Chapter 10
In the following days, Amelia continued to be present in the goods room as Maggie took each thief out to watch her work.
This had tugged at the nerves of some, and two of the younger ones, Cathy and Ann, had returned with a subdued air.
When I asked Cathy about it, she admitted she’d been bolder than usual to impress Maggie, who had taken her to task for carelessness.
I was determined to thieve as I always did and not allow her to rattle me.
My nerves were being rattled badly enough by learning that Billy and Tommy had left Elephant and Castle.
Were they lying low somewhere? Was this ordinary caution, or did they believe there was a heightened risk because Sarah had seen them?
Or—God forbid—were they in Mayfair, looking to intercept Sarah as she ran an errand?
I was scheduled to go out with Maggie on Wednesday afternoon, Amelia’s last day.
Mr. Ardle had asked me to come extra, as he had a good deal of work, so I spent the morning fixing loose prongs in two necklaces and a ring and repairing the hinges and handles on two jewelry boxes.
Afterward, I went to the costume room, changed into a thieving dress, and found Maggie in the goods room.
“Ready?” she asked, and I followed her downstairs.
When we reached the street, she said, “Let’s not walk.
” I assumed we’d take one of the omnibuses that crossed the river, but she led me to the railway station, where the cab stand was lined with hansoms. She approached, spoke to the driver, and climbed in; I followed, taking a seat beside her as the driver climbed onto his box, above and behind us.
The closeness of the space, the way our skirts couldn’t help but meet, suggested an intimacy at odds with how I was feeling, but I did my best to arrange my face and hands into an attitude that was amiable.
“I find it’s easier to talk in a cab, where we won’t be overheard,” she said. “I’ve been enjoying meeting all the girls.”
“I appreciate riding,” I said.
“Good.” She smiled and settled her skirts. “When did you start with Amelia?” she asked with a warm interest.
So she wanted my history. Well, all’s fair, I thought.
I was certainly curious about hers. For now, I wouldn’t tell her that I knew my mother had been her jenny the day she was caught.
I wanted to hear that story from her, without her knowing that I knew, and this was my opportunity to build some trust. I’d lose nothing by telling her how I came to thieving.
“You said you knew my mother,” I began.
She nodded. “I did.”
“She died when I wasn’t yet fifteen.”
“Leaving you with Sarah to support,” she said.
Maggie had a good memory.
I nodded. “Ma had apprenticed me to a seamstress when I was ten, but that didn’t bring in near enough, and I was too young to start thieving. I didn’t look old enough to go to the shops. But Amelia suggested I could run a badger scheme, so my friend James and I did that for a while.”
“James Kinnon,” she said.
I nodded, increasingly aware that she knew a good deal about me, and—moreover—she wanted me to know she did. Clever, I thought. It was a good way to caution me not to try to keep secrets from her.
“James was working for smugglers on the river, and one night he was caught and put in prison, which put an end to that. But by this time, I was old enough to thieve, and Amelia trained me up herself. I was her jenny for a few weeks and then I was ready to try.”
“What was your first shop?”
“A dry goods store in Bond Street,” I said.
I couldn’t recall the name, but the storefront appeared like a picture in my mind.
“It had a large plate glass window, a wood-framed door to the left with a diamond-shaped mottled glass pane, two locks, no bell above the door. Inside, on three sides of the room, there were tall wooden cabinets with glass fronts and shelves. I took seven yards of lace and a pair of gloves.” My mouth curved at the memory. “And the clerk’s pocket watch.”
Maggie’s eyebrows rose, and her lips twitched in amusement.
“You know how men can be,” I said. “He was rubbing up against me, touching my arm. That watch was begging to be nicked.” I still remembered the sight of it, the chain within inches of my fingers as he leaned in to murmur in my ear how pretty I was.
His breath had smelled of onions. “When Amelia and I met on the bridge on the way home, I showed it to her. She scolded me for the risk but couldn’t help laughing.
She said it earned me extra, but I should consider myself lucky and not to do it again.
The extra from that watch bought Sarah and me new shoes and the first meat we’d had in months. ”
“You said Sarah was out in service. What does she do?”
“She works as a scullery maid up this way.” I cast my eyes in the direction we were traveling.
“She won’t thieve?”
“She has a birthmark, here,” I said, touching my forefinger to my temple. “Makes her too noticeable. Besides, I don’t want her to.”
“Ah.” Maggie seemed to put that together with another thought.
“A birthmark would make it difficult.” She raised her right hand, turning it over in midair, as if she were inspecting it as well as inviting me to.
It almost gave me the feeling she’d steered the conversation toward Sarah so she could broach this.
“I can’t thieve anymore with this. Too noticeable, but also, my fingers don’t work as well. ”
She was begging the question, so I gave it to her. “What happened?”
“What do you know of Swan River?”
“Nothing, other than it’s a penal colony in Australia. Seems a strange name for the place. Makes me think of the swans in St. James’s.”
She snorted. “It’s not St. James’s.”
“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t,” she replied, but not as sharply as she could have.
“No, I suppose not,” I acknowledged. “Although when I was a child, I saw the hulks in the Thames once. I watched prisoners being loaded on. Only men, though.”
“They don’t mix us together, thank the lord, or every woman in the ship would have been up the pole by the time we landed,” she said drily, her hand sketching a bump over her belly. “As it was, half a dozen were, thanks to the crew.”
“Was it very dreadful?”
“Hellish, from the first day of the journey,” she replied.
“Imagine a hundred of us in a dark hold, drinking fetid water and surviving on stale bread and moldy cheese, pissing in a bucket that turned over when the seas were rough.” She drew a breath as if grateful for this air, fresh by comparison.
“When we finally got off the ship, we could barely walk. All of us, filthy and stumbling into each other, trying to find our land legs. We were taken to the market square and displayed. I can’t imagine we were much to look at, but still the men picked and quarreled over us.
I was one of the prettier ones, so I was picked early, by a man whose wife had died the previous year.
He’d murdered her when he found her trying to run off.
I didn’t know that then, of course. That was actually his second wife.
His first wife had died in childbirth. His name was Turner, and he was a drunk and cruel, and I worked from sunrise to sundown, washing, cooking, cleaning, and minding his children. ” Her voice was curiously flat.
The cab jolted over a rut in the cobbles.
“You survived,” I said.
“Nearly not. Have you ever been buried alive?” she asked, almost idly.
I started. “No.”
“One day, when Turner was in the barn, I had a knife with me, brought from the kitchen. I took it out, thinking to stab him in the neck. The man knew somehow, and he was quick as a snake. He grabbed it from me and flung it away.” Her eyes flicked to me.
“That’s all he did at first, it being daytime, but that night, he dragged me out of my bed by the hair and pulled me out of doors.
I struggled, which is when he broke my fingers.
Then he threw me in a ditch at the edge of one of his fields and covered me with dirt and rocks. ”
My throat scratched with sudden dryness.
“The next morning, he dug me up. I’d stayed alive by clawing away enough dirt to breathe, but I couldn’t shift the stones.
He said that if I had died, he’d have left me there, in that grave.
Then he dragged me to his house and put my hand on the stove.
He did it because my broken fingers would mend, and he wanted me to always have a reminder that he held the upper hand. ”
Maggie’s voice slowed over the last words, and she turned to look out the window.
I wondered if she’d told this same horrifying story to the others, while traveling to their mark for the day.
But I had been listening carefully, and I would swear the pain in her voice was genuine.
Then again, perhaps she could tell that story a hundred times and the pain would still carve as deep.
I shivered at the thought of being buried alive, of leaving Sarah utterly alone, not knowing what had become of me, or having to identify my body when it was eventually found—
“I wouldn’t trade that night, though,” Maggie said, turning back to me. “Because I touched death, and I learned something important. The dead can truly see what happens here on earth after they’re gone, like a play on a stage.”
I stared. That was an odd fancy, to be sure.
“You don’t have to believe me,” she said, “but some of what I envisioned that night has come true already. It’s as if I’d lived a full life instead of only a third of one, and was given all the wisdom of it, in that instant.”