Page 12 of An Artful Dodge
“But it wasn’t raining so hard earlier,” I said. “Why were you late?”
“We had the chimney sweeps, so I couldn’t polish the candlesticks and service from the dining room till after they left. I stayed late so’s I wouldn’t have to do it on Monday, when we’ll all be busy for Miss Clara’s engagement party the next night.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I like it there, Kit. Mrs. Rice said I’m ‘wonderfully meticulous.’ Everyone’s been kind, and I don’t want to disappoint them.”
Her eyes were entreating, and the last of my tension ebbed. This sounded like my sister; she tried to please, and she was making friends. “Of course not.” I touched her arm. “I’m proud of you for doing so well. And that’s kind of the housekeeper to notice. From what I’ve heard, most only shout when you’ve done something wrong.”
Gratefully, she threw her arms around me.
When she pulled back, her face had resumed its usual brightness. “That’s another thing I like. No one shouts. Not even Mrs. Rice, no matter how displeased she is. She just sighs, like this”—she heaved dramatically—“and looks sorry.” I laughed, like she wanted me to. “But if itisterrible weather, I don’t want you to fret if I don’t—”
“It’s all right,” I interrupted. “From now on, if it’s terrible weather, don’t come, and I’ll know why.”
She gave a smile full of sweetness. “And if something frightens me at the Willitses’ house, I’ll tell you. I promise.”
Relieved that the truth was so harmless, I pulled her close, shutting my eyes, laying my cheek against her hair, still damp from the rain and smelling of cleaning lye and coal dust. It was all I could do sometimes not to clutch Sarah tight, until she squealed, like she did as a child. But I let her go and followed her to the room we had once shared.
When we entered, I gave Mary a look so she wouldn’t mention Josie, and we talked of other things for an hour. Finally, with Sarah yawning so widely her jaw popped, she and I curled up together in my bed.
Sarah was asleep within minutes, her breath slowing, a small wheeze through her nose. I turned onto my side to face the wall, my eyes open, thinking of Josie’s boldness and bawdy sense of humor, and my mind leapt to Mina Simmons, who had been hanged last year.
Mina had been a pretty girl, with rich coils of straw-colored hair and large brown eyes, and if she had a fault, it was that she longed for people to look at her. Men, mostly. She dimpled at clerks and sashayed out of stores, her skirts swaying over her hips. She wanted to be a proper anonymous thief, but she wanted to be admired, too. The two roles fit badly together, for when she was finally caught, clerks from four different shops remembered her.
The memory of the night the constables came for Mina made my muscles tense, rustling the feathers and horsehair inside the cotton ticking. Truncheons pounding on the door of her lodging house, visible from our window. Mina dragged away, screaming, the silhouette of her writhing between the two constables as they vanished around the corner. It was the last we saw of her, for hangings now happened behind closed doors.
But I could well imagine Mina’s hanging because I’d witnessed one. I’d been seven, and I remembered it as pictures, perhaps because I had no words to describe it properly. It was one of my last memories of my father, likely another reason the memory was sharp.
Everyone had left their homes and shops empty to watch. (Years later, I realized a public hanging was a fine opportunity for thieves.) There had been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in the square in front of the prison, and my father had boosted me onto his shoulders and bought me a tuppence’s worth of roasted chestnuts. I clutched the small smoky sack without eating them, wanting to keep them because gifts were rare, and Da had given them to me. Perhaps even then I sensed he was preparing to leave us. Later that day, I hid the chestnuts under my bed, where they eventually rotted, and Ma shouted at me for my stupidity. I didn’t bother trying to explain.
The condemned was a woman who had murdered her husband and child.
Until that day, it hadn’t occurred to me a woman could do such a thing. But shortly afterward, when Da vanished, I feared Ma had murdered him and Sarah and I might be next. Ma’s rages since he’d left made this less unlikely than one would imagine.
The murderess wore a gingham dress with a filthy apron, and her hands were tied behind her back. As she mounted the steps, people shouted words I didn’t know and pelted her with rotten apples and potatoes. A priest approached, made signs, and spoke, his words drowned by the crowd. At last, the hangman slipped the black hood over her head, followed by a pale rope knotted in a loop. The trapdoor snapped open, and as she fell through, a triumphant cry went up, the weight of her bounced, and the rope jerked straight. Her feet flailed for a moment, and then the body went limp as a handkerchief with black boots sticking out of the bottom. I must have snatched my father’s hair, for he let out a yelp of pain and grabbed my hand. I loosened it immediately, and bent over his ear to shout: “When will they let her down, Da?” Surely a few seconds of punishment was enough, I thought, for her neck must be hurting terribly.
Fool that I was.
There was danger for us thieves, always. Now that no one was transported to Australia anymore, women thieves were sentenced to years in prison if the judge was feeling charitable and were hanged if the judge was not. And with what seemed to be a newly zealous police force? The thought of leaving Sarah unprotected in London turned my bones to water. I believed Amelia and Mary would watch out for her and keep her safe, but in prison or dead, I’d have no way of knowing if my sister was all right day to day.
This was perhaps the hundredth time I’d considered this possibility, and it always churned my insides to the same sharp pinch. I lay awake, listening as Sarah and Mary breathed in a mistimed rhythm—Sarah slower, Mary faster—while shouts and scurries from the street pierced my window, and panic spread like spilled ink through every inch of me, black and thick enough to drown in.
Chapter 5
By the morning, the rain had stopped, though gray clouds hung like dirty bedsheets, unmoving over the city. Sarah and I bought her favorite cinnamon rolls from Mrs. Jonas’s bakery—Mary waved to us from the kitchen—and cheese from Bender’s shop and went for a long, pleasant walk across the bridge to St. James’s, where we found a bench and enjoyed our makeshift picnic, stopping to feed the swans and ducks with the scraps.
On our way back to my room, we paused on Waterloo Bridge. The rain had washed away the bird droppings for a day, and we settled our forearms on the metal railing. Under the low-hanging clouds, the Thames was daubed in grays with black and white flecks. The river was at flood tide, high, half an hour from turning. Four hours from now the mud larks would be on the south bank with their buckets, scrounging for bits of metal and wood by the light of handheld lamps. The next bridge to the east was Blackfriars, where the great underground River Fleet emerged on the north bank, flowing into the Thames through a large semicircular opening. As a child, looking at the papers over my father’s shoulder, I’d seen a cartoon of Old Man Fleet, shaking his fist in rage at us Londoners for burying him beneath roads and railway lines. The thought of a powerful spirit dwelling silently underground had frightened me.
“You don’t have to walk me back,” Sarah said. “Unless you want to.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” I said, my eyes on a barge headed straight for a rowboat, whose two oarsmen were paddling furiously to get out of the way. “I’m meeting James for dinner over the river anyway.”
“What?” At the shock in her voice, I turned. A smile bloomed across her face. “Kit! That’s wonderful!”
“Why is it wonderful?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.
“Because ...” She studied my face. “Don’t you want to go?”
I didn’t answer at first. Did I? Didn’t I?
“Well,I’mglad you’re going,” Sarah said.
