‘Got nothin’ for you but I can knit and sew.’
‘Nothing required.’ He bows low.
‘Well, all right then, thank you, Jonesy Ling.’
‘Jonesy, please.’ Before he gives it to her he strokes the outline of the wings that are carved to appear folded underneath the insect.
‘Cicada. Chinese symbol for, um, very long life. Survives underground for long time, then comes up and flies. Flies to the sky. Um, forever … Symbol for … undying.’ He struggles to find the word.
‘Immortal?,’ Willa says.
‘Immortal,’ Jonesy repeats.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Francis Lawless diminishes each day from a withering illness that the doctors fail to identify; they consider he has lived a long life and as his death approaches there is really no need to label what overtakes him. Owen Mockett makes up the prescriptions for the laudanum to help ease his passing and cosset his dreams. It is the very least he can do for the Lawless family who have always been loyal customers.
George Fitzgerald’s legal team puts Francis’s affairs in order. There is more than a little sadness etched in the deep lines of his face. So intricately are the Lawless and Fitzgerald families entwined, with marriages, births and deaths.
Each time St Anne’s bell tolls the sisters are certain it is their father’s death knell. Claustrophobia settles in. There is no truly private place in the house. Their ailing father sleeps fitfully, and their well-intentioned cook, Bertie, their only live-in servant, has a natural ear to all conversation, even when she retires to an exhausted coma-like sleep.
An eagerness for a taste of the freedom that is a birthright of men has always gnawed at the sisters. How well their father knew it. As his dying countenance lies before her, Constance recalls that after the second tragedy of their lives bore down on them with the weight of iron, he gave them a choice. He would search for second husbands and she and Verity could live conventionally if they wished. Or, they could live their widowed lives unconventionally, as long as they applied themselves to something worthwhile. At the time, they were so heavy with grief they could not rise in the morning without dreading the day. He quickly realized they could make no such decision, so he made it for them. Francis whisked his daughters away from the scenes of their sorrows. He opened the doors of Europe to them in a Grand Tour wildly of his own making that followed no traditional itinerary. They returned to Limehouse forever changed.
During the restless years that followed, the sisters became primed to perform an act so daring that they would lay down their reputations for its cause.
Constance arrived home one day with a worn second-hand canvas haversack bulging with two suits of men’s clothing. She revealed the accepted uniform of a casual worker: trousers, shirts, waistcoats, loose fitting long jackets, two flat cloth caps and two pairs of dull boots.
The trousers offered such an extraordinary feeling of vulnerability and at the same time release, that at first the sisters’ gaits were awkward and exaggerated. At the completion of their transformation when they tucked their hair under the caps and wrapped neckerchiefs high to their chins, the mirror reflected that tall, thin men had come to roost. They sneaked from the house and stole into the night’s crisp air. They walked as men, free to discover London’s nocturnal underbelly.
On those nights when the wind suddenly howled, or when they were tired but still restless from their long walks, one of their father’s warehouses served as their private salon. The sisters bribed their father’s guards for two powerful hours of privacy in the dark fortress.
On these nights they became more of themselves when they shed a thin layer of the skin of their society. A society that of late seems to tighten and pinch like the corset that is a slave to the new waistline; its grip even more firm and prim in its quest for a curve.
It has been some months since they were last out. Gently they close the door that seals the deathbed air of their home and inhale the night as if it were their last breaths as well. They forgo their walk of discovery and stride quickly past the spars and rigging towering like menacing daggers thrust into the black sky.
Their father’s employee, Lewis the guard, paces to and fro, peeling around the building’s corners, stepping in time with the lapping water. He tips his hat to them. Verity slips a pouch of coins from her pocket and empties it into his leathery hand. Secrets are bought that might one day cause men to call them mad and scandalous, rather than two women who simply seek solace.
They grab the lanterns that rest on hooks by the door and take the stairs to the first floor. Carpets, rugs, and mats of all kinds are stored here, waiting to cover the floors of English parlours. They skirt past the corner where the skins of peacocks hang; their sup-erior feathers still attached, fan out into the room.
The air is pungent with the smell of tobacco that shoots down from the attic. Their boots stick to the leaked sugar on the floor. Silently they search for a space that is free of goods. There are eight rooms on this floor and in the sixth they find an empty aisle amongst the pipes of port. The long barrels with tapered ends stretch down the length of the room. Constance unrolls a fine Turkish rug and secures it onto the cast iron window frame then nods to Verity to light the larger lanterns.
Constance sits with her back supported by one of the barrels and removes the contents of the haversack. She fills the bowl of a pipe with tobacco and uses the slender remains of a taper to light it.
Verity pours from a crude Bohemian glass flask into two beakers. Apricot brandy, sweet and hot, stings their throats. Soon they are a little drunk.
‘I wish
