Free The Petticoat Men by Barbara Ewing Page B

over.
    We saw it. It was a little tiny real person, dead.
    When Ma came Freddie had already picked up the little white shape and wrapped it in his blue shawl and he and Ma went outside in the dark, you couldn’t leave it in the water closet, not for the other tenants to see, and Billy took me to my bed and Ma came and bathed me and sat with me and I fell asleep.
    For more than two weeks afterwards I kept the lamp lit on the big table in my room where I made my hats so I could see Hortense, and I kept the one on the chest of drawers lit, and the small one on the table by my bed lit, because I didn’t like the dark just then, because if it was dark – well if it was dark I saw it. I left the lights on and Hortense in the corner, well she was with me like a friend. Ma said to come down and sleep with her but I said ‘I’m fine’ and slept in my own room. Billy would always come in before he went to bed and talk to me for a bit and try and make me laugh, and I would try to laugh, and then he would go to bed. But I kept the lamps on all night.
    On one of those lamp-on nights Freddie and Ernest knocked on my door, past midnight, they’d been playing the piano earlier, but not loudly, and I suppose they saw my lights.
    ‘Greetings, dear Hortense!’ they called gaily, like they always did.
    They were dressed as gentlemen but – well – they still looked – like they looked. They had powder on, and no cravats, and cutaway jackets that showed their figures more I suppose. I hadn’t seen Freddie, or Ernest, since – well since what had happened to me when Freddie helped me – they didn’t say anything about it but they were very bright and gay and they had obviously decided to come and visit me and to be cheerful (even though it was so late and I was in bed but with all my lights on) and they sat on the edge of the big work-table very elegant in the lamplight with brandy breathing round my room and they told me about going down to the fashionable Burlington Arcade the previous day and all the shops that were there, selling elegance and jewellery, and after a while Ernest was yawning (but very prettily with his hand over his mouth, all graceful, like a girl).
    ‘I better go home to you know who! But what use is he to me now, he was made a bankrupt months ago! And he’s losing more of his hair.’ Ernest shuddered slightly. ‘Goodnight, Mattie!’ and we heard him running so lightly down the stairs and gone into the night and I felt (though it might not have been true at all) that Freddie was a bit sad, listening to the footsteps fading away, and then the front door closing.
    ‘Did Lord Arthur Clinton go bankrupt?’
    ‘He did, poor man,’ (and I didn’t say, but I thought, I bet it was Ernest that made him bankrupt ). ‘And he is no longer a Member of Parliament. But – he is – in the meantime at least – someone for Ernest to – go home to.’
    And again that odd sadness, it was in his voice, I heard it.
    ‘Well I better go home too,’ he said. ‘Are you all right, Mattie?’ and then I saw he looked at me carefully. ‘You’re shivering.’
    ‘No I’m not.’
    ‘You are shivering, Mattie.’
    And he came and sat on the bed and took my hands and rubbed them to make them warm and then after a few moments, not embarrassed at all, he moved the covers and took my feet including my mad foot and did the same. ‘They’re like ice,’ he said, and seemed not to notice my rotten foot as he warmed it.
    ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ I said, and I burst into tears like a blooming child, and Freddie held me and held me and I could smell brandy and “Bloom of Roses” and him but the arms were holding me, Freddie holding me. After a long time I stopped shivering and then I stopped crying and finally I said, ‘It was nearly a little person,’ and I felt rather than saw Freddie nod as he held me, because of course he had seen it too.
    And slowly he began talking to me about this and that while he was holding