Saga, page 5
‘Let us take horses and ride to the stones tomorrow, Astrid.’ His voice muffled into my hair. ‘Like we did as children. To Odin’s and Freyja’s stones. I’ve been wanting to take you there for weeks. This king business is sombre and strange. I miss those times. And I miss having a real friend. Will you come and play with me again?’
I remembered running about those stones as little children. It wasn’t really Freyja’s stone, I wanted to tell him. Nor Odin’s. These were later names given to the standing stones of the giants Nerthus and Njord. Nerthus, the Goddess of the Earth, and Njord, the God of the Sky, grown so old they turned to stone.
‘I would like that,’ I whispered to Olav. ‘If Arnórr will spare me.’
‘You forget, Astrid,’ he explained. ‘I am king-in-waiting and he will do whatever I order him to do. I am in control.’
Yes, I worried to myself. Kingdoms, thrones and souls.
My heart ached for the boy who did not wish to be king.
I felt alone and out of place at the Lesters’ at first, as I was so very used to being surrounded by other people. Children. The destitute mothers and the poor. The miserable infirm from the basement, who were thankfully kept locked away from the rest of us but filled the air with their cries and shouts. For so many years I had cursed living in the poorhouse, bemoaning my misfortune at having been left parentless and at the mercy of the Church-run charity. Now I felt as if I was sleeping in a coffin in the small cupboard at the top of the rickety staircase. I always left the door ajar, afraid I might suffocate in my sleep. The deep, dark quiet and aloneness were disconcerting. While I was bought for five pounds to be a helper in the coffin shop and deathly business, I learned immediately that I was also to be cook, cleaner, laundress, general maid and mother to the two men, so that my few hours of rest at night were sorely earned.
I was fed better, however, and certainly did not miss that horrid gruel. The scraps of Mr Lester’s and his son’s meals were divided between me and their little dog, Bundy. I got the end knuckles of the small boiled cabbages and the meat gristles. But Mr Lester gave me lots of bread to help fatten me up.
‘I don’t want a mourning girl who looks thin enough that onlookers might believe she’ll be a skeleton sooner than the coffin’s tenant.’
While I was better nourished, I was not much better treated and I found the Lesters to be mean and bitter people. For company, I much preferred their grieving clients and the dead.
I had seen a dead body before. Many in fact. The poorhouse had a notorious reputation for confusing charity and provision for its hard-done-by inmates with malnourishment and cruelty. More than one poor soul a month wasted away from it. But given the state of the streets and times in Glasgow, there were always more to take their place. My new job gave me a deeper understanding of life and death and the tenuous veil that separated them.
I had three main responsibilities at Lester’s Undertakers. First of all I was given the job of sewing the death shrouds. We used them only for pauper burials or unknowns because they were paid for by the Poor Union, so no coffin lining of silk or velvet for them. They were wrapped, put in the barest wooden box, borne by poorhouse pall-bearers and given a simple burial in the unmarked area of the graveyard without a headstone.
If the deceased was well loved, which was most often the case, the family usually decided to keep the body in their own parlour at home and have a funeral service there, followed by a nailing up of the coffin and the procession to the graveyard through the streets of the town for gawkers to tip their hats in respect.
The second responsibility I was given drew on my skill for writing. I would craft the obituary for the newspaper and, in my best penmanship, engrave invitations to the funeral on small squares of paper with wide black borders, and then pass them to Terry for him to hand deliver.
The third responsibility was to attend the funeral in my funeral garb, which made me look like a young widow. I was to look as dreary and distraught as possible while still keeping pace with the carriage being drawn by four black stallions, festooned with ostrich feathers. The carriage was black unless the funeral was for a child, in which case it was white. At first I found it quite hard to summon tears on will, but I learned that thinking of my lost mother was enough to tear-stain my cheeks.
The first funeral I attended was for a Mrs Emily McDonald. She had been sixty-two years old. I came with the Lesters to her house and timidly looked at the woman lying in her bed looking as if she were asleep. She had died suddenly while playing cards the night before. The doctor believed her heart had simply stopped.
‘You won’t usually come for a first visit but you might as well see what we are all about,’ Lester told me, looking closely at the woman.
‘What do I write for an obituary?’ I asked.
‘Her name. That she was sixty-two years old, the wife of Samuel McDonald. Missed by her children and grandchildren. Something short and simple like that.’
I nodded, looking at the peaceful, grey-haired woman.
‘And something about her? Something special that people might remember her for?’ I asked.
It was at that point that I noted the clock in the corner of the room had stopped.
‘The clock has stopped,’ I said distractedly as I watched Terry run his tape measure from the tip of the dead woman’s head to her toes.
‘Stupid girl.’ Mr Lester sneered as he tacked black crepe over the windows and mirrors. ‘Don’t you know that when a person passes away in a house the clocks must be stopped at the time of death and only restarted after the person has been safely buried?’
‘This is your business, Sir.’ I bristled. ‘I’m sure you would be just as ignorant of the running of a poorhouse.’
He glared at me and turned back to his work.
‘You write down her age and that she’ll be missed. If it was a gentleman you would add what profession he had or interests.’
‘Perhaps Mrs McDonald had interests.’
‘Her home and children. No point wasting words on it. You have less than twenty words to sum her up for the smallest box in the newspaper. Numbers don’t count but you don’t ever go over twenty words.’
It really wasn’t very much to sum up a person’s life, I thought.
I looked at the woman and around the beautifully furnished room. Every wall was covered with ornately framed oil paintings. There was one above the bed depicting a vase of flowers, and the colours were so vibrant you could imagine standing by the canvas and getting a waft of perfume from them. Reds, purples and lilacs. I went closer to it and saw the initials of the painter were E.M. and I wondered.
On our way out of the house Mr Lester discussed the payment arrangements.
‘We will be back tomorrow with the casket with white velvet lining and all the flowers. Here is the invitation list, girl,’ he said, thrusting a piece of paper with names and addresses scrawled upon it into my hand. I put it in my apron pocket. ‘Don’t lose it.’
I looked at the woman seeing us out the front door. She was the daughter-in-law of the deceased woman and her eyes were puffed and pink from crying.
‘Begging your pardon, Ma’am, but I’m curious. Did Mrs McDonald paint?’ I asked.
‘Shut yer trap,’ Terry grumbled under his breath and poked me hard in the ribs.
The woman stared at me and nodded.
‘Yes, dear,’ she said. ‘Mrs McDonald was a great art lover and many of the paintings in the house were done by her. It was her greatest passion.’
I smiled back at the lady and then let myself be dragged away by the irate undertaker.
‘We don’t pay you to talk to the grieving families,’ he said as he pushed me along in front of him, poking the centre of my back hard with his long bony finger. ‘Mourning children are called mutes because they are to be seen but not heard.’
‘Begging your pardon, Sir,’ I turned and spoke boldly. ‘But you don’t pay me at all. You simply provide lodgings in return for my service.’
‘You ungrateful, unloved fiend of an orphan,’ he shouted. ‘You can live on bread and water for three days to remind you of your thanklessness! If I so much as see you taste the food you prepare for Terry and me, I will go one further and give you a whipping.’
‘Yes, Sir,’ I muttered. ‘My apologies, Sir.’
The obituary came out in the paper the next day. I read it in the shop after the Lesters had gone to deliver the polished cedar box with its bronze crucifix on top and matching handles.
It read:
‘Mrs Emily McDonald, 62, wife of Samuel, mother and grandmother, died 17 February 1814. She will be remembered for her artistic passion.’
I felt such a thrill. My own words. Printed in the newspaper. I wanted to run all the way across the city to the poorhouse to show Jimmy.
Instead I went back to sewing the heavy canvas body shroud that would wrap the poor young boy who had been brought to the treatment room at the back of the building that morning. No one knew who he was or where he came from. Dressed like a beggar, the boy was no more than ten years of age and had been run down by a carriage in the fog. He would get an unmarked burial. He would be remembered by no one. I thought it terribly sad. I took one of the squares of fancy invitation paper and I wrote: ‘To Simon.’ I thought he looked like a Simon. ‘I did not know you but you have lovely brown hair. I will miss you. Rest in peace.’ Twenty words. He deserved them as much as anyone. Later that day after he was washed and wrapped and placed in his box, I went and tucked the note under his tiny folded hands on his chest to accompany him to eternity.
This became something of a ritual for me. We had so many forgotten, misplaced, unnamed coffin guests come through the place. An old lady who had frozen down under the Clyde Bridge. I called her Evelyn. She had graceful hands. A bloated, sore-ridden, hairy man who’d been killed in a brawl? I imagined he had a raucous sense of humour. I gave him the name Michael. No one passed by me without a written farewell and a compliment to mark their uniqueness.
I took real pride in what I did. It was only a small thing but I felt gratitude to be able to remember in words the simple lives of simple folk. Everyone deserved to be loved and remembered by someone, even if that someone was only me.
Despite working diligently for long hours, day and night for months on end, the Lesters continued to treat me little better than Bundy the dog. If he yapped, he got a kick. If I spoke out of turn at a funeral or served over-boiled carrots at dinnertime, I got a strap hard around the legs and at least two days out of every week I was back on bread and water rations for making some complaint. I worked hard, sewing, cooking, darning their socks, cleaning the house and the shop, washing corpses, writing invitations and obituaries, and I was permanently tired. I accepted my fate and the cruel way I was treated. Lester always reminded me that I should be grateful for what I did get because as an orphan my only other option was to be a street beggar, which would lead to death or prison. The undertaking job sounded preferable.
Lester let me come along to the initial meetings with the family so I could gather some gem about the deceased. Mostly the families I met were happy to have me ask about their loved one. And before too long we had families calling upon us to tend their dearly beloved lost ones, telling us that they wanted Lester’s Undertakers to look after them and no one else because we did the best obituaries of anyone in town. I was good for Lester’s business.
I had become accustomed to my tiny room in the cupboard. I appreciated it because it was the only space in the world I could call my own. I now mostly kept the door closed unless it was a humid night. One night, about ten months after coming to the Lesters’, I was woken by a noise downstairs. The men had company. I had been asleep for hours so I was certain it was very, very late. It happened sometimes that we would have a pauper, beggar or vagabond delivered to us by the city officials at such an hour. When it couldn’t wait until morning, it was usually after a fight in a public house or after a beggar was found frozen on a doorstep. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence but on that particular night the voices were loud and seemed to be fuelled by drink – they sounded festive rather than sombre. I opened my door, crept out to the landing, and listened.
‘And a very good night to you, Dr Pattison,’ Norbert Lester sang.
The back door slammed. Clearly a doctor had dropped off a delivery.
The next morning I was surprised to find the treatment room empty. No coffin guest. I wondered if I had dreamed the midnight visit.
‘Did I hear a doctor stop by late last night?’ I asked Terry at breakfast as I stirred his porridge on the cooker.
‘What? You spying on us, then?’ He glowered.
‘No.’ I laughed. ‘I was woken by voices.’
‘You were dreamin’.’ He scoffed. ‘Stupid girl.’
I shrugged his answer away.
Terry was mighty put out when people began talking about my obituaries in glowing terms.
‘You like showing off with your words, don’t ya?’ he jeered, cornering me in the hallway one day, pressing me up against the wall, his foul breath wafting over my face. ‘Saying sugary sweet things about dead people. But no one’s going to remember you when you’re gone cause you is an orphan. You’ll end up in the cheap box in a corner of dirt that only the worms will care about.’
I felt myself bubble, crimson with fury, but I swallowed my anger down and fought the urge to bite off his nose. Rising to his abuse would only further enrage him, and again I stayed mute.
As winter started to creep upon us, the temperatures plummeting and the ground beginning to ice up in the morning, I realised that business must have been booming, although our average funeral toll had not risen above two, six days a week. Mr Lester came home in a fine new suit one day and brought with him three full rolls of the finest white velvet. The next week he purchased a new carriage and replaced the two oldest horses with two young, glossy stallions. Terry Lester arrived one afternoon sporting a new pair of leather boots and a good bottle of rum.
The cuts of meat for the table improved and even Bundy and I were eating better. I had put some flesh on my bones and my face filled out. Bundy was getting a round little middle. I often played with him and tossed him a ball of yarn, which he would tangle himself in. At night he had taken to nudging open my bedroom door with his nose and sleeping curled at my feet.
On a cool morning in November, after a night of early light snow, a hessian bag containing the remains of a person was brought to us from the poorhouse. My stomach lurched and I was terrified that it might be one of the small children I had told stories to when I had been in charge of them at night. Or Jimmy. Mr Riggs arrived with all his usual pomp and ceremony and handed over the Poor Union payment to old man Lester. It wasn’t a lot. The hessian bag was also very little.
‘’Twas one of the infirm from the basement,’ he explained. ‘No next of kin. No family. No name other than the one he called himself, which was Brogden. Only word he ever said, beating on his chest.’
The two workmen dropped the sack on the treatment table with a thud.
‘How’s the girl working out for you?’ Riggs asked. ‘Not any trouble?’
‘A terrible cook and far too talkative,’ Terry growled. ‘Eats too much.’
‘Yes,’ Riggs said apologetically. ‘I remember she did have a tendency towards the sin of gluttony.’
‘And pride,’ Norbert Lester added. ‘I’ve seen how cocky and arrogant she gets every time she sees one of her obituaries in the newspaper. Gaining self-admiration from other people’s misfortune. Awful prideful.’
‘Well, sometimes these orphans carry the sins of their parents.’ Riggs opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘We do what we can to pray and beat it out of them but, alas, sometimes the rot is settled deep into their bones and there’s naught we can do. Feed her less meat to cool her tempers and inflamed sense of self.’
‘Very sound advice, Mr Riggs.’ Norbert Lester nodded and gave me a cold look. ‘And send around some pall-bearers at about two o’clock tomorrow afternoon. We are free to put him in the ground then. I’ll send a message to the diggers at the yard. It will take most of the day to make a hole big enough in the cold.’
After Riggs had left, Lester looked at the delivery in the sack and nodded to his son. ‘It’s an old man. Perfect.’
I looked up. I couldn’t imagine what the undertaker meant by it. Perfect for what? I could only assume that Lester meant he would be saving on canvas and timber in the interment because the body was small.
‘What sort of name is Brogden?’ Terry asked, picking at his teeth. ‘Musta been his surname, I suppose. Not that there’s anyone to care.’
I really did not like Terry Lester. Or his father.
‘Help me wrap him and put him in that box there,’ Lester ordered his boy. ‘Girl, go and get me a small canvas shroud. This fellow is as small as a child.’
I did as I was asked.
As the men worked together I went to the kitchen table to craft the obituary for a young girl who had died of measles, and write out the invitations to her funeral. Her mother had told me that Lavinia had loved her cat, Mink, more than anything in the world so I managed to mention that in my twenty words.
In the afternoon, Lester sent me on the delivery run. I had to hand deliver the invitations to Lavinia Hopkins’ funeral.
‘But I do not know how to drive a carriage and—’
‘Go on foot, girl,’ Mr Lester shouted at me. ‘Here’s a map of the city. The girl’s house is three blocks from here so most of the addresses will be in and around that area. Go. Be polite but don’t engage in conversation. You talk far too much for this sort of business. People like to grieve in peace. Terry, my boy,’ he added, ‘you go see the gravediggers and stop off to Dr Pattison at the Medical School in College Street. Ask him to stop by for a wee dram of spirits later this evening.’
