Never Look Back (20 page)

Taking one cent from her pocket she held it out to him. ‘Show me the way back to Pearl Street and I’ll give you this,’ she said.

He looked her up and down as if trying to surmise if she had more, and how he could best rob her. ‘My father is a policeman,’ she said, looking him squarely in the face. ‘So don’t try anything. Now, do you want the money?’

He stared at her silently for what seemed like forever, then nodded and held out his hand.

Matilda shook her head. ‘Not till you get me there.’

‘Whatcha come in here for?’ he asked with a sullen expression. ‘We sure ain’t nowhere near Pearl Street.’

‘I was trying to find my father and I lost my way,’ she said. ‘Now, are you going to take me?’

‘I’ll get yer to Broadway, that ain’t far,’ he said. Then, without waiting to hear if that would do, he set off at a trot a couple of yards in front of her. He led her through a fetid alley so narrow her arms touched the walls either side, across another wider street and out into a wide main thoroughfare busy with cabs and carriages. Across the street was a huge, strange-looking fortresslike building.

Matilda breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief to see civilization again. ‘This is Broadway?’ she asked for she knew that name, Giles had said it was one of the first proper roads to be built by the Dutch and it ran right from Lower Manhattan all the way up through the island.

The boy nodded, holding out his hand for the money.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Sidney,’ he said, his eyes on her hand rather than her face.

‘Well, thank you for bringing me here, Sidney. What’s that building over there?’ she asked, pointing to the fortress.

‘The Tombs,’ he said, glancing at it fearfully. ‘Now, give us the money.’

‘What goes on in there?’ she asked. Despite its rather splendid almost ancient Egyptian architecture, she could sense it had some awful purpose.

‘The prison, ain’t it,’ he said. ‘Now, give us the money.’

Matilda handed over the coin. ‘Have you got parents, Sidney?’

He shook his head.

‘So who looks after you?’

‘Me,’ he said, frowning as if he didn’t understand why anyone should ask such a question. Matilda put her hand back into her pocket and brought out the rest of the money she had there, six cents in all. ‘Buy yourself something to eat,’ she said, putting it into his filthy hand. But before she could ask him anything more, he raced away, back into the alley where he clearly felt more secure.

As Matilda made her way home down Broadway she felt sick and shaky. She had believed her childhood in Finders Court was a kind of protection against shock. Yet what she’d just seen made the slums of London and Bristol look like paradise.

She looked around her in bewilderment at the well-fed, fashionably dressed people going about their business in Broadway. The street was congested with fancy carriages, shops were stuffed to capacity with every kind of luxury imaginable and enough food to feed countless armies. Yet just five minutes away people were living in conditions worse than animals, without even the most basic of necessities like clothes and food.

Were all these prosperous-looking people unaware of what was so close to them?

Matilda found she couldn’t eat anything that evening. The thick pork chop on her plate reminded her of the pigs she’d seen earlier in the day, the vegetable dish piled high with roasted potatoes and carrots was like a silent reproach that she should be offered so much when that boy Sidney was starving. When Tabitha left the crust of her bread uneaten, she had a mental picture of the child she’d seen snatching stale bread from the filth in the street.

‘Have you been eating pastries while you were out this afternoon?’ Lily asked, giving her a scathing look.

‘No, I just don’t feel quite right,’ she said, hoping her mistress wouldn’t press her.

‘Maybe you’d better take a dose of castor oil before going to bed,’ Lily replied ‘You look a little peaky.’

After prayers later in the evening Lily retired for the night, leaving her husband reading in the parlour and Matilda in the kitchen making the oatmeal for the morning.

She was just placing it in the stove when Giles came in. ‘What’s troubling you this evening, Matty?’ he asked. ‘I’ve never known you refuse food or stay silent for so long. Yet I know you aren’t ill, whatever Mrs Milson might think.’

She hesitated, afraid he might be angry with her if she told him the truth.

‘Are you homesick?’

‘No,’ she said, amazed that he’d think of such a thing. She thought about her father and Dolly a great deal, and missed them, but London to her was a place of hardship, the only really good memories of it were connected with the Milsons. ‘This is home to me now.’

‘I’m very glad to hear that,’ he said with a smile. ‘But if this is
your home, that makes you part of my family, therefore you should be able to tell me what’s ailing you.’

He sat down at the table and folded his arms, waiting for her reply. In the year and a half Matilda had worked for him she had come to see he wasn’t a man to be fobbed off easily. He was intuitive, curious, and persistent. Those dark eyes of his looked deep into people’s souls, she could swear sometimes he even heard thoughts. But she also knew he used these abilities only to help people, not to intimidate them.

‘I’m not ill or homesick,’ she said. ‘Just troubled by something I saw today. I think if you’d seen it too, you wouldn’t have been able to eat either.’

She sat down opposite him, took a deep breath and blurted it all out, her eyes cast down at the table. It was only when she had got to the part where she thought the man with the cudgel was going to hurt her that she dared look up. He was resting his head on one hand, his fingers smoothing his brow as if what he was hearing was distressing him.

‘He didn’t hit me,’ she said quickly. ‘I ran for it, and I got a boy to show me the way out. But it was such a terrible place, sir, I know if you were to see it you’d want to do something about it.’

When he didn’t reply immediately she felt very uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she whispered, assuming he thought she was being presumptuous. ‘I’m being what Madam calls “uppity”.’

‘You aren’t being uppity at all,’ he said in a strained voice. ‘I wish everyone in New York could see what you have seen and react to it as you have done. Of those who have seen it, most believe the conditions are appropriate for the animals who dwell there.’

‘You have seen it then?’ she said in surprise.

‘Oh yes, Matty, I have. You are right, it’s the most Godforsaken, terrible place I have ever encountered. I can only feel relief right now that you got out without being hurt, for believe me, as well as the conditions there being an affront to a supposedly civilized city, it is an extremely dangerous place to go into alone and unprotected.’

‘But if you’ve been in it too, how could you keep quiet about it?’ She was staggered that he could sound so calm.

‘Why didn’t you come straight home and tell Mrs Milson about it?’

Matilda looked at him – one of his eyebrows was raised questioningly, a half-smile playing at his lips.

‘She would have had hysterics,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have put it past her to lock me in the shed outside too, until she was sure I hadn’t brought some disease home.’

He gave a tight little laugh. ‘That’s exactly why I haven’t spoken of it at home, and she would have made me promise that I would never go there again. So we both understand why neither of us could talk about it. But tell me, Matty, now that you’ve seen the horrors of Five Points, for that’s what it is called, what do you think should be done about it?’

‘Get the people out into proper houses, feed them and burn the place to the ground.’

He smiled. ‘You echo my first thoughts about it. But I soon discovered I had to think with my head, not my heart,’ he said. ‘To find a real solution to the problems there, we have to act logically and dispassionately.’

‘How can anyone be dispassionate about it?’ Her voice rose indignantly.

‘Well, first one has to look at the underlying reasons as to how that place came about, and why,’ he said, spreading his hands out on the table. ‘America has enough room for tens of millions of people and its government has an open-door policy to anyone who wants to come here. Yet there are no agencies to make sure there is work and housing for all. And no checks are made to see that immigrants have enough money to keep themselves and their families while they look for work.

‘Now, those ramshackle houses you saw today were once decent, one-family homes, but as the owners’ wealth increased, they moved out, further uptown and rented out their old houses. The newly arrived immigrants couldn’t afford to pay rent for a whole house, so they took just one room. Those who didn’t find a job immediately were soon forced to share that one room with another family, to pay the rent.

‘When each one of those houses becomes home for fifty people or so, and the landlord makes no repairs, it soon escalates into a slum situation. Those that are in work will find somewhere less crowded to move on to, but the poor devils at the bottom of the heap have no choice but to stay and put up with the conditions.’

Matilda nodded in understanding. Finders Court was just the
same. The only happy person was the landlord who lived miles away and sent someone else to collect the rents.

‘But why doesn’t someone stop the landlords exploiting the poor?’ she asked.

‘Maybe because those landlords have become rich and powerful,’ he said wryly. ‘I dare say that if one was to check out who owns those properties we’d find many of them sitting on the city council and in every seat of authority.’

‘But that’s wicked,’ she said in horror.

Giles shrugged. ‘It is, but who will speak out against them, Matty? No one, not even those with a degree of humanity and charity, really wants the people who live in Five Points now living next door to them. That place is out of sight and out of mind, and therefore an ideal spot in most people’s minds for the flotsam and jetsam who can’t or won’t work.’

Matilda thought of Seven Dials back in London. She knew only too well that most of its residents chose to live there because they were amongst their own kind. But then they were thieves, prostitutes and beggars.

‘But they can’t all be bad people in Five Points,’ she said. ‘Almost everyone I saw looked so sick and hungry.’

‘They are, Matty. What you saw today are those at the very bottom of life’s ladder, without the strength or will to climb to the next rung. You may have noticed that around half of them were Negroes, the other half are mainly Irish. Now, why do you think that it is just those two races there, not some English, Italians or Germans?’

Matilda shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘People in this city would be very quick to suggest it is because Negroes and Irish are indolent by nature,’ he said with a sneer. ‘It makes them feel better to make such sweeping statements because they don’t want to take any responsibility for the atrocities which have been heaped on these two races. The English have been abusing the Irish for centuries, and the Americans have enslaved the black men. So what the Irish and Negroes have in common is that they both come from backgrounds of extreme deprivation. Hunger and appalling living conditions are nothing new to them. They arrive here in the city with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, and the only place where they can find shelter is amongst their own.’

‘Why can’t they find jobs?’

‘The strong, bright and ambitious do. For every Irish man or woman who ends up in Five Points there are another hundred who have risen above their backgrounds, you will find them driving cabs, running businesses, in just about every field you can think of. It’s the same for the Negroes too, though they have even more prejudice to overcome, and mostly end up in manual or domestic work. But for the unlucky ones who end up in Five Points it becomes a trap. You once said to me you couldn’t get a better job than selling flowers because of your clothes and the way you spoke. It’s much like that for them.’

‘But I got out of it because you helped me,’ she said. ‘Surely that’s all we have to do for them.’

‘Matty,’ he said wearily, ‘we are talking about people who are in the main deficient in some way. Most are illiterate, with no skills, others are sick, and that place brutalizes them all.’

‘I’m sure they could be taught to do something,’ she said angrily. ‘People can’t just ignore them.’

‘I agree,’ he said gently. ‘But how do we reach out to those who have sunk so low that they seek only the oblivion of drink? We aren’t talking about fresh-faced young girls and boys who are eager to grasp any opportunity, but sick, worn-down people who have mainly lost all sense of morality. Five Points is a cesspit, Matty. People are murdered there nightly, thieving and prostitution are often their only means of survival.’

‘But surely the children could be saved,’ she said weakly, thinking of her brother George.

Giles looked at Matilda and seeing the same anguish in her eyes that he felt in his own heart, he wanted to let her into the plans he and Darius Kirkbright had been working on for the past few weeks. Yet the thought of Lily asleep upstairs completely unaware that his ministry work had taken him into such unsavoury places troubled him greatly. How would she react if she discovered he had confided in a servant but not in her?

‘The orphans could be rescued,’ he said hesitantly, trying to sound as if the thought had only just occurred to him. ‘I believe there are hundreds of them, tiny ones sometimes less than three years old, just rooting around in the muck. I suppose they could be rounded up and taken to somewhere they could be cared for.’

Matilda was just about to say what a sound idea that was when it suddenly dawned on her that the authoritative way he’d spoken about the problems in Five Points meant he’d been in and out of there many times. Knowing him as she did, there was no way that he would walk away from what he’d seen.

‘You’ve already planned to do it, haven’t you?’ she blurted out.

He blushed and looked away.

‘Oh, sir!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ve been working on this for weeks, haven’t you? What on earth will Mrs Milson say when she finds out? She thinks you’ve been off visiting the sick and mixing with the toffs at the church.’