AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Small steps lead down to the bank. I wait for Kartik to offer me the aid of his arm. Instead, he starts down without me, his hands bunched in his coat pockets.
“What’s keeping you?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say, taking the stairs at a fairly quick clip.
Kartik rolls his face heavenward. “Why do ladies refuse to say when they are angry? Is it a skill they teach you? It’s terribly confusing.”
I stop and face him in the weak blue light. “If you must know, you might have offered me your arm at the top.”
He shrugs. “Why? You have two of your own.”
I struggle to keep my composure. “It is customary for a gentleman to help a lady down the steps.”
He smirks. “I’m no gentleman. And tonight, you’re no lady.”
I try to protest but find I cannot, and we follow the Thames without another word. The great river laps against its banks with a rhythmic sloshing. It rises and falls and rises again, as if it, too, should like to be free for a night. I hear voices coming from below.
“This way,” Kartik says, running toward them. The voices grow louder. The accents are hard and rough. The mud thickens as the fog lifts. In the water are perhaps a dozen people of all sorts—from old women to dirty-faced children.
One of the old women sings a seafaring song, stopping only for the violent coughing fits that rack her body. Her dress is little more than rags. She is so caked in mud she folds into the murk like a shadow. As she sings, she dips a shallow pan into the Thames and brings it up. With quick fingers, she picks through the pan while shaking it, searching for what, I’m sure I don’t know.
“Mud larks,” Kartik explains. “They sift through the Thames for whatever they can find of value to sell or keep—rags, bones, a bit of tin or coal from a passing ship. If they’re lucky, they might find the purse of a sailor who met with a bad end—that is, if the riverman’s hook hasn’t found him first.”
I make a face. “But to wade into the Thames…”
Kartik shrugs. “It’s far better than being a tosher, I can tell you that.”
“What, pray, is a tosher?”
“Much like a mud lark, but they scour the sewers for their finds.”
“What a wretched existence.”
Kartik takes on a hard tone. “It is a means to live. Life isn’t always fair.”
The comment is meant to sting and it does. We fall into quiet.
“You’re the one always speaking of fate and destiny. How do you explain their lot, then? Is it their fate to suffer so?”
Kartik shoves his hands into his pockets. “Suffering isn’t destiny. Nor is ignorance.”
A woman’s voice cuts through the fog. “Wot’s the rivah give you tonigh’?”
“Luv, I go’ apples ’n’ stuffin’!” another shouts back.
They fall into loud gales of laughter.
“They’ve found apples and stuffing here?” I ask.
Kartik grins. “It’s Cockney rhyme. The last word is a rhyme for the word they mean. ‘I’ve got apples ’n’stuffing’ really means ‘I got nothing,’ or, as she’d say, ‘I got nuffin’.’”
“Oi! Kartik!” One of the urchins stumbles up from the filth and muck of the river. “Been waitin’ on you, mate.”
“We were delayed, Toby.” He apologizes to the mud-coated boy with a bow.
Toby nears, and so does his smell. It is a horrible mixture of stagnant river water, rubbish, and worse. I dare not think about what lives in his ragged clothes. My stomach lurches and I find I have to breathe through my mouth so as not to swoon.
“How is the treasure hunting?” Kartik asks. He thinks he’s clever but he’s got his hand at his chin. His fingers cover his nose.
