Emily's Penny Dreadful (5 page)

The lady didn’t answer. She asked Miley a
question

instead.

“
Where did you come
from?”

 
Then Miley made a
BIG mistake.

 
She told the
truth.

Chapter 7

“
I don’t remember exactly,”
she said.

 
The light went out.
Rattcch! The lady lit match number five and came up even closer.
Now Miley saw the lady (even though she wasn’t a proper lady
because of the swearing) for the first time. She was thin and grey
and wiry, like a strip of tough bacon.

  “
You don’t
remember?”

  “
I know the
address,” said Miley. “It’s number 37 Long Street.”

  “
But you don’t know
the way back to Long Street, do

you?”

 
Miley did not
answer. The lady smiled a small, grim smile. “No, of course you
don’t,” she said. “Not by

yourself. You lost your way in the dark and
stormy night, didn’t you?”

  “
What on earth is
happening down there?” called

the man from the top of the second
staircase. “Hurry up!”

 
Miley thought he
sounded rather brutish as well as ruffianly.

 
The lady ignored
him. Good!

  “
I left my parapluie
behind,” said Miley. “And my Hippo Bank. And my coat and
shawl.”

  “
Tut, tut. So many
things to be without. Such a pity,” said the lady. She held the
latest match up to Miley. It was a long, straight, skinny match.
Its light was bright and hot. And stinky.

  “
It hurts my eyes,”
said Miley. “And it gets up my nose.”

  “
You’d better come
along with me then,” said the lady. “This cellar is no place for a
little girl as refined as you to sleep in. The truckle bed belongs
to our night watchman. He sleeps there during the day.”

 
The lady with the
match took Miley’s hand (actually she grabbed it rather than simply
taking it, but Miley

didn’t want to believe that
anyone would take her hand in such a rough fashion) and bustled her
back down the Inward Goods Only stairs.

 
On the way to the
opposite set of stairs the fifth match

burnt out and the lady lit a sixth one,
saying ‘damnation’ again under her breath. Miley managed to cover
one ear so all she heard was ‘da’ which nonetheless upset her
greatly as it reminded her immediately of her Papa whom she and her
sister often called ‘da’ because ‘da’ rhymed with ‘Papa’.

  “
Such a waste,” the
lady said. “You’ve caused me no end of trouble tonight. That’s six
matches I’ve spent on you young lady.”

  “
My name’s Miley,”
said Miley. “And I’m nine.”

  “
There’s no need to
repeat yourself,” said the lady.

 
They reached the top
step and entered a room where the man had lighted an oil lamp. The
lady did not have to waste more matches, although she might not
have been too happy about having to waste her oil supply
instead.

  “
Here is our
intruder,” she said.

 
If the lady looked
like a piece of bacon the man

looked, in Miley’s opinion, like an
undercooked pork pie. And she didn’t like pork pies. He was pale,
short,

roundish and somewhat greasy. Without doubt,
a ruffian and a brute to boot, Miley decided.

  “
Can you take me
home now?” Miley asked.

“
Please,” she added, polite
as girls and ladies ought

always to be.

 
The lady and the man
looked at one another. “In the morning,” the lady said. “First you
will have to pay for the matches I’ve had to use up, as well as for
your bed and breakfast. Altogether that will cost you at least one
penny.”

  “
But that’s
dreadful!” exclaimed Miley. “You know I don’t have any money with
me. I left it behind, just like my parapluie and all.”

 
Miley was rather
ashamed at how her voice quivered and quavered. She really should
have done her best to disguise her fear but, in the circumstances,
that was not easy.

  “
What was that ‘p’
word?” said the man.

“
Parapluie,” said Miley.
“Some people call it an umbrella,” she explained.

  “
I haven’t come
across that word in any of my

newspapers,” said the man.
“Interesting.”

 
He took a small
notebook from the table.

  “
How do you spell
it?” he asked.

  “
I T,” said
Miley.

  “
No, no, no! I mean
the umbrella word!”

  “
Oh, sorry,” said
Miley. “It’s P A R A P L U I E. I’m a good speller, you know. The
best in my class. Now

that I’ve spelt parapluie for you, may I go
home?”

Chapter 8

Miley did not know why the
man suddenly burst into a raucous, villainous laughter. There was
nothing funny about her situation whatsoever. She suddenly disliked
Pork Pie even more than Bacon, despite his unexpected fondness for
proper grammar and interesting new words.

  “
Take no notice of
him,” said Bacon, trying to sound pleasant but managing only just.
“You can spend the rest of the night in the spare bedroom and
tomorrow we will take you home. After you’ve done one or two little
jobs for my husband and I, that is.”

“
You should say: ‘my
husband and me’,” said the

man. “It’s important to get it
right.”

  “
What a load of old
tosh!” snapped the lady. “Who cares about that sort of
thing?”

  “
Writers do,” Miley
was about to say but she was suddenly feeling far too tired to
argue. She simply

hadn’t had enough sleep. Bacon led her to
the spare bedroom and allowed her to crawl into the bed, still

wearing her day clothes.

  “
I’ll wake you early
in the morning,” she said. “When the factory begins its
work.”

  “
But I’m not a
factory worker,” said Miley. “And you haven’t told me what sort of
factory this is.”

 
But Bacon had shut
the door, leaving Miley all alone in the strange room. Miley heard
her turn a key in the lock.

 
She was shut
in!

  “
Oh, what must I
do?” was her last thought before she fell into a nightmarish
slumber.

Chapter 9

Miley was having a nightmare. She was
trapped in a factory called The Devil’s Element. There was a
devil

with a red tail chasing her, trying to set
her favourite dress alight with a match.  

“
When I wake up everything
will be fine,” Miley told

herself, in the middle of
the nightmare. “Nightmares don’t really bother me if they aren’t
real real.”

 
But when Miley woke
the following morning, the nightmare was most definitely real real.
There wasn’t

a devil with a red tail and Miley wasn’t
wearing her favourite dress but she was still in a strange bed (her
second strange bed that night) in a locked room in a strange place
with two wicked (not to mention rough) people she had nicknamed
Bacon and Pork Pie. This was the sort of nightmare Miley didn’t
like one little bit!

 
She got up and
banged on the door. Bacon opened it and passed her a bowl of claggy
gruel with a dirty-looking spoon stuck straight up in the middle of
it, like a lighthouse that had stopped working.

  “
You’ve had the bed
and this is the breakfast,” she said. “Eat up. You have a busy day
ahead of you.”

  “
But I want to go
home NOW,” said Miley. “You MUST take me.”

  “
So I will, so I
will, but first of all you have to pay us back the money you owe.
As we agreed.”

  “
Did we agree?” said
Miley. She couldn’t remember.

  “
Follow me,” said
Bacon.  

Clutching the bowl of gruel Miley followed
Bacon. She didn’t feel the slightest bit hungry, not even the

tiniest bit, but she dipped
a finger in the gruel anyway and sucked it. It tasted as horrible
as it looked – the

gruel, that is, not her finger, although by
now her finger looked nearly as dirty as the spoon.

 
Down the stairs they
went, into a kitchen where Pork Pie was sitting reading a
newspaper, hunting out the tastiest words for his notebook while
eating his breakfast, which looked far, far tastier than Miley’s,
and then through some doors into a big space with a wide table and
two long benches.

  “
This is our little
cottage-industry factory,” said Bacon. “This is where you will work
today.”

  “
All day!” Miley
protested. “But it can’t take as long as that to pay back one
penny!”

  “
Children take
longer than grown-ups to earn money,” said Bacon. “They don’t need
it as much as

grown-ups do.”

Bacon hustled Miley to one
of the benches by the big table where some other children were
already at work. All of them looked tired and one or two were
nearly asleep.

  “
Wake
up!”

 
Bacon’s sudden shout
startled Miley. It startled the

sleepy children as well. They shot to
attention. Miley could see how frightened they were of Bacon.

  “
Sit there,” Bacon
told Miley.

 
Miley sat down at
the end of one of the benches, beside a boy about her own
age.

  “
Young Ned, show her
what to do.”

 
Young Ned nodded.
Bacon turned and left him to it.

  “
You can call me Ned
instead of Young Ned,” said Ned. “It’s quicker to say. This is what
you have to do. Put these matches in those boxes.”

  “
So this is a match
factory!” exclaimed Miley. “I’ve heard about those. My Papa told me
all about their horrors.”

  “
Well, it’s
certainly not a fancy fish restaurant,” said Ned.

“
The work seems easy
enough,” said Miley, relieved she didn’t have to dip the matches
into white phosphorus. The matches already had coloured tips and
the colour was red. Papa had once described to

Miley the terrible things that happened to
people who

got close to white phosphorus. “Damnable
stuff,” he

had said, before Miley could cover her ears,
although she wasn’t sure if ‘damnable’ was as much of a swear

word as ‘damnation.’ Possibly it wasn’t.

  “
That’s the thing,”
said Ned. “It’s not easy at all.

Every box has to have exactly the same
number of matches as all the others.”

  “
I can count, you
know,” said Miley.  

“
So can I,” said Ned. “But
after you’ve done a few hundred boxes you won’t know if you’re
counting in your sleep or in your wake.”

  “‘
In your wake’
makes no sense,” said Miley. “It’s not proper English.”

  “
Neither does
counting matches make much sense, not after a while,” said
Ned.

  “
A few hundred
boxes,” said Miley. “Wow.”

  “
A few hundred each
day,” said Ned. “After a week . . .”   

 
He didn’t need to
finish his sentence. Miley was horrified. She went from ‘wow’ to
‘ow.’

  “
Ned, we must run
away,” she said. “All of us.”  

Ned just looked at her and
got back to his counting. Miley tried to work out if that look
meant Ned thought she was clever or if he thought she was
mad.

 
Maybe he thought she
was both.

Chapter 10

“
There’s no way we can
escape from here,” said Ned.

  “
There has to be,”
Miley replied, her chin in the air.   Ned waved his arm at the
factory walls. “Do you think I haven’t tried finding a way out? Can
you see a hidden doorway anywhere? And while you’re looking for
something that doesn’t exist, you’d better start counting your
matches, before she catches you

daydreaming.”

 
Miley picked up a
bundle of matches and started counting. She had to admit that Ned
seemed right.

There didn’t appear to be any way out of the
factory, other than the way she had come in, which meant going
through the kitchen where Pork Pie was eating his breakfast,
reading his newspaper and adding to his list of luscious words.
 

Miley could picture that
breakfast in her mind’s eye. Runny eggs, crispy sausages, oozy
tomatoes, small tasty beans, singed toast, steaming tea . . . had
she really seen all that or only imagined it? Whatever the truth of
the matter, her tummy rumbled and her mouth

watered.

 
Looking for an
escape route and drooling over an imaginary breakfast, all the
while trying to count matches, was not a good combination of
activities. Miley had to start over several times before she could
keep track of the number.

  “
Where do you come
from?” she asked Ned, once she had filled her first box.

  “
From up the hill,”
he said.