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The light of our lantern shivered on the wet pavement. The street where I lived was swept and clean but as we went downhill towards Mammie's lodgings the householders cared less and would not pay the scavengers. We picked our way over the dirt and I held the hem of my cloak high. Hannah was silent.
She opened the door with her own familiar key. My mother and her husband had four rooms upstairs with Hannah to care for everything as she had always done. Augustus was always from home, travelling from town to town into every wretched place that would hear his preaching on the rights of men. Tom Paine might be in Paris, but Augustus Gleeson was content to deliver his sermons to the mill-workers of Preston or the coalminers of Radstock.
Downstairs there was a family of seamstresses, mother and three daughters. They had the best of the light in their back room and rarely left the house. We climbed the stairs; Hannah produced her second key and the door opened.
Hannah had keys to my mother's house, and I had none. I thought of that as I stepped across the threshold, took off my things and hung my cloak to dry.
'Here she is,' announced Hannah, holding open Mammie's door. I expected to see the lamp lit and Mammie sitting up in bed, wearing her spectacles, blinking at me as she rose from the depths of her work. I looked where she should have been, and saw nothing but a rounded heap under the bedclothes. A candle burned on the bedside table.
She's sleeping, I thought. But then, why waste a candle? I glanced at Hannah, thinking I should withdraw, but she gestured to me to come on. The bed took up the best part of the room and the ceiling sloped so I always had to duck my head. There was a sour smell. My mother's hair was tangled on the pillow, hiding her face from me.
'Mammie?' I said, and she stirred. She rolled over, pushing back her hair. Her mouth was gluey with sleep. I went to the washstand and wrung out a cloth and passed it to her so that she could wipe her face. Hannah pulled out the pillows and shook them into shape; then she helped my mother sit forward while she replaced the pillows to support her.
After Hannah had gone out, I fetched the hairbrush. 'Shall I brush your hair, Mammie?'
She smiled and shook her head. 'I'll do it in a minute, Lizzie. How are you, my darling?'
I sat on the bed and took her hands. The skin was dry and a little rough, as always. I picked up first her right hand and then her left, and held them to my lips. They smelled of ink.
'Are you ill, Mammie?'
'No,' she said. 'Only a little tired. And how is my girl? How is John?'
'He's asked us to call him Diner, Mammie. I wish you would remember. Or you might call him John Diner, if you prefer. He doesn't object to that.'
'But isn't it rather cumbersome, when we are by ourselves?'
'Think of it as one word, and it's shorter than Elizabeth.'
'John Diner, then. And shall I call you Mrs Tredevant?'
'Mammie,' I said, kneeling beside the bed and rubbing my cheek against hers, 'should you like me to call you Mrs Gleeson?'
She laughed. 'Very good, Lizzie.' She patted the bed covers and I sat down carefully so as not to press against her. 'Tell me, how is the building going?'
'Work will go on much better now the weather has improved. He's taking me to see the new house very soon.'
I was glad we had left the subject of my husband's name. I thought his first wife, Lucie, must have called him John. That was why he flinched at the sound of it. He heard another woman's voice, not mine.
Mammie's writing- board was on the bed, but there was no sheet of paper attached to its clips. I could barely remember a time when she wasn't working.
Birdcage Walk © 2017 by Helen Dunmore. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.
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