The Gilded Lily (3 page)

Ella smiled at him. ‘Oh but we do. Charlie promised he’d help us fetch our bags to the Bear’s Head. We’ve no lodgings yet, see. And my sister, well, she’s only
thirteen and we’re fair worn out with travelling . . .’

Thirteen? Sadie took a sharp intake of breath and looked down at her feet, embarrassed. Ella knew full well she was way past her fifteenth birthday.

‘We’d be that grateful if you’d help us with our trunks.’ Ella looked up at the two men through her eyelashes.

‘Well, I . . .’ Charlie’s friend said, but Ella picked up a box and thrust it out towards him. Sadie saw the reluctance still on his face, but nevertheless his arms reached out
to take the box. Within a few minutes the two men were carrying the trunk between them, piled with all the boxes, leaving Ella and Sadie to follow behind with the handbaskets.

The Bear’s Head had a sign hanging half off, with a picture that must have once been a bear but now was so worn that only a vague silhouette and pig-like eyes were visible beneath a layer
of grime. They went through the squat wooden door into a tavern full of low-lying smoke, as airless and sunless as the bottom of a barrel.

‘Is this it?’ Ella said. She sniffed, turned to Sadie and shrugged her shoulders. A brass bell stood on the bar. Ella shook it till the clapper brought the alewoman.

‘Bring them in,’ Ella said, beckoning impatiently to the two men. They struggled through the door with the luggage. Ella supervised them, until they had dumped it, then brushed them
aside to haggle heatedly with the alewoman, leaving the men standing uncertainly under the lantern in the passage. ‘You can go now,’ Ella said, handing them a single token.

‘Now just wait a minute—’ Charlie said.

‘Well, if you don’t want it—’ Ella said.

‘Thank you for bringing our things,’ Sadie spoke quickly, to try to stave off an argument. Charlie’s friend stared at her as though he had only just seen her. His eyes rested
on her cheek a fraction too long. He pulled them away to look at Ella, but they slid back to Sadie. Sadie ignored him, acted busy by repacking one of the baskets.

‘Come on, Charlie, let’s go.’ He tugged at Charlie’s sleeve.

Charlie was hovering, still trying to attract Ella’s attention, but Ella was oblivious, persuading the alewoman to let them have a room at the front overlooking the street. Finally his
friend took him by the elbow and propelled him out of the door. Ella did not turn to bid them the time of day as they went.

They took a room for one night and Sadie watched Ella count out the coins from Thomas Ibbetson’s black leather purse. She remembered seeing it in his chamber, and how she watched Ella
slide it into her palm, then tie it into the string of her skirt and tuck it down inside. Now Ella was counting out an enormous sum for just one night in this filthy tavern.

Their room was furnished with a stiff horsehair bed, propped up with an old chopping-board where the leg had been broken off, a side table with a dusty washbowl and jug, and a window looking out
onto the street. Together they brought up their things, carrying them between them and bumping the trunk up the stairs. Ella began to unpack straight away, laying out a few of the lady’s
things on the washstand as if they were her own.

Sadie went straight over to the window, rubbed away the layer of greasy dust with a fingertip until the window squeaked. Below, folk on horseback rode by and tradesmen carried goods on their
heads. From here she saw right inside their baskets – nosegays of dried flowers, orange-coloured salted fish, bundles of lace and ribands, dried wafers of apple threaded on strings. The
apples made her wonder where they had come from, whether they had come from the country, maybe from a farm near their home in Westmorland.

‘Ella, where do you think apples come from in London? Are there apple trees in the city?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ Ella brought out some crocheted gloves and arranged them on the table, patting them gently into place. She had found a silver-backed
brush to tease her soft brown hair into waves over her shoulders. Then her face darkened and she put the brush down and shook her head as if to shake some unruly thought away.

She turned to Sadie with a false gaiety. ‘Isn’t this fine?’ Ella said. ‘No more slaving in Netherbarrow, we’ve left all that behind. A whole city waiting for us.
Nobody knows us here. We can be anything we like, start over.’

Sadie looked at Ella’s hopeful face and wanted to believe it, but for her Netherbarrow seemed as much a part of her as the stain on her face. She shivered, unable to quash the feeling that
the past clung on and would let neither of them go so easily.

Ella walked to the window beside her and stared out as a cobbler’s boy set up his mending last in the street. ‘There must be thousands of young men in the city,’ she said.
‘How’d you fancy it, Sadie? A London lad!’

Sadie laughed, but it was a brittle sound. Her heart sank. How could she have been so stupid? So it was not to be just the two of them after all. She watched Ella stroke her hair over her
shoulder. Ella was set on finding a young man, already planning on making it a threesome though she had been in London less than half a day. And then Sadie would be on her own. Her throat
tightened; there were so many people in London it made her feel as if she were drowning. She came away from the window, she had no taste any more for the sights of the city.

‘Tomorrow,’ Ella went on, ‘we’ll find work and proper lodgings. A room, just for the two of us. Now we’ve sold the mule, we’ve enough here so’s we
won’t have to share.’ She tapped the purse where it lay against her skirts. ‘Shall I go out and find us some snap? A pork pie, or a suet muffin?’

Hunger took over her judgement. Ella meant nothing by it, just talk – that was what it was. Sadie beamed. ‘Gradely, Ella.’

Ella pulled on the crocheted gloves. ‘You can stay here and mind us things.’

Ella hurried out onto the street, looking about to get her bearings. There was a pall of mist over everything, and the stench of coal. Opposite was a narrow alleyway where
there were stalls set up. The street was thronging. Ella blew out through her mouth, a long sigh. Free. She was free. She looked around. Netherbarrow seemed a dark and distant dream already. London
was altogether another world. Not a speck of green in sight – no hills, no trees and no gossiping neighbours. Nobody to whisper about her behind her back. The Ibbetsons would never find her
here.

She pulled her shoulders back and ran across the road with a little skip. She smiled at everyone she passed – the cobbler lad, a boy selling lampreys in a wriggling mass in a big bowl and
a woman hawking oranges from a basket balanced jauntily on her head. She even gave a smile to the pieman, who was a youth of about her own age, his skin marked with the pox, his hair tied up in a
greasy pigtail. She paid tuppence for the pies, ignoring his leers as she took the purse from her bodice.

‘You wanna watch out,’ he said, ‘put that purse somewhere less tempting.’

Ella smiled pleasantly, but turned away, thrusting her wrapped parcel into her basket. Lads like him were beneath her. She’d enough money to afford a chamber and a new gown – she was
going up in the world. She’d have to help Sadie though, make sure she got some proper employment. Like a babe she was – a proper greenhorn. At home, if a piglet or a kitten was born
weak or with some sort of deformity, her da would have dispatched it, with the blade of his shovel. But you couldn’t do that with people, could you? And the stronger ones had to look out for
the runts in the litter, that was always the way of it. Still, London might toughen Sadie up.

She worried about Sadie’s face, though. In the village some had taken against her – thought it was ill-luck to be seen abroad with her. It made her angry when they did that –
it hurt, as if somehow the taint stuck to her as well. And Sadie was a sweet-natured soul, always ready to believe the best of folk. Likely the poor thing would be hard-pressed to find a
sweetheart, so she’d need some useful craft to keep her occupied without a man to take care of her. Sooner the better, Ella thought. She didn’t want her hanging round her apron, putting
off all the young bucks.

Ella saw a man climb out of a shiny black sedan and dismiss the bearers with a wave of his hand. They jostled the contraption away up the street. The people stepped aside to let them stagger by.
The occupant was elegantly dressed in claret brocade with a broad-brimmed hat over a full wig. A footman walked a few steps behind him, his hand on his sword. She watched covertly as he walked over
to the market and a wave of anger washed over her. She hated the way he ignored his servant and those stepping out of his path. Immediately the anger was replaced by longing.

Someone like him, she thought, that’s the sort for me.

Titus Ibbetson clutched the piece of paper in one hand, steadying it on his knee. The sky was sullen with rain, and damp had blurred the ink, but he almost knew the words by
heart, he had read it so often. The journey through a never-ending wasteland of mud and trees had taken its toll on his patience, and he snapped at his wife Isobel when she kept complaining about
the state of the track. He could not think of anything else except the fact that his twin brother Thomas was seriously ill.

The village was scarcely more than a clutch of rough pigsties, and at first he was unsure if this really was Netherbarrow, so he stopped a sleepy farm labourer with his hoe over his shoulder to
ask for the Ibbetsons’ house. He pointed them ‘up yonder, second house past the green’. Titus scanned the horizon; there were indeed several more imposing dwellings clustered
together around the church.

He had never understood why his brother chose to live in this hellhole of a village and not in the more prosperous town. When Titus had asked him, he had replied that he could not abide the
smoke of Kendal, and the country air was good for his shortness of breath. Though Titus had to confess, from this distance his brother’s house looked substantial enough, a square stone box
half covered in ivy, with large glazed windows.

Isobel pushed her head out of the carriage window. ‘Oh hurry,’ she called to the driver. The horses sprang forward.

‘Don’t shout like that,’ Titus said.

‘But will you look there,’ Isobel said, ‘that dolt of a housekeeper’s left the front door flapping open, in this weather.’

He peered out, and immediately pulled his head back in. He got out a kerchief and rubbed a spatter of mud from his face as they pulled to a halt. ‘Wonder he puts up with her, letting the
heat out like that. Mind, there’s no smoke from the chimneys, so I guess there’s no fire lit.’

They looked at each other. That was not right – no fire, and Thomas ill abed. Titus rubbed his palms together, surprised to find them sticky with sweat.

‘Stay in the carriage, whilst I go in,’ he said, but Isobel had already alighted and pushed past him towards the gate.

The door was open but the hallway was gloomy and still. Once inside the front door he called out, but there was no reply. Their footfalls rang loud on the flagstones, and the rest of the house
was ominously shuttered and dark.

‘Wait there, I’ll get these open,’ he said. He tugged at the shutters in the drawing room so that the grey light flooded in, revealing gaping cabinets and all the drawers
wrenched out of the side table and cast aside. Concerned now, he strode past Isobel in the dim hallway and took the stairs.

One look through the door was enough.

He pulled out the muddy kerchief and held it to his nose, panting for breath.

‘Isobel,’ he shouted, ‘have the carriage take you to the rectory, and call for the curate.’

‘What is it? Is it Thomas?’ He heard the rustling of her skirts on the stairs.

‘No, don’t come in.’

‘Is he –? Let me see.’

‘I said don’t –’ He tried to usher her out of the room.

She pushed past him, but stopped dead. Her throat made a small choking sound. She opened and closed her mouth, lost for words. But then she raised a quavering finger. ‘God preserve us.
Look,’ she said, ‘look at that.’

‘What?’ he said, having no desire to look further.

She pointed again. The feather pillow was not where it should have been, under Thomas’s head, but on the coverlet next to his face, as if someone had just put it down. She moved
closer.