The Tea Rose Read online

  Jennifer Donnelly

  The Tea Rose

  For Douglas,

  my own blue-eyed boy

  Deep in the roots all flowers keep the light

  – THEODORE ROETHKE

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Two

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Part Three

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  Prologue

  London, August 1888

  Polly Nichols, a Whitechapel whore, was profoundly grateful to gin. Gin helped her. It cured her. It took away her hunger and chased the chill from her joints. It stilled the aching in her rotten teeth and numbed the slicing pains she got every time she took a piss. It made her feel better than any man ever had. It calmed her. It soothed her.

  Swaying drunkenly in the darkness of an alley, she raised a bottle to her lips and drained it. The alcohol burned like fire. She coughed, lost her grip on the bottle, and swore as it smashed.

  In the distance, the clock at Christ Church struck two, its resonant chime muffled in the thickening fog. Polly dipped her hand into her coat pocket and felt for the coins there. Two hours ago, she’d been sitting in the kitchen of a doss-house on Thrawl Street, penniless. The landlord’s man had spotted her there, asked for his fourpence, and turned her out when she couldn’t supply it. She’d cursed and screamed at him, telling him to save her bed, he’d get his doss money, telling him she’d earned it and drunk it three times over that day.

  “And I got it, too, you bastard,” she muttered. “Didn’t I say I would? Got yer poxy fourpence and a skinful to boot.”

  She’d found her money and her gin in the trousers of a lone drunk wending his way down the Whitechapel Road. He’d needed a bit of coaxing. At forty-two, her face was no longer her fortune. She was missing two front teeth and her pug nose was thick and flattened across the bridge like a fighter’s, but her large bosom was still firm and a glimpse of it had decided him. She’d insisted on a swig of his gin first, knowing a mouthful would numb her throat, get up her nose, and block the beer and onions stink of him. As she drank, she’d unbuttoned her camisole, and while he was busy groping her, she’d slipped the bottle into her own pocket. He was clumsy and slow and she was glad when he finally pulled away and staggered off.

  Christ, but there’s nothing like gin, she thought now, smiling at the memory of her good fortune. To feel the weight of a bottle in your hands, press your lips against the glass, and feel the blue ruin flowing down your throat, hot and harsh. Nothing like it at all. And close to full that bottle had been. No mean thru’penny swig. Her smile faded as she found herself craving more. She’d been drinking all day and knew the misery that awaited her when the booze wore off. The retching, the shaking, and, worst of all, the things she saw – black, scuttling things that gibbered and leered from the cracks in the walls of the doss-house.

  Polly licked her right palm and smoothed her hair. Her hands went to her camisole; her fingers fumbled a knot into the dirty strings threaded through the top of it. She tugged her blouse together and buttoned it, then lurched out of the alley and down Buck’s Row, singing to herself in a gravelly, gin-cracked voice:

  “Oh, bad luck can’t be prevented,

  Fortune, she smiles or she frowns,

  ’E’s best off that’s contented,

  To mix, sir, the ups and the downs …”

  At the corner of Buck’s Row and Brady Street, she suddenly stopped. Her vision blurred. A buzzing noise, low and close like the wings of an insect, began in her head.

  “I’ve the ’orrors of drink upon me,” she moaned. She held her hands up. They were trembling. She buttoned her coat up around her neck and began to walk faster, desperate for more gin. Her head lowered, she did not see the man standing a few feet ahead of her until she was nearly upon him. “Blimey!” she cried. “Where the ’ell did you come from?”

  The man looked at her. “Will you?” he asked.

  “No, guv’nor, I will not. I’m poorly just now. Good night.”

  She started to move off, but he grabbed her arm. She turned on him, her free arm raised to strike him, when her eyes fell upon the shilling pinched between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Well, that changes things, don’t it?” she said. His shilling plus the fourpence she already had would buy booze and a bed tonight, tomorrow, and the day after, too. As sick as she felt, she couldn’t turn it down.

  Polly and her client walked back the way she’d come in silence, past tumble-down dwellings and tall brick warehouses. The man had a powerful stride and she found herself trotting to keep pace. Glancing at him, she saw he was expensively dressed. Probably had a nice watch on him. She’d certainly have a go at his pockets when the time was right. He stopped abruptly at the end of Buck’s Row, by the entrance to a stable yard.

  “Not ’ere,” she protested, wrinkling her nose. “By the metal works … a little ways down …”

  “This’ll do,” he said, pushing her against two sheets of corrugated metal, secured by a chain and padlock, that served as the stable’s gate.

  His face shone weirdly bright in the thickening darkness, its pallor broken by eyes that were cold and black. A wave of nausea gripped her as she looked into them. Oh, Jesus, she pleaded silently, don’t let me be sick. Not here. Not now. Not this close to a whole shilling. She forced herself to breathe deeply, willing the nausea to subside. As she did, she inhaled his scent – Macassar oil, sweat, and something else … what was it? Tea. Bloody tea, of all things.

&n
bsp; “Let’s get on with it then,” she said. She lifted her skirts, fixing him with a look of weary expectation.

  The man’s eyes were glittering darkly now, like shiny pools of black oil. “You filthy bitch,” he said.

  “No dirty talk tonight, pet. I’m in a bit of an ’urry. Need some ’elp, do you?” She reached for him. He slapped her hand away.

  “Did you really think you could hide from me?”

  “Look ’ere, are you going to –” Polly began. She never finished. Without warning, the man grabbed her by the throat and slammed her into the gate.

  “Leave off!” she cried, flailing at him. “Let me go!”

  He tightened his grip. “You left us,” he said, his eyes bright with hatred. “Left us for the rats.”

  “Please!” she rasped. “Please don’t ’urt me. I don’t know about any rats, I swear it … I …”

  “Liar.”

  Polly never saw the knife coming. She had no time to scream as it plunged into her belly, biting and twisting. A soft gasp escaped her as he pulled it out. She stared at the blade, uncomprehending, her eyes wide, her mouth a great, round O. Slowly, delicately, she touched her fingers to the wound. They came away crimson.

  She lifted her eyes to his, her voice rising in a wild, terrified keen, and looked into the face of madness. He raised his knife; it bit into her throat. Her knees buckled and all around her darkness descended, enveloping her, dragging her into a thick and strangling fog, a fog deeper than the river Thames and blacker than the London night that swirled down on her soul.

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  The scent of Indian tea leaves – black, crisp, and malty – was intoxicating. It floated out of Oliver’s, a six-story wharf on the Thames’s north bank, and wafted down the Old Stairs, a flight of stone steps that led from Wapping’s winding, cobbled High Street to the river’s edge. The tea’s perfume overpowered the other smells of the docks – the sour stench of the mud bank, the salty tang of the river, and the warm, mingled scents of cinnamon, pepper, and nutmeg drifting out of the spice wharves.

  Fiona Finnegan closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. “Assam,” she said to herself. “The smell’s too strong for a Darjeeling, too rich for a Dooars.”

  Mr. Minton, the foreman at Burton’s, said she had a nose for tea. He liked to test her by holding a handful of leaves under her nose and making her name it. She always got it right.

  A nose for tea, maybe. The hands for it, surely, she thought, opening her eyes to inspect her work-roughened hands, their knuckles and nails black with tea dust. The dust got everywhere. In her hair. Her ears. Inside her collar. She rubbed at the grime with the hem of her skirt, sighing. This was the first chance she’d had to sit down since six-thirty that morning, when she’d left her mother’s lamplit kitchen for the dark streets of Whitechapel.

  She’d arrived at the tea factory at a quarter to seven. Mr. Minton had met her at the door and put her to work readying half-pound tins for the rest of the packers due in on the hour. The blenders, who worked on the upper floors of the factory, had mixed two tons of Earl Grey the day before and it had to be packed by noon. Fifty-five girls had had five hours to pack eight thousand tins. That worked out to an allotment of about two minutes’ labor per tin. Only Mr. Minton thought two minutes was too much, so he’d stood behind each girl in turn – timing her, shaming her, bullying her. All to gain a few seconds on the output of a tea tin.

  Saturdays were only half-days, but they seemed endless. Mr. Minton drove her and the other girls terribly hard. It wasn’t his fault, Fiona knew, he was only following orders from Burton himself. She suspected her employer hated having to give his workers half a day off, so he made them suffer for it. They got no breaks on Saturdays; she had to endure five long hours on her feet. If she was lucky, her legs went numb; if not, they ached with a slow, heavy pain that started in her ankles and climbed to her back. And worse than the standing was the grindingly dull nature of the work: glue a label on a tin, weigh out the tea, fill the tin, seal the tin, box the tin, then start all over again. The monotony was agony to a mind as bright as hers and there were days, like today, when she thought she’d go mad with it, when she doubted she’d ever escape it, and wondered if all her big plans, her sacrifices, would ever amount to anything.

  She pulled the hairpins from the heavy knot at the back of her head and shook her hair free. Then she loosened the laces on her boots, kicked them off, peeled her stockings off, and stretched her long legs out before her. They still ached from standing and the walk to the river hadn’t helped any. In the back of her mind, she heard her mother scolding. “If you ’ad any sense, child, any sense at all, you’d come straight ’ome and rest yourself instead of traipsing off down the river.”

  Not come to the river? she thought, admiring the silvery Thames as it shimmered in the August sunshine. Who could resist it? Lively waves slapped impatiently at the bottom of the Old Stairs, spraying her. She watched them inching toward her and fancied that the river wanted to touch her toes, swirl up over her ankles, draw her into its beckoning waters, and carry her along with it. Oh, if only she could go.

  As she gazed out over the water, Fiona felt the weariness in her ebb – a weariness that left dark smudges under her brilliant blue eyes and a painful stiffness in her young body – and a sharp exhilaration take its place. The river restored her. People said that the City, the center of commerce and government to the west of Wapping, was London’s heart. If that was true, then this river was her lifeblood. And Fiona’s own heart quickened and leaped at its beauty.

  Everything exciting in the world was right here before her. Watching ships traverse the river, their holds laden with cargo from all the far-flung reaches of the Empire, filled her with wonder. This afternoon the Thames was choked with traffic. Punts and lighters – small, quick boats – were plying the waters, ferrying men to and from ships moored midstream. A hulking steamer, intent upon her berth, shouldered smaller craft out of the way. A battered trawler, back from chasing cod in the icy waters of the North Sea, steamed upriver to Billingsgate. Barges jostled for right-of-way, moving upriver and down, discharging cargo – a ton of nutmeg here, sacks of coffee there. Barrels of treacle. Wool, wine, and whiskey. Sheaves of tobacco. And chest upon chest of tea.

  And everywhere, standing on the jutting docks conferring with their captains, or moving between the casks and crates and towering pallets, were merchants – brisk, imperious men who swooped down from the City to examine their goods the second their ships arrived. They came in carriages, carried walking sticks, and flipped open gold watches with hands so fine and white, Fiona could hardly believe they belonged to men. They wore top hats and frock coats and were attended by clerks who dogged their heels, carried their ledgers, and poked into everything, frowning and scribbling. They were alchemists, these men. They took raw goods and changed them into gold. And Fiona longed to be one of them.

  She didn’t care that girls weren’t supposed to involve themselves in business matters – especially girls from the docks, as her mother was always reminding her. Dock girls learned to cook, sew, and keep house so they could find husbands who’d look after them at least as well as their fathers had. “Foolishness,” her mother called her ideas, advising her to spend more time improving her short crust and less time at the river. But her da didn’t think her dreams were foolish. “Got to have a dream, Fee,” he said. “The day you stop dreaming you might as well take yourself down to the undertaker’s, for you’re as good as dead.”

  Lost in the river’s spell, Fiona didn’t hear a pair of feet approach the top of the Old Stairs. She wasn’t aware that the young man standing there smiled as he watched her, not wanting to disturb her, just wanting to gaze at her for a moment before he made his presence known, wanting to savor the image of her – slender and straight-backed against the backdrop of mossy stones and black mud banks.

  “Coo-eee,” he called softly.

  Fiona turned around. Her face lit up at the
sight of him, softening for a few seconds the resoluteness, the determination that was always present in her expression – a determination so apparent that neighbor women remarked upon it, clucking and sighing and gravely saying that a strong face meant a strong will. And a strong will meant trouble. She’d never get a husband, they said. Lads didn’t like that in a lass.

  But this lad didn’t seem to mind it. No more than he minded the glossy black hair that curled around her face and tumbled down her back. Or the sapphire eyes that seemed to sparkle with blue fire.

  “You’re early, Joe,” she said, smiling.

  “Aye,” he said, sitting down beside her. “Me and Dad finished up early at Spitalfields. The veg man’s miserable with a cold, so ’e didn’t ’aggle. I’ve got the next two hours to call me own. ’Ere,” he added, handing her a flower. “Found that on me way over.”

  “A rose!” she exclaimed. “Thank you!” Roses were dear. It wasn’t often he could afford to give her one. She touched the crimson petals to her cheek, then tucked it behind her ear. “What’s the weekly report, then? ’Ow much ’ave we got?” she asked.

  “Twelve pound, one shilling, sixpence.”

  “Add this to it,” she said, pulling a coin from her pocket, “then we’ll ’ave twelve and two.”

  “Can you spare it? Not skipping dinners again to save money, are you?”

  “No.”

  “I mean it, Fee, I’ll be angry if you are –”

  “I said I’m not!” she bristled, changing the subject. “Before long we’ll be at fifteen pounds, then twenty, and then twenty-five. It’s really going to ’appen, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it is. At the rate we’re going, another year and we’ll ’ave our twenty-five quid. Enough for three months’ rent, plus start-up stock.”

  “A whole year,” Fiona echoed. “It sounds like forever.”

  “It’ll go quick, luv,” Joe said, squeezing her hand. “It’s only this part that’s ’ard. Six months after we open our first shop, we’ll ’ave so much money, we’ll open another. And then another, until we ’ave a whole chain. Be making money ’and over fist, we will.”