Kitty Peck and the Child of Ill-Fortune

Black eyes glinted up at me. Bleedin’ thing was poking its nose out from under the hem of my dress, bold as a bishop come Christmas. I stamped my foot, pulled the fabric sharp to the side and watched the mouse dart over the rug, skittering across the polished boards to a hole in the skirting. The Palace was running alive. I lay awake most nights listening to them scratching in the walls. I wondered Lady Ginger had stood for it, considering the way she dealt with most things.

Traps, that’s what we needed, or a cat – a big hungry one.

I shifted in the chair so I couldn’t see the hole and ran my finger down the page again, memorising the names and the numbers, repeating them over in my head until they was locked into place. I’d be ready for the Beetle tomorrow – it unnerved him and I enjoyed it.

From that first meeting with her lawyer, Marcus Telferman, almost three weeks ago now, one thing, at least, was clear: Lady Ginger, my grandmother, had left me an estate that went a lot further than a mouse nest and three bob scrag halls on the edge of the City.

I knew she was a Baron – we all did – but I hadn’t understood what that meant until I began to go through her papers. Put together they told a ripe story. Names, buildings, trades, ships, goods, men, women, even little children for Christ’s sake – all bonded to her and none of it the sort of thing you’d jaw over with a vicar, let alone a rozzer.

Elsewhere in the City, other Barons ran their own territories. From what I could make out, sometimes that was a distinct area bounded by landmarks or streets, other times it wasn’t so easy to catch. I got the impression from reading some of the documents Telferman gave me that the Barons themselves – the criminal lords of London – watched each other like yellow-eyed gulls at Billingsgate wharf.

In the main, Lady Ginger’s patch ran from east to west along the river taking in the docks and some other choice spots hemmed up to Mile End. It was called Paradise and she’d ruled it like Queen Victoria ruled the Empire.

And now she’d left it all in my hands.

I still didn’t know with a clarity how I felt about that. In the day, part of me saw it as a way to make changes; to sweep out the dirt and make things clean as far as I could. But, I’ll admit it, in the dark, when I was awake and listening to them mice, part of me was scared.

If Lucca wondered what I was looking at on the page in front of me, he never let on.

He was curled in the crook of the couch, engrossed in a book in his lap. I couldn’t see what it was on account of the padded scroll of the arm, but I could tell he was in deep. He leaned forward and strands of dark hair fell across his face. As I watched, he pushed it back behind his ears so I could see his fine Roman nose, the angle of his cheeks and the fringe of his lashes.

He would have been a looker.

If a girl didn’t know different she’d make a play for him – until she saw the scars that melted the right side of his face, pulling his lips and nose out of line and sealing his eye into a crimson knot of puckered flesh. Then again, what girls thought of him didn’t much matter to Lucca Fratelli.

I slipped the page of columns and figures back into place. It was raining again. I could hear the drops spatter against the panes. We were quiet together in the first-floor room I’d set up as a parlour. Apart from the mice it was clean and warm. I was sitting across from Lucca on a low-backed chair drawn up to the fire.

As I sorted the papers a small cream-coloured square fell to the rug. It was the gilt-edged card I’d found waiting for me here at The Palace the day Lady Ginger disappeared leaving her filthy house and all of Paradise in my hands. I reached down and ran a fingertip over the letters. The address, 17 rue des Carmélites, was slightly raised. I flipped it over and read my grandmother’s looping script.

All that time she’d allowed me to think my brother was her prisoner – or worse, that he was a corpse wrapped in oilcloth and weighted down in the river. She’d bobbed gobbets of information in front of me like she was teasing a kitten with tidbits of bacon rind. She had me dancing for her all right. The worst of it was I reckoned she’d enjoyed it, been entertained by it, you might say. I’d been hauled up into place every night in that pretty glittering cage and I sang and I twirled seventy foot over the heads of the punters – and then I reported back to her on what I’d seen below, thinking what she wanted was a clear pair of eyes taking it all in for her benefit. The thieving, the whoring, the gambling, the gentlemen trippers who treated Limehouse like a zoological garden – I told her everything.

But as it turned out, that was only the half. She was testing me like she’d tested Joey, to see if I had the mettle to take her place. I brought back the last time I saw her in the churchyard at Ma’s grave. Eyes like jet buttons sewn on a chalk-white face, sticky black lips opening:

I turned the card again and looked at the address, wincing as the sharp edge sliced the ball of my thumb. I heard her fluting, oddly girlish voice again.

Altered? I knew she’d cut off his finger. She’d given it to me in a box ribboned up like a birthday gift. What else had the old cow done to him?

He was always so proud of his looks. What if . . .?

As if he’d caught my mind, Lucca glanced up from his book and smiled. I looked down and shuffled the papers in my lap. Don’t take it wrong – I loved Lucca. He’d saved my life and since Joey had . . . disappeared, he’d been the closest thing I had to a brother. Lucca knew everything about me and, these days, I knew everything about him.

Tell truth, it didn’t matter one jot to me who Lucca cared for. It was his business and anyways there’s plenty in the halls what don’t live regular. Who am I to tell a person who they can lie down with when the only man I’ve taken to my bed turned out to be . . .

I shook my head, forcing that bastard into the furthest darkest space in my mind, taking care to shut and lock the door. He didn’t deserve my thoughts. A couple of pins came loose and my hair sprang free from the plaited coil at my neck. I leaned forward to scoop them up from the rug where they’d fallen. When I sat back Lucca grinned wider and held up his book, the page opened out so I could see it clear.

I was wrong. He hadn’t been reading, he’d been drawing – as usual. The girl on the page was me, my head tilted as I read the card. I recognised my pointed chin and the scribble of curls around my face that had escaped from the coil even before I shook the pins free. He’d caught me in a few deft lines.

In the drawing I looked sad.

I smiled, leaned across and offered him the card. As he took it from my hand I noticed the gilt edges were newly stained with blood.

The Beetle didn’t answer. Sunlight pooled in the cups of his half-moon spectacles as he sniffed and shifted his head so I couldn’t see direct into his eyes.

I repeated the question. ‘I think I’ve got a right to know, Mr Telferman, don’t you?’ He looked down and started to leaf through some papers piled up on the desk. He licked his thumb and drew out a sheet from the centre of the stack.

‘I need you to sign this, Miss Peck.’ He stared at me now. ‘You are quite sure you wish to retain that name?’

I nodded as he pushed the page across the desk. ‘It is a matter of some urgency. You will find a pen in the drawer to your left.’ He sniffed again, hunched his narrow shoulders and drummed his dirty nails on the wood.

The Beetle was a good name for Marcus Telferman – he was a man of dust and shadows. The first time I’d come across him was at Ma’s funeral when me and Joey had thought he was at the wrong graveside. In his shiny black coat and tall hat with the trailing ends of a crêpe band flapping about his head he’d put my brother in mind of an insect.

I’d met him five times now, and the more I saw the more I was inclined to agree. Every time I thought I could slip away from Paradise there came another summons to Pearl Street and more urgent business – documents, transfers, contracts – waiting on his desk for my name. I swear it was like he lived with the mice in the skirting at The Palace. When his little twitching horns caught the faintest rustle of me packing a bag he’d find something for me to do.

The clock on the stone mantlepiece behind the desk made a sharp clicking noise before it gathered itself together and chimed the hour. The Beetle fished into the top pocket of his waistcoat and drew out a fob watch. He flicked open the golden case and brought the dial close to his eyes, then he placed it on the desk to his right.

‘Three already. Come, Miss Peck, I have other appointments. Your signature, please.’

He didn’t talk London natural. His clipped accent and the stiffness of his speech marked him out as an incomer – like the half of us in Limehouse. Lucca said he was almost definitely a ‘son of Abraham’ and I reckoned he was right on that score. He didn’t look like a man who enjoyed a pork chop with his greens. Then again, he didn’t look like a man who enjoyed anything much.

‘Like I said, Mr Telferman,’ I started up again, ‘I think I’ve got a right to know where she is. She’s my own grandmother, she told me that herself. It’s all very well her handing Paradise and everything in it over to me, but I need to know more. Not about the legal stuff – I want to know about her and about my mother. Then there’s our father – surely Lady Ginger can tell me something about him. She must know who he was. I want to know about . . .’

About me and Joey and who we really are, I thought, though I didn’t say it. So many questions I still needed answers to.

The Beetle removed his specs. He placed them carefully on top of the papers and leaned forward, steepling his long bony fingers. An oily lick of thin grey hair fell across his face and he pushed it back and upward so that it rose above his head and sat there in a greasy roll. It was distracting the way it stayed put. As he spoke I kept looking at it.

‘Lady Ginger was most specific, we both know this to be correct, do we not? I am bound by her wishes. I can tell you nothing more than she wishes to divulge. If she wants to contact you it will be through me and only through me. By the same token, if you need to . . . consult her, then I am to be your conduit.’

‘My what? That some fancy legal term?’

He shook his head and pursed his lips. The greasy roll stayed exactly where it was. When he spoke he sounded disappointed, like he was talking to a child in a schoolroom who couldn’t do a simple sum. ‘I am your means of communication. Your go-between. I am not at liberty to discuss the issue further. Now the paper, if you please.’

I leaned back in the chair and folded my arms. ‘And what if I don’t sign it?’

‘This is most tiresome. You are not a child any more, Katharine.’ I noted he used the name she’d given me. ‘People depend on you now. You have responsibilities – as I explained so very carefully that first day.’

That was nearly three weeks ago. When me and Lucca came out of Lady Ginger’s empty room at The Palace and went downstairs, Marcus Telferman, face long and grey as an old man’s nightshirt, had been waiting in the hallway, just as she’d written. I caught the smallest twitch of his lips as he took me in. There was a pile of boxes at his feet and a sheaf of papers under his arm. He nodded, but he didn’t say a word as he held out a page covered in handwritten lines packed so close together the sheet looked black. I noted there was a space at the bottom for my signature.

‘What will you do?’ Lucca repeated the question he’d asked upstairs when I read my grandmother’s letter. I stared at the paper in the lawyer’s hand and ran her message through my mind.

Telferman knows my wishes and will be ready to act for you should you decide to accept my terms. The document of transfer must be signed within the day or this offer will be rescinded.

The paper in front me was the ‘document of transfer’. If I signed, The Palace and everything,
everything
, of my grandmother’s would become mine.

Of an instant the hallway went dark. The room blurred to a shadow except that narrow white space at the foot of the page. Just for a moment back then I thought of running to the door and out into the light.

Now I stared out of the Beetle’s grimy window. The sunshine showed up the cloudy smears on the panes. He lived in a grand house – Lady Ginger must have paid him well – but he didn’t go much on cleaning so far as I could tell. Four storeys high it was, every room filled with books and papers, statues, bits of stone (I couldn’t for the life of me think why you’d want to display a lump of old brown rock on your mantle) and creatures – most of them dead. There was a fox in a glass case in front of the window giving me the eye.

Over the street a ragged woman with a baby on her hip stopped a passer-by. Mumping him for pennies, I supposed. I watched her spit at his back after he shook his head and moved on.

Was that how they all felt about me, I wondered? All the men and women in Paradise who looked to me for their bread and bacon. The people who worked for me now – the ones who knew it, leastways – did they spit at my back when I left a room? The woman pulled her shawl around the baby and pushed on. She limped badly. God knows what would become of them both eventually. For most of them on the streets it was hard enough just feeding yourself without bumping a child about too.

Perhaps I could find her a place in one of my establishments? At least she and the kid would have a roof over their heads.

My establishments
.

I caught myself thinking it and shuddered. See, it wasn’t just the music halls that Lady Ginger ran. No, her world ran deeper than me and Lucca had ever imagined – and we’d imagined quite a lot. The Gaudy, The Comet and The Carnival were what you might call front of house. The rest of it . . . well, tell truth, I still wasn’t entirely sure how much more there was to know. The Beetle enjoyed ladling out his little bits of information like a clergy at a soup stand.

When the pair of us had gone through the boxes of papers that first day I couldn’t keep track of it all. Not just here in Limehouse, mind, but across the City. You name it, however low you want to go, and she was in it right up to them blood-clot rubies hanging off her ears. Flesh houses catering to every appetite, opium pits, gambling rings, dog fights, cock fights, even rat fights in the meanest quarters.

From the books she appeared to have a dozen customs men tied to every finger. And there was respectable stuff, too – ships, warehouses, stocks, bonds, even a bit of a bank.

‘Miss Peck!’ The Beetle’s clipped voice was sharp. ‘Time is money. Your signature.’

I stared at the paper on the desk.

‘What’s this when it’s at home?’ I turned it over and scanned to the end where there was evidently a place for my name. I looked up. ‘I’m not signing nothing I can’t read. I might be new to this malarkey, but I’m not that green – and you know it.’

It was true. From the first I wouldn’t put my name to anything I hadn’t read and understood, right to the smallest line. If it was Latin – and of occasion it was – I got Lucca to help out. I trusted the Beetle, but I didn’t much like him, and if I was going to be running Paradise I needed to know exactly what was in it.

‘What language is this?’ Tell truth, I thought I knew, but I wanted the confirmation.

The Beetle picked up his fob watch and snapped the case shut. Then he reached for his specs and balanced them on the end of his long nose. He stared at me across the desk.

‘Well?’ I asked.

He didn’t blink, just kept staring at me, that roll of hair still perched on his head like a starched napkin in a cookshop.

‘French.’

I felt a little ball of excitement tumble in the pit of my stomach. I thought I knew where this was going. Under my bodice I became suddenly aware of Joey’s ring and his Christopher. When I’d thought he was lost, I’d hung them on a chain about my neck and clung to them for luck every time I went up in the cage. I didn’t want to give the Beetle the satisfaction of knowing how much the thought of seeing my brother again meant to me. Partly because I didn’t want to show a weakness and partly because I was tired of being treated like a child.

‘And?’ Despite the flutter in my chest my voice came out crisp. I was pleased about that.

I didn’t take my eyes off his. We glared across the table at each other like a couple of sparring cats. The Beetle broke first. He glanced down and started to gather the papers together, shuffling them neatly so that the jagged edges of the pile smoothed out.

‘It is a document pertaining to a house in Paris. Once you have signed it, Miss Peck, you will be the owner of that property. The Lady set this in motion some days before she . . . went away. The papers arrived yesterday.’

I stood up. ‘And?’

He sighed. ‘You really are most exasperating. Will I always have to spell everything out to you? Truly, I am beginning to wonder if The Lady made the right decision.’

‘That right? Well, truly, I’m beginning to wonder if that French house on the paper there happens to be number 17 rue des Carmélites, where – according to my grandmother – I’ll find my brother.’

He raised an eyebrow and shrugged. ‘As you know, The Lady had many interests. Property is another strand of her . . . portfolio, that is to say,
your
portfolio.’

I started to laugh.

‘I fail to see anything amusing, Miss Peck. It is merely a foreign business transaction, the first of many you will be required to undertake during our association. Now please . . .’ He waved at the document. ‘
Tempus fugit
.’

‘Time flies, does it?’ I grinned down at him. ‘The funny thing is, I’m planning on making a trip to Paris. Me and Lucca, we’re going over together.’ I saw the look on the Beetle’s face. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m not reckoning on staying. I just want to see my brother again. I want to make quite sure he’s . . .’

Alive
was what I meant. But this paper finally proved it, didn’t it? I really was going to be my brother’s keeper. I ran my finger down the first page looking for the familiar words in all that foreign and then flipped it over. I was right – third paragraph down, the address I knew I’d see.

I looked up to find that the Beetle was watching me close. Of a sudden he seemed interested. I cocked my head to one side. ‘I might collect his rent while I’m over there. Joey owes me.’ That last was true enough.

‘You may do as you wish . . .’ He sighed and flicked at a stain on his cuff, but then he looked up sharp. The sun caught his specs again, making them shine like the coins they put over the eyes of a corpse. His mouth twitched, ‘. . . as long as you are here in London during the first week of May. The Barons, Miss Peck. I trust you have not forgotten?’

I shuddered for the second time that afternoon. Of course I hadn’t forgotten. Now the Beetle smiled. ‘Your signature, please, the pen is . . .’

‘I know, in the drawer to the left.’

I took the handle and pulled. There was a pen there, just as he said, and a long pale envelope addressed in a familiar hand to Katharine Redmayne.

The Beetle sniffed. ‘If you had had the courtesy to allow me to finish, Katharine, I was going to say that the pen is resting on a letter from your grandmother.’