Avery & Blake 02 - The Infidel Stain (23 page)

‘It is not his first time then,’ I said, the disapproval seeping into my voice.

‘No.’

‘Go on, Matty,’ said Blake, as kindly as he had ever spoken to her. Now the words began to tumble out.

‘My pa died and left us nothing. We were on the street. No one to help us, nowhere to go. I was thirteen, Pen was nine. Parish overseer came to take us to the spike. We ran away, we knew it would be the end of us. We’d be separated and we’d never get out. We slept in a doorway. We was arrested that first night for vagrancy. Just for sleeping in the street for lack of anywhere else. Three days in Tothill prison. Pen didn’t mind: there was food and shelter at least. When we came out, well, it’s a different world on the street. No God, no book learning, but hunger and recklessness. I didn’t want to be part of it, but I am. I thieved and he did too; it was that or the spike. We stayed in lodging-houses, sometimes thirty bodies to a room, sometimes on the hard floor, payment in advance. You don’t want to know the things I was made to do, the things I did, what I saw. I don’t like to think of it now. And not for riches, just to put a little bit of food in our mouths, and a shelter over our heads, because no one would help us.’

I looked away, dismayed.

‘What?’ she said with great bitterness. ‘You are shocked, Captain Avery.’

I shook my head.

‘But I kept us out of the spike, and I got us out of the lodging-houses. I saved a tiny bit of stock money and bought cress and fruit. Every day I must decide if it’s worth walking the six miles to Hackney and back where I can buy them cheaper than Farringdon market. I’ll make more, but the walk’ll take it out of me. I got us this place. I know it’s nothing to you, but to me it’s a step up.

‘The whores up Holywell Street, some of them’s been kind to Pen and me. Bought us food when we was hungry. They say I’d be better off joining them, making a living on my back. But I’d rather thieve. Not every girl of my class thinks nothing of selling herself.’

She looked at me with a face both furious and pleading. I could not meet her eyes.

‘So you stopped thieving,’ Blake said.

‘Till now,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I stopped and it was for a reason that’s no reason. I keep holding on to this idea that sometime I’m going to get my chance, and I must be ready for it. So I tried to keep us both straight. But Pen, he came by some bad habits on the way. I sent him to the ragged school, but it was only a few hours a day and the rest he ran wild. I don’t know why I keep trying. I know in my heart that chance ain’t coming, not really. Not now.’

I thought she might cry. But she did not. She sat with her hands clenched in her lap.

‘I have tried to get better work. Pa showed me compositing, but the men, they won’t try me out. I’m clever. They know I’m honest – well, honest enough. But it doan – it doesn’t – do me any good. No one will give me that chance because I’m a girl, and work’s hard enough for men to come by. For the good jobs women come by, I’m not presentable. I got nothing decent to wear and I carn hardly keep clean. Not in here.’

Blake listened, his eyes in shadow.

‘This isn’t what I thought would become of me, what I imagined for mesself. When Pa was alive and we were clean and there was enough to eat, I had such plans. He said there wasn’t nothing – anything – I couldn’t do. I thought I’d be a printer like him, or maybe even a teacher, or if I couldn’t I’d work in a shop. He taught hisself Latin, my pa. But sickness and debt did for him and then us.’

She pulled her hair back from her face and rubbed her eyes. ‘Must seem strange to you, a poor coster girl wanting such things.’

‘No,’ said Blake.

‘It was all for nothing anyway, cos Pen is to be transported. Every day I see printers on Holywell Street selling their dirty books, salting away their money, what’d go to prison if they was taken, but the coppers doan care to look. How can that be fair?’

‘It isn’t fair,’ said Blake quietly.

‘So I’ve thieved again, and taken far more than Pen ever did. And from a dead man. Mr Blake, you do what you must do.’ It was as if all hope had been stripped from her. A part of me wanted to give her words of comfort, and yet I could not.

‘Tell me how the coins looked when you found them,’ said Blake.

She glanced at him, hopeful.

‘They were in three piles to the left of Nat’s body, on the bed of the press. The blood was everywhere but it didn’t touch them. I was sure they weren’t Nat’s. I never saw money like that round his. I thought I could use it to get Pen out of gaol. Or maybe after, we could go to a small town, find somewhere cheap to stay and I could get mesself presentable and find decent employment. When he was taken, I couldn’t find anyone to help. Even Abraham’d lost patience with him. I went to see the coppers but they laughed at me. So I hid the coins in the backyard and came and got them later. No one asked after them.’

‘How did you plan to use the money to get Pen out?’

‘There was a man that Nat and Connie used to know. A Member of Parliament who used to be a lawyer. Nat said he helped the poor. I thought I could ask him for help, and I could offer him the money. But it was hard to ask Connie about him when she was in such a state. So the days passed and I did nothing. Then you came. I knew you wouldn’t think well of me stealing, but I thought if I showed you I could help you, I could be useful, with looking out and such, you might help us. Everyone says you’re a clever man, Mr Blake. And you know people. You’re working for that Lord.’

‘Tell me more about Nat and Connie’s friend.’

‘They knew him from years back; he’s respectable now. I was going to buy fine paper, write a good letter. Go to his house.’

‘And where is Pen?’ I asked.

‘Coldbath Fields. There’s been cholera at Millbank prison, so they got some of them in Coldbath. It’s close-ish at least. And cos he’s going away, they’re letting me see him once a week. I am going day after tomorrow.’

‘How long until he’s shipped?’

‘They won’t say for certain. A week. Two. He swears he didn’t do it. Not this time. Says the grocer swore an oath against him to get him transported on purpose.’

‘Do you think that’s true?’

She shrugged wearily. ‘He swears it’s true. But I dunno what to believe when it comes to Pen. So, you going to take me in?’

‘No. You can keep the money,’ Blake said, Matty’s hands flying to her mouth, ‘for the moment. But I advise you not to tell anyone else about it and not to spend it. It’s known that you found Nat’s body. Whoever killed him may have heard.’

I had not thought of this and, it was evident, neither had Matty.

‘Too late to worry now,’ said Blake. ‘But take care. Watch out for yourself.’ He took two shillings from his pocket and put them on the table.

‘This will buy you dinner, a new candle and something to take Pen when you see him. I never make promises if I can’t be sure of keeping them, so I will tell you, I don’t know if I can do anything for Pen. But there are some people we might ask to help. What I want from you is the name of the Honourable Member.’

Matty let out a great ragged breath. Her eyes threatened to tear up. ‘He’s called John Heffernan. I know he lives in Chelsea, by the river, Cheyne something. They talked about him a few weeks before Nat died. I’d had a long day and Nat had let me in the shop. They knew him from when he had lived near them, Islington way. He’s Irish, from a good family, with land. Nat said he still worked for the poor, despite being in Parliament, but Connie got angry and said he’d left his old friends behind. I remember it because it was the night he and Daniel almost came to blows.’

‘To blows?’

She gulped, as though she had made a mistake. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Matty, I need you to tell me what they argued about. I can’t work this out if you don’t help me.’

‘Politics,’ she said. ‘It was always politics.’

‘The Chartists?’

‘Daniel was all fired up about the Chartists,’ she said at last. ‘He said with the vote poor men would become masters of their own fate, not like now, when the workers starve and the masters grow fat. Said he was going to take the pledge – not to drink, I mean, and to give up tobacco. He said what Nat did – the books – was shameful and dirty and a sin before God. The vote was worth fighting for and he wanted to be worthy of it. Such talk made Nat furious. He said Daniel should leave the Chartists well alone.
There was nothing to be gained by it. He said the meetings were full of informers and Daniel would end up in prison and no one would hire him. Daniel said he wouldn’t work for Nat no more. That he was a coward and a man of no principles. Connie begged them both to stop, told them off, but Daniel walked out and didn’t come back for three days.’

Blake stood. ‘We’ll leave now, Matty. But we will be back.’

‘Will you come with me to see Pen? I’m going the day after tomorrow at two o’clock.’

‘I can’t,’ he said.

She looked startled and disappointed.

‘But,’ he said, ‘I will do what I can.’

‘I will come.’ I spoke before I had thought. I did not know why I had offered.

‘Thank you, Captain,’ she murmured awkwardly.

Blake took her hand in farewell. I could not. But I found myself looking at her wrists and thinking how fragile and thin they were.

‘I will see you the day after tomorrow, Miss Horner,’ I said.

‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘You coming?’

I followed him up St Martin’s Lane, over Charing Cross Road and across the pigeon-filled seediness of Leicester Square, where a small man with thick, curling brown hair in a greatcoat swept past us, going south at a tremendous pace. He gave the impression of great purpose, and marched so quickly his coat-tails appeared to be chasing after him.

A few moments later Blake muttered, ‘That was your Mr Dickens.’

‘That was
Charles Dickens
?’ I turned on my heel, but he had long since disappeared amid the pigeons and the shooting galleries. ‘Why did you not say before?’

‘See him all over town, always at a rattling pace. Not a man who wants to be stopped.’

We arrived in a place called Old Compton Street. Here between the emporiums selling books, quack medicines and old curiosities,
there were a number of shops with foreign signs. One called itself a ‘Boucherie Charcuterie’; the one next to it was a ‘Librairie/Imprimerie’, and next to that was a ‘Tabac’. Blake halted at an odd little place, with a sign bearing the legend ‘Dubourg’, and beneath it, ‘table d’hôte’. I hesitated.

‘A French dining-room?’ I said doubtfully.

‘The hero of Doora unnerved by a French restaurant. William, the food is good and I am hungry.’ And he went in. Scraping as much of the London mud off my trousers as I could, I followed.

It was crammed with small tables, was stuffy and warm and smelt of garlic and butter. A man rose from a table and swooped down on Blake, taking him by the shoulders and kissing him on both cheeks. Blake submitted to this with a kind of dumb acceptance. Then the man cried, so the whole place could hear, ‘
Comment ça va? Eh bien, ça fait bien longtemps! Je vous attends toujours au Reform Cloob!
’

I had had a little French instruction as a boy, but almost none of it had stuck. It was the man’s get-up, however, that really arrested my attention. He wore a loose jacket of purple velvet with cuffs of lavender silk, loose trousers with a purple stripe down the seams, and a soft velvet hat perched on the side of his head. He had a prominent nose, a small, sculpted, almost feminine mouth, and his long dark hair grew down from his sideburns to form a neat beard under his chin.

His usual reserve quite intact, Blake replied in French, and I smiled and waited. This, I saw, would always be my fate with Blake, to be the one standing politely by while he prattled on in some unintelligible tongue. The man now enveloped my hands in both of his, shaking them vigorously. His hands and wrists, I saw, were covered in little scars.

‘
Enchanté!
’ he said. His smile spread across his whole face and he peered into my eyes as if to emphasize that he truly was enchanted. ‘It is very good to meet an old friend of Monsieur Bleck. He like to be mysterious,
non
?’

I nodded, carried by his enthusiasm.

‘Avery, this is Alexis Soyer,’ said Blake, somewhat overwhelmed by Soyer’s high spirits, I thought. ‘He is the chef at the Reform Club.’

Soyer grinned and gave a little bow. ‘
Eh bien
, Bleck, I do not see you for months! Why do you not visit me at the Reform Cloob?’

‘I have been working. How is Emma?’ said Blake.

‘She is,
comment dit-on
? Blooming! She is marvellous! Her paintings amaze and delight! The world beats its way to her door! But, Bleck, the kitchens at the Reform Cloob! You must see them. They will fascinate you – truly.
Il n’y a rien au monde comme elles!
They are unique! We have a grand invention – a gas stove with five small gas fires. Each lights immediately and may be regularized to any heat – and no dust and no smell! And steam power
partout
! It drives the rotisserie, heats the bains-marie, keeps the food warm! We have hot water and ice whenever we need! And the size! The scale! I guarantee you, Bleck, will find it of unsurpassable interest!’