Hope - Lesley Pearse [100]
It snowed that night and all the next day. Mole, Shanks and their women, Josie and Lil, stayed in too, all of them huddling around the fire. They played cards, drank the bottle of cheap rum Mole had brought in, argued and told stories.
Hope was glad enough of the shelter from the cold, but she wasn’t pleased to be forced to spend so much time with the four night-time lodgers. Mole and Shanks were crude, loud-mouthed thugs who didn’t hold conversations, they gave monologues on villainy. She had realized weeks ago that Josie and Lil were dollymops who handed over their earnings to their men. The four of them were everything she was nervous of in Lewins Mead.
Mole, a short, squat fellow with dark eyes set very close together beneath thick black eyebrows, got his nickname because he had been a miner. Shanks was tall and thin, with an ugly scar down his right cheek. He came from Dublin, and the only attractive thing about him was his Irish accent. Josie and Lil reminded Hope of tripe, white, flaccid and with nothing to recommend them. They were dull-eyed and slow-witted, their pale, thin faces registering no emotion. All four had quite decent clothes by the standards of Lamb Lane, but the dirt engrained in their skin, the lack of expression in their eyes and the constant barrage of profanity and gutter cant were repellent.
By five in the afternoon Hope thought that this was a taste of what being in a prison cell must be like, crowded together with six other people, breathing putrid air, assaulted by noxious smells of unwashed bodies and forced to endure the boastings of men who were human parasites. She had spent much of the day gazing out of the tiny window, for at least the snow had made the view of rooftops pretty and clean. But now it was dark she was forced to return to her pile of sacks, and in the light of just two candles and the fire, the four lodgers didn’t just look unattractive, but menacing too.
She sensed Gussie and Betsy were not happy either to have this company thrust upon them. Betsy called the lodgers friends but that meant she and Gussie knew them well, not that they liked them. They needed the regular lodging money to pay the three shillings a week rent on the room, and until today the lodgers had always cleared out by ten or eleven in the morning and didn’t return until late at night.
The enforced imprisonment at least had the effect of sharpening Hope’s conviction that she must find a way of getting out of Lewins Mead permanently. Yet as she looked at Betsy and Gussie’s faces softened by the candlelight she felt a pang of sorrow that this would almost certainly mean leaving them behind.
‘Whatcha’ thinking about?’ Gussie asked quietly, almost as if he’d tuned into her thoughts.
‘Finding work,’ she whispered back, knowing if one of the lodgers was to hear her they’d have plenty to say on the subject, and nothing she would want to hear.
‘You could go down to the Ragged School,’ Gussie suggested. ‘There’s a cove called Mr Phelps there what teaches. He might be able to help you. They say he’s a decent sort.’
Hope had also heard that a preacher’s daughter called Miss Carpenter had taken over an old hall in St James’s Back to teach the waifs and strays of Lewins Mead to read and write. She was reputed to be passionate about giving the children of the rookery a chance in life. Yet until today Hope had not been interested enough to find out more about her.
‘Sounds like you’ve put your nose around the door there,’ she said teasingly. Gussie was something of an enigma. Outwardly he appeared as cunning, cocksure and hard-headed as Mole and Shanks, but behind that lay a far more sensitive, kindly soul. Hope sensed that something appalling had happened to him at a young age, probably at the farm he was sent to work on, for he always clammed up when she asked him questions about it. He had a tender streak that a life on the streets hadn’t killed off, and he also had his own moral code which prevented