London - Edward Rutherfurd [535]
She had moved soon after that. She had found employment with a button-maker in Soho and took lodgings with a family in St Giles’s parish to be nearer her work. There she had stayed for the next ten years. It turned out that she had a talent for matching colours. Show her any piece of material and she could mix the dyes to reproduce that colour exactly. She could make buttons to go with anything. But the big vats of dye, which were in an upstairs room with little air, made a pungent smell; and at last their sharp fumes seemed to be affecting her breathing. Afraid that she would get asthma like her mother, she had given it up.
It was at about this time that she met her friend. He was a cousin of some Irish people she knew in St Giles, but he lived in Whitechapel. It was he who had found her work in a shop run by friends of his, in his own neighbourhood; it was because of him that she had moved, it was he who, in those years, gave her friendship and even affection. There was no one else, really, to do that now. He could read and write, quite well, too, which had allowed him to get a job as a clerk in a big shipping yard nearby.
And gradually, that kindness and friendship had turned into something more, until at last, some months ago, finding themselves alone, the inevitable had happened. And then again, several times more.
“I’m sorry for coming when you’re busy,” Lucy now remarked. “Sounds as if you’ve got company.”
“Company?” He was still watching her cautiously. For just a second she thought he looked awkward, but then it passed. “Nothing much,” he shrugged. “Just a few friends.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s nice.” Lucy did not know he had a family. Even twenty years ago, when he already had four daughters, Silas had never seen fit to mention the fact. If he had felt any interest in Lucy’s father or in her, that interest did not extend to allowing them even to imagine they had any claim on his own children. He had taken care never to let Lucy discover any of her other relations who might have given away his secret.
“And this house,” Lucy gestured around. “This is all yours?”
“Maybe.”
“You must be rich.”
“Some people think I am. I get by.”
It was, of course, a lie. By the time Lucy’s mother had died, Silas had already finished with the Bermondsey heap. But he had built three more in west London. Soon after that, he found he could do even better by building heaps and then selling them to others to exploit. The hugest heaps he had sold for tens of thousands of pounds. Waste, then as subsequently, was big business. By the time he retired, Silas had sold ten heaps, and was a very rich man indeed.
“So why are you here?” he said.
She explained very straightforwardly that she was going to have a baby. Why had she let it happen? There had been two men before now who had wanted to marry her. But though she had liked at least one of them, she had resisted. For they were both as poor as she: simple labourers like her father. A single accident and they could be crippled, or gone. And what then? Destitution: the same sort of life, for her children, that she and Horatio had known. She did not want that, and no better alternative had offered. So why had she allowed it to happen with her friend? Perhaps because she loved him. Perhaps because he was a clerk with a little education, the sort of man she might have hoped for. Perhaps because time was passing – she was over thirty now. And perhaps, too, because he had shown her affection.
“Your husband. What’s he do?”
She explained she had no husband.
“You mean you’ve a man who won’t marry you?”
“He’s married, Silas,” she said.
Then Silas, forgetting for a moment that he was the respectable old Guv’nor now, made a grimace of disgust and spat. “You were always a fool. So what do you want?”
“Help,” she said simply, and waited.
Silas Dogget considered. It was ten years