Tomorrow, Jerusalem Read online

  Tomorrow, Jerusalem

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  PART TWO

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  PART THREE

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Next in Series

  Copyright

  For my mother, with much love

  And did those feet in ancient time

  Walk upon England’s mountains green

  And was the Holy Lamb of God

  On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

  And did the countenance divine

  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

  And was Jerusalem builded here

  Among those dark Satanic mills?

  Bring me my bow of burning gold:

  Bring me my arrows of desire:

  Bring me my spear: o clouds unfold!

  Bring me my chariot of fire.

  I will not cease from mental fight,

  Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

  Till we have built Jerusalem

  In England’s green and pleasant land.

  PART ONE

  1906

  Chapter One

  I

  The young man with the insolent eyes had come to the soup kitchen almost every day for the past fortnight. At least so it seemed to Charlotte Bedford, for he had certainly and most noticeably been there each day that she had taken her turn behind the long, oil-cloth-covered table where she stood now ladling the watery concoction into battered tin bowls and passing them into eager, dirty hands that, despite herself, she tried to avoid touching. He was a too handsome young fellow who looked not in the least in need of a penn’orth of charity soup; he lounged, long legged, by the door, raffishly and ridiculously self-assured, openly watching her, as he always did, his cap pushed to the back of his blue-black head, his flamboyantly knotted canary yellow neckerchief a brilliant splash of colour in the crushingly drab surroundings. Absurdly aware of his eyes upon her – and somehow certain that he knew it – she resolutely kept her own eyes upon the tricky business in hand, ladling the soup more carefully than usual, though she could not for her life prevent the mortifying rise of colour in her cheeks beneath his amused and too knowing gaze. Disconcerted and angry with herself at her own discomfiture she bestowed an especially brilliant smile upon the old man who had just, with surly ill humour, slammed his penny on to the table and stood waiting for his soup. ‘Good morning, Mr Bennett – how are you today?’

  The dirty, lined, unshaven face did not alter. Pale and clouded eyes lifted to hers for a moment, totally expressionless. Then the old man, either in reply to the question or to the smile, hawked loudly and unpleasantly in his throat and after a bare moment’s hesitation turned his head, preparing to spit on the floor.

  She watched him helplessly and with a lift of anger that did nothing but tie her tongue and root her to the floor. Then, as he took breath, a small, bright-headed whirlwind swooped past Charlotte and planted herself before him, small arm extended, steady finger pointing at the door. ‘Out!’ Cissy Barnes snapped with high-tempered economy.

  He hesitated.

  ‘Out!’

  Mouth clamped shut, pale eyes murderous, the man turned and shambled to the door. Cissy, hands planted on her hips, the fire in her face matching the carrot brightness of her hair, glared after him in undaunted and righteous anger. ‘And you’ll go to the end of the line and queue again!’ she called after him.

  Charlotte stood, the bowl of cooling soup in her hand and watched him go. Hearing his noisy expectoration beyond the door her stomach quivered a little, delicately nauseous. She could not handle these people, and they knew it. Even little Cissy, five foot nothing and built like a sparrow, could take command of a situation in a way that she, Charlotte, could not. Did not indeed want to. Why should she? The old intense and useless rebellion stirred, lifting in her mind and in her heart like a tide of tears. What was she doing here? Why did she not tell them, all of them, how much she hated it? For no matter how she tried, hate it she did. She knew very well that Doctor Will was absolutely right when he explained in his gentle, meticulous way that most of these people were not poor nor ignorant through their own fault but through the faults of a system that allowed the squalor of the East End slums and the disease and exploitation they bred, that positively encouraged the cutting of wages to protect profits, that sent small children into sweatshops and their older brothers and sisters as like as not into crime and prostitution. She knew it. But she could not bring herself to care – not at any rate in the way that Doctor Will cared, and Ben, and Hannah, and even her own brother Ralph. The squalor appalled her, the seething, rapacious life of the East End streets frightened and repelled her. She could not find in these dirty, sometimes sullen, often ill-mannered people a cause for which to burn. She was young – barely eighteen, and two years now an orphan. She was pretty, indeed there were times when she knew that given the chance, given silks and satins, feathers and lace, given perfumed water to wash her fluffy, curling hair and perfumed lotions to soothe the small, well-shaped hands that lately were so often rough and sore, given even the minimum comforts and aids that a girl of her age and station might reasonably expect to enjoy, she could be beautiful. She did not belong here; no one in their right minds could believe that she did. Yet the impossible thought of hurting Doctor Will, of causing disappointment to Hannah and to Ben, who with no thought or misgiving had absorbed the two young Bedfords into the warm Patten family circle as if they were as much a natural part of it as their own much-loved and beguilingly light-minded younger brother Peter, held her here as firmly as padlocks and chains of steel. She sighed and straightened her aching back, lifting her head unwarily, looking straight into a pair of heartlessly brilliant blue eyes, one of which winked deliberately and gracelessly. Her face flamed again. Damn the boy! How dared he?

  Cissy, dusting her hands decisively, came back around the table. As she did so a small boy of perhaps four or five years, dirty, honey-blond curls a tangle above a wicked, cherub’s face danced behind her, mimicking her brisk, birdlike walk and the motions of her hands exactly, an act worthy of any music hall stage. As Charlotte watched him, happy to have something to distract her attention from the disturbing young man with the even more disturbing blue eyes, a narrow, grubby hand buried itself in the wealth of his greasy curls and pulled him up painfully short.

  ‘Be still, Toby Jug, or you’ll get your ear clipped!’ It was an unexpectedly attractive voice, low pitched and with a throaty break in it, like that of an adolescent boy’s. The tone, however, amused and indulgent, belied the words and the grinning child obviously knew it. Charlotte glanced at the girl who had spoken. She was tall, and thin to the point of gauntness. Her brown hair of which there seemed to be a remarkable amount, was stuffed untidily into a battered straw hat to which still clung the sorry looking remains of a bunch of silk daisies. Her skin had the unhealthy pallor brought about by inadequate nourishment and worse than inadequate living conditions. Her eyes were tired. Yet she returned the child’s cheeky laughter with a flashing grin of her own
that lit her face for a moment as lightning lights a storm-dark sky, imparting to it little of beauty but something of vivid life.

  Charlotte looked with distaste at the cooling bowl of soup that she still held. A scum of grease had formed on top and small pieces of unrecognizable vegetables had sunk to an unpleasant lump at the bottom. The girl with the child laughed aloud as the boy swung himself like a monkey on her hand. How could they do it? How could these people laugh still, and love, when home was a filthy tenement in an alley that ran like a midden? When dinner was a bowl of tasteless charity soup and a chunk of bread, often the only meal of the day? She watched as the girl cuffed the still-laughing child and hauled him into her dirty skirts. Then she turned to say something to her companion, a big-built and stolid-looking young woman with breasts that perilously strained the threadbare bodice of her blouse. The large young woman shrugged. ‘I doan’ know why yer bother yerself,’ she said, heaving her bulk a step closer to the table. ‘It ain’t even as if the kid’s yours, is it?’

  ‘If ’e’s not mine we don’t know whose ’e is, do we, Tobe?’ The dirty hand ruffled the child’s hair with infinite tenderness. The little boy leaned to her, the glint of his mischievous eyes blue as summer skies.

  The big girl shifted her weight from one foot to another, and the blouse sagged open. ‘What yer doin’ ’ere anyway, Sal? I thought you was on at Bodger’s?’

  ‘Yeah, I was.’ The other girl’s tone was dry with a kind of self-derisive amusement.

  Charlotte averted her eyes from the display offered by the open blouse. ‘We’re running out of soup,’ she said to Cissy.

  ‘There’s more on the stove. I’ll get it.’

  Alone, the focus of all eyes, and particularly of a pair brilliant and challenging beneath a shining thatch of black hair Charlotte stood, her features composed into a small, vacantly pleasant smile, and determinedly looked nowhere.

  ‘What ’appened then?’

  ‘You bin at Bodger’s?’

  ‘Yeah. Worked there for a month or two last year.’

  ‘Yer know Billy Simpson, the charge ’and?’

  ‘Gawd, I should say.’

  ‘’E ’appened.’

  The big girl giggled, or rather gurgled at terrible stress to her overburdened blouse. ‘Go on!’

  ‘Straight up. I told ’im to keep ’is bleedin’ ‘ands – ter say nothin’ of other more private parts – to ’imself. An’ ’e told me ter bugger off. So I did. An’ ’ere we are again. Tobe’s got to eat, ’aven’t yer, Toby Jug?’

  ‘Yer tried Levy’s?’

  ‘Yeah. An’ Goldstein’s, an’ Jessop’s – nothin’ doin’ just now.’ For a moment the girl’s narrow shoulders had slumped, but she lifted her head and smiled jauntily, ‘Still, somethin’ll turn up. It always does. P’raps I’ll try up west. One o’ those fancy shops or somethin’. An’ anyway—’ she jerked her head in the direction of the door and lifted her voice a little, a sharp, almost taunting edge to the husky tones, ‘seems like I’m in good company, eh? Seems like all the best people are comin’ ter the kitchen nowadays?’ Her friend, following the direction of the unfriendly glance she had directed towards the doorway tried unsuccessfully to control another eruption of amusement.

  The young man by the door had straightened to a considerable, lean, broad-shouldered height, and stood now with his hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels, his lips pursed to a soundless whistle, those remarkable eyes narrowed a little, their expression far from affable.

  Charlotte shifted the congealing and odorous bowl of soup further down the table and smiled at the wizened woman next in line who waited with the infinite patience of the defeated and who could have been aged anything from twenty-five to fifty. ‘There’ll be some fresh in a moment.’

  The woman nodded tiredly, unsmiling. Charlotte closed her eyes for the briefest of moments, blotting out the sights, if not the sounds, around her. It was no good; she would have to tell them. She would have to tell them, at least, that she did not want to come to the soup kitchen any more. The milk depot she did not mind so much; indeed, oddly, she quite liked the sweetish smell of the sterilized milk mixture, the neat little baskets packed along the shelves and filled with sealed and sterilized bottles. She liked the ‘weighing days’ and the gratitude of mothers who saw their babies growing and thriving where brothers and sisters had wasted and perished. But this? No. It added insult to injury that today should in fact have been her day at the depot and Hannah’s at the kitchen. But Hannah – strong, plain, distressingly energetic Hannah – had had other more important fish to fry and had not for a moment considered Charlotte’s needs or feelings – who in the busy Patten household did in matters such as this? – when she had crisply and efficiently reorganized the family rota to accord with her own plans.

  ‘More soup.’ Cissy, coping manfully with an urn almost as big as herself, thumped it upon the table before Charlotte then peered a little doubtfully into its depths. ‘I think it’s the same as the last lot. It’s hard to tell.’ She pulled a half-humorous, half-rueful face and the mouth of the drab woman next in line twitched in surprising sympathy.

  Charlotte reached for a tin bowl. And with her vacant, pleasant smile still firmly in place, she retreated, as she so often did, with deliberate and self-defensive intent, into a recess of her mind, seductive and secretive, behind curtains of velvet and silk – never revealed to and so never defiled by any other living soul. Her salvation and her refuge.

  A drawing room, prettily patterned and scented; a woman’s room this, delicate, delightful, the very picture of elegant femininity. Beautifully furnished, exquisitely decorated. She could dream for hours of the velvet chairs and rosewood writing desk, the discreetly ornate mantelpiece, the elegant card tables. Mirrors, tall and gilded, reflected to infinity the lovely room and its equally lovely occupant.

  An old woman snatched at the bowl Charlotte held, spilling some of the scalding soup on to her bare hand. She smiled on.

  A calling card. Ah, of course, the young man she had met at the Cavendish ball last night. The naughty thing had been so smitten he would have danced every dance with her had he been allowed. Oh – show him in, of course – though truly she could only spare a moment. And then, the Suitor. Often, though not always in uniform. Always, and without exception, young, handsome and ardent. Booted and elegant, but yet perhaps just a little awkward in this most feminine of rooms, and most devastating of company. His face – she could never quite see his face—

  ‘What’s going on?’ Cissy asked, and as she spoke the words were drowned in a raucous screech of laughter. Charlotte blinked a little, brought back with an unpleasant jolt to the long, stuffy, ill-lit and ill-ventilated room, chipped brown paint, the acrid smells of a hot summer’s day in the overcrowded slums of London. She glanced down at her hand, surprised. It was sore, an angry red patch had appeared on the pale skin. Automatically she handed out another bowl of soup. The line moved on. The crowd was thinning. Someone was singing, softly, a popular music hall song that Charlotte half recognized. The fat girl was rocking with laughter.

  Of me you may have read, I’m Fashionable Fred.

  And no matter where I chance to show my face,

  I’m looked on as the cheese,

  And all the girls I please.

  I’m a model swell of elegance and grace.

  It was the brown-haired girl singing, softly but very clearly indeed, her face innocent as an angel’s. Small Toby swung on her skirt, alive with mischief, and for some reason their overweight companion was all but apoplectic with laughter which she was trying to smother with a large and dirty handkerchief.

  ‘Yes, I’m just about the cut for Bel-gravia—’

  ‘Shut it, Sal.’

  To Charlotte’s surprise the sharp interruption had come from the young man at the door. He had stopped looking at Charlotte and the cornflower eyes were fixed in unfriendly fashion on the singing girl.

  The girl ignored him.

  T
o keep the proper pace I know the plan.

  Wire in and go ahead, For Fashionable Fred.

  She paused, lifted her hand in the manner of a conductor and Charlotte, remembering the last line of this cheeky chorus winced a little, glancing at the dangerous colour that was rising in the young man’s face as the fat girl joined in gustily, ‘I’m Fashionable Fred, the la-adies’ man!’

  ‘Will you shut it?’

  She turned the innocent face, derisively, to meet the blaze of anger in the astounding blue eyes. ‘What’s the matter, Jackie?’ Her voice was mildly injured, ‘I know I’m not Vesta Tilly.’

  ‘That you’re bloody not.’ The lilt in the voice bore out the flamboyant Irish good looks. Black haired, blue eyed, built like a barn, Jackie Pilgrim had inherited in full his mother’s bright beauty and his navvy father’s hard-hearted, hard-handed temper.

  The girl lifted a bony shoulder in insolent scorn and turned her back on him, slanting a smile of pure wickedness at her friend as she did so. She hummed for a moment, as if to herself, then sang again.

  ‘Though in the park I walk,

  And with the ladies talk,

  My tailor’s bills do get me on the run.

  I canter in the Row,

  And when to balls I go—’

  The other girl was obviously torn between a growing alarm and what seemed to Charlotte unjustifiably hysterical laughter. ‘Sal – for Pete’s sake!’

  ‘I gallop with the charmin’ girls like fun.

  I’m ready for a lark,

  No matter light or dark,

  Up to any game is Fashionable Fred.’

  Along the queue a few faces had lightened. A woman glanced furtively at Jackie’s face and grinned a little.

  Jackie Pilgrim moved, lithe and full of venom.

  ‘I’m Fashionable Fred the la-adies man!’ The girl Sal stopped as a hard hand clamped on her shoulder. She looked up, apparently surprised, her pale, bony face innocent as dawn.