The Linnet Bird: A Novel (15 page)

“W
HEN ARE YOU
getting rid of it?”

I shook my hands over the washbasin and wiped my face with a clean rag, looking down at Dorie. Helen had gone off to buy herself a hot pie, and Annabelle hadn’t returned at all after the night’s work, but Dorie was stretched on the bed, enjoying the space to herself before she headed out onto the street that afternoon.

I put my hands on my abdomen, wishing I’d pulled my stays tighter. “Can you tell?”

“I can. But most others wouldn’t see it; you’re that small. How far gone are you, then?”

“I don’t know.” For my own reasons I didn’t want to tell Dorie that I knew it to be almost six months. “But it’s been quickening a while now,” I added, trying not to smile, thinking of the tiny fluttering that kept me company, cheering me when there seemed little else that could.

Dorie made a sound of disgust. “It’s a right fool you are, then. Once it’s quickening it’s harder to get rid of. Means you must be four months along. Why didn’t you do something sooner? But it’s not too late, although it’ll be hard on you, I grant you that. A lot more painful and messy, but it can be done if you find the right person and are willing to pay.” She stuck a finger into her mouth and dug at a back molar, her face contorting, the heavy folds of her eyelids almost hiding her small eyes.

“Toothache?”

She sat up, nodding. “I’m planning to have it yanked at the barber later today. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll set you up, as long as you’ve got the money. There’s someone the barber knows; I’ve used him.”

Tying a dark blue ribbon in my hair, I shook my head and picked up my shawl.

“What do you do with all your money, Linny? You don’t buy yourself any finery, or even a frock from the pawnshop. And you hardly never come to a tavern or chophouse with us no more, and Lord knows you eat next to nothing. No fancy cakes, no fruit pies. Just the slop from the stalls, jacket potatoes and oxcheeks, from what I always seen.”

“I’m saving it.”

“Not for a rainy day, I hope,” Dorie said, laughing, her eyes disappearing again, and then she grimaced, slapping her palm to her cheek. “Ow. You’d have it all spent in one November if you was saving it for that.” Her tongue probed the back of her mouth now. “You’ll come with me, then?”

But I just shook my head again, leaving Dorie worrying her throbbing tooth.

I
KNEW SOME OF
the girls who had been forced to carry a baby to birth because it couldn’t be got rid of. Most left their newborns on the steps of the workhouse or a church. Only one girl that I knew, Elsie, had tried to keep hers and still stay in the game. She left it with a toothless hag during the night when she was at work, and the little thing—a well-formed boy—had appeared to be thriving for the first four or five months. But one night he wouldn’t stop crying, and the old hag, trying to quiet the teething infant so the others in the packed straw-filled room wouldn’t throw her out, had first cut open his gums to let the new tooth come through, and when that only intensified his screams, had, in desperation, overdosed him with Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup. The baby fell into a deep, deadly, laudanum-laced sleep that he never awoke from. After that Elsie slipped away from Paradise and word filtered down to us she’d hanged herself in a flooded cellar off Lime Kiln Lane.

But of course no one ever knew for sure.

Chapter Nine

I
WAS MORE TIRED THAN
I
EVER REMEMBER FEELING.
I
T DIDN
’
T
matter how many hours I slept; I was still weary when I awoke late afternoon to prepare for the night. I knew it was the baby, taking what she needed to grow. My feet hurt more than ever; I saw, each dawn as I unlaced my boots, that my ankles were swollen, the skin marked with angry red creases where the leather bit into them.

This particular evening—November Fifth, Bonfire Night—I considered not going out at all. Perhaps I would celebrate Guy Fawkes by buying myself something hot to eat and then spending the night on Jack Street, listening to the fireworks. Maybe I would even treat myself to a yellow-backed penny novel and attempt to concentrate enough to read.

But even as I cleared a spot in the soot-covered window and looked down at the teeming alley below, dreaming of reading by candlelight, and of sailing away, and of playing with my pretty baby in a sunlit patch of grass in a place far from here, I knew I was only fooling myself. I would have to go out. I still had to turn over a minimum amount to Blue each night, even if I didn’t pull any customers. And I wouldn’t dip into my savings—I was so close that I could hear the ripple of sails in the wind.

I’d been pulling fewer and fewer tricks this last while. I worried, foremost, that little Frances would come to harm by some of my rougher customers. As well, my body was unfamiliar, heavier and unwieldy, my dresses uncomfortably tight even after letting out all the seams. I found it difficult to muster the enthusiasm necessary to elicit a favorable response, and many men, perhaps reading the unconscious unwillingness in my face and posture, would glance over me and then move on to one of the other girls.

As I laced up my boots, wincing, I realized just how badly I needed to leave it all—the damp room on Jack Street and the cold, wet streets that fanned out from Paradise in an endless maze of dark alleys filled with drunken, smelly customers. And the streets were becoming ever more dangerous. In the last three weeks three prostitutes had turned up dead, strangled and deposited down by the docks. I knew one of them; she was a pallid young thing with her two front teeth knocked out in a brawl with another whore over a customer a few months earlier. There were rumors of even more girls gone missing since the summer, but if a body never materialized, she was never declared dead.

T
HAT EVENING
I
PICKED OUT
a spot on the corner of Paradise and Cable Street where I’d often had good luck. Ten bells had chimed, a cacophony from all the churches nearby—St. George’s, St. Peter’s, St. Thomas’s—but the evening was slow so far, only three customers. I knew it often took until after eleven for business to pick up, when gentlemen on their own flooded out of the musicals and dance halls and theaters. But as it was Bonfire Night, perhaps many men, their faces ruddy with the night air and rum, would choose to go home and spend the rest of the evening watching the public fireworks with their children. It was cold; the sky, that afternoon, had been leaden and carried the smell of snow. Now a thick fog descended. On the next corner I could make out the orange glow of a burning tar barrel, lit by the drunks with nowhere to doss. The streetlamps were little more than misty orbs.

A few minutes after the echo of the last bell had died, I heard the clatter of horses’ hooves behind me. I turned, momentarily blinded by the lanterns swinging on either side of a carriage. It was a fine brougham with a pair of dancing gray horses. I’d seen it before, although never its passenger. The brougham had started appearing on the streets a week ago, and one of the girls—Little Eve—had been inside.

She whispered to me, only a few evenings ago, that it was best not to get into it. “Take it from me, I was sorry. A mean sort he is,” she told me. “He likes to give it down the throat or up the arse and he’s brutal with his hands; he’s knocked about more than me, I’ve heard. Look what he did.” Little Eve had pulled back her bonnet to show me a red, swollen ear with an oozing scab where the lobe joined the jaw. “Pretty near tore the ear off my head. He pays well, but you’d do well to avoid him. A bit of a villain. And you never know, Linny. Who’s to say he’s not the very one what’s killed those girls?”

I had shook my head. “You’re imagining too much, Little Eve. A killer wouldn’t keep coming back to the same place, would he? He’d be afraid of being caught. And besides, you’re still here, aren’t you?” She didn’t return my smile, and carefully rearranged her bonnet over her injured ear.

Now the carriage stopped, and when the curtain was pulled aside, a very ordinary middle-age man looked out at me. An overshot jaw, sagging skin around the eyes and mouth, but nothing sinister appeared to be lurking there. Although I know well that looks mean little in this business, I usually trusted my instincts, and more than once I’d been right. Still. I thought about Little Eve’s mess of an ear and stayed where I was.

“Good evening, lass,” the man said. “Are ye not cold, standing in this chill?”

Scottish. Not a bad sort. Noisy, often, as they came, given to great huffing and groaning, but the cadence of their voices always reminded me of my mother and I must admit I’d a soft spot for them.

“I might be a little,” I told him.

He looked me up and down, his eyes stopping on my scar. His eyes lingered there longer than necessary, his gaze seeming to caress the damaged skin. “Would ye like to come for a wee ride, then? Have a nip and warm yourself on this miserable night?” He held up a silver flask. When I still didn’t come closer, he took a long drink, then put the stopper back into the flask.

“I pay well,” he said. “I’ll give you a sovereign.”

“A sovereign?” I repeated. A whole pound was triple the amount I was hoping to save over the next month. “Did I hear you correctly, sir? You did say a sovereign?”

“I did,” the man said, smiling now. His eyeteeth were very yellow. The horses stomped their heavy feet, their tails swinging through the fog, churning it, and one nodded his head testily, as if impatient at being kept waiting.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I must see it before getting in with you.” I expected him to drive off then, angry at my cheek. Gentlemen in fine carriages do not like to have to prove themselves—in any way—to a girl of Paradise Street.

But the man’s expression didn’t change. In the next instant he held up the piece of gold, glinting in the light of the carriage lantern. “I have it here,” he said.

I didn’t like his smile. But a whole pound! I could stop work after tonight, and look for a ship sailing earlier. It would mean baby Frances and I could be well taken care of until I could land myself a job. Bugger Little Eve and her dire warning.

It was a lucky break, I told myself, and one I deserved.

“All right, sir,” I said and stepped up to the carriage. The man opened the door from the inside and I climbed in, sitting across from him, arranging my skirt over my knees and crossing my ankles in their thick boots.

“A bit of early winter upon us, I fear,” I said in my best voice.