Page 45 of Lord Gabriel’s Undoing

“And left you?”

He gave an awkward shrug again, uncomfortable at the thought that she might have cared so little as to leave him behind. Uncomfortable, as well, that she’d chosen to give him away in the first place and never return to find him. Surely it would have been easier for her to find the duchess than it would have been for the duke to have found one French émigrée in a maelstrom of other French people. Not liking the way his thoughts were running, he pushed them away in irritation, a bitter taste in his mouth.

Best to change the subject. “This is a very mixed area and will get more so as we keep going. Lots of Irish in the rookeries. They come over here with nothing and gravitate towards this part of London. And they discover they have nothing still. But they have little choice in the matter if they want somewhere cheap to lay their heads. Or not so cheap in many cases. The landlords’ agents exploit them by charging high rent. They let and sublet until there might be forty people in one room, trying to eat and sleep and…other things.” He shook his head. “Some even pay a penny or so for a night spent slumped over a rope. You can get more people into a room if you stack them like that.”

From the look on her face she thought he was exaggerating. She’d soon see.

At last they reached Crown Street, off which Denmark Street opened. She could do with another history lesson. “This whole area was once very well-to-do. But the rich moved out and the poor moved in. Now the rich live in Mayfair, and these houses have dozens of families living where once was just one family and their many servants.”

A frown marred her brow. “You do know I’m not responsible for what I am, don’t you? And neither are you. I have to say you’ve taken on the demeanor of one of the preachiest of rectors to their congregation. You need to remember that I’m listening, and I’m not arguing with you.”

He had to admit she was right. He was getting carried away. He raised an eyebrow in inquiry, suspecting where this was going.

Her frown increased. “I can’t help it that I was born where I was. I can’t help it that I’m rich and grew up in luxury. And it’s not my fault if wicked landlords exploit people who have nowhere else to live. I’m not a landlord.”

She paused, as though scrabbling to draw her thoughts together. “But that doesn’t stop me wanting to do something to help. What little I can. But I have lots of questions. Why, for example, do they continue to come here if it’s so awful for them? Why not go elsewhere? Into the countryside to work on the land? From what you’ve shown me so far, life there would be much better than life somewhere like here.” And she gave her own hand a wave at her surroundings, which were not, of course, anywhere near as bad as they could have been. They were not yet within the rookery itself. This was an area where more people worked and less of them spent their few pennies on blotting out their lives with gin.

Gabriel pressed his lips together in irritation. “They come here to the city because they had nothing where they come from. There’s no work for them in Ireland, and no food. Many people come from the English countryside, too, because fewer are being employed on the land. They come to London because they’re starving.” He paused. “You’re making the mistake of thinking of the people on your father’s old estate, no doubt. Men with work on the farms, women taking in laundry, well-fed servants. The people who come here aren’t people like that. No one would take them on as servants. They’re the poorest of the poor, uneducated, and employable only in the meanest of professions, Phoebe. I mean, Will. Who do you think goes round in the dark emptying the night soil from all the big houses? People who live in places like St Giles, that’s who.”

The frown didn’t leave her face. “I think I begin to understand. But you must remember this is all new to me and a lot to take in.” She glanced around herself with some wariness. “Are you taking me to Denmark Street again?”

He shook his head, still irritated by her naivety. “No. There isn’t an actual boundary where the rookery starts and the more respectable areas end. It’s a blurred and wavy line. But we’re as much on the edge of it as we could be, so we’re going in. Remember who you are and who I am. Only speak if you’re spoken to and keep it to one-word answers or your accent will give you away. And stay close.” He offered her his coat to hang onto again. “Come on.”

Chapter Fifteen

The Rookery of St Giles was worse than anything Phoebe could ever have imagined, even after having listened to Gabriel’s descriptions. The dark, decaying buildings couldn’t have been described as houses. Teetering, tumbledown hovels, several stories high, leaned out over the narrow, filthy streets where there might perhaps have once been cobbles beneath the layers of mud, excrement, and rotting vegetables. She shivered at the thought that dead animals might be responsible for the odd crunch under her booted feet. The stench was unbearable and like nothing Phoebe had ever smelled before. It made her gag and she had to put a hand to her mouth and nose to try to keep the stink out and the possibility of embarrassing vomit in.

They’d walked up Crown Street, in itself not the most salubrious of roads, but gone past the entrance to Denmark Street, a road that had now taken on the proportions of a safe haven in Phoebe’s mind. If only Gabriel were taking her to the orphanage instead of into a hell even his most lurid descriptions hadn’t done justice to.

At the end of the road, where Oxford Street entered from the left, Gabriel hurried Phoebe across what he said was the junction between St Giles High Street and the Tottenham Court Road. Not that either of those road names meant anything to her, a girl who’d only ever lived on a country estate and in Mayfair. That crossing, noisy, thick with horse-drawn traffic and people on foot, had been the lull before the storm, had she but known it. For things were only going to get worse.

Bainbridge Street, which they entered on the far side of the High Street, proved to be narrower, darker and dingier than anything that had gone before, even though it was not long after noon. The buildings that seemed to be threatening to butt heads with each other across the street looked as though they’d been cobbled together haphazardly out of the shoddiest materials, but only after those materials had reached an advanced state of rot. From side to side above their heads, gray, shapeless washing hung on ropes, lank and motionless in the fetid air. It did not look as if it had ever been clean.

Gabriel pointed to a sign over an archway proclaiming The Horse Shoe Brewery. “See that? Just over a year ago, one of the huge vats in there burst and spilled thousands of gallons of beer into the rookery. You’d imagine the people would like that, wouldn’t you? And some did. But, unfortunately, there are countless cellars with families living in them, and these filled up with the beer and eight people drowned. Some of them young children.”

Phoebe would have stared, but he was hastening past the entrance now and she was towed along with him. People who had to live in cellars? She’d think about that later.

Despite the state of the street, it was far more crowded than any street she’d ever seen, although the people seemed to mill about without any motivation, as though they possessed no purpose in life other than to idly wander, shouting to one another in loud, coarse voices.

This was truly hell on Earth.

Phoebe hung on tightly to Gabriel’s coat, the fear that they might become separated in this throng of unfriendly, unwashed people enormous. She’d never seen people like this in any of the streets she knew. If you could even call what they were struggling up a street, for she was walking in mud up to her ankles. The shoddy boots Cecilia had furnished her with clearly had a leak in them for her toes were getting wet.

A further shiver of horror ran through her as half a dozen rats the size of cats raced from one side of the street to the other, seeming to skim lightly across the surface of the mud. So inured were her fellows to such a sight, no one but her seemed to have noticed.

Yes, the roads about Aunt Fanny’s house were busy during daylight hours, and even after dark, but this was something different. Did these people not have houses to go to? Or work of some sort? She hadn’t quite believed Gabriel when he’d said no one would employ them, but now she’d seen them for herself…Men in tatty, frayed coats, and boots far worse than her own, lounged on corners drinking what must have been gin and arguing with each other. Women in filthy, low-cut dresses did the same, many clutching half-empty, green-tinted bottles to their bosoms. And the women were shouting not just insults at the men, but enticements, pulling back the necks of their gowns to expose their grubby, scrawny breasts.

Where had Gabriel brought her to? Indignation at him boiled within her. This was nothing at all like Denmark Street. Yes, he’d said it would be worse. But he should have made it clearer just how much worse. He should have warned her what to expect. He should have given her more choice in the matter. But would she have believed him? Probably not. If she asked herself to be honest, she’d thought him guilty of exaggeration to shock her, but in truth, if anything, he’d underplayed the depravity of this place.

And now she was here, she was stuck. He represented the only way out, as well as the way in. If she let go of his coat tails, she might be lost here forever, and that thought terrified her.

She hung on even tighter.

Then she saw the children, by far a worse sight than the adults.

Dirty faced, their lank greasy hair in rat’s tails, hardly any clothes and no shoes, feet bare in the oozing mud, they lurked in the shadows like little, lost ghosts of what a child should be. Their naked limbs were like sticks, eyes huge in narrow faces but furtive, as though constantly searching for something.

“Don’t go near the children,” Gabriel muttered. “They’ll stick you with a knife just as soon as their parents would, or pick your pockets. More than half of them are in the employ of gangs that send them out on the dip in return for a place to sleep and a bite of food.”