The girl was as white as flour; her whole body shook.
“Don’t do that, please miss! I beg yer, don’t turn us aht. Me ma’ll die if yer put ’er in the street-and me an’ Alice and Becky’ll ’ave ter go inter the poor ’ouse. Please don’t. We aven’t done mithin’ wrong, honest we ’aven’t. We paid the rent-I swear.”
“I don’t want to put you out.” Charlotte was aghast. “I want to force whoever owns this place to make it fit to live in.”
The girl looked at her with disbelief.
“Wotcher mean? If we makes a fuss ’e’ll ’ave us aht. There’s plenty more as’d be glad ter ’ave it-an’ we’ll ’ave ter go souf into-w’ere it’ll be worse. Please miss, don’t do it!”
“Worse?” Charlotte said slowly. “But he should make this-this fit to live in. You should have water at least, and drainage. No wonder your mother is ill-”
“She’ll get better-jus’ let ’er sleep a bit. We’re all right, miss. Just leave us be.”
“But if-”
“That’s wot ’appened ter Bessie Jones. She complained, an’ now she’s gorn ter live in St. Giles, an’ she ain’t got no more’n a corner o’ the room to ’erself. You let be-please miss.”
Her fear was so palpable that Charlotte could do no more than promise to say nothing, to swear it in front of Matthew Oliphant, and leave shivering and by now aware of a rising nausea in her stomach, and an anger so tight it made all the muscles in her body ache.
“Tomorrow I’ll take you to St. Giles,” Oliphant said quietly when they were out in the main street again. “If you want to go.”
“I want to go.” Charlotte said the words without hesitation-if she had thought for even a moment she might have lost her resolve.
“Did you go there with Clemency also?” she asked more gently, trying to imagine the journey she was copying, thinking of Clemency’s distress as she must have seen sights just like these. “I expect she was very moved?”
He turned to her. His face was curiously luminous with memory that for all its bleakness held some beauty for him that still shone in his mind and warmed him till he was temporarily oblivious of the street or the cold.
“Yes-we came here,” he answered with sweetness in his voice. “And then to St. Giles, and from there eastwards into Mile End and Whitechapel-” He might have been speaking of the pillared ruins of Isfahan, or the Golden Road to Samarkand, so did his tongue caress the words.
Charlotte hesitated only a moment before plunging on, ignoring what was suddenly so obvious to her.
“Then could you tell me where she went last?”
“If I could, Mrs. Pitt, I would have offered,” he said gravely, his cheeks pink. “I only knew the general direction, because I was not with her when she found Bessie Jones. I only know that she did, because she told me afterwards. Would to God I had been.” He strove to master his anguish, and almost succeeded. “Maybe I could have saved her.” His voice cracked and finished husky and almost inaudible.
Charlotte could not argue, although perhaps by then Clemency had already frightened those landlords and owners whose greed had eaten into them until they had destroyed her.
Oliphant turned away, struggling for control. “But if you wish to go there, I shall try to take you-as long as you understand the risk. If we find the same place, then-” He stopped; the conclusion was not needed.
“You are not afraid?” she asked, not as a challenge but because she was certain that he was not. He was harrowed by feelings, almost laid naked by them, and yet fear was not among them-anger, pity, indignation, loss, but not fear.
He turned back to her, his face for a moment almost beautiful with the power of his caring.
“You wish to continue Clemency’s work, Mrs. Pitt-and I think perhaps even more than that, you wish to learn who killed her, and expose them. So do I.”
She did not answer; it was hardly necessary. She caught a sudden glimpse of how much he had cared for Clemency. He would never have spoken; she was a married woman, older than he and of higher social station. Anything more than friendship was impossible. But that had not altered his feeling, nor taken anything from his loss.
She smiled at him, politely, as if she had seen no more than anyone else, and thanked him for his help. She and Gracie would be most obliged.
Naturally she explained to Pitt what she was doing, and to what end. She might have evaded it had not Vespasia taken the children to Caroline, but their absence had to be explained and she was in no mood to equivocate.
She did not tell him what manner of place she would be going to because nothing in her experience could have foreseen where the following two days would take her. She, Oliphant and Gracie were driven by Percival from street to street, forever narrower, darker and more foul, following the decline of the unfortunate Bessie Jones. Gracie was of inestimable help because she had seen such places before and she understood the desperation that makes men and women accept such treatment rather than lose their frail hold on space and shelter, however poor, and be driven out into the streets to be huddled in doorways shuddering with cold, exposed to the rain and casual violence.
Finally in the later afternoon of the third day they found Bessie Jones, as Clemency Shaw had done before them. It was in the heart of Mile End, off the Whitechapel Road. There seemed to be an unusual number of police around.
Bessie was crouching in the corner of a room no more than twelve feet by sixteen, and occupied by three families, one in each corner. There were about sixteen people in all, including two babies in arms, which cried constantly. There was a blackened potbellied stove against one wall, but it was barely alight. There were buckets for the necessities of nature, but no drain to empty either that or any other waste, except the one in the courtyard, which overflowed and the stench filled the air, catching in the throat, soiling the clothes, the hair and the skin. There was no running water. For washing, cooking, drinking, it all had to be fetched in a pail from a standpipe three hundred yards away along the street.
There was no furniture except one broken wooden chair. People slept in what scraps of rag and blanket they could gather together for warmth; men, women and children, with nothing between them and the boards of the floor but more rags and loose ends of oakum, and the dross of the cloth industry too wretched even to remake into drab for the workhouse.
Above the crying of children, the snoring of an old man asleep under the broken window, boarded with a loose piece of linoleum, was the constant squeaking and scuttling of rats. On the floor below were the raucous sounds of a gin mill and the shouts of drunkards as they fought, swore and sang snatches of bawdy songs. Two women lay senseless in the gutter and a sailor relieved himself against the wall.
Below street level, in ill-lit cellars, ninety-eight women and girls sat shoulder to shoulder in a sweatshop stitching shirts for a few pence a day. It was better than the match factory with its phosphorous poisoning.
Upstairs a brothel prepared for the evening trade. Twenty yards away rows of men lay in bunks, their bodies rotting, their minds adrift in the sweet dreams of opium.
Bessie Jones was worn out, exhausted by the fruitless fight, and glad now at least to be under shelter from the rain and to have a stove to creep close to in the night, and two slices of bread to eat.
Charlotte emptied her purse and felt it a gross and futile thing to have done, but the money burned her hand.
In all of it she had followed the path that Clemency Shaw had taken, and she had felt as she must have felt, but she had learned nothing as to who might have killed her, although why was only too apparent. If the ownership of such places was accredited publicly there would be some who would not care, they had no reputation or status to lose. But there were surely those who drew their money from such abysmal suffering, and who would pay dearly to keep it secret, and call it by some other name. To say one owned property implied estates somewhere in the shires; farmlands might be envisioned, rich earth yielding food, cattle, timber-not the misery, crime and disease Charlotte and Gracie had seen these few days.
When she reached home she stripped off all her clothes, even her shift and pantaloons, and put them all in the wash, and told Gracie to do the same. She could not imagine any soap that would cleanse them of the odor of filth-her imagination would always furnish it as long as the memory lasted-but the sheer act of boiling and scrubbing would help.
