The Gilded Lily (6 page)

When she raised her eyes it was to see Sadie looking at her with a mixture of fear and reproach. She quickly returned to her work but her stomach squirmed, and when she tried to hook the next
hair through, she fumbled and got it all tangled. ‘Devil fetch it,’ she cursed.

Bread Street

‘Come on, you’ve not eaten enough to keep a mite alive.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ Sadie said, pushing away her half of the cold potage. ‘I’m afraid, Ella. What if Madame Lefevre gives us the elbow? How’ll we pay our way
then?’

‘Are you saying my knotting’s no good?’

‘No, Ell. No. It’s just she picks fault in everything. I’m afeared she’ll find something ill with it and throw one of her rages.’

‘She won’t get rid of us. You’re her little pet. Soon as you showed your needlework, she knew you’d take to the knotting. You’re quick as a fox. She’d be a
bedlam fool to let you go. Nah, she’ll keep us both on.’ Ella slicked the remaining potage from her bowl with a wipe of her bread, unconcerned.

‘But what if she don’t?’

‘Tush, Sadie. We’ll brook that when it’s in front of us. No point thinking of that now. Anyway, we’d get taken on someplace else. I’m not after being stuck in that
scum-hole for ever, not me. I’ve got my eyes peeled for something better.’

‘Wig shop pays scarce a scab, I know, but work’s hard to come by. I reckon we’re lucky. It’s not bad work, not like the fishwives, or tanners. And we’ve got a house
to live in, and food on the table, it’s more than most.’

‘Lucky? Huh. Some place. I sure as eggs don’t want to live here for ever.’ Ella screwed up her face at the thought of it. ‘Eat up, don’t waste it.’

Sadie spooned another mouthful of the grey oatmeal, forced herself to swallow. She had realized within hours of coming to London that the poor here were always hungry, for nothing grew here.
Livestock was not fed corn, but existed on scraps hurled from the back doors, if they could get to it before the foraging packs of yellow dogs that hung on every street. She had seen an old man
bloody another’s nose when he thought his neighbour was trying to steal his mangy chicken – poor pathetic creature, surely all gristle anyway.

Ella had been used to better, Sadie thought, what with living in as a housemaid at the Ibbetsons’. But to Sadie it was no worse than the house she had come from, except of course it was
crammed up in Cooper’s Yard with a score of others. London was tight as a closed fist round them, so tight you could smell its sweat.

The dwelling was furnished with only two chairs, a table and the trunks they had come with. Dingy and smoke-stained, it was a single room of crumbling lath and plaster more often than not damp
and cold. As yet there was not enough money from their earnings for a fire in the hearth every day, only on the coldest days or cooking days. Up a splintered ladder at the back of the room there
was a sleeping platform, partitioned off. Inside, a sagging truckle bed leaned against the wall, and under it a pot. By the door stood a bucket and ewer for washing.

But it was their own. Ella had insisted on that when they fled Westmorland. London was full of shared rooms where two or three families were crammed together, and everyone hung on each
other’s shirt tails. No, Ella had said, no shared lodgings for them. She’d had her fill of being at someone else’s beck and call.

They sold most of the goods straight away at Ella’s insistence – anything that wasn’t too valuable or ostentatious: the unremarkable watch, the lace and linen, all the silver
plate. She knew how much Ella had wanted to keep it all by the way she handled the goods as she parcelled them up to be sold. But London was expensive, much more expensive than Ella had reckoned
on, so the proceeds had only been just enough to rent this small chamber on Bread Street on a three-month lease. Bread Street was not as wholesome as its name, ramshackle and with a ditch running
down the centre always full of pigshit. The yeasty residues and bakery waste attracted the pigs, but at least there were ovens going most of the day and that meant it was warmer than other
places.

When Sadie had first seen it, she had mistakenly queried whether Ella had made a good bargain, and Ella had cuffed her and said she had not wanted to haggle and draw attention to herself –
she did not want Thomas Ibbetson’s family to trace them. Sadie had watched as she had a smith put a great iron lock on the door straight away.

Just looking at that lock still gave Sadie gooseflesh.

She put down her spoon, the bowl empty except for a ring of dried crust. She followed Ella’s eyes as they ranged round the room. ‘Do you think he’s still looking for
us?’

‘I don’t know. No. Shouldn’t think so. Not after all these weeks.’

Sadie swept up both bowls to take them for scrubbing in the sand pail.

‘It’s a kennel,’ Ella said, still looking about her with a disgruntled air, ‘but at least it’s our own, and I suppose we’ll get by.’

‘Then promise me you’ll be right particular with Mr Whitgift’s wig. Old Feverface will throw us out if it’s not up to the mark.’ She grabbed Ella’s hand and
squeezed it, searching her face, looking for an agreement.

Ella slid her eyes away, avoiding her, so Sadie dug her fingers further into Ella’s hand. Eventually Ella sighed. ‘If it means you’ll stop looking so mardy. But I’m
telling you, Sadie, when I see her claws picking over my work as if I’m somehow not good enough, it makes me so mad I could grind her bony fingers into dust under my boot.’

Sadie withdrew her hand, shocked by the venom of her sister’s words.

‘Don’t look at me like that. You know as well as I, she never shows her real face in the shop, acting all meek-mannered with the customers under her fancy black lace. But we know the
sting of that tape. I’d like to see her grovel. Her, and all the folk like her.’

Ella’s face darkened and a shadow passed over it, the way clouds alter the colours of the hills as they drift by. ‘It’s always us or them, isn’t it?’

‘Aw, come on, Ell, don’t start on that again.’

‘Or at least, mostly.’

Astonished, Sadie saw that Ella’s eyes had grown full of tears.

‘He weren’t like that though – not Master Thomas,’ Ella said.

Sadie put down the crocks and went over to put her arm round Ella’s shoulder, but Ella shrugged away, as if she wanted to gather herself together, folding her arms tight across her
chest.

‘I never would have thought it, but I miss him that sore. Before he fell sick, he were kind, and he treated me like a proper woman, not a servant. Oh aye, I had to roll over for him like
any man, but come morning he’d help me dress, bend down and put my two clogs side by side for me to slip my feet into, just like I were any lady.’ She stood up hurriedly and moved over
to the grimy window. ‘But I don’t know that I deserved him.’ Her mouth twisted into a wring of pain, her voice was choked as though in mid-swallow. ‘He shouldn’t have
died. We were happy. Comfortable. He should have got better, the physician said so. But then he went and—’

She came back to the table, eyes streaming. She brushed the wet across her cheeks and into her hair. ‘Do you think the dead can see us?’

‘Well, I don’t know . . .’

‘His wife cursed me. If it weren’t for her . . .’ She took a deep shuddering breath. ‘She hexed me – I saw her give me the cold eye when she was in the dock. She
saw to it we’d have no peace. We would have been happy, snug and safe in our warm little house.’ Ella took hold of Sadie’s arm and pulled her close. ‘You could have had your
own little room under the eaves. He were soft, a good provider, and he loved me. He would have done anything for me. Even though I were just a maidservant. He called me his little chicken.’
Ella’s lower lip trembled, and she let go. ‘Stupid bloody man. Why did he have to die?’

Sadie sat back down and pulled her hair forward, tugging it between her fingers. She was unsure what her sister meant – their flight from Netherbarrow had been hurried and confusing. She
was confounded by this strange talk of hexes – all she had understood was that Ella’s employer, Mr Ibbetson, had died and Ella had lost her position.

She knew of course that they had taken a large quantity of goods from the house – this alone made her quake, the value of the goods was far more than twelve penn’orth, and that on
its own was a hanging offence – but now here was Ella talking of curses too. Sadie shivered and looked behind, as if something might be lurking in the dark recesses under the platform. She
stared at Ella, standing now head tilted up towards the ceiling, her mouth twitching, as if she were chewing the inside of it.

Ella was serious. A chill ran through Sadie’s spine. ‘What do you mean, Ella? What sort of hex?’

Ella grabbed hold of the back of her chair, her hands white, the tears were gone. Her eyes turned hard and defiant. ‘I know folks think it sinful, what I did. But it didn’t feel
wrong. Maidservants are two a penny, and if one dies, then another mooncalf steps straight in to fill her boots, and most times the mistress don’t even notice the difference. As long as their
bloody fires are mended. Filled with her own importance she was, Mistress, like I didn’t have no feelings nor nothing, lording it over us all with her jangling keys.’

She paced the floor, her hands crushed into fists. Her voice took on a flinty edge. ‘It were time for Mistress to know what it feels like, to be left waiting.’

Sadie twined her hair round her index finger. She did not know how to respond, so she simply sat and waited for Ella to burn herself out. Even when they were small, she had often watched as
Ella’s storms blew up and then abated, and like the weather they seldom lasted too long. Ella had the knack of setting things to one side, putting them away neatly in sealed boxes in her mind
and pretending that they never happened, whereas Sadie could never stop one thought from leaking into the next, so that her thoughts crashed into each other in a sea of worries. Now her disquiet
began to mount as she tried to make sense of the fragments of Ella’s story.

‘What is it?’ Sadie whispered, when Ella stopped pacing and her shoulders showed that her breathing had settled. ‘What is it you’re telling me?’

Ella turned half away as if ashamed.

‘Go on,’ Sadie said.

‘He needed someone to love him, see. Great soft thing. But now I’m thinking, mayhap I was wrong, and Alice Ibbetson might be a witch after all. She cursed me afore she went –
not in words, but I caught it well enough. It were a look of hell and brimstone and I’ll not forget that look as long as I live.’

Sadie stared. ‘Is she dead?’

Ella did not look up.

‘Did they hang her?’

Ella nodded, as if she could not trust herself to speak.

There was a moment’s pause. Pigeons cooed in the rafters.

‘Then she can’t harm us,’ said Sadie, ‘whatever’s passed between you. God rest her soul.’ But the words seemed hollow and empty. She had not forgotten the
sight of the body in the bedroom, and here was Ella talking about another death. She had a sense that she had only just scratched the surface of the story; that the events of the night they left
Westmorland were like an underground river, deeply hidden, treacherous, so that the ground beneath them might suddenly collapse and drag them down and sweep them away in a black tide.

Ella’s face took on a closed look. She took hold of Sadie’s shoulder and her fingers pressed into her collarbone. ‘Never go out without locking that door. And keep your head
down when you’re out and about. That’s why I bought you that hooded cloak. That stain marks you out.’

Sadie felt her words like a slap. Ella hardly ever referred to her face, though plenty of other people used it as a stick to beat her with. But her sister had always ignored it, treating her
with a rough tenderness, partly bullying, partly loving, and for this she had been grateful.

Sadie went red, and her hand sprang up to her forehead as if she was pressing it over a headache. It was a gesture she used often, her hand resting on her eyebrow, half cupped over her left eye,
shadowing her cheek.

Ella looked uncomfortable. She picked up the potage bowls and took them purposefully out of the front door to empty the dregs into the gutter, before dropping them into the sand bucket next to
the fireplace. Sadie watched her sister scour the bowls with sand, rubbing hard round the edges with a cloth, put the lid back on the cooking pot with a clatter and wipe her hands. She turned back
to Sadie, a softer look on her face.

‘’Tis only for a time. Till the fuss dies down,’ she said, gruff now, almost apologetic. ‘Come on, brace up. That potage were foul. I’ll go out to the pie shop and
get us a savoury to share.’

‘Can we manage it?’ Sadie said. ‘There’s not much left from selling that ring, and you said it had to last us a month.’

‘I know what I said,’ snapped Ella, suddenly belligerent again. ‘Just stop moaning, will you. Lock the door after me, and don’t open it till you hear my knock – two
short raps. D’you hear?’

Sadie nodded and stood up as Ella unlocked the door with a key hung inside her petticoat on a long grubby string and took out the black leather purse of coins. When she got to the door she
called back, ‘Lock it after me, I said.’ And Sadie slid the two bolts on the inside, though the door frame was that rickety and rotten she doubted it would hold up against someone who
was really determined to get in.