Birdcage Walk by Kate Riordan

kept the book, using it as she’d intended.
    Now, his mother dead and the sheet she’d lain on with the stranger boil-washed many times since, he turned back to that first page and held the book up to the candle light, tracing a finger along the still-visible indentations of her message. Then he turned back to the outline of the house he’d seen for the first time that day and took up his pencil once again.

Chapter Six

    During the following weeks, as the mercury plummeted and the wind turned bitter enough to make the roots of his teeth jangle and ache, George struggled to concentrate at the press. Despite his best efforts, his mind kept wandering a mile or two to the north. As the days passed, he found it increasingly hard to believe that the white house really existed, along with its otherworldly occupants and the imagined bounty of its library.
    Instead of avoiding his father’s silences by taking refuge in the pub with Charlotte, he found relief in the peace and quiet of home during the evenings. With more zeal than he’d shown in years, George drew long into the night, copying from memory botanical illustrations more complex than he’d attempted before. Cissy, who found any break in routine a cause for quiet alarm, was also baffled. On the nights when George worked well past the hour that she retired to the truckle bed near his, she took to pointedly sighing and fidgeting in order to register the disapproval that masked her concern.
    Just after his visit to Highbury, he’d tried hard to draw the house from memory but, just as he’d struggled to describe Miss Clemency’s appearance to his sister, his powers of recall proved more vague than he would have liked. In his mind’s eye the house had been reduced to an impression of white stucco, as pristine as the girl’s dress, and the startling green of the lawn, brilliant as an emerald in spite of the arid summer it had endured.
    Two Fridays after he’d been there, George was helping Cissy to stuff rags in the window frames to stop a bitter easterly wind finding its way inside. He had told a sulky-mouthed Charlotte he would see her in the pub that night but, once the draughty windows had stopped rattling, it felt quite snug at home and he felt again the lure of his sketchbook. Abandoning the trail of wisteria he’d been working on for the last few days, he began a new sketch, starting with the outline of a face and then moving onto a pair of wide eyes. Where his mouth had failed him when Cissy had asked, his hand now seemed to remember who and what he had seen.
    By the time he’d finished, the candle on the rickety side table had burned low in its holder, the flimsy tin saucer that held it deformed by the dirty globules of wax that had dripped and hardened on it. Cissy was finally asleep across from him, lost in dreams with her mouth slightly open and her eyes flitting rapidly under their lids. Even in sleep, her face looked afraid, an expression that irritated George when she was awake but now, her thin hands clasped over her chest, her body barely making a hump under the blankets, he felt an ache in his chest for her. He could already see how she would look when she was older; a slighter version of his mother, with the same chapped knuckle joints and congested voice from an endless stream of colds.
    It was late enough for the moon to have risen high, but it didn’t matter now that he wasn’t expected at the print tomorrow. After the tedium of work that day, when even his daydreams hadn’t hastened the hours on, he’d asked to swap his shift the next day and the foreman had nodded his permission, much to George’s astonishment. The surprise gift of time stretched out in front of him now, becoming such a vast tomorrow that he felt reluctant to snuff out the candle and sleep, diminishing it all the sooner. That was when he decided, just like that. Tomorrow he would return to the house that had taken root in his mind. He could pretend he was off to the