Fallen Grace - Mary Hooper [18]
‘You read it to me.’
‘Well, I won’t bother with the details, but basically it says they’re looking for two pigeons and are offering a reward for their finding.’
‘Two pigeons, you say?’
‘Mother and daughter,’ said Yellow Cravat, glancing up at a fine oil painting of Her Majesty Queen Victoria over the fireplace and saluting her with his glass of port.
‘And you reckon there’s a chance of finding them, do you?’
‘I should say it’s worth looking,’ said the first, dodging a cloud of smoke. ‘My nark at the law courts says there’s a small fortune waiting around in unclaimed inheritances. He mentioned the case concerning these two, as a matter of fact. The person who locates them will take ten per cent of a tidy sum.’
The second blew out another perfect circle. ‘Worth a try, then. Mother and daughter, you say?’
‘The girl’s seventeen so the mother’s probably . . . what? Thirty something?’
‘I’ll use my contacts.’
‘We’ll go halves, eh?’ Yellow Cravat said.
‘We’ve got to find them first,’ said the other. Above his head, the smoke circle bloomed and dissolved. ‘Anything else to report?’
The first shook his head. ‘Just the usual: several substitutions of painted chipboard for oak. Oh, and I got a couple of nice wedding rings this week. The family said they wanted ’em buried with the corpse.’
‘More fool them! Bet that raised a cheer.’
‘It did,’ said Yellow Cravat, ‘but only after they’d left the premises.’
x
Chapter Seven
For the next four or five weeks, matters went quite well for Grace and Lily. At the beginning of July, the watercress which came into London from the outlying farms was at its most abundant, meaning that a large bunch could be purchased for a ha’penny, doubling all their profits. After two weeks of this, therefore, they had their rent money put aside for a whole month, and a little later Grace redeemed her mama’s cup and saucer and also bought two straw baskets in which to carry the watercress around and display the bunches to their best advantage. The other thing she’d managed to do was to put aside two shillings for her train fare to Brookwood, so she could go sometime and pay her respects to her dead child.
At the end of August, however, things changed again, this time for the worst, when the free-flowing brook used by one of the largest watercress farmers in Hampshire dried up, the authorities having diverted the brook to bring fresh water to a nearby village. This event caused such a shortage of watercress that the Farringdon Market sellers were able to double and double again the price of a wholesale bunch. It also rained every day for near three weeks so that there were few buyers on the streets, with the result that by the end of September their fortunes had turned again, and Grace and Lily were as poor as they’d ever been. The shillings Grace had saved for the Necropolis Railway had been used for food and Mama’s cup and saucer had been pawned again, together with the teapot and the baskets. Besides this, they had no money to put aside for that week’s rent.
‘We’ve just six pennies left, so tomorrow we’ll buy three large bunches,’ Grace said, laying out the money along the top of one of the crates. ‘If we’re very careful, if we make four bunches from each bunch we buy and sell them for a penny, then we will have . . .’ She counted on her fingers. ‘Twelve pennies.’ She sighed. ‘And then we must lay out six for stock the next day, and two towards our rent and two for some potatoes – oh, and a penny to use Mrs Macready’s oven to cook them. Even if we have them dry, it is barely enough.’
‘We could put an advertisement in the paper!’ Lily said. She was sitting on a crate with Grace kneeling beside her. ‘We could say we need money, being gentlewomen in trying circumstances