Free Birdcage Walk by Kate Riordan

think I’d throw my guts up if I ate.”
    Cissy looked shocked and tried to cover it by getting up and going over to the table. “Look, I’ll just fetch you a slice of bread to have with your tea,” she said. “You look like you might faint otherwise.”
    Charlotte closed her eyes and clasped the hot cup tighter. She knew George was close to Cissy but how much would she tell him about this? Knowing she should keep quiet she asked the question in her mind anyway.
    “Cissy, has George said anything to you about me? I won’t tell him you told me or nothing.”
    Cissy looked up from the uneven slice of bread she was cutting and smiled shyly. “Oh, he’s always on about you! When you first come and live here and he couldn’t pluck up the courage to talk to you, he was always dropping you into the conversation. Or even just mentioning someone on Avebury Street and I reckoned that was just to get close to talking about you. He said you had fine eyes once, I remember that. I laughed at him for it and he got cross and wouldn’t say nothing else for the rest of the day. I don’t know where he got that from, ‘fine eyes’. Like something out of a romance.”
    Charlotte smiled wanly. “But, I mean, has he said anything recently? Like this week or last night, when he was here.”
    “Oh, I see. Well, now that I think of it, I can’t remember anything in particular. But then he doesn’t talk much to me, he’s a man, and most of them never say much. He’ll end up like our dad by the time he’s his age, never saying a word. Don’t say I never warned you.”
    She giggled, but seeing Charlotte’s face she hurried back over with the bread, the merest scraping of lard smeared on it. Her eyes were round with concern again. “I’m sure he thinks the world of you, Charlotte.” She cast around, not wanting the older girl, who seemed quite fascinating to Cissy, with her strange, slanted eyes and sharp chin, to be disappointed and leave. Then a wonderful idea occurred to her.
    “You know what, I bet he’s done drawings of you. He’s been up late two nights on the trot doing something. I’ll fetch his book.” She hesitated. “But you must promise you’ll never tell him what you’ve seen. He keeps his drawings secret, hides them away. Of course I’ve known he keeps his book under the mattress for months—who does he thinks makes the beds round here?—but he’d kill me if he thought I’d shown them around.”
    Charlotte’s face had softened as Cissy talked, her cheeks turning rosy with the hope that she’d been worrying over nothing, and that George had just been tired the past few weeks. Perhaps things hadn’t changed between them after all, she’d had it all wrong.
    “Oh, I won’t tell, Cissy, cross my heart,” she said eagerly. “I’m good with secrets, honest. Do you really think he’s done a picture of me in his book?’
    Cissy quickly returned with the small volume, giggling as she sat back down. She flicked excitedly through the pages until she reached the last sheet to have been drawn on. Her eyes scanned the page quickly and she stopped for an instant before she hurriedly turned it over to the previous drawing. At this her face darkened and she shut the book abruptly.
    “What? What is it?” cried Charlotte, standing up and knocking over the tea Cissy had left on the bare boards of the floor.
    “I’ll get a cloth for that,” said Cissy, but as she rose, Charlotte reached out and snatched the book from her hands. She opened the book at the front and turned the sheets quickly, the long nail of her forefinger separating the leaves deftly. Most of the sketches were plants, copies, some of them surprisingly intricate and life-like, of the botanical plates George set every day at the print. But a rough sketch left incomplete on one page showed a small face with a pointed chin. Only the eyes had been properly drawn in with shading and detail and they were undoubtedly her own. She looked up and smiled