“Damn, the Blakes!” Maggie muttered, and turned to look for the procession. After moving so slowly through the back streets, the cart was now picking up speed on the larger road. It was almost out of sight among the traffic along High Holborn. “I’ll just run and see which way they’re going-wait here and I’ll come back for you.” Maggie disappeared into the crowd.
“What you doing here?” Jem asked Rosie.
Rosie looked around, as if to remind herself of where she was. “I do work here,” she said through a mouth full of ginger sludge.
“But why did you run off an’ come to London?”
Rosie swallowed. “You know why. I couldn’t have my parents and the neighbors all pointin’ fingers at me about the fire. So I made my way up here, didn’t I.”
“But why don’t you go home?” Maisie said. “Your parents would-” She stopped as she remembered that the Wightmans were in the workhouse at Dorchester, information she was not about to pass on to Rosie. “Anyway, surely Dorsetshire be better than this!”
Rosie shrugged and wrapped her arms around herself, as if comforting herself with a hug.
“We can’t just leave her here, Jem,” Maisie said. “Let’s bring her back to Lambeth with us.”
“But then Ma and Pa’d know we come into town,” Jem argued, trying not to let his distaste show. It seemed that whores were following him everywhere.
“Oh, they won’t mind, not when they do see we’ve brought Rosie.”
“I dunno.”
While the Kellaways discussed what to do, Rosie stood docile, licking her fingers for stray ginger crumbs. It might be expected that she would take some interest in what was to happen to her, but she did not. Since arriving in London the year before, she had been raped, robbed, and beaten; she owned nothing but what she wore, and was constantly hungry; and though she didn’t know it yet, she had the clap. Rosie no longer expected to have any say over her life, and so she did not say anything.
She’d only managed to attract one man so far today. Now, though, perhaps because a bit of attention was being paid to her, men suddenly took more notice of her. Rosie caught the eye of a slightly better dressed man and brightened.
“You busy, love?” he asked.
“No, sir. Anything for you, sir.” Rosie wiped her hands on her dress, smoothed her straw hair and took his arm. “This way, sir.”
“What’re you doing?” Maisie cried. “You can’t leave us!”
“Nice to see you,” Rosie said. “Z’long.”
“Wait!” Maisie grabbed her arm. “Come-come and find us. We can help you. We live in Lambeth. Do you know where tha’ be?”
Rosie shook her head.
“What about Westminster Bridge?”
“I been there,” Rosie said.
The man pulled his arm from her grasp. “Are you coming or do I have to find company elsewhere?”
“Course I am, sir.” Rosie grabbed his arm again and walked away with him.
“Go to Westminster Bridge, Rosie,” Maisie called, “and at the end of it you’ll see a big building that has a white flag with red and black letters flying from it. Tha’ be Astley’s Circus. Go there during the day and ask for Thomas Kellaway-all right?”
Rosie did not look back but led her customer down a side street, pulling him out of sight into an alley.
“Oh, Jem, I think she nodded,” Maisie said. “She heard me and she nodded. She’ll come-I’m sure of it!” Her eyes were full of tears.
Maggie ran up to them. “It’s all right,” she panted. “They’re held up by two coaches scraped each other and the drivers arguin’. We’ve a minute or two.” She looked around. “Where’s the other Miss Piddle?”
“Gone off,” Jem said.
“She’s going to meet us at Astley’s tomorrow,” Maisie added. Maggie looked from one to the other and raised her eyebrows.
5
As the children followed the funeral procession down High Holborn, Jem sensed a change in the city the farther east they went, into the older part of London. The streets of Soho had been laid out in a kind of grid pattern. Now, however, streets led away from High Holborn less predictably, curving out of sight, dead-ending abruptly, narrowing into lanes a cart could barely squeeze through. They looked as though they simply grew into their shape and size rather than being planned. This part of London was what it was, and made no attempt to be grand or elegant or ordered, as Soho and Westminster did. There were still plenty of houses and shops and pubs about, but these were broken up with larger buildings-factories and warehouses. Jem could smell beer, vinegar, starch, tar, lye, tallow, wool. And when they at last turned off High Holborn, he smelled blood.
“Lord a mercy, I can’t believe they’re going through Smithfield’s!” Maggie cried, wrinkling her nose. “Couldn’t they take another route?”
“What’s Smithfield’s?” Maisie asked.
“Cattle market. We’re on Cow Lane now.”
The street led uphill toward a series of low buildings, where the smells of manure, urine, and cow sweat mingled with the darker metallic odors of blood and flesh. Though the market was shut on a Sunday, there were still people cleaning out stalls. As they passed, a woman threw a bucket of water across their path, sloshing a pink wave around their shoes. Maisie froze in the puddle and put her hand to her mouth.
“C’mon, Miss Piddle,” Maggie ordered, grabbing her by the arm and marching her through the bloody water-though she herself had gone pale at the sight of blood. “Don’t stop now-we can’t have you being sick on us, can we? Now, you haven’t told us how you managed to follow us so far without being seen. I didn’t see her back there, did you, Jem?” As she spoke, she was gulping air, making Jem study her.
Maisie giggled, recovering more quickly than Maggie. “It weren’t easy-especially all that time when you was waiting for the undertakers to arrive. Once you doubled back on yourselves and I had to turn away and look in a clockmaker’s window till you’d passed. I were so sure you’d see me then, but you didn’t. And then in the second square when I were looking at the statue and you come up, I had to jump behind it! Oh, but Jem, you do think Rosie will come to Astley’s, don’t you? She has to. And we’ll help her, won’t we?”
“I don’t see what we can do, really. We can’t send her back to Dorsetshire-not with her parents in the workhouse, and her like she be now.”
“She could stay with us, couldn’t she? Ma and Pa wouldn’t turn her away.”
“Miss Pelham would.”
“Not if we say she be our sister, come from Dorsetshire. Miss Pelham won’t know we han’t a sister.”
“She’d have to change her clothes, that’s sure,” Maggie interjected. “Couldn’t wear those clothes and call her a Piddle girl. The old stick would see her for what she is in a minute.”
“I’ll lend her clothes. And she could get a job-at the mustard factory, for instance. She could work with you.”
Maggie snorted. “I wouldn’t wish that even on an enemy. Look what happens when you work there.” She pulled a handkerchief from her stays, blew into it, and showed them. The contents were bright yellow, streaked with blood. “D’you know that feeling when you take too much mustard sauce on your beef or your fish, and it hurts your nose? Well, that’s what it feels like every day at the factory. When I was first there I sneezed all the time, and my eyes and nose ran. They said they’d let me go if it kept up. Wish they had. I got used to it finally, but I can’t smell anything now, and I taste mustard whenever I eat. Even that gingerbread tasted of mustard. So don’t go suggesting your friend work there.”
“P’raps we could find her work at the circus,” Maisie suggested.
“Or the Asylum for Female Orphans might take her, if we lie and say her parents be dead,” Jem said. “Which they do be, in a way, to her.”
“There’s better’n that for her,” Maggie said. “She could go to the Magdalen Hospital in St. George’s Fields. They take whores there”-Maisie flinched at the word-“and turn ’em into proper girls, teach ’em to sew an’ that, find ’em places as servants.”