“Watch yourself,” the waterman said, skillfully nudging his skiff in among the other boats at the Wapping Steps. He was not warning Sharpe against the slippery flight of stairs, but against the folk who lived in the huddled streets above.
Sharpe paid in coppers, then climbed up to the wharf which was edged with low warehouses guarded by ragged dogs and cudgel-bearing thugs. This place was safe enough, but once through the alley and into the streets he was in hungry territory. He would be back in the gutter, but it was his gutter, the place he had started and he felt no particular fear of it.
“Colonel!” A whore called to him from behind a warehouse. She lifted her skirt and then spat a curse when Sharpe ignored her. A chained dog lunged at him as he emerged onto High Street where a dozen small boys whooped in derision at the sight of an army officer and fell into mocking step behind him. Sharpe let them follow for twenty paces, then whipped round fast and snatched the nearest boy’s shabby coat, lifted and slammed him against the wall. Two of the other boys ran off, doubtless to fetch brothers or fathers. “Where’s Maggie Joyce?” Sharpe asked the boy.
The child hesitated, wondering whether to be brave, then half grinned. “She’s gone, mister.”
“Gone where?”
“Seven Dials.”
Sharpe believed him. Maggie was his one friend, or he hoped she was, but she must have had the sense to leave Wapping, though Sharpe doubted that the Seven Dials was much safer. But he had not come here to see Maggie. He had come here because it was Friday night and he was poor. “Who’s the Master at the workhouse?” he asked.
The child looked really scared now. “The Master?” he whispered.
“Who is it, boy?”
“Jem Hocking, sir.”
Sharpe put the lad down, took the halfpenny from his pocket and spun it down the street so that the boys pursued it between the people, dogs, carts and horses. Jem Hocking. That was the name he had hoped to hear. A name from a black past, a name that festered in Sharpe’s memory as he walked down the center of the street so that no one emptied a slop bucket over his head. It was a summer evening, the cloud-hidden sun was still above the horizon, but it seemed like winter twilight here. The houses were black, their old bricks patched with crude timbers. Some had fallen down and were nothing but heaps of rubble. Cesspits stank. Dogs barked everywhere. In India the British officers had shuddered at the stench of the streets, but none had ever walked here. Even the worst street in India, Sharpe thought, was better than this fetid place where the people had pinched faces, sunk with hunger, but their eyes were bright enough, especially when they saw the pack in Sharpe’s left hand. They saw a heavy pack, a saber, and assessed the value of the greatcoat draped like a cloak over his broad shoulders. There was more wealth on Sharpe than these folk saw in a half-dozen years, though Sharpe reckoned himself poor. He had been rich once. He had taken the jewels of the Tippoo Sultan, stripping them from the dying king’s body in the shit-stinking tunnel of the water gate of Seringapatam, but those jewels were gone. Bloody lawyers. Bloody, bloody lawyers.
But if the folk saw the wealth on Sharpe they also saw that he was very tall and very strong and that his face was scarred and hard and bitter and forbidding. A man would have to be desperately hungry to risk his life in an attempt to steal Sharpe’s coat or pack and so, like wolves that scented blood but feared losing their own, the men watched him pass and, though some followed him as he turned up Wapping Lane, they did not pursue him into Brewhouse Lane. The poorhouse and the foundling home were there and no one went close to those grim high walls unless they were forced.
Sharpe stood in the doorway of the old brewery, long closed down, and stared across the street at the workhouse walls. On the right was the poorhouse that mostly held folk too old to work, or else they were sick or had been abandoned by their children. Landlords turned them onto the street and the parish beadle brought them here, to Jem Hocking’s kingdom, where the men were put in one ward and the women in the other. They died here, husbands forbidden to speak with their wives, and all half starved until their corpses were carried in a knacker’s cart to a pauper’s grave. That was the poorhouse, and it was divided from the foundling home by a narrow, three-story brick house with white-painted shutters and an elegant wrought-iron lantern suspended above its well-scrubbed front steps. The Master’s house. Jem Hocking’s small palace which overlooked the foundling home which, like the poorhouse, had its own gate: a black slab of heavy timber smeared with tar and surmounted with rusted iron spikes four inches long. A prison, really, for orphans. The magistrates sent pregnant girls here, girls too poor to have a home or too sick to sell their swollen bodies on the streets. Their bastards were born here and the girls, as often as not, died of the fever. Those that survived went back to the streets, leaving their children in the tender care of Jem Hocking and his wife.
It had been Sharpe’s home once. And now it was Friday.
He crossed the street and hammered on the small wicket door set into the foundling home’s larger gate. Grace had wanted to come here. She had listened to Sharpe’s stories and believed she could change things, but there had never been time. So Sharpe would change things now. He lifted his hand to hammer again just as the wicket door opened to reveal a pale and anxious young man who flinched away from Sharpe’s fist. “Who are you?” Sharpe demanded as he stepped through the small opening.
“Sir?” The young man had been expecting to ask that same question.
“Who are you?” Sharpe asked. “Come on, man, don’t bloody dither! And where’s the Master?”
“The Master’s in his house, but… ” The young man abandoned whatever he had been trying to say and instead attempted to stand in front of Sharpe. “You can’t go in there, mister!”
“Why not?” Sharpe had crossed the small yard and now pushed open the door to the hall. When he had been a child he had thought it a vast room, big as a cathedral, but now it looked squalid and small. Scarce bigger than a company’s barrack room, he realized. It was supper ana some thirty or more children were sitting on the floor among the oakum and the tar-encrusted fenders that was their daily work. They scooped spoons in wooden bowls while another thirty children queued beside a table that held a cauldron of soup and a bread board. A woman, her red arms massive, stood behind the table while a young man, equipped with a riding crop, lolled on the hall’s low dais above which a biblical text arched across the brown-painted wall. Be sure your sin will find you out.
Sixty pairs of eyes stared at Sharpe in astonishment. None of the children spoke for fear of the riding crop or a blow from the woman’s burly arm. Sharpe did not speak either. He was staring at the room, smelling the tar and fighting against the overwhelming memories. It had been twenty years since he had last been under this roof. Twenty years. It smelt the same, though. It smelt of tar and fear and rotten food. He stepped to the table and sniffed the soup.
“Leek and barley gruel, sir.” The woman, seeing the silver buttons and the black braid and the saber, dropped a clumsy curtsey.
“Looks like lukewarm water to me,” Sharpe said.
“Leek and barley, sir.”
Sharpe picked up a random piece of bread. Hard as brick. Hard as ship’s biscuit.
“Sir?” The woman held out her hand. She was nervous. “The bread is counted, sir, counted.”
Sharpe tossed it down. He was tempted to some extravagant gesture, but what would it do? Upsetting the cauldron merely meant the children would go hungry, while dropping the bread into the soup would achieve nothing. Grace would have known what to do. Her voice would have cracked like a whip and the workhouse servants would have been scurrying to fetch food, clothes and soap. But those things cost money and Sharpe only had a pocketful of copper.