Shanghai Sparrow

by Gaie Sebold

  He had visited Lathrop’s home, and there he had had his first stroke of luck. The former servants were still in place, awaiting the confirmation of a male heir. The housekeeper had remained chilly and disinclined to be charmed, but one of the maids, sufficiently bribed, had managed to procure him a picture of the family: the mother, father, daughter and a wrapped bundle of lace that was presumably the younger child. It was faded, but the features were sufficiently clear. They had run away, and London was the nearest place they might have reached, other than small villages in which they would immediately have been spotted.

  Acquiring the machines had been comparatively simple. The things were not regarded as of particular value. Money in the right hands, a suggestion that Her Majesty’s Government would be grateful for cooperation in the matter, and the mechanisms were his. The rest of the estate would no doubt be tied up in probate for months or years while the search for a relative – any relative – went on.

  Then it had been a matter of time, money and persistence. He had a sufficiency of the first two, and an exceptional amount of the last. Honour among thieves there might be, but Holmforth found that the right combination of money and threat could make it evaporate like morning dew.

  The girl’s background had been respectable. If she had not fallen too far into degeneracy, she might still be useful to the Empire. But if she had no Etheric talent, she would be of no use to him. His hands clenched.

  EVVIE DAWDLED AWAY from the park, walking as though she’d not a care in the world, until a steam hansom came chuffing and rumbling along behind her. A quick glance told her it had cut her off from the sight of Grey-Coat – she grabbed the wheel-arch and lifted her feet, holding on grimly. Her hands were the strongest part of her. Luckily for her, the driver was sloppy with keeping his vehicle up – the arch had been a while between polishings, and the grime helped her grip. The driver, humming to himself, didn’t notice her; and the cab was empty of any passengers who might have raised a fuss. She briefly considered trying to slide inside, but though the driver might not notice her clinging like a monkey to the outside of his cab, he’d be pretty sure to notice the door opening. Instead she waited until they passed an alleyway and dropped to the ground, landing at a run, ducking into the smelly, narrow space and pelting like a hare for the other end. She made swift, not entirely random jigs and turns, nipped into a pub and out the back, through another four or five turns, keeping up the pace until she felt safe enough to glance behind her.

  No sign of Grey-Coat. She wiped her hands on the rag she’d lifted from the pub kitchen, smoothed her hair, raised her chin, and sashayed, grinning, along the back alleys towards Limehouse, Ma Pether’s, and home.

  “NIHAO, EVVIE!” A young man in the green and gold uniform of the Brighart Steam Transport Company waved at Eveline as he balanced easily on top of a pile of crates. “How are you today?” Behind him one of the ships gave a great blaring whoop and a blurt of steam. Chains and crates clashed and creaked and groaned.

  “Nihao, Liu!” Eveline dropped a brief curtsey. Liu had been hanging around for the last month, as his ship underwent apparently endless repairs. The first time he had called out to her, she had ignored him. The third, she had sighed and made a rude gesture. The fifth time he had not called out at all, but had dropped a little parcel in front of her, of bamboo wrapped in a green silk ribbon. She had picked it up suspiciously. It turned out to contain a small figurine of a grinning fox carved in pale green stone, nestled in silk padding.

  She had turned around and glared at him. “I’m not in that game,” she said. “So you can take this back.” She thrust the figurine at him, not without regret. It was a very pretty thing. Automatically, she wondered what its value was; she had seen something like it in a fancy shop off Regent Street, but didn’t know if it was of the same stuff.

  He had looked so miserable, she almost laughed. “What, you can’t get it somewhere else?”

  He bowed. “I am not seeking anything but the pleasure of your company.” She looked him over, properly this time. She had dismissed him before as just another of the Chinee sailors, with their chattering singsong voices and funny eyes. Now she saw him properly, he was slender and neat, in his smart uniform, a matching green and gold cap perched on sleek black hair tied in a pigtail. His eyes were strange, but it was only a matter of the way they were set in the skin – for that, he looked pretty much like anyone, and a deal more like her than half the Folk did, especially the lesser Folk, like the bogles.

  “Why?” she said. “And how come you speak so fancy?”

  “You wanchee pidgin talk my?” he said.

  “I dunno what you just said, but if it was something rude...”

  “It was not. I would like to know you because you are very clever, and I speak good English because I am very clever.” He bowed again, grinning at her.

  “How do you know I’m clever?”

  He leaned towards her, put a finger on his lips, and then held up, before her eyes, a linen handkerchief embroidered with the initials JK in pink silk. “Very clever,” he said.

  Evvie’s heart speeded up. She’d lifted that handkerchief just this morning, and had never felt it being lifted off her. “You... cheeky sod.”

  “I think that was rude, yes?”

  “Bloody right. What’re you doing with my billy?” She should be furious, but somehow the way he was looking at her, with his head a little to one side, like a dog that had just fetched a stick, kept bringing a smile to her lips.

  “Your... billy?” He gave it to her, with a flourish, like a fine gentleman bowing to a fine lady.

  She snatched it from his fingers, and made it disappear before he had straightened up. “What billy?” she said.

  He laughed.

  Since then, an odd, intriguing, half-wary friendship had developed. Evvie didn’t let herself get too fond of him – after all, his ship would eventually be mended, loaded, and back on its way.

  People disappeared out of your life easy as handkerchiefs. It happened all the time.

  Liu dropped lithely to the ground in front of her, and scrutinised her face. “What have you been doing, Evvie? I can see mischievous spirits in your eyes.” He grinned.

  “Get away with you; you can’t.” She grinned back.

  She hadn’t told Ma Pether about Liu, though if she didn’t know already she’d probably find out soon enough. She might even be pleased, though not about Evvie speaking with a young man – outside picking their pockets or otherwise making off with their goods, she didn’t encourage her girls to have any dealings with men. But Ma would be pleased about the words he was teaching her, because Ma believed in knowledge. She believed in it like some believed in the Life Everlasting. “The more you know, my birdlets, the stronger you are. Be you little as a kitten, if you’ve got a brain and the means to fill it, you can outwit the Queen and all her ministers.”

  But Liu was a friend, not business. She’d keep him secret from Ma as long as she could. “I gotta go.”

  “Meet me later and I will teach you how to ask for a cup of tea.”

  “It’s late. Tomorrow, if I can get away. By the pie shop on Matlock Street, about three.”

  He sighed. “Their pies are made of bits the pigs did not want even when they were alive. I will not eat one.”

  “No one asked you to,” she sang over her shoulder as she hurried away. “I’ll have two of ’em.”

  Where she’d been earlier, the city’s ever-present stinks – of sewage and soot, hot metal and humanity – had been overlaid with expensive perfumes, laundered linen, and well-tended gardens. Limehouse, on the other hand, reeked. The presence of human wastes was not a hint, but a bold declaration in letters fifty feet high. Other smells – filthy bodies, rotting food, damp, vermin, sickness – could hardly compete, though they tried. The only occasional relief, a banner of clean air, came when the wind blew up from the harbour. Even that was as likely to smell of fish as of the open ocean. Eveline noticed the stench, because she
was a noticing girl, but it hardly bothered her. She had spent her last seven years here. It was home.

  Only when she passed the transport moored near the bridge did she put her handkerchief in front of her face, and hurry past. The ship, restrained by a great black dripping chain, loomed above her like some terrible ancient half-dead thing, dragged up from the depths, its sails hanging like dying seaweed rotting on the rocks. A miserable ragged line of convicts shuffled up the gangplank, their chains clinking. As the wind shifted, she could hear the roaring and moaning of those already below decks and, clear as gunshot, the cracking of whips.

  The streets churned with people. Some were decently covered, others ragged to near nakedness; almost all were dirty, thin, and tired. Sailors, dockworkers, men and women and children from the mills and the tanneries.

  Docky Sal was sitting on the steps of the Duke of Windsor, taking advantage of the last of the sunlight. Sal smiled at Evvie, shifting her latest baby from one breast to the other. She had a dramatic bruise around one eye and bundle of crumpled linen draped over her lap.

  “Awrite, Sparrow?”

  “What’s that, Sal?”

  “Fancy shirt. See?” Sal held it up. A needle marked the end of a row of fine, tiny stitches. “Lucky we got the sun today. I’ll get it done by tomorrow, then that’s me off me back for a few days. If that cheapskate in the shop pays me what I’m owed.”

  Eveline leaned down and stroked the baby’s fluff of bright red hair. “Look at him, proper little copper-top.”

  “Ah. Reckon it was that Irish stoker fella. Lovely head of hair he had. Ha’n’t seen him for a long time. Shame, really, he was all right. Not like the last one.” She made a face.

  “He give you the shiner?”

  “Some of ’em are more for hitting than wapping, love. You’re better off with Ma.”

  “Don’t I know it. Here.” She tossed a guinea in Sal’s lap. “Buy him something, eh?”

  “Oh, Evvie.”

  “Shut it. Just don’t tell Ma, all right? You know what she’s like.” She’d want to know where Evvie’d got the guinea for starters, and why she’d given it to Docky Sal instead of Ma herself for seconds. “You take care, Sal.”

  “You too.”

  Evvie continued through the weary wandering crowd. Those who had no room for the night were already starting the evening’s desperate search for somewhere to sleep for a few hours. The soot-blackened scraggle of buildings often held three or four families to a room, and even when there was space to spare, it cost. If you had no money, you’d like as not end up sleeping on the docks or under a bridge, until the peelers came and moved you on. She’d spent plenty of nights that way herself, before Ma took her in. There were already dozens of children settling on the roofs or jamming themselves into tiny crannies. She’d done that, too – if you found a place too small for an adult you were less likely to get hauled out of it by someone bigger and stronger.

  They called it a rookery, but the people, especially the children, always reminded Eveline more of sparrows. Small and scruffy and dirt-brown and noisy, ignored by almost everyone. Like her.

  She jumped over the swollen, gut-burst corpse of a dog, raising a roar of flies. Clean, small, and respectably dressed, she could have been a less colourful version of Little-Red-Riding-Hood, striding innocently through the forest.

  And here came a would-be-wolf, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, nearly as small as Eveline herself, and skinnier, his thin legs so bandy he looked as though he had an invisible gas-balloon between his knees.

  When he reached for her pocket Eveline spun around, grabbed both his arms and held his hands up. “That,” she said, “that was a right munge. What were you trying to do, pat me on the arse? Saw you coming halfway down the street.” The nice young country girl the cook had fed with cake was gone like the hallucination she was; now Eveline was a city rat, all lash and grimy bite.

  The boy swore and tried to kick her shins.

  “Need some help, love?”

  Eveline glanced at the grinning, broad-shouldered man standing behind the boy, an ancient stained bowler tilted over one eye.

  Her captive hunched and tried to twist out of her grip. “He needs help more’n I do,” she said. “Bugger off, then. Juggins.” She let go. The boy gave her a final look of fierce dislike, spat at her feet and darted off into the crowd.

  “Not a local, is he?” said the smiling man. “Or he’d know better.” He eyed her maid’s getup. “You going into service, turning respectable? That’d be a waste, that would.”

  “No,” she said. “I gotta go, Bartie, Ma’s waiting.”

  “Tell her I said hello.” He waved jauntily and set his hat to an even more aggressive tilt before striding off. Eveline watched him go with slightly narrowed eyes. Bartholomew Simms thought well of himself, but she didn’t like him. He gave her the cold grue. He ran a string of girls, and she heard things. Well, he wasn’t getting her into that line of work. Like Sal said, she was better off with Ma.

  “WELL, HOW WAS it?” Ma Pether was seated at the vast littered table, a chewed and weary cheroot in the corner of her mouth, poking a screwdriver at something that looked like a dismantled pistol with a bulbous barrel and a fancy chased-silver stock. Evvie moved around to one side of the table, so the barrel wasn’t pointing at her. She knew Ma and her mechanisms.

  There was a pop and a spurt of vapour; something pinged off into a corner of the room, and Ma swore.

  “Did I hear you cheeking Bartholomew, Sparrow-Girl?”

  “No, Ma.”

  Ma raised her head. She had a jeweller’s glass screwed into one eye; the other was grey, sharp, ready to be amused or to glower. Her strong coppery-blonde hair was streaked with white, pulled back in a rough bun under a net. She wore a coarse cotton shirt, a hide weskit and battered canvas trousers.

  “Better not. I know you ain’t never going to be best of friends, and let’s be honest, he ain’t none of mine either, but he’s too useful to go making an enemy of. Enemies are bad seeds you sowed yerself, remember.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “So, the house. Anyone scope you?” Eveline had given her answer some thought on her way home. She’d been pleased with how her morning’s business had gone, but the more she’d thought about it, the more Grey-Coat had wormed his way into her head.

  If he was a copper and she didn’t tell Ma about him and there were consequences, she’d be up to her neck in shit. And if Ma had sent him herself, the fact that Evvie had spotted him would show Ma how good Evvie was.

  “The house went well,” she said. “I know where everything is, and it’ll be empty on Whitsun. But there was someone hanging about. Not while I was checking the place, but after, a good street away. Smelled like a bluebottle, though he wasn’t in uniform. Darkish, not so tall, in a grey coat. Neat-looking.” She eyed Ma for some sign of recognition, but Ma’s frown looked genuine. “Seemed like he was watching me. Well, he wasn’t actually watching me, I just got that feeling that he’d been looking, and looked away, just as I caught him. I’d not have made anything of it, only I think I seen him before. Anyway, I lost him.”

  “I hope you weren’t staring, Evvie. You know what I taught you.”

  “‘Staring’s foolish, staring stinks, staring gets you thrown in clink.’ Yes, Ma, I remember.”

  “You’d better. You seen him before. When and where?”

  “Down the docks, about three days back. I dunno what made me take notice, only he didn’t seem quite right. Then seeing him again – it seemed odd.”

  Ma blinked the glass out of her eye and dropped it among the other debris. “Sounds like a copper, all right. That’s it, then, that house is blown. I’m not risking it. Hell and the devil, what a waste. I thought that might be the one. You never know what you’re going to find in a place like that. Enough to retire on, maybe.” She looked Evvie over and sniffed, shaking her head. “Dunno how he spotted you. You look all soap and Sunday in that getup. And with your talents – you d
o something stupid?”

  “Not as I can think, Ma.” She picked up the pistol. “Where’d this come from?”

  “Never you mind, and put it down.” Ma eyed her, and Eveline, feeling it, looked up enquiringly. “You sure you didn’t make a botch of it?” Ma said, taking out her cheroot and pointing it at Eveline. “I worry about you, Evvie Duchen. You’re getting too full of yourself. And that’s...”

  “‘The fastest way to a fall.’ Yes, Ma. I know.”

  “Don’t you roll your eyes at me, missy. You get caught, I can’t help you. You want to get transported, die of the flux halfway to hellangone and be thrown over the side for fishes’ dinners, hmm?”

  “No, Ma.” Eveline said, her voice small. The thought of transportation was one of the few things that really frightened her, and Ma knew it.

  “Well, then. You’re to stay indoors for a week. You can do some mending and such, and make yourself useful. And see if you can get some letters into Saffie’s head. Now get out of the maid’s rig, ’fore it gets all over muck. And brush that mud off and put it on Lazy Lou.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “I’ll check.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “Then come down and tell me the rest.”

  Evvie slouched upstairs, scowling. What was the point in talking about the house she’d been checking over, since now they’d not be robbing the place? But Ma always wanted to know everything. Or maybe it was Grey-Coat she wanted to know about, but there was so little to tell.

  “I dunno, Lou, what’s she want?” Evvie said, getting out of her dress and apron and fitting it over Lazy Lou, the brass and copper mannequin who stood in Ma’s room, staring blind-eyed out of the filthy, rag-curtained window. Lou chimed faintly, as she always did when dressed or undressed. She was a clever creation. She had jointed limbs that all folded inside each other so you could pack her into a box no bigger than a travelling-bag, and was supposed to be able to move about, but as long as Evvie had been working for Ma, Lou had been no more than a clotheshorse. Ma was forever picking up mechanical bits and pieces and fadgetting with them, trying to make them work, then she’d get bored before they complied. The cellar was piled with the things.