Little Bones (17 page)

The apothecary smiled.

Jane hesitated. ‘I have a friend who’s very sick,’ she said, looking not at the apothecary’s face, but at the counter. ‘It’s his breathing. The only thing is, sir, they
haven’t
any money. I wondered if you could give me some advice.’

‘There are many kinds of breathing problems,’ he said. ‘Sit down, Miss Stretch, and I’ll see what I can do.’

‘You’ll help, sir? Really?’

Reaching into a drawer, the apothecary pulled out a chart showing a picture of the lungs and all the complicated tubing. ‘Is he coughing?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

Running his finger down the pale pink windpipe, the Frenchman told Jane there were a dozen different coughs, some caused by irritations, such as coal dust, or a blockage. Or some were part of a threatening disease. ‘We will have to take a chance,’ he said, pulling out a beaker. ‘We will do what we can.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

He pursed his lips and shrugged. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘it’s nothing.’

Susannah was waiting for Jane at the Cock. Mr Beam’s Iris was sitting in the sunshine with a glass of milk stout. ‘I’ll look after your sign,’ she told them. ‘It might give my poor battered soul some nourishment.’

‘I can’t believe that Frenchie gave you something for nothing,’ said Susannah, as they walked into the depths of Seven Dials. ‘I mean, whoever would have thought it of a foreigner?’

The house they stopped at looked decrepit. ‘Home sweet home,’ said Susannah, stepping into a room so dark Jane had to squint to see anything.

‘I’ve brought medicine,’ Susannah told a moving heap of blankets which turned into her mother. ‘And he didn’t charge a penny for it.’

‘Give it here,’ the woman grunted, grabbing at the bottle. ‘Let me smell it. It might be arsenic for all we know.’

‘It came from a very good chemist.’

‘Did it now?’ The woman unplugged the bottle, sniffing long and hard. ‘Well it smells like medicine all right, but so did those drops we bought from the street doctor, and they made him worse.’

‘We’ll have to try it,’ said Susannah, pulling Jane by the arm. ‘Come upstairs with me. If he opens his eyes he might be glad to see you.’

Ned was lying on an assortment of old clothes and blankets. Jane could see an old sailor’s coat and a torn patchwork quilt. ‘You have a visitor,’ said Susannah. ‘And medicine from a real doctor’s chemist.’

‘Is the doctor here?’ he said. ‘Did he come?’

‘No, but he sent you this bottle, and you must take it now, because it’s a very good mixture and will help you.’

Ned began to cough. When the rattling subsided, Susannah put the bottle to his lips.

‘Tastes terrible.’

‘It’s supposed to.’

‘Who’s here?’

‘Jane.’

‘Jane?’ He looked surprised. ‘How you doing, cripple?’

‘Better than you,’ she said.

He laughed then started coughing. Susannah handed him a cup of water. ‘Jane got you the medicine,’ she said.

‘I might have known. It’s foul.’

‘Don’t be ungrateful.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It’s delicious. Like drinking sweet honey, it is.’

As she left, Jane told herself the medicine would have to make him better. The apothecary was clever. He was almost as good as a doctor. He knew about illness. He had rows of framed certificates. She pictured Ned when he was better. He would tap out tunes with his fingernails. His favourite comic song was about a girl stepping out with a monkey.

‘Have you heard it?’ he’d said. ‘There’s a part where the girl takes the monkey to the barber’s for a shave – it kills me every time.’

‘Does the monkey speak?’ she’d said. ‘Does the monkey know what the girl is saying?’

‘Jane, Jane, Jane!’ he’d laughed, shaking his head and clapping her on the shoulder. ‘It’s a song. It’s just a funny song. I mean, what girl on earth would step out with a monkey?’

Of course Jane had laughed with him. But then she thought about herself. She wondered if even a monkey would refuse to hold her miniature hand. London was a city full of cripples. They were everywhere. She had once counted more than twenty-five on Drury Lane alone. And though she usually turned her head when she saw another poor specimen trying to make their way down the street, occasionally she studied them. She looked at their hair. Their clothes. Were they laughing? Happy? Did they wear a wedding ring?

THE DAY THE
Stretches moved above the locksmith’s, Arthur was in an optimistic mood. He had been asked by the landlord of the Kestrel to sing at his mother’s birthday party. ‘She’s from Cork,’ Arthur told the girls, who were amazed to find he’d hired a cart for the removal. ‘She wants to hear plenty of Irish ballads.’

‘From an Englishman?’ said Agnes.

The locksmith’s was a large corner establishment. When the cart pulled up, the locksmith’s wife, with two small boys in tow, came out to welcome the family. Ivy disliked her on sight. ‘What was that woman wearing?’ she said later. ‘A flag?’

Arthur soon left the unpacking. He was going to a poker game.

‘Well, remember where you live,’ Ivy warned him. ‘Perhaps I should tie your new address around your neck. Or perhaps I should let you get lost.’

‘I’m not a parcel,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I won’t be drinking. I’ll need all my wits for the game.’

Ivy was trying to find her saucepans when the locksmith’s wife came knocking on their door. She wondered if they’d like to step downstairs for a nice cup of tea.

‘My husband is out,’ said Ivy. ‘He has business to attend to.’

‘Then you and the girls must come. I’ve made a jam tart.’

Agnes sprang up. ‘We like jam tart,’ she said.

They were led into the shop. Jane was enthralled. Above their heads keys of all shapes and sizes hung in fat metal bunches. Shelves were filled with locks, tools and yet more keys. Some were minuscule. One was the size of Jane’s arm.

‘Hello, Ma.’ A boy in a thick blue apron stood behind a counter. He stared at Jane with more than a little curiosity, his mouth gaping, until his mother shot him a look and his jaw snapped shut.

They passed through a narrow curtained doorway and found themselves in a backroom. A fire was blazing. The locksmith was holding court with some unsavoury-looking characters.

‘Meet our new lodgers,’ said the locksmith’s wife. ‘This is my husband, Mr Baylis.’

Mr Baylis, wearing a leather apron and a squashed black hat, nodded, as did his friends. ‘Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,’ said Ivy, with a sour expression.

In the kitchen, Mrs Baylis busied herself with the tea, while the family sat at the table and eyed up the raspberry jam tart. Jane looked around. The kitchen was large. She liked the jelly moulds, clinging onto the wall like crustaceans. Jars of rice and tapioca stood
between
jugs of yet more keys. Some of them looked rusty.

‘You do have a lot of keys,’ said Jane.

Mrs Baylis laughed. ‘Oh, I’m used to them now,’ she said, reaching for the tea caddy. ‘My father-in-law was a street locksmith, so there’s always been keys in the house. And they don’t just open things. Keys have all sorts of different uses.’

‘Like what?’ said Ivy, narrowing her eyes.

Cutting the tart into four oozing slices, Mrs Baylis told them that keys came in handy when babies were teething, or for curing the hiccoughs. She had used them as weights in her curtains and inside the hems of her dresses. ‘Though you do tend to rattle now and then.’ Her boys had spent hours tracing their shapes and colouring them in. ‘A strange but lovely man called Walsh buys them by the dozen. He’s an artist and he uses them in his pictures.’

‘Well, now I’ve heard it all!’ said Ivy, helping herself to the largest slice of tart.

Mrs Baylis asked them about their previous abode, and Ivy told her the truth. Their landlord had come into some money. He no longer wanted lodgers cluttering up his house. ‘It was a poky place,’ she sniffed. ‘We shan’t miss it for a minute.’

As they ate the tart and drank their tea, the boys reappeared, their eyes widening when they saw the empty plate. Jane wiped the crumbs from her chin. A few bitter seeds had stuck like bits of chaff between her teeth.

‘Here are my boys,’ said Mrs Baylis, ruffling the nearest one’s hair. ‘Oswald and Frankie. I also have
Dicky
, but he’s working in the shop. Dicky’s the eldest, he’s ten.’

‘Please can I have sixpence?’ asked Oswald, looking very put out.

‘And why do you need a sixpence?’ asked his mother.

‘Because I’m very hungry, and that’s the price of a tart.’

Ivy belched. Jane could feel herself blushing and Agnes started picking at her fingernails.

Arthur lost the poker game. He lost the money in his wallet, his leather belt with the fancy steel buckle, and a small enamelled pillbox that had once belonged to his aunt. He could not believe his bad luck. The next day, the birthday party was cancelled. The landlord’s mother had run off with a drayman. For days Arthur had been practising ‘The Old Maid in the Garret’ and ‘Rose of Tralee’. He had promised the girls he would bring home a selection of party food wrapped in a handkerchief. He had imagined the weight of his pockets, loaded down with tips.

‘I told him that I’d sing anyway,’ Arthur told them. ‘But he was having none of it.’

For days the girls watched their father pacing aimlessly around the room. He sat in the armchair circling his ankles – first one way, and then the other. He made intricate patterns with his nail clippings.

Eventually, Ivy told her husband to get off his back side. Tavern-singing could not be classed as employment. It was pin money. And there was always the temptation of spending what few coins he did get at the bar.

‘You can do other things,’ she said.

‘Like what?’

‘You’ve got two arms, haven’t you? You could sweep. Deliver coal. Pack boxes. There are a hundred jobs you could do. A thousand!’

‘But I like singing.’

‘And I like dancing a polka, but I have to serve coffee instead.’ Ivy, now in full throttle, told Arthur to take a leaf from their daughter’s book. Wasn’t he ashamed? Agnes busied herself with sewing and mending. Mrs Baylis had given her a blouse to alter. The woman in the haberdasher’s said she could put a card in her window for halfpence a week.

‘Even Jane makes herself useful,’ said Ivy. After cleaning the room, Jane sometimes ran errands for Miss Casey, the old spinster who lived above the meat shop. She posted her letters (mostly to a niece in Southampton), collected her groceries and arranged them inside her cupboards. Miss Casey had a frugal existence. From what Jane could gather, she lived on canned pilchards and brown bread and butter.

‘Well,’ sighed Ivy, pulling off her boots. ‘I’ll say this for you. At least you’re not a hard-hearted criminal, like those sitting downstairs.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Arthur. ‘Criminals?’

Ivy raised her eyebrows. She folded her arms. ‘I have seen their brutish faces. The eager way they wait for the keys to be filed. You’re not telling me those ruffian friends of our landlord are simply gentlemen who are locked outside their homes?’

‘Burglars?’ said Arthur.

‘I’m saying nothing,’ said Ivy.

Later, Arthur managed to rouse himself. Peeling off his shirt, he pressed a bar of wet soap across his upper body. He pulled a comb through his hair. Then he polished his boots.

‘Where are you off to, Pa?’ asked Agnes, looking up from her stitching.

‘I am going to venture into the nearest, and so far unexplored taverns,’ he told them. ‘And before you say a word, I am going into these busy establishments to show my face. To let them know I am a neighbour and on the lookout for employment.’

‘God give me strength,’ Ivy rolled her eyes.

Arthur returned at twenty past midnight with money in his pocket, a scrappy piece of paper, and a tin that had once held Pontefract cakes. Ivy and Agnes were sleeping but Jane had seen her father trying to hide the tin behind the linen basket. As soon as he fell asleep (and he was out for the count in less than five minutes), she had found it. The tin was wrapped in a crushed grey stocking. The scrappy piece of paper was stuffed inside the toe. She read it.
77 Pilkington Terrace. Ivan Young (Travel Consultant) 6 Poole Road. 43 Southwark Bridge Road
. She shook the tin. There was something inside, but the lid had rusted and she couldn’t prise it open. It rattled. Small liquorice cakes didn’t rattle.

The tin was never mentioned. Arthur explained he had let it be known in the Coach and Horses, the Black Knight and the King’s Arms that he was available and looking for any kind of work. He was going to see a man that afternoon. The man had a junk yard, and though slightly inebriated when they
talked
, he had expressed an interest in hiring someone who could collect the junk, or even seek it out.

‘You mean from poor grieving widows and the like?’ said Agnes.

‘I can see you with junk,’ Ivy told him.

Three hours later, Arthur returned to the room with a large bottle of gin. The junk man was brainless. A cheat. He had made out that Arthur was a stranger when only the previous night he had stood him three drinks.

‘I wouldn’t work for that po-faced liar if he begged me,’ he said, pulling the cork from the bottle.

‘So what now?’ said Ivy.

‘Don’t you worry, my sweet,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose. ‘I have other things up my sleeve.’

Leaving the grocer’s (more pilchards), Jane saw her father shaking his head and laughing with the locksmith. It was the beginning of winter and pools of sooty leaves were clinging to the pavement. When her father bent to remove a particularly irksome piece of foliage from his trousers, Jane could see something shifting in his hand. It was the tin he had hidden in the stocking. By now, the locksmith was patting Arthur’s elbow and leading him into the shop. The door closed behind them with a clang.

With her basket over her arm, Jane walked towards the locksmith’s. The shop was crammed with open safes, giant keys and other metal objects. Squinting, she tried to see through the shadows, squealing when a thin white cat darted from the open doors of a cabinet.
Jane
moved away. She couldn’t see her father and Miss Casey would be waiting for her fish.