with an eye-patch and the slow gestures of someone long acquainted with opium, accepts the pipe and pulls on it with appreciation. She is surprised. But they pay double what anyone would and she does not complain. What she does not like is the way they keep staring at her and looking around her den. Could they be policemen? But no, nothing she does is seriously illegal, and would a policeman come in and smoke? Still, perhaps she should ask around a little, find out if others had reported the presence of such men in their places too.
The men leave in fifteen minutes, and when they push aside the flap that serves as the curtain of the door, they almost run into the young woman coming in. Her clothes are dirty and she smells of sweat and dust, but she is uncommonly pretty, with straight, well-formed limbs and high cheekbones, long hair done up in a clean bun; the men notice her. They are also too sober a group and at least John May is too well-dressed for this place; she notices them too, if only in passing.
‘Oy Jenny, yer back’, says the old woman in a voice, like her life, of bits and pieces, saving and borrowing and patching and hoarding. An’ ain’t no Injun prince wi’ yer, m’gul? Wuz’t ’is granpa the Great Mogul they ses just upped and died in Inja?’
She chortles at her own joke and starts hustling the customers out, for she knows that Jenny does not like to see too much evidence of her trade, and it is time for the aunt and daughter to retire for the night. It has been nineteen or twenty years now, she recalls, that they have been sharing these smelly, dank quarters; ever since Jenny’s mother first handed her the girl, then a baby of four, or was it three, before being taken to Newgate and from there to that upside-down place, the land of black swans, Australia. That is where she must have died, for they never heard of, or from her, again.
23
Mrs Grayper and Mary withdrew for a few moments, as was proper, and the men moved to the parlour fireplace to smoke. Carried away by the conversation and Mary’s presence, Captain Meadows had drunk and eaten more than he should have, and he welcomed the opportunity to stand up and smoke a pipe. Major Grayper never smoked a pipe; it was one of his idiosyncracies: he lit his trademark cigar, studying its end for almost a minute before biting it off instead of using a clipper. The men puffed in silence, Meadows reclining against the fireplace, the Major sitting in his favourite armchair in one corner of the room.
The two men were used to such silences between them: they preferred them to discussions which were likely to go awry. For, while they were polite and courteous to a fault — the Major because it was the wish of his wife who considered Meadows a good catch for her daughter, and Captain Meadows for the sake of Mary — the two men seldom agreed on anything.
It was a sign of the high esteem in which he was held by his peers that, despite Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Rowan’s and Richard Mayne’s total agreement with Sir Robert Peel on the issue of not employing gentlemen of the retired officer class, Major Grayper had been made a superintendent in the new force. He was known to be one of the most successful Metropolitan police superintendents in the land, once praised by Sir Peel in person and reportedly admired even by the famous private investigator, Mr Seaton Holmes, but he was also known as a man who did not give criminals, or anyone, a second chance. No, Major Grayper did not hold much hope for those who had failed even once. One life, one chance. You needed to be the Son of God to raise the dead, and even He did not raise them from death twice, did He?
It was only when Mary and Mrs Grayper returned to join the men that the conversation resumed. And it resumed on the topic that had engrossed the three, under the Major’s bemused gaze, through most of dinner: Captain Meadows’ pet, the thug he had brought from India and whose tale he was
The men leave in fifteen minutes, and when they push aside the flap that serves as the curtain of the door, they almost run into the young woman coming in. Her clothes are dirty and she smells of sweat and dust, but she is uncommonly pretty, with straight, well-formed limbs and high cheekbones, long hair done up in a clean bun; the men notice her. They are also too sober a group and at least John May is too well-dressed for this place; she notices them too, if only in passing.
‘Oy Jenny, yer back’, says the old woman in a voice, like her life, of bits and pieces, saving and borrowing and patching and hoarding. An’ ain’t no Injun prince wi’ yer, m’gul? Wuz’t ’is granpa the Great Mogul they ses just upped and died in Inja?’
She chortles at her own joke and starts hustling the customers out, for she knows that Jenny does not like to see too much evidence of her trade, and it is time for the aunt and daughter to retire for the night. It has been nineteen or twenty years now, she recalls, that they have been sharing these smelly, dank quarters; ever since Jenny’s mother first handed her the girl, then a baby of four, or was it three, before being taken to Newgate and from there to that upside-down place, the land of black swans, Australia. That is where she must have died, for they never heard of, or from her, again.
23
Mrs Grayper and Mary withdrew for a few moments, as was proper, and the men moved to the parlour fireplace to smoke. Carried away by the conversation and Mary’s presence, Captain Meadows had drunk and eaten more than he should have, and he welcomed the opportunity to stand up and smoke a pipe. Major Grayper never smoked a pipe; it was one of his idiosyncracies: he lit his trademark cigar, studying its end for almost a minute before biting it off instead of using a clipper. The men puffed in silence, Meadows reclining against the fireplace, the Major sitting in his favourite armchair in one corner of the room.
The two men were used to such silences between them: they preferred them to discussions which were likely to go awry. For, while they were polite and courteous to a fault — the Major because it was the wish of his wife who considered Meadows a good catch for her daughter, and Captain Meadows for the sake of Mary — the two men seldom agreed on anything.
It was a sign of the high esteem in which he was held by his peers that, despite Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Rowan’s and Richard Mayne’s total agreement with Sir Robert Peel on the issue of not employing gentlemen of the retired officer class, Major Grayper had been made a superintendent in the new force. He was known to be one of the most successful Metropolitan police superintendents in the land, once praised by Sir Peel in person and reportedly admired even by the famous private investigator, Mr Seaton Holmes, but he was also known as a man who did not give criminals, or anyone, a second chance. No, Major Grayper did not hold much hope for those who had failed even once. One life, one chance. You needed to be the Son of God to raise the dead, and even He did not raise them from death twice, did He?
It was only when Mary and Mrs Grayper returned to join the men that the conversation resumed. And it resumed on the topic that had engrossed the three, under the Major’s bemused gaze, through most of dinner: Captain Meadows’ pet, the thug he had brought from India and whose tale he was
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