Her gaze fixed on the window, seeing nothing but her past, he suspected.
“My parents escaped the Reign of Terror in the spring of seventeen ninety-four,” she said. “They were master weavers who supplied fine fabrics to the French nobility. In the beginnings of the Revolution, they had been safe, but then the winds changed. Anyone who conducted trade with aristocrats were suspect and imprisoned as sympathizers. They fled to England and set up their business in London. Several years later, I was born, their little Amelie.”
“That’s what they called you?”
She nodded.
“Then how did you—” He shut his mouth. It would be wrong to rush her along. This story didn’t end well.
“How did I end up in the workhouse?” Her eyes went dark with a deep sadness. “Cholera began making the rounds of Spitalfields. Papa and Maman contracted it and succumbed.”
“You weren’t infected?”
“I was, but it was milder for me.”
“How old were you?”
“I’d just reached my seventh year.”
Shock traced through him. So young to be alone in the world. “And you were taken to St. Mary Magdalen workhouse?”
She nodded.
“What was it like?” He needed to know. The place had affected those who he cared about most in the world, including the brave woman sitting opposite him. He wouldn’t dwell too long on that, only it was the truth.
“It houses about two hundred children. We were kept separate from the adults.”
“What was the work?”
“Mostly picking oakum for shipbuilders, and some shoe work, too. Tasks requiring small, nimble fingers and sharp eyes. We were fed three times a day, had a pallet for sleeping, and a roof over our heads.”
Her eyes had gone flat in the telling, as if she needed distance from her own story.
“How did you get out?”
“One day, I saw one of the workhouse boys—Ned—talking to another boy through a crack in the wall.”
“One of Doyle’s eels?”
“Doyle wanted the matron’s strongbox lifted.”
“Not our Mrs. Ditch by chance?”
Hortense laughed drily. “The same. I shoved Ned aside and said I would do it.”
“And you pulled it off?”
“Aye.”
“You have nerve.”
“Lugged that box all the way to a hole dug beneath the wall. Once outside, I was one of Doyle’s gang, a lucky eel. The first and only girl.”
He intuited something important here. “And you weren’t called Amelie?”
“That was Papa and Maman’s name for me. I could no longer be her.”
“Hortense had to be a different sort of girl.”
