Fallen Grace - Mary Hooper [5]
The woman laughed, but not unkindly. ‘Do you think I don’t know that? I do! And I’m quite prepared for crying.’
‘Shall we hire a nurse? Mother said she’d pay.’
‘Certainly not,’ the woman said. ‘I’ve waited too long to give over care of Baby to a stranger.’
‘Just as you like, my sweet,’ said the man. He put out a finger and stroked the baby’s cheek, plump and pink under the prettiest of lace bonnets. The baby started in his sleep, and the couple froze in case he was about to wake up, but he fell still again. ‘Dear Baby,’ said the man.
‘Dear, precious Baby,’ said the woman, and she and her husband smiled at each other fondly. ‘At last . . .’
x
Chapter Three
Seven Dials in the Parish of St Giles was, perhaps, the poorest area in west London, for it was said that nearly three thousand people were crammed into little over a hundred dwellings. Named for the seven lanes which converged together below Oxford Street, each court and alleyway leading off these contained slums and rookeries. Decrepit lodging houses, shops and stinking taverns leaned this way and that, shored up with old planks and rusty sheets, their broken windows boarded over, and tarpaulin nailed over holes in the masonry in an effort to stop the rain coming through. Those living in the houses were poor, but not quite destitute. None had an income that could be relied on, however, and thus they lived hand to mouth, hoping that each day would bring forth enough money to feed them and their families for the next twenty-four hours. They were costermongers with stalls in the marketplaces, street sellers of matches and pickled whelks, crossing sweepers, laundresses, sewer cleaners and boys who contrived to earn a living by holding a gentleman’s horse or turning somersaults in order to amuse. Below that level, in the very worst hovels, lived packs of scoundrels and ne’er-do-wells, thieves and beggars.
The stalls and shops around them sold all manner of things for, though some could manage without shoes, even the very poorest needed food and something to wear. The clothes for sale in Seven Dials were never new, but second-, third- or fourth-hand: old dresses, hats, shoes, stockings, crumpled petticoats, fraying jackets and tattered shawls. A large number of the shops were for bird fanciers and almost every variety of pigeon, fowl and hen could be found there, together with thrushes, finches and other songbirds. At the southern end of Seven Dials, one could find shops selling cheap household goods: brooms, dustpans, dusters, washing bowls, wiping cloths and rags, for even the poorest woman knew that cleanliness was next to Godliness, and strove to keep up her standards.
Mrs Macready’s boarding house in Brick Place, Seven Dials, was four storeys high with two rooms on each floor, and a basement which was green and mouldy with damp. Mrs Macready lived on the ground floor, keeping a watch over the comings and goings and a tally of rents paid, and presiding over a kitchen which the lodgers were allowed to use for a ha’penny or two. There was a makeshift privy in the backyard and also a well, but owing to the proximity of one to the other, the water from the well was polluted and undrinkable – so much so that, some years before, several of Mrs Macready’s lodgers and those from the next-door house had died of cholera. Since then, everyone had queued to get their water in pails, kettles and bowls from the standpipe in the street.
Mrs Macready was a stout and cheery landlady who took up and wore whatever raggedy items her lodgers left behind when they moved on, hardly differentiating between men’s and women’s clothes. Thus she would wear torn lace blouses with old suit jackets or crumpled skirts with threadbare shawls and waistcoats, and top the lot off with a bonnet decorated with artificial flowers. Out of the kindness of her heart, she kept strictly to her maxim of having only one family to a room and charged them well below the going rate. She charged so little, in fact, that she couldn’t maintain the property,