The Whitechapel Conspiracy - Anne Perry [50]
There was a sudden chill in the room. At the table next to Pitt three men stopped talking. Even now, nearly four years afterwards, it was not done to speak of the Whitechapel murderer. No one made jokes about him, and there were no songs, no music hall references.
“Yer shouldn’t say that!” A gray-haired man was the first to speak, his voice hoarse, his face pasty-white.
“I’ll say wot I want!” Charlie retaliated, the blood high in his cheeks.
Someone else started to laugh, and then stopped just as suddenly.
A stoop-shouldered man stood up and held his glass tankard high. “ ’Ere’s ter nothin’!” he said with a grin. “ ’Ere’s ter terday, ’cos termorrer yer could be dead.” He drank down the entire glass without taking it from his lips to draw breath.
“Shut yer mouth, yer fool!” the man nearest to him hissed, hard anger in his face, his fist clenched on the tabletop.
The man subsided sullenly, his grin vanished. “I never said nothin’!” he snarled. “Our day’s gonna come! An’ soon.”
“Then we’ll see ’ow much sugar they can eat!” his companion said between his teeth.
“Yer say ‘sugar’ again an’ I’ll put yer bleedin’ lights out meself!” the first man threatened, his eyes hot and black, and hideously sober. “I’ll practice on yer, ready fer all them foreigners wot’s poisonin’ this city an’ takin’ wot should be ours.”
This time there was no reply.
Pitt hated everything about this public house—the smell of it, the sudden anger in the air, the defeat, the gleam of gaslight on the battered pewter mugs, the stale sawdust—but he knew it was his job to overhear. He hunched lower down into himself and sipped at the cider.
Half an hour later a couple of street women came in, soliciting business. They looked tired, dirty, overeager, and for a few moments Pitt was as angry as Charlie had been, for the poverty and despair that made women walk alone around streets and public houses trying to sell their bodies to strangers. It was a squalid and often dangerous way to earn a little money. It was also quick, usually certain, and easier to come by than sweatshop or factory labor, and in the short term, far better paid.
There was a burst of laughter, coarse, overloud.
A man at the table next to Pitt was drowning his sorrows, afraid to go home and tell his wife he had lost his job. He was probably drinking the little money he had left, next week’s rent, tomorrow’s food. There was a gray hopelessness in his face.
A youth named Joe was telling his friend Percy how he planned to save enough money to buy his own barrow and start selling brushes farther west, where it was safer and he could make a better profit. One day he would move and find rooms somewhere else, maybe in Kentish Town, or even Pinner.
Pitt stood up to leave. He had learned all he was going to, and none of it was anything Narraway would not already know. The East End was a place of anger and misery where one incident would be enough to set it alight with rebellion. It would be put down by force, and hundreds would die. The rage would be submerged again, until next time. There would be a few articles about it in the newspapers. Politicians would make statements of regret, and then return to the serious business of making sure that everything stayed as much as possible the same.
He trudged back towards Heneagle Street with his shoulders hunched and his head down.
The remarks about sugar had seemed irrelevant to the rest of the conversation, at least on the surface, and yet they had been said with such bitterness of feeling that they stayed in his mind over the next few days. He had realized from snatches of conversation overheard in the various places he called at in the course of his duties just how many people were dependent in one way or another on the three sugar factories in Spitalfields. The money that was earned from them was spent in the shops, in the taverns and on the streets.
Had