About the Author

Heather Parry is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Her debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year award and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. She is also the author of a short story collection, This Is My Body, Given For You, and a short non-fiction book, Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism, and writes the Substack general observations on eggs. She was raised in Rotherham and lives in Glasgow with her partner and their cats, Fidel and Ernesto.

Also by Heather Parry

Orpheus Builds a Girl

This Is My Body, Given For You

Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism

Heather Parry

CARRION CROW

for Madeleine,

a wise owl so young

Empedokles says the talon is the crystallization of the tendon, the nail is the wintered nerve.

– Robert Bringhurst, Hachadura VII

1

the French are noted for their skill in making forcemeats

Marguerite Périgord had been confined for the sake of her wellbeing. That’s what her mother had said, on that foggy February morning when she took Marguerite up the stairs with a small stack of books and an armful of bed linen and settled her into the cramped attic of the family home.

Marguerite, Cécile’s eldest daughter, was on the brink of putting herself out into the world, on the brink of marrying herself off to a man, and Cécile felt it necessary to bless her daughter with everything she knew about being such a thing – a woman, married to a man. There are some facts about the world that only your mother can teach you. So into the attic Marguerite had gone, climbing the stairs towards her promised freedom, and she would stay there until she had learned the lessons that would prepare her for the real world, the lessons that only a mother could teach. Such a queer girl. It was for the sake of her own wellbeing.

The Périgord family lived in a smart house in Chelsea, a residence befitting their blood, which was aristocratic, as Cécile would often remind them, and French aristocratic at that, which was the best type. Marguerite had never lived anywhere but the Chelsea house; she was born within its walls. Cécile had expelled her eldest child in her bedroom on the first floor, screaming into a pool of her maternal blood while holding the hands of staff who’d delivered their own babies in tin baths, alone. After her long recovery and countless fruitless efforts to expand the family, more than six years later came Louis, and after that, in quick fashion, Thérèse, and then there were no more children because there was no more husband at all. From then it had been the four of them: the wellborn Périgords.

The family home was on a street called Cheyne Row. It had three storeys above ground and a room perched at the top. A tall, thin house, like a top hat, with a secretive underworld in which all the work had, formerly, been done. In the basement, a front and back kitchen, a larder, a coal cellar; an old well came up in the front kitchen and had to be covered, for the odours that came up from the ground were offensive to the nose and inappropriate for the preparation of food. On the ground floor, a large reception area where, in the better days, Cécile would take her guests, where the good china watched from highly polished furniture, where the family had received the man whom Marguerite intended to marry and served him their most expensive tea. On the first floor, the cisterns, a grand bedroom for Cécil, with wrought-iron balcony front and back; on the second, a bathing room that held a magnificent eagle-clawed tub. On the third floor, a bedroom for Louis, and one for Thérèse, and the room in which Marguerite had previously lived. A moderate and untended garden reached out from the backside of the house, and in it were trees as old as the Périgord family, twisted inwards and heavy with their own weight, their branches lowering with each passing year. Above all this, Marguerite was now cocooned.

The attic was the best place for her; it was self-contained and petite, and so small as to be easily kept neat at all times. The hatch into the attic was covered by a piece of flooring that could be pushed upwards and aside when her mother wished to enter from below. To do so, Cécile would stand on the disfigured stairs beneath, bent and curled like the bodies dredged up from the bed of the Thames. Cécile had covered the floor around the hatch in thick rugs, once gold and rose and plum, now greyed and beiged with years of footfall; the rugs overlapped, as if to permit no sound from the attic. For rest, Marguerite had an iron-framed bed on which lay two pillows, feather-thin, for the straightness of the neck, and a cover for all seasons. At the end of Marguerite’s bed was a desk of very thick wood, yellow-brown, with knots engraved on the front of each wide leg. This was Marguerite’s primary torment, for she wished to sit at the desk and rewrite her Hugo stories, or draw a picture of her brother and sister, or press the bodies of the small insects that made their way out of the attic room’s woodwork, but she could not. Affixed to the desk was a black and gold sewing machine with a stabbing needle and a heavy wheel, the mechanisms of which crowded the underneath, making it painful to sit at and awkward to avoid.

In the far corner from the bed head was a tiny pedestal sink, by Doulton Sanitary Works of Lambeth and proudly marked so, and on the tops of the nickel taps were the words chaud and froid. The sink’s presence in the attic, almost certainly a late addition to the house, suggested that the space had previously been prepared for someone’s residence there, but the sink was unreliable, giving out only a trickle and often running filthy for days at a time. Next to the sink, Marguerite had a small area in which to relieve herself.

From the other side of the sink ran a wall which was mostly left free, as the hatch, through which her mother would appear, was placed directly in the middle of it. In the corner opposite the sink, however, she had a shelf of tidy books, the pages of which had become wet-weathered and ripped with the ferocity of repetition. Her mother encouraged her to read the works of Victor Hugo, which she said had been written by a fine Frenchman who knew about families like theirs. Marguerite tolerated these huge books, one of which ran to almost a thousand pages over three volumes, by selecting small sections, reading a scene or two and remaking the world in her head in a manner she would better enjoy, adding decadence and some fun for the characters. In the books of Victor Hugo there were a million dreary half-worlds to remake for yourself.

The other book Cécile encouraged her daughter to engage with religiously was Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. The copy on the attic shelf was the one that had been given to Cécile on the event of her own marriage, and within its worn pages were notes scribbled in pencil as to the reception of the many dishes that had been served in the Périgord household over the years since: taken very well by Mr and Mrs Lincolnshire alongside a slice of tongue; Cook reports that this jelly did not set, perhaps due to an excess of blood in the veal; made young Louis vomit bile. Cécile held firm in her conviction that, mistress of a house or simply a wife needing to feed her working husband, every woman stood to learn something useful from Isabella Beeton. During her time in the attic, Marguerite had found this to be incontrovertibly true.

On the floor underneath her bookshelf was a set of cast-iron scales in black, with a gold bowl on one side and on the other a circular platform where weights would sit. There were only two weights left, the two heaviest of the set, and these were not intended for Marguerite, but were a remnant of one of Cécile’s tempers; Thérèse, when she had been no more than four, had dropped the weights into the bath and caused the ceramic to crack and split, after which both weights and scales had been banished to the attic, as was Thérèse for two days, or perhaps it was three. Poor Thérèse had cried for the entirety of her confinement, and it was only when she grew silent, having fallen faint due to lack of food, that Marguerite herself had stormed the top of the house and rescued her. Cécile had carried on her day as if nothing was amiss, and from somewhere she found the money to have the ceramic on the bathtub mended, though it was never as grand afterwards, and not one of the children mentioned it again. But the scales remained in the attic, tarnished with badness.

The attic had no windows. There was only a small skylight where the two sides of the roof met, no more than the width and height of a book, so that Marguerite might acquire the upper-class pallor that Cécile said she needed. She had spent too much of her youth in the sun. Her attic space was far from the kitchens, so she might shed some of the childhood weight around her face and arms. On the walls of the attic were portraits of Queen Victoria, three in total, and, pinned tidily, a few of Marguerite’s favourite letters from her betrothed, and behind them the deeply embossed repeating patterns of the Lincrusta-Walton paper, installed some years prior with grand fanfare throughout the home, Cécile declaring, with assistance from a pamphlet, that it would not warp or be eaten by worms, was not cold in winter or hot in summer like stone or terracotta and was impenetrable and resistant to wet. Above Marguerite’s head there was a ceiling which rose to a point, or rather which sank at either edge of the room, making it difficult for her to stand near the walls. The paint covering the wood above her had flaked in places, and through the timber many-legged insects had burrowed, leaving small holes through which draughts sometimes blew.

At the head of Marguerite’s bed, sitting on a small set of drawers between mattress and shelf, there was a creature dead and stuffed and mounted on a wooden plinth. It was a black bat, and it stood straight up instead of hung, its head tilted upwards as if howling, its wings half mast, its tiny claws lifted in celebration, and at the bottom of its strange legs were the feet of a small duck. If you lifted the creature into the light you would see that its wings were skin-paper, and if you ran your finger pad over its face you could feel its tiny teeth. Its borrowed feet were spread with dark grey flaking between each toe, a heel appendage at the back to help it stand, and Marguerite could fathom no reason for this debasement of both animals other than that the artist had needed to keep the artwork upright and thought he could improve on each of God’s creations. Still, she could not part with it. Its progenitor had been a gift from her grandfather to her mother, the replacement passed on to Marguerite, and it reminded her that you can throw away the rules of life and let your creative instinct take over; that you can put strange, unfitting parts together and create something atypical but beautiful, something truly unique.

Marguerite’s engagement – the seed of her confinement – was to a solicitor, a Mr George Lewis, thirty-five years her senior and hailing from the north. He was a man who had never entered into marriage before and had fathered no children. Raising himself up from his beginnings, he had learned his trade and invested in turning himself into the kind of person that would inspire love in a woman, rather than earning enough money to buy his way into someone’s bed. Though decades separated them, Marguerite thought his grey hair attractive, and noticed the muscles of his calves through his trousers, and had often found herself thinking about the broadness of his hands around her forearms at night, how she might feel comfort there, above anything else. On his shoulders he carried the weight of the law and if his clients could not afford his services he discounted them, sometimes to almost nothing at all, and each time he did this he increased the price of his work for those with money. He had several apprentices, some of whom lived in the lower rooms of his house without paying a penny, and she had seen him in the street giving money to beggars and those without shoes, the poor unwashed that her mother bade them turn away from. Marguerite had first noticed Mr Lewis at the London Zoo, with a boy she soon understood to be his nephew. Noticing his gentle way with the boy in his charge, and the way he gave him his full attention, she had followed the two for a good while, then seized upon a moment in which the man was explaining the thylacine to his nephew. He was only a mite taller than her, and wider at the hips, and held himself straight, though his shoulders drooped from working over his books. His lips were wet and his hair was kept tight to his head, and he had pale wrinkles where, she imagined, he had squinted into the sun for the sake of feeling the heat on his face.

‘There exists a creature that laughs,’ said he as the child listened, rapt, ‘called a hyena. And one called a wolf, which is a wild version of the common dog. This creature here, from Tasmania in the Antipodes – they say he is a cross between the two.’

‘A laughing dog, then?’ ventured Marguerite, drawing the stranger’s attention abruptly from the boy. He smiled quickly at the challenge in her eyes, and her forwardness.

‘He is not laughing,’ said the boy.

‘Perhaps,’ said Mr Lewis, conspiratorially, ‘that’s because we have not told him a joke.’

Marguerite went to answer, a smart comment on her lips, but the boy took against the conversation – refusing to be caught in the silly fantasy of adults, for he knew much better – and led his uncle away from both Marguerite and the thylacine. But before they departed, Mr Lewis had asked her name and given his own, and as he bowed his head courteously his eyes had smiled, and something like curiosity had played upon his lips. She watched him roll up his trouser legs and wade with his nephew into a pool so they could crouch and better see the crabs and snails and things that live under the water in puddles, not caring that the wetness was creeping up the fabric at his knees and his jacket was dangling dangerously close to the water level. He was older, but for Marguerite he held the potential of joy, in more ways than one, and that was something that hadn’t existed in the Périgord household, or in Marguerite’s vision for the future, for all too long. Marguerite knew she would marry him.

While younger men had tried to grab her in the streets, had pushed her up against horses and had thought themselves deserving of affections for nothing more than a bunch of flowers cheaply bought from a woman on the next road, Mr Lewis courted her with tales of strange cases and readings from books. He sent fresh scones to the Cheyne Row house to treat the whole family, and on visiting the house he brought good sherry, napkins embroidered by his two beloved sisters, and, with Cécile’s grudging permission, played the piano, which hadn’t been touched since their father’s disappearance. He was merry with Marguerite’s siblings – he taught Louis to play pontoon and showed Thérèse some sleight of hand, and by the time he left both of them begged Marguerite to marry him, though he had not yet asked. When the proposal came by couriered letter Cécile took it gently out of her hand and told her the marriage would not work; he was not of the same breeding as their family, and it would save Marguerite the ignominy of a divorce to politely turn him down now. But it was Mr George Lewis that Marguerite now hung her life plans on, Mr George Lewis who was the key to her happiness, and so after weeks of pained silence at Cheyne Row, during which Thérèse and Louis barely spoke and Marguerite packed a suitcase in case she was sent away in disgrace, Cécile quietly re-read the letter, took some books from their sparse shelves, and promised her eldest daughter that she would prepare her for her marriage; she would teach the girl all the lessons she needed to learn.

Marguerite had not relished the prospect of weeks in the attic, with its draughts and its spiders and long days with nothing to do, but Cécile had spent a day arranging things that might entertain her daughter in the correct ways, and Marguerite recognized that it was the attic or nothing. Freedom always comes at a price, that much she had learned, and a confinement was a small sacrifice for the reward of being able to set the rest of her life exactly as she wanted it. She sent a letter to Mr Lewis, saying she would need a brief engagement, and that she would be unable to see him until she had allowed her mother time enough to prepare her in whatever way Cécile saw fit. And now the couple communicated solely through letters, his affections more muted on some occasions and more blunt on others, but each time Cécile brought a letter to her daughter, Marguerite was renewed, and applied herself to her books, and quoted Mrs Beeton’s thoughts on yeast dumplings and carving game, and ate her next meal in a manner restrained and delicate, and thought of the day she would marry her rolled-up-trouser husband, and her life could truly start.

But until then, she must wait. Sometimes, on long afternoons alone with her books, Marguerite would stare at the browning pages and listen to the world outside her cloying chrysalis, the world into which she would eventually emerge, a fully formed fluttering thing with sheer wings and soft-landing feet. Below her Louis and Thérèse went on with their lives, too young to worry yet about the manner of their marriages, still concerned with their schooling and the fashions that they hoped would not pass them by. Friends were not often welcomed into the house, for Cécile found few families that she felt she could trust, or whose children could be expected to keep to the standards of a Périgord home (though this could also be said of her own children). So the house remained quiet, with its staff already whittled down, over time, from many to just the one cook, who came in the mornings from her house nearby, and a cleaner, who lived in her own home some miles away and trundled in on the carriages, and Louis and Thérèse did not interrupt their sister’s preparations for marriage, never knocking at her attic hatch or shouting her name from the top of the staircase, nor bringing her sweets or other distractions that might make her preparations last even longer than they must.

Likewise, London had not waited for her appearance; it had not asked where she had gone, the red-cheeked, black-haired girl who used to run around its streets, who grew from a baby into a woman within its embrace. London went on regardless of Marguerite, without Marguerite, forgetting Marguerite. Hooves and carriages clattered across the cobblestones. Messengers shouted their deliveries. Children tripped and smashed their noses on the pavements, shouted at by their nannies. Marguerite thought she could hear the howling cries of families in Battersea Park scudding across the Thames, or the educated men walking in the physic garden, or perhaps even the rattling chests of the terminal inmates at the consumption hospital in Brompton. But more intensely than any of these things she could smell the shit-stink of the Thames, the deadly sewer on which boats brought wealth from abroad. The year she was born there had been six feet of pure filth on top of the water, Cécile had told her, and when Marguerite was nursing, the streets of the city had been so hot that the river fell and the excrement stuck to its walls and the whole of London choked on the poison smell of its own productions. Her first steps were taken with the stench of the river waiting just at the door; her siblings were born into it too. As they all grew, and found cause to spend more time indoors, newspapers reported that new measures were in place, that London was cleaner, that the people within it were now spared from all of that. And it seemed to be so; the fug of excrement had lifted, for a while, and Londoners had breathed a little easier. But in her attic Marguerite could once again smell the disgust of the Thames; she went to sleep with the miasma pooling on her pillow and woke to the fresh assault of human waste, having dreamed of cholera and dyspeptic expulsions, and sometimes, if she was lucky, her wedding.

But Marguerite’s confinement was for the sake of her wellbeing. She had been named for a princess of France, with all the traits and impulses that came with it. She could not marry until her mother was sure she would not make the mistakes that she, herself, had made, that had taken a young woman and left her bereft, decaying, inside Cheyne Row.

2

divisions of birds

Marguerite was woken by a small square of paint and a ragged nugget of wood falling from the ceiling above her onto her face. The wood had been painted white many years ago, perhaps before any of the current Périgord children were born, and through sluggish time had turned an uneven sort of grey which looked yellow in places. It had cracked and in parts stained, and Marguerite had found that if she scratched at it, hoary splinters would flake off, then wet chunks would come away at the edges, as if the wood had curdled and turned to white cheese. It was the colour and texture of her mother’s flesh. She pulled one of these moist chunks from her forehead; it left a residue on her skin. She lifted her stiff nightgown and wiped the feeling off. The piece of wood was thicker than the others she’d pulled from the ceiling over the course of her confinement, when her hands had such energy that only scratching would help. Sitting up, and exposing herself to the cold of the morning, she could see that the hole left by this falling nugget went almost through the wood; she poked a finger, the splinters scratching at the sides of her first knuckle, and with only a slight push it emerged into the space between the rafters and the roof proper. Marguerite hooked her finger and tugged; rotten wet timber came away and fell onto the bed. Another tug and the space was about the size of an eye, or the tight fist of an angered marsupial (she had seen several at the zoo). She could now push two fingers inside, and exploring around the space felt the layers and layers of fabric that had been pushed inside by workmen to fight off the cold, and then a sharp beak pecked at her fingers.

There was a great flapping inside the ceiling. Quickly Marguerite recovered herself and pushed her face towards the wood. Soft, half-formed black feathers moved within, then settled. Marguerite pulled one of them from the wet tissue of her eye, and as her vision adjusted to the dark of the space she could make out its shape: upright but slightly cowed, dark as the night and twitching in consternation. She saw flashes of brown and a pale chest; a lark

Alouette

she thought, this surely is

Alouette

a lark. But her sight settled, and she could see that it was neither woman nor songbird; the creature was black and solidly grown. It was a carrion crow, the type that gathered in the shadowy parts of the city and made them their own, the type of animal so ubiquitous they become nearly invisible, passing among the people almost entirely unobserved. But this was a particularly attractive bird, proud and shifting, energetic from tip to toe, conscious of being under Marguerite’s gaze but not intimidated by it. The crow stood on one of the rafters directly above the hole Marguerite had made and, as she watched, it shuffled sideways, pressing its body into the space where one piece of timber (horizontal) met another (vertical), and it turned its face, coquettish. What a strange creature, up here in the Périgord house. There must have been a loose roof tile, or a gap in the material somewhere, or had another piece of timber rotted through above Marguerite, welcoming the crow into her home?

The rattle of the attic hatch startled Marguerite, and her hands scrabbled to push the wet wood back where it came from. It was an action born of experience; things could be taken from her so quickly, so thoughtlessly. Any damage in the attic could be used against her, any small pleasure turned into a vice. By the time Cécile appeared through the hatch, Marguerite had moved one of the portraits of the queen and pinned it over the hole, hiding both the carrion crow and any damage that Marguerite could be said to have caused. Her mother would suspect nothing of Victoria.

Cécile brought a tray up to her eldest daughter; it held several small plates, a glass of white wine, a letter addressed in fine script to Miss Marguerite Périgord. Underneath the envelope was a single sheet of paper, an empty envelope and a pen. Marguerite settled herself on the bed as if she had just woken, and Cécile wiped her white-gloved hand along the sheet, pulling it tight and straight before she sat on it. She placed the tray on Marguerite’s bed and handed her one of the plates; Marguerite lifted the carved silver spoon and set about her meal. Today, it was a single egg poached in a heavy cream, the body of the egg gelatinous, the cream set, the yolk hardened throughout. Marguerite was learning to establish within herself the reserved palate and physical restraint of the married lady. She had been told that men found greed distasteful in their wives and it was likely that Marguerite, marrying down, would have to make do, at times, with rather less food than she might otherwise be used to. Yet Cécile could not bring herself to serve her children the peasant food on which she had been raised; she had spoiled her children as they grew, having their cook fill the house with baked biscuits and roasted birds of all kind – at least, in the early years of their youth, when such things were still available to them. These years had made Marguerite the hungry type, and if she was determined to marry a man of more humble origins then she would have to make do with less. The meals served to her in the attic were upper-class dishes, scaled down (thought Marguerite, in the words of Mrs Beeton, under such circumstances, the stomach soon becomes deranged). Cécile stroked her daughter’s long hair, pulled matted parts through with the tips of her fingers, while Marguerite cut tiny portions of the egg free with the spoon and brought them to her mouth.

‘Neatly, dear,’ said Cécile, from beneath the silk handkerchief she kept over her mouth during these visits. Marguerite stopped eating to kiss her mother’s hand, seeing her mother shiver against either the attic’s chill or her daughter’s touch, then took more cream up in the silver spoon. As her daughter ate, Cécile took Mrs Beeton’s book from the small shelf on the wall and flicked to the General Observations on Eggs:

‘Eggs are employed in a very great many articles of cookery, entrées and entremets, and they form an essential ingredient in pastry, creams, flip, &c. It is particularly necessary that they should be quite fresh, as nothing is worse than stale eggs. You’ll need to keep a chicken, Marguerite, if you’re determined to live like a pauper. You’ll need two chickens, in fact. If you have room in the garden to keep such things. Listen here: Cobbett justly says stale, or even preserved eggs, are things to be run from, not after.’

Cécile closed the book as if to make her point.

‘They have eggs preserved in old vinegar on display in all the public houses and you can smell them from several streets away. Imagine what such foods do to the gut, Marguerite. It’s no wonder the working classes die so young.’

As her mother replaced the book on the shelf, the portrait covering the new hole above Marguerite’s bed fell, and Marguerite saw the carrion crow fluff herself and shift around. She willed her mother not to turn in that direction; the ceiling was not tall enough at the side of the room for her mother to twist and turn in all directions, but it would take only a movement of the head for Cécile to notice the damage her daughter had done, and worse, the evidence of the creature within it.

Cécile ran her finger in the thick dust along the shelf.

‘What a condition to live in, Marguerite. You’re going to have to learn to tend to your surroundings. You’re not a child any more.’

Marguerite swallowed the last of the solid yolk, trying to remember the glossy orange ones that used to burst forth from a fried egg, coating her throat. Pain scored down her soft oesophagus, like nails drawn across a chalkboard. How long had it been since her last meal?

‘Where is the old dress fabric I brought for you to sew cloths? You’ll have to learn to be more independent, to apply yourself to the necessary tasks. Have a little of your own volition, won’t you?’

Cécile would leave the glass of wine and the rest of the plates and would retrieve the tray the next afternoon, or the one after that; it was so hard to keep hold of time these days. But when there were several plates, it meant Cécile would not be returning quickly.

‘Maman, how does my skin look now? I’ll bet you can see right through me.’

Cécile held her daughter’s chin as if she was examining a fine ceramic or an artwork handed to her by a small child; she turned it this way and that, as if catching the light.

‘You’re getting a good pallor. You’ve a sallowness of the cheek, and a strong nose underneath that furrowed brow. But there are still lines around your eyes, my darling; you simply must cure those moods of yours. Scowling ages a woman before her time. You should try to adopt a more passive expression. Don’t squint at your books. If there’s not enough light through the skylight it’s a sign that you should be asleep.’

Marguerite felt her mother’s lips briefly on the top of her head; Cécile took the tray and left her daughter. It was always this way; there were always things for Marguerite to work on, ways that she would have to be better, but no indication as to when she might be good enough to leave.

On the bed remained the letter. Marguerite tore it open and read.

My dearest Daisy,

Her mother hated the nickname Daisy; a friend had given Marguerite that name during her short-lived schooling and Cécile had complained to the child’s parents. A dismissal of the gravity of the girl’s true name, said Cécile, and an attempt to drag into the common gutter a child who held good blood in her veins. Yes Mother, she’d said, I hate it, what a silly little name, I hate anyone who uses it, and Cécile had been satisfied, but Marguerite had enjoyed it – Daisy, playful, a thing that grows out of the mud – and both Louis and Thérèse would use it for their sister when their mother could not hear. Mr Lewis had come to address her that way without ever being told; a sign, she thought.

My dearest Daisy,

I trust that you remain in good health and that your period of education is fruitful and enjoyable. How lucky you are to have a family that so strongly considers the needs of your future and will use their resources to ensure your marriage will be a successful one. If only all young women could consider themselves so well cared for, I think that London would be a more refined place. Certainly my own mother never considered my sisters in such a loving regard and they have ended up the worse for it.

My preparations for our wedding continue, my dearest Daisy, though I should impress upon you once again that the marriage will be a small affair, and your dress quite plain, and your ring a thin band of used gold. Gratuitous expense on such items is not, to me, a wise use of money, and you must understand that, as a working man, I must consider our finances at all times. Of course, we will feast in some regard after the ceremony, but there shall be little in the way of honeymoon; perhaps a night or two at a local inn to introduce ourselves to our new life – and to each other’s intimacies, and to the new form of our relationship – but our wedded life will begin in earnest without delay. There is much to organize in a new household, my Daisy, and I trust after your period of education you will be able to take on these responsibilities with immediate effect as I continue to provide the earnings on which we will live.

In his letters – and she had received many, by now – Mr Lewis always seemed both excessively pompous and overly concerned with pressing upon Marguerite what the conditions of their marriage would be, even though Marguerite had confirmed to him in person and in numerous written responses that she understood his financial situation and was more than willing to accept it. His wage, as much as she could ascertain, was growing year by year, and in conversation he had mentioned that he had a modest but decent sum set aside for any events that would necessitate a significant spend. Marguerite had no plans to force him to part with all his money; quite the opposite, in fact. She would rely on him putting his money away and leaving it there, but in the first instance she would like to regain the weight lost in the attic, and add a little more so she might feel adult, and fecund. She pressed a spider into the wall as she continued to read and wiped its body on her nightgown.

I am but a lowborn man of almost three times your age, Daisy, and if you were to find yourself another husband with whom you might live a more comfortable life more befitting your situation, I would hold no grudge nor bitterness towards you. All I want for you is your endless happiness and if that be with another man, I will not stand in your way.

With my fairest regards,

George

Marguerite took the letter and, turning the writing to the wall, pinned it over the crow’s hole, replacing the fallen queen. She took a sheet of paper and the envelope, on which she wrote Mr Lewis’s address, which she knew by heart, having copied it so many times before. Writing these letters was never a comfortable affair; she could perch on the corner of the sewing-machine desk, sitting side-saddle to keep her legs from the machine’s iron traps underneath, shifting her hands and paper with each half line to stop the words falling onto the wooden floor; or sit cross-legged on one of the damp rugs, bent almost double; or, and this was the choice she most often favoured, she could lie on her bed, using Victor Hugo as a surface area, and write quickly to avoid a pain in her back and shoulders. She placed her thin pillows under her chest and began to write as neatly as possible.

Dearest Mr Lewis,

George,

I am told that I remain well and that my countenance is maturing into one fit to be seen at your side. Certainly my shape diminishes with every meal; my mother has retained our very fine cook, but despite her efforts at inhibited nutrition I find myself longing for a sweet trifle or the crumbling sugar of a nutty macaroon. Can we have treats every day, George, when we are married? I don’t expect to be provided for in any material sense but it would be a delight to be kept well fed. As per my mother’s instruction I am learning every one of Mrs Beeton’s tricks and I feel confident that when I am let loose in even a small galley kitchen I will be able to whip sugar and egg whites into mountainous meringues, dust them with fresh icing snow and cover them with strawberries so ripe the juice seeps from the fruit and runs down the rivulets of the candied landscape. Might we have some space, George, to grow strawberries in a kitchen garden? And a plant of fresh rosemary for me to crest a thick cut of lamb, for a special occasion, and perhaps one of our neighbours, or those living in grander homes, might have some apple trees from which we can glean an Egremont Russet or two for a pie. I know you will work long days and there will not be money for unnecessary things, George, but when I imagine my life I see you lifting me up so I might pick an apple from a tree branch hanging over a tall wall, or you holding out to me a slice of bread with rhubarb and orange jam, or me wiping sweet red juice from your lips when we are both satisfied. These things hold no value on them, George, but they are meaningful to me, and these are the things I think of when I lie at night waiting for the morning to come. I hope you think of them too.

I once again ask you to put out of your mind this concern that I might turn my back on our engagement and instead run off to the country with a younger man. I have met younger men, George, and they are idiots; silly children in long britches who think that they own the very land on which they walk. I don’t care to spend my life having to pretend to be less intelligent or capable than I am for the sake of a young man’s ego; I would rather stand by the side of a person who is wise and warm and comfortable in himself. I’ve no desire for a Lord Byron, and I doubt Lady Byron was entirely happy with him either.

I must express my gratitude, however, for your endless patience with regards to our separation. Please know, George, that were the feelings of my mother not at stake I would have married you long before now, and we would be striding along the cobblestones of Camden with the newspapers in our hands and some hot scones from the baker in my basket, to go home and discuss the politics from abroad and drown our scones in melted butter and eat ourselves silly. Please send news of the outside world, of how the season turns and what new travelling attractions have come to the city. Please also send information about the treatment of the Thames; has there been an industrial accident of some sort? Every day the stench of it grows heavier still. Some days I could swear I would choke.

I feel sure that my time here must be coming to a close; I can recite my books on command, even that tiresome Frenchman, and if my mother is waiting until I take mastery of the sewing machine then I’m afraid I shall be here until we’re both dead. If you will, George, please do drop a note to my mother outlining your expectations of me as a wife, for I am sure they are reasonable and that I have already met them with my natural self. I am simply dying to get out.

Yours, with all my love and affections,

Daisy

Marguerite folded the paper and ran her tongue along the gummed edge of the envelope; it always caught a little, and if her mother had brought her the higher quality envelopes with the stiff paper she would cut her tongue and bleed on the paper. She’d suck the metallic taste for the rest of the day, a sharp respite from the miniature fatty, starchy plates brought by Cécile, and she would think of the life that was coming to her. She placed the letter on the floor by the entrance to the attic; her mother would take it when she next came.

Marguerite was impatient to get into the kitchens of Mr Lewis’s home. She had not seen his house, but she imagined a homely space, full to the brim with books; novels and textbooks on every shelf, piled by every chair, shoved into any space between timber, the house built on the very knowledge that Mr Lewis had gained over his life. It would be a good, solid house made of bricks, thin and not altogether long, but enough for a single man to bring in his young wife, for they could press themselves together and keep away the cold. There would be visitors most evenings and at the weekends when Mr Lewis was home, his colleagues or sisters (whom, despite the uncharacteristic comment in his letter, Mr Lewis loved dearly) or someone invited in from the cold that they did not know, but on whom they were keen to bestow their hospitality, and Marguerite would be a consummate hostess. In the daytimes, with Mr Lewis at work, Marguerite already knew with whom

Alouette

she would warm her cockles and keep herself busied. Perhaps the house would sag a little around the corners, like its owner, and if his street was like so many she’d seen in other parts of town, the very old streets, it would no longer stand up straight, instead leaning on its neighbours for dear life, so that if you removed one abode the rest would fall like dominoes. In these homes you could borrow a cup of sugar without even leaving your front door. In these homes you could smell the biscuits baking next door. In a house like this you could build a life, or maybe two, and you would never be lonely, would never have to step lightly on the landing for fear the expensive things would fall in the cabinets below you, would never call out to a family member without being heard.

Marguerite lay back on her bed, removed the paper covering the hole and watched the crow for some time, losing herself in the bird’s small movements and the way it smoothed its lower feathers with the help of its long, dark beak, angling its head slightly to ensure the softest edge of the beak against its body. Marguerite ran her own soft palm down the dark waves of hair that lay against her breast; we’re preening, she thought, we’re making ourselves neat. Like her, the bird settled into its roof space and stared upwards for some time, no doubt thinking about the adventures it would have when it flew into the sky. The beat of its wings would meet the excitement in its heart, its talons itching to land not far from this roof, where it would meet its lover, perch next to its lover, the two birds picking parasites out from each other’s plumes, raising their tails and rubbing their cloacas together, shrieking their pleasure across the London air. After the crow made its satisfaction, its feet would land on the cobbles of the street outside, the dewy grass of the largest parks, the frosted brick of the palace. Marguerite greatly envied the crow.

3

they are then hung, head downwards, in a dry and not too cold place; and there they ripen

When the rain fell on Marguerite’s rooftop, she felt it in the red marrow of her bones. The sloping roof would invite her to press bare palms and soles to it; the lashed and battered outside wall ran alongside her like a lover. Cécile, however, couldn’t stand the cacophony of the frigid storms, so when they began Marguerite would immediately set about rationing the rest of the food she had, for she might not see her mother for days, a week – perhaps even longer. Whether there was a feast or only a morsel left on the tray, Marguerite was expected to exercise her own restraint. This time, with her mother having visited just the day before, and Marguerite’s stomach already so small and so easily satisfied, the tray still held the following items:

a cup of white soup

a medium thick slice of jugged hare

a ladleful of ragout of cold neck of mutton

a baked apple dumpling

Of course, these were now cold, but most of the meals Cécile brought were already cold, as if the cook had prepared them hours before and Cécile had forgotten to deliver them. When the storms began, Marguerite ate the thin white soup on the first day, the hare on the second, and the third day pushed her spoon through the thick skin of yellow fat that had congealed on the top of the ragout. As she ate, swallowing the gelatinous mouthfuls of tendon and ligature, she recited from memory the advice that Mrs Beeton had given on the subject of old sheep’s meat:

The remains of an underdone leg of mutton may be converted into a very good family pudding, by cutting the meat into slices, and putting them into a basin lined with a suet crust. It should be seasoned well with pepper, salt and minced shallot, covered with a crust and boiled for about three hours.

There would be no waste in the house she would share with Mr Lewis; a single creature could go a long way to feed a family if she was careful and let nothing go spare. She would take the bones from Mr Lewis’s table and save them, and when he departed for work she would wrap them in napkins and unwrap them in Alouette’s rooms, and put them to boil with spices and butter. If the two of them could keep their attention on the pot to ensure it didn’t burn, she would catch the concoction at just the right time and feed it by the spoonful to Alouette, so that the hearty fat might soothe her songbird throat. She would save the yolks from separated eggs and whip them with lemons, for Alouette, into a rich and sinful curd. She would make her steamed puddings from leftover suet and drown them in fiery spirits. She felt sure that pudding bowls could be bought for a reasonable price, or perhaps gifted as a wedding celebration from her mother, who had more than enough crockery in the bowels of the house, left over from the too-brief period when the Périgords had staff to keep the household alive from morning till night, when grand meals with acquaintances had been occasion to show off their young family: Marguerite with her good hair, Louis a round-cheeked and serious baby and the seed of Thérèse just catching within their mother’s womb.

For months after the birth of Louis, Marguerite would be required to put on her shiny black shoes and her new woollen tights and say please and thank you and ever so nice to meet you, Mrs—, and Cook would serve them and their guests course after course, but then Marguerite would be sent upstairs halfway through the meal, put to bed by the nanny, and some time after her exhausted mother would climb the stairs too, and their itinerant father and his guests would carry on into the night. By the morning it would all have been cleaned up and Cécile wouldn’t appear until midday, even then moving only from the bedroom to the bathroom. It would be a ‘Périgord quiet day’ after that, the children kept in the far corners of the home and expected to entertain themselves neatly, without noise. These were Marguerite’s favourite days, after the zoo trips and the occasions they went to the country, because on these days, with her mother cloistered in the grand bedroom and her father somewhere else entirely and Louis in the arms of the nanny, Marguerite could sneak down to the bottom of the house and put on an apron and place a stool at the end of the surface on which Cook rolled out her pie crusts, and be fed scraps of delicious things all day, things that her mother would never have eaten, but which Cook would make to feed that briefly orphaned child, and which were all the more delightful for having been made with that intent. Steaming bowls of clear bone broth, so hot they blistered the tongue; the milk-boiled rice and smoked haddock that made up a spiced kedgeree; and if she was lucky, and Cook had had time to stop on the way to Cheyne Row, fat slices of jellied eel, a revelation to Marguerite, who reacted violently to the texture yet found herself compelled, a whole ocean inside her mouth. It was this way that she would feed Alouette, in the stolen hours of the afternoons, when her husband was at work and her second, secret life could flourish: not with grand ingredients but with love.

For those few years in her childhood, meals at the Périgord table were so rich and greedy you could use them to build a house, and Marguerite had preferred her illicit moments of culinary tourism down in the kitchens, eating the foods that other, poorer people ate, until her mother woke and her father dragged himself in, looking for all the world as if he had not slept the night before, and they force-fed themselves and their children indulgent meals that were befitting their status. But soon enough there was no more father, and then their meals were smaller, and sometimes there was no dessert, and the kitchen was half empty, and finally Cook and her helpers were sent home and replaced with someone who only came in when it was time for them to eat.

In the years without permanent staff, the Périgord children were spoiled not with food but with agency; though the meals in the kitchen were gone, the Périgord quiet days became more and more frequent. Absent a nanny or a governess, they were left to amuse themselves in the Cheyne Row house, which was a mansion to three children under ten years old. With their mother’s bedroom sealed, they had every other inch of the house to turn into their own world. There was bread in the lower kitchens and eggs in a basket; there were biscuits and fruits and sweets that were delivered from the striped shop on a nearby lane, for in those days the front door of the house did not open except to receive parcels.

Marguerite was in charge, Cécile would say so, and then with their mother safely taken away, to her bed as usual, Marguerite established her own dictatorship, sometimes benevolent and sometimes not, and by the third time it happened the children knew to apply rationing to their situation, for they did not know when they might see their mother next, when the experiment would be over. There was no bedtime, and no bath time, and no time to eat their dinner. The normal measure of a day did not apply here; they decided how each hour would be used, and how they could measure the amount of space before their mother appeared again. They would not bathe, not without Cécile, and they would eat what they could, and if they felt especially brave, they would take the front door key from its hidden place, the place that was not so secret any more, and sneak out onto Cheyne Row to charm the local fruit sellers with their golden smiles so that they might have baskets of food on account, for all the local vendors knew the Périgord family, and looked on Cécile with some pity, though Cécile told her children to keep away from them, told them they should not have any association with the street sellers.

In this way the Périgord children, kings of their own castle, would survive in their adventure until their mother resurfaced, when she would take to the kitchens below and send the cook away as she arrived at the back entrance, and would herself put together a meal, a rich stew, of which the children could each have three portions, and after dinner they would sit on the floor of the reception room and Cécile would pick off the scales and scabs that had taken Louis’s body, as they always did when Cécile disappeared, for the boy worried at himself endlessly without her presence. The girls would not look as Louis bled and cried, would not stare as Cécile rubbed stinging creams into his lizard skin, the damage undone slowly, and always leaving scars. For they were having adventures, the Périgord children, and they believed themselves more grown up for it. They learned that if you can handle hardship, if you can make it fun, there will always be a prize at the end of it.

Alone in her attic, Marguerite grew restless, as she always did when her mother was unable to attend to her, and she had to find ways to entertain herself, to help pass the time. Reading or writing could only do away with a few hours before her back began to spasm, as she knelt over Victor Hugo with the blanket and quilt pulled tight around her, or her pelvis began to ache from the unorthodox way she would have to situate herself at the desk in order to avoid the pointed appendages of the sewing machine. To lie on her back on the bed for more than a few hours would, eventually, cause her to experience a stabbing pain between the ribs when breathing in, but the attic was so squat in all but the middlemost part that standing or walking around was out of the question. On such occasions, when she had exhausted all the entertainment options available from the attic’s contents, Marguerite would turn towards herself.

There was no mirror in the attic, and when Marguerite managed to wedge herself between sewing machine and wall the only reflection she could get from the machine’s gold panel was distorted, metallic and swathed in debossed lines. She turned sideways, as much as she could, and couldn’t tell if she was seeing herself at all, such were the strange angles and void spaces of her body. She understood that by now she must be older than when she had first entered the attic; that there would be much less of her, no swells at her hips or breast, no youthful weight at her chin, nothing to fill her cheeks up when she smiled. And despite all her mother’s meals, the types of dishes that the Périgords had long eaten and enjoyed, there had necessarily been little of them, to prepare her for her wedding attire. She would have to gain that back, in her new home life, with marzipan, and apricot cream, and apples à la portugaise. There would be bakeries, French bakeries, from which she and Mr Lewis, or she and Alouette, could buy pastries on Saturday mornings for eating in the park. Her two relationships would be distinct, in many ways, but in this she felt they could mirror one another. She would have two lives, for a while at least, but she did not understand why they could not be each as pleasurable as the other. On the arm of her husband she would be the respectful muse, and as a much-loved wife she would enjoy the attentions of Mr Lewis, and make every attempt to fulfil her responsibilities in return. For her husband she would brew elder wine and dress sweetbreads and process veal so it might prove a more economical choice for the home (The London mode of cutting the carcass is considered better than that pursued in Edinburgh). And on the arm of her darling, Alouette, in the long hours when Mr Lewis was occupied elsewhere, with either the work that took so much of his effort or the travel that was required by a man of his skills, she would be both a recipient and a provider of unbridled pleasure. Men had long done this; men had always kept a mistress, a second family, a city full of women, so why could she, Marguerite, not learn from them? It struck her as only fair, and she would be a better wife to Mr Lewis if she would not demand everything from him. She would be a perfect wife for both her lovers. For Alouette, whether cooking in her small marital home or the close rooms of her sweetheart, Marguerite would make barberry tarts and trifles and, on a special occasion, a Charlotte Russe. She would eat so well and so often, with both her husband and her lover, that she would soon be twice the woman she was now, growing ripe and so full she could drop, and Alouette would pick her right off the branch and lick the juice from her skin. If Marguerite’s body now belonged to her mother, she knew how, in time, she would gain it back.

Her face was a more urgent concern. She had no doubt acquired the pallor Cécile was so keen on; this was clear from the hues of the rest of her skin, which seemed blue on certain mornings, and she knew her hair had thinned in places, because so much of it seemed to be left on her pillows. If only she could see her face she might know what to do with it, and could even ask Cécile for the products that would brighten up her complexion, for it had surely been long enough since she’d seen either sun or rain, and there would no doubt be layers of herself that needed to be scratched off, and soothed, and replaced with something better, something that came from a bottle. She would spend an entire day in her mother’s bedroom when she was free; she would reach into her own mouth and grab one of the thin, shimmering pieces of skin she often felt there. When she pulled, it would run all the way to her lips and the flesh around her mouth, her nostrils, up her nose and around her eyes until it came away at her hairline, and it would continue to pull away down her neck and onto her torso, and Marguerite would keep on tugging until there was a complete skin-thin copy of her whole body, an empty chrysalis, and next to it she would be baby-fresh, free from her dead cells. Cécile would comb her hair through, curling it into bundles that could be pinned neatly to the back of her head, and in the brush of Cécile’s hands against her skin they would regain something they had long lost, the mother and daughter. The thought of it made Marguerite blush.

Cécile’s dressing table had always been a thing of beauty. It was a grand-looking piece, a gold-framed mirror with a table in front of it full of small glass dropper bottles that sprayed plumes of scent in every direction. The seat was padded and fringed with gold, and the material on it made the toddling Thérèse giggle so much the rest of them couldn’t help but laugh too. When Cécile was otherwise disposed, the three children would take to her dressing table and douse themselves in perfumes so strong it caused their eyes to run. More than once Cécile returned to find her children pouring milk onto their own faces, for Louis had sprayed the girls with something redolent but painful and managed to drench his own poor skin as well. For this, the children were chastised and left without supper, about which they could cry as loud as they liked; they would stay hungry. But it was Marguerite who would be locked in her room with her hunger, for she should have stopped her brother, of course; she should have met her responsibilities in the absence of Cécile, for she was the oldest by far, and a girl as well. On days like this Marguerite simply put herself to sleep and stayed there until she was woken by the sound of the door unlocking. She had learned to be very good at waiting.

But in the attic she had no dressing table, no mirror and no milk that she might pour upon her skin – not to save her stinging eyes, now, but to plump her skin. A cold cream, she’d read, kept the wrinkles at bay and improved the complexion. But Cécile would not bring her products such as these, impressing upon Marguerite time and time again that she must use her ingenuity if she wanted to live as Mr Lewis lived, and so an idea occurred. Marguerite leaned over the cup that had held the white soup, and saw a thin film of fat; the remnants of the heavy cream that formed part of the dish. At several days old it was little more than a slick of moisture, but Marguerite scooped it up with her fingertips and set about massaging it under her eyes, which threatened to water at the sourness of it. Her skin thirsted for such a solution, that much she could tell, and her flesh vibrated with the attention. Squinting into the scored gold of the Singer, she fancied that her brows were unruly and, by applying her fingernails in a pinching motion she could, with incredible patience, remove some of these hairs from her face, though she had only the sharp pain to tell her that she had succeeded. Taking the edge of the pillowcase and rolling it tight, Marguerite found that the insides of her ears were thick with mustard-coloured wax; this she removed with the help of her overgrown nails, though not without catching herself agonizingly several times on the soft tissue of her ear canal. She retrieved so much matter that she rolled it into a ball and put it neatly on the shelf by her books; in a situation like hers, wax was a thoroughly useful material, and as her mother said, she did have to learn to be frugal. Marguerite slapped herself several times, imagining the charming blush that would rise on her face, and ran her palms over her scalp, luxuriating in the sensation and pulling several scabs free of her skin. Perhaps if she could procure a freshly shined spoon from her mother, she might set about examining her pores in the back of it, pushing her fingers so that the dirt would come clear, a habit that she had indulged in many times at Cécile’s dressing table. Feeling somewhat freshened and beautified, Marguerite let her hands meander over her neck and décolletage and down onto the rest of her body. Here, she would place Mr Lewis’s hand, to show him the things that she enjoyed. And here was where Aloutte had dragged her tongue along a throat. Here she could still feel the press of her lover’s lips, in the soft nest of hair at her armpit. She had learned that every inch of her body could bring her such joy.

The rain had finally begun to lessen, in intensity at least, and as she let herself lie back on the sheets of her bed, Marguerite noticed a scratching from the roof above her head. Scrambling to her knees, she lit one of the candles, which had almost burned to nothing, pulled Mr Lewis’s letter away from the wall and held the light to the hole underneath. The carrion crow was there again, feathers wet from the formerly unrelenting rain outside, its head twitching to try and rid itself from raindrops, its wings opening and closing in the tiny space. The more it spread, the more its feathers caught on the thick woven fabric that lined the roof. It turned and its claws took up threads; it was turning itself into an insect caught in a web. Marguerite pushed her two fingers into the hole in her ceiling and found that more chunks of cheese-wood came away with little effort, as if the whole attic might fall in if she pulled with her whole weight. It was wet, and gave easily, and soon fell onto Marguerite’s bedcover, spreading its moisture in neat little stains, until she could push four fingers in up to the knuckles, and holding the candle above her head to shed some thin light inside she reached out to grab the fabric with her fingertips. The carrion crow flapped and screeched and pecked at her fingers, drawing a sharp line of blood (place the thumb of the left hand firmly over the cut, until all the bleeding ceases). Marguerite worried for the potential annoyance of her mother in the lower floors but the rough weave of the fabric caught on her nails, long unattended and sharpened by her scraping them on the metal of her bed, and by crossing her fingers she pulled from the hole a handful of what looked like matted sheep’s wool. She pushed her fingers in again and brought out more of the strange matter; somewhere between down and hay, in its driest parts collapsed like ash. She coughed the dust off it, and laid it underneath her bed, and into the space she shone her candle again; she could see the crow stretch and clean herself, able to shake out her glossy wings and turn her body around to pick at her rear feathers. No longer was she pushed up against rafter and wall – Marguerite had decided the bird was a she, as she held her dark beak into the air and had tiny, smart eyes that would take in all things around her. The bird dried herself off, and nibbled into the spaces between her feathers, and tucked herself into a position where she could wait out the icy rain. Now the space was all hers, and limited though it might be, and even with the knowledge there must be a leak, and it must be cold, and it wouldn’t even give much protection from the rain, now that space belonged to the crow.

4

the remains of cold joints, nicely garnished

The days were lengthening in the attic, the light staying longer in the city sky; Marguerite could tell that much through the few inches of wood and air and slate between her and the outside world, and could feel the lightness of encroaching spring on her skin and in the cloistered air she breathed. Marguerite did not welcome the change of seasons; shorter nights meant more waking hours that she would have to somehow pass.

Over the many nights of her confinement Marguerite had lain in the dark, trying to make out the shape of the duck-bat at her head, to see if she could make him move without the constricting influence of the harsh daylight with all its relentless truth-telling, and he would remain still, perhaps flapping those paper wings a little, and eventually she would fall asleep and wake up to brightness. But lately she didn’t fall, she clung, and she held on so long, staring into the dark, that the duck-bat would leave his unnatural, uncomfortable perch, and crack his stiff, long-wasted forearms, and she would hear the parts of him snap and break and stretch, and he would take off into the tallest point of her squat attic, exploring his limited freedom and the comforting hug of night. But the duck-bat could not land, of course; he could not grasp at the exposed timber in the attic with the feet he’d been given, and if he tried to turn upside down the weight of his thick webbing turned him once again to stand straight in the air. So the duck-bat could fly his short circuit around the summit of the attic, a single line traversed again and again, or could circle to the floor and graze his wings on the rugs, thick with age and dust and so filthy they were almost serrated, or he could return to his podium, knowing now that he could free himself at will, but also that there was nowhere else he could land.

The bed underneath Marguerite seemed to have lost its spirit. She felt the corners and abrasions of it as she never had before, she the princess and it an entire sack of peas. If Marguerite passed the majority of her days unaware of the intricacies of her own body, in the night this blessed ignorance passed and instead she was consumed with knowledge. There were her bones, resting awkwardly against the solidifying mass of the mattress. There were her teeth, aching at the back. There was her stomach, collapsing inwards, folding like an envelope, taking away all unnecessary space that it was not using, because there was not enough room inside Marguerite for all the things she was expected to contain. In the daylight she could look down at herself and see that she was shrinking, she was smaller, she was almost nothing at all. But in the darkness, she could feel everything inside her and the way it tore at her boundaries. She would seize, her muscles primed. She would flush, as if with embarrassment, finding herself shivering in one moment and bathed in perspiration the next, the flesh at her cheeks burning as if filled with tiny needles, each one pulled out and in and out and in until the skin there was completely numb. Her legs would suddenly become host to a thousand woodlice, crawling around in the space between her muscles and her skin, leaving her unable to lie still, unable to stop moving from one side of her body to the next, and these anxious creatures would gather between her legs, scurrying about her, running circles around the most sensitive parts of her, until she would have to hold herself there with both hands, or lie on her front and push the tips of her fingers into her skin, and even then it would not stop them moving, these not-real things, these tormenting ghost bugs.

The night-time saw her on her knees on her family’s old rugs, squatting in front of her mother’s sewing machine, lying on the floor with her legs up on the wall to try to make more of the tiny space she lived in, her head full of the shit-stink from the Thames, unfathomable in the dark and yet there so thickly she could taste it. And she would find she had fallen asleep, but woke up in a sweat again, and by the time the attic grew light and the duck-bat was still she was so exhausted she could cry. These nights used to be sporadic. Now, Marguerite couldn’t remember when she had last slept through till morning. Marguerite wasn’t sure when she woke whether it was a different day at all.

The carrion crow announced herself with a screech from her throat and a scraping of her needle-claws against the timber above Marguerite’s head. She had kept the ceiling hole covered for the sake of privacy, but each time her bird-friend called to her she would remove the barrier between them and, if it was light, watch the crow bathe in the sunshine from the growing hole in the roof; each time the bird entered she knocked away a scrap of slate, making a more comfortable door for herself, and now in the daytime Marguerite could see her well enough, could make out her blue shades and the nobility in her stature, and today she could see that the crow had had some small accident, and had a small fissure of sorts on her right foot.

‘Look at you, look at you. Have you been somewhere you shouldn’t have?’

Marguerite imagined the crow sneaking, wriggling her soft-plumed body into another crack in another roof somewhere across the river, to meet another bird there, a filthy little rendezvous. Or perhaps this was the rendezvous, and in some house across the water there was another girl in an attic waiting for her bird to come back?

The crow did not respond, apart from to bother the wound on her leg with her beak; out from it she picked gravel and dirt. Perhaps there was infection, swallowed down by the crow, or perhaps she would peck straight through and take off her whole leg?

No; birds needed balance. To lose a leg would be a tragedy. When she was satisfied that her injury was cleaned, the crow took the beak to her body, attacking herself with such ferocity that Marguerite cried out, worried she might bleed or break her skin or cut so deeply into her round stomach that her intestines would fall straight out and into the dirt of the roof space, a situation so desperate it could not be undone; Marguerite would simply have to watch her die. But the bird took from herself the feathers that were half-broken, the small objects lodged in her body. She rubbed with her beak the oil that had built up too sleekly on her feathers. She was making herself smarter, more attractive. And attractive she surely was.

Marguerite looked down at her own body; how long had it been since she had washed? She could attend to her head, but the body was a different matter. In the attic she only had her miniature Doulton Sanitary Works of Lambeth pedestal sink. The family had always bathed in the grand bathroom on the second floor, lying one after the other in the cast-iron tub; Cécile often told the story of the five men that had been required to bring the tub into the house, and her displeasure when one had fallen and dropped it onto himself, scraping the heirloom along the walls of the staircase and damaging it beyond repair. The scratched side of the tub was, from then on, hidden against the bathroom wall, and when Marguerite had been a child she had shared the tub with Louis and, dunked in from their nanny’s arms, baby Thérèse. By the time Thérèse cracked the ceramic, the bath was long past its best. When she outgrew bath times with her siblings, and had to spend her own time filling the bath from buckets of heated water, she would fill it so high that her whole body could be kept under the water line, her hair like Medusa’s snakes reaching out into the world around her, her back floating free from the place where she would otherwise lie. She was weightless there, and yet embodied. The world around her muted, her own pulse the strongest thing she could hear. And then Louis would find her and she would fail to notice him until the stream of his piss interrupted her dreaming and she would rise up out of the water only to find he had already run away with himself in his hand, laughing though his cheeks were bare, and she would thrash him the minute she caught him. Piss-sister, he cried as he ran to his room, and if Cécile heard, he would be spared his sister’s wrath, because the eldest son is to be kept as if in cotton, no matter where he puts his manhood. No matter into whose bathwater he might piss.

Now, when the half-hearted splashes from the pedestal sink were not enough, when Cécile found her daughter’s odours too abrasive, her breath too strong, Marguerite had to make do with a folded flannel in a bowl of warm water. Cécile would deliver a towel and the flannel and a bowl and leave her daughter to attend to herself, saying you will have to learn to manage your own hygiene, darling, as if Marguerite was a babe in arms instead of a grown woman who had been attending to herself since her mother had decided she was too tired to do it. Such comments had led Marguerite to conclude, long ago, that Cécile’s memories might have been tied, in some way, to her own, but they were two entirely different creatures.

Running her hands along the cold and clammy flesh of her legs, Marguerite thought longingly of the days when Cécile bathed them as much as twice a week, bringing the three of them into her sprawling bathroom and setting a chest in front of the door so they might not be disturbed. It was a fantasy land for Thérèse and Louis, the tub a vast chasm in the landscape of the house, the steam forming clouds through which they could fly, and beneath the water was Marguerite, submerged, boiled like a lobster, a snapdragon waiting to pounce. Cécile on these occasions would open her small chest of soaps, their grandfather’s soaps, the ones that had been delivered in boxes once a month, in the early life of Marguerite, by men with serious expressions, along with gifts for the youngsters and fresh flowers for Cécile. Marguerite would hide from these men, who acted as if they were delivering bad news or a fresh corpse, but every time brought treats instead. The bunches of flowers were arranged downstairs and there were flowers inside the soaps too. Marguerite’s maternal grandfather could clarify fat around a fresh bloom, and Marguerite considered it magic. When the soaps were worn down to the petals, they would be placed back into their box, and patience would be required until the next bath time, when the water was at its hottest, and only then would Cécile take the almost-finished bars from their box, float them in the water and watch with her progeny as the soap melted into the water and freed the flower once and for all.

There was only one family other than theirs who received these special soaps from James Hargreaves, and that was the family of Queen Victoria herself. Alongside his line of everyday products for plebeian families up and down the country, Cécile’s father also made specialist products by appointment to the queen, for she must have the best things, and only she. These particular soaps were not for sale to the general public, not even the aristocratic class. But Mr Hargreaves was a man who had grand aspirations, a man who came from a humble place, and if the Queen of England was to have flowers in soap, then his only daughter would have them too. Victoria’s patronage had allowed him to marry Cécile into a good family, and so too had Victoria allowed him to put flowers in soap for her. With the chest in front of the bathroom door and the special box of the queen’s soaps, the children felt they were sharing a great secret with their mother; a crime in which they were all complicit. They were royalty in that water, the wellborn Périgords, and sometimes, when she had particularly dark circles under her eyes, or sometimes around them, Cécile would stand watching her children, and her shoulders would drop, and she would take off her clothes and get into the tub, the four of them laughing and chasing for space, and on these days the children would touch Cécile’s belly, where they came from, and understand what love felt like.

When the soaps had run out, and the deliveries long since suspended, the bath times were abandoned; no longer did Cécile follow them into the bathroom and push something heavy across the inside of the door. With none of Queen Victoria’s special soap to help them stay clean, it was as if the task was below Cécile. It was Cook who bathed Thérèse, and Marguerite who bathed Louis, hiding the scratches and bites he would give her, knowing that she would only be blamed for not controlling him. Then, later, their steaming baths of hot water were only warm, and then tepid, and often not even that. Yet this did not stop Cécile from smelling like peonies. There were other places she could buy soap, and no matter the cost, she always would. In Marguerite’s teen years, Cécile emerged into the increasingly dank and dreary rooms of the Cheyne Row house like a burst of paint, and no matter what had gone on the night before, no matter whether the children had been denied their evening meal, or Cécile had had a screaming fit at the cook, or Louis had screamed and broken china and pinched his sisters for the loss of his beloved father, there she was, floating from her own bedroom on a cloud of scented matter, made up and tightened into a dress, her neckline up to her jaw, her hair almost always pinned up at the back. The mornings where Cécile left her hair down were the sad mornings, and the rest of the day would not be good, but on these days the children ran to bury their faces in their mother’s back, for the stuff that grew from her head smelled so good they could eat it.

When Cécile was in one of her wistful moods, when she had bathed herself and smelled of the hair oils that she kept on her dresser, she would bring a bronze-coloured comb into the attic, the same that her own mother had used on her teenage tangles, and pull its chipped tines across Marguerite’s scalp, scattering feather-light flakes of the girl across the bed and floor. She would massage her fingers into her own hair, then rub oil into the knots that had formed in Marguerite’s, working to pull the strands free one by one until the hair hung flat and neat, just like when Marguerite was a child. This was when Cécile remained with her the longest; it was when she told stories from when Marguerite was a baby, or stories from her own youth, or tales of how the Périgords, a hundred years previously, had fled France with all the belongings they could stuff into their trunks and landed in London. She wore these stories like a protective shell; you can remove people from their palaces, Cécile said, but you cannot alter their blood. Cécile had not brought her mother’s comb to the attic for a long time. These days Marguerite could barely remember what the grand bathroom looked like; she could only fathom it as a memory of a place she had once visited, rather than a room that remained just a few yards below her. She tried to remember the feeling of being wet, when she might last have been properly wet, and all she could do was to fill the tiny pedestal sink full of tepid, dirty water, or drag the pads of her fingers across her upper arms to feel the constant dampness there, the oil on her feathers. As the carrion crow groomed her plumage, Marguerite dragged her clawed fingers through her own hair; matted at the scalp, tangled into a bunch at her shoulders, and dry at the ends where it hung on her thighs. She could never attend her own wedding in such a condition; what would Mr Lewis say, with a veil on top of a bird’s nest? She grabbed the knotted mass and shook it, using her long, pointed nails as a comb, pushing the sharpened points into the most matted parts and tugging gently. In among the threads were bits of other matter; crumbs, perhaps, or flakes of paint from the ceiling and floor. Under the nail of her ring finger she found a woodlouse, so old as to be almost fossilized. She flipped it onto its back on the pad of her thumb then crushed it against the wall, pulling her thumb across the embossed swirls of the wallpaper, and there was so little moisture left in the poor creature there was barely even a smear of it; only dust and detached parts. By the time she had made her way over half her head, Marguerite had found, and had placed on the shelf:

four dead scabs (two intact; two partial)

one feather (small)

six tiny bugs (unidentifiable)

one link from a thin gold chain (which Marguerite could not remember wearing)

two hair pins (rusted)

three pieces of tissue (hard)

one mass of apple pips (five in total)

She had gathered a substantial pile of hair, for she had quickly given up patience with the attempts to untangle and realized that such problematic little knots could not be undone; they could only be removed, excised from the whole. If a knot did not yield, Marguerite simply yanked her nails through it and out would come the heart of the issue and a half-handful of hair along with it. But for every mass of hair that Marguerite attacked, three more seemed to spring up in their place. Each section became its own project, but at the end of each one Marguerite had the pleasure of a clear, smooth path from scalp to thigh; she was presentable again.

5

nearly pure albumen

The carrion crow had, in the short while since Marguerite had checked on her, settled in very nicely to the project of making her nest. As Marguerite watched, the crow shredded a variety of scavenged materials into smaller and smaller pieces, until they were the same, of a muchness, and perfect for her to weave together neatly; it was as if she had carried out this process a dozen times before. She had torn chunks from the wads of material that kept the heat trapped; she had brought in yellowed strips of newspaper that had stiffened over time; she flew away and returned with a few tufts of what looked like fur, stolen from a lady’s shoulders. Marguerite could smell the lady still on it; her perfume, the oil she used in her bath, the stale cigar scent that hangs on the clothes from a day spent smoking in a room without open windows. She sucked desperately at the air for the taste of dank tobacco, the knowledge that it had been smoked by another mouth. She knew it well: the burnt leaves mixed with a perfume, the combination soaking into damp bedsheet; the afternoon sun warming skin, the smell of two bodies; fur brushing against her cheek.

No, not fur; it was the nape-pinned curls of her lover against her skin. The burnt tobacco was from the mouth of her lover. The warming skin, the second body, the damp bedsheets; they belonged to Marguerite and her lover, Alouette, as they lay with brandy breath and a satisfied laziness, four soft thighs pressed together and their hands sweet-smelling of each other. Alouette, having spent her nights singing, meandering in the early light across the city so she might stand where Marguerite could see her from an upstairs window, and there she would stay, sometimes the whole morning, pretending to read a newspaper, until Marguerite could fashion some plausible excuse for leaving the house, some errand for her mother that would take several hours, or a manufactured betterment trip to the physic garden or the museum, and when Marguerite gave the signal, Alouette would turn on her stained heels and start walking, and when Marguerite was out of sight of all who knew her she would turn a street towards Alouette’s small room, and only behind Alouette’s door would they meet, and Marguerite would drink up the vice smells and tastes of her lover, of another life that she knew almost nothing of, a second-hand pleasure of which she could only dream. In stolen hours Alouette would feed her langues de chat, and they would drink strong coffee, and Marguerite would push layers of fabric back on itself to expose her lover, to please her as she had now learned to do, and Alouette would reach and moan for her ankles, and Marguerite would turn, and they would lose themselves until Alouette fell asleep, and there Marguerite would leave her, closing the door softly behind her, washing her mouth and hands in a fountain before she came home, taking a receipt or a ticket from the city floor so she could wave it in the direction of her mother as alibi, but still, she was certain, stinking like someone who had got exactly what she wanted. She took the foetid fur and sucked on it.

Hardly noticing the low braying sound coming from her stomach, Marguerite began to look around for something that she might contribute to the carrion crow’s nest, wanting to be a part of the bird’s home-making, lest she forget she was there and fly away without a moment’s notice. The crow deserved a home, a home that she could share, that she could make her own; she must have one, Marguerite knew she must. There was the now-sodden fur and all her pulled-out hair, which she pushed into the hole in the ceiling and fingered towards where the bird was creating, but it didn’t feel enough. The nest should be homely, delightful, sheer comfort for this glorious creature. Marguerite pulled the sheet from her mattress and remembered the strange sensations against her back in the night-time; she knelt and bit through the material, hooking her fingertips into the hole she’d made and ripping it wider. She had thought her bed was composed of padding and bedsprings, the way it creaked when she moved over in her rare sleep.

Their beds had always been made of these things before, and when they had leapt on Louis’s bed as young children the springs had torn through the heavy fabric on top and cut right into Thérèse’s calf, sending Louis into a faint as the blood shot from the pumping muscle and onto the chocolate and gold Lincrusta-Walton. Cécile had forced the spring back in with the help of Cook and had sewn the tear closed with the thickest yarn they could find while the children had kept the spring pushed down. But inside her bed now was something altogether different; inside the bed were rags, and paper, and, yes it must be, it was straw. This was the cause of the sore lesions on her lower back; inside it there were tiny leaping things, creatures the size of a wrinkle in a finger, but they leapt out and onto Marguerite’s skin. She tore a nub of the straw mixture free from her bed and pushed it through to the space where the crow might use it, then did her best to cover the divot in her bed by spreading the rest out and hiding the results of her excavation with her bedcover. At least the carrion crow would make good use of the materials.

But now: a torn bed, bitten, as if an animal had been about it. A cold, low horror set in as her mother’s words (you are ferocious, Marguerite) were spoken (a dangerous, dangerous girl) from a disembodied mouth over her shoulder. A ripped sheet would not do, not for Cécile, and an error like this – would it be an additional month? Or six? Every time Marguerite erred, every time she showed she could not be trusted out in the world, her period of education seemed to grow longer. She would have to fix it. She took deep breaths, deep breaths; she held one hand over her mouth and another over her stomach, as she had learned to do, and closed her eyes and breathed. She could make it better. She could make it good as new. All she would need was a needle and thread.

Marguerite approached the neglected sewing machine, covered in rust and a thick black substance, and the pile of mouldering fabrics next to it, which her mother had instructed her to sew into cloths. Since the departure of the household staff, the machine had festered in the basement until Cécile, assisted by Louis, had hauled it to the top of the house. A cold dread settled on her; innumerable times, in the early days of her confinement, had she taken up a thread and failed to sew a straight line onto her nightgown as she sat at the torturous desk. You will perhaps be put to work, when money is scarce, her mother had said, lest you become nothing but a burden to your husband.

She snapped the needle from the sewing machine; it was easier than she had hoped. The insides of her bed were spilling only gently, and she held the material in with her toes, bent almost double, while she brought the two sides of the stiff sheet together and sewed. Cécile would never have to know. As she worked at the sheet, the small effort caused Marguerite’s arms to grow heavy and tired. It could not have been more than a few minutes, but overcome with fatigue, she lay down on the dust-laden rug. She found she could place her thumb and third finger around her upper arm and have the nails meet on the other side, and when she brought her right fist to her right shoulder there was nothing to suggest the presence of a muscle. Strange, how women must be so slight when they enter into marriage; so small they might slip in beside a man without his having to move himself to make room. Paper ladies, hanging off the arms of their husbands, adding no weight to them, not even bringing their own names. Marguerite would have to feed herself up when she finally made it to Mr Lewis’s house, would have to eat bowls full of orange compôte and almond icing by the handful, so she might regain the pleasing plumpness around her middle, so at night in bed it would keep her warm, and in the day times, when Mr Lewis was at work and she went a-wandering, it might please, once again, the hands of her lover.

Marguerite tried to imagine her mother as one of these newly married paper women; young, tiny, as thin as the skin stretched across her duck-bat’s wings. Of course, neither Cécile’s mother nor the senior Mrs Périgord, the mother of Cécile’s husband, had ever in their married lives sewn a hem, or mended a sock, or brought to life small dolls for their children; the Périgords would never demean themselves with physical labour, no matter how domestic, nor debase themselves with tending to the hysterical needs of children, which they considered a job for hired help. Marguerite’s paternal grandmother used her hands for directing her staff, as they ferried the family endlessly between their five estates; late summer in Eastbourne, up to Yorkshire to shoot grouse throughout September, to Scotland for the winter months, to Ireland to fish salmon in spring, and, of course, to London for The Season. The senior Mrs Périgord considered socializing a full-time occupation, for they had a reputation to keep, and so their favourite dishes were delivered across borders and seas, their best china was replicated in five locations, their children had tutors when they were not sent away, and everyone spoke highly of the Périgords. The family’s fondness for serving turtle soup was such that, when they were in Scotland for the winter months, they had the creatures sent up live from London three times a week, and from the local suppliers they would order, every Monday, an enormous ham, several pounds of veal and a basket full of its knuckles, freshly churned butter, sugar, onions, cloves, mace, milk, eggs, bay leaves, parsley, and bunches and bunches of the sweet herbs that gave the dish its inimitable taste (says Mrs Beeton, This is the most expensive soup brought to table). If you listened quietly in the Périgords’ winter house you would likely hear the crack of a turtle shell as Cook leaned into it with her knife, the one that she kept for only this job, the one heavy enough to crack a creature’s armour and sharp enough to remove its head with a single chop. When live turtle is dear, said Mrs Beeton, many cooks use the tinned turtle, which is killed when caught, and preserved by being put in hermetically-sealed canisters, and so sent over to England. But the Périgords would have nothing hermetically sealed, so their Cook was as proficient in de-shelling turtles as she was in beheading pheasants, and bleeding rabbits, and shucking the oysters brought to them by the salt-smelling men from the Hebridean shores. Cook would have letters from her own family sent up with the boxes that clipped and snapped and had the distinct smell of the upper classes, and by the time she sat down to read the letters the Périgords would have already half digested the poor unknowing messengers of her children’s good wishes.

The high society set in Scotland would flock to the Périgord house in expectation of this particular dish (the green turtle is highly prized on account of the delicious quality of its flesh), yet the Périgords themselves had no real affinity for it, finding themselves restless and beset with digestive issues every time they consumed it (the soup, however, is apt to disagree with weak stomachs). So the Périgords, having fed their esteemed guests, allowed their staff to take home to their families any remnants of the soup, and the maids of Inveraray could be found, between the months of October and March, rushing home with as much of the fat-silken, grass-green dish as they could carry. Each year in September there would be a spate of heavy children born to the families around the estate thanks to its aphrodisiac qualities, the heartiness of the ingredients and the favourable mood in which the locals found themselves after eating the type of meal that sustained the aristocracy. The Périgords, however, put a stop to this practice when Inverarians not connected to the estate began to gather at Cook’s door in want of a meal, and one man with no shoes was seen taking away an entire wheelbarrow full of food. From then on, a keen observer might see tureens of deep green liquid poured onto the lawns of the Périgords’ winter estate, and might, if they were so inclined, note that the smell around the grounds of the house took on a permanent herb-sweet quality, despite no herbs growing there.

It was into this family that Cécile was engaged, thanks in large part to the efforts of her father, who had over the previous two decades come up in the soap-making business despite his own humble origins. Cécile had the strange experience of her family becoming more and more prosperous with each passing year, though her parents seemed to grow more distant with each lost child, which, by the time Cécile reached marriageable age, numbered seven. Theirs was a neat, busy family, used to getting on with things, not bothering Cécile’s father, keeping themselves to themselves even when they were within the same home, because her mother was often recovering or grieving, and her father was almost never home. By the time she was seventeen, as the only daughter of ‘new money’, Cécile had become a nervous young woman thrust lately into a world that was not entirely kind to her, including that of her fiancé. She had not met her husband-to-be when their fathers shook on the deal, and Cécile had had no option but to go where this particular wind was carrying her. While the Périgord patriarch had sought out this match, the senior Mrs Périgord had considered it beneath their family, and only consented to the marriage on financial grounds, the Périgords’ liquidity being a pressing concern. Her eldest son, despite his behaviour of the previous decades, was still aristocracy, by name if not by reputation, so instead of welcoming Cécile – and her father’s money – into the family with gratitude, her new mother-in-law clearly felt that the inclusion of Cécile was a stain on the Périgords. That this young upstart woman was the daughter of working people and had only bought her way into their family; she did not deserve to be there.

6

a very vulgar potation

Upon delivery of Marguerite’s next meal, there was, on the tray, a letter in the familiar hand, a large glass of sparkling wine (the type that Cécile kept for their guests, though they were few and far between in recent times), a dish of minced fowl, a bowl of snipes and a small blancmange, set white and formed into a castle, with turrets and all, for the only way Louis would eat a milk dessert was if it was fashioned into some sort of architectural shape, and this habit had never been shaken from the family table; any time cream was jellied, it came as a fortified residence or it was not eaten.

Cécile sat on the bed before she placed the tray down for her daughter, and Marguerite noted the tiredness about her mother. She mentioned nothing of her absence, which seemed to Marguerite to have been longer than usual. She turned the silver spoon towards Marguerite and as usual held a handkerchief to her face, as if protecting herself from something difficult, and would not meet Marguerite’s gaze, and though she did offer a brief critique of her appearance, it came listlessly from her mouth, as if spoken from somewhere far beyond the attic:

‘Something will have to be done about your hair, Marguerite. I’ll bring you up a comb for an hour or two, and perhaps some oil for these lice. Some fresh water to run through will bring up the shine. You should pin it while you sleep, to keep out the tangles.’

Cécile had brought her daughter pins before, but they had stabbed her in the head as she shifted in her dreams, leaving drops of blood on her pillow by the morning. Marguerite said as much, and Cécile failed to respond; she did not know that Marguerite had grown so frustrated with the pins and their quiet night-time torture that she had swallowed them, opening up her throat like a chick waiting to be fed, pulling each one down her gullet with the movement of her tongue, losing sleep as it made its way through her system, nicking and pricking her on the way through, and then a day or two later bringing a satisfied smile to Marguerite’s face as it tinged off the chamber pot. Each shit-smeared one was now buried into the attic’s rafters, hammered in with The Book of Household Management. Remembering this, Marguerite worried that Cécile might see where the pins remained in the wood, but her mother was removed, in some way, from where she sat. She did not stand to inspect the bookshelf; she didn’t look at the paper which hung over the crow’s nesting place; she did not mention the mustiness in the air, the parts of Marguerite that had been discarded into the atmosphere and then hung there suspended, as if waiting to be released. She looked instead at her hands, and it was her daughter’s turn to prompt herself.

‘During the moulting season, beginning properly at the end of September, the fowls will require a little extra attention,’ said Marguerite, as she eased each mouthful of the bird down her throat, gently gasping against the strange pain. ‘If in any fowl the moult should seem protracted, examine it for broken feather-stumps still bedded in the skin; if you find any, extract them carefully with a pair of tweezers.’ She looked up at her mother, who did not respond. ‘A moulting chicken makes but a sorry dish.’

Cécile had always been a woman fond of method and tradition; their meals in the Cheyne Row house had adhered to the strictest habits of cultured people, even when the guests at the table were no more than Cécile, Marguerite, Louis and Thérèse. The children knew which spoons should be used to eat soup; they set their napkins about their laps, they said their pleases and thank yous and sometimes, if Cécile was in a foul mood, they would ask for le boeuf and say merci beaucoup, for they knew that would raise a smile even on the harshest of evenings, when Cécile had spent her day away from the home and the children had had to amuse themselves. The way she presented the dining trays to her daughter followed this distinction. But Marguerite could not help noticing that the blancmange forming her post-fast dessert was not Mrs Beeton’s arrowroot type, or the version containing thick cream from the nearest cow, and ten bitter almonds, and decorated with quince. Instead, as she drove the metal into the quivering stronghold, she noticed the pallor of the mixture, the way it fell away from itself; for this was simple sugar, and milk, and some lemon rind. Not even the laurel leaves had made it into this dish; neither had Cécile followed the instructions to Turn it out carefully on a dish, and garnish with preserves, bright jelly, or a compôte of fruit. This was just set milk with a sweetened twist, the colour of a sick child, what Mrs Beeton called cheap blancmange, with all the connotations that came with it.

While Marguerite ate, Cécile remained silent. Usually when she delivered a meal, she stayed for a short while, telling Marguerite all the ways she needed to improve, giving her endless lists of things she would have to concern herself with if she was going to marry Mr Lewis. This was tedious, and often nonsensical, to Marguerite’s mind, but silence was worse. The proximity of Cécile made Marguerite feel even more lonely, even more isolated than when she was alone. Marguerite longed for the sensation of skin against her own, for the heat of another person’s body, even if just the palm of a hand, briefly, on her head. She briefly considered pushing her head into the woman’s lap, like a loyal dog, but thought better of it. Cécile could not be relied upon to act one way or another in response to Marguerite’s movements, for she was powered by something outside her daughter’s understanding; for all the ways in which she was spontaneous and exciting, she was beyond comprehension too. Instead, Marguerite reached behind her collection of scabs and dead creatures and hardened phlegm discs and took the age-ripened copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management down from her shelf. She could not remember the last time she had touched the book; it was Cécile who liked to take it down and handle it, and she fancied that she could still feel the warmth of her mother’s fingers on it from the last time she had flicked to a page to test Marguerite’s knowledge. Of course, by now Marguerite knew every word of it by heart. She tested herself aloud (What is Mrs Beeton’s advice on the nun pigeon? To be a perfect bird, it should have a small head and beak; and the larger the tuft at the back of his head, the handsomer the bird is esteemed, and proportionately valuable in the eyes of pigeon-fanciers), hoping to rouse her mother into praise or critique; either would do. But Cécile did not respond, did not even move, so Marguerite abandoned subtlety and gathered up her nerve, despite the unsettled feeling at the back of her neck.

‘I don’t believe that Mrs Beeton herself knows this book as well as Marguerite Périgord. I might seek employment assisting her with the next edition. Such a job would teach me the skills I will need to acquire as a newlywed, and bring some money into the household. There’s little more I can learn here, don’t you agree?’

A cold air moved across the attic space.

‘Mrs Beeton is long dead, Marguerite, so has even less use for you now than if she were alive.’

Marguerite dropped her gaze slightly, and picked at a scab behind her right ear.

‘Perhaps I can write my own books, then, when I have found my feet in the world.’ At this, Cécile merely scoffed.

Marguerite had learned not to show her hurt to her mother, no matter how cutting Cécile’s words. And in her hands there was a bigger conundrum. There were over a thousand pages of the book, and though it did contain illustrations designed to aid the household manager in the identification of a superior bird, or the arrangement of a jelly dessert, or the architecture of a high-quality dessert table for a gathering of up to twenty, these drawings didn’t account for much of its heft. She must know every sentence in the book. But could that really be the case? She hadn’t had the book before she began her confinement, she knew that much, and surely the period of her engagement was not enough time for a young woman to have memorized Mrs Beeton’s opinions and recommendations on every single subject pertaining to all foodstuffs? She picked pages at random, holding them up to her mother and reciting:

On asparagus: May be had, forced, from January, but cheapest in May, June and July.

On chicks who cannot release themselves from the egg: Weakness from the cold may disable the chicken from commencing the operation of pecking the shell, which must then be artificially performed with a circular fracture, such as is made by the bird itself.

On aspic: A savoury jelly, used as an exterior moulding for cold game, poultry, fish, &c. This, being of a transparent nature, allows the bird which it covers to be seen through it.

It was all there, word for word. It seemed unfathomable that she could have taken to memory such a vast amount of knowledge in such a short space of time. Marguerite had always been a good student; when she was small, when they were still a family with means, she had been sent briefly to a private school run by two spinsters, the Misses DeWale, two thin women with blonde hair tied so tightly it pulled their jaws back and made them appear consistently appalled and surprised by the presence of the children in their care.

The Misses DeWale were favoured by parents who had no time for the frivolity of the young; it was no surprise that the senior Mrs Périgord had insisted upon Marguerite’s attendance at their school, especially as she was paying for it. It was a very exclusive class, in which the students wore short trousers (apart from the only two girls, Marguerite and Lettice, who each wore a dress that cut them at the wrists and the chest) and boating hats, and despite the teachers’ belief in the strict education of children, the rooms had an anarchic air about them; there was more ink on the walls and floor than could ever have been contained in a single jar, and broken chalk was powdered into white dust on the floor; despite their uniforms, the classes smelled of mildewed books and white caps that had been worn for days on end. The parents would have been shocked to learn that when the children were not at their desks they were permitted to run riot, and the cook rang a small gong to announce lunch time, whereupon the boys would scream through the building to be fed first, and Marguerite and Lettice had to elbow their way forwards so that they weren’t just left with the scraps.

The Misses DeWale had taken to Marguerite when she had proven her dedication to study; in a class of mostly boys, who did their best to kick her when the Misses weren’t looking and spit on her books even if they were, she had been keen to show herself as one of the most capable. By six, she had known how to divide numbers by each other, and she could add and subtract into the thousands, and she could identify birds by the colour of their plumage and the way they ruffled at their females. By seven, she was peppering precocity into conversations with her parents; Daddy, Louis has issued an edict against breakfast, and it seems futile to resist. She would revise Latin conjugations and recite them to the piss-sour face of her grandmother, who required monthly performances of Marguerite’s success at school, lest she find her lazy and stop paying for the education completely. She was so adept at learning that the Misses DeWale had offered her a subsidized place at the school when the senior Mrs Périgord had washed her hands of the family, and the teachers had even arrived unannounced one day at Cheyne Row, to apply directly to Cécile for the benefit of her eldest daughter. She might teach, herself, one day, they said. She might go abroad as a missionary. Cécile had laughed bitterly, standing at the front door in her bare feet and with young Thérèse at her hip, and the Misses DeWale had exchanged a glance that said: perhaps there’s something wrong with the mother. She has a great friendship with the only other girl, said one Miss DeWale, very tender, and said the other, they are often found in quiet study, hidden away together. And then it was Cécile’s turn to cast a glance, first at Marguerite and then at her teachers, as if questioning whether the Misses DeWale were indeed sisters, if they had something that might be catching.

But either way, it did not matter. The money was gone, and life had changed, and Cécile expected the children to teach themselves, or to go to the normal school with the other children, if it was cheap; but in the long months of Cécile’s emotional illness the Périgord children took to staying in their cavernous house and entertaining themselves, and school was never mentioned again.

Education, like money, seemed something that caused Cécile much consternation; her opinions on it seemed to change every time she spoke to her children. While Marguerite was in school, it was the most important thing in the world, the only way a young woman could have freedom. Later, it was frivolous, a waste of time for a society woman, a distraction from the way things truly worked. Her children had no other word than hers. Cécile was not, like her own Périgord children, born into a family for whom wealth was simply a matter of course; Cécile’s family had come up in soap. For the Hargreaveses, wealth was a novel conceit, something for which they were as unprepared as they were desperate. Their family name was not one steeped in history; generations before, their ancestors had been sewing the clothes of their betters rather than stuffing their breeches with cash and escaping from France with their heads still on their shoulders, and Cécile’s grandparents had fewer rooms in their house than her husband’s family had homes around the country.

This is not to say that they were impoverished; Cécile had been raised in the growing pains of the middle class, which was coming up in the world like parts of a corpse, recently knitted together and imbued with life by the Industrial Revolution. She was the only living child born to James and Ellen Hargreaves, a couple who carried with them the sadness of their small family, who knew that hard work was their only way up, who had little time left in the day to love their daughter as other, more prosperous, families might.

The baby Cécile (or, as she was born and raised, Cecilia, before she (was it she?) changed the expression of her name to fit in better with the Périgords) hardly knew her father; he spent the first years of her life away for days, weeks, even months far from the family, sometimes in the next towns and sometimes much further away, and when he was home he was shut away in his room on the second floor of the house, scribbling all over plans and staring out of his window, which had a cracked pane that would never be fixed. In fact, the young Cecilia had despised mornings when her father was home, for he often woke before she did, leaving his wife in bed, to get on with his work in his office room, and when he did hear cries from Cecilia’s room, he would take her out of her bed and climb the stairs to the very top of the house, the place in which he slept with his wife, which could no sooner be called a room than an elephant can be called a tea kettle.

Cecilia’s parents slept in an attic from which an entire side had been removed, so that the bed could be exposed to the open air. When they had moved into the house with the baby Cecilia, a group of men had been brought in to remove the roof tiles and all else from one side of the top of the house, for Mr Hargreaves was a firm believer in the beneficial health properties of open-air sleeping, despite the frequently inclement weather in Chorley. Though Cecilia’s mother had petitioned strongly to spare the infant Cecilia such injurious sleeping conditions, she had not had the strength of fortitude for herself, and she, too, was resigned to sleeping in a situation many couples far their social inferiors would never have dreamed of subjecting themselves to. Her father had explained his predilection thus: If you can withstand hardship, Cecilia, you will receive benefit; it is the way of things. Still, neither his workers nor their neighbours could understand it. The house was not in disrepair; it had been purchased soon after Cecilia’s birth, to allow her father to oversee the construction of a new factory plot nearby, and anyone could see that the Hargreaveses were of such fortunes that a broken roof need not hamper them. But James Hargreaves would not be moved from his position that fresh air strengthened the lungs and lengthened the life, and when challenged would quote from a book on the matter, and so the bed was arranged under the little roof remaining, so that most of the rain and snow, when it fell, would not land directly upon the couple. It did stop most. But not all.

Cecilia had spent many a cold morning, after waking and seeking out her mother and father, in their bed, always damp, with her father tending to his books and her mother fruitlessly pregnant and sleeping long, for she said that the sounds of the birds and the weather would wake her all night through; never did Cecilia’s mother look like she had achieved restorative sleep, from the moment Cecilia was born to the day her mother died.

What Cecilia did enjoy, however, was the way her father would take her in his lap, her feet tucked under his notebooks, and explain to her what all the strange figures meant; this column was costs, and this column was labour, and over here was profit. And all this from just a single month. She had no idea what the numerical scribbles contained, nor what profit was, nor loss, but here James would tuck Cecilia’s head under his chin, and against her back she would feel his heartbeat, and if there was a harsh breeze he would raise up his knees to protect her from the worst of it. When her mother roused, they would take themselves downstairs and eat together; bread with jam, most mornings, or porridge when it was cold, or, in the middle of summer, fresh English fruit. Nothing but good, hearty fare, little prepared, for the family. But these mornings were rare, and they became more rare, and Cecilia saw little of her father until she was of use to the business.

Mrs Hargreaves’ tasks, as dictated to her by her husband, were to care for the home and ensure Cecilia’s education. As a woman from a working background, she would have been much more comfortable in the factory environment, but her husband’s morals around the fact of the married woman could not be moved; a mother was there to care for the household, and once they had managed to grow their family there should be no work for her outside the home. Yet with each pregnancy she was forced to rest more intensely, not even leaving bed to educate her child. So there was a governess, who came to their home every morning from the time Cecilia was five years old; a kind woman in her youth by the name of Miss Pye, whom her mother had chosen as much for her own good as for Cecilia’s. Classes were from eight until two, and between Mrs Hargreaves’ unproductive pregnancies she could be found taking tea with Miss Pye in the relative warmth of the kitchen as late as four some days, and if Cecilia kept herself hidden while she crept down among the women’s laughter, she might even see them sharing a cigarette, something that Cecilia’s cleanliness-obsessed father had expressly forbidden, especially given his wife’s inability to birth another healthy child. But when she reached the age of seven, a man from her father’s business would come to collect her most afternoons, for there was a special job set up for Cecilia, who must learn the value of hard work, and see for herself the labour upon which their burgeoning wealth relied. She must earn her keep just like anyone else, one way or another. This was a lesson she had since passed on to her children.

Marguerite had finished her recitation on the transparency of aspic and still Cécile, for she was a woman far from that child Cecilia, sat on the bed, the material to her mouth, taking breaths as if she had been starved of air for centuries, as if she was coming up from the bottom of a deep abyss and could not believe she was still alive. Marguerite did not mean to push her mother, but found words tumbling out of her mouth, unbidden.

‘I never hear Louis or Thérèse below. Have they moved lower in the house perhaps? They surely must have both grown louder of late, and Louis no doubt must be striding around the place, putting himself about in the model of our father.’

Cécile did not meet her daughter’s gaze, but removed her white gloves instead, piling them neatly on top of each other, then immediately sliding them back onto her hands. In the silence she repeated this two times, then three. Marguerite could stand it no longer.

‘How long have I been here, Maman? There is not a paragraph of this book I do not know by heart.’

There was an intake of breath sharp as broken glass; Cécile’s gloved hands began to shake. Marguerite found she did not know the words to comfort her mother; she had never before had cause to do it, not since she was a child, so she said nothing at all, and neither did Cécile. Suddenly Marguerite flung herself at her mother, though she knew she should not, it wasn’t the right thing, and Cécile pushed the body of her daughter aside and stood as if burned, and grabbed at the food tray, and took it out of the room, weeping openly, throwing a letter and a writing pad onto Marguerite’s bed. She did not even attend to the chamber pot, about which flies had set.

7

general observations on eggs

The neat handwriting on the front of the letter said

Marguerite Périgord

without even a title or an address, no sign it was from a fiancé. Marguerite ripped open the envelope and read the short note inside

Dear Marguerite – Daisy,

I send this letter with great regard and a hope that you remain healthy and well in your preparations for your entrance into society. London in your absence remains a place of change, not all for the better, but I rest easier in the knowledge that you are kept safe with your mother at this strange time. The familial home is always a sanctuary.

My responsibilities around my work remain pressing, and I am away from my home for long hours. Unfortunately, it is the lot of my type to be called upon to labour at uncivil hours, at the mercy of other men, often writing into the morning by candlelight. I should think by the time I see you twenty years will have been added onto my face.

Though you know Daisy that I am a man of my word and consider it my unbreakable vow that I will take your hand in marriage at whatever time you find yourself ready to become a wife, I must press upon you the possibility that you could find someone closer to your own age and breeding, a young man with great resources who would be able to provide you with many more years than I, and keep you in the manner that you are used to being kept. For a life by my side would surely be one of poverty, and as our engagement continues I grow less and less sure that this is what you want.

I will not break our vow, Daisy, but please do consider that you might, with no harshness of feeling left between us, and only good wishes to go with you into your new life where you belong.

Your sincere friend,

George Lewis

Marguerite immediately folded the letter and wrote a short note to her fiancé impressing upon him, once again, that she would not go to market for a lover nearer her own age, and she would not consider herself any lesser for marrying a man of the law, and that she would tend to their house as best she could around his working life which, though she did not have experience in this regard, she would remain wholeheartedly supportive of. Mr Lewis had already dismissed the idea of a dowry, delivering Marguerite from the horror of having to face her mother with such a question, but Marguerite reminded him that she had several well-made items in her possession, theoretical though that might be during the period of her confinement, and that in the event of a need for money she could put these to buyers, and in this way bring in the money that might be necessary in the event of their family growing larger. For she was sure that this was the concern that plagued Mr Lewis; that it was not only Marguerite he might have to provide for, but any little Lewises that came along too. And children, as Cécile reminded her often, were expensive.

Taking another piece of paper, she wrote a second letter, finding her cursive smaller, as if this might ensure secrecy. She would have to rely on Mr Lewis to relay this letter, and though she of course found him worthy of trust, she would not take an undue risk, and so wrote the short note as if to an acquaintance:

My dear friend A,

Do forgive me for not reaching you earlier. I find myself detained for longer than anticipated, and greatly regret that our enjoyable afternoon meetings have thus been delayed. My marriage plan is still in place, and it is this that constrains me: my loving mother must ensure that I am ready to wed. I hope that you have not replaced me with a more available friend and that our games, from which I derive great pleasure, can continue upon my release. If you wish to write a short note back, which would thrill me enormously, please send it c/o Mr George Lewis, of —————, with my name written instead of his. He will understand that it is to be sent on with his own correspondence.

Yours adoringly,

M.

She folded this twice and slid it into an envelope, which she also folded. On the sealed flap she wrote to Mr Lewis: I would be grateful for you to affix a stamp and post this letter, for the friend in question does not enjoy receiving correspondence by hand. Thank you.

As she wrote Mr Lewis’s address on the envelope she noted again that there was none written on her own letter. Mr Lewis might have delivered the missive himself, hoping that he might catch a glimpse of his fiancée, though Marguerite had told him she was staying in a remote part of the home meant to keep her from public engagement. But it had been so long, her confinement, as he had mentioned in this letter and so many previous to it, and perhaps Mr Lewis, straining, like her, against the endlessly unfolding days, had stolen along to Cheyne Row on his way to a baker, or to take a stroll in one of the large parks, perhaps even standing outside the house and looking up at Marguerite’s attic. Perhaps, even, he was still there? Marguerite stood against the flat walls at the side of the room and pushed her chest to the wallpaper, stroking her finger over the raised patterns on it, letting her nail pick at a greyed portion of the decoration that had begun to come free. Mr Lewis was entirely justified in his impatience, and in all the anxieties that appeared in the hours along with it. When would the planning of her wedding begin? Marguerite had learned all the lessons she could; she knew all of Mrs Beeton’s advice and tips for the kitchen. She could converse with any educated person about the tales of Victor Hugo and his tedious thoughts on class and culture. She had lost almost all of herself, ready to fill her body up again in the shape of a married woman. Could she be any more ready than she was?

Something like panic reached up inside Marguerite and took her flaccid stomach in its fist. She needed Mr Lewis. She had spent much time on the project of this marriage, even before her mother had begun her accusations. Cécile, who had not been an attendant mother since her children were very young, had suddenly taken a deep interest in Marguerite’s comings and goings, had raised an eyebrow at Marguerite’s praise of a mediocre dish, at her uncharacteristic enjoyment of a fresh blossom brought into the house. Over dinner she would interrogate her daughter about the places she claimed to have been, the studies she claimed to be undertaking. On more than one occasion Marguerite had suspected that her mother had followed her out of the house when she had sent herself on an errand, for her mother’s shoes were scuffed and warm when she returned, having abandoned her real plan and walked all the way around Battersea Park. Soon after had come the weeks of screeching arguments with Cécile, the cursing, the allegations, the violent entreaties. Then months, almost a year, of searching for a man to whom she might be wed without the slow erosion of her sanity and will. A man older than her, past his most energetic years, whose physical needs would be met with the effort available to Marguerite, for she did have some interest in this kind of male attachment, though it was limited; she could satisfy someone who did not make excessive requests of her. She would even enjoy it.

She needed a man whose home would be stable and undemanding, so that her wifehood would not be her profession. She needed a man who offered his time and energies to others, often to the detriment of his own home life, so that she might take the long hours between morning and night as her own, to fill them with the pleasures she would not be allowed to have otherwise, the pleasures that would else have made her an outcast, penniless, robbed of the lifestyle a Périgord should have. For what was the point of having wellborn blood, if one could not luxuriate in the gratification of debauchery and sensualism? Of a life lived outside usual customs, a queer existence? Kings and queens had it, with their favourites; the aristocracy revelled in it; the educated and renowned throughout history had been given licence for it. It was that, not manners or possessions, that the wellborn were accustomed to. And Marguerite was determined to have it for herself.

She opened the envelope again and scribbled a postscript underneath her signature:

It is no exaggeration to say that marriage to you is the only thing that can satisfy the needs of my life, Mr Lewis. I beg you, for the sake of my soul, not to abandon me yet.

A tiny knot of fowl caught in the hole of Marguerite’s tonsils and caused a retch so violent she purged neatly onto the bedsheet. She wiped it away with the hem of her nightdress and picked up the offending nugget; it was marbled with white fat and half-covered in it too, the threads of muscle within and without, and if she squeezed it, the knot gave way a little, like a child’s ball. She would keep it on her shelf with her books and the other things she had collected over her time in the attic; the piece of eggshell that had come in a bowl of chocolate pudding; the rat bones she had found behind the sewing desk; the thick disc of yellow phlegm that she had coughed out on an especially cold afternoon, so big you could chew on it and still it would not break. When Marguerite was particularly hungry, she did just that.

Marguerite could entertain herself for hours with the investigation of her own tonsils. She could ascertain no purpose for the minuscule caves at the back of her mouth, worse when occupied than when they were empty; what was the need for them, apart from to act as a threat to her own body, from her own body? As her fingernails grew longer Marguerite found that she could reach into the strange little holes in the back of her throat, these useless parts of her, and, when the attic was particularly chilly, and when she had woken up feeling as if she had barely slept at all, a little white-yellow caught on the end of a nail told Marguerite she was in luck. Kneeling forward, she’d push her finger on whichever tonsil felt most sore, and she would retch a dry retch that brought tears to her eyes and brought a cough from down inside her body, and she would be rewarded with a beige nugget of matter, almost nothing to look at, sometimes the size of a green pea and sometimes twice as small, and you could lick it and sniff it and roll it between your fingers and nothing would appear to be monstrous about it, but the second you let your nail cleave it in half, or the moment you crushed it between finger and thumb, the most horrendous smell would escape. Marguerite would hold the malodorous mess to her nostrils and delight herself with her own reactions to it; she shook her head, she closed her eyes; she could, if she wanted to, vomit from the stench of it. And yet this, from her own small body, was a creation of herself, an evil and foul something that she had created. And she would press some more and retch again and would only stop when her tonsils were so swollen that she could not speak at all.

Cécile did not come for Marguerite’s letter for days, or perhaps longer. She had read the letter that she had thrust at her daughter, as Marguerite knew she read all of the letters that came from Mr Lewis, but she normally collected her daughter’s responses promptly, giving her at least the dignity of that. But there was a darkening of the atmosphere in the Cheyne Row house. In unfocused moments Marguerite found herself clutching her stomach and legs, sometimes her wrists, as if reminding herself that she was still there. After receiving impatient word from Mr Lewis, it was her chest, her ribs that she grasped at; as her days were filled with hunger and cold, she lay on the bed in a state of semi-consciousness, the type that she would almost enjoy, that would take her back to the opiate afternoons of her previous life, and on waking from her stupefaction she would find she had one hand at her breast and the other tucked into her underwear, or both hands cradling the small distension below her navel, which was tight and round as if something was growing there, even though Marguerite knew, on her clearer days, that this could not be so.

Mrs Beeton had written extensively about the rearing, management and diseases of infancy and childhood, and though of course Marguerite, when married, would have as little use for the sections on lady’s maids and nursemaids as she did in her attic, she had memorized this portion of Mrs Beeton’s book with particular zeal, for she would not, as the author put it, be able to call in the services of hired assistance. This, in fact, had been marked already in the book, by the harsh pen of Cécile, and around a certain section had been drawn an angry black box, to mark it out as something the reader should take very clear note of:

It has justly been said – we think by Hood – that the children of the poor are not brought up, but dragged up. However facetious this remark may seem, there is much truth in it; and that children, reared in the reeking dens of squalor and poverty, live at all, is an apparent anomaly in the course of things, that, at first sight, would seem to set the laws of sanitary provision at defiance, and make it appear a perfect waste of time to insist on pure air and exercise as indispensable necessaries of life, and especially so as regards infantine existence.

Marguerite had read this short paragraph over and over, running her finger across the divot that the strength of her mother’s emotion had driven into the paper. She had thought often about what an affront it would be to Cécile if Marguerite’s children, born in a smaller house than the one Cécile owned, and without any of the assistance of the maids and household staff that had worked at Cheyne Row before their father departed, not only survived the relative ‘squalor’ of their infancy but thrived into childhood, and went on to be reputable adults with good careers who cared about the lower orders and even gave money to them. How torn would Cécile’s heart be, if babies born in a lower-class marriage, in an unnatural arrangement, could live, when so many of her own mother’s had not?

For Marguerite’s part, she could think of nothing more delightful than spending her days tending to a new child. Mrs Beeton had not written on the efforts to which a newly married couple must go to produce such a child, but Marguerite had some experience there; it had always been perfunctory, for Marguerite, and something of a chore for the boys, something they had seemed desperate to do but were not keen to be good at. Marguerite felt that she was ready for Mr Lewis’s tutelage in that regard, that a man of more refined tastes and more wisdom might take his time, and make it a considered occurrence, and that she might even enjoy the process. For all that her needs diverged from those of Mr Lewis, she did not wish to deprive him of a healthy and satisfying balance in his life, and neither did she mean to torture herself by abstaining from things that could bring her pleasure; after it happened she would report back to Alouette, who was fascinated, but only from a remove.

Being young and of a good and fertile family, at least on the Périgord side, her babies should come quickly, and she would apply herself and all her learned knowledge to the job of keeping Death at the door, until they could walk and chase him away themselves. Without a nurse at her side, she might have to apply the methods necessary to revive a child; she would have ready a firm right hand, a warm bath at a temperature of eight degrees, and a bottle of brandy. From the moment of the baby’s first cry her attentions must be given, according to Mrs Beeton, to understanding the meanings conveyed by the child’s various sounds and screams, and then secondly to the quality of the air allowed into the lungs of the baby, and she should keep it from rooms filled with the breath of adults. But she must not grow so attached that she forgets that she, too, is a danger to the child:

Mothers, in the fulness of their affection, believe there is no harbour, sleeping or awake, where their infants can be so secure from all possible or probable danger as in their own arms; yet we should astound our readers if we told them the statistical number of infants who, in despite of their motherly solicitude and love, are annually killed, unwittingly, by such parents themselves, and this from the persistency in the practice we are so strenuously condemning.

Cécile Périgord was certainly a mother who kept her babies in her arms; from the moment her children arrived great force had had to be applied to allow the nursemaids to take the bodies from her grasp. Her pregnancies had all been plagued by physical maladies and endless pains. Whatever she did, Cécile’s body was at war with itself; her joints ached, her bones scraped against each other and strained to the point of snapping, and no dish, no matter how intricately or plainly prepared, could satisfy her; most, indeed, made her nauseated if she chanced so much as to look at them, and her husband never ate as well as during Cécile’s pregnancies, taking two courses at almost every meal and falling directly to sleep afterwards. If Cécile was not confined to her bed for the months of her late gestation, she was ordered to walk in London’s parks, avoiding any point at which she might come into contact with other mothers or children, for they carried disease and could pose a threat to her health. The household staff were instructed to stand at Cécile’s beck and call, yet were simultaneously allowed nowhere near her. By the time her babies came, everyone at Cheyne Row was relieved.

At no point during her life did Marguerite remember being held tenderly by her father, and whenever the nurses, who were so present during her first years, did have her in their arms, they would be in constant danger of Cécile reclaiming her child from their grasp. Cécile flourished in the role of the new mother and she was most content when she did not have to present herself to her husband’s social connections or draw plans up for a banquet or even converse with the family members who had deigned to visit their house on Cheyne Row, small and unremarkable in the eyes of his family, to pay their respects to their new grandchildren, even though they did not see them or request to. At these times Cécile would steal herself away in her grand bedroom, sure that she would not be disturbed, and hold her child’s face as it suckled at her, and she would take her deepest breaths with the sun on her face, and the child would know it was safe. In these moments Cécile did not need a book to tell her how to behave; all she needed was the small body against hers and the space to breathe her own air. Marguerite fancied that she remembered this feeling, the sensation of being at her mother’s breast, Cécile’s milk flushing through her body and feeding it to plumpness.

At six, Marguerite was replaced in her mother’s arms by Louis, who was replaced only eighteen months later by Thérèse, and by the time Thérèse was weaned, there was no other baby to be had, for her husband had gone, and they were, and would always be, a family of four. But the children had grown from their suckling-pig phase, and now that there were no staff to steal the babes from Cécile’s arms she found that she did not want to hold them. For all Cécile’s enjoyment of producing children, she did not seem to hold the same regard for being a lifelong mother. While her husband remained, the children were pawns to use against him, for he was prone to behaviour unbecoming of a family man, and Cécile, whose meagre power faded with every step he took out of the house, was forced to apply to him in the most emotionally manipulative ways, holding their three children out to him and begging with him to protect their reputation. When applying to his affections had not worked, she sought to prove herself at risk; the child Marguerite was found with a knife, and Cécile was found bleeding. Marguerite could not be left with the baby, could not be kept in the same room, Cécile had said, for the older child was a menace to the family, and she needed her husband home to keep them all safe. By the time their father was gone, Cécile saw the children for what they were; a burden, financial and physical, that she would never be rid of until they were secured in a marriage of their own, and even then, as she knew all too well, that was not the end of the story.

Marguerite would not be a fair-weather mother to her children. She would cherish them, in their short breeches and lost socks, and when she needed help to interpret their cries or cure a mild illness or encourage them to sleep through the night, she would apply to Cécile, who despite the situation in which she had spent most of her mothering life, did her best by her children, Marguerite was sure, and would do her best by her grandchildren, if there were any. For all Cécile wanted was for Marguerite to be happy, and to enter into a marriage that would not leave her unhappy, and without support, and half destitute despite her grand home.

Cécile, for all her love, still was wrong. Marguerite would not marry a man like her father, removed from the responsibilities of his own life by money; she would marry a good man, a concerned soul, who worked to build a life for himself and wanted to add to it. Mr Lewis walked with his back straight, thinking about his own affairs and stopping only to ask a homeless person if he might help them into a house. She would love him, grateful, and he would know that if nothing else.

Marguerite peeked under the letter pinned to the wall, and saw the carrion crow asleep there in her nest; she could build a happy home, one that welcomed all its guests, both peripatetic and permanent. She could make a small nest and stay there, content and calm. And sometimes Mr Lewis would be there, and other times not, and when she was not in that house she would be free to build her strange little life, a child and two mothers, one named for a French princess and one for a bird, and they would tickle the cheeks of that cherubic child, another wellborn Périgord, and feed it and swaddle it, and as it grew, its second mother would teach it to sing, just as she could sing, and she would teach it to read, in the two languages she spoke, and Marguerite would have everything she needed there, everything she had ever wanted, and as the sun set on a winter day Marguerite and her baby would go back to their other home, where she would be a good wife to a good man, and with that she would buy the happiness of all four people, a man, a woman, a child and herself. As Marguerite lost herself in fantasies of her married lives, she once more read aloud to herself the learned Mrs Beeton:

she wakes languid and unrefreshed from her sleep, with febrile symptoms and hectic flushes, caused by her baby vampire, who, while dragging from her health and strength, has excited in itself a set of symptoms directly opposite, but fraught with the same injurious consequences – ‘functional derangement’.

8

the ptarmigan, or white grouse, when young and tender, are exceedingly fine eating

Marguerite wept through the night, a fresh and formless night. She had no solid sense of why, on this night, she should be so upset, for it was far from the only one during which she’d felt helpless and alone, and now that feeling was almost comforting; to be so low, only to know that one day the matching heights would be reached. But this time it came with a feeling of absence inside her, and she found that she was making a braying sound that she didn’t know she could make, and she found herself delirious, at times, though she could not say whether this was from the cold that crept inside her, or the endless hunger, or the feeling that her mother was growing to hate her.

Glancing down, Marguerite saw herself as she would be seen on the theatre slab; an emaciated body waiting for the cold hands of the coroner, and it jolted her awake. She could be a syphilitic pig, with so many marks about her. The skin from beneath her left arm to her left nipple was an artwork in shades of red. Pinks peaked into deep maroons, from which a scratch would bring a pool of clear liquid and a brief euphoria. The blue coastlines under her skin peeked out from the mottled patches of deep scarlet, and the flesh there was dry, and raised, and wrinkled.

She could not present herself to either Mr Lewis or Alouette in this condition; it could not be countenanced. She would need a new dress, but she had broken the sewing machine’s needle away, and couldn’t work out how to remove the shard, and she had no clean fabric. Her mother would sew it, because her mother loved her, despite everything she did. Her mother loved her, for she was a mother. Underneath the nightdress Marguerite’s legs were covered in matted hair; she could not neaten, oil or remove it; she would have to do it when she was permitted into the bathroom again. Cécile used to bring her a small bowl and a straight razor with a hot cloth, she was sure, but it was a memory faded like a drawing left in the sun, so hard to make out whether there had ever been a picture there at all. She must stand up straight, to walk alongside Mr Lewis; she must hold her head up to live on the arm of Alouette. Marguerite tried to lift her arms above her head but no matter how she stretched they stayed largely in front of her. So long in bed, so little space. She had become smaller; not only less, but bent in the wrong ways too. She was curled up like the invalids in the pictures she had seen, those who lay so long in the shape of foetuses that they had turned into them and could not be turned back.

She would unfurl in the water of her mother’s bathroom, like one of her grandfather’s soap-trapped flowers. She would soak herself alive in hot water, and her mother would sew her a dress. She would like to wear earrings on her wedding day; there were precious stones in the drawers of Cécile’s dressing table, all the children had seen them, and she could hang them from her ears, a sign to Mr Lewis that she was, despite all evidence, from a wellborn family. But there were no holes in her lobes, nowhere to put such earrings. This, she could attend to right away. Marguerite took her needle, the one she had snapped from the machine, and she took her duck-bat, with his big ear for listening to secrets in the dark, and she pushed the needle through the dry skin; simple with a small effort of force. And, having proven it could be done, she sat down at her Singer desk, bending with the natural curve of her poor tired body, and she felt the wood of the desk against the lobe of her right ear, and, singing a little to herself, Marguerite drove the needle through the flesh of her ear, and then she turned and put the other lobe in the small pool of blood (when a person is bled, he should always be in the standing, or at any rate in the sitting, position), and it was the work of a moment, and then she was ready, she thought: a perfect picture, off which the marks of wealth might hang.

Marguerite hauled herself onto her knees, dried blood on her cheek and neck. She must have fainted, though she couldn’t remember it. Now she was hungry, painfully so, and there was a stain on the rug, a Périgord heirloom. Wiping her drool from her open mouth she pulled the carpet pieces about so that the offending mark was covered with the corner of another rug, but she knew that Cécile would see it, eventually, for when you were trying to hide something Cécile had a nose like a bloodhound. She would smell Marguerite on the floor, a stain on the Périgords, and Marguerite would lose another week, another month in this godforsaken attic. Any minor infraction would increase her detention, and the rules were never fully explained. The thought of a minute more, a second more than necessary in the attic pained her. But a stain on the rug was bound to be a serious matter, and there was nothing Marguerite might use to remove it from the ancient fibres. She had only the water from the pedestal sink, which was now more often than not spotted with brown matter, and only a few thin slivers of soap she’d kept from the bars Cécile had brought to her early in her confinement when she was allowed such pleasures as a truly clean body. A few slivers – but it could be enough, Marguerite thought, feeling faint again, it could be enough, couldn’t it, for wasn’t soap in her very veins?

She scrabbled to her bed, the nausea rising in her stomach, thinking if she could just get the soap to lather, if she could just catch the blood before it dried, she might have a chance of undoing the harm. There were three slivers, each a pink-rose colour, and cracked from being so long dried, but Marguerite held them under the trickle of filthy water that spluttered from the tap, forced them together between her hands and rubbed, hoping the heat of her would fuse them together into something useable. She began to spit into her hands, hoping for a lather, but her palms were too cold, the attic was too cold. She pushed the mass of pink into her mouth, sucking on it gently, knowing there was warmth, at least, inside her mouth, and it made her retch, the slick fat and acid tingle, but still she sucked, and after a seasick minute she vomited into the chamber pot, full and foetid, and there was so little food inside her it was mostly yellow bile.

That was it.

It removed all stains, that’s what the adverts said. Gall soap, made from the stomach bile of cows; she heard it in her grandfather’s voice, a memory long lost: just soap and bile yet guaranteed to remove the hardest of stains from all sorts of textiles, Marguerite. A goldmine, if you know a farmer or two. And Marguerite had it as well,

a sharp acid liquid called the gastric juice

had it inside her, with no food

it comes into contact with the bile from the gallbladder

in its way. She pushed the soap slivers back into her mouth and began to suck them down as far as they would go. Tears spilled from her eyes as the bile came again, again – one more time. Sleek acidic fat all over the rug, now, and so warm as to melt the soap. She scrubbed the mixture into the rug and prayed the blood would lift, the blemish of her removed. She spat until her throat was metallic with the effort, until no more moisture would come from her, and a lather did eventually come. Hard work would make it better, hard work would lift it out. Shame engulfed her, as if Cécile was already watching, already aware of what she’d done. Cécile was the Lincrusta-Walton wallpaper, Cécile was the splintered rafters, Cécile was the springs that dug into the soft of her back when she was trying to rest. Marguerite kept going until the soap scraps were no more, then she scraped everything off with her broken, feral nails and deposited the grey-brown scum into the chamber pot. Her mother would not notice, for she always laid a flannel over the pot before she took it away from Marguerite, and Marguerite knew her mother would not look inside when she threw it out in the street either. When the fatty lather was removed, she could see only a faint stain on the rug, though by then the light had begun to die, and she felt dizzy. Perhaps it would be more obvious in the daylight; she would have to wait and see. But Marguerite recognized a sensation she had not felt in a long while. She had remembered one of her grandfather’s skills; she had dabbled in the family trade. As she lay unable to swallow, holding her fingers, hands aching and bent into claws, there was a sensation underneath all that. It was pride.

True pleasure came from the rewards of hard work; she had heard this often, from her Hargreaves grandfather, who gave extensive examples of such from his own life, and wished to hear it from her mother, who did not. As a child Marguerite had loved to be told about the Bri-White factory, to imagine her mother within its complex human machinery, but only a handful of times had she managed to coax Cécile into detailed recollections, as if the woman was afraid of going back to that mental place.

The factory was a labyrinthine structure to the tiny Cecilia, who ate simple meals served in portions described as just enough; if you stood in her father’s office and looked down to the people working below, you could lose yourself in the image, and think you were looking down on a colony of ants or other industrious insects, and you might find yourself leaning forward to see their faces, and over the barrier you might fall; more than once James Hargreaves had had to catch his curious daughter. But he was eager to show that his child carried no favour more than any other worker, so Cecilia did not spend her time in the factory in her father’s office. It was judged to be unsafe for her on the factory floor (though many others of her age worked in stranger conditions), so a small room was converted for Cecilia’s work, in which a square window allowed her to look out onto the white-capped women who sliced the long blocks of soap that came to her on a cart. For it was Cecilia’s job to wrap her father’s soap, which had been lately stamped with the name of the product, in the parchment that arrived pre-cut; a small innovation, this new manner of wrapping, but one that had proven to be the biggest success of James Hargreaves’ tenure so far. The soaps, stamped and dry, would be wrapped, neatly and tightly, in the parchment by Cecilia’s adept hands, and then into a cardboard box made to the perfect dimensions and illustrated with the bright but basic colours with which the family’s name had become synonymous. She kept the office door open as much as she could, even though, despite her father’s famous dedication to a clean working environment for his staff, without any of the murderous chemical agents that killed workers in other factories, there was still the stench of boiled tallow in the air, a beefy fug of death, and underneath it the caustic cut of lye. Each day for four hours she would fold and roll the soap in the parchment until her wrists ached, and for this she was paid the same rate as the youngest workers on the shop floor – though of course, said her father, this must go towards her room and board. So although she received a payslip at the end of each month, the pride of which warmed her from the inside, she was the only worker to go away without even a penny in her pocket, unless one of the young ladies there took pity on her, stole away to buy some fudge for them to share, and let her keep a halfpence after it.

Still, Cecilia was proud to be part of the family’s success, and on the days she caught her father watching her, she was happy to have done a good job. The wrapping and the box stopped the soap from going rancid, so it could be long stored in the back rooms of small grocery shops and warehouses alike, and the cardboard boxes made them stackable, whereas other soaps would sweat and melt fat and slide all over the shelves, creating an unsightly mess. A stack of Bri-White, conversely, was a sight to behold; neat, tidy and bright enough that children would take a box into their hand and pass it to their mother at the payment till, embarrassing her into buying it no matter how many she had already paid for in her weekly shop. Cecilia’s father was full of these smart little changes; some were his own ideas, some were his wife’s, and he heard of many from his foreign friends, and implemented them at home before anyone else had a chance. For it was ferocious, Mr Hargreaves said; it’s ferocious, the soap game, a real dog-eat-dog world. And there were many dogs other than her father, and an overcrowded yard.

By the time Cecilia was ten years old, her father had taken to advertising. Illustrated posters were becoming a fashion, and Cecilia one morning emerged from her bedroom to find that her father had taken from the wall one of her mother’s favourite works of art, a painting of a startlingly angelic child in a fairytale garden, carrying a pail into which it had placed an array of colourful flowers. This had long been framed and installed on the wall of their home, the home decor being one of the few things that Cecilia’s mother had been allowed to make decisions on, for her father was not interested. Yet on this morning he had not only removed it from its place on the wall, and indeed from its frame, but he had hitched up his trouser legs and knelt on the floor with the artwork in front of him, attending to it with chalk and black ink, making alterations all about the canvas, and writing in great grand letters at the top of the piece: BRI-WHITE SOAP. FOR WHITES AS WHITE AS SNOW. Long after the argument over this desecration of Mrs Hargreaves’ favourite painting had subsided, the amended version, solidified by a proper artist, working with heavy paints instead of her father’s ink pen, could be seen all over the north of England. It proved so popular that James Hargreaves desecrated all manner of art: an oil painting of a flushing girl, celebrating her sixteenth birthday with ruffles around the neck and hair as high as Marie Antoinette’s; a watercolour of a genderless nymph, bathing in a countryside river; a domestic scene of a wizened yet oddly buxom grandmother proselytizing to half a dozen infants. All splashed with the Bri-White name and claims of near-miracle effects, all taken and reproduced by an artist of repute. Each time they drove by one of his posters, Cecilia’s father would point it out, and tell his wife that she should be happy; he had spread that painting further across the country than the artist ever had, and had raised up the name of their business along with it. Cecilia’s mother remained silent on the matter, and each time, the conversation would quite blacken her mood for the rest of the day.

Later, Mr Hargreaves’ competitors would poster the cities of England with visual illusions, around which crowds would gather and stare until the name of the company appeared from the black and white squares of circular patterns. Cecilia’s father thought these cheap; it was a trick, and he did not deal in tricks. No, he dealt in facts, or at least what could be sold to his customers as fact, and his advertising took a turn towards the instructional just as his competitors turned to magic. Bri-White was the best in the market, and the most pure and natural at that, and Mr Hargreaves was at pains to explain this to his would-be customers, even though orders for Bri-White far outstripped the amounts that his factory could produce.

Cecilia took her first trip to London soon after her eleventh birthday, to have some hardy clothes made for her, ones that might better fit the family’s rising status, and as she walked beside her mother, feeling for all the world like an adult in her newest hat and with a packet of sweet bullseyes in her pocket, her father stopped and knelt down beside her.

‘See that, my darling?’

Across the street there was a poster, unassumingly plain compared to the magic puzzle ones but striking for its simplicity, that said, in enormous letters:

WHY DOES A WOMAN LOOK OLD SOONER THAN A MAN?

‘That’s your father’s work,’ said James Hargreaves into Cecilia’s ear, and as they watched, no fewer than a dozen women going about their days stopped, sometimes walking past the poster and turning back to address it more fully, and read the entirety of the rest of the text, which was rendered in much smaller type and required the reader to lean inwards, so that by the time they had finished reading the women were almost bent double. They would take note of the message, and say the name out loud to themselves until they got home, when they would write it down and make sure to take it with them next time they went to the groceryman’s shop. Mr Hargreaves promised to keep women young, to save them time, to keep husbands happy and families together, to provide time for play where before there had only been work. He shouted these messages to the women of England and in turn they made him rich. Cecilia, however, was ushered past the poster, and could only make out one more line from the smaller rows below: These facts, which are known to every housekeep, readily explain why so many women LOOK OLD while yet young in years.

9

all birds being oviparous

The carrion crow had laid some eggs. It became clear that this was the situation in the late afternoon, when the light was failing, and the stench of London’s major artery had infected the attic in the way it always did on such warm days. Marguerite had been reading on the merits of currant puddings and the superior method of allowing butter to warm before beating it into cream, for some hours; all day, perhaps. She had lifted the hidey-hole letter to check that the crow was listening, and was taking in her recommendations, should the bird ever find herself needing to put on a dinner party, and as Marguerite had pushed her hand inside the hole to give the bird a gentle stroke, the carrion crow had gone for her knuckles. Blood was drawn, as it seemed to be so easily from Marguerite’s hands these days, and she had pulled herself free of the hole and peered inside, and shooed the carrion crow out of the way, though the bird extended her neck and screeched for privacy, and behind her Marguerite could just make out four perfect blue-green eggs (the quality of eggs depends much upon the food given to the hen), speckled dark teal, and on one of them a single patch of white at its tip.

Sucking her sore skin, Marguerite wondered whether a corvid could raise her children alone; she quickly flipped to Isabella Beeton’s General Observations on Birds, though she found she knew the words before she read them:

pressure and motion are communicated to the parts of the egg, which, in some inscrutable way, gradually promote the formation and growth of the young, till the time comes for its escaping from the shell.

There was no specific incubation period given, nor any details for any particular type of birds. Mrs Beeton explained that the male and female usually helped each other in building a nest, yet this bird had never brought a mate to the attic. Perhaps she was beyond all of that, dabbling in it only to the extent that it suited her. Marguerite’s shallow wound suggested that the crow needed no male to protect her babies. Marguerite would be their security, she thought; no, she would have nothing to do with it. She flushed hot, her hands itching, and continued reading: To preserve an egg perfectly fresh, said Mrs Beeton, you’d need only a slight coating of varnish or mutton-suet.

Marguerite had no varnish, and no mutton-suet either. She might extract some thick fat from a piece of lamb, if Cécile was to bring her some before they hatched, and perhaps in that way she would achieve what Isabella Beeton described. She might keep the eggs on her shelf, with her treasures.

No. She closed the book and kicked it to the floor, worrying not about the fuss it might cause below. The bird could have her eggs, for wouldn’t they be Marguerite’s too? Wouldn’t she share in the joy of the babies, as they hatched and grew? Silly to feel this way, this hot and fussy, about a silly little bird having eggs.

Better than that, it would be an opportunity for Marguerite to have some education on parenthood beyond what Mrs Beeton had cared to write down – parenthood without all the maids and cooks and nannies and other barriers that people liked to place between themselves and their children. Cécile would undoubtedly have her own advice, if Marguerite was to give her grandchildren, but the chasm between what Cécile said and what Cécile herself had done was large enough for a person to fall into and never get out (every woman is not gifted with the same physical ability for the harassing duties of a mother). The carrion crow would raise her children on a primal level, attending to their needs without the concerns of society, and that was what Marguerite wanted to learn. How to fly above the heads of these people and make a nest where others might not see.

Cécile had told her children that there was a special kind of bond between a mother and her babies. From one body there are two, and then one feeds the other, and no matter how much a father or a grandmother or an aunt might feel they love that child, their loves are all secondary. It was the excuse she gave for locking the bathroom door when washing the children, and it was quite separate from the things she said when their father was about to depart the Cheyne Row house, having exhausted his patience for parenthood and having run out of concern for societal censure or disapproval. But Marguerite did not believe in this pure and singular mother love of which Cécile spoke. There was certainly a type of grief in Cécile when all her babies could exist without her body, in their separate rooms of the house, only coming to her when Cook hadn’t given them enough attention, or when they wanted something they could not get on their own. In those moments the world pulled at a cord that ended within Cécile, and her pain was palpable. But where was that feeling, that love, when the Périgord children could not live up to Cécile’s capricious whims, and they were met with something that looked more like hatred? When Cook could only be employed for a single hour each day, and the children’s need to eat was met as if it was an assault on Cécile?

On the day their father walked away for the final time, even the toddler Louis knew that Cécile had wished them dead, or if not dead, then to have never been born. And when the tide of their mother’s affection went out, Marguerite loved her siblings in a way she had not anticipated. Louis in short trousers and Thérèse still in arms; she had kept those children warm with her own body, and had even tried to feed Thérèse from her own chest, not understanding that things simply did not work that way. And after that Marguerite had loved any other newborn they had ever met (All children come into the world in the same imploring helplessness), because sometimes, walking the streets of Chelsea, they would find a nurse out with her employer’s baby, or even a poor mother out with her baby at her shoulder, trying to calm it from crying, and on each of these occasions Marguerite had been unable to keep her eyes from the child, fat marzipan cheeks and grape-dark eyes. So this declaration from Cécile, on a distinct kind of motherly love, intrigued her; what would be the sensation deeper than this, that she would feel for the children that came from her own body? Was it a violent love, that of the carrion crow tearing at Marguerite’s arms and chest as she lay unmoving on her bed, or was it a passive love, the type that made you give every part of yourself over for someone who did not even realize they were taking it?

Marguerite and Mr Lewis had discussed children, and he knew of Marguerite’s great wish to fill a nest. He was older than her, but common knowledge took that men could make babies into their later age, whereas if women tried to, the babies would reject them, and come out into the world long before they were ready. But a man’s side of it did not age; stout-faced babies with gout, she imagined, were being carried and shushed all over Westminster. No; for men there was no time limit. It was the women who rotted on the vine.

So Mr Lewis had agreed, despite his own ambivalence towards this aspect of their future, that they could try for children as soon as they were married, and if any of their children lived, he would provide for them in the most loving way; it wasn’t that he didn’t like babies, he said, but there had been no place for one in his life prior to Marguerite. But he saw long evenings by the fire with her in the rocking chair, and he saw mornings in which he might rise to look at the baby while it slept, and as he grew old they might grow around him into proud and well-educated people, and he found these things agreeable. If they were to be found lacking in this regard, he would not consider it a curse on them, for he would be happy in old age with Marguerite and Marguerite alone. She had touched his hand and called him sweet, and there the conversation was left. But Marguerite knew she would set herself immediately towards this task, after the wedding. She would take enjoyment in the machinery of it, for she might as well, but more joyful than that would be the nine months of holding the baby inside her, letting the palms of her lover press themselves against her skin, Marguerite stretching, growing a world, and when the nine months were over there would be a child made by her and Mr Lewis, husband and wife, but really, truly, the baby inside her would be for Marguerite and Alouette.

The evenings and mornings would be fine, in the house of Mr Lewis, and Marguerite would indeed hold their fat child and fold herself into the arms of her husband, and love him, in a way, and be grateful for his love. But after Mr Lewis left for work, she would wrap the baby in a blanket and walk for twenty-five minutes, for she had tested the route from Mr Lewis’s street and already knew it by heart, and in a small apartment there she would find a sleeping lark, her nightbird Alouette, who would still smell of the tobacco and alcohol and sweat-pressed bodies of the previous night, when she would have stood, well-plumed, in a small room of strangers and friends, and tipped her face, and opened her throat, and sung out for all to hear. She would drink and she would sing, and then afterwards be raucous until the dawn, and when Marguerite found her, she would be barely rested but freshened by her presence, and the weight of the tiny body upon her chest would wake her, and in the daylight hours the two women would raise the child, their child, the child that was their own.

A bird-child can be raised in a small space, Marguerite knew that now. She knew that a child could be raised in a room with a bed and a small kitchen and two large windows that let in the light; it could learn to walk on a blanket and learn to swim in a bath. But she knew that Alouette would not keep them confined to the apartment; Alouette would take her lover, her wife by their own law, Marguerite, to walk about in the park, and to buy pastries from sellers, and flowers from the women who ask only a penny. She would put her arm around Marguerite, and kiss her throat, and hold their baby, and she would not notice the stares that burned through Marguerite, would not notice the unhidden scorn heaped upon them from the people of London. Because Alouette lived in a different world, one where loves like theirs were commonplace, where they existed in secret spaces and flourished in the night-time, and Alouette could see that shine on those same people when they walked about in the daytime, and those people were the only ones she recognized, the only ones she walked among, even if there were a thousand people around her. Marguerite had tried to live in this realm, but she could not – yet. She could only holiday there, and that would have to be enough for now. And in the hours when the baby slept, she would know herself best, for Alouette would show her who she really was, what she was, and Marguerite, then, Marguerite’s body, would not just be a collection of items for pleasure, nor a thing to be engaged with briefly and shamefully; she would be a landscape to traverse, to get lost in, to live inside.

Alouette made her own money; she shook it from her wings every evening. But one day, she would have no need to sing in close little rooms, and she would be able to sleep with Marguerite in her arms throughout every night and wake up with her every morning, and Marguerite would provide her with shelter and pleasure and a humble but ideal existence. They would go about their days without a concern, just as all the rest of London did, reading and walking and hosting and raising their baby birds. And in each other’s arms, they would make up for the many lost years. Until they knew the exact topography of each other’s bodies, they would spend hours, days in one another’s valleys and would sing from the peaks, and there would be nothing they loved more than being shown themselves in this way, than knowing themselves in this way. Marguerite would live out the rest of her life learning the map of Alouette. One day.

Marguerite felt sure that no matter her concerns about her daughter’s marriage, Cécile would look upon the pregnant Marguerite with nothing but compassion, and she hoped that Cécile would be there to help her as the pains took her, and the water flooded out of her, and the baby squeezed itself from where it had rested into an angry new world full of light and new things. Thérèse would be a help, of course, though she was too clumsy to be tasked with any holding or catching, and Louis, who despite being quite spoiled had still grown up with some manners, would take Mr Lewis out of the house for an extended stroll, as was tradition, and perhaps she could even pay him to ‘slip a note to a stranger’, Alouette, who would be smoking alone in her rooms, nervous, and picking at the battered old wooden stool by her bed, but it was Cécile who knew what it was like to take a child out of your body and hold it in your arms, and it was Cécile who could remind her daughter of Mrs Beeton’s advice if the baby did not cry as it should:

the child should be turned on its right side, and the whole length of the spine, from the head downwards, rubbed with all the fingers of the right hand, sharply and quickly, without intermission, till the quick action has not only evoked heat, but electricity in the part, and till the loud and sharp cries of the child have thoroughly expanded the lungs, and satisfactorily established its life.

Marguerite could fathom no situation whereby she would not grow healthily with child; she was young, and had taken her bleeding at fourteen years old, and felt that natural inclination towards children that marked out women who were ripe, and whose bodies had arrived at a place whereby they might be taken for this purpose. About her bed were darkened stains from her night-time bleeding, when at the start of her confinement she had neglected to wear the T-bandages at night, for they made her too hot around her crotch and sometimes itchy too. Marguerite stuffed her bandages into the chamber pot and Cécile took them when they were finished with, and a month later freshly cleaned bandages would be provided, for they had settled at about fifteen as the correct number needed, and Marguerite remained as discreet as possible, because her mother did not like to speak about such things, and in fact had only instructed Marguerite on how to manage her menses when she found her daughter on the floor of the grand bathroom one morning, having fainted, covered in a bleeding that she did not understand, and there was so much of it around the floor and bathtub that Cécile took in a faint as well, and they had to bar the door while they cleaned it up, for Thérèse was still too young to understand these things and it must be kept a secret from boys.

Cécile had attended to this need regularly in the attic, until it had become less regular; Marguerite took it to be an effect of her more fragile stature, or her lack of exercise, or the want of fresh air (birds however, do not lay eggs before they have some place to put them). No matter that they stopped for a time; it had happened before, briefly, and would prove better, for her wedding, as she would hate to cover herself with pad-bandages on her wedding day, bleeding dark nubs of herself underneath her clean white dress. Her cycle would return in her married home (in building their nests, the male and female generally assist each other). It would return when she applied herself to the business of children-making, and the difficulty of this confinement was over.

Marguerite dipped her head and sniffed at the stains on her bedcover. They had been a dark red once, then brown, but now they had faded to a pale yellow, indistinguishable from the remnants of food or the places where she had vomited on the sheets; it was difficult to make out one stain from another now, but she knew that blood did not simply vanish from fabric. There had been enough covert throwing-away of petticoats in her youth. How long had it been since she had bled onto this bedcover (when, however, the bleeding is excessive, or returns too frequently, it becomes necessary to apply means to subdue or mitigate the amount)? Her curse had slipped away so easily, and of course it was better not to have to concern yourself with it, for who enjoys attending to themselves so much and so often? But Marguerite could not remember when she had last bled out of herself, and she found herself pulling up her nightdress and looking between her legs, where the hair covered from her navel down onto her thighs, the same dark hair that had grown so thickly from her head until lately, and she saw that it was not the brown tangle that she knew so well, but that it had begun to grey at the sides, like her mother’s temples at the loss of her father. And then Marguerite’s fingers were inside herself, grasping for any matter that might be stuck there, and she pulled out her hand and there was nothing but a yellow-white paste, not a hint of blood. Had Cécile entered her daughter’s attic cocoon at that moment, she would have found a thin-boned creature bent almost in half, her hair falling in patches from her head to her crotch, no face to be found in the structure as the girl stared as far as she could inside herself, her fingers exploring, her whole self, looking for where the promise of her future had gone, seeking eggs with her fingertips and finding none.

10

to dress truffles in champagne

The childhoods of Marguerite, Louis and Thérèse had been decided on long before any of them were born. Their wheels were set in motion not by Cécile making eyes at someone over a scant dinner, or being asked to dance at a ball, but in an office with the acrid stench of tallow in the air, over a handshake slick with sweat.

The Bri-White factory had turned into several factories, and as women across London began to fear that their weekly wash days were prematurely ageing them, shelves of Bri-White would be emptied nearly as soon as they were filled. James Hargreaves’ handful of slogans had imprinted themselves into the minds of consumers, and he believed that it was one in particular (It’s not just white. It’s Bri-White) which had finally ensnared the formerly loyal customers of his rival brands. But James Hargreaves was not simply building factories. He was building something larger than that.

Cecilia’s father relieved her of soap-wrapping duties one afternoon as they sat in the park of the village he had built. The village, rather grandly named Avalon, was a marvel of construction; modern in every sense of the word, and so full of green space that the workers, lifted out of slums and deposited into a small, neat family home, the payments being taken directly out of their wages, rarely knew what to do with so much grass and garden, and were often too scared to touch their own flowers. But this was fine, for Cecilia’s father paid for gardeners; the spaces around the houses should be kept as neat as possible, for the benefit of everyone, to his own design. The park had been designed as the centre of the village, to specifications drawn up by her father himself, and he was greatly praised for his concern for his workers; they were healthier, and less likely to die, and as long as they kept working for the company, and behaved in a fashion considered becoming of the village, they could live there for a portion of their wages. Members of the press and parliament visited on a weekly basis. James Hargreaves wanted it known that he was raising a generation of whom the country might be proud; fine young workers, healthy and well, who would turn in their timecards without exaggeration and would act in a manner befitting their employ in their leisure hours as well as their busy ones.

Within the village there was also separate barracks-style accommodation for the young women who, being too young or unprepared for marriage, were not engaged, and wished to keep themselves from the company of men in their entirety. In the barracks they could live among women their own age, and therefore avoid any of that potential sexual attraction and those hormonal urges that drove people to act in a filthy manner – and for just half of their weekly wage. Mr Hargreaves knew that what these women needed was the company of other women, to keep them out of any of that trouble. Cecilia could not understand what kind of young woman would want to live there, with its higher price and distinctly un-luxurious design and decor. Yet some of her peers did so, and some older women too. There were even three women near to retirement age who had moved there from their much nicer homes. The residents shared everything, almost like a family, weaving their lives together as if they might exist this way for ever.

But the young women who lived in the barracks, as well as all others in the village, would be expected to give up their jobs when they eventually married. Her father strictly believed that the job of a wife was to tend to the home and the husband, and eventually the children, and he believed this so strongly that no married women were allowed to work in his factories; spinsters and children were welcomed, however. And so it was that he announced to Cecilia that she would be made unemployed, for like any good businessman he had been working on a trade, in secret, in small rooms with closed doors, for a long time.

‘He’s a man of a good, old family. French, generations back, and there’s a duke in there somewhere.’

‘I’m to marry a duke?’

Cecilia’s father smiled at the thought; perhaps he’d aimed for that and missed.

‘I’m afraid not. But it’s a marriage that will do you and us well. There aren’t many families that make connections with aristocracy when they were born in terraced houses in Chorley, Cecilia. You’ll never have to work another day in your life, and you’ll have your pick of homes, and staff to arrange every part of your existence. Not to mention the food, my girl. They’re quite known for their largesse.’

It was rare that when you spoke to James Hargreaves he was looking at your face. His secretaries, who took to his office between nine and eleven every morning to take down the many letters he would dictate, were used to not making eye contact as he rattled through the correspondence that required four women to keep up with him. His workers would shake his hand while his gaze was already creeping over their shoulders. Even his wife was used to him looking out onto the horizon when she told him she loved him. Now, he was puffed up with pride at his business achievements; in front of him, the village he’d built to protect the people who made him his money. At his side, his key to the better classes.

‘You’ve never eaten decadently in your life,’ said Cecilia, studying her father’s earlobes, and the wrinkles on his neck.

‘No, but if you’re keen for gout you’ll be in the right place. Just don’t listen to his juvenile thoughts on politics; I hear he’s quite the bohemian, a bleeding-heart liberal. Lots of stupid ideas about the Empire. But his family is a fine one, and I trust that you can impress some sense upon the man.’

Cecilia was permitted one last afternoon in her work room, with the smell of lye about her and the smiling faces of the women who would miss her, for they would no longer see her about the village, and wouldn’t ever set eyes on the babies she made. Cecilia was being delivered into a different world and they all knew it. Afterwards she told her parents she was going to the lending library and the girls took her to the pub. She drank port and wept on someone’s shoulder.

Cecilia’s mother reported the details: he was older than her, but no matter there, for wasn’t it natural for a gentleman to seek out the innocence of youth in his bride? And it was better for both of them that he had grown past his wilder days; quite the handful then, said her mother, with an expression that Cecilia had not seen before. But he had settled, that was the message, and now he was ready to make a good marriage to a woman who could contain him, and in return he could provide her with all things necessary for a truly lavish life, and more than that, a good name: Périgord.

‘Your father is quite made up with it, Cecilia. A Périgord daughter. His grandchildren will be Périgords. Good blood is the only thing you can’t buy, you know.’

He was charming; she could give him that much. He had the broken-champagne-flute accent on his words and he knew French and Latin. He didn’t seem keen for books, but so enjoyed the work of Lord Byron that he would recite it to her in lieu of conversation, which she grew to be thankful for, given that his conversation was so regularly about himself. She was taken to the Périgords’ Scotland residence for the formal introduction, and was presented to a mother, a father, three sisters and a profusion of nieces and nephews. Even the spaniels sniffed around her feet as if she was something that had been dragged in and didn’t belong, and one made his feelings known by cocking his leg and pissing all over her shoes. A servant took him away but the Périgords were laughing.

It was Mrs Périgord who addressed her first.

‘You’re a virgin, of course.’

Cecilia had no prepared response that she could reach for; instead her mouth stayed firmly closed.

‘I’m asking after your virginity. Whether you’ve been with other men.’

Cecilia felt the heat prickling on the inside of her skin and wished her father had not gone to a meeting on the other side of the loch and left her here with these strangers. She would not answer such a question, and thankfully her fiancé burst the silence.

‘Ceci, why don’t you come for a walk around the grounds? I’m sure we can be more convivial than this.’

He put her hand on his arm and they walked around the estate; she had never seen such a show of money. The families they knew were all like their own, made up in business and willing to show their money only in so much as they could keep hold of it. The Périgords looked like they had spent more than Cecilia’s family had ever had, and as the newspapers kept saying of her father, he was quickly rising to be one of the wealthiest businessmen in Britain.

‘You’ll have to excuse my mother, she’s a terrible bitch.’

Cecilia laughed; she had never heard language like it. Swearing was forbidden both in the village and the factories.

‘Oh, it’s true. No point painting her a saint. Both of them just want me settled down, in a nice house with a nice girl, with the noose of their money around my neck. I’m the shame of the family, if you’d believe it to look at me.’

He held open his arms and twirled, presenting his backside like a peacock. She laughed.

‘I won’t go into parliament and I’ve no interest in any of the titles; they all come with work, and I don’t believe in it. Not when there’s food to be eaten, and wine to be drunk, and – well, I could go on. Life is for pleasure, don’t you think, Cecilia?’

She did not think. Life was for the improvement of oneself; this was the maxim in the Hargreaves house. The residents of Avalon were expected to engage themselves in self-betterment classes two nights a week, not including music practice, for which the instruments would be provided on request. On her twelfth birthday her father had presented her with a copy of the book which had changed his life; a book on how to pull oneself up with determination and hard work. It was the first and only time she’d seen him teary-eyed. The pleasure came from the rewards of hard work. From knowing you had achieved. She put this across to her fiancé.

‘My God. Were you raised by nuns?’ He lit a cigarette and offered one to her; shocked, she declined. ‘This sort of claptrap is how they keep your people down.’

‘I’d like to travel,’ she stated, plain as day. ‘I’ve been on a cruise to the tropics with my parents and found it very stimulating. I’d like to do more of that.’

He agreed; travel was very good for introducing a person to new experiences. He had been abroad himself, quite often.

‘And what about babies?’

‘Babies are beautiful, gorgeous, world-building things. We can have a dozen.’

So, then, she was to be a factory.

‘Or two or three,’ he said, taking in her expression, which she thought she had hidden. ‘Or simply one. However many come, you’ll have help with that. And then an entire brood of little ones running around us, breaking the dishes and vomiting on the carpet. A whole team of little Périgords on whom Mother will dote. Between her and the nurses we’re unlikely to get anywhere near them. Then they’re off to board and then married. And off to make us grandchildren of our own to dote on.’

This life presented: one without work or concern, without need for strain or hardship. She was not right for it; about this she felt sure. She was not particularly beautiful. From some angles she felt she had a strong face, but it was more like her grandmother’s: stout and capable, with looks that could cut someone’s knees off if sharpened. She was broad at the shoulders and carried herself well, but she was not pretty, not some great charm. And yet all this was being offered on a gilt plate. And she couldn’t help but marvel at how quickly he had shaped her from plain Cecilia Hargreaves, a Lancashire girl, into a new metropolitan woman: Cécile Périgord.

‘My mother won’t rest until I am wed, and your father will have you marry upwards come hell or highwater. We could do a lot worse than each other.’

Seizing an idea, he got down on one knee, took her closed fist in his hand and kissed her knuckles, slipping his tongue between her third and fourth fingers. She blushed, and felt something entirely new. He grinned.

‘My proposal is this: let’s live a little, shall we?’

The wedding was enormous. Her father, for all of his hard-working ways, knew when a celebration was in order – and when a show of his means would entrench him in a place he wanted to be. Since the engagement, Bri-White had been granted the royal seal, and with it, though nobody but the company and the royals knew, came a special order; soap containing real flowers, made especially for Victoria, and nobody else. A contract in perpetuity, to account for exclusivity. James Hargreaves set his Avalon ladies to growing roses immediately – red, of course, for a white rose inside his soap would kill him – and instructed them to behead the plants early, when the flowers were young, so that they could be set in his saponified fat before they reached full bloom. Cecilia’s father was in the palace, and now his daughter was to be in the aristocracy too. He was swollen, practically fit to burst with secret pride, and the money in his pocket was regal, and had to be seen. So there were hundreds at the wedding, people she had never met and didn’t intend to, and despite their shared love of luxury, you could split the new and old money people down the middle on nothing more than a look.

Cécile and her husband fucked in the vestry of the church. They asked for a moment to go and pray, and there, overcome, for she had never felt anything like it and grew desperate at the very sight of him, there he got on his knees and lifted her dresses and underclothes and pressed his hot mouth to her body. He hummed, and devoured, and she fainted. When she came round he had his hand around his cock and at a nod from her he took her, his moans so loud she was sure the priest would hear. His sisters sneered as they emerged, derision running off their pointed noses. And when Cécile and her new husband walked down the aisle to the sounds of bells, he dripped steadily down the inside of her thigh.

The meal was preposterous, arranged by the Périgords with no input from the newlyweds; there were traditions, after all, and guests of this type would have expectations of a certain kind. It was a July wedding, and among a whole retinue of blancmanges, jellies, tarts, pastries, cheesecakes and fruit platters were served:

a glazed boar’s head, holding an apple between its teeth

six pheasants in their tail feathers

four shoals of sardines swimming in aspic

a dozen roast quail

mayonnaises of salmon

mayonnaises of trout

braised ox hearts in aspic

raised pies

larded capon

vats of snail soup

a young roasted deer

shoulders of lamb, stuffed

three dozen lobsters

veal and ham pies

pigeon pies

two hundred marzipan petit fours

Charlotte Russe à la vanille

a gilded marzipan peacock with meringues and sugared almonds

Tea, coffee, wine, spirits, ginger beer and lemonade were replenished apparently without end. There was champagne brought in crates from France and sherry given in nips. Every time Cécile laid down her fork, staff in sharp white aprons and high collars took away her plate and brought clean china, onto which they laid a thick slice of honeyed ham, muscle-pink and edged with jellied fat, or a shredded pile of lobster swimming in a pool of butter, or a point of tongue, which moved if she took her eyes off it, flicking itself in her direction if she glanced to see a great-aunt waving. Each time she tried to shoo away the attendants they simply came back with more food; she tried to leave it but it seemed impolite. She was sick after the first three courses and vomited twice more during the dancing, but her new husband did not seem to care, for he kissed her on the mouth and ran his hands all over her as if they were in bed at home rather than in front of a castle full of strangers and family.

Throughout the dinner and the rest of the evening, Cécile passed her hand over to her husband, only to find him aroused at her touch, and during the pigeon pie course he excused himself in a state of near-peak and returned ruddy. The normal rules of life did not apply to her new husband; if her father was the personification of responsibility and ambition, her husband was the refutation of it. There was no politeness about him; he said his words in the right way and knew so many of them, but he did not care for reputation, nor propriety, and each time he did something outrageous, something that Cécile knew within her very marrow was wrong, another part of her swelled with blood and desire. She had imagined marriage to be an austere situation, a promise to be sober and sensible and to dedicate their lives to each other; to uphold all the social pillars on which society rested. But it was looking to be something much more exciting.

The wedding gifts from the Périgords and their many acquaintances ranged from wads of cash (in envelopes all addressed to her husband) to crockery so delicate it threatened to smash if you breathed in the wrong direction. Sheets in cotton from countries she had never heard of, and enough of them to furnish three homes. A chest, older than time, so pristine it could never have been used. From her own parents, a lump sum to her husband and his family. She would never know the actual amount, and it tortured her, later, to know what value had been given and then removed from her. The business, of course, was done prior to the ceremony; on the day, the only visible transactions were the gifts: jewellery and art and the odd creature killed and stuffed. To her, though, there was one particularly pointed gift. From the senior Mrs Périgord, a brand-new copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, in which, she later found, her own wedding menu had been written, with the inscription:

To Cecilia. This book will teach you how to be a lady suitable for this life. You will need it.

11

only fit to be eaten

There had been no rain on Marguerite’s roof for forty-three full days. She couldn’t keep the count in her head past twenty, and when marking the thick, increasingly warm days with a pen, she got confused about which she had marked already, so instead had torn small pieces of paper from Victor Hugo novels each morning, and by the time she heard the speckling of drops on her roof again there were forty-three pieces. She counted them twice, three times; forty-three. That was almost a month and a half, give or take, but without Victor Hugo she would have sworn it was a week. Her Hargreaves grandfather had told her, when she was very little, that there were natural rhythms in the body. No matter what the season, no matter how dark the mornings of winter or how light the early hours of summer days, he would wake in his half-covered bed at six and no later, for the body knew when a day began, and it knew, too, where it ended. Marguerite’s body, then, was out of time, or perhaps it was numbers that were wrong. Thinking about it for too long induced a feeling like nausea in the head.

By the final days of that period she was sleeping without a nightgown, and in the brightening mornings listened to the cries of the children on the streets outside. She felt, acutely, how small her world had become, and within her bubbled the desire to run down the house’s wide staircase and into the street with the local children, and to drag her hands through the rain-soaked leaves of the trees in the gardens, and roll around in her bare nudity on the wet cobbles on the street. But was this really possible? Even if she could make it happen, it would destroy her progress and lengthen her confinement. Cécile would add months to her tenure; it was not the behaviour of a girl ready for marriage. So Marguerite stood on her bed, noting the creak of old metal and wondering if it would snap, and she unfurled her body, which was stiff in every place and solid in some, and stretched herself upwards as much as possible; she pushed her face against the damp ceiling, her right cheek against the damp plaster, and took deep breaths and convinced herself they were cold, and ran her hands down the chilled ceiling, letting the cold go in through her finger bones, and in this way she had cleansed herself in the freshening rain, taking it inside her skin, breaking the clouds in her mind, drops falling softly onto the small sack of her stomach, the thick curve of her spleen, the beating muscle of her heart.

She could not have been left without food, without mother, for forty-three rainless days. She would surely be dead. But when did she last hear the rattle of the attic hatch? Never mind; Cécile arrived, and reset the clock. Marguerite drew herself up, hoping to present to her mother the ways in which she was preparing herself for her re-entry to society. She spent her days tidying her hair, scratching away the lice, tidily removing insects from her body. Her fingers twitched to pull the sheet tight beneath her prone body; she had begun to feel every wrinkle as if it were a blade. But Cécile arrived, speaking quickly of the safety of the house, and of repairs to be done and paid for, and of criminals in the streets and not a single thing to do about them. There was no mention of how long she had been in coming, or how Marguerite had behaved last. She only looked up at her daughter when she realized Marguerite was not reaching for the tray that rested on the bed.

‘Oh, dear girl, what’s happened to your head?’

Cécile took Marguerite’s skull with both hands and turned it this way and that, pressing her thumbs around it, running her hands through her hair and making a frustrated sound as she stared at the long strands caught in the rings she wore on each finger.

‘You are half bald, Marguerite, what on earth have you done? My God, what shame you’d bring on us if anyone could see you. Why must you always be vicious, even to yourself?’

Marguerite brought her fingers to the crown of her head – two fingerprint-sized patches of skull amid the thick knots of her hair. She looked quickly around the floor for discarded handfuls but there were none. Perhaps she had eaten them? She forced her tongue back as far as it would go into her mouth, feeling around for strands caught in her tonsils, for the tug of a hair poking up from her throat. She caught her mother staring at how much this action distorted her face, and in response Marguerite loosened her jaw and stuck out her tongue, to show her mother she was doing nothing strange. But Cécile turned quickly away from her open-mouthed child and busied herself with the food tray instead. Cécile had brought to the attic a glass of sherry, a boiled artichoke, its leaves there to be scraped with the teeth, and on a white and blue plate, three thick slices of eel, boiled in salt water with a fresh bunch of parsley, set on the plate with a coating of bright yellow melted butter. The leftover water pooled underneath them on the plate.

Marguerite took the edge of her spoon and tipped one of the eel-slices on to its wide back, driving the metal into the rubbered flesh so she might separate it into quarters. Four pieces, three slices, twelve mouthfuls of eel. She put the first piece neatly on her tongue, folded her lips closed and began to suck.

Cécile, bothered by this, stood up and tried to engage herself elsewhere. She took Mrs Beeton from the shelf: ‘The common eel … is known frequently to quit its native element, and to set off on a wandering expedition in the night, or just about the close of day, over the meadows, in search of snails and other prey. Oils from the sea creatures are good for the brain, Marguerite, and I’ve heard it said they are responsible for the elasticity of the skin, the sort of foods that keep a woman of a manner that she might be shown on the arm of a businessman, or an earl, or a man of that type.’

‘Mr Lewis cares not for the state of my skin, Mother,’ said Marguerite, around the eel. ‘He cares for the lightness of my soul.’

Marguerite did not know what Mr Lewis saw in her, if she was honest, and she also did not really care. She ran the body of the eel against her teeth and swallowed it without chewing, taking a mouthful of sherry to help it down.

Cécile continued: ‘It also, sometimes, betakes itself to isolated ponds, apparently for no other pleasure than that which may be supposed to be found in a change of habitation. This—’

‘From a canal near his house at Twickenham, he (Sir John Hawkins) missed many young ducks; and on draining, in order to clean it, great numbers of large eels were caught in the mud,’ recited Marguerite, even remembering which of Mrs Beeton’s pages the anecdote was from. ‘When some of these were opened, there were found in their stomachs the undigested heads of the quacking tribe which had become their victims.’

Cécile, book still open in her hands, stared at her daughter, the interrupting daughter, the daughter who ate like a choking fish, and Marguerite could feel exuding from her mother a frustration that she had thought gone from the woman entirely, the frustration she had felt as a child when she would not put on her boots. Cécile snapped the book closed and threw it onto the bed.

‘You really must turn everything awful, mustn’t you?’

Marguerite swept the remains of the boiled eel up with her fingers and pushed them all into her mouth, knowing that the tray would be swiftly removed, and she grabbed at the wine glass to drink the remains. Cécile took the glass from her grasp and in doing so spilled the remnants of the sherry onto the girl’s nightgown. The artichoke tumbled off the bed and onto the filth-laden floor.

‘It is the great shame of my life, Marguerite, that you have turned out the way you have, despite my best efforts. You will be the death of me, I think. You will be the death of us both.’

Cécile swept away from her daughter like a lady leaving court, having been offended by the bad-taste joke of a jester; royal bearing, she could not deny that the Périgords had it.

‘Is there word—’

‘There is no letter for you,’ spat Cécile without turning her head. ‘Your Mr Lewis must have begun to forget you.’

Marguerite sucked on the cold, disintegrating remnants of an artichoke leaf, her teeth having scraped the last of its flesh off some hours before. There were seven leaves left in the neat arrangement on the floor; she calculated one a day would be the least she could eat. As she pulled saliva from her gums, her lips nearly numb from the sucking, she read Mr Lewis’s letter, the one she’d pinned against the ceiling to give the carrion crow some privacy, moving the yellowed portrait of Queen Victoria over the hole again so that the bird might not be unduly disturbed. There was little doubt that his tone had changed; the early days of her confinement had brought outpourings of affection (within the realms of discretion; she had not been so restrained, thinking if she could whip Mr Lewis into a frenzy he might demand her freedom from Cécile) and long descriptions of his day trips to the country, of meals he had been forced to sit through; Mr Lewis did not enjoy sitting among men for whom food and drink were methods through which to prove their wealth, and yet these were the people he often had to associate with. He enjoyed her withering put-downs of men who sent away platters half-eaten, who would order bottles that cost a month’s rent to someone just outside their door. If only Mr Lewis had been forced to meet her father.

Naturally, over the course of her confinement this sort of communication would have begun to tire Mr Lewis. It is an effort to write at the end of a work day, and as an older man, it would only be natural for concern to set in. Marguerite might have tired of him, or found love with another, or simply outgrown her dedication to him. But Marguerite had done none of these things (at least, not since the start of her confinement) and she spent pages reassuring Mr Lewis that her plans had not altered, and that she loved his descriptions of London and his life and the men he despised, for she despised so many of them too.

Yet the letter before her, the letter hiding her carrion crow and its clutch of potential babies, was different, somehow, from those she remembered.

Certainly my own mother never considered my sisters in such a loving regard before their marriages and they have ended up the worse for it.

Mr Lewis adored his sisters, Bessie and Ida. Years younger than him, and only half-related, they were vivacious where Mr Lewis was reserved; frivolous where he was serious. Marguerite looked forward to the evenings they might spend together teasing her husband and larking about. Different though they might have been from their brother, he had never said a word against them; neither had fallen into a bad marriage, and both were well considered in general society. How strange for him to have taken against them in a letter to his darling.

There is much to organize in a new household, my Daisy, and I trust after your period of education you will be able to take on these responsibilities with immediate effect as I continue to provide the earnings on which we will live.

During their courtship, however short, Mr Lewis had impressed upon Marguerite that she would not be chained to their home as so many women were; he had managed quite well as a single man and did not expect to be throwing grand parties in his small married home. Marguerite firmly believed that he did not require a woman to look after him; rather, in his twilight years he wanted a bright young thing to bring some life to his evenings, and if that came with a family, so be it. It would be Marguerite’s concern to look after the children while he worked, but she was not to be a servant, and certainly not to waste her young life away in toil. And yet here he was, again stating that she would be some sort of house maiden. He wasn’t himself at all.

I am but a lowborn man of almost three times your age, Daisy, and if you were to find yourself another husband with whom you might live a more comfortable life more befitting your situation, I would hold no grudge nor bitterness towards you. All I want for you is your endless happiness and if that be with another man, I will not stand in your way.

It was the bulb of the b that gave it away. Lowborn; husband; bitterness. Letters that were straight, directly vertical, making room for the curl at the top of the stalk, the high bulb on top of the low one, and all this set against Mr Lewis’s natural slanted cursive. Now she saw it, it was impossible to unsee; so many letters standing straight against their neighbours, the French style that Cécile had forced her children to learn, had forced herself to learn, making itself known against the tight, angled alphabet the writer was trying to emulate. Marguerite crawled to the edge of her bed and reached under it; there was the end of a floorboard missing, revealing a cavity between her floor and the ceiling of the room below, and there she kept her letters from Mr Lewis, posting them through the letterbox slit and fishing them out with her fingers when she wanted to read one. A mouse or something bigger must have been chewing at the floorboard, as it was now all turned to splinters, and though she tried to thread her fingers through the web of shards she ended up with lacerations on the thin skin of her hand and no letter to show for it. Taking one of the weights from the scale, she smashed through the splintered wood and thrust her hand into the pile of letters stashed below; an early letter, one delivered to her just several weeks into her stay. There were wine spills and splatters of oil smudging some of the letters but she held it flat against the ceiling, next to the new letter, and it was plain as day. The new letter, despite best efforts to disguise it, had been written by Cécile.

When Marguerite was small, before Thérèse or Louis had come along, before the thin scaffold holding their family together had truly crumbled, when she was just about upright and her father had called her Toddlekins, there was a single morning she’d spent alone with her father. He had been out all night and walked in at dawn, and with Cécile still in bed and the bedroom door firmly locked, he had wrestled his child from the arms of the staff, demanded a crumpet with butter and a glass of champagne, and taken Marguerite into the garden. It was still tended to, then, by a gardener half the staff were in love with, who seemed to leave children in every garden he worked in, and it was a late spring morning with dew on the grass and a breeze that brought a rise on the cheeks. If Marguerite’s memory had been sharper she might have recalled that her father had tripped and stumbled as he walked on the lawn with her, and that she’d slipped from his arms several times, only to be caught awkwardly by a leg or a cardigan sleeve. Had she not been so young, she might have been able to smell vice on him, both perfume and a variety of masculine sweats mingling with a chemical aroma, and she might remember that he spat phlegm onto the ground in chunks. But she didn’t recall these things, nor the words he said to her as he held her against his chest and spoke to her about the flowers, although she could still, even now, feel the peerless terror of being thrown into the air by him, unsure at that age whether she would be caught or not, and the giddy exhilaration of meeting her father’s hands once again.

It was this, the sensation of being haphazardly thrown, that she felt looking at the two letters. The air around her, the knowledge of gravity, the undeniable truth that for many months at least, the letters had come not from the desk of Mr Lewis, but from her own mother’s, just metres away.

Before she could stop herself, Marguerite had torn the letter from the carrion crow’s hole and grabbed the largest egg inside.

She quickly pushed Mrs Beeton’s cover against the gap in the sloped roof of the attic, and against it the carrion crow scratched her claws, and butted her head, and screamed with maternal indignation for the unborn chick taken from her nest so easily. Marguerite stared at the egg in her hand (Eggs in general are considered most easily digestible when little subjected to the art of cookery) as if she had no conception of how it might have got there. Had her mother arrived through the hatch at that moment she would have found, in this small space, a woman crouched on a bed, a matted nest of hair hanging from her head, her hand pressed against a book pressed against a disintegrating ceiling, an egg in her palm (Eggs are much better when new-laid than a day or two afterwards), a sewing machine taking in her actions from the edge of the bed. Marguerite saw herself, for a fleeting moment, as this painting, this tragic portrait, trapped in dried oils, motionless. She shook herself and the layers of colour cracked on the inside, and she twitched her arm and a thick blob flaked off, and she looked at her hands and they were living hands, and she looked at the egg (they form an essential ingredient in pastry, creams, flip, &c), which was a three-dimensional egg, and she saw before herself two courses of action, but she no longer knew which one made sense to her, and she didn’t really know which woman she was, a real one or a painted one, and with each moment the crow grew angrier, a mother betrayed, and Marguerite pressed harder to keep the animal trapped, and in her hand there was a pale blue-green egg (it is particularly necessary that they should be quite fresh), and with a great jolt of her body Marguerite flew from her paralysis and into her mouth went the egg. Crack down, crunch, thick skin, it was crusty, the ooze from within, a cold heat and a heartbeat, fragments of protection against her teeth, her molars again, the large sheets of it gone, and small matter in the liquid, a thick heart pad, yellow she knew, it was in her mouth yet it reached down her throat, she knew the feeling from a childhood illness, and Marguerite swallowed the egg down into her stomach, and she dropped the book, and the carrion crow forced her rage-filled body through the serrated hole and cut her wings and dived with her beak for Marguerite, still Marguerite, Marguerite on her bed, lying perfectly perfect, eyes wide open, albumen at her chin, eggshell between her teeth, breathing slow as the carrion crow scratched its anger across her body and pecked its rage at her face.

12

hogs are very fond of them, and frequently lead to their being found, from their rutting up the ground in search of them

The newly married Cécile had been drunk on her husband. She had been drunk on London. Her husband had chosen the Cheyne Row house of all those on offer to them; they could have lived in Scotland, or Yorkshire, or in a late great-uncle’s country pile in an obscure part of Wales that seemed neither here nor there. But in all his wisdom Cécile’s husband chose Cheyne Row, the smallest of the properties, but the one that had been longest in the possession of the Périgords; it was a house for a new family, he said, and the one closest to the fun.

They arrived in August, after a brief sojourn up to the Scotland home, where they had ridden horses and fucked in a fountain in the grounds. The Périgord seniors had accompanied them where possible, apparently fearful that the two lovers would leave the country if allowed out of sight for the merest moment, but given the excess of small flies that affixed themselves to the face during the Scottish summer months, the older couple could not be coaxed out of doors for more than a minute; the senior Mrs Périgord took all of her sun in the conservatory that had been affixed to the Inveraray home by some ambitious ancestor long prior.

Having never spent much time with families other than her own, which was small and quiet, she realized now, Cécile found the time in Scotland most educational. The sisters had dismissed her entirely, an extension of their brother, whom they seemed to despise. The senior Mr Périgord was, on paper, the patriarch; he walked at the head of any excursion; paintings of him in oil hung on the walls of the corridors; he was served first, and tasted the wine, and if there was any business to attend to, he would direct one of his staff to take care of it for him. His wife walked on his arm or shortly behind him, but if one was to watch carefully, they would see that she was the one directing where the group was going; even from behind, she led the way. And while Mr Périgord viewed Cécile as some sort of delightful folly, a visitor from a country that had never seen cutlery nor eaten at a table, whose broad mouth spoke a different language altogether, he still held her in some sort of regard; she was, of course, from a moneyed man, and had come with a dowry. He flirted with her, making jokes at his son’s expense and nodding knowingly in Cécile’s direction, and as soon as dinner was over he removed his shoes and socks and lifted up his gout-ridden feet on the furniture, stretching and crimping his toes until it looked as if the thick white deposits might burst out of his skin altogether. He took turns around the dining hall of a morning, his response to the garden being ‘ridden with gnats’, and made jokes about his son’s virility, and whether he might deliver them a grandchild before the next summer came – and if not, he would do the job himself.

The senior Mrs Périgord had Cécile trapped under glass. When Cécile stood up from the table, her posture was appraised. When she spoke, her vowels were critiqued. When she took the arm of her husband, it was noted and stored away. The senior Mrs Périgord spoke little, knowing that silence was her greatest weapon, tapping her husband gently on the arm when she considered him to have spoken too long or too stupidly. A slight nod of her head brought servants who would take away plates unfinished, or pile yet more food on top of that which was being too slowly eaten. She judged things wrong on a whim, had them removed, and complained about the gap they left. Cécile spent her days being grilled on her capabilities, and her evenings being fed turtle soup by the green tureenful, though the rest of the family simply sat speaking over the meal, letting the dish grow cold beneath their gesticulating hands. She barely noticed that she was the only one consuming the soup until their fourth dinner of the week, when her husband was scarlet-cheeked, arguing with his father about the country’s movements overseas, and he broke from his liberal diatribe to spit the words, ‘Christ, Cécile, must you constantly remind us that you’ve flown in here via the gutter?’ The spoon was taken from her hand and the dishes removed from the table. Her husband had already turned away, left the table and slammed the solarium door, but his mother was smiling broadly.

For the rest of the trip Cécile avoided the senior Mrs Périgord by hanging on to her own husband in every waking instant. Her husband made no complaints. By the time the newlyweds left they had disgraced themselves in almost every public space on the family estate; despite having his wife at his disposal all evening, with all of her willingness, Cécile suspected that her husband had a greater attachment to an open environment, and indeed any time they caught a moment together in somewhere with fresh air and a possibility of being caught, her husband grew so hard it appeared to physically pain him; only a swift resolution would suffice. He taught her things she’d had no clue even existed; upon the knees with a mouth; on a lap, bouncing; in places she had never had items before. And every time, outdoors, against walls or on piles of grass, and sometimes, underneath running water, wherein her husband also relieved himself either during or shortly after, washing it off her with small laps. Cécile was amenable to every piece of education, and brought forth some of her own ideas; her husband was encouraging of these experiments and indeed was excited by them in the sheets of his own bed, underneath paintings of his ancestors in their French garb, their taffetas and silks. Cécile found herself, during these moments, the rare indoor moments of fucking, allowing herself a vocal relief, peaking loudly, hearing the echoes of her ecstasy melt down the wall and into the empty and occupied spaces of the old Périgord house. It might not belong to her, but now she belonged to it.

Then they were in London. The city had shape-shifted; it once towered over her, forming tunnels in which she had lost herself at the side of her parents. This new London opened like a ripe flower, and each step she took created new paths through it. Her husband tugged her down alleys shaded from the light, where women laughed as her husband lifted her skirts and put his mouth on her. The first time it happened, she was racked with shame and tried to fight him off, then despite herself she was lost in the soft wetness all about her, fingernails cutting into the brick behind them; a moment later they were back in the daylight, her husband nodding hello to the newspaper sellers and kissing old women on the cheeks with his Cécile-covered lips. As if they had slipped to another universe and then back again. Underneath her father’s London was another city, a city where people like her husband resided, and Cécile believed she might like it there. She might like who she was there.

In the London of other people, the Périgord name was a golden ticket which bought them access to anywhere, and credit everywhere. She and her husband walked into places they had never been before and walked out with goods unpaid for, with nothing more than a card given and his name dropped. Her father had always paid his way around the world, giving cash and buying small gifts for people; shaking hands, listening, remembering names, asking after families. Cécile’s new husband simply moved through the world as if it revolved around him. And it did. Delivery after delivery of antique goods and family heirlooms arrived at their door, so many that she soon had more sofas than she could think to arrange, and what they needed to buy was procured either by her father or through some Périgord connection. Money no longer existed; they could simply be, and life would arrange itself to compensate for them.

Cheyne Row was already a lived-in home when they arrived; the brass-framed bed had belonged to Périgord couples for six generations; it had been refitted and painted and taken apart and put back together, but still it remained. The dining table that seated sixteen had been brought over from Normandy on a boat with its own guard, lest it be stolen by errant revolutionaries to sell for a shifty profit. Even the household staff were arranged by the senior Mrs Périgord. No sooner had Cécile managed to take an entire tour of her new home than on her doorstep she found a team: a cook, a housekeeper, three maids, a laundry maid, and a scullery maid for the kitchen. The housekeeper, Mrs Arnott, had so much of the senior Mrs Périgord in her that Cécile could have believed they were sisters; she gave a stout shake of the hand, marched the crew into the household and set about bringing it up to the standards to which she adhered. On a chilly afternoon Cécile had the staff draw her a bath in her grand new bathroom. She closed the door and unclothed herself, brushing her hair in the gilt-framed mirror before for a while sitting on the marble floor, bending over the bath with her head held below the water line and the breath still in her chest, letting her hair explore the space around her. Constellations appeared in her eyes, her chest tightened, her strength started to slip and she knew then she was on the precipice. She pulled her head out of the water moments before she gave way entirely. She let her heavy, wet hair hang in front of her face, a curtain on the world, protective and quiet, and when she threw the weight of it over her back, there was the housekeeper. Holding a robe at the door, waiting.

But the staff could not hold back Cécile’s husband’s desires. In fact, they seemed to encourage them. He could not be induced to dress in the morning until he had eaten a toasted crumpet with some sort of pâté; he needed hot tea, and would stride naked around the house, among the servants, until he had it. They kept to the kitchen but he would wander there too, proud as his morning allowed, saying his good days and how did you sleep and seems like it might be full of rain today, Daphne, what do you think? No matter the length of his breakfast, he remained excited, and when sated would make his way upstairs, where he might fuck his wife with not a door closed between them and the rest of the household, or pleasure himself in the empty bath, his moans ringing around the ceramic and seeping through the floorboards. It shamed Cécile, and with this shame she was aroused, and with this arousal she felt shame. Another Cécile blossomed, and in that house she lived.

They had landed in London on the promise of society, of grand events wherein Cécile might be introduced to the best and brightest of the country’s intellectual lights, those in the highest power, those with serious ideas, ones that might change the face, the guts of the country as they knew it. Cécile was hungry for a world outside hard work and austerity. She wanted immoderate things and decadence and bright new people in whose aura she might bathe. But the couple rarely left the house, other than to stroll around the city on the increasingly crisp mornings, taking coffee and buying cakes, acting for all the world like any other couple of their class; in the afternoons they sometimes had guests, mostly friends of the family and elderly people calling in to bore them half to death, and while Cécile would not be informed of it, the housekeeper always seemed to know when the Périgords were coming, and prepared for them the foods they liked, for it was truly their house, and the boxes of turtles would come, and their shells would be cracked, and afterwards the majority of the green broth would be poured into the drains on Cheyne Row; you cannot give the poor a sniff of it, said the senior Mrs Périgord, or you’ll never have peace again. There seemed to be an endless well of acquaintances from which the Périgords could bring up a former schoolmaster here, a great-aunt there, or even a pensioner of unspecified relation who would fall asleep in the drawing room and dribble on the rug, until Cécile began to wonder if these visitors were being sent by her mother-in-law purely so they might exhaust her. She was grateful when her parents returned from their most recent trip abroad, for at least she knew their whims and idiosyncrasies. They had brought her a gift from the Antipodes, where they had tried and failed to solve the Bri-White company’s fat problem, their increasingly pressing need for soap-making resources that wouldn’t run out. It was a strange creature, a fluffy pebble of a thing with a bill like a shoehorn and the hands and feet of a duck, though the way the taxidermist had curled the front set, they looked more like children’s hands, sharp and webbed. Its beady eyes sat above the shoehorn, and from the back stuck out a wide tail, also furred, and Cécile had laughed, an obvious jest, a silly put-together model intended to mock the theories of Mr Darwin. But her father did not smile, said he would never spend money on a ridiculous joke, and that most girls would be grateful for such a gift, killed and stuffed and brought halfway across the world just for their delight. A platypus, he said it was called. So Cécile put the strange creature on the mantel, and said it was beautiful, and tried not to catch the eye of her husband for fear she might laugh.

Her husband behaved himself, for he was nothing if not well bred, despite his strange afflictions, and on this evening was especially charming and pretended to be interested, and Mr Hargreaves spoke at length on his recent activities. Their trip around the world had ostensibly been a holiday, but in her father’s inimitable way, he had managed to undertake an entire tour of potential markets on his way to Australia, for he was on the hunt for another edge with which to shoulder out his rivals. A queen was not enough for him; he needed the world. By the time he had exhausted his many theories and opinions, and had, quite unusually, had a few nips of whisky, Mr Hargreaves was calling Cécile’s husband ‘a fine man’. When her parents departed to stay at a new hotel in Kensington, for they had meetings early the next morning and her father would not sleep in a room that couldn’t be opened up to the outside world, her husband had been sullen and uninterested in their usual activities, instead taking a stiff brandy and standing by the fire, looking into the flames, his glass inches from their monstrous new pet. When pushed, he, with more passion than she’d known he had for any type of political affairs, told her that her father was running a knife through the open wounds that the Belgians had left behind; that he would work the Congo to death all for the sake of his precious soap. Cécile didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about; he called her naive, and ranted about hands cut off, and women abused, and all sorts of horrors that Cécile did not wish to hear.

‘It is just business, simply business, and nothing to get so worked up about. I’m sure you’ve misunderstood, regardless.’

She tried to pour him another brandy; he snatched the glass to his lips.

‘It is filthy money, this new money. It is covered in blood.’

‘And yet you were happy to take it, my dear.’

It was the first thing she had ever said against her husband. She had been raised obedient; intelligent and well-kept, but obedient. She had heard tell of women being hit by their husbands, thrashed for a wrong word or a burned dinner, and these stories were common around the factory, along with the vengeful fantasies of the women who told them. She braced herself for such a response; she held her face up, for she would take it and force him to look at her face while he did it. But her husband simply looked at her with such disdain it was a hot needle through her skin.

‘And your father was desperate to give it, darling. To rid himself of you.’

13

a marked and specific effect on the secretion of milk

A shrieking red mouth dropped onto Marguerite’s bed. The baby crow, little more than a screeching handful of skin, had fallen straight out of the nest and through the portrait that Marguerite had repurposed as a door. The bird, finding itself disagreeably removed from its siblings, opened its mouth upwards, and ah-ah-ah-ed its feelings, all the while waddling its wonky-footed body over to Marguerite’s damp face. It was a fresh bird (The art of taking or killing birds is called ‘fowling’), mostly beak, with perfectly blue discs for its eyes (In the construction of the eyes of birds, there is a peculiarity necessary to their condition), a scraggly thing patched in a translucent dark fuzz; new, but not brand new (It is a common practice to cram young chicks with food as soon as they are born). Its beak was so large that it could barely lift its head; its pink legs were folded underneath its body and it screamed. Marguerite wondered whether the bird knew that it was helpless, whether it could comprehend the situation in which it had found itself. Or was it simply an animal reaction to being separated from its home and parent? It tried to stand, taking all its strength into its legs and pushing its heft upwards, and it only lasted for the briefest of moments. That the mother had not torn through the privacy door and pecked out Marguerite’s eyes suggested that she had gone for her morning glide to find some food; there was no father to tend to the nest while the mother was away. Marguerite pushed herself up to sitting and allowed the chick to heave itself forward with pathetic jolts, wishing for safety. Wishing to be fed. She knew she should not pick it up, but she did.

There remained on Marguerite’s floor the majority of a roasted hare, its head turned leftwards, cooked in its entirety with a little salt rubbed into the skin, surrounded now by a half solidified puddle of gravy; the brains removed, and boiled, and chopped, and mixed with the onions and parsley to be laid around the head, the ears fried crisp and positioned on either side. It was a meal for three or four, really, and she was sure that her mother had intended for it to keep her going for several days or perhaps longer, but Marguerite did not have a cold room or even a cupboard, so although she kept the tray as near as she could to the hole in the ceiling through which a chill breeze blew, the hare had begun to fester, and on it swarmed the sweet little flies that did you no harm other than to steal your food. As Marguerite had found with the artichoke, the grapes and the marzipan, she could eat little more than a nibble of food at once, so the rest of the tray had fed her since her mother’s visit – was it a week, already? Certainly more than a handful of days. She had even scraped a little meat from the hare’s back, but it was so rich and dry that it caused her to fall asleep almost instantly, with a pain in her stomach and a desperate need to drink. Afterwards, she had turned the taps of the Doulton Sanitary Works of Lambeth sink, and caught the filthy sputters that came out, and drank the handful of metallic dirt water, and later filled the chamber pot with shit that ran through her like the Thames.

Cradling the bird in her palm, she crawled over to the hare and shooed away the flies around its closed eyes. With the spoon she scraped tendrils of the cold meat from the ribs, where it was thickest, and she held these like worms above the bird’s mouth; the creature ah-ah-ah-ed and swallowed them, and Marguerite hoped the bird would digest them better than she had, for the attic stank of her excrement, and she knew a nest would not handle that well.

The bird hacked down the hare meat, pulling it down its gullet with the motion of its head. It was quite disgusting, thought Marguerite. There was nothing tender about it. Nothing delicate, just the pathetic glugging of a featherless little sack whose entire existence was to eat. No wonder your father has left you, thought Marguerite, for we are all horrifying, as children, with our clawing, desperate needs. You will feel differently about your own children, they always say. Your eyes will be opened to the myriad ways in which children are the best of us. The carrion crow would certainly give her life for her babies; Marguerite had already been on the sharp, pecking end of that truth. The baby would have to be replaced in its nest before its mother returned, if the family of birds and Marguerite were to continue their cohabiting situation without undue stress. Marguerite had not forgiven herself for the eating of the egg, and she still could not make sense of it, and she panicked, then, with the gentle bird in her hands; Marguerite could be unnatural, Marguerite could not be controlled. She leapt up and, with the bird in one hand, shoved her fist into the attic space, dropped the bird among her siblings, similarly wanton and pathetic, and double-pinned the letter over the hole, for the mother would undoubtedly smell Marguerite on the baby and come with threats and warnings. Marguerite wanted none of it; she wished she had not touched the bird.

Marguerite pushed the tips of her long nails into the back of her throat and scratched there for treasures. Marguerite picked at a cleft between the flat cheeks of her behind, tearing scabs and dabbing the blood with torn pages from Victor Hugo. Marguerite pulled at the hairs between her legs, watching her skin turn translucent as it struggled to contain the root, twisting hair around fingertips and ripping each strand out one by one. But she could not settle the agitation inside her skin, the prickling, crawling, strangling something building in the midst of her. It was growing worse as she tried to stay still. A wave swept through Marguerite; her two hands made pitiful fists, her nails pressing into the palms of her hands till they brought blood. So much of Marguerite staining the attic. She could tear right into her bones, she thought. She could rip out her own eyes and squash them to pulp between her knuckles.

It was wrong, it was all wrong. The injustice burned. The bird had endured nothing. The bird had her total freedom, the run of London, and now this. When would Marguerite get her baby, her little family? When would she get her freedom? Why should her thin body lie barren, untouched, far from the feathered touch of her lover, Alouette, when she could be full and caressed, bursting and consumed, licked and kissed and eaten and alive, alive in her own body and that of another, the two of them creating a nest of their own, a secret nest hidden from the shit-stink and the callous views and the pressures of expectation? Marguerite had endured so much for this. When she had assented to all the rules, why did she still have nothing?

It was too much to bear. Too much to keep inside a body. Marguerite was the shrieking red mouth, the flying talons, the savage beating of wings. She ripped pages from Victor Hugo and shoved them into her mouth, biting maniacally down on them. She lifted her chin, her jaw thrust forward, and dragged eight fingernails down her bared neck, layers of skin trapped under her claws. She bit her lips, she kicked the walls, she slammed her head against the cast-iron bed.

You have always been unnatural, Marguerite.

Marguerite came round in the daylight, among her mess. She clutched the torn shreds of pillowcase in her hand and in a moment, still only half awake, she knew what she would do. She brought herself up, tidied the chaos she’d caused, and settled down to her task. She arranged the pillowcase fragments and tore some more neatly. Her idea was simple; on her bed lay the strips of pillowcase she’d torn into T-shapes (two), the smaller triangles (four), and the larger shapes that she would describe as circles, though in reality they had little in common with that descriptor (two). The thread loaded into the sewing machine by her mother did not match the pillowcase, but it did not matter. Marguerite had had nothing in the way of instruction on how to do such a thing, but it couldn’t be so hard, the bringing together of two things into one. It seemed impossible before you tried, but when you started, it was as if you had been born to do it; this was what Cécile had said.

She worked out how to remove the shard of broken needle from the Singer, took the instruction booklet from the drawer and inserted another needle as described. She worked hard to gather enough saliva to wet the thread, and after painstaking minutes manoeuvred it through the needle’s eye. She laid together the two edges of fabric that she wanted to join; turning the handle with some difficulty, she drove the point of her needle through one sheet and then the other; she turned the material and did the same again from the other side. In this way she made a dotted line along the edge of the material, and the pieces held together. She kept going around the corners, pulling the thread off the bobbin and through all of the holes she’d made, sure she must be doing it wrong but keeping going, until there was just one edge of the T-shape left open, and into this Marguerite stuffed the yellowed fabric and mouldy felt she’d found in the space above, the material she’d moved to make space for her crow. It was dusty and some broke down in her hands; some had to be torn into smaller and smaller pieces, and when it came free it made her cough and caused her to scratch at her skin, but soon it was inside, and Marguerite sewed closed the last of the T-shape, and she broke off the thread with her teeth and knotted it five times, and here: she had a body. The triangles made two feet, the circles made a funny flat head, and with what was left of the thread she hand-sewed two crosses for eyes, and a line for a mouth; her dolly would have to remain silent, for she had no lips. Every part of her was filled, her feet and head stuffed with the handfuls of hair that had come out of Marguerite’s head, and it took all day to sew the parts of her together, but by the time she had to light the candle the girl was done: the first person Marguerite had ever made. She was bald, that was true, and she had no hands, and only half a face, and no ears or bendable parts, so she could do little other than lie on her back quietly, but Marguerite immediately felt more for this poor half-creature than she had in a long time. Holding her doll in her hands, Marguerite began to cry. She brought the girl to her face and breathed in the dry dust of her insides, and she wept so hard she could not close her mouth, and drooled onto her bedclothes, and her entire body bent with the convulsions of her despair, of missing the touch of another human person, a dull punch of wanting, needing, hands and lips and skin and someone else inside her, and by the time she quieted and fell onto her side, exhausted, both Marguerite and her doll were soaked in the wetness of Marguerite’s body. It was evidence that she was ready; for she had made a child of sorts, not in the normal motherly way, no, but she had created it, and felt love for it, and was thus prepared to be wife and parent. She would show Cécile what she had made, to prove that she was ready. And if her mother didn’t want to look, she would have to make her see.

14

from the grossness of his feeding

Several months into their marriage, Cécile’s husband assented to her pleas for an evening of entertainment that did not consist of members of either family or several hours tending to his sexual needs. The promises he had made in the Périgords’ garden seemed to have withered in the harsh sun of reality, and underneath there was responsibility and duty after all. After a number of hushed arguments, her husband said he would take her to a Christmas ball at the house of an aristocratic family whose name could be found all over London, and she had Mrs Arnott help her dress in a manner such that she would not stand out as the daughter of a factory owner. The housekeeper scrubbed the stench of new money off her, and rubbed her feet as she pushed them into the new shoes Cécile had bought for the occasion, and her businesslike manner was shrugged off for an hour. As they readied Cécile, the sun set, as it does on late afternoons in winter, and soft orange clouds scattered the deepening blue sky outside the grand bedroom windows, and as Cécile sat at her dressing table, newly bought, Mrs Arnott pinned her hair up and pushed her fingers against her head and gossiped with her about who would be there, and the scandals of their marriages, and which politicians were known to have their hands up a new bride’s skirt as soon as look at them.

‘But my husband will be there. Surely such men wouldn’t even try.’

Mrs Arnott looked at Cécile’s face, reflected back at her, with a look of pity and sadness that Cécile would never forget.

‘Stick to your husband, tonight, ma’am. Hold your wedding ring against the palm of his hand and don’t let go. That’s the best thing for it.’

The pre-dancing feast was equal to their marriage meal, and made Cécile embarrassed at her assumption that their spread had been of a singular quality – an occasion that none of the guests would ever forget, for there was more food than this gathering of people could ever really eat, and more good champagne than she had seen in her life. Cécile had been proud of their wedding, and yet here it was again, improved upon and served as if it was nothing, and consumed in the same regard; lobster claws tossed onto plates of unfinished game soup and larded sweetbreads slipped down throats as if they were penny sweets. Cécile sampled small morsels of each course as red-faced husbands sweated onto her dress sleeves and their wives leaned into the man next to her, putting their fingers on his arm so he might come closer still. Cécile felt a degree of remove from it all; there was invisible glass between her and them, no matter the quality of her dress or the strength of her invitation. She could watch the rest in two ways: either they were a mass of humanity, with too much to take in at once, or she could isolate couples and watch them play tug of war with each other, one sliding away, the other rejected by an outsider, then jealous, then manipulative; spilling wine onto a plate to bring attention back to themselves, or setting lips about a neck, carrot and stick, come back to me, lover; otherwise, a faux rage, threatening, you are mine and you should act as such. Cycles of it, all around the table, all around the room.

Cécile looked to her own husband, chewing on ornamented tongue, dipping it with his fingers into a mayonnaise of fowl and spluttering it all over the lap of a woman older than him, who laughed at his behaviour and touched her neck as she pretended to look away. Cécile, alone amid the fray, touched her husband’s arm gently, echoing the actions of the couples surrounding them. When he did not react, she took the hand that held a slice of tongue and kissed his fingers. No response. She took her left hand and slid it below the table, grabbing his crotch, which he responded to by freeing himself into her palm and continuing his conversation. She left him freed and untended, and turned back to the man by her side, old enough to be her grandfather and unconcerned by her lack of interest. The food was so rich the fat coated the inside of her cheeks and slid down her throat before she’d taken a bite of the meat. Salt stung her mouth and she gagged on the melting tallow, her body heaving as the lord to her right spat all over her plate, telling her his role in the Empire and about those poor savages abroad, thank Christ we are going over there and civilizing them, they can’t even feed themselves.

Cécile caught sight of the whole boar’s head at the centre of the table, surrounded by aspic jelly, a transparent solid which contained chunks of cooked meat, never unmoving thanks to the passionate thumps of bellies and slapped hands against the table, and as she chewed, another strip of fat slid halfway down her gullet, and Cécile vomited the mouthful of food into her hand, and continued to retch, louder and louder, and opened up her hands and into her palms went the food she’d swallowed over the course of the previous hour, undigested galantine of veal and chewed cuds of roast pheasant, and crusts of turkey pie, and a silence descended on the table as Cécile’s harried retching increased and the acidic burn of the vomit stretched out from her opened hands, and she stung inside and out, and three servants ran to Cécile, draping a clean napkin over her full hands, and they hurried her past the dessert table heaping with fruited jellies and vanilla cream and ornate trifles and glasses of thick custard and into the bathroom, where the youngest of the waiting staff pulled the tendrils of hair back from her slick forehead and rubbed her back while she emptied her stomach. Cécile wept over the bowl, not through distraction but through the sheer force of her body, and the girl at her side cooed gently and told her to let it all out, no point in keeping it in, and it’s just too much for a body, isn’t it ma’am? The girl was no younger than her, and still she was ma’am. In a gilded bathroom with her hands covered in her own bile, she was ma’am.

The girl, whose name was Betty, brought a cold flannel for Cécile’s face; it was quickly over, after all that, and she felt steady on her feet and settled in her stomach, after a glass of water.

‘I wouldn’t eat much more though, ma’am, not with a baby in there.’

Cécile looked down at herself; she had been somewhat bloated of late, and nauseated too, though she’d assumed it was thanks to the rich diet of the cook at Cheyne Row, all the heavy cream and fat, and she’d thought she had dressed to cover it, pulling in her dress as much as she felt comfortable doing without pressing herself flat. She let her hand run down her body, and her palms felt as if they were touching something for the very first time.

‘You can always tell. I’ve two of my own.’ Betty smiled warmly. ‘Don’t have too much of that wine though, ma’am,’ she whispered, as she opened Cécile’s powder and applied it to her face, to take the shine of the effort off her and make her presentable once more.

Cécile returned to a room much changed; the guests had left their seats, and the dancing had begun in the ballroom adjacent. Cécile could have been convinced it was a different group of people entirely. The world seemed to have shifted without her, once again; now she was a woman readying to be a mother, if the girl was to be believed, and society seemed to know it. She held her hands in front of her, clutching a small purse; it was to be kept a secret, always, until there was a solid something, a part of you that you could hold in your hands and say for certain it was there. Couples were now dancing with others, some sitting on the circular tables around the dance floor with tiny forks and slices of snow egg, some gliding around the room, others clustered in the corners and edges, lovers whispering to each other over the rims of their wine glasses. Cécile had been led to believe that such an affair would be horribly formal, and for the previous days she had had the household staff teach her the dances that she would need to know if a general or some other grand gentleman asked for her hand and took her for a spin. But these dances were the ones that everyone knew, and there were so many couples moving that you could barely see their steps, and hands were not held where hands should be, and bodies were closer than appropriate, and her husband was not waiting for her, racked with worry.

It was a woman in her forties, holding a glass of champagne and smiling a cynical smile, who signalled for her to take a seat.

‘Here. Don’t stand for too long, you must be weakened.’

Cécile could find no excuse so folded her dress under herself and began to apologize for her digestive outburst.

‘Oh, darling, not at all, don’t worry. It gave us all quite the shock. A few of the stuffier gentlemen will hold it against you but if you are going to feed game to a pregnant woman, what do you expect?’

Cécile looked down at herself again; had she been so mistaken? Was she so hopelessly naive to the ways of things?

‘You’re not showing, don’t worry. But we all know of your husband’s ways. I’m only surprised it didn’t happen before the wedding. A sherry for the nerves, perhaps?’

Cécile was cold, and drank the sherry that was given to her, and listened to this woman, whose name she didn’t care to learn, for over an hour, her eyes scanning the room every time a person moved; she might catch sight of her husband, her virile husband, and he might be dancing with the lady of the house, thanking her for such a delirious feast, and telling her tales of his new wife, who was from new money but had taken to the aristocracy like someone born to it, though she of course was not.

But Cécile’s husband did not appear, and Cécile drank sherry after sherry; it only took a wandering of a corridor or two, and an opening of a few doors, to find him half-nude across a sofa with three women and a man even younger than her, a hypodermic needle amid their half emptied glasses, their bodies trapped against each other, the five so intoxicated they did not even notice her, parts of each inside each other, moaning and burying faces in flesh, her husband half flaccid and still taken into a mouth, legs around necks and champagne kicked onto the floor, and after a while of watching Cécile took herself to the door of the mansion without her coat and from the footman, ordered her own carriage home.

15

to the foetor and darkness

There was now a family in Marguerite’s attic. A mother and her three children, and Marguerite, a great-aunt, unmarried as yet, kept at arm’s length, invited over for weddings and Christmases but otherwise left out. She could hear the children day and night, now untethered from their mother’s side but still a family unit. She sometimes stole a glance at them when the mother had wriggled herself out of the roof hole to hunt. Had she wriggled past the flimsy door between her and Marguerite, perhaps to pick at Marguerite’s body once more, she would have seen that the hole left by the fallen part of the roof was growing too, a crack forming here, a chunk blowing off there, a whole slate lifting and breaking at once, and she would have seen that perhaps her nest was not as safe as she had thought. How hard it is to learn that your nest is vulnerable to change, to danger. But the crow did not know this; she still wriggled through her tiny exit, and when she did, the children shrieked louder, and it was then that Marguerite lifted Mr Lewis’s letter and looked at them. They remained three, no baby birds dead, and they had stopped looking like pieces of something you might cough up into a handkerchief and started looking like real creatures; fluffy still around the neck and head, pillow fuzz, with their adult feathers emerging underneath, as if they were stuck in the midst of a costume change between scenes. She had seen them take their first unsure flutters from the nest; had seen them fall face first into the slanted joists that sent them right down to the bottom of the roof space, from where their mother had to retrieve them with panicked cries. Their wings batted against the thin barrier that kept them from Marguerite’s head when they tried to take flight, constrained by the place they were held, and one afternoon much scratching of talons gave way to a silence; they had flown, all four of them, a family journey for the first time. Of course, small birds cannot go far; the children skittered back to the nest before five minutes were over, and the mother returned with food for all, even though Marguerite had poked the last rancid pieces of the hare’s brains through the hole and watched as her favourite crow-baby nipped down to eat every last morsel itself.

There was a chicken bone on Marguerite’s floor, the remnants of a meal she did not remember eating, on a tray she did not remember Cécile delivering. There were several lingering flies, desperate for the last strips of muscle but deterred by the cold sleet that had fallen in sheets through the roof hole and onto the attic floor a few nights before, and there was little meat for them to eat now anyway. What had remained on the bones was going to slime, and grey-blue in colour; any meat left had sunk out of the static skin and begun its strange process of putrefaction, a three-times death; killed, cooked, abandoned. Marguerite always now shared her meat with the birds, and if there was skin on the meat she peeled it neatly and kept it aside, letting it dry on her shelf of treasures, and when the pains in her stomach bent her double, when there was nothing but drops of soup or wine or vinegar left on the other plates and bowls, she tore strips of the skin and dipped them in whatever was there, the acid making the freezing flesh a little tender – at least, she chose to believe so. The skin strips, when chewed, made her mouth produce saliva, which briefly sated her thirst. She tried to ration her wine, and the small cups of tea Cécile sometimes allowed her, but it was so difficult to exercise restraint, and the thin stream of water from her sink seemed more often than not to be rancid. When it rained she had taken to standing underneath the roof gap with her mouth open, as if waiting to be anointed.

The three babes in the crow nest bayed with hunger, willing their mother to come back and retch her food into them. Her trips were taking longer; perhaps it was late autumn outside, with the frosts in the morning and the small creatures staying inside, a more difficult time than any other in which to hunt. Marguerite was not sure, for she so rarely crawled out from underneath her bedcover now. She lifted the letter-door and peered at them; they seemed smaller than they were before, and differently coloured. She knew that children may regress, sometimes; if food was in short supply perhaps they were merely undernourished. Or was this a different family altogether? For a moment she thought to take these birds and weigh them in the scales underneath her bed, to see if they were smaller, new babies, but she did not know what normal things weighed, and had no clue what a child weighed compared to an adult. Perhaps she had eaten the first birds, the family who had nested alongside her. She had eaten an egg, and she was unnatural, You are unnatural, Marguerite. She had often failed in her responsibilities to her siblings. So might she not have destroyed a family here as well? Children could do this, and parents too. Perhaps she had eaten the family one sinew at a time, crushed their beaks under the weights of her scales, throwing their beaks out of the hole in the ceiling. Perhaps she had done this two times, three times, a dozen. The thought jolted Marguerite; there was a cloying déjà vu. There were so few edges of the world to cling onto, there in her attic. The seasons shifted, not long enough, or too long; it was permanent winter, a day of spring, a deep, hot summer week and then winter again. There were birds, and they left, and they returned. Perhaps they were the same birds. Perhaps not. Marguerite would never know.

Marguerite had not given her doll-child a name; she had not named the duck-bat, and she had not named the carrion crow. She thought that it would be dangerous to do so; during confinement one might grow monstrously attached to things, and create habits that one could not break even when they had been presented into the world once again. Marguerite had read about French nobility who had taken to keeping mice and snails as pets in their cells, trying to train them to follow orders or treating them as children, and it was a sign of their madness, their inability to remain stoic in the reality of their situation. No man with any sense of himself can claim to be giving orders to a woodlouse, or to converse with a rat as if it were a student of history. It was a kindness upon oneself, Marguerite could see that now, for no sane person can walk out to a scaffold and see the blade that will separate their head from their neck, and keep on placing one foot in front of the other; it is better to throw your sanity away than to be tormented by it. But Marguerite was not awaiting a trial, nor suffering punishment; she would not allow herself to lose her grip on herself, and so her carrion crow and her duck-bat and her pillowcase doll-child would remain unnamed. They were just things, after all.

Marguerite had no inclination to either train or teach her new companion; she felt that she had no right to indoctrinate the doll into any of the codes or secret behaviours of the world below their feet. She would not force the doll to learn her times tables, or confront a table full of cutlery and work out which fork to pick up, or to wear her socks so high they might cover up the grazes on her knees because it was not ladylike to have them. She would not make her doll memorize Mrs Beeton’s recipes, or her thoughts on the humble partridge, or a series of menus for four, ten or twenty guests. The thousand pages of prescribed femininity, the dictionary of what men wanted from women, would remain unknown to this new creature. She would exist in the company of women, in the arms of women, she would learn how to be a person solely from women. Her doll would be raised by Marguerite and Alouette, and would live exactly as she wanted to live. But first she would be presented to Cécile, proof that Marguerite might be a worthwhile woman after all.

It would be so different in the house of Mr Lewis. True, there would be things expected of her, and invisible constraints, and the strange shackles of polite society. To maintain her decency, she would have to be a good wife to an upstanding man. And she wanted to be this fine wife; it would be through this marriage that she would win back her grandfather, her House-of-Lords grandfather, who had shown the toddler Marguerite how to make a bar of soap, shown her that you could take something unappealing and add a factor of change and from it something beautiful, and valuable, would be born. He would not publicly acknowledge her, of course; not a child of a broken marriage, not the evidence of his failed investment. But he was an old man, and no doubt sentimental, and what good man can turn away a granddaughter when she arrives at his door with a hard-working husband and a baby of her own?

She would show him that she was not tainted by the sins of Cécile, or more rightly of her father; that from their decadent household had emerged a young woman of a wellborn family name and a strong moral compass, and for that James Hargreaves would love her as he once had, and he would accept her secret visits through the servants’ door, and love his great-grandchild, and seeing the relative penury in which Marguerite and Mr Lewis lived, he would give them a little money, here and there, and perhaps send Marguerite the queen’s soaps, as he once had Cécile, for she was named after a princess of France, and Marguerite would show him what a diligent, humble young woman she was, and how little she asked for, and James Hargreaves, Lord Graves, the man who had taken the fat from cows and made it into an empire, the man who had built entire villages, who owned half of the Congo, whose unfathomable wealth came from his quietly cut-throat ambitions for domination, would write into his will that a portion of his riches should go to his meek granddaughter, the one who rebuilt the bridges her wicked mother had burned, and that small portion alone would be a fortune, and Mr Lewis would not spend it, and neither would Marguerite, and then when Mr Lewis died, after five years or after fifteen, then Marguerite would have both his money and her grandfather’s, she would be wealthy beyond her dreams. Such money breaks down laws, breaks down the walls of what a woman should be, and with it she and Alouette would live, Sappho and Erinna, with their glorious child, away from the prying eyes of society, removed from the Mrs Beetons of the world and their dry and pathetic rules, and they would disgrace themselves in the decadence of strangeness, the doing-away of everything they had ever been taught, for they would live in a different world, a different London, one which existed if only you knew how to look. There they would be happy, and they would want for nothing, and they would give nothing to that other world, and with Lord Graves’s money they would live out their days doing just as they pleased, eating turtle soup and wearing silks and being accountable only to themselves.

Marguerite had put this plan to Alouette. She had whispered it on one of the rare afternoons they had chanced out into the world since they had become lovers. When they had been courting, before she knew that was what was happening, she had been thrilled to be seen with Alouette; now she was certain that the people of London could see it on her, her strangeness, could tell that in every moment she wished to suck the moisture from Alouette’s lips, wished to swallow her fingers and run her tongue across her palm. There was a stain on her, she was sure of it, and even then, as she sat dipping choux pastry into sweet coffee like any other girl of her class, she felt the accusatory eyes of the public on her, condemning her. She would not sit next to Alouette, for fear that her mother followed her, so whispered the plan across the table to her lover, who was staring into a cup of steaming chocolate. Alouette, never short of words, did not speak when she had finished.

‘Enough money for the rest of our lives,’ Marguerite had repeated, ‘and more besides.’

Alouette still did not respond; Marguerite reached across the table, then snatched her hand back, and hid it by sitting on it.

‘If that’s as you want it.’

They had spoken of the future before. They had planned for a life, and a child, and existing in the spaces they knew they could exist. Marguerite felt slapped, and grew warm with panic.

‘You’re changing your mind?’ she ventured, feeling as if she might vomit.

‘It is not me who is evading the future,’ said Alouette, still not meeting her lover’s gaze. ‘There is a simpler way, Marguerite. I have a skill. I make a living. I have rooms and a bed and a place to make food. Our life is ready for you. You only have to walk into it.’

Marguerite, then, burned under her skin. A judgement lay heavy on her, but this time it did not come from the eyes of strangers.

‘Why must we exist like paupers, when instead we could have decadence? I do not wish to be kept by you, darling. I have seen what happens when women are kept.’

Alouette, staring over her shoulder, as if looking for someone lost. There were a number of years between her and Marguerite, and Marguerite could see them around her eyes at that moment; the marks of a struggle that she herself had never engaged with.

‘I cannot presume to know your family, and most likely never will. Perhaps your scheme would come to fruition. But I would rather live on our terms now than someone else’s later.’

Marguerite now did catch her lover by the hand; her lover, slipping away from her, sliding down a cliff of disbelief.

‘If I left, Alouette, she would only look for me. If I ran she would be on my tail. If she considers me settled, and mannered, and solid, she will let down her guard, and there we can live; in the space between that life and this one. We can make it our own.’

But Alouette had fallen out of her grasp. Alouette, now, could not be brought forward, hopeful. A limping bird on the cobblestones, dejected, clipped. She must catch her; she must throw her capable body into the air. Neither of them spoke.

Marguerite found herself pulled into the streets, dragged along by Alouette as a cold panic ran through her body. Her lover was asking for valour; she feared she was a coward. Small and inexperienced, too afraid to fly the coop. In the doorway of Alouette’s rooms she pulled Alouette’s body against hers. Marguerite held Alouette’s face, kissed her songbird in the open air. There was no city but the landscape between them, no audience but each other. I am not running from you, she thought. Alouette breathed heavily against her lips, pinned her body against the sun-warmed bricks. Time stopped. They tumbled into the building, into the bedroom, drawn to the floor. Marguerite wildly kissed at her lover; her shoulders, her hair, her throat, her nipples. This was where she longed to live, against this skin, within these feathers. Alouette responded, tearing cotton from skin, holding Marguerite at the throat, grasping her exposed breast. We will have each other, thought Marguerite as she pressed herself to her lover, as she snatched a hairbrush from under the bed and turned its handle towards Alouette, slid it across Alouette, pressed it inside Alouette. A physical language for words she did not have. The sleek back of the brush was turned to her, and she straddled it, taking the other position, moaning as she pushed her hips forward, holding onto the nightstand, knees pressed against rough carpet. She thrust and tore the skin; there would be marks to be explained at home. She would scuff her shoes and claim a fall.

She burst into tears; she was overcome. The tide swept away her throttled pleasure and she felt shame, embarrassment. She felt weakened by the intensity of what she wanted. And terrified she might get it.

Alouette, enveloping, stoic Alouette, took her weeping lover in her arms.

‘I just want you, Marguerite.’

Marguerite lay back and dreamed of it. She dreamed of the warmth of a body on hers, next to hers, inside hers. She remembered herself turned inside out, laid bare, transported. In a bed so different from this one, in a room small and busy and full of pleasure. She held her doll to her chest, its face turned towards her, and she felt the broad span of two wings around her, wings big enough to obscure them from view completely, a brown-feathered universe in which the three of them lived. So often now she thought of this, the smell of the wings, her songbird’s soft call, and she could almost be there, with the smell of a crow so close to her face. When she was freed, she would run to Alouette’s small room, and beg for her forgiveness, for her absence of so long, and run a bath so hot it took your flesh off, and coax her lover into it, no matter whose arms she had been in while they had been apart, and in it they would cook together. There she would wash the stain of her confinement off them both, the dust of their forced separation, rubbing her grandfather’s soap into their dusty wings, and they would start anew. She would prove that her absence had not been for nothing; they would have the life that they truly deserved.

The rain began to fall on the roof and spit through the cracks. Marguerite pulled away chunks of the arid ceiling where fault lines had taken hold, and behind them found tiles broken and fallen, the rain coming straight through to her bare hands, the real rain on her real skin, and when her arms grew tired of reaching out, she took the last sliver of soap from beside her bed and brought her palms to a lather, closing her eyes and pretending it was the touch of someone else, and when she looked upon her hands she saw that the lather was red, a deep crimson, spilling blood down her forearms, staining her skin, and she knew it would be there for ever, in her James Hargreaves future, and she would simply pretend, for ever, that she could not see.

16

general observations on the common hog

When the likelihood of pregnancy had been confirmed by Cécile’s doctor, she was horrified to learn that she would be required to rest during the latter months of her expectancy, confined to the house for the sake of herself and the child within her – by decree not medical, but social. The senior Mrs Périgord had responded to their news with arrangements for nannies and bedrest, as if Cécile not only lacked all the natural instincts most mothers had, but could not even be trusted as a vessel for a Périgord child, as if she might absentmindedly walk herself out under a carriage if not restrained. If her new family was to have its way, Cécile would go from daughter to mother without so much as a sniff of what it was to be a society wife, and she was incandescent at the loss.

With Cécile in her bed during the day, the household seemed to cement itself into a routine of self-sufficiency. It would continue whether or not its master and mistress were there. Mrs Arnott ordered the food, and took deliveries, and came home with the staff armed with flowers and loose teas and bottles of wine. Neither Cécile nor her husband were asked to decide on a menu; she was brought down to dinner, food arrived, and was served, and afterwards the things were removed and cleaned, and the newlyweds were ushered into their reception room, where Cécile could rest on a chaise and, depending on the mood of her husband, they would either read poetry or engage in a newly invented perversion. Though the rest of the Périgord machine saw Cécile as fragile, her husband saw her as vital and engorged with sexuality. There was not a part of her that he couldn’t make erotic. He fluctuated between debasement and adoration, taking her swollen feet in his hands and then his mouth, or straddling her chest to paint himself all over her growing cleavage. The servants knew to leave them alone, and Cécile was glad of it, but on the occasions that a drink was brought to them when she was full of her husband, the interruption would bring him to climax, and afterwards he was more loving than ever. Often her husband stoked a fire so hot it would require him to take all his clothes off, and on one occasion he even dined naked, feeding himself filet de boeuf with one hand and interfering with himself with the other.

Even her own parents seemed to arrange visits with their housekeeper. Two days after she had informed them of her pregnancy, they arrived while Cécile and her husband were fucking in the bathroom, and only when a servant rapped on the open door and announced their guests did Cécile know to fuss into her dresses and pin her damp hair up, powdering her face and explaining her red cheeks away with the cold of the day, despite the fact that it was mild. Her husband’s desires had grown wild as she grew riper; twice she checked that her husband was in his britches and unaroused before she let him downstairs to listen to her father talk of his expeditions to Africa, to the ingenious new ways he had come up with for undercutting his competitors and stimulating his workforce. Cécile’s mother commented on the change in her voice, how the weeks of travel and London life had sheared the edges off her accent and rounded her vowels, and though Cécile didn’t mention the many times her mother had slapped her legs for shouting something too flatly across to the neighbour-children, she did find herself reflecting her mother’s voice back at her, returning again to the sounds that her mouth knew best. Her husband was sullen and quiet throughout the visit, as if somehow demeaned by their presence, her father’s displays of their increasing wealth, and he made pains to show Cécile’s mother the china that been in the family for generations, the tapestry from the Middle Ages, things he had never seemed to notice in the Cheyne Row house before. He applied himself cloyingly to her once her parents had left, instructing the staff to run her a bath into which he also climbed, massaging every part of Cécile adoringly until they were both quaking with pleasure, and afterwards he took their secret soap, Queen Victoria’s stolen soap, to Cécile’s straining abdomen, to her sore breasts, to her smooth neck. He brought the lather up onto her cheeks, cooing his love to her, and bade her open her lips, those sweet lips Cécile, and so she did, and into her mouth went his soap-laden fingers, just a little here, my sweet duck, to make you better, and she thought then of the lye, how it burned the skin, and she felt him aroused again already, pressing himself against her under the water, and his thumb brought her lower lip down and into her mouth it went, and the half-used bar of soap sat heavy on her tongue, and she began to retch, and he thrust his hardness into her, we’ll clean this out, Cecilia, make you proper, and the wetness in her mouth brought bubbles to her throat, and her tongue reached outwards, and his hands forced in, and she purged so forcefully she was pushed backwards, and she brought her heel to the centre of his chest and kicked out as much as she could in that confined space, and she purged again, and her hands took the side of the grand bath and she began to pull herself outwards, and she tumbled forwards with nothing to grip on, and she felt completely adrift in that bathroom, naked and retching and almost in a faint, and by the time she gathered herself, by the time she had come to her senses again, her husband was gone, a trail of wet steps from the tub to the closed door, and all there was in the bath was scum-laden water and the roses released from her father’s soap.

Cécile’s labour had been long and difficult, the baby’s broad shoulders tearing Cécile completely apart, or at least it felt that way, and the new child could only be enticed into the world by Mrs Arnott spreading lard on her hands and pushing them inside Cécile, grabbing the offending shoulders and wrenching them free of the birthing canal. Cécile, who was delirious with pain and had screamed herself to distraction, collapsed, hysterical, onto Mrs Arnott, who wrapped the grease-slicked baby in a sheet and pressed her to her mother’s chest, into Cécile’s unwilling arms, slapping the woman around the face to have her recognize that they were both alive; here, mother, here’s your beloved child.

Cécile’s husband was elsewhere, that untouchable place into which he slipped, now, for days at a time; a holiday in elsewhere was her husband’s favourite pastime, from which he returned quiet and taciturn, and for several days after would be violently ill. As the pressing responsibilities of his life marched over the horizon and into view, off to elsewhere he ran. Cécile named the baby without him, a name for a French princess, a name that would solidify her child’s claim to her heritage – and, too, her class.

He arrived when the baby was two days old, when Cécile had been given a dose of opium by the family doctor to help her sleep, leaving the baby in the care of the wetnurse who had been assigned to Cheyne Row by the senior Mrs Périgord. He slipped into bed next to her and when she awoke he was at her leaking breast, his mouth around her nipple, sucking as he slept. She shifted herself away from him and watched him, his dark curls thinning at his temples, his clothes still about him and covered in stains, his face wrinkled with laughter lines and twitching at whatever toxified dreams he was having. He is more than twice my age, thought Cécile; he crawls in at dawn like a boy in the flush of youth but he is losing his hair, and he cannot even fix himself to pretend at being presentable. He paddles in the pool of childhood but he is a man in his middle age. Yet as she tried to reach for a silken shawl, a wedding gift from her mother, another thing bought in another part of the world, something paid for by the pains of others, if the libertines were to be believed, she felt her muscles languish drowsily, the delay of her body. How easily she had been pushed in his direction, by doctors who thought little of it.

Cécile wrapped the silk around her, and went to fetch her child; the baby slept soundly and did not object to being folded into its mother’s embrace. Cécile took to an armchair in the bedroom and watched her husband until the morning’s sun woke him.

‘You must stop this,’ said Cécile, in a voice which she intended to be decisive, but which came out thin and undefined, affected by the medication she’d been given the night before. Her husband looked at her as if he could not remember who she was, this stranger with a baby at her hip. ‘You are a father now, and a husband, and this must not continue.’

She held their daughter, their little Marguerite, to his chest, and he took the baby, made of him, with his darkness of hair and bright eyes, and clinging to his wife he cried, shameful, and begged for her forgiveness. But it meant nothing, she knew. It was simply the delirious waking life of a man who had tried to care, and could not.

Louis arrived in the absence of his father, and so too did Thérèse; after six years without a change in condition the two arrived within eighteen months of each other, the last gasp of hope. Cécile’s husband had curtailed his ways – briefly, unwillingly – and he re-embraced them pathetically, absconding from the family for several nights and returning with pleas and cries and promises to do better. It was all artifice, Cécile knew that, but artifice was everything. It was what kept her chin held high in the streets, it was how she gave orders to the staff who saw everything in her life, it was how she spoke to her parents about how happy she was, about how they had made a good match, which was what her father truly wanted from her. For what was the alternative?

By the time Louis was born her husband had given up on the begging, and was for a short period interested in the family, thrilled by the idea that he had a son who might grow up to be precocious, and wild, and as boyishly charming as him. For the first few weeks of their existence as a family of four, he even carried the baby around the cobbled streets near their home, looking every bit the rehabilitated lush, telling Marguerite, ecstatic with his attention, stories about worlds far away that might welcome such travellers as they. But the magic of parenthood does not come alone; it comes with tedium and difficulty and a relinquishing of who you are and what you do. Cécile’s husband did not agree with work; it was below him, and to engage in it diminished him; he was a wellborn Périgord. He did not expect to have to raise his own children.

Though she knew it was temporary, Cécile couldn’t help being seduced by hope, and applied herself to the task of becoming the type of wife that her husband might want. Perhaps she was not shaping up in the right fashion; perhaps their courtship had led her into strange ways of behaving, though they were encouraged by her husband, and perhaps her role was to become a woman that could keep her husband home. Perhaps he had grown bored by the realities of parenting and missed their early days of marriage. She asked Cook to find the Mrs Beeton book that the senior Mrs Périgord had gifted her for her wedding; in it, the young Isabella Beeton, who was around Cécile’s age yet seemed to know so much more of the world she had been delivered into, had very kindly laid out everything that the mistress of a household was bound to do. On the first page, she had quoted the Word of the Lord itself.

Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come. She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness. She looketh well to the ways of her household; and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.

Strength; honour; kindness. Cécile had strength, for she was brought up with hardship, in a house without a roof, on a factory floor, and she had kindness, or at least had had it in the past. Honour might have left her, while her husband was fucking her in places she hadn’t ever thought to be fucked in, or straddling her face and covering her in what would have been better going down a toilet. But if she didn’t have it then neither did he; Cheyne Row would be a place without honour, and for that they could blame the Périgord side.

Over the next few weeks Isabella Beeton told Cécile of the necessity of frugality and economy (virtues, without which no household can prosper), of friendships (should not be hastily formed, nor the heart given) and of how to serve meals (with the same cleanliness, neatness, and scrupulous exactness, whether it be for the mistress herself alone, a small family, or for ‘company’). Bending over Mrs Beeton’s pages in the soft light of the early morning with a baby in her lap, a nipple in its mouth, Cécile felt her body shift and mould itself to this new position. She knew it, now; she had seen what could be put inside and brought forth from it; she had felt its sensations, its natural disasters, its power. With it she straightened her long neck and shook off the constricting victimhood she had been labouring under, a cage in which her husband had placed her. Isabella Beeton told her she was the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega in the government of her establishment. She had been a hard worker, a soap wrapper; a decadent bohemian, a sinner; a society wife, however briefly; a screaming, bleeding, delivering vessel; a protective shell; and now she would be a mistress. These parts of her might not fit together elegantly, but they made up who Cecilia Hargreaves had been, who Cécile Périgord now was. She would be all of these things and more. She saw no reason why she could not.

Cécile formed herself in the model of Isabella. She gave soirées (a separate room or convenient buffet should be appropriated for refreshments) for the Périgord associates. She arranged the way that Cook bought and prepared food, so they might eat the same rich food (every kitchen should be well supplied) to which her husband was accustomed. She took control of what her children consumed, and when, and through what means (it is injurious to the infant by allowing it, without control, to imbibe). And for a time, a short time, the Cheyne Row house ran like machinery, sewing together the lives of two people, and her husband stayed home of an evening, and read her poetry, and showed off their two children to the people who came to drink brandy and brag and see what gossip they might come by. And if her husband skulked away to some other place in the early evening, he was back within hours, and his former tastes returned to the extent that Cécile had to fit a lock on their bedroom door, and when she woke in the mornings with her third round of sickness, her husband was always there, in their bed, sleeping the sleep of the careless.

And yet Isabella Beeton could not confine Cécile’s husband. As she grew bigger, and her children needed more from her, her husband shrank away again. By the time Thérèse was showing underneath the stretched skin of her mother’s stomach, Cécile knew that her husband had other women in houses around the city, and other children too. An offhand comment, meant for only the ears of the servants, confirmed that he had an entire string of illegitimate children sired before they were wed, one of the reasons the Périgords had been so keen to have him married, even if it was to new money. All of this was confirmed to Cécile by a visit from the senior Mrs Périgord, three weeks after Thérèse was born. The housekeeper showed her in, and spent a long while speaking with her before she told Cécile of the arrival; Cécile had seen her mother-in-law’s carriage from the window and let them speak freely. Cécile had not slept, and she knew that she did not look her best; she laid the baby on the bed and dressed not for the older woman but for herself, needing a backbone to strap onto herself for she did not have her own. She painted a soft smile onto her face and went downstairs with the baby.

Marguerite was already at their grandmother’s feet, the toddling Louis in her untrained arms; the senior Mrs Périgord had sent money at each one’s birth, along with boxes of silk baby clothes long passed down by the family and of such an old style that it showed. She liked to hold the children, and did not react when a child put the skirts of her dress in its mouth, nor even when it vomited milk down her back. But she would catch herself, in those moments, and quickly pass the babies back, as if they were made of a burning material, and bring out a handkerchief to wipe her hands, though she did not stop speaking and did not appear to know she was doing it; it was a tic, a protective movement against her own instincts. On this occasion the senior Mrs Périgord cooed at the baby’s fat cheeks, and sat down to her sugared tea, which had been served with a madeleine, just as she preferred. Her visit, as always, had been premeditated.

‘Has my son seen this one yet?’ The older woman, it seemed, would not bother with extended pleasantries.

‘Briefly,’ said Cécile, no longer inclined to bend over and kiss the floor on which her mother-in-law walked. She motioned for the housekeeper to take the two older children away, sure that whatever the intention of this visit, the children would not take well to it.

‘Cécile, I feel it’s only correct to lay out to you the situation in which we find ourselves. My son, as you may know, is a father many times over, and, as is no doubt clear to you now, has no real intention of fulfilling his role as a parent in this house. My contacts around London tell me he is continuing to disgrace himself with all manner of persons all over the city, both inside and out of homes. He is a wanton and destructive force, Cécile, and it is a great shame that you have not managed to tame some of his wilder predilections. I thought you might at least achieve that.’

Choke on your cake, thought Cécile.

‘As neither of you deems it necessary to protect the good name of this family we, that is my husband and I, have taken the decision to renounce our son, and his children too. We simply cannot be held responsible for the manner in which he puts himself about, nor for the wellbeing of any offspring he chooses to create. He will no longer be kept by the family. And neither will you.’

The baby in Cécile’s arms began to cry; she opened her dress to let the child feed and her mother-in-law sneered. The housekeeper brought a pot of hot tea, and poured a cup for Cécile. Neither woman spoke.

‘I’ll be direct with you, Cécile. My family’s finances are not in a position to support tawdry behaviour. We had hoped that a match with you would bring him to a responsible position, but it seems you have failed. There will be no divorce; it cannot be countenanced. But you would be better to consider yourself a single woman. For our part, we will no longer support or legitimize this household, and you will be removed from any official record of the Périgord family. We cannot take your name from you, and we cannot take it from your children any more than we can bestow it on the five he had before he married you, and it would only disgrace us if we did. You can keep this house, Cécile. It will remain in the family name, but provision has been made to allow you to stay here until you die. All upkeep will be your concern, and I will no longer pay for the education of the children. Your best course of action would, perhaps, be to gain the favour of a generous man of some advanced years who might find something of worth in you and take pity on your situation. As for my son: if his previous behaviour can provide a template, I suggest you pack up everything you’d permit him to take and keep the rest, for I feel this situation will push him further away from you, and if I may speak frankly, you are better off without him.’

The baby had had its fill, drinking as if she knew the milk would no longer be as rich.

‘I have paid the staff until the end of the year, for their sake as much as yours, and in this envelope you will find a cheque for enough money to keep on one member of staff throughout their childhoods. This is a gift, from mother to mother. My husband must not know of this; it comes not from his money but mine. I am not a monster and I don’t wish these children to end up gutter babies, sullying our name even further than their father has. On occasion there may be gifts of clothes and other such items. But there will be no further familial contact between us, you understand.’

Cécile fancied that the foundations of the Cheyne Row house had shaken; that cracks had appeared in the walls and the old bricks had started to fly out of the walls and past her head. The air had been removed from the house; the child in her arms clung to her and the other two began to cry in a back room. She looked past her mother-in-law to the dust on the lace hanging beside the window; it was hers and it was not hers. She was to be kept there until death, trapped in the crumbling ruins of her own marriage, forced to reckon with the choices she’d made, the choices that had been made for her, until her children were gone, and her youth had withered, and any money had long since been spent, and she would fester and rot with nothing of her own to sell, with only a name to cling to, a name that promised one thing and delivered quite another.

The senior Mrs Périgord finished her madeleine and stood at Cécile’s side. She paused, and ran her hand over the new baby’s head, the child squirming gratefully beneath her hand as its mother simply stared.

‘You are on your own, Cecilia. If I were you, I would go crawling back to your father.’

17

to scald a sucking-pig

A small part of Marguerite’s roof fell in. The damage, she was happy to note, was on the opposite side to the crow’s nest, and high up, at the point of the room. With nothing to clamber onto she could not reach into or through it, but she held her hands as high as she could reach, and on them she felt sunlight, and by the time her arms had fallen, a swarm of bees flying about their insides, she found that she was crying out.

Marguerite tried to trace her finger along the cracks in her ceiling and she found that there was no end; each one connected to another, or two. They were like the wrinkles in her mother’s neck, or the veins on the backs of her hands. Time was only making them deeper, cutting away at the surface. The wallpaper, damp and yellowing, torn in places, was her mother’s mottled skin, always sallow-looking, tired, and only growing more so. There was not a part of Cheyne Row that was not Cécile, and not a part of Cécile that was not Cheyne Row. The floorboards were her creaking bones, the roof slate her dark, greying hair, which had come out in clumps after her husband had left. She was the fat-stains on the kitchen walls, the thinning rugs, the bedsprings that stabbed into Marguerite’s back. And Marguerite was an ossifying part of that body.

Marguerite sucked on her doll’s head to banish the nausea. It was not true; she had once been part of Cécile, but now she was not. She was a separate structure, a different place. Alouette had shown her as much, shown her that her body was a cathedral, a cavernous space in which to pray, to shout out the name of God. She was built of old bones, wellborn blood; the hardy foundations of a factory were within her. But she had stained glass, and grand doors, and inside Marguerite you might feel something holy. Alouette had told her as much.

Marguerite held her face as close to the new roof hole as she could. Though she could not see out of it, save for the clouds moving with the wind and the fall of the night, the hole, which was about the width of five Mrs Beetons (for she checked, holding the book up and moving it very carefully to the imagined lines she drew to measure), brought the sounds and smells of London closer to her than they had been in – years? For an entire morning, afternoon and night she lay on her back, clutching her dolly, and listened to life going on down on the streets below; the cries of food sellers, of missionaries, of those shouting their political theories, raving against one person and for another, and above all this the sounds of children screeching, except these noises seemed to Marguerite to be closer, as if they were inside the Cheyne Row walls, as if they were in the very building.

A door slammed, and Marguerite rushed to her feet, holding her face as close to the floor as she could, pushing her cheek painfully against the stiff old rugs, for she knew that was the clunk-click of their old, heavy door, and she shushed the carrion crow and her dolly, and a second later she heard two voices she knew: that of Louis and that of Thérèse. Yet there must have been some distortion, something wrong in her ears or head, for the voices were deeper than those of her child sister and brother, and they were speaking about deeds and arrangements, things that Thérèse and Louis had never talked about, for they were just children. Perhaps they were sick, or perhaps Marguerite had an excess of wax in her ear canals, a thick substance which might warp the sound, because then she did hear children, a screaming babe, screeching as Thérèse had done, and the careless, stamping feet of a toddler, tiny heels driving heavily onto the floor for no reason at all, their owner not having the capacity to conceive of lives, or ears, other than his own and that of his family. And after that, the slamming of tiny fists into the keys of the old family piano; arrhythmic, clumsy, abstract. But her sister and brother were not babies; they could not be adults either. It was as if all of Marguerite’s memories were tumbling into each other, layering on top of one another, burying her underneath them, trapping her alive. She took to her bed and wrapped her head in the torn sheet and the flat, foetid pillow. Such a cacophony of the mind could do no good for anyone. It could do no good for Marguerite.

Cécile appeared the next day with a tray, neat as ever, on which there was more food than Marguerite could remember her bringing before:

asparagus fingers

hothouse grapes

a small bowl of horseradish vinegar

twelve marzipan pieces shaped to look like fruit

half a boiled calf’s head (with the skin on)

Among all this was an entire bottle of white wine, and Marguerite thought for one dizzying moment that they might be eating together, might be sharing a meal, and that perhaps this was celebration for the date-setting of her wedding. Perhaps it was ready to happen, after all this. But there was one single glass, and one silver fork, with taint all down the sides and the tines, and Cécile did not even sit on the bed, let alone raise the bottle to her lips. Her hands were covered in her white gloves, now yellowed, and the moment the tray was down, she held a handkerchief to her mouth. The calf’s head (In America, the calf is left with the mother for three or four days, when it is removed, and at once fed on barley and oats ground together and made into a gruel) was on its side, so that the single remaining eye would have looked straight up at her, had it not been sewn closed to spare the diner the sight of the burst sphere within. Marguerite thought to lift its lid, place a grape where the eye should be, and then converse with this calf (The age at which a calf ought to be killed should not be under four weeks) about how he might like to be eaten, whether she should take a slice of his jaw muscle first, or perhaps pick at his brow. His neck had been severed as if by guillotine, as if the calf (The liquor in which the head was boiled should be saved) had committed a crime.

‘Did you save the liquor?’

Cécile moved as if she had forgotten the sound of her daughter’s voice altogether.

‘You should keep the boiling water,’ said Marguerite. ‘It makes excellent soup, and will be found a nice addition to gravies, &c.’

‘We don’t throw anything away,’ said Cécile, lowering the handkerchief, and with it she dusted off the front of her dress, as if she had been sullied by something. Thereafter there was a silence, more comfortable to both.

Marguerite lifted one of the grapes to her lips and swallowed it whole, only to find that the cold, damp skin unsettled her stomach, and immediately a pain tore through her stomach. She cried out.

‘Small bites, Marguerite. You are supposed to be delicate. You are never quite delicate enough.’

Cécile stood by the entrance to the attic, staring at the books on her daughter’s shelf – the Hugos with their pages ripped and folded through boredom, The Book of Household Management with its binding giving out under the strain of leaning – like a captain staring off the deck to the expansive sea. She was not watching her daughter attempt to eat. She appeared not to have even noticed the damage to the roof. The attic was, then, something with which she would only connect when absolutely necessary. Cécile’s ability to detach from reality and shape herself into new roles had always impressed Marguerite, had been one of the few traits of her mother’s she had attempted to emulate. Put Cécile in the water and she would swim; put her in a tree and she would swing from its branches; put the woman in a vivarium, in the hothouse at the zoo, and she would become a bearded dragon. She had been young when she’d had her first child, only nineteen, and only by a day at that, but she’d been a solidly built woman, skeleton set in the positions for hard work, shoulders back, neck straight, and a length of bone that, when half-starved, had given her the look of the women who attended The Season, spending their entire lives flitting from one gala to the next. It was this that had gained her entry into the world of the Périgords, this chameleon ability to change how she looked, to affect the clothing of one class while remaining of another. It was this, and her father’s money. But she could never have been described as delicate.

Her children had kept her strong, if stoic. The young Cécile was constantly fretting, and pacing the house waiting for her husband, and carrying at least two children at any one time, which will keep a woman sturdy, and grounded, and straining for change. The rich food of the Cheyne Row house had filled out her cheeks and her arms, had given her a neat round stomach that she often stuck out and held for comfort, for no matter whether her husband was home or briefly lost, their staff would cook Périgord meals for five, and not a scrap of food left that table uneaten. But abandoned Cécile was greyer, about the face and the body. She sprouted white hair at her temples and the skin on her hands grew wrinkled and dry, causing her to constantly rub oil from the kitchen into her knuckles. The woman standing in the attic now was another person altogether; the white at her temples had given way to tufts of grey all over her hair, and even where it remained brown, it was a watery brown, too exhausted to even hold onto its colour. Her body was smaller, her neck had prominent blue veins where there had been none before, and when Marguerite looked at her hands, she saw that they could not stretch themselves out; the fingers her mother dragged along the spines of her books were talons.

‘Mother, I am rotting here.’

Cécile did not turn to look at her daughter. She was not shocked by the assertion, nor by the difficulty Marguerite had in speaking words of her own, having to cough and try again three times before she could even form a word. It is a strange thing when you speak and your words lose themselves from mouth to ear; Marguerite was not sure whether she had made a sound at all. Cécile took the Mrs Beeton from the shelf and flicked to a page in the middle; feathered game have from time immemorial given gratification to the palate of man, thought Marguerite.

‘Did you hear me? I am becoming old and dry, a calcified thing.’

Cécile slowly turned a page with her clawed fingers, trying to ignore the words of her child, her own child, and with them the accusation against her. Marguerite lunged to grab the book from Cécile’s hands; Cécile moved like someone stung. She faced across the attic, where the roof came to a point, and soon enough found the hole.

‘You are becoming vicious, Marguerite. Aggressive, as you were when you attacked poor Louis as a babe. First you rejected me. Then you worked against me. Now you have begun to destroy your very attic itself. Did you pull this free? Did you cut through this tile? I would scarcely have thought it possible, yet here is my evidence.’

Cécile took a handkerchief from her breast and held it to her face, for the movement about the room was making her retch; Marguerite wondered if she might be ill, this old woman, her mother.

‘Has anyone called for me, while I have been locked in here? I cannot believe that no one has asked about me, for the neighbours knew me, and others too.’

‘You do not seem to understand that your confinement here is for your own wellbeing, Marguerite. I could turn you out to Mr Lewis as you are, this cloying, unnatural thing, and what good would that do? To give a creature to a man who wants a wife?’

Marguerite looked down at herself. A yellowed nightgown. Hair to her hips, thin in places, thick in others. Her stomach lost at her ribs, then out at her navel, a little bump, where any other woman might be keeping a baby. Nails drawn down the sides of her bed so that they might be sharper, all the better for picking at the backs of her teeth, and inside her ears, and sucking on when she was hungry. Unnatural, she thought. Cécile spoke again, the tone in her voice now changed.

‘There were strangers calling at the door, in the early days. Unsavoury characters that you couldn’t possibly have kept acquaintance with. Not my daughter, not a Périgord. So they were set to rights, and told that you had gone away. That you were elsewhere for an education, and would not be back.’

At the thought of her lover at the Cheyne Row door, Marguerite became incensed. She snatched up the doll from beneath the bed, where it had fallen, and thrust it at Cécile.

‘I am playing by your rules, Mother. I have learned the sewing machine, I have made myself a doll-child.’ She heard herself shrieking, a bird caught in a roof. ‘You will have me make things out of nothing, so here – look, I have made something. Out of the nothing I have!’

The doll-child quivered in her hands. Both women stared at it.

‘It is a madness, this,’ said Cécile, quietly, to herself.

Marguerite grew incredulous.

‘You would have me master the machine. So I have! You would have me do all these things. I have done them, Mother!’

‘I could let you marry like this, with all this wildness about you, your strange projects and distractions, and in five years, in seven years, you would be out on the street, disgraced, sullied, used up. In such a sorry state that not even Mr Lewis would take you, not even for a price. Unnatural, still, and now infamous for it.’

Cécile was younger now, the blood pumping through her, pink in the cheeks, her hair falling about her face like a child rushing through her life. Marguerite looked into her mother’s wide eyes (a handful of grapes, sweating, put one in the mouth) and thought, with the ebb of her sanity, When did you last look at yourself, Mother? When last did you think about who you are? About who you have made me?

Marguerite looked at this woman, and she did not know her. Time had passed in the world below the attic. This woman was tired of carrying the things that no one would help her with. Marguerite was tired of it too, for the children hold what their mother does, though none of them would notice. Look at how she carries me, thought Marguerite. Look at the burden I am, trapped here, on poor dear Cécile Périgord.

She will never let me go, thought Marguerite, and it was nothing like a shock, nor even a sadness, simply a settling in of a truth that she had known in her bones long before. A ferocity stirred within her, and she forced it down like a piece of gristle.

‘Say it’s over, Mother.’ Marguerite put her filthy, serene palm to her mother’s twitching cheek, her hand still, her heart racing. ‘Say it’s time.’

But Cécile Périgord could not say it. Cécile Périgord, disgraced woman, left her eldest daughter in the attic, with an artichoke, a small bowl of vinegar and half the head of a baby cow.

18

a bitter but not unpalatable taste

Cécile was serene, in the weeks after her mother-in-law’s final visit, like a woman removed from life. Nothing that her children did could touch her; if there was a spill, or a breakage, or a screaming fit, she simply stepped over it, clutching the baby to her chest, and signalled for the staff to mop, or throw away, or reprimand as needed. Her husband’s solidifying detachment from the home caused no outward reaction in her; if he arrived home in the early hours, or strode in for dinner, or crawled in from the street in the middle of the night, getting lost in his own home, vomiting and voiding his bowels in the larder, where he was found the next morning by his eldest daughter Marguerite, who was then a girl of almost eight – if he did any of these things, you would not have known, for his wife neither chastised nor complained, nor did she speak a word against him to their visitors, or their acquaintances in the street, or their staff, who saw it all anyway. Her smiles were thin and inauthentic, her eyes drawn and tired, but she was mother to a newborn, and anyone might put this disconnection down to the lapses of depression into which some women fall. But Cécile was not numb. Cécile was in active purgatory, suspended in one life and anticipating another. There was nothing she could do to either hurry along the change or stop it from happening. All she could do was calculate. All she could do was plan.

As the year ripened into late summer, the temperatures soared; the smell of the Thames was inescapable, and they suffered the types of rains her father, now Lord Graves, loved to tell them of when he was back from one of his tropical adventures. The air is thick, so much so you can hold it in your hands, though the locals seem not to feel it, and it is heavy to move in, not like the stiff air of England. The thickness builds and builds, rising upwards in its knots, forming dark clouds just out of sight, until in the mid-afternoon it breaks, and the clouds roll in, and all heaven is poured out from the shadowy knots, like a bucket turned above the head. And then the drains, if there are any, overflow, and the cesspits burst, and all the gentlemen have to retreat with their hands over their noses to leave the locals to fix it. He told them more than once, and told them how he was paying great amounts to provide better sanitation, better infrastructure, better health for these poor people, these poor hot people, and Cécile would nod and say how proud she was, how worthy their project. She joked, that summer, that her father had brought the weather back from abroad, and when the well in the basement kitchen overflowed, covering the floor in a foot of filthy water from the river, she joked he’d have to bring them a new sanitation system too.

The well-bursting could not be stopped, it seemed, and by the fifth time it occurred the staff had a system in place to remove all the food to the upstairs rooms, to keep some of it in the shade in the garden, cleaned by the rains, until they could fish the water out with buckets and deposit it into the streets – or, if the mistress wasn’t looking, on the back garden. This gave the lower levels of the Cheyne Row house a distinctive smell, a strange combination of excrement and rotting meat, and though the children complained about it, Cécile didn’t say a word and her husband seemed incapable of noticing, so the staff shoved cotton wool into their nostrils and carried on as usual.

Marguerite, though, begged to leave the house more often, inventing new reasons that they should go on adventures, the latest being that there was an elephant delivered to the zoo, the biggest one there had ever been, and she had heard about such creatures from her grandfather, who had seen one killed, and she wanted to see one when it could still move. Cécile, placid as ever, agreed, left her husband in his stupor in bed, and was finding her shoes when two strangers knocked at the Cheyne Row door. Marguerite, of an age to break the house rules and desperate to escape the rancid smell, ran to the door and opened it before the maid could do so, shouting BOO at the two startled ladies who stepped backwards and apparently forgot their script, for it took them several seconds to gather themselves enough to say, ‘Hello, young lady. Is the master of the house available?’

‘Father is in bed, and he’s pissed on the floor again,’ said Marguerite, as the staff stood horrified. In a moment Cécile was there, Thérèse clutched to her, for she never let the child down these days, not even to sleep, and she gently wrapped Marguerite around her skirts and spoke to the strangers in a voice that seemed to come from elsewhere, it was so calm and beatific. Marguerite ran heavy-footed upstairs to hide in her room, thinking that her mother might not chastise her, but the nanny surely would. Cécile ignored her daughter’s movements and took in the strangers instead; plain-dressed women, one taller than the other and with more fire in her eyes, both in bonnets that were gathered at the back and then extended forwards past their foreheads and noses, as if to keep them from seeing anything that wasn’t in their direct line of sight. As if to keep them from turning away from their task.

‘Do excuse me. My daughter does enjoy her flights of fancy.’

The women smiled indulgently; we know children, the smile said, and we certainly won’t mention this digression to the other well-to-do families. Cécile knew such lying smiles as these.

The ladies had leaflets, and a collection box, and wished to speak of the destitute poor, and the responsibility of the good people, the wellborn people of London, to ensure that no child went hungry – children just like yours, they said, these darling ones who, God willing, will never know such dire days. Cécile knew these types and while they continued with their script, which they knew as well as any recruit knows their rules, instructed the maid to fetch a few pennies from her husband’s wallet; he could pay for her relative peace while he still had the family money. He had responded to the news of his forthcoming excommunication with complete indifference, as if it did not matter a bit, as if he had money waiting for him elsewhere, and perhaps he did. Perhaps his increasingly frequent nights from home were spent in the bed of a woman or man with wealth to throw at an ailing bohemian. For his sake, she hoped so.

‘—And the children of these street women lie alone in their beds at night. Rehabilitation of such creatures is one of our primary concerns of course, and your donations will be put towards helping such creatures to escape from the brothels into which they may be sold by their own mothers. Their own mothers.’

Cécile smiled and glanced behind her; there was no sign of the maid, but her husband had a habit of sleeping in his clothes, with his wallet shoved down his boots, and it was likely the poor woman was having to move his laden body this way and that just to take a few pennies from him. Marguerite’s giggling suggested this was the case, and with a thud and a childish squeal her eldest daughter ran to her room, giddy and teased by her father’s pathetic state. For not the first time, Cécile thought of her own childhood, in which the greatest digression had been her mother’s smoking in the kitchen when James Hargreaves was at work, the ash caught neatly in a small ceramic bowl and washed out in the street lest he notice any residue around the sink.

‘—yet there are those who would leave the dark corners of this country to languish, ma’am, while they spread their civilizing mission to the other continents, as if there were not problems enough in this country to keep them busy for all their lives, nor enough needy.’

‘And there are those whose civilizing missions leave a lot to be desired,’ said the second, smaller woman. She said it quickly, as if it simply could not be held inside, as if a second more and she would burst. ‘Men of industry who go abroad to grow their business, to take advantage of the colonies, and do wholly unchristian things there in the name of profit.’

Cécile looked up from her husband’s wallet, which had finally been delivered to her; the stench of alcohol rose from the leather.

‘Is that correct?’

The smaller woman looked stricken, but her companion urged her to complete her thought, keeping her eyes on Cécile’s hands. Cécile wondered whether the knock at her door had been as accidental as it had first seemed, or these women were quite as well-meaning.

‘Indeed it is, ma’am. Our organization sends us over to face our duty to the colonial subjects, because they rely on us, ma’am, and look to us for assistance,’ she said, with growing spite. ‘And what we find, ma’am, is that such men have these poor people working in their factories and growing trees for them and slaving under that miserable sun, with barely water to drink, and in charge of them are hard-minded Englishmen who treat them like enemy soldiers, whipping their backs and doing terrible things with their wives. But the profit keeps coming in, ma’am, if you sell your soul. And those of your family.’

Where does the life of the wealthy libertine intersect with the life of the middle-aged missionary? She felt, once again, adrift in a society she did not understand. But then, there were many men and women who had interacted with her husband, and she would not care to know the details of many of those interactions.

‘And who are these men of whom you speak?’

‘The captains of industry, as the press might call them. Those who have built their wealth and grown excessively greedy, and been rewarded for it. A lord here and there, for shame. And—’

‘—and yes, I know the type.’ Cécile, comprehending at last, put on her Périgord airs and continued, ‘And a Lord Graves, he of the Bri-White soap company?’

Marguerite appeared in her mother’s skirts and tugged at her hand, but Cécile did not turn her face from the women in front of her. The woman carried on, nervous now, red in the cheeks, and slightly too loud.

‘It seems Lord Graves, people such as he, I mean, have forgotten what it means to be charitable. There are workers here that need his jobs, ma’am, and there are missions such as ours that seek to bring salvation to those poor subjects rather than work them to death. They need God and not such labour. Or how are we to be a civilizing influence? Where is the society there? Where is the godliness? Such men need the women in their lives to bring them back to their humanity, to see that by mistreating those in the colonies we only debase ourselves.’ The smaller woman trailed off and the two waited for Cécile to react, glancing at each other as she continued to stare past them, past the carriages on the street outside, into the empty space where a woman had been squatting, skirts up around her knees and piss streaming from her, just moments ago. Civilizing, thought Cécile, with her wellborn husband stewing above her, almost lost to her, and two women bribing her for funds to further their own cause, to impose their own way of being on others with less power. A word that covers a great many sins. Marguerite pinched baby Thérèse’s thick thigh and the girl began to scream; the women on the doorstep grew cowed and awkward by the violence of the baby’s cries. Cécile slowly looked down at her daughter, her conniving eldest daughter. There was a slight and affected cough from the doorstep. Cécile slowly turned her gaze back, put on a smile, though it felt unconvincing, and offered a handful of pennies to the two women, putting Thérèse up at her shoulder and rubbing the baby’s back.

‘Is much known about this?’

Placing the pennies into the box, the women began to turn from the door, but the smaller woman faced Cécile for a final moment before they scurried away.

‘It is spoken of in our circles, for many of us go abroad, and bring children back from time to time, and we’re told stories straight from the mouths of those babes. That is, if we don’t see such behaviour with our own eyes.’

‘Thank you, this has been very illuminating,’ said Cécile. ‘Truly.’

In the days succeeding the visit from the doorstep women, the temperatures soared, and the basement shitwater rose, and Cécile gave in to her daughter’s begging for a trip outside, for she worried the baby was breathing in too many excretive fumes. The fug in the house was oppressive; only her husband, naked and comatose on the bedroom floor, seemed not to notice. Cécile and the nanny wrestled the children into sunhats and summer shoes and set off into the city air, which surged with cloying heat and filth, but at least it was not their own.

The zoo was full to the brim with families like theirs, all wanting to escape the heat of the late afternoon. Cécile played the satisfied wife very well as they crossed paths with people who knew her husband or mother-in-law; she showed the baby and had Louis stand neatly for their inspection; such a bright-eyed young child; there’s much in his future, and so much of his father in him too. Cécile said little but what was necessary, and other women might have thought that the humble Cécile had finally assumed the bearing of the rest of the London set, finally settled into her life as a Périgord, and Cécile did nothing to dispel that belief, even as she politely removed the children from the conversation. None of the acquaintances asked after her husband, all knowing, Cécile assumed, that such a question would only embarrass her. Marguerite, of course, was overwhelmed with pleasure, and even Louis was allowed to toddle where he could when he wouldn’t settle in the carriage, for his legs were strong in the late days of that summer, and he was keen to discover the world. There was much excitement around the new elephant, so much so that Marguerite had not been able to see over the crowd, and had cried and tantrummed until a kind man in some acquaintance with their nanny had lifted her up and slowly walked her to the front, to meet the creature face to face as it were, and then Marguerite had become overwhelmed with terror and screamed to be let down. It was this that had brought Cécile from her placid thoughtfulness, and she tore Marguerite from the stranger’s grasp and admonished her angrily, until her eldest daughter was in tears and the other children had to have their faces turned away by their parents.

The outburst changed the mood of the day. Nanny and her friend took them to sit by a small pond, in which some children were looking for frogs, and Marguerite was told to stand quietly with Louis by her side while her mother gently fanned herself and stared off into the middle distance, at the neck of a giraffe. The baby began to cry, and Nanny was despatched to quieten her down, Cécile parcelling her daughter into the other woman’s arms as if trying to escape a straitjacket, and shooing the woman away like a troublesome animal. Cécile sighed mightily and Marguerite wondered if other mothers had this in them, this secret sadness that only came out when there was no company; whether all grown-ups had it, and whether that was why they had children: so they always had someone to perform for. Cécile stared at the caged animals, trapped not where they could be kept from violence, but where their violence might only be directed to their own types, to their lovers or offspring, and Louis tugged at her hand, wishing to see the frogspawn better, and Cécile did not respond, and Marguerite did not take her eyes off her mother when Louis appeared again at her side, talking about the murky waters and something underneath, and Cécile did not see Marguerite and Marguerite saw nothing but Cécile, and neither noticed that Louis had leaned over and fallen in until another lady rounded the corner and saw a boy in short trousers face-down in the frog pond, and their reactions were lost in the struggle to pull him out and get him to breathe; the many arms that pushed and loosened and bent him over, and the fingers that found their way into his throat and the hands that held him upside down and hit him on the back, until there was an almighty vomit and a scream, and a cheer, and their little Louis was miraculously fine once again.

There was no talk of blame, until later that night. Until Cécile could be heard to say to her barely roused husband: it was Marguerite, and she pushed him.

19

a little needlework for herself

Marguerite had removed the torn and damp letter that separated her from the carrion crow and its family, for she knew that Cécile was not coming. Had Cécile ever been to the attic? She thought so, but could not say for certain whether any woman, let alone that woman, had visited her in her confinement. She could not say anything for certain, except for that she existed, and with her, existing, was a carrion crow and her children, of which there were three. The children had become so interested in the creature below them that they had squeezed themselves through the previously covered entrance, breaking the space with their bodies and causing plaster and splintered wood to rain down on Marguerite as she lay in her bed, which she so often did now. Finding a whole new playground in which to revel, the three children, for they were still children, even though they were now each the size of their mother – you are always a child in the shadow of your mother – the three child-birds opened their wings in the attic space, gliding under the tallest part and hopping out at the end, where the roof had come in, and continued to do so. They flew to their own secret entrance, into the attic, and kept circling, babies at play. They screeched at each other and at Marguerite, unmoving, until they tired and rested at the head of her bed, on the sewing machine, on the clean-picked skull of the half-calf that, she remembered, had once had meat on its bones. If she had had the strength she might have reached out to touch the bird at her head, to tickle the feathers about its under-body; her hands were now permanently formed into a perch for whatever creature might jump onto her. But the birds did not land on her fingers; she was not strong enough for them. If she had a coughing fit the birds might grow annoyed, and catch her skin with their talons (trifling as scratches often seem, they ought never to be neglected, but should be covered and protected, and kept clean and dry until they have completely healed). Marguerite kept herself covered, lest the birds take against her dolly-girl, her pillow-child, and rip it from her grasp. When it was light, and the sounds of London filled the attic space, the birds swept in and out, delivering scraps of mud from the nearby grasslands, and each time such a gift was brought Marguerite took it and pushed it into her mouth, chewing the moist ground as if it were a rich bride’s cake (the whites of the eggs are whisked to a solid froth), hints of nutmeg and candied orange (plunge a clean knife into the middle), the sting of brandy oozing down her throat with each bite. On one occasion a bird-child swept over Marguerite and from its talons fell half a worm, but still with life in it for it squirmed on the stiffened material of Marguerite’s bedclothes, and she leapt at it, moving with such swiftness she cracked and agonized herself, but then her curled fingers were about the worm and it was in her mouth, and there she let it move, drawing moisture from her dry gums, and it pushed against the insides of her lips before she bit it into two wet halves, chewing it into a cud and keeping the flesh in her mouth until she had no choice but to swallow. It was orange jelly, it was veal cake, it was fricasseed turkey on the coldest day of the year. It was a banquet for one.

The carrion crow-children were no longer confined to their nest. Frequently, the family took flight together, the younger birds learning from their mother the skills necessary to find food and nourish themselves. Still on occasion she fed them, bringing small creatures up her gullet and depositing them into their lazy mouths, but more often now they all came back with something between their beaks; a tiny mouse here, a lizard there, an apple core, discarded by a tourist, prime dessert for a teenage bird. Marguerite awoke on a freezing morning to the sight of the carrion crow delivering to her children, above Marguerite’s face, a recently born magpie, still moving and braying for its mother; the crow’s offspring set about the bird and ripped off its head and ate its legs in an instant. This was mothering. This was what Marguerite, too, deserved. We must eat. We must be fed. You cannot leave your children hungry.

Marguerite would show her mother.

Marguerite crept across her bed and put her bare feet on the floor. She fingered the scabs on her shelf and instead chose a thick dried puck of phlegm to chew on, so she might enjoy at least half the sensation of eating. She turned to the Singer sewing machine and screwed the small cap off the half-spent motor lubrication tube, which curled in her hand like a fledgling fallen from its nest. The thread was already in the needle; the needle was thick but that made it better, more secure. She gently brought the needle out of the machine. She pulled her nightgown off over her hair and shook at the atmosphere in the attic; cutting cold, constant breeze. Her hands fumbled. Storing the puck in her cheek, she cut off a good length of thread with her teeth and pushed her spine against the chair, leaning backwards so her torso was spread. The needle went through dolly’s side easily, no pain, all in the mind, and Marguerite pinched the flesh at her navel, trying once and once again to get an amount of skin there, and she managed only a pinch of it, the amount you’d snatch at your sister’s arm to teach her a lesson, but it was enough, and without a moment more she drove the needle through it, a wave of heat coming from her stomach to her head, a pause, deep breaths, the puck in her mouth to bite down on, to suck for the wetness in her mouth, to swallow it down to give her energy. She pulled through the thread, and there it was; they were connected now. Marguerite stitched one, and the next, and the next this way, into her own body and through dolly’s edges, until she was sewing the back of dolly’s bald head beneath the divot where her ribs met, and there she stopped in a faint, put her forehead on the desk and let her consciousness slip. She came round again, chew on the skin, Daisy, you’ll be all right here, and five more pinches, big stitches, and then she was two; a child at her belly, their two skins one, flesh material around them both, and no one would take her pillow-child away now, for they were part of each other. She was not alone. A white blade of pain ran through her and she vomited. Head light as air, Marguerite ran her hands over her body from nipples to hips; now it took up the space a body should take up, a woman’s body growing another something; she was a mother now, she was a mother to her dolly-child, and she would not be alone.

All of a moment she was thrilled with an excitement; she had to tell Alouette of her new companion, their baby. She had to let her know the good news. Cécile had not brought her paper of late, nor a letter, but she had paper aplenty beneath the floorboard under her bed, where she had stored the Mr Lewis letters. She could rip off the unused portions and take a note, scratch a note into the paper and send it out on the wind to her lover. She lay on the floor with her head under the bed, and found that once again a rodent had been at the wood, leaving shards just waiting to nick the flesh of a girl. Impatient, Marguerite once again took one of the weights that had ruined her mother’s bathtub so long ago, the heavier one this time, and with an effort that brought sweat to her skin, broke through the floorboard a bit at a time, revealing, slowly, more letters than she could fathom. Dozens upon dozens, jammed together against the rotting wood between the building’s floors, all folded, still neat, some marked in Mr Lewis’s refined cursive, the result of a career writing letters meant for judges’ eyes, and then, noticeably, in Cécile’s unfitting approximation of that cursive, her French curls so obvious on so many of the letters Marguerite could not believe she had never noticed them. At the beginning of her confinement Mr Lewis told her he would write once a month, no more, for he did not want to distract her from her education, and with it prolong their engagement unnecessarily. Whether he or Cécile, this rhythm was kept. Once a month, and then surely less, for she could not remember when she had seen Cécile last, let alone when a letter had been brought to her, with a reply expected too. Marguerite, with one hand on her pillow-child, the blood seeping into the flesh material of both her and her dolly, reached down into the stark space and slowly, neatly, counted the letters she had kept. She lost the numbers in her head, and did three full counts, for she could not believe it. Two hundred and seventy-eight letters. There were two hundred and seventy-eight letters beneath the floorboard of her attic, at the top of the Cheyne Row house, where, she now realized, with a hand at her dolly and her mouth opened up like a screeching baby crow, she had been imprisoned. For two decades and more.

20

this refuse, in its turn, being conveyed to the liver, there to be converted into bile

Cécile did petition her father. She invited her parents to the Cheyne Row house to celebrate the half-birthday of their third grandchild, and as always they arrived with boxes full of gifts for the children and soap for their daughter, along with champagne to toast the entirely invented occasion. Her father’s business was now a global affair, and was reported on in both the broadsheets and the pamphlets brought door to door by the virtuous ladies of the missions. The children were thrilled to see their grandparents and made such a fuss that the baby began to cry and had to be taken out by the staff, who were only weeks away from being terminated, as the Périgord money ran out. Cécile’s mother noticed the cold manner in which her daughter’s employees now responded to her and immediately stiffened, sitting straight up in her seat with worry on her face. But James Hargreaves hardly noticed the agitated state of his daughter or the absence of her husband, for he was pontificating about his most recent successes and the challenges that his staff were facing in his absence in his new colonies, the pieces of land he had purchased with soap. Cécile could barely hear him, so nervous was she, but when Mr Hargreaves arrived at a story of a small monkey ripping out the throat of one of his overseas foremen, Mrs Hargreaves laid a gentle hand on his knee and swiftly changed the subject.

‘There’s such an awful closeness today, I think. On days like this I find London simply too cloying, and miss the clear air of home.’

‘It’s the river,’ said Cécile, finding tears in her eyes. ‘It’s covered in filth. And being so nearby—’

‘That’s the problem with this country,’ said James Hargreaves, summoning the voice he used as his new persona, Lord Graves, when he stood in the House of Lords and decided on the laws that applied to people like his workers. ‘We push our best efforts ever outwards and do not consider the things we need to do at home. You must start with your own family, your own staff.’ He rapped his knuckles on the glass table on which his tea sat and his voice resonated. ‘We can colonize the remotest ends of the earth; we can conquer India; we can farm our wealth from every part of the world. But we cannot clean the River Thames.’

Cécile began to weep, naturally, without artifice, for it all was too much, her father’s pomposity the final straw. She took her mother’s hand and wailed, spilling all the details of her husband’s indiscretions, his strange desires, his other families and myriad children. Between heaving breaths she spoke of the destitution she faced (failing to mention the temporary keeping-on of the staff, and of the promise of legal protection for her residence), the desperate position she found herself in, how she would soon be alone in that house with three children and no earnings. She would have to rely on her parents, a shameful situation, for she knew the value of work, but what work could a mother be put to? Would she take her toddlers to the work house? Would she blister her fingers on lye for the rest of her life?

It was hysteria, a good performance of it, and it came easier to Cécile than she ever would have imagined. She kept on crying as long as her lungs allowed her to. What harm could there be from laying it on thick? She brought her hand to her mouth, as if disgusted by her own request, and said that what she needed was not much; an allowance, monthly, in her own name; she had grown accustomed to the staff around her, and her children to the type of food they ate, the type of life they lived. She was terrified, she wept, that destitution would drag the family’s name down, and she would bring shame on them. She took to her father, then, and called him Daddy, and promised she would work back in the factory if that was what he wanted. But Lord Graves was implacable; he listened to Cécile, speaking as if she had never had another name, each now so far from where they began, and said that he could simply not allow her situation to have any bearing on his standing. He was in the House of Lords now, the highest chamber in the land, and a daughter with a broken marriage would tarnish his reputation. What does it say of a man when his own daughter stands in ill repute?

Cécile dropped her tears and raised her voice: ‘From what I hear on my own doorstep, this particular man’s reputation is being sullied by the actions of none but himself.’

He did not turn to look, but she saw a twitch of his neck; a tension in his stance.

‘The missionary women of this city speak of terrible things done in the name of James Hargreaves. They are just door-to-door women, of course, easily dismissed. But the stories they bring are sure to find a keen listener soon, and a man of fine standing would not wish to have dead children, maimed men, abused women on his conscience. Certainly not attached to his name, nor his rank. Not a lord.’

Lord Graves stood, and examined the wallpaper lining the reception room. Silence settled on Cheyne Row; a thin silence, empty of meaning. Cécile had rarely felt powerful in the presence of her father, and for a moment she felt him diminished, and something dropped away from her, and it hurt. But looking still she saw his jaw was forward, straining; he was a man caught guilty. He looked down at his feet, gaze kept from his daughter, then called his wife. He spoke into his wife’s ear quietly, his face still turned. Cécile’s mother hugged her tightly and stiffly told her to stay well; that this situation would be sorted, and soon. She left, and in her wake it was not Lord Graves, but Jim Hargreaves who walked away from his daughter, Cecilia.

A week later Cécile received a letter from her father’s lawyer. Her parents would provide her with a small allowance, much smaller than Cécile had requested, and they would henceforth be estranged from Cécile and her children. They would not starve, and the children would not run naked through the streets of London. But she was a Périgord now. The boxes of Victorian soaps, made for a queen, would stop arriving at her door. In payment for relinquishing her familial ties, she would not be removed from her father’s will. They would pay for her distance after their deaths. Until then, she would be just another unclaimed woman of neither means nor name, at least not her own.

It was less than nine years between her marriage and this. A tarnished, used-up woman, and not even thirty. Cécile took to her grand bathroom and drew a bath so scalding the doctors afterwards found blisters on her skin. She took a blade to her wrists and it was Marguerite who found her mother leaking into the waters around her. The housekeeper brought a doctor and, as Cook fed Cécile brandy and packed towels against her arms, the doctor sewed her arms closed with a sewing kit from her own bedroom. No opium for her now; she was expected to simply bear it. She was kept under close surveillance for the rest of the month, until the staff departed. Just one woman stayed, her cook, nurse and jailer. She was not allowed to leave the house nor feed her baby. She was confined for one year. It was for her own good.

21

the moulting season

Somewhere in London a bell rang, for one hour or another, and Marguerite could hear it clearly, as there were now so many fallen tiles, so many broken beams that the roof was almost more hole than it was roof. The smell of the river was inescapable; every thick mouthful of air contained the gaseous shit of her many neighbours, those who had no cause to ask after her, or wonder about the Périgord girl, or come knocking to find her. The Cheyne Row house was being slowly beheaded, cut apart with a blunt blade, the Périgords facing the guillotine after all. After all of that. Twenty-three years of a slow hacking at the spine, splinters of bone flinging out into the city’s sky, snatched away by magpies, washed down the drains. A smart house ruined; downstairs it would be clean and opulent, Cécile having found the money to employ some staff

the number of servants, of course, would become smaller in proportion to the lesser size of the establishment

to care for the place, to replace the cracked bath, to beat the dust and dead cells out of the rugs, to breathe life into Cheyne Row again. Or perhaps the head had been cut off long ago, and the attic and Marguerite were all that was left; perhaps the body of the Cheyne Row house had crumbled away to nothing, its grand staircase fracturing, its good china flying off the walls and breaking, its kitchen well overflowing with the shit-laden water that ran through London’s core and drowning everyone in residence. Marguerite felt hot in her chest, started to breathe rapidly, shallow breaths, and fat tears ran down her cheeks though she did not believe she was crying. She rubbed her fingers into her eyes, so dry, as if to erase the feeling welling up in her. She hated the Cheyne Row house; the Cheyne Row house was all she had. The roof rafters, increasingly bare, were its ribs, picked clean of flesh. The floorboards, warped and splintered, were its hip bones, jutting through skin, bruising, breaking. And inside its rotten womb, there was Marguerite. A stillborn woman, a caged bird, one of those infants who, in despite of their motherly solicitude and love, are annually killed, unwittingly, by such parents. She was the victim of careless suffocation; Cécile had read Isabella, they both knew Isabella, and yet Cécile had killed her regardless. Cécile had done her wrong.

The material pulled taut between her hands felt umbilical. Layers wound around a central cord, textured and thick, and it was wet with her. She shook and sweated. Marguerite was perched, feet flat, toes curled, on the edge of the attic hatch. She had been here for hours. She had been here for days. Her dress covered her dolly bump, her baby there, her family way. Underneath her was a puddle of piss, brown-yellow, seeping slowly into the edges of the carpets that lined the attic floor. Water ran from her anus but she had no food; there was nothing in her stomach to be expelled. She shook, out of fear, and out of physical exhaustion. Had she tried to move, she would not have been able. Now it was animal, the perching. Like her duck-bat, she had nowhere else to go.

The cord in her hand was of her own construction. Thread pulled from the sewing machine, pulled from spools, inside layers of her bedclothes, torn into strips. She simply held it in her fists and twisted her hands in opposite directions. It was thick and tight, and she shook as she held it, thinking of the strength of it, the way it would wrap around her mother’s neck as she unlocked the hatch, slipped back the cover and ascended the awkward stairs that always required the climber’s full attention. The energy she had was her last, for there was nothing else to feed her. The carrion crow screeched from the ceiling hole, and the babies flapped and flustered. A family trip, or a feeding frenzy. They had each other. The carrion crow had made a nest and raised her babies and now they could fly away. The nails on Marguerite’s toes were curled, and scratched at the wood beneath her. She was primed, and would dive at her mother with her umbilical device; she would have the woman caught before she had even seen what her daughter had turned into. The tray would drop, the china would smash, and Marguerite would hold her mother, squeeze her mother, wring her mother’s neck. And then she would drop her, and she would be free.

Marguerite lived outside of time. Marguerite had lived in an attic for over twenty years. She had aged; she had not aged. She was human; she was not-human. She had been a sister, a daughter, and then she was not either. She wondered how they had explained her absence; thought of a funeral and an empty box with her name on it. Or perhaps there had been a complete erasure, the destruction of any memory that she had once existed, a scary story for the children: You saw a ghost once, and thought she was your sister. She stood static, and time stood with her. Suspended, lying in wait. All her functions were focused, all her energy stored. It could have been days she was perched at the attic hatch. It could have been years. And yet there it was, finally; a small metal key, a small metal sound. All fell from Marguerite’s view but the square beneath her. The padlock thudded to the ground. All sound ceased. A thin high note in Marguerite’s ears. She leaned. She shook. Her fists were solid, pure bone, pure flesh, and the hatch slid back, and there was Cécile Périgord, looking down at her tray, there was her neck, there was Marguerite. And then there was a dive, a wrap, a pull. Cécile’s chin forced upwards, Cécile’s hands letting go and then scrabbling to grab, Cécile’s eyes looking into the eyes of her daughter. Marguerite pulled tight. The thread tore in. The cord dug deep. Marguerite would gouge out her mother’s eyes. Marguerite would open her mother’s mouth, take hold of her tongue and rip it right from the root. Marguerite would peck the dead flesh off her mother’s body, and it would make her strong, and with it she would feed her children, her doll-girl, her carrion crow, her babies, and they would pour her blood, thick green, herby and fat, into the gutters on Cheyne Row.

But. No.

Marguerite was on her back, the cord flung from her hands. Cécile had grabbed the sides of the hatch, had surged upwards, had thrown her daughter off. She was on her back and in front of her were her bent legs, in the air, solidified, looking for a perch. Her talons grabbed air but could not unclench. She made a noise, she could hear herself making noise, and she thrashed, but she thrashed pathetically. On the floor by her feet Cécile grabbed at her neck, drinking air down by the gallon, her razored breathing, her panic settling, and she kicked at Marguerite, who seemed so small, and Marguerite was pushed away, and she could not move, and she had no strength, and she knew that was the end of it, then.

Cécile felt no need to rush away, felt no need to reach for her daughter, to remove the cord from her reach, to do anything at all. Marguerite fell onto her side and her arms and legs were useless. Cécile, on all fours, came back to herself slowly. Cécile sat back, the wall at her spine, one leg bent, one out straight, and she breathed, and she breathed. And in time the two Périgords grew silent, and Cécile stared at her daughter, her skeletal daughter, her daughter who had blue-black blossoms beneath her skin, who was so pale she had grown colour, who had eaten away at her lower lip, who had torn the skin from her palms so the muscles showed beneath, who after so long was more animal than woman, who had failed, Cécile thought. A woman who had failed.

Marguerite watched as her mother fussed at the carpets on her attic floor, dabbing at the piss stains with a handkerchief pulled from the sleeve of her dress. Her mother leaned over and pushed hair from her eyes, and held in her hands, for a second, Marguerite’s face.

And then she disappeared, all but her head, which turned towards her daughter and said:

‘You have always been unnatural, Marguerite.’

Marguerite took the black feathers that fell from the attic space and, putting her fingers into her mouth so that they might bend so slightly, wrapped the feathers into the knots in her hair, a decoration of a sort, perhaps the type that she could engage in for her wedding; she did not want a church wedding, not a small affair; it was outside that they would marry, she and Mr Lewis, for her grandfather was right in that hardship brought good, and this marriage would be the hardship with which she would buy the happiness of herself and her lark, Alouette, and if they could withstand a marriage in the sharp cold of a London winter, for surely it was winter now, then they would be blessed with all they wanted. Marguerite would wear a fur, one taken from her mother’s closet, or if there were none there, rented from a shop for a small sum, and onto her head she would weave feathers from the birds who had kept her safe and entertained, and some picked from the tail of her lover, Alouette, and she and her husband, her pass into the world, would marry in a roofless building so that the birds might be a part of it, for they were family now, she knew that, Marguerite and the birds who had made their home so close. She would hide her pillow-child beneath her dress and it would not show and shame her, for her body caved in at the stomach now, and the baby would hardly be seen at all, it would be their little secret, Marguerite and Alouette and Mr Lewis, or perhaps they would not tell him, and on their wedding night she would present herself, naked as she was made, and say to him look, I have made a baby, and it will be ours, and we shall be a family. And she would not tell him she’d made the baby with Alouette, thinking of Alouette, confined away for the sake of Alouette. On her wedding day she would be feather-haired and glorious, and her lover-wife, her face newly lined with handsome wrinkles, would be elsewhere making their nest, and Mr Lewis would wear a neat tailcoat and a cummerbund, and his beard would be oiled. There was red in his beard, and strands of grey – more now, for he would have grown worried at the length of Marguerite’s confinement, over two hundred and seventy-eight letters and many more, and hadn’t he urged for her to be released over those letters, hadn’t he asked for her to hurry through her education, so that they could be married, for time was passing by, rushing by him while it stood still in the attic, and for all that Marguerite was calcified, preserved, were both Mr Lewis and Alouette not living still? Growing stouter and thicker and more bent in the back, these two people whose paths would never cross, apart from inside Marguerite? Perhaps Alouette had grown thin with worry, with concern for her bride, for their life to begin, for the children they would have, for she was several years ahead of Marguerite already, Marguerite who was nineteen when she had gone into the attic, Marguerite who remained nineteen after two hundred and seventy-eight letters and more.

Where was Alouette now, with all of London to fly around? What had Mr Lewis made of himself now that time had passed, and where had his letters been of late? Where were the notes from Alouette and her trained birds, to ask after Marguerite’s health? With this, Marguerite brought herself up in bed, painfully and with the smell of six feet of shit about her, and she began to tear with her clawed fingers at the Lincrusta-Walton from the walls so close to her, and then, falling from the bed, at the rugs passed down through generations of her family, taking thick handfuls of both paper and wool. She would have to stitch herself a living husband and a living wife, she knew, for Alouette must be nesting in another woman’s arms, and Mr Lewis must surely be dead.

22

the more loudly it peals, the greater should be her joy

In the first two decades of her existence, Marguerite Périgord had discovered a great many things at the zoo. It occurred to her that, except for the Cheyne Row house, it was the only place she had ever really known; she had flitted from one land of confinement to the next. Perhaps due to the presence of the various strange creatures about the Cheyne Row house, from the impossible platypus and the duck-footed bat to the half-man, half-child who had been their brief and disappointing father, the Périgord children could find endless entertainment among the numerous enclosures and animal houses, and thought themselves superior in their visits to the tourists, who, in a foolhardy fashion, tried to see as much of the zoo as they could in a few short hours, sweeping past the vivaria and the insect house so they might see the giant elephant and pass on home. The Périgord children knew that this was only to dip the toes into the pleasures of the natural world, boxed and caged and presented for their entertainment. The Périgord children would never think of broaching more than one area of the zoo on any one visit, and instead, on the days they were driven from the house by Cécile’s moods or indifference, would jump on a horse tram to Regent’s Park, and, arriving at the zoo, focus their attentions on one particular type of creature, dedicating themselves to it wholly. In this manner they learned all about the chevrotain, which has enormously developed canine teeth but finds that the best use for these tusks is to hang from a tree until danger has passed; the polyphemus moth, which spins cocoons of deep brown silk and appears to observe from the eyes on the backs of its wings; and the wallaroo, a creature only described in its likeness to other creatures, for whom this slight is enough to inspire constantly tight fists, always ready for fighting, which it achieves, sporadically, with the support of its own mighty tail.

Yet Marguerite was alone on a morning in late May when she found herself without entertainment, bought the Girl’s Own Paper from a street-seller for a penny, and read with interest about the zoo’s Great Aviary, recently opened as an improvement in the terms of captivity of the many birds that lived there. The headline in the paper was Wild Fowl at Home, and the first line read:

If birds can in any way be considered happy when in confinement, surely the fate of our feathered friends at the ‘Zoo’ may be so styled.

Marguerite, having reached an age where the bones of the Cheyne Row house had begun to feel like the cage of a corset, pulling her inwards when she wished to grow out, thought she could spend her afternoon no better than in the company of similarly enclosed creatures whose material conditions were yet better than her own; perhaps she would be able to learn something from them. She wished she knew of somewhere else to go, but the children had been raised to see the Cheyne Row house as the entire world, and the city as a place that had latterly rejected them. Cécile had grown no more consistent as Marguerite had aged; an extended absence from the home might be punished, and such punishment might also fall on Louis and Thérèse. But it was just as likely that Cécile would barely notice her missing, and that if her absence was not mentioned, Louis and Thérèse would also keep quiet, because the children had learned not to ask questions when things were strange; to simply stay on their own paths with their eyes down, taking every confusing day as it came and making their own pleasure in secret. Perhaps Louis would be happier, feel safer if she was away, having been told his older sister was a threat to him, that she had once tried to drown him in a pond. Perhaps Thérèse would live better in the comfort of the quiet, without her bigger sister who would always upset the apple cart.

There were a great many people around the new exhibit, but even amid the crowd Marguerite could see that the writer of the paper was, seemingly, correct; the open nature of the aviary allowed the birds to stretch their wings, letting the herons fish, the egrets sport and the flamingos jabber among themselves happily. Inside the aviary they were safe from predators, safe from guns, safe from starving for want of a meal. She stayed there long enough that the gathered audience dissipated, and by the late afternoon there were just a few spectators, mainly older maids with toddling children, holding their hands out for babies that were not their own. Marguerite could close her eyes and listen to the chorus of chirrups and coos and trills drowning out the sounds of London, could hear the shrieks of one creature trying to bury its beak into another, could pick out one bird trying to attract a mate, and with her eyes closed she could see no barrier between them and the freedom of the sky. But when she looked once again she noticed that there was a barrier; that some of the aviary’s birds clung to the mesh from the inside, taking material in their beaks as if trying to tear it, and on the other side there were birds not thus constrained, birds who might join the aviary’s inhabitants in their play and their singing and even their fighting but who could, at any moment, simply turn and fly away. While she watched, the pale chest of a brown lark pushed itself into the aviary’s traceries, the wire cutting into the animal’s plumage, while a dark bird from the inside fluttered around, looking panic-stricken, trying to take something from the lark’s beak. She strained to see; the lark was delivering a morsel of food for her friend, she thought, or perhaps trying to tear through the wire mesh with the ferocious talons on her pretty feet. Blood began to seep onto the lark’s pale chest, and the black bird struggled to keep herself lifted, for there were other birds about her, some pulling her backwards, some pecking at her feet. Marguerite couldn’t continue to watch, and willed the lark to fly away, for she might torment herself fruitlessly for ever, trying to free a creature that was born to be caged.

In a moment, Marguerite felt the weight of observance fall upon her. It was as if, while she stood watching, a zookeeper had placed a brass plaque in front of her: Marguerite Périgord, French breeding, to be found native in the wetlands of the Thames. Her flesh suddenly felt unmoored, as if she was moving around inside it, as if it was not entirely attached to her, and could be shaken off with the right will. The experience of being thus perceived made her alien from herself; made her ask questions of herself that she had never asked before. It was an experience both uncanny and arousing. Her observer was a woman standing not far away, around the corner of the aviary, so two layers of the delicate mesh separated them from each other. Her eyes did not fall when Marguerite met her gaze; Marguerite became aware of her own thin wrists, her pale face, her eyes that darted from object to object yet kept coming back to the woman. She was dressed fashionably but with austerity; her dress held her swells and curves in a manner much alluring, but it was patched in places and showed its stitches without shame. She was broad in the shoulders and looked strong beneath her sharpened femininity; her eyes were dark, so brown they were almost black, and her thick hair swept across her shoulders and chest. Her elegant fingers curled around the aviary’s net. She smiled at Marguerite and the corners of her mouth pulled up devilishly; Marguerite was caught.

It had unfolded slowly, though desperately, on Marguerite’s side at least. Cécile’s moods and whims now sat heavily on her, dictating her movements. Each day Marguerite woke up thinking of the aviary, but for days her mother’s demands kept her fixed. Louis must be taken to have his shoes mended; Thérèse must go to the park. Cécile must be allowed to stay in her bed while Marguerite tended to the necessities of the home; no, Cécile must have the children about her, lest she screech about their lack of love. It was a week before Marguerite could return to the aviary, and she spent hours there, performing an interest in the storks and pintails and variegated sheldrakes, before the sharp-eyed woman finally appeared, as striking as she had been before but now hidden among a crowd. She, too, was consumed by the animals, and for a moment Marguerite thought herself idiotic, to think that there was anything here, anything other than a handsome stranger with a kind face who had instinctively reacted to her presence. It was just like Marguerite to imagine such a thing; just like her to invent a story that suited her perfectly. A heat rose in her cheeks and she felt silly to have pulled her hair back, to have put on the clothes that she thought most current, only to find herself ridiculous and preened for nothing at London Zoo. She had just convinced herself to leave, before she did anything else that might draw attention to her, when she felt someone slip into place by her side.

It was the woman who spoke, though Marguerite could never, afterwards, bring to mind what was first said, nor how they, over subsequent weeks, always late in the afternoon, fell into step with each other, turning their gaze from the caged birds to each other, finding new pathways around the zoo that Marguerite had thought she knew so well, and neither could she remember whose hand first wound itself round the other’s forearm, or how that hand had slipped around a waist, or whose lips reached for a mouth instead of a cheek, or which woman was gripping the other, in the cloying warmth of the reptile house, close to closing time, when Alouette, for that was her name, held Marguerite’s skirts high and pressed the palm of her hand to Marguerite’s cunt, and licked her throat, and did things with her fingertips that made Marguerite faint. They had blamed the humidity – they needed it, the lizards, to keep them alive – but Alouette could not help but laugh as the zookeepers tended to Marguerite as an invalid, and afterwards it had seemed only natural that Alouette should lead Marguerite out of the zoo into a London much changed; a London that had always existed, but that she had never seen before. They found themselves first in coffeehouses, sucking fingertips dipped in drinking chocolate and courting stares; then in music halls, being crushed together by crowds so that Alouette might straddle Marguerite’s leg and move herself without attention; and then in the privacy of Alouette’s rooms, close and sparse as they were, for the relationship was turning into something much more than titillation, and they needed to feast on each other without the distraction of clothes or an audience, and each wanted to build the other a nest, a space of decadent comforts where a woman might be worshipped, and in it create a world for themselves.

Marguerite, of course, was careless, as infatuated creatures are, and let the hours fall from her grasp so she might hold Alouette instead, and returned to Cheyne Row outside the schedule she’d been permitted for walking and other activities, and sometimes with her hair smelling of tobacco, if she’d allowed Alouette to convince her to a ladies’ bar, those thrillingly illicit spaces, in which passions like theirs were free to exist, and sometimes even with marks around her décolletage, for Marguerite so rarely had time to examine herself between leaving Alouette’s bed and fleeing back to her own, and in this atmosphere of excitement Cécile sensed something unnatural, for Cécile could always sniff out a secret, so onto Marguerite’s secretive back she placed a mountain of demands, and on her time she placed a corset, pulling the laces so tightly her relationship could barely breathe.

It was months, almost a year, of snatched afternoons and paranoid embraces before Alouette laid her cards on Marguerite’s table: Marguerite should depart, disgraced, no doubt, from the Cheyne Row house, from the embrace of her mother, as cloying and contrary as it could be, and she and Alouette would live as wives together in Alouette’s small rooms, until Alouette could earn enough money to afford something bigger, something further from the streets where they might be bothered, a veritable palace in the dark lanes of London where people like them could truly live. Alouette sang in the evenings, in the close rooms where Marguerite had yet to go, and she would sing twice as often and twice as loudly, and show more thigh and more cleavage, for the men always slipped her a penny here and there for something they might not get from their wives, and she would live frugally, eating nothing but small plates and staying at home, saving all the money that she could earn so that she and Marguerite, her sweet young bird, could purchase the kind of freedom they might never otherwise enjoy. It would be the pleasure of her life, Alouette said, to labour like this for her love. Marguerite could say nothing but cling to the body lying naked next to her, around her, inside her, and scream out her wishes without a care who could hear.

Marguerite crept back to Cheyne Row in the early hours. Cécile was listening, from the master bedroom, but it did not matter; Marguerite’s life had changed, that evening, and it could be kept from Cécile no longer. Marguerite wanted everything that Alouette had painted, the life that they might have, but Marguerite could not be a kept woman, for she had seen how such stories turned out, with wandering hands and bitter words and women left holding together the pieces of themselves that were left. Marguerite must come up with another plan, for she might have been named for a princess of France, but she was half constructed in a factory, just like her grandfather’s soaps. Her grandfather might be a lord, but there was grit and cunning in their family, and she knew she had it too.

By the light of a candle, Marguerite took down her mother’s worn, oil-stained copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. It was the book that had taught Cécile Périgord how to turn from one thing into another; during the stretched nights of her confinement, during the strained days of her relative penury; during the wild and emotional hours of the life she had not asked for and did not want, Cécile Périgord had been found, again and again, searching this book for a way out. For a way to navigate a world she was not happy in, to build instead a life that she actually wanted. But she had never succeeded; she was trapped by someone else’s money, by someone else’s rules. A pathetic creature, Cécile Périgord, despite her wellborn name, despite her grand old house, despite being the daughter of a lord who had, through business, conquered the world, a man who had, and would leave behind him, an empire of great wealth, with only a single daughter to give it to, and an excommunicated one at that. Marguerite let the heavy, hard-backed book fall open, and her eyes fell immediately upon the words:

Let her prove herself, then, the happy companion of a man.

23

the most perfect exactness

The divisions of birds are founded principally on their habits of life, and the natural resemblance which their external parts, especially their bills, bear to each other.

The feathers are so placed as to overlap each other, like the slates or the tiles on the roof of a house. They are also arranged from the fore-part backwards; by which the animals are enabled the more conveniently to cut their way through the air. Their bones are tubular or hollow, and extremely light compared with those of terrestrial animals. This greatly facilitates their rising from the earth, whilst their heads, being comparatively small, their bills shaped like a wedge, their bodies slender, sharp below, and round above – all these present a union of conditions, favourable, in the last degree, to cutting their way through the aerial element to which they are considered as more peculiarly to belong. With all these conditions, however, birds could not fly without wings.

The duck-bat had not always been a duck-bat. Before him there had been a stuffed creature even stranger; a fluffy log with a beak the size of half its body, with webbed feet and a long, wide tail, come all the way from the Antipodes. He was settled on a wooden plinth, his head turned in such a way that no matter where around the room you moved, his front-facing eyes still seemed to catch you. He lived on the mantel of the Cheyne Row house and was treated with a kind of reverence by the younger members of the family. He had come a long way, this unreal animal. He had been brought on a ship, for a celebration; to show someone’s love. Marguerite especially had loved him, and the children had named him Fickle, for he looked like he might change any moment into one of the many creatures he, in part, was. They fancied that at night, when they slept, he stretched and changed his body into that of a duck, so he might go splashing around the puddles of a wet London. Into a beaver, so he might take the wood from the fire and build himself a nest in the bathtub. Or into a large furry mole, so that he could burrow down into the Cheyne Row carpets and escape into the earth. But he loved them so much that each night he returned from his adventures, and turned himself back, and watched from the top of the mantel as the children grew and grew. He stayed where he was, just to make sure that the children were safe and well.

Marguerite was soon tall enough to reach Fickle, and the moment Cécile’s back was turned, Marguerite stood on a footstool and stole him from the mantelpiece, immediately falling backwards under his weight and knocking him off his plinth. Gathering up the wood and the creature, she ran up the stairs to her room, where Louis and Thérèse awaited her, and the three of them crept under Marguerite’s bed to love the animal they’d wanted to touch for so long. Of course, there was so little of Fickle to go around, and though he looked dense, and heavy, and strong, the children found, when his head was accidentally torn from his body, and when his feet were snapped off by grabbing hands, and when his tail collapsed under the weight of a small body, that the furred skin of the creature was as fragile as glass, and beneath the skin just a mess of matted hay, and beneath the matted hay a wire frame, so easily bent that the skeleton twisted and snapped in their tiny fingers.

The children left the scattered mess of Fickle under Marguerite’s bed, and went about the rest of their day, terror in their eyes, their behaviour suspiciously obedient. It was Cécile herself who found the remains of her wedding present, so broken as to be utterly unfixable, and the children grew wary of the silence from the bedroom, and crept upstairs to find their mother, bare feet folded under her on the musty old carpet in that room, weeping silently into the handfuls of hay.

The next morning, Cécile left the children and went to a Saturday market. She was gone for so long the children feared she had left them for ever, but she returned with warm bread, and biscuits made by the lady down the road, and under her arm, wrapped in a series of handkerchiefs, a brand-new creature for them all to keep. Fickle’s replacement was a similarly mixed-up animal, a bat whose feet had been replaced with those of a duck, whose paper-thin wings were drawn out in a strange presentation, as if he were trying to convince his audience that he was, in fact, real. Marguerite and Louis and Thérèse all cooed their admiration, pinching each other on the backs of the arms at the same time, and they clapped when Cécile placed the duck-bat on the mantel to watch over them as the platypus had. But there was no magic about the duck-bat. He was not mystical, hid no secrets and had not travelled, had amassed no knowledge for the children to unlock. The duck-bat was just wrong, and he remained on the Cheyne Row house mantel for the rest of their childhoods, a reminder that you can take things apart but you may not always be able to put them back together.

Wrong as he was, unnatural as he was, the duck-bat remained in Cheyne Row, his impenetrable prison, about which he might fly in the depths of night, into which he might become as inured as the family’s piano, or the cracked-ceramic bath, or the sewing machine, which was for family use, but from which he could never escape. And around him the ribs of the house sagged and snapped, the bones crumbled, the flesh grew wet and came off in chunks, and the weight of expectation, the gravity of the past, lay so heavily on all its inhabitants that they tried to bend, and instead, they snapped.

Marguerite felt the absence of the young carrion crows. She imagined that each one had found its own home in rafters across London, sneaking their way into confined spaces that no one knew of, hiding in spots that shielded them from view. There, each bird would take mouthfuls of hay and twigs and weeds and build around itself a cocoon in which it might multiply, a place in which to become

nature is unquestionably the best nurse

more than what they once were. Perhaps the females would lay their eggs and tend to them with other females; there was such a thing in the animal kingdom, for Marguerite had heard of it in the nightclub where Alouette sang. In the animal kingdom, there was so much more freedom. Perhaps the baby birds had found some of that freedom; perhaps they did not want it. Marguerite lay still, watching the mother crow, for she could little move now; the sharp air of the London winter was all around her, no longer kept out by the roof. Marguerite lay on her left side, one arm around her pillow-child, the other straight out in front, her fingers stretched painfully out from her hands, trapped in their spread but bent at the knuckles, so that the tips of her nails, which had grown long, dug into the middle of her palms. She was bent at the hips, her knees protruding in front, the backs of her heels almost touching the bones of her pelvis. Her feet were spread in an endless stretch, which shot pain up her legs, keeping them tensed in every moment, her mouth chattering with the agony. On colder nights she was numb, and she was grateful for it. She was grateful, too, for the movement of the carrion crow, who flew away from her nest and came back each time; who pushed her children out of the home but welcomed them back; who sometimes dropped from her talons a scrap of fruit or a bite of weeds, which Marguerite might be able to reach with her own mouth and chew on for hours. She was grateful too for the smells that the carrion crow brought, which evoked memories she knew must have belonged to someone else; cigar smoke, burned into the bird’s feathers from sitting on an open windowsill while the gentry celebrated a wedding; fresh coffee, from a gathering of intellectuals debating a point in a coffeehouse; perspiration left to fester on a body meandering home, to the surface London, from a London that so few people could inhabit. All of this covered the shit-stink of the Thames, which was not the Thames now, and might never have been. It was Marguerite, filthy Marguerite, leaking endless watery shit into the rancid sheets of her cell bed and nesting in the mess.

The carrion crow had been restless of late, picking at both herself and the nest, flitting around the attic on her feet rather than settling anywhere, and staying away from the attic space increasingly too. Marguerite knew it was because the attic no longer offered the protection she needed; the fallen-in places that the birds had used as doors had given way so that little of the roof remained; hail bounced off the gold plate on the front of the Singer, and rain soaked the pages of the books on Marguerite’s shelf. She could see little of the other side of the roof, the side that belonged to the crows, but she knew it must have fallen too, because it had been so long since these things had been tended to, and rot will set in where care is absent. But now Marguerite observed that the carrion crow in fact was taking apart her nest. She no longer needed it. It did not protect her, and her children had flown. She could make her home somewhere else, nestle down in a place that would be hers anew, and make a new life there. She would not stay there in that wrecked place to die a slow, cold death. Or was it that she was preparing herself for the long, cold night of non-existence? To live was exhausting; Marguerite knew this. Perhaps the bird’s life was soon to be over, and she was merely packing up her things. There was a freedom in recognizing finality.

Marguerite rolled her head to the right, the back of her skull against her thin pillows, and delighted in the cracks of movement. The pain was nothing to her now; it was constant, in all of her, and so formed a shield against itself. She rolled her shoulders and found that her upper arms stayed at her side, her hands raised upwards, her talons stretched out from the wrists. She shook herself off, taking in deep, reviving breaths, the first she had taken in months perhaps, or years even, and it was not the fug of the closed attic, wet and heavy, but the crisp, nourishing air, winter fresh, that the other residents of the city breathed into their lungs. With each breath she cracked and shook herself free of the cocoon she’d made for herself, and as she lifted her head and her body, dizzy as she brought herself upright, her patchwork head of black hair, now long enough to reach down to her knees and knotted into tight sections, fell free, covering her, catching on her bent arms and sticking there. Her spine was bent backwards, her chest forced forwards, her shoulders back, her feet curled beneath her folded legs, her feet searching for a perch, and there where her doll-baby had been part of her she had a proud torso instead, a belly that pushed out and made her round, and swallowing the outside world she stretched into herself, her body so tense she could burst, and with the long nails of her toes she tore again at the hay and material that had formed her bed-nest, and as the carrion crow ripped apart twigs and hair and dirt, Marguerite, named for a French princess, took her talons and did the same. Soon there was nothing but a stain on a rafter where a family had been made, and soon enough too there was nothing but a gilt-framed bed and a room full of piss-soaked straw, and Marguerite tipped her head and pulled it back into her shoulders and opened her mouth and for the first time in months, perhaps years, she issued forth a cry

admit air into the mouth and nostrils

and breathed the thick, fresh London breeze

the lungs expand, the heart beats, the blood rushes

and she shook herself again and there about her black feathers shook too, and she cried

the liver forms its bile

and her nose was a solid thing, and her mouth heavy and her tongue small, and she cried again

the eye elaborates its tears

and from that moment her nose was a beak, her hair was plumage, her fingers and toes were talons, and there were two carrion crows screeching at each other: look at this, look at me here, look what I have done.

The larger crow hopped onto the frame of the bed and set its beak to dismantling the barrier between the two birds; the ceiling crumbled, dry and old; around her the entirety of it fell, and then the birds could be said to have inhabited the same space finally. This is my attic, thought Marguerite, and now it is yours. But it could barely be called an attic, and could no longer confine either crow, so the larger bird began to scratch at what was left of the framework, and there fell the last remains of the roof tiles and rafters, slates cracked and flung from the top of Cheyne Row, desiccated wood crumbling beneath feet, until there was only a skeleton of the attic, a room that once was, and the two crows now faced the broad openness of the city, and the larger crow closed its eyes against the brilliance of the sky, for it had been so long since it had seen daylight that it had forgotten what pain it could bring. Yet the tension in its body was gone, and it shook

the arteries, like innumerable bees

and it spread out its wings and found it was wide and strong, and that its body took up space, and was thick and full, and held a power in its wingspan, and through its body coursed new feelings, electric sensations, urges to behaviours it had never had before. They were enlivening. She was alive.

The crow-children flew back to their mother’s side, for they were physically parted but no mother could ever suffer without her children knowing, and Marguerite wondered then if these were the bird-babies she had helped to protect, or whether those children had long flown the nest, and she thought of the fourth egg there once was, and the guilt she had felt for it, and these children she had watched or may not have watched, and they groomed their mother’s feathers and held their bodies against hers, for they were a family then, and something surged within Marguerite, something familiar among her unfamiliar body, and when the foursome made to take flight the larger crow leapt with speed and grabbed the smallest child by its neck. Marguerite dragged the bird down to the attic floor, among the remains of her nest-bed while the mother and her flock flew away, and she drove her new strong beak into the child-bird’s head, and it screeched out for help, and she drove her beak into its chest and it flapped and twitched, and she took in her beak a mouthful of wet brains and swallowed them, and the bird stopped moving and Marguerite did not notice for she was hungry, she was feeding; she had so long been kept on morsels of fat and now she wanted meat, and she would have it.

No subject can be fraught with greater interest than watching the first spark of life, as it courses with electric speed.

Marguerite had her fill, pecking bones clean and shaking feathers from her beak, and she found herself wanting yet more, and a mother bird flew circles nearby but did not dare land, and Marguerite knew it was her body that caused the fear, and Marguerite knew that she was powerful then, and deserving of life, and she lifted her face, heavy with its new adornments and covered in blood, and she looked open-eyed to the clear blue sky, and she was lifted, and she beat her wings and drank in the clear air, finally the clear air, and she moved her body and was lifted higher still, and she saw up there a society of birds, and space for them all, and a door opened beneath her, a door that had stiffened with non-use and become a wall, and Marguerite turned her gaze down to the attic, the remnants of the attic, and in a bed there was a body, little more than skeletal, a girl’s body that had failed to become a woman’s, greyed skin draped over the framework of a person, and about her head there was a bird’s nest of matted hair, and at the end of the curled fingers there were nails that dug into the hands, and into the concave abdomen there was sewn a pathetic approximation of a child, made from blood-soaked cloth and held to its mother by raw, festering stitches. There by the bed stood a woman and a man who looked like Marguerite had once looked, and she knew them, or had known them somewhere, in a life long buried, and they were wearing clothes that looked alien to her, and they had grown bent and twisted and grey at their heads, and behind them at the attic hatch were others calling upwards, families perhaps, and they glanced around the attic frigid with horror, and they held their arms to their faces against the stench of what had happened there, and the woman began a feral screech, an animal sound, and they might even have called her name, Marguerite, but Marguerite was not there now, Marguerite had found her feathers and her beak, and Marguerite flapped her wings and looked over London, a changed city, a place that had continued when she was incarcerated, a place now ruled by the child of a queen, and the wind took her higher, and she felt her body, a changed body, a fragile thing, and she spread herself open, and she found that flight, of a kind, was not beyond her.

Author’s Note

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management – a guide to running a middle-class household in Victorian Britain, written by domestic columnist Isabella Beeton – was first published in 1861.

The chapter headings and extracts Marguerite quotes in this book all originate from it and are reproduced here verbatim; these might be considered ‘found literature’.

This novel’s publication coincides with the 160th anniversary of Isabella’s death. Her influence on this work of fiction cannot be overstated.

Acknowledgements

Huge thanks go to my agent, Emma Shercliff, for never flinching in the face of my odd and visceral work, and for being as generous as she is thoughtful. Enormous thanks to my dream editor, Bobby Mostyn-Owen, whose good humour, insight and belief in this strange book were invaluable. To Izzie Ghaffari-Parker, Sara Roberts, Vivien Thompson and the many individuals at Doubleday whose efforts helped this novel into existence: I am so grateful to work with you.

To Luke Bird, thank you for the phenomenal cover design.

Thanks to Kirsty Logan, Camilla Grudova and Heather Palmer for taking the fledgling version of this novel and feeding it with honesty, good grace, constructive criticism and endless support.

To the many writer friends who share woes, wine, whining and joy: what would I do without you?

To the friends not in publishing who remind me there is a life outside it: you keep me sane.

To those whose wildly generous words graced this book’s covers and ushered it on its way: my gratitude will never run dry.

To my mother, for keeping a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management in the house my entire childhood, but not being any of the mothers in this book.

To the cats, Ernesto and Fidel, for coming into my life in the middle of this novel and reminding me how nice it would be not to have a brain.

To D, for cocktails and philosophy by the bay window, for cups of coffee at my desk, and for everything.

THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING

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First published in Great Britain in 2025 by Doubleday

Copyright © Heather Parry, 2025

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Cover design by Luke Bird
Cover illustration © Keith Corrigan / Alamy

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ISBN: 978-1-529-93870-8

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