Girl of Shadows (40 page)

‘A bit of a drop then the military hospital and the fort. If you go hard right along the fence you’ll get to Windmill Street. It’ll take you up to —’

‘Princes Street, I know. Thanks, love,’ Friday said. ‘You want to get yourself someone decent to work for.’

‘Can’t. I’m assigned.’

‘Tell them he’s raped you.’

‘He bloody has.’ Ivy’s face was scarlet again.

Christ almighty. Friday scrambled onto the high fence. ‘Go to the Siren’s Arms on Harrington Street. Ask for Elizabeth Hislop. She might be able to help. I’ll tell her to expect you.’

Ivy gave a little wave, then Friday was over the other side, tumbling down a long greasy slope until her progress was halted by a soggy clump of bushes. She stood up, wiped herself off, and headed towards Windmill Street, wondering what Mrs H was going to say about the state of her wig.

Saturday, 28 May 1831

Sarah and Friday were walking north along Cumberland Street, their skirts held high to avoid the muck; it had been raining heavily for several days and the deluge hadn’t improved the condition of the streets any. But the sun had shone for several hours this afternoon, and now that evening was approaching the air felt a little drier and the autumn wind a tad less fractious.

Sarah half turned and called, ‘Come on, keep up!’

‘It’s not me, it’s her,’ Walter replied, gesturing at Clifford, who was stopping every ten feet to lift her leg.

‘God, how can such a small dog be so full of piss?’ Friday said.

Walter caught up. ‘I don’t think she’s weeing, I think she’s marking her territory.’

‘Well, she must own all of Argyle and half of Cumberland Street by now,’ Sarah grumbled. Then she said, ‘Harrie wanted to come today, but I said she couldn’t.’

‘While you break into Bella’s? She’d fret herself to death.’

‘She’s worried about Walter.’

‘Oh, you’ll be all right,’ Friday said to him. ‘You’re a tough little bugger, aren’t you?’

Walter shrugged, his ears turning red.

‘I told her that,’ Sarah said.

Friday pointed. ‘We’d better stop here. That’s Bella’s house over there.’

‘Yes, I do know where she lives.’ Suddenly Sarah almost tore off Friday’s sleeve, dragging her behind a hedge. ‘Keep your head down, Furniss is opening the gates.’

Crouching behind someone’s manicured shrubbery, they watched as Amos Furniss dragged wide first one and then the other of the carriage gates at the side of the Shand residence. Nothing happened for a minute or two, then a vehicle appeared, presumably from the stables behind the house — not Bella’s smart curricle, but a roomier landau lacquered a deep forest green with a coat of arms on the door — and parked in the carriageway.

A minute later Bella and Clarence, both attired extremely elegantly, appeared on the verandah at the rear of the house (actually the front), and climbed aboard. Or at least Friday assumed it was Clarence Shand; she’d never encountered him until now. Shorter than Bella, and older by a good twenty years or more, he had a bit of a belly above thin, bandy legs. His face she couldn’t see
clearly from their vantage point in the bushes. He held himself well, though, and managed to exude an air of authority bordering on arrogance as he handed Bella into the landau.

Furniss shut the gates again after the carriage had departed, then vanished from view himself. A moment later the two dogs appeared, racing wildly up and down the carriageway, clearly delighted at being let out of wherever they’d been confined.

‘Shit,’ Sarah said.

‘Can they smell us?’ Friday asked nervously.

‘Maybe,’ Walter said. ‘I could smell that filthy bastard Furniss,’ he added, the cords in his neck stretched tight and his fists clenched.

Friday eyed him with alarm, startled by the anger rolling off him. She knew Walter disliked Furniss — Harrie had told her — but she’d never said why.

Clifford’s bristly hackles were up and her short little legs splayed as she eye-balled the dogs still bounding around across the street. A dreadful, low growl emanated from her throat. Walter lay a hand on her head, and the growling subsided to a barely audible rumble.

‘You’ll never get past Furniss
and
the dogs,’ Friday said.

Sarah’s hand tapped up and down on her knee. ‘Just wait a while.’

They did.

Half an hour later, as the late afternoon light began to decay, tinting the rain-rinsed sky a vivid pink and orange, Furniss appeared once more, let himself out through the hand gate, and strode off down Cumberland Street.

From the bushes, his face pinched with loathing, Walter watched Furniss walk past.

‘Now?’ he asked when Furniss was out of sight.

‘Not yet.’ Sarah raised her eyebrows at Friday. ‘I’ll give it fifteen minutes. What about you?’

‘Ten, I’d say.’

Betraying his nerves, Walter snapped, ‘
Now
what?’

‘Servants,’ Friday said.

They were both wrong. Barely five minutes passed before two more figures appeared, sidling along the carriageway, backs to the wall of the house, doing their best to keep their distance from the dogs.

‘Bugger me, look who it is,’ Friday said. ‘I didn’t know they were working for Bella. She must have got Clarence to have them assigned.’ But hadn’t Sally Minto said something about the pair of them coming into her bakery? Friday hadn’t realised she’d meant they’d come in
with
Bella.

Louisa Coutts and Becky Hoddle were evidently as frightened of Furniss’s animals as were Friday and Sarah. Clearly dying to sprint the last few yards to the hand gate, they restricted themselves to a brisk walk, the dogs stalking them closely, then let themselves out. Once through and with the gate safely closed again, Becky gave the dogs the finger with both hands before she and Louisa hurried off.

‘Still at her beck and call, washing her filthy smalls and doing her dirty work. Haven’t they gone up in the world,’ Sarah remarked.

‘Better than Liz Parker,’ Friday said, referring to Louisa and Becky’s previous boss.

‘Barely.’

‘Do you think there’s anyone else in there?’

‘If there is, it’ll only be some poor little house girl,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ll be all right. Walter? Are you ready?’ She slipped out of her jacket and skirt to reveal her burglary outfit of trousers and sleeveless shirt, and settled her satchel over her shoulder.

He nodded. ‘Someone’ll have to hold Clifford. She can’t come with me.’

‘Christ,’ Friday grumbled, ‘that’ll be me, obviously. Give her here.’

As Walter picked up Clifford, her legs paddled furiously and she wriggled and squirmed, but he managed to thrust her into Friday’s arms.

‘There we are,’ Friday said. ‘What a good little girl you are! Now, you be good and stay with Auntie Friday.’

Clifford snapped at Friday’s face with sharp white teeth, missing her nose by less than an inch.

‘Fucking hell!’ Friday exclaimed, holding Clifford out at arm’s length. ‘You’d better hurry up, Sarah, before I’m torn to shreds.’

‘Better be quick, anyway,’ Walter said. ‘I dunno how long I can do this for. I’ve never tried it before.’

Sarah unlaced her boots and toed them off. ‘Come on then, let’s get started.’

‘You got a pocket?’ Walter asked Friday.

‘What for?’

He produced a bulging paper twist. ‘Aniseed balls. She loves them. If she plays up, feed them to her one by one.’

‘
If?
’ Friday tucked a struggling Clifford under her arm. ‘God almighty.’ As Sarah and Walter moved off into the deepening shadows, she called after them, ‘Good luck!’

‘What sort of dogs are they?’ Sarah asked.

The animals stood in Bella’s carriageway, ears pricked, watching their every move as they crossed the street. One let out a barrage of barks.

‘Dunno, really. Mastiffs? They’re beautiful.’

‘They are not. I still say we should poison them.’

Walter shook his head vehemently. ‘No! It’s not their fault. That bastard’s
ruined
them. Just give me five minutes.’

‘Quick as you can, then.’

And in case Walter’s amazing dog-wrangling turn didn’t work, she’d brought along two small pieces of raw mutton treated with cyanide, tightly wrapped in oilcloth in her satchel. That would
certainly
do the trick, though, of course, then Bella would know her property had been broken into when she came home to find two dead dogs in her yard.

Walter stepped off the roadway, walked up to the wrought-iron fence and peered through; the dogs immediately raced over to him, barking and slavering. Staring calmly at them, he didn’t flinch, his hands wrapped casually around the bars within easy reach of the beasts’ teeth.

They stopped barking. One sat down, followed by the other. They both tilted their huge heads to one side, whining slightly.

Seconds ticked past. Sarah couldn’t see, but she was sure Walter was doing his ‘nothing’ face. One of the dogs took a moment to nip at something near its nether regions.

The whining stopped.

Walter opened the gate and went inside, hands extended, palms down, fingers curled out of harm’s way. The dogs ambled over and had a good sniff.

‘You can come in now,’ he said over his shoulder.

Her heart pounding thunderously, Sarah crept in and closed the gate, and waited until Walter moved off down the carriageway, the dogs flanking him, rubbing against his legs like a pair of overgrown house cats. Christ, she hoped he knew what he was doing. She followed, and when he’d settled himself on the verandah, the dogs sitting expectantly before him, she set to work unlocking the nearest door.

It took her less than a minute. Once inside she stood very still, listening, but heard nothing, no sign that anyone remained in the house. She started with the large desk near the far wall — Bella’s, judging by the elegantly feminine desk accessories — picking the locks on each drawer and, lighting the lamp on the desk, going through the papers contained within, but finding nothing that made any mention of a business relationship with Jared Gellar. In fact, she could see nothing that could be used against Bella in any way at all; everything seemed to relate to perfectly legal commercial transactions concerning Clarence’s import company. Which made sense, as Bella was a convict and forbidden from setting up her own
business. Sod it. Perhaps she kept her dodgy paperwork somewhere else. Upstairs, or even at different premises entirely?

She put everything back exactly as she’d found it, relocked the drawers, picked up the lamp, glanced out at Walter to make sure he was still in one piece, and began a tour of the house. Clarence’s desk was in a small library, but also held no documents of use, though letters from his bank indicated his businesses and investments were doing extremely well. She found no other repositories of papers downstairs, and no safe, so in silence she climbed the stairs, hesitating once again on the topmost landing to listen for the presence of anyone else. The upper floor was unlit and as the building was constructed from sandstone there was nothing to hear, not even the creaks and groans of a house settling for the evening.

She went through each room. Clarence’s bedroom was what you’d expect of a man, albeit expensively and very stylishly furnished, though his wall safe contained bundles of crude and explicit letters signed by several different males. She wondered if Bella knew. Or cared. Bella’s chamber was also extremely tasteful, which was a surprise. Her clothes press overflowed with lovely gowns and gorgeous accessories. She had an entire chest filled with exquisitely soft linen and sateen corsets and demi-corsets, beautifully embroidered lawn shifts and petticoats, and the finest linen drawers; the latter a garment, everyone knew, worn only by wealthy women or those with serious pretensions. Sarah really had to suppress her desire to squat and piss all over the lot.

Bella’s safe contained some good jewellery, a silver-framed miniature portrait of a fat middle-aged woman, and some letters on yellowing paper that began,
To My Dearest Son
, on which the signature had been deliberately obscured with blobs of ink. Letters to a brother of Bella’s from their mother? Even Bella must have had a mother. From Bella to her son? Surely not, but if he existed, God have mercy on the poor boy. Sarah was very tempted to read the letters,
but the thought of Walter holding off the dogs downstairs stopped her. Again, however, there was nothing in the safe she could use.

A bubble of panic rose in her chest, and she forced herself to swallow it.

She crossed to the dressing table, littered with beauty tools and preparations; two extravagant wigs on stands, pomades, creams and salves, skin-bleaching solutions, tweezers, brushes, a mortar with pestle, perfumes, powders, rouge and kohl and tinted balms, plus a range of lotions. Opening a bottle of the latter, she sniffed and winced, recognising beneath the sweet scent of roses the bite of chalk and almonds that indicated quicklime and arsenic, which she knew was used to remove body hair. A bit strong, though, this particular concoction. She’d prefer to have hairy armpits — which, in fact, Adam said he found rather alluring — than scorch herself ragged with this. She smiled slightly as it occurred to her what might have happened to Bella that day on the
Isla
when she’d burnt her face. Wrong bottle of lotion?

But, dismayingly, there was nothing here for her. Reluctantly she trotted back downstairs, extinguished the lamp and returned it to Bella’s desk.

Out on the verandah, Walter was still sitting with the dogs.

‘Have you finished?’ he asked, his voice wavering. He didn’t turn away from the animals. ‘I’m getting bloody tired.’

‘I’m done. Let’s go.’

Walter rose and followed Sarah to the gate, the dogs closely flanking him as before. As he and Sarah stepped through, Walter turned and gave the dogs a last hard stare and they lay down with their big heads on their paws, as exhausted as he looked.

‘That’s not easy to do, you know,’ he said, wiping his brow as they crossed the street to Friday’s hiding place in the shrubbery. Sarah hoped Clifford hadn’t torn her to pieces.

‘I’m absolutely sure it isn’t. I’m very impressed. And grateful.’ She smiled and gave his hand a squeeze.