“No.”
“Out, before I throw you out.”
“These rooms are mine, Jack. I pay for them. You had no right to come in without knocking.”
“This house is mine. Mine. And if I choose to ask my sister where my wife and children are, should I knock on a door to do it? Get downstairs.” He stepped forward and Christopher Edmonton flinched physically from him.
“You’re not to touch him! Don’t you dare.” Nancy moved protectively between the two.
“Get out of my way.”
“No.”
Brother and sister glared at one another. “Then get out of my house,” Jack said softly, the memory of another such occasion bitter in his words.
“Don’t worry. I’m going,” Nancy said.
Chapter Thirty-One
It was from Jack that Molly heard the story, a Jack subdued but not ready to admit that he had overreacted.
“Edward. Jake Aster. Prison. And now a boy of seventeen. She isn’t fit to have in the house, Molly. We’ve the children to consider. She’s a bad influence.”
“I don’t believe that.” Molly’s voice was quiet.
“You want the girls growing up like our Nancy?”
“They won’t. They don’t have Nancy’s problems.”
“If Nancy’s problems include a yen for a snivelling, spineless child, then we can thank God for that.”
“Jack, I have to say it: I think you’re being utterly unreasonable. Apart from anything else I can’t possibly manage without Nancy in the office—”
“You must go your own road. But I’ll not have her living in this house. And neither will I have that – that perverted whipper-snapper set foot in the door.”
Molly looked up sharply. “That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?”
Jack’s face was closed. “No. It isn’t. Now I want to hear no more about it.”
* * *
Nancy found lodgings a few streets away with a friend. The arrangement was not as convenient as before, but it caused no insurmountable problems as far as the agency was concerned. A couple of months after she had moved out the newspapers announced the engagement of Christopher Edmonton to Felicity Randal, the daughter of one of his mother’s friends. The engagement, said the paper, would be a lengthy one, due to the couple’s youth. The morning the announcement appeared, Molly eyed her sister-in-law’s unresponsive face, but made no comment. In more than two months Jack and Nancy had spoken not a word to each other, and nothing that Molly could do or say would heal the breach. Nancy, in fact, flatly refused to discuss the matter at all, offering neither excuse nor explanation. The little attic flat stood empty. Molly, her own life not exactly simple, gave up arguing about it with both of them and left it to time to bring them together.
In July, and for the first time in London, the Olympic Games were held at the White City Stadium. It had been built especially for this prestigious occasion, and the whole city went Olympics mad. Edward, Jack and Danny were among the crowds that lined the streets from Windsor to the White City to watch the marathon runners, and throughout the event Londoners in their thousands turned out to cheer the home country’s fifty-six gold medals. Such success diverted the mind from unemployment and rising prices, from marked and growing unrest.
“Bread and circuses,” Adam said idly to Molly during one of their snatched afternoons at his apartment. “It works every time.”
Molly’s temper that afternoon was strained. Two days before she had seen Adam’s car draw up outside Stratford Station. Impulsively she had hurried forward, to see Adam, smiling, swing a pretty, laughing girl to the ground and escort her into the booking hall. Neither of them had noticed her. All this afternoon she had been on the brink of asking, of demanding, but had so far said nothing.
“Not every time,” she said now, shortly. “The whole world isn’t stupid, you know.”
“Isn’t it?” Adam was still good-tempered. “You surprise me.”
“Don’t be smug.”
“What else can I be when the whole of London appears to have lost its senses over some idiots who are willing to kill themselves in this heat in order to run faster or jump higher, or whatever, than anyone else? It’s madness.”
“Especially when they don’t get paid for it.”
“Quite.”
“I thought that’d get in somewhere.”
“So you were right. So now you can feel smug too.” The merest edge of irritation had crept into his voice. “What’s got into you this afternoon?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m tired, that’s all. We’ve been very busy, and I’ve been single-handed for most of this week—”
He laughed. “What’s Nancy campaigning about now?”
“Sweated labour. Women and children. She’s got friendly with an organizer of something called the National Federation of Women Workers. They’re doing some kind of survey—”
Adam, lying on his back naked beside her, his arms folded behind his head, made a derisive sound.
“Heard of them? I should say so. I doubt there’s anyone who employs women between here and John O’Groats who hasn’t. A bigger set of interfering biddies I’ve never come across. When it comes to business they don’t know their—” he paused, grinning, “—their rear ends from their elbows. But needless to say they don’t let that stop them from telling those who do how to run their affairs.”
“That isn’t what Nancy says.” Molly reached for her clothes, her mind only partly on the conversation.
“No, I don’t expect that it is.”
“They’re trying to stop the exploitation of women and children in the sweatshops.”
“Fine words. What do they mean?”
That needled her to sharpness. “You know as well as I do. There are women and children working, living – and dying – in conditions that a decent man wouldn’t keep a dog in. And not a million miles from here, either. Slave labour. In one of the richest countries in the world? Living off the lifeblood of people too weak to fight for themselves? It’s a disgrace. You don’t have to be a suffragette – or a union man – to know that.”
He looked at her in some amusement, but the expression in his eyes was wary. “Has Nancy made a convert?”
“She didn’t have to. No sane person could defend the sweated labour system. Women are blinded, children die of diseases born of filth. If the miners can win an eight hour day, who’s to say that these poor souls must work all day and halfway through the night in terrible conditions and for next-to-nothing?” Molly wrestled with a tangled ribbon on her petticoat. “D’you know what a girl gets paid for matchbox making? Twopence farthing a gross. A gross! And they have to buy their own paste. How would you like it? Working sixteen hours out of twenty-four to bring in a wage of a few shillings a week?” She buttoned herself into her dress, her movements angry.
Adam said nothing. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, reached for his shirt, pulled it over his head.
“Do you have any idea of the cost, in suffering, of that fancy shirt?” Molly was watching him.
“No,” he said, unruffled.
“And you don’t care, either.”
He looked up, anger very close. “There you go again. If you’re trying to pick a fight, then for God’s sake try to find something more plausible than my bloody shirt.”
Her colour high, she turned to the mirror and began tidying her hair.
“Molly? What’s wrong?”
She stared, seeing not her blurred reflection in the mirror, but the pretty face, the small, proprietary hands upon Adam’s shoulders.
“Nothing,” she said. She had to be fair. He had never said, never pretended, that he would be faithful. Faithful? What a word to use.
There was movement in the mirror. Adam had come up behind her and was watching her, over her shoulder in the glass, his face hard. “I’ve told you before that I don’t play games,” he said. “If you didn’t want to come this afternoon you had only to say so.”
Mi
serably she tugged at her hair.
“No one is forcing you to come. Not now. Not ever.”
Her heart had begun to thump – a heavy, slow beating that seemed to fill her body, making her breathless. Still she fiddled with her hair.
He reached for her wrist, held it still. “Well?”
She shook her head. The fingers that wrapped, long and strong, around her arm were not gentle. Without releasing her he turned her to face him. “Do you want to finish it?” he asked very quietly, “Is that it?”
“No!” The denial was involuntarily and humiliatingly violent, cutting across his words. “No,” she said again, more quietly.
“What, then?”
She avoided his eyes. “Nothing. Nothing, truly. I told you, I’m tired. I’m out of sorts this afternoon. I – I have a headache.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?” He was not placated.
“I didn’t want to – make a fuss.” It did not sound convincing, even to her. “It’s the weather I expect. It’s so hot and sticky—”
He watched her for a long moment, then let go of her wrist, the anger clearing from his face. He dropped a light kiss onto the top of her head. “Silly girl. You should have told me. I’ll find something for your headache before I take you home.”
* * *
On a sunny August day Molly, as a favour to Nancy, conducted a representative from the National Federation of Women Workers in a short and pre-arranged tour of some of the Venture Employment Bureau’s clients. She did not include Stowe, Jefferson and Partners in the itinerary.
Ellie Boston, an abrasive and tactless young woman with plain, aggressive features and unfashionably short dark hair was, despite her obviously preformed opinions, favourably impressed.
“But then, conditions in offices have always been better than those in the factory or the shop, both for men and women,” she said. “It’s the sweated labour problem that I’m most concerned with. Are you coming on Wednesday?”
“Wednesday?”
“I’m taking Nancy to see some of the sweatshops. You can’t campaign unless you know, first hand, what you’re campaigning for. Or against. Coming?”
Molly’s heart sank. “Oh, no, I don’t think—”
“We aren’t going till four. You can leave the office for an hour or so, can’t you?”
“Well—”
Ellie smiled an unpleasant smile. “I see. You just give donations, do you, Mrs Benton? Leave others to stick their noses in where they aren’t wanted? Actually to try to do something? Can’t say I blame you. You and ninety-nine per cent of the rest of the world. But Nancy’ll be disappointed. She seemed to think you’d want to come.”
Molly was stung. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t come. I just said it was difficult, that’s all.”
“Wait for easy and you’ll wait for ever. Come with us, Mrs Benton. I’ll show you things that you haven’t read about in the papers. You’re an employer yourself, after all. You should know about these things.”
* * *
The garret was an oven, a squalid and filthy oven beneath bare, cobwebbed rafters and broken slates. In the winter, blood would freeze. A half-naked baby crawled on the floor, tethered by a piece of rope to the leg of its mother’s chair, for the narrow stairs that led directly from the lower room were not banistered, the stairwell was an unguarded and dangerous edge, a sheer drop to the floor below.
Molly held her breath. The stench was appalling. And familiar. The hateful smell of poverty, of hopelessness, of dirt and disease. She loathed it, as she loathed the defeated look on the worn face of the woman, the scabs and scars on the baby’s skin, the rat’s tail, unwashed and obviously lice-ridden hair of the two small girls who sat at the table with their mother, bending stiff cardboard with sore, calloused fingers, pasting, making boxes.
Ellie Boston, her brusque tongue gentled, laid a few pence on the table and said, “There you are, Bet. Not much, I’m afraid, but the best we can do this week.”
“Thanks, Miss.” The woman did not stop working, hardly looked up.
In the comparatively fresh air of the street Ellie looked at Molly and Nancy. “You two had enough?” There was painful, frustrated fury in her that needed, it seemed, to be vented in rudeness. “You looked pretty sick up there.”
“Of course not,” Nancy said stoutly before Molly could open her mouth. “Where are we going now?”
Ellie turned and trudged off down the dirty streets. “Whitechapel,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ve got a message to deliver.”
Molly’s heart turned over. “Nancy!”
Nancy stopped. “Yes?” She looked tired. Ellie was a long way ahead, hurrying.
“Nothing.”
The streets were not familiar; ten years is a long time, and during her stay with Johnny Cribben Molly had seen very little of her surroundings. Whitechapel. The very name had terrified her. Yet here she was, and it was, after all, just another place. There could be nothing to fear. Not now. Not after all this time. But even as she thought it she found herself scanning anxiously every face, every window that they passed.
Ellie stopped outside a decaying clutter of buildings. “Here we are,” she said, leading the way into the same depressing dereliction of peeling walls, rickety stairs, doorless holes draped with ragged curtains of dirty blankets that they had seen so often this afternoon. Somewhere a child shrieked, a man’s voice was raised in anger. An unappetizing smell of cooking hung on the air, competing with other even less savoury odours. A lavatory door in the yard outside stood permanently jammed open. Even Ellie pulled a face as they passed it.
She led them up several flights of dark stairs, stopped at the bottom of a short run of steps that led up to a curtained doorway. “Dolly? You there? All right if we come up?”
Molly was surprised and uneasy; for the first time today she detected in their guide the faintest air of caution.
A girl’s head appeared above them. “If yer quick. ’E’ll be rahnd later. But we’ve got ’alf ’our or so.”
Ellie led the way up the steps and into a long narrow room in which were several women and children, heads bent over their work, needles flying. None of them bothered to look up. Battered trestle beds were stacked at one end of the room, indicating that several people lived as well as worked here. Scraps of material littered the floor, were piled into heaps in corners, stuffed into broken windowpanes and in wide cracks in the walls. Near where Molly was standing lay an old newspaper, the edge shredded and torn. Rats. Molly shivered.
The girl called Dolly was as thin and dirty as any of the other women, and her eyes showed the same overstrained exhaustion. Her speech was almost unintelligible. Yet there was something in the intense, haggard face, in the ugly voice, that caught the attention. Beneath the brutalized surface was a sharp intelligence.
“What did yer fink of it?” she asked Ellie tersely, with no preamble.
“It was marvellous. Just what we were looking for. Have you managed to do any more?”
The girl went to a corner, delved into a pile of scraps, pulled out a couple of grubby sheets of crumpled paper that were covered in untidy writing. “Sod them rats. Little bleeders. Look at that.” She smoothed out a nibbled corner. “This’ll ’ave ter be yer lot. ’E nearly caught me at it the other day. It’ll be me fer the chop if ’e does.”
“That’s the first sensible fing you’ve said in weeks,” said a woman of indeterminate age who was sitting nearby, without lifting her reddened eyes from her work. “Bleedin’ troublemakers the lot of yer.”
Dolly spat, accurately, “Shut yer mahf.”
Ellie took the paper. “Thanks, love. The other will be in next week’s edition, this’ll make the week after. It’ll stir things up if anything can. Here.” She handed over a couple of silver coins.
The older woman looked up sharply. “D’yer mean ter say yer’ve been scribblin’ that bleedin’ stuff fer the papers?”
Dolly pocketed the coins. “What if I ’ave?”
“You out yer bleedin’ mind or somefink? Yer fink the boss can’t read? Jesus, girl, I wouldn’t want ter be in your shoes when ’e sees that. Silly cow.”
“We’ve changed the names,” Ellie said soothingly. “No one’s going to find out who wrote it.”
“Why don’t yer write yer own rubbish?”
“Because Dolly’s stuff is authentic. No amount of study can make up for experience.”
Molly moved away from the argument, found herself near the window which looked down into a narrow alleyway, four storeys below. The light was fading. With a shock she remembered slippery, crumbling roofs and wet lamplit cobbles, and her stomach stirred. As she stepped sharply back a small boy with an armful of garments cannoned into her.
“Sorry, Miss.”
“It was my fault.” She watched him throw back a stained blanket from a stack of clean cardboard boxes. For a moment the significance of the lettering on the boxes did not strike her. Carefully the boy folded intricately tucked and embroidered blouses and laid them, one by one, in a square, tissue-lined box. Upon whose lid was neatly stencilled the words “Stowe, Jefferson and Partners.”
From a distance Molly heard Dolly saying, “You’d better be orf. ’E’s due back any minute. ’E really ’ates you do-gooders.” Her smile was mirthless.
The boy threw the blanket back across the boxes to protect them from the dirt of their surroundings, and glanced out of the window. “Bit late,” he said, laconically. “’E’s ’ere. Comin’ up now. Wiv a friend.”
“God Almighty. There’s only one staircase. You’ll ’ave to ’ide. Not ’ere. There’s not room. Dahn the steps. Door to the left. Storeroom. ’Urry, fer Christ’s sake—”
“Molly! Come on!” Nancy grabbed Molly’s arm, hauled her towards the doorway. As she passed the window Molly looked down. Two men were walking briskly towards the door below, one short, fat, balding, the other much taller, dark, wide-shouldered. “Come on!”
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