Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders (3 page)

The feathers on the violent purple tippet that was wrapped tight around Jenny Pierce’s throat quivered as she breathed out.

Now, Jenny had a face on her like a flat iron most days of the week, but today the way her heavy jaw was working – all clenched and twitching at the sides – made her look like a boxer in a frock. She was certainly spoiling for a round.

Jenny leaned back against the door, folded her arms and flicked her eyes around the room. She snorted and the cheap feathers under her chin danced about again. ‘And you got a fire in here too, Kitty. Aren’t we just the lucky little lady.’

Peggy jumped up.

‘If you haven’t got something pleasant to say to Kitty, I’d bugger off, if I was you.’

She’d been kneeling behind me pulling hard at the ribbons that made the spangled bodice dig so tight into my waist that the first time I’d practised in it I’d fainted. Luckily I’d only been five foot off the ground at the time.

‘You know very well why she’s got a fire in here, Jenny Pierce. If you was going to dangle over the heads of the punters and do the things she’s got to do tonight you’d want a bit of heat in your bones too.’ Peggy knelt again and pulled the ribbons tighter. I gasped. ‘Sorry, Kitty, but Fitzy was most specific about how he wants you to look tonight – fragile, as if a man could snap you in two with his bare hands, he said.’ She shuddered before adding softly, ‘The old pervert.’

I took a deep breath, leaned forward and gripped the back of the chair in front of me as Peggy pulled harder.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You can use your foot too if it helps, we wouldn’t want to disappoint him, would we?’

I wasn’t being sarcastic. I might not have been Fitzpatrick’s type, but, unfortunately, Peggy, with her abundant figure and thick dark curls, was. He and Mrs C had a longstanding arrangement, but that didn’t stop him walking his dog elsewhere, if you get my meaning – or trying to, leastways. When he was soused, he’d corner Peggy in some dark corner, start pawing at her and then turn rough when nothing happened. A couple of times she’d come to The Gaudy with a black eye or a welt as big as a boot print blooming across her shoulders. We borrowed Mrs C’s paint box and tried to disguise the bruises.

Peggy didn’t want her Danny to find out. He’s a decent lad, but he’s got a temper on him too and if he knew what Fitzy had done to his girl he wouldn’t think twice about taking him on, and that wouldn’t have done anyone any good. Even though Fitzy was twice Dan’s age and looked like a badly stuffed couch, he could still throw a punch that would floor a Dutchman. I’d seen him deal with parties of great tall Hollanders, fresh off the barges and ripe on the gin – and if I was to lay a bet on the outcome of one of those encounters I know where I’d put my money.

I suppose it’s the way of things that once you’ve learned to handle yourself on the streets the moves are grained into your head like the choreography of a chorus dance, or like my routine up in the cage. You don’t have to think about it, your muscles just know what to do. Of occasion when I watched Fitzy laying one on a soused shipmate I’d get a glimpse of what he must have been. Tell truth, under all that flesh he might even have been Peggy’s type – once.

But now she had big Danny Tewson and she was forever telling me that one day soon the pair of them would be packing their things and getting out of Paradise. It was hard to see how that was going to happen. I liked Danny, he was good for Peggy and he was one of the best of the hands in the halls, but Lucca said that if you wrote his gambling debts on separate pages and laid them out in a row you could walk on them from the front steps of The Gaudy down to Kidney Stairs on the river – and then have a good long think about throwing yourself in.

I never mentioned it to Peggy. We was respectful of each other’s secrets. It was none of my business what her man got up to, and if she was worried, she never talked about it to me. She was more concerned about keeping Danny in the dark about Fitzy’s attentions and I can’t say I blamed her.

One time it happened when Peggy was down to do a ‘Sylvan Interlude’ with two other girls. Not having been further than Lambeth, I can’t say as I’ve seen many woodland nymphs disported with joy, but I’m sure they wear a lot more than the flimsy bits of stuff that passed for a costume. Anyway, she couldn’t go on that evening because there was a purple mark the shape of a man’s hand – fingers and all – around her throat. I pinned a bit of cloth about her shoulders up to her ears and made her go home. Then I told Dan she’d caught a bad chill and couldn’t speak, which was half true.

Don’t run away with the wrong idea about Peggy. She wasn’t a hard one like Jenny Pierce. Quite the opposite, in fact. Peggy was all warm and comforting, and she fussed over little Alice like a mother. Thinking about it, that’s probably what old Fitzy particularly liked about her. My guess is she reminded him of Mrs Conway in her better days – when the two of them was both young and the future was all moonlight and roses. And that made him angry too.

No, Peggy was my friend and the way things had been going in the halls since word had got out about my new act, I was glad of her more than ever. I hadn’t told her why Fitzpatrick had selected me to be his cagebird, but Peg was no fool. She knew there was something going on and she was waiting for me to tell her in my own good time.

‘Hard as you like. Pull again, I’m ready.’ I braced myself against the chair and took another deep breath.

Jenny sniffed. She was still leaning against the door. ‘Wants you to look fragile, does he? Like something that might smash itself into little tiny pieces if it plummets to the ground?’ Her eyes glinted with malice and a nasty smile twitched the corners of her mouth.

Peggy stood up again; she still had the bodice ribbons tight in her hands and I jerked up and away from the chair as she moved.

‘You’ve always been a piece of work, Jenny, but this beats all. Would you really want to swap places with Kitty tonight? Would you want to hang up there in that bleedin’ thing? It might be covered in all them pretty ribbons and twinkling jewels, but I’ll tell you what it is, it’s a death trap without so much as a net or a rope to save you when . . . if . . .’

Peggy faltered and her grip on the ribbons slackened. ‘Sorry, Kitty, I didn’t mean . . .’

The room was silent for a moment except for the sound of the little fire crackling away in the grate. It was most important that I was kept warm before a performance – Madame Celeste had said so.

For the last week or so, even over Christmas, which didn’t mean much to me anyway, I’d spent every waking hour in Madame Celeste’s cavernous attic learning how to use the trapeze that had made her a star way back when Fitzy started out as a circus hand in Ireland. The old girl drank like a navvy and to look at her now you wouldn’t think that someone of such prodigious corpulence could ever have hauled her body up the steps of a tavern, let alone to the platform of a flying trapeze a hundred foot up in the air. But she didn’t half know her stuff.

Fitzy said she’d been the most dazzling aerial artiste Dublin had ever clapped eyes on, and the faded, curling circus bills that decorated the shabby stairwell leading up to her attic showed a lithe and beautiful young woman soaring through the air like a painted angel.

Now she was a mound of flesh, draped in what looked like the shredded remnants of some tasselled parlour curtains. Only her glittering jet eyes and the unlikely confection of thick black hair piled up on top of her head hinted at the likelihood of some long-ago connection to the flying girl on the stairwell.

The first thing to say is that Madame Celeste’s attic was vast. It must have run across five houses. When I pushed open the little door at the top of the stairs I wasn’t expecting there to be so much space in front of me of a sudden – and above me too. It was like one of them optical illusions of Swami Jonah’s.  He had a magic box that was bigger on the inside than it had any right to be if you looked at it from the outside. He told me it was done with mirrors. Madame Celeste had a mirror, twelve foot high it was, propped up against the wall on the left. There should have been at least one more floor above us, but that had been removed so that I could see the network of timbers stretching out high overhead beneath the underside of the roof.

It reeked of sweat and cat piss in there. It was hardly surprising – when I stepped into the echoing room, a dozen pairs of yellow eyes turned to stare at me. The old girl swayed to her feet, clapped her hands and started to make shooing sounds. As the cats bolted for the stairs, Madame Celeste nodded to herself and patted the leather flask at her hip absent-mindedly – she didn’t seem entirely able to focus her eyes on me.

‘You’ll be Kitty then? Take off your shoes, now, and on you get.’

She gestured vaguely to the centre of the room. As she waved her hand I got a powerful whiff of armpit that hadn’t seen a soap bar since the death of Prince Albert.

I knew where she wanted me to go. The attic was a big bare space. A fire crackled in a corner hearth, a pile of empty gin bottles teetered against the far wall and a heap of dusty cushions littered the floor beneath a long rope swing that dangled from the rafters high above. I say swing, but it didn’t have a seat – just a narrow wooden bar that swayed gently about five foot in the air.

We started off low, but I still had to use a stool to climb up. At first Madame Celeste told me, ‘Lean back, kick out and go as high as you like, just for the hang of it.’

I won’t deny it was a lovely feeling as the ropes creaked and the swing rose higher and higher into the spaces between the beams. The old girl just watched me, occasionally taking a swig from the flask. After a few minutes she called out, ‘Enough of that. Bring it to a stand, Kitty.’

When the swing was still again, she told me to stand up on it. I scrambled up on the bar and watched as she hefted off to a corner and started to turn a wheel set into the wall. She breathed hard as she worked it. Instantly the ropes jerked and the swing began to rise, six, eight, twelve, fifteen, twenty foot up into the space between the rafters. I clung tight as I got higher and higher, trying not to think that the only thing between me and the floorboards – which were now perhaps thirty foot below – was a wooden bar no broader than an eel.

‘Good, Kitty.’ Madame Celeste wheezed from somewhere below and to the right. ‘You did well. You didn’t scream and you didn’t look down – always a fatal error. I think you might indeed have potential, as young Paddy says.’

My guts churned, but it wasn’t the height that did it. The image of Lady Ginger with her black-stained fingers and spider-trap mouth reared up into my mind. I had ‘
potential
’ – that’s what Fitzpatrick had told her too. And was that what he’d also said about Joey three years earlier?

The wheezing continued. ‘While you’re up there, I want you to do one simple thing to test your mettle. Sit down on the swing . . .’

I eased myself down to the bar – simple.

‘. . . good, that’s right. Now take your hands off the ropes and hold the sides of the seat, tightly. Don’t look down – eyes ahead.’

Not so simple. Cautiously I did as I was told. The swing wobbled and I shifted to balance myself – all the while keeping my eyes trained on a stain high on the wall opposite me. I could feel the muscles in my arms twitching. My back was damp with the sweat prickling under my clothes.

Joey. I’m doing this for Joey, I thought, gripping harder and concentrating on the brown stain on the wall, which was beginning to remind me of a skull.

‘Back straight, Kitty. Good.’ The old girl had caught her breath now. ‘Right,’ she continued, ‘I want you to keep hold until I say otherwise and then I want you to lean back and out from the swing so that only the backs of your knees and your hands are in contact with the wood.’

Joey.
I could feel his Christopher around my neck as I did as she instructed, wriggling backwards until my nancy was hanging out in mid-air and every muscle in my body pulled tight as a dockyard hawser. The ropes creaked and the swing began to judder and twist from left to right and back again.

‘And let go, now!’

The voice was suddenly sharp and loud. I took a gulp of air and felt my fingers slip from the wood. I arched back and felt the swing move forward. My knees tightened over the bar, my calf muscles clenched and my feet pointed downward so violently that the arches hurt. Instinctively I threw my arms out to the sides for balance. Pins fell from my hair and the tight blonde coil that wound round the back of my head came free, sweeping through the vast empty space below me.

Gradually the swing steadied and I found that I was laughing. I can’t say if it was the relief of not having dashed my brains out on the boards so far below or whether I was laughing out loud at the fact that ‘
young
’ Fitzy’s name was really Patrick Fitzpatrick.

‘Well, well, well.’ Madame Celeste was puffing again as she worked at the wheel and the swing began to lower. When my hair brushed the floorboards I pulled myself upright. The old girl was smiling – she seemed to be looking more direct at me now.

‘Yes. I think we can make a start with you. Take off your dress now and your shift too. We can’t have yards of fabric flapping around your legs and over your head, girl, it impedes the flow, destroys the line and is positively lethal. Try this for size.’

She belched, took a gulp from the leather flask and indicated a pile of dark material on the floor by the swing. It was a pair of breeches made of thin material – like a fine lady’s hose, only stronger – and a sort of camisole made of similar stuff. They were covered in cat hair. Once I’d got them on, Madame Celeste shuffled around me and nodded to herself.

‘You have my body, Kitty.’

I buttoned it as she continued. ‘Like me, you are a natural. As Paddy says, you have enormous potential.  It’s a mighty challenge, so it is, but I will make you the talk of London.’

A lump of coal in the little grate popped and spat a burning marble-sized fragment onto the rag carpet. Peggy kicked it back onto the hearth and glared at Jenny. ‘Haven’t you got somewhere to go? You’re all trussed up like a bangtail at a funeral, after all.’