could pass anything, anything at all, at speeds which would astonish you. We could pass ice, in August, before a quarter of the block should have had a chance to turn to water. We could pass sunshine in summer— Mr Ibbs would find a buyer for it.
In short, there was not much that was brought to our house that was not moved out of it again, rather sharpish. There was only one thing, in fact, that had come and got stuck— one thing that had somehow withstood the tremendous pull of that passage of poke— one thing that Mr Ibbs and Mrs Sucksby seemed never to think to put a price to.
I mean of course, Me.
I had my mother to thank for that. Her story was a tragic one. She had come to Lant Street on a certain night in 1844. She had come, 'very large, dear girl, with you,' Mrs Sucksby said— by which, until I learned better, I took her to mean that my mother had brought me, perhaps tucked in a pocket behind her skirt, or sewn into the lining of her coat. For I knew she was a thief.— 'What a thief!' Mrs Sucksby would say. 'So bold!
And handsome?'
'Was she, Mrs Sucksby? Was she fair?'
'Fairer than you; but sharp, like you, about the face; and thin as paper. We put her upstairs. No-one knew she was here, save me and Mr Ibbs— for she was wanted, she said, by the police of four divisions, and if they had got her, she'd swing. What was her lay? She said it was only prigging. I think it must have been worse. I know she was hard as a nut, for she had you and, I swear, she never murmured— never called out once. She only looked at you, and put a kiss on your little head; then she gave me six pounds for the keeping of you— all of it in sovereigns, and all of 'em good. She said she had one last job to do, that would make her fortune. She meant to come back for you, when her way was clear
So Mrs Sucksby told it; and every time, though her voice would start off steady it would end up trembling, and her eyes would fill with tears. For she had waited for my mother, and my mother had not come. What came, instead, was awful news. The job that was meant to make her fortune, had gone badly. A man had been killed trying to save his plate. It was my mother's knife that killed him. Her own pal peached on her.
The police caught up with her at last. She was a month in prison. Then they hanged her.
They hanged her, as they did murderesses then, on the roof of
the Horsemonger Lane Gaol. Mrs Sucksby stood and watched the drop, from the window of the room that I was born in.
You got a marvellous view of it from there— the best view in South London, everybody said. People were prepared to pay very handsomely for a spot at that window, on hanging days. And though some girls shrieked when the trap went rattling down, I never did. I never once shuddered or winked.
'That's Susan Trinder,' someone might whisper then. 'Her mother was hanged as a murderess. Ain't she brave?'
I liked to hear them say it. Who wouldn't? But the fact is— and I don't care who knows it, now— the fact is, I was not brave at all. For to be brave about a thing like that, you must first be sorry. And how could I be sorry, for someone I never knew? I 7
supposed it was a pity my mother had ended up hanged; but, since she was hanged, I was glad it was for something game, like murdering a miser over his plate, and not for something very wicked, like throttling a child. I supposed it was a pity she had made an orphan of me— but then, some girls I knew had mothers who were drunkards, or mothers who were mad: mothers they hated and could never rub along with. I should rather a dead mother, over one like that!
I should rather Mrs Sucksby. She was better by chalks. She had been paid to keep me a month; she kept me seventeen years. What's love, if that ain't? She might have passed me on to the poorhouse. She might have left me crying in a draughty crib.
Instead she prized me so, she would not let me on the prig for fear a policeman should have got me. She let me sleep beside her, in her own bed. She shined my hair with vinegar. You treat jewels like that.
And I was not a jewel; nor even a pearl. My hair, after all, turned out quite ordinary.
My face was a commonplace face. I could pick a plain lock, I could cut a plain key; I could bounce a coin and say, from the ring, if the coin were good or bad.— But anyone can do those things, who is taught them. All about me other infants came, and stayed a little, then were claimed by their mothers, or found new mothers, or perished; and of course, no-one claimed me, I did not perish, instead I grew up, until at last I was old enough to go
among the cradles with the bottle of gin and the silver spoon myself. Mr Ibbs I would seem sometimes to catch gazing at me with a certain light in his eye— as if, I thought, he was seeing me suddenly for the piece of poke I was, and wondering how I had come to stay so long, and who he could pass me on to. But when people talked— as they now and then did— about blood, and its being thicker than water, Mrs Sucksby looked dark.
'Come here, dear girl,' she'd say. 'Let me look at you.' And she'd put her hands upon my head and stroke my cheeks with her thumbs, brooding over my face. 'I see her in you,' she'd say. 'She is looking at me, as she looked at me that night. She is thinking that she'll come back and make your fortune. How could she know? Poor girl, she'll never come back! Your fortune's still to be made. Your fortune, Sue, and ours along with it..."
So she said, many times. Whenever she grumbled or sighed— whenever she rose from a cradle, rubbing her sore back— her eyes would find me out, and her look would clear, she'd grow contented.
But here is Sue, she might as well have said. Things is hard for us, now. But here is Sue. She'll fix 'em . . .
I let her think it; but thought I knew better. I'd heard once that she'd had a child of her own, many years before, that had been born dead. I thought it was her face she supposed she saw, when she gazed so hard at mine. The idea made me shiver, rather; for it was queer to think of being loved, not just for my own sake, but for someone's I never kne'V . . .
I thought I knew all about love, in those days. I thought I knew all about everything. If you had asked me how I supposed I should go on, I dare say I would have said that I should like to farm infants. I might like to be married, to a thief or a fencing- man.
8
There was a boy, when I was fifteen, that stole a clasp for me, and said he should like to kiss me. There was another a little later, who used to stand at our back door and whistle The Locksmith's Daughter', expressly to see me blush. Mrs Sucksby chased them both away. She was as careful of me in that department, as in all others.
'Who's she keeping you for, then?' the boys would say. 'Prince Eddie?'
I think the people who came to Lant Street thought me slow.— Slow I mean, as opposed to fast. Perhaps I was, by Borough standards. But it seemed to me that I was sharp enough. You could not have grown up in such a house, that had such businesses in it, without having a pretty good idea of what was what— of what could go into what; and what could come out.
Do you follow?
You are waiting for me to start my story. Perhaps I was waiting, then. But my story had already started— I was only like you, and didn't know it.
This is when I thought it really began.
A night in winter, a few weeks after the Christmas that marked my seventeenth birthday. A dark night— a hard night, full of a fog that was more or less a rain, and a rain that was more or less snow. Dark nights are good to thieves and fencing- men; dark nights in winter are the best nights of all, for then regular people keep close to their homes, and the swells all keep to the country, and the grand houses of London are shut up and empty and pleading to be cracked. We got lots of stuff on nights like those, and Mr Ibbs's profits were higher than ever. The cold makes thieves come to a bargain very quick.