“I’m sorry?” a confounded Freda said. How could she not be wanted? She considered herself to be very wanted.
“You’re demobbed, dear,” Adele said, with more sympathy than usual. (She rarely roused herself to emotion.) But it was true that, despite her elfin features and sprite-like demeanour, Freda had developed a highly visible bust and had embarked upon her “monthlies” some time ago, a disconcerting journey overseen by Vanda in lieu of Freda’s own mother. She had “growing pains,” Vanda said. What on earth were they?, Freda wondered. She had an image of being stretched on the rack.
“You’re advanced for your age, dear,” Adele said. “In every way.”
“We’ll miss you,” Vanda said, hugging Freda to her tobacco and Habanita-infused mohair. Searching in her handbag for some kind of parting gift, Vanda could only come up with a handkerchief, embroidered with a “V.” It was creased but “not used,” she reassured Freda. Duncan gave her his pack of (marked) cards. That was nearly a year ago now and Freda had felt grief at the thought of her companions going on without her in the drizzle of Darlington or Doncaster, but then learnt from a chance encounter with Adele in the Shambles a few weeks ago that the Knits were no more and Vanda had unexpectedly married a man called Walter who owned a building firm in Grantham, “of all the places,” Adele said, making it seem as unlikely as Timbuctoo. Even more unlikely, she had heard that Vanda was expecting a baby. (In triumph or sorrow?, Freda wondered.)
Freda had no idea where Grantham was, but she had a good idea of where London was on the map. She was already dreaming about living amongst its pleasure palaces. “Dens of iniquity,” Adele said. Freda had no idea what that meant but she thought that it sounded entrancing.
Duncan, too, it seemed, had abandoned wool, having taken a job as an assistant restaurant manager at the Scarborough Grand, but the odds must have turned against him because he was currently serving two years’ hard labour in Armley Gaol for gross indecency. “You don’t want to know what that is,” Adele said and then told her anyway. Freda had the great gift of rarely being surprised.
* * *
—
Freda’s school attendance at Park Grove, always sporadic, came to an end when she reached her fourteenth birthday, and Gladys announced that now she was no longer at school Freda was obviously going to have to get a job. Freda didn’t feel the imperative, she was happy to wait until she found an opportunity for stardom. Unfortunately, other than a couple of indifferent amateur dramatic groups, no one seemed to want Freda to model or dance or act (she was at an “awkward age,” apparently), and certainly not for money. Pantomime season was a long way off and anyway Freda felt unsure that the Theatre Royal would be ready for her transition from village child to village maiden.
Gladys prompted her to apply for a job in a milliner’s in Coney Street. Freda thought it would entail nothing more than graciously assisting women to choose their next hat and was horrified to learn that she was to be confined to a basement, where she was expected to steam felty cloches into shape on a faceless, bald wooden bust. She lasted half a day before walking off in her lunch hour. The railway offices on Station Rise, then, Gladys said. Or behind the counter in the new Woolworth’s. Or Terry’s. Or Rowntree’s—surely they would take her on with her family connections?
Freda was not going to work in Rowntree’s! She was going to be a star! She was going to be famous! She was going to go to London! She would rather die of a surfeit of exclamation marks before she worked in an office or a factory!
What she needed was a kick up the bum, Gladys said. Full stop.
* * *
—
The night porters in Covent Garden had given way to the daytime barrow boys and stallholders. The world was waking up. Freda’s feet were already practising steps beneath her thin coverlet. Florence, sharing the lumpy horsehair mattress, moaned a protest in her sleep.
The Grand Tableau
Nellie’s flock still nestled in their beds, all apart from Niven, whose whereabouts were an eternal mystery to the rest of his family. The Cokers were, of necessity, nocturnal, the dawn chorus their lullaby, although it was already fading by the time they arrived home after celebrating Nellie’s release. They roosted in Hanover Terrace, where Regent’s Park was literally on their doorstep. Their grand white stucco house was a world away from the seediness of the Soho that paid for it.
Nellie, however, had grown accustomed to the harsh prison clock, being woken at six by the wardens banging and crashing on cell doors as if sleep itself were a sin. Sore-eyed with insomnia, she rose now from her sleepless bed after barely an hour, made herself a pot of tea and took her cup out to the garden just for the pleasure of opening a door and breathing her own air.
While she drank her tea, Nellie watched a freckled thrush tugging a worm out of a bed of red tulips. The worms would have their vengeance, for one day they would eat the thrush. They would eat Nellie, too. She feared it would not be long before she was worm food. She must prepare. She needed a plan.
When she had finished her tea she threw the residue into the flowerbed, surprising both tulips and thrush equally, and scrutinized the tea leaves that remained in the bottom of the cup. They confirmed her suspicions. Change was coming. It was time to do a Lenormand Grand Tableau.
Nellie went back inside the house and laid out the full pack of cards on the huge dining-room table. (Early Georgian, Cuban mahogany, a bargain obtained from the estate sale of an ancient lineage destroyed by the war. Nellie loved a bargain.)
“Hmm,” she said when she scrutinized the cards. A more expressive sound than it appears when written down. There was nothing mystifying about the cards. You might have said their message was Ozymandian. The serpent, the scythe, a coffin and a bouquet. The end of the party.
* * *
—
Nellie was tired. For perhaps the first time in her life she was wearying of the relentless drive required to keep their lives thrusting forward. The anchor of the Amethyst, the drag of the whole empire, was tugging her down. She knew that her health would not survive incarceration a second time and while in Holloway had begun to wonder about retiring—Deauville possibly, or even Torquay (a residential suite in the Imperial Hotel perhaps)—handing the keys to the kingdom to her children, with the crown going to the ever-reliable Edith.
Maddox had failed her in his role as protector. There had been no warning of the unexpected raid, of the sudden arrival of the uncouth troupe of uniforms who had lumbered into the club that night and arrested her. It had been humiliatingly public—the night of the Lord Mayor’s Show—and the club had been packed to the rafters. She had been led away in handcuffs, bolstered a little by the supportive jeering by the police aimed at the Amethyst’s regulars.
Maddox had visited her in jail, vigorously defending himself. He had not been on duty on the night of the raid, he said, and she must surely understand that, despite his best attentions, he was unable to divert the entirety of the Metropolitan Police all of the time. “Methinks he doth protest too much,” Nellie said to her new cellmate.
The Belgian woman who had murdered her lover had been moved to a long-term wing. Nellie’s new cellmate, Agnes, was from a family of cockney crooks and thieves; she and her sister were members of the notorious Forty Thieves gang. All women. (“Good idea,” Nellie said.)
There was a grapevine telegraph in Holloway that buzzed with a heady mixture of rumour and fact. Agnes herself was well acquainted with Maddox. “He’s after you, Nellie,” she warned. “He’s watched you all these years, seen how well you’ve done and now he wants it for himself.” It seemed that Maddox was no longer content to be the knave, he wanted to overthrow the Queen of Clubs and make himself the King.
“Over his dead body,” Nellie said.