Kitty Peck and the Child of Ill-Fortune (2 page)

The wind caught the sheet and almost whipped it out of my hand and over the rail. I turned around so that the white cliffs were behind me. For all that I’d spent my life on the banks of the Thames, I’d never been so far out on water before.

I’d been on a coal barge to Rotherhithe once when I thought I was sweet on a lad called Freddie Coates whose dad owned a couple of carriers at the basin. I made up an errand and asked him to take me over the river just so we could get friendly. Trouble was, Freddie got a bit too friendly, if you get my meaning. Joey went round to have a little chat with him when he saw the black print of his hand on the back of my skirt.

Freddie didn’t talk to me after that, but he didn’t talk much on the barge neither, so I wasn’t too put out. And there was another time when Nanny Peck took me and Joey out in a tuppenny row boat on the lake at Victoria Park. We were only small so she took charge of the oars, but the old girl hadn’t got a clue. We just went round and round on the same patch of water. All the while Nanny Peck was puffing like a deal porter and looking likely to burst a vessel. I remember us laughing so hard we almost toppled the boat.

I wondered if we’d ever laugh like that together again.

Lucca grinned at me. ‘What do you think, Fannella? How do you like the sea?’

‘I don’t feel noxious, if that’s what you’re asking.’ I kept a tight hold of the letter, stood on tiptoe and leaned over the side to watch the bottle-green waves shatter into foam against the side of the boat. Another gust caught the brim of my new hat and I had to slam my hand down on the crown to keep it from flying away. I took a deep breath and looked back at Lucca.

Fannella was his name for me. In his natural speech it meant little bird. It was appropriate seeing as how that’s what I’d been. Night after night swinging and trilling in that cage seventy foot up over the punters’ heads, caught in my grandmother’s trap.

I first met Lucca at The Gaudy. He was – and still is – the finest set painter working the halls. He was wasted in Paradise, I’ve told him that often enough even though I wouldn’t want him to go. All the same, he had a rare talent and he was clever with it. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian – all them old-time painter boys from his country – he worshipped them. He talked about them like they was living down his street. I reckon I knew more than most about art and that was entirely down to spending so much time listening to Lucca. To speak frank, of occasion, I wished he’d show a bit of interest in something more lively, but Lucca was Lucca. And I wouldn’t change him.

The first time we spoke proper was a couple of years back. I was a general help at The Gaudy then and on that particular night I was slopping out the gallery and singing a song to keep my mind off what I was dealing with. Lucca was working on the stage.

When I finished he came down to the front and clapped. I was surprised, tell truth. Of a general rule he kept himself apart. We Gaudy girls reckoned it was because he didn’t want anyone’s pity. In the halls we all knew how vicious the limelight could be. Back then we – that’s to say me and my friend Peggy – assumed the angry crimped flesh that ran from his hairline down into his collar on the right side of his face was the result of an accident with the flares. We were wrong.

As it happens, we were both wrong about a lot of things when it came to Lucca. God love her, Peggy still thinks we might be a couple.

He steadied himself as the boat rocked. ‘Well, Fannella, you didn’t answer my question?’

I breathed out.

‘Actually, I like it very much – the feeling of it. And the air here, it tastes . . . clean. Like it’s doing you good to swallow it down. How long will it take, do you think?’

He shrugged. ‘Not so long. These small boats are fast and the weather is clear. On a fine day you can see France from the cliffs back there.’

A pair of smartly dressed passengers came to stand at the rail just behind him. Lucca pulled his hat lower and fiddled with his scarf and the collar of his coat so that the scarred side of his face was masked from view. I supposed there’d never come a day when he wasn’t conscious of his looks.

‘So, the letter?’ He nodded at the paper in my hand. ‘Will you tell him?’

‘That I’m his landlady?’

Lucca narrowed his good eye. ‘I mean the other.’

I looked down at the paper again and flattened it out over the rail, careful to pin it down. Lady Ginger’s elegant, looping hand was as familiar to me now as my own.

That was it. No date, no address, just her signature scrawled across the bottom and another line added as an afterthought.

‘How can I tell him he can never come back? He’s my brother.’

Lucca fussed at the trailing ends of his scarf. ‘The Barons, Kitty. Joseph made some powerful enemies among men who—’

‘That was a lie! Joey didn’t do it.’ I cut in sharp, but I knew Lucca was right.

He didn’t like to speak about the fire that had melted half his face away. Lucca was supposed to have died that night along with the rest of them – not one over eighteen years of age. Every Baron believed that my brother, Joseph Peck, had started the blaze in which the pick of the boys from their houses of singular entertainment had perished and they wanted revenge. Lady Ginger had spirited Joey away to Paris to protect him.

But now I could make it right. I caught Lucca’s arm.

‘Listen, I can explain what happened. I’ll tell them Joey was there to stop the fire. I’m in a position now to make it right again.
I’m
a Baron, aren’t I?’

I spoke too loud. A donkey-faced woman in a fine fur-edged cape standing just along the deck from Lucca tutted, nudged the arm of the gent with her, presumably her husband, and whispered something into his ear behind her gloved hand. They both turned to look at us.

Her eyes raked my outfit from the tip of the feather bobbing above my bonnet to the toes of my boots. I could see she was pricing up every bit of clobber to put a value on me. The gent did the same, but whereas his missus found me wanting, he clearly liked what he saw.

Neddy must have dialled that because her voice clipped up. ‘Come along, Rufus. The salon is reserved for First Class travellers. It is so difficult to avoid unfortunate encounters on these compact vessels.’

She released his arm and trotted briskly up the deck. The gent stared at me for a moment, then he smiled and tapped the side of his nose. ‘The Limehouse Linnet – I’d know you anywhere. I saw you perform in your cage three times.’ He spoke quietly so that his wife shouldn’t hear.

‘Rufus!’ The voice was shrill. He tipped his hat to me and turned to follow her.

‘Unfortunate encounters!’ Lucca snorted. ‘If only she knew.’

‘Knew that I could likely buy her husband and everything he owns and still have small change for twenty acres up west, or knew that I’m one of the twelve most dangerous people in London? Take your pick.’

I watched as the man who’d spoken to me held open the half-glazed door to the salon for his lard-faced wife. He stared back at us and nodded once as he followed after her.

The
Prince Leopold
rose and fell on the waves and I planted my boots wider to keep straight. ‘You didn’t answer me, Lucca.’

He shrugged and pulled at the fingertips of his new green Spanish leather gloves. I’d given them to him this morning at Victoria, just before we got on the boat train, in the way of a thank-you for coming with me. He likes a bit of fancy gear, does Lucca – I knew they’d be right up his alley, in a manner of speaking.

Nanny Peck held that you should never give a pair of gloves as a gift or a love token. ‘Handing away the feelings – that’s what you’d be doing.’ I heard her voice in my head clear as Old Peter’s cornet when I chose them in Zedelman’s on Burdett Road. I wasn’t one for superstition so I ignored her. I bought a neat leather travelling trunk, too – that’s why I’d gone there – and when I put the coins on the counter the proprietor looked at me narrow through his rambling eyebrows and bit down hard on one of the sovereigns to test it for a dimmick.

At the time I wished he’d crack a tooth, but I suppose he had every right to wonder how a girl like me came to have a purse full. He didn’t look the entertainable sort so he wouldn’t have known me from the halls, not like the gent in the salon. But he would soon. They all would.

I tightened my grip on the rail. The low spring sun was sparking on the water and beneath the soles of my boots I could feel the thrum of the engine through the deck boards. It was a good day for a crossing.

‘I’m still waiting. Who am I?’ I turned to Lucca and pushed a stray blonde coil loosened by the wind out of my eyes.

‘What do you want me to say, Fannella? We have gone over this a thousand times. You are your own woman. You do not have to do things as she did. Paradise is yours now and you will run it your own way – a better way.’

‘That’s all very well but we both know, however I shine it up, that it’s a dirty place. Everything I have now is . . . tainted.’

He was quiet for a moment, his good brown eye unblinking. ‘I watched you sign the paper. You made a choice that day.’

‘But was it the right one? I might have high ideas about setting things right, cleaning things out and making things fair and decent – but what if that’s just unicorn shit . . .’

Lucca winced and glanced around to make sure no one heard me. He could be quite high-minded of occasion. Usually it made me laugh, but today it didn’t. I think I was tight wound about the prospect of seeing Joey and I took it out on the next best thing.

The edge in my voice sharpened. ‘You know what I mean, Lucca. How can I give the girls who work in Lady Ginger’s dab-houses a better life? I can’t just close up and turn them out on the streets, can I? And maybe you think I should have a nice little chat with the rozzers about what goes on at East India when my customs boys aren’t looking too closely? Then there’s her opium doss-houses – nine of them off Narrow Street as far I can make out, although Telferman’s tight as a wren’s arse on that score . . .’ Lucca looked pained again, but I carried on, ‘and there’s her toolers working up west – tidy little business that is, given as how she owns all the jerryshops out east – her bit fakers, a dainty line in blackmail – Telferman’s got a safe laid flat in his office so cram full of letters from notables that he has to sit on it to make it close – her collection boys, her—’

Lucca raised his hand. ‘They are not
hers
any more, they are yours. And you will find a way to make it better. I know you will. It is not in your nature to be cruel. Think of it as a business, Kitty.’ His puckered mouth gathered into a sort of smile. ‘The wealth and reputation of every great man in London is built on the backs of others. In their comfortable clubs, their grand houses, their gilded restaurants and their panelled offices they are still in the business of buying and selling lives. You are the same now, I think?’

‘I’m not!’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I glared up at him and felt my cheeks flush up with anger as he began to smile.

‘Oh, I think you are, Fannella – but there is an important difference. Remember The Lady saw herself as a mother?’

Now, maternal is a word you could never bring to mind when thinking of my grandmother – and that was another word I had problems with as well – but she harped on about family like all of us in Paradise was tucked up in a cot together and she was warming our milk and singing us a lullaby.

‘What are the things children want most from a mother?’ Lucca ducked his head as a shower of sea spray came over the rail and spattered around us.

I thought about Ma.

‘Love . . . and protection?’

Lucca nodded. ‘And . . .? Think about when you and Joey were small. How did she treat you?’

Tell truth, it was still painful to think about Ma. Every time I tried to bring her to mind I felt an ache behind my eyes. Nanny Peck was easy to picture, bustling about in her stiff black dress with her plaid shawl pinned tight at her neck. Round as a winter robin she was and twice as cocky. Looking back, it’s easy to see that her and Ma had as much in the way of family ties as me and Princess Alexandra, but if you don’t suspect anything you don’t go poking around for it.

Ma was skinny as a sighthound and fair like me and Joey, only in her it was fragile, like you could pick her up, drop her down and she’d splinter into tiny little pieces. Nanny Peck called her a beauty and she was, I suppose. But doesn’t every child think that of its mother?

She had a lovely clear singing voice, I remember that, and when she laughed it was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. But there were dark days too when Nanny Peck took me and Joey out and away from our neat three-room lodgings off Church Row, and away from Ma. When we came home she’d be all smiles and stories again. I only realised that when they were both gone.

One time, when we got back, Ma had set the table for a feast. There was a white napkin, candles, boiled potatoes and a cold ham sitting on a dish. And when we’d had our fill of that and our fingers were all greasy from the meat, she’d gone to the cupboard in the wall by the fire and brought out a small round russet-coloured thing.