“No, Ma’am – it’sh Twill,” she attempted to lisp.
“Ah, Baggage’s girl! Excellent! Excellent! Let me see you – come into the light.”
Alas, as Twill stepped forward she was so taken by the sight of a slim volume by Mr Walter Scott that she had been particularly longing to read that she momentarily forgot her hunchbacked, drooling persona and stood for a moment in a shaft of sunlight from the big bay windows, transfixed by the sight. And she wore a look of such bright wonder that even the ganache and cinders could not obscure the beauty beneath.
And that is how Madam Manzoni-Jones beheld Twill for the second time in her life.
“Well, well!” declared Madam, her own eyes sparkling like two small gems. “The little snow baby has grown into quite a beauty.”
“Oh – um – indeed no, ma’am,” said Twill coming to herself and remembering what Baggage had told her about not being beautiful at any cost. “Indeed I am very, very ugly.” She quickly attempted to rearrange her face as Baggage had instructed, hoiking up her shoulder in her best impression of a hump, but her efforts were too late for the old matriarch, who, accustomed to the Butterflies’ attempts to paint over their faded looks, was just as quick to see through Twill’s charade.
“Come a little closer, snow girl!” she said, waggling a tiny white finger, an expression on her face that Twill was powerless to disobey. As she stepped forward, the claw-like hand shot out, grabbing her wrist, wrenching Twill so that her face was just inches from the old woman’s.
“Fancy that,” said Madam, eyes alert and glistening. “A regular pearl in the pigswill. You remind me of myself when I was your age.”
Twill’s eyes widened with alarm and astonishment.
The old woman laughed, a tinkling high-pitched sound. “I do declare, you are just the thing – the very thing, my dear!”
“For – um – what, Madam?” said Twill, forgetting her lisp in her alarm.
“The icing on the cake, the cherry on the tree – the shining star in tonight’s sky. Who more fitting than a brand-new Butterfly to present the coming-of-age cake? A new duke and a new Butterfly!
“What – me? In the Black Jack?” stammered Twill, caught momentarily between excitement at the idea of a new adventure (a lifetime of being strictly shut out of the gaming rooms had only heightened her curiosity to glimpse what went on within!) and horror at what Baggage would say.
“Certainly, my dear. Tonight, you will be my latest Butterfly. A new Pearl, perhaps?”
Twill gasped in horror. She, like everyone in the Black Jack, was only too aware of the perilous position of the current Pearl-of-the-Night. Indeed, it had been the main topic of conversation in the Butterfly boudoir for some months now. Baggage had been preparing all sorts of face poultices; and Bob the butcher’s boy had procured a detoxing concoction from a Moorish gypsy in Dulwich Village; even Mr Scapegrace had been reading up on ancient rejuvenating practices such as sleeping with a rabbit’s foot and drinking backwards and standing on your head for ten minutes a day – all of which were designed to keep poor Pearl’s skin young, her forehead wrinkle free and her hair clear of the telltale silver threads that would surely lead to her ejection from the Black Jack.
“But … you already have a Pearl!” said Twill.
“Yes, and I suppose the girl has not quite outlived her usefulness – yet!” Madam Manzoni mused, before waving her hand decisively. “Indeed, now I think on it, my dear, I believe a new name is required. Nothing recycled.” Madam managed to raise an eyebrow, like a slug wriggling on a vast mountain of lard. “Yes, you need – a nom de papillon all of your own. Brighter than a pearl – hmm – a crystal, perhaps? No, a gem, a jewel… You, my dear, are that rarest of gems. A diamond!”
“A … diamond?” asked Twill.
“Yes, a diamond! You shall be my Snow Diamond,” declared Madam Manzoni with a glitter of triumph. “And tonight, my dear, will be your chance to dazzle!”
Chapter 8
In which Bob proves to be a young man of substance and a flight plan for the newest Butterfly is hatched
While all this was going on, Baggage had completed the sugar nest and – to her great consternation – had been sent out on an “emergency errand”. More sugared almonds were required for Duke Whatshisname’s coming-of-age cake and none were to be had closer than Lordship Lane. Mrs Spanks had insisted that Baggage procure them herself – none other could be spared she said, with a gleam of malice in her eyes, even when Baggage protested that the ganache filling could not afford to wait, let alone the chocolate mirror glaze. So to Lordship Lane Baggage hurried, her heart a-quiver and her head in a spin, thinking of Twill and Manzoni – and by the time she returned to the Black Jack kitchens she was confronted with a most unnerving sight.
For there was Twill, bathed, scented, painted, primped and dressed in a gown that Madam Manzoni had sent down from her own wardrobe – a white sugary confection with puffed sleeves, mountains of underskirts like layers of a wedding cake and sewn with tiny glass gems and diamonds made of paste that made it glitter like a snowflake. Her hair – at Madam Manzoni’s direction – had been elaborately curled, a dab of rouge applied to her cheeks and lips, and a drop of perfume applied behind ears that had been hung with tiny paste diamonds on strings. The whole effect was simply…
“Horrible! Horrible!” wailed Baggage when she set eyes upon her snow baby, now transformed into an ice princess. “What has she done to you?”
“Madam wants her to present the cake to the new duke in the gaming parlour tonight,” said Cleo, who had been fixing the little earrings to Twill’s lobes with a thread.
“They are calling her the Snow Diamond!” said Birdy.
“Medora hasn’t christened a new Butterfly since the king’s father was on the throne!” declared Mr Scapegrace, who had made a rare venture from his study to witness Twill’s transformation. He had a wistful expression on his papery old face as he beheld her, while the collection of Butterflies giggled, most of them having never heard Madam Manzoni referred to by her first name – or even really imagined that she had one!
“No, no, no!” said Baggage, her crumpled face glowing with anger. “I won’t have my Twill in among the gambling and the drinking and the swearing and who knows what else, till she grows old and is thrown out on the flower heap! I won’t have it.”
“But what’s the alternative?” mumbled Mr Scapegrace, peering through his glasses like a mole. “Where else can the girl go? Medora will never allow her to stay on any other terms.”
“I know where she can go!”
Everyone turned to see who had made this pronouncement. And there stood Bob the butcher’s boy, holding a brace of pheasants and looking extremely pleased with himself.
A word here about Bob the butcher’s boy. He was, despite his name, no longer a boy – indeed he had not been boyish for over a decade. But he was small of stature and had the soft, plump features of a newborn and not much more hair on his head than a babe-in-arms either. This made it hard to tell if he were eleven or one hundred and eleven, and thus he had been addressed as “boy” since he was the former and probably would remain so until he was the latter.
He had also been in love with Baggage since he was old enough to remember, and probably would be till he was old enough not to, and he might easily continue to that grand old age without ever plucking up the courage to tell her. Baggage herself was mighty fond of Bob, but since it never occurred to her that anyone could fall in love with her, she never noticed that he had.
Bob showed his devotion by procuring for Baggage little delicacies and spices that she might experiment with in her baking, while she in turn saved him morsels of her latest sweetmeats to sample, and both were pretty well satisfied with the arrangement, save Bob did dream sometimes of planting a kiss on Baggage’s sweet pudding of a face and calling her his currant bun.
That same face turned to him now, alight with love, anger and despair, and Bob thought she had never looked so beautiful. In fact, it wa
s all he could do not to clasp her in his arms and ask her to be his apple turnover! Instead he pulled himself up to his tallest height – nearly achieving five foot in the process – pushed back his shoulders and declared, “They be wanting a kitchen maid. In a house I deliver to over in Clerkenwell way. Twill’s the right age. She might go there!”
For a second he wondered if he had said the wrong thing, as silence reigned in the Black Jack kitchens. But then Baggage’s eyes lit up and she grabbed his face in both hands and planted a kiss on his astonished lips.
“That’s perfect! The very thing! Do you think they’d take her?”
Still reeling from the kiss, which had tasted of sugared almonds and newly baked bread rolls – and something that he imagined was the very taste of heaven itself – Bob stammered, “Why – um – that is … I don’t see why not!”
“It would offer an alternative for the child,” Mr Scapegrace was saying, peering through his spectacles as if weighing up the situation like a contract.
“Though she do look so beautiful!” murmured Pearl-of-the-Night, gazing wistfully at the vision in white.
“Well, she can be beautiful north of the river!” declared Baggage. “There’s no time to lose if we want her out before the mistress gets wind of our plan.”
“You’re … sending me away?”
Everyone turned to Twill, who was as pale as a snowflake in her Butterfly garb. Baggage took a step towards her darling and looked at her with an expression of such love it made her dishwater eyes glow. “You know I’d keep you by me side till me dyin’ day, but I always knew this day would come, though it breaks me ’eart to see it come around so soon.”
“But – but – this is my home…” said Twill. She’d had a most extraordinary morning. After the initial horror of discovery, she had rather enjoyed her transformation into the Snow Diamond and had even started to look forward to catching a glimpse of life behind the doors of the gaming parlours, meeting the strange species she had heard the Butterflies talk of – profligate young gentlemen known as “Greeks”, the silly dupes they called “Pigeons” and the scoundrels known as “Captain Sharps”. She’d been excited about presenting Lord Whatshisname with his cake and being lauded as the newest and brightest of the Black Jack Butterflies. Now she was being told she was to be sent away – away from the only home she had ever known, the only family.
“The Butterflies are my sisters, Mr Scapegrace is like an uncle and you, Baggage … you’re my…” She wanted to say that Baggage was like a mother to her, but the words stopped on lips that were glossed cherry pink and trembling. “You’re my Baggage!” was all that came out.
“And I will always be your Baggage,” declared that good lady. “But I ditn’t save you from the rubbish ’eap only for Madam to throw you right back there. So there’s no time to waste.”
Chapter 9
In which Twill departs the Black Jack and takes her destiny with her, wrapped in a twist of paper
In barely half an hour’s time, Twill was back in her old clothes, her hair neatly piled back into a modest cap, a clean apron round her tidy little waist and a new pair of stockings on her feet. She had a small bundle packed with some morsels of food for the journey, a spare apron and cap, and a pocket handkerchief embroidered with her initials.
Bob the butcher’s boy had errands in Clerkenwell and could take Twill to the house he had mentioned that very afternoon. Farewells were hasty before Mrs Spanks or Madam Manzoni could learn of her flight, and poor Baggage – who had been like a whirlwind in readying her girl for departure – suddenly found herself pushing back tears as Twill stood before her, good to go. She had said her goodbyes to the Butterflies and even to Mr Scapegrace – who had pressed a copy of the latest novel by Mr Scott into her hands and told her not to abandon her Greek – but faced with her beloved Baggage, Twill wasn’t sure she could hold it all together.
“If you love your old Baggage, you’ll promise me summat?” said that good lady, who was trying to look extremely fierce in an effort not to cry.
“Anything, anything.”
“Promise you will leave ’ere an’ never come back,” said Baggage. “No matter wha’ happens!”
“Never?” Twill stared in astonishment and horror. “But then … I’ll – never see you again.”
“That’s as may be,” said Baggage, though in truth the prospect near on broke her dear warm oven of a heart. “But I need you to promise.”
Poor Twill gazed at her Baggage, who had saved her that snowy night, given her more than a mother’s love, raised her with such care and never asked anything in return. How could she refuse her this one last request? Yet how could she grant it?
“I – I promise,” said Twill, the words tearing a hole in her heart as she uttered them.
“Good girl!” Baggage sniffed loudly and nodded her head violently to ward off the flood of dishwater pooling in her eyes. “An’ take this.” She handed Twill a little kid bag, containing a tiny twist of paper wrapped around something small and round – the size of a penny, perhaps.
“What is it?”
“I found it on you – that night in the snow – ’twas in the blanket you’d been left in, so truly it’s yours and I was selfish to keep it from you till now,” said Baggage. “I always thought of myself as your mother, see!”
“And so you are to me!” declared Twill. “I have never wanted any other!”
Baggage gave a sound somewhere between a sob and a hiccup, then pulled herself together and went on. “Maybe one day if you do…”
“I never will!” insisted Twill.
Baggage’s whole frame shuddered at this pronouncement and it was with supreme difficulty that she uttered the rest. “Well, you ’ave this if that time should come. Keep it safe an’ keep yourself safe too,” she said. “Make your Baggage proud.”
“I’ll try,” said Twill, with a crack in her voice that was most unlike the fierce leader of the Camberwell Grovers, for Twill Jones – who had long dreamed of adventuring far beyond the familiar streets and alleys of her home – now wanted nothing more than to be told she could stay at the Black Jack till her dying day.
“Go to your wide future,” Baggage managed to declare. And then she wrapped Twill in a tight embrace from which she thought she might never be able to tear herself. When she eventually managed to do so, she scrunched up her crumpled dear old face and blinked away the tears: “Now, be off with you, me girl!”
And then Bob the butcher’s boy was lifting Twill up beside him on the cart and giving Baggage a nod to say he’d look after her girl. And then the cart was off and away, down the lane of tall larch trees lining Camberwell Grove, into the city.
Chapter 10
In which Twill encounters a familiar face, though she don’t rightly recognise it at the time
Bob the butcher’s boy had promised Baggage that her girl would be just fine, and it so happened that he was both right and wrong, about that and other matters.
As he drove along at a steady pace, with the dazed and heartbroken girl by his side, she might have shed a tear or two as they made their way along the long cart track towards the city, but Bob was enough of a gentleman that he pretended not to notice. And in truth her weeping soon dried up as they passed the Elephant and Castle and approached Waterloo Bridge, and Twill started to notice all the activity on the road into the city. She had never been into London before and the sights and sounds along the roadway thrilled the girl so much that she forgot about Baggage and the Butterflies.
Such an array of traffic was there on the road that day – flower sellers and fruit stalls, a man with a monkey, an organ grinder, a troop of May Day dancers, and a rag-and-bone man shouting out for “any old iron”. The sun was shining as they approached the bridge and the light danced on the river and over all the little boats bobbing up and down in a way that made Twill think of pirates and perilous journeys to foreign lands and Robinson Crusoe on his island. And with such pleasant imaginings in her head it was diff
icult to remain completely unhappy.
They stopped at a coaching house, where Bob had errands to run. Twill climbed down off the cart and perched herself on a barrel in the mews where she watched the ostlers who ran to greet the great men’s carriages and unharness their tired teams, racing to provide them with new horses for the next leg of their journey. All this was done with such speed and dexterity that Twill marvelled as she watched. Sometimes the owners of the carriages stayed in their equipages, ordering coffee and ale and mutton and bread to be brought to them from within the inn. Others stepped into the coaching house for a small meal before emerging contented to continue the next leg of the journey.
Bob was gone some time and so Twill entertained herself by watching the rich folk, trying to predict who would alight and who would remain in their carriages. A lady in a plumed hat and a gentleman in a greatcoat with so many capes it might have clothed a whole family of Peckham railway children chose to alight; but a pair of elderly ladies in powdered wigs and fur mufflers sat stiffly in their carriage, pooh-poohing the time it took to fix the horses.
At length an elderly gentleman with a young boy – his grandson, Twill guessed – arrived at the inn. The old man looked so frail, and the boy so solicitous for the old man’s comfort, that Twill bet herself that they would alight. And indeed they did. She watched them from her barrel perch by the servants’ entrance, and as the boy passed he caught her eye, and there was something so familiar in his glance, something so much like home in the expression of his eye, that Twill was sure she must know him, and yet at the same time she knew she had never seen him before.
The boy started as if she were known to him too. He was the same age as her, though he was slighter of build; he shared her flaxen hair and cornflower-blue eyes, though his had a milkier hue. And he was dressed in a smart sailor suit and well-shined shoes that must have cost ten times what her modest garb was worth. He looked, thought Twill, well cared for, and well loved, and for some reason this gave the girl a burst of pleasure she could scarce account for. Yet he neither seemed puffed up by good fortune, nor did he look down upon her, as some young gentlemen of his standing might. Instead he smiled, and she could not help but smile in return.
Another Twist in the Tale Page 3