Black eyes glinted up at me. Bleedin’ thing was poking its nose out from under the hem of my dress, bold as a bishop come Christmas. I stamped my foot, pulled the fabric sharp to the side and watched the mouse dart over the rug, skittering across the polished boards to a hole in the skirting. The Palace was running alive. I lay awake most nights listening to them scratching in the walls. I wondered Lady Ginger had stood for it, considering the way she dealt with most things.
Traps, that’s what we needed, or a cat – a big hungry one.
I shifted in the chair so I couldn’t see the hole and ran my finger down the page again, memorising the names and the numbers, repeating them over in my head until they was locked into place. I’d be ready for the Beetle tomorrow – it unnerved him and I enjoyed it.
From that first meeting with her lawyer, Marcus Telferman, almost three weeks ago now, one thing, at least, was clear: Lady Ginger, my grandmother, had left me an estate that went a lot further than a mouse nest and three bob scrag halls on the edge of the City.
I knew she was a Baron – we all did – but I hadn’t understood what that meant until I began to go through her papers. Put together they told a ripe story. Names, buildings, trades, ships, goods, men, women, even little children for Christ’s sake – all bonded to her and none of it the sort of thing you’d jaw over with a vicar, let alone a rozzer.
Elsewhere in the City, other Barons ran their own territories. From what I could make out, sometimes that was a distinct area bounded by landmarks or streets, other times it wasn’t so easy to catch. I got the impression from reading some of the documents Telferman gave me that the Barons themselves – the criminal lords of London – watched each other like yellow-eyed gulls at Billingsgate wharf.
In the main, Lady Ginger’s patch ran from east to west along the river taking in the docks and some other choice spots hemmed up to Mile End. It was called Paradise and she’d ruled it like Queen Victoria ruled the Empire.
And now she’d left it all in my hands.
I still didn’t know with a clarity how I felt about that. In the day, part of me saw it as a way to make changes; to sweep out the dirt and make things clean as far as I could. But, I’ll admit it, in the dark, when I was awake and listening to them mice, part of me was scared.
If Lucca wondered what I was looking at on the page in front of me, he never let on.
He was curled in the crook of the couch, engrossed in a book in his lap. I couldn’t see what it was on account of the padded scroll of the arm, but I could tell he was in deep. He leaned forward and strands of dark hair fell across his face. As I watched, he pushed it back behind his ears so I could see his fine Roman nose, the angle of his cheeks and the fringe of his lashes.
He would have been a looker.
If a girl didn’t know different she’d make a play for him – until she saw the scars that melted the right side of his face, pulling his lips and nose out of line and sealing his eye into a crimson knot of puckered flesh. Then again, what girls thought of him didn’t much matter to Lucca Fratelli.
I slipped the page of columns and figures back into place. It was raining again. I could hear the drops spatter against the panes. We were quiet together in the first-floor room I’d set up as a parlour. Apart from the mice it was clean and warm. I was sitting across from Lucca on a low-backed chair drawn up to the fire.
As I sorted the papers a small cream-coloured square fell to the rug. It was the gilt-edged card I’d found waiting for me here at The Palace the day Lady Ginger disappeared leaving her filthy house and all of Paradise in my hands. I reached down and ran a fingertip over the letters. The address, 17 rue des Carmélites, was slightly raised. I flipped it over and read my grandmother’s looping script.
Full Recompense
All that time she’d allowed me to think my brother was her prisoner – or worse, that he was a corpse wrapped in oilcloth and weighted down in the river. She’d bobbed gobbets of information in front of me like she was teasing a kitten with tidbits of bacon rind. She had me dancing for her all right. The worst of it was I reckoned she’d enjoyed it, been entertained by it, you might say. I’d been hauled up into place every night in that pretty glittering cage and I sang and I twirled seventy foot over the heads of the punters – and then I reported back to her on what I’d seen below, thinking what she wanted was a clear pair of eyes taking it all in for her benefit. The thieving, the whoring, the gambling, the gentlemen trippers who treated Limehouse like a zoological garden – I told her everything.
But as it turned out, that was only the half. She was testing me like she’d tested Joey, to see if I had the mettle to take her place. I brought back the last time I saw her in the churchyard at Ma’s grave. Eyes like jet buttons sewn on a chalk-white face, sticky black lips opening:
He was weak, Kitty. And you are strong.
I turned the card again and looked at the address, wincing as the sharp edge sliced the ball of my thumb. I heard her fluting, oddly girlish voice again.
I will return your brother to you in due course but whether you will accept him . . . ah, that is a different matter. You will find him much altered.
Altered? I knew she’d cut off his finger. She’d given it to me in a box ribboned up like a birthday gift. What else had the old cow done to him?
He was always so proud of his looks. What if . . .?
As if he’d caught my mind, Lucca glanced up from his book and smiled. I looked down and shuffled the papers in my lap. Don’t take it wrong – I loved Lucca. He’d saved my life and since Joey had . . . disappeared, he’d been the closest thing I had to a brother. Lucca knew everything about me and, these days, I knew everything about him.
Tell truth, it didn’t matter one jot to me who Lucca cared for. It was his business and anyways there’s plenty in the halls what don’t live regular. Who am I to tell a person who they can lie down with when the only man I’ve taken to my bed turned out to be . . .
I shook my head, forcing that bastard into the furthest darkest space in my mind, taking care to shut and lock the door. He didn’t deserve my thoughts. A couple of pins came loose and my hair sprang free from the plaited coil at my neck. I leaned forward to scoop them up from the rug where they’d fallen. When I sat back Lucca grinned wider and held up his book, the page opened out so I could see it clear.
I was wrong. He hadn’t been reading, he’d been drawing – as usual. The girl on the page was me, my head tilted as I read the card. I recognised my pointed chin and the scribble of curls around my face that had escaped from the coil even before I shook the pins free. He’d caught me in a few deft lines.
In the drawing I looked sad.
I smiled, leaned across and offered him the card. As he took it from my hand I noticed the gilt edges were newly stained with blood.