Pickpocketing was a favourite. That red-haired woman I noticed on the first night was a regular dipster. Watches were her thing, but I saw her lift ’kerchiefs, pocket books and even a jewel dangling from a smart lady’s ear. I didn’t mean Red any harm – she was a grafter, I’ll give her that. At the end of that first week me and my cage were moved to The Carnival – a low sort of hall on the other side of Paradise, up Bethnal Green way – and I saw her up to her usual tricks there too. I felt bad, but I thought I’d better mention it to Fitzy.
After that I didn’t see her no more.
Red wasn’t the only one. There were a couple of bum-fluff lads who worked as a team, plying their marks with beer and gin until they were able to strip him (or her) of anything of value as they sat there and stewed.
A tall, well-dressed gentleman had a very neat way with the lifting of small items. I watched him on several occasions as he deftly unscrewed the silver top of his cane to deposit the objects he’d stolen into a hollow space inside.
Then there were the bangtails – the sort unregulated by Lady Ginger – who frequented the shabby boxes at The Carnival. I’m no prude, but the tricks I saw them turn! I didn’t even know that a couple of them were anatomically possible until I had a very frank chat with Peggy one evening after a show. I was glad she generally came with me wherever I performed and I was glad she looked after my paint box too. There were stories doing the rounds of theatre girls who ended up a ruin when a jealous rival put ground glass or acid into their face powder. Plenty of the girls in Lady Ginger’s halls were as hard towards me as Jenny Pierce . . . and I can’t say as I blamed them.
And that brings me to Jenny. No one realised she’d gone missing at first. She’d been so tight wound about what she saw as my promotion that it seemed highly likely she’d flounced off in her feathers and war paint just to prove she still had it in her.
We all expected her to turn up any day, preening in a new bonnet or soaked in some fancy cologne. Even when she missed three shows on the trot, risking Fitzy’s anger and, most probably a fine, we still thought she was off somewhere licking her wounds like a vicious old she-cat. No, Jenny Pierce could take care of herself and none of us suspected that her absence was anything more than ill temper and a sore head.
Don’t mistake me, we was all frightened by the way the girls from the halls were disappearing, we knew something very wrong was happening, but no one spoke about it for fear of bringing trouble to their doorstep. Like I said, the theatre is a superstitious place at the best of times. We all went about our business as usual, but we’d begun to keep our wits as sharp as the knives a couple of girls hid in their purses.
It was the Wednesday, five days after my first show at The Gaudy, that word came from Jenny’s lodgings in Ropemaker’s Fields. Her landlady, Mrs Skanks, sent pock-faced Bessie Docket – another of the Gaudy girls who called that flea-infested doss-house down near the river home – along to the theatre with a final demand for Jenny’s rent.
Now, Ropemaker’s was a filthy place and Jenny was welcome to it. Mother Maxwell’s wasn’t what you’d call smart, but at least it was clean in every way. Mrs Skanks turned a blind eye to the business some of her girls got up to. Tell truth, she was so far gone on the gin most days she probably wouldn’t have noticed if an entire ship’s crew had walked through her door. But she come to quick enough when the rent wasn’t paid.
Jenny hadn’t been seen at Ropemaker’s Fields – or anywhere else for that matter – since the Friday previous and her landlady thought it only fair, apparently, that Fitzy should pay up for one of his girls. As Bessie told us, still quaking after her encounter with Fitzy, no one at Mrs Skanks’s would dare to skip a rent day – and thinking of that woman’s freckled meaty arms and fists the size of ham hocks, I believed her.
I didn’t like Jenny, but I didn’t wish evil on her. I felt guilty, as if her blood was on my hands. Out, out damned spot. That’s what she’d said in my dressing room that evening. She should have known better than to tempt fate like that. I thought back to that last time I’d seen her in the box with her gent. I didn’t give it much thought then and looking back there hadn’t been much to see apart from her big yellow head bobbing up and down.
But what was I supposed to see?
For all that I was up there in the cage night after night, watching all the petty thefts and indecencies that gave the halls such a black name, I wasn’t picking up on anything that could point me the way to finding out what had happened to Jenny Pierce or to any of them other missing girls.
When I took my crumbs back to Fitzy I could tell he wasn’t happy and it didn’t make me feel too easy in myself. Tell truth, I was beginning to feel a right nark telling tales on poor types like me who needed to make a living. The problem was I needed to give him something to feed back to the old bitch to show I was keeping my part of the bargain and I had nothing else to offer.
On the evening of my last show at The Gaudy he caught me and Peggy just as we was leaving. He stood in front of the door leading out to the workshop and barred our way.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ I felt Peggy stiffen beside me, but he wasn’t talking to her. I looked up into his coarse red face. The usual aroma of liquor was rolling off him and the remains of something he’d eaten was caught up in the whiskers around his mouth. I gripped Peggy’s hand and squeezed it.
‘We’re going back to our lodgings – we always walk together part of the way now – all of us do. You know it’s not safe for a girl alone.’
‘Safe!’ Fitzy snorted and leaned forward. The stench of his rotten teeth made me catch my breath. He stared at Peggy and I saw his tongue move over his lower lip, then he looked back at me. ‘A bit early for you two to be leaving, isn’t it?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s late and it’s cold. I need to rest before we move over to The Carnival. Madame Celeste said I should have at least one free day a week, for the sake of my muscles. She was most particular on that, remember? Come on, Peg.’ I stepped forward.
Fitzy didn’t move, but his little eyes narrowed. ‘Have you been going home straight after the performance every evening, girl?’
I knew what he was driving at. It was common knowledge that a lot of girls in the halls offered late entertainment, if you get me, and Fitzy liked to take a cut of their earnings, but that was never part of this deal. I squared my shoulders and looked at him straight.
‘I’m not going to wait around making chit chat with the Johnnies, if that’s what you mean. Isn’t it enough that I’m hanging up there every night all done up as a tuppenny drab, without me actually putting out as one? I’m doing what you want, aren’t I?’
‘Are you now? We’ll see about that.’ He grunted and moved away from the door. As me and Peggy stepped down into the icy yard he called out, ‘And it’s not me you want to be worrying about, is it, Kitty? Think on that.’
As if I’d forgotten. Every night now when they winched the cage with me inside it up from the stage and out over the hall I’d close my eyes, hold Joey’s Christopher tight in my hand and promise him that everything would come right. This time I’d see something.
It never worked.
But I tell you one thing – I was a sensation, just like Fitzy told Lady Ginger. My act even made a corner of The London Pictorial News:
Miss Kitty Peck, The Limehouse Linnet, nightly defies gravity to delight her growing band of ardent admirers. She is our city’s most daring and radiant rising star, but this correspondent declares that it is the purity of her voice and the effulgence of her soul that glow most brightly in the East.
Well, that was all very complimentary, but those fine words were accompanied by a bold sketch that showed even more of my legs (and other parts) than that little spangled costume allowed. It made Lucca remark that my ‘purity’ and the ‘effulgence’ were probably not the first things that would arrest the readers’ attention when they turned to page seven. Lucca had to explain to me what effulgence meant and I thought it was a lovely thing to say, quite the sort of word that Joey might have used.
At least there was one thing that made Fitzy happy – the takings.
Every evening now, queues formed in the streets outside the halls where I performed. I had thought that the success of that first night was down to Fitzy’s theatricals with his whispers on the street, the black cover over the cage and all that malarkey, but I was wrong. No, the punters knew what they were getting all right, and they were wild for it. Fitzy had my cage illuminated by strategically positioned limelight flares, and, as the customers filed in, I fluttered about a bit and I gave out as good as I got when they called up to me.
Most of them were respectful, but just occasionally you’d get a drunken Johnny with a really filthy mouth on him. Although there was no love lost between me and the old bugger, I’ll admit I was grateful when I saw Fitzy’s barrel of a body bumping a half-cut heckler up the aisle and out through the curtains. It didn’t do for a girl in my position to get a reputation. Joey had always been very clear on that.
For some reason, the spot just under my cage was particularly popular. Most nights I’d look down and see all these calf-faced ninnies staring up at me. Generally they just looked, but sometimes I caught sight of the odd dirty bleeder fetching mettle. What they was doing with their hands turned me over. I wondered what would happen if The Limehouse Linnet brought the fatty chops she’d had for her dinner up over their greasy little heads, but I reflected that it probably wouldn’t be good for trade. No, when that happened I just concentrated hard on my purity and effulgence. Now I knew what they were.
We soon discovered that there was no point in anyone else going on before me. Mrs Conway was right put out and I don’t think Dismal Jimmy was too pleased about it neither. The regulars turned quite mutinous until they saw their pay packets, but what could you do? If a punter came into the hall and saw me hanging up there in my little bits of sparkled stuff, he wasn’t going to sit through a dog act, a sentimental serenade, a magician and a puppet routine before getting stuck into the main course.
Fitzy worked out that if I opened the evening and closed it a couple of hours later, then everyone (except Mrs Conway) went home happy – ’specially if the chorus came on in the middle and did a nymph routine.
That gave me a lot of time every night to watch from my cage, not that it did much good.
By the time I was due to start at the third of Lady Ginger’s halls, The Comet, exactly two weeks after that first night, it wasn’t only Jenny Pierce who’d gone missing. Another girl – just fourteen years old – had disappeared from The Gaudy, right under my very cage.