Rough Justice (2 page)

He rubbed the heel of his hand into his temple,
trying to clear his aching, drink-fuddled head. The brooch. Would she be wearing it? Would it be pinned somewhere amongst her layers of musty old skirts and petticoats?

No, she was far too wary for that; she’d said she’d only just come home, and she’d have been too scared of being robbed while she’d been out ‘working’ that night to have it with her. It had to be hidden somewhere in the room.

It didn’t take him long to search the few places where Lottie might have secreted the little gold and pearl brooch – the whole room, their family home, was not as big as the ramshackle sculleries tacked onto the back of the meanest of terraced, jerry-built houses – before coming to the conclusion that she must have pawned it.

But how could she have done that? When he had given it to Lottie on their wedding day, and he had told her that the brooch had belonged to his mother, his lovely young bride had taken an oath with him that she would never ever pledge it for cash. They had both sworn they would never do that, no matter what, even when times got hard; it was the bond between them, their only treasure. And, up until now, she had kept her word. Not even when they had nothing save for a few crusts of stale bread for the child. Not even when she had been reduced to going to the dock gates to pick up lonely seamen and had given them her once plump and beautiful body for money.

He had dragged them down to this: to her
parting with the only token he had ever given her, the token that had signified their once pure, but now forever corrupted love, and –
how had it happened?
– to him beating the very life out of her.

With a roar, coming now from frustrated resignation rather than despair, Henry dashed the lamp to the floor, where it smashed onto the bare boards, spilling sparks, oil and its cleansing force of destruction.

As the flames took hold, eating their way greedily into the rotten wood, he was out of the door and was on the brink of making his escape along the dark alley, when a terrified whimpering froze him to the spot.

It couldn’t be. Lottie was dead.

But there it was again.

He hesitated in the doorway, considering, for a long, reprehensible moment, what do to, before diving back into the room with his arm shielding his face from the heat.

Grabbing at his wife’s shabby clothing, he pulled and tugged her from the tangle of bedding.

As her cold, clammy body flopped forward, what Henry saw made him start back in horror. What had he nearly done, God help him? How much worse could this nightmare become?

There, on the flattened, straw-filled mattress was the cowering form of a skinny, snivelling child.

He had nearly burned his own daughter to death.

But what was she doing here? When he’d come home, his lying trollop of a wife had sworn she’d sent the child over to the Old Dog with the other street urchins, to scrounge ha’pennies from the seamen made sentimental by the booze. She’d sent her out, she said, so she could tell him about the baby in her belly without their daughter hearing. But she’d been taking him for a fool; she had had the brat hidden away in the bedding all along.

If Lottie hadn’t already been dead, Henry would have killed her there and then. He knew exactly what she’d been thinking when she’d lied to him about the child being over the road: she’d been protecting her from him, Henry Tolliver – her own father. And he knew why. She would have been scared, quite rightly, about how he would react when she told him about the thing she was carrying inside her.

The scrawny scrap of a girl stared up at him. Her pale grey eyes – made huge by terror and the thinness of her pinched little face – prickled and stung with unspilled tears. But, young as she was, she knew she mustn’t cry. Her mother had taught her that crying made him angry, even angrier than usual, especially when there was that stink about him, the stink that meant he had been in the pub. And she had to be careful to keep her mouth closed tight like Mummy had told her, when she had warned her how upset he was going to be tonight.

Despite the heat, Henry did nothing at first, but
then, with a self-admonishing
I don’t know why the hell I should care what happens to that whore’s bastard,
he snatched the child from the mattress and dragged her from the room. She couldn’t help it, she whimpered again in fear, partly of the flames that were now licking their way up the hopsacking nailed to the broken windowpanes, but mostly because of her dread of her father, the man she had just seen batter her mother to death with the leg of the only chair they possessed.

Henry Tolliver dumped the child down on the icy slush in the alley, apparently oblivious of the fire that was taking hold behind them.

‘What did you see back there? Tell me. What?’

The child said nothing; she just kept her mouth shut and stared up at him.

‘Wait there, damn you,’ he hissed through his teeth. ‘Don’t you dare move.’ Then, taking a big gulp of air, he scrambled back through the now smoke-filled room to the lifeless form of Lottie Tolliver.

With his lungs almost bursting, he grabbed his dead wife’s hand and wrenched the narrow wedding band from her emaciated finger.

Like the finger, the ring was thin and worn, but it was made of gold, so it had to be worth something. Why hadn’t she pawned that instead of his mother’s brooch?

Because she was a spiteful bitch, that’s why.

With his traumatised child now wrapped in the folds of his shabby black overcoat, Henry shoved his way through the crowds of revellers as they laughed and sang in their drunken huddles in the freezing, fog-shrouded riverside byways, courts and alleys. For once, he wanted nothing to do with such things; he just wanted to stick close to the high, blind walls of the massive bonded warehouses, to seek the anonymity of their shadows and the shelter they offered from the bitter wind that was slicing through his threadbare clothes as it gusted in off the Thames.

Now almost completely sobered by a combination of the realisation of the enormity of what he had done and the perishing bite of the night air, Henry came to a halt by a crumbling terrace in Old Gravel Lane in Wapping. It looked, even by a slum-dweller’s standards, as if it should have been abandoned or even demolished a long time ago.

After swallowing hard and taking a deep breath, he banged on the front door with the side of his fist.

What seemed like an age passed, and then a downstairs window was thrown up with a crack
of splintering wood and a muttered oath. A wild-haired woman stuck her head out into the street.

‘Blast your eyes, whoever you are. What do you want, disturbing me at this time of night?’

‘They say you take in young ones.’

‘Who does?’

‘A girl who works in the Dolphin and Crown. That pub, the one up on the crossroads.’

Henry knew what he said was true, he’d heard the barmaid talking about the woman only the other day; he’d gone in there as part of a pub crawl when the landlord in the Old Dog had refused to let him have any more drinks on the slate. The girl had been telling another barmaid where she could find someone to look after her newborn baby. Henry Tolliver now conveniently chose to forget the fact that the new mother hadn’t seemed very impressed with what she’d been told the woman had to offer by way of caring for youngsters. But then maybe she’d had more choices than he did.

There was a brief silence while the woman considered this piece of information, weighing it up for reliability. She did recall a dark-haired girl, a silly daft tart who was always singing to herself like she had something to be happy about. She remembered minding her kid for a good few months – till it was carried off with the whooping cough. She knew that girl had sometimes done a bit of work in a pub over that way.

The woman decided to tolerate this intruder into her sleep for a few moments longer – maybe
he had some business to put her way, and she never said no to a few bob extra.

‘And what if I do take people’s chavvies in?’ she ventured cautiously, not wanting to seem keen, or he might try to get her to lower the price.

‘I’ll pay you.’

The woman let out a loud, scornful grunting sound that might have been a derisive laugh, but could just as easily have been the start of a fit of repulsively bronchial coughing.

‘Will you now?’ Her head disappeared back into the room, and Henry listened as she first cleared her throat and then spat noisily.

‘You don’t think I look after the little bleeders out of the goodness of me own heart, now do you?’ he heard her rasp.

Henry closed his eyes, feeling the bony featherweight child against his chest, as sleety rain began to drive through his coat, chilling them both. ‘Let me in. Please. I’ve got a proposition for you.’

The woman smiled horribly to herself as she unbolted the street door. She could smell someone’s desperation as surely as she could sniff out a stinking fish washed up on the mud at low tide.

Eliza Watts, the brown-toothed old hag of a baby farmer, tied her grey, greasy wrapper more tightly around her middle – as though she had anything desirable to hide from a man – and then peered at the pitifully narrow wedding band that
Henry had handed her. He had also tried to hand her the now urine-soaked child that he had produced from under his coat, but when Eliza brushed his efforts aside he had set the little one down on the cold flags of her scullery floor.

The woman curled her lip at the wafer-thin gold of the ring; she’d got this one completely wrong. Admittedly he looked a bit manky, but she really hadn’t thought he’d be this mean. Guilt usually had even the poorest of them nicking something better than this as a down payment for her services. Blast him; she’d gone and let him in for nothing.

‘This won’t pay for much,’ she said, making a final effort to see if he had anything hidden away that he might just be willing to part with. ‘Young as they are, these nippers have bellies to fill. So I’ll be needing the next instalment sooner rather than later, or I won’t be held accountable for what happens to the poor little thing. Worst comes to the worst, and it’ll have to be a foundlings’ home for her. You do know that, don’t you?’

He nodded, a picture of self-pitying misery. ‘I know.’ He also knew that as sure as his soul was cursed to damnation for what he had just done to his wife, and for what he was about to do to his daughter, he had nothing more to give her. Nothing. He could have lied to himself, could have made plans that he would find work, pay this woman to care for his daughter until he could afford a decent home where he could make a life for them that would be worth living. But why
bother to lie? He knew that a foundlings’ home would be his child’s sad lot in life. At least he wouldn’t be soiling his hands any further by being the one who took her there.

Even if he could find the strength to take her to such a place himself, they’d be sure to guess he was her father and refuse to accept her. There were too many calls on the orphanages, settlements and churches around those benighted parts for them to be anything other than discerning about whom they chose to help. It would have been laughable if it wasn’t so heartbreaking, but having a parent, any parent – even one as useless as him – put the child, as far as the already overpressed charities were concerned, in too fortunate a category to warrant their attention.

The Lord alone knew what might happen to her if even the sanctuary of the orphanage was denied her.

‘You’ll have your money by the end of the week. I swear on my life.’

The baby farmer scratched herself, absorbed for the moment in something lodged in the recess of her armpit. Then she looked Henry directly in the eye. ‘What’s your trade?’

‘I’m in the docks.’

‘What? Stevedore, are you?’

He bowed his head. ‘No. I’m a casual.’

With those words, Henry had sealed his child’s fate.

He couldn’t bring himself to look at his daughter. ‘Her name’s Nell,’ he said, his voice
cracking with emotion. ‘After her grandmother. My mother.’ He turned his head to hide his tears. ‘May God take care of her soul.’

Eliza Watts wasn’t sure whether he was talking about God taking care of his mother or of his child.

And nor was he.

As Henry made his way back through the crowds down towards the river in search of a ship that might prove to be his salvation – if he would ever deserve such a thing after what he had done – the bells of nearby St George’s began ringing out their joyous message of welcome to the new year.

The crowds erupted into yet more ebullient shouts, laughs and cheers, and he was surrounded by roaring, drunken women trying to kiss him and hug him, even to dance with him. He pushed them all away.

What could he possibly ever have to celebrate again? All he could do was pray that 1914 would bring him some sort of peace and forgiveness, that his dead wife would find some sort of rest at last, and that their child might be granted some sort of a life – if there was a god who would even begin to listen to the prayers of a man as wicked as Henry Tolliver.

Eliza Watts tossed Lottie Tolliver’s sad little wedding band into a cracked blue and white jug that stood on the dust-laden overmantel above the blazing fire in her front parlour, the room
where she slept on a battered, old-fashioned couch. It was the only room in the house that she ever heated, and she was the only person who was ever allowed to go into it. Being suspicious of anyone and everyone, Eliza was a woman who preferred to keep her own company and her own counsel. Nell, chilled to the bone, still silent, and soaked in urine, had been dumped on a foul-smelling palliasse in one of the two upstairs rooms that were packed with all the rest of the young charges in Eliza’s supposed care.

‘Some chance of getting any more dough out of that one.’ Eliza Watts spoke out loud even though she was the only one in the room. ‘In fact, there’s as much chance of that bloke turning up again with money to pay for the upkeep of his little bastard, as there is of them posh tarts getting anywhere with all their old votes for women nonsense. Votes? What good’s votes to anyone? Money, that’s the only thing of any use.’