The Linnet Bird: A Novel (12 page)

I
READ ABOUT THE SHIP
to America on a blustery March night. It was down at an agent’s office in Goree Piazza, where the slave trade once had its offices. It was now home to various shipping companies and a few public houses. Business had been slow that night and I’d hardly earned enough to make it worthwhile to stand in the blowing rain. I wasn’t as comfortable down near the water; I preferred staying closer to Paradise, where the gaslights afforded a shred of safety, but every once in a while I took my chances.

Luck was with me and I’d quickly found two customers, one after another, which was enough to finish up my night. I was on my way back to Jack Street when I stopped outside an agent’s office to stuff a scrap of paper down the side of my boot, where it chafed my ankle bone. As I straightened up and glanced at myself in the darkened glass of the office, I saw a newly placed advertisement with a heading in large black letters:

THE UNION LINE OF PACKETS

LIVERPOOL TO NEW YORK

FITZHUGH AND CALEB GRIMSHAW

Underneath, in smaller letters, were details: “The
Bowditch
will sail on the 5th of April. Room for one hundred fifty to two hundred passengers steerage, as well as several first- and second-class cabins. No salt will be taken; the trip is guaranteed to be dry and comfortable.” The price for a first-class cabin was twenty-five pounds
—twenty-five pounds
! I thought. I couldn’t imagine anyone ever managing to save that amount of money. The steerage price was five pounds ten shillings.

Even five pounds was an amount I’d never seen. I shrugged and walked on, not thinking much about it.

But as the weeks passed, I thought more and more about the advertisement. I thought about what it could mean—going to America. And one dark night when I was closer to sixteen than fifteen, my lip throbbing from a punch by a punter who’d refused to pay and then given me the quick fist for my trouble, my feet aching in their cheap boots, I started to think about the advertisement and the picture of the tall-masted sailing ship, its sails full and wide in an apparent sea breeze.

I thought about a new life—a different life, where nobody knew me and where I could start over. I knew it might be my only chance to avoid ending up like other girls I had worked with—Lambie beaten so badly she’d gone blind and ended up in the workhouse, and, just last month, Skinny Mo dead of the bloody cough after too many years on the cold, wet streets.

So I started to hoard my earnings, pawning my cheap trinkets and extra bonnets and not allowing myself to purchase any more books, much as I loved to run my hands over the softness of their covers, my fingers tracing the stamped letters. I ate less and didn’t visit the drinking houses with the other girls as often. And I waited.

I knew that when the time was right for me to go, there’d be some kind of a sign. I didn’t know what it would be, but it would be unmistakable.

A
FEW MONTHS AFTER
I made my vow to go to America I met Chinese Sally.

“Well, look who’s come down in the world,” Blue had said when a young woman, tall and slender, walked up to us as we stood on the street one summer evening. She carried a large and obviously heavy brocade carpetbag and wore a dainty lace frock far too fine for the street. She wore high pattens on her shoes so that her hems didn’t drag through the muck. Her hair was so black it shone navy where it showed beneath her stylish bonnet. She had beautiful skin, pale and unmarked, and the color of her almond-shaped eyes shifted and reflected the light so I couldn’t quite tell whether they were green or brown.

“Yer old man back in the clink again, is he?” Blue asked.

“Just for a bit, Blue. He’s only got a tailpiece this time, just the three months,” she said. “And he was stitched up by someone he thought was a mate. Thanks to that rotter, Louis was caught in the act.” She shook her head, setting her carpetbag on the street with a tiny sigh of regret, carefully avoiding a glob of spittle. She flexed her fingers. She wore knitted gloves. “Just goes to show you can’t trust anyone.”

“Linny,” Blue said, “this is one of my old girls, Sal. Can you make room for ’er wif you for a few months?”

“I prefer to be called Chinese Sally,” she said.

She looked different than any of the rest of us on Paradise. It wasn’t only her face, but her obvious style. The lace dress was new, pressed, and had been tailored to fit, not bought from a pawnshop or a market stall. And her voice was soft, cultured.

“Certainly,” I said. “There’s only Helen in the room with me right now.” Did she notice that my voice matched hers?

Chinese Sally smiled, a small, wry smile.

“She ’as a fancy man, doesn’t she,” Blue told me. “A real swell. Our Sal lives with the best of ’em as long as ’er feller don’t get lagged. But she’s lucky she’s got ’er old friends fer when times gets rough. This is the second time you’ve been back now, ain’t it?”

The girl nodded, studying the building behind my head. “I didn’t imagine I’d ever be back. We had planned to be off to London next month.”

“What does your man do, then?” I asked.

“He’s a mobsman,” Chinese Sally told me. “Best of the best. There isn’t a pickpocket in Liverpool better than my Louis.” She picked up her carpetbag, stifling a dainty yawn behind her glove. “I’m all done in,” she said. “I heard this morning, early, from one of Louis’s men that he’d been lagged. I was nervous to go out all day in case they were watching for me, too. I thought it best to come back here and lie low until he’s out.” She yawned again. “I’ll have a good sleep, then be out for full night’s work tomorrow.”

Blue nodded. “Linny, take ’er up to the room.” She gave the other girl a clap on the shoulder. “Good to have ya back, Sal.”

I saw Chinese Sally stiffen and her lips tighten but she didn’t say anything.

“This way,” I told her. “The room is over on Jack Street.”

She walked beside me. “I’m Chinese Sally down on the street. But I’m Miss Sing in my true life,” she said. And then she said nothing more, all the way to Jack. I left her sitting on the rumpled bed, looking around the tiny room with distaste, the carpetbag on her lap.

This wasn’t her true life, then. Like me. I thought of her words the rest of the night. “In my true life,” I whispered to myself, in that same superior tone Chinese Sally had used. “My true life.”

I
GOT TO KNOW
Chinese Sally well over the next few months. You do, don’t you, when you sleep beside someone, when you hear them cry out in their nightmares, when you know what kind of customer they’ve last had by the smell they carry on them. I knew that her eyes were brown when she was feeling her best, and that they glinted green when she was angry. She was eighteen, a few years older than me, and her life with Louis sounded exciting and wonderful.

“I’m his flash girl,” she told me one evening, as I sat on the bed, putting on my powder before I started work. “You know, dress up pretty and entertain the higher class of gentlemen. He buys me the fancy clothes and pays my rent on a lovely set of rooms. The gentlemen who come to visit me are of the upper caliber, none of the riffraff we have to contend with on Paradise.” She smiled, a wistful smile, and fell silent.

“And it’s not just the customers,” she eventually went on. “The life—well, Linny, it’s nothing like this.” She looked at her expensive dresses, hanging on nails on the wall, then studied my face, coming to stand in front of me, holding her gloves. “You’d be a good flash girl,” she said.

I set my ormolu mirror and the box of powder in my lap. “I would?”

“Of course. You’ve still got the freshness the gentlemen want—all your teeth, decent enough looks, your hair thick. And more than that, you’ve got a few manners, and a way with a phrase.”

Even though she was complimenting me, I still felt slightly insulted. “A few manners? I’ve got more than any of the other girls here, as you well know. My mother taught me,” I said, standing, letting a slightly disdainful tone creep into my voice. “Manners and proper speech.”

Chinese Sally smiled, her usual careful smile, keeping her bottom lip stiff. She had two missing bottom teeth, and was loath for anyone to see the dark gap. “You may think you’re quite fine, my girl,” she said, “but if you were to spend some time with me, among the right people, you’d learn a thing or two about what you call ‘proper’—from those actually born into the idle life. You’re only a small step above the rest of the girls, and I guarantee you, a few more years here and you’ll have fallen off that step and realize you really are just common baggage. And then it will be too late for any opportunities.”

I stared at her. Was she right? Would I just go on, night after night, customer after customer, my dream of leaving Paradise and Liverpool just that—a dream? Would I end up diseased, dying alone?

Chinese Sally must have seen the confusion on my face. She reached out and ran one finger down my cheek. “When Louis gets out, maybe I’ll bring you back with me. Would you like that?”

I shrugged, stepping back. Her finger was soft; she had a jar of lavender cream that she rubbed onto her hands before putting on her gloves each evening. “I don’t know, do I?” I raised my chin and narrowed my eyes as I spoke. “I don’t know what would be expected of me. It’s not so bad here,” I said, although she and I both knew I was bluffing.

“Well, I’ll ask you again, then, shall I, when you’ve had a chance to think about it? You don’t have to take it pushed up against a wall, you know. Not looking like you do. You could bring Louis in a tidy profit, and the sooner we can make enough to leave, the sooner Louis and I will be on our way to London. Did I tell you, Linny, that Louis is going to marry me—when the time is right, of course—once we’ve moved down to London? And then of course I shall stop working, for Louis will support me properly, with a fine house and a downstairs full of servants. Of course I shall have my own lady’s maid.”

I thought then that if I worked for Louis I could save my money even faster, and be able to book passage to America sooner than I had planned. The idea was appealing.