Den of Thieves

by Julia Golding

  ‘Ah, I see you’ve passed your time profitably, Cathy,’ he said, stirring his porridge and smiling at me as if for all the world our quarrel of yestereve had not happened.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  I went out the back to escape his presence. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep up the pretence of obedience when I hated every wispy hair on his head. I’d only swept the yard twice over when he came to the door holding my new story.

  ‘What’s all this?’ he asked me. ‘Where are the boxers and the villains? The musicians and actors?’

  So he had read my stuff then.

  ‘I wrote what I thought you, standing in loco parentis, would approve of, sir,’ I said with a passable imitation of meekness.

  ‘Well, no, no, I do not approve, Cathy. I want the other kind of story from you – something with guts and excitement, not this curds-and-whey stuff.’

  ‘Why? I thought I was supposed to be just amusing myself – a hobby you called it.’ A suspicion was forming in my mind that perhaps after all his delays he might, just might, be considering putting out a collection of my work. This might all be a test to see if I really was the author.

  ‘Hmm.’ He looked up at the sky and then down at me. ‘If you are ever going to make it into print, Cathy, you have to be true to yourself. This . . . this is cheap imitation. I want the genuine article.’

  I nodded. ‘I understand. I’ll write something for you – to show you I can do it.’

  ‘That’s it. You do that. Take the morning to see what you can knock out for me.’

  Heartened by this exchange, even partially reconciled to my position in the household if I was allowed time to write, I cleared the kitchen table and set down to work. I was soon lost in an account of a visit to a crime lord’s flashy household and forgot the time. I was amused to find that even Billy made good copy when turned into a story – the repellent reality becoming quite amusing when looked at from a distance.

  I was so pleased by the end product that I was determined to take it to Mr Tweadle directly. I tried the kitchen door: it wasn’t locked this morning. Running along the corridor, I paused outside the shop entrance, wondering if it was safe to knock. Mr Tweadle would not want me to interrupt him with a customer. I could hear voices. I put my head close to the door to listen.

  ‘I asked you, sir, if you knew where I could find Catherine Royal.’ It was Mr Sheridan. Thank goodness I hadn’t burst in dressed in my dirty scullery maid’s apron – I would have died of embarrassment.

  ‘As I told you, I have no idea where the young person can be found,’ Mr Tweadle said airily.

  ‘He’s lying, he must be.’ Frank! What was he doing here? ‘It’s her stuff, I know it is.’

  Mr Sheridan spoke again. ‘Look, Mr . . . er . . . Mr Tweadle, the young lady has disappeared and her friends are most anxious to locate her. I’m not asking you to betray any confidences – we’re not fortune hunters trying to muscle in on her success or anything of that kind – but we know that you must be in contact with her or you wouldn’t have all this.’

  All what? What were they talking about?

  ‘I repeat, sir, I have no knowledge of the lady. You are mistaken if you think this belongs to anyone but my talented young assistant, George Nokes. He’s a prodigy.’

  ‘He’s a fraud and a thief!’ interrupted Frank, outraged. ‘If he’s told you those stories are his then he’s lying through his teeth.’

  ‘Am not!’ protested Nokes. ‘I’ve sweated over those, I ’ave. I’d swear it in court, I would. No girl could write that stuff.’

  I went cold and leant against the door.

  ‘Well, you are wrong,’ countered Mr Sheridan. ‘I know the only girl in London who could write “that stuff ” as you call it and I’m prepared to say so in court. Produce her or I’ll fetch the constable.’

  ‘There’s no young lady on the premises. There’s just me, Nokes and the maid, as I am more than happy to prove to anyone who comes with a warrant.’

  The dirty double-crossing liar! Roused by my fury, I pushed the door open, pulling the cap from my head as I entered the shop.

  ‘I suppose it’s not exactly a lie, is it, Mr Tweadle?’ I said flatly. ‘That’s all there is – but you’ve a maid no longer. I resign.’

  ‘Cat!’ Frank vaulted the counter and gave me a hug. He then held me out at arm’s length. ‘You look terrible.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Despite having demanded that I be produced, Mr Sheridan was shocked to see me. I suppose I did not cut a very good figure in my shoddy clothes and I’d been living off scraps, thanks to the large appetites of my employers.

  ‘Cat, you’re not staying another moment under this man’s roof. I’ve a carriage outside,’ Mr Sheridan said. ‘Come along.’

  ‘Not without my manuscripts.’

  ‘I think you’ll find he no longer has them,’ he said, casting a disgusted look at Mr Tweadle. ‘They’ll be locked in the printer’s safe. That is now a matter for my lawyer. I’ll be instructing him immediately to take action on your behalf.’

  He put a small magazine in my hand, the kind you can buy unbound on any street corner at a penny a time. London Life – Tales of Cat of Drury Lane, the mischievous orphan girl.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s made you quite sensational, Cat. I was surprised that you’d allowed it when I first heard of the success of the series – but now I see you had no say in the matter.’

  So Mr Tweadle had not only stolen my stories – but my character too! The magazine trembled in my fist. This wasn’t at all how I had imagined my print debut: a cheap pamphlet with crude woodcuts. How I wished I was a big man like Syd and could punch his nasty face. But I wasn’t – I was a stupid fool of a girl who had fallen for so simple a trick. I’d even cooked the meals that my own work had bought him – he and Nokes must have been laughing themselves silly over me. I should have taken a leaf out of the last maid’s book and tried poisoning them.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said faintly.

  ‘Let’s get you out of here, Cat. We’ll leave this to Mr Sheridan’s lawyers,’ said Frank, steering me gently towards the door.

  And shaking the dust of that foul place off my feet, I let myself be led out of Mr Tweadle’s shop.

  ACT II

  SCENE 1 – CORRESPONDENT

  You may guess my feelings, Reader, as I sat in a corner of Mr Sheridan’s carriage watching St Paul’s Cathedral disappear behind me. I was heartily ashamed of myself. I had taken pride in being wise to the ways of the street but, once truly thrown on my own resources, I had fallen at the first hurdle. How could I have let a lowlife like Mr Tweadle get the better of me? He must have thought I was quite the Christmas goose, turning up on his doorstep and offering to pluck, stuff and cook myself for his dinner.

  ‘The first thing we need to do is get a square meal inside you, Cat,’ said Mr Sheridan in a fatherly tone. ‘There never was much of you but you seem to have diminished dangerously over the past few weeks.’

  ‘And a change of clothes wouldn’t go amiss,’ added Frank, smiling at me from the seat opposite.

  I looked out of the window as we rattled down Fleet Street, gazing at the piles of books displayed on the booksellers’ stalls – stacks of respectable volumes bound in leather, produced by highly-regarded authors.

  Mr Sheridan gave an awkward cough, finding my silence difficult after years of me speaking out of place. ‘Cheer up, Cat, it’s over now.’

  But it wasn’t over for me – not till I had my manuscripts back. I felt like I’d left a part of me behind.

  ‘It was good luck that Lord Francis turned up this morning demanding to know where you were. I had thought of finding you myself as I wanted to ask you a favour, but I assumed that you would be too busy to see me in the bloom of your success.’

  ‘What success?’ I asked in a dull tone of voice.

  ‘The stories, of course. That man may have changed a few things here and there, but they were essentially yours
. The public love them. I’ve heard of nothing else all week – you are quite the fashion. The Prince of Wales told me his favourite was the incident where you rampaged through Brook’s; mine was the boxing match, as I’ve always had a soft spot for the Fancy.’

  I felt a glimmer of pride that my tales had made it into the hands of the most illustrious personages in the land. ‘How did Tweadle change them?’ I asked, feeling a flicker of curiosity. ‘You said he had made them sensational.’

  Frank suddenly became very interested in his nails. Mr Sheridan avoided my eye and looked out the window.

  ‘Aside from massacring the language with a hurried print job, he . . . er . . . made you out to be rather less respectable than you are.’

  ‘What did he say about me?’ If my reputation was in tatters, I wanted to know the worst.

  ‘Well, the language was rather stiff for one – and you appear to spend your time in the company of some rather bad characters, criminals and the like.’

  Perhaps Mr Tweadle hadn’t had time to change very much then, I thought sourly.

  ‘But it is not so much what was in the stories as the way he presented them.’ Mr Sheridan placed on my knee the pamphlet he had briefly shown me in the shop. I turned to the smaller print. ‘Read the next episode from the pen of this real-life moll, Queen of the London Underworld.’

  ‘I’m nobody’s moll!’ I said indignantly. ‘I’m not a thief, neither do I live among them!’

  ‘We know you’re not, Cat,’ interjected Frank, ‘but I’m afraid the damage is done.’

  Mr Sheridan looked out of the window – we were approaching his house. You could always tell which one it was because it had a perpetual queue of creditors waiting outside in the hope of catching a few moments of the great man’s time.

  ‘You may find it best to lie low until the furore about your print alter ego dies down,’ Mr Sheridan said, patting me on the knee as the carriage came to a stop. ‘We writers can’t let the booksellers get away with this kind of sharp dealing, can we?’

  I shook my head miserably.

  ‘Come on, Cat, cheer up! I’ll get my man to take Tweadle to court to get your manuscripts back. I haven’t yet decided if exposing his cheat would do you more harm than good, but if we decide to go public, we’ll seek damages too.’

  Mr Sheridan’s display of writerly solidarity did hearten me a little but I still felt as if my life had been taken out of my hands. I let him conduct me through the noisy crowd of petitioners and pass me over to his wife’s maid. In half an hour, I was bathed and dressed in fresh clothes, ready for dinner.

  Mrs Sheridan was dining out. It was well known in theatre circles that husband and wife were no longer on good terms with each other so I was not surprised to find myself alone with Frank and the master of the house in the dining room. Even in my despondency, it registered somewhere in my brain that this was the first time I had ever sat at a table with my patron. Perhaps if Frank had not been there I would have been invited to eat in the kitchen. Whatever the reason, I found myself being waited on by footmen and served a fine meal that I had not had to cook. I thought of all those involved in preparing this food, knowing all too well exactly how long it took to wash, peel and boil the vegetables on my plate. It was a pity I couldn’t summon the appetite to do justice to their hard work.

  We ate in silence for some minutes before Mr Sheridan put down his knife and fork. I looked up; he hadn’t finished but he was gazing at me thoughtfully as he topped up his wine from the decanter in front of him.

  ‘I’m surprised at you, Cat.’

  Was this the scolding I had long been expecting?

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Surprised that you haven’t shown any curiosity at all as to what favour I wanted to ask you.’

  I remembered dimly that he had said something about this in the carriage.

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, sir.’

  ‘The old Cat would have pounced on this the instant I mentioned it.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘There’s no perhaps about it! You would have plagued me until I revealed all. What’s got into you?’

  I shrugged, biting my lip to stop the embarrassing display of tears that were close to falling, and pushed the peas around on my plate.

  ‘I think, sir,’ said Frank boldly, ‘you are to blame for this new Cat. It was you, after all, who forced her out of Drury Lane so she fell prey to the likes of Tweadle. I – we thought the theatre was going to look after her.’ He had obviously been saving this speech up, resentful that I had been so casually abandoned.

  Mr Sheridan splashed some wine into Frank’s glass.

  ‘Well said, young Avon. I’m glad Cat has such an able supporter. But if she would rouse herself to show the merest glimmer of interest, I’ll tell her how I wish to make amends.’

  I looked up. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Over the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling at a bit of a loss.’

  Not as much as me, he hadn’t.

  ‘Events are happening so fast in France – things that will decide the fate of Europe – and I only get to hear about them long after, when some newspaper gets round to printing an inaccurate story or two. Even then, they rarely cover the really important matters, such as how the French are reacting to the changes.’

  He was right of course: I’d often thought that newspaper editors saw it as their national duty to send us to sleep with their accounts of debates and legislation. I rarely picked up a paper and then only to read the scandal column.

  Mr Sheridan refilled his glass. ‘I was thinking that I need a correspondent in Paris, someone who can keep me up to date. A couriered letter would take only a few days to reach me – I could be among the best informed in parliament. This person could find out for me what the common people are thinking without alerting the governments of either France or Britain to my interest. This revolution is not going to be decided in the debating chambers or palaces of Europe, but on the streets. Only last week, I was asking myself who I know who understands both worlds – that of the poor as well as the rich – and could move between them without being noticed.’

  Very interesting, but what was it to do with me?

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I ventured. ‘I don’t know anyone who could help – unless you count Johnny – Lord Jonathan Fitzroy. Perhaps if you –’

  ‘No, no, you halfwit. Not Johnny. In any case, he’s transferred his allegiance from us to his adopted country. I thought the answer was obvious. Don’t you, Lord Francis?’

  Frank was now grinning at me. ‘As clear as daylight, sir.’

  Surely he didn’t mean what I thought he meant?

  ‘I’m talking about you, Cat.’

  ‘Me? But I couldn’t even look after myself in London and you expect me to do so in Paris?’

  Mr Sheridan waved this objection away with the decanter. ‘You mustn’t take one mistake as the last word on your abilities. Chalk it up to experience. Learn from it.’

  ‘I’ve learnt that I’m useless.’

  ‘Never say that – you are not to say that.’ Mr Sheridan exchanged a worried look with Frank. ‘It’s not like my Cat to let a scoundrel like that bookseller put her down – not the Cat who saved my diamond, the Cat who rescued Pedro, the Cat who wrote those stories.’

  His words reignited a glimmer of pride in my achievements. He was right. I was wallowing in my own misery – not an attractive sight. It was time I struggled back into the mêlée as others had done before me. Syd never gave up if he was floored in a fight. He pulled himself up to the scratch and continued to slog it out. Mr Sheridan himself had not conceded defeat when his debut play, The Rivals, failed dismally on its first night: he revised it and continued on to a triumph.

  ‘Tell me what you want me to do,’ I demanded, pushing my plate aside.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ replied Mr Sheridan, raising his glass to me. ‘As I told you, I need to place a confidential agent in Paris and I have been keeping you in mind. You have
shown yourself to be resourceful and loyal – important qualities for the job.’

  His praise was like water on parched earth. I felt relieved to hear that someone did not consider me entirely worthless. He was giving me a chance to travel like all my friends; I could prove to them that I was not limited to Covent Garden as they thought.

  ‘I have a few ideas as to how it can be done,’ he continued. ‘First, we must get you there without anyone being any the wiser. I’m glad to say that fate has handed us the perfect opportunity.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Our ballerinas have to return to their native land after the closure of Drury Lane. I have sounded out Madame Beaufort as to the possibility of smuggling you in with them.’

  ‘You want me to pretend to be a ballet dancer?’ The idea was so absurd as to be laughable.

  ‘Exactly,’ he continued, not seeing the joke. ‘Madame Beaufort will tell the girls that she has decided to give you a trial.’

  ‘It’s going to be a very short one – I don’t know the first thing about dancing.’

  ‘Nonsense, Cat,’ interjected Frank. ‘You’re light on your feet and quick to learn – you might turn out to be perfect.’

  ‘A perfect disaster like enough,’ I muttered.

  ‘Lord Francis here will escort you to Paris on the pretext of visiting his family,’ Mr Sheridan explained. ‘He will be on hand to sort out any . . . er . . . diplomatic problems you might encounter at the border.’

  Frank winked. ‘Cat, I have you to thank for getting me out of studying for a month. Mama and Papa will understand that I had a higher duty to perform.’

  Once again, I had the sensation that my life had been taken completely out of my control, but this time the feeling was exhilarating, like sledging down a steep hill not knowing exactly what was at the bottom.

  ‘Once in Paris at Madame Beaufort’s I will expect you to write regular letters to me,’ continued Mr Sheridan. ‘To keep the arrangement private, you’d best write them with an eye to the fact that they may be opened in transit. I suggest you sign them as “Diamond”.’