‘But all is not gloomy. There is a ballroom. What do they look like I wonder, Willa? Do they dance in tattered and stained gowns? Might their shaved, scorched heads, oozing with wounds, catch the flickering light? And how, I consider, do people who are mad take to the drink when they are offered ale and punch. I dare say it is not for the weak. Hmm?’
Clovis draws her chiffon mask higher still.
‘Well. We must get back to the river before the heavens open. My goodness, but you are shivering. One of these days soon Willa Robinson, you are going to rub a hole in that pocket of yours. Whatever is the matter with you?’ she asks innocently.
Willa may be naive and unworldly, she may possess a head full of spectacularly simple thoughts, but she is not stupid. She knows a threat when she feels it.
Before Clovis steps up into the cab, she turns again to face the hospital.
‘A dead house stands behind those walls. An apothecary hacks off the heads of the dead patients and places them in pickling pans until the flesh falls off. A gruesome end, yes?’
‘Yes, mistress.’ Willa enunciates the words but her mind is free now, counting – one, two, three, four, five, six … and on and on until she crushes the panic.
The cab driver, who would normally curse and spit during the interminable wait, stands quietly as if under the spell of the unnerving place. After the jerk of the first turn of the hansom’s wheels, Clovis turns her entombed head and unties the chiffon, until it falls down in long strands around her neck. She calculates that this would be an opportune moment to release another smile. It is after all a new beginning, a new relationship. So she summons it, warm and inviting, full and open, until Willa’s shoulders relax, and the girl’s hands are finally still.
Then Clovis lays forth the map to Willa’s new appointment.
‘Should the two of us ever come to any … disagreement … that we cannot remedy, or if you ever display a single act of disloyalty, that broad building where London deposits its mad will be your new home and its inhabitants your new family.’
Willa casts a timorous parting glance. Her mistress’s sweet breath fills the cab.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The smoke is as thick as a hand; the stench in the stifling room is born of ale and sweat. Finn Fowler’s insides churn with the pure exuberance of what is sure to be a win.
It has only been a few months since Willa’s arrival and the peopling of the Fowler household is near completion.
Around the table in the house of Far East whores, unshaven men murmur at the scene in progress, set for a climax and perhaps a fight. The Chinese proprietor’s son perches on a tall stool with a knife in his hand. He scrapes away at a piece of wood and while he seems to be concentrating on the shape taking form, he also listens to the men who are carving the shape of another’s life – his.
‘Nothing left,’ Mr Ling says.
‘You have one asset.’ Finn raises a brow at the boy.
The two men lock eyes.
‘I need an apprentice,’ Finn says.
‘Premium?’ The Chinese man asks and looks away, as if he’s no longer interested.
Finn glances again at his cards.
‘Twenty pound.’
Someone coughs.
‘Count it,’ Another man says.
‘There ain’t twenty on there,’ says the man next to Finn, entirely drunk.
‘Whatever sits shiny and hard on the table, the premium is twenty pound,’ Finn says.
‘Terms?’ Mr Ling asks.
The men at the table groan. Their tough-skinned fingers impatiently strum the table and they adjust their itchy crotches.
‘Agree the twenty, finish the hand. If I win, we sort out the rest tonight and I go back to Three Colt Street with the boy. If my hand’s a crapper, well then, you keep the boy – for now.’
They lock eyes once again. The expression on Mr Ling’s face is blank. He agrees with a swift nod.
The boy’s knife stops its work. He reveals nothing. His stomach, however, churns at the events being played out before him. His future will be decided by a game of Put. His father prefers Fan-Tan, or Pak-ah-puh, but the rogues insisted on their English card game tonight and he was impotent against them.
‘Fer fuck’s sake, show yer cards,’ another brays.
This has never happened before. Mr Ling has never allowed the stakes to stack up so high that he could not meet them. But things have been bad for him lately. The parish is becoming more dangerous for those who operate below the law. He has no allies and there is no other Chinese man who resides within this parish. He could die quickly and quietly and no one would notice, and those who would, well, they would be grateful to his murderer. People owe him. People despise him. There are those who find this foreigner too foreign.
The boy is long ruined. Ling first noticed it after his mother crept out of the door late one night and never returned. He heard she’d hidden on a ship in the docks that sailed the next day for the East, but was discovered during the voyage and thrown overboard like a morsel, fed to the insatiable sea. What a good idea, Ling thought. He was tempted to drown the boy. He is meant to treasure a male child. But he does not, not this one who pines after his grandmother from some shitty little province full of Jurchens.
Jonesy’s mother had been running her entire life, first from an arranged marriage in Shanghai, then from the floating life of the canal brothels, and finally from him and his father. She had learned to travel light. Several of her tunics were left discarded
