by Susan Green
“The name Verity,” he said, looking down at me all serious and stern, “comes from the Latin veritas, and it means ‘truth’. I hope you intend to be truthful, Verity?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. Pompous ass, I thought.
“Your age and employment?”
“Thirteen, sir. I’m an apprentice trimmer at Madame Louisette’s.”
“Who are your parents?”
“Thomas and Elizabeth Sparks, sir.”
“Where do they live?”
“They’re dead, sir.”
“We don’t need her pedigree,” interrupted Lady Throttle. “Search her.”
“Just a few more questions.” He turned back to me. “After your parents died, where and with whom did you reside?”
“Beg pardon, sir?”
“Who took you in?”
“Auntie Sarah and Uncle Bill.”
“Tell me about your uncle and aunt, Verity.”
“They run a used-clothes stall. Auntie Sarah couldn’t keep me, and so I got apprenticed to Madam Louisette.”
“When did you last see them?”
“Christmas time, sir.” Only for a few minutes though. Auntie Sarah had a black eye, and that meant Uncle Bill was back on the grog. I didn’t want to cause any trouble, so I’d given her a quick kiss and gone away.
Lady Throttle stamped her foot, and Mr Plush turned to her. “There is method in my questioning, as you will see. What is your uncle’s name?”
Oh, no, I thought. So this is where Mr Plush was leading. “Bill – I mean William – Bird, sir.”
“Aha!” Mr Plush got out another notebook and flipped through the pages till he found what he was after. “Just as I thought,” he said. “Are you aware, Verity, that he is a notorious fence?”
Lady Throttle was wide-eyed. “A fence? Whatever do you mean, Mr Plush?”
I tried to look as blank as a sheet of paper, but I knew. We used to have visitors, lots of them, coming at all hours with parcels and packages for Uncle Bill. Money changed hands, no questions asked, and then they’d go away. So I knew about Uncle Bill all right, but I wasn’t going to tell Mr Saddington Plush.
“No, sir,” I lied. “He’s an honest man, he is. He’s no fence.”
“Fence is thieves’ slang for a receiver of stolen goods, Lady Throttle,” he explained.
“Stolen goods.” Lady Throttle was shrill. “A rookery of thieves! A den of criminals! Thank God we were not all murdered.” She shot me a glance that’d poison a snake. “It is all clear to me now.”
“Verity Sparks, I propose to you that you have stolen Lady Throttle’s brooch, with the intention of passing it on to your uncle, the notorious fence, William Bird. What do you say to that?”
“I say I haven’t done it, sir.” I tried to speak loud and strong, but I felt like a rat in a trap, and it came out as a whisper. They’re fitting me up, good and proper, I thought. Who done it? That bony old maid, Crewel? I stole a glance at her, and she met my eye, cold as an icicle. Then again that little smirk. Something was going on.
My fingers began to itch. It was annoying, and I rubbed them together, but it only got worse. They were stinging now, worse than a wasp bite. What was wrong with them? Lady Throttle was saying something but I couldn’t hear what it was. The only thing I could think of was my itchy fingers, and then …
“The brooch is in Lady Throttle’s purse,” I gasped. All eyes turned to the embroidered bag on her bureau.
Lady Throttle almost fell off her chair. “What nonsense.”
“It is,” I insisted. In a flash I’d seen it, clear as day.
Mr Plush turned to Crewel. “May I have Lady Throttle’s purse, please?”
“You may have no such thing, Mr Plush!” Lady Throttle was red in the face. “This creature is simply trying to delay the inevitable. Search her, sir!”
“Crewel?” Mr Plush held out his hand.
Mistress and maid locked eyes, and I saw Lady Throttle give a tiny shake of her head.
“Surely, Lady Throttle, if there is any chance of a mistake?” pleaded Mr Plush. “I know that a lady such as yourself would not wish to falsely accuse this young person, however dubious her ancestry.”
My what? Never mind that. Grabbing my chance, I snatched up the bag and handed it to Mr Plush.
His hand hovered over it. “I need your permission, Lady Throttle.”
“Which I do not give.” Lady Throttle snarled. For a pretty little thing, I thought, she can come up ugly all right. “Hand it over, and search the brat.”
Mr Plush bowed. “Of course, Lady Throttle.” But somehow, in the handing over, he fumbled and dropped it, and out onto the threadbare carpet rolled a hair comb, three gold-wrapped chocolates, a couple of sovereigns – and the Throttle diamond.
“My God!” cried Lady Throttle. “Crewel, you idiot. Why did you not tell me you’d put it in my purse?”
“I … I …” stammered the maid, and dodged as Lady Throttle threw a small clock at her. A silver hairbrush and a cut-glass perfume bottle followed, then Lady Throttle flung herself into the armchair and began drumming her heels on the floor like a child having a temper tantrum.
“You’d best go,” said Crewel sourly, and opened the door.
I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I hurtled down the stairs and into the hall. It was empty, but when I opened the front door I nearly collided with the master of the house. Sir Bertram looked down at me with surprise.
“What’s this?” he said.
I pushed past him and ran as fast as I could.
“Hey, you!” I heard him shouting, but I was down the street and round the corner already.
I ran for two blocks, then I sat in the gutter and up came my lunch. After I’d heaved a few times I just sat there, trembling. My hands were still tingling, ever so slightly, and I held them out in front of me and stared at them.
Itchy fingers. That had come first. And then suddenly, with no shadow of a doubt, I’d known where the brooch was. It had been like a picture in my mind’s eye, clear and sharp and certain and sure. But there was no way I could have known that the brooch was in the purse. It was true I’d always been good at finding things, but not like that. And I’d never before had itchy fingers.
“Miss?”
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and stood up. Mr Saddington Plush gave a quick bow.
“Miss Sparks, I–”
I backed away from him. “Miss Sparks all of a sudden, is it? What do you want with me? I ain’t going back there.”
“No one wants you to go back there, Miss Sparks,” he said. He was puffing slightly. “I simply wanted to apologise.”
“What?”
“Say sorry.”
“Why should I say sorry? I never done it. It was the maid, Crewel; I saw her put the brooch in the bag.”
“No, you didn’t.”
I stared at him.
“How did you know where it was, Miss Sparks?”
“I dunno what you mean.”
He sighed. “Have it your own way,” he muttered. He fished in his inner pocket, brought out a little rectangle of pasteboard and handed it to me.
“It’s my card,” he said. “I’d like to discuss this matter with you further. At your convenience. Feel free to contact me. Any time.”
I glanced at it.
Saddington Plush and Son, Con–
Continental-something-or-other. I popped it in my pocket and turned to walk away.
“Let me detain you just one instant further, Miss Sparks,” he said. He took my hand and folded it around a couple of coins. “If you continue along this street, and then turn left, you will be able to find a cab for your journey home.”
Never take money from a gentleman, Cook had warned me. Evil designs, she said. But I was too tired to walk and too tired to care about designs, evil or otherwise.
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“I shall expect to see you, Miss Verity Sparks.”
Expect all you
like, Mr Saddington Plush.
Even with the cab ride, it was after five by the time I got back to Madame Louisette’s. I went to the kitchen first, and Cook gave me a couple of fairy cakes. I wondered, as I ate them, what to say to Madame. Any kind of trouble with customers was bad for business, and I knew she’d worry when I told her.
She knew already. The door of her private parlour was open and she was sitting at her bureau with a glass in her hand and a gin bottle in front of her. A litter of bills and letters and advertising fliers lay mixed with ribbon samples and odd trimmings around her on the floor, as if she’d simply swept the lot from her desk. She’d been crying.
“Oh, Verity.” She swayed to her feet. “Verity, I’m so sorry. So very sorry, my dear girl.”
“What’s the matter, Madame? Have you heard about the brooch?”
She nodded.
“But you know I didn’t take it.”
“I know, I know.” She gulped down the rest of her gin and poured another half-glass, then scrabbled around on the floor for a piece of paper. “But here. Look! It’s a note from Lady Throttle. She insists I let you go.”
“What do you mean?”
“Kick you out. Get rid of you. She says that if I don’t, she won’t pay her bill.”
“Is it so very much?”
Madame ignored me. “And she’ll tell all her friends not to pay. Don’t you understand, dear? If they don’t pay me, I can’t pay for these.” She tossed a bunch of ribbons into the air. “And then they’ll send the bailiffs round. I’ll be ruined.”
I sat shocked and still while Madame continued drearily, “And not just me: there’s Emily and Bridget and Beth, and there’s Charlotte, and Cook as well. I’ll have nothing.”
I could see why Madame was scared, but my heart sank like one of Cook’s fairy cakes. Where would I go? What would I do?
“I’d like to stick up for you, Verity, I truly would, but she’s got me, and there’s nothing I can do.” Madame upturned the gin bottle and shook the last drops into her glass. “Nothing.”
3
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT
Three days later at eight o’clock in the morning I was out on the street with my shabby old carpetbag. I glanced back at the shop. For more than two years Madame Louisette’s boutique had meant home and friends as well as my job. My room with Beth; Cook’s stories and second helpings and rough, kind hugs; Madame’s little lost things that I was always finding … well, goodbye to all that, I told myself. If I thought about it too much, I’d cry or get scared. With a wave to Cook and Beth, who were leaning out the third-storey window, I started to walk as fast as I could down Oxford Street.
I was hoping that Auntie Sarah could put me up for a couple of nights until I found somewhere to live. Cook said there were always rooms at Ma Bolivar’s. It was a respectable place, she told me, adding to watch out for lice because Ma Bolivar packed, racked and stacked her boarders four to a room. I thought of Beth and the cosy attic we’d shared, and sighed.
I’d need a job first. Madame had given me a letter addressed to her old friend Miss Musquash of the Belgravia Dress Agency. She bought and sold high-class used clothes, and employed a few girls to mend and freshen up the trimmings. I’d have to work day and night to earn a wage, and Madame knew it, for she clutched me to her bosom and snuffled.
“I wish I could do something, Verity. I wish I’d never laid eyes on Lady Throttle.”
Me too.
The smell hit me first. It was nearly three years since I’d lived with Uncle Bill and Auntie Sarah, but the smell of their market stall brought it all back. Their tiny house in Racketty Lane, only a couple of streets away, was always crammed with merchandise, and every room stank of musty, greasy, sweaty, worn and worn-again old clothes. Not to mention the overflowing drains, the piles of rubbish and empty beer bottles, and the stale fat from Uncle Bill’s favourite pork sausages.
And speak of the devil, there he was. Uncle Bill was lounging in front of his stall with a line of silk handkerchiefs hanging like sad flags above him.
“Is Auntie Sarah about?”
“Wotcher want ’er for?” He spat a gob of phlegm that just missed my shoe.
“I’ve lost my place.”
I shouldn’t have said it. I knew straightaway I shouldn’t have. He came right up to me and stuck his face so close to mine that I could see every broken vein and gin-blossom on his nose. “Lost yer place? And so you come crawling back here? Auntie Sarah will help you, is that it? Well, little Miss Fancy-breeches, you know what? You know what? Yer Auntie Sarah don’t exist.”
I stared at him.
“She don’t exist.” He grabbed one of the handkerchiefs and waved it around in the air. “Tra-la-la! Yer got no auntie at all.”
Was he joking? Or had he gone barmy? Then a terrible thought came to me. “She’s not … not …”
“Dead? ’Course she’s not dead. I ’aven’t told her she can die yet.”
I was bewildered by now. “Then what do you mean?”
“What I mean, missy, is this. She don’t exist because she’s not yer auntie.”
“I don’t understand.”
Uncle Bill must have got tired of talking in riddles. “She’s not yer auntie because yer a foundling,” he said. “A dirty little bastard of a foundling.”
My jaw dropped and Uncle Bill laughed. He was enjoying this.
“When you was only a few months old someone wrapped yer in a blanket and left yer in a box in Seacoal Lane. And who found yer? Lizzie Sparks, and what does she go and do? Not give yer up to the foundling ’ospital like anyone else would. She adopts yer.”
Finally, what Uncle Bill was saying sunk in. Ma and Pa were not my real parents. I was that shocked and surprised, I came over all giddy. I leaned against the trestle table, just staring at him. Could it really be true?
“I’m adopted?”
“Ain’t that what I jist told yer? Yes, full of the milk o’ human kindness, my sister-in-law,” sneered Uncle Bill. “But I’m not, so ’op it.”
“But Auntie–”
“Yer got no auntie. Yer got no uncle. Throw yerself on the parish, go on the streets, starve in a gutter – I don’t care.” He gave me a long, slow look, full of hatred. “Don’t come ’ere again, or I’ll knock yer teeth out. And that’s jist for starters.” He jabbed my chest hard with his finger. “See?”
I nodded. “I see.”
I wasn’t staying there the night, then. Better try Ma Bolivar’s.
As I walked, I kept thinking about Uncle Bill’s thunderbolt. Was it true? Was it true?
I rolled that question round and round my mind like a marble in a jar. Uncle Bill had always hated my guts, and it’d be just his style to make something up on purpose to hurt me. But still I wondered. You see, I had a bit of a mystery packed in my carpetbag.
Pa died first. He got the typhoid fever, and Ma nursed him so well it seemed like he was getting better. But he didn’t. Then Ma took ill. Most of the time she didn’t even know me, but near the end she came to herself again, and I could tell there was something troubling her. I asked her did she want the minister, but she shook her head.
“The lucky piece,” she whispered. “The ring … in my chest of drawers. In brown paper.”
“Here, Ma. I’ve got it.” I showed her the parcel, and she breathed a bit easier.
When I opened it, I found a little quilt, a ring and an old coin. I’d never seen them before; Ma had never so much as mentioned them.
“Keep them safe,” she said. “They’re your future and your fortune.” But I never got to find out what she meant, for she took a turn for the worse. She passed on soon after.
Uncle Bill sold everything, even the canary. I did ask myself whether Ma meant that I should sell those things too. The ring was real gold and the quilt was the finest fancywork, made of coloured silk in a pattern of stars. But in the end I never so much as showed them to Auntie Sarah, even though Uncle Bill raised the roof about the expense of keeping
me. I hid them under a loose floorboard. I didn’t have anything else to remind me of Ma, and I never thought any more about how she’d come to have them. But now I wondered, if Ma had lived a bit longer, would she have told me.
I sighed, wiped my eyes, and looked around me. I must have been in a bit of a daze, because I’d walked for half an hour in the wrong direction.
“Bloomin’ hell,” I said. My feet were already aching. I turned around and started plodding back in the direction of Ma Bolivar’s.
Ma Bolivar would want some rent in advance, of course. Madame had given me some money to tide me over, and I’d put it in that red purse that Miss Charlotte had given me. I’d put the purse in my carpetbag, but I suddenly thought, what if it got stolen? I’d be sunk. There were snatch-and-grab artists everywhere. How easy would it be to yank the bag out of my hand and run off with it? The thought made my blood run cold. I took the purse out of my bag and slipped it into the pocket of my dress, where I could feel it bump against me as I walked.
Then I started to worry about pickpockets. It would be just as easy for someone to jostle up against me on the crowded street. I left a few small coins in the purse, but the rest of the money I wrapped up in my handkerchief and stuck down the front of my bodice. It made a funny lump on my chest, but with my shawl pulled round me, no one would notice. I felt a lot better after that.
I was hungry by then, so I stopped at a pie stall. When I reached into my pocket, I found Mr Plush’s card. Not on your life, I thought, and dropped it in the gutter. But when I fished a penny from my purse to pay for the pie, I brought something else up too. Something tiny and hard. I blew the fluff off it.
“Gawd, what’s this?” I whispered to myself.
It was bright red and sparkled. It was just like one of the tiny rubies from around the Throttle diamond. And it was right here in my purse.
I thought back to Lady Throttle’s dressing room. She’d made me shut my eyes when she’d put the chocolate into my hand, and she’d been so close I’d smelled her perfume. Crewel was right behind me. She could have put it in my purse then. But why? Lady Throttle had been determined to make trouble for me. She’d insisted that I be searched.
