him.
But that was not quite true. When daylight came and it seemed that Eliza was poised on the very margin between life and death, Cornelius slipped into the room.
Nancy got up from the bedside to try to warn him or perhaps to shield him but he gently put her aside. He studied his mother’s congested face and listened to her breathing, then lifted her wrist to count her pulse. He was composed, although he understood how ill she was. Eliza opened her eyes and saw him.
‘There, Ma,’ Cornelius soothed. ‘I’m here.’
The winter light crept across the floor. The three watchers sat in silence until Devil’s chin drooped on to his chest and he fell into an exhausted doze. Nancy tensed with Eliza’s every breath but Cornelius remained impassive. When Eliza coughed so hard that she retched up mouthfuls of pink mucus he wiped it away and afterwards moistened her lips with a few drops of water.
An hour passed and then another. There was no change, but Eliza still breathed.
‘We should send for Aunt Faith,’ Nancy said at last.
Devil lifted his head. ‘I will do it.’ He was glad of anything that was not just waiting.
It was time for another dose. Cornelius took the bottle from Nancy and administered the pills, doing it more deftly than she could have done. She saw that he had somehow been hooked from his despair into the detached state that must have allowed him to do his work in France. It was odd to feel any satisfaction on this terrible morning but she did feel it, and it grew stronger when her brother touched her arm and said in a voice that was almost his own, ‘She is holding on, you know.’
When Faith arrived two hours later in response to Devil’s telegram, Eliza had fallen uneasily asleep. Her features were sharp and her eyes had sunk deep into their sockets.
Nancy and Faith wordlessly hugged each other.
Faith was wearing the dark clothes she had put on after Rowland was killed on the Somme. His death had come only a little more than a year after Edwin succumbed to his wounds at Ypres. Faith’s happiness now was all in her grandson, Lizzie’s child, although there had not been so much satisfaction when the baby came far too soon after Lizzie’s hasty wedding. The marriage had not lasted many months into the war and the whereabouts of little Thomas Shaw Hooper’s father were not now known.
Matthew Shaw said, ‘You couldn’t trust that man as far as you could throw him. I knew it the minute he walked through my front door.’
Nowadays Lizzie never spoke of Jack Hooper, although when she first met him she had talked of nothing else. She had breathed in Nancy’s ear, ‘God, he’s so handsome. He makes me feel like a queen and a she-devil, both at the same time.’
And then she had laughed, a strange glittering laughter that made Nancy jealous. Nancy had not then been able to imagine what passion must feel like, but now it occurred to her that she had experienced the softest premonitory whisper of it. Was it only a matter of hours ago that she had sat talking to Gil Maitland? Yesterday evening seemed to belong in another life.
Devil made room for Faith at one side of the bed and Cornelius sat opposite them. There was no space for Nancy, so at Faith’s suggestion she slipped away to make tea. The fire had gone out and the kitchen was chilly. She brought in a basket of kindling from the lean-to in the back area, lit a twisted horseshoe of newspaper and set the kettle on the hob. Her chilblains flared and she clawed absently at them. While she was waiting for the water to boil she rummaged in the drawers of the old dresser and after quite a long search found what she was looking for, a small roll of butter muslin that Mrs Frost must have used for making raspberry jelly. Devil liked jelly, although none had been made in this kitchen for several years. She laid the muslin to one side, acknowledging that it was too late now to try to protect anyone from infection. But it was the memory of sweet red jelly that prompted her to carve slices off yesterday’s loaf and toast them in front of the yellow fire. She laid a tray with butter and shop jam and carried it up to the drawing room, not even glancing out of the window at the spot where Lawrence Feather had appeared last night.
Eliza was still fitfully sleeping. Her mouth hung open and her jaw sagged. Nancy gave a cup of tea to Faith and sent Devil and Cornelius downstairs for theirs.
Nancy murmured, ‘I’ve heard that the first twenty-four hours are the worst. If she can survive the night, you know …’
Faith answered, ‘Your mother will, if anyone can. I have seen her do it before. After Cornelius was born she was more dead than alive, then a few hours later she was sitting up and trying to nurse him and insisting that he was going to live too. Matthew and I sent for the priest to baptise him, we were so certain that he wouldn’t last the day.’
‘Was she always the same?’
Faith said, ‘Yes. Always.’
Nancy almost smiled. There were no compromises in Eliza except for those forced on her by life’s reverses, and she bowed under those with little grace.
Eliza’s fits of coughing shook the house. They could only hold her arms and hope that the spasms would not crack her ribs. When the latest one subsided Faith folded a damp cloth with some drops of eau de cologne and placed it on her forehead while Nancy sponged her wrists with cold water. The pillow was sweat-soaked so they placed a fresh towel under her head.
The two women talked in low voices.
Nancy asked, ‘Carlo was the dwarf, wasn’t he? She keeps saying his name.’
‘Carlo was your father’s stage partner in the very first days of the Palmyra. Eliza and I went to see them perform an act called The Philosopher’s Illusion.’
Nancy had often heard it described. The trick turned on the dwarf’s miniature stature, which he concealed from the audience throughout by walking on stilts.
‘Carlo was in love with her, poor fellow. They all were,’ Faith added.
‘Who was Jakey? Ma talked about him too.’
Faith was distracted. ‘The boy? He was in the company back then. He could act rather well. I think he went on to another theatre and much bigger things.’
Nancy bent her head and laced her fingers with her mother’s. Eliza’s wedding ring was loose on the bone.
Devil and Cornelius came back, somewhat restored by toast and tea.
The day wore on. At the end of the afternoon Nancy walked up the road to the post office. The cold air was like a slap after the close fug of the sickroom. She telephoned Miss Dent, to let her know that she would have to be away from work for as long as her mother needed to be nursed. Miss Dent accepted her apologies with a brief word of sympathy and didn’t ask her when she expected to return to work.
At home again Nancy found Faith busy in the kitchen and hearty smells of cooking drifting up through the house. She tried to thank her, but Faith would hear none of it.
‘Who else needs me? Not Lizzie. And Matthew can look out for Tommy just as well as I can.’
Nancy put her arms around her aunt’s plump shoulders.
‘All the same, thank you,’ she said.
Soon there was a hot meal ready for Devil and Cornelius. The men ate quickly
