by Lyn Gardner
Then he saw Rose standing in the doorway and brightened. “At least I’ve still got my Rose, and I couldn’t do without her. She’s been a daughter to me.”
Ned smiled and stood up. “Come on, Grace, we must return to Shoreditch. I need to send a letter to America by the evening post.” He turned to Thomas. “Grace and I will discuss your offer of work, Thomas. I’ll be in touch. Thank you.”
It was a week later. Lizzie Gawkin, face as plain as flour and eyes as sharp and steely as a stiletto, stepped out of the Southwark lodging house where she had arrived late the previous night. The clock of St Olave’s Church struck ten. She and the Infant Phenomenon were not expected at Campion’s music hall until early evening.
She drank in the bustling street, where cabs and carriages fought for space and the voices of hawkers and ballad sellers, all eager to trade their wares, competed with the yaps and barks of a pack of dogs as they fought over scraps. Ah, London. She loved it. Although of course she would prefer to be in Piccadilly rather than these stinking streets. But at last she was within the grasp of the life of luxury that she knew she’d always deserved. She just had to be very clever.
It was good to be back after all this time. Twelve, nearly thirteen years of being patient. Five years of tedium buried alive in Balham, followed by seven trailing around filthy continental music halls with the brat, and then close to a year on the northern hall circuit. Biding her time until it was safe to return to London and finally put the squeeze on Lord Henry Easingford.
She patted her pocket where she kept the torn-out page from The Times, dated a few weeks previously. It speculated that the Queen would shortly make Henry Easingford a privy councillor. Now was the moment to strike.
Lizzie needed to be in London to carry out her plan, but she would have felt safer if she’d signed a contract with a music hall north of the river. There she was less likely to be recognised as Bess Jingle, as she’d been known in her Bermondsey days. She went back to her maiden name, Gawkin, following that unfortunate incident at the Victorious when a tenor she had been blackmailing had threatened to expose her and she had been forced to shut his mouth. Permanently.
There had been quite a hue and cry over his death, and her name had been mentioned. It had got the wind up her and she’d had to flee to her sister’s down Balham way. Although, of course, her first few weeks at Balham had been very enlightening. So much so, she would have liked to have capitalised on her discovery immediately. But it wasn’t safe, and she’d had to lie low before eventually skipping to the continent with the Infant Phenomenon. At least she knew the act would make her a good living.
Yes, a hall north of the river would have been much better. But the contracts offered had been poor. She suspected that word was spreading that Aurora Scarletti was getting a bit too old to be called the Infant Phenomenon any more. Never mind; Lizzie had another, much more lucrative, use for the brat.
Only Thomas Campion had made a halfway decent offer for the act. At first Lizzie had thought it was too dangerous to accept. It was so close to the Victorious, but fortuitously that had closed down months before so it was less likely that anyone would be around to recognise her from the old days.
She was most wary of Thomas Campion himself. But he had never known her name, and it had been the most fleeting encounter all those years ago. Besides, she had changed substantially. Her luxurious dark hair was now sparse and grey, and she had put on a considerable amount of weight. She was almost unrecognisable from the wiry woman she had been almost thirteen years before.
Lizzie Gawkin heaved herself huffing and puffing from the hansom cab, which had stopped outside the post office. She had a letter in her hand. The Infant Phenomenon pushed back a ringlet and tried to read the name and address while at the same time appearing to have absolutely no interest in it at all. She couldn’t see the addressee but she could see part of the address: Silver Square.
“You wait there, Aurora,” ordered Lizzie. “I won’t be long.”
Lizzie disappeared into the post office. Aurora sighed. She hated trailing around after Lizzie, she hated the scratchy taffeta frocks that Lizzie insisted she wear, and she hated the thought of arriving at a new music hall where she knew that she would prove an instant disappointment. She was way too old to be billed as an Infant Phenomenon. When she had performed as a tot she could hold any audience in the palm of her hand, but as she had grown older, audiences had become a lot less forgiving. But Lizzie wouldn’t let her change the act, said it wasn’t worth the effort. The last time she had suggested it Lizzie had pinched her until her arms were black and blue.
She’d be lonely at Campion’s too. Lizzie insisted that they kept themselves to themselves. Aurora had learned the hard way that there was no point in trying to make friends at the halls; it was easier to be surly and disagreeable from the start rather than suffer the disappointment of having friendship snatched away just as it was blossoming.
“I don’t want my treasure mixing with nasty, common hall people,” said Lizzie. “Our business is our business. We don’t want other people’s noses prying into our secrets.”
Aurora was increasingly confident that all Lizzie’s secrets were nasty ones. She had lost count of the number of times they had unexpectedly moved on from halls before her contract had expired. In Dieppe one evening the drunken owner had chased her and Lizzie off the premises shouting in French that Lizzie was a “blackmailing cow” and that he would call the police if either of them ever set foot in the hall again.
Aurora glanced down at the floor of the cab, where a folded piece of newsprint lay near the door. Lizzie must have dropped it as she’d left the cab. Aurora picked it up and smoothed it out. It was about a toff called Lord Henry Easingford who was about to join the Privy Council. Aurora didn’t know what the Privy Council was but it sounded grand. She wondered why Lizzie had been keeping it. But then she wondered a great many things about Lizzie, not least whether Lizzie Gawkin really was her aunt and what had happened to her real mother and father.
Every time she asked, the story changed. She had a hazy memory of dancing in a great black-and-white tiled hall and being chucked under the chin and given a sweet for her performance. A place where you looked through bars when you looked out of the window. She decided to try again to take a peek inside the small, locked lacquered box that Lizzie always kept in the trunk that she stored in the dressing room of any theatre they visited. Lizzie had been drinking more gin recently. If she bided her time, Aurora was sure she’d get a chance to filch the keys. Maybe she would at last find out who her parents were and where she came from.
She leaned out of the window of the cab. London was frightening, noisy and dirty, but it was exciting too. She saw a young tousle-haired man of about thirty walking towards her along the street. His clothes were worn, even slightly ragged, but brightly coloured. He was wearing a Lincoln-green waistcoat and matching cap and he walked with an easy, confident gait. He had an open, handsome face and he smiled generously at people as he passed. Aurora could spot an actor from a mile away and she was confident that this young man was an actor. She wondered if he worked at Campion’s. It wasn’t far away, just up an alley closer to the river.
As the young man reached the door of the post office, Lizzie emerged, heading straight for the cab. She was pulling on her dogskin gloves and, not looking where she was going, she barged into the young man. She dropped a glove and let out a tirade of foul-mouthed abuse that made Aurora long for the earth to swallow her up. If the man did work at Campion’s and recognised them later it would be mortifying. But the young man was unfazed. He gracefully retrieved the dropped glove for Lizzie and presented it to her with the sunniest of smiles while bowing his head ever so politely. Lizzie gave a tiny squawk and there was something about the way she looked at the young man that made Aurora quite certain Lizzie knew him, and was shocked by this chance meeting. But the man had simply smiled again, completely unconcerned, and continued onward in the direction of Campion’s, l
eaving Lizzie staring after him as if she’d seen a ghost.
Lizzie collected her wits and waddled over to the window of the cab. She flung a few coins into Aurora’s lap.
“Go back to the lodging house and wait for me there. I’ve got business that I need to attend to,” she said.
She set off in pursuit of the young man. The hansom cab had only gone a few yards when it was held up by a dray cart that had lost a wheel. Aurora poked her head out of the window and looked back. She saw the young man turn down a narrow street towards the river. A few seconds later, Lizzie turned down the street after him.
It was almost noon before Lizzie returned to the lodging house, by which time the city was cocooned in a fog that enveloped it like a yellow shroud. Lizzie was unusually dishevelled and in an even more foul mood than ever. Aurora noticed that she had a speck of blood on one of her dogskin gloves.
With her back to the sagging, mould-covered wall, Effie slid down on to the damp earth floor and twisted a strand of her dirty blonde hair around her finger. The one-roomed tenement in Shoreditch that she had called home was open to the world. Even the door had been removed. Effie guessed somebody had wanted it for firewood. The glass had gone from the single squat window too. She felt desolate.
Her stomach was yawning with hunger. She hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday. But it was her heart that felt empty. The look of despair in her mother’s eyes that morning as the judge pronounced sentence – nine years in Holloway Prison for stealing a pocket watch – was etched on to her memory. Effie had wanted to shout at the judge about how it was their landlord’s lackey, Josiah Pinch, who should be in the dock. How he waited for them at the tenement off the Bethnal Green Road, stick in hand, ready to deliver a beating if they ever dared to return empty-handed. How he enjoyed frightening them, half raising his bowler hat at them in a gesture that was not respectful but threatening. How they had tried to leave and make a fresh start in Hackney, but how Josiah Pinch had found them and dragged them back, beating her mother so badly that she hadn’t been able to walk for a week. Then he’d stroked the waxed moustache that sat like a slug on his top lip and walked away, whistling his favourite tune, “Pop Goes the Weasel”. Effie had opened her mouth to speak but she saw the warning look in her mother’s eye, telling her to remain silent and not to draw attention to herself.
Now her mother was behind bars, there was nothing keeping her in Shoreditch. Effie stood up and walked down the street, peering into the dark, smoky tenements squirming with adults, shoeless children and yapping dogs. Most people looked away. They had their own problems; they didn’t want trouble knocking at the door. Everyone lived on the edge here.
Only Grace Dorset, who lived further down on the other side of the street, invited Effie close to her smouldering fire. Effie’s mum had liked Grace and Ned, said they were kind and not yet worn down by Shoreditch life. Now Grace hugged Effie while she cried for her mother, and gave her some tea and bread that she could ill afford to spare.
Grace didn’t judge, not like some people. She told Effie that things might be looking up for them at last – Ned had left very early that morning to go and see Thomas Campion.
“Oh, I really hope he’s going to accept Mr Campion’s job offer. He got another letter from America this morning, see. From Chicago. He won’t say who he writes to there. But he gets letters back, and whoever it is I think it was that person who sent him to visit that Eliza in the workhouse. He seemed very excited by it, and told me everything was going to be all right and he’d explain everything on his return. Said he might have to go north after going to Campion’s, but hoped we’d be proud of him for doing the right thing. It was lovely to see him so excited since giving up King Lear in Oxford.”
“Why’d he do that?” asked Effie.
Grace sighed. “This actor joined the company, got the part of the Fool, see, and said he’d met Ned’s double in Chicago when he’d been in a production of Romeo and Juliet there. Asked if he might be a relation. Showed him a review cut from a Chicago newspaper. The photograph was blurry, but even I could see the likeness. Ned seemed quite rattled by it. Maybe because the actor in the picture, I can’t remember his name, Ed something, was doing really well. He’d even been called the greatest Romeo of his generation and was about to play Hamlet. Ned said he had to go to Yorkshire immediately. I guessed it must be to see someone in his family. When he returned, he said he was leaving King Lear and we were moving to London. Just like that. No discussion, which isn’t like Ned. We’ve always decided everything together.”
“Doesn’t say much about his family, does he?”
Grace sighed. “I can’t even say for sure that the man I love really is called Ned Dorset. Once when he was upset he said that he’d taken his name off a gravestone.”
Effie pulled a face. “How strange. Do you think it could be true?”
“I don’t know,” said Grace, shaking her head. “He said afterwards he’d been joking. Maybe he was. But since what happened at Oxford I’ve thought he seemed frightened, and it was because of something in his past. But maybe things are changing and he’ll take up Thomas Campion’s offer of a job and we can get back on our feet again.” Grace waved a hand. “I know we can do better than this.”
Effie nodded. She knew about better. Her mum had always wanted better for her too. They had both tasted better when her mum had worked at the match factory. There had been cosy suppers of meat puddings and saveloys. They had even occasionally gone to the Fortune to see the glamorous and saucy Tilly Tiptree or hear chimney-sweep-turned-music-hall star Sam Harries sing. It made her mum grow bright-eyed and sentimental and tell Effie stories of when she was a young seamstress over in Southwark on the other side of the Thames. Effie hadn’t realised it then but although money was tight, they had been richer than the old Queen herself.
Then came the factory accident. Her mother’s burned arm had never worked properly after that. She had been laid off. They didn’t even pay her the wages they owed, saying the accident had been her own fault. Now her mum could no longer afford for Effie to buy the watercress in winter and lavender in summer that she hawked in the streets for a small profit. They quickly fell behind with the rent. The rent collector had put the frighteners on them, then he had sent round Josiah Pinch, a nasty piece of work, who said that he would help them with the landlord if they helped him out in return.
He set her and her mum to work. Thieving. Effie created a disturbance and acted as lookout; her mum did the prigging. Effie’s hazel eyes welled at the memory of her mother’s shame and self-hatred. It had been such a short journey from just enough to absolutely nothing, from full stomachs to empty, and from respectability to Holloway Prison.
Grace pressed a tuppence that she couldn’t afford into Effie’s hand and waved the girl’s protests away.
“Maybe the deuce will change your luck, Effie.”
Effie hugged Grace. “Good luck to you too, Gracie.”
Effie set off towards the river. She would go south to Southwark or Bermondsey. Maybe she could get work as a seamstress. She would begin again. Somewhere Josiah Pinch would never find her. She would rely on nobody but herself, work hard and when her mother was released from the forbidding brick fortress of Holloway Prison, she would have a home for her.
She walked across London Bridge with hundreds of others. In the middle, she stopped and looked back. But the swirling fog obscured everything. She steeled herself and walked onward, knowing that all the love and warmth and laughter she had ever known in the world were behind her.
It was one of those bitter nights when chilly fingers of foul-smelling fog crept off the Thames and curled into the narrow, muddy warren of streets where Southwark and Bermondsey collide. As Effie was walking over London Bridge, Rose was centre stage at Campion’s. She was playing the doomed young Prince Arthur in a scene from Shakespeare’s play King John.
On a good night some of the more sentimental members of the audience would be moved to tears by the sight
of poor little Arthur facing up to his uncle’s wickedness with such pluck. But no night had been good at Campion’s recently.
The audience was sparse again and the blonde wig on Rose’s head itched and kept sliding over her eyes. Some men with mutton-chop whiskers were propping up the carved mahogany bar at the back of the auditorium and laughing raucously among themselves; a woman in the front was so gripped by the drama that she had fallen fast asleep, her bonnet askew. Her snores were louder than a railway engine.
O’Leary, who was playing the man sent to murder Arthur, put his red, veined face close up to Rose’s as he reached the end of his speech. In his prime, O’Leary had been a fine actor and an even better balladeer. But drink and age had taken their toll. He should have retired from the stage years ago, but kind-hearted Thomas knew that if he did, O’Leary would drink himself to death within months. He needed the camaraderie of Campion’s to stay alive.
On stage, O’Leary tried and failed to suppress a belch. Rose tried and failed not to wince. The fumes suggested that he had already enjoyed an early supper of bloaters and beer. Rose sighed, and her mind wandered. Campion’s was hardly the Theatre Royal, the Haymarket or the Lyceum, which was run by the great actor-manager Henry Irving and where she’d seen the incomparable Ellen Terry play Cordelia in King Lear. But it was home.
With luck, it would be busier later in the evening. The crowd would be rowdier and sated with beer and stewed oysters. Then the bill would feature saucy comic songs, daredevil acrobats, murder scenes from the melodramas, ballet dancers showing their ankles, and Belle Canterbury, daringly dressed in a sailor suit, looking wistfully up to the gallery and singing her signature song about how her heart had been broken by a faithless lover.
Rose tried to get back into character, but she was distracted by all the shouting coming from the stage door. She suddenly sensed movement up in the gallery too, which was closed due to lack of custom. She risked a quick glance upwards past the twisted gilt-painted pillars that seemed far too fragile to support the horseshoe-shaped gallery. That was when she spotted Ned. He was leaning over the ledge and watching her intently with a big, wide boyish grin. There was something odd, almost insubstantial and ghost-like about him. She wondered if there was something wrong with her eyes.