excellently. I shall go and change while you make the tea. Are we taking Gracie as well? It will hardly be a pleasant adventure for her.”
“Please ma’am?” Gracie said urgently. She had tasted the excitement of the chase, of being included, and was bold enough to plead her own cause. “I can ’elp. I unnerstand them people.”
“Of course,” Charlotte said quickly. “If you wish. But you must stay close to us at all times. If you don’t there is no accounting for what may happen to you.”
“Oh I will, ma’am,” she promised, her sober little face as grave as if she were swearing an oath. “An’ I’ll watch an’ listen. Sometimes I knows w’en people is tellin’ lies.”
Half an hour later the four of them set out in Emily’s second carriage on the journey to Mile End to trace the ownership of the tenement house to which Charlotte had followed the trail of Clemency Shaw. Their first intent was to discover the rent collector and learn from him for whom he did this miserable duty.
She had made note of the exact location. Even so it took them some time to find it again; the streets were narrow and took careful negotiation through the moil of costers’ barrows, old clothes carts, peddlers, vegetable wagons and clusters of people buying, selling and begging. So many of the byways looked alike; pavements wide enough to allow the passage of only one person; the cobbled centers, often with open gutters meandering through them filled with the night’s waste; the jettied houses leaning far out over the street, some so close at the top as to block out most of the daylight. One could imagine people in the upper stories being able to all but shake hands across the divide, if they leaned out far enough, and were minded to do so.
The wood was pitted where sections were rotten and had fallen away, the plaster was dark with stains of old leakage and rising dampness from the stones, and here and there ancient pargetting made half-broken patterns or insignia.
People stood in doorways, dark forms huddled together, faces catching the light now and then as one or another moved.
Emily reached out and took Jack’s hand. The teeming, fathomless despair of it frightened her. She had never felt quite this kind of inadequacy. There were so many. There was a child running along beside them, begging. He was no older than her own son sitting at home in his schoolroom struggling with learning his multiplication tables and looking forward to luncheon, apart from the obligatory rice pudding which he loathed, and the afternoon, when he could play.
Jack fished in his pockets for a coin and threw it for the boy. The child dived on it as it rolled almost under the carriage wheels and for a sickening moment Emily thought he would be crushed. But he emerged an instant later, jubilant, clutching the coin in a filthy hand and biting his teeth on it to check its metal.
Within moments a dozen more urchins were close around them, calling out, stretching their hands, fighting each other to reach them first. Older men appeared. There were catcalls, jeers, threats; and all the time the crowd closing in till the horses could barely make their way forward and the coachman was afraid to urge them in case he crushed the weight of yelling, writhing, shoving humanity.
“Oh my God!” Jack looked ashen, realizing suddenly what he had done. Frantically he turned out his pockets for more.
Emily was thoroughly frightened. She hunched down on the seat, closer to his side. There seemed to be clamoring, reaching people all around them, hands grasping, faces contorted with hunger and hatred.
Gracie was wrapped with her shawl around her, wide-eyed, frozen.
Charlotte did not know what Jack intended that would help, but she emptied out her own few coins to add to his.
He took them without hesitation and forcing the window open flung them as far behind the coach as he could.
Instantly the crowd parted and dived where the coins had fallen. The coachman urged the horses forward and they were free, clattering down the road, wheels hissing on the damp surface.
Jack fell back on the seat, still pale, but the beginning of a smile on his lips.
Emily straightened up and turned to look at him, her eyes very bright and her color returned. Now as well as pity and fear, there was a new, sharp admiration.
Charlotte too felt a very pleasant respect which had not been there before.
When they reached the tenement it was decided Charlotte and Gracie should go in, since they were familiar to the occupants. To send more might appear like a show of force and produce quite the opposite effect from the one they wished.
“Mr. Thickett?” A small group of drab women looked from one to another. “Dunno w’ere ’e comes from. ’E jus’ comes every week and takes the money.”
“Is it his house?” Charlotte asked.
“ ’Ow the ’ell der we know?” a toothless woman said angrily. “An’ why der you care, eh? Wot’s it ter you? ’Oo are yer any’ow, comin’ ’ere arskin’ questions?”
“We pays our rent an’ we don’ make no trouble,” another added, folding fat arms over an even fatter bosom. It was a vaguely threatening stance, although she held no weapon nor had any within reach. It was the way she rocked very slightly on her feet and stared fiercely at Charlotte’s face. She was a woman with little left to lose, and she knew it.
“We wanna rent,” Gracie said quickly. “We’ve bin put aht o’ our own place, an’ we gotta find summink else quick. We can’t wait till rent day; we gotta find it now.”
“Oh-why dincher say so?” The woman looked at Charlotte with a mixture of pity and exasperation. “Proud, are yer? Stupid, more like. Fallen on ’ard times, ’ave yer, livin’ too ’igh on the ’og-an’ now yer gotta come down in the world? ’Appens to lots of folk. Well, Thickett don’t come today, but fer a consideration I’ll tell yer w’ere ter find ’im-”
“We’re on ’ard times,” Gracie said plaintively.
“Yeah? Well your ’ard times in’t the same as my ’ard times.” The woman’s pale mouth twisted into a sneer. “I in’t arskin’ money. O’ course you in’t got no money, or yer wouldn’t be ’ere-but I’ll ’ave yer ’at.” She looked at Charlotte, then at her hands and saw their size, and looked instead at Gracie’s brown woollen shawl. “An’ ’er shawl. Then I’ll tell yer w’ere ter go.”
“You can have the hat now.” Charlotte took it off as she spoke. “And the shawl if we find Thickett where you say. If we don’t-” She hesitated, a threat on her lips, then looked at the hard disillusioned face and knew its futility. “Then you’ll do without,” she ended.
“Yeah?” The woman’s voice was steeped in years of experience. “An’ w’en yer’ve got Thickett yer goin’ ter come back ’ere ter give me yer shawl. Wotcher take me for, eh? Shawl now, or no Thickett.”
“Garn,” Gracie said with withering scorn. “Take the ’at and be ’appy. No Thickett, no ’at. She may look like gentry, but she’s mean w’en she’s crossed-an’ she’s crossed right now! Wotsa matter wiv yer-yer stupid or suffink? Take the ’at and give us Thickett.” Her little face was tight with disgust and concentration. She was on an adventure and prepared to risk everything to win.
The woman saw her different mettle, heard the familiar vowels in her voice and knew she was dealing with one more her own kind. She dropped the bluff, shrugging her heavy shoulders. It had been a reasonable attempt, and you could not blame one for trying.
“Yer’ll find Thickett in Sceptre Street, big ’ouse on the corner o’ Usk. Go ter ve back an’ ask fer Tom Thickett, an’ say it’s ter give ’im rent. They’ll let yer in, an’ if yer says aught abaht money e’ll listen ter yer.” She snatched the hat out of Charlotte’s hands and ran her fingers over it appreciatively, her lips pursed in concentration. “If yer on ’and times, ’ock a few o’ these and yer’ll ’ave enough ter eat for days. ’Ard times. Yer don’ know ’ard times from nuffin’.”
No one argued with her. They knew their poverty was affected for the occasion and a lie excusable only by its brevity, and their own flicker of knowledge as to what its reality would be.
Back in the carriage, huddled against the chill, they rode still slowly to Sceptre Street as the woman had told them. The thoroughfare was wider, the houses on each side broader fronted and not jettied across the roadway, but the gutters still rolled with waste and smelled raw and sour, and Charlotte wondered if she would ever be able to get the stains out of the bottom of her skirts. Emily would probably throw hers away. She would have to make some recompense to Gracie for this. She looked across at her thin body, as upright as Aunt Vespasia, in her own way, but a full head shorter. Her face, with its still childish softness of skin, was more alive with excitement than she had ever seen it before.
