Mrs. Bone didn’t take long to make her arrangements. She started in her bedroom, her secret place, the place she called her hidey-hole. The walls were as thick as those in a strong room. The bed was piled high with cushions and feather pillows and she needed a stepladder to climb into it. The rest of her furniture was temporary. Portable. Easy to off-load. But her bed was her great luxury; it was very important. It simply had to be nice.
The windows were shuttered and bolted. She didn’t need to peek outside to know there were men watching the house. Mr. Murphy’s boys. There’d very nearly been a skirmish with his men behind the shop. She thanked her lucky stars it hadn’t come to anything. Intimidation was one thing. Outright assaults were another. They demanded retaliation. And Mrs. Bone didn’t have the resources to retaliate at present.
But soon she would, if this job were worth it, if it passed her test.
She climbed out of her black dress and put on a tea gown. She had a fine collection of those. This one was the color of ripe peaches, edged with ermine. She lit a cigarette, gave it a few good puffs. It was nice to have a smoke in private. Then she hauled open her closet and started rifling through her dresses. “No good,” she muttered. “Too nice. No, no, no.”
She had to push right to the back of the closet. Dragged out boots and stays. Found a neat, sad blouse, much mended. A long coarse skirt of indeterminate color.
“Perfect,” she said with a wry sigh. “Oh, very nasty.”
She’d look just like a daily woman, wearing that. She stubbed out her cigarette and tried it on.
Next, resources. She summoned a ragged-looking boy, who sat before her, head in his hands, bawling with rare splendor. He kicked his heels on the floor. Mrs. Bone counted her fingers. “And your ma. And your pa. And your Aunt Eilidh. And your cousin Gerry. And you, too.”
The boy’s howls grew louder.
“Now don’t start. You know what you owe.”
“I don’t know nothing ’bout that!”
“Well, you’d better run home and ask your pa, then, hadn’t you? Tell him Mrs. Bone got her ledger out.”
He lifted his head at the word ledger. Mrs. Bone opened the book and licked a finger, keeping her eye on him. “Let’s see. Where’s your name in here?”
The boy switched off his tears. She saw him calculating whether he could run for it. He realized he couldn’t. Sensible lad.
“What do you want?” he said, mutinous.
“I’d like repaying—that’s what I’d like. But I’m willing to make some alternative arrangements. For now.”
“What sort of arrangements?”
“Men,” said Mrs. Bone, digging a stare into him. “Your brothers. All six of them. And you. Seven’s my lucky number.”
“What you need us for?”
Mrs. Bone slapped the desk with the ledger. “That’s for me to know, and you to find out.”
The boy untangled himself from the chair. He sniffled, rubbing his eyes. “They’ll ask me whether you can pay.”
“Whether I can pay?” She leaned right into his face. “Wasn’t you listening? I’ll come for your ma, and your pa, and you, too.”
He scrambled out of the chair. “I’ll tell ’em,” he said.
Mrs. Bone nodded, done with him. “Then ta-ta, my love, and off you tumble.”
The boy wanted to know whether she’d pay. Not what she’d pay. Mrs. Bone didn’t care for that at all. Her sort of business depended on everybody having great confidence in her affairs. She’d done the sums on this job, of course. It made her heart hammer, working out how much Danny’s house could make for her. It made her hate him, too.
A few years ago she wouldn’t have touched this enterprise. She’d have tested the risk, and put it back in a drawer. But big jobs had their own momentum. They’d keep Mr. Murphy and any other rival families in line. And this was big. This was bigger than big.
Her next chore was one she despised. She went to get a second pair of hands to mind the shop. She met her cousin Archie on a bench in the park. He’d curled his mustachio to magnificent points, and Mrs. Bone didn’t like that. She didn’t care for showy fashions, not outdoors. Archie jumped at the sight of her ratty skirt and blouse.
“What in the world?” he said, not able to help himself.
“Manners,” she said, pointing a finger in his face.
He ducked his chin, gave her an oily kiss on the cheek, then the hand. “Is the ledger up to date, ma’am?”
Mrs. Bone didn’t lower her finger. “Don’t you worry yourself about the ledger. Anything tricky comes up, one of the boys’ll know where to find me. I can be back in a jiffy. Believe me.”
He scratched his nose. “I was thinking about going on holiday myself.”
Mrs. Bone told him his fee.
His eyes popped. “Why didn’t you say so? I thought business was slow?”
Mrs. Bone leaned in, gripped him by the arm. He smelled of sugar and oil, pomade and cologne. His skin was polished and creamy. He looked like an egg.
“Business is never slow,” she said.
Great confidence: that’s what she would always project.
Arriving at Park Lane was quite something. The house was like a hotel, Mrs. Bone thought, wiping a line of sweat from her brow. Doors opening and closing, parcels and goods coming in and out. A place this big needed feeding, laundering, delivering, restocking. Waste of money. Of course Danny had an army of servants. Typical of his extravagant tastes. Mrs. Bone tugged her ugly hat down over her ears. I’m a poor, humble creature, she told herself sternly. I’m as low as can be. I’m a rat; I’m a worm.
She reached out and jabbed the tradesmen’s bell. Heard it ring, shrilly, somewhere in the depths of the house.
She looked up. White walls, fancy pillars, windows the size of buses. So big it could squash you. “I’ll tear you limb from limb,” she told the house, under her breath. She corrected herself. She hadn’t made any decisions about investing in this job yet. She was here to check the lay of the land—that was all.
It wasn’t the first time she’d visited. Back then the house was only half-built. She’d seen the dust cloud all the way across the park, heard the clang and clatter of construction as she approached through the trees. The scaffolding was immense: a monstrous, sprawling mass of beams and joists and planks and cranes. There must have been fifty men employed on the site. Carts lined up around the street. White tarpaulin flapping in the breeze, a tall ship with a hundred sails. It frightened her, somewhere far, far down in her gut. It made her feel nastily tiny.
She’d seen Danny stretched out on a picnic blanket, watching the men at work. Tweed jacket, white boater tied with a yellow ribbon—immaculate silk, that. His butler had crossed the grass with a silver platter, a jug of lemonade, ice bobbing on the surface.
She’d balled her fists. “Danny,” she’d called, voice hoarse.
He’d aged. Of course he had: it had been a decade since they’d seen each other. But she still recognized that quick, lethal turn of the head. That was an O’Flynn, through and through. If anyone could spot it, she could. Wealth hadn’t made him soft, not at all.
She’d wanted to scare him. At first she reckoned she’d managed it. She noted the click in his jaw. But then his mouth revealed a Cheshire Cat grin. She remembered that, too. He loved it: the thrill of winning, of beating her, of having something over on her. It was everything, the stuff of life. He was pleased to see her.
“Hullo, Sister Scarecrow,” he said, same as always.
Mrs. Bone had loved her brother. He was five years older than she was. He took her gambling when she was still a girl—only fourteen, fifteen. Dogs, fights, sometimes the races. She watched him take men out by their kneecaps. Helped him count out the returns. Went shopping with him, helped him choose beautiful things. Danny knew his silks. He had a fine collection of neckerchiefs. Yellow spotted, black fringed, always printed, never plain. He bought quality. So did she.
The diamonds had been his idea. She had to credit him with that. It was the early rush across the world to the mines in Kimberley: you had to be quick as lightning to get in with a shot. He’d brought the scheme to all the neighbors before he came to his little sister.
“You’re asking me last?” she said. Clever of him, really. It put her in a temper. She had the cash, after all. She was already making good money, her commissions from prizefights and protection.
“You’ll make it all back,” he said. “And then some.”
“Says you.”
“Says me, exactly.” He gave her a hard look. “And you can’t tag around after me forever. You need a husband. You’ll need a down payment.”
Mrs. Bone wasn’t Mrs. Bone, back then. She was just a girl called Ruth O’Flynn, from Devil’s Acre, working for an ironmonger called Mr. Bone who kept a shop over in Aldgate. She was good at selling nails. She looked like a nail. Hard and pointed and gleaming. Her older brother was the flash one, the one with the wild schemes and reckonings. He was twenty-one and a man of the world: he was going to bend it to his will.
“Don’t mess me about, Danny,” she said.
He shrugged. “The risk’s on you. Take it or leave it.”
He called a spade a spade, did Danny. Or at least he did when it pleased him. When it suited the story. But she understood that, too, didn’t she? She gave him what he needed in the end. Enough to buy his ticket all the way across the world, to the Cape Colony.
I’m on the make, she told herself, reading his letters, racing through the newspapers, waiting for him to buy his first claim, purchase his first stones, start making returns. It was very wonderful, that heart-stopping, breathless feeling. That certainty that she was sorted, that this was it, this was her made, forever. It lasted until the letters stopped. Till Danny dropped her. Vanished altogether.
At first she couldn’t credit it. She went up to town, waited outside the offices of the only mining company she knew, doorstepped a clerk on his way home for dinner. There were a whole host of women on the pavement, waving billets and ticket stubs and blurry photographs, asking for news of husbands and brothers and cousins who’d gone off to the mines.
“It’s about my brother,” she said. “Daniel O’Flynn.”
The clerk was a young man, but he had silvery threads in his hair. He smoothed them now, irritation written all across his face. “Madam. I get inquiries such as these nearly every week. There are as many as fifty thousand men out there. You understand? I would have—we have—simply no way of knowing all their movements.”
She squared up to him, pressed a letter into his hand. “Put out an inquiry. That’s all I’m asking.”
The clerk clicked his tongue in impatience. “I see I must be frank with you. It is a hard life out there. It’s been a long, taxing summer. Even when they take the greatest care in the world, men put their lives in the hands of their Maker every day.” He frowned. “Is this an insurance matter?” he asked. “If so, I really must reserve my counsel.”
This notion, that Danny could be dead, carried no credence with her. She turned her back on that clerk and marched home. There was no circumstance on earth in which Danny would have got himself killed. He was too hard-shell, too wily, for that. He would have negotiated with the boulder before it fell on his head. She pictured him in a shack office somewhere on the other side of the globe, heat raging down on him through a slatted window. Signing contracts, pondering his signature. He never respected his name. He hated being an O’Flynn, being one of a multitude, cousins crawling all over the neighborhood.
“I’d like to live forever, Scarecrow,” he used to say, lying awake at night, bouncing a rubber ball off the beams. “Forever.”
He’d return—she’d always been certain of that. The rest of the family wore black armbands and the priest came and Ma expired with grief, but she never went into mourning. “You wait,” she said grimly. “Just you wait.”
There was no satisfaction in being right. Trust Danny to return with a horde of newspapermen in his slipstream, a milksop merchant’s daughter on one arm: renamed, transformed, richer than the devil. Wilhelm de Vries, he called himself. They were ablaze with it, in the old neighborhood. Danny sent a gentleman, a young clerk with silvery hair, from house to house, making arrangements. Everybody needed a little something to keep their mouths closed and their opinions to themselves. Danny—Wilhelm—was extravagant in his generosity. He gave a good deal more than was necessary. He could afford to, of course.
That day at the house, she’d trod carefully across the grass, stopping at the edge of the picnic blanket. He didn’t get up.
She understood why he was smiling. This must have been everything he’d ever dreamed of. To lie there, basking in the ferocious heat of a London summer afternoon, his mansion springing up behind him. His own sister staring at him, goggle-eyed. He wanted her to feast her eyes on him. To see how well he’d done. To marvel. She understood that impulse: she felt it herself. It wasn’t easy to make a name for yourself in the lanes and back alleys of Devil’s Acre. You had to roar as loud as a lion if you wanted anyone to pay attention to you.
His curls had faded and he looked thinner around the cheeks—sunken, as if his back teeth were rotting. But he’d done something to the surface of his skin, rubbed it with oils or creams, made it shiny and expensive looking. He was wearing a wedding ring. He was always wearing wedding rings, she remembered. Every time he knocked up a girl he used to wear one, for the sake of appearances, to appease the neighbors. He’d yank it off five minutes later, of course.
“We hear you’re not dead, then,” she said tartly, trying to hide the shake in her voice.
“I’m not dead,” he said, grin stretching, arms stretching too.
She loathed him for that. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow at that. “Don’t be so pious, Scarecrow. You’d have done the same yourself.” He paused. “If you could.”
In the end he gave Mrs. Bone two checks. The first was a neat repayment of that original loan, plus a very fair rate of interest. Everybody in the old neighborhood heard about it. He made sure that they did. It was signed in his new name, with the most beautiful flourish, that whip-crack W slicing right across the paper: “Wilhelm de Vries.”
She didn’t cash it. She knifed it to the wall instead, to make the point.
The second check was bigger. Nobody heard about that one. It came with no terms, no parameters—without words, even. No need for explanations with a sum that size. It said, I don’t want any trouble.
That one she lingered over, weighing it in her hands, for many months. Of course she cashed it in the end. It bought her the factory, and the villa attached to it, and her seaside place in Broadstairs, and the storage house for her favorite treasures down in Deal. It bought her evidence of her own importance, her own mark on the world. It made her feel bigger; it made her feel as if she had teeth. It didn’t parch one iota of her rage against Danny. It made it worse. She yearned to crack rubies between her teeth, drink liquid gold, draw blood.
All that was twenty-four years ago. And now Danny was gone, really gone, and here she was still on the outside, gazing up at his vast and glistening house.
Nobody had answered the tradesman’s door. She banged on it, hard.
“Oi!” she shouted. “Let me in!”
The kitchen impressed her—she couldn’t help it. It bustled with life. Stove belching heat, tiles as white as teeth. Mrs. Bone felt stirred up by the glinting surface of everything. She eyed a line of gigantic fire irons. Mr. Bone would have liked those, she thought, with a little pang.
“Very busy, ain’t it?” she said to the cook, who was giving her the tour. Clearly, the woman had schooled the new people before, had perfected her system. She described the contents of every cupboard, taking her time about it. Mrs. Bone was itching to get on, get upstairs, take a look at the good stuff. “You’ll need to be patient,” Mrs. King had warned her. “Don’t let them know you’re a little racehorse. Don’t give yourself away.”
“I know how to do my preliminaries, thank you,” she’d said brusquely.
“What shall I call you, mum?” Mrs. Bone asked the cook now, trying humble on for size.
“Cook,” said the cook. “Now, then. Here’s where you empty the cinder pails. I suppose you know how to do that? You’ll need to make up the housemaids’ boxes, do the tea leaves for the carpets, get the hot-water buckets filled.”
Mrs. Bone sniffed. “All right.”
Cook eyed her, suspicious. “You bring the fresh dust sheets out. My girls don’t do that. And you do the napkin press, all right? Mr. Shepherd don’t like seeing no utensils out and about in the kitchen, and nor do I.” She glared at Mrs. Bone. “Got that?”
I’m a worm, thought Mrs. Bone. I’m a slug. She bowed from the waist. “Oh, yes, mum. That’s all most familiar to me.”
Cook liked being bowed to. It showed on her face. But it went against the rules. “You don’t call me mum, you call me Cook,” she said. “Now, are you f’miliar with brushes?”
Mrs. Bone had rolled her eyes when Mrs. King lectured her on this point. Hard brush for mud, soft brush for blacking, and the blacking went in a corked bottle. Always a corked bottle.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I know ever such a lot about brushes!”
“And look out—you’re in Mr. Shepherd’s way.”
Mrs. Bone only vaguely recalled the butler. The one who’d brought out a jug of lemonade to the park, carrying his silver tray. He plowed heavily toward them, followed by a train of bootboys, oblivious to her, nodding vaguely. He smelled of camphor and oil, and he was sweating. She saw a flash of light, the bright and perfect glitter of a key, attached to a chain around his waist. Oh, I could snap it off with my teeth, she thought.
“We don’t like dawdlers,” Cook said, and grabbed Mrs. Bone by the elbow.
And I could snap you in two pieces and all. Mrs. Bone grinned like an idiot, and matched Cook’s pace: slow, slow, slow.
“And here’s your room,” said Cook, banging the door open. “You’ll be sharing with Sue.”
Mrs. Bone could see an urchin peering at her from the shadows, wide-eyed and holding on to the washbasin for dear life. She looked pale and scaly, wracked by storms. Mrs. Bone felt her skin crawling. She hated sharing a bed.
“All right, Sue?” said Cook.
“All right,” replied the girl, voice husky.
Mrs. Bone disliked the name Sue. It always made her feel edgy, as if there were static in her hair. Her own little girl had been called Susan. She tried to breathe it away.
Cook fiddled with the water jug and the pail, straightening them, then straightening them again. “It’s lights-out at eleven, once you’ve put away the irons. Then we lock up.”
Mrs. Bone frowned. “Lock up?”
Cook was serene, halfway out the door. “We’ll be locking your bedroom doors at night.”
Mrs. Bone banged her bag down on the bed. It managed a sorrowful sort of half bounce. “Nobody’s locking me in anywhere,” she said before she could help it.
Mrs. Bone could hear bodies moving next door, girls coming in and out of their rooms. The light paused at the tiny window, unwilling to cross the threshold. She looked down at the purple-stained boards and saw grooves in the paintwork, nicks and cuts and spoiled varnish, as if someone had been dragging the furniture across the floor, barring the door.
“We’ve had a lot of unpleasantness this month,” said Cook. “And it’s Madam’s orders.”
Mrs. Bone could feel her heart thumping slowly, steadily. Madam. She repeated the name in her head. It made her feel the nearness of her own flesh and blood, the presence of Danny in the walls. She looked at the door and thought, He’s got me in a cage.
“Well,” she said, with a monumental effort, “if them’s the rules.”
Cook wrinkled her nose. “Good. Now put your things away, and report downstairs. Any questions?”
Mrs. Bone imagined her prize, the vast booty glittering and clinking in the house beneath her. She pictured herself standing on top of Aladdin’s cave, filled to the brim with treasures. That was all that mattered: not her own memories, her own feelings.
She sucked in her cheeks and practically curtseyed. “Oh, no, Cook,” she said. “Everything’s lovely.”