Sylvia stood up and came over to my chair, where she knelt down. ‘Why don’t you go to your special place, and cry?’ she suggested. She stroked my hair, and dabbed at a tear with her finger. I did not know what she meant. I must have looked at her blankly. ‘Where do you go to, to cry, Dora?’ she asked. ‘Everyone has a special place where they can cry safely, don’t they, Pansy? I used to go to the bathroom, when I had one.’
‘I’ve seen it. It was lovely.’
‘Yes, it was,’ Sylvia sighed.
‘I do it under the blankets, at night,’ Pansy interjected. ‘Or when I take the slops out. I have to be quick about it, though. There’s nowhere you can cry at home, or in a factory. I do a lot of cryin’ when I’m walkin’, it’s handy cos it keeps the odd folk away. They look at you, cos they think you can’t see them if you’re cryin’, but they won’t come near you at least.’
‘Do yourself a favour, for once,’ Sylvia commanded. ‘Go, find yourself a space, and cry in it. What are you afraid of? Tears are only salt and water.’
And I knew where I had to go, and I lay there, in her little bed, and cried until the mattress was soaked through, which was going to be a bore for Pansy, but I do believe it was some help to me. At times, I feared I would never stop. It seemed I had forgotten how to be soundless. My eyes and the patch of skin between my nose and mouth became raw, and I yearned to rub my face on Lucinda’s soft hair.
I got up out of her bed eventually, angry at my indulgence. My arms felt heavily light without their usual charge, and a strange sensation ate at my chest. Grief enshrouded me like a mist, as I drifted around the house, picking up and moving around Lucinda’s possessions hither to thither and back again. I had to hide Mossie above the wardrobe, for fear I would do her some damage; I took her down again and placed her in the ottoman; I moved her to the coal-cellar. Anything to fill the waiting.
Sylvia and Pansy looked at me as I came through the parlour.
‘Sleep, won’t you,’ I scolded them. But this is a shared grief, their faces said. We are with you, and yet we are not you. We do not presume to know how you feel, and yet we sympathise and feel it too.
And then the front door opened, and Din staggered in, carrying a bundle in his arms, from which a leg fell, and then an arm, and then a cascade of blonde hair, and I rushed to help him put Lucinda down on the rug by the fire.
‘Is she alive?’
‘Sleepin’, ma’am. Safe, and unharmed.’
I knelt down at her head, and rested my hand on her back.
‘Where was she?’
‘She was with them all along. Mr Diprose gave the woman some money, an’ tol’ her to keep her until he sent word.’
I shuddered to think what would have happened to her had Diprose decided that she was to be ‘disposed’ of, like her mother. It would not have been too hard a task, in Limehouse.
And then, just as if it were the gentle awakening of a normal sunny morning, Lucinda shifted herself under my palm, and started to stir. Her eyes opened, and closed again for a moment, and then opened fully. She moved her lips together to moisten them after her sleep, and gave one stretch, and then settled back against me, staring straight ahead with her big blue eyes. None of us dared move. And then she tilted her head back a bit so she could see who it was sitting at her head, and I moved to a crouch so she could see me more clearly, and her mouth broke into a smile, and she curled her fingers up to my face. Then she closed her eyes again, and stretched once more, yawned, and flexed to see the room on the other side of her, scanned the faces of the onlookers, and then turned back to me, and grasped my ribbons in her hand.
‘My darling, my darling,’ I whispered. ‘Lucinda, Lucinda. You’re home. You’re safe.’
She said ‘Mama,’ and smiled again, and turned fully on to her side, facing me, and closed her eyes once more. I reached for her hand, and there was no such thing as wrong or right, or sick or well, or noble or savage, or old or young, only her and me.
‘Where’s Din gone, Mama?’ she said, after a while.
I looked around. ‘Go see if he’s in the bindery, Pansy,’ I said. But he wasn’t. He was nowhere in the building. ‘He must have slipped away,’ I said. ‘He’s very good at that.’ I was slightly troubled not to have noticed, or to have extended to the man my thanks, but I had my Lucinda, and as we sat with our hands entwined, and our faces shining, and so many salty tears that one could have been forgiven for thinking that it was like a birth all over again, I knew that, contrary to my mother’s ruling, I had, at last, all that I desired, at least until the men came from Scotland Yard to mete out something approximating justice.