My bedchamber contained two maroon damask chairs with a bedraggled green ottoman between, a bed beneath a window overlooking Henrietta Street, and a greying basin with funereal lilies edging the bowl. Secondhand books lay piled along the peeling green-papered walls, and my desk with its pen and ink was tucked in the corner.
The desolate period following Clarke’s departure ended when a cartman whose pocket I picked, rather than whistling for a bobby and thereby bestowing upon me a stint in Newgate (which I was not fascinated enough by to fancy living there), instead gave me two cracked ribs under a dank archway in Whitechapel. As I recovered from this blessing in disguise, I realised destitution was growing tiresome and—selfishness restored—schemed over how best to earn my bread and cheese. Single pages were all I could afford to print, so I tried my hand at “last confessions,” which were the fanciful one-page admissions of the recently executed.
It will surprise no one to learn that I was marvellous at them.
Last confessions were quite a different thing from broadsides and from gallows ballads; with our broadsides’ contents you are familiar, but as for gallows ballads, here is an excerpt from “Mary May,” that you may determine why I did not go in for that line of work:
Before he long the poison took
In agony he cried;
Upon him I in scorn did look,—
At length my brother died.
Since I laughed myself silly over them, I thought it imprudent to write them myself. But oh!—the confessions! The soaring imagination I lent them, the lecherous details, the pathos I could render as if it had been splayed upon a rack before me. I chose my subjects with alacrity and experience; I did not want Samuel Green, who drunkenly bludgeoned a guardsman, but I did want Hezekiah Pepper, a new father who strangled a maiden on the outskirts of St. Giles. The stories were all that mattered—how dark the deed, how deep the despair. Writing them required two to three hours of ink rippling over pages to the tune of my black heartbeats and the street soprano below, who—despite her great rolls of belly fat—reminded me achingly of Clarke.
“Me little one’s off raising ’ell, I shouldn’t wonder.” Tilly ventured to my window to see if she could glimpse Kitty playing amidst the lost violet blooms and the chestnut shells; it was freezing, but Kitty was a reckless, towheaded thing with thick mittens, and no weather could touch her.
I shifted in my chair, wrapped in a brown dressing gown with lace at the collar, sifting through newspapers as the draught of poisoned smoke trickled into my brain.
“You know I’ll buy next time,” I mentioned, regarding her pipe. “If you’re short of chink—”
“Not I, I’m rich as butter.” She winked, adjusting a tatty purple shawl over the friendly spillage of her bosoms. “Nay, it’s . . . we’re nigh out o’ hard up, and I’ve Judge Frost arrivin’.”
My friend Tilly’s speech was thick with local slang, which made me wish I were more fluent, since I rather adored the dialect of society’s underbelly (though I certainly understood hard up meant tobacco). Meanwhile, most of Tilly’s clientele were no more dangerous than horseflies—pimpled youths with sweaty hands, hawkers who had sold their stock of Barcelona nuts in the market below, sad widowers with silver hair; but Judge Frost was what Tilly liked to call a right scaly customer.
I gasped sharply, and Tilly pivoted. “Lord, Jane, you done give me a turn. What’s up, then?”
Folding my lips together, I reread:
WANTED, at Highgate House,——shire. One young lady to see to a nine-year-old ward. Estate recently taken possession of by Mr. Charles Thornfield, heir of the Barbary family, late of the Sikh Wars, whose household requires the services of a qualified governess. Compensation——— pounds per annum with room and board, apply care of Mr. S. Singh, with references.
“Ye look like someone just slapped ye in the quim with a fish.”
I restored myself to my full senses with a hard shiver. “It’s nothing. But . . . I used to live there, you see those words—Highgate House. They want a governess.”