Jack Tallis did not have the pleasure of her company again that week or the next. He looked for her in the Queen and then the Britannia, the Alma, the Princess Alice, the Ten Bells, the Horn of Plenty and even the Saracen’s Head. Had he known he had missed her by a few moments on Thursday outside Spitalfields Market and then again on Saturday at the top of Brick Lane he might have persevered, but he was not famous for sticking at it and gave up at last. He was sulking into his beer at the Frying Pan–she seemed to have disappeared from the face of the Earth, as if he had dreamed her–when the door swung open and in she came, followed by a small girl, maybe five years old, with a crisp blue bow in her hair. He almost rubbed his eyes to make sure he was seeing straight.
Grace Hammer marched straight past him up to the counter and banged her fist upon it, making the jars jump. It was midday and the regular rabble were not all in yet, so the landlord swung round ready to start, but laughed heartily when he saw it was Grace and lifted the hatch to let her through to the back room. The little girl caught Jack’s eye as she followed them in, trailing by the hand from her mother’s grip, fixing him to the wall with that cast-iron look he has seen already, only blue this time, right through him. Then the door closed behind them.
Jack waited, straining his ears, but heard nothing–he sat for a while feeling unaccountably awkward, as if he was watching himself. He was getting up to leave when they reappeared, and sat down quickly; there was handshaking and more joviality. The little girl ate an iced bun, looking past them at him, studying his hat and his hands, which unnerved him somehow. It seemed an awkward moment to present himself so he sank back in his seat, trying to merge with the shadow. Grace and the little girl walked out into the street. Jack drained his jug and slid after them.
Grace Hammer has four living children: Charlie, who is almost a grown man, Billy, eleven, Jake, nine, and lovely Miss Daisy, just five. The boys are a crew of fine young men with a righteous sense of justice and respect for their fellows, though they earn their daily bread and butter rifling the pockets of wealthy strangers–they are often to be found helping old Mrs Cutler to eat her meagre dinner or reading to Miss Grieve, who is dying in a cold bed. They are fiercely and utterly devoted to their little sister, though they love to tease her for their own selfish amusement.
‘Who’s your sweetheart Daisy? Is it Harry Harding? I saw you getting friendly on the corner.’
‘Go away!’ she shouts: a fair retort, she uses it often–for a greeting sometimes, as they enter the room, even before they have opened their mouths.
‘Was you sharing secrets? Or just sugar lumps?’
Daisy does not respond in English but growls as well as any jungle creature might at such a bunch of monkeys. One day when she grows big she will be something to reckon with; for now she is small, and soft, the prettiest girl in London Town, so they laugh, and prod some more, as boys do–‘So it is Harry now, see! What happened to poor Joe? He was the only boy in the world last week. Ain’t you gonna marry him no more?’–making her roar. Daisy beats them back and they laugh at her as they run away.
When the girls are left in peace they draw pictures, or do chains of cut-out people, holding hands. The Hammer boys keep all the things their sister makes them–careful, knotted, twisted things of string and paper, sticks and bones, and feathers she finds in the street. There are dozens, she being an extraordinarily busy little person: sheaves of drawings and maps of the world, adorned with writing of her own design, which she will read you if you ask her nicely.
Charlie lost his father at the age of three–the only decent man Grace had found. He fell into a blast furnace at the foundry where he worked and is much missed still. Billy and Jake’s father fared no better, catching tuberculosis in the outbreak of 1879 and wheezing on for a few miserable months in the Union Workhouse before kicking the bucket a fate richly deserved as he was a useless cheat, cruel and unfaithful, though he had seemed charming at first. Grace had thought herself thoroughly cured of scoundrels until Daisy’s father happened along, giving her two girls. The first was Rose, who died while still new, buried in a tiny white coffin carried by her brothers while her father mourned in the pub. The second was darling Miss Daisy, after whose conception Grace kicked him out. She had embarked already on a private life of crime and had no need of him. The family thrived thereafter; they ate well, they wanted for nothing. Grace felt herself lucky every day. Poor Mrs Ratch next door had a brute who beat her twice a week and gave her a baby every year; he spent his wages on drink and Grace could see she was starving slowly to death, trying to feed her children.
Daisy was lucky enough never to meet her father. He died under the wheels of a brewery cart not a month after he’d gone; a kindly copper brought the solemn news, which made Grace laugh and clap her hands, and ask if death had been swift and merciful, or horribly brutal; and if he had suffered, how terribly and for how long. Sergeant Manley Goodwell was shocked at Grace Hammer’s cruel sentiments and wondered if she had arranged the accident–which, indeed, she would have been happy to do–but he was not to know that the dead man’s favourite game was to eat his fill when there was not enough for dinner before the family were allowed to start. They had to wait around the table and watch him smack his lips and lick his fingers until there was nothing left but rind and bones and potato skins. Grace wanted to stick a fork in his eye, and we must forgive her hard heart. Reluctantly she paid for a decent funeral, which might have seemed worth every penny if she had been driving the brewery cart.
And so it is their mother who has taught the Hammer children all they know. From her the boys have learned their trade, and to read and write–which sets them in some way apart from the other ragged children in the street. She is loving, and strict as the Law, which they respect as a convention though they break it every day. They have the smartest manners in London. And though Grace has a violent temper–which last exploded on Christmas Eve of 1878, driving Billy and Jake’s father bare-chested from the house, beating at his charred beard, never to be seen again–she keeps it in a box and never turns it on her children, not even Charlie with his bare cheek. She had wondered if he might be better for a slap or two until her neighbour Mrs Jacob nosed across the street one day to tell her he was getting far too clever, and to recommend correction, along those very lines: iron discipline, as she had dealt her own wilful sons. Grace wouldn’t have the heart anyway. She loves him, wilful as he is.
Jake doesn’t say much; she keeps a special eye on him.
Billy reads the most, easily the best behaved. She loves them all as much.
Jack didn’t spot Grace and Miss Blue Eyes for a minute or two, coming out into the light of day. Blinking up Brick Lane this way and that, he clocked them outside the chapel, exchanging a word with the shoe-black. He bent to pick up an imaginary penny as she turned her head his way, and when he looked up again they were on their way down the street. He hurried after them, feeling urgent suddenly, as if it were his last chance to see her. They turned right down Church Street before he reached the corner, and for the few moments that they were out of sight a strange panic held tight to his chest, until he saw them again, walking hand in hand past the tall Christ Church. He dropped back until they crossed Commercial Street, where he dived into the crowded road after them, weaving through the traffic, and caught them up, hanging close behind. At White’s Row they turned right, then left into Bell Lane. He watched from the corner as they went inside and ventured up the street a little, unusually timid, to see the door. Number twenty-eight. There it was.
Now he wasn’t sure what to do next, or why he had stalked her there in such a furtive manner when he might have presented himself, with his charm and his flashing teeth, as he would any other day. Upright, he liked to see himself, not skulking in the street. He drew himself tall but felt awkward still. It seemed he must turn tail and walk away–how could he knock? He stood there stupid, feeling as if he were frozen to the spot. His next move was decided by Grace, who stepped out abruptly into the street, hands upon her hips. She stood and watched him writhe, like an earthworm in salt. Her eyes did not twinkle.
‘Hello, Jack,’ she said. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’
Inside it was dim but for a small lamp by the bed. He was surprised by the exotic scent of tuberose, though he didn’t know what it was called. Glancing around, feeling uncommonly shy, he took in the clean stove, the patchwork bedspread–and sheets! He was sure they were the only decent sheets in that street, the next and the next as well. Then a small table with books upon it, not a lonely almanac or a Holy Bible, but books, in a teetering pile, stacked by some distracted intellectual. He wondered who that might be.
A red curtain half drawn across a small doorway revealed a second room; he could see the edge of a bed and a tin bath leaning against the wall beyond. Rows of paper dolls and some lively drawings of what he supposed were zoo creatures decorated the walls, signed in varying degrees of legibility by the artist, one Daisy Hammer. A lofty ballerina hung in pride of place, poised above the mantel on one toe with the other leg high in the air and her arms stretched out as if she was flying. All evidently the work of Miss Blue Eyes. He wondered how many others there were. Three at least, judging from all the washing. There were plates and clean cutlery, and by the stove a bucket of coal. The effect of entering the room from the world outside (apart from the frosty reception) was of stepping into an enchanted cave, in which to fall headlong and rest, receive comfort and refuge. She was certainly doing very nicely for herself, very nicely indeed. The woman in the back next door slept under a flour sack and ate apple cores and peelings from the gutter; a fact he did not know but would surely not have been surprised to discover.
‘Charlie, this is Jack. Jack, this is my son, Charlie.’
Charlie was reading in the corner, sat regally upon a shabby armchair. He looked Jack up and down, in the way that young men have for male strangers who follow their mother home. ‘How d’you do, Jack?’ He stood up to kiss his ma.
‘What you reading, darlin’?’
‘Charles Dickens.’
‘Oh, lovely.’
‘Two Cities.’
‘Where d’you find that?’
‘Holywell Street.’
‘Did you borrow it?’
‘No, Ma!’
‘Very nice indeed. Where are the boys?’
‘Gone to look at Tommy’s aunt again.’
‘Haven’t they buried her yet?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘God bless her.’
Daisy pushed forward to be introduced to the stranger. He could see she remembered him, but was keeping it to herself for the moment.
‘Hello,’ she said from behind the stuffed dog she was clutching. ‘Who are you?’
‘Jack.’
‘Can you draw animals?’
Now Jack, unknown but yet suspected by Grace Hammer, may be a chancer and a scoundrel but he is sweet with little children and they love him. He endeared himself thoroughly to Daisy and, to a lesser extent, with the young men of the family, when they had tired of Tommy’s aunt and returned to find this stranger. They like him much better than they allow for. By the time Grace sent him home he had been invited to the next roast dinner and asked very many questions on the subjects of football, and cards, about which he seems to know a great deal.
Grace tucked Daisy into the big bed with her scruffy stuffed dog and kissed her delicious cheek.
‘When is Jack coming again?’
‘I couldn’t tell you, darlin’, I don’t know. He wasn’t meant to come today.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because no one invited him.’
‘I could invite him next time.’
‘Get your face washed, Jake.’
Charlie was popping out and Billy wanted to go with him.
‘Course you bloody can’t. He’s off to see some girl, most likely. He won’t want you hanging about. Sit and read that Family Robinson.’
‘I finished it.’
‘Was it any good?’
‘It’s all right.’
‘Well, start something else, then.’
The fire snapped; Billy shuffled through the cupboard.
‘And I don’t want you going to the bloody Eagle anyway, not by yourself.’
‘Yes, Ma.’
‘Don’t you cheek me.’
Jack Tallis lay on a sack of coffee in warehouse twelve, London Docks, smiling to himself in the dark. He drained his fine brandy, fresh from the barrel at the foot of his sackcloth bed–tomorrow he might sample the armagnac–and fell into contented slumber.
In Bell Lane Grace closed her eyes and pictured his strong hands, his face. He had a crease beside his mouth made by smiling, the particular smile that seems made just for you. He was a devil indeed. She could remember such details about him, and so vividly! What a charmer.
Out in the dark countryside Mr Blunt snoozes peacefully, with a smile upon his face. He dreams of choking her, slicing her throat.