I closed the door behind me and leaned back against it. I could hardly see the little office for the tears glassing my eyes. There was a time when I thought myself a pretty piece, twirling about in the cage decked out as The Limehouse Linnet, but she was a bird of ill omen. Everything and everyone she cared about ended up as damaged goods. And that’s if they was lucky.
When I thought about Lucca and Sam, my heart pounded against my ribs like a farrier shoeing a dray horse. I loved them both, I knew that now – one as a brother, and the other as something more. Tell truth, I think I’d known it for a time, only I didn’t allow myself to take it out and turn it around in the light. And now …
What now?
I’d brought Sam Collins nothing but pain. Anything he’d ever felt for me was likely as dead and buried as poor Danny Tewson. I rubbed my face. When I went back with the smokes, I didn’t want him to see I’d been crying.
The boards overhead creaked as someone moved around in the room above. It was where Peggy and Pardieu were tending to Lucca. I stared up at the ceiling and tried to imagine how it was for him, kept in a lightless room and forced to paint them pictures. There were still things – a lot of things, tell truth – I didn’t understand, but I was certain of this – he never made it out of London. When he went off that day he was caught in a snare, just like Sam when he went to Angel Alley. Kite’s man had trapped them both, but how?
How did Schalk work it?
Under the stage at The Gaudy (before it burned to a hole in the ground) there’d been an old-time mechanism – a greasy network of cogs and wheels that moved things around up top. It took a deal of sweat and muscle to work the machinery beneath the boards, but the punters never knew a thing when a painted forest or a distant castle slipped into place. All they saw was what was right in front of their eyes.
I was in much the same position now. There was something else at work here, something I couldn’t catch on to. Just when I thought I saw a twitch in the corner of my eye it vanished quicker than one of Swami Jonah’s birds.
Another board creaked overhead and my throat went tight as a miser’s pocket. If Lucca wasn’t actually hammering on death’s door he was reaching for the knocker to join the rest of them: Danny, Old Peter, Amit Das, Edie Strong, Dalip, even that poor vain cow Netta Swift. In a roundabout way I was responsible for the woman they fished out of the Thames, the one who carried that letter to Telferman.
Blood was painted so thick on my hands I might as well have killed them all myself. And it wasn’t like it was over.
Joey was still folded away in his grim little cell at the Bedlam. I hadn’t had time to even think about him, let alone how to get him out of there. What would happen if I didn’t hand him over at the Barons’ Aestas session? I couldn’t do that, not to my own flesh and blood, but, then again, what else could I do?
It was hopeless. I was hopeless. Tears streamed down my face. They slipped round my chin and slid down my neck under the soiled cotton shirt.
I wasn’t a Baron. I was a joke to them – it was sharp and clear as the limelight. They were playing a game with me, testing me to see how much it would take to break the wings off the foolish little songbird from the halls. For Lord Kite it went somewhere deeper. I knew – no, that’s not right – I felt a darkness at the heart of all this that was about something more than power.
It was personal. I thought about Ma and what they’d done to her. I was aware of an odd sound something halfway between a sob and a wail. I clamped my hand over my mouth and forced it down.
I thought of my grandmother’s little bundle of opium sticks and, God forgive me, I wanted one bad. It wasn’t the taste of the smoke I needed. It was the nothing. I understood now why she gave me them that day. Lady Ginger’s pain wasn’t a physical thing. No, what she felt inside was her soul rotting away.
I went to the mirror over the little fireplace and stared at my face in the glass, noting the lines around my mouth that hadn’t been there a year back. I daresay most people wouldn’t mark them, but I could read them plain. My eyes were different too. The eyes of the girl in the mirror were a hundred years old.
I recognised the woman looking back at me.
I took up a brass candlestick, stepped back and hurled it at the glass. It crashed, bounced back and clanged to the stone of the hearth. For a moment nothing happened. The girl in the mirror froze, and then there was a splintering sound as a thousand tiny lines obscured her face. The glass clouded white like frost on a pane of a winter morning and then, very slowly, almost delicately it crumbled to the mantle, little glittering shards of it tumbling to the hearth and out over the rug and the boards.
In the sunlight from the window, the shattered glass at my feet glinted like fresh clean snow.
Cold and hard as a diamond.
I stared at the mess. My grandmother’s splintered little voice repeated the words over and over. I bent to take up a pinch of the glass and pressed it hard between my thumb and the tips of my fingers until blood ran red and vivid against the smuts.
She was wrong. Lady Ginger was so wrong about me.
I was glad I burned them black sticks. I wanted to feel the pain. It reminded me who I was – the girl who was never afraid; the girl who went so high in the cage every night the punters couldn’t see her through the smoke; the girl with a fierce bright spark burning inside her that could fire every hearth in Limehouse, maybe every hearth in the whole stinking City.
No, I wasn’t my grandmother and her way wasn’t mine. But she was right about one thing. If it took the last breath in my body to bring the Barons to their knees, I would give it. I was more than they knew, I wasn’t Lady Linnet. I wasn’t their creature.
I was Kitty Peck.
It was like an exhilaration. It was like being up on that swing in Madame Celeste’s attic the very first time, when the pins fell free and my hair came tumbling loose.
The air in the room was stale as the fug that had filled my head for the last weeks. I let the splinters of glass fall from my hand and went to the window, throwing it open to let a fresh cool draught into the room. It felt clean on my face. I closed my eyes and gulped down a lungful.
There was a scuffling sound and I opened my eyes to see that bold little sparrow on the sill. It cocked its head to one side as if it was about to remark on the broken glass scattered across the boards behind me. If I’d had any crumbs handy I would have fed it.
I reached out my hand. ‘You come back later, Edie, and I’ll have something for you.’
The sparrow ruffled its dull brown feathers and then it took off again. I wondered if it was one bird or a whole family of them packed tight in a nest.
Family.
Something Lucca said on the row boat came back.
Edie.
I thought he was rambling with the fever, but it came to me with a clarity that he wasn’t. And then there was that other word he kept repeating.
Figlia.
Pardieu said it meant daughter. Lucca wasn’t rambling, he was trying to tell what I should have seen a long time back. I ran to the pile of ledgers stacked on the desk. Everything in Paradise, every shoddy business I’d inherited from Lady Ginger, was listed there; the people I ran, their trade and their value down to the last brass farthing. I knew their names, ages, occupations and where they laid their heads of a night.
I took the ledger for the halls and flicked to ‘S’. Blood from the glass cuts stained the page as I ran my finger down the column until I reached ‘Strong’. Poor little Edie’s name had a line through it, but just above there was her mother, Brigid.
I followed the line across. Brigid Strong lodged at Palmer’s Rents, off Broad Street.
That pain twisted into my temples again. I was a fool. It was right under my nose all along. The stink of lyco from the tissue wrapping Netta’s blue dress should have told me. I flicked back five pages to ‘M’. I found the name I was looking for, but by then I was certain. I ran my finger over the page.
Lady Ginger’s words came to me.
Family, Katharine, it is always a simple matter of family. Remember that.