Paying Guests (23 page)

Silas swore loudly and held on to the reins as Tilly let go of her bonnet, and grabbed for the sides of the phaeton and held on grimly. Her bonnet ribbons unravelled and flew free and with them so did the bonnet, dancing away across the grass like a thing with a mind of its own.

Somehow Silas pulled the horse up and it stood still at last, quivering between the shafts and Silas leapt down and ran to its head to soothe it, muttering in its ear to ensure it did not take off again. Not until he was certain it had settled did he return to Tilly’s side.

‘My dear – are you all right? I had to soothe the brute first for it might have taken to its heels again and taken you heaven knows where. My dear, I am mortified – I promised to keep you safe and now –’

‘It’s all right, Silas,’ she managed and took a deep breath and smoothed her thoroughly disordered hair with slightly shaking hands. ‘It was not your fault and there is no harm done – I have but lost a bonnet.’

‘Wretched creatures!’ someone shrilled and Tilly lifted her head and looked over Silas’s shoulder to see a man wearing a top hat held firmly in place with a hat protector tied to his frock-coat, and a warm muffler wrapped round his neck.

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ Tilly said and the man, now visibly elderly from the greyness of his somewhat scanty whiskers, snorted.

‘Beggar children, Ma’am, beggar children! See them? They run everywhere like the vermin they are, and cause such havoc. Some fool in the carriage that turned in through the gates just before yours tossed a coin at them, and this ragamuffin ran to obtain it. Could have killed you, Ma’am. I trust you are recovered.’

‘I am very well – what children, Silas?’ she said, for at the old man’s words Silas had turned to look, and she too turned now and saw a little knot of figures in the middle of the path a few yards away, at the point where their horse had swerved. ‘What has happened?’

‘Stay there,’ Silas said sharply and moved towards the group, but she was not to be prevented and at once scrabbled at the fastening of the door and managed to swing it open and jump down, though it was difficult, for she had not let down the little steps, so her gown flew about her ankles – indeed almost to her knees – and made the elderly man step back in a state of strong disapproval.

‘Well, bless my soul, Ma’am, I trust that you – Madam!’ But she had gone, running after Silas.

She caught up with him just as he reached the group and she peered round him to see what was going on. A boy who looked to her maternal eye to be about thirteen, though a very scrawny and ill-grown thirteen, was sitting rubbing a bloody knee with a very dirty hand and biting his lip ferociously, clearly determined not to cry. This determination was not shared by those around him, however. Several of them were bawling loudly and sniffing and gulping in a very unappetizing way. There were perhaps four or five of them, one of them a girl who seemed a little older than the others. She was crouching awkwardly beside the boy, muttering at him and trying to see what his injury was, and every so often roared at the other children to be silent. But they ignored her completely, and snivelled on.

‘Now then,’ Silas said with authority. ‘What’s going on here?’

The injured boy looked up with a sudden gleam in his eye. ‘Your ‘orse, Mister, that’s what, your ‘orse knocked me down and me just walkin’ quiet in the park, like. You done this.’

The other children stopped bawling as though someone had held up a whip in threat and looked at Silas and also at Tilly behind him, and for a moment Tilly felt as though five pairs of eyes were slicing into her, so intense were the stares.

‘You ran in front of my phaeton,’ Silas said firmly. ‘This gentleman here –’ He looked over his shoulder for the old man, but he had stomped away in high disapproval; in his book, clearly, people who actually spoke to these children were quite beyond the pale. ‘Well, you were seen. The horse swerved and nearly took the bit between its teeth and bolted because you ran under its hooves. What have you to say to that, hey? What have you to say?’

‘I say as you ought to pay us for what you done to ‘im, that’s what!’ The girl spoke now, still crouching beside the injured one, and glaring up through a tangle of very dirty hair. Her face was pale and thin, and dirtier than her hair; it might have been a pretty face, Tilly found herself thinking, if it had been washed and fed. ‘It ain’t right as ladies and gennelmen should run down the likes of us and not ‘ave to pay for it.’

‘But you ran under my wheels!’ Silas began again, but Tilly gave him no chance to go on. She pushed past him and crouched beside the boy.

‘Let me see,’ she said and the firmness in her voice and perhaps the quietness of it made the boy stop rubbing his leg and Tilly reached forwards and with her own handkerchief, which looked absurdly white against the dirty flesh, mopped and peered.

‘It is happily a very minor injury,’ she said to Silas at last. ‘No more than a large graze. Duff had many such when he played in the garden as a boy. This will form a scab and then heal well enough – can you stand?’ And she put out a hand and the boy, a little bemused, it seemed, at his own obedience, took it and let her pull him to his feet.

‘There, you see?’ Silas said. ‘No harm done, glory be. It might have been quite dreadful – you could have killed yourselves and overturned us and –’

‘Well, we didn’t.’ The girl, moving awkwardly, got to her feet and stood there scowling at him. She seemed oddly out of shape, Tilly thought; her face and hands, which were visible round the edges of the large and ragged shawl that was pulled about her body, were very thin, but her body looked bulky. Tilly frowned at her, thinking hard.

‘Come on, you.’ The girl jerked her head at the boy, now standing with the other children behind her. ‘All of you. We’ll go some place else where we won’t get so ‘ard done by.’

She turned but Tilly said softly, ‘Just a moment.’ The girl turned back, suspicious, but with a glint of hope in her eyes as Tilly put out her hand, and put her own forward, clearly expecting money; but Tilly moved faster and tugged at the shawl the girl was still clutching in place with her other hand, and set it aside. And found herself looking down onto the face of a sleeping infant.

It was almost as dirty as the other children and certainly as thin. It lay there in the curve of the girl’s arm, its eyes not quite closed, so that a rim of white could be seen beneath the almost translucent eyelids, and breathing, as Tilly could see clearly, with rapid shallow breaths. That it was a sick baby was very obvious.

The girl snatched her hand back, covered the baby’s face and turned to go, marshalling the other children, but Tilly held on to her and pulled her back.

‘My dear girl,’ she said gently, ‘that baby is ill.’

The girl looked at her contemptuously. ‘D’you think as we don’t know that? It’s been sickly since it was born. I been lookin’ after it since its ma died and trying to raise it myself, but it won’t do.’ She looked down at the bundle in her arms and then lifted her chin to stare pugnaciously at Tilly. ‘Well, that’s the way of it, I dare say. It’ll be one I won’t ‘ave to fret over.’

‘Oh, my dear,’ Tilly said, as distress lifted in her. ‘How can you speak so? Is the baby your – a relation?’

‘’Alf brother,’ the girl muttered. ‘Not that that’s none o’ your business.’

‘A sick baby is everyone’s business,’ Silas put in. ‘Now, it is clear you need help.’ He became businesslike suddenly. ‘I can arrange for care of you and this infant – you say your mother died?’

‘Not my ma,’ the girl said, still truculent but staring up at him with what might have been a spark of hope in her expression.

‘’
Is
ma –’ She jerked her head at the older boy. ‘She took up with our pa and then she ’ad this baby and died and then my pa got took to prison for stealin’ food for us – so –’ She said no more, just shrugging her shoulders and looking back at Silas.

‘How old are you, my dear?’ Tilly said.

‘Fourteen,’ the girl said and then, clearly losing hope of any sort of financial aid, turned away. ‘Come on, you lot.’

‘Wait,’ Silas said and reached into his pocket. ‘Do you know where St George’s Hospital is? Just down there, by the Marble Arch – at the end of the park –’ He pointed. ‘Take this card with you.’ He had taken a card from his pocket book and was scribbling on it with a pencil. ‘Ask for Mr Cumming and say I sent you. Tell him I will settle any costs necessary for the care of this infant and for your brother’s injury and tell him also that he is to seek through the almoner for better care of you all. Again I will be responsible for reasonable costs. Children should not have to run under horses’ hooves to get their living.’

‘There ain’t no other way,’ the girl said, and hesitated, looking at the card.

For a moment Tilly thought she would not take it, and then one of the other children, who looked to be a very undersized ten or so, began to whimper and she looked back at him and her shoulders seemed to sag even more.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll take ‘em there. Can’t do no ‘arm, I don’t s’pose. Worst as’ll ‘appen is we’ll never come out and I don’t care one way or the other, sometimes, and that’s a fact.’

She took the card and slid it into her shawl somewhere and as she gathered the others under her eye, Tilly also reached into her reticule.

‘Here, my dear,’ she said hurriedly and quietly. ‘A little something to help you on your way. Don’t let anyone steal it from you –’ and she gave her a half sovereign. The girl looked at it glinting in her filthy palm, and then up at Tilly. Her eyes were glazed with surprise.

‘My dear Tilly, anyone seeing that will think she stole it!’ Silas said. ‘She will never be able to change it. And it would get her into great trouble. Let us at least make it smaller in denomination. She has a better chance of keeping it for herself then.’ He shook out change in his pocket and picked through it. ‘Give the half sovereign back to the lady, and take this instead. It will give you less trouble.’ And he gave her a handful of coins.

‘’Ere,’ the girl said, in some wonderment, ’you lot, you’re all right, ain’t yer? All right.’ And this time she did manage to go, shooing her brood in front of her and they went off across the grass in the direction of St George’s Hospital as fast as was possible, the biggest boy limping a little, and the girl hunched over her bundle.

They watched them go and then gently Silas touched Tilly’s elbow and led her back to the phaeton. The horse had wandered to the side of the roadway and was cropping the grass contentedly enough and Silas checked the steps for safety, handed her in and then climbed up himself and pulled the horse’s head round.

They rode on in silence for a while at a respectable walking pace and Tilly stared out at the passing scenery and the people walking
and riding along Rotten Row, seeing little but the memory of those starving, dirty children. And then she turned to Silas and said impulsively, ‘I am so glad I was with you when we met those children. Silas – I fear that most people would have been like that old man and shown only concern for our skins and not for those poor children, But you –’

He glanced at her and his expression was unsmiling. ‘It makes me so angry to see it, I can barely speak,’ he said. ‘I spend my time busy about philosophical and scientific matters when what a real man should do is concern himself with these – did you ever
see
such misery, Tilly? How can civilized persons allow such things to occur?’

‘Well, you will not, clearly,’ she said and put one hand on his arm. ‘You did something practical, sending them to St George’s – and we will of course be able to find out from Mr Cumming what befalls them and if necessary make other help available to them – it was very good of you.’

‘Not good at all,’ he said bracingly. ‘I would hope anyone would do as much –’

‘That old man didn’t,’ Tilly said. ‘He didn’t even go to see what had happened to the boy. Nor did any of the other people who were about. I saw them. They just walked past and some looked disgusted that we were speaking to such children at all.’

‘Well, they are perhaps inured,’ Silas said. ‘There are, after all, so many beggars about. We see them all the time. But children – they do reach into one’s feelings in a most painful manner.’

‘They do indeed,’ Tilly said and then took a deep breath as the phaeton turned into Rotten Row proper and began to bowl along gently beside the railings where there were more people, many of them dressed in the first stare of fashion, strolling to watch the passers-by and the horseback riders. ‘Well, we have done our best so far and tonight I will speak with Mr Cumming. We will see what more can be done for that sad little party.’

‘And I will give some thought to what more I might do to deal with the problem of poverty in our world,’ Silas said and seemed to liven up visibly. ‘I think a meeting of the society might usefully discuss it as a phenomenon of our times – yes, I think that would
serve very well. I shall arrange it as soon as I can. You will of course wish to come to such a meeting, Tilly? I’m sure you will.’

Tilly looked at him and opened her mouth to say she would probably prefer to deal more directly with the children they had sent to St George’s and then closed it again. He was right, of course. It was necessary to waken others to such matters and certainly those like the old man with the hat protector. So she contented herself with saying only, ‘Of course, if I am able. Silas,’ and turned to look at the people riding by.

‘Well, that is settled then,’ Silas said with a full return of his usual good humour. ‘Now, we must settle ourselves to enjoying the rest of our drive, for I would not dare to be late for Eliza’s cooked luncheon!’

Eliza, thought Tilly. Oh, Eliza, what am I to do for you? There is much more to think out still, but I think I have a better view of what to do than I had when we set out. When we return, I shall tell her.

‘Why, there are Duff and Sophie!’ Silas said, and lifted his whip to indicate. ‘There, do you see? Coming this way. We must make sure they see us.’

She lifted her chin to look and indeed there they were, riding so closely side by side that their stirrups almost touched and their horses tossed their heads close together, as though they were set between the shafts of the same carriage. Both riders were leaning towards each other too, although it was Duff who was almost sliding out of his saddle in his eagerness. Sophie was sitting more erect on her side saddle, the skirt of her riding habit well thrown back to display her ankles in their well-fitting riding boots, but her head was inclined towards Duff in a most confiding sort of manner.