from Great Russell Street in the north all the way to Long Acre. You could stumble in and not come out again, not ever—just wander lost till someone took pity and slit your throat. A lot of it had been torn down, but parts of it remained. Houses so rickety you’d think the next big wind would blow them over, all jumbled together so close that one couldn’t fall without taking a hundred more with it. Broken windows patched up with rags and paper, with poles sticking out for hanging clothes, and slops being emptied look-out-below. In the old days there was paths through the Holy Land that never saw the light of day—you could go from one end to the other through windows and cellars. This was wonderful handy for thieves and footpads, for how was the Watch to follow? Nip in and just disappear, like a rabbit in a field of brambles. There were still routes like this, if you knew where to look—and I did, since the Holy Land is where I’d lived with Mrs Dalrymple.
But I wasn’t deep into the rookery that night, just on the very fringes. The roads beyond were still crowded and busy, but here it was just filthy and quiet. Dark too, and choked with fog, for who’d waste good gaslight on a shit-hole like St Giles?
That’s when I knew someone was following me.
I looked quickly round, but of course there was no one there.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
I started forward again, and tried to tell myself I was just being a fool, and frightening myself with imaginings. But I was moving fast, now. This was London, and you knew the risk you took. There were gangs who roamed these streets at night, looking for a girl on her own, to rob and do things to and leave half dead. There was eyes watching from alleyways, belonging to God knows who. And if you were really unlucky, there was the London Burkers. Luna Queerendo laughed at this, but Luna was a twat. God forgive me for saying that, but she was, no matter what happened to her afterwards.
The London Burkers were a gang of murderers. They crept about in the London fog slitting throats and selling the corpses to medical students, who wanted them for cutting up and studying. When Luna heard me mention this, she gave that laugh of hers— hooting like an owl, all smug—and said the last of the London Burkers was hung at Newgate twenty years ago, which everybody knew except for poor Nell apparently. And anyway the law’d been changed so medical students could get their corpses other ways, poor Nell she’s such a daisy isn’t she, hoot-hoot-hoot.
Twat.
Besides, there was worse than the London Burkers. There was Spring-Heeled Jack. I knew for a fact he was out there, cos everyone knew about Spring-Heeled Jack. I knew someone once who actually seen him. She nearly died. He jumped up from behind a wall—jumped twenty feet into the air—with his eyes burning and two horns on his head. Except you couldn’t think that way. You couldn’t slink about scared all the time, cos then you couldn’t live a life at all.
I’d been listening to my own footsteps echoing on the cobblestones: one-two-one-two. And then I heard the others: muffled and uneven. They stopped, half a second after I did. But I’d heard them, behind me.
Clip-clop.
I stood very still.
“Who the fuck is there?”
Silence and fog, growing thicker by the second. A deadly chill creeping over the cobbles.
“You better know, I got a knife. I know how to use it. You don’t believe me? Then try.”
Fog like a living thing, moving.
There. Something moving that wasn’t fog.
I ran for my life, with him behind me—whoever it was. I slipped, and almost fell, and every second I expected to feel hot breath on the back of my neck, and hands laying hold. But I was fast, and he wouldn’t catch me. I knew these streets—I knew where I was going. Except I’d turned the wrong way, or this was the wrong street, cos it was a dead end. In front of me was a wall of brick.
The yellow glare of a bull’s-eye lantern came lurching at me out of the fog. There was a face. I screamed.
“Good God!” he exclaimed.
A chalk-white face with the eyes black and horrible. “Christ, you startled me! No, it’s all right. Look, I’m sorry. I think I got turned around—bit lost—the fog and these damned winding . . . Look, I really wish you wouldn’t wave that thing in my face.”
Cos I had the knife in both hands, never mind how both of them was shaking. “You bastard—keep away!”
“Yes—fine. Look, I’m not going to hurt you . . .”
The two of us, in the yellow pool of light from the bull’s-eye. I’d seen him before—I was suddenly sure of that. But where?
“Stop following me!”
“Following you? How could I be following you? I was coming the other way. I was back there—whichever way it was. I was coming from the theatre, and now I’m completely turned around.”
The Kemp Theatre. The black around his eyes was make-up. That was where I’d seen him. He stood uncertainly, the lantern rocking in his hand.
“Look, I’m sorry if I frightened you, but look here, could you please stop—Christ!”
He broke off with a shout of pain. He’d put his other hand out, and this startled me, which was too bad for him, cos I was still very twitchy—even though I recognized him now.
“You’re him. You’re that French turd.”
“Look what you’ve done! What did you do that for? You’ve sliced my hand to the bone!
“Not the first turd—the other one. You’re the French turd’s friend. From the bloody play.”
I was so relieved I started to laugh. He was shorter without his high-heeled shoes, and of course his face was different, without the black wig and glued-on whiskers. But it was him, all right. Now he was clutching his hand and tottering back, staring at me all shock and disbelief. You’d think I’d just run him through the heart.
“Fucksake, it’s a nick. Look at you, a grown man, carrying on. Besides, it’s your own fault, cos you startled me—so don’t go blaming me, I fucking hate that. And mister? Maybe this ent the time, but someone’s got to tell you the truth. You just can’t act for dogshit.”
PEOPLE CLAIMED Mother Clatterballock had been a famous beauty in her day, with men from all over London queuing up with guineas in their hand. Hard to believe, but looking back I suppose it makes sense. It would explain how she’d managed to earn the money in the first place, to set herself up in business— that and a great grasping fist, and a nose that could sniff out an advantage like a bloodhound, and an ear that could hear a farthing drop onto a feather bolster half a parish away. Now she was twenty stone poured into a purple velvet dress, with a great braying laugh and a nose like a potato and her bosoms billowing up from her bodice like two great wobbling blancmanges. But she had her charm, when she wanted to use it—give the old girl her due—and she was decent enough to me, more or less, much of the time. So you take the bad with the good, and get on with your business, don’t you?
Mother C kept a house in Panton Street, across from a dance hall and wedged between a hot baths and Dalley’s Oyster Rooms. Two floors up rickety stairs there was rooms for the girls, and down below was the
