The Flower Girl Read online

  Maggie Ford

  * * *

  The Flower Girl

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  About the Author

  Maggie was born in the East End of London but at the age of six she moved to Essex, where she has lived ever since. After the death of her first husband, when she was only twenty-six, she went to work as a legal secretary until she remarried in 1968. She has a son and two daughters, all married; her second husband died in 1984.

  She has been writing short stories since the early 1970s.

  To my friend Rosalie Howe

  Also my thanks to James Sacre for his most valued information on magic and magicians

  Do I own the days I walk through?

  Do I dare to choose my way?

  And where you lead should I just follow?

  I’ll never walk this path again.

  You draw the world that I must live in.

  Are you the writer, and I the pen?

  ‘The Pattern Maker’ by Brian Bedford of Artisan

  Chapter One

  The tray was empty. All that was left were four tiny posies, their paper leaves and petals limp and soggy from the damp air.

  As Christmas shoppers passed along London’s opulent Oxford Street, hurrying with a mid-December fog beginning to descend, Emma Beech took the tray from around her slim neck and dropped the spoiled bunches into the gutter. No point taking them home. Her mother would have made a fresh batch for tomorrow.

  Tomorrow, Saturday, the fog hopefully having lifted, she’d try the theatre queues. The wealthy who never queued but hurried straight into the foyer from their carriages preferred real flowers, a lady fluttering her eyes at being presented with a posy or a corsage. It was ordinary folk who bought paper ones for a penny or two. They didn’t wilt and could be used as fire-stove ornaments, lasting for ages and gathering dust, but perfect imitations of the real thing. Mum was clever with her fingers.

  The fog was closing in rapidly. With the tray under her arm, Emma made for a horse-bus pulling up a few yards away. It went from Oxford Street to Shoreditch. To save the fare, she would be walking the rest of the way along Commercial Road to Stepney, where she lived with Mum and her elder brother Ben.

  Clutching her ticket and half listening to the conversation around her, the plod of the horses’ hooves and the driver’s throaty warning to others partly blinded by the thickening fog, she gazed through the window.

  Mum would be pleased to see an empty tray. She worked hard, did Mum. As well as paper flowers she did silk work, tassels for ladies’ mantles, antimacassars and mantelpiece runners for an employer who, like all his kind, paid an insult of a wage to outworkers. Nor was it regular, so the paper blooms helped keep her just clear of poverty’s cold clutches.

  Emma helped, twisting stems, cutting leaves and petals. She’d left school two years ago, at thirteen, to work at Bell & Co. the match people in Bow, but after a year of repetitious work with its stink of phosphorous and hot wax, she’d been laid off. She wasn’t sorry. She’d hated dipping sticks in the thick paste from which, despite the match girls’ protest fourteen years ago in 1888, it was still possible to get that disease that rotted the jaw bone, called phossy jaw.

  By the time she got to Shoreditch, visibility was down to a yard or two. One hand clutching her tray, the other holding her skirt clear of the pavement, she tucked her head into the narrow collar of her flimsy jacket. Already drops of moisture were gathering on her lashes, her long, auburn hair under the inadequate straw boater now damp and heavy.

  At six-thirty and completely dark, this pea souper meant feeling her way at a snail’s pace. She could hear the detonation of fog signals from the railway, nearer at hand muffled warnings of cab and cart drivers, a wheel easily mounting the kerb in a fog to endanger pedestrians.

  The air had become acrid with the stink of thousands of London’s domestic and industrial chimneys, but one smell assailed her as she blindly passed one point. Hot tar. It brought back childhood memories of standing beside the warm, glowing brazier as workmen raked the shiny, smooth-flowing tar to the puff and rumble of the ponderous steamroller.

  The odour lingering in her nostrils, Emma looked for the glow of the next gas lamp. It was easy to become disorientated. All she had to tell her she was still in Commercial Road was the occasional dull clip-clop of hooves or the muffled rumble of cart or carriage wheels. Once or twice a figure, head sunk into a scarf, breath hanging on the air, sidestepped a near collision with her in the fog, grunting an apology, to be swallowed up again in passing.

  The landmark she’d been looking out for, St Anne’s Church, loomed up like an apparition. Church Row ran beside it. Down there was home.

  She was preparing to turn the corner, cautiously feeling the railings, when a tall figure came out of the fog, cannoning into her with some force.

  She gave a little cry of annoyance. The cry became a shriek of alarm as the man grabbed her arm, his face, half hidden in a thick muffler, inches from hers, the eyes pale and staring. Certain she was about to be molested and not a soul nearby to run to her aid, Emma hit out with both hands, her tray tumbling from her grip.

  Her cry must have startled him because he instantly leaped back. Unable to save himself or the heavy object he held in both arms, together with a long stick, he hit the ground, still clutching the thing he held as though it were a baby, though the stick clattered a short way off.

  With an impulse to run vanishing, Emma went over to him, now full of apologies. In an effort to make amends she bent to help him up but was surprised to have him cringe away.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to scare yer,’ she blurted. Silly, it was he who had scared her. ‘Let me ’elp you up.’ Silly again – he was tall, thick-set and she was slim, with little weight to her.

  She stood back uncertain as he waved her away, at the same time pulling his muffler higher over the lower part of his face. She watched him get awkwardly to his feet, still refusing to let go of the thing he clutched so protectively.

  ‘I’m ever so sorry,’ she began.

  He appeared embarrassed. ‘It is I who should apologise.’

  The voice was cultured, in the pronounced way actors on the stage spoke, every syllable clear and clipped, and she wasn’t sure whether to feel amused or belittled by it.

  ‘Clumsy of me,’ he continued. ‘I should have taken care in weather such as this. I must have given you quite a turn, my dear. I do apologise.’

  ‘Don’t think nothing of it,’ she began. ‘It was …’ She stopped, as in putting his weight on both feet, he sucked in a painful hiss.

  ‘Oh, yer’ve ’urt yerself!’ she burst out. ‘Is it yer ankle?’

  He tried the injured foot again. ‘I must have twisted it. Stupid of me.’

 
; ‘No it ain’t,’ she countered. ‘Look, sit down fer a bit on the concrete edge of them church railings till the pain goes. I’ll ’elp yer over to them.’

  She made to take his arm but again he drew back from her as though insulted and hobbled over the railings. Taken aback by his almost aggressive reaction, she was about to leave him to himself when he spoke.

  ‘Would you kindly retrieve my pole before someone trips over it?’

  He pointed to the stick just about visible in the murk. It was more an order than a request, the voice deep and commanding, one accustomed to being obeyed, like a regimental sergeant major. She now noticed that his clothes, though shabby, had the look of having once been expensive. If they were his own and not given to him, then perhaps he was someone who had recently come down in the world, hence his tone.

  Annoyed, she moved to obey, but only because it was sensible to move an object that could be dangerous to anyone walking by and not seeing it. It was a strange-looking thing, one end pointed, the other end carved like a blunt screw.

  ‘What is it?’ she queried, handing it to him. ‘It’s funny-looking fer a walking stick.’

  ‘It is not a walking stick.’ Again the sharp and commanding tone.

  ‘Oh! Then what is it?’ She was determined to have him speak civil to her. After all, none of this was her fault. To her surprise his tone moderated.

  ‘To support this.’ He looked down at the object he still held. ‘This is a hurdy-gurdy in case you are wondering. Some date back eight hundred years. This isn’t so old, maybe around thirty years. I bought it nearly a year ago from a pawn shop. When I still had a little money left to spend.’ His low chuckle held a bitter ring.

  ‘Can you play it?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course I can play it.’

  ‘Is it easy?’

  ‘That depends. One needs nimble fingers. And mine are very nimble – or were once.’ He leaned over to examine his ankle, twisting it this way and that, the pain obviously now diminishing.

  Emma knew she ought to be on her way. Mum would have supper ready, eager to see how much she’d made today. But she was intrigued.

  ‘Where do yer play?’

  He looked up sharply. Although she couldn’t see much of him between the scarf and the hat he wore she felt instantly intimidated. She wasn’t one to be easily put down. Life, especially these last three years, had made her strong-minded even at fifteen, sixteen come February, and where poverty often bowed some people, she had always fought it tooth and nail with some vague belief that one day it must all change, that somehow she’d make it change. This unfamiliar feeling made her angry with herself.

  ‘What I mean is,’ she forged on as the scrutiny threatened to put her even further on edge, ‘do yer play it for yer own amusement or fer money?’

  He didn’t reply but she guessed he must be a street musician, one of the many of such down and outs trudging the gutters for a pitying penny or two. If he was a street entertainer he seemed painfully ashamed of it – like someone who may have known easier times, even genteel times, but was now forced to beg for a living. This fact seemed obvious from his speech.

  She’d known better times too, maybe not so grand, but comfortable enough. Her father had been a stevedore in the docks with a good gang who got the plum jobs while hundreds of others had to line up ‘on the stones’ as it was called, in hope of a week’s or even a day’s work. Three years ago he’d been killed falling into a ship’s hold. There were no more wages, and his colleagues, hard up as they were, putting a few pence into the hat to help tide the widow over for a week or two.

  Mum had tried to keep body and soul together with nothing coming in. Emma’s elder sister Molly had died of influenza. Not long after, they’d lost Ernie, only eight years old, of meningitis. It left just her and Ben. How Mum had got through those years didn’t stand thinking about.

  Emma had never seen her weep though she was sure she did inside. Missing her sister terribly, Molly so lively and animated and kind, she’d often given way until a sharp reprimand from Mum to pull herself together made her force back the tears. Mum was tough. And thank goodness. But for her they’d have ended up in the workhouse, because Ben was no bloody use.

  His temper, which had always been short, had become insufferable, and he never once took into consideration how Mum struggled on. Evicted from the little rented house in Leonard Street, with most of their belongings taken and sold by the landlord to help pay the back rent, she still remembered helping push a borrowed old handcart with what little Mum had managed to keep hold of through the wet streets to the two rooms in Stepney she’d finally found while Ben instantly pronounced it a slum. As if it were Mum’s fault.

  Life would have been so different if Dad hadn’t got killed. Yes, she knew all about coming down in the world and the bitterness she could detect in this man touched a spot in her heart.

  ‘I sell flowers,’ she said, affecting cheerfulness so as to let him see that trying to earn an honest penny from selling wares or making music was not begging, if that was what he was thinking. ‘Paper flowers – in the West End – but not to the toffs. They buy real ones. Just to ordinary people. I was on me way ’ome when you blundered into me.’

  ‘I have apologised for that.’ Above the muffler, the eyes didn’t look a bit apologetic. They seemed to pierce into her with an intensity she was finding almost alarming.

  Against her better judgement, Emma subdued an urge to hurry away. She wasn’t going to let him intimidate her. And let him get the best of it? No.

  ‘D’you busk round ’ere, then?’ she continued with more cheeriness than she felt. ‘I expect you work the pubs. You get the best pickings from them coming out after a good evening’s boozing.’

  ‘Why should that interest you?’ The sharp retort should have warned her away but she was now determined to stand her ground.

  ‘Do you? I mean busk round ’ere?’

  He stood up abruptly, startling her. ‘That is none of your business.’

  He was looming over her now, making her back away a fraction. What if he wasn’t as harmless as he’d first appeared, sitting by the parapet with his twisted ankle?

  She saw his hand come towards her. It might have been a gesture of apology but looked more like a threat. Worse, as he reached out, the muffler slipped to reveal a deep scar stretching from the point of the chin almost to the left ear, the scar new and still livid. In this eerie fog it looked as though half his chin had once been cleft.

  She let out a shriek and made to run, but the hand caught hold of her arm. ‘Let me go!’ she screamed. ‘I’ll call someone.’

  ‘I mean no harm.’ His raised voice certainly sounded as if it did.

  ‘Let go of me! I’ll scream for the police!’ she cried out as she fought the unyielding grip.

  ‘Please,’ boomed the voice. ‘Don’t be afraid of me.’

  But already she had pulled free. Clinging to her tray, her other hand holding up her skirts for more freedom of movement, she ran blindly into the fog, putting distance between him and her, praying that she was heading down Church Row in the direction of home. If not, she would be hopelessly lost. There was panic in the thought as she ran.

  After a while with no pursuing footsteps, Emma calmed. What had made her tarry so long with a total stranger? She’d felt sorry for him at first, reluctant to leave someone who’d been hurt, but why had he turned so odd? Still, it was over now. She was safe. What mattered now was not to lose her way. Too easy to lose all sense of direction in this weather, you could walk right past a familiar place and not even know.

  Emma turned her mind to gauging where she was, sensing rather than seeing landmarks. Coming up against the iron bollard at the corner of the alley crossing Church Row that led to St Anne’s churchyard, she felt the unforgiving coldness of the cast iron before she saw it, black as black in a black world.

  A few cautious steps into empty space, hand outstretched like a blind person, took her to the bollard’s companio
n on the other corner. All that was needed now was to proceed straight on, one hand exploring the wall, doors set at intervals, a faint smudge of light from a window or two for comfort.

  Too occupied now to think of the narrow escape she’d just had, she counted the doors. One. Two. Three. The broken pavements were barely eighteen inches in width with a cobbled road hardly wide enough for a horse and cart to pass, yet this evening it was like moving through a black chasm. The only indication of the houses opposite was the indistinct glow from an uncurtained window or two, blurred by vapour, the gas lamp at the end of the street affording no light this far down. All was so quiet now, quiet like the grave. Quieter, knowing it wasn’t, yet a dead feel to the air around her.

  She thought again of the man who’d accosted her. What if he’d gone down another street and was already ahead of her waiting for her? Emma’s heart began to beat against her ribs with sickening thuds.

  Ahead loomed a broad, darker patch in the fog – the arch under the Blackwall Railway line. The fifth door of the eight houses between the alley and the Mitre Street Bridge was where she lived.

  She all but fell through the front door, so warped as to be incapable of being locked. This was the hovel she called home, but never had it been so welcome. The dark hall smelled of stale cooking. A door on her right led to a tenanted room. The two rooms her mother rented from a scrimping landlord were up one flight of bare wood stairs that went on up to a top floor.

  Hardly had she got in when her mother’s voice called from the bedroom where she did her work. ‘That you, Em? How’d it go terday?’

  Before she could reply, Mum was there, her satisfied gaze trained on the empty tray. ‘Sold ’em all then, did yer?’

  Emma put the tray down behind the door. She must still have looked a little flustered for Mum eyed her suspiciously. ‘Yer did sell ’em all, didn’t yer? Yer didn’t throw any away just ter make me feel pleased?’