Kitty Peck and the Child of Ill-Fortune (29 page)

‘Take this at least.’ He went to the bed and pulled a blanket free. Returning to the fire he bent to drape it round my shoulders.

‘And your face!’ Lucca’s eye widened in alarm as I stared up at him.

‘You are injured, your clothes are scorched and yet they are wet through and you reek of smoke and sewer. What has happened?’

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Lucca’s scars were hidden by the shadows cast from the fire and by the thick dark curls that fell to cover the burned side of his face.

How could anyone love a ruin?
His question ran through my mind again, but the young man I saw was beautiful. How was I going to tell him about Misha?

My eyes flicked to the glasses and the bottle. Lucca saw it.

‘He . . . he didn’t come, Fannella. I waited and he didn’t come.’

I swallowed hard as he continued. ‘I think he knew I wouldn’t go with him. But I thought at least that he would . . .’

‘You weren’t going to leave?’ I found a voice at last, but it was thin as the pap in Robbie’s bottle.

Lucca shook his head. ‘I was . . . tempted, but no. There is more for me here. Everything I know, everyone I . . . love.’ He tried to smile. ‘Besides, Russia is cold and I was not born for snow.’

He leaned down to kiss my forehead, but then he straightened up, brought his hand to his lips and wiped the foul taste of me away. He frowned. ‘And you need me by your side. What has happened tonight, Fannella?’

I didn’t know where to begin. I tried to find the right place – maybe with Joey and Della or perhaps the fire at The Gaudy? But as I looked up at Lucca I knew it kept coming back to Misha Raskalov. That was what I had to tell him and I dreaded it.

We were a pair of blind fools, me and Lucca, weren’t we?

I reached under the blanket and shawl and felt beneath the scratchy damp collar of my dress for the chain. I needed to hold Joey’s Christopher and his ring tight between my fingers. I pushed deeper under the fabric, trying to catch the links of the chain. I loosened the knot of the shawl and then I pulled at the buttons forcing my hand down into the ruffled neck of my dress. I caught at something and pulled it free. The chain had broken somewhere along the way tonight.

It was an omen. Frosted lips kissed the back of my neck.

I felt my nails scrabble across the skin of my throat and then lower across my breasts nestled up in the bodice as I delved frantically under the fabric. Perhaps the ring and the Christopher were lodged somewhere?

When, truly, I knew they were gone I began to cry.

Lucca stroked my head and rocked me from side to side as heaving sobs tore me apart. I could hardly breathe for the tightness in my chest, but all the while my lungs kept pumping away like a pair of knackered foundry bellows. Eventually I was able to snatch down enough air to make a voice.

‘He . . . he’s gone.’

‘Who? Who’s gone?’ Lucca sat back and took my hands in his. His eye was huge in the firelight. ‘You must tell me, tell me everything.’

Something hardened in my throat, blocking the words. ‘B . . . but you won’t want to hear it. I can’t—’

‘You can, Fannella and you must.’ Lucca stood and went to the table. Collecting the bottle and glasses, he came back to the fire. ‘Here.’ He unstoppered the bottle and poured clear liquid into one of the glasses.

‘This will help. Take it.’

As I reached out my hands were shaking so violent that the liquor splashed over the rim and onto the boards. Lucca placed his own hands over mine to steady me and helped bring it to my lips. My throat and stomach burned as I sipped down a mouthful, but the feeling kicked something to life inside. I swallowed again and then again and again, greedily revelling in the churning, burning sensation.

In less than a minute I’d drained the glass. Lucca took it from my hands and filled it to the brim again.

‘Take this one more slowly, Kitty. Now, tell me.’

At first I could hardly make the words form on my lips, but the liquor helped. Once I started they came tumbling over themselves like the filthy water running through that drain. Lucca listened in silence. He didn’t look at me as I spoke. Instead he stared down at the boards in front of the great marble fireplace in his room, circling the tip of a finger around a knot in the boards. When I’d told him everything he stopped. His hand hovered just above the wood like he’d been turned to stone.

His hair had fallen forward to cover his face. I could see the place on his head where the burns crept up across his scalp. Pink furrows of skin were visible through the dark curls. He was usually careful to cover them.

I looked away. Pinned to the wall just behind him was a sheet of paper. The sweeping charcoal lines dashed confidently across the page to form a man’s face. It was Misha, his slanting eyes and curved lips taunted us both.

I folded my hand over Lucca’s. ‘I . . . I don’t know what to say.’

He didn’t answer for a long time. When he finally looked up both sides of his face were wet.

‘There’s nothing you can say, Fannella.’

I gripped tight. ‘He’s not worth your tears, Lucca.’

‘I am not crying for him, Fannella. Amit, The Gaudy, the fire, Della, the child . . .’ He faltered. ‘These are tears of shame. I should have been there with you, but instead I was so caught up with . . .’ He shook his head and something hot splashed onto the back of my hand. ‘I’ll never forgive myself. I should have listened to you – all along you felt—’

‘You didn’t know! He lied – he tricked us both. Misha was clever, I’ll give him that.’

‘And I was a fool.’ Lucca reached for the bottle between us. ‘A stupid, selfish, lovesick fool.’

His hand faltered. Instead of taking the bottle he span round and stared at the drawing behind him. I saw him hesitate for a moment and then he lashed out, ripping the paper from the wall. He flattened it out on the boards between us, dug into the pocket of his breeches and produced a fat black stub of charcoal.

I watched in silence as Lucca slashed thick black lines across Misha Raskalov’s grinning face, swiping down hard again and again until the features were cancelled by a jagged cross. He raised his hand above the paper, clutching the charcoal like a blade, and then he slammed it down again, circling wildly until there was nothing but a storm of scrawl.

When the stub tore through the paper and squealed on the boards below, I reached across and prised it gently from his fingers.

The pounding came again. The violent blows hammered on the door with such a force behind them that the panes in the second-floor parlour window rattled. I turned the oil lamp down, went to the shutter and pulled it open to a crack.

Through the gap I watched Fitzy stagger down the steps and out onto the street. He stared up at the double doors to The Palace like he couldn’t believe they were closed to him. He squinted and rolled his massive head on shoulders padded like a couch. It was evening and cold for the dying day of April. I could see steam fug the air around him as he breathed out his fury like a tethered bull.

He took a step back and scanned the windows. He was looking for me.

Shaking his head, he slammed a fist the size of a roofer’s mallet into the palm of his hand. He was itching to strike out at something. His days as a bare knuckler on the streets were never far below the surface. The fancy suits in unlikely colours and the over-patterned waistcoats gave him the air of a genial, but I knew he was a brute. It was why Lady Ginger employed him and why I kept him on. I needed him.

‘I see you watching me, girl. Don’t think I don’t know you’re there.’

I flinched and narrowed the opening between the shutters as the bellow echoed off the stones. ‘It’s a fucking wreck – do you hear me? The Gaudy is a smoking pit in the ground, so it is.’ He’d been drinking. His accent was thicker than treacle and his words were bound together in it.

‘You’re a cowardly bitch, so you are. Hiding behind your shutters with your cat-faced yellow men when people need to see you. All day they’ve been waiting for you – wanting to know what’s going to happen. If you haven’t got the balls on you to speak to me now, how are you going to face them? All the people who rely on you. Tell me that, eh?’

He put a foot on the lowest step and steadied himself on the rail. He swayed a little as he craned his head back.

‘She’s gone. My lovely girl is gone.’ I heard something catch in his voice, something like a sob. Christ! He was talking about The Gaudy like he was married to it. He looked up again.

‘What are you going to do now? How you going to pay them all a fair wage like you promised when the only hall you still got open is no more than a pimple on the City’s arse? Call yourself a Baron, do you? You’re no more a Baron than I’m a fucking prince of the realm.’

He swung back from the rail onto the cobbles and pulled at the shoulders of his jacket, like he was attempting to prove his sobriety. He twitched his head to one side and scanned the building once more, his little eyes sweeping the bricks from the top to the bottom. He wiped a hand across his mouth and called up again.

‘But I’ll tell you what I call you, Kitty Peck, and I’ll tell you it for nothing. You’re a Jonah, so you are. You’ve brought nothing but misfortune to us all.’

He spat on the step, turned and lumbered away towards the end of the passage. I watched his bulky shadow trail along behind, moving against the greasy stones of the wall opposite.

I pressed my forehead against the shutter, feeling the ridge of the wooden panel dig into the cuts in my skin. Of an instant I was minded of that time when it was me standing out there bawling up at the closed doors. I knew she was there, my grandmother, watching me, listening to me spill my heart out on her steps. Like I’d just done with Fitzy.

But I couldn’t face him now. I couldn’t face any of them. I glanced at the note on the table beside the couch where Lucca sat staring blankly into the fire. A pain shot across my temples.

Not now, not today of all days.

The heavy fabric of my finest dress was tight around me. The high collar and long sleeves trapped me like a moth bound up in a silky purse on a web. The ruffles of the collar scratched into my neck. Beneath the stiff satin I felt the absence of Joey’s ring and his Christopher like a dull ache in my chest.

Lok had filled the tin bath in my room with steaming water and I’d tried to scrub the night from my skin. It didn’t work. No matter how hard I scraped and how much geranium I poured into the water I couldn’t shift the stink of the sewer in my nostrils. I didn’t think I’d be able to smell anything other than shit ever again. That and Misha’s filthy lemon and church cologne.

After a while I threw the cloth aside and lay there, staring up at the ceiling. By rights it should have made me drowsy, but every part of me was crying out loud and not just at the thought of the evening ahead.

Della was wrong. Joey wasn’t going to turn up in Hamburg. He was here in London somewhere – and he was in danger. Overhead a spider with a fat body and long match-like legs probed across the plaster. I knew there was another just like it, snug in a shroud of web in the corner above the linen press. I’d meant to take a dust stick to it.

I watched as the spider above reached the centre of the ceiling where a crack ran across the plaster. It stopped there, waving its front legs around like it was taking stock of its position, and then it turned and scuttled back to its own corner. There were two of them waiting to set their traps up there, both of them killers and both of them barely aware of the other’s existence.

Two of them.

As I stood at the window I pulled the blue sleeves lower so the lace cuffs covered the burns and scratches on my hands. I wasn’t going to let them think I was damaged goods.

I wrapped Nanny Peck’s shawl around my shoulders, folded my arms beneath it and pulled the shutter open a little wider. I stared down at the rain-slicked cobbles again, but it wasn’t Fitzy I was looking for.

A few minutes before the hammering started up there was a rattling sound on the panes of the parlour window. I’d thought it was raining again and I’d gone over to look out. Down below someone was bent double in the passage outside. I watched as a hand stretched out, sweeping the cobbles to gather up another handful of stones to patter against the windows.

My heart leapt under the plaid. It was Joey. I was sure of it. He was trying to catch my attention. I threw back the shutters and stood in the lighted window as the man straightened up. When he saw me he paused and moved his cloak aside to hold out a hand. He opened his fist and let the pebbles fall to the ground. The movement revealed the cane held in his other hand – at the tip the vicious hawk head glinted in the soft light from the window. The hooded man bowed once, turned and walked slowly away.

My spine felt brittle as ice as I watched him melt like a huge black cat into the mouth of an alleyway off Salmon Lane.

It wasn’t Misha – he was rat meat at the bottom of a sewer – so who was it? Who was the man who killed Old Peter? Who was the man who smelt of leather and spice when he tore the earring through my flesh in The Gaudy, the man who mistook me for Joey?

Where is he, Josette?

I brought my hand to my ear and touched the rip in the lobe. He hadn’t mistaken me for Joey, and he wasn’t asking about Robbie Lennox. He was asking me where my brother was. I should have known that all along.

‘There were always two of them.’ I turned to Lucca who was staring into the fire like he was watching a story there. I reckoned I knew what he was seeing – running it through again and again, punishing himself.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ I moved away from the window and went over to the couch. Since we’d come back to The Palace earlier that day he’d closed in on himself, folding up tight like a jack-in-a-box forced back into its painted home. But I knew he was going to burst out soon and when he did he’d bring all his fury and his sadness with him. That was why I asked him to come to stay at The Palace with me.

God knows I didn’t need protection – not with all the locks and shutters and bolts Lady Ginger had installed about the place. No, Lucca needed protecting from himself.

The clock on the mantle chimed twice for the half. It was a delicate little thing, gold set with china panels painted with shepherds and shepherdesses frolicking among flowers. I couldn’t imagine my grandmother choosing such a thing, but it was there in the parlour when I’d thrown back the shutters that first day, sitting on a mantle in a finger of dust, tented over with a loom of cobwebs.

Less than two hours to go. The pain shot through my head again, so sharp this time it made the skin around my left eye twitch. I sat down heavily next to Lucca and placed my hand over his.

‘If you want to take any comfort from this, Lucca, you need to know that it wasn’t Misha who killed Old Peter.’

When he didn’t react I repeated myself. He dragged his eyes from the flames and turned to me. ‘Who was it then?’

I bit my lip and felt a cut there from the exploding glass of the mirror open again. I could taste blood on the tip of my tongue.

‘I . . . I don’t know.’

‘Then why is that a comfort?’

I couldn’t answer. I rifled through the papers on the table.

‘Will you stay here tonight? When I get back it would be good to know you’re here.’

Lucca nodded. ‘
Sì
– of course, but I don’t understand why I can’t come with you. After what happened . . .’

‘You can’t – that’s all I know.’ I squeezed his hand and wished he could come with me, wherever it was I was going.

‘I have to go alone. No one can come with me, not even the Beetle. It’s the law.’

Lucca raised a brow. ‘A strange word to use, under the circumstances, Fannella.’

I took up Telferman’s note again. It had been waiting for me on the hall table when I returned with Lucca earlier that day. If Tan Seng noticed the state I was in when he opened up to us both he didn’t show it. Instead, he bowed and gestured towards the package of papers.

‘For The Lady, it came an hour ago.’

Telferman was brief and to the point.

His name crept across the bottom of the page. There were tiny spots of ink where the nib had leaked over the paper. I noted that my hand trembled as I held the paper closer to the lamp.

None of that, girl, I told myself. You master it now, or they’ll master you.

I took up the pages enclosed with the letter and scanned them again.

Telferman was thorough, but there was nothing set down there I didn’t already know. The dens off Glass House Street were turning a decent profit. The customs officers at West India, St Katharine’s and London Shadwell were satisfied with their cut. The tail parlours off Narrow Street were clean – I’d had the girls checked by a crow and they were turning a tidy sum along with tricks. Three of the screwsman parties had done good trade with the brokers on the Commercial – and no one had made a provable link between their jemmy raids up west and the pawny shops in the east. One of my toolers had been taken by the law, but Telferman was paying to see it right.

I nodded to myself. I had it all clear. I’d gone through it all a hundred times over the last few weeks. If a vicar’s wife farted in Paradise I’d know it. I turned the page. The accounts of The Gaudy, The Comet and The Carnival were listed in columns. Only one of them was making a fine profit – and now it was a smouldering wreck. I flipped over the page and stared down at a list of every soul in my employ.

I ran down the page looking for a name. I found it, but it was crossed through – Peter Ash. I brushed the tip of my finger over the words. There was a pantomime where a China boy had a magic lamp. Every time he rubbed that lamp a genie came to life. I touched the letters, but the ink came off on my skin, blurring the writing.

I moved on, pausing at ‘D’. Amit and his brother Ram were both there. I blinked and took up the next page. Near the end under ‘S’ little Edie Strong was listed with her mother. Jesus, I didn’t even know if she was still alive.

Fitzy was right, I was a Jonah.

They were all here in my hands, not just the crews on the streets and the warehouses, but everyone who worked for me in the halls, scores of them. All the people I’d made a promise to. A fair wage – that’s what I’d told them. Where were they going to work for that wage now?

I heard a cough and looked up. Tan Seng was standing in the doorway. He bowed.

‘It is time, Lady.’