always a few sporting gentlemen, meaning gamblers and swells and layabouts, mixed in with a regular working man or two and maybe a table of law students out on a spree. And of course them as come creeping out of their holes after dark. Thieves of all manner, for thieves came in every category you could imagine, and they all had names. Burglars and sneaks and dog-thieves. Cracksmen who specialized in breaking locks, rampsmen who specialized in breaking heads, and bug-hunters who preyed on them as was staggering drunk. Swindlers and card-cheats and sharpers, and hard men talking flash, and girls from the Haymarket. There was a painting of Tom Cribb on the wall, who was once champion prize-fighter of all England, and a story that the great man once raised a glass here years ago, long before Mother C ever came. People said he danced a sailor’s hornpipe on top of a table, though whether there’s truth in that I couldn’t say. Another time a man come in and emptied an entire sack of rats out onto the floor. I can tell you that was true, cos I was here the night it happened, and Lord you should have seen it. A hundred people in a room thirty foot by twenty, shrieking and yelling and brown sewer rats running everywhere and biting. I’m not sure why the man done it. He was a sporting gentleman.
I was hardly through the door before old Lushing Mary spotted me. She came screeching like a seagull.
“Where did you get to? Where? I was frantic!”
I rolled my eyes a bit, and reassured her. “I’m fine, Mary. I went out, but now I’m back again, ent I? Back again safe and sound.”
“And what if you weren’t? What if you were floating in the river right now? Or face down with your windpipe slit like a chicken’s, you selfish little slut! For then just think what would happen to me!”
It was a fair enough point. I wasn’t supposed to go out at all, except when I had Mary with me. This was the arrangement for all the girls who lived at Mother Clatterballock’s, and such places. Mother C couldn’t have a girl sneaking off to do her business and pocketing all the coin for herself, or perhaps sneaking off and never coming back at all, wearing clothes on her back that belonged to Mother C, since she provided the dresses we wore. So when a girl went out, she had an old lady with her, and mine was Lushing Mary.
I slipped off fairly regular, of course, whenever Mary was in her cups or turned the other way. Mother C knew about it, too, but she didn’t make too much of a fuss, cos she trusted me, as far as she ever trusted anybody. Or at least she was willing to take a chance where I was concerned, after first explaining what would happen to me if I ever tried to sneak away from her. Explaining very carefully, and in specific detail. Besides, Mother C done well out of me—selling me for a virgin every night for three weeks running, when I first turned twelve and was old enough. It’s an easy enough trick, with a bit of acting and a few drops of sheep’s blood. She’d done well enough from me ever since, seeing as I had a bright eye and a fine set of teeth—every one of them still in my head.
“I’d be in the park—that’s where I’d be, if something happened to you!” cried Mary. “You want me to end my days in the park? God save us, the girl’s a monster—she’s got no feelings at all. An old woman in the park, reduced to all manner of depravity!”
When gay girls got too old and lost their charms, they had to find another way to scrape their living together. Some of them, like Mary, managed to get themselves kept on at houses like this, cleaning up in the daytime, and at night minding one of the girls. In return, they’d get a roof to sleep under, and food to eat, and enough gin to keep them limping through another day. If Mary lost her position, then where else would she go? Except down to the river to drown herself, or else to the park, like she said? And the river was the cleaner of the two, for all the stench and the shit floating down, pumped in from every sewer in London.
You could see the women in Hyde Park every night, as soon as it was dark. The old ones who couldn’t show their faces in the gaslight, no matter how heavy they painted. They’d creep about like crows, and in the end they’d be just a bundle of rags a-laying on the ground, to be discovered when the sun come up and carted off like all the bundles of rags before them. But till then they’d sell themselves for pennies to men who wanted things they couldn’t get from anyone else. Things you couldn’t even think of without your stomach turning. Things you’d die before you’d ever do, except here you were in the park, doing them.
“Come on, now, don’t cry,” I said. My arm around her shoulder, giving her a squeeze, cos she was working herself into a state. “We’ll get you something to drink. For Christ’s sake, buy her a glass of daffy—it’s the least you can do.”
“The least I can do? Jesus wept!”
This being my actor gentleman.
“Who’s the injured party, here?” he demanded. “I’m the injured party!”
“And I gave you my handkerchief to wrap it with, didn’t I? A brand-new handkerchief, practically new, and now it’s ruint— got blood all over. So stop moaning and buy a lady a fucking drink.”
He was cradling the hand in his lap, like it was a kitten that got run over in the street. Milking this for every last drop, and being most wonderfully wounded and aggrieved. A bit dramatic, was my actor gentleman. He would surely have been even worse if he hadn’t also been hunkering himself down in the darkest corner of the room, and hoping that Mother C’s fine customers would fail to notice him. But they did, of course, and were currently eyeing him pretty much exactly the way you’d expect: which is to say, like a pack of wolves noticing a piglet.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he muttered, out the side of his mouth. “I just wanted to see you home safely. And now I’m liable to end up floating in the Thames. Christ, no good deed goes unpunished.”
He tried a rough little laugh as he said it, like a man accustomed to risking his life as if ’twere nothing at all. Like I said: dramatic. Give him a cloak and a French accent, and he’d be the Count of Monte Cristo.
“He’s an actor,” I said to Mary.
He essayed another rough laugh. “But not, apparently, a particularly good one.”
“Dogshit,” I agreed, with a shrug. “Sorry.”
“An actor. D’you act in Shakespeare?”
This was Old Mary. She’d stopped her blubbering once the glass of daffy was in her hand, for being alive is never so bad if there’s gin to take the edges off. Now she actually perked up.
“I approve of Shakespeare.” She was sitting up a little straighter on the bench—as straight as she could manage, with a back bowed like a question-mark—and God save us if there wasn’t a spark in her eye. “My father was a schoolmaster, you know.”
I’d heard her say that before. I’d also heard her say her father was a Member of Parliament, or else a vicar. This last was something you’d hear an astonishing amount, with gay girls. On any given night, the dens and night houses of London was apparently chock full of vicars’ daughters, all painted and flat on their backs. How much of this was true I couldn’t say, though I certainly had my suspicions. If I had to guess about Mary, I’d guess she wasn’t sure herself, any more. But I’d actually seen her reading books. I’d even given her a book once, and told her it was for her birthday, though God only knew when her birthday was. It was a book of poems, with a cover of dark green pebbled leather. I wrote her name inside—to my friend Mary Bartram, on her birthday—and she grew all grave and said it was a treasure. She didn’t speak like she come from the streets, either, or from the servants’ quarters of some dirty provincial town. She spoke like someone who’d had an education, even after all these years, and falling all this long way down—all
