Grace spoke in a coarse Scottish accent, but knew that it didn’t sound quite right. She tucked her hand into her sleeve and revealed several bank notes.
“Wot did I just say…” The woman’s eyes lit up at the sight of Grace’s money. “Oh, aye, ya can, I see. Well, come in, come in.”
Grace followed the woman into a dark room, with dirty wood floors and dozens of laundry lines strung up from one side of the room to the other. All manner of clothing were set out to dry as if after being washed, although they didn’t look particularly clean and Grace had to duck her head several times until they reached a plain wooden desk with an open ledger book on it. The woman scooted around it.
“How long might ye be staying with us fer?” she asked, glancing down at the pages.
“Ah, two nights.”
“Is that all?”
“Well, er, I may be staying longer, depending.”
The woman winked.
“Sounds like ye’re not too familiar with the area. Are ye new in town?”
Grace shook her head but didn’t answer. She was already speaking too much and she worried her accent might not be as convincing as she hoped.
Her silence seemed not to bother the old woman who scooted out from behind the desk and nodded her head in a “follow me” way as she turned around, opening a door. Grace was close behind her when they crossed another threshold and revealed a room crammed together with long, wooden boxes. Grace’s heart dropped at the sight of it. It appeared as though rows and rows of coffins had been built, but upon closer inspection, they were slightly wider than coffins and there were people moving around in them and each one had a number carved onto the foot of them.
These were four-penny coffin beds. Grace had heard about them while reading Aunt Belle’s pamphlets on the poor conditions of the housing problems that had been happeningall over the country. In recent years there had been a boom in population and there simply weren’t enough homes to fit people. In some cities, they had tried to build affordable houses, such as tenant housing, but these buildings had quickly become overcrowded. Some boarding houses had ceased renting out single rooms and had instead installed wooden box beds, much like these ones, and rented them out by the night. There were also hangover benches, where people would be about to sit and lean forward on a rope to sleep, or a penny sit up, where they weren’t allowed to even sleep, but sit all night. Sometimes, that was all they could afford and a far better prospect than getting frostbite in an alley.
The number of miserable people moving about the room slowly made Grace’s heart ache, but she had to focus on the task at hand. As she followed the woman to the end of the room, where the 19th bed was, she tried to ignore the cries of two children, huddled against their mother.
“Hush, hush,” the young woman cooed.
“Ye shut those brats up or you’ll be out on the street tonight!” the yellow-toothed woman threatened. “These people pay good money to sleep in peace. Ah, here we are.” She held out her hand as if to present the bed to Grace. “Home for the night.”
“Thank you.”
For a moment, the old woman squinted.
“Where’d you say you were from again?”
Grace shook her head.
“Nowhere important.”
The woman lifted her chin and glared at her.
“You’re familiar…”
One of the other lodgers started coughing abruptly, distracting the old woman for a moment. Grace sat down on the edge of her small bed and hung her head low, hoping to end their conversation. It worked, for in the next moment the woman letout a curse of sorts and left. Once she had gone back to the front of the house, Grace glanced around the cramped room. She needed to ask someone about the bald man; surely someone here had seen him.
One of the children that clung to her mother wailed, causing the poor woman to cover the child’s mouth.
“You must be quiet,” she insisted.
“But I’m hungry.”
“We haven’t any food, so you must hush, or we’ll be frozen and hungry as opposed to just hungry.”
Grace stood up and walked over, kneeling before them. The mother wrapped her arms tightly around her children, as if to protect them from whatever Grace was about to do or say.
“They’ll be quiet, I promise.”
“Oh, no,” Grace said, shaking her head. “I just, I overheard they were hungry and I don’t have anything to eat, but I do have some coins that you could use at the market, down the street?”
