by Kate Morton
I need to know what brought her to the house today. Is she simply an art lover or is there more to it than that? It is remarkable enough that after so many years I should have at once a visitor mention the name Ada Lovegrove and now another speak of James Stratton; but for the latter then to produce Edward’s sketchbook from the summer of 1862 is uncanny. I cannot help but think that there is unseen mischief at work.
My young man Jack was curious, too, in his own way, for when she went back downstairs and ducked her head around the door into the malt house kitchen to call out, ‘Thank you’, he looked up over the top of the blackened dish that he was scraping into the sink and said, ‘Found what you were looking for?’
There came then the most infuriating of non-answers. ‘You’ve been very kind,’ she said. ‘Thanks so much for letting me in on a Friday.’
Not so much as a hint as to her purpose.
‘Are you staying nearby?’ he asked as she started down the hallway towards the front door. ‘Or heading back to London now?’
‘I have a room booked at The Swan – the pub down the road. Just for the weekend.’
I shifted closer and concentrated all of my might on sending him my message. Invite her to stay. Invite her to come back.
‘Feel free to drop in any time,’ he said, a look of brief confusion settling on his face. ‘I’m here every day.’
‘I might just do that.’
It was, as they say (when they must because they’ve been denied their heart’s desire), better than a kick in the teeth.
Her visit was brief, but the disturbance sat in the house all afternoon. It left me flummoxed and excited, and so while Jack got on with his inspection of the house – he is in the hallway on the first floor now, running his hand lightly along the wall – I retreated to my spot at the bend of the stairs, from which I distracted myself by ruminating on the old days.
Mostly, I thought of Pale Joe and the morning that we met.
For while I was a good thief, I was not above making mistakes. Ordinarily they were inconsequential and easily resolved: I chose to target the wrong person, I was forced to give a policeman the slip, I picked a wallet only to find it as empty as a fool’s promise. On one occasion, though, when I was twelve years old, I made a mistake with more far-reaching consequences.
It was one of those London mornings when the sun does not rise so much as the fog changes colour, from black to pewter to a yellow-tinged gun-metal grey. The air was thick with factory smog and the oily smell rising from the river; it had been thus for days and I had suffered a poor week’s takings. There were simply fewer fine ladies willing to ride alone in London when the sullen fogs came in.
That morning I had taken Little Girl Passenger on the omnibus that ran between The Regent’s Park and Holborn, in the hope that I might find the wife or daughter of a lawyer returning from her morning stroll around the park. The plan was sound, but my technique was not, for I was distracted by a conversation I’d had with Mrs Mack the night before.
Although she was of an optimistic disposition, Mrs Mack had an image to uphold and was thus never happier than when she had a gripe in her mouth. One of her frequent laments, owing to the expense of keeping me in fine dresses, was that I grew like a weed: ‘No sooner do I finish letting out the seams or dropping the hems than I have to go back and start all over again!’ This time, however, she had not left the comment there: ‘The Captain and I have been saying it might be time we made some changes to your work. You’re getting too old to be Little Girl Lost. Won’t be long and those Helpful Gentlemen are going to be getting other ideas about how they might like to “help” a pretty girl like you. More so, how you might be able to help them.’
I didn’t want to make changes to my work, and I was quite sure that I didn’t like Mrs Mack’s insinuation as to the sort of ‘help’ I might be able to render the gentlemen. I had started to perceive a change in the way the barflies at the Anchor and Whistle looked at me when I was sent in to drag the Captain home for dinner, and I knew enough to realise that it had more than a bit to do with the ‘nice little pair of buds’ that Mrs Mack had noted when she was measuring me up for recent alterations.
Martin, too, had begun to observe me more closely. He lingered in the hallway outside the room where I slept, and when I dressed in the mornings, where light should spill through the keyhole, it was dark instead. I was finding it almost impossible to escape his watch. It had always been a part of his role within his mother’s enterprise to keep an overseeing eye on things – to make sure that none of us kids mistakenly dragged home trouble in the evenings – but this was different.
And so, as I rode the omnibus that morning, as I slipped my hand into the pocket of the lady beside me and felt her purse beneath my fingertips, I was not concentrating as I should have been; I was turning over Mrs Mack’s worrying pronouncement, probing it for implications, and wondering for the umpteenth time why my father still had not sent for me. Every month or so, Jeremiah would arrive to collect from Mrs Mack the money to be forwarded on to America, and Mrs Mack would read me my father’s most recent letter. But whenever I asked whether he had instructed me to purchase a ticket to America, she told me, no, that it was not yet time.
Thus, I was careless, and the first I knew that the lady was intending to leave the omnibus was when I felt the tug against my hand as she stood up, taking her pocket with her and my arm with it. And then the cry of: ‘Why, you little thief!’
Over the years I had prepared myself for this precise scenario. I had been through it many times in my head. I should have feigned innocence, widened my eyes and pretended that it was all a mistake, perhaps even produced some pitiable tears. But I was caught unawares. I hesitated a fraction too long. All that I could hear was Mrs Mack’s voice reminding me that accusing is proving where power sits in judgement. Against this lady with her fancy hat, fine manners and wounded delicacy, I was nothing.
The driver was moving up the aisle towards me; a gentleman, two seats ahead, was on his feet. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that there was a relatively clear path towards the rear door, and so I ran.
I was a good runner, but in a stroke of bad luck a newly minted policeman doing rounds nearby heard the commotion, saw me take flight, and with a jolt of lusty enthusiasm began to give chase. ‘Stop! Thief!’ he yelled, wielding his baton above his head.
It was not the first time that I had been pursued by a policeman, but on this particular morning the fog had driven me too far north to be able to rely on any of my friends to help my flight. As Lily Millington had warned, to risk capture at my age was to flirt with a one-way ticket to the workhouse, so I had no choice but to run as hard as I could towards the safety of Covent Garden.
My heart pounded as I pelted down Red Lion Square. The policeman was carrying more weight than he might, but was nonetheless a grown man and faster than I was. High Holborn was teeming with traffic and my spirits lifted; I could duck and weave between vehicles and that way escape him. But alas, when I reached the other side and shot a look over my shoulder, he was still there, even closer than before.
I slipped down a narrow alleyway and immediately realised my folly: on the other side was Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with its wide green plain offering nowhere to hide. I was out of options, he was almost upon me, and then I glimpsed a slender lane that ran behind the imposing row of rendered houses, a ladder snaking up the brick back of the nearest one.
With a surge of elation, I gambled that I would be faster than the policeman if I were to move the chase off the ground.
I began to climb, step by step, as quickly as I could. The ladder shook beneath my grip as my pursuer clambered after me, his heavy boots clanging on the metal rungs. Higher and higher I went, past one, two, three rows of windows. And when I had gone as high as the ladder would take me, I scrambled off and onto the slate tiles of the rooftop.
I picked my way along the guttering, arms out wide to keep my balance, and when one house gave way to the next, I
climbed over the partitions between them and shimmied past the chimneys. I had been correct in my assumption that I would have an advantage at height, for although he was still behind me I had gained a small amount of breathing space.
But my relief was short-lived. I was already well along the row of houses, and once I reached the other side, there was nowhere further for me to go.
Just as the dire realisation was dawning, I saw it! One of the windows in a rooftop dormer was pushed halfway open in its sash. I didn’t think twice: I forced it higher still and slipped beneath.
I fell hard to the floor, but there was not a spare second to admit injury. I scurried to fit under the wide sill, pressing myself against the wall in a tight crouch. My pulse was roaring such that I was sure the policeman would be able to hear it. I needed to silence it so that I could hear him pass, for only then would I know that it was safe to climb out again and start making my way home.
It had been such a blessed relief to find the window open that I hadn’t given a single moment’s thought as to what sort of room I was leaping into. Now, though, as I began to catch my breath, I turned my head to take stock and saw that I was in the bedroom of a child. Which was not a disaster in itself, except that the child in question was in current occupation of the bed and looking directly at me.
He was the palest creature I had ever seen. About my age, with a wan face and hair the colour of bleached straw, propped up against enormous white feather pillows, his waxen arms draped limply over the smooth linen sheets. I tried to smile reassuringly and had opened my mouth to speak when I realised that there was nothing I could say or do to make the moment seem normal; what was more, the policeman would be upon us at any minute, and really, it would be best if neither of us were to say anything.
I lifted my finger to my lips to implore the boy to silence, aware that he held my fate in his hands, and then he spoke: ‘If you come any nearer –’ his vowels were so crystal-sharp that they sliced through the room’s thick, stale air – ‘I shall call for my father and you will be on a transport ship to Australia before you can utter even the hint of an apology.’
Transportation was about the only thing worse than the workhouse, and I was trying to find the words to explain to him how it came to pass that I had arrived in his room through a rooftop window, when I heard another voice; the gruff, embarrassed tones of a man above me at the window saying, ‘My apologies, sir – Little Master – There was a girl I was chasing, you see: a young girl running away from me.’
‘A young girl? On the rooftop? Have you gone mad?’
‘Not at all, Little Master, she climbed you see, like a monkey, straight up the ladder—’
‘You expect me to believe that a young girl outran you?’
‘Well, ah, er … yes, sir.’
‘And you a grown man?’
A slight pause. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Remove yourself from my bedroom window this minute or I shall call out at the top of my lungs. Do you know who my father is?’
‘Yes, sir, but I … You see, sir, there was a girl …’
‘This. Minute!’
‘Sir. Yes, sir. Very good, sir.’
There was a scuffling noise on the roof, followed by the sound of something heavy sliding along tiles, and then a diminishing yelp.
The boy turned his attention to me.
It was my experience that when there was nothing to be said, it was best to say nothing, and so I waited to see which way the wind was going to blow. He regarded me quizzically before saying, finally, ‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’ With the policeman gone, there seemed little point in remaining crouched and so I stood. It was my first opportunity to look properly at the room and I am not ashamed to say that I was powerless to stop gawping.
I had never seen anything like it. The room was a nursery, with a slanted roofline and shelves lining the walls from floor to ceiling, upon which sat an example of every toy I could have thought to name. Wooden soldiers and skittles, balls and bats and marbles, a remarkable clockwork train engine with carriages containing little dolls, an ark with pairs of each animal under the sun, a set of spinning tops in different sizes, a red and white drum, a jack-in-the-box, and a rocking horse in the corner keeping a cool eye on things. A Punch and Judy set. An elaborate doll’s house that stood as tall as I did on its plinth. A spinning hoop and stick that had the shining look of items that had never before been used.
As I conducted my inspection, my eyes alit upon a tray on the foot of his bed. It was covered with the sort of food I had glimpsed through the windows in Mayfair but never even hoped to sample for myself. My stomach became a knot and perhaps he noticed me staring because he said, ‘You would be doing me a great favour were you to eat some. They are always trying to feed me, even though I’ve told them that I’m rarely hungry.’
I did not need to be told twice.
The food on the tray was still warm and I ate it gratefully, perched on the very end of his quilted bed. I was too busy eating to speak, and as he was inclined to do neither we watched one another warily across the tray.
When I was finished, I patted my mouth with the napkin, the way Mrs Mack always did, and smiled cautiously. ‘Why are you in bed?’
‘I am not well.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘There seems to be a degree of uncertainty in that regard.’
‘Are you going to die?’
He considered. ‘It is possible. Although, I haven’t to this point, which I take as a positive sign.’
I nodded in agreement but also encouragement. I did not know this strange, pale boy, but I was glad to think that he was not at death’s door.
‘But how rude of me,’ he said. ‘Forgive me. I don’t have many guests.’ He held out a fine hand. ‘I was named for my father, of course, but you shall call me just plain Joe. And you are … ?’
As I took his hand, I thought of Lily Millington. Inventing a name was by far and away the more sensible thing to do and I still cannot say why I told him the truth. An irrepressible urge started deep down inside my stomach and then rose, growing in pace and solidity until I could resist it no longer. ‘I was named for my mother’s father,’ I said. ‘But my friends call me Birdie.’
‘And so shall I, for you arrived on my windowsill just like a bird.’
‘Thank you for lending it to me.’
‘Not at all. I’ve often had cause, lying here with nothing much else to look at, to wonder why the builders wasted so much material in making it so wide. I see now that they were wiser than I gave them credit.’
He smiled at me and I smiled back.
On the table beside him was something that I had never seen before. I felt emboldened by his kindness and picked it up. It was a disc with pieces of twine attached to two opposing edges; on one side was drawn a canary, and on the other side a metal cage. ‘What is this?’
He indicated that I should hand it to him. ‘It’s called a thaumatrope.’ He held one of the strings and then rotated the disc so that it wound tightly. Holding both strings, he then pulled them away from one another so that the disc began to spin rapidly. I clapped, delighted, as the bird suddenly flew into the cage.
‘Magic,’ he said.
‘An illusion,’ I corrected.
‘Yes. Quite right. It is a trick. But a pretty one.’
With a final glance at the thaumatrope, I thanked him for the lunch and told him that I had to go.
‘No,’ he said quickly, shaking his head. ‘I forbid it.’
The response was so unexpected that I could think of nothing to say. It was all I could do not to burst out laughing that this pale bedridden boy thought he might be capable of forbidding me anything; it made me sad, too, because in three words he had exposed himself so plainly, both his wishes and his limitations.
Perhaps he also glimpsed the absurdity of his order, for his tone lost its bravado and he continued, almost desperately, ‘Please. You must stay longer.’
> ‘I will be in trouble if I stay out after dark.’
‘There’s plenty of time until sunset – two hours at least.’
‘But I haven’t done my work. I’ve nothing to show for the day.’
Pale Joe was confused by this and asked what sort of work I meant. Did I mean schoolwork, and if so where were my books and slate and where did I intend to meet my governess? I told him that I did not mean schoolwork, that I had never been to school, and I explained to him about my omnibus route and the gloves and the dresses with the deep pockets.
He listened to this account with widening eyes and then asked me to show him the gloves. I sat closer to him on the edge of the bed, pulled them from my pocket, and arranged them on my lap, acting the part of the little lady in her carriage. ‘You see that my hands are here,’ I said, nodding at the gloves, to which he agreed. ‘And yet,’ I continued, ‘what is this?’
He gasped, because without appearing to alter my position I had slipped my actual hand beneath the covers to tickle his knee.
‘And that is how it works,’ I said, jumping off the bed and smoothing my skirts.
‘But – that’s wonderful,’ he said, a quick smile spreading across his face, restoring to him, briefly, a welcome look of life. ‘And you do this every day?’
I was at the window now, surveying the climb back down. ‘Mostly. Sometimes I just pretend to be lost and then pick the pocket of the gentleman who helps me.’
‘And the things you take – purses, jewellery – you deliver them home to your mother?’
‘My mother is dead.’
‘An orphan,’ he said reverently. ‘I have read books about them.’
‘No, not an orphan. My father is away for a time, but he is going to send for me as soon as he’s settled.’ I hoisted myself onto the sill.
‘Don’t go,’ said the boy. ‘Not yet.’
‘I have to.’
‘Then come again – please. Say you will?’
I hesitated. To agree, I knew, would be foolish: this was not an area that a young girl without a chaperone would go unnoticed for long, and the policeman at the end of the street knew me now. He might not have had a chance to see my face, but he had already given chase and the next time I might not be so lucky. But then, that food – I’d never tasted anything like it. And those shelves of toys and wonders …