If I stayed, I would go back to the desperate, exhausting tedium of the bookbindery—if they’d still have me—or if not, another factory, for pauper’s wages taken by Ram Munt. And I’d also continue to be pimped out by him, receiving for those efforts nothing but the spurt of slime deposited in or on me.
If I left, my future was uncertain, but at least I would have a say in it.
The choice was simple and obvious.
I went to the fruitwood box and took out the mirror. I stared at myself and saw that what I had felt happening, as I tossed on my damp sheet, was true. My face was even thinner than usual, which was a temporary thing, but it was my eyes that showed the change. They had an intenseness, grown darker and larger, and they glittered with something that I had no name for. My pale hair stood up around my head with the look of a pullet, but the lack of curls and new angular cheekbones had taken me from child to young woman.
I unwrapped the strip of muslin I had exchanged for the dirty flannel. The stitching on my breast was dark. I touched it. The skin was raised and sealed in a twisted, ropy seam. It was beginning to harden, and I knew that with the hardening of that skin something deeper had also grown dense and rigid. Resistant and unyielding.
I cleaned up the green dress and stitched the rent. I hunted out and found coins Ram had hidden away about the room—my money, what I’d earned. The only thing I was sorry about was that Ram seemed to have drunk most of it away, and it was a pitiable sum for the years of work both on my feet and on my back.
And then I ate the heel of bread I found on the table, holding my hand over my mouth as I swallowed, willing myself to keep down the first solid food I’d had for so long, took a drink of tinny water, and walked out. I left the miserable room on Back Phoebe Anne Street, left the miserable court with its trickle of human waste running down the shallow gutter in the middle, left the blocks of leaning, back-to-back, vermin-infested buildings.
I wore the sophisticated green gown and a clean shawl and a straw bonnet, and under my arm I clutched the fruitwood box with its mirror, book, pendant, and my folding knife. The bit of money was twisted in an old handkerchief, which I’d sewn onto my underskirt.
“THIS IS MY TERRITORY,” the tall, raw-boned woman said, eyeing the golden fringe poking out from my bonnet as, a few hours later, I stood along Paradise Street, filled with its sailors’ lodgings and doss-houses.
“It’s a free street, isn’t it?” I said, my tone matching hers.
“How long you bin workin’?”
“Close to three years,” I told her.
“Not around ’ere, you ain’t. I knows every girl in a square mile. But you do look as if you knows your way around.” She studied my face. “You’re young. Younger’n most. From what I can see most likely the curse ain’t even on you yet.”
I didn’t answer.
“How old are you?”
“Fourteen.” Close enough to fourteen.
“You want to work around here, you work for me. What do you say to that?”
“Depends,” I answered, with a boldness I didn’t know I was capable of. I liked it. “How much do you take?”
“’Alf of what ya makes each night. Rules are I don’t abide my girls drinkin’ on the job. And I’ve me ways to find out if youse bin cheatin’ me, and if you ’as, you’re out of ’ere before you can tie your bonnet strings, and I’ll see to it you never gits no more customers in this area again. Understand?”
I nodded.
“You clean? My girls don’t work with clap or open pox. I got a name to up’old. Only clean girls, anyone wot comes to Blue’s girls knows. Were the same when I run my business down in Seven Dials in London afore I come up ’ere; my girls was all clean.”
“I’m clean,” I said, then purposely let my shawl drop open. I was rewarded by the slight look of disgust that filmed the woman’s expression.
“Bleedin ’ell. That’s fresh. You wanna work with it in that state?”
“I don’t care.”
She pulled a grimy yellow scarf from around her own neck. “Cover it with this for the next little while,” she said. “Don’t want to be scarin’ ’em off first fing.”
I took the scarf and arranged it over my scar.
“What’s yer name?”
“Linnet,” I told her. “Linnet Gow.” I pulled myself taller. “Although I go by Linny.”
The woman shook her head. “You wanna change your name? You got anyone from before lookin’ for ya”—here she raised her chin at my chest “—that you don’t want findin’ ya? Well?” She tapped her foot, waiting for an answer.
“I’ll stay with Linny,” I said. “Linny Gow. And if anyone comes looking for me,” I added, as the unshaven face of Ram Munt filled my head, “I’ll look after myself.”
“Fine. I got rooms ya can use, and ya can work for me as long as ya prove yourself. ’Ave trouble with a customer or any of the other girls or the ol’ Bill, ya come to me.You’ll find me fair, if you follow the rules.” When I nodded, she smiled, revealing a missing eyetooth. Otherwise her teeth were long and square, strong-looking. “Seems like you’ve got pluck,” she said. “Men who come down to the streets lookin’ for it, they like a bit of pluck, don’t they? If they want coyness and reluctance, well, I tells ’em, stay ’ome with yer good missus.”
She laughed at her own joke, and I opened my mouth and made a sound that may have been interpreted by some as laughter.
MY HAIR GREW OUT and eventually I could lift my chin and straighten my shoulders without my chest pulling and aching. In exchange for a share in a cramped room to sleep in and another room, curtained into three spaces with a thin flock mattress in each, to bring customers to, I handed over half of my nightly earnings to Blue, as was our deal.
“Where’d you say you come from?” asked Lambie one night, as we sat around a greasy table in the Goat’s Head.
“Back Phoebe Anne Street, off Vauxhall Road,” I told her.
“Vauxhall Road? Then how is it you got that smart talk? Them wots from Vauxhall don’t talk like yer does. I’m from Scottie Road meself, and I sure never learned no fancy talk.”
I smiled, a true smile. “Noble blood,” I said. “Noble blood, my dears.” I raised my glass of sugar water, and Lambie and Sweet Girl and I toasted to noble blood, to earning more in an hour than a day in the glassworks or the pottery or the candlemakers or the sugar refinery or bookbinders, and to the freedom that comes from not giving a monkey’s of what anyone thought.
“No shortage of customers for you, is there? How does she do it then, eh?” Lambie looked at Sweet Girl. “How does she pull in the most customers? And her with that.” Lambie pointed a finger. I looked down. My right breast swelled gently above the graying lace of my bodice, the skin smooth and glowing with the dull sheen of pearl under the stinking sputter of the gaslight. But on the left side the wide, jagged crimson ridge ran from the top of my breast to the top of my first rib. When no one was watching I rubbed that deep puckered scar on the flatness of my left breast. It still ached sometimes, as if the blades that had sunk deep into the tender flesh there had left invisible poisoned barbs that nipped and stung even after the surgeon had cut away the destroyed flesh and clumsily stitched the ragged edges together. The nipple was spared, but the muscle and fat that caused the slight fullness of my right breast was lost on the left.
Sweet Girl shrugged. “Sure as hell I don’t know, but I wish she’d send some of whatever she’s got my way. Some nights are damn useless, with little but piss-dribbling poxy cocks.”
“I think it’s because she let’s ’em pretend she’s a fine lady, just stepping down for a quick fuck with her pretty little cunt all powdered and fresh. Ain’t that right?”
They laughed loudly, and I raised one eyebrow at them. I knew it was my blood that made me different. And there was something else. I knew I wouldn’t be staying in this life, knew there was something different, something bigger for me. Linny Gow would become a name people would remember.
> Chapter Seven
IT WAS TRUE; I HAD NO SHORTAGE OF MEN. MOST I TOOK TO ONE of the tiny cubicles containing the mattress covered with layers of cheap, coarse sheets—the top soiled one taken off after each customer—on the third floor of the house on Jack Street, one of the narrow lanes that led away from Paradise. Some couldn’t wait; they only wanted a quick fumble in a doorway or alley.
And of course Ram Munt had found me not long after I’d left Back Phoebe Anne Street. I wasn’t hiding, and even with Ram’s muddled thinking it wasn’t difficult for him to figure out where I might be.
I saw him coming as I stood under a gaslight. I knew his rolling walk and the way his ears stood out from his head, and recognized that he was squiffed to the gills even in the darkness between the light poles. He was staring boldly into the faces of all the girls he passed, and I stepped even closer to the light, reaching under the back of my bonnet.
Ram’s steps quickened to a bowlegged lopsided run when he realized it was me. I came toward him, arms wide as if to embrace him. When he reached me I put my left hand on his shoulder. Then I slid the glinting blade of my folding knife, honed to a deadly point, to the pulse in his neck.
“Hello, Ram,” I breathed into his face. “I wondered how long it would be before I saw you here.” I pressed harder and the point broke the surface of his skin; a bright crimson bead welled up.
Ram whimpered like a babe. “Linny, my girl, that’s no way to say hello to your old Da,” he said, his eyes shifting.
I looked at the broken veins on his cheeks, the reddened, pocked surface of his nose, grown bulbous from drinking. Of course he was stronger than I, and even in his ale-addled state could surely manage to knock both me and the knife down before I could use it to cause any real harm—he knew it and I knew it. But I felt strangely powerful, standing in the circle of light. I had imagined this scene—the scene where I held a knife to Ram Munt—so many times over the last few years that I knew my face showed him that even after this short time, I wasn’t little Linny Munt anymore.
“Go away, Ram. This is my home now. You don’t own me any longer.” I liked the sound of my voice as I spoke up to him.
“Linny. Now Linny. Think it over.”
One half of my mouth smiled. “Oh, I have, Ram. I have.”
“Trouble, Linny?” It was Blue, come up behind me. Ram frowned at her.
I smiled more fully, never taking my eyes off Ram. “No, Blue, no trouble. Just someone who thought he knew me. But he’s mistaken. He doesn’t know me after all.” I lowered the knife but kept it visible, the light glancing off it.
Ram’s mouth opened, then closed. He glowered at me, looked at the knife one more time, then his gaze swung back to Blue. “She’ll rob you blind,” he growled. “And put on airs. A right sly little bitch, is this one. You’ll be sorry you took her on.”
“I’ll be the judge, my man,” Blue said.
Ram Munt turned and left. I watched him go and knew he wouldn’t bother me again. I was almost sorry I hadn’t sunk the knife deep into that pulsing vein when I’d had the chance. I realized it would have been easy to kill again. That the first killing is like losing the maidenhead—difficult, filled with pain and confusion. But once it’s been done, there can be no going back. There is little to prevent the next fuck. Or murder.
SUMMER CAME, and customers were more plentiful. Standing outside with the warm night air on my face and arms, my feet neither cold nor wet, could be quite pleasant at times. I liked the camaraderie of the other girls; we would stand, arm in arm, watching for carriages slowing, sometimes cracking peanuts as we laughed and gossiped. It reminded me, in a small way, of my old friendship with Minnie and Jane, of standing in the court with my mother after dinner. I realized how lonely I’d been for the last years, and how tightly Ram had controlled me. I liked my independence; although I rarely turned down a customer, I knew I could, if he was too repulsive or suspicious. I liked the freedom of knowing that whatever I earned, I could keep half. I remembered the simple girlish dreams I’d shared with Minnie and Jane as we skipped home together from the bookbinders, and now acquired paste necklaces and beaded reticules and feather bonnets from pawnshops. I popped into a chophouse for a hot pie, sometimes twice a night, and I started a collection of small, used, but fairly dear, leather books.
I felt quite grown-up with my purchases and at times, as I slipped a garish bauble over my wrist and admired it, reveled in a feeling that was close to happiness, I realize now. And where were Minnie and Jane? They would still be at the bookbinders, giving their earnings to their fathers or, possibly, by now, their husbands. They’d have left behind their girlish dreams of finery from shop windows, their wages going only to keep bread on the table and them out of the rain.
I was honest with Blue, thankful for her protection, and I knew she liked me. As I handed over half of my take one night, she gave me a wink. “Yer doing just fine for yerself, my girl,” she said. “I fink you’ve got yer future sewn up tight, long as ya stay clean. A girl like you can make a living fer a good number o’ years.”
I nodded, but of course I had no intention of staying and working the streets forever. Although I had a freedom Minnie and Jane would never know, I didn’t like the price I had to pay. I knew I would be leaving Paradise, leaving Liverpool, leaving all of England. I had begun to think about America—the America my mother once dreamed of. Even if she hadn’t been able to leave the hard life, I planned to.
I READ ABOUT THE SHIP to America on a blustery March night. It was down at an agent’s office in Goree Piazza, where the slave trade once had its offices. It was now home to various shipping companies and a few public houses. Business had been slow that night and I’d hardly earned enough to make it worthwhile to stand in the blowing rain. I wasn’t as comfortable down near the water; I preferred staying closer to Paradise, where the gaslights afforded a shred of safety, but every once in a while I took my chances.
Luck was with me and I’d quickly found two customers, one after another, which was enough to finish up my night. I was on my way back to Jack Street when I stopped outside an agent’s office to stuff a scrap of paper down the side of my boot, where it chafed my ankle bone. As I straightened up and glanced at myself in the darkened glass of the office, I saw a newly placed advertisement with a heading in large black letters:
THE UNION LINE OF PACKETS
LIVERPOOL TO NEW YORK
FITZHUGH AND CALEB GRIMSHAW
Underneath, in smaller letters, were details: “The Bowditch will sail on the 5th of April. Room for one hundred fifty to two hundred passengers steerage, as well as several first- and second-class cabins. No salt will be taken; the trip is guaranteed to be dry and comfortable.” The price for a first-class cabin was twenty-five pounds—twenty-five pounds! I thought. I couldn’t imagine anyone ever managing to save that amount of money. The steerage price was five pounds ten shillings.
Even five pounds was an amount I’d never seen. I shrugged and walked on, not thinking much about it.
But as the weeks passed, I thought more and more about the advertisement. I thought about what it could mean—going to America. And one dark night when I was closer to sixteen than fifteen, my lip throbbing from a punch by a punter who’d refused to pay and then given me the quick fist for my trouble, my feet aching in their cheap boots, I started to think about the advertisement and the picture of the tall-masted sailing ship, its sails full and wide in an apparent sea breeze.
I thought about a new life—a different life, where nobody knew me and where I could start over. I knew it might be my only chance to avoid ending up like other girls I had worked with—Lambie beaten so badly she’d gone blind and ended up in the workhouse, and, just last month, Skinny Mo dead of the bloody cough after too many years on the cold, wet streets.
So I started to hoard my earnings, pawning my cheap trinkets and extra bonnets and not allowing myself to purchase any more books, much as I loved to run my hands over the softness of their covers
, my fingers tracing the stamped letters. I ate less and didn’t visit the drinking houses with the other girls as often. And I waited.
I knew that when the time was right for me to go, there’d be some kind of a sign. I didn’t know what it would be, but it would be unmistakable.
A FEW MONTHS AFTER I made my vow to go to America I met Chinese Sally.
“Well, look who’s come down in the world,” Blue had said when a young woman, tall and slender, walked up to us as we stood on the street one summer evening. She carried a large and obviously heavy brocade carpetbag and wore a dainty lace frock far too fine for the street. She wore high pattens on her shoes so that her hems didn’t drag through the muck. Her hair was so black it shone navy where it showed beneath her stylish bonnet. She had beautiful skin, pale and unmarked, and the color of her almond-shaped eyes shifted and reflected the light so I couldn’t quite tell whether they were green or brown.
“Yer old man back in the clink again, is he?” Blue asked.
“Just for a bit, Blue. He’s only got a tailpiece this time, just the three months,” she said. “And he was stitched up by someone he thought was a mate. Thanks to that rotter, Louis was caught in the act.” She shook her head, setting her carpetbag on the street with a tiny sigh of regret, carefully avoiding a glob of spittle. She flexed her fingers. She wore knitted gloves. “Just goes to show you can’t trust anyone.”
The Linnet Bird: A Novel Page 7