The Cater Street Hangman - Anne Perry [88]
“No, not many,” he answered. “It’s as often tragic, pitiful, or even funny, as it is violent. Most people would prefer to serve their sentences and stay alive. The punishments for violence are too savage to be taken lightly. Murder is a hanging offence.”
“Funny?” she said incredulously.
He sat sideways on the arm of one of the chairs. “How do you suppose people stay alive, in the rookeries, without a sense of humour? Without a rather bitter notion of the ludicrous, without wit, one could drown in it. You wouldn’t understand the costermonger, the prostitutes, the dolly-shop owners, but if you did, you’d find them funny sometimes: savage, giving no quarter and expecting none, inventive, greedy, but often funny as well. That’s the sort of world they live in. The weak and the disloyal die.”
“What about the sick, the orphaned, the old?” she demanded. “How can you regard that with humour!”
“They die, just as they often do even at your end of society,” he replied. “Their deaths are different, that’s all. But what happens to a divorced woman in your world, or one who has an illegitimate child, or a woman whose husband dies or can’t meet the bills? He’s politely driven to ruin, and often suicide. As far as you’re concerned, he or she is ruined from the day of their disgrace. You no longer see them in the street. You no longer call on them in the afternoons. There is no possibility of work, of marriage for the daughters, no credit with tradesmen. It’s a different kind of death, but we usually see the end of it, all the same.”
There was nothing to say to him. She would like to have hated him, to have denied it all, or justified it, but she knew inside her it was true. Little bits of memory returned, people whose names were not to be mentioned anymore, people one suddenly did not see again.
He put his hand out and touched her arm gently. She could feel the warmth of him.
“I’m sorry, Charlotte. I had no right to say that as if it were your fault, as if you were part of it willingly or consciously.”
“That doesn’t alter it though, does it?” she said bleakly.
“No.”
“Tell me about some of the things that are funny. I think I need to know.”
He leaned back, taking his hand away. She felt a coldness from the move. She would have expected to find his touch offensive; it surprised her that she did not.
He smiled a little wryly. “You met Willie at the police station?”
Involuntarily she smiled also. She recalled the thin face, the friendly mixture of interest and contempt for her ignorance.
“Yes; yes, I imagine he could tell a few colourful stories.”
“Hundreds, some of them even true. I remember one he told me about a costermonger family, and a long and picturesque revenge against a shofulman—”
“A what?”
“A passer of forged money. And Belle—I was going to say you would like Belle, but she’s a prostitute—”
“I might still be capable of liking her,” Charlotte replied, then wondered if she had committed herself too rashly. “Perhaps. . . . ”
His face softened in amusement. “Belle came from Bournemouth. Her parents were respectable but extremely poor, in service in a middle-class house. Belle was seduced—I understand with more force than charm—by the son of the house, and as a result turned out. She was henceforth marked as soiled. Naturally it was never considered that he should marry her. She came to London and discovered she was pregnant. To begin with she worked as a seamstress, sewing shirts—collars and wristbands stitched, six buttonholes, four rows of stitching down the front, for two and a half pence each. Do you sew, Charlotte? Do you know how long it takes to make a shirt? Do you do household accounts? Do you know what two and a half pence will buy?
“She tried the workhouse, but was turned away because she did not have an official admittance order. At that point she was propositioned by a gentleman not old enough to be rich enough to make an advantageous marriage,