Chapter Fifty-Two Nina
We arrived in Scurry in the same way my mother once left it.
Patrick helped me out of the bowels of a passenger boat, his cap pulled low over his brow, adjusting my own hat to keep my face in shadows. “Ready?” he asked.
But there is no readying for the assault of one’s childhood. Particularly if one was a child in a town like Scurry.
John let the boat float away, and there was no one to pay us any mind as we made our way onto the sodden banks, slipping in the slush, skin already mottled with the cold.
John sniffed at the air and looked about the town. “Smells like home,” he said.
“Horse shit and smoke?” Patrick muttered.
But I thought he meant the bite in the air, less stinging than Kenton.
Never cold enough to freeze the ground, but enough that snowfall melted as soon as it touched the earth, all of Scurry turning to mush underfoot.
The roads were the color of molasses. The roofs dripped from their eaves in a perpetual rhythm, sagging under the burden of it.
Everything sagged in Scurry. Women lugged laundry and children and baskets that seemed intent on breaking bones. Men bowed in their miner’s coats, shrinking inward from the chill, bent almost double before they turned thirty. By fifty, their noses skirted the puddles.
Most of Scurry was set atop a hill, cut off like an island between the river and its mines, so we had to walk the slope, slipping the entire way.
I was hounded by sour memories, and some sweeter ones—Ma dragging me up the hill while I sat on a wide tin oven tray, then pretending I was too heavy and letting me slip back down the slope, right to the culvert next to the river.
The days I’d spent on this slope, watching the river for boats mooring and pulling away, my mother not aboard, the boatmen watching on with obvious pity.
I thought of the resilient red flowers that dared to sprout heads among the dust in the spring.
Widow’s lace, only there for a short while.
You had to be quick in the picking before they sagged, too.
No one but us has this, Rose Harrow would say, twirling the flower before my eyes.
The city might have its own beauties. But no one else gets this.
Midwinter, and the flowers had mostly decomposed. The hills were brown and sullen. But I wondered if perhaps, when Idia lived here, the land was beautiful. Before the hills were plundered and the flowers squashed.
Patrick’s arm caught me as I stumbled, his fingers tightening around my forearm. “Easy,” he said.
I tugged the heavy hem of my skirt away from the ground. Women in Scurry did not wear long skirts in the winter. They wore their husband’s trousers, or their brother’s. Practicality and warmth outweighed fashion.
Patrick took the folds of skirt from my hands and held it aside for me as I walked. He watched me warily. Likely he was noticing the strain taking hold of me as Scurry grew closer. I was trembling a little. Sickness spilled into my belly.
“Do you want to hear a story?”
I looked at him. “What?”
“A story. See if I can’t take that pin out of your arse.”
I grinned, though I didn’t want to. “You’re a pig. Have I ever told you that?”
He nodded. “Among other things. Now, when I returned home to Kenton after our siphonin’, I promised myself I wouldn’t mention your name, not even to my father,” he looked up toward John, who was ten paces ahead.
“But I told Gunner. Couldn’t help it. You were bangin’ about my skull and I wanted to brag to someone about you, so I told him your name.
I told him that I knew the earth Charmer was the same girl from that courtyard, and that I’d held her hand and kissed her stupid. ”
“You barely touched my cheek.”
“Well, the way I told it, there was a lot of skillful tongue work.”
I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t contain a chuckle.
“Now, Gunner don’t look like he gossips, but trust me, he’s worse than a widow in a tea shop.
He told Donny, and Donny told our Ma, and the first thing she did was cuff me about the head and tell me that a man never kisses a girl so soon into courtship.
I had to confess my lyin’ so she wouldn’t think her son was a tail-chasin’ scoundrel. ”
A genuine laugh slipped free. I could picture him cowering beneath Tess Colson’s scorn.
“She told me the next girl I kissed better ask for it first, or she’d find out and flog me.” He twisted my skirt up in his hand.
I grinned. “And did you honor her?”
“I waited for you to ask me in Kenton Hill,” he said. “Nearly killed me, but I waited.”
I looked up at him, his hair more overgrown than I’d ever seen it, a thickening scruff of beard shadowing his jaw. But still the same boy underneath it. Still the man I loved, even if he tried to smother it.
“You’re impossible to ignore, Nina Harrow,” he told me. “You’re cunning, and powerful. Grown men have to hide their fear around you.” He said it softly, seriously. “Whatever lies in wait here, you’ve faced worse. Remember that. You’re stronger now.”
I nodded once, a tight soldier’s nod, the kind that hid the quaking and cracking of one’s chest.
We reached the summit of Scurry and ventured inward, and imbued as I was by Patrick’s warmth, a chill slunk over my shoulders. Scurry was unchanged. Identical slate roofing conjoining one flat to the next. A sea of brick chimneys, soot-encrusted and coughing.
Scurry was twice the size of Kenton Hill, with triple the population stuffed inside its flats and all their waste dumped in the alleys.
There were no hanging lanterns, no gleaming pipeworks, trolleys, canals, drains.
No cobblestones or flower boxes. Just the flat exteriors of homes, and then, farther inward, the shop fronts, the trading post, the church, and the school in the westernmost part of Scurry.
We passed a bulletin board, its notices peeling away from the cork in reproach. Upon it, over and over again, was my face.
Did the House expect I’d return here after I’d disappeared seven years ago? I supposed most people’s first thought in times of trouble was home.
And I had to admit, there had been those awful nights where I’d lain awake, suffocating in fear, and I’d thought of this town. Dreary as it was, there was comfort in the familiar. Still, I’d never returned.
“Never did get this far out, did we, Pat?” John said casually. “Ground’s too fuckin’ unstable for tunnels.”
“Too many coppers, besides,” Patrick replied. “Crawlin’ with ’em. Always was. Too much terranium lyin’ about for it to go unguarded, or at least there used to be.”
“Reckon all those hats ain’t got much to do nowadays,” John muttered.
And indeed, the town did seem to have an air of complacency about it. There was an eerie silence. A hum of activity now missing, the miners short of terranium and the coppers short of remit.
A man passed on horseback, and a woman with three baskets stacked one on top of the other overtook them.
A group of grubby-looking men stood clustered on a stoop, lighting three cigarettes with one match.
They kept their noses down, their eyes never wandering, not even to the young boy who sat a few feet from them up against the bricks with his hat out for coins, his feet bare and his gloves bitten through.
A skinny dog lay at his side, one stray warming himself against another.
“Poor bloody kid,” John muttered too loudly, patting his pockets for coins he didn’t have. “Ain’t they got hearts in Scurry?”
Bleeding hearts bleed out, my father used to say, and he wasn’t often right, but about this he might have been. There were too many hungry mouths in Scurry to feed. “We’ll pass a dozen more yet,” I muttered.
A few paces later, there were two more, then a whole family. “Bloody hell,” John cursed, shaking his head. “Can’t imagine a place that don’t take care of their own.”
I wanted to tell him that the people here were so troubled by their own poverty that it was dangerous to take on the burden of another’s.
The drowning often drowned their rescuers.
But in truth, there wasn’t much to be said in defense of Scurry.
I had once knocked on doors that refused to open, pleaded with strangers who ignored me.
“We headed to a hotel?” he asked. “A pub?”
I shook my head. “They’ll be full of police.”
“Where then?” John insisted, rubbing his chapped hands together. “Wouldn’t mind a nip.”
I sighed, turning a corner I hadn’t believed I’d ever take again. Past Mrs. Penhaligon’s and my childhood neighbor’s.
“Where are we headed?” Patrick asked warily, though I was sure he already knew. There was never another place to hide when I was a kid. Stood to reason it would be no different now.
“To call on my father,” I said. “If he isn’t yet dead.”
The door to the attached town house, in an endless oblong row of town houses, now had its brass numbers missing. The faded impression of the number 348 remained. The doormat was missing. A rat fished scraps from an overturned bin beneath the window.
I swallowed. Knocked.
And Patrick, who perhaps sensed that my heart was lashing itself against my ribs in some last spasm of self-preservation, took my hand in his, enveloped my fingers with his own and pulled me just slightly behind his left shoulder.
He took on that indecipherable expression, the one he used in moments of bad business.
There was a grunt from within, the sound of wood whining against tile, heavy discordant footfalls, a wracking cough.
The door opened, one hinge pulling free of the frame.
Fletcher Harrow, a man who was fifty but looked seventy, stood at the threshold, as though the past fourteen years hadn’t gone by at all.
There was still the apparent sense that he flirted with death, as though he was already half gone.
Leathery skin pulled down toward some grave he was destined for.
The blond of his mustache, now stark white and untrimmed, covered his lips.
The scruff of his beard was encrusted with what might have been decades of soot. Likely bluff, too.