The Silk Thief (20 page)

The answer was yes and when Serafina told them what it was, Sarah and Friday knew they hadn’t a hope in hell of doing anything to stop it, because it had probably already happened.

Sarah took Harrie home, but Friday went to her favourite pub, the Bird-in-Hand on Gloucester Street, and got drunk. Not falling-down mashed, but drunk enough, she’d hoped, to numb the dread that pulsed in her belly at the thought of Harrie finding out about Serafina’s latest revelation. But it didn’t work, so she picked a fight with a loud-mouthed lummocks who kept grabbing at her tits, got punched in the head, and thrown out of the pub with a warning she’d be banned next time.

At about eleven o’clock she staggered home to the Siren’s Arms and was about to go up to her room when she decided she wanted to talk to Mrs H. She made her way unsteadily along the alley, fumbled with the latch on the gate at the far end and let herself into the brothel’s backyard. As she lurched across the cobbles, her hands out because she knew the clothesline was in front of her somewhere, a figure stepped out of the privy, raised a lantern and demanded, ‘Who’s that?’

‘God, in the shitter again,’ Friday boomed, her voice shattering the still night air.

‘Oh, shut up,’ Lou said.

‘You shut up. You’re always in the bloody thing.’

They still bitched at each other constantly, but since Rowie Harris had revealed herself to be the mole — the traitorous
bitch —
working for Bella Shand, the venom had gone out of their bickering. Friday, however, could not bring herself to offer an olive branch, and she knew Lou would never get off her high horse to do the same. So here they were, continuing to fire off shots at each other, to the amusement of the other girls and the ongoing exasperation of Mrs H.

Lou lowered her lantern, in an effort to share the absolute minimum of light. ‘You go first. You’re obviously swattled. Again. I’d hate for you to fall and hurt yourself.’

‘No, no, you first. Swine before pearls.’

‘Don’t you have that the wrong way round?’

‘Don’t think so.’ Friday took two steps, slipped on the cobbles and fell, landing heavily on her side.

Lou gave way to dainty giggles while Friday erupted into her usual raucous shrieks of laughter.

The back door flew open. ‘What on earth’s going on out here?’

‘Friday’s fallen over. She’s as pissed as a rat again,’ Lou said quickly, putting the boot in.

Elizabeth stormed down the steps and grabbed Friday’s arm. ‘For God’s sake, girl, get up! What if the customers see you?’

‘Fuck them.’

‘You’ll be lucky. Not in the state you’re in. Lou, help me get her up.’

From the ground, Friday took a wild swing, missing both Elizabeth and Lou. ‘Fuck off, I can get up by myself.’

‘Good,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Then get yourself into my office. I want to talk to you. And you,’ she said, jabbing a finger at Lou, ‘stop spending all night in the crapper.’

‘I can’t help it,’ Lou said. ‘I have a delicate bladder.’

‘Infected bladder, more like. Make sure you drink plenty of citrate of magnesia in boiled water. Now get back to work.’

While Lou flounced off up the steps, Friday dragged herself to her feet, Elizabeth right behind her. Once inside her office, Elizabeth shut the door and steered Friday towards a chair.

‘What’s the meaning of this?’

‘Of what?’

‘Coming over here drunk and making such a racket? You finished work hours ago.’

‘I wanted to talk to you. I need some advice.’

‘For God’s sake, couldn’t it wait until tomorrow?’

‘No.’

‘And why
are
you so drunk? Again?’

‘Something’s happened.’

Elizabeth gave a weary sigh. ‘Friday, something’s
always
happening with you. You’ll never run out of excuses for getting on the jar, will you? I suppose you were with Molly?’

Elizabeth didn’t care at all for Molly Bates, though Molly had been working in the brothel for some time. She felt the girl led Friday astray by encouraging her to drink, though she knew in her heart that Friday was a habitual inebriate. Molly, however, was proving very difficult to fire, threatening Elizabeth with blackmail over her employment of convict girls as prostitutes, an aggravation she had yet to remedy.

‘No, me and Sarah and Harrie went and saw Serafina Fortune, then I went to the pub by myself. I felt shitty and I wanted a drink.’

‘Why?’

Friday pulled up her skirt and examined her knee; she had a big, weeping graze on her kneecap. ‘Why what?’

‘Why did you feel shitty?’ Elizabeth gritted her teeth. Talking to Friday when she was mashed could be very trying.

‘Oh, ’cos Serafina told me and Sarah something horrible about Harrie.’

‘But she didn’t tell Harrie?’ Elizabeth didn’t bother asking what Serafina’s bad news was. If Friday wanted to tell her, she would.

‘She’d already rushed off. She was upset.’

‘I don’t know Harrie well,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but would I be right in assuming it was her idea to go to Serafina? About her baby?’

‘Serafina said it was a boy, but it would have died anyway.’ Friday sighed. ‘I don’t know. That would have made me feel better. It just made Harrie cry and go a bit unhinged. Have you got any brandy? Can I have some?’

‘Haven’t you had enough already?’

‘I can never have enough.’

‘No, more’s the pity. You’ll drink yourself to death one day.’ Against her better judgment, Elizabeth produced a bottle of good brandy and two tumblers from her desk drawer. ‘You said you wanted advice. What about?’

‘Should we tell Harrie what Serafina told us?’

‘Will she find out anyway?’

Friday thought about it, which Elizabeth could see was quite a demanding task, given the extent of her inebriation. ‘Probably. But I’m not sure.’

‘Then if you’re not a hundred per cent sure, keep your mouths shut. Why tell her if she may never need to know?’

‘That’s true,’ Friday said after a moment. ‘And clever.’ She raised her tumbler. ‘You’re not just a pretty face, are you?’

‘There’s no need to be cheeky, young lady.’

Friday gulped down her drink in one go. ‘Can I ask you something else?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Who’s the dead man in your cellar?’

Elizabeth stared at her, eyes wide in sudden alarm, her throat working as she swallowed. The metal flap in the office door gave a harsh little clang as someone slid the money she’d just earned through the slot and into the basket. Elizabeth started, then rose to collect it. She insisted her girls hand over payments after each customer departed, for their own safety and to keep them from the temptation of slipping it into their own pockets.

Friday watched her as she sat down again, took an age to count the money, and mucked about ticking a column in one of her many ledgers.

Eventually, Elizabeth said, ‘What on earth are you talking about, Friday? What dead man? Really, how much have you had to drink tonight?’ and poured herself another three fingers of brandy.

Friday pushed her own tumbler across the desk. ‘There’s a skeleton in a trunk in your cellar.’

‘My cellar, under
this
house? Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I broke into it, Mrs H, and —’

Elizabeth glared at her, the hand holding the brandy bottle suspended in the air. ‘You broke into the cellar?
My
cellar?’

‘And the trunk, and I saw it.’ Friday grabbed the bottle and filled her tumbler to the rim. ‘I don’t give a shit what you did. I just want to know if it’s who I think it is.’

Elizabeth’s face had gone white now. It had been red before. And her hands were shaking badly. She looked really upset. Friday wondered if she was about to have a heart attack.

‘What were you doing in my cellar, Friday?
Tell
me!’

‘I will, if you tell me who’s in the trunk. It’s your husband, isn’t it?’

Very, very slowly, Elizabeth sat back in her high-backed chair, lifted her hands and placed them over her eyes. For nearly a minute she said nothing, although she did let out a small, barely audible groan. Friday thought it sounded more like the kind of noise you might make if you were relieved, rather than crapping yourself because you were in the shite. But she sort of understood why that might be.

After a while, Elizabeth lowered her hands, and nodded. The little bit of kohl she always wore to enhance her eyes had smudged. ‘Yes, it is. It’s Gilbert, my husband,’ she admitted. ‘How does he look?’

Friday took a long sip of her drink. ‘Pretty dried out, actually.’

‘Yes, he’s been there a while.’

‘There’s a hole in his head. Like from a lead ball.’

‘There will be.’ Elizabeth frowned. ‘I shot him.’

‘After he broke your jaw?’

‘Yes. I … I’d had enough.’

‘How did you get him down there? He looks like he would have been twice your size. Well, back then, anyway.’

Now that Elizabeth had confessed, the gates opened and out it all came. ‘Oh, he was. Gil was a big man. It’s extraordinary, really. I’ve no idea how I’ve never been caught. It’s been a worry, believe me.’

Tell me about it, Friday thought.

‘You know, we had our last fight right here in this room. It was a dreadful stormy night with thunder and lightning, well, about two or three in the morning, actually, and he was drunk and very nasty, but not so far gone that he couldn’t punch me in the face and knock out two of my teeth. He went through my desk drawers, took all the money the girls had made that night, and walked out the back door. I grabbed my pistol and followed him, and when I got out onto the steps I shot him.’

Friday let out a huge burp, redolent of the gin, cheese and pickles she’d consumed at the Bird-in-Hand. ‘’Scuse me. And no one saw anything?’

‘If they did, they’ve never said.’

‘Then what happened?’ This was better than reading the reports on the Court of Quarter Sessions in the
Sydney Herald
.

‘I panicked. I’d killed him outright, thank Christ. Blood was pouring out of his head, blood was pouring out of
my
mouth and my jaw was killing me, there was mud everywhere because we didn’t have the cobbles down then, it was windy and pouring with rain and as dark as the inside of a coalmine. So I grabbed his feet and dragged him over to the cellar door, which wasn’t locked back then, and I opened it and shoved him down the stairs. Then I hauled him across the floor and managed to jam him into that trunk. My
Christ
, he was heavy. And my
back
! I could barely move for days after. I spent the rest of that night praying no one would go down there, though folk never had reason to, and the next day I got Jack to put a couple of locks on the cellar door.’

Friday said, ‘When I found him, there was another trunk on top and it weighed a bloody ton. How did you get it up there? You can’t have lifted it yourself, surely?’

‘Jack did.’

Friday’s mouth fell open. Did Jack know his boss had killed her husband?

Elizabeth must have read her mind because she said, ‘He doesn’t know. I waited two years until I thought the smell would be gone, then I asked him to help me move some old bits and pieces of furniture down there, and while he was at it put the empty trunk on top of the other one. I felt a bit more confident that no one would find Gil after that. Well, not until I’d died myself. It isn’t going to matter, then, is it?’

‘’Spose not. Didn’t anyone notice he was missing? What about his ship?’

Elizabeth shrugged. ‘I saw in the newspaper it had sailed with a new captain. I suppose they thought … Well, I don’t know what the shipping company thought. Gil
was
known for his drinking, and his temper. He had a drinking mate, William Butler. He came looking for him and when I said I didn’t know where Gil was, he went to the police. They came to the Siren’s Arms and I told them the same thing, that Gil had just disappeared, and that was the last I heard of it, thank Christ. When did you find him?’

Friday screwed up her face. ‘Mid-July?’

‘You haven’t told anyone else, have you?’

‘Er, someone already knew.’

Elizabeth looked horrified. ‘Oh my God. Who?’

‘Walter.’

‘The boy who killed Amos Furniss? Why would he know?’

‘Because I hid him in your cellar. He had three days and nights in there before his ship sailed and, well, I suppose he got bored. He told me about it. But he didn’t tell anyone else, and he’s gone now.’

‘But …’ Frowning, Elizabeth ferreted through the enormous bunch of keys on her chatelaine. ‘How did you get in? Did you break the locks?’

‘Sarah.’ Friday knew she didn’t need to say any more; Mrs H was well aware of Sarah’s lock-picking skills.

‘Does she know?’

‘No,’ Friday lied.

Elizabeth seemed to deflate. She poured herself another drink and sat back in her chair again, her shoulders slumped. ‘Well, now you know my darkest secret. You do realise that gives you considerable power over me?’

Friday scowled. She hadn’t once thought of that.

‘You’re in a perfect position to blackmail me.’

Shocked, Friday stared. ‘D’you really think I would?’

After a moment — a moment that was
almost
too long but not quite — Elizabeth said, ‘No, I don’t. I think we’re birds of a feather, you and I. And more than that, we’re friends. At least, I hope we are.’

Friday said, ‘’Course we are, you silly old trout. But I think you’re pushing your luck keeping a trunk full of bones in your cellar. You need to get rid of them. I’ll do it, if you like.’ She saw herself tossing what was left of Gil Hislop into someone’s cesspit one night when the moon wasn’t shining too brightly.

‘My husband was violent and he was a drunk,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love him. Yes, I killed him, but he was the only man for me. There’s never been anyone else. I loved Gil then, and I still love him now. I want him near me, Friday.’

‘Well, I think you’re making a bad mistake. What if your house gets raided?’

‘Then I’m bound for gaol anyway.’

‘But not for the gallows. You’ll
swing
if someone opens that trunk.’