Falling Angels. Tracy Chevalier
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this morning she told me the Queen died yesterday evening. I ate my porridge very slowly, to see if it tasted different from yesterday’s, now that the Queen is gone. But it tasted just the same – too salty. Mrs Baker always makes it that way.
Everyone we saw on our way to the cemetery was dressed in black. I wore a grey wool dress and a white pinafore, which I might have worn anyway but which Nanny said was fine for a girl to wear when someone died. Girls don’t have to wear black. Nanny helped me to dress. She let me wear my black and white plaid coat and matching hat, but she wasn’t sure about my rabbit’s-fur muff, and I had to ask Mummy, who said it didn’t matter what I wore. Mummy wore a blue silk dress and wrap, which did not please Daddy.
While they were arguing about the angel I buried my face in my muff. The fur is very soft. Then I heard a noise, like stone being tapped, and when I raised my head I saw a pair of blue eyes looking at me from over the headstone next to ours. I stared at them, and then the face of a boy appeared from behind the stone. His hair was full of mud, and his cheeks were dirty with it too. He winked at me, then disappeared behind the headstone.
I looked at Mummy and Daddy, who had walked a little way up the path to view the angel from another place. They had not seen the boy. I walked backwards between the graves, my eyes on them. When I was sure they were not looking I ducked behind the stone.
The boy was leaning against it, sitting on his heels.
‘Why do you have mud in your hair?’ I asked.
‘Been down a grave,’ he said.
I looked at him closely. There was mud on him everywhere – on his jacket, on his knees, on his shoes. There were even bits of it in his eyelashes.
‘Can I touch the fur?’ he asked.
‘It’s a muff,’ I said. ‘My muff.’
‘Can I touch it?’
‘No.’ Then I felt bad saying that, so I held out the muff.
The boy spat on his fingers and wiped them on his jacket, then reached out and stroked the fur.
‘What were you doing down a grave?’ I asked.
‘Helping our Pa.’
‘What does your father do?’
‘He digs the graves, of course. I helps him.’
Then we heard a sound, like a kitten mewing. We peeked over the headstone and a girl standing in the path looked straight into my eyes, just as I had with the boy. She was dressed all in black, and was very pretty, with bright brown eyes and long lashes and creamy skin. Her brown hair was long and curly and so much nicer than mine, which hangs flat like laundry and isn’t one colour or another. Grandmother calls mine ditch-water blonde, which may be true but isn’t very kind. Grandmother always speaks her mind.
The girl reminded me of my favourite chocolates, whipped hazelnut creams, and I knew just from looking at her that I wanted her for my best friend. I don’t have a best friend, and have been praying for one. I have often wondered, as I sit in St Anne’s getting colder and colder (why are churches always cold?), if prayers really work, but it seems this time God has answered them.
‘Use your handkerchief, Livy dear, there’s a darling.’ The girl’s mother was coming up the path, holding the hand of a younger girl. A tall man with a ginger beard followed them. The younger girl was not so pretty. Though she looked like the other girl, her chin was not so pointed, her hair not so curly, her lips not so big. Her eyes were hazel rather than brown, and she looked at everything as if nothing surprised her. She spotted the boy and me immediately.
‘Lavinia,’ the older girl said, shrugging her shoulders and tossing her head so that her curls bounced. ‘Mama, I want you and Papa to call me Lavinia, not Livy.’
I decided then and there that I would never call her Livy.
‘Don’t be rude to your mother, Livy,’ the man said. ‘You’re Livy to us and that’s that. Livy is a fine name. When you’re older we’ll call you Lavinia.’
Lavinia frowned at the ground.
‘Now stop all this crying,’ he continued. ‘She was a good queen and she lived a long life, but there’s no need for a girl of five to weep quite so much. Besides, you’ll frighten Ivy May.’ He nodded at the sister.
I looked at Lavinia again. As far as I could see she was not crying at all, though she was twisting a handkerchief around her fingers. I waved at her to come.
Lavinia smiled. When her parents turned their backs she stepped off the path and behind the headstone.
‘I’m five as well,’ I said when she was standing next to us. ‘Though I’ll be six in March.’
‘Is that so?’ Lavinia said. ‘I’ll be six in February.’
‘Why do you call your parents Mama and Papa? I call mine Mummy and Daddy.’
‘Mama and Papa is much more elegant.’ Lavinia stared at the boy, who was kneeling by the headstone. ‘What is your name, please?’
‘Maude,’ I answered before I realised she was speaking to the boy.
‘Simon.’
‘You are a very dirty boy.’
‘Stop,’ I said.
Lavinia looked at me. ‘Stop what?’
‘He’s a gravedigger, that’s why he’s muddy.’
Lavinia took a step backwards.
‘An apprentice gravedigger,’ Simon said. ‘I was a mute for the undertakers first, but our Pa took me on once I could use a spade.’
‘There were three mutes at my grandmother’s funeral,’ Lavinia said. ‘One of them was whipped for laughing.’
‘My mother says there are not so many funerals like that any more,’ I said. ‘She says they are too dear and the money should be spent on the living.’
‘Our family always has mutes at its funerals. I shall have mutes at mine.’
‘Are you dying, then?’ Simon asked.
‘Of course not!’
‘Did you leave your nanny at home as well?’ I asked, thinking we should talk about something else before Lavinia got upset and left.
She flushed. ‘We don’t have a nanny. Mama is perfectly able to look after us herself.’
I didn’t know any children who didn’t have a nanny.
Lavinia was looking at my muff. ‘Do you like my angel, then?’ she asked. ‘My father let me choose it.’
‘My father doesn’t like it,’ I declared, though I knew I shouldn’t repeat what Daddy had said. ‘He called it sentimental nonsense.’
Lavinia frowned. ‘Well, Papa hates your urn. Anyway, what’s wrong with my angel?’
‘I like it,’ the boy said.
‘So do I,’ I lied.
‘I think it’s lovely,’ Lavinia sighed. ‘When I go to heaven I want to be taken up by an angel just like that.’
‘It’s the nicest angel in the cemetery,’ the boy said. ‘And I know ’em all. There’s thirty-one of ’em. D’you want me to show ’em to you?’
‘Thirty-one is a prime number,’ I said. ‘It isn’t divisible by anything except one and itself.’ Daddy had just explained to me about prime numbers, though I hadn’t understood it all.
Simon took a piece of coal from his pocket and began to draw on the back of the headstone. Soon he had drawn a skull and crossbones – round eyesockets, a black triangle for a nose, rows of square teeth, and a shadow scratched on one side of the face.
‘Don’t