As I shifted about on the slippery cushions the contents of my head seemed to move slower than the rest of me, like a stew that someone had stirred in a vigorous manner and left to spin about in the pan. For a moment I wasn’t sure where I was. I stared up at the low brick arches overhead, trying to make sense of the space and the gloom of it. It was the smell that told me.
I sat upright on the bunk, but my brains lingered on the stained pillow. Of an instant, everything blurred and doubled itself. There were two little flames in the lantern beside me, two greasy feathers, two long pipes lying on the floor. After a moment the pipes rippled and merged themselves into one.
The woman on the low bunk over the way turned over and hacked so loud you’d almost expect to see a lung lying there on the stones next to her own pipe. There was an itching at my temples. I reached up and felt the band of a cap digging tight into the skin. I looked down at the breeches on my legs and felt a rush of shame.
Nanking Nancy’s was quiet. So far as I could make out from the lamps only four of her bunks was occupied. I swung my legs over the side and rested my forehead in my hands. My mouth was dry as the Billingsgate salt house.
The candles had burned to stumps before I finally went back down that black aisle and out into the yard where Tan Seng and Hari were waiting. Matthias Schalk was there still too. A single gas lamp half hidden by a scraggy tree cast a slick of yellow across the stones.
Schalk bowed. ‘My master told me to wait. It was the bond. Now that your servants can see you are unharmed, I will leave.’
He started off across the yard towards the arch where we’d come in earlier. I watched the roll of his broad shoulders and the swagger in his stride and took in an oddity. For all his bulk, he was silent as a cat.
I yelled after him, I couldn’t help myself. ‘How can you do such things, Matthias Schalk? How can you wake in the morning and haul that carcass out of the sheets knowing what it’s done?’
He turned and bowed again.
‘I am most flattered that Lady Linnet has taken the trouble to learn my name.’
‘It wasn’t from Netta. You lied to her and then you murdered her, making a spectacle of her death, poor cow.’ I thought of the big redhead dragged from the river. ‘And then there’s all them others. Tell me, when you look at yourself in a shaving mirror of a morning, don’t you ever feel like slitting your own throat in shame?’
Schalk scraped the tip of his cane on the cobbles as if he was writing a word or drawing a picture. The silver hawk head caught the lamplight. ‘What can I say, Lady Linnet?’ He grinned. ‘You know my work. I am an artist.’
He flipped up the cane, caught it and bowed.
‘Proost, Lady Linnet. I bid you good evening and good health.’
He sauntered to the arch.
The three of us sat in silence in the cab all the way back to Limehouse. Tan Seng crouched forward to scan the streets. It was quiet now, past eleven. Hari made a snuffling sound beside me. His big head dipped lower and lower until it was resting on my shoulder. I didn’t have the heart to wake him. The cabman up top clearly didn’t care who he took on board. I heard him whistling as we clattered along.
Kite’s final words kept winding around my head.
Who did your whore of a mother lie with? I think the answer will surprise you.
Tell truth, I didn’t remember ever having a father – Joey didn’t, neither. And it didn’t matter. Ma and Nanny Peck might have been an ill-assorted pair – not that we noted it, mind – but they were tight as the halves of a walnut packed in a shell, and they loved us fierce. Besides, plenty of kids in Limehouse didn’t have the benefit of a father’s name they could go by.
But looking back, there were things we never spoke about when Ma was alive. Both of them – Nanny Peck most especially – had the knack of carefully changing the matter if we was to introduce a subject that might take a personal turn.
They were storytellers, the pair of them, and the talent for invention served them well when me and Joey strayed into places where we weren’t welcome. I didn’t have the smallest suspicion that Nanny Peck wasn’t my real grandmother until Lady Ginger told me the truth of it that day in the cemetery when the mist rose around us, fugging up the past, hers most especially.
There were a lot of things kept hidden away from us like that bleedin’ dress in Ma’s closet. Joey had taken it out and given it an airing, hadn’t he? And it hurt her bad when he spoiled it. It was like he’d stirred something up that shouldn’t have come to light.
I saw one thing very plain now – my brother had always had a knack of stirring things.
I plucked at the folds of my skirt. Kite said he gave Ma that dress, but when? When did she know him? Why would he give her something like that and why would she keep it all them years?
Then again maybe it wasn’t true at all. Perhaps he was lying?
I knew straight off, that wasn’t right. The way the old goat’s face twisted up when I told him about the way she’d kept it, like it was something precious, told the truth. He was careful to keep a rein on himself, but just for a moment he couldn’t hide the way he felt.
Questions – that was the heart of it. I never got any answers from anyone. It was all lies and secrets tangled together, breeding with each other like lice in an old mattress.
My head was a writhe of thoughts that couldn’t find a home. It could burst open and spray a thousand trailing ends into the carriage and I’d never be able to pack them away again. That pain went off on the right side and crawled to the top of my scalp.
As I sat there in the dark of the carriage I knew a way to make it stop. I tried to push the smoke from my mind, but this time I didn’t have the strength to shut the door after it. As we rattled along I worked out how to slip out from The Palace again without anyone knowing I’d gone. I was good at secrets too.
‘Come awake, have we?’ Nancy peered down at me; the glass in her spectacles fetched the lamplight blanking her eyes. For a moment I took her for Kite standing there.
‘Haven’t seen you here in a while … Mr Riley. That’ll be a guinea. You took Persian again – two pipes.’ She glanced around the dim-arched room and knelt beside my bunk.
‘Someone’s come for you, ma’am.’ She spoke so quiet only I could hear. ‘It’s not safe to go about like this – to get yourself into this state.’
She pulled her loose black sleeve up a little way to show her wrist. A faintly marked snake coiled on her skin, beneath an ivory bracelet. ‘Like I said before, I make it a point to know my customers. My eyes aren’t the best, I grant you, but I know who you are, Lady. And I take it you know what this means?’ She moved the bracelet to show the tattoo more clear. The spade-like head of the snake curled onto her palm to the base of her thumb.
‘You’re among friends – but you shouldn’t have come, not alone again.’
She stood up and scanned the bunks. Someone coughed over near the back wall.
‘On your way, are you, young man? I’ve heard it’s another lovely day up top. You wouldn’t want to waste it.’
She offered me her hand and pulled me up. The room span, the lamps blurring to smears of orange that didn’t stop moving when I closed my eyes.
‘This way.’ We walked through the rows of bunks to the curtain at the entrance. I wasn’t sure who I’d see there and on account of the opium I didn’t have it in me to care. Nancy held back the drape to let me go through first. She followed and shifted the curtain behind her so we were standing private in a narrow space in front of the stone steps leading up to the street.
The Chinaman sitting at the little table in the doorway turned to nod at Lok, who was standing just behind him.
‘Lady.’ He stared at my breeches and bowed curtly. His plait flicked.
‘I’m sorry.’ I mumbled the apology. I wasn’t sure if it was to Lok, to Nancy or most particularly to Lucca.
I fumbled in a pocket.
Nancy shook her head. ‘You don’t pay me, Lady. I pay you. Very lucral it is – with women being a speciality, but it’s a dirty thing the opium. I wouldn’t touch it and if you want my opinion …’
She stopped as I hawked up a gobbet of black slime.
Nancy’s spectacles twitched. ‘A person could lose their soul in the stuff.’ She jerked her head at the low, brick arched room behind her. ‘They’re all wandering here – the regulars. If you need it – and I’m not advising it – send someone to collect. I did the same for her – for Lady Ginger – for medicinal purposes, you understand.’
She pushed the spectacles up her nose with the tip of that single long nail of hers. In the glow from the lamp hanging from the arched ceiling I could see her clear. Her skin was brown and wrinkled like a pair of old leather bellows. She caught me staring. ‘Yes – I’m smoked as a kipper, my gir … my Lady, and I don’t even use it. Just being in the environs takes a toll. If you want to keep that pretty face of yours fresh, steer clear of the trade. Take your cut of the earnings, but not the goods, that’s my advice.’
She tucked her arms into her black sleeves. ‘It’s the strangest thing you coming here these last few times dressed as a gent, when for all those years you came as you were – really were, I mean, a woman. Then again, it’s no business of mine how you go about. I suppose it’s by way of a disguise, now you’ve taken her place …’
I shook my head. Nancy wasn’t making sense. I’d never come here without breeches scratching my legs. I leaned back against the brick wall as she carried on. Her painted lips twisted and wriggled. I wanted to laugh.
‘Soon as you came in here this evening I sent word to The Palace, like your friend with the scar asked that last time when he came to find you. She was good to me, Lady Ginger, and if she chose you to take her place she must have known what she was doing.’
I was coming back to myself now. I straightened up. ‘When … when was Joey here?’
Nancy frowned. ‘Joey?’
I coughed again and wiped sticky black from my mouth with the back of my hand. I needed to be clear but my head was thick with the opium. I took a deep breath and thought about what I wanted to say.
‘When … When was I last here dressed as a girl? When did you last see me in a dress?’ The words came out slow and deliberate.
‘I would have thought you’d know that.’ She stared at me. ‘Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising. To my collection you were far gone that time as well. I wouldn’t have let you leave in that state if I’d known the truth of it.’
She chopped out a stream of words to the man at the table. He opened the lid of a black lacquer box set in front of him and took out a book. Then he flicked from the back, running a long nail down column after column of squiggles and dashes.
Nancy sniffed. ‘He’ll find you. We give all our customers a name to recognise them by and we make a remark on their particulars. It’s good to keep track of the trade. As a matter of fact I’m very certain we made a note of it when you came back. It was quite a surprise seeing you after all that time. I never forget a pretty face. Of course, we didn’t know then that you were about to …’
She stopped as the man jabbed at a mark halfway down a page.
Nancy turned to me. ‘May – the very beginning of May. That was the last time we saw you here dressed in a frock … ma’am.’