The Trial of Elizabeth Cree by Peter Ackroyd

low laugh and curtsied to me. “Are you mellow in the marshes? Are you a little light in the marshes, Lizzie?”
    “Now then. Order, ladies and gents.” But my “uncle” need not have remonstrated with them. All at once they seemed to have forgotten about me, and began talking to each other and eating their pies. Then Dan Leno came over.
    “Don’t let them dumb yer,” he said, very confidentially. “It’s just their way. Isn’t that right, Tommy?” My “uncle” was still hovering about me, and Dan Leno gave him a stern look before introducing him to me. “Allow me to present Tommy Farr. Agent, author, actor, comic acrobat and manager.” “Uncle” bowed to me. “He’s the one who hands out the spondulicks.”
    “The dear girl doesn’t understand, Dan. You see, dear, he means the baksheesh.”
    “Sir?”
    “The bustle. The bunce. The money.”
    “Come to think of it, we owe you a little something.” Dantook a shilling out of his pocket. “As Tommy would say, you did extend to us a helping hand.” When I took the coin, he glimpsed my own hands—so raw, so pitted and so large that, even then, I think he felt sorry for me. “We’re at the Washington tomorrow night,” he said in a very gentle voice, quite unlike his stage scream. “There may be a little job for you there. If you would oblige again.”
    I recognized that line from the variety, and I laughed. “Where is the Washington, sir?”
    “It’s in Battersea. In your immediate neighboring vicinity. And if it’s all right with you, I’d rather you called me Dan.”
    I left them soon after, and I walked through the night. I could not have slept, because I was already in a dream. I drifted down the line of gas lamps, and sang as softly as I could the words I had heard in the Craven Street theater:
    Oh mother, dear mother, come home with me now
,
       
The clock in the steeple strikes one
.
    I could not remember the rest of it, but it was enough for me to imagine myself dancing upon the stage with the beautiful picture of London behind me.

FOURTEEN
    S EPTEMBER 9, 1880: My wife sang to me after dinner. It was an old song from the halls and, when she did all the business in her usual droll fashion, it brought back those days so fresh that we both might have wept.
    S EPTEMBER 10, 1880: Very cold and foggy for the time of year. Spent the day in the Reading Room, where I made copious notes on Mayhew’s
London Labor and the London Poor
. What a moralist that man is! I had been reading the newspapers ever since my first escapade, even though I knew that the death of such a chicken would cause no great stir in the world. Then I saw a paragraph in the
Morning Herald
—“Self-Slaughter of Young Woman”—and I knew at once that the affair had been hushed up. The gay ladies would not want to spoil their trade in that quarter, and my little business might have scared away the swells. Yet I must admit that I felt somewhat humiliated; all that work gone for nothing and, in the face of this neglect, I made a pledge to myself that next time I would leave a mark that everyone would notice. Really, I was not to be trifled with in these matters.
    I left the Museum that evening and waited in Great Russell Street by the cab stand, although the fog was still so thick that I despaired of ever finding a driver. But then I saw a pair of bull’s-eye lamps approaching from a distance, and I waved my bag; I shouted out “Limehouse!” but my words could find no passagethrough the fog. Then, as the cab drew nearer, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned quickly, in case it were some thief set to rob me, but it was the old bearded gentleman who sometimes sits near me in the Reading Room.
    “We are going the same way,” he said. “And there is only one cab. May we ride together?” He had a foreign accent, and at first I took him for a Hebrew; I have a great reverence for their learning, and so I assented at once. It seemed delightful to me to spend a little