A Breach of Promise (46 page)

“Hester!” he said exasperatedly.

“What?” She regarded him as if she had no idea what he was going to say.

There was no point in arguing with her. She was not going to give up. He might as well agree now as in half an hour, or tomorrow, or the day after.

“I’ll try,” he said warningly. “It won’t do any good.”

“Thank you….” Her eyes were soft and bright, and she looked at him with a kind of trust he would never have believed could be so fiercely, uniquely precious.

Monk started out early the next morning without any hope of success. He might trace them from Putney if he was diligent—and lucky. He might even follow the first few years of their unfortunate lives. Would it really help Martha Jackson to know how they were treated, and when and where they died, from what cause? Perhaps it would. Perhaps Hester was right in that it would at least allow her to know there was nothing she could do, so she could begin to leave the worst of the distress behind her.

He packed a small, soft-sided bag with a change of clothes and paid a week’s rent in advance, then left Fitzroy Street to travel south and west. He no longer wore his usual smartly cut jacket and elegant trousers. In the places he knew he would be going they would mark him out as a stranger, a target for cut-purses and possibly even garroters. He loathed the feeling of being unshaven, but it helped him to blend less noticeably into the background of those who lived in the borders of the underworld. He wanted to seem a man who should not be crossed, a dangerous man who was too familiar with the territory to be lied to. He also armed himself with a small, sharp knife and as much money as he could spare for food and accommodation, and for such bribes as should prove necessary.

The beginning would be the hardest. It was going to be very difficult indeed to find anyone who knew what had happened to two ugly, slow-witted little girls fifteen years ago. He turned
the problem over and over in his mind as he rode in the omnibus along the riverbank and then across the Putney Bridge. The only person who would know would be the landlord who had passed them on, sold them, or whatever arrangement it had been. It would be a waste of his time to bargain with anyone else. Please heaven he was still alive!

It took him all morning and into the early afternoon to track him. He had bought almost a dozen pints of beer or cider for the information.

Mr. Reilly turned out to be a huge man with white hair like a mop head, unkempt and falling over his ears. It also fell over his brow and eyes, but that did not matter because apparently he was completely blind. He welcomed Monk cheerfully. He was sitting in a tattered chair beside the hearth, a mug of ale at his hand where he could reach it without having to fumble. A small black-and-white dog of some terrier breed lay beside his feet and watched Monk carefully.

“What yer be wantin’ ter know, then?” Reilly asked cautiously. He was lonely these days, and companionship was precious.

Monk traded on it. “A few tales about the Coopers Arms, when it was yours,” he replied, settling into the rickety chair opposite, afraid to let his full weight fall on the back of it in case it collapsed. “What was it like?”

Reilly did not need asking a second time. He launched into one tale after another, and it was the best part of three hours before Monk could steer him towards the two deformed kitchen maids he had sold to a man from Rotherhithe who kept a big public house down by the river and could use some rough help where it wouldn’t be seen and no one would mind the twisted lips and the crooked eyes.

“Ugly little beggars, they were,” he said, staring sightlessly at Monk. “An’ slow with it. Could tell ’em ‘alf a dozen times ter do summink, and they still wouldn’t. Jus’ ignore yer.”

“Deaf,” Monk said before he thought to stop himself. He was not supposed to know them, or care.

“What?” Reilly frowned at him, taking another long draft of his ale.

“Perhaps they were deaf?” Monk suggested, trying to keep the anger he felt out of his voice, not very successfully.

“Yeah, p’raps.” Reilly did not care. He set the mug down with a clunk. “Anyway, I couldn’t keep ’em. Upset me customers, and not much bloody use.”

“So you sold them to a man from Rotherhithe. That was clever of you.” Monk tried to force some appreciation into his tone. Reilly could not see the contempt on his face. “Wonder what he thought when he got them home?”

“Never ’eard,” Reilly said, chuckling. “ ’E din’t come back, that’s all I know.”

“You never went after him to find out?” Monk barely made it a question.

“Me? Ter Rother’ithe? Not on yer life! Common place. Full o’ all sorts. Dangerous too. Nah! I likes Putney. Nice an’ respectable.” Reilly reached again for his ale mug, which Monk had refilled several times. “What else’d yer like ter ’ear abaht?”

Monk listened another ten minutes, then excused himself after one more attempt to learn the name of the public house in Rotherhithe.

“Elephant an’ summink … but you won’t like it,” Reilly warned.

It was late afternoon and the mournful sound of ships’ foghorns drifted up the Thames on the incoming tide as Monk got off the omnibus in Rotherhithe Street, right on the river’s edge. He could not afford to ride in hansom cabs on a job like this. Martha Jackson’s pocket would not stretch to meet his legitimate expenses, never mind his comfort.

It was a gray, late-spring day with the water slurping against the stones a few yards away and the smells of salt and fish and tar sharp in the air. He was many miles nearer the estuary here than in Putney. The Pool of London lay in front of him, Wapping on the farther side. To his left he could just make out the vast bulk of the Tower of London in the mist,
gray and white. Beyond it lay Whitechapel, and ahead of him Mile End.

The pool itself stretched out silver in the light between the ships coming and going laden with cargoes from all over the earth. Every kind of thing that could be loaded on board a vessel came in and out of this port. It was the center of the seagoing world. A clipper from the China Seas, probably in the tea trade, rocked gently on the swell, its masts drawing circles against the sky. A few gulls rode the wind, crying harshly. Barges worked their way upstream, tied together in long queues like the carriages of a train, their decks laden with bales and boxes tied down and covered with canvas.

Downriver on the farther side lay the Surrey Docks, Lime-house and then the Isle of Dogs. He stirred with memories of that, and of the fever hospital where Hester had worked with Callandra during the typhoid outbreak. He would never forget the smell of that, the mixture of effluent, sweat, vinegar and lime. He had been sick with fear for her, that she would catch it herself and be too exhausted to fight it.

Even standing there with the cool wind in his face off the water, he broke out in a sweat at the memory.

He turned away, back to the matter in hand. He must find a public house called the Elephant and something.

He stopped a laborer pushing a barrow along the cobbles.

“Elephant an’ summink?” The man looked puzzled. “Never ’eard of it. ’Round ’ere, is it?”

“Rotherhithe,” Monk answered, a sinking feeling gripping him that the man did not know. Rotherhithe was not so large. A man such as this would surely know all the public houses along the water’s edge, by repute if not personally.

They were passed by another group of longshoremen.

“You sure?” The man squinted at Monk skeptically, looking him up and down. “W’ere yer from? Not ‘round ’ere, are yer!”

“No. Other side of the river.”

“Oh.” He nodded as if that explained everything. “Well, all I knows abaht ’ere is the Red Bull in Paradise Street an’ the
Crown an’ Anchor in Elephant Lane—that’s just up from the Elephant Stair … which you can see up there beyond Princes’ Stair. Them two are real close.”

“Elephant Stair?” Monk repeated with a surge of hope. “Thank you very much. I’m obliged to you. I’ll try the Crown and Anchor.” And he walked briskly along the river’s edge to the Elephant Stair, where the shallow stone steps led down into the creeping tide, salt-sharp and slapping against the walls, crunching and pulling on the shingle. He turned right and went up Elephant Lane.

He went into the crowded, noisy, steamy barroom and ordered and ate a good meal of pie with excellent pastry. He declined to imagine what the filling might be, judging that he preferred not to know. He followed it with a treacle suet pudding and a glass of stout, then began his enquiries.

He was glad he had eaten first; he needed the strength of a full stomach and a rested body to hear what was told him. It seemed the landlord had paid more attention to the low price than to the goods he was purchasing. When he had got the girls back to Rotherhithe he had put them to work in the sculleries washing glasses and dishes and scrubbing the floors. They had worked from before dawn until the public house closed at night. They had eaten what they could scavenge, and slept on the kitchen floor in a pile of sacking by the hearth, curled up together like cats or dogs.

They were willing enough to work, but they were slow, hampered by partial deafness and by being undersized and frequently ill. After a few months he had come to the conclusion that they were a bad bargain and cost him more than they were worth. He had been offered the chance to sell them to a gin mill in St. Giles, and seized the opportunity. It was a few shillings’ return on his investment.

Where was the gin mill?

The publican had no idea.

Would a little money help him to recall?

It might. How much money?

A guinea?

Not enough.

The anger exploded inside Monk. He wanted to hurt the man, to wipe the greedy smile from his face and make him feel for a few minutes the misery and fear those children must have known.

“There are two possible ways of encouraging people to tell you what you need to know,” he said very quietly. “By offering a reward …” He let the suggestion hang in the air.

The man looked at Monk’s face, at his eyes. He was slow to see the rage there. He felt no more than a short shiver of warning. He was still working out how much money he could squeeze.

“Or by threat of something very nasty happening to them,” Monk finished. His voice was still polite, still soft, but there was an edge of viciousness in it a sensitive ear would have caught.

“Oh, yeah?” the man said with more bravado than assurance. “You got something nasty in mind, then, ’ave yer?”

“Very,” Monk answered between his teeth. He had the perfect excuse. He knew all the details. He had helped pull the body out of the river before he had quarreled with his superior and left the police force. “Do you remember Big Jake Hillyard?”

The man stiffened. He swallowed with a jerk of his throat.

Monk smiled, showing his teeth. “Do you remember what happened to him?”

“Anybody could say they done that!” the man protested. “They never got the bloke who done it.”

“I know they didn’t,” Monk agreed. “But would anybody else be able to tell you exactly what they did to him? I can. Would you like to learn? Would you like to hear about his eyes?”

“ ’E ’ad no eyes … w’en they found ’im!” the man squeaked.

“I know that!” Monk snapped. “I know precisely what he had … and what he hadn’t! Where in St. Giles did you send those two little girls? I am asking you very nicely, because I
should like to know. Do you understand me … clearly understand me?”

The man’s face was white, sweating a little across the lips.

“Yeah! Yeah, I do. It were ter Jimmy Struther, in Coots Alley, be’ind the brickyard.”

Monk grinned at him. “Thank you. For the sake of your eyesight, that had better be the truth.”

“It is! It is!”

Monk had no doubt from the man’s expression that indeed it was. He let the man go, then turned on his heel and left.

St. Giles turned out to be only another stop along the way. According to the woman he questioned there, the girls had remained for several years. She was not certain how many, seven or eight at least. Many of the patrons were too drunk or too desperate to care what a serving girl looked like, and the work was simple and repetitive. Little was asked of them, but then little indeed was given. Such affection or companionship as they ever received was from each other. And apparently each was quick to defend the other, even at the cost of a beating. The elder had once had her nose and two ribs broken in a brawl to protect her younger sister from the temper of one of the yard men.

Monk listened to the stories, and a picture emerged of two girls growing up totally untutored and unhelped, learning what little they did by trial and error—sometimes acutely painful error—able to speak only poorly, words muffled by crooked lips, heard by partially deaf ears. They were sometimes mocked for their afflictions, feared for their appearance, as if the disfigurement might be contagious, like a pox.

One woman said that she had heard them laugh, and on two or three occasions seen them play games with one another. They had a pet dog for a while. She had no idea what had become of it.

“Where did they go from here?” Monk asked, fearing this would be the end of his pursuit. No one would know. They
were too weary, too sodden in drink to remember anything, or to care. The next bottle was all that mattered.

One woman shrugged and spat.

A second laughed at him.

The third swore, then mentioned the name of a whorehouse in the Devil’s Acre, the teeming slum almost under the shadow of St. Paul’s.

That was all he could get from them and he knew it. He had already lost their attention. He rose and left.

It took him two days of bribery, questioning, trickery and threats, and several abortive attempts, before he traced the girls to a brothel off a smith’s yard in the Devil’s Acre. It was a filthy place awash from overflowing drains and piles of refuse. Rats scuttled along the curbs above the gutters and people, almost undistinguishable from the heaps of rags, lay huddled in doorways.

Monk had been there before, but it still made him sick every time. He was hunched up with a cold that seemed to reach through his flesh to the bones. It knotted his stomach and made him shake till he clenched his teeth together to keep them from rattling. It was partly the wind turning and whistling through the alleys and cracks between the walls, partly the damp which rotted and seeped everywhere. Only when it froze did the incessant sound of dripping stop. And partly it was the smell. It gagged in the throat and churned the stomach.