Gulliver's Wife by Lauren Chater

Author:Lauren Chater
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Published: 2020-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

15

Mary has often daydreamed about taking Bess with her to births, imparting all the useful knowledge gleaned from years of experience, first fostered by her own mother. She sees the two of them walking hand in hand along the dirty roads, visiting clients, untangling thorny problems – what to do when a baby’s foot protrudes instead of its crown, or how to soothe a dying woman’s panic. She sees the world fall away, the ugliness of the streets diminished by warm companionship. It never crossed her mind that it might be like this, the two of them walking in silence, too wounded by the horrifying revelations of the night before to exchange anything but stiff queries about sleep and the weather. What they really need to say to each other churns under every coldly civil sentence. Each silence stretches a little longer, deepening mistrust. If Bess were a client, Mary would gain her confidence by sharing a little about her garden or asking questions about her physical well-being. She would ask: what did you eat this morning? How are you feeling? What can I do to help you? But confidence goes both ways and Bess, shuffling along in her new mantua – a brown-striped tabby with blue laces criss-crossing the stomacher – seems to have taken a vow of silence. When Mary’s third attempt to draw her out results in nothing but a blank stare, she gives up and strides on, skirting around a boy trundling a barrow of steaming hog’s manure destined for the market.

Wapping, if it ever sleeps, is waking. Men and women push their carts along the rutted lanes, and geese girls usher honking flocks through the canal, spraying brackish water. Everything looks as it always does, the buildings drab and unchanging, the people industrious, determined to make a profit and earn their daily bread. Last night Mary saw a side of Wapping she tries her best to avoid. The fact that Bess saw it, too – that she knows now something of what goes on after dark – fills Mary with sour dread. All her notions of easing Bess into adulthood have lifted. Seeing Bess surrounded by danger in that awful place – with a strange boy, no less – has completely unbalanced her, as if the world has tipped upside down, sky and sea reversed.

‘Bess,’ she calls sharply, when her daughter falls behind again, distracted by something in a shop window. ‘Do you want to be late?’

The girl stares at her mutinously, then slowly picks up her skirts.

As they pass the apothecary’s shop, Bess sends a look of longing in the direction of the glittering Aladdin’s cave of herbs and tinctures. She doesn’t dare ask, though, and Mary is glad. Delivering two scoldings in less than twenty-four hours would make her feel worse than she already does. It would make her feel like the worst mother in the world, which is what Bess told her she was last night when they finally arrived home and all the pain and hurt came bubbling out, like black poison.

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