Kitty Peck and the Child of Ill-Fortune (3 page)

I took it for an apple until she put it on a saucer and cut it in two. Then, for a moment, I thought it was a jewel box on account of all the little rubies that spilled out. Ma handed one half to Joey and said it was a pomegranate – God knows how she came by one of them in Limehouse – and that he should try it.

I watched him bite into it and chew the meat off the pips before spitting them out. It was obviously good eating. Next thing he crammed the pomegranate against his lips and began to suck loudly. I laughed as all the red juice streaked down his chin and over his hands. He licked the sticky sweetness off them.

Then it was my turn. I reached out for the other half, but Joey snatched it up and wouldn’t let me have it.

‘It’s mine. She gave it me,’ he said. But Ma stood there with her hands on her hips and gave him daggers. ‘What do I always tell you, Joseph?’

Joey looked at the half pomegranate in his hand and twisted it about so that all the pips glistened in the candlelight, and then, reluctantly, he put it back on the saucer. I grabbed it.

‘What’s the word?’ Ma asked again.

Joey mumbled something and fiddled with the ends of the napkin.

‘I can’t hear you, Joseph.’

‘Share. We must always share, that’s what you say, Ma.’

Of course! That was how she treated us. It’s what children want from a mother. I turned to Lucca.

‘Fairness – that’s it, isn’t it?’

He nodded. ‘I know you, Kitty. You cannot abide injustice. No matter what comes – and I think it will be . . .’ he paused, looked down and stretched his fingers wide like he was searching for the right word there in his green leather palms, ‘. . . complicated, you will always be fair and you will always be loyal to those who are loyal to you. People will grow to respect you and perhaps even to love you for that.’

Complicated
– that’s what The Lady said about Joey too, wasn’t it? What a family we’d turned out to be. I reached out to brush a hair from Lucca’s shoulder.

‘It’s not going to be easy, is it? It’s not like I’ve inherited a nice little fish business up Billingsgate or a fancy draper’s store. I’ve got more than market porters and shop girls working for me. I don’t know how they’re going to take to being told what to do by a twist who was slopping out the gallery at The Gaudy not three months back. Look at Fitzy, Lady Ginger’s right fist. According to Peggy he’s been chewing up the cushions in his parlour. Not that it’s going to be his for much longer.’

‘Exactly! The cage, Fannella, remember the cage.’

I snorted. ‘I’m not likely to forget that, am I?’

Lucca tilted his head to one side so that his thick dark hair flopped forward to cover the scarred half of his face. He smiled and I was minded over again that he really must have been quite the dazzler – before my brother saved him from that fire.

‘I mean you have shown yourself to be fearless. There are not many who could have performed as you did, night after night. You have . . .
coglioni.
’

‘I’ve got what?’

Lucca arched his brow. ‘It is not a word I care to translate. I mean you are brave, bold. People will know that of you. It was part of her test, was it not?’

‘Part of her trap, you mean.’

He shook his head. ‘She knew what she was doing. The Lady rarely made mistakes.’

‘She was wrong about Joey.’ My hand moved to my neck. Under the thick stuff of the coat and the high collar of my dress I could feel the bump of my brother’s ring and his Christopher.

‘No – I believe she was temporarily blinded by his sex. It is the order of things, is it not, for a man to inherit the family estate? The Lady did not follow the usual rules, but in that one case she was a traditionalist. Then she saw you and recognised—’

‘Are you saying I’m like her?’ I bristled up like a fighting cock. ‘Because let me tell you, Lucca Fratelli, I am nothing like Lady Ginger. For all that she’s my blood, there’s nothing about me that comes from her. She’s as much like me as old Tan Seng back at The Palace. Actually that’s a lie, because at least he’s got a kind heart.’

Lucca raised his hands. ‘I meant your spirit, Kitty. She must have seen something in you, some . . .
riflesso
, reflection, that showed her that you were the one.’

‘Reflection! I don’t even look like her. When I stare at myself in the mirror I can’t see a smudge of her there, no matter how deep I look. And don’t think I haven’t tried because it . . . it . . . Tell truth, it worries me that me and her are—’

I broke off. ‘Why are you grinning?’

‘Because in a way you have just answered your own question.
That
is exactly how you must remake Paradise, Fannella. In your own image.’

The
Prince Leopold
lurched as a wave crashed against the side. I reached for the handrail to keep upright, but as I did so Lady Ginger’s letter was snatched from my fingers by a gust of wind. For a moment it flattened itself against the side of the boat a couple of foot below us. Lucca knelt and reached down to try to get it back, but another wave came up and swept it free. I watched it unfurl in the frothy wake of the steamer. For a moment or two it was near enough for me to see the ink slide off the page.

‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t catch it.’ Water dripped from the brim of Lucca’s hat where he’d been caught by the swell. He stood and leaned out over the rail to track the paper bobbing about in the choppy water.

‘Don’t worry. It’s all in here, every word.’ I tapped the side of my bonnet. ‘Telferman tells me I have a gift for memorising things. I can quote whole documents back to him after just one read through. I think it unnerves him.’

Now Lucca snorted. ‘
You
unnerve him, Kitty. I don’t think you realise that you are . . .
eccezionale –
remarkable.’

I smiled and reached for his hand. ‘Well, this is a day for compliments, isn’t it? First I’m kind and fair, then I’m brave and loyal and now I’m remarkable with it. Thank you very much, kind sir.’ I dipped him a mock curtsey and pulled his hand. ‘Come on. Get the tickets out just in case and follow me.’

‘Where?’

‘I think we’ll go and find ourselves a cosy seat in the First Class salon – right next to that woman we saw earlier. I’m going to show her my coglionis.’

‘It’s on the map. Look – rue du Colombieris there and rue des Carmélites should be the third turning on the left.’

I turned the map around again. The print was small, but I could see the place I was looking for. The trouble was it only seemed to exist on paper. There was no third turning in the narrow passage ahead.

‘Let me see.’ Lucca took the flimsy sheet from my hands and held it out in front of him. He frowned as he looked from the paper to the gloomy alley. ‘It can’t be right.’

‘The man in the kiosk didn’t look right to me. That black thing under his nose wasn’t normal for a start. It was so rigid with wax that it didn’t move when he talked. I reckon he has to chip it off at night. I think you were done back there at the station, Lucca. I thought you said you could speak their lingo?’

‘I said I can speak a little French, Kitty. It is a Latin language, like Italian – not so hard for me,
sì
? I know enough to make myself understood.’

‘Old rat lip understood all right. He took us for a pair of daisies and sold you a fake map. I said we should have taken a hack or whatever they have here.’

My voice scratched like a wire brush. I was in a coil about seeing Joey, and Lucca was still getting the benefit of it.

It was almost dark now. Lamps glowed behind the tall shuttered windows of the flaking stone buildings around us. If rue des Carmélites was nearby it wasn’t in what you’d call the finest part of town.

I was disappointed. I wanted Joey to be . . . Tell truth, I don’t know what I wanted him to be, exactly, but I think I was hoping for more than a back alley that reeked of cat piss.

I imagined I might find it exotic to be in Paris. I thought I might feel the difference of it through the soles of my boots from the moment we stepped into the street. Look at you, Kitty Peck, I thought to myself as we walked down the platform at the Gare du Nord, a porter following up with our gear, you’re a long way from Limehouse now, girl.

But the fact of the matter was that apart from the way everyone spoke – and a certain manner of dress I’d noticed in some of the women . . . and a couple of the men, come to that – the streets we’d been walking for the last hour or so looked curiously familiar. When it comes to it, I suppose one city is much like another, but I’d swear there were corners up Spitalfields way that were the double of the quarter we’d just gone through. Even the sound and the smell of the place was the same – carriages on cobbles and horse shit. Mind you, it was colder than London, which came as a surprise seeing as how France was continental.

I shivered and stamped my feet. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to Joey when I found him, but it was, after all, why I was here. I certainly didn’t want to spend the rest of the night searching for his house.
My
house
, I corrected myself. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to him about that neither.

‘Perhaps the scale is wrong. Wait there.’ Lucca folded the map into a square and walked a little way up the cobbled passage. I watched as he craned to check the names painted on the walls just above head height. Soon it would be too dark to see them.

‘What about the trunk?’ I called after him. ‘We won’t be able to collect it after nine. That’s what they told you, isn’t it?’

Right on cue a church bell somewhere off to the right began to sound the hour. After eight metallic strikes the echo faded gradually off the stone walls. It was the only sound. This part of the city wasn’t just shabby, it was deserted.

‘Lucca, we’ll have to go back to the station for it and find a hotel for the night. We’ll buy a new map tomorrow.’ My voice was tight as a docker’s bowline. Looking back, I think I was close to tears.

‘I’ll go just a little further.’ I watched him disappear into the shadows and kicked at some loose stones. This couldn’t be the right place.

A door opened halfway along the passage and a tall woman stepped out. She looked left and right, glanced up at the crack of starry sky overhead and patted the ivory handle of the ruffled black umbrella hooked over her arm. As she came towards me I noticed her clothes were far better than you’d expect of someone living on these streets. Sleek fur trimmings sheened at the neck and hem of a velvet cape worn over a heavily beaded skirt. I could hear it rustle and crackle as she came towards me.

The woman’s dark hair was piled high on the top of her head, curled and pinned in a way I couldn’t begin to emulate, and her face was so artfully painted that anyone who hadn’t worked the halls would have taken her for a natural.

So, I thought to myself as she drew level and I found myself admiring the way her boot-black lashes curled upwards, it’s true what they say about French women after all. She must have seen me gawping because a couple of seconds after she’d passed by I heard her stop and rustle some more.

A gloved hand that smelt of fresh-cut violets touched my right cheek.

‘
Josette! Est-ce que vous?
’

I whipped about.

The woman stared at me confused. Her darting black eyes took in every angle of my face and then she looked down at my dusty travelling coat and at the tips of my new boots poking out from underneath. Shiny brown leather, they were, like a pair of fresh hatched conkers. This morning when I buttoned them up I thought them very fine indeed, but now they were giving me the gyp. I couldn’t wait to tear them off and toast my bare feet in front of a fire.

She frowned and shook her head.

‘
Pardon, mademoiselle. Je suis désolée, je me suis trompée
.’

I didn’t understand a word of that, but all the same I reckoned she was apologising for something. She nodded her head and the glittering black jewels dangling from her ears fell forward over the fur of her collar. She turned away and carried on up the street.

‘Wait, please!’ She didn’t look back so I called after her. ‘Why did you . . .?’

‘You may be right, Fannella. I went to the end and there’s nothing. The map’s useless.’

I turned to see Lucca folding the tissue roughly before forcing it into a pocket of his coat. He glanced at the woman who was a dozen yards away now.

‘You called out to her?’

I nodded. ‘I think she mistook me for someone. We could ask her for directions?’

Lucca sprinted to catch the woman, who had almost reached the corner. I followed and heard him gabble a string of words. The woman halted and looked back. Lucca pulled the map from his pocket and flapped the creased paper open. I noticed again how the woman stared at me, like she’d lost something in my face and was searching for it.

‘
Nous sommes ici, madame?
’ Lucca took a couple of steps closer, holding the map out so that she could see it clearly too. ‘
Ici?
’ He pointed at the sheet and looked direct at her. Then he paused. For a moment he froze like one of them old marble statues he was so fond of drawing at the Victoria and Albert. Of a sudden he rattled off something in French and the woman shook her head so violent that a couple of hair pins came loose and chinked down on the cobbles. She raised her hand to cover her mouth and backed away.

I was so used to Lucca’s face that most of the time I forgot about the scars. You couldn’t blame her, I supposed, for taking fright like that, but all the same I felt for him. Usually he took it quite personal, but this time I was amazed to see him go after her. He caught her arm and carried on in French, speaking so soft that I couldn’t hear the words distinctively, just make out the fact that he sounded . . . concerned, like
he
was trying to comfort her, not the other way round.

At first she tried to pull away, but he kept on speaking. He minded me of one of the Fore Street dray lads calming a skittish mare. When he stopped we all stood there in silence. I noticed that the woman had flushed up like a rose and that she was breathing fast under that fancy cape. Surely she could tell we didn’t mean her any harm? And as for Lucca’s face . . . well, you get used to that soon enough. The polite thing is not to stare.

And tell truth she didn’t. Instead, she kept glancing at me through them thick black lashes, sidling her eyes away if I caught her. I didn’t have a clue what Lucca had said, but it must have done the trick because after a minute she took the map from his hand and started to speak very quickly and very quietly.

She flattened the map against the wall behind her and pointed. Lucca leaned forward and nodded. Then the two of them were off again, rabbiting away like a couple of schoolgirls.

I couldn’t hold it any longer. ‘What’s she saying?’

Lucca didn’t look at me. ‘In a moment, wait please.’

‘Does she know where rue des Carmélites is?’ I tried again, moving closer. I was beginning to feel like a teetotal at a gin palace. The woman clammed up. Lucca leaned forward and whispered something to her and her expression changed. Handing him the map, she reached out to touch my face. The smell of violets, expensive ones at that, came strong again.

‘
Oui, je vois, il est vrai
.’ She murmured. ‘
Jolie fille
.’

Without another word, she turned her back on us both and walked on down the street. The beads on her skirt made a brittle scratching sound as they brushed the surface of the cobbles. Just before turning the corner she raised her left hand in a sort of salute before disappearing.

I waited until her footsteps faded to nothing before turning to Lucca.

‘Well? What was all that about, then? You two were having a nice tête
-
à-
tête, weren’t you? See, I know the French for getting on like a house on fire, all right.’ I stopped myself. Under usual circumstances I would have thought it through proper and chosen my words more careful. But if Lucca noticed he didn’t let on, in fact he began to smile, and that riled me.

‘Anyway, I wouldn’t have thought she was your type!’ I said, pointedly.

Now he laughed out loud.

‘It’s not bleedin’ funny to me, Lucca. Did she tell you anything? The map for a start – what did she say about that? She showed you something, didn’t she?’

He nodded. ‘I know exactly where rue des Carmélites is now.’ His face softened and he looked at me, almost sadly I thought, like a crow giving bad news to an invalid. He took my hand and squeezed it. ‘And now I know exactly what we will find there. Come, Fannella, it is this way.’

We started back towards the narrow passage where we’d already been. I pulled on his arm, confused.

‘But that can’t be right. We’ve already tried up there. What did she tell you?’

‘Quite a lot, actually, Fannella . . .’ Lucca paused. ‘By the way, she was a
he
.’

Lucca stepped back and stared up at the tall narrow house. It must have been six storeys at least and as far as I could tell in the dark there was another row of windows set along the roof.

‘She said it was here – a side passage leading to a courtyard, but there’s nothing.’ He rubbed his hands together, but not because he was cold. Fiddling with his fingers was something he did when he was thinking. If it wasn’t for the new green gloves he’d be picking at his nails.

I looked up too. The woman had told him to look for a passage after the fifteenth house along the left-hand side of rue du Colombier. We’d counted it out and that was where we were now, but there wasn’t a passage like she said.

She?
I wouldn’t have known her for a man. Lucca said he could tell as soon as he got a clear view of her face, but apart from her height, which I put down to her being foreign, there was nothing to make me think that under all that fancy rig she was so very different to me.

Something twisted about in my belly. Lucca and I hadn’t talked much about Joey, not since he told me about the fire and why my brother was there that night.

I’m not green as Albert’s Ointment. I knew what he was telling me all right, but I didn’t dress it up in my mind and have a good long look. It felt like prying – like that time I found Lucca’s drawing of Joey standing there without a stitch on his back, or his front come to it. No, Joey was my brother and whatever he was doing here in Paris that was his business. I just wanted to make sure he was alive as I’d been promised.

And that he was . . . content.

I scanned the shuttered windows. There wasn’t a single chink of light showing. That was odd, I thought, because all the other houses around us were clearly occupied whereas this one was lifeless. As I looked I realised that wasn’t entirely true. The shutters had been painted quite recently, a shade of red was it? It was hard to tell in the dark. And the double doors to the left weren’t flaked and battered like the other entrances along the passage. Someone cared about appearances here, they’d even painted a trail of leaves across the top and down one side of the door. It was clever work to trick the eye, like one of Lucca’s scenery flats for The Gaudy.

That tipped something. I frowned and peered at the building again. Of course! Now I saw it clear. I tugged at Lucca’s sleeve. ‘Come and see this.’

I crossed the passage and stood on tiptoe to work my fingers between the painted slats of a shutter covering one of the two windows at street level. It was a narrow gap, but just as I expected I felt flat stonework underneath, nothing more.

‘It’s not a house.’ I turned to Lucca. ‘It’s painted to look like one, but there’s nothing behind these shutters – that’s why there’s no light. Most people passing by wouldn’t give it a second glance, but that’s not a proper house. It’s a shell.’

Lucca pushed up the brim of his hat to get a better view and nodded slowly. ‘
Sì
– and it is good work, but when you know, it is obvious. It is
una
facciata
– a facade.’

‘So what’s behind it? And how do we get there?’ I went to the doors. There was no knocker or bell, not even a handle. I smoothed my hand over the painted wood considering whether or not to beat my fist on the panels and call out.

There was a scratching noise from the other side. It came from low down and I knelt to listen. Lucca bent next to me. The noise came again and as we crouched there on the cobbles half of the door swung silently inward.