Page 3 of An Artful Dodge
“What?” he asked.
She rumpled his hair, and he ducked away.
“Pickford’s at half past three,” I said. “Don’t be late.”
“Yah.” He sniffed and turned away and went back to his friends.
Mary turned to me, rolling her eyes, half annoyed, half amused. “Let’s get ready.” We went upstairs to the costume room, where racks held dresses with thieving pockets that reached to the bottom of the crinolines, coats lined with fisherman’s netting that easily caught jewelry, trousers with adjustable turnups, two-sided cloaks, paste jewelry good enough to pass for genuine, hats, spectacles, paste-on moles, and such. Mary carefully braided my brown hair tight to my scalp to fit under the wheat-colored wig. We each chose a cloak, a reticule, gloves, and a hat, then set out for the West End.
Chapter 2
From the far street corner, I eyed our mark for the day.
The roofline of Pickford’s rose against low, scudding clouds. Like every other building on this street, the department store had a white façade interrupted by arched windows, like high-and-mighty eyebrows. If our borough of Southwark was the pickpocket of London, Kensington was the bride, regal and fair.
Ahead of me, Mary reached the door and vanished inside at twenty past three. I dallied on the pavement, holding my cloak closed against the breeze, watching the horses, omnibuses, and cabs pass, and counting out three full minutes so no clerk would think, even looking back, that we’d entered together. Approaching Pickford’s, I cast one final look for a uniformed constable before I crossed the street. Usually I smiled at sweeps, even offered a coin, but this boy I ignored, to prevent him from taking notice of me, and upon reaching the opposite curb, laid my hand on the shining brass doorknob, stepped in, and drew in a breath. People say that dry goods are pretty to look at, but I liked the smell of these brightly lit shops, with the leather, silk, linen, felt, feathers, and ribbons, and the waxy linseed oil used to polish the wooden cabinets.
We timed the dodge for midafternoon, so the shop would be busy. There were five—no, six—men and nine women, some with their maids in attendance, making selections at the various counters. Mary was one of three looking at men’s neckwear, and the clerk had taken out half a dozen cravats, laying them on the wooden counter to be examined. Mary was very pretty, taller than I, with a creamy complexion, fair hair, and blue eyes; I was plainer, with brown eyes, which I dimmed behind spectacles, and though we always traded off as decoy—Mary wanting to divide the risk fairly—the role fell more naturally to her. I worked my way along the counter on the opposite side of the store, gazing at the women’s hats for three minutes, and then halting by the gloves case. The clerk obligingly pulled several pairs from behind the counter, along with different silk ribbons to match. The tall case clock in the corner chimed once for half past three.
We have rules for thieving, and one of them is to never, ever look at one’s jenny. So I kept my attention focused on the gloves, hiding my annoyance that Sid was now late. The longer Mary and I stayed, the more risk we’d be recognized later. Ideally, this dodge took less than a quarter of an hour. The clerk’s mouth twitched with impatience as I peered through my spectacles and tried on this pair of gloves, then that one, fidgeting with my gold band—the mark of a husband’s ability to purchase—all the while.
From across the room, Mary’s anxiety came like heat on my own back. When I saw Sid tonight, I was going to smack the bloody little bugger. Another minute or two, and we’d have to call it off. It had been years since I’d given in to those early lurches between fear and frustration, but wanting this to go well for Mary, I felt them now.
Damn it, where is he?
The front door swung open and closed. I had positioned myself so I could see the entrance in the looking glass behind the clerk, and my nerves eased. With his cap pulled low, Sid appeared and vanished out of its gilded frame. His dark-coated figure would be strolling toward Mary—ten seconds, then five—and then came Mary’s scream.
Like everyone else, I spun to see her hands up—“My reticule! It’s been stolen!” she cried, whirling about and peering around the shop desperately before she put her hand to her side, shrieked “Oh,” as if in sudden pain, and slumped to the ground in a spectacular fashion.
It was exactly the way she’d always done it, and relief rolled over me.
The gloves clerk edged around the counter and pushed past me, rustling my skirts. Together with other clerks, he crouched down, bending over Mary’s limp form as the customers gathered around.
“A glass of water! Smelling salts!” cried the cravat clerk. “And catch that rascal! He went out there!” The gloves clerk leapt up from Mary’s side and headed for the side door to give chase.
With all eyes on Mary, no one paid me a whit of attention. My hands were already slipping gloves and wooden spools of ribbon into my thieving pockets, the bulky shapes vanishing into my crinoline.
I was stashing the fourth pair of gloves when a man in a brown suit stepped out from behind a pillar. His eyes weren’t on Mary; they darted around the shop. Even as I noted his features—medium height, a bit thick around the middle, dark wavy hair, clean-shaven, a rounded chin, forty years of age or thereabouts—I clasped my empty hands before me and peered worriedly at Mary, like everyone else.
A few moments later, the gloves clerk burst back into the shop, breathless. I wasn’t worried he’d catch Sid, who would have already handed Mary’s purse to Harry, who would stash it inside his waistcoat and stroll on. Even if Sid was nabbed—which was unlikely, as he’d have stuffed his cap into a pocket and slowed to an amble immediately after fleeing the shop—he wouldn’t have the reticule. No evidence, no arrest.
I longed to snatch one more look at the brown-suited man, to determine whether he was a Yard plainclothes detective or a shop-hired privy. But I wouldn’t have risked meeting his eyes for the world. As I kept my gaze on Mary and the cravat clerk, her would-be rescuer—who was running his hand over her breast, pretending to feel for her heartbeat, the filthy git—a woman who had been trying on hats approached me. Her jowly chin shook with indignation. “It’s dreadful! London’s full of devils these days, vicious wretches who will stealanything!”
“Devils and wretches,” I murmured in agreement.
I was, after all, one of them.
Chapter 3
Outside, I rounded the corner, flipping my cloak from blue silk to black for good measure. It had been a narrower escape than I liked. My heart beat out of time until the next street, where I forced it back into order.
I strolled south and east, the weight in my thieving pocket lying heavy along the crinoline. We were all used to being off-kilter, accustomed to hiding the limp it gave us. Better to have a limp from the pocket than to be a man and limp between the pockets, as Josie would say.
I reached the west end of the Charing Cross rail footbridge and started across the Thames, knowing Mary would have taken the Waterloo. I paused, resting my hands on the parapet, and looked east, for it was one of the rare afternoons when the sun slipped the clouds, laid the bridge’s shadow across the river, and dusted gold across the boats’ chop. From below rose the rank smells of rotting fish and tangy brine, of filthy old stone and molding green muck crawling up the pillars.
From behind me came the distant blare of a locomotive whistle followed by a screech of brakes as a train drew into the London and South Western station. The sound was lost in the grind of a motor as a tugboat avoided ramming a lighter not fifty yards from me. I shaded my eyes to watch as a coal carrier plowed its way along, its flaring blast overwhelming the sound of the tug. That’s the way London was, one sound drowning another. I walked on and waited for Mary at our usual corner on Waterloo Road. As she appeared, I was gratified to see lightness in her step and a quietly confident smile on her face.
I felt a moment of misgiving at the thought of deflating her spirits by telling her about the brown-suited man who’d escaped her notice. But Mary and I told each other the truth.
