Saturday dawned wet and gray. Lucy spent the first part of the morning bustling through the shop, layering high-quality silks and muslins around rolls of cheaper fabrics to create a sumptuous display. She draped the front racks with pretty chintzes and opened drawers so shining ribbons and colorful laces peeked out. The drawers looked bountiful, packed with trimmings. No customer would guess that there was nothing behind those few visible bits of ornament.
The drawers were all but empty.
Every now and then Aunt Marian looked up from her sewing machine to smile at Lucy’s progress. She was in the far back of the shop, letting out seams in one of Mrs. Fairfax’s unutterably ugly day dresses. Back when she was Miss Clara Oakes, Mrs. Fairfax, a soprano who sang opera at the Lyceum Theatre and was feted by the press for her daring fashion, had been—for a season at least—as famous as the queen. Now she was stout, widowed, and somber-minded, with tastes that ran to prudish severity.
Seeing her aunt drowning in all that black and gray fabric caused Lucy physical pain. What a waste of her talent! Aunt Marian was a genius. Theater managers used to send her their more glamorous singers and dancers. No comic opera, no romance, no gothic or nautical drama, was complete without Aunt Marian’s elaborate gowns, each with its signature flourish. At the peak of her success, she’d employed five seamstresses. She’d partnered with Dodie Thistleship, costume designer for the leading Shakespearean actresses of the day. That had been the beginning of the end. Dodie Thistleship took credit for Aunt Marian’s patterns, patterns that set society trends. Slowly, Aunt Marian was edged out and forgotten.
She was lucky that any star continued to patronize her, even an aged star determined to sport the silhouette of an eighteenth-century dowager. The beau monde took no more notice of Miss Stirling, Dressmaker. The shop couldn’t stay afloat on rare special orders. They eked by on rack sales and girls from the penny gaffes who wanted a bit of lace edging.
Still, the shop remained her aunt’s pride and joy. Lucy wouldn’t let it look like a ragpicker’s cart, however depleted the stock, however meager the prospect for new sales.
She finished arranging trimmed bonnets in the counter display, then surveyed the corner of the shop where clients were once measured and fitted by the dozen behind a green velvet curtain. Now that corner was occupied by a woeful little table piled with Mrs. Fairfax’s petticoats. Sighing, she pushed through a rickety door and went past the little kitchen, down the narrow hall to the back court to retrieve her latest creation. She burst into the shop carrying a bottle filled with fern fronds and moss and set it in the center of the little table.
“There,” she said with satisfaction. She’d gotten the idea after a visit to Kate’s house. The Holroyds had two large glazed cases on ornate tables in their drawing room containing dozens of fern species from around the world. With what glass Lucy had to hand, and one fern she’d bought from a Drury Lane root seller, she’d made a miniature version. It was simple, true, but absolutely cunning. If she did say so herself.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Never mind! Don’t look until I’m done.”
She walked backward to the front door and cast an eye over the shop. Gorgeous, even with the light coming feebly through the small, wavy panes. The Argand lamps gave the room a warm glow, and even her aunt, thin and drawn at her sewing machine, looked picturesque in the background.
At the sound of a knock, Lucy turned, smoothing her skirt, but it was only the wind, rattling the door against the frame. A dummy dressed in black broadcloth caught her eye. She grimaced, dragging the dummy away from the window. Aunt Marian could do better than advertising family mourning! She stripped the dummy and began to lace a gown of cheerful yellow silk around its wasp waist. It was Aunt Marian’s style, but it was her own handiwork, bountifully embroidered with daisies.
“This is all very nice,” said Aunt Marian. Her new sewing machine was purring along as she pumped the treadle. “But, Lucy . . .” She paused, a twinkle in her eye. “Are you expecting the queen?”
Lucy made a face and gave the gown a few final tugs.
“The queen would look well enough in one of your dresses,” she said. “You’ve outfitted plenty of queens.”
“Guinevere, Cleopatra, Cymbeline, Gertrude . . .” Aunt Marian laughed, ticking off the characters she’d costumed.
Lucy laughed too and dragged the dummy back to the front of the shop.
Perfection achieved, she could settle in for a few hours of needlework. Maybe it was foolish to keep the shop looking elegant, with the semblance, at least, of luxury. The women who came in off the street were by and large seeking out ready-made print frocks, something prettier than they’d find in a market stall, for a holiday or for church. They didn’t have much to spend, and they paced the floor warily, on guard against their own desires.
She sank into a chair and reached into the open basket on the floor for her needle and thread.
“Go on.” Her aunt made shooing noises, her hands too busy at the sewing machine for the accompanying motions. “Aren’t you working on a picture of Flossie Dowling’s boys?”
“It came out wrong.” Lucy threaded her needle swiftly. “I whited it out. I have to start over again. So, you see, I’m not working on anything.”
She shrugged as though the subject was of no import whatsoever, gathering undersleeves onto her lap that Mrs. Fairfax had allowed might do with a bit of decoration.
“The light’s bad for painting anyway,” she muttered, plucking one of Mr. Malkin’s hairs from a cuff.
Now that Aunt Marian couldn’t manage the precipitous stairs, Lucy slept alone in the garret, which she also used as her studio. Saturdays and Sundays she tried to paint for an hour or two when the sun was out and sew later into the night, to save on oil. But it scarcely mattered on such a gray morning.
“Whited it out!” The shop fell silent as the belts and wheels of the sewing machine stopped turning. “Without showing it to me?” Aunt Marian shook her head. The sewing machine began to hum again and she bent low over the table.
Aunt Marian was also frizz-haired, although hers was now iron gray. Lucy spoke haltingly to her mass of curls and hairpins.
“The portrait was ludicrous,” she said. “The faces had the texture of overripe cheese.”
Aunt Marian raised her head.
“I don’t care if you doubled the size of Tom Dowling’s head and painted on an extra eye. I’d have liked to see it.”
Lucy forced herself to meet her aunt’s gaze.
“I’ll show you the next one.” She tried to make the promise sound new, as though she hadn’t made it before, after she’d bought the sewing machine.
My dear girl! Aunt Marian had looked between Lucy and the gleaming Singer with tears in her eyes. Then she’d blinked, scowled to conceal the hurt.
You sold a picture and this is the first I know of it?
At that moment, Lucy would have promised her anything.
It wasn’t that she found her aunt’s interest burdensome. As a girl, Lucy had solicited her opinions, presenting sketches with shy excitement. Aunt Marian’s bright, dark eyes had a piercing quality, and her praises gratified. They always rang with truth. Aunt Marian saw, even in Lucy’s scribbles, energy and emotion, the potential of a grand design. Her faith was unshakable.
Lucy had been afraid to show her Endymion. After a lifetime spent associating with theatrical personalities, Aunt Marian wasn’t easily scandalized. But a male nude, bathed in moonlight, the personification of longing . . . Lucy didn’t dare. An experiment in classicism was how she’d described the picture. Aunt Marian could sense her discomfort and allowed her to leave it at that.
The most recent picture, of the Dowling boys . . . it was simply a failure. Whatever flaws Aunt Marian imagined, the reality was worse.
“Truly, you’d have been disappointed,” she said.
“Very well, then.” Aunt Marian gave a stern nod. “What are you waiting for? Off you go. Paint something better.”
Lucy looked helplessly at Mrs. Fairfax’s gowns hanging along the back wall, all of them in need of letting out, of new buttons, of even dowdier collars.
“I’m paying the older Cosgrave girl to come sew with me. Now, don’t say a word! I’m paying her from your money, so it’s you who bought yourself the time. With one picture, you earned more than I made on Cymbeline and Gertrude put together, so drop that sleeve.”
The one picture had taken Lucy nearly five months and she’d never have gotten such a sum if she hadn’t pretended she was a man, famous on the continent and a Visitor to boot.
But that was an objection she couldn’t make.
Lucy tucked away her threaded needle. For a moment, her aunt sewed in silence; then she sighed.
“I’ll see it someday.”
Lucy’s stomach dropped.
“You won’t,” she said, too bitterly. She’d had nightmares of the canvas burning as she tried to pull it from a great fireplace, big as the gates of hell, and Weston leaning on the mantel, laughing. Mercifully, when he started to kiss her, the force of her anger woke her up and she lay awake, heart pounding. Saved from that particular perdition.
Aunt Marian peered at Lucy speculatively over the thread unspooling from the bobbin.
“It’s just a feeling I have,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”
Lucy managed a wan smile as the knock came at the door.
Not the wind this time.
The knock repeated.
“That’ll be Megan now,” said Aunt Marian, but the woman who burst into the shop wasn’t the pale, timid Cosgrave girl. The woman was short, broad, and ruddy, well into her middle years.
“Mrs. Cantrell.” Aunt Marian finished her seam and stood painfully. “It’s a wet morning to come out.”
“Miss Stirling.” Mrs. Cantrell’s round face was damp, with rain and with tears.
“Don’t tell me it’s your husband.” Aunt Marian rushed to the younger woman, forgetting her stiff knees, and helped her into a chair.
Overcome, Mrs. Cantrell shook her head.
“Not one of the children?” At her aunt’s look, Lucy hurried to put the kettle on the hob.
“No, no, they’re fine, all in good health, thank God.”
The Cantrells were a boot-making family, had been for generations. Most boot makers worked in factories now, but the Cantrells still ran the shop two doors down as a family business. They were numerous. Even the youngest Cantrell children could cut and sew and paste. Their tiny store was a manufactory in miniature.
“You haven’t heard?” Mrs. Cantrell pressed a hand to her cheek and stared around the room, avoiding Aunt Marian’s gaze. She seemed to notice Lucy for the first time, hovering on the threshold between the little back kitchen and the shop proper. “You look well, lass,” she said, and her voice broke.
She was Irish by birth and had been a beauty in her time. The story was she won Mr. Cantrell’s heart with a glance. He’d felt her green eyes pierce him like a dart as they haggled over the price of oranges. His parents tried to dissuade him—an Irish basket girl!—but he would not be moved. Her eyes were an extraordinary color. Lucy had only seen one pair that made their emerald seem dim by comparison. She didn’t want to think of them.
Mrs. Cantrell’s eyes were brimming.
“Perhaps you’ll find a man at your painting school who’ll give you a good home, a decent, hardworking man, like my Alvin, but not so unlucky. That’s what I hope for you.”
She meant well, of course. Mrs. Cantrell was bighearted, quick to anger, and quick to laugh. Sometimes, Lucy could hear her from down the street, yelling at her children or singing as she soled baby shoes. Family was everything to her.
Nonetheless, Aunt Marian snipped back.
“Stuff and nonsense. A man!”
Aunt Marian made no bones about her own hopes for Lucy, or about her belief that, when it came to realizing those hopes, a man would prove less a boon than a bane. She fixed Lucy with a fierce look before turning it on Mrs. Cantrell. Sometimes she transformed into a veritable gorgon. Her hair made a magnificent prop.
“Lucy needs a man as much as a toad needs a side pocket. She’ll make a triumph with her oils, mark my words,” declared Aunt Marian. “We’ll all be part of a big crowd looking up at her pictures on the wall. I’m saving my legs for it.”
She meant it. As painful as it was for her to move, if Lucy exhibited anywhere in England, she would run after trains, clamber in and out of cabs and omnibuses, trudge miles.
“One day, she will become a member of the Academy!”
“Is that right? Then I’m glad,” murmured Mrs. Cantrell. Like all the neighbors, she humored Aunt Marian, the resident firebrand.
Aunt Marian did tend to get carried away. The Royal Academy had never elected a female Academician. Neither were its members known for their radical ideas. Change came slowly, if at all.
Lucy was more likely to stand for Parliament.
“I just want her to be taken care of.” Mrs. Cantrell’s eyes were welling again, and she dried them with a handkerchief. “I don’t know what we’re to do.”
“What is it? What’s happened?”
Aunt Marian had gone unnaturally still, bracing herself.
“They’ve put up notices.” Mrs. Cantrell balled the handkerchief in her fist. “They’re all around, notices and placards. They’re demolishing the house, the whole block. It’s been condemned.”
“Condemned?” Aunt Marian sank back into her chair. “Condemned? Our block?”
Some streets in Shoreditch were little more than open sewers. But this wasn’t one of them. The Elizabethan houses that fronted onto the narrow lane had been divided into tinier and tinier sections to fit more and more families, but at street level the shops, if not prosperous, were clean and respectable.
“This house?” Aunt Marian continued. “It’s solid as bedrock! It’s old, but it will stand forever.”
She looked dazedly about as though expecting the ceiling beams themselves to speak their confirmation.
Now Mrs. Cantrell’s eyes blazed green fire. “I told the bill poster,” she said, “him that was putting up the notices. I told him you couldn’t find a stouter, squarer house, and families living more respectably, in any corner of England. Wasn’t nothing to do with him, he said, and so I offered to let him see for himself how strong the walls were by knocking his head on them. He didn’t like that, not a bit of it.”
“It’s nothing to do with the bill poster, that’s right.” Aunt Marian’s voice was hoarse. “It’s the vestrymen looking to make a penny. And the city . . .”
Her voice broke. On other occasions, people shushed Aunt Marian when she began to rail against local government with the passion of a pamphleteer. But today Mrs. Cantrell nodded. Aunt Marian cleared her throat and continued.
“We all know that the Board of Works is rotten as old meat.”
The kettle was screaming for half a minute before Lucy shook herself and turned on her heel. She filled the teapot and put cups on the tray with trembling fingers.
She could hear her aunt talking again in that same strained voice.
“I remember Mr. Pomeroy complaining when it came time for the board to send out its inspectors to check the theaters. He had to give free tickets and I don’t know what else, or they’d declare a fire hazard and close him down.”
“You don’t have to be telling me,” said Mrs. Cantrell. “The Board of Perks, they call it. Alvin went to talk with James Purcell.”
Neither woman looked at Lucy as she set the tea tray between them. Bile was rising in her throat. She retreated to the chair in the corner.
Condemned! And their only hope James Purcell! Since he’d been appointed vestry clerk, his cronies had become the parish rate collectors and sanitary inspectors. He’d improved only the streets that ran past his furniture workshops, and he’d been accused—by an irate surveyor—of taking cuts of the paving contracts to boot.
“James Purcell. We’d be fools to trust in James Purcell.”
Her aunt sounded old, older than Lucy had ever heard her sound before. She was old. She wouldn’t survive the loss of the shop. The enormity struck her like a slap. She bit back a cry, and her aunt gave a small start and glanced in her direction.
“But surely there’s something to be done.” Lucy stood, bumping the little table. She put a protective hand on the bottled fern as it wobbled.
Another knock. Megan Cosgrave at last. She hesitated on the doorstep, thin and stooped, clutching her sewing bag. Her eyes were huge. She, too, had seen the notices.
“Oh, Miss Stirling, it isn’t fair! Your beautiful shop!”
“It’s not gone yet, Meg,” said Mrs. Cantrell, rising. She looked at Aunt Marian. “James Purcell can’t be trusted, true, but he can’t be condemning buildings willy-nilly either.”
“He can’t, that’s right,” said Aunt Marian, quietly. “Not alone.”
“Don’t stand where you’ll catch your death of cold.” Mrs. Cantrell turned back to Megan Cosgrave. “If you’re here to sew, you’d best be sewing.”
“And you, too, Mrs. Cantrell, I’m so sorry!” Megan’s lips were trembling. “They haven’t any right.”
“What of your building?” asked Lucy. The Cosgraves lived in a sagging tenement overloaded with perilous wooden galleries, one of dozens built around a tiny court. The privies stood over cesspools. People had to fight to take their water from a common standpipe.
Under recent acts of Parliament, the vestries under the vestry boards, the district boards, and the Metropolitan Board of Works had been tasked with improving public health through housing reform. They sought out landlords whose diseased, overcrowded buildings were on the point of collapse and compensated them handsomely for the seizure of their properties. The tenants were sent scurrying like rats. New roads crisscrossed the old sites. Model dwellings went up, with fewer rooms and higher rents.
Slum clearance in one place resulted in more congestion elsewhere. No one on the boards seemed to care so long as the evictions rolled out and the money rolled in.
The inspector of nuisances had visited the Cosgraves’ tenement the previous month. Mrs. Cosgrave had told Aunt Marian the news with resignation.
They’ll have to knock it down around our ears. We’ve nowhere else to go.
Megan shook her head and came farther into the shop, lowering her worn bag. “The only notices went up here.”
Aunt Marian laughed. She laughed so hard tears streamed down her cheeks. Lucy watched, stunned and helpless.
“Miss Stirling.” Mrs. Cantrell hesitated, then approached Aunt Marian’s chair, laying a gentle hand on her arm.
Aunt Marian hated fussing, but she didn’t swat Mrs. Cantrell away. She choked off her laughter with a short sob.
“Villains,” she said. “Perfect villains. I wish I could dress them for the part. Scarlet pantaloons and waistcoats. Everyone would know them for what they are.”
“That’d be a sight, James Purcell in scarlet pantaloons.” Mrs. Cantrell patted Aunt Marian and stepped away.
“It’d be a sea of scarlet pantaloons.” Aunt Marian swiped at her eyes angrily.
“Your landlord,” she said to Megan. “He’s making a fortune, packing more and more people into his buildings like maggots in a nut. More than enough to pay off Purcell and the inspector of nuisances. He’ll keep extracting rents until the floors are caving in; then he’ll let the city take his properties at market rate.”
“But here?” Lucy burst out. “No inspector of nuisance came here.”
Not that she knew of, anyway. Heat mantled her cheeks as three pairs of eyes fixed on her. Weren’t most of her days spent on the other side of the city? Maybe it wasn’t her place to speak. Even as the thought formed, she rejected it.
This is my home.
“We’re the nuisance.” Aunt Marian sounded old again, old and sad. “Someone wants to lease this block for his own purposes. Someone who can bribe, or influence, Purcell, his inspectors, and the medical officer himself.”
Lucy’s face grew hotter.
“If he were wearing his red pantaloons, I’d go right up to him and scratch his eyes out.”
Aunt Marian laughed, a real laugh this time.
“Exactly,” she said. “Now bring this half-frozen girl a cup of tea before she expires.”
Lucy went and fetched another cup. Mrs. Cantrell had taken her seat and was sipping her own tea. Megan sat beside her. Lucy set down the cup and filled it. The tea was strong and hot. Megan took a grateful sip, but not before turning it white with milk and adding sugar until the liquid could stand a spoon. Her best meal of the day, Lucy was willing to wager. She pulled her chair closer to the other women and sat.
With the sewing machine stilled, the sound of rain was audible.
They sat for a time in silence, listening, each lost in her thoughts.
Even when she was shivering under her blanket up in her little garret room, Lucy always felt comforted by the sound of the rain falling on the roof tiles. It reminded her that she was dry and safe, that she was fortunate.
Now she wanted to crawl up over the eaves, to protect those roof tiles with her body, to hold the house together, come what may.
The door flew open. Mr. Cantrell ducked into the shop, face livid. Megan shrank back. Her father, it was widely known, made free with his fists. The girl was never easy in male company. Lucy touched her arm to let her know there was no cause for fear.
“Alvin!” said Mrs. Cantrell. “What happened? Did you find him?”
He gave her a stark look as he snatched off his hat.
“He was at the George and Dragon,” he muttered. “With a half dozen of his friends or I’d have left him bleeding.”
Here was a side of Mr. Cantrell Lucy had never seen. He’d always seemed far more reserved than his fiery Irish wife, a gentle giant. But it made sense. Mrs. Cantrell would hardly have married a man without spirit.
All at once, he seemed to remember himself. To notice he and his wife were not alone. He nodded at the rest of them.
“Not the finest day,” he said, slapping his hat against his leg. Tiny drops sprayed from it.
“Irreparable structural defects. That’s what he said. Dangerous, and pestilential, attested to by the inspector, and Dr. Jephson signed off.”
“Jephson?” asked Mrs. Cantrell.
Mr. Cantrell gave his hat a final slap. “The new medical officer for the vestry. Agrees we’re a risk to public health.”
“Lies!” Lucy crossed her arms and trapped her balled fists beneath her elbows, to keep them from flying at nothing.
“But Purcell knows—” began Mrs. Cantrell. Her husband cut her off.
“It’s beyond Purcell. We’re condemned. The Board of Works has already received an application for the leases.”
Mr. Cantrell ground his teeth so hard Lucy feared they might break.
“Purcell’s opening a coach-making workshop,” he continued at last, loosening his jaws by tugging at his beard.
“Needs extra hands, he told me, large and small. We can have work, even the babies, if we don’t fancy mending boots on the street.”
Mrs. Cantrell gave a strangled cry.
“Red pantaloons in Parliament too,” muttered Aunt Marian. Mr. Cantrell looked uneasy, no doubt suspecting the bad tidings had dislodged something in the old woman’s brain.
“The MPs win elections giving speeches on the floor about ending misery and squalor. The Lords make their names passing improvement bills. From where they sit, it’s a job well done. But from where we sit? There’s more human suffering every day.”
The firebrand, still sparking, faculties no more or less intact.
Mr. Cantrell looked relieved, but he shook his head.
“Some mean well enough. Do you remember the Duke of Weston’s speech?”
Mercifully, Mr. Cantrell took Lucy’s gasp for affirmation.
“I read it, the five inches they printed in the Times,” he said. “He was arguing for a royal commission on housing because the prior remedies have increased the evil.”
“Sound and fury, signifying nothing,” responded Aunt Marian tartly. “These politicians all mean to trounce their opponents or line their own pockets, probably both. You won’t see them righting wrongs in Shoreditch.”
“The two of you are not debating on the floor of Parliament,” broke in Mrs. Cantrell, her voice shaking. “In case you’ve forgotten, you’re in a house that’s about to be demolished. I don’t think we’ve time for debates.”
“Niamh,” said Mr. Cantrell and opened his arms. She walked into his embrace and he held her. The tenderness of his posture contrasted with his grim expression.
Aunt Marian had laid both her hands atop her sewing machine. Lucy knew she was calculating their resources, totting up what it was all worth: their furniture, their stock, their sewing kits, their linens, their shoes.
Lucy rose slowly on rubbery legs. She felt strange, at once hot and cold. She had to do something.
The Duke of Weston. He’d wanted to establish a royal commission on housing. He’d wanted to address the evils caused by eviction, jobbery, and corruption.
She could race to the George and Dragon and fly in the face of James Purcell.
Or she could race to Mayfair and apply to the Duke of Weston. Both options felt absurd, pointless. She couldn’t overcome James Purcell by force. Nor could she influence a duke’s political agenda.
She had to try one or the other.
Before she’d thought to formulate her plan, she was running up the back stairs for her cloak.