The Body at the Tower

Sixteen





Her final stop this evening was Peter Jenkins’s cellar. As she picked her way through the stinking cesspools of Bermondsey, the air grew thicker and more humid, coating her throat with dust. The weather-beaten door was slightly ajar tonight, and no one answered her knock. She rapped again, then pushed the door open. “Hello?”

No reply. Inside was still and quiet, sticky and fetid. She let her eyes adjust to the dim light before advancing. Still nobody. She made her way to the cellar hatch, half-holding her breath. The hatch was already propped open and she stared down for a moment into the cellar’s murky depths. “Jenkins? You there?”

Again, no reply. With a sigh, she prepared to climb down the rotting ladder. She hoped that this would be the last time. The Academy should surely help Jenkins’s father meet the cost of clean, safe lodgings. Her foot was on the top rung when somebody shrieked in her ear, “Get out of my house!”

“Gah!” Mary jumped, nearly tumbling down the ladder. Something swiped at her face – something foul and prickly – and she batted it away, spitting in disgust. It was the straw end of a broom.

As it clattered to the floor, she saw the hunchbacked old woman who’d opened the door to her last time. She was clearly terrified and now she flew at Mary, gnarled claws seeking to tear out her eyes. “Get out! Get out!”

“I knocked!” shouted Mary, twisting away from those cold, crooked fingers. “I’m here to see Jenkins!”

“Get! I ain’t got naught to steal, nohow!”

“I’m not here to steal! Nobody answered when I knocked!”

Eventually, the old woman stopped her feeble attack, exhausted. “Young man,” she croaked, a terrible, helpless expression on her face, “I ain’t got nothing. You see for yourself. There ain’t nothing for to take.”

Mary shook her head. “I’m not a thief,” she said again, enunciating clearly. “I’m here to see Peter Jenkins.”

“Eh?”

“Peter Jenkins!” shouted Mary. She pointed to the cellar. “The boy!”

The old woman shook her head. “Ain’t nobody lives down there, lad.”

“Peter Jenkins lives there,” insisted Mary, “with his family.”

The old woman shook her head again. “The lad Jenkins moved out, yesterday morn. Took the babies with him.”

“Where did he go?”

The woman shrugged. “Somewhere better, I suppose. Ain’t much worse out there.”

Mary privately agreed. “You don’t know where he went? Was it nearby?”

“He just upped and went. Didn’t say nothing.”

That couldn’t possibly be good news. Yet… “What about his father? Did he go, too?”

“His pa?” The woman looked at Mary, confused. But her eyes were clear and alert, and her mind certainly didn’t seem to be wandering. “He ain’t got no pa.”

“Yes, he has. He’s a joiner or something, isn’t he?”

She shook her head. “He ain’t nothing. Jimmy Jenkins been dead these past two years.”

Friday, 8 July

Coral Street, Lambeth

Despite her concern for Peter Jenkins, Mary slept better that night than she had since arriving at Miss Phlox’s. It was a combination, she decided, of exhaustion and experience. Even Rogers’s bed-shaking snores hadn’t spoiled her rest. Once he’d left the room, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stretched sore muscles. Did she have time for a wash? She investigated the amount of fresh water in the jug by the washstand and had just decided she did when the door banged open and somebody staggered into the narrow room. It was Winnie, the maid. She was lugging a mop and bucket.

At the sight of Mary, Winnie’s eyes widened and she blushed fiercely. “P-pardon,” she managed to say after a few seconds. “I thought – I didn’t – I never knew you was in here. You ain’t come in for a couple nights.”

Mary shrugged. “Sometimes I stay with friends.”

Winnie nodded. She was staring at Mary again, in that fixed way of hers, and showed no signs of leaving.

Mary began to pull on her boots. Apparently, any sort of wash would have to wait.

“Where?”

“What d’you mean, ‘Where’?”

Winnie’s gaze was fixed on the floor, which she mopped with careful, vigorous strokes. “Where do your friends live? Limehouse? Poplar?”

It was hardly a subtle approach; everyone knew that east London had significant south Asian and south-east Asian populations. Mary had spent all week dreading this moment. But now that Winnie had finally found the courage to ask, however clumsily, it seemed foolish to dissemble. “No,” she said. “In St John’s Wood.” Winnie’s expression – what she could see of it – was carefully still. “They’re not Chinese, although my father was.”

Winnie’s head snapped up, delight stretching her normally downturned features into an eager smile. A rapid-fire string of questions, all in Cantonese, poured from her lips.

This was the bit Mary hated, and no small part of the reason she always dodged questions about her race. “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t understand you.”

Winnie’s mouth fell open in an expression of dismay so foolish it was difficult not to smile. “You don’t understand your own language?”

“No,” said Mary firmly. She had no intention of entering into explanation or apology.

“But your father – he did not teach you?”

“He’s dead.”

“And your mother…?”

“Dead. And a gwei lo.” That was about all the Cantonese she knew. And she’d got the inflection wrong.

“Ohhh…”

The pity in Winnie’s voice was both moving and irksome, and Mary was glad for a reason to leave. She shrugged on her jacket and said, “I mayn’t be back tonight.” The last thing she wanted was Winnie creating an opportunity to question her further.

She stalked from the lodging-house in a bitter mood. People were so damned nosy, so obsessively intent on categorizing and classifying. She would for ever be plagued by that question or variations thereon, and there would never be a satisfactory way to answer. If she was untruthful, it was a denial of her blood. If she met the question directly, she became an object of pity or a lesser species; a mongrel. The only reasonable solution was to do the very thing she’d done for years: keep her head down, often literally, and avoid the issue entirely.

For the thousandth time, she wondered what her father would have done. He’d been a brave man, a clever man, highly regarded in their little community. Mary had learned, just the previous year, that he’d perished trying to uncover the truth. Ironically, he was so lost she didn’t even know what about. But when she’d made that limited, all-transforming discovery, it had affirmed her resolve to work for the Agency.

To uncover truths.

To serve the truth.

To live a life worthy of her father’s approval.

The jade pendant he’d left for her – the only thing that had survived the fire at the Lascars’ refuge, and her sole memento of childhood – was curled safely in a drawer at the Academy. It was her most precious belonging. There still remained the problem of how to reconcile that pendant, a talisman of her Chinese heritage, with her equally powerful desire to bury entirely the question of her race. But she would have time enough to think of that once she was Mary, just Mary, again.