“What if I am! Who wants to stay in this filthy hole all their life! I hate it! And I
He was a formidable giant who might have snapped her bones like toothpicks, but he threw back his head and laughed. “Go ahead and ask her if you like! But believe me, she’d as soon lend you four hundred of her teeth.”
ONE AFTERNOON WHILE Black Jack was away Amber sought out Mother Red-Cap. When she was home, which was not often, she was almost always employed in working on her ledger, entering long columns, filling out bills and receipts by the dozen, and she did not like to be interrupted. Now, as Amber approached, she made her a signal to be silent and continued running her pen up a line of neatly written figures, her lips moving as she did so, and then finally she set down the total and turned to Amber.
“What is it, my dear? Can I do something for you?”
Amber had prepared and rehearsed her speech, but now she cried impulsively: “Yes! Lend me four hundred pound so I can get away from here! Oh, please, Mother Red-Cap! I’ll pay it back, I promise you!”
Mother Red-Cap observed her coolly for a moment, and then she smiled. “Four hundred pound, Mrs. Channell, is a large sum of money. What do you offer for security?”
“Why—I’ll give you a promise, on paper, or anything you like. And I’ll pay it back with interest,” she added, for she had learned by now that Interest was both God and Sovereign to Mother Red-Cap. “I’ll do anything. But I’ve
“I don’t believe you understand the business of pawn-brokerage, my dear. It may seem to you that four hundred pound is an insignificant sum to borrow. It is, however, a very large sum to lend upon no better security than the promise of a young girl to repay. I don’t doubt your intentions, but I think you would find it more difficult to come by four hundred pound than you imagine now.”
Surprised, disappointed, Amber was angry. “Why!” she cried. “You said yourself you could have got a hundred pound for me!”
“And so I probably could. More than half that hundred, however, would have been mine for arranging the match, not yours. But to be frank with you, it was merely an idle thought. Black Jack’s told me very flatly he intends keeping you for himself and I believe, my dear, you should feel some gratitude toward him. It cost him three hundred pound to get you out of Newgate.”
“Three hundred—Why, he never told me that!”
“And so I think that while Black Jack’s here we won’t be using you that way.”
“While he’s here? Is he going somewhere?”
“Not very soon, I hope. But someday he’ll ride up Tyburn Hill in a cart—and he won’t come down again.”
Amber stared at her, horror-struck. She knew that he had been burnt on the left thumb, which meant he was to hang for the next offense. But he had escaped again in spite of that and he had a reckless audacity which made her think of him as almost indestructible. Now, however, she was thinking not of him but of herself.
“That’s what’s going to happen to all of us! I know it is! We’re
Mother Red-Cap lifted her brows. “We might, I suppose. But we’re far more likely to die of consumption here in Alsatia.” She turned away and picked up her pen and though Amber lingered a few moments she knew that she had been dismissed, and went to climb the stairs back up to her bedroom.
She was discouraged but not beaten. She still intended to escape somehow, and comforted herself with the reminder that she had made the far more difficult escape from Newgate.
Alsatia lay just east of the Temple Gardens and could be reached from them by going down a narrow broken flight of steps. Low as it was and close to the river it was perpetually invaded by a thick dingy-yellow fog that hung to the very pavements, seeped into the bones, stuck in the nostrils and made it difficult even to breathe. Ram Alley, where Mother Red-Cap’s house was, smelt of stinking cook-shops and the lye-soap used by the laundresses who made that street a headquarters.
Its courts and alleys were crowded with beggars and thieves, murderers and whores and debtors, a wild desperate rabble who lived in a constant internecine warfare but who invariably banded together to beat off any attempted intrusion by constable or bailiff. Children swarmed everywhere—almost as numerous as the dogs and pigs—starving little dwarfs with sunken eyes and husky high-pitched voices. Amber shuddered at the sight of them and looked swiftly away for fear her own baby would be marked before birth because she had seen them. She felt that living here she had left the world—the only world that mattered to her, the world where she might see Lord Carlton again.
