Walking in Pimlico (32 page)

At this she started to weep and was unable to continue for some moments. And all the while, in the bright sunshine, were the sounds of children’s merry voices, and the laughter of their mothers.

‘Her poor hands – her voice – I am certain she understands, for her eyes speak though her sweet voice . . .’

It was again too much, and we both wept, until Lucy got too
restless and Mrs Strong said we should take her indoors. I was ready to help, but she would have none of it and with her two arms picked her up easily, like she was just a baby, and carried her to a chair by the fireside. I was much struck by this, for though wasted, Lucy was no babe-in-arms, but mothers do things for their children, so I’m told, that pass all understanding and this was one of them. When we were settled inside sharing the cup that cheers, she told me how Lucy had suffered an apoplexy so great, the doctor said, that few could survive it, let alone recover a bit. I was stunned for, as I said to Mrs Strong, she’s hardly out of smocks and bonnets, and apoplexy was surely the complaint of the old and infirm. What had brought it on?

‘The doctor couldn’t say, though I wonder if it was her medicine. She always had a mighty appetite for her drops, and would have twenty-odd a day and more, no matter what I said. But since this happened, she won’t take any.’

Lucy lurched about like an excited child, and Mrs Strong took her hand and stroked it gently, all the time looking into her face, but talking to me.

‘You remember, Corney. Once upon a time she couldn’t do without it,’ she said, ‘but now she can’t abide it. If she even sees the bottle, she makes her noises and throws her hands about. When she was first took bad, we thought it was just her way of being eager for it, and we give it her on a spoon or through a babby-tit, and I can’t help think it made her worse. But I don’t know,’ she said, smoothing Lucy’s hair, and then frowning, ‘now she’s a bit better, she turns her head away, like she doesn’t want it.’

Lucy groaned and gurgled, and I think now she was agreeing with her mother.

‘And will she recover more?’ I asked, though I knew what she would say, and sure enough Mrs Strong shook her head, and the tears welled up so that she could hardly utter a word.

‘The doctor says the apoplexy has taken away her voice and her legs and she can’t hardly hold a cup, let alone drink from it.’

I looked at Lucy, sitting in the chair by the dead fire, and thought on the time when her head had made that hollow in my pillow, and how the smell of her clung to my bedclothes. I thought of the letter she wrote about Bessie and the murder and how many times I had read it and heard her voice, which I would never hear again. I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out from the corner, where it lodged in the lining, the picture of the beautiful young woman that Lucy took from Bessie’s hand as she lay in the yard of the Constellation. I held it out for Mrs Strong to see, and to discover how much Lucy had told her about that terrible business.

‘It’s strange,’ I said, ‘how these things just carry on. For I had believed that when the Shovelton fellow was arrested, poor Bessie Spooner would be laid to rest. But no. Everywhere I go I am reminded of the Constellation and what happened to her.’

I do believe that Lucy Fitch understood every word I said for she mewed and groaned and her poor hands twitched and even her little slippered feet kicked a bit. Mrs Strong was obliged to take one of her twisted hands again and stroke it, and wipe her mouth, and altogether calm her. When she came to the table, she picked up the portrait and gazed at it keenly.

‘True to you, Corney, she’s a pretty creature. But what had she to do with Bessie Spooner? Or did Bessie lift it from someone? Not wanting to speak ill of the dead, but she was a light-fingered girl.’

Had Lucy talked of her? Of this locket? Of what she saw? Oh yes, Mrs Strong knew all about that business.

‘Lucy took it from Bessie’s hand as she lay in the yard, thinking it was a sixpence,’ I said, speaking no more than the truth. ‘What sends me dizzy is how such a beauty can have a brother what would trample a poor girl to death. Why, looking upon a face like this you would think that she kept company with angels, not murderers.’

‘But he wasn’t convicted, wasn’t Mr Shovelton,’ Mrs Strong said with surprise in her voice, and Lucy seemed to agree, gurgling and rolling her eyes and kicking her feet. ‘Didn’t you know? He was set free. No case to bring against him. No evidence to convict him.’

‘But I was at the trial . . .’

‘And didn’t hang about either, or you would have seen
us
. She told me everything, didn’t you Luce, and you didn’t want to go, but I made her. We owed it to Bessie, I said. So we went back, and we went to the trial. Sat there in the court with judges and wigs all pointing their fingers and trying to twist her words about.’ She paused and frowned hard at me. ‘The gent in the dock, who you saw and they accused, it wasn’t
him
, was it, Lucy? Mr Shovelton wasn’t the brute who murdered your pal.’

So I
had
been right to wonder if that gent was the same one I saw, for darkness and fatigue and the clothes he had on (which all gents wore), was trying. But I’d been pushed hard, and nodded my head when I ought to have shook it. And I said so to Lucy who, anyone could tell, understood me, for she was so agitated it took Mrs Strong all her strength to keep her from falling from the chair and had to strap her in with a belt, which brought tears to my eyes again.

‘He’s been good to us has Mr Shovelton,’ said Mrs Strong. ‘How do you think we live so comfortable? For you know he was fond of Lucy, and when she was took bad I wrote to him, care of the address in the papers, and he came here straight away.’ She stroked Lucy’s hand gently. ‘He wanted to take Lucy off and have her properly looked after, so he said, but I wouldn’t have it. Looked after by strangers when she has her mother! So he says, I’ll send you some money, to keep her decent and get her good food, and true to you he did, and we bought a few nice things, didn’t we, Luce? But it’s not regular, so I’m looking out for us. And Kitty.’

I hardly heard the last of what she said. So Shovelton was not the brute who did for Bessie? And all the time I thought it was, because
of his clothes and the way he looked, but also the picture and the writing on the back and the name that kept turning up like a bad penny. I turned that picture over and over and fiddled with it while Mrs Strong put the kettle on the fire. One of the clips had broken off and another was loose, through being so long in my pocket, I suppose, and the back was sliding out. Inside was the tiny note which I had seen before and quite forgotten. I unfolded it and spread it on the table and when I looked up, Lucy had her eyes fixed on me, and she had stopped mouthing.

‘What is it, Lucy?’ I say, for I feel she is trying to tell me something.

But whatever it is she cannot get it out, though she tries, looking hard at me and then hard at the picture.

Mrs Strong takes her hand and pats it.

‘We talked about it, didn’t we, Luce, because Lucy knows who did it. She said to the judge when we went to court, “Mr Shovelton didn’t do it. It was that
young
man, the one who had a fight. The one who took young Bessie outside. It was him.” But they didn’t listen to her. “Young,” she told them over and over, “a boy almost.”’

Yes, I knew that Lucy had seen him. She told me, and she wrote it down.

And for the first time I knew him too.

In my mind’s eye, I could see him clear as water. Smooth-faced, small features, elegant. Well turned-out. A young swell trying hard.

Familiar, I thought, though I couldn’t say why.

‘Did they arrest him?’

‘Not him. He was long gone. Doing over some other poor girl I should think.’

I collected up the note, but my stubby fingers found it hard to press it into the back of the picture, so Mrs Strong lent a hand. It was she who took the note to the window.

‘Remarkable what people will say to each other. This doesn’t look like a note from a brother, does it? More like a girl’s writing.’

I had never noticed. In fact, apart from the occasion when I first found it, when the girl Topsy turned it out with the rest of my stuff at the Old Pitcher, I had never looked at it. For you don’t. Things get carried around and become part of you, and you never once think to look close. But now I did.

I read it again, then Mrs Strong. And we said nothing to each other for a while, while we considered it. Lucy’s cries brought us up and the poor girl wagged her head about and drummed her little feet until Mrs Strong said, ‘She wants to hear it too, don’t you, Luce?’ and she read it out to her.

My dearest Helen

Time passes so slowly when we are not together. I long for your gentle touch and your sweet, sweet kisses. My dearest, sweetest Helen! My own fair mistress! Shall I come and find you one night like we said? Shall I scale the ivy as I promised and leap, like Don Juan, into your room and into your bed? Oh, how I shall love you! I shall put on my breeches and shirt and pull off these silly pieces and let you see me as I am with my boy’s hair, just as I’ve told you in my stories.

Dear Helen! Sweetest girl! My love!
         
Your Phyll

We talked about it long and long, for we are wanderers in the world and hear of such things as women’s affections for each other and how powerful they are. I am of the live-and-let-live persuasion, and Mrs Strong of much the same mind, and Lucy too had her opinions which she voiced in her own way.

‘What is more rum, Mrs S,’ says I, getting ready to shift myself, ‘is how the young gent got hold of it. And what a co-in-ci-dence, as
Joe would say, that Mr Shovelton’s name is written upon it. I do recall his sister, for I saw her clear as clear from the stage of the Pavilion at Springwell. She was there with her brother who I didn’t see, and . . . ’

Now there’s another rum thing to make the trinity, as they say, for it seems to me I see the row of faces and the square battlements of the military gents, and the angel face of Miss Shovelton (not difficult to place from the excellent likeness) a-peeping around those battlements. Yes, and another face, which I cannot remember to the letter. Perhaps it was turned away. Perhaps this was the Phyll who wrote the letter, I said to Mrs S. Who knows, says she, taking up the locket and putting it carefully in Lucy’s hand to pacify her, it is past all understanding and that’s a fact. I shivered, though the day was warm and there was sunshine coming through the window. It was time to go, and I took Lucy’s poor hands in mine and kissed them, and there were tears in her beautiful eyes which fell upon her cheek, and her poor mouth was red and trembling.

‘I’ll come again before I leave the circus,’ I said, knowing that I probably wouldn’t, and because I knew it, I said, ‘And, look, if you need a bit of cheering up or want me at all, here is where I’m going. A nobby little shop, I think, and no trouble.’

I wrote ‘The Vine Concert Hall, New Clay’ on a scrap of paper. Then added my name, just in case it got lost. And our little joke, ‘Mind your eye’, which would make Lucy laugh when she read it. I stuck it up on the mantelshelf, alongside Her Majesty’s left ear where Lucy could see it.

‘I’m sorry I can’t help your Mrs Marsh,’ said Mrs Strong, opening the door. ‘She was a good soul, and we enjoyed her company in our last shop, didn’t we, Luce?’

Lucy rolled her head from side to side and worked her mouth about and drummed her feet until Mrs Strong had to go and calm her down with stroking and gentle words. I closed the door as
quietly as I might and struck off across the court, but hadn’t got so far when Mrs Strong’s voice stopped me. She was holding the locket in her hand.

‘Keep it,’ I cried. ‘It’s not brought me a shred of good fortune.’

‘I will do that,’ she returned, ‘for Lucy seems taken with it. I’ll put it on a chain for her to wear around her neck. She still has a fancy for pretty things. Trinkets and such like.’

I collected Joe from his sun spot. His novelty had quickly worn off, and he was sitting, quite Tom-all-alone, with his back to the wall and his black face turned to the sky. As we walked back to the circus, I thought how fine it would be to have no worries, no ailing women and monstrous babies to fret about, no friends done down and sad. But just to sit, peaceful and quiet, and warm my bones in the sun.

Miss Marweather – Birmingham – Halls’s Lodging House, Paradise-court

W
hen Mr Corney Sage related the details of his visit to Lucy Fitch (a story much embellished with sentiment) I was disappointed to discover that I had misjudged the strength of her medicine. I had anticipated that she would have been insensible, then quite dead very soon after taking it, but what I learned was quite the reverse. However, although it was not an entirely satisfactory outcome, I did take some pleasure in the horrible piquancy of her ‘living death’. And those coins left on the table by Mrs Strong for her daughter’s ‘medicine’ – forty pieces of silver! What exquisite irony in that gesture – the mother unwittingly paying for the child’s destruction! Particularly as, only moments later, I made those very arrangements via the excellent if dim-witted Prithy Taverner.