Sparrow Falling (11 page)

“He likes it when they can’t pay up, miss. Makes him happy, that does. Like I said, he’s a bad ’un.”

“You’re a good boy, Bat.”

“Thank you, miss.”

“You stay away from them fellas.”

“Oh, I will, miss. Less they wants the crossing, cos that’s me job, that is.”

“Yeah, I know. All right, Bat.” She felt an odd impulse to say, “Be good,” but being good had never done her any favours, not when she was out on the streets. There was one other thing she could do for him, though. “Here, Bat. One of them boys comes after your broom again, I can show you something to put ’em off, you want to see?”

“What?” He was wary again, clutching his broom close to his chest.

She put her hands over his. They looked very clean by comparison, and she felt that sense of dislocation again. “You hold it like this, so they can’t grab it so easy. Then, one of ’em comes at you, you jab it like this – see? That’ll wind ’em proper, and you can get away. Or give ’em a bit more to remember you by, if you’ve a mind – but getting away’s usually better.”

“That’s smart, that is. Show me again?”

She showed him twice more. She remembered that much from her Bartitsu lessons, and a broom was as good a weapon as any. “You could see if you can find someone to shave a coupla feet off the end, and you’ll get by easier, and you can still jab with it – better, even.”

“I dunno about that, miss. It makes the ladies go a bit soft, seeing me with this broom.”

He gave her that gappy grin again and she grinned back, feeling a little better and glad to give him something more than a few coins – the move would last him longer than they would, especially if he had a chance to grow a bit.

She made her way to the miserable collapsing heap of a house.

J
UICY
P
EG PROVED
to be at home, if you could call her room ‘home.’ She flung open the door of a tiny little cupboard of a place, which Juicy Peg filled like a bunch of big, blowsy flowers jammed into a small, ugly vase. She was a full-figured woman, wearing a pink sateen wrap thrown over scarlet corsets. With her bright ginger hair, the combination was startling, but cheerful.

Peg looked Evvie up and down. “You ain’t my usual sort of customer,” she said, “but I’m accomodatin’. Come in.”

“I ain’t here for wapping, love,” Evvie said. She felt perfectly at home, instantly; the room was crammed with cheap colourful junk – brightly painted fairground china, luridly dyed shawls and artificial flowers. A scrapbook and a pot of glue lay on the small rickety table. Red-cheeked cherubs frolicked over its pages among finely-dressed children. More cherubs were paused in flight across the table top, ready to be pasted in. A boy doll in a sailor suit perched on a chair, the crisp whiteness of his jacket startling against the grimy cushions. Crammed among the gimcrackery were dozens of brightly-tinted picture postcards of elaborately dressed children. There were damp stockings and undergarments hanging off the furniture. It smelled of sausages and Dr Mackenzie’s Arsenical Soap and cheap Mille Fleurs perfume and sex, and, of course, of sewage. Everywhere around here smelled of sewage.

“What you want then?” said Juicy Peg. “I’m about to have me breakfast.”

“Don’t mind me.”

“If Viper sent you...”

“He didn’t. I wanta ask you about him.”

The sausages were steaming in a greasy wrapper. Peg unfolded it and picked a sausage out, delicately, with the tips of her fingers. “What about him?”

“He’s the landlord, right?”

“So?”

“So... I heard maybe he isn’t on the up and up.”

Peg opened her mouth, closed it on a big bite of sausage, and chewed, eyeing Evvie thoughtfully. Eventually she swallowed. “This room,” she said, gesturing with the remaining sausage, “it en’t much, but it’s what I got, and it’s no worse than some. Better’n others, ’cos I got it to meself, and my customers likes a bit of privacy. I can charge more. So I can’t afford to be on outs with the V... Mr Stug, right?”

There was a porcelain dog with an expression of sneering idiocy and a dusty ruff around its neck staring down at Evvie from the grimy mantel. She looked at it while she considered. “All right,” she said. “I know. I ain’t planning to make trouble and I ain’t naming no names. Anything I hear, I didn’t hear off of you.”

“S’all very well,” said Peg, “but how do I know?”

Evvie let out a small sigh. It was partly genuine, too – after talking to Bat and seeing the room, it was almost too easy to guess where Peg’s lever was.

“I think,” she said, “he’s up to no good – and it’s something to do with children.”

Peg wrapped her arms around herself, as though she was cold. “Here,” she said, “you fancy a drop of porter? I always has a drop of porter with me breakfast.”

“All right.” Evvie hated porter.

Peg poured the dark stuff into two mugs, both chipped. She leaned forward confidentially, enveloping Evvie in the smells of sweat and cheap perfume.

“Every time he comes here, him or Bowler, there’s something bad happens. Every time.”

“Some people are like that,” Evvie said.

“But it’s children. Always the children. Now me, I ain’t got none, I caught pregnant once and it ended bad, I near died of it, but I likes the little ’uns.” For a moment her jolly face drooped mournfully and she looked old, something old and lonely left out in the sun too long and drying up. “But anyways, the Viper comes round – normally he doesn’t want his fancy self carrying our stink, so he sends Bowler, who’s as bad, or worse. But every now and then round he comes, and I swear, day later or two, something happens to one of the children. Mrs Pritchard’s boy died of a fever, the
very next day
, and he hadn’t even been that sick. And the Viper promised work for the Glucks’ boy but the lad never wrote nor come home, and it just about broke Gluck’s heart. He was a good, likely boy – handsome as the day, and the hope of that family, he was. There was a girl found at the foot of the stairs, with her neck broke, and another boy just faded away, like he had the consumption but he never even coughed, just faded.

“And last time, it was the Stones’ girl. Just disappeared. Lovely little thing, she was, like a little daisy, all white and gold, used to make me think of when I was a girl in the country, just looking at her. But the day after Stug’s visit, she disappeared. And Bat... he’s the sweeper boy, he told me he sworn he saw the Viper’s carriage, that night. Stone’s never been the same. I mean, he wasn’t never what you’d call a good man, but he got his head out the bottle now and again and got work, and he never used to baste that poor woman so bad. I thought maybe I should go and look, you know, around one of the bawdy-houses, but...” She looked down at her hands, shiny with sausage-grease. “I couldn’t bear it, I can’t see the little ’uns like that. ’Sides, there’s so many of ’em. I din’t know where to start. But there’s one not a mile from here.”

“Why would he take her there? S’not like he needs the money.”

“Because he’s evil, that’s why,” Peg said. “He’s the devil, and that Bowler, he’s the devil’s red right hand, he is.” She shuddered, and pulled her pink wrap tighter. “I shoulda gone,” she said, turning away. “I shoulda gone looking but I’m just a scared old whore. I’m scared of Viper and Bowler and the Peelers and I’m scared of what I’da seen, in those places.”

“You wasn’t the one took ’em,” Evvie said.
If anyone did.
“’Sides, if they were in one of those places, he’d take ’em further away, not close by where they could run home. You wouldn’t’a seen ’em anyway.”

“Poor little things,” Peg said, and snuffled, and picked up her porter. “Poor little things.”

Children died of fever all the time, there was nothing new in that. When Eveline was at Ma Pether’s, in the surrounding rookery a week without a death or two was a rare one, and sometimes, they went two and three in a day, from the typhoid or the whooping cough or some new thing that came in with the ships.

Children fell downstairs. Sometimes children fell downstairs because a parent had had enough, because there was too much misery and not enough money and too much gin and not enough hope.

These were the rookeries. Children died in their hundreds; or just disappeared into the chaffering crowds of mites who swarmed the rooftops and the parks and the alleys.

But there was something. Something in what Peg had said that niggled her.

She thought of Bat and his dreadful boots. She’d worn boots like that herself. Now her feet were cased in neat, laced boots – that
fit,
and kept her feet dry. She wondered how many people, like Stug, knew what it was like to be so grateful for a decent pair of boots... and why was she thinking of boots, and feet, and shoes... Charlotte’s little wet feet in the snow....

A child’s shoe. A slum-child’s shoe in a place where no such thing had any right to be.

Under a carved chest, in an office, miles away from here.

She felt a chill go through her despite the warm coat and thick stockings she would once have had to steal for.

Oh, Eveline, what have you stumbled into?

Maybe it was nothing, maybe it was just coincidence. Shoes got everywhere, you saw them on railway embankments and the tops of walls and who knows where – though if there were a slum-child about, they didn’t stay there long. Shoes were precious.

So such a child wouldn’t voluntarily leave a shoe behind.

She’d come meaning to check Stug out, and maybe had got more than she bargained for.

What was he up to? And did she want to know?

She’d meant – she’d thought – that perhaps she could do something, once she was safe, and established, and had money and a respectable name. That maybe she could do something for the people who had no-one else fighting their corner.

But she wasn’t safe yet. And there was Mama, and Beth – who was bright, but out here would be completely helpless. And the others she had taken on and promised to protect.

She could feel the weight of the slum all around her, a great lump of heavy, seeping, stinking darkness.

“So,” Peg’s voice broke into her reverie. “If that’s all...”

“No. Do us a favour?”

“Maybe.”

“All I want is you should tell me when either of ’em turns up next, that’s all. Get us a message. Send... I dunno, send Bat.”

Juicy Peg looked at Eveline over the rim of her mug. “Why’d I do that, then?”

“’Cos if you’re right, he’s a bad man, and if I can find out what he’s up to, maybe I can do something.”

“You? What are you, the Peelers? Even if you was, you couldn’t get Bowler. He’s snake-slippy, he is.”

“Maybe he is. And maybe I’m the snake-charmer.”

“That’s all very well but if he finds out I peached, I’ll be in an alley with a red smile round me neck soon’s winking, like them poor girls over Whitechapel.”

“I’m not going to let on, what d’you think I am?”

Peg scowled. “And what about Bat? I’m not getting that innocent in trouble with Bowler, not for any money, I’m not.”

“What makes you think Bowler’d know anything about Bat being in it? All he’s gonna be doing is running an errand for a sixpence, like as he might do any time.”

“He won’t leave his crossing, anyroad.”

“Find another, then – there’s enough little ’uns round here’d do it for a penny or two. Or someone else, not little. But it’s
about
the little ’uns, Peg. All of ’em. He’s up to something with ’em, I know it. But if you’re too scared to do anything, even without a ha’porth of risk to yourself, I suppose I’d better find someone as actually
cares
about the poor innocents, instead of just rambling on all pious, and doing nothing.”

Peg slammed her mug down and started yanking still-damp stockings from the bedrail, shaking them like a terrier with a rat, and moving them to the back of the chair, for no good reason Eveline could see.

Eveline waited her out. She’d set her crowbar, now to see whether she’d applied enough pressure to wheedle the window up.

“All right!” Peg burst out. “All right. And if Bowler strangles the pair of us and throws us in the Thames I hope you’ll be properly remorseful.”

B
AT WAS NOWHERE
in sight when Evvie left, scurrying away from the slum as though it might reach out long filthy fingers and grab her back.

It wasn’t until she was nearer the school, with fields in sight, that her shoulders unhunched and her pace slowed.

Now what? She’d given Peg the address to send a message, but it might lead to nothing.

She would have to talk to Liu... but what if he wasn’t there, what if she’d annoyed him so much he’d taken off?

She bit at her nails, made herself stop.
Think, Evvie.

Stug had promised her the job. She’d take it, and find out more, and when she had enough information, she’d do something. What, she had no idea.

The Sparrow School

“M
RS
S
PARROW
?”

It took Madeleine a moment before she turned around, with a screwdriver in her hand. “Oh, Beth dear.” She gave a sad smile. “I do
forget,
you know.”

“I know.” Beth smiled back. “I don’t know what I’d do if I had to change my name. I forget things enough as it is.”

“Aren’t
you
worried someone will come looking for you?”

Beth shrugged. “Once I was at the school my mother never cared to come looking, and my father hadn’t any interest except to keep me out of the way. I don’t know what the school will tell her, and I don’t care much –
they
don’t know
where
I am and no-one else cares
who
I am.”

“That sounds dreadfully lonely.”

“Oh, no, ma’am. I was. At the school, and before. But not since I met Evvie.”

“I’m very pleased to hear it. Beth, did you want me for something?”

“Oh! Oh, yes, I’m sorry. There’s a gentleman. A Mr Thring? He said you had an appointment?”

Madeleine’s hands flew to her mouth. “I forgot! Oh, dear... and he’s come all this way... Beth, please, would you arrange some tea, have them bring it here, show him through. Oh, I meant to have this ready... and this...” She started to adjust the device in front of her, a beautiful creation of brass and cherry wood, with a spiral metal groove set into its upper surface. A bronze ball-bearing sat in the centre of the spiral, quivering slightly.