The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter (26 page)

I pushed the door, setting a bell jingling and stepped into the small shop, a corner of which had been cordoned off with a carved screen. Framed designs lined the walls – predatory animals, palm trees, crosses, stars and national flags. The pungent, sweet smell in the air I recognised as opium smoke.

I coughed politely and the proprietor ducked his head out from behind the screen. His eyes flicked from my bonnet to my travelling case. I held out two silver tenpences. His eyes flicked to a pot on the counter. I nodded and dropped the money into it. When I looked back, he had already disappeared behind the screen once more.

Though he worked with ink and needle, I had heard it said that this was his highest art-form – looking the other way. For a pound he could be blind to a gang of porters sweating under a weight of cloth or china or any other commodity that he never saw. And so skilled was he in his work that a whole regiment might pass unheard should sufficient funds be found.

I picked up my case and started making my way towards the rear of the parlour. Glancing behind the screen, I saw a bare-chested man lying on a couch. The proprietor was wiping a patch of blood and ink from above his breast.

A doorway led through into a small kitchen from which I exited the building into a yard of greasy flagstones. From there I followed a narrow passageway, at the head of which was a door with a hole where the handle should have been. It swung open to reveal a second courtyard, this one stacked with barrels and crates of empty bottles. The smell of stale beer hung in the air.

With every step I found myself wondering if I had crossed yet. But no line marked the border on the ground as it did on the map.

Sunlight shone through from a passageway ahead. Hurrying now, I rushed towards it and emerged, blinking onto a bustling South Leicester street.

Chapter 31

Though you live and travel all the years of your life in the gap between that which is known and that which is not known, yet you will have explored but a fraction of that vast land.

– The Bullet Catcher’s Handbook

Returning home should not be bewildering. It should fill you with peace and a sense that everything is in its proper place. It should be the smell of baking bread or the sight of sunlight through lace curtains.

Carriages and pedestrians in the Kingdom are supposed to keep to the left. In the Republic it is the other way around. Making this small adjustment might seem easy, but there is a deeper difference. Good Republicans follow rules meticulously. But Royalists are meanderers – whether they be walking, driving or paying their taxes. On the roads and pavements they sometimes pass to the left and sometimes to the right. I bumped shoulders with a young woman, elbowed an elderly man and collided full on with a boy. By the time I was making my fifth apology, my initial elation at crossing the border had begun to chill.

The streets were busier than I remembered them. I wanted to step out of the jostle for a few minutes, to sit quietly and get used to all the newness. I also wanted a chance to watch for anyone who might have been following. There were coffee houses here, any of which would have served my purpose. There were even bars which I could enter without causing a scandal. Here women could drink alongside men in a public house without an eyebrow being raised.

But before any of that, I needed money.

Dressed in an ankle-covering skirt of subdued purple and a charcoal grey coat, hauling a case and now asking directions to the money changer, I could not have looked more like a tourist. Though I had seen across the border from behind the customs barrier in Gallowtree Gate, I had never set foot in the other half of the divided city. From the safe side of the border things had not looked so very different. The cultural mixing across this most permeable of national boundaries made sure of that. But now it felt as if I had passed through Alice’s looking glass. All the things I could not see from the other side were altered and strange.

I progressed up Granby Street wide-eyed, eventually finding the Midland Money Exchange, a grand red-brick building fronted by a set of low steps. Trying my best to move around obstacles rather than cut a straight Republican line, I wove through the crowd that jostled in the entranceway.

Just inside the door, I paused to rest my travelling case on the floor. It was an act that would have caused confusion and collisions at a busy junction in the Republic. Here, people simply moved around me as river water flows past a rock.

Two great sandstone pillars lay ahead, and beyond them, the huge expanse of the trading floor, which seemed more like a hive of bees than a room of people. Light flooded down from windows in the cavernous roof onto knots of men standing in inward-looking groups. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. Those in the centre of each circle wore colourful bowler hats. I saw greens, browns, reds and even a soft pink. These men gesticulated wildly with slips of paper clutched in their hands, calling out numbers. Their shouts mixed, becoming a dizzying cacophony. A few feet back stood men in high top hats, who seemed disinterested by comparison. There were a few women here also, but these stood waiting around the edge of the trading floor.

Making my way between the columns, I skirted the room and took up position next to one of the women. She wore the same jewel-green colour that the Duchess had been dressed in when we first met. Her red and black striped stockings were visible to the calf.

“The trade’s full steam today,” she said.

“What do I do?” I asked.

She turned to look at me properly. “You’ll be a Republican then?”

I shook my head. “But I’ve been away. I need to change money.”

“You surely talk like a Republican. And will you look at that skirt!”

“I’ll be changing clothes very soon.”

“Well, the world’s ever yours if you’ve money to spend.”

She took my arm and waved towards a knot of men on the trading floor. The intimacy of her touch took me aback. It was something that would only have passed between close friends in the Republic. Moments later, a trader wearing a russet bowler hat had spotted us and was hurrying over.

“She’s from the Republic,” explained my new friend.

I emptied my purse onto his hand. After picking up one of the coins and examining it in close detail, he did a quick count.

“I can do you a one to five exchange, Kingdom for Republic on a half hour turn.”

I had no idea whether the rate represented good value, or what was meant by a half hour turn. But the woman next to me gave a small nod and an encouraging smile, so I offered my hand and we shook on the deal. It was all done so quickly that only as he left with my money did it occur to me that I might have been hustled like the greenest josser ever to walk onto a gaff. I looked down at the contract slip he had given me. The ink was green and the writing so spidery that I could hardly make it out.

The trader was lost in the crowd already. If the woman now made her excuses and left, I would know for sure that I had been conned. It would take only one such slip to seal my fate. The woman had let go of me already. Fighting my reserve, I took her arm as she had done mine a few moments before. She did not pull away.

“Thanks for the help,” I said.

She squeezed my hand. “You Republicans are so polite.”

“Are you changing money for a journey north?”

“I’m surely not!” she said, as if I had suggested something dangerous. “This is only my hobby.”

Perhaps she sensed my confusion because she gestured to the crowds before us and explained, “Only men can work the trading floor. They’re lords over us, yes?”

“I suppose–”

“Well you suppose too easily! As do they. But they see only the little things. The price of the Mark against the Pound. The Franc against the Dollar. Standing here, listening in, we can see it all. My hobby is to change money from one currency to another, then on to another still.”

I felt a smile spreading across my face. I was not the target of her games. The traders were.

“How much money do you make in a day?”

She put a hand to her chest in faux shock. “My dear! I thought such questions were never asked north of the border.”

“Like I said, I’m coming home.”

“I’m beginning to see that,” she said. “There’s a Royalist underneath all that Republican grey. As to the money...” She nodded towards the men of the trading floor. “I make more than any of them.”

My trader in his russet bowler returned before the half an hour had expired. He took the contract slip, wrote down the time then made me countersign it. I counted the thick bundle of paper money he had given me. One hundred and sixty-five Kingdom pounds. The man touched the brim of his hat then dived back into the chaos from which he had just emerged. As I wove away through the crowds, I took a final glance at the woman in the jewel-green dress. For all her instant friendliness, she had not bothered to take a final glance at me. Her focus was back on the money market, her arm held high, waving to attract the attention of another trader.

It was said that the house of a true Republican was narrow, ensuring that the frontage would not give away the wealth within. The house of a Royalist was wide by contrast, often with a high false wall at the front. “Wide and shallow” had become the phrase wherewith Republicans made fun of their southern neighbours. “Mean and narrow” being the standard reply.

As if to belie this cliché, the Turkey Cafe, which stood opposite the Midland Money Exchange, seemed too narrow for its height. Yet its frontage was as rich and showy as any Kingdom building could have been. The ornately curved windows might have come from the Kasbah of Algiers. Moulded plaster turkeys stood proud from the walls on either side of the front doors and a brightly coloured turkey emblem crowned the apex of the building.

Taking a table with a good view of the street, I ordered a cup of rose-flavoured chocolate and something the waiter described as the Turkey Special – a raisin pastry square, dotted with brilliant blue icing and what appeared to be tiny flecks of gold leaf.

I handed over a note and received a handful of thre’pences, crowns and shillings, none of which were familiar to me. I pretended to check the money. Then, none the wiser, nodded my acceptance of the waiter’s arithmetic.

As I ate, I thought about the woman in the money exchange. She had found a way to make the world of men serve her own advantage. In that respect we were alike. Yet I felt uneasy. The signing of financial contracts in the Republic was hidden away in wood-panelled offices – a shameful necessity in the pursuit of higher goals. One would no more talk of it than discuss intimate medical complaints with a stranger. In the Kingdom, the acquisition of money seemed to be an end in itself.

There was so much that I did not understand. Though I had spent most of my life south of the border, I had never learned to be an adult there.

Rested, but with my mind buzzing from more sugar than I had eaten at one sitting for many years, I hefted my case from the floor and set off back into the afternoon sunlight.

On Rutland Street, I found a used-clothing shop. A man in a lilac and mustard check waistcoat jumped to his feet as I entered.

“Are you the proprietor?” I asked.

He nodded, his fingers dancing nervously over the edge of the counter.

“I need a skirt, blouse, coat and bonnet.”

“We don’t... that is, we do... but not...”

I began to rummage through the nearest rack, pulling out possibilities, holding them against myself then replacing those obviously too small. The double life I led precluded any possibility of training my waist down to fashionable dimensions.

“There is nothing – how should we say? – Nothing plain enough to–”

“It will be a gift for a Royalist friend,” I said.

“Will your friend... ah... be coming into the shop for... for a fitting?”

“We’re two peas in a pod. If they fit me, they’ll fit her.”

As a child, I had shopped in places like this. I used to love the touch and smell of the fabrics. Only the poorest women in the Republic would wear second-hand clothing. In the Kingdom rummaging castoffs was one of life’s great pleasures.

Having found a green skirt similar to the one worn by the woman on the trading floor, I moved on to a rack of puff-sleeved blouses. My shoulders being unfashionably broad, I was surprised and pleased to find several possibilities. Soon I was striding across the changing room, testing my new outfit for the freedom of movement it allowed. After years of wearing full-length skirts, I felt a thrill of daring excitement on seeing my boots and stockinged calves in the looking glass.

“You’re surely not wearing them?” said the frowning proprietor as I emerged, money in hand.

“I surely am!” I said, trying out an abrupt Royalist tone of voice and liking the effect.

“But they’re for your friend. Won’t she–?”

“She likes me to wear them first,” I said.

He nodded, accepting my words. It seemed that no amount of strangeness would be a surprise if it came from the mouth of a foreigner.

Noticing a rack of accessories, I picked out a straw hat with turquoise ribbon and flash of jay feather.The proprietor eyed the pile of subdued clothing in my arms as if he were examining an exotic creature. “I suppose... that is, you’ll be wanting to hold onto your old ones... since you’re buying for a friend.”

“Not necessarily.”

Clothes in the Republic are made to last a lifetime before being cut into squares or hexagons and stitched together as quilts. In the Kingdom, fashions change from one year to the next and clothes fall apart if worn for too long. Therefore, I had no illusions, knowing full well I was exchanging good for bad. But I had no more need of Republican clothes. If I succeeded in my quest, I would win the freedom to remain. And if I failed I would be permitted no return.

Chapter 32

Comfort comes from simple knowledge, whether the knowledge be true or false. Thus are fools so common and wars and lovers also. And thus will the audience know for sure that you caught a flying bullet with your teeth.