She was writing, illuminated letters on pages with rich coloured borders and tiny figures fitted into the ornate capitals. Her room was open to the balconied night, with vaulted ceilings and a series of shallow steps that led out – he somehow knew – into the gardens. He had never seen that view before, but inside him was a memory of green evening scent and the dark movement of trees. He moved closer instinctively to see it better.
She stopped writing, and turned.
She had eyes like his mother. She was looking right at him. He fought the instinct to take a step back.
She was coming towards him, her gown unfurling behind her in a train across the floor. He could see the candle she held on its stalk, the bright medallion she wore around her neck. She was coming so close, it was as though they faced one another. He felt suddenly that all that separated them was the distance of an outstretched hand. He thought he must see his own face reflected in each one of her eyes, small as candle flame, a twinned flicker.
Instead, doubled, silver and new-minted in her eyes, he saw the mirror.
All the hairs rose on his arms, the strangeness of it prickling over him. The same mirror … she’s looking into the same mirror …
A voice said, ‘Who are you?’
He jerked back, sudden, a stumble, only to realise – foolishly – that the voice had not come from the mirror; it had come from behind him. One of the warehouse labourers was staring at him suspiciously, a raised lamp in his hand. ‘Get back to work!’
Will blinked. The warehouse with its dank crates faced him, dull and ordinary. The gardens, the high pillars and the lady were gone.
It was as if a spell had broken. Had he imagined it? Was it the warehouse fumes? He had the urge to rub his eyes, half wanting to chase the image that he had seen. But the mirror was just a mirror, reflecting the ordinary world around him. The vision in it had vanished: a fantasy, a daydream, or a trick of the light.
Shaking off the dazed sensation, Will forced himself to nod his head and say, ‘Yes, sir.’
CHAPTER TWO
DAWDLING IN THE warehouse earned Will three weeks of docked pay and a demotion to some of the toughest work on the docks. He forced himself through it, though his muscles burned and his stomach cramped without food. The first three days were dredging and lifting, and then Will was put on wheel work, trudging to turn the warehouse’s giant wooden cylinder with six much bigger men, his legs aching as the wheel’s pulleys lifted giant casks eighteen feet in the air. He returned each night to his anonymous, overcrowded lodging house too exhausted to even think about the mirror or the strange things he’d seen in it, too exhausted to do more than tumble down onto the grimy straw pallet and sleep.
He didn’t complain. Crenshaw was still in business. He wanted this job. Even at reduced pay, dock labour was better than the living he’d scraped when he’d first come to London. He’d spent days scrounging for scraps before he’d learned to pick up burnt-out ends of cigars, dry them, then sell them to dockmen as tobacco for pipes. It was those men who had said you could get unskilled jobs on the docks if you were prepared to work hard enough.
Now Will hefted the last sack of barley onto its pile, long after most of the other men had left at the bell. It had been a punishing day’s work, double pace with no breaks, to try to make up for lost time when the barge came in late. The sun was setting, and there were fewer people on the foreshore, the last stragglers finishing up their work.
All he had to do was sign off with the foreman and he’d be free for the night. He’d head to the main street, where food sellers gathered to offer a bite to workers for the right price. A late finish meant that he had missed out on his scoop of pea soup, but he had a single coin that would buy him a hot potato in its jacket, and that would be enough to fuel him for tomorrow.
‘Foreman’s around front.’ Murphy indicated upriver with his chin.
Will scrambled to get there before the foreman left. He turned the corner, calling a goodbye to Beckett and the last of the workers, who stumbled off towards the public house. Crunching along the foreshore, he saw a chestnut seller in the distance crying his wares to the last of the dock labourers, his bearded face crimson with the fire shining through the holes at the bottom of his stove. Then he reached the empty pier.
That was when Will really looked at where he was.
It had grown dark enough that men had come out to light the grease lamps that coughed and spluttered, but Will had left those behind him. The only sounds were the slap of black water at the end of the pier and the distant calls of a dredging boat moving slowly from the canal to the river, netting whatever it could find. The pier was utterly deserted, with no hint of life.