Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders (23 page)

He rested his forehead in his hands. I could see his shoulders heaving. ‘I have been the cause of so much evil. But I didn’t know, I swear to God, I didn’t know.’

I put my hand lightly to his arm. ‘Go on, Lucca, tell me, please. I won’t judge. I’d never do that. Tell me everything.’

He nodded, cleared his throat and took a deep inward breath. ‘Verdin invited, no, that’s the wrong word, he
commanded
us to attend a . . . celebration. He said we would be paid handsomely. I was surprised. I thought he had forgotten me, but Giacomo was delighted. He took such care preparing himself for the evening like the little whore he was. He told me that our fortunes were about to change, but even then I did not think he really meant that for both of us.

‘It was to be a great secret, we were told – a surprise. A carriage was sent to collect us and we were taken to a mansion outside London. The house was set at the end of a long drive and surrounded by trees. It was high summer and the light was just fading from the sky when we arrived. Even now I can remember the scent of
gelsomino
. . . jasmine climbing over the porch. For a moment I was reminded of home.’

Lucca paused and followed the pattern woven into the rug with his finger.

‘The house was derelict, but it was still beautiful. The entrance hall had been dressed with vines and candles. The air was thick with musk and we could hear music and laughter. Giacomo was joyful. He thought it was his chance to begin his old life again.

‘At the foot of the stairs a young man wearing a carnival mask offered us glasses filled with . . . I don’t know what it was. Not champagne, that’s for sure. Then we were ordered to remove our clothes and to join the gathering above. You must understand – this was how it always was at Verdin’s townhouse and we were used to the rules. It was . . .
Dio mi perdoni
, exciting.’

Lucca broke off and wrung his hands together. ‘You said you would not judge me, Fannella. But I am not so sure when you have heard me to the end.’

I reached out to stroke his scarred right cheek and then, gently, I turned his face towards me. ‘Go on. I made a promise. Finish your story.’

‘The drink – there was something in it, some drug. By the time we reached the room the sounds, the scents and the colours were so intense, almost unbearable, but wonderful too. As we swayed through the doors, it was like entering a magic kingdom, like a scene from ancient Rome. There were cushions and rugs laid out across the floor, a feast set out along a trestle table against a row of windows, and there were bodies moving everywhere. But as I looked, Fannella, I realised, even through the hazy madness that shattered my mind into a thousand brilliant, glittering pieces, that the only people there were the young men and boys from the special school.

‘Verdin was there too – watching from a tall chair raised up on a dais. In the red light of the setting sun that came from the window behind him he glowed like the Devil in the old wall painting at the church in my village. He always liked to view us, but I felt then that something was wrong. This wasn’t like one of the evenings at his townhouse. This was something different – the room was charged with something wild.

‘Giacomo ran forward. I tried to stop him. I caught his hand, but he shook me off laughing as he darted through the bodies towards the dais. Verdin was standing now and he was smiling. While everyone else in the room was intoxicated with lust he was cold and apart. I looked away for a moment as someone whispered my name, a soft hand caressed me and I nearly fell to my knees to become a part of the ecstasy, but I knew, Fannella, I knew then it was a trap. My head was swimming as I tried to see where Giacomo had gone.

‘Instead I saw Verdin and in his hand there was a lighted taper. I watched as he stepped slowly down from the dais and deliberately set light to a pile of cushions. No one seemed to notice as the fabric quickly became a golden pyre and then the fire began to spread across the rugs and up the hangings. Thick smoke began to fill the room, a tapestry caught alight and peeled from the wall folding itself over the back of a boy not older than fourteen.

‘I couldn’t think and I couldn’t see, my mind was a carnival. Part of me wanted to laugh and run into the flames and part of me wanted to scream aloud to warn everyone to get out. I tried to find Giacomo, but the room was full of smoke and fire. I staggered back to the doors, but they were closed – locked or barred from the outside. I was choking now as the smoke filled my lungs.

‘I crouched low, cupping my hands over my nose and mouth. I could hear screaming and I could smell the terrible sweetness of burning flesh. A hand fastened round my wrist and I was dragged into the smoke. I tried to resist, but the grip was strong. We dodged through the flames until we ducked into the space beneath the table. A choked voice told me to keep my head low and take shallow breaths. Then I felt the grip tighten round my wrist again as the table toppled forward and we scrambled up to a window sill. I heard the sound of splintering wood and breaking glass and I cried out as a ball of fire seared across my head and shoulder. Then I screamed even louder as I was pushed through the jagged panes, falling twenty, perhaps thirty feet to the grass below. A moment later there was a great thud next to me as someone else jumped from above.’

Lucca fell silent and started to pull again at the ragged skin around his thumb.

I tried to take in everything he had just told me. I tried to imagine how he’d lived with himself, with all that festering, pointless guilt eating away at his fish-on-Friday soul. I might not have been the most worldly of creatures, but I knew that when it came to a choice between filling your belly or starving in the gutter there weren’t many of us who wouldn’t sell our body for bread.

I didn’t give a monkey’s toss about what he’d done with Verdin and the other boys – after all, there were plenty of types like Lucca in the halls – and the better theatres too – and no one minded much, except the rozzers. And even they turned a blind eye when it suited them.

But all the same, I was angry with him.

Why hadn’t he told me any of this before? Didn’t he trust me? I thought I’d made it plain I trusted him to the boundaries of Paradise and beyond. Of occasion the thought of me and him being a pair had crossed my mind – and sometimes I got the impression he might have thought that too. He’d certainly let the other lads at the halls think that way – and Peggy too.

I dug my nails into my palms. This wasn’t the time to start a fight. And sitting next to Lucca now I found I didn’t have the stomach for it. He didn’t look at me, just kept picking his fingers and twisting his hands over and over.

I watched him for a moment. It wasn’t true what I’d just thought, was it? Lucca had never led me to think we was anything more than good friends and people at the halls had come to their own conclusions. Lucca hadn’t said a thing. I’d even shared a bed with him for Christ’s sake, and he hadn’t made a move.

It came to me then that, sometimes, I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. If anything, Lucca had always been more like a brother to me and that’s how I loved him.

The fire was burning low. I glanced over at the little window above his bed and saw that the sky was deep violet shot with streaks of pink and gold. It would be light soon.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught a sudden movement near Lucca’s rumpled bed as a mouse darted for cover across the boards, disappearing into a hole no bigger than a ha’penny in the wainscot. Let it be, I thought, we were all of us scrabbling around in a filthy world to stay alive. Lucca had nothing to be ashamed of.

His head hung low and his dark curls had tumbled forward but I could see the curve of his lips and his fine straight nose. No wonder Verdin took him up. He’d been beautiful too once. Like Giacomo.

I took a deep breath. ‘Look,’ I began, ‘this wasn’t your fault, none of it was. If anyone was to blame it’s Giacomo.’

Something Lucca said earlier repeated itself in my mind:
I only discovered the truth about that night afterwards when we escaped.

I straightened my back. ‘So what happened to him, this Giacomo, then, when you two got out?’

Lucca stopped picking his nails. He was completely still for a moment and then he turned to stare at me. He blinked twice and a shadow seemed to pass across the good side of his face.

He reached for my hand.

‘It wasn’t Giacomo who saved me that night, Fannella. It was Joey.’

There were rooms in my mind I was careful to keep closed. Looking back, I can see that Ma and me weren’t too different there, but in the end she closed so many doors in her head she couldn’t find her way out again.

After Ma had gone I’d trained myself not to open the doors that led to memories. It was better that way. In fact, I’d found it was better to keep a lot of things locked away – fear, for example.

When I was up there in that cage I made sure that even the smallest doubt about what I was doing was folded small into such a distant corner of my head that I didn’t even know it was there.

There was The Lady too, and this business with the missing girls. I’d dealt with that by watching it from the outside – keeping it away from me like it was all happening to another Kitty Peck.

The girl who worked in the halls, sang in the galleries as she slopped out the vomit and gave the old backchat to Fitzpatrick was hard as an oyster’s shell and every year since Joey left her she’d grown a new protective layer. Everything that happened to her was like a barnacle growing on her shell, adding another stony rivet to her armour.

But inside, that girl was soft as an oyster too, and now something was tearing her apart.

‘Fannella . . .’

Lucca reached out towards me.

‘Don’t you dare!’ I pushed him away and wiped my cheeks roughly with the heel of my hands. Then I leaned forward and slapped the good side of his face. He didn’t move or say a word, so I hit him again on the other side, so hard this time that his head jerked and his hair fell forward to cover his face.

Still he just sat there – and he let me hit him over and over until I crumpled sobbing into his lap. Outside, the shift bell at the docks began to clang.

Lucca stroked my hair.

‘I am sorry, Fannella. I should have told you long ago.’ His voice was almost a whisper. ‘There is so much I should have said.’

‘You’ve known all the time, Lucca‚ haven’t you? You’ve known he was alive.’

‘
Si
.’ I barely caught the word.

‘I don’t understand, why didn’t you tell me? You were there with me that day when they came to the theatre and told me about the accident. You knew then it was a lie and yet you let me think he was dead. How could you do that to me?’

Lucca was silent, but I could hear his heart beating fast in his chest. I twisted my head to look up at him and asked again. ‘How could you do that to me when you knew he was all I had?’

He swallowed. ‘Joey asked me not to. He was my friend. He saved my life.’

‘Friend – or more? I have to know.’ My voice was sharp.

Lucca shook his head. ‘Friend. But he was part of the school. He was . . . one of us.’

That drawing came into my head again. My clever, handsome brother – I hadn’t known him at all, had I? All this time I’d been blind to something right in front of my eyes. ‘Degenerate’ – that’s what Fitzpatrick had said about Joey. Now I knew why, and The Lady too, she’d called him a murderer. I sat up.

‘What happened next – after you both jumped?’

Lucca sighed. ‘I’m not sure what happened immediately after the fire. I was taken to a house in London and Joey cared for me. I was badly burned. This . . .’, he gestured to his face, ‘. . . is what happened just before your brother pushed me through the window. My hair was burned into my skin. He told a doctor that it was an accident with an oil lamp. I was dead to the world for days and there was fever too. I nearly died. Sometimes I wish I had.’

He put his hand to his face and followed the lumps of flesh from his eye to his nose and lips. ‘It took months for the wounds to heal and the flesh to grow back. I am a ruin now. It is my punishment.’

I squeezed his hand. ‘It wasn’t you who lit the fire, was it? And as for punishment, as far as I can tell someone was looking out for you that night. That’s when you came to us at The Gaudy, wasn’t it? When you was healed up again?’

Lucca nodded. ‘Joey – he found me a place. He did it for you, Fannella, because he knew he was going away. He asked me to look after you.’

I stared up at him. ‘Going where? If he knew he was going away why didn’t he take me with him?’

Lucca was careful not to look at me. ‘Many of the boys who died in the fire were the property of the Barons. There are houses across London where gentlemen seek singular entertainment. And those houses are valuable. It was in everyone’s interest to keep the events of that night secret, but all the same the Barons wanted a name. Someone let it be known that Joey had started that fire. Your brother’s life was in danger. He had to disappear and he asked The Lady to help him.’

I dropped Lucca’s hand and pulled my hair back from my face, knotting it at the nape of my neck. A dull throb was beginning at my temples. ‘But why would she do that? Why would he ask
her
?’

Lucca shrugged. ‘Because, as you know, he was already in her pay. The Barons always look after their own. It’s possible The Lady used him as a pawn in some game we couldn’t even begin to guess at. All I know is that he made a bargain with her and I promised that when he went away I would take his place and care for you. I owed him my life. It was a debt, and I have been happy to pay it, Fannella, because you became my friend . . . No, that’s not right – you became my sister.’

I tried to smile, but the dull pain in my head was growing sharper. There was something else here too, something that Lucca wasn’t telling me.

Another wooden piece slotted into place, but I had to hear it.

‘Who was it that fingered Joey for the fire, Lucca?’

He pulled at a stray loop of wool in the rug. When he answered his voice was flat. ‘You remember I told you that Verdin exchanged Giacomo for a new lover?’

My heart felt like a stone. I nodded.

‘It was Joey. He could pass, you see, in society and that made Verdin feel safe.’

The pain was spearing through my left eye now and up into my forehead.

‘But you and that Giacomo – with your accents you two could pass for rich folk anywhere in the right clothes. You speak lovely. None of us could tell if you were a lord or a pauper, Lucca.’

Now, Joey was a good actor, I thought to myself, and he could pick up any lingo quicker than a tooler could pick a pocket, but he’d give himself away somehow.

‘You’d never take my brother for a real toff, Lucca.’

The room was suddenly so silent that if that mouse in the wall had taken a breath, I’d’ve heard it.

‘But you might take him for a girl – for a woman? And Sir Richard did – often. Your brother was beautiful and the two of them fooled society. For Joey it was a game, for Verdin I think it was more. He paid well and bought him clothes even finer than the ones he gave to Giacomo. In some twisted way Verdin loved your brother. He trusted him enough to tell him about Giacomo’s attempt to blackmail him and then he told him about his own plans to wipe every dangerous trace of the special school from the face of the earth so that he could never be blackmailed again.

‘He wanted to begin a new life – a public life – with your brother, but he could not allow anyone who knew the truth to live. That’s why Joey was there that evening. He wanted to stop it – to save us all. Apart from Joey, I was the only one who lived. I don’t think Verdin realised that.’

Lucca stood up and went over to the window. The morning sun showed up the red shades in his dark hair. When he continued, he kept his back to me.

‘Joey knew of his guilt and what’s more he despised him. Verdin had to make sure he would never betray him, Kitty. What better way to kill your brother than to turn every Baron in London against him?’

I remembered that night again when I woke up and Joey was sitting on the floor by the door crying as he watched me in the dark.

The last little bits of jigsaw bumped into place and the picture they formed was ugly. I don’t mean I thought of Joey or Lucca as ugly – they could never be that to me. No, the thought of Sir Richard Verdin running his flint-grey eyes over the bodies of boys who were little more than children and then murdering them to keep his public face as clean as his private soul was filthy made me want to tear him to pieces with my bare hands until all that was left of him was his shrivelled black heart.

I went over to the window and stood next to Lucca. ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this earlier?’

‘I couldn’t. I promised Joey that I would keep his secret. He made me swear an oath . . . he didn’t want you to despise him.’

He looked at me now. ‘And he did it to keep you safe too. I didn’t even know he had a sister until he brought me here to Paradise.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

Lucca shook his head. ‘The Lady dealt with him. She spirited him away.’

‘Just like the girls from the halls?’ I laughed bitterly. ‘Before I came to you I went to see her last night with
more
,
just like she wanted, but it still wasn’t enough. I’m going to have to go and fetch them back. I reckon that’s the only thing that will satisfy her.’

He was quiet for a moment and his eye glinted in the dawn light. ‘Fetch them back from where? You know where they are, don’t you?’

The sun was showing clear in the narrow gap between the houses at the end of the street. You could see a glimmering stripe of the river from here and it seemed to shine with that mysterious silver-gilt light the unknown artist used in the sky above
The Cinnabar Girls
.

Only I was certain who he was now.
Infettato
– that was the word Lucca had used about Giacomo, wasn’t it? It had a lovely sound in his language, but then he’d explained what he meant by it – infection. This was a sick business all right.