Girl of Shadows (4 page)

‘How does she think you’re going to meet a decent cove when you’re on the town?’

‘She thinks I’m a maid of all work for a rich family in a big house. I’m sending money home to her and my little sisters. They depend on it. You’ve
no
idea how pleased I was to be taken on here.’

She leant over to set the bottle of laudanum on her night table, and Friday saw that blood had seeped through her rags, shift and robe, staining her bed cover.

‘Don’t move, love, you’ve sprung a leak.’

‘What? Oh shite.’

Friday took a towel from a chair and slipped it beneath Rowie’s bottom. ‘Where do you keep your rags?’

Rowie pointed at her clothes press.

‘Spare shift?’

Rowie gestured again and Friday fetched her what she needed.

‘Look, I’m due at work in a minute but I’ll send Annie up from the laundry with clean linen, all right?’

‘Thanks, Friday. And thanks for my medicine and the sweets.’

‘Any time.’

Friday turned to go but Rowie blurted, ‘And Friday?
Please
don’t tell Mrs H how bad I am. I’m desperate to keep this job. Please? I really can’t afford to lose it.’

‘I won’t, don’t worry. See you tomorrow.’

Friday knocked on the closed door of Elizabeth Hislop’s office.

‘Come in!’

Striding in and flopping down in the armchair beside her boss’s desk, Friday stretched her long legs out in front of her. She’d sat there dozens of times over the past year chatting away to Mrs H, and over that time they’d become friends. Friday missed Harrie and Sarah desperately since they’d all been assigned to different jobs after being in the Female Factory together, and Elizabeth had become a substitute during the frequent times the other girls weren’t available. She was older than Friday by almost thirty years, but she was wise and she was good. It had still taken Friday months, however, to tell her why she would have preferred not to work in a brothel.

One day she’d simply said, ‘Mrs H, do you remember when I first started here and you asked me why I’d rather be on the streets?’

Elizabeth had nodded.

‘Do you still want to know?’

‘If you want to tell me.’

Friday had decided that she owed Elizabeth Hislop an explanation, and that it was time. ‘I had a friend a few years ago, a very dear friend. Very pretty, she was. And sweet. I was fifteen, she was a year younger. We were working in a bawdyhouse on Long Acre
Street near Covent Garden for a madam called Ernestine Monk, a real bitch, flash as they come. And her crew! Bloody mongrels! We worked all hours of the day and night and she took sixty-five per cent. Sixty-five! Well, we were young and stupid and we just didn’t know any better. One night a cully beat the shit out of my friend and cut her with a broken bottle. Everywhere. Nearly killed her. Monk said she’d asked for it and fired her. My friend couldn’t live with looking the way she did and necked herself. I vowed then never to work for a madam again, or belong to a crew. And I never
have
worked in a brothel, until now. Never run with a crew, either.’

Elizabeth’s eyes had filled with tears. ‘Well, I can understand your reasons, Friday, but I hope you’ve realised I’m nothing like that woman.’

‘I know,’ Friday had said. ‘I know you’re not. That’s why I’ve bothered to tell you.’

But Friday had never told Elizabeth Hislop how much she despised the men she had sex with day after day, how they made her sick with their pathetic, slobbering physical greed and inability to control their bodies and desires. Most days it required considerable will and gin before she could make herself do what was required to earn her pay, but she persevered because paradoxically she was good at it, she was in demand, and she made a lot of money, which she needed for the Charlotte fund, to help Harrie so she could send money home to her family, and to keep herself in drink.

‘Friday, dear,’ Elizabeth said. ‘What can I do for you?’ She glanced at the watch on the silver chatelaine she always wore around her plump waist. ‘Shouldn’t you be starting work?’

‘I’ve got a few minutes.’

‘I hope you don’t plan to wear those dreadful boots?’

Friday smiled. ‘No. Can I talk to you about Rowie?’

Sighing, Elizabeth closed the ledger in which she’d been writing, removed her gold-wire spectacles and sat back in her chair. ‘How is she?’

‘Bleeding all over her room,’ Friday said without a shred of guilt, despite her assurance to Rowie only minutes earlier. She had a plan.

‘My God, really? Should I send for Dr Chandler?’

‘No, I just mean she’s bleeding heavily.’

‘That’s unfortunate. It really is.’ Elizabeth looked grim. ‘I’ve thought hard about this and I’m sorry to say it but I’m going to have to let her go.’

Friday nodded.

‘I really don’t have much choice,’ Elizabeth went on. ‘I’ve had complaints from customers about availability, and mess and what have you, and it isn’t as though she’s only off a few days a month. We could have worked around that. She seems to be on the rag all the time. I
am
a bit cross she wasn’t honest with me when I took her on.’

‘She says she wasn’t having trouble when she started here.’

Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

‘What a shame,’ Friday said, staring at the scuffed toes of her boots. ‘The money she sends home to her mam and sisters will have to stop, I suppose. I hear they’re only little girls, her sisters.’

Elizabeth sighed again, but much louder this time.

‘Father’s long gone, of course.’

Silence.

‘Still, I suppose she can get work somewhere scrubbing floors. Christ,’ Friday said, alarmed, ‘I hope that doesn’t make her troubles even worse!’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Elizabeth exclaimed. ‘I’ll see what I can do! Can she cook? I can probably put her in the kitchen until she finds something else. Not permanently, mind! And I expect I can spare the money for a few doctor’s visits. What are you smirking at, young lady?’

Friday kissed Elizabeth’s powdered cheek. ‘Thank you, Mrs H. You’re such a good person.’ And she grabbed her things and hurried out, properly late now.

‘So are you, Friday Woolfe,’ Elizabeth said to the empty room. ‘If only you would stand still long enough to realise it.’

October 1830, Sydney Town

Harrie perched on an upturned bucket and sipped her tea. Adam and Esther Green’s backyard was really quite pleasant now that someone — Mr Green, probably, given that
she
apparently didn’t like gardening — had planted shrubs and rose bushes along the tall fence and a flowerbed in each corner. They would all shrivel up to sad little sticks in summer because there would be no water to spare for them, but a few might struggle back in the autumn. There was also a new gate, installed at the behest of Mr Green, who likely didn’t want Sarah’s friends climbing over the fence and landing in the new plantings.

‘Is your tea hot enough?’ Sarah asked.

‘Yes, thanks.’ Harrie raised her cup. ‘New tea service?’

‘For my visitors. For you and Friday. I got sick of her telling me I had to use the old cracked cups, so I bought my own.’

‘Very pretty.’ It was, too, the pattern on the china a complicated arrangement of flowers and birds in dark blue against a white background.

‘They’re not actually new; they’re from the pawnshop. I only got the cups and saucers and the teapot.’

‘Mr Skelton?’ Mr Skelton was the fence who bought everything Sarah stole from Adam Green.

Sarah nodded.

‘Good price?’

‘Reasonable. What’s she doing now?’

Harrie squinted past Sarah into the house. ‘Still looking through her magazine. Now she’s … no, now she’s coming out.’

They’d positioned their buckets as close as possible to the kitchen without making it obvious. Esther Green emerged from the house, shot stony-faced disapproval at them and disappeared into the kitchen.

She popped back out a moment later. ‘Sarah, I want you at work polishing the furniture in the parlour as soon as you’ve had your tea. Harriet, you’ll have to leave. And when I’ve finished baking, Sarah, come out here and clean up.’ With another pointed glare she vanished again.

‘Ready?’ Sarah whispered.

Harrie swallowed. Was she? She’d thought hard about this and still wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do. It was mean, but then Esther Green was mean herself, and really shouldn’t be so unkind to Sarah. But it was more than that. Given what had been happening lately, she had an uneasy feeling that something may well be started that might not so readily be stopped again. Her friend needed help, though; Esther Green was wearing her down, that was plain. But it was all right for Sarah — she didn’t believe ghosts were real.

Against her better judgment, she nodded.

Something clattered onto the table in the kitchen.

Sarah smiled and touched her hand. ‘Good girl.’ In a louder than normal voice she said, ‘Are you still having those terrible dreams?’

‘About Rachel?’ Harrie replied squeakily. She cleared her throat.

‘Yes. Have they gone away?’

The clattering next door ceased.

‘No,’ Harrie said. ‘They haven’t.’

‘Mine haven’t either,’ Sarah admitted heartily. ‘It’s worrying, isn’t it? What does she do in
your
dreams?’

For an awful second Harrie forgot what Sarah had coached her to say. ‘She, um … well. Oh! She appears and tells me she’s all alone out at St John’s Cemetery.’

‘Yes!’ Sarah exclaimed. ‘That’s what she does in
my
dreams. Except she seems
quite angry
in mine.’

‘She’s angry in mine, too.’ Harrie agreed. ‘Really angry.’ From the corner of her eye she saw Esther appear at the kitchen window and peer out at them.

Sarah raised her eyebrows, silently asking Harrie if Esther had taken the bait. Harrie gave a barely perceptible nod.

‘She stands at the foot of my bed, all pale but at the same time faintly
glowing
, like a lamp turned all the way down,’ Sarah went on. ‘At least, I
think
I’m dreaming when I see her. I was wondering if we should talk to a priest. What do you think, Harrie?’

‘I don’t know, Sarah. I
am
feeling quite frightened by it all.’

‘So am I.’ Sarah finished her tea and stood. ‘I have to get back to work now. Do you mind if I come to church with you this Sunday? I don’t really know any priests I can talk to.’

Harrie rose as well. ‘I’m sure that will be fine. Father Davenport is a nice man.’ She handed Sarah her cup and saucer. ‘Thank you for the tea.’ As she turned to go, she said through the kitchen window, ‘Good day, Mrs Green.’

But Esther, eyes wide, only stared at her.

Harrie felt vaguely guilty on the way home to Gloucester Street, as if she’d let someone down, though certainly not Esther Green.

Rachel.

As she negotiated carriage traffic, potholes and piles of animal droppings on her way across George Street, she thought about how for her, in the end, it almost always came down to guilt.

She still felt guilty — every day, in fact — for the theft of the silk and embroidery thread for which she’d been arrested in London two years earlier. Not because she was now a convict — she’d actually made her peace with that — but because in those few seconds of terrible, misguided thinking she’d deprived her mother and her younger brother and sisters of both her presence and the regular wage she had earnt. Robbie was ten now and, according to the letters she received from home, working for pennies as a barrow boy at Covent Garden, and Sophie at almost nine was bringing home piece work, much against her mother’s wishes. And Harrie’s: her sister would be blinded and hunchbacked by the age of twenty-five
if she kept that up. Anna, the youngest, was still at home, but for how much longer?

She felt guilty, too, for not doing more to ensure that Gabriel Keegan had never gone near Rachel on the
Isla
. But she’d not done more because she’d assumed he was decent — just because he’d appeared to have good manners and could afford to pay for a cabin and wore a silk top hat. Oh, she’d been so
naive
, and look what had happened! It had been the same with Bella Jackson, whom she had initially considered so generous — kind, even — in spite of
everyone
saying what a nasty piece of work she was. And now they were at the horrible woman’s mercy, waiting and waiting to see what she would do to them. The worry of it was dreadful and some days it built and built until Harrie felt like screaming so her throat bled.

And she hadn’t done enough when the time had come for Rachel’s lying-in, and their poor little sweetheart had slipped away. The damage Keegan had inflicted on her had killed her, of course, but surely she could have done something more to help her? And she hadn’t even gone to Rachel’s funeral — thank God Friday had.

Though they’d avenged her, the guilt over what they’d done to Gabriel Keegan was burning a hole in her. At first she hadn’t really felt much at all and she’d stupidly thought she might have got away without any repercussions to her conscience. But that had changed and every day now she battled with herself: sometimes she was sure she would go to hell for the sin of taking a human life; at other times she believed they’d been right to kill Keegan. It was exhausting. She prayed for serenity and a sign she wasn’t losing her mind, and at times it came. And sometimes it didn’t.

And then of course she was responsible for the most awful betrayal of all.

She could have stopped James Downey, if only she’d known what he was going to do. She could have run after him and stood in front of the mortuary door and barred him from entering; she
could have flung herself across poor Rachel’s cold, still body and not let him near; she could have slapped the scalpels and drills and saws from his hands — anything so he couldn’t have done what he did. But he
had
done it; he’d cut into her, horribly violating her even after death. And he’d done it without Harrie’s permission.

She would
never
forgive him for that, no matter how much she had come to care for him; no matter what silly ideas had dared to blossom in her head about the two of them since his wife died. Rachel had been
hers
, she had belonged to her and Friday and Sarah, and James Downey hadn’t asked. He had walked all over them in his shiny toff boots and his smart black mourning coat that
she
had repaired the button on, and he
hadn’t
asked her permission.