Bluegate Fields - Anne Perry [111]
“Not much use to Jerome!” he said harshly. “Unfortunately, people like Albie are murdered for too many reasons, and most of them perfectly obvious, to assume it related to any particular incident.”
“The girl prostitute has gone, too,” Charlotte continued. “Abigail Winters. She’s disappeared, so we can’t ask her either. But Thomas did say that he thinks neither Jerome nor Arthur Waybourne ever went there, to her rooms, because there is an old woman at the door who watches everyone like a rat, and she makes them all pay her to pass. She never saw them, and neither did any of the other girls.”
Emily’s mouth curled in revulsion as her imagination conjured up the place for her. She put out her hand and stroked the black cat.
“There would be a procuress,” Carlisle said, “and no doubt a few strong men around to deal with anyone who caused trouble. It’s all part of the mutual arrangement. It would be a very sly girl indeed who managed to smuggle in private customers—and a brave one. Or else a fool!”
“We need more facts.” Emily would not allow herself to be excluded from the conversation any longer. “Can you tell us how a girl who begins as respectable ends up on the streets in places like these? If we are to move people, we must tell them about the ones they can feel sorry for, not just the ones born in Bluegate Fields and St. Giles, whom they imagine never desire anything else.”
“Of course.” He turned to his desk and shuffled through piles of papers and loose sheets, coming up at last with the ones he wanted. “These are rates of pay in match factories and furniture shops, and pictures of necrosis of the jaw caused by handling phosphorus. Here are the piecework rates for stitching shirts and ragpicking. These are conditions for entry into a workhouse, and what they are like inside. And this is the poor law with regard to children. Don’t forget a lot of women who are on the streets are there because they have children to support, and not necessarily illegitimate by any means. Some are widows, and the husbands of some have just left, either for another woman or simply because they couldn’t stand the responsibility.”
Emily took the papers and Charlotte moved beside her to read over her shoulder. The black cat stretched luxuriously, kneading its claws in the arm of the chair, pulling the threads, then curled up in a ball again and went back to sleep with a small sigh.
“May we keep these?” Emily asked. “I want to learn them by heart.”
“Of course,” he said. He poured the chocolate and passed it to them, his wry face showing he was not unaware of the irony of the situation: sitting by the blazing fire in this infinitely comfortable room, with its superb Dutch scene on the wall and hot chocolate in their hands, while they talked about horrendous squalor.
As if reading Charlotte’s thoughts, Carlisle turned to her.
“You must use your chance to convince as many other people as possible. The only way we’ll change anything is to alter the social climate till child prostitution becomes so abhorred that it withers of itself. Of course we’ll never get rid of it altogether, any more than any other vice, but we might reduce it massively.”
“We will!” Emily said with a deeper anger than Charlotte had heard in her before. “I’ll see that every society woman in London is so sickened by it she’ll make it impossible for any man with ambition to practice it. We may not have a vote or pass any laws in Parliament, but we can certainly make the laws of society and freeze to death anyone who wants to flout them for long, I promise you!”
Carlisle smiled. “I’m sure,” he said. “I never underestimated the power of public disapproval, informed or uninformed.”
Emily stood up, carefully depositing the cat in the round hollow she had left. It barely stirred to rearrange itself.
“I intend to inform the public.” She folded the papers and slipped them into her embroidered reticule. “Now we shall go to Deptford and look at this corpse. Are you ready, Charlotte? Thank you so much, Mr. Carlisle.”
The Deptford police station was not easy to find. Quite naturally,