Daughter of the House. Rosie Thomas
As swiftly as it had come the smell ebbed away, carrying the mud and the wounded and dead with it. Her head grew heavy once more and wobbled on her neck, and the man’s hand lifted at last.
He murmured, ‘Don’t be frightened. You are a seer. You might even think of your ability as a gift. Some of us do.’
She didn’t want to be any sort of us, not in a company with this man who excluded her father and mother and even Neelie and Arthur.
Then to her joy she saw Devil. He was searching the knots of people lined up on the beach. She scrambled to her feet and now Feather did not try to hold her back.
‘Pappy! We’re here.’
She ran at him and pressed her face against his soaked clothes as he hugged her. Neither of them could find words. Arthur came more slowly, white with shock, and Devil bent his head over his two children.
‘Thank God,’ he murmured.
‘Mama?’ Arthur managed to ask.
‘She is safe. Cornelius is with her.’
‘And Phyllis?’
Nancy’s question was not answered. Devil thanked the cockle seller and her helpers and shepherded his children away from the rescue scene. At the pier entrance Eliza and Cornelius had been searching amongst the passengers who had been brought in that way. As soon as she saw them Eliza ran, tripping up in the constricting skirt. Tears were running down her face, her smart turban was gone and her hair had come down in thick hanks. Nancy had never seen her composed mother in such a way and the sight was deeply shocking.
Devil hustled them away from the beach. Nancy didn’t look back to see if Mr Feather was still searching for his sister. Devil said they must get back to the hotel immediately, to warmth and dry clothing. Some of the townspeople had brought drays and fish wagons down to the promenade to ferry survivors, but these had now set off and it seemed that the Wixes must either walk or take the little pleasure tram that ran to their hotel from the pier. Its driver looked incongruous in his smart braided uniform as he tried to hurry their shivering group towards it.
‘But where is Phyllis?’ Nancy demanded. Eliza was trying to massage some warmth into Arthur’s blanketed body. Cornelius took Nancy’s hand and tucked it under his arm.
‘We don’t know,’ he said.
‘Where is she?’
‘The men are looking for her,’ Devil answered.
‘We can’t go without her,’ Nancy flamed.
Her father’s face darkened. ‘There’s nothing you can do here, Nancy. Do as you are told.’
The toy tram trundled towards the hotel, leaving behind the rescue scene and the stricken steamer. It was wrong to be perched like carefree holidaymakers under the little canopy. In Nancy’s head the wind seemed to chivvy the fragments of the day, briefly pasting lurid, disjointed images of the steamer and their escape from it over the innocent seaside landscape.
Arthur had still barely spoken.
Eliza told him, ‘You’re safe now. You did very well, you know, to take care of your sister. Papa and I are proud of you.’
The tram rocked around the curve of track. Arthur turned his coin-bright profile towards Nancy. There was a tick of silence during which she prepared to accept whatever he would say. He was younger than her by fifteen months, but she was only a girl. Cornelius was watching her too from beneath his heavy eyelids. Cornelius often saw more than he would afterwards admit to.
‘I didn’t take care of her,’ Arthur said.
It must have been the salt in his throat and chest that made his treble voice crack and emerge an octave lower.
‘Nancy saved me. She was safe but she let go and came for me. The boatman told her she was a brave girl.’ There was another silence before he added, ‘So you see, actually I was rather useless.’
The last words came out in a boy’s piping voice once more.
Nancy noticed that her skirt was beginning to dry, leaving wavy tidemarks of salt. She was thinking that from today – or from the day before yesterday, really – everything would be different. You could never un-see what you had seen; that much was clear without any intervention from the Uncanny or Mr Feather.
‘No, Arthur, you weren’t useless at all,’ she mumbled.
Eliza cupped Nancy’s chin and lifted it so their eyes met. Her fingers were icy cold and the grey in her matted hair was revealed. With the blanket over her shoulders she could have been one of the cockle women, but still she commanded attention. Nancy yearned for the warmth of her approval.
Eliza asked, ‘Is that what happened?’
Arthur’s honesty was brave because it had cost him something. Nancy had done what she did without thinking, and therefore she hadn’t really and truly been brave at all. So she reluctantly nodded because to claim any more would have felt like an untruth.
‘Good girl,’ Eliza said, and Nancy stored up this praise like treasure.
‘Well done, Zenobia.’
At her father’s insistence Nancy had been named after the queen of the Asian desert kingdom of Palmyra, and Devil invariably used her formal name on significant occasions. But there had never been a day like this one. Nancy shifted closer to him on the narrow seat, he put his arm round her and she nestled against him.
At the hotel Eliza took charge of running a hot bath in the clanking bathroom at the end of the corridor. Usually it was Phyllis who filled baths and laid out nightclothes and brought hot-water bottles when they were needed. Her absence shouted at every turn.
When Nancy was dressed Cornelius and Arthur came to her room. Cornelius settled himself at the foot of his sister’s bed and Nancy rested her feet against his solid thigh. Of all of them he seemed the best survivor – he told her that after he had lost sight of her and Arthur he had paddled to the pier ladder and clung on to the lowest rung until all the women and children had climbed to safety. Devil had swum several times between the pier and the stricken steamer, desperately searching the water for the two of them.
Arthur remained silent, standing with his back to them and apparently staring out at the heathland. Finally he spun round.
‘I want to be a brave man,’ he blurted out.
The possibility that he might not be, that bravery was not the automatic right of boys of his sort, was deeply disturbing to him.
Cornelius blinked behind his glasses. Nancy said quickly, ‘Of course you will be.’
Arthur’s mouth quivered. He was on the point of tears.
‘And I want Phyllis to come back.’
Late that afternoon Devil and Eliza broke the news to their children that the companion’s body had been recovered from the sea.
Four of the forty people aboard the Queen Mab had lost their lives. The others were Mr and Mrs Clare and the youngest passenger, the little girl with the posy basket. Nancy couldn’t put out of her mind how Devil’s first thought had been for Eliza, and she imagined how Mr Clare must also have struggled to save his wife, never giving up until the waves claimed him too. That evening, the Clares’ usual table in the dining room was covered with a cloth but left unlaid.
In her bed, after the strange dinner where almost no one in the room spoke or ate much and the rattle of cutlery seemed too loud to bear, Nancy was unable to sleep. For the last year Phyllis had been with her to make sure she brushed her hair and placed her shoes side by side under her chair. Now the gaunt little hotel bedroom was full of strange shadows, and although she forced herself to lie still her head seethed with unwelcome images.
She lay awake for so long that sleep seemed impossibly remote. The procession of images through her mind led her to the Palmyra, to one of the theatre’s private boxes. She