Playing Beatie Bow (11 page)

It had not occurred to her that Beatie would play truant from school to go to meet her brother. But there they were, dodging amongst the crowd, gaining on her every minute.

She could not see the lamp-post that marked the stairs she had ascended on that first night; it was too late to look for the right alley. So she dived into the first opening she noticed. It was so narrow she could have spanned it with her arms. Its uneven cobbles ran sluggishly with thick green slime. Pressed against the wall, she saw Beatie and Judah run past.

Suddenly a hand fastened round her ankle. She looked down and saw a frightful thing grinning gap-toothed at her. It was a legless man, on a little low trolley like a child’s push-cart. He had a big bulging forehead and fingers as sinuous as steel.

‘Let me go!’ panted Abigail. With her free foot she kicked at the man’s face, but he dodged her with the nimbleness of a monkey. Laughing, he dragged her closer, and bit her leg just above the ankle. The pain was bad enough, but the horror that seized the girl was unbearable.

She let out a ringing shriek. ‘Beatie, Judah, help, help!’

That was all she could utter, for a bag smelling of rotten fish descended over her head and was pulled tight. She was half carried, half dragged she knew not where. Abigail was a strong girl, and her hands were free. She hammered and punched, scratched and tore. Once her fingers fastened in a beard: she could tell by the bristly texture of it. She gave a great yank and a handful came out. The owner slapped her repeatedly over the ears, cursing in an accent and tones such as she had never heard.

‘You’ve caught yourself no tame puss-cat there, Hannah!’ a husky voice said with a chuckle. Abigail’s hands were deftly snared and tied behind her back, and the sack was whisked off her head. She was in a dark, evil-smelling room, and before her stood a mountainous woman holding a blood-spattered fist to her hairy chin. She must have weighed nearly a hundred kilos; there seemed no end to her in her full skirts and vast blouse of gaudy striped silk. Out of the sleeves poked sausagey hands covered in rings. Ferret eyes gleamed at Abigail; the sausage hands filled themselves with her hair and jerked brutally.

‘I’ll have yer bald!’ she yelled. Abigail shrieked at the full power of her lungs, and kicked violently at everything she could see or reach.

A hand went over her mouth. It was accustomed to holding captives thus, for it pushed her upper lip down over her teeth so that she could not bite.

‘Hold on now, Hannah,’ said the husky voice. ‘We’ve a pretty little canary bird here; she’ll go for a sweet sum, fifteen quid or more. But not if you take off all her hair at the roots.’

Abigail glared over the hand at the bearded woman. She had never seen anything so grotesque in her life. Whether the creature had come from a circus or not, she was terrifying.

Yet, now that the first shock was over, Abigail felt mad fury rather than panic. The panic ran underneath the anger, like a fast-rising tide. She realised clearly that she was in the kind of peril of which she had never dreamed. For the room contained many people, and there was no way, even if she could get her hands free, that she could fight her way out.

The room was, she thought, an underground kitchen. It was like a lair or cavern, pitch black except for a few candle stubs stuck in bottles or their own grease, and the murky gleam of a vast open fireplace. The smell was terrible, even for The Rocks – not only of unwashed and crowded humanity, but decayed meat and rotting wood.

A girl in a draggletail pink wrapper wandered over and looked at her curiously. She seemed half imbecile, with no front teeth and a nose with a flattened bridge. Picking this nose industriously, she lisped, ‘She ain’t much to look at, Master. Be she right age, you think? Mebbe with her ‘air frizzed out and some paint on she’d pass in twilight.’

Abigail felt her skin creep.

‘Shut your trap, Effie,’ said the husky voice. ‘She’s fresh as a new-laid egg. What else matters?’

Abigail felt a hand stealing around the hem of her skirt. Twisting sideways, she saw the terrible little cripple sniffing about her ankles like a dog.

‘She taste sweet as a newborn mouse, Hannah,’ he cajoled. ‘Let poor Barker have a nibble.’

‘Sho, you cannibal,’ shouted the woman. ‘Mark her and I’ll do fer yer, I swear I will.’

The husky voice now said, almost with kindness, ‘Just out from the Old Country, are you, my pet?’

Abigail nodded.

‘Hannah will see you right,’ went on the voice. ‘Heart of gold, Hannah, though it’s a long way in, eh, Hannah?’

The fat woman snarled. But it was plain she was afraid of the man with the husky voice. He now said, ‘If I take away my hand, will you be quiet, like the dear child you are?’

Abigail nodded, and the hand was removed from her mouth. Instantly she yelled, ‘Ju …’ But she got no further. A kerchief was thrust between her teeth and tied behind her head, and she was given a push that sent her sprawling into a corner. She was now able to see that the owner of the husky voice was a handsome man, a gentleman, as Beatie would have said, in well-fitted breeches, a tailored coat of cocoa colour, and a dashing tall beaver to match.

He held a tiny bouquet of jonquils and fern to his nose, presumably to keep the smells away.

‘She’s to be kept close,’ he instructed the bearded woman, jerking his head at the ceiling. He took out a gold watch, sprang open its lid, and shut it again. He said, ‘In the morning, Hannah, and I don’t want the goods damaged.’ Without another look at Abigail he strolled out.

Now Abigail began to sweat with growing terror. If Judah and Beatie had not seen her duck into the little alley, what chance would she have? The bearded woman came over, a rag still held to her bloody chin, and said venomously, ‘Lucky for you the master took a fancy to yer. But don’t think I ain’t able to hurt you bad where it don’t show.’

Abigail swallowed with difficulty. Her mouth was dry. The scarf was salty with dirt and sweat. She retched a little. She thought desperately, ‘I can’t lose my head, whatever I do.’

She made herself breathe quietly. But something soft and squashy moved beneath her. She realised with horror that it was a woman, a kind of woman, for shortly it wriggled feebly out from underneath her and showed itself in the candlelight to be a hobgoblin with tangled hay-like hair, cheeks bonfire red with either rouge or fever, and a body hung with parti-coloured rags.

She crept over to the table, and began to tear at a mildewed crust of bread. One of the other women, wearing a flounced red petticoat and a black corset and little else, good-naturedly pushed over to the wreck an anonymous hunk of meat that might have been a rooster’s neck.

‘Here, Doll,’ she said. ‘Don’t eat that muck you got there. Ruin your gut it will.’

The wreck stuffed it in her mouth, bone and all, but before she did she said in a voice of extreme refinement, ‘Thank you, Sarah, I’m much obliged.’

‘Oh, God,’ thought Abigail, ‘that thing has had an education. It might even have been a
lady
.’

Now she was paralysed with terror. She could imagine herself as another Doll in twenty years’ time, all spirit beaten out of her, sodden with booze and disease, not even fit for the life of degradation the gentleman with the husky voice evidently intended for her. No matter how fiercely she blinked, tears filled her eyes and fell down on the gag.

One of the other girls strolled over to her. She was fancily dressed, with much flouncing and many ribbons, and a large hat with a purple ostrich feather. Below this hat was a young plump face, pretty and good-natured. Abigail noticed that she, like Dovey, uncannily resembled a Victorian doll.

‘It must be their idea of good looks,’ thought Abigail hazily. ‘No wonder everyone’s always telling me how homely I am.’

The girl smiled, showing chalky teeth. ‘Don’t pipe your eye, duck; ’tisn’t such a bad old life. Better than starving on slop work in the factories, any old how. I’m the dress-lodger, and me name’s Em’ly, but I call meself Maude ’cos it’s more posh. Come on, Doll, the lamps is lit, time we was getting on the road.’

All of this, spoken in a thick south London accent, was scarcely comprehensible to Abigail. But she was to find out that the handsomest girl in the house was called the dress-lodger, sent out in garments belonging to the proprietor, always with an attendant to see that she didn’t run off with them.

But Doll began to cough and splutter. Her eyes rolled up; she looked as if she were going to die.

‘Gawd, I’m not going off with that death’s head trailing behind me,’ protested Maude. ‘It’d scare off Robinson Crusoe.’

So another famine-wasted object was dragged out of a corner, arrayed respectably, and pushed forward to follow Maude. Maude protested, but finally laughed and set off.

Doll cringed timidly as Hannah stood over her.

‘You good-for-nothing, you scarecrow! You’re fit for the bone-yard, that’s all, breathing pestilence over us all.’

‘Chuck her out, Hannah,’ advised one of the men who sat smoking a cutty pipe by the fire. They seemed to have nothing to do with the establishment as customers or protectors. Abigail guessed that they were employed by the gentleman proprietor to bully the women’s takings from them and keep an eye on Hannah’s honesty.

‘Ah, well,’ said Hannah, putting on a ludicrous face of long-suffering virtue, ‘if I ain’t charitable towards me own niece I dunno what the rest of you villains can expect. Here, you, Chow, take the new ’un up to the attic, and you come up and keep an eye on her, Doll.’

Chow, an emaciated half-Asian, seized Abigail as though she weighed no more than a cat, carried her up stairs built of rough-hewn baulks of timber, and at last dropped her on a sagging pallet. Doll sidled breathlessly about Hannah, beseeching, ‘Just a little gin, Aunt dear. Twopenceworth would be sufficient. Just enough to keep my cough from annoying our guest.’

‘Here y’are, then, and don’t say I ain’t a good aunt to you, bit o’ useless rubbish that you are.’

Hannah dug into a depthless pocket and fished up a small bottle. Doll seized it with tearful gratitude. Hannah cautioned her to keep a keen eye on Abigail.

‘Them rats are partial to a nice bit o’ fresh chicken,’ she said. Abigail could hear rats scampering over the ceiling. Hannah saw her look upwards and grinned, satisfied.

‘They come out in their fousands.’ She chuckled. Placing the candlestick on a box in the corner, she jerked her head at Chow. The door slammed, and Abigail heard a key turn and a bar clank home.

She wanted to cry but she knew that if she did she would choke on the gag. To distract herself she looked around at the attic. Doll, lying on a sack beside the pallet, sucked luxuriously at her bottle.

The attic did not have the proportions or the sloping roof of the usual attic, such as the one Gibbie slept in. The window, too, was almost as large as a door. And then, those stairs … they were not stairs anyone would build in a house. Abby tried to think as sensibly as she could.

Was it likely that houses, however derelict, would stand beside such a narrow alley? The walls of the attic seemed to be made of blocks of bare stone. That, too, was uncommon. There was no fireplace and, as she had now learnt from Beatie, almost every room in every house in Sydney, no matter how poor, had a fireplace.

She realised with despair that she was too frightened to make sense of it. Her thoughts began to chase one another round and round.

‘Like those rats up there,’ she thought. Sometimes her whole body shuddered spasmodically, as if she were lying on an ice floe. She was aware in the direst way of her great danger. It could be that she would never be seen again in 1873, let alone her own time. She had nothing to hope for except that Judah and Beatie had heard the first great yell she had given.

She forced herself to lie quiet. There was no one to help her, no one at all. But she could not give up without a battle. Whatever she could do to escape, she had to try to do.

She had an imaginative flash of her grandmother, addressing her perm in resigned tones: ‘She’s dodgy, Katherine. Not one of your nice frank open-faced girls. You’re too soft and protective. Heaven help her if she ever has to fend for herself.’

‘We’ll see about that, you old bat,’ thought Abigail. But her bravado was false. If her grandmother had come through the door, smiling her bogus smile, Abigail would have welcomed her like an angel.

But Grandmother would never come through the door. Grandmother had not yet been born.

Abigail, with one eye on Doll, began to strain at the fabric that bound her hands. It seemed to be another kerchief. She twisted it patiently, at last got a thumb free and, after half an hour, the fingers of one hand.

Doll drank, sometimes wept, the tears oozing like oil out of the black-socketed eyes. She mumbled and sang, sometimes seemed to speak to her companion, though perhaps it was to herself.

‘My name is Dorothea Victoria Brand. I had God-fearing parents. Mother was ill-educated, like Aunt Hannah, and Father married beneath him. He was a clerk in a counting house. He saw that I went to school, a boarding-school on the moors. It was very cold there, but I was happy. I was a bookish child. Clever and industrious, that’s what the Board said. Father wanted me to have private tutoring in French and singing, but he could not afford it. He wept, I remember. He loved me dearly, did my father.’

It’s a warehouse or bond store, that’s what it is, thought Abigail suddenly. A disused one. And that window might be the kind that opens on a platform, with a pulley and rope for hauling up bags of flour and stuff.

She got the other hand out, and with infinite slowness untied the gag at the back of her head. She clamped the gag between her teeth, did not shift her position, and kept her gaze on Doll.

‘Father was taken suddenly. His horse rolled on him. And Mother went labouring in a slop-shop, making sailors’ smocks. Twenty girls in a room ten by ten – think of it! – stitch, stitch, fourteen hours a day without a breath of fresh air. So Mother took the lung fever. Thirty-two she was when God took her. So the parish Board sent me out to Mother’s sister. I had my thirteenth birthday on the ship
Corona
. That was ten long years ago.’