Death at Dawn - Caro Peacock [35]
The London Flyer drew out on Monday, prompt to the minute. I’d arrived early and secured a seat by the window and when I looked out there was Amos Legge, taller by a head and a faded felt hat than the crowd of grooms, ostlers, boys and travellers’ relatives come to see our departure. I waved to him as we clattered away, but if he waved back I didn’t see it for the cloud of dust we were raising.
CHAPTER NINE
Store Street is not in a fashionable part of London. It lies, as Blackstone had said, near the British Museum, off the east side of Tottenham Court Road. They’d been building the new museum for almost my entire life and were still nowhere near to finishing it, so the streets around it were dusty in summer and muddy in winter from the coming and going of builders’ wagons. It was an area I knew quite well because, being cheap, it provided rooms for exactly the kind of musicians, writers, actors and wandering scholars who tended to be my father’s friends. So when I got down from the Flyer on Monday afternoon, I had no need to ask directions.
In other circumstances it would have delighted me to be back among the London crowds, on this sunny day with the season at its height, the barouches whirling their bright cargoes of ladies to afternoon appointments, the shouts of the hawkers and snatches of songs from ballad sellers, the smell compounded of soot and hothouse bouquets, whiffs of sewage from the river and crushed grass from the parks, baked potatoes and horse dung, that would tell you what city of the world you’d arrived in if some genie dropped you down blindfold. Even now, my heart kept giving little flutters of delight, like a caged bird that wanted to be let out, only the bars of the cage were the memory that this was not how I was meant to come back to London. I should have been walking at my father’s side, laughing and talking about the people we’d soon be meeting again, the operas and new plays we were planning to see. Another reason for sadness was that there seemed to be more beggars in London than when I was last there: not just the usual drunkards or boys holding out hands for halfpennies, but men who looked as if they might have been respectable once, in workmen’s clothes with hungry faces.
My progress was slow because of the heavy bag and I had to keep stopping to change arms. I suppose I should have paid a boy a shilling to carry it – certainly there were enough of them around – but the slowness suited me. It was evening by the time I got to Store Street. Many different families or solitary individuals found living space in the terraces of houses, like sand martins nesting in a river bank. The sound of a guitar and a man singing in a good tenor voice drifted from an open window. From another window on a first floor, a woman’s laughter rang out over a green-painted balcony with pots of geraniums and a parrot in a cage. I couldn’t help smiling to myself. According to one of my aunts, the combination of green balcony, geraniums and parrot were unmistakeable signs of what she called a ‘fie-fie’ – a fallen woman. Well, that woman sounded happy enough and even her parrot looked more cheerful than my aunt’s. Number 16 was blank and drab by comparison. I knocked and the door was opened by a thin, frizzy-haired maid, chewing on her interrupted supper. I gave her my name and said Miss Bodenham was expecting me.
‘Second floor left.’
The bag and I had to bump and stumble up the two flights, so it was hardly surprising that Miss Bodenham heard us coming.
‘Miss Lane? Come in.’
An educated voice, but weary and rasping, as if her throat were sore. She held the door open for me. It was hard to tell her age. No more than thirty-five or so, I’d have guessed from her face and the way she moved, but her dark hair already had wide streaks of grey, and her complexion was yellowish, her forehead creased. She was thin and dressed entirely in grey: dark grey dress with a kind of cotton tunic over it in a lighter grey, much ink-stained,