London - Edward Rutherfurd [548]
As she looked around her, the signs were not encouraging. Her son was a drunk. Young Tom had taken up with some of the rowdier youths of the Jewish community; and though these Jewish boys did not drink so much, they were always gambling. “Which is just as quick a way of losing your wages,” she pointed out to Jenny. Then, the previous year, there had been the terrible murders of Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel. So far the victims had been prostitutes, but with madmen like that about, what girl was safe?
There was something else that worried Lucy, too. The first sign of trouble in the East End had been last year at the Bryant and May match factory, when the girls there, led by a vigorous outsider called Annie Besant, had walked out in protest at their starvation wages. This year, more ominously, another woman called Eleanor Marx, whose father Karl Marx, they said, was a revolutionary writer who lived in the West End, had come to help the gasworkers organize a union; and soon after that, there had been a huge strike down at the docks.
“I’m not saying they’re wrong,” Lucy told Jenny. She knew all about the pay of the matchworkers; and her son had often described the terrible scenes at the docks where casual labourers were allowed to fight each other for the shift-work. “But where will it lead?” Whatever the future held for the East End, she wanted to find Jenny a safe haven, before she herself was no longer there to protect her. But how? Every year the East End had grown larger as the population swelled and immigrants came in. Villages like Poplar had completely disappeared in the endless, dreary wasteland of docks, factories and long rows of mean houses. Lucy could think of only one possible hope. And so, on a cold December day, she set out on a journey she had not attempted for over thirty years.
In the universe of lawyers there is no place more august and dignified than the big square near Chancery Lane known as Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A noble old hall adorns one side, lawyers’ chambers and other ancient offices stand quietly round the rest. And in one corner, up handsome, shadowy stairs which, somehow, suggested an appropriate air of dignified obfuscation, were the offices of Odstock and Alderbury, Solicitors.
Lucy had never gone to see Silas’s lawyers, since she had not given up her child. Nor, given the circumstances, had she ever mentioned Silas to her son. But she could not help hoping that at his death at least he would do something for her. What other kin had he, after all? She had tried to discover what had happened to him and at last, a dozen years before, she had learned from an old newspaper of his death. She wrote to the lawyer and, receiving no response, wrote again to ask whether her kinsman had remembered her. This time she received a brief and curt reply: he had not.
She could think of no one else who could give her what she wanted: a nice place for Jenny in a decent house as far from the East End as possible, where she would be treated kindly. And besides, might not some tiny drop of Silas’s great fortune come the girl’s way?
At ten o’clock in the morning, therefore, she presented herself at the office in Lincoln’s Inn, gave her name and asked if she might speak to Mr Odstock.
He kept her waiting two hours, a bent, severe, grey-haired old man who was certainly surprised to see her, but who also, clearly, knew well enough who she was. He interviewed her in a small, book-lined office, nodded carefully, and after some thought replied: “I am afraid I cannot help you. I know of no such situations, though no doubt they exist.”
“My kinsman left no word about me at all?”
“Apart from his original instructions, nothing.”
“But what became of all his fortune?” she suddenly burst out.
“Why,” he looked a little surprised.