The Cater Street Hangman - Anne Perry [57]
“What’s a toffken?” She felt her father would be furious if he knew of this extraordinary conversation, but it was a world which appalled her too much to turn her back on it. She was fascinated as a child is by a scab that he must keep picking at.
“A swell house, like maybe you lives in.” He seemed to bear her no resentment, but rather to find her the more interesting for it.
“I don’t think we have a great deal worth taking,” she said honestly. “What happened to you then?”
“Well, come the time I got too big, of course. But before that, he got caught and I never seen him again. But he’d taught me a lot o’ things, like how to use all ’is tools, how to do a spot of star glazing—”
“Star gazing?” she said incredulously.
He burst out with rich, dry laughter.
“Bless you. You are a caution. Star glazing. Look.” He got off his seat and went to the window. “Say you wanted to get through that piece of glass. Well, you lean up against it,” he demonstrated. “Put your knife here, near the edge, and press hard but gentle, till the glass cracks. Not so hard it falls out, mind. Then you put brown paper plaster over it so it all sticks, and presto—you can pull the glass out without a whole lot o’ noise. Put your hand in and undo the latch.” He looked back at her in obvious triumph.
“I see. Didn’t you ever get caught?”
“Of course I did! But you expects that, don’t you, occasional like?”
“You didn’t consider taking—a—a—regular job?” She did not want to say an honest job. For some incomprehensible reason, she did not want to hurt his feelings.
“I’d got a ready-made team, ’adn’t I? Got me tools, a good crow, the ’andsomest canary in London, and a good fence as lived in a flash house, nice and comfortable for us, and a few dolly-shops if we hit hard times. What else did I need? What did I want to go and break me back for in some factory or sweatshop for a few pence a day?”
“What are the birds for?”
“Birds?” his face puckered up. “What birds?”
“The crow and the canary?”
He chuckled in genuine delight.
“Oh, I do like talking to you, Miss. You’re a refreshment, you are. A crow is either a quack, a medical man, or in this case, a feller what stands around and gives the warning if anyone comes along as is dangerous, like a jack, or the crushers, or whatever. And a canary is the one who brings your tools for you. If you’ve got any class, you don’t bring your own tools. You goes to the place, takes a good look around, and then your canary brings them when all’s clear. She’s usually a woman. Works better that way. And Bessie was as ’andsome as a summer day, she was.”
“What happened to her?”
“Died of cholera, she did, in ’sixty, the year before the American war. Poor Bessie.”
“How old was she?”
“Eighteen, same as me.”
Younger than Emily, younger than Lily Mitchell. She had lived in the slums, been a carrier of burglar’s tools, and died of disease at age eighteen. It was an existence which mocked Charlotte’s tidy life, with its small difficulties. The only big thing that had ever happened to her was her love of Dominic, and Lily’s death. Everything else was comfortable. Have we mended all the linen? Shall we preserve peaches or apricots? Is the fishmonger’s bill too high? What shall I wear to the party on Friday? Do I really have to be civil to the vicar? And all the while there were people like this funny little man here fighting just to eat. And some of them lost: the smallest and the weakest, the most easily frightened.
“I’m sorry,” was all she could say.
He looked at her closely. “You’re a funny creature,” he said at last.
Before she could react to that,