too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
Shortly, reader, you shall experience chronological leaps which may startle the timid. Jane Eyre contains the delightful passage, A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play, thus I likewise embrace abrupt shifts even as I abhor the imminent subject matter.
We arrived in London, Clarke and I, homeless and horridly inexperienced, as coral dawn lit the charred air draped over the centre of the British Empire.
“Oh!” Clarke snatched at me as we crossed a deep wheel gouge, further slowing the already painfully lethargic Chestnut.
I steadied my friend, but said nothing; for never had I fathomed such a sight as passed before me like a parade through the coach window.
Some cities bustle, some meander, I have read; London blazes, and it incinerates. London is the wolf’s maw. From the instant I arrived there, I loved every smouldering inch of it.
A lad hunched against a shoddy dressmaker’s dummy slumbered on, cradled by his faceless companion. The atmosphere was redolent—meat sat piled up to a shop door’s limit of some six feet, the butcher sharpening massive knives before his quarry. Yesterday’s cabbage was crushed underfoot, and tomorrow’s cackling geese were arriving in great crates, ready to kill. So early, the square we passed through ought to have been populated only by spectres. Instead, sounds reverberated from all directions—treble notes from a bamboo flute; the breathy scream of a sardine costermonger; the bass rumble of a carrot vendor, his cart piled with knobby red digits, shouting as his donkey staggered in the slick.
It was not welcoming, but it was galvanising. Arguing with London was useless; she was inexorable, sure as the feral dawn.
“Where are we?” Clarke fretted. “This is nowhere near where my parents live.”
“I haven’t the faintest notion.” Bending, I touched my brow to hers. “Are you ready, though?”
Clarke grinned—an easy grin which made me long to buy her hearty sausage and pastry breakfasts. The carriage halted before a dingy public house with a small paved yard. Clarke stumbled out with her carpetbag and I followed, sharp pinpricks running up and down my legs.
“Thank you,” I called up. Nick sat like a turtle in his shell on his high plank seat. “I hope that one day—”
“Neither of us hope to see t’other again, ye mad child.” He took a long pull from his flask.
“I’m grateful, though. With all my heart, I am.”
“Then let it be fer this advice. I’ve food enough and drink enough to keep what they call a life, but that’s all’s I can say on the subject. Treat yerself better—keep yerself a good girl, and sleep in a bed wi’out interruptions. Can ye manage that?”
“Yes.” I stepped back, passing an arm around Clarke’s horridly small waist. “I can, I promise.”
Nick had already snapped the jangling reins and pulled away—a man who lived not much better than his horse did. Meanwhile, I knew precisely which vice he was warning me against, and in starker detail than he might have imagined; words like virtue and chastity and fallen were lobbed over our heads like so many shuttlecocks at Lowan Bridge, but I had read Mr. Munt’s “love letters,” and so understood the mechanics of the practice.
Some form of employment had to be found, and at once, for when I caught Clarke’s bright green eye and thought of all which could befall her—rough hands against her freckled shoulders, chapped lips at her slim throat—a swell of disgust rose. Becky Clarke, in a way which had not been true since my mother’s sad, soft-edged smile and her cool hand against my cheek, belonged to me.
“First, a celebratory breakfast,” I decided. “The man across the street with the sign for hot ham sandwiches—doesn’t he seem like an expert toaster of cheese and meat?”
“Indeed. And after eating the best ham sandwiches in all of London?”
I lifted my luggage as the smile faded from my face, willing myself not to say, I haven’t the faintest idea.
• • •
Dark days followed, and far darker nights.
After inquiring after lodgings, all priced too dear, we passed the night in the back room of a public house, Clarke’s flaxen hair mingling with the straw strewn across our shared pillow. We passed a night in the spare room of a cottage outside town