Gussie’s suggestion that a couple of farm boys couldn’t look after themselves in London didn’t bother Hope, but it did trigger the memory of her father staggering in soaking wet and sick, trying to explain the horror he’d experienced in Bristol. All at once she realized that the rooming house where he’d caught the disease which killed him and her mother had probably been in Lewins Mead.
Suddenly she was afraid. Not so much of sickness, though she knew there was plenty of that around, especially among the Irish people who arrived hollow-eyed and starving on every ship out of famine-ridden Ireland. But she had been infected by the other evil her father was so shocked by – theft.
Her parents had always been scrupulously honest. Her father wouldn’t even have helped himself to a cabbage or a few potatoes while working on a farm. She knew they would spin in their graves if they were aware of where she was living and what she’d done today.
In her first week or two in Lewins Mead she had been every bit as horrified by the place as her father had been. She used to cry herself to sleep at night, hating Albert because of what he’d done to her. But in front of Gussie and Betsy she had to put a brave face on it; after all, if it hadn’t been for them she would have no roof over her head.
Nell always used to say, ‘You can get used to anything,’ and she was right. The conditions she lived under, wearing the same clothes day in, day out, and never knowing where the next meal was coming from – she’d got used to all of it.
Before long Betsy and Gussie became her new family, and she’d embraced their views and standards, putting aside those she’d been brought up with.
But now, as images of her parents and her brothers and sisters kept coming to her thick and fast, she was ashamed of losing her old values. While it was right and good to show affection and loyalty to people who had helped her when she most needed it, she should never have lost sight of who
she
was, or stopped listening to her conscience.
Tears pricked at her eyelids as she remembered how cherished she’d been as a child. As the baby of the family she’d been better fed, dressed and educated than her siblings. Every one of them had been proud that she could read and write so well, and Nell had often said that their parents had purposely kept her at her lessons longer in the hope that it would give her chances they’d never had.
Yet she’d become a common thief!
The frozen fields they were walking through, the woods in the distance, even the astringent cold wind were further reminders of home. She could smell wood smoke and cow pats, and hear crows cawing in the bare trees. Up on the hill before her she could see a church spire, and that evoked an image of the Reverend Gosling and his fiery sermons on sin.
Betsy stopped grumbling about the cold as they reached the woods. Gussie became excited at the abundance of fuel for their fire littering the ground. But Hope was so choked up with feelings of shame she couldn’t even feel any triumph that it had been her idea to come out here. She began filling her sack quickly and silently, all the while reproaching herself.
It wasn’t her fault she had to leave Briargate, or that she ended up in Lewins Mead, but she knew in her heart that she hadn’t tried very hard to get herself out of it.
Back in early January when her bruises had begun to fade, she had tried to find respectable work. She’d asked in shops, at inns, even a couple of laundries. But the refusals got her down, and it was far less daunting to go scavenging with Gussie and Betsy. It was a lark doing the rounds of warehouses, factories and workshops to search amongst their rubbish for stuff they could sell to the marine shops.
She liked picking up the money people threw to Gussie when he did his mimes outside the theatre. She even enjoyed distracting shopkeepers while Betsy and Gussie stole things. Only a couple of days ago Gussie had been talking about the rich pickings that could be found in the mud at low tide along the river Avon. Scavengers who worked there were called ‘mud larks’, and Hope could barely wait for the warmer weather to become one of them. A year ago, if anyone had suggested that she might seriously intend to make a living wading in filthy mud she would have been appalled.
But the unpalatable truth was that she’d allowed herself to become as apathetic as everyone else in Lewins Mead. She slept till late in the morning, roamed the streets rather than looking for real work, and even worse, she had begun to rely on having a few glasses of gin each day because it blocked out the sordid reality of her new life.
Ignorance and apathy were the true evils of Lewins Mead. While it might be said the residents lived under conditions which made it almost impossible to keep themselves clean and healthy, few of them ever attempted it, or even saw that it was desirable. Thieving and prostitution were the main occupations, and the money earned went on drink. Children were pushed out on to the streets to steal or beg almost as soon as they could walk and no one saw anything wrong in it.
But Hope couldn’t claim ignorance as an excuse for anything. She knew the difference between right and wrong, she had been educated and had a great many skills that none of her neighbours had. She might have fallen into this pit through no fault of her own, but now she’d got to find a way out of it. If she didn’t she’d end up in prison, or selling her body until it was too diseased for anyone to want it.
Daylight was fading and the wind was growing keener as the three friends made their way home with heavy sacks of wood over their shoulders. Hope had found some potatoes missed by a farmer in his field, and miraculously they hadn’t become blackened by frost.
‘We could sell one of the bags of wood and get enough for a couple of gins each,’ Betsy said as they reached the town.
‘It’s going to snow, so we’ll need the wood,’ Hope said sharply. ‘Gin won’t keep us warm.’
‘Hark at you!’ Betsy jeered. ‘So you think you’re in charge now you’ve cracked thieving?’
Hope hesitated before replying. She knew if she voiced all the thoughts she’d had this afternoon her friends would take it as a condemnation of their way of life. ‘I haven’t cracked it,’ she said carefully. ‘And I know I daren’t try it again. I’m going to get some real work.’
‘There ain’t no work for people like us,’ Betsy replied. ‘You should’ve seen that by now.’
Hope had half-expected that reaction. ‘Then I’ll collect wood and sell it,’ she retorted.
‘You’ll never be able to collect enough to sell without a barrow,’ Gussie said, though he looked at her with sympathy, not scorn. ‘But I never thought you was cut out fer thievin’ anyways.’
A couple of hours later, back in the room with the fire blazing and the potatoes baking around the edges, Hope attempted tactfully to explain more fully how she felt. As she had expected, Betsy bridled a bit, but Gussie came down on Hope’s side.
‘I’d hate it if you ended up a dollymop,’ he agreed, using the name used by the locals for a prostitute. ‘So would Betsy, she wouldn’t do that even if she were starving.’
‘I might,’ Betsy said airily. ‘If the cove was young, rich and good to me.’
Hope laughed, for Betsy always liked to have the last word, and more often than not she argued just for the sport of it. ‘If a man like that came along I’d want to marry him, not just lie with him,’ Hope said. ‘But that isn’t going to happen, not when I look like this!’
Gussie looked at her appraisingly. ‘You’re beautiful, Hope,’ he said, clearly not seeing the tangled hair or how shabby and dirty her grey dress had become. ‘So is Betsy. You could both get anyone if you put your mind to it.’
‘You charmer,’ Hope smiled. ‘But it isn’t any good wishing for a man to whisk me off to a nice home with good food on the table. I’ve got to work my way to something better.’
It snowed that night and all the next day. Mole, Shanks and their women, Josie and Lil, stayed in too, all of them huddling around the fire. They played cards, drank the bottle of cheap rum Mole had brought in, argued and told stories.
Hope was glad enough of the shelter from the cold, but she wasn’t pleased to be forced to spend so much time with the four night-time lodgers. Mole and Shanks were crude, loud-mouthed thugs who didn’t hold conversations, they gave monologues on villainy. She had realized weeks ago that Josie and Lil were dollymops who handed over their earnings to their men. The four of them were everything she was nervous of in Lewins Mead.
Mole, a short, squat fellow with dark eyes set very close together beneath thick black eyebrows, got his nickname because he had been a miner. Shanks was tall and thin, with an ugly scar down his right cheek. He came from Dublin, and the only attractive thing about him was his Irish accent. Josie and Lil reminded Hope of tripe, white, flaccid and with nothing to recommend them. They were dull-eyed and slow-witted, their pale, thin faces registering no emotion. All four had quite decent clothes by the standards of Lamb Lane, but the dirt engrained in their skin, the lack of expression in their eyes and the constant barrage of profanity and gutter cant were repellent.
By five in the afternoon Hope thought that this was a taste of what being in a prison cell must be like, crowded together with six other people, breathing putrid air, assaulted by noxious smells of unwashed bodies and forced to endure the boastings of men who were human parasites. She had spent much of the day gazing out of the tiny window, for at least the snow had made the view of rooftops pretty and clean. But now it was dark she was forced to return to her pile of sacks, and in the light of just two candles and the fire, the four lodgers didn’t just look unattractive, but menacing too.
She sensed Gussie and Betsy were not happy either to have this company thrust upon them. Betsy called the lodgers friends but that meant she and Gussie knew them well, not that they liked them. They needed the regular lodging money to pay the three shillings a week rent on the room, and until today the lodgers had always cleared out by ten or eleven in the morning and didn’t return until late at night.
The enforced imprisonment at least had the effect of sharpening Hope’s conviction that she must find a way of getting out of Lewins Mead permanently. Yet as she looked at Betsy and Gussie’s faces softened by the candlelight she felt a pang of sorrow that this would almost certainly mean leaving them behind.
‘Whatcha’ thinking about?’ Gussie asked quietly, almost as if he’d tuned into her thoughts.
‘Finding work,’ she whispered back, knowing if one of the lodgers was to hear her they’d have plenty to say on the subject, and nothing she would want to hear.
‘You could go down to the Ragged School,’ Gussie suggested. ‘There’s a cove called Mr Phelps there what teaches. He might be able to help you. They say he’s a decent sort.’
Hope had also heard that a preacher’s daughter called Miss Carpenter had taken over an old hall in St James’s Back to teach the waifs and strays of Lewins Mead to read and write. She was reputed to be passionate about giving the children of the rookery a chance in life. Yet until today Hope had not been interested enough to find out more about her.
‘Sounds like you’ve put your nose around the door there,’ she said teasingly. Gussie was something of an enigma. Outwardly he appeared as cunning, cocksure and hard-headed as Mole and Shanks, but behind that lay a far more sensitive, kindly soul. Hope sensed that something appalling had happened to him at a young age, probably at the farm he was sent to work on, for he always clammed up when she asked him questions about it. He had a tender streak that a life on the streets hadn’t killed off, and he also had his own moral code which prevented him from stealing from those he considered ‘his own’.
‘Yeah, I’ve bin in there a few times,’ he sighed. ‘I wanted a bit of book learning, but it ain’t fer me. The kids wot goes there are young. I can’t be doin’ wif goin’ every day neither.’
‘They give lessons at night, don’t they?’ Hope asked. ‘You could go then.’
Gussie shrugged. ‘I thought about that an’ all, but it would’ve meant leavin’ Betsy on her own. She ain’t safe wivout me, nor you neither.’
That explanation made a lump come up in Hope’s throat for she knew what Gussie was afraid of: what people called ‘White Slavers’, who forced young girls into prostitution.
There were countless men in Lewins Mead, Mole and Shanks included, who lived off their women’s earnings as prostitutes. Doubtless many of these women had been pushed or even forced into it by their men too. But they weren’t to be feared, Betsy knew them all and would not be taken in by any of them.
The White Slavers were very different. They were seemingly respectable, well-dressed and presumably charming, judging by the number of young girls who had just disappeared after being seen talking to a stranger. There was a woman working in the Drawbridge, an ale house on the quay frequented by sailors, who had been captured like this and taken to a brothel in London. Her story, and it was verified by the police who raided the brothel after she was thrown out because she was pregnant, was that a smart-looking man had bought her a drink which she thought must have been drugged. She came round to find herself gagged and tied up in a carriage.
The brothel she ended up in had a wealthy clientele who wanted unspeakable perversions, not a quick release in an alley. Unwilling girls were beaten or starved if they didn’t comply; some were dosed with laudanum. But willing or unwilling, the girls received none of the money they earned, and escape was impossible for they were never allowed out and the doors were kept locked.
The people who ran the brothel were caught and sent to prison, but it was thought there were hundreds of other places just like it in London and almost certainly in other big cities too. Every now and then there would be articles about it in the newspapers, a list of names of girls who had gone missing, but it was generally thought that the police didn’t strenuously investigate because the men who used these brothels were rich and powerful.
Betsy had had her fingers burned once already. She had told Hope about the ordeal she’d gone through with a ship’s captain who had offered her five pounds for her virginity. She had said with her customary bluntness that he was ‘hung like a donkey and he weren’t satisfied with taking me cherry, he buggered me an’ all’. She said she left the inn he’d taken her to bleeding and hardly able to walk, and vowed that even if someone was to offer her a hundred pounds she couldn’t go through that agony again.