Walking in Pimlico (8 page)

I am desperately tired.

I find the doorway to a shop and, supporting myself between the wall and the window, sink down and fall immediately into a strange sleep, in which dogs bark and voices come and go. Once or twice I try to rouse myself and see, indistinctly, legs and feet walk by me, and once someone lays a hand upon my shoulder and asks a question which I cannot answer.

Corney Sage – Springwell

I
t all started with the murder, and after the murder, it was like everyone and everything closed up. People you had known for an age cut you, looked at you different. Women in particular seemed to close up, and took to wrapping themselves in shawls and blankets, and hurrying here and there without looking you in the face. It was like they didn’t want to be out longer than they had to and got back inside their homes as quick as they could, though the houses too looked different, with the windows shut tight as a nun’s novelty, and doors that had stood open for air and company were similarwise shut on the world. Even the air smelled like it was old and had been shut up and breathed in and out over and over, and when it rained, which in general sparks up a London street, everything now turned to grey and mud.

Constable Tegg was on sentry-go at the back gate of the Constellation for the best part of a fortnight. From Hampstead to Hackney, everyone came wanting to say they’d seen the yard, and some looked for souvenirs. When the bricks started disappearing off the yard wall, and Gov found a fellow selling them – dabbed in red paint for the ‘splashes of her very own blood’ – he made a right stink and threatened him with the papers (Fleet Street rather than Bow
Street). He didn’t have to look far for ink-slingers and lawyer’s narks were in great abundance, the first sniffing for a story, and the rest for a writ, and Gov was inclined to both persuasions. His ugly phiz was regular occupying the front pages of every picture paper in the land.

Lucy up and left. Mind your eye, she said, and that was her gone, and her stuff (not that there was much of it) with her. Only the dent in the pillow on my bed where her head had been the previous night showed she had ever been there. Where she went I had no notion at first, and I did wonder for a while if he, the murderer, had got to her after all. But I felt in my bones she was still alive, and true to you, she was, and doing all right for herself. For sure as death, one Sunday I came upon a square ad in the
Era
, the Postbox of the Profession, bottom of the column, back page:

NOTICE
.

To Professor Moore [one of my professional names]. A note to Miss Bellwood, care of the
Era
, would be obliged and understood. Mind your eye, Corney.

I understood and obliged, letting her know that I was off to a nobby shop in the north, to Springwell, and that her packet was safe with me. I was fearful of it falling into the wrong hands – though whose they might be, I could not say – so it sat in my coat pocket, whether it was on or off my back. At first, I could feel it banging against my side while I was about my business, like it was reminding me it was there. Then I got so as I didn’t notice it. It was always there, and I felt for it when I put my coat on, and sometimes wound the bit of string around my finger, and turned it about (for there was something hard and round inside). But I never thought to take it out. After some months, though, the edges started to get ratty where the oilcloth was worn, and I knew the string was down to
threads, for I often caught my nail in them. When I reached in my pocket and found, not the accustomed shape, but one with flaps and edges and shapes quite different, I knew what had happened.

I was not inclined to open it. It had travelled with me around London as I looked for a shop, pressed against my side when I spent my only night in the House, and rode with me as I cadged a seat on an open cart heading northwards. I didn’t take it out, for although I’m not superstitious (unlike some actors who won’t say the name of this drama or that, and rub their noses with their thumb if someone does), it seemed to me that ignorance of what was under the oilcloth wrappings had seen me all right so far, and I wanted that state of things to continue. It might sound as though I am making light of the tragedy, and of course I am not. I was fond of Bessie and was much put out by what happened to her. But it is often my way to look sideways at life and ponder upon people and things that happen. Which is what I was doing in the Old Pitcher, Springwell, with my glass of Bunty’s Best before me and my pipe, and the fire to myself. It was a while since the business in Whitechapel, the Constellation was now renamed the Tidy Woman, Gov had left and gone into the entertainment line on his own account, and everything was different. It was very different, and no mistake.

But men aren’t always master of their fates, as Mr Figgis used to say to me, and certain he was very wise, for what happened was this. While I was waiting for Mr Flynn of the Old Pitcher to bring me a plate of bread and cheese, I went into the yard to wash away the dirt of the journey, and took off my coat and hung it on a hook by the door. It was my only coat, you should know, and though I had my bag with me, that was only to make me appear a respectable man, for it contained little more than a shirt and my notices. But I had clearly made an impression on Mr Flynn for he sent the girl with a stiff brush and cloth to dust off my coat, and when I turned round, with soap and water in my eyes, she was on her knees collecting the
bits and pieces that she had turned out of my pockets on to the ground, and apologizing very sweetly all the while. The screw of bacca was there in its paper, a needle and a bit of thread in their tin (what Mrs Figgis had give me all them years ago and still with me, after all I’ve been through), and a lucky hen’s tooth given to me by a genuine gypsy queen. Lucy’s packet spilled out with everything else, so the bit of oilskin wrapping and the string and the bits of paper were all tumbled together in the girl’s apron.

‘I’m ever so sorry, Mester,’ said she in her child’s voice, for she could be no more than twelve years, ‘they just fell out while I was brushing down your coat, like Mr Flynn told me. I think I’ve got ’em all,’ she said, looking down into her apron, which had been white and now was all the dirty colours you could imagine.

I said it was not a whisker of trouble to me, and if I had a penny I would give it to her, but I hadn’t.

‘Oh,’ says she, blushing, ‘I’m sure you have,’ and she looked hard into her apron again and then around her feet.

‘I am sure I saw – yes, I did. I must have missed it.’ She stooped down and picked up what did indeed appear to be a penny. And then she exclaimed, ‘Oh, sir, it’s not a penny, though it has a lady’s head on it.’

She offered me the penny, and I saw that it wasn’t a coin at all. I was about to say it wasn’t mine and that someone must have dropped it, when I realized what it was.

It was that hard object in Lucy’s packet.

The girl left, disappointed, I suppose, that I was speaking the truth, for I had not got a penny on me. And what I had in my hand was no penny but – well, I shall describe it. It was the size and shape of a penny, and appeared to be of the same dull metal. But on one side, where you might expect to find the face of our good Queen Victoria, there was a tiny portrait of a lady, set against a blue background. Here was an angel, surely, with tumbling curls about a face
which wore a sweet expression, and was painted so very much ‘to the life’ as it were, that I felt I should know her immediately if I saw her. Her blue eyes smiled, her lips (the faintest pink) were parted, and there was good humour and sweetness there. It was a regular lady’s face. And it was clear to me that the owner treasured this likeness, for it was covered with a piece of glass, cleverly held in place by tiny grips.

When I turned the coin over, the metal (gold probably) had been inscribed, though I had to peer hard at it to make out the words:

For my dearest Brother on his birthday.
John Shovelton
From his affectionate Sister Helen

It amazed me how so much writing could be inscribed upon so small an area, but more how someone might want to destroy what had been taken so much care over. For the writing had been scratched at with something sharp, and on purpose, as if a person wanted to score it out. It was ferociously done, and dug deep into the metal. I turned it around in my hand, and while the fire crackled and the clock ticked, and Mr Flynn’s good ale stood warm in the glass, it occurred to me that perhaps I had in my hand something material in whatever had caused Lucy to flee and hide. And perhaps something material to the other business also.

I had restored the other bits and pieces to my pocket what the girl had tipped out, so it was but the work of a moment to rediscover them, and there, now wrapped roughly around by the piece of oilcloth, were the papers that Lucy had entrusted to me. When I unwrapped them, I could see clearly where the coin had lain all these months, and its impression, which was quite dirty owing to the metal rubbing off on the paper. So I got them all out, all the bits that Lucy had put together and pushed across the table to me in Mr Tidyman’s back room, me drinking my coffee and reading the
Era.

There on Mr Flynn’s table was everything in Lucy’s packet. Two pieces of newspaper from the
Gazette
about the murder, and another with Gov’s physog a-staring out like some gargoyle.

And there was another. Folded up very small, and yellow, not having been written on good paper to begin with. When I opened it up, the letters swum around before my eyes like tadpoles in a pond, so small and black were they. But, when Mr Flynn brung in a lamp and I was able to cast a good light upon it – well, things looked different. Everything looked different from what it did before, and I was obliged to sit still awhile and consider what I had read.

It was strange to see it all laid out before me. Words that I had only thought of, or that me and Lucy had spoke, were set out here, in Lucy’s writing (like me, she is no scholar). But not just words, of course, but words that told about that night and the things that happened in it, which made me understand it all better because everything was now gathered up in one place, rather than in different people’s mouths. Gov had talked about Bessie’s murder (hadn’t he just!), and Sergeant Bliss and I had seen her poor broken body with its marks of being stamped upon, but Lucy was there and saw him do it, the devil, and so wrote it down like she was in the yard watching it again. She saw the gent what did it, how he’d been in the concert room all that night, how he was knocking Bessie around and how she cried out and he saw her. No wonder she was frightened out of her mind, for she saw the horror what I saw, but more than that. ‘I reach out and touch her hand and it’s cold now,’ her letter says. ‘I stroke her fingers and I feel something hard between them. I think to myself, poor Bessie, all this for a sixpence, and I take it out of her hand. I wasn’t stealing from her, but I know them as would.’ Yes, girl, I think, so do I, and that sixpence is better in your pocket than in some others. I read the words over again and bite my lip, for it is like having her at my shoulder, leaning upon it and reading it with me. ‘What a place to die,’ it says. ‘And I can’t help but cry for
Bessie and me and all those like us and how wrong it is that poor girls should be used in such a way while the gents who use us so walk free.’ I know she is right, and she has said it to me often enough. I have never read Mr Dickens’s tales (not being able to get the letters in just the right order), but I am sure they can never give a notion of how he was speaking to a person in their ear, not in the same way as Lucy’s words do.

I take myself and my glass to the window and look out upon the river and the trees, and peek up at the sky which is a nice shade of grey but going dark. There are a few ladies and gents out, taking the last of the air, hardy sorts, muffled, for the wind up here is a cutter. But it is a pleasant scene, and quiet. And think I am a lucky man in spite of all the knocks I have had. For here is Bessie, dead and cold in a yard, some mother’s daughter, who had thought that one day she might see trees and sky, not brick walls, and feel the sun on her face, not a fist. It is not a fair world, and that’s sure.

I drink off my Bunty’s Best in one, and start folding up the bits and pieces on the table. It is when I am trying to get Lucy’s letter back in its old shape that I notice something written on the bottom of the page, which I had missed. It is in different characters, but still Lucy’s writing: ‘Corney, if you read this do the right thing by Bessie and me. Here is the coin what I know is not a sixpence but something more.’ I pick it up, the coin what Bessie had held on to, and turn it over in my hands and gaze upon the beautiful face.

Which is not Her Majesty.

By no means.

And I turn it over again and fiddle with the back, for it seems to me that it is loose. Which it is. And the whole business drops apart – glass, picture, gold back, lock of hair, tiny folded-up piece of paper. Another one.