A Beggar's Kingdom Read online

  Miri says she can’t go and won’t go, adding, “looking like this.” She points to her tattered dress.

  Julian offers to take her shopping for a more presentable outfit.

  “Where to?” Miri says gruffly. “Covent Garden? They’ve got nothing good there. I’ve had enough of Monmouth finery, thanks marvelous much.”

  “I was thinking Bond Street.”

  Jasper and Monk ooh and ahh, Mortimer stays sullen and quiet, but surprising everyone, Julian most of all, Miri agrees!

  While she’s off, putting on her cleanest dress and scrubbing her hands and face to look presentable for Bond Street, Julian sits with Agatha. From the stalls he has brought her some bread with warm bacon and apple cider, though Agatha keeps insisting on rum. As she eats, Julian probes into the mother’s aversion to travel.

  “Travel where?” says Agatha.

  “Anywhere, really.”

  “Like the park?”

  “Farther.”

  “Stratford?”

  “Farther.”

  “I don’t know nothing farther than Stratford. Not bloody Scotland?”

  “Not Scotland. What about America?”

  Agatha laughs fondly. “Oh, you are daft,” she says. “So, so daft.”

  Julian presses. He would accompany her, of course. He would buy her a passage on a big boat, with a first-class cabin. She’d be well fed and safe. There might even be a dram or two of gin. It would take six weeks to cross the ocean.

  “What about Miri?”

  Julian says she will go, too—on a different boat.

  “Oh, my Julian,” says Agatha, shaking her head.

  He persists. The three of them could stay in Maine until the war is over. Everything would be okay after that.

  “Why would I ever want to sail the ocean?” Agatha says. “I don’t even want to get on a boat across the Thames to visit my syphilitic cousin Eunice.”

  Julian begins to tell her about a house near the water in a small rocky town where she can walk and buy flowers and fish, and about her daughter staying alive, but the alive daughter returns, ready for her shopping trip. Agatha pats Julian’s head as he rises to his feet. The look on Agatha’s face as she watches Miri walk away tells Julian there is nothing the mother doesn’t already know about a desperate desire for salvaged children.

  21

  Troilus and Cressida

  INSIDE WHITE’S THE MILLINER’S, A LARGE DRESS SHOP ON Bond Street, Miri is intimidated. She doesn’t speak, lest the well-dressed saleswomen hear her common dialect. Gingerly she walks around, afraid to touch the displayed clothing. After much silent browsing, she decides on a long lilac skirt, with a white lace hoopless petticoat, and a cropped pale yellow taffeta jacket, stitched with maroon ribbons. It comes with a matching silk bonnet lined with ostrich feathers. For her feet, she selects pointed-toe ivory shoes with gold buckles and stacked heels. Julian buys her embroidered white gloves and pearly beads for her throat. The shop ladies fuss over her, complimenting her on her alabaster skin and her shiny black hair. What about her soft red lips, Julian wants to say. And her melting chocolate eyes. You forgot about those.

  Miri walks out of the shop, her tiny slender frame shaking with joy. She twirls her walking stick umbrella, her old clothes in a tightly wrapped bundle in her hand. “How do I look? Unrecognizable?”

  “I’d know you anywhere,” Julian says.

  She scans up and down Bond Street. “Well, where to now? I can’t go back to St. Giles looking like this.”

  “Like what, a princess?”

  Miri attempts a non-reaction. “I’d never willingly go to the Old Bailey, visit some magistrate. But if I must go, I need to look my best, that is all. I’m doing it for Fulko,” she declares, all serious.

  “Of course you are.” Julian is all serious back. “Would you like to take a carriage ride?”

  “I still don’t know what you mean by that. Carriage ride to where?”

  “Nowhere. I said ride, not journey.”

  “Why would we hire a carriage if we ain’t going nowhere?”

  “Let’s ride around London in an open carriage. It’s a beautiful day.”

  “For what reason?”

  “For no other reason than to ride,” says Julian.

  In vain Miri tries to hide how badly she would like this. The gap between her daily life and a carriage ride is vaster than the black chasm Julian leaps over in the Cave of Desperate Hope.

  He offers her his hand to help her up into the cab, and though Miri is agile and doesn’t need the help, she takes his hand anyway. They ride to the pastures at Hyde Park. They ride around Green Park, past Buckingham Palace, and down Pall Mall.

  Before re-entering the Strand, she asks the driver to stop. She doesn’t want to go back to the bloody Strand, she says. “It’s like my backyard. I’d like to see something new.”

  “What about a ride through the City, to London Bridge, to St. Paul’s?”

  She shakes her head. “I’ve never liked it over there,” she says. “I don’t know why.”

  Julian directs the driver to take them down to the river and along the Thames to Westminster, past the Houses of Parliament. Westminster Bridge is there, built twenty-five years earlier, but there is no Clock Tower or Big Ben rising over it. Julian’s eye can’t get used to it. The mind’s eye keeps supplying what’s missing in real life. He keeps looking up to see the time, as they pass by the House of Commons.

  They hop off to get some bread and sausage at a food stall and with an ale and a pastry, find a bench near the House of Lords. Julian wants to tease her a little, ask her if the House of Lords brings back any memories. But it will just confuse and irritate her, and hasn’t he done enough of that? He keeps quiet, while she barely touches her food because she doesn’t want to spill crumbs on her new skirt.

  “You must be quite rich to let us ride so long,” Miri says.

  “Not me,” he says. “You’re rich.”

  It confuses and irritates her.

  After the intimate break by the river, another carriage takes them back to her neighborhood. Motionlessly they stand in the congested clacking crossroads of the Strand and St. Martin’s Lane. Julian can tell Miri wants to say something. She certainly makes no move to cross the street.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “Nothing, nothing.”

  “Are you ready to go back?”

  She chews her lip.

  “Or…would you like to see that play I was telling you about? Drury Lane is showing Troilus and Cressida.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  For a good minute, Miri stands mute. “What’s it about?” she finally says. And then she smiles. Her face warms, flushes, becomes even more beautiful.

  Julian smiles back. “I need to bark it up like one of your newspapers? Fine. It’s set during the Trojan War. Troilus is Paris’s brother and he falls in love with Cressida, the daughter of a Trojan noble. Troy is fighting a losing battle with the Greeks for its survival, but not Troilus. All he wants is to be with Cressida.”

  “Do you have tickets?”

  “We will in five minutes.”

  “It’s a shilling. And you spent all yer money ridin’ around London for no reason.”

  “Not for no reason,” Julian says, “and it’s more than a shilling for box seats. Let’s hurry. It’s first come, first served.” Even the luxury boxes are unnumbered. Julian wishes he could say the same for their days.

  They hurry. She raises her silk skirts above the manure.

  At the ticket office on Catherine Street, Julian buys two box seats, the best in the house. Seat purchases are divided by class, but Julian knows that money speaks louder than class. He offers the ticket seller twenty shillings a seat instead of the usual five, and not a minute later, they’re in the most expensive box right by the side of the stage. A chandelier of three hundred wax candles hovers over the proscenium. Every night those candles need to be manually replaced with new ones. For t
he rest of his days, Julian will live in full appreciation of the chandlery arts.

  Miri can’t hide her excitement. “You spent two pound on these seats? As God is my witness, you’ve lost your mind.” Her thrilled demeanor denies her words. “When I save up a shilling, I buy a ticket in the back gallery. I stand the entire play.”

  Her hands in a knot in her lap, Miri doesn’t breathe through the first act, doesn’t speak during the intermission, and doesn’t breathe through the second. After it’s over, she cries. Miri, who’s seen it all, endured all, cries. “That’s the saddest play I ever saw,” she says, even though Troilus and Cressida is a comedy. “Tear my bright hair and break my heart, I will not go from Troy. But why did Cressida betray Troilus if she loved him? How could she do that? You don’t betray the one you love. Why did she have to go with that awful Greek? And Troilus who loved her so much, how could he be so cruel and compare the body she gave him to leftover scraps from the table? Oh, it’s just awful—they lost their city and the love between them was destroyed. Why did you take me to this—wait—why are you waving down a carriage?”

  “Well,” Julian says, “I was thinking we could go have some supper and talk about the play.”

  “Supper where? Neal’s Yard?”

  “How about a dining room on Grosvenor Square?”

  She stands in the middle of the street. “Sounds far.”

  “It is far.”

  The carriage doesn’t come right away, and Julian and Miri walk for a bit, past St. James’s Park, as familiar to him as skin and heat. Oh, how they wore out the paths of that park with their lovers’ strolls, waxing poetic about which wild berries could kill a grown man. In 1775, in the silence of his overflowing heart, Julian offers Miri his arm, and in silence she takes it. It’s nearing the summer solstice, and the days are long on the 51st parallel. During the gloaming, the sun sets slow in the sky, and the city burns orange flame forever.

  “I don’t know if I’m using the right word,” Miri says, “but for some reason, this feels familiar to me, walking here.” She doesn’t say walking here with you. “And yet I know I never been down this way in my life.”

  “You are right,” Julian says. “Some things are hard to explain.”

  In the crystal dining room of the corner townhouse on Grosvenor Square, Miri sips red wine out of crystal goblets while a man in a black suit delivers her lamb and roast potatoes and fine Stilton cheese. All her life Miri has eaten with her hands, and Julian can see it’s an effort for her to pick up a knife and fork. She asks if she can eat the Yorkshire pudding with her hands. “Probably not,” says Julian. “Not when it’s dripping with gravy.” In the corner of the candle-lit, white-walled dining room, a quartet of strings—a cello, a viola and two violins—plays Bach’s mournful fugues.

  The normally terse Miri doesn’t stop talking. As if perhaps even her terseness has been a disguise. She talks about the ladies’ shops and how nice they smelled inside, full of perfumed atomizers. She talks about the carriage and how nice it was not to walk but be driven. Holding her wine goblet like a beer stein, she talks about Troilus and Cressida.

  “That was not a very good comedy,” she says. “The lovers are separated the minute they come together. What’s so funny about that?”

  Julian cannot disagree.

  “That Shakespeare didn’t take Troilus’s heart seriously is what bothers me most of all,” Miri continues. “Troilus the ever-faithful is betrayed by that dreadful girl.”

  “Nonetheless, she never stops being the subject of his heart.”

  “Yes, but the good Cressida is only in his mind! She doesn’t exist. And the real, wanton Cressida is not worthy.”

  “She is,” Julian says. “The war between his faith in the idealized Cressida and his knowledge of the true Cressida might resolve into a truce of enduring love.”

  “That’s not the play we saw. Shakespeare forgot the difference between a comedy and a tragedy,” Miri says. “Comedies have a happy ending. Did that seem like a happy ending to you? Now, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that’s a much better comedy. I saw that the other week”—she rolls her eyes—“but I suppose you already know that, pacing fifty steps behind me as you do.”

  Julian smiles. “You don’t like to cry?”

  “Who does? Who wants to see a play about love being fickle and fleeting?”

  “I don’t know, the theatre tonight was packed to the rafters.”

  “People have no sense.” Miri smiles lightly. “Why, did you like it very much? I suppose you would. You like the point of it—that love turns men into weaklings. Men who do not love go and fight instead. Like Achilles. But men who love write poetry and wail under the windows of their beloveds, like Troilus and Romeo.”

  She’s teasing him. He could cry. “Sometimes men who love still fight. Tear my bright hair and break my heart, I will not go from Troy,” Julian whispers.

  They linger in the dining room. Julian doesn’t want this watershed day to end, a day not quite like all the others. A man in a black suit keeps coming over and refilling Miri’s wine. He removes her dirty plate from the table and brings her a clean one. Another man places a dessert menu in front of her. He nods his head when she orders a pudding with vanilla sauce and raspberries, and says, “Very good, miss.”

  Julian watches her, trying not to frighten the horses by his staring, by his open adoration of her lovely, serious, deeply affected face. She is so grown-up, yet longs to be a child, a child she never got to be.

  “I have an idea,” Julian says. “Do you want to hear?”

  “I’m not sure,” Miri replies, her eyes twinkling faintly. “By the expression on your face, I’d say no.”

  “We have to be up and out so early tomorrow,” he says. “Instead of going back, why don’t you stay upstairs with me? I have three rooms on the top floor. You could have the bed. I’ll sleep on the sofa. You could get a good night’s rest.” Instead of looking for trouble. Instead of picking the pockets of drunks. Instead of undressing men and carting them into alleys.

  “You have three rooms, why? There’s only one of you.”

  Slowly Miri walks with him up the stairs, woozy from the wine, holding on to the railing, as if she can’t quite believe she’s agreed to enter a man’s apartment. Inside his high-ceilinged rooms, she is composed but stunned, walking around, touching the chairs. The ceilings are white. The walls are pale blue. There are ten-foot windows.

  “This must cost you a fortune,” she says. “We have fourteen ladies staying in one room, not near half as nice.”

  “The ladies or the room?”

  And Miri laughs.

  That’s a first.

  In the third room with the sinks and the dressing tables and a tub, she turns on the faucet and is amazed when water spurts out. She asks if he’s ever had a bath in the tub. Every day he doesn’t sleep in the rookery, he tells her. Miri’s face is full of longing as she stares down into the white porcelain, but she can’t bring herself to ask if she can have a bath, and he doesn’t want to scare her away by offering to draw her one. They remain silent.

  She touches the sideboards, the drapes. From the windows, they can see the heavy trees in the square and beyond it silhouettes of buildings against the night sky. The air is cool but not cold. She stands out on the balcony for a few minutes. “What is this called?”

  “It’s called a balcony.” Julian nearly breaks down. Do you remember how you asked me this, Miri, under the stars of somebody else’s life, and I told you it was a Juliet balcony?

  “What’s the matter with your voice?”

  “Nothing.” He clears his throat.

  “What do you do on this balcony?”

  “You can sit, watch the park.”

  “Why?”

  “For beauty. For pleasure. To listen to the sounds of the city.”

  “What sounds? It’s so quiet.” Miri doesn’t know quiet, and it shows. She’s nervous around it. She likes it, but it sets her on edge.

  �
�There’s nothing like the largest city in the world, asleep and silent.”

  “London is the largest city in the world?”

  “By far.”

  “Larger even than Paris?”

  “By far.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He shrugs. “How do you know about A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

  “Because I saw it.”

  “That’s how you know most things. You see them.” Though not all things.

  She can’t seem to relax. It’s as if she wants something from him and can’t say what. He pours her a glass of red wine, pulls two chairs outside, and they sit listening to the trees. It begins to drizzle.

  “The world is full of beauty,” he says softly, “don’t you agree?”

  Miri shrugs. “Sometimes yes. Mostly no. Oh, there’s beauty in the theatre,” she says. “That’s where I see it most often. That’s why I spend my precious money on it. But otherwise, I’ve seen things in my life that are decidedly not beautiful. I don’t always look. But I can’t help but see.”

  Julian asks what things, though he doesn’t want to know. He senses she wants to tell him, as if to explain why she has been so difficult, so uneasy, and he will listen, but he doesn’t want to hear it. He can only imagine what she’s seen, what she knows.

  “Sometimes what I see doesn’t look like beauty,” Miri says. “Sometimes I see things that in their mass, shape, activity, unending debauchery, flagrant pain, oozing dark things, limbs that look like they’re being broken, bodies that look like they’re being busted open, the screaming that goes on that some think is some kind of sexual abandon, but I regard as terror, sometimes those things look more like satanic rituals to me than acts of beauty, to be perfectly honest.”

  Julian listens, nods. He can’t explain to her with words that what she has seen is not what it is. What she has seen has been degraded, subjugated to its basest component, often removed even from its primal physical pleasure. There is no pleasure in what Flora feels in the alleys behind Neal’s Yard. He wants to tell Miri it’s not always like that. That sometimes it can also be an act of beauty.

  “I will admit that Fulko is not the best of men,” Miri continues. “Yes, he can be idle and stupid, but he is polite to me and he’s not rife with disease, and that’s something.”