Pandora(4)
As if on cue, the bell tinkles again and Dora turns to find the older woman poking her face through the crack in the door.
‘You’re up, missum. Are you having breakfast? Or have you already helped yourself?’
Dora eyes Hezekiah’s housekeeper – a stocky soft-mouthed woman with small eyes and straw-coloured hair – with scorn. Outwardly she looks as though she would fit the role perfectly, but Lottie Norris is as far from excelling in the domestic realm as Dora’s uncle is from mastering athleticism. No indeed, Lottie is in Dora’s opinion altogether too lazy, too opinionated and, like tar on a gull’s wing, noxious, hard to remove, and wily with it.
‘I’m not hungry.’
But Dora is hungry. The bread was consumed over three hours ago, yet she knows that if she asks for more Lottie will make a point of mentioning to Hezekiah that she has been stealing from the larder and Dora has no patience for his hypocritical lectures.
The housekeeper steps into the shop, looks at her with eyebrows raised.
‘Not hungry? You hardly ate a thing at dinner last night.’
Dora ignores this, instead raises her finger to show the black.
‘Shouldn’t you be cleaning?’
Lottie frowns. ‘In here?’
‘Where else do you suppose I mean?’
The housekeeper scoffs, swings a stout arm through the air like a fan. ‘It’s a shop for antiquities, isn’t it? They’re meant to be dusty. That’s the charm.’
Dora turns her face away, purses her lips at Lottie’s tone. Always she has treated Dora like this, as if she were nothing more than a servant herself and not, in fact, the daughter of two reputable antiquarians and the niece of the current proprietor. Behind the counter Dora straightens the ledger, begins to sharpen the pencil to a fine point, biting down the bitter words on her tongue; Lottie Norris is not worth the breath it would take to scold her, nor would it do any good if she did.
‘You sure you want nothing?’
‘I’m sure,’ Dora says shortly.
‘Please yourself.’
The door begins to close. Dora lowers the pencil.
‘Lottie?’ The door stops. ‘What was so important at the dock that Uncle had me mind the shop?’
The housekeeper hesitates, scrunches her stub nose. ‘How’m I to know?’ she says, but as the door swings shut behind her, infernal bell tinkling, Dora thinks Lottie knows very well.
CHAPTER TWO
Creed Lane teems like maggots in an open sore.
The traffic seems to have spilled over from the heaving maw of Ludgate Street, flooding into side streets with the ferocity of a burst riverbank. The smells so unique to the city seem more pungent in such close quarters – soot and rotten vegetables, fish on the turn. He keeps a handkerchief clasped firmly to his mouth and nose. When he finally emerges onto the quieter slope of Puddle Dock Hill, Hezekiah Blake breaks into the fastest walk his corpulent body can manage.
The letter – crumpled now from excessive reading – arrived over two weeks ago, and while he anticipated the time it takes to travel such a distance he expected the Coombes to arrive long before now; Hezekiah’s patience wears dangerously thin.
Slowing, he lowers his handkerchief and tries to catch his breath. His inclination to idleness is apparent from his squat build, though at fifty-two he sees this as quite, quite ordinary, for a man so long in trade like himself must surely be expected to enjoy the fruits of his labours. Hezekiah tugs at his wig, tweaks the lip of his newest hat, smooths a hand down the muslin waistcoat stretched tight across his rounded belly. Indeed, he is sorry not to be more at liberty to indulge – the luxuries that could be his! – but soon, he thinks with a smile, soon he will be free to indulge all he likes. He has waited in long sufferance these past twelve years. Very soon, his wait will be over.
As he approaches Puddle Dock, Hezekiah lifts his handkerchief once more. He uses this particular wharf for all his more questionable transactions. Here the stench of filth is at its most pungent. Primarily a laystall for the soils of London’s streets, shipments here are unlikely to be monitored. He is thankful that this particular transaction will be conducted in the depths of deepest winter for in the summer months the fumes of shit steam and rise, sinking into everything they touch: nostril hair and eyelashes, the very clothes on his back, shipments large and small. The last thing he wants is for this most precious item to be tainted with the stench. No, he thinks, that would not do at all.
This dock is small and narrow as docks go, enclosed between two towering buildings with boarded-up windows. Hezekiah must press his back to the grimy walls to get past the bustle of dockers, tries unsuccessfully to ignore the night-soil men emptying their carts of excrement, the unappealing slop and smack of brim-filled buckets hitting the cobbles. His heel skids on something slick (Hezekiah refuses to entertain the thought of what it might be) and he barrels into the back of a Chinaman holding a bucket, its filthy contents threatening to spill over at the collide. As he reaches out a hand to steady himself against the wall Hezekiah stares, affronted, but there is no apology, no sign the man has even registered his presence at all and he has moved along before Hezekiah can press the matter. Eyes watering he breathes deeply into cotton, continues unsteadily down the sloping ramp to the river’s edge.
The foreman, directing the night slop on the barges to be taken downriver, has his back to Hezekiah, and the older man must call out across the racket to be heard.