This was all supposition, but knowing what I did of my ma, I could see it.
My feelings toward Ma were so tangled, they were like knots on badly done embroidery. Try to take them out, and you’d rip the cloth for good. My mother had told me many times how selfish I was, that I’d driven her to drink, and toward the end, that the silver lining in her dying was she’d never have to see me again.
Afterward, I told myself that Ma didn’t wholly mean it, that she was ill, her heart rotten with gin. She drank to submerge the fear we both lived and breathed and slept and for Sarah’s sake tried to pretend wasn’t there, that we’d lose our two small rooms, that we’d starve on the street. It tore at my ma the same way it tore at me. In this we were the same.
But it gave me little pleasure to think of my mother, as most of my memories were not happy ones. Entering our rooms to find her snoring by the stove, a half-empty bottle standing upright on the floor, for even drunk, she’d be careful not to spill it. Waking to the scrape of our door to hear her giggling, taking a man to her bed, just on the other side of a hung curtain. Turning over in our bed to see Sarah’s eyes open, shining in the light coming between the broken shutters. “I don’t like it,” Sarah would whimper. I’d hush her, and she’d roll toward me, her hands covering her ears, one side of her face pressed against the bed, while I covered her other hand with my own.
My mother didn’t have friends the way other women did. The first time I went over to my friend Livvy’s house, her ma and her friends were laughing together over their cups at their corner table. The sight made me stare, and when Livvy asked what was the matter, I made no reply. But that afternoon altered the way I saw my family, trenching my heart with an uncomfortable sense of difference. Later, I realized that Ma didn’t trust other women, though she never said why. Now, I suspected that if she’d done this terrible thing to Maggie, she might imagine every woman capable of the same.
Restless, I turned from one side to the other, yanking the quilt.
As for James, his recent seriousness and kindness surprised me not a little. At the Silver Plover and again tonight, his manner had revealed genuine concern, even real affection. He said he didn’t want to see Sarah or me hurt, and I believed him, for what other reason could he have for warning me about Maggie?
I thought of how James had taken every precaution against anyone in the taproom knowing what we were saying. Likely he’d become more cautious and less trusting because of his time in prison. I could understand how that would change someone.
But James had served less than a year. Maggie had served many times that amount, in brutal and cruel conditions.
God only knew how it had changed her.
Chapter 12
For the next few days, with James’s warning fresh in my mind, I studied Maggie to see if she treated me any differently than the others, but I saw no sign of rancor. She seemed to be unfailingly agreeable. She looked approvingly over Nell’s shoulder at the record book; she continued jennying with different thieves; and she seemed to have no favorites, which would have been a certain way of instilling ill will. But it was early days yet.
On Saturday morning, with Sarah due that night, I wondered if she would come home—if she would be afraid to, for fear of seeing Billy or Tommy. I’d written a discreet note to tell her they were no longer here, but perhaps she worried they might have returned. As I worked at Mr. Ardle’s shop that morning, fixing and mending, my mind turned over what I knew, what I surmised, and the worst I could possibly imagine. It was not an exercise conducive to soothing my nerves. Still, I emptied the tray of jewelry and watches before I headed to the inn.
Maggie was taking Mary out, so she’d paired Fanny and me for the afternoon dodge, assigning us Hunt and Roskell on Mortimer, away from the West End.
Fanny and I started out, but a few blocks from Elephant and Castle, she looped her hand through my arm to slow my steps and halted us on the bridge. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” Fanny said. Her round face, usually cheerful, was anxious. I understood why she’d stopped here, despite the wind and the chipped green railing covered in bird droppings. The noise from the passing boats and ships meant no passersby would hear us.
Her light blue coat flapped open, and a spiral of Fanny’s red hair came loose from its pin.
“Here, let me fix it,” I said, and fastened the curl back in place. “What’s the matter?”
The sudden blare of a ship drew Fanny’s brown eyes to the river. “I went to see my mum last Sunday.”
“She’s still living in Erith?” I asked. Fanny’s mother, June, had been a thief under Patty Wirth and now spent her days in this small town well east of London, famous for its marshes and as a place where the steamships docked to let the shilling trippers off to picnic.
Fanny turned toward me. “I wanted to ask her about Maggie.”
My heart gave a thump. “Why?”
She sniffed and folded her arms across her plump chest. “I knowyoudon’t believe in the tarot, but I laid out cards the day I went thieving with Maggie, and there were all sorts of bad signs. The Devil and the Tower, both.”
“Did the dodge go badly?”
“Oh, it went fine,” she said, her brown eyes wide. “But the cards told me it was Maggie being deceptive and dangerous, in ways we don’t know yet.”
In this case, the cards likely aren’t wrong, I thought.
“Maggie asked if my mother was still here,” Fanny said, “and I didn’t want her to know, so I pretended I thought she meant London proper and said no.”
“You don’t trust her.”
“Do you? No matter what Amelia says, I don’t think she’d have let the ring go unless Maggie snaked it from her somehow. If Amelia told anybody, I thought it would be you.”
“She didn’t.” Fanny’s face fell with disappointment at my answer, and I asked, “What did your mother say?”
Fanny turned to put the breeze to her back, and it pulled the same corkscrew of red hair loose, blowing it around her face. “Mum said the police knew something that doubled her sentence. About a snooze Maggie did at a fancy hotel, going into the rooms. It was one of the biggest pokes of the year. Might be the police were only looking for someone to pin it on, but ’twas likely her jenny that told them.”
