Read Online Kitty Peck and the Child of Ill-Fortune by Kate Griffin - Free Book Online
Authors: Kate Griffin
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women passing in and out of the hotel. It was a game we played when we were small.
The front room of our old lodgings in Church Row looked out over the street. If you closed the shutters up behind you and squeezed into the narrow space before the window you could see down to the corner and into the houses opposite. When Ma was taking a bad turn and Nanny Peck was sitting with her in the back room, me and Joey used to play the story game, sitting sideways on the ledge facing each other with our knees and toes touching.
Now we watched the comings and goings outside Le Meurice; elegant city couples, provincial businessmen fluffed out like bantam cocks, silent spouses walking a lifetime apart, lovers with less than a Rizla between them, and the kept women. Joey said you could always smoke them in Paris – their dress was much finer and better set than anything a husband would pay for. He reckoned he could tell visitors from England too. ‘Something about the cut,’ he said, and I noticed the way he took in my good blue frock.
It was raining hard and every time a carriage drew up a fat little porter in a long red coat bobbed down the hotel steps to shield the arrivals with an umbrella the size of Nanny Peck’s Sunday crinoline. Caught in the lamplight, the raindrops looked like a scattering of crystals as they rolled off the rigid black shell and shattered on the steps.
I knew it was a chance to talk proper, but it felt so good to slip back into the old ways that I didn’t want to spoil the magic of it. And I do think that my brother worked a kind of spell over me – the sort that blinds your eyes and binds your tongue. I was the adoring little sister again, hanging off his every word, laughing at his stories and lapping up his attention like an abandoned kitten that couldn’t believe its luck to be back in a warm kitchen.
If you was to ask me now exactly what it was we talked about for that second evening at Le Meurice, there’s barely a full sentence I can recall – excepting one thing that struck me as odd. We watched a family – mother, father and four little girls all done up like porcelain dolls – tumble out of a coach and scurry up the steps into the dry. Joey asked if I’d ever thought about having children of my own. I laughed and said I needed to find myself a man before I could make him an uncle.
When I cast back, I see them days in Paris through a haze of red and gold; velvet-padded restaurant chairs, gilded mirrors, floating down the river on a pleasure barge done out with crimson banquettes, rose-flecked light alive with gleaming sparks of dust falling through the kaleidoscope windows of a darkened church, a night at the opera that felt like sitting in an open jewel box, the scent of the crowd; all leather, lavender, lemon and a hundred other fine foreign things rolling off them in waves of prosperity.
Oh yes, I soon came to see that plenty of the types my brother mixed with were a good deal cleaner and fancier than the ones he’d left behind in Limehouse. Me and Lucca included.
There was one place, though, that put me in mind of The Gaudy. We took a cab and went on there after the opera on the third night. It was a dance and drink hall, hot with the smell of bodies, tobacco and mecks. I could feel the throb of the music and the stamp of the dancers as we pushed through the crowd. Joey went first holding my hand and Lucca followed behind.
The young men, and most particularly the girls there, were a lot wilder than the ones back home. The dancing had a whirling physical violence to it that threatened, but never quite descended into, a riot. It was infectious. The pulse of it spread from my feet up my legs and into my body. I wanted to be out on that dance floor, spinning and stamping and shrieking with the rest of them.
I tugged Joey’s hand. He turned, grinned and mouthed some words I couldn’t make out. I tapped my ear and shook my head. He nodded and pointed at a row of booths set along a
The front room of our old lodgings in Church Row looked out over the street. If you closed the shutters up behind you and squeezed into the narrow space before the window you could see down to the corner and into the houses opposite. When Ma was taking a bad turn and Nanny Peck was sitting with her in the back room, me and Joey used to play the story game, sitting sideways on the ledge facing each other with our knees and toes touching.
Now we watched the comings and goings outside Le Meurice; elegant city couples, provincial businessmen fluffed out like bantam cocks, silent spouses walking a lifetime apart, lovers with less than a Rizla between them, and the kept women. Joey said you could always smoke them in Paris – their dress was much finer and better set than anything a husband would pay for. He reckoned he could tell visitors from England too. ‘Something about the cut,’ he said, and I noticed the way he took in my good blue frock.
It was raining hard and every time a carriage drew up a fat little porter in a long red coat bobbed down the hotel steps to shield the arrivals with an umbrella the size of Nanny Peck’s Sunday crinoline. Caught in the lamplight, the raindrops looked like a scattering of crystals as they rolled off the rigid black shell and shattered on the steps.
I knew it was a chance to talk proper, but it felt so good to slip back into the old ways that I didn’t want to spoil the magic of it. And I do think that my brother worked a kind of spell over me – the sort that blinds your eyes and binds your tongue. I was the adoring little sister again, hanging off his every word, laughing at his stories and lapping up his attention like an abandoned kitten that couldn’t believe its luck to be back in a warm kitchen.
If you was to ask me now exactly what it was we talked about for that second evening at Le Meurice, there’s barely a full sentence I can recall – excepting one thing that struck me as odd. We watched a family – mother, father and four little girls all done up like porcelain dolls – tumble out of a coach and scurry up the steps into the dry. Joey asked if I’d ever thought about having children of my own. I laughed and said I needed to find myself a man before I could make him an uncle.
When I cast back, I see them days in Paris through a haze of red and gold; velvet-padded restaurant chairs, gilded mirrors, floating down the river on a pleasure barge done out with crimson banquettes, rose-flecked light alive with gleaming sparks of dust falling through the kaleidoscope windows of a darkened church, a night at the opera that felt like sitting in an open jewel box, the scent of the crowd; all leather, lavender, lemon and a hundred other fine foreign things rolling off them in waves of prosperity.
Oh yes, I soon came to see that plenty of the types my brother mixed with were a good deal cleaner and fancier than the ones he’d left behind in Limehouse. Me and Lucca included.
There was one place, though, that put me in mind of The Gaudy. We took a cab and went on there after the opera on the third night. It was a dance and drink hall, hot with the smell of bodies, tobacco and mecks. I could feel the throb of the music and the stamp of the dancers as we pushed through the crowd. Joey went first holding my hand and Lucca followed behind.
The young men, and most particularly the girls there, were a lot wilder than the ones back home. The dancing had a whirling physical violence to it that threatened, but never quite descended into, a riot. It was infectious. The pulse of it spread from my feet up my legs and into my body. I wanted to be out on that dance floor, spinning and stamping and shrieking with the rest of them.
I tugged Joey’s hand. He turned, grinned and mouthed some words I couldn’t make out. I tapped my ear and shook my head. He nodded and pointed at a row of booths set along a
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