She gave her brother an incredulous look as they turned back onto the main street, and the hum of carriages rattled past them once more. ‘You always say that when you know perfectly well that you’re about to rile me.’
‘Then promise at least totry.’
‘Very well,’ she said, as they waited for a gap to cross the busy thoroughfare of Ranelagh Street.
‘When I broke my arm and had to leave the theatre,’ Oliver began cautiously, ‘Lillian lent me a sum to tide us over. Pa and me. And now I need to pay it back. Which I cannot do, because I’m not working, and I cannot work, because—’ He lifted his broken arm. ‘Which is why I thought perhaps your memory work would be a good solution.’
‘To a problem I did not know we had,’ said Ava, spying a gap in the carriages to drag her brother across the road. ‘You should know better than to let Lillian sink her claws into you,’ she said. ‘What did Itell youbefore you took the job at the theatre—’
‘She doesn’t have her claws in me,’ muttered Oliver, his pace quickening.
‘She is asnake, Oliver. And all she does is wait for the day she can uncoil, and bite you. No need to make her job easier by living in the tall grass with her.’
She watched Oliver’s expression grow stony as he sidestepped a woman carrying a precarious stack of packages in one hand, and a basket in the other. ‘I wouldn’t have had to borrow money from her if you’d been here. If you’danswered my letters.’
‘You never mentioned you were sore for money,’ Ava countered. ‘Just as you didn’t mention Pa’s …’ She hunted for the right words to describe the maudlin darkness of the house. ‘… Domestic fixtures.’
‘Ava, I am not going to start scribbling down all of our family’s woes for some soul in the postal office to read. You weren’t here to help me, and I had nowhere else to turn.’
Ava clamped her mouth shut at the accusatory note in his tone. ‘I had little other choice,’ she said, with great effort. ‘You know that.’
‘Just like I had no choice but to manage everything that came afterwards. “How’s the theatre without me, Oliver? I hope Miss Lillian isn’t making your life hell, Oliver. She must surely be mad that I’ve upped and left without a word, but I’ll leaveyouto deal with that, Oliver.”’
Ava’s expression flattened as two ringleted girls raced past, their red-faced governess some paces behind. ‘Youwere the one who chose to keep working for her after I’d left.’
‘It was my job,’ said Oliver. ‘And I wasn’t going to give it up just because you ran off to Edinburgh.’
‘I didn’trun,’ Ava said, though some of the heat had disappeared now from her voice. ‘I just – I …’
Oliver sighed, reaching with his good hand to rub at his eyebrows. ‘I know,’ he said, the anger draining from him, too. ‘And I’m sorry. Ava, I still feel … I still feel awful about what happened between you and Jem.’
‘Why shouldyoufeel awful?’ she said, veering them east to avoid Williamson Square – despite it being the quickest way to the market. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘And it wasn’t yours, either. You know that, don’t you?’
It took everything she had to try and turn from the memory bubbling up in her mind, the expression on Jem’s face, the feeling of something pressing down on her windpipe as he’d said: ‘It’s not that I don’t think we’d be good together,Ava. I think we’d find a way, you and I. We’d have managed. But … that’s not all there is to life, is it? “Managing”? You’d want more than that. I’d want more than that.’
She pushed the memory away with vicious speed – for she’d never thought they were “managing” together.
She’d thought he’d loved her.
‘Come on,’ she said to Oliver, hooking her arm back through his. ‘At this rate the market will be closed before we get there.’
‘Ava,’ Oliver said, his voice more urgent now. ‘Answer me. You know you did nothing wrong, don’t you?’
Ava looked at her brother, at the concerned expression stitched into the lines across his forehead, the downwards slant of his eyebrows. And she nodded, even though her mind whispered:Of course it was your fault.Who else’s could it be?
Chapter Ten
St John’s Market was the largest in Liverpool, a grand stone building that had been remodelled to look as though it had been standing for centuries, when in truth it had only been in place since Ava’s grandfather was a boy. The grand awnings on Elliot Street extended nearly the full way to the pavement, the windows stuffed with what Ava hoped were empty boxes, and not truly pats of butter left to melt behind the glass.
She was grateful when they stepped inside, not just because they were finally shielded from the clawing wind, but because they were met with what she loved most about the market: the sea of sound it created. It was hard to feel lonely when you were surrounded by hundreds of voices, some haggling, some shouting, but all raised to try and be heard amidst thesquawkof live chickens, the wail of babies, and the discordant barks of hounds and lapdogs meeting snout to snout beneath the benches.
‘God,’ said Oliver, plugging his ears. ‘What a din.’
Stalls hugged the full circumference, and there were five great avenues that stretched from end to end and sold everything from thick back bacon to fluffy white bread, live geese to hand-whittled toys. You could buy anything youcould ever need, all under one roof, all in one pass. She thought it was rather ingenious, actually. Not to mention it was open a good hour or so later than the greengrocers on Argyle Street.
‘Potatoes,’ she said, grabbing Oliver’s sleeve and dragging him left, towards the vegetable stands. ‘These look good, don’t they?’
