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

'He is well.' I hid my face against her and scrubbed my skin into hers. I shut my eyes and now I could say anything. 'Mammie, those things you told me were wrong. Now I seem to have a hard object pressing into every orifice of my body.'

I felt her breathe. 'Does he hurt you, Lizzie?'

'No. But it is firmly done.'

'Do you use the little sponge I gave you? And the vinegar?'

My mother thought I was too young to bear a child, although I was older than she had been when I was born.

'Yes.'

'And he doesn't object.'

'There is no hurry, he says. He says, "I want you to myself." '

'I suppose that is natural, Lizzie.' Her arms have come around me now and she is rocking me. Hannah would be angry if she knew. She'd say I was tiring Mammie and draining her strength, which ought to be kept for her work. 'But you had better not stay. He won't like it.'

He would not. My husband was very much against my stravaiging about the streets after dark, even though with Hannah at my side it was perfectly respectable. Nor did he like my habit of taking walks without him. What the eye didn't see, the heart wouldn't grieve after, I thought, and carried on as before.

'He was at the house today, supervising the plasterers. They are to put our names into the ceiling.'

'So, when your visitors look up, they'll see Elizabeth Fawkes and John Diner Tredevant entwined?' More laughter bubbled in her voice.

'You are so foolish, Mammie. Of course not. Besides, I am no longer Fawkes: I have changed my name. It's to be El and Din. Eldin. Our two names, made into one. He calls the house Eldin. He thought of carving the name into the stone above the front door, but he decided not. It is to be hidden in the ceiling, just for ourselves.'

'It will be a very fine house for you both,' said Mammie, as if I were a child describing a home for her dolls.

I thought of our new house, the smallest in the terrace, built on the turn. If it was one of the grand houses we could never have had it. The new house has four large bedrooms, drawing and dining rooms, and attics for Sarah and Philo. Everything is new and smells of wood and wet plaster. The kitchen will be equipped with the latest conveniences. The garden is a raw tumble of earth and stone. We look out directly over the Gorge. Diner says it is the finest prospect in all England.

'I know,' I said.

Mammie did not really care about houses. She was content wherever she was, because she rarely looked about her except to find her pen or her writing- board. I was content, too, when I was a child, as long as Mammie's Indian shawl spread its rich colours over my bed and there were flowers in the blue- and- white jug. Today, there were small wild daffodils that Hannah must have picked.

Augustus had not changed things much, because he was away so often. We had lived in Hoxton, Southwark, Devon and Bath before we came to Clifton. That was not long before I met Diner. Each time we moved the floors were sprinkled with water and swept, the Indian shawl spread out and the fire lit. Hannah found out the best places to buy coal and wood and candles. I rolled up my sleeves to bake bread or to skin and joint a rabbit. If it was cleaner work, such as making cakes or biscuits, I kept a book propped on the table in front of me and shook out the flour from between its pages as I read. And Mammie put on her spectacles and wrote, even as I swept under her feet. Nothing broke her concentration: she merely drew up her feet and held them there until I had passed on with the broom.

The sound of her writing is so exact in my ears that I can hear it whenever I choose: the long, steady course of her quill over the paper, the tiny pauses as she dipped it in the ink, the longer ones while she thought, the noise of writing, the friction of the pen with which she made her words and sent them out into the world. Wherever we went it was the same, until even our shifting from house to house and city to city began to seem like part of that handwriting.

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.