The Penny Heart (3 page)

Mother Eve’s Secrets

The black-capped judge gave Mary his verdict: she must return to Newgate and two days later, be taken ‘thence to a place of execution and there hanged by the neck until you are dead’. So this is it, girl, she told herself, she was going to go dance with the hempen collar about her throat. She put the boldest face she could upon it; not swooning or squeaking; to die hard was her creed. She had sworn to die game, the day she made her oath to follow The Life.

Her mobsman, Charlie Trebizond, came down to London and paid the garnish fee to the jailer to keep her in the best style, on the Master’s Side of Newgate. ‘Anything you want, I’ll pay, Mary,’ he’d said, his monkey face grave, his lean figure garbed in black velvet and ruffles. And so he should be flash-handed with his coin, she thought. Charlie was the king of the fake-screeve racket, the false letter dodge, the high-flying game. It was said that not even the Lord High Chancellor himself could tell one of Charlie’s fakes from the genuine article. A damned shame it had been Red the Forger who had faked that damned pound note, and not Charlie, she thought sourly.

Aunt Charlotte had raised her on tales of the Hangman’s Supper. ‘Before you goes off to the next life, you sups with him who snaps your neck,’ was how she put it, with her reptile’s smile. ‘It’s like a binding oath to forgive your murderer before he snuffs you out. It’s so you won’t be a phantom wandering this earth till the end of time.’ The pluckiest lags always gave the executioner a fancy meal the night before they swung. So Mary set out to do it the proper way; ordering in a rump of beef and a dozen of claret. There were tarts and cakes and trifles too; it looked like a queen’s feast arranged on fine pressed linen. Piggot, the hangman, was her guest of honour.

‘You’ll make it quick?’ Charlie asked the hangman.

Piggott halted a moment in guzzling the wine and tearing the beef with his gravestone teeth. His frog’s eyes assessed Mary’s throat. ‘No more’n two minutes, sir. I could snap a little neck like that in one hand.’ Then, wheezing bawdily, he added, ‘I tell you what, I’ll give ’er a pull on her pretty ankles, to bring ’er on the faster.’

‘That’s enough,’ Charlie snapped. ‘Just remember there’s another guinea when you bring her straight to me for a decent burial. Not a hair out of place, mind.’

Piggott nodded, settling his gaze lower than her throat this time.

She would have liked to smash a bottle of wine in Piggott’s leering face, but instead she poured him another glass. He was her journeyman to the next world, and she was relying on him for an easy passage.

She had heard that when you look death in the face, your entire past life springs before your eyes. So it did seem, that final night before she faced the gallows. Scenes played in her mind like a brightly-lit theatre. There sat Granny sleeping, a dark shape in the parlour chair. She’d groped to find her hand – and when the old woman’s fingers didn’t return her squeeze, she shook her arm. ‘Wake up,’ she urged, but Granny’s lips never moved again. Only a thread of dark blood slid down from her nose to her warty chin. When she touched her cheek, it was stone cold.

I’m all on me own now, she said to herself in the hush of the firelight. Alone seemed such a dreadful notion: an emptiness that swallowed the cottage, Granny, and everything she had ever known. She had few memories of her mother, who had kissed her one moment and knocked her flying the next. ‘Liza went wandering off with a fellow across Slaiden Bridge, and was swept away in the river,’ Granny had said. She had never missed her slummock of a mother.

Taking a rushlight, she’d gone to look in Granny’s chamber, where she’d always said she kept money set by. All was as neat as a pin: the picture of King George still pasted on the wall, the scrap of lace on the shelf, the mound of the bed covered in ancient patchwork.

Lifting the lid of the wooden trunk, she found all Granny’s treasures: a lock of her grandfather’s flame-red hair, a cracked china teacup, a few lines from a newspaper that told of Liza Jebb’s death in a river accident. She rooted deeper and there it was; a leather money bag. But when she turned it upside-down, it was empty. She felt along the bottom of the trunk, but there was only a paper lying flat against the wood. She snatched it up and held it before the dripping rushlight.

It was written in a clear round hand, and though she spelled the words mighty slowly, her hours poring over the spelling book with Granny proved their worth.

To whomever be attending to the sad affairs of Liza Jebb

Dear Sir,

I wish to make myself known to you after reading in the newspaper of the tragic passing of my dear cousin Liza. It is a most terrible shock to learn of that sad accident, most especially as many years have passed without word between us. I confess I am also at fault, being now a wealthy widow with a thriving trade here in Manchester Town. Sir, you must understand that I am Charlotte Spenlove, that was Charlotte Jebb before marriage. Though our connection has not been maintained of late, I believe I may now be the last remaining of dear Liza’s kin.

Sir, I should be most obliged if you would do me the kindness to write by reply of any funerary arrangements or any other business you believe I should attend to. I can assure you I am acquainted with an attorney who will vouchsafe my credentials and offer all assurances should you so wish.

Your servant,

Mrs Charlotte Spenlove (Widow)

At the Sign of The Pen & Angel

Fetter Lane

Manchester

How could Granny not have told her about her living kin – this cousin, or should that be aunt – Charlotte?

In the morning Granny’s face had been as red as a plum. Whatever happened, the rent was due and there was no money left in the cottage. Taking the letter and what food she could find, she let herself out of the door and set off stealthily for the road, in search of a wagon headed Manchester-way.

Arriving at the Pen and Angel, footsore and hungry, she had needed to gather all the courage of her twelve short years to insist on speaking to Mrs Charlotte Spenlove. Behind the false shop, she’d been led through a ramble of rooms, down stone stairs to the greasy kitchen. Aunt Charlotte had not proved the flighty ginger piece she had expected her mother’s cousin to be. Instead, a vast wheezing shape had waddled towards her. To her horror, the toad-faced woman asked, ‘So who might you be?’ Then, snatching up the letter, she began to guffaw; a horrible sound like a broken bellows. She knew at once that she had made a very great fool of herself, but she did not understand how. Then the woman brandished the letter and cackled, ‘This don’t signify nowt, sweetheart. I in’t no more your kin than you’re Uncle Tom’s horse.

‘Come and sit by the fire, pet. Want a Little Devil?
Devilinos
, the Italians call ’em.’ She pushed a dish of exquisite little brown globes, studded with comfits, towards her. Mary was as hungry as a hawk; when she put one in her mouth it was sweet yet bitter, melting but nutty; by far the most marvellous thing she had eaten in her life. She stared at the dish longingly.

‘Good, eh? Have another one. God sends meat but the Devil sends chocolate. I make ’em the Italian fashion.’ They both took another and chewed in silence. Then Auntie fixed her black ferrety eyes on Mary and said, ‘So you have come, after all.’

‘What?’

‘I saw it in the cards last night. A carroty-haired girl trudging along the road. Look. The past.’ She flipped over a card that showed a moon and road, plainly inked on card. ‘This is you. Run away, ain’t you, lovey?’

Mary nodded, all agape.

‘Choose three cards. The past. The future. The answer.’

Reverently, Mary turned the three top cards and slid them towards the woman.

‘Here goes. The past.’ The first was a walking skeleton with a leering grin.

‘Death,’ Auntie wheezed and looked hard into Mary’s face. ‘Looked Death square in the face, ’aven’t you?’

Flabbergasted, Mary nodded. ‘Me granny.’

‘We must all give the crows a pudding, one day. What’s this now?’ The next card was a grand building with towers, and dozens of lighted windows. ‘The future looks grand, dearie. The house of money. A lucky one, in’t you?’

‘Me?’ Mary’s palms itched with want.

‘Now for the answer.’

The last card showed a fancy lock and key. ‘What’s that mean?’ she asked.

‘Most momentous,’ Aunt Charlotte rested her many chins on her sausage fingers and mused. ‘The key. To open all doors,’ she said slowly, her rasping voice rich with knowing. Did Mary understand? She wasn’t sure. It was good, Auntie said, but it wasn’t yet clear.

Maybe it was Mary coming into a House of Money one day, but Auntie told her she could stay. In return for a pallet in the corner and plenty of kitchen leavings, Mary ground loaves of sugar, chopped and peeled food and scrubbed pots. And when she was finally allowed to go up the carpeted stairs into the Palace, she found the most remarkable place she had ever seen.

Fence End, where she’d lived with Granny, had been a dour, grey-and-mud sort of a place, but the Palace was as tawdry as a fairground and as wild as a circus. The girls at Ma Brimstone’s wore pink paint and a rainbow of frilled petticoats, which they lifted up in saucy postures at the tall glass windows. As for the running of the establishment, Ma had not forgotten her days on the stage at Drury Lane. She ran it like a roaring great play, with a half-hour bell telling her cast to get in place before the lamps were lit down Jerusalem Passage. The stage was set with red and green lanterns, gauzy curtains, wafted perfumes, sofas, and a fountain that trickled with real – if very cheap – wine. Aunt Charlotte was everyone’s Auntie, and provided the food: the ladies’ sugared ratafias, plates of toasted cheese at four in the morning, and beef and eggs for the gentlemen’s hearty breakfasts. But her pastrycook’s heart was in the buffets that glittered under the coloured lamps: the sugarwork Pleasure Gardens, and Rocky Islands decorated with jellies, rock candies, and pyramids of sweetmeats. And best of all were the chocolate Little Devils, morsels of magic that all the gentlemen loved.

Ma Brimstone herself was a cadaverous old bawd with lead-white skin and a passion for chinking gold. ‘She were once famous for her marble complexion,’ Aunt Charlotte whispered, ‘but it were all out of a bottle, a bottle of lead.’ All her girls had to be extraordinary, in some advertisable way. So Miss Nancy was her French widow, very cold and pretend-genteel, and said to have mysterious arts never before seen in the north. Black Bess was mighty strong, as black as tar, and advertised as most welcoming at the front door, but requiring double payment for the rear. Miss Edwina was a Sapphist, for the ladies, if they didn’t care for athletically-built Captain Locket. Or there was strapping Miss Dora, who wore a man’s boots and had a case of whips and birches, or child-size Miss Lucy, who was rumoured to have sold her maidenhead twenty-five times over, under different names.

It was Aunt Charlotte who explained to her about The Life. There were two tribes in the world; those who knew The Life, studied the game, and profited accordingly; and there were the gulls and dupes who were their natural victims. Aunt Charlotte boasted that she was a born member of the Ancient Order of Rogues. Her ma had been a fator, selling fortunes at fairs, and her da a swell cracksman, head of a crew of locksmiths and sneaks. ‘Baubles and trinkets was ’is game,’ she recalled with a fond look to her moony face. ‘’E ’ad an eye for the glim trade.’ Mary was always on at her aunt to talk the odd backward lingo of rogues, until at last she’d round on her with a swipe to the head.

‘Bing avast, chitty-faced tib!’ she’d cry. ‘There be caz and pannam to be snic.’

Mary begged to know the secret meaning, and shook with laughter when she heard it was only: ‘Be gone, baby face. There’s bread and cheese to slice.’

‘Can’t you teach me, Auntie?’ she’d wheedled, until at last, when she was fourteen, Aunt Charlotte gave in. ‘It’s not some jest, Mary, it’s the most solemnest vow you can make. If you want to learn the lingo you ’as to join the Ancient Order.’

She gave it not a second thought, not even of Granny, who’d been duped by Auntie’s racket. Every week the cook chased news of any likely funeral with letters purporting to be from respectable kin. Granny, it seemed, had been gulled into sending all her small savings to pay for empty promises. Nor did she give a tinker’s curse for the slaveys who worked to give coin to the thieving class. One famous night they had got Mary deep cut on the gin they called Strip-Me-Naked. Giddy as a top, she had been held up by two of Ma Brimstone’s girls and had a full pint of spirit emptied over her head.