I was still coming to understand exactly who ‘us’ was and just what Lily Millington and the others did for work. They were good at it, I suppose, and that’s the point. I knew only that it involved hours of loitering, occasional instances when I was instructed to wait while Lily mingled briefly with the crowd, and then, sometimes, a hot-cheeked flight – from whom, I was not sure – through a tangle of cluttered lanes.
Some days, though, were different. From the moment that we set out from Mrs Mack’s place, Lily Millington would be jumpier than usual, like a skinny cat that does not take kindly to petting. On such occasions, she would find me a spot to stand at the markets and make me promise to wait for her. ‘Don’t you go nowhere, you hear? And don’t talk to nobody. Lily’ll be back for you soon.’ Where she went then, I did not know, only that she was always gone longer than usual, and often returned with a grim, secretive expression on her face.
It was on just such a day that I was approached by the man in the black coat. I’d been waiting for what felt to me then like an eternity and, growing weary, had wandered from the spot where Lily had left me, to crouch instead against a brick wall. I was half-watching a shop girl sell roses and didn’t notice the man in the black coat until he was right above me. His voice made me startle: ‘Well, now, what have we here?’ He reached down to take my chin roughly in his hand and turned my face towards him, eyes narrowing as he carried out his inspection. ‘What’s your name then, girl? Who’s your father?’
I was about to answer, when Lily appeared, like a flash of light, to stand between us.
‘There you are,’ she said, grabbing my arm in her strong, skinny fingers; ‘I’ve been looking all over for you. Ma’s waiting on those eggs. It’s time we got them home.’
Before there was time for me to utter so much as a sneeze, Lily yanked me after her and we were zig-zagging through the alleyways.
Not until just before the Seven Dials did she finally stop. She spun me around to face her, her cheeks blotchy red. ‘Did you tell him anything?’ she said. ‘That man?’
I shook my head.
‘You sure about that?’
‘He wanted to know my name.’
‘Did you tell him?’
Again I shook my head.
Lily Millington put both of her hands on my shoulders, which were heaving still from the effort of running so far, so fast. ‘Never tell nobody your real name, you hear me, Birdie? Never. And certainly not him.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it isn’t safe. Not here. The only way to be safe is to be someone else when you’re out here.’
‘Like an illusion?’
‘Just like that.’
And then she explained to me about the workhouse, for that’s where the man in the black coat was from. ‘If they find out the truth, they’ll lock you up, Birdie, and they’ll never let you out. They’ll make you work until your fingers bleed and flog you for the merest fault. Mrs Mack has her moments, but there’s far worse can happen to the likes of us. A girl I heard of was given sweeping duties. She left a spot of dirt on the floor and they stripped off her clothes and beat her black and blue with a broom. Another lad was strung up in a sack and hung from the rafters for wetting his bed.’
My eyes had begun to sting with tears and Lily’s face became kinder. ‘There, now. No need for the waterworks or I’ll have to thrash you myself. But you must promise me solemn that you’ll never tell no one your real and proper name.’
I swore that I wouldn’t and at last she seemed satisfied. ‘Good.’ She nodded. ‘Then let’s get home.’
We turned the corner into Little White Lion Street, and when the shop selling birds and cages came into view, Lily said, ‘One more thing, while we’re giving undertakings. You’re not to go tattling to Mrs Mack that I left you on your own, all right?’
I promised that I wouldn’t.
‘She has her “special plans” for you, and she’d have my head if she knew what I’d been doing.’
‘What were you doing, Lily?’
She glanced at me and stared hard for a few seconds, and then she leaned close to my ear, so that I could smell the tang of perspiration. ‘I’m saving up,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all very well to work for Mrs Mack, but you’ll never get free if you don’t earn a little for yourself.’
‘Have you been selling things, Lily?’ I was doubtful because she did not carry fruit or fish or flowers like the other traders.
‘In a manner of speaking.’
She never told me more than that, and I never thought to ask. Mrs Mack used to say that Lily Millington had ‘a mouth on her’, but Lily could be tight-lipped when it suited.
I never had the chance to ask her much anyway. I only knew Lily Millington for six weeks before she was killed by a sailor with too much whisky under his belt who didn’t agree the price that she was asking for her services. The irony is not lost on me that I know so little about a girl to whom I tied myself for eternity. Yet she is precious to me, Lily Millington, for she gave me her name: the most valuable thing she had to give.
Although she hadn’t a spare two pennies to rub together, Mrs Mack had a way about her that could almost be described as airs and graces. There was an abiding narrative in her household that the family had once been destined for Better Things, dislodged from their rightful place by an Incident of Cruel Misfortune a couple of generations before.
And so, as befitting a woman of such illustrious lineage, she kept a room at the front of the house that she referred to as her ‘parlour’, and into which she poured every bit of spare money that she possessed. Colourful cushions and mahogany furnishings, skewered butterflies on velvet backings, bell jars flaunting taxidermy squirrels, autographed images of the royal family and a collection of crystal oddments with only the merest cracks.
It was a sacred place and children were most certainly not permitted unless a specific invitation had been issued, which it wasn’t, ever. Indeed, aside from Mrs Mack, the only two people granted entrée into the sanctum were the Captain and Martin. And Mrs Mack’s dog, of course, a boarhound who had come off one of the boats and whom she’d named Grendel, because she had heard the word in a poem sometime and liked it. Mrs Mack doted on the dog with the kind of cooing affection I do not recall ever hearing her bestow upon a human being.
After Grendel, the light of Mrs Mack’s affection fell upon Martin, her son, who was ten years to my seven when I came to live with them at their place on Little White Lion Street. Martin was large for his age – not merely tall but imposing, his presence being of the sort whereby he seemed to occupy more space than was his due. He was a boy of little intelligence and even less kindness who had, however, been gifted with a great deal of natural slyness, an attribute which proved a blessing in that particular time and place as, I dare say, it would now.
I have had much opportunity to wonder over the years whether Martin might have turned out differently had he found himself within another situation. If he had been born into the family of Pale Joe, for instance, would he have become a gentleman of refined tastes and proper decorum? The answer, I am all but certain, is yes, for he would have learned the manners and mask required to survive, and indeed to thrive, in whichever station society determined that he must. This was Martin’s prevailing skill: an innate ability to see which way the wind was blowing and to hoist his sail accordingly.
His conception had apparently been immaculate, for a father was never mentioned. He was only ever referred to, proudly, by Mrs Mack as ‘my boy, Martin’. That she was his mother was as clear as the noses on their matching faces, but where Mrs Mack was a woman of great optimism, Martin tended always towards the negative view of life. He saw losses everywhere and could not receive a gift without wondering at the alternatives he would now be forced to do without. Another trait, it must be said, that served him well in our particular knot of London.