The Mud Rose

by Renee Duke

  “Thank you, sir. Blessings on you, sir.”

  “See what I mean?” she said to the others, once the man was out of sight. “That brings us up to fourpence ha’penny. Can’t remember when we last did that well in a day. You lot must have brought us luck. Here.”

  Fishing three farthings out of the day’s takings, she held them out to Paige.

  “What are those for?” Paige asked.

  “Your suppers. Like I said, you brought us luck. I knows you’ve got a bit of brass, but you’re new to London. Prices here might be higher than you’re used to.”

  Appalled at the idea of taking money from this half-starved waif, Paige stepped back from the proffered hand. “No, no,” she said quickly. “It’s all right, Hetty. We’re all right. We’ve got enough to get by on.”

  “You sure?”

  Paige nodded vigorously.

  “Right, then. You up for getting some grub?”

  Again, Paige nodded. Having had only a share of the cabbages to sustain them since meeting Hetty and Pip in what, in Victorian times, had been mid-morning, she and the boys were feeling, as Jack put it, “a bit peckish”.

  An astounding assortment of edibles could be obtained from pubs, shops, and stalls throughout the East End. People living rough, or in lodgings with limited cooking facilities looked to food venders to provide them with ready-made meals. They could have soup, sandwiches, baked potatoes, cups of hot peas, meat pies, boiled meat puddings, pig and sheep’s trotters, oysters, pickled whelks, or, the ultimate luxury, fish and chips.

  Ice creams were available, too, as were baked goods such as muffins, cakes, biscuits, fruit pies, tarts, and hard-baked items such as bull’s eyes, peppermint sticks, toffee, and lollipops. Jack’s ever-active sweet tooth automatically drew him to all of the latter.

  Paige shook her head in wonderment. “I don’t know how you stay so skinny, Jack. You hate sports, and with all the cakes and candy you put away, you should be totally obese.”

  “I have a high metabolism,” he replied airily.

  “Dunno what that means, but you’d be best off with summut else,” Hetty told him as he eyed a tray of sticky buns. “Lots of kids fill up on sweet stuff, but Old Rosie always said to get what’s good for you first, and only go for the other if you’ve extra dosh.”

  “Good advice,” said Paige. “But don’t expect Jack to take it.”

  Nor did he. After surreptitiously checking to make sure his pennies had all been minted before the Queen’s Jubilee year of 1887, he spent a whole one on some gingerbread and a three cornered jam-puff called a Coventry.

  Hetty clucked disapprovingly. “Boys! Pip’d do the same if I didn’t watch him. Cruds is much better for you.”

  She led them to a stall selling curds and whey and purchased a halfpenny glass for herself and Pip to share. Intrigued by the thought of eating something she had only heard about from the “Little Miss Muffet” nursery rhyme, Paige did the same.

  Hetty nodded toward a man with a pony cart. “Pip and me’ll be having meat pies from him over yonder as well. Either of you fancy that?”

  “How much are they?” asked Paige.

  “A penny.”

  Paige hesitated. She had already used a halfpenny of her money, and bringing out all their coins might arouse suspicion, especially the silver threepenny pieces.

  “Uh, well, we really only have my halfpenny change and maybe a penny of Dane’s left to spend.”

  “That’s all right. Only going to be offering a ha’penny m’self. I’m usually lucky at the toss.”

  “The toss?” said Dane.

  “Yeah. If you’ve only got a ha’penny, you can toss the pieman, heads or tails. If you wins, you gets a pie for a ha’penny. If he wins, he keeps the ha’penny and don’t have to give you a pie.”

  Dane also had his allergies to consider. “What’s in those pies besides meat? Some food can make me sick, so I have to be careful. Do they have any mushrooms, or beans of any kind?”

  Hetty laughed “Nothing that fancy in any I’ve had. Just onion, and maybe a bit of tater or summut.”

  Reassured, Paige and Dane followed her across the street, with Pip racing ahead to stroke the pieman’s pony.

  The pieman allowed Hetty four tosses and did not seem to mind when she won three of them.

  While she was choosing her pies, Paige and the boys sampled the curds Paige had bought.

  Paige screwed up her face. “Ugh. That’s disgusting. Forget the spider. Miss Muffet was running from this stuff.”

  “I concur,” said Jack, popping a piece of gingerbread into his mouth to take away the taste.

  “I don’t think they’re all that bad,” said Dane. To prove it, he took another.

  “You wouldn’t,” Paige sneered. “You like liver. And broccoli. And that awful orangeade Great-Grand-mére Marchand makes.”

  The pie Hetty brought her met with a much better reception.

  “That was great,” she said as she finished off the last few crumbs. “What was in it?”

  “Eels. Eel pie’s me favourite. Pip likes mutton better, so I got him and Dane that.”

  Dane and Jack laughed at the expression on Paige’s face.

  She shot them a glare, but then shrugged. “I never thought eels would be something I’d put on my list of acceptable foods, but I guess they’re okay. Hurry up and eat that jam thing, Jack. It’s starting to attract wasps.”

  “Bothers you, does they?” Hetty asked as Paige edged back.

  “More than bother. Dane’s not the only one with allergies. Mine’s to stinging insects.”

  She reached into her skirt pocket to feel for the adrenaline injector she and her brother never went anywhere without—even into the past. Might cause a bit of a stir if I have to use it though, she thought.

  Fortunately, she didn’t. Jack obligingly finished his Coventry and the wasps moved on.

  “Where’re you lot planning to spend the night?” Hetty inquired. “If you i’nt got nothing fixed up, I could have a word with Nellie. She might let you kip in the shed with us. Be a bit of a squash, but—”

  “That’s all right,” said Paige. “Don’t worry about us, Hetty. We’ve got somewhere to go. You did a lot for us in just showing us around.”

  “Show you more tomorrow, if you like.”

  “That’d be great. There’s some business we might have to attend to first, though. It could be a while before you meet up with us again.”

  The time jumps the medallion made followed some mysterious pattern of its own. Weeks, even months, might have passed when they next materialized in Victorian London.

  Hetty nodded. “Whatever suits. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

  With that, she and Pip turned and made their way down the street.

  Watching them go, Dane looked aggrieved. “Why couldn’t we have gone with them? It would have been fun to sleep in a shed.”

  His sister wrinkled up her nose in disdain. “You might think so. I beg to differ. I don’t do fleas and rats, and their ‘doss’ probably has both. Besides, we should get back to our own time. I want to ask a few questions about this one and try to figure out how we’re supposed to be helping Hetty and Pip.”

  Chapter Five

  No matter how far medallion users roamed in other times, saying the connecting rhyme always returned them to the place they had originally departed from. When Paige and the boys crept back inside the Ragged Museum’s mock kitchen, no one seemed to have noticed their absence.

  As soon as the talk was over, Trish took Mr. Marchand’s party around the entire museum. Having already taken several photos of the care group, he now used his own models to add atmosphere. For this, he applied ‘dirt’ to their faces, and made Dane take off his glasses, which he didn’t think street kids were likely to have owned.

  “Hetty didn’t say anything about your glasses,” Paige whispered. “She must have thought they were left over from our affluent days.”

  The tour concluded in the gift sh
op where Mr. Marchand was indeed able to purchase a backboard and two sets of fingerstocks.

  “Planning to use those on anyone we know?” Uncle Gareth inquired.

  Mr. Marchand grinned. “Someone has to demonstrate their function on film.”

  “You’re going to include the Ragged Museum in your documentary, then?” Trish asked.

  “I think so. I’ll call you in two or three days to set things up.”

  Mrs. Marchand and Aunt Augusta were not at Trafalgar Square for their arranged reunion.

  “Surprised?” Mr. Marchand remarked to Uncle Gareth.

  “Not really. I tend to lose track of time in bookshops myself. And Gus did say something about taking in some new exhibit at the British Museum as well. Do you think we should feed the young while we’re waiting? We ate early and they usually have their tea around now.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Why don’t you find them a take-away and I’ll stay here. You can bring me something back. If we all go, Tania and Gus might turn up and wonder where we are.”

  “They wouldn’t have to wonder if they had cell phones. You could just text them.”

  Paige wanted a cell phone of her own, and never missed an opportunity to point out their usefulness.

  Mr. Marchand shook his head. “You know how your mother feels about modern technology. She wouldn’t even have a computer if it wasn’t so hard to get ribbons for her typewriter.”

  “My mum’s the same,” said Jack. “And my dad.”

  “Steady on,” protested Uncle Gareth. “I quite like my computer.”

  “You don’t have a mobile,” his son argued.

  “Only because they don’t confine themselves to letting you talk to people. They do a hundred and one other things as well. That confuses a poor old duffer like me.”

  Just then Jack spied his mother and Mrs. Marchand coming across the square. “There they are,” he said, pointing.

  As they approached, Mr. Marchand called out to them. “Hello, girls. Forget the agreed upon time, did we?”

  “No,” his wife replied. “We’d have been here on the dot if we’d been able to take the Tube, but a ‘suspicious package’ has temporarily shut down the line. Hoofing it here took a bit longer.”

  “You could have taken a bus,” Mr. Marchand pointed out. “Or a taxi.”

  “Yes, well, with the Underground having problems, the world and his wife were trying to get on the bus. And London cabbies are maniacs.”

  Mr. Marchand groaned. “One bad experience over twenty years ago—”

  “Was quite enough to put me off, thank you. Anyway, we’re here now. Have the children had their tea?”

  “Not yet. We were about to get them burgers, or pizza, or something. Still can, if that kind of meal’s agreeable to you.”

  “Any kind of meal’s agreeable to me. We were on the trail of an out-of-print book that could provide vital information for my next novel. Caught up in the thrill of the chase, we decided to skip lunch.”

  Mr. Marchand clicked his tongue. “It’s not good to miss lunch.”

  “Says the man who’s missed many a meal when engrossed in a project.”

  “True. But you shouldn’t have deprived your sister of hers.”

  “She wasn’t bothered, were you, Gus?”

  Aunt Augusta smiled and shook her head. “I was pursuing some rare volumes of my own, Alan. Lunch seemed an unnecessary waste of time. I’m ready for a little something now, however.”

  Having recently partaken of Victorian fare, the children weren’t but could hardly say so.

  While waiting for their orders to be filled, Jack tried to find out what their parents knew about children like Hetty and Pip.

  “Do you know anything about mudlarks, Daddy?” he asked his father.

  “The feathered ones belonging to the Grallindae family, or the human urchins who used to poke around in the Thames?”

  “The human urchins.”

  “I know it was a miserable existence. They spent much of their time cold and wet. That made them susceptible to chills and, back then, chills often turned to pneumonia. They were also exposed to a multitude of water-borne diseases and risked infection every time they stepped on a rusty nail or cut themselves with a piece of broken glass. In the days before antibiotics, such things could be fatal.”

  “The pittance they made from what they found barely kept them alive anyway,” put in Aunt Augusta. “And the ones who survived didn’t have enough marketable skills to get any better type of work as they got older. Considered the lowest of the low, society’s only expectation of them was that they would eventually become thieves and spend the rest of their lives in and out of prison. Which, I’m sad to say, was what happened in a great many cases.”

  “What about mudlarks who went to schools like the one we were at today?”

  “They usually did all right,” said Uncle Gareth. “Even a small amount of education could put youngsters in the running for a shop job or domestic service. Office work, too, if they were clever. The school would also have provided clothes and grooming materials, thus allowing them to go off to interviews looking reasonably presentable.”

  “Why didn’t more of them go, then?” asked Paige.

  Mr. Marchand gave her a wry smile. “Because then, as now, some kids just don’t like school. Even those who wanted to better themselves would have found it cut into their work day. They couldn’t really afford to take learning over earning. Unlike you, they didn’t have doting parents plying them with food and drink. Speaking of which, ours is ready for pick-up, so let’s go get it, eat it, and head for the theatre.”

  The children usually loved going to the theatre but, weary from tramping around London with Hetty and Pip, they all found this particular performance a bit long. Going home, it was all Paige could do to keep from falling asleep on the train. Dane did fall asleep, but Jack didn’t. Like most non-morning people, he could last far into the night.

  Uncle Gareth had left his estate car near the train station in Slough, and by the time the train pulled in there, Dane was awake again, and Paige had got her second wind.

  “Don’t forget that Grantie Etta wanted us to stop off at Rosebank on the way home.” Aunt Augusta reminded her husband as he slid behind the wheel.

  “Bit late, isn’t it?” Mr. Marchand commented.

  Uncle Gareth laughed. “Not for her. The old girl might be coming up for a hundred and five, but she’s still quite the night owl. Says she naps enough during the day to keep herself going.”

  Sure enough, several lights were still on in the large medieval-era house when they got to the end of its long driveway and pulled up behind another car.

  “Seems like we’re not her only visitors,” said Mr. Marchand.

  Jack identified it as Uncle Edmond’s car. Uncle Edmond was not, however, the driver. Inside, his son and daughter-in-law were in the sitting room chatting with Grantie Etta.

  “Hello, my dears,” said Grantie Etta. “Look who’s here.”

  “Trevor. Maxine,” Mrs. Marchand beamed with delight as her cousin stood to greet her. “What brings you from your wild moors?”

  “The city of York is hardly a moor,” Uncle Trevor responded reprovingly. Though he was not, technically, their uncle, the children addressed most of their adult relatives by courtesy titles.

  “We’ll be back for Grantie’s birthday,” he went on. “Right now we’re just passing through. If you were wondering about the car, mine’s in the shop. Started making strange noises on the way down. We’ll be staying with Mum and Dad for two days, and then it’s off to Greenland.”

  “Something to do with Max’s beloved Vikings?”

  “Yes. A friend of hers has turned up something interesting. Tomorrow we might go to Bristol to see a friend of mine. He’s also turned up something interesting, albeit far removed from Vikings. He heard about Alan’s documentary on those medieval letters and thinks he might have something in his archives pertaining to them. He rang my mobile while we we
re here having tea with Grantie. You, of course, don’t have one, and since she didn’t know Alan’s number, we had to wait ’til you got here to ask if he and Gareth would like to go and take a look. Would you, Alan? Or have you already ‘wrapped everything up’, as you film people say?”

  “I can always add to what I’ve got if it seems warranted. Trouble is, we promised the kids we’d do some more sightseeing in London tomorrow.”

  “Can’t Gus and Tania handle that?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Mrs. Marchand replied. “We have appointments with some rare books dealers in Oxford.”

  “Oh. Well, if it were anywhere else, I’d suggest you take them with you, but we can’t have you exposing impressionable young minds to that sort of place.” Uncle Trevor glanced at Uncle Gareth to see if he would rise to this bait. Like all the Hollingsworths before him, Uncle Trevor had gone to Cambridge University. Uncle Gareth was an Oxford man.

  Amiable by nature, Uncle Gareth made no reply.

  Jack, however, did.

  “My Daddy went to Oxford,” he said hotly, “and I shall be going there too. It’s the best university in the world.”

  “Really?” Uncle Trevor feigned astonishment. “I could name several instances in which it doesn’t hold a candle to Cambridge.”

  “But you’re not going to,” said his wife.

  “Unless you feel sufficiently threatened that you have to argue with a little child,” murmured Uncle Gareth.

  Mr. Marchand threw his hands up impatiently. “Enough with the Oxford-Cambridge thing. Let’s get back to this guy who might be able to provide me with additional footage. You’ve obviously only got tomorrow to meet with him, Trev, so how about it, kids? Can you wait a day?”

  The boys both nodded.

  Paige wasn’t as quick to agree. “I guess so.” She sighed. “It’ll cost you, though.”

  “How much?”

  “Five pounds extra spending money—each.”

  “Deal.”

  Mrs. Marchand shook her head. “You really shouldn’t negotiate with her, Alan.”

  “Why not? The kid’s a born entrepreneur. She’ll eventually amass a fortune and be able to keep us in our old age.”