Fallen Grace - Mary Hooper [15]
Grace flounced out her skirts slightly so that it was impossible to see the outline of her figure and went into the kitchen, where Mrs Macready was sitting with one of the costermongers, enjoying a glass of stout.
‘I haven’t seen you for a few days, dear,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m very well, thank you,’ Grace replied, thinking that Mrs Macready would probably have made an excellent confidante, but there seemed to be little point in telling her now.
‘Are you quite sure of that?’ Mrs Macready said, giving her a meaningful look.
‘Perfectly, thank you,’ Grace said, her smile fixed. She did not feel perfectly all right, in fact she was glad now that the costermonger was there, for if he had not been, she might have thrown herself on the floor by Mrs Macready’s chair, told her everything and wept until she could weep no more.
‘And how’s the trade in cresses?’ asked the costermonger.
‘Fair to middling,’ Grace said.
‘Slow everywhere at this time of the year,’ he grunted.
‘It is,’ Grace said. ‘But if you’ll excuse me, Lily’s waiting for me.’
‘Ah,’ said Mrs Macready. ‘You’re a saint with your sister, indeed you are.’
x
The next morning before light, when the only people about were milkmaids and drovers taking sheep to Smithfield, Grace and Lily set off to buy watercress at Farringdon Market. It was mostly the very old and very young who gathered to buy the cresses, for the stock money needed was no more than a few pennies and the goods were easy to carry. The people were of the very poorest, however, and Grace and Lily were among the few who were wearing shoes. Cresses were always sold along the railings at the entrance and gaslights burned brightly above here, enabling the buyers to see more clearly the quality of the goods being offered. A coffee seller had set up his stall by the entrance and lit a charcoal fire, causing the earliest customers to crowd about him trying to gain a little warmth from his brazier.
As it turned five o’clock, the country sellers opened their hampers and baskets and began to display their goods. The buyers – clutching bags, shawls, trays or fraying baskets of their own to collect their green stuffs – began to go up and down, looking carefully into the hampers, asking prices, inspecting the stock for its colour, sniffing it and holding it towards a light to judge its freshness. Grace and Lily’s own purchases eventually made – six large bunches for a penny each – the girls took the cresses over to a water pump to freshen them and discard any discoloured leaves. They then sat down on the stone pavement to break each large bunch into three or four smaller ones and tie them with a rush. Lily suffered with cold hands and had neither the patience nor the deftness to tie the fiddly little bundles, but Grace had become quite neat and quick at it and was fast enough to do four bunches to Lily’s one.
The bunches prepared, they set off to sell them, Lily with half of them in her spare shawl and Grace with the others displayed on an ancient tea tray carried in the crook of her arm. Grace’s cry was, ‘Fine, fresh watercress!’ and Lily’s, ‘Cresses, fresh and green!’
How discomforted they’d been, Grace reminded Lily that morning, when they’d first gone out shouting their wares; how humbly they’d called – whispered, almost – as if apologising for having anything to say at all. They had grown braver over the months, for if they hadn’t they would have starved.
It was a busy morning, fine and bright, and the two girls managed to sell several bunches of watercress to labourers going to work and, a little later, to housewives looking for something sharp and tasty to have with their bread-and-cheese dinner. It proved a good day for them, because by eleven o’clock Grace had sold all her stock, her pretty face and solemn demeanour provoking sympathy from gentlemen and ladies alike and often drawing over the asking price of a ha’penny a bunch. Once Grace’s tray was empty, the sisters walked together, calling in harmony, and by midday they had more than tripled the money laid out that morning.