‘Apologies for the meddling of you into it, my dear,’ she continued, ‘but I can’t find myself to catch your husband these days. Not that it’s a worry to me, as you’re honest souls, and I shan’t be throwing you out on to the street, I’m sure, but it is now three weeks and two days behind.’
‘Is it now? I’ll get Peter to see to it at once,’ I said.
‘And how fare you, young master Jack? Keeping your feet nice and dry in here, I’ll warrant.’
‘Yes, thank you,’ he muttered, continuing to glue down the grey moiré endpapers of a volume of plain, unvarnished calf, entitled, The Law and Practice of Joint-Stock Companies. Jack Tapster lived right up by the river, and was flooded out every other year, but the river had been his family’s livelihood – or deathlihood – ever since his father ran off one night after a prize-fight and never came back. Mud-larks, they were, and turd-collectors. Mrs Eeles had brought him to us, as, though the Tapsters lacked respectability, they had not just the whiff but the stink of tragedy about them, which she could not resist. Besides, Jack was often called ‘The Skull’, not only from the black grimacing skull tattooed on his left bicep, but also owing to his skeletal appearance and his unusual cleverness, so to her he was a living memento mori, which may have had something to do with her favouring of him for our apprentice.
Mrs Eeles didn’t care to look at Sven, who was German, despite him being the best finisher south of the Thames. It was a miracle he was still with us; he had come over on his Wanderjahre in search of work and had never left. He was fine-tooling around a copper-plate let into the cover of Rules and Articles of War (Better Government of All Her Majesty’s Forces); second-in-command after Peter, he was clearly intent on not catching my – or her – eye.
‘Peter must’ve forgotten, strange enough,’ I said. ‘He’s been awful busy, Mrs Eeles, what with Christmas and things.’ I became aware that I was blunting the needle on the wood of the sewing-frame, and Lucinda was clutching my skirt, pale as candlewax.
Mrs Eeles started to make her way towards the door. ‘Ho, dearie, never need to worry about you Damages, do I?’ she said heartily. ‘You’re a pattern young family.’
Despite the talk about her, I liked Mrs Eeles. She fussed about the wrong kind of people, but she never knew that I’d seen her from our box-room window, perched on her back porch, knees up outside her hitched skirts, smoking on a pipe. I could not tell her either, for I did not know how to without letting her know that I did not mind, that I thought she was quite the screamer for it. Sometimes she even came rent-collecting in her yellow curl-papers, when she must have thought she had already thoroughly brushed and fluffed her feathers.
I picked Lucinda up, and together we stood at the door and waved Mrs Eeles off into the gloomy drizzle. She lived round the corner from us, in the house two along from the workshop. Her empire only extended to the top ends of these two streets, where she could keep at bay the seedier folk that so troubled her sense of decorum, namely Fenians, Italians and Jews. On our side of the road was a terrace of fifteen houses, like a long line of dirty red siblings with the same narrow faces and familial features. Each had three floors with two rooms on each floor, one front and one back, plus a basement, except for ours, the first – or fifteenth – house, number two, Ivy-street, which had no basement but two small cellars, too small to use for anything other than storing coal and mixing paste. But the house did have an extra room off the ground floor where two roads met (and where a public-house should have been, were it not for a hiccup of town planning), and it was this room that became the binding workshop. So far, the neighbours had not complained about our industry, even though we could hear them plain as pewter through the damp walls.
I smiled at Nora Negley opposite at number one, with her saggy-dugged goat that always strolled into the parlour just when you were sat there having a cup of tea, and the widow Patience Bishop at number three who never liked visitors, or tea. Agatha Marrow was leading her donkey-cart up the road to number sixteen; I could see she had a new maid from the poorhouse to help her, for the last one was carried off by an ague even as she was stoking the range not long back.
‘Marnin’, Dara dearie.’
‘Morning, Agatha.’
‘Wet in’t it?’
‘Wet it is.’
‘It is wet, oh, in’t it wet?’
When times were better I used to give her our laundry, for although her children were the dirtiest in the street, it was a miracle the way the sheets came back from her without a speck of soot on them. But when I did it, no matter where I hung them, inside or out, the smuts and blacks from my hearth, or of the hearths of the city, would get to them some way.