Hope (24 page)

The four extra lodgers, introduced to her as Mole, Shanks, Josie and 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 felt a little better once they’d got away from Lewins Mead and went down by the docks. That was every bit as dirty, noisy and stinking, but the beautiful ships bobbing up and down on the wide expanse of river which glinted silver in the weak autumn sunshine made up for it. Gleaming brasswork, shiny varnished wood and neatly coiled huge ropes bleached by salt water were good to look at after the filth of Lamb Lane. She looked up at the tall masts and wondered how anyone would dare climb to the top of them. She was entranced by the carved figureheads on the ships’ bows, the sight of sailors sitting on decks mending sails, and even the crates of live chickens, sheep and goats she saw being loaded.

The docks were a hive of industry. Huge barrels of French and Spanish wine were being rolled along over the cobblestones, burly men were hauling great nets of goods on and off the ships, carts came and went carrying more goods, and she saw carriages arriving that looked grand enough for royalty.

The hammering from a ship-builder’s yard, sails flapping in the wind to dry, sailors scrubbing decks and the squawking sound of seagulls took Hope out of herself. It was thrilling to imagine the foreign countries the ships set sail for, and in their way, the docks were just as ordered as her life had been back at Briargate.

She thought she would like to work there, in some capacity, but when she voiced this thought to Betsy she cackled with laughter.

‘Oh, there’s work to be had here,’ she said, rolling her eyes at a gang of sailors. ‘There’s lead the drunks up an alley and rob them; there’s wait and watch for them to leave some goods unattended. You can even offer to clean the seagull shit off some fine lady’s shoes.’

That wasn’t what Hope had in mind at all. She was thinking more of sitting in one of the shipping offices writing things down in a big ledger. But she didn’t correct Betsy because she didn’t want her to get the idea that the girl she’d rescued thought she was too grand for Lewins Mead.

The days after that first one seemed endless for she elected to stay in alone while Gussie and Betsy went about their business. But there was nothing to do in the room, and she felt desolate whenever her mind slipped back to her family or Briargate. She felt white-hot hatred for Albert, and although she busied her mind plotting her revenge, she knew that in reality there was nothing she could do to him, even killing him, that wouldn’t adversely affect Nell.

She felt utterly hopeless. She couldn’t get a decent job without a character. She couldn’t leave here because she had no money. She couldn’t even pass the time cleaning, cooking or mending because there was none of the necessary equipment.

She’d worked since she was a child and although she’d often thought it would be nice to sit and do nothing, it wasn’t. Not in a squalid, dirty room anyway, when you were eaten up with hatred for someone and dependent on the kindness of strangers just to eat.

In the next couple of days, sometimes, when her boredom grew bigger than her fear, she ventured downstairs and explored Lamb Lane and the neighbouring alleyways. It was on these occasions that she observed that the kind of housekeeping skills she had were unknown here.

The residents bought food ready-cooked and ate it on the move; they didn’t wash or mend clothes, but wore them till they fell apart, or in Betsy’s case, until she could steal replacements. The family life Hope had known as a child didn’t exist either. Children were out on the streets from first light till after dark, and the man of the house who only went in to sleep wasn’t necessarily their father.

In a lesson once with the Rever-end Gosling he’d said that a huge proportion of babies born in the poorest areas of cities died in their first year, and for the survivors, life would continue to be an obstacle course. If they recovered from measles or scarlet fever, there were dozens more diseases which could easily carry them off.

Gussie had told her that by the time the children were seven or eight, almost all of them would be living on the streets, foraging for their own food. Some of them were like him, escaping a brutal man in the home and a mother in a constant gin-soaked haze, but the rest had been pushed out to fend for themselves as the home was too crowded, often with three or four families sharing one room. All were ragged and barefoot, and some had barely a shirt to cover them.

Hygiene as Hope knew it was unknown. Neither bodies nor clothes were washed, and the latter were worn until they fell apart. The children had matted hair which had never known a comb or a brush, their scalps crawling with lice. She saw poor little mites with festering wounds, impetigo and hideous boils scrabbling after scraps of food thrown into the street. Hope knew that with no care, schooling or even anyone to set them a good example, those that survived to reach adulthood would perpetuate this appalling state of affairs by bringing still more neglected waifs into the world.

On her third day in Lamb Lane Hope could stand the dirt no more, and she picked up each of the sacks used for sleeping and shook them out of the window. Then she made a broom of sorts with some rags left in a corner. She bundled some together, tied a bit of string round it so it was like a mop, and swept the room. The rubbish and dust filled a box, and she took it out and deposited it in the street where everyone else put theirs.

With another rag she washed over the window and polished it up with some old newspaper she found under the sacks. With the sacks back in neat piles, each with a blanket on top, the room looked marginally better, but it got her thinking about her old room at Briargate, with its soft quilt, clean blankets and white cotton sheets, and that made her cry all over again.

Gussie and Betsy viewed the tidied room with a certain amount of admiration, but mostly amusement. ‘We can tell folks we’s going up in the world cos we’ve got ourselves a maid,’ Betsy chortled. She lay down on one of the piles of sacks and waved her hand at Hope.

‘Make me tea now, girl, and quick about it,’ she said in a grand voice. ‘Use the silver teapot of course, and once you’ve done that you can press my ballgown for tonight.’

Hope laughed, for it was impossible not to, Betsy was so warm and irreverent, but her laughter turned to consternation when Gussie pulled two candles out of the front of his coat.

‘Are they from a church?’ she asked in horror, recognizing them as the same thick, long kind they always had in St Mary’s back home.

‘Indeed they are,’ he said with a grin. ‘They last a goodly time too. So while her ladyship sups her tea, we can have light.’

Hope bit back her protest. She’d already observed they had no respect for the law, authority or gentry and teased her because she had. But stealing something from a church was so wicked.

‘Don’t look like that,’ Gussie reprimanded her. ‘They’ve got dozens of them, they won’t miss two. Besides, the Church is rich, they takes money from the poor and dresses up all those bishops in swanky folderols so they can live in palaces and lie around all day doing nothing.’

Gussie’s caustic remark about the Church was just one of many he made on various subjects, which challenged beliefs Hope had held since childhood. She was soon finding herself far less certain of what was right and what was wrong.

The Reverend Gosling had drummed into her ‘Blessed are the Meek.’ Gussie said that was put about by rich and powerful people to make sure there were always millions of meek people they could exploit. He pointed out that she had meekly laid fires and emptied chamber pots for the idle rich and that she’d been taught to be grateful for the few shillings a year she got. He said it was time she valued herself a bit more.

Betsy was even more controversial. She thought women should have equal rights to men. She said it was wrong that a woman’s property and money should become her husband’s when she married, that he could beat her whenever he liked, and take their children away from her if she finally got brave enough to try to leave him. She also thought women should be able to do any job, be that as a doctor, judge, priest or carpenter, if they had the ability. She had a yen to be a carpenter herself, and she was fed up with men laughing at her for it.

Hope walked to the Grapes in trepidation later that evening, but to her surprise it wasn’t a hideous dark dive as she’d expected, but a veritable palace, with bright gas lights, gilt pillars, huge mirrors and velveteen seats. She had marvelled at the gas lamps out on the streets, but she hadn’t expected to see them in a beer house.

‘Shut yer mouth, the fleas will jump in,’ Betsy said with a grin.

‘But it’s like a palace,’ Hope exclaimed. She wasn’t just amazed by the elegance of the place, but the customers weren’t like the woebegone folk in Lamb Lane – some of them in fact were quite smartly dressed.

‘It’s a gin palace,’ Gussie said. ‘And you’ve got to try some.’

Hope didn’t much like the taste of her first gin and water, but she had to admit the effect was pleasant. By the second one she’d forgotten about her bruised face, Lamb Lane, and that she could see no future for herself.

Gussie introduced her to his and Betsy’s friends as his cousin up from the country, and they were a lively, good-natured bunch of people. Hope guessed some of the girls were whores as they had paint on their faces and plunging necklines, but it was so good to see people who didn’t look wretched that she didn’t care.

One of Gussie’s male friends was called Basher Boulton. He had a squashed nose and a cauliflower ear, but Gussie said he was a champion prize fighter. There was another man who was talking about dog fighting; he appeared to be organizing one a few miles out of Bristol. Both these men were very sweet to her, commiserating over her bruises. Basher said he had some special ointment which would make them go double quick and maybe she could meet him at his lodgings tomorrow night so he could give it to her.

‘I know what you want to give her!’ Betsy chimed in. ‘And it’ll be over my dead body!’

Hope had never had such a good time. A man began playing a piano accordion, and she danced first with Gussie, then with everyone else who asked her. Watching the men cavorting around exuberantly, she was reminded of the May Day celebrations and harvest suppers back home. Nell, who had seen gentry dancing, had often remarked in a superior tone that country folk danced like carthorses. But Hope liked it, it was fun to be swirled around until she was dizzy. She understood now why Betsy and Gussie came out every night.

It was after midnight when Gussie took Hope’s arm and led her towards the door. ‘It’s time I took you home,’ he said.

‘But I don’t want to go home yet,’ she said, pulling back. ‘I’m having a lovely time.’

‘You’re drunk, Hope,’ he said.

‘No I’m not,’ she insisted.

He caught hold of her more tightly and drew her outside. After the sweaty heat and smoke inside, the street felt icy cold. But she also felt very dizzy and the gas light above them seemed to be swaying.

‘I’m just dizzy,’ she insisted. ‘It was the dancing. Let me go back in and I’ll sit down.’

Gussie put one hand either side of her face and kissed her nose. ‘You ain’t dizzy with dancin’, it’s the gin,’ he said. ‘You go back in there and you’ll pass out.’

His hands felt good on her face and he was looking at her in such a strange way. ‘You wouldn’t be intending to get me back home just so you can have your wicked way with me, would you?’ she giggled.

She had never noticed before how attractive his eyes were, like amber, with specks of a darker colour too, and his eyelashes were very long and thick.

‘No, I weren’t,’ he smiled. ‘But if I don’t getcha home some cove will try it on. I’m not tough enough to fight them off for you.’

She laughed, more because of the intense way he was looking at her than thinking he’d said something funny. ‘A perfect gentleman,’ she said, and leaned against his shoulder for suddenly she felt very strange and woozy.