IN RESPONSE TO Gerrund’s urgent knocking, Sledgehammer opened the door. There were already footsteps clattering close behind us.
‘Do you think that you could keep it closed for a minute?’ I asked and passed him a crumpled note.
‘Give you two for tha’,’ he promised, slammed the door shut, bolted it and leaned back on it for good measure. Somebody was pounding already on the other side. ‘Wish I could hear ’em over this racket.’ Sledgehammer shook his head sadly.
I wiped my mouth, resisting the urge to spit. The hand that I had nibbled had been neither fresh nor delicious.
If anything, the saloon was more crowded than before and I had a torn sleeve and a hanging hem by the time we had battled back onto the street. I put a hand to my bonnet. It felt more like a mob cap now.
At least the moon was out again and we did not have to wait for Gerrund to relight his lantern.
A gentleman passed by with his hat down and a muffler pulled up over his lower face despite the heat.
‘Somebody doesn’t want to be recognised,’ I commented.
‘And I think we can both guess why,’ Gerrund replied and puffed out his cheeks.
‘Come here, girl,’ the stranger called to somebody unseen and I recoiled to think that he actually meant girl rather than young woman.
‘Got a long walk back to the park,’ Gerrund remarked. ‘Friendless will never hear us from here.’ He glanced uneasily over his shoulder. ‘Wish I’d brought my revolver now. This sword stick isn’t much use against a mob.’
‘There is a hansom on Salvation Road by the park gate,’ I shouted to his puzzlement. ‘Sixpence to whoever fetches it to the end of this alley.’
About ten figures emerged from the dark doorways across the road, all children, scattering back up the street, an old man struggling after them on crutches.
‘Go back to sleep,’ I told him and slipped a florin into his clawed hand, enough to feed him for a week if he did not drink it away.
Gerrund relit his lamp and we hurried, sloshing through the stinking sludge, back up the road until we reached a deep stream. Abandoning any pretence of decency, I hitched up my dress and waded across.
‘Yick,’ I breathed as it seeped over the top of my shoe.
What a silly word, Ruby said, annoyingly, for I had been thinking of giving it to her. I would rather roast, she asserted which was a distinct possibility.
Gerrund peered back.
‘They’re coming,’ he warned, and I made out perhaps a dozen people running after us.
‘There they goo,’ somebody yelled. It was the old man who had managed to hobble after them and he was pointing down a side alley.
‘Thank you,’ I breathed as they went towards it.
‘No they dint,’ a woman lord-bless-her cried. ‘They goo there.’
Cancelling my relief I broke into a messily sploshing gallop.
Crossing the hole was not something to which I had been looking forward, but the act presented much less of a challenge since Gerrund had straightened the plank. Once we were both across I peered back.
‘They are catching up.’
‘Soon stop that.’ Gerrund crouched in the sludge, grasped the plank and heaved, tipping it crashing with a splash into the crater.
‘But how will the children get home?’
He dipped gingerly into his pocket to bring out a handkerchief.
‘Home?’ He wiped his hands. ‘They haven’t got homes.’ He tossed his handkerchief into the hole. ‘But don’t you fret, milady. Like alley cats they are. They’ll go over the rooftops if they want to, in fact some of them sleep up there.’
The urchins were gathered around our cab when we got to the junction, all clamouring to take credit for having summoned it.
‘First one touch my horse take a lick of my whip as’ll put his eye out,’ Friendless threatened and the children left him to swarm around us.
‘Have a care, milady,’ my man warned. ‘They’ll have the laces off your shoes and the gold out of your teeth given half a chance.’
I did not have any stoppings, but this was not the time to compare our experiences of modern dentistry.
‘Stand away,’ I warned, holding my bag close. ‘Or not one of you will get a farthing.’ I stepped backwards, feeling my way carefully and, while Gerrund held up the lantern, sorted through my winnings. ‘Form a queue,’ I instructed, ‘and I shall give you all something.’
‘Wha’s a coo?’ a tiny girl demanded.
‘A soup-line with no soup,’ my man explained, and they jostled each other into some kind of order.
I handed the biggest and, therefore, first child a half crown and he eyed it suspiciously. He had probably never seen so much money at one time.
The next followed and then another. As the last, a bow-legged child, held out his or her hand, Gerrund slapped it on its shaved head.
‘I let you go twice already,’ he said. ‘Don’t be greedy.’
After I had finished paying them, we climbed aboard.
‘Home driver,’ Gerrund called, pulling the flaps shut.
‘Tint home,’ Friendless corrected him. ‘If it is you dint need me.’
Not for the first time I wondered if his mother had known how richly her baby would merit his name.
‘So what was Bradley up to, milady?’ my man asked as we emerged onto the open road and I took a deep breath of the air that would have been fresh had it not stunk of me and Gerrund.
‘He thought that nobody would bet on the dog killing them all in that time,’ I explained. ‘But I had more faith in Little Tich than that, besides which, the rats were drugged.’
‘Drugged?’ Gerrund repeated incredulously. ‘I’ve known of it with horses and greyhounds and even a prize fighter but rats!’
‘They were all too sluggish.’ The cab rose over an unseen obstruction and I braced myself for the fall. ‘The one I prodded with my parasol hardly reacted.’
‘Blimey,’ Gerrund said for the second time that night.
‘Blimey indeed,’ I agreed, finding the little box I kept in a side pocket of my bag.
I had been dying for a Beeman’s. My father’s cousin Gertrude had sent him a case of the chewing gum from her home in Boston – not the proper one but the place in America. It contained pepsin, which she thought might help his heartburn. He had hated it, but I had tried some and loved it. There was something wonderfully horrible about the delicious natural and artificial flavors with no u and I soon became a hopeless addict, consuming two packets a day, sometimes even having a stick before I got out of bed in the morning. Before my supply ran out, I had arranged regular shipments from the city posing as Cleveland, always keeping a crate aside in case of delays or loss at sea.
Gerrund sniffed disapprovingly as I unwrapped a stick. He would rather that I adopted a more ladylike habit such as cigarettes, or his personal favourite. He brought out his coffin-shaped snuff box and took a couple of pinches of something white that perked him up more than pulverised tobacco ever could. I for one had been quite invigorated enough for one night.
‘Why did Gervey need so many men around him?’ I wondered.
‘A show of power,’ Gerrund explained, ‘and protection. There’s a war brewing with the Braise Shotten gang for control of the Hams.’
These were the surrounding villages, the largest being Great Bardham, which was almost a town, and the smallest Kelham, little more than a hamlet. Together these settlements made up a sizeable population, enough from which to make a dishonest living at any rate.
I knew Cane Braise by sight. He was a huge jolly man, always smiling and laughing, tipping his tilted slouch hat to the ladies and dispensing coins to street children. On cattle market days he would be seen rubbing shoulders with the farmers, discussing their livestock and buying drinks – a gentle giant one might have thought if one did not know of his fondness for roasting people on a spit. Braise is as Braise do, he was alleged to chuckle through their screams.
‘The girl I love is sweet and fair. Her heart is kind and trooo-oo-oo,’ Friendless sang mournfully, the tune lost somewhere in the mists of his mind.
Where were you while all that was going on? I asked Ruby.
Cooking, she reminded me and, of course, she meant being rather than doing for, like Dracula in reverse, she had to be back in her coffin by midnight.
‘But come the day I lose my hair she lose her heart to you-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo,’ Friendless wailed. ‘Her name wa—’
Be quiet, Ruby commanded quite nastily, I thought, and he stopped abruptly so perhaps it had not been Ruby after all.
Gerrund fetched a jug of iced water from the cellar, half-filled my absinthe fountain and bade me a good night, though I rarely had one. The fountain looked like a miniature brass lamppost with two taps off the chamber at the top. I only ever needed one. The ritual comforted me, placing a cube of sugar on the slotted silver spoon and watching the water drip slowly through, clouding the clear green liquor, but never diluting it enough to take away the bite nor sweeten it enough to mask the bitterness.
‘You swore that you loved me,’ I said aloud.
You are better off without him, Ruby asserted, and I knew that she was right but it did not feel that way.
And to think I turned down Timothy Curtin, I fumed. Tim was a sweet man with forty thousand a year and a castle in Buckinghamshire near the pretty village of Milton Keynes.
Men, you cannot live with them. You can live without them, Ruby asserted.
It is said you cannot drown your sorrows and that may well be true, but you can certainly anaesthetise them, as I was proving almost every night.
Never trust a man, Ruby had advised and so I found some comfort in the company of Hettie who lived three streets away. She was a portrait painter and a very good one I thought.
Except me, Havelock Hefty chipped in, rather late to join the conversation and conveniently forgetting how he had investigated me for the murder of my great aunt the Dowager Herbena Lady Strainge.
It had not been my fault that she had drowned in a vat of pickles, I mused as the first sip ran onto my tongue. Some people thought her demise suspicious since she had bequeathed everything to me, but her fortune was not so much dwindling as dwindled. Strainge Comestibles was already in debt following the failure of its jellied bovine colons and her late husband, the baron, had lost heavily on a scheme to breed Manx cats with tails.
I rolled my drink around my mouth, wondering if I would become a sour spinster and waiting for Ruby to tell me that I had already done so, but she lifted a loose tress of my hair, placed it gently behind my ear and said nothing.
The one object of value that I had inherited from my aunt was Break House, tucked oddly into the corner of Seraphim Square in Montford, eighteen miles from our family seat in Thetbury. I say oddly because it was a wedge-shaped building, two rooms off the hallway at the front, fanning out to four at the back.
I swallowed, feeling the liquid trickle down into my waiting stomach.
Jack had vowed that he would die for me. If my father, second cousin or maid ever caught up with him he would find that promise fulfilled. Gerrund had made no threats, but I had seen the way he had gripped his meat cleaver when he had found out. Out of those three, my money would have been on Agnust. Few things escaped her though she had yet to discover that my green fairy, as some referred to the spirit, was not a herb-flavoured peppermint cordial.
‘I loved him,’ I told the absinthe.
It did not reply of course, but Ruby had plenty to say on the subject.
What is love? she philosophised. A flutter of the heart or a surge of blood in the brain? Doctors will find a cure for it one day.
From my readings of poetry I had hoped that there might be more to it than that, but I was forced to admit that she could be right.
Poets, Ruby snorted. What do they know? They think that clouds are lonely.
There had been little to inspire me in sleepy Thetbury and so I moved into the town to discover that the major differences were the readier supply of coffee and that the bumkins lived closer together.
From there Jack Wastrel would die horribly in my next book The Revenge of Rose Rachet. It was otherwise an uneventful existence, but I was quite content to have my excitement on paper. Life, however, had other plans and you cannot argue with life because it can always threaten to leave you and, if it does, you can never woo it back.