taken by residents of Lambeth who wanted to cross Westminster Bridge but did not fancy their chances on the poor, ramshackle lanes along the river between Lambeth Palace and the bridge.
No. 12 Hercules Buildings boasted a shoulder-high iron fence, painted black, with spikes on top. The ground of the front garden was covered with raked pebbles, broken by a knee-high box hedge grown in a circle, with a bush severely pruned into a ball in the middle. The front window was framed by orange curtains pulled half to. As Maggie approached, a man, a woman, a boy her age and a girl a little older were each carrying a chair into the house while a small woman in a faded yellow gown buzzed around them.
‘This is highly irregular!’ she was shouting. ‘Highly irregular! Mr Astley knows very well that I choose my own lodgers, and always have done. He has no right to foist people on me. Do you hear me, Mr Fox? No right at all!’ She stood directly in the path of John Fox, who had come out of the house with his sleeves rolled up, followed by a few circus boys.
‘Pardon me, Miss Pelham,’ he said as he sidestepped her. ‘I’m just doing what the man told me to do. I expect he’ll be along to explain it himself.’
‘This is my house!’ Miss Pelham cried. ‘I’m the householder. He’s only the owner, and has nothing to do with what goes on inside.’
John Fox picked up a crate of saws, looking as if he wished he hadn’t said anything. Miss Pelham’s tone seemed also to bother the unattended cart horse, whose owner was also helping to carry the Kellaways’ possessions upstairs. It had been standing docilely, stunned into hoof-sore submission by the week-long journey to London, but as Miss Pelham’s voice grew higher and shriller, it began to shift and stamp.
‘You, girl,’ John Fox called to Maggie, ‘there’s a penny for you to hold the horse steady.’ He hurried through the gate and into the house, Miss Pelham at his heels, still complaining.
Maggie stepped up willingly and seized the horse’s reins, delighted to be paid for a front-row view of the proceedings. She stroked the horse’s nose. ‘There now, boy, you old country horse,’ she murmured. ‘Where you from, then? Yorkshire, is it? Lincolnshire?’ She named the two areas of England she knew anything about, and that was very little – only that her parents had come from those parts, though they’d lived in London twenty years. Maggie had never been outside of London; indeed, she rarely enough went across the river to its centre, and had never been a night away from home.
‘Dorsetshire,’ came a voice.
Maggie turned, smiling at the singing, burring vowels of the girl who had carried her chair inside and come out again, and was now standing next to the cart. She wasn’t bad-looking, with a rosy face and wide blue eyes, though she did wear a ridiculous frilly mob cap that she must have fancied would go down well in a city. Maggie smirked. One glance told her this family’s story: they were from the countryside, come to London for the usual reason – to make a better living here than they did back home. Indeed, sometimes country people did do better. Other times – ‘Where’s home, then?’ she said.
‘Piddletrenthide,’ the girl answered, drawing out the last syllable.
‘Lord a mercy – what did you say?’
‘Piddletrenthide.’
Maggie snorted. ‘Piddle-dee-dee, what a name! Never heard of it.’
‘It mean thirty houses by the River Piddle. ’Tis in the Piddle Valley, near Dorchester. It were a lovely place.’ The girl smiled at something across the road, as if she could see Dorsetshire there.
‘What’s your name, then, Miss Piddle?’
‘Maisie. Maisie Kellaway.’
The door to the house opened, and Maisie’s mother reappeared. Anne Kellaway was tall and angular, and had her scrubby brown hair pulled back in a bun that hung low on her long neck. She gave Maggie a suspicious look, the way a chandler would at someone he thought had stolen wares from his shop. Maggie knew such looks well.
‘Don’t be talking to strangers, Maisie,’ Anne Kellaway scolded. ‘Han’t I warned you about London?’
Maggie shook the horse’s reins. ‘Now, ma’am, Maisie’s perfectly safe with me. Safer’n with some.’
Anne Kellaway fastened her eyes on Maggie and nodded. ‘You see, Maisie? Even the locals say there be bad sorts about.’
‘That’s right, London’s a wicked place, it is,’ Maggie couldn’t resist saying.
‘What? What kind of wicked?’ Anne Kellaway demanded.
Maggie shrugged, caught out for a moment. She did not know what to tell her. There was one thing, of course, that would clearly shock her, but Maggie would never tell that to Anne Kellaway. ‘D’you know the little lane across Lambeth Green, what runs from the river through the fields to the Royal Row?’
Maisie and Anne Kellaway looked blank. ‘It’s not far from here,’ Maggie continued. ‘Just over there.’ She pointed across the road, where fields stretched almost unbroken to the river. The red-brick towers of Lambeth Palace could be seen in the distance.
‘We only just arrived,’ Anne Kellaway said. ‘We han’t seen much.’
Maggie sighed, the punch taken out of her tale. ‘It’s a little lane, very useful as a short cut. It was called Lovers’ Lane for a time ’cause—’ she stopped as Anne Kellaway shook her head vehemently, her eyes darting at Maisie.
‘Well, it was called that,’ Maggie continued, ‘but do you know what it’s called now?’ She paused. ‘Cut-Throat Lane!’
Mother and daughter shuddered, which made Maggie smile grimly.
‘Tha’ be no great thing,’ a voice chimed in. ‘We’ve a Dead Cat Lane back in the Piddle Valley.’ The boy who had been carrying the chair inside was standing in the doorway.
Maggie rolled her eyes. ‘A dead cat, eh? I suppose you found it, did you?’
He nodded.
‘Well, I found the dead man!’ Maggie announced triumphantly, but even as she said it she felt her stomach tighten and contract. She wished now that she’d kept quiet, especially as the boy was watching her closely, as if he knew what she was thinking. But he couldn’t know.
She was saved from having to say more by Anne Kellaway, who clutched the gate and cried, ‘I knew we should never have come to London!’
‘There, now, Ma,’ Maisie murmured, as if soothing a child. ‘Let’s get some things inside now. What about these pots?’
Jem let Maisie calm their mother. He had heard often enough during their journey of her worries about London. She had never betrayed such nerves in Dorsetshire, and her rapid transformation from capable countrywoman to anxious traveller had surprised him. If he paid too much attention to her, he began to feel anxious himself. He preferred instead to study the girl holding the horse. She was lively looking, with tangled black hair, brown eyes fringed with long lashes, and a V-shaped smile that made her chin as pointy as a cat’s. What interested him most, however, was seeing the terror and regret that flashed across her face as she mentioned the dead man; when she swallowed, he felt sure she was tasting bile. Despite her cockiness, Jem pitied her. After all, it was certainly worse to discover
