City of Shadows

Chapter 62

6 November 1888, Whitechapel, London

‘It’s best to be in pairs, love,’ said Mary. ‘Ain’t so safe on the streets these days with that madman out there somewhere.’ She grasped Faith’s bare arm. ‘That’s why you should stick close to me, you understand? We can look out for each other while we work.’

Faith adjusted the muslin wrapped tightly round her still-healing arm. ‘I understand,’ she replied evenly. ‘I will stay close.’

She wasn’t entirely sure what the woman meant by ‘work’ — they appeared to be doing nothing at all productive; instead, they were standing together beneath the soft amber gaslight glow of a street lamp and calling out peculiar greetings to males who happened to pass them by.

‘What is your “work”?’ asked Faith.

Mary looked at her with a coy grin. ‘A finger-snitch, love.’

‘What is a finger-snitch?’

‘Oi, you serious?’ She sighed. Faith stared at her, awaiting an answer. ‘You really are a funny one, aintcha? I s’pose I better explain. See, what I do is lift a little coin from gents who should be behaving ’emselves better.’

Faith frowned. ‘I do not understand.’

‘Pick their pockets, love. Only the ones who look like they can afford it, mind. And usually gents who’ve had a bit too much of the ol’ drink and rather fancy themselves.’

‘Pick their pocket?’ Faith ran a search for that phrase in her head. ‘You are talking of theft? Stealing?’ she said finally.

Mary laughed. ‘Blimey, you’re a bit slow on the uptake, love. Yes, I steal. I ain’t so proud of that, but it’s that, my dear, or starve. And I’ll tell you there’s plenty of gents in London who make a pretty penny by doing very little but sit on their fat backsides while poor hardworking sods break their backs making ’em rich. It’s a bloomin’ unfair place this city. One world for the rich, and another world for the rest of us.’ Mary shrugged. ‘So, I don’t feel so bad about lifting the odd coin from a gentleman’s back pocket.’ She winked. ‘It’s all in ’ow you go about distractin’ ’em.’

‘Distracting them?’

‘A saucy wink, love. That an’ a cheeky smile.’ She laughed. ‘Men can be such fools. ’Specially when they’ve ’ad a bit too much to drink.’

Faith nodded. ‘I understand. We deploy mating signals to distract them. Then we steal from them.’

Mary shook her head, bemused and tickled by Faith’s choice of words. ‘You’re an odd one, love. But, yes, that’s the gist of it. You can ’elp me, Faith. Two of us? We could make a good team. Pretty girl like you would get plenty of attention. You keep ’em talkin’, an’ I can do the finger work. What do you say?’

Faith gave that a few moments’ thought. ‘We will require money to obtain food. I need food to sustain me.’

‘Don’t we all. Ain’t nothin’ bleedin’ well free in London.’

Faith nodded. ‘Your logic is sound. I will assist you in finger-snitching. You will have to teach me the “saucy winks” and the “cheeky smiles”. I can learn these actions.’

Mary nodded. ‘I’ll teach yer, that and a few saucy things to say to ’em gents. They like that. We should practise on someone…’ She spotted a likely candidate. ‘Hoy! Cooeee, love!’ Mary called out to a gentleman a little worse for wear, tracing a drunken zigzag along the pavement opposite them. ‘You want some company?’

The drunk snarled something back at her and staggered on.

‘Charming,’ muttered Mary.

Faith looked up and down the street. It was almost completely empty apart from them and another couple more women down the far end, like them, huddled in the pool of light at the base of a street lamp.

‘Trade ain’t good tonight. ’S the rain see? All the gents stayin’ at home with their missus.’ She laughed. A throaty sound. ‘Get things for free at ’ome now, dontcha?’

Faith offered the distant women a polite nod, but they ignored her. She wasn’t fully listening to Mary as she talked. Faith was busy evaluating her mission status. It was, of course, still active, yet to be completed. And she knew her targets were close by. They’d come here to this time, this place for a good reason — whatever that was. She was reasonably confident — 76 per cent — that they wouldn’t know she’d actually managed to follow them through the portal. And here in this time with no CCTV cameras, no wireless transmitters, no radios, mobile phones, no computer tracking and monitoring they would probably feel entirely safe.

Which meant they might get careless.

She had identified a search radius of a mile in diameter, the approximate distance she’d been offset by the displacement process. A lot of people in such a densely populated place as London, but her eyes were good, her recognition software exceedingly fast. Yesterday Mary had taken her along Oxford Street to a pie shop that sold ‘proper meat in the middle’. Oxford Street had been a good place to be. Faith had locked on to and evaluated 7,056 faces in just under ten minutes.

Streets were the best place to be, Faith decided.

A sea of humanity out there, plenty of opportunity for her to wait and watch. At some point one of her targets was bound to walk down one of these busy roads, in need of some essential thing: food, drink, clothing. And, if she was standing in the same street, she would spot them, and make her move.

‘… although it is a shame…’ Mary was still talking. ‘Pretty flower like you ’aving to do something like this. ’Aving to be a common thief. But that’s ’ow it is, I’m afraid.’

Faith turned to her. ‘I am a “pretty flower”?’

Mary laughed. ‘Course you bloomin’ well are!’ She sighed. ‘Mind you, even I was pretty once. This place does that to you… sucks all the blimmin’ life out of you.’

Faith sensed that was probably some sort of a metaphor, not to be taken literally. The woman was talking about fatigue, attrition. Being ‘worn down’, to use another human aphorism. Faith considered how long she had been pursuing the targets. Her ‘elapsed mission time’ counter was showing four weeks, five days and seventeen hours. Given that she’d been birthed nine hours before being sent back from 2069 to 2001, she’d effectively been on-task pretty much all of her short life.

She wasn’t exactly tired; the proteins she’d managed to get hold of and consume were keeping her organic chassis fed. Perhaps not ideal forms of nutrition long term; her digestive system wasn’t exactly designed to deal with pigs’ trotters and eels.

No, her body was well-fuelled for now… it was her mind that felt tired.

Her hard drive was filling up with a trillion things observed, heard, smelled, felt, tasted. She needed to compress her data, to offload the unimportant, trivial data and defragment the spaces left behind. Data retrieval, sorting, ordering, filtering, all those necessary processes were getting markedly slower and that was undoubtedly beginning to affect her performance.

She looked at Mary and imagined that her hard drive looked like the skin on this woman’s face: pockmarked, weathered, lined.

A visual metaphor, of course. Not literally.

A drip of rainwater from the lamp-post landed on Mary’s upturned face. She wiped it away. ‘I wanted to be a musician, a piano player when I was a little girl,’ she said. ‘You know, I was brought up near a convent. And they had an old piano there they let me play on. I could play some pretty tunes on that, Faith, I could. Even though I couldn’t never read the music.’ She smiled wistfully and listened to the soft patter of raindrops all around them. ‘We all ’ave silly dreams when we’re children, don’t we?’

Faith felt she should nod at that.

‘Only dream I got left, I s’pose, is taking meself back ’ome ’gain. To me mum and dad. Be a little girl all over again.’ Mary sighed and the soft hiss of drizzle filled the silence.

‘What about you, Faith? Was you a bit of a dreamer?’

Faith hadn’t told Mary much about her past. In fact, Mary had assumed most of it — country girl from a farm? Longed for the excitement of the big city? Came to London with little or no money and soon found herself in trouble? All Faith had really needed to do was nod at Mary’s stated presumptions.

Did she have ‘dreams’? Faith gave that a moment’s thought.

[Information: I have goals. Objectives]

But dreams… in a different sense, dreams. She had trace memories: the faintest recollection of pre-born foggy images and muffled sounds. A growth cycle in her tube, before her miniature silicon chip became active and thinking became a digital process.

‘I sometimes dream,’ said Faith finally. She panned her cool grey eyes on to Mary. ‘I dream that I can go back home also.’

Mary laughed. ‘Right blimmin’ daft couple standin’ here, ain’t we?’

‘Yes,’ said Faith. ‘ Blimmin ’ daft.’

‘You an’ me… we should try and save every penny we make. No more of the gin, no more of the bad stuff… just save up all the money we can lay our ’ands on.’

‘Agreed. The gin is toxic to your body chemistry. It does you harm consuming it.’ Faith looked at Mary. ‘What is your intended purpose for the money?’

‘To pay for a train, of course! A train away from ’ere. A train back home. That’s where you an’ me should try and get. Back to our ’omes. This ain’t no decent place to live. Farm animals live a better life than most of the poor sods trapped ’ere in Whitechapel. I wish I’d never come ’ere in the first place.’

‘Correct. Many of the humans here appear to be in poor condition.’

‘It’s so hard to get by.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Even just gettin’ enough to eat. But then you walk no more’n a mile west… places like Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus… and you see ’em posh blighters in their fancy clothes, in their fancy carriages, stepping into fancy clubs and eateries. None of ’em done a day’s work in their lives. Ain’t right.’ She sighed. ‘If I ’ad a say in things… I’d change it all. Take what’s theirs and share it among all them poor beggars out there workin’ all day an’ night just to scratch together enough money to blimmin’ well eat!’

A thought occurred to Mary just then. ‘Where did you tell me your ’ome was, Faith?’

Faith looked at her. ‘I have no… home.’

‘Then, blimmin’ ’eck, you could come with me!’ Mary’s face creased with a gap-toothed grin. ‘How about that? Would you like that? Wales is lovely, Faith. Mountains and valleys. Nothin’ like London.’ She grabbed Faith’s arm. ‘We could both go live in Wales. Would you like that? You and me? We could pinch as much money as we can… save every penny, an’ buy us some tickets away from this miserable city.’

Faith’s tight lips curved, producing a practised-several-times, almost genuine-looking smile. ‘That sounds like a blimmin’ good plan, Mary.’