“London Bridge is falling down.
Falling down, falling down.
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady!”
Piping out into the vast kitchen, her thin, small voice was hardly strong enough to reach the bleak, high ceiling overhead, but it helped her to scrub. “Falling down,” sang Emily, at the same time suiting the action to the words. Down, brush! Down, brush! Even though the nursery rhyme soon lost all semblance of a tune, sung over and over as it was, it carried Emily across the floor to the stove on the far side of the kitchen. Then suddenly she stopped singing and scrubbing. At that moment, the loudest sound in the room was the thumping of her heart. She sensed that someone had entered the kitchen and was staring at her. Slowly, carefully, she turned her head to peer over her shoulder.
In the doorway stood an ordinary young boy in a well-worn, navy-blue wool jacket, and a somewhat disreputable green-and-white-striped muffler. He had materialized without either ringing a bell or knocking, bringing into the kitchen with him a newspaper-wrapped parcel, and an overpowering smell of fish as well.
But what made the boy not quite so ordinary after all was his ownership of the brightest head of curly red hair Emily had ever seen in her life. It shone like a patch of marigolds in the dreary grey kitchen. As for the rest of him, he was sturdy-looking, with a snub nose blanketed in freckles, eyes the color of the blue sea when the sun is on it, and cheeks so ruddy they seemed to be in competition with his hair to see which was the cheeriest. Bright red hair, a cheerful look, not to mention an overpowering smell of fish—it would be difficult to miss such a boy no matter where he was. Can’t miss seeing him! Wasn’t that what Tilly had said about a fishmonger’s boy named Kipper?
The boy continued to dart curious looks at Emily over his shoulder as he set his parcel on a table, and then pulled off his coat and muffler. He hung both on a nail by the door as if the nail had his name on it. Then, pretending indifference, he picked up the parcel and strolled to the sink, whistling.
Emily felt strangely shy. She quickly returned to scrubbing the floor. Down, brush! Down, brush! She tried to keep her mind on her chore, but at last curiosity won out, and she stole a quick peek toward the sink. If she had been a little closer, she could have fallen right into the two big pools of blue that were the boy’s eyes staring at her. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment.
Her only consolation was that the boy’s cheeks appeared to do the same. “My name’s Kipper,” he mumbled. “What’s yours?”
“Emily.”
“Emily? Then ain’t you Mrs. Luccock’s niece what was coming here?”
Emily nodded.
Then, with the stiff, self-conscious look he might have worn had he just been told to look into a camera, Kipper said, “Well, howdy do, in which case.”
Emily scrambled up from the floor and dropped a curtsy. “How do you do, Kipper.”
In an instant, the frozen look on Kipper’s face dissolved into a wide grin. “Dingus! Ain’t anybody ever curtsied to me before, me not exactly being the King o’ England. Pa would like it, curtsying and all that, even from someone what looks like a chimney sweep!”
Kipper’s pleasure over the curtsy was so genuine that Emily couldn’t even feel offended over this honest description of her appearance. Besides, she felt she must look worse than a chimney sweep with coal dust streaked from her chin to the tips of her once-white shoes, dirty water sloshed all over her silk dress, and the hem of her skirt black from dragging across the floor.
“You get here yesterday?” Kipper asked.
“Last night,” replied Emily.
“And Tilly got you doing floors already, as well as carrying coal? Wheeoo!” Kipper whistled his sympathy.
“I scrub pots and pans, too,” said Emily. “Tilly says we have to be equals.”
“Well, you best be careful, or you’ll end up more equal ’n Tilly, if you get my meaning.” Kipper raised his eyebrows at Emily. “Anyways, speaking o’ Tilly, you best get back to your ‘London Bridge’ whilst I tend to this fish.” He started to unwrap the newspaper parcel. “Most times I just dump this in the icebox when Tilly’s not here, nor your aunt, but today I got something special.” He held up by the tail two huge, grey-speckled fish with dead, staring eyes.
Despite herself, Emily shuddered and crinkled her nose at the sight and the smell of these unattractive specimens.
Kipper shrugged ruefully. “They ain’t the best-smelling things, I got to admit, being two or three days ’long in age. But Pa always sends ’em when he’s got ’em left over, so the old ones can have something more than fish heads for their stew.”
Fish head stew! What next? Emily was made speechless by the thought of those eyes staring dolefully up at her from her soup bowl. Whistling a tuneless tune, Kipper pulled a stout knife from his trousers pocket and began to scrape the fish. Fish scales flew out from the sink like a flurry of tiny silver coins. But suddenly, the hand wielding the knife froze in midair, and Kipper stood absolutely still, listening. Then he twisted his head with a jerk and stared at the dining room door. A moment later, Mrs. Meeching glided through the doorway as silently as day becoming night.
She crossed the kitchen, her small, cruel, unblinking eyes looking neither to right nor left.
