Chapter 1 #2
“When you’re in trouble or you need someone to do your dirty work?”
“The Forty Elephants!”
“That’s right, ladies,” Alice said. “Loyalty. And if you don’t know who you pledge your loyalty to, you don’t belong here. You turn your back on us, we turn our back on you—and leave you with a lasting mark you’ll never forget.”
The women whistled and pounded on the table.
Alice silenced them with one wave of her hand. “Your loyalty to us and to me must be absolute, or we all go down. Your mistakes become ours. We work together as one, you hear me?”
More cheering.
She paused to let her words sink in. She didn’t like doling out punishment to her own.
In truth, it always left her a bit sick to the stomach, but it had to be done.
Being a leader wasn’t an easy thing, and the rules—and consequences—that she enforced were always for the good of their vetted cocoon of thieves.
Gangland wasn’t safe without a system, without rules.
And her rules were simple. First, sell all items that were hoisted; showing up in last week’s frock was the perfect way to get nicked by a copper.
Second, wear their Sunday best to a job to throw the clerks off their scent.
Looking like a washerwoman was a sure sign they didn’t have the cash to buy posh clothes in posh stores.
Third, never ever take up with a man outside their ring of associates without Alice’s seal of approval.
Finally, one of Alice’s personal rules and a code she’d always lived by: help any woman in serious need, as long as it didn’t put the other Forties at risk.
Still, loyalty mattered most of all.
The office door flew open and banged closed, and a flustered Ruth dashed inside. “Sorry I’m late.” She slipped into a seat gingerly, as if it pained her to move.
“Look who’s late again.” Lily Rose rolled her eyes.
“What was it this time?” Alice asked, though she already knew the answer. Ruth was boarding with her wanker of a boyfriend these days, and they were seeing a lot less of her. “Don’t tell me it’s bloody Mike again.” Alice looked more closely at her then. “Jesus, that shiner from him?”
Ruth looked down at her hands in her lap. “Mike came home from the gin house pissed as usual, after God knows how many pours. Angry as a lion, too.” She sniffed, wouldn’t meet anyone’s eye.
“Let’s have a look.” Alice bent over Ruth, gently lifting her chin to examine her left eye. It was swollen shut and big as an orange.
“I think he’s broken a couple of ribs, too,” Ruth said, wincing.
Alice shook her head. “He’s going to keep at it, you know. When are you going to leave him?”
“My brother is single,” June offered.
“Your brother looks like he was dragged behind the back of a wagon,” Maggie piped up.
“Too true,” June agreed.
The titter of laughter eased the tension.
Ruth shrugged. “I–I don’t know. I love him.”
“Well, he clearly loves you, too,” Alice snapped. She’d like to say she didn’t understand it, why Ruth stuck around while he beat her senseless, but she did. Her own father had taught her what a man’s love looked like: all fists and words that cut twice as deeply.
“I don’t know what to do,” Ruth said, tears streaking from her healthy eye down her cheek. “If I try to leave him, he may try to kill me.”
Alice’s anger gathered like a storm cloud. Her girls deserved better than this, but she couldn’t very well force Ruth to leave Mike. Alice could hire an Elephant and Castle man to protect Ruth for a little while. Problem was Mike was one of the gang, too, so that wouldn’t be the best option.
“I seem to do things wrong all the time, so he punishes me,” Ruth continued. “I guess I’m too dense to learn how to please him.”
“You aren’t dense, Ruth, and for Christ’s sake, you don’t need to be punished,” she said. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”
“At least I yelled back,” Ruth replied, sniffing.
“As was your right.”
“What time is it? I can’t stay long.” Ruth’s eyes filled with fear. “If he wakes and I’m not there, he’ll be spitting mad.” She looked like a small, frightened bird.
Alice bit her tongue. She didn’t know when Ruth had become less herself, had shrunk so small that she’d become this shell of a person, especially since she had all the backup she needed with the Forty Elephants.
But nothing Alice could say would dissuade Ruth, and with the woman’s broken ribs and black eye, she was bloody useless for the shopping they were going to do in a few hours anyway.
“Fine,” Alice said. “But you’re on the next job.”
Ruth nodded and shuffled carefully across the room to the door.
After she’d gone, Alice assigned the girls their posts for the day’s shopping trip.
When they’d all left, she stayed behind a moment, thinking, feeling some semblance of guilt, an emotion she scarcely recognized let alone experienced.
Ruth was a grown woman. She made her own choices, and yet Alice couldn’t help feeling like she was somehow responsible for the woman’s safety.
She was the queen of the Forties after all, and her girls’ business was her business.
They counted on her. She offered them a better life than the worst of the slums where they’d come from, a life of good times and finer things.
But for the first time, Alice wondered if what she was offering them was enough and, more importantly, if she was doing her job as leader of England’s most notorious female gang. As she walked to her car, unease slid over her skin like the encroaching fog.