Kitty Peck and the Child of Ill-Fortune (14 page)

By the time we’d got to the second flight of stairs I’d given up trying to get anything out of him. Lady Ginger’s Chinaman had turned his back and waited at the door while I pulled on my stockings and buttoned my boots, but when I stood up and asked him to tell me where we were he just shook his head and bowed. It didn’t matter what question I put to him, the answer was always the same.

Now I was following the old boy down a long, dark corridor two floors higher than the room I’d woken up in. Like the bedroom below it was panelled and gloomy. Wide wooden floorboards creaked beneath our feet as we made our way along. The old man was brisk. I couldn’t see his feet under the hem of his gown but I could hear the shuffling slap of his slippers as he led the way.

There were paintings along the wall to the right, but I couldn’t see them clear because the tall, square windows all down the left side were shuttered or curtained. I could tell a fine day was blooming outside because the light creeping round the edges was tinged with gold. Just occasionally I could see dust dancing about in a brilliant sliver that dared to cut across the boards at our feet.

We walked on past the biggest fireplace I’d ever seen, propped up either side it was with life-size marble statues of men who had half a fish where their legs should have been, and into a part of the corridor where the curtains were pulled so close that the day couldn’t come in. The only light here came from a couple of candles set in silver cups shaped like shells set either side of a massive door.

The Chinaman halted. He knocked once, bowed again and stood aside.

As the door swung open the smell of Lady Ginger – not just the opium, but the warm, sour smell of her old body – came rolling out to meet me.

And then it happened, just like all the other times. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it wasn’t until that moment when the door opened and something of her leeched out that my body remembered the things my head was trying to bury.

My neck went cold like a frozen hand had clamped across the back of it. I tried to wrestle my breathing to a steady rise and fall, but of a sudden it came fast and shallow. I wasn’t seventy foot up on a trapeze, but for some reason the impression of being dandled over something dangerous went through me. Of an instant the wooden floor beneath my feet felt less substantial than I knew it to be.

I brought Madame Celeste to mind.
Never look down; never let go; and never give up hope.
That’s what the old girl told me time after time when she trained me for the heights and I was swaying under the beams in her attic. Tell truth, it all seemed like a game back then.

And that last is the most important rule of all. If you ever allow yourself to think you might fall, you will. It’s as simple as that.
I bit down hard on the inside of my bottom lip to bring myself up. I wasn’t going to show weakness now. I wasn’t going to fall. Out of habit I brought my hand up to my collar and felt for Joey’s ring and the Christopher. For a moment I was surprised they weren’t there and then I remembered they were lying together in a drawer at The Palace along with the broken chain.

I heard a scraping sound and a light flared in the room ahead before dying to a glowing red point.

‘Tell me, Katharine, are you going to come in or are you intending to stand there gawping like a herring, girl?’

Oh, that voice – so sweet and girlish. Cultured too. When I heard it again, I realised that my grandmother’s accent was very like the one I’d heard on Joey. Neither of them spoke Limehouse these days. Thinking about it, I wondered if Lady Ginger ever had.

‘I am waiting.’ The voice came again from the dark.

I know I said it was girlish, but don’t for a moment think of it as soft. Lady Ginger’s words were like something noxious coughed up by a pampered cat. One minute it’s purring and curled up neat on your lap, next it’s hawking out a half-digested rat head.

I tightened my grip on the handle of my bag and stepped into the room. Immediately the door swung shut behind me.

‘Come closer, Katharine, I want to look at you.’

I paused, letting my eyes get used to the dark. At first all I could make out was a bulk of black shadow immediately ahead. Over to the right, but deeper into the room, a stubby candle stood on a low table set in a sort of alcove. As I stared I saw the pattern flicker on the curtains behind the candle and realised it was a covered window. The air was thick with opium smoke. The sweet tarry fug of it was so dense I could almost feel it on my face. But there were other scents too – something medicinal and tartly floral masking the smell of disease.

‘Bring the candle to me.’ Her voice crackled like old paper.

I put down my bag, went across to the table in the window and lifted the silver candle holder. The flame jittered about as my fingers trembled. I counted to ten, willing my hand to be still. When the candle steadied I turned and stared at the shadowy mass that I now recognised as one of them great old boxed-up beds with hangings up to the ceiling. I couldn’t see my grandmother through the thick folds of fabric.

‘Set it beside the bed.’

I thought I saw the red drapery move. Beside the bed there was a table with a glass and jug on the top. I walked over and placed the candle next to the jug, pushing the glass back to make a little more space. Just as I released the curved handle of the candle tray a hand shot through the bed curtain, closing round my wrist so tight I yelped.

The hand was more bone than skin, yellow as parchment in the dim light. I could feel the stone set into a great gold ring on Lady Ginger’s middle finger dig into the soft skin of my arm and I heard the familiar clatter of the bracelets on her arm. Sharp black nails gouged deep.

‘You will adjust my pillows, Katharine.’ The hand loosened from my wrist and was drawn back into the curtains as she began to cough. The rasping sound went on for several seconds more than was comfortable. I was beginning to wonder if I’d been summoned to God knows where only to stand by and hear the old cow choke up her last, when she spoke again. ‘Draw them back.’

I glanced up. The bed was at least seven foot high and Oriental in design. Black lacquer columns painted over with little gold figures and topped with gilded pagodas stood at each corner. On three sides the red hangings spilled down from curved pelmets of lacquered wood set high between the columns, giving the bed the look of a small theatre. It was very like a stage set Lucca might have painted up for Swami Jonah, only I got the impression it was a good deal older than any of The Lady’s halls.

My halls.

‘The curtain, if you please.’

I reached to the place where the hand had come from, catching the edge of the fabric to pull it aside.

I gasped and covered my nose. I couldn’t stop myself – I had to take a sudden step back at the smell that came rolling out from the dark within. At the same moment my mind washed up a word Lucca had used once – catafalque. He was describing some painting he’d seen at one of the public galleries and I’d asked him to explain what it meant. I liked the sound of it, even if it was a box of death. I’d tucked that word away somewhere, but it came to me again now as I stood looking into what was most surely a fabric-lined tomb.

In just two months Lady Ginger had changed. In the flickering glow of the candle I hardly recognised the gristly knot of skin hunched in the midst of stained sheets and velvet bolsters.

She was dressed in a black embroidered gown that gaped wide at the neck revealing a throat that was strung like a broken violin. She still wore her grey hair in a plait, but it was a poor shabby thing. I noticed that the hair at the front of her head was so thin and spare I could see the moony gleam of her scalp through it. Her cheekbones jutted out so sharp now beneath the hollowed pits of her eyes that she put me in mind of a rook skull Joey kept on his windowsill when we were kids.

He’d found it in a park one day when Nanny Peck had taken us out and away from Ma. ‘You keep that close, now, Joseph, and the King of the Birds will never harm you.’ That’s what the old girl had told him. It was another one of her superstitions from the old country. I always felt guilty about that little skull. I’d smashed it apart by accident one day when I opened that window, but I never told Joey what I’d done.

Lady Ginger smiled, her black lips pulling at the skin stretched tight across the bones of her face.

‘Cat got your tongue, Katharine?’

I realised I was staring at her. I shook my head slowly and moved the candle to the edge of the table to give us more light. She blinked as the glow played across her sunken features, throwing valleys of flesh into shadow and bringing harsh illumination to the ranges of her chin, nose and cheekbones. She was a fearful sight, but I didn’t want her to see I was scared.

And I’ll tell you this for nothing: one thing about my grandmother was the same as ever. Her black eyes glittered like French glass beads sewn into her head. If the life I saw caught there was anything to go by, Lady Ginger would likely keep her body alive for another hundred years by will power alone.

As she looked up at me she began to laugh. Gobs of dark saliva dribbled onto her chin as she rocked in the bed, setting off the jingle of the little golden bells hanging off the roofs of the pagodas at each corner. She pushed the grey plait over her shoulder and scrabbled a claw-like hand into the nest of sheets beside her, the bangles clattering as they slid down her stick of an arm. She pushed a bolster aside and revealed a long carved opium pipe sitting on a small tray balanced across another cushion. She snatched the pipe up and brought it to her lips sucking greedily so that the bowl glowed red. It was what I’d seen through the bed hangings as I stood at the door.

She inhaled deeply and shuddered. Her eyes rolled back in the sockets as two thin trails of smoke wound from her nose, rising up into the canopy overhead. She nodded, opened her eyes and fixed her gaze on me again.

‘It does not bring the dreams now, Katharine, not as it once did. Neither does it bring sleep. I do not sleep.’

She took another pull and sighed. ‘It brings relief.’ She placed the pipe back on the tray. ‘I believe I asked you to straighten my pillows.’ It wasn’t a question.

She twisted about and indicated that she required me to pull up the pillows at her back so she could sit straighter in the bed. I hesitated for a moment and she saw it. Her lips twitched. ‘You will soon become accustomed to the stench of corrupting flesh, Katharine, as I have. Now your assistance . . .’

I leaned forward and pulled the pillows into place behind her, then I moved a couple of the bolsters over too. I smoothed the sheets and helped her settle back. Through the black silk gown I could feel the knobbles of every bone in her back and the jagged edges of her shoulder blades. By accident I brushed the skin of her neck with my fingers and it was cold.

‘Good. We may begin.’

She began to scratch the bed covers with the curved black nails of her left hand and it took a moment before I understood that she was inviting me to sit on the edge of the bed. I climbed up and sat there under the canopy. She was right about the smell, I was getting used to it now.

‘I have received several reports on your activities. Some are not pleasing to me.’

I shook my head and raised my hand. ‘I haven’t come here for a lecture.’

Of an instant I realised she didn’t frighten me so much as disgust me. This place, this room, wherever it was, it was all show. My grandmother was good at putting on a performance, I’ll give her that, but I knew what she was up to. I found my voice again now.

‘No. I’ve come here for some answers. After what I went through I think I deserve them.’

Lady Ginger coughed and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. ‘Deserve?’ There was a sharp, metallic edge to her little voice. ‘That is an interesting word to use, Katharine, when I see very little evidence to convince me that you
deserve
anything.’ She leaned forward. ‘You have the letters?’

I held her gaze. ‘I’m not here to talk about correspondence. Where am I? And why did your old China boy have to drug me to bring me here?’

She scratched the side of her nose and I could hear the scrape of her nails on paper-thin flesh. ‘That is not your concern. I have summoned you here to answer some of
my
questions.’

I folded my arms and leaned back against the painted bed column. ‘And I’ve come here to
ask
some. Let’s start with our father, shall we – mine and Joey’s, that is. Who was he, then? And where is he now?’

Lady Ginger closed her eyes. ‘This is tiresome.’

‘Maybe for you, but not for me. I reckon I have a good right to know about my own
family
.’ I put an emphasis on that last word, echoing the way she used to mouth it about in the halls. ‘And what about you and Ma? If she was your daughter you must have—’

Her eyes snapped open. ‘I must have what?’

I wasn’t rightly sure how to finish that. The thought of Lady Ginger indulging in any sort of romantic liaison seemed absurdly grotesque. When I didn’t answer she reached into the bed sheets and produced a lace-edged ’kerchief. She spat something black into it and folded it carefully into a neat square. I noticed the rings hung loose below her knuckles now.

‘I do not have time for this.’ She pushed the square under a pillow again and flicked a desiccated hand at the room around us. ‘This is my . . . retreat. It has been in my family – our family – for generations. At present you do not need to know more: not a name, not a town, not even a county. It is irrelevant.’

I shifted on the bed, so that I was sitting cross-legged facing her. The little bells up top went off again as I tucked my boots under my skirt. ‘Irrelevant? That’s an interesting word too. So all this . . .’ I nodded at the room. ‘It’s another one of your secrets then, is it? Another one of your games?’

She blinked slowly, her hooded lids pleating themselves into the sockets of her eyes.

‘Only if you regard dying as a pastime, Katharine. I do not think it likely that I will ever leave this room again, let alone this house. That is why I left Paradise in your care. I thought you understood that?’