Kitty Peck and the Child of Ill-Fortune (5 page)

‘When . . . when did you find out she was our grandmother, Joey? You were working for her for a long time before you . . . went.’

He didn’t answer. Instead he stood and lifted an iron to poke the grate. A shower of sparks burst from the logs and leapt into the throat of the chimney. Despite the fire, the atmosphere in the room was as cold as a workhouse itch ward.

When he spoke he didn’t look at me.

‘It was Nanny Peck,’ he paused. ‘Just before she died I . . .
found
some papers in her purse – chits signed Elizabeth Redmayne. I thought it might be something to do with our father and his family, some payment to keep us quiet, and I was angry with the old girl for keeping him from us so I confronted her.’

I stared at my brother’s back. I thought I’d known him through and through, but the person standing in front of me now was as foreign as skinny old Frenchie with the scent and the lace.

‘You went through her purse! You know she would have given us anything. I didn’t have you down as a thief, Joey, whatever else you—’ I buttoned it before I said something wrong. I looked down and plucked at a fraying loop of brocade detaching itself from the upholstery of the couch.

‘You don’t have to tell me that, little sister. Don’t you think I knew how low it was to steal from my own grandmother?’ He rolled his shoulders and muttered something under his breath.

‘At the time I was in a deal of trouble. I couldn’t tell—’ He stopped and shifted a small china ornament on the marble fire surround an inch to the right.

‘I didn’t know what to do – you don’t need to know the details, but please believe that I meant to pay her back. Then, when I found the notes in her purse I thought I could use them. I was harsh. I made her cry and I bitterly regret that because she was kind and good – the closest thing we’ll ever have to a grandmother. When I forced her she told me about The Lady and our . . .
connection
and so I went to The Palace to see her. That’s when it all began.’ He turned round and smiled – it was the first time I’d seen him do that since we’d arrived – only it was a sour look.

‘I thought she liked me. Everyone did – back then.’

He rested the iron on one of the fire dogs and crossed to the table beneath the uncurtained window overlooking the courtyard. Moonlight caught his cropped fair hair, turning it silver for a moment. He reached for the neck of a bottle standing in a bucket of ice and poured out three glasses of something that frothed and spilled over the rim.

‘Have you tried champagne, Kitty?’ He offered me a brimming glass. ‘I know Lucca has, but what about you? After all, you can afford it now.’

The edge in his voice cut me.

I reached to take the champagne and tried to brush the skin of his fingers to reassure myself that he was real. There’d been no physical contact between us so far, no brotherly embrace for the little sister he’d allowed to believe him dead.

Back in London when I made my plans about coming over to Paris I’d run through several little scenes in my head and all of them had ended up with him folding me in his arms and swinging me round and round so that my skirts and my hair tangled about us. And then, when we were both so dizzy that we couldn’t stand up any more, we collapsed in a heap and sprawled on the floor laughing at the ceiling.

That was what used to happen anyway. But we were both kids then, not the strangers who stared at each other now. I looked up at him.

In two years Joey’s face had become leaner, the angles more defined. His eyebrows were darkened and shaped – he plucked them into submission I guessed, like Mrs Conway – so that they framed his long heavy-lidded eyes. It was the look in those blue eyes that had changed most. Once they had a sparkle that could charm a profanity from a Methodist, but now they were hard.

And there was something else there too, something elusive and contained, like he was hiding someone else deep inside and was frightened they might show their face. I thought I knew who that was. Tell truth, I was glad about the dressing gown.

As I brushed his fingers I felt the fine hairs stand up on the back of my hand and at the nape of my neck. Of an instant I knew he’d felt it too. He was looking at me now as if he was taking me in for the first time. His eyes darkened as the pupils bloomed. He reminded me of her in that moment, just a flash of the old cow – brilliant black beads in a gaunt pale face. I think it was only then that I really knew it was true.

I took a deep breath. ‘I can afford a lot of things now, Joseph Peck, but if you want to know the truth, I’d have given everything to find you again. Lady Ginger – our grandmother – knew it and that’s why she used me and nearly got me killed. You’re the reason I’ve got Paradise.’

Something flickered across his face. I couldn’t tell if it was anger or pain or something in between. He closed his eyes and a muscle worked in his jaw. I stroked his wrist and spoke softly. ‘Look at us both. What would Ma think of us circling each other like a couple of strays? I’ll happily take a glass with you, Joey. This should be a celebration, not a wake. We’re both alive, aren’t we?’

He blinked and the tears spilled onto his cheeks, leaving a glittering trail over his sharp high cheekbones.

‘Kitty.’ My name sounded like it was caught halfway down his throat.

The glass dropped to the floor and the contents fizzled into a rug. He knelt in front of me, clasping my shoulders in his hands. He rested his forehead on mine, looked into my eyes and smiled at me, properly, his handsome face falling easily into the lines and dimples I recognised.

‘Forgive me. Please forgive me. I thought it was better, safer, if you believed I was dead. Then when you came here today . . . it was a shock. I . . . I was angry and I was afraid that you . . .’ He broke off and closed his eyes. ‘There are things about me that I didn’t want you to know, little sister . . . I am sorry, so sorry . . .’

The door clicked softly as Lucca left the room. I took my brother’s face between my hands and smiled. I could feel the tears streaming down my own face again.

‘It doesn’t matter, Joey, nothing matters. We’re both safe now.’

He kissed my forehead and I felt him rock in my arms. At first I thought he was weeping, but then I realised he was laughing.

For a long time I’d buried my brother. Then, when The Lady told me he was alive I didn’t allow myself to believe it – not entirely. And now, even though he was sitting at my feet leaning back against the couch and smiling up at me I couldn’t quite believe he was real. I had to keep touching his head, stroking his cropped hair, to reassure myself he was there.

Once he melted back into the brother I knew, we talked until the sky outside that elegant room in rue des Carmélites was swimming with shoals of salmon. Mostly we talked about Ma and Nanny Peck – the good days when we was small. It was like we were finding our way to each other again. I told him I felt like that girl who followed a trail of crumbs to track her brother through the forest. He laughed and said there was a witch in that story too, and then he asked me about Mrs Conway and Fitzy.

See, Joey was nimble that night. We didn’t talk much about Lady Ginger – he kept veering off the subject, taking the conversation back to Nanny Peck’s stories or the characters at the halls. There was so much I meant to ask him – about Ma, about Nanny Peck, about our father – about our grandfather too, for that matter – but he always wound the conversation back to something designed to make me do the telling.

Looking back, I reckon I learned more from what he didn’t say than what he did. I tried to broach the subject of his living in Paris – more exactly the way of it, if you follow me – and I tried to make it very clear that it didn’t trouble me a sparrow’s fart how he chose to spend his days – or his nights. But he didn’t open out.

When it was fully light outside he called the Monseigneur back into the room and the two of them had a conversation in pattering French. The old gent skiddled off into the hallway and ten minutes later I heard a hand-bell ringing from the hall below.

‘Your carriage has arrived.’ Joey held out a hand to raise me from the couch. ‘It will take you, both of you, to Le Meurice – it’s a hotel, one of the best in Paris. I’m sure Lucca will approve.’

‘Can’t we stay here with you?’ Confused, I took his hand and stood up. I realised I was almost looking him straight in the eye. I’d grown three or four inches since I last saw my brother.

He didn’t answer. Instead he smiled, wrapped his arms around me and hugged me so tight against him I could taste the flowers on his skin. Joey stroked my hair and I felt his heart beating beneath the blue robe.

‘I will call on you later today and I will show you Paris. You don’t know how much I’ve missed you, little sister.’

Them four days went fast, too fast.

I fell in love with Paris and I fell in love all over again with Joey. I was proud to be escorted by my brother, the dashing young Englishman who, in perfect French, had the knack of charming everyone we met, from the most dismal droop-tached waiter to a goat-faced woman at the opera who was introduced to us as the Duchesse de Somewhere or other. I could tell she liked Joey, but when her eyes sidled over me her mouth puckered up like a cat’s arse and the bristles growing through the powder on her chin fetched the lamplight.

Lucca joined us for part of the time. Him and Joey was wary at first, civil enough to each other, but oddly formal too. When a touring act came back to Lady Ginger’s halls after a country ramble, I’d often note that the hands and the girls treated them with a certain caution. They acted like they were strangers when only six months before they’d all been drinking together down The Lamb six nights out of seven. It was like the travellers had to prove themselves again, demonstrate they hadn’t changed or got beyond us.

I reckoned I could feel something of that between Joey and Lucca, so on the afternoon of the second day, when we was all supposed to go to some public garden for a stroll about, I said I had a headache. Lucca was all for cancelling, but I insisted he should go with Joey, just for an hour at least, while I rested.

In the end they were out until dark. I didn’t ask what they did, where they went or what they talked about, but after that they were comfortable together and I was glad to see it. That evening Lucca left me and Joey alone. He took himself off somewhere – I saw Joey slip him a card – while we ate in my room.

I think that was my favourite time of all. Just me and Joey sitting at a round table set up by the window. We kept the curtains open so we could look down onto the street. There was a gas lamp fixed to the wall outside lighting up the entrance to the hotel. It was directly below us so we didn’t bother with any other light in the room, just a fire.

We had chicken. I remember that because I had to ask Joey what it was. I couldn’t recognise the meat under all the sauce. To my way of thinking there’s something criminal in smothering good meat, but everything in Paris seemed to come in disguise. Back home, people went wild for the French style, but as far as I could make out it was mainly a complication of the natural.

Anyway, the waiter brought our meal up to the room under a little silver dome. He placed the covered platter at the centre of the table and then he fussed about, tweaking the tablecloth and flapping out our napkins until he was satisfied that we were good enough for what we were about to receive.

Then, with a flourish that wouldn’t have disgraced Swami Jonah when he was doing the disappearing dove (I say dove, but the mangy thing was really a pigeon caked in chalk dust), he swept the dome away to reveal a pool of lumpy yellow gravy.

‘
Voilà!
’

He stood, expectant like, by the side of the table, the cover held high in his white-gloved hand. I wasn’t entirely sure what to do – give him a round of applause or maybe the bird? He was so solemn and impressed with himself that I got the urge to laugh. Once it came on me, I couldn’t stop it. I tried to pretend I was coughing into my napkin, but I caught Joey’s eye and that was the finish of us.

The steaming liquid in the dish jiggled about as the table rocked under my elbows. Joey just about managed to draw himself together. He said something to the waiter and pressed a coin into his hand. Then we watched in a most painful silence as the man stalked back to the door, giving every impression, if you’ll pardon another of Nanny Peck’s observations, that he had a ripe Kerry Pippin stuffed up his fundamental.

Once he was gone, I repeated this to Joey, who remarked in his beautiful toff English that with an arse that tight it was more likely a pineapple. The two of us began to laugh so loud that I’m sure the carriage men lined up on the street outside three storeys down could hear us.

That was a thing about Joey – he wasn’t like Lucca who wrinkled his nose whenever I used an expression unfit for a lady. No, my brother had always had a way of talking low, but making the words sound like something Queen Victoria herself might let slip. I remembered then how he held court with his fancy friends at The Lamb, and at that moment I realised how blind I’d been.

That second evening was when we really began to act natural together again – like the past two years hadn’t happened. We were just a couple of kids, larking about and teasing each other. After our meal – which, to be fair, tasted better than it looked – we sat there in a comfortable glow and made up stories about the men and women passing in and out of the hotel. It was a game we played when we were small.

The front room of our old lodgings in Church Row looked out over the street. If you closed the shutters up behind you and squeezed into the narrow space before the window you could see down to the corner and into the houses opposite. When Ma was taking a bad turn and Nanny Peck was sitting with her in the back room, me and Joey used to play the story game, sitting sideways on the ledge facing each other with our knees and toes touching.

Now we watched the comings and goings outside Le Meurice; elegant city couples, provincial businessmen fluffed out like bantam cocks, silent spouses walking a lifetime apart, lovers with less than a Rizla between them, and the kept women. Joey said you could always smoke them in Paris – their dress was much finer and better set than anything a husband would pay for. He reckoned he could tell visitors from England too. ‘Something about the cut,’ he said, and I noticed the way he took in my good blue frock.

It was raining hard and every time a carriage drew up a fat little porter in a long red coat bobbed down the hotel steps to shield the arrivals with an umbrella the size of Nanny Peck’s Sunday crinoline. Caught in the lamplight, the raindrops looked like a scattering of crystals as they rolled off the rigid black shell and shattered on the steps.

I knew it was a chance to talk proper, but it felt so good to slip back into the old ways that I didn’t want to spoil the magic of it. And I do think that my brother worked a kind of spell over me – the sort that blinds your eyes and binds your tongue. I was the adoring little sister again, hanging off his every word, laughing at his stories and lapping up his attention like an abandoned kitten that couldn’t believe its luck to be back in a warm kitchen.

If you was to ask me now exactly what it was we talked about for that second evening at Le Meurice, there’s barely a full sentence I can recall – excepting one thing that struck me as odd. We watched a family – mother, father and four little girls all done up like porcelain dolls – tumble out of a coach and scurry up the steps into the dry. Joey asked if I’d ever thought about having children of my own. I laughed and said I needed to find myself a man before I could make him an uncle.

When I cast back, I see them days in Paris through a haze of red and gold; velvet-padded restaurant chairs, gilded mirrors, floating down the river on a pleasure barge done out with crimson banquettes, rose-flecked light alive with gleaming sparks of dust falling through the kaleidoscope windows of a darkened church, a night at the opera that felt like sitting in an open jewel box, the scent of the crowd; all leather, lavender, lemon and a hundred other fine foreign things rolling off them in waves of prosperity.

Oh yes, I soon came to see that plenty of the types my brother mixed with were a good deal cleaner and fancier than the ones he’d left behind in Limehouse. Me and Lucca included.

There was one place, though, that put me in mind of The Gaudy. We took a cab and went on there after the opera on the third night. It was a dance and drink hall, hot with the smell of bodies, tobacco and mecks. I could feel the throb of the music and the stamp of the dancers as we pushed through the crowd. Joey went first holding my hand and Lucca followed behind.

The young men, and most particularly the girls there, were a lot wilder than the ones back home. The dancing had a whirling physical violence to it that threatened, but never quite descended into, a riot. It was infectious. The pulse of it spread from my feet up my legs and into my body. I wanted to be out on that dance floor, spinning and stamping and shrieking with the rest of them.

I tugged Joey’s hand. He turned, grinned and mouthed some words I couldn’t make out. I tapped my ear and shook my head. He nodded and pointed at a row of booths set along a wall to the left. I noted the way my brother was just as comfortable among that set as in the grand dining rooms of the city. I followed as he moved from table to table, a nod here, a wink there, a smile, some larky patter in the lingo, a generous tip to the red-haired girl with a tilted nose and a gap-toothed grin who brought a jug of some gut-rot green stuff to our booth. Half an hour in and Lucca was over by the stage talking to a knot of gents gathered by the music pit. From their looks I took them for four brothers – they all had white blond hair, cat-slant eyes and cheekbones you could slice a ham on.

When Joey took me back to the hotel later that evening, Lucca didn’t come with us, but early next morning he was back at my door with a guilty smile and a ribbon-covered box of sweet pastries so beautiful I almost didn’t want to spoil them by biting into them.

Little works of art they were, no wonder he bought them.

‘The dress suits you. I think you are made for the Parisian style.’ Lucca stepped back and nodded. ‘It is perfect. Turn to the left.’ The grey watered satin skirt whispered as it moved with me. The dress was cut narrow and low. Complicated pleats and folds of material gave the bodice the look of a close-petalled flower about to open and the skirt was caught up at the back in a parted bell-like shape with a fantail of silver lace trailing out behind.

I stared at myself in the mirror and I hardly recognised the girl looking back. I say girl, but with my hair plaited and looped up top, my waist tightened to a pint glass and other parts of me looking more prominent than felt proper, it was a woman I saw there – for the first time ever. I didn’t know how I felt about that.

‘Does it look . . . decent, Lucca? I don’t want to be taken for a bangtail or whatever they call them over here.’ I glanced at the handwritten note on the table.

‘You look like a lady. And the maid has done an excellent job with your hair.’ He smiled and slipped into his jacket, pulling the sleeves so that the buttons at the cuffs lined up. ‘She said it was unusual for a woman to travel without a servant, but was happy to assist when I explained that you were travelling on urgent family business and had to leave London without making arrangements. Also, the coins helped – she didn’t ask another question when I counted them out in front her.’

He raised a brow. ‘I think they find us to be a most interesting couple. At least our rooms are on separate floors, otherwise we would be a scandal.’

Lucca was done up fine too. Matter of fact, I’d never seen him look so smart. I could tell he was revelling in it – there was a streak of vanity in Lucca Fratelli that hadn’t been burned away.

Joey sent the evening clothes to our rooms. Monogrammed boxes padded out with scented tissue had arrived that morning. In both cases the fit was almost perfect, although I’d had to ask the hotel seamstress to adjust the filmy, chiffon-covered straps of the bodice so they didn’t gape.

I was going to do it myself. Not having been away before I’d packed for all eventuals, I even had my sewing kit with me. Lucca pulled a face when he saw my things laid out on the brocade cover of the hotel bed and he laughed out loud when I showed him all the clothes hung up by a chamber maid in a mahogany wardrobe half the size of my old room at Mother Maxwell’s. I pointed out that as I’d bought a trunk for the trip it seemed a shame not to use it.