You work your way up to the high street. Night is falling, but you make your way to the apothecary’s lit window, clinging to your last forlorn hope, that with your bracelet you’ll buy Ma a cure for smallpox.
The apothecary snorts. ‘Do you think little Prince Alfred would have died of smallpox if there were a cure? King Louis of France? Both of King William’s parents and his bleeding wife, pardon my language? And a little grub like you asks for a cure? Stop wasting my time and get out of my shop!’
‘Please,’ you beg him. ‘I may look poor, but I can pay. I’ve got something right here …’
You reach for your petticoat and begin to lift the hem. He leers at you and you get a sudden, sick feeling in your stomach.
Suddenly you’re backing out of the shop as fast as you can go, feeling furious. Of course there’s not a cure. But you’re sure that wouldn’t stop this horrid man from taking your precious bracelet from you. You resolve to keep the bracelet an absolute secret from now on, and never be tricked into parting with it.
It’s dark and cold, and you decide you might as well try Mrs Raeburn’s for a place to stay, though you don’t know her well. When you arrive, however, she takes one look at you and slams the door in your face.
‘They say your ma’s got the pox,’ she shouts through her closed door, ‘and I’m not running the risk of having you in this house. I’ve six children of my own to keep alive!’ Then the door opens a crack, and she throws a piece of bread in your direction. ‘Take it and go!’
You return home, only to discover that your own door has been locked from the inside. You realise, with a wrench in your heart, that Ma must have used the last of her strength to stagger to the door and lock you out, to protect you from coming back to look after her. You ball yourself up on your doorstep and cry.
You’re not sure how you’ll make it through this terrible night, but the dawn does eventually arrive, cold and bright. Mrs Raeburn bustles down the street, hair in a bun, starched work-apron tied to her pudgy body.
‘Well, up you get, then,’ she says, as if you’d planned to meet her here. ‘Come along!’ And she nods for you to fall into step behind her.
This woman slammed the door in my face last night, you think. But seeing you huddled in the doorstep of your own home seems to have awakened some sort of bossy maternal instinct in her, as she hustles you along to her workplace at the cloth mill.
‘They often need young ones to work here,’ she tells you, ‘and you may as well have something useful to do, since you don’t know what your future holds. You’ll be paid twenty pence at the end of each week.’ She looks away from you uncomfortably, a mix of pity and annoyance on her face.
These machines spin thread like nothing you’ve ever seen – a whirling clattering of arms and wheels. The noise of a hundred of them going at once fills the vast room, and the air is hazy with dust and cotton fibres. Cloth spills off the looms in creamy folds, and metal ribs and teeth crunch hungrily.
The job you’re given is ‘scavenger’: you must keep the floor underneath the machines free from dust and fibres, so that nothing gets caught in the machines and jams the mechanism. You have no idea how these machines work, but you can see straight away that if you let your hair or fingers become caught in them, the machines would rip them clean off your body.
Stifling your coughs, you work on your knees for six hours until midday, when you are given a bowl of watery soup. Then you go back to work under the thrashing, pounding machines for another six hours, driven on despite your exhaustion, as you’ve been told the fierce factory owner won’t hesitate to beat anyone who stops to rest.
You’re so busy being careful not to fall into one of the machines that you hardly manage to think about Ma all day. By its end, you are so bone-tired that it’s only as you’re walking down your street, that you remember you’re still locked out of your home.
Then you stop. The door is wide open – splintered and busted off its hinges – and there’s a horse-and-cart out the front. Two men wearing black, with rags tied over their faces, are lifting something long, covered in a blanket, onto the back of their cart.
‘Ma!’ you cry, running towards them. But the nearest man puts out his arm. ‘She’s gone,’ he says, his voice muffled beneath the rag. ‘Best not to look.’
Your stomach heaves as you glance into the empty house. ‘Where are you taking her?’ you ask.
‘London Cemetery,’ comes the muffled reply. ‘Pauper’s grave.’
You feel a black crow fly in and land heavily on the branches of your heart. An unmarked pauper’s grave. You’ve heard that gravediggers stack the bodies one on top of another at the cemetery, with only a few inches of soil to cover them. The stench can drift for miles on a bad day. Old, rotting bodies are chopped into pieces to make way for the new, and the coffins are sold as firewood. You’ve even heard of bodies being stolen from graves and sold to medical schools for dissection.
You can’t allow Ma to be dumped into the cold earth like that, without even a marker or a prayer; not when you know she might be dug up again,
