The Crimson Petal and the White Read Free

to the police-wagon.
    Within minutes, as the pale sun begins to rise over St Giles, whatever can be done has been done. The living and the dead have trundled away, leaving the wrecked cab in their wake. Splintered wheel-spokes and window-frame glass shards hang still as sculpture.
    Peeping over Caroline’s shoulder, you may think there’s nothing more to see, but she remains hypnotised, elbows on the window-sill, shoulders still. She isn’t looking at the wreck anymore; her attention has shifted to the house-fronts across the street.
    There are faces at all the windows there. The silent faces of children, individually framed, or in small groups, like shop-soiled sweetmeats in a closed-down emporium. They stare down at the wreck, waiting. Then, all at once, as if by communal agreement on the number of seconds that must pass after the cabman’s disappearance around the corner, the little white faces disappear.
    At street level, a door swings open and two urchins run out, quick as rats. One is dressed only in his father’s boots, a pair of ragged knickerbockers and a large shawl, the other runs barefoot, in a night-shirt and overcoat. Their hands and feet are brown and tough as dog’s paws; their infant physiognomies ugly with misuse.
    What they’re after is the cab’s skin and bone, and they’re not shy in getting it: they attack the maimed vehicle with boyish enthusiasm. Their small hands wrench spokes from the splintered wheel and use them as chisels and jemmies. Metal edgings and ledges snap loose and are wrenched off in turn; lamps and knobs are beaten, tugged and twisted.
    More children emerge from other filthy doorways, ready for their share. Those with sleeves roll them up, those without fall to work without delay. Despite their strong hands and wrinkled beetle-brows, none of them is older than eight or nine, for although every able-bodied inhabitant of Church Lane is wide awake now, it’s only these younger children who can be spared to strip the cab. Everyone else is either drunk, or busy preparing for a long day’s work and the long walk to where it may be had.
    Soon the cab is aswarm with Undeserving Poor, all labouring to remove something of value. Practically everything is of value, the cab being an object designed for a caste many grades above theirs. Its body is made of such rare materials as iron, brass, good dry wood, leather, glass, felt, wire and rope. Even the stuffing in the seats can be sewn into a pillow much superior to a rolled-up potato sack. Without speaking, and each according to what he has in the way of tools and footwear, the children hammer and gouge, yank and kick, as the sound echoes drily in the harsh air and the framework of the hansom judders on the cobblestones.
    They know their time is likely to be short, but it proves to be even shorter than expected. Scarcely more than fifteen minutes after the first urchins’ assault on the wreck, a massive two-horse brewer’s dray turns the corner and rumbles up the lane. It carries nothing except the cabman and three well-muscled companions.
    Most of the children immediately run home with their splintery armfuls; the most brazen persist for another couple of seconds, until angry shouts of ‘Clear off!’ and ‘Thief!’ send them scurrying. By the time the dray draws up to the wreck, Church Lane is empty again, its house-fronts innocent and shadowy, its windows full of faces.
    The four men alight and walk slowly around the cab, clockwise and counter-clockwise, flexing their massive hands, squaring their meaty shoulders. Then, at the cabman’s signal, they lay hands on the four corners of the wreck and, with one groaning heave, load it onto the dray. It settles more or less upright, two of its wheels having been plundered.
    No time is wasted scooping up the smaller fragments. The horse snorts jets of steam as it’s whipped into motion, and the three helpers jump on, steadying themselves against the mangled cab. The cabman pauses only to