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“Cor! Yeah, I do. Ta.” Ruby looked at the jar and she could almost taste it already. “Yer'll ‘ave ter ‘ave a blouse an’ skirt wot's right, an’ a shawl. I can get yer one. It'll smell, mind. But it should. Yer can't go lookin’ like that, or they'll con yer in a second. An’ yer'll ‘ave ter keep yer mouth shut as much as yer can. I'll tell yer wot ter say. Or better, pretend as yer deaf, an’ can't ‘ear nuffin’. An’ boots. I'll get yer some boots wot look like yer'd already walked ter Scotland an’ back in ‘em.”
“Thank you,” Claudine said quietly. She was beginning to wonder if she really had the courage to go through with this. It was an insane idea. She was totally incompetent to carry off such a thing. It would be humiliating. They would see through her disguise in an instant, and Wallace would have her committed as a lunatic. He would have no trouble at all. What other explanation could there be for such behavior?
Ruby shook her head. “Yer got some guts, Missus.” Her eyes shone with awe. “I reckon even Miss ‘Ester'd be proud o’ yer. ‘Course I won't tell ?
??er!” she added hastily. “I won't never give yer away.”
That sealed the decision. There was no escape now. She could not possibly forfeit Ruby's faith in her, and that burning admiration. “Thank you,” Claudine said again. “You are a loyal and excellent ally.”
Ruby beamed with pleasure, but she was too thrilled to speak.
Naturally Claudine did not go until it was dusk, when she had far greater chance of being unrecognized. Even so, she walked with her head down, shuffling a little in unfamiliar and extremely uncomfortable boots. She must have looked dreadful. Her hair was greased with oil from the kitchen, the smell of which she found distasteful, like a stale pan. Her face was carefully smeared with grime, similarly her hands and as much of her neck as showed. She had an old shawl around her, and was glad to hold it tight, not for warmth, because the evening was mild, but to conceal as much of herself as she could. She carried a light tray that would be hung around her neck on a string, and a bag full of matchboxes to sell. She also had about one and sixpence worth of change, mostly in pennies and halfpennies. Ruby had told her that more would be suspicious.
She began on the dockside beyond Wapping and walked slowly until she found a corner between a good tobacconist and a public house, then stood there with the tray resting just below her bosom and felt as conspicuous as a squashed fly on a white wall, and about as useful.
She also felt afraid. As darkness settled she could see only the short stretches under the street lamps clearly, or wedges of broken pavement where light spilled out a window, or a suddenly opened door. There was noise all around. In the distance dogs were barking above the clatter of hooves from the traffic on the busy cross street seventy yards away. Closer to her people were shouting, and above it was the occasional burst of laughter.
She was ridiculously grateful when someone bought matches, and actually spoke to her. Just that they had seen her and acknowledged her as a human being broke the loneliness that had hardened around her like imprisoning glass. She smiled, and then with a shock of shame remembered that Ruby had also blackened two of her teeth. She said they were beautiful, far too even and white for the sort of woman she was pretending to be.
What was even stranger and more disconcerting was that the man did not even notice. He took her for exactly what she was pretending to be, a street woman too old and too plain to be a whore, but still needing to earn perhaps a shilling or two, standing alone in the night on a street corner selling matches, mild or freezing, wet or dry. She was relieved, but oddly “puzzled also. Was that really the only difference, clothes and a little dirt, the way she carried her head, whether she dared meet his eyes or not?
She could stand here all night, and those who were sorry for her might buy matches, but she would learn nothing. She needed to move closer to the shops that sold books and periodicals, tobacco, the sort of things a man would buy without arousing any interest or comment. Ruby had told her where they were, and what they were like. Maybe she should be closer to Jericho Phillips's boat? She wanted to catch his trade in particular. Maybe it was like most other trades; people had their own areas. One did not trespass. Certainly she was growing cold and stiff here, and achieving nothing except a little practice.
She began to walk back towards the river and the stretch half a mile or so to the south of Execution Dock. That was one of the places where Phillips had been known to moor his boat. Another was further south again, on the Limehouse Reach. There was another where the curve of the Isle of Dogs bends back to the Blackwall Reach, opposite the Bugsby Marshes. Too far for rich men to go for their pleasures, and certainly a less profitable place to sell books and pictures. Was she being intelligent? Or merely too stupid to know just how stupid she was? Wallace would have said the latter, if he were not too apoplectic with rage to say anything at all. She could not bear for him to be right; that would be almost as bad as letting Ruby down.
She kept walking. It was late and completely dark now. How long did shops stay open? Buying pornographic photographs of little boys was surely not a daytime occupation? At this time of the year maybe they stayed open all night? Perhaps people went to such places after the theater? The most obvious of all would be after visiting Jericho Phillips's boat.
That was her best chance, to go towards the river and the alleys leading off the waterfront.
But she paced up and down fruitlessly until after midnight. Then tired, cold, and dispirited, she went back to the clinic and Ruby let her in. It was then that she made the wild boast that she was not beaten, and would quite definitely return the following evening. She went into one of the empty bedrooms kept for patients with contagious diseases, and slept until she was woken in the morning by the sound of footsteps, and one of the maids cursing under her breath.
The next evening, Claudine found herself standing on the corner of the same street again in gusting wind and a fine summer rain, carrying a tray of matches, covered with oilskin, when a couple of well-dressed men passed by, apparently not even aware of her.
She turned, as if to cross the street, or possibly even to follow after them and beg them to buy a box of matches. But instead she passed by them, and took a quick, furtive glance at the photograph one of the men was looking at. She was too disappointed that it was an adult woman to be shocked at her total nakedness. All she felt was chagrin that it was not one of Phillips's boys. To her guilt, she was also relieved. They were pictures she did not actually wish to see; it was simply that she could hardly take any proof back to Hester if she could not swear what it was.
Then she realized that of course selling one kind of pornography does not exclude selling another kind. She stopped abruptly, as if she had forgotten something, then turned and went back again to take up her place a few yards from where she had been before. This time she was on the opposite side of the street, where she could watch whoever went into the shop from either direction.
She allowed several very ordinary-appearing customers to go in and come out again, but the next time a well-dressed man went in, she crossed over and went in after him. She stood in the corner as if waiting in the shadows for her turn, well out of the sound of his voice. At a glance one might have thought she was being discreet.
When he had agreed on the cards he wished for and paid his money to the shopkeeper, she moved forward, pretended to be dizzy, and swayed to one side. As though by accident, she knocked the cards out of his hand and they fluttered to the floor. Two lay facedown, three were faceup. They showed naked and frightened little boys in attitudes only grown men should adopt, and that in the strictest privacy. One of them had bloody weals on his flesh where any clothes at all would have concealed them.
Claudine closed her eyes and sank to the floor, not entirely having to pretend a feeling of nausea. The shopkeeper came around the counter and tried to assist her to her feet, while his customer scrabbled on the floor to pick up his treasures.
The next few moments passed in a daze. She staggered to her feet, now quite genuinely dizzy, and at the shopkeeper's insistence drank a small mouthful of brandy, probably all he could afford to offer. Then she told him her husband's tobacco would have to wait, she needed some air, and without accepting any further assistance she thanked him and blundered outside onto the dark street and the beginning of more rain. It was light, only a drifting mist blowing off the river, the mournful sound of foghorns echoing up from Limehouse Reach and the long stretch beyond.
She leaned against the wall of the tenement houses, a sickness in her stomach, the taste of bile in her mouth. She shuddered with cold, her back ached, and her feet were blistered. She was alone here in the dark and dripping street, but this was victory!
Three or four more men walked past. Two bought matches. She was going to earn enough for a loaf of bread. Actually she had no idea what a loaf of bread cost. A pint of beer was three pence, she had heard someone say that. Four pints for a shilling. Nine shillings a week was a fair rent, half a laborer's weekly wage.
They were well dressed, these
customers of the tobacconist. Their suits must have cost two pounds or more. That one's shirt looked like silk. How much were the photographs? Sixpence? A shilling?
Another man had stopped in front of her. She had not even noticed him approaching. It must be midnight. He was a big man, solid, holding cards facedown like the ones she'd seen in the shop.
“Yes, sir? Matches, sir?” she said through dry lips.
“I'll have a couple of boxes,” he replied, holding out two pennies.
