Sweet Songbird

by Sweet Songbird (retail) (epub)

  Croucher barked again.

  Matt blinked, flinching.

  ‘Go it, Crouch! Slit ’is gizzard!’

  The smaller boy moved again, supremely confident, quick as a cat. But this time, with the lanky agility that Kitty knew so well, Matt sidestepped, avoiding the attack and – as much by luck as by judgement – caught his opponent a buffeting blow on the ear as he did so.

  The openly surprised Croucher staggered a little, spun to face Matt and dropped into his threatening crouch again. He was smiling no longer. He sidled closer. The knife, cradled loosely within his small, flat palm, held deceptively lightly, wove a glimmering pattern in the air. Twice, experimentally it flashed, a lethal gleam in the shadowed light; but this time Matt, with less apparent effort, stayed beyond the blade’s reach. Sudden silence had fallen upon the watchers. Kitty glanced around. Eyes avid for blood watched every movement. Here and there a brow furrowed. Then with that same strange little barking sound Croucher attacked, in a flickering fury of movement that had Matt stumbling back before its force. The arm he raised to protect his face was blooded twice, and deeply, before his opponent fell back. The onlookers growled again, satisfied.

  ‘Cut ’im up good, Crouch.’

  ‘Cripple ’im, Croucher.’

  Croucher fell back, the grin back in place. His eyes flickered to his rapacious supporters.

  It was a mistake.

  With a swift, deft movement that took even Kitty by surprise, Matt was upon him, his long-fingered hands banded in a grip like steel about the other boy’s wrists as he used the advantage of his greater height and strength to contain the threat of the knife. They swayed so for a moment, locked together in a fierce, hostile embrace. Then with a vicious twist Croucher was free again, and the shining knife-arc divided them once more. Yet the smaller boy was unbalanced. Gracefully Matt sidestepped the blade and his hard, bunched knuckles took the other boy high on the cheekbone, drawing blood. Croucher hissed like an angry cat and slashed awkwardly at his dancing opponent. Matt avoided the cut with ease and fell back, big hands spread open and wary before him, eyes watchful.

  There was a movement now, Kitty saw, within Croucher’s watching tribe; a shifting of feet, a worrying restlessness. That Croucher’s victim should show a good account of himself had in no way apparently featured in their plans, and they were clearly not impressed. She clenched her hands nervously; nothing, it seemed to her, short of a miracle, could save them now. Whichever way the fight went they were lost, for the concept of fair play clearly figured nowhere in this struggle, and if Matt did not finish it quickly – and the likelihood that he could finish it at all was remote, despite his courageous defence – then he would be overwhelmed, not just by Croucher, but by this venomous mob of young devils who were not about to stand by and see their leader bested.

  Croucher moved again, leaping in to the attack with practised skill. Matt dodged, stumbled, and the two crashed to the ground almost at Kitty’s feet. Matt’s left hand was clamped desperately about the wrist of Croucher’s knife-hand, his right was buried, deeply and painfully, in the sooty black hair. For a moment the knife hovered perilously at his throat, but then once again his greater strength began to tell and inch by hard-fought inch the smaller boy’s arm was forced back, as was his head, dragged brutally backwards by Matt’s fierce grip on his hair. Croucher’s face twisted in pain; with a strong, convulsive movement he broke Matt’s grip and twisted free, his knee in Matt’s groin.

  As he did so the knife spun from his hand and skidded clattering past Kitty into the gutter.

  She turned. Yards from her a small, wicked face snarled, daring her to try. The knife lay between them, honed like a razor and with a point ground as viciously as a needle’s. For the space of a drawn breath she faced the rat-faced urchin, then she threw herself forward, snatched at the knife and in one movement turned, calling ‘Matt!’ as she tossed it to her brother’s hand. Almost before it had left her hand she felt the monkey-weight of the child on her back, felt the terrifying strength of its bony fingers upon her throat, smelled its stink in her nostrils. Staggering, she fell, carrying her burden with her. Those terrible, fleshless fingers with savage sureness probed for her eyes. She screamed. Then, suddenly, the world was still. Her attacker, with one last cruel raking of her face with sharp nails, was gone. She sat up, dazed.

  Within the closed circle of watchers Matt knelt. On the ground beside him, locked painfully there by the grip of Matt’s hand in the thatch of black hair, was Croucher. But what held him there most surely, and held too for the moment at least the poised and menacing crowd of watchers, was the rock-steady knife-point that rested bloodily on his dirty, stretched neck.

  ‘Well, now,’ Matt said, very softly. ‘Shall we talk?’

  Silence.

  Matt’s dark head wagged sorrowfully. ‘Manners!’ he said, gently, and a trickle of blood wormed its way across the grimy skin of Croucher’s throat.

  Croucher spat a filthy word, the sound strangled.

  Matt sighed. ‘Tha’ss a shame, you don’t seem to be hearin’ so well,’ he said, pleasantly. And the knife slid, infinitely menacing, to Croucher’s right ear. Blood again, like dark rubies, dripping. ‘There. Is that better?’

  His captive’s instructions were explicit, and obscenely impossible to carry out.

  Incredibly, Matt grinned. ‘You do have a fine turn of phrase, I’ll say that for you.’ He lifted his head, looked slowly round the ring of faces. In the sudden silence a pigeon lifted from the ground of the square, wings clapping in the still, warm air. It landed ponderously upon the pumphead, its beady eyes regarding the scene with detached lack of interest. A short distance from them Kitty saw, to her astonishment, that the tiny, scavenging children still swarmed about the piles of discarded fruit as if nothing untoward were happening. Nothing, it seemed, could distract them from their frantic and pathetic search for sustenance.

  Matt took his time. Kitty watched him, breath held. ‘Seems to me,’ he said at last, as much to the watchers as to his captive, ‘that there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding.’ About his mouth there was still the faintest quirk of a smile.

  One of the crowd, oddly, tittered.

  Croucher was very still, black eyes wide and unblinking on Matt’s face.

  ‘Seems to me—’ Matt said again, more soberly this time, and directly into those savage dark eyes, ‘that – bein’ on the same side, so to speak – it don’t make too much sense, you an’ me scrapping like cat an’ dog?’

  A faint tremor ran through the small, tense body, the faintest shadow of relaxation.

  ‘Let’s get straight.’ Matt might have been holding a friendly conversation with a mate over a pint of ale. ‘This is your patch, right?’

  Imperceptibly, the dark head moved in assent.

  ‘An’ you thought I was hornin’ in – that I was a’ – he paused – ‘member of the opposition, so to speak?’

  Again the movement.

  ‘Wrong on both counts. Seems to me – if you’d given a feller a chance to ask, civil-like – that you were the gent I was lookin’ to meet.’ He let that sink in for a moment. The knife-point had not moved by a fraction. ‘Now. I’m sorry our acquaintance has started so’ – he paused again, and his long mouth twitched – ‘unfortunate—’

  Another snigger from the audience.

  ‘—but I s’pose that can happen to the best of us. Me and my sister, we’re’ – he crinkled his eyes a little, frankly now playing to the gallery; and it was working. Quite distinctly Kitty could sense the lessening of the hostility around them – ‘lookin’ for work,’ Matt finished, innocently. The phrase brought more laughter which quickly choked to astonished silence as, easily and slowly, Matt sat back on his heels, releasing his captive, and smiling his crooked, infectious grin. Casually he reversed the knife in his hand, held it, bouncing upon its slender blade, hilt first towards its owner, who had twisted to face him. ‘Any ideas?’

  The moment hung on a fragile threa
d of tension. Kitty, breath and heartbeat suspended, stood as if rooted to the spot. Then, slowly, the small grimy hand reached for the knife. Matt relinquished it. Hardly glancing at it Croucher tossed it, spinning, into the air and caught it, hefting it lightly and thoughtfully in his hand. ‘You an’ the Duchess,’ he said at last, pensively, ‘lookin’ fer work, you say?’

  Shakily, Kitty opened her mouth.

  ‘Yes,’ Matt said.

  There was the smallest of silences. Then Croucher’s face split into a ragged, evil grin. ‘Plenty of that around here,’ he said.

  (iii)

  ‘No!’ Kitty said for the dozenth time, dogged anger in her voice. ‘I won’t stay here! I won’t live like this!’ She jerked her head, indicating the dirty, sparsely furnished room. ‘I won’t, you hear?’ She turned her back on her brother and stared through the uncurtained window to the cheerless vista of filthy alleys below. Age-blackened buildings, their fabric rotten, their squalor exacerbated by the hopeless grime of poverty, huddled together around a nest of darkling streets and alleyways so narrow that they rarely felt the warmth of sunlight. On a sultry day such as today, with heavy storm clouds resting almost on top of the smoke-blackened, decaying chimneystacks, it looked to her like the worst vision of hell. ‘I won’t,’ she said again, miserably.

  ‘Kit—’ Matt’s voice showed the strain of an argument repeated to the point of quarrelling. ‘I keep telling you – we’ve no alternative. Not at the moment. And it won’t be for long, I promise you. At least we’re safe here – we’ve food, and shelter—’

  ‘Safety? Shelter?’ She flung to face him, her expression incredulous. ‘Here? Are you mad? Safety in a den of thieves? Shelter in a filthy, crawling pigsty that’s home to more villains than a dog is to fleas? I’d as soon take refuge in a snake-pit!’

  ‘Kitty!’

  ‘Matt, no! I won’t listen to you! We have to get out now! Now! Or God alone knows what will happen to us!’

  He gestured angrily. ‘And go where? Do what?’

  ‘I don’t care! Anywhere – anything – but this! Oh, Matt, can’t you see what will become of us if we stay?’ She was almost in tears. ‘You’ll become a hardened thief – hounded, hunted, never safe – flogged and sent to the hulks if – when – you’re caught. And I—?’ She stopped, said quietly, ‘What of me, Matt? What will become of me?’ It was the first time she had uttered the words openly, and they gave him pause.

  He shook his head, held out an awkward hand. ‘Nothing’ll happen to you, Kit. I’ll look after you.’

  She pulled away from him. ‘Oh?’ The single syllable was bitter, her smile entirely mirthless. ‘Well, that’s a great comfort, I must say.’ She turned back to the window. When she spoke again her voice had changed – it shook with an intensity of fear and loathing that brought him quickly to her, his hands on her shoulders. ‘I don’t want to live like a rat in a drain,’ she said. ‘And I won’t – Matt, I won’t become a whore! Have you seen them out there? Have you seen their eyes – their faces!’ She was trembling, as if fevered.

  He swung her to face him, his eyes fierce. ‘You? A whore? What’re you talking about?’

  She wrenched herself from his hands. Tears of anger and of fear smeared her angular face. In the three days since they had accompanied Croucher and his gang back to the slums of Whitechapel that were their sanctuary and their home these thoughts had haunted her. Whilst Matt had set off each morning in company with the young thieves to ‘work the market’ she had stayed here, huddled in this hateful room alone, looking fearfully into a hateful future, afraid to leave, afraid to stay, afraid for her brother and even more afraid for herself. She had seen and heard the activities about her, knew with certainty the trade of the women who flaunted their diseased charms in the doors and alleys of the shambles that were the back streets of Whitechapel. Corruption bred in the very air – and Matt was breathing it. ‘What else can there be for me here?’ she asked now, hopelessly. ‘What?’

  He looked at her, nonplussed. ‘Kit – we can’t leave now. Not just yet. I’ve promised to stay for a while. There’s a man – Moses Smith – he runs things round here. P’raps he’ll find something for you? But we can’t go. Not yet. We’ve nowhere to go. No friends. No money.’

  ‘I’d rather be friendless in the street than sheltered here!’ The words were violent.

  ‘That’s easy enough to say.’ He was fighting to hold his temper. He flung out his arm, long finger pointing. ‘Have you seen what’s out there? Do you know what you’re saying? We wouldn’t last twenty-four hours on our own, I tell you!’

  ‘We could try!’

  ‘No!’

  They glared at each other. He regained control of himself first. ‘Kitty – I’m sorry – I know how you hate it’ – almost, ruefully, he smiled – ‘tha’ss not exactly what I had in mind for myself. But for now it’s all we’ve got. We’ve food and a bed and a roof over our heads. And whatever you might say, tha’ss better than nothing. I’ve had to say that we’ll stay for a bit—’

  ‘Why?’

  With open hands he pacified her. ‘Kit – Croucher needs me. He has to pay dues to this Moses Smith, and his takin’s are down. He can do with a bit of what I’m bringing in. And – Kit, listen to me – he knows every wrinkle, every dodge there is! We can use him, p’raps. Make a killing, quick, then get out. Set you up in a little shop somewhere—’

  In despair she turned from him. ‘Oh Matt!’

  The door opened. Weed jerked a sour head. ‘You’re wanted dahnstairs. Mr Smiff’s ’ere.’

  Kitty glanced a sharp enquiry at her brother.

  ‘The man for the rent,’ he said. ‘And – Kitty – if we know what’s good for us, we’ll pay it.’

  * * *

  The place to which Weed led them Kitty had never been in before. It was in the foundations of the tenement – a long, low cellar with weeping, arched walls and roof and a damp flagged floor. It was lit by smoking tallow candles whose acrid smell lay upon the dank air like scum on dark water. There were benches set along the walls, and low tables. On one side the benches were occupied by the child thieves and mendicants that Kitty had seen in the market. Here and there she recognized a face. Most of them greeted her brother with, it seemed to her, some respect – her they ignored. For the first time she realized that Croucher’s disreputable battalion was not exclusively male; here and there a grimy ribbon, a pathetically tidied head of long, no doubt louse-infected hair bespoke a girl-child, though in no other way, either in signs of cleanliness or softness, did they betray themselves from their fellows. Their faces were as hard-eyed, as fearsomely sly as any other to be seen about the room.

  As Kitty and Matt were shepherded into the vast cellar by an impatient Weed and waved to a seat beside Springer, the acrobat, who neither glanced at nor acknowledged them, they were followed in by a woman in her late twenties who was escorting a frail-looking but strikingly attractive girl a little older than Kitty herself. She had seen them both before from a distance. They lived, she believed, on the floor above the room she shared with Matt. The pretty one, slight, golden-haired and blue-eyed, looked death-pale and extremely unwell. Her friend, a buxom brass-blonde whose dark eyebrows were at surprising and violent variance with her hair, supported her solicitously and settled her on a bench not far from where Kitty sat. There were others too, men and women, that she had not seen before. She glanced at Matt, raising questioning brows, and he leaned to her.

  ‘That’s Pol, and Lottie,’ he said, indicating the two girls. ‘They both work for this Smith bloke too – seems just about everyone does. The chap next to them’s called Squirt. He’s a bouncer’ – he caught her puzzled look, ‘—steals from shops. Kids on that he wants to buy something, then nicks whatever he can lay hands on while the shopkeeper’s occupied.’ He paused, running his eyes over the oddly quiet assembly. He indicated with a movement of his head a small, well-dressed whippet of a man who leaned negligently against the wall behind Pol and the wilting Lott
ie. ‘That’s Johnny Sly. Best dragsman in London, so Crouch reckons—’

  ‘Matt – must you talk their ridiculous language? Dragsman?’

  Matt was patient. ‘He relieves carriage and cab-passengers of their excess luggage by climbing up behind and cutting the straps—’

  ‘Very public-spirited,’ she said, dourly. ‘Tell me – is there anyone here who isn’t a thief?’

  He shrugged. ‘Must be, I s’pose. Moses Smith runs some legitimate business – well, sort of anyway. He’s got a Song and Supper Rooms somewhere round Bethnal Green – that’s where Pol and Lottie work—’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Just what it sounds like. A kind of theatre where you eat. Or p’raps it’s an eating house where people entertain you – I don’t know.’

  ‘And that’s all that goes on there?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘It seems unlikely,’ she said quietly, ‘that anything this Moses Smith is involved in can be that straight.’

  He shrugged, and turned away from her. She brought her attention to Croucher’s unusually silent street arabs. She had picked up some of their names now – or rather their nicknames, for none appeared to be blessed with such a luxury as a true Christian name. Weasel was the rat-faced boy who had faced her over the knife and had been ready, she knew, to kill her for it. Tater and Gasser were brothers and looked it, brown-haired and pale-eyed, their mouths twin hollows of blackened, rotting teeth. Og the Shaller was a slight, hauntingly pretty child with a clear, piping voice and a vocabulary that would shock a docker; he was, according to Matt, the most accomplished young mendicant to be found between here and Poplar, often bringing home from his West End haunts more in his begging box than Croucher’s best thieves made in the market at far greater risk. He could not, she thought, be more than eight years old. Beside him sat an ugly urchin that Kitty surmised upon the evidence of a grubby scrap of ribbon that dangled from the lank and filthy hair to be a girl. As she studied her some sixth sense told the girl she was being observed. Venomous eyes flickered to Kitty’s face, and the child scowled menacingly. Kitty hastily looked away. Of all the threats of the past few days she still found these poisonous children the most difficult to come to terms with. Around her subdued conversations whispered along the cold walls. There was a strange air of tension amongst the gathering that kept the children fidgeting and voices hushed. Then, as a door at the far end of the cellar opened all sound died and in total silence three men entered.