Babylon Read Free Page A

mind!—and then, after ten years, they’re thrown onto the scrap heap with just a pension to keep the wolf from the door. Or else they become temple-maidens simply because that’s what their mothers did, and their mothers before them, and they don’t know any better.’ He paused a moment to stare at me, a note of gentleness entering his voice. ‘Yes, of course I feel sorry for them.’
    ‘We all feel sorry,’ said Mum, frowning. ‘But stay away from those girls, Maddy.’ She clucked her tongue. ‘They’re trouble.’ But they weren’t sorry. Not really. Nobody was. The only person sorry was me. For myself. Because I wanted Mum, Dad, and everybody to know that my middle name was Trouble, too.
     

     
    I turned down the lamp, lay on my bed, and gave myself up to the embrace of the dark. Outside, across the hallway, Mum was playing the piano. After a while, I heard her lift up her voice:
    Caro mio ben ,
    Credimi almen ,
    Senza di te
    Languisce il cor.
    Il tuo fedel
    Sospira ognor.
    Cessa crudel
    Tanto rigour!
     
    Mum taught music. Sometimes, when I had been younger, and aunts and uncles believed I wouldn’t understand, I had overheard whispered comments: that she had married beneath her, that she could have sung before kings and queens rather than at the University Settlement of Toynbee Hall. But Mum did good work. She was helping Canon Barnett uplift Whitechapel’s unfortunates, both spiritually and culturally. She was creating a moral aristocracy amongst the poor. Besides, the Hall’s musical concerts sometimes featured Lady Colin Campbell and Madam Clara Butt. And as well as teaching music, she had only last week lectured on Carlyle.
    I stared at the ceiling, listening to Mum sing of her dear, cruel love, of how her heart grew faint, and how she so longed for her cold, cold life to meet its end in fire.

 
     
     

Chapter Two
     
     
    Next morning I left early. The sky was clear and Wilmot Street was suffused in crisp, wintery light. But I was under a cloud. I didn’t have my letter. And as I walked along, passing under the Great Eastern Railway Bridge and into Tap Street, the light had begun to seem increasingly brittle, worrying at my eyes like grit. I knew now that I would never have my letter. However forthright I might be at school, I had lacked the courage to speak to my poor, unsuspecting parents.
    The sun had not long risen, and apart from a few market porters, dock labourers, and cabbies returning home from the Aldgate cab rank, the streets were empty.
    As I crossed a quadrangle formed by tall, overarching tenements I gazed up towards Lizzie’s rooms.
    Lizzie and I had always walked to school together. But for the last few months I had begun to bristle at her possessiveness. It certainly wouldn’t do to call on her today. I needed some time to myself. I had to think of how to explain myself to Miss Nelson.
    My nape prickled. I half believed that Lizzie might be peeping down at me through a gap in the drapes. I averted my eyes and hastily turned right into Brady Street, and then, as I walked towards Whitechapel Road, right again, past The Roebuck public house, and into the narrow, cobbled thoroughfare known as Buck’s Row.

    I kept close to the warehouses of Essex Wharf on the north side of the street. On the other side were two-storey terraces occupied by some of the district’s better-class tradesmen. Holding my breath, and barely daring to look, I crossed the road and scurried past the stables and big wooden gate where they’d discovered Polly Nichols in the early hours of August 31. I remembered that night well. There had been a violent storm, and flashes of lightning had shone through my bedroom window. And later, a red glow had filled the sky. The docks had caught fire, and great tongues of flame writhed above the rooftops of the South Quay.
    As if woken from a trance, I found myself outside my school: a square pile of municipal brick and mortar that rose above the surrounding streets