“Very pretty,” I told her truthfully. “Mightn’t you get work with a milliner?”
She flapped a hand. “No, miss. That’s for girls, and I am no spring chicken. I make my flowers the old-fashioned way, my gran taught me. But the fashion nowadays is for great bloody birds, and I’ll not stuff a bird to put on my head. It’s unnatural, that is,” she said vehemently.
I had to agree. The fashion for befeathered millinery including heads was a ghoulish one.
She went on. “No, miss. This suits me well enough. I make flowers for some of the less expensive suppliers when my hands are nimble. When the wind is out of the east, they swell up like Cumberland sausages, they do, and it’s all I can do to button my boots.” She thrust out her hands and I saw they were swollen across the knuckles, marked with rheumatism, one of the innumerable disadvantages of the life of the poor—sketchy nutrition, damp beds, and chilly nights spent in fogbound streets.
“That’s when I find myself a fellow for the evening and make a little coin that way,” she said, as if it were as natural as anything.
Stoker returned, subsiding heavily into his seat as Elsie signaled for another bottle. We sipped the vile stuff as if it were vintage champagne. It would never do to insult our hostess, and Stoker’s innate courtesy was the stuff of legend.
He glanced down at her hands and touched one knuckle lightly with a fingertip. “Rheumatism. November is coming along, Elsie. You need to sleep inside.”
She bristled. “That don’t always happen, Mr. Stoker,” she told him, her mouth slightly mulish.
“What about the allowance from the temperance worker you told me about?” he asked gently. Elsie and I exchanged quick glances, neither of us willing to reveal to Stoker that his little fiction had been exposed. (It has long been my experience that men are confused and sometimes upset by the truth. It is a kindness to let them go on believing what they like in such circumstances.)
“Sometimes I helps a few of the other girls out,” she told him, raising her chin. “Long Bet needed new boots last week, and Mary Jane lacked a few shillings to renting her own room. She’s got a snug little place of her own, just around the corner,” she added. The dreams in this part of the city were as small and pinched as the faces. Four walls to call one’s own. A hot meal, a pair of shoes with sound soles.
I thought of the little Gothic temple that Lord Rosemorran had given over to me to use as my own, a bolt-hole where I was snug and safe. I had meals cooked in his kitchens, a generous wage. Elsie would be mistaken by many for a drab, and I might be taken often for a lady, but neither of these was entirely the truth. We were, both of us, women who worked, making our own way in the world. I had expertise and knowledge, but my greatest advantage had been the sheer luck of being born into a gentler class. I might fall a little, but Elsie, whatever she did, could never climb.
Stoker went on, careful not to scold. “Where do you sleep when you’ve given your coin away?”
She shrugged one bony shoulder. “The corner of a yard, sometimes. A quiet doorway.”
“Sleeping rough is dangerous,” Stoker told her. “Particularly now.”
He did not say the fiend’s name; there was no need. Everyone in London knew of the murderous devil who stalked Whitechapel, exercising his brutality upon the women who lived there.
Elsie gave him a fond look and patted his hand. “Lord love you, I can take care of myself, Mr. Stoker. Don’t you worry.”
But a line had etched itself between his brows, and I knew he would think of Elsie, stubborn, incorrigible, generous Elsie, sharing her meager bounty with her friends.
She rose suddenly. “Come on, then, ducks. You cannot go haring about the city dressed as you are. I’ve spoken to a few of my friends. We’ve had a whip-round to see the lot of you dressed decently and a bite to eat.”
She led the way upstairs and showed us into her accommodation for the night—a small room fitted with a narrow bed and a washstand with a cracked bowl. Eddy managed the stairs under Stoker’s ungentle coaxing and flopped onto the bed.
Elsie gave him a fond look. “He’s a pretty sort of lad, isn’t he? I imagine he has a mother what loves him dearly. Just look at those moustaches!” She shook her head. “But he cannot hold his drink and that’s God’s own truth.”
He burbled out a snore just then, and Elsie left to find us clothes while Stoker and I took turns washing with a pitcher of cold water, shivering but happy to be at least marginally cleaner than we were. I stripped off the robes of Boadicea at last as Stoker peeled away the shirt he had lent Eddy, the fine cotton stiff and crackling with dried blood.
Elsie appeared, her arms full of garments, and clucked over Stoker’s injured flesh. “I brought something for those bruises. Seen it often enough with the sailors who fall to brawling,” she added. She produced strips of bandages and a bottle of ferociously pungent liniment. “This will help.” Without waiting for permission, she bent to her task, pouring a palmful of liniment into her hand and slapping it onto his skin.
He howled in protest, but she would not let him squirm away, holding him firmly until the nasty stuff had penetrated his flesh. “Now, isn’t that just like a man?” she demanded. “Kicking up such a fuss over a little good horse liniment. I made less noise when I was in labor.”
“You have children?” I asked as I shook out the petticoats she had brought for me.
“Aye, miss. A pair of them. Molly is in service with a wine merchant and Jemmy is a deckhand on one of them great ships with Cunard,” she said with unmistakable pride.
“Do you see them often?” I stepped into the petticoats and tied them firmly about my waist.
“Heavens no, miss. That would never do,” she said with no trace of regret. “They’re my flesh and blood and I love them, but I’ll not have them living a life like mine. They need better, and if I catch them in this part of the city, I’d tan them properly.” I did not doubt it. Most mothers in her situation were content to let their children follow in their footsteps, their future bound by the limitations of poverty and lack of imagination. But Elsie had glimpsed a bigger world, and I marveled that she had managed to launch her children into it.
She bossed Stoker into a set of borrowed clothes, down to the boots. “Got those off Tom from the bar,” she said proudly. “He reckons he can sell them to you for three shillings.”
Stoker handed her Tiberius’ empty notecase, a fine affair of bottle green leather set in silver. “It hasn’t a tuppence in it, but I can promise Tom will get far more than three shillings in pawn for it.”
She hurried away to make the trade whilst Stoker wrestled Eddy into a moderately clean shirt of striped cotton, tying a jaunty scarf around his neck for warmth. He dropped the slumbering prince back onto the bed as Elsie returned several minutes later with word that Tom had accepted the barter, and just then another figure appeared, a young woman, blond, with her hair piled high in an attempt at glamour.