Fingersmith Read Free Page B

homes, and the swells all keep to the country, and the grand houses of London are shut up and empty and pleading to be cracked. We got lots of stuff on nights like those, and Mr Ibbs’s profits were higher than ever. The cold makes thieves come to a bargain very quick.
    We did not feel the cold too much at Lant Street, for besides our ordinary kitchen fire there was Mr Ibbs’s locksmith’s brazier: he always kept a flame beneath the coals of it, you could never say what might not turn up that would need making up or melting down. On this night there were three or four boys at it, sweating the gold off sovereigns. Besides them was Mrs Sucksby in her great chair, a couple of babies in a cradle at her side; and a boy and a girl who were rooming with us then—John Vroom, and Dainty Warren.
    John was a thin, dark, knifish boy of about fourteen. He was always eating. I believe he had the worm. This night he was cracking peanuts, and throwing their shells on the floor.
    Mrs Sucksby saw him do it. ‘Will you watch your manners?’ she said. ‘You make a mess, and Sue shall have to tidy it.’
    John said, ‘Poor Sue, ain’t my heart bleeding.’
    He never cared for me. I think he was jealous. He had come to our house as a baby, like me; and like mine, his mother had died and made an orphan of him. But he was such a queer-looking child, no-one would take him off Mrs Sucksby’s hands. She had kept him till he was four or five, then put him on the parish—even then, however, he was a devil to get rid of, always running back from the workhouse: we were forever opening the shop-door and finding him sleeping on the step. She had got the master of a ship to take him at last, and he sailed as far as China; when he came back to the Borough after that, he did it with money, to brag. The money had lasted a month. Now he kept handy at Lant Street by doing jobs for Mr Ibbs; and besides them, ran mean little dodges of his own, with Dainty to help him.
    She was a great red-haired girl of three-and-twenty, and more or less a simpleton. She had neat white hands, though, and could sew like anything. John had her at this time stitching dog-skins onto stolen dogs, to make them seem handsomer breeds than what they really were.
    He was doing a deal with a dog-thief. This man had a couple of bitches: when the bitches came on heat he would walk the streets with them, tempting dogs away from their owners, then charging a ten pounds’ ransom before he’d give them back. That works best with sporting dogs, and dogs with sentimental mistresses; some owners, however, will never pay up—you could cut off their little dog’s tail and post it to them and never see a bean, they are that heartless—and the dogs that John’s pal was landed with he would throttle, then sell to him at a knocked-down price. I can’t say what John did with the meat—passed it off as rabbit, perhaps, or ate it himself. But the skins, as I have said, he had Dainty stitching to plain street-dogs, which he was selling as quality breeds at the Whitechapel Market.
    The bits of fur left over she was sewing together to cover him a greatcoat. She was sewing it, this night. She had the collar done and the shoulders and half the sleeves, and there were about forty different sorts of dog in it already. The smell of it was powerful, before a fire, and drove our own dog—which was not the old fighter, Jack, but another, brown dog we called Charley Wag, after the thief in the story—into a perfect fever.
    Now and then Dainty would hold the coat up for us all to see how well it looked.
    ‘It’s a good job for Dainty that you ain’t a deal taller, John,’ I said, one time she did this.
    ‘It’s a good job for you that you ain’t dead,’ he answered. He was short, and felt it. ‘Though a shame for the rest of us. I should like a bit of your skin upon the sleeves of my coat—perhaps upon the cuffs of it, where I wipes my nose. You should look right at home, beside a bulldog or a