‘All these fancy frocks and posh manners,’ she sighed. ‘I wish me old mates…’
‘Friends,’ Jacob corrected her as he came into the bedroom. He looked over Ettie’s shoulder at her reflection in the cheval looking-glass. ‘You’re pleased with the seamstress’s work?’ he asked.
‘My old friends won’t know me,’ said Ettie, twirling around the room admiring her new outfit. ‘Yellow and grey striped satin, eh? Who’d have thought Ettie Wilkins would ever wear something like this?’
‘Anyone who had really looked at you, Ettie, could have seen past your poverty, and could have recognised you for what you really are – a beautiful, clever and wonderful girl.’
‘You’ve quite turned my head, Jacob Protsky,’ she said coquettishly as she walked over to him and put her hand on his arm. ‘You’ll have me actually believing all your pretty words before you know it.’
Jacob didn’t move away from her, but neither did he respond to her touch.
‘In these couple of weeks you’ve shown me how I can be a lady, Jacob. And I feel as good as anyone now. Thank you.’
‘You always were as good as anyone, Ettie. It was just that you weren’t aware of it before.’
‘It really, I don’t know, it amazes me, that a geezer…’ she laughed happily. ‘A gentleman, I mean, should sort of like women like you do. It’s kind of, well, funny, don’t yer think?’
‘Funny? In what way funny?’
‘To like us, not just to want to, you know, do it with us.’
‘I learnt many things whilst I was in France, Ettie. Many funny ideas, as you put it.’
She turned back to her reflection in the mirror and primped at her hair. ‘Yer never did tell me, Jacob,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Why did yer leave Paris if it was so good?’
‘“You”, Ettie, “you”. Not “yer”. Your voice, concentrate.’
‘Just who d’yer think I bloody am?’ she demanded, angry at his continual evasion. ‘A sodding princess?’
‘Princess or not, Ettie, we have work to do. We are becoming dilatory, we must proceed with our plan of action.’
‘If you like,’ Ettie said.
‘You sound reluctant,’ said Jacob.
‘If that means I’m fed up with being taught table-knocking, ecto-bloody-plasm appearances, trances and all the other rotten tricks of the trade, then yes, I bleed’n am reluctant.’
He took out his gold half-Hunter watch from his waistcoat pocket. ‘Oh, Ettie, I’m sorry. It’s almost five o’clock. We’ve been working for hours. I’ve been very selfish. Shall we go for a walk? Or would you like some tea?’
Ettie put her hands on her hips and narrowed her eyes at the man she found fascinatingly handsome, but whose face was now crumpled with concern for her. ‘You know just how to get round a girl, don’t you, Jacob? You’re such a bloody good actor. I must be bonkers, but come on then, let’s get on with it. What do you want me to do next?’
‘Get into the box,’ he said, his enthusiasm returning immediately. He drew back the muslin curtain covering the front of the three-sided cabinet which stood in the corner of the bedroom and indicated that she should enter. ‘Mind your head. You’re a bit taller than my last assistant.’
‘Oh, is that right? Who was she then?’
She should have known better than to have asked. As usual, he did the trick he did best of all: that of changing the subject whenever he chose not to answer her questions.
‘Is your mother tall?’ he asked, friendly and kind, helping her into the seat at the back of the black painted box.
‘Not especially,’ she answered tersely, settling back.
‘Your father, then?’
She laughed. ‘Who knows? He could have been a bleed’n giant for all I know. Or care.’
‘Look,’ he said, concentrating on fiddling with a small brass eyelet on the side of the box. ‘This is where I fix the string that allows you to move the spirits around the room.’
‘But that’s so obvious. They’ll see it’s all done with tricks.’
‘Oh no. The spirits can only commune in the dark, Ettie. Our earth light hurts their ethereal bodies. Watch.’ He turned the gaslights down to the faintest glow and began mumbling incomprehensible phrases. Then in a loud, clear voice he called on the spirit world to join them, there in the room. ‘I can feel them with us, Ettie,’ he moaned, and began panting alarmingly. ‘Yes! Yes! Oh yes! They’re here.’
Ettie could see both his hands on the table, in full view, but she could also see a hand – not Jacob’s – reaching up from under the table and waving its frightful fingers in her direction.
She screamed.
‘Please! No!’ Jacob groaned as though he were in great pain. ‘The spirits will be afraid. Oh,’ he moaned. ‘Too late. Too late. They have departed. They have left us.’ His voice took on a saddened, disappointed tone. ‘Please, turn up the lights, Ettie.’
Ettie took a deep breath and levered herself out of the box. Feeling her way across the room and only turning her back on the hideous apparition of the hand at the last possible moment, she turned up the lamps to shed their full light. Then she swallowed hard and turned her wide-eyed gaze back to the table where the vile thing rested. She burst out in loud, relieved laughter.
‘You’re a bloody… Aw, I dunno, but you are one.’
Jacob was still sitting at the table, waggling his hands high above his head. One of his legs was also raised so that his foot rested on the table top. And there, clear for her to see, was the spirit hand, a luridly coloured rubber confection, which he had slipped neatly over the toe of his boot.
‘Easy,’ he said grinning, ‘all you have to do is cross your leg and bend your knee, and,’ he lowered his voice to a slow, dramatic growl, ‘up pops the spirit.’ He resumed his normal, persuasively gentle tone. ‘And putting a shoe on your hand and brushing it over the sitters’ heads in the dark gives a wonderful impression of flying spirits.’
She laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. She hadn’t admitted it, even to herself, but she was falling in love with him: a rogue. But such a handsome one; such a charming, funny, kind, con man.
‘And now,’ trilled Lou. ‘The first ever performance in England of the World Famous Silent Beauty!’
‘Well I ain’t never heard nothing about her,’ shouted a wag from the back of the penny gaff.
‘How yer gonna hear about someone who can’t talk? Yer dozy great nit,’ Lou hollered back at him.
Satisfied that she had confused the heckler enough to silence him, Lou flipped her train to one side, treated the front row to a slow wink, and then wiggled away behind the curtain, leaving the makeshift stage clear for Jacob and Ettie.
Within moments of taking their first, introductory bow, Professor Protsky and the Silent Beauty had the audience totally captivated, and Ettie was enjoying every moment of being on the stage, just as Jacob had promised her she would when she had said she could not go on in front of everyone. Now each face in the audience was turned eagerly towards her, hoping above hope that the spirits might have a message just for them. It didn’t matter whether the message was good news of a fortune to come, or a warning of possible danger: the fact they were singled out was all that mattered, exactly as Jacob had said.
During the next few weeks, they worked almost non-stop. By night they played the penny gaffs, with Jacob always making sure that they didn’t set up too close to her old haunts: he wanted her to make a clean break with her old life. And, during the day, they worked on practising the more sophisticated patter and tricks for a new act intended for a very different audience to that of the East End. They laboured ceaselessly. Sometimes they would return from a penny gaff and fall asleep in their clothes, but still they worked.
Jacob taught her all about melodrama, the importance of fanciful rituals and the use of ambiguity. He showed her how someone in an audience would always respond to a message – so long as it came from a spirit with a common enough name, of course.
Even as they ate their breakfast he instructed her.
‘People will always hear what they want to hear, Ettie. Remember only that which matters to them,’ he said, slicing at the cold mutton that Mrs Hawkins had set out for them the night before. ‘And they simply forget any message without significance for them. Believe me, we all only hear what we want to.’
Ettie was doubtful. ‘I know people can be daft, but they aren’t that stupid, Jacob,’ she said, taking the plate he held out to her.
‘Oh, but they are,’ said Jacob, joining her at the table. ‘We see it every night in the gaffs.’
‘Yeah, well, the gaffs are one thing, but this new act…’
‘Not only the gaffs, Ettie. Think of those crowds who flocked for the Jubilee,’ he said, swallowing a mouthful of meat. ‘They forgot, they chose to forget, for that day how much they resented the privilege of the crown. They ignored the discomfort as they stood and waited for the parade to pass by. Took no note of the stink of the bodies pushing against them, as though none of it existed. Forgot even the calls they had made for so long for the monarchy to be destroyed once and for all. And now they only recall the wonder of seeing their beloved Victoria. People act like stupid fools, Ettie. No, worse, they are self-deluding fools.’
‘It’s all right for you to say all that, Jacob, but I ain’t the bloody Queen, now am I? Girls like me are a penny a dozen. We don’t ever really get out of the East End.’ She concentrated on her plate as she spoke, as though it held all the answers to her confusion. ‘See, no matter what you do, it’ll always be in me. Always. The people who you’re aiming at with all this new stuff, they’ll never believe that I’m anything special. Not little Ettie Wilkins from Whitechapel.’
Jacob gulped at his coffee and shook his head. ‘You are wrong. So very wrong. They will believe in you, Ettie, they will.’
Ettie carried on eating in silence.
‘Don’t fail me now, Ettie. Don’t lose your nerve.’
She set down her knife and fork very deliberately, wiped her mouth on the napkin in the way he had shown her, and put it beside her plate before she spoke. ‘Jacob,’ she said, levelly. ‘I’ll tell you the truth. I’m scared. I’ve heard about those blokes who deliberately go spirit-grabbing for a laugh. Say they do that to me? Say I get caught tricking them and they call the coppers?’
‘Ettie, they do those things when amateurs make it obvious that they are trying to gull the sitters. When they have their cheap pieces of cloth dipped in substances to glow in the dark, and give themselves away by forgetting that their hands too will be stained. They make mistakes. We will make none. We will be professional. The best. I have so much knowledge, so many skills.’ He clasped his hands in tight fists and threw back his head. ‘Ettie, we will become the greatest.’
He stood up and moved round the table towards her. She sat very still, bewildered and threatened by his sudden passion.
He stood behind her, looming over her. His breathing slowed, and he placed his hands gently on her shoulders.
‘I have seen what people are prepared to do to have proof of the spirit world, Ettie. I have seen the lengths to which they will go to convince themselves that this world,’ he gestured wildly around him, ‘is not all there is. People want to believe in anything that gives meaning to their dull, inconsequential lives. Let me show you something.’
Jacob held up his hand to indicate that she should remain sitting while he took down a leather-bound book from the shelves. He held the spine towards her.
‘Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’ he recited from memory.
‘Blimey, what an ’andle,’ said Ettie.
Jacob was too obsessed with finding the page he wanted to reproach her for her relapse into her old way of speaking. ‘Listen. The man who wrote this – Charles Mackay – certainly knew man’s folly for novelty, Ettie. He tells, here in these pages,’ Jacob held the open book towards her, ‘how on the continent men were once prepared to kill one another over tulip bulbs. Can you imagine?’
Ettie shrugged, discomforted by his excitement. ‘Can’t say as I can, really. No.’ She paused. ‘So, what’s a tulip then?’
‘A flower.’
‘And they went mad over these tulips, did they?’
‘Yes. They were the latest wonder, just as you shall be, Ettie. The rarest bloom. The wonder whom everyone desires to meet and possess.’
‘If you say so,’ said Ettie dubiously.
‘Let me read you what he says about the tulip bulbs. No, let me read first what he writes on the pursuit of fortune-telling.’ He flipped eagerly through the pages. ‘Right, this is it: “Upon no subject has it been so easy to deceive the world as upon this.” And he’s right, Ettie. We can do it. Together.’
‘I don’t know about all this, Jacob. I didn’t realise it was going to be so serious. I thought we were going to do a few shows round the gaffs and then maybe the music halls when we’d practised enough.’
‘Would you object to providing a little amusement in the drawing rooms of the idle rich who have nothing better to do with their time and money?’
‘It ain’t – isn’t – that. I just haven’t got the experience of nothing like it. How will I know what to do? I know you’ve been teaching me and everything, but I don’t think I could swing it, Jacob. I really don’t and that’s the truth.’
‘I have all the experience we need,’ he assured her, his face lighting up as he told her how the public could always be persuaded to want what they never knew they needed. ‘Guaranteed cures from wonder drugs,’ he said, laughing loudly. ‘Gladly purchased after rumours of fever scares had been spread, of course. Games of Three Card Monte and Thimble Rigging in shabby market places in order to get the stakes for bigger games, where rich men can’t wait to throw their golden guineas in my direction. Promises to relieve rich curse victims from certain death.’
‘What curses?’ Ettie wanted to know as she grew increasingly tantalised by his enthusiasm.
‘The curses I convinced them were on them in the first place.’
She couldn’t help laughing out loud. Her fears were not entirely forgotten, but she was now excited as well as intrigued. Her head spun as Jacob became more animated in his recalling of his exploits in his journeys around the world.
‘And, the wiles I learned from two women from the United States of America – the big one that we can do, Ettie. The Pow-Wow.’
His eyes glowed with promises of future glory. Ettie could only stare.
‘It’s so simple, Ettie, just like I’ve shown you. The seances. They love them. The trance. The distorted voice. Messages from the spirits. Vague words which have significance and meaning for almost anyone. They love the flattery, thinking that the spirits have come to give a message just to them.’ He threw back his head in the uninhibited way which always alarmed her. ‘Ettie, Ettie. We can do what we like. Forget the penny gaffs, they are in the past. We can do anything.’
‘Say they don’t believe in us?’
‘I’ve told you, Ettie. They will.’
‘Say they don’t?’
‘Then we blame them. Say it is their fault. They don’t have sufficient faith or mental powers to assist the spirits in their return journey to this plane. Nobody likes to be a failure, Ettie. It’s foolproof. We can never be proved wrong. By the time we have prepared them, with ritual and mystery, they will believe anything we say.’
He went and stood in the corner of the room with his back to her. Then he suddenly turned round, his chin low to his chest, his eyes hooded.
‘There must be no animals within ten yards of this room,’ he chanted. ‘The spirits must not be disturbed. No green silk can be allowed. Oh,’ he moaned in agony, ‘please, your scarf, remove it, madam. For all our sakes.’
‘What?’
‘Mystery, Ettie, mystery,’ he said in his normal voice, flashing her his most appealing grin.
‘Bloody nonsense, more like.’
‘So what? So long as it detracts from what is really going on, and builds up the anticipation that something is about to happen.’
‘Whatever would my old mum make of all this, eh?’ said Ettie grinning back at him, but shaking her head as though she really didn’t know what to make of it all either.