Ettie felt her head drop with shame. Even though she was innocent, she felt Mary’s guilt. To steal from another was also a sin; not hers in this instance, but nevertheless, the butler’s words pierced her heart. Tears splintered on her lashes as her world fell around her.
Mrs Powell stepped forward, her hands clenched in front of her.
‘You are fortunate. The maid from whom you stole has not initiated proceedings. Therefore, this embarrassment will not go before the police. Nor will your disgrace be revealed to Lord and Lady Marsden.’
Ettie raised her eyes, too full of unshed tears to see clearly the three faces in front of her. But the words Mrs Powell had spoken only deepened the wound in her heart.
‘You will leave Chancery House immediately.’
Ettie gasped a breath. Her body trembled under this final blow. She could not even beg for another chance; there was no hope her plea would be heard. For in their eyes and in the whole household’s, she was now confirmed a thief.
Silence descended and Ettie realized there was no more to be said. She turned, her shoulders drooping in mortification. Somehow, she walked from the room, clutching her cloth bag.
Her steps were slow and halting as she passed the kitchen passage. At the end of it, stood Cook, dabbing her eyes with the corner of her apron.
Ettie raised her hand hopefully. Cook, whom she considered to be her friend. Cook, who surely would not believe she was guilty?
But Cook turned away, rejecting her gesture, leaving the passage empty. No other member of staff appeared. Ettie knew the whole household had been given orders to ignore her.
With the unbearable weight of this unfair disgrace, Ettie left Chancery House. Her head hung as she stumbled through the boot room; the tradesmen’s entrance from which only yesterday afternoon, she had departed in high spirits with Jim and Mary to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
Chapter 67
Part Five
Home
November 1897
‘Clear ‘orf, you perishing nuisance,’ yelled the angry man as Ettie rifled inside the stinking bin. There was nothing there but mouldy skins of vegetables, clumped together with fat. But she always held a faint hope she would find something edible.
The café owner lifted a potato sack, twirled it above his head and took aim. Although there were only a few rotted potatoes left inside, the weight winded Ettie and she went sprawling across the alley. Hard wooden pallets broke her fall, their spiky edges digging into her skin. ‘You’re no better than a bleedin’ animal. If I see you round here again, I’ll call the coppers.’
Ettie picked herself up and ran away, leaving the mouth-watering smell of the café’s open kitchen door behind her. She had been foolish to come here in broad daylight and should have waited until dark. But hunger had driven her to take chances. And today the emptiness of her belly, which had not truly been satisfied in many days, had a particular quality. She could not quite say what it was. Only that it made her so desperate to feed, she would eat anything, no matter what it looked like or where it came from.
For five long months, she had trudged the streets of the East End searching for work and shelter. But who would employ a filthy and homeless girl who wore a workhouse tunic and raggedy shawl? None of the factories would consider her; even the match and rope factories had their standards to keep.
The great River Thames was the only provider for an army of half-starved skeletons who scavenged its shores for items lost in the mud. Ettie divided her days between begging on the busy thoroughfares of the metropolis and the watery banks of the city’s fast-flowing river.
Now, as Ettie trudged on, a cold mist descended. A blanket so thick it threatened a river fog. She passed the many shadowy figures of scrawny, sick children who like herself were born from misery, ignorance and vice. She thought often of her mother, who had died in Sister Patrick’s arms. Had she, too, suffered such shame? With no one to care or help her? And only a nun to join her in the last moments of life.
A frozen tear slipped down Ettie’s cheek. She tried to wipe it away but her fingers were too sore. She caught sight of herself in a shop window; an unrecognizable heap of rags with a head of hair so entangled, wild and knotted that she looked inhuman.
‘Am I really me?’ she croaked. ‘Henrietta O’Reilly, Colleen O’Reilly’s daughter?’
Ettie turned away, attempting to step over the ditch into which the drains bubbled and gurgled. She remembered the sound from the tunnels and stepped back again. All around her there was the bobbing, endless tide of human waste passing a few feet away.
Ettie hurried on, desperate to escape the hideous slums and misery of the people squashed inside them; innocent victims of the poverty into which they had been born.
Where was Lady Marsden’s charity now? Ettie wondered. Why was she not here, on the streets of the East End, to say a kind word or show a good deed to the impoverished and desperate of London?
Suddenly she found herself by the wooden bridge that crossed to the Isle of Dogs. Here was the greatest poverty and unfairness of all. One road led to the affluent district of Poplar where fine homes like Chancery House stood in its elegant surroundings. The other led to the remains of a convent orphanage whose holy truths had been its undoing.
Sick at heart and in body, Ettie knew she could go no further. Stumbling to the wooden bridge, she crept unsteadily down its bank to the muddy stream that would eventually lead to the river’s estuary.
Tonight she would sleep here under the little bridge. Here in this dark space, where she might rest awhile.
The fog thickened and she curled tighter into her corner. The fingers she had used to forage were so painful, she could not move
