Midnight is a Place (16 page)

"Oh," said Lucas. His heart sank. How could he possibly go to London, let alone soften the heart of something called the British Rug, Mat, and Carpet Manufacturing Corporation? "So—so what should I do, sir, do you think?"

"Do? Do?" snapped Mr. Throgmorton peevishly. "Why, stop bothering me, go away, and let me get on with my business. I do not know why I have taken such pains to give you all this information, after all! There is work to be had in the town—you look like an able-bodied boy—do not let me catch you begging here again, or I shall have you taken up for vagrancy!"

"I had not the least intention of begging, sir," said Lucas, suddenly angry. "I merely wished to know what I was entitled to." He drew himself up. "I am sorry to have troubled you." And he walked quickly away through the outer office and down the dusty stairs.

He was heavy hearted as he regained the street. His hopes of Mr. Throgmorton had not been particularly high, but this reception was even worse than he had feared.

He walked slowly and gloomily along the shabby street, with his hands in his pockets, looking vaguely about him, wondering if Mr. Throgmorton had been speaking the truth, and how he was going to break this bad news to Anna-Marie.

But then his gloom was somewhat dispersed—he did not quite know why—by the sight of a thin girl who was walking ahead of him, pushing along an untidy pair of infants in a baby carriage. They were not a particularly prepossessing pair, but the girl was talking to them and laughing, as if she enjoyed their company, and their grubby little faces wore broad smiles.

Anna-Marie would not be too discouraged, he suddenly felt sure. What a good thing it was that she turned out to have such a practical disposition: if she had been the whining, helpless kind,
they would have been properly in the suds. Indeed, Lucas acknowledged to himself, he owed it to her calm discussion of their prospects on the drive home from the hospital that Mr. Throgmorton's unhelpfulness had not been more of a shock.

With some difficulty he found his way back to Haddock Street, where Mrs. Tetley's house was situated. The first thing that met his eyes was the sight of Anna-Marie, with her skirts pinned up, scrubbing the front steps and shoveling snow off the cobbled pavement.

"Eh—
te voilà!
" she said, pushing the hair off her face with the back of a dirty hand.

"Anna-Marie! You shouldn't be doing that!" said Lucas, rather upset.

"
Pourquoi
pad?
Meeses Tetley ask for our money in advance. I say I have no money, me; so she say, well then, she will take it this week in work. So I have cook the dinner and done much cleaning. But now I think it is time we go back to see Monsieur Ookapool, no?"

"Yes, it is."

"Then I wash, " she said, and swiftly disappeared down a path at the side of the house to the backyard, where there was a pump.

Lucas fetched the pony, which he had arranged to leave in a nearby shed at an extra cost of sixpence a week.

Anna-Marie reappeared almost at once with pink-scrubbed face and hands.

"I am thinking, Luc-asse," she began in a low voice when they were well away from the house, "that we had better stop at a
bijouterie
and sell my beads, for we have no money to pay for Monsieur Ookapool." She fingered the necklace of tiny pearls that she always wore clasped round her neck.

"It's all right. I thought of that. Don't sell your pearls," he said.

"You have some money?"

"I sold my watch."

"Then how will you know what time it is?" she said, frowning.

"Well, we are living in the town—there is always a clock somewhere. You hang on to your pearls. But I think you should hide them—it's a rough district that we are living in."

"There is nowhere safe," Anna-Marie said. "When I am cooking the dinner I have need of a
mouchoir
from my coat pocket so I go to our room. There is Madame Tetley, prying through our things—what there is to pry through. I think she is
méchante;
she looks like a scrubbing brush, and she smells like a bar of soap. I do not think we shall like living in her house."

"Nor do I," said Lucas glumly. "But perhaps presently we can find something better when I have found some work."

Rather reluctantly, he then told Anna-Marie about his disappointing interview with Mr. Throgmorton. But she only shrugged.

"
Quoi donc?
Sir Randolph has no more money, and his house is burned. To me it does not seem to make much difference if this Trog—

"Throgmorton—"

"Trog-morton knows you or not."

Lucas decided to keep his suspicions of the lawyer to himself. What was the point in loading Anna-Marie with yet another worry?

They left the pony cart in the hospital courtyard and went to the desk, where Lucas paid over the money for Mr. Oakapple's keep, and was told that one of them only might visit him for ten minutes, no more. Anna-Marie's face fell when she heard this,
but she said, "You go see him, Luc; you know him best. Me, I wait here."

The visit proved a disappointment. The tutor was still not fully conscious, due to the laudanum he had been given, but even so he was plainly in a good deal of pain; he tossed and turned restlessly, cried out about someone called Grenvile, and then fell to incomprehensible muttering, plucking at his sheet with heavily-bandaged hands. His face, too, was all swathed in bandages.

One of the gray-robed sisters came and fed him some cooling drink through a straw.

When Lucas asked anxiously if Mr. Oakapple were going on all right, she told him that it was too early to say yet. He went back down the many flights of stone stairs in a very low and apprehensive state of mind. He had hoped that the tutor might be sensible enough to talk to—for all they knew, Mr. Oakapple might have a family who would be anxious to know about his plight and to help him—but at present getting any information from him was plainly out of the question.

Back in the downstairs lobby, he found Anna-Marie looking pale and scared. She clutched hold of Lucas's arm.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

A burly, shock-headed youth pushed by; Lucas caught a glimpse of his face and wondered where he had seen it before.

"Come away!" whispered Anna-Marie. "We talk outside." She pulled his hand, and he followed her out. The short afternoon had already darkened; the wind was rising and more snow had begun to fall.

"That
type
—" she began, when they were in the cart and moving. "You remember him, we meet him the other day in the street when we are lost—"

"Oh, yes, of course; now I remember. I knew I'd seen him somewhere," said Lucas, frowning. "Did he bother you just now? Tease you?"

"No, no, worse than that! He ask if I have a friend in the hospital, sick. I say to him, 'What is that to you?' He say,
'Bien,
if you do not pay me, I see your friend get no food, no medicine; he soon die!'"

"But how can he say so?" said Lucas, frowning. "
He
certainly isn't a doctor—"

"No, he is a brigand! It is a gang, who make menaces—they are assassins! The porter at the desk have told me it. is best to pay them. Last week they pull a poor old man out of his bed and leave him in the yard in the rain because his sons will not pay."

"How much do they want?" asked Lucas, his heart sinking.

"Also another twenty-five shillings."

"But that's wicked—it's wicked to get money from people by such threats—"

The day began to be more than Lucas could take. Too many things were piling up against them.

"Of
course
it is wicked," said Anna-Marie. "But what can you do?
Il faut payer ces voleurs, ces cochons!
We do not want poor M. Ookapool put out in the snow. He is the one friend we have left, I think."

Next day Lucas began doggedly looking for work. Questing back and forth, back and forth, he soon acquired a wretched familiarity with the unpleasing streets of Blastburn. Factories, shops, mills, collieries—he tried them all, and the answer was always the same: "We want no new hands, we are turning off those we have. Times are hard."

Nobody wanted an inexperienced boy. And more particularly, Lucas thought, no one wanted a boy who had any connection at all with Sir Randolph Grimsby.

The only place he had not tried—out of pride, out of a strong disinclination to show his face there, and a strong feeling that there he would be most unpopular of all—was Murgatroyd's Mill.

At the end of ten hours' hunting he was footsore, chilled to the bone, hungry, disheartened, and no nearer finding any employment.

Turning wearily from the gates of Thrupp's Furniture Manufactury—where they wanted only experienced master carpenters, inlayers, mortice men, or turners—he perceived by the great clock on the town hall that it was nearly six; and he started glumly trudging in the direction of Haddock Street. How could he face Anna-Marie with such unrelieved news of failure?

The moment of facing her came sooner than he expected. A littie figure ran down the steps of the market building and came hurrying to meet him across the snowy, gaslit square.

"
Hé,
is that you, Luc-asse? I thought I recognized your walk. Listen, affairs are not too bad. Only figure to yourself, I seem to be the only person who has thought of picking up cigar ends in this foolish town, and I have collected such a quantity! Even in the snow and slush I find them, and I think it will not be too hard to dry them out. All the rich manufacturers must smoke them all the time. I have already collected three basketsful—first, I put them in my handkerchief, but it became too wet, so then I found me an old basket on the riverside—and I have sold some ends already to a man in a tobacco shop for twelve-some shillings to buy food for supper. Tomorrow I buy papers to make my own cigars; one can make more profit that way—"

She interrupted her chatter to say, "You look very tired, Luc-asse, and not at all cheerful. Come in here out of the snow and tell me what has happened to you."

At the top of the main square was a big, arcaded market building, open at each end. Inside were dozens of stalls, still doing brisk business even at this late hour, for the shift workers from the factories wanted food at all hours of the day.

There were stalls with fish and meat, stalls with big loaves of bread and shiny doughcakes, stalls where rabbits and hares dangled in their fur, stalls piled with apples and potatoes and cabbages. Clothes were sold here, too—racks of cheap cotton trousers and jackets and print dresses occupied one corner; a table was covered with wooden clogs; in another corner were blankets and household utensils, all of the simplest, coarsest kind. Another corner held second-hand goods—furniture, pots, pans, books, children's clothes, tools, farm implements. Elsewhere could be found plants in pots, birds in cages, vividly colored medicines in bottles, bales of thin gaudy cotton. Everything that humans could wish to buy—humans who did not have much money—seemed to be on sale here.

The floor of the market was stone-paved, wet and dirty from the snowy feet of the countless shoppers who had been tramping through all day long. A faint muggy warmth from all the people in it made the arcade at least more sheltered than the square outside, which was scoured by a bitter wind.

Anna-Marie pulled Lucas along to a stall with a crudely painted sign that said "Veg Soup halfpenny per Cup."

"Here," she said, "I am sure you must be hungry, and I feel
comme an meurt-de-faim!
" She bought them each a halfpennyworth from an old lady who stood behind the counter by a big iron caldron, ladling soup into brown mugs.

Lucas felt it was wrong that he should be allowing Anna-Marie to spend money on him, and made a faint protest, but she said, "
Chut!
We share all we have, you look after me; I look after you also."

The soup was thick, tasteless, made mostly from potatoes or large beans, but it was hot and comforting. Lucas cradled the coarse earthenware mug in his hands, beginning to feel just slightly more hopeful. There
muât
be work somewhere that he could do.

"Now," said Anna-Marie, when the soup was drunk, "over here is the stall of Monsieur 'Obday, who is a
marchand de bric-à-brac
—I talk to him already today; he says I can have a corner of his
étalage
to sell my cigars when I have made them."

Mr. Hobday nodded in a friendly manner to Anna-Marie. He was a wizened little man with one shoulder higher than the other, very small quickly moving eyes, and two very large red ears like basket handles. At the moment he was engaged in selling a wooden mangle to a housewife. When she and her son had carried their purchase away between them, he came over to Anna-Marie and said, "Well, yoong lady, have you made enough money to buy me out yet?"

"
Non,
monsieur, but I have here my friend Luc. I think he will find many useful things for you if you hire him."

To Lucas, Anna-Marie said, "Monsieur 'Obday is looking for a boy to find him things for his stall."

"Mind you, it's mucky work," Mr. Hobday said. "I won't pretend it ain't. No use letting on that you end the day smelling like a rose garden. Such is not the case. But if you're agreeable to that, then there's decent pickings to be made."

"I don't quite understand," Lucas said. He was very tired, and slow to realize that his luck might have turned. "Are you offering me a job?"

"That's it. I can see you're a bright-looking, well-set-up lad. I lost my last tosh boy last week—'e was a good, steady boy, too; we miss 'im crool, me and old Gudgeon; if you're interested in the job, son, and if you're prepared to level up with us and bring in the tosh
us
you find it, and not go skiving off to some other dealer—then the beat's yours."

"Thank you," said Lucas.

"You'll be working with old Gudgeon, he's a very steady cove, been with me a long time; he'll show you the ropes."

Mr. Hobday stuck out a grimy clawlike hand, which Lucas shook, feeling somewhat dazed.

"Start tomorrow, six o'clock," said Mr. Hobday. "Now you'll want clothes, which I dessay you haven't got—a long overcoat—must have big pockets—canvas trowsies and some old slops of shoes; I'll provide those; then you want a bag, and a pole seven or eight feet long: can you get those? Also there's a leather apron needful, and a dark lantern with a bull's-eye. I'll furnish those and you can pay me back out of your wages."