Highgate Rise - Anne Perry [104]
“It won’t do,” Charlotte said immediately.
“I am quite aware that it won’t.” Emily came in, gave her a quick peck on the cheek and made her way to the kitchen. “I am only half awake. For pity’s sake have Gracie put on the kettle. I shall have to borrow something of yours. Everything of mine looks as if it cost at least as much as it did—which of course was the intention. Have you got a brown dress? I look terrible in brown.”
“No I haven’t,” Charlotte said a little stiffly. “But I have two dark plum-colored ones, and you would look just as terrible in either of them.”
Emily broke into laughter, her face lighting up and some of the tiredness vanishing.
“Thank you, my dear. How charming of you. Do they both fit you, or might one of them be small enough for me?”
“No.” Charlotte joined in the mood, her eyes wide, preventing herself from smiling back with difficulty. “They will be excellent ’round the waist, but too big in the bosom!”
“Liar!” Emily shot back. “They will bag around the waist, and I shall trip over the skirts. Either will do excellently. I shall go and change while you make the tea. Are we taking Gracie as well? It will hardly be a pleasant adventure for her.”
“Please ma’am?” Gracie said urgently. She had tasted the excitement of the chase, of being included, and was bold enough to plead her own cause. “I can ’elp. I unnerstand them people.”
“Of course,” Charlotte said quickly. “If you wish. But you must stay close to us at all times. If you don’t there is no accounting for what may happen to you.”
“Oh I will, ma’am,” she promised, her sober little face as grave as if she were swearing an oath. “An’ I’ll watch an’ listen. Sometimes I knows w’en people is tellin’ lies.”
Half an hour later the four of them set out in Emily’s second carriage on the journey to Mile End to trace the ownership of the tenement house to which Charlotte had followed the trail of Clemency Shaw. Their first intent was to discover the rent collector and learn from him for whom he did this miserable duty.
She had made note of the exact location. Even so it took them some time to find it again; the streets were narrow and took careful negotiation through the moil of costers’ barrows, old clothes carts, peddlers, vegetable wagons and clusters of people buying, selling and begging. So many of the byways looked alike; pavements wide enough to allow the passage of only one person; the cobbled centers, often with open gutters meandering through them filled with the night’s waste; the jettied houses leaning far out over the street, some so close at the top as to block out most of the daylight. One could imagine people in the upper stories being able to all but shake hands across the divide, if they leaned out far enough, and were minded to do so.
The wood was pitted where sections were rotten and had fallen away, the plaster was dark with stains of old leakage and rising dampness from the stones, and here and there ancient pargetting made half-broken patterns or insignia.
People stood in doorways, dark forms huddled together, faces catching the light now and then as one or another moved.
Emily reached out and took Jack’s hand. The teeming, fathomless despair of it frightened her. She had never felt quite this kind of inadequacy. There were so many. There was a child running along beside them, begging. He was no older than her own son sitting at home in his schoolroom struggling with learning his multiplication tables and looking forward to luncheon, apart from the obligatory rice pudding which he loathed, and the afternoon, when he could play.
Jack fished in his pockets for a coin and threw it for the boy. The child dived on it as it rolled almost under the carriage wheels and for a sickening moment Emily thought he would be crushed. But he emerged an instant later, jubilant, clutching the coin in a filthy hand and biting his teeth on it to check its metal.
Within moments a dozen more urchins were close around them, calling out,