Sweet Songbird

by Sweet Songbird (retail) (epub)

  Her brother Matt could not get over his sister’s new-found glory.

  ‘Who’d ’a’ thought it, moi owd gal?’ He still often used that affectionately exaggerated Suffolk accent to her, though now in normal speech it was more often than not overlaid by the flat London accent, as his vocabulary was laced with the pithy Cockney slang. ‘You’ll ’ave your owd face on a broadsheet next, you see if you don’t! I heard the Guv’nor say the other night as how he reckons you’ve got the makin’s of real talent—’

  Kitty lifted her head in a swift, impatiently irritated movement. ‘For heaven’s sake, Matt – just because that awful Spider calls’ – she hesitated – ‘Mr Peveral “the Guv’nor” does it mean you have to? And,’ she added, honest peevishness showing itself, ‘does it take Luke Peveral’s word to show my own brother if I have or haven’t got some talent?’

  Matt grinned, infuriatingly knowingly, and did not bother to reply.

  She looked at him, a faint worried line fine-drawn between her brows. Lately, to her already strong dislike of Luke Peveral had been added a growing unease about his – as she saw it – unhealthy influence upon her brother. For if she had escaped the net of the man’s doubtful allure, Matt most certainly had not. Since the day that Luke had caught him trying to pick his pocket and had shown such unexpected clemency the boy had been all but enslaved; Luke Peveral was his hero, and – more disturbing to Kitty – his model, his boyish devotion and admiration rivalling the faithful Spider’s. Luke, obviously aware of the boy’s hero-worship, treated him with a casual and tolerant amusement, accepting, it seemed to the infuriated Kitty, her brother’s devotion as his natural due, and doing nothing whatsoever to discourage the growing close association between Matt and Spider – an association that seemed to her to promise nothing but trouble for her brother.

  ‘Matt,’ she said now, abruptly, ‘do you think it’s a good thing for you to be seeing as much as you do of Spider Murphy? The man’s a notorious drunkard, and his—’ She stopped. Matt had unfolded his lanky frame and stood, towering above her, shaking his dark head.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. And oddly the word stopped her in her tracks. ‘Spider’s my friend. He’s all right. And anyway – even if he weren’t – it’s none of your business.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘But nothing, moi owd Kitty.’ There was steel beneath the usual affection, and in the dark sharp glance. ‘You got to face it, Kit. I’m not your baby brother any more. You’re makin’ your life, an’ I don’t interfere with that. If you want us to stay mates – you got to do the same for me.’

  ‘But Matt! Can’t you see? If you get too involved with these people we’ll never get away! Never be free—!’

  ‘Get away?’ His voice was suddenly soft. ‘Who wants to get away?’

  ‘I do!’

  He watched her for a long, long moment. Then he shook his head. ‘But I don’t, Kit. And I never will. You have to face it. This is where I belong. Whether you like it or not.’ All trace of the spurious accent was gone. His mouth was hard.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe that. I’ll never believe it.’

  He was struggling with his temper, trying to hold it, trying to prevent sharp words from becoming a quarrel as they so often had before. ‘Kit – listen to me. I’m sorry. I know what a disappointment I’ve always been to you. But I can’t help what I am—’

  It was a match to tinder. ‘And what’s that?’ The words were bitterly angry. She glared at him. ‘Say it, Matt. Tell me what you are? And as you say it – think of Father. And of Sir George, who did his best for you. And of me—’

  He flung away from her. ‘I can’t help it!’ he said again, his voice shaking. ‘Why won’t you understand that? I can’t help it! Kitty – I couldn’t stop myself thieving any more than I could stop myself from breathing, or growing! Why can’t you see that? No matter what happens – I’ll never be able to stop—’

  ‘I don’t believe it! I won’t believe it!’ She caught his arm. ‘Matt – please – listen to me! I’ve discovered something I can do, and can do well. Can’t you see what that could mean? Eventually I might be able to get out of this rat hole and earn us an honest living. Oh – I know it won’t be yet – I need experience, and I need to find how to get away from Moses. But I’ll do it! I will! And it won’t be an easy life, I know that too – but surely, anything’s better than this? How long, Matt, before you’re caught? How long before they send you to Newgate, to tread the wheel? Do you want that? Do you? Matt – somewhere there’s a chance for us – I feel it, I know it – but if we’re going to take it you have to promise to give up thieving—’

  ‘I can’t.’ The words were flat. ‘Will you listen to me? I’m telling you – I can’t. Not now. Not ever.’

  ‘Is that what your precious Luke Peveral’s put into your head?’ she asked, bitterly. ‘Is it? And you’d listen to that – that thief – before you’d listen to me—?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Kit, will you stop this? It’s nothing to do with the Guv’nor. It’s to do with me! Me!’ He was shouting now. ‘Leave me be, will you? Stop trying to change me! I know what I’m doing! I know what I want. And you’ll break both of us if you try to stop me!’

  She stepped back from him. She was shaking violently with anger and with a disappointment so brutal she hardly knew how to contain it. In the past weeks small dreams had dared to grow, like fragile flowers defying the frosts of March. Somewhere, sometime, a new life. A life without the threat of the whip and the treadmill and the iron bars of Newgate hanging over her brother’s head. Her dread for him was often fierce as physical sickness. He stared now, defying her, miserably unable to explain himself any further, apparently obstinately unwilling to listen. Remembered words, words she struggled time and again, unsuccessfully, to keep from her memory rose, soft and deadly in her head – ‘Are you familiar, Matt Daniels, with the saying that those born to hang will never drown?’

  ‘You should have gone that day,’ she heard herself say, bitterly and softly. ‘You damned well should have drowned with them. Before you disgraced your father’s name and broke my heart—’

  White-faced, he stepped back from her, as if she had struck him.

  The unforgivable words streamed from her like helpless tears. ‘You’re worthless! You always have been! It’s your fault! All of it! Everything that’s happened – your fault! Don’t you dare – don’t you ever dare! – come to me for help again! Stay with your good-for-nothing, pitch-fingered mates! See if I care! I despise them and I despise you—!’ She stopped, appalled at her own words. His face was bleached with pain and anger. Without a word he turned and left her.

  * * *

  The breach was deadly. For days they treated each other like the strangers they had become and barely spoke. Kitty, aware once more of the damage done by an unruly temper and an even more unruly tongue, was utterly miserable. But yet she could not bring herself to take the first step to reconciliation – if indeed such a step were possible. She snapped at Pol, flared up at kindly George. When Moses, prompted by the practical Midge, who pointed out that the long trip from Market Row in still-bitter weather could hardly improve Kitty’s voice, offered her a room of her own – at twice the rent – in a lodging house not too far from the Rooms she jumped at the chance. The move, however, was not a particularly good one, for though it afforded her the privacy that she had longed for it cut her off from Pol and from Matt and made reconciliation with her brother even more unlikely. His intransigence, somewhat unfairly, she used to fuel the fire of her dislike for Luke Peveral; the man was a pernicious influence and – totally unable to accept Matt’s own explanation of his compulsion to thieve – she chose to believe that her brother’s hero-worship of a man steeped in corruption was to blame. Hurt and miserable, she threw herself into her work, learning new songs, practising movement and gesture before the long, fly-specked mirror in her room. And each night she sang, and each night she became for those few, too-short minutes, that
other Kitty Daniels, and was transiently happy. She was learning, slowly, the trick of handling her difficult audience, and her fear, though still fed and kept alive by nerves each night, retired like a small, sharp-clawed creature to the corner of her mind, patiently awaiting its opportunity to spring.

  To her astonishment it was Luke Peveral who intervened at last in her quarrel with Matt.

  It was a fortnight before Christmas. The winter had been a dreadful one so far and promised no better. There had been riots, brutally suppressed, in the streets of the city by a starveling population calling for bread to fill their bellies and the bellies of their dying children. They received, these helpless dregs of a prosperous nation, whose average expectance of life was less than twenty-three years, earnest lectures upon thrift and self-help and the evils of drink. And, when these failed lamentably to cure the bad habits of protest and riot, vicious prison sentences and a close acquaintance with the whipping post and the treadmill were substituted for sanctimonious words. Standards, after all, must be maintained in society, and the poor kept in their place. The thieves and whores of Stepney and Shoreditch felt little if any sympathy. Starvation and disease were the old enemies. You cheated them if you could, as you cheated any and everyone else. It was the way of things. To protest was a waste of time and of precious energy. What was the use? What politician was interested in filling the bellies of the unfranchised poor, or of clearing the festering rubbish from their streets, or ensuring a clean and healthy water supply? What votes would that buy? As soon protest to Lucifer that he should clean up hell. And so, on the whole, the unrest passed the criminal fraternity by, and the weather and the high price of food simply added another unpleasant dimension to the struggle to survive.

  Sitting at the round table, Kitty heard the subject discussed quite often – for Moses had firm views on the subject; in his view the rioters should get back to their sweatshops and leave the streets to those who knew what to do with them. Civil unrest meant an uncomfortable number of regular policemen and special constables on the streets, and that was bad for business. If people were indeed starving to death, what the dickens were they about, wasting time in marching the streets and besieging an unsympathetic Parliament? Were they going to feed their children better from Newgate?

  Kitty sat one night half-listening for at least the dozenth time to the aggrieved Moses’ complaints and watching in fascination the young man who, sitting beside Luke Peveral, was with swift confident pencil-strokes transferring the ranting Moses to the pages of a sketchbook that lay on the table before him. A recently acquired drinking-partner of Luke’s, he had been joining the company assembled around Moses’ table for the past few nights, always with his sketchbook and pencil at the ready.

  Luke, openly amused at Moses’ conservative reaction to the crisis, was mildly and mischievously egging him on. ‘You can’t expect a man not to protest when, after working in intolerable conditions for intolerably long hours, he has to stand by and watch his children die as the pittance he’s earned goes up in the smoke of high prices and extortionate rents. Can you?’

  Kitty noted a little acidly that Luke’s sympathy, such as it was, did not apparently extend itself to the hundreds of thousands of women in the same boat.

  Moses twitched disgustedly at such idiotic notions. ‘You should start a Mission, my boy, that you should! Teach the poor bastards how to take care of themselves, eh? Pass on a few of your skills. I don’t see you starving, eh, Jem boy?’

  The young man beside Luke lifted his head at the sound of his name and smiled a little abstractedly. He was perhaps a year or so older than Kitty herself, fair and slight with a pleasant, boyish face and thick straight hair that flopped over his eyes and lay in shaggy untidiness on his neck. He obviously had not been listening to the conversation.

  ‘Luke’s about to start a self-help Mission for the poor of Stepney,’ Moses said, grinning hugely.

  Jem smiled back. He had an extremely nice smile, Kitty thought, vivid and warm, that brought bright life to his face. ‘Well, he’s sure helped me out once or twice, Mr Smith—’

  He had the strangest accent she had ever heard – a soft, not at all unattractive drawl that Pol, very impressed, had told her had its origins in the Confederate States of America. ‘There’s some sort o’ shindig goin’ on out there at the moment,’ she had said, at Kitty’s questioning, ‘or so Luke told Lot, anyway. An’ ’e’s bin fightin’ in it. Funny, in’t it? Don’ look no kind of soldier ter me. But, Gawd, – ’ave yer seen ’im drink? ’E can do that all right, ’parently ’e told Lot ’e’d found ’imself fightin’ on the wrong side and scarpered. Don’t make a lot o’ sense ter me. But ’e’s a sweet little thing, ain’t ’e? An’ as fer them drawin’s of ’is – bloody marvellous they are! Got a name fer it, too,’ she had added, giggling. ‘James Beauregard O’Connell if yer please. Sounds like the bleedin’ Kings of Ireland, don’t it?’

  Kitty watched him now as he picked up his pencil again. Already several of his sketches and charcoal drawings were pinned about the walls and behind the bar, to the much-denied but quite obvious delight of his villainous subjects. The pictures were like nothing that Kitty had ever seen before – neither the heavy and rather lifeless oil paintings that she remembered adorning the dark walls of Westwood Grange, nor the stylized, minutely detailed book illustrations to which she was used. James O’Connell’s art was a bold, inventive affair of undisciplined line and quite startling life. It astonished Kitty that from a few apparently random lines, boldly drawn, a vital and astonishing likeness could appear. For days she had been trying to gather the courage to engage the intriguing young man in conversation, but had not yet managed it. She craned her head a little now, to see what he was doing. The face upon the paper smiled, defiantly sweet, desperately vulnerable. Lottie’s face. Kitty looked sharply away and caught Luke’s eyes upon her. Before she could turn from him he leaned towards her. ‘How long are you going to let your poor little sod of a brother eat his heart out?’ he asked, pleasantly.

  She blinked, too surprised, almost, to be angry. ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, I think you heard.’ He reached for his glass of wine, sipped it, watching her over the rim.

  ‘I – don’t know what you mean.’

  The long mouth tucked itself in at the corners and he made a small gesture of exasperation. ‘Suit yourself.’

  She waited for a moment. He said no more. Annoyed at her own defensiveness, she found herself saying sharply, ‘It takes two to make a quarrel.’

  ‘And one to finish it.’

  She was silent.

  Unusually soberly he watched her. ‘He’s a child,’ he said, unexpectedly. ‘You aren’t. And I’m not talking about age alone. I don’t know what the fight was about. I do know he’s unhappy. You’re all he’s got.’

  ‘It’s his own fault if he’s unhappy,’ she said, stubbornly.

  ‘Very possibly.’

  Oddly, she could not leave it. ‘He knows where I am.’

  He said nothing.

  She fiddled with her glass of watered wine, staring into its pale depths, the sudden recollection of her brother’s white, drawn face choking her to silence.

  ‘What did you fight about?’ Luke’s voice was neutral. She could not tell if he were truly interested or not. She glanced at Moses and away. Luke did not miss the look. ‘He can’t hear. What did you fight about?’

  ‘His thieving,’ she said, flatly, and lifted her head to look with direct dislike into the narrow, guarded eyes. ‘I hate it. I always have. I always will.’

  He nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. ‘I see.’

  ‘I don’t think you do.’

  Infuriatingly and imperturbably he half-smiled.

  ‘I promised our father I’d care for him,’ she found herself saying, miserably, ’and I’ve tried –I have tried – but—’

  ‘But I don’t see how you can keep that promise if you aren’t speaking to him?’ The practical words were quizzical.

&nbs
p; ‘He doesn’t want me to.’

  ‘Are you quite sure of that?’

  The battered upright piano was being pushed to the centre of the stage, its candles lit. Kitty felt the sudden, inevitable onslaught of nerves. Her hands were ice-cold and clammy. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re wrong.’

  She shook her head. Her throat was closing. This was the night. This was the night when her voice would desert her. She stood up, shakily.

  Luke leaned forward. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said again, gently. ‘Spider knows. He talks to Spider. Whatever you said to him it all but broke him. Can you stand that? He won’t come to you. If you want him back whole you’ll have to do the asking. Tell me, little songbird—’ The eyes narrowed further, their gleam inquisitive. ‘What the hell was it you said to him?’

  You should have drowned with them.

  She stared at him in silence, biting her lip.

  He leaned back, letting her go.

  She escaped onto the stage.

  * * *

  She knew he was right, and characteristically, having admitted it, she acted upon the knowledge immediately. As she stepped from the stage the second time that evening she saw Matt pushing his way through the crowds towards the draped door, his hand in that of a tall, red-headed girl with a dirty neck and a wide gap between her two front teeth. Biddy had not lasted long. Quickly Kitty slipped through the crowd to cut him off, acknowledging applause and congratulations as she went.

  He faced her with flat hostility in his eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, clearly and directly. ‘What I said was unforgivable. And I didn’t mean it.’ She steadfastly ignored the glances and open eavesdropping of an interested audience. She kept her eyes and her voice very steady, willing him to respond, to take the olive branch she offered. ‘I’m truly sorry, Matt – I can’t say I understand – but I’ll try. If you’ll let me. I can’t bear for us not to be friends.’