After spending the past month as a cheerful amnesiac, drinking gin and making jokes while his world disintegrated, Jack Cade finally has his memories back. That means he knows exactly who Ellini Syal is, and how he feels about her. Unfortunately, he...
London was a wonderful antidote to Oxford. Here, there was no golden calm – just a soot-caked frenzy.
Ellini felt as though she was adrift in the sea of faces – most of them too hungry, irritable and exhausted to spare her a second glance. What was making that woman frown? What was that young apprentice on his way to, skipping with every other step? It didn't matter. None of it mattered. They weren't tied to her in any way. They were separate and self-contained and she was free.
She had been in the city almost two days now. The surgeons who had stitched and dressed her wound at Tetsworth Hospital had been adamant that she didn't need a transfusion. They said she'd hardly lost any blood at all. They said she simply couldn't have been bleeding for two hours, as she maintained. It must have been the shock, they said, making the time between her accident and her treatment seem longer that it really was. One of them even added that the female mind was quite susceptible to such periods of befuddlement.
It was mysterious. Ellini was fairly sure she should have died hours before she even got to Tetsworth. But she didn't waste any time wondering about it. Her disappearing act wasn't finished yet. She waited until her doctors were busy discussing the finer points of female hysteria, and then crept out of the hospital and into her waiting cab.
She spent all her money buying the cabbie's silence, and – not least – his patience, so she didn't have a farthing left when she stepped down into the pre-dawn bustle of the East End.
But there were always places to find work. She ended up in a slop-house – which was almost, but not quite, as nasty as it sounded. Slop-houses were where the seamstresses worked: a network of back-rooms and garrets where dozens of needlewomen sat, crammed in together, clustered around a few cheap candles for light, and furiously sewing up the cheap clothing that London workers seemed to burn through like coal.
Shirts were three shillings a dozen, and you couldn't make more than two of them in a day, even if you sewed from five in the morning till eleven at night. On top of that, you had to buy your own cotton and trimmings and candles, so three shillings a week was the most you could hope to earn. You could never rent a room with that, so you put all your earnings into a pot and shared the rent with two dozen other girls, sleeping beside them on a bed-roll on the floor of the slop-house.
Ellini – or Ellie Sanderson, as she had introduced herself to her new room-mates – didn't speak much, but smiled politely whenever her name was called. After a few days, most of the girls seemed to decide that she was simple, and they let their chatter wash over her just as though she wasn't there. It was wonderful.
The only men who ever came into the slop-house were the Sweaters – and, on these hot summer days, they were living up to their name. The Sweaters were something like agents. They bought the cloth at wholesale, divided it up among the slop-workers to sew, and then sold the finished items of clothing back to the shop owners – apparently for increasingly low prices, because they came back to the girls in their garrets with fewer and fewer coins.
The Sweaters didn't visit often. They had more money and could afford to breathe cleaner air. And, apart from them, the only men you ever saw in the slop-houses were the missionary workers, who came to preach the word of god, guessing – in some cases, quite rightly – that the needlewomen wouldn't have long to hear it.
Occasionally, one of these sporadic male visitors would turn his head in Ellini's direction, and she would wonder exactly what it was he'd seen.
Because it was nice, really – in the first instance. She just stirred up their earliest memories of love. It was a sweet, soft, swirling thing before it hardened. It made their faces unfreeze and their fingers curl. Sometimes, it even brought half a smile to their lips.
But she couldn't let it go on too long. When they caught sight of her, she would always drift towards the prettiest girls and hide in their midst, hoping their obvious charms would mask her more insidious ones.
And, if a man noticed her more than once, it would be time to leave. There were any number of slop-houses in the East End, and the streets were so crowded that you hardly ever encountered the same face twice. She could move on and start again every few weeks if she needed to.
Mrs Gratton – who was old and ill-favoured enough to have appointed herself the house's moral guardian – warned her about the dangers of their chosen profession. Apparently, needlework was not just bad for your eyes; it was bad for the soul.
"If you get into conversation with any strange men," she said. "And I don't advise it, dearie – never tell them you work as a needlewoman."
"Why not?" Ellini asked.
"Because no needlewoman ever makes enough to live on. If you say that's your profession, they'll think you're not averse to taking on a bit of... extra work."
Ellini, mindful of her reputation as a simple girl, feigned ignorance. "What, you mean like mending their old shirts and stockings?"
Mrs Gratton looked exasperated and pleased at the same time. "Bless you, dear! I mean they'll think you're a street-walker." She saw Ellini's blank face, and rolled her eyes. "A woman of easy virtue!"
Ellini was silent for a moment, counting the stitches in the cuff she was sewing. "What shall I say I am, then?"
"Say you're a dress-maker. They earn a decent living. You've got to serve an apprenticeship to be a dress-maker."
"And how shall I make enough to live on? Without taking on... extra work?"
Mrs Gratton patted her hand. "Just you work hard and say your prayers every night. God will know you lived a good life, no matter how short it was."
Ellini didn't argue. Arguing was for people who intended to get involved. She just went back to her stitching and let the silence unravel her.
The wound in her chest was healing very quickly, but it still twinged sometimes – usually when her thoughts wandered back to Oxford, or Jack, or the poor elemental she had stabbed on the steps of the Turl Street Music Rooms. Then she would feel a wrench and realize that blood was seeping through her chemise, making the other girls stare.
Most people would have said that she had traded in one type of slavery for another. But she didn't feel like a slave. She felt like a ghost. As she listened to the inane chatter and the sound of busy needles, she could feel herself dissolving. She couldn't believe she had spent so long trying to lose herself in solitude when the most effective way to lose yourself was in a crowd.
And, at night, generally when her fellow needlewomen were 'walking the streets', Ellini went out into the smoky, lamp-lit murk, and walked the streets in a far more literal way.
There were night-markets and accordion-players and magic lantern shows. But, most of all, there was music – from so many different sources that they all tripped over each other and formed an exquisite discord in her head. There was no room for memory in all that chaos. It was the sound of oblivion.
Sometimes, she thought about the elemental – pictured it riding the wind, or being blown about on a dandelion seed – and wondered if this was how it was feeling. She was utterly free. There was no grief or guilt or disappointment, nothing to do with her days but sew and let the chatter wash over her, nothing to do with her nights but wander the streets and revel in the unfamiliar faces. She would never, ever, ever get involved again.
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