Back to London.
London in 1925 was a city on the verge of change. In Stoke Newington the day I arrived the mayor installed a new horse trough for passing beasts to drink at, and within a few hours of its ceremonial opening it was struck by a car that lost control on the corner. Everyone knew that change was coming, but as no one quite knew what shape that change would be, society seemed to wobble, balancing on a precipice, the old clinging on with one hand as the new pushed and shoved with the other. Costermongers fought with grocers, Labour with Liberal, while the Tories stayed aloof, reluctantly resigned to the reforms that were inevitable but tactfully hoping their rivals would push through the most controversial measures. Universal suffrage was the banner of the moment, as women who’d fought for political equality now turned their attention to social equality–the right to smoke, drink and party like any man about town. It was everything that my grandmother Constance would not have approved of, but then she had never really approved of anything since the 1870s.
It was easy for a boy to pass through these streets. Packs of infant thieves still abounded in the alleys and outside the brothels around King’s Cross, and Holborn, for all its aspirant imperial grandeur, was as yet all fa?ade and no belly. I moved with confidence, eyed up by the coppers but not stopped, heading deeper into the city, in search of the Cronus Club. The coal-soaked air turned white stone black; even the newer buildings were already scrawled with initials and messages scraped into the dirt. But there was the passage where the Cronus Club had been, where I had first met Virginia that warm summer’s day at the height of the Blitz, and we had talked of time and protocol, and lounged between the dust sheets. There the door, and there no sign. Not a brass plaque. Nothing at all.
I knocked anyway.
A maid in a stiff white apron and hat that was three parts frill to one part headpiece answered.
“Yeah?” she demanded. “What you want?”
I lied instinctively. “Do you buy oranges?” I asked.
“What? No! Push off!”
“Please, ma’am,” I blurted. “Finest Cronus oranges.”
“Piss off, you little tyke,” she retorted and, for good measure, gave me a half-hearted prod with her foot as she slammed the door shut in my face.
I stood, stunned, in the street, staring at nothing.
The Cronus Club was gone. I looked frantically for signs, for clues, messages left in iron, in stone, hints in any form as to where it could be–nothing. Turning wildly in the street I looked up for a notch in a gutter, for any smear of a suggestion, and saw a curtain twitch overhead.
My heart froze.
But of course.
Stupid stupid stupid.
Of course, even if you’d destroyed it, you’d leave watchers on the Cronus Club to see who came out of the woodwork.
Well, I’d come out of the woodwork all right, with the intelligence of the idiot child I appeared to be.
I didn’t try to fight, didn’t try to see who was looking at me from behind the grubby brown curtain overhead. I simply put my head down and ran.
Chapter 60
I had no choice.
I slunk back to Berwick.
Back to Hulne House, back to Patrick and Harriet, to Rory and Constance. Back to where I’d come from, back where it all began.
I arrived, four days after I’d left, grimy, tired, bedraggled. A thief child who’d run away and found nowhere to run to. Harriet wept when she saw me, held me close and rocked me in her arms, sobbed until my clothes were damp with it. Patrick took me out the back and gave me the worst hiding of my life. Then, he dragged me up to the house and made me apologise, still bleeding, to Mr Hulne and all the family, who told me I was very lucky that I wasn’t being thrown out entirely, to starve like the little brat I was, and that from now on I would have to work every day and every night until I’d made it up to them, nasty, ungrateful child that I was.
I took my beating and humiliation in silence. I had no choice. The luxury, the lifeline of my last few lives had been pulled out from beneath my feet. I was six years old. I was seven hundred and fifty. I was being hunted.