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Hester pushed it back. “I’m a nurse and I keep a clinic for street women in Portpool Lane.” She remembered too late that it was no longer true. “I’
ll wager you a good dinner I’ve done more dirty washing than you have!” she added.
The woman’s hand went slack with surprise, allowing the door to swing open, and Rose took full advantage of it.
Inside, the house was bare and cold with the sort of poverty that teeters on the edge of starvation. Hester heard Rose draw in her breath, then very carefully let it out silently while she tried to compose her face as if she saw such things every day.
It was like the Collards again, only worse. This man was sickly pale, his eyes hollow and defeated. He had been crushed from the waist but his legs were still there, deformed and—from the way he lay and the pinching around his mouth—a constant agony.
Patiently and with trembling gentleness Rose tried to elicit facts from him, and he refused. No one was to blame. It was an accident. Could have happened to anyone. No, there was nothing wrong with the machines. What was the matter with them that they could not understand that? He had told the others the same.
Hester half listened as she started on the laundry with lye soap and water that was almost cold. The physical misery of it did nothing to assuage her sense of guilt. Even as she did it she knew that was ridiculous. Her hour or two of discomfort would be pointless. But the biting cold on her skin pleased her, and the drag on her shoulders when she heaved the wet sheets out and tried to wring them by hand. At the clinic at least they had a mangle.
It was the fourth house after that before they learned anything further. Mary Havilland had been there also.
“You are certain?” Hester said to the handsome, weary woman busy sewing shirts. All the time she was talking to them her fingers never stopped. She barely needed to look at what she was doing.
“Course I am. Don’ forget summink like a young lady, an’ she were a lady, comin’ an’ askin’ about sewers an’ drains an’ water wot runs under the ground. Knowed about it, too, she did—engines, too. Knew one from another.”
Rose stiffened, glancing at Hester, then back at the woman.
“She knew about underground streams?” Hester asked, trying to keep the urgency out of her voice.
“Summink,” the woman replied. “Queer, though.” She shook her head. “She wanted ter know more. I said me pa’d bin a tosher, afore ’e got took, an’ she wanted ter know if I still knew any toshers now. Or gangers. I tol’ ’er me bruvver were a tosher, but I in’t seen ’im in years. She asked me ’is name. Now wot’d a nice young lady like that wanna find a tosher fer?”
“To learn more about hidden streams?” Rose suggested.
The woman’s eyes opened wide. “Wot fer? Yer don’ think one o’ them’s gonna break through, do yer?”
“Did she say that?”
“No! Course she din’t! D’yer think I’d be sittin’ ’ere wi’ a needle in me ’and if she ’ad? Me sister’s ’usband’s down there diggin’.” She made no reference to her own husband, one-armed, who was out somewhere in the streets trying to earn a living running errands for people. “Is this wot yer on about? Wot ’appened to ’er, anyway? Why are yer ’ere?”
Hester debated only for an instant. “She fell off Westminster Bridge and drowned. We are concerned it may not have been an accident. We need to know what she learned.”
“Nothin’ from ’ere that’d get her topped, I swear that on me muvver’s grave!”
They stayed another ten minutes, but the woman could add nothing.
Outside it was dark and the snow was beginning to accumulate, even though it was only shortly after six.
“Do you suppose she went looking for toshers?” Rose said unhappily.
“What for? To tell her where the underground streams were? Surely Argyll would have done all that. He can’t want a disaster—it would ruin him most of all.”
“I don’t know,” Hester admitted, beginning to walk towards the omnibus stop. Moving was better than standing still. “It doesn’t make any sense, and she must have known that. But she learned something. What could it be, other than that they are somehow using the machines dangerously, in order to be the fastest, and therefore get the best contracts? Are Argyll’s machines different from other people’s? We need to find out. Could they be more dangerous?”
Rose stopped, shuddering with cold. “It seems they work faster—so maybe they are. What can we do? These men won’t tell us anything—they daren’t!” There was anguish in her cry.
“I don’t know,” Hester answered. “All we can do is find out what happened to Mary…maybe. If she found proof of some sort—I mean something that would have shut down the works until the machines were made safe, even if it were slower—whom would she have told?”
“Morgan,” Rose said straightaway. “She didn’t. She never came back.”
They started walking again, as it was too cold to stand.
“Perhaps she wasn’t certain,” Hester suggested. “If it was almost complete, perhaps lacking one point…?”
They reached the bus stop and stood side by side, moving their weight from one foot to the other to prevent themselves from freezing.
