every spoonful might cost a man’s life.
Devil didn’t even contemplate going to the Palmyra for the evening performance.
‘Anthony will have to manage,’ he shrugged.
The evening slid into night. Devil dozed at the bedside with his head on his folded arms and Nancy and Faith took it in turns to lie down in Nancy’s bedroom. Cornelius padded between his own room and Eliza’s, and Nancy found his withdrawn vigilance oddly reassuring. He picked up the latest letter from Arthur and scanned it.
‘Have you sent for him? He would get compassionate leave, I think.’
Devil briefly shook his head. They all understood that he delayed because Arthur was to be shielded as far as possible.
‘Ah. Well, maybe it’s for the best. I think the crisis may be almost over.’
It seemed that Cornelius was right. The next time Eliza woke she was too weak to lift her head but she knew them all. Her eyes always came back to Devil.
Dr Vassilis was visibly surprised when he called the next day, but he pretended to have foreseen the improvement. He examined her before stepping well back to remove his muslin mask.
‘Yes, you see, it is just like I told you. It is not the strongest ones who survive. Last night I have a young man die, sick for one day and pfffff, he goes like blowing out this.’ He pointed to the candle in its holder on the night table. The family stared at him, not at all comforted, and the doctor snapped his bag shut. To Cornelius he said in a more cheerful voice, ‘How are you, my friend?’
Cornelius considered the question.
‘There has been more than enough dying, doctor. To sit and brood on it as I have been doing is not helpful. I find nursing my mother a more useful occupation.’
Vassilis looked shrewdly at him.
‘That is a fine discovery, Mr Wix.’
The doctor bowed and wished them good day. After she had seen him out Nancy gave way in private to tears of relief. To manage her feelings for Devil and Cornelius’s sake she set herself the job of laundering all the soiled bed linen and towels. In the scullery she put water on to boil and found a kind of painful oblivion in plunging her arms deep in the enamel wash tub and scrubbing with the laundry soap until her muscles ached. She tipped the scummy water down the stone sink and ran a fresh tub. She rinsed everything twice and fed the clean items through the mangle, leaning down on the heavy handle with all the weight of her body. She pegged out sheets under the tin roof that partly covered the back area and draped the towels on the wooden maiden suspended from the kitchen ceiling. Her arms were scalded crimson to the elbows.
Faith found her as she was finishing the work.
‘Nancy? Look at you. Doesn’t Eliza send out to a laundry?’
‘The boy came for it yesterday when we were all too busy. Anyway I needed to do it myself, and it’s made me feel much better. Is Ma sleeping?’
‘She is. Cornelius is with her. Your father’s exhausted so I told him to lie down in your room.’
‘That’s good.’
Faith regarded her with an odd expression.
‘Aunt Faith? Is something wrong?’
‘You are so like her, you know.’
Nancy was taken aback.
Her whole life was coloured by being unlike her mother and by wishing to resemble her more closely.
‘Not in your looks, although since you have grown up I see more of her in you every day. In your stubbornness, I mean. You won’t ever give up once you have fixed on an idea. Even when you were tiny, if you wanted to play with a toy you would have it, however hard the boys tried to take it off you. You wouldn’t yell, but you kept your eyes and your little hands fastened tight on it. Lizzie always understood the power of a bargain. She’d hand over the ball so as to get herself something better. You have your mother’s energy too.’ Faith pointed at the white ramparts of sheets, stirring in the wind. ‘She would have done that, before her strength went.’
‘Poor Ma,’ Nancy sighed.
She hadn’t been aware that she possessed Eliza’s iron will. Nancy’s own impression was of inhabiting the margins of her family. She stayed on the outskirts and kept quiet, mostly because of the Uncanny and her conviction that she had to protect it and keep it secret. Her way of camouflaging her difference was to be unobtrusive in plain sight.
She took it for granted that her father loved her, in the way that fathers always loved their only daughters, but she didn’t think he knew or understood her particularly well, any more than Eliza did. Most of her parents’ energies, after all, were applied to each other. The memory of the Queen Mab returned, and how her father’s first and strongest instinct had been to save his wife.
Nancy wiped her damp forehead with the back of her hand. Her shoulders ached from lifting and mangling wet towels, and there was a new and less manageable ache in her that she did not yet recognise. She wondered how it ever came about that you loved someone like a husband or wife, and were loved back. It seemed too complicated to happen very often and yet the suggestion of it was everywhere, except in her own life.
Faith saw her expression.
‘Nancy, dear. You’re very tired. You’ll be ill yourself if you don’t take care.’
‘It’s not that, Aunt Faith.’
‘What is it, then?’
Faith’s motherly concern touched her, and the ache faded a little. But Nancy’s instinct was always to parry a direct question so she turned aside and asked, ‘Will Ma get well?’
Faith used a folded cloth to lift a pan of scalding water. Clouds of steam billowed between them.
‘I believe she will recover from this bout, yes.’
Nancy could see that her aunt was disappointed by her reticence.
The next day Eliza was a little better. The sweating and shivering stopped, although the terrible cough persisted. The day after that Faith held her while Nancy fed her two or three spoonfuls of soup.
The household adjusted to the rhythms of nursing Eliza. Faith spent the days helping Nancy and Cornelius in Islington, but she returned to Matthew every evening because he complained so much about Lizzie’s cooking and standards of housekeeping.
After the end of her marriage Lizzie went back to her parents, although she confided to Nancy that it was difficult to live in a house that had become a shrine to Edwin and Rowland. Their boyhood possessions were preserved like relics and there were photographs of the dead sons everywhere. Nancy couldn’t say much in response to this, because Lizzie must think it unfair that Cornelius and Arthur were both still alive.
Lizzie had adopted a brisk manner that could make her seem a little hard. She had to give up her beloved job with the tea importer once she became a mother, but afterwards she had quickly yielded the daily care of Tommy to Faith, in favour of helping her father with the family greengrocery. The loss of his sons had aged Matthew Shaw, and Lizzie had energy and
