Kitty Peck and the Child of Ill-Fortune (11 page)

‘I have it – the ring. I heard you call. Can you see now?’

I leapt to my feet and narrowed my eyes trying to see into the furthest corners of the unlit hall. My heart swung like a pendulum on a tight-wound clock. It struck me then that if you’re looking for a hiding place, a theatre with its curtains, columns, tiers, booths and secret trysting places was just the ticket. He was still here, I could feel him watching from the shadows.

‘Bring up the house lights.’ When Lucca didn’t answer I span round. He was holding the lamp up now. He pushed his hair back. ‘You are—’

I cut him off quick. ‘Didn’t you hear? The lights.’

He frowned.

‘Now, Lucca!’

I watched him pick his way through the chairs and tables to the far side of the stage. He left the lamp on the edge and went up the steps disappearing behind the curtain. I kept my back to the stage and flattened my hands against the painted panel that separated the orchestra boys from the punters. I could feel the sweat on my palms as I stared into the hall.

After a moment I heard the familiar tick of the burners and then a gentle hiss as the gas came through. One by one the lamps set along the walls sputtered into life. The flickering light made The Gaudy seem alive, bringing some of it up sharp and sending parts into deeper clots of dark.

I dug my nails into the panel. ‘Come on then, show us your face.’

Nothing.

‘Oh, you were very bold when we were out there in the dark, weren’t you? Well, you’re not so brave now.’

Lucca jumped from the steps and came to stand next to me. ‘What is it, Fannella – what’s happened?’

I didn’t look at him but I muttered from the side of my mouth, ‘There’s someone here with us.’

From the corner of my eye I caught the shake of his head.

‘There is! If you don’t believe me—’

I broke off as Lucca thrust something into my hand. ‘I believe you, Kitty, take this.’ We both started as a door slammed at the far end of the hall somewhere beyond the serving board and the red velvet drapes.

Without a word we were off, pelting between tables and chairs until we were through the curtain and standing in the wide panelled lobby leading out into the street. One of The Gaudy’s three main doors swung open.

I went out onto the top step. Rain was hammering down on the metal canopy above, the wind caught at my skirts puffing them out around me like a bell. The only sign of life in the narrow street was a ripe pile of horse shit – mist coming off it like steam rising from a mug of hot cocoa. The last of the night hacks would be clattering home now.

It was only then I felt something trickling down into the material at my neck. I raised my hand and pushed through the sticky strands of hair that clung to my cheek. I looked at the black stain on Lucca’s ’kerchief and then I reached up again to touch the stinging ragged flesh.

The man had twisted my earring and ripped it from my ear, tearing the lobe in two.

We stood side by side in the rain on the cobbled street outside The Gaudy, but nothing moved in the shadows. After a minute, Lucca hustled me back inside, locked and barred the doors and led me to the office to clean me up. I was surprised at the amount of blood. The rip in my ear would heal soon enough, but for the moment it stung like hell.

‘Did you see him?’ Lucca rolled the spotted ’kerchief into a ball and thrust it into his pocket.

‘No. It was black as Newgate’s out there when the door closed. First off I thought it was you playing a trick, but . . .’ I winced as he moved a strand of blood-matted hair away from my ear. ‘I didn’t see him at all, but I heard him. He called me Josette.’

Lucca’s eyebrow shot up.

‘And that’s not all – “Where is he, Josette?” – that’s what he said. Do you think . . . is it possible he mistook me for Joey? Remember how people remarked how alike we were when he was . . .’

When he was dressed as a woman, as Josette, was what I meant. Even now I couldn’t quite say it. But why would anyone think Joey was here in London? As far as most of them in Paradise knew he was most likely sewn into a stone-packed oilcloth and resting at the bottom of the Thames. I pushed Lucca’s hand away from my face, leaned forward on the chair and cradled my head in my hands.

What if it wasn’t Joey he was after?

I couldn’t help thinking that I’d brought trouble back with me from Paris when I agreed to help David. God help me, every time I said that name to myself – I didn’t bother with Lennox now – I felt my neck flush and my cheeks bloom. It was true what they said about distance. That ’kerchief he’d given me at the station was in my pocket now. I’d washed it out, pressed it and of occasion in private I took it out to run my fingers over the ‘D’ embroidered at the corner.

Thing was, I was so happy to help that man, so flattered to be singled out by him and so keen to impress him that I never, for a moment, thought to ask him why he was frightened.

Him and my brother, too.

I sat up, fastened the top three buttons of my dress and unwound Nanny Peck’s shawl from the back of the chair. ‘It’s getting cold in here. Let’s get a fire going.’

‘It is late, Fannella, better surely to go back to The Palace?’ Lucca took my hat from the desk and held it out to me, but I pulled the shawl around my shoulders, stood up and went over to the little grate. I looked at myself in the mirror. ‘The blood’s stopped now – at least that’s something.’

I knelt and started to heap the coals together, poking some bits of kindling and scraps of old newspaper beneath them. I paused as I ripped up a sheet from the pile. It was from
The London Pictorial News –
I recognised it from the picture. Sam Collins’s over-lively account of the cage plummeting from the ceiling of The Comet with me clinging on inside had included a drawing of the sort that gentleman readers might find invigorating. The girl on the page looked like a canary crossed with a ripe dollymop. I screwed it up and forced it into the coals.

‘Lucca, tell me again about Frank Seton’s girl. I didn’t take it all in when you were talking on the way over – I was too wound up.’

He reached into his coat pocket for a packet of Lucifers and came over to sit cross-legged next to me in front of the grate. It felt like the old days when I used to go to his lodgings with a paper wrap of cold cuts and a bottle to share. He’d got himself some better rooms now, I’d seen to that, but as he settled down beside me I realised I missed the closeness.

‘Poor man – to lose wife and child in the same year. She was his world.’ He struck a light and set it to a curl of newspaper. ‘I think he will lose his mind.’

‘But what actually happened? Little Rosa, how did she die?’

Lucca held the Lucifer to the edge of another ball of paper and ripped a couple of sheets from the pile of newspapers next to the scuttle. He scrunched them up and fed them to the flames. ‘It was an accident. Frank was working on the gantry ropes. Rosa was in a basket at the back of the stage when the glass fell. Danny says she was asleep, which is a small comfort. She would have died instantly.’

‘Danny was there when it happened?’

‘
Sì.
He had taken some scenery from The Comet over to The Carnival. While The Comet is closed for the repairs we have been moving items between The Gaudy and The Carnival. Some of the acts say the atmosphere at The Carnival is better – more . . .
vivace
.’

I snorted. ‘Rough, you mean?’

Lucca shook his head. ‘No, they like it, truly. Jesmond is fair and the hall is smaller so the atmosphere is more intimate, more . . .
amichevole
, friendly.’

I held out my hands to the fire that was crackling in front of us now. ‘Well, it might be friendly, but it’s knackered. If it hadn’t been for the ceiling coming down at The Comet I would have spent my grandmother’s money on fixing The Carnival first. Peggy says when it rains you can see water dripping down the scenery at the back. The roof is full of holes and the skylight is shattered.’

‘It’s
your
money, not Lady Ginger’s.’ Lucca was quiet for a moment. ‘The glass that killed Rosa must have slipped from the skylight. Danny said it pierced her chest like a knife.’

I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck for the second time that night. I glanced at Lucca, the good half of his face was golden in the glow of the flames. He shook his head. ‘Rosa’s mother died giving birth to her. No wonder Frank is mad with grief. He took her everywhere with him, did you know that?’

I nodded. ‘We – me and the Gaudy girls, that is – thought a lot of him for it. He sometimes helped Danny test the chains when I was in the cage and she was always with him, pretty little thing she was. He’s a good man and a good worker. I’ll see him all right.’

Lucca turned sharply. ‘Money won’t make him happy, Kitty.’ His voice was oddly flat. ‘I thought you of all people would understand that?’

I bit my lip and looked away. There was a hardness just then in Lucca’s face I hadn’t seen before. Of course I was sorry for Frank and Rosa, who wouldn’t be? But I couldn’t do a Lazarus with her, could I? There was something I could do, mind.

I ripped another sheet of newspaper, scrunched it up and threw it into the flames. It caught in seconds, shrivelling into a blackened ball shot with orange veins. The fire didn’t really need feeding, I just wanted to sort my thoughts for a moment.

I sat back. ‘Them two little ones who’ve died, poor mites – it’s a terrible coincidence, isn’t it?’

Lucca nodded, but didn’t answer my question. I went on. ‘Paradise isn’t the best place to raise a kid, I grant you, but two of them – Rosa and Ada’s boy – in the past eight days, babes in arms the pair of them? That’s not right.’

He sighed heavily. ‘Bad things happen, Fannella. It is a hard world and a hard life for many. Those infants . . .
Dio benedica le loro anime
. . .’ he whispered and crossed himself, before adding quietly, ‘I think it is worse for those who are left – for Frank and for Ada.’

I was quiet too for a moment, wondering how to make Lucca see what I was driving at without sounding cold as a Billingsgate fish fag. A coal spat in the fire and I watched the page from
The London Pictorial
with the drawing of me spread across the top slowly unfurl before catching light at the edge. In seconds the doe-eyed, bow-fronted girl on the paper blackened and crumpled to cinders.

In the end I blurted it out.

‘Don’t you see? Them poor little sods were both dark skinned, Lucca.’

I looked again at him now. He was picking at the paint caught under his nails – Lucca Fratelli was the most fastidious soul I knew, but there was always paint under his nails. It was his habit to pick at it when he was thinking. I sat up straight.

‘Since we brought Robbie Lennox back from Paris with us, two little ones with skin as dark as his have died. That’s more than coincidence, I’d say?’

It was true enough. I’d realised it when Mary O’Brien called out to me in the hall earlier.

Rosa had had the gypsy skin of her mother and Ada’s Tommy was dark as a lascar. His ma had come over from India with an English army family. Poor cow had worked as a nurse to the little rajlings until they were packed off to school and then the colonel and his good lady had thrown her out on the streets. A lot of them gentle souls uprooted from India and shipped back here with their starch-white families ended up in Limehouse – at least there were people here who spoke their patter.

Of an instant another thought came. I didn’t know about the children who died with Mrs Cudlipp in Mordant Street, but it was like as not that at least one of them was the result of a late-night encounter down the docks between a local bobtail and an outpost of Her Majesty’s Empire.

‘What do you think, Lucca?’

He stared into the fire, resting his elbows on his knees.

‘It . . . it seems an odd coincidence, but . . .’ He steepled his fingers. ‘No – you are right – it seems more than coincidence. And what happened tonight . . .?’

‘Exactly!’ I pushed my hair back from my forehead. ‘“
Where is he?
” That’s what the man said before he ripped out my earring.’ I felt for the scab of crusted blood. My ear was hot now and it was throbbing too. ‘He meant Robbie Lennox, I’m sure of it. No wonder David and Joey were scared.’

‘What?’ Lucca’s eye narrowed as he turned to stare at me.

I reached for an iron and poked the fire. Lucca took the iron from my hands and laid it down on the boards.

‘You didn’t mention anything about them being scared, Fannella, you said it was a favour to this, this . . . David.’ He looked up at the ceiling. ‘Let me see if I can remember correctly – you told me that Joey’s friend had got a girl into the usual sort of trouble and that her family were angry. I think on the train your exact words to me were – “He has asked me to look after the kid until the trouble dies down.”’

I nodded. ‘That’s right. He said it wouldn’t be for long.’

‘But there’s something else, isn’t there?’

When I didn’t answer Lucca stood up abrupt. ‘Well, if you are not going to tell me, I might as well go.’

‘No, don’t. You’re right. There is more.’ I pulled the edge of his jacket. ‘Sit down again – please. I’ll tell you as much as I know – and it’s not much.’ I kneeled up and caught his hand. ‘Don’t go. Please.’

When I’d finished, Lucca was silent. He shook his head and muttered something in Italian.

‘I . . . I didn’t know what I was getting into, exactly. It was late – I’d been drinking champagne and it doesn’t sit well on me, unlike you . . .’ As I spoke, Lucca tore another page from the paper and crumpled it viciously before hurling it into the fire. ‘And that evening was all so . . . unreal. It was like being in a sort of dream. My head was full of a thousand things. I wasn’t thinking straight, that’s for sure. And by the next morning it was too late.’

Lucca brought his fist down hard on the boards and let out a stream of Italian.

I put my hand over his clenched fist. ‘Don’t – don’t be angry with me. Please.’

He sighed heavily. ‘I’m not angry with you, Fannella. I’m angry at Joseph and his friend. I saw him, briefly, at the station, remember? He’s very dark, very handsome, very . . . persuasive, I’m sure.’

I didn’t answer. Lucca was right. David Lennox had persuaded me all right. I felt my neck flush scarlet under the shawl and I was glad I’d buttoned up my dress. Something else came to me then.

‘The station! That was no accident with the trolley. Someone tried to kill me before we’d even left Paris – and most likely they thought your bag was Robbie wrapped in a blanket or some such. I was clutching it to me when I fell.’

Lucca frowned. ‘But why would anyone want to kill a child so badly? It makes no sense. His skin is dark, yes, and I can see that an old family would not be happy with such a situation. But surely they could pay this David Lennox simply to
disappear
with him? He is a performer, yes?’

I nodded. ‘A ballad singer. He’s half Scottish – he was born in Glasgow.’

Lucca picked at a thumbnail. ‘Then he cannot be rich. Surely he would agree to come to an arrangement?’

Despite the fire, I shivered. ‘I don’t understand it neither. But I’m right, aren’t I? It
is
more than coincidence. The little ones – and poor Ada. I reckon someone pushed her into the way of that cart.’

A burst of sparks shot up into the throat of the chimney and a glowing coal shifted to the edge of the grate. Lucca took up the iron to prod it back. The firelight flickered across his damaged features as he turned to look at me.

‘And what about Peggy? Is she in danger too, Fannella?’

Tell truth, the summons to Pearl Street had come two days later than I expected, but I was right about the Beetle not being happy.

‘I cannot believe that you have made such a foolish promise.’

Telferman scratched the end of his nose with a thickened yellow nail. ‘You are not a charity, Katharine.’

I noted that, as usual, he used my full first name when he wanted to emphasise my childish errors. ‘You cannot buy popularity by the shilling.’ He sighed and pushed his glasses further up his nose. ‘You will, no doubt, learn this – in time.’

Right on cue, the clock on the mantle behind him struck the quarter. He took out his fob, flicked it open and nodded to himself. A new dead animal was set next to the clock today. The creature behind the glass looked like a masked cat with small ears and very short legs. The dermist had wired its mouth into a permanent snarl. The teeth were huge in its little flat head.

Telferman caught me giving it the eye.

‘A polecat. Small, but utterly ferocious. They will take on animals four times their size and win. They do not make good pets.’ He moved a glass paperweight and took up a sheet of paper, running a fingernail down a column of figures.

Without looking at me he continued, ‘They are your employees, Katharine, not your pets.’

I leaned forward and tapped the paper under his nose. ‘But I’ve got money – more of it than I could spend in a hundred lifetimes if my reading of the books is true. I don’t see why paying a fair and regular wage is foolish. If it keeps them sweet and if that makes the halls a success, I call that good business.’