‘Can you manage those keyholes, Cato?’ Addy asked, and his dream faded. He pulled himself back into the present. He could see that most of the front doors had the newest style locks, the ones that required keys with changeable bits.
‘I’ll have to see if I can take a look at one before it’s set in a door. Take one apart a couple of times. But anyway, folks are always forgetting they have back doors and side doors.’
‘And windows!’
‘Oh, I know our mark’s here somewhere,’ Cato said, looking around.
Addy stamped her feet to keep warm. ‘Can we go to the fair now, Cato. Please?’
‘There’s so much money in this half a mile, but in St Giles, scarce a breath away, they’re fighting over a farthing in the gutter. Life’s not fair, Addy.’
‘No one ever said it was.’
‘We shall have to make it fairer then.’ Cato took a deep breath. ‘You can almost smell the cash round here.’
‘Cato, that smell is only the roast chestnut man, and there’ll be a deal more chestnuts and hot pies and hot everything down at the fair!’ Addy looked at him with her best puppy eyes. ‘Come on, Cato?’
Cato sighed. She was right. ‘The fair then,’ he said.
As they turned away, a carriage pulled by two fine matched bays drew in ahead. The footman jumped down and opened a door, and a young woman wearing a floor-length velvet cloak, edged with white fur, lowered a satin-shod foot onto the pavement.
She was a picture of such radiance and beauty that Addy stopped in her tracks and stared. Cato had to nudge her to make her stop.
‘Quit staring, Add!’
The woman stared back for a second. Her face was powdered white as the fur that framed it, and her lips were painted deep red. Cato shuddered and pulled Addy away.
‘Hey! I was only looking!’ Addy protested. ‘I never seen so much rabbit except in Smithfield! She must have more slosh than is proper in a get-up like that. Maybe that’s our mark, Cato.’
Cato turned back and saw a man getting out of the carriage to follow the woman into a grand house. He felt a chill run down his spine that wasn’t caused by the air or the frost underfoot.
‘Now you’re staring,’ said Addy. ‘Do you think they might be possibles? State of that cloak! We’d get five guineas for it at least, I reckon!’
‘I’ve seen her face before, I know it,’ Cato said as they walked back through Leicester Fields.
‘Friend of yours then?’ Addy smiled. ‘From Turnmill Street? I don’t think I seen her round Clerkenwell or up the Garden.’
‘Don’t be daft, Addy. I can’t recall where I’ve seen her.’
‘Ooh, you’ve gone all serious. Did you really know her? So who is she then?’ Addy pestered.
‘I’m trying to remember. Some gentry,’ replied Cato, racking his brain for a reminder.
Addy snorted. ‘Well, I think I could have told you that!’
‘No, Addy – could be London, could be some country lady. I’ve been in and out of that many families over the years. The number of times I’ve been some nob’s slave I’ve lost count of the names. But I know her, I’m sure.’
‘Well, remember quick.’ Addy pulled out her cards. ‘I shall have to warm my hands up good and proper first, then we’ll turn round enough rhino for supper and more besides.’
The Thames was transformed. Instead of the muddy brown river there was now a huge field of white stretching across to Southwark, dotted with tents and booths and stalls like a tented city magicked into existence overnight. Curls of smoke from a hundred little fires wisped up into the air like grey velvet ribbons.
‘Why don’t the fires melt holes?’ Addy said as they reached what had been the river bank.
‘It’s too thick, and too cold. I expect more water just freezes every night,’ Cato said, almost slipping on the steps down to the ice. He had to speak almost into her ear because of the noise: scratchy fiddles and droning pipes, shouts for hog roasts, nuts and potatoes, calls to see a ‘real unicorn’ and a ‘true life mermaid’ and a woman who ‘gives birth to live rabbits before your very eyes!’
‘So you’ll set me off and watch my back?’ Addy asked.
‘Don’t I always?’ said Cato.
After they’d looked at the Russian bear and the unicorn – both too sad to contemplate for long, Cato thought – Addy found a half-barrel abandoned near the booths and turned it over, dusted it off and laid out her cards. Cato watched at a distance, pretending he was part of the crowd waiting to see the woman give birth to rabbits.
Addy looked small and slightly untidy, her light brown hair falling on either side of her face to her shoulders. Her features were sharp, her mouth smiled more than frowned, and Cato thought that most people wouldn’t look twice if she ran past as they crossed the Strand or Covent Garden. Addy was small for twelve, a melt-into-the-crowd sort of grey-eyed girl. But when she started up her patter, with a voice loud enough to crack stone, she came alive.
‘Laydies, gennelmen!’ Addy shuffled the cards so fast they rapped a kind of tattoo on the barrel top. ‘Give me your time, your concentration, your full and undivided attention, and see if you can earn yourselves some pennies! I won’t ask once’ – she threw the cards from one hand to the other in a perfect arc and one or two punters slowed to watch – ‘I won’t ask twice!’ The cards flew back into the other hand. ‘You find the lady, find our Good Queen Anne, Lord love her, and you can beat me.’ She fanned the cards in her hand and made the queen seem to rise out of the pack by itself. ‘There she is! Oops, most sorry, Your Majesty!’ She turned the picture card over face down on the barrel with a slap.
‘And there’s her subjects, the two of spades and the nine of cups! Watch ’em, watch ’em, laydies and gennelmen, young and old. Watch her now an’ see where she goes.’
There were one or two watching closely as Addy slid the cards around one another.
‘Have a free go, sir! Yes, you!’ She pointed at a printer’s apprentice, black hands folded over his blacker apron. ‘Can you tell? Can you?’ she asked.
The apprentice shrugged and pointed an inky finger at the middle card and Addy turned it over and affected surprise.
‘Oh, sir! Most intelligent young man!’ she cooed.
‘Don’t give me that!’ the apprentice snarled. ‘I seen this game done before! As soon as I puts my money down, you’ll have magicked that queen away.’
‘Now, young master,’ Addy said, smiling at him, ‘would I do such a thing? A maid like myself?’
Cato heard his cue and made his way out of the crowd, penny in hand. He pushed the apprentice aside and stood opposite Addy.
‘Here’s my cash says I can find your lady, miss.’
The apprentice looked at Cato sideways and Cato smiled back.
Addy’s cards slid almost faster than the eye across the barrel top and Cato took his time following and picking out the queen, even asking the apprentice his opinion, then with much deliberation and effort chose his card. Addy flexed her fingers, bit her lip and turned the card. When they saw the queen’s face, the little crowd that had gathered to watch raised quite a cheer. Addy made a show of world weariness and Cato winked at the apprentice and moved out of the way so a man with a red nose who stank of gin could take his place.
Cato stood at a distance for a while until he was sure that Addy had enough punters, and that no one was giving her any trouble, then he took his money to the chestnut man.
He was on his way back when he passed the rabbit-birthing tent for the third time and bothered to read the sign.
LIVE RABBITS BORN FROM A FAIR KENTISH MAID! it said in foot-high black letters. There was a picture too, of a bonneted girl with red cheeks. And underneath: NO ARTIFICE. NO DEVILRY! A MOST NATURAL WONDER! VERILY A SECOND MARIAH HOPKINS!
Cato almost dropped the chestnuts. Mariah was Mother Hopkins’s given Christian name.
He caught the bag of nuts before they hit the ground, but then he heard Addy’s voice, clear and sharp
as a knife, calling ‘Ca-to!’ and he ran through the crowd and pulled her away from four seriously cross-looking apprentices.
‘Addy, you’ll never guess – there was a live rabbits booth with Mother’s name on it—’
‘Hold your breath for running, Cato. I can still hear the ’prentices!’
They ran in between the stalls and booths back to the Strand Steps, the wooden soles of the apprentices clattering close behind.
‘Faster, Cato!’ Addy shouted.
The gang of inky-aproned apprentices were shouting and throwing things at them as they skidded straight into the Russian bear’s handler, a tall blond youth who swore loudly in authentic Russian as he hit the floor. Luckily he swore even more when the pack of apprentices careered round the corner, slid on the ice and fell on top of him in a heap.
Cato pulled Addy up behind him onto the river bank and they legged it as far as Portugal Street before stopping to catch their breath.
‘I’ve told you, Addy, steer clear of the ’prentices. They always come back at you mob handed!’
‘We got away, didn’t we?’ she puffed. ‘Anyway, you should have rescued me sooner! What was you going on about? Live rabbits! It’s a scam old as the hills an’ you should know it.’
‘You never saw the bill stuck outside in big huge letters. Isn’t her first name Mariah?’
‘Who are you on about? The cat’s mother?’ Addy asked, getting more and more confused.
‘No, Addy, our Mother Hopkins. She’s Mariah.’
Addy nodded, but she wasn’t really listening: she was too busy counting up her pennies.
‘Two shillings! Well, near enough. Ooh, I’m good!’
‘And didn’t she say as she’d done work with the fairs?’ Cato continued. ‘When she ran away from the big house where she worked? She was a maid, she said. Remember?’
‘What?’
‘Mother Hopkins! When she travelled with the fair, she did a turn, giving birth to live rabbits!’
‘Wouldn’t half mind seeing that!’ Addy laughed. ‘Dare you to ask her how she done it!’
Cato was quiet. Mother Hopkins wasn’t one for talking about the past. She’d go on about jobs they’d done, but her past, before Arabella, was like a closed book.
Addy tied her money up in her purse. ‘You know what Ma’s like: “Don’t go looking under stones – something’ll come up and bite you!” That’s what she always says. Bet you don’t ask her!’
Cato walked on. Addeline was right. ‘Anyway, Mother’ll be the one doing the asking, I reckon. Asking us whether we saw anything up St James’s,’ he said.
‘Ah. Yes. She’ll be pleased to hear my pocket. But you’re right as usual, Cato. If she thinks we’ve been at the fair all afternoon . . . What about that woman, that lady? Her with the cloak to the ground and the fancy slippers. And you thought you knew her face, remember? She looked the business.’
Cato held out the bag of still-warm chestnuts. ‘S’pose so,’ he said.
‘See, we’re in the best of all possible situations: quids, a sprinkling of information and some warm chestnuts! We’ll be set for the best place by the fire, I warrant!’
CHAPTER FOUR
A Fine Pair of Pigeons
IT WAS THE next morning when Cato remembered. He was trying to fit back together the newest of the barrel locks just made in Staffordshire, sent over by Daley the locksmith’s boy. Mother Hopkins made sure the locksmith at the Aldwych always had a bottle of something extra so that Cato could be up to date with his practice. The pieces lay strewn about on the seat of a stool. It was like the hardest kind of puzzle, seeing which tiny piece of brass fitted where, and although it was vexing, it was worth it just for the feeling of achievement he had when he’d mastered a lock. The harder he stared and thought, the more he seemed to be almost thinking about nothing – nothing but the actual lock in front of him. It was as if he had to approach the lock sideways, like a shy child, not letting it realize it was the object of his attention. It was during one of these reveries that the name of the woman he’d seen in St James’s came flying into his head.
‘Elizabeth Walker!’ he said, not looking up.
‘Is that the name of your new sweetheart?’ Bella was standing by the window, holding a looking glass and trying to blacken her eyebrows with a bit of charcoal she had pulled out of the fire.
‘No! And you look as if two black caterpillars are making a meeting on your forehead,’ Cato said.
Bella stuck out her tongue but looked at herself again and began rubbing some of the charcoal off.
‘Elizabeth Walker.’ Cato picked up a tiny brass screw and held it up to the light. ‘You don’t remember? She was the daughter of those nobs in Greenwich. Where Sam worked.’
‘Now that was a nice house. At least from the outside. Maybe we can get one like that in Bath,’ Bella suggested.
‘I think she lives in an even finer one now,’ replied Cato. ‘Unless, that is, she was only visiting.’
‘Was it the woman you saw in the velvet? The one Addy was prattling on about?’
Suddenly the door opened and the cold wind that blew in scattered some of the lighter metalwork off the stool and onto the floor. Cato jumped up.
‘God’s teeth!’ he said, crawling across the floor after them.
Bella laughed. ‘You swear like an old man!’
Addy and Mother Hopkins came in, stamping to rid themselves of the cold.
‘Watch my lock!’ Cato wailed, but Addy made a beeline for the fire and her feet knocked the brass screws, and fixings rolled farther away.
Cato crawled after them. ‘It will take me all day to find the pieces now and that lock was five shillings worth!’ he moaned.
‘I promise I’ll help as soon as my fingers are thawed out,’ Addy said, hands outstretched in front of the flames.
‘And didn’t Old Man Daley give you the lock for nothing?’ Mother Hopkins asked, placing her copious black bag on the table with a thud.
‘Yes, but if I don’t return it, we’ll be paying.’ Cato took a red cotton handkerchief from his back pocket and began collecting up the parts and tying them inside.
‘You’ll be paying,’ Bella said, pinching at her cheeks to redden them. ‘I’m off to the White Raven. To pour coffee for gentlemen who are, sadly, gentlemen in name only.’
‘Hah! Then they will appreciate you, being as you are a maid in name only,’ said Cato.
Addy laughed and Bella cuffed him across the side of the head on her way out.
‘You provoke each other too much,’ Mother Hopkins said, sitting in her chair and warming herself. ‘There are enough people in this world who will provoke you without you and Bella making it a family sport. She is your sister. You should remember that and treat her so.’
Cato was about to say that very many people treated their flesh-and-blood sisters a good deal worse. He had seen Daley the locksmith’s boy and his sister come to such blows in the street that they pulled whole handfuls of one another’s hair clean out. But he shut his mouth again. He wondered if he had any blood sisters, any real sisters. Girls with hair as black and woolly as his own and skin as dark as the tabletop. He sighed and shook the thought away.
Addy had collected some pieces of lock and handed them over, smiling. Her hair was coming undone from where she had tied it up and it fell around her face.
‘I remembered the name. Of the woman we saw,’ he said.
‘Oh?’ Mother Hopkins looked up.
‘I’ve seen her before, only younger, and then her face was rounder and her hair wasn’t hidden inside that hood . . .’
‘Oh, that velvet cape was so lush!’ Addy said.
‘Cut to the chase, Cato!’ snapped Mother Hopkins.
‘She was that Elizabeth Walker, Captain Walker’s daughter. Of Greenwich,’ Cato said.
Mother Hopkins looked interested and leaned forward. ‘I did read of her wedding in the London Gazette. She married John Stapleton, the honourable Sir John Stapleton, who is
already wealthier than all the nabobs of India caught up together in one room. And as soon as his father, the Marquess of Byfield, dies – and the marquess is not long for this world, so I’ve heard – he will have as much gold as the Bank of England. Sir John Stapleton is a member of parliament, a post his father paid handsomely for. Well, that is what’s said.’ Mother took her clay pipe from its place at the side of her chair and tapped it twice to empty out the old tobacco.
‘So she married him, did she?’ Cato said. ‘That Stapleton, that lump of a boy who came calling – I told you about him – he gave her some diamonds. Great rocks like boiled sugar. I never seen the like since. That dullard a member of parliament!’ He shook his head. ‘Wonders never cease.’
‘No, my boy,’ Mother Hopkins said, and smiled. ‘They certainly do not.’
That evening Mother called her family to a meeting. She sat in her chair nearest to the fire as everyone piled in around her. Jack and Sam remained standing, looking flash in their chairman’s livery – long brocade coats and matching hats. Bella sat at the table pouring coffee and Addy and Cato were shelling walnuts as fast as they were being eaten.
‘Bella tells me your mark has found you.’ Jack stood with his back to the fireplace, his hands lifting the tails of his fancy jacket out of the way of the heat.
‘So it seems,’ Mother Hopkins said.
‘Sam and me thought you might try the Careys of Mayfair. They have plenty of money and the eldest son, Alexander, is so free with the rhino it practically falls from his britches as he walks – which of course he never does. You’ll have seen him in Hyde Park driving the best matched pair of Arabians I’ve seen in town! He’s ripe, Mother!’
‘Pah! The Careys!’ Mother spat into the fire.
‘Or Lord Fitzadam,’ Jack continued. ‘That man is so old he is practically waiting to fall into his own grave! And he has no heirs. His money is waiting to be plucked from him before some other rogue does it first.’
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