‘But – that’s wonderful,’ he said, a quick smile spreading across his face, restoring to him, briefly, a welcome look of life. ‘And you do this every day?’
I was at the window now, surveying the climb back down. ‘Mostly. Sometimes I just pretend to be lost and then pick the pocket of the gentleman who helps me.’
‘And the things you take – purses, jewellery – you deliver them home to your mother?’
‘My mother is dead.’
‘An orphan,’ he said reverently. ‘I have read books about them.’
‘No, not an orphan. My father is away for a time, but he is going to send for me as soon as he’s settled.’ I hoisted myself onto the sill.
‘Don’t go,’ said the boy. ‘Not yet.’
‘I have to.’
‘Then come again – please. Say you will?’
I hesitated. To agree, I knew, would be foolish: this was not an area that a young girl without a chaperone would go unnoticed for long, and the policeman at the end of the street knew me now. He might not have had a chance to see my face, but he had already given chase and the next time I might not be so lucky. But then, that food – I’d never tasted anything like it. And those shelves of toys and wonders …
‘Take this,’ said Pale Joe, holding the thaumatrope towards me. ‘It’s yours. And next time you come, I promise, I’ll show you something far, far better.’
And that is how I came to meet Pale Joe and he became my secret, just as surely as I became his.
There has been a shift in the house’s temperament. Something of importance has happened while I was thinking of my old friend Pale Joe. Sure enough, Jack is in the hallway, a look upon his face just like the cat that got the cream. It does not take me long to realise why. He is standing in front of the hiding hole, its concealed panel wide open.
He has gone off now at a trot, back to his room in order to fetch his torch, I imagine. Despite telling Rosalind Wheeler that he would not enter the house before Saturday, I understand curiosity and its demands and have no doubt that he has plans to search every square inch of the hiding hole, every groove within the boards, in the hope that he might find the diamond lurking. He won’t. It isn’t there. But all truths must not be told at all times. It will do him no harm to search. I rather like him when frustration makes him bearish.
I am going to leave him to it and wait for him in the malt house. I have other things to think about, like Elodie Winslow’s visit. There was something familiar in her bearing when she was here this afternoon. I couldn’t place it at first, but I have since realised what it was. When she entered the house, as she walked about its rooms, she let out a sigh that no one else but I would have been able to detect, and I saw upon her face a look of satisfaction that could almost be termed completeness. It reminded me of Edward. It is the same way that he looked when we first came to this house.
But Edward had a reason to feel such strong attachment. He was tethered to this place when just a boy, by his night of terror in the nearby fields. Why is Elodie Winslow here? What is her connection to Birchwood Manor?
I hope that she comes back. I wish it with a fervency that I have not felt in years. I begin to understand at last how it must have been for Pale Joe that first day, when he promised to show me something wonderful if I would only agree to return. One becomes rather desperate for visitors, when one has lost the power to visit.
After Edward, Pale Joe is the person whom I miss most in this limbo of mine. I used to think of him a lot and wonder what became of him, for he was a special person; he had been poorly for some time when I met him and his life of isolation in that room of untouched treasures made him far more interested than most in the world beyond his window. Everything that Pale Joe knew he had learned from books, and thus there was a lot he did not understand about the way things worked. He could not comprehend when I told him about the poky damp rooms that I had shared with my father in the shadow of St Anne’s; the communal privy and the toothless old woman who cleaned it out in exchange for leftover cinders; what happened to Lily Millington perhaps saddest of all. He wanted to know why people would choose to live in such a way and was forever asking me to tell him stories of the London that I knew, the alleyways of Covent Garden, the dark areas of commerce below the bridges along the Thames, the infants with no parents. He wanted to hear especially about the babies who had come to live with Mrs Mack, and his eyes would fill with tears when I told him of those unlucky little ones who just weren’t strong enough for this world.
I wonder what he thought when I disappeared so completely from his life. Did he look for me? Not at first, but eventually, when more time passed than could be explained away with logic? Did he doubt and ask questions or did he believe the worst? Pale Joe was the same age that I was, born in 1844; if he lived into old age, he would have been eighty-seven years old when Leonard’s book was published. Being such an avid reader – we read together often, up there in his attic bedroom, the two of us sitting shoulder to shoulder in his white linen nest – he was always aware of what was being published and when; he was a lover of art, too, a passion acquired from his father, whose house on Lincoln’s Inn Fields was filled with Turners. Yes, I feel sure that Pale Joe would have read Leonard’s book. What did he make of its theories, I wonder? Did he believe me a faithless jewel thief who fled to a better life in America?
Pale Joe certainly knew me capable of thievery. He knew me better than Edward in some respects. We had met, after all, when I was mid-flight from a policeman, and from the start he had been filled with questions about Mrs Mack and her enterprise, delighting in my tales of Little Girl Lost and Little Girl Passenger and, as time went on, Theatre-Going Lady, encouraging me to tell him my stories, as if they described great feats of derring-do.
Pale Joe knew, too, that I had resolved that if my father did not send for me, I would travel to America and find him. For although Jeremiah delivered regular reports, standing importantly in Mrs Mack’s parlour as she read out letters in which my father described his efforts to remake himself and encouraged me to listen to Mrs Mack and to do as she bade me, I was always concerned that there was something I was not being told; for if my father’s new life was progressing as his letters said, then why did he continue to insist that I should not yet join him?
But later Pale Joe knew that I also loved Edward. Indeed, it was he who saw it first. I can still remember the night, on the evening of the Royal Academy exhibition of 1861, when Edward invited me to see the La Belle painting unveiled, and afterwards I went to Pale Joe’s window. I have had much time since to reflect upon Pale Joe’s words that evening, after I gave him my report. ‘You are in love,’ he said, ‘for that is exactly how love feels. It is the lifting of a mask, the revealing of one’s true self to another, and the forced acceptance, the awful awareness, that the other person may never feel the same way.’
He was wise about love, Pale Joe, for a boy who rarely left his bower. His mother was always encouraging him to attend Society dances so that he could meet London’s eligible young debutantes, and many times, as I bade him farewell, I left him to dress in his black-and-white suit for this dinner or that. I used to think about him as I hurried back along the laneways towards Covent Garden, my pale, elegant friend with his limp and his kind heart, who had grown tall in the five years since we’d met, and handsome; and I pictured the two of us as if from above, going about our parallel lives in the one great city.