It wasn’t her fault she had to leave Briargate, or that she ended up in Lewins Mead, but she knew in her heart that she hadn’t tried very hard to get herself out of it.
Back in early January when her bruises had begun to fade, she had tried to find respectable work. She’d asked in shops, at inns, even a couple of laundries. But the refusals got her down, and it was far less daunting to go scavenging with Gussie and Betsy. It was a lark doing the rounds of warehouses, factories and workshops to search amongst their rubbish for stuff they could sell to the marine shops.
She liked picking up the money people threw to Gussie when he did his mimes outside the theatre. She even enjoyed distracting shopkeepers while Betsy and Gussie stole things. Only a couple of days ago Gussie had been talking about the rich pickings that could be found in the mud at low tide along the river Avon. Scavengers who worked there were called ‘mud larks’, and Hope could barely wait for the warmer weather to become one of them. A year ago, if anyone had suggested that she might seriously intend to make a living wading in filthy mud she would have been appalled.
But the unpalatable truth was that she’d allowed herself to become as apathetic as everyone else in Lewins Mead. She slept till late in the morning, roamed the streets rather than looking for real work, and even worse, she had begun to rely on having a few glasses of gin each day because it blocked out the sordid reality of her new life.
Ignorance and apathy were the true evils of Lewins Mead. While it might be said the residents lived under conditions which made it almost impossible to keep themselves clean and healthy, few of them ever attempted it, or even saw that it was desirable. Thieving and prostitution were the main occupations, and the money earned went on drink. Children were pushed out on to the streets to steal or beg almost as soon as they could walk and no one saw anything wrong in it.
But Hope couldn’t claim ignorance as an excuse for anything. She knew the difference between right and wrong, she had been educated and had a great many skills that none of her neighbours had. She might have fallen into this pit through no fault of her own, but now she’d got to find a way out of it. If she didn’t she’d end up in prison, or selling her body until it was too diseased for anyone to want it.
Daylight was fading and the wind was growing keener as the three friends made their way home with heavy sacks of wood over their shoulders. Hope had found some potatoes missed by a farmer in his field, and miraculously they hadn’t become blackened by frost.
‘We could sell one of the bags of wood and get enough for a couple of gins each,’ Betsy said as they reached the town.
‘It’s going to snow, so we’ll need the wood,’ Hope said sharply. ‘Gin won’t keep us warm.’
‘Hark at you!’ Betsy jeered. ‘So you think you’re in charge now you’ve cracked thieving?’
Hope hesitated before replying. She knew if she voiced all the thoughts she’d had this afternoon her friends would take it as a condemnation of their way of life. ‘I haven’t cracked it,’ she said carefully. ‘And I know I daren’t try it again. I’m going to get some real work.’
‘There ain’t no work for people like us,’ Betsy replied. ‘You should’ve seen that by now.’
Hope had half-expected that reaction. ‘Then I’ll collect wood and sell it,’ she retorted.
‘You’ll never be able to collect enough to sell without a barrow,’ Gussie said, though he looked at her with sympathy, not scorn. ‘But I never thought you was cut out fer thievin’ anyways.’
A couple of hours later, back in the room with the fire blazing and the potatoes baking around the edges, Hope attempted tactfully to explain more fully how she felt. As she had expected, Betsy bridled a bit, but Gussie came down on Hope’s side.
‘I’d hate it if you ended up a dollymop,’ he agreed, using the name used by the locals for a prostitute. ‘So would Betsy, she wouldn’t do that even if she were starving.’
‘I might,’ Betsy said airily. ‘If the cove was young, rich and good to me.’
Hope laughed, for Betsy always liked to have the last word, and more often than not she argued just for the sport of it. ‘If a man like that came along I’d want to marry him, not just lie with him,’ Hope said. ‘But that isn’t going to happen, not when I look like this!’
Gussie looked at her appraisingly. ‘You’re beautiful, Hope,’ he said, clearly not seeing the tangled hair or how shabby and dirty her grey dress had become. ‘So is Betsy. You could both get anyone if you put your mind to it.’
‘You charmer,’ Hope smiled. ‘But it isn’t any good wishing for a man to whisk me off to a nice home with good food on the table. I’ve got to work my way to something better.’
It snowed that night and all the next day. Mole, Shanks and their women, Josie and Lil, stayed in too, all of them huddling around the fire. They played cards, drank the bottle of cheap rum Mole had brought in, argued and told stories.
Hope was glad enough of the shelter from the cold, but she wasn’t pleased to be forced to spend so much time with the four night-time lodgers. Mole and Shanks were crude, loud-mouthed thugs who didn’t hold conversations, they gave monologues on villainy. She had realized weeks ago that Josie and Lil were dollymops who handed over their earnings to their men. The four of them were everything she was nervous of in Lewins Mead.
Mole, a short, squat fellow with dark eyes set very close together beneath thick black eyebrows, got his nickname because he had been a miner. Shanks was tall and thin, with an ugly scar down his right cheek. He came from Dublin, and the only attractive thing about him was his Irish accent. Josie and Lil reminded Hope of tripe, white, flaccid and with nothing to recommend them. They were dull-eyed and slow-witted, their pale, thin faces registering no emotion. All four had quite decent clothes by the standards of Lamb Lane, but the dirt engrained in their skin, the lack of expression in their eyes and the constant barrage of profanity and gutter cant were repellent.
By five in the afternoon Hope thought that this was a taste of what being in a prison cell must be like, crowded together with six other people, breathing putrid air, assaulted by noxious smells of unwashed bodies and forced to endure the boastings of men who were human parasites. She had spent much of the day gazing out of the tiny window, for at least the snow had made the view of rooftops pretty and clean. But now it was dark she was forced to return to her pile of sacks, and in the light of just two candles and the fire, the four lodgers didn’t just look unattractive, but menacing too.
She sensed Gussie and Betsy were not happy either to have this company thrust upon them. Betsy called the lodgers friends but that meant she and Gussie knew them well, not that they liked them. They needed the regular lodging money to pay the three shillings a week rent on the room, and until today the lodgers had always cleared out by ten or eleven in the morning and didn’t return until late at night.
The enforced imprisonment at least had the effect of sharpening Hope’s conviction that she must find a way of getting out of Lewins Mead permanently. Yet as she looked at Betsy and Gussie’s faces softened by the candlelight she felt a pang of sorrow that this would almost certainly mean leaving them behind.
‘Whatcha’ thinking about?’ Gussie asked quietly, almost as if he’d tuned into her thoughts.
‘Finding work,’ she whispered back, knowing if one of the lodgers was to hear her they’d have plenty to say on the subject, and nothing she would want to hear.
‘You could go down to the Ragged School,’ Gussie suggested. ‘There’s a cove called Mr Phelps there what teaches. He might be able to help you. They say he’s a decent sort.’
Hope had also heard that a preacher’s daughter called Miss Carpenter had taken over an old hall in St James’s Back to teach the waifs and strays of Lewins Mead to read and write. She was reputed to be passionate about giving the children of the rookery a chance in life. Yet until today Hope had not been interested enough to find out more about her.
‘Sounds like you’ve put your nose around
the door there,’ she said teasingly. Gussie was something of an enigma. Outwardly he appeared as cunning, cocksure and hard-headed as Mole and Shanks, but behind that lay a far more sensitive, kindly soul. Hope sensed that something appalling had happened to him at a young age, probably at the farm he was sent to work on, for he always clammed up when she asked him questions about it. He had a tender streak that a life on the streets hadn’t killed off, and he also had his own moral code which prevented him from stealing from those he considered ‘his own’.
‘Yeah, I’ve bin in there a few times,’ he sighed. ‘I wanted a bit of book learning, but it ain’t fer me. The kids wot goes there are young. I can’t be doin’ wif goin’ every day neither.’
‘They give lessons at night, don’t they?’ Hope asked. ‘You could go then.’
Gussie shrugged. ‘I thought about that an’ all, but it would’ve meant leavin’ Betsy on her own. She ain’t safe wivout me, nor you neither.’
That explanation made a lump come up in Hope’s throat for she knew what Gussie was afraid of: what people called ‘White Slavers’, who forced young girls into prostitution.
There were countless men in Lewins Mead, Mole and Shanks included, who lived off their women’s earnings as prostitutes. Doubtless many of these women had been pushed or even forced into it by their men too. But they weren’t to be feared, Betsy knew them all and would not be taken in by any of them.
The White Slavers were very different. They were seemingly respectable, well-dressed and presumably charming, judging by the number of young girls who had just disappeared after being seen talking to a stranger. There was a woman working in the Drawbridge, an ale house on the quay frequented by sailors, who had been captured like this and taken to a brothel in London. Her story, and it was verified by the police who raided the brothel after she was thrown out because she was pregnant, was that a smart-looking man had bought her a drink which she thought must have been drugged. She came round to find herself gagged and tied up in a carriage.
The brothel she ended up in had a wealthy clientele who wanted unspeakable perversions, not a quick release in an alley. Unwilling girls were beaten or starved if they didn’t comply; some were dosed with laudanum. But willing or unwilling, the girls received none of the money they earned, and escape was impossible for they were never allowed out and the doors were kept locked.
The people who ran the brothel were caught and sent to prison, but it was thought there were hundreds of other places just like it in London and almost certainly in other big cities too. Every now and then there would be articles about it in the newspapers, a list of names of girls who had gone missing, but it was generally thought that the police didn’t strenuously investigate because the men who used these brothels were rich and powerful.
Betsy had had her fingers burned once already. She had told Hope about the ordeal she’d gone through with a ship’s captain who had offered her five pounds for her virginity. She had said with her customary bluntness that he was ‘hung like a donkey and he weren’t satisfied with taking me cherry, he buggered me an’ all’. She said she left the inn he’d taken her to bleeding and hardly able to walk, and vowed that even if someone was to offer her a hundred pounds she couldn’t go through that agony again.
Yet Hope felt Gussie was justified in worrying that Betsy might be snatched for she attracted a great deal of male attention. She had an engaging, lively personality that lit up a bar the moment she walked in, and she moved in a sensual manner and would talk to anyone. If Gussie wasn’t with her it would be easy enough for anyone to drug her and take her away.
‘You could ask Betsy not to go out while you were at lessons,’ Hope suggested.
Gussie chuckled. ‘I know what her answer to that would be!’ he said.
Hope did too. Betsy didn’t like to be ordered around and she’d laugh at Gussie’s fears for her. ‘Well, get her to go with you then,’ she said. ‘I’m sure she’d like to be able to read too.’
He shook his head ruefully. ‘She don’t like people like Miss Carpenter.’
Hope hardly slept at all that night. She wasn’t tired because she’d been indoors all day, and her mind was churning over and over about where she could go to find work. Without a character and any clean clothes she had no chance of getting back into service or any other respectable kind of work. Wood collecting was the only thing she could do. But as Gussie had pointed out, without a cart she couldn’t get enough at one time to sell.
It was still pitch dark when she got up. The room stank and Mole was snoring so loudly she couldn’t stand another minute in there. She always slept in her clothes because it was so cold at nights, and picking up her boots and her cape, which she used as a blanket, and one of the sacks she’d been lying on, she crept out, side-stepping all the sleeping bodies.
Lamb Lane was treacherous with snow on the cobbles, and as silent as the grave because it was so early, but thankfully it seemed slightly warmer than the day before. She reckoned she would need to sell five or six loads of wood a day to make a living at it. That was an awful lot of walking and a full sack was very heavy. But she could do it if she put her mind to it.
Chapter Eleven
Matt stumbled sleepily down the stairs. It was five in the morning, still dark and raining very hard. It was days like this when he wished he was anything but a farmer and could stay in bed with Amy for at least another hour.
He heard the kettle boiling even before he opened the kitchen door. Nell was sitting hunched up on a stool by the stove and had clearly been there for some time.
His heart sank as she turned to him and he saw her eyes were swollen with crying. He couldn’t cope with her misery first thing in the morning.
‘You must stop this, Nell,’ he blurted out before he could stop himself. ‘There’s no call for you to be up so early.’
‘I’ve always risen early,’ she retorted in a whining tone. ‘Amy will be busy enough with the children all day. The least I can do is get the stove going for her.’
Matt sighed and sat down at the table. When Amy complained that she felt Nell was usurping her position, he always told her that doing chores was Nell’s way of showing her appreciation they’d taken her in. Amy retorted that she was sick and tired of appreciation, what she wanted was her kitchen back.
‘I wasn’t talking about you fixing the stove or making my breakfast,’ he said wearily. ‘You’ve got to stop brooding about Hope.’
‘How can I when I know she’s been murdered and the man who did it is as free as a bird?’ Nell asked sharply. ‘And I seem to be the only person who cares.’
‘Don’t be foolish, you know that’s not true.’ Matt ran his fingers distractedly through his tousled hair. ‘We’ve all just accepted that she ran off with her lover, and you must too.’
‘I’ll never accept that,’ Nell said indignantly. ‘That’s what Albert wants us to believe. You agreed with me that her letter didn’t sound right.’
Matt groaned; it was too early in the morning for this. He’d told her his views on that letter dozens of times, but once again he repeated that Hope had been in a hurry. And that no amount of explaining herself to Nell was going to make her hurt less.
‘But she would have written again later to stop us all worrying.’ Nell’s eyes filled with tears yet again. ‘You know she would, Matt.’
As always when Matt saw the pain in Nell’s eyes, he was sorry he’d been sharp and irritated with her. He got up and put his arms around her, holding her to his shoulder and patting her back comfortingly. ‘Maybe she’s too ashamed? I know if I skipped off the way she did and caused all this trouble I’d just want to stay missing.’
Matt wished his feelings were as clear-cut as that explanation. He lurched from extreme anxiety for Hope to near hatred for what she’d done to Nell and the embarrassment to his family.
It was understandable that people were shocked by Hope running off with a soldier; after all, the Rentons had always been steady, sober and well-res
pected people who never caused scandals. But it would have been just a nine-day wonder if Nell hadn’t reacted so dramatically about it. Leaving her husband and Briargate had created all kinds of suspicions, and the way Nell had acted since then only added more fuel to the fire. Many people thought she had gone mad, others thought Albert or even Sir William must have ravished Hope. Hardly a day passed without Matt or Amy being cornered by someone determined to get to the bottom of what they considered a sinister mystery.
When Nell ran in here on Christmas Eve so distressed, Matt had taken her accusations of murder seriously. He’d gone rampaging up to Briargate straight away and would have killed Albert himself if he’d shown his face. But Sir William had taken him into his study and calmed him down. He pointed out that Albert had been chopping wood in the shed on the afternoon Hope disappeared; he said he’d seen him himself when he came back from a ride on Merlin. He reminded Matt too that Albert had gone straight to Baines when he found Hope’s letter at the gatehouse, and it was Baines who talked him out of informing Nell by letter because it would be too great a shock for her.
Sir William couldn’t have been more understanding. He even agreed that he would get the police to make an investigation to convince Nell no crime had been committed, in the hopes that it would persuade her to return to Briargate and Albert.
On Boxing Day, Matt helped the police comb the grounds of Briargate, the surrounding woods and even the gatehouse, but they found nothing suspicious. Yet still Nell ranted and sobbed, refusing even to speak to Albert when he came to the farm to try to persuade her to go home with him.
Matt had tried to talk her round, explaining that a woman who left her husband became an outcast, and reminding her of the vows she’d made on her wedding day. But it did no good, she said she didn’t care what people thought about her, she knew the truth about what Albert had done.
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