The Black Charade. John Burke
the costermonger was not going to dawdle here, trying to sell his wares to folk who themselves lived so close to the market: until he found a ready customer in the bookseller.
His daughter must have been about fifteen. Boyish, with a boy’s jacket and torn trousers, she aped her father and swaggered like a boy. In rainy weather she wore a cap jammed down on tangled black hair. When it was fine, the hair itself formed a sort of tea-cosy tangle over her head and far down her neck. Once he had noticed her, Wentworth looked for her again. Soon he looked for nothing else. He would have recognized her across the most crowded thoroughfare, in the most fleeting glimpse. For the first time in his life he was under the spell of a girl’s movements—for the first time finding they caught at his breath more than the movements of a boy’s hips and shoulders. She was boyish, but not a boy. He did not know why this should have happened to him; but it had happened, and now there was nobody else in the world. He gazed out of the window for hours on end, attending automatically to customers, but not daring to look away for too long in case the barrow and the donkey and the man and his daughter should pass and be lost again. When they came in view, he would hurry out to buy vegetables from the barrow, although his housekeeper had a long-standing arrangement with one of the stallholders in the market itself. If the man served him, the girl would stand back a few paces and give a complacent little grin every few seconds. If she were the one to serve, she would raise dark olive eyes to his face and then lower them provocatively whenever he spoke. Her own face was invariably dirty, but the skin had a darkness that was not mere grime: under her eyes, stains the colour of an over-ripe plum suggested something Italian or maybe Portuguese in her blood. Wentworth found himself stumbling into whimsicalities with her. She answered readily, cheeky and knowing, until her father told her to pipe down; and when Wentworth said he enjoyed it, and such natural charm ought not to be suppressed, the father regarded him suspiciously and the girl with full understanding.
Then she stopped coming.
The first time, he found he could not ask where she was. There was something too surly in the coster’s attitude. The second time, the restraint had increased. But the third time, aching for news of her, he asked as casually as possible: ‘What’s happened to your little helper? Haven’t seen her with you recently.’
‘Not much of a helper, she wasn’t. Except,’ said the coster meaningly, ‘in attracting customers, you might say.’
‘She found the work too arduous?’
‘She found herself a reg’lar.’
‘A regular?’
‘Settled in with her own feller. Got themselves a room down Clerkenwell. Let’s see what ’e can make of ’er. Fancies his chances at moving off the barrers and settin’ up as a greengrocer somewheres. And he ain’t got himself a decent pony and trap, let alone a shop. Finish up in a dosshouse, both of ’em, I wouldn’t be surprised.’
‘Couldn’t you have stopped it?’
‘Suits me. Makes a bit more room at home.’
‘They’ll get married?’
The coster spluttered a wide guffaw, emitting sour breath through a gap in his yellowing teeth. ‘Married? No gilt in getting’ married. Leastways, not as I’ve ever heard tell.’
Alone, Wentworth paced in memory the streets of Clerkenwell. It would not be too far a drive from the hall of the Young Men’s Self-Improvement Association where he lectured. But of course he wasn’t going to be such a fool as to go there. A fine fool, at his age. He’d probably get mauled, as he had been on one occasion in those parts after walking home with a boy from his lecture class. So many times there he had been smitten—the slant of a young apprentice’s head, the full lips of some spellbound or sulky lad. It was unseemly to want so desperately that slip of a girl because she looked like a boy, but not like a boy. He would forget her.
He did not forget her. On the evening of his next talk to the society, he gave them less than their usual quota of his time and escaped into the streets. He recollected the name on the barrow—Tucker—and asked about the family from a chair-mender in one street, a shellfish seller on the corner of another. And about the girl in particular. He made it sound as casual as he could, but encountered some odd looks, and backed away and went home, though not to sleep.
It took two weeks to find her, and by then it was no use telling himself that tomorrow or the next day he would abandon the humiliating chase. He knew he must go on until he had found her.
Finally he came to her in a room, which could be reached only by squeezing past three beds and a landing window draped with sacking. The building had once had a central yard, now obliterated by a piling up of sheds and lean-to’s. Once in the middle of this warren, you would be lucky to get out safely if anyone had a mind to stop you.
She showed no surprise at his arrival. She was even grimier, her hair even more matted, than when he had last joked with her. But the wicked sparkle was still in her eyes, and she was immediately on her feet and moving towards him with just the faintest twitch of her hips.
‘I intend to take you away from this place,’ he said.
Two faces, one wizened and one pale and surprisingly unmarked, peered around the doorpost.
The girl said: ‘Not until he gets back.’
‘‘Perhaps it would be better if we just—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t be better. Not bloody likely it wouldn’t.’ She grinned, very close to him. ‘Don’t worry, he’s only gone round the corner. He’ll be back in five minutes.’
Wentworth was sure that he had done one of the maddest and riskiest things in his life. But he could not have called off the pursuit; and he would not forsake her now, no matter what her ‘reg’lar’ made of his presence.
The lad came back. He had large hands, which clenched when he set eyes on Wentworth and remained clenched as Wentworth tried to find a way of saying that he wanted to take the girl away and give her a good home. He had expected questions—what sort of a home, what would she be expected to do when she got there, what was all this leading up to?—or outright curses. But the lad kept his scowling gaze fixed on the floor, and asked only one question at last:
‘’ow much?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You can ’ave ’er for ten quid.’
‘Disgraceful.’
‘Seven, then. Call it seven. But not a penny less.’
His eyes widened when Wentworth took out a five-pound note and crackled it between his fingers.
‘Not a penny more,’ said Wentworth.
It was all done within two or three minutes.
As they shuffled along the landing past the beds and down the rickety stairs, out across the noisome yard and at last into the street, Wentworth asked:
‘‘What’s your name, child?’
‘Annie, sir.’
‘Annie Tucker.’
‘Not rightly, mister. Used to be Annie Johnson, but my mum shifted abaht a bit, so I don’t know if it still is.’
‘Never mind. Annie will do.’
One person for whom Annie, however, would not do was his housekeeper. Mrs. Burnett had primly and uncommunicatively kept the rooms above and behind the shop tidy this ten years, herself sleeping in the tiniest attic of all under the roof at the back. She gave no sign of disapproving, or indeed of having any opinion whatsoever, of his stock in trade; and if from time to time he brought some young boy home for a night or two, she was invisible and inaudible. But somehow a girl like Annie would not do. When she left, she brought herself to say: ‘Well, I only hope that young lady can look after you as well as I’ve done. I only hope so, that I do.’
Meaning, thought Wentworth with amusement rather than resentment, that she hoped just the