Excerpt from Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'You are mine, Lizzie. Why should you hide yourself from me?'

I did not know enough about marriage. Perhaps it was nothing for a husband to spy on his wife's nakedness but I felt as if he had stolen a part of me. The moon shone while he lay as still as a fox. I would not let him guess that I had seen the glint of his eyeball. I turned back to the bowl to take up one more scoop of water, but I could not drink. His eyes were on me, drying the water, pulling away the light. I would go back to bed, and close my eyes so that I too would appear to sleep.

In the morning Diner would pull on his boots, saying, 'Lizzie, put me up some bread and fat bacon.' He would eat it with the men and he would not taste it unless I put in a handful of pickled walnuts to please him. Tomorrow we would wake and live our common day.


Our day was almost spent when the bell rang and Philo rushed to tell me that Hannah was downstairs, waiting for me in the kitchen. It was late. I knew that Hannah hadn't come to the front door because my husband might be at home and she did not want to meet him. I ran down, frightened. Hannah never visited at such an hour.

There she stood with rain dripping from her cloak on to the flags. 'Your mother's not well,' she accused me.

'What's the matter?'

'She's in bed.'

'With her writing-board, I suppose.'

There was nothing to worry about. Mammie was strong. She said herself that she never ailed. If she retreated to bed, it was in search of solitude. There were always so many visitors, and they never knew when to leave.

Hannah sniffed: her nose was red, with a drop hanging from it. 'It's rest she needs, not writing- boards.'

Sacrilege, coming from Hannah. Mammie's ideas flowed most clearly at night, with one lit candle to speed her pen while Augustus slept on beside her. There was nothing more important than that those ideas of hers should be captured and set down. Hannah had always arranged our days for that purpose. Our rooms were clean, our clothes washed and our food cooked, but even so Mammie needed the night for her work. She would wake with her mind suddenly, startlingly alive. She'd sit up in bed, reach for her writing- board, prop it against her knees, and seize on her thoughts before they vanished. Who would imagine, from the clarity of her treatises, that they sprang from a warm bed?

It was not always so warm. When I was little and money for coal was short we would stay in bed together on cold days, curled under every cloak and blanket that we owned, like porpoises under the ice. My breath smoked when I put my face up into the chill of the room, and down I dived again. But there was always Mammie beside me, working with a heavy shawl around her shoulders and fingerless gloves knitted by Hannah, which left her fingers free to write.

She didn't need those gloves any more. She had a fire in her room every day. Augustus and she lived frugally, but they were never short of what they needed.

'But, Hannah, she's not really ill, is she?'

'She's been better. She'd like to see you. Now don't fly off like that, Elizabeth, she's not as bad as that.'

I ran upstairs for my cloak and boots, while Sarah continued to scour the pots with sand, indifferently, as if she were alone in the kitchen. She didn't like Hannah.


Hannah took my left arm and walked between me and the edge of the pavement, as if I were still a child. She was so tall and stiff and perpendicular that it was like being taken in charge by a sergeant of the militia.

'Mind that puddle, Elizabeth.'

She always called me by my full name, severely. She loved me; I knew that. Hannah would beat off anything that sprang at us out of the dark. Diner called her my duenna, although that was quite wrong given how firmly Hannah believed in the liberty of women. He said that her petticoats were too short: could she not afford to buy a few more yards of flannel and make herself decent? I answered that she afforded nothing for herself, if the money saved could be given to others. Hannah would have been angry to be called a Christian, but she was more charitable than most who went to church.

Birdcage Walk © 2017 by Helen Dunmore. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.