Chapter 2 #2
“The French call this dish pain perdu—lost bread,” Joshua said as Holly stared intently at the bowl of lump sugar. “Probably because stale bread works as well as fresh. Child, what are you about?”
“Mama said one lump, so I’m looking for the biggest one. That’s fair.”
“You may have my lump as well,” Joshua said, then realized he’d just countermanded a maternal order, which the slowest step-papa soon learned he was never to do. “Provided your mother agrees.”
“Mama?”
“You may have the top two lumps in the bowl if you thank Mr. Penrose for sharing.”
“Thank you, Mr. Penrose, and happy Christmas too!” The wonder in Holly’s eyes as she pinched the lumps to sugar dust and sprinkled them on her toast made Joshua uncomfortable.
“You’re not having any sugar?” he asked Mrs. Burdette.
“I prefer mine plain.” She also preferred to consume her toast in tiny, savored bites, eaten in a slow progression.
Not simply in want of coin, then, but destitute. She also consumed her weak tea plain—the leaves were probably reused from last night’s pot—and she ate only one strip of bacon, while serving two to the girl and three to Joshua.
Even a confidence trickster deserved adequate tucker. Joshua put his third strip of bacon on her plate.
“I am not that fond of bacon,” he said, “but good food shouldn’t—”
“Go to waste!” Holly bellowed.
“Thank you.”
Something about the genuine humility of Mrs. Burdette’s reply left Joshua thinking that she was indeed a lady fallen on hard times. Very hard, if a born lady turned confidence trickster.
The rest of the meal passed in the sort of busy quiet that springs up when hungry people are intent on dispatching food.
“What’s for lunch?” Holly asked when her plate had not a morsel left upon it. “Should I look in the conservatory for more eggs?”
“Eggs in the conservatory?” Grandpapa’s conservatory was not a henhouse.
“Mrs. Bennifer keeps her hens in our conservatory when she goes to the country for the holidays,” Mrs. Burdette explained.
“There’s enough light that the hens do occasionally lay, and we keep the eggs in exchange for minding the biddies.
We found two eggs yesterday, Holly, so today we aren’t likely to find any. ”
Mrs. Burdette had made a meal out of two eggs, a dash of milk, and some stale bread.
Holly set her plate aside. “I shall look anyway. Christmas is the season of miracles. I might find a golden egg!”
“Then bundle up first, and don’t let Heifer follow you in. The hens pick on him terribly.”
“May-I-be-excused-and-thank-you-for-breakfast, Mama.” Holly was off the bench and out the door, her wings once more pressed into service like a shawl.
“Her manners are a work in progress.” Mrs. Burdette rose and collected Holly’s dishes and utensils. “A very slow work in progress some days. She wants to find eggs to impress you, but I’m afraid…”
Mrs. Burdette paused at the sink, her back to Joshua. For him to sit at the table while she labored at the sink was… Maureen would have disapproved.
Joshua rose and collected the rest of the dishes. “You are afraid?”
“Before I could procure comestibles for today’s lunch, I’d have to sell something, or somebody would have to pay me for services rendered—several customers are past due—and with the snow, I don’t see that happening.
I’ve maybe three slices of bread left, thin slices at that, and a bit of cheese, but not much else in the larder. ”
She worked as she spoke, putting dishes into the lukewarm water Holly had used to wash her hands, pouring a bit of hot water into the skillets still on the stove.
“I can wash,” Joshua said. “One doesn’t forget how. You are telling me the food has run out?”
“Very nearly. Last winter by about February we were in the same condition. I am an ineffective debt collector, and to sell Edwin’s things is difficult when they would bring so little coin.
The solicitor was very clear that I ought not to sell the fungibles in the house, because I’ll get a better price for the place if I can sell it looking spruce and luxurious. ”
As it had looked when Joshua had dwelled within its walls.
He scrubbed the first plate, trying to concoct an accusation. Something along the lines of this pathetic story would not move him to relent on the matter of the house, and Mrs. Burdette ought to be ashamed of herself for plucking so heartlessly at Joshua’s nonexistent heartstrings.
Et cetera and so forth.
The woman was thin. Without her shawls and by the decent light of the kitchen, she was nearly gaunt.
“What services do you sell?”
“I take in mending, of course. I will also stitch samplers to order—they make nice holiday tokens—and I can teach servants to read. When my wealthier neighbors decamp for the shires at Yuletide and close up their houses, I water their plants, leave a dish of milk out for the cats, and so on. I will do any honest work I can find, but one doesn’t… That is… I am not… I don’t find much.”
The simple solution would be for Joshua to send to the bank for a draft and write this woman and her child out of his life. Sending to the bank would alert Quinn to Joshua’s return, though, and Joshua was not yet ready to face that gauntlet.
The even simpler solution would be to pull some coins from his own pocket and trot around to the chophouse, where good, plain fare was available in abundance.
“I haven’t any coin either,” Joshua said. “One doesn’t use coin on board ship, and American coin isn’t British coin, and what British coin I do have is with my luggage.” He might have tossed a few pennies into his satchel at some point.
“In this weather, no telling when your luggage will arrive.”
And one could not even send a message to the docks without coin for the messenger or ticket porter.
The simplest solution of all popped into Joshua’s head as he was rinsing off a tea cup. “The shovel is in the gardener’s shed?”
“At least one, possibly more.”
“Then start planning your luncheon menu.” He passed over the tea cup for Mrs. Burdette to dry. “God knows I can wield a shovel.”
“You’d labor like that?”
“I need to eat, you and your child need to eat, and sooner or later the coal will also run out. Coin becomes a priority.”
“We have enough coal for one more week.” She set the tea cup on the towel where the rest of the dishes were drying. “If you’re going out and about, you’ll need old boots. Edwin’s should fit you. I haven’t been able to sell them. They still do the job, but they’re a bit worn.”
That Joshua was proposing to shovel snow to keep Mrs. Burdette and her offspring in bread and butter should have astonished him. She was the next thing to a thief, and the sooner she and Holly were off to some charitable establishment, the better.
Though the charitable establishments were rife with disease, and the house would have been standing empty were she not here.
Joshua accepted the loan of a pair of sturdy, worn boots, donned his greatcoat, gloves, and scarf, and collected the gardener’s flat shovel.
He would sort out Mrs. Burdette and her mendacious claim to the house later.
If he wanted any kind of meal in the next day or two, the time to take advantage of London’s snowy streets was now.
To Joshua’s surprise, an army of boys had beaten him to the job. Some wielded brooms fashioned from bundled twigs, two had dustpans, and several others had dilapidated shovels.
“You can’t work here, mister. This is our patch.” One of the taller shovel-wielding fellows gestured grandly as if indicating the entire street.
“This is my front door,” Joshua replied, “and I haven’t given you leave to set foot on my property. That makes you trespassers.” A very broad—and erroneous—reading of the law as it applied to London walkways.
The boys had made minimal progress with their makeshift tools. At least three members of this ragged regiment were barely out of leading strings, and one boy’s toes were visible through the holes in his boots.
Calculation came into the taller boy’s eyes. He was doubtless assessing Joshua’s diction, the value of his greatcoat, the quality of the lamb’s-wool in his black scarf.
“You dint not give us leave to be here, and we done a power of work already.”
“You have created a greater mess, tramping the snow down and narrowing the walkway. Move aside. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
With boys, establishing authority on some topic was imperative.
The bank employed any number of young fellows.
They would work loyally and well, provided their superiors had earned their respect.
Heaven help the manager who thought to maintain order in the junior ranks on the strength of age, size, and threats.
Bullies had no place among the bank’s junior ranks.
One of the smaller boys shifted to stand on the front steps, the rest followed.
Joshua made a quick, tidy job of shoveling off his own frontage. “Like that, so you don’t have to shovel the same lot twice, and you don’t make your job harder by packing the snow with your boots before you shovel it. Who wants to give it a try?”
He held up his shovel, and the spokesman snatched it. “I know me job, toff.”
What the boy did not know was how it felt to push away from the table with a full belly. He was that thin. If he survived into adolescence, he’d be even thinner. Several inches of wrist and ankle showed, and his coat was held together with twine.
He made a good effort to extend the area Joshua had cleared, but he hadn’t Joshua’s strength or stamina.
“Well done,” Joshua said. “Now, how about if I negotiate a price for finishing Mr. Clattermule’s walkway?”
“Clattermule died,” one of the smaller boys said through chattering teeth. “That’s Hophouse’s place now.”
Ye gods. Clattermule hadn’t been that old. “Then I will negotiate with the present resident.”
“I will neg-oh-see-ate with the present re-si-dent,” a boy with a dustpan said, sticking his nose in the air. “Give it a go, guv, and we’ll laugh when the watch comes to haul you off to the bin.”
Joshua had eaten a hot, if small, breakfast that included tea, albeit weak tea. He’d slept out of the weather, and he was intimately acquainted with money and its handling. These boys had likely never seen a genuine gold sovereign, and they’d be lucky to consume cold porridge once a day.
“Done,” Joshua said, sticking out a gloved hand. Several of the boys shook, though not the leader. “And you,”—he tossed his gloves to the boy with holes in his boots—“put these on your feet. They’ll do for stockings, and then you can sell them and get real stockings that fit.”
“You don’t want ’em back?” the boy said, fingering the gloves wonderingly.
The little boy who’d been first up the steps took the opening. “He won’t want ’em back after they been on your smelly feet, Slivers.”
The ambiguity of the riposte sent a fierce ache through Joshua’s heart.
Boys thrived on this sort of wayward diplomacy.
What sounded like an insult was, in fact, a sop to a fellow’s dignity.
Smelly feet were a point of puerile pride, and deflecting the conversation from Slivers’s poverty was pure kindness.
Even at a young age, Eric had known how to distract his playmates with a quip or a joke. His cheerful demeanor had been a gift from his mama, but that instinct, to take up in a sideways fashion for the boy who’d been left out or who’d become the butt of a taunt, had been Eric’s alone.
The heartache passed, more slowly than Joshua would have wished, and he left the boys to debate who had the most odoriferous feet. Joshua rapped on what had been Mr. Stephan Clattermule’s front door and found himself facing Riggs, who had been Clattermule’s butler.
“Tradesmen around the back, my good man. Shouldn’t have to tell you that.”
He does not recognize me. That thought was lowering, also useful. “Around back is two feet deep in snow. These lads can shovel you out in the next half hour, front and back, if you can spare a bit of the household coin.”
The butler looked past Joshua to the boys. His gaze then traveled up the walkway to the cleared patch in front of Joshua’s house.
“They did Mrs. Burdette’s walkway?”
Mr. Penrose’s walkway. “In about a quarter hour and for a reasonable price.” A short negotiation commenced. The butler was no match for one born with an abacus in one hand and a ledger in the other.
Joshua had no idea what the going rate for cleared walkways was, but the boys were impressed with his results. He rapped on another half-dozen doors while the boys fell to, and by the time he’d secured agreements with almost every house on the street, the coin was starting to pile up.
“Please, God, may it keep snowing forever,” the tall boy said when Joshua informed him of the total the team stood to earn. “Who are you, anyway, mister?”
“I own property on this street. Used to live here. Name’s Penrose.” Joshua stuck out a hand, and this time, the boy shook.
“Gabriel. What do we owe you?”
They occupied the stone wall that separated the walkway from the small fenced square at one end of the street. Some obliging boy had broomed the snow off, leaving a penetrating cold in its place.
“Owe me?” Negotiating on behalf of the boys had been a small pleasure. A rusty skill put to modest use, yielding results that pleased both the boys and the households who’d bought their services.
“We couldn’t never have charged what you got for us, and some of the smaller lads were just in the way until you showed them how to go on. Slivers needs proper stockings, or he’ll lose his smelly toes. What do we owe you?”
“You would make a fine banker, Gabriel. You aren’t afraid to discuss coin, and you appreciate the symmetry of a fair transaction.”
Gabriel scratched his nose and gazed at the pewter sky. The boy had patience, another skill every competent banker claimed.
“I need enough coin for a loaf of bread, some cheese, a few apples, milk, and a couple days’ worth of ham for three people.”
“No gin? Gin comes cheap. Keeps you warm.”
“No gin.” For pity’s sake, what had London come to? The boy might not have seen twelve years. “And I’ll shovel for the next hour.”
Gabriel grinned, his teeth surprisingly white in his grimy face. “No shirkin’, Penrose. We’re good lads. Not like some.”
Meaning Gabriel wasn’t picking pockets today. “No shirking.”
Joshua reclaimed his flat shovel from one of Gabriel’s minions and put in a good hour at a steady pace. When a snowball fight broke out among the lower ranks, he kept working and was declared to be no damned fun.
One did not tolerate insubordination, even if the charge was true.
As the accuser darted off across the street, Joshua fashioned some ammunition and potted the little beast on the shoulder. Work resumed in high spirits, and Joshua was almost sorry when Gabriel informed him that his hour-long indenture had been amply satisfied.