny-looking drawings Snowy did of folk, insults for which they paid in ale. Even with a prolific morning’s work, May thought it odd her father had been sent on such a bender by his grandchild’s birth. Just as rare for her dad, the booze appeared to have brought on a melancholy mood. He couldn’t take his eyes from little May, although he viewed her through a quivering lens of tears, the soppy bugger. She’d not known her dad had got a sentimental bone in all his wide-eyed, staring, scrawny frame. She found she liked him a bit more for it. If only he were like it all the time.

Snowy now looked toward the elder May. By this time both creased lids had overflowed and wet was running down her father’s cheeks.

“I didn’t know, m’love. I never dreamed. I knew she’d be a smasher like your mam and you, but not a precious thing like this. Oh, this is hard, gal. She’s that beautiful.”

Snowy reached out and placed one hand upon May’s arm, a poorly-hid crack in his voice.

“You love her, May. Love her with all you’ve got.”

With that her father bolted from the room. They heard him clump upstairs, most probably to sleep off all the beer he’d put away. Throughout all this Mrs. Gibbs had sat quiet, drinking her tea, speaking when spoken to. May’s mam Louisa slipped the deathmonger two shillings, twice the usual going rate. Firmly, Mrs. Gibbs gave one of them back.

“Now, Mrs. Vernall, with all due respect, if she’d been ugly I’d not charge half price.”

Stooped by the couch she said farewell to May, who thanked the deathmonger for all she’d done.

“You’ve been a godsend. When I have me next I’ll make sure that they send for you again. I’ve made me mind up that I want two girls, then after that I’ll stop, so I suppose you’ll be back when me second daughter’s due.”

May got a wan smile in response to this.

“We’ll see, my dear. We’ll see” said Mrs. Gibbs.

She said her goodbyes to the family, the lengthiest her one to baby May, then said no one need show her from the room. She put her hat and coat on. They could hear her as she stamped along the passageway and, after fumbling briefly with the catch, went out, leaving the front door on the latch.

The tuneless wail of an accordion moved on the river’s surface with the light and rippled the September afternoon. From where May stood upon the wrought-iron bridge between the river island and the park, her eighteen-month-old daughter in her arms, she could make out Aunt Thursa, far away, a small brown dot that walked the green’s far edge towards the cattle market further up.

Although too distant to be clearly seen May could imagine all too vividly every distressing detail of her aunt, who, next to her dad Snowy, May believed to be their family’s worst embarrassment. She could just picture Thursa’s bird-like head with its proud beak, its pale and staring eyes, its gray hair that erupted up in tufts and looked as though her brains were smoldering. She’d have her brown coat on and her brown shoes, bloody accordion slung around her neck, an ancient mariner with albatross. Both night and day she’d wander through the streets extemporizing, fingers fluttering on the gray keys of her weighty instrument. May’s sense of shame would not have been so great if Thursa had displayed the faintest sign of any musical ability. Instead, her aunt made an unholy row, short stabs of falling or ascending chords all smudged into a skirling banshee wheeze, which stopped dead at the sudden precipice of Thursa’s frequent random silences. From noon till midnight seven days a week you’d hear her frightening cacophony, winding among the yards and chimneypots, that scared cats and woke babies in their cribs, that scattered birds and showed the Vernalls up. Stood there upon the bridge, May watched the speck of noisy sepia that was her aunt as, like a heron, the madwoman picked her way along the shore of Beckett’s Park, where leaves frothed up against Victoria Prom. When Thursa and her grim accompaniment both faded in the distance, May turned back to the blond infant cradled in her arms.

The red hair that May’s daughter had at birth had fallen out and come back as white-gold, luminous catkins in a halo blaze that looked, if anything, more glorious than the hot copper with which she’d been born. Looked even more unearthly, certainly. The younger May grew lovelier each day, to May and Tom’s uneasy wonderment. She’d hurt to look at if it carried on. Both parents had at first merely assumed their child was only marvelous to them, that friends were being complimentary, but gradually had come to realize from the reaction everywhere she went that this was beauty without precedent, beauty that startled up a flock of gasps, a nervous awe, as if onlookers saw a Ming vase or the first of a new race.

May purred and drew her baby close to her so that their foreheads touched, pebble to rock, and so that their eyelashes almost beat against each other’s like two courting moths. The child gurgled with unrestrained delight, her sole response to nearly everything. She seemed that pleased to simply be alive and evidently found the world at large just as astonishing as it found her.

“There. All that nasty racket’s gone away. That was your auntie Thursa who’s half sharp, out with her squeeze-box kicking up a fuss. But she’s cleared off now, so that me and you can get on with our visit to the park. Out on the island there might be some swans. Swans. Should you like that? Here, I’ll tell you what, let your mam get into her pocket here, and you can have another rainbow drop.”

Fumbling in a side vent of her skirt her fingers found the small brown paper cone, top twisted, that she’d bought at Gotch’s shop in Green Street on their way down to the park. One-handed, with her other full of child, May unscrewed and then opened up the bag, reaching in to retrieve three chocolate drops, hundreds-and-thousands speckling their tops, one for her infant daughter, two for her. She held the first sweet to her baby’s lips, which opened with a comic eagerness to let May place it on the minute tongue, then pressed the two remaining chocolate discs together into one, shaped like a lens, the colored flecks now beading the outside in little dots like the French painters used. She popped it in her mouth and sucked it smooth, her favorite way of eating rainbow drops.

With little May against one shoulder like a set of bagpipes not in current use she sauntered from the slight hump of the bridge onto the island’s sparse and yellowed grass. The isle, two or three acres all in all, had the Nene forked around it to its north, continuing as two streams that re-joined to form one river at the land’s south tip. A foot-worn path ran round the island’s edge, enclosing at the center marshy ground that was sometimes a pond, but not today. Once off the railed bridge May turned to her right, starting an anticlockwise circuit of the riverside, breeze in her dark red hair, her daughter slobbering chocolate on her neck. Some clouds slid through the azure overhead so that May’s shadow faded then sprang back, but otherwise it was a perfect day.

She walked now with the water on her right and the broad swathe of Beckett’s Park beyond, its old pavilion tinted lime by moss, its benches, bushes, and its public lavs, trees scorched by autumn starting to catch fire. The river’s mirror-ribbon ran below the dark reach of the overhanging boughs, reflecting shattered umber, cloudy sage, torn scraps of sky in peacock blue beneath the medaled shimmer of its rippled breast.

If today was a Sunday, there’d have been chaps renting boats out from the peeling hut propped up between the crowding elms there on the bank towards its cattle-market end. Most weekends, if the weather was all right, you’d find half of the Boroughs down the park in their best bonnets, walking arm in arm, shrieking and laughing as they rowed upstream through trailing willow fingers for a lark. The chimney-sweep from Green Street, Mr. Paine, who’d got one of them wind-up gramophones, would take it out with him on his hired boat. It was nice, hearing music out of doors; nice seeing Mr. Paine play sweet old songs while he cruised down the river in among the lovebirds and the splashing families. It made it seem as if times weren’t so bad.

May got on well with Mr. Paine. He’d once shown her the flowers he’d grown in his back yard, which was just down from Gotcher Johnson’s shop. Crammed into the brick rectangle there’d been more colors than she’d ever seen before, sprouting from a bewildering array of makeshift flowerpots. Pinks bloomed from tins. Apothecary jars spilled marigolds. Cracked piss-pots brimmed with fragrant jasmine sprays. May liked the Green Street crowd in general. She’d often thought that one day her and Tom might find a decent house to rent down there, away from Fort Street and her mam and dad, perhaps not far off from the chimney-sweep who’d got Eden in saucepans out the back, whose murmuring Victrola charmed the crowds out strolling on the Sunday riverbanks. And he loved little May. Who didn’t, though?

The riverside path curved round to the left, its grass a threadbare carpet, pile rubbed flat by strolling old men, lovers, truant boys. May followed it towards the isle’s far side, her pace unhurried and her skirt’s thin hem billowing at her ankles in the breeze. Head on her mother’s shoulder, little May was chattering fluently, unhindered by irrelevant concerns like sense or words.

Of course, May understood that while her child was almost universally admired, some people’s admiration might be shown in ways that were intolerably cruel. There’d been that afternoon some months before when her and Tom were walking in this park, having a Sunday outing with young May. They’d carried her or let her trot a while between them, holding one of her hands each, lifting her up for slow suspended leaps to skim the puddles and the buttercups. There’d been a well-dressed couple marching by, keeping their distance from the Boroughs types, keeping at nose’s length, the way they do. The woman with her gloves and parasol stared at the Warrens and their little girl, remarking to her husband as they passed, “You know, it does upset me when I see a tiny child as beautiful as that being brought up by people of their sort.”

The bloody cheek. The bloody, bloody cheek that woman had, to say a thing like that. Tom yelled “You what?” at their retreating backs but they just walked on like they hadn’t heard. May could remember how she’d cried herself to sleep that night, face hot and red with shame. You’d think that her and Tom were animals, not to be trusted with a baby girl. May knew, just from the woman’s tone of voice, that if the couple could have found some means to have May’s daughter took away from her, then they’d have done it without thinking twice. The incident had sparked a fierce resolve, a fire that scorched her throat and stung her eyes. She’d show them. She’d look after little May better than some posh woman could have done.

Mother and child had by now wandered round the island’s northern, cattle-market end, dawdling along beside the river’s edge towards Midsummer Meadow and the south. The baby’s eyes, clear blue like winter sky, gazed fascinated at the central bog where ducks with heads beer-bottle emerald still pecked and fussed near almost emptied nests. Far off, a factory horn made brief complaint.

Around May’s snub-nosed shoes were ghost-green leaves with queer pods bulging from their fallen stems. Split with a thumbnail they’d have grubs inside, the offspring (or so May’s dad had once said) of small black flies who’d lay eggs in the bud, deforming it to what was called a gall. It was a nasty thought, but better than the first conclusion she had drawn, which was that worms and maggots somehow grew on trees, signs of death blossoming unnaturally from leafy boughs that represented life. The bank was strewn, beside the blighted leaves, with other bits of litter here and there: dog muck blanched by a diet of well-gnawed bones, an empty packet of ten Craven ‘A’ that had the black cat mascot on its box in sodden cardboard and a half-inch tall, now at the mercy of the island’s birds.

Apart from this there was a pair of pants, a set of ladies’ bloomers in the grass between the tree roots, white and crumpled up. Some couple had come here to have it off far from the gaslights on Victoria Prom, the river’s tinkle lost beneath their groans, then not cleared up behind them when they’d done. May tutted, though she’d done the same herself with Tom before they’d married, here at night beside the river, him on top of her, then afterwards they’d sit here and they’d talk, propped up together underneath a tree. Head resting on Tom’s breast she’d heard his heart, both gazing off towards the stream’s far side, the scrublands and the railway tracks that stretched off to the abbey out at Delapre. She’d listened to him, quiet and wonderstruck, while he told her his tales from history, the subject that had been Tom’s best at school. The whole Wars of the Roses, he’d explained, the wars between the Lancasters and Yorks, had been decided on the soil across the river from where May was walking now. The King was captured on the waste-ground that the Boroughs thought of still as its back yard. She’d sprawled there, half asleep and marveling at the important things these fields had seen, at the low voice of her husband-to-be, whose spunk hung cooling from the dandelions. The memory made May warm between her thighs so that she had to stop and shake her head to clear it before she could concentrate on her and young May’s Friday afternoon. She went on, curving round the isle’s south end and back in the direction of the bridge.

Reentering the main grounds of the park she peeped to see if Thursa was nearby. Her aunt, however, was by then long gone, as were the other sorts who’d been about. Perhaps her aunt had led them dancing off Pied Piper fashion with a cockeyed tune on her accordion, brown coat a-flap, her gray hair streaming like a chimney fire. May laughed and so did young May, joining in.

The only other people she could see were up near Derngate and the hospital, mothers or governesses pushing prams by Becket’s Well at the park corner there. Snobs. Why, even their servants put May off, looked at her like they thought she’d steal their purse, despite being no better born than her … although that wasn’t strictly speaking true. Being hatched in a gutter full of shit, near everyone was better born than May.

That didn’t make her a bad mother, though. It didn’t mean that woman had been right. She took more care of her own little girl than all the la-di-da types did of theirs. May looked after her daughter to a fault, at least if what the doctor said was right. What that had been, young May kept getting colds, just coughs and sniffles how most babies do. The doctor came to see her, Dr. Forbes, annoyed he’d been called out so many times, and they’d had words, him and the older May. He’d led her out onto her own front step and pointed further off down Fort Street’s length to where the simple girl from down the way was sitting on the cold, uneven flags with a toy tea-set spread out all around, sharing black puddle-water with her dolls.

“You see? That child is healthier than yours, because her mother lets her play outside. Your baby, Mrs. Warren, keeps too clean to build up a resistance to disease. Let her get dirty! Don’t they say you’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die?”

It was all very well for him to talk, him up Horsemarket in his doctor’s house. Nobody would accuse him or his wife of being unfit to bring up a child, the way that old cow had with her and Tom. His children, May knew, could have mucky knees and nobody would think the worse of him. It wouldn’t be him that got talked about, or be his wife what cried herself to sleep with the humiliation of it all. Having some money spared you all of that. The Doctor didn’t know what it was like.

Here young May shifted in her mother’s arms and pulled a face. It was her ugliest one, although it would have shamed a work of art. If the wind changed and she’d been stuck like that, May’s baby would still knock spots off Miss Pears. The reason for her daughter’s restlessness was more than likely want of rainbow drops. She reached in her skirt’s pocket for the bag, discovering they’d only got three left. Giving May one she pressed the other two into another sandwich for herself. With her miniature vision in the crook of one arm, so May senior went on beside the railings and the lavatories towards the dung-chute of Victoria Prom. The sun was lower. Time was getting on. She didn’t want to keep her little girl outdoors too long, despite old Forbes’s advice. With little May not long rid of one cough some fresh park air had seemed a good idea, but there was no sense overdoing things. They’d best get home and in the warm while there was still some bright, and it was quite a walk. Stepping from under tea-leaf colored trees they turned left on the curving promenade and carried on through cattle market musk towards the iron gas-holder’s rotund bulk.

May passed the Plow Hotel across the road at Bridge Street’s mouth, continuing until the pair had reached the foot of Horseshoe Street where they turned right, beginning the long trudge uphill along this eastern boundary line into the Boroughs’ grubby, glad embrace, into its welcoming and soot-streaked arms. The sun was a Montgolfier balloon descending on the railway station yards. Breeze stirred the pale curds of her daughter’s hair and May was pleased she’d brought her out today. There was a feeling in the air, perhaps brought on by sunset or the autumn’s cool, as if these hours were a last precious glimpse of something, of the summer or the day, which made them twice as flawless and as fair. Even the Boroughs, with its bricks rubbed raw, seemed to be trying to look its very best. A wealth of newly-smelted golden light slicked its slate rooftops and its guttering, spread blinding scum on the rainwater tubs. The scraps of lilac cloud over Bellbarn were handbill fragments, torn, left pasted up on the great awning’s deepening blue above. The world seemed so rich, so significant, like an oil painting May was walking through with her Gainsborough baby on her hip.

Across the trot and creak of Horseshoe Street, its cobbles greased with fibrous olive smears, was wasteland where St. Gregory’s once stood, or so May’s dad had told his daughter once. There’d been some tale about an old stone cross a monk had brought here from Jerusalem, so as to mark the center of his land. They’d set it in an alcove at the church, and for some centuries it was a shrine where folk made pilgrimages and all that. “Rood in the Wall” they called it. ‘Rood’ meant cross, though in May’s mind she mixed it up with ‘rude’ and thought of the stone cross as plain or coarse, chipped ruggedly with rudimentary tools from hard gray rock, rough-cut and biblical. The monk was sent by angels, so he’d said. Angels were common in the Boroughs then, gone now unless you counted little May. The church itself was also long since gone, with only nearby Gregory’s Street to mark the fact that it was ever there at all. Now buddleia and nettle ruled the plot, the first with fallen petals thick as meat, the latter thrusting white and senile heads up into the last spare rays of the sun, lit with a burning citrine at their tips. To think it was the center of the land.

The baby chuckled, clutched against May’s side, so that her mother turned to see what for. Some way uphill, where Gold Street and Marefair cut across Horsemarket and Horseshoe Street to form a crossroads, on the corner there outside Vint’s Palace of Varieties a slim young fellow leaned against the wall, looking away then slyly looking back as he played peek-a-boo with little May.

Her daughter seemed enchanted by the man, and an inspection forced May to admit that there was much to be enchanted by. He wasn’t tall but had a slenderness, a litheness, not a wiriness like Tom. The fellow’s hair was blacker than his shoes, a springy nest of unwound licorice whips. His girlish, long-lashed eyes were darker still, batting flirtatiously to tease the child. Fancied himself, May thought. And fancied her.

She knew the type, their baby strategy: strike up a conversation through the tot, so your advances won’t seem obvious. She’d had that quite a bit when she’d been out with little May in this last year-and-half. With such a lovely offspring, it was nice to sometimes get attention of her own. May didn’t mind a whistle and a wink, so long as it weren’t from a lush or thug. Or if it was, she could soon brush them off, was tough enough to look after herself. But if the lad should be presentable, like this one was, she didn’t think it hurt to flirt a bit, or pass five minutes’ chat. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her Tom nor had her eye on anyone but him, but she’d been quite a smasher as a girl, and sometimes missed the looks and compliments. Besides, as they drew closer to this bloke May had a feeling that she knew his face, though for the life of her she couldn’t think where it was that she recognized him from. If it weren’t that, then it was déjà vu, that feeling like something’s happened before. Also, May’s daughter seemed to like the chap, who had the knack for making children laugh.

The next time that he turned, mock-shyly, round to sneak a peek at little May he found her mother gazing back at him as well. May spoke first, taking the initiative, saying he’d an admirer in her child, and he came back with something daft about how he’d just been admiring little May. He knew as well as she did this was tosh, and that he’d had his eye on big May too, but they both played along with the pretense. Besides, he could see now that she were wed.

He made an awful fuss of little May, but seemed for the most part to be sincere, saying as how she’d end up on the stage and be a famous beauty of her time and all that. He was on the stage himself, appearing at Vint’s Palace later on and only idling on the corner while he had a fag or two to calm his nerves. And look at women, May thought to herself, but let it pass since she enjoyed his talk. She introduced herself and baby May. He said to call him “Oatsie” in return, which was a nickname she’d not heard for years, not since she’d lived down Lambeth as a girl. This set wheels turning in May’s mind until she worked out where she’d seen Oatsie before.

He’d been a small boy of about May’s age who’d lived in West Square off St. George’s Road. She’d seen him, when out with her mam and dad, and recognized him by the pretty eyes. He’d had a brother, older than himself as she recalled, but when she told him this he looked at her as if he’d seen a ghost, out of a past he’d thought behind him now. He looked at her as if he’d been found out. The man’s confusion and pop-eyed surprise made May laugh. He’d not been expecting that. He’d bit off more than he could chew with her. She played him on in this way for a while, then, taking pity, let him off the hook, confessing that she too was Lambeth born. He looked relieved. He’d evidently thought she was a Sybil or an oracle, not just an escaped cockney like himself.

Put in his place like this it was as if he didn’t need to go through such an act, and their street-corner chat grew more relaxed and warm, without the need for any show. They nattered on discussing this and that, her brother John’s ambitions on the stage, the history of Vint’s Palace where they stood, and so on, him and her and little May in cheery conference while the Boroughs sky turned from brocade to sapphire overhead. At last, her daughter squirming in her arms, and mindful there were no more rainbow drops, May knew she’d better get the baby home to have her meat-paste sandwiches for tea. She said her farewells to the handsome clown and wished him good luck with his show that night. He told her to take care of little May. She didn’t think it odd, not at the time.

The climb up Horsemarket didn’t take long although, after some hours of walking round, the child seemed heavier in May’s tired arms. Ascending past the lofty houses there, the doctors’ residences, lit up warm, she wondered which belonged to Dr. Forbes. Past open curtains children home from school sat on plump sofas next to roaring fires, ate muffins, or else read improving books. She felt briefly resentful at her dad. If he’d not sniffed at that director’s job, if just once her old man had spared a thought for someone other than his willful self, that could be her and little May in there, well-fed and snug, May’s daughter on her knee and being read to from a picture book with embossed covers and bright tipped-in plates. She snorted, and turned up St. Mary’s Street.

The heavens in the west ahead of her showed bruises from the roughhouse of the day, purpling into dark above the roofs of Pike Lane and Quart Pot Lane further on. It startled May, the way the nights fell in when you got close to this end of the year. St. Mary’s Street looked haunted in the gloom. Its alcove doorsteps sucked the shadows in, and splintered work-yard gates clanked on their chains. May strode on with her child held up in front like a blond candle through the crowding dusk.

She’d have to say she weren’t at all surprised that this was where the great fire had broke out, back two hundred and something years ago. There was a simmering feel about the place, as if it could boil over into harm at any time, quick as you could say ‘knife’. No doubt it went back to the Civil War with all the Roundheads bivouacked near here, Cromwell and Fairfax kipping overnight in Marefair, parallel to Mary’s Street, before they went to Naseby the next day and sealed King Charlie’s and the country’s fate. Wasn’t it Pike Lane where they’d made the pikes? That’s what May’s dad had said, at any rate. She carried on and over Doddridge Street, continuing across the burial ground that ran from Doddridge Church down to Chalk Place. The Reverend Doddridge, who had preached down here, while not a terrible destructive force like old Oliver Cromwell or the fire was as incendiary in his own way, fighting for Nonconformists and the poor, and suited the spot’s troublemaker air. May pressed on through the bone-yard’s overgrowth and hoped her daughter wasn’t getting cold.

In Chalk Lane, by the chapel’s western wall, little May started kicking up a fuss and pointing to that queer door halfway up, as if wanting to know what it was for.

“Don’t ask me, love, I haven’t got a clue. Come on, let’s get you home and lay the fire for when your dear old dad comes back from work.”

Except a burp, young May made no reply as Castle Terrace led to Bristol Street. The lamps were going on at the far end which meant that Mr. Beery was about, walking from post to post with his long pole, angling it up towards the gaslight’s top, flame held beside the jet until it caught. He looked like he was fishing for the dark, using his little glowworm light as bait. May’s child cooed at the distant, greenish gleams as though they were a Roman candle show.

They went on, heading for the Fort Street turn, when from the unlit terrace at May’s heels there came a washboard clatter drawing near, a rattling sound as someone dragged a plank across the bumping cobbles to their rear. A voice as rich as broth called out “Why, Mrs. May and Missy May! You ladies been off gallivanting all around the town, I bet, you only just now coming home!”

It was Black Charley, him from Scarletwell who had the rag-and-bone cart and the bike with ropes all round their wheels instead of tires. The sound she’d heard had been the blocks of wood he had strapped on his feet to use as brakes. May laughed to see him, but then told him off for scaring them, although in truth he’d not. He was a local marvel, who she liked. He brought a touch of magic to the place.

“Black Charley! Blummin ’eck, you made me jump!” She told him there should be a law that forced black men to carry sparklers after dark, so you could see them creeping up on you, then thought it was a silly thing to say. For one thing, there weren’t black men round these parts. There was just him, Black Charley, Henry George. Also, she knew her quip made no more sense than if he’d said white people should black up so he could see them coming at midday. He didn’t take offense though. He just laughed and made the usual fuss of baby May, saying she was an angel and all that, a compliment May briskly swept aside. Angels were mostly a sore point with her, part of the madness in the Vernall clan. Her dad and granddad and her barmy aunt had all insisted that such things were real, which, in May’s own opinion, said it all. Nobody took stuff like that seriously, or at least nobody who was all there. They hadn’t since the times of that old monk who’d brought the cross here from Jerusalem. The only angel, little May aside, was that white stone one on the Guildhall roof her dad had cuddled with when he’d been drunk. Besides, May found thoughts like that frightening, great winged chaps watching over people’s lives and knowing what would happen ’fore it did. It was like ghosts or anything like that, it made you think of death, or else that life was a big, foggy, overwhelming place you knew would kill you going in the door. She didn’t dwell upon unearthly things. Anyway, angels would be snobs, May knew, judging her like that pair in Beckett’s Park.

She chatted to Black Charley for a while, and little May, God bless her, tried her best, calling him Char-Char and grabbing the beard that grew in a white frizz around his chin. Eventually, they let him cycle on, shouting goodbye in his deep Yankee voice, down Bristol Street back home to Scarletwell, which was a street May didn’t like to go. It just gave her the willies, that was all, although there was no reason why it should. There was that funny creature of Newt Pratt’s, on Sundays, drunk outside the Friendly Arms, but that weren’t what frit May about the street. Perhaps it was the bloody-sounding name, or else that up round Scarletwell they kept the fever cart, high windows, leaded glass, that let in light but wouldn’t let you see the poor buggers inside that it took off, with scarlet fever or that other one whose name May wasn’t sure how to pronounce, to camps out on the edges of the town. Whatever it was that got on her nerves about the old hill, you could safely say as Scarletwell Street weren’t May’s favorite place. That might change, she supposed, in a few years when she was traipsing up there every day and taking little May to Spring Lane School, but until then she’d give it a wide berth.

May turned left into Fort Street where there was no cobbled road, just flagstones wall to wall. Although she knew it bent round to the right at its far point and ran along the back of Moat Street, sloping down into Bath Row, her home street always looked like a dead end where vehicles couldn’t go, that led nowhere of very much importance anyway. Her daughter was now bouncing up and down with shrill excitement in May’s freckled arms, the child having by this point recognized the dear, familiar row down which they walked. May clacked on over the rough tilting slabs and past her mam and dad’s house, number ten. Gaslight was shining from their passageway out through cracks round the poorly hung front door; the parlor dark, empty save ornaments.

Johnny and Cora and her mam and dad would at this time of night most likely be round the tea-table in the living room, having their bread and jam and bit of cake. She went on to her own house, number twelve, and opened its unlocked door with one hand, not putting May down ’til she was inside. She lit the mantle first, then lit a fire, sticking her daughter into the high chair while she went to retrieve the potted meat from the tin safe atop the cellar stairs. She made the baby’s tea and served it up after she’d carefully trimmed off all the crusts. Little May slowly ate her sandwiches, taking her time, making a lot of mess, while her mam took the opportunity to do a nice liver and onion roll, then put it in the stove for her and Tom.

The evening nigh on flew by after that. Tom got home from the brewery where he worked, his Friday night pay-packet in his hand, in time to say goodnight to little May before she got took off upstairs to bed, up the apples and pears to Uncle Ned. Next her and Tom had dinner by themselves, then chatted until they retired as well. They cuddled once the candle was blown out, then May asked Tom to pull her nightgown up and get on top so he could put it in. It was their favorite time, a Friday night. No need to get up early the next day, when with a bit of luck their little girl would sleep in long enough for May and Tom to have another fuck when they woke up. Beneath her man, May hardly spared a thought for that chap by Vint’s Palace earlier on.

By Saturday, their daughter’s cough was back and it seemed like she had a job to breathe. They called old Forbes out, Sunday afternoon, when they’d meant to be walking in the park. The doctor turned up, as he always did, moaning about them spoiling his weekend, then shut up after he’d seen little May. The child’s skin had took on a yellow cast which they’d both hoped they were imagining.

He said their baby had diphtheria.

The wagon from the top of Scarletwell was summoned. Little May was placed aboard and off it went, windows of leaded glass placed too high up its sides to see in through. The hooves and coach-wheels hardly made a sound, rolling away down the uncobbled lane as the one ray of light that lit May’s heart was taken off inside the fever cart.

The second time that Mrs. Gibbs called round she had a different colored apron on, black where the previous one was pristine white. When May recalled it afterwards she thought that it had had a decorated hem, Egyptian beetles in viridian embroidered there instead of butterflies. That was just her imagination, though. The apron was an unadorned plain black.

May was sat by herself in the front room. The half-sized coffin, resting on two chairs like a mesmerist’s audience volunteer, was by the window at the room’s far end. Her baby’s sleeping face looked gray, suffused by dusty light decanted through the nets. She’d no doubt look all right when she woke up. Oh, stop it, May thought to herself. Just stop. Then she began to shake and cry again.

The cruelest thing was that they’d brought her home. After a week May’s child had been sent back to Fort Street from the remote fever camp, so May and Tom had thought she’d be all right. But what did they know of diphtheria? They couldn’t even say it properly and called it ‘Dip’ like everybody else. They didn’t know that it came in two parts, or that most people got over the first only to have the next stage take them off. Weakened by the onset of the disease, they’d got no fight left when it stopped their hearts. Especially young children, so they said. Especially, May thought, the ones whose mams had kept their little boys and girls too clean. Whose mams had been concerned lest people say that they weren’t fit to take care of a child, and then gone on to prove those people right.

It was her fault. She knew it was her fault. She’d been too proud. Pride came before a fall, that’s what they said, and sure enough it did. May felt as if she’d fell out of her life, the lovely life she’d had two weeks before. She’d fell out of her dreams, her hopes. She’d fell out of the woman that she thought she was into this dreadful moment and this room, the coffin and that bloody noisy clock.

“Oh, my poor little darling. My poor lamb. I’m here, my love. Mam’s here. You’ll be all right. I shan’t let anything bad …” May trailed off. She didn’t know what she’d been going to say, hated the sound of her own useless voice making a promise she’d already broke. All of the times she’d comforted her child and told her she’d always look after her, sworn sacred oaths like every mother does then let her daughter down so wretchedly. Said she’d always be there for little May but didn’t even know, now, where ‘there’ was. Just eighteen months, that’s all they’d had with her; that was as long as they’d kept her alive. They’d joined that tragic and exclusive club folk whispered sympathetically about and yet preferred to keep their distance from, as though May were in quarantine for grief.

She wasn’t even thinking, sitting there. Thoughts wouldn’t stick together anymore, led nowhere that she was prepared to go. What filled her was a wordless, shapeless hurt, and the enormity of that small box.

There were black holes burnt in the hearthside rug that she’d not noticed, prior to today. The wicker footstool was unraveling. Why was it such hard work to keep things new?

The door being as usual on the latch, May didn’t hear the deathmonger come in. She just glanced up from studying the rug and Mrs. Gibbs was stood beside the chair, her apron showing up the dust flecks like the powdered, folded wings of a black moth. It was as if the previous eighteen months had never happened, as though Mrs. Gibbs had never even truly left the house that first time. There’d just been a change of light, a change of apron, butterflies all gone, embroidered summer’s day replaced by night. It was a ‘spot the difference’ picture game. The baby had been switched on May as well. Her lovely copper cub had disappeared and in its place was just this hard blond doll. And May herself, that was another change. She wasn’t who she’d been when she gave birth.

In fact, upon closer inspection May realized that the whole picture was now wrong, with nothing else but differences to spot. Only the deathmonger remained the same, although she’d put on a new pinafore. Her cheeks, like Christmas stocking tangerines, weren’t changed a bit, nor her expression which could mean whatever you supposed it meant.

“Hello again, my dear,” said Mrs. Gibbs.

May’s “hello” in reply was made from lead. It left her lips and thudded on the mat, a lump of language, blunt and colorless, from which no conversation could be built. The deathmonger stepped round it and went on.

“If you don’t feel like talking, dear, then don’t. Not lest you need to but you don’t know how, in which case you can tell me all you want. I’m not your family, and I’m not your judge.”

May’s sole reaction was to look away though she conceded, at least inwardly, that Mrs. Gibbs had hit on something there. She’d had no one to talk to properly these last two days, she thought, except herself. She couldn’t speak above two words to Tom without she’d weep. They set each other off, and they both hated crying. It was weak. Besides, Tom wasn’t there. He was at work. May’s mam, Louisa, that was useless, too, not just because her mam wept easily. It was more May had let her mother down. She’d not been a good mother in her turn, not kept up the maternal tapestry. She’d dropped a stitch and failed the family. She couldn’t face them, and they couldn’t help. Her aunt’s attempt had been an awful scene that May was keeping shut out of her mind.

As a result, May had been left cut off. It was her fault, along with all the rest, but she was stuck with nobody to tell about all that was going on inside, the frightening thoughts and ideas what she had, too bad to say out loud to anyone. Yet here she was, and here was Mrs. Gibbs, a stranger, outside May’s immediate clan or any clan as far as May could see, except that of the deathmongers themselves. Mrs. Gibbs seemed outside of everything, as carefully impartial as the sky. Her apron, deep and private like a night, or like a well, was a receptacle that May could empty all this horror in without it ringing round her brood for years. May raised her sore red eyes only to find the other woman’s gray ones gazing back.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I shall do. I don’t know how I shall get over it. They’re burying her tomorrow afternoon and then I shan’t have nothing left at all.”

May’s voice was rusty, cracking with disuse, a crone’s voice, not a twenty-year-old girl’s. The deathmonger pulled up the fraying stool, then sat down at May’s feet and took her hand.

“Now, Mrs. Warren, you listen to me. You’re not to tell me you’ve got nothing left. You’re not to even think it of yourself. If nothing’s left, what was your child’s life worth? Or any of our lifetimes, come to that? It’s all got value, else none of it has. Or do you wish you’d not had her at all? Should you prefer that you’d not seen me once if you were going to have to see me twice?”

She took it in and found it was all true. Put like that, asked in such straightforward terms if little May were better never born then she could only dumbly shake her head. The lank red strands, uncombed, fell on her face. She’d not got nothing, she’d got eighteen months of feeding, burping, going down the park, laughing and crying, changing tiny clothes. The fact remained, though, that she’d not got May. She’d got her memories of her little girl, favorite expressions, gestures, favorite sounds, but they were painful in the knowledge that there’d be no new ones added to the list. And that was just her sorrow’s selfish part, her pitying herself for what she’d lost. It was her baby should be pitied more, who’d gone into the dark all on her own. May looked up hopelessly at Mrs. Gibbs.

“But what about her? What about my May? I want to think she’s up in Heaven but she’s not, is she? That’s just what you tell kids about their cat or dog when all the time you’ve found it with its back broke in the street.”

At this she wept again despite herself and Mrs. Gibbs gave her a handkerchief, then squeezed May’s hand between her papery palms, a bible closing on May’s fingertips.

“I don’t hold much in Heaven, personally, nor in the other place. It sounds like tosh. All I know is, your daughter’s upstairs now, and whether you believe me or you don’t is none of my concern and none of hers. That’s where she is, my dear. That’s what I know, and I’d not say it if I wasn’t sure. She’s upstairs, where we all are by and by. Your dad’s told you already, I dare say.”

The mention of May’s father made her start. He had said that. He’d used that very word. “She’s upstairs, May. Don’t fret. She’s upstairs now.” In fact, now that she thought, she’d never heard him speak of death in any other way. Not him, her kin, nor anyone round here. They never said “in Heaven” or “with God”, nor even “up above”. They said “upstairs”. It made the afterlife sound carpeted.

“You’re right, he did say that, but what’s it mean? You say it’s not like heaven in the clouds. Where is it, this upstairs, then? What’s it like?”

In May’s own ears her voice was sounding cross, angry that Mrs. Gibbs was so cocksure about a thing as terrible as this. She hadn’t meant it to come out that way and thought the deathmonger would take offense. To her surprise, Mrs. Gibbs only laughed.

“Frankly, it’s very much like this, my dear.” She gestured, at the armchair, at the room. “What else should you expect it to be like? It’s much like this, only it’s up a step.”

May wasn’t angry now. She just felt strange. Had someone said those words to her before? “It’s much like this, only it’s up a step.” It sounded so familiar and so right, although she’d got no idea what it meant. It felt like those occasions, as a girl, when she’d been let in on some mystery, like when Anne Berk told May the facts of life. “The man puts spunk on the end of his prick, then puts it in your crack.” Though May had thought spunk would be soap-flakes in a little pile, spooned on a flat-topped cock-end into her, she’d somehow known that the idea was true; made sense of things she’d previously not grasped. Or when her mam had took her to one side and gravely told her what jamrags were for. This was like that, sat here with Mrs. Gibbs. One of those moments in a human life when you found out what everybody else already knew but never talked about.

May glimpsed the coffin at the room’s far end and knew immediately it was all junk. Upstairs was heaven with a different name, the same old story trotted out again to console the bereaved and shut them up. It was just Mrs. Gibbs’s atmosphere, the way she had, that made it sound half-true. What did she know about the hereafter? She was a Boroughs woman, same as May. Except, of course, she was a deathmonger, which gave the rot she talked that much more weight. Mrs. Gibbs spoke again, squeezing May’s hand.

“As I say, dear, it doesn’t matter much if we believe these things or if we don’t. The world’s round, even if we think it’s flat. The only difference it makes is to us. If we know it’s a globe, we needn’t be frit all the time of falling off its edge. But let’s not talk about your daughter, dear. What’s happened can’t be helped, but you still can. Are you all right? What’s all this done to you?”

Again, May found she had to stop and think. No one had asked her that, these last two days. It wasn’t something that she’d asked herself, nor dared to in the wailing, echoing well her private thoughts had recently become. Was she all right? What had this done to her? She blew her nose on the clean handkerchief that she’d been given, noticing it had no butterflies, just one embroidered bee. When she was done, she screwed the hankie up and shoved it in one jumper-sleeve, a move that meant Mrs. Gibbs letting go May’s hand, although once the maneuver was complete May slid her fingers voluntarily between the digits of the deathmonger. She liked the woman’s touch; warm, dry, and safe in the wallpapered whirlpool of the room. Still sniffing, May attempted a reply.

“I feel like everything’s fell through the floor and dropping down a tunnel like a stone. It doesn’t even feel like I’m meself. I sit and cry and can’t do anything. I can’t see any point in doing things, brushing me hair or eating, anything, and I don’t know where all of it shall end. I wish that I was dead, and that’s the truth. Then we’d be put together in one box.”

Mrs. Gibbs shook her head.

“Don’t say that, dear. It’s both a cheap and silly thing to say, you know it is. And anyway, unless I’m wrong, you don’t wish you were dead at all. It’s just that you don’t want to be alive because life’s rough and don’t make any sense. Those are two very different things, my dear. You’d do well to be sure which one you mean. One can be put right and the other can’t.”

The clock ticked and the tumbling dust motes stirred in sunbeams that fell slanting on the floor while May considered. Mrs. Gibbs was right. It wasn’t that she truly wanted death, but that she’d lost the reason for her life. Worse than this, she had started to suspect that life, all life that walked upon the earth, had never had a reason from the start. This was a world of accident and mess without a divine plan that guided things. It weren’t that God moved in mysterious ways, more that you never saw him move at all. What was the point of going on with it, the human race? Why did everyone keep on having babies, when they knew they’d die? Giving them life then snatching it away, just so you’d have some company. It was cruel. How had she ever seen things differently?

She tried conveying this to Mrs. Gibbs, the senselessness that was in everything.

“Life don’t make sense. It’s not made sense to me since Dr. Forbes said May had got the Dip. The fever horse come trotting up the street over the paving slabs where there’s no road, when generally carts wait along the end. Just like that, she was gone. They took her off in that dark wagon, off and down Bath Row, and that was that. I stood there in the road, roaring, and chewing on me handkerchief. I shan’t ever forget it, standing there …”

Cocking her bun-crowned head upon one side, Mrs. Gibbs silently renewed her grip on May’s hot hand, bidding her to go on. May hadn’t realized until now how much she’d needed to recount this to someone, get it all into words and off her chest.

“Tom was there. Tom had got me in his arms to stop me running off after the cart. Me mam, at number ten, she stayed inside to keep our Cora and our Johnny quiet, so that they’d not come out and join the fuss.”

Mrs. Gibbs pursed her lips enquiringly and then chimed in with what was on her mind.

“Where was your father, dear, if I might ask?”

May seemed to ponder this, and then went on.

“He was just standing out on his front step and … no. No, he were sitting. Sitting down. I hardly noticed him, not at the time, but thinking now, he was sat on that step as if it were a Sunday in July. As if there wasn’t an emergency. He looked glum, but not upset or surprised like everybody else. To tell the truth, he seemed more rattled back when she were born.”

She paused. She squinted hard at Mrs. Gibbs.

“And come to think about it, you did, too. You went white as a sheet when she came out. I had to ask if anything was wrong, and you said that you were afraid there was. You said it was her beauty, said she’d got an awful beauty, I remember it. Then later on, when you were leaving you took ages over your goodbyes to her.”

The penny dropped. May stared in disbelief. The deathmonger, impassively, stared back.

“You knew.”

Mrs. Gibbs didn’t even blink.

“You’re right, my dear. I did. And so did you.”

May gasped and tried to pull her hand away, but the deathmonger wouldn’t let it go. What? What was this? What did the woman mean? May hadn’t known her child was going to die. The idea hadn’t crossed her mind. Although …

Although she knew it had, a thousand times, scaring her in a score of different ways. The worst was feeling it was a mistake, this gorgeous child being given to her when it was clearly meant for royalty. There’d been some error, been some oversight. Sooner or later, it would get found out, like a large postal-order that had been delivered to an incorrect address. Somebody would be round to take it back. She’d known she wouldn’t get away with it, not with a child what shone like hers had done. Somewhere inside her, May had always known. That was the real reason, she now saw, why she’d took that woman’s remark so bad, that time in Beckett’s Park. It was because it told her something she already knew and yet was keeping from acknowledging: her daughter would be took away from her. They’d hear a knock upon the door one day, someone come from the council or police, or a Barnardo’s woman, looking sad. She’d just not thought it would be Dr. Forbes.

The clock ticked, and May wondered fleetingly how much time had gone by since its last beat. Mrs. Gibbs watched until she was convinced that May had took her point, then carried on.

“We know a lot more than we tell ourselves, my dear. Some of us do, at any rate. And if I’d said back when your May were born what I’d foreseen, then should I have been thanked? There’s no point served in saying things like that. If you yourself had taken notice of such premonitions as you might have had, it wouldn’t have prevented anything except for eighteen months of happiness.”

The deathmonger sat forward on the stool, her crisp black apron almost crackling.

“Now, you’ll forgive me saying this, my dear, but it appears you’ve took this on yourself. You think you’re a bad mother, and you’re not. Diphtheria don’t pick and choose like that or come to people ’cause of how they live, although the poor are very vulnerable. It’s a disease, dear, not a punishment. It’s no reflection on you or your bab, nor a result of how you brought her up. You’ll be a better mam for this, not worse. You’ll have learned things not every mother learns, and you’ll have learned them hard, and early on. You lost this child, but you shan’t lose the next, nor them that likely follow after that. Look at you! You’re a mam by nature, dear. You’ve got a lot of babies in you yet.”

May glanced away, towards the skirting board, at which the deathmonger narrowed her eyes.

“I’m sorry if I’ve spoken out of turn, or said something I shouldn’t ought have done.”

May blushed and looked back up at Mrs. Gibbs.

“You’ve not done nothing. You’ve just hit upon one of the things been going through me mind. Them babies in me, like you said. It’s daft, but I keep thinking one’s already there. There’s nothing what I’ve got to base it on, and half the ruddy time I think it’s just something I’ve dreamed up, to make up for May. I’ve had no signs, but then I wouldn’t do. If I’m right in this feeling what I’ve got, then I fell pregnant just two weeks ago. It’s all a lot of nonsense, I’m quite sure, just something I’ve come up with that it’s nice to think of, ’stead of crying all the while.”

The deathmonger began to stroke May’s hand, between caress and therapeutic rub.

“What is it, if it’s not too personal, that makes you think you’re in the family way?”

May blushed again.

“It’s nonsense, like I say. It’s just that … well, it was that Friday night, before they sent the fever cart for May. I’d been out round the park with her all day and she was wore out, the poor little thing. We put her to bed early, then we thought, it being Friday, we’d go up ourselves. So then we … well, you know. We had it off. But it was special, I can’t say just how. I’d had a lovely day, and I loved Tom. I knew how much I loved him on that night, when we were in bed getting up to it, and knew as well how much he loved me back. We lay there afterwards, and it were bliss, talking and whispering like when we first met. Upon my life, afore the sweat were dry I thought “there’ll be a baby come from this”. Oh, Mrs. Gibbs, whatever must you think? I never should have told you all of that. It’s nothing I’ve told anybody else. You only come round here to do your job, and here I’m dragging all me laundry out. You must think I’m a proper dirty cat.”

Mrs. Gibbs patted May’s hand, and she smiled.

“I’ve heard worse, let me tell you. Anyway, it’s all included in my shilling, dear. Listening and talking, that’s the biggest part. It’s not the birthing or the laying out. And as for if you’re pregnant or you’re not, you trust your instincts. They’re most likely right. Didn’t you say to me you’d have two girls, and then you’d stop and not have any more?”

May nodded.

“Yes, I did. And laying there that night I thought ‘here’s daughter number two’. Although it’s not, now, is it? It’s still one.”

She thought about this briefly, then went on.

“Well, it don’t make no difference. I still want two little girls, same as I said before. If it turns out I’ve got one on the way, I’ll have one more and then that shall be it.”

May marveled, hearing herself saying this. Her darling girl was cold and lying in a half-pint box down at the parlor’s end, not six foot from where May was sat herself. How could she even be considering a baby, let alone one after that? Why wasn’t she just sitting here in tears and trying to get herself under control, the way she had done for these past two days? As though she’d found some stopcock in her heart, the waterworks had been at last shut off. She felt like she weren’t falling anymore, May realized with surprise. It wasn’t like she was filled up with happiness and hope, but at least she weren’t plunging down a hole that had no bottom, or light at the top. She’d hit some bedrock where she’d come to rest, a floor that didn’t give beneath her grief. There was a faint chance she’d get out of this.

She knew she owed it to the deathmonger. They handled death and birth and everything that come as part of that. It was their job. These women – always women, obviously – had got some place to stand outside it all. They weren’t rocked by the mortal ebb and flow. Their lives weren’t those arrivals would upend, nor would departures leave them all in bits. They stood unmoved, unchanged, through all life’s quakes, invulnerable to joy and tragedy. May was still young. Her daughter’s birth and death had been her first exposure to these things, her first instructions in life’s proper stuff, its gravity and frightening suddenness, and frankly it had all knocked her for six. How would she get through life, if life did this? She looked at Mrs. Gibbs and saw a way, a woman’s way, of anchoring herself, but the deathmonger had begun to speak again before May could pursue the thought.

“Anyway, dear, I’d interrupted you. You were just telling me about the day the fever cart took off your little girl. I butted in and asked about your dad …”

For just a mo, May looked at her gone out, and then remembered her unfinished tale.

“Ooh, yes. Yes, I remember now. Our dad, sat on the step while it were going on, like he already were resigned to it, while I stood roaring in the street with Tom. I barely noticed him, not at the time, and can’t hold it against him even now. I know that I go on about our dad, how he’s an old fool and he shows us up with all his climbing round the chimneypots, but he’s been good to me since our May died. Me mam, the others, I can’t talk to them without the whole lot ending up in tears, but our dad, it turns out, he’s been a brick. He’s not been down the pub or on his jaunts. He’s been next door in earshot the whole time. He don’t intrude. He pops in now and then to find out if there’s anything I want, and for once in me life I’m glad he’s there. But on that day, he just sat on the step.”

May frowned. She tried to go back in her mind to Fort Street on that Sat’day dinnertime, shuddering in her husband’s arms while they watched little May go trundling off inside the fever cart, across the listing flags. She tried to conjure all the sounds and smells that single moment had been made up from, sausages burning somewhere on a stove, the railway shunts and squeals come from the west.

“I stood and watched the fever cart roll off, and it come welling up inside of me, just losing her, losing my little May. It all come welling up and I just howled, howled as I haven’t done in all me life. The row I made, you’ve never heard the like. It was a noise I hadn’t made before, fit to break bottles and curdle the milk. Then, from behind me, I heard the same sound, but changed, an echo with a different pitch, and just as loud as my own screech had been.

“I broke off from me wailing and turned round, and standing there, down at the street’s far end, there was my aunt and her accordion. She was stood there like … well, I don’t know what, her hair like wool from hedgerows round her head, and playing the same note as what I’d screamed. Well, not the same note, it were lower down. The same but in a lower register. A thunder roll, that’s what it sounded like, spreading down Fort Street. Smokey, like, and slow. And there was Thursa, holding down the keys, her bony fingers and her great big eyes, just staring at me, and her face were blank like she were sleepwalking and didn’t know what she were doing, much less where she was.

“She didn’t care what I were going through, or that my child was being took away. She was just off in one of her mad dreams, and I hated her for it at the time. I thought she was a callous, useless lump, and all the anger what I felt inside for what had happened to my little girl, I took it out on Thursa, there and then. I drew a breath and yelled but it weren’t grief like it had been the first time. This were rage. I hollered like I meant to eat her up, all bellowed out in one long snarling rush.

“My aunt just stood there. Didn’t turn a hair. She waited until I were done and then she changed her fingers’ placement on the keys, holding them down to strike a lower chord. It was like when I’d first screamed, done again: she hit the same note lower down the scale as though she thought she was accompanying me. Again, it was a rumble like a storm, but one that sounded nearer, nastier. I give up then. I just give up and cried, and blow me if that silly ruddy mare weren’t trying to play along with that as well, with little trills of notes like snuffling and sounds like that noise you make in your throat. I’m not sure quite what happened after that. I think old Snowy got up off the step and went along to quiet his sister down. I only know when I turned and looked back the other way down Fort Street, May were gone.

“That was the worst, Thursa’s accordion. It made me feel like none of it made sense, like all the world was barmy as my aunt. It was all pointless. None of it were fair, had no more scheme or reason than her tunes. I still don’t know. I don’t know why May died.”

She lapsed here into silence. Mrs. Gibbs released May’s hand and raised her own to place them on May’s shoulders with a soft, firm grip.

“Neither do I, dear. Nor does anyone know what the purpose is in anything, or why things happen in the way they do. It don’t seem fair when you see some of them mean buggers living to a ripe old age and here’s your lovely daughter took so soon. All I can tell you is what I believe. There’s justice up above the street, my dear.”

Where had May heard those same words said before? Or had she? Was that a false memory? Whether the phrase was ever spoke or not, it seemed familiar. May knew what it meant, or sort of understood it, any road. It had the same ring to it as “upstairs”, the ring of somewhere that was higher up and yet was down to earth at the same time, without all the religious how-d’you-do and finery, what just put people off. It was one of those truths, May briefly thought, that most folk knew but didn’t know they knew. It hovered in the background of their minds and they might feel it flutter once or twice but mostly they forgot that it was there, as May herself was doing even then. Just an impression of the warm idea remained, the bum-dent left in an armchair, a fleeting sense of high authority that was summed up somehow in Mrs. Gibbs. May’s earlier notion now came back to her, of the deathmongers as a breed apart who’d gained their ledge within society where they could stand above the churning flood of life and death that was their stock in trade, unmoved by the fierce currents of the world that, these last days, had nearly done for May. They’d found the still point in a life that seemed, alarmingly, to have no point at all. They’d found a rock round which the chaos dashed. Barely afloat upon a sea of tears, in Mrs. Gibbs May caught sight of dry land. She knew what she must do to save herself, blurted it out before she changed her mind.

“I want to know what you know, Mrs. Gibbs. I want to be a deathmonger like you. I want to be stuck into birth and death so I’m not frit by both of them no more. I’ve got to have a purpose now May’s gone, whether I have another child or not. If kids are all the purpose what you’ve got, you’re left with nothing when they’re took away by death, policemen, or just growing up. I want to learn to do a useful task, so’s I should be somebody for meself and not just someone’s wife or someone’s mam. I want to be outside of all of that, to be someone who can’t be hurt by it. Could I be taught? Could I be one of you?”

Mrs. Gibbs let May’s shoulders go so she could sit back on the stool and study her. She didn’t look surprised by May’s request, but then she’d never looked surprised at all, except perhaps when little May was born. She breathed in deep and exhaled down her nose, a thoughtful yet exasperated sound.

“Well, I don’t know, my dear. You’re very young. Young shoulders, though you might have an old head. You will have after this, at any rate. What you must understand, though, is you’re wrong. There isn’t any place away from life where you can go and not be touched by it. There’s no place where you can’t be hurt, my dear. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way things are. All you can do is find yourself a spot that you can look at all life’s turmoil from, the babies born and old men passed away. Take a position close to death and birth, but far enough away to have a view, so you can better understand them both. By understanding, you can lose your fear, and without fear the hurt’s not half so bad. That’s all deathmongers do. That’s what we are.”

She paused, to be sure May had took her point.

“Now, bearing all of that in mind, my dear, if you think you’ve a calling to my craft, there’s no harm in me showing you a bit. If you’re in earnest, then perhaps you’d like to be the one what brushed your daughter’s hair?”

May hadn’t been expecting that at all. It had been all conjecture up to then. She’d not thought she’d be called upon so soon to put her new ambition to the test, and not like this. Not with her own dead child. To pull a comb through those pale, matted locks. To brush her daughter’s hair for the last time. She choked, even upon the thought of it, and glanced towards the box at the room’s end.

A cloud had pulled back from the sun outside and strong light toppled at a steep incline into the parlor, strained through graying nets, diffused into a milky spindrift fog above the coffin and the child within. From here, she could just see her baby’s curls, but could she stand it? Could she brush them out, knowing that she’d not do it anymore? But then equally daunting was the thought of giving someone else that sacred job. May’s child was going away, and should look nice, and if she could have asked she’d want her mam to get her ready for it, May was sure. What was she scared of? It was only hair. She looked back from the box to Mrs. Gibbs and nodded until she could find her voice.

“Yes. Yes, I think as I can manage that, if you’ll bear with me while I find her comb.”

May stood up, and the deathmonger did too, patiently waiting while May sorted through the bric-a-brac heaped on the mantelpiece until she’d found the wooden baby-comb with painted flowers on she’d been searching for. She gripped it, drew in a determined breath and made to walk towards the parlor’s end where the small coffin waited. Mrs. Gibbs placed a restraining hand upon May’s arm.

“Now then, dear, I can see you’re very keen, but first perhaps you’ll join me in some snuff?”

Out of an apron pocket she produced her tin with Queen Victoria on its lid. May gaped at it and blanched, and shook her head.

“Ooh no. No, thank you, Mrs. Gibbs, I shan’t. Excepting for yourself I’ve always thought it was a dirty habit, not for me.”

The deathmonger smiled fondly, knowingly, continuing to hold the snuffbox out towards May, its enamel lid flipped back.

“Believe me, dear, you can’t work with the dead, not lest you take a little pinch of snuff.”

May let this sink in, then held out her hand so Mrs. Gibbs could tip a measure of the fiery russet powder on its back. The deathmonger advised that May should try to sniff half up each nostril if she could. Gingerly dipping her face forward May snorted raw lightning halfway down her throat. It was the most startling experience she’d ever had. She thought that she might die. Mrs. Gibbs reassured her on this point.

“Don’t fret. You’ve got my hankie up your sleeve. Use that if you’ve a need to. I don’t mind.”

May yanked the crumpled square of linen from the bulge it had made in her jumper’s cuff and clutched it to her detonating nose. Down at one corner the embroidered bee was smothered by royal jelly in result. There were some minor tremors after this, but finally May could control herself. She cleaned herself up with a dainty wipe, then stuffed the ruined rag back up her sleeve. Mrs. Gibbs had been right about the snuff. May couldn’t now smell anything at all, and doubted that she ever would again. Upon the spot she made a firm resolve that if she took up this deathmonger lark she’d find another way to mask the scent. Perhaps a eucalyptus sweet might work.

Unhurriedly, and walking side by side, the women went down to the room’s far end and stood a moment there beside the box just gazing at the luminous, still child. The clock ticked, then they both got down to work.

Mrs. Gibbs first took off the baby’s clothes. May was surprised how supple the child was, and said as how she thought it would be stiff.

“No, dear. They have the rigor for a time, but after that it all goes out of them. That’s how you know when they’re best in the ground.”

Next they dressed little May in her best things, what were laid out already on a chair, and the deathmonger did her hands and face with some white powder and a bit of rouge.

“Not too much. You should hardly know it’s there.”

At last, May was allowed to brush the hair. She was surprised how long it took to do, although it might be as she dragged it out and didn’t want it to be finished with. She did it gently, as she always did, so that she didn’t tug her daughter’s scalp. It looked like spun flax by the time she’d done.

The funeral next day went off all right. For saying, there were a big crowd turned up. Then everyone got back on with their lives and May discovered she’d been right about the second child she’d thought was on the way. They had another girl, 1909, little Louisa, named after May’s mam. May was determined, still, to have two girls, but rested after having baby Lou just for a year or two, to get her breath. The next child was put off for longer than intended when an Austrian Duke got shot so everybody had to go to war. May and a five-year-old Lou waved Tom off at Castle Station, praying he’d come back. He did. That First World War, May got off light, and afterwards the sex was better, too. She had four babies, straight off, on the trot.

Though May thought one more girl and then she’d stop, their second child, in 1917, turned out to be a boy. They named him Tom, after his dad, the way that little May, their firstborn girl, was named after her mam. In 1919, trying for a girl to go with Lou, she had another boy. This one was Walter, and the next was Jack, then after that was Frank, then she give up. By that point her and Tom and their five kids had moved to Green Street, down along the end, and all this time May was a deathmonger, a queen of afterbirth and of demise who took both of life’s extremes in her stride. She was thick limbed by then, and dour, and stout and all her youthful prettiness was gone. Her father died in 1926 and then her mother ten years after that, in 1936, after a score of years where she’d not come outside her house. May’s mam had trouble walking by that time, but that weren’t really why she stayed indoors. The truth of it was, she’d gone cornery. May’s brother Jim got her a wheelchair once, but they’d not reached the end of Bristol Street before she’d screamed and pleaded to go home. It was the cars, which were the first she’d seen.

Her husband Tom died two years after that, and that took all the wind out of May’s sails. Their daughter Lou was grown and married now, and May had grandchildren, two little girls. May wasn’t a deathmonger anymore. All that she asked for was a peaceful life, after the upsets and the scares she’d had. It didn’t seem much, though that was before they started talking of another war.