Shanghai Sparrow (13 page)

“Yes, monsieur,” Eveline said, briefly imagining a line of Bon-Bons, dancing away, grinning gap-toothed grins and swigging gin. Hiding her smile, she hastily scooped up the rest of her stew.

A
FTER LUNCH, THE
French lesson proved somewhat easier than Navigation. Her time around the docks had given her a smattering of half-a-dozen languages, and not all the words she’d learned were rude, though a good many of them were. For the first time she realised how a word that meant almost the same thing in another language could help you pick up the sense of a phrase.

Duvalier was pleased with her and did, indeed, give her a bon-bon – which proved to be a piece of pink marzipan, from a box tied up with green satin ribbon. When she took it, she caught Treadwell giving her that look again – an odd mix of resentment and a sort of sly satisfaction.

Marzipan and pleasure at her own cleverness aside, Eveline didn’t particularly enjoy the lesson. Duvalier would
pet
her so, smoothing her hair as though she really were a dog, or squeezing her arm, whenever she pleased him. She was still bruised from Bartitsu and Mr Clancy’s stick, and it hurt. And she just didn’t
like
it.

By the time it came to the last lesson, Retention, Eveline was tired in a way that was completely unfamiliar, wide awake but distracted, her brain pulsing and buzzing with information. She didn’t think she’d be able to fit a single other thing in there.

Which proved to be the entire point of Retention. Miss Fairfield was a large, brisk woman with black hair so very thick and shiny and tightly wedged in its bun it looked as though it was all of a piece, like a hat. Eveline wondered whether she took it off at night. “Memory!” she snapped. “Memory, girls, is your greatest treasure, and your most useful ally. Nothing you learn here, not one word or chart or position of a star, not the name of an ally nor the location of an army, is of the slightest use unless you can
retain
it. Who can recite the Four Principles of Retention for our new girl?”

This time a number of hands shot up.

“It should be all of you, come on! Recitation...”

“Recitation, Repetition, Association, Imagination!” the class shouted.

“Good!”

And away they went into memorizing lists of names and objects on a tray and a number of other things for which Eveline struggled to imagine the slightest use.

She just about managed to keep her eyes open during a supper of cold fat bacon and bread and dripping. Afterwards the girls gathered in another echoing, high-ceilinged room with peeling paint, a battered assortment of uncomfortable chairs, and an inadequate fire muttering to itself in the grate. Here, they did mending or schoolwork under the half-hearted supervision of Miss Prayne, who was absently tatting some lace, in the same faded snuff-colour as everything else about her, in between bouts of staring out of the window at the darkening evening, and sighing.

Eveline got the woman’s attention long enough to supply herself with needle, thread, and scraps of cloth. She tucked them away in her apron pocket; she wasn’t going to go putting secret pockets in her uniform with the others watching. Instead she opened the great atlas she’d been lugging about since this morning’s lesson, and stared at maps.

She only realised she’d fallen asleep when someone nudged her foot. She jerked awake to see that Hastings had taken the chair next to her. She smelled faintly of bacon and still had a pencil in her hair. She nodded at Eveline and opened a large book with a blue cloth cover, full of drawings, and a small battered notebook.

Eveline stared, fascinated, at the drawings. Wheels and levers and cogs and things she had no name for. Tiny precise labels saying
fig 1
and
ratchet assembly.
They reminded her of her mother’s workbooks.

Hastings dug around in her apron pocket and looked exasperated. She leaned close and whispered, “Do you have a pencil spare?”

“You’ve got one,” Eveline whispered back. “It’s on yer head.”

Hastings’ hands flew to her hair and she whipped out the pencil, sending her curls tumbling. “Thank you.”

“
Some
people are trying to
work,
miss,” Treadwell said loudly. “And
other
people are
chattering
.”

“Quiet down, girls,” Miss Prayne said.

Hastings rolled her eyes at Eveline, who grimaced back.

A few moments later, she felt something nudge her hand and realised Hastings had turned her notebook towards her. Written there in tiny, precise letters she saw,
My name’s Beth Hastings. I saw you looking at my notes. Do you like machines? I like machines.

Glancing around to make sure no-one was watching, Eveline scrawled,
Eveline Duchen. I like –
she hesitated –
games. Card tricks and such. My mama liked machines, but hers weren’t like the ones in your book. How did you get here?

She realised Treadwell was eyeing them and gave her a cool stare, then looked back at her atlas as though it occupied all her attention. When she could see, out the corner of her eye, that Treadwell was no longer watching, she slid the notebook back to Hastings.

Some time later it reappeared.
You’re to learn about mechanism. I’ll see you in lessons.

That night Eveline lay in a bed in a long room lined with beds, listening to the shuffles and sighs of the other girls. Tired as she was, her brain was still whirling too fast to let her sleep.

Her life had changed again, big and sudden. Did everyone have lives like this, suddenly swinging from one thing to another like a conker on a string?

Margate

F
IRST THERE HAD
been the place she still, in weak moments, thought of as home: the cosy little redbrick house in Margate, with the sea before and the woods behind and Mama and Papa and Eveline and, later, Charlotte, safe as rabbits in a burrow. Mama with her instruments and Papa with his books and fossils and Eveline with her family and the Folk, and especially Aiden. Aiden who was her best friend, who had first appeared when she wandered away from Mama and found a pretty, plump boy the same age as herself, laughing and surrounded by little Folk. He had smiled at her and taken her hand and the little brightly coloured flying Folk had spun and danced about their heads. When Mama had come looking for her, he had disappeared; but after that, she saw him often.

He would appear sitting on a branch above her head, swinging his legs, and drop down beside her light as a leaf, making not a sound. He was light and swift as a squirrel in the trees, and liked to tease the naiads, pulling leaves from their branches while they scolded in their silvery whispering voices. He would coax her away from the house with promises of secrets, and he always kept them. Aiden was one of the Higher Folk, a son of the Court.

He showed her the houses of the goblins down among the moss, and the den where the fox laid up with her cubs, bringing them out to play at dusk. He made her crowns of leaves and berries and put them on her head and hung necklaces of dew and cobwebs around her neck. She had no gifts to give him in return but a crust of fresh bread stolen from the kitchen, which he liked; when she brought him some he would tear into it eager as a puppy.

Between her sixth and seventh year they spent hours together in the woods and fields and along the shore, though Mama would come and search for her if she was out too long, calling her in to eat or do her lessons.

She asked him to take her to see his house, but he always shook his head. “Maybe later,” he said. “And you can’t go without me, you can’t cross into the Crepuscular without permission.”

“Why not?”

“You just can’t. If you try, something will happen to you.”

“Like what?”

But he had gone. He often disappeared when she talked about something he didn’t like, and most of the time she had no idea what she had said wrong. It was better, in the end, to let him do most of the talking.

One day Aiden took her down to the shore at dusk and made her sit on a rock while he called a strange sweet cry across the water, and there was a glittering stir in the waves and out of them rose the heads and shoulders of three of the merfolk. Eveline had caught glimpses of them, but never so close. Their hair was green-gold and their eyes were silver and they had strange long ears, not pointed like Aidan’s but ribbed like a parasol. He called to them again and they laughed, and began to sing.

Eveline listened in a wild dream of wind and water and shifting blue light, until the tide came up and wet her boots. She woke to cold feet and a wet bum and the splash of the merfolk disappearing. Aiden had gone and the sun was dipping below the waves.

She wandered home still half in the dream. Papa came striding out and took her arm roughly. “Eveline, we thought you’d got lost! You know to be home before this. And look at the state you’re in. Your good boots, all soaked! You’re a careless girl, and this is no time for your mother to be upset.”

“I’m sorry, Papa, but Aiden...”

“Yes, well, I think we need a little talk about Aiden.”

Mama was cross, and tugged her boots off roughly, and Eveline cried because Mama was upset.

“Oh, my poppet, I didn’t mean to make you cry. Come, come, don’t fret, there. Mama was only cross because she worries about you.”

She took Eveline on her lap – with a little difficulty, as her belly was getting big with the coming baby – and glanced at Papa, and said, “I want you to spend more time with people, darling, and less with the Folk.”

“Do you mean Aiden? I like Aiden, he’s my friend.”

“I know you think so, but the Folk aren’t like us, my pet, especially the Higher. They see the world differently. I’m not saying he’s bad, or anything like that, you understand? But if the tide had come in, and you’d not woken from the dream the merfolk sang you, well, Aiden might not have realised you were in danger. He’s not like you, you see. Things that can hurt you can’t hurt him. Besides... oh, you’re very young, I know, and not thinking of such things, but... Folk are Folk and people are people. I don’t want your heart broken. And if he ever asks you to go home with him, you’re not to.”

“Aiden wouldn’t hurt me, Mama.”

“He might not mean to, sweetheart. But he might not be able to help it.”

“Emma Povey didn’t know any Folk, and her mama said she had her heart broken.”

Papa coughed into his hand and he and Mama exchanged glances.

“Oh, my dear, people can break your heart too.” Mama hugged her so hard Eveline was barely able to breathe. “I wish I could save you from everything bad, my dove. I do. But I can’t. All I can do is give you advice.”

Eveline tried to be good, and come home early and do her lessons and help the maid as Mama got slower and heavier.

And Aiden was about less and less.

Days would go by, then weeks, when she never saw him. Autumn, with all its fruit and colour and sweetness, ripened. The local landowner obtained a steam tractor which was a wonder and amazement, though very loud, but Aiden did not come to see and she wondered if he had forgotten her. Some days she wandered the woods and fields and shoreline, occasionally calling his name, but he did not come. She wondered if he’d heard Mama and Papa and was cross that they thought so badly of him, or if she herself had done something to offend him.

But Papa said that the Folk were retreating, withdrawing from their old ways. And Mama thought that perhaps it was the new farm machinery that they did not like, with its clatter. “Remember how they used to come to hear my instruments?” she said. “I never see them now.”

Then one frost-crisped day as sweet as an apple, as Eveline clambered among the rocks along the tideline, Aiden appeared, so suddenly she slipped and almost fell in a pool and he caught her hand, laughing. “How clumsy you are!” he said.

“Aiden! I’ve been looking for you.”

“Have you?”

“I thought you’d gone away.”

“I had. Come with me, I’ve found the nixie’s new pool where she takes her baby to wash him. You’ll like him, he’s very funny and makes such faces.”

“Why did you go away for so long?”

“It wasn’t long.”

“It was to me.”

“Silly Eveline.” He took her hand and tugged her down from the rocks and into the forest. The nixie wasn’t there, but he showed her a fallen tree-trunk that someone had hollowed out into tiny rooms and passages, and a dormouse tucked into a curl in a nest of grass, so thoroughly asleep that even when Aiden put him in her hand, he didn’t wake. She held the tiny thing, feeling its warmth and the strange sleeping life in it, then tucked it back into its nest. “Aiden?”

“Yes?”

“Mama says...”

Aiden was playing with something in his hands, tossing it from one to the other. It glittered. “What?”

“It doesn’t matter. Would you like to see the new tractor? I know where they keep it.”

“Not at all. Why must you make such noisy things?”

“I don’t know,” Eveline said.

“You’re sad I went away. Don’t be sad, Eveline. Hold out your hand.” He dropped the glittering thing onto her palm, hard and cold after the soft breathing warmth of the dormouse. It was a crystal, a milky ghost-coloured thing, hung on a thin silver chain. “This is for you.” He stroked her hair. “I’ll always come if you really want me, you know.”