Free A Broken Vessel by Kate Ross Page B

sent to Botany Bay. And I didn’t know what become of Dip, till I run into him t’other night.”
    “What about you? What were you doing all this time?”
    “Oh, there ain’t much to tell about me. When I was a kid, I picked pockets like Dip, but I never had the gift for it he had. Mostly I was a stall: I’d play up to a cove while me pal did him over. I give that up—I likes being on me own hook, and not having to answer to nobody. ’Sides, thieves is al’ays getting took up on account of the reward, and I can’t stick being locked up. So I went on the grind. Nobody bothers a honest whore, as is just trying to make her way in the world. ’Course, I lifts handkerchiefs off me flats, but that ain’t nothing. It’s mostly for sport of it, and to keep me forks in form.”
    “How did you and Dipper get separated?”
    “I got in a kick-up with another gal, and we was both sent to the house of correction. When I got out, I went to live in Ratcliff and married a sailor. I don’t mean married legal, in a church— just temporary, like sailors does when they comes ashore. I fancied him uncommon. He was a first-rater—sent me blunt for months after he went back to sea, and he didn’t even know I was full in the belly—”
    She broke off, biting her lip.
    He asked gently, “Do you have a child, Sally?”
    “I did have. Becky, I called her. She only lived for about a fortnight. She wasn’t strong—right from the beginning, everybody told me she’d never stick it. I didn’t want to believe ’em. When she went, I cut up something mortal. Even now, I thinks about her sometimes, and I—” She swallowed hard, “I miss her.”
    She wiped her nose on her sleeve. He gave her his handkerchief. She blew into it, then slipped it into her pocket. He pretended not to notice.
    “It’s over and done,” she said. “I’ve put it behind me, mostly I’d like to have another one, though. I dunno why. If it was a boy, I couldn’t do nothing for him, and if it was a gal, she’d only end up like me.”
    “You might marry.”
    “Not likely!” she laughed
    “Of course, I realize—” He broke off uncertainly.
    “That I ain’t just what every mother’d like her son to bring home?” She grinned. “I expect there’s coves as’d marry rite all the same. But I ain’t so soft as that comes to! A friend of mine married her fancy-man, and she never had a farthing to call her own again—he took all she earned and turned it into drink. So she went to a parson and said, What’ll I do? and he said there wasn’t no help for it, ’coz why, ’coz the bastard was her husband, and everything she had in the world—everything she got by her own hard work— belonged to him. He said that’s the law . Is that true?”
    “I believe so. The law doesn’t recognize a married woman as a person separate from her husband.”
    “Well, with a law like that, what gal’d be so dicked in the nob as to get spliced? Not me, I can tell you!”
    He regarded her thoughtfully. “Why have you been telling me all this?”
    “ ’Coz you was blue-deviled, and I wanted to cheer you up. If you was any other cove, I’d’ve found better ways to do it than by talking, but you al’ays stalls me off when I makes up to you. So I thought I’d talk about Dip, ’coz he’s somebody you and me has in common, see?”
    “Yes, I see. That was very kind of you, Sally.”
    “There ain’t much I wouldn’t do for you, Lightning—if you’d let me.”
    “You’ve done more than enough. Would you think me rude if I asked to be alone for a while?”
    She glared at him and got up. “Some folks,” she said darkly, “wouldn’t know a good thing if it was to bite ’em in the cods!”

    “The inquest is at two o’clock, sir, at the Rose and Thorn, in Guilford Street.”
    “What, today? How the devil did Harcourt arrange for it so quickly?”
    “I talked to some of the neighbours, sir—them as lives around the refuge. They says Mr. Harcourt wants to