I grinned at her and did a quick salute with my fingers pressed against my forehead. ‘I absolutely promise to return her in one piece,’ I vowed, ‘so help me God.’
‘God help you if you don’t,’ Cat growled before turning away to help Cora find her shawl, bonnet and boots in the chaos of their kitchen as I leaned against the doorframe and watched them. The boys, their younger brothers, may well all be in bed but their home still bore their imprint from the boots piled under the table to the dog eared books littered amidst the dirty plates to the woollen vests that steamed in a neat line before the fire. It was a mess, yes, but it made my heart ache for home and my own younger brothers whom I hadn’t seen for two years now. I wondered if they still remembered me then felt ashamed and had to push the thought away, just as I had done with the memory of Albert.
Eventually Cora was ready to go and I gravely offered her my arm as we went down the stairs together with Cat watching us silently from the doorway the whole time. ‘I don’t think your sister likes me very much,’ I whispered when we had finally gone out of sight and heard the click of the door shutting behind us.
Cora smiled. ‘She’s like that with everyone,’ she said. ‘She’s been very protective of us all since Ma died. I suppose because she’s had to become the mother to us all now.’
‘It can’t be easy,’ I said carefully. ‘After all, she should by rights have her own husband and children by now.’
Cora nodded pensively. ‘I know,’ she agreed. ‘We all know. One of the other policemen is sweet on her but Cat won’t hear about it. She says she’s going to stay until Pa doesn’t need her any more and who knows how long that’ll be when our littlest brother, Alfred isn’t even old enough to start school yet.’
I shook my head. ‘Well, it’s no wonder she’s as prickly as she is,’ I said. ‘I’d be the same in her shoes.’
‘It’s alright for you,’ Cora said gruffly, sounding just like her sister for once. ‘You can come and go as you please, can’t you? It must be nice to have no ties and no one to answer to.’ She sounded wistful and I resisted the urge to take hold of her shoulders and give her a good hard shake.
‘Nice?’ I said instead. ‘Hardly. I’d much rather have a nice family and friends to care that I have gone and to wonder what has become of me. It’s not nice to think sometimes that no one cares what happens to you.’
She looked startled. ‘I care what happens to you,’ she said softly, her grasp on my arm tightening. ‘I’ll be sorry to see you go, Em and it’s not true that you don’t have a family to wonder where you are, you know that it isn’t.’
We’d reached the bottom of the stairs and I paused with my hand on the door. ‘I can’t go back,’ I said, unable to prevent a craven petulant note from creeping into my voice. ‘I can’t let them know what happened to me.’
Cora sighed. ‘They wouldn’t be angry,’ she said. ‘Not if they really loved you and it sounds to me like they do.’
I shrugged and shoved the door open before pulling her into the yard with me. ‘They might not be angry but they’d be disappointed in me, of course they would and that’s what I don’t think I can bear. My Ma will cry and Pa will look all sad like he’s the one that let me down and that’s what I can’t go back to.’ I angrily rubbed at my eyes. ‘It’s worse than anger. I would know what to do if they shouted and showed me their fists and told me never to come back. I’d know to run and stay away and I’d know that I deserved it. It’s the sadness though, that’s what I don’t like. How can you feel right and decent when you’ve made your parents cry?’
‘I don’t know.’ She put her hand to the latch and opened the yard door. ‘I don’t think I could ever feel myself again if my Pa cried over me.’ She looked back at me over her shoulder. ‘I still think you should go home though.’
I smiled and took her hand in mine. ‘Then I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree, Cora my love.’
We crossed the road and shambled down to the Ten Bells, which was full to bursting as usual with several drinkers standing outside on the street, nursing their glasses and bottles in their hands and tucking themselves against the wall to hide from the chill wind that blew through the streets that night. ‘You off to the parade tomorrow, Em?’ someone called as I went inside. The annual Lord Mayor’s Parade was due to take place in the City the next morning and as usual most of the East End was looking forward to making a day of it.
‘You’ll be gone by morning, won’t you?’ Cora said in a small voice as we pushed our way through the crowd to the bar.
I looked at her. ‘Yes, I will,’ I said. I had it all planned out - my belongings were all packed up and ready to go, I’d written a note for Mrs Ringer and another for the other girls and after that there was nothing to do but slip out before dawn and make my way to the docks to look for a passage somewhere else. ‘You could come too.’ The words had blurted out before I could stop them, prompted no doubt by the miserable look on Cora’s face and my own pathetic feelings of guilt and remorse.
Her eyes lit up. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘You’d let me go with you?’
I sighed. This wasn’t exactly the response I had been hoping for. ‘Yes,’ I said after a pause, ‘of course you can come with me.’ After all - why not? It would be safer and more fun with someone else along to share the adventure. ‘Wouldn’t you rather stay here though?’ I asked curiously. We’d made it to the bar and I leaned against it as I tried to catch the barman’s eye.
Cora shook her head. ‘I sometimes think that I’m going to be stuck here forever,’ she said. ‘I love Whitechapel or at least, I love it as much as anyone can but I can never forget that there’s more to the world than these few dirty streets and all the same faces every day.’
I laughed. ‘You should have been a boy,’ I said, ‘then you could have joined the navy and seen a bit of the world.’
She pulled a face. ‘That’s what I wish I could do,’ she said sadly. ‘It’s harder for girls though. Just look at Cat - she should be married now with children of her own and instead she has to stay with us. I don’t want my life to be like that.’
‘You don’t think that you should stay as well and help your sister?’ I said, elbowing a large man who had encroached on my bar territory out of the way.
Cora flushed. ‘I suppose I sound very selfish,’ she said miserably. ‘I know I am but I can’t help it. I want more from my life than this.’
I shrugged. ‘Well, I can’t exactly blame you for that.’
Chapter Thirty
We stayed in the Ten Bells for several hours, content to sit in our little corner beside the pretty tiled mural of a couple in old fashioned clothes walking together, and drink and talk while rain lashed against the windows and the gas lamps were gradually turned up, bathing everything in a soft amber glow that made even the most threadbare and downtrodden old tarts look softly alluring, especially when you’d had a few drinks.
‘I’ll miss this,’ I said at one point, looking around me with a smile that took in the whores clustered around the bar, the men intently playing cards at the table behind us and the usual noisy, rowdy throng of East Enders enjoying themselves on a cold, rainy night. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so at home anywhere as I do right here in Whitechapel.’
‘Then don’t leave,’ Cora said. She’d had one too many beers and peered at me tipsily from behind her curtain of red gold hair, which had fallen loose around her face. ‘You don’t really have to go.’
I felt my face tighten with annoyance. ‘I must go,’ I said in a low voice, finishing off the rest of my bottle of beer and shoving it crossly away. ‘There’s nothing here for me now.’
Cora sighed and shrugged. ‘You’re still thinking about that Albert, aren’t you,’ she said, waving her own bottle about to punctuate the point. ‘You want to get him back. You miss him, don’t you?’
‘Not a bloody chance.’ I glared at her. ‘That Sarah is bloody well welcome to him. I’ve had a belly full of his
sort.’ I stood up and angrily shoved my chair back. ‘I’m getting another drink. You?’ She nodded her head and I staggered off to the bar, pulling a few coins out of my pocket as I went and squinting up at the clock set into the wall. It was almost one in the morning and probably about time Cora was back home, safely tucked up in bed under the watchful gaze of her draconian sister. ‘Ah well,’ I said to myself as I waved the barman over. ‘It’s not like she gets out much, poor thing.’
‘Well well well, fancy seeing you here.’ I would have recognised that voice with its fake genteel softness anywhere and immediately stiffened with surprise and dislike when I heard it in such unexpectedly close proximity.
‘Lisette.’ I turned around then and looked her in the eye. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘Madame Lisette to you, dear,’ she said cordially, taking a drag from her perfumed French cigarette and blowing the violet scented smoke into my face. ‘I am sure it is quite a surprise seeing me after all this time.’
I shrugged and turned away briefly to take my bottles of beer off the counter and sling some pennies at the barman who gave me a cross look as he picked them up. ‘It’s not really a surprise,’ I said. ‘You over here looking for more poor little geese for your Calais house? Isn’t Whitechapel a lot more down at heel than your usual hunting grounds or are you economising?’
She flushed angrily. ‘I’m here on a social visit,’ she said. ‘I do have friends, you know.’
I couldn’t stop myself smirking. ‘Oh, I know.’ I also knew that her career had started on these streets before she was whisked away to a discreetly exclusive knocking shop on Bishopsgate which catered for the more rarefied and occasionally unpleasant tastes of certain City gentlemen.
She looked me up and down, taking in my newly dyed hair, dark blue cotton dress, moth eaten red shawl and battered boots. In contrast she was dressed in a fashionable and immaculate watered purple silk trimmed with deep blue velvet and had a matching hat, complete with towering dyed feathers, perched at a jaunty angle on her brassy ringlets. ‘You were missed, you know,’ she said grudgingly. ‘Several gentlemen asked after you and that Marie as well.’
‘Did they now?’ I took a swig from my beer, never taking my eyes off her. ‘That’s nice.’ I remembered the ‘gentlemen’ in Calais - they’d mostly been sailors, townsfolk and the very rare passing toff looking for a bit of rough trade. I don’t suppose most of them knew what we looked like above the waist let alone cared enough to miss us.
‘There was one gentleman,’ Lisette continued as if I hadn’t spoken, ‘tall and not all that well favoured but he asked most particularly about you and Marie as well after you’d gone. He was most put out when I told him you’d both cleared off to Whitechapel.’
‘How did you know we’d come here?’ I asked, feeling bored and hoping Cora was alright and not being bothered by anyone. ‘We could have gone anywhere.’
‘Marie let slip to one of the other girls before you went. She never did have any sense did she?’ She paused and adjusted her bodice. ‘I saw him earlier on in fact. He said he’s still looking for her and I told him where she could be found.’ She smiled at my expression. ‘I saw her in the Britannia earlier on, you see, falling over drunk and barely able to remember her own name but she told me where she lived alright - said she’d got a nice snug little room on Miller’s Court and has no need of my help any more.’
I stared at her. ‘You told him that?’ I said, taking another swig from my bottle and then another in quick succession. ’You told him where she lives? Bloody hell, Lisette, it seems to me that you’re the one without any sense.’
Lisette gave me a haughty look. ‘Why shouldn’t I have told him?’ she asked, drawing herself back from me as if I had stung her. ‘What’s it to me or to you either if he wants to have his way with her?’
‘What is it to me indeed,’ I agreed grimly before pushing my way past her and then shoving through the crowd to where Cora sat, pale and nervous looking in the corner. ‘Drink up quickly,’ I said, thrusting her bottle at her. ‘We’re leaving.’
She stared up at me, wide eyed. ‘What’s happened? Why are you looking like that?’
‘Just drink up,’ I said, nodding at the bottle. ‘We’ve got to go somewhere. One of my friends might be in trouble.’ The very worst trouble but of course I couldn’t say that.
Cora obediently lifted the bottle to her lips and took a long swig before lowering it and wiping her mouth on the back of her sleeve. ‘Is it Marie?’ she asked.
I nodded. ‘I’ve always wondered how he knew where to find me and now I know.’ I looked back towards the bar but Lisette had vanished - either gone on somewhere else or hidden from view by the crowd. ‘Bloody Marie and her big flapping bloody mouth. I knew I couldn’t trust her to keep a bloody secret.’
‘Oh.’ Cora’s eyes grew even wider and she took another great swig of beer. ‘That’s bad.’ She clumsily stood up, almost knocking the chair over as she did so. ‘We can drink these while walking.’
I took her arm and we shambled out together into the cold misty rain. ‘I can feel the winter coming,’ Cora said with a shiver as we stood for a moment in the dark looming shadow of Christ Church. ‘I can feel it in my bones.’
I smiled at her. ‘Albert does that too,’ I said softly. ‘He gets a prickling at the back of his neck when a storm is coming and his leg aches where he broke it tumbling out of an apple tree as a boy when it’s going to rain.’
Cora put her head to one side and looked at me. ‘You sure you aren’t still sweet on him?’ she said with a grin.
‘As sure as eggs is eggs,’ I said curtly, angrily shoving the thought of him away from me. ‘That’s all done with now, I told you.’ I took her hand and pulled her across the road to the market, which was all closed up and dark now but would soon be humming with some semblance of life again as the market boys started to stream in to unload deliveries and set up their stalls. ‘Why didn’t the stupid bugger stay in Essex? It was all easier before I saw him again.’ I stopped and looked at her. ‘I’d managed to forget him, more or less but now he’s all I can think about again.’
She put her arms around me and put her head on my shoulder. ‘Maybe it means something,’ she whispered. ‘Maybe it was fate telling you that it’s time to go back.’
I shook my head. ‘Not to him though,’ I said. ‘You saw him and that girl he was with. They were married, weren’t they, or as good as married.’
She pulled back to look at me then kissed my cheek. ‘You don’t know that,’ she said with a smile. ‘Maybe she was his sister?’
I laughed then and pulled her closer. ‘He doesn’t have a sister,’ I whispered, ‘but thanks all the same.’
We carried on down the road towards the top of Dorset Street. The Britannia was still open and I could see Cassie and the other girls yawning behind the bar as they served the last few customers, while Mrs Ringer herself was at the door, bodily throwing a drunk adolescent boy out on to the pavement. ‘Touch one of my girls again, and I’ll have your bloody hands off,’ she screamed at him as he cowered away from her, his cap lying in the dirt at his feet. ‘Now clear off and consider yourself lucky that I don’t cut your puny little balls off and feed them to my dogs.’
I grinned and took Cora’s arm. ’Is she always like that?’ she asked, looking a bit scared.
‘Yes.’ We turned down Dorset Street, bypassing the ragged crowd of tarts on the corner, who were having a half hearted cat fight over some hapless man who had fallen into their clutches. A bit further along, a thin faced bedraggled woman was sitting on a doorstep nursing her baby, who squalled and pummelled her breast with its small fists. I released Cora’s arm and felt in my pocket for some coins, which I handed over with an apologetic smile, sorry that I could not give her more. ‘Best get inside,’ I whispered as she looked up at me in surprise then gave a hesitant, confused smile. ‘This is no time to be out with a little one.’
Cora slipped her arm around my wais
t as we moved away. ‘That was kindly done,’ she said.
I shrugged, feeling suddenly embarrassed. ‘I wish that I could have done more,’ I replied. ‘I wouldn’t have noticed her a few months ago though. I would have just walked past and ignored her and the baby too but now, I don’t know, it’s like something has changed.’
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Cora said in a low voice. ‘I think that I have changed too.’ We stopped and looked at each other then without smiling. ‘It seems like such a long time ago now that I stole that envelope and took it to Miss Alice,’ she said hesitantly as I watched her.
‘Miss Alice,’ I repeated, looking towards Miller’s Court and wondering. Marie had stopped off at the Britannia earlier to gloat about luring poor Miss Redmayne to visit her - for all we knew, she might be there still but it seemed more likely that she was long gone back to Highbury, probably never to return.
‘Well, well, well,’ he stepped out of the shadows as we approached Miller’s Court, gingerly skirting around the drunk noisily vomiting on to the pavement. ‘Fancy seeing two fine ladies like yourselves in a place like this. Remember me, do you?’
It took me several moments to recognise him in the dim, greenish glow cast by the few street lamps that lined Dorset Street but when I did, I felt my heart sink into my stomach. ‘You again,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d taught you a lesson about bothering me and my friend?’ After all, the last time I’d seen him, he’d been sprawled on the mud in front of the music hall after I’d punched him to the ground for refusing to release Cora.
‘Well you thought wrong,’ he said with a grin that revealed several missing teeth as he pulled out a knife. ‘You thought wrong and now it’ll be me who’s teaching the lessons around here.’
I stopped dead and looked him up and down. ‘Really?’ I said, pushing Cora behind me. ‘Come here and try it.’ He stepped forward, snarling and slashing his knife drunkenly and ineptly towards my face. ‘Is that the best you’ve got?’ I taunted. ‘Did your mother teach you how to fight?’
From Whitechapel Page 33