She never ruled out using that one asset one day, providing she got big money for it. But until then she intended to stay alive and keep out of prison, so she kept her wits about her and didn’t take unnecessary risks.
The dank, stinking alleys and narrow lanes around the docks were her domain. She knew almost everyone who lived there and didn’t steal from them. She knew all the marine shops where she could get a few pennies for the wood, nails and metal she managed to scavenge. That paid the rent. When there was nothing left over for food, she would go up to the big houses in Clifton and find one where the cook had been foolish enough to leave the back door open while she was baking. It took only a few seconds to slip in and steal a pie or a cake – once she grabbed a whole leg of lamb straight from the oven.
The docks were a source of many free gifts for anyone prepared to watch and wait, patiently armed with a basket and a pot or jar. Betsy would check every morning which ships were being unloaded, and loiter in the hopes that a dropped crate would spill open. She would pounce on the fruit, sugar or tea and be off with it, often even before the dockers became aware that they’d damaged the crate.
There were also the foreign sailors she could charm into giving her a sixpence to buy a new dress so she could meet them later.
She never bought clothes, just as she never kept those appointments with foreign sailors. But up in the High Street there were second-hand clothes shops where she could whip a petticoat, dress or hat while the shopkeeper was distracted.
Betsy met Gussie when she was thirteen and he was twelve, a small, freckle-faced, ginger-haired boy who’d tramped from Devon to Bristol to seek his fortune. He’d come up to her as she was hanging about waiting for a pie man to turn his back so she could snatch one of his wares, and he’d asked her where he could sleep for the night.
Betsy was so hungry that she said if he could distract the pie man’s attention she’d help him. He played a blinder by pretending to throw a fit in front of the stall, and she didn’t get just one pie, but three.
She was of course obliged to give Gussie one of the pies and to take him back to the flophouse she mostly stayed at.
Within a couple of days Betsy had decided Gussie was the perfect partner for her. He wasn’t tough, but he was wily and daring. Apart from the pretend fits, he could shin up a drainpipe and enter a house by an upper window in broad daylight. He could also make a sound which frightened horses. When they began to bolt, he’d grab the reins and calm the horse, for which the stunned owner would then reward him. He said he’d learned it from a man in a circus who had also taught him acrobatics and clowning.
It was the clowning that really won Betsy over. Gussie would do fantastic funny mimes, twisting his rubbery face to portray emotions and different kinds of people. One night he did a little act while people were queuing to get into the theatre in King Street and they roared with laughter, throwing nearly two shillings in pennies and halfpennies to him. Even his name, Augustus Pomfrey, made Betsy laugh; she said it would make an excellent name for a fat alderman, but was ridiculous on a small, skinny boy with hair the colour of carrots. But then, she found she laughed a great deal with Gussie, for despite his small stature she felt sort of protected and comfortable with him. He might not be able to fight off the many men who tried to have their way with her, but his presence deterred them. And in turn she protected him from the thugs and ruffians that she’d grown up with.
Six years on they were inseparable, an indomitable unit, but not lovers. Betsy had eventually traded her virginity to a sea captain for the princely sum of five guineas, but the experience had put her off men. Gussie, with his brotherly affection and total loyalty, was the only male she trusted completely.
‘She’s quite a little lady,’ Betsy said thoughtfully. ‘Hurt as she is, she thanked us real nice. When those shiners have gone I bet she’ll be real bonny.’
‘You ain’t thinkin’ of taking her down to Dolly’s!’ Gussie exclaimed.
‘’Course not, whatcha take me for?’ Betsy replied indignantly. Dolly owned a bawdy house in King Street.
‘So what are we going to do with her?’
‘We don’t have to do nothin’ with her. I jest feel sorry fer her. It won’t kill us to take care of her for a day or two till she’s mended, will it?’
Gussie shrugged. He knew once Betsy’s mind was made up about something, nothing would change it. ‘I’d best light the fire then so we can dry her clothes, then I’ll go out and get us something to eat.’
Betsy sat on the floor by the fire after Gussie left, but she kept glancing round at the sleeping girl. Her whole face was purple and black with bruising, swollen flesh completely covering her eyes. But as she’d helped her take off her sodden dress, the girl had clutched at her stomach, and Betsy guessed she’d been punched and kicked there too.
Men beating women was an everyday occurrence around here. It was equally common to see people weak with hunger. Young girls and boys flocked into Bristol every day in the hopes of finding work, and unless they had a character from a previous employer, almost all of them ended up dead, defeated or criminals.
Betsy didn’t normally help anyone. The one thing she’d learned right from the age of eight when she saw that house burn down with her mother, father and Sadie inside, was that it was a tough old world. You had to look after yourself, be quicker, more cunning, braver and smarter than anyone else, for if you just dropped your guard for a moment then someone would do you down.
So she couldn’t quite understand what it was about this girl that had made her want to help her.
Looking at her clothes drying round the fire, she could see they were well made. Plain cloth, but the stitching was as small and neat as some she’d seen on gowns in the market that had once belonged to rich women. Her undergarments had impressed Betsy too, for apart from the mud splattered around the hems of her petticoats, they were very clean and dainty.
The girl’s face was too distorted and swollen to tell if it was a pretty one, but her hair was black and glossy, and where she wasn’t bruised, her skin was smooth and very white, not mottled and rough like so many women’s round here. Her hands were proof she’d spent years in a kitchen, for they were red and call used, but overall she looked as though she’d been cared for.
Was she carrying a child?
Round here no one could afford to get married, so if a girl got in the family way no one thought anything of it. But Betsy had enough recollection of life before her parents died to know that in more genteel circles bastards were frowned on.
Betsy was just going to wriggle over closer to the girl and look to see if she had a swollen belly, when she began to stir. She moved to sit up, winced with pain and flopped down again.
‘How’d yer feel now? Any better for a sleep?’ Betsy asked.
The girl looked about her as if confused. ‘I can see a bit better now. But both my eyes hurt. Are they very swollen?’
‘Let’s just say you won’t be getting no admirers for a bit,’ Betsy said with a chuckle.
‘It was very kind of you and your husband to help me.’
The sweetness of her voice touched Betsy, but it also reminded her to be careful. For all she knew the girl could be a magistrate’s daughter! ‘Gussie ain’t me husband; only a friend. I’ll tell youright now, we don’t normally help no one. So if you wants to stay tonight you’d better spill it out!’
‘Spill what out?’
‘Well, yer name, how old you are, and where you from, fer a start. We couldn’t get no sense out of yer while we was helping you ’ere.’
‘Hope Renton, fifteen, and I come from a village beyond Bristol to the south. Did you say your name is Betsy?’
‘That’s right. Betsy Archer and I’m nobody’s fool. So I’m gonna make a cup of tea. And then you’re gonna tell me how you ended up nearly getting yerself flattened under a carriage wheel. And when the baby’s due.’
‘I’m not having a baby,’ Hope said indignantly. ‘What made you
think I was?’
‘That’s the usual reason for girls running away.’ Betsy shrugged. ‘But if you say you ain’t, then that’s one problem out the way.’
Hope watched as Betsy filled an old tin teapot with some water from a jug, and then put it on the fire to boil. She wondered why she hadn’t got a kettle.
Her memory of coming here was cloudy. She remembered Betsy and Gussie being with her in the church, then them holding her arms to support her and taking her through some very narrow alleys. But that was all she could remember.
She shuddered as she looked about the small, gloomy room. It was clearly at the top of the house for the ceiling sloped sharply towards the tiny window, and it had no furniture, only a few wooden crates and piles of sacks which clearly served as beds. On one of the crates there were several cracked cups and a large tin box. A bucket stood in the corner by the door, presumably for slops, and on another crate was a tin basin.
Hope knew people who were very much poorer than her own family, but even they had some sort of furniture, a few trinkets and bits of china. Betsy must be desperately poor, but she didn’t look it for she had gold hoops in her ears, and her red dress was stylish, even if it was shabby, dirty and a bit vulgar with such a low neck.
‘It’s quiet here,’ Hope said. ‘Is that because you are the only people living here?’
Betsy gave a kind of strangled snort. ‘Your eyes must’ve been bad when we brought you in here,’ she said. ‘It’s like a bleedin’ ants’ nest, so many people coming and going you can’t count them all. It’s quiet now cos most are out, but come this evening it’ll be a different story. Now, that brings me round to your’n. Come on, tell me!’
Hope thought fast. She was very grateful to Betsy, but she wasn’t sure it was sensible to tell her the whole truth, not until she knew she could trust her. So she gave her a safer, shortened version, that Albert resented her living with him and her sister, and while Nell was away he’d hit her and told her to get out.
‘Why didn’t you go up to the big house and tell them what he’d done?’ Betsy asked.
‘Because he would have taken it out on Nell when she got back,’ Hope said. ‘I couldn’t do anything to Albert without it coming back on Nell.’
Betsy seemed satisfied with that. The water was boiling in the teapot now, and she lifted it off the fire and put it on the crate, then opening the tin she took out a packet of tea and spooned some into the water.
‘We gotta keep any food stuff in this tin cos of the mice and rats,’ Betsy said, getting out a small bag of sugar. ‘There’s a bit of bread if you want it. Gussie’s gone to get us some pies, but it’ll keep you going until then.’
With the cup of sweet black tea in one hand and a lump of bread in the other, Hope felt a little better, though it was hard to eat and drink with her cut lips. ‘I’ll pay you back for my keep as soon as I get a position,’ she said.
‘You got a character?’ Betsy asked.
‘No, I couldn’t, could I? Albert threw me out too fast.’
‘Then you’ll be lucky to get anything,’ Betsy said curtly. ‘Whatcha want to be a servant for anyways?’
Hope said it was all she knew, but she wouldn’t mind working in a shop.
‘You has to be able to figure, writing it down and that,’ Betsy said.
‘I can do that,’ Hope replied. ‘I know all the stuff about linen and household things too. And I know about farming and animals.’
‘You’re a bit of a know-all, ain’tcha?’ Betsy said sarcastically.
Hope was embarrassed then and hung her head. ‘I didn’t mean to be, I was only telling you what I could do because I thought it might give you ideas for places I could go to look for work.’
Betsy didn’t know anyone who could read and write, and she was in fact impressed. It struck her that if her own parents had lived, she might have learned such skills. But there was something more about this girl, maybe it was her name, God knows, hope was the only thing that kept her going sometimes. Or maybe it was because if her sister hadn’t died, she’d be the same age. Yet whatever the reason, she felt drawn to the girl, like it was a kind of fate.
‘You can’t go now here till yer face is mended,’ she said, more kindly. ‘So jest rest up fer now. Tell us about what you done in the big house. I ain’t bin in one, leastways not to stop, if yer know what I mean.’
A week later, Hope studied her face in a small mirror Gussie had brought home for her.
‘You look pretty now,’ he said, his pale brown eyes crinkling up as he smiled at her. ‘We didn’t want you to see how bad you looked when we found you.’
Hope’s eyes prickled with tears of gratitude. Not for the mirror – she would sooner have remained in ignorance about how she looked, for once the swelling had gone down on her face she had imagined she would look normal again. But the bruising was still purple and at no stretch of the imagination did she look pretty. Yet it was another act of kindness, of which Gussie and Betsy had showered so many on her. They’d let her stay, they’d fed her and comforted her, all when they had so little themselves.
‘Gus might be sweet-talking when he says you look pretty, but you don’t look like a monster no more,’ Betsy said with laughter in her voice. ‘It’ll be a couple more weeks before them bruises fade, but you look good enough for the Grapes tonight.’
Gussie and Betsy went out drinking every night; it seemed that the only thing which made life bearable for everyone in Lewins Mead was cheap gin or rum. Up till now Hope had declined to go with them, using her injuries as an excuse, but it was clear they thought the time had come for her to venture out.
‘I can’t,’ Hope said in alarm. ‘I’m not ready for that. I’ll be all right here on my own.’
‘I didn’t take you for a coward,’ Betsy retorted, putting her hands on her hips and glowering at the younger girl. ‘No one will take no notice of a few bruises, they’s as common as fleas down the Grapes.’
Hope realized by that response she had to go. It wasn’t just that they’d be offended if she refused, she had to prove to them she had spirit. But they couldn’t possibly know how terrifying their world was to her.
On the day they’d brought her here, she had felt like an ill-treated dog that was just grateful for being brought inside. Her mind had stopped working and she couldn’t think about the next day, or the one after. She answered Betsy’s questions as best she could, but she couldn’t even summon up enough strength to ask her anything. She would have been glad just to lie down and die for she hurt too much to want to live.
She must have fallen asleep again soon after Gussie arrived back with some hot pies for them and she didn’t wake till the following morning. To her shock and horror there were four other people aside from Gussie and Betsy asleep all around her, and a stink coming from the bucket in the corner.
She wanted to relieve herself too, but she couldn’t bring herself to add to that already nearly full bucket, and as she lay there wondering if there was a privy downstairs, she became aware of a strange noise. It was a kind of animal sound, deep and irregular, and it was some time before she realized it was people snoring all over the house. Soon there were other sounds too, babies crying, children shouting, and a man bellowing for them to shut up.
Even as the noise downstairs got louder and louder it didn’t wake her room-mates. She heard a church clock strike eight and it seemed inconceivable that she and all these other people were still in bed so late in the morning. Not that the pile of sacks and a blanket qualified as a real bed, and she was itching all over as if she’d been bitten by something.
Later that morning, she discovered that the slop bucket was emptied out of the window into the alley below. Water had to be drawn from a pump further down, and there was a privy out the back. But as it served the whole house – eight rooms with an average of ten people sleeping in each – it wasn’t a place anyone would visit willingly.
The four extra lodgers, introduced to her as Mole, Shanks, Josie an
d Welsh Lil, were all around the same age as Betsy, much more shabbily dressed, and almost as sinister-looking as their names. But they disappeared almost as soon as they got up. Betsy said her room was a ‘padding ken’ to them, meaning just a place to flop, and she and Gussie didn’t trouble themselves with what they did all day. There was an implication in that explanation that they were criminals.
Hope’s clothes and boots were dry again, and as it had stopped raining at last, Gussie and Betsy insisted they took her out to show her around.
Maybe it was because she was in pain and very aware people were staring at her injuries, but the part of Bristol they showed her that day looked nothing like the splendid, exciting place she remembered coming to as a child with her father. It was grey, filthy and noisy: mean, stinking alleys with human effluent running down them, houses that looked as if they were on the verge of collapse. She saw people that were like something from a night mare; diseased-looking women with hollow eyes sat like statues in doorways, often clutching a wailing baby in their arms. There were brutish-looking men in broken-down stove-pipe hats and ragged coats swigging from bottles, and hundreds of barefoot, ragged children playing in the muck. Cripples hobbled past on crutches ready for a day’s begging in the better parts of town, and she even saw a child pulling a cart along with a woman with no legs sitting on it. There were mad people raving and shaking their fists, gin-soaked floozies and even men who were as black as coal.
Betsy and Gussie appeared to be oblivious to Hope’s shock as they pointed out the best stall for herrings, their favourite beer shop, and the marine shop where they sold anything they’d managed to scavenge. They pointed out a man carrying a hoe and a net and said he scavenged in the drains that ran into the river, and it was said he could make as much as five pounds on a good day as money dropped in the street often ended up there. Gussie laughingly told her that such men could drown in those drains if they didn’t take careful notice of tides.
Betsy showed her a house with boarded-over windows and said a coiner lived and worked there. Hope had no idea what a coiner was, but it seemed it was someone who made counterfeit money. Betsy said he’d once got her to pass some for him, and all had gone well until one shopkeeper got suspicious, and she had to run like the wind to escape him.
Hope Page 18
