The Sin Eater(38)
‘She was here, but she ain’t here now, more’s the pity, because the gentlemen liked her.’
‘I see,’ said Colm, and although his voice was perfectly ordinary, Declan could feel that he was raw with pain at having learned Romilly had been a prostitute. He thought they were both raw with pain.
‘All to do with her being Irish,’ said Flossie Totteridge. ‘Goes down well, Irish.’ She sent an appraising look at the two boys, particularly lingering on Colm.
‘Where did she go?’ said Colm, and Declan heard, with apprehension, that Colm’s voice had taken on a softer note.
Flossie Totteridge heard it as well, and sat up a little straighter. ‘I couldn’t say,’ she said. ‘I did hear she’d taken a room somewhere, but I don’t remember where.’
‘Would you try?’ said Colm, and now there was no doubt about the tone of his voice.
‘It’s no good, it’s gone. I’m a poor hand at remembering. It might have been Canning Town, but then again it might not.’
This meant nothing. Canning Town might have been anywhere in the world.
Declan said, ‘Would any of the . . . the girls know?’
‘They might.’ A speculative gleam came into Mrs Totteridge’s eye. ‘’Course, their time’s very valuable to me. I have to think of that. Gentlemen pay to spend time with my girls.’
Neither Colm nor Declan had any idea what a prostitute would cost, but the knowledge that they barely had enough for a night’s lodging passed between them.
‘But we might come to an arrangement,’ said Flossie. ‘With you being Romilly’s family, as it were.’ She reached out a pudgy hand and laid it over Colm’s.
Colm sat very still and then, to Declan’s disbelief, took her hand and smiled into her eyes. ‘What kind of arrangement had you in mind?’ he said.
‘Bit o’ company, maybe. An hour or so. It gets lonely here at times for me, and I was always partial to a bit of Irish.’
Something flickered behind Colm’s eyes. ‘That sounds a very reasonable idea,’ he said. ‘We could come back tomorrow. Would that give you time to question the girls?’
‘Come in the afternoon,’ said Flossie. ‘Afternoons are the time I get lonely, if you take my meaning.’
‘I do,’ said Colm. ‘Afternoon it is.’
Somehow he and Declan got themselves out of the house, and back on to the street.
‘You can’t go back there,’ said Declan, as they walked towards the cluster of shops and the smaller houses where they might find a cheap night’s lodging. ‘Colm, you can’t.’
‘I must. That’s where Romilly was living when she wrote that letter about being frightened. It’s the only link I have to her.’
‘But that woman – those girls . . .’
‘You think I can’t cope with one or two whores?’
‘Of course I don’t think that.’
They walked along the wide London street, scanning all the windows for notices advertising lodgings, resignedly going past the uncompromising ones that said ‘No Irish’, both trying to come to terms with the knowledge of how Romilly had been living all these weeks.
As they finally picked out a modest but clean-looking house that announced itself as having ‘Clean, comfortable lodgings for single, working gentlemen’, Declan knew that Colm would stop at very little to find Romilly and put right whatever had gone so dreadfully wrong in her life.
He realized that he, too, would stop at very little when it came to Romilly Rourke.
TWELVE
The present
Michael was rather relieved when the main part of Christmas was over and he could start thinking about the forthcoming term. He had a very promising batch of first-year students, and he thought there were a couple of double-first possibilities among the final years. He had prepared some of his next term’s work, and had also written a new episode of Wilberforce to replace the rejected haunted house incident. The tutorials for his students included the influence of Andrew Marvell’s anti-monarchist sentiments on his later poetry; the Wilberforce episode included the mice wiring Wilberforce up to the electricity circuit after he had absent-mindedly sat on a cable and fused the lights.
Michael thought his final years would enjoy discussing Marvell’s rallying call to take up arms against the Stuart kings, and he thought the mice’s latest ploy would make for some good illustrations of Wilberforce with his fur standing on end. It would also serve as a warning to his youthful readers that it was dangerous to meddle with electricity. He sorted the Marvell notes into the appropriate folder, emailed the new Wilberforce chapter to his editor, and was aware of a pleasing sense of having completed some worthwhile work.
Immediately after Christmas he and Nell had put Beth on the plane for her American trip to Michael’s Maryland friends and his god-daughter. Beth would go to school with Ellie for three weeks, then return home for the remainder of the term at her English school. She was looking forward to seeing Ellie, wide-eyed with delight at the enormity of embarking on this grown-up adventure, and charmed to meet the stewardess who would oversee her journey and deliver her into the hands of Jack and Liz Harper at the other end. She was also almost speechless with pride over the brand-new notebook computer which had been a Christmas present; she had promised to email Nell every day on it, and she made Michael promise to send her the newest Wilberforce chapter so she and Ellie could read it.