“Is that right?” Percy had answered.
“That’s four now, and better her than me,” Meg had said with a laugh. “Never let yourself get outnumbered. That’s my motto.”
He’d since seen Mrs. Turner in town. A couple of weeks ago, she’d been carrying the babe in her arms, and he’d nearly knocked them over on his way out of the shop. He’d colored with embarrassment, but she’d smiled at him as if it were no inconvenience at all to be trampled.
Percy had been carrying a large sack of flour for delivery, so he couldn’t lift his hat in greeting and had settled instead for a nod. “Mrs. Turner, how are you?”
“I’m well, thank you—we’re both very well.”
His eyes had followed hers then to the small face in the blanket she held. A pair of ink-blue eyes stared up at him, pale brow knitted in that attitude of false wisdom that all newborn babies share and then shed with their first smile.
“So tiny,” he said.
“It’s true what they say. One forgets.”
Meg joined them on the footpath then and started cooing over the baby, making elaborate apologies to Mrs. Turner meanwhile. “Not usually forgetful, my Percy, but when he does make a mistake, he’s always sure to make it worthwhile. I trust you were happy with the fish paste I sent over?”
“It was delicious, Mrs. Summers, and far too generous. I was coming to see you, to ensure you add the charge to my account. I’ve been meaning to telephone, but my mind hasn’t been my own lately.”
“I don’t wonder why,” Meg said, reaching up to rub the tip of herfinger against the baby’s cheek. Her ease was so contrary to Percy’s own discomfort that he felt even more oafish by comparison. “These little ones have a way of taking over, don’t they? And what a lovely babe she is, too: so pretty.”
She.Percy hadn’t realized Meg knew. He’d made a quick study of her face, searching for signs of grief or envy or anything else of note. But she was only smiling at the slumbering child.
To see Mrs. Turner lying there on the blanket now made Percy’s cheeks burn, as if he’d crept up on purpose. There was an intimacy to the setup beneath the willow, a vulnerability: here was a family asleep together, evidence of their lunch still laid out haphazardly on the blanket between them—plates and cups, sandwich crusts and crumbs of cake.
The stillness of the scene struck him then. It was almost unnatural.
He took his hat from his head. Afterward, he would wonder what it was, precisely, that made him do so. He was aware of the sound of his own breath: in and out, in and out.
Something was moving on the younger girl’s wrist, he noticed. He took a careful step closer. And that’s when he saw the line of ants crawling straight across her body, over her arm, and on toward what was left of the picnic food.
Everything else was static, silent. No one’s features twitched in sleep. No one yawned and readjusted as the breeze grazed their skin. Not a single chest lifted or lowered.
He went to Mrs. Turner and knelt beside her head. Dampening his finger, he held it near her nose, willing it to cool with an exhalation. He realized that his finger was shaking. He looked away into the middle distance, as if that might somehow help him, as if by concentrating his senses he could force her to breathe.
Nothing. There was nothing.
Percy backed away. He stumbled over the lunch basket, flinching at the jarring noise of cutlery and crockery clanking together. Still no one stirred. Not one of them so much as moved a muscle.
With trembling hands, Percy jammed his hat back on his head. He tried to stop his thoughts from racing, tumbling, colliding with one another. Realization, shock, fear—he tried to clear his head of the lot of them so he could work out what should happen next.
Blaze was nearby, and without another moment’s hesitation Percy grabbed her reins and found his way into the saddle, urging her onward in search of help.
Part I
1
London
December 7, 2018
Whenever Jess felt angry or sad or even just inexplicably unsettled, she paid a visit to the Charles Dickens Museum on Doughty Street. There was something enormously comforting about sitting down to a pot of English breakfast tea after a wander through the museum’s rooms. Sometimes she listened to the audio guide, even though she’d heard it enough times to have memorized the information, because she liked the narrator’s voice.
She had discovered the museum during her first months in London. She’d been twenty-one, living in the attic of her school friend’s mother’s aunt, working part-time in a run-down pub near King’s Cross station. One day, having arrived too early for her shift, she’d decided to take a roam around the area. It was her favorite thing to do, to walk and to look, to pinch herself in wonder at being here, in this place of cobblestones, pint glasses, and mews houses, of poets and painters and playwrights, of the great skulking, ageless River Thames.
In the spirit of exploration and discovery, she’d granted herself the freedom to turn in either direction at random when she reached the end of a road, which was how she happened to be walking along Doughty Street, past a row of neat brick houses, when she noticed a sandwich board on the pavement outside number forty-eight, announcing it as the Charles Dickens Museum. A thousand childhood hours spent lying in her grandmother’s garden in Sydney, book in hand, had come back in an instant, and she’d hurried up the concrete stairs and pushed open the shiny black door. Time had dissolved; the novelty of being in England, of finding that the names and placesshe’d come across in novels werereal,was still fresh, and Jess had been utterly awed to think that Dickens himself had once walked through these halls, eaten at this table, stored his wine in the cellar downstairs.
She’d arrived late for work that day and earned herself a warning, followed shortly by a second, which had led in turn to her dismissal. In a stroke of good fortune, unemployment had begot opportunity, and the next job vacancy she answered had been for a small travel company in Victoria that required her to write, among other things, copy for their newsletter. And so, in an instance of rare, perfect synchronicity, she had always felt that she had Dickens to thank for giving her a professional start as a journalist.
