Silence in Hanover Close - Anne Perry [96]
He stopped short of the hotel itself and left the cab on the comer, opposite a stall where a man wearing a white apron and a black hat with a ribbon round it was selling hot eels. Beside him, a girl ladled out thick pea soup at a halfpenny a cup.
The aroma drifted on the wet air and Pitt automatically reached in his pocket. He had never acquired the native Londoners’ taste for eels, but he was partial to pea soup. A red-faced woman was before him in the queue, but after she was served he produced his halfpenny and took the hot cup gratefully. The liquid was thick and a little lumpy, but the flavor was rich and its warmth rippled through him, creating a tiny heart of strength inside.
“You here in the evenings?” he asked casually.
“Sometimes, in the summer wiv ve eels,” the man answered. “Vis time o’ year anyone wiv an ’ome ter go to is in it! Vem as ’asn’t usual don’t ’ave money neither.”
“Who’d be here in the evening?”
The man went on ladling eels. “Wot time yer talkin’ abaht? Early on, till eight or nine, ’er.” He gestured to a small girl about fifty yards up the pavement, who stood shivering in the cold, a box of sweet violets by her bare feet. She might have been ten or eleven years old.
“I’ll take another cup of soup.” Pitt gave the man a second halfpenny and took the cup from the girl. “Thank you.” He turned to walk away.
“Hey! I want the cup back!” the man shouted behind him.
“You’ll get it,” Pitt said over his shoulder, “when it’s empty.” He approached the flower girl. She was only a few years older than Jemima, with a pinched face and few underclothes beneath her plain dark dress and faded shawl. Her feet were mottled red and blue with extreme cold.
He put the cup of soup down on the pavement and fished in his pocket for two more pennies.
“I’ll have two bunches of violets for my wife,” he said, holding out the coins.
“Thank you, sir.” She took the pennies, glancing at him out of clear blue eyes, then stole a glance at the steaming soup.
He picked it up and took a sip, then set it down again.
“I’ve bought more than I can eat,” he said. “You can finish it if you like.”
She hesitated; nothing came into her life without a price.
“I don’t want it,” he repeated.
Very carefully she reached out her hand and picked it up, still watching him.
“Have you been on this street long?” he asked, knowing as he said it that she was probably too young to be any help to him. But he had bought the soup without thinking of Cerise.
“Two year,” she replied, sipping soup with a slurp and sucking it round her mouth.
“Is it busy in the evenings?”
“Fair.”
“Are there other traders here?”
“Some. ’Bout two or free.”
“Who? What do they sell?”
“There’s a woman wot sells combs, but she goes early. Girl wot sells matches sometimes. An’ o’ course there’s ’im wot sells ’ot plum duff; ’e’s ’ere of an evenin’. An’ sometimes there’s patterers. They moves abaht, mostly from Seven Dials way, ’cause vat’s w’ere the printers is.”
He did not need to question her, he knew what running patterers were: men of prodigious memory and usually a nice turn of humor, who sold red-hot news, generally of crime and seduction. And if there was nothing sufficiently grisly in truth, then they were not above inventing something, replete with detail, and frequently showing pictures.
“Thank you,” he said civilly, picking up the empty cup. “I’ll come back this evening.”
He went home for dinner and gave Charlotte, to her surprise and delight, both bunches of violets. Then at about ten o’clock he forced himself to go out again into the freezing fog.
It was a vile night, and there was no one in the street outside the hotel except a fat, pasty-faced youth selling hot plum duff, a cooked dough filled with sultanas and kept at a good temperature with layers of steaming cloth. The youth was well patronized by the men leaving the hotel, but after half an hour of standing and stamping