Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders (28 page)

I heard a crunching noise as someone came towards me down the gravel pathway. The noise grew louder, heavier. It was more than one person, perhaps two or three.
Joey?

My heart pounded under the starched blue bodice as I flung down the weeds and darted back to the cypress avenue.

Four Chinamen set down Lady Ginger’s chair.

It was that same black one I’d seen before, carved with dragons. Their hooked talons gripped at the feet and at the ends of the arms. The men carried the chair on long poles set through metal hoops at the sides.

Lady Ginger sat there like a queen. For a moment she was still, then she nodded, raised her hand and the Chinamen bowed and moved off silently, melting into the garden of stones.

Today her grey hair was coiled in a plait on the top of her head and I could see the strands of pure white winding through it. She was dressed in heavy black lace sewn over with tiny glittering beads of jet so that she seemed to shimmer in the pale winter light. Like before, her face was painted white, although her cheeks were daubed with bright, unnatural spots of crimson.

Ma had an old doll – a wooden one with real human hair and glass eyes – that put me in mind of Lady Ginger now. That doll still gave me nightmares.

She watched me for a moment and then she moistened those cracked black lips that looked like something sewn onto her face.

‘Good afternoon, Kitty Peck. I trust you are well?’

That light girlish voice, so sweet yet so sour.

I nodded curtly. I could feel my palms sweating in my gloves.

‘Come closer.’

I walked slowly to the chair and stood just in front of her. She stared up at me. Her eyes flickered across my face like they were reading the lines in a book.

‘As I remarked once before, you are so very alike – you and your pretty brother, Joseph.’ Her eyes half closed. ‘But he was weak, Kitty. And you are strong.’

‘
Was?
’ I couldn’t stop myself. ‘You promised me, Lady, you told me he was alive. “
Full recompense
” – that’s what you said.’

She began to laugh, but it became a cough that wracked her tiny body and made her lean forward. I could see her skinny shoulder blades all knotted up beneath the lace.

When she straightened up she took a square of cotton from her sleeve and dabbed it at her mouth. There was a black stain on the material as she folded it away.

‘Forgive me. It was a figure of speech. You brother is still very much alive. But I am afraid he is not here with me today.’

I knelt down in front of her, gripping the arms of the chair. One of the Chinamen appeared just to the right but The Lady flicked a hand and he shuffled back into the shadows.

‘Where is he? You owe me, Lady. The things I did – they was for Joey, nothing else.’

She was silent for a moment and then she smiled.

‘Do you really mean that? Look into your heart, can you honestly tell me that you did not revel in your fame? I watched you, girl. You were the perfect choice. It has been most diverting.’

She reached into her sleeve and pulled out a thin black roll.

‘I knew a girl very like you once. You will light this. Here.’

She handed me a small silver box full of matches. My hands shook as I lit her opium stick. It was smaller than her usual pipe, but I’d seen enough men in the backstreets dragging on a tarry stub to know what it was.

Lady Ginger inhaled deeply and the tip of the black stick glowed. A trail of sweet smoke coiled around us. I saw a tremor go through the old woman’s frail body and her eyes rolled back in her head, then, of a sudden, they snapped open again.

‘I will return your brother to you . . . in due course. But whether you will accept him, now, that is another matter.’ She grinned, showing her black gums. ‘You will find him much altered.’

I thought of that finger and felt the bile rising. The cemetery seemed to spin around us. What else had the old bitch done to him?

‘If you want your brother you will come to The Palace tomorrow at noon. Not a moment before. You may bring the Fratelli boy with you, it will be useful.’ She paused and held her head to one side, like a crow sizing up a morsel of carrion. ‘There – you see, I know all about you, Kitty
Peck.
’

She made my last name sound like something you’d want to spit out of your mouth.

I stood and took a step back. The wind gusted through the cypress trees and a little storm of dust and gravel blew around my feet lifting the edge of my skirts and billowing them out around me. I didn’t know what to think any more. Was she lying again, playing a game?

I curled my fingers tight around her silver strike box. ‘Why are we here, Lady? Why couldn’t you just bring Joey here with you today and let us be? What have we ever done to you?’

She brought the stick to her lips again and sucked greedily. Then she threw it down onto the gravel beside her chair.

‘Pain comes in many ways. I find that the opium helps. You will do well to remember that. Now, you will help me, please. I cannot walk without assistance.’

She raised herself from the chair and I saw her mouth twist with pain as she forced herself to her feet. She shook a little as she gripped the left arm of the chair and reached out towards me. I took her gloved hand and felt the lumpy knots of rings and bones through the leather.

‘Walk with me to your mother’s grave.’

She leaned heavily on me as we went the little way back to Ma’s grave. I realised then how frail she was. The great Lady Ginger was fragile as a baby bird fallen from the nest.

‘It’s here. I know it is.’ I pointed at the stone. ‘But it’s all wrong, someone’s made a mistake. She was Eliza, not Elizabeth – and her name was Peck. We didn’t put that thing there.’

She was silent for a moment. ‘No, you did not. I
did. When she was born I gave her my own name, because, at the time, it was all I had left.’

Lady Ginger looked at me and her eyes glittered. I couldn’t tell if she was on the edge of tears or if it was malice there.

‘Elizabeth Redmayne was my daughter.’

I handed the paper to Lucca without a word and watched his face as he read to the bottom, and then read it again. I stood and went over by the window where something standing on the floor and covered in a slump of dusty velvet propped open the shutter. I passed Lady Ginger’s dice box from hand to hand. The shagreen case was rough to the touch and I could hear the dice rattling inside.

I looked out across the jumbled roofs and smoking chimneypots of Paradise. It was a fine day.

When we’d got to The Palace the doors were wide open. Two of The Lady’s Chinamen stood waiting in the hall at the base of the broad oak stairs. One of them took his right hand out of the opposite sleeve and pointed to the floors above; the yellowed nail on his first finger was long and curled.

As we passed, he bowed. They both did.

I felt Lucca’s hand tighten on my arm as we made our way up. On every landing corridors lined with china pots and oriental rugs stretched away into the depths. Every time we halted, uncertain where to go, another of The Lady’s men stepped out of the shadows, bowed and pointed the way upwards.

At the top of the stairs the doors to The Lady’s receiving room stood open.

Lucca caught my hand. ‘What if this is another trap, Fannella? We have walked into it.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s too late for that now.’

I pulled him forward across the threshold and into the room.

In daylight The Lady’s chamber was a dreary, musty place. The ceiling and walls were stained, cobwebs hung in garlands in the corners as if no one had ever noticed them to clear them away and the air was heavy with the sickly smell of her. Only she wasn’t there.

The room was empty apart from a square of red cloth set out in the middle of the bare boards. There were three things on the cloth arranged in a triangle.

I went forward and knelt down. My fingers tingled as I reached for the small, gilt-edged card nearest to me. It was an address:
17 rue des Carmélites, Paris
. I turned it over.

Two words in Lady Ginger’s looped hand scrawled across the back.

I flipped it back and stared at the address again. I felt for Joey’s Christopher and his ring in the neck of my dress as Lucca crouched next to me.

‘The letter is for you, I think, Fannella?’

I looked down at the name written neatly in the centre of the folded paper on the cloth –
Katharine Redmayne
. Was that really who I was?

Elizabeth Redmayne was my daughter.

God forgive me, but when Lady Ginger said that in the cemetery, I began to laugh. There was a furious wildness in the sound that I could barely control and I brought my hands to my mouth to stop it and to stop myself from lashing out at her chalk-white face.

All the while she had just stared at me, her doll-black eyes dead and unblinking.

After a moment she raised her hand and one of her Chinamen appeared from nowhere. She reached for his arm and turned her glittering back on me as he guided her to the chair.

I called out to her then. Now it was my turn to demand
more
– just as she’d done, but she never looked back, not once – and she didn’t speak another word to me.

Katharine Redmayne
– if I touched the letter would that make it true?

Lucca decided. He leaned across the square of red silk, took up the letter and handed it to me. For a moment I stared at the name and then I ripped it open.

Her signature wound across the bottom of the page, underlined twice. Like before there was a postscript.

Lucca looked up from the letter. The good side of his face was lit from the window.

‘What will you do, Fannella?’

I turned Joey’s Christopher and his ring between my fingers and looked at the dingy room around me. The stains up the far wall where Lady Ginger had leaned into her nest of silken cushions and smoked her opium pipe was a dirty ghost of the past.

The whole place needed a good clear-out and a lick of paint.

‘I’ll deal with it,’ I said, turning to push the shutter back further to let more light into the room. There was a scratching noise at my feet and the sound of something rasping on metal. The noises came from beneath the mound of velvet that was propping open the shutter. I pulled the fabric free and found myself staring into the glinting black eyes of Lady Ginger’s parrot. The bird fluffed out its tatty grey wings and held its head to one side.

‘
Pretty girl, pretty girl, pretty girl, pretty girl, pretty . . .
’

The London Pictorial News
: February 28th 1880

Writing
Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders
has been an adventure and I’d like to thank everyone who has helped me on the way.

First‚ the team at Faber and Faber‚ whose enthusiasm‚ optimism and wise counsel has been invaluable – Hannah‚ Katherine‚ Becky‚ John . . . and everyone at Bloomsbury House.

Also‚ massive thanks to
Stylist
Magazine for setting Kitty free‚ to Tamsin and Sarah for their forensic attention to detail‚ and to Eugenie for her excitement and encouragement.

Finally‚ I must mention my family, friends and work colleagues, whose unflagging support‚ interest and amazement kept me going through a long dark winter at the keyboard.