The girls each lifted their pinafores to reveal boy’s boots that were several sizes too big.
Gertie gave Maggie’s leg a sharp tug as the little girl wriggled. “I’m warning you . . .” she said, blue eyes blazing.
Essie sighed as Flora tugged at a gaping hole in her black woolen stocking and waggled her finger like a worm. Maggie put her hands over her mouth and started to giggle, before it dissolved into a hacking cough. Essie bent down and patted Maggie’s back to soothe her, worrying as she felt the child’s bones jutting through the thin fabric. Their braids still reeked of sarsaparilla—remnants of the Rankin’s oil Essie had massaged into everyone’s heads last night to at least try to get rid of the lice that kept them scratching all night.
Gertie looked up with softer eyes and met Essie’s gaze before looking away with a gulp. “Every damn day . . .” she muttered.
“Gertie. Enough!” But Essie’s scolding felt hollow.
There was nothing in the house for breakfast. Ma had fed the last hard crusts to the chickens. But the chicks were so hungry they were laying only every other day, and now all residents of their Southwark garden flat were starting their day with empty stomachs. Again.
“Up you get, girls,” said Gertie with a weary voice much older than her thirteen years. “Here, each of you take one of my hands.”
“Sing us a song, Gertie,” begged Flora.
“Please,” her twin chimed in.
The trio leaped onto the footpath ahead of Essie, and Gertie started to half sing “Colcannon”—a folk song about creamy mashed potatoes stirred through with green herbs, spring onions, and kale. Essie rolled her eyes. Trust Gertie to sing about food they couldn’t have. “Really, Gertie,” she said, “I don’t think—”
But the twins started to sing tunelessly as they stumbled along, trying to keep up with Gertie in their too-big boots, looking like a pair of sailors after too many pints.
Or their mother any day of the week.
Essie tried to swallow her anger and resentment. Ma hadn’t always been like this, and she didn’t want the little girls to grow up hating their mother.
Every Halloween, Ma used to mix a batch of buttery mashed potato with bacon and herbs in her favorite skillet pot and poke in a coin, a button, and a gold ring. Gertie always got the button in her bowl, and Da would tickle her tummy and declare there was no man in Ireland good enough for his girls anyway.
Essie picked her way along the footpath, trying to remember when Ma had last made up a pot of mashed potato mixed with scallions, milk, pepper, and bacon.
Not since they came to live in London.
Certainly not since Da shipped out to fight the Boers, never to return.
As the girls skipped and chanted in front, Essie stepped off the footpath to avoid a hunched man pushing a barrow of snails.
The fishmonger, Mr. Foster, tipped his hat to the girls as he finished rolling up his sleeves to add silver flounder to a mountain he’d already piled onto a wooden board—a shilling for the lot—while plates of haddock, whiting, and herring sat on his counter. Behind him, a shelf was crowded with mustard pickles that could be added to the fish order for just a penny.
Da used to love his fish on a Friday . . .
“Don’t forget to fix your account by Frid’y. There’ll be none till you do.” Mr. Foster waggled a warning finger at Essie as she hurried the girls past.
Essie tugged at Gertie’s sleeve to cross the road to avoid the crumpet man standing on the corner in his dirty black coat with a wooden tray perched on his head. Even though the tray was covered with a length of green baize, the unmistakable smell of freshly baked dough, butter, and cinnamon filled the dusty air.
One of Gertie’s classmates approached the man, and he hoisted the tray from his head and rested it at his hip as the child pulled back the cloth and took her time before clutching a crumpet with both hands. As she held it up to take a bite, Essie looked the other way.
They reached the school gate. In the playground, boys whooped as they chased metal hoops with sticks. Girls laughed and squealed as they skipped and gathered in groups, long skirts hiding skinny legs.
Essie watched the twins struggle to stand tall and straight. Flora’s left eye twitched, the only hint that her bandy legs were paining her. Maggie’s face was equally still. Their faces were so pale they could be carved from marble.
Essie resolved to take on more work—whatever she could find—to buy the girls fresh food and the leg braces they badly needed.
The headmaster, Mr. Morton, stood with his bucket and list. Each child had to drop thruppence into the bucket each week as they went through the school gate.
Essie stepped in front of her sisters.
“I don’t have the money. But I’m off to work now and I’ll have it for you tomorrow.”
The headmaster snapped, “I believe you said the same thing last week. Consider this your last warning, Miss Murphy. Unless you start to pay on time I shall have no choice but to expel these three. In any case, they’ll need to be punished in the usual manner. They’ll continue to be punished until you pay what’s due, Miss Murphy.”
Essie’s cheeks started to burn, and she could feel Gertie stamping her feet like a frustrated horse.
“Please—”
Gertie stepped out from behind Essie and gave her sister a nudge as she pulled Flora and Maggie with her. “You get to work, Es,” she whispered behind Flora’s back. “We’ll be all right with Mr. Godly Gen-er-osity here . . .”
“No,” said Essie, trying to wipe away the tears that had sprung into her eyes.
“Essie, you need to go,” said Gertie, louder now, with as much authority as her headmaster.
“Very well.”
Essie lifted the cloth on her basket and handed over three tin bottles of tea as she whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Flora winked at her big sister, and flicked her braid over her shoulder as she stepped across to Mr. Morton and bent down to put her lunch at her feet. Straightening, she held both hands out, palms up and ready for a whipping.
Maggie tentatively did the same, standing shoulder to shoulder with her twin. Last to join the lineup was Gertie, who was now standing with her chin slightly lifted and cheeks flushed. Defiant.
Essie tried to turn and walk away, but her feet were lead. It was all she could do to stop herself from rushing over and scooping up each of the girls to take them home for the day.
But she needed to go to work. And besides, the girls were safer here at school than at home.
The newsstands were full of headlines trumpeting free education and housing for all, but that hadn’t happened in their parts, south of the river. Miss Barnes, Gertie’s kind teacher, had told Essie it might not be happening for some time yet if the rumors were to be believed. Still, Miss Barnes wanted Gertie to finish her schooling and matriculate.
Ma wouldn’t hear a word of it. “It’ll be the factory for Gertie, or the workhouse,” she said. “Don’t be putting fancy ideas in her head, Esther. No good’ll come of it.”
But fancy ideas filled Essie’s head when it sank into her pillow in the evening. As her bones ached and her sisters coughed, spluttered, and scratched beside her, she wished more than anything for the girls to have their own beds. New shoes and a coat for winter. Most of all, she wished for them to stay in school so their days would not end up like hers.
Essie now eyed her sisters standing in a line, bravely awaiting a punishment from their headmaster they did not deserve.
Mr. Morton pulled out his short horsewhip and Maggie flinched. Flora dipped a little to one side, as if her knees were buckling under her skirts.
A whoosh and then a sharp slap as the whip hit Maggie’s hand.
The child, so frail compared to Flora, started to sob and cough just as the second slap landed with a hiss. She coughed more, and the headmaster, whose face had gone red, retaliated with two more lashes, each harder than the last.
Flora trembled as it was her turn and,
over their heads, Gertie looked at Essie and raised her chin a little higher, eyes glinting with anger. Her message was clear: Leave.
Helpless, shamed, and left with no choice, Essie forced herself to do as she was bid. She turned and hurried off to work.
Chapter 4
Essie had been sitting at her machine hemming men’s evening shirtfronts for three hours when old Mrs. Ruben came and rapped her scarred knuckles on the side table.
“Enough, Miss Murphy!”
Essie stopped pedaling, but the thrumming in her ears continued. There were fifty other machinists on this sixth floor of the factory.
“I want you to do a delivery. It’s urgent.” Mrs. Ruben waved her hand at the table beside Essie’s as she continued. “And take Miss Davis with you.”
“It’s Miss Avery, ma’am. Miss Davis left last week.” The skinny girl with riotous ringlets bursting from her hairnet blundered on, oblivious to Mrs. Ruben turning a deeper shade of purple. “Tu-ber-culosis, ma’am. Remem—” The girl’s sentence tripped, then stopped.
“I am well aware of the situation. I’ll thank you not to bring it up again.” Mrs. Ruben squared her hefty frame and eyed Essie. “I need you both to take these to The Goldsmiths’ Company in Foster Lane off Cheapside.”
She wheeled over a rack with a black tailcoat, white bow ties with matching waistcoats, and half a dozen stiffly starched white shirtfronts and collars.
“Mr. Ruben’s automobile and driver are waiting for you downstairs. You’ll make your own way home. Now be gone with you. Don’t be getting any ideas, mind. This is a friend of Mr. Ruben’s who is over from Antwerp and needs a dinner suit for tonight. And Miss Murphy . . .”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“They’ll pay you a tuppenny at the other end for your trouble. Don’t embarrass the firm. No creases.” She was yelling now across the noise of the unending machines. “Do not disappoint me.”
The girls carried the rack slowly down the six flights of stairs, stopping for a rest on each landing. Judging by Miss Avery’s bagging sleeves and pinned skirts, there was as little for breakfast at her house as at the Murphys’.
“I’m Essie,” Essie volunteered.
“Bridget,” the other girl replied breathlessly as they wheeled the rack out of the factory to the waiting car.
They loaded the pieces carefully into the middle of the back seat, then, as the driver held the door open for them, the two girls slid onto the buttery leather seats. Essie had never been in a motorcar and, if Bridget’s saucer-wide eyes were anything to go by, she never had either.
Both girls were too nervous to speak, so they sat stiffly in their patched pinafores and scuffed boots as the car motored away from the warehouse on the Thames, passing other automobiles, horses and carts loaded with wooden barrels, and tired, filthy navvies.
Essie thought of her brother, Freddie, gone with his pickaxe before dawn. Nothing but a bottle of tea for his break.
If she was going past Cheapside, perhaps she could stop by with some food on her walk back.
“Essie.” Bridget touched her arm and shook her out of her daydream. “Look!”
A crowd of women closed in around their vehicle, causing the driver to slam on the brakes. Most wore white dresses, wide-brimmed hats clad with green and purple ribbons, or a ribbon fixed at the waist. The dresses tapered at the ankles, and Essie noted with a twinge of jealousy that most had fine stockings and pretty shoes with the latest French heel.
What would it feel like to have a spare change of fresh clothes and silk stockings? she wondered, as she tried to hide her calloused hands in her rough skirts.
The driver cursed under his breath and muttered, “Bloody suffragettes. Clogging up the streets like this. Should be slammed in the clink, the lot o’ them.”
Several women were wearing placards dangling from thick straps at their shoulders emblazoned with the words: votes for women.
“What do they say?” Bridget whispered, cheeks pink with embarrassment.
Essie read the nearest placard. “They’re inviting us to a procession. This Friday evening at five thirty in Knightsbridge.”
“Us? In Knightsbridge?” Bridget adjusted her hairnet and giggled. “Don’t think they’ll be wanting the likes of us, do you?”
Essie shrugged. Even if she’d wanted to attend, she had coal to fetch and supper to cook, then bathing and delousing the little ones before washing out their clothes for the week and hanging them over the fire.
Friday nights were always the same for Essie. The only highlight was a scrap of mackerel instead of turnip soup—if she could convince old Mr. Foster to extend their credit for another week.
The driver leaned on his horn as the women walked in front of the vehicle, filling the pavement with linked arms, chanting: “Votes for women.”
Who were these immaculate women with time to protest in the streets? No jobs here—or in the home, she reckoned with a quick glimpse of their neatly gloved hands. A row of police riding on black Clydesdales started to appear from a distance, and the women in white started to move in circles, as if in a butter churn.
Soaring above them all was the Monument, Wren’s beautiful sculpture commemorating the Great Fire, golden urn glittering in the sunshine. Essie walked past it every day on her way to and from work, and often stopped to admire the frieze on the base, in which London was portrayed as a woman languishing, disrobed, on a pile of rubble. Bishops, king, architects, and soldiers all crowded around to lift her to her feet. The woman—London—looked tired. Defeated. Probed and pulled by too many people.
Essie knew what it meant to have so many regarding you with expectant faces. Depending on you to keep going.
She’d heard it said that this sculpture represented the might of London. She would recover, pick herself up, and fight again. But the sad line of London’s cheek—so many hands pushing and pulling at her shoulders—made it hard for Essie to breathe.
* * *
“Eel, thanks, sir.” Essie handed over her precious tuppence and tried to ignore her own hunger pangs as the pie man wrapped the pie in newspaper. She slipped the warm parcel into her apron pocket and felt the comforting weight against her leg.
“I hope your brother knows how lucky he is,” Bridget remarked. “I’d best be getting on. It’s mid-afternoon . . . If I walk back to work then ’ome again it’ll be long past dark. My babies are with Mother and she’ll be in a right state. Who’d’ve known the gentleman would take so long to choose his shirtfront? Tell you what, there was more gold in those columns at that Goldsmiths’ ’ouse than in the Crown Jewels. Surely the butler could have done his bidding today?”
“You go.” Essie shooed her along, wishing she had a second tuppenny to buy her new too-skinny friend a pie as well. “I’ll tell Mrs. Ruben it was my fault.”
“But she’ll dock your pay . . .”
“Shush. Go.”
Bridget mouthed a thank-you, fist clinging tight to her tuppence. She refused to slip the coin into her pocket in case it got lost. Closer to home, Bridget would probably buy some potatoes, a turnip, and perhaps some salmon. For her babies. For her ailing mother. It wouldn’t go far enough . . .
Essie walked along Cheapside, scanning the demolition sites and listening for the telltale tink of pickaxes striking rock and rubble. Eventually she came to Freddie’s site, and was surprised to see that in the past week they had razed almost all the walls and floors of the old line of shops, except the cellar.
Her brother had removed his shirt, revealing ribs and sinewy arms. His best friend Danny looked the same, only with sandy hair rather than her brother’s dark Murphy curls. Beside them stood a row of navvies in an assortment of patched overalls, torn shirts, and waistcoats and filthy boots. Everyone was bent over, digging through clumps of soil and stone with their picks.
“Tea break,” boomed the foreman from the lip of the cellar, just a few feet from where Essie stood.
There was a collective sigh of relief as tools were drop
ped, and men tried to straighten backs bent stiff from hours of toil.
Essie looked across to the foreman, noticed his thick dark hair, green eyes. He had removed a fob watch from the pocket of his smart waistcoat and was making a show of looking at the time, holding it up to the light.
Freddie waved and walked over to her.
Danny found an old metal bucket, brushed it clean, and turned it over to make a seat. “Sit, here, Miss Essie.”
“Thank you, Danny,” she said as his ears reddened. Essie reached into her pocket and handed her special parcel to Freddie. “Lunch—special delivery,” she joked.
Freddie beamed as he placed the parcel on his lap, carefully unwrapped the newspaper, and split the pie into three with his pocketknife. He handed a piece to Essie.
She shook her head.
“Es, you’ve been working just as hard as me.”
“You lads split my share. I’ll get another on the way home.”
All three knew she wouldn’t, and Freddie pulled a pained face at the rest of the pie, torn between gobbling it up and forcing his little sister to eat.
“No fraternizing on-site, Murphy. Don’t care if it is tea. Y’know the rules,” a voice boomed over Essie’s shoulder.
Startled, she jumped up and knocked over the bucket.
Standing behind her with his hands on his hips was the foreman. Up close, he was younger than she expected. Perhaps a year or so older than her brother, with neatly combed dark hair and a ribbon of dark freckles over his nose.
“Sorry, sir. I’m Freddie’s sister. It’s my fault. He didn’t know I was coming. I surprised him with a pie.”
“A pie!” He looked bemused. “Wouldn’t have picked you to have your sister running your errands, Murphy.” He glanced over her shoulder at Freddie.
“Sorry, sir.”
“Back to work, the lot o’ you.”
Danny started to protest. “But, sir, it’s only been—”
“I take it you want a job tomorrow, O’Brien?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get moving. You too, Murphy.”
The young men walked in single file back into the cellar. Essie could hear them cursing and muttering under their breath.
The Lost Jewels Page 3