The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (6 page)

The theater in Craven Street was so brightly lit that I might have been watching it in a dream; all the gaslights flared around me, and in the brightness my mother’s coat looked so faded and threadbare that I would gladly have exchanged it for any piece of outlandish stage gear. There was a small crowd outside, wondering at a poster—they must have been flower girls and cab touts and hawkers and such trades—and one boy was spelling it out for his father. “It’s Jenny Hill,” he said as I joined them. “The Vital Spark. And then there’s Tommy-Move-Over-for-Your-Uncle-Farr.”

“He dances with a skipping rope.” His father shook his head with immense satisfaction. “And then it turns into a hangman’s piece of cord. But where’s that tiny one with the clogs?” He was there, billed on this night as “The Infant Leno, the Whipper-Snapper with a Million Faces and a Million Laughs! Every Song Funny! Every Song in Character!” I could no more have prevented myself from walking towards the lights than I could have stopped breathing. All thoughts of Lambeth Marsh and of my mother disappeared as I took my ticket and went up into the gods. This was where I belonged, with the golden angels all around me.

The Dancing Quakers came on first, with a shuffle routine, and some peel was thrown at them from the pit. Then there were a couple of swagger songs from a lion comique, a pair of patterers called The Nerves who did some encores and “obligings again,” until Dan Leno made his appearance. He was dressed as a dairy girl, complete with a little apron and a bonnet
frilled in blue, and he danced his way across the stage with a milk pail on either arm. There was a lovely picture of the Strand behind him once again and, this time, I managed to pick out some of the signs and shop windows which were much more glorious here than they were in reality. In my old life I had seen things darkly, but now they were most clear and brilliant. Even the dust on the stage seemed to shine, and the painted green door at the corner of Villiers Street seemed so inviting that I wanted to knock and walk in. But then Dan Leno dropped his milk pails and began to sing:

He came forward and started squirming and simpering, putting forward one dainty foot and then withdrawing it, advancing towards the pit and then retreating, with such a wistful, piteous, put-upon face that you could not help but laugh. “This morning a lady came in and said, ‘How do you sell your milk, dear?’ I said, ‘As quickly as possible.’ ” Who would have thought that he was still a young boy? “ ‘And how do you go with those big buckets?’ she asks me. ‘Well, believe me or believe me not,’ I says, ‘I goes natural.’ ” There was some more patter and then, when the little orchestra struck up a tune, he began swaying across the stage and singing “I’m Off to Get Milk for the Twins.” He came on next as Nelson and then as an Indian squaw: you never heard such laughter when he accidentally set fire to his pigtail by rubbing two sticks together. “Kindly give me a few moments to change,” he said, joining in with the fun, although we all knew that it was part of his spoof. “Just a very
few moments.” And then he came back, in a battered old hat, and sang a cockney solo.

I had not had a bit to eat since my mother’s death, but I felt so revived and refreshed that I could have stayed in the gods forever. When it all came to an end, and when the last copper had been thrown upon the stage, I could hardly bring myself to leave: I think I would be sitting there still, staring down at the pit, if the crowd had not pushed and pulled me out into the street. It was like being expelled from some wonderful garden or palace, and now all I could see were the dirty bricks of the house fronts, the muck of the narrow street, and the shadows cast by the gas lamps in the Strand. There was straw scattered on the cobbles of Craven Street, and some pages from a magazine lying in a puddle of filth. A woman or child was crying in an upper room, but when I looked up I could barely see the silhouettes of the chimney stacks against the night air. Everything was dark, and the sky and the rooftops merged together. Now, with all my strength, I longed to be in the theater once more.

There was an oil lamp gleaming at the corner near the river, with some people gathered around: I could see that it was some kind of pie stall, and so I walked that way to purchase a saveloy for myself. It was a bitter cold evening, and the hot coals offered some comfort as well. I must have been standing there for a minute or two, shuffling my feet on the cobbles, when a beery-looking man in a bright yellow check suit ran over. “Harry,” he said to the pie-seller, “they’re all in dire need of pies. Be a good boy and heat some up.” I knew at once that he had come from the theater, and I stood in awe of this blessed creature who lived within the light; he saw me staring, I think, and tipped me a wink. “Be a good girl,” he said, “and help your uncle with these pies. Be careful, though. They’re too good to drop, as the pregnant woman said to the midwife.” I followed him across Craven Street, holding some of the pies—I could scarcely feel them, hot
though they must have been, and I could barely contain my trembling as we walked down a narrow alley by the side of the theater, and then up a flight of iron steps into the building itself. He pushed open a door covered in green baize and we walked into a passageway that smelled of beer and spirits. My eyes were so wide that I noticed everything, even the faded purple carpet which curled up at the edges and the skipping rope which one of the shufflers must have left against the wall. “Here’s a little bit of what you fancy,” the man who had called himself my “uncle” was saying now to a dancer who opened a door at the sound of his footsteps. “Nice and hot as you like it, Emma dear. But perhaps not quite big enough.”

She seemed to look at me with disapproval but turned back into the room. “Bring in the donkey meat.” I recognized the voice as that of the swaggering lion comique who had sung “All Through a Little Piece of Bacon” to great applause. Then another door was thrown open and we entered a room full of people: there were two large mirrors propped against the walls, as well as some wooden stools and chairs which already had costumes and garments thrown across them in apparent confusion. I held out my hands, and the pies just went. The comedian-caroler who had sung “The Whole Hog or None” took one, the Dancing Quakers grabbed three from me (they could not have been in the highest spirits, having been whistled from the stage) and then the Nerves took two more. There was only one left. I suppose I was meant to eat it myself, but then I noticed Dan Leno sitting on a stool in a corner of the room; he had his head cocked to one side, and gave me such a bright funny look that I walked straight over to him. Even as I spoke I was surprised by my own audacity. “Here’s the last one for you, Mr. Leno.”

“
Mr
. Leno, is it?” One of the Dancing Quakers had heard
me. “She should be in a green room, since she’s such a green one.”

“Now, now.” It was my new “uncle” remonstrating with her. “What’s the harm in doing us all a favor, as the cannibals said to the missionary?” Meanwhile Dan Leno had spoken not a word, but sat munching his pie with his eyes fixed upon me. “Tell me, my dear,” said “Uncle,” coming over to me and patting me on the arm. “What’s your moniker?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your name, dear.”

“Lizzie, sir.” Then, as I looked around at all of them, I suddenly felt that I must also step into a character. “Lambeth Marsh Lizzie.”

The wicked Dancing Quaker gave another low laugh and curtsied to me. “Are you mellow in the marshes? Are you a little light in the marshes, Lizzie?”

“Now then. Order, ladies and gents.” But my “uncle” need not have remonstrated with them. All at once they seemed to have forgotten about me, and began talking to each other and eating their pies. Then Dan Leno came over.

“Don’t let them dumb yer,” he said, very confidentially. “It’s just their way. Isn’t that right, Tommy?” My “uncle” was still hovering about me, and Dan Leno gave him a stern look before introducing him to me. “Allow me to present Tommy Farr. Agent, author, actor, comic acrobat and manager.” “Uncle” bowed to me. “He’s the one who hands out the spondulicks.”

“The dear girl doesn’t understand, Dan. You see, dear, he means the baksheesh.”

“Sir?”

“The bustle. The bunce. The money.”

“Come to think of it, we owe you a little something.” Dan
took a shilling out of his pocket. “As Tommy would say, you did extend to us a helping hand.” When I took the coin, he glimpsed my own hands—so raw, so pitted and so large that, even then, I think he felt sorry for me. “We’re at the Washington tomorrow night,” he said in a very gentle voice, quite unlike his stage scream. “There may be a little job for you there. If you would oblige again.”

I recognized that line from the variety, and I laughed. “Where is the Washington, sir?”

“It’s in Battersea. In your immediate neighboring vicinity. And if it’s all right with you, I’d rather you called me Dan.”

I left them soon after, and I walked through the night. I could not have slept, because I was already in a dream. I drifted down the line of gas lamps, and sang as softly as I could the words I had heard in the Craven Street theater:

I could not remember the rest of it, but it was enough for me to imagine myself dancing upon the stage with the beautiful picture of London behind me.

S
EPTEMBER
10, 1880: Very cold and foggy for the time of year. Spent the day in the Reading Room, where I made copious notes on Mayhew’s
London Labor and the London Poor
. What a moralist that man is! I had been reading the newspapers ever since my first escapade, even though I knew that the death of such a chicken would cause no great stir in the world. Then I saw a paragraph in the
Morning Herald
—“Self-Slaughter of Young Woman”—and I knew at once that the affair had been hushed up. The gay ladies would not want to spoil their trade in that quarter, and my little business might have scared away the swells. Yet I must admit that I felt somewhat humiliated; all that work gone for nothing and, in the face of this neglect, I made a pledge to myself that next time I would leave a mark that everyone would notice. Really, I was not to be trifled with in these matters.

I left the Museum that evening and waited in Great Russell Street by the cab stand, although the fog was still so thick that I despaired of ever finding a driver. But then I saw a pair of bull’s-eye lamps approaching from a distance, and I waved my bag; I shouted out “Limehouse!” but my words could find no passage
through the fog. Then, as the cab drew nearer, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned quickly, in case it were some thief set to rob me, but it was the old bearded gentleman who sometimes sits near me in the Reading Room.

“We are going the same way,” he said. “And there is only one cab. May we ride together?” He had a foreign accent, and at first I took him for a Hebrew; I have a great reverence for their learning, and so I assented at once. It seemed delightful to me to spend a little time with such a scholar before pursuing my own researches. The cab stopped and we clambered inside; it smelled no more wholesome than a dogcart but, on a night such as this, I would willingly have traveled in a prison wagon.

“This fog,” I said to my companion, “is as thick as I have known it. It might have come straight from hell.”

“From the furnaces and manufactories, sir. There was nothing like it even twenty years ago. Now all the coal that we consume literally surrounds us.”

He had a sharp voice, which I thought interesting in a man of his age. “You are from Germany, sir?”

“I was born in Prussia.” He looked out at the fog as we slowly made our way down Theobald’s Road. “But I have lived in this city for over thirty years.” He had a noble forehead and, when we passed a gas lamp, I could see how fiercely his eyes gleamed in the light. It was at this precise instant that I surprised myself with a wonderfully new idea. Why should I lavish all my genius upon those who were unworthy of it, when to exterminate a fine scholar would be so easily within my power? Think of the glory in destroying a brilliant man, and then, in the exultation after the act, what if I were to take off the topmost part of his skull and examine a brain still warm with its exertions?

“I have seen you in the Reading Room,” I said to him at last.

“Yes. There is always more to learn. More books to devour.”
He lapsed into silence again, and I understood that he was not accustomed to general conversation. But, still, he seemed disposed to talk to a stranger on such a night as this. “I used to come to the Museum before the Reading Room was first built. We had all grown so used to the old library that we thought we would never accustom ourselves to the new establishment. But we survived.”

“You came regularly?”

“I came every day. I lived in Dean Street in those days, and I walked there each morning. There was much illness in my house, and the Museum became my retreat.”

“I am sorry to hear of it.”

“Well, well, these things are determined for us.”

We had come up into the City Road, before turning south towards the river, and in the light from the front of the Salmon Vaudeville I took the opportunity of inspecting his head in a purely scientific spirit. If I could break it open with one blow, then perhaps the accumulated knowledge of his years would fly from him in some tangible shape. “You are a fatalist, then?” I asked.

“No. On the contrary, I wait impatiently for change.”

I looked out into the fog, reflecting to myself that it might come sooner than he thought. “A fine night for a murder,” I said.