Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders (7 page)

Thinking like a man wasn’t a problem; walking like one was.

When we got out into the stinking alley outside Lucca’s lodgings at The Wharf, he made me strut up and down a bit until I stopped what he called my ‘cat’s tail promenade’. Truly, I never thought about what I did with my derrière when I was out and about until now, but according to Lucca it seemed to have a life of its own.

‘Don’t sway. You need to take bigger steps, Kitty. And keep your head up – shoulders back, remember. Now, again.’

After a bit I got the hang of it. The boots helped – shiny black leather they was, flat with laces and straps at the ankle. Being on the small side I was used to a heel and at first it felt like my feet were slapping down on the slimy cobbles like a plaice on a fishmonger’s slab. But they stopped me walking dainty.

When Lucca was happy with my gentleman’s walk, we went to the end of the alley and turned onto Narrow Street.

‘This will be a test,’ Lucca hissed as a couple of dockers came tramping towards us. ‘Keep to the middle. Meet their eyes once and then look away as if they don’t register. Walk straight past and don’t, whatever you do, look back.’

I froze for a moment; now I was out on the open street I didn’t feel so confident. Lucca knelt down and pretended to tie the laces on his boots. ‘You must move,’ he whispered. ‘A man is not a statue.’

Come on, girl, I thought, you’re a performer.

I took a deep breath, squared up and did exactly as Lucca said. When the dockers were just past, I heard one of them say something to his mate, who laughed and said loudly, so as we could hear, ‘If they’re gentlemen customers for Mrs Dainty’s clap house, then they’ve lost their fucking way.’

There was more laughter and then a small stone knocked the back of my hat so I had to adjust it. But we just carried on walking. After a moment Lucca said quietly, ‘Good, Fannella. You fooled them. Now you just have to convince the rest of London that you are a man.’

When we got up to Commercial Road I held back for a moment. The street was crowded with men and women jostling for space and the air was thick with dust thrown up from all the carts and carriages. I sneezed, couldn’t help myself, and it must have come out girlish, because a begging woman bundled up against the cold in layers of rags looked at me very strange.

Then she rustled up from her patch and started to follow us, muttering and mumbling and picking at the strings that held her bits of stuff to her filthy body. Lucca quickened his step and I kept up, but the woman was surprisingly fast. I could smell her rankness right behind me and I yelped when I felt her tugging at my coat sleeve.

‘Spare a penny,
lady
.’ Her voice was low, but it was full of malice and the promise of something more.

Lucca span about and loosed a torrent of violent Italian. It was clear she couldn’t understand a word, and neither could I, but she backed away – little eyes glittering from the grubby depths of the shawl wrapped round her head.

‘Foreign bastards,’ she said, and spat a gobbet of thick greenish stuff onto the stones and grinned. ‘Unnatural with it.’ The old bunter’s voice was loud now and people were looking at us.

Lucca dug into his pocket and threw down a coin. It landed in the little slick of spittle and the woman scrabbled for it.

‘Quickly!’ he hissed, dragging me away.

The woman didn’t follow, but I heard her call out, ‘I know what you are.’

‘Here.’ Lucca unwound the scarf from his neck and handed it to me. ‘Wear this. It will hide more of your face.’

‘But what about you?’ I asked. ‘What about your . . .’

He sighed and pulled his hat lower. ‘Don’t you think I’m used to people’s stares by now?’

We walked on in silence for a bit, pushing through the crowd. No one else seemed to notice anything. When we got to a quiet stretch I pulled Lucca’s sleeve.

‘It’s odd, isn’t it – the only one who’s found me out so far is a beggar woman?’

He shrugged. ‘She has the most to gain. A woman like that lives on what she can find, and she found you.’

I nodded. ‘And she was female too. Takes one to know one?’

Lucca laughed. ‘You have a point. It’s why I know you’ll pass at the gallery. The men there will be too interested in themselves to truly see anything else.’

‘Except your filthy painting?’ I grinned, but Lucca just looked pained. I was amazed at the next thing he did. He stepped into the gutter and flagged down a hack.

He spoke to the driver and then he opened the door and climbed inside, motioning for me to join him. Normally he would have let me go first – Lucca’s a proper gentleman as a rule – but what with me being dressed up I supposed it was the correct way of things.

I’d never been in a cab before. ‘Are you made of money?’ I whispered as I settled into the leather seat.

Lucca just smiled. ‘You, of all people, should know, Kitty, that appearances are everything. If we arrive at the gallery as gentlemen, we will be treated as gentlemen. There’s just one thing – let me do all the talking,
capisci
?’

The cab bounced about a bit and then jerked forward. Then the driver’s voice came down from the box. ‘Half Moon Street is it, sir?’

Lucca didn’t answer. He rapped the door sharp just once and we were off.

As I looked out at the street I wondered, for a split second, how he knew to do that.

The gallery was crowded. There must have been upward of a hundred men in there – all pressing forward for a good hard stare.

Just as Lucca said, as soon as we rolled up in the carriage we were treated as proper gents. A little bald man with an umbrella came tripping down the steps to open the carriage door and then he sheltered us from the thin snow up to the broad entrance where another man whose coat was covered in big gold buttons greeted us with great servility.

Lucca produced a fancy printed card and we were directed up the wide marble stairs.

‘First door on the left at the top, sirs, and on behalf of The Artisans Gallery, may I wish you a most . . . enjoyable viewing.’

The stairs were lined with portraits of men who looked like they were trying to digest something fatty. I nudged Lucca and whispered that a particularly red-faced nob leaning against a column and staring out over a field looked like he was trying to hold onto a fart. He ignored me, but just as we were about to enter the room where
The Cinnabar Girls
was on display he muttered ‘No talking, Fannella, remember.’

The gallery was long and narrow. It was tall, though, and rows and rows of gold-framed paintings covered every inch of red-flocked wall space. Some of the pictures were so high up that you couldn’t make them out at all. I was about to remark to Lucca that if I was an artistic type I wouldn’t be too happy if my painting was so far away that no one could see it, but there were too many men pushing and shoving around us and I thought better of it. Best to keep your mouth shut, Kitty. And anyway, there wasn’t much talking going on in there. It was gloomy as a funeral and twice as serious. In fact it was all so reverent – and it being little more than an old man’s prick starter – that I had to have a very stern chat to myself about laughing out loud.

The room had a very distinctive smell. At first I got the whiff of cigars – expensive ones. Just occasionally at The Comet if a real toff had been in a box for the evening you got the memory of his smokes. Sweeter than the usual ones they were, more healthy like, with a sort of warm, comforting richness you couldn’t take against. Then there was the smell of soap and cologne. Over at Limehouse you were lucky to see a tin bath and a bar of Wright’s Coal Tar once a month – less in the winter, truth be told – but these gentlemen were all very fragrant.

Money smelt clean, I thought.

And then, under that, there was another smell too. One I recognised from the workshop at the theatre – the sharp smell of fresh paint and something else as well.

You could feel the anticipation in the room; the air around us almost crackled with feverish expectation. Whether or not it was the paint I can’t say, but it was heady like Lady Ginger’s receiving room in there, only a hundred times more potent.

At The Gaudy a year or so back there was a visiting act, Dr Klaus, an Austrian I think he was. He had this painted box on the stage connected up to a length of rope. He passed the rope out into the hall and invited people to hold onto it, then he went back to that box and wound a handle on the side until it started to fizzle and spark. Next thing, everyone hanging onto the rope was yelling and hopping, but they couldn’t let go, see, they just found themselves caught there with their hair crackling and their fingers tingling. And everyone in the hall could feel something coming off them, even if they weren’t holding the rope. Dr Klaus called it being brushed by the wings of angels, but I didn’t think that would leave a burn.

The atmosphere in the gallery put me in mind of Dr Klaus and his painted box again.

The picture we were all here to see was at the far end of the room. The crowd kept surging forward and Lucca and I were carried with it. I couldn’t see much over the hats of the gents ahead, but I could see the top of a heavy gold frame stretching across the whole of the back wall. About fifteen foot up it was, and perhaps twenty foot long.

As we got closer I began to see splashes of colour and I made out shapes through the gaps between the heads – an arm here, a leg there, a pair of naked buttocks – no wonder they didn’t want women in here with them. From what I could see, and admittedly that wasn’t much so far,
The Cinnabar Girls
was highly incidental.

As we got closer to the painting the crowd was funnelled into a zig-zag pathway marked out with red velvet ropes. Another warder with white gloves and even more gold buttons than the man in the hall downstairs herded us in.

A note attached to the entrance of this final approach informed us that this was to ‘
enable our patrons to appreciate
The Cinnabar Girls
in the most favourable circumstances and to protect the work itself, the composition of which is so freshly completed that in certain sections the paint is yet to dry
’
.

We moved even slower now. It seemed likely that around twenty or so ‘patrons’ at a time got a front-row view and after a couple of minutes of artistic ‘appreciation’ they was moved on and out through a door to the left.

After ten more minutes shuffling behind the ropes, it was our turn. Lucca and I filed forward to take up our ‘favourable’ positions and then I looked up.

The word ‘evil’ is a powerful one, isn’t it? It’s much stronger than ‘wicked’, which, to my mind, has a sort of larky charm and might come with a wink and a slap on the wrist. No, ‘evil’ suggests something dark, something wrong, something rotten, something sinful.

The Cinnabar Girls
was evil. No other word would do.

It was the work of a devil, and as I looked at it, the clever insulting comments and laughter I’d been planning to share with Lucca died inside me.

The first thing to say is that the painting was huge. It stretched the whole length of the wall and was held within a thick carved frame. Even the gilded fruits and vines that coiled about the scene seemed to have a horrible, over-ripe liveliness to them.

The carved branches dipped and curled so that occasionally they drooped from the frame into the scene, partially blocking the distant stormy landscape that rolled beyond the arches of the ancient red stone marketplace where the Cinnabar Girls – all six of them – were displayed.

The sky was alive. A shimmering, sickly silver-yellow, it seemed to have deepness to it like a pool of water. You almost felt you could put your hand through it – although you probably wouldn’t want to for fear of the lightning about to strike out.

Now, this was the clever thing – if you can use that word about something so twisted – along the front of the picture the artist had painted the backs of what I took to be the market ‘buyers’ – a row of men all dressed up in Roman gear like the pictures in Lucca’s books. They were craning for a better view, the muscles in their backs and necks shown tight and sharp. They were straining to see those girls – and we were too.

I flinched as I looked up at them and I felt a trickle of sweat running down my back. And it wasn’t because it was hot in there – that gallery was cold as a nun’s tit, as Nanny Peck would have said.

No, it was because every poor half-naked girl was trussed up in some impossible, peculiar position. Limbs were tied back or staked out where they couldn’t possibly rest in a natural way.

It was an odd thing, but those contorted bodies were displayed, you might say arranged, to show the maximum amount of flesh and the minimum amount of person. It’s difficult to describe exactly what I mean, but those girls were meat – like you might see hanging up at Smithfield of a morning.

It was as if the artist wanted to . . . I don’t know if this sounds right, but it was like he wanted to
reduce
them to mounds of flesh, shaped in a way he chose.

The word ‘hate’ kept repeating over and over in my mind. The man who painted these women hated them.

But I tell you another thing, that painting had a horrible power. You wanted to look away and then you wanted to look back again and every time you did you saw something else that twisted the knife.

Take the girl in the middle. She lay on her side with her head turned away from you and her red hair sweeping the stones. Her legs were lashed up behind her and a wooden stake ran between them up to her hands, which were forced back behind her head and knotted to the top of the wood. She looked like a plucked chicken ready for the pot.

On her arms the artist had delicately painted in the marks of old scars, dried and crusted, where her pale skin had been tied before.

Another girl, upright, was chained to a column. I say ‘chained’ but she was actually wrapped tight around it, her blue-veined breasts crushed against the stone like she’d been flung at it. Her matted blonde hair hung low from her lolling head. Her eyes, although wide open, were dark blanks and her parted lips were red and wet. There was a fleshy lump slick with crimson blood on the stones by her feet.