Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [90]
‘A guinea, blimey,’ Nell exclaimed. ‘I’d ’a bitten ’is balls fer a guinea.’
‘Get in the coach with you, you embarrassin’ tart,’ Mary Jane said. ‘I don’t know of what you’re thinkin’.’
‘I do believe I will, Duchess,’ she said, squeezing through the door, wiggling her rump from side to side.
Mary Jane followed and settled down.
‘Oi you,’ Nell shouted to the driver, ‘’ome, an’ don’t spare the ’orses.’
The carriage lurched into motion. Nell was still playing with her gold coin. She had tried to bite it. Now she was shining it against her shawl.
‘I’ll be off the streets fer a month,’ she said, licking her fangs. ‘I’ll go up West an’ find myself a guardsman with a knob like a firehose, an’ suck the bastard dry.’
‘But you’ll be back in the alleys when the money’s gone, on your back in the muck while some drunkard wobbles all over you.’
Nell shrugged. ‘I ’ardly think I’ll be marryin’ royalty. Yer neither, Marie Jeanette de Kelly.’
‘I’m not on the streets any more.’
‘Just ’cos there’s a roof over the bed yer shag in don’t make it a church, girl.’
‘No strangers, that’s my rule now. Just familiar gentlemen.’
‘Very familiar.’
‘You should be listenin’ to me, you know. It’s not healthy on the streets these nights. Not with the Ripper.’
Nell was unimpressed. ‘In Whitechapel, ’e’d ’ave to kill an ’ore a night til kingdom come til ’e got to me. There’s thousands of us, an’ there will be long after ’e’s rottin’ in Hell.’
‘He’s killin’ them two at a time.’
‘Garn!’
‘You know ’tis true, Nell. ’Tis over a week since he did for Cathy Eddowes and the Stride woman. He’ll be out and about again.’
‘I’d like to see ’im try anythin’ with me,’ Nell said. She snarled, a mouthful of wolf-teeth glistening. ‘I’d rip ’is ’eart out, an’ eat the blighter.’
Mary Jane had to laugh. But she was being serious. ‘The only safe thing is familiar gentlemen, Nell. Customers you know, and are sure of. The best thing would be to find a gentleman to keep you. Especially if he wants to keep you outside Whitechapel.’
‘Only place that’d keep me is the zoo.’
Mary Jane had been kept once. In Paris, by Henry Wilcox. He was a banker, a colossus of finance. He had gone abroad without his wife, and Mary Jane had travelled with him. He told everyone she was his niece, but the French understood the arrangement all too well. When he travelled on to Switzerland, he left her behind with an old frog rakehell to whom she did not take. ‘Uncle Henry’, it turned out, had lost her on a hand of cards. Paris had been lovely but she still came back to London, where she knew what folk were saying and she was the only person gambling with her life.
It was almost dawn when they got to Whitechapel. She’d not known enough at first to stay out of the sun, and her skin had burned to painful crackling. She had ripped dogs open for their juice. It had taken her months to catch up with the other new-borns.
She gave directions to the warm driver, realising with a nice hot surge that the man was petrified of his vampire passengers. She rented a room just off Dorset Street, from McCarthy the chandler for four and six a week. Some of the guinea would have to pay the arrears and keep McCarthy off her back. But the rest would be for her. Perhaps she could find a picture-framer?
Once they were out of the coach, it trundled off quickly, leaving them on the pavement. Nell gestured after the departing driver and howled like a comical animal. She even had fur growing around her eyes and up behind her pointed ears.
‘Marie Jeanette,’ croaked a voice from the shadows. Someone was standing under the Miller’s Court archway. A gentleman, by his clothes.
She smiled, recognising the voice. Dr Seward stepped out of the dark.
‘I’ve been waiting most of the night for you,’ he said. ‘I’d like...’
‘She knows what yer’d like,’ Nell said, ‘an’ yer orter be shamed of yerself.’
‘Shush, furface,’ she said. ‘That’s no way to be talkin’ to a gentleman.’
Nell stuck her snout in the air, rearranged her shawl, and trotted off, sniffing like a music hall queen.