Free A Memory of Violets by Hazel Gaynor Page B

floorboards at one side of the room, to use as a privy, and there’s chickens roosting at the back of us. The smell from under those boards and from them chickens and the busted drains and the buckets of piss and rubbish that get thrown into the street at the back of the houses hangs about somethin’ awful—it gets into y’r blood, into the back of y’r throat. In the summers it brings the bile up from y’r belly and the tears smartin’ to your eyes. Even the Thames don’t smell as bad, sure it don’t. We pay two shillin’ a week for the room. Da says the landlord should be paying us to live there, it’s that bad.
    We’ve no water in the house, just a standpipe in the middle of the Court that we all use. It comes up brown like mud. Sometimes me and Rosie take a drink from the pumps we use to wash the cresses down the markets—it’s a bit better than the standpipe, but not much. Da says ye would never see brown waterin Ireland. “Clear as glass,” he says the water was back there. I think he’s sometimes sad not to be livin’ in Ireland still. He gets fierce angry when he’s after taking the drink, and then he shouts, “Feck the robbin’ bastards anyway.” When he gets all maudlin and has a belly full of ale, I know a beating’s coming for sure, ’specially if we don’t sell our flowers and don’t bring any pennies home.
    They say not to drink the water now anyway, not until it’s been boiled, for fear of the cholera coming back again, but we don’t have money for buying fuel for the fire, so we’ve to drink it as it is, cholera or not. Sometimes I find some dropped lumps of coal on the street or walnuts—walnuts is grand for burning when they’re dried out—and I gather them up in my skirts, and I know Da’ll be pleased, but it’s still not enough for a proper fire. Da says he’ll more ’n likely have to burn the rest of the furniture this winter, just to get a bit of warmth, like. We don’t have much furniture left anyway. He took most of it to the dolly shop for a few shillings. There’s just a stool now for a chair, a tattered old rug by the fireplace, a penny tea canister that we use as a candlestick for our light, and an old table what Da nicked from one of the other houses when old Mrs. Herrity died. It’s on the pallets now, for legs.
    Da sleeps behind the curtain, and I sleep with Little Sister on an old flock mattress in the corner of the room. I make up stories to tell Rosie, about travelin’ on one of them fancy paddle steamers from the pier and heading off for a day trip to Gravesend. Rosie likes when I tell the stories to her; makes the nights less frightenin’ she says. Poor little thing. Terrible afraid of the nighttime she is—says she don’t like it when the shadows go out. Lord bless ’er. She can only see shadows, y’see, what with her eyes not working proper: dark shadows and a faint glow from the gaslights, that’s all Rosie can see. So, I keep her ’specially close to me at night and we say our prayers and sing the songs that Mammy used to sing to us.
    We all know Rosemary Court is a bad, filthy place to live, but we’ve nowhere else to go, other than the workhouse. Even the cold nights and the street gangs and the bad men and the thieves is better than that. If they took me and Rosie to the House, I might never see ’er again, and that’d be worse than dyin’, sure it would.

Chapter 8
London
    April 1876
    T urns out Mammy was right about them lucky shamrocks on the handkerchiefs, ’cause I know it was them for certain what brought Mr. Shaw to help me and Rosie at the Aldgate Pump. It was those lucky Irish shamrocks, sure as eggs is eggs.
    Mr. Shaw stopped to help me, see, after some swell had knocked the flower basket clean out of my hands. Running for something that swell was—or