Sweet Songbird

by Sweet Songbird (retail) (epub)

  ‘Matt, for heaven’s sake let me at least tend to those cuts—’

  ‘Can’t. Too many people know about you. Someone’ll put two an’ two together an’ start lookin’.’

  ‘Who? Who’s looking for you?’ The sinking of her heart put sharpness in her tone.

  Once again the grin was crooked, distorted by crushed lips, but it was recognizably Matt’s. ‘All the world an’ his wife. Friend. Foe. The law’ – his knees buckled again and he leaned against the wall – ‘and the lawless. I’ve really done it this time, moi owd Kitty. Like you always said I would.’ He pushed himself away from the wall, made a gallant attempt to stand upright. Through the heartbreaking bravado she could all but smell his terror.

  She stared at him. ‘Matt – what were you thinking of? Coming here. If they guess – anyone who wants you only has to stand guard on the causeway—’

  He drew a massive, trembling breath. ‘Had to say goodbye, didn’t I? Couldn’t just go off – not like before. Don’t fuss. I can swim.’

  ‘In that condition?’ She was appalled. ‘Matt – surely it can’t be as bad as that? What – what have you done—?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing they won’t cut my throat for.’ He tried again to grin, but looking at him in despair Kitty knew that he was not joking. He was next to delirious with pain and exhaustion. If she let him go like this she knew instinctively he stood no chance at all. The thought cleared her head; suddenly, for the first time in weeks, she was herself again, quick-thinking and positive. She caught him firmly by the shoulders, propped him against the wall. Wait here. Don’t move.’

  ‘What’re you doing?’ His speech was getting more slurred with every word.

  ‘I’m coming with you. The skiff’s on the hard by the church. If we take that we’ll be in Salcott in half an hour and Maldon by noon. No one will catch us then. Wait!’ she exhorted him again, fiercely and unnecessarily, and sped indoors.

  The mile-long journey to the beach, encumbered by her injured brother and the small bundle of possessions she had hastily thrown together, seemed like ten. As the sky grew progressively and threateningly brighter, and the ghostly, transparent summer moon faded, she tried to hurry Matt, knowing that only one inquisitive early riser could be their undoing. Bravely, but almost at the end of his tether, he hurried his stumbling steps. When at last they reached the skiff it was all he could do to tumble aboard and collapse like a heap of bloody rags in the scuppers. Single-handed, desperation lending her strength, she kilted her skirts about her waist and pushed off, then scrambled inelegantly aboard and laid hold of the oars. At the far rim of the world the first crimson light of morning bloodied the moving waters.

  ‘Well,’ Matt said, uncertainly, from somewhere near her feet, ‘it’s off to London at last, eh?’ He paused. Then, ‘About bloody time, an’ all,’ he said, and passed out.

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  (i)

  The darkness, emphasized here and there by the infrequent, pale wavering nimbus of a gas lamp, but for the most part unrelieved as pitch, showed no obvious signs of an approaching dawn. Huddled in filthy discomfort upon a dirty sack of potatoes, Kitty glanced up at the stooped back of the sleeping cart-driver and wondered at his ancient horse’s undisturbed and steady progress, unguided, through the narrow city streets. Blinkered head down, great fringed plodding feet sure upon the slick unevenness of the cobbles, the animal toiled, the dilapidated cart, punitively loaded, groaning and clattering behind it, the all-but-unconscious driver, head drooping almost to his knees, swaying to the movement. For what seemed like hours now, sleepless beside her slumbering brother, Kitty had watched in alarmed fascination as the figure perched high above her had lurched perilously from side to side, seeming always to be on the very point of being pitched clear to the cobbles below, yet always, miraculously, righting himself with no apparent conscious effort nor any break in the stentorian snoring which sounded trumpet-like even above the ear-splitting clatter of the iron-shod wheels on the road. For herself – dirty, exhausted, and desperately uncomfortable – she could not help but envy the man his improbably sound repose, as she envied Matt his apparent ability to sleep anywhere and under any circumstances. By the shafting light of a street lamp she glanced at her brother. The two weeks since they had left Mersea Island, despite their privations, had seen his battered face return to something like normality, the bruises fading, the cuts healing, though the deepest of them, high on his cheekbone, still showed red and angry and promised a certain scar. He could consider himself lucky, she thought now, grimly, that this was, so far as she could ascertain, the only lasting damage incurred by the savage beating he had suffered.

  The reason for the attack and for his flight from Colchester she still did not know and had, in face of her brother’s stubborn reluctance to divulge it, given up questioning. With an often barely conscious, injured boy on her hands the first few days of their journey had in any case been such a nightmare, involving as they did the simple, basic need for survival, that such questions had been an irrelevance in a world dominated by the search for food and for shelter.

  The first three or four days, until Matt’s condition had improved enough for him to travel, had been spent hidden in a barn on the mainland a mile or so from the village of Tolleshunt d’Arcy. During that time they had lived frugally upon the few pence that Kitty had brought with her – for, needless to say, Matt’s pouch with its precious hoard of stolen gold was gone, together with the ill-gotten rings and stickpins she had so often seen him wearing – and upon the produce of Kitty’s own wits and determination. And indeed, after the months in thrall to Amos and her own infatuation she had found herself almost welcoming that challenge, and her ability to rise to it. During those days she had discovered within herself a strength and a ferocity of will that she had herself found astonishing. Doggedly she had tended her brother’s hurts, guarded him through the endless, friendless nights while he slept, foraged for them both as if born to the vagabond life. She had coaxed life-giving milk from the cows who peacefully grazed the unknowing farmer’s pastures, had stolen eggs from his wife’s chickens and early apples from his orchard. Once she had ventured to the village to expend a few precious coppers upon bread and cheese, and on the way back had, with smiles and winks and a quick, lascivious kiss that had promised more on account than she had any intention of paying, shamelessly blandished a scrawny rabbit from a young poacher who evidently thought his supper well lost for a few moments’ counterfeit of laughter and love. With a mocking self-derision Kitty had thanked Amos Isherwood for that rabbit – six months before, she would have gone hungry. Remembering, she mused now – not for the first time – on the undeniable fact that the girl who had seen Matt through those first, harrowing days and had since shepherded the at first subdued youngster along the forty or so difficult and penniless miles to London bore scant relationship to the one who had shared Anne Bowyer’s tears of grief in her bereavement a long year ago. She tilted her tired head, closing her eyes for a moment. A year? Dear God, it felt like a lifetime—

  She flinched and grabbed for the side of the cart as one of the wheels mounted a kerbstone and crashed down again with a particularly bruising jolt. Matt stirred, muttering, and was still. In the sky now it seemed to her that at last she could discern the first herald of the coming day, not strong enough yet to be described as light, but the faintest lessening of darkness, which allowed the dense bulk of the buildings around them to loom, mysteriously shadowed, above the lumbering vehicle and its load of fresh vegetables bound for London’s Covent Garden Market. They had been more than relieved at last to meet with a driver who had not greeted their request for a ride with a lifted fist or boot. ‘’Course, me old ducks,’ the wizened, weather-beaten gnome of a man had said with a wide, discoloured grin, ‘climb aboard. First class passengers on the ’taters, second on the carrots—’ And, despite the bone-shattering discomfort of the unsprung cart, they had been grateful – for their rumbling bel
lies and blistered feet had been quarrelsome companions for the past few miles.

  Kitty shifted again, trying in vain to find comfort. The now rapidly paling sky showed clearly the buildings that towered above her, crowding in on the narrow streets, leaning, it seemed, towards each other as they reached like dying plants towards the cleanliness and light of the sky. Kitty sighed, and tried to dismiss a too-well-remembered vision of wide, light horizons and a vaulted, wind-cleansed sky.

  Since they had left the flat Essex countryside and entered the first outlying areas of the suburbs of the city an oppression had settled upon her that she knew to be due to more than just the uncharitable and depressing hour. And as they had progressed into the maze of endless, cluttered streets that was the East End of London she had been aware of optimism and confidence draining quietly from her, leaving a vacuum all too easily filled by uncertainty and apprehension. It had seemed in the circumstances a simple and obvious plan to journey to the capital, where surely there must be work, and where surely no enemy would think it profitable to search for them. But now, rattling in solitary discomfort beside her sleeping brother through strange streets that smelled squalidly of night-odours and the droppings of horses, suddenly she could not be so brave. What if work were not so easily come by? What were they to do, friendless and penniless in an environment that must be innately and inimicably hostile? Far from any fear that anyone might search them out and do them harm, it seemed to her in that bleak moment a far greater possibility that, together or separately, she and her brother might well disappear unnoticed into the sea of uncaring humanity that she sensed about them, drowned as surely as had been Sir George and his sons in the North Sea waters. Miserably for a moment she huddled, close to sudden tears. Then, with an enormous effort she straightened her back and flexed her aching neck, trying to throw off such morbid fancies. If she gave up now, before they had started, then what chance would they have? The cart was bound for Covent Garden Market; well and good – there must surely be casual work in a market? Enough, anyway, to keep them from starvation until such time as they could find more permanent employment?

  That her brother undoubtedly had other ideas concerning their future was a fact that for the moment she resolutely ignored.

  She became aware that their pace had slowed, and craning her neck saw that it was because they had come up behind another cart, smaller than their own, piled high with vegetables and cut flowers and drawn by a shambling donkey.

  ‘’Ay, Charlie!’ – a woman’s voice, raucous and brassily good-humoured, its owner nothing but an enormous shrouded bundle half-seen in the darkness – ‘Wake up, yer silly bugger! Afore that flea-bitten nag o’ yours ’as yer in bleedin’ Billin’sgate!’

  ‘Piss orf, Berth.’ Charlie did not move; his voice, mildly at variance with his words, issued from his still apparently sleeping form. ‘Silly cow.’

  The woman, unoffended, shrieked with laughter and clucked at her donkey. From a side lane another cart issued, and another.

  ‘’Mornin’, Charlie.’

  ‘’Morning, Alf.’

  ‘Where’s the Missis then?’

  ‘Orf sick. Legs is gorn agin. Sunthin’ awful.’

  ‘Sorry to ’ear that, Charlie. Give ’er me best, eh?’

  ‘Will do.’

  They turned into a wider thoroughfare; handcarts here, and women with loaded baskets over their crooked arms or balanced upon their heads. Others carried stacks of shallow baskets for sale, or trays of trinkets. The slow-moving river of humanity was fed constantly by the tributaries of the side lanes and alleys as the market traders headed for their day’s labours, calling greetings and more-or-less friendly insults, braving the chill half-dark with coarse camaraderie.

  Matt stirred and stretched. Jumped awake, wincing. ‘Ouch! God Almighty – I feel as if I’ve been kicked by a horse!’ With unfeigned difficulty he struggled to a sitting position. ‘Bloody hell!’ he said, with pious depth of feeling.

  Kitty smiled faintly but said nothing. The streets through which they were passing were wider now, and less depressing. She looked around her with growing interest. By the lifting dawn light and the pale flicker of the now more numerous gas lamps she saw the ancient streets of the City of London with their top-heavy buildings crowded together, huddling as if for support and protection whilst here and there a grand new edifice stood, four-square and ornate, proud offspring of the new and burgeoning iron-age of industry. The roads were teeming now with slow-moving market traffic – coster-carts, porters, donkey-barrows, shawled women with their flower baskets – and she guessed that they must be nearing their destination. She watched in faint and unkind amusement as Matt painfully unfolded his long, cramped legs, cursing beneath his breath, before he lifted his marked young face to look about him with quickening interest. ‘Well, well,’ he said, softly. ‘So here we are at last, eh?’

  ‘Looks like it.’ She had to smile. ‘Not quite the way we planned to arrive?’

  He grinned back, his teeth a gleam in the darkness. ‘S’pose we might as well get off this bone-shaker and walk?’

  Kitty shook her head. ‘Not yet.’ Something that their benefactor had said in his exchange with the woman he had called Berth had registered in her subconscious and now surfaced smartly. She edged closer to Charlie who now, thoroughly awake at last, had taken the reins in his hands and was guiding the plodding old horse through the dense traffic.

  ‘Er – excuse me?’

  He neither turned nor answered.

  She raised her voice, shouting against the opposition about her. ‘Excuse me, Mr – er Charlie?’

  This time he glanced across his shoulder. ‘Yes, ducks?’

  ‘I wondered – I heard you say that your wife was poorly. I thought – could you do with some help? For the day at least?’

  He pondered, sucking his lower lip noisily through his hideously discoloured teeth. ‘S’madder o’ fact—’ He paused, glanced at her, warily appraising. ‘Can’t pay more’n a tanner—’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘—fer the both of yer.’

  She hesitated at that. ‘Ninepence,’ she said, firmly.

  He wavered, shrugged, grinned his grimy grin. ‘Ye’r on.’

  She nodded, relief flooding her. It was better than nothing. And certainly better than the mischief idle hands might bring to Matt.

  They were moving now along a road which, suddenly and unexpectedly, gave onto the vast market square. Kitty stared, aware too of Matt’s wide eyes beside her. She had never in her life seen such a place. The great market building with its grand arched entrance, its colonnades and arcades, dominated the paved square, on the far side of which stood a large but simple church whose columned portico complemented that of the market building perfectly. Kitty’s first bemused glance took in the tall, elegant gas lamps, the shops and taverns that lined the market place, the enormous theatre building beyond church and market – but the thing that most riveted her eyes and opened her mouth in a small breath of amazement was the turmoil of activity that seemed to fill every far-flung corner of the square.

  Even at this hour Covent Garden Market was a swarming ant-heap. It seemed to her that every conveyance that had ever been invented clogged the Piazza and the streets that led into it: barrows and carts of every size, condition and description, battered gigs and wagons, even to her astonishment an elegant carriage, the uniformed driver, his expression supercilious, riding high above the heads of the crowds, and beside him a mannikin child, black as new-mined coal, sumptuously attired in silks and satins the peacock colours of the East, his teeth flashing like jewels in his small ebony face as he beamed down on the apparent chaos about him. As the carriage slowly passed, a great rocking galleon on a heaving human sea, Kitty caught a glimpse through the curtained window of a pale, haughty face shaded beneath an enormous hat which was decked itself with flowers and fruit as any of the stalls being set up close by. As they stopped to let the vehicle pass a movement caught her eye wit
hin a pile of baskets stacked against the wall. Seemingly of its own volition a large basket rocked, rolled a little on the pavement and then, to Kitty’s amazement, disgorged a small boy who, apparently totally unaware of the crowds about him – as indeed they appeared unaware of him – rubbed his eyes sleepily, stretched, brushed a little at his crumpled, ragged clothes and, his morning toilette apparently accomplished, sauntered off across the square. As Charlie’s cart struggled on past the portico of the church she saw him again, in company with another half a dozen or so waifs, drinking from the pump that stood beside the church. Others of their kind dodged about the crowd, all reaching hands and cajoling voices.

  ‘Want some ’elp ter set up, Mister?’

  ‘Need an ’and wiv yer basket, Missis?’

  ‘Spare a copper, Guv?’

  ‘Git orf.’ Charlie, voice still mild, took a casual sideways swipe at an importuning lad and Kitty winced as leather rapped knuckle and the boy snatched his hand away from the horse’s reins with an exclamation that meant nothing at all to Kitty but which raised Matt’s expressive eyebrows almost to his thatch of hair and brought from Charlie a muttered, ‘Filthy little bugger.’

  ‘Watch yer back terday, Charlie—’ The half-laughing warning came from a huge, cheerful-looking porter who strode beside the cart, a great swaying tower of baskets balanced upon his head. ‘That’s one o’ Croucher’s lads if I’m not mistook.’

  Charlie shrugged, heaved on the reins. ‘Right-o, me old ducks. ’Ere’s where we start.’

  They had drawn up not in the market building itself, within whose deep and shadowed arcades Kitty could see carts and wagons far bigger than theirs being unloaded, but in the Piazza, not far from the church. Stacked in a nearby doorway were some trestles and planks. ‘’Eave-o, lad. Give us an ’and,’ said Charlie, and – reluctantly – Matt clambered from the cart and, with a speaking glance at his sister, bent his back to the trestles.