The Ladies In Love Series

by M. C. Beaton

  Both young ones waited with bated breath while Penelope went quietly up the stairs to her father’s bedroom to rifle his pockets for any money that might be left.

  The house was very small, consisting of a front parlor—never used—a back kitchen, and two small bedrooms up a rickety flight of stairs.

  Penelope soon returned and shepherded the small girls out into the dark and freezing cold. Winter held London in its grip. One woke up in darkness and lived in darkness all day, as clouds covered the heavens and thick smoke belched from millions of chimneys. Hoarfrost sparkled on the railings and pavements of Cutler’s Fields.

  “Look!” cried Penelope. “Innit wunnerful? Like dyamonds!” But her sisters felt too scared to open their mouths. Their home was not yet far enough behind them.

  “Come along, duckies. Cheer up!” said Penelope, putting an arm around each shawled shoulder and doing a little dance with her old cracked boots on the frosty pavement. “Tell yer wot… I’ll sing yer a song I ’eard.” Releasing the girls’ shoulders, she struck an attitude and started to sing in a voice as clear as a lark:

  “She was poor, but she was honest,

  Victim of the squire’s whim:

  First he loved her, then he left her,

  And she lost her honest name.”

  One by one, like wary animals, the neighbors ventured out of their houses into the damp, sour squares of earth that passed for gardens, drawn by Penelope’s singing. Her little sisters forgot their fears as they listened to the well-known comic ballad.

  Oblivious of her small audience, Penelope caroled on for the sheer joy of it.

  One by one they joined in until it seemed as if everyone in dreary Cutler’s Fields was roaring out the last verse:

  “It’s the same the whole world over,

  It’s the poor wot gets the blame,

  It’s the rich that gets the pleasure,

  Isn’t it a bleedin’ shame?”

  There was a spattering of applause, and Penelope grinned and swirled her dirty patched skirts in a curtsy.

  “You otter be on the styge,” wheezed old Mrs. Jenkins, nearly falling on her face as she tried to lean on her nonexistent gate, forgetting in the glory of the moment that her husband had sold it to the scrap dealer only the week before. “Luverly, your voice is. Luverly.”

  “’Ere, Penny-lope,” called Mr. Barker, the rag-and-bone man. “’Ere’s yesterday’s pyper, and innit they says something abaht wantin’ Lewis girls.”

  “’Ave a look at it,” begged Mrs. Tyson, a thin, anemic housewife carrying her fourteenth offspring in her shawl. “You could be a Lewis girl, Pen, you really could.”

  “I’ll look at it later,” said Penelope, laughing, taking the paper and tucking it under her arm. “I’ve gotter get the girls off to school.”

  Waving to the neighbors, she swung off down the road, keeping up a brisk trot until the parish school loomed up through the black, sooty air.

  “Run along, ducks,” she said, giving Emily and Josie a kiss each. “Now don’t you worry. Pa’ll be like lambs when you gets ’ome. And me? Well, I may have a job, that’s wot.”

  “Oh,” breathed Josie, round-eyed. “Are you goin’ on the stage, then?”

  “Maybe,” said Penelope, laughing. “Off with you!”

  She waited until the two girls had been swallowed up in the darkness of the school entrance and turned around and ran home, dancing and skipping through the cold air.

  She stopped at the Post Office, which also served as bakery, sweet shop, haberdasher, and general grocer and bought a small brown paper bag of coal with a little of the money she had found in her father’s pockets.

  Penelope decided to treat herself to a fire. Just a little one. She would save the rest of the coal to warm the girls when they came home from school.

  Once the fire was lit and a few stale tea leaves at the bottom of the caddy were coaxed into something resembling a brew, Penelope opened the Morning Bugle that Mr. Barker had given her and turned to the advertisements.

  There it was, in a neat box all on its own: ONE LEWIS GIRL WANTED. AUDITIONS 11:00 A.M., WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5. LEWIS’S. THE STRAND.

  Penelope took a deep breath. A Lewis girl.

  The Lewis girls were already famous. They were the brainchild of a Mr. Benjamin Lewis, who knew how to titillate the fancy of his audiences without offending the ladies or stooping to the vulgar level of the music hall. He put on musical comedies, all with a very thin story line, which nonetheless played to packed houses, for everyone came to see the chorus—the Lewis girls. They were hailed as the prettiest in England, with their gorgeous dresses, twirling parasols, and tiny waists.

  One had already married into the peerage.

  All at once Penelope decided to go. She knew she was pretty, because every boy in Bermondsey had told her so. She knew she could sing. She did not know that she looked dirty and ragged. She wore the same clothes and had the same hygiene as the people for miles around. In Bermondsey, temperance was next to godliness. People had enough to worry about without bothering about baths—and whoever heard of a house having a bathroom anyway?

  Penelope washed her face and hands over the piled-up dishes in the sink, skewered one of her mother’s old felt hats, which boasted a pheasant’s tail feather, on her curls, and set out for the Strand.

  It was a long walk. Over London Bridge to Cannon Street, down Cannon Street, past St. Paul’s, down Ludgate Hill and up Fleet Street, past the Law Courts, past the Temple Bar, around in front of Somerset House, and so up the Strand.

  And there at last was Lewis’s Theater, its gaslights flaring to banish some of the murk of the winter’s day.

  At first she made the mistake of entering the theater foyer and was told severely to go around to the stage door.

  After some searching she found the stage door and then gasped in dismay. A long queue of elegant young ladies stretched out down the dingy lane that ran up the side of the theater.

  Penelope’s heart sank. She became bitterly aware of the poverty of her own dress. But she could not go back. There seemed to be magic, which would not let her turn away, emanating from the very stones of the theater. So she stayed and shivered and stamped her feet as the line shuffled slowly forward.

  One by one unsuccessful applicants began to emerge from Lewis’s, the faces of some of them swollen with tears. “He’s a right tartar, that Mr. Lewis,” sobbed one to the waiting girls. “He said I looked awful and sang like a crow.”

  Again Penelope’s heart sank, but once more she found she could not leave.

  At last she found herself at the entrance to the stage door—to find her way barred by a small, stern-looking man.

  “Wot ’ave we ’ere?” he demanded with awful dignity, looking Penelope up and down. “Scrubbing woman?”

  Several of the girls, already inside and waiting on the stairs, giggled with malicious enjoyment.

  Penelope straightened her spine. All at once she remembered her last school prize-giving, where a certain Lady Bentley, a minor peeress given to good works, had come to hand out the prizes and had terrified everyone by the haughtiness of her manner. Penelope was a good mimic.

  She fixed the small man with her hard blue eyes, and in the steely, arctic tones of the upper class said loudly, “I, my good man, am Poppy Duveen. In character.” Then with one withering look she pulled her ragged shawl around her shoulders and swept past.

  “Sorry, madam,” said the stage doorkeeper hurriedly. He assumed, as Penelope had meant him to, that she was some well-known bit-part actress who had come straight from her own theater to audition at Lewis’s.

  One of the waiting girls looked at Penelope in awe. “Which theater are you playing?” she asked.

  But Penelope did not feel she could sustain the accent of Lady Bentley much longer, so she fixed her interrogator with a cold look and turned away without replying.

  “Snob,” muttered the girl sulkily.

  Mr. Benjamin Lewis leaned back wearil
y in his seat in the pit and stared moodily at the stage. “Next!” he yelled.

  “They’re bloody awful,” he muttered to Mr. Pettifor, his stage manager. “They’re either too common or too refeened. I want a saucy girl. I want innocence combined with come-hither. And their clothes are dreadful. No style.”

  “Well, you ain’t going to get it this morning,” grumped Mr. Pettifor. “What a lot!”

  Like quite a lot of badly dressed people, Mr. Benjamin Lewis had a sharp eye for the faults of others. He was dressed in a biscuit-colored suit, too tight at the waist and too wide about the shoulders. A ruby pin winked above the embroidered glory of his two waistcoats.

  “Oh, my Gawd!” he cried suddenly, jerked into animation. “Oh, no! Take it away. It’s some awful joke!”

  “It” was Penelope Smith, blinking in the footlights and clutching a ragged sheet of music.

  Penelope heard the loud voice and froze. She angrily shook off the hand that was trying to tug her from the stage, and marched to the front of the footlights.

  “Look ’ere!” she yelled, “Mr. Whoever-you-are. I come ’ere for to sing, and sing I will. You ain’t ’eard me yet.”

  Mr. Lewis stared amazed at the ragged defiant figure, at the blazing blue eyes, and sank back in his chair in weary defeat.

  “Oh, very well,” he shouted crossly. “Get on with it. What’s she going to treat us to?” he muttered to the small, dormouselike figure of Mr. Pettifor. “‘The Coster’s Saturday Night?’”

  “Dunno,” shrugged Mr. Pettifor. “What sewer did that one climb from, eh?”

  Penelope had handed her music to the accompanist and once again approached the footlights. She put her small work-worn hands behind her back.

  She sang.

  She had chosen one of her mother’s favorite Scottish ballads, and Robert Burns’s immortal love song rang out sweetly to the darkened boxes with their fat gilt cherubs.

  “My love is like a red, red rose,” sang Penelope with all the yearning pathos that the East End slums of London could bring to a ballad.

  Mr. Benjamin Lewis, like many theater people, was very emotional and sentimental. The beauty of the clear, innocent voice soaring heavenward out of that pile of filthy rags and cracked boots—the very… yes, dammit, the very gallantry of the girl—moved him so much that his eyes began to blur with tears. Even stony little Mr. Pettifor cleared his throat several times.

  The last bell-like note died away, and Penelope stood very alone in the center of the stage… waiting.

  “What is your name?” called Mr. Lewis in a strangely altered voice.

  Penelope took a deep breath.

  “Miss Poppy Duveen,” she called back.

  “Very well, Miss Duveen, report for rehearsals at this time tomorrow.”

  “Oh, sir!” cried Penelope. “Oh, sir, I—”

  “Stow it, Miss Duveen.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “And er… Miss Duveen…”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Have a bath before you come back, dear girl. Do, do have a bath!”

  Now, there was quite a large section of society that firmly believed that the poor would be perfectly happy if only they were kept in their proper places. And of course they were quite right. Witness the fury of the once-sunny Miss Penelope Smith.

  “I ain’t Penny-lope no more,” said that young lady, leaning over the kitchen table and glaring at her equally infuriated father. “I’m Poppy Duveen, that’s wot, and don’t you forget it neither, you old toad.”

  “You’re a lydy,” howled père Smith, quite beside himself with hangover and injured pride.

  “Me?” sneered Poppy ominously. “I was never so ashamed in me life. Never. ’Ave a bath, Miss Duveen, ’e says. I could’ve dropped where I stood. My sainted mother, God rest her soul, would’ve died too,” Poppy went on, quite forgetting in her rage that her sainted mother had never been one for cleanliness either.

  “Who’s a-goin’ to look after the little uns when you’re prancin’ abaht on the stage?” demanded Mr. Smith.

  “I’ll pay someone, that’s wot,” said Poppy. “And I’ll pay someone to look after you too, you miserable old scrounger. I’ll pay Ma Barker.”

  “Blimey!” said Mr. Smith, falling back before this termagant. “See ’ere, now, Pen—I means Poppy. Not ’er, anyone but ’er.”

  “It’s ’er or nobody,” said the new Poppy, arms folded.

  “Oh, dear,” said Mr. Smith, putting his head down and beginning to cry. “Them snakes were better’n this.”

  But Poppy would not relent. She knew her father could become violent in his cups, and she feared for the safety of her little sisters. Ma Barker was built like a coal heaver and a red-hot member of the Temperance for the Poor Society.

  And so it was that Poppy Duveen was born on that cold winter’s day, and never had such excitement descended on Cutler’s Fields. It was as good as having the Prime Minister living right next door.

  After weeks of gruelling rehearsals Miss Poppy Duveen made her debut, thanks to the backing of the whole of Cutler’s Fields, supported by the local pawnshop. Poppy herself had pawned the last memento she had of her mother, a cameo brooch, to buy gallery seats for everyone, for the tickets were expensive by the Fields’ standard, being threepence each.

  Mr. Lewis had been fascinated by Poppy’s fresh beauty after she had had a bath. “Cleaned up a treat,” as he remarked to Mr. Pettifor. He had placed her last in the chorus line, so that it was Poppy who came back to take the bow for all the girls, which was why she had no friends in the chorus, the others feeling that this little bit of stardom should not have been given to the newcomer.

  They were all there, with the exception of Mr. Bert Smith, who was sulking in a solitary state back at the Pig and Crumpet. Little Emily and Josie clutched the brass rails at the front of the gallery and hoped they would not be sick from excitement.

  Ma Barker held a short clay pipe between her broken teeth and hoped the strain of it all would not bring on her palpitations. Her husband sat foursquare beside her, a new bowler on his lap. Mrs. Tyson and all her fourteen children were present in strength. Even old Solly, the pawnbroker, had turned up, but he had a more expensive seat in the upper circle directly below them, and it said a lot for the importance of the occasion that none of the Cutler’s Fields contingent in the gallery dropped anything on his gleaming bald head as they were longing to do.

  The musical was called The Happy Prince, which took place “in the wild and savage country of Tremania.” But the Lewis girls were dressed in the latest London fashion, and to roars of applause they swirled onto the stage to sing their opening number, froufrou swishing, pink taffeta skirts rustling, enormous hats perched at a saucy angle, and parasols twirling.

  “We can show you a little bit of what you like,” they sang.

  “A little of what you desire.

  A little swish of our skirts,

  To set your hearts afire.”

  And at the end of the number, each girl raised her skirt and showed her whole foot and a tiny glimpse of ankle! The mashers in the pit went wild. Poppy tripped out to take the applause, and Cutler’s Fields leapt to their feet as one man and gave tongue. “Poppy! Poppy! Poppy!” they yelled, stamping their feet.

  “Hooray!” screamed little Emily, bursting into tears.

  The roar was infectious. Poppy, with her shining blue eyes, sparkling blond hair, and shy smile, went straight to the hearts of the audience. “Poppy! Poppy!” they yelled until Mr. Lewis hissed her from the stage before his leading lady had a temper tantrum from sheer jealousy.

  To the more sophisticated of the audience, the story line was painfully thin. But Cutler’s Fields believed every word of it, and when the villain seized the heroine, young Alf, the bread delivery boy, threw his leg over the gallery, shouting vengeance, and had to be pulled back and cooled down with several bottles of stout.

  But after the final curtain, Ma Barker held the others back from ru
shing around to the stage door. “They’ll be fellows,” she said wisely, “wantin’ for to take ’er out, and I told ’er for to go and ’ave a bit o’ supper and nuthin’ else. I told ’er wot ter do. ’Er’ll be all right.”

  Poppy changed as quickly as possible in the cluttered dressing room that she shared with the other girls. The rage and jealousy emanating from her fellow performers was almost tangible. She changed out of her pretty costume and hung it away carefully and donned the shirtwaist blouse and skirt and rather battered cloak which had been all she could afford. She pinned the felt hat with the pheasant’s tail feather on top of her blond curls and clattered down the stairs in her buttoned boots to the stage door and walked outside—and stood still.

  Several gentlemen crowded around her, begging her to share their suppers. They all seemed to have very white faces, oiled hair, and to be wearing black-and-white evening dress. For a moment the faces swam before her, and then she focused on them. There was one who had a fat, unhealthy face, and his eyes held a look she instinctively distrusted. Another two were handsome but in a bold, flashy way. Another three were quite obviously drunk. But one, a thin, tall, gangling young man with a neat little mustache and patent leather hair, stood a little apart from the others, a hesitant smile on his face. She looked at him, and he came bounding forward. “I say, Miss Duveen. Do have supper with me,” he begged. “My name’s Freddie Plummett. I think you’re most frightfully pretty.”

  Poppy smiled into his eyes.

  “Ta, ever so,” she said, placing her hand on his arm.

  Quite dazzled, the Honorable Freddie Plummett led his prize down the cobbled lane and into the roar and bustle of the Strand. “Hey, cabbie!” he yelled. “Café Royal, if you please.”

  “Lumme!” said Miss Poppy Duveen.

  Chapter 2

  Poppy stepped out into another world. She tried to look as if taking supper at the Café Royal with an aristocratic young gentleman was an everyday occasion. But secretly she felt overawed by the marble and glass and dazzling white linen, by the subdued well-bred murmur of the other diners, and by the enormous menus.