Fallen Grace - Mary Hooper [29]
The woman shook her head and gave a bitter laugh. ‘Don’t you think I’d be doing it if there was?’
‘Is there really nothing at all? My sister and I are very hard workers,’ Grace went on. ‘Is there ever any packing work to be had in the warehouses?’
‘None for the likes of us,’ the woman said. ‘If there is work, then it goes to the men, for they have families to keep. The only job for women round here is the usual one.’
‘What’s that?’ Lily asked eagerly, but the woman merely laughed and made a vulgar gesture with her hand.
Many of the sleeping units were already taken up by regulars, watermen mostly, and the girls’ neighbours were a married couple with two young children on one side, and on the other, three burly dockers. When night fell and the dockers went out to the nearest tavern, both girls, exhausted, fell asleep straight away. After midnight the men returned much the worse for wear, singing, shouting and falling all over the place, and woke not only the married couple and their children, but all the other residents. The married man fought the dockers, the children cried, his wife screamed, and on their own side of the curtain Grace and Lily sat huddled together, too scared to move.
By one o’clock in the morning most of the people in the warehouse seemed to be involved in the fight in some way or other, and at two o’clock someone went for a peeler. Order was soon restored, for the dockers had passed out by this time, and Grace and Lily fell into an uneasy sleep. When they were woken at six o’clock by the lighting of the boilers below them and the shouting of the workers, it was to discover that the last penny had gone from Grace’s pocket and their shoes had been stolen off their feet.
x
Chapter Eleven
‘Well, this morning we shall have to have a Seven Dials breakfast,’ Grace said to her sister as they sat on the riverbank a little later. The river was packed with smoking boats and there was a stink in the air of hot oil, boiled animal carcasses and something even more unsavoury, for there was a tannery nearby which relied on the use of fresh dung to treat the hides.
‘A Seven Dials breakfast? What’s that?’ asked Lily with interest.
‘It’s a joke,’ Grace said. ‘It’s nothing. Nothing at all.’
‘But how can it be a breakfast, then? I don’t understand.’
Grace squeezed her sister’s hand. ‘It’s just a saying, Lily. It’s supposed to be droll.’
‘I’d rather it was breakfast.’
Grace sighed, looking at the chugging, wheezing boats on the river and the engine smoke drifting across the water. She fingered the black-edged card in her pocket, the card bearing the address of the Unwin Undertaking Establishment, knowing this was their last hope. The weather was quite clement now, but she knew they would never survive on the streets of London in snow, fog and freezing rain. She was wondering how she was going to explain this job to Lily and – now that they were without shoes – if she looked respectable enough to call on Mrs Unwin about such a matter anyway.
Lily, the traces of tears still on her face, was counting the number of boats that went by. Every time she got to twenty she would start again, for that was as high as she could go. At last she tired of this and asked what they were going to do next.
‘I’ve been thinking about a woman I met recently,’ Grace said cautiously. ‘Her family have an undertakers’ establishment, and she once said I might be able to go to work for them as a mute.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Someone who attends funerals dressed all in black, and looks sad.’
‘Can I be a mute as well?’
‘Yes. Perhaps,’ Grace said. It couldn’t be too difficult for someone to stand around looking mournful? Surely even Lily would be able to do that? She took the small card from her pocket. ‘We’ll go and find out, shall we?’
x
The undertaker’s was at the far end of Oxford Street, off the Edgware Road and about half a mile from the great Marble Arch, which had recently been moved from its site in front of Buckingham Palace. The traffic