C. Harris: Who Buries the Dead

“Me Nathan was alive then,” said Mattie. “He had his own handbarrow, y’know. We was doin’ grand, with two nice rooms and our own furniture.” Her watery brown eyes clouded with memories of a loss that was now some half a century in the past. “We was even sendin’ our boy, Jack, t’ school. But after I was laid up fer the better part of a year, we had to pledge all the furniture and move to an attic room in Hemming’s Row. And poor Jack, he had t’ leave school and start t’ work with his da.”

“How old was Jack?”

“Six. Afore that, Nathan used t’ hire a lad every mornin’ at the market. A coster needs a lad, you see, t’ help watch the barrow, else thieves’ll steal him blind when his back is turned. And a boy’s voice carries better’n a man’s. All them years of shoutin’ ruins a coster’s throat real quick.”

Hero checked her list of questions. “How many hours are you here, at your stall?”

“This time of year? I’m usually here from eight in the mornin’ till ten at night. My Gretta, she gets up early and goes t’ market t’ get me apples and things. I don’t know what I’d do without her. I can hobble down here by meself, but ’tain’t no way I could haul me basket of apples from market.”

“Is Gretta a coster as well?”

“Aye. She works Beaufort Wharfs with her da’s barrow. Ain’t many women can handle a barrow, but me Gretta’s always been a strappin’ lass. Course, she’s gettin’ on in years now herself; don’t know how much longer she’ll be able to keep it up. And then what’s t’ become of us?”

“She never married or had children?”

A gleam of amusement lit the older woman’s eyes. “’Tain’t one coster out of ten is married proper-like. Most see it as a waste of money could be better spent buyin’ stock. No parson never said words o’er me and Nathan, but it didn’t make no difference t’ us or t’ anybody else.”

“And Gretta?”

Mattie shook her head. “She always says costers treat their wives worse’n cheap servants, and ain’t no man ever gonna beat her.”

Hero suspected those sentiments spoke volumes about the behavior of the late Nathan Robinson, but all she said was, “What about your son, Jack? Is he a costermonger as well?”

The old woman turned her head to spit, as if needing to clear a foul taste from her mouth before she could speak. “Me Jack was impressed by His Majesty, back in the American War. Ain’t seen nor heard nothin’ from him since. I reckon he’s dead, but ain’t nobody ever told us fer certain.”

“I’m sorry,” said Hero.

Again, that faint sparkle of amusement. “What fer? Ye ain’t His Majesty, now, is ye?”

Hero laughed out loud. “No.” A donkey in the street beside them began to bray loudly. “What do you normally have for breakfast and supper?”

The question obviously struck Mattie as rather daft, but she answered readily enough. “Bread and butter, same as everybody else. A few herrings now and then. Course, if we’ve had too many days of wet weather, we don’t eat nothin’. Can’t eat up our stock money, now, can we? Then what would we do?”

Hero focused on recording the woman’s answer, being careful not to allow any emotion to show on her face. She’d thought, when she first began this series of articles, that she understood the plight of the city’s poor. But she knew now that she had never appreciated just how thin the line between survival and starvation was for a vast segment of London’s population. A few pence a day could make the difference between supper and a place to sleep, and a cold, hungry night spent huddled beneath the arches of the Adelphi.

Mattie said, “The nice thing about hunger is that while ye feel it at first, it goes off after a while if ye’ve nothin’ t’ eat. Don’t know why, but I ain’t one t’ question the goodness of God.”

“Do you go hungry often?”

“Mostly in the winter, when we’ve had a long spell of wet weather. And of course, in winter ye needs fire and candles, and they’re so dear. There’s many a night Gretta and I jist go t’ bed. But I ain’t complainin’. There’s plenty worse off than us. Least we ain’t got no little ones t’ worry about.”

Hero stared off down the street, to where a wagon loaded with lumber jolted heavily over the wet paving. There were more questions she’d intended to ask the old woman. But sometimes, the frank recitals of bad luck and loss and endless struggle threatened to overwhelm her.

“Thank you,” she said, and gave Mattie another shilling before walking away.

After the squalor and desperation of St. Martin’s Lane, there was something vaguely obscene about the opulence of the Prince of Wales’s London residence on Pall Mall.

As Hero followed a liveried and powdered footman through the silk-hung marble corridors of Carlton House, she found she couldn’t stop thinking about Mattie Robinson and Gretta and the boy, Jack, dragged away from his family to fight in one of His Majesty’s wars so long ago.

The chambers set aside for the exclusive use of her father, Charles, Lord Jarvis, lay at the top of a sweeping grand staircase ornamented with exquisite plasterwork and copious gilding. She found him seated at a delicate French desk that, like so much else in the palace, had been supplied to the Prince of Wales by the same Parisian marchand-mercier who’d served as interior decorator to the ill-fated Marie Antoinette.

Jarvis looked up at her entrance and dismissed the footman with a curt nod, his eyes narrowing as his gaze traveled over her. “You’re looking surprisingly well-despite Devlin’s insistence on using you as a milk cow for his son.”

“The decision was mine and you know it,” she said, slipping off her pelisse.

Jarvis simply grunted and set aside his quill. “I had hoped motherhood would have a domesticating effect on you. But I’m told you’ve undertaken to write a new article, this one on that blackguard tribe of costers infesting our streets.”

“And who told you that, Papa?” she asked with a silken assumption of ignorance that brought an answering gleam of amusement to his intense gray eyes. Everyone in England knew Jarvis directed a vast network of spies and informants who reported not to the Prince or Downing Street, but to Jarvis alone.

The smile faded. He said, “No good can come of this project of yours, you know.”

“I disagree.” She unwrapped the brown paper parcel she had brought with her to reveal the thin strip of old inscribed lead. “I was wondering if you know what this is?”

He stood, taking the old metal band in his hands and carrying it to the window.

She watched him turn the upper surface to the light, his lips pursing as he ran his thumb over the scrollwork. Jarvis’s face never betrayed his thoughts or emotions. But she knew him well, so that very lack of any of the traces of surprise or interest one would expect told her she’d come to the right place.

He said, “Where did you get this?”

“It was found last night at Bloody Bridge, near where Mr. Stanley Preston was murdered. You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?”

He fingered one sliced end of the strap, then set it aside and reached for his handkerchief to carefully wipe his hands. “Devlin’s involved you in this murder, has he?”

“I involved myself.”

He tucked away his handkerchief.

She said, “It’s always been my understanding that the final resting place of Charles I is unknown.”

“It was-up until a week or so ago.”

Jarvis clasped his hands behind his back and shifted his gaze out the window to the forecourt below. “Three years ago, after the death of the Princess Amelia, His Majesty decided to build an elaborate new royal vault at Windsor Castle, beneath the Wolsey Chapel at St. George’s. As originally constructed, the vault could only be accessed from outside the chapel. But the Prince Regent recently decided to install a new entrance in the form of a sloping passage that opens from the quire of St. George’s itself.” He paused to glance over at her. “You know Princess Augusta is gravely ill and unlikely to recover?”