The Truth About Verity Sparks Read Free Page B

Sparks.”
    Expect all you like, Mr Saddington Plush.

    Even with the cab ride, it was after five by the time I got back to Madame Louisette’s. I went to the kitchen first, and Cook gave me a couple of fairy cakes. I wondered, as I ate them, what to say to Madame. Any kind of trouble with customers was bad for business, and I knew she’d worry when I told her.
    She knew already. The door of her private parlour was open and she was sitting at her bureau with a glass in her hand and a gin bottle in front of her. A litter of bills and letters and advertising fliers lay mixed with ribbon samples and odd trimmings around her on the floor, as if she’d simply swept the lot from her desk. She’d been crying.
    “Oh, Verity.” She swayed to her feet. “Verity, I’m so sorry. So very sorry, my dear girl.”
    “What’s the matter, Madame? Have you heard about the brooch?”
    She nodded.
    “But you know I didn’t take it.”
    “I know, I know.” She gulped down the rest of her gin and poured another half-glass, then scrabbled around on the floor for a piece of paper. “But here. Look! It’s a note from Lady Throttle. She insists I let you go.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Kick you out. Get rid of you. She says that if I don’t, she won’t pay her bill.”
    “Is it so very much?”
    Madame ignored me. “And she’ll tell all her friends not to pay. Don’t you understand, dear? If they don’t pay me, I can’t pay for these.” She tossed a bunch of ribbons into the air. “And then they’ll send the bailiffs round. I’ll be ruined.”
    I sat shocked and still while Madame continued drearily, “And not just me: there’s Emily and Bridget and Beth, and there’s Charlotte, and Cook as well. I’ll have nothing.”
    I could see why Madame was scared, but my heart sank like one of Cook’s fairy cakes. Where would I go? What would I do?
    “I’d like to stick up for you, Verity, I truly would, but she’s got me, and there’s nothing I can do.” Madame upturned the gin bottle and shook the last drops into her glass. “Nothing.”

3
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT
    Three days later at eight o’clock in the morning I was out on the street with my shabby old carpetbag. I glanced back at the shop. For more than two years Madame Louisette’s
boutique
had meant home and friends as well as my job. My room with Beth; Cook’s stories and second helpings and rough, kind hugs; Madame’s little lost things that I was always finding … well, goodbye to all that, I told myself. If I thought about it too much, I’d cry or get scared. With a wave to Cook and Beth, who were leaning out the third-storey window, I started to walk as fast as I could down Oxford Street.
    I was hoping that Auntie Sarah could put me up for a couple of nights until I found somewhere to live. Cook said there were always rooms at Ma Bolivar’s. It was a respectable place, she told me, adding to watch out for lice because Ma Bolivar packed, racked and stacked her boarders four to a room. I thought of Beth and the cosy attic we’d shared, and sighed.
    I’d need a job first. Madame had given me a letter addressed to her old friend Miss Musquash of the Belgravia Dress Agency. She bought and sold high-class used clothes, and employed a few girls to mend and freshen up the trimmings. I’d have to work day and night to earn a wage, and Madame knew it, for she clutched me to her bosom and snuffled.
    “I wish I could do something, Verity. I wish I’d never laid eyes on Lady Throttle.”
    Me too.

    The smell hit me first. It was nearly three years since I’d lived with Uncle Bill and Auntie Sarah, but the smell of their market stall brought it all back. Their tiny house in Racketty Lane, only a couple of streets away, was always crammed with merchandise, and every room stank of musty, greasy, sweaty, worn and worn-again old clothes. Not to mention the overflowing drains, the piles of rubbish and empty beer bottles, and the stale fat from Uncle Bill’s