Resurrection Row - Anne Perry [52]
The woman smiled, showing blackened teeth, and mumbled something in reply. She had a large, shambling figure, and Dominic would have judged her to be about fifty. He did not understand a word of her speech.
Carlisle led him on a few yards to where half a dozen children sat unpicking old trousers, some of them no more than three or four years old.
“Three of these are Bessie’s.” He looked at them. “They used to work at home, before putting the new railway through caused the slum clearance, and the house their room was in was demolished. Her husband and older children made match boxes at tuppence ha’ penny for a hundred and forty-four, and out of that they found their own twine and paste. Bessie herself worked in the Bryant and Mays match factory. That’s why she speaks so oddly—phossy jaw—a necrosis of the jaw caused by the phosphorus in the matches. She’s three years older than Alicia Fitzroy-Hammond—you wouldn’t think it, would you?”
It was too much. Dominic was bewildered and appalled. “I want to get out of here,” he said quietly.
“So do we all.” Carlisle embraced the room in a gesture. “Do you know third of London lives no better than this, either in the rookeries or the workhouses?”
“What can anybody do?” Dominic said helplessly. “It’s—it’s so—vast!”
Carlisle spoke to one or two more people; then he led Dominic back out into the square again, bidding Mr. Eades a tart farewell on the doorstep. After the thick air inside, even the gray drizzle seemed cleaner.
“Change some of the laws,” Carlisle replied. “The meanest ledger clerk who can write or add is a prince compared with these. Get pauper children educated and apprenticed. There’s little you can do for their parents, except charity; but we can try for the children.”
“Possibly.” Dominic had to walk sharply to keep up with him. “But what is the point in showing me? I can’t change laws!”
Carlisle stopped. He passed a few pence to a child begging and saw him immediately hand them over to an old man.
“Fancy sending your grandchild out to beg for you,” Dominic muttered.
“He’s more likely no relation.” Carlisle kept on walking. “He probably bought the child. Children make better beggars, especially if they are blind or deformed. Some women even cripple them on purpose; gives them a better chance of survival. To answer your question, you can talk to people like Lord Fleetwood and his friends, persuade them to go to the House and vote.”
Dominic was horrified. “I can’t tell them about this sort of thing! They’d—” He realized what he was saying.
“Yes,” Carlisle agreed. “They would be disgusted and offended. Most distasteful. Not the sort of subject a gentleman embarrasses others with. I think I rather spoiled your luncheon the other day. You don’t get the same pleasure out of roast goose when you think about something like this, do you? And yet how far do you think it is from Gadstone Park church pews to Seven Dials?” They turned the corner into another street and saw a cab at the far end. Carlisle increased his pace, and Dominic had almost to trot to keep up with him. “But if I can court a cold-blooded sod like St. Jermyn,” Carlisle continued, “to get a bill introduced, I think you can manage a little discomfort with Fleetwood, can’t you?”
Dominic spent a wretched evening and woke the next morning feeling no better. He told his valet to have all his clothes cleaned, and if the smell would not come out, then to give them away to whosoever would take them. But nothing so simple would get rid of the pictures from his mind. Part of him hated Carlisle for obliging him to see things he would much rather not ever have known of. Of course, he had always appreciated in his head that there was poverty, but he had never actually seen it before, one did not really see the faces of beggars in the streets; they were simply faces, there—like lamp posts or railings. One was always about some business of one’s own and too occupied to think of them.
But worse than the sight was the taste of it in his mouth, the smell that stayed at the back of the