Jem halted. “P’raps we should go back to Lambeth,” he suggested, swallowing to try to move the lump lodged in his throat. Seeing the coffin in the cart and the neighbors removing their hats had reminded him of his own brother’s funeral, where neighbors had stood in their doorways with heads bowed as the cart carrying his coffin passed, guided to the graveyard by the tolling of a single bell at the Piddletrenthide church. People had openly cried, for Tommy had been a popular boy, and Jem had found it hard to make that short walk between cottage and church in front of everyone. Though he thought of his brother less now, there were still moments when he was ambushed by memories. London had not completely buried Tommy, for any of the Kellaways. At night Jem still heard his mother crying sometimes.
Maggie did not stop with Jem, however, but ran up the street the moment the neighbors turned away to go back to their houses. At the intersection where the procession had disappeared she looked back at Jem and gestured urgently. After a moment, he followed.
4
They soon arrived at Soho Square, a little larger than Golden Square, but with similar iron railings, grass plots, gravel walks, and a statue of Charles II on a pedestal in the center. Unlike Golden Square, it was open to the public, and while the funeral procession passed around the north side, Jem and Maggie walked directly through it, mingling with other Londoners out looking for a bit of fresh air and light-though the air was thicker here than in Lambeth, and full of the smells of people living close together: coal fire smoke, sour, mildewed clothes, boiled cabbage, fish on the turn. And although Soho Square was much more open than the surrounding streets they had walked through, the sky had clouded over completely now, so that there was no longer any golden September light, but a weak, diffuse gray that made Jem think of endless November afternoons. It seemed late, almost evening, and he felt he had been away from Lambeth for hours; yet he had not heard the bells strike four o’clock.
“Here.” Maggie thrust a piece of gingerbread at him that she’d bought from a seller walking past with a tray on his head.
“Thank’ee.” Jem crunched the hard, spicy bread guiltily. He had not brought any money to buy things with, for he had thought it might be taken from him.
On the other side of the square they rejoined the back of the procession, and a few turnings later passed a square church topped with a tall tower. Maggie shivered. “St. Giles,” was all she said, as if the name should conjure up its own associations without her having to explain. Jem did not ask. He knew St. Giles was the patron saint of outcasts, and it was clear enough from the surrounding buildings that the church was aptly named. Though they did not advance down them, Jem could glimpse the filth on the cramped streets, smell them from afar, and see the misery marked on the faces around him. It was not his first encounter with London slums. He and Maggie had explored some of the streets by the river in Lambeth, not far from where she now worked making mustard, and he had been shocked that people could live in such dank, dark conditions. Then, as now, his heart was squeezed tight with longing for Dorsetshire. He wanted to stop a man who passed them in rags, his face drawn and dirty, and tell him to walk out of London, and to keep going until he reached the beautiful green hills etched with furrows and washed in sunlight that formed the backdrop of Jem’s childhood.
He did not stop the man, however. Jem followed Maggie, who followed the Blakes. He did notice that Mr. Blake turned his head to look down those slummy streets even as he continued his march behind his mother’s coffin.
Where there were slums in London, there were whores; St. Giles was full of them. They had the manners not to call out to the members of the funeral procession. Jem, however, was at a distance behind it, and not wearing black, and so was considered a fair target. They began calling to him, as those on the Haymarket had, though these whores were a very different breed. Even Jem, who’d had no experience of women like this, could see that the St. Giles whores were in a much more desperate state than their better dressed, healthier Haymarket equivalents. Here faces were gaunt and pockmarked, teeth black or missing, skin yellow, eyes red from drink or exhaustion. Jem could not bear to look at them, and stepped more quickly, even at the risk of catching up with the Blakes. But he could hear them. “Sir, sir,” they insisted on calling him, running alongside and tugging at his sleeve. “Have a go, sir. Give us sixpence, sir. We’ll make you smile, sir.” Their accents were pri-marily Irish, like most of the St. Giles population, but there were others too-Lancashire, Cornish, Scottish, even a Dorset burr piping up.
Jem walked faster; but not even Maggie swearing at them could shake the women. He drew so close to the funeral procession, with his human gaggle of geese honking noisily at his elbow, that one of Mr. Blake’s brothers-the one Jem thought might be Robert-turned around and frowned at the whores, who at last dropped back.
“We’re coming up to High Holborn,” Maggie announced as the street began to widen. Then she stopped.
Jem stopped too. “What is’t?”
“Shh. I’m listening.”
He thought he could hear nothing but the normal sounds of London life: carriages rumbling past; a man calling, “Cotton laces, ha’penny a piece, long and strong!”; another playing a sad tune on a pipe and interrupting it to shout, “Give a penny to a poor man and I’ll change my tune to a merry one!”; a couple quarreling over a mug of beer. These were all sounds he’d grown used to after six months in Lambeth.
Then he did hear something; underneath all of these growls and rumbles and shouts came a voice of a different timbre-a Dorset voice. “Jem! Jem! Come back!”
Jem whirled about and peered through the crowded street. “There,” Maggie said, and darted toward a frilly white cap.
Maisie was standing with another girl near a stall selling cockles. Though Maisie’s age, she was much smaller, with a hank of straw-colored hair and a pale thin face rouged with two great dots on her cheeks and a smear across her lips, like a young girl’s idea of how to paint her face. Her eyes were pinched and red, as if she’d been crying, and she looked about as if expecting a blow to come at her from anywhere. She wore no chemise, but simply her leather stays, dark and greasy with use, and a red satin skirt over dirty petticoats. She had torn a strip from the bottom of the skirt and tied it in her hair.
“Jem! Jem!” Maisie cried, rushing up to him. “Here be Rosie Wightman. Didn’t you recognize her when you passed? Rosie, it’s Jem.”
Jem would not have given the girl a second look, but when she turned her red-rimmed eyes up to him he saw-under the rouge, the grime, and the pathetic attempt at seductiveness-the face of the girl he used to catch eels with in the River Piddle, and whose parents lost their barn to fire because of her. “Ar’ernoon, Jem,” she said, revealing the familiar gap between her front teeth.
“Lord-you know this girl?” Maggie said.
“She be from home,” Maisie answered.
“And what in the name of God’s green earth are you doing here, Miss Piddle?”
Maisie looked as shifty as it was possible for a girl wearing a frilly mop cap to look. “I were-I were following you. I saw you set out after the Blakes, so I told Ma and Pa my head ached, and I come after you. Followed you all the way,” she added proudly.
“You got a penny for us, Jem?” Rosie asked.
“Sorry, Rosie-I han’t any money on me.”
“Give her your gingerbread,” Maisie ordered.
Jem handed the half-eaten piece to Rosie, who crammed it into her mouth.