Through Streets Broad and Narrow (Ivy Rose Series Book 1)

by Gemma Jackson

  When Ivy opened the ties on the cotton slip she bit back a cry. The little one’s back was covered in bruises. It was obvious some kind of switch had been used with a great deal of force to beat the dickens out of the child.

  “Right, Rosie is in her bed and ready for sleep.” Jem forced cheer into his voice when he joined the two females. “How are things in here?”

  “We need a bowl of warm water.” Ivy gave a jerk of her head towards the child’s feet.

  The look of horror on Jem’s face answered one question at least. He’d had no idea of the state of the child.

  “Let me get that organised.” Jem kept the fury out of his voice with effort. “Do we need any medicines?”

  “No, warm water will soak off these socks.”

  “The funny lady said my socks would float away,” Emerald was bold enough to say. She felt safe now the man with the gentle eyes and hands was here.

  “Why am I a funny lady?” That accent isn’t from around here, Ivy thought. It’s also an upper-crust accent if I’m not mistaken.

  “Because you’re wearing a gentleman’s trousers and hat!” Emerald giggled.

  “So I am.” Ivy grinned.

  Jem and Ivy busied themselves getting the child ready for bed. Jem soaked the little feet then Ivy wrapped her in a soft cotton long-sleeved winter vest belonging to Jem. It covered the child from neck to feet and then some. The sleeves, until Ivy rolled them back, hung down in a way that had little Emerald giggling in delight. Ivy brushed the child’s hair with a brush belonging to Rosie. The two adults made every effort to reassure the little one. While they fussed and petted the child both adults wondered about the strange situation they found themselves in.

  “She’s asleep.” Ivy had been sitting on the side of Jem’s big bed, gently rubbing the child’s back. The deep breathing and gentle snores reassured both adults.

  Ivy stood and poked Jem in the chest. “Start talking,” she said softly but in deadly earnest.

  “Where to start?” Jem’s sigh came up from his boots.

  “At the beginning is usually the best place.” Ivy pulled Jem away from the bed by his elbow. They didn’t need to wake the child. “Where in the hell did that child come from?” She pointed across the room at the little figure on the big bed. “She’s not from around here, that’s for sure, and unless I’m very much mistaken she’s a member of the quality. What the hell have you got me into, Jem Ryan?” Ivy’s whisper was almost a shout.

  “Shh . . .” Jem glanced at Emerald. She hadn’t moved. “I’ve got meself into a right pickle. That’s the truth.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.” Ivy poked Jem again. “What I want to know is where that child came from. Where’s her family?”

  “Her aunt’s dead body is downstairs in my carriage.” Jem began to giggle hysterically. The stresses of the evening were finally getting to him.

  “In the name of Jaysus, Jem!” Ivy croaked. “What’s going on here?”

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” Jem calmed down enough to say. “It’s a long story and I haven’t a clue about the ending.”

  “The ending is usually a dead body.”

  “That’s only the start.” Jem sighed and pulled open the door that led from his room out into the stable loft. “I’ll fetch water.”

  “Jem?” Ivy stood in the open doorway and watched Jem’s head disappear over the ledge as he used the ladder to slide down to the stable floor. She turned to glance at the sleeping child. With a bewildered shake of her head she closed and bolted the bottom part of the half door that led into Jem’s room. She walked over to the lip of the loft and watched Jem below her fill the kettle. “Jem!”

  “What?” Jem looked up.

  “Is there really a dead body in there?” Ivy pointed her chin towards the carriage.

  “Yes, there is and I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do about it.”

  “You’ll be explaining to me how you come to have a dead body on hand, Jem Ryan.” Ivy stood with her hands on her hips, practically glaring holes in Jem’s shoulders as she gazed down on him.

  “Look, there was an accident – she got hit on the head, I’ll explain everything to yeh, Ivy, I promise, but can we leave it for the minute . . .” Jem twisted the tap closed with a force that almost snapped the top off, “I’ll explain it to you as soon as I figure out how the feck I got meself into this mess.”

  “I don’t claim to know a great deal about dead bodies.” Ivy started to climb down the ladder. It would be better to have this conversation out of the child’s hearing. “But hadn’t we better get it out of your carriage?”

  “Jaysus, she could stiffen up!” Jem dropped the kettle in fright.

  “I’ll give yeh a hand.” Ivy walked up behind him. Seeing the worried look Jem sent in the direction of his room, she added, “I left the top half of the door to your place open. If the little one wakes up and tries to open the bottom half of the door we’ll hear her.”

  They hurried over to the carriage standing in the middle of the large open area inside the entrance of the livery building. Jem hurried around to the other side of the vehicle.

  “It’s all right.” His voice came from the interior of the carriage. “She’s not stiff yet, praise the good Lord, because she’s a woman who liked her food.”

  Ivy opened the door nearest to her and stared in at the dead woman. Jem had clambered in on top of the large trunk which was wedged in the floor space. “You’re not joking’,” said Ivy. “She’s like a ruddy barrel. Here, give her a shove over here. I’ll pull her out by the feet.”

  “Show a little respect,” Jem said, forced to work on his knees as he struggled to push the woman forward.

  “Me nerves are shot, Jem Ryan, so don’t you be talking to me about respect.” Ivy groaned as she tried to pull the dead weight from the carriage. “Hold it, hold it!” she shouted.

  “What’s wrong?” Jem demanded, straining to move the woman’s body.

  “Don’t talk soft! ‘What’s wrong?’” Ivy snapped. “We’re manhandling a dead body, for Jaysus sake! What’s right about that?”

  “Ivy, me arms feel like I’m swinging a baby elephant around the place!”

  They wrestled and pushed until the woman’s body was finally half in, half out of the carriage door nearest to Ivy. Jem jumped out and rushed around to give Ivy a hand.

  “We need to pull her all the way out. You can hold her up against the cab.” Ivy was studying the clothes the woman wore. “We need to get her out of these fancy clothes.”

  “What? Jaysus, Ivy, you want me to strip the woman naked?”

  “Well, you already killed her. How much worse could stripping her be?”

  “I did not kill her, Ivy Murphy!” Jem roared. “She got hit in the head by a flying stone! It was an accident. I told yeh.”

  “Well, the woman’s dead and we can’t leave her in these fancy clothes.”

  “What’s wrong with her clothes?” Jem gritted his teeth. They needed to get the bloody woman all the way out of the carriage.

  “They shout money and lots of it, you fool!” Ivy dropped to her knees. “I’ll get her boots off before we pull her all the way out.” She opened the laces and pulled the boots from the woman’s feet. There was no sign of cuts or bleeding from these boots. Ivy gave the butter-soft leather a look. The boots looked awfully big for the little fat feet they covered.

  “Right,” Ivy stood up. “We can pull her all the way out now. You hold her up while I get the rest of this off her.”

  “I can’t be stripping a woman naked,” Jem objected.

  “If it offends your delicate sensibilities, close your feckin’ eyes!”

  “You don’t half know some big words, Ivy Murphy.” Jem kept his eyes averted. He obeyed Ivy’s barked orders to move, budge, shift, while she ruthlessly stripped every stitch of clothing from the dead woman.

  “It comes from listening to the storytellers whenever I got the chance and making me brothers read to me while
I sewed of an evening.”

  It didn’t matter what they talked about. It helped to take their minds off what they were doing. With swift skilled fingers Ivy opened what needed to be opened and pushed and shoved at whatever else there was.

  “I remember you sitting on the staircase, your eyes as big as saucers.” Jem hadn’t always been able to attend the frequent story evenings put on in one or other of the tenement buildings. “You were always asking questions, it seemed to me.” Jem desperately wanted to be finished with this chore.

  “If you don’t ask questions how can you learn anything?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I always thought the storytellers were magical.”

  Finally she straightened up. The woman was naked as the day she was born. Ivy tried not to look at her. The woman deserved some dignity.

  “That’s it. We need something to wrap the body in.”

  “Ivy.” Jem blushed scarlet under his covering of hair. “The body is going to empty itself.” He didn’t know how to explain what was about to happen.

  “Help me lower her to the floor,” Ivy snapped. “You get a stall ready and be quick about it. This woman was obviously a great lover of food.”

  “What?”

  “Jaysus, Jem! The horses don’t use a chamber pot!” She glared at him. If her hands had been free she’d have given him a box around the ears. “Put a load of hay down and we’ll lay your one out. If we cover her up with a load of hay we can leave her here while you tell me what the hell you’ve got me into.”

  “Oh, right.” Jem jumped to obey his instructions. He was glad Ivy was able to think. He was still frozen in horror at the events of this evening.

  Between them they wrestled the figure to the stable floor.

  “What did your one want with all this luggage, do you know, Jem?” Ivy looked at the bags stacked in the carriage interior. It beat thinking about the naked dead woman at her feet. “Do you know which one belongs to the child?”

  “I haven’t a clue.” Jem shouted from the empty stall he was preparing. He kicked straw into a bed that would cushion the woman’s body. “Okay, this is ready.”

  Between the two of them they dragged and pushed the remains of Mary Rose Donnelly across the floor, into a stall and onto the hay. Panting from the effort of moving the heavy body, Ivy left the stall without a word while Jem covered the body with more hay.

  Jem walked out to join Ivy in the aisle outside the stall. He closed both sections of the stall door, top and bottom, and locked it. Not that it was necessary – Mary Rose Donnelly was going nowhere.

  “You better bring that kettle up,” Ivy reminded. “I don’t know about you but I could really use a cup of tea.”

  Back in the comfortable space Jem called home, he put the kettle on to boil on the stove while Ivy checked on the child. Jem remembered the pretty cups Ivy had served him tea in. He went to the effort of rinsing out a cup and saucer belonging to a tea set that had sat at the back of one of his cupboards for years.

  “Tea’s served, Ivy.”

  Jem put a bottle of milk and a package of sugar along with a plate of biscuits onto an occasional table he’d pulled away from the wall. He poured the tea and put the teapot on top of the cast-iron free-standing fireplace that he used to heat his room. Then he collapsed onto one of the two chairs he’d put by the table, put his elbows on the table and buried his head in his hands.

  “Take your time.” Ivy sipped her tea, delighted by the delicate china cup and saucer. She took a biscuit from the plate. A biscuit was a rare treat. She studied the man across the table and waited for him to speak. When she’d first seen the little girl’s green eyes she’d thought the child might be Jem’s. That didn’t seem to be the case. So, she’d drink her tea, nibble on these delicious biscuits and wait.

  “The dead woman.” Jem sat back against the wooden back of the chair. “I don’t even know her name. I picked her and the little one up from Kingsbridge train station. I don’t know how long ago.” Jem was rambling but Ivy let him. “I drove around for what seemed like days trying to think what to do.”

  “Tell me exactly how she got dead?” Ivy asked when it seemed Jem was through talking.

  “We were passing Kilmainham Gaol. I was taking the long way around, trying to give myself time to think . . .”

  The story began to pour out of Jem. It seemed he’d kept the words blocked up long enough. Ivy gasped and stared but she didn’t interrupt. She couldn’t believe any woman would willingly put a child into Goldenbridge, but then everyone knew the rich were strange.

  “Jem, you have to decide now, tonight, what you’re going to do.” Ivy stood to refill their tea cups. Jem looked fit to collapse.

  “I don’t know what to do, Ivy. I don’t know why I knocked on your door tonight. Everything just happened.”

  Ivy was used to taking control. She’d ruled four men in her time. “Well, the way I see it, we need to take care of that body downstairs first. What did you plan to do with it?”

  “I haven’t a clue!” Jem almost wailed. “It’s not something you have to think about every day.”

  “I’ll grant you that.” Ivy said. “But nevertheless, you have to think about it now.”

  “I thought about driving around and just dumping the body somewhere.”

  “Not smart.” Ivy could almost feel her own brain turning over. “I don’t think a naked dead woman would go unnoticed anywhere in Dublin. Certainly not one as well fed as that one down there.” She pointed her chin in the general direction of the stalls.

  “I thought about burying her somewhere.”

  “You’d be seen and have to explain yourself.” She stared at Jem, waiting to hear his next hare-brained scheme.

  “There’s this wagon . . .” Jem was going to tell Ivy something he’d sworn to keep secret. It wasn’t an official secret. He wasn’t breaking his sworn word but the men who drove the death wagon agreed to keep the existence of the wagon secret. People would be horrified to think a body could be thrown away. Without any of the signs of respect most hoped and prayed for upon their death. He’d have to approach the subject delicately.

  “The death wagon.” Ivy watched Jem choke and splutter when the tea he was sipping went down the wrong way.

  “How in the name of God do you know about that?” Jem was red to the gills. His feeling of outrage shimmered in his watering green eyes.

  “Never you mind how I heard about it.” Ivy wasn’t about to be intimidated. “I know you and your uncle were out and about at all the hours God sends. Did you two drive these death wagons?” A perfectly straightforward question as far as Ivy was concerned.

  “Yes.” Jem stared across the small table at Ivy. The woman had practically shot him in the face. The explosion had knocked him back in his seat. Yet she sat there and calmly waited for him to answer a question that should never have been asked.

  “Right.” Ivy slapped the table, glancing guiltily at the sleeping child. “I presume it’s not like the rubbish cart? You can’t just throw a body up on it, can you?”

  “No, you most certainly can not!” Jem pushed his hands through his hair. His life was going to hell in a hand-basket while he sat sharing a pot of tea and chatting about death. “You can’t just murder your granny and throw her on a cart, you know.”

  “I’ve no intention of murdering me granny,” Ivy said calmly. “You need to calm down. You’re getting hysterical.”

  “You’re right.” Jem took a deep breath. “I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

  “We need to get this settled tonight.” Ivy was accustomed to being the voice of reason. “We can’t leave your one down there stinking up your stalls.”

  “Jaysus, Ivy, can you be any more hard-hearted?” Jem didn’t know what he’d expected when he’d knocked on Ivy’s door but her calm, collected manner in the face of this disaster amazed him.

  “Have a look at that child’s back.” Ivy pointed over to the still snoring Emerald. “Have a look at her
feet. Think about what her aunt was going to do to her. Does the woman downstairs really deserve any consideration?”

  “Truthfully, when I was listening to her pour scorn and abuse on the poor child’s head I wanted to kill her myself. But you have to admit, Ivy, this situation is a bit out of the ordinary.”

  “Yes, it is. But we have to deal with it, Jem, and we have to deal with it now. Tonight.”

  “The wagons don’t go to every hospital every night.”

  “The porters would know if a wagon was due, wouldn’t they?” Ivy had been impressed by the porter she’d met at Kevin’s Hospital. She thought briefly of suggesting they ask Ann Marie Gannon for advice but quickly discarded the notion. She couldn’t involve the woman in something like this. She and Jem would have to sort it out between them.

  “The door porter, yes, yes, they should do.” Jem was nodding his head frantically.

  “Well, there is part of your answer.” Ivy shrugged. “Walk over to Hollis Street Hospital and ask if the wagon is coming tonight.”

  “Just like that?” Jem was glad Ivy was on his side. The woman hadn’t been fazed by anything he’d thrown at her this evening.