by Mary Hooper
x
Chapter Six
The discreet announcement, a neat oblong, had come from the front page of The Mercury. The man holding it, wearing his usual Saturday garments of a loud tweed jacket and yellow cravat, had cut it out before taking several items wrapped in newspaper to sell at Morrell’s, who never asked questions about an item’s provenance.
This man and one other were in Barker’s, a gentlemen’s club in London’s St James’s, and were occupying the largest leather seats in the smoking room. They had paid considerably over the odds to secure their membership to the club, for being ‘trade’ rather than ‘society’, by rights they shouldn’t have been there at all.
The man with the yellow cravat passed the announcement over to his companion, who was much more formally dressed in an immaculate dark suit with handmade boots and the softest of leather gloves. This man was puffing on a cigar, trying to blow smoke rings. This was the only point of levity about him, for his heavy face, bulbous nose and arrogant expression pointed to him having an altogether different character. He stared at the ceiling and a smoke ring rose into the air.
‘You read it to me.’
‘Well, I won’t bother with the details, but basically it says they’re looking for two pigeons and are offering a reward for their finding.’
‘Two pigeons, you say?’
‘Mother and daughter,’ said Yellow Cravat, glancing up at a fine oil painting of Her Majesty Queen Victoria over the fireplace and saluting her with his glass of port.
‘And you reckon there’s a chance of finding them, do you?’
‘I should say it’s worth looking,’ said the first, dodging a cloud of smoke. ‘My nark at the law courts says there’s a small fortune waiting around in unclaimed inheritances. He mentioned the case concerning these two, as a matter of fact. The person who locates them will take ten per cent of a tidy sum.’
The second blew out another perfect circle. ‘Worth a try, then. Mother and daughter, you say?’
‘The girl’s seventeen so the mother’s probably . . . what? Thirty something?’
‘I’ll use my contacts.’
‘We’ll go halves, eh?’ Yellow Cravat said.
‘We’ve got to find them first,’ said the other. Above his head, the smoke circle bloomed and dissolved. ‘Anything else to report?’
The first shook his head. ‘Just the usual: several substitutions of painted chipboard for oak. Oh, and I got a couple of nice wedding rings this week. The family said they wanted ’em buried with the corpse.’
‘More fool them! Bet that raised a cheer.’
‘It did,’ said Yellow Cravat, ‘but only after they’d left the premises.’
x
Chapter Seven
For the next four or five weeks, matters went quite well for Grace and Lily. At the beginning of July, the watercress which came into London from the outlying farms was at its most abundant, meaning that a large bunch could be purchased for a ha’penny, doubling all their profits. After two weeks of this, therefore, they had their rent money put aside for a whole month, and a little later Grace redeemed her mama’s cup and saucer and also bought two straw baskets in which to carry the watercress around and display the bunches to their best advantage. The other thing she’d managed to do was to put aside two shillings for her train fare to Brookwood, so she could go sometime and pay her respects to her dead child.
At the end of August, however, things changed again, this time for the worst, when the free-flowing brook used by one of the largest watercress farmers in Hampshire dried up, the authorities having diverted the brook to bring fresh water to a nearby village. This event caused such a shortage of watercress that the Farringdon Market sellers were able to double and double again the price of a wholesale bunch. It also rained every day for near three weeks so that there were few buyers on the streets, with the result that by the end of September their fortunes had turned again, and Grace and Lily were as poor as they’d ever been. The shillings Grace had saved for the Necropolis Railway had been used for food and Mama’s cup and saucer had been pawned again, together with the teapot and the baskets. Besides this, they had no money to put aside for that week’s rent.
‘We’ve just six pennies left, so tomorrow we’ll buy three large bunches,’ Grace said, laying out the money along the top of one of the crates. ‘If we’re very careful, if we make four bunches from each bunch we buy and sell them for a penny, then we will have . . .’ She counted on her fingers. ‘Twelve pennies.’ She sighed. ‘And then we must lay out six for stock the next day, and two towards our rent and two for some potatoes – oh, and a penny to use Mrs Macready’s oven to cook them. Even if we have them dry, it is barely enough.’
‘We could put an advertisement in the paper!’ Lily said. She was sitting on a crate with Grace kneeling beside her. ‘We could say we need money, being gentlewomen in trying circumstances . . .’ Grace had read out such an advertisement a few days before and, although Lily hadn’t known exactly what the words meant, she’d been fascinated by them.
‘And how much do you think such an advertisement in The Times would cost us?’
Lily shook her head in doubt.
‘Certainly ten shillings.’
‘Ten shillings! So the gentlewomen couldn’t have been in very trying circumstances at all,’ said Lily. She frowned deeply, thinking. ‘One of us could do something else to obtain money, get some different work . . .’
‘Perhaps,’ Grace echoed, thinking that now they were selling fewer bunches, there was certainly no need to have both of them out with cresses.
‘I could sweep the roadway!’ Lily went on. ‘I could buy a broom, look for ladies coming along and offer to make a passageway for them. That’s what the Wilson children do. Or I could hold horses for gentlemen.’
‘All the good crossings are taken,’ Grace said. ‘And it’s only boys who have the strength to hold horses.’
‘Well then, I could wait outside shops and carry parcels for ladies. Or pick up things in the streets. Patrick Cartwright told me that he once found two silk handkerchiefs.’
‘What he means is, he found them in someone’s pocket,’ said Grace.
‘Or I could go down to the river to look for things in the mud.’
‘No!’ said Grace. ‘Not that. You and I will never do that. I would rather go to . . .’
Lily looked at her and then burst into tears. ‘I’m not going back to that last place!’
Grace moved closer to put an arm around her sister. ‘No, Lily. Never. We shall never do that.’
‘You promised that we wouldn’t go back there. You said that whatever happened we never would!’ Once she’d started crying, Lily always found it difficult to stop. ‘You said that even if we had no shoes and were starving to death, we wouldn’t! You said!’
‘I meant every word,’ Grace said, smoothing her sister’s hair. ‘I promised you then and promise you now: we will never go into a workhouse or go back to the training house.’ She looked at her sister carefully. ‘But why was that place so very awful for you?’
‘That man might come for me again!’
Grace felt the blood drain from her face. ‘What do you mean?’
‘That wicked man. Oh!’ She looked at Grace in horror. ‘I said I’d never tell anyone. He said he’d kill me if I did.’
Grace was silent for a while, controlling her feelings, then she said, ‘We’re away from there now and we’ll never go back, so he couldn’t possibly know that you’ve told me.’
Lily gave a shuddering sob.
‘Tell me what you remember,’ Grace prompted gently.
‘He came at night-time. You weren’t there . . . one of the little children had called out for you and you’d gone into another room, so when he got into my bed, I thought at first it was you coming back.’
‘And then . . .’
‘Then he did something . . .’ Lily looked away, deeply ashamed. ‘He was improper with me.’
‘And di
d he say anything?’
‘Hardly anything, and he spoke very low, in a growl. He said that I should be a woman soon and it was as well that I found out what was in store for me.’
Grace nodded sadly. It had been the same for her. ‘Did you see his face at all?’
Lily shook her head. ‘You’d taken the candle and there was no moon that night. Besides, I was so frightened that I kept my eyes tightly shut the whole time – until he was getting out of the bed. And then I looked and saw the back of him, and when he pushed away the bedclothes . . .’ She shuddered again. ‘I saw that he only had one hand. Where the other should have been, there was just a stump.’
Grace nodded and swallowed the bile which had risen in her throat.
‘He told me that he visited all the girls once. He said he was a very important man and it was his special, secret treat for them.’ She suddenly realised the implications of what she’d said and gasped. ‘Did he come to you, too, Grace?’
Grace managed to control herself before replying, ‘Yes.’
‘Did he say the same things?’
Grace nodded.
‘And do . . . do the same?’
‘Yes, the very same. But because of that . . .’ She hesitated, but thought it was as well that Lily should know the facts of life.
‘Yes?’ Lily stared at her, somehow knowing that something even more serious was coming.
‘It was the baby, Lily. When a man and a woman do that, it can lead to the woman having a baby. And that’s what happened to me.’
‘And will it happen to me, too?’
Grace managed to smile. ‘No, dearest. If it was going to happen, it would have been before now. You’re perfectly safe, and so am I.’
‘Suppose he finds us?’
‘He doesn’t know where we are – or who we are – because when he visited us it was darkest night. I don’t believe he saw any more of us than we did of him.’
‘And besides, he has the other girls in the home if . . . if he wants . . .’
Grace sighed. ‘Yes, I’m afraid he does. But if we ever see a man with one hand, we will know him.’
‘And then?’ Lily prompted. ‘Then?’
Then she would kill him, Grace thought dispassionately.
x
Between them, the girls decided that perhaps the best way of earning a little money would be for Lily to wait outside shops and offer to carry parcels for lady shoppers. Early the following morning, therefore, after going to market with Grace, Lily set off for Burlington Arcade in Piccadilly, which was known to have the classiest, most opulent shops and, as a consequence, the richest lady shoppers. Unfortunately, this was such a well-known fact that, even by seven o’clock in the morning, a parade of tattered children had already assembled waiting for the arcade gates to be opened so they could take their places outside their chosen shop. Most of them were girls and were all very poor. Only a few of them had shoes, but all had made some attempt at gentility. The boys had battered top hats, while the girls had some form of head-covering, even if it was just an out-of-shape and fraying straw bonnet, or ragged scarf wound around their hair.
Lily approached the wrought-iron gates of the arcade and stared through. Beyond she could see curved, glittering glass windows filled with all manner of delightful things: soft leather purses and handbags, fur tippets, exquisite porcelain, jewellery, perfumes, soaps and lotions. Mama had had a real fur coat, she remembered, and lovely clothes, but all those things had gone years ago.
At half past seven the arcade gates were opened by two uniformed men who tried to scare off the would-be errand-runners by shouting that a couple of burly peelers were on their way and would arrest the lot of them for begging. This made the nervous ones, including Lily, hang back a little, but the threatened policemen never arrived and, after a few moments, she followed the braver ones into the arching passageway. Here she discovered that the arcade had two ends, and that a similar number of children had been waiting at the far one, so that there were already two children waiting outside most doors – three, in the case of the larger shops.
Lily walked through the arcade, pretending to look at the things in the windows, but actually trying to find a shop with a single person outside it. She found one, The Gentlemen’s Shaving Emporium, but standing sentry outside was a hefty boy of about seventeen, with an aggressive stare and large hands already curled into fists. Lily, too scared to speak to him, went on, reached the end of the arcade and walked back again, discovering as she did so that if she slowed down in any way, those already outside shop doors would hiss at her, or tell her in no uncertain terms to move on.
She thought it might be better when the ladies actually arrived and began shopping, but then she remembered that ladies of quality hardly rose before eleven o’clock, then spent the morning putting on their clothes and having their hair dressed before venturing forth in the afternoon to do a little light shopping and make their social calls. And they usually went with companions or ladies’ maids, so wouldn’t they carry the purchases? Lily made one attempt to speak to a little girl of about eight, asking if she might stand with her and take a chance, but the girl turned on her like an angry cat, saying that she’d fought for this place and it was hers and she would kill anyone who said otherwise, so Lily retreated.
Leaving Piccadilly, she went towards the Strand, intending to wait outside what was billed as the largest drapers’ store in London, but found a similar system there run by a team of boys who made it clear to Lily that she would never get any parcel-carrying work while one of them stood upright on two feet. And so it went on at every store or shop Lily approached, ensuring that she went back to Seven Dials that evening with precisely what she’d started with: nothing.
‘How did you fare?’ Grace asked anxiously. She, too, had had a bad day. Watercress had long been a favourite garnish for a bread-and-cheese dinner, but under the present circumstances most Londoners thought it was too expensive, and chose to go without.
Lily shook her head sadly. ‘But tomorrow I could try picking up cigar ends in the street, for I heard someone say that it’s a really good and profitable job.’
‘No!’ Grace said. ‘You can’t do that. Watercress-selling is one thing – and even carrying parcels for ladies is not too disgraceful – but we must never hunt along the gutter like tramps or wade in river mud. Mama would dislike it very much.’
‘But Mama’s not here to see us!’ Lily, tired and hungry, burst into tears, and Grace could offer her little comfort.
x
Chapter Eight
At Barker’s in St James’s, the same two men were reading the newspapers, occasionally putting them to one side to discuss some aspect or other of the past week’s business. One man was sporting his usual tweed jacket and yellow cravat, the other – the one with the arrogant expression – was dressed as formally as before, and had just put out his cigar.
‘Unfortunately, not so many dead this week,’ said Yellow Cravat, who was, in fact, Mr George Unwin, the well-known funeral director. He gave a guffaw of a laugh, then looked about them quickly to make sure no one else had heard. ‘I know how that must sound to outsiders,’ he said, holding up his hand in mock protest, ‘but business is business!’
‘Quite, quite. And without the funeral, we are without the mourning. Not a good situation to be in at all,’ said his companion and cousin, Mr Sylvester Unwin.
‘Luckily for us, everyone dies sooner or later.’
‘And even more luckily, we have some secondary earners until they do, eh?’
‘Talking of which, I see the two pigeons haven’t been traced yet.’ George Unwin stabbed a finger at the advertisement.
‘I’ve got my employees on the lookout.’
‘And my usual squealers have been primed.’ George folded the paper so that the advertisement was uppermost. ‘I’ve got a feeling about this one, you know.’
‘What sort of a feeling?’
‘A feeling we’re going to find Mrs . . .’ He
consulted the paper again. ‘. . . Mrs Parkes and dear little Lily.’
‘Be nice if you’re right, George. Be very nice,’ said Sylvester Unwin.
‘Indeed it would,’ said George complacently.
x
Chapter Nine
When Grace answered a tap at the door, she opened it to find old Mrs Beale there, anxiously threading a handkerchief through her fingers and looking as if a strong wind might blow her away.
‘I’ve come to say goodbye, dear,’ she said. ‘Mr Beale and I are leaving Mrs Macready’s.’
Grace ushered her into their bare little room, knowing that however low one sank down the social scale, manners were still important. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said. ‘Where are you going?’
‘We’re going to a . . . to a . . . well, to a workhouse.’ As the old woman managed to say the last word, it seemed to stick in her throat and nearly choke her.
Grace, trying not to show her dismay, took Mrs Beale’s hand. ‘Well, who could blame you for seeking shelter elsewhere?’ she said. ‘This coming winter promises to be a harsh one.’
Mrs Beale’s handkerchief became even more twisted. ‘We’ve tried to manage on our own, but last week Mr Beale was knocked down and all his shoelaces were stolen, and yesterday he fell in the middle of the street and only just missed being run over by an omnibus. Now we’re three weeks late with our rent and though Mrs Macready is the best of women, we can’t abide being in debt to anyone.’
Grace squeezed the old woman’s hand.
‘Is it so very terrible in these homes?’ Mrs Beale asked. ‘You hear such tales. You were in a home, were you not?’
Grace nodded. ‘I think they’re all very different,’ she said diplomatically. ‘At the first place we went, the orphanage, they were very kind to us. We were allowed to take our own possessions, and there was always enough to eat.’
‘Then may I ask, dear, why did you leave?’